>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next '19. Brought to you by Google Cloud, and its ecosystem partners. >> We're back at Google Cloud Next, at the new, improved Moscone Center. This is day two of theCUBE's coverage of Google's big Cloud show. theCUBE is a leader in live tech coverage, my name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. John Furrier is walking the floor, checking out the booth space. Ranga Rangachari is here, he's the Vice President and General Manager of Cloud Storage and hyper-converged infrastructure at Red Hat. Ranga, good to see you again. >> Hi Dave, hi Stu, good to see you again too. >> Thanks for coming on, this show it's, it's growing nicely, good thing Moscone is new and improved. How's the show going for you? >> Show's going really good. I just had a chance to walk around the booths and a lot of interesting conversations and, the Red Hat booth too, there've been a lot of interesting conversations with customers. >> A lot of tailwinds these days for Red Hat. We talk about that a lot on theCUBE, this whole notion of hybrid cloud, you guys have been on that since the early days. >> Yeah. >> Multi-cloud, omni-cloud, hyper-converged infrastructure, it's in your title. It's like that all the moons are lining up for you guys, you know is it just luck, skill, great predictions powers, what's your take? >> Well, I mean, I think it's a combination of those, but more importantly, it's about listening to our customers. I think that's what gives us, today, the permission to talk to our customers about some of these things they're doing, because when we talk to them, it's not just about solving today's problems, but also where they're headed, and anticipating where they're going, and the ability to meet their needs. So is, I think. >> So the Google partnership, we were talking earlier, it started 10 years ago with the hypervisor. >> Yup. >> And it's really evolved. Where is it today, from your perspective? >> Well, I think it continues to, it continues to cooperate in the technical community very well, and a couple of data points, one is on Kubernetes, that started four, five years ago, and that's going really strong. But more importantly, as the industry matures, there are, what I would call, special interest groups that are starting to emerge in the Kubernetes community. One thing that we are paying very close attention to is the storage SIG, which is the ability to federate storage across multiple clouds, and how do you do it seamlessly within the framework of Kubernetes, as opposed to trying to create a hack, or a one-off that some vendors attempted to do. So we try to take a very wholistic view of it, and make sure, I mean the industry we are in is trying to drive volumes, and volumes drives standards, so I think we pay very, very close attention-- >> And the objective there is leave the data in place if possible, provide secure access and fast access, provide high-speed data movement if necessary, protect the data in motion. That is a complex problem. >> It is, and that's why I think it's very important that the community together solves the problem, not just one vendor. But it's about how do you facilitate, the holy grail is how do you facilitate data portability and application portability across these hybrid clouds. And a lot of the things that you talked about are part and parcel of that, but what users don't wanna do is stitch them together. They want a simple, easy way. And most common example that we often get asked is can I migrate my data from one cloud to the other, from on-prem to a public cloud beta based on certain policies. That's a prototypical example of how federated storage and other things can help with that. >> Ranga, bring us inside some of those customer conversations, 'cause we talk on theCUBE, we go back to, customers always say I want multi-vendor, yes, I don't want lock-in, portability is a good thing, but at the end of the day, some of these things, if it's some science experiment or if it's difficult, well, sometimes it's easier just to kind of stick on a similar environment. We know the core of Red Hat, it's if I build on top of rail, then I know it can work lots of places, so where are customers at, how does that fit in to this whole discussion of multi-cloud. >> So, what I can kind of give you a perspective of the hybrid cloud, the product strategy that we've been on for better part of a decade now, is around facilitating the hybrid cloud. So if you look at the open, or the storage nature of the data nature of the conversations, it's almost two sides of the same coin. Which is, the developers want storage to be invisible. They don't wanna be in the business of stitching their lungs and their zone masking all that stuff. But yet at the same time they want storage to be ubiquitous. So, they want it to be invisible, they want it to be ubiquitous. So that's one of the key themes that we are in from our customer. >> Come on, Ranga, you guys are announcing storage list this year, right? >> Yeah, (laughs) exactly. (laughs) So that's a great point. The other part that we are also seeing from our customer conversations is, I think, let me give you, kind of the Red Hat inside out perspective. Is any products, any thing that we release to the market, the first filter that we run through is will it help our customers with our open hybrid cloud journey? So that kind of becomes the filter for any new features we add, any go-to-market motion, so that there is a tremendous amount of impedance match if you will. Between where we're going and how customers can succeed with their open hybrid cloud journey. >> So, in thinking about some of the discussions you're having with customers on their hybrid cloud strategy, specifically, what are those conversations like, what are the challenges that they're having? It's a maturity spectrum, obviously, but what are you seeing at each level of the spectrum, and where are some of those execution, formulation and execution challenges? >> So, as the industry evolves and the technology matures, the conversation change, and 12, 24 months ago it was a dramatically different conversation. It was an all around help me get there. Now the conversation is people really understand, and most of our conversations that we see, and even the other industry players are seeing this, is the conversation starts with on-prem looking out, as opposed to a cloud looking in. So, customers say look I've invested a tremendous amount of assets, intellectual horsepower into building my on-prem infrastructure and make it solid, now give me the degree of freedom for me to move certain workloads to one or many of these public clouds. So that's kind of a huge shift in the conversations we have with the customers. If you click one or a couple of levels below, the conversation talks about things like security as you pointed out. How do you ensure that if I move my workload my overall corporate compliance stuff aren't anywhere compromised. So that's one aspect. The other aspect is manageability. Can it really manage this infrastructure from a proverbial single pane of glass. So now the conversations are less about more theoretical, it's more about I've started the journey help me make this journey successful. >> So when you talk about the perspective of, I've built up this on-prem infrastructure, I've invested a ton it in, and now help me connect, I can see a mindset that would say think cloud first. Of course, the practical reality says I've got all this tactical debt. So how much of that is gonna be a potential pitfall down the road for some of these companies, in your view? >> Well, I think it's not so much of a technical debt. In one way you could call it a technical debt, but the other aspect is how do you really leverage the investment that you've made without having to just say well I'm gonna do things differently. So, that's why I think the conversations we have with our customers are mutually beneficial, because we can help them, but the same token they can help us understand where some of the road blocks are. And through our products, through our services, we can help them circumvent or mitigate some of those-- >> And those assets aren't depreciated on the books, they've gotta get a return on them, right? >> So, Ranga, we know that one of the areas that Red Hat and Google end up working a lot together is in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. >> Yep. >> Bring us up to speed as to where we are with that storage discussion, 'cause I think back to when Docker launched it was oh, it's gonna be wonderful and everything, but we all live through virtualization, and we had to fix networking and storage challenges here, and networking seemed to go a little further along and there's been a few different viewpoints as to how storage should be looked at in the containerized and the Kubernetes SDO world that we're moving towards today. >> So one example that illustrates storage being the center of this is there is a project called Rook.io. If you're familiar with this, think of it as kind of sitting between the storage infrastructure and Kubernetes. And that is taking on a tremendous amount of traction, not just in the community, but even within the CNCF. I could be wrong here, but my understanding it's a project that's in incubation phase right now. So we are seeing a lot of industry commitment to that Rook project, and you're gonna see real, live use cases where customers are now able to fulfill the vision of data portability and storage portability across these multiple hybrid clouds. >> So Kubernetes is obviously taking off, although again, it's a maturity level. Some customers are diving in, and others maybe not so much. What are you seeing is some of the potential blockers, how are people getting started? Can you just download the code and go? What are you seeing there? >> That's a very interesting question, because we look at it as projects versus products. And, Kubernetes is a project. Phenomenal amount of velocity, phenomenal amount of innovation. But once you deploy it in your production environment, things like security, things like life cycle management, all those things have to be in place before somebody deploys it. That's why, in OpenShift you've seen the tremendous amount of market acceptance we've have with OpenShift is a proof point that it is kind of the best Kubernetes out there, because it's enterprise ready, people can deploy it, people can use it, people can scale with it, and not be worried about things like life cycle management, things like security, all the things that come into play when you deal with an upstream project. So, what we've seen from a customer basis, people start to dabble, and they'll look at Kubernetes, what's going on, and understand where the areas of innovation are. But once they start to say look I've got it deployed for some serious workloads, they look at a vendor who can provide all the necessary ingredients for them to be successful. >> We're having a good discussion earlier about customer's perspectives, I wanna get as much out of that asset as I possibly can. You said something that interested me. I wanna go back to it. Is customers want options to be able to migrate to various clouds. My question is do you sense that that's because they wanna manage their risk, they want an exit strategy? Or, are they actively moving more than once. Maybe they wanna go once and then run in the cloud. Or are you seeing a lot of active movement of that data? >> I think the first order of bit in those discussions that are about the workloads, What workload do they wanna run? And once they decide this is the, for instance, with the Google Cloud, with the MLAI type of workloads, lend themselves very well to the Google Cloud infrastructure. So when a customer says look this is the workload I wanna run on-prem, but I want the elastic capability for me to run on one of these public clouds, often the decision criteria seems to be what workload it is and where's the best place to run it in. And then, you know, the rest of the stuff comes into play. >> So, Ranga, let's step back for a second. I come out of this show, Google Cloud this year, and I'm hearing open, multi-cloud, reminds me of words I've heard going to Red Hat, some every year. Help us to kind of squint through a little bit as to where Red Hat sits in the customer. If I'm the c-suite of an enterprise customer day, where Red Hat fits in the partnership with customers, and where the partners fit into that overall story. >> So, our view is let's look at it customer end. And practically every customer that we talk to wants to embark on an open hybrid cloud storage. And I wanna kind of stress on the open part of it, because it's the easier way to say okay let me go build a hybrid cloud. The more difficult part is how do you facilitate it through open hybrid cloud story. And that's the march, if you will, that we've been on for the last five plus years. And, that business strategy and the technology strategy has not, we've been unwavering in that. And, the partners are and they say we truly believe that for us to be successful, for our customers to be successful, we need an ecosystem of partners. And the cloud providers are absolutely a critical ingredient and a critical component of the overall strategy, and I think together, with our partners, and our core technology, and our go-to-market routes, we think we can really solve our customers, we are solving them today, and we think we can continue to solve them over time. >> You talk about open, open has a lot of different definitions. And again it's suspected UNIX used to be open. (laughs) I see that potentially as one, real solid differentiator of Red Hat. I mean, your philosophy on open. What do you see as your differentiators in the marketplace? >> Well, I think the first is obviously open like you said, the second part is, I think I hinted upon it earlier, which is, projects are good. I think they are almost a fountain and of ideas and things, but I think where we spend a tremendous amount of hours of energy is to transform it from the upstream project into a product. And if you go back, Red Hat Linux, I think we've shown that Linux was in the same kind of state of vibe in other ways, 10, 20 years ago. And I think what we've shown to the industry is by being solely committed and focused on make these projects enterprise ready, I think we've shown the market leading the way, and making it successful. So I think for us, the next wave, whether it's Kubernetes, whether it's other things, it's a very similar recipe book, nothing dramatically different, but fundamentally what we want to do is help our customers take advantage of those innovations, but yet not compromise on what they need in their enterprise data centers. >> The recipe book is similar, but you've gotta make bets. You've made some pretty good bets over the years. >> Yep. >> We could debate about OpenStack, but I mean, even there. But that's not an easy thing for an open source company to do. 'Cause you've gotta pick your poison, you have to provide committers, what's the secret sauce there? >> Well, I think, first off, I think the number one secret sauce from our perspective is add more technical and intellectual horsepower to these communities. And, not so much for the sake of community, it's about does it solve a real business problem for our customers? That's the way we go about it because in the open source community, I don't even know, hundreds of thousands of open source projects are out there. And we pay, and our office of the CTO pays very close attention to all the projects out there, identify the ones that have promise, not just from our perspective but from customers' perspective, and invest in those areas. And a lot of them have succeeded, so we think we'll do well in that. >> Alright, so, Ranga, one of the biggest announcements this week is Anthos from Google. Wanna get your viewpoint as to where that fits. >> I think it's a good announcement, I haven't read through all the details, but part of it is I think it validates, to a certain extent, what Red Hat has been talking about for the last five, seven years. Which is you need a unified way to deploy, manage, provision your infrastructure, not just on public clouds, but a seamless way to connect to the on-prem. And I think Anthos is a validation of how we've been thinking about the work. So we think it's great. We think it's really good. >> Ranga Rangachari thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE >> Thank you, David! >> It's always a pleasure. >> Thank you again, Stu. >> Have a great Red Hat summit coming up in early May, theCUBE will be there, Stu will be co-hosting. You're watching theCUBE, day two of Google Cloud Next 2019 from Moscone. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

live from San Francisco it's the cube covering Red Hat summit 2018 brought to you by Red Hat welcome back everyone we're here live in San Francisco for the Red Hat summit 2018 events the cubes exclusive coverage I'm John for the coast of the Q with John Troy you're my Coast analyst as we blues co-founder of tech reckoning advisory and Community Development firm meniscus is ranked at Rangachari vice president general manager Red Hat storage for you to see you again welcome back to the cube thank you thank you invited me again so Steve a lot they said storage is where all the action is with wellness data to be stored somewhere with the cloud yeah it's still important you guys have a new concept yeah on storage yeah I'm storage what is the unstirred you know I think essentially when we got into the storage business the status quo was your traditional storage mainframe so wheeling a piece of gear and it's to scale up and have things workloads running there but with the movement towards cloud especially with hybrid cloud where you really can't take a physical box and move it into a public cloud and in the last year or so with containers the common theme that's emerging is things like agility things like scale things like almost having ubiquitous storage all around the place is becoming more and more important so our thought is it almost turns a storage the phenomenal storage industry upside down on its head because the things that people cared about decade ago on the workloads are no longer relevant or less relevant than where they are today so and you know it seems to be people seem to get it so we're pretty I mean we've seen the strain on servers server less storage less so in a way this the recent resource pool is not just you know a box and provision the LUNs more like okay I need storage exact a button I don't care where it comes from is that we're kind of getting to somebody that's exactly what it is right I think in a in a different way right one of the customers said I want storage to be everywhere but nowhere right in that they want storage to be a pervasive but it has to be invisible so they don't have to worry about things like zoning and LAN masking on one piece hardware and do the same thing with twenty other pieces what our solution offers offers is truly a scalable storage platform that's running on any kind of footprint physical virtual private a public cloud but it's a common user experience across all these different footprints and that's why and the other part of this thing which is also different is yes it does appeal to the storage admins but more importantly as you become as organizations of all the cloud architects and DevOps know what they care about is like I want storage to be as invisible as possible but yet I want to make the devil developers more and more productive so I think we are I feel really right track in appealing to how storage needs to be viewed it's a no brainer in my mind if you're DevOps you want to go total cloud horizontally scalable you need gel apps stores just to be available programmable all that's great stuff question I have for you is what's the impact of customers who have been buying boxes for decades so what's the impact of them with Red Hat so I'm still gonna need boxes and still gonna put them somewhere and so it's an on-prem cloud operation so I still need storage bits cloud obviously those guys have their own storage but I mean but you still gotta plug it in and put storage in sure what's the impact of the customer well I think they I mean we do we are practical enough and we rarely realize that no customer is gonna pull the plug one day and move on to the next infrastructure what we are seeing more and more is as those new workloads which are dramatically different the previous workloads as they come into play then they have to rethink how they develop deploy provisioned storage infrastructure so that's where we come in so it's not about in either/or it's about how do you are meant your existing storage infrastructure but think about it in a modern way think about how you can future-proof your architectures so that it scales so that's the way we think about it wrong how should people be thinking about storage at different levels of the architecture there's actually a lot of storage here there's been a lot of sessions and the ecosystem expo there's a lot of storage providers but you've got the we've been talking a lot about open shift and an open shift on OpenStack here at the show this is this year so if you're at the OpenStack lair versus on the open shift layer how should you be thinking about storage and and what and what products are plugging in at those layers yes so you know think with OpenShift a couple of days ago earlier this week we announced our 150 customers we're actually deploying our product which is called containing nearly storage CNS for short and what that does is it enables it's essentially the storage infrastructure for open shaft so wherever open ship goes the storage footprint follows along whether you're running it on Prem on top of virtualized infrastructure or you're running any of these public clouds and the most interesting part of that is you know getting back to the earlier conversation we try to make it as invisible as possible so you we as vendors don't have to say you've got to deploy it here so make it as invisible as possible and as seamless as possible now with OpenStack it's a different set of experience because that's kind of infrastructure up right and the advantage for us is if you look at the OpenStack community in general almost 70% of the OpenStack community in one way shape or form uses a safe project so it's almost become I wouldn't call it almost de facto standard on how people manage the storage infrastructure with an open stack but even there the cardinal rules are still the same which is when they think about spinning up a machine the storage has to be attached automatically to it and then scale as their computer in the storage infrastructure scales and this the scale is the question we're living in a new era of cloud economics scale is key and we here the customers here Red Hat Red Hat's customers talking about things like horizontally scalable asynchronous micro sets of micro services levels of granularity this is the programmable new fabric that is a new infrastructure of the Internet you know 30 year old statuses from e-commerce DNS they're you know gonna be abstracted away with a new abstraction layer yes hello opens yes hello you know new things kubernetes and in containers so with that being said there's an opportunity yes so when you that's kind of like the state of the yard now but you're welcome to an enterprise like what's kubernetes again so you got some enterprises are learning about kubernetes and it's good news for them learning about containers where they don't have to throw away anything you just containerize it how is that impacting the classic definition of software-defined datacenter yeah and software-defined storage because those are the two important trends that have been happening in Software Defined does it accelerate it does it change it a little bit what's your thoughts on those do you know I think it accelerates it and here's why that's a great question right because when you look at organizations especially in the container era right where there are certain companies who are actually I would argue even bypassing you know and building it container first strategy as opposed to a cloud first strategy right so that's that's the way they are thinking about this and when you talk about route through that lens storage essentially is an application as opposed to infrastructure so you have to talk as three or you have to talk whatever protocol it is so it just becomes part and parcel of that so the challenge or what vendors or customers are looking at us is how can you make it as seamless as possible so that they can get the acceleration can happen because a year ago I think nine months ago there was a survey that was done where customers said the top two issues with moved to accelerated move the containers were storage or persistent storage and security well I think we have a firm handle on what we need to do to really help our customers at least address the storage part of that discussion what's up what and what's the make of the use cases right now how many customers are deploying this roughly order of magnitude mean let's go into details but I mean you know you know how's the migration okay the early adopters and in mode now is it fast followers is it the rest of the market I think it's still in the early adoption in the truest definition I think you know using the baseball analogy we're at the top of the first inning right and most of the workloads tend to be new workloads right there are some left cloud native but there's some but as far as the use cases it is you know across the board you know no sequel databases see I see Dee Jenkins type of environment so we surprised vertical centric either because storage your Stora just used by everybody yes there is one layer where there's certain I is free apps that tend to be focused on certain verticals but they happen right by our availability or I ah she might need financial services or stretch clusters and all those kinds of things okay cool I love the concept of unstitch but that does leave in the cold a little bit the people that we used to call storage admins right so now multi cloud hybrid cloud a lot of examples and blood demonstration operators operators done does the job of the storage the person you who used to be in charge of storage it seems like that that changes now even with unstitch a lot of automation a lot of fabric a lot of pooling does it itself but you still are on a lot of different clouds and things like that how do you how are you talking to customers about that so you know I think one of the I think the term that people have started to use as generalists right if you look at it you know five years ago or seven years ago you had a silo of systems administrators storage administrators and network administrators now the whole vertical store the silos have been in a way normalized so now you have a pool of people might be the major is in storage but the minor is a networking by the major isn't compute their minor is in storage so it really helped her all the organizations that we talked to now they say look I have a collective pool that can help me where I need to get to so this plays really well what about that audience absolutely it does and the hybrid cloud equation in your thoughts there cuz lastly we'll keep on did a great piece of research on true private cloud and there and they are looking for more folks to first rating the next set of surveys so I'd love to introduce you to the Peter verse over there but the point is was true private cloud report showed that on-premise cloud if occasion whatever you want to call it action was much higher and growing it's not so much on premise has been dying or being reduced its transitioning to on-premise cloud operations which is essentially cloud it's a fat edge or you know and the cloud is that what is the cloud so you're seeing still a lot of work being done on premises where there we recasting reimagining cloud so how is that impacting the hybrid cloud because I've been cause it's not really a product it's a yes it's a journey it's a connection between two clouds so storage data the data plane control planes are all kind of like evolving your thoughts on multi cloud and as hybrid starts to accelerate that's the path I'll see open shift but your thoughts on so the I think the way we think about this right is hybrid cloud it's not so much that everything is running on app I absolutely agree with the research right but the customers that we talk to they are still building the foundational business on I got a you know keep the private cloud make it as seamless and as efficient as possible but there are certain workloads that lend themselves well to running on a public cloud now it's not so much as a disjointed these two universes never talk to each other it's how do we the Red Hat try to bring the two together so the user experience you almost in a way try to minimize where it actually runs right now so that's that's an open shift is a classic example of that right where you're running it on Prem but you're also running on these public clouds if certain workloads that are great on a public cloud an example of that is one of the largest airports and Europe so they use OpenShift on Prem but they also use OpenShift on a couple of other public clouds and our CNS product which is a continuous tourist product run runs along all those three environments so to the end-user it's essentially a seamless experience and that's you know as the journey unfolds I think that's what you're going to see more and more is about how do we start to know that the storage foundation is built how do we start to exposed some data services that can run across all these different that's gonna be killer so here's an update in the business how's the business what's the road map looked like what are the things that you guys are working on what's the priorities so business is like we announced on Monday 150 net new customers over the last 12 months and that's just on one specific strategic imperative which is containing native storage or help the customers with a container journey besides that I think there are two other pillars we are focused on one is around hybrid cloud right which is how do you really provide the best storage substrate for customers building private clouds and hybrid clouds and the third part is hyperconvergence because I think what our customers are asking for is they've seen the power of hyperconvergence but they want an open-source variant of hyperconvergence for their environment and stay tuned on that front we got some exciting stuff going on and we'll keep you folks updated on the final question what's going on the show here for you what's notable but the folks that are watching who couldn't make it here what's the vibe what's the hall way conversation what's the customer conversate with steer some color of what's happening here at breadhead summit here in san francisco so a lot of things but then I wish we had time but I know we're short of time here but the few things I want to highlight one is all the technology demos that we did yesterday today and some in the tomorrow or tomorrow timeframe you'll see are containing native storage or a storage portfolio be an integral part of every one of the teams that we are talking about so that's you know and we've got very positive feedback on that we have over two dozen text sessions and my understanding is I don't go to those my understandings they've all been standing room only so there is definite customer interest in where we are what we're doing so we this show has been awesome so for us yeah storage is the gift that keeps on giving now it's going to be storage less than unstirred whatever word you want I like storage list because it sounds like server list which doesn't mean anything either but it sounds good but it's a full of resource gratulations I play it's a hot area certainly having programmable infrastructure means better development time and certainly making it you know elastic and making it horizontally scalable is the dream we all want to get to fast so be there more live coverage bringing you all the action here in the in the open here at Moscone you're in the mill the floors the cube coverage of Red Hat Summer 2018 I'm John Fourier with John Troy your stay with us we back with more after this short break thanks John