>> From around the globe, it's the CUBE with digital coverage of Red Hat Summit 2020 brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the CUBE's coverage of a Red Hat Summit 2020 happening digitally. We're connecting with Red Hat executives, thought leaders, practitioners, wherever they are around the globe, bringing them remotely into this online event. Happy to welcome back to the program, Joe Fernandez, who's the Vice President and General Manager, of Core Cloud Platforms with Red Hat. Joe, thanks so much for joining us. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. Glad to be here. >> All right, so, Joe, you know, Cloud, of course, has been a conversation we've been having for a lot of years. When I went to Red Hat Summit last year, when I went to IBM, I think last year, there was discussion of moving from kind of chapter one, if you will, to chapter two. Some of the labels that we put on things back in the early days, like Hybrid Cloud and Multicloud, they're coming into a little bit clearer picture. So, let's just give a high level, what you're seeing from your customers when they talk about Hybrid and Multicloud environment? What does that mean to your customers? And therefore, how is Red Hat meeting them where they are? >> Yeah, sure. So, Red Hat obviously, serves an enterprise customer base. And what we've seen in that customer base, really since the start and it's really informed our strategy, is the fact that all their applications aren't going to run in one place, right? So they're really employing a hybrid class strategy, a Hybrid and Multicloud strategy, that spans from their data centers out to a public cloud, typically then out to multiple public clouds as their cloud investments grow, as they move more applications. And now, even out to the edge for many of those customers. So that's the newest footprint that we're getting asked about. So really we think of that as the open hybrid cloud. And you know, our goal is really to provide a consistent platform for applications regardless of where they run across all those environments. >> Yeah. Let's get down a second on that because we've had consistency for quite a while. You look at the largest cloud provider out there, they said, hybrid environment, will give you the exact same hardware that we're running in the public cloud of your bet. You know, that in your environment. Of course, Red Hat's a software company. You've lived across lots of platforms. We're going to Red Hat's entire existence. So, you know, where is that consistency needed? How do you, well, think about how Red Hat does things? Maybe the same and a little different than some of the other players that are then, positioning and even repositioning their hybrid story over the last year or so. >> Yeah. So, we're really excited to see a lot of folks in the industry, including all the major public cloud providers are now talking about Hybrid and talking about these types of initiatives that we've been talking about for quite some time. But yeah, it's a little bit different when we talk about Hybrid Cloud, when we talk about Multicloud, we're talking about being able to run not just in one public cloud and then in a non-premise clients that mirrors that cloud. We're really talking about being able to run across multiple clouds. So having that consistency across, running in, say Amazon to Azure to Google, and then carrying that into your on-premise environments, whether that's on Bare Metal, on VMware, on OpenStack, and then, like I said, out out to the edge, right? So that consistency is important for people who are concerned about how their applications are going to operate in these different environments. Because otherwise, they'd have to manage those differences themselves. I'm speaking as part of Red Hat, right? This is what the company was built on, right? In 20 years ago, it was all about Linux bringing consistency for enterprise applications running across x86 hardware, right? So regardless of who your OEM vendor was, as long as you're building to the x86 standard and leveraging Linux as a base, Red Hat Enterprise Linux became that same consistent operating environment for applications, which is important for our software vendors, but also more importantly for customers themselves as they yep those apps into production. >> Yeah, I guess, you know, last question I have for kind of just the landscape out there. We've been talking for a number of years. When you talk to practitioners, they don't get caught up in the labels that we use in the industry. Do they have a cloud strategy? Yes, most companies have a cloud strategy, and if you ask them is their cloud strategy same today, as it was a quarter ago or a year ago, they say, of course not. Everything's changed. We know in today's day and age, what I was doing a month ago is probably very different from what I am doing today. So, I know you've got a survey that was done of enterprise users. I saw it when it came out a month ago. And, you know, some good data in there. So, you know, where are we? And what data do you have to share with us on kind of the customer adoption with (mumbles). >> Yeah, so I think, you know, we put out a survey not too long ago and we started as, I think, over 60% of customers were adopting a hybrid cloud strategy exactly as I described. Thinking about their applications in terms of, in an environment that spans multiple cloud infrastructures, as well as on-premise footprints. And then, you know, going beyond that, we think that number will grow based on what we saw in that survey. That just mirrors the conversations that I've had with customers, that many of us here at Red Hat have been having with those same customers over the years. Because everybody's in a different spot in terms of their transformation efforts, in terms of their adoption of cloud technologies and what it means for their business. So we need to meet customers where they're at, understand that everybody's at a different spot and then make sure that we can help them make that transition. And it's really an evolution, as opposed to , I think, some people in the past might've thought of as a revolution where all the data centers are going to shut down and everything's going to move all at once. And so helping customers evolve. And that transition is really what Red Hat is all about. >> Yeah. And, so often, Joe, when I talk to some of the vendors out there, when you talk about Hybrid, you talk about Multicloud, it's talking about something you mentioned, it's a box, it's a place, it's, you know, the infrastructure discussion. But when I've been having conversations with a lot of your peers of these interviews for Red Hat Summit. We know that, it's the organization and it's the applications that are hugely important as these changes go and happen. So talk a little bit about that. What's happening to the organization? How are you helping the infrastructure team keep up and the app dev team move forward? >> Yeah, so first, I'll start with, that on the technology side, right? One of the things that that has enabled this type of consistency and portability has been sort of the advent of Linux containers as a standard packaging format that can span across all these different (mumbles), right? So we know that Linux runs in all these different footprints and Linux containers, as a portable packaging format, enables that. And then Kubernetes enables customers to orchestrate containers at scale. So that's really what OpenShift is focused on, is delivering an enterprise Kubernetes platform. Again, spanning all these environments that leverages container-based packaging, provides enterprise Kubernetes orchestration and management, to manage in all those environments. What that then also does on the people front is bring infrastructure and operations teams together, right? Because Kubernetes containers represents the agility for both sides, right? Or application developers, it represents the ability to pay their application and all their dependencies. And know that when they run it in one environment, it will be consistent with how it runs in other environments. So eliminating that problem of, works on my machine, but it doesn't work, you know, in prod or what have you. So it brings consistency for developers. Infrastructure teams, it gives them the ability to basically make decisions around where the best places to run these applications without having to think about that from a technology perspective, but really from things that should matter more, like cost and convenience to customers and performance and so forth. So, I think we see those teams coming together. That being said, it is an evolution in people and process and culture. So we've done a lot of work. We launched a global transformation office. We had previously launched a Red Hat open innovation labs and have done a lot of work with our consulting services and our partners as well, to help with, sort of, people in process evolutions that need to occur to adopt these types of technologies as well as, to move towards a more cloud native approach. >> All right. So Joe, what one of the announcements that made it the show, it is talking about how OpenShift is working with virtualization. So, I think back to the earliest container days, there was a discussion of, "oh, you know, Docker and containers, "it kills VM." Or you know, Cloud of course. Some Cloud services run on VMs, other run on containers, they're serverless. So there's a lot of confusion out there as to. >> Yep. >> What happened, we know in IT, no technology ever dies, everything's always additive. It's figuring out the right solutions and the right bet. So, help us understand what Red Hat is doing when it comes to virtualization in OpenShift and Kubernetes and, how is your approach different than some of what we've already seen in the marketplace? >> Yeah, so definitely we've seen just explosive adoption of containers technology, right? Which has driven the OpenShift business and Red Hat's business overall. So, we expect that to continue, right? More applications moving towards that container-based, packaging and deployment model and leveraging Kubernetes and OpenShift to manage those environments. That being said, as you mentioned, virtualization has been around for a really long time, right? And, predominantly, most applications, today, are running virtualized. And so some of them have made the transition to containers or were built a container native from the start. But many more are still running in VM based environments and may never make that switch. So, what we were looking at is, how do we manage this sort of hybrid environment from the application perspective where you have some applications running in containers, other applications running in VMs? We have platforms like Red Hat, OpenStack, Red Hat Virtualization that leveraged the KVM hypervisor and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to serve apps running in a VM based environment. What we did with Kubernetes is, instead, how could we innovate to have convergence on the orchestration and management fund? And we leveraged the fact that, KVM, you know, a chosen hypervisor, is actually a Linux process that can itself be containerized. And so by running the hypervisor in a container, we can then span VMs that could be managed on that same platform as the containers run. So what you have in OpenShift Virtualization is the ability to use Kubernetes to manage containerized workloads, as well as, standard VM based workloads. And these are full VMs. These aren't micro VMs or, you know, things like Firecracker Kata Container. These are standard VMs that could be, well, Windows guests or Linux guests, running inside those VMs. And so it helps you basically, manage that type of environment where you may be moving to containers and more cloud native approach, but those containers need to interact or work with applications that are still in a VM based deployment environment. And we think it's really exciting, we've demoed it at the last Red Hat Summit. We're going to talk about it even more here, in terms of how we're going to bring those products to market and enable customers. >> Okay, yeah, Joe, let me make sure I understand this because as you said, it is a different approach. So, number one, if I'm moving towards a (mumbles) management solution, this is going to fit natively into what I'm doing. It's not taking some of my traditional management tools and saying, "oh, I also get some visibility containers." There's more, you know, here's my Kubernetes solution. And just some of those containers happen to be virtualized. Did I get that piece right? >> Yeah, I think it's more like... so we know that Kubernetes is going to be in in the environment because we know that, yeah, people are moving application workloads to standard Linux containers. But we also know that virtual machines are going to still exist in that environment. So you can think about it as, how would we enable Kubernetes to manage a virtual machine in the same way that it manages a Linux container? And, what we do there, is we actually, put the VM inside the container, right? So because the VM, specifically with (mumbles) is just a Linux process, and that's what a Linux container is. It's a Linux process, right? So you can run the hypervisor, span the virtual machines, inside of containers. But those virtual machines, are just like any other VM that would run in OpenStack or Red Hat Virtualization or what have you. And you could, vSphere for example. So those are traditional virtual machines, that are now being managed in a Kubernetes environment. And what we're seeing is sort of, this evolution of Kubernetes to take on these new types of workloads. VMs is just one example, of something that you can now manage with Kubernetes. >> Okay. And, help me understand what this means to really the app dev in my application portfolio. Because you know, the original promise of virtualization was, I can just stick my application in a VM and I never need to think about it ever again. And well, that was super helpful when windows NT was going end of life. In 2020, we do find that most companies do want to update their applications, and they are talking about, do I refactor them? Do I make them microservices architecture? I don't want to have that iceberg of an application that I'm just dragging along slowly into the new world. So. >> Yeah. >> What is this virtualization integration with Kubernetes? You mean for the AppDev and the applications? >> Yeah, sure, so what we see customers doing, what we see the application development team is doing is modernizing a lot of their existing applications, right? So they're taking traditional monolithic applications or end tier, like the applications that may run in a VM based environment and they're moving them towards more of a distributed architecture leveraging microservices based approach. But that doesn't happen all at once either, right? So, oftentimes what you see is your microservices, are still connected to VM based applications. Or maybe you're breaking down a monolithic application. The core is still running in a VM, but some of those business functions have now been carved out and containerized. So, you're going to end up in a hybrid environment from the application perspective in terms of how these applications are packaged, and deployed. The question is, what does that mean for your deployment architecture? Does it mean you always have to run a virtualization platform and a container platform together? That's how it's done today, right? OpenShift and Kubernetes run on top of vSphere, they run on top of Amazon and Azure and Google bands, and on top of OpenStack. But what if you could actually just run Kubernetes directly on Bare Metal and manage those types of workloads? That's really sort of the idea. A whole bunch of virtualization solution was based on is, let's just merge VMs natively with Kubernetes in the same way that we manage containers. And then, it can facilitate for the application developer. This evolution of apps that are running in one environment towards apps that are running essentially, in a hybrid environment from how they're packaged and deployed. >> Yeah, absolutely, something I've been hearing for the last year or so, that hybrid deployment, pulling apart application, sometimes it's even, the core piece as you said, is on premises and then I might have some of the more transactional pieces happening in the public cloud. So really interesting. So, how long has Red Hat been working on this? My (mumbles), something, you know, I'm familiar with in the CNCF. I believe it has been around for a couple of years. >> Yeah. >> So talk to us about just kind of how long it took to get here and, fully support stateful applications now. What's the overall roadmap look like? >> Yeah, so, so (mumbles) as a open source project was launched more than two years ago now. As you know, Red Hat really drives all of our development upstream in the open source community. So we launched (mumbles) project. We've been collaborating with other vendors and even customers on that. But then, you know, over time we then decided, how do we bring these technologies to market, which technologies make sense to bring the market? So, (mumbles) is the open source project. OpenShift and OpenShift Virtualization, which is what this feature is referred to commercially, is the product that then we would ship and support for running this in production environments. The capabilities, right. So, I think, those have been evolving as well. So, virtual machines have a specific requirements in terms of not only how they're deployed and managed, but how they connect to storage, how they connect networking, how do you do things like fencing and all sorts of live migration and that type of thing. We've been building out those types of capabilities. They're certainly still more to do there. But it's something that we're really excited about, not just from the perspective of running VMs, but just even more broadly from the perspective of how Kubernetes is expanding to take on new workloads, right? Because Kubernetes has moved far beyond just running, cloud native applications, today, you can run stateful services in containers. You can run things like AI and machine learning and analytics and IoT type services. But it hasn't come for free, right? This has come through a lot of hard work in the Kubernetes community, in the various associated communities, the container communities, communities like (mumbles). But it's all kind of trying to leverage that same automation, that same platform to just do more things. The cool thing is, it'll not just be Red Hat talking about it, but you'll see that from a lot of customers that are doing sessions at our summit this year and beyond. Talking about how, what it means to them. >> Yeah, that's great. Always love hearing the practitioner viewpoint. All right, Joe, I want to give you the final word when it comes to this whole space things kind of move pretty fast, but also we remember it when we first saw it. So, tell us what the customers who were kind of walking away from Red Hat Summit 2020 should be looking at and understanding that they might not have thought about if they were looking at Kubernetes, a year or two ago? >> Yeah, I think a couple of things. One is, yeah, Kubernetes and this whole container ecosystem is continuing to evolve, continuing to add capabilities and continue to expand the types of workloads, that it can run. Red Hat is right in the center of it. It's all happening in open source. Red Hat as a leading contributor to Kubernetes and open source in general, is driving a lot of this innovation. We're working with some great customers and partners, other vendors, who are working side by side with us as well. And I think the most important thing is we understand that it's an evolution for customers, right? So this evolution towards moving applications to the public cloud, adopting a hybrid cloud approach. This evolution in terms of expanding the types of workloads, and how you run and manage them. And that approach is something that we've always helped customers do and we're doing that today as they move out towards embracing a cloud native. >> All right, well, Joe Fernandez, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on the launch of OpenShift Virtualization. I definitely look forward to talking to some the customers in finding out that helping them along their hybrid cloud journey. All right. Lots more coverage from the CUBE at Red Hat Summit. I'm Stu Miniman ,and thank you for watching the CUBE.

>> Live, from Las Vegas! It's theCUBE! Covering the VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. We're in Las Vegas, and you're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMworld 2018. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my cohost Justin Warren, and happy to welcome to the program for the first time, James Labocki, who's a director of product management with Red Hat. And joining him is CUBE alum, Rob Young, who's the lead manager of virtualization product management strategy, also with Red Hat, wearing the shadow man logo. Rob, James, thank you so much for joining us. >> Great to be here >> Thanks for having us. >> Alright, so Rob, we touch base with Red Hat at a number of shows, you know, Red Hat Summit. We spoke with you last year at VMworld. Give us the update, Red Hat's got a nice booth here at the show, A lot of things going on, Red Hat plays in a lot of the multi-cloud environments that I hear VMware talking about, so, talk about your presence here. >> So, Red Hat has done quite a bit of growing over the course of the last year that we talked. We are focused on not only where our customers are today, but also on how our portfolio needs to evolve to where they aspire to be. And by that, I mean, RHEL is still the foundation of our business. We have Red Hat Virtualization, we have OpenStack Platform, we have the OpenShift, as you know, and what we're learning from our customers and the market, is that, on top of RHEL, customers have not only a footprint in the virtualization world, but they have an aspiration to evolve along with the market to more of a containerized world that is managed, orchestrated, delivered via Kubernetes, and we feel that our portfolio is well positioned with the pillars of our business from infrastructure to application middleware all the way through management, to allow them to act on those aspirations, not in the future but right now. So that's where we are. Our strategy is build around that vision and around that level of enablement and market dynamic, right now, so we're excited, would you agree? >> Yeah absolutely. A lot of interest in OpenShifted option, whether that's on the Vmware platform itself, out on the public clouds, and then on KVR, KVM based hypervisors with Red Hat Virtualization OpenStack Platform as well. >> Yeah it's interesting because, I've watched this adoption of containerization in the marketplace. What's the line I hear from Red Hat? It's like, Linux is containers, containers are Linux. >> Hey you got that good. >> Yeah I got the t shirt too. But, you know, here at VMworld, some people are still trying to understand that virtualization versus containers and, "How do I stack things?" "How do I do that?" What do you hear from customers? Where is their head at? Talk to us about, you know, it's pervasive in the product line so how do you think about it internally too? >> Yeah absolutely so, I think containers are absolutely Linux and Linux is fundamental to containers, so I think one of the most interesting paradigms that we're seeing, or one of the interesting trends we're seeing is that as people are beginning to adopt containers, they're also beginning to realize that they're looking to simplify their environments as they do that. And so it's presenting a lot of new opportunities and reinvigoration of other technologies. So things like traditional virtualization that they have in place today, they're looking at, maybe bringing along KVM and starting to orchestrate containers and virtual machines with Kubernetes in a consistent manner across both on-premise and public cloud providers. So, we're really excited to be involved in projects around that. We're helping drive the adoption of that. And with that reinvigoration of KVM as a hypervisor, based on that work, to bring a common orchestration layer we're seeing even reinvigoration of the ecosystem around KVM with partners of ours like Trilio, Maxta, Veeam, and so on and so forth, which have been kind of discussed in... >> Yeah, Sorry. >> Well I was just going to add to what Dave said. What we see also happening is that the Linux market 25 years ago was open-source, contributor laden. Red Hat was fully engaged there, we are seeing that very same dynamic happening in the Kubernetes environment. We actually see that as very much the equivalent of what Linux was 25 years ago, so we are contributing upstream to the Kubernetes project, but our goal really is not only to stabilize and build out Kubernetes, but also to bring the virtualization aspect that we had brought into KVM and to virtualization into the Kubernetes project and community so that we can get rid of an additional layer of complexity around the hypervisor allowing containers to be managed and deployed and to have the same isolation levels that you have with VMs now. So all that is in process now. We've got upstream work going on and we're leading a lot of those contributions in the Kubernetes community, specifically via the Kubert project so anyway... >> Leads nicely into what I wanted to ask about which was, Red Hat has a long history of open-source, and open-source is a really important part of containers in general. What are you seeing for enterprises in their adoption of open-source? I mean clearly you've watched it go from something which was once verboten, to now it's pretty much de facto. So what are you seeing customers using open-source for in this new cloud and container world? >> Yeah so I think, you know, the typical pattern we see is a lot of times previously people would look at open-source as a way to commoditize and reduce cost. That was the beginning of open-sources right, with the UNIX to Linux migrations and things of that nature. Now, open-source and really Linux is at the forefront of a lot of the innovation happening, so customers are using both those, basically, techniques inside of their environments to embrace open-source. So at one point, they're using their Linux skills to commoditize things inside their environment or reduce cost. They're also looking at it as the basis of containers, microservices, machine learning, so on and so forth, so really this common skillset of Linux is kind of on both sides, and it's really rooted in the open-source knowledge and methodologies that our customers need to be able to... >> You hit the nail right on the head when you mentioned that everything that has to do with the new modernization of the data center built on containers is open-source, and Red Hat's participation in the community is we already have credibility in the Linux world and the OpenStack world and the KVM world and the Kubernetes world as well, and what we're seeing on the customer side, specifically enterprise and public sector is, they are embracing open-source. They've actually got strategies that named open-source as part of the criteria for proof of concepts and things like that, and we believe we've been preparing for this moment for the last 25 years, for the market to really see this as an open opportunity, not only for open-source and communities, but also to enable their development staffs to extend and participate in those projects to their advantage, so it's a really good thing, for a Red Hat market. >> Yeah it's certainly encouraging to see it. Having watched it develop, it's been really nice seeing that actually get used with enterprises, and seeing that Red Hat is there, the whole way through that and as a trusted partner I'm sure gives them a lot of confidence. >> One thing I would add is just, it's not just about the ability to deliver open-source and to use it, although delivering that with along lifecycle is something that is a core competency of Red Hat as a company, but also the ability to actually affect change in those communities and get contributions back in is really key. And then, even advising customers on how to do that is something that we're, it's just to say, "Hey we do open-source," but actually providing that lifecycle around it is a whole nother story. >> Red Hat has a lot of experience living in a lot of different environments, just Linux is pervasive in the data center and in the cloud. When you talk about multi-cloud, customers need to figure out how to deal with these multi-could environments and you know, multi-cloud, multi-hypervisor, how does Red Hat help customers through this journey? >> So there's, we have a really good story there and really good enablement. There are basically four footprints that you can deploy an application on, physical, virtual; public, and private cloud, and red hat portfolio deploys nicely there, RHEL, VMs, OpenStack, OpenShift, containers, you name it. So our approach is, not only do we allow the deployment there, but also the management of it as well, and we agree with you wholeheartedly, workloads are portable, they're mobile, people are going to move them between clouds, on site, they're going to burst into clouds, so our solution to that is the management console that we provide with CloudForms, and our management vision going forward for software as a service and some other things that we're doing, is all about that heterogeneous environment. Multiple hypervisor, multiple cloud providers, multiple OSs as well, so, you know, we want people to see Red Hat as a platform to stabilize on, not a solution where they have to go out and cobble together a solution. They should be able to do everything with our product in a portfolio from a single management console, including that heterogeneous environment with multiple hypervisor, multiple cloud. So that's how we approach it and we're building on that concept, not only with CloudForms, but also with the new CoreOS Tectonic Platform that we just, acquired, that'll be part of OpenShift, and then going forward our management business unit is working on software as a service, consumption based model that allows customers to do the same thing from their phone as an example. It's that vision that we've already executed on, but it's only going to get bigger going forward. >> One thing I would add is, one thing that's fundamental to our vision is that we're actually delivering a consistency across all those footprints so, it's not one version of Kubernetes for public cloud, another version for on-premise, a different automation tool here and a different automation tool there, it's consistent right? Ansible automation across bare metal on-premise, virtualization, private, public cloud, OpenShift with the foundation of RHEL, consistent across all those for one version of Kubernetes across all of them. So I think that's a big key differentiator as opposed to some of the other visions where you have one version on public cloud, one version on private, different disparate tools tools for each of those. We really believe in simplifying that from a complexity standpoint. >> Well Rob and James, really appreciate you giving us the update on Red Hat. We'll be back with lots more coverage from VMworld 2018. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE covering OpenStack Summit North America, 2018, Brought to you by Red Hat, the OpenStack foundation, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stew Miniman here with theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver. My co-host is John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program, we have Berna Devrim, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing of Platform at Red Hat. And we are thrilled to have a customer on, Nico Wellner, who's a Unix Systems Engineer with Finanz Informatik out of Germany. Thank you both so much for joining. Alright, Berna let's start with you. Just give, your first time on the program I believe, so a little bit about your background. You've been with Red Hat less than a year so tell us your role there. >> Yeah, yeah I've been at Red Hat for nine, 10 months now. I've very very excited to be here in the Open Source community development model. It's a very unique opportunity, as I've been leading the platform's marketing, which includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well as Red Hat Virtualization, and Red Hat OpenStack platform, of course, which is why we are here at OpenStack summit. >> Great. We've got Rhel, and RHV, and RHOSP, and lots of other "LMNOP's." So Nico, give us a little bit about your background. Tell us about your organization and then lets get into the mini case study we'll do with you. >> It's an honor for me to be here. Thank you very much for this. I working for Finanz Informatiks, as you said, and it's a centralized IT service provider in the S Finance Group in Germany, for savings banks and state banks. We always have about 400 institutes. Savings banks, individual savings banks. On our systems we are supporting more than 120 million accounts, bank accounts, nearly half of them online accounts. We also develop the software for the savings banks for our customers, not savings banks only. Also, assurances and state banks. We operate the applications we developed previously. It's a huge and amazing company with a lot of different groups and systems. >> Well, we're really glad you could make it here. With GDPR banging down the door in just a couple of days we expect everybody in Europe to be pretty busy getting ready for that. Tell us your role inside the organization. What's your team do? Your title has Unix in it, so what's that entail? Give us the scope of what you cover. >> I'm assistant engineer, as you said and I'm working in the department. We are integrating and operating the Unix systems, which are AIX, we have a huge AIX, and why-mite and a huge Lenox, and why-mite in our data centers. On these Lenox systems, we started with OpenStack in 2014, with testing, and went into production in 2015, half a year later. We integrated OpenStack. We operated and served for our customers internally on the OpenStack platform. We host one of our core applications, it's the internet banking for our customers, as I said for about 50 millions account. We have multiple OpenStack Clouds. My department is responsible for the clouds and for operating them well. >> Nico I wonder if we step back for a second and what led to you going down this path. Was the company figuring out its cloud strategy? Obviously financial institutions, we understand there's governance, compliance, security is a huge concern. What does Cloud mean to your team? What led you to OpenStack? Let's start with kind of that problem statement that you had. >> Yeah, it was the main reason we introduced OpenStack was the time to market was our applications, it was our environment. And it's a plummet process. Took a long time normally and the environment. With OpenStack we could dramatically increase the time to deploy the systems from days or weeks to minutes. So we solved one huge problem with OpenStack. What was another reason was vendor lock-in. We wanted to avoid vendor lock-in. So we decided for OpenStack because it's a huge open source software, great community, and very stable, in our case. So it's OpenStack for us. >> So Berna, I've actually had the opportunity to interview quite a few Red Hat customers. I remember three years ago we were actually in the other hallway here talking to FICO about their role out of Red Hat OpenStack. I hear some similar themes, but you've got access to way more customers than I do. What are you hearing from customers in general? Is this kind of the typical? Is speed and agility at the top of the list when it comes to their Cloud environment? >> Exactly Stew, just like Nico said, actually. Our customers tell us all the time that it is about speed and agility. But it's also about different types of use cases and the workloads that they're actually looking at in their environments. Very popular ones, the use cases are. For example, scale-out IS, as well as they have test environments for the clouds needs applications, for example. Also we do see that big data analytics, NFV also. So there are many different types of use cases we see from our customers. We also have been hearing that they are actually using Open Shift on top of the Red Hat OpenStack platform. Majority of them are either deploying it or planning to deploy containers. So we do see a lot of different, but similar, aspects as well. >> Yeah. Nico have you started to go down that path with containers, Kubernetes, all that stuff yet? >> Not so far. We plan to do so. In general will use containers, we are planning to. But we already started the process, but it would take a little bit. I'm saying that we're not sure if start with OpenStack, containers on OpenStack or plain, but I think that with OpenStack could be a great way to do so. Because one of the reasons is our OpenStack environment is very reliable. This is important for us, very important for us and our customers. Over the years, as I said, since 2015 we had no outage due to OpenStack and the whole environment is great for us. >> That's great. So where are you now in your Red Hat OpenStack deployment? You have an OpenStack in production and now you're already a Red Hat customer in other products and you're now going out with Red Hat OpenStack platform, is that correct? >> Yes that's correct, yeah. >> I'm kind of curious. One of the conversations around OpenStack is the component nature of it and that many OpenStack deployments are different. So as you're now deploying Red Hat and you were already on OpenStack, are the skills transferable? Do you find the the processes transferable? Do you feel that this was a good investment, no up time for three years now and now you're moving to this new platform. Do you and your team feel like you're able to properly instrument and maintain and operate it? >> I think it's the best platform for us for infrastructure and management, Lenix and why-mite. We want to in-wolf it furthermore. >> Stew: And the skills will still transfer? The skills you've known for years will still transfer to the new OpenStack? >> Yes we have only a few people working actively on the design and the architecture, and operating for OpenStack. It's turned out that we could do fine with them. Now we have huge experience with OpenStack, feel comfortable with it. We are planning to increase the OpenStack environment, slightly I think. But scale out works great for us. The OpenStack itself, in our case, we could very flexible do a systems releases, which is one important thing for us. I think the OpenStack itself is the best platform for us and our application tools. >> That's great. Berna I was at Red Hat Summit and the interesting thing there for me was the portfolio, the breadth of portfolio, right? One of the messages was clear. You've always depended on Red Hat Enterprise Lenix, and that's still there and containers are Lenix. There was lot of multi-cloud talk and stuff like that, and OpenStack was part of the mix. Can you talk a little bit about OpenStack as part of the Red Hat portfolio and what you all are bringing to the table, and how you're thinking of open shift on OpenStack and that sort of thing? >> Yeah, exactly. As you pointed out Red Hat is all about open hybrid cloud. Within that Red Hat OpenStack platform plays a big role, of course as you can imagine. What we are trying to do at OpenStack platform is to help our customers like Nico get towards the digital transformation. With that comes, again, the need for speed and agility. What we are enabling with OpenStack platform is we would like to call it powering the digital transformation through enabling our customers to accelerate their businesses by simplifying their applications and delivery as well as the services delivery, which then, of course, moves towards innovation, fast innovation at the speed of the business. At the same time, we are trying to enable IT teams to be empowered so that they can actually do the innovations at their own pace without worry, with all of the Red Hat portfolio, as you pointed out. Yeah. >> Nico, we'd love to hear your take on digital transformation. I think back, five years ago we were talking about financial institutions, oh well we need to go mobile. Well it's much more than that for most companies that I talk to. Do you consider a digital transformation in your company? How does that relate to what IT does to what the business does, to what your users need? >> It's one of our core tasks in our company to help our customers for digital transformation. Finanz Informatik itself sees itself to be the best partner for our customers to do this transformation. With leading technologies like OpenStack and a special case was Red Hat OpenStack, of course, which is a product which enables us to be flexible, secure, and fast with our environment, and to drive this process of digital transformation in the S Finance Group, Savings Finance Group. >> Alright, so you've been at this for three or four years now with OpenStack, I'd love to get what learnings you've had for peers of yours that might be earlier in their journey. What have you learned? What advice might you give them? Let's start there. >> Overall I would say the OpenStack environment is very reliable. More reliable as I thought at the beginning. But it's turned out it's really good. From the automation perspective it's a really nice, let's say tool, for our environment. I found OpenStack is a great project with a lot of software components you can combine. We have a flexible platform. We can add some components we do not have today, but are part of OpenStack community of OpenStack product at all, to enable additional functionalities to the environment, let's say for containers, for object solid, and something like that, and new services for our customers to decrease the time to market. >> Okay. One of the things that this show we're seeing is looking beyond where we've been. I think the keynote this word, people are asking to do more and in more places. Everything from containers, and edge, and server lists, and the like. What's interesting you these days as you look down the road? Different technologies that are in your roadmap in the future, inside or outside OpenStack? >> For our company, we are in the process to integrate new needs for our customers and we are planning to do a lot of big data. Maybe OpenStack could be part of the white platform forward for the future we are planning. I think it will be much more diverse in future because right now we do have one application running on it, one co-application. It's a co-application where we partnered for us. But we will maybe will spread it or enable it for other applications, because of the great experience we've made with it. >> Nico and Berna, thank you so much for giving us the updates on where you stand with OpenStack and all of your deployment. We'll be back here with lots more coverage here at OpenStack Summit 2018 in Vancouver for John Troyer. I'm Stew Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone. Live here in Las Vegas. This is Vmworld 2017, exclusive CUBE coverage. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. My co-host Dave Vellante. Next guest Brian Biles, who's the CEO and founder of Datrium, former entrepreneur. Founder, Data Domain. Entrepreneur, great to have you. >> Great to be here. Good to see you guys. >> Big launch, Datrium. You guys are out there as the crest of the wave is hitting. >> Brian: The crest of which wave? >> The wave of cloud, data, all the waves. >> Dave: So many waves. >> I mean, okay question. What's the biggest wave you're riding right now? >> Within, so there are two big ones. One is you know, enterprises are shifting some of their deployment to public clouds. So, you know, we're helping navigate some of that. The other is, within private clouds, they're moving to converged infrastructure. So our business starts with that but it's starting to have dimensions on public cloud. >> And what does that mean for the customers, people out there right now coming to VMworld this year, they go "Okay, I know what cloud is. "It's a true private cloud on premise operating model "with bursting now, with Amazon, I've got clear picture. "Everything else I'll fill in the blank from there." >> Yeah, let me start in the other order. Within convergence, there's something like 10 percent, 20 percent of infrastructure has kind of moved to that model and it's growing. So traditional sort of specialized appliances are declining in favor of that. Most of our business is in that world. And we're able to combine compute primary and secondary storage in one scalable infrastructure. And that's never been done our way before. So we have a lot of great things to talk about there. Within migration to cloud, the sort of first thing that happened, if you're not moving like wholesale, a bunch of applications there, if you're doing a hybrid thing, the first thing that moves is like back up. Because it's a simple thing to move. It's a low cost store. So we're showing at this show, migration of snapshots in a pre compressed, pre de duplicated, encrypted way to S3 for restore to your on prem site. >> So as an entrepreneur, we're sitting around kind of like on the beach, playing golf, saying I just want to do a start-up. What was the motivation for you to do Datrium? >> For Datrium, so you guys have seen me for a while. I was the founder of Data Domain and Data Domain got bought by EMC. Frank Slootman who was running service now used to say as our CEO that after that acquisition it's sort of like being eaten by a python. Every day you look a little less like yourself. So we all sort of decided to move to a different thing. So the CTO group and I left about the same time. Decided to do something different. We met two guys who were principal engineers at VMware, had been there for 10 years and knew everything about the hypervisor world. We got together. And Datrium came out of that set of discussions. And it turned out, that was in 2012. Hyperconvergence was just starting to emerge so we were looking for the next thing after that. And then, Cloud was becoming big. How do we branch out to that? So all of these discussions were relevant to kind of early thinking even then. And now it's just become more clear. >> So Brian, this notion of bringing compute primary storage and secondary storage together. Where did that come from? Nobody really does that. >> Brian: No, and it's partly because of our background as people. Data Domain was a backup centric product. When I went to EMC, I ended up doing product strategy for the networker and Avamar products as well. We'd been in the backup world for 10 years. So we knew that space pretty well. Doing a storage system that was good for that on either disc or flash was something we knew how to do. But the people that were purely doing that couldn't figure out how to get it to work for primary storage. We took our understanding of that and with the help of our founders from VMware who knew how VM's expected primary IO to work, put together a different kind of framework. So we use hosts with Flash as a primary store. And a secondary set of chassis with spinning rust for persistence of data. So it's like a Pure on every host writing to, kind of a rubric for persistence. So if you actually had hyperconverged and a scale-out backup system, you'd have too much of everything. You'd have too many motherboards, too many persistence drives. You'd have duplicates of all kinds of hardware. By doing it together, we stripped it down so it's way more cost efficient. And it turns out way more scalable. >> So to share those resources and still solve those unique problems efficiently. >> That's right. So we can be as competitive as any data protection archiecture as well as being faster than the fastest all-flash array. >> You know there's a lot of debates going on. Mostly on the all-flash data center side. People say all-flash, it's here to stay. Flash is cheaper than spinning disc. There are a few people who say, "That's not true." And I think you're one of them. >> If you look at an actual implementation of an all-flash array, it's never alone. You're always doing back up to something else. And the something else is probably disc. We all the time see some all-flash array partnering with some disc based back up thing and that's the composite solution. Well you're not getting rid of spinning disc in that case. You're only doing it for the primary IO. But the secondary IO is going to disc. Or it might be going to tape. There are risk management cases where you might be going to Amazon with that backup data. You might be going to tape. But you're not getting rid of something low cost. And if you look at the list prices of an all-flash array versus the list prices of a scale-out backup array, it can be a quarter of the price. Because even if both have dedupe compression, you just, you're paying for insurance in the backup side. You don't want it to be super expensive. >> Yeah so, okay. And so you see that gap, indefinitely. >> You want to protect your data. And you want it to be low cost. We just engineered it together. >> So if we uplevel it beyond the media, Datrium, data is obviously fundamental to your name. Everybody talks about digital transformation. We see digital businesses as defined by the way in which you use your data. So how does Datrium fit into helping companies better leverage their data? >> Well you can sort of go through the life cycle of the data. At the end of the day, we're kind of a data management company that also lets you go fast. So in data management, you mostly want to work at a small granularity. Like VM or container level. An application level. Not at a sort of storage artifact level, like a LUN. You want to deal with apps. And so the convenient approximation of that is VM's are containers. That lets you deal with it easily. So when we have policies in our product for data protection, we don't do volume level snapshots. We let you do container level snapshots. Persistent volumes or VM level snapshots. Replicate them across any number of sites including AWS. Keep more than a million of these granular snapshots in a single system of shared data. So if you snapshot a VM on one host, it's immediately cloneable on another one in the rack. Or the same with a container. And otherwise, you can't really do that with a normal storage system. And this just makes it much more flexible. As it turns out, a lot faster. Because the read IO never leaves the host. It's always on local flash. >> We first had you on theCUBE at VMworld, I think two years ago. But you're moving beyond your VMware roots. >> Quite a bit. >> Dave: Into Linux and other areas. Maybe talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah thanks for bringing that up. This year we've had a lot of announcements. We changed the product considerably, the company. So not only can we do all this data management stuff, we can simultaneously support VMware hosts, Red Hat Virtualization, on just Linux hosts as well as Docker on bare metal. So that multi-hypervisor, multi-container ability in the same shared storage space is very unique. Even hyperconverged vendors don't do that. So yeah, that's opened up a lot of doors for us. >> What's the impact of customers? That's a unique opportunity for you guys. Why go that way and what's the impact to customers? >> Ultimately, people want to consolidate to converged infrastructure. But different application environments are optimized differently. If you want to consolidate, you have to support all the ones that matter. And that's why we're doing this. >> So give us the update on where you guys are right now as a company. Employee headcount, what's the vision, what's the next couple milestones for your success? >> We're about 140 people. We have sales in the U.S. predominantly. A little bit in some other locations. But mostly U.S. We'll be expanding that. We just over the course of this year done quite a lot. So we've gone from, you know, we've expanded our capacity and performance by more than an order of magnitude. We've expanded our number of snapshots and so on. And at the same rate, M by N replication across sites, including Amazon. What you'll see, so that's a lot. >> Lot of product work. Lot of product tech getting done. >> Yes, digestion of that and selling of that, we've moved to everything from commercial midrange, hyperconverged or array sales to sort of teleco, service provider class rack scale infrastructure opportunities. There's a lot. A lot of where we're investing is data management across multiple clouds. So we're showing Amazon replication today. We'll get to other clouds over time. And as well, do more things than just store backup data. We'll be doing more migration and disaster recovery. And a lot of things in the future with cloud. >> What's the most exciting thing happening that gets you excited right now in the industry? In the industry, as you guys look at your opportunity, cause you're the founder, CEO, you got the 20 mile steer. You kind of, lot of product work product CEO. You get to see the vision. As you guys got that trajectory going as a starter, you're forging new ground. What's getting you excited out there? >> In a sort of physical infrastructure sense, it's really interesting to see where NVMe fabric is going and how to leverage that. Because it's, first of all, going to be a different way to compose host instances. It has some problems. It's not a SAN, it doesn't let you do shared data. You can't do V motion using it because it's not a shared facility. And it requires hosts to do the aracia coding for the off-host storage. And that's not a normal model. It turns out it's what we do. So it's interesting. >> And that could be an opportunity or a challenge. >> Yeah. It's also really interesting to see where customers are going with their interface of data management across multiple clouds. It's very much an emerging territory. Similarly with containers. Containers have always been this sort of light weight stateless, it comes up it goes away kind of thing. Within a host, you don't really think about orchestrating container management across host in data management sense. But because we can do it, you can snapshot a container persistent volume on a host with us and then clone it immediately in the same name space under another host. For rapid development, no one's ever thought that through. And now we can offer that. So we're in a bunch of emerging dialogues in that stuff that no one's really had before. >> It's interesting. Bringing adult supervision to stateless apps. >> Yeah because containers are super useful as a development paradigm. It's lightweight, it's small. It allows migration in these really interesting ways. So people are trying to apply it to persistent data as well as stateless data. And that's giving a bunch of interesting new energy to the whole policy approach. >> Brian, great to have you on theCUBE. Great to see you. Congratulations on the venture, it's going great. And you had your launch recently. Big announcements. Keep on innovating, you're a pioneer. Looking forward to our next chat. Great to have you on theCUBE. Appreciate it. >> Thank you very much, thanks for the time. >> For live coverage, three days wall to wall coverage. Day one coming to an end. And here at VMworld 2017, it's theCUBE. Be right back with more coverage after this short break.