>> Robert: It feels like we're talking because it's boring TV. Tech people love tech. Consumers love the benefit of tech. No consumer opens up their iphone and says oh my gosh, I love the technology behind my iphone. >> What's it been like, being on the Shark Tank? >> You know filming is fun and hanging out is fun and it's fun to be a celebrity at first. Your head gets really big and you get really good tables at restaurants. >> Who says tech isn't got a little pizazz. >> Voiceover: More skin in the game. In charge of his destiny, Robert Herjavec is Cube Alumni. Live from Santa Clara, California, it's the Cube covering Open Networking Summit 2017. Brought to you by the Linux foundation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Rick here with the Cube. We're at the open networking summit 2017 in Santa Clara, California. I think it's the fourth year of the conference. We've been coming for a long time. It's pretty amazing, a lot of transformation is happening as this project moves from the conversational to the testing to actual. A lot of deployments being talked about in the keynotes. So happy to have Scott Raynovich joining me again. >> Pleasure as always, thank you. >> Did you have a good night last night? >> Excellent. >> Alright, super. Super guest Drew Schulke, he is the vice president of converged networking at Dell EMC. Drew, Welcome. >> Thanks, thanks for having us. >> You've been busy at this show. You're doing panels, you're doing keynotes, they're working you. >> It's been a bit of a whirlwind going on thus far. Yeah, I had a keynote talk on economic and organizational impacts of open networking, which went really, really well. A lot of great questions from the audience, really insightful questions on that. Have met with folks like yourself, some other folks in the media, some analysts, talking to some customers which is always nice to have. We'll close it out tomorrow with one of the keynotes. A panel discussion on the role of open source and moving to 5G where I'll be participating with some folks from Intel and Ericsson. I'm looking forward to that, but yeah, definitely a whirlwind week. >> So before we get into some of the specifics, just your general impressions as to how this thing has evolved over time. Impressions of this show this year. >> Yeah, great question. I think the thing that struck me the most this year was the amount of customers coming in and actually talking about putting a lot of the things we've been talking about at this summit for several years into production environments and seeing results out of it. Some great keynotes last night by some folks, Amadeus in the travel industry and talking about their journey actually moving things into production, I thought was fabulous. Which gives people a vision of what really is possible and moving these out of the theoretical and here's the vision, the strategy into here's how you can actually get things done and getting into results. Ultimately, when you put things into production, that's how you ultimately learn and refine things over time. It's a great move forward for us. >> Awesome, so on the economics and organizational impact of open networking, your keynote. What are some of those really key economic drivers that you outlined in that conversation? >> Yeah, great question. You can kind of break it into a capex and an opex discussion. On the capex side, what we've seen is this whole open networking model is built on merchant silicon and the commoditization of hardware, which may sound like okay, that's a bad thing. Well no, it's really, really good because what it's doing is it's allowing all of us to take the benefits of huge volume and scale that's going on. From the biggest cloud providers down to the enterprise, as we move into this hardware model that's based upon merchant silicon and more standard network designs that are capable of supporting multiple OS's, we all benefit from the economies of scale that go in that. We can amortize R&D investments over a larger number of things. That's all goodness, so there's a huge tailwind on the capex side. On the opex side, as we start to disaggregate the network stack and focus on the individual layers, it creates a different operational model that allows for a high degree of automation. One of the things that we brought up in the session was contrasting a study from 2013 where the typical enterprise network admin was controlling about 300 ports. That was the breadth of support that they had back in 2013. That same year, Facebook came out and said an individual operator can support up to 20,000 servers. It's not like they're just super humans. What happened in there was a level of automation. That's a key ingredient of our open networking strategy, is driving that automation. That's where you get true economies of scale on the opex side. Those are the main points on that one. >> Jeff: Yeah, good ones. >> So Drew, one of the themes we've seen here is that the Linux foundation has done a good job of consolidating some of the open source technology and putting them in the same place so we can all track them and figure out what's going to happen. You just told us about Dell donating some of your code to the Linux foundation. >> Drew: Correct. >> Why don't you explain how you made that decision and what you think it's going to do for your customers. >> Yeah absolutely, as a little bit of context, what we see happening in terms of networking software is one, it's become decoupled from the hardware. That's already done right now. But even when we start to look at the software side, we think there's more disaggregation possible. We can peel apart the layers of what currently is a network operating system today and create a based operating system upon which several different companies can come in and put in what at that point becomes applications on top of it to do things like an L2, L3 stack, or to do MLAG, or tapping, or anything like that. It creates an ecosystem similar to what we had with servers 20 years ago, where I've got an operating system that basically keeps the box running. Then I've got applications which are really the magic on top of it. That's sort of the context. What we donated was that base OS. We've worked on something called OS 10. We have an open edition of it which you can go out to the web and download for free today and start playing around with it. It's an unmodified Linux kernel currently based on the Debian distribution which we believe will serve as a solid foundation for that evolving network and ecosystem going forward. Linux foundation agreed with that and accepted our donation of that to be the foundation of the open switch project, which was talked a little bit about at this particular summit as well. We couldn't be happier to be working with the Linux foundation on the open switch project. Look forward to getting even more of the ecosystem working on that with someone like the Linux foundation behind it to build a very, very capable stack which ultimately benefits all of our customers at the end. >> Where will we see this code go into? What types of products and what markets? Is it NFE for telecom? Is it cloud servers? Where are we going to see this stuff? >> The wonderful thing about it is the answer is all of the above. That's the flexibility of it. Think of it as this way, which is maybe you have a telecom network that's focused on something like MPLS. A company that has a lot of good IP around MPLS can then write an application that can run on that base operating system giving the customer the ability to pick that specific application without having to worry about dragging on an operating system and hardware that may not be what they want. That's the telecom use case. Maybe it's a big cloud provider that has some very specific needs around an L2, L3 stack. Maybe they even have their own IP around that that they want to build on top of this OS. We've really opened up the degrees of freedom in that space across all of those industries. I certainly think where we see the early adopters and starting from that OS 10 base solution today, will be more in the telco service provider and in the cloud space, just because of the level of scale and what it is that they can benefit out of this level of flexibility. >> Excellent. >> There had to be some detractors before you open sourced this. I'm just curious, the conversation in the room about should we or should we not open source this project and take it out to the Linux foundation? What was ultimately the decision that pushed it out the door? >> Yeah, we had been working with some other open source based projects for a couple of years already, so there was a comfort level internally. But what we saw, I think going on in the networking space, was heavily influenced by what we saw going on in the server space 20 years ago when client server hit the scene. That stack became massively disaggregated. The folks who tried to keep these things stitched together into monolithic silos ultimately weren't successful. Either had to change their strategy, or drifted off into the sunset. We certainly was influenced by that history and looking forward at what we saw happening in this space. I'd say as well looking at a lot of the innovation coming out from open source projects and start ups in this space as well, doing some new and exciting things in networking. There was a big keynote yesterday and the panel discussion where a venture capitalist starting talking about, hey networking's cool again. I couldn't agree more where we're seeing startups come in and do really interesting things really, really well. What we're trying to do is create a model where those startups don't have to develop their own operating system and develop their own hardware and then all the management tools that go on top of it. Let them focus at what they're good at, which is a certain piece of IP. Let us work through things like the open networking foundation to drive disaggregation of the stack, making them successful. >> It's an interesting way too to build your community almost indirectly if you will. It's not like you have to sign a bunch of partner agreements and you can't keep track of all these startups and all your alliance people running around. But by putting it into the open source, especially with the Linux foundation just automatically, you're exposed to all these different types of new companies and innovations and that exposure goes both ways. >> Drew: Absolutely. >> It's a really cool trend, where we're seeing these big companies donate parts of these things into this formal situation that is the Linux foundation so it has a home and a place to live and grow. >> Absolutely. >> I want to shift gears a little bit. Today's keynote is about 5G. A lot of talk about 5G, mobile world congress is all about 5G but some people saying wait, it's not here yet, it's far out. But clearly, I think the message this morning from Sandra and also on the Cube yesterday is it's coming, but you don't just turn it on one day. You got to put all the pieces in place. What's Dell EMC's perspective on 5G? Where are you guys on this journey? >> For us in terms of where we play at an infrastructure level in the data center, for us, the key step right now is to get to this model where we can decouple function from location. Which is what the telecoms and the mobile networks have been trying to do through things like NFV. What we've been trying to do is help them on that journey long before we even get to the point where 5G is knocking at the door. Working with them today to put in the right infrastructure capable of supporting highly virtualized workloads and also capable of supporting a variety of different software defined networking solutions. If you get those components right, you're setting yourself up with a really good foundation for 5G. If 5G gets here and you haven't decoupled function and location yet in terms of your infrastructure or strategy that's going to be a tough one. What we're trying to do is shepherd that along and move that as fast as we can right now. >> We got Dell EMC World coming up pretty soon right? >> That's right, I hope to see you guys there. >> Previews of this? What can we expect to see? >> It will be interesting. This is the first time that as a combined company we're doing this event in Vegas. We had a preview in October as a newly closed transaction. This will have the full force effect of the combined Dell EMC firm coming together to put on a great show. Looking forward to it. Huge venue, I know you guys play a prominent role there. I'm hoping to see you guys there as well. Yes, there will be lots of announcements. I'm not going to go get myself in trouble by saying what any of those are four weeks in advance of when that's going to happen. >> No hints or anything. >> No hints, but certainly on the networking side, you'll hear a couple of announcements from us in terms of new products that we'll be talking about and stay tuned. >> I'll ask you the softer way to get to the same answer, but I know you're not going to give me the answer, but looking forward, 2017 what are some of your priorities top of mind that you guys are working on where if we see you a year from now, you'll report back that here's what we did in 2017? >> Clearly, this OS 10 strategy that we have, building upon this base is going to be key for that. Continuing to support the donations that we've made through the Linux foundation and Open Switch. Bringing in additional partners to develop on top of that to get their IP ready to be able to take advantage of that will be a key focus for us. But as well, there's some key networking speed transitions coming up that you got to keep pace with from a road map perspective, so you'll probably hear some things about that. Then as well just thinking from a Dell EMC perspective, as we look at how our portfolio as a company is evolving, a big shift toward software defined storage models, converged infrastructure, hyperconverged infrastructure. On the networking side, we're clearly trying to do everything we can to position ourselves to be a value add in any of those solutions today. That'll be the hint of the areas you can expect to hear about in May. >> That's good, that's a good little hint. It's a month to the Dell EMC World again the first combined Dell EMC World >> Drew: In Vegas. >> Well, last year we had EMC World in Vegas and Dell EMC World, it got very confusing. Now there's just one. We're like is it the Vegas one or the Austin one? So now there's just one, it's easier to keep track. >> Drew: One forum to rule them all. >> We look forward to Michael coming on, we had him on at both as well as VM World and it's always great to get his take as well. So Drew, thanks for stopping by and we look forward to seeing you in about a month in Vegas. >> Likewise, thanks guys, great time. >> Drew Schulke, Scott Reynovitch, Jeff Rick. You're watching the Cube from Open Networking Summit 2017. Thanks for watching. We'll be back after this short break. (bright music)