>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas its theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. >> Hello everyone, welcome back to our live coverage, exclusive coverage at NetApp Insight 2017, it's theCUBE's coverage. I'm John Furrier, co-host, theCUBE co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, with my co-host, Keith Townsend at CTO Advisor. Our next two guests is Gabe Chapman, Senior Manager, NetApp HCI, and Sidney Sonnier, who's the IT consultant at 4th and Bailey, also a member of the A-Team, a highly regarded, top-credentialed expert. Welcome to theCUBE, guys. Good to see you. >> Hey >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you, good to be here. >> So love the shirt, by the way, great logo, good font, good, comes up great on the camera. >> Thank you. >> We're talking about the rise of the cloud and everything in between, kind of the segment. As a NetApp, A-Team member, and customer. It's here, cloud's here. >> Sidney: Yes >> But it's not yet big in the minds of the Enterprise because they got, it's a path to get there. So, there's public cloud going on, >> Sidney: Right. >> Hybrid clouds, everyone gets that. >> Sidney: Right. >> There's a lot of work to do at home inside a data center. >> Yes, there is, there's an extreme amount of work. And, like you said, these are very exciting times, because we have a blend of all of the technologies and being at an event like this allows us to look at those technologies, look at that fabric, look at that platform, and how we can merge all of those things into an arena that can allow any customer to dynamically move on-prem, off-prem, public cloud, private cloud, but still be able to manage and securely keep all their data in one specific place. >> Gabe, I want to get your thoughts, as he brings up a good point. Architecture's king, it's the cloud architect. Devop has gone mainstream. Pretty much, we all kind of can look at that and say, okay QED, Don, and everyone else put their plans together, but the Enterprises and the folks doing cloud, cloud service providers and everyone else, they have issues, and their plates are full. They have an application development mandate. Get more developers, new kinds of developers, retrain, re-platforming, new onboarding, open source is booming. They have security departments that are unbundling from IT in a way and fully staffed, reporting to the board of directors, top security challenges, data coverage, and then over the top is IoT, industrial IoT. Man, their plate's full. >> Sidney: Right. >> So architecture's huge, and there's a lot of unknown things going on that need to be automated. So it's a real challenge for architects. What's your thoughts. >> So you know, my thoughts about that is, I like to make this joke that there's no book called, The Joy of Menial Tasks. And there are so many of those menial tasks that we do on a day-in and day-out basis, in terms of the Enterprise, whether it's storage, whether it's virtualization, whether it's, whatever it is, right? And I think we've seen this massive shift towards automation and orchestration, and fundamentally the technologies that we're provisioning in today. APIs are king, and they're going to be kind of the focal point, as we move forward. Everything has to have some form of API in it. We have to be making a shift in a transition towards infrastructure as code. At the end of the day the hardware has relevance. It still does, it always will. But the reality is to abstract away the need for that relevance and make it as simple as possible. That's where we have things like hyper converged infrastructure being so at the forefront for so many organizations, NetApp making a foray into this space, as well, is to push, to simplify as much as possible, the day-to-day minutiae, and the infrastructure provisioning. And then, transition those resources over towards getting those next-generation data center applications up, running, and functional. >> Old adage that's been in the industry around making things simple, as our cubbies like an aircraft carrier. But when you go below the water lines, everyone in little canoes paddling, bumping into each other. These silos, if you will. >> Gabe: Right. >> And this is really the dynamic around cloud architecture, is where the operating model's changing. So, you got to be prepared to handle things differently. And in storage, the old days, is, I won't say, easy, but you guys made it easy. A lot of great customers. NetApp has a long history of, but it's not the storage anymore. It's the data fabric as you guys are talking about. It's the developer enablement. It's getting these customers to drive for themselves. It's not about the engine anymore, although, you've got to have a good engine, call it tech, hardware, software together. But the ultimate outcome is the people driving the solutions are app guys. They're just the lines of businesses are under huge pressure and huge need. >> I think you can look at it this way. It's like we're kind of data-driven. You'll see Gene talk about that as part of our messaging. We can no longer be just a storage company. We need to be a data company and a data management organization as we start to have those conversations. Yes, you're going to go in there and talk to the storage administrations and storage teams, but there are 95% of the other people inside of the Enterprise, inside information technology, within different lines of business. They're the ones that we have the most relevant discussions with. That's where our message probably resonates more strongly in the data-driven aspect, or the management, or analytics, and all those other spaces. And I think that's the white space and growth area potential for NetApp, is the fact that we can go in there and have very authoritative discussions with customers around their data needs, and understanding governance. You have things like GPRD, and AMIA. That's a giant open ecosystem for, it has so many requirements and restrictions around it, and everybody's just now starting to wrap their head around it. So building a program around something like that, as well. So there's challenges for everybody. And there's even challenges for vendors like ourselves, because we had, we were mode one. Now we're mode two. So it's kind of like making that transition. And the old speeds, the speeds were always, hey, how fast can you go, what's the files look like, with replication, blah, blah, blah. Now you've got solid, solid state storage. You got SolidFire. Now people want outcomes as a service. Not outcomes anymore, like a cliché, things are happening very dynamically. And last week at Big Data NYC, our event, around the big data world, you couldn't get anymore clear that there's no more room for hype. They want real solutions now. Realtime is critical. And, now watching the keynotes here at NetApp, it's not speed that's featured, although there's a lot of work going on under the hood, it's really about competitive advantage. You're hearing words like data as a competitive advantage. >> Sidney: Yes. >> Sidney, you're in the field, you're in the front lines. Make sense of this. >> The sense that we have to make is, we made up some great points. >> Gabe: Yes. >> Getting the business engaged is one thing, because you still, with the cloud and the cloud architecture, you still have a lot of individuals who are not necessarily sold on it, all the way. So even from a technical perspective. So those guys that are down in the bottom of the boat, so to speak, you still have to kind of convince them because they feel somewhat uncomfortable about it. They have not all the way accepted it. The business is kind of accepted it in pockets. So being, having been on a customer's side and then going to more of a consulting side of things, you understand those pain points. So by getting those businesses engaged and then also engaging those guys to say, listen, it's freeing, the relevance of cloud architecture is not to eliminate a position, it's more to move the mundane tasks that you were more accustomed to using and move you closer to the business so that you can be more effective, and feel more of a participant, and have more value in that business. So that's-- >> So it's creating a value role for the-- >> Right, Right. >> The nondifferentiated tasks >> Absolutely. >> That were being mundane tasks, as you called them. >> Yes. >> You can then put that person now on, whether analytics or ... >> All those IoT things like you were mentioning on those advance projects, and use and leverage the dynamic capability of the cloud being able to go off-prem or on-prem. >> Alright, so what's the guiding principle for a cloud architecture? We'll have to get your thoughts on this because we talked about, in a segment earlier, with Josh, around a good devops person sees automation opportunities and they jump on it like a grenade. There it is, take care of that business and automate it. How do you know what to automate? How do you architect around the notion of we might be continually automating things to shift the people and the process to the value? >> I think what it boils down to is the good cloud architect looks and sees where there are redundancies, things that can be eliminated, things that can be minimized, and sees where complexity is, and focuses to simplify as much of it as possible, right? So my goal has always been to abstract away the complexity, understand that it's there and have the requirements and the teams that can functionally build those things, but then make it look to you as if it were your iPhone, right? I don't know how the app store works. I just download the apps and use it. A good cloud architect does the same thing for their customers. Internally and externally, as well. >> So where does NetApp fit in there, from a product perspective? As a cloud architect, you're always wondering what should I build versus what should I buy? When I look at the open source projects out there, I see a ton of them. Should I go out and dive head deep into one of these projects? Should I look towards a vendor like NetApp to bring to bear that simplified version? Where is the delineation for those? >> So the way we see it is traditionally, there's kind of four consumption models that exists. There's an as-a-service model, or just-in-time model. There are, we see converged, hyper converged as a consumption continuum that people leverage and utilize. There are best-of-breach solutions. Because if I want an object store, I want an object store, and I want it to do exactly what it does. That's an engineering solution. But then there's the as-a-service, I mean, I'm sorry, there's a software-defying component, as well. And those are the, kind of the four areas. If you look at the NetApp product lines, we have an ONTAP set of products, and we have an Element OS set of products, and we have solutions that fit into each one of those consumption continuums, based on what the customer's characteristics are like. You may have a customer that likes configurability. So they would look at a traditional FlexPod with a FAS and say that that's a great idea for me for, in terms of provisioning infrastructure. You may get other customers that are looking at, I want the next-generation data center. I want to provide block storage as a service. So they would look at something like SolidFire. Or, you have the generalist team that looks at simplicity as the key running factor, and time-to-value. And they look at hyper converged infrastructure. So there's a whole set. For me, when I have a conversation with a customer around build versus buy, I want to understand why they would like to build it versus buy it. Because I think that a lot of times, people think, oh, I just download the software and I put it on a box. I'm like, well, right, that's awesome. Now you're in the supply-chain management business. Is that your core competency? Because I don't think it is, right? And so there's a whole bunch of things. It's like firmware management and all these things. We abstract away all of that complexity. That's the reason we charge up for a product, Is the fact that we do all that heavy lifting for the customer. We provide them with an engineered solution. I saw a lot of that when we really focused significantly on the OpenStack space, where we would come up and compete against SEP. And I'm like, well how many engineers do you want to dedicate to keeping SEP up and running? I could give you a turnkey solution for a price premium, but you will never have to dedicate any engineers to it. So that's the trade-off. >> So on that point, I just want to followup. A followup to that is you vision OpenStack, which, big fans of, as you know, we love OpenStack. In the beginning, the challenge with the dupe in OpenStack early on, although that kind of solved, the industry's evolved, is that the early stage was the cost of ownership problem. Which means you had the early tire kickers. Early pioneers doing to work. And they iterated through it. So the question around modernization, which came up as a theme here, what are some modernization practices that I could take as a potential customer, or customer of NetApp, whether I'm an existing customer or a future customer, I want to modernize but I don't want to, I want to manage cost of ownership. And I want to have an architect that's going to allow me to manage my data for that competitive advantage. So I want the headroom of know that it's not just about putting a data link out there, I got to make data realtime, and I don't know when and where it's going to be available. So I need kind of like a fabric or a layer, but I got to have a modern infrastructure. What do I do, what's the playbook? >> So that's where that data fabric, again, comes in. It's like one of the keynotes we heard earlier in the General Session yesterday. We have customers now who are interested in buying infrastructure like we buy electricity. Or like we buy Internet service at home. So by us having this fabric, and it being associated with a brand like NetApp, we're, it's opening up to the point where, what do you really want to do? That's the question we come to you and ask. And if you're into the modernization, we can provide you all the modernization tools right within this fabric, and seamlessly transition from one provider to the next, or plug into another platform or the next, or even put it on-prem. Whatever you want to do. But this will allow the effective management of the entire platform in one location, where you don't have to worry about a big team. You can take your existing team, and that's where that internal support will come in and allow people to kind of concentrate and say, oh, this is some really interesting stuff. Coming from the engineering side of things, being on that customer side, and when you go into customers, you can connect with those guys and help them to leverage this knowledge that they already have because they're familiar with the products. They know the brand. So that makes it more palatable for them to accept. >> So from the cloud architect's perspective, as you look at it, you look at the data-driven fabric or data fabric, and you're like, wow, this is a great idea. Practically, where's the starting point? Is this a set of products? Is it an architecture? Where do I start to bite into this apple? >> So ultimately, I think, you look at it, and I approach it the same way, I would say, like, I can't just go and buy devops. >> Right. >> Right, but data fabric is still, it's a concept, but it's enabled by a suite of technology products. And we look at NetApp across our portfolio and see all the different products that we have. They all have a data fabric element to them, right? Whether it's a FAS, and Snapmirror and snapping to, and ONTAP cloud, it's running in AWS. Whether it's how we're going to integrate with Azure, now with our NFS service that we're providing in there, whether it's hyper converged infrastructure and the ability to move data off there. Our friend Dave McCrory talked about data having gravity, right, he coined that term. And it does, it does have gravity, and you need to be able to understand where it sits. We have analytics in place that help us craft that. We have a product called OCI that customers use. And what it does, it gives them actionable intelligence about where their data sits, where things may be inefficient. We have to start making that transition to, not just providing storage, but understanding what's in the storage, the value that it has, and using it more like currency. We heard George talk about data as currency, it really is kind of the currency, and information is power, right? >> Yeah, Gabe, I mean Gabe, this is right on the money. I mean cryptocurrency and blockchain is a tell sign of what's coming around the corner. A decentralized and distributed environment that's coming. That wave is way out there, but it's coming fast. So you, I want you to take a minute to talk about the cloud component. >> Sidney: Sure. >> Because you mentioned cloud. Talk about your relationship to the clouds, because multi cloud is coming, too. It's not yet there yet, but just because you have a cloud, something in every cloud means multi cloud in the sense of moving stuff around. And then talk about the customer perspective. Because if I'm a customer, I'm saying to myself, okay, I have NetApp, I got files everywhere, I've got ONTAP, they understand the management game, they know how to manage data on-prem, but now I got this cloud thing going on, and I got this shiny new toy start-up over there that's promised me the moon. But I got to make a decision. You're laughing, I know you're thinking about it. This is the dilemma. Do I stay with what I know? >> Right. >> And what I know, is that relevant for where I'm going? A lot of times start-ups will have that pitch. >> Oh, yeah. >> Right >> So address the cloud and then talk about the impact of the customer around the choice. >> Ultimately, it boils down to me in many respects. When I have a conversation with a customer, if I'm going to go for the bright and shiny, right, there has to be a very compelling business interest to do so. If I've built a set of tools and processes around data governance, management, implementation, movement, et cetera, around a bunch of on-premises technologies and I want that same effect or that same look and feel in the public cloud, then that's how we transition there. I want to make it look like I'm using it here locally but it's not on my site, it's somewhere else. It's being managed by somebody else, from a physical standpoint. I'm just consuming that information. But I also know I have to go back and retool everything I've spent in the last 15 and 20 years building because something new and neat comes along. If that new and neat thing comes along, it abstracts away, or it makes a significant cost reduction or something like that, then obviously, you're going to validate that or look at and vet that technology out. But reality is, is that we kind of have these-- >> Well, they don't want to recode, they don't want to retool, they'll rewrite code, but if you look at the clouds, AWS, Azure, and Google, top three in my mind, >> Sidney: Right. >> They all implement everything differently. They got S3 over there, they got it over here, so like, I got it resting on-prem but then I got to hire a devops team that's trained for Azure, Sidney, this is the reality. I mean, evolution might take care of this, but right now, customers have to know that. >> We're at a point right now where customers, businesses we go to, realtime is very important. Software as a service is the thing now. So if you have a customer who is just clicking on a button, and if they can't see that website or whatever your business is, that's a problem. You're going to lose money. You're going to lose customers, you're going to lose revenue. So what you have to do is, as a business, discover what you have internally. And once you discover that and really understand it as a business, not just the tech team, but the business actually understands that. Move that forward and then blend some cloud technology in that with a data fabric, because you're leveraging what you already have. Most of the time, they usually have some sort of NetApp appliance of some sort. And then some of the new appliances that we do have, you can either say, have a small spin, put it next to an old appliance, or use some of the OCI, or something of that nature, to help you migrate to a more dynamic, and the thing about it is, is to just make it more a fluid transition. That's what you're looking to do. Uptime is everything. >> Yeah. >> Totally. >> This fabric will allow you to have that uptime so that you can propel your business and sustain your business. Because you want to be able to still use what you have, and still get that ROI out of that technology, but at the same token, you want to be more dynamic than the competition, so that you can increase that business and still grow the business, but now lose any business. >> Sidney, you bring up a good point. In fact, we should do a followup segment on this, because, what I'm hearing you say, and I've heard this many times in theCUBE, but it's happening, and certainly, we're doing our part on theCUBE to help, but the tech guys, whether they're ops or devs, they're becoming more business savvy. They've got to get closer to the business. >> Sidney: You have to. >> But they don't want to get an MBA, per se, but they have to become street MBA. >> Sidney: Right. >> They got to get that business degree through scar tissue. >> Yes. You can't just be the tech anymore, you have to understand why your business is making this effort, why it's investing this technology, why they would look to go to the public cloud, if you can't deliver a service, and try to emulate that. We've seen that time and time again, the concept of shadow IT, and a shift away from resources. And if you want to be relevant longterm, and not just the guy that sits in the closet, and then plugs in the wires, start learning about your business. Learn about how the business is run and how it generates revenue and see what you can do to affect that. >> Yeah, and the jobs aren't going away. This nonsense about automation killing jobs. >> No, it's not. >> And they use the mainframe as an example, not really relevant, but kind of, but there are other jobs. I mean, look at cyber security, huge data aspect, impact story. >> Sure, it's huge. >> That paradigm is changing realtime. So good stuff, a lot of good business conferences we should do a followup on. I'll give you guys a final word in this segment. If you could each weigh in on what cloud architects should be doing right now. I mean, besides watching theCUBE, and watching you guys here. They got to have the 20-mile stare. They got to understand the systems that are in place. It's almost like an operating system model. They got to see the big picture. Architecting on paper seems easy, but right now it's hard. What's your advice for cloud architects? >> I mean, I say continue to follow the trends. Continue to expose yourself to new technologies. I mean, I'm really interested in things like serverless and those type technologies, and how we integrate our platforms into those types of solutions. Because, that's kind of the next wave of things that are coming along, as we become more of an API-driven ecosystem, right? So if it's infrastructure, if it's code, if it's everything is just in time instance of spin up, how do I have the communications between those technologies? You've just got to stay well ahead of the curve and, you know ... >> John: Sidney, your thoughts? >> My thoughts are along those lines. Not only from a technical perspective but also like you were talking about, that business perspective. Understand your business needs. Because even though, and be able to provide a portfolio, or a suite of tools that will help that business take that next step. And that's where that value. So it's kind of like a blend. You're more of a hybrid. Where you're coming in, not only as a technical person, but you're coming in to assist the business and develop it and help it take it's next step. >> John: And IT is not a department, anymore, it's everywhere. >> No it's not, not. >> It's integrated. >> It is the business. >> Yes. >> Guys, great conversation here on the future of the cloud architect, here inside theCUBE at NetApp Insight 2017 here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, theCUBE's coverage. We'll be right back with more after this short break. (techno music) (fast and furious music)