>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by. >>Hey, welcome back to the cube Lisa Martin with Steven and Amanda. We are covering combo go 19 in Colorado day two of our coverage and we're excited to welcome a successful comm vault customer to the cube. We have from the main stage this morning, Matthew mag meet data center, director of Sonic healthcare. Matthew, welcome. Thank you for having me. This is so exciting. Oh good. We're excited to have you. So you got to, you are, you're, as your pen says, a combo customer champion. >>I am a customer champion a, I've kind of prided myself on that for the last few years. Uh, I like to get involved in the community and kind of help the other newcomers to come volt as well. As better my understanding and try to give the guys on the other end of the support line and break. >>So before we dig into Sonic and what you guys are doing and how you're working with combo, give our audience an overview of Sonic healthcare, what you guys do, where you're based, all that good background stuff. Okay. >>So I worked for a Sonic healthcare USA, so that's obviously in the United States. Uh, we are an anatomical and clinical pathology laboratory company. Um, we are based, uh, West coast central and East coast of the United States and we work with hospitals, doctor's office to provide, you know, quick and reliable laboratory results. >>So this is patient data. Yes. We think of, we think of data as I'm sure you do as well. It's the lifeblood. It's the new oil. It's all the things, right? That you hear the new bacon. It's the new bacon is that was like your quote? I saw that combo last year. >>Yeah, they had, they had teachers last year with that data. Yeah. Data is the new bacon. >>Well it's, it's critical, you know, regardless of if you're for Kim comparing it to bacon, I do like that. But it's also, there's the proliferation of it is hard to manage. Tell us a little bit about the it environment at Sonic. You guys have been using combo for about four years, but give us an overview of what you were working with before and how, what may be some of the compelling events were. >>So coming on board with Sonic, uh, the combo rollout was relatively new. We didn't, I didn't really come into a preexisting environment. It was like, okay, this is, this is what we're going to use. I need you to learn it and run with it, make sure that it works. Right. And um, you know, coming from other companies that had different software applications, I was always in charge of the disaster recovery. That's always been kind of like a, a beating heart for me. >>You're the Dr. Guy. It is apparently, >>it's really hard to find someone who's excited about backups. So I've put, it's like, yes, please take it. So I'm coming in and being able to mold this application to kind of how I wanted it was a little like touch and go at first because we had people out of our, um, overseas office that were, uh, handling already and is, they kind of set the stage of how they wanted it to go. But, you know, things change. We've got to kind of move things as we go, but I kind of owe a lot to them to kind of really introducing me to combo. >> So Matthew, one of the things that we've really enjoyed talking about at this show is everybody's ready. They're born ready, they know what they're doing, what it's preparing for when things do fail. So you talked a little bit on stage about some of those times when things fail and how today you're able to be here and you're, the other person in the D R group is here and you don't have to worry about walking away from the office and you know, having, you know, I guess not a Pedro anymore, but getting that call. >>Yeah, they need to be there. So my cell phone. But yeah, so bring us through some of those, you know, failure scenarios. We are always trying different things. You know, combo does offer a wide array of different solutions they have for plans and one of them is their active directory plan. And I'm leaning towards this cause this is my most recent failure is, you know, we were just, I've always had issues with active directory testing. The fail over and my first attempt at it was a failure. But I learned so much off the bat that I'm actually comfortable now that there might be a few tweaks that we have to do. By worst case scenario, we'd definitely be able to get it back online without any issue. But if we would've gone into it without testing, without that failure, who knows what could have happened. It could've been just a resume generating event, you know? >>Well, so you, you Stu alluded to it and what you mentioned in the keynote was, Hey, my other only other Dr. Guy is here in the audience. So I actually, I have >>team a data center team and we're all in charge. It's eight, eight people and we're, we're in charge of the disaster recovery. But, uh, the old gentleman who's with me is the only other one who's, uh, uh, done a lot of the combo training. He comes to Kai, he's been to all three combos, goes with me and uh, he's, he's probably the, if I'm not around, he's the next in line to take that. So if there's a major issue it would be one of us that they would contact by. We're both here >> and you're both here. Well that actually speaks volumes. It does. And we're comfortable and you know, we've been checking email for things but you know, everything's smooth sailing so far. >>I think I saw a quote from you, I think it was in a video where you said before it was like having a newborn. >>Absolutely, absolutely. I used to check like sign in. It's like 10 o'clock every single night for the first year that I worked for sign cause I was petrified cause you know, I knew that I was backing stuff up but I don't know, was it still running with it still being backed up? Did it pause? Was it causing performance issues on the other end? There were so many what ifs and I just, I was, I was a mess. I was a nervous wreck constantly, you know, working till one or two in the morning and then go to bed and then eagerly get up and start checking stuff even before I left the house, you know? And I'm like, Oh, okay, that's finished. But now it's like, yeah, I know I finished not worried about Matthew. I think back to early in my career it was the dreaded backup window is, you know, when am I going to be able to get that in there? >>Can I finish the backup in the window that I have? And we've mostly gotten beyond that. But you know, there's so many new now we were just talking with Sandy Hamilton who was on stage before you about some of that automation. Really great automation sounds good, but there's gotta be a little bit of fear. It's like shit, you know, talking about like texting, I said like we've all texted the wrong thing or the wrong person or you had the wrong person. So tell us your thoughts about how automation is impacting your world and how calm voltage. >> I actually have very little automation workflow running through comm vault right now. A lot of the stuff that we do automation wise lies on the VMware side. Um, so that's, that's been good. I haven't really implemented a lot just because I personally am not comfortable with it yet. >>I'm not against it. It's just something that I haven't really trained myself enough to say I'm going to leave and let this run by itself. I'm still like, Oh no, this could be better. This could be better. This can be better. So until I'm 100% comfortable with that, I think we'll just leave it at a semiautomated task of just, sorry, you said something down the road that you're absolutely even even sitting in keynote yesterday and listening about the Alexa automation and SMS tax, I like writing in a piece of paper to test that because it's something that I've always wanted and ever since combo go last year when they were using Alexa to check SLA and RPO and RTO, I'm like, I want to be able to do that. So that's definitely down the road, but it's on the back burner right now. >>So give us a landscape view distributed organization. You talked about your base in the U S but all of the different clinics and organizations that you work with, are you living in this multi-cloud world? >>So, uh, we are pretty much zero cloud initiative company. Yeah. I'm actually trying to work on a slogan, Oh no, cloud zero cloud and proud or something like that. But I'm not 100% sure. It's definitely not out of the question. But with FedRAMP co compliancy and HIPAA, there's just a lot of regulation between the data that we have for the U S that transmits back and forth, let's say Australia or Ireland or something like that. There's certain regulations that we have to deal with and uh, in the cloud there's, there's very few options of where you can actually have those servers. So it's right now, you know, on prem is kind of, it's kind of our jam. >>So as a lot of organizations are going through FedRAMP certification, I was just at one of Dell's events the other week. They're going through it. I know some other like e-signature companies are doing, a lot of companies are, are you paying attention to that? Is that something that you think in the future might provide more confidence? >>Completely transparent. It's something I should be paying more attention to that I'm, I've just, I really haven't really done as much research as I should have and you know, I take full responsibility for that. But at the same time, you know, there's, there's a lot of other things going on in the U S that until we implement something of that nature, I don't really think that I'm really too concerned about it. So Matthew, you've been to a few of these events. Last one, last year there was a lot of talk about the coming change in this year. Lot of new faces, new Hedvig metallic. Yeah. So what we'll want to get your impression on the executive changes, some of the, you know, are you seeing any indications of organizational changes and the products? What I'm seeing is I'm seeing new life to a product that I've always been told is a dinosaur, which I kind of laugh cause I'm like, well if this dinosaur is doing things that, you know, the greatest and latest and greatest things aren't or aren't really doing. So to see this new life, the new rebranding of the logo, the new leadership, the new acquisitions and everything is just like feeding fuel to the fire. That is combo. And, and I'm, I'm pretty excited. I will say that I'm a little bit more excited about the new additions to like orchestrate and activate since stuff like metallic. I won't really be implementing just because of our business practices. But yeah. >>Let's talk about in our last few minutes here, cause they actually talked about some of the new technologies with orchestrate activate yesterday and today, but in terms of support we just had as to mention, we just interviewed Sandy Hamilton and she's come on board in the last, I think she said four and a half months. Owning professional services systems, engineering support, customer success throughout the entire life cycle. Tell us a little bit in, in our closing minute or so about the support and training that you've gotten from combat that give you the confidence for you and one of your other guys to be here and not tied to your phone. >>I don't think I'd still be with combo if it wasn't for their support. I, I owe so much to their support. They've brought me through some pretty dark times with deployment, with troubleshooting, with failures where I thought that I had things right and it just didn't work. I've called in at one in the morning, got great support, I've caught any 10 in the morning and got great support, phenomenal follow up. Um, their, their community impact, like their forums and their customer champion. So much. Just additional information that helps you not have to call in and not make you feel like that, Oh, that failure. So I owe a lot to their support and their training because without a, like I wouldn't be, I wouldn't be on stage. I'm, I'm wonder if you could put a point on that, the, the forums in your participation as a customer champion, you're spending your own time, you're working with your PBM. >>Why is that so important and how is this the vibrancy of this community, you know, it belongs to the worlds, you know, naming the things that you learn. Somebody taught me, so why shouldn't I teach somebody else? And if that makes someone else be able to go out and ride mountain bikes or cook with their daughter or do anything like that, then I'm all for it because it got me, it got me through all that. So I mean I have 10 15 minutes on the customer forum to answer you. Oh yeah, I know that. I've seen that. I had a gentleman the first morning at breakfast, like I've had a ticket open for two weeks and they can't figure it out. And we worked together and actually got his problem solved, you know? And it was like the only reason is because I've seen that and I worked with combat and they showed me how to fix it and I retain that knowledge. >>That's awesome. DOE takes paying it forward to a whole new level. And it also volumes about how you followed Jimmy chin this morning and nailed it. I tried. It was very difficult, you know, I'm sure that you know why he was filming that solo climber. He was sweaty palms. I was definitely sweaty phone calls. It was, well, Matthew, what a pleasure to have you on the program. So much fun. Thank you. Congratulations on your success and we look forward to hearing it. Many more great things out of Sonic. Thank you. All right. First to a minimum I and Lisa Martin, you're watching the cube from combo go 19.

(upbeat music) (logo swooshing) >> Good morning and welcome back to Dallas, ladies and gentlemen, we are here with theCUBE Live from Supercomputing 2022. David, my cohost, how are you doing? Exciting, day two, feeling good? >> Very exciting. Ready to start off the day. >> Very excited. We have two fascinating guests joining us to kick us off. Please welcome Pete and Armando. Gentlemen, thank you for being here with us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm excited that you're starting off the day because we've been hearing a lot of rumors about Ethernet as the fabric for HPC, but we really haven't done a deep dive yet during the show. You all seem all in on Ethernet. Tell us about that. Armando, why don't you start? >> Yeah, I mean, when you look at Ethernet, customers are asking for flexibility and choice. So when you look at HPC, InfiniBand's always been around, right? But when you look at where Ethernet's coming in, it's really our commercial in their enterprise customers. And not everybody wants to be in the top 500, what they want to do is improve their job time and improve their latency over the network. And when you look at Ethernet, you kind of look at the sweet spot between 8, 12, 16, 32 nodes, that's a perfect fit for Ethernet in that space and those types of jobs. >> I love that. Pete, you want to elaborate? >> Yeah, sure. I mean, I think one of the biggest things you find with Ethernet for HPC is that, if you look at where the different technologies have gone over time, you've had old technologies like, ATM, Sonic, Fifty, and pretty much everything is now kind of converged toward Ethernet. I mean, there's still some technologies such as InfiniBand, Omni-Path, that are out there. But basically, they're single source at this point. So what you see is that there is a huge ecosystem behind Ethernet. And you see that also the fact that Ethernet is used in the rest of the enterprise, is used in the cloud data centers, that is very easy to integrate HPC based systems into those systems. So as you move HPC out of academia into enterprise, into cloud service providers, it's much easier to integrate it with the same technology you're already using in those data centers, in those networks. >> So what's the state of the art for Ethernet right now? What's the leading edge? what's shipping now and what's in the near future? You're with Broadcom, you guys designed this stuff. >> Pete: Yeah. >> Savannah: Right. >> Yeah, so leading edge right now, got a couple things-- >> Savannah: We love good stage prop here on the theCUBE. >> Yeah, so this is Tomahawk 4. So this is what is in production, it's shipping in large data centers worldwide. We started sampling this in 2019, started going into data centers in 2020. And this is 25.6 terabytes per second. >> David: Okay. >> Which matches any other technology out there. Like if you look at say, InfinBand, highest they have right now that's just starting to get into production is 25.6 T. So state of the art right now is what we introduced, We announced this in August, This is Tomahawk 5, so this is 51.2 terabytes per second. So double the bandwidth, out of any other technology that's out there. And the important thing about networking technology is when you double the bandwidth, you don't just double the efficiency, actually, winds up being a factor of six efficiency. >> Savannah: Wow. >> 'Cause if you want, I can go into that, but... >> Why not? >> Well, what I want to know, please tell me that in your labs, you have a poster on the wall that says T five, with some like Terminator kind of character. (all laughs) 'Cause that would be cool. If it's not true, just don't say anything. I'll just... >> Pete: This can actually shift into a terminator. >> Well, so this is from a switching perspective. >> Yeah. >> When we talk about the end nodes, when we talk about creating a fabric, what's the latest in terms of, well, the nicks that are going in there, what speed are we talking about today? >> So as far as 30 speeds, it tends to be 50 gigabits per second. >> David: Okay. >> Moving to a hundred gig PAM-4. >> David: Okay. >> And we do see a lot of nicks in the 200 gig Ethernet port speed. So that would be four lanes, 50 gig. But we do see that advancing to 400 gig fairly soon, 800 gig in the future. But say state of the art right now, we're seeing for the end node tends to be 200 gig E based on 50 gig PAM-4. >> Wow. >> Yeah, that's crazy. >> Yeah, that is great. My mind is act actively blown. I want to circle back to something that you brought up a second ago, which I think is really astute. When you talked about HPC moving from academia into enterprise, you're both seeing this happen, where do you think we are on the adoption curve and sort of in that cycle? Armando, do you want to go? >> Yeah, well, if you look at the market research, they're actually telling you it's 50/50 now. So Ethernet is at the level of 50%, InfinBand's at 50%, right? >> Savannah: Interesting. >> Yeah, and so what's interesting to us, customers are coming to us and say, hey, we want to see flexibility and choice and, hey, let's look at Ethernet and let's look at InfiniBand. But what is interesting about this is that we're working with Broadcom, we have their chips in our lab, we their have switches in our lab. And really what we're trying to do is make it easy to simple and configure the network for essentially MPI. And so the goal here with our validated designs is really to simplify this. So if you have a customer that, hey, I've been InfiniBand but now I want to go Ethernet, there's going to be some learning curves there. And so what we want to do is really simplify that so that we can make it easy to install, get the cluster up and running and they can actually get some value out the cluster. >> Yeah, Pete, talk about that partnership. what does that look like? I mean, are you working with Dell before the T six comes out? Or you just say what would be cool is we'll put this in the T six? >> No, we've had a very long partnership both on the hardware and the software side. Dell's been an early adopter of our silicon. We've worked very closely on SI and Sonic on the operating system, and they provide very valuable feedback for us on our roadmap. So before we put out a new chip, and we have actually three different product lines within the switching group, within Broadcom, we've then gotten very valuable feedback on the hardware and on the APIs, on the operating system that goes on top of those chips. So that way when it comes to market, Dell can take it and deliver the exact features that they have in the current generation to their customers to have that continuity. And also they give us feedback on the next gen features they'd like to see again, in both the hardware and the software. >> So I'm fascinated by... I always like to know like what, yeah, exactly. Look, you start talking about the largest supercomputers, most powerful supercomputers that exist today, and you start looking at the specs and there might be two million CPUs, 2 million CPU cores. Exoflap of performance. What are the outward limits of T five in switches, building out a fabric, what does that look like? What are the increments in terms of how many... And I know it's a depends answer, but how many nodes can you support in a scale out cluster before you need another switch? Or what does that increment of scale look like today? >> Yeah, so this is 51.2 terabytes per second. Where we see the most common implementation based on this would be with 400 gig Ethernet ports. >> David: Okay. >> So that would be 128, 400 gig E ports connected to one chip. Now, if you went to 200 gig, which is kind of the state of the art for the nicks, you can have double that. So in a single hop, you can have 256 end nodes connected through one switch. >> Okay, so this T five, that thing right there, (all laughing) inside a sheet metal box, obviously you've got a bunch of ports coming out of that. So what's the form factor look like for where that T five sits? Is there just one in a chassis or you have.. What does that look like? >> It tends to be pizza boxes these days. What you've seen overall is that the industry's moved away from chassis for these high end systems more towardS pizza boxes. And you can have composable systems where, in the past you would have line cards, either the fabric cards that the line cards are plug into or interfaced to. These days what tends to happen is you'd have a pizza box and if you wanted to build up like a virtual chassis, what you would do is use one of those pizza boxes as the fabric card, one of them as the line card. >> David: Okay. >> So what we see, the most common form factor for this is they tend to be two, I'd say for North America, most common would be a 2RU, with 64 OSFP ports. And often each of those OSFP, which is an 800 gig E or 800 gig port, we've broken out into two 400 gig ports. >> So yeah, in 2RU, and this is all air cooled, in 2RU, you've got 51.2 T. We do see some cases where customers would like to have different optics and they'll actually deploy 4RU, just so that way they have the phase-space density. So they can plug in 128, say QSFP 112. But yeah, it really depends on which optics, if you want to have DAK connectivity combined with optics. But those are the two most common form factors. >> And Armando, Ethernet isn't necessarily Ethernet in the sense that many protocols can be run over it. >> Right. >> I think I have a projector at home that's actually using Ethernet physical connections. But, so what are we talking about here in terms of the actual protocol that's running over this? Is this exactly the same as what you think of as data center Ethernet, or is this RDMA over converged Ethernet? What Are we talking about? >> Yeah, so RDMA, right? So when you look at running, essentially HPC workloads, you have the NPI protocol, so message passing interface, right? And so what you need to do is you may need to make sure that that NPI message passing interface runs efficiently on Ethernet. And so this is why we want to test and validate all these different things to make sure that that protocol runs really, really fast on Ethernet. If you look at NPIs officially, built to, hey, it was designed to run on InfiniBand but now what you see with Broadcom, with the great work they're doing, now we can make that work on Ethernet and get same performance, so that's huge for customers. >> Both of you get to see a lot of different types of customers. I kind of feel like you're a little bit of a looking into the crystal ball type because you essentially get to see the future knowing what people are trying to achieve moving forward. Talk to us about the future of Ethernet in HPC in terms of AI and ML, where do you think we're going to be next year or 10 years from now? >> You want to go first or you want me to go first? >> I can start, yeah. >> Savannah: Pete feels ready. >> So I mean, what I see, I mean, Ethernet, what we've seen is that as far as on, starting off of the switch side, is that we've consistently doubled the bandwidth every 18 to 24 months. >> That's impressive. >> Pete: Yeah. >> Nicely done, casual, humble brag there. That was great, I love that. I'm here for you. >> I mean, I think that's one of the benefits of Ethernet, is the ecosystem, is the trajectory the roadmap we've had, I mean, you don't see that in any of the networking technology. >> David: More who? (all laughing) >> So I see that, that trajectory is going to continue as far as the switches doubling in bandwidth, I think that they're evolving protocols, especially again, as you're moving away from academia into the enterprise, into cloud data centers, you need to have a combination of protocols. So you'll probably focus still on RDMA, for the supercomputing, the AI/ML workloads. But we do see that as you have a mix of the applications running on these end nodes, maybe they're interfacing to the CPUs for some processing, you might use a different mix of protocols. So I'd say it's going to be doubling a bandwidth over time, evolution of the protocols. I mean, I expect that Rocky is probably going to evolve over time depending on the AI/ML and the HPC workloads. I think also there's a big change coming as far as the physical connectivity within the data center. Like one thing we've been focusing on is co-packed optics. So right now, this chip is, all the balls in the back here, there's electrical connections. >> How many are there, by the way? 9,000 plus on the back of that-- >> 9,352. >> I love how specific it is. It's brilliant. >> Yeah, so right now, all the SERDES, all the signals are coming out electrically based, but we've actually shown, we actually we have a version of Tomahawk 4 at 25.6 T that has co-packed optics. So instead of having electrical output, you actually have optics directly out of the package. And if you look at, we'll have a version of Tomahawk 5. >> Nice. >> Where it's actually even a smaller form factor than this, where instead of having the electrical output from the bottom, you actually have fibers that plug directly into the sides. >> Wow. Cool. >> So I see there's the bandwidth, there's radix's increasing, protocols, different physical connectivity. So I think there's a lot of things throughout, and the protocol stack's also evolving. So a lot of excitement, a lot of new technology coming to bear. >> Okay, You just threw a carrot down the rabbit hole. I'm only going to chase this one, okay? >> Peter: All right. >> So I think of individual discreet physical connections to the back of those balls. >> Yeah. >> So if there's 9,000, fill in the blank, that's how many connections there are. How do you do that many optical connections? What's the mapping there? What does that look like? >> So what we've announced for Tomahawk 5 is it would have FR4 optics coming out. So you'd actually have 512 fiber pairs coming out. So basically on all four sides, you'd have these fiber ribbons that come in and connect. There's actually fibers coming out of the sides there. We wind up having, actually, I think in this case, we would actually have 512 channels and it would wind up being on 128 actual fiber pairs because-- >> It's miraculous, essentially. >> Savannah: I know. >> Yeah. So a lot of people are going to be looking at this and thinking in terms of InfiniBand versus Ethernet, I think you've highlighted some of the benefits of specifically running Ethernet moving forward as HPC which sort of just trails slightly behind super computing as we define it, becomes more pervasive AI/ML. What are some of the other things that maybe people might not immediately think about when they think about the advantages of running Ethernet in that environment? Is it about connecting the HPC part of their business into the rest of it? What are the advantages? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a big thing. I think, and one of the biggest things that Ethernet has again, is that the data centers, the networks within enterprises, within clouds right now are run on Ethernet. So now, if you want to add services for your customers, the easiest thing for you to do is the drop in clusters that are connected with the same networking technology. So I think one of the biggest things there is that if you look at what's happening with some of the other proprietary technologies, I mean, in some cases they'll have two different types of networking technologies before they interface to Ethernet. So now you've got to train your technicians, you train your assist admins on two different network technologies. You need to have all the debug technology, all the interconnect for that. So here, the easiest thing is you can use Ethernet, it's going to give you the same performance and actually, in some cases, we've seen better performance than we've seen with Omni-Path, better than in InfiniBand. >> That's awesome. Armando, we didn't get to you, so I want to make sure we get your future hot take. Where do you see the future of Ethernet here in HPC? >> Well, Pete hit on a big thing is bandwidth, right? So when you look at, train a model, okay? So when you go and train a model in AI, you need to have a lot of data in order to train that model, right? So what you do is essentially, you build a model, you choose whatever neural network you want to utilize. But if you don't have a good data set that's trained over that model, you can't essentially train the model. So if you have bandwidth, you want big pipes because you have to move that data set from the storage to the CPU. And essentially, if you're going to do it maybe on CPU only, but if you do it on accelerators, well, guess what? You need a big pipe in order to get all that data through. And here's the deal, the bigger the pipe you have, the more data, the faster you can train that model. So the faster you can train that model, guess what? The faster you get to some new insight, maybe it's a new competitive advantage, maybe it's some new way you design a product, but that's a benefit of speed, you want faster, faster, faster. >> It's all about making it faster and easier-- for the users. >> Armando: It is. >> I love that. Last question for you, Pete, just because you've said Tomahawk seven times, and I'm thinking we're in Texas, stakes, there's a lot going on with that. >> Making me hungry. >> I know, exactly. I'm sitting out here thinking, man, I did not have big enough breakfast. How did you come up with the name Tomahawk? >> So Tomahawk, I think it just came from a list. So we have a tried end product line. >> Savannah: Ah, yes. >> Which is a missile product line. And Tomahawk is being kind of like the bigger and batter missile, so. >> Savannah: Love this. Yeah, I mean-- >> So do you like your engineers? You get to name it. >> Had to ask. >> It's collaborative. >> Okay. >> We want to make sure everyone's in sync with it. >> So just it's not the Aquaman tried. >> Right. >> It's the steak Tomahawk. I think we're good now. >> Now that we've cleared that-- >> Now we've cleared that up. >> Armando, Pete, it was really nice to have both you. Thank you for teaching us about the future of Ethernet and HCP. David Nicholson, always a pleasure to share the stage with you. And thank you all for tuning in to theCUBE live from Dallas. We're here talking all things HPC and supercomputing all day long. We hope you'll continue to tune in. My name's Savannah Peterson, thanks for joining us. (soft music)

>>You can put this in a conference. >>Good morning and welcome back to Dallas. Ladies and gentlemen, we are here with the cube Live from, from Supercomputing 2022. David, my cohost, how you doing? Exciting. Day two. Feeling good. >>Very exciting. Ready to start off the >>Day. Very excited. We have two fascinating guests joining us to kick us off. Please welcome Pete and Armando. Gentlemen, thank you for being here with us. >>Having us, >>For having us. I'm excited that you're starting off the day because we've been hearing a lot of rumors about ethernet as the fabric for hpc, but we really haven't done a deep dive yet during the show. Y'all seem all in on ethernet. Tell us about that. Armando, why don't you start? >>Yeah. I mean, when you look at ethernet, customers are asking for flexibility and choice. So when you look at HPC and you know, infinite band's always been around, right? But when you look at where Ethernet's coming in, it's really our commercial and their enterprise customers. And not everybody wants to be in the top 500. What they want to do is improve their job time and improve their latency over the network. And when you look at ethernet, you kinda look at the sweet spot between 8, 12, 16, 32 nodes. That's a perfect fit for ethernet and that space and, and those types of jobs. >>I love that. Pete, you wanna elaborate? Yeah, yeah, >>Yeah, sure. I mean, I think, you know, one of the biggest things you find with internet for HPC is that, you know, if you look at where the different technologies have gone over time, you know, you've had old technologies like, you know, atm, Sonic, fitty, you know, and pretty much everything is now kind of converged toward ethernet. I mean, there's still some technologies such as, you know, InfiniBand, omnipath that are out there. Yeah. But basically there's single source at this point. So, you know, what you see is that there is a huge ecosystem behind ethernet. And you see that also, the fact that ethernet is used in the rest of the enterprise is using the cloud data centers that is very easy to integrate HPC based systems into those systems. So as you move HPC out of academia, you know, into, you know, into enterprise, into cloud service providers is much easier to integrate it with the same technology you're already using in those data centers, in those networks. >>So, so what's this, what is, what's the state of the art for ethernet right now? What, you know, what's, what's the leading edge, what's shipping now and what and what's in the near future? You, you were with Broadcom, you guys design this stuff. >>Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. So leading edge right now, I got a couple, you know, Wes stage >>Trough here on the cube. Yeah. >>So this is Tomahawk four. So this is what is in production is shipping in large data centers worldwide. We started sampling this in 2019, started going into data centers in 2020. And this is 25.6 tets per second. Okay. Which matches any other technology out there. Like if you look at say, infin band, highest they have right now that's just starting to get into production is 25 point sixt. So state of the art right now is what we introduced. We announced this in August. This is Tomahawk five. So this is 51.2 terabytes per second. So double the bandwidth have, you know, any other technology that's out there. And the important thing about networking technology is when you double the bandwidth, you don't just double the efficiency, it's actually winds up being a factor of six efficiency. Wow. Cause if you want, I can go into that, but why >>Not? Well, I, what I wanna know, please tell me that in your labs you have a poster on the wall that says T five with, with some like Terminator kind of character. Cause that would be cool if it's not true. Don't just don't say anything. I just want, I can actually shift visual >>It into a terminator. So. >>Well, but so what, what are the, what are the, so this is, this is from a switching perspective. Yeah. When we talk about the end nodes, when we talk about creating a fabric, what, what's, what's the latest in terms of, well, the kns that are, that are going in there, what's, what speed are we talking about today? >>So as far as 30 speeds, it tends to be 50 gigabits per second. Okay. Moving to a hundred gig pan four. Okay. And we do see a lot of Knicks in the 200 gig ethernet port speed. So that would be, you know, four lanes, 50 gig. But we do see that advancing to 400 gig fairly soon. 800 gig in the future. But say state of the art right now, we're seeing for the end nodes tends to be 200 gig E based on 50 gig pan four. Wow. >>Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah, >>That is, that is great. My mind is act actively blown. I wanna circle back to something that you brought up a second ago, which I think is really astute. When you talked about HPC moving from academia into enterprise, you're both seeing this happen. Where do you think we are on the adoption curve and sort of in that cycle? Armand, do you wanna go? >>Yeah, yeah. Well, if you look at the market research, they're actually telling it's 50 50 now. So ethernet is at the level of 50%. InfiniBand is at 50%. Right. Interesting. Yeah. And so what's interesting to us, customers are coming to us and say, Hey, we want to see, you know, flexibility and choice and hey, let's look at ethernet and let's look at InfiniBand. But what is interesting about this is that we're working with Broadcom, we have their chips in our lab, we have our switches in our lab. And really what we're trying to do is make it easy to simple and configure the network for essentially mpi. And so the goal here with our validated designs is really to simplify this. So if you have a customer that, Hey, I've been in fbe, but now I want to go ethernet, you know, there's gonna be some learning curves there. And so what we wanna do is really simplify that so that we can make it easy to install, get the cluster up and running, and they can actually get some value out of the cluster. >>Yeah. Peter, what, talk about that partnership. What, what, what does that look like? Is it, is it, I mean, are you, you working with Dell before the, you know, before the T six comes out? Or you just say, you know, what would be cool, what would be cool is we'll put this in the T six? >>No, we've had a very long partnership both on the hardware and the software side. You know, Dell has been an early adopter of our silicon. We've worked very closely on SI and Sonic on the operating system, you know, and they provide very valuable feedback for us on our roadmap. So before we put out a new chip, and we have actually three different product lines within the switching group within Broadcom, we've then gotten, you know, very valuable feedback on the hardware and on the APIs, on the operating system that goes on top of those chips. So that way when it comes to market, you know, Dell can take it and, you know, deliver the exact features that they have in the current generation to their customers to have that continuity. And also they give us feedback on the next gen features they'd like to see again in both the hardware and the software. >>So, so I, I'm, I'm just, I'm fascinated by, I I, I always like to know kind like what Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. Look, you, you start talking about the largest super supercomputers, most powerful supercomputers that exist today, and you start looking at the specs and there might be 2 million CPUs, 2 million CPU cores, yeah. Ex alop of, of, of, of performance. What are the, what are the outward limits of T five in switches, building out a fabric, what does that look like? What are the, what are the increments in terms of how many, and I know it, I know it's a depends answer, but, but, but how many nodes can you support in a, in a, in a scale out cluster before you need another switch? What does that increment of scale look like today? >>Yeah, so I think, so this is 51.2 terras per second. What we see the most common implementation based on this would be with 400 gig ethernet ports. Okay. So that would be 128, you know, 400 giggi ports connected to, to one chip. Okay. Now, if you went to 200 gig, which is kind of the state of the art for the Nicks, you can have double that. Okay. So, you know, in a single hop you can have 256 end nodes connected through one switch. >>So, okay, so this T five, that thing right there inside a sheet metal box, obviously you've got a bunch of ports coming out of that. So what is, what does that, what's the form factor look like for that, for where that T five sits? Is there just one in a chassis or you have, what does that look >>Like? It tends to be pizza boxes these days. Okay. What you've seen overall is that the industry's moved away from chassis for these high end systems more towards pizza, pizza boxes. And you can have composable systems where, you know, in the past you would have line cards, either the fabric cards that the line cards are plugged into or interface to these days, what tends to happen is you'd have a pizza box, and if you wanted to build up like a virtual chassis, what you would do is use one of those pizza boxes as the fabric card, one of them as the, the line card. >>Okay. >>So what we see, the most common form factor for this is they tend to be two, I'd say for North America, most common would be a two R U with 64 OSF P ports. And often each of those OSF p, which is an 800 gig e or 800 gig port, we've broken out into two 400 gig quarts. Okay. So yeah, in two r u you've got, and this is all air cooled, you know, in two re you've got 51.2 T. We do see some cases where customers would like to have different optics, and they'll actually deploy a four U just so that way they have the face place density, so they can plug in 128, say qsf P one 12. But yeah, it really depends on which optics, if you wanna have DAK connectivity combined with, with optics. But those are the two most common form factors. >>And, and Armando ethernet isn't, ethernet isn't necessarily ethernet in the sense that many protocols can be run over it. Right. I think I have a projector at home that's actually using ethernet physical connections. But what, so what are we talking about here in terms of the actual protocol that's running over this? Is this exactly the same as what you think of as data center ethernet, or, or is this, you know, RDMA over converged ethernet? What, what are >>We talking about? Yeah, so our rdma, right? So when you look at, you know, running, you know, essentially HPC workloads, you have the NPI protocol, so message passing interface, right? And so what you need to do is you may need to make sure that that NPI message passing interface runs efficiently on ethernet. And so this is why we want to test and validate all these different things to make sure that that protocol runs really, really fast on ethernet, if you look at NPI is officially, you know, built to, Hey, it was designed to run on InfiniBand, but now what you see with Broadcom and the great work they're doing now, we can make that work on ethernet and get, you know, it's same performance. So that's huge for customers. >>Both of you get to see a lot of different types of customers. I kind of feel like you're a little bit of a, a looking into the crystal ball type because you essentially get to see the future knowing what people are trying to achieve moving forward. Talk to us about the future of ethernet in hpc in terms of AI and ml. Where, where do you think we're gonna be next year or 10 years from now? >>You wanna go first or you want me to go first? I can start. >>Yeah. Pete feels ready. >>So I mean, what I see, I mean, ethernet, I mean, is what we've seen is that as far as on the starting off of the switch side, is that we've consistently doubled the bandwidth every 18 to 24 months. That's >>Impressive. >>Yeah. So nicely >>Done, casual, humble brag there. That was great. That was great. I love that. >>I'm here for you. I mean, I think that's one of the benefits of, of Ethan is like, is the ecosystem, is the trajectory, the roadmap we've had, I mean, you don't see that in any other networking technology >>More who, >>So, you know, I see that, you know, that trajectory is gonna continue as far as the switches, you know, doubling in bandwidth. I think that, you know, they're evolving protocols. You know, especially again, as you're moving away from academia into the enterprise, into cloud data centers, you need to have a combination of protocols. So you'll probably focus still on rdma, you know, for the supercomputing, the a AIML workloads. But we do see that, you know, as you have, you know, a mix of the applications running on these end nodes, maybe they're interfacing to the, the CPUs for some processing, you might use a different mix of protocols. So I'd say it's gonna be doubling a bandwidth over time evolution of the protocols. I mean, I expect that Rocky is probably gonna evolve over time depending on the a AIML and the HPC workloads. I think also there's a big change coming as far as the physical connectivity within the data center. Like one thing we've been focusing on is co-pack optics. So, you know, right now this chip is all, all the balls in the back here, there's electrical connections. How >>Many are there, by the way? 9,000 plus on the back of that >>352. >>I love how specific it is. It's brilliant. >>Yeah. So we get, so right now, you know, all the thirties, all the signals are coming out electrically based, but we've actually shown, we have this, actually, we have a version of Hawk four at 25 point sixt that has co-pack optics. So instead of having electrical output, you actually have optics directly out of the package. And if you look at, we'll have a version of Tomahawk five Nice. Where it's actually even a smaller form factor than this, where instead of having the electrical output from the bottom, you actually have fibers that plug directly into the sides. Wow. Cool. So I see, you know, there's, you know, the bandwidth, there's radis increasing protocols, different physical connectivity. So I think there's, you know, a lot of things throughout, and the protocol stack's also evolving. So, you know, a lot of excitement, a lot of new technology coming to bear. >>Okay. You just threw a carrot down the rabbit hole. I'm only gonna chase this one. Okay. >>All right. >>So I think of, I think of individual discreet physical connections to the back of those balls. Yeah. So if there's 9,000, fill in the blank, that's how many connections there are. How do you do that in many optical connections? What's, what's, what's the mapping there? What does that, what does that look like? >>So what we've announced for TAMA five is it would have fr four optics coming out. So you'd actually have, you know, 512 fiber pairs coming out. So you'd have, you know, basically on all four sides, you'd have these fiber ribbons that come in and connect. There's actually fibers coming out of the, the sides there. We wind up having, actually, I think in this case, we would actually have 512 channels and it would wind up being on 128 actual fiber pairs because >>It's, it's miraculous, essentially. It's, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So, so, you know, a lot of people are gonna be looking at this and thinking in terms of InfiniBand versus versus ethernet. I think you've highlighted some of the benefits of specifically running ethernet moving forward as, as hpc, you know, which is sort of just trails slightly behind supercomputing as we define it, becomes more pervasive AI ml. What, what are some of the other things that maybe people might not immediately think about when they think about the advantages of running ethernet in that environment? Is it, is it connecting, is it about connecting the HPC part of their business into the rest of it? What, or what, what are the advantages? >>Yeah, I mean, that's a big thing. I think, and one of the biggest things that ethernet has again, is that, you know, the data centers, you know, the networks within enterprises within, you know, clouds right now are run on ethernet. So now if you want to add services for your customers, the easiest thing for you to do is, you know, the drop in clusters that are connected with the same networking technology, you know, so I think what, you know, one of the biggest things there is that if you look at what's happening with some of the other proprietary technologies, I mean, in some cases they'll have two different types of networking technologies before they interface to ethernet. So now you've got to train your technicians, you train your, your assist admins on two different network technologies. You need to have all the, the debug technology, all the interconnect for that. So here, the easiest thing is you can use ethernet, it's gonna give you the same performance. And actually in some cases we seen better performance than we've seen with omnipath than, you know, better than in InfiniBand. >>That's awesome. Armando, we didn't get to you, so I wanna make sure we get your future hot take. Where do you see the future of ethernet here in hpc? >>Well, Pete hit on a big thing is bandwidth, right? So when you look at train a model, okay, so when you go and train a model in ai, you need to have a lot of data in order to train that model, right? So what you do is essentially you build a model, you choose whatever neural network you wanna utilize, but if you don't have a good data set that's trained over that model, you can't essentially train the model. So if you have bandwidth, you want big pipes because you have to move that data set from the storage to the cpu. And essentially, if you're gonna do it maybe on CPU only, but if you do it on accelerators, well guess what? You need a big pipe in order to get all that data through. And here's the deal. The bigger the pipe you have, the more data, the faster you can train that model. So the faster you can train that model, guess what? The faster you get to some new insight, maybe it's a new competitive advantage. Maybe it's some new way you design a product, but that's a benefit of speed you want faster, faster, faster. >>It's all about making it faster and easier. It is for, for the users. I love that. Last question for you, Pete, just because you've said Tomahawk seven times, and I'm thinking we're in Texas Stakes, there's a lot going on with with that making >>Me hungry. >>I know exactly. I'm sitting up here thinking, man, I did not have a big enough breakfast. How do you come up with the name Tomahawk? >>So Tomahawk, I think you just came, came from a list. So we had, we have a tri end product line. Ah, a missile product line. And Tomahawk is being kinda like, you know, the bigger and batter missile, so, oh, okay. >>Love this. Yeah, I, well, I >>Mean, so you let your engineers, you get to name it >>Had to ask. It's >>Collaborative. Oh good. I wanna make sure everyone's in sync with it. >>So just so we, it's not the Aquaman tried. Right, >>Right. >>The steak Tomahawk. I >>Think we're, we're good now. Now that we've cleared that up. Now we've cleared >>That up. >>Armando P, it was really nice to have both you. Thank you for teaching us about the future of ethernet N hpc. David Nicholson, always a pleasure to share the stage with you. And thank you all for tuning in to the Cube Live from Dallas. We're here talking all things HPC and Supercomputing all day long. We hope you'll continue to tune in. My name's Savannah Peterson, thanks for joining us.

>>We're back with a blueprint for trusted infrastructure and partnership with Dell Technologies in the cube. And we're here with Mahesh Nager, who is a consultant in the area of networking product management at Dell Technologies. Mahesh, welcome. Good to see you. >>Hey, good morning Davis. Nice to meet, Meet to you as well. >>Hey, so we've been digging into all the parts of the infrastructure stack and now we're gonna look at the all important networking components. Mahesh, when we think about networking in today's environment, we think about the core data center and we're connecting out to various locations including the cloud and both the near and the far edge. So the question is from Dell's perspective, what's unique and challenging about securing network infrastructure that we should know about? >>Yeah, so a few years ago IT security and an enterprise was primarily putting a wrapper around the data center because it was constrained to an infrastructure owned and operated by the enterprise for the most part. So putting a rapid around it like a parameter or a firewall was a sufficient response because you could basically control the one small enough control today with the distributed data, intelligent software, different systems, multi-cloud onement and asset service delivery, you know, the infrastructure for the modern era changes the way to secure the network infrastructure. In today's, you know, data driven world, it operates everywhere. And that has created and accessed everywhere so far from, you know, the centralized mono data centers of the past. The biggest challenge is how do we build the network infrastructure of the modern era that are intelligent with automation, enabling maximum flexibility and business agility without any compromise on the security. We believe that in this data era, the security transformation must accompany digital transformation. >>Yeah, that's very good. You talked about a couple of things there. Data by its very nature is distributed. There is no perimeter anymore, so you can't just, as you say, put a wrap around it. I like the way you phrase that. So when you think about cyber security resilience from a networking perspective, how do you define that? In other words, what are the basic principles that you adhere to when thinking about securing network infrastructure for your customers? >>So our belief is that cybersecurity and cybersecurity resilience, they need to be holistic. They need to be integrated, scalable, one that spans the entire enterprise and with a consistent and objective and policy implementation. So cybersecurity needs to span across all the devices and running across any application, whether the application resets on the cloud or anywhere else in the infrastructure. From a networking standpoint, what does it mean? It's again, the same principles, right? You know, in order to prevent the threat actors from accessing, changing, destroying, or stealing sensitive data, this definition holds good for networking as well. So if you look at it from a networking perspective, it's the ability to protect from and withstand attacks on the networking systems as we continue to evolve. This will also also include the ability to adapt and recover from these attacks, which is what cyber resilience aspect is all about. So cybersecurity best practices, as you know, is continuously changing the landscape, primarily because the cyber threats also continue to evolve. >>Yeah, got it. So I like that. So it's gotta be integrated, it's gotta be scalable, it's gotta be comprehensive, comprehensive and adaptable. You're saying it can't be static, >>Right? Right. So I think, you know, you had a second part of a question, you know, that says what do we, you know, what are the basic principles? You know, when you're thinking about securing network infrastructure, when you are looking at securing the network infrastructure, it revolves around core security capability of the devices that form the network. And what are these security capabilities? These are access control, software integrity and vulnerability response. When you look at access control, it's to ensure that only the authenticated users are able to access the platform and they're able to access only the kind of the assets that they're authorized to based on their user level. Now accessing a network platform like a switch or a rotor for example, is typically used for say, configuration and management of the networking switch. So user access is based on say, rules for that metal in a role based access control, whether you are security admin or a network admin or a storage admin. >>And it's imperative that logging is enabled because any of the change to the configuration is actually logged and monitored as well. We talking about software's integrity, it's the ability to ensure that the software that's running on the system has not been compromised. And, and you know, this is important because it could actually, you know, get hold of the system and you know, you could get und desired results in terms of, say validation of the images. It's, it needs to be done through in digital signature. So, so it's important that when you're talking about say, software integrity, A, you are ensuring that the platform is not compromised, you know, is not compromised, and B, that any upgrades, you know, that happens to the platform is happening through validated signature. >>Okay. And now, now you've now, so there's access control, software integrity, and I think you, you've got a third element which is i, I think response, but please continue. >>Yeah, so you know, the third myth about civil notability. So we follow the same process that's been followed by the rest of the products within the Dell product family. That's to report or identify, you know, any kind of a vulnerability that's being addressed by the Dell product security incident response team. So the networking portfolio is no different. You know, it follows the same process for identification for tri and for resolution of these vulnerabilities. And this are addressed either through patches or through new reasons via networking software. >>Yeah, got it. Okay. So I mean, you didn't say zero trust, but when you were talking about access control, you're really talking about access to only those assets that people are authorized to access. I know zero trust sometimes is a buzzword, but, but you I think gave it, you know, some clarity there. Software integrity, it's about assurance validation, your digital signature you mentioned and, and that there's been no compromise. And then how you respond to incidents in a standard way that can fit into a security framework. So outstanding description, thank you for that. But then the next question is, how does Dell networking fit into the construct of what we've been talking about Dell trusted infrastructure? >>Okay, so networking is the key element in the Dell trusted infrastructure. It prides the interconnect between the service and the storage world. And you know, it's part of any data center configuration for a trusted infrastructure. The network needs to have access control in place where only the authorized nels are able to make change to the network configuration and logging of any of those changes is also done through the logging capabilities. Additionally, we should also ensure that the configuration should provide network isolation between say the management network and the data traffic network because they need to be separate and distinct from each other. And furthermore, even if you look at the data traffic network and now you have things like say segmentation isolated segments, I know via vrs or, or some micro segmentation via partners, this allows various level of security for each of those segments. >>So it's important, you know, that, that the network infrastructure has the ability, you know, to provide all this, this services from a Dell networking security perspective, right? You know, there are multiple layers of defense, you know, both at the edge and in the network, in the hardware and in the software and essentially, you know, a set of rules and a configuration that's designed to sort of protect the integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility of the network assets. So each network security layer, it implements policies and controls as I said, you know, including send network segmentation. We do have capabilities sources, centralized management automation and capability and scalability for that matter. Now you add all of these things, you know, with the open networking standards or software, different principles and you essentially, you know, reach to the point where you know, you're looking at zero trust network access, which is essentially sort of a building block for increased cloud adoption. >>If you look at say that you know the different pillars of a zero touch architecture, you know, if you look at the device aspect, you know, we do have support for security for example, we do have say trusted platform in a trusted platform models tpms on certain offer products and you know, the physical security know, plain, simple old one lab port enabled from a user trust perspective, we know it's all done via access control days via role based access control and say capability in order to provide say remote authentication or things like say sticky Mac or Mac learning limit and so on. If you look at say a transport and a session trust layer, these are essentially, you know, how do you access, you know, this switch, you know, is it by plain or telenet or is it like secure ssh, right? And you know, when a host communicates, you know, to the switch, we do have things like self-signed or a certificate authority based certification. >>And one of the important aspect is, you know, in terms of, you know, the routing protocol, the routing protocol, say for example BGP for example, we do have the capability to support MD five authentication between the VGP peers so that there is no, you know, manages attack, you know, to the network where the routing table is compromised. And the other aspect is about second control plane is here in now, you know, it's, it's typical that if you don't have a contra plane here, you know, it could be flooded and you know, you know, the switch could be compromised by city denial service attacks. From an application trust perspective, as I mentioned, you know, we do have, you know, the application specific security rules where you could actually define, you know, the specific security rules based on the specific applications, you know, that are running within the system. >>And I did talk about, say the digital signature and the cryptographic checks and that we do for authentication and for, I mean rather for the authenticity and the validation of, you know, of the image and the BS and so on and so forth. Finally, you know, the data trust, we are looking at, you know, the network separation, you know, the network separation could happen or VRF plain old wheel Ls, you know, which can bring about say multitenancy aspects. We talk about some microsegmentation as it applies to nsx for example. The other aspect is, you know, we do have, with our own smart fabric services that's enabled in a fabric, we have a concept of c cluster security. So all of this, you know, the different pillars, they sort of make up for the zero trust infrastructure for the networking assets of an infrastructure. >>Yeah. So thank you for that. There's a, there's a lot to unpack there. You know, one of the premise, the premise really of this, this, this, this segment that we're setting up in this series is really that everything you just mentioned, or a lot of things you just mentioned used to be the responsibility of the security team. And, and the premise that we're putting forth is that because security teams are so stretched thin, you, you gotta shift a vendor community. Dell specifically is shifting a lot of those tasks to their own r and d and taking care of a lot of that. So, cuz sec op teams got a lot of other stuff to, to worry about. So my question relates to things like automation, which can help and scalability, what about those topics as it relates to networking infrastructure? >>Okay, our portfolio, >>It enables state of the automation software, you know, that enables simplifying of the design. So for example, we do have, you know, you know the fabric design center, you know, a tool that automates the design of the anti fabric and you know, from a deployment and you know, the management of the network infrastructure, there are simplicities, you know, using, you know, like Ansible s for Sonic for example, are, you know, for a better or settle and tell story. You know, we do have smart fabric services that can automate the entire fabric, you know, for a storage solution or for, you know, for one of the workloads for example. Now we do help reduce the complexity by closely integrating the management of the physical and the virtual networking infrastructure. And again, you know, we have those capabilities using Sonic or Smart Traffic services. If you look at Sonic for example, right? >>It delivers automated intent based secure containerized network and it has the ability to provide some network visibility and awareness and, and all of these things are actually valid, you know, for a modern networking infrastructure. So now if you look at Sonic, you know, it's, you know, the usage of those tools, you know, that are available, you know, within the Sonic NAS is not restricted, you know, just to the data center infrastructure is, it's a unified no, you know, that's well applicable beyond the data center. You now right up to the edge. Now if you look at our north from a smart traffic voice 10 perspective, you know, as I mentioned, we do have smart fabric services which essentially, you know, simplifies the deployment day zero. I mean rather day one, day two deployment expansion plans and the life cycle management of our conversion infrastructure and hyper and hyperconverge infrastructure solutions. And finally, in order to enable say, zero touch deployment, we do have, you know, a VP solution with our SD van capability. So these are, you know, ways by which we bring down the complexity by, you know, enhancing the automation capability using, you know, a singular loss that can expand from a data center now right to the edge. >>Great, thank you for that. Last question real quick pitch me, can you summarize from your point of view, what's the strength of the Dell networking portfolio? >>Okay, so from a Dell networking portfolio, we support capabilities at multiple layers. As I mentioned. We've talking about the physical security, for example, let's say disabling of the unused interface. Sticky Mac and trusted platform modules are the things that to go after. And when you're talking about say secure boot for example, it delivers the authenticity and the integrity of the OS 10 images at the startup. And Secure Boot also protects the startup configuration so that, you know, the startup configuration file is not compromised. And Secure port also enables the workload of prediction, for example, that is at another aspect of software image integrity validation, you know, wherein the image is validated for the digital signature in know prior to any upgrade process. And if you are looking at secure access control, we do have things like role-based access control, SSH to the switches, control plane access control that pretty do attacks and say access control from multifactor authentication. >>We do have various tech hacks for entry control to the network and things like CSAC and P IV support, you know, from a federal perspective, we do have, say logging wherein, you know, any event, any auditing capabilities can be possible by say, looking at the clog service, you know, which are pretty much in our transmitter from the devices overts for example, and last we talked about say networks, you know, say network separation and you know, these, you know, separation, you know, ensures that that is, you know, a contained say segment, you know, for a specific purpose or for the specific zone. And you know, this can be implemented by a, the micro segmentation, you know, just a plain old wheel are using virtual route of framework vr, for example. >>A lot there. I mean, I think, frankly, you know, my takeaway is you guys do the heavy lifting in a very complicated topic. So thank you so much for, for coming on the cube and explaining that in, in quite some depth. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you indeed. >>Oh, you're very welcome. Okay, in a moment I'll be back to dig into the hyper-converged infrastructure part of the portfolio and look at how when you enter the world of software defined where you're controlling servers and storage and networks via software led system, you can be sure that your infrastructure is trusted and secure. You're watching a blueprint for trusted infrastructure made possible by Dell Technologies and collaboration with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>The cybersecurity landscape continues to be one characterized by a series of point tools designed to do a very specific job, often pretty well, but the mosaic of tooling is grown over the years causing complexity in driving up costs and increasing exposures. So the game of Whackamole continues. Moreover, the way organizations approach security is changing quite dramatically. The cloud, while offering so many advantages, has also created new complexities. The shared responsibility model redefines what the cloud provider secures, for example, the S three bucket and what the customer is responsible for eg properly configuring the bucket. You know, this is all well and good, but because virtually no organization of any size can go all in on a single cloud, that shared responsibility model now spans multiple clouds and with different protocols. Now that of course includes on-prem and edge deployments, making things even more complex. Moreover, the DevOps team is being asked to be the point of execution to implement many aspects of an organization's security strategy. >>This extends to securing the runtime, the platform, and even now containers which can end up anywhere. There's a real need for consolidation in the security industry, and that's part of the answer. We've seen this both in terms of mergers and acquisitions as well as platform plays that cover more and more ground. But the diversity of alternatives and infrastructure implementations continues to boggle the mind with more and more entry points for the attackers. This includes sophisticated supply chain attacks that make it even more difficult to understand how to secure components of a system and how secure those components actually are. The number one challenge CISOs face in today's complex world is lack of talent to address these challenges. And I'm not saying that SecOps pros are not talented, They are. There just aren't enough of them to go around and the adversary is also talented and very creative, and there are more and more of them every day. >>Now, one of the very important roles that a technology vendor can play is to take mundane infrastructure security tasks off the plates of SEC off teams. Specifically we're talking about shifting much of the heavy lifting around securing servers, storage, networking, and other infrastructure and their components onto the technology vendor via r and d and other best practices like supply chain management. And that's what we're here to talk about. Welcome to the second part in our series, A Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure Made Possible by Dell Technologies and produced by the Cube. My name is Dave Ante and I'm your host now. Previously we looked at what trusted infrastructure means and the role that storage and data protection play in the equation. In this part two of the series, we explore the changing nature of technology infrastructure, how the industry generally in Dell specifically, are adapting to these changes and what is being done to proactively address threats that are increasingly stressing security teams. >>Now today, we continue the discussion and look more deeply into servers networking and hyper-converged infrastructure to better understand the critical aspects of how one company Dell is securing these elements so that dev sec op teams can focus on the myriad new attack vectors and challenges that they faced. First up is Deepak rang Garage Power Edge security product manager at Dell Technologies. And after that we're gonna bring on Mahesh Nagar oim, who was consultant in the networking product management area at Dell. And finally, we're close with Jerome West, who is the product management security lead for HCI hyperconverged infrastructure and converged infrastructure at Dell. Thanks for joining us today. We're thrilled to have you here and hope you enjoy the program. Deepak Arage shoes powered security product manager at Dell Technologies. Deepak, great to have you on the program. Thank you. >>Thank you for having me. >>So we're going through the infrastructure stack and in part one of this series we looked at the landscape overall and how cyber has changed and specifically how Dell thinks about data protection in, in security in a manner that both secures infrastructure and minimizes organizational friction. We also hit on the storage part of the portfolio. So now we want to dig into servers. So my first question is, what are the critical aspects of securing server infrastructure that our audience should be aware of? >>Sure. So if you look at compute in general, right, it has rapidly evolved over the past couple of years, especially with trends toward software defined data centers and with also organizations having to deal with hybrid environments where they have private clouds, public cloud locations, remote offices, and also remote workers. So on top of this, there's also an increase in the complexity of the supply chain itself, right? There are companies who are dealing with hundreds of suppliers as part of their supply chain. So all of this complexity provides a lot of opportunity for attackers because it's expanding the threat surface of what can be attacked, and attacks are becoming more frequent, more severe and more sophisticated. And this has also triggered around in the regulatory and mandates around the security needs. >>And these regulations are not just in the government sector, right? So it extends to critical infrastructure and eventually it also get into the private sector. In addition to this, organizations are also looking at their own internal compliance mandates. And this could be based on the industry in which they're operating in, or it could be their own security postures. And this is the landscape in which servers they're operating today. And given that servers are the foundational blocks of the data center, it becomes extremely important to protect them. And given how complex the modern server platforms are, it's also extremely difficult and it takes a lot of effort. And this means protecting everything from the supply chain to the manufacturing and then eventually the assuring the hardware and software integrity of the platforms and also the operations. And there are very few companies that go to the lens that Dell does in order to secure the server. We truly believe in the notion and the security mentality that, you know, security should enable our customers to go focus on their business and proactively innovate on their business and it should not be a burden to them. And we heavily invest to make that possible for our customers. >>So this is really important because the premise that I set up at the beginning of this was really that I, as of security pro, I'm not a security pro, but if I were, I wouldn't want to be doing all this infrastructure stuff because I now have all these new things I gotta deal with. I want a company like Dell who has the resources to build that security in to deal with the supply chain to ensure the providence, et cetera. So I'm glad you you, you hit on that, but so given what you just said, what does cybersecurity resilience mean from a server perspective? For example, are there specific principles that Dell adheres to that are non-negotiable? Let's say, how does Dell ensure that its customers can trust your server infrastructure? >>Yeah, like when, when it comes to security at Dell, right? It's ingrained in our product, so that's the best way to put it. And security is nonnegotiable, right? It's never an afterthought where we come up with a design and then later on figure out how to go make it secure, right? Our security development life cycle, the products are being designed to counter these threats right from the big. And in addition to that, we are also testing and evaluating these products continuously to identify vulnerabilities. We also have external third party audits which supplement this process. And in addition to this, Dell makes the commitment that we will rapidly respond to any mitigations and vulnerability, any vulnerabilities and exposures found out in the field and provide mitigations and patches for in attacking manner. So this security principle is also built into our server life cycle, right? Every phase of it. >>So we want our products to provide cutting edge capabilities when it comes to security. So as part of that, we are constantly evaluating what our security model is done. We are building on it and continuously improving it. So till a few years ago, our model was primarily based on the N framework of protect, detect and rigor. And it's still aligns really well to that framework, but over the past couple of years, we have seen how computers evolved, how the threads have evolved, and we have also seen the regulatory trends and we recognize the fact that the best security strategy for the modern world is a zero trust approach. And so now when we are building our infrastructure and tools and offerings for customers, first and foremost, they're cyber resilient, right? What we mean by that is they're capable of anticipating threats, withstanding attacks and rapidly recurring from attacks and also adapting to the adverse conditions in which they're deployed. The process of designing these capabilities and identifying these capabilities however, is done through the zero press framework. And that's very important because now we are also anticipating how our customers will end up using these capabilities at there and to enable their own zero trust IT environments and IT zero trusts deployments. We have completely adapted our security approach to make it easier for customers to work with us no matter where they are in their journey towards zero trust option. >>So thank you for that. You mentioned the, this framework, you talked about zero trust. When I think about n I think as well about layered approaches. And when I think about zero trust, I think about if you, if you don't have access to it, you're not getting access, you've gotta earn that, that access and you've got layers and then you still assume that bad guys are gonna get in. So you've gotta detect that and you've gotta response. So server infrastructure security is so fundamental. So my question is, what is Dell providing specifically to, for example, detect anomalies and breaches from unauthorized activity? How do you enable fast and easy or facile recovery from malicious incidents, >>Right? What is that is exactly right, right? Breachers are bound to happen and given how complex our current environment is, it's extremely distributed and extremely connected, right? Data and users are no longer contained with an offices where we can set up a perimeter firewall and say, Yeah, everything within that is good. We can trust everything within it. That's no longer true. The best approach to protect data and infrastructure in the current world is to use a zero trust approach, which uses the principles. Nothing is ever trusted, right? Nothing is trusted implicitly. You're constantly verifying every single user, every single device, and every single access in your system at every single level of your ID environment. And this is the principles that we use on power Edge, right? But with an increased focus on providing granular controls and checks based on the principles of these privileged access. >>So the idea is that service first and foremost need to make sure that the threats never enter and they're rejected at the point of entry, but we recognize breaches are going to occur and if they do, they need to be minimized such that the sphere of damage cost by attacker is minimized so they're not able to move from one part of the network to something else laterally or escalate their privileges and cause more damage, right? So the impact radius for instance, has to be radius. And this is done through features like automated detection capabilities and automation, automated remediation capabilities. So some examples are as part of our end to end boot resilience process, we have what they call a system lockdown, right? We can lock down the configuration of the system and lock on the form versions and all changes to the system. And we have capabilities which automatically detect any drift from that lockdown configuration and we can figure out if the drift was caused to authorized changes or unauthorized changes. >>And if it is an unauthorize change can log it, generate security alerts, and we even have capabilities to automatically roll the firm where, and always versions back to a known good version and also the configurations, right? And this becomes extremely important because as part of zero trust, we need to respond to these things at machine speed and we cannot do it at a human speed. And having these automated capabilities is a big deal when achieving that zero trust strategy. And in addition to this, we also have chassis inclusion detection where if the chassis, the box, the several box is opened up, it logs alerts, and you can figure out even later if there's an AC power cycle, you can go look at the logs to see that the box is opened up and figure out if there was a, like a known authorized access or some malicious actor opening and chain something in your system. >>Great, thank you for that lot. Lot of detail and and appreciate that. I want to go somewhere else now cuz Dell has a renowned supply chain reputation. So what about securing the, the supply chain and the server bill of materials? What does Dell specifically do to track the providence of components it uses in its systems so that when the systems arrive, a customer can be a hundred percent certain that that system hasn't been compromised, >>Right? And we've talked about how complex the modern supply chain is, right? And that's no different for service. We have hundreds of confidence on the server and a lot of these form where in order to be configured and run and this former competence could be coming from third parties suppliers. So now the complexity that we are dealing with like was the end to end approach and that's where Dell pays a lot of attention into assuring the security approach approaching and it starts all the way from sourcing competence, right? And then through the design and then even the manufacturing process where we are wetting the personnel leather factories and wetting the factories itself. And the factories also have physical controls, physical security controls built into them and even shipping, right? We have GPS tagging of packages. So all of this is built to ensure supply chain security. >>But a critical aspect of this is also making sure that the systems which are built in the factories are delivered to the customers without any changes or any tapper. And we have a feature called the secure component verification, which is capable of doing this. What the feature does this, when the system gets built in a factory, it generates an inventory of all the competence in the system and it creates a cryptographic certificate based on the signatures presented to this by the competence. And this certificate is stored separately and sent to the customers separately from the system itself. So once the customers receive the system at their end, they can run out to, it generates an inventory of the competence on the system at their end and then compare it to the golden certificate to make sure nothing was changed. And if any changes are detected, we can figure out if there's an authorized change or unauthorize change. >>Again, authorized changes could be like, you know, upgrades to the drives or memory and ized changes could be any sort of temper. So that's the supply chain aspect of it and bill of metal use is also an important aspect to galing security, right? And we provide a software bill of materials, which is basically a list of ingredients of all the software pieces in the platform. So what it allows our customers to do is quickly take a look at all the different pieces and compare it to the vulnerability database and see if any of the vulner which have been discovered out in the wild affected platform. So that's a quick way of figuring out if the platform has any known vulnerabilities and it has not been patched. >>Excellent. That's really good. My last question is, I wonder if you, you know, give us the sort of summary from your perspective, what are the key strengths of Dell server portfolio from a security standpoint? I'm really interested in, you know, the uniqueness and the strong suit that Dell brings to the table, >>Right? Yeah. We have talked enough about the complexity of the environment and how zero risk is necessary for the modern ID environment, right? And this is integral to Dell powered service. And as part of that like you know, security starts with the supply chain. We already talked about the second component verification, which is a beneath feature that Dell platforms have. And on top of it we also have a silicon place platform mode of trust. So this is a key which is programmed into the silicon on the black service during manufacturing and can never be changed after. And this immutable key is what forms the anchor for creating the chain of trust that is used to verify everything in the platform from the hardware and software integrity to the boot, all pieces of it, right? In addition to that, we also have a host of data protection features. >>Whether it is protecting data at risk in news or inflight, we have self encrypting drives which provides scalable and flexible encryption options. And this couple with external key management provides really good protection for your data address. External key management is important because you know, somebody could physically steam the server walk away, but then the keys are not stored on the server, it stood separately. So that provides your action layer of security. And we also have dual layer encryption where you can compliment the hardware encryption on the secure encrypted drives with software level encryption. Inion to this we have identity and access management features like multifactor authentication, single sign on roles, scope and time based access controls, all of which are critical to enable that granular control and checks for zero trust approach. So I would say like, you know, if you look at the Dell feature set, it's pretty comprehensive and we also have the flexibility built in to meet the needs of all customers no matter where they fall in the spectrum of, you know, risk tolerance and security sensitivity. And we also have the capabilities to meet all the regulatory requirements and compliance requirements. So in a nutshell, I would say that you know, Dell Power Service cyber resident infrastructure helps accelerate zero tested option for customers. >>Got it. So you've really thought this through all the various things that that you would do to sort of make sure that your server infrastructure is secure, not compromised, that your supply chain is secure so that your customers can focus on some of the other things that they have to worry about, which are numerous. Thanks Deepak, appreciate you coming on the cube and participating in the program. >>Thank you for having >>You're welcome. In a moment I'll be back to dig into the networking portion of the infrastructure. Stay with us for more coverage of a blueprint for trusted infrastructure and collaboration with Dell Technologies on the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We're back with a blueprint for trusted infrastructure and partnership with Dell Technologies in the cube. And we're here with Mahesh Nager, who is a consultant in the area of networking product management at Dell Technologies. Mahesh, welcome, good to see you. >>Hey, good morning Dell's, nice to meet, meet to you as well. >>Hey, so we've been digging into all the parts of the infrastructure stack and now we're gonna look at the all important networking components. Mahesh, when we think about networking in today's environment, we think about the core data center and we're connecting out to various locations including the cloud and both the near and the far edge. So the question is from Dell's perspective, what's unique and challenging about securing network infrastructure that we should know about? >>Yeah, so few years ago IT security and an enterprise was primarily putting a wrapper around data center out because it was constrained to an infrastructure owned and operated by the enterprise for the most part. So putting a rapid around it like a parameter or a firewall was a sufficient response because you could basically control the environment and data small enough control today with the distributed data, intelligent software, different systems, multi-cloud environment and asset service delivery, you know, the infrastructure for the modern era changes the way to secure the network infrastructure In today's, you know, data driven world, it operates everywhere and data has created and accessed everywhere so far from, you know, the centralized monolithic data centers of the past. The biggest challenge is how do we build the network infrastructure of the modern era that are intelligent with automation enabling maximum flexibility and business agility without any compromise on the security. We believe that in this data era, the security transformation must accompany digital transformation. >>Yeah, that's very good. You talked about a couple of things there. Data by its very nature is distributed. There is no perimeter anymore, so you can't just, as you say, put a rapper around it. I like the way you phrase that. So when you think about cyber security resilience from a networking perspective, how do you define that? In other words, what are the basic principles that you adhere to when thinking about securing network infrastructure for your customers? >>So our belief is that cybersecurity and cybersecurity resilience, they need to be holistic, they need to be integrated, scalable, one that span the entire enterprise and with a co and objective and policy implementation. So cybersecurity needs to span across all the devices and running across any application, whether the application resets on the cloud or anywhere else in the infrastructure. From a networking standpoint, what does it mean? It's again, the same principles, right? You know, in order to prevent the threat actors from accessing changing best destroy or stealing sensitive data, this definition holds good for networking as well. So if you look at it from a networking perspective, it's the ability to protect from and withstand attacks on the networking systems as we continue to evolve. This will also include the ability to adapt and recover from these attacks, which is what cyber resilience aspect is all about. So cybersecurity best practices, as you know, is continuously changing the landscape primarily because the cyber threats also continue to evolve. >>Yeah, got it. So I like that. So it's gotta be integrated, it's gotta be scalable, it's gotta be comprehensive, comprehensive and adaptable. You're saying it can't be static, >>Right? Right. So I think, you know, you had a second part of a question, you know, that says what do we, you know, what are the basic principles? You know, when you think about securing network infrastructure, when you're looking at securing the network infrastructure, it revolves around core security capability of the devices that form the network. And what are these security capabilities? These are access control, software integrity and vulnerability response. When you look at access control, it's to ensure that only the authenticated users are able to access the platform and they're able to access only the kind of the assets that they're authorized to based on their user level. Now accessing a network platform like a switch or a rotor for example, is typically used for say, configuration and management of the networking switch. So user access is based on say roles for that matter in a role based access control, whether you are a security admin or a network admin or a storage admin. >>And it's imperative that logging is enable because any of the change to the configuration is actually logged and monitored as that. Talking about software's integrity, it's the ability to ensure that the software that's running on the system has not been compromised. And, and you know, this is important because it could actually, you know, get hold of the system and you know, you could get UND desire results in terms of say validation of the images. It's, it needs to be done through say digital signature. So, so it's important that when you're talking about say, software integrity, a, you are ensuring that the platform is not compromised, you know, is not compromised and be that any upgrades, you know, that happens to the platform is happening through say validated signature. >>Okay. And now, now you've now, so there's access control, software integrity, and I think you, you've got a third element which is i I think response, but please continue. >>Yeah, so you know, the third one is about civil notability. So we follow the same process that's been followed by the rest of the products within the Dell product family. That's to report or identify, you know, any kind of a vulnerability that's being addressed by the Dell product security incident response team. So the networking portfolio is no different, you know, it follows the same process for identification for tri and for resolution of these vulnerabilities. And these are addressed either through patches or through new reasons via networking software. >>Yeah, got it. Okay. So I mean, you didn't say zero trust, but when you were talking about access control, you're really talking about access to only those assets that people are authorized to access. I know zero trust sometimes is a buzzword, but, but you I think gave it, you know, some clarity there. Software integrity, it's about assurance validation, your digital signature you mentioned and, and that there's been no compromise. And then how you respond to incidents in a standard way that can fit into a security framework. So outstanding description, thank you for that. But then the next question is, how does Dell networking fit into the construct of what we've been talking about Dell trusted infrastructure? >>Okay, so networking is the key element in the Dell trusted infrastructure. It provides the interconnect between the service and the storage world. And you know, it's part of any data center configuration for a trusted infrastructure. The network needs to have access control in place where only the authorized nels are able to make change to the network configuration and logging off any of those changes is also done through the logging capabilities. Additionally, we should also ensure that the configuration should provide network isolation between say the management network and the data traffic network because they need to be separate and distinct from each other. And furthermore, even if you look at the data traffic network and now you have things like segmentation isolated segments and via VRF or, or some micro segmentation via partners, this allows various level of security for each of those segments. So it's important you know, that, that the network infrastructure has the ability, you know, to provide all this, this services from a Dell networking security perspective, right? >>You know, there are multiple layer of defense, you know, both at the edge and in the network in this hardware and in the software and essentially, you know, a set of rules and a configuration that's designed to sort of protect the integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility of the network assets. So each network security layer, it implements policies and controls as I said, you know, including send network segmentation. We do have capabilities sources, centralized management automation and capability and scalability for that matter. Now you add all of these things, you know, with the open networking standards or software, different principles and you essentially, you know, reach to the point where you know, you're looking at zero trust network access, which is essentially sort of a building block for increased cloud adoption. If you look at say that you know the different pillars of a zero trust architecture, you know, if you look at the device aspect, you know, we do have support for security for example, we do have say trust platform in a trusted platform models tpms on certain offer products and you know, the physical security know plain, simple old one love port enable from a user trust perspective, we know it's all done via access control days via role based access control and say capability in order to provide say remote authentication or things like say sticky Mac or Mac learning limit and so on. >>If you look at say a transport and decision trust layer, these are essentially, you know, how do you access, you know, this switch, you know, is it by plain hotel net or is it like secure ssh, right? And you know, when a host communicates, you know, to the switch, we do have things like self-signed or is certificate authority based certification. And one of the important aspect is, you know, in terms of, you know, the routing protocol, the routing protocol, say for example BGP for example, we do have the capability to support MD five authentication between the b g peers so that there is no, you know, manages attack, you know, to the network where the routing table is compromised. And the other aspect is about second control plane is here, you know, you know, it's, it's typical that if you don't have a control plane here, you know, it could be flooded and you know, you know, the switch could be compromised by city denial service attacks. >>From an application test perspective, as I mentioned, you know, we do have, you know, the application specific security rules where you could actually define, you know, the specific security rules based on the specific applications, you know, that are running within the system. And I did talk about, say the digital signature and the cryptographic check that we do for authentication and for, I mean rather for the authenticity and the validation of, you know, of the image and the BS and so on and so forth. Finally, you know, the data trust, we are looking at, you know, the network separation, you know, the network separation could happen or VRF plain old wheel Ls, you know, which can bring about sales multi 10 aspects. We talk about some microsegmentation as it applies to nsx for example. The other aspect is, you know, we do have, with our own smart fabric services that's enabled in a fabric, we have a concept of c cluster security. So all of this, you know, the different pillars, they sort of make up for the zero trust infrastructure for the networking assets of an infrastructure. >>Yeah. So thank you for that. There's a, there's a lot to unpack there. You know, one of the premise, the premise really of this, this, this, this segment that we're setting up in this series is really that everything you just mentioned, or a lot of things you just mentioned used to be the responsibility of the security team. And, and the premise that we're putting forth is that because security teams are so stretched thin, you, you gotta shift the vendor community. Dell specifically is shifting a lot of those tasks to their own r and d and taking care of a lot of that. So, cuz scop teams got a lot of other stuff to, to worry about. So my question relates to things like automation, which can help and scalability, what about those topics as it relates to networking infrastructure? >>Okay, our >>Portfolio, it enables state of the automation software, you know, that enables simplifying of the design. So for example, we do have, you know, you know the fabric design center, you know, a tool that automates the design of the fabric and you know, from a deployment and you know, the management of the network infrastructure that are simplicities, you know, using like Ansible s for Sonic for example are, you know, for a better sit and tell story. You know, we do have smart fabric services that can automate the entire fabric, you know, for a storage solution or for, you know, for one of the workloads for example. Now we do help reduce the complexity by closely integrating the management of the physical and the virtual networking infrastructure. And again, you know, we have those capabilities using Sonic or Smart Traffic services. If you look at Sonic for example, right? >>It delivers automated intent based secure containerized network and it has the ability to provide some network visibility and Avan has and, and all of these things are actually valid, you know, for a modern networking infrastructure. So now if you look at Sonic, you know, it's, you know, the usage of those tools, you know, that are available, you know, within the Sonic no is not restricted, you know, just to the data center infrastructure is, it's a unified no, you know, that's well applicable beyond the data center, you know, right up to the edge. Now if you look at our north from a smart traffic OS 10 perspective, you know, as I mentioned, we do have smart traffic services which essentially, you know, simplifies the deployment day zero, I mean rather day one, day two deployment expansion plans and the lifecycle management of our conversion infrastructure and hyper and hyper conversion infrastructure solutions. And finally, in order to enable say, zero touch deployment, we do have, you know, a VP solution with our SD van capability. So these are, you know, ways by which we bring down the complexity by, you know, enhancing the automation capability using, you know, a singular loss that can expand from a data center now right to the edge. >>Great, thank you for that. Last question real quick, just pitch me, what can you summarize from your point of view, what's the strength of the Dell networking portfolio? >>Okay, so from a Dell networking portfolio, we support capabilities at multiple layers. As I mentioned, we're talking about the physical security for examples, say disabling of the unused interface. Sticky Mac and trusted platform modules are the things that to go after. And when you're talking about say secure boot for example, it delivers the authenticity and the integrity of the OS 10 images at the startup. And Secure Boot also protects the startup configuration so that, you know, the startup configuration file is not compromised. And Secure port also enables the workload of prediction, for example, that is at another aspect of software image integrity validation, you know, wherein the image is data for the digital signature, you know, prior to any upgrade process. And if you are looking at secure access control, we do have things like role based access control, SSH to the switches, control plane access control that pre do tags and say access control from multifactor authentication. >>We do have various tech ads for entry control to the network and things like CSE and PRV support, you know, from a federal perspective we do have say logging wherein, you know, any event, any auditing capabilities can be possible by say looking at the clog service, you know, which are pretty much in our transmitter from the devices overts for example, and last we talked about say network segment, you know, say network separation and you know, these, you know, separation, you know, ensures that are, that is, you know, a contained say segment, you know, for a specific purpose or for the specific zone and, you know, just can be implemented by a, a micro segmentation, you know, just a plain old wheel or using virtual route of framework VR for example. >>A lot there. I mean I think frankly, you know, my takeaway is you guys do the heavy lifting in a very complicated topic. So thank you so much for, for coming on the cube and explaining that in in quite some depth. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you indeed. >>Oh, you're very welcome. Okay, in a moment I'll be back to dig into the hyper-converged infrastructure part of the portfolio and look at how when you enter the world of software defined where you're controlling servers and storage and networks via software led system, you could be sure that your infrastructure is trusted and secure. You're watching a blueprint for trusted infrastructure made possible by Dell Technologies and collaboration with the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, your own west product management security lead at for HCI at Dell Technologies hyper-converged infrastructure. Jerome, welcome. >>Thank you Dave. >>Hey Jerome, in this series of blueprint for trusted infrastructure, we've been digging into the different parts of the infrastructure stack, including storage servers and networking, and now we want to cover hyperconverged infrastructure. So my first question is, what's unique about HCI that presents specific security challenges? What do we need to know? >>So what's unique about hyper-converge infrastructure is the breadth of the security challenge. We can't simply focus on a single type of IT system. So like a server or storage system or a virtualization piece of software, software. I mean HCI is all of those things. So luckily we have excellent partners like VMware, Microsoft, and internal partners like the Dell Power Edge team, the Dell storage team, the Dell networking team, and on and on. These partnerships in these collaborations are what make us successful from a security standpoint. So let me give you an example to illustrate. In the recent past we're seeing growing scope and sophistication in supply chain attacks. This mean an attacker is going to attack your software supply chain upstream so that hopefully a piece of code, malicious code that wasn't identified early in the software supply chain is distributed like a large player, like a VMware or Microsoft or a Dell. So to confront this kind of sophisticated hard to defeat problem, we need short term solutions and we need long term solutions as well. >>So for the short term solution, the obvious thing to do is to patch the vulnerability. The complexity is for our HCI portfolio. We build our software on VMware, so we would have to consume a patch that VMware would produce and provide it to our customers in a timely manner. Luckily VX rail's engineering team has co engineered a release process with VMware that significantly shortens our development life cycle so that VMware would produce a patch and within 14 days we will integrate our own code with the VMware release we will have tested and validated the update and we will give an update to our customers within 14 days of that VMware release. That as a result of this kind of rapid development process, VHA had over 40 releases of software updates last year for a longer term solution. We're partnering with VMware and others to develop a software bill of materials. We work with VMware to consume their software manifest, including their upstream vendors and their open source providers to have a comprehensive list of software components. Then we aren't caught off guard by an unforeseen vulnerability and we're more able to easily detect where the software problem lies so that we can quickly address it. So these are the kind of relationships and solutions that we can co engineer with effective collaborations with our, with our partners. >>Great, thank you for that. That description. So if I had to define what cybersecurity resilience means to HCI or converged infrastructure, and to me my takeaway was you gotta have a short term instant patch solution and then you gotta do an integration in a very short time, you know, two weeks to then have that integration done. And then longer term you have to have a software bill of materials so that you can ensure the providence of all the components help us. Is that a right way to think about cybersecurity resilience? Do you have, you know, a additives to that definition? >>I do. I really think that's site cybersecurity and resilience for hci because like I said, it has sort of unprecedented breadth across our portfolio. It's not a single thing, it's a bit of everything. So really the strength or the secret sauce is to combine all the solutions that our partner develops while integrating them with our own layer. So let me, let me give you an example. So hci, it's a, basically taking a software abstraction of hardware functionality and implementing it into something called the virtualized layer. It's basically the virtual virtualizing hardware functionality, like say a storage controller, you could implement it in hardware, but for hci, for example, in our VX rail portfolio, we, our Vxl product, we integrated it into a product called vsan, which is provided by our partner VMware. So that portfolio of strength is still, you know, through our, through our partnerships. >>So what we do, we integrate these, these security functionality and features in into our product. So our partnership grows to our ecosystem through products like VMware, products like nsx, Horizon, Carbon Black and vSphere. All of them integrate seamlessly with VMware and we also leverage VMware's software, part software partnerships on top of that. So for example, VX supports multifactor authentication through vSphere integration with something called Active Directory Federation services for adfs. So there's a lot of providers that support adfs including Microsoft Azure. So now we can support a wide array of identity providers such as Off Zero or I mentioned Azure or Active Directory through that partnership. So we can leverage all of our partners partnerships as well. So there's sort of a second layer. So being able to secure all of that, that provides a lot of options and flexibility for our customers. So basically to summarize my my answer, we consume all of the security advantages of our partners, but we also expand on them to make a product that is comprehensively secured at multiple layers from the hardware layer that's provided by Dell through Power Edge to the hyper-converged software that we build ourselves to the virtualization layer that we get through our partnerships with Microsoft and VMware. >>Great, I mean that's super helpful. You've mentioned nsx, Horizon, Carbon Black, all the, you know, the VMware component OTH zero, which the developers are gonna love. You got Azure identity, so it's really an ecosystem. So you may have actually answered my next question, but I'm gonna ask it anyway cuz you've got this software defined environment and you're managing servers and networking and storage with this software led approach, how do you ensure that the entire system is secure end to end? >>That's a really great question. So the, the answer is we do testing and validation as part of the engineering process. It's not just bolted on at the end. So when we do, for example, VxRail is the market's only co engineered solution with VMware, other vendors sell VMware as a hyper converged solution, but we actually include security as part of the co-engineering process with VMware. So it's considered when VMware builds their code and their process dovetails with ours because we have a secure development life cycle, which other products might talk about in their discussions with you that we integrate into our engineering life cycle. So because we follow the same framework, all of the, all of the codes should interoperate from a security standpoint. And so when we do our final validation testing when we do a software release, we're already halfway there in ensuring that all these features will give the customers what we promised. >>That's great. All right, let's, let's close pitch me, what would you say is the strong suit summarize the, the strengths of the Dell hyper-converged infrastructure and converged infrastructure portfolio specifically from a security perspective? Jerome? >>So I talked about how hyper hyper-converged infrastructure simplifies security management because basically you're gonna take all of these features that are abstracted in in hardware, they're now abstracted in the virtualization layer. Now you can manage them from a single point of view, whether it would be, say, you know, in for VX rail would be b be center, for example. So by abstracting all this, you make it very easy to manage security and highly flexible because now you don't have limitations around a single vendor. You have a multiple array of choices and partnerships to select. So I would say that is the, the key to making it to hci. Now, what makes Dell the market leader in HCI is not only do we have that functionality, but we also make it exceptionally useful to you because it's co engineered, it's not bolted on. So I gave the example of spo, I gave the example of how we, we modify our software release process with VMware to make it very responsive. >>A couple of other features that we have specific just to HCI are digitally signed LCM updates. This is an example of a feature that we have that's only exclusive to Dell that's not done through a partnership. So we digitally signed our software updates so the user can be sure that the, the update that they're installing into their system is an authentic and unmodified product. So we give it a Dell signature that's invalidated prior to installation. So not only do we consume the features that others develop in a seamless and fully validated way, but we also bolt on our own a specific HCI security features that work with all the other partnerships and give the user an exceptional security experience. So for, for example, the benefit to the customer is you don't have to create a complicated security framework that's hard for your users to use and it's hard for your system administrators to manage it all comes in a package. So it, it can be all managed through vCenter, for example, or, and then the specific hyper, hyper-converged functions can be managed through VxRail manager or through STDC manager. So there's very few pains of glass that the, the administrator or user ever has to worry about. It's all self contained and manageable. >>That makes a lot of sense. So you've got your own infrastructure, you're applying your best practices to that, like the digital signatures, you've got your ecosystem, you're doing co-engineering with the ecosystems, delivering security in a package, minimizing the complexity at the infrastructure level. The reason Jerome, this is so important is because SecOps teams, you know, they gotta deal with cloud security, they gotta deal with multiple clouds. Now they have their shared responsibility model going across multiple cl. They got all this other stuff that they have to worry, they gotta secure the containers and the run time and and, and, and, and the platform and so forth. So they're being asked to do other things. If they have to worry about all the things that you just mentioned, they'll never get, you know, the, the securities is gonna get worse. So what my takeaway is, you're removing that infrastructure piece and saying, Okay guys, you now can focus on those other things that is not necessarily Dell's, you know, domain, but you, you know, you can work with other partners to and your own teams to really nail that. Is that a fair summary? >>I think that is a fair summary because absolutely the worst thing you can do from a security perspective is provide a feature that's so unusable that the administrator disables it or other key security features. So when I work with my partners to define, to define and develop a new security feature, the thing I keep foremost in mind is, will this be something our users want to use and our administrators want to administer? Because if it's not, if it's something that's too difficult or onerous or complex, then I try to find ways to make it more user friendly and practical. And this is a challenge sometimes because we are, our products operate in highly regulated environments and sometimes they have to have certain rules and certain configurations that aren't the most user friendly or management friendly. So I, I put a lot of effort into thinking about how can we make this feature useful while still complying with all the regulations that we have to comply with. And by the way, we're very successful in a highly regulated space. We sell a lot of VxRail, for example, into the Department of Defense and banks and, and other highly regulated environments and we're very successful there. >>Excellent. Okay, Jerome, thanks. We're gonna leave it there for now. I'd love to have you back to talk about the progress that you're making down the road. Things always, you know, advance in the tech industry and so would appreciate that. >>I would look forward to it. Thank you very much, Dave. >>You're really welcome. In a moment I'll be back to summarize the program and offer some resources that can help you on your journey to secure your enterprise infrastructure. I wanna thank our guests for their contributions in helping us understand how investments by a company like Dell can both reduce the need for dev sec up teams to worry about some of the more fundamental security issues around infrastructure and have greater confidence in the quality providence and data protection designed in to core infrastructure like servers, storage, networking, and hyper-converged systems. You know, at the end of the day, whether your workloads are in the cloud, on prem or at the edge, you are responsible for your own security. But vendor r and d and vendor process must play an important role in easing the burden faced by security devs and operation teams. And on behalf of the cube production content and social teams as well as Dell Technologies, we want to thank you for watching a blueprint for trusted infrastructure. Remember part one of this series as well as all the videos associated with this program and of course today's program are available on demand@thecube.net with additional coverage@siliconangle.com. And you can go to dell.com/security solutions dell.com/security solutions to learn more about Dell's approach to securing infrastructure. And there's tons of additional resources that can help you on your journey. This is Dave Valante for the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> We're back with a Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure in partnership with Dell Technologies and theCUBE. And we're here with Mahesh Nagarathnam who is a consultant in the area of networking product management at Dell technologies. Mahesh, welcome, good to see you. >> Hey, good morning, Dave. It's nice to meet you as well. >> Hey, so we've been digging into all the parts of the infrastructure stack, and now we're going to look at the all important networking components. Mahesh, when we think about networking in today's environment, we think about the core data center and we're connecting out to various locations including the cloud and both the near and the far edge. So the question is from Dell's perspective what's unique and challenging about securing network infrastructure that we should know about? >> Yeah, so a few years ago, IT security in an enterprise was primarily putting a wrapper around the data center because IT was constrained to an infrastructure owned and operated by the enterprise for the most part. So putting a wrapper around it like a perimeter or a firewall was a sufficient response because you could basically control the enormous data into small enough control. Today, with the distributed data intelligent software different systems, multi-cloud environment and asset service delivery. The infrastructure for the modern era changes the way to secure the network infrastructure. In today's data driven world, IT operates everywhere and data is created and accessed everywhere. So far from the centralized mono data centers of the past. The biggest challenge is how do we build the network infrastructure of the modern era that are intelligent, with automation, enabling maximum flexibility and business agility without any compromise on the security. We believe that in this data era, the security transformation must accompany digital transformation. >> Yeah, that's very good. You talked about a couple of things there. Data by its very nature is distributed, there is no perimeter anymore. So you can't just, as you say, put a wrapper around it, I like the way you phrase that. So when you think about cyber security resilience from a networking perspective, how do you define that? In other words, what are the basic principles that you adhere to when thinking about securing network infrastructure for your customers? >> So our belief is that cybersecurity and cybersecurity resilience, they need to be holistic. They need to be integrated, scalable, one that spans the enterprise and with a consistent and objective and policy implementation. So cybersecurity needs to span across all the devices and running across any application whether the application resets on the cloud or anywhere else in the infrastructure. From a networking standpoint, what does it mean? It's again, the same principles. In order to prevent the threat actors from accessing, changing, destroying or stealing sensitive data, this definition holds good for networking as well. So if you look at it from a networking perspective it's the ability to protect from and withstand attacks on the networking systems. As we continue to evolve, this will also include the ability to adapt and recover from these attacks which is what cyber resilience aspect is all about. So cybersecurity, best practices as you know is continuously changing the landscape primarily because the cyber threats also continue to evolve. >> Yeah, got it. I like that. So, it's got to be integrated. It's got to be scalable. It's got to be comprehensive and adaptable. You're saying it can't be static. >> Right. So I think, you had a second part of the question that says, what are the basic principles when you're thinking about securing network infrastructure. When you are looking at securing the network infrastructure it revolves around core security capability of the devices that form the network. And what are these security capabilities? These are access control, software integrity and vulnerability response. When you look at access control it's to ensure that only the authenticated users are able to access the platform and they're able to access only the kind of the assets that they're authorized to, based on their user level. Now accessing a network platform like a switch or a router, for example, is typically used for configuration and management of the networking switch. So user access is based on roles for that matter role based access control, whether you are security admin or a network admin or a storage admin. And it's imperative that logging is enabled because any of the change to the configuration is actually logged and monitored as well. When we're talking about software's integrity, it's the ability to ensure that the software that's running on the system has not been compromised. And this is important because it could actually get hold of the system and you could get undesired results. In terms of validation of the images, it needs to be done through digital signature. So it's important that when you're talking about software integrity, A, you are ensuring that the platform is not compromised and B, that any upgrades that happens to the platform is happening through validated signature. >> Okay. And now you've, so there's access control, software integrity and I think you got a third element, which is, I think response, but please continue. >> Yeah. So, the third one about vulnerability. So we follow the same process that's been followed by the rest of the products within the Dell Product family that's to report or identify any kind of vulnerability that's being addressed by the Dell Product Security Incident Response Team. So the networking portfolio is no different. It follows the same process for identification for triage and for resolution of these vulnerabilities. And this address either through patches or through new resource via networking software. >> Yeah, got it. I mean, you didn't say zero trust but when you were talking about access control you're really talking about access to only those assets that people are authorized to access. I know zero trust sometimes is a buzzword, but you, I think gave it some clarity there. Software integrity, it's about assurance, validation, your digital signature, you mentioned, and that there's been no compromise. And then how you respond to incidents in a standard way that can fit into a security framework. So outstanding description. Thank you for that. But then the next question is how does Dell Networking fit into the construct of what we've been talking about, Dell Trusted Infrastructure? >> So networking is the key element in the Dell Trusted Infrastructure. It provides the interconnect between the server and the storage world and it's part of any data center configuration. For a trusted infrastructure, the network needs to have access control in place where only the authorized personals are able to make change to the network configuration and logging of any of those changes is also done through the logging capabilities. Additionally, we should also ensure that the configuration should provide network isolation between the management network and the data traffic network because they need to be separate and distinct from each other. And furthermore, even if you look at the data traffic network, you have things like segmentation, isolated segments and via VRFs or micro-segmentation via partners. This allows various level of security for each of those segments. So it's important that the network infrastructure has the ability to provide all these services. From a Dell networking security perspective, there are multiple layers of defense, both at the edge and in the network, in the hardware and in the software. And essentially, a set of rules and a configuration that's designed to sort of protect the integrity, confidentiality and accessibility of the network assets. So each network security layer, it implements policies and controls, as I said, including network segmentation, we do have capabilities, resources, centralized management, automation, and capability and scalability for that matter. Now you add all of these things with the open networking standards or software different principles, and you essentially reach to the point where you're looking at zero trust network access which is essentially sort of a building block for increased cloud adoption. If you look at the different pillars of a zero touch architecture, if you look at the device aspect, we do have support for secure boot, for example, we do have trusted platform, trusted platform models, TPMs on certain offer products. And the physical security, plain simple old WLAN port enable disable. From a user trust perspective, we know it's all done via access control base via role based access control and capability in order to provide remote authentication or things like sticky MAC or MAC learning limit and so on. If you look at a transport and a session trust layer, these are essentially, how do you access this switch. Is it by plain old Telnet, or is it like secure SSH. And when a host communicates to the switch, we do have things like self-signed or a certificate authority based certification. And one of the important aspect is, in terms of the routing protocol the routing protocol, for example, BGP, for example, we do have the capability to support MD5 authentication between the BGP peers so that there is no malicious attack to the network where the routing table is compromised. And the other aspect is about control plain ESL. It's typical that if you don't have a control plane Azure, it could be flooded and the switch could be compromised by denial of service attacks. From an application test perspective, as I mentioned, we do have the application specific security rules where you could actually define the specific security rules based on the specific applications that are running within the system. And I did talk about the digital signature and the cryptographic checks and that we do for authentication and, I mean rather for the authenticity and the validation of the image and the boundary and so on and so forth. Finally the data trust, we are looking at the network separation. The network separation could happen over VRF, plain old VLANs which can bring about multitenancy aspects. We talk about micro-segmentation as it applies to NSX, for example. The other aspect is we do have with our own smart fabric services, that's enabled in a fabric, we have a concept of cluster security. So all of this, the different pillars, they sort of make up for the zero trust infrastructure for the networking assets of an infrastructure. >> Yeah, so thank you for that. There's a lot to unpack there. One of the premise, the premise really this segment that we're setting up in this series, is really that everything you just mentioned, or a lot of things you just mentioned used to be the responsibility of the security team and the premise that we're putting forth is that because security teams are so stretched thin, you got to shift a vendor community, Dell specifically is shifting a lot of those tasks to their own R&D and taking care of a lot of that. 'cause SecOps teams got a lot of other stuff to worry about. So my question relates to things like automation which can help and scalability. What about those topics as it relates to networking infrastructure? >> Our portfolio, it enables state of the automation software that enables simplifying of the design. So for example, we do have the fabric design center, a tool that automates the design of the entire fabric and from a deployment and the management of the network infrastructure, there are simplicities using like Ansible playbooks for SONiC, for example. Or for a better storage, we do have smart fabric services that can automate the entire fabric for a storage solution or for one of the workloads, for example. Now we do help reduce the complexity by closely integrating the management of the physical and the virtual networking infrastructure. And again, we have those capabilities using SONiC or smart traffic services. If you look at SONiC for example, it delivers automated intent based secure containerized network. And it has the ability to provide network visibility and awareness and of these things are actually valid for a modern networking infrastructure. So now if you look at SONiC, the usage of those tools that are available within the SONiC NAS is not restricted just to the data center infrastructure, it's a unified NAS that's well applicable beyond the data center, right up to the edge. Now, if you look at our NAS from a smart traffic OS10 perspective, as I mentioned, we do have smart traffic services, which essentially simplifies the deployment, day one day two deployment expansion plans and the life cycle management of our converged infrastructure and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions. And finally, in order to enable zero touch deployment, we do have a VEP solution with our SD-WAN capability. So these are in a ways by which we bring down the complexity by enhancing the automation capability using a singular NAS that can expand from a data center now, right to the edge. >> Great, thank you for that. Last question real quick. Pitch me, can you summarize from your point of view what's the strength of the Dell networking portfolio? >> So from a Dell networking portfolio we support the capabilities at multiple layers, as I mentioned. We've talking about the physical security, for example, let's say disabling of the unused interface, sticky MAC and trusted platform modules are the things that to go after. And when you're talking about secure boot, for example, it delivers the authenticity and the integrity of the OS10 images at the startup. And secure boot also protects the startup configuration so that the startup configuration file is not compromised. And secure boot also enables the bootloader protection, for example. That is at another aspect of software image, integrity validation, wherein the image is validated for the digital signature prior to any upgrade process. And if you are looking at secure access control we do have things like role-based access control, SSH to the switches, control plane, access control, that pre-onset attacks and access control through multifactor authentication. We do have Radius Tech ads for entry control to the network and things like CSE and PRV support from a federal perspective. We do have logging wherein any event, any auditing capabilities can be possible by looking at the syslog servers which are pretty much in our transmitter from the devices ORTS, for example. And last we talked about network separation. And this separation ensures that that is a contained segment for a specific purpose or for the specific zone. And this can be implemented by a micro-segmentation, just a plain old WLAN or using virtual route of framework VRF, for example. >> A lot there. I mean, I think frankly, my takeaway is you guys do the heavy lifting in a very complicated topic. So thank you so much for coming on theCUBE and explaining that in quite some depth. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Oh, you're very welcome. Okay in a moment, I'll be back to dig into the hyperconverged infrastructure part of the portfolio, and look at how, when you enter the world of software defined where you're controlling servers and storage and networks via software led system, you could be sure that your infrastructure is trusted and secure. You're watching a Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure made possible by Dell technologies and collaboration with theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (soft upbeat music)

>>We're back with the Cube's coverage of Von 2022 from the aria in Las Vegas, we're talking pure data protection and nobody better to talk you about that than pure storage. You can't miss these guys when they're around because the orange crush is here. Dave ante for Dave Nicholson, Michael Sonic is here. He is the vice president of global alliances at pure storage. Michael. Good to see you again. Thanks for the little golf. Appreciate joy Lee. Yeah, appreciate that. Hopefully you get out there my back and, uh, be seen. So how you doing, man? I'm doing face to face. >>It's wonderful to be face to face with the cube. It's, uh, always a pleasure to have the opportunity to spend some time with you. Good to meet you. Good to meet. You have the opportunity to get, spend some time together. You guys, um, it's just great being at a show my first one back. And so I'm, uh, you know, just feeling the energy from the room and, uh, just great to come in here and see the cube all lit >>Up. Yeah. Accelerate 2019 in Austin was an awesome event. And, and one of the last ones that we did before, you know, the pandemic for all of us, um, we did some obviously support for, for virtual. You guys are having another show finally face to face in June. So look forward to that. Got it. >>20 days, 21 days, >>We'll see you there. Right. So tell us about what's going on with Veeam. Give us the update. Yeah, >>Look, we're thrilled to be here as a sponsor for Veeam and for Veeam on, uh, this is a longstanding partnership, you know, us, right. So found in 2009 start shipping product in 2012, um, really disrupted the block storage space with an all flash solution. Yeah. And you know, it's, it's a success story in terms of company going from single product to multi-product to portfolio, to solution. And along that way, the data protection use case and workload has really come into the, you know, kind of center focus for us first with flash blade in the market, which is our unified fast file and object solution. And more recently with flash array C, which is our capacity optimized flash array for block storage, which is a great relationship with Veeam and an area where we've done some, um, significant, you know, joint engineering and the FAC, which is what we refer to it as. >>And the Veeam selling motion is extremely strong. Um, and you know, it's, it's solving a real problem and that is, you know, customers are increasingly being faced with these, um, tighter and tighter SLAs to ensure the availability of their data is there. And then there's also, you know, the, the security element. And I think a term that VES using here was cyber resiliency, which I like, right. I mean, you know, the, um, safe mode integration, which is our solution for IM mutability and, and for, um, anti ransomware or, or one step to take, to, to safeguard yourself in a, against a ransomware event. Um, you know, that those are great complimentary parts of us. And indeed, >>You know, Michael, I, I, I want to ask you about your shared vision with, with Veeam. I remember I was talking to cause on the cube. Um, it might have been a 2019. I can't remember. Might have been the year before that. No, I >>Think shorts or pants. >>Sorry. >>Was he in shorts or pants? He was in pants. >>Ah, okay. So I was pushing him on, well, why don't you do it this way? Why don't you do that? Why don't you do tiering all this stuff? And it just always came back to simplicity. He said, we optimize for simplicity over all this complexity and you know, we'll get the, the function through the ecosystem partnership. So is that the shared vision with Veeam? I mean, that, it's kind of, it's just work. It just works is their mantra. But, but talk about that shared vision as particularly as it relates to data protection and cyber resiliency. >>Yeah. Thanks so much for, for recalling that Dave, cuz it, it, we hear it constantly. It's it's in the, now that we're coming back to the office, it's in the hallways, it's out in front of conference rooms, you know, the, the elegance and, and the, and the, um, value and simplicity is everywhere inside of pure. Um, I would say it's part of our shared vision. I think it's customer centricity is at the core of what Veeam and pure, you know, has really fused us together. We're both global, you know, their history is European based and grew up out of there and then have succeeded in north America. Ours is absolutely north America based first on the west coast, then across the country. And then finally into Europe, more recently globally and, and, and a lot of growth internationally, including APJ. So it's customer centricity, it's global, it's the way we go to the customer. So a partner centric go to market motion is live and well in both organizations, uh, solution providers, MSPs, GSIs, you know, range of different ways to get to that customer. Um, and without a doubt, the customer experience is, is part of the, is part of the piece. And, and that's where our simplicity is, um, front and center. And, and I know vem is the same >>Dig, dig it into it. Go ahead. >>Yeah. Yeah, no. So, so out in the real world, are the conversations still about flash for backup and recovery convincing people that that makes sense or, or have we moved on to where now it's the pure flash value proposition BEC because people accept that flash makes sense. Where, where are we in the real world? >>Yeah, I, I think it's, it's different in different industries, different use cases, different workloads, different environments, and it's, um, part of a bigger story. But I think what, what is happening now is, um, we were before the inevitability of flash as the data center, primary storage solution, but now, like, I don't think anyone would debate that. Right. And, and I think now in data protection flash as a component to a robust, secure data protection, both as a target for backup and as a source of recovery is an inevitability to be part of that conversation. Flash is >>There, you guys like to be first at a lot of things, you know, gives you bragging rights, but it also gives you market momentum. Again, I'll pull it. My, my bag of pure memories. I remember meeting Scott Deason, who was the first CEO of, of pure, it's only been two to my knowledge, right. Scott was first Charlie G Carlo now, um, in, in, it was early days, it was 2009, like in an Oracle open world or something. And he was telling me about this startup that he's doing. And, and one of the things that struck me is the vision around the API economy, which was new at the time. It was like, well, okay, what's that? And that's really, what's, what's happened here. It's part of simplicity. It's part about ecosystem. We were talking about products versus platforms. You can't really have a platform unless you have an ecosystem. So where are we at today? How does that relate to your partnership with, with Veeam? Yeah. >>It, it's such a great recall on your part, you know, cause I think, um, we are a storage company. We do provide a raise in the wild, you know, over 10,000 customer, tens of thousands of arrays now. And you know, but at the core, it's the software that matters and, and that's really what drives the user experience. And we're proud to be, you know, the development partner on the universal storage API, the us API for Veeam, that is a essential ingredient to success for the joint pure and vem customer experience. It gives them that single pane of glass, that administrative view, where they're able to get the information they need on what's happening within their environment and be able to take corrective action. And, you know, we're very proud of all the tools that we provide our storage customers, but in a da in a data protection use case and workload, they want to put, you know, they want to go right to Veeam and, and have that be the source of truth. And that's where that API is so important. >>What, what's the story to customers, Michael, in terms of particularly cyber resilience, you've got obviously got a TCO play, simple equals lower cost. Um, you got really much tighter service level agreements and requirements now, um, the security, the storage and data protection and security space are kind of coming together. So what's the narrative for customers. Give me the pitch. Yeah, >>Look, I think, I think every customer today has an obligation to include security as a must have within their solution anywhere in the data center. And for us, it's, you know, simply put the combination of Veeam for data protection, with pure for FlashRay C or flash blade with safe mode, you know, which provides that imutability provides that customer with a safeguarded copy against bad actors externally to their organization, or was jointly developed with a customer to prevent the risk of bad actors inside of the organization. Um, city of new Orleans is one of the customer references that's up on, you know, the pure storage website, just a, a great, um, you know, story in terms of the city's ability to defend against ransomware attack, continue, you know, with continuity of essential services, police, ambulances, fire departments, um, all on the combination of pure and deem. And so, you know, a good, you know, example to pull that thread all the way through in terms of what the value proposition is. And then what's the experience for the customer when they are find themselves on the other side of that event. >>What's the nature of the partnership, um, with, with Veeam, obviously there's a go to market, um, are there, you know, solutions that you guys are doing together, engineering work that you're doing together? Can you explain that? Yeah, >>You bet. I mean, you know, these are two of, uh, I think high profile adjacencies in the data center, you've got your primary storage and then secondary tertiary, and you've got your data protection use case and workload. Um, with Veeam, we've got dedicated engineering to the Veeam partnership on the pure side, as a development partner for the us API, um, you know, is a, is a key piece we're integrated into what the support experience is like for the customer. And really trying, starting to challenge ourselves now with some of the leadership changes that beam's taken on and the opportunity to sit down and, and spend some time, you know, with the non and, and John, and really say, Hey, like we're at the core here, we've got an opportunity. Let's, let's open up some strategic doors and see what could be next. >>Well, Veeam Ising, there's no question it's kind of early Veeam was the wild west that's right. Course big parties are still, you know, the reputational, but, but as you think about these joint engineering and joint go to market and you talk to, to joint customers, where do you see sort of the future? I mean, I, I, you know, the ransomware stuff, obviously the pandemic was impossible to predict. I, I shouldn't say that a lot of people did predict it, but now that we see it, but now that you have some visibility on these permanent changes that are affecting CSO, buying strategies, data protection, storage, buying strategies, how do you see the future of this relationship? >>Yeah, look, I think, I think the, um, at the core we do what we do and we're focused on continuing to innovate and do it with excellence in everything that we do. Um, we measure ourselves rigorously against a net promoter score. It's a certified net promoter score. We're at 85.2 top 1% of all B2B. So >>Head of V even >>At the core, >>Barely at the >>Core it's, it's about that customer experience and customer satisfaction. Um, and, and so that's a, maybe a, a different way of saying we trust that our partners do what they do with excellence. And in the case of Veeam, you know, partnering around the data protection, use case and workload, looking at how that's evolving into holistic data management and hybrid cloud environment. Um, we see rich opportunity for us to continue the partnerships, strengthen it, learn and listen from our customers and our partners. And, uh, and maybe challenge ourselves to, to do some things a little differently uniquely along the way I talked >>To them. Oh, good. >>Yeah, no, yeah. You, you mentioned, uh, you mentioned something at the outset that lends a lot of cred, credibility to the pure story anywhere you seek to play. Um, you mentioned that he, uh, you know, founded in 2009 product shipping in 2012. Um, I remember that Dave's not old enough to remember that period of time <laugh>, but, uh, if you remember, um, violent memory was the king, they, they were, they were the ones to be. Yep. And you guys were quietly toiling in a bit of obscurity and people were asking, well, come on, come on, come on, come on, give us something, but you didn't until you were ready. So I've seen that methodical approach in every, in every step of the way as you've transformed from being a product into solution focus and partnership focus. Um, so what does that look like? Moving forward? You, you mentioned kind of getting ahead of the game in terms of all backups and recovery, uh, volumes being on flash. What does that addressable market look like to you guys in the future? How, how are you looking at that? Yeah. Is this just the beginning of a new thing that's gonna develop over time? >>Yeah, I think, I think it's a, is a great question. It's an insightful question. It's also a great way for me to plug accelerate in, in 20, you know, 20 days or so. Um, it's a great backdrop for pure to make some announcements in terms of what's next and, and, you know, and when we're ready to make them, you know, it's a good example. Um, but, but in direct answer to your question, you know, without a doubt, you know, the adjacencies between data protection, primary storage, secondary storage, the blurring that's happening within that, you know, based on the ransomware threats, based on, you know, other environments around cloud and, and how customers have learned from cloud experiences early on and applying those learnings, not just to demanding simplicity in their solutions, but demanding the ability for, you know, kind of the storage is code and, and to have that cloud operating model across everything that they do. And so, you know, I think those are at the core, some of the things that we think about in terms of what's next and, and, uh, and to do it with partners like beam at the forefront, as well as the voice of our customer at >>The forefront. And that's why I wanted to ask you that's great setup. Thank you, David. Um, so the port works acquisition was really interesting. We're at, um, in Valencia Spain, the cube is, uh, our, our colleagues are over there. Unfortunately, John furier couldn't make the trip, the vid hit him. Uh, but one of the conversations, the topic of conversations over there is, you know, shift left with the solar winds, hack the sensitivity around the software supply chain. We certainly talked about it last week at red hat summit. I haven't heard a lot about DevOps here, but it's sort of intrinsic that, that whole shift left component, that idea of not bolting on data protection at the tail end, actually shifting left means doing it in the development cycle, not throwing it over the fence, you know, to, to the operations people. What's that conversation like subsequent to the port works acquisition, which was very interesting. A small lever can go a long way. Can you give us the update there? >>Yeah. And first and foremost, I hope John's okay. Right? >>He is. He's doing well. Good, Mr. John, >>We do. And so, you know, I think the, um, the, the future of applications is really on center stage when you put port works into the conversation mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so as companies move like no, one's gonna develop applications today without a container strategy right related to that. And that's gonna allow for the applications to move and data gravity to really play a bigger role and pure feels confident in our ability to play a big role in that. And as those applications mature up the containerized curve, they're definitely gonna have data protection, data management, other fundamental things built into it in that shift left context that we're gonna be prepared to take advantage of based on the assets. We have >>The two hardcore engineering cultures, uh, that, that have momentum, uh, pure and, and Veeam. Michael. It's great to see you again. Thanks so much for coming to the cube. >>Uh, it's always a pleasure to be with you gentlemen, and, uh, great to meet you for the first time. Good to meet you, Michael. Look forward to seeing you the next time and, and thanks again. >>All right. You bet. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Thanks for watching. This is the Cube's coverage of vem on 2022. We're at the area in Las Vegas, and we'll be right back right after the short break.

>>Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm John fury host of the cube here in Palo Alto, California. We're talking open source. We're talking about the data center. We're talking about cloud scale, bringing that software benefits all to the table, all around the network, the network operating system, and more gotta go a guest here, sir. Rob Capor director of product management, Dell networking, sir. Rob. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you, John. Good to be here. Thanks for inviting me. >>You know, we were talking before we came on camera around how the networking business is changing, why hardware matters, why software's more important. And in all of this shift, that's happening in the transition to fully distributed computing, which Matt, you got the edge, you got the data center, you got the cloud all coming together. One of the common threads in all of this is open source. Okay. Open source software, next generations coming. You're seeing more and more new cool things in open source, but also in parallel with the enterprise. This is a huge kind of flash point to the next gen open source enterprise convergence with, with open source software and the communities and all and all that, all that good stuff. And you're in the middle of it. What's driving this Hmm. Source and the data center. We're seeing the levels of support like we've never seen before and specifically at the network level. >>Awesome. Yeah. So, well, to set the context, let's start by looking at the story of comput solution, right? Uh, in the nineties, the comput infrastructure was vertically integrated. Uh, there were multiple vendors each offering their own operating system, usually a version of hearings, uh, on, on the proprietary hardwares. If I wanted to run a Solas operating system, I had to run that over a Spoor and the applications were written, especially for, for that architecture. So, so this represented multiple challenges back then the customer were locked in growth and innovation developers had to recreate applications for, for different architectures and, and the interoperability was extremely difficult, but with the advent of X 86 architecture and standardized operating systems like like windows and Linux, the stack got disaggregated, which allowed for flexibility, innovation, affordability and finding expand engine. We see a similar trend happening on the networking side now where the traditional networking solutions, uh, are not flexible. >>The switch, the network operating system, the APIs are all provided by the same vendor. So if a feature is, is needed, the user has to either wait for the vendor to deliver it, or is forced to replace then time for structure. But with the of open networking and opensource networking based solutions, we see an evolution that has paved the way for the customers to unlock their data center technologies and innovate. The modern data center is, is no longer centered around protocol sax. It's about agility, flexibility, innovation, network automation, and simplicity. It's about how to make operations more agile, agile, more effective, and, and, you know, bake it into an overall infrastructure today. A large element of, uh, of, of business action behind open networking is that companies are moving towards application centricity and, and a true realization of as a service model. Right? So, so that is where Sonic comes into the picture, right? >>But it's large and diverse community around, around modular containers, architecture born in Microsoft as your environment, Sonic is, is built for automation, telemetry and scale. And the flexibility of this architecture allows you for, you know, in terms of running to applications by providing that high level of redundancy. So, so basically know Sonic kind of check marks to all the requirements of the modern data center from open flexible architectures to cloud economics. And if you have to follow a comput evolution analogy, we believe that, you know, switches is the server now in Sonic is the Linux for networking. >>It's like the Ker of networking. I mean, we'd be and reporting. We've had all the cube conversations where Sonic's been mentioned and people have been saying things like it's taking the networking world by storm. Um, and all, all that with open source kind of ties it and scales it together. Can you take a minute to explain a little bit about what it is? What is Sonic, what does it stand for? Why is it important? What does it do? What's the benefit to the customers? What are they, what what's going on around Sonic take a minute to explain what is Sonic. >>Absolutely. Yeah. So is Sonic stands for software for open talking in the cloud. It's a brain of Microsoft in, in 2016, they announced their contribution of Sonic to the open source community and, and through the networking technology to revolutionary set forward with the yet level of this aggregation by breaking the monolithic nos into multiple containers components. And, and through the use of ization, Sonic provides the, the network managers, the plug and place sensibility, the ability to run third party proprietary or open source application containers and, and perform those in-service updates with zero down time. Sonic is, is primarily designed across four main per principles. First one is the notion of control where, uh, Sonic is an open software organizations are deploying it, working on it. The network managers can decide what features they want to ship on a switch, so that there's less potential for bug and, and tailored for more of the use cases, right? >>Sonic was designed for extensibility for, uh, the developers to come and add new cable, roll those out rapidly on, on a platform. Uh it's it was designed for agility. The ability to take changes, roll those out rapidly, whether it's a bug fix or a new feature coming out, uh, which is significant. And finally Sonic was designed around this notion of open collaboration with such a diverse community around. We have Silicon vendors to ODM providers. It contribute is the more people work on it better and more like the software it becomes. Yeah. I mean, it has evolved considerably and, and since it's inception, it's, it's, uh, the growth is, is nurtured by an increasing set of users, uh, a vibrant open source community. Uh, and then there's a long, uh, trail of, of, you know, falling from, from the non hyperscalers where they like the value propers, you know, technology. And I want to adapt it for their environment. >>Yeah. And of course we love Silicon here at Silicon angle on the cube. Uh, but this is the whole new thing. Silicon advances is still software hardware matters. Dave LAN is doing a big thing called on why hardware matters with our team hardware and software together with open source really is coming back smaller, faster, cheaper. It's really good. So I want to ask you about Sonic, what types of customers mm-hmm <affirmative> would be looking to implement this, is this more of a, a reset in the data center? Is it a cloud scale team? Is it tributed computing? What's the new look of the customer who are implementing the like so, so, >>Well, uh, you know, it has evolved considerably since it's <inaudible> right. It was born into a hyperscale environment and we see a big end happening where, uh, you know, there's a wider appeal that is across non hyperscalers who want to emulate the best practices of the hyperscalers. They, but they want to do it on their own dumps. They want, uh, uh, a feature solution that is tailored for enterprise use cases. And, and, you know, looking at this whole contains architecture, Sonic kinda fits the build well where, you know, providing a Linux, no, that can be managed by the same set of automation management tools. Uh, and you know, these are the same teams, you know, uh, that have, you know, been acclimated world on website. Now with this all tool consolidation and consistent operations across the data center infrastructure, we, we see that Sonic brings a lot of value, uh, to these distributed application use cases, these modern data center environments, where you, you know, you have, you know, customers looking for cloud economics, multi vendor ecosystem, open and flexible architectures. And in fact, you know, uh, you know, we are told by the industry analyst that there's a strong possibility that, you know, during the next three to six years, Sonic is going to become analog as to Linux. Uh, now allowing the enterprises to, to sanitize on this. No, and, and, and, you know, they also predict that, uh, you know, 40% of the organizations that have, uh, you large data centers or 200 plus switches will deploy Sonic in production. And the market is going to be approximately 2.5 billion by, by 25. >>You know, we've Al we've always been riffing about the network layers, always the last area to kind of get the innovation, because it's so important. I mean, right. If you look at the advances of cloud and cloud scale, obviously Amazon did great work and what starts with networking lay what they did kind of with the, in the cloud, but even in the enterprise, it's so locked down, it's so important. Um, and things like policy, these are the concepts that have been moving up the stack. We see that, but also software's moving down the stack, right? So this notion of a network operating system kind of now is in play at the data center level, not just on the server, you're talking about like packets and observability monitoring, you know, more and more and more data coming in. So with data surging, tsunami of data, new, um, agile architectures changing in real time dynamic policy, this is what's happening. What's the role of Dell in all this? You guys got the hardware, um, you got the servers now it's open source, it's got community. What is Dell bringing to the table? What's your role in this development and the evolution of Sonic and, and what do you guys bringing to the table? >>Absolutely. So, so we are now, uh, enterprise Sonic distribution by Dell technologies, a commercial offering for Sonic in June last year. And our vision has been primarily to bridge the cap between hyperscale networking and enterprise networking. Right here we are, we are combining the stents and value proposition of Sonic and Dell technologies where the customers get an innovative, scalable, open source NA, which is hardened supported and backed by industry leader and open networking that has been, that has been our primary play into this where enterprise Sonic by Dell, we, we CU the customers, you know, get support and deployment services. Uh, we work with the customers in building out a roadmap that is, you know, a predictable software and hardware roadmap for them. Uh, we, we provide extended and validated use cases where, uh, you know, they can average, you know, Sonic for their, you know, specific environments, whether it's a cloud environment or the enterprise environment, uh, we've created a partner ecosystem where, uh, you know, with, with certain organizations that allow you to leverage the inherent automation, telemetric capabilities in the NAS, uh, to enhance the usability of the software, we have, uh, created an intuitive CLI framework called manage framework to allow you to better consume Sonic for your environment. >>We offer support for open conflict models and then also answerable playbooks for, for network automation. So, so it's been a journey, uh, you know, we are making the solution ready for enterprise consumption is a, a big fan falling that is happening from the non hyperscaler awards. And, uh, we've made significant in, in, in the community as well. Yeah. 1 million lines plus of code what fixes and, and helping with the documentation. So we are at the forefront of, of so journey. >>So you're saying that you, you're saying Dell for the folks watching you guys are putting the work in you're investing in opensource. >>Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we, we, we are, uh, you know, extending open source to the bottom market, you know, making it enterprise ready, uh, with, with feature enhancements and building a partner ecosystem. Uh, you know, we, we ensure that, you know, it advanced through extensive internal testing and validation for the customers. And then, uh, in order to allow the customers to absorb this new technology in house, uh, you know, we, we provide virtual to MOS. We have, you know, hands on labs for, for customers and channel partners. We, we also help them with, with a lot of documentation and reference architecture so that, you know, it's a knowledge repository across the board that can be leveraged for the modern use cases. So, yeah, so that's been a, it's been a journey with the customers and it's always in evolution where we, you know, get better of it with extended use cases and, and more capabilities on the portfolio. >>You know, I always, I always talk with Michael Dell at the Dell tech world every year. And sometimes we text back and forth. Uh, we kind of grew up together in the industry about the same age. Um, and we joke about the Dell early days of Dell, how supply chain was really part of their advantage. Um, and this is getting a little bit of a throwback, but you look back back then it was a of systems architecture. You have suppliers, you have chips, you have boards, you build PCs, you build servers. And the DNA of Dell, Dell technologies has always been around the system and with open source and tributed computing cloud data center edge, it's a system. And we're hearing words like supply chain in software, right? So when you start to think about Sonic and network operating systems and that kind of, those kinds of systems, when you modernize it, it's still gotta enable things to enable value. So what's the enabling value that Sonic has for the modern era here and comput as new kinds of supply chains emerge, new kinds of partnerships have to evolve. And the environment under the covers is changing too. You got cloud native, you got growth of containers. I think DACA was telling us that the container market there is pushing 20 million developers. I mean, massive cloud native activity and open source growth. This is a system. >>No, absolutely. I mean, uh, you know, the modern world has changed so much from, from, you know, the proprietary infrastructure and stacks. Now, uh, we Dell, you know, becoming, uh, uh, you know, more software focused now because that's a real value, uh, that you bring to the customers. Now, it's all about application centricity. Nobody is talking about out, you know, protocol stacks, or, you know, they, they want simplicity. They want ease of network management. And how do you expose all these capabilities? It's, it's with software, right? Sonic being open software. There's so much happening, uh, in, in the community around it. You know, we provide not bond interfaces that, you know, customers can hook up into their applications and get better at monitoring, get better at you managing that entire CIC CD pipeline in the infrastructure. So I think, you know, soft is, is a core in the heart of, you know, the modern data center infrastructure today. And, you know, we've been, uh, you know, uh, uh, at the forefront of this journey with, with Sonic and, uh, you know, bringing the real choice and flexibility for the customers. >>It's certainly an exciting time if you're in the data center, you're in, in architecture, cloud architecture, urine in data engineering, a new growing field, not just data science data is code. We did a big special on that recently in the cube, but also just overall scale. And so this, these are all new factors in C CXOs are dealing with obviously securities playing a big part of it and the role of data, uh, and also application developers all in the partner ecosystem becomes a really important part of, so I have to ask you, can you expand a little bit more on your comment earlier about the partner ecosystem and the importance of plays mm-hmm, <affirmative> in providing a best in class service because you're relying on others in open source, but you're commercializing Sonic with others. So there's a, there's a ecosystem play here. What's, what's talk more about that and, and the importance of it, >>Right, right. Yes, sir. As I mentioned earlier, right, the modern data center is no longer centered on protocol stack, right? So it's about agility, flexibility, choice, uh, network automation, simplicity, and based on these needs, we've built up, uh, portfolio with, with plethora of options, for, uh, you know, integrations into open source tool chains and, and also building enterprise partnerships for, uh, with, with technologies that matter to the customers. Right? So, uh, the ecosystem partners, uh, are, are, you know, apps are Juniper. Um, Okta, there are crews that offer solutions at simplify network management and monitoring of, of massive complex networks and leverage the, the inherent automation telemetry capabilities in Sonic. It comes to the open source tools. Uh, you know, these, these are tools that, you know, the broader, the, the tier two cloud of this point is the large enterprises also want, you know, based on how they're moving towards an open source based ecosystem. We have, you know, created ible modules for network automation. We have integrated into open source marketing tools like Telegraph or far and Promeus, and then we continue to, you know, scaling and expanding on easy integrations and ecosystem partners, uh, to bring the choice, flexibility, uh, to the customers where, uh, you know, they can leverage inherent software capabilities and leverage it to their application business needs. >>Rob, great to have you on the cube Sergeant Kabar, director of product management, Dell tech, Dell networking, Dell technologies, um, networking really important area. That's where the innovation is. It matters the most latency. You can't change the, the laws of physics, but you can certainly change architectures. This is kind of the new normal going on. Find final point final comment. What can people expect to see around Sonic and where this goes? What, what happens next? How do you see this evolving? >>Well, there's a, uh, you know, I think we start off a journey to an exciting, you know, evolution on a networking happening with Sonic so much. This, this technology has to offer with, you know, a lot of technical value prop and microservices, container architecture with such a diverse community around it. There's, uh, a lot of feature additions, extended use cases that are coming up with Sonic. And we, we, we actively engage in the community with lot of feature enhancements and help also helping stay the community in, in a direction that, you know, uh, brings Sonic to the wider market. So, you know, I think this is, this is great, you know, start to a fantastic journey here. And, uh, we look forward to the exciting things that are coming on the so journey. >>Awesome. Thanks for coming on. Great cube culture. We'll follow up more. I wanna track this Dell networking networking's important software operating systems. It's a system approach distributed computings back modernizing here with Dell technologies. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Awesome. Thank you, John. >>I'm John furry with the cube here at Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching.

>>Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm John fury host of the cube here in Palo Alto, California. We're talking open source. We're talking about the data center. We're talking about cloud scale, bringing that software benefits all to the table, all around the network, the network operating system, and more gotta go a guest here, sir. Rob Capor director of product management, Dell networking, sir. Rob. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you, John. Good to be here. Thanks for inviting me. >>You know, we were talking before we came on camera around how the networking business is changing, why hardware matters, why software's more important. And in all of this shift, that's happening in the transition to fully distributed computing, which Matt, you got the edge, you got the data center, you got the cloud all coming together. One of the common threads in all of this is open source. Okay. Open source software, next generations coming. You're seeing more and more new cool things in open source, but also in parallel with the enterprise. This is a huge kind of flash point to the next gen open source enterprise convergence with, with open source software and the communities and all and all that, all that good stuff. And you're in the middle of it. What's driving this Hmm. Source and the data center. We're seeing the levels of support like we've never seen before and specifically at the network level. >>Awesome. Yeah. So, well, to set the context, let's start by looking at the story of comput solution, right? Uh, in the nineties, the comput infrastructure was vertically integrated. Uh, there were multiple vendors each offering their own operating system, usually a version of hearings, uh, on, on the proprietary hardwares. If I wanted to run a Solas operating system, I had to run that over a Spoor and the applications were written, especially for, for that architecture. So, so this represented multiple challenges back then the customer were locked in growth and innovation developers had to recreate applications for, for different architectures and, and the interoperability was extremely difficult, but with the advent of X 86 architecture and standardized operating systems like like windows and Linux, the stack got disaggregated, which allowed for flexibility, innovation, affordability and finding expand engine. We see a similar trend happening on the networking side now where the traditional networking solutions, uh, are not flexible. >>The switch, the network operating system, the APIs are all provided by the same vendor. So if a feature is, is needed, the user has to either wait for the vendor to deliver it, or is forced to replace then time for structure. But with the of open networking and opensource networking based solutions, we see an evolution that has paved the way for the customers to unlock their data center technologies and innovate. The modern data center is, is no longer centered around protocol sax. It's about agility, flexibility, innovation, network automation, and simplicity. It's about how to make operations more agile, agile, more effective, and, and, you know, bake it into an overall infrastructure today. A large element of, uh, of, of business action behind open networking is that companies are moving towards application centricity and, and a true realization of as a service model. Right? So, so that is where Sonic comes into the picture, right? >>But it's large and diverse community around, around modular containers, architecture born in Microsoft as your environment, Sonic is, is built for automation, telemetry and scale. And the flexibility of this architecture allows you for, you know, in terms of running to applications by providing that high level of redundancy. So, so basically know Sonic kind of check marks to all the requirements of the modern data center from open flexible architectures to cloud economics. And if you have to follow a comput evolution analogy, we believe that, you know, switches is the server now in Sonic is the Linux for networking. >>It's like the Ker of networking. I mean, we'd be and reporting. We've had all the cube conversations where Sonic's been mentioned and people have been saying things like it's taking the networking world by storm. Um, and all, all that with open source kind of ties it and scales it together. Can you take a minute to explain a little bit about what it is? What is Sonic, what does it stand for? Why is it important? What does it do? What's the benefit to the customers? What are they, what what's going on around Sonic take a minute to explain what is Sonic. >>Absolutely. Yeah. So is Sonic stands for software for open talking in the cloud. It's a brain of Microsoft in, in 2016, they announced their contribution of Sonic to the open source community and, and through the networking technology to revolutionary set forward with the yet level of this aggregation by breaking the monolithic nos into multiple containers components. And, and through the use of ization, Sonic provides the, the network managers, the plug and place sensibility, the ability to run third party proprietary or open source application containers and, and perform those in-service updates with zero down time. Sonic is, is primarily designed across four main per principles. First one is the notion of control where, uh, Sonic is an open software organizations are deploying it, working on it. The network managers can decide what features they want to ship on a switch, so that there's less potential for bug and, and tailored for more of the use cases, right? >>Sonic was designed for extensibility for, uh, the developers to come and add new cable, roll those out rapidly on, on a platform. Uh it's it was designed for agility. The ability to take changes, roll those out rapidly, whether it's a bug fix or a new feature coming out, uh, which is significant. And finally Sonic was designed around this notion of open collaboration with such a diverse community around, we have Silicon vendors to ODM providers. It contribute is the more people work on it, the better and more like the software it becomes. Yeah. And, and it has >>Go ahead, continue. >>Yeah. I mean, it has evolved considerably and, and since it's inception, it's, uh, the growth is, is nurtured by an increasing set of users, uh, a vibrant open source community. Uh, and then there's a long, uh, trail of, of, of, you know, falling from, from the non-hyper killers where they like the value propers of technology and they want to adapt it for their environment. >>Yeah. And of course we love Silicon here at Silicon angle in the cube. Uh, but this is the whole new thing. Silicon advances is still software hardware matters. Dave LAN is doing a big thing called on why hardware matters with our team hardware and software together with open source really is coming back smaller, faster, cheaper. It's really good. So I want to ask you about Sonic, what types of customers mm-hmm, <affirmative> what we looking to implement this, is this more of a, a reset in the data centers? Is it a cloud scale team? Is it distributing computing? What's the new look of the customer who are implementing the like so, so, >>Well, uh, you know, it has evolved considerably since it's ion, right. It was born into a hyperscale environment and we see a big 10 happening where, uh, you know, there's a wider appeal that is across non hyperscalers who want to emulate the best practices of the hyperscalers. They, but they want to do it on their own terms. They want a feature solution that is tailored for enterprise use cases. And, and, you know, looking at this whole contain architecture, Sonic kinda fits the build well where, you know, providing a Linux, no, that can be managed by the, the same set of automation management tools. Uh, and, and, you know, these are the same teams, you know, uh, that have, you know, been acclimated to the world on the server side. Now with this all tool consolidation and consistent operations across the data center infrastructure, we, we see that Sonic brings a lot of value, uh, to these distributed application use cases, these modern data center environments, where you, you know, you have, you know, customers looking for cloud economic, multi vendor ecosystem open and flexible architectures. And in fact, you know, uh, you know, we are told by the industry analyst that there's a strong possibility that, you know, during the next three to six years, Sonic is going to become analog as to Linux, uh, now allowing the enterprises to, to sanitize on this. No, and, and, and, you know, they also predict that, uh, you know, 40% of the organizations that have, you know, large data centers or 200 plus switches will deploy Sonic in production. And the market is going to be approximately 2.5 billion by, by 2025. >>You know, we've, we've always been riffing about the network layers, always the last area to kind of get the innovation because it's so important. I mean, right. If you look at the advances of cloud and cloud scale, obviously Amazon did great work, Amazon what starts with networking lay, what they did kind of with in the cloud, but even in the enterprise, it's so locked down, it's so important. Um, and things like policy, these are concepts that have been moving up the stack. We see that, but also software's moving down the stack, right? So this notion of a network operating system kind of out is in play at the data center level, not just on the server, you're talking about like packets and observability monitoring, you know, more and more and more data coming in. So with data surging, tsunami of data, new, um, agile architectures changing in real time dynamic policy, this is what's happening. What's the role of the Dell and all this, you guys got the hardware, um, you got the servers now it's open source, it's got community. What is Dell bringing to the table? What's your role in this development and the evolution of Sonic and, and what are you guys bringing to the table? >>Absolutely. So, so we are now, uh, enterprise Sonic distribution by Dell technologies, a commercial offering for Sonic in June last year. And our, our vision has been primarily to bridge the gap between hyperscale networking and enterprise networking. Right here we are, we are combining the strengths and value proposition of Sonic and Dell technologies where the customers get an innovative, scalable opensource NA, which is hard and supported and backed by industry leader in open networking. That has been, that has been our primary play into this where enterprise Sonic by Dell, we, we cus the customers, you know, get support and deployment services. Uh, we work with the customers in building out a roadmap that is, you know, predictable, soft, and hardware roadmap for them. Uh, we, we provide at extended and validated use cases where, uh, you know, they can leverage, you know, Sonic for their, you know, specific environments, whether it's a cloud environment or the enterprise environment, uh, we've created a partner ecosystem where, uh, you know, with, with certain organizations that allow you to leverage the inherent automation, telemetry capabilities in the NAS, uh, to enhance the usability of the software, we have, uh, created an intuitive CLI framework called management framework to allow you to better consume Sonic for your employment. >>We offer support for open conflict models and then also answerable playbooks for, for network automation. So, so it's been a journey, uh, you know, we are making the solution ready for enterprise consumption is a, a big fan falling that is happening the non hyperscale awards. And, uh, we made significant contributions in, in, in the community as well. Yeah. 1 million lines plus of court, what fixes and, and helping with the documentation. So we are at the forefront of, of so journey. >>So you're saying that you, you're saying Dell for the folks watching you guys are putting the work in you're investing in opensource. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we, we, we are, uh, you know, extending open source to the bottom market, you know, making it enterprise ready, uh, with, with feature enhancements and building a partner ecosystem. Uh, you know, we, we ensure that, you know, it advanced through extensive internal testing and validation for the customers. And then, uh, in order to allow the customers to, of this new technology in house, uh, you know, we, we provide virtual demos. We have, you know, hands on labs for, for customers and channel partners. We, we also help them with, with a lot of documentation and reference architecture so that, you know, it's a knowledge repository across the board that can be leveraged for the modern use cases. So, yeah, so that's been a, it's been a journey with the customers, and it's always in evolution where we, you know, get better with, with extended use cases and, and more capabilities on the portfolio. >>You know, I always, I always talk with Michael Dell at the Dell tech world every year. And sometimes we text back and forth. Uh, we kind of grew up together in the industry about the same age. Um, and we joke about the Dell early days of Dell house supply chain was really part of their advantage. And this is getting a little bit of a throwback, but look back back then it was a systems architecture. You have suppliers, you have chips, you have boards, you build PCs, you build servers. And the DNA of Dell, Dell technologies has always been around this system. And with open source and tributed computing cloud data center edge, it's a system. And we're hearing words like supply chain in software, right? So when you start to think about Sonic and network operating systems and that kind of, those kinds of systems, when you modernize it, it's still gotta enable things to enable value. So what's the enabling value that Sonic has for the modern era here in computing as new kinds of supply chains emerge, new kinds of partnerships have to evolve. And the environment under the covers is changing too. You got cloud native, you got growth of containers. I think DACA was telling us that the container market there is pushing 20 million developers. I mean, massive cloud native activity and openside growth. This is a system. >>No, absolutely. I mean, uh, you know, the modern world has changed so much from, from, you know, the proprietary infrastructure and stacks. Now, uh, we tell, you know, becoming, uh, uh, you know, more software focused now because that's a real value, uh, that you bring to the customer is now it's all about application centricity. Nobody is talking about, you know, protocol stacks that, you know, they, they want simplicity. They want ease of network management. And how do you expose all these capabilities? It's it's software, right? Sonic being open software, there's so much happening, uh, in, in the community around it. We know we provide not bond interfaces that, you know, customers can hook up into their app applications and get better at monitoring, get better at, you know, managing that entire C I CD pipeline in the infrastructure. So I think, you know, soft is, is a core in the heart of, you know, the modern data center infrastructures today. And, you know, we've been, uh, you know, uh, uh, at the forefront of this journey with, with Sonic and, uh, you know, bringing the real choice and flexibility for the >>Customers. It's certainly an exciting time if you're in the data center, you're in, in architecture, cloud architecture, you're in data engineering, a new growing field, not just data science data is code. We did a big special on that recently in the cube, but also just overall scale. And so this, these are all new factors in C CXOs are dealing with obviously securities playing a big part of, and the role of data and also application developers all in play. The partner ecosystem becomes a really important part of, so I have to ask you, can you expand a little bit more on your comment earlier about the partner ecosystem and the importance of ways in providing a best in class service, because you're relying on others in open source, but you're commercializing Sonic with others. So there's a, the ecosystem play here. What's, what's talk more about that and, and the importance of it, >>Right, right. Yes, sir. As I mentioned earlier, right, the modern data center is no longer centered around protocol Sachs. It it's about agility, flexibility, choice, uh, network automation, simplicity. And based on these needs, we built up portfolio with, with plethora of options for, uh, you know, into open source tool chains and, and also building enterprise partnerships for, uh, with, with technologies that matter to the customers. Right? So, uh, the ecosystem partners, uh, are, are, you know, abstract, Juniper, um, Okta, and are crew that offer solutions at simplify network management and monitoring of, of massive complex networks and leverage the, the inherent automation telemetry capabilities in Sonic. It comes to the open source tools. Uh, you know, these, these are tools that, you know, the product, the, the tier two cloud at this point is the large enterprises also want based on how they're moving towards an open source based ecosystem. So we have, you know, created ible modules for network automation. We have integrated into opensource modeling tools like Telegraph or FA and pros. And then we are continue to, you know, scaling and expanding on these integrations and ecosystem partners, uh, to bring that choice, flexibility, uh, to the customers where, uh, you know, they can leverage the, the inherent software capabilities and leverage it to their application business needs. >>Rob, great to have you on the cube Sergeant Kalo, director of product management, Dell tech, Dell networking, Dell technologies, um, networking really important area. That's where the innovation is. It matters the most latency. You can't change their, the laws of physics, but you can certainly change architectures. This is kind of the new normal going on final point final comment. What can people expect to see around Sonic and where this goes? What, what happens next? How do you see this evolving? >>Well, there's a, uh, you know, I think we start of our journey to an exciting, you know, evolution on and networking happening with Sonic. There's so much this, this has to offer with, you know, a lot of technical value prop around microservices, container architecture with such a diverse community around it. There's, uh, a lot of feature addition, extended use cases that are coming up with Sonic. And we, we, we actively engage in the community with lot of feature enhancements and help also helping stay the com community in, in a direction that, you know, uh, bring Sonic to the wider market. So, uh, you know, I think this is, this is great, you know, start to a fantastic journey here. And, uh, we look forward to the exciting things that are coming on the Sonic journey. >>Awesome. Thanks for coming on. Great cube culture. We'll follow up more. I wanna track this Dell networking, networking it's important software operating systems. It's a system approach distributed computings back modernizing here with Dell technologies. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >>Awesome. Thank you, John. >>I'm John furry with the cube here in Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching.

hey everyone this is thecube's live coverage from los angeles of kubecon and cloud native con north america 21 lisa martin with dave nicholson we're going to be talking with the founder and ceo next of cloudnatics rohit seth rohit welcome to the program thank you very much lisa pleasure to meet you good to meet you too welcome so tell the the audience about cloudnatics what you guys do when you were founded and what was the gap in the market that you saw that said we need a solution so just to start uh cloud9x was started in 2019 by me and the reason for starting cloud netex was as i was starting to look at the cloud adoption and how enterprises are kind of almost blindly jumping on this cloud bandwagon i started reading what are the key challenges the market is facing and it started resonating with what i saw in google 15 years before when i joined google the first thing i noticed was of course the scale would just overwhelm anyone but at the same time how good they are utilized at that scale was the key that i was starting to look for and over the next couple of months i did all the scripting and such with my teams and found out that lower teens is the utilization of their computers servers and uh lower utilization means if you're spending a billion dollars you're basically wasting the major portion of that and a tech savvy company like google if that's a state of affair you can imagine what would be happening in other companies so in any case we actually now started work at that time started working on a technology so that more groups more business units could share the same machine in a efficient fashion and that's what led to the invention of containers over the next six years we rolled out containers across the whole google fleet the utilization went up at least three times right fast forward 15 years and you start reading 125 billion dollars are spent on a cloud and 60 billion dollars of waste someone would say 90 billion dollars a waste you know what i don't care whether 60 or 90 billion is a very large number and if tech savvy company google couldn't fix it on its own i bet you it it's not an easy problem for enterprises to fix it so we i started talking to several executives in the valley about is this problem for real or not the worst thing that i found was not only they didn't know how bad the problem was they actually didn't have any means to find out how bad the problem could be right one cfo just ran like headless chicken for about two months to figure out okay i know i'm spending this much but where is that spend going so i started kind of trading those waters and i started saying okay visibility is the first thing that we need to provide to the end customer saying that listen it doesn't need to be rocket science for you to figure out how much is your marketing spending how much your different business units so the first line of action is basically give them the visibility that they need to make the educated business decisions about how good or how bad they are doing their operations once they have the visibility the next thing is what to do if there is a waste there are a thousand different type of vms on aws alone people talk about complexity on multi-cloud hybrid cloud and that's all right but even on a single cloud you have thousand vms the heterogeneity of the vms with dynamic pricing that changes every so often is a killer and so and so rohit when you talk about driving levels of efficiency you're not just you're not just talking about abstraction versus bare metal utilization you're talking about even in environments that have used sort of traditional virtualization yes okay absolutely i think all clouds run in vms but within vms sometimes you have containers sometimes you don't have containers if you don't have containers there is no way for you to securely have a protagonist and antagonist job running on the same machines so containers basically came to the world just so that different applications could share the same resources in a meaningful fashion we are basically extending that landscape to to the enterprises so that that utilization benefit exists for everyone right so first of first order business for cloud natick is basically provide them the visibility on how well or bad they are doing the second is to give them the recommendation if you are not doing well what to do about it to do well and we can actually slice and dice the data based on what is important for you okay we don't tell you that these are the dimensions that you should be looking at of course we have our recommendations but we actually want you to figure out basically do you want to look at your marketing organization or your engineering organization or your product organization to see where they are spending money and you can slice and match that data according and we'll give you recommendations for those organizations but now you have the visibility now you have the recommendations but then what right if you ask a cubernities administrator to go and apply those recommendations i bet you the moment you have more than five cluster which is a kind of a very ordinary thing it'll take at least two hours just to figure out how to go from where you are to be able to log in and to be able to apply those recommendations and then changing back the ci cd pipelines and asking your developers to be cognizant about your resources next time is a month-long ordeal no one follows it that's why those recommendations falls on deaf ears most of the time what we do is we give you the choice you want to apply those recommendations manually or you can put the whole system on autopilot in which case once you have enough confidence in cloud native platform we will actually apply those recommendations for you dynamically on the fly as your workloads are increasing or decreasing in utilization and where are your customer conversations happening you mentioned the cfl you mentioned the billions in cloud waste where do you start having these conversations within an organization because clearly you mentioned marketing services you can give them that visibility across the organization who are you talking to within these customers so we start with mostly the cios ctos vp of engineering but it's very interesting we say it's a waste and i think the waste is most more of an effect than a cause the real cause is the complexity and who is having the complexity is the devops and the developers so in 99 of our customer interactions we basically start from cios and ctos but very soon we have these conversations over a week with developers and devops leads also sitting in the room saying that but this is a challenge on why i cannot do this so what we have done is to address the real cause and waste aspect of cloud computing we have we have what we call the management console through which we reduce the complexity of kubernetes operations themselves so think about how you can log into a crashing pod within two minutes rather than two hours right and this is where cloud native start differentiating from the rest of the competition out there because we provide you not only or do this recommendation do this right sizing of vm here or there but this is how you structurally fix the issue going forward right i'm not going to tell you that your containers are not going to crash loop their failures are regular part of distributed systems how you deal with them how you debug them and how you get it back up and running is a core integral part of how businesses get run that's what we provide in cloud natives platform a lot of this learning that we have is actually coming from our experience in hyperscalers we have a chief architect who is also from google he was a dl of a technology called borg and then we have sonic who was the head of products at mesosphere before so we understand what it takes for an enterprise who's primarily coming from on-prem or even the companies that are starting from cloud to scale in cloud often you hear this trillion dollar paradoxes that hey you're stupid if you don't start from cloud and you're stupid if you scale at cloud we are saying that if you're really careful about how you function on cloud it has a value prop that can actually take you to the web scalar heights without even blinking twice can you share an example of one of your favorite customer stories absolutely even by industry only where you've really shown them tremendous value in savings absolutely so a couple of discussions that happened that led like oh but we are we have already spent a team of four people trying to optimize our operations over the last year and we said that's fine uh you know what our onboarding exercise takes only 20 minutes right let's do the onboarding in about a week we will tell you if we could save you any money or not and put your best devops on this pov prove a value exercise to see if it actually help their daily life in terms of operations or not this particular customer only has 30 clusters so it's not very small but it's not very big in terms of what we are seeing in the market first thing the maximum benefit or the cost optimization that they could do over the past year using some of the tools and using their own top-class engineering shots were about seven to ten percent within a week we told them 38 without even having those engineers spend more than two hours in that week we gave them the recommendations right another two weeks because they did not want to put it on autopilot just because it's a new platform in production within next two hours they were able to apply i think at least close to 16 recommendations to their platform to get that 37 improvement in cost what are some examples of of recommendations um obviously you don't want to reveal too much of the secret sauce behind the scene but but but you know what are some what are some classic recommendations that are made so some of them could be as low-hanging fruit as or you have not right sized your vms right this is what i call a lot of companies you would find that oh you have not right side but for us that's the lowest hanging code you go in and you can tell them that whether you have right size that thing or not but in kubernetes in particular if you really look at how auto scaling up and how auto scaling down happens and particularly when you get a global federated view of the number of losses that's where our secret sources start coming and that's where we know how to load balance and how to scale vertically up or how to scale horizontally within the cluster right those kind of optimization we have not seen anywhere in the market so far and that's where the most of the value prop that our customers are seeing kind of comes out and it doesn't take uh too much time i think within a week we have enough data to to say that this service that has thousands of containers could benefit by about this much and just to kind of give you i wouldn't be able to go into the specific dollar numbers here but we are talking in at least a 5 million ish kind of a range of a spend for this cluster and think about it 37 of that if we could save that that kind of money is a real money that not only helps you save your bottom line but at that level you're actually impacting your top line of the business as well sure right that's our uh value crop that we are going to go in and completely automate you're not going to look for devops that don't exist anymore to hire one of the key challenges i'm pretty sure that you must have already heard 86 percent of businesses are not able to hire the devops and they want to hire 86 percent what happens when you don't have that devops that you want to have your existing devops want to move as fast cutting corners sometimes not because they don't know anywhere but just because there's so much pressure to do so much more they don't scale when things become brittle that's when um the fragility of the system comes up and when the demand goes up that's when the systems break but you're not prepared for that breakage just because you have not really done the all the things that you would have done if you had all the time that you needed to do the right thing it sounds like some of the microservices that are in containers that are that run the convention center here have just crashed i think it's gone hopefully the background noise didn't get picked up too much yeah but you're the so the the time to value the roi that you're able to deliver to customers is significant yes you talked about that great customer use case are there any kind of news or announcements anything that you want to kind of share here that folks can can be like looking forward to without the index absolutely so two things even though this is kubecon and everyone is focused on kubernetes kubernetes is still only about three to five percent of enterprise market okay we differentiate ourselves by saying that it doesn't matter whether you're running kubernetes or you're in running legacy vms we will come on board in your environment without you making a single line of change in less than 20 minutes and either we give you the value prop in one week or we don't all right that's number one number two we have a webinar coming on november 3rd uh please go to cloudnetix.com and subscribe or sign up for that webinar sonic and i will be presenting that webinar giving you the value proposition going through some use cases that oh we have seen with our customers so far so that we can actually educate the broader audience and let them know about this beautiful platform i think that my team has built up here all right cloudnatics.com rohit thank you for joining us sharing with us what you're doing at cloud natives why you founded the company and the tremendous impact and roi that you're able to give to your customers we appreciate learning more about the technology thank you so much and i really believe that cloud is here for stay for a long long time it's a trillion dollar market out there and if we do it right i do believe we will accelerate the adoption of cloud even further than what we have seen so far so thanks a lot lisa it's been a pleasure nice to meet you it's a pleasure we want to thank you for watching for dave nicholson lisa martin coming to you live from los angeles we are at kubecon cloudnativecon north america 21. dave and i will be right back with our next guest thank you you

(smooth music) >> Hi, welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. We've got James Wynia here with me, the Director of Product Management at Dell. We're going to be talking about modern data center networks. Jim, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. Great to be here. >> So let's talk about this. We've had so many dynamics going on in the last 15, 16 months, I've lost count. A lot of dynamics in play that are contributing to IT complexity. There's new sources of data. We had this massive shift to work from home, work from anywhere, that's now kind of this hybrid environment. Talk to me about some of the core requirements of a modern network infrastructure that organizations need to deploy. >> Absolutely, and thanks for teeing that up. The modern networking requirements these days, so many people have moved home, and so as a result, then the infrastructure back on the farm, back in the data center have to be beefier. You have to have more capacity. You have to be able to handle more scaling operations. And so things like the ability to radically increase your backbone just by swapping in some different transceivers, possibly some different switches to support those faster transceivers, allow for us to multiply that bandwidth very quickly. So that's been a big result of what we have seen coming out of all this, the COVID madness. >> Yeah. (chuckles) Madness is a great description for it, and there's going to be that hybrid as we go forward. There's going to be that need to, for any industry, I imagine, to enable work from anywhere. But talk to me about where customers are from a speed perspective. 100 Gig, that's really mature at this point. Is that where most businesses are? And then what's the next step from there? >> Another great question. (chuckles) I mean, 100 Gig is pretty much the de facto standard at this point. It has really become very cost-competitive and very stable. I mean, we've really been shipping QSFP28 at the latest 100 Gig for five years, and it has become the de facto standard for many, many different scenarios. As we move forward, though of course, we just need to move more data is what it comes down to, and so the next logical jump from 100 is 400. And so 400 started rolling out about the time that COVID came on, a couple months before that. And so honestly, there was a slight kind of delay in the industry as COVID kind of made everybody take a step back and say, "Whoa, hold on." But now it's really come back in full force. >> So what does an organization, and we'll kind of just leave this as any industry, need to do to be able to prepare to go from 100 to 400, because as you mentioned, the data sources aren't diminishing. It's only going to continue to increase. >> Absolutely. And so one of the things is to make sure that the backbone infrastructure can handle 400 Gig. Ironically enough, the actual optical cable trunks, those are pretty much the same. And so if you were running single-mode fiber to go a long distance, you would use that same cable. So you don't have to rip out all your cable infrastructure. What you have to look at closely is when you plug that transceiver into a switch, what is it capable of running at? In olden days, that was probably 100 Gig. Now you have a 400 Gig, so you have to make sure that you have just the right hardware to go with that. And then as you go down the chain, down the stack, rather, from those, the switch from the cord, or the switch all the way to your server, on the servers we see a lot of interest in 100 Gig, even up to 200 Gig today. And so it's the same discussion. You're taking a close look at your NIC or your adapter. What is it rated at? Is it going to be able to handle a faster speed? >> So it's not a rip and replace. Can you give us an idea of the migration path that a customer would take, and how Dell would facilitate that? >> Absolutely. And so we have some great customers who have really stepped out in different ways. You have the Greenfield customers who, they're building out a whole additional data center, say. And so they would just, from the ground up, replace it with the latest and greatest equipment that's just already ready to go. Other customers that are just extending, maybe they're tapping a couple data centers together and replacing those 100 Gig links to aggregate them with 400 Gig links. And then they would maybe migrate, adding in an additional 400 Gig links down through the stack as it makes sense. So ethernet is ethernet, right? Whether you have 100 Gig on one link, 400 Gig on another link, it all plugs and plays nicely. And so you don't have to have this big step where you have to forklift everything out and then move all new equipment in. It's as it makes sense. >> As organizations have pivoted multiple times in the last 15, 16 months, as we've all seen, and there will continue to be that I mentioned, there's this sort of work from anywhere hybrid model, what are some of the benefits that a business could expect going from 100 Gig to 400 besides just quadrupling the speed? Talk to me about some of the business impact that can be made here. >> So business impact as is can be tremendous. Certainly, the capacity is the biggest one that jumps out at us here, as we can just combine, add on more services. Another area where we see this impact, and which, again, boils down to capacity, is IoT and edge. We have these new edge devices coming left and right. I mean, every time you turn around in the consumer world, there's some new thing that we never thought was possible, or we thought was 20 years down the road, and well, there it is. All of those cute little gadgets are just creating these streams of data, okay? So you just have so much more data that has to be processed. And so some of that gets processed at the edge, and that's kind of a cool new thing, but you still have more data that has to come back to the home base, either for storage, or for analytics, or for number-crunching, and so you have to be able to manage that. Bigger, fatter pipes going long distances, going short distances, going just in the same rank. >> Have you noticed, Jim, in the last year or so any industries in particular that are really prime candidates for this upgrade? As you mentioned, IoT, the explosion at the edge, sensors, sensors everywhere. Any industries that you saw that really are benefiting from doing this migration? >> Well, certainly the hyperscalers. The big companies that we all use social networking on. They're just moving around just piles of data, and everyone's working from home, and so they just have a little extra time to do the clicking and searching and stuff. And so that, and as well as entertainment. From home, people are just... They're just using up more bandwidth, and so the tier one, tier two providers certainly... We've seen just tremendous interest and growth as they have stepped out and adopted. >> Jim, can we do a double-click now on some deployment options and capabilities, maybe helping us understand it by industry segment? >> Yes, absolutely. And so some of the segments that we've been working closely with over the last 18 months here is like cloud service providers. Also large enterprise companies who have the large data centers. And then thirdly, federal is moving along very quickly. Federal's got all the security stuff that's been in the news of late. They have more calculation and just data transfer needs than ever, and so those are a couple of good ones. >> Got it, yeah. Ransomware is now, unfortunately, one of those common household words, as is pandemic and Pfizer, right? Talk to me about where automation comes into play as organizations look to migrate to become faster, to be able to manage more data coming in faster from more sources, where does automation factor in the mix? >> One of my favorite questions, actually, because in the networking industry, it has changed so much in the last five years. It used to be that when you were talking about large data centers, and just massive amounts of data, that the entire discussion revolved around these large modular chassis. And the reality is that nowadays, yeah, large modular chassis still exist, and they have a place, but they're not mandatory in all circumstances. And one of the big changes is that you can get building blocks that push out tremendous amounts of data within a single box. And you can use like a claw structure that allows you to do more data safer because you have higher availability than these really expensive modular chassis. And so when you come with kind of more switches, the reality is that now you have a bigger automation requirement. And so the tools to be able to automatically set that up, automatically maintain, and automatically monitor it, those are critical. And especially when we're talking about high capacity environments where you have millions of people watching the video being on the screen right now. It better be there no matter what blip happens on the backend. >> Yep. There's always that demanding consumer, (chuckles) no matter what you do. What about automating day one and day two operations? How does it play into managing this infrastructure, this modern data network infrastructure, with on-prem and in the cloud? >> Yes. So I work for Dell, and I forgot to mention upfront, I apologize, I'm a Dell employee, but I'm actually speaking from my opinion. I'm not representing Dell in terms of their viewpoint of all of these things we're talking about today. But one of the big things is that, as we have gone from those modular chassis to more individual units to get this cleaner deployment, the day one has to do with how do you design that. How do you, when you have more fiber cables connecting things up, how do you make sure that you don't oops, plug one into the wrong place? And so tools such as in Dell, we have tools like the Fabric Design Center that automatically generate all of those wiring diagrams for you, all of the testing. When you plug it in for the first time, it actually verifies that everything's clean. And then day two is monitoring what's happening. Are you getting issues, subtle issues that are maybe not noticed but are building up? And so things like the Smart Fabric Director can allow us to monitor those types of things and make recommendations for, "Hey, there's something happening we need to be aware of and watch it," or "Here's some corrective action." And so those kinds of tools really are the lifeblood to make sure that the team doesn't just get overwhelmed. And the reality is we all know as time goes on, we need, or we're given the opportunity to have fewer people working on maintaining stuff. And so you need more equipment that's more complex, but you have less number of eyes on what's going on, and so the tools just have to be locked in. >> So tools you mentioned. What about operating systems? Anything that you would recommend that customers looking into? >> That's another great question. So operating systems have changed. If you look back on the server world, you go back 20, 25 years ago, every server company, they made their own CPU, they made their own operating system, and then it evolved so that there was, now you buy a CPU from either maybe Intel, maybe AMD. But it's not like Dell goes out and makes its own CPU. We buy from other established leaders. When it comes to operating systems on the server side, the same thing happened. Well, the networking world has been catching up for quite a while, and so four years ago, we started talking about open networking, and the fact that there are options. You're not locked into just what is our primary operating system. And so there are opensource operating systems that you can run. There are things like SONiC, which has just really been taking the networking world by storm. And so we certainly support Dell Enterprise SONiC on our platforms. And that is another fantastic option. >> Excellent. Last question, Jim, for you. If you had a crystal ball, given the dynamics of the world today and how quickly things are changing, and how organizations need to be competitive, what are some of the things that you think we're going to see in the networking world in the next 12 to 18 months? >> Well, it doesn't take a whole lot of a crystal ball. We just follow the standards, bodies. We see that 400 Gig has really come on strong. And honestly, we played catch up in that industry, having all of the optics that we needed. We needed all the breakout optics to go from 400 to four by 100. Those took a good, well, six to eight months before those really came on board. And so now we're finally at the place where we're in a good place, but the next thing clearly is everything doubles. And so now we'll jump to 800 Gig over the same infrastructure, and so that's, again, everything doubles. And then there's a lot of talk about, "Well, what happens after that?" Well, then you go everything from 800 to 1.6T over that same infrastructure, and so it's just kind of mind-boggling capacity, but it's coming at us like a freight train. >> It is like a freight train. We'll say a good freight train. Jim, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE today, talking to me about modern data center networks, what's going on there, the opportunities for businesses in any industry to take advantage of the latest and greatest. We appreciate your time. >> You bet. Thank you for inviting me. >> For Jim Wynia, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this CUBE Conversation. (smooth music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a CUBE conversation. I'm coming to you from our Boston Area studio. And we're going to be digging into some interesting news regarding networking. Some important use cases these days, in 2020, of course, AI is a big piece of it. So happy to welcome to the program. First of all, I have one of our CUBE alumni, Kevin Deierling. He's the Senior Vice President of Marketing with Nvidia, part of the networking team there. And joining him is Scott Tease, someone we've known for a while, but first time on the program, who's the General Manager of HPC and AI, for the Lenovo Data Center Group. Scott and Kevin, thanks so much for joining us. >> It's great to be here Stu. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Alright, so Kevin, as I said, you you've been on the program a number of times, first when it was just Mellanox, now of course the networking team, there's some other acquisitions that have come in. If you could just set us up with the relationship between Nvidia and Lenovo. And there's some news today that we're here to talk about too. So let's start getting into that. And then Scott, you'll jump in after Kevin. >> Yeah, so we've been a long time partner with Lenovo, on our high performance computing. And so that's the InfiniBand piece of our business. And more and more, we're seeing that AI workloads are very, very similar to HPC workloads. And so that's been a great partnership that we've had for many, many years. And now we're expanding that, and we're launching a OEM relationship with Lenovo, for our Ethernet switches. And again, with our Ethernet switches, we really take that heritage of low latency, high performance networking that we built over many years in HPC, and we bring that to Ethernet. And of course that can be with HPC, because frequently in an HPC supercomputing environment, or in an AI supercomputing environment, you'll also have an Ethernet network, either for management, or sometimes for storage. And now we can offer that together with Lenovo. So it's a great partnership. We talked about it briefly last month, and now we're coming to market, and we'll be able to offer this to the market. >> Yeah, yeah, Kevin, we're super excited about it here in Lenovo as well. We've had a great relationship over the years with Mellanox, with Nvidia Mellanox. And this is just the next step. We've shown in HPC that the days of just taking an Ethernet card, or an InfiniBand card, plugging it in the system, and having it work properly are gone. You really need a system that's engineered for whatever task the customer is going to use. And we've known that in HPC for a long time, as we move into workloads, like artificial intelligence, where networking is a critical aspect of getting these systems to communicate with one another, and work properly together. We love from HPC perspective, to use InfiniBand, but most enterprise clients are using Ethernet. So where do we go? We go to a partner that we've trusted for a very long time. And we selected the Nvidia Mellanox Ethernet switch family. And we're really excited to be able to bring that end-to-end solution to our enterprise clients, just like we've been doing for HPC for a while. >> Yeah, well Scott, maybe if you could. I'd love to hear a little bit more about kind of that customer demand that those usages there. So you think traditionally, of course, is supercomputing, as you both talked about that move from InfiniBand, to leveraging Ethernet, is something that's been talked about for quite a while now in the industry. But maybe that AI specifically, could you talk about what are the networking requirements, how similar is it? Is it 95% of the same architecture, as what you see in HPC environments? And also, I guess the big question there is, how fast are customers adopting, and rolling out those AI solutions? And what kind of scale are they getting them to today? >> So yeah, there's a lot there of good things we can talk about. So I'd say in HPC, the thing that we've learned, is that you've got to have a fabric that's up to the task. When you're testing an HPC solution, you're not looking at a single node, you're looking at a combination of servers, and storage, management, all these things have to come together, and they come together over InfiniBand fabric. So we've got this nearly a purpose built fabric that's been fantastic for the HPC community for a long time. As we start to do some of that same type of workload, but in an enterprise environment, many of those customers are not used to InfiniBand, they're used to an Ethernet fabric, something that they've got all throughout their data center. And we want to try to find a way to do was, bring a lot of that rock solid interoperability, and pre-tested capability, and bring it to our enterprise clients for these AI workloads. Anything high performance GPUs, lots of inner internode communications, worries about traffic and congestion, abnormalities in the network that you need to spot. Those things happen quite often, when you're doing these enterprise AI solutions. You need a fabric that's able to keep up with that. And the Nvidia networking is definitely going to be able to do that for us. >> Yeah well, Kevin I heard Scott mention GPUs here. So this kind of highlights one of the reasons why we've seen Nvidia expand its networking capabilities. Could you talk a little bit about that kind of expansion, the portfolio, and how these use cases really are going to highlight what Nvidia helped bring to the market? >> Yeah, we like to really focus on accelerated computing applications. And whether those are HPC applications, or now they're becoming much more broadly adopted in the enterprise. And one of the things we've done is, tight integration at a product level, between GPUs, and the networking components in our business. Whether that's the adapters, or the DPU, the data processing unit, which we've talked about before. And now even with the switches here, with our friends at Lenovo, and really bringing that all together. But most importantly, is at a platform level. And by that I mean the software. And the enterprise here has all kinds of different verticals that are going after. And we invest heavily in the software ecosystem that's built on top of the GPU, and the networking. And by integrating all of that together on a platform, we can really accelerate the time to market for enterprises that wants to leverage these modern workloads, sort of cloud native workloads. >> Yeah, please Scott, if you have some follow up there. >> Yeah, if you don't mind Stu, I just like to say, five years ago, the roadmap that we followed was the processor roadmap. We all could tell you to the week when the next Xeon processor was going to come out. And that's what drove all of our roadmaps. Since that time what we found is that the items that are making the radical, the revolutionary improvements in performance, they're attached to the processor, but they're not the processor itself. It's things like, the GPU. It's things like that, especially networking adapters. So trying to design a platform that's solely based on a CPU, and then jam these other items on top of it. It no longer works, you have to design these systems in a holistic manner, where you're designing for the GPU, you're designing for the network. And that's the beauty of having a deep partnership, like we share with Nvidia, on both the GPU side, and on the networking side, is we can do all that upfront engineering to make sure that the platform, the systems, the solution, as a whole works exactly how the customer is going to expect it to. >> Kevin, you mentioned that a big piece of this is software now. I'm curious, there's an interesting piece that your networking team has picked up, relatively recently, that the Cumulus Linux, so help us understand how that fits into the Ethernet portfolio? And would it show up in these kind of applications that we're talking about? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So you're absolutely right, Cumulus is integral to what we're doing here with Lenovo. If you looked at the heritage that Mellanox had, and Cumulus, it's all about open networking. And what we mean by that, is we really decouple the hardware, and the software. So we support multiple network operating systems on top of our hardware. And so if it's, for example, Sonic, or if it's our Onyx or Dents, which is based on switch def. But Cumulus who we just recently acquired, has been also on that same access of open networking. And so they really support multiple platforms. Now we've added a new platform with our friends at Lenovo. And really they've adopted Cumulus. So it is very much centered on, Enterprise, and really a cloud like experience in the Enterprise, where it's Linux, but it's highly automated. Everything is operationalized and automated. And so as a result of that, you get sort of the experience of the cloud, but with the economics that you get in the Enterprise. So it's kind of the best of both worlds in terms of network analytic, and all of the ability to do things that the cloud guys are doing, but fully automated, and for an Enterprise environment. >> Yeah, so Kevin, I mean, I just want to say a few things about this. We're really excited about the Cumulus acquisition here. When we started our negotiations with Mellanox, we were still planning to use Onyx. We love Onyx, it's been our IB nodes of choice. Our users love, our are architects love it. But we were trying to lean towards a more open kind of futuristic, node as we got started with this. And Cumulus is really perfect. I mean it's a Linux open source based system. We love open source in HPC. The great thing about it is, we're going to be able to take all the great learnings that we've had with Onyx over the years, and now be able to consolidate those inside of Cumulus. We think it's the perfect way to start this relationship with Nvidia networking. >> Well Scott, help us understand a little more. What you know what does this expansion of the partnership mean? If you're talking about really the full solutions that Lenovo opens in the think agile brand, as well as the hybrid and cloud solutions. Is this something then that, is it just baked into the solution, is it a reseller, what should customers, and your your channel partners understand about this? >> Yeah, so any of the Lenovo solutions that require a switch to perform the functionality needed across the solution, are going to show up with the networking from Nvidia inside of it. Reasons for that, a couple of reasons. One is even something as simple as solution management for HPC, the switch is so integral to how we do all that, how we push all those functions down, how we deploy systems. So you've got to have a switch, in a connectivity methodology, that ensures that we know how to deploy these systems. And no matter what scale they are, from a few systems up, to literally thousands of systems, we've got something that we know how to do. Then when we're we're selling these solutions, like an SAP solution, for instance. The customer is not buying a server anymore, they're buying a solution, they're buying a functionality. And we want to be able to test that in our labs to ensure that that system, that rack, leaves our factory ready to do exactly what the customer is looking for. So any of the systems that are going to be coming from us, pre configured, pre tested, are all going to have Nvidia networking inside of them. >> Yeah, and I think that's, you mentioned the hybrid cloud. I think that's really important. That's really where we cut our teeth first in InfiniBand, but also with our Ethernet solutions. And so today, we're really driving a bunch of the big hyper scalars, as well as the big clouds. And as you see things like SAP or Azure, it's really important now that you're seeing Azure stack coming into a hybrid environment, that you have the known commodity here. So we're something that we're built in to many of those different platforms, with our Spectrum ASIC, as well as our adapters. And so now the ability with Nvidia, and Lenovo together, to bring that to enterprise customers, is really important. I think it's a proven set of components that together forms a solution. And that's the real key, as Scott said, is delivering a solution, not just piece parts, we have a platform, that software, hardware, all of it integrated. >> Well, it's great to see you. We've had an existing partnership for a while. I want to give you both the opportunity, anything specific, you've been hearing kind of the customer demand leading up this. Is it people that might be transitioning from InfiniBand to Ethernet? Or is it just general market adoption of new solutions that you have out there? (speakers talk over each other) >> You go ahead and start. >> Okay, so I think that there's different networks for different workloads, is what we've seen. And InfiniBand certainly is going to continue to be the best platform out there for HPC, and often for AI. But as Scott said, the enterprise frequently is not familiar with that, and for various reasons, would like to leverage Ethernet. So I think we'll see two different cases, one where there's Ethernet with an InfiniBand network. And the other is for new enterprise workloads that are coming, that are very AI centric, modern workloads, sort of cloud native workloads. You have all of the infrastructure in place with our Spectrum ASICs, and our Connectx adapters, and now integrated with GPUs, that we'll be able to deliver solutions rather than just compliments. And that's the key. >> Yeah, I think Stu, a great example, I think of where you need that networking, like we've been used to an HPC, is when you start looking at deep learning in training, scale out training. A lot of companies have been stuck on a single workstation, because they haven't been able to figure out how to spread that workload out, and chop it up, like we've been doing in HPC, because they've been running into networking issues. They can't run over an unoptimized network. With this new technology, we're hoping to be able to do a lot of the same things that HPC customers take for granted every day, about workload management, distribution of workload, chopping jobs up into smaller portions, and feeding them out to a cluster. We're hoping that we're going to be able to do those exact same things for our enterprise clients. And it's going to look magical to them, but it's the same kind of thing we've been doing forever. With Mellanox, in the past, now Nvidia networking, we're just going to take that to the enterprise. I'm really excited about it. >> Well, it's so much flexibility. We used to look at, it would take a decade to roll out some new generations. Kevin, if you could just give us latest speeds and feeds. If I look at Ethernet, did I see that this has from n gig, all the way up to 400 gig? I think I lose track a little bit of some of the pieces. I know the industry as a whole is driving it. But where are we with the general customer adoption of some of the some of the speeds today? >> Yeah indeed, we're coming up on the 40th anniversary of the first specification of Ethernet. And we're about 4000 times faster now, 40,000 times faster at 400 gigabits, versus 10 megabits. So yeah, we're shipping today at the adapter level, 100 gig, and even 200 gig. And then at the switch level, 400 gig. And people sort of ask, "Do we really need all that performance?" The answer is absolutely. So the amount of data that the GPU can crunch, and these AI workloads, these giant neural networks, it needs massive amounts of data. And then as you're scaling out, as Scott was talking about, much along the lines of InfiniBand Ethernet needs that same level of performance, throughput, latency and offloads, and we're able to deliver. >> Yeah, so Kevin, thank you so much. Scott, I want to give you a final word here. Anything else you want your customers to understand regarding this partnerships? >> Yeah, just a quick one Stu, quick one. So we've been really fortunate in working really closely with Mellanox over the years, and with Nvidia. And now the two together, we're just excited about what the future holds. We've done some really neat things in HPC, with being one of the first watercool an InfiniBand card. We're one of the first companies to deploy Dragonfly topology. We've done some unique things where we can share a single IP adapter, across multiple users. We're looking forward to doing a lot of that same exact kind of innovation, inside of our systems as we look to Ethernet. We often think that as speeds of Ethernet continue to go higher, we may see more and more people move from InfiniBand to Ethernet. I think that now having both of these offerings inside of our lineup, is going to make it really easy for customers to choose what's best for them over time. So I'm excited about the future. >> Alright, well Kevin and Scott, thank you so much. Deep integration and customer choice, important stuff. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thanks Stu. >> Alright, I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the global its theCUBE, covering HPE Discover Virtual Experience, brought to you by HPE. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of HPE, discover the virtual experience for 2020, getting to talk to Hp executives, their partners, the ecosystem, where they are around the globe, this session we're going to be digging in about artificial intelligence, obviously a super important topic these days. And to help me do that, I've got two guests from Nvidia, sitting in the window next to me, we have Paresh Kharya, he's director of product marketing and sitting next to him in the virtual environment is Kevin Deierling, who is this senior vice president of marketing as I mentioned both with Nvidia. Thank you both so much for joining us. >> Thank you, so great to be here. >> Great to be here. >> All right, so Paresh when you set the stage for us? AI, obviously, one of those mega trends to talk about but just, give us the stages, where Nvidia sits, where the market is, and your customers today, that they think about AI. >> Yeah, so we are basically witnessing a massive changes that are happening across every industry. And it's basically the confluence of three things. One is of course, AI, the second is 5G and IOT, and the third is the ability to process all of the data that we have, that's now possible. For AI we are now seeing really advanced models, from computer vision, to understanding natural language, to the ability to speak in conversational terms. In terms of IOT and 5G, there are billions of devices that are sensing and inferring information. And now we have the ability to act, make decisions in various industries, and finally all of the processing capabilities that we have today, at the data center, and in the cloud, as well as at the edge with the GPUs as well as advanced networking that's available, we can now make sense all of this data to help industrial transformation. >> Yeah, Kevin, you know it's interesting when you look at some of these waves of technology and we say, "Okay, there's a lot of new pieces here." You talk about 5G, it's the next generation but architecturally some of these things remind us of the past. So when I look at some of these architectures, I think about, what we've done for high performance computing for a long time, obviously, you know, Mellanox, where you came from through NVIDIA's acquisition, strong play in that environment. So, maybe give us a little bit compare, contrast, what's the same, and what's different about this highly distributed, edge compute AI, IOT environment and what's the same with what we were doing with HPC in the past. >> Yeah, so we've--Mellanox has now been a part of Nvidia for a little over a month and it's great to be part of that. We were both focused on accelerated computing and high performance computing. And to do that, what it means is the scale and the type of problems that we're trying to solve are just simply too large to fit into a single computer. So if that's the case, then you connect a lot of computers. And Jensen talked about this recently at the GTC keynote where he said that the new unit computing, it's really the data center. So it's no longer the box that sits on your desk or even in Iraq, it's the entire data center because that's the scale of the types of problems that we're solving. And so the notion of scale up and scale out, the network becomes really, really critical. And we're doing high-performance networking for a long time. When you move to the edge, instead of having, a single data center with 10,000 computers, you have 10,000 data centers, each of which as a small number of servers that is processing all of that information that's coming in. But in a sense, the problems are very, very similar, whether you're at the edge or you're doing massive HPC, scientific computing or cloud computing. And so we're excited to be part of bringing together the AI and the networking because they are really optimizing at the data center scale across the entire stack. >> All right, so it's interesting. You mentioned, Nvidia CEO, Jensen. I believe if I saw right in there, he actually could, wrote a term which I had not run across, it was the data processing unit or DPU in that, data center, as you talked about. Help us wrap our heads around this a little bit. I know my CPU, when I think about GPUs, I obviously think of Nvidia. TPUs, in the cloud and everything we're doing. So, what is DPUs? Is this just some new AI thing or, is this kind of a new architectural model? >> Yeah. I think what Jensen highlighted is that there's three key elements of this accelerated disaggregated infrastructure that the data center has becoming. And so that's the CPU, which is doing traditional single threaded workloads but for all of the accelerated workloads, you need the GPU. And that does massive parallelism deals with massive amounts of data, but to get that data into the GPU and also into the CPU, you need really an intelligent data processing because the scale and scope of GPUs and CPUs today, these are not single core entities. These are hundreds or even thousands of cores in a big system. And you need to steer the traffic exactly to the right place. You need to do it securely. You need to do it virtualized. You need to do it with containers and to do all of that, you need a programmable data processing unit. So we have something called our BlueField, which combines our latest, greatest, 100 gig and 200 gig network connectivity with Arm processors and a whole bunch of accelerators for security, for virtualization, for storage. And all of those things then feed these giant parallel engines which are the GPU. And of course the CPU, which is really the workload at the application layer for non-accelerated outs. >> Great, so Paresh, Kevin talked about, needing similar types of services, wherever the data is. I was wondering if you could really help expand for us a little bit, the implications of it AI at the edge. >> Sure, yeah, so AI is basically not just one workload. AI is many different types of models and AI also means training as well as inferences, which are very different workloads or AI printing, for example, we are seeing the models growing exponentially, think of any AI model, like a brain of a computer or like a brain, solving a particular use case a for simple models like computer vision, we have models that are smaller, bugs have computer vision but advanced models like natural language processing, they require larger brains or larger models, so on one hand we are seeing the size of the AI models increasing tremendously and in order to train these models, you need to look at computing at the scale of data center, many processors, many different servers working together to train a single model, on the other hand because of these AI models, they are so accurate today from understanding languages to speaking languages, to providing the right recommendations whether it's for products or for content that you may want to consume or advertisements and so on. These models are so effective and efficient that they are being powered by AI today. These applications are being powered by AI and each application requires a small amount of acceleration, so you need the ability to scale out or, and support many different applications. So with our newly launched MPR architecture, just couple of weeks to go that Jensen announced, in the virtual keynote for the first time, we are now able to provide both, scale up and scale out both training data analytics as well as imprints on the single architecture and that's very exciting. >> Yeah, so look at that. The other thing that's interesting is you're talking about at the edge and scale out versus scale up, the networking is critical for both of those. And there's a lot of different workloads. And as Paresh was describing, you've got different workloads that require different amounts of GPU or storage or networking. And so part of that vision of this data center as the computer is that, the DPU lets you scale independently, everything. So you can compose, you desegregate into DPUs and storage and CPUs, and then you compose exactly the computer that you need on the fly container, right, to solve the problem that you're solving right now. So these new way of programming is programming the entire data center at once and you'll go grab all of it and it'll run for a few hundred milliseconds even and then it'll come back down and recompose itself onsite. And to do that, you need this very highly efficient networking infrastructure. And the good news is we're here at HPE Discover. We've got a great partner with HPE. You know, they have our M series switches that uses the Mellanox hundred gig and now even 200 and 400 gig ethernet switches, we have all of our adapters and they have great platforms. The Apollo platform for example, is break for HPC and they have other great platforms that we're looking at with the new telco that we're doing or 5G and accelerating that. >> Yeah, and on the edge computing side, there's the edge line set of products which are very interesting, the other sort of aspect that I wanted to touch upon, is the whole software stack that's needed for the edge. So edge is different in the sense that it's not centrally managed, the edge computing devices are distributed remote locations. And so managing the workflow of running and updating software on it is important and needs to be done in a very secure manner. The second thing that's, that's very different again, for the edges, these devices are going to require connectivity. As Kevin was pointing out, the importance of networking so we also announced, a couple of weeks ago at our GTC, our EGX product that combines the Mellanox NIC and our GPUs into a single a processor, Mellanox NIC provides a fast connectivity, security, as well as the encryption and decryption capabilities, GPUs provide acceleration to run the advanced DI models, that are required for applications at the edge. >> Okay, and if I understood that, right. So, you've got these throughout the HPE the product line, HPE's got long history of making, flexible configurations, I remember when they first came out with a Blade server it was, different form factors, different connectivity options, they pushed heavily into composable infrastructure. So it sounds like this is just a kind of extending, you know, what HP has been doing for a couple of decades. >> Yeah, I think HP is a great partner there and these new platforms, the EGX, for example that was just announced, a great workload there is a 5G telco. So we'll be working with our friends at HPE to take that to market as well. And, you know, really, there's a lot of different workloads and they've got a great portfolio of products across the spectrum from regular servers. And 1U, 2U, and then all the way up to their big Apollo platform. >> Well I'm glad you brought up telco, I'm curious, are there any specific, applications or workloads that, where the low hanging fruit or the kind of the first targets that you use for AI acceleration? >> Yeah, so you know, the 5G workload is just awesome. We're introduced with the EGX, a new platform called Ariel which is a programming framework and there were lots of partners there that were part of that, including, folks like Ericsson. And the idea there is that you have a software defined hardware accelerated radio area network, so a cloud RAM and it really has all of the right attributes of the cloud and what's nice there is now you can change on the fly, the algorithms that you're using for the baseband codex without having to go climb a radio tower and change the actual physical infrastructure. So that's a critical part. Our role in that, on the networking side, we introduced the technology that's part of EGX then are connected, It's like the DX adapter, it's called 5T for 5G. And one of the things that happens is you need this time triggered transport or a telco technology. That's the 5T's for 5G. And the reason is because you're doing distributed baseband unit, distributed radio processing and the timing between each of those server nodes needs to be super precise, 20 nanosecond. It's something that simply can't be done in software. And so we did that in hardware. So instead of having an expensive FPGA, I try to synchronize all of these boxes together. We put it into our NIC and now we put that into industry standard servers HP has some fantastic servers. And then with the EGX platform, with that we can build, really scale out software to client cloud RAM. >> Awesome, Paresh, anything else on the application side you'd like to add in just about what Kevin spoke about. >> Oh yeah, so from application perspective, every industry has applications that touch on edge. If you take a look at the retail, for example, there is, you know, all the way from supply chain to inventory management, to keeping the right stock units in the shelves, making sure there is a there is no slippage or shrinkage. So to telecom, to healthcare, we are re-looking at constantly monitoring patients and taking actions for the best outcomes to manufacturing. We are looking to automate production detecting failures much early on in the production cycle and so on every industry has different applications but they all use AI. They can all leverage the computing capabilities and high-speed networking at the edge to transform their business processes. >> All right, well, it's interesting almost every time we've talked about AI, networking has come up. So, you know, Kevin, I think that probably ease up a little bit why, Nvidia, spent around $7 billion for the acquisition of Mellanox and not only was it the Mellanox acquisition, Cumulus Networks, very known in the network space for software defined really, operating system for networking but give us strategically, does this change the direction of Nvidia, how should we be thinking about Nvidia in the overall network? >> Yeah, I think the way to think about it is going back to that data center as the computer. And if you're thinking about the data center as computer then networking becomes the back plane, if you will of that data center computer and having a high performance network is really critical. And Mellanox has been a leader in that for 20 years now with our InfiniBand and our Ethernet product. But beyond that, you need a programmatic interface because one of the things that's really important in the cloud is that everything is software defined and it's containerized now and there is no better company in the world then Cumulus, really the pioneer and building Cumulus clinics, taking the Linux operating system and running that on multiple homes. So not just hardware from Mellanox but hardware from other people as well. And so that whole notion of an open networking platform more committed to, you need to support that and now you have a programmatic interface that you can drop containers on top of, Cumulus has been the leader in the Linux FRR, it's Free Range Routing, which is the core routing algorithm. And that really is at the heart of other open source network operating systems like Sonic and DENT so we see a lot of synergy here, all the analytics that Cumulus is bringing to bear with NetQ. So it's really great that they're going to be part here of the Nvidia team. >> Excellent, well thank you both much. Want to give you the final word, what should they do, HPE customers in their ecosystem know about the Nvidia and HPE partnership? >> Yeah, so I'll start you know, I think HPE has been a longtime partner and a customer of ours. If you have accelerated workloads, you need to connect those together. The HPE server portfolio is an ideal place. We can combine some of the work we're doing with our new amp years and existing GPUs and then also to connect those together with the M series, which is their internet switches that are based on our spectrum switch platforms and then all of the HPC related activities on InfiniBand, they're a great partner there. And so all of that, pulling it together, and now as at the edge, as edge becomes more and more important, security becomes more and more important and you have to go to this zero trust model, if you plug in a camera that's somebody has at the edge, even if it's on a car, you can't trust it. So everything has to become, validated authenticated, all the data needs to be encrypted. And so they're going to be a great partner because they've been a leader and building the most secure platforms in the world. >> Yeah and on the data center, server, portfolio side, we really work very closely with HP on various different lines of products and really fantastic servers from the Apollo line of a scale up servers to synergy and ProLiant line, as well as the Edgeline for the edge and on the super computing side with the pre side of things. So we really work to the fullest spectram of solutions with HP. We also work on the software side, wehere a lot of these servers, are also certified to run a full stack under a program that we call NGC-Ready so customers get phenomenal value right off the bat, they're guaranteed, to have accelerated workloads work well when they choose these servers. >> Awesome, well, thank you both for giving us the updates, lots happening, obviously in the AI space. Appreciate all the updates. >> Thanks Stu, great to talk to you, stay well. >> Thanks Stu, take care. >> All right, stay with us for lots more from HPE Discover Virtual Experience 2020. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright upbeat music)

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, welcome back to the cubes coverage of combo go 19. Stu Miniman is here with me, Lisa Martin and we are wrapping up two days of really exciting wall to wall coverage of the new vault and we're very pleased to welcome a couple of special guests onto the program. To help us wrap up our two days, we have Miranda foster, the vice president of worldwide communications for comm vault and Al Bunty is here, the co founder, former COO and board member. Welcome Miranda and Al. Great to have you on the program. Thanks Lisa. So a lot of energy at this event and I don't think it has anything to do with our rarefied air here in the mile high city. Al, let's start with you. >>Well, there's other things in Colorado. >>There are, yeah, they don't talk about it. They talked about that on stage yesterday. So owl, you have been with convo ball as I mentioned, co-founder. What an evolution over the last 20 years. Can you take us back? >>Surely. So, um, yeah and it's been, it's, it's really kind of cool to see it coming together at this point. But if you go back 20 years when we started this, the whole idea was around data. And remember we walked into a company that was focused on optical storage. Um, we decided it would be a good company to invest in. Um, for two reasons. One, we thought they were really great people here, very creative and innovative and two, it was a great space. So if we believed we believe data would grow and that was a pretty decent thesis to go with. Yeah. And then, then it started moving from there. So I tell people I wasn't burdened with facts so I didn't understand why all these copies were being made of the same set of data. So we developed a platform and an architecture focused on indexing it so you just index at once and then could use it for many different purposes. >>And that just kept moving through the years with this very data centric approach to storage, management, backup protection, etc. It was all about the data. I happened to be lucky and said, you know, I think there's something to this thing called NAS and sand and storage networks and all those things. And I also said we have to plan for fur on scale on our solution of a million X. Now it was only off a magnitude of about a thousand on that, but it was the right idea. You know, you had to build something to scale and, and we came in and we wanted to build a company. We didn't want to just flip a company but we thought there is a longterm vision in it and if you take it all the way to the present here it's, it's really, um, it's, it feels really good to see where the company came from. It's a great foundation and now it will propel off this foundation, um, with a similar vision with great modern execution and management. >>Yeah. Al, when we had the chance to talk with you last year at the show in Nashville, it was setting up for that change. So I want to get your view there. There are some things that the company was working on and are being continued, but there's some things that, you know, Bob hammer would not have happened under his regime. So want to get your viewpoint as to the new Convolt, you know, what, what is, what are some of those new things that are moving forward with the company that might not have in the previous days? >>Yeah, that's a good questions. Do I think Mo, a lot of the innovation that you've seen here, um, would have happened maybe not as quickly. Um, we, the company obviously acquired Hedvig. Uh, we were on a very similar path but to do it ourselves. So you had kind of been a modern, we need to get to market quicker with some real pros. I think, um, the, the evolution of redoing sales management essentially was probably the biggest shift that needed to be under a new regime, if you will. Yeah. >>So Miranda, making these transitions can be really tricky from a marketing standpoint. Talk, talk us through a bit, some of the, how do you make sure trusted yet innovative and new that you've accomplished at this show? >>Well, trust it is obviously the most important because the Bob, the brand that Bob and Al built really embodies reliability for what we provide to our customers. I mean that's what gives them the peace of mind to sleep at night. But I'll tell you, Sanjay has been with us for just eight months now, February of 2019 and it's been busy. We've done a lot of things from a points on J transition with Bob and now to his point we've, we've acquired Hedvig, we've introduced this new SAS portfolio and you're exactly right. What we need to do is make sure that the reliability that customers have come to rely on Convolt for translates into what we're doing with the new Convolt and I think we've done a really good job. We've put a lot of muscle behind making sure, particularly with metallic that it was tried, it was trusted, it was beta tested, we got input from customers, partners, industry influencers. We really built it around the customer. So I think the brand that comm brings will translate well into the things that we've done with these, with these new shifts and movements within the company >>on, on that questions too as well. Um, I think Miranda is a good example of somebody that was with the company before a tremendous talent. She's got new opportunities here and she's run with it. So it's kinda that balance of some, uh, understood the fundamentals and the way we're trying to run the business. And she's grasped the new world as well. So, >>and Rob as well, right? Robin in his new, >>yeah, that's another good point. So that was all part of the transitioning here and Sanjay and the team had been very careful on trying to keep that balance. >>Change is really difficult anywhere, right? Dissect to any element of life. And you look at a business that's been very successful, has built a very strong, reliable brand for 20 years. Big leadership changes, not just with Sanjay, but all of the leadership changes. You know, analysts said, all right, you've got to upgrade your Salesforce. We're seeing a lot of movement in the area. You got to enhance your marketing. We're seeing metallic has the new routes to market, new partner focus, so PSI focuses. We're also seeing this expansion in the market, so what folks were saying, you know a year ago come on is answering in a big way and to your point in a fast way that's not easy to do. You've been here nine years since the beginning. Can you give us a little bit of a perspective, Miranda, about some of the things that were announced at the show? >>How excited everybody is, customers, partners, combo folks. How do you now extend the message and the communications from go globally after the show ends? That's an awesome question. I'm really passionate about this. So you know, Monday we announced metallic, we announced a new head of channels and alliances and Mercer Rowe, we had crazy technology innovation announcements with activate, with the acceleration of the integration with Hedvig with the momentum release that we put out today. We're also doing cool stuff with our corporate social responsibility in terms of sponsoring the new business Avengers coalition. That's something that Chris Powell is really championing here at, at the show and also within combo. So we're very excited about that. And then when you add people like yourselves, you know the tech field day folks, because not everybody can be here, right? Not everybody can be at go. So being able to extend the opportunity for, for folks to participate in combo, go through things like the cube through things like tech field day and using our social media tools and just getting all of the good vibes that are here. Because as Al says, this really is an intimate show, but we try to extend that to anybody who wants to follow us, to anybody who wants to be a part of it. And that's something that we've really focused on the last couple of years to make sure that folks who aren't here can, can get an embrace the environment here at Commonweal go. >>It's such an important piece that you're here helping with the transition I talked about. It's important that some of the existing >>get new roles and do responsibility going forward. What's your role going to be and what should we expect to see from you personally? Somebody has got to mow the lawn. >>Yeah. >>But yes, do I, I'll stay on the board. Um, we're talking through that. I think I'll be a very active board, not just the legal side of the equation. Um, try and stay involved with customers and, and strategies and, and even, uh, potential acquisitions, those kinds of things. Um, I'm also wandering off into the university environment. Uh, my Alma mater is a university of Iowa. I'm on the board there and uh, I'm involved in setting up innovation centers and entrepreneurial programs and that kind of thing. Um, I'll keep doing my farming thing and uh, actually have some ideas on that. There's a lot of technology as you guys know, attacking Nat space. So, and like I said, I'll try to keep a lot of things linked back into a combo. >>What Al can have confidence in is that I will keep him busy. So there's that. And then I will also put on the table, we agree to disagree with our college athletic loyalties. So I'm a big kid just because we don't compete really. Right. So I mean, but if I won Kansas wherever to play, then we would just politely disagree. Yeah. Well that's good that you have this agreement in place. I would love to get some anecdotal feedback from you of some of the things that you've heard over the last three days with all this news, all these changes. What are you hearing from customers and partners who you've had relationships with for a very long time? >>I think they're, I think they're all really excited, but, and maybe I'm biased, but they liked the idea that we're trying to not throw out all the old focus on customers, focus on technologies, continue the innovation. I'm pleased that we, Miranda and the team started taking this theme of what we do to a personal level, you know, recovery and those kinds of things. It isn't just the money in the business outages. It's a really a effect on a personal lives. And that resonates. I hear that a lot. Um, I asked our bigger customers and they've loved us for our support, how we take care of them. The, the intimacy of the partnership, you know, and I think they feel pleased that that's staying yet there's lot of modern Emity if that's a good word. I think fokai was what you, I think it's the blend of things and I think that really excites people. >>We've heard that a lot. You guys did a great job with having customers on stage and as a marketer who does customer marketing programs, I think there's nothing more validating than the voice of a customer. But suddenly today that I thought was a pivot on that convo, did well as Sonic healthcare was on main stage. And then he came onto the program and I really liked how he talked about some of the failures that they've been through. You know, we had the NASA talking yesterday, NASA, 60 years young, very infamous, probably for failure is not an option, but it is a very real possibility whether you're talking about space flight or you're talking about data protection and cyber attacks and the rise of that. And it was really, I'd say, refreshing to hear the voice of a customer say, these are the areas in which we failed. This is how come they've helped us recover and how much better and stronger are they? Not just as a company as Sonic healthcare, but even as an individual person responsible for that. That was a really great message that you guys were able to extend to the audience today and we wanted to get that out. >>I loved that as well. I think that was good. I have also back on driving innovation, I always felt one of my biggest jobs was to not punish people that failed. Yeah. I, you know, with the whole engineering team, the bright people in marketing, I, I would be very down on them if they didn't try, but I never wanted them to feel bad about trying and never punish them. >>And one of the things Matthew said on main stage, first of all, I love him. He's great. He's been a longtime CommonWell supporter. I love his sense of humor. He said, you know, combo came to me and said, can you identify, you know, your biggest disaster recovery moment? And he was like, no, because there's so many. Yes. Right? Like there's so many when you're responsible for this. It's just the unpredictability of it is crazy. And so he couldn't identify one, but he had a series of anecdotes that I think really helped the audience identify with and understand this is, these are big time challenges that we're up against today. And hearing his use case and how con ball is helping him solve his heart problems, I think was really cool. You're right. I loved that too. He said, I couldn't name one. There are so many. That's reality, right? As data proliferates, which every industry is experiencing, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. There's also great risk as technology advances for good. The bad actors also have access to that sort of technology. So his honesty, I thought was, was refreshing, but spot on. And what a great example for other customers to listen to the RA. To your point, I, if I punish people for failure, we're not going to learn from it. >>Yeah, you'll never move forward. >>Miranda. So much that we learn this week at the shows. Some, a lot of branding, a lot of customers, I know some people might be taking a couple of days off, but what should we expect to be seeing from con vault post go this year, >>continue to innovation. We're not letting our foot off the gas at all. Just continuing innovation as as as we integrate with Hedvig continued acceleration with metallic. I mean those guys are aggressive. They were built as a startup within an enterprise company built on Comvalt enterprise foundation. Those guys are often running, they are motivated, they're highly talented, highly skilled and they're going to market with a solution that is targeted at a specific market and those guys are really, really ready to go. So continued innovation with Hedvig integrate, sorry, integration with Hedvig with metallic. I think you're just going to be seeing a lot more from Combalt in the future on the heels of what we consider humbled, proud leadership with the Gartner magic quadrant. You know the one two punch with the Forrester wave. I think that you're just going to be seeing a lot more from Combalt and in terms of how we're really getting out there and aggressive. And that's not to mention Al, you know what we do with our core solutions. I mean today we just announced a bunch of enhancements to the core technology, which is, which is the bread and butter of, of what we do. So we're not letting the foot off the gas to be sure >>the team stay in really, really aggressive too. And the other thing I'd add as a major investor that I'm expecting is sales. Now I'd love to just your, your final thoughts that the culture of Convolt because while there's some acceleration and there's some change, I think some of the fundamentals stay the same. Yeah, it's, it's right to, and again, that's why I feel we're at a good point on this transition process. You alluded to it earlier, but I feel really good about the leadership that's in, they've treated me terrifically. I'm almost almost part of the team. I love that they're, they're trying to leverage off all the assets that were created in his company. Technology, obviously platform architecture, support base, our support capabilities. I, I told Sandy today I wish she really would have nailed the part about, and by the way, support and our capabilities with customers as a huge differentiator and it was part of our original, Stu knows he's heard me forever. Our original DNA, we wanted to focus on two things. Great technology, keep the great technology lead and customer support and satisfaction. So those elements, now you blend that stew with really terrific Salesforce. As Ricardo says, have you guys talk with Ricardo soon? But anyway, the head of sales is hiring great athletes, particularly for the enterprise space. Then you take it with a real terrific marketing organization that's focused, Oh, had modern techniques and analytics on all those things. You know, it's, it's in my opinion, as an investor especially, I'm expecting really good things >>bar's been set well. I can't think of a better way for Sue and me to our coverage owl veranda. Thank you. This has been fantastic. You've got to go. You get a lawn to mow, you've got a vacation to get onto and you need some wordsmithing would focus your rights. You have a flight ticket. They do five hours. Hi guys. Thank you. This has been awesome. Hashtag new comm vault for our guests and I, Lisa Martin, you've been watching the cubes coverage of Convault go and 19 we will see you next time.

>> Narrator: Live from Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Commvault Go 2019. Brought to you by Commvault. (upbeat electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are covering Commvault Go '19 from Colorado and Stu and I are pleased to welcome a couple of guys back to theCUBE. We've got David Wigglesworth, a VP, now VP of Global Sales and Emerging Technologies at Commvault for what, a couple weeks now David? >> About a month and five days. >> About a month, and look who's back, it's Don Foster, VP of Storage Solutions, >> Great to be back. from the Keynote stage, welcome back Don. >> Thank you very much. >> Don, and we appreciate you bringing your own personal makeup artist, Sanjay Merchandandi, >> Yeah. >> A man of many skills. >> Indeed. (laughing) >> He really is. So if this whole, like, CEO thing doesn't work, he's clearly got a career in, you know, touch-up makeup. >> In makeup. >> Yeah, all right, so Wigs we'll start with you, you've got a cool nickname, so I got to use it. You've been here for about a month or so. This is a new Commvault. We've heard a lot in the last two days. A lot of news, a lot of leadership changes, obviously, go-to-market changes, new partner offerings, lots of stuff. Tell us first, before we dig in, what attracted you to Commvault? >> That's a pretty easy question to answer, it's the leadership. So, obviously I'm very familiar with Commvault. I've competed with them in my past career. Always been a very formidable competitor. When you walked into an account in my previous life and they said they had Commvault, you usually kind-of wiped your brow, and thought 'Oh okay, I've got to find something else here to talk about' but in all seriousness, for me it was, you know, when I first noticed in the News that Sanjay had come onboard. That peaked my interest, because obviously I knew Sanjay in my previous life at EMC and at VMware. And then when I watched Ricardo join the company, I was like, okay, this is something I really need to dig into. And so when I had the opportunity to meet with them and understand the direction of where they want to take the company, which was also already just a phenomenal IT organization, just a pillar in the IT community, with what the founders were able to do in relatively short amount of time. I was really excited to be able to come over and be a part of it. >> Wigs, you've got a emerging tech under your purview, tell us a little bit about what that's going to mean in your role. >> Right now it means I'm head big, right? So, by now, everyone's heard of the acquisition that was made. That was the other thing also that really interested me, was that technology because I really think that's where the market is going and I just felt like it was a great addition to the Commvault family of products. But it's a different technology. It's calling on a different set of folks with inside of an account and it's primarily an enterprise play. It can be a go-down-market a little bit, and enterprise's is kind of where I spent the last several years of my career, the last 20 or so (laughs) and so what we've decided to do is, because it's so different, we've decided for the time being, that we were going to create a special aid organization globally to go sell that solution so that our existing core sellers can focus on our existing set of products, right? That we can be a specialist organization that can help them with their customers, selling all of the additional emerging tech, right? And so, here at the show, we've obviously spent time talking about Hedvig. Metallic is another new technology for us. Now Metallic is going to handled differently, but as we continue to grow our emerging technologies from the traditional core Commvault family of products, that's what I'm going to be focused on. So it'll begin with Hedvig. >> So for the role that you're in now, you said about a month or so, are you bringing in a brand-new sales overlay team? Are you guys hiring like crazy or are some of the Commvault OG sales-guys-or-girls shifting up, we'll say? >> For the most part, we're bringing in new talent. We're looking for people that have a broad spectrum of the experience, right. Obviously someone with strong storage background, but also people that know virtualization code, people that understand containers. Those skillsets are really important to us. And so we're busy building out both an America sales team and also building out a Nemea sales team. And then my partner, I call him my partner-in-crime, Ediz. Ediz is building out our SE organization for the same two theaters. We'll start in those two theaters and then once we get the product fully integrated, which is part of what this guy is doing, once we get the product fully integrated, then I think you'll see us start to move into some other theaters. But right now we're going to focus on those. So yes, we're hiring. Right now my LinkedIn says, "David Wigglesworth, we're hiring." >> I think I saw that actually (laughing). >> So Don, we got to dig into some of the technology with you and Avinash yesterday. >> Absolutely. >> So we're now getting most of the way through the conference, bring us inside some of the conversations you're having. I know it was one of the biggest question, we had coming in was: 'All right The Hedvig that we knew, what's going to change, how does that fit?' Blurring the lines between primary and secondary and all those discussions we had with Sanjay. So take us to how people, are they kind of getting it at this point? And we know it's a journey for the integration and where it will ultimately end. >> Here's the real interesting thing, is probably in the first, I don't know, maybe 24 hours of having conversations with people from partner exchange all the way through to basically day one of actual Commvault Go, I probably had about four, maybe five if you count one of the service providers from Customers' Partners, come up and say, "Okay look, we looked at this tech about 18, 12 months ago and it was top of our list for what we wanted to do for building out this initiative, but there was a little bit too much risk." Going okay, do we really want to invest that much on a company that is maybe not the largest, most, I wouldn't want to say, reputable, but substantial in the marketplace. Will they be there in the future? And they're like, "Now that we know you've legitimized that business "and you want to keep that technology going forward, "this is fantastic. "We totally want to go and take a re-look back at this "and see how we can apply "that back into our infrastructure." So that's a great feedback to hear, and only serves as validation that when we look at the tech and say "This is good stuff," that we know it's good stuff and then of course the next piece is always, "All right, so now when can I start using this for Commvault and?" >> Right. >> That's when we start getting into the conversations of all right, we've got some integration work to do, the partners are asking when they can start to get access to sell it and again, we've got some work to do just to industrialize what we're doing and make the experience similar and then we'll start to roll it out in a considered fashion. >> I'm curious about the education piece. One of the customers that was onstage this morning, Sonic Healthcare, one of the things he said, on main stage and when he stopped by theCUBE a couple of hours ago, was, he said: "I wouldn't be in my job," and he runs disaster recovery and business continuity for Sonic Healthcare, "I wouldn't be in my job without Commvault's support." And I really appreciated and respected how he talked about some of the failures that they had. I always think failure is a good F-word if you leverage it in that way, (agreement) failure can mean success, if you learn from it. But the support organization and the training he talked about have been instrumental. Talk to us, guys, about how you're going to be partnering together to not just enable the big partners for those large enterprise accounts but maybe even the new sales-guys-and-girls that are coming, David, to your team to help everybody really understand how best to delivery a really stellar customer experience with something as exciting now as Hedvig is. >> You want to start, since you've been working on the integration. >> Yes, absolutely. First and foremost, I've been working with Avinash and his brother, Srinivas, and a lot of their engineering team. You really start to lock in things that are repeatable and scalable in nature, right? So that if we are going to open this up to more people, we do need to have repeatable nature of the building blocks for different use cases. So there's some core work we're doing on outlining, positioning, criteria, success, what the outcome needs to be, how that ties back in to hardware. Making sure as well that we understand how the messaging really does resonate and make sure that we're following and being focused on what our core targets are. Because a solution like what Hedvig offers, you can quickly start talking about a lot of different things that could be all things to many people, and we know that that's probably the worst decision to make, because you go super wide and don't go very deep at all and you end up losing the value prop. So identifying what the real core use cases are, getting deep in how it works, one with what the structure of it looks like, making it repeatable, that's the first and foremost thing, I think, for how we can help both Ediz and Wigs' sales team, and on the support side, doing very similar things but also doing some of the programmatic work of the integration and the experience. I talk about experience, like the sending of logs, the things that Matthew Magby from Sonic Healthcare was talking about how we really helped him. We want that same level of experience tied into where the software storage platform works as well. So there's some work to be done there. But as we get it done, the enablement on the support side, as you know, we deal with storage everyday anyway, so it's not like it's a big leap, but we do have to bring them into the mix of how the actual technology works, where it breaks, why it breaks, and those are all the things that we're really focused on in the next 90 days. >> Yeah, I think the real key for me as we talk to customers and also employees is I want them all to have the same experience with the new Hedvig solution that they experience with Commvault, right? And that goes from training our employees, really getting our SEs up to speed, so they can have a meaningful conversation to be able to get a customer to say, "Yeah, I think I'd like to speak with the Special Aid team. "Please have them give me a call." And also on the enablement for the clients, and having the customer understand that you can dial to 1-800 number for support, you can talk to somebody that can lead you down a path and give you the same quality of support you've been used to whether you're calling about a Hedvig solution or whether you're calling about a Commvault solution. >> Yeah, we talked about it a little yesterday, but the scale of the offering is a little bit different. >> It is. >> And therefore, that has some challenges on the support. And something that I'm sure Commvault is going to work on making that, it's not identical for every customer but a little bit more repeatable to be able to scale out that offering. >> I would agree, I would agree. The hardest thing to do is when you have a product that has so much functionality as Hedvig is to not lose focus and try to talk way too broad. What you've really got to do is, you've got to drill down with the client try to understand where their pinpoints are and because, quite frankly, the Hedvig product can do a lot of things. >> Don: Yeah, it can. >> Who's the ideal target customers, we talked about the theaters in which you're going to be launching first. Enterprise, we talked about that. Commvault has a significant presence in the Fortune 500, I think I read about three quarters of Commvault's revenue today comes from the Fortune 500, and Stu was saying yesterday about 80% of the revenue comes from the channel. So we look at Hedvig and the enterprise for a second, customers that are new to Commvault, those existing enterprise customers, GTM both? >> Yeah, I would say, the primary focus is going to be calling on the existent customer set. It's much easier to have a conversation with someone who knows who you are, even though you may be selling a new solution, at least they know who you are and they have a positive experience with us. So that, number one, we're going to focus on our probably our top 300 global accounts to start, as well as our top enterprise accounts. So there's probably, I would say, in the two theaters I mentioned earlier, there's probably about 35 hundred accounts that we're really going to focus on, and really try to make sure that we get in front of as many as we can and tell the story. I think that's where we have to start. Now, will there be greenfield opportunities? Yeah, I think quite frankly, that the Hedvig offering is different enough that it will enable us to go call on some of accounts that aren't doing business with Commvault today, maybe doing business with some of our competitors. So hopefully we can use that to actually win more traditional Commvault business. That's the plan. >> And the reason the enterprise really makes sense, the global accounts, is most larger companies have figured out how try solve the CapEx problem, right? >> David: Yeah. >> They've figured out just the economies of scale and how they grow and move, they can kind of handle that. What really still becomes a challenging piece is the operational efficiency. So, can I get the right solution at the right cost, but do it in a way that I'm actually making things more simplified? I'm not actually exploding more complexity into my environment. That's really where the Commvault data management platform and the Hedvig solution together really make a really solid story. >> All right, so Wigs, Don's team's really got their work cut out for them with all the integration work and know they've got a cadence and a roadmap. For you, obviously, new logos, there's got to be revenue goals. What are some of the key KPIs to measure how this becomes a successful acquisition? >> Well if my CEO is standing close by, he may be in earshot of this, right now it's trying to drive as much revenue as we can. But we also have to realize that we also have to build a pipeline, right? So right now my main focus here is I got to get a team in place that can go articulate the value of this solution to a client, right, number one, both technically and then working with Ediz to get the SE team in place, so that's number one. Number two, while we're doing that, we need to build a pipeline, right? When you make an investment, as you guys know, you're expected to start getting a return on that pretty quickly. And, it's nice, we inherited some nice pipeline with the acquisition. But with opportunity comes responsibility and so we've got to build that pipeline up and really get out in front of customers and find some opportunities that we can not only try to finish for this second half so we can hit all of our financial metrics, but really build pipeline for FY21, for us which starts in April. >> So the voice of the customer is, really can be really powerful. We've heard from a number of Commvault customers on our program yesterday, today on main stage. Is there a plan, Wigs, from your perspective, to get customers into some sort of data so that you have proof in the pudding to show those large enterprises and those theaters to help build that pipeline. Look at someone who's been an existing Commvault customer for five, 10 years or so, here's the, I don't want to say migration path, but maybe upgrade path to expand footprint in there. Here's how we did it, here's why this was ideal for this customer. Plans to get those early adopters to help you dial up the pipeline? >> So have you been reading my 'Go to market strategy' (laughing) 'cause you kind of you basically just read it. So yes, listen we are inheriting some nice accounts with Hedvig. They have some nice logos out there which is really good. And it's a good foundation for us to build upon. But we're very fortunate in that our core sellers have some really good relationships with some pretty large customers really in all different industries. And so, what we're doing right now is we're trying to identify probably about 10 accounts that make sense. That are really strong partners. They don't have to necessarily be really big customers, but just really strong partners that want to work together with us. And exactly what you just said, let's get in front of them, let's give them an opportunity to play with the technology and have them help us figure out, we think we have a pretty good idea what the go-to-marketing messaging should be for our existing customer base but certainly don't assume that we know everything. So have them help us build that strategy. So that is absolutely the plan. >> We've been hearing a lot about the last couple of days, of just, the openness of Commvault. Whether it's, I really thought it was cool with Metallic that the telemetry that partners can get to help customers, maybe even before a customer knows of an issue or an opportunity, but this telemetry, this 'let's learn from our customers,' couldn't agree as a marketer with you more about, we might think we have a great tagline, great messaging, but it's the users who need to validate that. What I'm hearing a lot over the last day and a half is how receptive Commvault is. We're listening to our customers, whether it's existing and comeback customers that Sanjay's team are dealing with, or even through partners. That message is loud and clear, and that's pretty important. >> Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I'll be honest with you, what's it's also been able to give us an opportunity to do is where we've had some relationships, quite frankly, that maybe we need to work a little harder on. Hedvig has given us that opportunity to kind of start those conversations as well. I think there's a lot of value, both on the existing opportunities as well as growing the business overall. >> Guys, nothing short of a lot of work ahead. But, pretty exciting stuff. We thank you both. Wigs, welcome again to Commvault. >> Thank you. >> Can't wait for next year. Going to bring some cool customers on the program. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Looking forward. The buzz is so amazing this year. So many customers have said, "I know you weren't here last year, but wow," and that's what they've said. I can't wait to see what this is going to be like next year. Thank you for having us on here. >> You've got to come back. >> Absolutely we will. >> Yeah? >> Yeah. >> All right, guys, thank you for joining Stu and I. >> Thank you both very much. >> Thank you. >> For Stu Miniman, I am Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE from Commvault Go '19. (upbeat electronic music)

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, good morning. Welcome to the cubes coverage of combo go 19 I'm Lisa Martin and it was stupid man. Hey Sue. Hey Lisa. Are you ready? I was going to ask you. Yes. Are you ready? >>I believe the statement this morning was, we're born ready. >>We are born ready? Yes. That was a big theme this morning. It's the theme of the event here at con Volvo 19 in Colorado and great parody this morning of all these old video clips of all these actors including the Lego movie stars from saying I'm ready. Even SpongeBob. That one got me, so we had a great day. Yesterday's to love some news came out Monday and Tuesdays a lots of great stuff to talk about. We had there a lot of their C level execs and let a new changes a call yesterday. Really got the vibe of, Hey, this is a new Combalt. >>It's interesting Lisa, because one of the things we've been talking about is the 20 years of pedigree that the company has. This Andre Mirchandani said yet they're doing some new items. I was talking to some of the partners in there like how come metallics like a separate brand, don't you worry about brand spread? We knew a thing about having too many brands on the program so it is the history, the experience, the lessons learned, the war chest as they said of all of the things that have gone wrong over the years and I sure know that from my time living on the vendor side is there's no compression algorithm for all the experience you've had and like, Oh we fixed something in that stays in the code as opposed to there's something brand new might need to work through things over time but metallic a separate brand but leveraging the partnerships and the go to market and the experience of Convolt overall. >>So if you want, my quick take is, you know metallic. I definitely, I think coming out of here is the thing we will be talking the most about their SAS plus model. I want to see how that plays in the marketplace. As I probed Rob, when we interviewed him, customers, when you think about SAS, it should just be, I worry about my data and I get up and running and they said they have a very fast up and running less than 15 minutes. That's great. But some of that optionality that they built in, Oh well I can bring this along or I can add this and do this. It's always worried that a wait, do I have to remember my thing? And as it changes down the road, do I have everything set up right? Those are things that we're trying to get away from when we go to a SAS or cloud model. >>And to your point, another theme of the show has been about operational simplification, not just what Combolt is doing internally to simplify their operations, but what they need to deliver to customers. Customers want simplicity rates. Do we, we talk about that at every show regardless of industry, but there is this, this line, and maybe it's blurring, >>like we talked a lot about blurred lines yesterday of too much choice versus simplification. Where's the line there? >> Yeah and a great point Lisa, so one of the items Sandra Mirchandani said yesterday in his keynote was that blurring the line between primary and secondary storage and I probed him on our interview is Convolt going into the primary storage market with Hedvig. Hedvig has got a, you know, a nice offering, strong IP, good engineering team. I think they want to make sure that customers that have bought head vigor want to keep buying Hedvig we'll do it, but it really, I think two years from now when you look back at is that core IP, how does that get baked into the solution? That's why they bought it. That's where it's going to be there. I don't think we're going to be looking two years from now and saying, Oh wow know Convolt they're going up against all the storage star Walton competing a bit gets HCI and everything. >>They have a strong partnership, so I think I got clarity on that for the most part, even though the messaging will will move over time on that, it will move over time on that. >> That's a good point that the song blurred lines kept popping into my head yesterday as we were talking about that. But one of the things that was clear was when we spoke with Rob Kalusi and about metallic, we spoke with Avinash Lakshman about Hedvig Sanjay as well as Don foster. They're already working on the technical integration of of this solutions and we even spoke with their VP of pricing. So from a customer, from a current Hedvig customer perspective, there is focus on that from Combolt's perspective. It's not just about integrating the technologies and obviously that has to be done really well, but it's also about giving customers that consistency and really for combo kind of a new era of transparency with respect to pricing. >>And another thing we talked about some of that transformation of the channel and Mercer row came on board only a couple of days officially on the job. He's helped a number of companies get ready for multicloud and absolutely we've seen that change in the channel over the last five to 10 years. Know back in his days when he was at VM world at VMware there the channel was, Oh my gosh, you know, when Amazon wins we all lose and today we understand it as much more nuance there. The channel that is successful partners with the hyperscale cloud environments, they have practices built around it. The office three 65 and Microsoft practices are an area that Convolt in their partners should be able to do well with and the metallic will tie into as well as of course AWS. The 800 pound gorilla in this space will be there. Combolt plays into that and you know, setting the channel up for that next generation with the SAS, with the software and living in a broader multicloud environment is definitely something to watch you a lot of news about the channel, not just from a leadership standpoint but also so metallic for the mid market >>really delivered exclusively through the channel but also the new initiative that they have. And we talked a little bit about this yesterday about going after and really a big focus with global systems integrators on the largest global enterprises. And when we spoke with their GTM chief of staff yesterday along with Mercer with Carmen, what they're doing, cause I said, you know, channel partners, all the channel partners that they work with work with their competitors. So you have to really deliver differentiation and it can't just be about pricing or marketing messaging goes all the way into getting those feet on the street. And that's another area in which we heard yesterday Combolt making strategic improvements on more feet on the street co-selling with partners, really pulling them deeper into enablement and trainings and to them that's one of the key differentiators that they are delivering to their partners. Yeah >>and Lisa, he, we got to speak to a number, a couple of customers we have more coming on today. It's a little bit telling that you know the average customer you talk to, they have five 10 years of experience there. They are excited about some of the new offerings, but as we've said many times metallic, the new Hedvig we want to talk to the new logos that they're going to get on board. That is something that for the partners has been an incentive. There were new incentives put in place to help capture those new logos because as we know, revenue was actually down in the last fiscal year a bit and Convolt feels that they have turned the corner, they're all ready to go. And one other note I'd like to make, the analogy I used last year is we knew a CEO was canoe CEO search was happening, a lot of things were in motion and it's almost as if you were getting the body ready for an organ transplant and you make sure that the antibodies aren't going to reject it. And in conversation with Sanjay, he was very cognizant of that. His background is dev offs and he was a CIO. We went for it, he was the CEO of puppet. So he's going to make things move even faster. And the pace of change of the last nine months is just the beginning of the change. And for the most part I'm not hearing grumbling underneath the customer seem fully on board. The employees are energized and definitely there was good energy last year, but a raise of the enthusiasm this year. >>Well Stu, first of all, you have just been on fire the last two days comparing their CEO transition to getting a body ready for a transplant. It's probably one of the best things I've heard in a long time. That was awesome. But you're right, we've heard a lot of positivity. Cultural change is incredibly difficult. You talked a minute ago about this as a 20 year old company and as we all have all experience and the industries in which we're in, you know, one of the things that's important is, is messaging that experience and talking about the things that that worked well, but also the things that didn't work well, that they've learned from that message was carried through the keynote this morning. That three customers on stage that we saw before we had to come to the side. And I, I had, my favorite was from Sonic healthcare. Matthew McCabe's coming on in shortly with us and I always appreciate, you know, I think the voice of the customer is the best brand validation that you can get. However, what's even better is a customer talking about when the technologies that they're using fail because it does happen. How are they positioned with the support and the training and the education that is giving them to make those repairs quickly to ensure business continuity and ensure disaster recovery. I think that to me that speaks volumes about the legacy, the 20 years of experience that combo has. >>Yeah, no, Lisa, you're absolutely right. There's certain products out there that we talk about uptime in 100% in this space. You, I believe the stat was about 94% success rate and we had NASA in the keynote yesterday talking about success versus partial success versus failures and Convolt really embraces that and has customers that we'll talk about that because there are times that things will happen and there are things that you need to be able to recover from ransomware. Often it is not a question of if, when it is going to be happened, at least. The other thing I want to get your comment on Jimmy chin who is the director and one of the, the cameraman of the free solo Oscar-winning free solo documentary definitely gave me a little bit of, Oh my gosh, look at some of the Heights and I was nervous just looking at some of this stuff they're doing. I like a little bit of lightweight hiking. I'm not a mountain climber, nothing like that. But he talked about when the camera goes on, there's that added pressure that goes on and it's sitting there. It's like, yeah, you know, we sit here live all day doing that. There's that, that energy to perform. But you know, we all appreciate the everybody watching and understanding that we're all human here and every time, every once in awhile a word or a mistake gets in there, but we keep going summit. Yeah, >>that's life. But also Jimmy chin, phenomenal. I think at 2018 they just won the Oscar just earlier this year for free. Solo. I have to watch that this weekend. But a couple of things that he talked about is that failure is a huge part of preparation. Couldn't agree more. What a simplified statement for somebody that not only has has skied Everest, the climbed Meru, I think they call it the shark fin of India, but what you talked about with what he documented with free solo and all of the thousands of sequences and he talked about that, Alex, I'm forgetting his last name, the guy who closed, who free soloed, El Capitan, all of these different failure scenarios that he rehearsed over and over again in case he encountered any of them, he would immediately be to remedy that situation and get himself back on track. I thought that message to me, failure is a good F-word if you use it properly. You know NASA, you mentioned yesterday and NASA was famous for coining in the 60s failure is not an option and I always say onto that cause I used to work for NASA, but it's a distinct possibility. And so what Jimmy chin shared this morning was electrified, but it also was a great understatement of what Combolt is helping their customers. We have to help you prepare for this. We can't help you prepare for all of it. As you mentioned, ransomware, it's not if but when. >>Well, right and both NASA and when the climbing is understanding where something could go wrong and therefore what the failures scenarios are. So you know rockets today you can't have a failure and by failure they mean look, if the rocket isn't going to work or something goes wrong, we need to make sure we don't have loss of life. That is something that if you look at blue origin and SpaceX that is pre eminent in there is we can't have another challenger disaster. We can't have some of these environments where we have the loss of human life. So that is number one. Some of the other ones, sometimes we know that the unknown happens or things don't go quite right. So being prepared to understand if something goes wrong, how do we recover from that? And that brings us back to the whole data protection and recovery of the environment because the best laid architecture, eventually something will happen and therefore we need to make sure that that data, the lifeblood of the company is able to be recovered and used and that the business can go forward even if some piece of infrastructure or some attack got through. >>There are, and there's inherent risk in every industry, whether you're talking about healthcare data, we talked with AstraZeneca yesterday, you know, genetics, clinical data, or you're talking about a retailer, doesn't matter. There's an inherent risks with every business and one of the most important things that I got out of the NASA talk yesterday, Jimmy Chin's talked today, some of the customers, is that preparation is key. You can't be over prepared. You really can't act fact. He said that you can't be overprepared in his line of work, but I think it applies to the inherent risks that any business has. Managing data. As we talk about Sue all the time, it's the lifeblood. It's the new oil. It is. It has to be available, accessible 24 by seven if it isn't and can't be. Businesses are massive risk in this day and age. Competitive competitors who have maybe better risk fault tolerance scenario in play. >>So that risk that they have to mitigate comes a preparation. We're going to be talking with Sandra Hamilton in just a few minutes about who leads customer success for combo. Really want to dig into the training, the support. We've heard that articulated from customers on stage that I don't wake up in the middle of the night anymore because I have this support from my trusted vendor combo and that is critical to any business staying up. Absolutely. We're going to hear from number of customers. I'm sure they're ready and we are ready for day two. We are ready. See, let's have a great day. Yeah, thanks. All right, so Sue and I will be right back with our first guest on day two of our coverage of comm Volkow for Stu. I'm Lisa Martin. We'll be right back.