>>Hello, welcome to the special cube conversation. I'm John for your host of the queue here in Palo Alto, California. We're still remoting in getting great guests in events are coming back. Next few weeks, we'll be at a bunch of different events and you'll see the cube everywhere, but this conversation's about network challenges in a distributed hybrid workforce era. We've got a team say he principal, product manager, edge networking solutions, a Dell technologies and Rob McBride channel and partner sales engineer at versa networks. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on this cube conversation, >>John. Thank you, John. >>So first of all, obviously with the pandemic and now we're moving out of the pandemic, even with Omnichron out there, we still see visibility into kind of back to work and events and it's, but it's clearly hybrid environment cloud hybrid work. This has been a huge opening of everyone's eyes around network security provisioning, you know, unexpected disruptions around everyone being worked at home. Nobody really forecasted that. The fact that the whole workforce would be remote coming in. So again, put a lot of pressure on the network challenges over over the past two years. How is it coming out of this different what's your guys' take on this. >>Yeah, to then when we start looking at it, let's kind of focus a little bit on challenges, you know, you know, when this all kind of started off, obviously, as you stated, right, everyone was kind of taken by surprise in a way, right? What do we do? We don't know what to do at this moment. And you know, I go back and I remember a customer giving me a call, you know, when they were at first looking at, you know, your traditional land transformation and one of the changed their branches to do something from an SD perspective. And then the pandemic hit. And their question to me was Rob, what do I do? Or what do I need to start thinking about now, all of a sudden to your point, right? Everyone now is no longer in the office and how do I get them to connect. >>And more importantly, now that I can maybe figure out a way to connect them, how do I actually see what they're doing and be able to control what they're actually now accessing? Because I no longer have that level of control as of them coming into the office. And so a lot of customers, you know, we're, we're beginning to develop kind of homegrown solutions, look at various different things to kind of quick hot patches, if you will, to address the remote workers coming in and things of that nature. And we'll be seeing kind of progression through all this as a, as, as opposed to just solving, getting a user, to connect into the, into an environment that it can provide, you know, continuity for. They started coming up with other challenges to the point of security. They started, you know, I have other customers calling me up and saying, you know, I I've now got a ransomware problem, right? >>So, you know, what do I do about that? And what are the things I need to kind of consider with respect to now I'm much more vulnerable because my, my, my branch has state has basically become much more diversified and solutions and things that they're looking for, regardless, obviously around security connectivity, there they've been challenged with addressing how do they unify their levels of visibility without over encumbering themselves and how they actually manage now this kind of much more kind of distributed kind of network if you will. Right? So things around, you know, looking at, you know, acronyms around from like a Z TNA or, you know, cloud security and all this fun stuff starts coming into play. But what it, what it points to is that the biggest challenge ideas, how does, how do they converge networking and security together and provide equitable and uniform policy architecture to identify their users, to connect and access the applications that are relevant to the business and be able to have that uniformity between whether it's the branch for them being remote. And that's part of what we've kind of seen as this progression to the last two years and kind of solutions that they're looking for to kind of help them address that. It's almost like >>It's a good thing in a way. It actually opens up the kimono and say, Hey, this is the real world we've got to prepare for this next generation a TIF. I want to get your take because, you know, remember the old days we were like, oh yeah, we've got to prepare for these scenarios where maybe 30% will be dialing on the V land or remotely, you know, it's not 30%. It was like 100%. So budgets aren't out of whack and yet they want more resiliency at the edge. Right. So, so one, I didn't budget for it. They didn't predict it and it's gotta be better, faster, cheaper, more skier. >>Yeah. Yeah. So, so, so John, the difference is, is that, you know, Dell, for instance, as already was already working towards this distributed model, right? The pandemic just accelerated that transformation. So, so when customers came to us and said, oh, we've got a problem with our workforce and our users being so geographically suddenly dispersed, you know, we had some insight that we could immediately lean on. We had already started working on solutions and building those platforms that can help them address those, those problems. Right. Because we'd already done studies before this, right. We had done studies and we'd come back on this whole work from home or remote office scenario. And, and the results were pretty unanimous in that customers were, all users were always complaining about, you know, application performance issues and, and, you know, connectivity issues and, and things like that. So we, we, we kinda knew about this. And so we were able to proactively start building solutions. And so, you know, so when a customer comes, there's like Rob was talking about, you know, their infrastructure, wasn't set up for everybody to suddenly move on day one and start accessing all the corporate resources where the majority of the organization is accessing corporate resources from away from campus. Right? So we, we, we have solutions, we've been building solutions and we have guidance to offer these customers as they try to modernize that network and address these problems. >>Well, that's a great segue to the next topic. Talk track is, you know, what is a network? What is network monetization? Right. So let's, let's define that if you don't mind, well, I got you guys here. You're both pros get that sound bite, but then let's get into the benefits of the outcomes from what that enables. So if you guys want to take a stab at defining what is network modernization mean? >>I think there's a lot of definitions, or it kind of depends on your point, your point of view of where you're, where you're responsible for, from a network or within the stack, you know, are from a take obviously is, you know, working, working from a vendor. And with solutions that we provide modernization is really around solutions that begin to look at more software defined architectures and definitions to begin a level of decoupling between, you know, points of control, hardware and software, and other kinds of points of visibility and automation to the point where, where things are let's, let's kind of put an air quotes in a sense of being more digitized. And in the sense, like even how we're looking at things from a consumerization perspective, but looking at things a much more, more cloud aware cloud specific cloud native in built automation, as well as inbuilt kind of analytics where things are much more in a, in a broader SDN, kind of a construct would be a form of a definition from a, from a, from a, from a monetization perspective. >>Now, do the other element of your, kind of a question in regards to, it's kind of the benefits that come as a result of this. So as customers have been in the last 24 months, looking at different solutions to address part of what we've been talking about, part of it is you want, when you're looking at, whether it's like you're using a word like sassy to kind of define, you know, how are enterprises looking for ZTE and they based solutions or cloud security to augment their, their overall needs. The benefits that they're finding are simplicity of management, because they're now looking for more uniform solutions that can address secure access for remote workers, in addition to their own kind of traditional access, as it relates to their offices to better visibility. Because as this uniformity of this kind of architecture, the now able to actually really see the level of context, right? >>I can see you, John, as far as where you're coming in and access and what applications on what devices. And now I have a means to actually apply a policy to that matters to me as the business, from an IP perspective, to protect me as the business, but also to ensure that you're actually authorized and accessing things that I have from an it regular reg regulations perspective. So benefits and the summary are kind of like Mo in bill automation, better, you know, things get done faster, things repair on their own in a different way, as a result of automation, greater visibility. Now they have much more greater insights into what we are doing as users of the overall it infrastructure and better overall control. That's been ultimately simplified as result of consolidation and unification. >>That's awesome. Insight. I T what's your take on the benefits of ma network modernization? >>So I'd like to sort of double down on, on, you know, something Rob said, right? So the visibility, right? So enhanced visibility in layman's terms, that just means more insight, more insight means the ability to implement best practices around application usage, application performance, more insights means control that it departments are, are meeting. They need that to manage and address security threats, right? To be able to identify an abnormal traffic pattern or unauthorized data movement, to be able to push updates and, and patches quickly. So, so it's really about, you know, that, that manageability, that that level of control gives them the ability to offer a resilient and secure underlying networking infrastructure. And then, you know, finally one of the key benefits is cost savings of, you know, everybody is trying to be more efficient. And so from, from our perspective, it's, it's really about building an open platform. >>You know, we've built a platform or an x86 based platform. We've we chose that because we wanted to tap into a mature ecosystem that, you know, customers can leverage as they, as they build their build towards their modernizing modernization goals. And so we're like tech leveraging technologies, like UCPs so universal customer premise equipments. And so that's really just an open hardware platform, but what you get by consolidating your network functions like routing and firewall, and when optimization you, and when you consolidate it all onto a single device, you get hardware savings, cost savings. You, you get operational savings as well, right? So you've it, common hardware infrastructure means a common deployment model means a streamlined operations means fewer truck rolls, right? So, so there's a tremendous amount of, of, of benefit from the cost standpoint as well, because from our perspective, it's really that what customers are looking for, they need enterprise grade solutions that can scale in a cost-effective manner. >>That's awesome. You guys mentioned sassy earlier. I'm like, first of all, software as a service is very sassy, big modern application movements. Always get my hair sassy. I think, you know, a kind of a term around SAS software as a service, but for you guys, it's talking about secure access service edge, which is a huge category growth right now where, you know, per security and networking, it's a huge discussion SD win fits into that somehow, because it used to be campus networking before now. It's everyone's world is the same. Now it's connected. So sassy is huge. How does that fit into SD when it's in the trend of the SAS at the same? What's the difference? Cause wan has been booming for the past decade as well in terms of trends. How are you guys seeing those converging in what's the difference? >>You know, I like to also agree with you, this thing has been booming the last couple of years, right. You know, kind of, kind of bread and butter part of what we've been doing, but, you know, to your question in regards to kind of its linkage relative to sassy, right. You know, as you articulated, right. It's the sassy secure access service edge from a definition of the acronym. So it's authority is first kind of good to kind of define a little bit, maybe for some of those that may not be overly familiar with it. And I like to kind of dumb it down a little bit into the point of sassy is really an architecture that is around, you know, the convergence of networking and security being put together in a uniform platform or service that is delivered from both the cloud, as well as addressing, you know, their, their kind of traditional land requirements. >>Now digging in sassy is broken to two little buckets, right? It's broken into a network layer and the six security layer and by its definition, right, by, by a particular analyst, the network component, a big portion of that is SD wan. And so SD wan providing that value associated to what does, you know, dynamic lanes, steering automation, application attachments, so on and so forth is a core element of the foundation of the network layer associates, associate sassy. And then the other element of zesty is around the security bit. And so they're very much intrinsically linked, whether, you know, for example, like versus just the kind of mentioned this here, the, the, the sassy cloud that we built for our customers to leverage for private access, public access, you know, secure internet CASBY, DLP type of services is built upon SQM. In addition to our customers that are using Guesty Lampard or traditional land are using SD wan to connect to that cloud. >>So it's very, very much linked and they kind of go hand in hand, depending on your approach to the broader architecture. And, you know, another point I'll bring into that. What, what it also highlights is that whether it's around sassy or not, when we, when in pertinent to everything we'd been other kind of been talking about, the other thing that's coming with sun intrinsically and natively is really the concept of security it's around, whether it's security at the branch, or whether it's around some form of, you know, identity management or a point of improving posture for the, for the enterprise to, you know, obviously the spec traffic at the branch where remotely, but what we're seeing at a trend wise, which, you know, part by customer adoption from our own platform, if you will, is basically security and SD Wang coming together, whether for your traditional land transformation, or as a result of sassy services for a hybrid needs of connectivity, right? Remote workers, hybrid workforce, going into the cloud for, for their connectivity needs and optimizations. In addition to obviously the, the enterprises branch transformations, >>I like that native aspect of it. We used to joke and call SD way in St. Cloud because it's, we're all using cloud technologies. Talk about the security impact real quick. If you don't mind, I want to just double click them what you mentioned there, because I think the cloud effication plus the security piece seems to be a key part of this dynamic. Is that true? Or did they get that right? What's what's this all mean with cloud vacation? Yeah, >>And I, I would, I, I, I agree with, I guess kind of where you're leading into that is, you know, review all of us you're right now. Exactly. In talking with you right now, right. John is, as you stated at the beginning, we're all remote. And so from a business perspective, right, we are accessing, or from an engagement we're accessing a cloud service. Now what's critical for us, as you know, obviously enterprise employees is that our means of accessing this cloud service needs to have some level of hardening. We need to protect, right. Not only our own asset that we're using, right. Our laptops or other machinery that you use to connect to the network, but in addition to protect our company, right? So our company also needs to protect them. So how can we do that? Right? How can we do that in a very fast and distributed way? >>Sure. We can put security endpoints at every location with every user and every home. And that's one means of, of a particular solution. So your point about cloud is now take all of that and bring it to the cloud where you'd have a much more distributed means, right? And much more dynamically, scalable approach to actually doing that level of inspection, posture and, and enforcement. And so that's kind of where the rubber meets the road, right, is for us to access those cloud applications. The cloud that we're using as a conduit for security, as well as network also is now even connected and optimized paths to applications like what we're using right now, right. To, to, to do this conversation. So that's kind of where it meets together. And the security element is because we're so diverse, we just need, we, we, we need to ensure, right. We're all much, we're much more vulnerable. Right? My home network is, you know, maybe arguably maybe not as secure as when I go into an office. Right? >>So most people, because you have worked for virtual networks, >>I can make that argument. Yes. Right. But you know, the average, most of us, remote workers, you know, our homes aren't as hard. And so we point a point of risk, right? And so, as we, as we go to cloud apps, we're more connected to the internet. Right. You know, the, the, the point of being able to do this enforcement from a sassy concept helps provide that improved posture for enterprises to secure their traffic and get visibility into that. >>All my network engineer, friends are secure, as you read about. And I always joked to the malware, you missed, missed the wrong network engineer. If I go after them, their house, spear fishing. And you're trying to get into your network. I'd say, if I want to bring this back, because what we're bringing up here is cloud is actually enabling more on premises because you're working at home. That's a premise, right? So you're also edge is a premise edge and cloud. And a cloud kind of eliminates all this notion of what is cloud and edge, but at the end of the day is where you are. Right. So having the performance and the security and the partnership that same with Dell, I know you guys have been on this for a while because I've been covering it, but the notion of edge completely changes now, because what does that even mean? Home's edge is the camp of data centers and edge the, the cars and edge, the telco monopoles and edge. This is a big deal. This is the unit about the unification. This is all about making it all work. What's your, what's your take on this from the Dell perspective. >>Yeah. And I think, I mean, it that's, I mean, you, you kind of summarize it, right. I mean, what does edge mean to you? Right. It's and then, so every time I have a conversation with, with somebody, I always start with, let's define what your edge is. And so, you know, from, from our perspective, from the Dell perspective is, you know, we believe that we want to provide enterprise grade infrastructure. We want to give our customers the right tools. And we're seeing that with this trend of a hybrid workforce, a geographically dispersed user base, we're seeing a tremendous need for, you know, from it departments for tools, for solutions that can give them the control that they can sort of push out into their networks to ensure a safe and secure external access to corporate resources. Right. And so that's what we're committed to is making sure that, that, that management layer by either developing the solutions, in-house bringing the right partners to the table and just ensuring that our customers have the right tools because this sort of trend, or this, this, this new normal is not going away. And so we have to adapt. >>So thanks for coming on, Rob, we'll give you the final word. What's changed the most, in your opinion, with customers, environments, around how they're handling their networks as we come out of the pandemic, which has proven kind of which projects are working, which ones aren't where to double down on what was screwed up. I mean, come on. This is, we're kind of seeing it all play out. What's your, what's your take on as we come through the pandemic and people come out of this, what's the big learning. Okay. >>Well that you need partners. Right. Okay. So it's not even from a vendor perspective. What I mean by partners is what we're finding and what I think a lot of other customers I've engaged with and others is this ain't easy for even as much as we can within the technology vendor market, right. It's to make things easier to do. There's a lot of technology and the enterprise, it is recognized. They need a lot of these building blocks, right. To, to accomplish a lot of different things, whether it's around automation, to, in other tools as, as auto was leading into. And so we're finding that, you know, a lot of our, our base or our interactions are really trying to identify an appropriate partner that can help not only talk to the technology, but help them actually understand all the various different, you know, multi-colored legal blocks, they've got to put together, but also help help them actually put that into a realization. >>Right. And, you know, and then be able to then give the keys to them so they can eventually drive the car. Right. And so the learning that we're seeing here is this is a lot of tech, there's a lot of new tech, new approaches to existing technology of things that they've actually done. And they're, they're, they're looking for help. Right. And so they're looking for kind of, let's call it like trusted advisor kind of status of people that can help explain the technology to them and then help them understand how do they put it together. So they can then ultimately accomplish our overall kind of, you know, other kinds of objectives from an it perspective. And the other learning that I'll just say, and then I'll, then I'll stop. Here is SD wan isn't dead, right? Yes. The man is actually still driving. And it's actually an impetus for a lot of other things that enterprise is actually doing, whether it's around, you know, sassy, oriented services, remote access, private access, and other things of that nature. >>I totally agree. I think the networking, stuff's still going to be so much innovation going on with the edge exploding as well. That the really great, amazing stuff happening. Thanks for coming on this cube conversation, great conversation, taking it to the edge network challenges in the distributed hybrid workforce era is about moving things around the internet, making them secure. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: Live from San Diego, California, it's The Cube! Covering Cisco Live U.S. 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and it's eco system partners. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of Cisco Live, Day 3 from buzzy, sunny San Diego. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host is Stu Miniman and Stu and I are pleased to welcome to the Cube Stephanie Wible, Senior Product Manager, hybrid networking and SD-WAN, from CenturyLink. Stephanie, welcome to the Cube! >> Thank you, I'm glad to be here. >> Yeah, so welcome to the buzzy dev nut zone. This place has been buzzing for three days now. >> It is definitely an active session over here today. >> It is, so let's talk about SD-WAN. We've heard a lot the last few days about the massive transformations to the network. Changing customer demands, changing customer needs, talk to us about the SD-WAN marketplace, overall. >> So we don't have a conversation with any of our customers these days that don't include some kind of a conversation about SD-WAN. Everybody is looking to transform their networks and their looking for the next best thing. They're also trying future-proof their networks. Some of the customer drivers that we see are folks looking to augment existing MPLS networks with lower cost access, making the best use of their assets, both from an equipment perspective as well as a network perspective. And then having that sort of centralized command and control capability that SD-WAN provides them. >> Alright, so Stephanie the SD-WAN space, while most customers are familiar with it, it's not a monolithic space. It's not like there's five products on the market and there all very similar. There's a few different areas and even Cisco has two primary products that your offering. Can you give us a little bit about the lay of the land as to what use cases there are for the various pieces? How do you decide which there are? Or I know I've talked to customers that have had multiple SD-WAN solutions. >> That's a good point. So, when we initially started looking at SD-WAN, we kind of did a RFI on about 15 or so different vendors. The market has compressed a little bit since then through acquisitions and mergers but we at CenturyLink, in particular, recognized that one size does not fit all for all customers. So we wanted to offer a choice of services for our customers and most of the vendors have very similar kind of capability but some have other features that some don't. For example, the Meraki one, we typically have our branch customers, our customers that have many homogenous kind of like sites that they want something simple and something easy and not something that has a lot of bells and whistles. That's a perfect fit for them. It's very easy to install and get it up and running. Where something like Viptela that has a lot more capability and a lot more customization available would be perfect for some of our larger customers. The Telepher, for example, is we have a large install base of customers already using Cisco gear, the ASR and the ISR, where that's very attractive to those folks where they can just lay the software on top of their existing assets without having to do a full network swap out. And then our other option is our Versa which was our initial launch which was in 2016. Again, that's a full-featured SD-WAN capability. So it kind of depends and we try to bring the customers and have that conversation. Understand what theirs drivers are so that we can help tailor them and select and help them select one of the options that we have. >> Yeah I have to imagine that most of the time you're really helping the customer down there. It's not, "Okay there's a catalog, choose which one." That's some of the reason we would go to a CenturyLink is so that you listen to them, understand that, and you've helped filter a lot of that for them and maybe get them down to some of the just what size they're buying. >> Yep, and its not just the vendors. The pure play vendors talk about we call it the tip of the iceberg. So they talk about the SD-WAN capability. Where CenturyLink can add a lot of value to that is we also provide hybrid WAN solution and PLS, we also do. That's the public, the private section. And we recently, with the introduction of our SD-WAN services, started offering public connectivity in broadband and WIFI. So we can offer the mix of access along with the overlay service. We can be the single button to push for that but we also have had extensive history in managed services. So we have done managed routers and managed iads for our voice or data. And then the other big portion of that is we are a global provider, so for those customers looking to expand they're already in our global network. We've got one of the largest global backbones in the world. >> So let's give our audience a view from a customer who is in the process of needing to upgrade their network being able to future-proof it, as you said a few minutes ago, be ready for WIFI sites. Say it's a bank with many different retail branches. What would be the ideal solution for them? Would it be something more like Viptela that, is that more customizable? That in one branch you might need a much smaller pipe than you do in a much larger branch? What goes through that for a customer that's going through that upgrade process to modernize their network? >> Yep, so we try to have our technical experts go in and sit down with the customer and kind of do a question and answer session and try to understand what their business drivers are, what solutions that they're trying to solve for, and provide guidance and expertise along that lines and try to suss out. We also have what we call a Transformation Workshop where we like to bring customers in and have a kind of in-depth conversation, one-on-one conversation, show them some of the demos of the services that we offer and try to suss out what their real requirements are. And then, again, we can offer solutions and say, "Hey, based on the footprint that you have, "based on the connectivity options that you want, "based on your time frame, based on your cost," all of those things are factors to where would direct a customer. >> So giving them sort of a prescriptive, customized pathway for that upgrade based on all the analysis about what they, what their current lay of their WAN looks like and where they want to get to. >> Exactly, exactly. >> So, Stephanie I knew you'd do those in-depth discussions with customers. One the great opportunities about a show like Cisco is you've got 28,000 people here coming by the booth, coming into to sessions, so you get to speed date on some of these things, but what are some of the top things that they're asking for? What are some of the pain points that your hearing from customers? Is SD-WAN one of the top things bringing them to you? Or what are some of those key conversations? >> SD-WAN is, that's been kind of the industry term and so everybody knows a little bit about it and the crazy part is a lot people coming in have really done their homework and know a lot about the differences between the different platforms. Security is at the top of everybody's mind and that is another really big driver that everybody wants to have a conversation about. Security, how can I get a security patches out to my endpoints faster and better and quicker? How do I integrate my security with an SD-WAN solution? And so we see those a lot. We have answers for those questions and we can help folks figure that out. >> So here we are at the 30th annual Cisco customer partner event. A lot of evolution in the last 30 years. A lot of work has been done by Cisco to transition from just a hardware network gear provider to hardware, now software. Challenging for large organizations with the history and the product depth and the networking expertise-- >> Absolutely. >> that a company like Cisco has. I want to get your opinion. You've been with CenturyLink for a long time. CenturyLink and Cisco also go way back. >> Stephanie: Yep >> What are some of the advantages is CenturyLink seeing by Cisco's transition to more of a software provider? >> Cisco's always been a great hardware provider partner for us and I hadn't worked in that space too much. However, the folks that we have been working with, both on the Meraki side and Viptela side, super responsive, super willing to help. They're always available. What questions can we answer? Can we get in? Is there training that we can provide? They've been great. Super partners to work with. >> In terms of the customer reaction though, is it giving you guys a leg up, an advantage, that there is more of a software lead approach of looking at an old legacy company that is much more modernized? If you think of how Cisco would compete with a born-in-the-cloud company, what is that kind of competitive advantage like for you guys? >> That's an interesting thing too. So where Cisco has traditionally been a hardware provider, a lot of our customers are very familiar. They're CCIE network certified. It's funny trying to get those folks over. Some are very, its usually the younger set that's willing to go the whole software designed route. So its a challenge. Some folks are very, very much old school and they want to stick with the hardware-based solutions and they don't want to move to the digital world. However, things, cloud computing and all the applications moving to the cloud is kind of forcing them there. So its kind of a slow cycle on some of those and then some of their smaller groups. And we, the early adopters were the ones that were, "Yeah, let's just jump in "and go directly the software route," so it's-- >> Yeah, Stephanie you bring up a great point. I used to give presentations and when you would talk about rollout of technology in the network world, we would measure it in a decade. >> Right, yeah. >> It was like, "Okay, here comes 10 gig and there's the standard "and here's the piece," and all the things like that. What are some of those drivers in your customers because are they moving? You know we found, in general, they are moving faster. Speed is one of the things that we talk about. That agility to be able to respond. So what are some of those drivers from your companies that your work with that's helping them refresh faster, look at new technologies, and be open to some change? >> I think it's just keeping up with the industry. Like you said, it used to take years to do things and now its changing on a monthly and a weekly basis. And people are, I think, they're a little bit scared. It's like if we don't do something, we're going to get left behind. And it, the industry, is kind of forcing people to make those changes. Cost driver is another one that we see and people having to hit their fiscal numbers and everything else like that. But network transformation is not a simple thing. It's not a quick go in, run something. It's something that requires a lot of planning, a lot of analysis, and you want to, what do the old carpenters say? You measure twice and cut once, right? You want to plan, you want to plan, you want to plan and then you implement. So it does take time and people are getting there. When we first start talking about SD-WAN there was a lot of talk, it was a lot of talk, it was a lot of talk, it was a lot of talk and all a sudden then you start seeing, and it seems to be speeding up. People wanting to make decisions. We've had people that have had experiences and have shared experiences, and I think that has helped people make their decisions to actually go. >> What are some of the factors, like security, as an accelerator of a business that maybe might be on the slower side to migrate and start moving to a multi-cloud? Which a lot of businesses live in. Security also just the threat of being Uber-ized by a smaller company that isn't taking advantage-- >> They can move fast. >> Right, of whether it's network automation, SD-WAN, taking advantage of the expansion of 5G. What are some of those, how are some of the security and some of those other threats, are they catalysts that you guys are leveraging with customers to help them understand why the transition is imperative? >> I think they are. I think the iPhones and the laptop devices where you can click and have that immediate user experience, that's starting to build people's expectations that you can get things that quickly. And for the old legacy companies that aren't willing to get in there and to start thinking about doing that migration and change, they will get left behind. It's just where the industry is today. >> Great, Stephanie, why don't I give you the, give us the take-away from Cisco Live. You know, Cisco plus CenturyLink, what's that mean for customers? >> I'm sorry, I didn't catch all, I'm sorry. >> Cisco plus CenturyLink, the take-away for customers. >> Yeah, we're great partners. We've been partners for years. We continue to be partners. I think we bring a great marriage of the SD-WAN services and our hybrid network and all of our managed services together. Lots of years of experience and we love helping our customers, both of us. We want to delight and provide that great customer experience. >> Well. Stephanie, it's been a pleasure to have you on the Cube talking about all things SD-WAN, marketplace, the drivers, the opportunities, and the benefits. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks so much you guys. Have a great show. >> Thank you. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube Live from Cisco Live, San Diego. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to SiliconANGLE media's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman here with my cohost Keith Townsend, happy to welcome back to the program Tom Burns, who's the SVP of Networking and Solutions at Dell EMC. Tom, great to see ya. >> Great to see you guys as well. Good to see you again. >> All right, so I feel like one of those CNBC guys. It's like, Tom, I remember back when Force10 was acquired by Dell and all the various pieces that have gone on and converged in infrastructure, but of course with the merger, you've gotten some new pieces to your toy chest. >> Tom: That's correct. >> So maybe give us the update first as to what's under your purview. >> Right, right, so I continue to support and manage the entire global networking business on behalf of Dell EMC, and then recently I picked up what we called our converged infrastructure business or the VxBlock, Vscale business. And I continue also to manage what we call Enterprise Infrastructure, which is basically any time our customers want to extend the life of their infrastructure around memory, storage, optics, and so forth. We support them with Dell EMC certified parts, and then we add to that some third-party componentry around rack power and cooling, software, Cumulus, Big Switch, things like that. Riverbed, Silver Peak, others. And so with that particular portfolio we also cover what we call the Dell EMC Ready Solutions, both for the service provider, but then also for traditional enterprises as well. >> Yeah, well luckily there's no change in any of those environments. >> Tom: No, no. >> Networking's been static for decades. I mean they threw a product line that I mean last I checked was somewhere in the three to four billion dollar range. With the VxBlock under what you're talking there. >> Yeah it's a so, yeah-- >> Maybe you could talk, what does this mean? 'Cause if I give you your networking guy. >> Right. >> Keith and I are networking guys by background, obviously networking's a piece of this, but give us a little bit of how the sausage is made inside to-- >> Tom: Sure. >> Get to this stuff. >> Well I think when you talk about all these solutions, Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Public Cloud, when you think about software-defined X, the network is still pretty darn important, right? I often say that if the network's not working, it's going to be a pretty cloudy day. It's not going to connect. And so the fabric continues to remain one of the most critical parts of the solution. So the thought around the VxBlock and moving that in towards the networking team is the importance of the fabric and the capability to scale out and scale up with our customers' workloads and applications. So that's probably the reason primarily the reason. And then we can also look at how we can work very closely with our storage division 'cause that's the key IP component coming from Dell EMC on the block side. And see how we can continue to help our customers solve their problems when it comes to this not your do-it-yourself but do-it-for-me environment. >> All right, I know Keith wants to jump in, but one just kind of high-level question for you. I look at networking, we've really been talking about disaggregation of what's going on. It's really about disaggregated systems. And then you've got convergence, and there's other parts of the group that have hyper convergence. How do you square the circle on those two trends and how do those go together? >> Well, I think it's pretty similar on whether you go hyper converge, converge, or do-it-yourself, you build your own block so to speak. There's a set of buyers that want everything to be done for them. They want to buy the entire stack, they want it pre-tested, they want it certified, they want it supported. And then there's a set of customers that want to do it themselves. And that's where we see this opportunity around disaggregation. So we see it primarily in hyperscale and Cloud, but we're seeing it more and more in large enterprise, medium enterprise, particular verticals where customers are in essence looking for some level of agility or capability to interchange their solutions by a particular vendor or solutions that are coming from the same vendor but might be a different IP as an example. And I'm really proud of the fact that Dell EMC really kicked off this disaggregation of the hardware and software and networking. Some 4 1/2 years ago. Now you see some of the, let's say, larger industry players starting to follow suit. And they're starting to disaggregate their software as well. >> Yeah, I would have said just the commonality between those two seemingly opposed trends it's scale. >> Right. >> It's how do customers really help scale these environments? >> Exactly, exactly. It depends a lot around the customer environment and what kind of skill sets do they have. Are they willing to help go through some of that do-it-yourself type of process. Obviously Dell EMC services is there to help them in those particular cases. But we kind of have this buying conundrum of build versus buy. I think my old friend, Chad Sakac, used to say, there's different types of customers that want a VxRail or build-it-themselves, or they want a VxBlock. We see the same thing happen in a networking. There's those customers that want disaggregated hardware and software, and in some cases even disaggregated software. Putting those protocols and features on the switch that they actually use in the data center. Rather than buying a full proprietary stack, well we continue to build the full stack for a select number of customers as well because that's important to that particular sector. >> So again, Tom, two very different ends of the spectrum. I was at ONS a couple of months ago, talked to the team. Dell is a huge sponsor of the Open Source community. And I don't think many people know that. Can you talk about the Open Source relationship or the relationship that Dell Networking has with the Open Source community? >> Absolutely, we first made our venture in Open Source actually with Microsoft in their SONiC work. So they're creating their own network operating software, and we made a joint contribution around the switch abstraction interface, or side. So that was put into the Open Compute Project probably around 3 1/2, maybe four years ago. And that's right after we announced this disaggregation. We then built basically an entire layer of what we call our OS10 base, or what's known in the Linux foundation as OPX. And we contributed that to the OPX or to the Linux foundation, where basically that gives the customer the capability through the software that takes care of all the hardware, creates this switch subtraction interface to gather the intelligence from the ASIC and the silicon, and bringing it to a control plane, which allows APIs to be connected for all your north-bound applications or your general analysis that you want to use, or a disaggregated analysis, what you want to do. So we've been very active in Linux. We've been very active in OCP as well. We're seeing more and more of embracing this opportunity. You've probably seen recently AT&T announced a rather large endeavor to replace tens of thousands of routers with basically white box switches and Open Source software. We really think that this trend is moving, and I'm pretty proud that Dell EMC was a part of getting that all started. >> So that was an awful lot of provider talk. You covered both the provider's base and the enterprise space. Talk to us about where the two kind of meet. You know the provider space, they're creating software, they're embracing OpenStack, they're creating plug-ins for disaggregated networking. And then there's the enterprise. There's opportunity there. Where do you see the enterprise leveraging disaggregation versus the service provider? >> Well, I think it's this move towards software-defined. If you heard in Michael's keynote today, and you'll hear more tomorrow from Jeff Clarke. The whole world is moving to software-defined. It's no longer if, it's when. And I think the opportunity for enterprises that are kind of in that transformation stage, and moving from traditional software-defined, or excuse me, traditional data centers to the software-defined, they could look at disaggregation as an opportunity to give them that agility and capability. In a manner of which they can kind of continue to manage the old world, but move forward into the new world of disaggregation software-defined with the same infrastructure. You know it's not well-known that Dell EMC, we've made our switching now capable of running five different operating softwares. That's dependent upon workloads and use cases, and the customer environment. So, traditional enterprise, they want to look at traditional protocols, traditional features. We give them that capability through our own OS. We can reduce that with OS partners, software coming from some of our OS partners, giving them just the protocols and features that they need for the data center or even out to the edge. And it gives them that flexibility and change. So I think it really comes at this point of when are they going to move towards moving from traditional networking to the next generation of networking. And I'm very happy, I think Dell Technologies is leading the way. >> So I'm wondering if you could expand a little bit about that. When I think about Dell and this show, I mean it is a huge ecosystem. We're sitting right near the Solutions Expo, which will be opening in a little bit, but on the networking side, you've got everything from all the SD-WAN pieces, to all the network operating systems that can sit on top. Maybe, give us kind of the update on the overview, the ecosystem, where Dell wins. >> Yeah, yeah I mean, if you think about 30-something years ago when Michael started the company and Dell started, what was it about. It was really about transforming personal computing, right? It was about taking something that was kind of a traditional proprietary architecture and commoditizing it, making sure it's scalable and supportable. You think of the changes that's occurred now between the mainframe and x86. This is what we think's happening in networking. And at Dell Technologies in the networking area whether it's Dell EMC or to VMware, we're really geared towards this SDX type of market. Virtualization, Layer two, day or three disaggregated switching in the data center. Now SD-WAN with the acquisition of Velocloud by VMware. We're really hoping customers transform at the way networking is being managed, operated, supported to give them much more flexibility and agility in a software-defined market. That being said, we continue to support a multitude of other partners. We have Cumulus, Big Switch, IP infusion, and Pluribus as network operating software alternatives. We have our own, and then we have them as partners. On the SD-WAN area while we lead with Velocloud, we have Silver Peak and we also have Versa Technology, which is getting a lot of upkick in the area. Both in the service provider and in the enterprise space. Huge area of opportunity for enterprises to really lower their cost of connectivity and their branch offices. So, again, we at Dell, we want to have an opinion. We have some leading technologies that we own, but we also partner with some very good, best-of-breed solutions. But being that we're open, and we're disaggregated, and we have an incredible scaling and service department or organization, we have this capability to bring it together for our customers and support them as they go through their IT transformation. >> So, Dell EMC is learning a lot of lessons as you guys start to embrace software-defined. Couple of Dell EMC World's ago, big announcement Chad talked about, ScaleIO, and abstracting, and giving away basically, ScaleIO as a basic solution for free. Then you guys pulled back. And you said, you know what, that's not quite what customers want. They want a packaged solution. So we're talking on one end, total disaggregation and another end, you know what, in a different area of IT, customers seem to want packaged solutions. >> Tom: Yeah. >> Can you talk to the importance of software-defined and packaged solutions? >> Right, it's kind of this theory of appliances, right? Or how is that software going to be packaged? And we give that flexibility in either way. If you think of VxRail or even our vSAN operating or vSAN ready node, it gives that customer the capability to know that we put that software and hardware together, and we tested it, we certified it, most importantly we can support it with kind of one throat to choke, one single call. And so I think the importance for customers are again, am I building it myself or do I want to buy a stack. If I'm somewhere in the middle maybe I'm doing a hybrid or perhaps a Rail type of solution, where it's just compute and storage for the most part. Maybe I'm looking for something different on my networking or connectivity standpoint. But Dell EMC, having the entire portfolio, can help them at any point of the venture or at any part of the solution. So I think that you're absolutely right. The customer buying is varied. You've got those that want everything from a single point, and you got others that are saying I want decision points. I think a lot of the opportunity around the cost savings, mostly from an Opex standpoint are those that are moving towards disaggregated. It doesn't lock 'em in to a single solution. It doesn't get 'em into that long life cycle of when you're going to do changes and upgrades and so forth. This gives them a lot more flexibility and capability. >> Tom, sometimes we have the tendency to get down in the weeds on these products. Especially in the networking space. One of my complaints was, the whole SDN wave, didn't seem to connect necessarily to some of the big businesses' challenges. Heard in the keynote this morning a lot of talk about digital transformation. Bring us up to speed as to how networking plays into that overall story. What you're hearing from customers and if you have any examples we'd love to hear. >> Yeah, no so, I think networking plays a critical part of the IT transformation. I think if you think of the first move in virtualization around compute, then you have the software-defined storage, the networking component was kind of the lagger. It was kind of holding back. And in fact today, I think some analysts say that even when certain software-defined storage implementations occur, interruptions or issues happen in the network. Because the network has then been built and architected for that type of environment. So the companies end up going back and re-looking at how that's done. And companies overall are I think are frustrated with this. They're frustrated with the fact that the network is holding them back from enabling new services, new capabilities, new workloads, moving towards a software-defined environment. And so I think this area again, of disaggregation, of software-defined, of offering choice around software, I think it's doing well, and it's really starting to see an uptick. And the customer experiences as follows. One is, open networking where it's based upon standard commodity-based hardware. It's simply less expensive than proprietary hardware. So they're going to have a little bit of savings from the CapEx standpoint. But because they moved towards this disaggregated model where perhaps they're using one of our third-party software partners that happens to be based in Linux, or even our own OS10 is now based in Linux. Look at that, the tools around configuration and automation are the same as compute. And the same as storage. And so therefore I'm saving on this configuration and automation and so forth. So we have examples such as Verizon that literally not only saves about 30% cost savings on their CapEx, they're saving anywhere between 40 and 50% on their Opex. Why? They can roll out applications much faster. They can make changes to their network much faster. I mean that's the benefit of virtualization and NSX as well, right? Instead of having this decisions of sending a network engineer to a closet to do CLI, down in the dirt as you would say, and reconfigure the switch, a lot of that now has been attracted to a software lever, and getting the company much more capability to make the changes across the fabric, or to segregate it using NSX micro segmentation to make the changes to those users or to that particular environment that needs those changes. So, just the incredible amount of flexibility. I think SDN let's say six, seven years ago, everyone thought it was going to be CapEx. You know, cheaper hardware, cheaper ASICs, et cetera. It's all about Opex. It's around flexibility, agility, common tool sets, better configuration, faster automation. >> So we all have this nirvana idea that we can take our traditional stacks, whether it's pre-packaged CI configurations that's pre-engineered, HCI, SDN, disaggregated networking. Add to that a software layer this magical automation. Can you unpack that for us a little bit? What are you seeing practically whether it's in the server provider perspective or on the enterprise. What are those crucial relationships that Dell EMC is forming with the software industry to bring forth that automation? >> Well obviously we have a very strong relationship with VMware. >> Keith: Right. >> And so you have vRealize and vROps and so forth, and in fact in the new VxBlock 1000, you're going to see a lot of us gearings, a lot of our development towards the vRealize suite, so that helps those customers that are in a VMware environment. We also have a very strong relationship with Red Hat and OpenStack, where we've seen very successful implementations in the service provider space. Those that want to go a little bit more, a little bit more disaggregated, a little bit more open, even it from the storage participation like SAP and so forth. But then obviously we're doing a lot of work with Ansible, Chef, and Puppet, for those that are looking for more of a common open source set of tools across server, compute, networking storage and so forth. So I think the real benefit is kind of looking at it at that 25,000-foot view on how we want to automate. Do you want to go towards containers, do you want to go traditional? What are the tool sets that you've been using in your compute environment, and can those be brought down to the entire stack? >> All right, well Tom Burns, really appreciate catching up with you. I know Keith will be spending a little time at Interop this week too. I know, I'm excited that we have a lot more networking here at this end of the strip also this week. >> Appreciate it. Listen to Pat's talk this afternoon. I think we're going to be hearing even more about Dell Technology's networking. >> All right. Tom Burns, SVP of Networking and Solutions at Dell EMC. I'm Stu Miniman and this is Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching The Cube. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering IBM Think 2018. (upbeat music) Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to IBM Think 2018 everybody. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm with my co-host Peter Burris. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day three of our wall to wall coverage of IBM Think. The inaugural Think conference. Good friend Eric Herzog is here. He runs marketing for IBM storage. They're kicking butt. You've been in three years, making a difference, looking great, new Hawaiian shirt. (laughter) Welcome back my friend. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Good to see you. >> Always love being on theCUBE. >> So this is crazy. I mean, I miss Edge, I loved that show, but you know, one stop shopping. >> Well, a couple things. One when you look at other shows in the tech industry, they tend to be for the whole company so we had a lot of small shows and that was great and it allowed focus, but the one thing it didn't do is every division, including storage, we have all kinds of IBM customers who are not IBM storage customers. So this allows us to do some cross pollination and go and talk to those IBM customers who are not IBM storage customers which we can always do at a third party show like a VM World or Oracle World, but you know those guys tend to have a show that's focused on every division they have. So it could be a real advantage for IBM to do it that way, give us more mass. And it also, you know, helps us spend more on third party shows to go after a whole bunch of new prospects and new clients in other venues. >> You, you've attracted some good storage DNA. Yourself and some others, Ed Walsh was on yesterday. He said Joe Tucci made a comment years ago Somebody asked him what's your biggest fear. If IBM wakes up and figures it out in storage. Looks like you guys are figuring it out. >> Whipping it up and figuring it out. >> Four quarters of consistent growth, you know redefining your portfolio towards software defined. One of the things we've talked about a lot, and I know you brought this was the discipline around you know communicating, getting products to market, faster cycles, because people buy products and solutions right? So you guys have really done a good job there, but what's your perspective on how you guys have been winning in the last year or so? >> Well I think there's a couple of things. One is pure accident, okay. Which is not just us, is one of the leaders in the industry, where I used to work and Ed used to work has clearly stubbed its toe and has lost its way and that has benefited not only IBM but actually even some of our other competitors have grown at the expense of, you know, EMC. And they're not doing as well as they used to do and they've been cutting head count and you know, there's a big difference in the engineering spend of what EMC does versus what Michael Dell likes to spend on engineering. We have been continuing to invest. Sales resources, marketing resources, tech support resources in the field, technical resources from a development perspective. The other thing we did as Ed came back was rationalize the portfolio. Make sure that you don't have 27 products that overlap, you have one. And maybe it has a slight overlap with the product next to it, but you don't have to have three things that do the same thing and quite honestly, IBM, before I showed up, we did have that. So that's benefited us and then I think the third thing is we've gone to a solution-oriented focus. So can we talk about, as nerdy as tracks per sector and TPI and BPI and, I mean all the way down to the hard drive or to the flash layer? Sure we can. You know what, have you ever... You guys have been doing this forever. Ever met a CIO who was a storage guy? >> No, no. CIOs don't care about storage. >> Exactly, so you've got to... >> We've had quite a couple of ex-CIOs who were storage guys. (laughter) >> So you've really got to talk about applications, workloads, and use cases. How you solve the business problems. We've created a whole set of sales tools that we call the conversations available to the IBM sales team and our business partners which is how to talk to a CIO, how to talk to a line of business owner, how to talk to the VP of software development in a global enterprise who doesn't care at all, and also to get people to understand that it's not... Storage is a critical foundation for cloud, for AI, for other workloads, but if you talk latency right off the top, especially with a CIO or the senior executive, it's like what are you talking about? What you have to say is we can make your cloud sing, we can make your cloud never go down. We can make sure that the response time on the web browser is in a second. Whereas you know Google did that test about if you click and it takes more than two and a half seconds, they go away. Well even if that's your own private cloud, guess what they do the same thing. So you've got to be able to show them how the storage enables cloud and AI and other workloads. >> Let's talk about that for a second. Because I was having a thought here. It's maybe my only interesting thought here at Think, being pretty much overwhelmed. But the thought that I had was if you think about all the things that IBM is talking about, block chain, analytics, cloud, go on down the list, none of them would have been possible if we were still working at 10, 20, 30 milliseconds of wait time on a disc head. The fundamental change that made all of this possible is the move from disc to flash. >> Eric: Right. >> Storage is the fundamental change in this industry that has made all of this possible. What do you think about that? >> So I would agree with that. There is no doubt and that's part of the reason I had said storage is a critical foundation for cloud or AI workloads. Whether you're talking not just pure performance but availability and reliability. So we have a public reference Medicat. They deliver healthcare services as a service, so it's a software as a service model. Well guess what? They provide patient records into hospitals and clinics that tend to be focused at the university level like the University of California Health Center for the students. Well guess what? If not only does it need to be fast, if it's not available then you can't get the healthcare records can you? So, and while it's a cloud model, you have to be able to have that availability characteristic, reliability. So storage is, again, that critical foundation. If you build a building in a major city and the foundation isn't very good, the building falls over. And storage is that critical foundation for any cloud, any AI, and even for the older workloads like an SAP Hana or a Oracle workload, right? If, again if the storage is not resilient, oh well you can't access the shipping database or the payroll database or the accounts receivable database cause the storage is down and then obviously if it's not fast, it takes forever to get Dave Vellante's bill, right. And that's a waste of time. >> So it's plumbing, but the plumbing's getting more intelligent isn't it? >> Well that's the other thing we've done is we are automating everything. We are imbuing our software, and we announced this, that our range are going to be having an intelligent infrastructure software plane if you will that is going to help do diagnostics. For example, in one of the coming releases, if a customer allows access, if a power supply is going bad, we will tell them it's going bad and it'll automatically send a PO to IBM with a serial number, the address, and say please send me a new power supply before the power supply actually fails. But it also means they don't have to stock a power supply on their shelf which means they have a higher cost of cap ex. And for a big shop there's a bunch of power supplies, a bunch of flash modules, maybe hard drives if they're still dinosauric in how they behave. And they have those things and they buy them from us and our competitors. So imbuing it with intelligence, automating everything we can automate. So automatically tiering data, moving data around from tier to tier, moving it out to the cloud, what we do with the reuse of backup sets. Instead of doing it the old way of back up. And I know you've got Sam Warner coming on later today and he'll talk about modern data protection, how that is revolutionizing what dev ops and other guys can do with their, essentially, what we would've called in the old days back up data. >> Let's talk about your spectrum launch. Spectrum NAS, give us some plugs for that. What's the update there? >> So we announced on the 20th of February a whole set of changes regarding the Spectrum family. We have things around Spectrum PROTECT, with GDPR, Spectrum PROTECT Plus as a service as well as some additional granularity features and I know Sam Warner's going to come on later today. Spectrum NAS software defined network attached storage. Okay, we're not going to sell any infrastructure with it. We have for big data analytics our Spectrum scale, but think of Spectrum NAS as traditional network attached storage workloads. Home directories. Things like that. Small file service where Spectrum scale has one of our public references, and they were here actually at Edge a couple of years ago, one of the largest banks in the world, their entire fraud detection system is based on Spectrum scale. That's not what you would use Spectrum NAS for. So, and it's often common as you know in the file world to have sort of a traditional file system and then a big one that does big data, analytics and AI and is very focused on that and so that's what we've done. Spectrum NAS is a software only, software defined, rounds out our block, now gives a traditional file. We had scale out file already and IBM cloud object storage is also software defined. >> Well how about the get put world. What's happening there? I mean we've been waiting for it to explode. >> Ah so the get put world is all about NVME. NVME, new storage protocol as you know it's been scuzzy forever. Scuzzy and/or SATA. And it's been that way for years and years and years and years, but now you've got flash. As Peter pointed out spinning disc is really slow. Flash is really fast and the protocol of Scuzzy was not keeping up with the performance so NVME is coming out. We announced an NVME over InfiniBand Fabric solution. We announced that we will be adding a fiber channel. NVME fabric based and also in ethernet. Those will come and one of the key things we're doing is our hardware, our infrastructure's all ready to go so all you have to do is a non-disruptive software upgrade and for anyone who's bought today, it'll be free. So you can start off with fiber channel or ethernet fabrics today or InfiniBand fabric now that we can ship, but on the ethernet and fiber channel side, they buy the array today and then later this year in the second half software upgrade and then they'll have NVME over fiber channel or NVME over ethernet. >> Explain why NVME and NVME over fabric is so important generally but in particular for this sort of new class of applications that's emerging. >> Well the key thing with the new class of applications is they're incredibly performance and latency sensitive. So we're trying to do real artificial intelligence and they're trying to, for example, I just did a presentation and one of our partners, Mark III has created a manufacturing system using AI and Watson. So you use cameras all over, which has been common, but it actually will learn. So it'll tell you whether cans are bad. Another one of our customers is in the healthcare space and they're working on a genomic process for breast cancer along with radiology and they've collected over 20 million radiological samples of breast cancer analysis. So guess what, how are you going to sort through that? Are you or I could sort through 20 million images? Well guess what, AI can do that, narrow it down, and say whether it's this type of breast cancer or that type of breast cancer. And then the doctor can decide what to do about it. And that's all empowered by AI and that requires incredible performance which is what NVME delivers. Again, that underlying foundation of AI, in this case going from flash with Scuzzy, flash to NVME, increasing the power that AI can deliver because of its storage foundation. >> But even those are human time transactions. What about when we start taking the output of that AI and put it directly into operational transactions that have to run like a bat out of hell. >> Which is where NVME will come in as well. You cannot have the performance that we've had these last almost 30 years with Scuzzy and even slower when you talk about SATA. That's just not going to cut it with flash. And by the way, you know there's going to be things beyond flash that will be faster than flash. So flash two, flash three, it's just the way it was with the hard drive world, right? It was 2400 RPM then 36 then 54 then 72 then 10k then 15/5. >> More size, more speed, lower energy. >> Which is what NVME will help you do and you can do it as a fabric infrastructure or you can do it in the array itself. You dual in box and out of box connectivity with NVME increasing the performance within your array and increasing the performance outside of the array as you go out to your host and out into your switching infrastructure. >> So I'm loving Think. It's too many people to count, I've been joking all week. 30,000 40,000. We're still tallying up. I'm going to miss Edge for sure. I'm going to miss the updates in the you know, late spring. But so let's get 'em now. What can we expect? What are you trying to accomplish in the next six to nine months? What should we be looking for without giving any confidential information. >> Well we've already publicly announced that we'll be fleshing out NVME across the board. >> Dave: Right. >> So we already publicly announced that. That will be a big to-do. The other thing we're looking at is continuing to imbue what we do with additional solution sets. So that's something we have a wide set of software. For example, we publicly announced this week that the Versa stack, all flash array will be available with IBM cloud private with a CYSCO validated design in May. So again, in this case taking a very powerful system, the Versa Stack all flash, which already delivers ROI and TCO, but still is if you will a box. Now that box is a converge box with compute with switching with all flash array and with a virtual environment. But now we're putting, again as a bundle, IBM cloud private on there. So you'll see more and more of those types of solutions both with the rest of IBM but also from third parties. So if that offers the right solution set to cut capx/opx, automate processes, and again, for the cloud workloads, AI workloads and any workloads, storage is that foundation. The critical foundation. So we will make sure that we'll have solutions wrapped around that throughout the rest of this year. >> So it's great to see the performance in the storage division. Great people. We're under counting it. We're not even counting all the cloud storage that goes and counts somewhere else. You guys are doing a great job. You know, best of luck and really keep it up Eric, thanks very much for coming back on theCUBE. >> Great thank you very much. >> We really appreciate it. >> Thanks again Peter. >> Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next segment right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live from Think 2018. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Manhattan, it's theCube, covering AWS Summit, New York City, 2017. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back to the Big Apple as we continue our coverage here on theCube of AWS Summit 2017. We're at the Javits Center. We're in midtown. A lot of hustle and bustle outsie and inside there, good buzz on the show floor with about 5,000 strong attending and some 20,000 registrants also for today's show. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, and glad to have you here on theCube. And Dustin Kirkland now joins us. He's at Ubuntu, the product and strategy side of things at Canonical, and Dustin, good to see you back on theCube. >> Thank you very much. >> You just threw a big number out at us when we were talking off camera. I'll let you take it from there, but it shows you about the presence, you might say, of Ubuntu and AWS, what that nexus is right now. >> Ubuntu easily leads as the operating system in Amazon. About 70%, seven zero, 70% of all instances running in Amazon right now are running Ubuntu. And that's actually, despite the fact that Amazon have their own Amazon Linux and there are other, Windows, Rails, SUSE, Debian, Fedora, other alternatives. Ubuntu still represents seven out of 10 workloads in Amazon running right now. >> John: Huge number. >> So, Dustin, maybe give us a little insight as to what kind of workloads you're seeing. How much of this was people that, Ubuntu has a great footprint everywhere and therefore it kind of moved there. And how much of it is new and interesting things, IOT and machine learning and everything like that, where you also have support. >> When you're talking about that many instances, that's quite a bit of boat, right? So if you look at just EC2 and the two types of workloads, there are the long-running workloads. The workloads that are up for many months, years in some cases. I met a number of customers here this week that are running older versions of Ubuntu like 12.04 which are actually end of life, but as a customer of Canonical we continue providing security updates. So we have a product called Extended Security Maintenance. There's over a million instances of Ubuntu 12.04 which are already end of life but Canonical can continue providing security updates, critical security updates. That's great for the long-running workloads. The other thing that we do for long-running workloads are kernel live patches. So we're able to actually fix vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel without rebooting, using entirely upstream and open source technology to do that. So for those workloads that stay up for months or years, the combination of Extended Security Maintenance, covering it for a very long time, and the kernel live patch, ensuring that you're able to patch those vulnerabilities without rebooting those systems, it's great for hosting providers and some enterprise workloads. Now on the flip side, you also see a lot of workloads that are spikey, right. Workloads that come and go in bursts. Maybe they run at night or in the morning or just whenever an event happens. We see a lot of Ubuntu running there. It's really, a lot of that is focused on data and machine learning, artificial intelligence workloads, that run in that sort of bursty manner. >> Okay, so it was interesting, when I hear you talk about some things that have been running for a bunch of years, and on the other side of the spectrum is serverless and the new machine learning stuff where it tends to be there, what's Canonical doing there? What kind of exciting, any of the news, Macey, Glue, some of these other ones that came out, how much do those fit into the conversations you're having? >> Sure, they all really fit. When we talk about what we're doing to tune Ubuntu for those machine learning workloads, it really starts with the kernel. So we actually have an AWS-optimized Linux kernel. So we've taken the Ubuntu Linux kernel and we've tuned it, working with the Amazon kernel engineers, to ensure that we've carved out everything in that kernel that's not relevant inside of an Amazon data center and taken it out. And in doing so, we've actually made the kernel 15% smaller, which actually reduces the security footprint and the storage footprint of that kernel. And that means smaller downloads, smaller updates, and we've made it boot 30% faster. We've done that by adding support, turning on, configuring on some parameters that enable virtualization or divert IO drivers or specifically the Amazon drivers to work really well. We've also removed things like floppy disk drives and Bluetooth drivers, which you'll never find in a virtual machine in Amazon. And when you take all of those things in aggregate and you remove them from the kernel, you end up with a much smaller, better, more efficient package. So that's a great starting point. The other piece is we've ensured that the latest and greatest graphics adapters, the GPUs, GPGPUs from Invidia, that the experienced on Ubuntu out of the box just works. It works really well, and well at scale. You'll find almost all machine learning workloads are drastically improved inside of GPGPU instances. And for the dollar, you're able to compute sometimes hundreds or thousands of times more efficiently than a fewer CPU type workload. >> You're talking about machine learning, but on the artificial intelligence side of life, a lot of conversation about that at the keynotes this morning. A lot of good services, whatever, again, your activity in that and where that's going, do you think, over the next 12, 16 months? >> Yes, so artificial intelligence is a really nice place where we see a lot of Ubuntu, mainly because the nature of how AI is infiltrating our lives. It has these two sides. One side is at the edge, and those are really fundamentally connected devices. And for every one of those billions of devices out there, there are necessarily connections to an instance in the cloud somewhere. So if we take just one example, right, an autonomous vehicle. That vehicle is connected to the internet. Sometimes well, when you're at home, parked in the garage or parked at Whole Foods, right? But sometimes it's not. You're in the middle of the desert out in West Texas. That autonomous vehicle needs to have a lot of intelligence local to that vehicle. It gets downloaded opportunistically. And what gets downloaded are the results of that machine learning, the results of that artificial intelligence process. So we heard in the keynotes quite a bit about data modeling, right? Data modeling means putting a whole bunch of data into Amazon, which Amazon has made it really easy to do with things like Snowball and so forth. Once the data is there, then the big GPGPU instances crunch that data and the result is actually a very tight, tightly compressed bit of insight that then gets fed to devices. So an autonomous vehicle that every single night gets a little bit better by tweaking its algorithms, when to brake, when to change lanes, when to make a left turn safely or a right turn safely, those are constantly being updated by all the data that we're feeding that. Now why I said that's important from an Ubuntu perspective is that we find Ubuntu in both of those locations. So we open this by saying that Ubuntu is the leading operating system inside of Amazon, representing 70% of those instances. Ubuntu is, across the board, right now in 100% of the autonomous vehicles that are running today. So Uber's autonomous vehicle, the Tesla vehicles, the Google vehicles, a number of others from other manufacturers are all running Ubuntu on the CPU. There's usually three CPUs in a smart car. The CPU that's running the autonomous driving engine is, across the board, running Ubuntu today. The fact that it's the same OS makes it, makes life quite nice for the developers. The developers who are writing that software that's crunching the numbers in the cloud and making the critical real-time decisions in the vehicle. >> You talk about autonomous vehicles, I mean, it's about a car in general, thousands of data points coming in, in continual real time. >> Dustin: Right. >> So it's just not autonomous -- >> Dustin: Right. >> operations, right? So are you working in that way, diagnostics, navigation, all those areas? >> Yes, so we catch as headlines are a lot of the hobbyist projects, the fun stuff coming out of universities or startup space. Drones and robots and vacuum cleaners, right? And there's a lot of Ubuntu running there, anything from Raspberry Pis to smart appliances at home. But it's actually, I think, really where those artificially intelligent systems are going to change our lives, is in the industrial space. It's not the drone that some kids are flying around in the park, it's the drone that's surveying crops, that's coming to understand what areas of a field need more fertilizer or less water, right. And that's happening in an artificially intelligent way as smarter and smarter algorithms make its way onto those drones. It's less about the running Pandora and Spotify having to choose the right music for you when you're sitting in your car, and a lot more about every taxicab in the city taking data and analytics and understanding what's going on around them. It's a great way to detect traffic patterns, potentially threats of danger or something like that. That's far more industrial and less intresting than the fun stuff, you know, the fireworks that are shot off by a drone. >> Not nearly as sexy, right? It's not as much fun. >> But that's where the business is, you know. >> That's right. >> One of the things people have been looking at is how Amazon's really maturing their discussion of hyrid cloud. Now, you said that data centers, public cloud, edge devices, lots of mobile, we talked about IOT and everything, what do you see from customers, what do you think we're going to see from Amazon going forward to build these hybrid architectures and how does that fit in to autonomous vehicles and the like? >> So in the keynote we saw a couple of organizations who were spotlighted as all-in on Amazon, and that's great. And actually almost all of those logos that are all-in on Amazon are all-in on Amazon on Ubuntu and that's great. That's a very small number of logos compared to the number of organizations out there that are actually hybrid. Hybrid is certainly a ramp to being all-in but for quite a bit of the industry, that's the journey and the destination, too, in fact. That there's always going to be some amount compute that happens local and some amount of compute that happens in the cloud. Ubuntu helps provide an important portability layer. Knowing something runs well on Ubuntu locally, it's going to run well on Ubuntu in Amazon, or vise versa. The fact that it runs well in Amazon, it will also run well on Ubuntu locally. Now we have a support -- >> Yeah, I was just curious, you talked about some of the optimization you made for AWS. >> Dustin: Right. >> Is that now finding its way into other environments or do we have a little bit of a fork? >> We do, it does find it's way back into other environments so, you know, the Amazon hypervisors are usually Xen-based, although there are some interesting other things coming from Amazon there. Typically what we find on-prem is usually more KVM or Vmware based. Now, most of what goes into that virtual kernel that we build for Amazon actually applies to the virtual kernel that we built for Ubuntu that runs in Xen and Vmware and KVM. There's some subtle differences. Some, a few things that we've done very specifically for Amazon, but for the most part it's perfectly compatible all the way back to the virtual machines that you would run on-prem. >> Well, Dustin, always a pleasure, >> Yeah. >> to have you hear on theCube. >> Thanks, John. >> You're welcome back any time. >> All right. >> We appreciate the time and wish you the best of luck here the rest of the day, too. >> Great. >> Good deal. >> Thank you. >> Glad to be with us. Dustin Kirkland from Canonical joining us here on theCube. Back with more from AWS Summit 2017 here in New York City right after this.

why from the mandalay bay convention center in las vegas it's the cues covering vmworld 2016 rock you buy vmware and its ecosystem sponsors now you're your host John furrier and John wall's well welcome back to Mandalay Bay here at vmworld along with John furrier I'm John wall's glad to be with you here on the cubes to continue our coverage what's happening at vmworld exclusive broadcast a partner here for the show and along with John we're joined by eric Herzog's the vice president product marketing and management at IBM storage and Erica I just found out you're one of the all-time 10 most popular cute guests or most prominent cube guests most prolific congratulations well thank you we always love coming to the cube it's always energizing you love controversy and I love controversy and you get down to the heart of it you're the hard copy of high tech they're like oh I loved and we could probably mark each of your appearances by the Hawaiian shirt I think what do you think either Hawaiian shirt or one of my luggage share we could trace those back ever stop vibe about the show I mean just your thoughts about they've been here for three four days now just your general feel about about the the messaging here and then what's actually being conveyed in the enthusiasm out on the show floor well it's pretty clear that the world has gone cloud the world is doing cognitive and big data analytics vmware is leading that charge their strong partner of IBM we do a lot of things with them both with our cloud division on our storage division and vmware is a very strong partner of IBM we have all kinds of integration in our storage technology products with vai with vasa with vcenter ops all the various product lines at vmware offers and the key thing is ever wants to go to the cloud so by working with IBM and vmware together makes it easier and easier for customers whether it be the small shop Herzog's barn grill or whether it be the giant fortune 500 global entity working with us together allow them to get to the cloud sooner faster and have a better cloud experience so you got you know everybody cloud and virtualization and you know big themes big big topics so why does storage still matter well the big thing is if you're going to go to a cloud infrastructure and you're going to run everything on the cloud you think of storage as at solid foundation it has to be rock solid it has to be highly resilient it has to be able to handle error codes and error messaging and things failing and things falling off the earth at the same time it needs to be incredibly fast where things like all-flash arrays come in and even flexible so things like software-defined storage so think of storage as the critical foundation underneath any cloud or virtualized environment if you don't have a strong storage foundation with great resiliency great availability great serviceability and great performance your cloud or your virtual infrastructure is going to be mediocre and that's a very generous term so that's a key point so controversial II speaking to get to the controversy the whole complexity around converged infrastructure hyper converge or whatever the customers are deploying for compute they're putting the storage close to that whether it's a SAS and the cloud which is basically a data center that no one knows the address of as we were saying they always going to have stores has to sit somewhere what is the key trends right now for you because software is leading the way iBM has been doing a lot of work I know and soft we've been covering you guys will be at IBM edge coming up shortly in a couple weeks where's the innovation on the storage side for you guys well how do you talk to the customer base to say ok I got some sass options now for back and recovery weird one of your partners earlier i'm talking about that where is the physical storage innovation is that the software what's your thoughts on so we have a couple paths of integration for us first software-defined storage several the other analyst firms have named it's the number one software-defined storage coming in the world for several years in a row now software-defined storage gives a flexible infrastructure you don't have to buy any of the underlying media or underlying array controller from us just by our software and then you could put on anybody else's hardware you want you can work with your cloud provider with your reseller with your distributor enterprises create their own cloud whether it's a software-defined storage gives you a wide swath of storage functionality backup archive primary store grid scale out software only so ultimate flexibility so that one area of innovation secondary ish is all flash all flash is not expensive essentially I love old Schwarzenegger movies in the 1980s was all about tape he was a spy go and show what is supposedly the CIA was Schwarzenegger I'll take mid 90s Schwarzenegger another spy movie show a datacenter all hard drive arrays now in the next Schwarzenegger movie hopefully it'll be all flash arrays from IBM in the background so flash is just an evolution and we do tons of humor white shirts I keep swapping monitors it so he's intimated I get one from Maui went from kawaii one from the Big Island so flash is where it's at from a system level perspective so you've got that innovation and then you've got converged infrastructure as you mentioned already will you get the server the storage the networking and VMware hypervisor all packaged up dramatically so we have a product called the vs tak we do jointly with Cisco and vmware we were late to market on that we freely admit that but just give you an idea in the first half of this year we have done almost 2x what we did in the entire year of 2015 so that's another growth ending particularly cloud service providers love to get these pre-canned pre racked versus tax and deploy them in a number of our public references are cloud service providers both big and small essentially wheel in a versus stack when they need it whelan not own will another pre-configured ready to go and they get up and up and quit going so those are three trends we just had a client on Scott equipment not a Monroe Louisiana went to the Versa stack and singing your praises like a great example of medium size small sized businesses so we keep think about enterprises and all this and that it doesn't have to be the case their services that you're providing the companies of all sizes that are gaining new efficiencies in protocol al people everybody needs storage and you think about it is really how do you want to consume the storage and in a smaller shop you may choose one way so versus stack is converged infrastructure our software-defined storage like spectrum accelerate spectrum virtualize a software-only model several of the products like spectrum accelerate inspect can protect are available through softlayer or other cloud is he consumed it as a cloud entity so whether you want to consume an on-premises software only full array full integrated stack or cloud configuration we offer any way in which you want to eat that cake big cake small cake fruit cake chocolate cake vanilla cake we got kicked for ever you need and we can cover every base with that a good point about the diversity of choices from tape to flash and they get the multi multi integrated Universal stack so a lot of different choices I want to ask you about you know with that kind of array of options how you view the competitive strategy for IBM with storage so you know I know you're a wrestler so is there a is there a judo move on the competition how would you talk about your differentiation how do you choke hold the competition well couple ways first a lot from a technical perspective by leading with software-defined storage and we are unmatched in that capacity according the industry analysts on what we do and we have it in all areas in block storage we got scale-out file storage and scale out big data analytics we got back up we got archive almost no one has that panoply of offering in a software-defined space and you don't need to buy the hardware from us you can buy from our competitors two things I hear software and then after the array of eyelash what's specifically on the software are you guys leading and have unmatched as-safir already well spectrum protect is you know been a leader in the enterprise for years spectrum scale is approaching 5,000 customers now and we have customers close to an exabyte in production single customer with an exabyte pretty incredible so for big data analytic workloads with on gastronomic research so for us it's all about the application workload in use case part of the reason we have a broad offering is anyone who comes in here and sits in front of you guys and says my array or my software will do everything for you is smoking something that's not legal just not true maybe in Colorado or yeah okay me but the reality is workloads applications and use cases very dramatically and let's take an easy example we have multiple all-flash arrays why do we have multiple all flash arrays a we have a version for mainframe attached everyone in there wants six or seven 9s guess what we can provide that it's expensive as they're all is that our six or seven 9s but now they can get all flash performance on the mainframe in the upper end of the Linux world that's what you would consume at the other end we have our flash our store wise 50 30 f which can be as low street price as low street price as eighteen thousand dollars for an all-flash array to get started basically the same prices our Drive rang and it has all the enterprise data services snapshot replication data encryption at rest migration capability tiering capability it's basically what a hard drive array used to cost so why not go all flash threat talk about the evolution of IBM storage actually them in a leader in storage in the beginning but there was a period of time there and Dave when I won't talk handling the cube about this where storage my BMC it took a lot of share but there's been a huge investment in storage over the past i'd say maybe five years in particular maybe past three specifically i think over a billion dollars has been spent I think we thought the Jamie talent variety of folks on from IBM what is the update take a minute to explain how IBM has regained their mojo in storage where that come from just add some color to that because I think that's something that let people go hmm I great for things from my being but they didn't always have it in the storage so as you know IBM invented the hard drive essentially created the storage industry so saying that we lost our mojos a fair statement but boy do we have it back explain so first thing is when you have this cloud and analytic cognitive era you need a solid foundation of storage and IBM is publicly talked about the future of the world is around cloud on cognitive infrastructure cognitive applications so if your storage is not the best from an availability perspective and from a performance perspective then the reality is your cloud and cognitive that you're trying to do is basically going to suck yeah so in order to have the cloud and convey this underlying infrastructure that's rock-solid so quite honestly as you mentioned Dave we've actually invested over three and a half billion dollars in the last three years not to mention we bought a company called Texas memory systems which is the grandfather our flash systems knocks before that so we've invested well over three billion dollars we've also made a number of executive hirings ed walls just joined us CEO of several startups former general manager from emc i myself was a senior vice president at emc we just hired a new VP of Sales they're serious you guys are serious you guys are all in investing bringing on the right team focusing on applications work gloves in use case as much as I love storage most CEOs hate it yeah there's almost no cio that whatever a storage guy they're all app guys got to talk their lingo application workload in use case how the storage enables their availability of those apps workloads and use cases and how it gives them the right performance to meet their essays to the business guy what's interesting I want to highlight that because I think it's a good point people might not know is that having just good storage in and of itself was an old siloed model but now you mentioned could we cover all the IBM events world of Watson we should call insights edge and and interconnect the cloud show cognitive is front and center there's absolutely the moon shot and the mandate from IBM to be number one in cognitive computing which means big data analytics integrated to the application level obviously bluemix in the cloud Philip blank was here on stage about IBM cloud the relation with VMware so that fails if it doesn't have good steward doesn't perform well and and latency matters right I mean data matters well I add a couple things there so first of all absolutely correct but the other thing is we actually have cognitive storage ok if you automate processes automatically for example to your data some of our competitors have tiering most of them tier only within their own box we actually can tear not only within our own box for from our box to emc our box to netapp our box to HP HP to del Delta hitachi we can t r from anything to anything so that's a huge advantage right there but we tier we don't just set policy which is when data's 90 days old automatically move it that's automation cog nation is where we not only watch the applications and watch the data set we move it from hot to cold so let's take for example financial data your publicly traded company cuban SiliconANGLE going to be public soon i'm sure guys are getting so big your finance guys going to say Dave John team this financial data is white-hot got to be on all flash after you guys do your announcement of your incredible earnings and thank God I hopefully get friend of the company stock and my stock goes way up as your stock goes way up what are we spoking now come on let me tell you when that happens the date is going to go stone-cold we see that you don't have to set a policy two-tier the data with IBM we automatically learn when the data is hot and when it's cold and move it back and forth for you you know there's no policy setting cognition or cognitive its storage understand or stands out as the work for some big data mojo coming into the storage right and that's a huge change so again not only is it critical for any cognitive application to have incredibly performance storage with incredible resiliency availability reliability ok when there is cognitive health care true cognitive health care and Dave's on the table and they bring out their cognitive Juan because they found something in your chest that they didn't see before if the storage fails not going to be good for Dave yeah at the same time if the storage is too slow that might not be good for Dave either when they run that cognitive wand a that hospital knows that it's never going to fail that doctor says Oh Dave okay we better take that thing out boom he takes it out Dave's healthy again well that's a real example by the way not necessary Dave on the table but there was a story we wrote insult an angle one of our most popular post last month IBM Watson actually found a diagnosis uncured a patient the doctor had missed I don't know if you saw that story when super viral but that's the kind of business use case that you're in kind of illuminating with the storage yeah well in fact that one of the recent trade shows what's called the flash memory summit we won an award for best enterprise application commercial developer spark cognition they developed cyber security applications they recommend IBM flash systems and actually Watson's embedded in their application and it detects security threats for enterprises so there's an example of combining cognition with Watson the cognition capability of flash systems and then their software which is commercially available it's not an in-house thing or they're you know a regular software all right now we're a now we're in like the big time you know intoxication mode with all this awesome futuristic real technology how does a customer get this now because now back to IT yeah the silos are still out there they're breaking down the silos how do you take this to customers what's to use case how do you guys deploy this what's the what are you seeing for success stories well the key thing is to make it easy to use and deploy which we do so if you want the cloud model we're available in software IBM Global resiliency services uses us for their resiliency service over 300 cloud providers you spectrum protect for backup pick the cloud guy just pick one you want we work with all of them if you want to deploy in-house we have a whole set of channel partners globally we have the IBM sales team IBM global services uses IBM's own storage of course to provide to the larger enterprises so with your big shop medium swaps well flop we have a whole set of people out there with our partner base with our own sales guys that can help that and you get up and then we back it up as you know IBM is renowned for supporting service in all of our divisions in all of our product portfolio not just in storage so they need support and service our storage service guys are there right away you'd it installed we can install it our partners can install this stuff so we try to make it as brain dead as possible as easy as possible Jen being cognitive and are some of our user interfaces are as easy as a Macintosh I mean drag-and-drop move your lungs around run analytics on when you're going to run out of storage so you know ahead of time all these things that cut things people want today remember IT budget cut dramatically in the downturn of 08 09 and while budgets have returned they're not hiring storage guys there are hiring developers and they're hiring cloud guys so those guys don't know how to use storage well you got to make it easy always fast and always resilient that way it doesn't fail anyway but when it does you just go into the GUI it tells you what's wrong bingo and IBM service our partner service comes right out and fix it so that's what you need today because there aren't as many storage guys as you used to be no question you've got the waterfront covered no doubt about that and again congratulations on cracking the top 10 way back we consider that an honor and a privilege to be a part of that great welcome picture we really appreciate it thank you we'll continue the coverage here on the Cuba vmworld right after this

Yeah, I'm Aala, They're the co-founder back to back. This is the cube silicon angle.com, Silicon angle dot TV's production of the cube, our flagship telecasts. We go out to the event. That was a great conversation. I was really just, just cool. I could have, we could have probably hit on a few more things, obviously well read. Awesome. Co-founder of Cloudera a. You were, you did a good job teaming up with that co-founder, huh? Not bad on the cube, huh? He's not bad on the cube, isn't he? He, >>He reads the internet. >>That's what I'm saying. >>Anything is going on. >>He's a cube star, you know, And >>Technology. Jeff knows it. Yeah. >>We, we tell you, I'm smarter just by being in Cloudera all those years. And I actually was following what he was saying, Sad and didn't dust my brain. So, Okay, so you're back. So we were talking earlier with Michaels and about the relational database thing. So I kind of pick that up where we left off with you around, you know, he was really excited. It's like, you know, hey, we saw that relational database movement happen. He was part of that. Yeah, yeah. That generation. And then, but things were happening or kind of happening the same way in a similar way, still early. So I was trying to really peg with him, how early are we, like, so, you know, as the curve, you know, this is 1400, it's not the Javit Center yet. Maybe the Duke world, you know, next year might be at the Javit Center, 35,000 just don't go to Vegas. So I'm trying to figure out where we are on that curve. Yeah. And we on the upwards slope, you know, down here, not even hitting that, >>I think, I think, I think we're moving up quicker than previous waves. And actually if you, if you look for example, Oracle, I think it took them 15, 20 years until they, they really became a mature company, VM VMware, which started about, what, 12, 13 years ago. It took them about maybe eight years to, to be a big company, met your company, and I'm hoping we're gonna do it in five. So a couple more years. >>Highly accelerated. >>Yes. But yeah, we see, I mean, I'm, I'm, I've been surprised by the growth. I have been, Right? I've been told, warned about enterprise software and, and that it takes long for production to take place. >>But the consumerization trend is really changing that. I mean, it seems to be that, yeah, the enterprises always last. Why the shorter >>Cycle? I think the shorter cycle is coming from having the, the, the, the right solution for the right problem at the right time. I think that's a big part of it. So luck definitely is a big part of this. Now, in terms of why this is changing compared to a couple of dec decades ago, why the adoption is changing compared to a couple of decades ago. I, I think that's coming just because of how quickly the technology itself, the underlying hardware is evolving. So right now, the fact that you can buy a single server and it has eight cores to 16 cores has 12 hards to terabytes. Each is, is something that's just pushing the, the, the, the limits what you can do with the existing systems and hence making it more likely for new systems to disrupt them. >>Yeah. We can talk about a lot. It's very easy for people to actually start a, a big data >>Project. >>Yes. For >>Example. Yes. And the hardest part is, okay, what, what do I really, what problem do I need to solve? How am I gonna, how am I gonna monetize it? Right? Those are the hard parts. It's not the, not the underlying >>Technology. Yes, Yes, that's true. That's true. I mean, >>You're saying, eh, you're saying >>Because, because I'm seeing both so much. I'm, I'm seeing both. I'm seeing both. And like, I'm seeing cases where you're right. There's some companies that was like, Oh, this Hadoop thing is so cool. What problem can I solve with it? And I see other companies, like, I have this huge problem and, and, and they don't know that HA exists. It's so, And once they know, they just jump on it right away. It's like, we know when you have a headache and you're searching for the medicine in Espin. Wow. It >>Works. I was talking to Jeff Hiba before he came on stage and, and I didn't even get to it cuz we were so on a nice riff there. Right. Bunch of like a musicians playing the guitar together. But like he, we talked about the it and and dynamics and he said something that I thoughts right. On money and SAP is talking the same thing and said they're going to the lines of business. Yes. Because it is the gatekeeper that's, it's like selling mini computers to a mainframe selling client servers from a mini computer team. Yeah. >>There's not, we're seeing, we're seeing both as well. So more likely the, the former one meaning, meaning that yes, line of business and departments, they adopt the technology and then it comes in and they see there's already these five different departments having it and they think, okay, now we need to formalize this across the organization. >>So what happens then? What are you seeing out there? Like when that happens, that mean people get their hands on, Hey, we got a problem to solve. Yeah. Is that what it comes down to? Well, Hadoop exist. Go get Hadoop. Oh yeah. They plop it in there and I what does it do? They, >>So they pop it into their, in their own installation or on the, on the cloud and they show that this actually is working and solving the problem for them. Yeah. And when that happens, it's a very, it's a very easy adoption from there on because they just go tell it, We need this right now because it's solving this problem and it's gonna make, make us much >>More money moving it right in. Yes. No problems. >>Is is that another reason why the cycle's compressed? I mean, you know, you think client server, there was a lot of resistance from it and now it's more much, Same thing with mobile. I mean mobile is flipped, right? I mean, so okay, bring it in. We gotta deal with it. Yep. I would think the same thing. We, we have a data problem. Let's turn it into an >>Opportunity. Yeah. In my, and it goes back to what I said earlier, the right solution for the right problem at the right time. Like when they, when you have larger amounts of unstructured data, there isn't anything else out there that can even touch what had, can >>Do. So Amar, I need to just change gears here a minute. The gaming stuff. So we have, we we're featured on justin.tv right now on the front page. Oh wow. But the numbers aren't coming in because there's a competing stream of a recently released Modern Warfare three feature. Yes. Yes. So >>I was looking for, we >>Have to compete with Modern Warfare three. So can you, can we talk about Modern Warfare three for a minute and share the folks what you think of the current version, if any, if you played it. Yeah. So >>Unfortunately I'm waiting to get back home. I don't have my Xbox with me here. >>A little like a, I'm talking about >>My lines and business. >>Boom. Water warfares like a Christmas >>Tree here. Sorry. You know, I love, I'm a big gamer. I'm a big video gamer at Cloudera. We have every Thursday at five 30 end office, we, we play Call of of Beauty version four, which is modern world form one actually. And I challenge, I challenge people out there to come challenge our team. Just ping me on Twitter and we'll, we'll do a Cloudera versus >>Let's, let's, let's reframe that. Let team out. There am Abalas company. This is the geeks that invent the future. Jeff Haer Baer at Facebook now at Cloudera. Hammerer leading the charge. These guys are at gamers. So all the young gamers out there am are saying they're gonna challenge you. At which version? >>Modern Warfare one. >>Modern Warfare one. Yes. How do they fire in? Can you set up an >>External We'll >>We'll figure it out. We'll figure it out. Okay. >>Yeah. Just p me on Twitter and We'll, >>We can carry it live actually we can stream that. Yeah, >>That'd be great. >>Great. >>Yeah. So I'll tell you some of our best Hadooop committers and Hadoop developers pitch >>A picture. Modern Warfare >>Three going now Model Warfare three. Very excited about the game. I saw the, the trailers for it looks, graphics look just amazing. Graphics are amazing. I love the Sirius since the first one that came out. And I'm looking forward to getting back home to playing the game. >>I can't play, my son won't let me play. I'm such a fumbler with the Hub. I'm a keyboard controller. I can't work the Xbox controller. Oh, I have a coordination problem my age and I'm just a gluts and like, like Dad, sorry, Charity's over. I can I play with my friends? You the box. But I'm around big gamer. >>But, but in terms of, I mean, something I wanted to bring up is how to link up gaming with big data and analysis and so on. So like, I, I'm a big gamer. I love playing games, but at the same time, whenever I play games, I feel a little bit guilty because it's kind of like wasted time. So it's like, I mean, yeah, it's fun and I'm getting lots of enjoyment on it makes my life much more cheerful. But still, how can we harness all of this, all of these hours that gamers spend playing a game like Modern Warfare three, How can we, how can we collect instrument, all of the data that's coming from that and coming up, for example, with something useful with predicted. >>This is exactly, this is exactly the kind of application that's mainstream is gaming. Yeah. Yeah. Danny at Riot G is telling me, we saw him at Oracle Open World. He's up there for the Java one. He said that they, they don't really have a big data platform and their business is about understanding user behavior rep tons of data about user playing time, who they're playing with. Yeah, Yeah. How they want us to get into currency trading, You know, >>Buy, I can't, I can't mention the names, but some of the biggest giving companies out there are using Hadoop right now. And, and depending on CDH for doing exactly that kind of thing, creating >>A good user experience >>Today, they're doing it for the purpose of enhancing the user experience and improving retention. So they do track everything. Like every single bullet, you fire everything in best Ball Head, you get everything home run, you do. And, and, and in, in a three >>Type of game consecutive headshot, you get >>Everything, everything is being Yeah. Headshot you get and so on. But, but as you said, they are using that information today to sell more products and, and, and retain their users. Now what I'm suggesting is that how can you harness that energy for the good as well? I mean for making money, money is good and everything, but how can you harness that for doing something useful so that all of this entertainment time is also actually productive time as well. I think that'd be a holy grail in this, in this environment if we >>Can achieve that. Yeah. It used to be that corn used to be the telegraph of the future of about, of applications, but gaming really is, if you look at gaming, you know, you get the headset on. It's a collaborative environment. Oh yeah. You got unified communications. >>Yeah. And you see our teenager kids, how, how many hours they spend on these things. >>You got play as a play environments, very social collaborative. Yeah. You know, some say, you know, we we're saying, what I'm saying is that that's the, that's the future work environment with Skype evolving. We're our multiplayer game's called our job. Right? Yeah. You know, so I'm big on gaming. So all the gamers out there, a has challenged you. Yeah. Got a big data example. What else are we seeing? So let's talk about the, the software. So we, one of the things you were talking about that I really liked, you were going down the list. So on Mike's slide he had all the new features. So around the core, can you just go down the core and rattle off your version of what, what it means and what it is. So you start off with say H Base, we talked about that already. What are the other ones that are out there? >>So the projects that we have right there, >>The projects that are around those tools that are being built. Cause >>Yeah, so the foundational, the foundational one as we mentioned before, is sdfs for storage map use for processing. Yeah. And then the, the immediate layer above that is how to make MAP reduce easier for the masses. So how can, not everybody knows how to learn map, use Java, everybody knows sql, right? So, so one of the most successful projects right now that has the highest attach rate, meaning people usually when they install had do installed as well is Hive. So Hive takes sequel and so Jeff Harm Becker, my co-founder, when he was at Facebook, his team built the Hive system. Essentially Hive takes sql so you don't have to learn a new language, you already know sql. And then converts that into MAP use for you. That not only expands the developer base for how many people can use adu, but also makes it easier to integrate Hadoop through all DBC and JDBC integrated with BI tools like MicroStrategy and Tableau and Informatica, et cetera, et cetera. >>You mentioned R too. You mentioned R Program R >>As well. Yeah, R is one of our best partnerships. We're very, very happy with them. So that's, that's one of the very key projects is Hive assisted project to Hive ISS called Pig. A pig Latin is a language that ya invented that you have to learn the language. It's very easy, it's very easy to learn compared to map produce. But once you learn it, you can, you can specify very deep data pipelines, right? SQL is good for queries. It's not good for data pipelines because it becomes very convoluted. It becomes very hard for the, the human brain to understand it. So Pig is much more natural to the human. It's more like Pearl very similar to scripting kind of languages. So with Peggy can write very, very long data pipelines, again, very successful projects doing very, very well. Another key project is Edge Base, like you said. So Edge Base allows you to do low latencies. So you can do very, very quick lookups and also allows you to do transactions. So you can do updates in inserts and deletes. So one of the talks here that had World we try to recommend people watch when the videos come out is the Talk by Jonathan Gray from Facebook. And he talked about how they use Edge Base, >>Jonathan, something on here in the Cube later. Yeah. So >>Drill him on that. So they use Edge Base now for many, many things within Facebook. They have a big team now committed to building an improving edge base with us and with the community at large. And they're using it for doing their online messaging system. The live mail system in Facebook is powered by Edge Base right now. Again, Pro and eBay, The Casini project, they gave a keynote earlier today at the conference as well is using Edge Base as well. So Edge Base is definitely one of the projects that's growing very, very quickly right now within the Hudu system. Another key project that Jeff alluded to earlier when he was on here is Flum. So Flume is very instrumental because you have this nice system had, but Hadoop is useless unless you have data inside it. So how do you get the data inside do? >>So Flum essentially is this very nice framework for having these agents all over your infrastructure, inside your web servers, inside your application servers, inside your mobile devices, your network equipment that collects all of that data and then reliably and, and materializes it inside Hado. So Flum does that. Another good project is Uzi, so many of them, I dunno how, how long you want me to keep going here, But, but Uzi is great. Uzi is a workflow processing system. So Uzi allows you to define a series of jobs. Some of them in Pig, some of them in Hive, some of them in map use. You can define a series of them and then link them to each other and say, only start this job when these other jobs, two jobs finish because I'm waiting for the input from them before I can kick off and so on. >>So Uzi is a very nice framework that will will do that. We'll manage the whole graph of jobs for you and retry things when they fail, et cetera, et cetera. Another good project is where W H I R R and where allows you to very easily start ADU cluster on top of Amazon. Easy two on top of Rackspace, virtualized environ. It's more for kicking off, it's for kicking off Hadoop instances or edge based instances on any virtual infrastructure. Okay. VMware, vCloud. So that it supports all of the major vCloud, sorry, all of the me, all of the major virtualized infrastructure systems out there, Eucalyptus as well, and so on. So that's where W H I R R ARU is another key project. It's one, it's duck cutting's main kind of project right now. Don of that gut cutting came on stage with you guys has, So Aru ARO is a project about how do we encode with our files, the schema of these files, right? >>Because when you open up a text file and you don't know how to what the columns mean and how to pars it, it becomes very hard to work for it. So ARU allows you to do that much more easily. It's also useful for doing rrp. We call rtc remove procedure calls for having different services talk to each other. ARO is very useful for that as well. And the list keeps going on and on Maha. Yeah. Which we just, thanks for me for reminding me of my house. We just added Maha very recently actually. What is that >>Adam? I'm not >>Familiar with it. So Maha is a data mining library. So MAHA takes some of the most popular data mining algorithms for doing clustering and regression and statistical modeling and implements them using the map map with use model. >>They have, they have machine learning in it too or Yes, yes. So that's the machine learning. >>So, So yes. Stay vector to machines and so on. >>What Scoop? >>So Scoop, you know, all of them. Thanks for feeding me all the names. >>The ones I don't understand, >>But there's so many of them, right? I can't even remember all of them. So Scoop actually is a very interesting project, is short for SQL to Hadoop, hence the name Scoop, right? So SQ from SQL and Oops from Hadoop and also means Scoop as in scooping up stuff when you scoop up ice cream. Yeah. And the idea for Scoop is to make it easy to move data between relational systems like Oracle metadata and it is a vertical and so on and Hadoop. So you can very simply say, Scoop the name of the table inside the relation system, the name of the file inside Hadoop. And the, the table will be copied over to the file and Vice and Versa can say Scoop the name of the file in Hadoop, the name of the table over there, it'll move the table over there. So it's a connectivity tool between the relational world and the Hadoop world. >>Great, great tutorial. >>And all of these are Apache projects. They're all projects built. >>It's not part of your, your unique proprietary. >>Yes. But >>These are things that you've been contributing >>To, We're contributing to the whole ecosystem. Yes. >>And you understand very well. Yes. And >>And contribute to your knowledge of the marketplace >>And Absolutely. We collaborate with the, with the community on creating these projects. We employ committers and founders for many of these projects. Like Duck Cutting, the founder of He works in Cloudera, the founder for that UIE project. He works at Calera for zookeeper works at Calera. So we have a number of them on stuff >>Work. So we had Aroon from Horton Works. Yes. And and it was really good because I tell you, I walk away from that conversation and I gotta say for the folks out there, there really isn't a war going on in Apache. There isn't. And >>Apache, there isn't. I mean isn't but would be honest. Like, and in the developer community, we are friends, we're working together. We want to achieve the, there's >>No war. It's all Kumbaya. Everyone understands the rising tide floats, all boats are all playing nice in the same box. Yes. It's just a competitive landscape in Horton. Works >>In the business, >>Business business, competitive business, PR and >>Pr. We're trying to be friendly, as friendly as we can. >>Yeah, no, I mean they're, they're, they're hying it up. But he was like, he was cool. Like, Hey, you know, we know each other. Yes. We all know each other and we're just gonna offer free Yes. And charge with support. And so are they. And that's okay. And they got other things going on. Yes. But he brought up the question. He said they're, they're launching a management console. So I said, Tyler's got a significant lead. He kind of didn't really answer the question. So the question is, that's your core bread and butter, That's your yes >>And no. Yes and no. I mean if you look at, if you look at Cloudera Enterprise, and I mentioned this earlier and when we talked in the morning, it has two main things in it. Cloudera Enterprise has the management suite, but it also has the, the the the support and maintenance that we provide to our customers and all the experience that we have in our team part That subscription. Yes. For a description. And I, I wanna stress the point that the fact that I built a sports car doesn't mean that I'm good at running that sports car. The driver of the car usually is much better at driving the car than the guy who built the car, right? So yes, we have many people on staff that are helping build had, but we have many more people on stuff that helped run Hado at large scale, at at financial indu, financial industry, retail industry, telecom industry, media industry, health industry, et cetera, et cetera. So that's very, very important for our customer. All that experience that we bring in on how to run the system technically Yeah. Within these verticals. >>But their strategies clear. We're gonna create an open source project within Apache for a management consult. Yes. And we sell support too. Yes. So there'll be a free alternative to management. >>So we have to see, But I mean we look at the product, I mean our products, >>It's gotta come down to product differentiation. >>Our product has been in the market for two years, so they just started building their products. It's >>Alpha, It's just Alpha. The >>Product is Alpha in Alpha right now. Yeah. Okay. >>Well the Apache products, it is >>Apache, right? Yeah. The Apache project is out. So we'll see how it does it compare to ours. But I think ours is way, way ahead of anything else out there. Yeah. Essentially people to try that for themselves and >>See essentially, John, when I asked Arro why does the world need Hortonwork? You know, eventually the answer we got was, well it's free. It needs to be more open. Had needs to be more open. >>No, there's, >>It's going to be, That's not really the reason why Warton >>Works. >>No, they want, they want to go make money. >>Exactly. We wasn't >>Gonna say them you >>When I kept pushing and pushing and that's ultimately the closest we can get cuz you >>Just listens. Not gonna >>12 open source projects. Yes. >>I >>Mean, yeah, yeah. You can't get much more open. Yeah. Look >>At management >>Consult, but Airs not shooting on all those. I mean, I mean not only we are No, no, not >>No, no, we absolutely >>Are. No, you are contributing. You're not. But that's not all your projects. There's other people >>Involved. Yeah, we didn't start, we didn't start all of these projects. Yeah, that's >>True. You contributing heavily to all of them. >>Yes, we >>Are. And that's clear. Todd Lipkin said that, you know, he contributed his first patch to HPAC in 2008. Yes. So I mean, you go back through the ranks >>Of your people and Todd now is a committer on Edge base is a committer on had itself. So on a number >>Of you clearly the lead and, and you know, and, but >>There is a concern. But we, we've heard it and I wanna just ask you No, no. So there's a concern that if I build processes around a proprietary management console, Yes. I'm gonna end up being locked into that proprietary management CNA all over again. Now this is so far from ca Yes. >>Right. >>But that's a concern that some people have expressed. And, and, and I think one of the reasons why Port Works is getting so much attention. So Yes. >>Talk about that. It's, it's a very good, it's a very good observation to make. Actually, >>There there is two separate things here. There's the platform where all the data sets and then there's this management parcel beside the platform. Now why did we make the management console why the cloud didn't make the management console? Because it makes our job for supporting the customers much more achievable. When a customer calls in and says, We have a problem, help us fix this problem. When they go to our management console, there is a button they click that gives us a dump of the state, of the cluster. And that's what allows us to very quickly debug what's going on. And within minutes tell them you need to do this and you to do that. Yeah. Without that we just can't offer the support services. There's >>Real value there. >>Yes. So, so now a year from, But, but, but you have to keep in mind that the, the underlying platform is completely open source and free CBH is completely a hundred percent open source, a hundred percent free, a hundred percent Apache. So a year from now, when it comes time to renew with us, if the customer is not happy with our management suite is not happy with our support data, they can, they can go to work >>And works. People are afraid >>Of all they can go to ibm. >>The data, you can take the data that >>You don't even need to take the data. You're not gonna move the data. It's the same system, the same software. Every, everything in CDH is Apache. Right? We're not putting anything in cdh, which is not Apache. So a year from now, if you're not happy with our service to you and the value that we're providing, you can switch. There is no lock in. There is no lock. And >>Your, your argument would be the switching costs to >>The only lock in is happiness. The only lock in is which >>Happiness inspection customer delay. Which by, by the way, we just wrote a piece about those wars and we said the risk of lockin is low. We made that statement. We've got some heat for it. Yes. And >>This is sort of at scale though. What the, what the people are saying, they're throwing the tomatoes is saying if this is, again, in theory at scale, the customers are so comfortable with that, the console that they don't switch. Now my argument was >>Yes, but that means they're happy with it. That means they're satisfied and happy >>With it. >>And it's more economical for them than going and hiding people full-time on stuff. Yeah. >>So you're, you're always on check as, as long as the customer doesn't feel like Oracle. >>Yeah. See that's different. Oracle is very, Oracle >>Is like different, right? Yeah. Here it's like Cisco routers, they get nested into the environment, provide value. That's just good competitive product strategy. Yes. If it they're happy. Yeah. It's >>Called open washing with >>Oracle, >>I mean our number one core attribute on the company, the number one value for us is customer satisfaction. Keeping our people Yeah. Our customers happy with the service that we provide. >>So differentiate in the product. Yes. Keep the commanding lead. That's the strategist. That's the, that's what's happening. That's your goal. Yes. >>That's what's happening. >>Absolutely. Okay. Co-founder of Cloudera, Always a pleasure to have you on the cube. We really appreciate all the hospitality over the beer and a half. And wanna personally thank you for letting us sit in your office and we'll miss you >>And we'll miss you too. We'll >>See you at the, the Cube events off Swing by, thanks for coming on the cube and great to see you and congratulations on all your success. >>Thank >>You. And thanks for the review on Modern Warfare three. Yeah, yeah. >>Love me again. If there any gaming stuff, you know, I.