(mellow music) >> Oh, welcome back to theCUBE. We continue our coverage here at AWS re:Invent 22. We're in the Venetian in Las Vegas, and this place is hopping. I'm tell you what. It is a nearly standing room only that exhibit floor is jam packed, and it's been great to be along for the ride here on Accenture's sponsorship at the Executive summit as well. We'll talk about Pfizer today, you know them quite well, one of the largest biopharmaceutical companies in the world but their tech footprint is impressive, to say the least. And to talk more about that is Wes Barnes, senior Director of Pfizer's Digital Hosting Solutions. Wes, good to see you, sir. >> Good to meet you, John. >> And Jon Harrison, the North American lead for Infrastructure and engineering at Accenture. Jon, good to see you as well. >> Good to see you as well. >> Thanks for joining us. >> Happy to be here. >> Alright, so let's jump in. Pfizer, we make drugs, right? >> Pharmaceuticals. >> Yes. >> Among the most preeminent, as I said biopharms in the world. But your tech capabilities and your tech focus as we were talking about earlier, has changed dramatically in the 18 years that you've been there. >> Yep. >> Now, talk about that evolution a little bit to where you were and what you have to be now. >> Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. When I started at Pfizer, IT was an enabling function. It was akin to HR or our facilities function. And over the past couple years, it's dramatically changed. Where Digital now is really at the center of everything we do across Pfizer. You know it really is a core strategic element of our business. >> Yeah. And those elements that you were talking about, just in terms of whether it's research, whether it's your patients, I don't want to go through the laundry lists the litany of things, but the touch points with data and what you need it to do for you in terms of you know, computations, what you, the list is long. It's pretty impressive. >> Yeah, yeah, for sure yeah. >> I mean, shed some light on that for us. >> We cannot release a medicine without the use of technology. And if you think about research now, a huge component of our research is computational chemistry. Manufacturing medicines now is a practice in using data and analytics and predictive machine learning and analytics capabilities to help us determine how to best you know, apply the capabilities to deliver the outcomes that we need. The way in which we connect with patients and payers now is wholly digital. So it's an entirely different way of operating than it was 10 years ago. >> And the past three years, pretty remarkable in many respects, to say the least, I would think, I mean, John, you've seen what Pfizer's been up to, talk about maybe just this, the recent past and all that has happened and what they've been able to do. >> Yeah, I mean, what is so exciting to me about working with a company like Pfizer and working in life sciences more broadly is the impact that they make on patients around the world world, right? I mean, think about those past three years and Pfizer stepped up and met the moment for all of us, right? And as we talk a little bit about the role that we played together with Pfizer with AWS in their journey to the cloud, it's so motivating for myself personally it's so motivating for every single person on the team that we ask to spend nights and weekends migrating things to the cloud, creating new capabilities, knowing that at the end of the day, the work that they're doing is making the world a healthier place. >> Yeah, we talk so much about modernization now, right? And it's, but it kind of means different things to different people depending on where you're coming into the game, right? If you've been smart and been planning all along then this is not a dramatic shift in some cases though, for others it is. Right? >> Yeah. >> Traumatic in some cases for some people. >> For sure. >> For Pfizer, I mean talk about how do you see modernization and what does it mean to your operations? >> Following our success of the COVID program of 2021, I mean it became evident to us that, you know we needed to maintain a new pace of innovation and in fact try to find ways to accelerate that pace of innovation. And as I said earlier everything we do at Pfizer is centered around digital. But despite that, and despite 10 years of consolidating infrastructure and moving towards modern technology, last year, only 10% of Pfizer's infrastructure was in the native public cloud. So we had a problem to solve. In fact, I remember, you know, we had to build up our clinical systems to support the volume of work that we were doing for COVID-19 vaccine. We were rolling things into our data center to build up the capacity to achieve what we needed to achieve. Moving to the public cloud became more imperative to try to achieve the scale and the modern capabilities that we need. >> And so where did you come into play here with this? Because obviously as a partner you're right alongside for the ride but you saw these inherent challenges that they had and how did Accenture answer the bell there? >> Well, so look, I mean we saw Pfizer react to the pandemic. We saw them seize the moment. We talked together about how IT needed to move quicker and quicker towards the cloud to unlock capabilities that would serve Pfizer's business well into the future. And together we laid out some pretty ambitious goals. I mean, really moving at a velocity in a pace that I think for both Accenture and AWS surpassed the velocity and pace that we've done anywhere else. >> Yeah, right, yeah. >> So we've set out on an ambitious plan together. You know, I was kind of reflecting about some of the successes, what went well what didn't in preparation for re:Invent. And you know, many of the folks that'll listen to this will remember the old days of moving data centers when you'd have a war room you'd have a conference bridge open the whole time. Someone would be running around the tile floor in the data center, do a task, call back up to the bridge and say, what do I do next, right? Then when I think about what we did together at Pfizer in moving towards the public cloud, I mean, we had weekends most weekends where we were running a wave with 10,000 plus discrete activities. >> Yeah. >> Wow. >> Right, so that old model doesn't scale. >> Right. >> And we really anchored, >> You have a very crowded data center with a lot of people running into each other. >> You'd have a whole lot of people running around. But we really anchored to an Accenture capability that we call myNav Migrate. I know you guys have talked about it here before so I won't go into that. But what we found is that we approached this problem of velocity not as a technical problem to solve for but as a loading and optimization problem of resources. Right, thought about it just a little bit different way and made sure that we could programmatically control command and control of the program in a way that people didn't have to wait around all Saturday afternoon to be notified that their next activity was ready, right? They could go out, they could live their day and they could get a notification from the platform that says, hey it's about your turn. Right, they could claim it they could do it, they could finish it, and that was really important to us. I mean, to be able to control the program in that type of way at scale. >> Yeah, by the way, the reason we went as fast it was a deliberate choice and you'll talk to plenty of folks who have a five year journey to the public cloud. And the reason we wanted to move as fast as we did and Jon talked about some of it, we wanted to get the capabilities to the business as quickly as we could. The pace of innovation was such that we had to offer native cloud capabilities we had to offer quickly. We also knew that by compressing the time it took to get to the cloud, we could focus the organization get it done as economically as possible but then lift all boats with the tide and move the organization forward in terms of the skills and the capabilities that we need to deliver modern outcomes. >> So, you know, we talk about impacts internally, obviously with your processes, but beyond that, not just scientists not just chemists, but to your, I mean, millions of customers, right? We're talking, you know, globally here. What kind of impacts can you see that directly relate to them, and benefits that they're receiving by this massive technical move you've made? >> Pfizer's mission is breakthroughs that change patient lives. I mean, the work that we do the work that everybody does within Pfizer is about delivering therapies that, you know provide health outcomes that make people live longer, live healthier lives. For us, modernizing our infrastructure means that we can enable the work of scientists to find novel therapies faster or find things that perhaps couldn't have been found any other way without some of the modern technologies that we're bringing to bear. Saving money within infrastructure and IT is treasure that we can pour back into the important areas of research or development or manufacturing. We're also able to, you know, offer an ecosystem and a capability in which we connect with patients differently through digital mechanisms. And modern cloud enables that, you know, using modern digital experiences and customer experience, and patient experience platforms means that we can use wearable devices and mobile technologies and connect to people in different ways and offer solutions that just didn't exist a couple years ago. >> And so, I mean, you're talking about IoT stuff too, right? >> 100%. >> It's way out on the edge and personal mobile, in a mobile environment. And so challenges in terms of you know, data governance and compliance and security, all these things, right? They come into play because it's personal health information. So how, as you've taken them, you know to this public cloud environment how much of a factor are those considerations? Because, you know, this is not just a product a service, it's a live human being. >> Yeah. I mean, you start with that, you think about it through the process and you think about it afterwards, right, I mean, that has to be a core factor in every stage of the program, and it was. >> So in, in terms of where you are now, then, okay, it's not over. >> It's never over. >> I mean, you know, as good as you are today and as fast as you are and as accurate and as efficient. >> Yeah. >> Got to get better, right? You got to stay competitive. >> Yeah. >> So where do you find that? Because, you know, with powers being what they are with speed and what it is how much more is there to squeeze out of this rock? >> There's a lot more to squeeze out of the rock. If you think about what we've done over the past year it's about creating sort of a new minimum viable product for infrastructure. So we've sort of raised the bar and created an environment upon which we can continue to innovate that innovation is going to continue sort of forever at this point. You know, the next focus for us is how to identify the business processes that deliver the greatest value ultimately to our patients. And use the modern platform that we've just built to improve those processes to deliver things faster, deliver new capabilities. Pfizer is making a huge investment in digital medicines therapies that are delivered through smart devices through wearables using, as I said technology that didn't exist before. That wouldn't be possible without the platform that we've built. So over the past year, we've come a long way but I think that we've effectively set the table for all of the things that are yet to come. >> So, Jon, how do you then, as you've learned a lot about life science or, and certainly Pfizer with what they're up to, how do you then apply, you know, what you know about their world to what you know about the tech world and make it actionable for growth to make it actionable for, for future expansion? >> Yeah, I mean, we start by doing it together, right? I think that's a really important part. Accenture brings a wealth of knowledge, both industry experience and expertise, technology experience and expertise. We work together with our clients like Pfizer with our partners like AWS to bring the best across that power of three to meet clients where they're at to understand where they want to go, and then create a bespoke approach that meets their business needs. And that's effectively what we're doing now, right? I mean, if you think about the phase that we've just went through, I mean, a couple of fast facts here no pun intended, right? 7,800 server instances across 11 operating system versions 7,500 databases across 20 database versions, right? 4,700 applications, 350,000 migration activities managed across an eight month period. >> In eight months. >> Yeah. But that's not the goal, right? The goal is now to take, to Wes' point that platform that's been developed and leverage that to the benefit of the business ultimately to the benefit of the patient. >> You know, why them, we have we've talked a lot about Pfizer, but why Accenture? What, what, what's, 'cause it's got to be a two way street, right? >> We've had a long partnership with Accenture. Accenture supports a huge component of our application environment at Pfizer and has for quite a long time. Look, we didn't make it easy on them. We put them up against a large number of world class SIs. But look, Accenture brought, you know, sort of what I think of as the trifecta here. They brought the technical capabilities and knowledge of the AWS environment. They brought the ability to really understand the business outcomes that we were trying to achieve and a program leadership capability that, you know I think is world class. And Jon talked about myNav, you know, we recognized that doing what we were trying to do in the time that we were doing it required new machinery, new analytics and data capabilities that just didn't exist. Automation didn't exist. Some people experience capabilities that would allow us to interface with application owners and users at a velocity and a pace and a scale that just hasn't been seen before at Pfizer. Accenture brought all three of those things together and I think they did a great job helping us get to where we need to be. >> When you hear Jon rattle through the stats like he just did, right? We talk about all, I mean, not that I'm going to ask you to pat yourself on the back but do you ever, >> He should. >> Does it blow your mind a little bit, honestly that you're talking about that magnitude of activity in that compressed period of time? That's extraordinary. >> It's 75% of our global IT footprint now in the public cloud, which is fantastic. I mean, look, I think the timing was right. I think Pfizer is in a little bit of a unique position coming off of COVID. We are incredibly motivated to keep the pace up, I mean across all lines of business. So, you know what we found is a really willing leadership team, executive leadership team, digital leadership team to endorse a change of this magnitude. >> Well, it's a great success story. It's beyond impressive. So congratulations to both you on that front and certainly you wish you continued success down the road as well. >> Thank you. >> Thank you gentlemen. >> Thank you. >> Good job. >> Pfizer, and boy, you talk about a job well done. Just spectacular. All right, you are watching our coverage here on theCUBE, we're at the AWS re:Invent 22 show. This is Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture and you're watching theCUBE the leader in high tech coverage.

(mellow music) >> Oh, welcome back to theCUBE. We continue our coverage here at AWS re:Invent 22. We're in the Venetian in Las Vegas, and this place is hopping. I'm tell you what. It is a nearly standing room only that exhibit floor is jam packed, and it's been great to be along for the ride here on Accenture's sponsorship at the Executive summit as well. We'll talk about Pfizer today, you know them quite well, one of the largest biopharmaceutical companies in the world but their tech footprint is impressive, to say the least. And to talk more about that is Wes Barnes, senior Director of Pfizer's Digital Hosting Solutions. Wes, good to see you, sir. >> Good to meet you, John. >> And Jon Harrison, the North American lead for Infrastructure and engineering at Accenture. Jon, good to see you as well. >> Good to see you as well. >> Thanks for joining us. >> Happy to be here. >> Alright, so let's jump in. Pfizer, we make drugs, right? >> Pharmaceuticals. >> Yes. >> Among the most preeminent, as I said biopharms in the world. But your tech capabilities and your tech focus as we were talking about earlier, has changed dramatically in the 18 years that you've been there. >> Yep. >> Now, talk about that evolution a little bit to where you were and what you have to be now. >> Yeah, yeah. It's interesting. When I started at Pfizer, IT was an enabling function. It was akin to HR or our facilities function. And over the past couple years, it's dramatically changed. Where Digital now is really at the center of everything we do across Pfizer. You know it really is a core strategic element of our business. >> Yeah. And those elements that you were talking about, just in terms of whether it's research, whether it's your patients, I don't want to go through the laundry lists the litany of things, but the touch points with data and what you need it to do for you in terms of you know, computations, what you, the list is long. It's pretty impressive. >> Yeah, yeah, for sure yeah. >> I mean, shed some light on that for us. >> We cannot release a medicine without the use of technology. And if you think about research now, a huge component of our research is computational chemistry. Manufacturing medicines now is a practice in using data and analytics and predictive machine learning and analytics capabilities to help us determine how to best you know, apply the capabilities to deliver the outcomes that we need. The way in which we connect with patients and payers now is wholly digital. So it's an entirely different way of operating than it was 10 years ago. >> And the past three years, pretty remarkable in many respects, to say the least, I would think, I mean, John, you've seen what Pfizer's been up to, talk about maybe just this, the recent past and all that has happened and what they've been able to do. >> Yeah, I mean, what is so exciting to me about working with a company like Pfizer and working in life sciences more broadly is the impact that they make on patients around the world world, right? I mean, think about those past three years and Pfizer stepped up and met the moment for all of us, right? And as we talk a little bit about the role that we played together with Pfizer with AWS in their journey to the cloud, it's so motivating for myself personally it's so motivating for every single person on the team that we ask to spend nights and weekends migrating things to the cloud, creating new capabilities, knowing that at the end of the day, the work that they're doing is making the world a healthier place. >> Yeah, we talk so much about modernization now, right? And it's, but it kind of means different things to different people depending on where you're coming into the game, right? If you've been smart and been planning all along then this is not a dramatic shift in some cases though, for others it is. Right? >> Yeah. >> Traumatic in some cases for some people. >> For sure. >> For Pfizer, I mean talk about how do you see modernization and what does it mean to your operations? >> Following our success of the COVID program of 2021, I mean it became evident to us that, you know we needed to maintain a new pace of innovation and in fact try to find ways to accelerate that pace of innovation. And as I said earlier everything we do at Pfizer is centered around digital. But despite that, and despite 10 years of consolidating infrastructure and moving towards modern technology, last year, only 10% of Pfizer's infrastructure was in the native public cloud. So we had a problem to solve. In fact, I remember, you know, we had to build up our clinical systems to support the volume of work that we were doing for COVID-19 vaccine. We were rolling things into our data center to build up the capacity to achieve what we needed to achieve. Moving to the public cloud became more imperative to try to achieve the scale and the modern capabilities that we need. >> And so where did you come into play here with this? Because obviously as a partner you're right alongside for the ride but you saw these inherent challenges that they had and how did Accenture answer the bell there? >> Well, so look, I mean we saw Pfizer react to the pandemic. We saw them seize the moment. We talked together about how IT needed to move quicker and quicker towards the cloud to unlock capabilities that would serve Pfizer's business well into the future. And together we laid out some pretty ambitious goals. I mean, really moving at a velocity in a pace that I think for both Accenture and AWS surpassed the velocity and pace that we've done anywhere else. >> Yeah, right, yeah. >> So we've set out on an ambitious plan together. You know, I was kind of reflecting about some of the successes, what went well what didn't in preparation for re:Invent. And you know, many of the folks that'll listen to this will remember the old days of moving data centers when you'd have a war room you'd have a conference bridge open the whole time. Someone would be running around the tile floor in the data center, do a task, call back up to the bridge and say, what do I do next, right? Then when I think about what we did together at Pfizer in moving towards the public cloud, I mean, we had weekends most weekends where we were running a wave with 10,000 plus discrete activities. >> Yeah. >> Wow. >> Right, so that old model doesn't scale. >> Right. >> And we really anchored, >> You have a very crowded data center with a lot of people running into each other. >> You'd have a whole lot of people running around. But we really anchored to an Accenture capability that we call myNav Migrate. I know you guys have talked about it here before so I won't go into that. But what we found is that we approached this problem of velocity not as a technical problem to solve for but as a loading and optimization problem of resources. Right, thought about it just a little bit different way and made sure that we could programmatically control command and control of the program in a way that people didn't have to wait around all Saturday afternoon to be notified that their next activity was ready, right? They could go out, they could live their day and they could get a notification from the platform that says, hey it's about your turn. Right, they could claim it they could do it, they could finish it, and that was really important to us. I mean, to be able to control the program in that type of way at scale. >> Yeah, by the way, the reason we went as fast it was a deliberate choice and you'll talk to plenty of folks who have a five year journey to the public cloud. And the reason we wanted to move as fast as we did and Jon talked about some of it, we wanted to get the capabilities to the business as quickly as we could. The pace of innovation was such that we had to offer native cloud capabilities we had to offer quickly. We also knew that by compressing the time it took to get to the cloud, we could focus the organization get it done as economically as possible but then lift all boats with the tide and move the organization forward in terms of the skills and the capabilities that we need to deliver modern outcomes. >> So, you know, we talk about impacts internally, obviously with your processes, but beyond that, not just scientists not just chemists, but to your, I mean, millions of customers, right? We're talking, you know, globally here. What kind of impacts can you see that directly relate to them, and benefits that they're receiving by this massive technical move you've made? >> Pfizer's mission is breakthroughs that change patient lives. I mean, the work that we do the work that everybody does within Pfizer is about delivering therapies that, you know provide health outcomes that make people live longer, live healthier lives. For us, modernizing our infrastructure means that we can enable the work of scientists to find novel therapies faster or find things that perhaps couldn't have been found any other way without some of the modern technologies that we're bringing to bear. Saving money within infrastructure and IT is treasure that we can pour back into the important areas of research or development or manufacturing. We're also able to, you know, offer an ecosystem and a capability in which we connect with patients differently through digital mechanisms. And modern cloud enables that, you know, using modern digital experiences and customer experience, and patient experience platforms means that we can use wearable devices and mobile technologies and connect to people in different ways and offer solutions that just didn't exist a couple years ago. >> And so, I mean, you're talking about IoT stuff too, right? >> 100%. >> It's way out on the edge and personal mobile, in a mobile environment. And so challenges in terms of you know, data governance and compliance and security, all these things, right? They come into play because it's personal health information. So how, as you've taken them, you know to this public cloud environment how much of a factor are those considerations? Because, you know, this is not just a product a service, it's a live human being. >> Yeah. I mean, you start with that, you think about it through the process and you think about it afterwards, right, I mean, that has to be a core factor in every stage of the program, and it was. >> So in, in terms of where you are now, then, okay, it's not over. >> It's never over. >> I mean, you know, as good as you are today and as fast as you are and as accurate and as efficient. >> Yeah. >> Got to get better, right? You got to stay competitive. >> Yeah. >> So where do you find that? Because, you know, with powers being what they are with speed and what it is how much more is there to squeeze out of this rock? >> There's a lot more to squeeze out of the rock. If you think about what we've done over the past year it's about creating sort of a new minimum viable product for infrastructure. So we've sort of raised the bar and created an environment upon which we can continue to innovate that innovation is going to continue sort of forever at this point. You know, the next focus for us is how to identify the business processes that deliver the greatest value ultimately to our patients. And use the modern platform that we've just built to improve those processes to deliver things faster, deliver new capabilities. Pfizer is making a huge investment in digital medicines therapies that are delivered through smart devices through wearables using, as I said technology that didn't exist before. That wouldn't be possible without the platform that we've built. So over the past year, we've come a long way but I think that we've effectively set the table for all of the things that are yet to come. >> So, Jon, how do you then, as you've learned a lot about life science or, and certainly Pfizer with what they're up to, how do you then apply, you know, what you know about their world to what you know about the tech world and make it actionable for growth to make it actionable for, for future expansion? >> Yeah, I mean, we start by doing it together, right? I think that's a really important part. Accenture brings a wealth of knowledge, both industry experience and expertise, technology experience and expertise. We work together with our clients like Pfizer with our partners like AWS to bring the best across that power of three to meet clients where they're at to understand where they want to go, and then create a bespoke approach that meets their business needs. And that's effectively what we're doing now, right? I mean, if you think about the phase that we've just went through, I mean, a couple of fast facts here no pun intended, right? 7,800 server instances across 11 operating system versions 7,500 databases across 20 database versions, right? 4,700 applications, 350,000 migration activities managed across an eight month period. >> In eight months. >> Yeah. But that's not the goal, right? The goal is now to take, to Wes' point that platform that's been developed and leverage that to the benefit of the business ultimately to the benefit of the patient. >> You know, why them, we have we've talked a lot about Pfizer, but why Accenture? What, what, what's, 'cause it's got to be a two way street, right? >> We've had a long partnership with Accenture. Accenture supports a huge component of our application environment at Pfizer and has for quite a long time. Look, we didn't make it easy on them. We put them up against a large number of world class SIs. But look, Accenture brought, you know, sort of what I think of as the trifecta here. They brought the technical capabilities and knowledge of the AWS environment. They brought the ability to really understand the business outcomes that we were trying to achieve and a program leadership capability that, you know I think is world class. And Jon talked about myNav, you know, we recognized that doing what we were trying to do in the time that we were doing it required new machinery, new analytics and data capabilities that just didn't exist. Automation didn't exist. Some people experience capabilities that would allow us to interface with application owners and users at a velocity and a pace and a scale that just hasn't been seen before at Pfizer. Accenture brought all three of those things together and I think they did a great job helping us get to where we need to be. >> When you hear Jon rattle through the stats like he just did, right? We talk about all, I mean, not that I'm going to ask you to pat yourself on the back but do you ever, >> He should. >> Does it blow your mind a little bit, honestly that you're talking about that magnitude of activity in that compressed period of time? That's extraordinary. >> It's 75% of our global IT footprint now in the public cloud, which is fantastic. I mean, look, I think the timing was right. I think Pfizer is in a little bit of a unique position coming off of COVID. We are incredibly motivated to keep the pace up, I mean across all lines of business. So, you know what we found is a really willing leadership team, executive leadership team, digital leadership team to endorse a change of this magnitude. >> Well, it's a great success story. It's beyond impressive. So congratulations to both you on that front and certainly you wish you continued success down the road as well. >> Thank you. >> Thank you gentlemen. >> Thank you. >> Good job. >> Pfizer, and boy, you talk about a job well done. Just spectacular. All right, you are watching our coverage here on theCUBE, we're at the AWS re:Invent 22 show. This is Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture and you're watching theCUBE the leader in high tech coverage.

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

>> Live, from Orlando, Florida. It's theCube covering Microsoft Ignite, brought to you by Cohesity, and theCube's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, to theCube's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We have two guests for this segment, we have Ross Smith, the Principle Program Manager at Microsoft, and Greg Taylor, who is the Director of Product Marketing at Microsoft. Thank you so much for joining us! >> Thanks for having us. >> So, I want to start off by talking about messaging. You are both legends in the Microsoft messaging world, sorry to be obsequious here. >> That just means we're old. >> You've been around a while, it's not your first rodeo. >> No, no. >> So, talk a little bit about what's new, what the enhancements you're doing for Enterprise, it is the most used app. >> Yeah. >> So we're launching Exchange Server 2019 this year. It's another version of on-premises exchange, it's incredible. We had 2000 people registered for the session, we had 1000 in the room. There's still some love for on-prem exchange, no doubt, so that's been a big thing we're talking about at Ignite this year. For those customers, and I'll be honest it's very much a release aimed at large Enterprise customers who want to keep some exchange on-prem. We strongly believe that small-medium business should be in the cloud, so we've focused on the kind of features that really large Enterprises really want to get from Exchange. >> Yeah, and then from a app perspective, we've been heavily invested with ALUP, Fry, WES and Android to bring a unique and valuable experience for both consumers and commercial users using both Office 365 and Exchange on-premises. So we now have a hundred million users using Outlook Mobile today, and it's been a great experience and we continue to evolve the app on a weekly basis, now. >> Can you talk a little bit about the evolution of the app and what kinds of features and enhancements you're using for both the consumers and Enterprise? >> Right, yeah. So the app originally began as a consumer acquisition, which we've now targeted and rebranded it as Outlook, and we've been heavily focused on bringing Enterprise features that our users know and love. Office 365 Groups is a great example of an experience that we built into the app that no other native mail client or third-party mail client can deliver today. We've delivered other Enterprise security-specific features like Azure Active Directory conditional access so customers can lock down what mobile apps can access the service and prevent any other client from doing so. And then, of course, there's in-tune app protection policies which allow us to, and customers to, ensure only the corporate data is protected and exclude the personal data, so that we can ensure there's no data leakage scenarios going. >> I wonder if we can step back for a second. I think about messaging, it's very diverse. I remember back in the '90s, I was helping companies get access to this whole "internet thing" and LANs and setting up and oh, we're going to go from faxes and memos to emails, show how old I am in this business, too. But today, our mobile devices, a lot of what we're doing companies, whether they have their own data-centers or doing their cloud, there's usually lots of different ways we communicate. My joke is, the best way to communicate with someone is probably the one they prefer to and hopefully aren't buried in. >> Yes. Because we all have the Slacks and all those other things out there. How do you view the word's game, how does the Exchange and Outlook and those fit into the overall portfolio and interact with everything else. >> From the Exchange side, email is dead. I've heard email is dead for I don't know how many years and well, email is still one of the primary communication methods we all use and rely upon. And so Exchange was one of the applications that kind of coined the mission-critical application moniker, right? 22 years ago, 20 years ago, Exchange was one of the mission-critical apps. But we actually kind of think of Exchange now as almost a service, a commodity, like the power. And most people, it's kind of interesting, we have the front and the back end of things, right? I'm thinking about the messaging infrastructure of the back, and Ross is now working on the client side. Most people see the client features and think of them as Outlook and client features, but a lot of them are Exchange features which are servicing the client. It's been a real kind of evolution. We've got to a point where nobody really cares about the back end, unless it's not there, then that's a problem, but most of the things servicing the client. >> And so what we see is that the transition from typical on-premises infrastructure to the cloud service usually, generally begins with email into the Office 365 stack, and that starts lighting up additional features. And then from a mobility perspective, we're seeing that that begins the on-ramp into mobile. Because, like Greg mentioned, we've had email capability on mobile devices integrated into Exchange for 17 years now, so it's a very ubiquitous thing to have on a mobile device, so it's just a natural progression just to use email on a mobile device. And then that begins lighting up as customers begin to move to Office 365, they start lighting up additional features like teams integration or Skype for business or any of the other Office apps. And then they just light up naturally. And then through all of our protection mechanisms we're able to ensure that that entire experience is secure from a IT business, and protecting it. >> Just speaking of the evolution of messaging in and of itself, what do you see, people who've been in the industry a long time, what do you see as next, I mean, where do we go from here? Email, they say, is dead, we know it's not dead, but what are the next kinds of generation of features and enhancements that you see customers really needing, and that you're working on at Microsoft? >> Alright, I think that Exchange was really interesting from an Office 365 perspective, as Exchange isn't really just a messaging engine anymore, it's a data store that we are, through things like Graph and all the other applications, is giving businesses a whole new way of looking at the data, and so we're pulling data from all the different places. Exchange is becoming almost a plumbing kind of infrastructure piece, but it's a key data source and I think the data is still there, the communication is still there, but I think much of the future development is in the client-side apps and how people interact with the data, and the back-end just becomes the infrastructure, right? >> Actually you bring up a great point. A premise that my Head of Research at Wikibon had is talking about Microsoft's position in AI today, and Office 365 and the messaging that you have, there's so much data there if you wanted it. What are people worrying about? How can a company understand that? How can Microsoft help businesses in general? There's a touchpoint that even an infrastructure as a service-provider wouldn't have, but you really get to the end-point and the end users in productivity, and that's a huge opportunity for Microsoft in the future as long as you're not messing with our data, you're not as heavy into, you know some of the other messaging people out there, that you're like, wait, why am I getting ads for that stuff, or, I think I talked about that stuff. >> And that's a great point, Stu, because going back to Outlook Mobile as an example, right? We're heavily invested in AI-driven capabilities into that app, zero-touch search, as an instance. You can go right in the app, tap one button and you see your favorite contacts, you get your Discover information from the Office Graph your next itinerary and travel information, and we're lighting up that functionality across the board throughout the app. Location-rich data, using Cortana time-to-leave services, so that you can get to a meeting at the right time, as opposed to a typical oh, it reminded me at 15 minutes and I got to hop 45 minutes down the other end of, where are we, West? In the West building, right? So we're building all that functionality into clients like Outlook Mobile and the rest of the stack to help drive that type of capabilities. >> And all of that data's in the back end, right? You said email is this repository of incredible business information, and so the question is how you leverage that, how do you take what's in there and surface it in a way that makes sense to the users? It's a fascinating time at the moment, where the data's there, we just got to know how to use it in the right way. And I agree, using it in the right way and not using it to sell stuff, that's absolutely our approach to it, so, super important. >> And do you work closely with clients to come up with this new kind of functionality? One of the biggest challenges that so many technology companies face is staying on the cutting edge of these ideas and innovation, so how closely are you working with customers to dream up new functionality? >> Yeah, we're working with customers all the time. We do it through a variety of different channels. We have UserVoice, which allows customers and end users to directly interface and provide their ideas. We have private preview programs, where we target customers about specific new feature sets. TAP programs, like we're doing with Exchange 2019, as well as future releases within Office 365 that enable that type of experience. >> Exchange, I think, historically, has always been very customer focused, very community focused. We have a great bunch of MVPs, the TAP program, the Technology Adoption Program, is a bunch of customers that deploy our pre-production code in production for us, so we've got some real big customers who, they're running versions of Exchange that the world hasn't seen. >> One of the themes we heard in Satya's keynote yesterday is business productivity, and we know one of the biggest challenges out there is, you get this new stuff, and you're like, well, I'm going to pretty much just try to use it the way I always have been doing it, and some of us have been using emails for decades and decades and I look at my own usage and wow, I'm probably a bit out of date. If I could just wipe my brain and say 'okay, here's this cool new tool' that could do all this stuff, we wouldn't even call it email, we'd call it something different. I know you guys do things like the Channel 9 broadcast, I'm sure there's lots of things on the website, how do you help customers learn to use the new stuff and get rid of some of the things, the old habits that they had in using these technologies. And can you get everybody to stop 'reply to all' in the big group, that would be super helpful. >> Work on that please. >> That's interesting, we're building it into the apps, to be honest. We're doing a lot of work whenever we release new features to light up an experience within the app that guide the user on how to use that new functionality to help them understand what they can do with the app, as well as simplifying the overall app structure. You look at some of our apps, they become very bloated in terms of all the widgets you have available and knobs to control it and we're trying to simplify that stack. We're refreshing with Outlook 2019 and Office Pro Plus. We're refreshing the user interface on desktop, we're doing the same in Mac. We've done it in Outlook for iOS, we're redoing OA, as well, and Office 365, all to enhance and simplify the experience, and, as well, provide a consistent experience across all the endpoints, which will help. >> If the question is here, how do we wean people off email, how do we get them off email. >> Just their old habits and patterns. >> And you know, it's kind of funny, but it still works. I remember having a conversation with somebody once who, it was a presentation we did once, and it was a team who did more of a social kind of thing, and their view was, they put a picture of the Queen of England up on a slide and said 'Email is old, like the Queen of England.' And my response was, well so are fire and the wheel, but they seem to be hanging around pretty well, so far. So I think there are certain things for which email is still king, but it's evolving and changing. I think we're still waiting for the real killer app that replaces email. >> It's not Yammer. >> It's not what? (laughter) >> It's not Yammer. >> I'm not going on camera saying that. The way I prefer to think of it is, I don't really matter what the client is or how you all interact with it, if we can all use an app that suits our own style of working, right? My inbox is zero inbox. I'm a zero inbox kind of guy, right? If I can work like that and interact with people who want to work on a different client, I'm happy. >> Not to go on the Yammer piece, but you made me think a little bit about acquisitions. Big acquisitions, like LinkedIn and Github, messaging ties into both of those quite a bit. Any visibility you can give? I know there's some integrations there, but how does that look? >> So we're launching LinkedIn integration with Outlook for iOS and Android as we speak. That's something we'll be rolling out shortly, and it enables, within the people or contact card, you can quickly see information from their LinkedIn data set, as well as the ability for us to push data from Office 365 into LinkedIn, so that LinkedIn users can also see relevant information about who that person's interacting with from a calendar type of perspective. So we're definitely taking that availability and providing that through our mutual customers. >> Great. Well, Ross and Greg, thank you so much for coming on the show, it was >> Thanks for having us. really a pleasure having you. >> Yeah, it was great. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more of theCube's live coverage from the Orange County Civic Center Microsoft Ignite in just a little bit. (electronic music)