>>The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid two thousands permanently changed the way we think about it at the heart of it. The cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs more than half of it, budgets were spent on people. And much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning management, recovery optimization and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud-like model across all their application infrastructure, irrespective of its physical location. This is not only cut costs, but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone. My name is Dave Vellante and welcome to simplifying hybrid cloud made possible by Cisco today, we're going to explore hybrid cloud as an operating model for organizations or the definition of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services, you know, somewhere out in the clouds. >>No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud on premises infrastructure. And it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale. While at the same time, preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where it managers must think differently to deal with this complexity. And the environment is constantly changing the growth and diversity of applications continues. And now we're living in a world where the workforce is remote hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIO is by enterprise technology. Research ETR indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. >>So the challenge for it managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem public cloud and edge locations. This is the future of it. Now today we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding hybrid cloud. First up is Didi Dasgupta, who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next we're going to hear from Maneesh Agra wall and Darren Williams, who will help us unpack HyperFlex, which is Cisco's hyper-converged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment we'll drill into unified compute more than a decade ago. Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking in a single offering. Cisco frankly changed the legacy server market with UCS unified compute system. The X series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade, and we'll explore how it fits into the world of hybrid cloud and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So thanks for being here. Let's go. >>Okay. Let's start things off. Gus is back on the cube to talk about how we're going to simplify hybrid cloud complexity. DD. Welcome. Good to see you again. >>Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. Yeah, >>Our pleasure here. Uh, look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >>Well, I think first off every customer, these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but um, every customer is looking to move workloads, use services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's, that's one of the big things that we're seeing, um, while that is happening. We're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got bare metal applications. You always have virtualized applications. Um, and then most modern applications are, um, are containerized and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, uh, uh, in the application landscape as well, and probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves it's triggering a change in the it organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across, um, all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, uh, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >>Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game and in server and compute when it, when it developed the original UCS and you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team. And of course the bus storage team. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >>No, I think you're right. Um, back to the origins of UCS, I mean, we widen the networking company, builder server, well, we just enabled with the best networking technology. So we do compute that and now doing something similar on the software, actually the software for our, um, for our and you know, we've been on this journey for about four years. Um, but the software is called intersite and, you know, we started out with intersite being just the element manager management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. Um, but then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that the customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software would do manage the hardware of the underlying hardware and then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then the third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization or cost optimization, a fourth tool do now manage Kubernetes and not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi cluster multicloud. >>They should not have to have a fifth tool that does go into observability. Anyway, I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that manage their infrastructure, but it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the Kubernetes infrastructure, uh, Kubernetes clusters. I mean, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. So overall that's the strategy, bring it to a single platform and a platform is a loaded word, but we'll get into that a little bit, uh, you know, in this, in this conversation, but that's the overall strategy simplify? >>Well, you know, we brought a platform, I, I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day and you could still point to some examples today in the it industry where, Hey, another tool we can monetize that and another one to solve a different problem. We can monetize that. Uh, and so tell me more about how intersite came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through. You said we can do better. So w tell us the story there. >>Yeah, absolutely. So look, it started with, um, you know, three or four guys in getting in a room and saying, look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director, and these are just the Cisco's management, you know, uh, for our softwares, for our own platform. Then every company has their, their own flavor. We said, we took on this ball goal of like, we're not when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service, or we're going to create a SAS offering because the same is the infrastructure built by us, whether it's on networking or compute or on software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SAS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. >>They live and die by how they work or don't. And so we were like, we want to eat our own dog food here, right? We want to deliver this as a SAS offering. And so that's how it started being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. Um, but it was a pretty big boat patient because, you know, um, the big change with SAS is, is you're, uh, as you're familiar today is the job of now managing this, this piece of software is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities, and we've learned so much along the way, whether it's around scalability, reliability, um, working with, uh, our own companies, security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SAS service. Um, so again, it's just been a wonderful journey, but, uh, I wanted to point out, we are in some ways eating our own dog food because we built a SAS application that helps other companies deliver their SAS applications. >>So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compete, I of course, compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business, and obviously a very profitable company or large company you're growing faster than, than, than most of the traditional competitors. And so that means that you have more to invest. You, you, you can, you can afford things like doing stock buybacks, and you can invest in R and D. You don't have to make those hard trade-offs that a lot of your competitors have to make. So It's never enough, right. Never enough. But, but, but in speaking of R and D and innovations that your intro introducing I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud in the operations there and prove flexibility and things around cloud native initiatives as well? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, look, I think one of the fundamentals where we're philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is we don't need to build everything ourselves. We don't, I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around, um, search ability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control, multi-tenants, I need to create a really good platform and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and a half companies, and then figure out how to stitch it all together. Cause it's, it's almost impossible if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's, it's three times more difficult, but for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference in how we went about building in our sites. >>We've created a harden platform that's, that's always on. Okay. And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, um, you know, infrastructure partners like, uh, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or your, you know, others who want their conversion infrastructure is also to be managed or are other SAS offerings and software vendors, um, who have now become partners. Like we do not, we did not write to Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Tashi and now, uh, you know, Terraform services available on the intercept platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem, we partnered with a company called ergonomics. And so that's now an offering on the intercept platform. So that's where we're philosophically different and sort of, uh, you know, w how we have gone about this. >>And, uh, it actually dovetails well into some of the new things that I want to talk about today that we're announcing on the inner side platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and, and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters, which are not on prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, uh, soon coming on, uh, on GC, on, uh, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there, but in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use in our site is since you're using it on prem, you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud, or even manage the end in, in a, in an easy to instance. So, >>So the fact that you could, you mentioned storage, pure net app. So it's intersite can manage that infrastructure. I remember the hot-seat deal. It caught my attention. And of course, a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco because you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move Turbonomic. You mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud, so a lot different than it was 10 years ago. Um, so my last question is how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these, these, these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve over the next few years? >>Well, I think it's, it's the evolution of the model and really look at depending on, you know, how you're keeping time. But I think one thing has become very clear. Again, we may be eating our own dog food. I mean, innercise is a hybrid cloud SAS applications that we've learned. Some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is referred that customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the polo public cloud, on-prem no data center. It doesn't matter if they're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governings or upgrades, or they're looking for a consistent operating model. What my crystal ball doesn't mean. There's going to be the rise of more custom plugs. It's still going to be hybrid. So allegations will want to reside wherever it makes most sense for them, which is most as the data moving data is the most expensive thing. >>So it's going to be located with the data that's on the edge. We on the air colo public cloud doesn't matter, but, um, basically you're gonna see more custom clouds, more industry-specific clouds, you know, whether it's for finance or constipation or retail industry specific, I think sovereign is going to play a huge role. Uh, you know, today, if you look at the cloud providers, you know, American and Chinese companies that these, the rest of the world, when it goes to making, you know, a good digital citizens, they're they're people and, you know, whether it's, gonna play control, um, and then distributed cloud also on edge, um, is, is gonna be the next frontier. And so that's where we are trying to line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really your cloud, your way, every customer is on a different journey. They will have their choice of like workload data, um, you know, upgrading your liability concerns. That's really what, what we are trying to enable for our customers. >>Uh, you know, I think I agree with doing that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers. They're connecting their on-prem to their, to their public cloud. They're doing that. They're, they're doing that across clouds. And they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work. It give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of, because I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with it. I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco in your R and D to do that. Do you buy that? >>Absolutely. I think, again, it goes back back to what I was talking about with blacks. You got to get the world, uh, a solid open, flexible platform, and it's flexible in terms of the technology flexible in how they want to consume it at some customers are fine with a SAS software. What if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team now that does not work so how they want to consume it, they want to, you know, our perspective sovereignty, we talked about it. So, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is give the world an open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API. Um, but the last thing I would mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. Some of my colleagues are gonna engage into some of those, um, you know, details, whether it's on our X series platform or HyperFlex. Um, but it's really, it's going to, it's going to be software defined to SAS service and then, you know, give the world and open rock-solid platform, >>Got to run on something. All right, thanks DDL. It was a pleasure to have you in the queue. Great to see you. You're welcome in a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged and where HyperFlex fits and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today.

>>With me now or Maneesh outer wall, senior director of product management for a HyperFlex. It's Cisco at flash for all. Number four. I love that on Twitter and Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco, Mr. HyperFlex at Mr. HyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and in HyperFlex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Thanks David. >>Hi, Darren. Let's start with you. So for hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, we agree. You can't, you can't have a hybrid cloud without that private adamant. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the, the whole benefit of the cloud model you build in, in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. High conversions provides that we see more and more customers requiring a private cloud in their building with hyper conversions in particular HyperFlex, Mexican bank, all that work. They need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SAS offering Nathan looks around simplified operations, give some optimization and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >>Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days? W when it comes to implementing hyper-converged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >>So, so there's many things they're trying to achieve. My probably the most brutal, honest is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer, but I think they're trying to look at, in terms of simplicity, how can they remove laser components they've had before in their infrastructure, we see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that class into a hyper conversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure, also about scalability. They don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyper-conversion. It's very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads, they need that consistency all the way through. >>And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management to make it easier for their operations. And we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in that operations model, deploying flex also around the time-savings. They make massive time savings, which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces where you've seen as people move away from the three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyper-converged, especially with edge edge is a major, key use case for us. And what our customers want to do is get the benefit of the data center at the edge without a big investment. They don't want to compromise on performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and employment. >>And we've seen our analyst recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for it, operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyper conversions. And as I said, the savings elements, the key there, and again, not always, but obviously there's all case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people could make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >>Great. Thank you for that, Darren, uh, Monisha, we have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyper flex line. What's the big news that you've just announced. >>Yeah. Thanks Dave. Um, so there are several things that we are seeing today. The first one is a new offer, um, called HyperFlex express. This is, uh, you know, Cisco intersite lend and Cisco intersect managed it HyperFlex configurations that we feel are the fastest spot to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our service portfolio by adding support for each X on EMD rack, uh, UCS M D rack. And the code is a new capability that we're introducing that we calling, um, local and containerized witness and get, let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty, uh, capability to optimize for, for an edge environments. So, you know, this leverage is the Cisco's ubiquitous presence, uh, of the networking, um, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is, uh, configuration, which is primarily used in edge environments, think of a, you know, a backup woman or department store, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere on the blue for these two, not two configurations. >>There is always a need for a third entity that, uh, you know, industry down for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. Uh, we had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is where do you host this witness? It cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witnesses to when the infrastructure is going. Now, it basically breaks, um, sort of, uh arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster, but finding infrastructure, uh, to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environments. So what we've done is we've taken that test. We've converted it into a container or a form factor, and then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR ESR, mixers, catalyst, industrial routers, uh, even, uh, even as we buy that can host host this witness, eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure are doing any, um, you know, Caden feeding or that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >>I want to ask you about HyperFlex express. You know, obviously the, the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can, can HyperFlex express help customers respond to some of these issues? >>Yeah, indeed. The, um, you know, the primary motivation for HyperFlex express was indeed, uh, an idea that, uh, you know, one of the folks on my team had, we was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time, but as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and, uh, make sure that, uh, you know, that is in it for something in it for customers, for sales, as well as our partners. Uh, so for example, uh, you know, for customers, uh, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex express. These are still high-paced configurations, and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster, but the part to that cluster is much, much, uh, simplifying. Uh, second is that we've added an flexibility where you can now deploy these, uh, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with, or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. >>Um, we've also added a, uh, attractive price point for these. And, uh, of course, uh, you know, these will have a better lead times because we made sure, uh, that, uh, you know, we are using components that are, um, that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective for partner and sales. This is represents a high velocity sales motion, a foster doughnut around time, uh, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. Uh, this is actually a set of distinct friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stock. And with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for, uh, the disease as well. >>It's interesting Maneesh, I'm looking at some fresh survey data set more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed. This is ETR survey. Again, I mentioned them at the top more than the 70% said they had difficulty procuring a server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So, so that's encouraging. Um, what about ministry, uh, AMD that's new for HyperFlex? What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >>Yeah, Dave, so, uh, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS EMD direct support, we've had several record breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a, it's a, it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, uh, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it is, it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the masters compute together with the foster storage and this, we are logging that will, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, um, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads, uh, that were previously locked out from the hyper-converged experience. >>Yeah. Cool. Um, so Darren, can you, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >>Sure, absolutely. So I've made, Maneesha been involved right from the Stein before it was called hype and we we've had a great journey and it's very exciting to see where we're taking, where we've been with the $10 year. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. Um, the majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've, uh, approved for technology and are comfortable with the technology. They repeat by expanded capacity, putting more workloads on they use in different use cases on that. And from an age perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement, the technology, um, we get used across all verticals or segments, um, to house mission critical, uh, applications, as well as the, uh, traditional virtual server infrastructures, uh, and where the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers. >>They want example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audiences, uh, the super bowl. So, uh, the like, uh, stadium that house, the soup, well actually has Cisco HyperFlex, right? In all the management services through, from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's compete completely cashless. So if that were to break during the super bowl, that would have been a big, uh, news article, but it was run perfectly. We in the design of the solution were able to collapse down nearly 200 service into a few nodes, across a few racks and at a hundred, 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run super bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with the high place where it's going, what it's doing. And some of the use cases we're getting involved in very, very excited. >>He come on Darren Superbowl, NFL, that's, uh, that's international now. And you know, it's, it's dating London. Of course, I see the, the picture of the real football over your shoulder. But anyway, last question for minis. Give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for HyperFlex. >>Yeah, so, you know, as Dan said, what data and I have been involved with type of flicks since the beginning, uh, but, uh, I think the best is we have to come. Uh, there are three main pillars for, uh, for HyperFlex. Um, one is intersite is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass, um, management, but we are going to date this beyond the lifecycle management, which is a for HyperFlex, which is integrated. You're going to say today and element management, we're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI ops, because intersect really provides us a ideal platform to gather slides from all the clusters across the globe, do AIML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as, uh, you know, customer value, um, actionable insights. >>So that is one, uh, the second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms and newer, uh, UCS, several platforms as well. But the highlight, there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is HX on X, CDs, uh, extra users. And other thing that'd be able to, uh, you know, uh, uh, get announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. Uh, but each Axonics cities will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X of hosting, a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We were hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads, uh, that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex need a platform. >>This is the heart of the offering today, and you'll see the hyperlinks data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, a unique architecture, primarily where we get our, you know, uh, they got bidding performance wrong. You'll see it get foster a more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for, uh, you know, containerized workloads, meaning it will get a granular container, a container, granular management capabilities and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. >>That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay guys, we gotta leave it there. And, you know, Monisha was talking about the HX on X series. That's huge. Customers are gonna love that. And it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with VKS Ratana and Jim leech, and we're going to dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform and we're gonna explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on the cube. You're a leader in enterprise tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE special presentation, Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna who's the director of product management for UCS at Cisco and James Leach, who is director of business development at Cisco. Gents welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks for having us. >> Okay Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers. And as organizations as they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, what are the most common challenges that they face? What are they telling you? How Cisco specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >> Well, you know, first I think that's a, you know, that's a great question and, you know, customer-centric view is the way that we've taken, is kind of the approach we've taken from day one right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for that our customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications right? That's the, that's where the rubber meets your proverbial road with the customer, and I would say that, you know, what we're seeing is the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data-centric applications for example. Those require that we, you know, are able to move, and process large datasets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications I think that give our customers kind of some, you know, pose some challenges, would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today, or the day that they, you know, make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application, that application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can keep up with today. So, that creates some challenges around, you know, how do I build the infrastructure? How do I rightsize it without over provisioning for example? But also there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planning those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements. And within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges, we see customers who are being forced to move away from the, like a modular or Blade approach which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits, and they have to move to something like a rack server model for some applications because of these needs that these data-centric applications have, and that creates a lot of, you know, opportunity for siloing infrastructure. And those silos in turn create multiple operating models within the, you know, a data center environment that, you know, again drive a lot of complexity. So that complexity is definitely the enemy here. And then finally I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratization of processing if you will, right? So it's no longer just CPU-focused, we have GPU, we have FPGA, we have, you know, things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together, that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So, when those life cycles don't align, for a lot of our customers they see a challenge in how they can manage this, you know, these different life cycles and still make a purchase, without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So that is a, you know, kind of the other bucket. And then finally I think management is huge, right? So management, you know, at its core is really rightsized for our customers and give them the most value when it meets the mark around scale and scope. You know, back in 2009 we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took a management outside the chassis, right? We put it at the top of the rack and that worked great for the scale and scope we needed at that time, however, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed right? So we're talking about a hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centers, across clouds, and, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those operational pieces that touch the application, that touch the infrastructure but they're not the same tool. They tend to be disparate tools that have to be put together. >> Dave: All right. >> So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of, you know, building their own tools so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >> Right, you know, Jim I said in my open that you guys, Cisco had sort of changed the server game with the original UCS, but the X-Series is the next generation, the generation for the next decade which is really important 'cause you touched on a lot of things. These data-intensive workloads, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs, the whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed so how is it going with with the X-Series? You made a big splash last year, what's the reception been in the field? >> Actually it's been great. You know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our, you know, UCS X-Series story. I think that, you know, the main reason they relate to it is they helped create it, right? It was their feedback and their partnership that gave us really the, those problem areas, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add, you know, significant value. So, you know, since we brought UCS to market back in 2009, you know, we had this unique architectural paradigm that we created, and I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history in terms of growth. What we're seeing now is X-Series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake, we're seeing, you know, both in terms of, you know, the number of customers, but also more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using, and the types of workloads are growing, right? So we're growing this modular segment that exists, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product but we're actually bringing them into the product in the way that we had envisioned which is one infrastructure that can run any application into it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. I think the other piece, you know, that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco but also within the industry. And I think right now as a, you know, a great example, you know, our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, at a, you know, kind of the new next architecture, and we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any of our competitors have seen when they announced something that was new to this space. So, I think that the ground-up work that we did is really paying off, and I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leapfrog game as it may have been in the past. X-Series is out in front today and, you know, we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers, and, you know, we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So as our competitors hit walls, I think we're, you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June, when we launched X-Series to the world. And, you know, as we continue to do that, we're seeing, you know, again, tremendous uptake from our customers. >> So thank you for that Jim. So, Vikas I was just on Twitter just today actually talking about the gravitational pull, you've got the public clouds pulling CXOs one way, and you know, on-prem folks pulling the other way, and hybrid cloud so, organizations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures, and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away and they need infrastructure to support that and I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that confusion with the X-Series right? I mean, so how so? Can you explain that? >> Sure, and that's the right, the context that you built up right there Dave. If you walk into enterprise data center you'll see plethora of compute systems spread all across because every application has its unique needs, and hence you find drive node, drive-dense system, memory-dense system, GPU-dense system, core-dense system, and variety of form factors, 1U, 2U, 4U, and every one of them typically come with, you know, variety of adapters and cables and so forth. This creates the siloness of resources. Fabric is brought, the adapter is brought, the power and cooling implications, the rack, you know, space challenges. And above all, the multiple management plane that they come up with which makes it very difficult for IT to have one common center policy, and enforce it all across the firmware, and software, and so forth. And then think about upgrade challenges of the siloness makes it even more complex as these go through the upgrade references of their own. As a result we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really, seeing a slowness in their agility, and high burdened in the cost of overall ownership. This is where with the X-Series powered by Intersight, we have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities, they become more agile, and drive lower these issues. And we are delivering it by doing three things, three aspects of simplification. First, simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure. An infrastructure which removes the siloness of form factor. An infrastructure which reduces the rightful footprint that is required. Infrastructure where power and cooling budgets are in the lower. Second, we want to simplify with, by delivering a cloud operating model. Where they can create the policy once across compute, network, storage, and deploy it all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade, and any platform evolution that they're going to go through in the next two, three years. So that's where, the focus is on just driving down the simplicity, lowering down their issues. >> Oh, that's key. Less friction is always a good thing. Now of course, Vikas we heard from the HyperFlex guys earlier, they had news not to be outdone, you have hard news as well, what innovations are you announcing around X-Series today? >> Absolutely, so we are following up on the exciting X-Series announcement that we made in June last year Dave, and we are now introducing three innovation on X-Series with the goal of three things. First, expand the supported workload on X-Series. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third, dramatically reduce the complexities in the data center by driving down the number of adapters and cables that are needed. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU node using a cableless and very unique X Fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPUs to the compute node in the modular form factor. Thereby our customers can now power in AI/ML workload, or any workload that need many more number of GPUs. Second, we are bringing in GPUs right onto the compute node. And thereby our customers can now fire up the accelerated VDI workload for example. And third, which is what you know, we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the 5th generation of our very popular Unified Fabric Technology. With the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and densities that we have on the compute node, our customers can now fire up the big data workload, the HCI workload, the SDS workload, all these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular farm factor, can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric we've become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 Gig end-to-end single port bandwidth, and there are multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our CI partners to deliver the benefit of this performance through our Cisco Validated Design to our CI franchise. And third, the innovations in the fifth gen fabric will again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters, may it be ethernet adapter, may it be with fiber channel adapters, or may it be the other storage adapters, they've reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable. So very, very excited about these three big announcements that we are making in the smart release. >> Great, a lot there, you guys have been busy, so thank you for that Vikas. So Jim you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have, customers are adopting, what problems are they telling you that X-Series addresses and how do they align with where they want to go in the future? >> That's a great question. I think if you go back to and think about some of the things that we mentioned before in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what Vikas mentioned I think is is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhanced that story and really move, again, to the, kind of to the next level of taking advantage of some of these, you know, problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look at, you know, I think Vikas mentioned accelerated VDI, that's a great example. These are where customers, you know, they need to have this dense compute, they need video acceleration, they need tight policy management, right? And they need to be able to deploy these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X-Series right now. We're hitting the market every, every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs, and a lot of room to grow, we have the, you know, the premier cloud-based management you know, hybrid cloud suite in the industry right? So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that you, that Vikas just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the, through the use of the X Fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well, and, you know, I think finally the fifth generation of Fabric Interconnect, and Virtual Interface Card, and Intelligent Fabric Module go hand in hand in creating this 100 Gig end-to-end bandwidth story that we can move a lot of data. Again, you know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere, to be able to get the bandwidth that they need, to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible to, that it fit exactly their needs, this is huge, right? It solves a lot of the problems we can tick off right away. With the infrastructure as I mentioned, X Fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here, you know, we're talking about GPUs today, but in the future there are other elements that we can disaggregate like the GPUs that solve of these life cycle mismanagement issues, they solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for, like it does for GPU we can do that with storage or memory in the future. So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregation that actually delivers, right? It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing, this is something that customers can really get value out of day one. And then finally, I think the, you know, the future readiness here, you know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPUs going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve, the drives, you know, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly, the fabric that stitches them together is critical and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the developments that are coming with CXL, with some of the PCI Express changes that are coming in the very near future, so we're ready to go. X, and the X Fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers, right? Our customers are out there saying that, you know, they want to buy into something like X-Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future right? We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted but use them to disrupt their competition as well. So we, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X-Series brings, and, you know, again, you know, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >> Yeah, a lot of headroom for scale and the management piece is key there. Just have time for one more question Vikas, talk, give us some nuggets on the roadmap. What's next for X-Series that we can look forward to. >> Absolutely Dave. As we talked about and James also hinted, this is a future-ready architecture. A lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up, no refund replace. And there we are looking into enabling the customer's journey as they transition from PCA in less than four to five to six, without rip and replace, as they embrace CXL without rip and replace, as they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCI or NVMe-based dense drives and so forth. We are also looking forward to X Fabric next generation which will allow dynamic assignment of GPUs anywhere within the chassis and much more. So this is again all about focusing on the innovation that will make the enterprise data center operations a lot more simpler, and drive down the TCO, by keeping them not only covered for today but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on Dave. >> Okay, thank you guys, we'll leave it there, in a moment I'll have some closing thoughts. (bright upbeat music) We're seeing a major evolution perhaps even a bit of a revolution in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support hybrid work. Look, virtualizing compute and running general purpose workloads is something it figured out a long time ago. But just when you have it nailed down in the technology business, things change don't they? You can count on that. The cloud operating model has bled into on-premises locations, and is creating a new vision for the future, which we heard a lot about today. It's a vision that's turning into reality and it supports much more diverse and data-intensive workloads and alternative compute modes. It's one where flexibility is a watchword enabling change, attacking complexity, and bringing a management capability that allows for a granular management of resources at massive scale. I hope you've enjoyed this special presentation, remember all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net, and if you want to learn more please click on the information link. Thanks for watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid 2000s, permanently changed the way we think about IT. At the heart of it, the cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs. More than half of IT budgets were spent on people, and much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning, management, recovery, optimization, and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud-like model across all their application infrastructure, irrespective of its physical location. This has not only cut cost, but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone, my name is Dave Vellante and welcome to Simplifying Hybrid Cloud, made possible by Cisco. Today, we're going to explore Hybrid Cloud as an operating model for organizations. Now the definite of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services, you know, somewhere out in the clouds. No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud, on-premises infrastructure, and it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale. While at the same time, preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where IT managers must think differently to deal with this complexity. And the environment is constantly changing. The growth and diversity of applications continues. And now, we're living in a world where the workforce is remote. Hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIOs by Enterprise Technology Research, ETR, indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode. Splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. So the challenge for IT managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem, public cloud, and edge locations. This is the future of IT. Now today, we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding Hybrid Cloud. First up, is DD Dasgupta, who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next, we're going to hear from Manish Agarwal and Darren Williams, who will help us unpack HyperFlex which is Cisco's hyperconverged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment will drill into Unified Compute. More than a decade ago, Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking in a single offering. Cisco frankly, changed the legacy server market with UCS, Unified Compute System. The X-Series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade and we'll explore how it fits into the world of Hybrid Cloud, and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So, thanks for being here. Let's go. (upbeat music playing) Okay, let's start things off. DD Dasgupta is back on theCUBE to talk about how we're going to simplify Hybrid Cloud complexity. DD welcome, good to see you again. >> Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >> Yeah, our pleasure. Look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >> Well, I think first off, every customer these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but, every customer is looking to move workloads, new services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's one of the big things that we're seeing. While that is happening, we're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got, you know, bare metal applications, you always have virtualized applications, and then most modern applications are containerized, and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, in the application landscape as well. And, probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves, it's triggering a change in the IT organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >> Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game in server and compute when it developed the original UCS. And you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team and of course the storage team as well. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >> No, I think you're right Dave, back to the origins of UCS and we, you know, why did a networking company build a server? Well, we just enabled with the best networking technologies so, would do compute better. And now, doing something similar on the software, actually the managing software for our hyperconvergence, for our, you know, Rack server, for our blade servers. And, you know, we've been on this journey for about four years. The software is called Intersight, and, you know, we started out with Intersight being just the element manager, the management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. But then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that a customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software, would do manage the hardware, the underlying hardware. And then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then a third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization, or cost optimization. A fourth tool to now manage, you know, Kubernetes and like, not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi-cluster, multi-cloud. They should not have to have a fifth tool that does, goes into observability anyway. I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that manage their infrastructure. But it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the, the Kubernetes infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, I mean, whether it's on-prem or in a cloud. So, overall that's the strategy. Bring it to a single platform, and a platform is a loaded word we'll get into that a little bit, you know, in this conversation, but, that's the overall strategy, simplify. >> Well, you know, you brought platform. I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day, and you could still point to some examples today in the IT industry where, hey, another tool we can monetize that. And another one to solve a different problem, we can monetize that. And so, tell me more about how Intersight came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through, you said, "We can do better." So tell us the story there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, look, it started with, you know, three or four guys in getting in a room and saying, "Look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director." And these are just the Cisco's management, you know, for our, softwares for our own platforms. And every company has their own flavor. We said, we took on this bold goal of like, we're not, when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service. Or we're going to create a SaaS offering. Because the same, the infrastructure built by us whether it's on networking or compute, or the cyber cloud software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SaaS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. They live and die by how their applications work or don't. And so, we were like, "We want to eat our own dog food here," right? We want to deliver this as a SaaS offering. And so that's how it started, we've being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. But it was a pretty big, bold ambition 'cause you know, the big change with SaaS as you're familiar Dave is, the job of now managing this piece of software, is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities, and we've learned so much along the way, whether it's to announce scalability, reliability, working with, our own company's security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SaaS service. So again, it's been a wonderful journey, but, I wanted to point out, we are in some ways eating our own dog food 'cause we built a SaaS application that helps other companies deliver their SaaS applications. >> So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compare, of course compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business and, you're obviously a very profitable company, you're a large company, you're growing faster than most of the traditional competitors. And, so that means that you have more to invest. You, can afford things, like to you know, stock buybacks, and you can invest in R&D you don't have to make those hard trade offs that a lot of your competitors have to make, so-- >> You got to have a talk with my boss on the whole investment. >> Yeah, right. You'd never enough, right? Never enough. But in speaking of R&D and innovations that you're intro introducing, I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud, the operations there, improve flexibility, and things around Cloud Native initiatives as well? >> Absolutely, absolutely. Well, look, I think, one of the fundamentals where we're kind of philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is, we don't need to build everything ourselves, we don't. I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around, searchability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control, multi-tenants. I need to create a really good platform, and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and 1/2 companies and then figure out how to stich it all together. 'Cause it's almost impossible. And if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's three times more difficult for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference and how we went about building Intersight. We've created a hardened platform that's always on, okay? And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, you know, infrastructure partners, like, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or PR, or you know, others, who want their conversion infrastructures also to be managed, or their other SaaS offerings and software vendors who have now become partners. Like we did not write Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Hashi and now, you know, Terraform service's available on the Intersight platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem. We partner with a company called Turbonomic and so that's now an offering on the Intersight platform. So that's where we're philosophically different, in sort of, you know, how we have gone about this. And, it actually dovetails well into, some of the new things that I want to talk about today that we're announcing on the Intersight platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters which are not on-prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, soon coming on GC, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there. But in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use Intersight, and since you're using it on-prem you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud. Or even manage DMS in a EC2 instance. So. >> Yeah so, the fact that you could, you mentioned Storage Pure, NetApp, so Intersight can manage that infrastructure. I remember the Hashi deal and I, it caught my attention. I mean, of course a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco 'cause you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move, Turbonomic you mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud. So a lot different than it was 10 years ago. So my last question is, how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, and it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve on for the next few years? >> Well, I think it's the evolution of the model and I, really look at Cloud, you know, 2.0 or 3.0, or depending on, you know, how you're keeping terms. But, I think one thing has become very clear again, we, we've be eating our own dog food, I mean, Intersight is a hybrid cloud SaaS application. So we've learned some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is for sure that the customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the COLO, public cloud, on-prem, no data center, it doesn't matter. They're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governance, for upgrades, for reliability. They're looking for a consistent operating model. What (indistinct) tells me I think there's going to be a rise of more custom clouds. It's still going to be hybrid, so applications will want to reside wherever it most makes most sense for them which is obviously data, 'cause you know, data is the most expensive thing. So it's going to be complicated with the data goes on the edge, will be on the edge, COLO, public cloud, doesn't matter. But, you're basically going to see more custom clouds, more industry specific clouds, you know, whether it's for finance, or transportation, or retail, industry specific, I think sovereignty is going to play a huge role, you know, today, if you look at the cloud provider there's a handful of, you know, American and Chinese companies, that leave the rest of the world out when it comes to making, you know, good digital citizens of their people and you know, whether it's data latency, data gravity, data sovereignty, I think that's going to play a huge role. Sovereignty's going to play a huge role. And the distributor cloud also called Edge, is going to be the next frontier. And so, that's where we are trying line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really, your cloud, your way. Every customer is on a different journey, they will have their choice of like workloads, data, you know, upgrade reliability concern. That's really what we are trying to enable for our customers. >> You know, I think I agree with you on that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is, you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers, they're connecting their on-prem to their public cloud. They're doing that across clouds, and they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work, and give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of. 'Cause I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model, or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with, I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco and your R&D to do that. Do you buy that? >> Absolutely. I think again, it goes back to what I was talking about with platform. You got to give the world a solid open, flexible platform. And flexible in terms of the technology, flexible in how they want to consume it. Some of our customers are fine with the SaaS, you know, software. But if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team, no, that does not work. And so, how they want to consume it, they want to, you know, (indistinct) you know, sovereignty we talked about. So, I think, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is to give the world a open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API tool kit. But the last thing I will mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. And I think some of my colleagues are going to get into some of those, you know, details, whether it's on our X-Series, you know, platform or HyperFlex, but it's really, it's going to be software defined, it's a SaaS service and then, you know, give the world an open rock solid platform. >> Got to run on something All right, Thanks DD, always a pleasure to have you on the, theCUBE, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. In a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged, and where HyperFlex fits, and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today. >> It used to be all your infrastructure was managed here. But things got more complex in distributing, and now IT operations need to be managed everywhere. But what if you could manage everywhere from somewhere? One scalable place that brings together your teams, technology, and operations. Both on-prem and in the cloud. One automated place that provides full stack visibility to help you optimize performance and stay ahead of problems. One secure place where everyone can work better, faster, and seamlessly together. That's the Cisco Intersight cloud operations platform. The time saving, cost reducing, risk managing solution for your whole IT environment, now and into the future of this ever-changing world of IT. (upbeat music) >> With me now are Manish Agarwal, senior director of product management for HyperFlex at Cisco, @flash4all, number four, I love that, on Twitter. And Darren Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco. MrHyperFlex, @MrHyperFlex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and HyperFlex, and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you. >> Thanks a lot Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> All right Darren, let's start with you. So, for a hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So, you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, we agree. You can't have a hybrid cloud without that prime element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. Hyperconversions provides that. We see more and more customers requiring a private cloud, and they're building it with Hyperconversions, in particular HyperFlex. Now to make all that work, they need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at Intersight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SaaS offering. That looks around simplified operations, gives them optimization, and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >> Darren let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days when it comes to implementing hyperconverged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge, what are they trying to achieve? >> So there's many things they're trying to achieve, probably the most brutal honesty is they're trying to save money, that's probably the quickest answer. But, I think they're trying to look in terms of simplicity, how can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconversions and storage networking. And we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that collapse into a hyperconversion infrastructure away from their Three Tier infrastructure. Also about scalability, they don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now, and how they can grow that with hyperconvergence very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all all way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management. To make it easier for their operations, yeah, we've got customers that have told us, they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model on deploying HyperFlex, also around the time savings they make massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyperconverged, especially with Edge. Edge is a major key use case for us. And, what I want, what our customers want to do is get the benefit of a data center at the edge, without A, the big investment. They don't want to compromise in performance, and they want that simplicity in both management and deployment. And, we've seen our analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployment's key for our IT operations teams. And how much they're actually saving by deploying Edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyperconversions. And as I said, the savings elements is the key bit, and again, not always, but obviously those are case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times, over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So, I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for. Yeah. >> Great, thank you for that Darren. Manish, we have some hard news, you've been working a lot on evolving the HyperFlex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? >> Yeah, thanks Dave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. The first one is a new offer called HyperFlex Express. This is, you know, Cisco Intersight led and Cisco Intersight managed eight HyperFlex configurations. That we feel are the fastest path to hybrid cloud. The second is we are expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AMD Rack, UCS AMD Rack. And the third is a new capability that we are introducing, that we are calling, local containerized witness. And let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty capability to optimize for Edge environments. So, you know, this leverages the, Cisco's ubiquitous presence of the networking, you know, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest HyperFlex configuration that we have is a 2-node configuration, which is primarily used in Edge environments. Think of a, you know, a backroom in a departmental store or a oil rig, or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere around the globe. For these 2-node configurations, there is always a need for a third entity that, you know, industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. We had that for HyperFlex as well. And the problem that customers face is, where you host this witness. It cannot be on the cluster because the job of the witness is to, when the infrastructure is going down, it basically breaks, sort of arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster. But finding infrastructure to actually host this is a problem, especially in the Edge environments where these are resource constraint environments. So what we've done is we've taken that witness, we've converted it into a container reform factor. And then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have, right from ISR, ASR, Nexus, Catalyst, industrial routers, even a Raspberry Pi that can host this witness. Eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure, or doing any, you know, care and feeding of that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. >> So I want to ask you about HyperFlex Express. You know, obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's, you know, global supply chain issues are in the news, everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can HyperFlex Express help customers respond to some of these issues? >> Yeah indeed Dave. You know the primary motivation for HyperFlex Express was indeed an idea that, you know, one of the folks are on my team had, which was to build a set of HyperFlex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that, you know, there is in it for, something in it for our customers, for sales, as well as our partners. So for example, you know, for our customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for HyperFlex Express. These are still HyperFlex configurations and you would at the end of it, get a HyperFlex cluster. But the part to that cluster is much, much simplified. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these, these are data center configurations, but you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy with your existing top of rack. We've also, you know, added attractive price point for these, and of course, you know, these will have better lead times because we've made sure that, you know, we are using components that are, that we have clear line of sight from our supply perspective. For partner and sales, this is, represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. This is actually a set of disty-friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stalk, and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the distys as well. >> It's interesting Manish, I'm looking at some fresh survey data, more than 70% of the customers that were surveyed, this is the ETR survey again, we mentioned 'em at the top. More than 70% said they had difficulty procuring server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So that's encouraging. What about, Manish, AMD? That's new for HyperFlex. What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >> Yeah Dave, so, you know, in the short time that we've had UCS AMD Rack support, we've had several record making benchmark results that we've published. So it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it. And HyperFlex, you know, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we are going to get the fastest compute, together with the fastest storage. And this, we are hoping that we'll, it'll basically unlock, you know, a, unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyperconverged experience. >> Yeah, cool. So Darren, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? >> Sure, absolutely. So, both me and Manish been involved right from the start even before it was called HyperFlex, and we've had a great journey. And it's very exciting to see where we are taking, where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've proved the technology and are comfortable with the technology. They, repeat buyer for expanded capacity, putting more workloads on. They're using different use cases on there. And from an Edge perspective, more numbers of science. So really good endorsement of the technology. We get used across all verticals, all segments, to house mission critical applications, as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. And we are the lifeblood of our customers around those, mission critical customers. I think one big example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audience is, the Super Bowl. So, the SoFi stadium that housed the Super Bowl, actually has Cisco HyperFlex running all the management services, through from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4k video distribution, and it's completely cashless. So, if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would've been a big news article. But it was run perfectly. We, in the design of the solution, we're able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few nodes, across a few racks, and have 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium, without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run Super Bowl, and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons, that's a win for us. So we really are, really happy with HyperFlex, where it's going, what it's doing, and some of the use cases we're getting involved in, very, very exciting. >> Hey, come on Darren, it's Super Bowl, NFL, that's international now. And-- >> Thing is, I follow NFL. >> The NFL's, it's invading London, of course, I see the, the picture, the real football over your shoulder. But, last question for Manish. Give us a little roadmap, what's the future hold for HyperFlex? >> Yeah. So, you know, as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved with HyperFlex since the beginning. But, I think the best is yet to come. There are three main pillars for HyperFlex. One is, Intersight is central to our strategy. It provides a, you know, lot of customer benefit from a single pane of class management. But we are going to take this beyond the lifecycle management, which is for HyperFlex, which is integrated into Intersight today, and element management. We are going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI Ops, because Intersight really provides us a ideal platform to gather stats from all the clusters across the globe, do AI/ML and do some predictive analysis with that, and return back as, you know, customer valued, actionable insights. So that is one. The second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms, and newer UCS server platforms as well. But the highlight there is one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help. Is HX on X-Series. X-Series is another thing that we are going to, you know, add, we're announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But HX on X-Series will have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X-Series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex data platform. This is the heart of the offering today. And, you'll see the HyperFlex data platform itself it's a distributed architecture, a unique distributed architecture. Primarily where we get our, you know, record baring performance from. You'll see it can foster more scalable, more resilient, and we'll optimize it for you know, containerized workloads, meaning it'll get granular containerized, container granular management capabilities, and optimize for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year, and talking about some of these newer capabilities. >> That's great. Thank you very much for that, okay guys, we got to leave it there. And you know, Manish was talking about the HX on X-Series that's huge, customers are going to love that and it's a great transition 'cause in a moment, I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach, and we're going to dig into X-Series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform, and we're going to explore what it all means. You're watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud on theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. >> The power is here, and here, but also here. And definitely here. Anywhere you need the full force and power of your infrastructure hyperconverged. It's like having thousands of data centers wherever you need them, powering applications anywhere they live, but manage from the cloud. So you can automate everything from here. (upbeat music) Cisco HyperFlex goes anywhere. Cisco, the bridge to possible. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's special presentation, Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna who's the director of product management for UCS at Cisco and James Leach, who is director of business development at Cisco. Gents, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. >> Hey, thanks for having us. >> Okay, Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers, and as organizations as they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, what are the most common challenges that they face? What are they telling you? How is Cisco, specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >> Well, you know, first I think that's a, you know, that's a great question. And you know, customer centric view is the way that we've taken, is kind of the approach we've taken from day one. Right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for that our customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications, right? That's the, that's where the rubber meets your proverbial road with the customer. And I would say that, you know, what we're seeing is, the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data centric applications for example. Those require that we, you know, are able to move and process large data sets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications I think to give our customers kind of some, you know, pause some challenges, would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today or the day that they, you know, make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application, that application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can keep up with today. So, that creates some challenges around, you know, how do I build the infrastructure? How do I right size it without over provisioning, for example? But also, there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planning those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements. And within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges, we see customers who are being forced to move away from the, like a modular or blade approach, which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits, and they have to move to something like a Rack server model for some applications because of these needs that these data centric applications have, and that creates a lot of you know, opportunity for siloing the infrastructure. And those silos in turn create multiple operating models within the, you know, a data center environment that, you know, again, drive a lot of complexity. So that, complexity is definitely the enemy here. And then finally, I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratization of processing if you will, right? So it's no longer just CPU focused, we have GPU, we have FPGA, we have, you know, things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So, when those life cycles don't align for a lot of our customers, they see a challenge in how they can manage this, you know, these different life cycles and still make a purchase without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So, that is a, you know, kind of the other bucket. And then finally, I think management is huge, right? So management, you know, at its core is really right size for our customers and give them the most value when it meets the mark around scale and scope. You know, back in 2009, we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took management outside the chassis, right? We put it at the top of the rack and that worked great for the scale and scope we needed at that time. However, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed, right? So we're talking about a hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centers, across clouds, and, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those operational pieces that touch the application, that touch the infrastructure, but they're not the same tool. They tend to be disparate tools that have to be put together. >> Right. >> So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of, you know, building their own tools, so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >> Right. You know Jim, I said in my open that you guys, Cisco sort of changed the server game with the original UCS, but the X-Series is the next generation, the generation for the next decade which is really important 'cause you touched on a lot of things, these data intensive workload, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs. The whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed. So, how's it going with with the X-Series? You made a big splash last year, what's the reception been in the field? >> Actually, it's been great. You know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our, you know, UCS X-Series story. I think that, you know, the main reason they relate to it is they helped create it, right? It was their feedback and their partnership that gave us really the, those problem areas, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add, you know, significant value. So, you know, since we brought UCS to market back in 2009, you know, we had this unique architectural paradigm that we created, and I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history in terms of growth. What we're seeing now is X-Series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake. We're seeing all, you know, both in terms of, you know, the number of customers, but also more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using, and the types of workloads are growing, right? So we're growing this modular segment that exist, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product, but we're actually bring them into the product in the way that we had envisioned, which is one infrastructure that can run any application and do it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. I think the other piece, you know, that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco, but also within the industry. And I think right now is a, you know, a great example, you know, our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, at a, you know, kind of the new next architecture. And, we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any of our competitors have seen when they announced something that was new to this space. So, I think that the ground up work that we did is really paying off. And I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leap frog game, as it may have been in the past. X-Series is out in front today, and, you know, we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers and, you know, we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So, as our competitors hit walls, I think we're, you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June when we launched X-Series to the world. And, you know, as we continue to do that, we're seeing, you know, again, tremendous uptake from our customers. >> So thank you for that Jim. So Vikas, I was just on Twitter just today actually talking about the gravitational pull, you've got the public clouds pulling CXOs one way and you know, on-prem folks pulling the other way and hybrid cloud. So, organizations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away and they need infrastructure to support that. And I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that confusion with the X series, right? I mean, so how so can you explain that? >> Sure. And, that's the right, the context that you built up right there Dave. If you walk into enterprise data center you'll see plethora of compute systems spread all across. Because, every application has its unique needs, and, hence you find drive node, drive-dense system, memory dense system, GPU dense system, core dense system, and variety of form factors, 1U, 2U, 4U, and, every one of them typically come with, you know, variety of adapters and cables and so forth. This creates the siloness of resources. Fabric is (indistinct), the adapter is (indistinct). The power and cooling implication. The Rack, you know, face challenges. And, above all, the multiple management plane that they come up with, which makes it very difficult for IT to have one common center policy, and enforce it all across, across the firmware and software and so forth. And then think about upgrade challenges of the siloness makes it even more complex as these go through the upgrade processes of their own. As a result, we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really seeing an inter, slowness in that agility, and high burden in the cost of overall ownership. This is where with the X-Series powered by Intersight, we have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities. They become more agile, and drive lower TCOs. And we are delivering it by doing three things, three aspects of simplification. First, simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure. An infrastructure which removes the siloness of form factor. An infrastructure which reduces the Rack footprint that is required. An infrastructure where power and cooling budgets are in the lower. Second, we want to simplify by delivering a cloud operating model, where they can and create the policy once across compute network storage and deploy it all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade and any platform evolution that they're going to go through in the next two, three years. So that's where the focus is on just driving down the simplicity, lowering down their TCOs. >> Oh, that's key, less friction is always a good thing. Now, of course, Vikas we heard from the HyperFlex guys earlier, they had news not to be outdone. You have hard news as well. What innovations are you announcing around X-Series today? >> Absolutely. So we are following up on the exciting X-Series announcement that we made in June last year, Dave. And we are now introducing three innovation on X-Series with the goal of three things. First, expand the supported workload on X-Series. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third, dramatically reduce the complexities in the data center by driving down the number of adapters and cables that are needed. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU node using a cableless and very unique X-Fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPUs to the compute node in the modular form factor. Thereby, our customers can now power in AI/ML workload, or any workload that need many more number of GPUs. Second, we are bringing in GPUs right onto the compute node, and thereby our customers can now fire up the accelerated VDI workload for example. And third, which is what you know, we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the fifth generation of our very popular unified fabric technology. With the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and densities that we have on the compute node, our customers can now fire up the big data workload, the FCI workload, the SDS workload. All these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular form factor, can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric, we've become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 gig end to end single port bandwidth, and there are multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our CI partners to deliver the benefit of these performance through our Cisco Validated Design to our CI franchise. And third, the innovations in the fifth gen fabric will again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters made with ethernet adapter, made with power channel adapters, or made with, the other storage adapters. They've reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable. So very, very excited about these three big announcements that we are making in this month's release. >> Great, a lot there, you guys have been busy, so thank you for that Vikas. So, Jim, you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have, customers are adopting, what problems are they telling you that X-Series addresses, and how do they align with where they want to go in the future? >> That's a great question. I think if you go back to, and think about some of the things that we mentioned before, in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what Vikas mentioned I think is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhance that story and really move again, to the, kind of, to the next level of taking advantage of some of these, you know, problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look at, you know, I think Vikas mentioned accelerated VDI. That's a great example. These are where customers, you know, they need to have this dense compute, they need video acceleration, they need tight policy management, right? And they need to be able to deploy these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X-Series right now. We're hitting the market in every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs, and a lot of room to grow. We have the, you know, the premier cloud based management, you know, hybrid cloud suite in the industry, right? So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that Vikas just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the, through the use of the X-Fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well. And, you know, I think finally, the fifth generation of fabric interconnect and virtual interface card, and, intelligent fabric module go hand in hand in creating this 100 gig end to end bandwidth story, that we can move a lot of data. Again, you know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it, right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere, to be able to get the bandwidth that they need, to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible that it fit exactly their needs, this is huge, right? This solves a lot of the problems we can tick off right away. With the infrastructure as I mentioned, X-Fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here, you know, we're talking about GPUs today, but in the future, there are other elements that we can disaggregate, like the GPUs that solve these life cycle mismanagement issues. They solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for like, it does for GPU we can do that with storage or memory in the future. So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregation that actually delivers, right? It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing, this is something that customers can really get value out of day one. And then finally, I think the, you know, the future readiness here, you know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPUs going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve, the drives, you know, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly. The fabric that stitches them together is critical, and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the development that are coming with CXL, with some of the PCI Express changes that are coming in the very near future, so we're ready to go. And the X-Fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers, right? Our customers are out there saying that, you know, they want to buy into to something like X-Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future, right? We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted, but use them to disrupt their competition as well. So, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and, I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X-Series brings, and, you know, again, you know, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >> Yeah, a lot of headroom for scale and the management piece is key there. Just have time for one more question Vikas. Give us some nuggets on the roadmap. What's next for X-Series that we can look forward to? >> Absolutely Dave. As we talked about, and as Jim also hinted, this is a future ready architecture. A lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up, no refund replace. And, there we are looking into, enabling the customer's journey as they transition from PCI generation four, to five to six without driven replace, as they embrace CXL without driven replace. As they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCIe or NVMe based dense drives, and so forth. We are also looking forward to X-Fabric next generation, which will allow dynamic assignment of GPUs anywhere within the chassis and much more. So this is again, all about focusing on the innovation that will make the enterprise data center operations a lot more simpler, and drive down the TCO by keeping them not only covered for today, but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on Dave. >> Okay. Thank you guys we'll leave it there, in a moment, I'll have some closing thoughts. (upbeat music) We're seeing a major evolution, perhaps even a bit of a revolution in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support hybrid work. Look, virtualizing compute and running general purpose workloads is something IT figured out a long time ago. But just when you have it nailed down in the technology business, things change, don't they? You can count on that. The cloud operating model has bled into on-premises locations. And is creating a new vision for the future, which we heard a lot about today. It's a vision that's turning into reality. And it supports much more diverse and data intensive workloads and alternative compute modes. It's one where flexibility is a watch word, enabling change, attacking complexity, and bringing a management capability that allows for a granular management of resources at massive scale. I hope you've enjoyed this special presentation. Remember, all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net. And if you want to learn more, please click on the information link. Thanks for watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante, be well and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Mm. >>Welcome back to the Cube. Special presentation. Simplifying Hybrid Cloud Brought to You by Cisco We're here with Vegas Rattana, who's the director of product management for you? CSS Cisco and James Leach, who was director of business development at Cisco. Gents, welcome back to the Cube. Good to see you again. >>Hey, thanks for having us. >>Okay, Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers and as organisations that they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, one of the most common challenges that they face. What are they telling you? How is Cisco specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >>Well, you know, first, I think that's a That's a great question. And, you know, the customer centric view is is the way that we've taken. Um, it's kind of the approach we've taken from Day one, right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for their customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications, right? That's the That's where the rubber meets your proverbial road. Um, with the customer. And I would say that you know, what we're seeing is the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data centric applications. For example, um, those require that we are able to move, um, and process large datasets really in real time. Um, and the other aspect of application, I think, to give our customers kind of some pose some challenges would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today or the day that they make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application. That application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can't keep up with today. So, um, that creates some some challenges around. How do I build the infrastructure? How do I write? Size it without over provisioning, for example. But also there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planting those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements and within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges. We see customers who are being forced to move away from the like a modular or blade approach, which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits. And they have to move to something like, um, Iraq server model for some applications because of these needs that these data centric applications have. And that creates a lot of opportunity for silo going. The infrastructure and those silos, in turn, create multiple operating models within the A data centre environment that, you know, again drive a lot of complexity. So that complexity is definitely the the enemy here. Um, and then finally, I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratisation of of processing, if you will, right, so it's no longer just CPU focus. We have GPU. We have F p g A. We have things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So when those life cycles don't align for a lot of our customers, they see a challenge in how they can can manage this these different life cycles and still make a purchase without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So that is a kind of the other bucket. And then finally, I think management is huge, right? So management at its core is really right size for for our customers and give them the most value when it when it meets the mark around scale and scope. Um, back in 2000 and nine, we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took management outside the chassis, right? We put at the top of the rack, and that works great for the scale and scope we needed at that time. However, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed, Right? So we're talking about hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centres across clouds. And, um, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those those operational pieces that that touched the application that touched the infrastructure. But they're not the same tool. They tend to be, um, disparate tools that have to be put together. So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of building their own tools. So, um, so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >>Right? You know, Jim, I said in my my Open that you guys, Cisco sort of changed the server game with the original UCS. But the X Series is the next generation, the generation of the next decade, which is really important cause you touched on a lot of things. These data intensive workloads, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs. The whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed. So how's it going with the X Series? You made a big splash last year. What's the reception been in the field? >>Actually, it's been great. Um, you know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our UCS X series story. Um, I think that the main reason they relate to it as they helped create it, right, it was their feedback and their partnership that they gave us Really, those problem areas, those, uh, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add significant value. So, you know, since we brought you see s to market back in 2000 and nine, we had this unique architectural, um uh, paradigm that we created. And I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history. Um, in terms of growth, Um, what we're seeing now is X series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake. We're seeing, uh, both in terms of the number of customers. But also, more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using and the types of workloads are growing. Right? So we're growing this modular segment that exists not just, um, you know, bringing customers onto a new product, But we're actually bringing them into the product in the way that we had envisioned, which is one infrastructure that can run any application and do it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. Um, I think the other piece, you know that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco, but also within the industry and I think right now is a You know, a great example. Our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, um, at a kind of a new next architecture, and we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any any of our competitors have seen. When they announced something, um, that was new to this space. So I think that the ground up work that we did is really paying off. Um, and I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leapfrog game, Um, as it may have been in the past, Um, X series is out in front today, and we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers, and we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So as our competitors hit walls, I think we're you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June when we launched that series to the world. And, uh, you know, as we as we continue to do that, um, we're seeing, you know, again tremendous uptake from our customers. >>So thank you for that, Jim. So viscous. I was just on Twitter just today, actually talking about the gravitational pull. You've got the public clouds pulling C x o is one way. And you know I'm Prem folks pulling the other way and hybrid cloud So organisations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures and and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away, and they need infrastructure to support that. And I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that with that confusion with the X series. Right? So how so? Can you explain that? >>Sure. And and and that's the right, Uh, the context that you built up right there, Dave, if you walk into Enterprise Data Centre, you see platform of computer systems spread all across because every application has its unique needs. And hence you find Dr Note Driving system memory system, computing system, coordinate system and a variety of farm factors. When you do, you, for you and every one of them typically come with a variety of adapters and cables and so forth Just create silence of resources. Fabric is broad. The actress brought the power and cooling implications the rack, you know, the space challenges and above all, the multiple management plane that they come of it, which makes it very difficult for I t to have one common centre policy and enforce it all across across the firmware and software and so forth and then think about the great challenges of the baroness makes it even more complex as these go through the great references of their own. As a result, we observe quite a few of our customers. Uh, you know, really, uh, seeing Anna slowness in that agility and high burden, uh, in the cost of overall ownership, this is where the X rays powered by inter side. We have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities. They become more Asyl and drive lower tco and we are delivering it by doing three things. Three aspects of simplification first simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure and infrastructure, which removes the narrowness of fun factor and infrastructure which reduces direct from footprint that is required infrastructure were power and cooling better served in the Lord. Second, we want to simplify it with by delivering a cloud operating model where they can create the policy ones across compute network stories and deployed all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade and any platform evolution that they are going to go through the next 23 years. So that's where the focus is on just driving down the simplicity lowering down there. >>That's key. Less friction is is always a good thing now, of course, because we heard from the hyper flex guys earlier, they had news. Not to be outdone, you have hard news as well. What innovations are you announcing around X series today? >>Absolutely. So we are following up on the excited, exciting extras announcement that we made in June last year. Day and we are now introducing three innovation on experience with the bowl of three things First, expand the supported World War and extra days. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third dramatically reduced the complex cities in the data centre by driving down the number of adapters and cables. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU note using a cable list and very unique X fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPS to the compute note in the model of form factor thereby, our customers can now power in AML workload on any workload that needs many more number of GPS. Second, we are bringing in GPS right onto the computer note and thereby the our customers can now fire up the accelerated video upload, for example, and turf, which is what you know we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the fifth generation of our very popular unified fabric technology with the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and density is that we have on the computer note our customers can now fire up the big data workloads the F C I work. Lord, uh, the FDA has worked with all these workloads that have historically not lived in the model of form. Factor can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric, we become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 gig and two and single board banned word and the multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our partners to deliver the benefit of these performance through our Cisco validated design to oversee a franchise. And third, the innovations in, uh, in the in the fifth and public again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters, made the Internet adapter made with our general doctors or maybe the other stories adapters. They reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable so very, very excited about these three big announcements that we're making in this part of the great >>A lot There. You guys have been busy. So thank you for that. Because so, Jim, you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have. Customers are adopting. What problems are they telling you that X series addresses and and how do they align with where where they want to go in the future? >>Um, that's a great question. I think if you go back to um and think about some of the things that we mentioned before. Um, in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what the cost mentioned, I think, is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhanced that story and really move again to kind of to the next level of, of taking advantage of some of these problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look, you know, I think the cost mentioned accelerated VD. That's a great example. Um, these are where customers you know, they need to have this dense compute. They need video acceleration, they need type policy management, right. And they need to be able to deploy these, um, these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X series right now, we're hitting the mark in every every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs. Um, and a lot of room to grow. Um, we have the the premier cloud based management. You know, hybrid cloud suite. Um uh, in the industry. Right. So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that that the cost just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the through the use of the X fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well. And, uh, you know, I think finally, the fifth generation of fabric interconnect and virtual interface card, um, and an intelligent fabric module go hand in hand in creating this 100 gig and end bandwidth story that we can move a lot of data again. You know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it, right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere be able to get the bandwidth that they need to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible to that fit exactly their needs. This is huge, right? This solves a lot of the problems we can take off right away with the infrastructure. As I mentioned, X fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here. We're talking about GPS today, but in the future, there are other elements that we can disaggregate like the GPS that solve these lifecycle mismanagement issues. They solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for like it does for GPU. We can do that with storage or memory in the future, So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregate Asian that actually delivers right. It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing. This is something that that customers can really get value out of Day one. And then finally, I think the future readiness here. You know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPS going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve the drives, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly. The fabric that stitches them together. It's critical, and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the developments that are coming with C XL with with some of the the PC express changes that are coming in the in the very near future. So we're ready to go X and the X fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers. Our customers are out there saying that you know, they want to buy into something like X Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future. We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted, but use them to disrupt, um, their competition as well. So, um, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X Series brings And, um, again, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >>A lot of headroom, uh, for scale and the management piece is key. There just have time for one more question because talk to give us some nuggets on the road map. What's next for? For X X series that we can look forward to? >>Absolutely Dave, as as we talked about. And James also hinted this is the future radio architecture, a lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up no infantry place. And there we are, looking into enabling the customer journey as the transition from PCH in less than 4 to 5 to six without rip and replace as they embraced the Excel without rip and replace as they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the desegregated memory desegregated P. C, A, r N B and dance drives and so forth. We're also looking forward to extract Brick Next Generation, which will and now that dynamic assignment of GPS anywhere within the chassis and much more. Um, so this this is again all about focusing on the innovation that will make the Enterprise Data Centre operations a lot more simpler and drive down the PCO by keeping them not only covered for today, but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on there. >>Okay, Thank you guys. We'll leave it there in a moment. I'll have some closing thoughts. >>Mhm

>>mhm. >>With me now are Manish Agarwal, senior director of product management for Hyper Flex at Cisco at Flash for all number four. Love that on Twitter And Deron Williams, the director of business development and sales for Cisco Mister Hyper flex at Mr Hyper Flex on Twitter. Thanks, guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news and and hyper flex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. >>Thanks, David. >>Thanks. Hi, >>Daryn. Let's start with you. So for hybrid cloud you gotta have on Prem Connection. Right? So you've got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, we agree. You can't, but you can't have a hybrid cloud without that private element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud, you need a strong foundation. I'm conversions provides that we see more and more customers requiring a private cloud, and they're building with hyper convergence in particular hyper flex no to make all that work. They need a good, strong Cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that. To be able to connect that around a Saas offering that looks around simplified operations, gives them optimisation and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. >>Darren, let's stay with you for a minute when you talk to your customers. What are they thinking these days, when it comes to implementing hyper converged infrastructure in both the the enterprise and and at the edge? What are they trying to achieve? >>So there's many things they're trying to achieve? Probably the most brutal honesty is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer, but I think they're trying to look at in terms of simplicity. How can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see obviously collapsing of storage into hyper conversions and storage networking, and we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that, a collapse into hyper conversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure. Also about scalability. They don't know the end game, so they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyper conversions. Very easy is one of the major factors and benefits of hyper conversions. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all the way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around. The simplicity model is the management layer ease of management to make it easier for their operations that we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model, deploying out flex also around the time savings. They make massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think that we one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from three tier architecture is the deployment elements, and the ease of deployment gets easy with hyper converged, especially with edge edges of major key use case for us and what I want. What our customers want to do is get the benefit of the data centre at the edge without a big investment. They don't compromise in performance, and they want that simplicity in both management employment. And we've seen analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for it, operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying edge and taking the burden away when they deployed hyper conversions. As I said, the savings elements to keep it and again, not always, but obviously those are his studies around about public Cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. We again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers looking for >>Great. Thank you for that, Darrin minutes. We have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyper flex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? >>Yeah, Thanks. Leave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. the first one is a new offer, um, called hyper Flex Express. This is, you know, Cisco Inter site lead and Cisco and decide managed it Hyper flex configurations that we feel are the fastest part to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AM Iraq, U. C s and Iraq. And the third is a new capability that we're introducing that we're calling local contemporaries witness. And let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a very nifty capability to optimise for forage environments. So, you know, this leverages the Ciscos ubiquitous presence. Uh, the networking, um, you know, products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest hyper flex configuration that we have is, uh it do not configuration, which is primarily used in edge environment. Think of a, you know, a back home in a department store or a oil rig. Or it might even be a smaller data centre, uh, somewhere, uh, on the globe. For these two not configurations. There is always a need for a third entity that, you know, industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. Uh, we had that for hyper flex as well. The problem that customers faces where you host this witness it cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witnesses to when the when the infrastructure is going down, it basically breaks, um, sort of upgrade rates. Which note gets to survive, so it needs to be outside of the cluster. But finding infrastructure, uh, to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environment. So what we've done is we've taken that witness. We've converted it into a container reform factor and then qualified a very large a slew of Cisco networking products that we have right from S. R. S R. Texas catalyst, industrial routers, even even a raspberry pi that can host host this witness, eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure or doing any, um, you know, care and feeding of that infrastructure. You can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we're announcing today. >>So I want to ask you about hyper Flex Express. You know, obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's global supply chain issues are in the news. Everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that? A little bit more Can can hyper flex express help customers respond to some of these issues. >>Yeah, indeed. The, uh, you know, the primary motivation for hyper Flex Express was indeed, uh, an idea that, you know, one of the folks around my team had, which was to build a set of hyper flex configurations that are, you know, would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that, you know, there is in it for something in it for customers, for sales as well as our partners. So, for example, you know, for customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the instal for hyper flex express. These are still hypertext configurations, and you would, at the end of it, get a hyper flex cluster. But the part to that cluster is much much simplifying. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these, uh, these are data centre configurations But you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects, meaning you can deploy it with your existing top of rack. Um, we've also, you know, already attract attractive price point for these. And of course, you know these will have better lead times because we made sure that, you know, we are using components that are that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective for partner and sales. This is represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time, Uh, and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. Uh, this is actually a settled, risky, friendly configurations, which they would find very easy to stalk and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the deceased as well. >>It's interesting many. So I'm looking at some fresh survey data. More than 70% of the customers that were surveyed this GTR survey again mentioned at the top. More than 70% said they had difficulty procuring, uh, server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So so that's encouraging. What about Manisha AMG that's new for hyper flex? What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? >>Yeah, so you know, in the short time that we've had UCS am direct support, we've had several record breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a it's a It's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it and hyper flex. Uh, you know, the differentiator that we've had from Day one is that it is. It has the industry leading storage performance. So with this, we're going to get the fastest compute together with the fastest storage and this we are hoping that will basically unlock, you know, a unprecedented level of performance and efficiency, but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyper converged experience. >>Yeah, cool. Uh, so, Darren, can >>you can you give us >>an idea as to how hyper flexes is doing in the field? >>Sure, Absolutely So both me and my initial been involved right from the start and before it was called Hyper Flex, and we've had a great journey, and it's very excited to see where we're taking where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5000 customers worldwide, and we're currently growing faster year over year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they approved the technology and are comfortable with technology. They repeat by for expanding capacity, putting more workloads on. They're using different use cases on there. And from an energy perspective, more numbers of science so really good. Endorsement the technology. We get used across all verticals or segments, um, to house mission critical applications as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. Uh, and we are the lifeblood of our customers around those mission critical customers think one example, and I apologise for the worldwide audience. But this resonates with the American audiences the Super Bowl. So the sofa like stadium that housed the Super Bowl actually has Cisco hyper Flex running all the management services through from the entire stadium for digital signage. Four K video distribution, and it's complete completely cashless. So if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would have been a big, uh, news article, but it was run perfectly. We in the design of the solution, we're able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few notes across a few racks and have 100 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission critical for you to run Super Bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with High Flex where it's going, what it's doing. And some of the use cases were getting involved in very, very excited. >>Come on, Darren. It's Super Bowl NFL. That's a That's international now. And, you know, the NFL >>NFL. It's >>invading London. Of course I see the picture of the real football over your shoulder, But last question for many is give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for hyper flex? >>Yeah, so you know, as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved the type of flicks since the beginning, Uh, but I think the best is yet to come. There are three main pillars for for hyper Flex. One is in. The site is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass management. But we're going to take this beyond the Lifecycle management, which is for hyper flex, which is integrated in winter side today and element management. We're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of a job. Because Interstate really provides us an ideal platform to gather starts from all the clusters across the globe. Do AML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as, uh, you know, customer valued, um, actionable insights. So that is one. The second is you'll see us expand the hyper flex portfolio. Go beyond you see us to third party server platforms, and newer, you see a server platforms as well. But the highlight there is one that I'm really really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is a checks on X CDs. Experience is another thing that we're able to, uh you know, uh, announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But a check sonic series. We'll have that by the end of this calendar year, and that should unlock with the flexibility of X series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of hyper flex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads, that we're locked out previously. And then the last thing is hyper flex leader platform. This is the heart of the offering today, Uh, and you'll see the hyper flex data platform itself. It's a distributed architecture, unique distributed architecture primarily where we get our, you know, record breaking performance from you'll see it get faster, more scalable, more resilient. And we'll optimise it for, you know, containerised workloads, meaning it will get granular containerised container granular management capabilities and optimised for public. So those are some things that were the team is busy working on, and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum and maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. >>That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay, guys, we got to leave it there and you know many She was talking about the HX on X Series. That's huge. Customers are gonna love that, and it's a great transition because in a moment I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach and we're gonna dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform, and we're gonna explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on the cube, your leader in enterprise tech coverage.

>>Okay, let's start things off Didi Dasgupta is back on the cube to talk about how we're going to simplify hybrid cloud complexity. Didi. Welcome. Good to see you again. >>Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >>Yeah, our pleasure here. Look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. >>Well, I think first off every customer, these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but every customer is looking to move workloads, use services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's, that's one of the big things that we're seeing while that is happening. We're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution off the application landscape itself. You've got bare metal applications. You always have virtualized applications and then most modern applications are, are containerized and, you know, managed by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in, in the application landscape as well, and probably, you know, triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications, and then the applications themselves it's triggering the change in the it organizations in the development organizations and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that, that I hear about when I talk to customers. >>Well, so it's interesting. I often say Cisco kind of changed the game and in server and compute when it, when it developed the original UCS and you remember there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team. And of course the, the storage team of, and now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to whole the application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? >>No, I think you're right back of the origins of UCS. I mean, we, you know, why the networking company builder server, well, we just enabled with the best networking technology. So do compute that and now doing something similar on the software, actually the managing software for our hyperconvergence, for our. And you know, we've been on this journey for about four years, but the software is called intersite. And, you know, we started out with intersite being just the element manager, the management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices, but then we've evolved it the last few years because we believe that the customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software would do manage the hardware of the underlying hardware and then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then the third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization or cost optimization, a fourth tool do now manage, you know, Kubernetes and like, not just in one, one cluster, one cloud, but multi cluster multicloud. >>They should not have to have a fifth tool that does goes into observability. Anyway, I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that managed their infrastructure, but it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the Kubernetes infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters. I mean, whether it's on-prem or in the cloud. So overall that's the strategy, bring it to a single platform and a platform is a loaded word, but we'll get into that a little bit, you know, in this, in this conversation, but that's the overall strategy simplify? >>Well, you know, he brought a platform. I, I like to say platform beats products, but you know, there was a day and you could still point to some examples today in the it industry where, Hey, another tool we can monetize that and another one to solve a different problem. We can monetize that. And so tell me more about how intersite came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through. You said we can do better. So tell us the story there. >>Yeah, absolutely. So look, it started with, you know, three or four guys getting in a room and saying, look, we've had this, you know, management software, UCS manager, UCS director, and these are just the Cisco's management, you know, for our softwares, for our own platform. Then every company has their, their own flavor. We said, we, we took on this bold goal of like, we're not when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service, or we're going to create a SAS offering because the same in the infrastructure built by us, whether it's on networking or compute or the cyber talk software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SAS services, every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. >>They live and die by how their assets work or don't. And so we were like, we want to eat our own dog food here, right? We want to deliver this as a SAS offering. And so that's how it started being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. But it, it was pretty big boat invasion. Cause you know, the big change with SAS is your, as you're familiar, Dave is the job of now managing this, this piece of software is not on the customer, it's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities. And we've learned so much along the way, whether it's around scalability, reliability, working with our own company's security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SAS service. So again, it's just been a wonderful journey, but I wanted to point out that we are in some ways eating our own dog food. Cause we built a SAS application that helps other companies deliver their SAS applications. >>So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I, I of course compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business and obviously a very profitable company or large company you're growing faster than, than, than most of the traditional competitors. And so that means that you have more to invest. You, you, you can, you can afford things like stock buybacks, and you can invest in R and D. You don't have to make those hard trade-offs that a lot of your competitors have to make. So It's never enough, right? Never enough. But, but, but in speaking of R and D and innovations that you're introducing, I'm specifically interested in, how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud in the operations there and prove flexibility and things around cloud native initiatives as well? >>Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, look, I think one of the fundamentals where we're philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is we don't need to build everything ourselves. We don't, I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's, you know, around search ability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around, you know, access control multi-tenants I need to create a really good platform and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and a half companies and then figure out how to stitch it all together because it's, it's almost impossible if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's, it's three times more difficult, but for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference in how we went about building in our sites. >>We've created a harden platform that's that's always on. Okay. And then you, then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is, you know, infrastructure partners, like, you know, some of our storage partners like NetApp or your, or, you know, others who want to their conversion infrastructure is also to be managed or are there other SAS offerings, software vendors who have now become partners? Like we did not, we did not write Terraform, you know, but we partnered with Tashi and now, you know, Terraform services available on the intercept platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem we partnered with a company called urbanomics. And so that's now an offering on the intercept platform. So that's where we're philosophically different and sort of, you know, w how we have gone about this. And it actually ducked a dovetails well into some of the new things that I want to talk about today, that we're announcing on the underside platform, where we're actually been announcing the ability to attach and, and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters, which are not on prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, soon coming on, on GC, on, on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters on, you know, in AWS or Azure, stay there, but in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use in our site, since you're using it on prem, you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud, or even manage VMs in, in a, in an instance. >>So the fact that you could, you mentioned storage, pure net app. So it's intersite can manage that infrastructure. I remember the hot-seat deal. It caught my attention. And of course, a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco because you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move Turbonomic. You mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud, so a lot different than it was 10 years ago. So my last question is, how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud, and it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these, these, these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve over the next few years? >>Well, I think it's, it's the evolution of the model and really look at know $2 or $3 depending on, you know, how you're keeping time. But I think one thing is become very clear. Again, we may be eating our own dog food. I mean, innercise is a hybrid cloud SAS applications that we've learned. Some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is referred that customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the polo public cloud, on-prem no data center doesn't matter. They're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governings or upgrades or liability. They're looking for a consistent operating model. What Mike is the law doesn't mean? I think there's going to be the rise of more custom plugs. It's still going to be hybrid. So obligations will want to reside wherever it makes most sense for them, which is data moving data is it's the most expensive thing. >>So it's going to be co-located with the data that's on the edge, on the edge colo public cloud doesn't matter, but you're basically going to see more customer droughts, more industry-specific clouds. You know, whether it's for finance or constipation or retail industry specific. I think sovereign is going to play a huge role, you know, today, if you look at the cloud providers, you know, American and Chinese companies that these, the rest of the world, when it comes to making good digital citizens, they're they're people and, you know, control. And the distributor cloud is also on edge is, is gonna be the next frontier. And so that's where we are trying to line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really your cloud, your way. Every customer is on a different journey that will have their choice of workloads, data, you know, uptime, reliability, concerns. That's really what, what we are returning any of our customers. >>You know, I think I agree with you that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers. They're connecting their on-prem to their, to their public cloud. They're doing that. They're, they're doing that across clouds. And they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work. It give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of, because I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with it. I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco in your R and D to do that. Do you buy that? >>Absolutely. I think, again, it goes back to what I was talking about with blacks. You got to get the world a solid open, flexible, and flexible in terms of the technology, flexible in how they want to consume it. Some customers are fine with a SAS software, but as I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team, no, that does not work. So how they want to consume it. They want to, you know, a hundred percent, no sovereignty. We, we talked about. So, you know, job for a decent structure vendor like ourselves is to give the world an open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API. But the last thing I will mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. Some of my colleagues are gonna engage me to some of those, you know, details, whether it's on our X series platform or HyperFlex, but it's really, it's going to, it's going to be software defined to SAS service and then, you know, give the world and open rock-solid platform, >>Got to run on something. All right. Thanks, Deedee. Always a pleasure to have you in the cube. Great to see you. >>You're >>Welcome. In a moment, I'll be back to dig into hyperconverged and where fits and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today.

(upbeat music) >> In 2009, Cisco made a major announcement in the form of UCS. It was designed to attack the IT labor problem. Cisco recognized that, data center professionals were struggling to be agile and provide the types of infrastructure services that lines of business were demanding for the modern applications of that day. The value proposition was all about, simplifying infrastructure deployment and management and by combining networking compute and storage with virtualization and a management layer, Cisco changed the game for running applications on premises and the era of converged infrastructure was born. Now fast forward a dozen years, and a lot has changed. The cloud has gone mainstream, forcing new requirements on organizations to bridge their on-prem environments to public clouds and manage workloads across clouds. Now to address this challenge, Cisco earlier this month, announced a series of offerings, that meaningfully expands its original vision, to support the more demanding requirements of today's dev sec ops teams. In particular Cisco, with this announcement is enabling customers to deploy a full stack cloud-like operating model that leverages modern platforms such as Kubernetes, new integrations and advanced tooling to bring automation, visibility and better security for both hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Now the underpinning of this solution, is a new UCS architecture called the X series. Cisco claims this new system gives customers a trusted platform for the next decade to support their hybrid and multi-cloud workloads. Gents, great to see you, welcome. >> Hey, thank you. Good to be here. >> Thanks for having a us Dave. I appreciate. >> My pleasure. Looking forward to this. So look, we've seen the X series announcement and it looks to be quite a new approach. What are the critical aspects of the X series that you want people to understand? Maybe James, and you can take that. >> Sure I think that, you know, overall, there is a lot of change coming in the marketplace, right? We're seeing we're looking at and we're seeing from a technology standpoint, a significant amount of change. Look at CPU's and GPU's, the power draw alone is becoming, you know, it basically at the trajectory, it is, it may be untenable for some, you know, of the current configurations that people are consuming, right? So some of these current architectures just can't deal with that, right? Or at least they can't deal with what's coming in the future. We're also seeing the relevance of other types of architectures like maybe arm to start to become something that our customers want to take advantage of, right? Or maybe want to see how that scale fits into their environment on a totally different level. At the same time, the fabrics are really evolving at lightning speed here, right? So we're seeing PCI express, we've gone from gen three to gen four, gen five is coming in the very near future. We're layering on top of that, things like CXL to take that, that fabric to the next level for capabilities and be able to do things that we couldn't do before. To connect things together, we couldn't do before. Beyond that, we probably are just a few years away from even more exciting developments in the fabric space around some of the high performance low latency fabrics that are that are again on the drawing board today just around the corner. Take that and you, you look at the kind of the evolution of the the admin, right? So we're seeing the admin developer emerge. No longer is this just a guy who's sitting in front of a dashboard and managing systems, keeping them up and down, we're now seeing a whole class of developers that are also administrators, right? So all of this together is starting to push us well beyond what human scale really can manage, what human scale can consume. So, there's a lot of change coming and I think that we're taking a look at that and realizing that something like X series has to be able to deal with that change and the challenges that it brings, but also and do so in a simple manner that we can allow automation orchestration and some of these new capabilities to enhance what our customers can do, not to drown them in technology. >> You know, that taught, that's kind of interesting what James was saying about beyond human scale. I mean, I think my little narrative upfront, it was sort of, hey, we recognize as an IT labor problem. We're going to address that. And it really wasn't about massive scale back then, it is now. We really what we've learned from the cloud guys, right? >> Definitely. I mean, people are moving from pets to cattle to now with containers, they're saying that it's mosquitoes, right? Cause they're so ephemeral, they come and go and on a single host, you could have, you know, hundreds if not thousands of containers. And so the application environment has influenced the infrastructure design and really changed the role of the infrastructure operator to one that necessitates automation, necessitates operations at scale, even on prem everyone's trying to operate in that cloud like model and they're trying to bridge, the big challenge I see is, they're trying to bridge their existing environment big monolithic applications they've got on-prem with those data lakes that they built around them over the past decade, but they're also trying to follow their developers as they go out into the public cloud and innovate there. That's really where the nexus of all the application innovation is. So the IT teams who are already strapped for resources it's not like their budgets are going up every year, are now taking on a new front out in the cloud while they're still trying to maintain the systems that they've built with on-prem. That's the challenge. >> Yeah that's really the hard part and where some of the innovation here is, is anybody that lives in an old house knows that connecting old to new is very challenging much more challenging than building from scratch. But James I wonder if we'd come back to the to the architecture of the X series and what's really unique about it and what's in it for your customers? >> Yes, absolutely. So we're, when were looking at at kind of redesigning this thing from the ground up, we recognized that, you know from a timing standpoint, we're sitting at a place with the development of future fabrics and some of these other technologies that we finally have the opportunity to hit the timing perfectly to start to do composability right. So we've heard a lot of noise, you know in the market for the last several years about composability and how that's going to be the salvation or change the game here. But at the end of the day, the technology hasn't been there in those offerings, right? So we're sitting at the edge of some of the development of those technologies that are going to allow us to do that. And what we've done with X series, is we've taken a construct that we call the UCS X fabric, which is the ability to consume these technologies today as like a effectively a chassis fabric that can allow us to connect resources together within the chassis and future external to the chassis. But it also allows us to take advantage of the change in fabric that's coming. So as fabrics evolve, as we see new technologies like CXL and the PCI express gen five and beyond, come into play here and eventually physical technologies like Silicon Photonix, those are constructs that are going to allow our customers to do some amazing things and we have the construct to be able to consume those. Our goal here is like, to effectively look out at these disruptive technologies on the horizon and make sure that they're not disrupting our customers that we give our customers the ability to disrupt their competitors and to disrupt their markets, but by consuming those technologies in an easy way. >> You know, you didn't use the term future-proof. And I usually don't like that phrase because a lot of times people go that's future-proof and I'm like, well, what's future proof? Well, it's really fast. Well, okay. And in two years, it's going to be, you know really slow compared to everything else. But what you, what you just laid out is an architecture that's really taking advantage of some of these new capabilities that are driving latency down. So that's so, thank you for that. Now, Todd I get how the X series is going to enable customers you know, today I just mentioned the future but how does it play into Cisco's hybrid cloud vision? >> Well I mean, our customers aren't looking for, you know, point solutions or bolt on layers of software to manage across the hybrid cloud landscape. That's the fundamental challenge and so what we're doing with intersite, if you really think about all the systems that we have in our portfolio, like X series, really it's just extensions of our inner site platform. And there we're bridging the gaps between fundamental infrastructure prem, with all of those services that you need to optimize workloads and infrastructure, both in that on-prem environment but also out in the public cloud and even moving up the stack now into serverless. So we know that customers again are trying to bolt together a cohesive environment that allows them to manage those existing workloads on prem but also support the innovation going on out in the cloud and to do that, you have to have services to manage Kubernetes. You need hooks into modern tool chains like a Hashi corks Terraform, we did that a few months back and we recently brought in something we call our service mesh manager that came out of an acquisition of a Bonzai cloud. So what we're doing is, we're kind of spanning that entire spectrum from physical infrastructure, to the workload and that could be extracted in any number of ways either in containers or containers around VMs or bare metal running applications run on bare metal or just virtual machine applications encapsulation. So, you got all these different modalities that customers are going to run applications in and it's our intent to create a platform here that supports all of them, both on their on-prem environment and also all the resources they're managing out in the cloud. So that's a big deal for us. You know, one thing I want to go back to the X series for a second, something James mentioned, right? Is you know as we see subsystems in computing, start to decompose and break apart, you know, we have intersite as the mechanism to put Humpty Dumpty back together again and that's really, I think composability and district's options bar, but that's okay. But so I'll read it together. And like James said, you know be able to take on whatever fabrics, low latency fabrics, ultra low latency fabrics we need in coming years to sew these systems together, we're kind of breaking a barrier that didn't, that wasn't, you know people have trouble breaking through in the past, right? And that's this idea of true infrastructure as code or true software defined infrastructure. Cause now we're talking about being able to apply policy and automation, to the actual construct of a server. How do you build that thing to the needs of the workload? And so if you talk to an SRE or a developer today and you say infrastructure, they're thinking of Kubernetes cluster, but ultimately we want to push that boundary or that frontier between the world software to find it abstracted as far down in the infrastructure, as we can. And with intersite and X fabric and X series, we're taking it all the way down to the individual drive or CPU or ultimately breaking memory apart and sewing that back together. So it's kind of exciting time for us, cause really, pushing that frontier of what is software defined further and further down into the infrastructure and that just gives people a lot more flexibility in what they build. >> So I want to play something back to you and see if it resonates. Essentially, I look at what you just said is you're building a layer across my on-prem, whatever public cloud across clouds at the conventionally, you know, get to the edge, but let's hold off on that, let's park that for now. But that layer obstructs the underlying technical complexity and allows that infrastructure to be, you said programmable, infrastructure is code essentially. So that's one of my other questions, it's like, how programmable is this infrastructure, you know, today and in the future? But is that idea of an abstraction layer kind of how you're thinking about hybrid and multi-cloud? >> It is in terms of the infrastructure that customers are going to run on prem right in the public cloud the cloud providers are already abstracting that for them. And so what we want to do is bring that same type of public cloud experience to managing infrastructure on prem. So being able to have pools of resources that you allocate out to workloads, shifted as things change. So it's absolutely a cloud-like approach to on-prem infrastructure and you know, one of the things I like to say is, you know, friends don't let friends, build their own private cloud platforms from scratch, right? We're productizing this, we're bringing it as a cohesive system that customers don't need to engineer on their own. They can focus on their operations and James actually, he's a pilot, and one of the things he observed about Intersight a couple of years ago was, this idea of Intersight as a co-pilot and kind of, you know, adding a person to your team almost when you have intersite in your data center, because some very, what feels like rudimentary things are incredibly impactful day-to-day for our customers. So we have recommendation engines. If it, if like, you know, maybe it says some interplay between bios and firmware and operating system and we know that there's an issue there rather than letting customers stumble upon that on their own we're going to flag it, show them the correction, go implement it for them. So that it starts to feel a lot more like what they're accustomed to in a public cloud setting where the system has some intelligence baked in, the system is kind of covering them and watching their back and acting like a co-pilot day-to-day operations. >> Okay, so I get that, you know, the cloud guys will abstract the complexity you guys are focused on prem, but is it, so my question then is multi-cloud across clouds because we have some cloud providers, you know you're partners with Google they do some things with Antho, so I know Microsoft with Ark, but even near-term. Should we think about Cisco as playing that role of my, across cloud, you know, partner if you will? >> Absolutely. You know, cloud agnosticism is core to our approach because we know that, you know if you dial the clock way back to the early odds, right? When cloud first started emerging it was kind of an efficiency play. And you had folks like Nicholas Carr, right? The author that they put out the big switch, kind of envisioning a world where there'd be this ultimate consolidation to maybe one or two or three cloud platforms worldwide. But what we're seeing, you know we had data sovereignty kind of emerge over the past decade but even the past year or two, it's now becoming issues of actual cloud sovereignty. So you have governments in Australia and in India and in Europe actually asserting control over the cloud providers and services that can be used by their public sector organizations and so that's just leading to actually cloud fragmentation. It's not nearly as monolithic of future as we thought it would be. It's a lot of clouds and so as customers want to move around geographically or if they want to go harvest innovation that maybe Google is really good at something like machine vision, or they want to use AWS or Azure for different applications that they're going to go build. We're seeing customers really being put in a place where they're going to deal with multiple cloud providers and the data supports that. So it's definitely our approach especially on the networking technology side to make it very easy for our customers to go out and connect these different clouds and not have to repeat the integration process every time they want to go, you know, start using another public cloud provider. So that's absolutely our strategies to be very agnostic and build everything in mind for customers they're going to be using in multiple providers. >> Thank you for that touch. So James, I want to come back and talk a little bit about sort of your competitive posture here. I mean, you guys, when you made the announcement, I inferred that you were feeling like you were in a pretty good position relative to the competition that you were putting forth, not just you know, core infrastructure in hardware and software but also all these other components around it that we talked about, observability extending out to the, you know, beyond the four walls of my data center, et cetera. But talk a little bit about why you think this gives you such competitive advantage in the marketplace. >> Well I mean, I think first of all, back to where Todd was going as well, is that, you know if you think about trying to be, to work in this hybrid cloud world, that we're clearly living in, the idea of burrowing features and functions as far down the stack as possible, doesn't make a lot of sense, right? So intersite is a great example. We want to manage and we want to orchestrate across clouds, right? So how are we going to have our management and infrastructure services buried into the chassis, down at the very lowest level, that doesn't make sense. So we elevated our, you know, our operating model to the cloud, right? And that's how we manage across clouds from the cloud. So, building a system and really we've done this from the ground up with X series, building a system that is able to take advantage of all these two technologies. And you mentioned, you know, how being future proof was probably you know, a derogatory term almost and I agree with you completely. I think we're future ready. Like, we're ready to embrace it because we're not trying to say that nothing is going to change beyond what we've already thought of, we're saying, bring it on. We're saying, bring on that change because we're ready for it. We've we can accommodate change. We, we're not saying that the technology we have today is to going to ride us for 10 years, we're saying,, we're ready for the next 10 years of change. Bring it. We can do that in a simple way. That is, you know, I think, you know going to give us the versatility and the simplicity to allow the technology to go beyond human scale without having to you know drown our customers in administrative duties, right? So that co-pilot that Todd mentioned is going to be able to take on a lot more of the work, just like an airplane where you know, the pilot has functionality that he has to absolutely be part of and those are the our developers, right? We want those admin developers to develop, to build things and to do things and not get bogged down in the minutiae that exists. So I think competitively, you know, our architecture top to bottom, you know, all the way up the stack, all the way to the bottom is unique and it is focused on not just the rear view mirror but what's coming in the future. >> So my takeaway there is that, okay, I get it. The new technologies will come along but this architecture is the architecture for the decade. You're not going to have to redo the architecture in a few years. That's really the key point here. Todd, I'll give you last word might just taking some notes here and takeaways that I heard, I heard upfront. Chip diversity really take advantage of all the innovations that are coming out. You're ready for that. You're kind of blurring the lines between blade and rack, giving some optionality there. Scale is a big theme. I mean, the cloud has brought that in and, you know people want to scale, they don't want to be, you know provisioning lawns all day and they won't be able to scale if that's what their job is. Developer friendly, particularly as it relates to infrastructure as code. And you've got a roadmap. So Todd, that's my summary. I'll give you the last word. >> No, it's really good. I mean, you hit it, right. We're thinking about this holistic operating environment that our customers are building for hybrid cloud and we're pre-engineering that environment for them. So our Intersight platform, all of our systems that connect to that, are really built to tackle that hybrid environment from end to end, and with systems like X series, we're giving them a more simple, efficient landing spot for their workloads on prem but crucially it's fully integrated with this hybrid cloud platform so as they have workloads on prem and workloads in the cloud, it's kind of a transparent environment between those two, between those two, two worlds there. So bringing it together so that our customers don't have to build it themselves. >> Excellent. Well, gents thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing the details of this announcement. Congratulations, I know how much work and thought goes into these things, really looking forward to its progress and adoption in the marketplace. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for time. >> And thank you for watching this cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From around the globe it's theCube. Presenting Future Cloud. One event, a world of opportunities. Brought to you by Cisco. >> We're here with Vikas Ratna, who's the director of product management for ECS at Cisco and James Leach is the director of business development for UCS at Cisco as well. We're going to talk about computing in the age of hybrid cloud. Welcome gentlemen, great to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Vikas let's start with you and talk a little bit about computing architectures. We know that they're evolving, they're supporting new data intensive and other workloads, especially as high-performance workload requirements, what's Cisco's point of view on all this? And specifically, I'm interested in your thoughts on fabrics, I mean, it's kind of your wheelhouse, you've got accelerators, What are the workloads that are driving these evolving technologies and how is it impacting customers? What are you seeing? >> Sure, Dave. First of all, very excited to be here today. You're absolutely right. The pace of innovation and foundational platform ingredients have just been phenomenal in recent years. The fabric, accelerators, the drives, the processing power, the core density all have been evolving at just an amazing pace and the pace will only pick up further, but ultimately it is all about applications and the way applications leverage those innovations. And we do see applications evolving quite rapidly. The new classes of applications are evolving to absorb those innovations and deliver much better business values, very, very exciting times, Dave, but talking about the impact on the customers, well these innovations have helped them pretty positively. We do see significant challenges in the data center with a point product based approach of delivering these platform innovations to the applications. What has happened is these innovations today are being packaged as point products to meet the needs of a specific application. And as you know, the different applications have their different needs. Some applications need more tributes, others need more memory, yet others need, you know, more cores. Some need different kinds of fabrics. As a result, if you walk into a data center today, it is pretty common to see many different point products in the data center. This creates a manageability challenge. Imagine the aspect of managing, you know, several different form factors, one you, to you, purpose-built servers or the variety of, you know, blade form factor. You know, this reminds me of the situation we had before smartphones arrived. You remember the days when you, when we used to have a GPS device for navigation system, a cool music device for listening to the music, a phone device for making a call, camera for taking the photos. Right? And we were all excited about it. It's when the smartphones arrived that we realized all those cool innovations could be delivered in a much simpler, much convenient, and easy to consume it through one device and, you know, and that could completely transform our experience. So we see the customers who are benefiting from these innovations to have a way to consume those things in a much more simplistic way than they are able to do it today. >> And I like, look, it's always been about the applications, but to your point, the applications are now moving at a much faster pace. The customer experience is, expectation, is way escalated. And when you combine all these, I love your analogy there Vikas, because when you combine all these capabilities, it allows us to develop new applications, new capabilities, new customer experiences. So that's the, I always say, the next 10 years, they ain't going to be like the last. And James, public cloud obviously is heavily influencing compute design and customer operating models. You know, it's funny, when the public cloud first hit the market, everyone, we were swooning about oh, low cost, standard off-the-shelf servers, you know, and storage devices, but it quickly became obvious that customers needed more. So I wonder if you could comment on this. How are the trends that we've seen from the hyperscalers, how are they filtering into on-prem infrastructure and maybe, you know, maybe there's some differences there as well that you could address? >> Absolutely. So, you know, I'd say first of all, quite frankly, you know, public cloud has completely changed the expectations of how our customers want to consume compute, right? So customers, especially in a public cloud environment, they've gotten used to, or, you know, come to accept that they should consume from the application out, right? They want a very application-focused view, a services-focused view of the world. They don't want to think about infrastructure, right? They want to think about their application. They want to move outward, right? So, this means that the infrastructure basically has to meet the application where it lives. So what that means for us is that, you know, we're taking a different approach. We've decided that, you know, we're not going to chase this, you know, single pane of glass view of the world, which, you know, frankly our customers don't want. They don't want a single pane of glass. What they want is a single operating model. They want an operating model that's similar to what they can get with the public cloud, but they want it across all of their cloud options. They want it across private cloud, across hybrid cloud options, as well. So what that means is they don't want to just consume infrastructure services. They want all of their cloud services from this operating model. So that means that they may want to consume infrastructure services for automation orchestration, but they also need Kubernetes services. They also need virtualization services. They may need Terraform, workload optimization. All of these services have to be available from within the operating model, a consistent operating model, right? So it doesn't matter whether you're talking about private cloud, hybrid cloud, anywhere, where the application lives doesn't matter. What matters is that we have a consistent model, that we think about it from the application out, and frankly, I'd say, you know, this has been the stumbling block for private cloud. Private cloud is hard, right? This is why it hasn't been really solved yet. This is why we had to take a brand new approach. And frankly, it's why we're super excited about X Series and intersight as that, you know, operating model that fits the hybrid cloud better than anything else we've seen. >> This is a Cube first, first time's a technology vendor has ever said that it's not about a single pane of glass because I've been hearing for decades we're going to deliver a single pane of glass. It's going to be seamless and it never happens. It's like a single version of the truth. It's aspirational. And it's just not reality. So can we stay on the X Series for a minute, James, maybe in this context, but in the launch that we saw today, it was like a fire hose of announcements. So, how does the X Series fit into the strategy with intersight, and hybrid cloud in this operating model that you're talking about? >> Right. So, I think it goes hand-in-hand, right? The two pieces go together very well. So we have, you know, this idea of a single operating model that is definitely, you know, something that our customers demand, right? It's what we have to have, but at the same time we need to solve the problems Vikas was talking about before, we need a single infrastructure to go along with that single operating model. So no longer do we need to have silos within the infrastructure that give us different operating models or different sets of benefits, when you want infrastructure that can kind of do all of those configurations, all those applications. And then, you know, the operating model is very important because that's where we abstract the complexity that could come with just throwing all that technology at the infrastructure. So that, you know, this is, you know, the way that we think about it is the data center is not centered, right? It's no longer centered. Applications live everywhere. Infrastructure lives everywhere. And, you know, we need to have that consistent operating model, but we need to do things within the infrastructure as well to take full advantage, right? So we want all the SaaS benefits of a CICD model of, you know, the intersight can bring, we want all of that, you know, proactive recommendation engine with the power of AI behind it, we want the connected support experience. We want all of that, but we want to do it across a single infrastructure. And we think that that's how they tie together. That's why one or the other doesn't really solve the problem, but both together. That's why we're here. That's why we're super excited. >> So Vikas, I make you laugh a little bit. When I was an analyst at IDC, I was a bit deep into infrastructure, And then when I left, I was doing, I was working with application development heads. And like you said, infrastructure, it was just a roadblock, but it was so the tongue-in-cheek is when Cisco announced UCS a decade ago, I totally missed it. I didn't understand it. I thought it was Cisco getting into the traditional server business. And it wasn't until I dug in that I realized that your vision was really to transform infrastructure deployment and management. And change the model. It was like, okay, I got that wrong. But, so let's talk about the, the ecosystem and the joint development efforts that are going on there. X Series, how does it fit into this converged infrastructure business that you've built and grown with partners? You've got storage partners like NetApp and Pure. You got ISV partners in the ecosystem. We see Cohesity, it's been a while since we hung out with all these companies at the Cisco live, hopefully next year, but tell us what's happening in that regard. >> No, absolutely. I'm looking forward to seeing you in the Cisco live next year, Dave. Absolutely. You brought up a very good point. UCS is about the ecosystem that it brings together. It's about making our customers bring up the entire infrastructure, from the core foundational hardware all the way to the application level so that they can all go off and running pretty quick. That converse infrastructure has been one of the cornerstones of our strategy, as you pointed out, in the last decade. And I'm very glad to share that conversed infrastructure continues to be a very popular architecture for several enterprise applications even today. In fact, it is the preferred architecture for mission critical applications, where performance, resiliency, latency, are the critical requirements. They are almost de facto standards for large scale deployments of virtualize and business critical databases and so forth. With X Series, with our partnerships, with our restorative partners, those architectures will absolutely continue and will get better. But in addition, it's a hybrid cloud world. So we are now bringing in the benefits of conversed infrastructure to the world of hybrid cloud. We'll be supporting the hybrid cloud applications now with the CA infrastructure that we have built together with our strong partnership with the store as partners to tell you with the same benefits to the new age applications as well. >> Yeah and that's what customers want, they want that cloud operating model. Right? Go ahead, please. >> I was just going to say, you know, that the CA model will continue to thrive. It will transition out, it will expand the use cases now for the newer use cases that we were beginning to see, Dave, absolutely. >> Great. Thank you for that. And James, like I said earlier today, we heard this huge announcement, a lot of parts to it. And we heard, you know, KD talk about this initiative is, it's really computing built for the next decade. I mean, I like that because it shows some vision and that you've got, you know, a roadmap, that you've thought through the coming changes in workloads and infrastructure management and some of the technology that you can take advantage of beyond just the, you know, one or two product cycles. So, but I want to understand what you've done here specifically that you feel differentiates you from other competitive architectures in the industry. >> Sure. You know, that's a great question. number one. Number two, I'm frankly a little bit concerned at times for customers in general, for our customers, customers in general, because if you look at what's in the market, right? These rinse and repeat systems that were effectively just rehashes of the same old design, right? That we've seen since before 2009 when we brought UCS to market, these are what we're seeing over and over and over again, that's not really going to work anymore, frankly. And I think that people are getting lulled into a false sense of security by seeing those things continually put in the market. We've rethought this from the ground up because frankly, you know, future-proofing starts now, right? If you're not doing it right today, future-proofing isn't even on your radar because you're not even, you're not even today-proofed. So we've rethought the entire chassis, the entire architecture, from the ground up. Okay. If you look at other vendors, if you look at other solutions in the market, what you'll see is things like, you know management inside the chassis. That's a great example. Daisy chaining them together. Like, who needs that? Who wants that? Like, that kind of complexity is, first of all, it's ridiculous. Second of all, if you want to manage across clouds you have to do it from the cloud, right? It's just common sense. You have to move management where it can have the scale and the scope that it needs to impact, you know, your entire domain, your world, which is much larger now than it was before. We're talking about true hybrid cloud here. Right? So, we had to, you know, solve certain problems that existed in the traditional architecture. You know, I can't tell you how many times I heard you know, talk about, you know, the mid plane is a great example. Well, you know, the mid plane in a chassis is a limiting factor. It limits us on how much we can connect or how much bandwidth we have available to the chassis. It limits us on air flow and other things. So how do you solve that problem? Simple. Just get rid of it. Like we just, we took it out, right? It's now no longer a problem. We designed an architecture that doesn't need it. It doesn't rely on it, no forklift upgrades. So as we start moving down the path of needing liquid cooling, or maybe we need to take advantage of some new high performance, low latency fabrics. We can do that with almost no problem at all, right? So we don't have any forklift upgrades. Park your forklift on the side. You won't need it anymore because you can upgrade granularly. You can move along as technologies come into existence that maybe don't even exist today. They may not even be on our radar today to take advantage of but I like to think of these technologies. You know, they're really important to our customers. These are, you know, we can call them disruptive technologies. The reality is that we don't want to disrupt our customers with these technologies. We want to give them these technologies so they can go out and be disruptive themselves, right? And this is the way that we've designed this, from the ground up, to be easy consume and to take advantage of what we know about today and what's coming in the future that we may not even know about. So we think this is a way to give our customers that ultimate capability, flexibility, and future-proofing. >> I like that phrase, true hybrid cloud. It's one that we've used for years. But to me, this is all about that horizontal infrastructure that can support that vision of what true hybrid cloud is. You could support the mission critical applications. You can develop on the system and you can support a variety of workloads. You're not locked into, you know, one narrow stovepipe. And that does have legs. Vikas and James, thanks so much for coming on the program. Great to see you. >> Thank you, we appreciate the time. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for watching. This is Dave Volante for theCube, the leader in digital event coverage. (uplifting music)

>>mhm, mm. All right. Mhm. Mhm, mm mm. Mhm. Yeah, mm. Mhm. Yeah, yeah. Mhm, mm. Okay. Mm. Yeah, Yeah. >>Mhm. Mhm. Yeah. Welcome to future cloud made possible by Cisco. My name is Dave Volonte and I'm your host. You know, the cloud is evolving like the universe is expanding at an accelerated pace. No longer is the cloud. Just a remote set of services, you know, somewhere up there. No, the cloud, it's extending to on premises. Data centers are reaching into the cloud through adjacent locations. Clouds are being connected together to each other and eventually they're gonna stretch to the edge and the far edge workloads, location latency, local laws and economics will define the value customers can extract from this new cloud model which unifies the operating experience independent of location. Cloud is moving rapidly from a spare capacity slash infrastructure resource to a platform for application innovation. Now, the challenge is how to make this new cloud simple, secure, agile and programmable. Oh and it has to be cloud agnostic. Now, the real opportunity for customers is to tap into a layer across clouds and data centers that abstracts the underlying complexity of the respective clouds and locations. And it's got to accommodate both mission critical workloads as well as general purpose applications across the spectrum cost, effectively enabling simplicity with minimal labor costs requires infrastructure i. E. Hardware, software, tooling, machine intelligence, AI and partnerships within an ecosystem. It's kind of accommodate a variety of application deployment models like serverless and containers and support for traditional work on VMS. By the way, it also requires a roadmap that will take us well into the next decade because the next 10 years they will not be like the last So why are we here? Well, the cube is covering Cisco's announcements today that connect next generation compute shared memory, intelligent networking and storage resource pools, bringing automation, visibility, application assurance and security to this new decentralized cloud. Now, of course in today's world you wouldn't be considered modern without supporting containers ai and operational tooling that is demanded by forward thinking practitioners. So sit back and enjoy the cubes, special coverage of Cisco's future cloud >>From around the globe. It's the Cube presenting future cloud one event, a world of opportunities brought to you by Cisco. >>We're here with Dejoy Pandey, a VP of emerging tech and incubation at Cisco. V. Joy. Good to see you. Welcome. >>Good to see you as well. Thank you Dave and pleasure to be here. >>So in 2020 we kind of had to redefine the notion of agility when it came to digital business or you know organizations, they had to rethink their concept of agility and business resilience. What are you seeing in terms of how companies are thinking about their operations in this sort of new abnormal context? >>Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think what what we're seeing is that pretty much the application is the center of the universe. And if you think about it, the application is actually driving brand recognition and the brand experience and the brand value. So the example I like to give is think about a banking app uh recovered that did everything that you would expect it to do. But if you wanted to withdraw cash from your bank you would actually have to go to the ATM and punch in some numbers and then look at your screen and go through a process and then finally withdraw cash. Think about what that would have, what what that would do in a post pandemic era where people are trying to go contact less. And so in a situation like this, the digitization efforts that all of these companies are going through and and the modernization of the automation is what is driving brand recognition, brand trust and brand experience. >>Yeah. So I was gonna ask you when I heard you say that, I was gonna say well, but hasn't it always been about the application, but it's different now, isn't it? So I wonder if you talk more about how the application is experience is changing. Yes. As a result of this new digital mandate. But how should organizations think about optimizing those experiences in this new world? >>Absolutely. And I think, yes, it's always been about the application, but it's becoming the center of the universe right now because all interactions with customers and consumers and even businesses are happening through that application. So if the application is unreliable or if the application is not available is untrusted insecure, uh, there's a problem. There's a problem with the brand, with the company and the trust that consumers and customers have with our company. So if you think about an application developer, the weight he or she is carrying on their shoulders is tremendous because you're thinking about rolling features quickly to be competitive. That's the only way to be competitive in this world. You need to think about availability and resiliency. Like you pointed out and experience, you need to think about security and trust. Am I as a customer or consumer willing to put my data in that application? So velocity, availability, Security and trust and all of that depends on the developer. So the experience, the security, the trust, the feature, velocity is what is driving the brand experience now. >>So are those two tensions that say agility and trust, you know, Zero Trust used to be a buzzword now it's a mandate. But are those two vectors counter posed? Can they be merged into one and not affect each other? Does the question makes sense? Right? Security usually handcuffs my speed. But how do you address that? >>Yeah that's a great question. And I think if you think about it today that's the way things are. And if you think about this developer all they want to do is run fast because they want to build those features out and they're going to pick and choose a piece and services that matter to them and build up their app and they want the complexities of the infrastructure and security and trust to be handled by somebody else is not that they don't care about it but they want that abstraction so that is handled by somebody else. And typically within an organization we've seen in the past where this friction between Netapp Sec ops I. T. Tops and and the cloud platform Teams and the developer on one side and these these frictions and these meetings and toil actually take a toll on the developer and that's why companies and apps and developers are not as agile as they would like to be. So I think but it doesn't have to be that way. So I think if there was something that would allow a developer to pick and choose, discover the apis that they would like to use connect those api is in a very simple manner and then be able to scale them out and be able to secure them and in fact not just secure them during the run time when it's deployed. We're right off the back when the fire up that I'd and start developing the application. Wouldn't that be nice? And as you do that, there is a smooth transition between that discovery connectivity and ease of consumption and security with the idea cops. Netapp psych ops teams and see source to ensure that they are not doing something that the organization won't allow them to do in a very seamless manner. >>I want to go back and talk about security but I want to add another complexity before we do that. So for a lot of organizations in the public cloud became a staple of keeping the lights on during the pandemic but it brings new complexities and differences in terms of latency security, which I want to come back to deployment models etcetera. So what are some of the specific networking challenges that you've seen with the cloud native architecture is how are you addressing those? >>Yeah. In fact, if you think about cloud, to me that is a that is a different way of seeing a distributed system. And if you think about a distributed system, what is at the center of the distributed system is the network. So my my favorite comment here is that the network is the wrong time for all distribute systems and modern applications. And that is true because if you think about where things are today, like you said, there's there's cloud assets that a developer might use in the banking example that I gave earlier. I mean if you want to build a contact less app so that you get verified, a customer gets verified on the app. They walk over to the ATM and they were broadcast without touching that ATM. In that kind of an example, you're touching the mobile Rus, let's say U S A P is you're touching cloud API is where the back end might sit. You're touching on primary PS maybe it's an oracle database or a mainframe even where transactional data exists. You're touching branch pipes were the team actually exists and the need for consistency when you withdraw cash and you're carrying all of this and in fact there might be customer data sitting in salesforce somewhere. So it's cloud API is a song premise branch. It's ass is mobile and you need to bring all of these things together and over time you will see more and more of these API is coming from various as providers. So it's not just cloud providers but saas providers that the developer has to use. And so this complexity is very, very real. And this complexity is across the wide open internet. So the application is built across this wide open internet. So the problems of discovery ability, the problems of being able to simply connect these apis and manage the data flow across these apis. The problems of consistency of policy and consumption because all of these areas have their own nuances and what they mean, what the arguments mean and what the A. P. I. Actually means. How do you make it consistent and easy for the developer? That is the networking problem. And that is a problem of building out this network, making traffic engineering easy, making policy easy, making scale out, scale down easy, all of that our networking problems. And so we are solving those problems uh Francisco. >>Yeah the internet is the new private network but it's not so private. So I want to go back to security. I often say that the security model of building a moat, you dig the moat, you get the hardened castle that's just outdated now that the queen is left her castle, I always say it's dangerous out there. And the point is you touched on this, it's it's a huge decentralized system and with distributed apps and data, that notion of perimeter security, it's just no longer valid. So I wonder if you could talk more about how you're thinking about this problem and you definitely address some of that in your earlier comments. But what are you specifically doing to address this and how do you see it evolving? >>Yeah, I mean, that's that's a very important point. I mean, I think if you think about again the wide open internet being the wrong time for all modern applications, what is perimeter security in this uh in this new world? I mean, it's to me it boils down to securing an API because again, going with that running example of this contact lists cash withdrawal feature for a bank, the ap wherever it's it's entre branch SAs cloud, IOS android doesn't matter that FBI is your new security perimeter. And the data object that is trying to access is also the new security perimeter. So if you can secure ap to ap communication and P two data object communication, you should be good. So that is the new frontier. But guess what software is buggy? Everybody's software not saying Cisco software, everybody's Softwares buggy. Uh software is buggy, humans are not reliable and so things mature, things change, things evolve over time. So there needs to be defense in depth. So you need to secure at the API layer had the data object layer, but you also need to secure at every layer below it so that you have good defense and depth if any layer in between is not working out properly. So for us that means ensuring ap to ap communication, not just during long time when the app has been deployed and is running, but during deployment and also during the development life cycle. So as soon as the developer launches an ID, they should be able to figure out that this api is security uses reputable, it has compliant, it is compliant to my to my organization's needs because it is hosted, let's say from Germany and my organization wants appears to be used only if they are being hosted out of Germany so compliance needs and and security needs and reputation. Is it available all the time? Is it secure? And being able to provide that feedback all the time between the security teams and the developer teams in a very seamless real time manner. Yes, again, that's something that we're trying to solve through some of the services that we're trying to produce in san Francisco. >>Yeah, I mean those that layered approach that you're talking about is critical because every layer has, you know, some vulnerability. And so you you've got to protect that with some depth in terms of thinking about security, how should we think about where where Cisco's primary value add is, I mean as parts of the interview has a great security business is growing business, Is it your intention to to to to add value across the entire value chain? I mean obviously you can't do everything so you've got a partner but so has the we think about Cisco's role over the next I'm thinking longer term over the over the next decade. >>Yeah, I mean I think so, we do come in with good strength from the runtime side of the house. So if you think about the security aspects that we haven't played today, uh there's a significant set of assets that we have around user security around around uh with with do and password less. We have significant assets in runtime security. I mean, the entire portfolio that Cisco brings to the table is around one time security, the secure X aspects around posture and policy that will bring to the table. And as you see, Cisco evolve over time, you will see us shifting left. I mean, I know it's an overused term, but that is where security is moving towards. And so that is where api security and data security are moving towards. So learning what we have during runtime because again, runtime is where you learn what's available and that's where you can apply all of the M. L. And I models to figure out what works what doesn't taking those learnings, Taking those catalogs, taking that reputation database and moving it into the deployment and development life cycle and making sure that that's part of that entire they have to deploy to runtime chain is what you will see. Cisco do overtime. >>That's fantastic phenomenal perspective video. Thanks for coming on the cube. Great to have you and look forward to having you again. >>Absolutely. Thank you >>in a moment. We'll talk hybrid cloud applications operations and potential gaps that need to be addressed with costume, Das and VJ Venugopal. You're watching the cube the global leader in high tech coverage. Mhm >>You were cloud. It isn't just a cloud. It's everything flowing through it. It's alive. Yeah, connecting users, applications, data and devices and whether it's cloud, native hybrid or multi cloud, it's more distributed than ever. One company takes you inside, giving you the visibility and the insight you need to take action. >>One company >>has the vision to understand it, all the experience, to securely connect at all on any platform in any environment. So you can work wherever work takes you in a cloud first world between your cloud and being cloud smart, there's a bridge. Cisco the bridge to possible. >>Okay. We're here with costume does, who is the Senior Vice President, General Manager of Cloud and compute at Cisco. And VJ Venugopal, who is the Senior Director for Product Management for cloud compute at Cisco. KTV. J. Good to see you guys welcome. >>Great to see you. Dave to be here. >>Katie, let's talk about cloud you And I last time we're face to face was in Barcelona where we love talking about cloud and I always say to people look, Cisco is not a hyper Scaler, but the big public cloud players, they're like giving you a gift. They spent almost actually over $100 billion last year on Capex. The big four. So you can build on that infrastructure. Cisco is all about hybrid cloud. So help us understand the strategy. There may be how you can leverage that build out and importantly what a customer is telling you they want out of hybrid cloud. >>Yeah, no that's that's that's a perfect question to start with. Dave. So yes. So the hybrid hyper scholars have invested heavily building out their assets. There's a great lot of innovation coming from that space. Um There's also a great innovation set of innovation coming from open source and and that's another source of uh a gift. In fact the I. T. Community. But when I look at my customers they're saying well how do I in the context of my business implement a strategy that takes into consideration everything that I have to manage um in terms of my contemporary work clothes, in terms of my legacy, in terms of everything my developer community wants to do on DEVOPS and really harnessed that innovation that's built in the public cloud, that built an open source that built internally to me, and that naturally leads them down the path of a hybrid cloud strategy. And Siskel's mission is to provide for that imperative, the simplest more power, more powerful platform to deliver hybrid cloud and that platform. Uh It's inter site we've been investing in. Inner side, it's a it's a SAS um service um inner side delivers to them that bridge between their estates of today that were closer today, the need for them to be guardians of enterprise grade resiliency with the agility uh that's needed for the future. The embracing of cloud. Native of new paradigms of deVOPS models, the embracing of innovation coming from public cloud and an open source and bridging those two is what inner side has been doing. That's kind of that's kind of the crux of our strategy. Of course we have the entire portfolio behind it to support any, any version of that, whether that is on prem in the cloud, hybrid, cloud, multi cloud and so forth. >>But but if I understand it correctly from what I heard earlier today, the inter site is really a linchpin of that strategy, is it not? >>It really is and may take a second to totally familiarize those who don't know inner side with what it is. We started building this platform quite a few years back and we we built a ground up to be an immensely scalable SAs, super simple hybrid cloud platform and it's a platform that provides a slew of service is inherently and then on top of that there are suites of services, the sweets of services that are tied to infrastructure, automation. Cisco, as well as Cisco partners. The streets of services that have nothing to do with Cisco um products from a hardware perspective. And it's got to do with more cloud orchestration and cloud native and inner side and its suite of services um continue to kind of increase in pace and velocity of delivery video. Just over the last two quarters we've announced a whole number of things will go a little bit deeper into some of those but they span everything from infrastructure automation to kubernetes and delivering community than service to workload optimization and having visibility into your cloud estate. How much it's costing into your on premise state into your work clothes and how they're performing. It's got integrations with other tooling with both Cisco Abdi uh as well as non Cisco um, assets and then and then it's got a whole slew of capabilities around orchestration because at the end of the day, the job of it is to deliver something that works and works at scale that you can monitor and make sure is resilient and that includes that. That includes a workflow and ability to say, you know, do this and do this and do this. Or it includes other ways of automation, like infrastructure as code and so forth. So it includes self service that so that expand that. But inside the world's simplest hybrid cloud platform, rapidly evolving rapidly delivering new services. And uh we'll talk about some more of those day. >>Great, thank you, Katie VJ. Let's bring you into the discussion. You guys recently made an announcement with the ASCIi corp. I was stoked because even though it seemed like a long time ago, pre covid, I mean in my predictions post, I said, ha, she was a name to watch our data partners. Et are you look at the survey data and they really have become mainstream? You know, particularly we think very important in the whole multi cloud discussion. And as well, they're attractive to customers. They have open source offerings. You can very easily experiment. Smaller organizations can take advantage. But if you want to upgrade to enterprise features like clustering or whatever, you can plug right in. Not a big complicated migration. So a very, very compelling story there. Why is this important? Why is this partnership important to Cisco's customers? Mhm. >>Absolutely. When the spot on every single thing that you said, let me just start by paraphrasing what ambition statement is in the cloud and computer group. Right ambition statement is to enable a cloud operating model for hybrid cloud. And what we mean by that is the ability to have extreme amounts of automation orchestration and observe ability across your hybrid cloud idea operations now. Uh So developers and applications team get a great amount of agility in public clouds and we're on a mission to bring that kind of agility and automation to the private cloud and to the data centers and inter site is a quickie platform and lynchpin to enable that kind of operations. Uh, Cloud like operations in the in the private clouds and the key uh As you rightly said, harsher car is the, you know, they were the inventors of the concept of infrastructure at school and in terra form, they have the world's number one infrastructure as code platform. So it became a natural partnership for Cisco to enter into a technology partnership with harsher card to integrate inter site with hardship cops, terra form to bring the benefits of infrastructure as code to the to hybrid cloud operations. And we've entered into a very tight integration and uh partnership where we allow developers devops teams and infrastructure or administrators to allow the use of infrastructure as code in a SAS delivered manner for both public and private club. So it's a very unique partnership and a unique integration that allows the benefits of cloud managed i E C. To be delivered to hybrid cloud operations. And we've been very happy and proud to be partnering with Russian government shutdown. >>Yeah, Terra form gets very high marks from customers. The a lot of value there. The inner side integration adds to that value. Let's stay on cloud native for a minute. We all talk about cloud native cady was sort of mentioning before you got the the core apps, uh you want to protect those, make sure their enterprise create but they gotta be cool as well for developers. You're connecting to other apps in the cloud or wherever. How are you guys thinking about this? Cloud native trend? What other movies are you making in this regard? >>I mean cloud native is there is one of the paramount I. D. Trends of today and we're seeing massive amounts of adoption of cloud native architecture in all modern applications. Now, Cloud Native has become synonymous with kubernetes these days and communities has emerged as a de facto cloud native platform for modern cloud native app development. Now, what Cisco has done is we have created a brand new SAs delivered kubernetes service that is integrated with inter site, we call it the inter site community service for A. Ks. And this just geared a little over one month ago. Now, what interstate kubernetes service does is it delivers a cloud managed and cloud delivered kubernetes service that can be deployed on any supported target infrastructure. It could be a Cisco infrastructure, it could be a third party infrastructure or it could even be public club. But think of it as kubernetes anywhere delivered as says, managed from inside. It's a very powerful capability that we've just released into inter site to enable the power of communities and clog native to be used to be used anywhere. But today we made a very important aspect because we are today announced the brand new Cisco service mess manager, the Cisco service mesh manager, which is available as an extension to the KS are doing decide basically we see service measures as being the future of networking right in the past we had layer to networking and layer three networking and now with service measures, application networking and layer seven networking is the next frontier of, of networking. But you need to think about networking for the application age very differently how it is managed, how it is deployed. It needs to be ready, developer friendly and developer centric. And so what we've done is we've built out an application networking strategy and built out the service match manager as a very simple way to deliver application networking through the consumers, like like developers and application teams. This is built on an acquisition that Cisco made recently of Banzai Cloud and we've taken the assets of Banzai Cloud and deliver the Cisco service mesh manager as an extension to KS. That brings the promise of future networking and modern networking to application and development gives >>God thank you. BJ. And so Katie, let's let's let's wrap this up. I mean, there was a lot in this announcement today, a lot of themes around openness, heterogeneity and a lot of functionality and value. Give us your final thoughts. >>Absolutely. So, couple of things to close on, first of all, um Inner side is the simplest, most powerful hybrid cloud platform out there. It enables that that cloud operating model that VJ talked about, but enables that across cloud. So it's sad, it's relatively easy to get into it and give it a spin so that I'd highly encouraged anybody who's not familiar with it to try it out and anybody who is familiar with it to look at it again, because they're probably services in there that you didn't notice or didn't know last time you looked at it because we're moving so fast. So that's the first thing. The second thing I close with is um, we've been talking about this bridge that's kind of bridging, bridging uh your your on prem your open source, your cloud estates. And it's so important to to make that mental leap because uh in past generation, we used to talk about integrating technologies together and then with public cloud, we started talking about move to public cloud, but it's really how do we integrate, how do we integrate all of that innovation that's coming from the hyper scale, is everything they're doing to innovate superfast, All of that innovation is coming from open source, all of that innovation that's coming from from companies around the world, including Cisco, How do we integrate that to deliver an outcome? Because at the end of the day, if you're a cloud of Steam, if you're an idea of Steam, your job is to deliver an outcome and our mission is to make it super simple for you to do that. That's the mission we're on and we're hoping that everybody that's excited as we are about how simple we made that. >>Great, thank you a lot in this announcement today, appreciate you guys coming back on and help us unpack you know, some of the details. Thank thanks so much. Great having you. >>Thank you >>Dave in a moment. We're gonna come back and talk about disruptive technologies and futures in the age of hybrid cloud with Vegas Rattana and James leach. You're watching the cube, the global leader in high tech coverage. >>What if your server box >>wasn't a box at >>all? What if it could do anything run anything? >>Be any box you >>need with massive scale precision and intelligence managed and optimized from the cloud integrated with all your clouds, private, public or hybrid. So you can build whatever you need today and tomorrow. The potential of this box is unlimited. Unstoppable unseen ever before. Unbox the future with Cisco UCS X series powered by inter site >>Cisco. >>The bridge to possible. Yeah >>we're here with Vegas Rattana who's the director of product management for Pcs at Cisco. And James Leach is the director of business development for U. C. S. At the Cisco as well. We're gonna talk about computing in the age of hybrid cloud. Welcome gentlemen. Great to see you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you because let's start with you and talk about a little bit about computing architectures. We know that they're evolving. They're supporting new data intensive and other workloads especially as high performance workload requirements. What's this guy's point of view on all this? I mean specifically interested in your thoughts on fabrics. I mean it's kind of your wheelhouse, you've got accelerators. What are the workloads that are driving these evolving technologies and how how is it impacting customers? What are you seeing? >>Sure. First of all, very excited to be here today. You're absolutely right. The pace of innovation and foundational platform ingredients have just been phenomenal in recent years. The fabric that's writers that drives the processing power, the Golden city all have been evolving just an amazing place and the peace will only pick up further. But ultimately it is all about applications and the way applications leverage those innovations. And we do see applications evolving quite rapidly. The new classes of applications are evolving to absorb those innovations and deliver much better business values. Very, very exciting time step. We're talking about the impact on the customers. Well, these innovations have helped them very positively. We do see significant challenges in the data center with the point product based approach of delivering these platforms, innovations to the applications. What has happened is uh, these innovations today are being packaged as point point products to meet the needs of a specific application and as you know, the different applications have no different needs. Some applications need more to abuse, others need more memory, yet others need, you know, more course, something different kinds of fabrics. As a result, if you walk into a data center today, it is very common to see many different point products in the data center. This creates a manageability challenge. Imagine the aspect of managing, you know, several different form factors want you to you purpose built servers. The variety of, you know, a blade form factor, you know, this reminds me of the situation we had before smartphones arrived. You remember the days when you when we used to have a GPS device for navigation system, a cool music device for listening to the music. A phone device for making a call camera for taking the photos right? And we were all excited about it. It's when a smart phones the right that we realized all those cool innovations could be delivered in a much simpler, much convenient and easy to consume through one device. And you know, I could uh, that could completely transform our experience. So we see the customers were benefiting from these innovations to have a way to consume those things in a much more simplistic way than they are able to go to that. >>And I like to look, it's always been about the applications. But to your point, the applications are now moving in a much faster pace. The the customer experience is expectation is way escalated. And when you combine all these, I love your analogy there because because when you combine all these capabilities, it allows us to develop new Applications, new capabilities, new customer experiences. So that's that I always say the next 10 years, they ain't gonna be like the last James Public Cloud obviously is heavily influencing compute design and and and customer operating models. You know, it's funny when the public cloud first hit the market, everyone we were swooning about low cost standard off the shelf servers in storage devices, but it quickly became obvious that customers needed more. So I wonder if you could comment on this. How are the trends that we've seen from the hyper scale, Is how are they filtering into on prem infrastructure and maybe, you know, maybe there's some differences there as well that you could address. >>Absolutely. So I'd say, first of all, quite frankly, you know, public cloud has completely changed the expectations of how our customers want to consume, compute, right? So customers, especially in a public cloud environment, they've gotten used to or, you know, come to accept that they should consume from the application out, right? They want a very application focused view, a services focused view of the world. They don't want to think about infrastructure, right? They want to think about their application, they wanna move outward, Right? So this means that the infrastructure basically has to meet the application where it lives. So what that means for us is that, you know, we're taking a different approach. We're we've decided that we're not going to chase this single pane of glass view of the world, which, frankly, our customers don't want, they don't want a single pane of glass. What they want is a single operating model. They want an operating model that's similar to what they can get at the public with the public cloud, but they wanted across all of their cloud options they wanted across private cloud across hybrid cloud options as well. So what that means is they don't want to just consume infrastructure services. They want all of their cloud services from this operating model. So that means that they may want to consume infrastructure services for automation Orchestration, but they also need kubernetes services. They also need virtualization services, They may need terror form workload optimization. All of these services have to be available, um, from within the operating model, a consistent operating model. Right? So it doesn't matter whether you're talking about private cloud, hybrid cloud anywhere where the application lives. It doesn't matter what matters is that we have a consistent model that we think about it from the application out. And frankly, I'd say this has been the stumbling block for private cloud. Private cloud is hard, right. This is why it hasn't been really solved yet. This is why we had to take a brand new approach. And frankly, it's why we're super excited about X series and inter site as that operating model that fits the hybrid cloud better than anything else we've seen >>is acute. First, first time technology vendor has ever said it's not about a single pane of glass because I've been hearing for decades, we're gonna deliver a single pane of glass is going to be seamless and it never happens. It's like a single version of the truth. It's aspirational and, and it's just not reality. So can we stay in the X series for a minute James? Uh, maybe in this context, but in the launch that we saw today was like a fire hose of announcements. So how does the X series fit into the strategy with inter site and hybrid cloud and this operating model that you're talking about? >>Right. So I think it goes hand in hand, right. Um the two pieces go together very well. So we have uh, you know, this idea of a single operating model that is definitely something that our customers demand, right? It's what we have to have, but at the same time we need to solve the problems of the cost was talking about before we need a single infrastructure to go along with that single operating model. So no longer do we need to have silos within the infrastructure that give us different operating models are different sets of benefits when you want infrastructure that can kind of do all of those configurations, all those applications. And then, you know, the operating model is very important because that's where we abstract the complexity that could come with just throwing all that technology at the infrastructure so that, you know, this is, you know, the way that we think about is the data center is not centered right? It's no longer centered applications live everywhere. Infrastructure lives everywhere. And you know, we need to have that consistent operating model but we need to do things within the infrastructure as well to take full advantage. Right? So we want all the sas benefits um, of a Ci CD model of, you know, the inter site can bring, we want all that that proactive recommendation engine with the power of A I behind it. We want the connected support experience went all of that. They want to do it across the single infrastructure and we think that that's how they tie together, that's why one or the other doesn't really solve the problem. But both together, that's why we're here. That's why we're super excited. >>So Vegas, I make you laugh a little bit when I was an analyst at I D C, I was deep in infrastructure and then when I left I was doing, I was working with application development heads and like you said, uh infrastructure, it was just a, you know, roadblock but but so the target speakers with Cisco announced UCS a decade ago, I totally missed it. I didn't understand it. I thought it was Cisco getting into the traditional server business and it wasn't until I dug in then I realized that your vision was really to transform infrastructure, deployment and management and change them all. I was like, okay, I got that wrong uh but but so let's talk about the the ecosystem and the joint development efforts that are going on there, X series, how does it fit into this, this converged infrastructure business that you've, you've built and grown with partners, you got storage partners like Netapp and Pure, you've got i SV partners in the ecosystem. We see cohesive, he has been a while since we we hung out with all these companies at the Cisco live hopefully next year, but tell us what's happening in that regard. >>Absolutely, I'm looking forward to seeing you in the Cisco live next year. You know, they have absolutely you brought up a very good point. You see this is about the ecosystem that it brings together, it's about making our customers bring up the entire infrastructure from the core foundational hardware all the way to the application level so that they can, you know, go off and running pretty quick. The converse infrastructure has been one of the corners 2.5 hour of the strategy, as you pointed out in the last decade. And and and I'm I'm very glad to share that converse infrastructure continues to be a very popular architecture for several enterprise applications. Seven today, in fact, it is the preferred architecture for mission critical applications where performance resiliency latency are the critical requirements there almost a de facto standards for large scale deployments of virtualized and business critical data bases and so forth with X series with our partnerships with our Stories partners. Those architectures will absolutely continue and will get better. But in addition as a hybrid cloud world, so we are now bringing in the benefits of canvas in infrastructure uh to the world of hybrid cloud will be supporting the hybrid cloud applications now with the CIA infrastructure that we have built together with our strong partnership with the Stories partners to deliver the same benefits to the new ways applications as well. >>Yeah, that's what customers want. They want that cloud operating model. Right, go ahead please. >>I was going to say, you know, the CIA model will continue to thrive. It will transition uh it will expand the use cases now for the new use cases that were beginning to, you know, say they've absolutely >>great thank you for that. And James uh have said earlier today, we heard this huge announcement, um a lot of lot of parts to it and we heard Katie talk about this initiative is it's really computing built for the next decade. I mean I like that because it shows some vision and you've got a road map that you've thought through the coming changes in workloads and infrastructure management and and some of the technology that you can take advantage of beyond just uh, you know, one or two product cycles. So, but I want to understand what you've done here specifically that you feel differentiates you from other competitive architectures in the industry. >>Sure. You know that's a great question. Number one. Number two, um I'm frankly a little bit concerned at times for for customers in general for our customers customers in general because if you look at what's in the market, right, these rinse and repeat systems that were effectively just rehashes of the same old design, right? That we've seen since before 2000 and nine when we brought you C. S to market these are what we're seeing over and over and over again. That's that's not really going to work anymore frankly. And I think that people are getting lulled into a false sense of security by seeing those things continually put in the market. We rethought this from the ground up because frankly future proofing starts now, right? If you're not doing it right today, future proofing isn't even on your radar because you're not even you're not even today proved. So we re thought the entire chassis, the entire architecture from the ground up. Okay. If you look at other vendors, if you look at other solutions in the market, what you'll see is things like management inside the chassis. That's a great example, daisy chaining them together >>like who >>needs that? Who wants that? Like that kind of complexity is first of all, it's ridiculous. Um, second of all, um, if you want to manage across clouds, you have to do it from the cloud, right. It's just common sense. You have to move management where it can have the scale and the scope that it needs to impact your entire domain, your world, which is much larger now than it was before. We're talking about true hybrid cloud here. Right. So we had to solve certain problems that existed in the traditional architecture. You know, I can't tell you how many times I heard you talk about the mid plane is a great example. You know, the mid plane and a chastity is a limiting factor. It limits us on how much we can connect or how much bandwidth we have available to the chassis. It limits us on air flow and other things. So how do you solve that problem? Simple. Just get rid of it. Like we just we took it out, right. It's not no longer a problem. We designed an architecture that doesn't need it. It doesn't rely on it. No forklift upgrades. So, as we start moving down the path of needing liquid cooling or maybe we need to take advantage of some new, high performance, low latency fabrics. We can do that with almost. No problem at all. Right, So, we don't have any forklift upgrades. Park your forklift on the side. You won't need it anymore because you can upgrade gradually. You can move along as technologies come into existence that maybe don't even exist. They they may not even be on our radar today to take advantage of. But I like to think of these technologies, they're really important to our customers. These are, you know, we can call them disruptive technologies. The reality is that we don't want to disrupt our customers with these technologies. We want to give them these technologies so they can go out and be disruptive themselves. Right? And this is the way that we've designed this from the ground up to be easy to consume and to take advantage of what we know about today and what's coming in the future that we may not even know about. So we think this is a way to give our customers that ultimate capability flexibility and and future proofing. >>I like I like that phrase True hybrid cloud. It's one that we've used for years and but to me this is all about that horizontal infrastructure that can support that vision of what true hybrid cloud is. You can support the mission critical applications. You can you can develop on the system and you can support a variety of workload. You're not locked into one narrow stovepipe and that does have legs, Vegas and James. Thanks so much for coming on the program. Great to see you. >>Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. >>When we return shortly thomas Shiva who leads Cisco's data center group will be here and thomas has some thoughts about the transformation of networking I. T. Teams. You don't wanna miss what he has to say. You're watching the cube. The global leader in high tech company. Okay, >>mm. Mhm, mm. Okay. Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Yeah. >>Mhm. Yes. Yeah. Okay. We're here with thomas Shiva who is the Vice president of Product Management, A K A VP of all things data center, networking STN cloud. You name it in that category. Welcome thomas. Good to see you again. >>Hey Sam. Yes. Thanks for having me on. >>Yeah, it's our pleasure. Okay, let's get right into observe ability. When you think about observe ability, visibility, infrastructure monitoring problem resolution across the network. How does cloud change things? In other words, what are the challenges that networking teams are currently facing as they're moving to the cloud and trying to implement hybrid cloud? >>Yeah. Yeah, visibility as always is very, very important. And it's quite frankly, it's not just it's not just the networking team is actually the application team to write. And as you pointed out, the underlying impetus to what's going on here is the data center is where the data is. And I think we set us a couple years back and really what happens the applications are going to be deployed uh in different locations, right. Whether it's in a public cloud, whether it's on prayer, uh, and they are built differently right there, built as microservices, they might actually be distributed as well at the same application. And so what that really means is you need as an operator as well as actually a user better visibility. Where are my pieces and you need to be able to correlate between where the app is and what the underlying network is that is in place in these different locations. So you have actually a good knowledge while the app is running so fantastic or sometimes not. So I think that's that's really the problem statement. What what we're trying to go afterwards, observe ability. >>Okay, and let's double click on that. So a lot of customers tell me that you gotta stare at log files until your eyes bleed and you gotta bring in guys with lab coats who have phds to figure all this stuff out. So, so you just described, it's getting more complex, but at the same time you have to simplify things. So how how are you doing that, >>correct? So what we basically have done is we have this fantastic product that that is called 1000 Ice. And so what this does is basically as the name, which I think is a fantastic fantastic name. You have these sensors everywhere. Um, and you can have a good correlation on uh links between if I run from a site to aside from a site to a cloud, from a cloud to cloud and you basically can measure what is the performance of these links. And so what we're, what we're doing here is we're actually extending the footprint of these thousands agent. Right? Instead of just having uh inversion machine clouds, we are now embedding them with the Cisco network devices. Right? We announced this with the catalyst 9000 and we're extending this now to our 8000 catalyst product line for the for the SD were in products as well as to the data center products the next line. Um and so what you see is is, you know, half a saying, you have 1000 eyes, you get a million insights and you get a billion dollar of improvements uh for how your applications run. And this is really uh, the power of tying together the footprint of where the network is with the visibility, what is going on. So you actually know the application behavior that is attached to this network. >>I see. So okay. So as the cloud evolves and expands it connects your actually enabling 1000 eyes to go further, not just confined within a single data center location, but out to the network across clouds, et cetera, >>correct. Wherever the network is, you're going to have 1000 I sensor and you can't bring this together and you can quite frankly pick if you want to say, hey, I have my application in public cloud provider, a uh, domain one and I have another one domain to, I can't do monitor that link. I can also monitor have a user that has a campus location or branch location. I kind of put an agent there and then I can monitor the connectivity from that branch location all the way to the let's say corporations that data centre, our headquarter or to the cloud. And I can have these probes and just we have visibility and saying, hey, if there's a performance, I know where the issue is and then I obviously can use all the other foods that we have to address those. >>All right, let's talk about the cloud operating model. Everybody tells us it's really the change in the model that drives big numbers in terms of R. O. I. And I want you to maybe address how you're bringing automation and devops to this world of of hybrid and specifically how is Cisco enabling I. T. Organizations to move to a cloud operating model? Is that cloud definition expands? >>Yeah, no that's that's another interesting topic beyond the observe ability. So really, really what we're seeing and this is going on for uh I want to say a couple of years now, it's really this transition from operating infrastructure as a networking team more like a service like what you would expect from a cloud provider. Right? It's really around the network team offering services like a cloud provided us. And that's really what the meaning is of cloud operating model. Right? But this is infrastructure running your own data center where that's linking that infrastructure was whatever runs on the public club is operating and like a cloud service. And so we are on this journey for why? So one of the examples uh then we have removing some of the control software assets, the customers that they can deploy on prayer uh to uh an instance that they can deploy in a cloud provider and just busy, insane. She ate things there and then just run it that way. Right. And so the latest example for this is what we have our identity service engine that is now limited availability available on AWS and will become available in mid this year, both in Italy as unusual as a service. You can just go to market place, you can load it there and now you create, you can start running your policy control in a cloud, managing your access infrastructure in your data center, in your campus wherever you want to do it. And so that's just one example of how we see our customers network operations team taking advantage of a cloud operating model and basically employing their, their tools where they need them and when they need them. >>So what's the scope of, I hope I'm saying it right. Ice, right. I see. I think it's called ice. What's the scope of that like for instance, turn in effect my or even, you know, address simplify my security approach. >>Absolutely. That's now coming to what is the beauty of the product itself? Yes. What you can do is really is that there's a lot of people talking about else. How do I get to zero trust approach to networking? How do I get to a much more dynamic, flexible segmentation in my infrastructure. Again, whether this is only campus X as well as a data center and Ice help today, you can use this as a point to define your policies and then any connect from there. Right. In this particular case we would instant Ice in the cloud as a software load. You now can connect and say, hey, I want to manage and program my network infrastructure and my data center on my campus, going to the respective control over this DNA Center for campus or whether it is the A. C. I. Policy controller. And so yes, what you get as an effect out of this is a very elegant way to automatically manage in one place. What is my policy and then drive the right segmentation in your network infrastructure? >>zero. Trust that, you know, it was pre pandemic. It was kind of a buzzword. Now it's become a mandate. I wonder if we could talk about right. I mean I wonder if you talk about cloud native apps, you got all these developers that are working inside organizations. They're maintaining legacy apps. They're connecting their data to systems in the cloud there, sharing that data. I need these developers, they're rapidly advancing their skill sets. How is Cisco enabling its infrastructure to support this world of cloud? Native making infrastructure more responsive and agile for application developers? >>Yeah. So, you know, we're going to the top of his visibility, we talked about the operating model, how how our network operators actually want to use tools going forward. Now, the next step to this is it's not just the operator. How do they actually, where do they want to put these tools, how they, how they interact with these tools as well as quite frankly as how, let's say, a devops team on application team or Oclock team also wants to take advantage of the program ability of the underlying network. And this is where we're moving into this whole cloud native discussion, right? Which is really two angles, that is the cloud native way, how applications are being built. And then there is the cloud native way, how you interact with infrastructure. Right? And so what we have done is we're a putting in place the on ramps between clouds and then on top of it we're exposing for all these tools, a P I S that can be used in leverage by standard uh cloud tools or uh cloud native tools. Right. And one example or two examples we always have and again, we're on this journey for a while is both answerable uh script capabilities that exist from red hat as well as uh Ashitaka from capabilities that you can orchestrate across infrastructure to drive infrastructure, automation and what what really stands behind it is what either the networking operations team wants to do or even the ap team. They want to be able to describe the application as a code and then drive automatically or programmatically in situation of infrastructure needed for that application. And so what you see us doing is providing all these capability as an interface for all our network tools. Right. Whether it's this ice that I just mentioned, whether this is our D. C. And controllers in the data center, uh whether these are the controllers in the in the campus for all of those, we have cloud native interfaces. So operator or uh devops team can actually interact directly with that infrastructure the way they would do today with everything that lives in the cloud, with everything how they brought the application. >>This is key. You can't even have the conversation of op cloud operating model that includes and comprises on prem without programmable infrastructure. So that's that's very important. Last question, thomas our customers actually using this, they made the announcement today. There are there are there any examples of customers out there doing this? >>We do have a lot of customers out there that are moving down the past and using the D. D. Cisco high performance infrastructure, but also on the compute side as well as on an exercise one of the customers. Uh and this is like an interesting case. It's Rakuten uh record and is a large tackle provider, a mobile five G. Operator uh in Japan and expanding and is in different countries. Uh and so people something oh, cloud, you must be talking about the public cloud provider, the big the big three or four. But if you look at it, there's a lot of the tackle service providers are actually cloud providers as well and expanding very rapidly. And so we're actually very proud to work together with with Rakuten and help them building a high performance uh, data and infrastructure based on hard gig and actually phone a gig uh to drive their deployment to. It's a five G mobile cloud infrastructure, which is which is uh where the whole the whole world where traffic is going. And so it's really exciting to see this development and see the power of automation visibility uh together with the high performance infrastructure becoming reality and delivering actually services, >>you have some great points you're making there. Yes, you have the big four clouds, your enormous, but then you have a lot of actually quite large clouds. Telcos that are either approximate to those clouds or they're in places where those hyper scholars may not have a presence and building out their own infrastructure. So so that's a great case study uh thomas, hey, great having you on. Thanks so much for spending some time with us. >>Yeah, same here. I appreciate it. Thanks a lot. >>I'd like to thank Cisco and our guests today V Joy, Katie VJ, viscous James and thomas for all your insights into this evolving world of hybrid cloud, as we said at the top of the next decade will be defined by an entirely new set of rules. And it's quite possible things will evolve more quickly because the cloud is maturing and has paved the way for a new operating model where everything is delivered as a service, automation has become a mandate because we just can't keep throwing it labor at the problem anymore. And with a I so much more as possible in terms of driving operational efficiencies, simplicity and support of the workloads that are driving the digital transformation that we talk about all the time. This is Dave Volonte and I hope you've enjoyed today's program. Stay Safe, be well and we'll see you next time.

>> Presenter: From around the globe. It's theCUBE present a future cloud one event a world of opportunities brought to you by Cisco. >> We're here with Vikas Ratina, who's the director of product management for ECS at Cisco and James Leach is the director of business development for UCS at Cisco as well. We're going to talk about computing in the age of hybrid cloud. Welcome gentlemen. Great to see you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Vikas let's start with you and talk about a little bit about computing architectures. We know that they're evolving they're supporting new data intensive and other workloads especially as high-performance workload requirements. What's Cisco's point of view on all this and we're specifically interested in your thoughts on fabrics. I mean, it's kind of your wheelhouse, you've got accelerators. What are the workloads that are driving these evolving technologies and how is it impacting customers? What are you seeing? >> Sure, Deb, first of all, very excited to be here today. You're absolutely right. The pace of innovation and foundational platform ingredients have just been phenomenal in recent years. The fabric, the accelerators, the drives, the processing power, the core density, all have been evolving at just an amazing pace and the pace will only pick up further. But ultimately it is all about applications and the way applications levels those innovations. And we do see applications evolving quite rapidly. The new classes of applications are evolving to absorb those innovations and deliver much better business values, very very exciting timestamp, but talking about the impact on the customers. Well these innovations have helped them pretty positively. We do see significant challenges in the data center with a point product based approach of delivering these platform innovations to the applications. What has happened is, these innovations today are being packaged as one point products, to meet the needs of a specific application. And as you know the different applications have different needs. Some applications need more tributes, others need more memory, yet others need, you know more course, some need different kinds of fabrics. As a result, if you walk into a data center today, it is pretty common to see many different point products in the data center. This creates a manageability challenge. Imagine the aspect of managing, you know several different form factors one you to you, a purpose-built servers the variety of, you know, ablate form factor. You know, this reminds me of the situation we had before smartphones arrived. You remember the days when you when we used to have a GPS device for navigation system. A cool music device for listening to the music. A phone device for making a call, camera for taking the photos that we were all excited about it. It's when smartphones arrived, that we realized all those cool innovations could be delivered in a much simpler, much convenient and easy to consume way through one device. And you know that could completely transform our experience. So we see the customers who are benefiting from these innovations, to have a way to consume those things in a much more simplistic way than they are able to do today. >> And I liked I mean it's always been about the applications but to your point, the applications are not moving at a much faster pace. The customer experience is his expectation is way escalated and when you combine all these, I love your analogy there Vikas because when you combine all these capabilities it allows us to develop new applications, new capabilities, new customer experiences. So that's, I always say that the next 10 years they ain't going to be like the last. And James' public cloud obviously is heavily influencing compute design and customer operating models. You know, it's funny when the public cloud first hit the market, everyone was swooning about oh low cost, standard off the shelf servers you know, and storage devices but it quickly became obvious that that customers needed more. So I wonder if you could comment on this. How are the trends that we've seen from the hyper scalers? How are they filtering into on-prem infrastructure and maybe, you know maybe there's some differences there as well that you could address. >> Absolutely. So, you know I'd say first of all, quite frankly, you know public cloud has completely changed the expectations of how our customers want to consume compute, right? So customers, especially in a public cloud environment they've gotten used to or you know, come to accept that they should consume from the application out, right? They want a very application focused view a services focused view of the world. They don't want to think about infrastructure, right? They want to think about their application. They want to move outward, right? So the, this means that the infrastructure basically has to meet the application where it lives. So what that means for us is that, you know we're taking a different approach. We've decided that, you know we're not going to chase this, you know, single pane of glass view of the world, which, you know, frankly our customers don't want. They don't want a single pane of glass. What they want is a single operating model. They want an operating model that's similar to what they can get with the public cloud, but they want it across all of their cloud options. They want it across private cloud, across hybrid cloud options as well. So what that means is they don't want to just consume infrastructure services, they want all of their cloud services from this operating model. So that means that they may want to consume infrastructure services for automation orchestration but they also need Kubernetes services. They also need virtualization services. They may need Terraform, workload optimization. All of these services have to be available from within the operating model, a consistent operating model, right? So it doesn't matter whether you're talking about private cloud, hybrid cloud, anywhere, where the application lives doesn't matter. What matters is that we have a consistent model that as we think about it from the application out and frankly I'd say, you know, this has been the stumbling block for private cloud. Private cloud is hard, right? This is why it hasn't been really solved yet. This is why we had to take a brand new approach. And frankly, it's why we're super excited about X series. and intersite as that you know operating model that fits the hybrid cloud better than anything else we've seen. >> There's theCUBE's first times a technology vendor has ever said, that it's not about a single pane of glass cause I've been hearing for decades we're going to deliver a single pane of glass. It's going to be seamless and it never happens. It's like a single version of the truth. It's aspirational and it's just not reality. So can we stay on the X series for a minute, James. >> Sure. >> And maybe in this context but in the launch that we saw today it was like a fire hose of announcement. So how does the X series fit into the strategy with intersite, in hybrid cloud and this operating model that you're talking about? >> Right, so I think it goes hand in hand, right? The two pieces go together very well. So we have, you know, this idea of a single operating model that is definitely, you know, something that our customers demand, right? It's what we have to have, but at the same time we need to solve the problems Vikas was talking about before. We need a single infrastructure to go along with that single operating model. So no longer do we need to have silos within the infrastructure that give us different operating models or different sets of benefits, we need one infrastructure that can kind of do all of those configurations, all those applications and then, you know, the operating model was very important because that's where we abstract the complexity that could come with just throwing all that technology at the infrastructure. So that, you know, this is, you know, the way that we think about it as the data center is not centered, right? It's no longer centered. Applications live everywhere, infrastructure lives everywhere. And, you know we need to have that consistent operating model but we need to do things within the infrastructure as well to take full advantage, right? So we want all the SaaS benefits of a CICD model of you know, the intersite can bring we want all of that, you know, proactive recommendation engine with the power of AI behind it. We want the connected support experience. We want all of that but we want to do it across a single infrastructure. And we think that that's how they tie together. That's why one or the other doesn't really solve the problem, but both together, that's why we're here that's why we're super excited. >> So Vikas I, I make you laugh a little bit. When I was an analyst at IDC, I was a bit deep in infrastructure and then when I left, I was doing, I was working with application development heads and like you said, a infrastructure it was just a roadblock. But with, so the target cheek is when Cisco announced UCS a decade ago, I totally missed it. I didn't understand it. I thought it was Cisco getting into the traditional server business and it wasn't until I dug in then I realized that your vision was really to transform infrastructure deployment and management and it changed the model. I was like, okay, I got that wrong. But so let's talk about the ecosystem and the joint development efforts that are going on there. X series, how does it fit into this converged infrastructure business that you've built and grown with partners. You've got storage partners like NetApp and pure. You got ISV partners in the ecosystem. We see Cohesity has been a while since we hung out with all these companies at the Cisco live hopefully next year but tell us what's happening in that regard. >> Now, absolutely. I'm looking forward to seeing you in the Cisco live next year. Absolutely. You brought up a very good point. UCS is about the ecosystem that it brings together. It's about making our customers bring up the entire infrastructure from the core foundational hardware all the way to the application level so that they can all go off and running pretty quick. The converged infrastructure has been one of the cornerstones of our strategy as you pointed out in the last decade. And I'm very glad to share that converged infrastructure continues to be very popular architecture for several enterprise applications even today. In fact, it is the preferred architecture for mission critical applications, where performance, resiliency, latency are the critical you know requirements. They are almost a de facto standards for large scale deployments of virtualize and business critical databases and so forth. With x-series, with our partnerships, with our storage partners, those architectures will absolutely continue and will get better. But in addition, it's a hybrid cloud world. So we are now bringing in the benefits of converged infrastructure to the world of hybrid cloud. We'll be supporting the hybrid cloud applications now with the CI infrastructure that we have built together with our strong partnership with our storage partners to deliver the same benefits to the new AEs applications as well. >> Yeah and that's customers want, they want that cloud operating model, right? Go ahead, please. >> I was just going to say the x series model will continue to thrive. It will transition our, it will expand the use cases now for the newer use cases that we were beginning to, you know say to if it absolutely right. >> Great. Thank you for that. And James, I said earlier today, we heard this this huge announcement, a lot of parts to it. And we heard, you know, KD talk about this initiative is it's really computing built for the next decade. I mean, I like that because it shows some vision and you've got, you know a roadmap that you've thought through the coming changes in workloads and infrastructure management and some of the technology that you can take advantage of beyond just the you know, one or two product cycles. So, but I want to understand what you've done here specifically that you feel differentiates you from other competitive architectures in the industry. >> Sure. You know, that's a great question, number one. Number two, I'm frankly a little bit concerned at times for customers in general for our customers customers in general because if you look at what's in the market, right? These rinse and repeat systems that were effectively just rehashes of the same old design, right? That we've seen since before 2009 when we brought UCS to market, these are what we're seeing over and over and over again that's not really going to work anymore, frankly. And I think that people are getting lulled into a false sense of security by seeing those things continually putting in the market. We rethought this from the ground up because frankly you know, future-proofing starts now, right? If you're not doing it right today, future-proofing isn't even on your radar because you're not even today proofed. So we've rethought the entire chassis, the entire architecture from the ground up. Okay, if you look at other vendors, if you look at other solutions in the market, what you'll see is things like, you know management inside the chassis. That's a great example. Daisy chaining them together, like who needs that? Who wants that? Like that kind of complexity is first of all, it's ridiculous. Second of all, if you want to manage across clouds you have to do it from the cloud, right? It's just common sense. You have to move management where it can have the scale and the scope that it needs to impact, you know your entire domain, your world which is much larger now than it was before. We're talking about true hybrid cloud here, right? So we had to solve certain problems that existed in the traditional architecture. You know, I can't tell you how many times I heard you know, talk about, you know, the mid-plane is a great example. We, you know, the mid and a chassis is a limiting factor. It limits us on how much we can connect or how much bandwidth we have available to the chassis. It limits us on air flow and other things. So how do you solve that problem? Simple, just get rid of it. Like we just, we took it out, right? It's no longer a problem. We designed an architecture that doesn't need it. It doesn't rely on it. No forklift upgrades. So as we start moving down the path of needing liquid cooling or maybe we need to take advantage of some new high-performance low-latency fabrics, we can do that with almost no problem at all, right? So we don't have any forklift upgrades, parker forklift on the side. You won't need it anymore because you can upgrade gradually. You can move along as technologies come in to existence that maybe don't even exist today. They may not even be on our radar today to take advantage of but I like to think of these technologies they're really important to our customers. These are, you know we can call them disruptive technologies. The reality is that we don't want to disrupt our customers with these technologies. We don't want to give them these technologies so they can go out and be disruptive themselves, right? And this is the way that we've designed this from the ground up to be easy consume and to take advantage of what we know about today and what's coming in the future that we may not even know about. So do we think this is a way to give our customers that ultimate capability, flexibility and future-proofing. >> I like, I like that phrase true hybrid cloud. It's one that we've used for years. And but to me, this is all about that horizontal infrastructure that can support that vision of what true hybrid cloud is. You could support the mission, critical applications. You could develop on the system and you can support a variety of workloads. You're not locked into, you know, one narrow stovepipe and that does have legs. Vikas and James thanks so much for coming on the program. Great to see you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE the leader in digital event coverage. (upbeat music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody welcome to this cute conversation sponsored by Dell EMC today we're gonna cover deli MCS next-generation data protection announcement but before we get into it I want to talk a little bit about data is data an asset or a liability you know many years ago people used to look at data because it was growing so fast it was so expensive to manage they looked at it really is a liability that had to be managed but that's changed data today is viewed as an asset why is that I would say it's because a digital business what's the difference between a business in a digital business we think it's how they use data digital businesses put data at the core it's their most important asset they're trying to figure out how data contributes to the moneth estate monetization or the mission of the business the problem is the data is plentiful but insights really aren't people want insights that drive business impact in a digital world protecting that data has never been more critical but it's complicated you've got data on prem you've got data in the cloud you've got data at the edge so what we've seen post acquisition of emc by dell is the company has dramatically accelerated the cadence of announcements and they're further enhancing their portfolio today and we're gonna talk about that we've got really three segments today I'm gonna talk to a real Barret about the announcement in the hard news we're gonna look at a short video and then Beth Phelan the president of the Dell UMC Data Protection Division is gonna come in and talk about the vision so let's get right into it Rhea Barret great to see you again thanks for coming on thank you so much Dave it's always a pleasure being here yeah well you've been here a few times this year haven't you a few times yeah quake coming here to opening presents on a holiday because it's the professional equivalent and I think we've been here four times already this year yeah that's right we had you here early in the winter and then of course pre Dell technologies world and we talked about those the survey that you guys did and here we are again so okay so you've got this market momentum I talked about that a little bit the space is is growing what's the news today we have some exciting before I talk about the news though I do want to talk about when we were here in April if you remember we introduced some exciting new products into our portfolio it was protocol power protect Data Manager our brand new next-generation software for data management we introduced an integrated appliance power protect x-series the multi-dimensional appliances basically as well as an IDP a a terabyte IDP a again these are all important because they're proof points of our commitment to our customers in terms of delivering industry-leading appliances as well as software-defined solutions to meet their ever-growing ever more complicated data protection environments from the core to the edge to the cloud so as I said I mean you guys are accelerating the cadence of announcements so how does all that fit in to what you're announcing today what are you introducing I'm actually really this is an exciting present for me because as you know in February when we talked about data domain we were celebrating a very important milestone data domain has been the bedrock and the foundation of our portfolio and since its inception it not only defined a brand new market and disrupted an existing market but it also led the market for over a decade as the as the lead product and the lead solution that customers chose that makes us announcement and this president even sweeter because I'm really here to introduce the next generation data domain power protect dd the ultimate data protection appliance so power protect that's that's kind of the new brand that you guys are using yeah and and so that's that's exactly the Cadell using it across its entire portfolio yeah we're powering up the portfolio and data protection is no exception we're introducing three new models under the new power protect DD umbrella its power protect sixty nine hundred ninety four hundred and ninety nine hundred that's replacing actually four four models and we're also what you'll notice is the power protect the DD 3300 as well as the power protect virtual edition will be parts of the solution for our customers so how how should we think about the value from a customer perspective that you're delivering yeah that's great at the end of the day it's all about customer value and when we think about data domain and what it meant to our customers in terms of proven solutions it's all about the next generation really taking that and and even even raising the bar further so for customers what are they looking for a cloud is everywhere so multi cloud is one of those facets the other is really around performance efficiency and security because those issues are never going away if not only getting exasperated and multi-dimensional appliance portfolio it's part of a bigger portfolio which is important from giving our customers choice so what about the business impact I mean sharing metrics or data I mean how do we you know quantify this sure absolutely it's we're all about measurement and data it's very important and customers really want to understand the value so you look at let's go one by one let's look at fast customers what are they trying to do what's the urgency it's all about restore speeds and what we're seeing with the power protect DD series is SL O's where customers have up to 38 percent faster backups and 36 percent faster restores so again really critical for our customers let's talk about efficiency next that's been a bedrock customers want efficiency because number one it really impacts their cost of ownership and with the new power protect DD series we're seeing 25 percent more usable capacity in half the rack space and and that's the case for the DD 9900 which means that one DD 9900 can replace 2 DD 9800 racks in the same footprint lower TCO is critical again we're doing the efficiency really matters because we're trying to make sure as the data growth is there as customers are looking for performance their cost of protection isn't going linearly up with that and with our new systems we're seeing up to 65 to 1 data reduction and that's really allowing us to be able to have up to 81 petabytes of logical data stored in the 9900 s so again up to sixty two point five percent more logical capacity per rack which is unheard of as well as the ability to grow in place grow in in in place capacity so customers can license have shelves and and you know seamlessly scale up within the family well it because people you know they want to keep investing in data centers that's a big part of you know the cloud value proposition so you know being able to more efficiently use the existing spaces keep what about you know ransomware is a hot topic how you guys how does this announcement fit into what you're doing you know with your ransomware solutions thank you Dave actually secure is one of our our pillars so it's fast efficient secure and Security's all about really customers being able to recover under any stringent circumstance and the security our cyber recovery solution is basically completely integrated into the power protect DD where customers can recover in in the event of a ransomware attack so it's that air-gap ability to be able to make sure that even in the you know most taxing recovery scenario that you have a solution and what about what about the cloud cloud is a target I mean that's a big topic of conversation there's a lot of use cases dr and many others where does the cloud fit into yeah you can't have a data protection solution if you can't address a multitude of cloud use cases protection use cases so that's in terms of being able to protect information to the cloud protect information from the cloud and protect information in the cloud and with our cloud long-term retention with our cloud tearing capabilities built in on day one customers will be able to get a slew of capabilities that is a page basically built into the products so i said you've been accelerating the pace of announcements can you paint a picture of the portfolio how should we think about it now oh yeah absolutely again i think one of the most important elements that the dull emc data protection portfolio brings to bear for our customers regardless of their you know size and scope is flexibility in terms of their needs whether it's our purpose-built appliances our integrated appliances or a software-defined solutions and the power protect DD Series is part of this now multi-dimensional portfolio so being able to scale up with the power protect DD series appliances as well as scale out with the power protect x-series appliances whether it's integrated or hybrid whether it's all I mean integrated or Target whether it's all flash or hybrid whether it's really an appliance or software define that's the amount of flexibility that our customers have to be able to make sure any workload no matter where it resides will get protected and meet their solos in the lowest cost of ownership possible well space used to be pretty straightforward really you know you backup an on-prem you know system and that was kind of it now you got the cloud you got the edge you got there you know ransomware all kinds of complicated stuff going on so congratulations on the announcement and it was great to have you again always a pleasure thank you Dave you're welcome all right keep it right here we're gonna watch a short video and then we'll come back with Beth Phelan bright back we're not ready to say job well done we keep working building comprehensive technology that protects and manages your data from the edge to the core to the cloud we won't rest at being your number one we evolved creating technology that's fast secure and even more efficient that reduces the risk of data loss we are forging the future by building on the past Dell EMC power protect DD series the next generation of data domain protection storage appliances the power protect DD series provides up to one point two five petabytes of capacity in a single rack using 30 percent higher data compression to lower costs but there's more to this appliance than a beautiful form it's also the preferred protection storage for data that's backed up and managed by power protect software power protects DD series appliances help you simplify your multi cloud environments and gain more efficient operations and because data protection capacity is challenging to predict we engineered our multi-dimensional power protect appliance portfolio with flexibility and agility at its core you can easily scale up and scale out to future-proof your environment Dell EMC power protect DD series the ultimate protection storage appliance we're back with Beth Phelan who's the president of the Dell MC data protection division that's good to see you it's great to be here you've been busy we have been so what's on your mind these days you know just adding to what we are said before this is a huge announcement in the history of data domain which by itself changed the data protection industry and now as we introduce power protect dd we're bringing that proven technology into the future couldn't be more excited what are some of the highlights that you're really into that you know get you excited for customers yeah I mean we recovered much of it but one thing that I'm particularly convinced it's going to be a game-changer is enabling data reuse customers don't want their backup data to be locked away more and more customers want to take advantage of it either for a quick recovery or for analytics tests and of and so with the improvements that we've made with instant access and instant recovery now up to 60 concurrent VMs can be available from your power protect DD 60,000 a ops we're really changing the way data domain can be used power tech dd makes it something that they can use not only for their backup for also a whole set of data reuse cases so under your leadership your division has really accelerated the the announcement cadence how about the software side of things I mean how does that relate if people want you know they think cloud that thinks SAS how is that effect your business I mean I hope people remember that just back here in July we announced power protect data manager which is our next generation software it includes power protect central which is a SAS based capability starting out with monitoring but over time we'll be filling that out Palpa Tech Data Manager is finely tuned to work with power track dd so while you know the prevalence of data domain historically has really been you know built on the fact that we let customers choose right if they want to use Dell EMC software wonderful but if they've already made a choice we also have always supported that broad ecosystem we will continue that with power protect dd but the best choice in our view is going to continue to be to use Dell EMC software and now with power protect Data Manager you're going to get absolute best capabilities combined with power protect DD so make sure I understand so you say Dell EMC on Dell EMC you're gonna get you know the best experience but if for whatever reason I choose some other product I can integrate in absolutely great how about disaster recovery it's a key topic it's a painful topic it's expensive you know that historically you've seen the three site dr it's usually bespoke separate tools what are you doing for customers around deal yeah so the nice thing is that in this world of multi-cloud configurations it's easier and easier for more companies to actually have a full dr strategy by doing cloud disaster recovery you can set up your environment without those sort of old-school approach of having a separate on-prem facility that was just for disasters doesn't seem viable as we go forward I expect fewer and fewer companies will choose that so with poverty' DD on day one combined with power protect data manager they'll be able to use our cloud disaster recovery capabilities that include orchestration just three steps to failover two steps to fail back and you get all the benefits of disaster recovery but at a lower cost the ability agility by leveraging the cloud provider of your choice we the market has really changed a lot since the days when he had data replacing tape yeah it was pretty straightforward and now you've got the you know the cloud you got the edge you have hybrid you've got heightened security concerns so you have to be kind of a trend spotter in your role what are you seeing as sort of where you're taking this what's the vision for the division and the organization yeah our strategy has been very consistent we're recognizing that data is first that we have to align closely with the application managers to make it easy for those customers to protect their data seamlessly but at the same time we have to protect that data no matter where it is on-premise on the edge in the cloud and no matter how customers are deploying their applications so we're continuing to execute on our multi-dimensional appliance and software-defined data protection strategy but we're now augmenting that with a concept of global scale and I think that that global scale concept is going to really bring us into the future so I've said many times that you know we've moved beyond the innovation of stemming from Moore's Law that's not the heart of it anymore it's data it's machine intelligence and artificial intelligence and it's cloud because of scale so explain further global scale and what you mean by that so what we found is you know obviously customers enjoy the benefits of scale out we have that with the X 400 where they need those benefits of easy expansion of capacity easy movement of backup data sets across location to meet that capacity intelligent placement of that backup data sets we need that capability beyond a single appliance and so as we think about the concept of global scale we're looking at how do we enable all of our multi-dimensional appliances to participate in those use cases and bring those benefits across the ecosystem so breaking some of those physical barriers and being able to view my data in its in its form which is also just distributed right all right good exciting congratulations we'll see you next month probably well thanks again for for coming on and sharing this this announcement and we'll be watching thank you for watching everybody you can get more information I'm sure at deli mc.com right you guys got your data protection side of the site so go there check it out and thanks for watching everybody we'll see you next time

>> Narrator: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube, covering Red Hat Summit 2017, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of the Red Hat Summit here in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Kirk Skaugen, he is the Executive Vice President and President of Lenovo Data Center group, Lenovo. So thanks so much for joining us, Kirk. >> Thanks for having me. >> I want to start out by talking about Lenovo's commitment to open source, right. We're hearing a lot about this in this summit, It's the real deal! >> Yeah, well I was at for 24 years and had a long partnership with Red Hat there so as I moved over to Lenovo on that, open source is a key aspect of our strategy. Kind of foundational for us and where we sit with the days in our company, because we don't have this legacy. We're not someone who's trying to protect an old router business or an old storage business. So as we look at open source as part of our, kind of, open partnerships commitment, it's pretty foundational to what we're doing. >> Kirk, could you help us unpack that a little bit? We heard in Keynote this morning they talked about open source hardware. I know you guys have been involved in OCP. How much is software, how much is hardware? Where do you guys put commitment in? How much of it is partners? >> Yeah, so I think we're in about over 30 different standards bodies now committed to open source. It really happened after our acquisition of the IBM xSeries server business, so now we're the third largest x86 server provider in the world and we're expanding ahead in the data center, so we're participating about 30 standards bodies. We have about 12 open source projects going on with Red Hat, and we're really at the base level, announcing today something called Open Platform at Lenovo. It's something we said we would do a year ago at this conference, and now here at the Red Hat summit we're showing it in our booth actually there. It's a base open platform with an optimized stack which you can put NFE and other solutions on top of, so that's one example of things we said we were going to do a year ago today and then are doing today. It's really about, from our perspective, optimizing the base hardware for all these platforms. >> Interesting, we look at things. I hear people look at open source and there's more transparency. It's not like '08; there's a secret project we're working on and here it is. You worked at Intel. Everybody kind of understood the tick-tock that went on there, how does open source influence the planing that you guys go into and do you feel the road maps at a company like Lenovo are more transparent since you're part of open source? I mean, again, what you should expect from us is we're a leader in x86 system technology but we've also acquired assets like blade network technologies in the past as well. We're expanding as a company out of our server routes into networking and storage. We think containerization is going to be the future. Today we're sitting with, something like 32 world record benchmarks and our theme is kind of "different is better" which means it's the little things that we're doing with all these partners to tune out the best performance of these systems working with our partners. We're not trying to go far up the stack and compete with our partners. I think that makes us a little bit unique. We're in trying to be the best x86 system provider in the world. Expand that into storage and networking as we get the software defined. >> Great, and absolutely. It would be useful to kind of explain your role in the data center group itself. As you said, you've got in some pieces. >> Some came from the IBM, there's various acquisitions. >> Kirk: Mmmhmm. >> Lay out a little bit more of what you guys do and what your partner does. >> Sure, so I think a lot of people know Lenovo as being number one in PCs. This is the 25th year of ThinkPad and we look at our Think Server brand today and our X series brand that we acquired from IBM. >> So we're, again, the third largest server provider but expanding that into storage and networking and then we acquired the Motorola phone business, so we just crossed to be number four in the world outside of China, with a presence in India. So we basically have three businesses within Lenovo but Data Center group, we believe, is a big growth driver for the future. A lot of people I think, 25 years ago, would have never thought Lenovo would be number one in PCs worldwide. I think we're kind of sitting there as a server provider with number one in customer satisfaction, number one in server reliability, number one in quality by all these third party measures. Our biggest issue is people don't realize we acquired this amazing asset from IBM so we're here at the summit basically showing and promoting our brand, but also promoting the proof points underneath that. >> This event is very global, multicultural. Lenovo's also a global company. Maybe speak a little bit to that; where your teams live, where development happens and what your customer base looks like. >> I live in Raleigh. We have a dual headquarters in Raleigh and Beijing, but we operate in over 160 countries. We have over 10,000 IT professionals now within the data center group. We have manufacturing in the United States, in Mexico, in Hungary, in China, so we can basically globally ship everywhere. When I looked at moving from Intel to another company, number one this enabled me to get one step closer to the customer, but I thought Lenovo's one of the best companies I saw that we're partnering. I think in the data center group, you look at our list of partners and it's unprecedented partly because we don't have a legacy business, so almost every startup and everybody who wants to do something new ends up wanting access to our presence in China, being number one in China, but also because we're not protecting a legacy so they see us as someone interesting and unique to partnership with. So open source is one of those areas where I think, now that we separated from IBM we're clearly an x86 provider committed to open source and the way we're getting into telecom, where we hadn't been, and competing with our big customers is because we're open and ideally we're more agile and partner better. >> I'm wondering if you could comment on the culture of these culture of these various places. As you said, you've been in Portland for a long time. You're now new to Raleigh. Your company is Beijing and Raleigh and you do business all over the world. How do you experience how these engineers, are they different in different parts of the world? Or is open source really transcending that and there is a much more of an openness and a transparency? >> Yeah, I thought I'd fit really well into the Lenovo culture. I think six months into the job, I feel like it's exceeded my expectations. If you look at the executive staff at Lenovo there's something like seven different nationalities on there from Italy, and Switzerland, and Australia, and the U.S., and China, Hong Kong, Singapore, India. >> Rebecca: And that's by design. >> Yeah, by design. So I think it provides a really unique perspective as you're looking at market trends, and then customers and things like that. When you look at the engineering aspect of it I'm looking at this efficiencies of the PC, the cost economics of the PC, having some of these factors. We're actually one of the last companies who's designing our own systems and putting them in our own factory, so from that perspective we get the efficiencies of being part of a larger PC company, but listen, data center's very different, right? We have a completely autonomous data center group now but we get the efficiencies of that, so we can kind of get the best of all the cultures that we participate in with development in Romania, in India, in China, Raleigh and again, we can manufacture in any place the customer wants us to manufacture pretty much. >> You mentioned that you're one of the last companies that's designing your own systems and putting them into your machines. Is that going to go by the wayside? You're one of the last, so all these other companies have decided it's just not sustainable. Can you comment on that? >> Well I think consolidation is absolutely key. If you look at the PC industry, and I managed the PC business at Intel the last three years. There's absolutely been consolidation in that market. You should look at some of the Japanese suppliers going away, but that's what enabled Lenovo to continue to grow in a multi-hundred million unit market. Today we ship about 100 servers a minute. A hundred servers an hour, rather, about one a minute. If you look at the consolidation trends I think still going to be a lot of consolidation in the market around that, so we believe we can grow in that market. PCs through consolidation, and if the PC market flattens out, even in the data center space where I think there'll be fewer and fewer players that will be able to compete. It really gets down to just uber-efficiency. When you're running in a factory that's building as the number one PC company, you get manufacturing efficiencies that other people can't do at our subscale. So as an example, when we look at things like supercomputing we're now the fastest growing supercomputing company on the planet. 99 of the top 500 supercomputers. That's because we can build very, very efficient products in a market that typically runs on razor-thin margins, right. >> Kirk, we talk about that huge volume of servers. Can you speak to where Lenovo's playing in the service provider and cloud marketplace? >> Sure, I think we just reorganized into kind of, four customer-centric markets. So first is in hyperscale, we participate with Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent and we're expanding across some of the largest hyperscale providers in the West Coast. We believe designing our own board, putting in our own factories gives us the cost economics to compete with the largest data centers in the world, just 'cause we can make money in PC desktop towers which is a pretty commoditized business. We think we can make money there. Software-defined, I think what we're seeing is because of our lack of legacy hardware whether it's a legacy SAN or a legacy routing business, we can leap ahead there both through our own stack but also our partner's stack. Third is supercomputing, so this is something where we brought a lot of that application knowledge over from IBM to the acquisition, and our goal is to continue to be the fastest growing supercomputing company on the planet and right now we're number two in the world, so we're building our Barcelona supercomputer right now to be 12 times more powerful that what it is today. With the University of Adelaide, 30 times more powerful than their last computer. Supercomputing's the third, and then the fourth is just traditional data center. So there you look at things like SAP HANA, where we were solutions-lead. We're trying to not just ship the hardware, but deliver optimized solutons so we feel like the little things don't mean a lot, the little things mean everything. So why does Lenovo have 32 worldwide per benchmarks? 'Cause we're tuning things with SAP, and now, for example, SAP just went public that they're running their own internal HANA on Lenovo. So I think it's a testament, it's the fine tuning of the application. It's hyperscale, software-defined, supercomputing, and then legacy data center infrastructure lead by solutions. Those are our four segments. >> Kirk, you talked about, it was 25 years for ThinkPad. As I look out towards the future, the data center group, what's kind of the touchstone? What are people going to really understand and know that group for in the future? >> Well, I think we want to be most trusted from a data center provider, right. We're not trying to contain anyone in a legacy thinking. We want to leap ahead into software-defined. We think we have the base hardware, customer satisfaction, reliability to do that. So I think, number one, we want to be most trusted. Number two, we're trying to be incredibly agile. Much faster than companies that are larger than us. That's been an innovation culture that's lead us to be number one in PCs, not through cost, but through innovation. We want to be known for innovation and being faster to deploy innovation both with us, but as well was with our partners. So if you go into our both, you showcasing with Intel. We're showcasing with Juniper. We're showcasing with Red Hat. So that's a very decent foundation. I think we can leap ahead, not be encumbered by the past, and be trusted, innovative, cost-effective, and make a lead to software-defined. What's interesting to me is, I think when I joined Intel in 1992, there was something like 100 gigabytes a day. When I joined Lenovo 24 years later, it was like 250 million gigabytes a day of data, if I have my numbers correctly. It's going to leapfrog up just in a massive way over the next 10 years with 5G and the whole internet buildup so you hear that from almost every keynote speaker, but what it means to me is that, we're just at the beginning of cloud transformation. A company like Lenovo, we didn't invent the PC, we just became number one in it over 25 years. We didn't invent servers, but we acquired amazing people. They can then leap us ahead over the next, now, 25 years. (laughing) >> Well Kirk, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for your time. >> Yeah. Thank you It's a pleasure, it's a great event. So thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We'll be more with the Red Hat summit after this. (electronic music)