hey welcome back everybody Jeff Rick here or the cube conversation and the SiliconANGLE cubes Palo Alto studio a little bit of a break and the crazy conference season so here to kind of fix the gear and take things up and sit down and in the context of a conversation outside of a show to really get the update and we're really excited to be joined here by two guests who are announcing a pretty exciting deal that's happening today is who you shoot a CTO of Hitachi Data scissors welcome again to you and jack mazzoni vice president storage networking at brocade welcome thank you so let's just jump right into it tell everybody what happened today and why this is big news yeah sure I'm gonna start it and so what we're announcing today is broke aids developed its its next-gen called gen-6 fibre channel switches and it's a whole portfolio and we're very excited that hitachi who resells the OEM are our product to to their customer base is launching on the state as well so we're very excited about that and it's big news right and so you'll be able to buy this product today from hitachi for all the great customers that we have out there today and that's the big announcement excellent and why is this important to your customers well this is just the next evolution in fibre channel I mean 32 gigabit per second don't you know we were just on 16 now not long ago and so it's going to open up a lot of bandwidth open up you know more workload being processed provide new opportunities for new applications as well so it's funny a lot a lot of talk on you know already it in the end of Moore's law we're going to be able to squeak out more compute power outage micro processors and stuff but it sounds like you guys are squeezing out a lot more performance on the network yeah I know absolutely and one thing that you know Hugh mentioned earlier which I thought was great is you know when you get performance like this in the network and you just get performance in general enables consolidation enables efficiencies right and when flash is able to go and allow you to do let's say the same or more amount of workloads with less course that's a good thing right and and the networks then got to be able to handle that and it's that kind of efficiencies that when we can jointly bring to our customers that allows them to then spend the time and think about how they transform their IT operations right into this digital transformation era into into enabling IT to be the strategic foundation to go drive the enterprise right and I know sometimes it's hard to to make that connection all the way from Genesis fibre channel to that that's how that connection goes so so it's it's been a proven winner to drive performance it saves money it saves it enables innovation and I think the commitment that brocade and Hitachi have had to to quality to the highest levels of reliability and customer service over the years has really been a cornerstone of our success it's been a great partnership I know our CEO likes to say we partner better than anybody in the industry and that's absolutely true and Hitachi has just been one of those fantastic partners for us for over a decade now so let's unpack that a little bit why is partnership so important and not only just specifically between the two companies here but you know we go to a ton of shows and every show now even if it's a specific vendor like the pentaho show is a whole ecosystem right nobody can do it alone anymore and there's a really kind of renewed focus around the ecosystem and and everyone kind of coming together at the end of the day provide solutions to customers that are going to solve problems so it's a very important piece of it yeah and I think you've a great example that is if it really is a requirement if you think about private cloud infrastructures and converge infrastructures you're bringing so many elements together to deliver a total solution and Hitachi UCP is a great example where you have you know great technologies from hitachi in there we've been able to participate some of our fibre channel as well as our IP storage switches we were able to participate with that and so really I think if you want to participate in a cloud type of architecture whether it's public private hybrid you're going to have to partner you're going to have to particles you may not have all the technologies you may not have all the specialties and customers could require that on at some some levels that's kind of my take on it yes I mean you know we could have tried to develop our own fibre channel switches but you know that would have taken a lot more effort and time and distraction from what our core competencies are you know I mean brocade has a conference season networking both IP and fibre channel networking so it doesn't make any sense for us to try to do that which is better to partner with that right so and the future is going to be all about partnering and and more toward open source to right and the other thing that we find over and over again is really the changing expectations of the way software performs and we hear it all the time you know that why doesn't the software at my work perform like the software on my phone and why isn't it faster and why isn't it more integrated with other sources of information so the demand for better faster stronger applications is only going to increase right nobody wants less data though he wants less performance buddy wats less latency and especially in kind of an API world where all these applications are now not just siloed stacks of applications but they're pulling data from all sorts of places the speed and latency really becomes critical yeah I know I absolutely right and that's why I think this announcement and the construct of the you know the all-flash data center and all the advancements happening with flash is so important it's that linkage and then what the applications can do once they take advantage that you know I always tell people it's like remember the first time your laptop went to a all flash disk remember that experience like via the old spinning disk you're booting up well go to windows right and then you with all flash it was like that emotional experience or how great it was right you take that level at an enterprise level right where you have thousands and thousands of thousands of disks running thousands of applications and now you bring in flash and then around the corner you ring in nvme it's amazing to think about what's going to be coming down the future right and we're very excited about our position it really being it that the the central point of if you will where all this information flow has to go through the network and you know whether it's fibre channel whether it's IP you know we're going to keep to our core values which is you know the highest levels of qualities resiliency bringing in the analytics and partner partner with the top quality companies in the world such as itachi and what was interesting about this release is you added a lot more than a tease a lot more manageability lot more reporting a lot more visibility you know one of the big themes obviously in big data is to move from you know reactive to predictive too prescriptive right and so to have the management layer to have kind of the extra amount of information that you can take advantage of because you've got excess capacity and the pipes if you will and better connectivity to the infrastructure enables a whole different layer of management is which is if you've talked about you and prior interviews you people have to manage a lot more right they're not managing individual boxes anymore now whole different scale man need to be able to automate that those management tools helps us to automate that the infrastructure management also the security part is very important you know the security that brocade brings them into their right into the switch itself right and the security is an interesting point right because that's again a consistent theme everywhere we go it's the old moat just doesn't work anymore the mode and the castle walls now you really have to have security baked in all over the place and the data layer the networking layer all over the place it was the interesting thing is if you think about fiber channel all right let's just offer five channels of technology it is fundamentally right more secure than Ethernet oh we love you know really a great IP portfolio and everything but if you think about Ethernet or excuse me fibre channel when you plug in it it's off by default well first it's a separate network all together right so that's that's one layer secure but it's an off by default meaning that just get you plug in doesn't mean you have access to anything you know you got to go through one man here go there's only going to go through some other stuff but some people say its complexity but but you're at least now actively saying how are the communication is going to happen thin within the this network or either that's really the opposite right because the benefit ethering you plug it in and hey everybody's connected right that's what you want but but when it comes to enterprise let's say storage applications that needs a really but is that the behavior you want that anything that just plugs into it all of a sudden now can connect and and that's one thing that gets kind of lost sometimes than the discussions and the monitor data centers and here I'm really glad that you brought it up and you dropped out of to Jeff it's it's we realize that we're adding more things into it right we're adding more capabilities for in-flight encryption you mentioned forward error correction so the other capabilities were built in it so we take security very seriously and and inherently I think that's another reason that the viability of fibre channel has remained for as long as it has been yeah and it just own it one more time you know kind of what are some of the specific benefits that came out of you two working together for this launch how are you really kind of taking advantage of each other's strengths to really provide a better solution today that people can go out and get well one of the things is they offer backward compelled compatibility we're with two generations right right and that enables us we have a lot of legacy things that we've got to bring forward they don't just rip everything out and put in all these stuff turn the data center off for the weekend is my bonus so you know it gives us that easy transition migration into these higher higher technology levels big one yeah a big one yeah and I think when when the in the porn part two is when we deliver our systems to itachi they test it with their latest and greatest storage they do this full you know systems total solution test so when a customer that brings it into the environment it's it's been fully tested completely NM by brocade and hitachi and then to Hugh's point it's it also then works its backward compatible with everything in the environment nothing's going to you know that nothing will ever break but you know so much time and effort is put into making sure everything runs to seamless as possible because again you have to think about the environments that we're in all right those from mission-critical big environments they got to solve some serious problems they're not up for science projects they're not for risk right yes they have to advance the technology but it's got it done be done in a way that a mitigator essence done a responsible way and that's where I think when you bring their storage and our network together as well as their servers right we have our technology part of their server solutions as well you get some very compelling solutions all right well congratulations to both of you and also to the team's I'm sure there was a lot of work that went up into this day and it's always a relief to get here so thanks for stopping by and sharing the story thank you absolutely right with you and Jack I'm chef Rick you're watching the Q's the cube conversation from Palo Alto thanks for watching we'll see you next time

hi everybody Jeff Rick here with the Q we're having a cute conversation in the Palo Alto studio something that we do when we have a little break in the show schedule we can take a minute catch our breath and still sit down with the tech leaders that you want to hear from but now we can do it in the studio outside the context of the hustle and bustle of a show and really excited to have a true industry veteran he's been around for probably longer than he wants me to say on air so I'll let him say how long but who is she - the CTO of Hitachi Data Systems welcome thank you Jeff great to see you pleasure to be here well doing a little research for this interview you've been around for a while you've done a number of interviews and the thing that struck me was kind of that maybe the last big trend that you were so excited about server virtualization and what a phenomenal difference that made in the marketplace as well as your business are we going through another one of those now yes well we're you know we're going through this digital transformation and I guess IDC is the one that started that term and it's based upon you know the social mobile analytics and cloud or smack because they called it and that has brought some new technologies and be able to create some new innovations in terms of how businesses can transform themselves right Hitachi Data Systems you guys are you guys are way down in the bowels of these big systems you guys are powering a lot of the storage and and you came from the mainframe business so how is it affecting your business how are you seeing you know real concrete changes in what your customers are asking you for and how you see their business changing yes well we started it as well we started as mainframes and then we transition to storage from the mainframe businesses that are declined but we're more than storage you know we have now we have an x86 of server platform a blade server that enables us to provide a converged solution along with our networking partners like brocade and these converts oceans are kind of the basis for private clouds because it eliminates all the the need for infrastructure connectivity and things like that so you can roll in one of these things plug in a the power plug on the network and and actually pick an application from a table menu of tables templates and be off and running so it makes it very easy to move into this new phase of digital transformation yeah cuz it's funny because on the infrastructure side you know it's kind of production line 101 as soon as you take care of one piece in the production line then you move to your next point of failure you move to your next point of failure you know between compute and and and storage and networking everyone seem to see the kind of networking was kind of the slowest leg of the three and kind of coming up to the modern architecture but now with this type of announcement they're really bringing their game up quite a bit right yeah no Gen 6 is really going to open up a lot of bandwidth and I ops for us and move a lot of the actually you know it's the peaks that we worry about right we have to over configure for the peaks but they've got this you know 32 gigabits per second yes the old mob no problem right everybody calls me everybody calls mom on Mother's Day and AT&T doesn't have to build the whole network out for Mother's Day but Mother's Day only comes once a year yeah yeah the other huge trend that you've talked about extensively which is another driver behind this is really software defined and how software-defined is spreading throughout many parts of the infrastructure and and adding a whole new layer of flexibility expandability elasticity to what customers can do with their infrastructure right yeah software-defined is is key to this transformational transformation that we're talking about and to us Software Defined you know many times people consider software-defined as a way of commoditizing the hardware and to us is much different than that it's really the communication between hardware and the application layer a good example is v-ball from VMware where we can publish our unique capabilities up through the vasa interface API and vSphere can see our capabilities and they find a virtual volume or on their capabilities and on our part we can see into vmware know that we're talking or configuring for a virtual machine not just presenting up Lunz and you know blocks but we can actually recognize that this virtual machine is higher priority than others and we can allocate to the right resources right so it's a communication process and a synergy between applications and hardware infrastructure and then what this has enabled what you've talked about in numerous times too is the ability for an individual to manage a whole lot more in terms of infrastructure storage etc so now as the as the you know kind of amount of stuff that I'm responsible for goes up you know the management and the management tools and the ability to manage this this bigger more complex things becomes much more significant yeah much simpler you know the old view of infrastructure or the data center it was sort of like a triangle you know with with the base of it being the infrastructure costs and the operations and all that the top of it was was the smaller part was what we focused on the applications and analytics what we have to do now is turn that triangle upside down so we focused less on the infrastructure software do you find helps us do that cloud helps us to do that and automate that so that we can spend most of our effort on the application the end user analytics right we hear that time and time again especially with with the DevOps ethos and what amazon has done with you know swipe your card infrastructure that it's really the application that drives everything and there's a there's an expectation in the developer world that now with containers that the application or the infrastructure to just respond and what I need from the application as opposed to limiting my application development based on what I think or I got away from them to spin up a new server or whatever that's completely flip-flopped as you said yeah I mean you make a good point on it's very disruptive I mean not just on the infrastructure side but it's also in development side as you as you talked about so DevOps and agile and scrum and those things are very important so instead of the waterfall approach we took the development right that's too slow we've got to go you know be faster and using these technologies are one thing but how we use that technology and innovation we put into that is what really makes a difference right and you put in the game like we said you've been in the game for a while and and you've mentioned in a number of your interviews you know that these little guys have driven kind of this last big wave of innovation but there's a new one coming on we hear about it all the time it's sio T Internet of Things now as sensors get cheap and actually a benefit of these is now all the sensors that are in them they are less expensive and much more pervasive so now we can put them on dogs you can put them on shipping boxes from Amazon you can put them on all kinds of things you know from your point of view as you start to see IOT build and the momentum building that's a lot of hype probably right now but it's coming right and big companies like GE are behind it and a lot of players are behind it what does that make you think how excited are you about IOT is there some specific challenges you're looking forward to taking down or DC is just kind of the next big step function of kind of demand for the big three of compute networking and storage yeah it's it's another integration process between the information technology we have grew up with the data centers and the operational technology that comes from those sensors how do we bring those things together you know we have you know we have to be able to bridge that too one of the ways we can do that is with several things we have to bridge we have to bridge the infrastructure and then that's software-defined we have to bridge the data and so we have to move more toward object stores with more enriched metadata and we've got to bridge the information so the the data that comes from aisle key is different from your structured data center but you need to bring together that Oracle or s ap data together with this sensor data that comes in and integrate that together so we acquired a company last year called Pentaho that does that allows me to integrate all these things and the way it we have all these connectors to all these disparate types of databases is that it's open source so open source contributes a lot of this we just harden it and provide a subscription maintenance for that so open source is another key driver for for enabler for this transformation did you even talked about the transformation at Hitachi going from proprietary Asics proprietary software to more open source and Intel chips and again kind of leveraging best-of-breed at scale and bringing that type of capability into your right you know the other thing is the Intel's roadmap I mean that is amazing how they went to all these cores and everything and so that is enabled us to do away with a lot of the Asics we use to have to make we do have some ASICs and FPGAs for special purpose but primarily its standard Intel memory and cores and that what that enables us to do is to have a straw floor hypervisor for storage in other words all our mid-range you remember how we used to have separate mid-range and enterprise storage right now that's all running all with one hypervisor storage hypervisor it's interesting we I think was at HP maybe were talked about you know this IOT the concept of kind of IT versus ot and congratulations on the Pentaho acquisition we're at Pentaho world to create a great event great show a lot of traction but you know the ot the operational technology that runs shop floors that people at GE or work that's been cranking along all the time then yeah the IT is kind of two separate worlds and this in this IOT really is bringing those two worlds together and the connectivity together of the devices in the sensors and the shopfloor versus the IT systems you know and what's fortunate for us is he taught you data systems is our parent company has been in the IOT oh well the operational world they build nuclear reactors or trains locomotives and all the infrastructure types of things right and so we're able to bring that expertise together with our expertise and information systems and create this IOT solution right spot right we're in a great spot so a little more specific about the announcement today you're partnering with with brocade on this Gen 6 mhm what does it mean to you for attach II data systems what does it mean for your customers oh well it enables us you know we're going to all flash I mean I think we've already passed the tipping point for all flash you know with our 6.4 terabyte flash drive so we're actually cheaper than lower cost total cost of ownership than hard drives and so the cost is not a factor anymore and then all the surveys the Gartner just did a survey said that you know the users of flash reported you know savings not only in power cooling maintenance and performance normal things but also things like licensing costs because they don't have to license as many cores or instances of databases because of performance of flash so what this Gen 6 does it just opens up the highway or the lanes as Jack was talking about for us to be able to drive more workload through there right and and possibly even reduce the footprint even further by making better utilization of what we have and not have as many cores and instances of applications and as you were talking about a little bit online it's beyond just flash or the all flash array but really now looking down the road and potentially the all flash data center and the impacts of that is gonna have as these data centers keep getting bigger bigger the demands the loads are going up enough power continues to be an issue but this is a complete game-changer in terms of it all right you know all flash arrays were the hot thing right the investors are just big VCS are going crazy about those things investing a lot of money into them but you know the small flash arrays are really appliances if you want an all flash data center you still have to worry about all the enterprise things around availability you know replication disaster recovery security features shredding encryption and all that those things come with an enterprise array so if you're talking about all enterprise all flash Data Center it's more than just an all flash array you've got to expand that requirements to include all the enterprise requirements we traditionally had right so and that's that's why I Jen brocade is so the Gen 6 is so important to this right because not only does it give us the performance but it also has some additional availability features like they have forward error correction for in-stream types of error Corrections it has F CSP they do chap you know like a challenge handshake authentication protocol that we have with with Ethernet they do that with fiber channel and so we you had those additional capabilities and in the Fibre Channel switches now right in six really really just in sync with software-defined everything right it's not beads now you have management you have software capabilities you have all kinds of writings that you can now add in and as you said what's the point of hooking up a really fast drive to it'll hold an old legacy connection system that really wasn't built for the performance that you get out and the i/o insight which is key to seeing seeing that whole network at sandwich there so before I let you go running out of time just kind of get your perspective as to where we are today in kind of the IT industry with these massive shifts in terms of you know cloud and big data now being an asset and on liability and flash even the all flash data center and and mobile and around the corner IOT is you kind of sit back you know on a Friday night maybe with a glass of wine and think wow this is just crazy for all the innovation you live through and seeing how do you rank where we are today and what do you think about when you look out over the - yeah I don't know you know I've been in this business a long time but every year it just seems to be getting you know more and more the world is just expanding you know we see it you know so much data being created and we know we can't store all that data it's a part of the things that we'll have to struggle with is how what do we save and what we don't save and what can we recreate just from metadata so metadata Dappy stores become more important but you know today we're in this transition we we have to have sort of take it bimodal approach we still have our course systems that we need to take care of and nurture and grow and scale but we also need to then move into the the new the new innovations are the things that are that are not as atomic and as we have in our data center but eventual consistency things like that so we have both worlds but we need to be able to bridge the information the data and the infrastructure between the two and and networking is a key piece of that bridging the shortage of opportunity going forward no all right you thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day appreciate thank you all right who you sheet I'm chef Ricky you're watching Q conversations so looking angles to be the cue production thanks for watching