(uplifting music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is a CUBEConversation at SiliconANGLE's, Palo Alto studio, happy to welcome to the program, a first time guest and and new to Nutanix, the Chief Marketing Officer, Ben Gibson. Ben, thank you so much for joining us. >> Stu thanks for having me here. I love the studio and love the chance to chat with you. >> Alright, so our audience know Nutanix really well, so let's introduce them to you first of all. Give our audience a little bit about your background and, you know, we know Nutanix IPO'd not that long ago. Exciting. Growing real fast so, you know, I'm sure it makes sense but why for Ben? >> Yeah. For me, firs and foremost, it's such an exciting company. We're going through a lot of fairly strong growth right now. We've really created a category in the Space Realm Hyperconvergence and now we're really expanding from that position and to be in the middle of that, I think is really exciting. >> So your background is mostly in the networking space and it's one of those things, I'm a networking guy by background. >> Yeah. >> Networking is changing a lot, lately, but not nearly as fast as some of the other parts so, you know, tell us a little bit about your background, where you've been, what your skillset is going to bring to Nutanix, in that ecosystem. >> Yeah, you know, I did, like you, I hailed from the networking industry. I spent a good portion of my career at Sisco, I spent part of my career at Aruba Networks, which is in the Wi-Fi, wireless space, but I think you're right. I think the acceleration of innovation in Nutanix's industry a lot of stuff has changed so quickly in that space, so networking hasn't quite kept up with that level of change of things and for me it's kind of getting on a much faster train and moving forward with it. >> Alright, so we've had theCUBE at every single one of the DotNext conferences >> Ben: Thank you. >> They're fun. Your predecessor Howard Ting had a certain flair so let's talk a little bit about the show and, you know are there things that your going to be putting your stamp on at this show, coming up in New Orleans? >> Yeah, I mean first of all it great to succeed Howard, in the role. I used to be an advisor for the company and so Howard and I used to have periodic pancake breakfasts and I told him what I thought and he shared with me a lot about how exciting things were. What was happening at Nutanix and how they really move forward. And I knew about DotNext, I've seen DotNext I know what an exciting show it is. For a company like Nutanix to draw, this year, over 5000, attendees to this show, that's notable. And, what, to me, that signals is the level of intensity and the level of loyalty that we enjoy in our customer base, they're believers and they're coming to the show to learn from us, to connect with each other and really to accelerate some of their plans on how they continue to innovate. >> Yeah, you know, we travel to so many different shows and absolutely, it is at it's core, it's a user conference, it's users there wanting to learn how to use what they have even better. Learn about the cool net technologies. Dave Valente and I have talked about Nutanix is up there with companies like Service Now, that have, just, people that come and are just, you know, kind of fanatically supported. It reminds me of, you know, Vmware's a great company, doing well today. Many years ago everybody had the I love VMware bumper stickers. Vmware is a great show. We'll be there this year >> Ben: Yeah, so will we. >> And your company will too, so ah, what, what do people what brings them to that show from your standpoint and give us a little insight as to, kind of, some of the special things they'll be seeing this year in New Orleans. >> Yeah, you know, I think one of the biggest attractions of coming to this show is if you think about the role of an infrastructure professional, someone who's looking at hybrid Cloud environments and how do you manage those. Thinking about what applications run on what cloud platform. There's a lot of change and fluidity to that and I think the nature or the role of an IT or an Infrastructure professional is changing. Server Store J-Admin is quickly evolving because that's converging, just like the technology has and so, for me this show is about how do you get ahead of those trends. How do you position yourself to be as strategic as possible, within your own organization? And that's the way I like to think of Dotnext, it's a place that a professional can come to learn and to grow their career and their technology expertise. >> Yeah it's a great point, one of the things I've loved on theCUBE is there are speakers that aren't just from the tech industry, so everyone from Deepak Malhotra, who is from Harvard, um, thought leaders in the space to onstage at one of the shows it was David Blaine doing a magic trick while one of your engineers was configuring stuff. So there's some great speakers that'll be at the event this year to, not only learn the tech but as you said, you're thinking about the persons career and how do they embrace change and how do they help become more valuable to their company. >> Yeah, you know, there's two in particular that are going to be joining this year that I'm very excited about. One is Dr. Brene Brown. If you haven't seen her TED talk on YouTube I highly recommend you go and check it out. It's something different. It's about how do you be vulnerable, with yourself, with your career. How do you take chances? How do you take risk, and that's a lot of what's going on in our in our industry right now. The second one I think is going to be really fun and that's Anthony Bourdain. Known for his show, Parts Unknown and he's going to have colorful language, right, noted, some colorful language but also he's just a riot. He's the one I think is going to bring his special kind of flair to the show and get everyone really excited, laughing and maybe a little bit of gasping, in terms of what he's going to be sharing with us. >> Yeah, absolutely I mean, New Orleans is a great culinary destination and so I know everybody that's going there you'll want to check out the music, the culture and a lot going in there. So, excited about the show. We're going to have theCUBE there for two days. Last thing I want to talk to you about, Ben, just, Nutanix as a company, when I registered for the show there was one of the questions I thought was pretty interesting. They said, "What do you think Nutanix is?" You know, how do you, what's your relationship with Nutanix? And I'm trying to remember, I know one of the options was M: Is Nutanix a hypercovergence infrastructure player? Are they a cloud player? I think storage might even be in there, it's been one of those things as to, who is Nutanix? What are you today and what do you want to be in the next phase of growth? >> You know, it's a great question Stu, "Who is Nutanix?" We are focused on helping our customers build their enterprise cloud. Our taglines could be Your Enterprise Cloud. Enterprise Cloud is not only how you modernize your own data center but it's also, how do you embrace? How do you have a strategy? How do you govern? How do you bring together the right workload, for the right cloud platform at the right time? And that's the direction we're taking with our innovation. This is what more and more of our customers are looking to do. Not every application's going to a public cloud provider. Not every application is staying on premise. We're going to be living in the hybrid world, Enterprise Cloud is about how do you take the ingredients of hyperconvergent infrastructure? Take the ingredients for automation and management, over these different workloads, across these different environments and do so in a way that makes the complexity of infrastructure and multiple cloud management and make that all invisible. So for us that's our mission. It's building that Enterprise Cloud and making all that complexity go away. And that's the vision we're going to be talking about and that's what we think our attendees are really looking to get the guidance and, kind of the vision of how they move their careers forward and flourish in that space >> Ben, it's the barometer that I've been using for probably the last two years. If I spend a lot more time in kind of the Dev/Op Cloud native, you know, worlds these days. We were at an Amazon summit yesterday but, absolutely. It's heterogeneous world. IT has never, you know, let's throw out the old and start the new. Sure there's some new companies that might do that but it's a heterogeneous world, it's a multi-cloud world and big struggle for people is how do they get their arms around it? So if I look at a company that has started mostly on premises, it's like, oh how are you evolving? How are you working with the public Cloud? You know, Nutanix has been working very closely with Google over the last year or so. A new acquisition recently that I know plays into this whole story. Tell us a little bit about the acquisition and, you know, how does Nutanix look at itself, which is now, I mean, if you read the Wall Street reports, Nutanix is a software company. And you're getting great multiples on that and it's helping and you know I've been pretty vocal on this from it's early days, is Nutanix was never a hardware company. It, you know, building an appliance was a go to market choice to simplify and make it easy for customers but as the company matured, >> Yep. >> It made a lot more options and today it makes perfect sense that really software is where it goes, so you talked about a bunch of things there but specifically, kind of the multi-cloud and the acquisition first. >> You know Stu, we're really excited about this recent acquisition we made. It's a company called Minjar and the offering is essentially it's going to be integrated into our broader software platform, that allows customers to be able to assess on a realtime basis. What's the right Cloud platform for a particular workload from a costing perspective? From reliability standpoint. Derish talks about the law of the land. The laws of physics and the like, you need to apply these all to determine what you're going to run where. And what we got with this Minjar acquisition, is a really sophisticated way that our customers can embrace and is part of their enterprise cloud. Because part of this is taking back control over all this disaggregation of workloads running everywhere. You're losing control. Losing governance of your data and your applications if you don't really keep on top of it, this acquisition, I believe, is going to be a really key part of helping IT organizations regain that control. Yet still enjoy all the benefits of hybrid-cloud environments. Whether it be with an AWS an Azure a Google Cloud platform, like we're partnering very closely with, as well as what they're building with their Enterprise Cloud on premise. Whether it be, you know, with Nutanix. >> Yeah, it reminds me of, was it Progressive Insurance, I think has the, you know >> Yeah. >> We're going to give you quote on all of the things there. Cloud is complicated these days. Is there bias towards it, pushing towards, you know, Nutanix closer partners in the technology itself. >> Yeah, I mean it certainly has. There's a lot of complexity around that and to me the industry hasn't solved a lot of new complexity that has come out of the emerging trend of a different line of businesses starting to develop a new application now, on a certain Cloud platform and the like. And as you're seeing this demand for more application mobility between clouds, so all of a sudden the partners that are coming to us and the partners we're seeing and are demanded of that we work with in the market our players are looking at application automation. Players that are looking at dev/ops tools and the like and it both guides how we innovate on our Calm platform, which we introduced last year at DotNext as well it helps us expand our reach. So, we talked to our traditional buyers but there's a lot of new buyers now that are building those apps and managing those environments and we're going to start to see some of those come into the DotNext show. >> Alright. Ben I want to give you the final word. DotNext is one of the many events that I know you do lots of regional shows and the like, what should we expect to see from Nutanix through 2018? >> Yeah, you know the first thing is that the dialogue, the narrative for the company, that we're going out with we've moved to be a software only company and I think our customers tell us and I heard this from one of our largest retail industry customers just a few weeks ago, by moving to a software only model, it's given them freedom to take advantage of Nutanix, regardless of their hardware platforms. And like you said we've never been a hardware company, it's all been about software value and what you're going to see from us is a new narrative. An expansion of the branded Nutanix talking about the freedom we give for customers to build the data center they've always wanted to build. Freedom to run their application or the workload that they've wanted to run, where they choose to run it based on that insight I talked about. And in another realm, the freedom to play. Freedom to get their weekends back. A lot of our value proposition is because of all the complexity we've taken out of the equation, is that we give our customers their weekends back. This is a story that our DotNext attendees, I think, know better than other but we want to spread the word and so part of that is harnessing that freedom concept to build, to run, to play to invent and tell the world. And DotNext, whether is be in New Orleans, which I think is going to be a blast. When we take it to Europe, London and we do this all around the world, to me that's kind of ground zero for that story. For the community of what we've built together with our customers and partners and that what we take out to the world. >> Alright, well Ben Gibson, I'm glad we could introduce you to our community today because we're going to be seeing you at lots of other events, you and your team, of course, theCUBE will be at Nutanix, DotNext in New Orleans. Nutanix and you will be at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. Google Cloud Next happening this summer in San Fransisco. Lots of other shows so be sure to tune in to theCUBE.net, get the list of all the upcoming shows, Ben, Nutanix and of course lots of the Cloud and infrastructure ecosystem. Check it all out. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE. (uplifting music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios. The conference season is just about ready to take off so we still have some time to get some Cube conversations in before we hit the road and spend the next several days and weeks and months in Las Vegas, Orlando, and points on the compass. So, we're excited to have our next guest. She's Lynn Lucas, Cube alumni, CMO of Cohesity, Lynn, great to see you again. >> Jeff, super to be here for the first time in Palo Alto. >> Yeah, how do you like the studio? >> I love it! >> It's a little different than the vibe at the conferences. >> A little quieter-- >> A little quieter. >> Than the conferences but I like it. >> Well good, good, welcome, so you have relatively recently joined a new company, Cohesity, so congratulations on that. >> Thanks, yeah. >> And just curious, one, give us just a quick overview on Cohesity but more importantly, what did you see that attracted you, to get you to join? >> Great, yeah, so Cohesity, just joined at the beginning of January, having a blast. And really what I saw that attracted me to Cohesity was three things. It's an incredible founder, Mohit Aron, who was formerly the CTO and co-founder of Nutanix called the Father of Hyperconvergence and before that the lead developer at Google File System. And, he really is doing what a lot of Silicon Valley is known for, which is he took a step back and is looking at this space in the data center that we call secondary data, back up, archives, replications, test dev, analytics, and said, "You know what? "The world doesn't need a better point solution. "We need to take a step back and look "at how this gold mine of data can be used "in a much more efficient way." Because data is after all, is what's powering the worlds businesses and their differentiation. So, the technology, Mohit himself is a founder and then it's just an incredible start up culture. It's fast growing, we're having fun every day, I love going to work. >> It's amazing, I was just doing some background and you guys have raised $160 million. The list of leadership and board and advisory is pretty amazing. It's like a who's who from this industry. So he pulled together a helluva team. >> He really has and you know Carl Eschenbach, former COO of VM Ware is on our board. >> Cube alumni, Patrick Rogers. >> Rob Salmon. >> Cube alumni, we could go on and on. >> Yes, Ned App, Dan Wormehoven, Google Ventures is invested, Sequoia. I think Sequoia said we're the fastest growing company in their portfolio. We grew 600% year over year last year, 40 to 50% growth in new customers every quarter, cause they're is just such a pent up demand to really solve some of the problems that haven't been addressed over the last, really, couple of decades for the inefficiencies and how all of this data for these secondary workloads is managed. >> So you got an interesting graphic on the website talking about secondary data. And that it's really the ugly part of the iceberg below the water and significantly bigger, heavier, and more expensive to manage than the primary data. So I wonder if you could take us into that a little bit deeper, how did it get to be such a problem? And why is this new approach a better way to attack that problem? >> Sure and an iceberg is really kind of a good metaphor when you think about the data center. You know, we've got our production, and applications, primary storage and that's what's floating above the water and we see that 20% but below is another 80%. And, according to most industry analysts, IDC, Gartner, that represents not just 80% of the data but 80% of the cost. On average, IDC says every organization has 12 to 14 copies of each piece of data. And that happens because what's grown up over time is point solutions for all the various work loads. You got one set of hardware and software for backup. You've got another set for test dev. You've got another set for analytics. There's been no sharing of the data. There's no single infrastructure, knowing even or operations knowing what you have and being able to tell you where the inefficiencies are and so you think about a developer in retail or in a bank organization, they're requesting a copy of a data to develop the new applications that copy gets instantiated. They do their work, never gets erased, just like in our consumer life. >> Right, Right. >> Do you ever erase photos off your phone? >> I can't tell you how many copies and copies and copies of, cause it's, cause it's often-- >> It's easy. >> You figure, it's easier to make another copy just in case, right? >> Exactly, so that never goes away and then you've got yet another copy for the next time they need an updated set. And so, this has been multiplying and it creates just an incredible expense to maintain and operate. And it also creates a lot of risk these days for organizations because of new regulations like GDPR. >> Right. >> Where are all those copies of personal information from e-use citizens, people don't even know anymore. >> Right, and then there's, you know, two other big factors that have come into play in recent years. Software to find and public cloud. Two really big, huge tidal waves of change that were not accommodated in prior architectures so you guys, obviously, saw that opportunity glommed on and are now offering something that can take care of the different types of needs based on what type of infrastructure you need, really not at a company level. But really at the application or the workload level right? >> Yeah, so I think it's a great point and I won't claim any credit for this, this is Mehit and his team of developers and really, as you pointed out, what do we see organizations looking for now? They now realize that, hey, if I can get a software to find platform, a lot of commodity hardware does a really good job for me and I want to have that flexibility to choose, you know, what vendor I might be using. So, Mohit developed a software to find platform that addresses, how do you bring all of these data and these workloads together in one platform so I can have a consistent set of infrastructure and a consistent operational model and, because of his heritage, working at Google, being one of the lead developers for Google File System, it comes with this cloud first mentality. So this is not a bolt on with a gateway to get to Amazon or get to Azure. >> Right. >> This is a software platform that natively understands and spans both your private cloud and your on premises data center and the public cloud. So it gives an IT organization the flexibility to choose how do I want to use the public cloud with my private data center and not have to think really about, kind of, that plumbing below. >> Right. >> Below the water line anymore. >> Because, because there is no either or, right? It's really workload specific where that particular workload lives and the storage that supports that. >> Yeah, so so let me be specific about what Cohesity offers. It's software defined and we offer a appliance so that it's very easy for an organization to go in and say, you know what, data protection, backup frankly, legacy architectures built 20 years ago, before the advent of the cloud. Biggest pain point we see right now can move in a Cohesity hyperconverged appliance and solve that problem and gain massive business benefits right away. We offer global deduplication, very advanced compression and erasure coding and we have customers that are telling us that they're seeing eight to one, ten to one, even 14 to one ratios that really then give them-- >> 14:1 ratio and a reduction of capacity to store the same amount of stuff? >> Versus from some of the current customer, or current vendors that they have been using, from what I would call these legacy architectures. >> Right, right, that's pretty significant. >> So they're getting an amazing storage efficiency. Then, they often next say, wow I'd like to give my developers the flexibility of spinning this up in the cloud. So we offer a cloud edition that allows them to choose whether they want to operate on Azure on Amazon on Google cloud and be able to move that data into the cloud, use it for a test dev instance, but again all under the same software interface all looks like one operating system. No bolt on gateway to manage. >> Right, so you get it-- >> And then. >> I'm sorry go ahead. >> And I was going to say in the third part is many organizations obviously have remote offices, branch offices so there's a virtual edition too. >> Right. So I'm just curious on the cloud side. So Andy Chassis' been on a ton of times, great guy. >> Yes. >> You know, one of the promises of cloud is spin up what you need and spin down when you - don't, as you said. >> Right. >> Nobody ever spins anything down so are you seeing customers have the same type of, of economic impact in managing their storage that's in the public clouds? Because now they're actually spinning down what they don't need or consolidating more efficiently. >> Yeah, so I think that we've seen, in general, in the industry that if you likened the data center it'd kind of been a messy garage where there was a lot of things in the garage and you weren't really sure what it was. A lot of folks, I would say five plus years ago, were like, kind of ran to the cloud cause it was clean and new and it was like that new shiny storage box. >> Right. >> You know, that you see parked on people's driveways sometimes and then realize that there can be a lot of expense, cause you're really replicating in the cloud, some of these same silos if you're not careful. >> Right. >> We're going to help customers avoid that. I think customers are much more sophisticated now than say five years ago. And they're now looking at what's the best way for me to incorporate public cloud. >> Right. >> So really common use case right now would be what I mentioned before test dev, let's move something there, get the benefit of the compute, do some analytics on it, build some new application, maybe get spun down after that but another really common use case is a lot of organizations worried about disaster recovery, bringing the cloud in as their second site. Because that's a very efficient way for them to do that and not build yet another on premises data center. >> Silo. >> Yeah. >> So, the company's been around, the a round is 2013, you're coming in as a CMO. You're brand new and fresh, what's your charter? You know, you didn't come in at a low level you came in with the C, what are you excited about, what you know, again why did they bring you in and what are you going to bring to the table and what are your priorities for the rest of 2018 and beyond? I still can't believe we're a third, a quarter of the way through 2018. >> Yes we are. We're going to be at those shows pretty soon. >> (laughing) I know, they're comin'. >> They are, so I'm here really to build on the good work that the team has done and I'm just really thrilled to be at the company. I think what my charter is is to continue the company's expansion. So, they've seen tremendous growth and in fact, we've just really launched into Asia so we now have a large sales presence in Australia, New Zealand and we're going to continue to expand into the rest of Asia. Significantly expanded in Europe as well recently. So part of my charter is to bring the marketing programs to all of these new regions and in general, to up our awareness level. I think Cohesity has an incredible opportunity to really be one of those companies that changes the data center landscape. >> Right. >> And I want to make sure the world knows about the incredible benefits the customers are seeing already with us. And do that in a way that really features the customer voice. I've been on theCUBE before and I talked about that. For me, that is all about ensuring that the customer voice is really front and center and so hopefully we'll bring a Cohesity customer here. >> Good, well and I just want to ask you kind of from a marketing professional in B2B business, it's a really challenging time in terms of, of the scarcity now is not information, which it used to be. Now the scarcity is in attention and people can get a lot of information before they ever make it to your website within peer groups and hopefully watching some Cube interviews, et cetera. So I'm just curious to get your perspective from a Chief Marketing Officer how are you kind of looking at the challenges of getting the message out. It's a really different world than it was years and years ago. >> Yeah. >> People aren't reading white paper so much and it's a different challenge. >> Yeah, and it's part of the fun actually in being in marketing and being in marketing and tech because a lot of that cool technology for marketing is invented right here in the Valley too. So, you know, I think that word of mouth still actually plays an incredible role and it is that customer voice but bringing that out in ways that are accessible for customers. You and I know, we're all very ADD, very time sliced-- >> Right. >> And so those small moments on social media where you can feature bits of information that get people's attention. In fact, we're running something right now, which I think has a lot of legs because at the end of the day I'm selling to a human. >> Right? >> Right. >> Right. >> So we've got B2B monikers but at the end of the day, folks are people that laugh, they cry, they want to have fun. >> Right. >> So we're running a break up with your legacy backup campaign right now. And I encourage the audience to go check it out. It's pinned on our Twitter feed at Cohesity but it pokes a little bit of fun at how you might break up with your older vendor-- >> Right. >> And that's a moment that we think captures folks attention and gets them interested so that maybe they do want to move down and read the white paper and so forth. So I look to do that through combinations of just, you know, bringing out Cohesity's incredible voice, our customer voice, and then sharing it on social because that's the way people really get their information these days. >> Right, this is really interesting cause I think the voice of the customer or the trusted referral's actually more valuable now because it's just a different problem. Before, I couldn't get information, so that was a good valuable sort, now it's really that person's my trusted filter cause I have too much information. >> Right. >> I can't, I can't take it in so that continues to be that trusted filter and conduit so I could just focus on my peers and not necessarily try to read everything that comes out. >> Exactly, you know, so as an example, Manhattan Associates is one of Cohesity's customers and we've been super thrilled to be able to feature them you know, through social, through our website, and let them talk about the benefits of moving to the platform and what they've seen. And I know, I hate to say it, but Gartner as well continues to be an incredible influence on most organizations and, but we're pleased to say that our customers chose Cohesity and we won the Gartner peer insights for data center backup software, just about a month ago. So, that again is another example of customers looking at the options that they have and voting with their voice and we'll continue to drive that message out in the variety of ways and hopefully get people engaged so that they can see that there really is a completely different way of managing your secondary data and getting a lot better efficiencies and a lot lower cost. >> Yeah, good exciting times, challenging times. The old marketing mantra, right? Half of my marketing budget's wasted, I just don't know which half. (laughing) So, you know you got to cover all your bases from the old school Gartner to the new school, having some fun, and some comedy. Well Lynn, really fun to sit down and spend a few minutes and to get deeper into the Cohesity story. >> Likewise, thank you and I'll be seeing you in Orlando, Vegas, and those other points on the compass. >> Alright, she's Lynn Lucas, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watchin' theCUBE from the Palo Alto studios. Great to see ya, we'll see ya next time. Thanks for watchin'. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, Veeam and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Here in Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, with my partner in crime this week Stu Miniman, Senior Analyst at Wikibon. Also co-host of many events across the world in terms of networking, storage, Cloud, you name it, Stu is on the developers with me. Stu, thanks. Nice seeing you. Stefan Renner is Technical Director, Global Alliances at Veeam Software is with us with Darren Williams, @MrHyperFlex, that's his Twitter handle, go check him out. HyperFlex-V at Cisco, guys welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Also love the Twitter handle. >> Darren: I live the brand. >> You live the brand. I mean that's got some longevity to it, it's evergreen. So congratulations on that. You guys are together with Cisco Veeam, what's the story? What's going on in Europe with Cisco and Veeam? >> I would say there is a lot of stuff going on between Cisco and Veeam. Especially around the Hyperflex story, obviously is the topic of this session, right? So having integration, Hyperflex, having a good go-to-market, having a good relationship between the two companies. We just joked about how often we've been in front of cameras talking about this exact same topic. So that shows that the relationship between the two of us is really moving forward and in a good shape. >> I think we're in good shape in terms of, you think about not just my product, Hyperflex, but you look at what Veeam can do for the rest of Cisco data-centered products, and be that backup, safer hands around what we need in terms of that data protection layer. But also then, what we can add in terms of that target to be the server of choice for backups so you get the benefits of the speed, performance, and more importantly, you get quicker restores. Because that's the important bit, you need to be able to do the quick restore. >> Yeah, we usually talk about availability, right? We don't talk about backups or recovery. Even if recovery is maybe the most important part of availability, still we talk more about availability than maybe anything else. The good thing about Cisco is that the actually can deliver what we need in terms of performance, in terms of capacity, in terms of compute resources. So yeah, that's a real benefit. >> It's such an interesting time, I mean we look back at history, go back 10 years ago, maybe, or more; backup recover, that's like, "Oh, we forgot to talk about that in our RFP." Kind of bolted on, kind of retrofitted in. But now we've seen it come to the main center. But more importantly, with AI and Cloud, and all the action happening with DevOpps on premises, you hear CIOs and CXOs and developers saying, "We're data driven." >> Yeah. >> Okay, so if you're data driven, you have to be data protection driven too. So those things go hand in hand. So the question for you guys is how does a data driven organization, whether it's in the data center, all the way up to the business units, or the business processes, become data protection built in? How do they design in from day one a data protection system up and down the stack? >> Yeah, so maybe I'll start to answer that question. I think when I'm going to customers, and I fully agree on what you just said, most customers 10 years ago were focusing on getting used to platforms and getting used to org systems. It has to be an isolated project, right? Now in those days when I go to customers I tried to convince them to include data protection in every project the do in data center, because at the end, data protection is one of the core elements. >> So designing in early, at the front end? >> I say whenever you go about having a new Hyperflex system or whenever you talk about replacing your existing environment, whatever you do, right, just look into data protection, looking into your availability story. Because right now, and you mentioned that, it's about data services, right? We don't really talk about restoring of EM, we don't restore to the single file. It's about, the customer wants to have a data availability in terms of a service availability. And that includes more than just the VM, it includes more than just the single thing, right? >> Yeah. So they need to include data protection and the design of that in the whole org chart. From the beginning. >> And you're point? >> Yeah we look at it from a similar thing in terms of where you've got changes happening in terms of the way people are looking at how they want to design their applications, where they want their data to live. And that's the whole messaging around 3.0, is that multi-Cloud readiness platform. Being able to think about an application and go, "Do I want to design in the public, and house privately, "or vice versa? Do I want to house the data "of the application in a private location "and the actual application in public?" Having that being able to be transparent to a user in terms of the way they design it and then position, but also as we look at other applications, not all people on this journey are going to go, "We're going to put everything in the Cloud." They're going to look at about, maybe have a little bit in the Cloud, a little bit of the traditional apps we need to manage and protect. And it's all about that 3.0 that we've delivered the pre-multi-Cloud offering around Hyperconvergence, we've now brought the multi-Cloud element. It's giving you the choice of where you want to position things, where you want to house things, how you want to design things. And keeping it nice and simple for customers, and the agility and performance. >> Darren, some really interesting points that you just had there. When I think back to a few years ago, Hyperconverge, pretty strong in North America. But it was project based, it was like, let's take a VDI, some virtualized environment, it wasn't a Cloud discussion. >> Darren: Correct. >> Take us inside what you're seeing in Europe here, because today Hyperconverge is a lot about Cloud, how that kind of hybrid or multi-Cloud environment, so what are you hearing from your customers? >> Absolutely, and I think if you look at the, what's happened in times of Hyperconvergence up to this point it's the initial building block of this multi-Cloud. And we're seeing more and more customers now, I think the latest IDC survey, surveyed that 87% of all customers have a multi-Cloud strategy. And we're seeing now more of the ability to think of Hyperconvergence as that multi-Cloud strategy, and have that simplicity that people have done in terms of the initial thought around a simple application, how they can collapse the layers, they can now utilize that experience into the multi-Cloud experience. And we're seeing more and more of that. We've now got 2500 users around the world around Hyperflex, and about 700-800 EMEA, and the majority of those are utilizing it as private Cloud experience. They're getting the benefits of what they've had in the Cloud, and getting away from the sovereignty issues, and the shadow IT issues that they all face. They can now bring it back into their own data center. They can start small. They can spin out applications very quickly. They're getting the benefit of that Cloud message, but locally now. >> And I think that perfectly aligns with the Veeam story because as you know we are also focusing on the Cloud. We recently changed and also did some acquisitions on the Cloud, so we're also moving forward in the Cloud story and the HyperCloud area. And that's more or less what Cisco's multi-Cloud's story is also about, right? And I think one thing we should also mention here coming a bit back to how to implement and how to design such solutions as having more of a broad view on all the projects. I think one important thing for customers is the CBD Cisco has, right? And we do have CBD available to beam Cisco on the data protection layer. So we try to make it really easy for customers and for partners to design, implement and actually do the right decisions for those projects. >> Stefan, at Veeam On, of course a lot of partners, a lot of talk about the multi-Cloud, of course Veeam has a long history of VMware, but why don't you talk about Microsoft? I believe there's some things you've been doing lately with Hyper-V and the like, what's the update? >> Yeah, so obviously with Hyperflex there is Hyper-V coming, right? That's one of the bigger things coming to Hyperflex. Now for us, when we started to talk with Cisco, Cisco actually told us that Hyper-V is next and 3.0. We said that's fine for us, because as I said, we are dealing with Hyper-V like we did with VMware since a couple of years. So there is no big difference in terms of features and what we can do with Hyper-V. On the Microsoft side obviously it's around extract, which also is a big story with Cisco and Veeam, because there is a extract solution, and so we tried to get the extract fully integrated in the Veeam portfolio, and it's about effort, right? As we just talked about, making this Cloud journey even easier for the customer, making sure we have data protection forever, or making sure we can actually use our Cloud solutions to provide the full experience in the cloud. >> So the question on European audience, I was just looking at some Twitter tweets, getting in some feedback, is, "Ask the GDPR our question." Which is basically code words for the sophistication between data protection, you know we say as you get bitten in the butt if you don't prepare. And this is one of those things where I mean literally, there's so much data out there, people can't understand their own tables. I mean, if you have accounts, how do I know a user uses a certain name in this one, I got a certain name in this database, I mean it's just a nightmare to even understand what data do you have, nevermind taking someone out of a database. >> Yeah. >> So, the challenges are massive. >> Yep. >> This is coming down and it really highlights the bigger trend is: what do I do with the data, what is my protection, what's my recovery, how do I engage in real time, GDPR issue? Talk about the GDPR issue, and then what it really is going to mean for customers going forward. >> Well, I think if you think about GDPR, and people, I've got the understanding that it's just a mere thing, it's not. It's a worldwide thing. Any data that relates to a European citizen, anywhere in the world, is covered under the GDPR. So you've got to think about the multinationals we work with, have to have this GDPR thoughts, even if they're not based in EMEA. They may house data based around a European citizen. So it's a massive thing. Now, not one person or one organization can fix GDPR. We're all part of a bigger framework. So it looks like if you look at the Hyperflex offering, having self-encrypting drives, having good data protection and replication of the data so it's protected. That protects the actual content of a record, but it doesn't solve everything around GDPR. There's no one organization that can do that. It's about having that framework of you do the right decisions around the architecture, and the data protection, you'll get in there in terms of the protection. >> Well, I mean, I'm just going to rant here and say whoever came up with GDPR doesn't know anything about databases, okay. >> Darren: Yeah. >> I mean I get the concept, but, I mean, just think about how hard it is to deal with unstructured data, and structured data in and of itself within a company. Nevermind inside a company, what's happening externally, it is a technical nightmare. And so, yeah, just hand waving, "Hey, someone came "to your website." Well, did they come in anonymously, did they login, which identity did they login on? There's no - I mean it's a nightmare. This is a huge problem. What do customers do? >> I think if you talk about GDPR it's first of all not about a single solution, right? It's not an issue of just one company, or one vendor, one solution. It goes across different databases, different applications, different software, so as you said, it's database solutions, you need to delete maybe a single table entry, which is almost impossible right now. Especially if that's ina backup, right? How are you going to do that? I think between Cisco and us, and he mentioned that one important part of GDPR is data protection itself. So the customers need to make sure they can actually promise and they can show to the government that they have a proper data protection in place, so they can showcase what does my DR plan look like? How do I recover? What is my RPO? So we can already solve those issues. >> It changes your game because, for you, it turns you into a insurance policy to a proactive; in order to do data protection you actually have to know what the data is. So it kind of creates an opportunity to say hey, this is an opportunity to say we're going to start thinking about, kind of a new e-discovery model. >> If you look at 3.0, the multi-Cloud platform, we were discussing around how Hyperconvergence started very small in certain apps. But when you actually then expand that out into the multi-Cloud, security is a major pillar. And you've got to have the security elements, and Cisco has some great security offerings in the data center and outside of the data center. They all form part of that GDPR message. But it's been baked into multi-Cloud 3.0. as a key component to allow customers that confidence. >> It's going to be a Hyperconvergence of databases. So this is coming. >> Darren: Yeah. >> So this is going to force, I think the compliance is going to be more a shot across the bow, if you will. I don't know how hardcore they're going to be enforcing it. >> It's going to be interesting in the first one. Because at the moment I think a lot of customers are thinking, "Well, we'll wait till we see "how big the fines are, and then we'll decide." >> They're going to create shell corporations in the Cayman Islands. (laughter) >> Alright, so we've talked a little bit about some of the headwinds we're facing in IT. Talk about the tailwinds. A lot of things in the Hyperflex 3.0, got 700-800 customers, what's going to drive adoption, get that into thousands of customers here in 2018? >> So I think it's the simplicity message. Customers want ease of use of technology. They want to get away from what they've had before where they've had tough times standing up applications, where they've had to invest time around different skill sets for the infrastructure, be it networking, be it storage, be it compute. Having 3 teams back leaning against each other, and change windows. So the simplicity message of Hyperflex is you can have a three node cluster up and running in 34 minutes, including the network. We're the only ones that incorporate the network into the solution, and we do it for good reason. Because when we can get predictability in performance, and we can grow the solution very, very easily. And that's the whole point of what they're doing, is they want to be able to start small, and add more nodes when required, around what applications they're going to deploy on. Our tagline is "any application, anywhere" now, and either private location or into that multi-Cloud location. Gives customers choice, and I think as we start seeing more and more customers, 700 in just under 2 years is a phenomenal amount in EMEA, and 2500 worldwide, we've had some great traction. And it's just going to get faster and faster. >> Yeah, I think a lot of customers are obviously talking about moving to the Cloud completely or at least majority of the data. So for the customers that stay for them, and I talked with some customers today, and they told me, "For us right now, we can't focus "anymore on a data center itself. "We do have much more difficult and more important "topics to talk about and to cover in our IT business "than the basic data center itself" That includes compute, that includes digitalization. So it's great to hear you can actually set up a Hyperflex system, no matter if that's Hyper-V or VM or whatever in less than an hour, right? And if I tell you now that if you add Veeam on that to provide the availability for Hyperflex environment that's also less than an hour. So if you know how to configure that you can be done in a couple of hours, and you have more or less the whole data center set up. >> You bring up a really good point. What are customers concerned about? I have to worry about my application portfolio, I have my security issue, my whole Cloud strategy piece, so, if the infrastructure piece is just invisible and I don't have to touch it, tweak it and do that, I'm going to have time to actually grow my business. >> The more integrated it is, the more easy it is to set up and to maintain and troubleshoot by the way, that's also an important thing, right? What if it doesn't work? If there is a consistent layer, a consistent way to get all this information sent to get a troubleshooting thing done, the better it is for our customers. Because again, they don't want to care anymore about what's happening in the back end. >> And that's the next challenge we're addressing, in-app product or Insight, is taking that management solution into the Cloud to make things easier for customers. And being able to take a lot of the things we have in point product into a Cloud model. So the likes of analytics, the likes of Smart Tac. Customers get fed up if when they have an issue they have to go and roll the logs up into Tac, and then go and FTP them. They get away from that, they don't need to do that in Insight. And it's all about, we're talking about the deployment of technology, well one of the fist benefits of Insight is Hyperflex. We can roll out sites without even visiting them. You just do a Cloud deployment, and a Cloud management, and it's job done. >> And this is the whole point we were kind of getting at earlier, connect back to the compliance issue, these agile like things are happening; it's throwing off data too. So now you got to organize the data, you can't protect what you don't understand. >> Correct. >> I mean that is ultimately the bottom line for what's happening here. >> Yeah, you can't protect what you don't understand, I think that's a good conclusion of the whole thing. And I think for us >> By the way when you guys use that tagline I want royalties. But it's true. (laughter) We'll get back to you on that. No, but this is a big problem. Protection is inherently assuming you know the data is. >> Stefan: Yeah. >> Darren: Yeah. >> There it is. >> That's for sure the case, and one thing we worked on and, you know, we announced it a couple of months ago, was the Veeam Ability Orchestrator, which is another layer on top of it. So he just talked about how they can deploy within the site, multiple sites of Hyperflex very easily. And for us it's about, you know, getting the customer an easy solution with all the successful recovery and failovers in areas across the data centers with the Availability Orchestrator. >> Data is the competitive advantage, data is messy if you don't control it and reign it in, of course theCUBE is doing their part and bringing the data to you guys here in theCUBE with Veeam and Cisco partnership. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman breaking it down here at Cisco Live in Europe 2018. Live coverage with theCUBE. Be back with more after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem partners. >> I'm Stu Miniman, here with Justin Warren, and you're watching The Cube, the worldwide leader in tech covered. Happy to welcome back to the program, Satyam Vaghani, who is now the Vice President of Technology with Nutanix. Satyam, great to see you, you've got a long history with the VMware community, always good to catch up with you, how have you been? >> Likewise too, great to see you guys again. I've been good. >> All right, so I like, it's always the progression as to what discussed at the show. I was kind of poking at VMware a little bit, that in 2015 it was any device in any application one cloud, and the keynote this morning it was any device, any application, any cloud, and we're highlighting one of the things VMware's highlighting is NSX, they want to be kind of the interconnected fabric between the cloud and the edge. And of course I bring that up because, besides the virtualization stuff that you've done for years, you've got a little bit of a different role now, you joined Nutanix through the PernixData acquisition, so why don't you tell us what's been keeping you busy and excited these days. >> In a word, or in two words, edge computing for sure. You know, this has been striking to me too because I walked in to pick up my badge this morning, and the first thing I see at VMworld is IoT, you know there's this big area right next to where you pick up the badge. And so it's quite telling as to how computing is evolving. As you just said, you know NSX is one way to quantify that evolution from, you know, how do we stretch the cloud all the way into the edge. There's some other ways. And so yeah, I've been working on what defines that operating system that can converge the edge and the cloud into one seamless piece. >> There's definitely a lot of excitement around edge, but as with any early technology, if you're talking to a telco it means one thing, if you're talking to somebody involved in centers and IoT, it kind of means a different thing. We're not talking about kind of the robo-use cases that some people looked at, kind of HCIS, so what is that, what is edge computing in your parlance, and that OS, how does that fit into it? >> Great question, in fact I'll come back to the talking to different verticals, and how we can make some sense out of all those disparate conversations, maybe, you know as second part of my answer. But you know, the edge in my definition, is a way to collect, digitize the real world, that's one thing, but then take real-time decisions on all this data that is coming in from the real world. And so in my sense, the edge is all about taking real-time decisions on data, and then the cloud long-term is going to be about taking some long-term decisions about the same data or some subset of that data. You know, that Tesla is a great post-agile example right, as you know, in a self-driving car, you want to figure out whether you're going to get into an accident or not right at the car, which is the edge. But the longer term notion of how Teslas can be made to drive better can be all done in the cloud, deep learning et cetera. And so there is this very fluid movement of data and code between the two systems, that we as operating system vendors need to make possible. Otherwise, every agile application, which is really a hybrid application, some part of the logic runs here on the edge, some part of the logic runs on the cloud. It's going to be tremendously difficult to create these applications. And you mentioned, and very rightfully so, is you know, the interpretation of what edge computing or IoT means is very different by vertical. And so in fact right now, my number one mission is to look at all these different use cases and figure out what's common, right? I think back 30, 40 years ago, when the guys sat down to write POSIX, right, you know people figured out what is it that an operating system can provide that makes sense to 200,000 different applications. I think it's time to answer that exact same question for the world of machines, right? What is it that an operating system can provide which makes sense in the world of machines, that sells transportation, that sells defense, that sells health care, and blah blah blah, et cetera. >> So what are some of the things you've discovered in the research you've done so far? Have you got some early hints of what those pieces of commonality are? >> For sure, great question. And so you know, one common thread that unifies all these different use cases is your, most of the use cases are around getting insights from the data that's being collected, whether it's image data, whether it's raw numbers, whatever it is, and so you know, machine learning and analytics seem to form the core of any interesting application subset that you're looking at. And so then the question is, can you make it from an operating system point of view, can you make it very easy to build applications around machine learning, can you make it very easy to build applications around analytics? And the third thing is, you know, it's very, this is not about running virtual machines anymore, yeah, sure, inside at the very crux of the system you might be running virtual machines, but it's about a developer-centric world. So, the question is, can you make it such that the developers can just deploy code without worrying about whether the code runs in a virtual machine, in a container, in a combination thereof? Can you make it very easy for data to move across without the developer having to explicitly code develop? And so that's the common parts. >> I wonder, you know, what your thoughts are contextually when you go in there? So we actually had, at Wikibon we have a weekly research call, we were talking about serverless last week, and we actually saw, you know, for edge computing, serverless, really good, Amazon has their Greengrass, leverages Lambda to go in there because, sure VMs seem a little heavy for some of these applications. What should we look at kind of from that same point? >> I agree, I agree. It seems to be more serverless and maybe containers, because sometimes when you're trying to do serverless applications you need a bunch of infrastructure that then has to be packaged into containers. And so, between the two probably is where the compute part of edge computing or IT is going to be edge. >> Can you talk to us, you know, Nutanix, I think there's, obviously Nutanix and VMware, strong partnership for some things, which is, you know about three quarters of Nutanix customers are running VMware, but differences of opinion as to some other things that, you know, VSAN versus Nutanix, and Nutanix has AHV. I've heard you saying operating system a bunch of time, is that an extension of AHV, is it something else? VMware has plans as to how they're going to go from IoT, can you maybe compare, contrast what your vision, how that matches with your skillsets inside Nutanix versus, you know VMware who you know real well. >> Oh yeah, for sure. And so AHV, the distributed storage fabric, which Nutanix has, I think that is a great kind of, you know, substrate on top of which to now build a much more application-oriented edge computing kind of you know, stack, right. And so the edge computing stack is more about what other data services that you can provide, which are not data stores anymore, you know, it's things like structured data as a service, or unstructured data as a service, or streaming data as a service, and function as a service to your point of serverless computing or containers. And so I think this becomes, the Nutanix asset becomes a great substrate on top of which to build this much more application-oriented architecture. You know the VMware story I would imagine is kind of sort of the same, although VMware is I think remarkably leading with NSX, because you know, there's network, the extended network between the cloud and the edge is obviously a great problem to solve. I have my own biases, so I tend to lead with the application side of things, right, which is, you know, what does it, as I said, what does it take to make the next POSIX layer for machine learning or for analytics, and then the infrastructure base is obviously important, bit it is worry less, you know, I'm sure we are going to solve it. And so, in some sense the two stories are evolving in a very congruent manner. We'll see. I think the market is so big, and the use cases are so diverse, that for a change, we can potentially, if we kind of do it in a cooperative manner, we can probably evolve an interesting standard, interesting stack that is kind of sort of you know, stable. And so I think this could potentially be a story of cooperation as opposed to throwing stones at each other, but you know, time will tell. >> One of the things that VMware talked about in the keynote was security, and the nature of security being baked into things, and you mentioned that your focus is on applications, and certainly developers of applications, they don't really care anything about infrastructure at all. So this service consumption is something that they think is quite interesting. But you also mentioned how fast things are changing. Those three things at once, on the edge, how do you see security services developing so that they can be easily consumed by people, instead of it being this really difficult infrastructure problem? >> I wish I had just an easy one line answer, but I think I'll explain it, just the abstract of how I see this evolving through an example, right. Because if you think about iOS and Android, they have a very structured way of doing notification, and no app can do notifications by itself, it just has to get in. So I think, you know, probably it's time to solve security that way, right. You know, it's time to put some structure to how you can program the movement of data, the collection of data, the deployment of compute, of program onto a substrate, and if you tightly control that movement of data and the deployment of compute and so on, then there is a higher chance that you are going to be able to, from an operating system provider point of view, probably you are going to be able to deliver a much more secure system, because you've taken the bulk load of security programming away from the application developer, and made it an operating system core service, right? And of course that requires you to impose a framework on how you develop applications, which is, you know, the notification examples, right. I've imposed a framework on how you deliver notifications, and by doing so, I've kind of, you know, made a very seamless or very good experience. I think >> So it's taking a very opinionated approach to doing things? >> Satyam: I think so, yeah. >> Which, that does restrain choice a little bit, and one thing that various vendors say is, well we're all about customer choice. But sometimes there is too much choice. However on the flipside, IT so far has been making choices about how you should do security so far that haven't really worked out so well. So what do you think needs to change for this opinionated design to feel like the correct one that people will want to use, and not then feel constrained and, but I want to be able to choose to write my own encryption algorithms. >> I think if we can democratize the availability of data, so you know, the edge computing stacks are all about collecting as much data as possible, and then writing great applications on it. So if there is a security framework which doesn't impede the ability of different tenants, whether it's analysts, whether it's application developers, whether it's regular operators like the guy running the airport, if it doesn't impede their ability to interface with data, and if it doesn't impede their ability to deploy interesting compute on top of that data, then probably we have a way to go. So I think having a great security framework, but in way that still democratizes the availability of data, the movement of data, and the deployment of compute, if we can achieve that, I know I'm asking for a bit too much, (Justin and Stu laugh) but probably the source of my next five patents. I think it's a doable thing, it's a doable thing. >> Satyam, why does Nutanix have a right to be a player in IoT? You know, I look at it, you know these are going to be some pretty gnarly ecosystems. I look at, you know, we did some early work with GE when they were coming up with the idea for the industrial internet, you know there's some really big challenges, you know, you're not going to create those centers and all those devices, you know, some of the really big companies in the world are working on some, you know, the messaging protocols and things like that. Where realistically does Nutanix play and how do you fit into that really big and very immature ecosystem today? >> Great question. So various different takes on it. One is, I think it's a natural evolution of the company strategy. We started by saying, look, here's hyperconvergence 1.0 the ability to converge, compute, storage and networking into this box. Hyperconvergence 2.0, which is what we are executing right now as we speak, is this orchestration layer between public and private cloud. So we have converging public and private into one. So things like Calm, et cetera. And so we naturally think the next step of our strategy, hyperconvergence 3.0, if you will, is a convergence of the edge and the cloud. And so just from the point of view of how we evolve the enterprise cloud operating system, we think this is the natural place for it to grow into as a piece of technology. The other way to look at it is, it's time to build the next hypervisor, and the next hypervisor is the hypervisor for data as it moves around in all these clouds between ridiculously disparate places, right, from an oil rig all the way to some mainland data center or from an airport into the cloud and so on and so forth. And so the process of creating hypervisor for data is a distributed data systems problem, which we have been really good at, historically. And so we think we deserve a good cut at it. And the last thing I'll say is, if you think about how ideal world, you used the example of G, great respect for companies like that, but think about it, you know, those companies had to evolve all of that by themselves because they happened to be the sensor vendor, and so the G's of the world, the Honeywells of the world, they had to not only make the sensors, but now they also had to make some compute capability to make some sense out of all that data. But now that sensors are here, they are here to stay, they are all open to your point, you know, the protocols to get data out of it, MQTT, CoAP, this that, everything is open. So now it's genuinely the time to focus on the data and code aspect of the data that's coming in. You know, 40 times more data is going to hit the edge than the cloud will ever see in three years. And you know, that deserves a, kind of a swing from traditional data operating systems guys like Nutanix and some of the other guys you see on the show floor. >> You mentioned it's a distributed computing problem, which is obviously very hard to do. But there's a networking aspect, and that's one thing, particularly in cloud and other things, it tends to get overlooked quite a bit, I mean the poor network people feel left out. What implications do you think there's going to be for this level of data from all of these sensors and the amount of computing and decision-making that will happen at the edge, as distinct from in the cloud, talking between different devices in the edge, but then also providing the data back to cloud. What are some of the network impacts that that's going to have? >> Great question, there's so many of them but, something that is front and foremost in my mind, because I literally got out of a customer conversation on this, is you know, for example, there's this customer who does smart oil rigs, and they now need to move that data, some of it at least, to the cloud, but the network is really flaky. So there is obviously the problem of securing that network, and so on, but now there's also the problem of what does that mean to the application itself? Can you express the flakiness of the network as a policy that a programmer can program towards? You know, when flakiness of the network happens, literally from a programming and API point of view, the programmer can make a choice as to, you know, for all the streaming data that's coming in, the programmer can choose either to drop all of it, you know, when the network's flaky, or to you know, have a data moving system which can catch up, when the network becomes stable again. So all those things now become a, these are all infrastructure problems that now manifest themselves into how you program the system, and so we are having some conversations around that. And so yeah, you know, there is so many interesting possibilities here, I don't even know where to start. >> Whole new programming abstractions that we may not even be using today. >> Exactly. And there's obviously the hardware part of the problem. People are creating LoRa networks, they are creating NBD, this new type of LT network just for IoT data, and so there's a whole bunch happening in hardware as well. >> Satyam, pull this all together for us. What, you know, you said you're meeting with customers. What can they do today and what are some of the major kind of milestones that we should be looking for to say, oh, I'm hearing from Nutanix customers they're doing this, we've reached that point, you know, give us a little bit of a today and maybe a year or two out if you can. >> Great question. So I think the here and now thing customers can do as well, apart from the obvious thing of figuring out what other interesting ways that their business wants to monetize data coming out of their own operational infrastructure. Assuming they've figured that out, you know the important thing they can do now, is to start creating their dispersed cloud, right. Cloud of assets out in the field, you know, in factories and airports and oil rigs and aircraft carriers, that they can manage centrally, right, and that they can deploy applications into centrally. And so now they don't need a specialist on an oil rig to figure out how to operate infrastructure. So that's a here and now problem. They can set it up right now, centrally managed clouds, with central application orchestration on those clouds. The second part of the thing, is to create a new generation infrastructure, which is one level higher than virtual machines and data stores. It's infrastructure that gives their developers the ability to use data as a service, both on the edge and on the cloud, and to deploy compute as literally code, functional service, either on the edge or on the cloud, and so that gives them a homogeneous system, a much more developer-friendly system to deploy applications that can, you know, that can consume data at a volume, at a pace that we have never seen before. And the only way to make that consumption possible is if we can make the movement of data, the availability of data across this dispersed cloud very, very easy. So that's step two, is a data and code hypervisor, something that we haven't seen yet in the industry. >> Satyam Vaghani, pleasure to catch up with you as always. We look forward to watching the progress as all of this progresses. >> Thanks guys, I'm jazzed. >> From Justin Warren and myself, we'll be back with lots more coverage here, from VMworld 2017, you're watching The Cube. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering OpenStack Summit 2017. Brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation, Red Hat, and additional ecosystem support. >> And we're back. I'm Stu Miniman with my cohost, John Troyer, getting to the end of day two of three days of coverage here at the OpenStack Summit in Boston. Happy to welcome the program Sujal Das, who is the chief marketing and strategy officer at Netronome. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Alright, so we're getting through it, you know, really John and I have been digging into, you know, really where OpenStack is, talking to real people, deploying real clouds, where it fits into the multi cloud world. You know, networking is one of those things that took a little while to kind of bake out. Seems like every year we talk about Neutron and all the pieces that are there. But talk to us, Netronome, we know you guys make SmartNICs. You've got obviously some hardware involved when I hear a NIC, and you've got software. What's your involvement in OpenStack and what sort of things are you doing here at the show? >> Absolutely, thanks, Stu. So, we do SmartNIC platforms, so that includes both hardware and software that can be used in commercial office house servers. So with respect to OpenStack, I think the whole idea of STN with OpenStack is centered around the data plane that runs on the server, things such as the Open vSwitch, or Virtual Router, and they're evolving new data planes coming into the market. So we offload and accelerate the data plane in our SmartNICs, because the SmartNICs are programmable, we can evolve the feature set very quickly. So in fact, we have software releases that come out every six months that keep up to speed with OpenStack releases and Open vSwitches. So that's what we do in terms of providing a higher performance OpenStack environment so to say. >> Yeah, so I spent a good part of my career working on that part of the stack, if you will, and the balance is always like, right, what do you build into the hardware? Do I have accelerators? Is this the software that does, you know, usually in the short term hardware can take it care of it, but in the long term you follow the, you know, just development cycles, software tends to win in terms, so, you know. Where are we with where functionality is, what differentiates what you offer compared to others in the market? >> Absolutely. So we see a significant trend in terms of the role of a coprocessor to the x86 or evolving ARM-based servers, right, and the workloads are shifting rapidly. You know, with the need for higher performance, more efficiency in the server, you need coprocessors. So we make, essentially, coprocessors that accelerate networking. And that sits next to an x86 on a SmartNIC. The important differentiation we have is that we are able to pack a lot of cores on a very small form factor hardware device. As many as 120 cores that are optimized for networking. And by able to do that, we're able to deliver very high performance at the lowest cost and power. >> Can you speak to us, just, you know, what's the use case for that? You know, we talk about scale and performance. Who are your primary customers for this? Is this kind of broad spectrum, or, you know, certain industries or use cases that pop out. >> Sure, so we have three core market segments that we go after, right? One is the innovene construction market, where we see a lot of OpenStack use, for example. We also have the traditional cloud data center providers who are looking at accelerating even SmartNICs. And lastly the security market, that's kind of been our legacy market that we have grown up with. With security kind of moving away from appliances to more distributed security, those are our key three market segments that we go after. >> The irony is, in this world of cloud, hardware still matters, right? Not only does hardware, like, you're packing a huger number of cores into a NIC, so that hardware matters. But, one of the reasons that it matters now is because of the rise of this latest generation of solid-state storage, right? People are driving more and more IO. Do you see, what are the trends that you're seeing in terms of storage IO and IO in general in the data center? >> Absolutely. So I think the large data centers of the world, they showed the way in terms of how to do storage, especially with SSDs, what they call disaggregated storage, essentially being able to use the storage on each server and being able to aggregate those together into a pool of storage resources and its being called hyperconverged. I think companies like Nutanix have found a lot of success in that market. What I believe is going to happen in the next phase is hyperconvergence 2.0 where we're going to go beyond security, which essentially addressed TCO and being able to do more with less, but the next level would be hyperconvergence around security where you'd have distributed security in all servers and also telemetry. So basically your storage appliance is going away with hyperconvergence 1.0, but with the next generation of hyperconvergence we'd see the secured appliances and the monitoring appliances sort of going away and becoming all integrated in the server infrastructure to allow for better service levels and scalability. >> So what's the relationship between distributed security and then the need for more bandwidth at the back plane? >> Absolutely. So when you move security into the server, the processing requirements in the server goes up. And typically with all security processing, it's a lot of what's called flow processing or match-action processing. And those are typically not suitable for a general purpose server like the ARM or the x86, but that's where you need specialized coprocessors, kind of like the world of GPUs doing well in the artificial intelligence applications. I think the same example here. When you have security, telemetry, et cetera being done in each server, you need special purpose processing to do that at the lowest cost and power. >> Sujal, you mentioned that you've got solutioned into the public cloud. Are those the big hyperscale guys? Is it service providers? I'm curious if you could give a little color there. >> Yes, so these are both tier one and tier two service providers in the cloud market as well as the telco service providers, more in the NFV side. But we see a common theme here in terms of wanting to do security and things like telemetry. Telemetry is becoming a hot topic. Something called in-band telemetry that we are actually demonstrating at our booth and also speaking about with some our partners at the show, such as with Mirantis, Red Hat, and Juniper. Where doing all of these on each server is becoming a requirement. >> When I hear you talk, I think about here at OpenStack, we're talking about the hybrid or multi cloud world and especially something like security and telemetry I need to handle my data center, I need to handle the public cloud, and even when I start to get into that IoT edge environment, we know that the service area for attack just gets orders of magnitude larger, therefore we need security that can span across those. Are you touching all of those pieces, maybe give us a little bit of, dive into it. >> Absolutely, I think a great example is DDoS, right, distributed denial of service attacks. And today you know you have these kind of attacks happening from computers, right. Look at the environment where you have IoTs, right, you have tons and tons of small devices that can be hacked and could flood attacks into the data center. Look at the autonomous car or self-driving car phenomenon, where each car is equivalent to about 2,500 Internet users. So the number of users is going to scale so rapidly and the amount of attacks that could be proliferated from these kind of devices is going to be so high that people are looking at moving DDoS from the perimeter of the network to each server. And that's a great example that we're working with with a large service provider. >> I'm kind of curious how the systems take advantage of your technology. I can see it, some of it being transparent, like if you just want to jam more bits through the system, then that should be pretty transparent to the app and maybe even to the data plane and the virtual switches. But I'm guessing also there are probably some API or other software driven ways of doing, like to say, hey not only do I want you to jam more bits through there, but I want to do some packet inspection or I want to do some massaging or some QoS or I'm not sure what all these SmartNICs do. So is my model correct? Is that kind of the different ways of interacting with your technology? >> You're hitting a great point. A great question by the way, thank you. So the world has evolved from very custom ways of doing things, so proprietary ways of doing things, to more standard ways of doing things. And one thing that has kind of standardized so to say the data plane that does all of these functions that you mention, things like security or ACL roots or virtualization. Open vSwitch is a great example of a data plane that has kind of standardized how you do things. And there are a lot of new open source projects that are happening in the Linux Foundation, such as VPP for example. So each of these standardize the way you do it and then it becomes easier for vendors like us to implement a standard data plane and then work with the Linux kernel community in getting all of those things upstream, which we are working on. And then having the Red Hats of the world actually incorporate those into their distributions so that way the deployment model becomes much easier, right. And one of the topics of discussion with Red Hat that we presented today was exactly that, as to how do you make these kind of scales, scalability for security and telemetry, be more easily accessible to users through a Red Hat distribution, for example. >> Sujal, can you give us a little bit of just an overview of the sessions that Netronome has here at the show and what are the challenges that people are coming to that they're excited to meet with your company about? >> Absolutely, so we presented one session with Mirantis. Mirantis, as you know, is a huge OpenStack player. With Mirantis, we presented exactly the same, the problem statement that I was talking about. So when you try to do security with OpenStack, whether its stateless or stateful, your performance kind of tanks when you apply a lot of security policies, for example, on a per server basis that you can do with OpenStack. So when you use a SmartNIC, you essentially return a lot of the CPU cores to the revenue generating applications, right, so essentially operators are able to make more per server, make more money per server. That's a sense of what the value is, so that was the topic with Mirantis, who uses actually Open Contrail virtual router data plane in their solution. We also have presented with Juniper, which is also-- >> Stu: Speaking of Open Contrail. >> Yeah, so Juniper is another version of Contrail. So we're presenting a very similar product but that's with the commercial product from Juniper. And then we have yesterday presented with Red Hat. And Red Hat is based on Red Hat's OpenStack and their Open vSwitch based products where of course we are upstreaming a lot of these code bits that I talked about. But the value proposition is uniform across all of these vendors, which is when you do storage, sorry, security and telemetry and virtualization et cetera in a distributed way across all of your servers and get it for all of your appliances, you get better scale. But to achieve the efficiencies in the server, you need a SmartNIC such as ours. >> I'm curious, is the technology usually applied then at the per server level, is there a rack scale component too that needs to be there? >> It's on a per server basis, so it's the use cases like any other traditional NIC that you would use. So it looks and feels like any other NIC except that there is more processing cores in the hardware and there's more software involved. But again all of the software gets tightly integrated into the OS vendor's operating system and then the OpenStack environment. >> Got you. Well I guess you can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much bandwidth. >> That's right, yeah. >> Sujal, share with our audience any interesting conversation you had or other takeaways you want people to have from the OpenStack Summit. >> Absolutely, so without naming specific customer names, we had one large data center service provider in Europe come in and their big pain point was latency. Latency going form the VM on one server to another server. And that's a huge pain point and their request was to be able to reduce that by 10x at least. And we're able to do that, so that's one use case that we have seen. The other is again relates to telemetry, you know, how... This is a telco service provider, so as they go into 5G and they have to service many different applications such as what they call network slices. One slice servicing the autonomous car applications. Another slice managing the video distribution, let's say, with something like Netflix, video streaming. Another one servicing the cellphone, something like a phone like this where the data requirements are not as high as some TV sitting in your home. So they need different kinds of SLA for each of these services. How do they slice and dice the network and how are they able to actually assess the rogue VM so to say that might cause performance to go down and affect SLAs, telemetry, or what is called in-band telemetry is a huge requirement for those applications. So I'm giving you like two, one is a data center operator. You know an infrastructure as a service, just want lower latency. And the other one is interest in telemetry. >> So, Sujal, final question I have for you. Look forward a little bit for us. You've got your strategy hat on. Netronome, OpenStack in general, what do you expect to see as we look throughout the year maybe if we're, you know, sitting down with you in Vancouver a year from now, what would you hope that we as an industry and as a company have accomplished? >> Absolutely, I think you know you'd see a lot of these products so to say that enable seamless integration of SmartNICs become available on a broad basis. I think that's one thing I would see happening in the next one year. The other big event is the whole notion of hyperconvergence that I talked about, right. I would see the notion of hyperconvergence move away from one of just storage focus to security and telemetry with OpenStack kind of addressing that from a cloud orchestration perspective. And also with each of those requirements, software defined networking which is being able to evolve your networking data plane rapidly in the run. These are all going to become mainstream. >> Sujal Das, pleasure catching up with you. John and I will be back to do the wrap-up for day two. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (techno beat)