okay we're back at vmworld twenty twelve i'm john fairy with SiliconANGLE calm this is the cube this is our flagship telecast we go out to the events extract a signal from the noise and share that with you i'm joe and stu miniman my co-host with this segment and martine casado the co-founder of nicera you guys are ranking number one on our trending tool that we built under networking because it moved up to the top of the list because of vmworld company had spent a billion dollars for you guys jaishree from Arista called you guys the Instagram of networking kind of tongue-in-cheek on the huge buyout but hey congratulations great wired story today SR with you guys we've done about the talent you have and you brought over the vmworld and you're the top story here so congratulations thank you welcome to the cube thank you so take us through the logic and your motion around past year okay up until the buyout what a roller coaster so just share with us personally from Europe as an entrepreneur what was it like what highlights of what happened well I guess I've been very focused on changing networking right so for me it's been largely a technical ride and since we started the company five years ago we've been focusing on developing core technology and we did that for the first three years and then the last year to us was primarily about execution and customer engagement and so you know we've spent a lot of time proving the technology getting into production doing the support and fixing out that model and so it turned out is a very natural transition point when the acquisition happened because we had gotten traction we had starting to realize how difficult it is to address a market as large as this within a small start-up and so it was very welcome to come join a much larger company where we can kind of provide this as a much box so you guys have some big backers obviously you know they're all it's all well documented in the valley but every entrepreneur has that moments like wait a minute is this what I wanted is this tea but the dollars was so good and vmware's asti growing company what clicked for you what made you go is this the right thing take us through that decision you know absolutely so I mean like to me business guides behavior and at the end of the day the goal is is how do you change networking and have a very very firm belief that the access layer to that network is moving from within the network towards the edge and so we wanted to develop technologies that can use this position to re-implement networking and software and so once you get the core technology done once you prove it out with large customers once you prove out the market the question is is kind of what is the best way to have the biggest impact and I think in some respects you can look at vmware is one of the largest networking companies in the in the world just based on port count right the number of virtual ports that they control is as large as any large networking vendor so this is the opportunity of a lifetime to change in industry so like I've been doing this now you know sdn since those doing my PhD at stanford for so going on 10 years now and this is the the opportunity of a lifetime to actually have broad broad like planet scale impact well congratulations certainly you disrupted the market not only in the validation of the acquisition but as you guys were moving out and talking about some of the deployments you guys were doing it just came out of left field for most people but in the inside baseball sure people knew it was going on in terms of like how you guys are disrupting so so congratulations thank you here I want to talk about is also the messaging here at vmworld very solid around suffered to find datacenter sure and that really kind of brings you into a whole nother beyond networking so you know we've been covering converged infrastructure that's looking a look upon you know around house storage servers and networking so its bigger now than just networking right so now you're taking it to a whole nother leg of the journey so connect the dots out there for the folks between software virtualization and software-defined networking to this to the data center help them understand what is going to happen under that next leg of the journey yeah of course so we're all familiar with compute virtualization right I mean this is how vmware initially changed the world where the time it takes to provision a workload when from weeks to literally minutes like two minutes however I t isn't about single workloads ideas about applications and all the network services that those applications require for example firewalling or security or or monitoring debugging and so even though we reduce the time it took to provisional workload from weeks two minutes you still took days to do everything else that was required so if we take a broad scope if we take a broad look at a thai tea we still realize it still takes days to provision new applications and to provision new workloads and so the only way to get past this the next step that we want to take is to virtualize every aspect of infrastructure and so there's three of those there's there's compute which is virtualized their storage which we're making good progress on and there's network and network really is a pivot piece right it's the one piece that touches everything right it is between the compute in the storage it is between the different types of compute and so if you look at large data centers even cloud data centers the long pole in the tent and provisioning is the network so we must must virtualize that so the goal is the software-defined data center that's like everything's in software everything's totally dynamic you create it on demand you can move it its liquid it's like water it'll go anywhere but in order for this dream to be realized we've got to get the network out of the way and that's what the sierra does we've been talking about going to go and Wikibon we've just kicked up a whole kind of research section on what we're calling data infrastructure and really highlighting this modern era right and we kind of use a lot of sports analogies but you know a modern era meaning the new way not the old way right so you're a classic example of disruption in a new way so talk about the enablement that you see happening from a from a marker play standpoint just you know open your mind and share the crowds and vision around what you will enable with this because networking is has to be dynamic it has that makes total sense you guys have done it what's going to happen next in your mind's eye in terms of what the possibilities are yeah yeah absolutely so I think ultimately this is where we want to get to we want to build a platform that will provide that will recreate you know every Network Service and functionality in a virtualized manner in software from the edge and that means that there can be any service available anywhere over any type of hardware at any scale that's needed and it can be done all at virtualization timeframe so this is like you do an API call you get a virtual network abstraction you add a firewall to it you you configure ackles to it and so all of network configuration all of network services all of network operations become soft state it becomes like a VM image and it's available anywhere that you want it to and so that is the first step so I believe these transformations and systems and this happened many times in the past happen in two steps the first one is you virtualize and when you virtualize you offer the same thing but in a more flexible manner like when you virtualize compute you offered an x86 cpu but you did it in software after you virtualize you can actually change the operational paradigm like when you when they created compute virtualization they didn't immediately get to migration or snapshot or rewind all these other kind of operational benefits these came later so the first step is any networking anywhere you want at any scale automatically and then the second step is like drastically changing the operational paradigm so you can do things like better security so you can rewind configuration state I mean things that we can't even think about today because now we have this ultimate point of indirection that's virtualized this virtualized layer and who's the candidate for these developers just admins net admins all the above is it going to be software programmatic I mean how does that it takes DevOps right to a level of functionality that is just mind-boggling so yeah who's the new personnel yeah it was like who's life does this impact think what happens called a CI easy out there well I mean it's a good question whose life does this impact I mean I mean immediately anybody that's building out a data center like a cloud architect is going to have this this primitive that that they can use to architect better system just like you gave them a virtual machine they use that as a primitive for building better data centers now we're giving them virtual networks as a primitive build virtual data centers so the cloud architects job gets easier application developers don't have to worry about the basics of you know the way networks work our network configuration operations will have a lot more flexibility and the virtual layer of where they can move things around as far as the physical networking layer the problem actually becomes quite a bit simpler but you still have to focus the on the problem of building a physical network so for example when server virtualization came around you didn't like reduce the need for servers you needed more servers and just like the same thing will happen with with network virtualization which is you'll still need physical networks and they're going to probably have to be better physical networks but the problem now is more of how do you build a physical network with high capacity that can support any workload and less about doing all the operational stuff you do today how does an impact we just had chris hoffman from juniper who's now a worker he's been a big security buff a great guest for us but we just were just riffing on the security problems right so give us your perspective on how this new canvas of software-defined virtualization is gonna impact security paradise yeah so I mean I think there are a couple of answers i actually think ultimately the security model is improved honestly so yeah the original work was done with the intelligence community actually the the original funding for nasira came from the intelligence community my background I used to work for the intelligence agencies and when you move everything to software we already have a fundamental security paradigm which is crust consolidation in the hypervisor right and with network virtualization you follow the same paradigm which is you you entrust the hypervisor to enforce things like isolation enforce the security but now you've got a strongly authenticated endpoint there you're not guessing about things but but it requires the security community to evolve with the virtualization community so I think that there's much more of a socialization hurdle more of a social hurdle than a technical hurdle like all of the technology is there to do good security in the cloud I think getting the traditional vendors to evolve their tools into of all they're thinking it's much more difficult so I've got one more thing to add I actually think there's an opportunity to do security in entirely new ways ones that again can transform the industry so for example with virtualization you've got deep semantics into the workloads I mean you're in the hypervisor you can look inside the VMS you know who's using them know what applications they're using guy you could even know what the documents are being sent or or read or passed around and because you have this information at the edge if you virtualize the network as well you can pass this context into the network so now instead of like looking at packets and kind of trying to guess what application there is by looking at traffic you can actually get past like the ground truth information from the hypervisor so I think we have the potential so it's like drastically improved security that's Martine if you look at the networking industry there's lots of companies that have tried to change it in the past when you talk about innovation standards have a lot of times slow things down yep you know there's the legacy thought set you know great respect for ccie s but you know they have their install base in their way of doing things so you know there's there's so many pieces that make up networking and even the first time I saw your solution there's multiple standards and open you know groups working on this so you know how do you guys tease through and work through all of these issues yeah so clearly a very complex and multifarious question so I'm going to I'm going to attack one piece of it and we can go from there one of the primary benefits of actual virtualization like actual virtualization is that what you end up with should look like what you started with right so like if you're fundamentally changing an operational paradigm you're probably not doing virtualization so for example in a network virtualization solution the physical network is still a physical Network and it needs to be managed like a physical network with physical networking tools and in order to be fully virtualized the virtual abstraction I give you if I give you a virtual network that should also look like the networks that you've kind of grown to love as a child right they should have all the counters all the debugging the ability to interpose services right and so from from that standpoint you're still preserving the interfaces that people are used to it says there's more of them so like for example when I talk to a network operator today they're like oh this is confusing I've got virtualization I say actually instead of having one network that's really complicated you've got em and simple networks now you've got a very simple physical Network and if you got any virtual networks and they all all of the same interfaces that you use to manage it however there's one catch and that one catch is is there's an additional bit of information which is how do you map this virtual world to the physical world which happened in compute virtualization as well so like everybody understood a virtual machine everybody understood the physical machine but people weren't entirely sure how you debug the mapping between the two and that's incumbent as US is software providers and solution providers to provide that to provide the ability to to map from this kind of you know like platonic virtual reality down to this kind of gritty physical reality okay so from a standard standpoint you I mean you guys helped invent OpenFlow you guys created the open V switch you're heavily involved in OpenStack Andy there's been a lot of buzz since the acquisition about you know the involvement in OpenStack and yeah yeah kind of God how many people today everything in what's your thoughts on it yeah so let me also teach a tease apart you know two things before I get to that one so in networking standards are really important and like in the way standards work he's got a bunch of people that kind of go and talk about things and they design things they agree on them that's actually quite different than open source right and like their different processes different communities different rules of engagement so let me focus on the open source first then we'll go back to the standards thank you because I perfect just to give you a little bit foreshadowing like I hope the world goes open source not open Stan so can we do to it so but we'll get there right so as far as open source yes so I wrote the first version of open flow I mean it came out of my thesis right the first three employees of nicera created the first craft of open flow and it was it was just something that we wanted to use to control switches right i mean we wrote the first reference implementation the first open flow controller you know we seeded the stanford stuff of course i'm a consulting a faculty at stanford so i was involved there we also are the primary developers behind open V switch it's in the linux kernel you know we've probably put you know many millions of dollars in developing that it's used by competitors and partners alike that's used in many clouds and then we've heavily participated in an OpenStack in particular you know where the Delete on quantum which is the networking portion of OpenStack we've done a lot of development bear so as far as the merger is concerned the acquisitions concerned none of that will change we're fully committed to open V switch to OpenStack will continue and even escalate our contribution there quick quick note on OpenStack i was told that something for folks have actually entered some code into the OpenStack of storage just kind of curious about that so and we touched many areas of OpenStack and again the the networking piece touches everything and you know we do a lot of the development on quantum and we run actually nasira internally randa an openstack cloud for internal dev cloud and we've got thousands of VMs on it that we use it and so we're heavily we're like heavy users and contributors to both OpenStack and linux I mean if you look in Linux we've actually fixed a lot of the veal and issues in the kernel right so like and we're very very involved in open source but we're involved as users right like we don't sell you know linux we don't sell OpenStack but we do believe for to have a vibrant ecosystem is nice to have these tools out there and as we use the tools we fix them and we contribute it back okay what about multi hypervisor environments because that was one of the things that really impressed me about like the open D switch is it really doesn able kind of that that multi hypervisor even more than kind of heterogeneous switches it's the multi hypervisor piece yeah that's right so if you kind of zoom away like I think we've had like a fairly myopic focus in the industry on servers over the last 10 years and it's like if you zoom away from the server to a data center you end up in this realm of heterogeneous technologies multiple cloud management systems multiple hypervisors and so when we came up with our our initial strategy of building a network virtualization layer we knew networks touch everything we must support all of those technologies and so it was like a fundamental tenant of the technology that we might support all hypervisors and physical hardware switches as well because there are workloads that are not july's and so you know open V switch itself which is the V switch that we use it's in sports in kvm bare metal linux it's been ported to bsd it's been ported to other operating systems it's been ported to top-of-rack hardware switches so we can use all of them to do to do network virtualization so mark can I want to ask you about the sufferer define partnering strategy from a technical perspective obviously we're really big believers in open source as well they love that we'd love to think it's great and it's now a business model in the industry so it's great to see all that work as vmware now with you guys in the family there go to other unifying clouds so they took a multiple clouds at this point so you know what would you bring to the table from hyper Microsoft hyper-v environment and other big vendors HP Dell yeah Microsoft what can you bring to the table in working with those guys or are you outgoing are you talking to them and and if you were having those conversations what does what would those conversations be well so the product itself that we're developing and we we do bring to market now we will continue is a network virtualization platform that's multi hypervisor right and so the goal is to have something that you can deploy into any cloud environment regardless of what CMS are running and regardless of what of what hypervisors they're using now we have many many partners whether their system integrators with the solution partners and so you know we don't have any religion on on the type of technologies in play we want to provide the best virtual networking solution in the industry and that's really our primary our primary focus let me ask you about it Trent some trends in the in the tech community in in academia and the research areas obviously at this example just randomly low-level virtual machines that kind of those kinds of shifts are happening could you talk about just what you're tracking right now that your get your eye on in terms of what's going on at some of the top university obviously low-level virtual machines at the University of Illinois and in Chicago so what other areas can you share with us that you monitoring listen this is a great question to ask a nap academic and I'm going to totally disappoint you in that I you know I i I'm on a lot of pcs and I follow a lot of research I mean you know I submit papers you know all the time and like I've mostly lost faith in the academic process on the research side lately which i haven't relevant so in terms of trends no but that's exactly the point I think that there's enough vision to last for a century and like now it's time to do work and if it were up to me we would all be taking these ideas that we've come up with over the last 10 years there's very few new ones in my opinion and we'd be executing like crazy and so well again while i'm on the pcs and while i do review the papers i do submit the papers i think we should all focus on like changing infrastructure into software executing like hell and changing the world that way and so and I don't have a really bad attitude about this especially as abuse or but it's a bad attitude okay we say it we hit it all hang out so final question for me and if she wants to get one more in and don't you can't say the acquisition as the answer what is the biggest surprise that that that you fell out of your chair over the past 24 months around you in the industry in your entrepreneurial venture here now at VMware and it could be like a surprise and this trend didn't happen that happened that you know these are the things that happened it could be good or bad what's the biggest surprise that caught you off guard this year that's 24 months yeah it's a good question I think the one that actually been a little the most shocking is how how difficult is being just very honest is how difficult to manage perception in the industry and if you look at kind of social media and you look at a lot of the buzz in the rags so much of it is generated by non disinterested parties so invested parties and so I think it's possible to be a perfectly good citizen and then get paint in a very negative light or be a very negative citizen and be painted in a very good light and it's been counterintuitive to me how you manage this effectively like almost a dynamic feedback system so for example this year has been an enormous contributor to open source I think we've contributed more than anybody in our space by you know factor of 10 or more we contributed most of the core technologies and often people like well but it's a proprietary solution on the other hand there sometimes we're like okay this is a closer source product people like we should use this here because it's the open solution and so well I think that definitely felt on both sides you know being both open source and close or sometimes it's worked for us and for the wrong reasons sometimes it's not worked for us for the right reasons and so that dynamic has been the least intuitive to me so I'm not sure I fell off my chair but definitely it's been the most surprising yeah and you know and that's what we're trying to solve a SiliconANGLE as we say we're agile media and ultimately with social media the whole media business is changing so we know one of the things that we care about here so that's why we have the qubits we just this is raw data we want to share be provocative be edgy is too it's a data-driven world and we believe the media business is absolutely screwed up beyond all recognition so so because of just lack of fact-checking just old techniques aren't working and but it's the same game right so it's just so things circulate things get branded and we've seen a time and time again I've seen great people show up as like almost painted as criminals yeah so it's just a sad state of reporting and media so would agree with you there okay John so if I if I can have that one last question your machine you know the networking industries is a big community and when you talk about kind of the jobs that people are doing today what's your recommendation to folks out there in the networking industry what should what should they start to you know we'd or you know start playing with to kind of understand where things are going down the line honestly I don't want to say a cliche but I actually really believe this one I think I think networking networks are evolving to become proper systems and proper systems in an end-to-end manner meaning that goes a very well-defined hardware a software layer they all work together and I think the data center is is becoming a large computer and I think the most important thing is to view the industry and that lens meaning you know I would get as much information as I could on how guys like Google or Amazon or Facebook build their data centers and you realize that if you do a cross-section of these things like the Capital savings the operational savings the flexibility of the software like that's changing the world and if it's not changing the world directly by changing infrastructure it's changing the world to the surfaces they deliver and understanding that model in your bones I think is the beacon going forward so if it were me the first thing I do is I really understand why they make those decisions what the benefits are and I would use that to guide my learning going forward okay Martinez out of this co-founder of this year now at do you have a title at VMware yet or do you I mean did i do I don't know my head honcho of the Sierra am where Thanks coming inside the cube really preciate it we right back with our next guest we're going to wrap up try to wrap up the day as they start to bon jovi soundcheck here at V emerald 2012 this is SiliconANGLE calm and Wikibon doors continues coverage at vmworld great thank you