>> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. >> All right, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. This is Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Day 4 of coverage MWC 23. We've been talking all week about the disaggregation of the telco networks, how telcos need to increase revenue how they're not going to let the over the top providers do it again. They want to charge Netflix, right? And Netflix is punching back. There maybe are better ways to do revenue acceleration. We're going to talk to that topic with Dave Trigg who's the Global Vice President of Telecom systems business at Dell Technologies. And Ken Burns, who's a global telecom partner, sales lead. Guys, good to see you. >> Good to see you. Great to be here. >> Dave, you heard my, you're welcome. You heard my intro. It's got to be better ways to, for the telcos to make money. How can they accelerate revenue beyond taxing Netflix? >> Yeah, well, well first of all, sort of the promise of 5G, and a lot of people talk about 5G as the enterprise G. Right? So the promise of 5G is to really help drive revenue enterprise use cases. And so, it's sort of the promise of the next generation of technology, but it's not easy to figure out how we monetize that. And so we think Dell has a pretty significant role to play. It's a CEO conversation for every telco and how they accelerate. And so it's an area we're investing heavily into three different areas for telcos. One is the IT space. Dell's done that forever. 90% of the companies leaning in on that. The other places network, network's more about cost takeout. And the third area where we're investing in is working with what we call their line of businesses, but it's really their business units, right? How can we sit down with them and really understand what services do they take to market? Where do they go? So, we're making significant investments. So one way they can do it is working with Dell and and we're making big investments 'cause in most Geos we have a fairly significant sales force. We've brought in an industry leader to help us put it together. And we're getting very focused on this space and, you know, looking forward to talking more about it. >> So Ken, you know, the space inside and out, we just had at AT&T on... >> Dave Trigg: Yep. >> And they were saying we have to be hypersensitive because of our platinum brand to the use of personal information. >> Ken: Yeah. >> So we're not going to go there yet. We're not going to go directly monetize, but yet I'm thinking well, Netflix knows what I'm watching and they're making recommendations and they're, and and that's how they make money. And so the, the telcos are, are shy about doing that for right reasons, but they want to make better offers. They want to put, put forth better bundles. You know, they don't, they don't want to spend all their time trying to figure that out and not being able to change when they need to change. So, so what is the answer? If they're not going to go toward that direct monetization of data? >> Ken: Yeah. >> How do they get there? >> So I, I joined Dell in- at the end of June and brought on, as David said, to, to build and lead this what we call the line of business strategy, right? And ultimately what it is is tying together Dell technology solutions and the best of breed of what the telecoms bring to bear to solve the business outcomes of our joint customers. And there's a few jewels inside of Dell. One of it is that we have 35,000 sellers out there all touching enterprise business customers. And we have a really good understanding of what those customer needs are and you know what their outcomes needs to be. The other jewel is we have a really good understanding of how to solve those business outcomes. Dell is an open company. We work with thousands of integrators, and we have a really good insight in terms of how to solve those business outcomes, right? And so in my conversations with the telecom companies when you talk about, you know combining the best assets of Dell with their capabilities and we're all talking to the same customers, right? And if we're giving them the same story on these solutions solving business outcomes it's a beautiful thing. It's a time to market. >> What's an example of a, of a, of a situation where you'll partner with telcos that's going to drive revenue for, for both of you and value for the customer? >> Yeah, great question. So we've been laser focused on four key areas, cyber, well, let me start off with connected laptops, cyber, private mobility, and edge. Right? Now, the last two are a little bit squishy, but I'll I'll get to that in a bit, right? Because ultimately I feel like with this 5G market, we could actually make the market. And the way that we've been positioning this is almost, almost on a journey for IOT. When we talk about laptops, right? Dell is the, is the number one company in the world to sell business laptops. Well, if we start selling connected laptops the telcos are starting to say, well, you know what? If all of those laptops get connected to my network, that's a ton of 5G activations, right? We have the used cases on why having a connected workforce makes sense, right? So we're sharing that with the telcos to not simply sell a laptop, but to sell the company on why it makes sense to have that connected workforce. >> Dave Vellante: Why does it make sense? It could change the end customer. >> Ken: Yeah. So, you know, I'm probably not the best to answer that one right? But, but ultimately, you know Dell is selling millions and millions of laptops out there. And, and again, the Verizon's, the AT&T's, the T-mobile's, they're seeing the opportunity that, you know, connecting those laptops, give those the 5G activations right? But Dave, you know, the way that we've been positioning this is it's not simply a laptop could be really a Trojan horse into this IOT journey. Because ultimately, if you sell a thousand laptops to an enterprise company and you're connecting a thousand of their employees, you're connecting people, right? And we can give the analytics around that, what they're using it for, you know, making sure that the security, the bios, all of that is up to date. So now that you're connecting their people you could open up the conversation to why don't we we connect your place and, you know, allowing the telecom companies to come in and educate customers and the Dell sales force on why a private 5G mobility network makes sense to connecting places. That's a great opportunity. When you connect the place, the next part of that journey is connecting things in that place. Robotics, sensors, et cetera, right? And, and so really, so we're on the journey of people, places, things. >> So they got the cyber angle angle in there, Dave. That, that's clear benefit. If you, you know, if you got all these bespoke laptops and they're all at different levels you're going to get, you know, you're going to get hacked anyway. >> Ken: That's right. >> You're going to get hacked worse. >> Yeah. I'm curious, as you go to market, do you see significant differences? You don't have to name any names, but I imagine that there are behemoths that could be laggards because essentially they feel like they're the toll booth and all they have to do is collect, keep collecting the tolls. Whereas some of the smaller, more nimble, more agile entities that you might deal with might be more receptive to this message. That seems to be the sort of way the circle of life are. Are you seeing that? Are you seeing the big ones? Are you seeing the, you know, the aircraft carriers realizing that we got to turn into the wind guys and if we don't start turning into the wind now we're going to be in trouble. >> So this conference has been absolutely fantastic allowing us to speak with, you know, probably 30 plus telecom operators around this strategy, right? And all of the big guys, they've invested hundreds of billions of dollars in their 5G network and they haven't really seen the ROI. So when we're coming into them with a story about how Dell can help monetize their 5G network I got to tell you they're pretty excited >> Dave Nicholson: So they're receptive? >> Oh my God. They are very receptive >> So that's the big question, right? I mean is, who's, is anybody ever going to make any money off of 5G? And Ken, you were saying that private mobility and edge are a little fuzzy but I think from a strategy standpoint I mean that is a potential gold mine. >> Yeah, but it, for, for lot of the telcos and most telcos it's a pretty significant shift in mentality, right? Cause they are used to selling sim cards to some degree and how many sim cards are they selling and how many, what other used cases? And really to get to the point where they understand the use case, 'cause to get into the enterprise to really get into what can they do to help power a enterprise business more wholly. They've got to understand the use case. They got to understand the more complete solution. You know, Dell's been doing that for years. And that's where we can bring our Salesforce, our capabilities, our understanding of the customer. 'cause even your original question around AT&T and trying to understand the data, that's just really a how do you get better understanding of your customer, right? >> Right. Absolutely. >> And, and combined we're better together 'cause we bring a more complete picture of understanding our customers and then how can we help them understand what the edge is. Cause nobody's ever bought an Edge, right? They're buying an Edge to get a business outcome. You know, back in the day, nobody ever bought a data lake, right? Like, you know, they're buying an outcome. They want to use, use that data lake or they want to use the edge to deliver something. They want to use 5G. And 5G has very real capabilities. It's got intrinsic security, which, you know a lot of the wifi doesn't. It's got guaranteed on time, you know, for areas where you can't lose connectivity: autonomous vehicles, et cetera. So it's got very real capabilities that helps deliver that outcome. But you got to be able to translate that into the en- enterprise language to help them solve a problem. And that's where we think we need the help of the telcos. I think the telcos we can help them as well and, and really go drive that outcome. >> So Dell's bringing its go to market expertise and its technology. The telcos obviously have the the connectivity piece and what they do. There's no overlap in terms of the... >> Yeah. >> The, the equipment and the software that you're selling. I mean, they're going to, they're going to take your equipment and create new networks. Beautiful. And, and it's interesting you, like, you think about how Dell has transformed prior to EMC, Dell was, you know, PC maker with a subpar enterprise business, right? Kind of a wannabe enterprise business. Sorry Dell, it's the truth. And then EMC was largely, you know, a company sold storage boxes, but you owned VMware and then brought those two together. Now all of a sudden you had Dell powerhouse leader and Michael Dell, you had VMware incredibly strategic and important and it got EMC with amazing go to market. All of a sudden this Dell, Dell technologies became incredibly attractive to CIOs, C-level executives, board level. And you've come out of that transition VMware's now a separate company, right? And now, but now you have these relationships and you got the shops to be able to go into these edge locations at companies And actually go partner with the telcos. And you got a very compelling value proposition. >> Well, it's been interesting as in, in this show, again most telcos think of Dell as a server provider, you know? Important, but not overly strategic in their journey. But as we've started to invest in this business we've started to invest in things like automation. We've brought together things in our Infra Blocks and then we help them develop revenue. We're not only helping 'em take costs out of their network we're not helping 'em take risk out of deploying that network. We're helping them accelerate the deployment of that network. And then we're helping 'em drive revenue. We are having, you know, they're starting to see us in a new light. Not done yet, but, you know, you can start to see, one, how they're looking at Dell and two, and then how we can go to market. And you know, a big part of that is helping 'em drive and generate revenue. >> Yeah. Well, as, as a, as a former EMC person myself, >> Yeah? >> I will assert that that strategic DNA was injected into Dell by the acquisition of, of EMC. And I'm sticking... >> I won't say that. Okay I'll believe you on that. >> I'm sticking with the story. And it makes sense when you think about moving up market, that's the natural thing. What's, what's what's nearly impossible is to say, we sell semi-trucks but we want to get into the personal pickup truck market. That's that, that doesn't work. Going the other way works. >> Dave Trigg: Yeah. >> Now, now back to the conversation that you had with, with, with AT&T. I'm not buying this whole, no offense to AT&T, but I'm not buying this whole story that, you know, oh we're concerned about our branded customer data. That sounds like someone who's a little bit too comfortable with their existing revenue stream. If I'm out there, I want to be out partnering with folks who are truly aggressive about, about coming up with the next cool thing. You guys are talking about being connected in a laptop. Someone would say, well I got wifi. No, no, no. I'm thinking I want to sim in my laptop cause I don't want to screw around with wifi. Okay, fine. If I know I'm going to be somewhere with excellent wifi connectivity, great. But most of the time it's not excellent. >> That's right. >> So the idea that I could maybe hit F2 and have it switch over to my sim and know that anywhere that I've got coverage, I have high speed connections. Just the convenience of that. >> Ken: Absolutely. >> I'd pay extra for that as an end user consumer. >> Absolutely. >> And I pay for the service. >> Like I tell you, if it interests AT&T I think it's more not, they ask, they're comfortable. They don't know how to monetize that data. Now, of course, AT&T has a media >> Dave Nicholson: Business necessity is the mother of invention. If they don't see the necessity then they're not going to think about it. >> It's a mentality shift. Yes, but, but when you start talking about private mobility and edge, there's there's no concern about personal information there. You're going in with basically a business transformation. Hey, your, your business is, is not, not digital. It's not automated. Now we're going to automate that and digitize that. It's like the, the Dell booth with the beer guys. >> Right. >> You saw that, right? >> I mean that's, I mean that's a simple application. Yeah, a perfect example of how you network and use this technology. >> I mean, how many non-digital businesses are that that need to go digital? >> Dave Nicholson: Like, hundred percent of them. >> Everyone. >> Dave Nicholson: Pretty much. >> Yeah. And this, and this jewel that we have inside of Dell our global industries group, right, where we're investing really heavily in terms of what is the manufacturing industry looking for retail, finance, et cetera. So we have a CTO that came in, that it would be the CTO of manufacturing that gives us a really good opportunity to go to at AT&T or to Verizon or any telco out there, right? To, to say, these are the outcomes. There's Dell technology already in place. How do we connect it to your network? How do we leverage your assets, your manager professional services to provide a richer experience? So it's, there's, you said before Dave, there's really no overlap between Dell and, and our telecom partners. >> You guys making some serious investments here. I mean I, I've been, I was been critical over the years of, hey, you can't just take an X86 block, put a name on it that says edge something and throw it over the fence because that's what you were doing. >> Dave Trigg: And we would agree. >> Yeah. Right. But, of course, but that's all you had at the time. And so you put some... >> We may not have agreed then, but we would agree. >> You bought, brought some people in, you know, like Ken, who really know the business. You brought people into the technical side and you can really see it happening. It's not going to happen overnight. You know, I mean, you know if I were an investor in Dell, I'd be like, okay when are you going to start making money at this business? I'd be like, be patient. You know, it's going to take some time but look at the TAM. >> Yep. >> You know, you guys do a good, good TAM. Tennis is a pro at this stuff. >> We've been at, we've been at this two, three years and we're just now coming with some real material products. You've seen our server line really start to get more purpose-built, really start to get in there as we've started to put out some software that allows for quicker automation, quicker deployments. We have some telcos that are using it to deploy at 10,000 locations. They're literally turning up thousands of locations a week. And so yeah, we're starting to put out some real capability. Got a long way to go. A lot of exciting things on the roadmap. But to your point, it doesn't, you know the ship doesn't turn overnight, you know. >> It could be a really meaningful portion of Dell's business. I'm, I'm excited for the day that Tom Sweet starts reporting on it. Here's our telco business. Yeah. The telco business. But that's not going to happen overnight. But you know, Dell's pretty good at things like ROI. And so you guys do a lot of planning a lot of TAM analysis, a lot of technical analysis, bringing the ecosystem together. That's what this business needs. I, I just don't, it's, it feels unstoppable. You know, you're at this show everybody recognizes the need to open up. Some telcos are moving faster than others. The ones that move faster are going to disrupt. They're going to probably make some mistakes, you know but they're going to get there first. >> Well we've, we've seen the disruptors are making some mistakes and are kind of re- they're already at the phase where they're reevaluating, you know, their approach. Which is great. You know, you, you learn and adjust. You know, you run into a wall, you, you make a turn. And the interesting thing, one of the biggest learnings I've taken out of the show is talking to a bunch of the telcos that are a little bit more of the laggards. They're like, Nope, we, we don't believe in open. We don't think we can do it. We don't have the skillset. They're maybe in a geo that it's hard to find the skillset. As they've been talking to us, and we've been talking about, there's almost a glimmer of hope. They're not convinced yet, but they're like, well wait, maybe we can do this. Maybe open, you know, does give us choice. Maybe it can help us accelerate revenue. So it's been interesting to see a little bit of the, just a little bit, but a little bit of that shift. >> We all remember at 2010, 2011, you talked to banks and financial services companies about, the heck, the Cloud is happening, the Cloud's going to take over the world. We're never going to go into the Cloud. Now they're the biggest, you know Capital One's launching Cloud businesses, Western Union, I mean, they're all in the cloud, right? I mean, it's the same thing's going to happen here. Might, it might take a different pattern. Maybe it takes a little longer, but it's, it's it's a fate are completely >> I was in high school then, so I don't remember all that. >> Sorry, Dave. >> Wow, that was a low blow, like you know? >> But, but the, but the one thing that is for sure there's money to be made convincing people to get off of the backs of the dinosaurs they're riding. >> Dave Vellante: That's right. >> And also, the other thing that's a certainty is that it's not easy. And because it's not easy, there's opportunity there. So I know, I know it's, it, it, it, it, it all sounds great to talk about the the wonderful vision of the future, but I know how hard the the road is that you have to go down to get people, especially if you're comfortable with the revenue stream, if you're comfortable running the plumbing. If you're so comfortable that you can get up on stage and say, I want more money from you to pump your con- your content across my network. I love the Netflix retort, right Dave? >> Yeah, totally Dave. And, but the, the other thing is, telco's a great business. It's, they got monopolies that print money. So... >> Dave Nicholson: It's rational. It's rational. I understand. >> There's less of an incentive to move but what's going to be the incentive is guys like Dish Network coming in saying, we're going to, we're going to disrupt, we're going to build new apps. >> That's right. >> Yeah. >> Well and it's, you know, revenue acceleration, the board level, the CEO level know that they have to, you know, do things different. But to your point, it's just hard, and there's so much gravity there. There's hundreds of years literally of gravity of how they've operated their business. To your point, a lot of them, you know, lot- most of 'em were regulated and most Geos around the world at one point, right? They were government owned or government regulated entities. It's, it's a big ship to turn and it's really hard. We're not claiming we can help them turn the ship overnight but we think we can help evolve them. We think we can go along with the journey and we do think we are better together. >> IT the network and the line of business. Love the strategy. Guys, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> All right, for Dave, Nicholson, Dave Vellante here, John Furrier is in our Palo Alto studio banging out all the news, keep it right there. TheCUBE's coverage of MWC 23. We'll be right back.

>> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (ambient music) >> Lisa: Hey everyone, welcome back to Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE Live at MWC 23. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. This is day two of four days of cube coverage but you know that, because you've already been watching yesterday and today. We're going to have a great conversation next with EnterpriseWeb and Red Hat. We've had great conversations the last day and a half about the Telco industry, the challenges, the opportunities. We're going to unpack that from this lens. Please welcome Dave Duggal, founder and CEO of EnterpriseWeb and Azhar Sayeed is here, Senior Director Solution Architecture at Red Hat. >> Guys, it's great to have you on the program. >> Yes. >> Thank you Lisa, >> Great being here with you. >> Dave let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an overview of EnterpriseWeb. What kind of business is it? What's the business model? What do you guys do? >> Okay so, EnterpriseWeb is reinventing middleware, right? So the historic middleware was to build vertically integrated stacks, right? And those stacks are now such becoming the rate limiters for interoperability for so the end-to-end solutions that everybody's looking for, right? Red Hat's talking about the unified platform. You guys are talking about Supercloud, EnterpriseWeb addresses that we've built middleware based on serverless architecture, so lightweight, low latency, high performance middleware. And we're working with the world's biggest, we sell through channels and we work through partners like Red Hat Intel, Fortnet, Keysight, Tech Mahindra. So working with some of the biggest players that have recognized the value of our innovation, to deliver transformation to the Telecom industry. >> So what are you guys doing together? Is this, is this an OpenShift play? >> Is it? >> Yeah. >> Yeah, so we've got two projects right her on the floor at MWC throughout the various partners, where EnterpriseWeb is actually providing an application layer, sorry application middleware over Red Hat's, OpenShift and we're essentially generating operators so Red Hat operators, so that all our vendors, and, sorry vendors that we onboard into our catalog can be deployed easily through the OpenShift platform. And we allow those, those vendors to be flexibly composed into network services. So the real challenge for operators historically is that they, they have challenges onboarding the vendors. It takes a long time. Each one of them is a snowflake. They, you know, even though there's standards they don't all observe or follow the same standards. So we make it easier using models, right? For, in a model driven process to on boards or streamline that onboarding process, compose functions into services deploy those services seamlessly through Red Hat's OpenShift, and then manage the, the lifecycle, like the quality of service and the SLAs for those services. >> So Red Hat obviously has pretty prominent Telco business has for a while. Red Hat OpenStack actually is is pretty popular within the Telco business. People thought, "Oh, OpenStack, that's dead." Actually, no, it's actually doing quite well. We see it all over the place where for whatever reason people want to build their own cloud. And, and so, so what's happening in the industry because you have the traditional Telcos we heard in the keynotes that kind of typical narrative about, you know, we can't let the over the top vendors do this again. We're, we're going to be Apifi everything, we're going to monetize this time around, not just with connectivity but the, but the fact is they really don't have a developer community. >> Yes. >> Yet anyway. >> Then you have these disruptors over here that are saying "Yeah, we're going to enable ISVs." How do you see it? What's the landscape look like? Help us understand, you know, what the horses on the track are doing. >> Sure. I think what has happened, Dave, is that the conversation has moved a little bit from where they were just looking at IS infrastructure service with virtual machines and OpenStack, as you mentioned, to how do we move up the value chain and look at different applications. And therein comes the rub, right? You have applications with different requirements, IT network that have various different requirements that are there. So as you start to build those cloud platform, as you start to modernize those set of applications, you then start to look at microservices and how you build them. You need the ability to orchestrate them. So some of those problem statements have moved from not just refactoring those applications, but actually now to how do you reliably deploy, manage in a multicloud multi cluster way. So this conversation around Supercloud or this conversation around multicloud is very >> You could say Supercloud. That's okay >> (Dave Duggal and Azhar laughs) >> It's absolutely very real though. The reason why it's very real is, if you look at transformations around Telco, there are two things that are happening. One, Telco IT, they're looking at partnerships with hybrid cloud, I mean with public cloud players to build a hybrid environment. They're also building their own Telco Cloud environment for their network functions. Now, in both of those spaces, they end up operating two to three different environments themselves. Now how do you create a level of abstraction across those? How do you manage that particular infrastructure? And then how do you orchestrate all of those different workloads? Those are the type of problems that they're actually beginning to solve. So they've moved on from really just putting that virtualizing their application, putting it on OpenStack to now really seriously looking at "How do I build a service?" "How do I leverage the catalog that's available both in my private and public and build an overall service process?" >> And by the way what you just described as hybrid cloud and multicloud is, you know Supercloud is what multicloud should have been. And what, what it originally became is "I run on this cloud and I run on this cloud" and "I run on this cloud and I have a hybrid." And, and Supercloud is meant to create a common experience across those clouds. >> Dave Duggal: Right? >> Thanks to, you know, Supercloud middleware. >> Yeah. >> Right? And, and so that's what you guys do. >> Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Dave, I mean, even the name EnterpriseWeb, you know we started from looking from the application layer down. If you look at it, the last 10 years we've looked from the infrastructure up, right? And now everybody's looking northbound saying "You know what, actually, if I look from the infrastructure up the only thing I'll ever build is silos, right?" And those silos get in the way of the interoperability and the agility the businesses want. So we take the perspective as high level abstractions, common tools, so that if I'm a CXO, I can look down on my environments, right? When I'm really not, I honestly, if I'm an, if I'm a CEO I don't really care or CXO, I don't really care so much about my infrastructure to be honest. I care about my applications and their behavior. I care about my SLAs and my quality of service, right? Those are the things I care about. So I really want an EnterpriseWeb, right? Something that helps me connect all my distributed applications all across all of the environments. So I can have one place a consistency layer that speaks a common language. We know that there's a lot of heterogeneity down all those layers and a lot of complexity down those layers. But the business doesn't care. They don't want to care, right? They want to actually take their applications deploy them where they're the most performant where they're getting the best cost, right? The lowest and maybe sustainability concerns, all those. They want to address those problems, meet their SLAs meet their quality service. And you know what, if it's running on Amazon, great. If it's running on Google Cloud platform, great. If it, you know, we're doing one project right here that we're demonstrating here is with with Amazon Tech Mahindra and OpenShift, where we took a disaggregated 5G core, right? So this is like sort of latest telecom, you know net networking software, right? We're deploying pulling elements of that network across core, across Amazon EKS, OpenShift on Red Hat ROSA, as well as just OpenShift for cloud. And we, through a single pane of deployment and management, we deployed the elements of the 5G core across them and then connected them in an end-to-end process. That's Telco Supercloud. >> Dave Vellante: So that's an O-RAN deployment. >> Yeah that's >> So, the big advantage of that, pardon me, Dave but the big advantage of that is the customer really doesn't care where the components are being served from for them. It's a 5G capability. It happens to sit in different locations. And that's, it's, it's about how do you abstract and how do you manage all those different workloads in a cohesive way? And that's exactly what EnterpriseWeb is bringing to the table. And what we do is we abstract the underlying infrastructure which is the cloud layer. So if, because AWS operating environment is different then private cloud operating environment then Azure environment, you have the networking is set up is different in each one of them. If there is a way you can abstract all of that and present it in a common operating model it becomes a lot easier than for anybody to be able to consume. >> And what a lot of customers tell me is the way they deal with multicloud complexity is they go with mono cloud, right? And so they'll lose out on some of the best services >> Absolutely >> If best of, so that's not >> that's not ideal, but at the end of the day, agree, developers don't want to muck with all the plumbing >> Dave Duggal: Yep. >> They want to write code. >> Azhar: Correct. >> So like I come back to are the traditional Telcos leaning in on a way that they're going to enable ISVs and developers to write on top of those platforms? Or are there sort of new entrance and disruptors? And I know, I know the answer is both >> Dave Duggal: Yep. >> but I feel as though the Telcos still haven't, traditional Telcos haven't tuned in to that developer affinity, but you guys sell to them. >> What, what are you seeing? >> Yeah, so >> What we have seen is there are Telcos fall into several categories there. If you look at the most mature ones, you know they are very eager to move up the value chain. There are some smaller very nimble ones that have actually doing, they're actually doing something really interesting. For example, they've provided sandbox environments to developers to say "Go develop your applications to the sandbox environment." We'll use that to build an net service with you. I can give you some interesting examples across the globe that, where that is happening, right? In AsiaPac, particularly in Australia, ANZ region. There are a couple of providers who have who have done this, but in, in, in a very interesting way. But the challenges to them, why it's not completely open or public yet is primarily because they haven't figured out how to exactly monetize that. And, and that's the reason why. So in the absence of that, what will happen is they they have to rely on the ISV ecosystem to be able to build those capabilities which they can then bring it on as part of the catalog. But in Latin America, I was talking to one of the providers and they said, "Well look we have a public cloud, we have our own public cloud, right?" What we want do is use that to offer localized services not just bring everything in from the top >> But, but we heard from Ericson's CEO they're basically going to monetize it by what I call "gouge", the developers >> (Azhar laughs) >> access to the network telemetry as opposed to saying, "Hey, here's an open platform development on top of it and it will maybe create something like an app store and we'll take a piece of the action." >> So ours, >> to be is a better model. >> Yeah. So that's perfect. Our second project that we're showing here is with Intel, right? So Intel came to us cause they are a reputation for doing advanced automation solutions. They gave us carte blanche in their labs. So this is Intel Network Builders they said pick your partners. And we went with the Red Hat, Fort Net, Keysite this company KX doing AIML. But to address your DevX, here's Intel explicitly wants to get closer to the developers by exposing their APIs, open APIs over their infrastructure. Just like Red Hat has APIs, right? And so they can expose them northbound to developers so developers can leverage and tune their applications, right? But the challenge there is what Intel is doing at the low level network infrastructure, right? Is fundamentally complex, right? What you want is an abstraction layer where develop and this gets to, to your point Dave where you just said like "The developers just want to get their job done." or really they want to focus on the business logic and accelerate that service delivery, right? So the idea here is an EnterpriseWeb they can literally declaratively compose their services, express their intent. "I want this to run optimized for low latency. I want this to run optimized for energy consumption." Right? And that's all they say, right? That's a very high level statement. And then the run time translates it between all the elements that are participating in that service to realize the developer's intent, right? No hands, right? Zero touch, right? So that's now a movement in telecom. So you're right, it's taking a while because these are pretty fundamental shifts, right? But it's intent based networking, right? So it's almost two parts, right? One is you have to have the open APIs, right? So that the infrastructure has to expose its capabilities. Then you need abstractions over the top that make it simple for developers to take, you know, make use of them. >> See, one of the demonstrations we are doing is around AIOps. And I've had literally here on this floor, two conversations around what I call as network as a platform. Although it sounds like a cliche term, that's exactly what Dave was describing in terms of exposing APIs from the infrastructure and utilizing them. So once you get that data, then now you can do analytics and do machine learning to be able to build models and figure out how you can orchestrate better how you can monetize better, how can how you can utilize better, right? So all of those things become important. It's just not about internal optimization but it's also about how do you expose it to third party ecosystem to translate that into better delivery mechanisms or IOT capability and so on. >> But if they're going to charge me for every API call in the network I'm going to go broke (team laughs) >> And I'm going to get really pissed. I mean, I feel like, I'm just running down, Oracle. IBM tried it. Oracle, okay, they got Java, but they don't they don't have developer jobs. VMware, okay? They got Aria. EMC used to have a thing called code. IBM had to buy Red Hat to get to the developer community. (Lisa laughs) >> So I feel like the telcos don't today have those developer shops. So, so they have to partner. [Azhar] Yes. >> With guys like you and then be more open and and let a zillion flowers bloom or else they're going to get disrupted in a big way and they're going to it's going to be a repeat of the over, over the top in, in in a different model that I can't predict. >> Yeah. >> Absolutely true. I mean, look, they cannot be in the connectivity business. Telcos cannot be just in the connectivity business. It's, I think so, you know, >> Dave Vellante: You had a fry a frozen hand (Dave Daggul laughs) >> off that, you know. >> Well, you know, think about they almost have to go become over the top on themselves, right? That's what the cloud guys are doing, right? >> Yeah. >> They're riding over their backbone that by taking a creating a high level abstraction, they in turn abstract away the infrastructure underneath them, right? And that's really the end game >> Right? >> Dave Vellante: Yeah. >> Is because now, >> they're over the top it's their network, it's their infrastructure, right? They don't want to become bid pipes. >> Yep. >> Now you, they can take OpenShift, run that in any cloud. >> Yep. >> Right? >> You can run that in hybrid cloud, enterprise web can do the application layer configuration and management. And together we're running, you know, OSI layers one through seven, east to west, north to south. We're running across the the RAN, the core and the transport. And that is telco super cloud, my friend. >> Yeah. Well, >> (Dave Duggal laughs) >> I'm dominating the conversation cause I love talking super cloud. >> I knew you would. >> So speaking of super superpowers, when you're in customer or prospective customer conversations with providers and they've got, obviously they're they're in this transformative state right now. How, what do you describe as the superpower between Red Hat and EnterpriseWeb in terms of really helping these Telcos transforms. But at the end of the day, the connectivity's there the end user gets what they want, which is I want this to work wherever I am. >> Yeah, yeah. That's a great question, Lisa. So I think the way you could look at it is most software has, has been evolved to be specialized, right? So in Telcos' no different, right? We have this in the enterprise, right? All these specialized stacks, all these components that they wire together in the, in you think of Telco as a sort of a super set of enterprise problems, right? They have all those problems like magnified manyfold, right? And so you have specialized, let's say orchestrators and other tools for every Telco domain for every Telco layer. Now you have a zoo of orchestrators, right? None of them were designed to work together, right? They all speak a specific language, let's say quote unquote for doing a specific purpose. But everything that's interesting in the 21st century is across layers and across domains, right? If a siloed static application, those are dead, right? Nobody's doing those anymore. Even developers don't do those developers are doing composition today. They're not doing, nobody wants to hear about a 6 million lines of code, right? They want to hear, "How did you take these five things and bring 'em together for productive use?" >> Lisa: Right. How did you deliver faster for my enterprise? How did you save me money? How did you create business value? And that's what we're doing together. >> I mean, just to add on to Dave, I was talking to one of the providers, they have more than 30,000 nodes in their infrastructure. When I say no to your servers running, you know, Kubernetes,running open stack, running different components. If try managing that in one single entity, if you will. Not possible. You got to fragment, you got to segment in some way. Now the question is, if you are not exposing that particular infrastructure and the appropriate KPIs and appropriate things, you will not be able to efficiently utilize that across the board. So you need almost a construct that creates like a manager of managers, a hierarchical structure, which would allow you to be more intelligent in terms of how you place those, how you manage that. And so when you ask the question about what's the secret sauce between the two, well this is exactly where EnterpriseWeb brings in that capability to analyze information, be more intelligent about it. And what we do is provide an abstraction of the cloud layer so that they can, you know, then do the right job in terms of making sure that it's appropriate and it's consistent. >> Consistency is key. Guys, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure really digging through EnterpriseWeb. >> Thank you. >> What you're doing >> with Red Hat. How you're helping the organization transform and Supercloud, we can't forget Supercloud. (Dave Vellante laughs) >> Fight Supercloud. Guys, thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you so much Lisa. >> Thank you. >> Thank you guys. >> Very nice. >> Lisa: We really appreciate it. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage coming to you live from MWC 23. We'll be back after a short break.

(soft corporate jingle) >> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat jingle intro) >> Welcome back to Barcelona. We're here live at the Fira. (laughs) Just amazing day two of MWC23. It's packed today. It was packed yesterday. It's even more packed today. All the news is flowing. Check out siliconangle.com. John Furrier is in the studio in Palo Alto breaking all the news. And, we are here live. Really excited to have Udayan Mukherjee who's the Senior Fellow and Chief Architect of wireless product at Network and Edge for Intel. And, Manish Singh is back. He's the CTO of Telecom Systems Business at Dell Jets. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you >> We're going to talk about greening the network. I wonder, Udayan, if you could just set up why that's so important. I mean, it's obvious that it's an important thing, great for the environment, but why is it extra important in Telco? >> Yeah, thank you. Actually, I'll tell you, this morning I had a discussion with an operator. The first thing he said, that the electricity consumption is more expensive nowadays that total real estate that he's spending money on. So, it's like that is the number one thing that if you can change that, bring that power consumption down. And, if you talk about sustainability, look what is happening in Europe, what's happening in all the electricity areas. That's the critical element that we need to address. Whether we are defining chip, platforms, storage systems, that's the number one mantra right now. You know, reduce the power. Electricity consumption, because it's a sustainable planet that we are living in. >> So, you got CapEx and OpEx. We're talking about the big piece of OpEx is now power consumption? >> Power Consumption >> That's the point. Okay, so in my experience, servers are the big culprit for power consumption, which is powered by core semiconductors and microprocessors. So, what's the strategy to reduce the power consumption? You're probably not going to reduce the bill overall. You maybe just can keep pace, but from a technical standpoint, how do you attack that? >> Yeah, there are multiple defined ways of adding. Obviously the process technology, that micro (indistinct) itself is evolving to make it more low-power systems. But, even within the silicon, the server that we develop, if you look in a CPU, there is a lot of power states. So, if you have a 32 code platform, as an example, every code you can vary the frequency and the C-states, power states. So, if you look into any traffic, whether it's a radio access network, packet code. At any given time the load is not peak. So, your power consumption, actual what we are drawing from the wall, it also needs to vary with that. So, that's how if you look into this there's a huge savings. If you go to Intel booth or Ericson booth or anyone, you will see right now every possible, the packet code, radio access network, everything network. They're talking about our energy consumption, how they're lowering this. These states, as we call it power states, C-state P-state they've built in intel chip for a long time. The cloud providers are taking advantage of it. But Telcos, with even two generation before they used to actually switch it off in the bios. I say no, we need peak. Now, that thing is changing. Now, it's all like, how do I take advantage of the built in technologies? >> I remember the enterprise virtualization, Manish, was a big play. I remember PG&E used to give rebates to customers that would install virtualized software, VMware. >> And SSDs. >> Yeah. And SSDs, you know, yes. Because, the spinning disc was, but, nowhere near with a server consumption. So, how virtualized is the telco network? And then, what I'm saying is there other things, other knobs, you can of course turn. So, what's your perspective on this as a server player? >> Yeah, absolutely. Let me just back up a little bit and start at the big picture to share what Udayan said. Here, day two, every conversation I've had yesterday and today morning with every operator, every CTO, they're coming in and first topic they're talking about is energy. And, the reason is, A, it's the right thing to do, sustainability, but, it's also becoming a P&L issue. And, the reason it's becoming a P&L issue is because we are in this energy inflationary environment where the energy costs are constantly going up. So, it's becoming really important for the service providers to really drive more efficiency onto their networks, onto their infrastructure. Number one. Two, then to your question on what all knobs need to be turned on, and what are the knobs? So, Udayan talked about within the intel, silicon, the C-states, P-states and all these capabilities that are being brought up, absolutely important. But again, if we take a macro view of it. First of all, there are opportunities to do infrastructure audit. What's on, why is it on, does it need to be on right now? Number two, there are opportunities to do infrastructure upgrade. And, what I mean by that is as you go from previous generation servers to next generation servers, better cooling, better performance. And through all of that you start to gain power usage efficiency inside a data center. And, you take that out more into the networks you start to achieve same outcomes on the network site. Think about from a cooling perspective, air cooling but for that matter, even liquid cooling, especially inside the data centers. All opportunities around PUE, because PUE, power usage efficiency and improvement on PUE is an opportunity. But, I'll take it even further. Workloads that are coming onto it, core, RAN, these workloads based on the dynamic traffic. Look, if you look at the traffic inside a network, it's not constant, it's varied. As the traffic patterns change, can you reduce the amount of infrastructure you're using? I.e. reduce the amount of power that you're using and when the traffic loads are going up. So, the workloads themselves need to become more smarter about that. And last, but not the least. From an orchestration layer if you think about it, where you are placing these workloads, and depending on what's available, you can start to again, drive better energy outcomes. And, not to forget acceleration. Where you need acceleration, can you have the right hardware infrastructures delivering the right kind of accelerations to again, improve those energy efficiency outcomes. So, it's a complex problem. But, there are a lot of levers, lot of tools that are in place that the service providers, the technology builders like us, are building the infrastructure, and then the workload providers all come together to really solve this problem. >> Yeah, Udayan, Manish mentioned this idea of moving from one generation to a new generation and gaining benefits. Out there on the street, if you will. Most of the time it's an N plus 2 migration. It's not just moving from last generation to this next generation, but it's really a generation ago. So, those significant changes in the dynamics around power density and cooling are meaningful? You talk about where performance should be? We start talking about the edge. It's hard to have a full-blown raised data center floor edge everywhere. Do these advances fundamentally change the kinds of things that you can do at the base of a tower? >> Yeah, absolutely. Manish talked about that, the dynamic nature of the workload. So, we are using a lot of this AIML to actually predict. Like for example, your multiple force in a systems. So, why is the 32 core as a system, why is all running? So, your traffic profile in the night times. So, you are in the office areas, in the night has gone home and nowadays everybody's working from remote anyway. So, why is this thing a full blown, spending the TDP, the total power and extreme powers. You bring it down, different power states, C-states. We talked about it. Deeper C-states or P-states, you bring the frequency down. So, lot of those automation, even at the base of the tower. Lot of our deployment right now, we are doing a whole bunch of massive MIMO deployment. Virtual RAN in Verizon network. All actually cell-site deployment. Those eight centers are very close to the cell-site. And, they're doing aggressive power management. So, you don't have to go to a huge data centers, even there's a small rack of systems, four to five, 10 systems, you can do aggressive power management. And, you built it up that way. >> Okay. >> If I may just build on what Udayan said. I mean if you look at the radio access network, right? And, let's start at the bottom of the tower itself. The infrastructure that's going in there, especially with Open RAN, if you think about it, there are opportunities now to do a centralized RAN where you could do more BBU pooling. And, with that, not only on a given tower but across a given given coverage area, depending on what the traffics are, you can again get the infrastructure to become more efficient in terms of what traffic, what needs are, and really start to benefit. The pooling gains which is obviously going to give you benefit on the CapEx side, but from an energy standpoint going to give you benefits on the OpEx side of things. So that's important. The second thing I will say is we cannot forget, especially on the radio access side of things, that it's not just the bottom of the tower what's happening there. What's happening on the top of the tower especially with the radio, that's super important. And, that goes into how do you drive better PA efficiency, how do you drive better DPD in there? This is where again, applying AI machine learning there is a significant amount of opportunity there to improve the PA performance itself. But then, not only that, looking at traffic patterns. Can you do sleep modes, micro sleep modes to deep sleep modes. Turning down the cells itself, depending on the traffic patterns. So, these are all areas that are now becoming more and more important. And, clearly with our ecosystem of partners we are continuing to work on these. >> So we hear from the operators, it's an OpEx issue. It's hitting the P&L. They're in search of PUE of one. And, they've historically been wasteful, they go full throttle. And now, you're saying with intelligence you can optimize that consumption. So, where does the intelligence live? Is it in the rig. Where is it all throughout the network? Is it in the silicon? Maybe you could paint a picture as to where those smarts exist. >> I can start. It's across the stack. It starts, we talked about the C-states, P-states. If you want to take advantage of that, that intelligence is in the workload, which has to understand when can I really start to clock things down or turn off the cores. If you really look at it from a traffic pattern perspective you start to really look at a rig level where you can have power. And, we are working with the ecosystem partners who are looking at applying machine learning on that to see what can we really start to turn on, turn off, throttle things down, depending on what the, so yes, it's across the stack. And lastly, again, I'll go back to cannot forget orchestration, where you again have the ability to move some of these workloads and look at where your workload placements are happening depending on what infrastructure is and what the traffic needs are at that point in time. So it's, again, there's no silver bullet. It has to be looked across the stack. >> And, this is where actually if I may, last two years a sea change has happened. People used to say, okay there are C-states and P-states, there's silicon every code. OS operating system has a governor built in. We rely on that. So, that used to be the way. Now that applications are getting smarter, if you look at a radio access network or the packet core on the control plane signaling application, they're more aware of the what is the underlying silicon power state sleep states are available. So, every time they find some of these areas there's no enough traffic there, they immediately goes to a transition. So, the workload has become more intelligent. The rig application we talked about. Every possible rig application right now are apps on xApps. Most of them are on energy efficiency. How are they using it? So, I think lot more even the last two years. >> Can I just say one more thing there right? >> Yeah. >> We cannot forget the infrastructure as well, right? I mean, that's the most important thing. That's where the energy is really getting drawn in. And, constant improvement on the infrastructure. And, I'll give you some data points, right? If you really look at the power at servers, right? From 2013 to 2023, like a decade. 85% energy intensity improvement, right? So, these gains are coming from performance with better cooling, better technology applications. So, that's super critical, that's important. And, also to just give you another data point. Apart from the infrastructure what cache layers we are running and how much CPU and compute requirements are there, that's also important. So, looking at it from a cache perspective are we optimizing the required infrastructure blocks for radio access versus core? And again, really taking that back to energy efficiency outcomes. So, some of the work we've been doing with Wind River and Red Hat and some of our ecosystem partners around that for radio access network versus core. Really again, optimizing for those different use cases and the outcomes of those start to come in from an energy utilization perspective >> So, 85% improvement in power consumption. Of course you're doing, I don't know, 2, 300% more work, right? So, let's say, and I'm just sort of spit balling numbers but, let's say that historically powers on the P&L has been, I don't know, single digits, maybe 10%. Now, it's popping up the much higher. >> Udayan: Huge >> Right? >> I mean, I don't know what the number is. Is it over 20% in some cases or is it, do you have a sense of that? Or let's say it is. The objective I presume is you're probably not going to lower the power bill overall, but you're going to be able to lower the percent of cost on the OpEx as you grow, right? I mean, we're talking about 5G networks. So much more data >> Capacity increasing. >> Yeah, and so is it, am I right about that the carriers, the best they can hope for is to sort of stay even on that percentage or maybe somewhat lower that percentage? Or, do you think they can actually cut the bill? What's the goal? What are they trying to do? >> The goal is to cut the bill. >> It is! >> And the way you get started to cut the bill is, as I said, first of all on the radio side. Start to see where the improvements are and look, there's not a whole lot there to be done. I mean, the PS are as efficient as they can be, but as I said, there are things in DPD and all that still can be improved. But then, sleep modes and all, yes there are efficiencies in there. But, I'll give you one important, another interesting data point. We did a work with ACG Research on our 16G platform. The power edge service that we have recently launched based on Intel's Sapphire Rapids. And, if you look at the study there. 30% TCR reduction, 10% in CapEx gains, 30% in OpEx gains from moving away from these legacy monolithic architectures to cloud native architectures. And, a large part of that OpEx gain really starts to come from energy to the point of 800 metric tonnes of carbon reduction to the point of you could have, and if you really translate that to around 160 homes electric use per year, right? So yes, I mean the opportunity there is to reduce the bill. >> Wow, that's big, big goal guys. We got to run. But, thank you for informing the audience on the importance and how you get there. So, appreciate that. >> One thing that bears mentioning really quickly before we wrap, a lot of these things we're talking about are happening in remote locations. >> Oh, back to that point of distributed nature of telecom. >> Yes, we talked about a BBU being at the base of a tower that could be up on a mountain somewhere. >> No, you made the point. You can't just say, oh, hey we're going to go find ambient air or going to go... >> They don't necessarily... >> Go next to a waterfall. >> We don't necessarily have the greatest hydro tower. >> All right, we got to go. Thanks you guys. Alright, keep it right there. Wall to wall coverage is day two of theCUBE's coverage of MWC 23. Stay right there, we'll be right back. (corporate outro jingle)

>> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, guys and gals, good to see you. It's theCUBE live in Barcelona at MWC23. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante on day one of four days of wall to wall CUBE coverage. Dave, today is ecosystem day. We've had some great conversations about why the open ecosystem is so important and some of the key players in it. >> Well and I'm in search of disruptors, so I'm looking for, okay, who are the network operators that are going to actually lean into the future and drive it and challenge the existing incumbents. We'll talk about that today. >> And we're going to be talking about that next. We've got one of our alumni back with us. Satish Iyer is here, the Vice President of Emerging Services at Dell. Great to have you back on the program. >> Thank you. >> Richard Leitao is with us as well, the Vice President of National Development at DISH Network. Welcome. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So, lots of, this is day one, the theme is velocity. I feel like the day has gone by so quickly. But Dell and DISH have partnered together on a multi-year initiative to build your nationwide cloud-native 5G network that's going to cover a lot of the US. Talk a little bit about that partnership, we'll get both of your perspectives. Richard, we'll start with you. >> Sure. So thank you again for having me. So DISH had the opportunity of, of going through this experience, of innovating once more. For the ones that know DISH, DISH is a company that was founded in 1980 by an innovator, a disruptor. Of course, in the course of the next 40 years, we had the opportunities of even disrupting ourselves. We launched our first satellite TV service. We then launched the first streaming, video streaming platform, disrupting our own satellite business. And since 2008, we have been acquiring Spectrum and, you know, Spectrum, the most valuable asset of a wireless operator. We felt that this was the right opportunity, having 5G , having O-RAN, and we decided to go full in in a greenfield project building national network, 5G O-RAN cloud-based network, one of a kind network in in the US and, and most of all, using O-RAN, it's very important to us, what, what it can bring and it can bring to DISH but to the entire ecosystem of, of this sector in the US. >> Satish, talk a little bit about the partnership from Dell's perspective and some of the unique advantages that Dell is delivering to DISH. >> Oh absolutely. Again, like Richard was saying, I mean the telecom network is being desegregated as we speak. You know, companies like DISH and everybody else is looking at what are the best-in-class technologies we can bring to the table. I would like to say that, you know, the cloud is coming to the telco world, right? A lot of us have seen the tremendous transformation in the cloud world in the last few years. Now, you know, DISH is a big enterprise company. As you know, you know, we are pretty strong within the cloud space and enterprise space. So what we try to work with DISH is Dell, is to bring to DISH is, you know, that notion of cloud scale and the cloud ecosystem into telecom, right? By means best-in-class infrastructure products, best-in-class software products, to allow somebody like DISH to innovate and incre, you know, basically expand and build their O-RAN network. So it's absolutely important for us as we build and get into the telecom space to work with somebody like DISH who's also disrupting as a carrier in that space. >> So it's early days for Open RAN but you've decided, "okay, we're all in". >> Yeah. >> Right? So (chuckling) you burn the bridge, as they say, "go for it". (Lisa chuckles) So when you talk to most people, they say, "okay, it's, it's, it's, it's immature." It's got to be able to get to the levels of, of the, the the hardened stack reliability. But of course it brings the advantage of flexibility and speed. Are you optimizing for one or the other right now? How are you dealing with that balance? >> Well, it, it's, it's not mature in the sense that most of operators that think about it, they have a legacy network. And in order to go full in on the O-RAN side, they need to scrap a lot of things that they have and honestly, they don't want, and it doesn't make sense. So being a greenfield operator, give us that advantage. Give us the advantage and, and desegregation, it's all about chip sets, boxes and software and the chip sets part and what I like the most in desegregation is the time of innovation. The time that we can use new chip sets coming into the market, the size of the boxes that we are using. Obviously our footprint onsite is much smaller than traditional carriers or proprietary systems. So all of that Dell has been critical in supporting us. Supporting us having the best chip sets, having the smallest footprint and, you know, the software, the cycle of innovation is much faster than in proprietary systems. So ma-, it's maturing. I'm glad to say that probably two years ago here O-RAN was more like a, a pilot type of technology. It is not, we are live, we are live for more than 30 million customers in the US and, you know, the performance levels are very similar to traditional networks. >> So you don't just buy a nationwide cloud-native 5G network out of the box, you got to- >> No, you don't. >> You got to build it. So I'm curious as to what Dell's role is in that, in that build out. >> Right? >> How and how, I'm really curious how to, how you would grade Dell but we'll get there. >> Yeah, I mean, look, yes, you don't. So I think the, the, the first and foremost is again, as, as we, Dell, comes into the telco space, one of the things we have to look at is to understand what makes Dell better in the enterprise space, right? It is the best-in-class infrastructure. It is the software ties together. As you talk about desegregated networks, it's important to understand lot of these piece parts have to still be touched together, right? So I think the integration and integration aspects becomes really key which is really Dell is very good at. So one of the things we are working really closely with DISH Tech, you know Richard was alluding to, is bringing all, not just bringing all the software and hardware assets together, but how do you continuously innovate and keep fixing things faster, right? So in the old days, traditional ways, you have a software stack, it takes you 18 months, 20 months to actually get an upgrade done. Here we have continuously CI/CD pipelines where if you want to a change done within, within a week's or within a few days, where we can actually go and test and make sure these things work. So I think a lot of the best enterprise software practices, cloud practices, combined with whatever needs for telco, actually is what makes it very unique. >> I, I saw that this started out as an FCC compliance initiative that turned into a partnership, obviously a very successful one. Richard, talk about what DISH saw in Dell that really made it the right choice, knowing you have choices, you have options. >> You know, we saw the capability to execute, but we also saw the capability to innovate. From an execution level, at the end of the day, like we were talking, we started the project in the middle of COVID, and we had the first mandate to cover 20% of the US population by June, 2022. And now we have a second one, 70% of US population by June 2023. At the beginning of the project, it was all about availability of materials, logistics, how to distribute, how to transport material. So Dell has a world-class supply chain, we felt that working with Dell through all these challenges made things easier. So from an execution perspective, whenever you need to build a network and you, you are building thousands of sites, you need to have materials, you need to distribute them and you need to install them. Dell helped us across the board. Our expectations obviously will change. We have a network, we want to cooperate with Dell in many other areas. We want to, you know, leverage on Dell ability to reach the enterprise market, to have private 5G offers. So hopefully this collaboration will endure in time and, and, you know, will change and evolve in time. >> And it's a big bet. I mean, it's not like a single, it's not like a little transaction that you guys are doing. I feel like, you know Michael Dell and Eric Carlson had dinner and they said, "okay, we're going to, we're going to partner up and this is going to be a multi-decade partnership. You had to be transparent, "Hey, we're new at this, even though we're really good at enterprise tech and so you're going to, obviously if you take a chance on us, here's what we promise you." >> Absolutely. >> And vice versa, you guys had to say, "all right, hey, we're willing to roll the dice because we're trying to change the world." So what was that dynamic like? I mean, how did, I'm curious as to this has to be a lot of different levels, engineering, senior management, board level discussions. >> You know, we felt a huge buy-in from Dell on the Open RAN concept. >> Right. >> Yeah, okay. >> And, you know, edge computing and, and the ability to get us the best product and evolve the best product, Intel is is critical in all these offerings. Intel has a great relationship with Dell. Dell helped us. Dell sponsored the DISH program and some of these suppliers, So it was definitely good to have their support and the buy-in on the O-RAN concept. We felt it from day one and we felt secure on that. >> Yeah, I mean, I, to add to that, I mean, you know DISH was very instrumental in driving, dictating and executing to our roadmap, right? They're one of the key, I mean, since they are out there and they're really turning in a way, it's important that a customer who's actually at the out front of innovation, helps us drive our own roadmap. So to Richard's point, a lot of our product roadmaps, in terms of what have you built and all that, was based on what DISH thinks as going to be market-based requirements. They also helped us a lot in the integration aspects. Like I said, one of the things about open desegregation of these networks is there is a lot of integration because, you know, there is, it's not a one, one monolithic pipe smokestack anymore. You are picking up best-in-class pieces, bits and pieces and tying it together. And it's important to understand when you tie it together things will go wrong, right? So there is a lot of learnings from an integration standpoint. Supportability, deployment, one of the things Richard talked about was supply chain, you know. Other Dell's ability to, lot of these deployments, a lot of these configs in the factory, right, in the second part. So especially a lot of these partnerships started during COVID time and as you all know, you know what we went through two years ago. So we had to make sure that lot of these things are done in one place and a factory, and not done in the field because we couldn't do a lot of these things. So there's a lot of, lot of experimentation, lot of, lot, lot of innovation on that. >> So it's 2030, what's this look like? What's the vision if we can work backwards from there? Well, a, a great network coverage to the entire country, bringing new services to enterprises, to verticals, bringing value add to customers and, you know, technology cycles, they are lasting much less than they were. I cannot even say what will happen in three years. 2030, I mean, I know, I know somebody has a vision for 2030. That's another thing. (everyone laughs) >> A lot of it is "build it and they will come", right? >> Yeah. >> I mean it really is right? You put that network in place and then innovation happens on top. That's the best thing. >> Yeah. And look and and I think the biggest people think about Open RAN in terms of cost, which, you know, you, you have some things in cost that you appreciate in Open RAN. The footprint, the the possibility to diversify suppliers and and have more competition. But for me, Open RAN is about innovation and cycles of innovation. I used to work for Nokia, I used to work for Alcatel. I knew from the generation of an idea to an execution and having a feature delivered to a certain customer, it, it took months. We want innovation to take weeks. We are innovating at the speed, speed of the cloud. We are cooperating with new players, players on the cloud and, and we expect things to happen much faster than they traditionally happen on the telecom sector. >> Move fast and break things. >> Well, we also expect that speed- >> Break and fix. (everyone laughs) >> Yeah, thank you for that. >> But speaking of speed, your customers expect that, right? They expect the service to be up 24/7. They expect to be able to access whatever content they want, whenever they want from wherever they are. So comment, Richard, in our last few minutes here of, of how the, the Dell partnership is helping DISH to really deliver the excellent customer experience that your customers just expect that you're going to deliver. >> Well by setting up the system, number one, we are leveraging on a number of services. And I mentioned the supply chain, but in reality Dell made much more than that for our 20% milestone and is supporting our 70% milestone by installing, testing, verifying most of our data center equipment. We found that this offering from Dell was really addressing some of our needs because, you know, we, we believe they know a lot in this area and they, they can provide the best advice and the best speed to market in, in terms of having this equipment. Because we are working on a time clock, we need to have this done as soon as possible. You know for the future, I hope that they can help us in driving more services. I hope they can bring all the infrastructure that we need to offer to our customers. And, you know, we keep committed to O-RAN. O-RAN is really important. We are not compromising that. And I think the future is bright for both of us. >> Yeah, and Dell learns from the experience. >> Exactly. >> Absolutely. >> There's got to be a catalyst for expanding your roadmap and vision in telecom. >> Yeah, I mean, like you said, I mean, you asked a 2030 question and I think that, you know, know six, seven years from now I think people should look at what DISH and Dell and say they were the trailblazers of make, bringing Open RAN to the market and making 5G a reality. I mean, you talk about 5G, but every 5G is on a different stages. I do think that this combination, this partnership has the best chance to be the first ones to actually have a truly Open RAN network to be successful in commercial. >> Awesome guys. Trailblazers, Dell and DISH. Well, we look forward to watching this story unfold. Thank you- >> Thank you. >> for joining Dave and me on the program today talking about what you're doing together. We appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you, bye. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Barcelona at MWC23. We'll be back after a short break, so we'll see you soon.

(upbeat music) >> From theCube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCube and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> While by no means a safe haven, the cybersecurity sector has outpaced the broader tech market by a meaningful margin, that is up until very recently. Cybersecurity remains the number one technology priority for the C-suite, but as we've previously reported the CISO's budget has constraints just like other technology investments. Recent trends show that economic headwinds have elongated sales cycles, pushed deals into future quarters, and just like other tech initiatives, are pacing cybersecurity investments and breaking them into smaller chunks. Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis we explain how cybersecurity trends are reverting to the mean and tracking more closely with other technology investments. We'll make a couple of valuation comparisons to show the magnitude of the challenge and which cyber firms are feeling the heat, which aren't. There are some exceptions. We'll then show the latest survey data from ETR to quantify the contraction in spending momentum and close with a glimpse of the landscape of emerging cybersecurity companies, the private companies that could be ripe for acquisition, consolidation, or disruptive to the broader market. First, let's take a look at the recent patterns for cyber stocks relative to the broader tech market as a benchmark, as an indicator. Here's a year to date comparison of the bug ETF, which comprises a basket of cyber security names, and we compare that with the tech heavy NASDAQ composite. Notice that on April 13th of this year the cyber ETF was actually in positive territory while the NAS was down nearly 14%. Now by August 16th, the green turned red for cyber stocks but they still meaningfully outpaced the broader tech market by more than 950 basis points as of December 2nd that Delta had contracted. As you can see, the cyber ETF is now down nearly 25%, year to date, while the NASDAQ is down 27% and change. Now take a look at just how far a few of the high profile cybersecurity names have fallen. Here are six security firms that we've been tracking closely since before the pandemic. We've been, you know, tracking dozens but let's just take a look at this data and the subset. We show for comparison the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ, again, just for reference, they're both up since right before the pandemic. They're up relative to right before the pandemic, and then during the pandemic the S&P shot up more than 40%, relative to its pre pandemic level, around February is what we're using for the pre pandemic level, and the NASDAQ peaked at around 65% higher than that February level. They're now down 85% and 71% of their previous. So they're at 85% and 71% respectively from their pandemic highs. You compare that to these six companies, Splunk, which was and still is working through a transition is well below its pre pandemic market value and 44, it's 44% of its pre pandemic high as of last Friday. Palo Alto Networks is the most interesting here, in that it had been facing challenges prior to the pandemic related to a pivot to the Cloud which we reported on at the time. But as we said at that time we believe the company would sort out its Cloud transition, and its go to market challenges, and sales compensation issues, which it did as you can see. And its valuation jumped from 24 billion prior to Covid to 56 billion, and it's holding 93% of its peak value. Its revenue run rate is now over 6 billion with a healthy growth rate of 24% expected for the next quarter. Similarly, Fortinet has done relatively well holding 71% of its peak Covid value, with a healthy 34% revenue guide for the coming quarter. Now, Okta has been the biggest disappointment, a darling of the pandemic Okta's communication snafu, with what was actually a pretty benign hack combined with difficulty absorbing its 7 billion off zero acquisition, knocked the company off track. Its valuation has dropped by 35 billion since its peak during the pandemic, and that's after a nice beat and bounce back quarter just announced by Okta. Now, in our view Okta remains a viable long-term leader in identity. However, its recent fiscal 24 revenue guide was exceedingly conservative at around 16% growth. So either the company is sandbagging, or has such poor visibility that it wants to be like super cautious or maybe it's actually seeing a dramatic slowdown in its business momentum. After all, this is a company that not long ago was putting up 50% plus revenue growth rates. So it's one that bears close watching. CrowdStrike is another big name that we've been talking about on Breaking Analysis for quite some time. It like Okta has led the industry in a key ETR performance indicator that measures customer spending momentum. Just last week, CrowdStrike announced revenue increased more than 50% but new ARR was soft and the company guided conservatively. Not surprisingly, the stock got absolutely crushed as CrowdStrike blamed tepid demand from smaller and midsize firms. Many analysts believe that competition from Microsoft was one factor along with cautious spending amongst those midsize and smaller customers. Notably, large customers remain active. So we'll see if this is a longer term trend or an anomaly. Zscaler is another company in the space that we've reported having great customer spending momentum from the ETR data. But even though the company beat expectations for its recent quarter, like other companies its Outlook was conservative. So other than Palo Alto, and to a lesser extent Fortinet, these companies and others that we're not showing here are feeling the economic pinch and it shows in the compression of value. CrowdStrike, for example, had a 70 billion valuation at one point during the pandemic Zscaler top 50 billion, Okta 45 billion. Now, having said that Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, CrowdStrike, and Zscaler are all still trading well above their pre pandemic levels that we tracked back in February of 2020. All right, let's go now back to ETR'S January survey and take a look at how much things have changed since the beginning of the year. Remember, this is obviously pre Ukraine, and pre all the concerns about the economic headwinds but here's an X Y graph that shows a net score, or spending momentum on the y-axis, and market presence on the x-axis. The red dotted line at 40% on the vertical indicates a highly elevated net score. Anything above that we think is, you know, super elevated. Now, we filtered the data here to show only those companies with more than 50 responses in the ETR survey. Still really crowded. Note that there were around 20 companies above that red 40% mark, which is a very, you know, high number. It's a, it's a crowded market, but lots of companies with, you know, positive momentum. Now let's jump ahead to the most recent October survey and take a look at what, what's happening. Same graphic plotting, spending momentum, and market presence, and look at the number of companies above that red line and how it's been squashed. It's really compressing, it's still a crowded market, it's still, you know, plenty of green, but the number of companies above 40% that, that key mark has gone from around 20 firms down to about five or six. And it speaks to that compression and IT spending, and of course the elongated sales cycles pushing deals out, taking them in smaller chunks. I can't tell you how many conversations with customers I had, at last week at Reinvent underscoring this exact same trend. The buyers are getting pressure from their CFOs to slow things down, do more with less and, and, and prioritize projects to those that absolutely are critical to driving revenue or cutting costs. And that's rippling through all sectors, including cyber. Now, let's do a bit more playing around with the ETR data and take a look at those companies with more than a hundred citations in the survey this quarter. So N, greater than or equal to a hundred. Now remember the followers of Breaking Analysis know that each quarter we take a look at those, what we call four star security firms. That is, those are the, that are in, that hit the top 10 for both spending momentum, net score, and the N, the mentions in the survey, the presence, the pervasiveness in the survey, and that's what we show here. The left most chart is sorted by spending momentum or net score, and the right hand chart by shared N, or the number of mentions in the survey, that pervasiveness metric. that solid red line denotes the cutoff point at the top 10. And you'll note we've actually cut it off at 11 to account for Auth 0, which is now part of Okta, and is going through a go to market transition, you know, with the company, they're kind of restructuring sales so they can take advantage of that. So starting on the left with spending momentum, again, net score, Microsoft leads all vendors, typical Microsoft, very prominent, although it hadn't always done so, it, for a while, CrowdStrike and Okta were, were taking the top spot, now it's Microsoft. CrowdStrike, still always near the top, but note that CyberArk and Cloudflare have cracked the top five in Okta, which as I just said was consistently at the top, has dropped well off its previous highs. You'll notice that Palo Alto Network Palo Alto Networks with a 38% net score, just below that magic 40% number, is healthy, especially as you look over to the right hand chart. Take a look at Palo Alto with an N of 395. It is the largest of the independent pure play security firms, and has a very healthy net score, although one caution is that net score has dropped considerably since the beginning of the year, which is the case for most of the top 10 names. The only exception is Fortinet, they're the only ones that saw an increase since January in spending momentum as ETR measures it. Now this brings us to the four star security firms, that is those that hit the top 10 in both net score on the left hand side and market presence on the right hand side. So it's Microsoft, Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Okta, still there even not accounting for a Auth 0, just Okta on its own. If you put in Auth 0, it's, it's even stronger. Adding then in Fortinet and Zscaler. So Microsoft, Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Okta, Fortinet, and Zscaler. And as we've mentioned since January, only Fortinet has shown an increase in net score since, since that time, again, since the January survey. Now again, this talks to the compression in spending. Now one of the big themes we hear constantly in cybersecurity is the market is overcrowded. Everybody talks about that, me included. The implication there, is there's a lot of room for consolidation and that consolidation can come in the form of M&A, or it can come in the form of people consolidating onto a single platform, and retiring some other vendors, and getting rid of duplicate vendors. We're hearing that as a big theme as well. Now, as we saw in the previous, previous chart, this is a very crowded market and we've seen lots of consolidation in 2022, in the form of M&A. Literally hundreds of M&A deals, with some of the largest companies going private. SailPoint, KnowBe4, Barracuda, Mandiant, Fedora, these are multi billion dollar acquisitions, or at least billion dollars and up, and many of them multi-billion, for these companies, and hundreds more acquisitions in the cyberspace, now less you think the pond is overfished, here's a chart from ETR of emerging tech companies in the cyber security industry. This data comes from ETR's Emerging Technologies Survey, ETS, which is this diamond in a rough that I found a couple quarters ago, and it's ripe with companies that are candidates for M&A. Many would've liked, many of these companies would've liked to, gotten to the public markets during the pandemic, but they, you know, couldn't get there. They weren't ready. So the graph, you know, similar to the previous one, but different, it shows net sentiment on the vertical axis and that's a measurement of, of, of intent to adopt against a mind share on the X axis, which measures, measures the awareness of the vendor in the community. So this is specifically a survey that ETR goes out and, and, and fields only to track those emerging tech companies that are private companies. Now, some of the standouts in Mindshare, are OneTrust, BeyondTrust, Tanium and Endpoint, Net Scope, which we've talked about in previous Breaking Analysis. 1Password, which has been acquisitive on its own. In identity, the managed security service provider, Arctic Wolf Network, a company we've also covered, we've had their CEO on. We've talked about MSSPs as a real trend, particularly in small and medium sized business, we'll come back to that, Sneek, you know, kind of high flyer in both app security and containers, and you can just see the number of companies in the space this huge and it just keeps growing. Now, just to make it a bit easier on the eyes we filtered the data on these companies with with those, and isolated on those with more than a hundred responses only within the survey. And that's what we show here. Some of the names that we just mentioned are a bit easier to see, but these are the ones that really stand out in ERT, ETS, survey of private companies, OneTrust, BeyondTrust, Taniam, Netscope, which is in Cloud, 1Password, Arctic Wolf, Sneek, BitSight, SecurityScorecard, HackerOne, Code42, and Exabeam, and Sim. All of these hit the ETS survey with more than a hundred responses by, by the IT practitioners. Okay, so these firms, you know, maybe they do some M&A on their own. We've seen that with Sneek, as I said, with 1Password has been inquisitive, as have others. Now these companies with the larger footprint, these private companies, will likely be candidate for both buying companies and eventually going public when the markets settle down a bit. So again, no shortage of players to affect consolidation, both buyers and sellers. Okay, so let's finish with some key questions that we're watching. CrowdStrike in particular on its earnings calls cited softness from smaller buyers. Is that because these smaller buyers have stopped adopting? If so, are they more at risk, or are they tactically moving toward the easy button, aka, Microsoft's good enough approach. What does that mean for the market if smaller company cohorts continue to soften? How about MSSPs? Will companies continue to outsource, or pause on on that, as well as try to free up, to try to free up some budget? Adam Celiski at Reinvent last week said, "If you want to save money the Cloud's the best place to do it." Is the cloud the best place to save money in cyber? Well, it would seem that way from the standpoint of controlling budgets with lots of, lots of optionality. You could dial up and dial down services, you know, or does the Cloud add another layer of complexity that has to be understood and managed by Devs, for example? Now, consolidation should favor the likes of Palo Alto and CrowdStrike, cause they're platform players, and some of the larger players as well, like Cisco, how about IBM and of course Microsoft. Will that happen? And how will economic uncertainty impact the risk equation, a particular concern is increase of tax on vulnerable sectors of the population, like the elderly. How will companies and governments protect them from scams? And finally, how many cybersecurity companies can actually remain independent in the slingshot economy? In so many ways the market is still strong, it's just that expectations got ahead of themselves, and now as earnings forecast come, come, come down and come down to earth, it's going to basically come down to who can execute, generate cash, and keep enough runway to get through the knothole. And the one certainty is nobody really knows how tight that knothole really is. All right, let's call it a wrap. Next week we dive deeper into Palo Alto Networks, and take a look at how and why that company has held up so well and what to expect at Ignite, Palo Alto's big user conference coming up later this month in Las Vegas. We'll be there with theCube. Okay, many thanks to Alex Myerson on production and manages the podcast, Ken Schiffman as well, as our newest edition to our Boston studio. Great to have you Ken. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social media and in our newsletters. And Rob Hof is our EIC over at Silicon Angle. He does some great editing for us. Thank you to all. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibond.com and siliconangle.com, or you can email me directly David.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @DVellante, or comment on our LinkedIn posts. Please do checkout etr.ai, they got the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCube Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> We are back, approaching the finish line here at Supercomputing 22, our last interview of the day, our last interview of the show. And I have to say Dave Nicholson, my co-host, My name is Paul Gillin. I've been attending trade shows for 40 years Dave, I've never been to one like this. The type of people who are here, the type of problems they're solving, what they talk about, the trade shows are typically, they're so speeds and feeds. They're so financial, they're so ROI, they all sound the same after a while. This is truly a different event. Do you get that sense? >> A hundred percent. Now, I've been attending trade shows for 10 years since I was 19, in other words, so I don't have necessarily your depth. No, but seriously, Paul, totally, completely, completely different than any other conference. First of all, there's the absolute allure of looking at the latest and greatest, coolest stuff. I mean, when you have NASA lecturing on things when you have Lawrence Livermore Labs that we're going to be talking to here in a second it's a completely different story. You have all of the academics you have students who are in competition and also interviewing with organizations. It's phenomenal. I've had chills a lot this week. >> And I guess our last two guests sort of represent that cross section. Armando Acosta, director of HPC Solutions, High Performance Solutions at Dell. And Matt Leininger, who is the HPC Strategist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Now, there is perhaps, I don't know you can correct me on this, but perhaps no institution in the world that uses more computing cycles than Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and is always on the leading edge of what's going on in Supercomputing. And so we want to talk to both of you about that. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today. >> Sure, glad to be here. >> For having us. >> Let's start with you, Armando. Well, let's talk about the juxtaposition of the two of you. I would not have thought of LLNL as being a Dell reference account in the past. Tell us about the background of your relationship and what you're providing to the laboratory. >> Yeah, so we're really excited to be working with Lawrence Livermore, working with Matt. But actually this process started about two years ago. So we started looking at essentially what was coming down the pipeline. You know, what were the customer requirements. What did we need in order to make Matt successful. And so the beauty of this project is that we've been talking about this for two years, and now it's finally coming to fruition. And now we're actually delivering systems and delivering racks of systems. But what I really appreciate is Matt coming to us, us working together for two years and really trying to understand what are the requirements, what's the schedule, what do we need to hit in order to make them successful >> At Lawrence Livermore, what drives your computing requirements I guess? You're working on some very, very big problems but a lot of very complex problems. How do you decide what you need to procure to address them? >> Well, that's a difficult challenge. I mean, our mission is a national security mission dealing with making sure that we do our part to provide the high performance computing capabilities to the US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration. We do that through the Advanced Simulation computing program. Its goal is to provide that computing power to make sure that the US nuclear rep of the stockpile is safe, secure, and effective. So how we go about doing that? There's a lot of work involved. We have multiple platform lines that we accomplish that goal with. One of them is the advanced technology systems. Those are the ones you've heard about a lot, they're pushing towards exit scale, the GPU technologies incorporated into those. We also have a second line, a platform line, called the Commodity Technology Systems. That's where right now we're partnering with Dell on the latest generation of those. Those systems are a little more conservative, they're right now CPU only driven but they're also intended to be the everyday work horses. So those are the first systems our users get on. It's very easy for them to get their applications up and running. They're the first things they use usually on a day to day basis. They run a lot of small to medium size jobs that you need to do to figure out how to most effectively use what workloads you need to move to the even larger systems to accomplish our mission goals. >> The workhorses. >> Yeah. >> What have you seen here these last few days of the show, what excites you? What are the most interesting things you've seen? >> There's all kinds of things that are interesting. Probably most interesting ones I can't talk about in public, unfortunately, 'cause of NDA agreements, of course. But it's always exciting to be here at Supercomputing. It's always exciting to see the products that we've been working with industry and co-designing with them on for, you know, several years before the public actually sees them. That's always an exciting part of the conference as well specifically with CTS-2, it's exciting. As was mentioned before, I've been working with Dell for nearly two years on this, but the systems first started being delivered this past August. And so we're just taking the initial deliveries of those. We've deployed, you know, roughly about 1600 nodes now but that'll ramp up to over 6,000 nodes over the next three or four months. >> So how does this work intersect with Sandia and Los Alamos? Explain to us the relationship there. >> Right, so those three laboratories are the laboratories under the National Nuclear Security Administration. We partner together on CTS. So the architectures, as you were asking, how do we define these things, it's the labs coming together. Those three laboratories we define what we need for that architecture. We have a joint procurement that is run out of Livermore but then the systems are deployed at all three laboratories. And then they serve the programs that I mentioned for each laboratory as well. >> I've worked in this space for a very long time you know I've worked with agencies where the closest I got to anything they were actually doing was the sort of guest suite outside the secure area. And sometimes there are challenges when you're communicating, it's like you have a partner like Dell who has all of these things to offer, all of these ideas. You have requirements, but maybe you can't share 100% of what you need to do. How do you navigate that? Who makes the decision about what can be revealed in these conversations? You talk about NDA in terms of what's been shared with you, you may be limited in terms of what you can share with vendors. Does that cause inefficiency? >> To some degree. I mean, we do a good job within the NSA of understanding what our applications need and then mapping that to technical requirements that we can talk about with vendors. We also have kind of in between that we've done this for many years. A recent example is of course with the exit scale computing program and some things it's doing creating proxy apps or mini apps that are smaller versions of some of the things that we are important to us. Some application areas are important to us, hydrodynamics, material science, things like that. And so we can collaborate with vendors on those proxy apps to co-design systems and tweak the architectures. In fact, we've done a little bit that with CTS-2, not as much in CTS as maybe in the ATS platforms but that kind of general idea of how we collaborate through these proxy applications is something we've used across platforms. >> Now is Dell one of your co-design partners? >> In CTS-2 absolutely, yep. >> And how, what aspects of CTS-2 are you working on with Dell? >> Well, the architecture itself was the first, you know thing we worked with them on, we had a procurement come out, you know they bid an architecture on that. We had worked with them, you know but previously on our requirements, understanding what our requirements are. But that architecture today is based on the fourth generation Intel Xeon that you've heard a lot about at the conference. We are one of the first customers to get those systems in. All the systems are interconnected together with the Cornell Network's Omni-Path Network that we've used before and are very excited about as well. And we build up from there. The systems get integrated in by the operations teams at the laboratory. They get integrated into our production computing environment. Dell is really responsible, you know for designing these systems and delivering to the laboratories. The laboratories then work with Dell. We have a software stack that we provide on top of that called TOSS, for Tri-Lab Operating System. It's based on Redhead Enterprise Linux. But the goal there is that it allows us, a common user environment, a common simulation environment across not only CTS-2, but maybe older systems we have and even the larger systems that we'll be deploying as well. So from a user perspective they see a common user interface, a common environment across all the different platforms that they use at Livermore and the other laboratories. >> And Armando, what does Dell get out of the co-design arrangement with the lab? >> Well, we get to make sure that they're successful. But the other big thing that we want to do, is typically when you think about Dell and HPC, a lot of people don't make that connection together. And so what we're trying to do is make sure that, you know they know that, hey, whether you're a work group customer at the smallest end or a super computer customer at the highest end, Dell wants to make sure that we have the right setup portfolio to match any needs across this. But what we were really excited about this, this is kind of our, you know big CTS-2 first thing we've done together. And so, you know, hopefully this has been successful. We've made Matt happy and we look forward to the future what we can do with bigger and bigger things. >> So will the labs be okay with Dell coming up with a marketing campaign that said something like, "We can't confirm that alien technology is being reverse engineered." >> Yeah, that would fly. >> I mean that would be right, right? And I have to ask you the question directly and the way you can answer it is by smiling like you're thinking, what a stupid question. Are you reverse engineering alien technology at the labs? >> Yeah, you'd have to suck the PR office. >> Okay, okay. (all laughing) >> Good answer. >> No, but it is fascinating because to a degree it's like you could say, yeah, we're working together but if you really want to dig into it, it's like, "Well I kind of can't tell you exactly how some of this stuff is." Do you consider anything that you do from a technology perspective, not what you're doing with it, but the actual stack, do you try to design proprietary things into the stack or do you say, "No, no, no, we're going to go with standards and then what we do with it is proprietary and secret."? >> Yeah, it's more the latter. >> Is the latter? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you're not going to try to reverse engineer the industry? >> No, no. We want the solutions that we develop to enhance the industry to be able to apply to a broader market so that we can, you know, gain from the volume of that market, the lower cost that they would enable, right? If we go off and develop more and more customized solutions that can be extraordinarily expensive. And so we we're really looking to leverage the wider market, but do what we can to influence that, to develop key technologies that we and others need that can enable us in the high forms computing space. >> We were talking with Satish Iyer from Dell earlier about validated designs, Dell's reference designs for for pharma and for manufacturing, in HPC are you seeing that HPC, Armando, and is coming together traditionally and more of an academic research discipline beginning to come together with commercial applications? And are these two markets beginning to blend? >> Yeah, I mean so here's what's happening, is you have this convergence of HPC, AI and data analytics. And so when you have that combination of those three workloads they're applicable across many vertical markets, right? Whether it's financial services, whether it's life science, government and research. But what's interesting, and Matt won't brag about, but a lot of stuff that happens in the DoE labs trickles down to the enterprise space, trickles down to the commercial space because these guys know how to do it at scale, they know how to do it efficiently and they know how to hit the mark. And so a lot of customers say, "Hey we want what CTS-2 does," right? And so it's very interesting. The way I love it is their process the way they do the RFP process. Matt talked about the benchmarks and helping us understand, hey here's kind of the mark you have to hit. And then at the same time, you know if we make them successful then obviously it's better for all of us, right? You know, I want to secure nuclear stock pile so I hope everybody else does as well. >> The software stack you mentioned, I think Tia? >> TOSS. >> TOSS. >> Yeah. >> How did that come about? Why did you feel the need to develop your own software stack? >> It originated back, you know, even 20 years ago when we first started building Linux clusters when that was a crazy idea. Livermore and other laboratories were really the first to start doing that and then push them to larger and larger scales. And it was key to have Linux running on that at the time. And so we had the. >> So 20 years ago you knew you wanted to run on Linux? >> Was 20 years ago, yeah, yeah. And we started doing that but we needed a way to have a version of Linux that we could partner with someone on that would do, you know, the support, you know, just like you get from an EoS vendor, right? Security support and other things. But then layer on top of that, all the HPC stuff you need either to run the system, to set up the system, to support our user base. And that evolved into to TOSS which is the Tri-Lab Operating System. Now it's based on the latest version of Redhead Enterprise Linux, as I mentioned before, with all the other HPC magic, so to speak and all that HPC magic is open source things. It's not stuff, it may be things that we develop but it's nothing closed source. So all that's there we run it across all these different environments as I mentioned before. And it really originated back in the early days of, you know, Beowulf clusters, Linux clusters, as just needing something that we can use to run on multiple systems and start creating that common environment at Livermore and then eventually the other laboratories. >> How is a company like Dell, able to benefit from the open source work that's coming out of the labs? >> Well, when you look at the open source, I mean open source is good for everybody, right? Because if you make a open source tool available then people start essentially using that tool. And so if we can make that open source tool more robust and get more people using it, it gets more enterprise ready. And so with that, you know, we're all about open source we're all about standards and really about raising all boats 'cause that's what open source is all about. >> And with that, we are out of time. This is our 28th interview of SC22 and you're taking us out on a high note. Armando Acosta, director of HPC Solutions at Dell. Matt Leininger, HPC Strategist, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. Great discussion. Hopefully it was a good show for you. Fascinating show for us and thanks for being with us today. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you for having us >> Dave it's been a pleasure. >> Absolutely. >> Hope we'll be back next year. >> Can't believe, went by fast. Absolutely at SC23. >> We hope you'll be back next year. This is Paul Gillin. That's a wrap, with Dave Nicholson for theCUBE. See here in next time. (soft upbear music)

(upbeat music) (logo swooshing) >> Good morning and welcome back to Dallas, ladies and gentlemen, we are here with theCUBE Live from Supercomputing 2022. David, my cohost, how are you doing? Exciting, day two, feeling good? >> Very exciting. Ready to start off the day. >> Very excited. We have two fascinating guests joining us to kick us off. Please welcome Pete and Armando. Gentlemen, thank you for being here with us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm excited that you're starting off the day because we've been hearing a lot of rumors about Ethernet as the fabric for HPC, but we really haven't done a deep dive yet during the show. You all seem all in on Ethernet. Tell us about that. Armando, why don't you start? >> Yeah, I mean, when you look at Ethernet, customers are asking for flexibility and choice. So when you look at HPC, InfiniBand's always been around, right? But when you look at where Ethernet's coming in, it's really our commercial in their enterprise customers. And not everybody wants to be in the top 500, what they want to do is improve their job time and improve their latency over the network. And when you look at Ethernet, you kind of look at the sweet spot between 8, 12, 16, 32 nodes, that's a perfect fit for Ethernet in that space and those types of jobs. >> I love that. Pete, you want to elaborate? >> Yeah, sure. I mean, I think one of the biggest things you find with Ethernet for HPC is that, if you look at where the different technologies have gone over time, you've had old technologies like, ATM, Sonic, Fifty, and pretty much everything is now kind of converged toward Ethernet. I mean, there's still some technologies such as InfiniBand, Omni-Path, that are out there. But basically, they're single source at this point. So what you see is that there is a huge ecosystem behind Ethernet. And you see that also the fact that Ethernet is used in the rest of the enterprise, is used in the cloud data centers, that is very easy to integrate HPC based systems into those systems. So as you move HPC out of academia into enterprise, into cloud service providers, it's much easier to integrate it with the same technology you're already using in those data centers, in those networks. >> So what's the state of the art for Ethernet right now? What's the leading edge? what's shipping now and what's in the near future? You're with Broadcom, you guys designed this stuff. >> Pete: Yeah. >> Savannah: Right. >> Yeah, so leading edge right now, got a couple things-- >> Savannah: We love good stage prop here on the theCUBE. >> Yeah, so this is Tomahawk 4. So this is what is in production, it's shipping in large data centers worldwide. We started sampling this in 2019, started going into data centers in 2020. And this is 25.6 terabytes per second. >> David: Okay. >> Which matches any other technology out there. Like if you look at say, InfinBand, highest they have right now that's just starting to get into production is 25.6 T. So state of the art right now is what we introduced, We announced this in August, This is Tomahawk 5, so this is 51.2 terabytes per second. So double the bandwidth, out of any other technology that's out there. And the important thing about networking technology is when you double the bandwidth, you don't just double the efficiency, actually, winds up being a factor of six efficiency. >> Savannah: Wow. >> 'Cause if you want, I can go into that, but... >> Why not? >> Well, what I want to know, please tell me that in your labs, you have a poster on the wall that says T five, with some like Terminator kind of character. (all laughs) 'Cause that would be cool. If it's not true, just don't say anything. I'll just... >> Pete: This can actually shift into a terminator. >> Well, so this is from a switching perspective. >> Yeah. >> When we talk about the end nodes, when we talk about creating a fabric, what's the latest in terms of, well, the nicks that are going in there, what speed are we talking about today? >> So as far as 30 speeds, it tends to be 50 gigabits per second. >> David: Okay. >> Moving to a hundred gig PAM-4. >> David: Okay. >> And we do see a lot of nicks in the 200 gig Ethernet port speed. So that would be four lanes, 50 gig. But we do see that advancing to 400 gig fairly soon, 800 gig in the future. But say state of the art right now, we're seeing for the end node tends to be 200 gig E based on 50 gig PAM-4. >> Wow. >> Yeah, that's crazy. >> Yeah, that is great. My mind is act actively blown. I want to circle back to something that you brought up a second ago, which I think is really astute. When you talked about HPC moving from academia into enterprise, you're both seeing this happen, where do you think we are on the adoption curve and sort of in that cycle? Armando, do you want to go? >> Yeah, well, if you look at the market research, they're actually telling you it's 50/50 now. So Ethernet is at the level of 50%, InfinBand's at 50%, right? >> Savannah: Interesting. >> Yeah, and so what's interesting to us, customers are coming to us and say, hey, we want to see flexibility and choice and, hey, let's look at Ethernet and let's look at InfiniBand. But what is interesting about this is that we're working with Broadcom, we have their chips in our lab, we their have switches in our lab. And really what we're trying to do is make it easy to simple and configure the network for essentially MPI. And so the goal here with our validated designs is really to simplify this. So if you have a customer that, hey, I've been InfiniBand but now I want to go Ethernet, there's going to be some learning curves there. And so what we want to do is really simplify that so that we can make it easy to install, get the cluster up and running and they can actually get some value out the cluster. >> Yeah, Pete, talk about that partnership. what does that look like? I mean, are you working with Dell before the T six comes out? Or you just say what would be cool is we'll put this in the T six? >> No, we've had a very long partnership both on the hardware and the software side. Dell's been an early adopter of our silicon. We've worked very closely on SI and Sonic on the operating system, and they provide very valuable feedback for us on our roadmap. So before we put out a new chip, and we have actually three different product lines within the switching group, within Broadcom, we've then gotten very valuable feedback on the hardware and on the APIs, on the operating system that goes on top of those chips. So that way when it comes to market, Dell can take it and deliver the exact features that they have in the current generation to their customers to have that continuity. And also they give us feedback on the next gen features they'd like to see again, in both the hardware and the software. >> So I'm fascinated by... I always like to know like what, yeah, exactly. Look, you start talking about the largest supercomputers, most powerful supercomputers that exist today, and you start looking at the specs and there might be two million CPUs, 2 million CPU cores. Exoflap of performance. What are the outward limits of T five in switches, building out a fabric, what does that look like? What are the increments in terms of how many... And I know it's a depends answer, but how many nodes can you support in a scale out cluster before you need another switch? Or what does that increment of scale look like today? >> Yeah, so this is 51.2 terabytes per second. Where we see the most common implementation based on this would be with 400 gig Ethernet ports. >> David: Okay. >> So that would be 128, 400 gig E ports connected to one chip. Now, if you went to 200 gig, which is kind of the state of the art for the nicks, you can have double that. So in a single hop, you can have 256 end nodes connected through one switch. >> Okay, so this T five, that thing right there, (all laughing) inside a sheet metal box, obviously you've got a bunch of ports coming out of that. So what's the form factor look like for where that T five sits? Is there just one in a chassis or you have.. What does that look like? >> It tends to be pizza boxes these days. What you've seen overall is that the industry's moved away from chassis for these high end systems more towardS pizza boxes. And you can have composable systems where, in the past you would have line cards, either the fabric cards that the line cards are plug into or interfaced to. These days what tends to happen is you'd have a pizza box and if you wanted to build up like a virtual chassis, what you would do is use one of those pizza boxes as the fabric card, one of them as the line card. >> David: Okay. >> So what we see, the most common form factor for this is they tend to be two, I'd say for North America, most common would be a 2RU, with 64 OSFP ports. And often each of those OSFP, which is an 800 gig E or 800 gig port, we've broken out into two 400 gig ports. >> So yeah, in 2RU, and this is all air cooled, in 2RU, you've got 51.2 T. We do see some cases where customers would like to have different optics and they'll actually deploy 4RU, just so that way they have the phase-space density. So they can plug in 128, say QSFP 112. But yeah, it really depends on which optics, if you want to have DAK connectivity combined with optics. But those are the two most common form factors. >> And Armando, Ethernet isn't necessarily Ethernet in the sense that many protocols can be run over it. >> Right. >> I think I have a projector at home that's actually using Ethernet physical connections. But, so what are we talking about here in terms of the actual protocol that's running over this? Is this exactly the same as what you think of as data center Ethernet, or is this RDMA over converged Ethernet? What Are we talking about? >> Yeah, so RDMA, right? So when you look at running, essentially HPC workloads, you have the NPI protocol, so message passing interface, right? And so what you need to do is you may need to make sure that that NPI message passing interface runs efficiently on Ethernet. And so this is why we want to test and validate all these different things to make sure that that protocol runs really, really fast on Ethernet. If you look at NPIs officially, built to, hey, it was designed to run on InfiniBand but now what you see with Broadcom, with the great work they're doing, now we can make that work on Ethernet and get same performance, so that's huge for customers. >> Both of you get to see a lot of different types of customers. I kind of feel like you're a little bit of a looking into the crystal ball type because you essentially get to see the future knowing what people are trying to achieve moving forward. Talk to us about the future of Ethernet in HPC in terms of AI and ML, where do you think we're going to be next year or 10 years from now? >> You want to go first or you want me to go first? >> I can start, yeah. >> Savannah: Pete feels ready. >> So I mean, what I see, I mean, Ethernet, what we've seen is that as far as on, starting off of the switch side, is that we've consistently doubled the bandwidth every 18 to 24 months. >> That's impressive. >> Pete: Yeah. >> Nicely done, casual, humble brag there. That was great, I love that. I'm here for you. >> I mean, I think that's one of the benefits of Ethernet, is the ecosystem, is the trajectory the roadmap we've had, I mean, you don't see that in any of the networking technology. >> David: More who? (all laughing) >> So I see that, that trajectory is going to continue as far as the switches doubling in bandwidth, I think that they're evolving protocols, especially again, as you're moving away from academia into the enterprise, into cloud data centers, you need to have a combination of protocols. So you'll probably focus still on RDMA, for the supercomputing, the AI/ML workloads. But we do see that as you have a mix of the applications running on these end nodes, maybe they're interfacing to the CPUs for some processing, you might use a different mix of protocols. So I'd say it's going to be doubling a bandwidth over time, evolution of the protocols. I mean, I expect that Rocky is probably going to evolve over time depending on the AI/ML and the HPC workloads. I think also there's a big change coming as far as the physical connectivity within the data center. Like one thing we've been focusing on is co-packed optics. So right now, this chip is, all the balls in the back here, there's electrical connections. >> How many are there, by the way? 9,000 plus on the back of that-- >> 9,352. >> I love how specific it is. It's brilliant. >> Yeah, so right now, all the SERDES, all the signals are coming out electrically based, but we've actually shown, we actually we have a version of Tomahawk 4 at 25.6 T that has co-packed optics. So instead of having electrical output, you actually have optics directly out of the package. And if you look at, we'll have a version of Tomahawk 5. >> Nice. >> Where it's actually even a smaller form factor than this, where instead of having the electrical output from the bottom, you actually have fibers that plug directly into the sides. >> Wow. Cool. >> So I see there's the bandwidth, there's radix's increasing, protocols, different physical connectivity. So I think there's a lot of things throughout, and the protocol stack's also evolving. So a lot of excitement, a lot of new technology coming to bear. >> Okay, You just threw a carrot down the rabbit hole. I'm only going to chase this one, okay? >> Peter: All right. >> So I think of individual discreet physical connections to the back of those balls. >> Yeah. >> So if there's 9,000, fill in the blank, that's how many connections there are. How do you do that many optical connections? What's the mapping there? What does that look like? >> So what we've announced for Tomahawk 5 is it would have FR4 optics coming out. So you'd actually have 512 fiber pairs coming out. So basically on all four sides, you'd have these fiber ribbons that come in and connect. There's actually fibers coming out of the sides there. We wind up having, actually, I think in this case, we would actually have 512 channels and it would wind up being on 128 actual fiber pairs because-- >> It's miraculous, essentially. >> Savannah: I know. >> Yeah. So a lot of people are going to be looking at this and thinking in terms of InfiniBand versus Ethernet, I think you've highlighted some of the benefits of specifically running Ethernet moving forward as HPC which sort of just trails slightly behind super computing as we define it, becomes more pervasive AI/ML. What are some of the other things that maybe people might not immediately think about when they think about the advantages of running Ethernet in that environment? Is it about connecting the HPC part of their business into the rest of it? What are the advantages? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a big thing. I think, and one of the biggest things that Ethernet has again, is that the data centers, the networks within enterprises, within clouds right now are run on Ethernet. So now, if you want to add services for your customers, the easiest thing for you to do is the drop in clusters that are connected with the same networking technology. So I think one of the biggest things there is that if you look at what's happening with some of the other proprietary technologies, I mean, in some cases they'll have two different types of networking technologies before they interface to Ethernet. So now you've got to train your technicians, you train your assist admins on two different network technologies. You need to have all the debug technology, all the interconnect for that. So here, the easiest thing is you can use Ethernet, it's going to give you the same performance and actually, in some cases, we've seen better performance than we've seen with Omni-Path, better than in InfiniBand. >> That's awesome. Armando, we didn't get to you, so I want to make sure we get your future hot take. Where do you see the future of Ethernet here in HPC? >> Well, Pete hit on a big thing is bandwidth, right? So when you look at, train a model, okay? So when you go and train a model in AI, you need to have a lot of data in order to train that model, right? So what you do is essentially, you build a model, you choose whatever neural network you want to utilize. But if you don't have a good data set that's trained over that model, you can't essentially train the model. So if you have bandwidth, you want big pipes because you have to move that data set from the storage to the CPU. And essentially, if you're going to do it maybe on CPU only, but if you do it on accelerators, well, guess what? You need a big pipe in order to get all that data through. And here's the deal, the bigger the pipe you have, the more data, the faster you can train that model. So the faster you can train that model, guess what? The faster you get to some new insight, maybe it's a new competitive advantage, maybe it's some new way you design a product, but that's a benefit of speed, you want faster, faster, faster. >> It's all about making it faster and easier-- for the users. >> Armando: It is. >> I love that. Last question for you, Pete, just because you've said Tomahawk seven times, and I'm thinking we're in Texas, stakes, there's a lot going on with that. >> Making me hungry. >> I know, exactly. I'm sitting out here thinking, man, I did not have big enough breakfast. How did you come up with the name Tomahawk? >> So Tomahawk, I think it just came from a list. So we have a tried end product line. >> Savannah: Ah, yes. >> Which is a missile product line. And Tomahawk is being kind of like the bigger and batter missile, so. >> Savannah: Love this. Yeah, I mean-- >> So do you like your engineers? You get to name it. >> Had to ask. >> It's collaborative. >> Okay. >> We want to make sure everyone's in sync with it. >> So just it's not the Aquaman tried. >> Right. >> It's the steak Tomahawk. I think we're good now. >> Now that we've cleared that-- >> Now we've cleared that up. >> Armando, Pete, it was really nice to have both you. Thank you for teaching us about the future of Ethernet and HCP. David Nicholson, always a pleasure to share the stage with you. And thank you all for tuning in to theCUBE live from Dallas. We're here talking all things HPC and supercomputing all day long. We hope you'll continue to tune in. My name's Savannah Peterson, thanks for joining us. (soft music)

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

>>We're back with a blueprint for trusted infrastructure and partnership with Dell Technologies in the cube. And we're here with Mahesh Nager, who is a consultant in the area of networking product management at Dell Technologies. Mahesh, welcome. Good to see you. >>Hey, good morning Davis. Nice to meet, Meet to you as well. >>Hey, so we've been digging into all the parts of the infrastructure stack and now we're gonna look at the all important networking components. Mahesh, when we think about networking in today's environment, we think about the core data center and we're connecting out to various locations including the cloud and both the near and the far edge. So the question is from Dell's perspective, what's unique and challenging about securing network infrastructure that we should know about? >>Yeah, so a few years ago IT security and an enterprise was primarily putting a wrapper around the data center because it was constrained to an infrastructure owned and operated by the enterprise for the most part. So putting a rapid around it like a parameter or a firewall was a sufficient response because you could basically control the one small enough control today with the distributed data, intelligent software, different systems, multi-cloud onement and asset service delivery, you know, the infrastructure for the modern era changes the way to secure the network infrastructure. In today's, you know, data driven world, it operates everywhere. And that has created and accessed everywhere so far from, you know, the centralized mono data centers of the past. The biggest challenge is how do we build the network infrastructure of the modern era that are intelligent with automation, enabling maximum flexibility and business agility without any compromise on the security. We believe that in this data era, the security transformation must accompany digital transformation. >>Yeah, that's very good. You talked about a couple of things there. Data by its very nature is distributed. There is no perimeter anymore, so you can't just, as you say, put a wrap around it. I like the way you phrase that. So when you think about cyber security resilience from a networking perspective, how do you define that? In other words, what are the basic principles that you adhere to when thinking about securing network infrastructure for your customers? >>So our belief is that cybersecurity and cybersecurity resilience, they need to be holistic. They need to be integrated, scalable, one that spans the entire enterprise and with a consistent and objective and policy implementation. So cybersecurity needs to span across all the devices and running across any application, whether the application resets on the cloud or anywhere else in the infrastructure. From a networking standpoint, what does it mean? It's again, the same principles, right? You know, in order to prevent the threat actors from accessing, changing, destroying, or stealing sensitive data, this definition holds good for networking as well. So if you look at it from a networking perspective, it's the ability to protect from and withstand attacks on the networking systems as we continue to evolve. This will also also include the ability to adapt and recover from these attacks, which is what cyber resilience aspect is all about. So cybersecurity best practices, as you know, is continuously changing the landscape, primarily because the cyber threats also continue to evolve. >>Yeah, got it. So I like that. So it's gotta be integrated, it's gotta be scalable, it's gotta be comprehensive, comprehensive and adaptable. You're saying it can't be static, >>Right? Right. So I think, you know, you had a second part of a question, you know, that says what do we, you know, what are the basic principles? You know, when you're thinking about securing network infrastructure, when you are looking at securing the network infrastructure, it revolves around core security capability of the devices that form the network. And what are these security capabilities? These are access control, software integrity and vulnerability response. When you look at access control, it's to ensure that only the authenticated users are able to access the platform and they're able to access only the kind of the assets that they're authorized to based on their user level. Now accessing a network platform like a switch or a rotor for example, is typically used for say, configuration and management of the networking switch. So user access is based on say, rules for that metal in a role based access control, whether you are security admin or a network admin or a storage admin. >>And it's imperative that logging is enabled because any of the change to the configuration is actually logged and monitored as well. We talking about software's integrity, it's the ability to ensure that the software that's running on the system has not been compromised. And, and you know, this is important because it could actually, you know, get hold of the system and you know, you could get und desired results in terms of, say validation of the images. It's, it needs to be done through in digital signature. So, so it's important that when you're talking about say, software integrity, A, you are ensuring that the platform is not compromised, you know, is not compromised, and B, that any upgrades, you know, that happens to the platform is happening through validated signature. >>Okay. And now, now you've now, so there's access control, software integrity, and I think you, you've got a third element which is i, I think response, but please continue. >>Yeah, so you know, the third myth about civil notability. So we follow the same process that's been followed by the rest of the products within the Dell product family. That's to report or identify, you know, any kind of a vulnerability that's being addressed by the Dell product security incident response team. So the networking portfolio is no different. You know, it follows the same process for identification for tri and for resolution of these vulnerabilities. And this are addressed either through patches or through new reasons via networking software. >>Yeah, got it. Okay. So I mean, you didn't say zero trust, but when you were talking about access control, you're really talking about access to only those assets that people are authorized to access. I know zero trust sometimes is a buzzword, but, but you I think gave it, you know, some clarity there. Software integrity, it's about assurance validation, your digital signature you mentioned and, and that there's been no compromise. And then how you respond to incidents in a standard way that can fit into a security framework. So outstanding description, thank you for that. But then the next question is, how does Dell networking fit into the construct of what we've been talking about Dell trusted infrastructure? >>Okay, so networking is the key element in the Dell trusted infrastructure. It prides the interconnect between the service and the storage world. And you know, it's part of any data center configuration for a trusted infrastructure. The network needs to have access control in place where only the authorized nels are able to make change to the network configuration and logging of any of those changes is also done through the logging capabilities. Additionally, we should also ensure that the configuration should provide network isolation between say the management network and the data traffic network because they need to be separate and distinct from each other. And furthermore, even if you look at the data traffic network and now you have things like say segmentation isolated segments, I know via vrs or, or some micro segmentation via partners, this allows various level of security for each of those segments. >>So it's important, you know, that, that the network infrastructure has the ability, you know, to provide all this, this services from a Dell networking security perspective, right? You know, there are multiple layers of defense, you know, both at the edge and in the network, in the hardware and in the software and essentially, you know, a set of rules and a configuration that's designed to sort of protect the integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility of the network assets. So each network security layer, it implements policies and controls as I said, you know, including send network segmentation. We do have capabilities sources, centralized management automation and capability and scalability for that matter. Now you add all of these things, you know, with the open networking standards or software, different principles and you essentially, you know, reach to the point where you know, you're looking at zero trust network access, which is essentially sort of a building block for increased cloud adoption. >>If you look at say that you know the different pillars of a zero touch architecture, you know, if you look at the device aspect, you know, we do have support for security for example, we do have say trusted platform in a trusted platform models tpms on certain offer products and you know, the physical security know, plain, simple old one lab port enabled from a user trust perspective, we know it's all done via access control days via role based access control and say capability in order to provide say remote authentication or things like say sticky Mac or Mac learning limit and so on. If you look at say a transport and a session trust layer, these are essentially, you know, how do you access, you know, this switch, you know, is it by plain or telenet or is it like secure ssh, right? And you know, when a host communicates, you know, to the switch, we do have things like self-signed or a certificate authority based certification. >>And one of the important aspect is, you know, in terms of, you know, the routing protocol, the routing protocol, say for example BGP for example, we do have the capability to support MD five authentication between the VGP peers so that there is no, you know, manages attack, you know, to the network where the routing table is compromised. And the other aspect is about second control plane is here in now, you know, it's, it's typical that if you don't have a contra plane here, you know, it could be flooded and you know, you know, the switch could be compromised by city denial service attacks. From an application trust perspective, as I mentioned, you know, we do have, you know, the application specific security rules where you could actually define, you know, the specific security rules based on the specific applications, you know, that are running within the system. >>And I did talk about, say the digital signature and the cryptographic checks and that we do for authentication and for, I mean rather for the authenticity and the validation of, you know, of the image and the BS and so on and so forth. Finally, you know, the data trust, we are looking at, you know, the network separation, you know, the network separation could happen or VRF plain old wheel Ls, you know, which can bring about say multitenancy aspects. We talk about some microsegmentation as it applies to nsx for example. The other aspect is, you know, we do have, with our own smart fabric services that's enabled in a fabric, we have a concept of c cluster security. So all of this, you know, the different pillars, they sort of make up for the zero trust infrastructure for the networking assets of an infrastructure. >>Yeah. So thank you for that. There's a, there's a lot to unpack there. You know, one of the premise, the premise really of this, this, this, this segment that we're setting up in this series is really that everything you just mentioned, or a lot of things you just mentioned used to be the responsibility of the security team. And, and the premise that we're putting forth is that because security teams are so stretched thin, you, you gotta shift a vendor community. Dell specifically is shifting a lot of those tasks to their own r and d and taking care of a lot of that. So, cuz sec op teams got a lot of other stuff to, to worry about. So my question relates to things like automation, which can help and scalability, what about those topics as it relates to networking infrastructure? >>Okay, our portfolio, >>It enables state of the automation software, you know, that enables simplifying of the design. So for example, we do have, you know, you know the fabric design center, you know, a tool that automates the design of the anti fabric and you know, from a deployment and you know, the management of the network infrastructure, there are simplicities, you know, using, you know, like Ansible s for Sonic for example, are, you know, for a better or settle and tell story. You know, we do have smart fabric services that can automate the entire fabric, you know, for a storage solution or for, you know, for one of the workloads for example. Now we do help reduce the complexity by closely integrating the management of the physical and the virtual networking infrastructure. And again, you know, we have those capabilities using Sonic or Smart Traffic services. If you look at Sonic for example, right? >>It delivers automated intent based secure containerized network and it has the ability to provide some network visibility and awareness and, and all of these things are actually valid, you know, for a modern networking infrastructure. So now if you look at Sonic, you know, it's, you know, the usage of those tools, you know, that are available, you know, within the Sonic NAS is not restricted, you know, just to the data center infrastructure is, it's a unified no, you know, that's well applicable beyond the data center. You now right up to the edge. Now if you look at our north from a smart traffic voice 10 perspective, you know, as I mentioned, we do have smart fabric services which essentially, you know, simplifies the deployment day zero. I mean rather day one, day two deployment expansion plans and the life cycle management of our conversion infrastructure and hyper and hyperconverge infrastructure solutions. And finally, in order to enable say, zero touch deployment, we do have, you know, a VP solution with our SD van capability. So these are, you know, ways by which we bring down the complexity by, you know, enhancing the automation capability using, you know, a singular loss that can expand from a data center now right to the edge. >>Great, thank you for that. Last question real quick pitch me, can you summarize from your point of view, what's the strength of the Dell networking portfolio? >>Okay, so from a Dell networking portfolio, we support capabilities at multiple layers. As I mentioned. We've talking about the physical security, for example, let's say disabling of the unused interface. Sticky Mac and trusted platform modules are the things that to go after. And when you're talking about say secure boot for example, it delivers the authenticity and the integrity of the OS 10 images at the startup. And Secure Boot also protects the startup configuration so that, you know, the startup configuration file is not compromised. And Secure port also enables the workload of prediction, for example, that is at another aspect of software image integrity validation, you know, wherein the image is validated for the digital signature in know prior to any upgrade process. And if you are looking at secure access control, we do have things like role-based access control, SSH to the switches, control plane access control that pretty do attacks and say access control from multifactor authentication. >>We do have various tech hacks for entry control to the network and things like CSAC and P IV support, you know, from a federal perspective, we do have, say logging wherein, you know, any event, any auditing capabilities can be possible by say, looking at the clog service, you know, which are pretty much in our transmitter from the devices overts for example, and last we talked about say networks, you know, say network separation and you know, these, you know, separation, you know, ensures that that is, you know, a contained say segment, you know, for a specific purpose or for the specific zone. And you know, this can be implemented by a, the micro segmentation, you know, just a plain old wheel are using virtual route of framework vr, for example. >>A lot there. I mean, I think, frankly, you know, my takeaway is you guys do the heavy lifting in a very complicated topic. So thank you so much for, for coming on the cube and explaining that in, in quite some depth. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you indeed. >>Oh, you're very welcome. Okay, in a moment I'll be back to dig into the hyper-converged infrastructure part of the portfolio and look at how when you enter the world of software defined where you're controlling servers and storage and networks via software led system, you can be sure that your infrastructure is trusted and secure. You're watching a blueprint for trusted infrastructure made possible by Dell Technologies and collaboration with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>The cybersecurity landscape continues to be one characterized by a series of point tools designed to do a very specific job, often pretty well, but the mosaic of tooling is grown over the years causing complexity in driving up costs and increasing exposures. So the game of Whackamole continues. Moreover, the way organizations approach security is changing quite dramatically. The cloud, while offering so many advantages, has also created new complexities. The shared responsibility model redefines what the cloud provider secures, for example, the S three bucket and what the customer is responsible for eg properly configuring the bucket. You know, this is all well and good, but because virtually no organization of any size can go all in on a single cloud, that shared responsibility model now spans multiple clouds and with different protocols. Now that of course includes on-prem and edge deployments, making things even more complex. Moreover, the DevOps team is being asked to be the point of execution to implement many aspects of an organization's security strategy. >>This extends to securing the runtime, the platform, and even now containers which can end up anywhere. There's a real need for consolidation in the security industry, and that's part of the answer. We've seen this both in terms of mergers and acquisitions as well as platform plays that cover more and more ground. But the diversity of alternatives and infrastructure implementations continues to boggle the mind with more and more entry points for the attackers. This includes sophisticated supply chain attacks that make it even more difficult to understand how to secure components of a system and how secure those components actually are. The number one challenge CISOs face in today's complex world is lack of talent to address these challenges. And I'm not saying that SecOps pros are not talented, They are. There just aren't enough of them to go around and the adversary is also talented and very creative, and there are more and more of them every day. >>Now, one of the very important roles that a technology vendor can play is to take mundane infrastructure security tasks off the plates of SEC off teams. Specifically we're talking about shifting much of the heavy lifting around securing servers, storage, networking, and other infrastructure and their components onto the technology vendor via r and d and other best practices like supply chain management. And that's what we're here to talk about. Welcome to the second part in our series, A Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure Made Possible by Dell Technologies and produced by the Cube. My name is Dave Ante and I'm your host now. Previously we looked at what trusted infrastructure means and the role that storage and data protection play in the equation. In this part two of the series, we explore the changing nature of technology infrastructure, how the industry generally in Dell specifically, are adapting to these changes and what is being done to proactively address threats that are increasingly stressing security teams. >>Now today, we continue the discussion and look more deeply into servers networking and hyper-converged infrastructure to better understand the critical aspects of how one company Dell is securing these elements so that dev sec op teams can focus on the myriad new attack vectors and challenges that they faced. First up is Deepak rang Garage Power Edge security product manager at Dell Technologies. And after that we're gonna bring on Mahesh Nagar oim, who was consultant in the networking product management area at Dell. And finally, we're close with Jerome West, who is the product management security lead for HCI hyperconverged infrastructure and converged infrastructure at Dell. Thanks for joining us today. We're thrilled to have you here and hope you enjoy the program. Deepak Arage shoes powered security product manager at Dell Technologies. Deepak, great to have you on the program. Thank you. >>Thank you for having me. >>So we're going through the infrastructure stack and in part one of this series we looked at the landscape overall and how cyber has changed and specifically how Dell thinks about data protection in, in security in a manner that both secures infrastructure and minimizes organizational friction. We also hit on the storage part of the portfolio. So now we want to dig into servers. So my first question is, what are the critical aspects of securing server infrastructure that our audience should be aware of? >>Sure. So if you look at compute in general, right, it has rapidly evolved over the past couple of years, especially with trends toward software defined data centers and with also organizations having to deal with hybrid environments where they have private clouds, public cloud locations, remote offices, and also remote workers. So on top of this, there's also an increase in the complexity of the supply chain itself, right? There are companies who are dealing with hundreds of suppliers as part of their supply chain. So all of this complexity provides a lot of opportunity for attackers because it's expanding the threat surface of what can be attacked, and attacks are becoming more frequent, more severe and more sophisticated. And this has also triggered around in the regulatory and mandates around the security needs. >>And these regulations are not just in the government sector, right? So it extends to critical infrastructure and eventually it also get into the private sector. In addition to this, organizations are also looking at their own internal compliance mandates. And this could be based on the industry in which they're operating in, or it could be their own security postures. And this is the landscape in which servers they're operating today. And given that servers are the foundational blocks of the data center, it becomes extremely important to protect them. And given how complex the modern server platforms are, it's also extremely difficult and it takes a lot of effort. And this means protecting everything from the supply chain to the manufacturing and then eventually the assuring the hardware and software integrity of the platforms and also the operations. And there are very few companies that go to the lens that Dell does in order to secure the server. We truly believe in the notion and the security mentality that, you know, security should enable our customers to go focus on their business and proactively innovate on their business and it should not be a burden to them. And we heavily invest to make that possible for our customers. >>So this is really important because the premise that I set up at the beginning of this was really that I, as of security pro, I'm not a security pro, but if I were, I wouldn't want to be doing all this infrastructure stuff because I now have all these new things I gotta deal with. I want a company like Dell who has the resources to build that security in to deal with the supply chain to ensure the providence, et cetera. So I'm glad you you, you hit on that, but so given what you just said, what does cybersecurity resilience mean from a server perspective? For example, are there specific principles that Dell adheres to that are non-negotiable? Let's say, how does Dell ensure that its customers can trust your server infrastructure? >>Yeah, like when, when it comes to security at Dell, right? It's ingrained in our product, so that's the best way to put it. And security is nonnegotiable, right? It's never an afterthought where we come up with a design and then later on figure out how to go make it secure, right? Our security development life cycle, the products are being designed to counter these threats right from the big. And in addition to that, we are also testing and evaluating these products continuously to identify vulnerabilities. We also have external third party audits which supplement this process. And in addition to this, Dell makes the commitment that we will rapidly respond to any mitigations and vulnerability, any vulnerabilities and exposures found out in the field and provide mitigations and patches for in attacking manner. So this security principle is also built into our server life cycle, right? Every phase of it. >>So we want our products to provide cutting edge capabilities when it comes to security. So as part of that, we are constantly evaluating what our security model is done. We are building on it and continuously improving it. So till a few years ago, our model was primarily based on the N framework of protect, detect and rigor. And it's still aligns really well to that framework, but over the past couple of years, we have seen how computers evolved, how the threads have evolved, and we have also seen the regulatory trends and we recognize the fact that the best security strategy for the modern world is a zero trust approach. And so now when we are building our infrastructure and tools and offerings for customers, first and foremost, they're cyber resilient, right? What we mean by that is they're capable of anticipating threats, withstanding attacks and rapidly recurring from attacks and also adapting to the adverse conditions in which they're deployed. The process of designing these capabilities and identifying these capabilities however, is done through the zero press framework. And that's very important because now we are also anticipating how our customers will end up using these capabilities at there and to enable their own zero trust IT environments and IT zero trusts deployments. We have completely adapted our security approach to make it easier for customers to work with us no matter where they are in their journey towards zero trust option. >>So thank you for that. You mentioned the, this framework, you talked about zero trust. When I think about n I think as well about layered approaches. And when I think about zero trust, I think about if you, if you don't have access to it, you're not getting access, you've gotta earn that, that access and you've got layers and then you still assume that bad guys are gonna get in. So you've gotta detect that and you've gotta response. So server infrastructure security is so fundamental. So my question is, what is Dell providing specifically to, for example, detect anomalies and breaches from unauthorized activity? How do you enable fast and easy or facile recovery from malicious incidents, >>Right? What is that is exactly right, right? Breachers are bound to happen and given how complex our current environment is, it's extremely distributed and extremely connected, right? Data and users are no longer contained with an offices where we can set up a perimeter firewall and say, Yeah, everything within that is good. We can trust everything within it. That's no longer true. The best approach to protect data and infrastructure in the current world is to use a zero trust approach, which uses the principles. Nothing is ever trusted, right? Nothing is trusted implicitly. You're constantly verifying every single user, every single device, and every single access in your system at every single level of your ID environment. And this is the principles that we use on power Edge, right? But with an increased focus on providing granular controls and checks based on the principles of these privileged access. >>So the idea is that service first and foremost need to make sure that the threats never enter and they're rejected at the point of entry, but we recognize breaches are going to occur and if they do, they need to be minimized such that the sphere of damage cost by attacker is minimized so they're not able to move from one part of the network to something else laterally or escalate their privileges and cause more damage, right? So the impact radius for instance, has to be radius. And this is done through features like automated detection capabilities and automation, automated remediation capabilities. So some examples are as part of our end to end boot resilience process, we have what they call a system lockdown, right? We can lock down the configuration of the system and lock on the form versions and all changes to the system. And we have capabilities which automatically detect any drift from that lockdown configuration and we can figure out if the drift was caused to authorized changes or unauthorized changes. >>And if it is an unauthorize change can log it, generate security alerts, and we even have capabilities to automatically roll the firm where, and always versions back to a known good version and also the configurations, right? And this becomes extremely important because as part of zero trust, we need to respond to these things at machine speed and we cannot do it at a human speed. And having these automated capabilities is a big deal when achieving that zero trust strategy. And in addition to this, we also have chassis inclusion detection where if the chassis, the box, the several box is opened up, it logs alerts, and you can figure out even later if there's an AC power cycle, you can go look at the logs to see that the box is opened up and figure out if there was a, like a known authorized access or some malicious actor opening and chain something in your system. >>Great, thank you for that lot. Lot of detail and and appreciate that. I want to go somewhere else now cuz Dell has a renowned supply chain reputation. So what about securing the, the supply chain and the server bill of materials? What does Dell specifically do to track the providence of components it uses in its systems so that when the systems arrive, a customer can be a hundred percent certain that that system hasn't been compromised, >>Right? And we've talked about how complex the modern supply chain is, right? And that's no different for service. We have hundreds of confidence on the server and a lot of these form where in order to be configured and run and this former competence could be coming from third parties suppliers. So now the complexity that we are dealing with like was the end to end approach and that's where Dell pays a lot of attention into assuring the security approach approaching and it starts all the way from sourcing competence, right? And then through the design and then even the manufacturing process where we are wetting the personnel leather factories and wetting the factories itself. And the factories also have physical controls, physical security controls built into them and even shipping, right? We have GPS tagging of packages. So all of this is built to ensure supply chain security. >>But a critical aspect of this is also making sure that the systems which are built in the factories are delivered to the customers without any changes or any tapper. And we have a feature called the secure component verification, which is capable of doing this. What the feature does this, when the system gets built in a factory, it generates an inventory of all the competence in the system and it creates a cryptographic certificate based on the signatures presented to this by the competence. And this certificate is stored separately and sent to the customers separately from the system itself. So once the customers receive the system at their end, they can run out to, it generates an inventory of the competence on the system at their end and then compare it to the golden certificate to make sure nothing was changed. And if any changes are detected, we can figure out if there's an authorized change or unauthorize change. >>Again, authorized changes could be like, you know, upgrades to the drives or memory and ized changes could be any sort of temper. So that's the supply chain aspect of it and bill of metal use is also an important aspect to galing security, right? And we provide a software bill of materials, which is basically a list of ingredients of all the software pieces in the platform. So what it allows our customers to do is quickly take a look at all the different pieces and compare it to the vulnerability database and see if any of the vulner which have been discovered out in the wild affected platform. So that's a quick way of figuring out if the platform has any known vulnerabilities and it has not been patched. >>Excellent. That's really good. My last question is, I wonder if you, you know, give us the sort of summary from your perspective, what are the key strengths of Dell server portfolio from a security standpoint? I'm really interested in, you know, the uniqueness and the strong suit that Dell brings to the table, >>Right? Yeah. We have talked enough about the complexity of the environment and how zero risk is necessary for the modern ID environment, right? And this is integral to Dell powered service. And as part of that like you know, security starts with the supply chain. We already talked about the second component verification, which is a beneath feature that Dell platforms have. And on top of it we also have a silicon place platform mode of trust. So this is a key which is programmed into the silicon on the black service during manufacturing and can never be changed after. And this immutable key is what forms the anchor for creating the chain of trust that is used to verify everything in the platform from the hardware and software integrity to the boot, all pieces of it, right? In addition to that, we also have a host of data protection features. >>Whether it is protecting data at risk in news or inflight, we have self encrypting drives which provides scalable and flexible encryption options. And this couple with external key management provides really good protection for your data address. External key management is important because you know, somebody could physically steam the server walk away, but then the keys are not stored on the server, it stood separately. So that provides your action layer of security. And we also have dual layer encryption where you can compliment the hardware encryption on the secure encrypted drives with software level encryption. Inion to this we have identity and access management features like multifactor authentication, single sign on roles, scope and time based access controls, all of which are critical to enable that granular control and checks for zero trust approach. So I would say like, you know, if you look at the Dell feature set, it's pretty comprehensive and we also have the flexibility built in to meet the needs of all customers no matter where they fall in the spectrum of, you know, risk tolerance and security sensitivity. And we also have the capabilities to meet all the regulatory requirements and compliance requirements. So in a nutshell, I would say that you know, Dell Power Service cyber resident infrastructure helps accelerate zero tested option for customers. >>Got it. So you've really thought this through all the various things that that you would do to sort of make sure that your server infrastructure is secure, not compromised, that your supply chain is secure so that your customers can focus on some of the other things that they have to worry about, which are numerous. Thanks Deepak, appreciate you coming on the cube and participating in the program. >>Thank you for having >>You're welcome. In a moment I'll be back to dig into the networking portion of the infrastructure. Stay with us for more coverage of a blueprint for trusted infrastructure and collaboration with Dell Technologies on the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We're back with a blueprint for trusted infrastructure and partnership with Dell Technologies in the cube. And we're here with Mahesh Nager, who is a consultant in the area of networking product management at Dell Technologies. Mahesh, welcome, good to see you. >>Hey, good morning Dell's, nice to meet, meet to you as well. >>Hey, so we've been digging into all the parts of the infrastructure stack and now we're gonna look at the all important networking components. Mahesh, when we think about networking in today's environment, we think about the core data center and we're connecting out to various locations including the cloud and both the near and the far edge. So the question is from Dell's perspective, what's unique and challenging about securing network infrastructure that we should know about? >>Yeah, so few years ago IT security and an enterprise was primarily putting a wrapper around data center out because it was constrained to an infrastructure owned and operated by the enterprise for the most part. So putting a rapid around it like a parameter or a firewall was a sufficient response because you could basically control the environment and data small enough control today with the distributed data, intelligent software, different systems, multi-cloud environment and asset service delivery, you know, the infrastructure for the modern era changes the way to secure the network infrastructure In today's, you know, data driven world, it operates everywhere and data has created and accessed everywhere so far from, you know, the centralized monolithic data centers of the past. The biggest challenge is how do we build the network infrastructure of the modern era that are intelligent with automation enabling maximum flexibility and business agility without any compromise on the security. We believe that in this data era, the security transformation must accompany digital transformation. >>Yeah, that's very good. You talked about a couple of things there. Data by its very nature is distributed. There is no perimeter anymore, so you can't just, as you say, put a rapper around it. I like the way you phrase that. So when you think about cyber security resilience from a networking perspective, how do you define that? In other words, what are the basic principles that you adhere to when thinking about securing network infrastructure for your customers? >>So our belief is that cybersecurity and cybersecurity resilience, they need to be holistic, they need to be integrated, scalable, one that span the entire enterprise and with a co and objective and policy implementation. So cybersecurity needs to span across all the devices and running across any application, whether the application resets on the cloud or anywhere else in the infrastructure. From a networking standpoint, what does it mean? It's again, the same principles, right? You know, in order to prevent the threat actors from accessing changing best destroy or stealing sensitive data, this definition holds good for networking as well. So if you look at it from a networking perspective, it's the ability to protect from and withstand attacks on the networking systems as we continue to evolve. This will also include the ability to adapt and recover from these attacks, which is what cyber resilience aspect is all about. So cybersecurity best practices, as you know, is continuously changing the landscape primarily because the cyber threats also continue to evolve. >>Yeah, got it. So I like that. So it's gotta be integrated, it's gotta be scalable, it's gotta be comprehensive, comprehensive and adaptable. You're saying it can't be static, >>Right? Right. So I think, you know, you had a second part of a question, you know, that says what do we, you know, what are the basic principles? You know, when you think about securing network infrastructure, when you're looking at securing the network infrastructure, it revolves around core security capability of the devices that form the network. And what are these security capabilities? These are access control, software integrity and vulnerability response. When you look at access control, it's to ensure that only the authenticated users are able to access the platform and they're able to access only the kind of the assets that they're authorized to based on their user level. Now accessing a network platform like a switch or a rotor for example, is typically used for say, configuration and management of the networking switch. So user access is based on say roles for that matter in a role based access control, whether you are a security admin or a network admin or a storage admin. >>And it's imperative that logging is enable because any of the change to the configuration is actually logged and monitored as that. Talking about software's integrity, it's the ability to ensure that the software that's running on the system has not been compromised. And, and you know, this is important because it could actually, you know, get hold of the system and you know, you could get UND desire results in terms of say validation of the images. It's, it needs to be done through say digital signature. So, so it's important that when you're talking about say, software integrity, a, you are ensuring that the platform is not compromised, you know, is not compromised and be that any upgrades, you know, that happens to the platform is happening through say validated signature. >>Okay. And now, now you've now, so there's access control, software integrity, and I think you, you've got a third element which is i I think response, but please continue. >>Yeah, so you know, the third one is about civil notability. So we follow the same process that's been followed by the rest of the products within the Dell product family. That's to report or identify, you know, any kind of a vulnerability that's being addressed by the Dell product security incident response team. So the networking portfolio is no different, you know, it follows the same process for identification for tri and for resolution of these vulnerabilities. And these are addressed either through patches or through new reasons via networking software. >>Yeah, got it. Okay. So I mean, you didn't say zero trust, but when you were talking about access control, you're really talking about access to only those assets that people are authorized to access. I know zero trust sometimes is a buzzword, but, but you I think gave it, you know, some clarity there. Software integrity, it's about assurance validation, your digital signature you mentioned and, and that there's been no compromise. And then how you respond to incidents in a standard way that can fit into a security framework. So outstanding description, thank you for that. But then the next question is, how does Dell networking fit into the construct of what we've been talking about Dell trusted infrastructure? >>Okay, so networking is the key element in the Dell trusted infrastructure. It provides the interconnect between the service and the storage world. And you know, it's part of any data center configuration for a trusted infrastructure. The network needs to have access control in place where only the authorized nels are able to make change to the network configuration and logging off any of those changes is also done through the logging capabilities. Additionally, we should also ensure that the configuration should provide network isolation between say the management network and the data traffic network because they need to be separate and distinct from each other. And furthermore, even if you look at the data traffic network and now you have things like segmentation isolated segments and via VRF or, or some micro segmentation via partners, this allows various level of security for each of those segments. So it's important you know, that, that the network infrastructure has the ability, you know, to provide all this, this services from a Dell networking security perspective, right? >>You know, there are multiple layer of defense, you know, both at the edge and in the network in this hardware and in the software and essentially, you know, a set of rules and a configuration that's designed to sort of protect the integrity, confidentiality, and accessibility of the network assets. So each network security layer, it implements policies and controls as I said, you know, including send network segmentation. We do have capabilities sources, centralized management automation and capability and scalability for that matter. Now you add all of these things, you know, with the open networking standards or software, different principles and you essentially, you know, reach to the point where you know, you're looking at zero trust network access, which is essentially sort of a building block for increased cloud adoption. If you look at say that you know the different pillars of a zero trust architecture, you know, if you look at the device aspect, you know, we do have support for security for example, we do have say trust platform in a trusted platform models tpms on certain offer products and you know, the physical security know plain, simple old one love port enable from a user trust perspective, we know it's all done via access control days via role based access control and say capability in order to provide say remote authentication or things like say sticky Mac or Mac learning limit and so on. >>If you look at say a transport and decision trust layer, these are essentially, you know, how do you access, you know, this switch, you know, is it by plain hotel net or is it like secure ssh, right? And you know, when a host communicates, you know, to the switch, we do have things like self-signed or is certificate authority based certification. And one of the important aspect is, you know, in terms of, you know, the routing protocol, the routing protocol, say for example BGP for example, we do have the capability to support MD five authentication between the b g peers so that there is no, you know, manages attack, you know, to the network where the routing table is compromised. And the other aspect is about second control plane is here, you know, you know, it's, it's typical that if you don't have a control plane here, you know, it could be flooded and you know, you know, the switch could be compromised by city denial service attacks. >>From an application test perspective, as I mentioned, you know, we do have, you know, the application specific security rules where you could actually define, you know, the specific security rules based on the specific applications, you know, that are running within the system. And I did talk about, say the digital signature and the cryptographic check that we do for authentication and for, I mean rather for the authenticity and the validation of, you know, of the image and the BS and so on and so forth. Finally, you know, the data trust, we are looking at, you know, the network separation, you know, the network separation could happen or VRF plain old wheel Ls, you know, which can bring about sales multi 10 aspects. We talk about some microsegmentation as it applies to nsx for example. The other aspect is, you know, we do have, with our own smart fabric services that's enabled in a fabric, we have a concept of c cluster security. So all of this, you know, the different pillars, they sort of make up for the zero trust infrastructure for the networking assets of an infrastructure. >>Yeah. So thank you for that. There's a, there's a lot to unpack there. You know, one of the premise, the premise really of this, this, this, this segment that we're setting up in this series is really that everything you just mentioned, or a lot of things you just mentioned used to be the responsibility of the security team. And, and the premise that we're putting forth is that because security teams are so stretched thin, you, you gotta shift the vendor community. Dell specifically is shifting a lot of those tasks to their own r and d and taking care of a lot of that. So, cuz scop teams got a lot of other stuff to, to worry about. So my question relates to things like automation, which can help and scalability, what about those topics as it relates to networking infrastructure? >>Okay, our >>Portfolio, it enables state of the automation software, you know, that enables simplifying of the design. So for example, we do have, you know, you know the fabric design center, you know, a tool that automates the design of the fabric and you know, from a deployment and you know, the management of the network infrastructure that are simplicities, you know, using like Ansible s for Sonic for example are, you know, for a better sit and tell story. You know, we do have smart fabric services that can automate the entire fabric, you know, for a storage solution or for, you know, for one of the workloads for example. Now we do help reduce the complexity by closely integrating the management of the physical and the virtual networking infrastructure. And again, you know, we have those capabilities using Sonic or Smart Traffic services. If you look at Sonic for example, right? >>It delivers automated intent based secure containerized network and it has the ability to provide some network visibility and Avan has and, and all of these things are actually valid, you know, for a modern networking infrastructure. So now if you look at Sonic, you know, it's, you know, the usage of those tools, you know, that are available, you know, within the Sonic no is not restricted, you know, just to the data center infrastructure is, it's a unified no, you know, that's well applicable beyond the data center, you know, right up to the edge. Now if you look at our north from a smart traffic OS 10 perspective, you know, as I mentioned, we do have smart traffic services which essentially, you know, simplifies the deployment day zero, I mean rather day one, day two deployment expansion plans and the lifecycle management of our conversion infrastructure and hyper and hyper conversion infrastructure solutions. And finally, in order to enable say, zero touch deployment, we do have, you know, a VP solution with our SD van capability. So these are, you know, ways by which we bring down the complexity by, you know, enhancing the automation capability using, you know, a singular loss that can expand from a data center now right to the edge. >>Great, thank you for that. Last question real quick, just pitch me, what can you summarize from your point of view, what's the strength of the Dell networking portfolio? >>Okay, so from a Dell networking portfolio, we support capabilities at multiple layers. As I mentioned, we're talking about the physical security for examples, say disabling of the unused interface. Sticky Mac and trusted platform modules are the things that to go after. And when you're talking about say secure boot for example, it delivers the authenticity and the integrity of the OS 10 images at the startup. And Secure Boot also protects the startup configuration so that, you know, the startup configuration file is not compromised. And Secure port also enables the workload of prediction, for example, that is at another aspect of software image integrity validation, you know, wherein the image is data for the digital signature, you know, prior to any upgrade process. And if you are looking at secure access control, we do have things like role based access control, SSH to the switches, control plane access control that pre do tags and say access control from multifactor authentication. >>We do have various tech ads for entry control to the network and things like CSE and PRV support, you know, from a federal perspective we do have say logging wherein, you know, any event, any auditing capabilities can be possible by say looking at the clog service, you know, which are pretty much in our transmitter from the devices overts for example, and last we talked about say network segment, you know, say network separation and you know, these, you know, separation, you know, ensures that are, that is, you know, a contained say segment, you know, for a specific purpose or for the specific zone and, you know, just can be implemented by a, a micro segmentation, you know, just a plain old wheel or using virtual route of framework VR for example. >>A lot there. I mean I think frankly, you know, my takeaway is you guys do the heavy lifting in a very complicated topic. So thank you so much for, for coming on the cube and explaining that in in quite some depth. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you indeed. >>Oh, you're very welcome. Okay, in a moment I'll be back to dig into the hyper-converged infrastructure part of the portfolio and look at how when you enter the world of software defined where you're controlling servers and storage and networks via software led system, you could be sure that your infrastructure is trusted and secure. You're watching a blueprint for trusted infrastructure made possible by Dell Technologies and collaboration with the cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage, your own west product management security lead at for HCI at Dell Technologies hyper-converged infrastructure. Jerome, welcome. >>Thank you Dave. >>Hey Jerome, in this series of blueprint for trusted infrastructure, we've been digging into the different parts of the infrastructure stack, including storage servers and networking, and now we want to cover hyperconverged infrastructure. So my first question is, what's unique about HCI that presents specific security challenges? What do we need to know? >>So what's unique about hyper-converge infrastructure is the breadth of the security challenge. We can't simply focus on a single type of IT system. So like a server or storage system or a virtualization piece of software, software. I mean HCI is all of those things. So luckily we have excellent partners like VMware, Microsoft, and internal partners like the Dell Power Edge team, the Dell storage team, the Dell networking team, and on and on. These partnerships in these collaborations are what make us successful from a security standpoint. So let me give you an example to illustrate. In the recent past we're seeing growing scope and sophistication in supply chain attacks. This mean an attacker is going to attack your software supply chain upstream so that hopefully a piece of code, malicious code that wasn't identified early in the software supply chain is distributed like a large player, like a VMware or Microsoft or a Dell. So to confront this kind of sophisticated hard to defeat problem, we need short term solutions and we need long term solutions as well. >>So for the short term solution, the obvious thing to do is to patch the vulnerability. The complexity is for our HCI portfolio. We build our software on VMware, so we would have to consume a patch that VMware would produce and provide it to our customers in a timely manner. Luckily VX rail's engineering team has co engineered a release process with VMware that significantly shortens our development life cycle so that VMware would produce a patch and within 14 days we will integrate our own code with the VMware release we will have tested and validated the update and we will give an update to our customers within 14 days of that VMware release. That as a result of this kind of rapid development process, VHA had over 40 releases of software updates last year for a longer term solution. We're partnering with VMware and others to develop a software bill of materials. We work with VMware to consume their software manifest, including their upstream vendors and their open source providers to have a comprehensive list of software components. Then we aren't caught off guard by an unforeseen vulnerability and we're more able to easily detect where the software problem lies so that we can quickly address it. So these are the kind of relationships and solutions that we can co engineer with effective collaborations with our, with our partners. >>Great, thank you for that. That description. So if I had to define what cybersecurity resilience means to HCI or converged infrastructure, and to me my takeaway was you gotta have a short term instant patch solution and then you gotta do an integration in a very short time, you know, two weeks to then have that integration done. And then longer term you have to have a software bill of materials so that you can ensure the providence of all the components help us. Is that a right way to think about cybersecurity resilience? Do you have, you know, a additives to that definition? >>I do. I really think that's site cybersecurity and resilience for hci because like I said, it has sort of unprecedented breadth across our portfolio. It's not a single thing, it's a bit of everything. So really the strength or the secret sauce is to combine all the solutions that our partner develops while integrating them with our own layer. So let me, let me give you an example. So hci, it's a, basically taking a software abstraction of hardware functionality and implementing it into something called the virtualized layer. It's basically the virtual virtualizing hardware functionality, like say a storage controller, you could implement it in hardware, but for hci, for example, in our VX rail portfolio, we, our Vxl product, we integrated it into a product called vsan, which is provided by our partner VMware. So that portfolio of strength is still, you know, through our, through our partnerships. >>So what we do, we integrate these, these security functionality and features in into our product. So our partnership grows to our ecosystem through products like VMware, products like nsx, Horizon, Carbon Black and vSphere. All of them integrate seamlessly with VMware and we also leverage VMware's software, part software partnerships on top of that. So for example, VX supports multifactor authentication through vSphere integration with something called Active Directory Federation services for adfs. So there's a lot of providers that support adfs including Microsoft Azure. So now we can support a wide array of identity providers such as Off Zero or I mentioned Azure or Active Directory through that partnership. So we can leverage all of our partners partnerships as well. So there's sort of a second layer. So being able to secure all of that, that provides a lot of options and flexibility for our customers. So basically to summarize my my answer, we consume all of the security advantages of our partners, but we also expand on them to make a product that is comprehensively secured at multiple layers from the hardware layer that's provided by Dell through Power Edge to the hyper-converged software that we build ourselves to the virtualization layer that we get through our partnerships with Microsoft and VMware. >>Great, I mean that's super helpful. You've mentioned nsx, Horizon, Carbon Black, all the, you know, the VMware component OTH zero, which the developers are gonna love. You got Azure identity, so it's really an ecosystem. So you may have actually answered my next question, but I'm gonna ask it anyway cuz you've got this software defined environment and you're managing servers and networking and storage with this software led approach, how do you ensure that the entire system is secure end to end? >>That's a really great question. So the, the answer is we do testing and validation as part of the engineering process. It's not just bolted on at the end. So when we do, for example, VxRail is the market's only co engineered solution with VMware, other vendors sell VMware as a hyper converged solution, but we actually include security as part of the co-engineering process with VMware. So it's considered when VMware builds their code and their process dovetails with ours because we have a secure development life cycle, which other products might talk about in their discussions with you that we integrate into our engineering life cycle. So because we follow the same framework, all of the, all of the codes should interoperate from a security standpoint. And so when we do our final validation testing when we do a software release, we're already halfway there in ensuring that all these features will give the customers what we promised. >>That's great. All right, let's, let's close pitch me, what would you say is the strong suit summarize the, the strengths of the Dell hyper-converged infrastructure and converged infrastructure portfolio specifically from a security perspective? Jerome? >>So I talked about how hyper hyper-converged infrastructure simplifies security management because basically you're gonna take all of these features that are abstracted in in hardware, they're now abstracted in the virtualization layer. Now you can manage them from a single point of view, whether it would be, say, you know, in for VX rail would be b be center, for example. So by abstracting all this, you make it very easy to manage security and highly flexible because now you don't have limitations around a single vendor. You have a multiple array of choices and partnerships to select. So I would say that is the, the key to making it to hci. Now, what makes Dell the market leader in HCI is not only do we have that functionality, but we also make it exceptionally useful to you because it's co engineered, it's not bolted on. So I gave the example of spo, I gave the example of how we, we modify our software release process with VMware to make it very responsive. >>A couple of other features that we have specific just to HCI are digitally signed LCM updates. This is an example of a feature that we have that's only exclusive to Dell that's not done through a partnership. So we digitally signed our software updates so the user can be sure that the, the update that they're installing into their system is an authentic and unmodified product. So we give it a Dell signature that's invalidated prior to installation. So not only do we consume the features that others develop in a seamless and fully validated way, but we also bolt on our own a specific HCI security features that work with all the other partnerships and give the user an exceptional security experience. So for, for example, the benefit to the customer is you don't have to create a complicated security framework that's hard for your users to use and it's hard for your system administrators to manage it all comes in a package. So it, it can be all managed through vCenter, for example, or, and then the specific hyper, hyper-converged functions can be managed through VxRail manager or through STDC manager. So there's very few pains of glass that the, the administrator or user ever has to worry about. It's all self contained and manageable. >>That makes a lot of sense. So you've got your own infrastructure, you're applying your best practices to that, like the digital signatures, you've got your ecosystem, you're doing co-engineering with the ecosystems, delivering security in a package, minimizing the complexity at the infrastructure level. The reason Jerome, this is so important is because SecOps teams, you know, they gotta deal with cloud security, they gotta deal with multiple clouds. Now they have their shared responsibility model going across multiple cl. They got all this other stuff that they have to worry, they gotta secure the containers and the run time and and, and, and, and the platform and so forth. So they're being asked to do other things. If they have to worry about all the things that you just mentioned, they'll never get, you know, the, the securities is gonna get worse. So what my takeaway is, you're removing that infrastructure piece and saying, Okay guys, you now can focus on those other things that is not necessarily Dell's, you know, domain, but you, you know, you can work with other partners to and your own teams to really nail that. Is that a fair summary? >>I think that is a fair summary because absolutely the worst thing you can do from a security perspective is provide a feature that's so unusable that the administrator disables it or other key security features. So when I work with my partners to define, to define and develop a new security feature, the thing I keep foremost in mind is, will this be something our users want to use and our administrators want to administer? Because if it's not, if it's something that's too difficult or onerous or complex, then I try to find ways to make it more user friendly and practical. And this is a challenge sometimes because we are, our products operate in highly regulated environments and sometimes they have to have certain rules and certain configurations that aren't the most user friendly or management friendly. So I, I put a lot of effort into thinking about how can we make this feature useful while still complying with all the regulations that we have to comply with. And by the way, we're very successful in a highly regulated space. We sell a lot of VxRail, for example, into the Department of Defense and banks and, and other highly regulated environments and we're very successful there. >>Excellent. Okay, Jerome, thanks. We're gonna leave it there for now. I'd love to have you back to talk about the progress that you're making down the road. Things always, you know, advance in the tech industry and so would appreciate that. >>I would look forward to it. Thank you very much, Dave. >>You're really welcome. In a moment I'll be back to summarize the program and offer some resources that can help you on your journey to secure your enterprise infrastructure. I wanna thank our guests for their contributions in helping us understand how investments by a company like Dell can both reduce the need for dev sec up teams to worry about some of the more fundamental security issues around infrastructure and have greater confidence in the quality providence and data protection designed in to core infrastructure like servers, storage, networking, and hyper-converged systems. You know, at the end of the day, whether your workloads are in the cloud, on prem or at the edge, you are responsible for your own security. But vendor r and d and vendor process must play an important role in easing the burden faced by security devs and operation teams. And on behalf of the cube production content and social teams as well as Dell Technologies, we want to thank you for watching a blueprint for trusted infrastructure. Remember part one of this series as well as all the videos associated with this program and of course today's program are available on demand@thecube.net with additional coverage@siliconangle.com. And you can go to dell.com/security solutions dell.com/security solutions to learn more about Dell's approach to securing infrastructure. And there's tons of additional resources that can help you on your journey. This is Dave Valante for the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> We're back with a Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure in partnership with Dell Technologies and theCUBE. And we're here with Mahesh Nagarathnam who is a consultant in the area of networking product management at Dell technologies. Mahesh, welcome, good to see you. >> Hey, good morning, Dave. It's nice to meet you as well. >> Hey, so we've been digging into all the parts of the infrastructure stack, and now we're going to look at the all important networking components. Mahesh, when we think about networking in today's environment, we think about the core data center and we're connecting out to various locations including the cloud and both the near and the far edge. So the question is from Dell's perspective what's unique and challenging about securing network infrastructure that we should know about? >> Yeah, so a few years ago, IT security in an enterprise was primarily putting a wrapper around the data center because IT was constrained to an infrastructure owned and operated by the enterprise for the most part. So putting a wrapper around it like a perimeter or a firewall was a sufficient response because you could basically control the enormous data into small enough control. Today, with the distributed data intelligent software different systems, multi-cloud environment and asset service delivery. The infrastructure for the modern era changes the way to secure the network infrastructure. In today's data driven world, IT operates everywhere and data is created and accessed everywhere. So far from the centralized mono data centers of the past. The biggest challenge is how do we build the network infrastructure of the modern era that are intelligent, with automation, enabling maximum flexibility and business agility without any compromise on the security. We believe that in this data era, the security transformation must accompany digital transformation. >> Yeah, that's very good. You talked about a couple of things there. Data by its very nature is distributed, there is no perimeter anymore. So you can't just, as you say, put a wrapper around it, I like the way you phrase that. So when you think about cyber security resilience from a networking perspective, how do you define that? In other words, what are the basic principles that you adhere to when thinking about securing network infrastructure for your customers? >> So our belief is that cybersecurity and cybersecurity resilience, they need to be holistic. They need to be integrated, scalable, one that spans the enterprise and with a consistent and objective and policy implementation. So cybersecurity needs to span across all the devices and running across any application whether the application resets on the cloud or anywhere else in the infrastructure. From a networking standpoint, what does it mean? It's again, the same principles. In order to prevent the threat actors from accessing, changing, destroying or stealing sensitive data, this definition holds good for networking as well. So if you look at it from a networking perspective it's the ability to protect from and withstand attacks on the networking systems. As we continue to evolve, this will also include the ability to adapt and recover from these attacks which is what cyber resilience aspect is all about. So cybersecurity, best practices as you know is continuously changing the landscape primarily because the cyber threats also continue to evolve. >> Yeah, got it. I like that. So, it's got to be integrated. It's got to be scalable. It's got to be comprehensive and adaptable. You're saying it can't be static. >> Right. So I think, you had a second part of the question that says, what are the basic principles when you're thinking about securing network infrastructure. When you are looking at securing the network infrastructure it revolves around core security capability of the devices that form the network. And what are these security capabilities? These are access control, software integrity and vulnerability response. When you look at access control it's to ensure that only the authenticated users are able to access the platform and they're able to access only the kind of the assets that they're authorized to, based on their user level. Now accessing a network platform like a switch or a router, for example, is typically used for configuration and management of the networking switch. So user access is based on roles for that matter role based access control, whether you are security admin or a network admin or a storage admin. And it's imperative that logging is enabled because any of the change to the configuration is actually logged and monitored as well. When we're talking about software's integrity, it's the ability to ensure that the software that's running on the system has not been compromised. And this is important because it could actually get hold of the system and you could get undesired results. In terms of validation of the images, it needs to be done through digital signature. So it's important that when you're talking about software integrity, A, you are ensuring that the platform is not compromised and B, that any upgrades that happens to the platform is happening through validated signature. >> Okay. And now you've, so there's access control, software integrity and I think you got a third element, which is, I think response, but please continue. >> Yeah. So, the third one about vulnerability. So we follow the same process that's been followed by the rest of the products within the Dell Product family that's to report or identify any kind of vulnerability that's being addressed by the Dell Product Security Incident Response Team. So the networking portfolio is no different. It follows the same process for identification for triage and for resolution of these vulnerabilities. And this address either through patches or through new resource via networking software. >> Yeah, got it. I mean, you didn't say zero trust but when you were talking about access control you're really talking about access to only those assets that people are authorized to access. I know zero trust sometimes is a buzzword, but you, I think gave it some clarity there. Software integrity, it's about assurance, validation, your digital signature, you mentioned, and that there's been no compromise. And then how you respond to incidents in a standard way that can fit into a security framework. So outstanding description. Thank you for that. But then the next question is how does Dell Networking fit into the construct of what we've been talking about, Dell Trusted Infrastructure? >> So networking is the key element in the Dell Trusted Infrastructure. It provides the interconnect between the server and the storage world and it's part of any data center configuration. For a trusted infrastructure, the network needs to have access control in place where only the authorized personals are able to make change to the network configuration and logging of any of those changes is also done through the logging capabilities. Additionally, we should also ensure that the configuration should provide network isolation between the management network and the data traffic network because they need to be separate and distinct from each other. And furthermore, even if you look at the data traffic network, you have things like segmentation, isolated segments and via VRFs or micro-segmentation via partners. This allows various level of security for each of those segments. So it's important that the network infrastructure has the ability to provide all these services. From a Dell networking security perspective, there are multiple layers of defense, both at the edge and in the network, in the hardware and in the software. And essentially, a set of rules and a configuration that's designed to sort of protect the integrity, confidentiality and accessibility of the network assets. So each network security layer, it implements policies and controls, as I said, including network segmentation, we do have capabilities, resources, centralized management, automation, and capability and scalability for that matter. Now you add all of these things with the open networking standards or software different principles, and you essentially reach to the point where you're looking at zero trust network access which is essentially sort of a building block for increased cloud adoption. If you look at the different pillars of a zero touch architecture, if you look at the device aspect, we do have support for secure boot, for example, we do have trusted platform, trusted platform models, TPMs on certain offer products. And the physical security, plain simple old WLAN port enable disable. From a user trust perspective, we know it's all done via access control base via role based access control and capability in order to provide remote authentication or things like sticky MAC or MAC learning limit and so on. If you look at a transport and a session trust layer, these are essentially, how do you access this switch. Is it by plain old Telnet, or is it like secure SSH. And when a host communicates to the switch, we do have things like self-signed or a certificate authority based certification. And one of the important aspect is, in terms of the routing protocol the routing protocol, for example, BGP, for example, we do have the capability to support MD5 authentication between the BGP peers so that there is no malicious attack to the network where the routing table is compromised. And the other aspect is about control plain ESL. It's typical that if you don't have a control plane Azure, it could be flooded and the switch could be compromised by denial of service attacks. From an application test perspective, as I mentioned, we do have the application specific security rules where you could actually define the specific security rules based on the specific applications that are running within the system. And I did talk about the digital signature and the cryptographic checks and that we do for authentication and, I mean rather for the authenticity and the validation of the image and the boundary and so on and so forth. Finally the data trust, we are looking at the network separation. The network separation could happen over VRF, plain old VLANs which can bring about multitenancy aspects. We talk about micro-segmentation as it applies to NSX, for example. The other aspect is we do have with our own smart fabric services, that's enabled in a fabric, we have a concept of cluster security. So all of this, the different pillars, they sort of make up for the zero trust infrastructure for the networking assets of an infrastructure. >> Yeah, so thank you for that. There's a lot to unpack there. One of the premise, the premise really this segment that we're setting up in this series, is really that everything you just mentioned, or a lot of things you just mentioned used to be the responsibility of the security team and the premise that we're putting forth is that because security teams are so stretched thin, you got to shift a vendor community, Dell specifically is shifting a lot of those tasks to their own R&D and taking care of a lot of that. 'cause SecOps teams got a lot of other stuff to worry about. So my question relates to things like automation which can help and scalability. What about those topics as it relates to networking infrastructure? >> Our portfolio, it enables state of the automation software that enables simplifying of the design. So for example, we do have the fabric design center, a tool that automates the design of the entire fabric and from a deployment and the management of the network infrastructure, there are simplicities using like Ansible playbooks for SONiC, for example. Or for a better storage, we do have smart fabric services that can automate the entire fabric for a storage solution or for one of the workloads, for example. Now we do help reduce the complexity by closely integrating the management of the physical and the virtual networking infrastructure. And again, we have those capabilities using SONiC or smart traffic services. If you look at SONiC for example, it delivers automated intent based secure containerized network. And it has the ability to provide network visibility and awareness and of these things are actually valid for a modern networking infrastructure. So now if you look at SONiC, the usage of those tools that are available within the SONiC NAS is not restricted just to the data center infrastructure, it's a unified NAS that's well applicable beyond the data center, right up to the edge. Now, if you look at our NAS from a smart traffic OS10 perspective, as I mentioned, we do have smart traffic services, which essentially simplifies the deployment, day one day two deployment expansion plans and the life cycle management of our converged infrastructure and hyperconverged infrastructure solutions. And finally, in order to enable zero touch deployment, we do have a VEP solution with our SD-WAN capability. So these are in a ways by which we bring down the complexity by enhancing the automation capability using a singular NAS that can expand from a data center now, right to the edge. >> Great, thank you for that. Last question real quick. Pitch me, can you summarize from your point of view what's the strength of the Dell networking portfolio? >> So from a Dell networking portfolio we support the capabilities at multiple layers, as I mentioned. We've talking about the physical security, for example, let's say disabling of the unused interface, sticky MAC and trusted platform modules are the things that to go after. And when you're talking about secure boot, for example, it delivers the authenticity and the integrity of the OS10 images at the startup. And secure boot also protects the startup configuration so that the startup configuration file is not compromised. And secure boot also enables the bootloader protection, for example. That is at another aspect of software image, integrity validation, wherein the image is validated for the digital signature prior to any upgrade process. And if you are looking at secure access control we do have things like role-based access control, SSH to the switches, control plane, access control, that pre-onset attacks and access control through multifactor authentication. We do have Radius Tech ads for entry control to the network and things like CSE and PRV support from a federal perspective. We do have logging wherein any event, any auditing capabilities can be possible by looking at the syslog servers which are pretty much in our transmitter from the devices ORTS, for example. And last we talked about network separation. And this separation ensures that that is a contained segment for a specific purpose or for the specific zone. And this can be implemented by a micro-segmentation, just a plain old WLAN or using virtual route of framework VRF, for example. >> A lot there. I mean, I think frankly, my takeaway is you guys do the heavy lifting in a very complicated topic. So thank you so much for coming on theCUBE and explaining that in quite some depth. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Oh, you're very welcome. Okay in a moment, I'll be back to dig into the hyperconverged infrastructure part of the portfolio, and look at how, when you enter the world of software defined where you're controlling servers and storage and networks via software led system, you could be sure that your infrastructure is trusted and secure. You're watching a Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure made possible by Dell technologies and collaboration with theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (soft upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Women in Data Science, WiDS 2022, coming to live from Stanford University. I'm Lisa Martin. My next guest is here. Nandi Leslie, Doctor Nandi Leslie, Senior Engineering Fellow at Raytheon Technologies. Nandi, it's great to have you on the program. >> Oh it's my pleasure, thank you. >> This is your first WiDS you were saying before we went live. >> That's right. >> What's your take so far? >> I'm absolutely loving it. I love the comradery and the community of women in data science. You know, what more can you say? It's amazing. >> It is. It's amazing what they built since 2015, that this is now reaching 100,000 people 200 online event. It's a hybrid event. Of course, here we are in person, and the online event going on, but it's always an inspiring, energy-filled experience in my experience of WiDS. >> I'm thoroughly impressed at what the organizers have been able to accomplish. And it's amazing, that you know, you've been involved from the beginning. >> Yeah, yeah. Talk to me, so you're Senior Engineering Fellow at Raytheon. Talk to me a little bit about your role there and what you're doing. >> Well, my role is really to think about our customer's most challenging problems, primarily at the intersection of data science, and you know, the intersectional fields of applied mathematics, machine learning, cybersecurity. And then we have a plethora of government clients and commercial clients. And so what their needs are beyond those sub-fields as well, I address. >> And your background is mathematics. >> Yes. >> Have you always been a math fan? >> I have, I actually have loved math for many, many years. My dad is a mathematician, and he introduced me to, you know mathematical research and the sciences at a very early age. And so, yeah, I went on, I studied in a math degree at Howard undergrad, and then I went on to do my PhD at Princeton in applied math. And later did a postdoc in the math department at University of Maryland. >> And how long have you been with Raytheon? >> I've been with Raytheon about six years. Yeah, and before Raytheon, I worked at a small to midsize defense company, defense contracting company in the DC area, systems planning and analysis. And then prior to that, I taught in a math department where I also did my postdoc, at University of Maryland College Park. >> You have a really interesting background. I was doing some reading on you, and you have worked with the Navy. You've worked with very interesting organizations. Talk to the audience a little bit about your diverse background. >> Awesome yeah, I've worked with the Navy on submarine force security, and submarine tracking, and localization, sensor performance. Also with the Army and the Army Research Laboratory during research at the intersection of machine learning and cyber security. Also looking at game theoretic and graph theoretic approaches to understand network resilience and robustness. I've also supported Department of Homeland Security, and other government agencies, other governments, NATO. Yeah, so I've really been excited by the diverse problems that our various customers have you know, brought to us. >> Well, you get such great experience when you are able to work in different industries and different fields. And that really just really probably helps you have such a much diverse kind of diversity of thought with what you're doing even now with Raytheon. >> Yeah, it definitely does help me build like a portfolio of topics that I can address. And then when new problems emerge, then I can pull from a toolbox of capabilities. And, you know, the solutions that have previously been developed to address those wide array of problems, but then also innovate new solutions based on those experiences. So I've been really blessed to have those experiences. >> Talk to me about one of the things I heard this morning in the session I was able to attend before we came to set was about mentors and sponsors. And, you know, I actually didn't know the difference between that until a few years ago. But it's so important. Talk to me about some of the mentors you've had along the way that really helped you find your voice in research and development. >> Definitely, I mean, beyond just the mentorship of my my family and my parents, I've had amazing opportunities to meet with wonderful people, who've helped me navigate my career. One in particular, I can think of as and I'll name a number of folks, but Dr. Carlos Castillo-Chavez was one of my earlier mentors. I was an undergrad at Howard University. He encouraged me to apply to his summer research program in mathematical and theoretical biology, which was then at Cornell. And, you know, he just really developed an enthusiasm with me for applied mathematics. And for how it can be, mathematics that is, can be applied to epidemiological and theoretical immunological problems. And then I had an amazing mentor in my PhD advisor, Dr. Simon Levin at Princeton, who just continued to inspire me, in how to leverage mathematical approaches and computational thinking for ecological conservation problems. And then since then, I've had amazing mentors, you know through just a variety of people that I've met, through customers, who've inspired me to write these papers that you mentioned in the beginning. >> Yeah, you've written 55 different publications so far. 55 and counting I'm sure, right? >> Well, I hope so. I hope to continue to contribute to the conversation and the community, you know, within research, and specifically research that is computationally driven. That really is applicable to problems that we face, whether it's cyber security, or machine learning problems, or others in data science. >> What are some of the things, you're giving a a tech vision talk this afternoon. Talk to me a little bit about that, and maybe the top three takeaways you want the audience to leave with. >> Yeah, so my talk is entitled "Unsupervised Learning for Network Security, or Network Intrusion Detection" I believe. And essentially three key areas I want to convey are the following. That unsupervised learning, that is the mathematical and statistical approach, which tries to derive patterns from unlabeled data is a powerful one. And one can still innovate new algorithms in this area. Secondly, that network security, and specifically, anomaly detection, and anomaly-based methods can be really useful to discerning and ensuring, that there is information confidentiality, availability, and integrity in our data >> A CIA triad. >> There you go, you know. And so in addition to that, you know there is this wealth of data that's out there. It's coming at us quickly. You know, there are millions of packets to represent communications. And that data has, it's mixed, in terms of there's categorical or qualitative data, text data, along with numerical data. And it is streaming, right. And so we need methods that are efficient, and that are capable of being deployed real time, in order to detect these anomalies, which we hope are representative of malicious activities, and so that we can therefore alert on them and thwart them. >> It's so interesting that, you know, the amount of data that's being generated and collected is growing exponentially. There's also, you know, some concerning challenges, not just with respect to data that's reinforcing social biases, but also with cyber warfare. I mean, that's a huge challenge right now. We've seen from a cybersecurity perspective in the last couple of years during the pandemic, a massive explosion in anomalies, and in social engineering. And companies in every industry have to be super vigilant, and help the people understand how to interact with it, right. There's a human component. >> Oh, for sure. There's a huge human component. You know, there are these phishing attacks that are really a huge source of the vulnerability that corporations, governments, and universities face. And so to be able to close that gap and the understanding that each individual plays in the vulnerability of a network is key. And then also seeing the link between the network activities or the cyber realm, and physical systems, right. And so, you know, especially in cyber warfare as a remote cyber attack, unauthorized network activities can have real implications for physical systems. They can, you know, stop a vehicle from running properly in an autonomous vehicle. They can impact a SCADA system that's, you know there to provide HVAC for example. And much more grievous implications. And so, you know, definitely there's the human component. >> Yes, and humans being so vulnerable to those social engineering that goes on in those phishing attacks. And we've seen them get more and more personal, which is challenging. You talking about, you know, sensitive data, personally identifiable data, using that against someone in cyber warfare is a huge challenge. >> Oh yeah, certainly. And it's one that computational thinking and mathematics can be leveraged to better understand and to predict those patterns. And that's a very rich area for innovation. >> What would you say is the power of computational thinking in the industry? >> In industry at-large? >> At large. >> Yes, I think that it is such a benefit to, you know, a burgeoning scientist, if they want to get into industry. There's so many opportunities, because computational thinking is needed. We need to be more objective, and it provides that objectivity, and it's so needed right now. Especially with the emergence of data, and you know, across industries. So there are so many opportunities for data scientists, whether it's in aerospace and defense, like Raytheon or in the health industry. And we saw with the pandemic, the utility of mathematical modeling. There are just so many opportunities. >> Yeah, there's a lot of opportunities, and that's one of the themes I think, of WiDS, is just the opportunities, not just in data science, and for women. And there's obviously even high school girls that are here, which is so nice to see those young, fresh faces, but opportunities to build your own network and your own personal board of directors, your mentors, your sponsors. There's tremendous opportunity in data science, and it's really all encompassing, at least from my seat. >> Oh yeah, no I completely agree with that. >> What are some of the things that you've heard at this WiDS event that inspire you going, we're going in the right direction. If we think about International Women's Day tomorrow, "Breaking the Bias" is the theme, do you think we're on our way to breaking that bias? >> Definitely, you know, there was a panel today talking about the bias in data, and in a variety of fields, and how we are, you know discovering that bias, and creating solutions to address it. So there was that panel. There was another talk by a speaker from Pinterest, who had presented some solutions that her, and her team had derived to address bias there, in you know, image recognition and search. And so I think that we've realized this bias, and, you know, in AI ethics, not only in these topics that I've mentioned, but also in the implications for like getting a loan, so economic implications, as well. And so we're realizing those issues and bias now in AI, and we're addressing them. So I definitely am optimistic. I feel encouraged by the talks today at WiDS that you know, not only are we recognizing the issues, but we're creating solutions >> Right taking steps to remediate those, so that ultimately going forward. You know, we know it's not possible to have unbiased data. That's not humanly possible, or probably mathematically possible. But the steps that they're taking, they're going in the right direction. And a lot of it starts with awareness. >> Exactly. >> Of understanding there is bias in this data, regardless. All the people that are interacting with it, and touching it, and transforming it, and cleaning it, for example, that's all influencing the veracity of it. >> Oh, for sure. Exactly, you know, and I think that there are for sure solutions are being discussed here, papers written by some of the speakers here, that are driving the solutions to the mitigation of this bias and data problem. So I agree a hundred percent with you, that awareness is you know, half the battle, if not more. And then, you know, that drives creation of solutions >> And that's what we need the creation of solutions. Nandi, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a pleasure talking with you about what you're doing with Raytheon, what you've done and your path with mathematics, and what excites you about data science going forward. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you so much. It was my pleasure. >> Good, for Nandi Leslie, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Women in Data Science 2022. Stick around, I'll be right back with my next guest. (upbeat flowing music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to this Cube Conversation kicking off 2022, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're with Loris Degioanni, Chief Technology Officer and founder of Sysdig. A company that's in the pioneering cloud native and cloud native security, open source, big part of the CNCF, CUBECon coverage. Of course, we know them as of that environment as well as DockerCon which we've covered many times. Sysdig is a very successful company. Loris, welcome to theCUBE Conversation. >> Thank you and thanks for having me. >> Well, we know a lot about you, but a lot of folks are learning about you guys with your success. Congratulations on the funding and the validation of your product, which is not a surprise. We've been saying on theCUBE open source has been powering innovation for some time and getting stronger, faster. The predictions in the Linux Foundation about this open source contributions continue to be blown away by their projections and more and more is coming. A new generation is upon us. Cloud Native, Edge, Kubernetes. All of these things are powering a modern application environment which is changing business. And under the covers, you guys are a big part of it. So take us through who Sysdig is, what you guys do for the folks out there and let's get into it. Obviously open source is a big part of it. Take us through who is Sysdig and what do you guys do. >> Yeah, Sysdig helps you run your software in the cloud in a way that is secure and confidently. We have a security solution that covers containers, cloud and Kubernetes. And we cover you in the life cycle of modern application. So the Sysdig security platform helps you secure application in a way that ranges from like shift left in CSD and finding vulnerabilities in your CSD pipeline to run time security that is very important in the cloud in particular with orchestrated infrastructures like the ones that are run by Kubernetes. And then of course, everything that has to do with the forensics, threat-hunting and so on. And the world is changing, security is changing, and Sysdig is one of the startups, one of the companies that is at the forefront of true modern cloud native security. >> So I got to ask you. Were you sitting in your backyard one day thinking, hey, I'm going to start a company? How did this all come together? I mean, the originator story, because we saw open source, we saw even more before CNCF was formed, you saw what cloud was doing. Again, we saw OpenStack and all these other things happening around technology. What was the driver behind the founding of Sysdig, and then how did that progress? Because again, there's an open source component here I want to get into. >> Yeah, and it's interesting that you say backyard because actually Sysdig was actually started in my backyard. Just outside of here. So the backyard metaphor is very, very fitting here. And in a general way, let's say I come from a background in open source for a very long time. Sysdig is my second company. My first company was called Case Technologies. It was the company behind an open source network analyzer called Wireshark, which is widely used by millions and millions of people around the world to do network troubleshooting and network analysis. And when we were doing network packets, we were using like the network devices to collect information. The data that is being transferred on the network has some very nice properties, it's rich. It's very deep. When you can see and decode what's happening on the network, you can understand what applications are doing, what the users are doing. I used to say, packets never lie, right? Because you could connect to the router and collect this data and they have a very good picture without any two instrument libraries to link, to install stuff and so on. And all of a sudden, we're moving to the cloud and the router that was like the vintage point for this beautiful way of doing security and visibility disappears. And you're renting instances that are floating in the Amazon cloud. And when the world changed that way from one point of view, I was sure that what we're doing before was useful and was powerful for the users. But I was also sure, okay, the world is going to change. The retrofitted solutions are not going to work. We can take our product, but then we have the innovator dilemma. We have a product that we cannot completely radically change. So I decided let's start from scratch. Let's start Sysdig. Let's try to understand actually what this cloud is going, where containers are going. There's this new Kubernetes thing that everybody's talking about. What does it mean to offer deep, rich, but at the same time lightweight and easy to deploy security and visibility for this kind of new way of writing software and that's how Sysdig was born. >> So if I remember correctly back in that timeframe, that couple you said you found a millions people using that application. If I remember correctly, that was software network monitoring. Is that true? Is that open source at that time? Was that an open project or was that? >> Yeah, like Wireshark is a network analyzer and the software that we're doing was heavily open source oriented and was mostly software and there were also potentially appliances because this was data center more kind of stuff. >> That was before cloud even came here. So again, defined data center software and defined clouds happening. So again, good segue into kind of where security, you mentioned footprints, you can track people with packets. So to your point, is this the tie into security, tell us how this fits in with open source and security with the software piece? >> Yeah, what Sysdig did essentially, the idea was let's learn from our prior life. I always say that every new wave of technology is built on the shoulders of the previous one. And you'd never reinvent anything. You just apply it and evolve it. And the same thing we did with Sysdig. So we learned what was working with our previous approaches that were based on observing the applications behavior by looking essentially at network traffic, but we adapted it to modern infrastructures. And open source was our mantra before with Wireshark and became our mantra with Sysdig. Sysdig, the company name comes from the open source tool that we released was the first thing that we released in our company. And then few years later with Falco, which now is the premier open source project that was created by Sysdig and is now part of the CNCF, it's an incubating project. And it's essentially the runtime security tool for containers, Kubernetes, and cloud. >> Take us through that Falco, because I think this is an important distinction on your success trajectory because CNCF has a nice playbook where companies can contribute to the CNCF at the same time, that creates an open environment for all, and then have a business model tied to it. This is kind of a new, not new, but this is a successful way to be open source and have a commercial opportunity. >> Yeah, and very much a substantial portion of our commercial product is let's say an extension of Falco. But let's say our approach was like, let's first produce something that is truly useful for the community and fits in the proper way with the ecosystem, with the rest of the ecosystem. Nowadays in every field security as well, you don't build any more a single solution. You build something that needs to fit very well in the stack. Kubernetes, Prometers, network meshes and DCO and this kind of stuff, these all fit together. So Falco, which is the runtime security component needs to fit as well. So initially our focus was like, okay, we need to fill the gap of runtime security for containers, for Kubernetes, and also for cloud. But we need to do that in a way that is community first and data really helps, but also engages and takes advantage of the users, of the broader community. At that point, going to the CNCF and telling the CNCF, hey, look, we developed these, are you interested in partnering with us and being essentially the organization behind this project, was very natural. And that's what we did in 2016, sorry, 2018. 2016 is when Falco started, 2018. And at that point, you know, it's a great partnership because the CNCF is really a great home for all of these projects and really makes it possible for the users to trust a project in a way that they know that even if the commercial banker, even if the original creators, even if the team rotates and changes and evolves, the end users can still use this project, trust this project and know that it's community driven. And it's been a great journey for us. >> How would you describe what Falco is and what are the key use cases? >> Yeah, Falco is, I compare it to the security camera for your containers, your house and your cloud infrastructure. So the same way that the security camera allows you to observe maybe what's happening in your home, even if you have a lock, is still useful to have a security camera, right? To understand when something breaks in what they're doing, when they do it, get an alarm when something better happens. Similarly, in software infrastructures, you can still have your lock, your firewall and so on, but then you use a security camera like Falco that is able to observe every single container, every single process, every single machine, every single network connection and so on. Keep an eye on it and then it has sort of a points-based system that includes a bunch of policies that come essentially pre-packaged that allow the users to detect when something dangerous or suspicious happens in the infrastructure. For example, I don't know somebody is spawning or sharing their radius container. Or somebody is logging in AWS without multi-factor authentication. Falco keeps a constant eye and lets you know, it gives you an alert when something like that happens. >> You know what I love about what you guys do and kind of highlights what we've been saying on theCUBE for many, many years is that the networking concepts of the older generations have been moving up the stack with cloud because you got rule engines, policy automation, all these things are now part of connected systems. So if you have the cloud, which is essentially a distributed computing, you have more networks, more connections. And so the networking paradigms of packets can be moved over to software, well, software maintenance, if you will, or anything, any middleware, whatever you want to call it. I mean, this is kind of a new paradigm. So, what's your reaction to that? I want to get your take on this because this is kind of really happening. >> Yeah, and you are absolutely right. And what us as a Falco community or as Sysdig as a company is exactly that. We're taking the concepts that were maybe at the base of the previous generation of the data center in terms of policies, in terms of one clause and we're sort of elevating them to what modern cloud is. To give you an example, I don't know if you remember, but a Falco was inspired by a tool called Snort and the company also was Sourcefire. Snort used to listen on the network, constantly observe the network traffic and the deploy policies to tell you, okay, somebody uploaded a file from China and this file contains a malware. Now we do this, but we're able to see inside containers. We have cloud context. We understand the regions. We understand Kubernetes namespace and all these kinds of stuff. So we're able to put so much more context and be so much closer to the user, but the concepts are the same. We're just, as I was saying, sitting on the shoulders of people before us that invented this and we're modernizing them. >> Well, this is what refactoring is all about. This is the benefit of the cloud. I think, this is why a lot of the cloud native success is happening because companies are realizing that they can actually not just re platform in the cloud, but actually refactor their business, completely different. Using other paradigms and not necessarily rip and replace or just cut and paste. They can take concepts and codify them in their workloads, not necessarily general purpose. So again, key cloud concept and only going to get stronger with the edge developing. So again, more and more complexity, connected complexity. >> Yeah, complexity that more and more you manage through automation, right? Which is another key concept in the cloud. So we are able as a market, as a community to have and manage more and more complex infrastructures because we have tools that are able to automate, to take care of stuff for us, to potentially remediate, which is another big theme in modern security for us and so on. And of course, again, companies like Sysdig, try to really read these in the plight, in a proper way that can be the most possible useful. >> And hackers love complexity, right? And love chaos. And so unless you tame that with really good software, this is the key challenge. >> You need to manage chaos and you need good software to help you manage chaos. >> All right, final question for you. How is Sysdig and the Falco community working with AWS? >> Yeah, in a number of ways. One of the beauties, as I was telling before of essentially being built on an open source project like Falco is that you can really work together with cloud providers like AWS with mutual advantage. For example, AWS and team members at Amazon have done many contributions to Falco and the Sysdig system and integrations and so on. We partnered as Falco community and Sysdig with AWS to offer proper support for Falco versus the products on Fargate, which is, managed containers are the future, are very powerful. Everybody wants to go there, but then you need to make sure that you are covered, you have security from the point of view of severability and so on. Sysdig and AWS work together on doing a P trace based implementation, this is a technical thing, but essentially it means that a tool like Falco can give you invitations, can be the security camera for Fargate as well. And in general way, Amazon is a great partner for us on a daily basis as a community and as a company. >> Loris, you've got a great company there. And again, it was great to see you guys grow from the beginning and the wave is here. As they say, in California, you guys are riding the right wave. And I think it's just the beginning. I think you're going to see more and more security be programmable, built in, automated, under the covers, invisible, but working. And I think the same is going to be true for data and other things. So a lot more to do. And again, it's distributed computing. We've seen this movie before, but not in this environment. So new tools are coming and you guys are a big part of it. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing what you guys are doing and the technology behind Sysdig. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much and thank you for the great conversation. >> Okay, this is theCUBE I'm John Furrier your host for Cube conversations with Sysdig's Loris Degioanni, CTO of Sysdig. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(ethereal music) >> Welcome to the special Cube Conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of "The Cube" here in Palo Alto, California. We've got two great remote guests here having a conversation around security, security convergence with platforms around networking and security with cybersecurity at an all time high, the need for understanding how to manage the breaches how to understand them, prevent them, everything in between cybersecurity and data are the number one conversation happening in the world today. We got two great guests, we've got Nirav Shah, VP of products at Fortinet and Peter Newton's senior director of products at Fortinet. The product leaders in the hottest cybersecurity company. And guys, thanks for coming on this Cube Conversation. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you, John. >> So last month or so I talked to John Madison about the Fortinet new release, FortiOS 7.0, as well as highlighting the convergence that's going on between the platforms around companies trying to consolidate and or manage or grow and build, converting networking and security together. Seeing that happening in real time, still doesn't change the underpinnings of how the internet works, and how these companies are structured. But the need for security is at an all time high. Talk about the impact to the customer. Do you guys have the keys to the kingdom here, product group? What is the killer product? What are customers doing? Give us the overview of why there's such a big need for the security platforms right now. >> Yeah, absolutely John. So if you see today's environment, we have seen working from anywhere it's become normal. And as part of that, we have seen so many different network edges. At the same time, they have different devices that they're using from anywhere. So what's important is as users have different devices, different users and applications that they're consuming from Cloud, we have to make sure that we provide security across the endpoint, across all network edges, and going to the Cloud compute. And for that kind of approach, you cannot have point products provide the visibility control and management. You need to have a comprehensive cybersecurity platform, which gives you security from that endpoint, to the edge, to the user, so that you have a simple but effective management and have a solid security in place to get that working from anywhere in a much more better user experience way. And that's exactly Fortinet describes as the security fabric platform. >> It's interesting not to kind of go on a tangent here, but to illustrate the point is, if you look at all the cyber security challenges that we're facing globally, especially here in the United States, the public private partnerships are increasing. We're seeing more public sector, commercial integration, the role of data. We've covered this on SiliconANGLE and many other cube interviews, especially with you guys. And there's all this kind of new approaches. Everyone's trying everything. They're buying every product that's out there, but now there's like overload. There's too much product. And that the obvious thing that's becoming clear, as cloud-scale, the evolution of this new edge environment. And so with that becomes the importance two trends that you guys are participating in. I want to get your thoughts on this because that's called SASE and SD-WAN. We know SD-WAN, but SASE stands for Secure Access Service Edge. That's I think Gartner made that term up or someone made that term up, but that's a new technology. And you've got SD-WAN, these are traditionally had been like edge for like branch offices. Now evolve now as pure network edges than a distributed computing environment. What's so important about these two topics. Nirav take us through the changes that are happening and why it's important for enterprises to get a handle on this >> Yeah John. So, as you said, SASE, Secured Access Services Edge. Really the foundation of that topic is the convergence of networking and security. And as you mentioned, Fortinet has been doing a lot of innovation in this area, right? Six years back, we pioneered the convergence of security and networking with security SD-WAN but what's happening now with the SASE is, as that working from anywhere continues to remain the dominant trend, users are looking for a Cloud-Delivered Security. And that's what Fortinet recently announced, where we can provide the most comprehensive Cloud-Delivered Security for remote users. For thin edge. You can still, anytime access from any device. To give you an example, now, our remote users, they are still at home or they can be branch of one user, but still have that always on threat protection with the consistent security given in the Cloud. So they don't have to go anymore from the branch or data center, but have a direct connectivity to the Cloud Security before they access SaaS application. That's what one of the SASE trend is. Second thing, John we are observing is users are now, as they are going back to the hybrid workforce, they are looking for a thin edge right? To your point of an edge, edge is still intelligent and a very important but there is an interesting architectural shift of, can I just use an intelligent networking there move my CapEx to OPEX and have security in Cloud? That unified security, unified policy is again becoming important. That's what SASE-- >> Okay, so I like this Cloud-Delivered Security. This is a hybrid workforce you're addressing with this marketplace, that's clear. Hybrid is a everywhere, hybrid cloud, hybrid workforce, hybrid events are coming. I mean, we love covering events physically but also now virtual. Everything's impacted by the word hybrid and Cloud. But talk about this thin edge. What do you mean by that? I mean I think thin edge, I think thin clients, the old trend. What is thin edge mean? >> Yeah, so there're different organizations are looking at the architecture in a different way. Some organizations are thinking about having a very simple branch where it is used for modern networking technologies, while security has been shifted to the Cloud deliver. What happens with this model is, now they are relying more into technologies like SD-WAN on edge to provide that intelligence steering, while everything in the security is being done in a Cloud compute way for both remote users and thin edge environment. Now the good news here is, they don't have to worry about the security patching, or any of those security capabilities. It is all done by Fortinet as they go and use the SaaS applications performance >> I want to come back and drill down on that but I want to get Peter in here in the Zero Trust equation because one of the things that comes up all the time with this edge discussion is network access. I mean, you go back to the old days of computing, you had edge log in, you'd come in, radius servers, all these things were happening, pretty simple cut paradigm. It's gotten so complicated now, Peter. So Zero Trust is a hot area. It's not only one of the things but it's a super important, what is Zero Trust these days? >> Zero Trust is indeed a very hot term because I think part of it is just it sounds great from a security standpoint, Zero Trust, you don't trust anyone, but it really comes down to a philosophical approach of how do you address the user's data applications that you want to protect? And the idea of Zero Trust and really what's driving it is the fact that as we've been talking, people are working remotely. The perimeter of the organization has dissolved. And so you no longer can afford to have a trusted internal zone and an untrusted external zone. Everything has to be "Zero Trust." So this means that you need to be authenticating and verifying users and devices on a repeat and regular basis, and you want to when you're bringing them on and giving them access to assets and applications, you want to do that with as granular of control as possible. So the users and devices have access to what they need, but no more. And that's kind of the basic tenets of Zero Trust. And that's what, it's really about prioritizing the applications and data, as opposed to just looking at, am I bringing someone into my network. >> God, the concept of Zero Trust, obviously hot. What's the difference between Zero Trust Access and Zero Trust Network Access, or as people say ZTA versus ZTNA? I mean, is there a nuance there? I mean, what's the difference between the two? >> That's actually a really good question because they both have the Zero Trust in the name. ZTNA is actually a specific term that a Gardner created or other analyst I should say, created 10 years ago. And this refers specifically to controlling application to controlling access to applications. whereas Zero Trust, overall Zero Trust access deals with both users and devices coming on to networks, how are you connecting them on? What kind of access are you giving them on the network? ZTNA is specifically how are you bringing users and connecting them to applications? Whether those applications are on premise or in the Cloud. >> So what the NA is more like the traditional old VPN model connecting users from home or whatever. Just connecting across the network with user to app. Is that right? >> That's actually a really good insight, but ironically the VPN clinical benefits of this are actually an outgrowth of the ZTNA model because ZTA doesn't differentiate between when you're on network or off network. It creates a secure tunnel automatically no matter where the user is, but VPN is all just about creating a secure tunnel when you're remote. ZTNA just does that automatically. So it's a lot easier, a lot simpler. You get a hundred percent compliance and then you also have that same secure tunnel even when you're "on a safe network" because with Zero Trust, you don't trust anything. So yes it really is leading to the evolution of VPN connectivity. >> So Nirav I want to get back to you on tie that circle back to what we were talking about around hybrid. So everyone says everything's moving to the Cloud. That's what people think. And Cloud ops is essentially what hybrid is. So connect the dots here between the zero trust, zero trust A and NA with the move to the hybrid cloud model. How does that, how does it, what's the difference between the two? Where's the connection? What's the relevance for your customers and the marketplace? >> Yeah, I think that again goes back to that SASE framework where ZTNA plays a huge role because John, we talked about when users are working from anywhere in this hybrid workforce, one of the important thing is to not give them this implicit trust right? To the applications, enabling the explicit trust is very important. And that is what ZTNA does. And the interesting thing about Fortinet is we provide all of this part of FortiOS and users can deploy anywhere. So as they are going to the Cloud-Delivered Security, they can enable ZTNA there so that we make sure this user at what time, which application they're accessing and should we give them that access or not. So great way to have ZTNA, SASE, everything in one unified policy and provide that anytime access for any device with a trusting place. >> Okay, real quick question to you is, what's the difference between SASE, Secure Access Service Edge, and SD-WAN? Real quick. >> Yeah, so SD-WAN is one of the core foundation element of SASE, right? So far we talked about the Cloud-Delivered Security, which is all important part of the security of the service. SASE is another element, which is a networking and a service where SD-WAN plays a foundation role. And John that's where I was saying earlier that the intelligent edge modern technology that SD-WAN provides is absolutely necessary for a successful SASE deployment, right? If users who are sitting anywhere, if they can't get the right application steering, before they provide the Cloud-Delivered Security, then they are not going to get the user experience. So having the right SD-WAN foundation in that edge, working in tandem with the Cloud-Delivered Security makes a win-win situation for both networking and security teams. >> So Peter, I want to talk to you. Last night I was on a chat on the Clubhouse app with some cybersecurity folks and they don't talk in terms of "I got ZTNA and I got some SASE and SD-WEN, they're talking mostly about just holistically their environment. So could you just clarify the difference 'cause this can be confusing between Zero Trust Network Access ZTNA versus SASE because it's kind of the same thing, but I know it's nuance, but, is there a difference there? People get confused by this when I hear people talking 'cause like they just throw jargon around and they say, "Oh, with Zero Trust we're good. What does that even mean? >> Yeah, we get a lot of that when talking with customers because the two technologies are so complimentary and similar, they're both dealing with security for remote workers. However sassy is really dealing with that kind of firewall in the Cloud type service, where the remote user gets the experience and protection of being behind a firewall, ZTNA is about controlling the application and giving them that secure tunnel to the application. So they're different things one's kind of that firewall and service, security and service, even networking in a service. But ZTNA is really about, how do I have the policies no matter where our user is, to give them access to specific applications and then give them a secure tunnel to that application? So very complimentary, but again, they are separate things. >> What's the landscape out there with competitive because has there products, I mean you guys are product folks. You'll get the product question. Is it all kind of in one thing, is this bundled in? Do you guys have a unique solution? Some people have it, they don't. What's the marketplace look like from a product standpoint? >> Yeah. So John, that starts back to the platform that we talked about, right? Fortinet always believes in not to develop a point product, but doing organic development which is part of a broader platform. So when we look at the thing like SASE, which required a really enterprise grade networking and security stack, Fortinet has organically developed them SD-WAN, we are a leading vendor, for the Gartner magic quadrant leader there, network firewall, including whether they deployed on Cloud, on-prem or a segmentation. We are a leader there. So when you combine both of them and ZTNA is part of it, there is only handful of vendor you will see in the industry who can provide the consistent security, networking, and security together and have that better user experience for the single management. So clearly there's a lot of buzz John, about a lot of vendors talk about it. But when you go to the details and see this kind of unified policy of networking and security, Fortinet is emerging as a leader. >> Well I always like talking the experts like you guys on this topic. And we get into the conversations around the importance under the hood. SASE, SD-WEN, we've been covering that for a long time. And now with Zero Trust becoming such a prominent architectural feature in Cloud and hybrid, super important under the hood. At the end of the day though, I got to ask the customers question, which is, "what's in it for me? "I care about breaches. "I don't want to be breached. "The government's not helping me over the top. "I got to defend myself. "I have to put resources in place, it's expensive, "and nevermind if I get breached." The criticality of that alone, is a risk management discussion. These are huge table. These are huge stakes and the stakes are high. So what I care about is are you going to stop the breaches? I need the best security in town. What do you say to that? >> Yeah this goes back to the beginning. We talked about consistent certified security, right John. So yes a SASE model is interesting. Customers are going to move to Cloud, but it's going to be a journey. Customers are not going Cloud first day one. They are going to take a hybrid approach where security is required in a segment, in an edge and on the Cloud. And that's where having a solid security in place is a number one requirement. And when you look at the history of Fortinet, over the last 20 years, how we have done, with our FortiGuard Labs, our threat intelligence and ability for us to protect over 450,000 customers, that's a big achievement. And for us to continue to provide that security but more importantly, continue to go out, and do a third-party certification with many organization to make sure no matter where customers are deploying security, it is that same enterprise grade security deployment. And that's very important that we talk to our users to make sure they validate that. >> Peter would weigh in on this. Customers don't want any breaches. How do you help them with the best security? What's your take on that? >> Well, to kind of reiterate what Nirav said earlier, we really believe that security is a team sport. And you do need best in class products at each individual element, but more importantly you need those products we talking together. So the fact that we have industry leading firewalls, the fact that we have industry-leading SD-WAN, we've got industry leading products to cover the entire gamut of the end point all the way email application, Cloud, all these products while it's important that they're, third-party validated as Nirav was mentioning, it's more important that they actually talk together. They're integrated and provide automated actions. Today's cyber security moves so fast. You need that team approach to be able to protect and stop those breaches. >> Well, you guys have a great enterprise grade solution. I got to say, I've been covering you guys for many years now and you guys have been upfront, out front on the data aspect of it with FortiGuards. And I think people are starting to realize now that data is the key, value proposition is not a secret anymore. Used to be kind of known for the people inside the ropes. So congratulations. I do know that there's a lot action happening. I want to give you guys a chance to at the end of this conversation now to just put a plug in Fortinet because there's more people coming into the workforce now. Post pandemic, young people with computer science degrees and other degrees that want to go into career with cybersecurity, could you guys share both your perspective on for the young people watching or people re-skilling, what opportunities there are from a coding standpoint, and or from say an analyst perspective. What are some of the hot openings? 'cause there are thousands and thousands of jobs give a quick plug for Fortinet and what openings you guys might have. >> Well, certainly in the cyber industry, one of the major trends we have is a work place shortage. There are not enough trained professionals who know about cybersecurity. So for those who are interested in retooling or starting their career, cybersecurity is an ongoing field. It's going to be around for a long time. I highly encourage those interested, come take a look at Fortinet. We offer free training. So you can start from knowing nothing to becoming certified up to a security architect level, and all those, all that training is now available for free. So it's a great time to star, great time to come into the industry. The industry needs you >> Any particularly areas, Peter you see that's like really jumping off the page. >> Well, it's hybrid, knowing Cloud, knowing on-prem, knowing the traffic, knowing the data on the applications, there's just so much to do. >> You're the head of product, you've got all, probably a ton of openings but seriously young people trying to figure out where to jump in, what are the hot areas? Where can people dig in and get retrained and or find their career? >> Yeah, no, I think to reiterate what Peter said, right? The program that Fortinet has built, LSE one, two, three which is free available, is a great foundation. Because that actually goes into the detail of many topics we touched upon. Even though we are talking about SD-WAN, SASE, ZTNA, fundamentally these are the networking and security technologies to make sure users are able to do the right work in the user experience. And that will be really helpful to the young people who are looking to learn more and go into this area. So highly encouraged to take those training, reach out to us. We are there to provide any mentorship, anything that is required to help them in that journey. >> Anything jump off the page in terms of areas that you think are super hot, that are in need. >> Certainly there's convergence of networking and security. There is a growing need of how and what is Zero Trust is? and how the security is applied everywhere. Definitely that's a topic of mine for a lot of our customers, and that's an area, it's a good thing to gain more knowledge and utilize it. >> Nirav and Peter, thank you for coming on. You guys are both experts and the leaders at Fortinet, the product team. The need for security platform is an all time high consolidating tools into a platform. More tools are needed and there's new tools coming. So I'm expecting to have more great conversations as the world evolves. Certainly the edge is super important. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> Okay, Cube Conversation on security here in the Palo Alto studios. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. (ethereal music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes Coverage of Del Tech World 2020. With me is Jeff Boudreau, the president general manager of Infrastructure Solutions group Deltek. Jeff, always good to see you, my friend. How you doing? >>Good. Good to see you. >>I wish we were hanging out a Sox game or a pat's game, but, uh, I guess this will dio But, you know, it was about a year ago when you took over leadership of I s G. I actually had way had that sort of brief conversation. You were in the room with Jeff Clark. I thought it was a great, great choice. How you doing? How you feeling Any sort of key moments the past 12 months that you you feel like sharing? >>Sure. So I first I want to say, I do remember that about a year ago. So thank you for reminding me. Yeah, it's, uh it's been a very interesting year, right? It's been it's been one year. It was in September was one year since I took over I s G. But I'm feeling great. So thank you for asking. I hope you're doing the same. And I'm really optimistic about where we are and where we're heading. Aziz, you know, it's been an extremely challenging year in a very unpredictable year, as we've all experienced. And I'd say for the, you know, the first part of the year, especially starting in March on I've been really focused on the health and safety of our, you know, the families, our customers and our team members of the team on a lot of it's been shifting, you know, in regards to helping our customers around, you know, work from home or education and learn from home. And, you know, during all this time, though, I'll tell you, as a team, we've accomplished a lot. There's a handful of things that I'm very proud of, you know, first and foremost, that states around the customer experience we have delivered on our best quality in our product. NPS scores in our entire history. So something I'm extremely proud of during this time around our innovation and innovation engine, we part of the entire portfolio which you're well aware of. We had nine launches in nine weeks back in that May in June. Timeframe. So something I'm really proud of the team on, uh, on. Then last, I'd say it's around the team and right, we shifted about 90% of our workforce from the office tow home, you know, from an engineering team. That could be, you know, 85% of my team is engineers and writing code. And so, you know, people were concerned about that. But we didn't skip a beat, so, you know, pretty impressed by the team and what they've done there. So, you know, the strategy remains unchanged. Uh, you know, we're focused on our customers integrating across the entire portfolio and the businesses like VM ware and really focused on getting share. So despite all the uncertainty in the market, I'm pretty pleased with the team and everything that's been going on. So uh, yeah, it's it's been it's been an interesting year, but it's really great. I'm really optimistic about what we have in front of us. >>Yeah, I mean, there's not much you could do a control about the macro condition on it, you know it. Z dealt to us and we have to deal with it. I mean, in your space. It's the sort of countervailing things here one is. Look, you're not selling laptops and endpoint security. That's not your business right in the data center. Eso. But the flip side of that is you mentioned your portfolio refresh. You know, things like Power Store. You got product cycles now kicking in. So that could be, you know, a buffer. What are you seeing with Power Store and what's the uptake look like? They're >>sure. Well, specifically, let me take a step back and the regards the portfolio. So first, you know, the portfolio itself is a direct reflection in the feedback from all our partners and our customers over the last couple of years on Day two, ramp up that innovation. I spent a lot of time in the last few years simplifying under the power brands, which you're well aware of, right? So we had a lot of for a legacy EMC and Legacy dollars. Really? How do we simplify under a set of brands really over delivering innovation on a fewer set of products that really accelerating in exceeding customer needs? And we did that across the board. So from power edge servers, you know, power Max, the high end storage, the Powerball, all that we didn't hear one. And just most recently. And, you know, it's part of the big launches. We had power scale. We have power flex for software to find. And, of course, the new flagship offer for the mid range, which is power store. Um, Specifically, the policy of the momentum has been building since our launch back in May. And the feedback from our partners and our customers has been fantastic. And we've had a lot of big wins against, you know, a lot of a lot of our core competitors. A couple examples one is Arrow Electronics SAA, Fortune 500 Global Elektronik supplier. They leverage power Store to provide, you know, basically both, you know, enterprise computing and storage needs for their for their broader bases around the world on there, really taking advantage of the 41 data reduction, really helping them simplify their capacity planning and really improve operational efficiencies specifically without impacting performance. So it's it's one. We're given the data reductions, but there's no impact on performance, which is a huge value proffer for arrow another big customers tickets and write a global law firm on their reporting to us that over 90 they've had a 90% reduction in their rack space, and they've had over five times two performance over a core competitors storage systems azi. They've deployed power store around the world, really, and it's really been helping them. Thio easily migrate workloads across, so the feedback from the customers and partners has been extremely positive. Um, there really citing benefits around the architecture, the flexibility architecture around the micro services, the containers they're loving, the D M or integration. They're loving the height of the predictable data reduction capabilities in line with in line performance or no performance penalties with data efficiencies, the workload support, I'd say the other big things around the anytime upgrades is another big thing that customers we're really talking about so very excited and optimistic in regards as we continue to re empower store the second half of the year into next year really is the full full year for power store. >>So can I ask you about that? That in line data reduction with no performance hit is that new ipe? I mean, you're not doing some kind of batch data reduction, right? >>No, it's It's new, I p. It's all patented. We've actually done a lot of work in regards to our technologies. There's some of the things we talk about GPS and deep use and smart Knicks and things like that. We've used some offload engines to help with that. So between the software and the hardware, we've had leverage new I. P. So we can actually provide that predictable data reduction. But right with the performance customers need, So we're not gonna have a trade off in regards. You get more efficiencies and less performance or more performance and less efficiency. >>That's interesting. Yeah, when I talked to the chip guys, they talk about this sort of the storage offloads and other offloads we're seeing. These alternative processors really start to hit the market videos. The obvious one. But you're seeing others. Aziz. Well, you're really it sounds like you're taking advantage of that. >>Yeah, it's a huge benefit. I mean, we should, you know, with our partners, if it's Intel's and in videos and folks like that broad comes, it's really leveraging the great innovation that they do, plus our innovation. So if you know the sum of the parts, can you know equal Mauritz a benefit to our customers in the other day? That's what it's all about. >>So it sounds like Cove. It hasn't changed your strategy. I was talking toe Dennis Hoffman and he was saying, Look, you know, fundamentally, we're executing on the same strategy. You know, tactically, there's things that we do differently. But what's your summarize your strategy coming in tow 2021. You know, we're still early in this decade. What are you seeing is the trends that you're trying to take advantage of? What do you excited about? Maybe some things that keep you up at night? >>Yeah, so I'd say, you know, I'll stay with what Dennis said. You know, it's our strategy is not changing its a company. You probably got that from Michael and from job, obviously, Dennis just recently. But for me, it's a two pronged approach. One's all about winning the consolidation in the core infrastructure markets that we could just paid in today. So I think Service Storage Network, we're already clear leader across all those segments that we serve in our you know, we'll continue to innovate within our existing product categories. And you saw that with the nine launches in the nine weeks in my point on that one is we're gonna always make sure that we have best debris offers. If it's a three tier, two tier or converge or hyper converged offer, we wanna make sure that we serve that and have the best innovation possible. In addition to that, though, the secondary piece of the strategy really is around. How do we differentiate value across or innovating across I S G? You know, Dell Technologies and even the broader ecosystems and some of the examples I'll give you right now that we're doing is if you think about innovating across icy, that's all about providing improved customer experience, a set of solutions and offers that really helped simplify customer operations, right? And really give them better T CEOs or better. S L. A. An example of something like that's cloud like it's a SAS based off of that we have. That really helps provide great insights and telemetry to our customers. That helps them simplify their I T operations, and it's a major step forward towards, you know, autonomous infrastructure which is really what they're asking for. Customers of a very happy with the work we've done around Day one, you know, faster, time to value. But now it's like Day two and beyond. How do you really helped me Kinda accelerate the operations and really take that away from a three other big pieces innovating across all technologies. And you know, we do this with VM Ware now live today, and that's just writing. So things like VX rail is an example where we work together and where the clear leader in H C I. Things like Delta Cloud Uh, when we built in V M V C F A, B, M or cloud foundation in Tan Xue delivering an industry leading hybrid cloud platform just recently a VM world. I'm sure you heard about it, but Project Monterey was just announced, and that's an effort we're doing with VM Ware and some other partners. They're really about the next generation of infrastructure. Um, you know, I guess taking it up a notch out of the infrastructure and I've g phase, you know, some of the areas that we're gonna be looking at the end to end solutions to help our customers around six key areas. I'm sure John Rose talking about the past, but things like cloud Edge five g A i m l data management security. So those will be the big things. You'll see us lean into a Z strategies consistent. Some big themes that you'll see us lean into going into next year. >>Yeah, I mean, it is consistent, right? You guys have always tried to ride the waves, vector your portfolio into those waves and add value. I'm particularly impressed with your focus on customer experience, and I think that's a huge deal. You know, in the past, a lot of companies yours included your predecessor. You see, Hey, throwing so many products at me, I can't I don't understand the portfolio. So I mean, focusing on that I think is huge right now because people want that experience, you know, to be mawr cloudlike. And that's that's what you got to deliver. What about any news from from Dell Tech world? Any any announcements that you you wanna highlight that we could talk about? >>Sure. And actually, just touching back on the point you had no about the simplification that is a major 10 of my in regards the organization. So there's three key components that I drive once around customer focus, and that's keeping customers first and foremost. And everything we do to is around axillary that innovation. Engine three is really bringing everything together as one team. So we provide a better outcome to our customers. You know, in that simplification after that you talk about is court toe what we're driving. So I want to do less things, I guess better in the notion of how we do that. What that means to me is, as I make decisions that want to move away from other technologies and really leverage our best of breed type shared type, that's technology. I p people I p I can, you know, e can exceed customer needs in those markets that were serving. So it's actually allows me to x Sorry, my innovation engine, because I shift more and more resource is onto the newer stock now for Del Tech world. Yes, We got some cool stuff coming. You probably heard about a few of them. Uh, we're gonna be announcing a project project Apex. Hopefully you've been briefed on that already. This isn't new news or I'll be in trouble. But that's really around. Our strategy about delivering, simple, consistent as a service experiences for our customers bringing together are dealt technology as a service offering and our cloud strategy together. Onda also our technology offerings in our go to market all under a single unified effort, which Ellison do would be leading. Um, you know, on behalf of our executive leadership team s, that's one big area. And there is also another big one that I'll talk about a sui expand our as a service offers. And we think there's a big power to that in regards to our Dell Technologies. Cloud console solving will be launching a new cloud console that will provide uniformed experience across all the resources and give users and ability toe instantly managed every aspect of their cloud journey with just a few clicks. So going back to your broader point, it's all about simplicity. >>Yeah, we definitely all over Apex. That's something I wanted to ask you about this notion of as a service, really requiring it could have a new mindset, certainly from a pricing and how you talk about the customer experience that it's a whole new customer experience. Your you're basically giving them access. Thio What I would consider more of a platform on giving them some greater flexibility. Yeah, there's some constraints in there, but of course, you know the physical only put so much capacity and before him. But the idea of being ableto dial up, dial down within certain commitments is, I think, a powerful one. How does it change the way in which you you think about how you go about developing products just in terms of you know, this AP economy Infrastructure is code. How how you converse about those products internally and externally. How would you see that shaking >>out Dave? That's an awesome question. And it's actually for its front center. For everything we do, obviously, customers one choice and flexibility what they do. And to your point as we evolved warm or as a service, no specific product and product brands and logos on probably the way of the future. It's the services. It's the experience that you provide in regards to how we do that. So if you think about me, you know, in in infrastructure making infrastructure as a service, you really want to define what that customer experiences. That s L. A. That they're trying toe realize. And then how do we make sure that we build the right solutions? Products feature functions to enable that a law that goes back to the core engineering stuff that we need to dio right now, a lot of that stuff is about making sure that we have the right things around. If it's around developer community. If it's around AP rich, it's around. SdK is it's all about how do we leverage if it's internal source or external open source, if you will. It's regards to How do we do that? No. A thing that I think we all you know what you're well aware but we ought to keep in mind is that the cloud native applications are really relevant. Toe both the on premises, wealthy off premise. So think about things around portability reusability. You know, those are some great examples of just kind of how we think about this as we go forward. But those modern applications were required modern infrastructure, and regardless of how that infrastructure is abstracted now, just think about things like this. Aggregation or compose ability or Internet based computing. It's just it's a huge trend that we have to make sure we're thinking of. So is we. We just aggregate between the physical layers to the software layers and how we provide that to a service that could be think of a modern container based asset that could be repurposed. Either could be on a purpose built thing. It could be deployed in a converge or hyper converged. Or it could be two points a software feature in a cloud. Now, that's really how we're thinking about that, regards that we go forward. So we're talking about building modern assets or components That could be you right once we used many type model, and we can deploy that wherever you want because of some of the abstraction of desegregation that we're gonna do. >>E could see customers in the in the near term saying, I don't care so much about the product. I want the fast one all right with the cheaper one e. >>It's kind of what you talking about, that I talked about the ways. If you think about that regards, you know, maybe it's on a specific brand or portfolio. You look into and you say, Hey, what's the service level that I'd wanted to your point like Hey, for compute or for storage, it's really gonna end up being the specific S l A. And that's around performance or Leighton see, or cost or resiliency they want. They want that experience in that that you know, And that's why they're gonna be looking for the end of the end state. That's what we have to deliver is an engineering. >>So there's an opportunity here for you guys that I wonder if you could comment on. And that's the storage admin E. M. C essentially created. You know, you get this army of people that you know pretty good of provisioning lungs, although that's not really that's a great career path for folks. But program ability is, and this notion of infrastructure is code as you as you make your systems more programmable. Is there a skill set opportunity to take that army of constituents that you guys helped train and grow and over their careers and bring them along into sort of the next decade? This new era? >>I think the the easy answer is yes, I obviously that's a hard thing to do and you go forward. But I think embracing the change in the evolution of change, I think is a great opportunity. And I think there is e mean if you look step back and you think about data management, right? And you think about all the you know all data is not created equal and you know, and it has a life cycle, if you will. And so if it's on edge to Korda, Cloward, depending think about data vaults and data mobility and all that stuff. There's gonna be a bunch of different personas and people touching data along the way. I think the I T advance and the storage admin. They're just one of those personas that we have to help serve and way talk about How do we make them heroes, if you will, in regards to their broader environment. So if they're providing, if they evolve and really helped provide a modern infrastructure that really enables, you know infrastructure is a code or infrastructure as a service, they become a nightie hero, if you will for the rest of team. So I think there's a huge opportunity for them to evolve as the technology evolves. >>Yeah, you talked about you know, your families, your employees, your team s o. You obviously focused on them. You got your products going hitting all the marks. How are you spending your time these days? >>Thes days right now? Well, we're in. We're in our cycle for fiscal 22 planning. Right? And right now, a lot of that's above the specific markets were serving. It's gonna be about the strategy and making sure that we have people focused on those things. So it really comes back to some of the strategy tents were driving for next year. Now, as I said, our focus big time. Well, I guess for the for this year is one is consolidation of the core markets. Major focus for May 2 is going to be around winning in storage, and I want to be very specific. It's winning midrange storage. And that was one of the big reasons why Power Store came. That's gonna be a big focus on Bennett's really making sure that we're delivering on the as a service stuff that we just talked about in regards to all the technology innovation that's required to really provide the customer experience. And then, lastly, it's making sure that we take advantage of some of these growth factors. So you're going to see a dentist. Probably talked a lot about Telco, but telco on edge and as a service and cloud those things, they're just gonna be key to everything I do. So if you think about from poor infrastructure to some of these emerging opportunities Z, I'm spending all my time. >>Well, it's a It's a big business and a really important one for Fidel. Jeff Boudreau. Thanks so much for coming back in the Cube. Really a pleasure seeing you. I hope we can see each other face to face soon. >>You too. Thank you for having me. >>You're very welcome. And thank you for watching everybody keep it right there. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. Our continuing coverage of Del Tech World 2020. We'll be right back right after this short break

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by Cisco. >>Hello and welcome to the Cube. I'm John for a year host. We've got a great conversation virtual event, accelerating automation with definite Cisco. Definite. And of course, we got the Cisco Brain Trust here. Cube alumni Suzy we Vice President, senior Vice President GM and also CTO of Cisco. Definite and ecosystem Success C X, All that great stuff. Many Wadley Who's the director? Senior director of definite certifications. Eric Field, director of developer advocacy. Susie Mandy. Eric, Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Great to see you down. So >>we're not in >>person. We >>don't Can't be at the definite zone. We can't be on site doing definite created All the great stuff we've been doing in the past three years were virtual the cube Virtual. Thanks for coming on. Uh, Susie, I gotta ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the succession had has been awesome. But definite create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the definite community. This is what this ties into the theme of accelerating automation with definite because you said to me, I think four years ago everything should be a service or X a s is it's called and automation plays a critical role. Um, could you please share your vision? Because this is really important. And still only 5 to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and program ability. What's your What's your vision? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that is, more and more businesses are coming online is I mean, they're all online, But is there growing into the cloud? Is their growing in new areas as we're dealing with security is everyone's dealing with the pandemic. There's so many things going on. But what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security. It has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure. How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be ableto really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable, the infrastructure is programmable, and you don't need just acts writing on top. But now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to a higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. >>You remember a few years ago when definite create first started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we're talking about Muraki. You know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about, then this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was Cisco um Europe in Barcelona before all the cove it hit and you had the massive cloud surgeon scale happening going on right when the pandemic hit. And even now, more than ever, the cloud scale the modern APS. The momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing Mawr innovation at scale. Because the pressure to do that because >>the stay alive get >>your thoughts on, um, what's going on in your world? Because you were there in person. Now we're six months in scale is huge. >>We are, Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers as businesses around the world as we ourselves all dealt with, How do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because >>you >>have to go home and then figure out how from home can I make sure that my I t infrastructure is automated out from home? Can I make sure that every employee is out there in working safely and securely? You know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and being kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. So we had to extend business applications to people's homes in countries like, you know, well around the world. But also in India, where it was actually not, you know, not they wouldn't let They didn't have rules toe let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer. You know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home, so that puts extra stress on automation. It puts extra stress on our customers digital transformation. And it just forced them toe, you know, automate digitally transform quicker. And they had to because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers. You have to figure out how to automate all of that. >>You know, one of them >>were still there, all in that environment today. >>You know, one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observe ability, uh, kubernetes serve micro services. So those things again. All Dev ups. And you know, if you guys got some acquisitions, you thought about 1000 eyes. Um, you got a new one you just bought recently Port shift to raise the game in security, Cuban, All these micro services, So observe, ability, superhot. But then people go work at home, as you mentioned. How do you think? Observe, What do you observing? The network is under huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on. People zooms and WebEx is and education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this in the upside? How are you guys looking at the what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this program? Ability, challenge and observe ability, challenges? It's a huge deal. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right? You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Muraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use, this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has This goes entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that Bigger Attn. Bigger scale. Francisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observe ability and the dashboards and the automation of the A P. I s and all of it. But when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in, um, they had to build in. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people toe work from home and how well you could reach customers. All of that used to be a nightie conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the heads of I t and the CEO and saying, You know, how is our VPN connectivity? Is everybody working from home? How many people are, you know, connected and ableto work and watch their productivity? Eso All of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure I t stuff became a board level conversation and you know, once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they're now building in automation, additional transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observe ability. You know, looking for those events. The dashboards, you know? So it really has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners air doing to really rise to that next level. >>Susan, I know you gotta go, but real quick, um, describe what? Accelerating automation with definite means. >>Well, you've been fault. You know, we've been working together on definite in the vision of the infrastructure program ability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that. And you need the right skill sets in the program ability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people. And it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run. Things are definite. Community has risen to this challenge. People have jumped in. They've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. You know, we have you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals. We have partners, you know, They're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerate accelerating automation while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people, Justus, much as it is about automation and technology. >>And we got definite create right around the corner virtual. Unfortunately, being personal will be virtual Susie. Thank you for your time. We're gonna dig into those people challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you got to go, but stay with us. We're gonna dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >>Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks, John. Okay. >>Mandy, you heard Susie is about people, and one of the things that's close to your heart you've been driving is a senior director of definite certifications. Um is getting people leveled up? I mean, the demand for skills cybersecurity, network program, ability, automation, network design solution, architect cloud multi cloud design thes are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >>Oh, yes, absolutely. The you know what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning those air. What's accelerating? A lot of the technology changes, and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing, uh, customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like Dev SEC ops engineer, network Automation engineer, network automation developer, which sues you mentioned and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current, um, scope and broaden out and take on new challenges? >>Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this, um uh, piece of getting the certifications. Um, first, before you get started, describe what your role is. Director of developer advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving what's the state of it now? Because with Cove and people are working at home, they have more time to contact, switch and get some certifications and that they can code more. What's your >>What's your role? Absolutely So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the definite creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and help share technical information with them, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into. How do you really start solving these problems? Eso that's had to pivot quite a bit. Obviously, Sisco live us. We pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect, as we found out with a much larger audience. So you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of you know how big the convention center is. We were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with are definite day that was kind of attached onto Sisco Live, and we got great feedback from the audience that now we're actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. But to your broader question of you know what my team does. So that's one piece of it is is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes, new learning labs, things like that that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the definite site. And then my team also looks after communities such as the Cisco Learning Network, where there's there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. We've seen a huge shift now in that group that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the definite certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with program ability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up community with, you know, helping answer questions, helping provide content. They move now into the definite spaces well and are helping people with that sort of certifications. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that >>I gotta ask you on the trends around automation. What skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are Is there anything in particular? Obviously, network automation been around for a long time. Cisco's been leader in that. But as you move up, the staff has modern applications or building. Do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What people learning? >>Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned observe ability was big before Cove it and we actually really saw that amplified during co vid. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observe ability now that we needed? Well, we're virtual eso. That's actually been a huge uptick, and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that air. Now, figuring out how can I do this at scale? I think one good example that Susie was talking about the VPN example, and we actually had a number of SCS in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up and one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that I T departments might care about about their firewalls, things that you didn't normally look at. The old days you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. And when that number went to 100% things like licenses started coming into play where they need to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the essays actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use them open source, tooling to monitor and alert on these things, and then published it so the whole community code could go out and get a copy of it. Try it out in their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that and trying to figure out Okay, now I could take that. I can adapt into what I need to see for my observe ability. >>That's great, Mandy, I want to get your thoughts on this, too, because as automation continues to scale. Um, it's gonna be a focus. People are at home. And you guys had a lot of content online for you. Recorded every session that in the definite zone learning is going on sometimes literally and non linearly. You've got the certifications, which is great. That's key. Great success there. People are interested. But what other learnings are you seeing? What are people, um, doing? What's the top top trends? >>Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time, they want toe advance, their skill set. And just like any kind of learning, people want choice. They wanna be able to choose which matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors leading them through a study plan. On we have two new expert lead study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do an immersive learning experience together with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kind of team experiences called Automation Boot Camp. And then we're also seeing individual who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands on lab, gets, um, skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. And so we have really modular, self driven hands on learning through the Definite Fundamentals course, which is available through DEV. Net. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like Thio experiment and then go, you know, read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're They're spending a lot of time in our definite sandbox, trying out different technologies. Cisco Technologies with open source technologies, getting hands on and building things, and three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD wan. There's a huge interest in people Skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about. Security is a focus area where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center using infrastructure as code type principles. So those were three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing more about that at definite create. >>Awesome Eric and man, if you guys can wrap up the accelerated automated with definite package and virtual event here, um, and also t up definite create because definite create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. Again, it's super important because it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end program ability. And with everything is a service that you guys were doing everything with a piece. Um Onley can imagine the enablement that's gonna enable create Can >>you hear the >>memory real quick on accelerating automation with definite and TF definite create. Mandy will start with you. >>Yes, I'll go first, and then Eric can close this out. Um, so just like we've been talking about with you at every definite event over the past years, you know, Devon, it's bringing a p I s across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating automation with definite. Suzy mentioned the people aspect of that the people Skilling up and how that transformed team transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so would I think about accelerating automation with definite. It's about the definite community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community with those new skills. >>Eric, take us home. He accelerate automation. Definite and definite create a lot of developer action going on cloud native right now, your thoughts? >>Absolutely. I I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for definite day this year for Cisco Live, and we're seeing we're able to leverage it even further with create this year. So whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding a start now track for people that I want to be there. They want to be a developer. Network automation developer, for instance, We've now got a track just for them where they could get started and start learning some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. Eso. I love that we're able to bring that together with the experience community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. So I'm really excited to bring that whole mixed together as well as getting some of our business units together to and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new AP eyes into their platforms? What are the what problems are they hoping that customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together, seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So, like I said, Cisco Learning Network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >>Awesome. Thanks so much. God, man, can >>I add one had >>one more thing. >>Yeah, I was just going to say the other really exciting thing about create this year with the virtual nature of it is that it's happening in three regions. And, you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions. And, uh, content and speakers and the region stepping upto have things personalized to their area to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for definite create that's going to be fantastic this year. >>You know, that's what God is going to close out and just put the final bow on that by saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now, during with this virtual definite virtual definite create virtual the cube virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups on sharing content. We're gonna learn new things. We're gonna try new things, and ultimately people will rise up and will be resilient. I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And whoa, we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on. The Cuban talk about your awesome accelerate automation and definitely looking forward to it. Thank you. >>Thank you so much. >>Happy to be here. >>Okay, I'm John for the Cube. Virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content amendment Virtual until we're face to face. Thank you so much for watching. And we'll see you at definite create. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by Cisco. >>Hello and welcome to the Cube. I'm John for a year host. We've got a great conversation virtual event, accelerating automation with definite Cisco. Definite. And of course, we got the Cisco Brain Trust here. Cube alumni Suzy we Vice President, senior Vice President GM and also CTO of Cisco. Definite and ecosystem Success C X, All that great stuff. Many Wadley Who's the director? Senior director of definite certifications. Eric Field, director of developer advocacy. Susie Mandy. Eric, Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Great to see you >>down. So we're not in person. We >>don't Can't be at the definite zone. We can't be on site doing definite created All the great stuff we've been doing in the past three years were virtual the cube Virtual. Thanks for coming on. Uh, Susie, I gotta ask you because you know, we've been talking years ago when you started this mission and just the succession had has been awesome. But definite create has brought on a whole nother connective tissue to the definite community. This is what this ties into the theme of accelerating automation with definite because you said to me, I think four years ago everything should be a service or X a s is it's called and automation plays a critical role. Um, could you please share your vision? Because this is really important. And still only 5 to 10% of the enterprises have containerized things. So there's a huge growth curve coming with developing and program ability. What's your What's your vision? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, what we know is that is, more and more businesses are coming online is I mean, they're all online, But is there growing into the cloud? Is their growing in new areas as we're dealing with security is everyone's dealing with the pandemic. There's so many things going on. But what happens is there's an infrastructure that all of this is built on and that infrastructure has networking. It has security. It has all of your compute and everything that's in there. And what matters is how can you take a business application and tie it to that infrastructure. How can you take, you know, customer data? How can you take business applications? How can you connect up the world securely and then be ableto really satisfy everything that businesses need. And in order to do that, you know, the whole new tool that we've always talked about is that the network is programmable, the infrastructure is programmable, and you don't need just acts writing on top. But now they get to use all of that power of the infrastructure to perform even better. And in order to get there, what you need to do is automate everything. You can't configure networks manually. You can't be manually figuring out policies, but you want to use that agile infrastructure in which you can really use automation. You can rise to a higher level business processes and tie all of that up and down the staff by leveraging automation. >>You remember a few years ago when definite create first started, I interviewed Todd Nightingale and we're talking about Muraki. You know, not to get in the weeds, but you know, switches and hubs and wireless. But if you look at what we were talking about, then this is kind of what's going on now. And we were just recently, I think our last physical event was Cisco um Europe in Barcelona before all the cove it hit and you had the massive cloud surgeon scale happening going on right when the pandemic hit. And even now, more than ever, the cloud scale the modern APS. The momentum hasn't stopped because there's more pressure now to continue addressing Mawr innovation at scale. Because the pressure to do that because >>the stay alive get >>your thoughts on, um, what's going on in your world? Because you were there in person. Now we're six months in scale is huge. >>We are, Yeah, absolutely. And what happened is as all of our customers as businesses around the world as we ourselves all dealt with, How do we run a business from home? You know, how do we keep people safe? How do we keep people at home and how do we work? And then it turns out, you know, business keeps rolling, but we've had to automate even more because >>you >>have to go home and then figure out how from home can I make sure that my I t infrastructure is automated out from home? Can I make sure that every employee is out there in working safely and securely? You know, things like call center workers, which had to go into physical locations and being kind of, you know, just, you know, blocked off rooms to really be secure with their company's information. They had to work from home. So we had to extend business applications to people's homes in countries like, you know, well around the world. But also in India, where it was actually not, you know, not they wouldn't let They didn't have rules toe let people work from home in these areas. So then what we had to do was automate everything and make sure that we could administer. You know, all of our customers could administer these systems from home, so that puts extra stress on automation. It puts extra stress on our customers digital transformation. And it just forced them toe, you know, automate digitally transform quicker. And they had to because you couldn't just go into a server room and tweak your servers. You have to figure out how to automate all of that. >>You know, one of them >>were still there, all in that environment today. >>You know, one of the hottest trends before the pandemic was observe ability, uh, kubernetes serve micro services. So those things again. All Dev ups. And you know, if you guys got some acquisitions, you thought about 1000 eyes. Um, you got a new one you just bought recently Port shift to raise the game in security, Cuban, All these micro services, So observe, ability, superhot. But then people go work at home, as you mentioned. How do you think? Observe, What do you observing? The network is under huge pressure. I mean, it's crashing on. People zooms and WebEx is and education, huge amount of network pressure. How are people adapting to this in the upside? How are you guys looking at the what's being programmed? What are some of the things that you're seeing with use cases around this program? Ability, challenge and observe ability, challenges? It's a huge deal. >>Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, going back to Todd Nightingale, right? You know, back when we talked to Todd before he had Muraki and he had designed this simplicity, this ease of use, this cloud managed, you know, doing everything from one central place. And now he has This goes entire enterprise and cloud business. So he is now applying that at that Bigger Attn. Bigger scale. Francisco and for our customers. And he is building in the observe ability and the dashboards and the automation of the A P. I s and all of it. But when we take a look at what our customers needed is again, they had to build it all in, um, they had to build in. And what happened was how your network was doing, how secure your infrastructure was, how well you could enable people toe work from home and how well you could reach customers. All of that used to be a nightie conversation. It became a CEO and a board level conversation. So all of a sudden CEOs were actually, you know, calling on the heads of I t and the CEO and saying, You know, how is our VPN connectivity? Is everybody working from home? How many people are, you know, connected and ableto work and watch their productivity? Eso All of a sudden, all these things that were really infrastructure I t stuff became a board level conversation and you know, once again, at first everybody was panicked and just figuring out how to get people working. But now what we've seen in all of our customers is that they're now building in automation, additional transformation and these architectures, and that gives them a chance to build in that observe ability. You know, looking for those events. The dashboards, you know? So it really has been fantastic to see what our customers are doing and what our partners air doing to really rise to that next level. >>Susan, I know you gotta go, but real quick, um, describe what? Accelerating automation with definite means. >>Well, you've been fault. You know, we've been working together on definite in the vision of the infrastructure program ability and everything for quite some time. And the thing that's really happened is yes, you need to automate, but yes, it takes people to do that. And you need the right skill sets in the program ability. So a networker can't be a networker. A networker has to be a network automation developer. And so it is about people. And it is about bringing infrastructure expertise together with software expertise and letting people run. Things are definite. Community has risen to this challenge. People have jumped in. They've gotten their certifications. We have thousands of people getting certified. You know, we have you know, Cisco getting certified. We have individuals. We have partners, you know, They're just really rising to the occasion. So accelerate accelerating automation while it is about going digital. It's also about people rising to the level of, you know, being able to put infrastructure and software expertise together to enable this next chapter of business applications of cloud directed businesses and cloud growth. So it actually is about people, Justus, much as it is about automation and technology. >>And we got definite create right around the corner virtual. Unfortunately, being personal will be virtual Susie. Thank you for your time. We're gonna dig into those people challenges with Mandy and Eric. Thank you for coming on. I know you got to go, but stay with us. We're gonna dig in with Mandy and Eric. Thanks. >>Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks, John. Okay. >>Mandy, you heard Susie is about people, and one of the things that's close to your heart you've been driving is a senior director of definite certifications. Um is getting people leveled up? I mean, the demand for skills cybersecurity, network program, ability, automation, network design solution, architect cloud multi cloud design thes are new skills that are needed. Can you give us the update on what you're doing to help people get into the acceleration of automation game? >>Oh, yes, absolutely. The you know what we've been seeing is a lot of those business drivers that Susie was mentioning those air. What's accelerating? A lot of the technology changes, and that's creating new job roles or new needs on existing job roles where they need new skills. We are seeing, uh, customers, partners, people in our community really starting to look at, you know, things like Dev SEC ops engineer, network Automation engineer, network automation developer, which sues you mentioned and looking at how these fit into their organization, the problems that they solve in their organization. And then how do people build the skills to be able to take on these new job roles or add that job role to their current, um, scope and broaden out and take on new challenges? >>Eric, I want to go to you for a quick second on this, um uh, piece of getting the certifications. Um, first, before you get started, describe what your role is. Director of developer advocacy, because that's always changing and evolving what's the state of it now? Because with Cove and people are working at home, they have more time to contact, switch and get some certifications and that they can code more. What's your >>What's your role? Absolutely So it's interesting. It definitely is changing a lot. A lot of our historically a lot of focus for my team has been on those outward events. So going to the definite creates the Cisco lives and helping the community connect and help share technical information with them, doing hands on workshops and really getting people into. How do you really start solving these problems? Eso that's had to pivot quite a bit. Obviously, Sisco live us. We pivoted very quickly to a virtual event when when conditions changed and we're able to actually connect, as we found out with a much larger audience. So you know, as opposed to in person where you're bound by the parameters of you know how big the convention center is. We were actually able to reach a worldwide audience with are definite day that was kind of attached onto Sisco Live, and we got great feedback from the audience that now we're actually able to get that same enablement out to so many more people that otherwise might not have been able to make it. But to your broader question of you know what my team does. So that's one piece of it is is getting that information out to the community. So as part of that, there's a lot of other things we do as well. We were always helping out build new sandboxes, new learning labs, things like that that they can come and get whenever they're looking for it out on the definite site. And then my team also looks after communities such as the Cisco Learning Network, where there's there's a huge community that has historically been there to support people working on their Cisco certifications. We've seen a huge shift now in that group that all of the people that have been there for years are now looking at the definite certifications and helping other people that are trying to get on board with program ability. They're taking a lot of those same community enablement skills and propping up community with, you know, helping answer questions, helping provide content. They move now into the definite spaces well and are helping people with that sort of certifications. So it's great seeing the community come along and really see that >>I gotta ask you on the trends around automation. What skills and what developer patterns are you seeing with automation? Are Is there anything in particular? Obviously, network automation been around for a long time. Cisco's been leader in that. But as you move up, the staff has modern applications or building. Do you see any patterns or trends around what is accelerating automation? What people learning? >>Yeah, absolutely. So you mentioned observe ability was big before Cove it and we actually really saw that amplified during co vid. So a lot of people have come to us looking for insights. How can I get that better observe ability now that we needed? Well, we're virtual eso. That's actually been a huge uptick, and we've seen a lot of people that weren't necessarily out looking for things before that air. Now, figuring out how can I do this at scale? I think one good example that Susie was talking about the VPN example, and we actually had a number of SCS in the Cisco community that had customers dealing with that very thing where they very quickly had to ramp up and one in particular actually wrote a bunch of automation to go out and measure all of the different parameters that I T departments might care about about their firewalls, things that you didn't normally look at. The old days you would size your firewalls based on, you know, assuming a certain number of people working from home. And when that number went to 100% things like licenses started coming into play where they need to make sure they had the right capacity in their platforms that they weren't necessarily designed for. So one of the essays actually wrote a bunch of code to go out, use them open source, tooling to monitor and alert on these things, and then published it so the whole community code could go out and get a copy of it. Try it out in their own environment. And we saw a lot of interest around that and >>trying >>to figure out Okay, now I could take that. I can adapt into what I need to see for my observe ability. >>That's great, Mandy, I want to get your thoughts on this, too, because as automation continues to scale. Um, it's gonna be a focus. People are at home. And you guys had a lot of content online for you. Recorded every session that in the definite zone learning is going on sometimes literally and non linearly. You've got the certifications, which is great. That's key. Great success there. People are interested. But what other learnings are you seeing? What are people, um, doing? What's the top top trends? >>Yeah. So what we're seeing is like you said, people are at home, they've got time, they want toe advance, their skill set. And just like any kind of learning, people want choice. They wanna be able to choose which matches their time that's available and their learning style. So we're seeing some people who want to dive into full online study groups with mentors leading them through a study plan. On we have two new expert lead study groups like that. We're also seeing whole teams at different companies who want to do an immersive learning experience together with projects and office hours and things like that. And we have a new offer that we've been putting together for people who want those kind of team experiences called Automation Boot Camp. And then we're also seeing individual who want to be able to, you know, dive into a topic, do a hands on lab, gets, um, skills, go to the rest of the day of do their work and then come back the next day. And so we have really modular, self driven hands on learning through the Definite Fundamentals course, which is available through DEV. Net. And then there's also people who are saying, I just want to use the technology. I like Thio experiment and then go, you know, read the instructions, read the manual, do the deeper learning. And so they're They're spending a lot of time in our definite sandbox, trying out different technologies. Cisco Technologies with open source technologies, getting hands on and building things, and three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest in specific technologies. One is around SD wan. There's a huge interest in people Skilling up there because of all the reasons that we've been talking about. Security is a focus area where people are dealing with new scale, new kinds of threats, having to deal with them in new ways and then automating their data center using infrastructure as code type principles. So those were three areas where we're seeing a lot of interest and you'll be hearing more about that at definite create. >>Awesome Eric and man, if you guys can wrap up the accelerated automated with definite package and virtual event here, um, and also t up definite create because definite create has been a very kind of grassroots, organically building momentum over the years. Again, it's super important because it's now the app world coming together with networking, you know, end to end program ability. And with everything is a service that you guys were doing everything with a piece. Um Onley can imagine the enablement that's gonna enable create Can >>you hear the >>memory real quick on accelerating automation with definite and TF definite create. Mandy will start with you. >>Yes, I'll go first, and then Eric can close this out. Um, so just like we've been talking about with you at every definite event over the past years, you know, Devon, it's bringing a p I s across our whole portfolio and up and down the stack and accelerating automation with definite. Suzy mentioned the people aspect of that the people Skilling up and how that transformed team transforms teams. And I think that it's all connected in how businesses are being pushed on their transformation because of current events. That's also a great opportunity for people to advance their careers and take advantage of some of that quickly changing landscape. And so would I think about accelerating automation with definite. It's about the definite community. It's about people getting those new skills and all the creativity and problem solving that will be unleashed by that community with those new skills. >>Eric, take us home. He accelerate automation. Definite and definite create a lot of developer action going on cloud native right now, your thoughts? >>Absolutely. I I think it's exciting. I mentioned the transition to virtual for definite day this year for Cisco Live, and we're seeing we're able to leverage it even further with create this year. So whereas it used to be, you know, confined by the walls that we were within for the event. Now we're actually able to do things like we're adding a start now track for people that I want to be there. They want to be a developer. Network automation developer, for instance, We've now got a track just for them where they could get started and start learning some of the skills they'll need, even if some of the other technical sessions were a little bit deeper than what they were ready for. Eso. I love that we're able to bring that together with the experience community that we usually do from across the industry, bringing us all kinds of innovative talks, talking about ways that they're leveraging technology, leveraging the cloud to do new and interesting things to solve their business challenges. So I'm really excited to bring that whole mixed together as well as getting some of our business units together to and talk straight from their engineering departments. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they thinking about when they're building new AP eyes into their platforms? What are the what problems are they hoping that customers will be able to solve with them? So I think together, seeing all of that and then bringing the community together from all of our usual channels. So, like I said, Cisco Learning Network, we've got a ton of community coming together, sharing their ideas and helping each other grow those skills. I see nothing but acceleration ahead of us for automation. >>Awesome. Thanks so much. God, man, can >>I add one had >>one more thing. >>Yeah, I was just going to say the other really exciting thing about create this year with the virtual nature of it is that it's happening in three regions. And, you know, we're so excited to see the people joining from all the different regions. And, uh, content and speakers and the region stepping upto have things personalized to their area to their community. And so that's a whole new experience for definite create that's going to be fantastic this year. >>You know, that's what God is going to close out and just put the final bow on that by saying that you guys have always been successful with great content focused on the people in the community. I think now, during with this virtual definite virtual definite create virtual the cube virtual, I think we're learning new things. People working in teams and groups on sharing content. We're gonna learn new things. We're gonna try new things, and ultimately people will rise up and will be resilient. I think when you have this kind of opportunity, it's really fun. And whoa, we'll ride the wave with you guys. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on. The Cuban talk about your awesome accelerate automation and definitely looking forward to it. Thank you. >>Thank you so much. >>Happy to be here. >>Okay, I'm John for the Cube. Virtual here in Palo Alto studios doing the remote content amendment Virtual until we're face to face. Thank you so much for watching. And we'll see you at definite create. Thanks for watching.