>> Robert: It feels like we're talking
because it's boring TV.
Tech people love tech.
Consumers love the benefit of tech.
No consumer opens up their iphone and says oh my gosh,
I love the technology behind my iphone.
>> What's it been like, being on the Shark Tank?
>> You know filming is fun and hanging out is fun
and it's fun to be a celebrity at first.
Your head gets really big
and you get really good tables at restaurants.
>> Who says tech isn't got a little pizazz.
>> Voiceover: More skin in the game.
In charge of his destiny, Robert Herjavec
is Cube Alumni.
Live from Santa Clara, California,
it's the Cube covering Open Networking Summit 2017.
Brought to you by the Linux foundation.
>> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Rick here with the Cube.
We're at the open networking summit 2017
in Santa Clara, California.
I think it's the fourth year of the conference.
We've been coming for a long time.
It's pretty amazing, a lot of transformation is happening
as this project moves from the conversational
to the testing to actual.
A lot of deployments being talked about in the keynotes.
So happy to have Scott Raynovich joining me again.
>> Pleasure as always, thank you.
>> Did you have a good night last night?
>> Excellent.
>> Alright, super.
Super guest Drew Schulke,
he is the vice president of converged networking
at Dell EMC. Drew, Welcome.
>> Thanks, thanks for having us.
>> You've been busy at this show.
You're doing panels, you're doing keynotes,
they're working you.
>> It's been a bit of a whirlwind going on thus far.
Yeah, I had a keynote talk on economic
and organizational impacts of open networking,
which went really, really well.
A lot of great questions from the audience,
really insightful questions on that.
Have met with folks like yourself,
some other folks in the media,
some analysts, talking to some customers
which is always nice to have.
We'll close it out tomorrow with one of the keynotes.
A panel discussion on the role of open source
and moving to 5G where I'll be participating
with some folks from Intel and Ericsson.
I'm looking forward to that, but yeah,
definitely a whirlwind week.
>> So before we get into some of the specifics,
just your general impressions
as to how this thing has evolved over time.
Impressions of this show this year.
>> Yeah, great question.
I think the thing that struck me the most this year
was the amount of customers coming in and actually talking
about putting a lot of the things we've been talking about
at this summit for several years
into production environments and seeing results out of it.
Some great keynotes last night by some folks,
Amadeus in the travel industry
and talking about their journey actually moving things
into production, I thought was fabulous.
Which gives people a vision of what really is possible
and moving these out of the theoretical
and here's the vision,
the strategy into here's how you can actually
get things done and getting into results.
Ultimately, when you put things into production,
that's how you ultimately learn and refine things over time.
It's a great move forward for us.
>> Awesome, so on the economics and organizational impact
of open networking, your keynote.
What are some of those really key economic drivers
that you outlined in that conversation?
>> Yeah, great question.
You can kind of break it into a capex
and an opex discussion.
On the capex side,
what we've seen is this whole open networking model
is built on merchant silicon
and the commoditization of hardware,
which may sound like okay, that's a bad thing.
Well no, it's really, really good
because what it's doing is it's allowing all of us
to take the benefits of huge volume
and scale that's going on.
From the biggest cloud providers down to the enterprise,
as we move into this hardware model that's based
upon merchant silicon and more standard network designs
that are capable of supporting multiple OS's,
we all benefit from the economies of scale that go in that.
We can amortize R&D investments
over a larger number of things.
That's all goodness,
so there's a huge tailwind on the capex side.
On the opex side,
as we start to disaggregate the network stack
and focus on the individual layers,
it creates a different operational model
that allows for a high degree of automation.
One of the things that we brought up in the session
was contrasting a study from 2013
where the typical enterprise network admin
was controlling about 300 ports.
That was the breadth of support
that they had back in 2013.
That same year, Facebook came out
and said an individual operator can support
up to 20,000 servers.
It's not like they're just super humans.
What happened in there was a level of automation.
That's a key ingredient of our open networking strategy,
is driving that automation.
That's where you get true economies
of scale on the opex side.
Those are the main points on that one.
>> Jeff: Yeah, good ones.
>> So Drew, one of the themes we've seen here
is that the Linux foundation has done a good job
of consolidating some of the open source technology
and putting them in the same place
so we can all track them and figure out what's going to happen.
You just told us about Dell
donating some of your code to the Linux foundation.
>> Drew: Correct.
>> Why don't you explain how you made that decision
and what you think it's going to do for your customers.
>> Yeah absolutely, as a little bit of context,
what we see happening in terms
of networking software is one,
it's become decoupled from the hardware.
That's already done right now.
But even when we start to look at the software side,
we think there's more disaggregation possible.
We can peel apart the layers of what currently
is a network operating system today
and create a based operating system
upon which several different companies
can come in and put in what at that point
becomes applications on top of it
to do things like an L2, L3 stack,
or to do MLAG, or tapping, or anything like that.
It creates an ecosystem similar to what we had
with servers 20 years ago,
where I've got an operating system
that basically keeps the box running.
Then I've got applications
which are really the magic on top of it.
That's sort of the context.
What we donated was that base OS.
We've worked on something called OS 10.
We have an open edition of it
which you can go out to the web
and download for free today
and start playing around with it.
It's an unmodified Linux kernel
currently based on the Debian distribution
which we believe will serve as a solid foundation
for that evolving network and ecosystem going forward.
Linux foundation agreed with that and accepted our donation
of that to be the foundation of the open switch project,
which was talked a little bit about
at this particular summit as well.
We couldn't be happier to be working
with the Linux foundation on the open switch project.
Look forward to getting even more of the ecosystem
working on that with someone like the Linux foundation
behind it to build a very, very capable stack
which ultimately benefits all of our customers at the end.
>> Where will we see this code go into?
What types of products and what markets?
Is it NFE for telecom?
Is it cloud servers?
Where are we going to see this stuff?
>> The wonderful thing about it
is the answer is all of the above.
That's the flexibility of it.
Think of it as this way,
which is maybe you have a telecom network that's focused
on something like MPLS.
A company that has a lot of good IP around MPLS
can then write an application that can run on that
base operating system giving the customer the ability
to pick that specific application without having
to worry about dragging on an operating system and hardware
that may not be what they want.
That's the telecom use case.
Maybe it's a big cloud provider
that has some very specific needs
around an L2, L3 stack.
Maybe they even have their own IP around that
that they want to build on top of this OS.
We've really opened up the degrees of freedom in that space
across all of those industries.
I certainly think where we see the early adopters
and starting from that OS 10 base solution today,
will be more in the telco service provider
and in the cloud space,
just because of the level of scale and what it is
that they can benefit out of this level of flexibility.
>> Excellent.
>> There had to be some detractors
before you open sourced this.
I'm just curious, the conversation in the room
about should we or should we not open source this project
and take it out to the Linux foundation?
What was ultimately the decision
that pushed it out the door?
>> Yeah, we had been working
with some other open source based projects
for a couple of years already,
so there was a comfort level internally.
But what we saw, I think going on in the networking space,
was heavily influenced by what we saw going on
in the server space 20 years ago
when client server hit the scene.
That stack became massively disaggregated.
The folks who tried to keep these things stitched together
into monolithic silos ultimately weren't successful.
Either had to change their strategy,
or drifted off into the sunset.
We certainly was influenced by that history
and looking forward at what we saw happening in this space.
I'd say as well looking at a lot of the innovation
coming out from open source projects
and start ups in this space as well,
doing some new and exciting things in networking.
There was a big keynote yesterday and the panel discussion
where a venture capitalist starting talking about,
hey networking's cool again.
I couldn't agree more where we're seeing startups come in
and do really interesting things really, really well.
What we're trying to do is create a model
where those startups don't have
to develop their own operating system
and develop their own hardware
and then all the management tools that go on top of it.
Let them focus at what they're good at,
which is a certain piece of IP.
Let us work through things
like the open networking foundation
to drive disaggregation of the stack,
making them successful.
>> It's an interesting way too to build your community
almost indirectly if you will.
It's not like you have to sign a bunch of partner agreements
and you can't keep track of all these startups
and all your alliance people running around.
But by putting it into the open source,
especially with the Linux foundation just automatically,
you're exposed to all these different types of new companies
and innovations and that exposure goes both ways.
>> Drew: Absolutely.
>> It's a really cool trend,
where we're seeing these big companies
donate parts of these things
into this formal situation that is the Linux foundation
so it has a home and a place to live and grow.
>> Absolutely.
>> I want to shift gears a little bit.
Today's keynote is about 5G.
A lot of talk about 5G,
mobile world congress is all about 5G
but some people saying wait,
it's not here yet, it's far out.
But clearly, I think the message this morning
from Sandra and also on the Cube yesterday
is it's coming, but you don't just turn it on one day.
You got to put all the pieces in place.
What's Dell EMC's perspective on 5G?
Where are you guys on this journey?
>> For us in terms of where we play
at an infrastructure level in the data center,
for us, the key step right now is to get
to this model where we can decouple function from location.
Which is what the telecoms and the mobile networks
have been trying to do through things like NFV.
What we've been trying to do is help them
on that journey long before we even get to the point
where 5G is knocking at the door.
Working with them today to put in the right infrastructure
capable of supporting highly virtualized workloads
and also capable of supporting a variety
of different software defined networking solutions.
If you get those components right,
you're setting yourself up
with a really good foundation for 5G.
If 5G gets here and you haven't decoupled function
and location yet in terms of your infrastructure
or strategy that's going to be a tough one.
What we're trying to do is shepherd that along and move that
as fast as we can right now.
>> We got Dell EMC World coming up pretty soon right?
>> That's right, I hope to see you guys there.
>> Previews of this?
What can we expect to see?
>> It will be interesting.
This is the first time that as a combined company
we're doing this event in Vegas.
We had a preview in October as a newly closed transaction.
This will have the full force effect
of the combined Dell EMC firm
coming together to put on a great show.
Looking forward to it.
Huge venue, I know you guys play a prominent role there.
I'm hoping to see you guys there as well.
Yes, there will be lots of announcements.
I'm not going to go get myself in trouble
by saying what any of those are four weeks
in advance of when that's going to happen.
>> No hints or anything.
>> No hints, but certainly on the networking side,
you'll hear a couple of announcements
from us in terms of new products
that we'll be talking about and stay tuned.
>> I'll ask you the softer way to get to the same answer,
but I know you're not going to give me the answer,
but looking forward, 2017 what are some of your priorities
top of mind that you guys are working on
where if we see you a year from now,
you'll report back that here's what we did in 2017?
>> Clearly, this OS 10 strategy that we have,
building upon this base is going to be key for that.
Continuing to support the donations that we've made
through the Linux foundation and Open Switch.
Bringing in additional partners to develop
on top of that to get their IP ready
to be able to take advantage of that
will be a key focus for us.
But as well, there's some key networking speed transitions
coming up that you got to keep pace with
from a road map perspective,
so you'll probably hear some things about that.
Then as well just thinking from a Dell EMC perspective,
as we look at how our portfolio as a company is evolving,
a big shift toward software defined storage models,
converged infrastructure, hyperconverged infrastructure.
On the networking side,
we're clearly trying to do everything we can
to position ourselves to be a value add
in any of those solutions today.
That'll be the hint of the areas you can expect
to hear about in May.
>> That's good, that's a good little hint.
It's a month to the Dell EMC World
again the first combined Dell EMC World
>> Drew: In Vegas.
>> Well, last year we had EMC World in Vegas
and Dell EMC World, it got very confusing.
Now there's just one.
We're like is it the Vegas one or the Austin one?
So now there's just one, it's easier to keep track.
>> Drew: One forum to rule them all.
>> We look forward to Michael coming on,
we had him on at both as well as VM World
and it's always great to get his take as well.
So Drew, thanks for stopping by
and we look forward to seeing you
in about a month in Vegas.
>> Likewise, thanks guys, great time.
>> Drew Schulke, Scott Reynovitch, Jeff Rick.
You're watching the Cube from Open Networking Summit 2017.
Thanks for watching.
We'll be back after this short break.
(bright music)