>> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE,
covering Cisco Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco
and its ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage
here in Barcelona, Spain, for Cisco Live Europe 2019.
I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE,
with Dave Vellante as well, Stu Miniman,
who's been doing interviews with us all week,
our next guest is Roland Acra,
Senior Vice President, General Manager
of the Data Center Group.
He's in charge of that core business of data center now,
at the center of cloud and the edge.
Roland, great to see you, thanks for coming on.
>> Thank you, thank you for having me.
>> So a lot of announcements, a lot of the big guns
are out there for Cisco, you got the data center,
you got the networking group, and you got IoT,
and then cloud center suite was part of the
big announcement, your team had a big piece
of the keynote yesterday and continues to make waves.
Give us a quick update on the news, the key points,
what was the announcements?
>> Yeah, the two big announcements for my group
were ACI Anywhere and HyperFlex Anywhere,
and we captured them under a common moniker
of There's Nothing Centered About the Data Center Anymore,
because both of these speak to
things going outside the data center.
ACI Anywhere is the integration of ACI,
our software-defined networking solution,
into two of the most prominent public cloud providers
out there, Amazon and Azure,
and for HyperFlex Anywhere, the exciting news is
the expansion of HyperFlex, which is our
hyper-converged solution, also outside the data center,
to the edge of the enterprise,
specifically branch offices and remote locations.
>> And the other thing that came out of our conversation
here on theCUBE and also on the keynote,
is that the center of the value is the data center,
as you guys pointed out with the slides,
big circle in the middle, ACI Anywhere, HyperFlex Anywhere,
but the network and the data and the security foundation
has been a critical part of this new growth.
>> Yes.
>> Take a minute to explain the journey of ACI,
how it started, where are we?
It's been a progression for you guys,
certainly inside the enterprise, but now it's extended.
What's the journey, take us through that.
>> When ACI came into the market five years ago now,
we have a five year anniversary,
ACI brought a software-defined networking solution
into the market.
It brought an automated network fabric capability,
which said you can no longer screw yourself up
by having incoherence between one part of the network
and another, it's all managed coherently as one thing,
and it brought, to your point about security,
what's called segmentation of applications.
Today, applications have data, they have databases,
they have different sensitive pieces,
and it's important to be able to tell the network
not only get the traffic from one place to the other,
but also selectively get the traffic that I tell you
to get there, and not the one, and don't get the traffic
that has no business getting there,
and that's known as segmentation,
which is a security concern, particularly when you have
sensitive data like consumer data
or things that have regulatory things around them.
ACI has brought that to the market.
That was the value proposition of ACI.
We worked on then expanding ACI in the direction of scale.
Customers have two or more data centers
for disaster recovery, for resiliency,
we made that possible.
We got to bigger and bigger footprints.
Then we took ACI to the edge of the enterprise.
What if somebody wanted to put some computing capability
in a store, or in a logistics center.
ACI then was expanded with that.
Step N minus one, was we took ACI to bare metal clouds.
Customers now want to deploy also things in co-locations
or bare metal clouds.
We decoupled ACI software from the Cisco switches,
which is the ACI hardware,
and ACI became completely virtualized,
and still able to be doing everything it does
in hardware on premise, in software instead,
in somebody's else's capability.
And yesterday we announced the full combination of this,
which is what if you don't want the ACI soft switching
or hard switching, can you use the native switching
of a public cloud, like Azure or AWS,
and you tell the other APIs, please let those packets
go from A to B because they're part of
the whitelisted paths,, and don't let packets
from C to D go because they're part of the
blacklisted paths.
And that was the full integration with these clouds--
>> Can you abstract that complexity?
>> Completely, completely.
One orchestrator, which is the multi-site orchestrator,
the same one people have used on premise,
that they've developed their policies around,
so that we have invested a lot of sweat equity
in that controller, it's where also they put their
compliance, verification, and audit and assurance,
and they use that thing even when something
goes to Azure or it goes to AWS.
>> So you mentioned the progression.
So it's now your full progression,
from core to the cloud, including edge--
>> Going through edge.
>> What has been some of the results?
You mentioned that segmentation's one of 'em, I get that.
How has ACI been used, what are some highlights
that show the value, because people start looking at ACI,
saying, hmm, I like this, I like scale,
I have a scale challenge with the new cloud world
and edge, and complexity's abstracted away with software,
okay, check, so far, so good.
Where has been the success of ACI and how do you see that
unfolding specifically in the cloud?
>> Yeah, the biggest value our customers have gotten,
cloud or no cloud, has been with ACI,
they've been able to shorten the speed of change,
shorten the time for change, therefore increase the speed
of change of their network,
because now the network needs to operate
at the speed of the applications.
Applications reconfigure themselves
sometimes on hourly or daily basis,
and it used to be that changing something in the network,
you sent a ticket to somebody who took weeks
to reconfigure things.
Now that software-defined capability means
the network reconfigures and people can change
generations of compute on the fly,
and the network is in lockstep with that.
The agility and speed has been great.
The other value has been the value of automation,
which is people can run a bigger and bigger
and bigger network with a small number of people.
You don't have to scale your people
the more switches you have.
Again, because programming and automation
comes to the rescue with that.
>> Well I'll tell you, people who are watching right now
can look behind Roland and see that it's a packed house.
We're in the dev net zone,
which has been the massively growing organization
within Cisco.
Community's been growing very fast,
people are developing on top of the networks,
and these are network folks,
and as well there's new talent coming in.
So skill gap is shortening, so you're getting a different
makeup for a Cisco user, your customers are changing
and changing, growing, existing base plus new people.
Talk about that dynamic about how that impacts
this intent-based networking, this notion of policy
software is defined. >> Yes, you it's you know
what many people have been calling infrastructure as code,
which is you go from scripting to actually coding
and composing very sophisticated automation capabilities
and change management capabilities,
for an automatable system, which is what ACI is.
It's made for people drawing on the strengths
that they were doing in the application domain
or in the server domain, and bringing that into the network.
And that's a new and exciting thing,
it brought the network within the purview of coders,
people who know how to do Python and know how to do
Go language and things which are modern
and exciting for the younger generation.
It's made also for bringing the analytical capabilities,
you know, a lot of what those young coders are used to is
a lot of logs, a lot of visibility,
a lot of analytics running on,
because they've done that on web servers,
they've done that on applications that run in the cloud,
and we now offer the network, which is very rich in data.
If you think about, we see every packet,
we see every flow, we see every pattern
of how the traffic is changing,
and that becomes a data set that is subject to programming
because then from there you can extract anomaly detection,
you can extract security signatures of malware,
you can extract prediction of where the traffic
is going to be going in six months.
There's a lot of exciting potential
from the telemetry and the visibility
that we bring into that framework.
>> And as you point out, devs love that.
I mean Cisco, we've talked about this,
is one of the few large established companies
that has, in our view, figured out developers, right?
There's a lot of examples of those companies that haven't
and continue to struggle, we've just witnessed here
the dev crowd.
I want to ask you about ACI and how it's different from,
for example, VMware NSX.
What's the differentiation there?
>> The biggest differentiation is ACI is one system
through which you manage the entire network,
the overlay which is the virtual view of the network
that the applications care about,
as well as the underlay, which is the actual
real delivery system that makes the packets
get from A to B with quality of service and so forth.
So that's first thing.
It actually does a lot more, it has much more scope
than NSX does.
The other thing that's very unique about ACI is
we have integrated it with every hypervisor on the planet
and every container management framework on the planet,
and ever bare metal system on the planet,
which means that any workload,
something sitting on a mainframe,
something sitting on a Sun Oracle server,
something on OpenStack on OpenShift, on VMware
or on Hyper-V, and now on the EC2 APIs of AWS
or on Azure, all of those are integrated with ACI.
We're not wedded to one hypervisor,
and our cloud implementation that we announced yesterday
is a true integrated cloud capability,
it's not a bring your own license
and go put it on bare metal at AWS,
which has been VMware's cloud strategy
is to team up with AWS and let customers
bring their software licenses into AWS bare metal.
That's not EC2.
And of course that's not Azure
and that's not the other clouds we're going to be doing.
So the openness to being multi-cloud on premise,
which means every hypervisor and every container framework,
and bare metal, with one system.
We're extending that into the cloud to give customers
choice and openness, that's really a very fundamental
philosophy in networks. >> So much wider scope.
That's kind of always been Cisco's philosophy in partnership.
When you think about HyperFlex going back 10 years
when you guys sort of created that with partners
and then multiple partners now,
maybe talk about that journey a little bit.
>> HyperFlex?
>> Yes.
>> Yeah, 'cause hyperconvergence is another
very exciting and fast growing trend in our industry.
And really, HyperFlex started off
with the hyperconverged infrastructure,
started of being the notion of putting
a mini-cloud in a box on-premise
for application developers to rapidly deploy
their applications, as if it was in the cloud.
So speed and simplicity were really at a premium,
and that's really what defines hyperconvergence.
And we've done a tremendous amount of work at Cisco
to make speed and simplicity there,
because we've integrated network compute storage
and a cloud management system called Intersight
to give that whole capability to customers.
We then hardened it.
We took it from being able to do VDI kind of workloads
and rather benign workloads, to mission-critical workloads.
So databases are now running on HyperFlex.
ERP systems are running on HyperFlex,
the real crown jewels of the enterprise
are now running on HyperFlex.
Then we made it multi-cloud.
We opened it to all hypervisors
and to all container frameworks.
We announced OpenShift yesterday,
we have already done Hyper-V, we had done OpenStack and DSX,
so again, same spirit of openness.
And yesterday's announcement was,
what if I want to take hyperconvergence
outside of the data center in hundreds or thousands
of remote locations?
Think a retailer.
In a retail environment, some of the most interesting data
is born outside the data center, it's born in a store.
The data is center that follows the customer
who's interested in a plasma TV,
and that data has a perishable lifetime.
You act on it on location and on time
or you lose the value.
So sending it over, taking two hours to do
a machine learning job on it and come back,
the customer's already back home watching a movie.
And so the window of opportunity for the data
is often right there and then,
and that's why our customers are taking
their computing environment off into where the data is,
to act on it fast and on location.
>> It sounds easy but I want to just get your thoughts
on this, because this is a critical data challenge.
If data's stored in classic old ways,
data warehouses and fenced off area,
it's kind of in the internet,
you're not going to have the latency to get that data
in real time.
Talking about real time data that's addressable
for part of the application value.
So this is a new notion that's emerged with dev ops
and infrastructure as code.
>> That's right.
>> That's hard.
How do you guys see that progressing,
how should customers prepare to have that data centered
properly for app addressability, discovery,
whatever the uses of the data contextually is,
time series data or whatever data it is,
this is a critical thing.
>> It's a critical thing, and there's no one answer,
because depending on what the data is,
sometimes you only see the value
when you concentrate it and consolidate it,
because the patterns emerge from rolling out
a thousand stores worth of data and seeing
that people who buy this toothbrush
tend to buy that toothpaste.
There may be that value where you want to
concentrate the data,
but there are also many things where
acting on the data in the moment and on location quickly
without referring to the other thousand stores
extracts 90% of the value of that data.
So that's why you want to do forward deploy computing
on that data.
>> So this highlights network programmability,
this means the applications driving the queries
or the network for that data, if it's available...
So there's two things, network programmability
from the app, and availability of the data.
>> Yeah, and the ability for the entire infrastructure,
network, compute, and storage,
and hyperconvergence is the automation of all three
to be able to deliver its value equally in remote locations
or in a cloud, as it would have in a data center,
because that's where, the application's going to want to go
where the value is, and if the infrastructure
can't follow it there, then you get a degraded
ability to take advantage of the opportunity.
>> Right, real time decisions happen at the edge,
but then as you describe, you got to bring data back,
certain data, back to the cloud,
do the modeling there and then push the models back down.
So you're going to have-- >> And you're going to have
decision making distributed.
>> And you've got to have low latency
to be able to enable that.
>> Yeah, and the same goes for other considerations.
For example, why is it important to do,
allow people to put data both on their premises
and in the cloud?
For disaster recovery, for data replication,
for resiliency.
Sometimes for governance reasons.
GTPR in Europe says the data of European citizens
that's personally identifying has to stay in Europe.
Somebody may not have a data center in Europe.
Could they take advantage of a co-location ability
or somebody else's cloud?
>> This is the theme we're seeing at this show this year,
and certainly at the center of the news is,
complexity is increasing 'cause it's just evolution,
more devices are connected, diverse environments,
scale for cloud and connectivity,
but software driving that.
So I got to ask you the question.
Go back to the old days, you know, the 1990s,
multi-vendor was a big word.
Now multi-cloud feels the same way.
This is the openness thing.
How would you describe multi-cloud strategy
for Cisco in context of this notion of being open?
>> It is really the new dimension of openness, right?
We've been open in the past to multiple forms
of physical networks.
Customers to use wireless or fiber or copper
or what have you, we need to give them an IP network
that operate equally well over all media.
That was one dimension of openness.
Another dimension of openness was,
does a product from vendor A work with a product
from vendor B?
My router, your router, my switch, your firewall,
those are other dimensions.
Hardware and software coupling.
Can I buy the hardware from Peter
and the software from Mary, will it work well?
The new dimension of openness is,
can a customer avail themselves of any form of cloud,
either because they like the tooling
and how well their developers are more efficient
on a given cloud, or because the pricing of the other guy,
or the third guy has a point of presence in Tokyo,
which this one doesn't.
All of those are business choices
that if we make our technology,
let them take advantage of them with
no technical restriction, they will,
because now they can shop on the merit
of what they want to do, and not on,
oh well, sorry, if you want to go to Azure,
I can't help you, but if you're willing to settle for
your own premise or for Amazon, then I have a story for you.
So that's--
>> Roland, you're leading the team on the core crown jewels
for Cisco, as you guys, the rising tide's
floating all boats here within the company.
What's your plan for the year, what's your goals,
you'll be out there pounding the pavement
with customers, what's your objective,
what do you hope to accomplish this year in 2019?
>> Well 2019 is the year of many things for us,
it's a very exciting year.
It's the year of, on the physical infrastructure side,
we're taking our switches to 400 gigabit per second.
We have our new silicon capability, our new optics,
so we're going to be able to scale for the cloud providers
who are heading the next frontier of speed
and density and scale.
So performance will always, always be there,
and when we're done with 400,
we're already going to be asking about 800.
So that's an exciting new generation of switches.
ACI Anywhere getting deployed now and adopted
across multiple clouds, is another exciting thing.
HyperFlex Anywhere, we're really looking forward
to the potential in financial services, in logistics,
in retail, where's there's a lot of deployed
data at the edge.
And then, security is a never finished journey, right?
Everything with give our customers in the way of security,
because there, there's an active actor
who's trying to make you fail, right?
It's not that you're only fighting physics
to get to 400 gigabit, then you win.
There we have a guy who's trying to foil your schemes
and trying to foil their schemes.
Security is a great-- >> Constant attacks
are on the network.
You guys have seen this movie before,
so you know how critical,
Roland thanks so much for spending the time,
congratulations on ACI Anywhere, HyperFlex Anywhere,
intent-based networking at the core.
It's theCUBE bringing you all the data,
we have an intent here to bring you the best content
from Cisco Live in Barcelona.
I'm John, Dave Vellante, stay with us for live coverage,
day two of three days of coverage
here in the dev net zone, packed with developers
learning new skills.
We'll back with more after this short break.