>> Narrator: From the cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston,
connecting with thought leaders all around the world,
this is The Cube Conversation.
>> Hi, welcome back.
I'm Stu Miniman and this is the Cube Conversation.
Digging in with Pensando.
Talking about what they're doing to help people.
Really by bringing some of the networking ideals
at a cloud native environments both in the clouds,
in the data centers happy to Welcome to the program,
Krishna Doddapaneni,
He is the Vice President of software with Pensando.
Krishna, thanks so much for joining.
>> Thank you Stuart for talking to me.
>> All right, so Krishna the Pensando team,
very well known in the industry.
Innovation startup especially in the networking world.
Give us a little bit about your background specifically
how long you've been part of this team
and what helped you and the team start Pensando?
>> So I'm VP of software in Pensando.
Before founding Pensando,
I worked in few startups in CMA Networks,
Numa Systems and Greenfield Networks.
All those three startups have been acquired by Cisco.
My recent role before this company was
I was VP of engineering in Cisco.
I was responsible for a product called ACI.
Which is Cisco's flagship SDN product.
So why did we found Pensando?
So when we were looking at the industry
the last few years,
the few trends that are becoming clear
so obviously we have a lot of enterprise background,
we were watching you know ACN big deployed
in the enterprise data centers.
One sore point for customers from operational point of view,
was installing service devices, network appliances
or storage appliances.
So not only the operational complexity
that this device is bringing,
it's also they don't give you the performance and bandwidth
and PPS that you expect
but traffic especially from east-west.
So that was one major issue
and also if you look at where the intelligence is going
this being the trend, it's been going to the edge.
The reason for that is the routers or switches
or in the devices in the middle,
they cannot handle the scale.
I mean the bandwidths are growing,
the scale is growing,
the stateful stuff is going in the network
and the switches and the appliances
are not able to handle it,
so you need something at the edge,
close to the application that can handle
this kind of services and bandwidth
and the third thing is obviously X86,
in few years back every two years
you're getting more transistors.
I mean obviously the Moore's Law ended
and we know we know how that that part is going.
So the exciting cycles are more valuable
and we don't want to use them for all this network services
including SDN or you know firewalls or load balancers
or NVMe virtualization.
So it's looking at all this trends in the industry
we thought there is a good opportunity to do
a domain-specific processor for an I/O
and build products around it,
and that's how we started Pensando.
>> So Krishna, it's always fascinating to watch,
if you look at startups,
they are often product of the time that they're in
and the technologies that are available.
Sometimes they're ideas that you know ,
it takes a few times and maturation the technology
and other times you know I'll hear teams and they're like,
Oh well, we did this,
and then, oh wow there was this next new innovation
that came out that I wish I had that
when I did this last time.
So we do a 2 duo or 3 duo generation
We've been talking about distributed architectures
for well over a decade.
It's been a long time now,
in many ways I feel aged computing is just
the latest discussion of this.
But when it comes to you know you've got software
under your purview, what are some of the things
that are available for Pensando,
that might not have been in your toolkit five years ago?
>> Yes so the growth of open-source software
has been very helpful for us because you know
we build a scale out micro-services case controller.
In the last time around when we were building that,
we had to build our own consensus algorithm.
we had to build our own tissue a database for metrics
and human cell logs.
So right now we have because of open source thing,
we leverage at CD, elastic influx
and all this open source technologies that you hear.
Since we want to leverage the carbon in this ecosystem
now that helped us a lot.
at the same time if you think about it right,
even the software which is not open-source,
closed source thing are maturing.
I mean if you talk about SDN,
seven, eight years back,
it was like there are end versions of doing SDN
but now the industry standardized eVPN.
which is one of the core pieces of what we do.
We do SDN solution with eVPN.
So it's more of the industry is coming to a place where
these are the standards and this is open source software
that you could leverage and quickly innovate.
Compared to building all of this from scratch
which will be a big effort for start-up to succeed
and build it in time for your customer success.
>> And Krishna, you talk about open-source
not only in the software and the hardware standpoint.
I think about things like open compute or the proliferation
of you know GPUs and CPUs and everything along that.
How is that impacted what you've built?
>> So I mean it's a good thing you talking about,
for example, we are working in the future and OCP card.
It's a good thing that OCP card goes into HP server,
it goes into a Dell server.
So pretty much you know we want to,
our goal is to enable this platform
that what we build in you know all the use cases
that customer could think of.
So in that way hardware standardization is a good thing
for the industry and then same thing if you go in
how we program the (mumbling).
We are about standards of this before programming
this is an industry consortium led by a few people.
We want to make sure that we follow the standards
for the customer whose coming in
who wants to program it,
it's good to have standards-based thing
rather than doing something completely proprietary.
At the same time you're enabling innovations
and then those innovations here
to push it back to the open-source.
That's what we are trying to do with P4.
>> Excellent.
I've had some some real good conversations about P4
and in the way Pensando is leveraging that
maybe a little bit differently
and that you know you talk about standards
and open source oftentimes it's like well,
is there differentiate?
There's certain parts of the ecosystem
that you say well, it kind of been commoditized.
Obviously you're taking a lot of different technologies,
putting them together, help share
the uniqueness of Pensando.
What differentiates what you're doing
from what was available in the market place
or that I couldn't just you know cobble together
a bunch of open-source hardware and software together?
>> I mean if you look at technologies
like the I think the networking
that both of us are very familiar with,
if you want to build an SDN solution
or you can take OVS or you can use X86 and
or take some much in silicon and cobble it together,
but the problem is you will not get the performance
and bandwidth that you're looking for.
So let's say if you want a high PPS solution
or you want a high CPS solution
because the number of connections are growing
for your IOT use case or 5G use case.
If you cobble together with an open-source thing
without any assist from a domain-specific processor,
your performance will be low.
So that's once of enterprise
that in the cloud use case right,
as you're trying to pack as many BMS as containers
in one server because you know you get charged.
I mean our customers make money based on that.
So you want to offload all of those things
into a domain-specific processor that what we built
which we call the TAC,
which will do all these services
at pretty much no cost to X86.
I mean X86 you will be using zero cycles
for we're doing features like security groups or VPCs
or VPN or encryption or storage virtualization.
That's where our value comes in.
I mean if you count the TCO model using bunch of X86 cores
or in a bunch of an ARM cores or AMD cores compared
to what we do, TCO model works out great for our customers,
I mean that's why you know there's so much interest.
>> Excellent.
I'm proud you brought up customers.
Krishna one of the challenges I definitely have seen
over the years with networking is it tends to be
a completely separate language that we speak there.
It's you know a lot of acronyms and protocols
and not necessarily accessible to people outside
of the silo of networking.
I think back to SDN,
people on the outside would be like,
that stands for Stu does nothing, right?
Is it like networking mumbo-jumbo there.
For people outside of networking,
when I think about if I was going for the C-suite
of an enterprise customer,
they don't necessarily care about
those networking protocols.
they care about the business results in the productivity.
How do you help explain what Pensando does
to those that aren't steeped in the network?
>> The way I look at it,
what is customer looking?
But yeah you're right.
The customer doesn't know what in cap you use.
Customer is looking for is operational simplicity
and then he was looking for security
and if you look at it sometimes both are like in orthogonal
if you make it very highly secure
but you make it like ten thousand operational procedure,
before you deploy a workload,
that doesn't work for the customer
because in operational complexity increases tremendously.
So where we are coming in
is that we want to simplify this for the customer.
There's a very simple way to deploy policies.
There is a simple way to deploy
your networking infrastructure
and in the way we do it is we don't care
what your physical network is in some sense.
So because we are close to the server
that's a very good advantage we have.
We apply the policies before even
the packet leaves the cell.
So in that way he knows he's fully secure environment
and we and you don't want to manage each one individually.
We have this protocol PSM which manages
all this service from a central place
and it's easy to operationalize the fabric whether
you talk about upgrades
or you talk about deploying new services,
it's all driven with REST API and you have agree
So you can do it a single place and that's where
a customer's value is.
Rather than talking about end caps or exactly
the raw throughput.
That is not the main thing that
they wake up every day thinking about it.
We have a security risk and in how easy for me is
to deploy new services or bring up new data centers.
>> All right Krishna.
You're also spanning with your product
a few different worlds out there.
Traditionally if I think about an enterprise data center,
versus a hyper scale public cloud and edge sites.
I comes to mind very different skill sets for management,
different types of deployments there.
I understand you were going to play
in all of those environments.
Talk a little bit about how exactly you do that
and just where you sit in that overall discussion.
>> Yes so I mean number one rule in sector companies,
we're driven by customers.
Now obviously our customers success is our success.
But having said that,
what we try to do is that we try to build a platform
that is kind of you know programmable.
obviously starting from before what we talked about earlier,
but it's also some software point of view
it's kind of pluggable.
So when we build a software,
for example our cloud customers in they use DSC.
They use the same set of API.
So GRPC or STAPS that DSC provides the tier controller
but when we shipped the same platform
who are enterprise customers,
we build our own controller and we use the same DSC APS.
So the way we are trying to do is think this fully leveraged
in what we do for enterprise customers and cloud customers
and we don't try to reinvent the wheel obviously.
At the same time if you look at the highest level constructs
from a network perspective or even storage perspective
what are you trying to do?
You're trying to provide connectivity
but you're trying provide isolation
and you're trying to provide security.
So all this constructs we encapsulated in APIs
which in some mostly like cloud like APIs
and those APIs are used by cloud customers
and enterprise customers
and the software is built in a way
where any layer is can be removed or any layer can be add.
Because it's in our interest
we don't want to build multiple different softwares
for different customers.
Then we will not scale.
So the idea when we started the software architecture
is that how we make it pluggable
and how we make a programmable that customer says,
I don't want this piece of it.
He can put them third party piece on it
and still integrate at a common layer with using rest APIs.
>> Yeah well Krishna,
I have a little bit of appreciation
where some of the hard work that goes through
what your team's been doing,
a couple years in stealth but really accelerating from
the announcement coming out of stealth at the end of 2019
to just about half a year your GA
with a major OEM of HPE,
definitely a lot of work that needs to be done,
bring us what are you most proud about
from the work that your team is doing
we don't need to hear any you know major horror stories
but there always are some of the
not holes or challenges that often get hidden
behind the curtain.
>> I mean personally I'm most proud of the team
that we've build
so you know obviously you know our executors
have a good track record of you know
disrupting the market multiple times
but I'm most proud of the team
because the team is not just worried
about technology that there are very senior technologists
and they're great leaders but they're also worried
about a customer problem, right?
So it's always about you know getting the right
mix of you know execution combined with
technology is when you succeed
that is what I mean most proud of you know
we have a team with independent leaders
running all these projects independently
and then releasing almost
we have a release every week
if you look at all our customers, right?
And then you know being a small company doing that
is pretty challenging in a way
but we came up with methodologies
where we fully believe in automation
everything is automated and whenever we release software
we run through the full set of automation
so that we are confident that
customer is getting good quality code
it's not like you know we cooked up something
and they should be worried when they need to upgrade
to this software,
so I think that's the key part if you want to succeed in
this day and age developing the features
of the velocity that you will want to develop
and still support all this customers at the same time
>> Absolutely, well congratulations on that Krishna
all right final question I have for you
give us a little bit of guidance going forward
you know often when we see a company out
and we you know try to say
well this is what that company does
you've got a very flexible architecture
a lot of different types the solutions
what kind of markets or services you know
might we be looking at from
Pensando down low down the road a little bit please?
>> I think we have a long journey
so we have a platform right now
we already mean we have a very baby
we're shipping the platforms already shipping
in a storage provider
we are integrating with premier clouds public clouds
and you know enterprise market
we already deployed distributed firewall
and some of our customers deployed distributed firewall
so if you take this platform
it can be extendable to add in all the services that you see
in data centers on clouds, right?
But primarily we are driven from a customer perspective
or customer priority point of view so
where we will go is we will try to add more edge services
we will try to add more storage features
and there's initial interest in service provider market
what we can do for 5G and IOT
because we have the flexible platform
we have to see you know how to apply this platform
to this new applications
that's where probably will go in future
>> All right well Krishna Doddapaneni,
Vice President of software with Pensando
thank you so much for joining.
>> Thank you Stu was great talking to you.
>> All right be sure to check out the cube.net
you can find lots of interviews from Pensando
I'm Stu Miniman and thank you
for watching the Cube
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