>> From around the globe
it's theCube.
Presenting Future Cloud.
One event, a world of opportunities.
Brought to you by Cisco.
>> We're here with Vikas Ratna,
who's the director of product management for ECS at Cisco
and James Leach is the director of business development
for UCS at Cisco as well.
We're going to talk about
computing in the age of hybrid cloud.
Welcome gentlemen, great to see you.
>> Thank you.
>> Vikas let's start with you
and talk a little bit about computing architectures.
We know that they're evolving,
they're supporting new data intensive and other workloads,
especially as high-performance workload requirements,
what's Cisco's point of view on all this?
And specifically, I'm interested in your thoughts
on fabrics, I mean, it's kind of your wheelhouse,
you've got accelerators,
What are the workloads that are driving
these evolving technologies
and how is it impacting customers?
What are you seeing?
>> Sure, Dave. First of all, very excited to be here today.
You're absolutely right.
The pace of innovation and foundational platform
ingredients have just been phenomenal in recent years.
The fabric, accelerators, the drives, the processing power,
the core density all have been evolving
at just an amazing pace
and the pace will only pick up further,
but ultimately it is all about applications
and the way applications leverage those innovations.
And we do see applications evolving quite rapidly.
The new classes of applications are evolving
to absorb those innovations and deliver
much better business values,
very, very exciting times, Dave,
but talking about the impact on the customers,
well these innovations have helped them pretty positively.
We do see significant challenges in the data center
with a point product based approach
of delivering these platform innovations
to the applications.
What has happened is these innovations today
are being packaged as point products
to meet the needs of a specific application.
And as you know, the different applications have
their different needs.
Some applications need more tributes, others
need more memory, yet others need, you know, more cores.
Some need different kinds of fabrics.
As a result, if you walk into a data center today,
it is pretty common to see many different point products
in the data center.
This creates a manageability challenge.
Imagine the aspect of managing, you know,
several different form factors,
one you, to you,
purpose-built servers or the variety of,
you know, blade form factor.
You know, this reminds me of the situation we had
before smartphones arrived.
You remember the days when you, when we used to
have a GPS device for navigation system,
a cool music device for listening to the music,
a phone device for making a call,
camera for taking the photos.
Right? And we were all excited about it.
It's when the smartphones arrived
that we realized all those cool innovations
could be delivered in a much simpler,
much convenient, and easy to consume it
through one device and, you know,
and that could completely transform our experience.
So we see the customers who are benefiting
from these innovations to have a way to consume those things
in a much more simplistic way
than they are able to do it today.
>> And I like, look, it's always been about the applications,
but to your point,
the applications are now moving at a much faster pace.
The customer experience is, expectation, is way escalated.
And when you combine all these,
I love your analogy there Vikas,
because when you combine all these capabilities,
it allows us to develop new applications,
new capabilities,
new customer experiences.
So that's the, I always say,
the next 10 years, they ain't going to be like the last.
And James, public cloud obviously
is heavily influencing compute design
and customer operating models.
You know, it's funny,
when the public cloud first hit the market,
everyone, we were swooning about
oh, low cost, standard off-the-shelf servers,
you know, and storage devices,
but it quickly became obvious
that customers needed more.
So I wonder if you could comment on this.
How are the trends that we've seen from the hyperscalers,
how are they filtering into
on-prem infrastructure and maybe, you know,
maybe there's some differences there as well
that you could address?
>> Absolutely. So, you know, I'd say
first of all, quite frankly, you know,
public cloud has completely changed the expectations
of how our customers want to consume compute, right?
So customers, especially in a public cloud environment,
they've gotten used to, or, you know, come to accept
that they should consume from the application out, right?
They want a very application-focused view,
a services-focused view of the world.
They don't want to think about infrastructure, right?
They want to think about their application.
They want to move outward, right?
So, this means that the infrastructure basically
has to meet the application where it lives.
So what that means for us is that, you know,
we're taking a different approach.
We've decided that, you know, we're not going to chase this,
you know, single pane of glass view of the world,
which, you know, frankly our customers don't want.
They don't want a single pane of glass.
What they want is a single operating model.
They want an operating model
that's similar to what they can get
with the public cloud,
but they want it across all of their cloud options.
They want it across private cloud,
across hybrid cloud options, as well.
So what that means is they don't want to just
consume infrastructure services.
They want all of their cloud services
from this operating model.
So that means
that they may want to consume infrastructure services
for automation orchestration,
but they also need Kubernetes services.
They also need virtualization services.
They may need Terraform, workload optimization.
All of these services have to be available
from within the operating model,
a consistent operating model, right?
So it doesn't matter whether you're talking about
private cloud, hybrid cloud, anywhere,
where the application lives doesn't matter.
What matters is that we have a consistent model,
that we think about it from the application out,
and frankly, I'd say, you know,
this has been the stumbling block for private cloud.
Private cloud is hard, right?
This is why it hasn't been really solved yet.
This is why we had to take a brand new approach.
And frankly, it's why we're super excited about X Series
and intersight as that, you know,
operating model that fits the hybrid cloud better
than anything else we've seen.
>> This is a Cube first, first time's
a technology vendor has ever said
that it's not about a single pane of glass
because I've been hearing for decades
we're going to deliver a single pane of glass.
It's going to be seamless and it never happens.
It's like a single version of the truth.
It's aspirational.
And it's just not reality.
So can we stay on the X Series for a minute, James,
maybe in this context, but in the launch that we saw today,
it was like a fire hose of announcements.
So, how does the X Series
fit into the strategy with intersight, and hybrid cloud
in this operating model that you're talking about?
>> Right. So, I think it goes hand-in-hand,
right? The two pieces go together very well.
So we have, you know, this idea
of a single operating model that is definitely,
you know, something that our customers demand, right?
It's what we have to have, but at the same time
we need to solve the problems Vikas was talking
about before, we need a single infrastructure to go
along with that single operating model.
So no longer do we need to have silos
within the infrastructure that give us
different operating models or different sets of benefits,
when you want infrastructure that can kind of
do all of those configurations, all those applications.
And then, you know, the operating model is very important
because that's where we abstract the complexity
that could come
with just throwing all that technology
at the infrastructure.
So that, you know, this is, you know, the way that we think
about it is the data center is not centered, right?
It's no longer centered. Applications live everywhere.
Infrastructure lives everywhere.
And, you know,
we need to have that consistent operating model,
but we need to do things within the infrastructure as
well to take full advantage, right?
So we want all the SaaS benefits
of a CICD model of, you know, the intersight can bring,
we want all of that, you know,
proactive recommendation engine
with the power of AI behind it,
we want the connected support experience.
We want all of that,
but we want to do it across a single infrastructure.
And we think that that's how they tie together.
That's why one or the other doesn't really
solve the problem, but both together.
That's why we're here.
That's why we're super excited.
>> So Vikas, I make you laugh a little bit.
When I was an analyst at IDC,
I was a bit deep into infrastructure,
And then when I left, I was doing,
I was working with application development heads.
And like you said, infrastructure, it was just
a roadblock, but it was so the tongue-in-cheek is
when Cisco announced UCS a decade ago, I totally missed it.
I didn't understand it.
I thought it was Cisco getting
into the traditional server business.
And it wasn't until I dug in
that I realized that your vision was really
to transform infrastructure deployment and management.
And change the model.
It was like, okay, I got that wrong.
But, so let's talk about the, the ecosystem
and the joint development efforts that are going on there.
X Series, how does it fit into
this converged infrastructure business that
you've built and grown with partners?
You've got storage partners like NetApp and Pure.
You got ISV partners in the ecosystem.
We see Cohesity, it's been a while since
we hung out with all these companies
at the Cisco live, hopefully next year,
but tell us what's happening in that regard.
>> No, absolutely.
I'm looking forward to seeing you
in the Cisco live next year, Dave.
Absolutely. You brought up a very good point.
UCS is about the ecosystem that it brings together.
It's about making our customers bring
up the entire infrastructure,
from the core foundational hardware
all the way to the application level
so that they can all go off and running pretty quick.
That converse infrastructure has been one
of the cornerstones of our strategy,
as you pointed out, in the last decade.
And I'm very glad to share
that conversed infrastructure continues
to be a very popular architecture
for several enterprise applications even today.
In fact, it is the preferred architecture
for mission critical applications, where performance,
resiliency, latency, are the critical requirements.
They are almost de facto standards
for large scale deployments
of virtualize and business critical databases
and so forth.
With X Series, with our partnerships,
with our restorative partners,
those architectures will absolutely continue
and will get better.
But in addition, it's a hybrid cloud world.
So we are now bringing in the benefits of conversed
infrastructure to the world of hybrid cloud.
We'll be supporting the hybrid cloud applications now
with the CA infrastructure that we have built together
with our strong partnership with the store
as partners to tell you with the same benefits
to the new age applications as well.
>> Yeah and that's what customers want,
they want that cloud operating model.
Right? Go ahead, please.
>> I was just going to say, you know, that
the CA model will continue to thrive.
It will transition out,
it will expand the use cases now for the newer use cases
that we were beginning to see, Dave, absolutely.
>> Great. Thank you for that.
And James, like I said earlier today, we heard
this huge announcement, a lot of parts to it.
And we heard, you know, KD talk about
this initiative is, it's really computing built
for the next decade.
I mean, I like that because
it shows some vision and that you've got, you know,
a roadmap, that you've thought through the coming changes
in workloads and infrastructure management
and some of the technology that you can take advantage of
beyond just the, you know, one or two product cycles.
So, but I want to understand what you've done here
specifically that you feel differentiates you
from other competitive architectures in the industry.
>> Sure. You know, that's a great question.
number one. Number two, I'm frankly
a little bit concerned at times for customers
in general, for our customers, customers in general,
because if you look at what's in the market, right?
These rinse and repeat systems that were
effectively just rehashes of the same old design, right?
That we've seen since before 2009
when we brought UCS to market,
these are what we're seeing over and over and over again,
that's not really going to work anymore, frankly.
And I think that people are getting lulled
into a false sense of security
by seeing those things continually put in the market.
We've rethought this from the ground up because frankly,
you know, future-proofing starts now, right?
If you're not doing it right today,
future-proofing isn't even on your radar
because you're not even, you're not even today-proofed.
So we've rethought the entire chassis,
the entire architecture, from the ground up.
Okay. If you look at other vendors,
if you look at other solutions in the market,
what you'll see is things like, you know
management inside the chassis.
That's a great example. Daisy chaining them together.
Like, who needs that? Who wants that?
Like, that kind of complexity is,
first of all, it's ridiculous.
Second of all, if you want to manage across clouds
you have to do it from the cloud, right?
It's just common sense.
You have to move management where it can have the scale
and the scope that it needs to impact,
you know, your entire domain, your world,
which is much larger now than it was before.
We're talking about true hybrid cloud here.
Right? So, we had to, you know,
solve certain problems that existed
in the traditional architecture.
You know, I can't tell you how many times I heard
you know, talk about, you know,
the mid plane is a great example.
Well, you know, the mid plane in a chassis
is a limiting factor.
It limits us on how much we can connect
or how much bandwidth we have available to the chassis.
It limits us on air flow and other things.
So how do you solve that problem?
Simple. Just get rid of it.
Like we just, we took it out, right?
It's now no longer a problem.
We designed an architecture that doesn't need it.
It doesn't rely on it, no forklift upgrades.
So as we start moving down the path
of needing liquid cooling,
or maybe we need to take advantage
of some new high performance, low latency fabrics.
We can do that with almost no problem at all, right?
So we don't have any forklift upgrades.
Park your forklift on the side.
You won't need it anymore
because you can upgrade granularly.
You can move along as technologies come
into existence that maybe don't even exist today.
They may not even be on our radar today to take advantage of
but I like to think of these technologies.
You know, they're really important to our customers.
These are, you know,
we can call them disruptive technologies.
The reality is that we don't want to disrupt our customers
with these technologies.
We want to give them these technologies
so they can go out and be disruptive themselves, right?
And this is the way that we've designed this,
from the ground up, to be easy consume
and to take advantage of what we know about today
and what's coming in the future
that we may not even know about.
So we think this is a way to give our customers
that ultimate capability, flexibility, and future-proofing.
>> I like that phrase, true hybrid cloud.
It's one that we've used for years.
But to me, this is all about that horizontal infrastructure
that can support that vision of what true hybrid cloud is.
You could support the mission critical applications.
You can develop on the system
and you can support a variety of workloads.
You're not locked into, you know, one narrow stovepipe.
And that does have legs. Vikas and James,
thanks so much for coming on the program.
Great to see you.
>> Thank you, we appreciate the time.
>> Thank you.
>> And thank you for watching.
This is Dave Volante for theCube,
the leader in digital event coverage.
(uplifting music)