>> Narrator: Live from Berlin, Germany, it's the Cube,
covering NetApp Insight 2017.
Brought to you by NetApp.
>> Welcome back to the Cube's live coverage of NetApp Insight
2017 here in Berlin, Germany.
I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host,
Peter Burris.
We are joined by Tim Pitcher.
He is the Vice President, Next Generation Data Center
for NetApp.
Thanks so much for coming on the program.
>> It's an absolute pleasure, a pleasure to be here.
>> So let's start just defining for our viewers,
the next generation data center, how it's built,
how its founded.
>> Yeah so, if you think about NetApp today,
you know, we think about our customers really, consuming
technology in three ways.
We've got sort of more, we're modernizing traditional
data centers and architectures using data management
and flash storage and these sorts of things and this is
really our backyard, you know, this is what we've been doing
for years and years and been incredibly successful at it.
And the big disruptor in many ways is cloud.
So our partnerships with the major hyperscalers
are critically important to us as well.
But there's a third piece to the jigsaw, which is the next
generation data center, and the way we think about that is
if you imagine that you want to use cloud services, but you
want to do a lot of that yourself, you want to take
advantage of the sort of simple, scalable, automated
nature of cloud then, that's really what we're delivering
in the next generation data center for our customers.
>> So, the next generation data center is
being driven by technology advances, business requirements,
the realities of data, what are the practical things
that are driving or indicating the steps that people
should take as they think about new technology
and new business practices?
>> Yes, I mean the big driver is really to remove a lot of
complexity from their business.
So if you think about going to the cloud, you're making a
very simple really, consumption choice.
You're saying, I'm gonna consume data and services from
the public cloud environment.
And that drives a similar behavior inside
large organizations as well, and organizations of all sizes.
So they're thinking about how do they build a private cloud,
take advantage of both in a hybrid cloud environment,
or they can have multiple, public cloud instances as well.
So they're thinking about it all very differently
and they're thinking about, the most appropriate service
that they are trying to deliver or the most appropriate way
to deliver that application or that data set, if you will,
to their customers.
So, you know, it's not like everything needs to be in
one place and also, critically, customers very often want
to change that as well, so they'll make a decision to put
something in a public cloud.
It might not be the best fit over time, for whatever reason,
so they want to bring it back in house, deliver that
on their own infrastructure.
When they do that, they want to take advantage, you know
they like what they had in the cloud so they want
to put that on premise.
So the real drivers are things like:
they really want simplicity, they're really focused on a
much more performant outcome that's focused on simplicity,
focused on how you scale your business,
and being able to have truly multi tenant environments
that give you the predictability of
your traditional architectures if you will,
the architectures you know well and you've been using
for a long time.
But you want to be able to do that in a cloud like
environment because you get the economics of cloud, but
you get the predictability of dedicated environments.
>> So, which of the customers that you work with,
are in fact, executing this next generation data center
strategy most beautifully, in your opinion?
>> Well so, if you think about the strategy that NetApp
has for NextGen data center, it's really based on
two company's that they acquired:
one is Object Storage Platform, good storage,
good web scale, the other is, SolidFire.
SolidFire was a young, emerging, hot technology company that
was focused on delivering what I just articulated,
simple technologies, simple storage platform,
upright in its scale, completely automated.
And, SolidFire was born out of a service provider
and born out of a service provider at the same time
as OpenStack, so it's kind of unique in that perspective,
in the company was formed to solve a problem.
And the problem that Req Space really were looking to
solve, was, how do they take their managed service clients
and move them into the cloud?
What's stopping them doing that?
And the answer is obviously customers worry about security
and things like that, but the key thing that was really
stopping them was their concern about performance.
So, if I'm gonna share, put all my stuff in with everybody
else's, in a shared environment, how do I know I'm gonna get
what I'm paying for?
How do I know that I'm not gonna have somebody else's
applications consume all the services that are going to
be given to me?
So, as a, as a consequence, this was the thing that
prevents the people going to the cloud, so this
was what the company was formed to fix.
So, SolidFire came out of that and that's our background and
that's why that NetApp acquired us, it's a very different
way of looking at things.
So as a consequence, service providers are you know,
really at the forefront of how they deliver services to
their customers and they leveraged SolidFire
and we were very successful as an independent company
selling to service providers and have been increasingly
successful now that we're part of NetApp.
So, our very first customer, for example, is in Jersey
and is still a very happy NetApp Customer,
a company called Calligo and they offer a tiered services,
all on SolidFire, trusted cloud services in an offshore
kind of environment, so they're focused on the financial
services community and things like that.
And now we have also, you know major service providers
as well, like 1&1 in Germany, which is one of the largest
service providers in Europe.
It's an existing, a long time, NetApp customer and they're
a SolidFire customer for their public cloud services as well
for the cloud that they offer.
And in the UK as well, Interoot, major service provider.
What I like about them, is one they deal with a massive
amount of traffic, they've got a huge network, so very
traffic intensive.
But also they really take advantage of NetApp being,
I'm sorry of SolidFire being part of NetApp now.
So they use the on-tap based products in their
managed services which those products are optimized for
that kind of environment.
But for their cloud environment, where they're
offering tiered services, they use SolidFire.
So they've got us on both sides of the house if you will.
And so it's a great example of SolidFire being
part of NetApp, why that's so powerful
and why that's so successful.
And companies like, Internet Solutions in South Africa,
It's one of the major service providers in South Africa.
Big consumer of, SolidFire and now is part of NetApp,
it's the most perfect place for them because we've got a
big business in South Africa.
We're very successful there so we're part of that team now
and they go from strength to strength.
>> So now, the next challenge is taking some of the
best practices that have emerged from what you've learned
with working with these service providers, and transferring
them to other industries.
>> Yeah, so we're seeing a lot in Fintech right now,
Pharma is a good market for us,
Astra Zenica uses SolidFire as a great example of one of
NetApps long term and major customer's that's now
consuming products and services from other business units
and other offerings we have across a much broader portfolio.
So, they've been, they're a very happy customer now.
That's part of our global account business.
Business Wire in the UAE is another example of a successful
business transformation that they're doing as well.
We see a lot of activity in DevOps.
These products are perfect for DevOps in that they, because
they're so simple, they don't require management,
they're completely automated.
You're not building those large infrastructures of people
to support these environments.
And it's much quicker to be able to launch applications
because of the simple nature of the technology you can
launch applications, new products, new services,
so your time to market is an awful lot quicker as well.
>> Great, well thanks so much for coming on the show Tim.
It's been really fun talking to you.
>> It's been a pleasure, thanks very much.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Peter Burris.
We will have more from NetApp Insight, just after this.
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