 Okay, we're back at VMworld 2011. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE, and we are here to host a panel to talk about hybrid cloud, the realities, where is it in the marketplace, and one of the myths is an opportunity, where the reality is, and I have an expert panel here, and far down there is Alex Williams, blogger for SiliconANGLE, he's the editor of our enterprise section, and he's going to give some observations around the marketplace, and what he's seeing in his expert opinion. Rich Miller, who's an entrepreneur, writer, he blogs, technically a blogger, I guess too, as well, an expert, and Doug Gorley from Arista Networks, who can give a perspective up and down the stack, and so guys, first question is, where are we in the reality of the hybrid cloud? Obviously, private cloud was rolled out about a year ago, and that was a nice buzzword, roll out private cloud, public cloud was already out there, and now hybrid kind of sits in the middle. So, what's going on? Doug, we'll start with you. Sure, I think we're certainly in the early or embryonic days of hybrid cloud, where private clouds are getting some adoption, public cloud's been well adopted in certainly across mid-market and small-medium business, and we're now seeing uptake in enterprise use of it, but the ability to move workloads from an enterprise to or a small-medium business to the public cloud, expand the workload, process it, bring it back, that's, it's early days for that, and especially if it's not a send the workload, have it processed, send the result back, but it's a cloud bursting up, where I'm going to extend my capacity on demand. That takes a tremendous amount of data movement, and I don't know that necessarily the wide area networks are even ready for a lot of that yet. Hey, Rich, what's your take on it? There's a definitional issue, and one of the things that I like about it- There's a cloudwashing issue, I think. Well, there might be. What's the definitional issue? The definitional issue is this. What's your moving? What's the workload? You can move data, you can move compute, you can move small pieces of compute. If you segment your applications such that they move around a private or a public environment, that is a hybrid cloud, in my mind. If you lay out your data in a distributed cash, dynamic cash across both private and public infrastructure, that's a hybrid cloud. It doesn't always have to be a matter of moving a VM. Doesn't always have to be a matter of moving big data for it to be a hybrid cloud. Alex, you're out there scouring the landscape. What are you seeing? You talked to startups, you also talked to some of the big companies. What are you hearing when you interview folks and you're reporting on this stuff? Well, I hear a lot of marketing talk. I talk to a lot of PR people, so that's just part of it. Okay, so just cut through it. What do you see? I mean, the more I look at it, just the people I talk to, I try to find a solid point where I can get some understanding. And increasingly, for me, is about the storage market and how really it's not a public cloud, it's not a private cloud, it's not a hybrid cloud. It's really about all the data being everywhere. And really, again, I think to your point about moving it around. But you got to store it somewhere, right? You got to have, you know, you got to keep it inside your own walls, you got to keep it out online. And it's those emerging technologies that are kind of playing in that space, like the clusters of the world that I find most interesting when we have this conversation. You know, I mean, companies get funded, they got to go into new markets, they got to have a little hype, so I can see the PR angle on that. But the question that we want to talk about now is, you know, VMware is promoting this slogan that says, own your own private cloud. Do people really want to own their own cloud? Own their own cloud, I mean, not private cloud? Well, if own it means own it as in control it, project your control over it. If I have a reasonable amount that I literally bought and I own, but I can project or federate my control out into a public service or something that someone else is running for me, that's owning my cloud too. And I think there is where you're living. It's the projection of control. It's projection of management. Not an ownership like I bought the gear because cloud is about variable, right? You can talk about cloud first. It's more of like own. It's like owning your destiny. You say, I own my own destiny. I don't go to Walmart or Costco and swipe my credit card to own my destiny. I take ownership of where it's going. And I think what VMware is saying here is own your cloud strategy, whether that is building an in-house, whether that's leveraging public clouds that are available or whether it's trying to move workloads between them, move data between them. It's ownership of your strategy and the execution of that strategy. And today I think the message is you have to have one. You have to own it. You need to develop your IT strategy for cloud. You need to start executing on it. That's what people need to do today. So we were on a panel last year. Actually, I don't think Alec was on, but you guys were on the panel last year. We talked about the cloud. What's changed this year from last year? And Alex, the question to you since you weren't on the panel last year, is there more marketing hype this year? So the question for you two guys is, what's changed this year from last year of VMworld? And Alex, for you, when you get to the question, is there more marketing hype this year than last year? Yeah, I went to VMworld last year and we were just starting to see the emergence of service providers and they were asking questions about VMware's cloud strategy. And now we have a number of service providers who have signed on to provide that global fabric, so to speak. So we're seeing the emergence of service providers providing that capability to extend data outside of your data center into a service provider environment. I think that's probably one of the most significant aspects of it, but in the background, we have all the other issues that affect this story. Tablets, smartphones, and the ability to provision your own storage through a service such as Dropbox. And again, I think that storage question is one that you can always come back to. And I think that's really become really the hot topic right now that we see this year at VMworld. And last year, I mean, really it was an issue, but it wasn't what it is like it is today. Rich, Doug, changes from last year to this year, your observations? Two things that are really obvious to me this year. Storage virtualization and the whole attention to storage, the incorporation of SSD into everybody's plans and everybody's fabric. The other thing that is clearly becoming an issue is the federation of management across multiple clouds or multiple instances. Those are two things I'm seeing, not just marketing hype, people are showing it up. And that's those are showing real product and people are buying it as service. And isn't that, isn't that testament to the service providers becoming? Absolutely. Well, Terry Mark was bought by last year. Service providers are definitely stepping up to it. But the product industry is fueling this whole thing. So it's not one or the other. It's- People are delivering product. What you're saying is- Absolutely. People are delivering product. And customers are buying product. Doug, what's your take on this? I'd probably, I'm definitely going to agree with Rich on this, but probably to be a shade trite, it's, I feel like I'm in Seattle. Because everywhere I look, all I see is cloud. Every vendor here has cloud so many times in their literature, signage and everything. I'm like, it's your point of cloudwashing, Alex. It's overcast in here today. Yeah, I'm actually writing a post right now about touching on this where it's like, you know, all the marketing we're seeing is about cloud. You know, is it marketing if you're flocking a concept of death? Yeah, the horse is being flogged. It may not be dead yet, but- And then right now, SiliconANGLE is introducing a cloud service today at VMworld. So I mean, you know, with a Hadoop cluster as well. So let's get- That's it. So let's talk about some of the trends that are getting a lot of action. Talk about proof points. That was our theme last year. This year's about delivery. People want real solutions. I wrote a post about calling out OpenStack saying, is OpenTech going too slow and do customers want solutions faster? So on delivering product, what are the key things you guys are seeing in terms of buying beyond like the TestimDev and DevOps stuff? What are you seeing that are being bought? Well, I'll probably start with, I'm seeing from the service provider market a significant investment today in all the carriers and hosting providers wanting to build their own public cloud offers. A lot of people started with some of the CAN solutions. It took enterprise technology and sort of cloudwashed it and put lipstick on the pig, rebranded it, called it a cloud. And what they're finding is they actually can't make money because when you're paying all the overage taxes for all the enterprise technology repurposed as a cloud, you're kind of at your wits end. You can't make money doing it. And so what we've seen happen is our customers say, how do I build a public cloud for profit? How do I understand the economics of it? And in that model, it's build a public cloud designed to enable a price point that lets them compete with the Amazons of the world for the small medium business market who are the primary early adopters of the cloud technologies today. And that type of laser focus from suppliers on building things that are open, based on open source, based on commodity hardware designed to enable automation. So you can have the economics of scale of a Google grow as fast as a Facebook and have the type of HR low cost operations we're seeing produced with Windows Azure while competing with the four month release and devops cycle of an Amazon. Who's doing that? Is there any examples you could point to? I mean, is that happening or? I mean, ones that are like trying to build that infrastructure as a commodity infrastructure. What's that doing at a price point? Because what he's saying is basically. Well, I mean, I would put a company like Cloud Scaling in that category that are like Randy Bias and what he's developing, for instance, what he did for Kreatel, you know, what he and his, and I think George Riley did with Kreatel.com. That's exactly the case study I was going to use. KT is a great example of, you know, a telecommunications company that reinvented itself and is basically did that to help kind of foster an entrepreneurial community in Korea by providing that service that is similar to what developers can get from Amazon Web Services. You know, that to me is, that's a smart route to take in this market. You know, worrying as much about the private and the public, you're worrying about innovation, right? And that to me is like, you know, if I was going to take, you know, provide any lesson to the folks out there who are thinking about this when they see the ownership cloud, you know, marketing, say, well, ownership, what does that mean? Well, you know, innovation leads all kinds of new potential ownership, right? And that's what you want. You want to be able to have that innovation edge so you can own the market. And if you want a customer who's owned the cloud and done it in a hybrid fashion, a year ago, Netflix wasn't doing what it is today, which has taken their entire in-house, on-premise, Oracle-based infrastructure, built in parallel on Amazon, the complete replica of that and moved everything off into the cloud, except that stuff that they absolutely must have in-house and there is a hybrid. They have owned it, they control it, they manage it to a fine, fairly well. And if it fails in any part, they have a place where they can fail over to it. That's owning your cloud, that's hybrid, that's a customer. Is that the exception of the norm in the future? I mean, it makes sense. In the future, I think for a class of service provider that's delivering content, which, look how much they deliver, that's managing content on behalf of other people like the photo companies, I think that will be the norm. And I think it will be increasingly what you see as the way people build. Yeah, and I think it's going to be a cost factor. People are just going to look at the prices. Plus the optimization of the infrastructure itself. One of the venture capitalists we had on today was talking about utilization rates, storage utilization rates, for an Amazon web service kind of company, it's like 95%, where for some of the managed service providers, it's on the realm of 20 to 30%. You know, how can there be really any competition there? I mean, it's definitely going to become a price issue. We have two minutes left, so I want to get one kind of question or comments from you guys before we wrap this up. Obviously, cloud and all the stuff, put cloud watching aside, they need some enablers, right? So two things that are popping out, you mentioned storage visualization, but things I'm seeing is obviously SSD and big data. Our areas of people are actually investing in. So you look at the dollars going in, you're seeing some innovations around those two areas. So comment the importance of flash SSD and big data to the cloud, hybrid cloud situation. Well, flash SSD accelerates the IO rates, right? When the IO gets faster, which was one of the key bottlenecks we had in processing, now we can generate, we get more data in, and therefore we can push more IO out and get better utilization of the computational resources we have available. So that accelerates things. That broke, if you put in, for instance, Fusion IO boards into a server, very quickly, you start breaking one gig. And so then they upgrade to 10 gig. I can move virtual machines really quickly. And now if I can dynamically load balance my virtual machines across the infrastructure I have available and use it as efficiently as possible by making the best, most efficient utilization of my private cloud. If I run out of capacity to Rich's point, I move it up to the public cloud. And then to the Hadoop model or the big data, the challenge there is going to be, can big data exist in a public cloud? The question is, can you get your big data to the public cloud to let it exist? I think today, given the state of the wide area network, FedEx might be our fastest way to do that. Which also argues that when you're using big data, using SSD makes it start to become progressively less batch oriented and closer to real time. And when you're going to use it, you're going to use it in a distributed, dynamic caching arrangement, as opposed to trying to move all of it at one time, either into the public cloud or out of the public cloud and back into private. And getting to what Richard is saying there and then backing it up a little bit. What are the problems that customers are facing today? A lot of them really did decide to virtualize their enterprise, but a lot of them didn't manage it very well. And so suddenly they had to buy more servers, right? And so now there's this whole issue of trying to unsnarl all that, but also making it as optimized as possible. And that's where these issues really started to come into play where they'll start to formulate in their own mind saying, wait a second. I've been looking at these guys out there, these, the pure storage of the world, those kinds of companies. Maybe they're the better option, because if I look at my costs over the span of the next five to 10 years, I'm going to need that instead of like, kind of these solutions that require you to just adding, you know, equipment to your back end. Okay, so final, final question. Just go down the line real quick, starting with Alex and then we're going to wrap up, so I know we're getting the hook here. What's going to be changing next year? Real quick, bumper sticker it. What's going to be different next year when we do our panel again? Alex starting it for VMworld 2012 in Moscone. I don't think, I think we'll have less, I think we'll have less marketing speak. I think we'll start really talking more about the issues. I think this whole SSD, you know, you know, flash storage issues going to really become much more pronounced and it's going to be really a big topic because there's going to be some major acquisitions. There's going to be some startups out there that are going to get acquired. There are going to be some startups out there that are going to start to become on their route to being billion dollar companies. There are even possibly tens of billion dollar companies. That's going to create all kinds of disruption with the existing players we have. Great, Rich, what's different next year? Well, vSphere 5 is going to actually show up to be rather well put together and coordinated and less a doggies breakfast. It's going to look a lot easier for people to actually take parts of the VMWare suite of technologies and have them not conflict with one another. That's for one. Second, also believe with Alex that SSD and storage is going to be huge. Third, I think network virtualization is going to be playing a much bigger role as we move into next year. Doug, can you trump that? No, but I'll try. Go ahead, I'm sure you can. I think we'll have moved from PowerPoint to case studies. Right this year there's a lot of PowerPoint. There's a lot of fluff and flash in this area and what we'll see over the next year is case studies from moving from leading companies and technology leaders like the Korea Telcom deployment you mentioned to a widespread swath of dozens of large-scale service providers that are building economical private or economical public clouds as services that are profitable. We'll see that happen. And what we'll realize is that the path they're choosing is one of automated systems based on commodity hardware and open source software. I think you're spot on. vCloud and vSphere 5 will be hitting in full effect enabling enterprises to reach into providers and SSD and those types of solid state technologies will absolutely be fueling things. Plus you'll see Intel Sandy Bridge in full effect which two port 10 gig by default on those servers is going to change some of the network architectures that people have stoically been building on in the past. The differentiation at the top of the stack. Well my prediction next year is that we're going to see a lot more consultants types at the show, less geeks because it's the case studies and we're going to have a bigger and better Cube next year. So thanks guys for a great segment. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com and you're watching the SiliconANGLE.tv's theCUBE flagship telecast here at VMworld 2011. We're talking about hybrid cloud with expert abundance. Thanks for watching and take care.