 All right, yep, I couldn't hear her. Welcome to Newsdash on SiliconANGLE TV for Wednesday, October 31, 2012. I'm Kristen Folletti. Rackspace is expanding its cloud capabilities via SDN, and EMC has gained a silver tail. Join us now with his breaking analysis on these stories is senior Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman. Welcome, Stu. Hey, Kristen, thanks for having me. Rackspace says it's now offering customers the ability to create customized virtual networks in a public cloud. Using software-defined networking like capabilities. They've named their offering Cloud Networks. Stu, what can you tell us about Cloud Networks? Can you give us an example of how it works? Sure, Kristen. So we know Rackspace calls themselves the Open Cloud Company, and they're one of the real leaders in the OpenStack initiative. They've got kind of all the wood behind the arrow on OpenStack, and OpenStack has had a networking initiative called Quantum for the last, I believe it's you or so, and the new piece that they've announced today is what they call Cloud Networks, and what's really interesting about it is if you look under the covers, they're actually using some of the pieces of NICERA technology. So they've got the OpenV-Switch, which is just a open virtual software V-Switch, which can be put in a lot of the Open hypervisors or for VMware in an appliance, and also they're using the NICERA management platform. So if you look, this is of course, NICERA was acquired by VMware for over a billion dollars, and what this technology allows us to do is customers don't just have a cloud network, but they can actually isolate the pieces of their network. So if you compare, usually just using VLANs before in the environment, I could have my environment isolated from other customers, but with using really the software-defined network pieces of the OpenV-Switch, I can actually isolate all of the applications in my environment so I can make sure my web traffic and some of my other applications inside my own private cloud network can be isolated. Now what are the advantages of using cloud networks? Yeah, so the cloud networks, what that's gonna allow is greater scalability and greater security. So as I mentioned before, VLANs or technology that customers in the enterprise have been using for a long time and service providers have been using it, but I run out of how many VLANs I can actually have in a space and that's gonna limit, especially at the service provider level, how much granularity I have to be able to isolate environments and give me the security, really that multi-tenancy that customers are looking for. Rex, based previously, let customers segment systems using VLANs. Why are they moving away from that kind of architecture? Okay, so as I mentioned, if you look at what VLANs could do, they were fine for most of the enterprises, but it's really to be able to get to a much larger environment, more applications. And if I really wanna have more of my data center in the cloud, whether it be hosted by Rackspace or really just managed as a service, this is the way to go. If you look at the offering today, this is only for new environments that Rackspace is setting up. So if I have already have my environment hosted up, I can't migrate to this yet. So we're still in early days of some of these deployments, especially in the cloud. So customers need to make sure that they understand it, plan ahead of time and this will slowly roll out to a broader set of the environments probably over the next year or so. In addition to the SDN capabilities announcement, Rackspace rolled out various other new features in the past few weeks. Can you talk about some of those for us? Yeah, sure. So there were two big announcements. One actually, you know, Silicon Angle and Wikibon were at the Strata plus Hadoop show last week and there was an announcement of Rackspace with Hortonworks. So we're starting to see that intersection of cloud and big data. I talked to Amazon and they really talked about how if you look at what we need for big data, we need to have a lot of information, we need to have compute power but we don't necessarily have to have it at once. So Rackspace is trying to make sure that they're matching what Amazon does. Amazon has a pairing of their S3 and AWS environments to be able to take my stored information, then be able to do the process thing and then get it back to the stored repository and Rackspace is moving in that direction. First with a partnership with Hortonworks and then they're eventually gonna have services that they're gonna offer for processing big data. The other one is competition to elastic block storage from Amazon and that's Rackspace's block solution. I believe it's the Cinder project that they have on that. Applications like databases are still typically gonna use block environments rather than file which is file and object is what most customers are using today in the cloud. According to statements by Rackspace on their blog and elsewhere, they're leveraging technology from Nacira to make this product offering possible. We've covered all the news around Nacira pretty closely at Silicon Angle and on theCUBE. Remind our viewers a bit about what makes Nacira worth the $1.2 billion price tag VMware paid for them. Yeah, so great question, Kristin. If we look at networking, there's really this wave saying that software is where the value is going to be and it's all the things that we were talking about earlier, scalability and security and how we roll these, really transform the way networking is done and Nacira has a lot of the talent that have helped create things like OpenFlow and the OpenV switch that we talked about earlier and with Rackspace leveraging some of the Nacira technology, it's a real proof point that this is good technology that's gonna help enable the cloud and enable really not only service provider clouds but enterprise cloud environments. So really justifying some of that billion dollars that VMware put into the Nacira acquisition. EMC announced today that they've agreed to acquire Silver Tail Systems, a software company in real-time web analytics space. Where does Silver Tail fit into the overall EMC portfolio? Yeah, so when we talk a lot about the EMC acquisition, VMware gets a lot of the attention but the $2 billion acquisition of RSA many years ago really made EMC a big player in the security space and there's a connection between EMC, VMware and RSA. If you look at kind of that whole portfolio that they share their technologies where it's needed. So back when vSphere 4 went out for VMware they started to offer things like their vShield product for security and there were also some RSA technologies that went into that. So Silver Tail is a security product. It's really for kind of the, on the website for banks and really monitoring massive amounts of real-time traffic. It's gonna fit right in the RSA acquisition. So right up the road from us in Bedford, Massachusetts you expect Art Coviello and his folks at RSA to take those technology in and they're pretty excited about that acquisition which from what I'm hearing is about a three to 400 million dollar acquisition. So a nice piece to the security portfolio for EMC. The question we all seem to be asking ourselves with EMC and VMware's focus on software to find networking is how does this fit into the overall SDN strategy? Is the Silver Tail acquisition an SDN related purchase or is this best classified as a tradition security and networking addition to their security portfolio? Yeah, so I do see this more on the kind of traditional security side but if you look at SDN as a whole, you know, security is going to plug in as an application for a lot of SDN environments. So things like firewalls and things like other pieces of the RSA portfolio are going to get through the network as a software appliance and that's where kind of there's the tie-in to the whole SDN messaging. I don't really see Silver Tail as directly tied into SDN but it does play into the overall picture of where the network and the security are tying into things which ties back to the cloud because some of the biggest challenges for cloud computing in general have been networking. How do we scale it? How do we have enough bandwidth? How do we isolate it? And then of course the security. So it all does kind of wrap together into a nice bundle for EMC and it's large subsidiaries of RSA and VMware. Well, Stu, thanks so much for joining us today. We appreciate you joining our program and hopefully we'll talk with you again soon. Excellent, thanks so much. For all the latest in-depth coverage and breaking analysis on tech innovation, keep up to date with News Desk on SiliconANGLE TV.