 Live from Seattle, Washington. It's theCUBE, covering DockerCon 2016. Brought to you by Docker. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Brian Graceley. Seattle, Washington for DockerCon 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media's flagship program. We go out to the events and expect the same noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Brian Graceley. Our next guest is Shashwad Suryasav with VP of Engineering at EMC. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, John. Good to see you again. Good to be here. EMC world was big this year. We had a great conversation about the pools, as Jyotishi once said, the pools of resources being addressable. And EMC now using the term infrastructure as code, almost like it's de facto standard, which we believe it is. So always great. And a lot of IT practitioners based their decisions on the architecture based on storage. Some drive it from security angles, some from storage perspective. What's your thoughts with Docker? Has that impact the customer from a storage perspective? What's it all about here? So that's a great question, John. I think the customers are moving to an environment where they want to consolidate their infrastructure and they want to bring the workload to where the storage is. They don't want separate storage silos for analytics or different type of use cases. So basically if you have the storage that runs in the environment which is friendly to Docker and ECS is an example where ECS ships as a Docker container and you could run the container on the nodes and you could also bring your other application and other workload on the same node which can run side by side in Docker container. And that helps consolidating your infrastructure or not. So I've got to ask you the question. I'm an EMC customer. Pretend I'm an EMC customer. Hey, I've been buying all these drives from EMC. I got tons of email. I got object store, all those capacities that we heard at EMC World Trade Stop. But all those Docker stuff, there's so much going on in this ecosystem. What the hell does it mean to me? So help us, take a minute and share your thoughts on what is this new Docker container trend and all the players here? And what does it mean for the customer? So the world is moving to an environment where people want to work in an agile manner. They've gone other days when you buy appliances from different companies for different purposes. And these days you want flexibility in terms of being able to buy the hardware from any company that you want and bring in the software pieces and make it a software defined infrastructure. So you could bring a software defined storage from EMC. You can buy the appliance from EMC. You can buy the appliance from somebody else. You have all your applications that runs in Docker container and missiles. And these are great examples of technology where your applications and storage, they can run side by side on the same infrastructure. I think the ecosystem that we are seeing here, it helps customers a lot into consolidating, being more flexible, being more agile and how they deploy, how they bring up the environment and how they make their work go. Yeah, what's, we've been hearing about software defined storage for a while now. What's really driving it? What makes a customer say, I want to go software defined storage? What's the use case? Who's the decision maker? Is it a DevOps team? Is it developers? Is it still a storage team? Like what's the landscape for software defined storage these days? Yeah, so if you look at how industry had worked in the past, they had different storage silos, for example, for the fire system in which the developers would want to run different workloads versus the analytics platform where you would want to run your Hadoop jobs or the Spark workload or your content, archive content where you would use the object interface. So based on different developers need the infrastructure admins job became pretty hard. So, and that also resulted in things like wasted space or not for utilize capacity in various silos. It resulted in data being copied from one place to another. So, now imagine that you have a pool of hardware where the software defined storage gives you the flexibility of storing the data just once and accessing it through any means that you want. You could access it through object interface, through fire interface, through object or the analytics SGFS interface. That allows the infrastructure admin to expand, flexibly expand, contract the pools as they want without having to copy the data between the different silos. And that allows the developers to have complete freedom to access the data anyway they want. So, it really is bringing a new trend the same way that virtualization brought in consolidating compute, the software defined storage is bringing the same thing. In ECS, we followed this principle from the day one. We've said that you create the architecture in a way that handles the scalability storage just once. And the same data could be exposed as object interface, as SGFS interface or fire interface. And since it's completely horizontal scalability with all nodes being equivalent symmetrically, you can keep on adding nodes to the system, keep on rebooting. And that gives the infrastructure admin the complete flexibility to offer the services to the developers. Yeah. You were at Microsoft Azure prior to coming to EMC. Azure's obviously delivered as a service. So all that operations is sort of hidden behind an API. It's hidden behind the service. How difficult, how complicated from an engineering perspective is it to build software that, because people want that same experience, right? They just want to talk to an API. As an engineer, how hard is it to build essentially a lot of that operational smart into the software so customers don't have to have an army of people to make it run? You bring up a great point, Brian. I think it's more of a thing that as an engineer, you have to keep in mind as a requirement. And once you have that, then it's possible to build up a system like that. We being at EMC, EMC values the ability of our customers to operate as the, or the enterprise features as the biggest thing. And we took the same philosophy and applied to the platform three type of storage infrastructure, which provides the cloud type of offering and scalability. But with ECS, you still get the enterprise feature and functionality to be able to operate easily. And essentially you, a customer doesn't need to have the expertise in a distributed storage system, but he should still be able to operate it. And you're seeing customers, the customers you talk to feel like they're getting a similar experience with ECS as opposed to what they might get from any cloud service provider in AWS or in Azure, something like that? Yeah, so basically in Azure or AWS, you just see the data into API, you don't see much about how the system is operating behind. We go a step further in the sense that our API is very similar to Amazon S3 interface. And, but in addition to that, we have dashboards and other monitoring tools, which gives customers a complete insight on what is happening in the system to show them the transaction rate, to show them the height of the system, nodes, et cetera. So we've heard good feedback in terms of the operability of ECS. What's the next big thing around the audience? You know, a little more developer centric, a little more container centric. What's the next big thing that you guys are looking at? I think the analytics is a huge thing because storage has to be tight. There's so much of data that you really need to think about how we are analyzing the data and how we are working with that data. And the next big thing for us is to extend the storage into analytics by providing the functionality of analytics in the same system. And that's where we are going with. I think the other thing is that Amazon and Azure, they've given a certain, a good feature for the developers, but it's like in some other, somebody ISIS premises. And really to operate on a huge amount of data, you need something that is on-premise where you don't have to pay the cost for bandwidth and VAN. And so there is a potential for creating a hybrid scenario where a customer has a choice on flexibility, moving the data on-prem, off-prem, running the workload where they see the best use case for. So I think moving up the stack in that fashion is where we think the next potential is. Yeah. Take a minute to share to the audience what goes on in the engineering team, what's the mindset, what are some of the specific things you're working on? So I saved the 3.0 announcement for the big announcement that we make, I won't reveal the secret at now. Come on. I think the mindset that we are operating on is more from thinking from the customer's perspective that there's huge amount of data sitting in the enterprises which are not so easy to move to the new generation of application or to the storage. So how do we make it so easy for customers to see basically move to the new type of storage, modern storage, modern analytics? That's how we are operating. And all the features that you see us working on or that would be announced, it would be along those trends. Final question. If someone asked you, hey I didn't get a chance to go to DockerCon this year, what happened? What was the bottom line? What's going on there? What's the big deal? I think the momentum is just amazing. You see so much of traction that is being made from our perspective. The integration of storage in the Docker environment, it looks to be the next big hurdle which is being caused which would make it so easy for customers to start using it in full functionality. If you think about it, if you have multiple data centers and you could have compute and storage tied together and be in a flow in an active, active manner, that would be a huge thing. And we are seeing the trend moving towards that direction so that's a great positive news for us. Final, final question. Advice to your customers out there that have a lot of storage and they're architecting their future for the digital transformation. They want to make sure that they're taking advantage of all the greatness of EMC but also they know that cloud native is ahead of them. What's your advice to them as those architects out there? Yeah, so basically like you said, the biggest pain points the customers have that they have a huge amount of data that they want to move to modern system. The huge amount of data comes huge cost so you should really look for something that is cheap and deep where you can move your data but that also offers you the modern primitives that you expect from cloud. And I think ECS is that type of architecture which would give you both the benefits of cost versus the modern application primitives. And the big vibe of the show this year is what? What's the big theme this year? In DockerCon, yeah. For me it's more of a storage to Docker integration and but I'm biased from the storage perspective, so. John, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate your insight. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. It was very nice talking to you. It's theCUBE, I'm Brian. I'm John Furrier with Brian Gracie. You're watching theCUBE. We'll be right back with more live coverage here at DockerCon 2016 after this short break.