 Welcome back to theCUBE's special presentation, Simplifying Hybrid Cloud, brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna, who's the director of product management for UCS at Cisco, and James Leach, who is director of business development at Cisco. Gents, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. Hey, thanks for having us. Okay, Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to Hybrid Cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers. And as organizations, as they hit the pavement for their Hybrid Cloud journeys, what are the most common challenges that they face? What are they telling you? How is Cisco, specifically UCS, helping them deal with these problems? Well, you know, first, I think that's a great question. And, you know, customer-centric view is the way that we've taken, is kind of the approach we've taken from day one, right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for there, our customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications, right? That's where the rubber meets your proverbial road with the customer. And I would say that, you know, what we're seeing is the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data-centric applications, for example. Those require that we, you know, are able to move and process large data sets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications, I think to give our customers kind of some, you know, pose some challenges would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today or the day that they, you know, make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application, that application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can keep up with today. So that creates some challenges around, you know, how do I build the infrastructure? How do I right size it without over-provisioning, for example, but also there's a need for some flexibility around lifecycle and planning those purchase cycles based on the lifecycle of the different hardware elements. And within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges, we see customers who are being forced to move away from the, like a modular or blade approach, which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits. And they have to move to something like a rack server model for some applications because of these needs that these data-centric applications have. And that creates a lot of, you know, opportunity for siloing the infrastructure. And those silos in turn create multiple operating models within the, you know, a data center environment that, you know, again, drive a lot of complexity. So that complexity is definitely the enemy here. And then finally, I think life cycles, we're seeing this democratization of processing, if you will, right? So it's no longer just CPU focus. We have GPU, we have FPGA, we have, you know, things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So when those life cycles don't align for a lot of our customers, they see a challenge in how they can manage this, you know, these different life cycles and still make a purchase without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So that is, you know, kind of the other bucket. And then finally, I think management is huge, right? So management, you know, at its core is really right size for our customers and give them the most value when it meets the mark around scale and scope. You know, back in 2009, we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took management outside the chassis, right? We put it at the top of the rack and that worked great for the scale and scope we needed at that time. However, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed, right? So we're talking about a hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centers, across clouds and, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those operational pieces that touch the application, that touch the infrastructure, but they're not the same tool. They tend to be disparate tools that have to be put together. So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of, you know, building their own tools. So that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility, but also can reach down into the infrastructure. Right. You know, Jim, I said in my open that you guys, Cisco sort of changed the server game with the original UCS, but the X series is the next generation, the generation of the next decade, which is really important because you touched on a lot of things. These data intensive workloads, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs, the whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed. So how's it going with the X series? You made a big splash last year. What's the reception been in the field? Actually, it's been great. You know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our, you know, UCS X series story. I think that, you know, the main reason they relate to it is they helped create it, right? It was their feedback and their partnership that gave us really those problem areas, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add, you know, significant value. So, you know, since we brought UCS to market back in 2009, you know, we had this unique architectural paradigm that we created. And I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history in terms of growth. What we're seeing now as X series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake. We're seeing, you know, both in terms of, you know, the number of customers, but also more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using and the types of workloads are growing, right? So we're growing this modular segment that exists, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product, but we're actually bringing them into the product in the way that we had envisioned, which is one infrastructure that can run any application and do it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. I think the other piece, you know, that, you know, we judge ourselves as, you know, sort of not just within Cisco, but also within the industry. And I think right now is a, you know, a great example. You know, our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, at a, you know, kind of a new next architecture. And we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any of our competitors have seen when they announced something that was new to this space. So I think that the ground up work that we did is really paying off. And I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a lead frog game as it may have been in the past. X-series is out in front today. And, you know, we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers. And, you know, we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So as our competitors hit walls, I think we're, you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June when we launched X-series to the world. And, you know, as we continue to do that, we're seeing, you know, again, tremendous uptake from our customers. So thank you for that, Jim. So Vikas, I was just on Twitter just today, actually talking about the gravitational pull. You've got the public clouds pulling CXOs one way and, you know, on-prem pokes pulling them the other way and hybrid clouds. So organizations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures and ways to do things. I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away and they need infrastructure to support that. And I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that confusion with the X-series, right? I mean, so how so? Can you explain that? Sure. And that's the right context that you've built up right there, Dave. If you walk into Enterprise Data Center, you see plethora of compute systems spread all across because every application has its unique needs. And hence you find a drive node, a drive-dense system, memory-dense system, GPU-dense system, core-dense system, and a variety of form factors when you do you for you. And every one of them typically come with, you know, a variety of adapters and cables and so forth. This creates the silence of resources, fabric sprawls, the adapter sprawls, the power and cooling implications, the rack, you know, the space challenges. And above all, the multiple management plane that they come up with, which makes it very difficult for IT to have one common central policy and then force it all across the formware and software and so forth. And then think about the great challenges of the silence makes it even more complex as these go through the great references of their own. As a result, we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really seeing an slowness in their agility and high burden in the cost of overall ownership. This is where with the X series powered by Intracite, we have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities, they become more agile and drive lower TCOs. And we are delivering it by doing three things, three aspects of simplification. First, simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure and infrastructure, which removes the silence or form factor and infrastructure, which reduces the RAC phone footprint that is required. Infrastructure where power and cooling but it's served in the lower. Second, we want to simplify with, by delivering a cloud operating model where they can create the policy once across compute network storage and deploy it all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade and any platform evolution that they are going to go through in the next two, three years. So that's where the focus is on just driving down the simplicity and lowering down their TCOs. That's key, less friction is always a good thing. Now, of course, because we heard from the Hyperflex guys earlier, they had news not to be outdone, you have hard news as well. What innovations are you announcing around X series today? Absolutely. So we are following up on the exciting X series announcement that we made in June last year, Dave, and we are now introducing three innovation on X series with the goal of three things. First, expand the supported workload on X series. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third, dramatically reduce the complexities in the data center by driving down the number of adapters and cables that are needed. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU node using a cable less and very unique X fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPUs to the compute node in the modular form factor. Thereby, our customers can now power in AIML workload or any workload that need many more number of GPUs. Second, we are bringing in GPUs right onto the compute node. And thereby, our customers can now fire up the accelerated VDI workload, for example. And third, which is what we are extremely proud about is we are innovating again by introducing the fifth generation of our very popular unified fabric technology. With the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and densities that we have on the compute node, our customers can now fire up the big data workload, the FCI workload. The FDS workload, all these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular form factor can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric, we've become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 gig end-to-end single port bandwidth and there are multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our CI partners to deliver the benefit of these performance through our Cisco Validate design to our CI franchise. And third, the innovations in the fifth gen fabric will again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters, maybe Ethernet adapter, maybe PowerChannel adapters, or maybe the other storage adapters, they've reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable. So very, very excited about these three big announcements that we are making in this past release. Great, a lot there, you guys have been busy, so thank you for that, Vikas. So Jim, you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have, customers are adopting, what problems are they telling you that X-Series addresses and how do they align with where they wanna go in the future? That's a great question. I think if you go back to and think about some of the things that we mentioned before in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what Vikas mentioned, I think is really important, those pieces that we just announced really enhance that story and really move again to the next level of taking advantage of some of these problems solving for our customers. If you look at, I think Vikas mentioned accelerated VDI, that's a great example. These are where customers, they need to have this dense compute, they need video acceleration, they need tight policy management, and they need to be able to deploy these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X-Series right now. We're hitting the market in every single way. We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the very top end configurations of CPUs and a lot of room to grow. We have the premier cloud based management, hybrid cloud suite in the industry, right? So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that Vikas just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the, through the use of the X-Fabric which is really critical to this launch as well. And I think finally the fifth generation of Fabric Interconnect and Virtual Interface Card and Intelligent Fabric Module go hand in hand and creating this 100 gig end-to-end bandwidth story that we can move a lot of data. Again, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it, right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere to be able to get the bandwidth that they need to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible to fit exactly their needs. This is huge, right? It solves a lot of the problems we can take off right away. With the infrastructure, as I mentioned X-Fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here. We're talking about GPUs today but in the future there are other elements that we can disaggregate like the GPUs that solve these lifecycle mismanagement issues. They solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues like it does for GPU. We can do that with storage or memory in the future. So that's gonna be huge, right? This is disaggregation that actually delivers, right? It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing. This is something that customers can really get value out of day one. And then finally, I think the future readiness here, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPUs going to evolve the CPUs are gonna evolve, the drives, the storage modules are gonna evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly. The fabric that stitches them together is critical. And we know that we're just on the edge of some of the developments that are coming with CXL with some of the PCI Express changes that are coming in the very near future. So we're ready to go. And the X fabric is exactly the vehicle that's gonna be able to deliver those technologies to our customers, right? Our customers are out there saying that, they wanna buy into something like X series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future, right? We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted, but use them to disrupt their competition as well. So, we're really excited about the pieces today. And I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X series brings. And again, stay tuned because it's gonna keep getting better as we go. Yeah, a lot of headroom for scale and the management piece is key there. Just have time for one more question, Vikas. Talk, give us some nuggets on the roadmap. What's next for X series that we can look forward to? Absolutely, Dave. As we talked about and Jim's also hinted, this is a future-ready architecture. So a lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up, no-repunter place. And there we are looking into enabling the customer's journey as they transition from PCI generation four to five to six without repunter place, as they embrace VXL without repunter place, as they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCI or NVMe based dense drives and so forth. We're also looking forward to X fabric next generation, which will end out that a lot dynamic assignment of GPUs anywhere within the chassis and much more. So this is again all about focusing on the innovation that will make the enterprise data center operations a lot more simpler and write down the PCO by keeping them not only covered for today but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on today. Okay, thank you guys, we'll leave it there. In a moment, I'll have some closing thoughts. We're seeing a major evolution, perhaps even a bit of a revolution in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support hybrid work. Look, virtualizing compute and running general purpose workloads is something IT figured out a long time ago. But just when you have it nailed down in the technology business, things change, don't they? You can count on that. The cloud operating model has bled into on-premises locations and is creating a new vision for the future, which we heard a lot about today. It's a vision that's turning into reality and it supports much more diverse and data intensive workloads and alternative compute modes. It's one where flexibility is a watchword, enabling change, attacking complexity and bringing a management capability that allows for a granular management of resources at massive scale. I hope you've enjoyed this special presentation. Remember, all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net, and if you want to learn more, please click on the information link. Thanks for watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud, brought to you by Cisco and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante. Be well and we'll see you next time.