 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2020, hard to believe our 11th year covering the event. Of course, the first year it's a global virtual event. So happy to welcome to the program. We're going to be talking about some of the multi-cloud networking. So first from Equinix, Bill Long, he's the senior vice president of product management and joining him, the founder of VeloCloud, Sanjay Upal. He's the senior vice president general manager. Of course, VeloCloud now part of VMware. Bill and Sanjay, thank you so much for joining us. Happy to be here. All right, so Bill, we had Sanjay on the program last year, hard to believe. Sanjay and I were talking, it's been over two years since the acquisition of VeloCloud, of course, SD-WAN has been real growth. Equinix has gone through some changes. You have an acquisition I want to talk about a little bit later, but since we're at VMworld, Bill, want to start with that partnership. Of course, I think most people know Equinix. You've got data centers around the globe. You've got direct connects into the big public clouds and obviously a long partnership with VMware. So bring us up to date. Yeah, so obviously with our data centers, there's tons of virtual machines running in our data centers today. As we, Equinix is a bit special because our specialty is the place where networks connect to each other. So as people are moving more to a distributed hybrid multi-cloud type of architecture, especially even with the work from home with COVID, they wanted to be able to get their infrastructure to deploy it out further closer to their users. And previously to do that, they had actually physically deploy hardware. So the exciting sort of evolution in the partnership with VMware is what we're doing with VeloCloud where you can actually deploy the SD-WAN infrastructure on a virtualized basis, spin up the VeloCloud infrastructure and have your SD-WAN solution without actually having to ship physical equipment. So what it's doing for our customers, it's allowing them to really move to that distributed hybrid multi-cloud architecture without a lot of the requirements that were previously there for shipping and appliance, installing the appliance, wiring it up. So we've sort of pre-deployed all of that and made the buying experience much more fluid, which was super fortuitous timing, given sort of the environment that we're all in today where you can't just hop on a plane and put a ship an appliance somewhere and install it. So it's a long-term relationship and we're super thrilled to have them on the network edge platform today so that it can be enabled virtually, not just physically. Yeah, Sanjay, I want to follow up on what Bill was just talking about there. Of course, being acquired by VMware, being a software solution makes a lot of sense and that vision that we've had for SDN, for NFV, was I want to get rid of the physical appliances, we want to make it much easier to be able to deliver those services. So, love to hear a little bit, especially here in 2020, the architecture of your service just makes it easy to deploy, easy to help customers do what they need to do. Yes, you and Bill, and it's all about the simplicity and automation. This whole thing about software-defined WAN or SD WAN came about because customers found it really difficult to have stacks of these physical appliances that they had to deploy at every endpoint in their network and then in a hub and spoke model where the hubs were there to deploy another set of appliances. So the software-defined part of this, right from the get-go for VeloCloud now at VMware, was to make this really be simple and automated. And how do you get simplicity and automation? Well, you take most of the complexity out and the way that we took the complexity out was to collapse all of that hardware at the endpoint and make it one very simple, easy to deploy appliance. And then the other end, which is the one that Bill was just talking about, for the co-located entities where we had our software-defined WAN gateways, you know, there was physical infrastructure that was required and Equinex has been a partner right from 2013 to get those gateways deployed at the SD-WAN points of presence. The great thing now, and you've heard the announcements at VMware, the great thing now is that you don't have to deploy all that hardware at the hub endpoints. All you do is use Equinex's network edge. You get our SD-WAN gateways, deploy them as software, and now you can also scale it out and get your SASE or secure access service edge deployed in exactly the same way. Bill, there's often just discussion of hybrid and multi-cloud and sometimes it's a little hard to wrap our brains around what customers are doing. I know when I tour a data center like one of yours, it really, you know, you can understand what's happening. But what I'm curious about is, you know, in some of your data centers, connecting between clouds could just be, I'm connecting a cable over a couple of rows or I've got an interconnect to AWS to Azure or the like. Does SD-WAN fit into those environments where we're connecting close is, you know, where does, and you know, maybe there's some areas that SD-WAN doesn't fit in. Because we know SD-WAN has been really that interconnected fabric helping customers do their multi-cloud. I'm just curious in your world, kind of the parameters. Yeah, I think Sanjay did a great job of describing is the hub and spoke where you have the hub that might be like a branch office location where you want to bring that traffic in to the, or the spoke would be the end officer in the hub. You want to bring that hub in. And then that traffic might want to go out to a cloud as you were talking about in that, the use case you just described. But what's important is you want that hub to be the place where the most ISPs are in that service providers are such that you're aggregating that traffic efficiently locally. And then you want to make sure you're getting that traffic over to a cloud as efficiently as possible. So luckily, Equinix, you know, locations, what's so special about those is not just, you know, it's not just the data center. It's who's in the data centers that are with you. So in the locations where we have the VeloCloud gateway and the network edge solution, they're all located together. So you have, it's a local place where the ISP networks terminate so you can originate that traffic from a home office worker or any kind of branch office location. You can then get it into the VeloCloud edge instance and then out to the cloud. And most of the time those cloud edge nodes are actually physically in an Equinix data center. So if you're looking for a solution has the least amount of hops can have the least amount of latency, highest performance, fewest amounts of points of failure, it's really a very efficient architecture to be there. And of course, with less sort of networks to traverse, it's also pretty cost effective as well. Yeah, absolutely. You know, as Bill pointed out, SD-WAN really solves two problems. So it is, it used to start off as a branch office solution, but the name doesn't connote anything that is specific only to branch offices. When you get to multi-cloud and you have information that needs to go, let's say from one of the public cloud providers, Amazon to another one, Azure, Equinix is a perfect location to do that because both those cloud providers and others meet at Equinix. And then also the network providers meet at Equinix. Now we are the software layer that directs the traffic and that steers it between cloud providers from branches to cloud providers, from remote users to cloud providers and that Equinix is the perfect meeting point. We are that SD-WAN software layer that's kind of like the traffic cop that steers the traffic around. Wonderful. Well, Bill, Shande was talking earlier about the secure access service edge, SASE. I keep having to go through my head. It's not a self-addressed stamped envelope anymore. But Bill, help us understand, you know, what Equinix, how Equinix helps deliver this environment. We know you've got a great footprint and not only the cloud partnerships, but really locations that help us get to, you know, the customer's edge. Yeah, it's very similar to what we were talking about earlier. If you're looking for an efficient way to basically originate traffic closest to the user, such as the highest performance, being, you know, the fact that we're in over 200 data centers spread out around the world means that we can be local to where the actual traffic wants to be. So, and we're connected to all the ISPs that are local. So you bring that traffic in and then you can provide a security perimeter around that today, like what the edge instance and what the VeloCloud solution has. But then also when you want to connect that out to the rest of your infrastructure, whether that's one of the, you know, 10,000 enterprise customers that happens to live within Equinix today, or if you need to connect to your MPLS provider, that's all there as well. So it really acts as that hub for bringing in to be able to efficiently originate that traffic into one of these SASE platforms. And then, you know, do the types of things that Sanjay was talking about with the software layer on top to be able to secure it and really do special routing with the traffic such that it has the highest performance and is more secure. So making sure that it's distributed, efficient, you know, aggregation of local traffic, but then also having the option to be able to connect out to whoever you want to connect out. Some of the ways that we've seen that evolve, you know, Sanjay was talking about the, it works not only for branch offices, but from work from home users as well. The fact that people were local in our data center and as traffic, we saw earlier this year as much as a 40% increase in some locations in traffic. In order to scale that, it was a matter of just setting up a couple cross-connects instead of having to all, you know, to procure, you know, multiple 100 gig circuits from a network service provider. So having all of those pieces co-resident in a single location really helps unlock the potential of the SASE architecture. Sanjay, one of the items that caught everybody's attention in the keynote is Project Monterey. You know, we went, the cloud native with Project Pacific last year, now really going deep with Monterey for AI and Edge. There's some similarities between the branch technology that you said we started with, with VeloCloud. Does SD-WAN fit into this Monterey discussion when we talk about Edge? And then Bill, I expect this is somewhere where packet fits in. So definitely want to hear your commentary on it too. Yeah, absolutely. I think the bigger picture here is traffic comes from all these locations. So whether it is remote users, branch office users, campus users, those are the entry points into the network. Then they come and they meet at the meeting point. The one of the best meeting points is Equinex. And then at that meeting point, you can analyze the traffic. Obviously you want to keep privacy and security in mind. You can add additional security services as you go, which is the whole idea behind SASE. If you're going to aggregate this traffic and bring it to those meeting points, the meeting points are the perfect places to add the additional security. Whether it is web-based security or it is firewall security, you add that there. And then the traffic goes on to its final destination as Bill was talking about. And that final destination may be a cloud provider. It may be through another carrier, an MPLS provider, or it may be just back to the enterprises data center. Now the whole idea here is as you collect the traffic, you can also analyze parts of it, again, keeping privacy in mind. And this is where AI comes in because you can have specific algorithms go in and figure out when something goes wrong in the network, how to recognize that, and how to self-heal. So self-healing is one of those areas that we are working on, but the infrastructure that we're putting in place between Equinex and us is a necessary building block to be able to get to that self-healing and state that we're all looking forward to. Great, Bill, on the edge piece, am I right that this is something that Packet's going to help with? Absolutely. So I mentioned earlier where the model forever, the value of Equinex has been, as Sanjay was highlighting, the ability to connect to the ecosystems you want to care about. But as I mentioned, it previously required, even if you want to have VMs, you still have to have physical servers that those VMs had to be on. And that was sort of a barrier to people adopting the hybrid multi-cloud architecture. So what we've done with the acquisition of Packet is we're basically pre-deploying infrastructure that you can then load whatever VMs you want on top of that, such that you can use a sassy type of architecture to originate and secure your traffic and then connect that directly into a set of pre-pre-deployed infrastructure at Equinex. But to be very clear, what we're trying to do is, we're still sort of the place that you put your workloads, but instead of having to ship physical equipment, we're just pre-deploying the infrastructure for you. So our goal is to really have infrastructure at software speed, but we still will continue to stop really at the software layer. So what the Packet acquisition was really about was removing one of those barriers of having to physically deploy equipment such that people can deploy their infrastructure much more quickly and without the constraints and time and CapEx requirements of actually having to deploy physical equipment. Yeah, definitely, and that's why I'd heard quite a bit about Packet at the Amazon shows the last couple of years, so exciting and seems like a solid fit, not only for Equinex, but to expand the VMware partnership. Bill, I'm wondering, long partnership, any specific customer examples that you might be able to share, even if it's anonymized as to how SD-WAN's really helping customers along with their business challenges? Yeah, we've got a couple great proofs of concept coming along right now. There's a manufacturing company that we're working with who needs to be able to localize traffic from both their headquarters and a couple of their factories, and so they're looking to be able to aggregate that traffic locally and then connect it to their infrastructure that's actually physically in Equinex. So this is a GA solution, we've got a couple of great proofs of concepts going and it's ready to scale. Wonderful, Sanjay, I want to give you and Bill, final words, final takeaways you want people to have regarding the partnership and VMware 2020. Yeah, sure, so we've been partners, like I said, since 2013 and we really value this relationship. It started off by us saying right in the beginning, the cloud is the network. That was our mantra right from the get go. Now, the cloud being the network, one of the perfect meeting places for the cloud was Equinex and we so we located our SD-WAN gateways there, it did require hardware infrastructure to be put in, but of course, people would much rather have a beer or drink a latte instead of rolling out hardware. And so Bill came along and said, hey, I have this perfectly good thing called a network edge. Doesn't require to put all your hardware in, you can get your SD-WAN software deployed and so we made that gateway into a virtual edge on the context of a specific enterprise and now literally at the click of a button, you can deploy your virtual edges at Equinex locations, don't have to roll out any specific hardware and from that meeting point, you can get to any cloud provider, many of the MPLS providers and then get access in low latency. Latency is now the criteria everybody's looking at and so between what Bill is doing and what we are doing, if we're solving that enterprise's problem, reducing the latency, getting all their entry points at this meeting place. So thank you, Bill. Thank you, Sanjay. I think you summed it up really well. I think Sanjay highlighted the value has been there for a long time of what it means to have a great SD-WAN solution in the right place and I think now with what we've done together, making that available on a point and click, we've really have the easy button and so I know from customer conversations that I've had, I get requested for fellow cloud being available and network edge and now that it's there, I'm confident there's going to be a lot of unlock now that we have the easy button. So I think it's a great combination of value made easy and I think the partnerships just going to get stronger from here. Well, definitely lowering the latency to be able to deploy those solutions faster is what customers need. Sanjay, Bill, thank you so much for joining us. Congrats on the progress and look forward to hearing more in the future. Thanks, Stu. Thanks, Bill. Stay with us for more coverage from VMworld 2020. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.