 from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Console Connect Live 2015. Sponsored by Console. There's your host, John Furrier. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in San Francisco for Console Connect 2015. This is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm my co-host Jeff Frick, general manager of theCUBE business. We go to all the events, 70 plus events, more and more every year. And we're here live in San Francisco to unpack this new software-defined, InterConnect, this new revolution around IIX and Console Inc. And our next guest is Samuel Curtis, partner at Rack 59. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, thanks for having me. Congratulations on your anniversary here at San Francisco, hanging out, feeling good? The beautiful city. Weather's perfect. Weather's nice, very nice. Very much like Oklahoma. Sorry to have their jackets on. It's like a hundred degrees here at San Francisco. Pat Gessner said, you know, dev ops and networks coming in, it's like, can the farmers and the cowboys live together? Kind of like they bring that Oklahoma vibe here. That's what's going on. It's a whole new convergence of talent opportunities, you know, joking aside, cowboys and farmers are really kind of living together. You got dev and ops, programmable infrastructure, application market. Now we need reliability end to end connected. That's what they're proposing here. What's your take on all this? As someone in the ecosystem, what do you make sense of? How do you make sense of console direct connect? You know, I'm by training a network engineer, so I understand the nuances and the details behind that connect button on the console and I'm super impressed. I think it simplifies a very complex and very difficult networking infrastructure to build and it makes it a lot easier and a nice social type, LinkedIn type approach which makes it a lot more easier to use and when you make things easier like that it just breeds more and more connections and it takes down a lot of barriers that exist today. Yeah, so what's your point of view? You're from Oklahoma and sometimes we're jaded. We're here in the valley and things are cranking along a little bit, probably ahead of the curve, but from your perspective, where are we in this journey? What's kind of cloud adoption look like in your world and your customer set and where is the direct connect story? Where are we kind of on that path? Well, I think with the console concept and Bill Norton's white paper on the business case for a direct connect makes a lot of sense. I mean, you focus on secure private connections and you try to build a business case not just financially but also operationally that makes sense. So I feel that this is early in, the clouds just kind of really become more and more defined. It was more kind of esoteric in the past and I think this further underpins what the cloud is and makes it accessible. Yeah, so we jumped right into it. We should give you a minute to kind of give the audience a little color on what Rack 59 is. Who are you guys? What's all about? Who's your customer set? Where are you located? Kind of the basic four one one. Sure, yeah. We are a 1.6 million square foot data centered in Oklahoma City. Previously a former Lucent 5E manufacturing facility. We have built the first NAP and IXP in Oklahoma and we had the very first peering conference in Oklahoma hosted that. So we're a huge components of connection. Connection is typically one of the highest costs on the income statement next to power and utilities. So we're trying to reduce our customers' OPEX by building an ecosystem that incorporates console. And you're getting a lot of call for connecting to the big public clouds as well through your customer base with Amazon and Microsoft, et cetera. We've had to aggregate a lot of different ISPs together to build a, to get, say for instance, Netflix attention. But I do know the content providers are wanting to get closer and closer to the eyeball and they want to make it as a good experience as they can for that consumer. So we're trying to just create the ecosystem or connectivity that will appeal to a content delivery network. And so that console actually kind of helps us bring, get closer to those content networks. Otherwise, we're kind of smaller. We're not as dense from a traffic perspective and the rest of the rest of the United States, but we're getting there. But if we pull together and people peer more and more on a local basis, we'll drive more and more interest and derive more and more value from consoles. It's an interesting concept though. 1.6 million square feet, you think that would give people's attention. I guess they're looking at your traffic, so how does something like console connect change the game where you no longer have to kind of, hey, look at us, look at us, we need your attention where now you've got really kind of a direct access point to go in and start to build those relationships both on the business side as well as the technology side with this direct connecting. That's a good question. I think the size of the building is one thing, but the power, the availability of power, redundant powers and others. So we have a 25 megawatt power substation on site that's dual-fed. Console is a lot like that power substation to power as it is to internet. So by saying we have console IX, a presence in our data center, it gives us that push that we need as from a wider network standpoint, direct connect. So I've got to ask about the dev options. I want to bring that back here because if you can simplify direct provisioning and Jay Adels was talking about how software guys now are coming together with the networking guys, that really creates a good environment for APIs and API-based software. Do you guys see that as a networking engineer? Do you guys think like that? Is that something that goes on? I mean, do you guys say, hey, we don't want to be in mitigating a DDoS attach, which is something you guys probably do now, but as you move into more of the proactive design, do you think about the applications in mind when you develop this out? Absolutely. I think typically network guys, traditional network guys, they're layer one, two, three, they don't go much higher than that, so there's not been that connection between the app guys and the network guys in my experience, but I will say we're seeing in the enterprise market, you typically have had your network staff in larger enterprises and an IT staff, and they typically didn't coalesce sometimes. The network guys are all about resiliency and the network guys, IT guys, are about robustness and application, so by software-defined networking with the new growth or intellectual growth of networks into software, I can see a definite marriage, and sometimes the app guys don't understand why it takes the hardware guys so long or network guys to run an Ethernet cable. It makes sense to just bring those two groups together as a maybe a poor analogy, but that's where I look at it. And is latency now in the world of consumer-defined expectations on application performance, is that kind of the unifying attribute that brings those two sides together, because it's all about latency to the app these days and latency's impacted by so many things along the line that I would think that maybe is that the universal tie that now brings them all together? Latency, DDoS mitigation is a big one. On the public network, you have about four, on average four networks that you traverse to get to your content or vice versa. You eliminate three of those networks along the way with DRAC Connect, it improves latency and it also reduces your exposure. And what's the number one conversation here with customers, is it scale, is it security? I mean, this is a new market opportunity for... I would say initially it's security, but it turns into bandwidth. Once, you know, it's bandwidth, they can never seem to get enough bandwidth. So it seems like the more bandwidth you provide, the more it's consumed. No one's ever complained from getting more bandwidth. It's like the CPU in the OS story, right, from back in the day. You get a better new computer and then the OS takes it more bandwidth. You get a better computer, the OS takes more bandwidth. That's right. I mean, Wi-Fi, it's so funny. I remember when my wife hit the scene with the Centrino chip set back in the day. Now you go anywhere with kids, where's the Wi-Fi? Because they're on the cell plans. You go international. Connectivity really is the big deal. No one, I'm joking, but no one complains when they get more bandwidth. I mean, just good things are happening. But they definitely complain where there is no connection. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, or slow because they're being rerouted through China. Yes. But that's a problem. Talk about that one issue about the rerouting of, because that's in the internet, there are some path decisions. I mean, routing protocols based on, you know, low scoff path, you know, performance is all these algorithms, if you will. I'm oversimplifying it. But explain that problem with the internet. That's a big deal. Well, you have no control over that path. It's going to take the open shortest path first, usually through BGP or whatever routing protocol. But I know if you can't control it, then you're susceptible. So a lot of problems that we have, like I go back to DDoS, and earlier a keynote speaker, Albergio, I think said that sometimes the network this is not the target, is inadvertently affected. So it also has an impact on the innocent network that's one of those four networks connecting your connections. So DDoS has really been a big driver. And I think if you can control the route in which your data packets go, then you mitigate that. So you have no control over a dynamic protocol that, you know, over the wide area now. Big eye internet. For the folks watching right now, and who are going to watch this on demand, what is the console connect show all about here? What's the vibe? Why is this such an important show? I mean, it's not like the Apple event, it's not Fox News is an outside, hey, breaking news, a direct connection. I mean, it's a nuanced business, but the impact is significant. Share your view on this event, why it's important, and some of the vibe in the hallways. Yeah, I think this is the undergirding of the network. This is the, without this element of technology, that Apple event, the other, the very obvious events that are more popular, they wouldn't have that event. They wouldn't have the application without the network to run on. Console, actually with IAX's solution, I see that they actually can solve problems for the cellular carriers to deliver that application for the ISPs to deliver that application. So it's a really important, it's the infrastructure aspect of that consumer experience. It's like without roads, Ferraris can't drive their car. Exactly, right? Exactly. The Audubon creates an engineer road, cars go faster, there's potholes in the road and a lot of turns. Yeah. This is a big deal, it's underlying, people take it for granted. Yeah, or airplanes, it's first class versus business, essentially, if you're a data package. Private jet? Private jet. A fleet of jets, a corporation that can have their own autonomous system. Yes, exactly. And dynamically, build an autonomous system for an enterprise customer is phenomenal. It's really good. Sam, let's take a final question here for you. What's the world going to look like five years out? As Direct Connect becomes popular, are we back to the more robust, stable, what's the future look like in your mind? I think it's an avenue or a medium by which to continue the exponential growth that we've seen on the internet of things thus far. So I think console is a necessary product and service that has to be there in order to keep that growth going. We can't continue to feed that growth with legacy solutions. So this is the next technology from an infrastructure standpoint to simplify and increase the awareness and the ability to interconnect. Shane O'Carris, partner at Rack 59. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Don't worry about me. I appreciate it. Enjoy your rest of the business services. We're live in San Francisco. This is theCUBE. We'll be right back more in Console Connect Live after this short break.