 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine VCE, innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade, say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. And we're back with our live coverage from EMC World. I'm Stu Miniman and my co-host for the segment is Steve Kenneson, the storage alchemist. EMC World 2014 in Las Vegas. I believe there's somewhere between 13 and 15,000 people here, I haven't heard a full count yet. And we're digging into cloud. And joining us on this segment, I can't believe it's your first time. Barb Robidu, who's a VP with EMC Global Services. Barb, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. We were saying so this fifth year we've done the Cube and so often you've been here with some of the executives pulling the strings, knowing how much effort goes in to make a show that just looks great and customers are having a great time and learning a whole lot. So glad to get you on the set. It's absolutely great to be here on this side of the camera for a change. So you're involved in one of the more interesting things going on at the show. It was previewed a little bit in the keynote. So there's talking about cloud. I mean, some people can just swipe a credit card and go buy a service up in the cloud. But you guys, I believe we're actually building a cloud. That's exactly right. Yeah, we ran out of three letter acronyms. So now we have a five letter acronym. It's, how do you say it? Bockel, right? Build a hybrid cloud live. And you can say it, I don't think I can. So the whole idea here though was, I think the benefits of cloud are fairly well understood. Doing things faster, saving money, et cetera. But there's a kind of acknowledgement that getting there is difficult. And what we wanted to do was show that while it is hard, it is not impossible. And basically what we're doing is we're going to stand up a hybrid cloud in 48 hours live. Wow. So I mean, when I think about just, if I'm just playing a storage array, we usually measure that in months. Right. So what's the goal of this? What are we customers looking to learn from this? Sure, sure. So it is software defined everything. And we've always talked about cloud and IT transformation in sort of the three main categories of transforming infrastructure, transforming applications, and transforming operations. And so basically what we're going to do is all three of those things. So from an infrastructure point of view, we'll actually stand up the cloud. And we will show automatically provisioning software defined storage, allow Viper to the cloud. We will show how you provision tiered backup. From an applications perspective, we'll show automatically provisioning enterprise applications like SAP Exchange SQL. But then we'll also show from a user point of view how you can self provision a simplicity account. And then from an operations point of view, we'll show things like how you can do automatic charge backs, and really how to get started with automation tools like VCOPs. And then really we'll sort of profile three different use cases for why are you going to hybrid cloud in the first place. One is simply migrating workload from a standard data center out to a service provider. One is actually doing a restore of a VM back to the primary data center from the service provider. And then the third one is a true HA shared workload environment between both environments. So it really is kind of an all in type of demonstration that we're going for. Yeah, so EMC has a pretty broad portfolio. In the video I saw this was not, it didn't look like the Google or Facebook data centers, which is just like this giant row of unnamed stuff. I saw Vblocks in there. I saw a lot of the different storage products in there, data domain, and everything. Can you give us a snapshot? What's in there, and how did the choice go in? Sure, sure. So the reference architecture is variable. You can build it with a VMAX, or a VNX, or Vblock. And then, of course, the whole data protection suite. And that's the EMC infrastructure, Viper. The particular configuration that we have at the show here is basically based off of two Vblocks. So that's sort of all in Viper will be there. The data protection suite will be there. And then in terms of management and orchestration, that's all of the VMware suite. And I don't think I'm revealing any trade secrets here, but the idea, the big hairy goal here was to start the cloud buildout on Monday, so that by the end of the day, Tuesday, I think when we go into area 53, which is the end of the day, Tuesday, that would be about the 48-hour clock. So from area 53, we would sort of do the big unveil. Ta-da, it's here, it's live, it's working. The problem that we encountered is it's a good problem to have. But when you go to the Grand Prix, you don't want the pit crew seeing the car for the very first time. So we did a little practice ahead of time to stand it up, tear it down, stand it up, tear it down and make sure we knew what we were doing. And the reports that we were getting all last week were, uh-oh, it's only taking us about 10 hours to stand this up. And should we wait and maybe get working on it, like later Monday night or Tuesday, so that we can time it backwards and still have the big unveil. And we all sort of said, hey, look, we're at a show. You got to give yourself plenty of opportunity in case something... So I expect in the video we're going to see them stopping for a pizza break, maybe going to the circle bar for a quick drink or something. It's going to be a big line through 24 hours or 48 hours. It's going to happen in 10 hours. It's sponsored by the Cube, right? They've got time to stop by and do the charity water event over here. Yeah, so it's a great problem to have. Knock on for Micah here. Well, actually I think that's pretty interesting. I think from our end user practitioner perspective, I think there's a lot of questions about how I get started and what do I do and that kind of thing. And now that they can actually see, it's almost like me when I write a white paper, right? I never start it and it takes forever because I don't really want to know how to get going. You're really helping them lay the foundation on how to get going and what are some of those pre-thoughts that I should be thinking about because if I don't know where to start, I probably am not going to take that first step. And then the services that we're wrapping around this, they sort of fall into three categories. We describe it as sort of before, during and after. So in the early phases beforehand, we have an assessment service that will help the customer figure out the exact configuration and whether or not it should be a V block, a V max, do you need Viber, et cetera, et cetera. So the assessment service will actually help you figure out what the exact bill of materials needs to be. That's optional. Then, while you're actually doing the implementation, what's bundled into the solution are the implementation services. So that's where EMC, Professional Services, Technology Implementation Experts will actually stand it up for you. And also in there is what we call our Infrastructure Automation Service. So we have a lot of customers that maybe aren't as familiar with all of VMware's automation tools. So this is where our experts will sort of hold your hand and together help you stand up a couple of workloads and do the knowledge transfer and make sure that you know how to use the tools. That's all sort of bundled in during as you're doing the setup. And then afterwards we have a whole bunch of value add services that are designed to really optimize and really take this from just being infrastructure as a service to getting a self-service portal going in a catalog and being able to do those charge backs and show backs and things like that. So we were talking to Peter just a minute ago. So I'm just going to poke at this a little bit, right? Part of the big value proposition we've seen here, both at EMC World as we've, was at EMC a long time ago, as you know. So as we've come forward, I had a lot of openness and a lot of ability to run a lot of different platforms on the EMC hardware from the infrastructure standpoint. And I realized this is a canned demo and you want to get it all right. But I've heard a lot about VCOPS and EMC here. What about like other tools, like other virtualization tools, both from a virtualization server perspective, but the tools to do monitoring and that kind of thing? How open or can you elaborate on how open it would be to kind of switch things out if a customer had a different kind of preference but wanted to use EMC infrastructure? Yeah, to do it today at the show, it would be very difficult. It'd be difficult, right? But in general, right now we have basically custom PS services where we will work with, whatever your incumbent tool set of choices. We're working to take those from custom engagements to sort of packaged, fixed scope service offerings, but today it's a custom engagement. And I think that fits into the Federation strategy where we're spending a lot of time at this conference talking about the Federation solutions. But keep in mind, the reason why we have a Federation in the first place is to allow EMC and VMware and Pivotal to go to market with the ecosystem partners that they need to go to market with independent of each other's own competitive basis. So it's very much part of the strategy. That's what when Stu and I were talking to Peter beforehand, I think that's a great message to get out there with, right? So you don't feel so trapped, not that you would, but to know that I have that freedom of choice and freedom of independence, I think, gives another layer of credibility to kind of what you're doing. When you say cloud, you can't, and I think it was coined it, whether it was Oracle, World or something, cloud in a box, right? Well, is that really cloud, right? Do you really want to be able to step out and have that freedom of choice? So I think that's a good message. And it's funny, I don't know if it's a psychological effect, but as I find as I'm talking to customers and we talk about the federated model and the reason why we did it, which is for the openness, it's almost removing an objection before they voice it. And I would say more than 50% of the time, the next reaction I get is, hey, that's a great strategy, but what happens if I want to buy it all for EMC and VMware and Pivotal? It's like, great, we love that, of course. But if we didn't have that open federated model, I'm not sure if people would just automatically go there with us. Be the big question mark, right? Right, right. So, from the services group, how much are you learning from helping customers spin all these up? How do you kind of get the crowd information back and feed that back into the services? That's a great question. So one of the things, believe it or not, that's different about services today is we now have a portfolio, whereas a year and a half ago, everything we did was custom. And so now we have a portfolio, we're actually following EMC's product-based internal Six Sigma process, it's called Regata, for how we bring new services to market. So it's all based on field and customer requirements, documented, well, they're not PRDs, product requirements, right? They're services requirements. It's all documented and we're basically following a process there. But one of the interesting things, just to maybe focus on one example for a minute, back to this Build a Cloud live model and those add-on services, at EMC right now, you hear a lot of talk about workloads, workloads, workloads, it's all being driven by workloads. And so one of the add-on services that we have, we call it cloud advisory, and it's where we sit down and look at the customer's workloads. And we can make suggestions about which applications and which workloads are even suitable for cloud. And then for those that are suitable for cloud, which type of cloud architecture, private cloud, virtual private cloud, hybrid cloud, public cloud is best for it. And our approach is a little bit differentiated in that we're not sending smart consultants running around with these giant spreadsheets, trying to interview customers and put all this data in and hope there's not an error in the cell. We actually have an automated data analytics engine that we're ingesting the data in near real time and very, very slick outputs that are readable by human beings and we can scale. So we can look at a lot of applications very, very quickly. So that's an area where we are starting to see some traction. So I've talked to VCE a lot and one of the things they've learned, and it sounds like you've learned with this cloud deployment is, if you work on your processes, you can speed things up. So is that one of your biggest takeaways from this cloud environment or for the build a cloud, what have you learned that you think customers can take away from this? Yeah, I mean, it's going to sound like a cliche because I think we all say it all the time, but it's less about the infrastructure and it's much more about the people in process. I think this experiment and Peter's solution is trying to make the process side of things easier and then the next frontier to tackle will be the people side of things. All right, well, Barbara, I appreciate you coming on to talk about the build a cloud hybrid service live, build a hybrid cloud live. Yeah, it's tough for me to get that out. Just go with the five letter acronym. Five letter acronym, absolutely. I wish we could shrink the time on some of the other things that we're working on as much as you guys are doing there. So thanks again for sharing with us. Thanks for having me. On theCUBE, we will be right back with our next guest.