 The Cube at OpenStack Summit at Lata 2014 is brought to you by Brocade. Say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. And Red Hat. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back everyone live in Atlanta. This is the OpenStack Summit. This is The Cube, SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by my co-host, Stu Miniman, and I'm at wikibond.org. And our next guest is Angel Diaz, Vice President of Open Technology and Cloud Performance. Welcome to The Cube. Hey, thank you very much for having me. I mean, IBM is no stranger to open source. I mean, you go back over the years, you look at the contributions you've done across the board, up and down. It's just been fantastic. The developer works well, well followed. Community, certainly the contribution there on the site is fantastic. They've followed you guys for years, so congratulations. But OpenStack now is leveling the playing field. We've heard quotes like, it's going to decimate the value change in the enterprise, remake IT, enable developers. What's your take of OpenStack right now? I mean, OpenCloud has been a concept that's been put out there. People are gravitating towards it. The attendance, I'll see. People are voting with their feet, sessions are packed. There's demand. What does it mean right now around OpenStack and OpenCloud and around open source, particularly? You know, I think, interesting intro. You could take a glass half full or a glass half empty approach. Decimate or opportunity. You're defined by how you answer the question. Don't worry. But let me tell you, I mean, look, I remember back in 2011 or so when basically OpenStack was mostly rack space. And by the way, hats off to the rack space guys who said, look, we wanted to take the OpenStack away. It was one of several open source infrastructures of service communities growing out there and say, look, what can we do to explode the ecosystem? I remember being in the room with Jonathan and the team and saying, look, how about we create a foundation together? IBM was one of the original eight founders of the OpenStack Foundation. And we thought, what we really needed to do is just empower the people who are doing OpenStack so they can do more and create more of a community. Because there's nothing really we need to change. We just need to take the OpenStack away and explode it out. That was back in 2011, 2012-ish. Here we are now, 2014. And I would say hands down, OpenStack is the ubiquitous infrastructure as a service platform of choice in the open source kind of world. And what that has done is that has opened opportunities. If you look at all of our clients in IBM, all the folks here who are using OpenStack, you see a freedom of innovation. They no longer have to worry about, look, am I building a dead-end cloud? Can I build a cloud that can span elastic across, on-premise, off-premise, and deal with hybrid situations? By adhering to OpenStack up, by adhering to what we're doing around the network, the compute, and storage, and the APIs, we're able to build an infrastructure that can essentially burst in any direction we want. Now that's just the beginning, but that's where we've been and how we've gotten here. It's almost like in the spirit of the NHL playoffs, the original six, it's four, the original six is Bruins and Canadians are in their black ox behind the Rangers. So the original eight, you guys are left from the beginning, but it wasn't a lot of fanfare, this original eight and the original rack space that pushed a lot of it, because they were building their own cloud out, so they saw the DevOps movement. Certainly it was on your radar screen. Obviously IBM's a big, the aircraft carrier of IBM, which is now all behind open now. They have to go into impact, more pulse than impact, clearly the company's rallying behind this. So what was going on at IBM at the time? So obviously you had your hands in it, what's happened at IBM since that time and now? So what we thought was we looked back at what we did in the early 90s with the web. In fact, I myself worked on some of the original XML, HTML standards and protocols, back in the 90s IBM research in the early 90s. And back then it was about creating markets, making it easier for people to use technology and feeling comfortable in adopting technology. And I think we all, we of industry ended up in a better place because of it. That's what we're trying to do in cloud. So what we're thinking about is a open cloud architecture, whether you look at the hardware, the software defined environments, the infrastructure layer, the platform layer, how you build applications, right? How you interact from the user experience in, right? When you build an application for a mobile device, should it be cross-device? How easy it is to create that? Just to have levels of interoperability at each one of those layers, but also vertically across that chain. What we're doing in OpenStack and a lot of the work that we're doing around OpenStack and supportive OpenStack is enabling that. Let me just give you a concrete. I don't want to get too nerdy here, but let me just give you a concrete. It's okay, it's a cube. We get nerdy here, yeah. Go down the geek weeds, help around. All right, we're going there. So imagine you have an application, developing an application in a polyglot way using many different runtime. And you want to say, look, I need to have a certain amount of, say network bandwidth for this application because it's a high priority application. You want to be able to have an application developer, specify that, okay? And then have that honored by the infrastructure and some type of policy. And then have that honored by a network infrastructure, going through the nuke-tron into a software-defined environment. How do you do that? That's kind of where we're starting to take all this stuff as an industry. If you do each one of these layers in an open way, you've got to hope and a prayer of doing that. It's frankly, if you're a vendor, IBM or anyone else, and you're not building on these open technologies across this architecture, you will be out-innovated by what's happening here at this conference and other conferences like it. And that's the way we view it. And that's what we've been trying to do, very systematically. If you look at what we're doing, I think one of the latest additions to the rock band that is something called Cloud Foundry, which is a great community for doing polyglot platform as a service. A lot of the original members who, Rackspace included, right, who started kind of this open stack movement are looking to do the same thing for platform and bringing these worlds together. That's really a very promising and growing community with the same kind of field. Dedication to the user, input from the users, community, very positive way of interacting in a meritocracy. When we started contributing in OpenStack, IBM, you know, we started with zero contributors, right? We started the foundation. We had nothing. We had to build our reputation. You go from Essex back in 2011, 2012 to now with Icehouse, right? IBM has hundreds of contributors, hundreds of over 500, so developers working it. We're in the top three in code contributions. We earned our permission by adding value. And that's how strong communities, well, do you know what the number one contributor is who the number one contributor to OpenStack is? It's the individual user. It's the individual contributor. It is not a vendor. And that is a sign of a healthy community. As an aggregate, not one person. Yes, it is. The individual. Mr. Individual out there, you're doing a good job. Yeah, kind of like the other categories. They catch all the individuals, but are those mostly users or does that doesn't count like the little startups that have? They're developers, but they're kind of folks who aren't in, say, a major company or don't count themselves as part of a major company. They're people who are contributing because they love it and that's what they do. It's part of who they are. Look, as a developer, right? You want to buff your resume, right? How do you buff your resume? Well, you become a leader in a community and an active community, right? There's nothing more important to folks who are hiring now today, being part of this ecosystem, this IT renaissance. I mean, you're out in the valley. You know it. You feel it. You feel the IT renaissance that's occurring. Well, the bubbles, I'll just put it plainly because I can say I don't work at IBM so I won't get fired. The bubble's bursting on the consumer side. We're not bubbled. It's froth is getting trimmed off the top. WhatsApp kind of set that table there. But the enterprise is a hard business. I mean, it's not, it's good business if you can pull it off, but it's the box pulled back from their IPO. You can't manufacture momentum in the enterprise. So there are some real, real smart people working on developing for the enterprise and cloud is that engine, right? So they realize that you can't just head fake your way to success. So, you know, with that, what are you seeing for development in open? How does open source become industrial grade or enterprise grade? Yeah, so there is a consistent democratization of technology. Certainly since the advent of the internet and kind of when things became much more visible from a software perspective, more and more innovation is happening in the open. So what you want to be able to do is inspire and bring and build skill around open technology. Then what happens is you take that technology into the enterprise and you face use cases, you face realities that perhaps you had not thought about in the open world that needs to be dealt with, okay? That's where companies come and add value to open technology, to make it easier to deal with existing systems with a variety of different networking switches and devices or a whole bunch of storage areas or certain performance characteristics. And that's kind of how folks are, how a lot of the companies, small and large, are adding value. And all they're really doing is adding fuel to the fire because it is about speed, okay? In the case of OpenStack, it is about speed of how quickly can you create your cloud, manage a heterogeneity of clouds within your environment. And that's kind of what's going on here. So Angel, IBM has huge history with open source. A lot of the companies that we look at, there's a couple of questions, is are you committed to open source and are you actively contributed to community? From an IBM standpoint, it's pretty straightforward. I mean, so many announcements now, we're putting a billion dollars towards something. I think back to the Linux billion dollars was really set the bar out there. Matter of fact, John said, we really need 10 billion to be the new billion from all the money that's flowing into cloud these days. If I look at OpenStack though, one of the debates we've been having is do we need really some strong leaders to step forth? Or can the community help moderate it? There's the technical board and the various boards that operate that. Is IBM just there to make sure that the community does things and everything stays open? Or what is IBM's leadership position in the OpenStack community? All right, so two questions. So let me just parse them. My one is around do we need strong leaders in OpenStack? And then also what is IBM's position or leadership in the community? Let me start off with the first one. I think we've got some pretty good strong leadership with Jonathan and the team that we have and the project leaders that have been elected by the community with an OpenStack to guide us technically. We've been really fortunate from the beginning and I think that system works, that's the OpenStack way, that's where it goes. Now, where we continue to get more leadership from and will always strive to get more is on end users. When you hear the folks stand up on stage this morning and talk about the Disney's and Wells Fargo's and what are all these folks who stand up on stage here and talk about how they're using, that is where we want more leadership to come from. From the end users to get deeply ingrained in this technology and explain and educate the development community what we need to do and educate Jonathan and the project leaders and so forth. Now, from a board perspective and what we're doing there and in particular IBM, we're involved here for several reasons. One, we are generally trying to accelerate the cloud market, right? We want the market to grow and the faster the cloud market grows, the faster we grow, the faster our clients do more. You do that by being open, by creating open technologies. We use OpenStack in our products. So whenever we need to improve something because working with our clients, there are use cases, things they need to do, we do those in the open. There's lots of areas in OpenStack whether you look at, if you look at the compute features about 15% of the compute features came from IBM or stuff that we did with clients, right? So we will contribute back into the community, provide leadership just because it results that our guys are doing so much work. They get elected into a position of leadership and then we bring that back into our products and that's the degree how we see it. We're not looking to take over or do anything. We're doing what we do, right? So, Angel, you talk about OpenStack getting into your products. Can you give us some specifics on that? Obviously you've got the software acquisition and OpenStack can sit on top of that. We actually dug in with some of your folks on theCUBE, I think talking about how software didn't start as OpenStack being one of the major offerings there but now it's definitely more along that line. Yeah, so IBM provides OpenStack technology in a variety of ways. Clients can start with an on-premise, what we call our smart cloud foundation offering which is OpenStack-based allows them to deal with setting up private clouds, dealing with orchestrating across cloud environments which is I think really, really important. You look at the ability to do DevOps and the ability to do sustainable and repeatable private cloud implementations. We've got, of course, software where you can stand up and put OpenStack on top of software. We also have our integrated systems which is our pure family which combines software and hardware optimized for certain kinds of workloads which also has OpenStack inside and then there is the combination of all those, right? The ability to burst based on your needs. If you have an optimized workload, you can burst from your private cloud to a pure systems or if you need more capacity, it becomes easy to burst an image from on-premise to our software and so forth. So that's kind of how we use the OpenStack technology. We've got services and practitioners all around this helping our clients be successful but it doesn't stop there, right? You know, the level of bursting that people think about is the virtual machine or the image, right? But what about the workload on the image? Well, we're doing work in the HEAP project and this thing called TOSCA which defines an abstract notion of a workload to allow you to have the application partitioned at a more fine-grained level or at the application layer where we're doing some cool stuff with Cloud Foundry to allow the application to be tiered in a natural kind of way. So that's kind of where we're headed and that's how we use it today in our products. So I got to ask you about the trend on the crowd chat. The number one conversation with the most votes is the 108 votes. It's not the NFL draft? My question was, we had to watch the Brewers game tonight but the question, OpenStack needs to make containers first-class citizens. Any arguments against this? Very heated thread, a lot of comments. Obviously, the Red Hat Summit containers were all the rage. Docker is getting a lot of traction right now. People are developing to Docker. We have an engagement container with a crowd chat that's our technology for the engagement data. Containers are the rage, but they're nothing. Nothing we haven't seen before. We've seen containers, we've seen wrappers, we've seen all kinds of things to make things compatible. What is going on with containers in your mind and are you happy with the development of that and is there a role in OpenStack and is it going to play well with what you guys are doing? Yeah, you know, there's a couple of recipes that make a good community and a good ecosystem. One is technology. Perhaps equally important is community. And by the way, OpenStack had that even before the foundation, right? If you look something like Docker, they have that. They got some good technology and they've got a really strong ecosystem growing, just exponentially. If you look at it recently, the Docker guys had a press release where they are talking about creating an advisory board and moving towards a truly open governance model. Not all open source projects are equal. You want to have a truly open model like the OpenStack way. So in fact, I think I'd be prior to quote to that press release saying this is a good thing. So I think that containers are good. There are several ways of integrating containers, right? It's all in the eye of the holder. It's what is your exactly containing, right? And I think the community will sort that out. But you know, at one level, you can imagine compute orchestrating containers just like it does an image. You could imagine an isomorphism between a container and a hot defined template. I think the community kind of sort out where that fits. But I think it could fit in both places or in other places and there's nothing wrong with containers. What's the answer? The answer is going to be where the users tell us. Okay, so we'll see. So I asked Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware at EMC World, what he thought of containers. He goes, you know, containers have been around for a while and he's a little more direct than you where he said, VMs make a good container. So containers are around, well, so we'll see. So you basically saying is Docker's got some legs, they got a community, healthy communities have alternatives. They have conversations and propose things. It all depends on what you're trying to do. One of the beautiful things with containers is the utilization of CPU. I mean, you can, on a rack, you know, have all these things sitting on a single host operating system, right? Getting great utilization on that particular thing. That's kind of hard to do at the VM layer. So it really depends what you're trying to accomplish. So I asked a question because one of the things in the middle of the thread was on the first class system question of containers is direct quote, I would say it will take a push by IBM before Docker gets any closer to being a first class listen on Cloud Foundry. So I mean, you guys just swing a big stick when it comes to muscle. I mean, you have clients moving around, 50 years celebrating the main frame. So you have clients, you see you guys will move fast on that. So I get that. The question I have for you is Cloud Foundry. What about Cloud Foundry that made that compelling for you guys? Can you comment on that? Is there any insight you can share? Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, it was very similar to the feeling that we had when we kind of started to get to know the rack space guys, right? Who were doing OpenStack early on. Great technology. Cloud Foundry is lock and step with how application developers are building stuff today, right? They are living in a polyclot world. In other words, they use the tool that fits what they're trying to build. They wanna mix a Ruby, a Java, whatever to build an application. They wanna have the right tool to do what they're trying to accomplish. That was very attractive. Then you add to that a growing and positive community. Those are the two aspects of what makes something special. So we got together with the pivotal guys with essentially the same cast of characters that help for the most part kind of create an OpenStack foundation. We announced that we're gonna be working on a Cloud Foundry foundation. All right, let's talk about performance. So we had Ubuntu founder on Mark Shulaworth and he's the home of performance labs. Tell us about what you guys look at. What makes good performance? How do you guys measure that? Talk about what you guys are doing. On performance. When you kind of go and you move from a small deployment to a real large scale deployment, that needs to handle massive amounts of transaction, raised massive amounts of data, right? There are lots of things you need to start taking into account around the network, around say storage prioritization. We just announced today something called Elastic Storage, which allows you to use Swift, for example, or Cinder and optimize the storage based on the workload, right? If it's really important, you put it on a flash. It's all separate from the user. If it's something that you can, you need to have lots of information, but not that it acts as a put it on tape, right? Tape still exists, all over the place, right? So that is the kind of thing. But tape was supposed to be dead a long time ago. No, that's dead. There's a lot of stuff going on. And bringing, bridging those rules together and having the right storage for what you need is real important. So that is what we talk about when we talk about scale. It is allowing our clients who are doing massively transactional, massively performance systems to be able to use OpenStack. And we tune all aspects of this architecture to allow that. Talk about for the CIOs out there that were evaluating OpenStack. What's your advice to them? Give them an update on what, from your perspective, where is OpenStack at right now? Viable, crossing the chasm, getting ready to cross the chasm. What's your take? Yeah, so I don't know. I think what we were talking, I was thinking about a picture and I don't know. I think it's, I don't know if it's good to be on the side of the chasm. So it's certainly viable. I think that if you're new to OpenStack, you're not alone. The way to get started is to get engaged in the community, look at the user stories and engage the community and how to get started. Look at the vendors that have OpenStack offerings. IBM, who love your business, but guess what? There's a lot of others and that's the beauty of what we're doing. It's not a single, you're not going to get locked in, right? You have a growing set of OpenStack skills. It's not like a vendor where you can only have one skill base to source from. So look at what others have done and get started and clearly define your use case. So let's talk about the, what's going on inside IBM. Give the folks a feel for the change internally. I know you guys have been doing OpenStack for a while. We talked about it on the intro segment here. But what's going on internally? What are you guys doing specifically? Obviously the company's rallied behind it. Take that hill, there's a comment I saw on CrowdChat. Management's aligned. Messaging's tight. It's like when you walk in a Nordstrom and you see everything on the rack. I want mannequins dressed up beautifully. It's hangs together. The story of IBM is hanging together pretty well. You go to Nordstroms? I go to Gap. Gotta get dressed up. Being channeled and all. Actually my wife goes there and takes the kids. But seriously, so you got a good story hanging together. But now internally Open is an opportunity. The more you share, the more powerful you become. That is the credo of this world. What are you guys changing internally? The middleware layer? Is it philosophy, new programs? What's going on? So I get that question asked a lot. The open source and open technology is inherent in the fabric of who we are as a company. Look at most of IBM's software offerings. They have open source technology in it. Our web application servers, our data, everything has open source technology in it. We participate in actively across many, many different communities. So there isn't anything different we are doing here. But I can tell you one thing we are doing is being very vocal and trying to get others to participate. So one of the things HP has done in their past is when SCO Unix was around, remember those days, they indemnified their customers around Linux and SCO. There's a lawsuit pending. We've done that for years. So are you going to do what HP is doing now and indemnify your customers around some of the licensing issues around open source? HP just announced. We've done that for years in our technologies. This is not new business. So you have that? Yes. You indemnify your customers with cloud. With our offerings, yes, absolutely. Okay, so they're matching you then? Pretty much. Okay, we'll hear from them. Nothing new here. Nothing new. I mean, this is how we have been, if you go back to how we started Apache and what we've done around making sure that we use our portfolio, our industrial property, to protect the open source community across from acts of aggression, right? That's what we do. We've been protecting the open communities. We protect these open communities. That's how we do our stuff. So Angel, if we say everybody's almost heading to table stakes on some of these. If it's open source and we're contributing to all the different things, how do you differentiate in open source? I've heard from other IBM for it's all about execution. From your standpoint, how does IBM differentiate its offer? Well, look, vision without execution is hallucination. So it is all about execution, but we just had discussion on performance, right? Scale. We had a proportion about time to value. We talked about speed, right? These are the things. There's gonna be a constant democratization of technology. These are the places where we, because of our experience, our years in the software business, kind of being number one middleware vendors to our clients, right? We are able to take those experiences and take OpenStack and make it fit in the context of what our clients are trying to do, okay? And that's how we build our offerings with OpenStack Inside to do that. And that's the value add, frankly, that our clients expect and appreciate. And so that's our secret sauce. Angel, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate you mentioning the old days. I remember John Patrick and I, you were friends, even though John ride his motorcycle around these days. But, you know, back in the day, I mean, IBM looked at the web and said, hey, you know, we might've missed it. It was viewed as a toy internally initially. Remember back in the 90s, talking to some of the folks at IBM. Now the web thing answers for kids playing in the basement. These web masses, what the hell they know. And look what that's turned into. Same with the clouds. Certainly social media is the same way you guys are looking at social business as a big driver. So I want you to end the segment and share with the folks out there in your own words. Why is this point in time so important in the industry? With all the confluence of the trends, you know, there's a little, you know, is it overused to say we're at an inflection point, disruption, all that stuff's going on. Explain in your own words, why here at this point in time in this technology era is it so awesome and so changing? Well when you look at what our business folks are trying to do, right? Our clients are business folks. They're trying to use mobile, social, big data analytics, all this stuff to do more for their clients, to do better, to better compete. This is all greatness. But guess what? You know, doing analytics requires compute power. Increasing the internet of things requires compute power. If you don't have a successful elastic cloud infrastructure, all of those markets will fail. So I think that to the degree that we as an industry are successful with cloud, in particular with an open cloud, all of these other very tightly-knit adjacent technologies, frankly, are going to improve our lives and improve what our business folks can do will be successful or not a success. So if that's an inflection point, let's call it an inflection point. If it's not, it's really darn important. It's something going on, tectonic shift, certainly accelerating the value. You guys have a lot of muscle in the market, big player in the business, and have a lot of investment going on in the area. So again, accelerating the greatness of the cloud will certainly accelerate the opportunities and the wealth creation. Everything's being disrupted. The money is on the table and the winners will take all in a lot of different segments. So I totally agree with you. Cloud is certainly the engine of innovation. This is the cue. We're doing our part in sharing that innovation with you. We'll be right back with our next guest live in Atlanta for the OpenStack Summit. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back. Thank you.