 All right, how's everyone good? Thank you So my name is Jeff Dickey chief innovation officer at redapt I've got a Assembled a great panel here today. I kind of talk about Open stack and appliances and kind of where that kind of fits in this ecosystem So I'm just want to start start with an introduction. Go ahead. Perfect. I'm Jim Sankster with Morantis I run the program that's showcasing and introducing converged appliances and we'll talk about that a little bit more and we even have one up on the floor to show Thanks. Hi. My name is Ken one. I'm director of marketing at HP One of the things that I do is I run our optimized cloud solutions, which are which are our integrated solutions Been at HP for about four years prior to that Spends some time at SGI doing solutions and spend a number of years at at Sun Micro systems doing solutions as well Hey, good afternoon. I'm Rob Esker with NetApp. I Started the open second. I'm sorry. Yeah, they open second at NetApp about four and a half years ago. They're about Presently the product management strategy around it actually here sitting in for my boss who unfortunately is in a hotel room with the influenza So please bear with me. I'm I'll try to do my best impression I'm also on the board. I'm here in the capacity of of NetApp though just to be clear So it's kind of kick things off like what's let's let's talk about an appliance and what is an appliance Go go ahead. Tell me your definition of an appliance Definition of appliance so the you know what we're trying to do is to make it easier to To deploy Whatever function it is that we're we're deploying right in this case obviously we're talking about open stack But you see these kinds of offerings in a lot of different places where you see integrations of Hardware and software and to make it make the deployment easier One of the things that we see certainly from HP standpoint is that we've been building out these what we call converged Infrastructure for for many many years Which we take the servers and the storage and the networking we added some software on top They offer it as a as a combined Bundle and and the effort the purpose of that is to make it simpler for our customers to adopt these technologies who quite frankly Don't want to deal with all of the details of the of the infrastructure and And so we're taking that concept and bringing it into the the open stack area as well What about you Robert what what what's your definition of a appliance? I I've I think sometimes it's useful to to kind of describe You know what you see in a tangible way and I think you know from my earliest memories I remember this device in the kitchen that produced toast Oh, but I'm sorry. This is theist. Ah, this is the open stacks That's that's that's the tea release So so I guess I'm also tempted to kind of look at it from a more of a product management perspective It seems like largely a packaging exercise for the benefit of those consuming it so Something that you know, it's validated repeatable deterministic sort of you've you've hidden the complexity in the rough edges. It's something that Maybe Because you've ideally hidden the complexity you it can appeal to a wider audience I think that's probably a relevant definition for this this ecosystem Jim what about the kind of differences between converged infrastructure and maybe an appliance or rack appliance? What what do you see there? Sure a couple different things converged infrastructure itself is when we're taking Compute and networking and storage and often having applications or solutions on top of that and Offering that up. It gets a little bit fuzzy in terms of is that an appliance? Is that not an appliance? I think there are true market definitions that analysts track specifically for converged infrastructure typically those are hardware based solutions and then when you start getting to hyperconverged that would be just on a compute platform and virtualized elements of software to find networking software to find storage and that all in in the software all just on the simple compute device and Again kind of that range of fuzziness around are those or are those not appliances and a little bit of a fuzzy definition there but truly tracked certainly numbers can be measured on hyperconverged solutions and Converged infrastructure in general Are we moving to like mega hyperconverged infrastructure? Is it are we kind of evolving mega? Yeah Well, so so you guys have had a lot of experience in the space and Who who who do we think of right now like like who are the players right now in this space that are doing well? And that we know of and we're seeing the traction out there I could start a little bit and then pass it on down I think in the broad sense a lot of the things that started happening in converged infrastructure we see like the V blocks and flex pods and the HP systems and Exa this that and the other from Oracle and then as we're getting more specific Into OpenStack and what we're all here about we're seeing a true emergence of that Today with a lot of different companies that have been starting to come out with these so Last week or whatever the week before last at EMC World project Caspian was talked about there I'll pass the mic and have these guys talk about some of the ones coming out there and Later I can touch on some of the things that we're doing at Mirantis, too Yeah, I think what you see here is there's a number of I mean all of you have been to the expo floor here You saw a number of vendors there or they're trying to pull together these these combined solutions And the challenge becomes in some cases that certainly in the OpenStack case There's no you know it's no hidden secret that OpenStack's a complicated thing to go implement and The idea is that we try to put put this together so that to to simplify that Implementation and of course the challenge of that the flip side of that is that whenever you package something up that Limits your flexibility and the idea of course is to define those things so that you get the maximum amount of Flexibility without making this thing too to Without having too many knobs to turn because then it kind of defeats the purpose of the whole of the whole offering Sure, I guess in terms of folks that aren't in the market. Unfortunately not Nebula So, you know a notable example of an early appliance Actually thought that should a lot of promise maybe a little early perhaps that something will touch upon in more depth here but You know, there's a lot of different takes I think it would be unfortunate to kind of sort of conflate like The unfortunate demise of Nebula with like whether or not there's applicability of appliance to to OpenStack I think appliance is fairly simplistically, you know again a way to deliver something in a deterministic Package repeatable way that is easy to consume and if in fact you can also address scalability ideally in multiple dimensions It it helps get beyond some of those sort of boundary traditional boundaries of just everything in one box That's an approach that over the years now for example, you know plug here in the capacity net app Has has solved for in combination with other folks in the way of something we call flex pod Where we attempt to kind of take a more modular approach to skin vertically and horizontally But give you a little bit more of that sort of package experience And and you'll see some offerings of that you'll cure in the coming months from us as well So, you know stuff like flex pod has been wildly successful. Does that is there a place for that style in the open-stack community? I Guess I can offer anecdotally that we knew there was when customers started coming to us and saying I'm buying all the essential components of Flexbot and assembling that myself to deploy open-stack. So that certainly That's not your classic, you know, what if Sort of you know build a business case pitch it and you know build and they'll come That was a they built it for us. Let's go respond by actually putting the validation and and and support model behind it So, yes Well, you can what I'd say, you know the so HP started doing these converge systems a long time ago If you you know, I don't know if this is true But people you are converged systems folks will tell you that we started that whole effort a number of years ago But so we've seen a lot of success behind that And if you look at the market share that the size of growth of systems, you know The server growth you look at storage growth as opposed to convert systems growth Converged systems are growing much much faster than just selling boxes selling individual storage devices networking compute So as we look at the the open-stack area, we say does does this make sense to do this kind of offering in a space which in some ways is Kind of almost set up to to be almost like a build your own because you have because it's such an interesting community effort and and we think that it is very applicable, you know as much as Most of the community here that comes is deeply Entrenched in under and their understanding of open-stack There are thousands of people outside of this conference that are interested in open-stack, but just don't have the the knowledge The in-house skills who are interested in and take an advantage of open-stack. I think for them That's really where these appliances come in is it the And especially with the the amount of skills shortage that you see out here in the open-stack area I mean everyone out here is hiring, right? It's just we see a lot of interest in in getting something that's easier to deploy the challenge of course is open-stack is still maturing as we know and and to Create something that package something up as Rob says it's the trick is in defining the package So that it's applicable yet. We're still maturing and I think that's one of the challenges of these kinds of offerings in this particular space So Jim, let's say we we we have an appliance The customer consumes the appliance what's next like are they able to manage it themselves like every solved everything I think that's part of the important thing that one needs to consider When looking at an appliance or as people coming together to build appliances because it's certainly it's great to do a packaging exercise that helps consumption for day one But I think it's equally important to think about day two and beyond so management of Overall ongoing how am I going to upgrade open-stack? How am I going to take care of things above open-stack? How do I bring in more hardware things like that need to be considered? And so it's more than just throwing everything together in Iraq and Delivering that to a customer. That's that's certainly the first step and a big part of it But not the last step in the whole end all What do you do you think that the In general is the the open-stack community going to be supportive of more of these these turnkey appliances these these kind of Are they vendor lock-ins? Does it go away from the openness of open-stack? I don't I think let me start off with some numbers at first and then answer second part on that and get the opinions down the line here If we look at and following general IT not just necessarily Open-stack general IT about 20 25 percent is being consumed in some form of either converged Infrastructure hyper-converged slash appliance by any definition, so it's not for everybody even in general IT But we expect that number to follow as open-stack matures and gets more and more into the mainstream enterprise We expect that same trend to follow of Appliances slash converged infrastructure inside open-stack it may start off at 10 or 15 percent But we'd expect to see that equal out something similar and then I know I don't believe it's necessarily lock-in certainly what we're trying to do We even named it unlocked because there you should have the choice Certainly, there'll be lots of choice across the industry and different offerings and that's already starting now We mentioned just a small number of them, but there's it's even broader But even in the program that we're doing here We will have multiple choices of different hardware to be able to run these different appliances with So pass that down Yeah, so what what we find we have a couple different Solutions today we have one that's called helium rack, which is essentially a Private cloud-in-a-box all based on open-stack, and then we have something called helium content depot Which is a a swift based objects towards solution And as we built these out the challenge that we have in this particular market Which is different from the general overall market is that the general market is much more mature Right and as much as I come from a server company, you know How how much difference is there really between the Dell server and the HP server? Well, I'm not the server division, so Anyway, it's you know that market is maturing quite a bit and and the opportunity for For these package offerings is as much greater the challenge in the open-stack area is that things are still shifting a lot you know one of the things that Jim said is one of the challenges is updating and and keeping these updated when you have new releases every six months You know, how do you how do you keep these kinds of solutions updated is is a much bigger challenge in a maturing market? Then or in a in a early market rather rather than a mature market That's one of the challenges that we see for for ours the way we approach this is that we have we end up doing reference Architectures of documents that you can say, okay Here's the servers the storage and how you connect it all up and here's all the configurations and all of that for someone who who for those people who who Don't need that level, you know, we have the complete thing we build but we build everything in our factory Just tell us how many how much compute how much storage you need and we'll build it all up And we'll select all the equipment. We've already tested it and so on so that's kind of the turnkey solution But people who don't want that and want to put in who've standardized on Cisco switches, for example, or on EMC storage Or or or net app storage, you know, we'll swap that out as well, right? So, you know, there's there's in this kind of market I think these appliances and kind of things need more you need to build in more flexibility in them because We're still figuring things out quite frankly sure as an industry Um, it's so agreed entirely with what everything said. I guess maybe just to lay around a little bit I think in some ways like Appliances or or you know, this this task of like making open stack more consumable which can is partly solved for via the distributions, you know The folks that have in my observations exceeded the the most with open stack today Have had kind of the institutional expertise talent wherewithal to deal with the kind of harder edges that the basic task of deploying it let alone You know Karen feeding and God forbid patching upgrading and So and that's not everyone And you know, things are things are in motion. I think the distributions kind of the Additional polish they put on it appeals to a broader audience But but but but the the act of or the means of delivering it in the form of an appliance it think of that as an experience is is Necessary or perhaps an eventuality however you want to kind of interpret it To bridge to that mere mortal, you know, the folks that like just want the capability They don't necessarily want to be a software development shop You know, hey, maybe it's that my software developers are you know starting at AWS and the economics are such that I need to Repatriated on-prem, but I can't like possibly contemplate what's involved with deploying and running open stack Give me that open stack in a box in a corner, you know in the extreme to repatriate you because again the economics favor it I'm not saying don't stay in any of this, you know The process might be bringing it back could be bursting out to it But not everyone is going to be a professional software development shop. Not everyone's going to be of the CI CD, you know mentality mindset So so yes, it has to happen. Now the question is I think the second part of the question was around lock-in I Can't imagine how it would be a problem in the sense that If it is open stack itself then what you have are in You know an open viable sustaining community that's well supported across a variety of vendors That allow you to like build your application logic against this open API this abstraction And then you could swap out the implementation behind it as necessary as perhaps like pricing dictates or perhaps capabilities require So so if you're you're standardizing on the open stack API set That's your means of avoidance of lock-in now There's lots of different ways to define lock-in, of course one would be I'm locked in because that's the best possible thing That's the kind of lock-in you might want You would like the option the escape hatch so to speak but everyone's going to try to distinguish and differentiate Oh, and maybe they succeeded in so the exact right thing and you it there's the bars too high to go to something else Well, that's an acceptable form of lock-in I just want to add one more thing and I will kind of wear the other hat briefly So those you I'm sure several folks in the audience are familiar with The move to what's called def core definition of core I think it's probably a little bit easier to to think of it as a Specification maybe come should be called def spec, but it is called def core and what this is is a means of looking back at What's commonly deployed for interoperability? So that you know a future state is that if I'm going to write to an upset API here I can reasonably expect it's commonly implemented over here whether that's an appliance whether that's a public cloud Whether that's hosted private cloud whatever That that helps you also avoid the lock-in So and if we're going to get further into that there's also some other relevant topics around def core Do you mind if I know go ahead? No, I think it's definitely very important that we so there is one additional thing That I think is relevant to the topic of appliance So within def core there is a provision that stipulates that You have to have designated sections doesn't any sections are actual upstream or you know OpenSec code from upstream so when you ship an appliance that has the open stack You know eligibility for the logo for the mark, you know to be a open-stack product official That product it has to actually contain some of that open, you know that actual open source code itself That's the way it currently looks so if you're going to build an open-stack appliance, you know That's that's one way of assuring that there is commonality I'll editorialize briefly. I don't actually think that's necessary as long as you just have a common API and a specification I think some point maybe can move pay on that, but I'll get off the editorial and give you the mic back Let me throw another question kind of kind of around that and you know, Robert You're talking about your customers are basically buying the you know net app solution but doing themselves and and What is the the value prop for the appliance? What's that biggest thing because I'll tell you when when I talk to customers and I say here's this reference architecture That's proven. They take it up and they tear it up and they said no it's you know, I'm doing it this way because I've had these experiences and There it is it's because This open stack is so open and you can do what I mean you can make whatever you want It's so many choices where you know, how do you kind of change that around? Is it a simplicity message is it a you know simple scales or what what is that value problem? I'll say that what I see is a huge variance in the types of customers who are interested in open-stack, you know, there are those who Have you know hundreds of engineers who are deeply involved. They're committing. They are contributing and Quite frankly, it is highly unlikely that they will ever look at one of these appliances Because they've got all the talent in house to be able to figure out exactly how to get exactly what they want There's another extreme which which quite frankly I believe is the majority the market at this point are people who don't have that Capacity people who don't have that experience people who look at open-stack and say I like that the openness the no vendor lock-in I like the idea of portability But I don't have a hundred engineers who know open-stack and in those cases those are those are customers who are ideal for the appliances or the You know cloud in the box if you will and there's a spectrum in in there And and when you're in these maturing markets, I think that spectrum tends to be wider So do you have the people who say, you know, I okay, so we have some open-stack knowledge And but I like this server or that storage or I like, you know, whatever component and I want to customize it partially But not completely And and so there's a lot I see there's a lot of variance in this particular market that more so than what you would normally What will you see in a more mature market? You had to add a little color to that and I agree with with what everyone has said here the different ways of consuming it you can go from What Ken just talked about a company that has the engineering know-how and the bodies to put on it and They may or may not even use a distribution and that's perfectly fine They can do so then there's the people in the middle and this is probably the majority at this point they're looking at distributions getting that support and The continued upgrade ability of that that you get everything all the nice things about the distribution But still that's going to require engineering services either ones that they have or with a consulting firm whether that's a big huge global SI or Company like mine or a company like yours or what have you need to get that kind of capability the value proposition for the Appliance is really the very the faster time to value for the cloud if we can get a cloud in a rack Racked and stacked as fast as there is the hardware material available So assuming it's all it's all ready to go you can do that a day Right how long does it take you guys to to rack something up full full rock? Couple minutes. We're gonna couple minutes What we're designing then is really a full automation process to be able to load all the software Ship that out and then really at that point. We're talking about Plugging in power integrating into the network and it's ready to go So in less than a day on site far less than a day you are now ready to go with your cloud That's vastly different than going with a services engagement to make a bespoke on premises cloud Both are good about questions. They wouldn't have any questions Specifically about my day and go to the go to the jump to the mic back. Yeah. Thank you So you guys are talking about the advantages and disadvantages for the Appliance and my understanding plans basically you pack the things to the user. He never opened it It just works, but now you're packaging the moving target. It always moves, right? So It seems that it's not time given an ambulance bankruptcy So I and then your customer you want help it cannot open the box, right? So unless you solve the problem like Chrome or iOS to a smooth upgrade It would disaster for customers. So after six months is obsolete and next six months It's dead. So what is the value proposition really? We block works because the way I'm really traditional software. So it's 18 months upgrade. So that's my so I want to say You can solve the first three months problem, but how you solve next three months and next we may want to touch on on each of us from from the standpoint of what we're doing at Marantis is Building in automated installation. So in our case that's using fuel and then automated testing So we can certify on day one that this is an up-and-running appliance and we recertify upon Day in upgrading the software automated install And then a false recertification So it handles that situation Continually doing that. So every time you want to do an upgrade you come out it automatic it's Company like Redap would come out. They would then perform the upgrade all automated in terms of how it's done and then recertified That's a goal and what we're delivering and what There's no question that That this is more complicated or more challenging than with a mature market I think that's that's the key the key point in all of this is it depends on where you are in the market For HP we do something very similar to to what Jim's talking about it at Marantis, you know And then we recertify and test For us with our with our distribution, you know, we will roll out a Distribution and then at some time after that we'll have tested the hardware tested the appliance to make sure that it is That it is updatable and and it can be easily updated and quickly updated It I think that it is a bigger challenge in this market There's no question because we are any still in a maturing motion, but the question is is are we too early? You know, I think it's a sort of thing where We're trying to serve a Broad set of customers, you know those who quite frankly don't have The knowledge that all you guys have right in the room here and want to take advantage of this but Just don't have the people in house How many folks here? I mean to the show hands. Do you think the the an appliance like? is is a good idea show vans and And kind of a bad idea or not supporting open-stack Can you guys exit I want to hear do you have a question do you have something that guy led you I Don't really have a question. I guess The the comments about open, you know about vendor lock-in And Some of the Q&A on Installs and upgrades and certification they kind of seem to be at odds with each other to me I think once you start down this path from the point of view of the organization that is that is Buying into this you you you are starting down a path which will not lead you to Adopting open-stack, you know, and then more general flavor eventually. I don't know, you know, and I wasn't going to raise it as a question Yeah, it's good point. Yeah, so so if I understood all of the point correctly I Guess I guess it depends on what you're integrating against what you know And then part of this probably bears a conscious decision, you know the things that you would sit on top of an appliance The things you would host on it, you know, how are you interacting with it? It's probably the case that most vendors of appliances not all are going to seek to offer some sort of Vendor differentiation minds better because of x y and z And you know if the intent and the reason why you're at open second the first place is the avoidance of lock-in then I think there's a Long hard look at whether or not you really want to derive that potential value To to potentially preserve the path to something else there I fit in my opinion There are places where it's not only like sufficient the bar You know perhaps the value that could be derived as sufficient that you you will but indeed, you know And I've seen in places where in fact it's a critical Mean it's critical to the viability of the business, you know that I do take advantage of it Again, I think that's the kind of lock-in willing to accept because the lights are on But it's it's a hard decision, you know, so what are you integrating against? And I'm glad you brought it up because I think it's a it's a good perspective on it And I think open stack really affords a different mentality Then let me let me do a compare and contrast if there's some of the other converged Infrastructures out there that have software on them with perpetual licensing Once you go down that path You are correct appliance or not If you don't like it and you try and back out of it, you're stuck That's the the license you can no longer use it anymore if you want to change things or what have you or you're no longer Going to get that next upgrade with open stack. It's different. So yes, it's delivered as an appliance But as Rob mentioned earlier, it's based on a distribution. It's based on the same API's and interfaces if you wanted to Go away from what the appliance affords You can do that. It's maybe starting to get less of an appliance But it's still a fully operational Fully functional something you can use to have your cloud on premises no problem at all And so you can even switch distributions if you wanted you can switch hardware all sorts of freedom there But then you know, it's it's no longer the original appliance and you know what that may be perfectly acceptable So we've got time for a few if you would like to actually purchase the appliance can you form a line behind the mic? And then we have time for a couple more questions. Go ahead Actually, we bought I work for a huge style code in Brazil and we we do have a you know I don't I don't count then but we do have a lots of V blocks down there And we are taking the opposite direction in order to get out of the locking We're thinking about open stack to be our let's say our I won't say a savior But you know the one that will break the stuff that we down here that we have down there but even even though It is hard to break these because it is so Slice it and dice it that even the most wild open stack developers they look at it and say oh No, it doesn't fit. I would like to ask you guys what you guys think about Not you know appliances not only for the future, but let's say that there's a bunch of companies They're already have a hardware that will be around for the next let's say three to four years and They're not satisfied with the solution that they have because they don't deliver what their customers are asking for and Do you guys see it as an opportunity for whatever for Mirantis for developers all around to redeploy these? appliances be at VCE or Nutanix whatever as as a as a as a let's say as V block. I'm sorry as open stack appliances, so to say Certainly could see that as an opportunity. Yes boards the warranty a bit But that's the decision that we take yeah, we actually we took okay No, one of the things that we did when we we architected our Our solutions is that we did it purposefully using Product that you can use to do other things with you know one of the things that Jim mentioned is that you know You can switch distributions, you know our Solutions actually designed that you can do that fact if if you For if you made a bad decision and you bought the supply engine you think oh my god. What the heck did I do? I don't want this anymore. You can actually use used to do something completely different. They're all industry standard servers You can you can redeploy them? Hopefully that doesn't happen right hopefully that the customer understands what they're trying to do that our sales Rep hasn't sold them something that they don't want And But the certainly the intention is to be able to provide a and offering something that you can be Upgraded and that meets what the customer is looking for. We got five more minutes. Let's try to do one question one answer Yeah, so here as we look at the Marketplace and providing these appliances and who they're targeted at right We're targeting down market to get people accelerated and on the on the open stack bandwagon, right? Those customers traditionally are very slow for upgrades and very slow for change, right? So as open stack continues to progress every six months and have releases and all that how How far ahead have your organization's thought about back porting capability because you're gonna have a customer out There that's not gonna upgrade their instance for two years, right? And so what's the what's the tow line, right? That they have to continue to push out these updates in order to to make sure they stay within compliance of your reference architecture You've sold them So this is not a this is a challenge I'd say is Not just specific to appliances sure right and and we know that most of the the enterprises update every every other big release Right every every couple years the challenge with open stack is that we've got new releases every six months, right? Yeah You're not required not required that yeah, right? And I think that these companies will not you know most of the companies are not gonna update that that frequently Because they just can't handle that level of change sure Thank you for your question So you have a window right now But I think that's gonna close remember the keynote where we were all encouraged to go out and make open stack more operator friendly Five times ten times easier to install I mean ultimately over some number of years there's gonna be a new open stack project I'll suggest the name open stack existential where it just wakes up Installs itself on whatever's there all the upgrades are automatic Probably continuous. I mean ultimately that's where the stuff has to go. So are we talking about Autonomous sentient Skynet open stack because I actually don't care anymore because I don't think I'll be around But No, I if I understand the point You're saying the windows closing sure Go for the window right now and do it I just think that we were all Encouraged to go out and I think we've seen a change In open stack from a developer focus to an operator focus and I think that's just gonna get This is like kind of a stopgap Yeah, I mean so yeah, there's a window who can get there first was something that's viable Actually, I think we've already determined that first wasn't necessarily best But but rather, you know viable when the market's ready You know is a good idea here And at some point in time if that's sufficiently profitable others will will will also deliver the sum of the same And there'll be a commoditization trend I think that's just kind of like the technology cycle we're in not to oversimplify it Any final thoughts Jim any final thoughts Sending up everything I think it's really a good turning point that we're seeing about at this time where We have 6,000 people here. We are seeing the matcher the maturity going over that curve We're starting to see the enterprises adopting this more and more so the tail end of 2015 going into the window of people looking at these types of Solutions, I think the time is now. So I think it's a great time for it Maybe in the long run it does go off to that noble goal where it's all completely automated But I think we're really heading the right direction as a community with everything we're doing. Yep. All right, Jim Ken Robert Thank you so much for doing this everyone. Please come up and ask questions while we're here. Thank you all Thank you all for coming