 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube at IBM Edge 2014. Brought to you by IBM. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. Okay, welcome back everyone here live in Las Vegas for IBM Edge, this is the Cube, our flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the symphony noise, I'm John Furrier, just looking at it. I'm Stu Miniman, analyst at wikibond.org. Our next guest is Mike Harrison, Vice President of the IBM Business Unit for Brocade. Welcome to the Cube. Thanks, I'm glad to be here. So what's your take on the show here? We've been covering Brocade, talking about Brocade all week, last week at OpenStack. You guys had a big presence at OpenStack, the work you're doing at the cloud, across all the different big guys out there. You guys are becoming the Switzerland of all the killer technology. So give us your take on IBM Edge. Well I tell you, it is really a great opportunity to spend some time with a collection of customers and have the opportunity to validate some of the things that we're doing. You know, we all spend a lot of time on the road, we talk, you know, go out and visit customers, but you don't get the opportunity to get this concentration of people in one place where you can talk about technologies, what they're implementing, what their requirements are, what their challenges are. And it's amazing to me, as we go through these sessions and have these discussions, that there were so many things that customers are challenged with today, that we have capabilities to address. It's just an awareness thing. They don't have access to the right information or we're not putting it out there in the right manner. So things that we can learn from going forward in the future, but it really is an opportunity to talk to them about what they're doing, what their challenges are, and how we can help them with that. So Mike, the theme of the show is infrastructure matters. Can you tell us what are the conversations you're having? What are the customers talking to you about? Because infrastructure is going through a lot of dramatic changes. You know, what have you been having? You know, infrastructure, it's kind of unique, right? Infrastructure, you can think of it as the whole IT spectrum, or you can think of it as the transport protocol, the network itself, which is what I tend to think of it as, especially from a brocade perspective. So infrastructure matters, I think, you know, when you think about it from an IBM Edge context, has more to do with the entire spectrum, the server, the network, the storage. And what we're trying to do is facilitate access from all of the different trends, all of the different things that we're seeing going on in the marketplace today, and develop the technologies that will allow customers to stay on top of these trends and be able to, you know, meet the demands of the third platform computing area that's just starting to burgeon in the market. Yeah, so the third platform, the big areas that IBM's talked about, cloud, mobile, social, and analytics, how are those impacting the solutions that you bring to market jointly with IBM? Well, if you think about that, it's putting those different technologies, those application areas, are putting tremendous demands on the network. Now, think about something, you know, along the lines of what IBM announced this week with Elastic Storage. Fantastic technology, right? You can have almost infinite scalability in terms of the amount of data that you can store and where you place that data. But then, you know, when you take the next logical thought process or step, it's, well, what about provisioning that storage or that data from the target device that you've just put it on, whether it's a LTO because you don't need that, you know, access to that data frequently or some type of a flash array because it's very high performance, but provisioning that to get it back to the application that's demanding it, that's where we commit. That's where the infrastructure from a networking standpoint really becomes critical in terms of what path to use, what's the right selection criteria to use. So, you know, this is where we're working very closely with IBM in this overall area, trying to address the new requirements that we're seeing in the marketplace, but at the same time, being able to have the technologies merge in such a way that, you know, we have the collaborative efforts that make it easier for customers to implement. So, at the OpenStack show last week, one of the great quotes I loved is, it used to be, you know, you had the triangle and you had to be at least two of the faster, better, cheaper and today it needs to be faster, faster, faster and that will make up for almost anything. So, you know, with the trends we were just talking about, things like elastic storage, you know, how are we going to make networking not be the bottleneck anymore? Because to be honest, you know, we look at, you know, virtualization, a lot of compute to be able to be very flexible and agile, but storage and networking have been, you know, tougher to provision, tougher to get out, so how are we allowing network to be an enabler rather than an inhibitor? Well, you know, if you think about it and the trends over the course of the past decade with virtualized applications, virtualized servers, the advances that have been made in storage, there really haven't been enough advances in the network to keep up with that. So, what we're working on now and delivering now in the marketplace is technologies that ensure that the network doesn't become a bottleneck, because as you develop these faster array technologies for storage, as you develop these more data-hungry applications, denser VMs running on, or VMs running on more dense processors, what you don't want to have happen is the bottleneck move to the network, certainly not from my perspective. So, with things like enhanced bandwidth capabilities, with things like enhanced monitoring and management capabilities, what we're trying to do is stay on top of it to make sure that as the advances occur on both sides of the infrastructure surrounding the network, the network never becomes a bottleneck in terms of delivering what the applications are looking for in terms of data. Okay, so IBM's trying to paint kind of that picture of the future and where the roadmap's going. What would you expect to see going forward from the future of storage networking? Well, from the future of storage networking, I think what you're going to see is an increased focus on automation, certainly. Lowering management costs, lowering OPEX costs, and I think you're going to see an increase in virtualized aspect of networking. One of the areas that's out in the forefront of that is in the telecommunications or the service provider space with network function virtualization, right? Taking purpose-built boxes and supplanting that with virtualized applications that can run on any x86 server. Our Viata platforms are perfect for that. I want to ask you about the convergence side Can I just one quick follow-up on NFV? Because I'd agree, it's interesting. SDN gets a lot of the buzz, but if you look NFV since it really ties to a telco provider, one of the analogies I've heard is if you think from a telco standpoint, how do I get my cable accessed? They put the entire solution together, I've got a box at the end, they provision a service, it's pretty straightforward as to how I virtualize the service and bring it down as opposed to SDN has got a lot more pieces in the mix and therefore it's going to take a while. So NFV is something that not as many people know about yet, but it's much faster to solution and seeing revenue and absolutely solutions like Viata are driving to the market. I agree completely. I think you're going to see a much faster uptake and uptake in NFV and it will be in the telco and the SP space, then you will see an SDN. That's going to have a longer gestation time in the marketplace. We've got engagements working with all of the major telco providers around the world right now with our Viata platforms, looking at virtualized load balancing, looking at virtualized firewalls, virtual tunneling. And all of these capabilities are what the telcos are clamoring for today and this consortium that came together to say enough, we want to have this technology today is really driving the adoption rate and I think we're going to see that happen much faster than we are SDN overall. So we've been talking to Broke in a lot of the past years. Stu and I have always talked about the, what's going on inside the weeds, inside the convergence of the engine, under the hood if you will. What are you seeing right now, relative to IBM and landscape out there, the big changes that's happened over the past three years? What can you point to saying, hey the shift has gone from here to here, has it been software defined, networking, is it virtualization, is there a couple of things you can point to that's changed the game? I think the things that, over the course of the past year that have changed the game are the things that we're doing to make management of the network easier. You know what we're really trying to do, if you think about storage networking and fiber channel protocols and the whole fabric based approach, what we're trying to do is make it even easier to use today than it was five years ago. And as you know, if you compare management of fiber channel to say ethernet technologies over five years ago, dramatically different, right? So what we're focusing on is, and the enhancements that we've made over the course of the past three years has really been on automation and ease of management so that there are less people that are required to run the network. And obviously we're also bridging that over into the IP world and into the ethernet world with ethernet fabrics and our VCS technology to try to do the same thing. Because we firmly believe fabrics are going to be the way that networks are going to evolve over the next five to 10 years. That's both a fiber channel and an IP stage. What's the biggest management challenge at the fabric level? By integrating fabrics, it seems to be a hot button for folks. Okay, how do you pull them together? Is there a management approach that you guys have found? Is there orchestration and challenge? Well, how do you look at those two things? I think one of the biggest management challenges is just trying to integrate new technologies and integrate new capacity. And again, that's an area that we've been very laser focused on so that we can non-disruptively add capabilities, add capacity to the network without having to worry about taking applications down, taking the network offline. As you well know, there is no room for downtime today. Not at all. And you need more performance, right? And you need more performance. Absolutely, right? Because think about, you know, retail applications and a customer that's going out to make a purchase online. If there's a millisecond delay in one site, there's 16 other sites that they can go to to buy that same, you know, whatever widget they're looking for, and they're going to flip over to that. So performance, absolutely key. So Mike, I wonder if you can address security. It's been a hot button issue in the networking space. There's a few people in San Francisco getting together to talk to a certain conference there. And you know, can we trust the cloud? Can we trust the network? You know, what's your take on everything happening? That's a great question. I think it's going to take time for customers to trust the cloud. You know, there have been a number of high profile incidents over the course of the past year where there have been security concerns, whether that's with some, you know, retail companies that have had some issues, whether it's with some, you know, access to IRS files, whatever the case might be. There's been concerns about security that I think are going to permeate customers' thinking in terms of moving to cloud. And that's an area that we're really going to have to do a much better job on as we move forward in terms of showing that the economies of scale offered by cloud, and which, by the way, are embodied in multi-tenancy, not, you know, singular applications and singular system setup, we're going to have to be able to prove to customers that that's a safe implementation for them, which is why I think you're going to continue to see, you know, on-premise, private cloud build up, and some use of public cloud, and you're going to see, you know, hybrid be the mode of choice for some period of time. Jamie Thomas is mentioning about her software paradigm that she believes is the revolution. It's not about just storage. So when people come to Brocade and say, hey, how do you fit into a little overall storage future? I mean, I'll see this elastic storage, you guys briefly touched upon that. That's a big part of IBM's announcement. There's just one tip of the iceberg. You got virtualizing sand, you got server sand, Stu did a thing about server sand, all the changes going on in storage. There's always confusion where you guys fit in. So when someone says, hey, how do you fit into the storage architectures? How does Brocade fit into that equation? You know, I'm not sure it's so much confusion anymore. I think there's a much higher level of awareness of the importance of the network. I would say, you know, if you go back three to five years, there were a lot of, there was a belief that the network was just plumbing, right? It was a vehicle to get from point A to point B with data on a wire. And that's not the case anymore. I think that people are looking at the network as a much more important and integral part of the overall IT infrastructure. And therefore, that's why they're putting so many different demands on the network, both from a performance, a security automation standpoint. And that's why we've been focused on those areas, you know, in terms of delivering value to customers. How about your relationship with IBM? How do you fit in? Obviously, you're paying a lot of accounts, a big business unit for you guys. What are you guys doing with those guys? Any new news you can share? Just overall working relationship, you guys are partnering? Share a Brocade connection to IBM. Absolutely, we have a fantastic working relationship with IBM. We were IBM's first sand partner 17 years ago. We've been working with them in innovative technologies and fiber channel ever since then. We've got a number of collaborative efforts that we're working with them today on that span not only the fiber channel space, but also IP that span management technologies and capabilities that will facilitate ease of use of the network. So they are a very, very good partner of ours. And we span a lot of the divisions within, in fact, just about all of the divisions within IBM from a working relationship standpoint. And that's, I really only see that enhancing and growing over time. So Mike, one of the important constituencies to IBM and at this conference are the managed service providers. And networking, of course, is pretty critical to what they're doing. Can you talk to your interaction? How are you helping MSPs, roll out services to customers and run their business? From an MSP standpoint, it's all about cost performance. And that really translates to the implementation of the technology and the management suite that you offer. So we spend a lot of time working with the managed service providers, trying to understand what it is they're trying to do. And this is an outsource, traditional sense and a cloud implementation perspective as well. So trying to understand what they see from a technology uptake standpoint, what the horizon is, what the timelines are and mapping our technology roadmap to those requirements. So we spend a tremendous amount of time with the MSPs and do a lot of business with them. And I anticipate that that's going to continue for quite some time. Okay, we're here inside the cube with Procade. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back after this short break. Live here in Las Vegas for IBM Edge. Right back.