 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE at IBM Edge 2014. Brought to you by IBM. Good afternoon from Las Vegas, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick and this is theCUBE SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We're here at IBM Edge. This is day one. We're going to be covering Edge wall-to-wall executives, practitioners, partners, consultants, analysts, bloggers running the gamut, getting you all the information on the news, the news of the day, trends, competition. Jim Larson is here. He is with the comms and the storage division of Intel. Jim, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, Dave. New occasions of storage are coming together. Yes, they are. You're seeing it all over the place. You're seeing it in converged infrastructure. You're seeing it in this whole software-defined meme. So tell us, what's new with Intel and what's happening in your part of the world? Well, on the networking side, we're really engaged with IBM to deliver some new technologies around SDN and NFV as the customer base is really meeting the physical limits of their network and everybody wants to be able to migrate jobs around quickly so this whole terminology of software-defined X could be infrastructure, could be storage, could be networking. They want to be able to migrate those jobs around quickly and effectively and so really both NFV and software-defined networking are coming out in the market and giving the practitioners those tools that they need to be able to migrate jobs quickly and be able to use their policies and procedures so that if your data isn't supposed to interact with Jeff's data, that it won't and you can then quickly migrate it around so that it changes. Why software-defined and why now? Is it that we're now at a point where compute power is so plentiful and relatively inexpensive or are there other factors driving it? What are the big drivers? Well, it's one because the networks are getting much larger and they're getting flatter. So it used to be a very tiered structure where you went to aggregation layers and then you went to end-of-road switching and routing. Nor south. And so now we're going wider and wider so we're maxing out on the physical limitations of like VLAN IDs. You only had 4,000 of them and people are just running out of that space. Those are architectural limitations that now the industry's bumping into. Yeah, and two, I mean just this whole idea of I want to change things quickly, right? Before people didn't want to change things very quickly. So how do you do that and you need the tools and NFV is really a prime example of being able to give those practitioners the tools to do that quickly? Yeah, so networking's an interesting animal. We're talking about a lot of Jeff and I and others on theCUBE, John Furrier and I talk about it all the time where you have networking in the data centers, a dominant player in Cisco, they got two thirds of the market. I can't think of another market. Oh, Intel and microprocessors, okay. But it's rare in our industry where you don't have some kind of binary compatibility issue or in the case of Microsoft, some kind of software affinity to see that kind of dominant share and now all of a sudden software defined, it brings this whole new innovation. It's creating innovation on innovation and the incumbents are innovating and the startups are innovating. It's a very exciting time for networking, isn't it? It is. It's new territory, it's wide open territory where the controllers to run the software find networks. They're just coming out, people are launching those, getting them to market, compatibility issues and Intel's really taking an end-to-end perspective from this. So we have our switch division that's bringing out new switch technologies and working with IBM to do that and then on the networking side, on the server sides or on the storage sides where you're doing LAN and SAN. We wanna be able to make sure that we have an end-to-end solution that's functional and brings that Intel quality that we're known for and the robustness so that customers don't have to worry about something not working or failing or going down. So, you know, as the controllers come out so that they can manage those policies and procedures, we wanna make sure that everything interoperates and it gives you that, such a set. Talk a little bit more about what's going on with IBM. I mean, obviously in the old days, IBM was a networking giant and then the industry, thanks to you guys and Microsoft and others, you know, changed dramatically. IBM made an acquisition of BNT, I believe I'm correct in saying that's going over with the Lenovo deal. You have, you know, a lot of shuffling of the deck in the industry, HP buys 3Com and then you have a bunch of startups coming out and now this whole software defined. So, given that Lenovo is now sort of IBM's new steward for things like BNT, what are you doing with IBM? Is it important sort of extending that piece of the business and are there other activities going on? I wonder if you could help us squint through that. Well, today in their portfolio, our X520 and X540 products, they support NFV today. And therein lies one big question. If you want your 10 gig network to run at true 10 gig, you need some sort of technology there that's gonna enable it. If you don't have some sort of offloader support for that, you're gonna be running at three to four gig where everything is gonna be pushed off to the processor and the processor's gonna have to process those packets. So today they have two cards in the portfolio that support this. They're going to make some announcements later this year on 40 gig products that are gonna talk about how they support this. All instantiations, all implementations VXLAN, NVGRE, GRE, all of the different ones that are coming out. Again, being a green field where people wanted to find things maybe a little bit different to add value. We're gonna be able to support those with this new product coming out. And IBM and Intel are very aligned there to get that out to the market. So Jimmy, your title is comms and storage. So how are those, at the top of the spot I talked about convergence, those things coming together. Are they, how much are they coming together in your world or in your activities and your outreach to the market? Are they still largely separate, sort of solutions and product sets? Well, they are coming together and a lot of people want to be able to be able to connect to whatever storage device. If you think about how this software defined infrastructure wants to move and maybe you want to be connected when your network's connected up to be connected to fiber channel. And maybe Dave's here or Jeff's here wants to be connected to fiber channel over ethernet. And you want to be able to switch that. You want to be able to turn those knobs and you don't want to have to physically go out to the systems and do that. You want to be able to control that from one system and say, this is how I want it set up in my policies. API call would be nice. Yeah, exactly. So there's how storage is kind of coming together. Intel also has some other technologies that were coming out with DPDK that's accelerating traffic and that traffic in storage platforms that's going to come out this year as well. Again, if you want to run some of those new technologies and you only want to have it applied to certain people under an SLA, right? You want to be able to set those policies so that only that runs in that environment. So you got some pretty interesting disruptions going on. What you described as this sort of hierarchical, hardened data center, I call it North South. You've got the SAN, which talk about hardened. I mean, that's been decade plus, you know, more than it's been a couple of decades now where that's been hardened. And you're starting to see all this software defined stuff come in and unravel is not the right word but certainly disrupt it. We've also seen function to get away from the server for years out to the SAN, for example. Now it's starting to come back. Stu Miniman coined this term server SAN. It's the idea you got a bunch of disk drives in the server and then you connect them up, I don't know, through some high speed interconnect whether it's Ethernet or whatever. Let's assume it's Ethernet. And then you've pooling that capability. So again, another example of convergence. When you talk to your partners and data center customers, are they seeing that? Are they driving that? Are they embracing that? Does it scare the, you know, what out of them? What are you seeing in the marketplace? Did you see it all? I would say that, you know, a lot of people are looking for improved performance and they're looking to put in flash drives where they can get that better performance and where they can maximize their return on investment to be able to put that in. A lot of these vendors are looking at other technologies right now today to maybe make interconnects that are very quick and very fast. And I think Intel's got some products on a roadmap to try to address that coming out shortly. But, you know, fast connections to tiered storage and then how that's gonna play out. In the keynotes here, they talked a lot about having this elastic storage environment where you're going from flash to drive, spinning disks to, you know, tape backups and so forth. I mean, Intel's obviously got our own flash department and products that we're rolling out there, our SSDs as well. Do you care if the world goes? I mean, I was sort of joking with Andrea that you guys are arms dealers, I mean, I hope that's not a pejorative, but it's true, you sell to anybody. I mean, the only guys you don't like are your direct competitors, right? I mean, otherwise, you're friends of everyone. You're trying to advance the ecosystem, you contribute to open source, you're spending money on R&D, you work with virtually everybody. So when you think about how this industry is evolving, you hear all about cloud, you guys sell it to the cloud, you sell it to the public cloud, you know, the large internet providers, do you care which way the industry goes or do you not? In other words, do you design products specifically? Do you make bets? Do you have to make bets internally or does it not matter to you guys in terms of which way it goes? No, it's very important. And we do make, you know, those strategic investments into what we think is going to happen in the future and where we see things. And then of course there's trends. You know, with each launch of platforms, there's always a trend. And we understand those trends pretty well. The cloud guys, even the Toco customers, they tend to push the envelope first and they'll roll out new technologies and bring those to the market. And then from there, you start to roll over to the enterprise markets and so forth. And so, you know, right now, all of these technologies that we're talking about, NFV, SDN, and storage, I mean, we're on the cusp right now of a very big deployment around the world with vendors trying to push out some really new technologies. And they're trying to bring their costs down and they're trying to bring great flexibility. You know, there's companies, for example, like Netflix and other of these service providers that are trying to push more and more content to the edge of the network. And by pushing more content to the edge, they don't bottleneck up their whole data center, right? They're pushing it out to open it up to everybody. And so this is where we've put a lot of strategic dollars and we've kept our ear very close to the ground about what they need and what kind of software technology they need built on top of that hardware to make it work for them. Because you got to make both of them work or you don't have a full solution. So is it, when you make these bets, you're obviously, you're making bets on hyperscale. You're clearly a player there. And we're starting to see that bleed into the enterprise. Is it, is what happens in hyperscale a harbinger for what will happen in the enterprise? Or are there substantial dramatic differences? In other words, if I look at what's happened in hyperscale today, will that bleed in five, seven years later? Or will it take a U-turn or a hard fork? You know, it's always hard to predict exactly what's gonna happen in the market and what kind of forces and what kind of factors are gonna come about. We look at the trends and we try to make branch predictions off of what we've seen in the past and where things are gonna go in the future. And then of course we keep our feet on the street and we keep our technologists and our architects out there talking to these people about, is this working? Is this providing the service and the SLAs and price performance that you're looking for? And if it's not, then we have to make course corrections. So what are some of the bets you're making? I mean, obviously scale out, that's a bet that sort of, you know, you guys, the trend that you guys have been writing. What other things can you share with us? Bet you're making that you think are gonna pay off, whether it's in the enterprise or emerging application markets and other spaces within networking or anything you can share? I would say that right now network functions virtualization is one of the large investments that we're making right now within our division. And network functions virtualization is all about trying to use common x86 hardware to run jobs and functions. And it's really targeted at the telco market. And this environment has very classically been a very tiered, very structured, very hardened environment. And these are people that don't change often. They make investments every seven years or so. And as they get ready to do their next deployment, they're looking at network functions virtualization and running these jobs, whether they're switches, routers, load balancers, all on common hardware. Does that software provide them the four nines, five nines or six nines that they need for the reliability to run in their environment? And these are the kinds of things that they're evaluating right now and that they're testing in their labs. So in thinking about your business over the next, let's say midterm, midterm is 12 to 18 months, is that fair? What are the things that we as observers should be looking at as indicators? What are the objectives that you have, the goals, sort of milestones at a high level? I know you can't share detailed plans, but things that we should be watching as sort of outsiders, as indicators that you're moving in the direction that you want to go. That's sometimes pretty hard for an outsider to look at because so many of these cloud and comms providers are pretty tight lipped with their products and what they're running. I mean, right now I'm a Verizon customer and an AT&T on my cell phone and I don't know what they're running in their data center, right? It's hard to know that. But those are the indicators that we'll be looking at as they're going through their transformation and the transformations that are going on in Europe and in Asia. We're gonna look at how well we're doing and supporting them with what they need and at the cost point that they need. So that's market share, that's a market share measure. Other things, other innovations that you should know about? Guys, I think we've got a platform launch coming up and I probably shouldn't talk too much about that, but it is coming up in the success of that platform launch as there's going to be a lot of products around that and a lot of technologies that's grouped in with that platform launch. Well, we guys do platform launches. It's the whole ecosystem. Exactly. It's not just, hey, here's a little product. It's deep. You guys got your tentacles everywhere. So, all right Jim, well listen, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate your perspectives and educating us on your business. You bet Dave, thank you. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live at IBM Edge. This is day one, Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick, we'll be right back.