 Hi, this is Stu Miniman with wikibond.org here with SiliconANGLE TV's live wall-to-wall continuous coverage from EMC World 2012 in Las Vegas. And joining me is Dominic Delfina from Cisco. Dominic, first time on theCUBE, thanks for joining us. Yes it is Stu, thanks for having me here, I really appreciate it. Great, so what we look to do here on theCUBE is we find the smartest and most interesting people with the most interesting stories and try to extract the signal from the noise, share it out there with the community, and help people understand some of the big changes that are happening in the ecosystem today. So Cisco obviously is a long partner of EMC's. Can you give our audience a little bit of a background as to your position at Cisco and how long have you been working with the Cisco EMC relationship? Sure, sure, thanks Stu. So I've been at Cisco now 12 years and I'm the senior director of systems engineering for the Americas for our data center product portfolio. Data center today includes our steroids networking products, our data centers ethernet switching portfolio as well as our unified computing system platform. I've been with the EMC relationship from day one. So about 10 years now I've been working very closely with them in the field and it's evolved many times over over the course of the last 10 years and I think the relationship is now as strong as it's ever been. So to be specific Dominic, I think we're talking about when Cisco actually got into solutions that support storage applications. Cause actually I worked when I started at EMC back in 2010, Cisco was a partner with some of the kind of the Oracle solutions. There was a kind of an ECO, the EMC Cisco Oracle relationship. So it is a long, deep relationship. Most people are where Joe Tucci and John Chambers have a long relationship, but storage side absolutely for the last 10 years and if you're handling the field guys, you're pretty much the Cisco version of Chad's Hackage. I am the Chad's Hackage for Cisco data center products. Okay, so what is face melting in your opinion with what's going on in the field between Cisco and EMC? You know, I think it's really interesting. You know, we rolled back the clock 10 years. You know, we were a provider maybe to EMC of storage networking technology, which was a small sub component over the overall solution. They would provide to a customer, but I think through our innovation in partnership with EMC and our joint solutions, we really started to take a systems approach with our customers where they saw a joint value out of that. Now fast forward over the course of the last 10 years and the evolution of convergent infrastructure, what we're doing with our joint investment, not only Cisco and EMC, but VMware and Intel with the VCE company, right? The virtual computing environment and the advent of Vblocks, which is our convergent infrastructure stack, in addition to now Vspecs, which is more an architectural reference based design, we're really to be able to bring to market a complete cloud solution for our customers. So the relationship is growing every quarter extensively. Our joint business is growing together extensively. Our number of customers, our number of references, the size of their infrastructures, the repeat business that we're doing at them has just really taken a relationship to the next level there. Okay, great. So, you know, Wikibon has done lots of research looking at this trend of converged infrastructure. And while it is relatively new, Cisco's been at the forefront here. One thing that doesn't get talked about a lot is, you know, we know about the hardware, we know about the software, but it's really the services. It's the people like your systems engineers, the VCE folks that are in the field and the channel is a very significant part of that. So, you know, how does the channel play into what your folks in the field are doing? Can you talk a little bit about kind of Vblock and maybe even Vspecs? Right, right. So, certainly Vblock is a very advanced solution. It's, you know, what we would refer to as Cisco as a whole offer or a whole stack relative to, you know, customers kind of had a choice in the market before it was kind of roll your own, right? Or maybe use an architectural reference and try to base your systems design off of that. So, with Vblock, it's a total converged infrastructure. It's a fixed configuration. It's standardized, it's tested. There's a single number for support. And we take it to market through VCE and our mutual channel partners between Cisco and EMC. Now, as you look at Vspecs, something that's more flexible, it's a very, very channel-centric program in order to get to the market. So, the Cisco proven partners, the EMC proven partners, my apologies, it will be the exclusive route to market for Vspecs. It gives that flexibility for customers who kind of want, I want to follow a reference architecture or design, but I don't necessarily want a fully converged infrastructure. I may want to deviate from it in some aspects in some areas in certain ways. And the channel partners will come in with their professional services in order to tailor that solution really specifically and finally down to those customer needs. Okay, so one of the biggest challenges we see in moving from kind of the siloed approach to more of the converged holistic approach is really skill sets. And your team has to be at the kind of forefront and have done this. So, the network silo, the storage vaults, cross-training, people can't know everything. We talked about automation is going to help that, but still, there's an evolution of the workforce. And so, in the channel side, we've seen some of the good Cisco partners have really started a whole brand new data center practice around what they're doing. I wonder if you've got any stories to tell us as to what you're seeing. It's a great point, right? Because as we look at converged infrastructure today, as we look at bringing compute network storage security together, that combined skill set doesn't really exist in the market today, right? So, it's typically those technologies have existed in silos or as my customers tell me, cylinders of excellence, right? But even as a challenge for Cisco, bringing UCS alone to market, where it's a converged infrastructure, where you require networking skills, you require computing skills, operating system skills, security virtualization skills, it creates a substantial opportunity for our partner base, right? You know, customers who have long standing practices with networking or storage or compute aren't typically going to go into those partners for help in those areas and for services to provide help in those areas. But when it comes to the more leading edge to converge infrastructure, that skill set that's not necessarily readily available in the market where it can go higher or rent some talent for a short period of time, they're really going to rely on those partners. So, those partners are investing early, building those skill sets, building those next generation data center practices within their organizations and they're seeing the services stream associated with having those practices and making that investment. Okay, so, obviously there's a long and deep partnership between Cisco and EMC. We've actually seen an increase of networking here at EMC World. For the first time in a few years, it's actually not conflicting with Interop, so maybe that helps get a few more networking people here, but we're also seeing some partners that hadn't been here before. So, Brocade and Cisco obviously have long storage relationships, but now Juniper and Arista are here, Broadcom's here, some of those partners. So, can you maybe kind of address what you think this means to the ecosystem and the relationship with Cisco and EMC? You know, I think it's a great point, right? So, as you look at cloud, right? Cloud's about a system, right? And a system is, again, the combination of compute, network storage, virtualization, applications, orchestration, automation, all of those things working together and in conjunction with each other. And I think as we look at historically how vendors competed for customers' dollars, it was all about price, performance, power consumption, latency, all of these finite, detailed metrics, which are still important. It's still important to be a market leader in those different technology areas, but now the real value that you bring to customers about operational transformation, right? How do I help you transform your operation, make these things, deliver on the promise of cloud, make these things easy to use, make them work in conjunction with each other? Does the virtualization guy know networking? No, but he has a lot of networking implications on deploying virtualization, so how do I bring some of the simplicity of networking into technology like vCenter, right? And give him the abstraction mechanism he uses to administer an environment while maintaining the security and diagnostics from a networking perspective. All of those things are very important. It's more and more as you look at the data center as a system, if anyone component along the way breaks, it doesn't work. So it's about bringing these things together as a system now, that's delivering on the promise of cloud. Okay, so just change direction a little bit here. If we look at the networking industry itself, to be honest, if you look kind of through the late 90s and most of the 2000s, it was almost a little bit boring. Cisco just dominated the market. In technology, we were going kind of in step functions, but there's so much innovation happening in networking today. We talk about flattening the network, things like fabric path from Cisco, SDN and OpenFlow are lots of discussions. Can you tell me, where do you find your field force educating, what's the hottest technologies that customers want to learn about and what things are people actually deploying today that people might be surprised to find out about? Well, I think on the theme of convergent infrastructure, obviously you see converged IO or unified IO, whatever term you want to use for that. Extremely hot technology, if you look at- So just what technology specifically, are you talking about FCOE? Fiber chair over here today, FCOE, I think the skepticism on the adoption of FCOE has been quelled at this point, particularly with the success of the So let's dig into that for a second, because if we look at FCOE adoption, I think there was a huge hype that it's going to kind of knock off fiber channel and it kind of changed this market. And it's right now mostly at the server end, either embedded in blade servers or because some of the top of rack, obviously the Nexus product lines. And obviously I think we have some proof points that Cisco has of end to end and broader deployments, but most people I think would say that it hasn't reached general adoption and fully out there, and it seems to be Cisco leads a lot of that conversation. So do you have any metrics or adoption stories you can share? I can tell you for this, looking at FCOE in an existing production environment, nobody's going to shut down their servers, rip out their NICs and their HBAs, replace them with CNAs, bring them back up. So it's more a brownfield, greenfield opportunity moving forward. So if you look at our 13,000 plus UCS customers, 90% of them using FCOE as their predominant mechanism for access to IO. Yeah, and you see on HP's latest generation and even IBM on the blade servers, they have lots of FCOE inside. It just doesn't get talked about a lot because it's kind of hidden from everybody. And now combine that with SDN, right? And you know SDN, it's kind of like using the term cloud meets a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I'm sorry, was that cloud or cloud? Yeah, cloud, sorry. It's all right. I'm sorry to slip maybe. Some of the big terms out there. But you know, I think if you look at SDN, right? There's a lot of different methodologies for SDN. OpenFlow is one of them. Overlay Networks is another one. Control Plane Centralization, Control Plane Separation, and a combination of those will play out over the next few years as this starts to mature. Look at the concept of a unified port on a Nexus 5000, right? The ability to program my infrastructure to be whatever I need it to be for the deem requirements for that infrastructure, right? So do I need it to be Ethernet? Do I need it to be 5.1 Ethernet? Do I need it to be native fiber channel, right? So that is a mechanism of SDN as well. So I think as you see these different things playing out here over the years, you will see that FCE adoption continue to increase further and further as we go along, okay? Great, so can you tell us a little bit about what have you seen here at EMC World? Have you been to the show before? Where are you spending your time this week? Probably my seventh or eighth time here at EMC World. I think they've got a room named after me here at the Palazzo. There's a meeting room named Elfino. So again, I think as we see continued emphasis and interest for our customers on convergent infrastructure, we certainly see continued emphasis and interest in the green plum solution for Hadoop type environments or big data requirements. Certainly lots of talk about V-Specs, the Cisco EMC relationship, the Cisco EMC VMware relationship and where that's going to their next level, what are the solutions and whole offers we'll bring to market. Every year you kind of come back and there's always a little level of skepticism from the client base about what the latest things EMC and Cisco are doing together are and are they real? And then kind of the next year you see the interest level, all right, we really want to talk to you about this. Spent a lot of time with the folks with EMC and many various customers while I'm here today, definitely seeing a lot of talk about next generation data center architectures and again, cloud and how we bring this to market there as well. Okay, well Dominic Elfino, thank you for joining us here in theCUBE, exciting times in networking, lots going on obviously between the Cisco and EMC relationships and with VMware, big data, lots of coverage on the Data Scientist Summit here at EMC World. So thank you for joining us here on theCUBE and hope you'll join us again sometime. Thanks again for having me Stu, pleasure being here.