 Okay, we're back, this is Dave Filante. We're live at the Dell Storage Forum in Boston. And this is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage of Dell Storage Forum. And this is our networking segment. I'm here with Stu Miniman of Wikibon.org, and we're here with Dario Zamarian, who is the Vice President and General Manager of Dell's networking business. Stu, we've been talking about the transformation of Dell generally in storage, specifically the networking group in Dell. It seems to be a pretty hot area going through a transformation of itself. Yeah, absolutely, Dave. So Dario, first of all, welcome to theCUBE. You and I first met a little over two years ago when you got put in as the General Manager of networking. And the first question I had for you back then was, Dell isn't really in networking. I mean, they have the Power Connect product line, but what is it? And your vision is really starting to come together. From what we talked about two years ago, yeah, the acquisition of Force 10 and some of the other software components of Dell are expanding like the recent acquisition of Sonic Wall. So first of all, congratulations, and can you tell us a little bit about what it means for Dell to have networking as part of the portfolio? Sure, first I'm glad to be here. Fantastic show here at Dell Storage Forum. So you're right, we met about two years ago. In fact, July 2011 and 2010 is when I joined Dell. Networking at Dell is a unique opportunity for the simple reason that, when you have data centers being virtualized, when you have the storage requiring much more resilient and high performance networking, when you have the whole East and West traffic on the data centers requiring different kind of networks, and you think now about the fact that Dell has been pretty good on servers and storage over time, networking was just a logical third piece to put to the table. So what we did was we augmented the original organic footprint that we had with the PowerConnect, and I went pretty quickly into a shopping spree, so to speak, because we all knew that there were a handful of companies that were interested in, and in August 2011 we closed for 4.10. Why is that important? It's important because in the data center you need a new fabric. You need a new fabric that has got a distributed core as the most economical way to deploy the right amount of power, the right amount of density, and having a very different cost acquisition profile. You connect the distributed core to a top of rack, you put it into a blade, and we just announced recently a 10 gig, 40 uplink full blade switch, and now you have a very different network for the data center. But the data center is just the beginning of the network, a revolution in a way. If you think about what's happening outside, you need to connect the mobile end users to the data and the application sitting on the network. So now there is an equal amount of opportunity that you can have by connecting the endpoint, the end user through a wireless network, going through the wire, aggregation layer, all the way to the data center. So we're active both on the campus as well in the data center for networking. Okay, so Dell has a long history and partnerships on the network space, and when you talk about convergence, people are concerned that we're just going to kind of make a converged play and it's going to be a lock in or a proprietary configuration. So can you answer people that are saying, well I'm just going to bring it all in house and Dell's not going to partner with others? Sure, no, it's a great question. I think the answer to the question comes in multiple areas. First, we all believe in standards. And if you believe in standards, particularly on the internet, a lossless, high performance, high bandwidth, fabric-based internet is the first starting point. The second one is that we are merchant-silicon driven. So if you actually build your solutions on merchant-silicon, the usual suspects, you will not, by definition, have the same level of proprietor-ness because the magic is in the software, not on the hardware. That keeps the network open. Not only that, but we continue to partner and we continue to make sure that partnership with Brocade is an example. We have a great partnership on the fiber channel side. Partnerships with Aruba on the wireless side, we do that too. And then more and more, we want to make sure that we interoperate with a core that today it is still fundamentally based on Cisco. So we are providing choices and being remaining open when you connect the fabric of the network. So, Daria, you're based in Silicon Valley. I am. And that's a lot of action out there. Not only just action, but action and networking. I mean, that really is the epicenter of innovation for networking. So, and you've been there since, you told us off-camera since 96. So you saw the first big bubble, I mean, the first famous bubble, right, the internet bubble, but there were little mini ones before that. And I want to come back and talk about that, but so what's happening in networking, it's frothy in a lot of areas, like social networking, so what's happening in the valley and networking and what are the big trends that are catching your eye? Yeah, well, first, Dave is important that we'll go back and reconcile and explain why did Dell want it to be in Silicon Valley in the first place? We haven't been there. Although we acquired companies in the past, what we didn't do is to make a major commitment, which we did. About a year ago, we opened up a Silicon Valley Development Center. We have about 700 people in that center alone, but we have about 1500 people almost trending to 2,000 in Silicon Valley. We put together acquisitions from Four Stand, now they recently acquired Sonic Wall, Wise as a footprint of engineering in Silicon Valley as well, Case, Bumi, Ocarina, Scale, and these are all acquisitions that demonstrates how much we really want to be at the center where the center of innovation is. And I was off camera, suggesting that we conveniently placed our buildings and our presence on 237, and I called that networking alley, because along that strip of road that goes from Sunnyvale to Milpitas, you have all the networking talent in the planet fundamentally. And therefore, it is a convenience for us to be part of an ecosystem of talent, an ecosystem of partners. And if you want to have innovation, not just in networking, but in IT in general, that's the place you want to be. Yeah, I mean, I'm sad about that being from the East Coast and the Boston area because we used to have a little bit of networking action going on. There's still some, it does pale in comparison. I know, of course, one of the areas Boston is trying to make a big splash and you've seen some announcements lately, the governor got in, it was big data. And big data, I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. Talk about big data, and there's a lot of action going on, cloud era, Hortonworks, we're actually out at Hadoop Summit this week. But it has impacts on the networking. So you take on big data and you're taking on the impact on networking. It's a great question because the way we are more and more thinking about our infrastructure offerings being converged, being standalone, networking or storage, when we bring it together, we believe in the power of what sits on top. When we say what sits on top are workloads, applications, and then you have the most innovative, the most bleeding edge, like big data. Big data is an opportunity to revalue the underlying infrastructure. Because if you think about the way big data needs to move data around, it is by definition demanding a high-performing data movement traffic, perhaps you want to put it this way, and therefore the power of the 10 gig, 40 gig, and making sure that the east-west traffic, when the data gets across either a chassis or adjacent racks, gets done with the right properties in the network. So for us, big data is one of the use cases that we put in front of our customers to bring together storage, bring together network, and making sure that the fabric and intelligent infrastructure serves the data and the applications on top. So what's driving that? You mentioned east-west, and Stu, you always talk about the flattening of the network. What's driving that? Well, the primary motivation to actually rethink the data center network is the fact that with introduction of virtual machines, you put a virtual machine on a particular server, and then soon you have to start doing virtual machine life cycle management. If you do the virtual machine life cycle management, it means that you want to actually place the virtual machine on the right server, then you have to actually move it to a different place, and underneath the network needs to be of help. It's supposed to be a hindrance like it was in the past, because you had VLAN boundaries, you had command line interfaces to deal with, and so forth. So what we are doing, we are rethinking the fabric of the network and the data center, primarily servicing the virtualization administrator, but not only, and therefore the network underneath needs to be rethought. And soft to define networking is one of the areas that is, they were very active so that you can rethink about the fabric of the network as reprogrammable, and being able to actually be simplified, so the workload and the application, big data, one of them, can be rethinking and reusing the network in a much more simple and effective way. So Dario, definitely SDN is the hot buzzword in the networking space. Lots of companies talking about their open flow initiatives. Can you tell us, where's Dell's positioning on SDN in general and open flow specifically? No, I'm glad you asked the question, because if you think about the most innovation comes from the individuals, the providers that have the least amount of legacy, and we do. So I'm very proud about the investment we are doing on soft to define networking. And I'm very careful about when we talk to our customers to distinguish the value and the properties that the soft to define network proposition gives you versus the underlying protocol, like for example an open flow. And if you think about the essence of what SDN gives you, is this, you want to put in control again the workload administrators with a network that can be programmed so that the traffic can go from point A to point B depending on what the workload needs are. So for us, soft to define networking is a way to go into a data center and bring in both the application, the storage, and more importantly the application lifecycle and virtual machine mobility. And now you got soft to define networking that leaves at the layer of a switch that is open flow enabled. We have those, a controller, and there are a few of them out there that we're partnering with, and there is a management layer as well. In fact, we demonstrated a number of use cases at Interop in May, just a couple of months ago on soft to define networking. So the question from those people that are starting to try out, which we see the universities tend to have a little bit of money, obviously the service providers are playing in this space. The controllers is kind of where the kind of the hot buzz is right now. Obviously you're partnering with a few people. Can we expect, do you have development going on in this space, anything you can share on kind of the open flow controller? Sure, first we have to recognize that the presumption that an open flow soft to define networking fabric creates a commodity switch, I think is something that we need to think very, very hard. Because if you deploy a switch fabric into a hybrid network, you have to make sure that you have open flow switch as well as the controller. So first myth that I want to debunk right here, you don't necessarily create a cheaper switch, you make it more powerful. We're partnering with big switch. As an example today, we're going to market with big switch and we actually specifically demonstrated that in Interop as well. And then the value again is about the combination of the switch layer, the controller, today's big switch, there are going to be others emerging and the management layer on top of it. The combination of the three provides the programmability of the network that we were discussing about. So we just got a couple minutes left here. I wanted to ask you, I want to go back to your California connections here. Do you actively work with the VC community? I mean, how does Dell interact with them? Do you have a Dell VC presence in Silicon Valley? Yeah, the way we work with the venture capital community is in multiple ways. The first one, you have the traditional, you call it personal connections. And yes, being in Silicon Valley, I do work with venture capital. Everybody wants to sell their companies to you, right? Well, yes, it does feel that way these days. For good reasons, because we are on a very much buildup of enterprise capabilities and innovation and talent coming in as well. But the second one actually, we just form Dell Ventures. Dell Ventures for us is an opportunity to be even closer, more formally closer, both to the venture capital community as well as the entrepreneurs. And in fact, we become more and more active in Silicon Valley to be doing that. So that's all Dell funded? It is all Dell funded activity. And you guys have put in, we do seed rounds? We do, we do typically look for a small seed capital, series E, you can go bigger. But there's a difference between M&A activity full time, which we do, as you can see pretty actively with Sony Core, Wwise and so forth. And of course, seeding the next wave of technologies that we are doing in the venture capital. So you're doing like half a million, million, up to two. Half a million, maybe even more than that actually. Up to two. More importantly is being able to combine what the entrepreneur and the small company brings to the table and the access that Dell can provide, both from an equipment standpoint, but equally from a go-to-market distribution standpoint as well. We're looking for the synergies built in upfront. Okay, so Dave, just one last question. So while we're on this topic, so you've made some acquisitions. What percentage would you say your portfolio is complete? We're 75% there. How much white space left in the networking environment? There's a lot of white space left in the networking environment. For the simple reason that, if you look about the way we're building our strategy is we're first paying attention to what I call the layer two, layer three fabric. So four stand, in my opinion, in our opinion, was a must to be able to have a solid foundation to which you attach to storage and service in the data center. But there's a whole area right there, not just on software defined networking, but also in the whole layer four, layer seven. One demonstrable point of that is our acquisition of SonicWall. It allows us to bring in network security, both for the branch and more and more into the data center and you can expect more and more advancements either from a partnership standpoint or from an acquisition standpoint in other areas of networking that makes sense from an overall strategy that we put in place. All right, Dario, you're getting the hook. I know you got a busy schedule. Thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you, my pleasure. Love to have you back. Thank you very much. Thank you for your perspectives. All right, keep it right there. This is theCUBE. We're live from Dell Storage Forum. We'll be right back.