 Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2018, brought to you by Red Hat. Welcome back everyone. We're here live in San Francisco for the Red Hat Summit 2018 events, theCUBE's exclusive coverage. I'm John Furrier, the cohost of theCUBE with John Troyer, my co-host analyst as we use co-founder of Tech Reckoning, advisory and community development firm. Our next guest is Ranga Rangachari, Vice President and General Manager of Red Hat Storage. Great to see you again. Welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you and my to me again. So as Dave Vellante said, storage is where all the action is as well as data to be stored somewhere and with the cloud. Yeah, it's still important. You guys have a new concept. Yeah. Unstorage. Yeah. Unstorage. What is the un-storage? So you know, I think essentially when we got into the storage business, the status quo was your traditional storage mainframe. So wheeling a piece of gear and scale up and have things, workloads running there. But with the movement towards cloud, especially with hybrid cloud, where you really can take a physical box and move it into a public cloud. And in the last year or so with containers, the common theme that's emerging is things like agility, things like scale, things like almost having ubiquitous storage all around the place is becoming more and more important. So our thought is it almost turns the storage, the phenomenon of storage industry upside down and it's sad because the things that people cared about decade ago on the workloads are no longer relevant or less relevant than where they are today. So and you know, it seems to be, people seem to get it. So we're pretty. Well, I mean, we've seen the trend on servers, server less, storage less. So in a way, this is a resource pool. It is. It's not just, you know, a box, provision the lungs. It's more like, okay, I need storage. Exactly. There's the button. I don't care where it comes from. Is that what we're kind of getting to? Is that what you mean? That's exactly what it is, right? I think in a different way, right? One of the customers said, I want storage to be everywhere, but nowhere, right? In that they want storage to be pervasive, but it has to be invisible. So they don't have to worry about things like zoning and lung masking on one piece of hardware and do the same thing with 20 other pieces. What our solution offers is truly a scalable storage platform that's running on any kind of footprint, physical, virtual, private or public cloud, but it's a common user experience across all these different footprints. And that's why, and the other part of this thing, which is also different is, yes, it does appeal to the storage admins, but more importantly, as you become, as organizations evolve into cloud architects and DevOps, what they care about is like, I want storage to be as invisible as possible, but yet I want to make the developers more and more productive. So I think we are, I feel we are on the right track in appealing to how storage needs to be viewed. It's a no brainer in my mind. If you're DevOps and you want to go total cloud, all horizontally scalable, you need agile apps, storage just to be available, programmable, all that's great stuff. Question I have for you is what's the impact of customers who have been buying boxes for decades? So what's the impact of them with Red Hat? So I'm still going to need boxes and still got to put them somewhere. And so if it's an on-prem cloud operations, they still need storage. If it's cloud, obviously those guys have their own storage, but I mean, but you still got to plug it in and put storage in there. What's the impact of the customer? Well, I think they, I mean, we do, we are practical enough and we realize that no customer is going to pull the plug one day and move on to the next infrastructure. What we are seeing more and more is as those new workloads which are dramatically different than the previous workloads as they come into play, then they have to rethink how they develop, deploy, provision, storage, infrastructure. So that's where we come in. So it's not about an either or, it's about how do you augment your existing storage infrastructure. But think about it in a modern way. Think about how it can future-proof your architecture so that it scales. So that's the way we think about it. So Ranga, how should people be thinking about storage at different levels of the architecture? There's actually a lot of storage here. There's been a lot of sessions in the ecosystem expo. There's a lot of storage providers, but you've got the, we've been talking a lot about OpenShift and OpenShift on OpenStack here at the show this year. So if you're at the OpenStack layer versus the OpenShift layer, how should you be thinking about storage and what products are plugging in at those layers? Yeah, so I think with OpenShift, a couple of days ago, earlier this week, we announced 150 customers. We're actually deploying our product which is called Containability Storage, CNS for short. And what that does is it enables, it's essentially the storage infrastructure for OpenShift. So wherever OpenShift goes, the storage footprint follows along. Whether you're running it on-prem, on top of virtual edge infrastructure, or you're running any of these public clouds. And the most interesting part of that is, getting back to the earlier conversation, we try to make it as invisible as possible. So you, we as vendors, don't have to say you've got to deploy it here. So make it as invisible as possible and as seamless as possible. Now with OpenStack, it's a different set of experience because that's kind of infrastructure up, right? And the advantage for us is, if you look at the OpenStack community in general, almost 70% of the OpenStack community in one way, shape, or form uses a SEF project. So it's almost become, I wouldn't call it, almost de facto standard on how people manage the storage infrastructure with an OpenStack. But even there, the cardinal rules is still the same which is when they think about spinning up a machine, the storage has to be attached automatically to it and then scale as they're computing the storage infrastructure scales. And this, the scale is the question, we're living in a new era of cloud economics. Scale is key and we hear the customers here at Red Hat, Red Hat's customers talking about things like horizontally scalable, asynchronous, sets of microservices, levels of granularity. This is the programmable new fabric that is new infrastructure of the internet. 30 year old stats are from e-commerce to DNS. They're going to be abstracted away with a new abstraction layer. Hello, OpenShift, hello, new things, Kubernetes and containers. So with that being said, there's an opportunity. Yes. So when you, that's kind of like the state of the art now but you're all going to do an enterprise like, what's Kubernetes again? So you got some enterprises are learning about Kubernetes and it's good news for them. They're going about containers where they don't have to throw away anything, you just containerize it. How is that impacting the classic definition of software defined data center and software defined storage? Because those are the two important trends that have been happening in software defined. Does it accelerate it? Does it change it a little bit? What's your thoughts on those two things? You know, I think it accelerates it and here's why that's a great question, right? Because when you look at organizations, especially in the container era, right? Where there are certain companies who are actually, I would argue, even bypassing, you know, and building a container first strategy as opposed to a cloud first strategy, right? So that's the way they are thinking about this. And when you talk about view through that lens, storage essentially is an application as opposed to infrastructure. So you have to talk S3 you have to talk whatever protocol it is. So it just becomes part and parcel of that. So the challenge or what vendors or customers are looking at us is how can you make it as seamless as possible so that they can get, the acceleration can happen? Because a year ago, I think nine months ago, there was a survey that was done where customers said the top two issues with move to accelerated move to containers were storage or persistent storage and security. And I think we have a firm handle on what we need to do to really help our customers at least address the storage part of the discussion. And what's the make of the use cases right now? How many customers are deploying this roughly order of magnitude, you know, it's going to details, but I mean, you know, how's the migration going? Early adopters in mode now? Is it fast followers? Is it the rest of the market? I think it's still in the early adoption and the truest definition. I think, you know, using the baseball analogy, we're at the top of the first inning, right? And most of the workloads tend to be new workloads, right? There are some lift and shift cloud native, but there's some, but as far as the use cases, it is, you know, across the board, you know, no sequel databases, CI CD, Jenkins type of environment. So we strive to support all of them. It's not vertical centric either because storage is storage, it's used by everybody. Yes. There is one layer where it's a certain ISV apps that tend to be focused on certain verticals, but they happen, right? Or high availability or high ops, you might need financial services. Or stretch clusters and all those kinds of things. Okay, cool. I love the concept of un-storage, but that does leave in the cold a little bit the people that we used to call storage admins, right? So now multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, a lot of examples and a lot of demonstrations. Storage operators. Call them operators, they're well done. Does the job of the storage, the person you, who used to be in charge of storage, it seems like that changes now. Even with un-storage, a lot of automation, a lot of fabric, a lot of pooling does it itself, like you still are on a lot of different clouds and things like that. How are you talking to customers about that? So, you know, I think one of the, I think the term that people have started to use is generalists, right? If you look at it five years ago or seven years ago, you had a silo of systems administrators, storage administrators and network administrators. Now the whole vertical silos have been, in a way, normalized, so now you have a pool of people, might be the major is in storage, but the minor is in networking, or the major is in compute, the minor is in storage. So it really helped the organizations that we talked to, now they say, look, I have a collective pool that can help me where I need to get to. So this plays really well with that audience, absolutely, it does. And the hybrid cloud equation, your thoughts there, because obviously, Wikibon did a great piece of research on true private cloud and they are looking for more folks to participate in the next set of surveys, so I'd love to introduce you to Peter Burns over there, but the point is, was true private cloud report showed that on-premise cloudification, whatever you want to call it, action was much higher and growing. It's not so much on-premise has been dying or being reduced, it's transitioning to on-premise cloud operations, which is essentially cloud, right? It states a fat edge or the cloud is, what is the cloud? So you're seeing still a lot of work being done on-premises, where they're recasting, reimagining cloud. So, how is that impacting the hybrid cloud? Because hybrid cloud is not really a product, it's a, yes. It's a journey. It's a connection between two clouds. So, storage data, the data plane, control planes are all kind of like evolving. Your thoughts on multi-cloud, and as hybrid starts to accelerate, that's the path, obviously, open shift, but your thoughts on- So, I think the way we think about this, right, hybrid cloud is, it's not so much that everything is running on a, I absolutely agree with the research, right? With the customers that we talk to, they are still building the foundational business on, I got to, you know, keep the private cloud, make it as seamless and as efficient as possible, but there are certain workloads that lend themselves well to running on a public cloud. Now, it's not so much as a disjointed, these two universes never talk to each other, it's how do we, as Red Hat, try to bring the two together, so the user experience, you almost, in a way, try to minimize where it actually runs, right? Now, so that's an open shift as a classic example of that, right, where you're running it on-prem, but you're also running it on these public clouds. There's certain workloads that are great on a public cloud, an example of that is one of the largest airports in Europe, so they use open shift on-prem, but they also use open shift on a couple of other public clouds. And our CNS product, which is a container-newly storage product, runs along all those three environments, so to the end user, it's essentially a seamless experience, so that's, you know, as the journey unfolds, I think that's what you're going to see more and more, is about how do we start to, now that the storage foundation is built, how do we start to expose some data services that can run across all these different clouds? And that's going to be killer, so give us an update on the business, how's the business, what's the roadmap look like, what are the things that you guys are working on, what's the priorities? So, businesses, like we announced on Monday, 150 net-new customers over the last 12 months, and that's just on one specific strategic imperative, which is container-new storage, or help the customers with the container journey. Besides that, I think there are two other pillars we are focused on. One is on hybrid cloud, right, which is how do you really provide the best storage substrate for customers building private clouds and hybrid clouds, and the third part is hyperconvergence, because I think what our customers are asking for is they've seen the power of hyperconvergence, but they want an open source variant of hyperconvergence for their environment, and stay tuned on that front. We've got some exciting stuff going on, and we'll keep you folks updated on that. Final question, what's going on in the show here for you? What's notable for the folks that are watching who couldn't make it here? What's the vibe? What's the hallway conversation? What's the customer conversation? Share some color of what's happening here at Red Hat Summit here in San Francisco. So, a lot of things, but I wish we had time, but I know we're short of time here, but a few things I want to highlight. One is all the technology demos that we did yesterday, today, and some in the tomorrow timeframe, you'll see our container-native storage or our storage portfolio be an integral part of every one of the teams that we're talking about. So that's, and we've got very positive feedback on that. We have over two dozen tech sessions, and my understanding is I don't go to those, but my understanding is they've all been standing room only. So there is definite customer interest in where we are, what we're doing. So we, this show has been awesome show for us. Yeah, storage is the gift that keeps on giving now. It's going to be storage less and unstorage. Whatever word you want to use. I like storage less because it sounds like serverless, which doesn't mean anything either, but it sounds good, but it's a full of resource. Congratulations. Exactly. It's a hot area, certainly having programmable infrastructure means better development time, and certainly making it elastic and making it horizontally scalable is the dream we all want to get too fast. So be there. More live coverage, bringing you all the action here in the open here in Moscone. You're at the middle of the floor. It's theCUBE coverage of Red Hat Summit 2018. I'm John Furrier with John Troyer. Stay with us. We'll be back with more after this short break. Thanks, John.