 Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2020. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back. This is theCUBE live coverage of Cisco Live 2020 here in Barcelona, Spain. I'm Stu Miniman. My co-host for this segment is Dave Vellante. John Furrier is also in the house. We're doing a little more than three days wall-to-wall coverage. One of the big themes we're talking about this week is in this complicated world, networking, containerization, applications going through transformation, future work, simplification is something that is very important. And helping us to really tease through and understand some of the integration, some of the announcements, where Cisco is helping to simplify the environment. Happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE alumni, Kostav Das who is the Vice President of Product Management at Cisco. Katie, thanks so much for joining us. Oh, I'm delighted to be here. Great to be here. So, up on the main stage, they walk through a number of the announcement. Liz Santoni was talking about some of the pieces and two of the announcements from the main stage are under your purview. So why don't we start there? Walk us through the news. Yeah, so there's two major announcements. The first one's called Cisco InnerSide Workload Optimizer. And what it is, is it's a way to have visibility into your data center, all the way from the applications. And in fact, the user journeys within those applications, all the way down through the virtualization there, through the app servers, through the container platforms, down into the servers, the networks, the storage lines. So you have a map of the data center. You have a common data set that the application owner and the infrastructure owner can both look at. And you finally have a common vocabulary so that it helps them to troubleshoot faster. So in a fast reactive way, they're talking the same language, not pointing fingers at each other, or do things proactively. Do things proactively to prevent problems from happening. When you see a server running hot, a virtual machine running hot, an application server running hot, you can diagnose it and have that conversation and cure it before it happens. My understanding is that's inter-site and there's also some integrations with AppDynamics there, AppD, which of course we know we talked to that team at the Amazon, the cloud shows a lot. So that common vocabulary spans between my hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Am I getting that right? Correct, and there's two pieces even within that. So certainly there's integrations with AppD. So from AppD, we get information about the application performance. We get information about the business metrics associated with the application performance. We get information about the journeys that user take within the application. And then we take that data, then we stitch it together with infrastructure data to map how many applications are dependent on which application servers. How many VMs are those dependent on? What do those VMs run on? What hosts are they dependent on? What networks do they traverse? What lungs do they run on? And each one of these is an API call into that element in the infrastructure stack. Each API call gives us a little bit of data and then we piece together this data to create this map of the entire data center. There's a multi-cloud aspect to it obviously. And so we also make API calls into AWS and Azure and the clouds out there. And we get data about utilization of the various instance types. We get data about performance from the cloud as well. So two announcements. Insight workload optimizer and Hyperflex AppDynamics. Is that right? Hyperflex application platform. So if we look at the, let me just put these two in context. Every enterprise is doing two things. It's trying to run application that it already hosts and then it's writing some bespoke new applications. So the first announcement, Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer and integration with AppD, that helps us be more performant for applications we're running to help troubleshoot faster, to help reduce cost in a multi-cloud environment. The second announcement Dave, the Hyperflex application platform is really targeted towards developers who are writing new applications on a container platform. And for those developers, IT needs to give them a simple appliance like easy to use container as a service platform. So what HXAP, Hyperflex application platform is, is a container as a service platform driven from the cloud. So the developer gets the same experience that they get when they, when they go to an AWS and request a pod, but they get it on prem and it's fully 100% upstream Kubernetes compliant. It's curated by us. So it's a very simple appliance like feel for development environments on containers. Okay, so Insight Workload Optimizer, it really attacks the problem of sort of the mystery of what goes on inside VMs and the application team, the infrastructure team, they're not talking to each other. You're bringing a common, like you said, parlance together. Correct. Really so they can solve problems and that trickles down to cost optimization as well as performance. It does. Got it. And if I understand Hyperflex app platform, it's really bringing that cloud experience to on prem for hybrid environments. For new development. So if you're developing on containers, you're probably using Kubernetes, but you're probably using this entire kind of ecosystem of open source tools. And we make that simple. We make it simple for developers to use that and for IT to provide that to developers. Okay, since underneath there's Hyperflex, is there still virtualization involved in there and how does this tie in with the rest of the Kubernetes solutions that we're talking about with your cloud partners? Great question. So yes, there is Hyperflex underneath this. So to develop, you need a platform. The best platform we think is an elastic platform that is Hyperconvergence. And with Hyperflex, we took storage, networking, and compute, packaged it together, made it super simple. We're doing the same thing with Kubernetes. So it's the same concept. How do you take complex things, package it together, and make it almost appliance-like? We're doing the same thing with Kubernetes. Now, let's do the point about virtualization is a good one. A lot of container deployments today are run in virtual machines. And they're running virtual machines for good reason, for isolation, for multi-tenancy, for all these kinds of good news. However, the promise of containers was to sort of get rid of the tax that you pay when you deploy a virtualization environment. And what we're giving out right now is no virtualization environment. So we have a layer of virtualization in there. It's designed for this use case. So it does give the isolation. It does give the multi-tenancy benefits. But you don't need to pay additionally for it if you're deploying on containers. You're saying there are no licenses. So some KVM-based type solution on the server. Correct. Underneath, it makes a lot of sense. If you look at the large virtualization player out there has been talking about how do I enable the infrastructure that's all virtualized and everything and bring them along to that journey. At Bridge, if you will, to the environment. Sure, containerization, sometimes I want to be able to spin it up super fast. It lives, it dies. But if I'm putting something in my data center, probably the characteristics I'm looking at are a little bit different. Correct, correct. The other thing it does, and then you touched on it a little bit, was we have a homogenous environment with the major clouds out there. So one of the things developers want to do is they want to develop in one place and they want to deploy in another place. So develop on Amazon and deploy on-prem or Azure. We've got an environment where we've got very native integrations so that it's natively integrated into EKS and AKS. And we facilitate that develop anywhere, deploy anywhere, motion for developers who are trying to build on this. So okay, what does a customer have to do to consume these solutions? So our customer right now for this one is IT, IT operations. And maybe it helps to peel back a little bit on why we did this. I had a lot of customers come to me and they said, listen, I'm IT. I'm in the business of taking shrink-wrapped software, taking enterprise grade resilient infrastructure, putting that together. I'm not in the business of getting open source drops every week, every day, every month, putting them together, making sure all the versions line up and doing that again and again and again. So the putting together an IKEA piece part of open source software has not been traditionally the IT operators business. So our customer is that IT operator. What they need to do is they buy it if they may have a Hyperflex system already or they buy a Hyperflex system. They add on a license for the Hyperflex application platform. They have an inner-site license. This is delivered from the cloud. So inner-site manages that deployment, manages the life cycle, manages the upgrades and so forth. If they have a state that spreads across multiple sites, inner-site is cloud-based so it can actually reach all those sites. And so they're in business. Okay, so very low prerequisite. You're just going to have the product and you can add on to it. Yeah, have the Hyperflex system add on to the license. You're done. So I'm curious, how unique do you see this in the marketplace? I think at the keynotes this morning I said there's no other company that can actually do this. I wonder if you could sort of add some color to that just to help our viewers understand the uniqueness of Cisco's offer. Sure. So I think it's unique on a number of different dimensions. The first dimension is Hyperflex itself. We've had an appliance mentality to this for a long time. And we've really co-designed the software and the hardware to build the most performance hyper-convert system out there. We took the same approach when we went down the path of Kubernetes and building this container platform. So it's co-designed software and infrastructure together. The second thing is we said we're going to be 100% upstream Kubernetes compliant. So if you look at the major offerings out there in this space, there are often several months actually behind where the open source is, where the upstream open source is. And developers don't want that. They want the latest and greatest. They want to be current, right? So we are far ahead of most of the other offerings out there in terms of how close they are to upstream Kubernetes. The final piece is InnerSight. InnerSight gives us immense ability to have scale, where especially if you're developing on containers and microservices, you're talking tens of thousands, many tens of thousands of end nodes, maybe more. And being in the cloud, we have the scale and we have reach. So a lot of our customers have distributed assets and branches and hotel chains with hotels and so forth. InnerSight allows us the ability to actually deploy across this kind of distributed asset class with the centralized kind of provisioning. You see a huge uptake right now in containers generally in Kubernetes specifically and sort of across the board. But I wonder if you could comment on how much of that demand and activity is coming from sort of the traditional IT roles versus you know, the hoodie developers. Yeah, that's a great question. So yes, there is a, on a hype cycle, it's at the top of the hype cycle that everybody, in actual adoption, I think it's pretty good as well, right? So that is, every company I talk to is doing something in containers, every company. But usually it starts with the developers. It starts with, like you described with the folks in the hoodies, and that's great. I mean, they're experimenting, they're getting this thing. What hasn't happened is it hasn't gotten mainstream. And things get mainstream when IT picks it up. It certifies, hey, this is resilient, this is enterprise grade, I can stand behind it, I can manage the life cycle of it. That's what we're enabling here. Giving IT a path to mainstream containers, to mainstream Kubernetes, so that the adoption kind of takes it from that hype cycle to mainstream adoption. Do you see KD new sort of data protection approaches or thinking as containers come into play? I mean, they're ephemeral, you know, microservices sometimes aren't so micro. Like you say, they're running oftentimes inside of VMs. How will people think about protecting containers? Yeah, that's a big topic in itself. One of the things that we've found is even though they were supposed to be ephemeral, they require persistent storage. So we've implemented within Hyperflex, a CSI plugin that provides that persistent storage layer to containers. Then once you do that, all of the data protection mechanism of Hyperflex come into play. So within the cluster, the resiliency, the triple replication, the backups, the partnerships we have with the other data protection players, all of those mechanisms become available instantly. And those are enterprise-grade. Those are ones that IT knows and can stand behind. Those become available to containers right away. But it's a great, great question also. I just want to go back to you when you were talking about InterSight and the reach and the scale of the solution. Reminds me that Cisco has a strong legacy of Robo environment. What I'm curious about, we've talked a little bit about edge computing in the past. Where are you seeing edge today? Where is that going? What should we be looking at in your space when it comes to edge? Yeah, no, it's a big part of our customer demand. In fact, we haven't seen, I think all flash was the other technology that took place so fast, but edge has been really phenomenal in its growth rate. Over the last year, we've seen, I think probably up to 15% to 20% of my engagements are in this space on at least the hyper-convert side. So we see that as a big growth area. More and more deployments are happening at the, they're being centrally managed, deployed at the edges. And so the only solution that scales to something like that is something that's based on the cloud. But it's not just enough to be based on the cloud. You've got to maintain that entire life cycle, right? You've got to make sure you can do installs, upgrades, OS installs, health monitoring. And so as we built that inter-site platform, we've added all those capabilities to it over time. So we started with, hey, this is a SaaS-based management platform. And then we added telemetry and then we said, hey, we can actually match signatures. Now machines can manage machines. So a good amount of my support calls are now machines calling each other and fixing themselves. So that's just path-breaking from an edge environment. You don't have an IT person at an edge location. You want to drop ship and appliance there and you want to be able to see it remotely. So I think it's a completely new operating model. I know we've got to go, but I want to run your scenario by Katie. She's too shared with me for one of my breaking analysis. I said, look, Dave, you mentioned flash. That's what triggered me. So think of containers and Kubernetes. Think of like flash. Remember flash used to be the separate thing. We used to think it was a separate market. And now it's just everywhere. It's embedded and everything. So the same thing's going to happen with Kubernetes. It's going to be embedded in solutions. This is exactly what you're doing. It's by 2023, we're probably not going to be talking about it as a separate thing. Maybe even sooner. It's really just going to be ubiquitous. It's also that. No, I totally agree. I think the underpinnings that you need for that future are you need a common infrastructure platform and a common management platform. So you don't want to have a new silo creator. And this has been a philosophy even for hyperconvergence. We said, hey, there's going to be converting infrastructure. There's going to be hyperconvert. But they need to be the same management system. They need to be the same fabric. And so if it's silo, it's not going to work. Same thing for containers. It's got to be the same platform. In this case, it's Hyperflex. Hyperflex runs virtualization. It runs containers with HXAP. You get all of those benefits that I talked about. It's all managed via ender sites. It's a common management platform across both of those. And at some point, these are all tools in somebody's toolkit. And you pick the right one for the job. Well, Kostup, it is wonderful to hear the company that has been dominant in one of the silos for so long. Of course, helping to bring the silos together, work across the domain. Congratulations on the news. Always great to catch up. Yeah, great to be here. Thank you. Thank you. Back with lots more here from Cisco Live in Barcelona 2020. Thank you for watching the queue.