 TheCube at Hadoop Summit 2014 is brought to you by Anchor Sponsor, Hortonworks. We do Hadoop. And headline sponsor, WAN Disco. We make Hadoop invincible. Okay, welcome back everyone here, live in Silicon Valley in San Jose for Hadoop Summit 2014. This is TheCube, it's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I've got a great, exciting, two guests from Cisco Systems here at the Big Data Event. Great to see you guys here at Cisco. Todd Brandt, Director of Product Market for Unified Computing and Raghu Nambiar, Distinguished Engineer, Data Center, Business Unit. Guys, great to see Cisco here. IBM, Cisco, the big whales are seeing big data as a big opportunity. You guys obviously, one of those big whales, Cisco, great business. So, the big data is a big part of the business, but I want to first get to some news that came out today. Number one, Cisco is number one this quarter in server shipments, blade server, X86 shipments in North America. Is that true? So, it's IDC just released their tracker data last week, and Cisco's on top in the Americas for X86 server revenue, vendor shares, for X86 blades. If you drill down into the US, number one there as well with 41% market share has, you know, where customers have placed it. So, it's a really exciting time for us. I think one of the other really eye-popping numbers in the data this week, this is a two and a half billion dollar server business that just grew 40% in the quarter year on year. So, that right now is really unheard of. Cisco's really leading the growth in the overall server market. So, first of all, I'm a skeptic at the beginning when it comes to server share. So, I've got to ask the question. Obviously, everyone's looking at that saying, okay, let's look at the numbers, let's unpack the numbers. So, it's Q1, calendar year, North America. So, and IBM got out of the X86 business. So, their customers are going sideways, going, hey, that part of it, HP has a server business. So, you're eating share from HP, IBM, and Dell. Correct. Yeah, consistently. This is our 17th consecutive quarter of share growth since we entered the business in March of 2009. So, this is just kind of continuous ramp. I think early on, there was a lot of skepticism. Right? You know, Cisco kind of crossing the aisle from the network buyer to the server buyer. And think about March of 2009, we're tailing right into the depth of the recession. A lot of people kind of wonder, is this the best time to go into a market adjacency? But it turned out it was perfect timing because at that moment, all of our customers are trying to figure out how to do this more efficiently. And we brought them a platform that allowed them to get a lot more efficient the way they ran their computing. So, perfect timing, got us off to a great start. And then, you know, the words out now that it's a better mousetrap. And our customers talk about it in a way that's even better than we can. And it's just snowballing. So, a lot of people were skeptical when you guys announced this because it was the whole John Chambers adjacency market strategy, right? Okay, let's go get some market expansion because Cisco's growing, it's a mature company now. Been around for a couple decades. Well, it was some of that, but I think it was also, we saw an opportunity, right? There really hadn't been a lot of innovation in the way all the pieces of the data center were put together. And it was, the industry kind of laid it on customers to figure out how to bolt it all together into a platform that you could run an application on. And what we saw was an opportunity to bring all that together and really optimize for virtualization as a virtualization and private cloud, public cloud waves start to take off. So, obviously, big data kind of telegraphs a little bit about like the software defined data center. So, I've got to ask you, what are the drivers on this? So like, obviously, you know, UCS has a promise and a plan, but the customer environments are still on-prem. I mean, I talked about cloud, we talked about the cloud open stack, whether it's open stack, VMworld, all the different shows. It's very clear, hybrid cloud is certainly the way to go, but not on-premise data centers are not going away. So, what's the landscape and what's the drivers from the shared growth? The server huggers are there and we love them, right? The server huggers, the bare metal huggers. I think the key differentiator that I point out as it relates here to what we're doing at Hadoop Summit is versatility, right? So the way we architected this system, it's fabric-oriented, right? We're not really making the server the center of the universe anymore, but it's more how everything's connected together. So, if you need a rack or a blade, fine. We can do that all in one system. If you really want an app that scales up or scales out, like we're talking about here this week, we can do that. If you want to go optimize for a physical, you know, bare metal environment or virtual, right? If you want to do, you know, DAS storage or out on the network, all of those different permutations of operating models that are driven by the apps, we can accommodate that all. You know, everyone can accommodate that, but they'd accommodate it by setting up different kind of little islands of infrastructure. We can do all that at the same time on one centrally managed platform, and it really plays into kind of the dynamic in the application space, and Reg, you can talk about that much better. Absolutely. You know, one question that you asked is, like, why UCS is winning, okay? The main reasons are the unique thing that we are bringing on the table from the architecture side, the unified management, unified fabric, advanced management capabilities across all the enterprise applications, okay? So if you look at, you know, your enterprise IT ecosystem, I would classify the applications in three categories. The traditional data managing tools, like Oracle, SAP and SQL Server, you know, running on Blade servers or Rackmon servers connected to enterprise class storage arrays. The second class is the emerging big data platform, like Hadoop and NoSQL and other distributions. And third is the fast data platforms and the real-time analytics. So what UCS is bringing on the table is a unified fabric-based architecture for all these three different type of applications. So on unification, some people get confused by this. I want us to just play this out. So the data center growth has server sprawl, whatever you want to call it, where you know, server sprawl, data center sprawl. People are trying to consolidate footprint, but yet they have issues, right? So take us through what is the use case for a customer? I might not have the same data center from one facility to the other or I might have different mix and matches. How do you guys fit into that environment? So if you look at, you know, as I said, enterprise, right? You have different type of applications solving different type of business problems. So you need like Oracle Database to solve your transaction processing application or SQL server, again, for transaction process application. But if you have a database application, there are two options. One is traditional data management systems, like enterprise data warehouses or the emerging Hadoop platform, okay? And when you talk about big data, the way we look at big data is another extension of your enterprise application portfolio, okay? Again, in a typical enterprises, you know, you will have a different type of applications. Okay, one is not going to replace the other one. So with UCS, you have the ability to manage your entire application portfolio from a single pane of glass. I mean, complexity is the bane of the data center, right? I mean, everything that our customers have asked us to do that's influenced the design of the product is all around simplification. They don't want to be in the business of IT manual labor, putting all these parts together. They want a system comes out of the box, ready to run apps. And crucially, to Raghu's point, all the different types of apps they might need to run without standing up all these different silos of specially tuned infrastructure to hit each one individually. We can tune, you know, you can basically, we pool our resources, you can assign those out, tune a pool, you know, a set of resources for our service profiles, a particular app, but you're not spawning new management environments. So that's really important. Another thing is like, if you look at today's IT system, right, scaling your infrastructure as your application demands is very, very critical. So that is another unique thing that UCS is offering using our service profile capability. So, what does this mean for me if I'm like, so we're at the Hadoop Summit, what is it, I'm a guy who wants to build in a big data environment. I got scale out, I love the message of scale out commodity servers. I don't actually want to get locked into Cisco. I'm scared about getting locked into Cisco. Talk to me, am I a candidate here or can you guys deliver? If I'm like, I want to just do big data, you know, I have some Cisco already maybe or all I care about is big data. Do you guys fit into that? Yeah, our value proposition in the big data space, what we have done is we have created an architecture called Cisco Big Data Common Platform Architecture. It is built based on the UCS fundamentals. You have UCS Fabric Interconnect for connectivity and embedded management using UCS Manager. And you have a rack mount servers with internal storage for storing your data. And you build a cluster of N number of servers based on your application demand. You distribute the data across all the servers and do concurrent processing, right? I mean, that is a typical scale out model. So, I mean, we are looking beyond Hadoop, okay? What we have done is we architected this solution to meet Hadoop, NoSQL distributions, and MPP databases. One common architecture, okay? That can meet pretty much all the demands of like a scale out applications. So, when you start with a, you know, 16 node, 32 node, whatever fits up your application demand today. But uniquely, we have the ability to scale as your application demands. So, I can put the toe in the water if I'm not a Cisco customer, if I'm a Cisco customer, it fits right into the architecture. So, there's nothing on me if I'm doing big data. I'm cool with it. And we're going to take you on the same commodity cost curve that the rest of the industry does, right? I mean, we're not using, we're using the same Intel parts, right? We're using the same types of drives, the same types of memory. It's really the way that we've constructed the larger system that's where we add our value, right? So, yeah. One thing I want to highlight here is like, if you look at, you know, the UCS last four years, so we have achieved 92 world record benchmarks. 94. 94, okay. You know, for CPU application, virtualization, database across the platforms. It's adversitility. Yeah, it is, it is, yeah. So, everyone cares about third party validation. So, you got that with the survey, with the IDC market share tracker. What about customer traction? Can you talk about any numbers, big picture, in terms of competitive wins, use cases? How many, we have about 32,000? We're north, I want to say, we're well north of 30,000. I can't remember it's 33 or 34, but we're well north of 30,000. And really there, it's the network effect. No pun intended, right, for Cisco. But it's- The network is the computer. The word's getting out. Scott McNeill is on the QB side. She just called it the cloud. I mean, IT admins are rightfully cautious creatures, right? You don't want to go do something that's going to, you know, you're going to cost you your badge. So, as more customers are seeing it play out successfully, you know, the word's getting out, even in a way that's better than the QB. So, whose lunch are you eating, and whose breakfast in the lunch are you eating, and then if you dinner will be yours? We're an equal opportunity luncheater. But I think if you look at the share shifts, obviously, you know, in the Q1 data, there was a big downturn for IBM. There's obviously a lot of uncertainty for those customers, but I think over time, it's probably HP and IBM, you know, where customers are already kind of thinking about- But Dell's pretty low in this survey, and where are they in this? Well, I think- Michael Dell always talks about how good his numbers are. Sure, so, well, and I've worked at Dell for a while, so, you know, I'm a little bit biased. Great company, but you know, there, you know, a lot of the differentiation they brought was adult supervision of the supply chain, but things that have really kind of now become table stakes, and now the game is really around true engineering innovation, and that takes the ability to invest and innovate, and Cisco has that in space. Well, that's why Michael Dell took it private, he's for like, you know, I'm done with this public offering, public scrutiny, just take the books off the public market. They've got a real strong play in SMB, right? Marius Haas is a great guy over there, they've got a good team of people. They can do volume and velocity, right? But, but in large part- But they're re-engineering, I mean, they're basically the, going private means we're going to go look at everything. We're going to still have big cash flow to throw off, but I'm sure they're going to like, hey, do you know, no more work right on Wall Street. So I got to ask you on the survey side, so how did you do it? What was your success? Because you know, we were talking before we came on about how the iPhone, one of the most- Oh yeah. For eliminating products of the, one of the most impressive products of our time. I think it's a context kind of thing, right? If you think about the iPhone, it was released in 07. It took three years for that product to hit number one in the smartphone category in the US, right? And if you think about the dynamics of what it took to hit that number one spot, it's a bunch of individual consumers seeing what is arguably the most iconic device of our lifetime, and saying, wow, I want that, switching over off you go. Think about the switching dynamics in a data center, right? And all the things that a customer's going to think about when they're going to decide on a new server architecture to put their mission critical apps on, and when they're also being presented with maybe a new way of operating together across their network storage and server teams. If you think about the amount of consideration and thinking that goes into that decision, for the iPhone to hit number one in three years, and for us to do it in kind of data center dog years in five years is nothing short of astonishing. It's pretty impressive. So, you know, we think the success is clearly to do that customers just want to plug in servers like they do routers. It's like, okay. But the thing about, you guys have done successfully with your other businesses that you have such nested products that have value. So it's really hard to switch from Cisco. Well, I think an example of the value together is what we do with integrated infrastructure. So, this wasn't in this most recent server tracker data, but in IDC's last integrated infrastructure tracker, if you look at the market for things like Vblock, FlexPod, VSpecs, integrated systems, all of those where Cisco is the underpinning for with Nexus and UCS for the compute and network component, we represent over 42% of that market. So the majority there. And that's actually before you start looking at, VSpecs isn't broken out, right? So if you add VSpecs in, it gets even bigger. So VSpecs would make the number bigger. So you're actually got an understated number. An understated number at 42. So that, and I think in many ways, you could say that with our partnerships, with EMC, with NetApp, we've almost created that category in many ways. And it's because of the synergy of the FAP approach that we have with Nexus, how that's extended into UCS and ultimately becomes a very flexible foundation for these private cloud initiatives that go on those integrated infrastructures. Todd, Ragu, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Cisco, great to see you guys here at Hadoop Summit. It's a great testament to what you guys are doing, very relevant, early days, and you guys are at the ground floor. Five years, you know. Well, early days for big data. Early days are big data, not for you guys. But we want to keep track of this further with you guys. Keep the conversation going. But I'll give you the final words. You're at the folks out there. What's going to go on next? What's the next big milestone? Your number one on the quarterly is to be consistent every quarter. What's the big to do item? So, you know, Paul Perez was our general manager for our server-businessed interview with CRN yesterday. And I'm paraphrasing the quote, but he basically said, I didn't spend 30 years in this industry to be number two. So if that gives you any idea where the mindset is of our leadership team and all the folks working into this, you know, I think there's a lot to be said for the fact that once that big domino falls in the U.S. and North America, you know, we often see the technology trend move out from there. So I think we've got a strong outlook. Cisco's got to be a lot of focus on the application side, too. And big data is a very strategic initiative for Cisco. You will see a lot of technologies coming from Cisco from the compute side, network side, platform management side, specifically focusing on big data. I mean, integrated systems is what it's all about right now. It's software, it's really awesome. You know, the old school's coming back. I said to everyone, you know, systems, networks, all the virtualization stuff all happening. You guys are great. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.