 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Red Hat Summit 2015. Brought to you by Red Hat. Now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with Wikibon, here with SiliconANGLE TV's live coverage from Red Hat Summit 2015, downtown Boston at the Heinz Convention Center. Join with me for this segment is Radesh Balakrishnan, who's the general manager of OpenStack at Red Hat. Radesh, it was good to catch up with you again at the Vancouver OpenStack Summit, and welcome back to the program. Thank you, all is a pleasure. All right, so, you know, when we went to Vancouver, I mean, it was all about OpenStack, and, you know, boy, there were people out there saying, you know, OpenStack's dead, we move beyond OpenStack, OpenStack's great, we're moving there. You know, OpenStack's part of the picture, can you help, you know, paint for us, you know, how important is OpenStack to the overall mission of what Red Hat's doing, and, you know, how does it fit into the show here at Red Hat Summit? Right, excellent question. So, from our vision and mission perspective, the value problem that we're painting in front of our customers is open hybrid cloud, right? So if you're talking hybrid, clearly you need to get to a private cloud and being able to mix and match with public cloud. So, OpenStack is integral to getting to a well-managed infrastructure as a service private cloud, so that's where the tie-in comes. The other aspect also is that, off-laid, you see a lot of interest from, especially in Europe, where there are country-specific regulations, if you will, for standing at public clouds based on OpenStack too. So from both the perspectives or both sides of a hybrid cloud, OpenStack is a very, very pertinent conversation. Yeah, it's interesting. We spent the last, you know, the first couple of years of OpenStack is, you know, what is it? You know, there's a bunch of these projects. It reminds me in some ways of, if you look at Hadoop, it's, you know, there's all these sub-pieces and how does it put together? How do I put together all the pieces? At OpenStack, some of the foundation put forth that OpenStack is going to be the integration engine for the future, which means it's going to help me bring in new technologies, so to say like, you know, containers and the like. It's going to help pull those in. And it's going to work down, kind of, plug-in architecture with lots of different devices. Reminds me in some ways of what Linux has done for a lot of years. So, you know, are you guys happy with that positioning? Does that fit with your vision as to where OpenStack fits in the ecosystem? Yeah, so I'll probably have a slightly different take to it. I view OpenStack as an ingredient to the end destination that customers want to get to. So, if, you know, the two analogies that you use, you know, lead up to that, I think we are an alignment, you know, just to add a little bit more color. We're seeing a lot of interest from our customers for our storage offering, Enterprise-SEF and OpenStack together, so that they can get to a storage as a service implementation, for example. We're also seeing a lot of customers interested in OpenShift on OpenStack. FICO is a customer who presented here on the solution that they have in that footprint. Again, it's music to our ears from two perspectives. One is that it helps bring the whole portfolio together. Secondly, it helps customers get to a destination that they want to get to. In other words, OpenStack is not the destination, it's an essential ingredient to the destination. A third perspective also is that many customers want to get to a footprint whereby they can manage what they have with OpenStack as well. So that's where CloudForms, which is our cloud management platform, comes into the picture so that you can have an infrastructure which has got vSphere, Hyper-V, and hopefully our Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and OpenStack, and maybe Public Cloud too, all managed with a single pane of glass. So, you know, it's exciting to be being able to provide that solution or a building block for fundamentally the data center fabric of the future. Yeah, as I've been talking to people around the show and talking to people going to the labs, I hear CloudForms is one of the top labs there. Thick Docker was the other one, for some reason, Docker's pretty hot again. And talk to some of your channel partners, have a lot of discussion around CloudForms. Maybe you can explain for those that aren't familiar, you know, what does that bring together, CloudForms, and why are the customers that you talk to so interested in it? Right, so before I even went to CloudForms, it's important to understand that there's a potential confusion in the minds of some of the customers, whether OpenStack is that orchestration engine. We view OpenStack as a core infrastructure block, if you will. So that's why if you look at our product, it's a real OpenStack platform where we are co-engineering Red Hat Enterprise Linux with OpenStack so that you can stand up the core infrastructure. Now, what's missing from that equation is things such as higher level functionalities, such as, you know, having a self-service portal or ability to bring in business rules so that you can decide where to place the workloads, et cetera. So that's where CloudForms fits in squarely. The other dimension that CloudForms brings into the table is what I mentioned earlier, which is, how do you not have to go to different schools to manage an all infrastructure, which is vSphere-based, as well as the new infrastructures which is based on OpenStack, so CloudForms brings that continuity across both the infrastructure, so. Yeah, and I've definitely heard that confusion. I mean, if you look at OpenStack and you say, oh wait, they've got this project called Heat, is that going to be managed, or is that going to plug into managers? When you talk about the containers, there's things that are working with Kubernetes and Mezos, but it's not replacing Kubernetes and Mezos, it's allowing those to pull in, which is why, you know, I kind of like the term, the integration engine, because it says, it's not necessarily, you know, it's not doing the stack, it's working with the stack and pulling all the pieces together. So, did I get right the heat in those pieces to how those fit? Absolutely, I mean, you can view it as a framework that brings all these elements together. Now, you mentioned, you know, Kubernetes and containers as well. One of the unique advantages we have is that we are not in a camp where we believe VMs that we all end all of the world as well. You know, we are fairly agnostic in terms of being physical or virtual machines or containers that becomes the footprint in a customer environment. So, our OpenStack journey is also structured in a way that we're not taking a camp. In other words, we're not going to say, you got to put a container inside a VM and that's the only way to look at it. But rather, regardless of, you know, whether you pick physical or virtual or containers, OpenStack becomes a way to manage that infrastructure if you will. Okay, great. So, you know, Red Hat Summit, obviously a lot of announcements from Red Hat and the ecosystem partner. What's new this week in OpenStack? Well, the first and foremost is if you look at enterprise customers who have deployment plans, we recently surveyed about 310 decision makers on what are their adoption plans on OpenStack, you know, the overwhelming majority. 73% of them said they have concrete plans to get to OpenStack in the next 18 months. So, while that's good news, we also probe them and what are the challenges you're facing? So, the number one challenge that they mentioned was deployment and management of OpenStack itself. To squarely address that, we are making available a piece of technology called Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director. You might recall that about seven, eight months ago, we acquired a company called Inovance. They were seventh largest contributor to OpenStack at that point in time. They were primarily services focused, but they had assets around deployment and management as well. So, we took that as well as took TripleO, which is an upstream project, which is OpenStack on OpenStack, and some of our own technologies around install and configure and made this cool new technology which you're going to make available in our next release, which is coming up in summer called Dell OSP Director. The fundamental turning point is that you can make the life cycle management of OpenStack easier so that you can do in place upgrade, mix and match components as you're living with OpenStack moving forward. Yeah, so Red Hat's made a number of acquisitions in the OpenStack space. Some, I think about the intake acquisition last year. 100% open source company, really easy to integrate in. Jim was talking this morning about how Sage and the team worked right in. E-Novans, were they, I mean, 100% open source that they came in or was there any transition? They were 100% open source and more exciting aspect is that although they were a services organization, whatever they were doing, they were doing in an upstream aligned fashion to a perfect marriage, maiden heaven kind of thing. Okay, great. So, when you say the platform director, how does that fit into kind of the overall management and orchestration tools that are out there? There's so many customers used today. Is it a manager or managers? Is it your single point for everything OpenStack and beyond, have you helped frame it for us? No, it doesn't replace any of the existing management tooling. You think of it as it's a great way to get started on OpenStack as well as manage the life cycle of the OpenStack layer. It plugs into satellite, it plugs into cloud forms. It, for a matter, it is also written in a way that are architected in a way that third party applications can plug in too as well, so the core design point is to make sure that the life cycle management of OpenStack is made easy because complexity has been the enemy to mainstream adoption of OpenStack, so we want to knock that off. Okay, great. Let's talk about your partners because, you know, Redhead here at the show, you know, keynotes on stage, you know, Cisco, Dell, IBM, you know, lots of partners here in the ecosystem, you know, OpenStack, a lot of people look at it and just say, you know, a lot of the big guys kind of, you know, trying to figure out who gets what and, you know, who's going to own one piece of it. You know, how does Redhead look at this? Who's your partners? Who's going to market with you when it comes to OpenStack? Well, at the highest level, if you look at our strategy around OpenStack, we set ourselves a mission of saying we need to have the world's largest ecosystem around OpenStack, right? So that's what we made a statement around two years ago. So April 2013, we announced a certification program around OpenStack. Today we have over 275 partners who are certified with roughly nine to 10,000 solutions around OpenStack today. So we feel very good about that. Do you have a question about who are the, you know, among the 275, who are the ones who are deeply partnered with? I will call out Intel, Dell, and Cisco as three important partners. At yesterday's keynote, Intel highlighted the fact that we have picked four key areas that we are partnering with around upstream-aligned engineering efforts to make sure that enterprise-ready features are available on OpenStack. And we're also turning around and partnering with Dell and Cisco to make sure that this cool technology is, you know, massively consumed by the enterprises as well. So very excited about the three-way partnership that's between Intel, us and Dell, Intel, us and Cisco to make sure that we are accelerating the enterprise adoption of OpenStack. All right, so one of the things that I guess, those of us that track the market of OpenStack is, you know, how much of this is going to live in service providers? How much of it, you know, are going to live either on-prem in my data center or in some kind of managed-hosted environment? I mean, it's early days, most OpenStack. Today, last status I saw, probably three-quarters at least are on some kind of on-prem type environment because some of those bigger services like from IBM and HP still being baked out. Rackspace, of course, you know, doing what they're there. Where do you see things today and, you know, what would you expect it to be in the next couple of years? From our vantage point, at least for the next 18 to 24 month window, 80% of the weightage will still be on on-prem, private cloud footprint. Like I said earlier, we are beginning to see a lot of interest from country-specific service provider to stand up the public cloud based on OpenStack too. But, you know, given the fact that we have a lot of assets to bring to the private cloud equation, our primary focus is on the private cloud side of OpenStack. Okay. Walk us through, you know, the show here. Where else, you know, what have customers been doing? You know, hands-on sessions that have been popular. And, you know, what questions are you getting asked about OpenStack that you'd like to clarify for the marketplace? Right, you know, maybe three things I can call out. One is that, while we talk quite a bit about the enterprise side of OpenStack, OpenStack is also becoming very, very hot and exciting subject from a telco NFE opportunity. So in our boot properties, we are showcasing how making OpenStack carrier grade is a journey that we are on and how we are delivering on that promise. So, you know, the distinction is that some of the other players in the space are taking the approach of having a carrier grade OpenStack and an enterprise grade OpenStack, but we are taking the approach that we will make OpenStack carrier grade, right? So we can get to see some cool demos there. The second thing is... And I'm sorry, can you just give us a key difference or two, you know, what do the carrier folks need? Well, it has to do more with the determinism, so you want to be able to, you know, clearly have real-time capabilities. You need to be able to have a NUMA, CPU pinning, et cetera. So, you know, the context of the telcos is they've lived in a proprietary past with proprietary hardware and proprietary software, which is tuned for their environment. Now they want to embrace the commodity hardware, but get still the same features and functionality. So those tend to be revolving around determinism, if you will. So that's the telcos space. So back to your question about what else is exciting here. We're also highlighting the fact that the integration between CloudForms and the REL OpenStack platform, which is a function of the new version of CloudForms, so you can take a look at the demos that are available there. We do have a lot of birds of the feather sessions and sessions focused on SDN. So we offer the broadest choice of SDN controllers that are out there that are certified around OpenStack, so be it PlumGrid, Nuage, Unipor, et cetera. So we have some sessions. Most of those open daylight focused or is it, you know, beyond just that? Well, actually our play is not to be picking one side or the other. So we certified the commercially available ones today, but at the same time, we're also participating in the Open Daylight project. I mean, you guys have had quite an input on Open Daylight, some of the major contributors and the like, and helped shape that. Yeah, it shouldn't be a surprise that anything truly open is something that we bet on, so yeah. All right, great. Did we get through all three of your points? I think so. Okay, awesome. So yeah, I just want to give you the last word is people leave Red Hat Summit. What do you want them taking away when it comes to your group? The first thing is that we are missionarily focused on making sure that all the blockers that are in the way in terms of broad based adoption of OpenStack are systematically addressed, both from a product perspective, ecosystem perspective, choice of solutions perspective, and we've made tremendous journey in the last two years. Expect us to continue down that path. The second thing is that to some of the points we discussed earlier, we are seeing OpenStack as an ingredient to the end destination of Open Hybrid Cloud, and so bringing together the rest of the portfolio of Red Hat to make sure that that journey is smooth and dependable in a truly open way is something that we are focused on as well. And third and most importantly, we are very, very excited about, you know, standing on tall shoulders such as Cisco and Dell and Intel to accelerate the journey that's in front of the customers. All right, Redesh, great summary. Feel like I was doing my wrap up of Vancouver. I said, friends of mine said, you know, we're kind of going down the trough of disillusionment customers that I talked to, you know, really are talking about OpenStack, looking how to implement it. And it's something that's really starting to permeate throughout the industry. And, you know, my take on it was, we'll look back five years from now and just like Linux, it's in there. It's in lots of places and majorly important after we've worked through some of those bumps. So knocking down the red flags, moving towards maturity. Thanks so much for coming back and talking to you. Welcome back anytime. And we'll be right back with our final guest from Red Hat Summit 2015, right after this break. Thank you very much.