 Hey, welcome everybody. This is Jeff Rick with theCUBE. We are in the Palo Alto studio to have a CUBE conversation. It's kind of a break in the action with the show schedule so we get to kind of settle down and mend the gear, mend the equipment and have CUBE conversation in the studio which is very similar to a typical CUBE segment but we're not part of a show. We just get to sit down and again, go out to the thought leaders, get the great information and we're really excited to have a many time CUBE alumni, Jack Rondoni, the VP of Storage Networking at Brocade. Jack, welcome. Thank you. Good to see you. Last time I think we saw you was it at EMG World? Absolutely. We were bragging about your Ruthian shot calling. I know. On the impact of flash and really what it has done. IT version of pointing to the left field bleachers or something, but well every once in a while you gotta get one right. Absolutely. I think I have that one right. But we've got new news though. So tell everyone kind of what's happening today that you're so excited to announce. Yeah, so what we're announcing today is our next generation of fiber channel products. We call it Gen 6 fiber channel. It's a whole suite of products, modular chassis, extension blades, we're launching it with one of our best partners, Hitachi Data Systems. And we're very excited about this. This is a great milestone for the enterprise IT market. This is a great milestone for fiber channel. This is a great milestone for all of our customers that really depend on this technology to enable their businesses to run as effectively as they can. And I'm always struck by the types of applications that run over our networks and just the vital importance that they bring to the customer. And that is why people always ask about the fiber channel, it's long-term history, and it's future, but it's the constant innovation we're bringing into this market without compromising the reliability and the resiliency and the availability that really fiber channel delivers. So we're very excited about it and looking forward to talking about it today. Yeah, I don't think the ITs get enough chat like they used to back in the day, reliability, scalability, flexibility, elasticity, and they're still very, very important. But so what can people do today that they couldn't do yesterday? Obviously they've been running mission critical applications and the enterprise on your guys stuff for a long time. What does this mean for them today and going forward? So when we think about our, when we upgrade our portfolios, the one thing we always think about is, what are the customers doing? What are the key technologies that are out there that are driving change within the enterprise? And certainly one of them today is around solid state type storage, right? Flash being the predominant today. It's just such a huge change in the market and the storage market. And basically when we approach our fiber channel products what we're doing is adding not only performance characteristics but we're adding services into the product that will basically enable those very high performance, very low latency devices to really perform at the level that customers expect. Now we use the parallel, it's like when you're buying a, from a performance perspective, let's say a high performance race car, Lamborghini, something like that, right? You don't go put it on a, highway 237 at rush hour, right? You don't go put on the 101, right? For the Bay Area version, but pick your congested highway, right? Right, right. And so not only do we bring that performance but then, so not only do we make sure that the lanes are wide enough and that there's HOV lanes to use this metaphor, but we also then add the sensors throughout our networks, right? We have this new capability called IO Insight which allows you then to create almost like a Google map of storage workflows around for an enterprise. And it's vitally important because the two things, one is you're dealing at enterprise scale, right? At low scale, I always say if you're at small scale, doesn't matter what you do, right? But if you're a petabyte scale, which most enterprises are, it's vitally important. And then when you put on top of that this speed and performance that all flash brings, you have to have the instrumentation, you have to have the sensor net and that's what we added into our Gen 6 products. So when customers deploy Gen 6 fiber channel, what they can do now that they couldn't do in previous generations is get that just, workflow of IO going to in their entire environment. And that's important for them so they can maintain SLAs. Because like I mentioned before, the applications that run in these enterprises, if they slow down, there's impact, right? It's not just your people are a little unhappy, there's like major impact. So that's really what's different now than what we had in previous generations. So it's interesting, right? Because we always just move to your next point of failure and obviously the three components of enterprise compute are compute and store and then you gotta move the data around and the networking and people have often said, networking is kind of the last thing to kind of come along with this virtualization and then with this whole all flash and clearly the performance and the low latency was kind of the early adoption. But I think we've seen that the adoption of flash beyond just low latency and super high bi applications has been much faster than anybody anticipated. And you hear about the all flash data center or the all flash array. But what you're saying is, if you didn't have that Ferrari on an open lane, it's really not doing you much good. So you're really enabling really to take advantage of the benefits of the flash that you couldn't do before. Absolutely, and that's why when you think about fiber channel as a market, it's really, you know, flash is giving it a whole new sense of purpose, right? And that's why if you talk to most analysts and you read out in the press about attach rates, actually fiber channel has a higher attach rate. Like if the option is I have an array, am I gonna use ischus, am I gonna use fiber channel? It's got a higher attach rate with flash and it does let's say a standard kind of hybrid array that's primarily disks. And that's for obvious reasons, right? Because in a super high performance and if I'm running more apps, more workloads, the importance of that network, not only just in terms of its ability to handle the performance, but it's ability to have in it the resiliency characteristic to make sure it's always up, it's always perform and it's highly available becomes even more important, right? And so that's why we're seeing this kind of resurgence of interest in FC today. And we're very excited about it. That's why we're so excited about this announcement. The other kind of trend that we hear over and over is really kind of this app's first point of view. You know, what's the load, what's the app? And it used to be, you know, you had to build the app with the restriction to your infrastructure. But now with cloud and what's going on, people just, they assume the infrastructure is going to be able to adapt to the app. So what are some of the kind of second tier benefits you're seeing beyond just speed, beyond just low latency in these all flash situations with fast connectivity in your customer base? Well, I think the key point there is if the apps need to respond to, let's say, dynamics, right? They're happening within the infrastructure and be able to do without, let's say, even relying on the infrastructure. One of the things that they have to know is they need to have the information to be able to make, let's say, that kind of information or make those decisions. And that's where the analytics is so critical for us, right? That's why we launched actually an analytics platform last summer where we have an incredible pipeline on which basically goes and creates all of that workflow of information. And that's why with the Gen 6 environment we've built in some of that capability. Not everything you can do is standalone appliance but a lot of it. And by doing that, then when you're building applications you now get this feedback mechanism of how these workflows are going around in this environment that you didn't have that information before. And then it was much more of, I have my app, I have a server, I do storage and that's just the way I could think about it. So that's how I see the analytics we're building into all of our fabrics, by the way. It's not just fiber channel fabrics but we're doing this for our IP fabrics as well. Right. As you're out talking to customers what are some of the things that they're excited about that they're doing a little bit differently that they couldn't do before? Well, certainly when you talk to them about, let's say flash storage just to start with, right? The exciting thing about that is just the savings they get in terms of beyond just performance. And I always say performance enables consolidation and you certainly see that. You see better services being run now on these devices, meaning better DDo, better compression rates. The utilization of the storage is becoming much more efficient than it was before which is a great thing for customers, right? Because storage is one of those things. I always say it's like death and taxes. More storage is a given in life, right? It's gonna keep coming, right? So you can't stop it but it's like how do you contain it, right? And that's one thing that's very exciting about flash, right? So the TCO is very compelling. And then what we can do is with our Gen 6 environment or offering is we can then say to a customer, okay, now you can even consolidate the SAN environment. Let's say you had 10 switches, we can get you down to two switches, right? If you want to save OPEX, you always just manage less things, right? I always said the easiest way to get OPEX is just have less stuff to go manage, right? And we're able to go do that. So I think those are a lot of the big benefits, a lot of the things that when I hear customers talk about the all flash data center, which, you know, and there's, you know, of course maybe archiving is gonna be on disk or there's always certain areas where there's gonna be other technology but for predominantly primary storage, you know, that is the big discussion right now. And the cool thing is that, you know, there's technologies coming down the road, right? They're gonna take it to new levels of performance that I think will open up other application opportunities. Yeah. Well, you've got all kind of great lines. So, you know, if the storage thing doesn't work out of brocade, you can probably kind of sit on this side of the chair. But another one of the things, a quote from a prior interview is performance really creates opportunities because it really is a game changer, right? It's an opportunity to rethink the way you do things. Now, it's kind of funny, because that's juxtaposed to the fact that you're working with mission-critical applications at mission-critical enterprises. So, how do those things kind of, how do they kind of work together? Where, yes, it's your old critical application that has to stay online or runs your business, but at the same time, hmm, now I have this kind of new opportunity with these new performance characteristics that I didn't have before. How are they kind of mixing those things together? Is it new apps? Is it integrating new functionality? Is it doing stuff with those old ones? How are they kind of taking advantage of that opportunity? Yeah, I think a lot of it is kind of rose right in the middle there. It's how do they go and integrate new capabilities from those existing apps? And banking's a great example, right? I mean, I think we all have our mobile banking apps right now, right? I mean, you can basically deposit a check. I mean, you take a picture of the check and it goes in and bam, it hits your account. They're great, right? Yeah. You never have to go to a bank, tell her again. Telling somebody to get your phone. Yeah, right, no, no. But, you know, seriously, you lock those down, right? And I think if you just look at how they've been able to extend, let's say, what were core applications into this mobile arena, right? I think it's a great example of how they're able to go and build upon that architecture. And in the end, that stuff hits our networks, right? At some level. And to me, that's a great example right there, right? But, you know, the other cool thing is in this era of digital transformation which many enterprises are going through, you know, there's whole new sets of workloads that are being thought about. Even just within the banking sector, which you would say, oh my God, they're, you know, they're the most conservative, most regulated, everything. You know, there's whole armies of companies out there developing, you know, this finance technology and blockchain technology in other areas to really go and kind of change the games, right? So, you know, we certainly believe that making networks as reliable and high performance as possible, building the right analytics, so you can give that information to the apps to let them go do what they go do very well, make it as easy as possible. That's our strategy. We're doing it on FiberChannel today. We're doing it more and more on IP today, right? That's a big play for us in our data center today. That's how we differentiate what our core differentiations is. We'll build this large scale IP network, really optimized for storage. Again, for large scale, right? Small scale, do whatever you want. But for large scale that we think is going to be a winning strategy for us. So you're out in the field talking to customers all the day. I just love to get your kind of point of view on kind of the evolution of the cloud. So, you know, public cloud, we were just at Amazon a couple of weeks ago. Obviously, Amazon changed the game and really the way IT can work with swipe and test dev and having a public cloud. And then everyone thinks, well, I want to be like Amazon. I want to be like Google. I want to have an army of PhDs and build beautiful giant data centers with lots of colors that look like bicycles out in the middle of Oregon. But the reality is, from a workload point of view, Facebook is one application basically, right? It runs on Facebook. And also from just a legacy, compliance, they thought, well, but can I do private cloud? Can I get cloud characteristics in terms of elasticity and flexibility and kind of low dependent and be able to morph if I have more demand? And now, of course, there's hybrid cloud a little here, a little there. So I'm just curious, because you're really in the infrastructure. You can be running in a cloud, can be running at a data center, can be running all kinds of places. You're really about delivering, as somebody said, the cloud's just somebody else's computer. But you're in the heart of the data center where the action's happening. What's your kind of read from a customer point of view on the view towards public cloud versus private cloud versus hybrid cloud and the actual execution of trying to pick a strategy that plays there? And it's a tough question and every enterprise has a little bit different kind of view on it. I mean, you just read the CIO journal and you'll hear different stories about different companies all the time. It's been about J and J today. So 85% of all their apps are now going to be in the public cloud, but every company's a little different. I think the important point that you mentioned there is how many apps are really critical to their operation? A lot of the banking customers, just to pick on that sector a little bit, but it's not that different when you're talking about airlines or retail. They have thousands, thousands of applications. And some of them are having an ability to let's say move to a architecture that's whether it's public cloud or private cloud. Some can't, I think they all wanted to be able to get to that point where they have that flexibility. So I see that a lot, right? Is I want all my apps to be developed so I have the flexibility to deploy it on the right infrastructure based on my need of the business today. Where things are going public cloud are, frankly, it's a lot of stuff that let's say it's not necessarily core to the business, right? There's some things such as, Microsoft has done a fantastic job making exchange just so easy to run and insured right now with Office 365. That you see that work let it make sense, right? I mean, unless an email is one of those things that is important for litigation reasons or other stuff, right? But it just makes sense, right? And so I see that, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the applications that are running the airline or the bank or the retailer are going to necessarily say, hey, let's go spend those up somewhere else, right? I think it's such a core element of their business that private cloud architectures that delivers the same levels of agility and cost and the flexibility to go and say, hey, I'm going to take my app and add all these cool new mobile things to it or all that other stuff, right? Which you have to have to survive, right? Or the next FinTech revolution, who knows what that's going to be? You got to be able to agile enough to go do that. That's where I see our customers really being thoughtful on, yes, some stuff's going to go there. In the end, it's this hybrid cloud type of deployment in the end, but then how do I go and be more efficient, leverage private cloud type of models? And I've seen some great stuff and there's just not one architecture that's winning out over everything. There's just not one vendor or customer doing it all the same way. It's going to be a little bit of a mix, but the customers are doing the right thing. I think the vendor communities have some good offerings and it'll continue to play out. And I think in the end, 10 years from now, everybody's going to be in some form of a hybrid cloud. That's my opinion. And then as you talked about, there's never going to be any demand for less data. I mean, Pokemon goes filling up data centers all over the country. They just sent out today. It's going to be in 200 more countries. I think I saw a press release. So traffic jam's coming to you. It just keeps coming, right? And so just get your opinion, right? There's going to be more data driven a lot by mobile applications. And just the concept that data before was a heavy and expensive to store and you had to sample it and you weren't sure if you could keep it all. And the whole attitude has changed now, right? Digital exhaust is of value. Capture whatever we can. And we saw the Hadoop revolution was just turned 10 years old this year, but now everyone's talking about sparks and now it's stayed in motion. And real-time analytics, as things are happening, which just falls kind of right into your benefit. Yeah, no, exactly. And that's why we're excited about the Gen 6 announcement today, our commitment to building analytics into our products. That's why we're excited about NVMe. That's a new technology for storage. Some people call it SSD 2.0, but it's really going to take the device level, latencies and characteristics, essentially removes scuzzy and brings it down a whole other, whether it cuts in half or order of magnitude. It's going to be a significant level of improved performance. And with the new devices coming out from Intel and others, these 3D cross-point technologies where you'll be able to get then higher levels of resiliency because of the way these cells are architected, you're going to be able to do more with that data. You don't have to all, let's say throw it away, or that time-based element of it where you can't keep it. And so all of that is going to require a really big links that are highly reliable and have lots of instrumentation built into it, which is what we're working on and that's why I'm so excited about the future. That's great. I was going to give you the last word and say, Jack, what are you excited about in the future, but I think you just answered the question. Yeah, NVMe, that's why I said it even, SeaWorld. It's going to be the next big thing, right? The next job, write it down. That's my next call. What's today? 718, NVMe, although I think you already called that shot. Yeah, yeah, back a few months ago. All right, Jack. Well, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day and giving us an update, exciting news, and best of luck going forward. All right, thanks. Jeff Frick here with Jack Rendoni. You're watching theCUBE. It's a CUBE conversation in our Palo Alto studio. Thanks for watching. See you next time.