 And now, SiliconANGLE TV and wikibond.org, present a focus spotlight. Live from Las Vegas at VMworld 2011, host John Furrier and Dave Vellante, a human being, the Open Data Center, with support from Intel and EMC. Intel Inside. Okay, we're back. This is Dave Vellante of wikibond.org, and this is SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of VMworld 2011. This is the spotlight on the Open Data Center. John Furrier and I just did an in-depth look at future data center requirements and how scale-out data centers are beginning to spill in to the traditional commercial enterprise. Now, before we go into an in-depth panel on this, I have Dave Nicholson from EMC, who's part of the EMC Alliance program. And Dave, welcome first of all to theCUBE. Thanks for being here. It's a real pleasure to be here. Thanks. I'd like to have a conversation with you about an initiative in the industry that came about in quite an interesting manner that I'll have you explain, but it's the Open Data Center Alliance, which is an effort, as John and I talked about, you've got some real challenges in the data center. People are trying to scale out, they're trying to lower costs, they're trying to use commodity components. At the same time, the vendor community has to fund R&D. They want to make sure that they can support the requirements of the customers and at the same time make enough margin to be able to fund it back into R&D, not lock in customers. And so there's this alliance that brings together the vendor community and the user community called the Open Data Center Alliance. And I wonder if you could explain what it is and what EMC's role is in that. Sure. The Open Data Center Alliance is an independent consortium that's made up of approaching 300 end-user IT organizations. And the express purpose is to bring together the joint wisdom of all of those IT organizations and chart a path into the future when we're talking about things like cloud architecture. It was mentioned earlier, you guys did a great lead-in into this. Existing IT organizations don't have the luxury of starting from the ground up. And they have plenty of experience dealing with the vendor community, so they want to avoid some of the hard lessons learned in the past. Try to avoid having those repeat themselves. So things like vendor lock-in, they want to avoid. So there are a whole host of usage models that have been created which are the expressed wisdom of this user community. And from a vendor perspective, EMC is very, very interested to get that feedback and to have our hand on the pulse of that community. So you mentioned there are almost 300 end-user IT organizations with some examples. I know Lockheed Martin is one. Cap Gemini, BMW, JP Morgan Chase, it's a very long list. And so how often do you guys meet? There are ongoing sessions with sort of a working group format. And different IT organizations will lend different areas of expertise to different subject matters. Whether it's security or compliance, so it's an ongoing effort. Documents are published quarterly. Last June, the first iteration of the usage model document was rolled out. So talk about some of the outcomes. So you're mentioning documents, usage models. What can people expect out of this collaboration? So there's a commitment that's been made by the customer members that they will join together and commit to follow the guidelines that they've created. So we're talking about billions and billions and billions of aggregate IT spending that will be directed towards vendors who follow the guidelines that are set by the ODCA. So out of these working groups, what you'll see are guidelines around things like security. So the concept of end-to-end trust, the ability to move a virtual machine from a private cloud to a public cloud securely. The vendor community will look at these recommendations and come up with their best ways to solve the problems that are set forth by the ODCA. Well, Dave, thanks for taking us through that. We're going to bring in the broader panel here. We have Kerry Johns-Vano from Intel. Welcome, Kerry. And Greg Scott is also here. He is an architect at Intel. And we're going to talk about this notion of the data center of the future. I'm going to start with Greg, if I may. Greg, you heard us earlier talking about these mega-scale out data centers. And Dave just made the comment that the IT departments out there, the IT organizations, don't have the luxury of starting from scratch, like Google or Facebook or Twitter did. So take us back maybe 10 or 12 years ago when it was that the new web-scale companies were coming at you and saying, hey, we need to rethink the way in which we're designing data centers. What did that mean for the architecture of the data center? And how did Intel respond to that? So many of the web portals that started and move forward, they started with the standard server building blocks. So they used these components and they looked at these as elements that were not necessarily going to be 100% reliable. So they used software to try to drive out a reliability model that would allow these systems to go down and not lose data. So they really kind of started from the grounds up looking at it from, how can I go from a standard building block perspective and scale out to a very large size in a very cost-effective manner? So Kerry, I wonder if I could ask you. Intel, obviously a company has a lot of partners. You work with virtually everybody in the industry except your direct competitors. How do you see your ecosystem evolving in terms of supporting this concept of a data center of a future? What do you see as Intel's role in terms of facilitating that collaboration amongst the vendor community? So a couple of things. One, organizationally, and then I'll talk a little bit about what we're doing from a silicon perspective. But organizationally, about just a few years ago, we reorganized into the data center group that would focus on compute, networking, and storage so that you could have all those three focus areas together. And recently, we just incorporated the embedded group with us as well. And now we're the data center of connected systems group. And so those things are really critical in order for us to move forward. You've heard our cloud vision, right? In terms of the many connected devices and the dynamics that we need. And then from a silicon perspective, really what we're focusing on is being able to put the intelligence and the performance, moving beyond performance, right? And putting the intelligence into the silicon so that we can help the suppliers and the companies that are building these systems do things smarter, right? So it's not just about throwing a bunch of data on disks anymore. It's about being able to efficiently store that in all these portals and stuff and doing things like data dedu that brings a huge amount of efficiencies to the data center. Yes, so I wanted to ask you, we think of these data centers, we think of white box Intel servers and Seagate disk drives. But there's a lot more to that in the commercial enterprise. And I think you think of EMC, you think of big refrigerator size systems and million dollar storage arrays. And I know you got a big portfolio, but I watched the transition inside of EMC from a proprietary risk architecture and the symmetrics and now it's all Intel based. I know Pat Gelsinger was a big part of that transition. And now you've got Intel architecture across the line. First of all, that's not a trivial change. No, it is not a trivial change. So I want to maybe give you some detail there, but what does that bring you as a storage supplier in terms of advantages that translate into customer value? Well, I think that Pat Gelsinger does a really good job of talking about the disruptive changes that are underway. And we see ourselves as much more than a storage company, especially moving forward. EMC is an IT infrastructure company. And IT infrastructure, the way that that will be deployed and consumed, we're in the midst of a big change. And that change is going to be characterized by, in our opinion, standardization on Intel architecture, x86 architecture, more pervasive solid state technology and virtualization. So our partnership with Intel is a critical strategic partnership because of the way that standardization will occur. We've done that internally across our product lines and we're gaining great synergies amongst our product groups because of that. And we see things moving forward in a wholesale way. Our core expertise lay in the protection and handling of mission critical assets. So we believe we can extend that core competency out into this relatively commoditized world that we move forward into. And it touches on the Open Data Center Alliance. We're under no illusions. We know that in a future where we can no longer offer differentiated value, we fail to thrive. So we need to be able to continue to offer that differentiated value. And that differentiated value comes from that core competency that we've been driving for decades now. Doesn't it also give the supplier community access to a much richer tool set that they can leverage? And does that translate into time to market advantages that the future data centers can take advantage of? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I'll give you one quick example. TXT, Trusted Execution Technology from Intel. From a security perspective, if you can fully leverage that tool set, you can deliver end-to-end trust. You could move a virtual machine from a private cloud into a public cloud. And you can be assured that it is booted in a trusted manner. You can deliver geotagging information to assure that it's being booted in Omaha and not somewhere other than Omaha where it's not supposed to be booted. And leveraging that common tool set is critical. Now, Kerry, you're in marketing at Intel. Correct. But a lot of people might not know that you're also a techie. You hold, I think, nine patents, is it? No, six. Six patents? OK. But a lot. More than most marketing people that I know. Can you talk about how that background that you have of being a technologist, how that translates into marketing, and how you take advantage of that? Yeah, absolutely. I think as I've made that transition from engineering to marketing, I find that the technical background is very beneficial. Because as you bring products to market, it's great to have a technical background so that you could understand the business implications of bringing that product to market. Not just like trusted execution technology is a prime example. And I managed that project for several years. The usability and the ability to have that security that you need, but also be able to have it implemented and build that ecosystem out is critical, right? Hi, Greg, we're almost out of time, but I'd like to give you the last word here. I wonder if you could take an architect's perspective and lay out the vision of the CloudScale data center. What is Intel's vision? And what do you see as an architect as the future of that mega-scale CloudScale data center? Sure, so what we see happening right now is a move to provide better tiers of storage inside the data center. Today, many data centers have direct attached storage or storage that's inside the server and then external storage that's primarily focused on high performance applications. But if you look at the type of data that's growing and expanding faster than any other type, it's really this data that doesn't require the performance of very high-end storage systems, but they really require quite a bit of capacity. So what we're seeing is the emergence of what we're calling a capacity tier. This is a tier of storage that's going to house data like video, audio, unstructured data files, backup and archive. That's really going to help provide a more efficient area to place these large sets of data and manage them and provide the right level of performance of that storage versus trying to put it on your high-end sand where your mission-critical databases are running and such, which is very expensive, providing very high throughput, but you don't need that for large chunks of your data. Excellent, and actually, we have a little bit more time. I wonder if I could come back to you, David. From the standpoint of EMC, this notion of, and you hear at Joe Tucci talking about all the time, we will not lock you in, but lock-in is how vendors make all their money. So how do you reconcile that imbalance between vendor lock-in and open standards? Talk a little bit about that and give us some color on it. So I think that when, it's interesting, people use the word proprietary in a derogatory way sometimes. I'd like to think that proprietary means worth paying money for. In other words, it's delivering a value proposition that's differentiated and it's worth paying something for. The downside to proprietary or lock-in is the pain associated with migrating from one vendor's technology to another. So with our work with the Open Data Center Alliance, we're putting all of our cards on the table and we're saying, hey, we're going to make it seamless for you to be able to move away from our technology, but we will deliver a compelling value proposition that will make you want to stay. So the pain of migration to someone else's stuff won't be the reason why people are staying. The reason why they will stay is because we're offering compelling value. So I think differentiated value, proprietary nature, doesn't have to go hand in hand with the downside of vendor lock-in. You know, it's interesting that comment. I remember the days when the term open systems was coined and open systems meant unix. Yes, exactly. Today, to your point, you know, unix is supposedly locked in proprietary. So it ebbs and flows and I think the Open Data Center Alliance is a great initiative that brings the user community and the vendor community together. I wish you luck with it. Carrie and Greg, thank you very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing Intel's vision and participating in this spotlight. So stay tuned everybody. We've got some more in-depth looks at this issue of the Open Data Center, the Data Center of the Future. This is SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of VMworld Live 2011. We'll be right back.