 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. Welcome back, we're here at VMworld 2019. You're watching theCUBE, it's our 10th year of coverage at the event. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host this afternoon is Justin Warren and happy to welcome back to the program Bob Gaffari, who's the general manager of the Enterprise and Cloud Networking Division at Intel. Bob, welcome back. Great, great to be here, thank you. So it's interesting, I think back last year felt like every single show that I went to, there was an Intel executive up on the stage. We talked about the TikTok of the industry is something that drove things. So last year, a lot going on. Haven't seen Intel quite as much, but we know that means that you and your team aren't really busy, a lot of things going on here at VMworld, why don't you give us the updates since last we spoke? Well, so I think we have to just go back a little bit in terms of how Intel has been involved, in terms of really driving just hold this whole network transformation. I want to say it started about a decade ago when we were really focused on trying to go drive. A lot of the capabilities onto more of a standard architecture, right? In the past, people were encumbered by challenging architectures, using proprietary kind of network processors. We were able to bring this together Intel architecture. We open source DPDK, which is really this fast packet processing library that we basically enabled the industry on. And with that, there's basically been this, I want to say this revolution in terms of how networking has come together. And so what we've seen since last year is how NSX, VMworld NSX itself has really grown up and be able to sort of get to these newer, interesting usage models. And so for us, what really gets us excited is being really involved with enabling hybrid cloud, multi-cloud from a network perspective. And that's just what really gets me out of bed every day. Yeah, and SDN has, I think, gone from that early days where it was all a bit scary and new and people weren't quite sure that they wanted to have that. Whereas now SDN is a thing. It's people are quite happy and comfortable to use it. It's now a very accepted way of doing networking. What have you noticed about that change where people have gone, well actually it's accepted now. What is that enabling customers to do with SDN? You know, I think what SDN really does, it gives a lot of the enterprise customers and cloud customers and a lot of others really the flexibility to be able to do what you really need to do much better. So if you can imagine, the first stage, we had to go get a lot of the functions virtualized, right? So we did that over the last 10 years, getting the functions virtualized, getting them optimized and making sure that the performance is there as a virtual function. The next step here is really trying to make sure that we can enable customers to be able to do what they need to in their micro services and be able to sort of do this in a micro segmented kind of view. And so, and also being in a scenario where you don't have to trombone the traffic off to be there, be it inspected or load balance and bringing that capability in a way in a distributed fashion to where the workloads need to happen. Yeah, well you mentioned micro segmentation there and that's something which has been spoken about again for quite a while. What's the state of play with micro segmentation? Because some customers have been trying to use it and found it a little bit tricky and so we're seeing lots of vendors who come in and say we'll help you manage that. What's the state of play with micro segmentation from your perspective? You know, I would say the way I would categorize it is micro segmentation has definitely become a very important usage model in terms of how to really contain policies within certain segments. So one, you're able to sort of get to a better way of managing your environments and you're also getting to a better way of containing any kind of threats. And so the fact that you can somehow segment off areas and if you basically get some kind of attack or some kind of exploit, that's not going to go out of that segmented area. To some extent it simplifies how you look at your environment, but you want to be able to do it in a fashion that helps ultimately the enterprises manage what they got on their environments. So Bob, one of the things that really struck me last year was the messaging that VMware had around networking, specifically around multi-cloud. It really harkened back to what I had heard from NYSERA pre-acquisition. And of course now VMware extending that with the VMware cloud in all of AWS, the partnerships they have also extended with Azure, with Google and on-premises with Dell EMC and others. And a big piece of that message is we're going to be able to have the same stack on both sides. You could kind of explain where does Intel fit in there? How does Intel's networking multi-cloud story dovetail with what we're hearing from VMware? Right, so I think the first thing is that Intel has been very involved in terms of being into any on-prem or public clouds. We get really involved there. What we really try to do and my team does is really focusing on the networking aspects. And so for us is to not only make sure that if you're running something on-prem, you get the best experience on-prem, but also the consistency of having a lot of the key instruction sets in any cloud and being able to sort of manage that holistically, especially when you're looking at the hybrid cloud environment, where you're basically trying to communicate between a certain cloud, it could be on-prem to another cloud that might be somewhere else, having the consistent way of managing through encrypted tunnels and making sure you're getting the kind of performance that you need to be able to go address that. I think these are the kind of things that we really focus on. And I think that for us, it's not only really bring this out and improving our instructions at architecture, so most recently what we did is we launched our second generation Xeon scalable processors that really came out in April. And so for us, that really takes it to the next level. We get some really interesting new instruction sets, things like AVX 512, we get also other kind of, more of like inference, analytic inference capabilities with things like deal boost that really brings things together so you can be more effective and efficient in terms of how you look at your workloads and what you need to do with them, making sure they're secure, but also giving you the insights that you need to be able to make the kind of decisions you want from an enterprise perspective. Steve, it always amuses me how much Intel is involved in all of this cloud stuff when it would support, we don't care about hardware anymore, it's a little terribly abstracted. Come on Justin, there is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer and there's a reasonable chance there's an Intel component or two in there, right? There's an Intel inside and the fact that Intel comes out and is continuing to talk to customers and coming to these kinds of events and showing that it's still relevant and that the technology that you're creating exactly how that ties into what's happening in cloud and in networking, I think it's an amazing credit to Intel's ability to adapt. Yeah, no, it's definitely been very exciting and so not only have we really been focused on how do we really expand our processor franchise, really getting the key capabilities we need so anytime, anywhere you're doing any kind of compute we want to make sure we're doing the best for our customers as possible. But in addition to that, what we've really done is we've been able to sort of round out our platform capabilities from a solution perspective to really bring out not only what has historically been a very strong franchise for us with what we call our foundational NICs or network interface cards, but we've been able to sort of expand that to be able to bring better capabilities no matter what you're trying to do. So let's say, for example, you are a customer that wants to be able to do something unique and you want to be able to sort of accelerate your own specific networking kind of functions or virtual switches. Well, we have the ability to do that and so with our Intel FPGA N3000 card as an example you get that capability to be able to expand what you would traditionally do from a platform level perspective. I want to talk about the edge but before we go there, there's a topic that's hot conversation here but one I've been talking to Intel for a lot of years that containerization in general and Kubernetes more specifically, where does that fit into your group? I mentioned it just because the last time Intel Developer Forum happened, a friend of mine gave a presentation that was working for Intel and just talking about how much was going on in that space and I made a comment back there this few years ago, we just spent over a decade fixing all the networking and storage issues with virtualization. Aren't we going to have to do that and again in containerization? Of course we know, we are having to solve some of those things again. So, we're working on the position. And for us, as you guys probably know, Intel has been really involved and one of the biggest things that sometimes is kept as a secret is that we're probably one of the bigger employers of software engineers and so Intel was really, really involved. We have a lot of people that started off with open source Linux and being involved there and of course containers is sort of an evolution to that and for us, really trying to be involved and making sure that we can sort of bring the capabilities that's needed from our instruction set architectures to be able to do containers, Kubernetes and being able to do this efficiently and effectively is definitely key to what we want to get done. All right, so that was a setup I wanted for edge computing because in a lot of these we have different architectures we're going to be doing when we're getting to the edge. Starting here at a little bit at that show, that this show, but it's an overall piece of that multi-cloud architecture that we're starting to build out. Where's your play? Well, so for us, I mean, the way that we look at it is we think it starts obviously with the network. So, when you are really trying to do things, oftentimes the edge is the closest to where the data is being realized. And so for us, making sure that we have the right kind of platform level capabilities that can take this data and then you have to do something with this data so there's a compute aspect to it and then you have this to be able to really ship it somewhere else, right? And so it's basically going to be to another cloud and might be to another microservice somewhere else. And so for us, what really sets the foundation is having a scalable set of platforms sort of this thick to thin kind of concept that sort of says, depending on what you're trying to do, you need to have something that can go and sort of mold into that. And so for us, having a scalable platform that can go from our bigger Xeons down to an atom processor is really important. And then also what we've been doing is working with the ecosystem to make sure that the network functions and software defined when and that we think sets a foundation to how you want to go and live in this multi-cloud world. But starting off at the edge, we want to make sure that that is really effective, efficient. We can basically provide this in a very efficient capability because there's some areas where this is going to be very price sensitive. So we think we have this awesome capability here with our atom processors. In fact, yesterday was really interesting. We had Tom Burns and Tom Gillis basically get on this stage and talk about how Dell and VMware are collaborating on this and this basically revolves around platforms that are based on the atom processor and that can scale up to our Xeon D processors and above that. So it depends on what you're trying to do and we've been working with our partners to make sure that these functions that start off with network are optimized and you can do as much compute or as little compute as you want on that edge. So of the customers who are starting to use Edge because it's kind of new, but it's also kind of not. It's been around for a while, we just used to call it other things like Robo. For the customers who are using Edge at the moment, what's the most surprising thing that you've seen them do with your technology? You know, what is interesting is we sometimes get surprised by this ourselves and so one of the things that some customers say, well, we really need low cost because all we really care about is just low level. We want to be able to deploy this into a cafe and we don't think you're going to be able to hit the price spots because they automatically think that all Intel does is big zions and we do a great job with that, but what is really interesting is that with our atom processors, we get to these very interesting solutions that are cost effective and yet it gives you the scalability of what you might want to do. And so for example, we've seen customers that say, yeah, we want to start off with this but networking is it, but you know what, we have this plan and this plan is like this, maybe it's a 90 day plan or it could be up to a two year plan in terms of how they want to bring more capabilities at that branch and want to be able to do more, they want to be able to compute more, they want to make decisions more, they want to be able to give their customers at that place a much better experience and we think we have a really good position here with our platforms and giving you this mix and match capability but easily be able to scale up and do what our customers want. Great, Bob, when I think about this space in general, we haven't talked about 5G yet and 5G, Wi-Fi 6, expected to have a significant impact on networking, we were talking a little bit about edge, it's going to play into that environment. What are you hearing from your customers? How much is that involved with the activities you're working through? You know, it's definitely really interesting. So 5G is definitely getting a lot of hype. We are very, very involved. We've been working on this for a while Intel is on the forefront of enabling 5G, especially as it relates to network infrastructure, one of the key focus areas for us and so the way that we sort of look at this on the edge is that a lot of enterprises, some of them are going to be leading, especially for cases where latency is really important. You want to be able to make decisions rather quickly, you want to be able to process it right there, 5G is going to be one of these interesting technologies that starts and we're already starting to see it and enable these newer use cases and so we're definitely really excited about that. We're already starting to see this end stadium experience being enabled by 5G, what we're doing on the edge, there's experiences like that that we really get excited when we're part of and we're really able to provide this model of enabling these new usage models. So for us, the connectivity aspects, 5G is important. Of course, we're going to see a lot of workloads used 4G as basically a predominant option and of course the standard wired connectivity of IP, MPLS and other things. Bob, I want to give you the final word. Obviously Intel, long partnership, as we know, current CEO, Pat Gelsinger spent a good part of his early part of his career at Intel. Give us the takeaway, Intel VMware from VMworld 2019. You know, I mean, we've had a long partnership here between Intel and VMware. We definitely value the partnership for us to start off with virtualized servers a while back. Now we've been working on networking and so for us, the partnership has been incredible. We continue to be able to work together. Of course, we continue to see challenges as we go into hybrid cloud, multi-cloud. We are very excited in terms of how we can take this to the next level and we're very happy to be great partners with them. All right, well, Bob Gaffari, thank you for giving us the Intel networking update. We go up the stack, down the stack, multi-cloud, all out the edge, IoT and all the applications. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back for our continuing coverage of VMworld 2019. Thanks for watching theCUBE.