 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman, coming to you from our Boston Area Studio and really happy to welcome to the program to dig into some of the latest on what's going on in the multi-cloud ecosystem. First, welcoming back to the program, not too far from where I'm sitting, Joe Caradana. He is the Vice President of Engineering Technologies with Dell Technologies and joining him, someone he knows quite well, Rich Sanze, who is Vice President of Engineering at Google Cloud. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Great to be here, Stu. All right, so Joe, we've been watching Dell Technologies, how the cloud portfolio and solution has been maturing and working with the ecosystem. So maybe you set the table for us. What's Dell doing with cloud? Why are we sitting here with the department of Google? Well, we're here to talk about our 1FS for Google Cloud offering. We did something really special with Google here. We brought together the power and scale of our 1FS file system, along with the economics and the simplicity of public cloud. And together, I think what we did is define a new standard for a scalable file in public cloud where we have a game-changing performance and capacity. We have a full range of enterprise-grade data management capabilities. And we enable real hybrid cloud and open up new use cases for our customers. Excellent. Thanks, Joe, for setting the table on that. Rich, let's pull you into the conversation. Before we go into the Google thing, give us a little bit about your background. You've been in storage. As I hinted at, you worked with Joe before and tell us about your role inside of Google. Yeah, so I actually joined Google a few years ago responsible for storage and storage for all of Google in addition to Google Cloud. And then, you know, big company things. You know, we've been growing rapidly and an opportunity opened up where I could be much more engaged on the compute side. And so I'm responsible for compute, the IaaS infrastructure for Google Cloud Engine. So it's my pleasure to be here and support Joe and Dell Technologies in the launch of 1FS on Google Cloud. Yeah, you know, Rich, I'd like to come back to you on something. Because, you know, when you look at, you know, cloud, you know, for many years it was, you know, cloud versus, you know, taking over the world, destroying, you know, everything before it. And especially, you know, you look at compute or, you know, storage specifically, you know, people have a little bit of a hard time wrapping their heads around, you know, where my application lives, does it just live one place? Or my application is going a little bit hybrid there. You know, I look back, you know, the disclosure, you know, I worked at EMT for years. You know, that, you know, storage is complicated and diverse, that's why, you know, we have file, block and object. We have lots of different type solutions out there. There's never been a silver bullet that says, okay, 90% of the people can, you know, use this one thing for everything. So, you know, Rich, let's start with you, you know, cloud definitely has changed the discussion of storage, but, you know, I feel like I've seen the enterprise solutions looking more like the hyperscalers and the hyperscale solution, you know, blurring the lines with what was traditionally happening in the data center. Did you agree with some of that? Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think it's really nice when you control the horizontal and the vertical and you can adapt your application stack, but that's just not the reality where we are today. The reality is that you, a cloud vendor, working with customers to bring their workloads on into the cloud, have to be able to support all of the best in class types of storage that, you know, you're absolutely right. We're using cloud, or sorry, we're using objects, we're using block, we're using file. One of the great pieces of this is that in the file space, you really need scalable file to go along with your scalable compute. Excellent. So, please, go ahead, Joe. Yeah. I mean, our customers for a long time have been asking, or Iceland customers in particular, asking for a long time to bring this type of capability to the cloud. They want the scalability of the elastic compute in the GPUs. They also want the OPEX model, right? And they want to be able to bring the high performance compute workloads to the cloud, but they need a scalable file system that can keep up with the demand. And that's what we set out to solve for. Excellent. So, Joe, you mentioned the Iceland piece. You know, we've watched what's happened with one of that. You know, Iceland has always been software at the core and highly scalable. So, I would like you both, Joe, you teed it up there, but, you know, Rich, you know, why is, you know, this important for Google Cloud customers? And, you know, how's it different from maybe how they were doing things in the past? Well, I think one of the things that I'm really excited about is that this enables customers to leverage the cloud and not make a ton of changes on the system. So it really allows them to preserve their investment and their applications and the way that they think about storage and the way they think about how that scales and performs. So that, for me, is let's make it easy for customers to consume cloud rather than make it a hurdle. And that's my view. And, Joe, help frame us this for us a little bit. We watched Dell Technologies recently had, you know, the power store announcement, a lot of discussion about, you know, cloud native architectures, moving to microservices. You know, I've been, you know, Google's one of the earliest and, you know, most prominent examples of, you know, containerized architectures out there. So, you know, where does the file solution fit in this whole discussion that customers have about, you know, modernization of their applications and the journey that they're going on? Yeah, well, you know, not all applications lend themselves well to object. They need, you know, file semantics as well as the performance characteristics that come along with that in terms of throughput and latencies. But even beyond that, you know, what our customer is looking for is the data management capability, right? Whether it's snapshots or the multi-protocol data access for, you know, NFS or SMB or even HDFS, right? And they're looking for replication, native replication, so they can have their ISLON systems in the data center, replicate their data directly into the file service of the cloud, so they can actually operate on that data. And then there's things that we take for granted now, at least in the data center, of that high availability and high durability that storage arrays deliver. So it's a combination of things that make it attractive for customers that open up these new workloads, especially in terms of high performance compute. Excellent. You know, you talked a bit about some of the reasons why, you know, customers wouldn't want file. Of course, scale is one of those things we've been talking about for many years. Scale means different things to many people. There's few companies that know scale better than Google. So, you know, we're talking about a little bit scalability, performance, what these type solutions, you know, mean in what you're hearing from customers. Certainly, from a scale perspective, things like objects or, you know, an object store is super scalable. It's also, you know, requires application changes to really make use of, you know, customers are really looking for scalable solutions that enable them to bring their existing applications cloud and not have to make a ton of changes. That's one of the things I think is great about the Dell offering, is that it is a full fidelity solution that has the performance and scale of what customers are expecting from their on-premise. And then when we wire that up with the Google network into our Google Cloud compute regions, we get very high performance and very high fidelity and low latency as a result. We think that that removes potential headaches that customers may have when they bring big applications in the HPC space and related performance computing space. Great, and Joe, is all of this available now? Tell us a little bit about availability. What do you expect the demand to be for this solution? Well, I expect a demand to be great, right? We, the kind of workloads we're talking about here, cut across a wide range of verticals. So everything from whether it's life sciences for genomics research, oil and gas for seismic data processing, media and entertainment for video editing and rendering or even finishing, automotive telemetry data that requires processing and scale and NEDA. So I think it hits upon a wide variety of use cases and verticals. And we've even structured our pricing and our tiers to make it more accessible for use cases from high performance all the way down to even archival. So maybe just to clarify, this is GA today? Ah, yes, it is GA. Okay, excellent. Appreciate that. And how does, you mentioned flexibility on pricing, how much of this is what's available from Google? What's available from Dell? How does that relationship and go to market work together? Yeah, well, it's a native service in Google. You can provision directly from the Google portal. You can manage your file systems directly from the Google portal. And the billing is integrated. So you get one bill from Google, whether it's for our 1FS file service or any of Google's native services. Excellent. Yeah, Rich would love to hear, you know, talk about from the Google side, the ecosystem. I know last year I was at the Google Next event, you know, really saw, you know, strong demand from the partner community. You know, they're looking to, you know, work with Google. We have worked with Google for many years. You know, what kind of feedback have you been getting in how this fits into the overall solution? So from a, you know, partner perspective, you know, one of the things that we really want to enable our partners is to bring their services onto our platform and integrate them tightly as if they were a Google offering. And that's so things like the integrated billing, the provisioning from the Google portal, things like that. Our core tenants for us or helping our customers and our partners' customers easily consume services in the cloud. So the sort of one of the P0 requirements from my perspective for our product offering here was that in fact, it was just integrated into the Google Cloud platform and that would be discoverable and easily usable by customers. So that's, I think that enables partners to deliver a first-class service on our platform. Yeah, I mean, Rich, absolutely. Some of the feedback I've gotten from the ecosystem is, you know, how do they put it? They say Google kind of puts you through the ringer. By the time you get through that, it is going to work. And of course we know Google is doing that to make sure that there are, you know, good, reliable, strong services by the time the end customer gets there. All right, go ahead, yeah. I was going to say, you know, delivering these services and delivering them reliably is a, it's a multi-company partnership, but we understand that at the end of the day, the customer wants to be assured that there is, they have one contact for problems with the service. And so that's where Google very much wants to be that primary contact, because who knows where the issues could be? Are they in the data center or are they in the network or are they on the server side? We feel responsibility to run that. Yeah, absolutely. So Joe, I guess final thing for you, talk about, you know, the Dell technologies, you know, Google Cloud relationship, why that's important, what differentiates it from some of the many other partnerships that Dell has. Yeah, sure. Before I touch on that, I want to talk about, you know, you mentioned scale, and scale means different things to different people. And when we're talking about scale here, you know, the capacity is one element of that, and we certainly scale that way, but performance is the other way. And, you know, ESG did a performance study on the 1FS file service that we're offering, and they fired up the IO zone benchmark, which fired up over a thousand cores in Google, running NFS load to the file system. They sized the file system at two petabytes, which seems large, and it is, but you can scale much larger than that with our service. And the results on throughput was 200 gigabytes per second on the read, and 100 gigabytes per second on the write. Now, these are game-changing numbers, right? These numbers like that, that enable, you know, compute-intensive, high-performance workloads in the Google Cloud, and we're opening that up. And it's also important to note that, you know, this is a scalable file system, so if you want to double those throughput numbers, you just double the capacity of your file system. So that's the power of scale that we're delivering here. And a file system can scale up to 50 petabytes, so a lot of runway there. As far as the partnership with Google goes, I mean, Google's been great. Their infrastructure is amazing in order to hit those kind of performance numbers. You know, your head goes to compute in the file system, but there's also a network in there. And hit those kind of numbers, Google had to supply a two-target per second network, and they were able to supply the compute and the network with ease and without a hiccup. So it's together that we, you know, solving for the compute network and storage equation that we can deliver a holistic solution. And lastly, I would just point out the engineering teams work great bringing that cloud native experience into that Google portal, you know, really simplifying user experience so they can provision and manage the systems directly from the portal, as well as unifying the billing. So I think the partnership's been great and it's going to be interesting to see how our customers use the service to accelerate their cloud journey. Well, Joe and Rich, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on the GA of this. And definitely look forward to hearing, you know, the customer journeys as they go on. Thank you, Stu. Thank you. And Rich, thank you for your partnership. Yeah, you're welcome, Joe. Thank you as well. All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all the coverage, the virtual events that were participating, as well as the back catalog of interviews that we've done. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCube.