 Welcome back everyone, we are live in San Francisco for the Red Hat Summit, this is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. My co-host, Stu Miniman, serving in for Dave Vellante here at an awesome event, the converges of software, DevOps, the whole world, it's going cloud, mobile, social, the whole big deal, and everything's all being discussed here. Our next guest is Jim Totten, Vice President and General Manager of the platform at Red Hat, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks John. I love when the bloggers and the press always say platform wars, I mean it's always the platform wars, you run the platform. It's a pretty meaty platform, I mean the legacy of Red Hat certainly adds to an amazing brand value, so first question I want to ask you is share with the folks out there, in context to the platform cloud and open source and what customers are trying to do, what is the most important thing happening here on the ground in San Francisco, why is this show in its 10th year so important? Yeah, so let me start by actually defining what do we mean by platform, you know, words in our industry are so overused, I think it's a good idea to maybe understand a little of what we're talking about. So for Red Hat, we're talking when we say platform, we're talking about the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, and you know we've been on this journey for 12 years now, building RHEL and serving our enterprises, so maybe to start our storytelling today, I'm going to just kind of give you a way to think about our conversation in fours. Think about physical deployments, operating systems running on servers, think about traditional virtualization environments, so whether it's our rev KVM based product, or whether it's VMware, or whether it's Microsoft's Hyper-V, traditional virtualization, number two. Number three, private cloud and open stack and the ability to have the agility in your private data center, and then finally, number four is public cloud. So as we think about what we're here at the summit talking about, these four environments is how we think about what our customers are running in their data centers. It's a lot of service is wrapped around that. I mean, a lot of folks have Red Hat in their enterprise across all those configurations. Some are more opportunities now than they were in the past, but they have a lot of legacy with Red Hat. So how do you keep sharp and keep this platform moving in the right direction to be relevant? What are the top things that your customers are telling you that they really, really need right now? Yeah. Okay, well, let's kind of look at operating systems and maybe divide that. What's the job of an operating system? So job number one is always light up the hardware. So our work closely with Intel, we heard Doug Fisher speak earlier this morning from Intel, so we work closely with those guys at an engineering level every few months, we're together and ensuring that we're lighting up the innovations in the processor architectures, the hardware designs that the OEM companies are building and ensuring that the operating system is going to translate all that hardware technology up through the stack. So that's kind of job one. And even that 12 years, it's something that is vibrant and fresh every single day. The other job of an operating system is to be the platform on which everything else is going to sit. And so whether it's physically deployed, virtually deployed, a cloud environment, you want the platform to be rock solid and stable. And that's where this term life cycle comes in. We have a 10 year life cycle. So that means we're promising our customers, we're going to have that platform be rock solid for 10 years. So that means REL version five is going to be supported until 2017, REL six, 2020, and then REL seven, which we're talking a lot about at this summit is going to start life this year. And that'll be a release that will support until 2024. So that's a little of what I mean by platform. So now you're going to light up the cloud, right? We are. Lighting up the hardware now. We got to light up the cloud. That's a huge life cycle support ranges. I mean, those are solid. How does that go to the cloud now? Okay, well, you know, the cloud, you can begin to look at dividing the discussion in a host and guest and client. So let's start with host. As a foundation, we've got an addition of REL. We call the REL OpenStack Platform. And we decided to bring to the marketplace this year, this past year, our OpenStack offering as an integrated addition of the REL operating system. Because we actually think it's important that we engineer the stack from the kernel to the hypervisor layer, to the OpenStack technology, all as an integrated solution. Because really that's where enterprise grade quality starts is ensuring that the integration of the stack really comes together. So as the host, that's part of the story. The other is guest. So even in a cloud environment, even a public cloud, for example, partners like Amazon or Google and others, the REL operating system is available in their cloud environment. And it brings all that same promise of the style of APIs, the 10-year life cycle, so that customers see a seamless environment. Just interoperability, that's where that kind of comes in. It's got to play well with others. Interoperability plays well, nice with others and provides the same environment from physical, virtual, private and public cloud. You got that same guarantee across all four environments. So Jim, Red Hat's done a great job of getting Linux everywhere. As you said, adoption, physical, virtual, cloud, public and private, the question I have is after 12 years of doing this and you just turned the crank on REL 7, how much room is there for innovation going forward in Linux? Yeah, you know what, it's not turned the crank. Actually, it's exciting every day, participating in the open source community and innovating. And as I think we heard this morning in some of our earlier talks, this is a time if ever of great innovation happening in the industry, including the operating system space. So this maybe leads us to containers. You've heard a lot about containers today in the summit and I think you were just talking a little bit about that with our Docker friends. And so containers is an area of innovation in REL 7. We're gonna be bringing an addition of REL. We're gonna call Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Atomic Host. And Atomic Host is an addition of REL that provides a host environment for running containers. Now what's a container? A container is a mechanism in the operating system, an innovation in the operating system that can take a Docker-formatted image and execute it and run it on an Atomic Host version of REL. So this is just one example of innovation in the operating system space. And an exciting one for this week. But there are many more I could share with you about today. Actually, can you unpeel for us a little bit, you know, REL 7? You've got the release candidate today, gosh. I mean, some of the stats I was just looking, you know, 17,900 bug reports were closed, 2,500 SRPMs, you know, makeup, you know, REL 7. So, you know, I'm sure there's a laundry list of stuff that you guys got out. And I wasn't trying to degrade by saying turn the crank, I knew how much effort goes in, but what are the highlights? You know, what are customers demanding? Stu, it's a great question. So let me just start with, we've had over 10,000 downloads of REL 7. So listen, the industry's appetite and interest in this next generation of the REL platform has been great. And as you point out, we've received lots of feedback and help with bug reports and things to ensure the quality reaches where we want it to be. We've been in beta since December. And in fact, next week, I can share some news with you guys, we're gonna be making available a release candidate. So there's a refresh coming for all of the beta testers that are interested in joining us to download yet another version of REL 7 next week. Just a couple of quick things I'll mention about REL 7, but you know, with over 3,000 packages, we could spend several hours together at least talking about all the features. But let me just highlight a couple. The first is, we now have customers that have thousands, a few I talked to that have tens of thousands of REL servers. So they asked me, Jim, how are we gonna upgrade to REL 7? You got anything to help us with that? So one of the things we're gonna be providing in REL 7 is some tools to be able to look at our REL server that's running REL 6, give the IT administrator some reports and some insights, what do they need to do in order to upgrade that server to REL 7? And in many cases, we're gonna automate that entire process. So the ability to then manage that transition from 6 to 7 is going to be something that's much better than in previous releases of REL 7. It's no secret you guys have huge penetration with the enterprise product. I mean, I talk to customers all the time from big banks and it's like, I got Red Hat running on NetApp, EMC and all this other stuff and this company services it. And they're like, great, how long have you had that big, long life cycles? And then they go, now I want to move to the cloud. So in your news today, it says that, quote, REL 7 offers near final look at the only operating system, love the term, crafted for the open hybrid cloud. Tackle those challenges to the modern infrastructure and the next generation computing. So define hybrid cloud, open hybrid cloud and what does that next generation look like, that landscape? All right, great, let me start with where you started. So IDC would say that Red Hat's achieved a 65.4% share of the Linux market, so for sure, that's why you're finding all the customers you talk to are running REL. So clearly we're doing a lot right in bringing. And by the way, they're not looking to throw it away either. I mean, they're all like, hey, we are Red Hat shop, we have developers, part of the fabric. Yeah, we've learned a lot in the 12 years that we've been building the operating system. And we have customers like running half of the world's financial transactions on our stack. So clearly the enterprise environment and customer we understand very well. So open hybrid cloud is how do we take all of that and bring that to this journey to the cloud? So let's define open hybrid cloud, open. It's our commitment to open source. It's the values of Red Hat. Everything we've done has been contributed to the open source community and the same will be true for open hybrid cloud. So that's open. Okay, hybrid, hybrid has two aspects to it. The first is all of the existing IT environments are never going to be virgin environments without legacy environments. So hybrid also means you can begin to adopt Red Hat technologies, but alongside the existing infrastructure that you've already got. We're compliant with industry standards, industry protocols, and so our stuff plays well, as you said earlier, with the things you've already got. The other part of hybrid though is the ability to use both a private and a public cloud environment together. And so there are many customers that are moving towards agile data centers with things like OpenStack as a big part of their vision, but may also want to bring in public cloud environments. And so the ability to bridge between a private environment and a public data center is what mean by hybrid. And of course cloud is the term we're all using for really a promise of an agile data center. The ability to dynamically provision storage and compute and networking and so forth. That's what we all talk about when we say cloud. I love the term agile data center. I'm going to say software defined data center. I think that's what VMware likes to coin it, but it's also footprint issues around the data. Agile could be physical. So you mentioned servers, the four pillars earlier. So you got the servers, that's getting smaller in the density, also scale out, creates opportunities. Drilled down on agile, what do you mean specifically? What are the key trends? It's obviously data centers aren't going away. I mean, you still need a data center to run stuff, but certainly the cloud will play into it. But what is, how do you define agile? How do your customers look at it? Yeah, well, maybe let's just start at a very simple notion. You know, not too many years ago, the idea of standing up a new server for some line of business application meant to visit to the procurement team to go buy a new server. And, you know, maybe in a few weeks or months, a new server would show up. And so what we mean first of all- And then you got to call a network guy and get a provision for it. Well, yeah, the box shows off in the warehouse and the shipping guy needs to move. I mean, it's a very physical world that that whole conversation took place in, right? So what do we mean by agile? Let's just start with that. You know, this is an environment where there's a web portal and you can say, I need to provision a server with these attributes. I need this much storage. I need networking capacity that looks like this. Hey, the profile of this server is going to be running this type of workload. And, you know, you click on the web portal and based on policies that were created by the IT organization, you're provisioned that server. And that process maybe took minutes. And so that's a good story that kind of underlying, what do I mean by agile? That's what the world needs to look like. And even if it's never a public cloud, the IT organization to really be strategic to a business needs to be agile, needs to be able to respond to creating value for the business. So that's what I'm talking about, John. That's awesome. Jim, when I think back to some of the early days, you know, Red Hat's always been very partner friendly. You know, the likes of IBM and HP help drive a lot of the early adoption. I'm wondering if you can give from, you know, your platform perspective, you know, who's helping to drive kind of, you know, the adoption of the solution today? Because I think about, you know, an Amazon or Google or Microsoft, obviously Microsoft would love to everybody to stay on Windows, but they're supporting Red Hat. And Google just added support for Red Hat. So how much do you see cloud providers, you know, having an affinity for an operating system, or do you have to drive this to the end user itself as opposed to when it was a server purchase, it was more, you know, a partnership in an OEM that would go with you? Sure. Does that make sense? Yeah. It does, it makes a ton of sense. And actually, let's start with, the answer is all of the above, okay? Maybe a bit obvious, but the most important thing is that we create value for end customers. And everything flows from there. Our partners, Google and Amazon, they're going to, what are they going to do? They're going to serve end customers. So creating value of the enterprise qualities that we have with REL for 12 years and bringing that to the cloud is going to bring customers that look for the same attributes in the cloud that they have in their private data center. So that's the first. Our OEM partners, our hardware industry partners you mentioned, they're also in the process of embracing and adopting agile data centers we're talking about. So at our summit conference, for example, Cisco gave a keynote today and talked about their partnership with us and around their vision for the cloud is very aligned with ours. Similarly, Dell is a great partner and recent announcements with Dell has chosen Red Hat as their partner to go after the agile data center with our Red Hat OpenStack platform. And that's how we're thinking about it, Stu. So there were some veiled comments about VMware in the keynote this morning. Obviously VMware is a partner because I can put REL in the guest but they're also kind of a significant competitor. Where do you see Linux in VMware these days? Yeah. Look, we're made up of an industry of a lot of companies that are at any given moment both partners and maybe competitors, right? And I think that's fair to say that's the nature today but it's always been somewhat true. VMware, Microsoft's environment, their Hyper-V environment and our own KVM based environments, we fully support the REL operating system as a guest and we will continue to fully support that. And I mentioned earlier the definition of hybrid meant embracing customer deployed environments. So things like our CloudForms orchestration management tool also supports the VMware environments as well as our own stack environments. So pragmatically we're about supporting customer choice and to the extent VMware is a largely deployed technology in our partner's data centers and our customer's data centers, then we embrace that. As we move up the stack, as we move towards cloud, it's pretty clear VMware and we are competitors. And so we make no bones about that. We're driving an open choice based solutions up the stack and that will put us in a competitive place with some other industry players like VMware. Okay, one of the places that you're embracing choice is you have, I guess it was called a partnership with CentOS. My understanding is you brought on some of the early developers of it and that's now part of really kind of the red hat portfolio. Can you explain to us how REL and CentOS fit in the portfolio? Sure. You know what, REL and CentOS have actually enjoyed a great partnership for many years. Early adopters of the Linux technology and the ability to really start exploring embracing a Linux alternative to say proprietary technologies, CentOS has provided a great on-ramp for the industry and therefore they've been a very close ally in a sense in that. We felt it was actually important that maybe we find a way to actually bring our relationship even closer together because if you think about the innovation that we're talking about today, a lot of it's happening above the operating system. Think about things like OpenStack where software defined networking. The innovation in the community actually needs an operating system on top of which to do that innovation and what better choice could there be for the community than to use CentOS as a foundation on which to innovate in the community and then that just sets the stage well for downstream productization. Now that said, REL is always the answer for a customer-deployed environment. REL has, we talked about earlier, 10-year life cycles, allowing data centers to carefully transition technology versions, full support for immediate access to patches and security, Arata and so forth. These are things where the value proposition of REL is well suited for enterprises. We think CentOS is well suited for the community for innovation and that's how we're thinking about CentOS. Talk about the platform. Let's get digging into more of the platform management side of it. Let's get your take on the future direction of where you see it going. And now obviously OpenSource has tried and true that some argue sixth generation OpenSource depending upon when you pick your favorite OpenSource project but it's clearly multi-generation growing, a lot of standardization around how things are done, business models. There was a post by Peter Levine from Andreessen Horowitz that said, there'll never be a red hat of something. And he was talking about the pictures he gets from startups that says, I'm going to be the red hat for Hadoop, I'm going to be the red hat for this. I'm going to be the red hat for social media or whatever. Can there be a red hat of something again and how do you guys continue to innovate your business model as some of the modern era of cloud and you're lighting up new things, not just hardware anymore, new capabilities? How do you deal with things like these new emerging areas? Can you maintain that red hat mojo? Oh, we for sure can create and maintain the mojo. So let me just be clear about that. In fact, I think we're demonstrating that at Summit this year for sure. Listen, there's a very broad surface area of technologies that I think the open source innovation model is great for. And red hats not going to pursue all of them. We're focused on a number of key core areas such as infrastructure and middleware and platform as a service. And so we've chosen some important areas that we're focused on being great at and having great mojo around. So for sure, I think there's a lot of opportunity there. But you know, you touched on business models so let me go there just for a second. Yeah, absolutely. You have to not only innovate in technology but you also have to innovate around your business model so you're always aligned to creating value for customers. And you know, the question for red hat 12 years ago was how are you going to build a company on free software exactly? And you know, our last year closed at a bit over a billion and a half dollar business which for us really means that we figured out how to create value for real enterprise customers. I'll just give you one example. Just recently this past year, we added some new ways that you can buy a subscription to RHEL. Up until recently, our subscription model for RHEL was based on something called a socket pair. This is a very hardware centered term. It means how many Intel processors are down on the motherboard, right? Well, as we start talking about virtual data centers and clouds, you might imagine socket pairs is not a concept that fits very well with deploying RHEL up at the guest virtual layer. So we now have a business innovation this year of purchasing RHEL as an instance of RHEL. And you can put it on the metal, you can put it as a virtual guest or you can take it out to the cloud and that same subscription can be used in any of those deployment environments. So what you're saying is you keep your eye on the prize relative to the software, keep that stable and rock and keep that mojo going but be flexible on the business side and be looking for opportunities to say, okay, what does virtualization do for us, for instance? Exactly. It's all about creating value for a customer. You do that with technology, but you got to do with business innovation also. So we're focused on both. How do you guys enable the data market? Because obviously Hortonworks is here, we're going to have them on earlier, John Price. Data is a big part of now the open ecosystem. So you're seeing Hadoop, you're seeing companies that make software infrastructure, software and infrastructure for data, people who have a lot of data. And the comment I had with a guy who started coming called Factual Gill Albez who said to me, there's two companies. There's people who have a lot of data and people who provide tooling for the people with a lot of data. And soon everyone's going to have a lot of data. So the concept's kicking around is how does that change the software piece, if any? Is it on the radar? How do you guys look at that analytics piece? Any thoughts on that? Yeah, of course. First of all, an interesting stat that I think was shared by Doug Fisher from Intel earlier today is that if you look at the growth of data, the largest share of data going forward is unstructured data. And what sometimes people focus on is data, but what really important is insight out of the data. And that's where analytics comes in. So clearly whether it's Hortonworks or Hadoop in general and the idea of running analytic systems, the idea is to provide insight for the lines of business from all of that data to create even more value for their business and their customers. So the Red Hat Stack, the rail operating system is actually one of the highest used platforms for Hadoop-based analytic engines in the world today. It's just an interesting trend. I see a lot of people, even new relics trying to get into the data business. They saw what Splunk has done, using data to harness kind of data exhaust, if you will, into gold. And so it's just a trend we're watching. Absolutely. Any other things on your mind that you'd like to share with the audience? Obviously, cloud's pretty hot right now. We're going to look forward to talking to Paul, he'll call me here later on today. And I do remember when Red Hat used to be shipped on CDs and then back in the day. So a lot's changed. What's around the corner? What can you share? What's around that next curve that you guys have to slow down off the straight and narrow and kind of peek around and be careful of? What's your take on that? Yeah, I think I'd answer your question, John, this way. The first of all is we're not going to forget everything that we've learned for 12 years, building a rail. We think we've built a very good set of values and systems for how to innovate upstream in a community model, but deliver that to enterprises in a form that they can consume and they can run their businesses on. And we're focused now, as you see here at Summit, on a complete portfolio solution. We're no longer just the Linux company. And I think what's around the corner is following through and continuing to deliver this portfolio that we're describing here. And I'm really looking forward to the launch of REL7 and what we'll have ahead for that. Okay, well we're here inside theCUBE, discussing the launch of REL7. A lot of great stuff announced today pre-release build of Linux 7. A lot of great features here at Red Hat Summit where the future's being recast and re-enabled on built on top of some greatness of Red Hat. And like I said, got some great mojo continuing to be displayed by Red Hat. Congratulations, Jim, thanks for joining us. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.