 Hi, this is Stu Miniman with Wikibon. Here with the SiliconANGLE TVs, live continuous coverage from EMC World 2013 in Las Vegas. We're in the brocade spotlight on data center network transformation. Joining me for this segment is Chris Wetzel, who's the director of enterprise storage products on Rackspace. Chris, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, Stu, good to be here. Great, so first time guests on theCUBE. Chris, what we try to do is we go out, we find the smartest people we can find, the hottest technologies, especially those technologies that are disrupting technologies and Rackspace, of course, is driving innovation. We were at the OpenStack Summit a few weeks ago. Tell me, what brings you to EMC World? So, happy to be here, and EMC World for us is all about EMC as a partner. They've helped us with our storage piece, through joint partnerships with brocade, all the fiber channel networking that we do, is really about what we're doing to kind of put that together for our end customers. So, we talk about transformation, it's absolutely in the middle of all that right now for our customers, so it's an exciting time. So, Chris, you're on the enterprise side of the house for Rackspace, can you explain to us what that means, really, in Rackspace's different businesses? Yeah, yeah, correct. So, on the enterprise side of it, we have our enterprise business unit comprised of, it's our bigger customers in general. We offer our entire portfolio to all of our customers, so enterprise customers can consume our public cloud, consume our private cloud. Our hybrid hosting is the connection of all those elements together. So, that's where a partner like EMC can come in, and we can deliver VNX based or ISON based storage, those customers along with a public cloud offer and a private cloud if need be. So, we're on that side where we kind of work a lot more with partners, but our, the offers go to the public cloud. Right, so Rackspace, everybody knows, I think you're one of the top three vendors when it comes to public cloud, and what has been interesting to watch is Rackspace taking what you guys do, kind of your operational model, and you've been putting that in the private cloud, and it might not be your group, but I also saw that you're going to be offering that to service providers so that they can offer that too. So, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And when we talk about transformation and data center transformation, it's for us, it's the walls of data center coming down, right? So, private clouds run on premise, private clouds run at Rackspace based on open stack, customers that need to have legacy applications running on a VMware base. We're open to all of that and helping provide those solutions and stitching it together. I think our, where the fanatical support piece comes in for us is our ability to help those customers figure out those journeys. And every journey is different, and some customers have the symbol, I want to move a legacy out, that's easy. When you get into data center consolidation or the horizontal scale, that's when it really gets to be challenging, and Rackers and our partners help kind of put that together for our customers. Yeah, so let's drill in a little bit on the applications. You know, I think back to over the last decade what we've seen in virtualization, virtualization started in test dev environments, moved into certain applications, and you know, close to 100% of all applications can really be virtualized today. Where are we with solutions that are kind of based on open stack and what you're doing at Rackspace? Yeah, you know, I think we're still in the early stages. Customers are showing great interest in it. I think what we're trying to do is help build the community so we overcome the interest and actually get into actually consuming it. So, you know, the technologies is there and can do it. It's just more leading customers down that path. And that's where, you know, Rackspace being kind of a founding member of that, we're very excited that our skillset allows us to help customers figure that out. And what's nice for us is it opens up our reach to those customers and say, whatever the best solution for you is. If it's on-prem and it's an open stack base, but we're good with that. You know, if that's right for your business, we can help deliver that. If it comes into our four walls, you know, we have the same technologies that can work with both. So it's all about figuring out what's the best piece that is, but it's still pretty early in general. Yeah, can you talk a little bit about that skillset? You know, how are you helping customers move from kind of the legacy to the more modern in that mix of what, you know, Rackspace does, your partners do and, you know, how customers need to transform themselves? Yeah, yeah, that's an interesting challenge for us. A lot of what the skillset that we need doesn't exist. In many cases, you know, you look back, you know, four or five years, what we needed to do wasn't available, wasn't out there. So a lot of the activities we have internally, just educating rackers, teaching rackers about, you know, the DevOps model, how to work it internally, getting them comfortable with our, we call it Rack on Rack, which is our Rackspace running our own systems on our cloud. We've moved our, one of our critical, mission critical systems, we actually moved over to our cloud group to put into a DevOps model to help kind of accelerate that learning. And then we broadcast it out. And, you know, every Racker obviously is on a different pace, but they have kind of centers of excellence internally that we can leverage on as we kind of grow that base. So. Okay, can you talk a little bit about how the network fits into this environment? Yes, absolutely. I actually, I view kind of the network and storage are both the areas that, for me, everything starts with your storage, right? You want to do something, you have to know your storage is at, the network is the ability to get it from one place to the next. Inside of Rackspace, you know, we've got, you know, large data centers and our ability to make sure we can connect the right compute with the right storage for the customer, grow those environments and whatever pace they need to be is an incredible challenge. We've had several occasions where we bumped up against design limitations on hardware from, you know, EMC or Brocade. What's powerful to us is the key partnership and helping us figure out what those design limitations are and engaging with the right product teams to help overcome them is something that we value very much and how it translates is our scale. You know, customers might do it once or twice. We're going to do it, you know, hundreds or thousands of times. So we'll be able to overcome them and kind of provide solutions together quicker. You know, once again, we're referencing back to kind of the virtualization wave. Virtualization rippled and broke storage and networking and for cloud oftentimes the network is seen as the bottleneck for kind of configuration and innovation. So, you know, is the network kind of getting past that and no longer being a detriment to getting to the cloud? Well, I think it's improved. I think it all depends on kind of where you're at in that journey, right? You know, as we talk about storage growing from, you know, terabytes to hundreds of terabytes to petabytes, you know, there's a constant evolution of how we have to grow the network. The ability to move the data is a problem today and it's getting better, you know, every year. I expect we have another, you know, couple of years of fixing that or at least kind of continuing to raise the bar, which I think is a good problem to have because when you talk about things like, you know, big data and disaster recovery and all those kind of things customers want to do, it becomes a lot about is the data where it needs to be and if not, how does the network help us do that? Okay, so in your involvement with Brocade, is it Ethernet only or is there also fiber channel in that? It's fiber channel. Okay, is it just fiber channel? It might say mostly fiber channel. Oh, okay, fiber channel. So talk to me a little bit about where we are with fiber channel in your estimation. Is 16 gigabit is kind of the latest speed that we're at, but you know, why are customers using fiber channel and what are the requirements from your standpoint when we look at cloud? Yeah, and what's interesting from our standpoint on, I'll use the enterprise storage side using our shared sand. The nice thing is we've maintained pace that I actually view our fiber channel network based on the Brocade directors is an advantage for rack space. You know, we can deliver the performance well above what a customer needs at a cost that you know, you can't touch with a dedicated device and it just works. And that's kind of the power behind it is that we don't spend a lot of time talking to customers about the performance of it, what do you need? It's more about how many ports do you need? We've got that capability. They can grow beyond it. We can go into the dedicated switch if need be, but that's when you talk about kind of how is the evolution of it? It is not one of the topics that we talk to customers about, which is powerful for us, because what your fabric switching is is not really what should be relevant to your business. It should be what are you doing? What application are you running? We'll make sure the infrastructure can deliver. Yeah, so maybe you can dispel some myths. People have said for years that fiber channel is expensive, it's hard to manage, and you know, to data center technology, maybe it doesn't scale. Is fiber channel a fine solution for kind of private and hybrid clouds? Oh, absolutely, absolutely. I view it in some cases differentiating for us. You know, when we talk about what the performance characteristics we need for some of our storage, fiber channel is one of the best ways for us to get it. So now, is it complex? Yes, to a degree, is it, you know, sometimes more costly alternatives? Maybe, I think it depends on what your solution is, but for the use cases for how we deliver it, it's very, very effective for us. And again, it's kind of the foundation that our shared sand runs on, which, you know, is pretty massive. Okay, well, no conversation with Rackspace can go on without talking about fanatical support. So, you know, how does that fit into the whole private cloud discussion? Yeah, yeah, if I look back to the kind of the transformation, one of the exciting things for me as a Racker is when you talk about customers' transformational journeys, you know, fanatical support is all about that, helping you figure out where are you at today and where do you want to be. And if that is something, as I mentioned earlier, something as simple as a legacy app, that's great, and we've got a portfolio for that. When you get into the more complex solutions, how do you get there, what do you want that to be? We provide our frontline Rackers have the expertise, we've got partners that we can bring into the game through professional services and advisory services. So, it's really kind of forcing our hand to get better at delivering that, you know. What years ago might have been okay, being reactive, now involves kind of being proactive and being in there with the customer. But step, the first step is to understand what are their goals and then where do they want to be? And then we kind of help stitch the rest together, so. Okay, great. So, we're here with Chris Wetzel of Rackspace. Chris, we want to talk about the competitive angle some. We've been talking a lot about OpenStack and while it's been said that OpenStack isn't necessarily competing with Amazon, when I think of Rackspace, I do think of competition with Amazon. So, are you competing against Amazon in a lot of environments? And if so, how do you compete with Amazon? Yeah, I think yes and no. Yes, we compete with a lot of companies. Many of the companies that we deal with are going after, they use Amazon. And in many cases, Amazon's the best solution for them. And if it is, we want to encourage that. That's about solving the right problem for the customer. And what we believe in one of that, I think the powers in the Rackspace offer in solutions are it doesn't have to fit into a public cloud if that's not right for the customer. If your first step in the journey is bare metal, we can help with that. If it's a private cloud, we can help with that. And I think that's kind of what differentiates Rackspace from a lot of our competitors is that breadth of portfolio, we don't have to make it fit into one solution or the other. We can have that consultative engagement and really find what's best, so. Okay, so Chris, when people are coming in to look at your solutions, what are some of the pitfalls? What would you recommend that people do when they're kind of looking at that journey in the cloud before they come talk to you that might save them some time going forward? Yeah, it's a great question. And I think, I don't know that I have just one answer for that, but I think just think in general, where do you want to be? And it's about, is it a buzzword that comes from the CIO? We need to, everything needs to go to the cloud. Okay, how do you get there? What are your, we have the ability and services that can help you do like an inventory of your existing applications? And which ones are cloud ready today? Which ones aren't? What order do you want to do them in? I think it's a little bit of homework on internally to say, how would I do that today? And then engage the Rackspace team to figure out what step we want to do first. What we have learned is trying to do it all at one time is complicated on both sides. I think re-architecting applications to work in a horizontal cloud is hard and it takes a lot of work. So maybe that takes a backseat to some other applications that are up for a legacy refresh or whatnot. It's really about that understanding your environment well enough that you can have that productive discussion and Rackers bring to the table the expertise of we've seen this before, we've done this before. What do you think about this? How would you have you considered taking this approach? Okay, so one final question I have for you is when you look at what customers now do differently when they go to a Rackspace environment, how does it help customers kind of drive innovation and transform their business? Yeah, absolutely. It frees you up to spend the time on what differentiates you. If you look back over the years, whether it was payroll, whether it's email, whether it's backup, those aren't really high value add functions of your company. So finding ways to take those resources and redeploy them on other areas that you are. It is your business and innovating in those areas is really what separates and differentiates you. So for our model, that's kind of where we try and add to your IT to do that for you. The more time you can spend on making your app better and more efficient understanding your business through analytics, that's what every company should be trying to do. We'll run the infrastructure for you. We're really good at that and we can deliver that with a fanatical support promise every time. All right, well Chris Wetzel, we're with the Rackspace. We appreciate you coming on the cubes, sharing how customers are transforming their environments in the cloud. This is Stu Miniman with Wikibon. We'll be right back with our next guest after this break.