 Okay, we're back, this is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host today, Stu Miniman. We're here live at Gillette Stadium at the V-Tug Winter Warmer. The V-Tug, the V-Mugs are local meetups where people get together. They talk about things like virtualization and cloud and just a bunch of peers getting together. A bunch of IT practitioners really sharing and it's a good event. Brad Maltz is here, he is the CTO's office of Luminate, a CTO, Lifetime CTO. Brad, welcome. Good to see you again. Thank you for having me. Appreciate you coming on. This is a good event. It's always been a good event for you guys, just for a little history. You were the CTO of ICI. Correct. Right around the corner from Wikibon. Yep. You know, the rents have dropped since you left, you know, the neighborhoods going to hell. Miss you guys, but the Luminate acquisition was a big deal for you guys. It really has taken you to a new level. So why don't we start there? Take us through sort of the last, I guess it's been what, 12 plus months, right? Yeah, so Luminate and ICI actually merged in the beginning of 2013. And it was really, it was the ability for ICI to be able to take our messaging nationally. And for Luminate to gain certain technologies and certain skill sets that were actually, I don't want to say missing, but were probably not as strong as what ICI had. So when we actually brought the two organizations together, we now have a very strong virtualization practice, a very strong data center. Security is a huge one that Luminate actually brought into the fold, so that the guys in the Northeast ourselves actually were able to utilize. So really what we actually like to say now is Luminate is really focused on data center, cloud, security, and end user experience. Those tend to be the four major areas that customers work with us on. So let's unpack those a little bit because you guys, I mean, when you think data center, I mean, I think I remember when EMC announced, or VCE, I guess they say, announced Vblock, you guys had your own converged infrastructure. You were ahead of the game there. So converged infrastructure's going on. Everybody wants to sort of replicate, duplicate the cloud-like capability in their own data center. I mean, not everybody, but many customers do for good reasons. So that's one trend that we want to look at. Cloud is obviously another one. Security on top of everybody's mind and the end user experience is what? Like VDI too? I mean, it's- It's basically the next generation of how we're handling the movement of the consumerization of IT. How enterprises are dealing with delivering not so much a virtual desktop, but delivering the application and the experience that has to go along with the application and usage of data. So it really takes it to a different level than just VDI. So let's start with the data center. Everybody's talking about the software defined data center. Is that a bunch of marketing BS? Is it real? Is that a sort of yes and yes? So, well, the term software defined data center obviously evolved from VMware. So at some level it is marketing, but what I've come to find is these terms always come to mean something, just like cloud started out as marketing and now is something real. Software defined data center, I always termed it as virtualization was the first form of it because it really took compute and memory and it virtualized that. And now what we're looking at is virtualizing the other aspects of the data center that we really didn't have that type of that type of software definition for. So obviously network and storage tend to be the next two most logical pieces of it. So, Brad, if I, just before we get off the data centers too, everybody talks about the software defined data center, but nobody talks about the actual data center itself. Can the notion of software defined and automation go to actually down into the facility, the cooling, the power? I mean, are customers thinking about that? Is the industry thinking about that or is it just sort of an afterthought? So customers are not thinking about that. I definitely see other manufacturers and vendors starting to head down that road, but I think what's happening is people are still trying to get used to the concept of software defined data center with the aspects that they understand, meaning storage and networks and stuff, for them to be able to fathom virtualizing all controls and all automation aspects of a facility, I think that is a little bit probably out there for many, many people out in the field right now. So I see that probably as a long term discussion of truly software defined data center. It's going to be building blocks of these pieces that we're starting with now. Part of that is organizational too. A lot of times the IT guys and the facility guys aren't talking about that. So Brad, I was wondering if you can unpack a little bit for us, software defined in the networking and the storage space, where are you and your customers at with that these days? That's a great question. So software defined storage I see is probably the next leg of what's going to become reality for a majority of people out there. For the reason simply that software defined storage, depending on what definition of software defined storage you use, many people are doing it already. There's been data cores been around for a while doing their version of it for many, many years. The fact that VMware has gotten into the game with VSAN, the fact that EMC has ScaleIO, all these other features and pieces of it are coming out, but left hand had a VSA years ago, NetApp has theirs. Depending on if you use the definition of virtualizing the software that runs the storage or is it actually going to be that separation of the control plane from the data plane? And that's really the big, I think the war that's going to be going on over the next year, probably 2014 is the big year for that, of what's going to truly win out for the term software defined storage. Is it more of an EMC Viper? Or is it going to be more of a VM or VSAN and where are we going with that? So I wonder if I could ask you again, I love having you on because the CTO perspective, this notion of separating the control plane from the data plane, I'd never heard customers talk about that until I heard the EMC Viper announcement. And so I said, okay, what's really behind that? Is that EMC trying to abstract the complexity of its portfolio or does it really truly add customer value and is that a long-term trend? Or maybe both, maybe sometimes EMC can lead that trend by trying to solve some of the problems that it created. So help us squint through some of that. So when you start talking about EMC Viper, specifically, because that's one of the leading form of the control plane storage discussion, realistically, EMC is one of the leaders there because they have a product around it, but even pieces like OpenStack have modules that do that breakout of storage control into a control plane. Now the problem is many organizations are not ready for that discussion, right? Many organizations are still trying to wrap their head around what is software defined storage for me and do we need to get to the layer of separating out control versus the data plane? Now, when you're talking about the enterprise shops, I like to say usually Fortune 50, maybe Fortune 1,000, somewhere up in that range, that's when the organization has enough people and enough talent internally to be able to separate out the control plane and the data plane and actually make a real functioning environment. When you start dropping down into the lower end enterprise and probably a large part of the commercial industry, those organizations don't have the talent on board or even the ability right now to implement anything close to an EMC Viper yet. Okay, so there's some complexities in separating the control plane and the data plane. There is. Let's assume I'm an organization that can exploit that mental model. What are the benefits of doing that? So the benefits are agnostic automation of your environment. The ability to not have to care what storage array is actually behind it, what vendor I've utilized. I can have EMC storage. I can have virtual like a VSAN. I can have an HP three par in place and at the same level, whenever I write my automation layer upfront, I can have the exact same set of commands and the same set of controls upfront, no matter who is sitting behind my storage layer. That right there is the true definition of as we move into the cloud, you are going to need that level of separation because cloud is about operationalization and automation. And to be able to get to a standardized operating model and a standardized automation model, you need to have commonality in the back end. So let me make sure I understand this. So historically the control plane and the data plane has sort of been munged in this box. Inside one array. It's locked inside the array and he who sold the array made a ton of cash. So now if you separate those out, great for customers that you can, everybody complains about, you know, stovepipes, but so the power in the industry shifts to the guy who can manage that control plane. Is that right? It's like VMware. I mean, and I'm going to equate software defined storage back to software defined servers because when VMware came out with a hypervisor, they took some of the control capabilities away from the server manufacturers. All of a sudden you saw Adele and HP and those guys starting to say, oh my God, we're not going to be able to sell as many servers because look at VMware, look what they can do. But realistically what happened was there was a happy medium that was found in between that the server manufacturers can augment and work with the virtualization layer, even though that virtualization layer didn't make those server manufacturers as unique anymore. And that's what's going to happen in the storage space. You're going to find the storage vendors trying to clamor for the ability to stay unique while also trying to be the owner of that control plane. And the owner of the control plane, you're saying will be able to deal with anybody's storage. So if I have an EMC control plane and an HP control plane and an IBM control plane. Well, that's the problem. I'm stove piping control planes. And that's going to be the discussion is, first of all, is the control plane based on standards, industry standards. That's a very big discussion that's going on right now in the back end of all these companies. And second of all, is somebody going to need multiple control planes, right? Is one control plane going to be enough? Will EMC Viper be enough if they have a mix of storage vendors behind the scenes? The answer by a lot of these guys is yes, it will be. And that's what they're aiming for to deliver through these different models. And that's a good vision. I mean, as a technologist, you love that, right? Now, and you mentioned OpenStack before, that's in part OpenStack's potential, is it not? That is exactly what OpenStack's potential is. OpenStack is interesting because it's affecting many different areas. And if you think about it, OpenStack has their storage modules. Their network modules tend to actually be not their own. It's not part of the OpenStack as much as the nice series of the world in Cisco and other people have modules that fit in. But OpenStack has like Cypher and some of these other pieces that actually will control the storage. So the real discussion in the softer defined storage spaces, who's going to win out and who's going to work best with OpenStack? Does OpenStack need to have an outside control plane such as an EMC Viper to truly function properly? Or will they have something built in that they can do themselves? And the other piece of that is if EMC, do I take my data plane and make it work with the OpenStack control plane? Exactly. And how aggressive am I about that? Or do I walk a fine line? Well, let's take EMC as a good example. They've always done a really good job of walking that fine line and building their own stuff. So I don't see that affecting them. There are other storage manufacturers out there that are going to have a tougher time in that. And I don't want to name names, but some of them know what's happening in the industry and are not keeping up with it. Well, but that's a good point. You're right, EMC has always somehow figured it out. Stu used to work there, but they, and they're not afraid to go after their own businesses, but at the same time, they're not afraid to keep their own businesses humming. So organizationally, they got that modeled out. Right, I wonder if we can take the discussion over to Convergence. As we said, when you were ICI, you had your own product. You've worked with VCE, and now there's even newer Converged architecture you mentioned. VSAN from VMware and EMC's got the Scale.io. What are you seeing out there in kind of the maturation and adoption of Converged solutions? So from a Converged perspective, there's actually another term we've been using of Hyper Converged. And the Hyper Converged term starts to head down the SimpliVity, the Nutanix, sort of these all-in-one boxes that have that extra layer of Convergence. The Convergence discussion has become really easy to have. First of all, because there are so many proven versions of it out there. Anything from a VBlock to VSpecs to FlexPod, all these different versions of it, they've been proven finally. People have bought in their references, and I think that market is set, and that market is going to push forward very quickly. When you get into the Hyper Converged market, it's basically kind of nipping away at the tail of the Converged market because it's extending it to such an extreme that those guys are actually doing really well out there now, and they're getting a lot of mind-sharing in the industry right now because the mentality of Converged and even Hyper Converged is, you don't need to worry about what's behind it. And if you don't need to worry anymore about those underlying layers, the storage layers and the server layers, then all of a sudden, you can minimize the impact on operations. You can minimize the impact on upgrade costs, on future build-out costs, and really, that's why I do see Converged and Hyper Converged taking off and being a mainstay for the industry. We had Dairy Lee on earlier, Stu, and they were looking at doing some, redoing their backup, and they realized that, geez, it's going to be too expensive. They ended up bringing in, was it's sublivity, I think. Sublivity. And they did the whole Converged infrastructure over, they did the whole compute, their whole storage, and they got their backup. It was quite an interesting story. So Brad, actually, we dropped a report about a week ago, and we said Hyper Converged was kind of an interesting term. There's a lot of storage solutions, software solutions out there that kind of answer that. What we put forth was what we call a server sand because if you look, we had Brad Anderson on for Microsoft and storage spaces for Microsoft could fit into this discussion. Exactly. You know, VMware, and of course, SimpliVity, Nutanix, who just announced a big round. So there's a lot going on in that space. What do you think? Will that just eat away at the flex pods and VCEs of the world? Is it additive? And just this whole Converged market will take over the legacy? What do you say? So it's funny, because it's always eat or be eaten world right now. That no matter what technology you're talking about, oh my God, that's the best thing ever. And it's going to destroy all the rest of the market. And then you wait, and you wait, and you wait, and everybody can live peacefully and happily and together, and that's what happens. Even inside of, again, you look at like the net apps of the world and Hitachi's and the EMC's, they all have these different storage arrays that have lived peacefully forever, VNX and VMAX and FAS, and HDS with VSP and HUSVMs. They all have their place in the market, and that's what's going to happen with the Nutanix and SimpliVity versus the VBlocks and the VSpecs, they're all going to find their niche, right? Now, yes, a Nutanix with SimpliVity can they work in a larger environment? Definitely. Are they going to take over the market? No, they're not, because you're still going to need some level of features and functions that these traditional storage arrays have actually given you, so a traditionally converged stack is actually going to be a lot better for some of the larger enterprise to actually put behind them. What about, let's talk Amazon for a bit. They were here, given the Amazon 101, which a lot of practitioners hadn't heard. I talked to a number of practitioners and said, this was all new to me, and very powerful messaging. You're seeing them be very aggressive moving into the enterprise. What are you seeing there? How do they fit into your go-to-market strategy in your portfolio? Are you connecting into Amazon? Are you kind of competing with Amazon? How's that all? It's interesting, because Amazon's one of those, for myself, right? We went from a traditional kind of consulting organization into the reseller space many years ago, and we've kind of tried to move forward into that future of our model, which we're trying to still figure out like everybody else. The cloud has driven us to learn more about all the different offerings out there, and Amazon has obviously been a leader in the cloud space, and I think they're going to continue to be for a very long time. If anything, many of the other cloud providers are catching up to Amazon. Amazon is truly the leader in this space, and I think they'll stay that way for a long time. For the reason that they're easy to use, they're easy to purchase. They have many, many features that a traditional set of clouds do not have, and the question really is, what do you need to get out of your cloud? Is it just IaaS? Is it just a virtual machine to run something? Or do you want to actually expand what your organization can do in the cloud, and get to the storage as a service, the platform as a service, the big data as a service? If you want to expand into this larger set of portfolios, if you want that one-stop shop, Amazon today is pretty much the only person you're going to be able to use. It's very lowering. It essentially turned the data center and all the utilities around it into an API. You're right. And we were reinventing, they're announcing things like Kinesis and VDI as a service. I feel as though, I mean, obviously huge market. And we're talking trillions of dollars in business. And it seems as though the sort of general enterprise market is still trying to figure out, okay, how do we compete with Amazon? How do we replicate some of those capabilities? Are they figuring it out? Is it coming together, or is there still need to be more work done there? There's going to be more work done. I mean, that's not ready yet. Unfortunately, it's going to be as good as the, how do I put this? The industry cannot absorb it all at once at this point, because things have been moving so fast for probably the past three to four years, since the inception of the term cloud, which I think happened around 06. Which is by the way, the year that Amazon announced AWS. Exactly. And that was when I think Google had kind of, termed the coin, coined the term cloud at some level. Amazon took that over and ran with it. And since then, that's really changed how the market has been progressing. Cause all of a sudden it was a deluge of everybody's going to be going cloud by 2010. Oh my God, it's going to take over the market. It's not the year of VDI joke that we always have around VDI. But the year of cloud has been a steady progression towards okay, we really seriously have to look at cloud. And Amazon has been the beneficiary of that because they were the first to market with it. They have the most robust solution if you're looking for breadth of actual features. And realistically, the cost model is there. Now the problem is organizations have not understood or learned how to control the progress into an Amazon cloud. And that's actually been one of the defensible pieces by other cloud providers is especially VMware based ones that they can help them get to a public cloud model with a little bit less impact to the business. Cause right now, if you have Amazon, your developers are using them, you don't know if they're using them possibly. They could just be swiping their credit cards off running machines and all of a sudden where are your apps? Where's your data? Oh, the security breach? Okay, we're in trouble. When you're in a VMware shop going to more of a VMware cloud, there tends to be a little bit more of an IT control put in place to move to that cloud. And that's what has to happen in the Amazon space right now is the IT organizations have to help lead the business to Amazon and not let the business lead IT to Amazon. So is that an opportunity for an integrator like yourself? Exactly. I mean, so you're not running from Amazon, you're watching it and potentially embracing it, right? We're watching it. Amazon's been interesting to partner with. They have not always been the most VAR friendly. They're really not. The most, you know, there was never a need to have a consulting organization work with Amazon until the past few years. Yeah, that's changing, isn't it? It's changing 100%. Now they're actually... Because they like to get into the enterprise. Exactly, they're seeing that. And they're needing the consulting aspect. There are a lot of coding partners, but not integration partners, and they're starting to get there. Yeah, go ahead, Stu. So I was just, you know, what about Microsoft? We had, you know, Brad Anderson on earlier and said everything that they build, it gets, you know, built out in Azure first and then puts on. So they have a really good story for that hybrid deployment. So I'm wondering your thoughts there and are you guys working with Microsoft? So it's funny, Microsoft is on my list of 2014 initiatives to work with. We have been a very traditional VMware partner to the point that obviously we've worked with every product set. We've picked up the VMware Clouds, become a service provider for them at some level as well as work with their VCHS offering. And then what we're seeing is Hyper-V kind of sort of is knocking on the door for a lot of SMBs and mid markets. Upstream, they're not really getting there yet. But what is ending up happening is the cloud discussion is happening more and more around Azure now. And because of that, people are forcing us meaning illuminate to be able to get into that discussion. What my experience has been is that it is very easy to use almost as easy as Amazon, not quite there yet. But they've also don't quite have the feature rich sets that Amazon has or the stability and the long history that a VMware type of setup has. Because VMware always do the opposite. VMware started with their internal products and they pushed them out to the cloud whereas Microsoft's doing the opposite. So they don't support as much yet which means that a lot of customers won't be able to get into that just yet. Right, and while we're on the VMware strategy, what are your thoughts? I mean, did the VMware get it right this time? The VMware hybrid cloud service? You know, what are you seeing? Is uptake there? Is it moving? The short answer is, do I think they got it right for the most part, yes. There was a lot of disruption in the VMware community when they came out with VCHS simply because they had so many service providers on their VCloud suite that it was almost like you're kind of killing the industry. What ended up happening though is they actually became friends at some level and VCHS became somewhat of a test bed to allow the service providers to see some of these other features of being able to be integrated into VCD. I have not seen VCHS stealing from the other service providers and we work with the likes of Island and some of those guys. The other nice thing that VCHS is doing, there is a slow uptick for them but it's a good slow uptick because they're having things like disaster recovery as a service tied directly into SRM, stuff like that, that's going to be coming out. And when you get those types of features, people are really comfortable doing DR as a service right now more so than infrastructure as a service to kind of put their foot in the water and see what's going on. Yeah, when we saw the VMware hybrid cloud service come up, we said, okay, this is kind of VMware's stick to get the service provider community behind what they're trying to do. And so I think you're right, they haven't been trying to steal business, they're trying to catalyze business. This is how you do it, follow us and we will lead you. But people were afraid it was a little bit of a head fake there for a while. It was and it was interesting, but actually in the past I would say probably two months there's been a huge uptick in discussion around VCHS as well as customer buy into it. And the cloud credits program from VMware was also a nice discussion to have with customers to give them flexibility of which VMware cloud to actually get. All right, Brad, I'll give you the last word. 2014, put a bumper sticker on what you want to see if we're here in 2015 and you're pulling away from Gillette Stadium at the, you know, 2015 VTUG. What's the bumper sticker on 2014 going to say? 2014 was probably the year that software defined data center was truly defined. Excellent. All right, man, really appreciate you coming on and always an awesome discussion and great guest. All right, keep it right there everybody. Stu Miniman and I will be back to wrap up. We're here live. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE. From the VTUG Winter Warmer live from Gillette Stadium. We'll be right back.