 In 2009, Cisco made a major announcement in the form of UCS. It was designed to attack the IT labor problem. Cisco recognized that data center professionals were struggling to be agile and provide the types of infrastructure services that lines of business were demanding for the modern applications of that day. The value proposition was all about simplifying infrastructure deployment and management. And by combining network and compute and storage with virtualization and a management layer, Cisco changed the game for running applications on premises in the era of converged infrastructure was born. Now fast forward a dozen years and a lot has changed. The cloud has gone mainstream, forcing new requirements on organizations to bridge their on-prem environments to public clouds and manage workloads across clouds. Now to address this challenge, Cisco earlier this month announced a series of offerings that meaningfully expands its original vision to support the more demanding requirements of today's DevSecOps teams. In particular, Cisco with this announcement is enabling customers to deploy a full stack cloud-like operating model that leverages modern platforms such as Kubernetes, new integrations and advanced tooling to bring automation, visibility and better security for both hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Now the underpinning of this solution is a new UCS architecture called the X-Series. Cisco claims this new system gives customers a trusted platform for the next decade to support their hybrid and multi-cloud workloads. Gents, great to see you, welcome. Hey, thank you. Good to see you here. Thanks for having us Dave. We appreciate it. My pleasure, we're looking forward to this. So look, we've seen the X-Series announcement and it looks to be quite a new approach. What are the critical aspects of the X-Series that you want people to understand? Maybe Jim, you could take that. Sure, I think that, you know, overall, there's a lot of change coming in the marketplace, right? We're seeing, we're looking at and we're seeing from a technology standpoint a significant amount of change. Look at CPUs and GPUs, the power draw alone is becoming, you know, basically at the trajectory it is, it may be untenable for some, you know, of the current configurations that people are consuming, right? So some of these current architectures just can't deal with that, right? Or at least they can't deal with what's coming in the future. We're also seeing the relevance of other types of architectures like maybe ARM to start to become something that our customers want to take advantage of, right? Or maybe want to see how that scale fits into their environment on a totally different level. At the same time, the fabrics are really evolving at lightning speed here, right? So we're seeing PCI Express, we've gone from gen three to gen four, where gen five is coming in the very near future. We're layering on top of that things like CXL to take that fabric to the next level for capabilities and be able to do things that we couldn't do before, to connect things together that we couldn't do before. Beyond that, we probably are just a few years away from even more exciting developments in the fabric space around some of the high performance, low latency fabrics that are, again, on the drawing board today just around the corner. Take that and you look at the kind of the evolution of the admin, right? So we're seeing the admin developer emerge. No longer is this just a guy who's sitting in front of a dashboard and managing systems, keeping them up and down. We're now seeing a whole class of developers that are also administrators, right? So all of this together is starting to push us well beyond what human scale really can manage, what human scale can consume. So there's a lot of change coming and I think that we're taking a look at that and realizing that something like X-Series has to be able to deal with that change and the challenges that it brings, but also and do so in a simple manner that we can allow automation, orchestration and some of these new capabilities to enhance what our customers can do, not to drown them in technology. You know that Todd, that's kind of interesting what Jim was saying about beyond human scale. I mean, I think my little narrative upfront that was sort of, hey, we recognize there's an IT labor problem. We're going to address that. And it really wasn't about massive scale back then. It is now really with what we've learned from the cloud guys, right? Definitely. I mean, people are moving from pets to cattle to now with containers, they're saying mosquitoes, right? Cause they're so ephemeral, they come and go and on a single host, you could have, you know hundreds if not thousands of containers. And so the application environment has influenced the infrastructure design and really changed the role of the infrastructure operator to one that necessitates automation, necessitates operations at scale, even on-prem. Everyone's trying to operate in that cloud-like model and they're trying to bridge, the big challenge I see is they're trying to bridge their existing environment, big monolithic applications they've got on-prem with those data lakes that they've built around them over the past decade but they're also trying to follow their developers as they go out into the public cloud and innovate there. That's really where the nexus of all the application innovation is. So the IT teams who are already strapped for resources, it's not like their budgets are going up every year, are now taking on a new front out in the cloud while they're still trying to maintain the systems that they built upon-prem, that's a challenge. Yeah, and that's really the hard part of where some of the innovation here is, is anybody that lives in an old house knows that connecting old to new is very challenging, much more challenging than building from scratch. Jim, I wonder if we could come back to the architecture of the X series and what's really unique about it and what's in it for your customers? Yes, absolutely. So when we're looking at kind of redesigning this thing from the ground up, we recognized that from a timing standpoint, we're sitting at a place with the development of future fabrics and some of these other technologies that we finally have the opportunity to hit the timing perfectly to start to do composability right. So we've heard a lot of noise in the market for the last several years about composability and how that's gonna be the salvation or change the game here. But at the end of the day, the technology hasn't been there in those offerings, right? So we're sitting at the edge of some of the development of those technologies that are gonna allow us to do that. And what we've done with X series is we've taken a construct that we call the UCSX fabric, which is the ability to consume these technologies today as effectively a chassis fabric that can allow us to connect resources together within the chassis and future external to the chassis. But it also allows us to take advantage of the change in fabric that's coming. So as fabrics evolve, as we see new technologies like CXL and the PCI Express Gen 5 and beyond come into play here and eventually physical technologies like silicon photonics, those are constructs that are gonna allow our customers to do some amazing things. And we have the construct to be able to consume those. Our goal here is like to effectively look out at these disruptive technologies on the horizon and make sure that they're not disrupting our customers, that we give our customers the ability to disrupt their competitors and to disrupt their markets, but by consuming those technologies in an easy way. You know, you didn't use the term future proof and I usually don't like that phrase because a lot of times people are just future proof and they're like, well, what's future proof? Well, it's really fast. Well, okay. And in two years, it's going to be really slow compared to everything else. But what you just laid out is an architecture that's really taking advantage of some of these new capabilities that are driving latency down. So that's, so thank you for that. Now, Todd, I get how the X-Series is going to enable customers today, I just mentioned the future, but how does it play into Cisco's hybrid cloud vision? Well, I mean, our customers aren't looking for point solutions or bolt-on layers of software to manage across the hybrid cloud landscape. That's the fundamental challenge. And so what we're doing with InterSight, you really think about all the systems that we have in our portfolio like X-Series really is just extensions of our InterSight platform. And there we're bridging the gaps between fundamental infrastructure on-prem with all of those services that you need to optimize workloads and infrastructure, both in that on-prem environment, but also out in the public cloud and even moving up the stack now into serverless. So we know that customers, again, are trying to bolt together a cohesive environment that allows them to manage those existing workloads on-prem, but also support the innovation going on out in the cloud. And to do that, you have to have services to manage Kubernetes. You need hooks into modern tool chains like HashiCorp's Terraform. We did that a few months back. And we recently brought in something we call our service mesh manager. That came out of an acquisition of Bonsai Cloud. So what we're doing is we're kind of spanning that entire spectrum from physical infrastructure to the workload. And that could be abstracted in any number of ways, either in containers or containers around VMs or bare metal running. Applications run on bare metal or just virtual machine applications and capsulations. So you got all these different modalities that customers are going to run applications in. And it's our intent to create a platform here that supports all of them, both on their on-prem environment and also all the resources they're managing out in the cloud. So that's a big deal for us. One thing I want to go back to the X series for a second, something Jim mentioned, right? Is we see subsystems in computing start to decompose and break apart. We have intersight as the mechanism to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. And that's really, I think, composability in the industry and slow-to-options bar is okay. But managing policy and having an app fabric is all these together. And like Jim said, be able to take on whatever fabrics, low-latency fabrics, ultra-low-latency fabrics we need in coming years to sew these systems together. We're kind of breaking a barrier that wasn't, you know, people had trouble breaking through in the past, right? And that's this idea of true infrastructures code or true software-defined infrastructure. Because now we're talking about being able to apply policy and automation to the actual construct of a server. How do you build that thing to the needs of the workload? And so if you talk to an SRE or a developer today and you say infrastructure, they're thinking of Kubernetes cluster. But ultimately, we want to push that boundary or that frontier between the world of software-defined and abstracted as far down in the infrastructure as we can. And with InterSight and X-Fabric and X-Series, we're taking it all the way down to the individual drive or CPU or ultimately breaking memory apart and sewing that back together. So it's kind of an exciting time for us because we're really pushing that frontier of what is software-defined further and further down into the infrastructure and that just gives people a lot more flexibility in what they build. So I want to play something back to you and see if it resonates. Essentially, I look at what you just said as you're building a layer across my on-prem, whatever public cloud, across clouds, I think eventually we'll get to the edge, but let's hold off on that. Let's park that for now. But that layer abstracts the underlying technical complexity and allows that infrastructure to be, you said programmable, infrastructure is code, essentially. So that's the only other question. It's like, how programmable is this infrastructure today and in the future? But is that idea of an abstraction layer kind of how you're thinking about hybrid and multi-cloud? It is in terms of the infrastructure that customers are going to run on-prem, right? In the public cloud, the cloud providers are already abstracting that for them. And so what we want to do is bring that same type of public cloud experience to managing infrastructure on-prem. So being able to have pools of resources that you allocate out to workloads, shift it as things change. So it's absolutely a cloud-like approach to on-prem infrastructure. And one of the things I like to say is, friends don't let friends build their own private cloud platforms from scratch, right? Where we're productizing this, we're bringing it as a cohesive system that customers don't need to engineer on their own. They can focus on their operations. And Jim, actually, he's a pilot. And one of the things he observed about InterSight a couple of years ago was this idea of InterSight as a co-pilot and kind of, you know, adding a person to your team almost when you have InterSight in your data center because some very, what feel like rudimentary things are incredibly impactful day-to-day for our customers. So we have recommendation engines. If it's, you know, maybe it says some interplay between BIOS and firmware and operating system. And we know that there's an issue there. Rather than letting customers stumble upon that on their own, we're going to flag it, show them the correction, go implement it for them. So that starts to feel a lot more like what they're accustomed to in a public cloud setting where the system has some intelligence baked in, the system is kind of covering them, watching their back and acting like a co-pilot in a day-to-day operation. Okay, so I get that the cloud guys will abstract the complexity. You guys are focused on prem, but is it, so my question then is a multi-cloud, across clouds, because we have some cloud providers, you know, your partners with Google, they do some things with Anthos, I know Microsoft with Arc, but, you know, and even near term. Should we think about Cisco as playing that role of my across cloud, you know, partner, if you will? Absolutely, you know, cloud agnosticism is core to our approach, because we know that, you know, if you dial the clock way back to the early aughts, right, when cloud first started emerging, it was kind of an efficiency play. And you had folks like Nicholas Carr, right, the author that put out the big switch, kind of envisioning a world where there'd be this ultimate consolidation to maybe one or two or three cloud platforms worldwide. But what we're seeing, you know, we had data sovereignty kind of emerge over the past decade, but even the past year or two, it's now becoming issues of actual cloud sovereignty. So you have governments in Australia and India and in Europe actually take asserting control over the cloud providers and services that can be used by their public sector organizations. And so that's just leading to actually cloud fragmentation. It's not nearly as monolithic of future as we thought it would be. It's a lot of clouds. And so as customers want to move around geographically or if they want to go harvest innovation that maybe Google's really good at something like machine vision or they want to use AWS or Azure for different applications that they're going to go build. We're seeing customers really being put in a place where they're going to deal with multiple cloud providers and the data supports that. So it's definitely our approach, especially on the networking technology side to make it very easy for our customers to go out and connect these different clouds and not have to repeat the integration process every time they want to go, you know, start using another public cloud provider. So that's absolutely our strategies to be very agnostic and build everything in mind for customers into using multiple providers. Thank you for that Todd. So Jim, I want to come back and talk a little bit about sort of your competitive posture here. I mean, you guys, when you made the announcement, I inferred that you were feeling like you were in a pretty good position relative to the competition that you were putting forth not just core infrastructure in hardware and software but also all these other components around it that we talked about, observability, extending out to beyond the four walls of my data center, et cetera. But talk a little bit about why you think this gives you such competitive advantage in the marketplace. Well, I mean, I think first of all, back to where Todd was going as well, is that, you know, if you think about trying to be, to work in this hybrid cloud world that we're clearly living in, the idea of burrowing features and functions as far down the stack as possible doesn't make a lot of sense, right? So intersite is a great example. We wanna manage and we wanna orchestrate across clouds, right? So how are we gonna have our management and infrastructure services buried into the chassis down at the very lowest level? That doesn't make sense. So we elevated our operating model to the cloud, right? And that's how we manage across clouds from the cloud. So building a system, and really we've done this from the ground up with X series, building a system that is able to take advantage of all these new technologies. And you mentioned, you know, how being future proof was probably, you know, a derogatory term almost. And I agree with you completely. I think we're future ready. Like we're ready to embrace it because we're not trying to say that nothing is gonna change beyond what we've already thought of. We're saying, bring it on. We're saying, bring on that change because we're ready for it. We can accommodate change. We're not saying that the technology we have today is gonna ride us for 10 years. We're saying we're ready for the next 10 years of change. Bring it. We can do that in a simple way. That is, you know, I think, you know, gonna give us the versatility and the simplicity to allow the technology to go beyond human scale without having to, you know, drown our customers in administrative duties, right? So that co-pilot that Todd mentioned is gonna be able to take on a lot more of the work, just like in an airplane where, you know, the pilot has functionality that he has to absolutely be part of. And those are our developers, right? We want those admin developers to develop, to build things and to do things and not get bogged down in the minutia that exists. So I think competitively, you know, our architecture top to bottom, you know, all the way up the stack, all the way to the bottom is unique and it is focused on not just the rear view mirror, but what's coming in the future. So my takeaway there is that, okay, I get it. The new technologies will come along, but this architecture is the architecture for the decade, you know? You're not gonna have to redo the architecture in a few years. That's really the key point here. Todd, I'll give you a last word. My, I've just taken some notes here and takeaways that, well, I heard up front, chip diversity really take advantage of all the innovations that are coming out. You're ready for that. You're kind of blurring the lines between blade and rack, giving some optionality there. Scale is a big theme. I mean, Cloud has brought that and people want to scale. They don't want to be, you know, provisioning LUNs all day and they won't be able to scale if that's what their job is. Developer friendly, particularly as it relates to infrastructure as code and you've got a roadmap. So Todd, that's my summary. I'll give you the last word. No, it's really good. I mean, you get it, right? We're thinking about this holistic operating environment that our customers are building for Hybrid Cloud and we're pre-engineering that environment for them. So our inner-site platform, all of our systems that connect to that are really built to tackle that Hybrid environment from end to end. And with systems like X-Series, we're giving them a more simple, you know, efficient landing spot for their workloads on-prem, but crucially, it's fully integrated with this Hybrid Cloud platform. So as they have workloads on-prem and workloads in the cloud, it's kind of a transparent environment between those two worlds there. So bringing it together so that our customers don't have to build it themselves. Excellent. Well, Gents, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing the details of this announcement. Congratulations. I know how much work and thought goes into these things. Really looking forward to its progress and adoption in the marketplace. Appreciate your time. Thank you. Thanks for the time. And thank you for watching this Cube Conversation. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.