 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Cover EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. And welcome back to EMC World 2016. I'm John Walls here on theCUBE or inside the Sands Expo live today, Tuesday and Wednesday bringing you EMC World. It's a pleasure right now, along with Dave Vellante to welcome to the set Larry Rao, who's the director of architecture and infrastructure at Verizon. Larry, thanks for joining us here on theCUBE. Thanks. Appreciate that. Hey, first off, I mean, it's kind of the softball, highball question here, but why EMC? Why that partnership? What's your decision based on that? Sure, Verizon's had a relationship with EMC for a number of years using a variety of projects, our products and when my group, when we started out building an internal cloud infrastructure, we were looking for storage solutions, software storage solutions and that led us to look at some of the products from EMC and evaluate what they can do for us. And you guys have been doing business with them for a while, but so I wonder if we could talk about your business. A little bit, yeah. When we talk to customers in our community, everybody's talking about disruptions and digital transformations, obviously as a giant telco you're seeing, you're in the heart of all this. What's going on in your business? What are the drivers? What are the things that the business line is asking you for that you're having to respond to? Well, as you know, Verizon has several different lines of business that we're doing, obviously our wireless unit, our files, our TV services, internet of things is starting to become really big. But I think what drives it all is the un-customer, the user, they want to use devices, whether it's their cell phone, whether it's different types of sensors or items added. This drives data into our network. It drives different usage patterns from our consumers. So I think that's still, and if I look at it from what comes out, I run development teams in-house and it's like, hey, how do we manage all these devices in a reliable way? How do we take in all this data in a reliable way and provide useful services back to our customers? So when you say you're running development teams, you guys are writing apps or? Yes, Verizon Labs is an internal development arm for Verizon, so we do everything from infrastructure components all the way up through applications. Okay, so given all this digital transformation, all these devices, IoT, talk about the infrastructure, because I mean, as a guy who runs app teams, you don't want to think about infrastructure, right? I mean, it's the plumbing, but when it goes bad, when it goes wrong in the pipe burst, then you think about it, right? So what's your perspective on that? Well, it's interesting, the reason I got in, I actually got in the infrastructure because I was building a team to look at IoT and the services around IoT and how would we handle all this exposure of data and that led us into actually looking at how do I want to deploy all these applications internally on our systems and our data centers and that led us to reevaluate how we did our infrastructure. And so we adopted more of a so-called cloud technology, cloud native computing, you hear that a lot here at EMC World. As we adopted that technology, we had to reevaluate that infrastructure component and my team kind of looked at that solution and then that led us into how do we handle storage, how to handle data, how to handle compute. So it was pretty interesting. So you're essentially trying to replicate the capabilities that we tend to associate with public cloud in-house, on-prem, if you will, is that right? And are you able to achieve that? I know you're an ECS customer, you're looking at scale IO, I guess you're kicking the tires on that or maybe in beta, I'm not really sure exactly, maybe you can clarify that, but are you able, Larry, to replicate those capabilities in-house in your view? So we didn't, obviously we don't necessarily have to replicate everything, someone like an AWS or a public cloud provider provides for our internal applications. What we're really looking for is how do we efficiently make use of our data centers. We've run data centers for a large number of years. We have a large number of systems. So if you take some of the lessons of cloud computing and those adopted by public cloud providers, you apply them internally for the same purposes. How do I take all this hardware around a whole data center and how do I manage it efficiently and then how do I make it more rapid infrastructure so I can deploy applications and services quicker? And that's really the key is how do we get new services deployed in this infrastructure so we can deliver new things to our customers? So it's not, the objective is not to mimic those public cloud providers, it's to get better, get more out of your existing assets, right? I mean, because you've got a budget, you've got a target, if you can exceed that then you're winning, right? Is that the mentality? Absolutely, what we found was when you deployed applications, everything was done in silos of equipment and applications and equipment and applications and equipment and applications. And if I want to make more efficient use of that, the cost associated with deploying that physical infrastructure make us more nimble so we can accomplish all these goals at once. More efficient use of our physical assets, better efficient use of deployment of applications across those assets. Larry, you were talking about the various services about video services, wireless, telecom, internet of things, hit on IoT. The fact that that market appears to have a huge hockey stick opportunity there in front of you, what does that do to you in terms of complicating what you do in terms of adapting to that demand and in coping with that? Well, one is it's exciting when you think about this, it's exciting to see all these devices come in and I think companies like Verizon are well positioned because we service, as you know, we service large numbers of users. We have, I mean, if you consider our wireless user base, if every one of those wireless customers started using a number of internet of, so-called internet of things, things, all of a sudden I have a lot of new connections on our network, a lot of new data coming into our network. So the challenge from our development perspective is make sure we can keep up with what our customers want from all these devices and data coming into our network. And so it's a good problem to have, I think we're well situated to deal with it and I think it's an exciting space to be in. So this, all this SDS stuff, the software defined storage, you know, it's like buzzword central, right? I mean, I apologize to those who don't follow this that closely, but this is real to you guys, right? This whole software defined notion. Absolutely. So how are you applying that to, what problems are you solving with software defined? So software defined in general allows us again to keep our software infrastructure layer one step, you sort of insulated from the actual physical hardware. Cause there's a couple things, physical hardware will have, will go wrong at some point. It will, you know, something fails, obviously. We have to expand the physical infrastructure. And the last thing you want is every time I need it to expand my physical infrastructure, it causes me to sort of have to redo my entire software layer. So you want the software to adapt to what's going on in physical layer. This is very important in storage. So I don't have to have my applications locked into the actual physical disk drive. It's a silo buster. It's a silo buster, absolutely. Okay, and so when you, when you look at that, what's the, what's the business impact, the operational impact? Is it, is it your people are more productive? You're able to shift people to more higher value activities? Talk about how you've changed the operating model. I think the, again, back to the cloud native computing, if I can take my applications and, and I can, it's sort of like if you look at pieces of a puzzle and where do you run your applications? Well, you can let a system now intelligently choose where to run them and so they can move around. And if they're not tied to any one physical machine, if that physical machine has a problem, the software can actually move that application somewhere else. So you don't want to be locked into a specific hard drive. You want to be locked into a large amount of storage. And you want that storage to obviously be very secure. You want it to be very efficient. You want it to be very available from a user perspective. You want the data to be high integrity of that data. So as things might adjust in the physical infrastructure, the user's data can move around with that application and application will always have that data available. Has that been your experience with ECS and I guess your expectation with Scale IO? I know it's early days for Scale IO, but maybe add some color to that. Yeah, I think what ECS is a good thing to look at. It provides a different abstraction level for application developers. So this notion of treating everything as an object and then the application's abstraction level is this contiguous object of data. And then you let this nice thing ECS manage that object. Where does it go? Does it need to be replicated across data centers? Do I keep redundant copies so that the user's data is nice and secure and safe? So those are all good attributes of a storage system in general. And in Scale IO, we're hopeful what Scale IO actually allows us to take this block storage device and run things such as databases on top of it. And again, insulate my software layer, my database layer from say hard drive failure. And so Scale IO provides a number of redundancy on that layer and gives us one step of isolation from the actual hardware. So if there is a physical node failure that virtual volume in a sense will find the application again. So as a senior manager, do you think about or how do you think about the changes that this all brings forth in terms of your labor pool, your skill sets? How do you manage that? That's a good question, I didn't think about that. I don't think anything really, to some level nothing really changes from a people perspective. It's, you got to hire really strong development teams. I think the things you look for, the developers that can learn a new technology. So as this technology evolves with us, they do have to learn a whole host of new technologies. I think one thing they don't necessarily have to deal with a lot anymore is sort of down on the physical layer. So my software developers can actually operate a different level of abstraction that makes them more efficient, makes them write the code faster and better, better quality. Kind of like the Bill Belichick, I know a lot of you people out there don't like the Patriots, but he's known for drafting linemen that can play center or guard or tackle. You're basically saying the same thing? He was great when he was at the Giants. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right, right. But you live in Boston now, don't you? You got to like, I know Verizon prides itself on speed, obviously. Larry at the customer driving experience last night offsite, made a little mile and a third lap in a Ferrari at 56 seconds, and so this man's all about speed. Yeah, all right, good stuff. Congratulations on that. Larry, thanks for joining us. We appreciate the time. No problem, appreciate it. Great having you here on theCUBE, and we'll continue with our coverage from EMC World 2016 here in Las Vegas in just a bit. It's always fun to come back to theCUBE because...