 Live from Vancouver, Canada, it's theCUBE at OpenStack Summit Vancouver 2015. Brought to you by headline sponsors EMC and jointly by Red Hat and Cisco with additional sponsorship by Brocade and HP. Okay, hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of the OpenStack Summit in Vancouver, British Columbia. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANG. I'm joined by our next guest, Madhu Kashyap who's the senior product manager at Brocade. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John. Brocade has been everywhere. You guys doing a lot of great work. The infrastructure is exploding, people want more. You know, on-demand data centers, they want faster fiber channel. They want, everything has to be faster, the network layer. So give us the update on, you know, with OpenStack and the builder, the build out utopia that's going on in the data center and cloud. What's Brocade doing? Sure, sure. So a lot of changes and innovation going on in the data center and Brocade is right in the middle of it. The same operational model that defines compute and virtualization, they want to bring into networking and Brocade is, you know, the agility, scalability, elasticity, what defined compute is coming into networking, the cloud networking, data center networking. So you want on-demand networks being able to scale, scale out your networks, add new switches, routers to your fabric and that's where Brocade plays in. So both through the physical infrastructure, switching, routing, as well as the NFV platforms that we bring in on the software side. And do you talk about this term that you, Brocade, uses called on-demand data center? What does that mean? Is that just software defined data center? Is it nuanced, explain what that means? Absolutely. So no, the on-demand data center is really going to the core of what the cloud definition is. It's the elasticity, scalability. In a way it is software defined data center but this encompasses both the physical infrastructure and the software and the virtual layer, the logical network. And so yes, you know, people sometimes use that interchangeably but that's Brocade's sort of marketing term as well as defines our approach. What's the changing nature of the data center? Where does this fit in? It's from a customer standpoint. Sure. What does that mean? Like I mentioned, you know, a lot of changes going on in the data center with, you know, containers is a big thing. But network and network virtualization is a key initiative for Brocade. The ability to create networks, tenant networks quickly on demand, bring in other services, layer three, layer four, layer seven services, things like VPNs and firewalls and load balancers. Those are all part of our offering from Brocade and so that is all integrated into OpenStack. And so today through OpenStack you can automate this whole process. One of the things I was just talking about on the crowd page is the new headline is that interoperability and certification, certainly federated ID, identifications, obviously key. Sure. Where is this certification party landing? Miranda's obviously behind that. Sure. As well as OpenStack and the work involved. What is certification? What's going on with certification? Yeah, yeah. So all of our plugins, with Kilo release we release 10 plugins across our entire product portfolio. And all of these plugins will be certified. So we've been doing that for a couple of years now with both Red Hat and Miranda's. Those are our primary distribution partners. So not only our OpenStack plugins are upstream but they're also certified. So they will work with distributions from Red Hat, Miranda's, and certified, documented, supported. There's a lot of customer activity here in terms of use cases, a lot of presentations from customers. What are some of the things that our customers are saying? Because customers are talking to each other. What's interesting is that a lot of the deals and a lot of the deployments are customers talking to other customers, hey, who did you use? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, between us. So what is the brocade? You guys are getting a lot of word of mouth advantage right now. What's going on? What are the customers saying about brocade? You know, customers are, we've seen a real uptick and surge in customer interaction, right from the number of field calls, from EBCs that I'm doing. Customers are looking at basic network isolation, tenant isolation, network security. But they're going beyond that. They want overlays and tunnels and VPNs and firewalls and load balancers. Look, all those services are coming in. We're already sort of ahead of that curve and catering to these customer use cases. So there's a use cases go across enterprise and service providers. So enterprises putting more traditional workloads, they don't need that kind of scale. Service providers, especially cloud service providers are looking at huge scale. So they need all kinds of virtual logical networks for their tenants. And so those are big requirements as well. A lot of network activity, certainly in the on-demand data center, your vision there, brocade, what's OpenStack's role with the on-demand data center? So, oh, OpenStack is critical. I mean, a lot of our customers are approaching us and saying, do you integrate with OpenStack? You know, what are you doing in the community? And those are all big things that we've ramped up in the last year or so, year and a half, where we're, like I mentioned, we're doing a number of plugins across our storage, network, and the virtual infrastructure through our Viata acquisition. We're doing a lot on the community side in terms of participating in bug fix, code reviews, API definitions, getting some more sort of leadership positions in the community. Talk about Brocade's role in OpenStack. Right. People may or may not know how heavily involved you guys are. Give us some quick sound bites. Sure, we've been involved with OpenStack for a couple years now. It started with our sand products and our switch, top-of-the-rack switches. This is from the Grizzly release almost two years ago. We did initial plug-in, you know, pre-ML2, NOAA network, what we call our classic plug-in. So that has been deprecated now, but slowly over time, we've expanded the scope of our OpenStack environment. And you're bringing a lot of code to the table. Absolutely. We are involved in a lot of the VPN firewall frameworks. We're doing stuff with the L2 or V Gateway for VXLAN to VLAN, you know, physical to virtual gateways. So we are getting a lot more involved. We are really hiring on that side. And our involvement with Open Daylight from this morning, you might have heard from Dave Meyer as well, our chief scientist. So that just fits well together. Just our work with Open Daylight and OpenStack. Talk about the role virtualization's had in the OpenStack ecosystem in terms of disruption. How has that enabled change? Sure, virtualization on the compute side, you know, happened a while ago now, you know, OpenStack works with all the hypervisors, but really the network is where now all of that virtualization technology is coming in. And again, right from the hypervisor and OVS, virtual logical switches to top-of-rack switches. So where you want to create line rate, you know, scale and performance that you get at line rate on the top-of-rack switches, that's where some of our overlay technologies and tunnel capabilities, and all enabled and automated through OpenStack. The sand side's hard, right? So what's going on there? I mean, we see VMware with vSan, some are saying struggling a bit with the performance areas. What's the key for the sand? So we, like I said, our heritage and DNA is sand. We've been doing sand for 14, 15 hours since the company started. So even this morning, you know, so our brocade sand switches are OEM, we have OEM partner, EMC, IBM, HP. They're our primary partners. Had a meeting with them this morning. So we're doing a lot as a cinder plugin. So we put in our code for the fiber channel zone manager, which is a cinder plugin. We continue to expand the scope of that. How do we make that for iSCSI and NAS? So again, it's a software storage controller. Think of that, you know, what EMC just announced with Viper. So we're looking at that whole ecosystem and figuring out, you know, where... Is that the reference architecture you're referring to? Yes. Has it been announced today? Or was it the EMC world they announced? The EMC world. All right, what is that reference architecture about? So that is their project Caspian. And so that's where their software defined controller comes in. And we are looking at how our top-of-rack switches plugs into that. So you have dedicated IP networks for IP storage. And that's part of the reference architecture that EMC talked about. So a lot of news going on. What's next for you guys? Oh, we continue to expand. We're looking at the storage as a critical piece. So going beyond fiber channel into IP storage, we're looking at layer three fabrics. These are massively scalable underlays of physical networks and how that can be automated through, not only OpenStack, but through our controller, through DevOps-style kind of API-driven. So for us, it's all about offering customer choice. So, you know, whether it's you want a controller-driven network or data center through OpenStack or through DevOps, you know, we provide all capabilities. And your customer form about 60 days ago, you guys talked about the fabric and OpenStack. What's that all about? I mean, what's going on with the brocade fabric? So there's on the sand side, is the sand fabric, but let me touch on the IP fabric on the network sites. So that's where our next generation of switches are coming in and they will be able to form a full layer three IP fabric. So this will be automated. You can continue to expand your data center to, you know, as you scale, as you bring in more tenants, more workloads. And that's the fabric, that's what it's all about. So this is the kind of architecture that the massively scalable, you know. So that's horizontally scalable. Correct. That's the new thing. Correct. We did that with SAP and other things. So this was what was in the realm of the big guys, right? Googles and Azure and, you know, all those guys used to Facebook do that, but now, you know, large enterprises, smaller cloud service providers, get the same kind of scale and can do that. So the top news today is that OpenStack launches the vendor certification federated identity support from over 30 different cloud providers. Does that help brocade? Sure, absolutely. So like I said, we are already getting certified. The more, you know, with the federated identity, we are looking at use cases where, you know, the hybrid cloud use case, you know, classic example where enterprises want to burst to the public cloud. Again, there was a notion of, you know, how do you get authenticated? You know, all this helps brocade with the whole customer, you know, acquisition and customer use cases. What's the hallway conversations here at OpenStack that you've been involved in? With brocade and without brocade, the distro, business models, you've got Mirantis out there. Sure. Is there confidence in the ecosystem? What are some of the things people are saying? So I can tell you, I mean, I haven't had a lot of time to really get into this, but I can tell you from our customer base and you in the field and just, you know, talking to sort of partners here, that, you know, it's still, there are still issues with OpenStack. You know, try installing a three-node OpenStack, you know, with two compute, a switch, and a controller, right? It's so difficult. So it needs to get there. And this morning at the keynote, I think the HP SVP mentioned, you know, installation issues and there was a round of applause. So it's getting there, it's getting better. It still needs to go through its spaces to get there. And it's still early. Yeah, it's still early. There's a lot of pressure from Microsoft. You've got VMware, you've got Google Cloud, EMC's got the cloud out there, HP Cloud. What's holding up the cloud? I mean, we're always saying the cube, go faster, can OpenStack go faster? Is it going as fast as it can? What can it do better? No, again, so some of the basics need to get right. You know, things like installation, upgrade, HA, need, you know, people are used to a certain level of enterprise software that they're comfortable with, which they've got used to. They want to see that same thing in open source, right? And it's not getting there fast enough for them. And I think that's where all the vendors bringing in their, you know, community of developers to make this faster, better, so that, you know, customers can start adopting it. What's the number one concern customers have when they look at OpenStack? Is it just readiness? Is it enterprise grade? Is it hardened code base? Yeah, so I think they're over that initial hump of, oh, this is open source, they're way past that. So now it's, they've done lab work, they've done POCs, they're happy with that. It's still a lot of tweaking. They need the skill sets, you know, to install and maintain OpenStack. They need a lot of the capabilities from the community. How does HA work? Where is the messaging? You know, the messaging bus is little, you know, broken, a lot of tweaks when you want to scale. So documentation, support, those are all still issues. It's the little details. Right, it's the little details. I mean, it's just chipping away at that. Correct. But you feel good, the ball's moving down the field. Oh, absolutely, absolutely, no doubt. All right, so I've got to ask you with the Brocade question, for the folks watching, share with what's going on at Brocade, the culture. A lot of people might, may or may not know with how much work you do in the foundation, with the community, with open source, just, you know, take a moment to share and brag a little bit about Brocade. Yeah, absolutely. So like I mentioned, we've been involved in the community, started doing plugins, very tactical, right? Let's just get our plugin in. So over time, now in the last, for Kilo release, we've got eight or 10 developers working on OpenStack across our product portfolio. On community work, doing plugins as well, but looking at beyond plugins. So we are involved with projects called Tacker, which is a service life cycle management for NFV related things. We are involved in the VPN, firewall, sub teams of Neutron. We are looking at Neutron. We are involved in the Cinder project. So again, we are doing a lot more in the community. We're in the trenches. Yes, absolutely. We're doing a lot of coding with the community. Absolutely. What about NFV? Is that going to be something that's going to be relevant? I mean, honestly, people are talking about it, but we hear conflicting views from service providers. Some say it creates more complexity than it should be. Right, right. It should be extracting away more complexity. So as you know, we are involved with the Open Daylight and the OP-NFV project. And the OP-NFV is there to create that reference architecture, right? So it takes OpenStack, OpenDaylight, OVS, you know, puts it all together so people can bank on it. They can say, okay, this works and we can take the buff forward. So we are all in for NFV. Well, there's a certain demand on the telco side. Right, exactly. Big time, right? Exactly. What's going on in the OpenStack industry from your standpoint? Are you happy with the results so far? Yeah, happy, but again, the details, right? Getting some of these things, you know, like win the enterprise, right? Big initiative from the foundation. We need to nail those little, little things so that the customer adoption is faster. Now you guys know, Brocade and Cisco, you guys are in the trenches. Little things matter when it comes to networking because something can break pretty easily. Absolutely, no, I agree. It's got to be mission critical. Correct, correct. So we are doing all, you know, we are totally engaged with the community. We are all in. Okay, so let's talk about networking. I've got the last couple of minutes left. Sure. So North, South, East, West, that's the old, you know, networking. Go North, send the packets this way, East, West. With virtualization and SDN in particular and with OpenStack, how is that changing? I mean, obviously it's now omni-directional. We've got all kinds of new capabilities. What is, just kind of share the mindset of how networking changes with virtualization with OpenStack? Correct, correct. So this goes back to the IP fabric in a way. So if you look at the big massive data centers, the whole layer to layer three boundaries are the switch. And so it's a massive IP fabric. And so then you have end of row or gateways that do North, South. So again, numerous studies have showed 80% of the traffic is, you know, East, West, 20% is North, South. So you don't need big routers that are traditionally architected for North, South. So now that is changing sort of the nature of data center, data center, networking. And so we- It's also complicated by workloads too. Correct. Because workloads also will shape traffic pattern. Correct, absolutely. But mostly we're seeing VMs talking to other VMs in there. And then the North, South traffic goes through a certain gateway. That gateway is defined again through OpenStack. We can, or through a controller where you can, you know, selectively change the bandwidth through open flow, for example. So there's a lot of, again, the thought process is automation, you know, scalability, agility. So with that in mind, you know, that's what we're seeing in the data center. All right, bringing us all back to the Open On-Demand Data Center, ODDC, the On-Demand Data Center, Division of Brocade. CIO conversation, bottom line me, what does it mean? It basically says Brocade brings you both physical, virtual, networking, infrastructure, storage. In a way that you can consume quickly through OpenStack. So this lets you do, you know, whether you want to scale your data center, you need quick services. We have the whole portfolio for... So you enable, you're an accelerant. Yes, absolutely, absolutely. You provide the foundation. Correct, yeah. All right, cool. Madhu, thank you for joining us on theCUBE. Brocade here inside theCUBE, great supporter of theCUBE. Obviously a lot of smart people we had them on all the time. Had you on EMC World, love working with you guys. Now this is Brocade inside theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, we'll be right back at this short break live in Vancouver, British Columbia for OpenStack Summit, beautiful city. We'll be right back.