 Live from the FIIA Barcelona Grand Villa Compensator in Barcelona, Spain, it's The Cube, and HP Discover Barcelona 2014, brought to you by headline sponsor HP. Here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Live in Barcelona for The Cube, this is our flagship program, we go out to the events I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante in Barcelona for HP Discover in Europe, the 2014 major customer event, our next guest is Dominic Weil, VP of Marketing and Global Product Line Management for HP Networking, and of course we love networking on The Cube, it's one of our highest rated content types, Dave and I were just talking about that, and Dominic welcome back to The Cube. Thanks Joe. Welcome to the first time on The Cube. No, no, no, second time. Second time, okay that's right, yeah, so second time on The Cube, so networking is hot, obviously we were just talking before we came on, it's really one of the most active areas right now, both online and also from an engineering standpoint, in enterprises and service providers. Networking guys tend to be engineering and architectural and doing all the hard stuff, but they're taking a lot of heat these days because the network is the bottleneck, everyone is like pointing at you, DevOps, it's on the enterprise, it's pretty much the mantra is hey I know you're important, it's important stuff, but can you go faster? Pedal faster. Yeah. So you're asking network virtualization, NFD, all the stuff's happening, give us a quick update, how are you guys putting that all together, how are you keeping customers happy, what's the state of the unit? So actually to your point there, one of the funny things we heard from our customer advisory board is the number one feature they want us to implement is mean time to innocence, because every time something goes wrong it's always the network's fault, nine times out of ten it is. So they're asking us to more and more try and figure out how can you prove that we're innocent before the problem gets there, but overall in general, yeah, so agility, as people move towards the cloud, they want the promise of agility in the enterprise environment, and agility is not a static thing, it's not a static measurement, it's really an evolving thing, and as cloud starts to roll out, people deploy cloud in the enterprise and service provider environments, the demands around agility just keep increasing. So what we're emphasizing here at Discover is around the power of simplicity and how if you simplify the network using software defined networking principles, you can really, really increase that agility, increase availability, reliability, etc. Networking has really been just too hard for too long, and SDN is really the thing that is really going to deliver on that promise of greater agility and reliability. And so network virtualization is one of those SDN technologies that people have gone beyond the tire kicking now, and they're really starting to roll out implementations, and the promise of network virtualization is just better utilization of your network resources, so you can do more with the existing network, but it's also around that agility, how quickly you can roll out ad hoc networks, how quickly you can spin up new applications, and so these are the points that we're really, really emphasizing today. I mean, most customers' networks are very hierarchical and structured and rigid and all these things, so how do we get from that to where we want to be and generally you're right, it's not static and it's sometimes hard to define, but you know it when you get it. So how do we go from this sort of structured hierarchy of the network today to where we want to go? Yeah, it's a great question, it's actually one of the first questions that customers ask us, you know when I talk to customers about the promise of SDN they say, you know, fantastic, sounds great, but how do I get from where I am today to there? One of the answers to that is that one of the things that we at HP do that is totally unique in the industry is that we provide our transformation services. So we have workshops where we can go into a client's environment and specifically in the context of their network talk about okay, not just the technology aspects, but also the business aspects, budgeting, organizational issues that you're going to have and basically deliver a road map, a phased road map of practical steps that they can take with all the different elements that they have to consider beyond just the technology and help them to actually develop that plan to go from A to B. And you know in most environments today people have these very hierarchical networks, you know the traditional 3D network that's associated with Cisco environments and so you know those were designed to send traffic north and south, everything had to go up the stack and down the stack. But of course today in the hyper-virtualized world everything goes east to west and so you have to actually start to look at how do you change and transform that underlying infrastructure so as you can take advantage of the principles around network virtualization and server virtualization as well. Are some customers saying okay, I want to fence that sort of hierarchy off and all the new stuff, I want to build out a new infrastructure for all these mobile apps? Or are you seeing more morphing of the old and the new world? It's actually a combination. So there are very specific applications that you know people want to take and just you know fence off. So things like HANA, Hadoop, etc. where you want to really tune the network and tailor it in a specific way to make those particular applications very efficient. So people are you know taking some you know dedicated infrastructure steps there so we have our converged systems group who are delivering converged systems that are very successfully tuned to just service those applications. But in general people also want to drive the advantage of software defined networking, virtualization, etc. into their general infrastructure. They just want to get you know greater efficiency and reliability. And so you know as we roll out these network virtualization solutions we're really delivering those to the more complex but the more varied environment of the general enterprise. Which is why we at HP again are unique. We've actually delivered three different network virtualization solutions because what we recognized is that you know what everybody's not the same. There's not one size that fits all. There are different use cases that require different features. So summarize those. What are the three? So we have three. The first one is virtual cloud network or VCN. And VCN is actually integrated into our Helion Cloud offering which is obviously based on OpenStack. And so it really is about changing the economics. It's cloud economics for network virtualization. So we actually include VCN in Helion. It's included in the license. You don't have to buy anything extra. So most people who are moving towards that OpenStack environment they want open. They want you know they want all the features and things but they want very open and they also want different economics. They're running KVM for instance. And so VCN fits very nicely in there. It also delivers on scalability both from the very small to the very large. So we can actually use traditional VLANs scaling up to 4,000 VLANs which for a lot of organizations is enough to virtualize. And they don't want to pay extra money for things that can scale much higher than that. So that's where VCN fits in the portfolio. The second one is the solution that we developed with VMware. So we've done a joint federation solution with VMware. Obviously very strong partners of ours. And for those customers who have already bought into the VMware stack and are using extensive VMware tools one of the challenges that they have with the network a problem they run into the network where the network holds them back is that while the overlay, the VMware NSX overlay gives them a great deal of operational flexibility when it comes to visibility and troubleshooting down into the underlying infrastructure it's kind of a black box. You kind of now run into some problems. And so taking HP's SDN controller federating that with VMware's controller it now links the overlay and the underlay and the physical and virtual worlds together and solves those problems. And it gives you visibility as to what's happening there. If something goes wrong you can address it. Would you brand that? It's branded as the HP VMware network solution. HP VNS. And yeah, we demoed it actually just a couple of months back at VMware. Here. Barcelona. Yeah. And so that is actually rolling out as a full GA product in the coming weeks. And then the last of the three solutions that we have is called our Distributed Cloud Network, DCN. And that is a solution that we just recently introduced and that is really geared more towards the service provider or really large organizations who act like service providers. So service providers who may be on their journey to NFV and want to accelerate that. DCN can scale to very, very high degree. It can scale to tens of thousands of VMs. But most conveniently it has a unique feature set as much as it has an MPLS data plane. And so it will integrate very neatly in those large organizations who have already implemented MPLS at the core. And so it will be able to just very, very simply without any need for disruption transform that network, it will be able to take advantage of the MPLS capabilities and drive MPLS all the way down to the top of that. So John, hearing a lot of scale out, network is finally scaling out. It is. Things are here. It's always been working on for a few years. We've been pounding that. Since the Nasir acquisition of VMware, I think everyone realizes that network globalization is tier one problem to focus on, create growth. But I want to ask you something about the cloud or cloud traction. If you look at Amazon's Direct Connect with Google Clouds doing the peering, the trend is to have a direct relationship with backbones. So obviously that's a networking challenge on the wide area side. But now as people want to connect their data centers, you're seeing a much more regional focus as the Amazon launched in Germany, their data center. That's a trend. I want to have workloads moving around. Basically treating data centers like network parts of presence. So what do you guys play into that trend? Obviously you have cloud, your own cloud, but also you have partners that have data centers and clouds. So you have your own cloud or you have people who have clouds. So talk about this new dynamic and what does that mean for you guys and what do you have in that area for products? Yeah, I mean, it's actually really a question for our Cloud Helion team and our public cloud team in terms of how we're going to implement things. From the networking side... Well, from their side, I'll ask them about the Direct Connect and how they view it. But as you get down, what it really means, what I want to get used to, what's the network problem? Well, from the networking side, there's a couple of problems. Number one is that people want to actually stretch their VLANs across different data centers. You don't want to have different addressing schemes in two different data centers. You want to be able to just have the same scheme across the two. So we introduced a technology two years ago now called EVI which enables you to do exactly that and enables you to actually stretch your VLAN addressing across different geographies. And so that's something that one of our customers is going to talk about in our keynote tomorrow. They've actually just implemented it. So Levi Strauss is up on stage with me in our keynote tomorrow. We'll actually be talking through their entire use case of exactly this problem. And so they implemented... It's a huge issue. We're hearing that everywhere. Yeah, absolutely. And they implemented EVI. They've had great results with it. They get fantastic disaster recovery scenarios now where they don't even know where, you know, when something happens. Well, EVI is also a very very virtualized environment. It is. They can say peace shop. Yeah. Yeah. Interviewing their CIO when you're at a Sapphire. Right. And, you know, they've got a really, you know, it's, I wouldn't say a complex environment. They've got a very advanced environment. Yeah. And they, you know, they've been doing some really interesting stuff. So they've now prepared the infrastructure to the point now where they can take that next step and start looking at NSX and overlaying that. So what was the core thing with their VLANs? So they had two different VLANs depending upon the geography and the regions. Yeah. I mean, that would have been the challenge is that, you know, if you have, you know, two, if you have two data centers, one is, you know, sort of backup disaster recovery. The challenge was that that actually had a different set of VLANs than your original site. So as you migrate VMs and transfer them over, you have to restart everything, readdress everything. Everything appears in a different VLAN all of a sudden, which causes a lot of problems and requires a lot of manual intervention. Now with, you know, REVI technology, those VLANs, those VMs just migrate across. And, you know, to the rest of the infrastructure, it just looks like the same data center. So it's a huge advantage. So now that you're running marketing now and as well as product, which is exciting, I think that's really good to have that kind of integration for what it's worth, given all the technical stuff going on. It's really a challenge. What are you guys doing to get the word out? Obviously, you guys have great chops and networking. You have award-winning. I mean, it's going back years. Yeah. To the, you know, Hubs and Switches. Yeah. But now you're serious around, you had first ones to ship OpenFlow and ports years ago. Right. We've got the Bethany mayor about that when she was around. But what's going on now? What are you guys doing to get the word out? Is there any marketing plans you're doing? Social media? Yeah. Any events happening? Give us a quick update. Yeah, I mean, you know, absolutely. Social media is becoming a bigger and bigger part of, you know, of our marketing efforts. You know, there's events, obviously, like Discover and you guys, and you know, these are great resources for us to get the message out. But social media is a big one. One of the things that we're focusing on is really doubling down on telling the market about our credentials. It's still, you know, amazing to me that people don't recognize that HP networking is actually the number two networking vendor in the world. You know, and just how successful we've been. We're actually the hidden story in networking. You know, we quietly just keep chipping away at Cisco Market Share. You know, just making really good progress. Stay stealth. I mean, Cisco's doing the opposite. They're trying to step on the messaging on servers, and you guys are cutting into their networking piece. Well, and to be honest with you, I think that we've been, you know, a little too polite in the market. You know, we've got to get a lot more aggressive and you know, and it makes leadership we're doing exactly that. We'll do our part. Your business is doing well there. Yeah, absolutely. I've closed it out on the calls. Yeah, absolutely. You got to be excited about that. There's a great article just came out in Time Magazine about the HP turnaround. There's a whole and talking about, you know, how EGE, our enterprise group is contributing to that turnaround. But, you know, things are actually going really, really well for us. And the key thing for you guys is first of all, I'll testify that you guys definitely have the chance to believe we've been following your networking group for many, many years. Right. Sol is a rocky equipment. I mean, just from a reliability standpoint, amazing. The key, you know, that's going to tie that together. But the key is to enable on top of you, right? I mean, the platform will be commoditized and the value will be in what you enable. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's all about, you know, bringing together one of the things, the other things we've done is bringing together networking technology and fundamentally integrating it into our server and storage offerings and things. So, stop thinking about networking as a standalone thing and think about it as a fabric that enables a broader solution. Well, that's going to be key at that point at those enabling disruptors that you're creating for your customers to create good solutions. So, we appreciate it. Dominic, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We appreciate it. We're out of time. Quickly to give you a quick last word here. Explain to the folks the bumper sticker for this show. What's it going to say when it leaves Barcelona? A pair of simplicity in networking is SDN. SDN. There it is. We are here live inside theCUBE in Barcelona getting all the action. Share that with you. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier. Thank you.