 We're talking because it's boring TV tech people love tech consumers love the benefit of tech You know no consumer opens up their iPhone says oh my gosh. I love the technology behind my iPhone What's it been like being on the shark tank? You know filming is fun and hang out is fun and it's fun to be a celebrity at first your head gets really big And you get a look at tables at restaurants who says tech isn't got a little pizzazz In charge of his destiny No From Santa Clara, California, it's the queue Covering open networking summit 2017 brought to you by the Linux foundation Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Rick here with the Cube We're at the open networking summit 2017 in Santa Clara, California. I think it's the fourth year of the conference We've been coming for a long time. It's pretty amazing a lot of transformation is happening as this project moves from the Conversational to the testing to actual a lot of deployments being talked about in the keynote So happy to have Scott Rainovich joining me again. Pleasure as always. Thank you last night excellent All right, super and super guest Drew Scholke. He is the vice president of Converged Networking at Dell EMC true welcome Thanks. Thanks for having us. So you've been busy at this show. You're doing yeah, you know They're working it's been a bit of a whirlwind going on thus far So yeah, I had a had a keynote talk on economic and organizational impacts of open networking Which was which went really really well a lot of great questions from the audience, you know really insightful questions on that Have met with you know folks like yourself some other folks in the media some analysts Talking to some customers, which is always nice to have and we'll close it out tomorrow with What's one of the key notes a panel discussion on kind of the role of open source and moving to 5g where I'll be participating with some Some folks from Intel and Ericsson, so I'm looking forward to that But yeah, definitely a whirlwind week. So before we get into some of the specifics Just you know kind of your general impressions as to how this thing has evolved over time and kind of impressions of this show this year Yeah, great question I think that the thing that struck me the most was this year was the amount of customers coming in and actually talking about Putting a lot of the things we've been talking about at this moment for several years into production environments And seeing results out of it some great key notes last night by some folks Amadeus in the travel industry and talking about their journey and actually moving things into production I thought was was fabulous, which you know gives people you know a vision of what really is possible and kind of moving These out of the theoretical and here's the vision the strategy into here's how you can actually get things done and getting Into results and ultimately when you put things into production, that's how you ultimately learn and refine things over time So it's a great move forward for us. Awesome. So on the economics and organizational impact of open networking You're you know, what what are some of those really key economic drivers that you outlined in that conversation? Yeah, great question So you can kind of break it into a capex and an op-ex kind of discussion on the capex side What we've seen is this whole open networking model is built upon Merchant silicon and the commoditization of hardware, which may sound like okay, look that's a bad thing Well, no, it's really really good Because what it's doing is it's allowing all of us to take the benefits of huge volume and scale that's going on So from the biggest cloud providers down into the enterprise as we move into this Hardware model that's based upon merchant silicon and more standard network designs that are capable of supporting multiple os's We all benefits from the economies of scale that go in that we can amortize r&d investments over a larger number of things That's all goodness. So there's a huge, you know tailwind on the capex side on the op-exide As we start to kind of disaggregate the network stack and focus on the individual layers Um, it creates a different operational model that allows for a high degree of automation And so one of the things that we brought up in the session was contrasting a study from 2013 where You know the typical enterprise network admin was controlling about 300 ports That was the the breadth of of support that they had back in 2013 that same year facebook came out and said an individual operator can support You know up to 20 000 servers And it's not like they're just superhumans. What happened in there was a level of automation And so that's a key ingredient of our open networking strategy is driving that automation in and that's where you get true You know economies of scale on the op-exide. So those are those are kind of the main points on that one. Yeah, good one So drew one of the themes we've seen here is that the linux foundation has done a good job of consolidating some of the Open source technology and putting them in the same place so we can all track them and figure out what's going to happen and You know you just told us about Dell donating some of your code to the linux foundation Why don't you explain, you know, how you made that decision and what you think it's going to do for your customers? Yeah, absolutely so As a little bit of a context what we see happening happening in terms of networking software is one It's become decoupled from the hardware. That's already sort of done right now But even if we start to look at the software side We think there's more desegregation possible and we can peel apart the layers of what currently is a networking operating system today and create a base operating system upon which Several different companies can come in and put what at that point becomes applications on top of it to do things like an l2 l3 stack or to do You know m lag or tapping or so or anything like that And it creates an ecosystem similar to what we had with servers 20 years ago Where i've got an operating system that basically keeps the box running and then i've got applications Which are really the magic on top of it. So that's sort of the context What we donated was that base os and so we've worked on something called os 10 We have an open edition of it Which you can go out to the web and download for free today and start playing around with it But it's a it's an unmodified linux kernel Currently based on the debi and distribution Which we believe will serve as a solid foundation for that evolving networking ecosystem going forward Linux foundation agreed with that and accepted our donation of that to be the the the foundation of the open switch project Which was talked a little bit about at this particular summit as well So we couldn't be happier to be working with the linux foundation on on the open switch project And you know look forward to getting even more of the of the ecosystem working on that With someone like the linux foundation behind it to build a very very capable stack Which ultimately benefits all of our customers at the end Yeah, and where where will we see this code go into what types of products in what markets? Is it is it NFP for telecom? Is it cloud servers? Where are we going to see this the great answer the wonderful thing about the the answer is all the above, right? Okay, and that's the flexibility of it and think of it as this way Which is maybe you have a telecom network that's you know focused on something like mpls Well, uh a company that has a lot of good ip around mpls can then Write an application that can run on that base operating system Giving a customer the ability to kind of pick that specific application without having to worry about dragging wrong An operating system and hardware that may not be what they want So that's kind of the telecom use case Maybe it's a big cloud provider that has some very specific needs around an l2 l3 stack Maybe they even have their own ip around that that they want to build on top of this os So we've really opened up the degrees of freedom in that space across all of those industries I certainly think kind of where we see the early adopters and starting from that os 10 base solution today Will be more in the telco service provider and in the cloud space Just because of the level of scale and and what it is that they can benefit out of this level of flexibility Excellent. Yeah, so there had to be some detractors before you open source this I'm just curious, you know, kind of the conversation in the room about, you know, should we or should we not open source this project and take it out to the linux foundation and then You know, what was ultimately the decision that pushed it out the door? Yeah, no, I so I we had been working with some other open source based projects for a couple of years already So there was a comfort level internally, but what we saw I think Going on in the networking space was heavily influenced by what we saw going on in the server space 20 years ago When client server hit the scene and that stack became massively disaggregated and the folks who tried to kind of keep these things stitched together into monolithic silos ultimately, you know Weren't successful and and either, you know, had to kind of change their strategy or drift it off into the sunset Um, and so we certainly was influenced by that history and looking forward at what we saw happening in this space I'd say as well looking at a lot of the innovation coming out from Open source projects and startups in this space as well doing some new and exciting things and networking You know, there's a big keynote yesterday on the panel discussion Where a venture capitalist started talking to me, hey networking is cool again And I couldn't agree more where we're seeing startups come in and do really really interesting things really really well And what we're trying to do is create a model where those startups don't have to develop their own operating system and develop their own hardware and then all the management tools that go on top of it Let them focus at what they're good at, which is a certain piece of ip And let us work through, you know, things like the open, you know, networking foundation to drive A disaggregation of the stack making them successful It's an interesting way too to kind of build your community Almost indirectly if you will it's not like you have to sign a bunch of partner agreements And you can't keep track of all these startups and all your alliance people running around But by putting it into the open source spear, especially with the linux foundation just automatically You're exposed to all these different types of new companies and innovations And that that exposure goes both ways. Absolutely. It's a really cool trend where we're seeing these big companies donate parts of these things Into this kind of formal situation that it's a linux foundation So it has a home and a place to live and grow Absolutely. So I want to shift gears a little bit. Yeah, today's keynote is about 5g a lot of talk about 5g Mobile world congress is all about 5g, but now some people saying wait, it's not here yet It's far out, but but clearly I think the message this morning from sandra And also on the cube yesterday is it's coming, but you know, you don't just turn it on one day He kind of put all the pieces in place. So what's kind of deli mc's perspective on 5g? Where are you guys on this journey? Yeah for us in terms of where we play kind of at an infrastructure level In in the data center, you know for us the key step right now is to get to this model where we can Decouple function from location, which is what you know the telecoms and the mobile networks have been trying to do through things like nfv And so What we've been trying to do is help them on that journey long before we even get to the point where 5g is kind of You know knocking at the door working with them today to put in the right infrastructure You know capable of supporting highly virtualized workloads and also capable of supporting a variety of different software defined networking solutions If you get those those components right you're setting yourself with a really really good foundation for 5g So if 5g gets here and you haven't kind of the coupled function and location yet in terms of your infrastructure or strategy That's going to be a tough one. So what we're trying to do is you know shepherd that along and move that as fast as we can right now right And we got um Dell emc world coming up pretty soon, right? That's right. You gotta see you guys there Previews of this or what can we expect to see? Well, it'll be it'll be interesting So this is the first time that as a combined company we're doing this event in vegas We had sort of a preview in october kind of as a newly closed, you know transaction This will have like the full force effect of the combined, you know del emc, you know You know firm coming together to put on a great show. So Looking forward to it a huge venue. I know you guys play a prominent role there I'm hoping to see you guys there as well. There'll be yes. There'll be lots of announcements I'm not going to go get myself in trouble by saying that any of those are four weeks in advance of what that's going to happen But you're certainly on the networking side. You'll hear a couple of announcements from us in terms of new products that we'll be talking about and All right, so I'll ask you the software way to get to the same answer, but yeah, I can give you the answer But you know kind of looking forward 2017, you know, what are some of your priorities? You know kind of top of mind, you know that you guys are working on where if we see you a year from now You report back that you know kind of here's what we did in 2017 Well, clearly this this os 10 strategy that we have building upon this base is going to be key for that So continuing to support the donations that we've made through the linux foundation and open switch Uh, you know bringing in additional partners to develop on top of that to get their ip ready to be able to take advantage of that Will be a key focus for us. Um, but as well, you know, there's um, you know Some some key networking speed transitions coming up that you got to keep pace with From a roadmap perspective. So you'll probably hear some things about that And then, you know as well just thinking from a del emc perspective As we look at kind of how our portfolio as a company is evolving, you know, a big shift towards software defined storage models Converged infrastructure hyperconverged infrastructure. And so on the networking side We're clearly trying to do everything we can to position ourselves to be a value add in any of those solutions today So that'll be sort of the the hint of the areas you can expect to hear about in may. It's a good little hint Yeah Some month to uh del emc world again the first, uh, combined del emc world last year there in vac Well, last year we had emc world in vegas and del world del emc world It got very confusing now. There's just one for like is it the biggest one or the austin one? So now there's just one one one formed a little more Michael coming on We had him on at both as well as vm world and it's always great to get his his take as well So uh, drew. Thanks for stopping by and we look forward to seeing you in about a month in vegas likewise. Thanks guys. All right You drew shulky scott reinevitz jeff rick. You're watching the cube from open networking summit 2017 Thanks for watching. We'll be back after this short break