 The Cube at EMC World 2014 is brought to you by EMC. Redefine VCE, innovating the world's first Converged Infrastructure solution for private cloud computing. Brocade, say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. We are back and this is the Cube we're here live at EMC World 2014. Here with my host, this is Dave Vellante here with Stu Miniman, who is a networking and cloud expert, principal contributor at Wikibon. And this is the drill down into storage networking. We've got Brocade here. Jack Rondini is the vice president of product management and data center storage and solutions. Jack, welcome to the Cube, great to have you. Thank you. So, big EMC World obviously, you do a lot of shows. How's this stack up? It's awesome, it's awesome. This is the premier storage event every year and I'm always amazed by how EMC just raises the bottom. Yeah, I mean, you know, we had Jeremy Burton on earlier and we had him on the first, the first Cube we ever did and he said, you know, you're going to see some great things going forward. And I really have to say they've stepped it up, you know, the great marketing but then they deliver, you know, sort of with the products behind the scene. Absolutely. Now you guys have been partners with EMC forever. You kind of created the sand market, you know, back when, you know, the world was struggling to share resources. So where have we come, you know, say in the last decade, and where are we going? Yeah, so you know, it's interesting because you're right, stands have been around for a long time, right? But just within even, yeah, maybe the last decade or even just the last five or six years, what we've seen within the storage area, network environment, the changes that have been, have been pretty phenomenal. In terms of, A, fabrics are just getting bigger, right? And a lot of that is just storage growth, right? You just see amounts of petabytes that continue to grow and grow. The number of virtual devices connecting into our fabrics, obviously because of server virtualization, more expansion of storage virtualization, continues to drive, right, highest levels. The diversity of the devices actually connected into our fabrics are also much different than they were, you know, five, 10 years ago. You know, D-Duke devices, Flash devices, all these other kinds of different things that what we used to do is just, you know, connect a physical, you know, server to shared storage, right? And now we're connecting bunches of virtual devices at specialty devices at larger levels of scale that we've ever done before, right? So you guys obviously, you know, known for your fiber channel expertise, deep, deep expertise, hardened stack. And so, but people sort of poo poo fiber channel, fiber channel, fiber channel's dead. Is fiber channel dead? So I can show you an article back in 2000, my old friend, Denny Conner, that said fiber channel was dead. And actually I have this little collage that I do that every year shows somebody writing a story about how fiber channel's dead. And then on top of that, I show the overall fiber channel market growing every single year, right? So the conversation's over, right? It's just, it's such a core element of the enterprise today as well as the service provider community, especially in the managed hosting side that it's really, it's like we need to move on. Yeah, so the discussion's over. So the reason I bring that up is because I talk to a lot of practitioners in the Wikibon community that are, I would characterize them as fiber channel bigots. They're not moving, they just, and they don't trust. It's a matter of trust is really the issue. Why is that? Well, if you look at how fiber channel was created from the beginning, right? It was created purpose built for the most important types of data communication within an enterprise, right? So that was, it was its purpose built for that. Unlike, let's say how Ethernet evolved, which is Ethernet's great, right? But it's very general purpose. It does lots of things, right? But sands and fiber channel sands were purpose built for storage and for the most important applications, right? That enterprises count on, right? It's foundational to these enterprises, right? And because of that, because of its really purpose built nature, the built in resiliency, the enterprise class scalability, all of these capabilities were built into it. That makes it, these types of things that customers would say, I will never abandon that, right? Because it's never let me down. And that's why I think you just see that continued resiliency around fiber channel. And why that whole conversation around this fiber channel that are not, it's over, right? It's everybody acknowledges, Gardner and IDC have very clear charts about the growth of the number of petabytes of fiber channel growing in the future. And they still show it on top, right? And the technology roadmap evolves, right? Yeah, absolutely, we've doubled speed, we add capabilities. We launched a capability called FabricVision last year, really around driving down then the operational costs of fiber channel. For the most part, when you manage a fiber channel environment, you need a minimum staff to go do it. You really do. But our customers come back and say, it's part of this transformation of our enterprise ITs becoming more services oriented, right? It's not about just deploying VMs or loans anymore. It's about adding value to the enterprise. They come to me and say, you know what? You guys are the expert in fiber channel, make it dramatically easier to go and deploy it. To the point where our goal is, we can have our customers deploy fiber channel stance and they need to know nothing about fiber channel. That is actually our goal. So, Jack, some of this discussion, you know, it's legacy because, you know, if you think back, you know, eight years ago, you know, fiber channel is a separate network and it's harder to do and, you know, fiber channel is a lot easier today. Pricing between fiber channel and ethernet, you know, I say for the most part, customers aren't choosing it based on, you know, price for the most part. It is the skill set, it's the, you know, what they have. You said that this is the premier storage show. I would say that this is also, you know, if not the one of the leading storage networking shows. But I wonder then if you could talk about, because if you talk about networking in general and storage networking, they do overlap and there's lots of similarities there, but they are different, which is why here at EMC World, I think if you're involved in storage networking, there's a lot of those folks there. Can you talk a little bit about that dynamic about storage networks versus just networking as an industry? Yeah, and, you know, in the end, we all interconnect, right? So there is a lot of similarities, but what we've found is if you think about what fiber channel networks do, it's really not about the FCP, it's not about the protocol, it's about delivering performance workloads at scale, right? So if you think about that and then you think about a lot of the other great things that EMC and others are talking about here, the notion of having networks that can deliver that level of scale and performance independent of the protocol is becoming a much more interesting conversation, right? And this notion of, you know what, I'm going to deploy dedicated networks irrespective of protocol, right? Because this information flow is so important, right? That the discussion of the importance of the network in these mission critical, large scale workloads is the interesting conversation, right? And that's why, you know, as part of Brocade's strategy, you know, in addition to fiber channel fabrics, we deploy Ethernet fabrics, right? And the goal is, hey, if it's a network connection you really don't care about whatever, right? But if it's a performance kind of workload, how do workloads, large scale NAS environments, large scale SCSI environments, right? The network is a critical component, right? And I think people here that come to this show, ones that maybe have deployed, you know, storage networking, understand the importance of performance scalable networks, right? And know that, you know, having those networks, you know, separate, dedicated towards those workloads is a vital part of the discussion, right? So it's very exciting. It's a very important part of this EMC world and it will be continued to be in all kind of the major trends moving forward. Yeah, so Jack, you know, Brocade works with tons of partners across the industry. We see you guys at larger shows. You've participated in the CUBE at some of the other storage events here. But, you know, when I come to this show, I mean, Brocade is everywhere. You know, I want to give you guys kudos, first of all, the charity water, you know, the work that you're doing with EMC is fantastic. I did the charity walk, you know, $10, you know, given to that, and that's great. Everybody's wearing Brocade t-shirts. You know, there's Brocade event, but, you know, what's new this year? You know, what do you got from the EMC partnership and from Brocade that you guys are showing off at the show? So I think certainly what's near and dear to my heart is our advanced integration. We're doing Viper. When EMC launched Viper initially, you know, we were right there with them in terms of having integration with our solution as part of their solution, because you're right. I mean, these are integrated entities. And as they launched the new version of Viper, we're expanding that, right? We're adding fiber channel routing and other kinds of capabilities. So certainly from my perspective, that's certainly near and dear to my heart. The advancements that, you know, EMC is extending some of their enterprise capabilities down to the VNXC line with fiber channels in particular. That's exciting for us because that's a new market and a lot of expanding regions, right? Expanding economies. So I've had some real good exciting things there as well. So, Jack, I wonder if you can comment on this. You know, if I look at some of the big trends, you know, Software Defined Data Center is definitely a big one and you guys definitely have a bunch of plays you're pushing in there. If I look at kind of the hyperscale environments, that tends to be really an Ethernet play. Although, I mean, even there, I see things like the Compute Project, you know, there's fiber channel there. OpenStacks, you know, got fiber channel there. But, you know, we're going to see, you know, some segregation in the marketplace. You know, what do you see for the future of fiber channel in some of these new environments? You know, again, and I go back to, you know, at Brocave, whether it's fiber channel, whether it's Ethernet, whether it's virtual fabrics, you know, we don't care, right? What we really care about is delivering the network's purpose built for performance and scale, right? And in hyperscale environments, that's what we're going to be focused on. So whatever that protocol is, we'll go for it. If it's Ethernet, we're all in on Ethernet, right? If it's a completely virtual kind of infrastructure, we're all there as well. But what Brocade, as you know, our vision is being, you know, the data center, you know, networking provider of choice, that is a protocol independent statement and that's what we're going to go drive to. But again, important workloads at scale, that is what Brocade is all about. And that's what we're going to do. I got to ask you about the Viper integration. So how should we think about that? So you think about software defined storage, software defined anything. I think about all this function locked inside of a box, inside of a controller, hidden, inaccessible. And I think about software defined is sort of extracting it, whether it's function or metadata and making it available allowing us to use it in new ways. Is that how we should think about Viper? Or should we think about Viper differently where you sort of still need the integration of the physical hardware and then over time it will evolve into a fully software defined or does it come out software defined out of the womb? Help us squint through that. Yeah, you know, certainly my view, my understanding of Viper is it is a fully abstracted, you know, software defined storage suite, right? Covering the entire portfolio of EMC offerings as well as other, you know, heterogeneous. So let me ask it differently. How do I get to your function? How do I get to brocade function through Viper? What do I need to do as a customer to do that? I got to buy a box still, correct? Or I have a box, right? Yeah, right, so the assumption is there's an underlying sand there for my thing. Okay, okay, so I have it. So it's existing, it's an asset. And then through those Viper interfaces if there's certain commands that you need to do, certain things that you need to run that involve an interface with the sand, that's what Viper takes care of seamlessly, right? So we provided those interfaces into our switches for the Viper offering. So from a customer perspective, the experience is that they're just working with Viper. Okay, so that obviously the customer, that's great for a customer who's got some VNXs and some VMAXs and maybe a Centera. Okay, so they can consolidate that. Where do you see that going over time from your standpoint? Do you see extracting your function out of the box and actually making it available as a pure software player? Is that going to happen in our lifetimes or does it need to happen? Yeah, so one of our strategies around, actually all of our various fabrics, but specifically in the fiber channel fabric is for the management plane of fiber channel, our strategy is to make that as open as possible. And we have a couple of good proof points and that certainly Viper's one, right? We've had a lot of recent new integration with VMware. And as Stu just mentioned, we're supporting OpenStack, right? So we submitted into the IceHouse release 24, just, excuse me, in April, in the IceHouse release, fiber channel sand zoning, right? So whether it's public cloud OpenStack, whether it's private, we want to make as open as possible the information coming out of our sands to be consumed and utilized by those software defined storage and or orchestration tools, right? So we're moving to restful interfaces across the board to go and really enable that. So you guys are making a big bet on OpenStack. I mean, that's pretty clear. Yeah, but as well as, you know, within the enterprise, VMware, EMC, you know, those are, you know, chosen partners as well, you know? Excellent. All right, Jack, well, we appreciate you coming on theCUBE, sharing your insights. Thanks guys. And fun. We'll be watching. You're going to be in Atlanta next week or no? Brocade will be there in force, right? Yeah. Yeah, that's all right. We're going to take a break. Yeah, ditto, but theCUBE will be there. All right, everybody, so keep it right there. We'll be right back with our next guest. We're live here from EMC World 2014 and this is theCUBE.