 Okay, we're back at VMworld 2011. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. This is theCUBE, our flagship telecast, where we go out in the ground, then we talk to all the smartest people we can find, bloggers, executives, thought leaders, anyone, Dave, who can share knowledge and we share that with the world through SiliconANGLE.tv. And I'm here with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org, and we are here with Sony G and Donnie, who's the senior vice president at Cisco. Welcome, Sony. Hi, how are you? Good, thank you, great to have you on theCUBE. As John said, we're here to extract knowledge and we'd love to pick your brain a little bit, if you could, and you are a rock star in the networking business. Everybody wants, they saw you on theCUBE, they said, oh, can we meet Sony? They said, yeah, come by, you know? So, you might get mauled as you're leaving here, but I apologize in advance for that. A lot of people want to meet you, but at any rate, if the fans are lined up, Dave, all out there for us. Like, see them all lined up, right in the pounce. So, let's see, let's start off. You guys have a super session today. Yes, we do. Making a bunch of announcements. Very tight partnership with VMware. Yes. What's going on in the super session? What are you guys talking about here at the event? We're very excited to be making some significant announcements at VMware. The first one clearly is second year in a row. We have won the VMware benchmark on our UCS platform, our premier consolidated infrastructure, bringing together compute, networking, and virtualization. The second key aspects of the announcements we are making today is to enable our customers alongside with VMware to go down this journey of the cloud with a protocol that we jointly co-developed with VMware and other industry partners, and we are taking it to the IETF called Virtual Extensible Lands. The whole notion is after 18 years of having VLANs, we are now at a juncture where we want to offer virtual applications, the ability to have the security and the mobility from private clouds onto the public cloud and offer the scalability and security capabilities for the virtual applications. And VXLAN precisely offers that. And the third key theme is around automation, is to, as we drive new innovations in the networking and virtualization space together, is to provide automation capabilities for the server administrators and the networking administrators while respecting the operational boundaries. But in this world of cloud, we want to drive more and more automation baked into our respective platforms and tied to integration with the cloud director. A lot of people are talking about standards. So we had a couple of conversations this morning about cloud foundry to open stack in the space. And standards are developing and there's open source. But there's a little pressure for performance and we heard in the keynote, performance, availability, mobility and security. There's some areas that need some work. So how are you guys addressing that at Cisco? And specifically in addition to the protocol, what else are you doing with VMware and others? So clearly the world was a heterogeneous world that we live in. Even when we look at our customers, private cloud environments, they have a heterogeneous of infrastructure. There's a heterogeneous pool of applications and there will be a heterogeneous pool of hypervisors. The key here is to, as an industry, is to come together on the specific problems that need to be solved around scalability, security, performance, as well as manageability. With open standards, you will prevent vendor lock-ins. And you also, as a user, will have the opportunity to retain the investments you have in place while conducting this journey on movements towards the cloud. So one of the classic examples we hear from our enterprise customers is the ability to retain their physical applications and their workloads as they move towards a virtualized and a private cloud environment. But for Cisco, companies like Cisco is to offer the infrastructure that can deliver the performance and the scale and the openness which we are driving from an industry standardization perspective. I have seen Cisco in my 18 years of history there where we have innovated and we have standardized in parallel. So it becomes extremely important that collectively as an industry, we continue to innovate while standardizing, making it more plausible for our customers to really experience the full promise of this journey to the cloud. And security too. We had Pat Gelsinger on theCUBE when we were at EMC World. He said security is a do-over, but yet you have a pressure for performance at the same time enhancing security, creates a lot of overhead, especially around the virtual machine. So where are we in that equation? Can you talk about, are we like at just the front end of it? Are we kind of midstream? How would you talk about that? I believe that one other key aspect of today's announcement that Cisco is making is taking its physical firewall products, which are more around optimization for the physical world and supporting all of those capabilities for the virtual in the virtual world. So our typical physical appliances have been offering internet-edge firewall capabilities. When you marry that with offering those same capabilities with our virtual firewall products and you extend it across it with VXLAN types of technologies, you truly will see the ability for the underlying infrastructure to be optimized around performance and scale and with technologies like the virtualized ASA, offering the same operational consistencies and the same firewall capabilities to your virtual applications. I believe that the answer is not one or the other. You have to walk somewhere in the middle while the infrastructure gets ready for scale and performance and has the characteristics with automation built into it and statelessness. Protocols need to emerge and network services need to evolve to continue to carry it from the physical world to this virtualized and the cloud world. Sony, you mentioned lock-in and it's an interesting topic and one that I want to just explore a little bit. Maybe we can double-click on it. You know, lock-in is kind of in the eye of the beholder and it ebbs and flows. You've seen the industry evolve. Unix used to be open. Ken Olson called it snake oil. Remember, that was called open systems and then Linux came along and so it's almost like our industry has grown up quite a bit in terms of it used to be that companies would just truly lock you in and then extract rents. You can't do that anymore. Well, unless you're Oracle. If you're Oracle, you can do that. But most companies can't do that anymore. How has that whole concept of lock-in evolve and talk about innovation and how you make money in this world where customers are calling your bluff and saying, look, if you're going to lock us in we're not going to do business with you? It's a very good question. I was one of the early groups that was responsible for the unified computing system and they told us it cannot be done. The key element there is that as long as you leverage industry standards, industry standards, whether it's x86, industry standards, whether it's open operating systems and hypervisors, industry standards like memory where everyone knows the price of memory, it's the price of gold, you understand it, fluctuates depending on the day. Yet Cisco innovated in memory, driving the overall cost down and allowing for virtual machine density and scale in terms of the performance enhancements that we put in our ASICs. While leveraging industry standard components. So the goal here is to allow for an open API that allows customers the automation functionality and their ability to operationalize without walking away from their current operational model. It always begins with the word evolution. So how do you strike that balance of innovation with standardization? That is the key element that we in the IT sector always straddle is how do you drive innovation while standardizing and offering the customer the choice of the openness of particular industries. So it's not that it has not been done, it continues to be done in our industry, especially with the market moving so rapidly in this direction. As you notice, these 20,000 people at this conference are all here because they are trying to drive their business applications with the agility that their CFOs and their CEOs are looking for. Ultimately, that is the promise of the private cloud that everyone is aspiring to achieve. And it's not that can it be done while not knocking in vendors. It is how soon can we as an IT community deliver that to our customers while coming together on areas of standardization. Because if we diverge as an industry, the market will not converge. Sony, you mentioned UCS in the early days you were involved and they said it couldn't be done. Can you give us a little insight to that? What was the big daunting task? What couldn't be done and how did you overcome that? Sure, the big daunting task was in a world which was all about commodity, how do you drive the value for the end user community? How do you drive the acceleration of virtualization? How do you drive the agility in IT practices? How do you do so while keeping in mind interoperability and heterogeneity and investment protection and installing your compute infrastructure which is converged alongside an IBM and an HP server? And yet, not change the operational practices but bring the benefits of innovation to the user. In less than two years of being in this market we are the number two blade vendor in the US and the number three blade vendor on a worldwide basis. With the second consecutive quarter of results. So I have to ask the question. Dave asked you the daunting task for UCS. My question is, well it's different. What are people saying now that can't be done you think can be done in the industry? Well what was said earlier which could not be done is how do you go about driving innovation? As I said, in a market that is quote unquote commoditized and Cisco basically looked at the problem and said we're not going to go solve the problems of x86 scale and Moore's law until an AMD have that under control. We're not going to go and write an operating system Microsoft hypervisor vendors and the rest of the community have that under control including the open Linux community. Where we decided to bring our innovations is an ASIC innovation fabric based computing models which our competitors are now trying to keep track of and keep pace with innovation. Where we define this term without necessarily defining it Gartner calls it fabric computing. It's all about you no longer are going to be deploying applications in silos. You're going to be deploying it across converged infrastructure and you will drive through the innovations of that converged infrastructure the ability to move from physical to virtual to cloud based models. Sony, G and Donny, thanks very much for your time today. We really appreciate you coming in to theCUBE sharing with us the results of your super session and some of your other perspectives in the industry. Hope you can come back someday. Surely, thank you. Thanks for having Cisco. Thank you.