 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. And now your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to OpenStack Summit 2015 here in beautiful and sunny Vancouver. Everybody expected some clouds when we came in here but it's been sunny, it's been a fantastic event. We're into day three, talking to a ton of people here. Guests for this segment are both from EMC. Last year at the show, there were definitely plenty of EMC people but not even an EMC booth. This year, EMC top level sponsor, whole lot of people, whole lot going on. So let's get into it guys. I've got Adam Waters, first time on the program, relatively new to EMC through the cloud scaling acquisition. We started off, our first guest of the week was Randy Bias, you're senior director of Private Cloud. Thank you for joining us. Awesome. All right, and Doreen Neve, who has gone with the OpenStack, wearing the EMC coat T-shirt, laid back, senior director, technology alliances with EMC. Thanks for coming back. Our pleasure sir, good to be on again. All right, so Adam, we talked to Randy a little bit about this but tell us what's it like coming to OpenStack as part of EMC? Not as, last year I saw the quanta servers in the little rack there and you guys, so what's it like being part of the big guys? Well, I think it's funny, the story really starts prior to OpenStack. We were building clouds, originally at GoGrid, second market IaaS, then we were building clouds sort of bespoke, we just pull out Python and build it from scratch, we built them on OpenNebula, we built them on CloudStack, we've been in OpenStack since Bayer, since the very beginning. I'm still operating a Diablo cloud for one of our customers. And now, being part of EMC, the exciting thing is that we were funded as a software company trying to solve a systems problem. Now we're a proper systems company, solving what I think is naturally a systems problem. So it's pretty cool. That's a great point. We always talk about kind of software reading the world, but one of the lines I've had is, somebody's got to put all those pieces together. The role of hardware is changing, but boy, there's a lot of hard work that goes into that integration. My time back at EMC, which I left five years ago, I've spent six of those 10 years in the interoperability lab, huge amount of effort. So Dorian, have you been to the OpenStack show before? Yes, it's my third one now. Okay, so. Yes, I'm a veteran at this point. We were just chatting with you like in the hallways in Vegas a couple of weeks ago. Yes, right. EMC rolled a little bit of a different show. You had the code, the dev show on Sunday, but the rest of the show, plenty of people in suits. I was wearing a jacket tie the first day, Tiram and jeans and hanging out. Talk to me a little bit about, what do you see kind of the OpenStack, how's it changed the last three years and how do you compare that with kind of traditional IT? Yeah, no, it's been a tremendous journey, right? I think, we've been in OpenStack for a while, right? And we've had contributions in the grizzly phase, right? All the way through where we are today in Kilo, right? So contributions across all of our platforms, right? Cinder now into Manila, which is pretty exciting as well. But it's been kind of a crawl walk run, right? And so we've seen that OpenStack come to a tipping point, right? And so the executive spent a lot of time understanding the space and then making some investments behind that, right? Cloud scaling, some other acquisitions, right? Dedicated teams focused on building out solutions within the company. So it's kind of getting all the fish swimming in the same direction. And now we see that we're at a tipping point, right? And now we're actually on the execution phase, right? Coming out with, you know, products that are specific for the open source community, right? We opened up a dojo, right, under Brian Gallagher, who I think I saw on here the other day. We've got, you know, Copperhead, right? Which is open sourced, right? We have, you know, other things that we're offering in market, right? Scale IO, free of charge, right? Download it, non-production, go for it, right? And then most exciting at this show we're announcing new reference architectures with our key partners, right? Canonical, Morantis, you know, Red Hat's coming up really soon as well. That these are actually, you know, we promised in Paris that we would do these kind of cool reference architecture and now we're actually delivering on them. So, I mean, it's an exciting time and we're kind of putting the pedal to the metal. Yeah, it's interesting. I wrote, and I started as a blogger. One of the things I wrote about is you want to understand a culture, talk about what books they really read. And from an EMC standpoint, you know, Mike Ruckers, who was CEO before Tucci, it was only the power in order to survive. So, you know, you can't stay top dog forever and therefore you need to be ready for that change. And EMC does a real good job of understanding what's going on. I heard that at leadership, Joe Tucci came out and said out of four things. It was, you know, Cots hardware, open soft software and you're starting to see, you know, EMC's been involved in some of those for a while now, but it's really starting to come to fruition. Yeah, it's really, and I wore the kind of the t-shirt for a reason as well, right? It's that commitment to open source. And that, I mean, that got so much news, right? Obviously, you know, we have big news around, you know, some of our new products, but I think our commitment to open source is just, is really unbelievable at this point. So I think, you know, and if you get on our GitHub, you can see all the stuff we've done across, you know, really important communities right now. So I'm, you know, look, I'm kind of a software guy in a hardware clothing. I, you know, I worked at, you know, in the old days in Veritas and some of these other companies. So seeing this commitment to software, seeing the commitment to open source and then backing up with real tangible offerings and market is thrilling for me. Yeah, so if I could, we can unpack a little bit. I want to go into the hardware and the software. And the hardware stands first. Last year at EMC World, I said, this is the moment we're going to look back on. And EMC got into like the commodity hardware business. Things like ECS. Last year, cloud scaling was showing off, you know, the ODM-Quanta servers there. Can you talk about, you know, what is, you know, choice and hardware mean and how do you guys determine and, you know, bake a stack that works? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it starts with the fact that the world is changing that customers say, look, I want hardware and software disaggregated. In part, so I have choice. In part, so I have leverage over my hardware vendors and a model that says I just want to buy it, you know, on one box and pay a giant margin on it. That's not the lock in people want to consume anymore. And so, you know, at cloud scaling, we said, okay, you know, let's go copy what Amazon has done. Let's take advantage of these Taiwanese ODMs and, you know, move into that new world. And what I see EMC doing and, you know, we're doing it with the traditional products as well as the new products is saying, look, let's provide customers that choice because that's what ultimately they want. Unfortunately, the tooling is getting there. Now, you know, anybody that's built a large open stack cloud, like at this point is fairly covered in scars and many of those scars are from dealing with the complexity of hardware. Like when you really get down there and you have to deal with the firmware and the BIOS, the displacement. I mean, all those things like everybody nods their head and says, oh my God, yeah, I know that. So for our customer, some segment of them says, you know what, just make it work, take the pain out of the hardware. Another segment says, hey, you know what, I need to build this on third party cuts. Give me both. Yeah, and Adam, to your point there, I think that's really critical. It's not that I can't change the hardware. It's just, you know, baking that full stack. It's, you know, the drivers matter. You know, the different pieces. It's not that I can't say, oh, I have to buy the most expensive stuff out there, but building that full stack. You know, I interviewed a bunch of customers at EMC World and we went into that. If you're a service provider, you know, you might spend a year baking your stack and EMC is trying to give that spectrum of, can I just give it to you? Or, you know, the whole stack, or can I give you the software that you can then build and we'll work with you to do it? I mean, the big stack has natural advantages. You know, I can guarantee the service experience. I can guarantee the performance experience. E.T. can phone home, right? Customers have huge investments and I mean, that support structure is critical. You know, at Cloud Scaling as a small team, we provided full stack support, you know, from the metal, you know, to the northbound APIs and it's a huge, huge job. And it's the sort of thing where you say, okay, customer might say, look, I want that. That's the version I want. And I think the customers will run in a dual mode. Well, they'll have some EMC hardware and some COTS. All right, so on the software side, you threw out names, you know, Morantis, Canonical, you know, Red Hat's coming. Wait, you're the EMC Federation. Everything VMware, right? You know, why these partnerships? How do you admit that? You know, let's put the elephant on the table and take a bite. No, it's a good question. And it's actually a little bit kind of keying off of what Adam said, too. Really, at the end of the day is about choice, right? There are partners out there that have commanding market share in this space. At the end of the day, EMC wants to give our customers choice, right? You know, certainly we have, you know, well, so we've made commitments and collaboration with these key partners, right? So it is literally building out these reference architectures in our labs with our partners collaborating together to get an optimized, certified solution into market that if the customer has EMC and the customer has one of these products, they can have this sort of peace of mind that it's going to work, right? And so look, it's like we've done in many other spaces. Look at networking, look at, you know, even the hypervisor space, right? We've partnered with the leaders in market for the customer. But we have multiple ways you can go, whether you want to do sort of an engineered system, whether you want to do a reference architecture approach and build it your own, whether you want to do it on VMware, that's fine, too, right? VMware has VIO, right? I mean, it's, you know, a great option for VMware customers that are trying to go that path. So it's not about picking one or the other, it's picking about what's the right one for the customer. So, yeah, we're pretty excited about it. We're going to continue adding to that list of partners. We're looking at this as an ecosystem play, right? But right off the bat, we picked those leaders in market right now. All right, so you talked a little bit about converged infrastructure. At EMC World, there was a little tease that something's coming later this year called Caspian. It's open stack related, but we haven't shared so much. What can you develop? Show us a little leg. What do we? I just wanted to put on the dark sunglasses. A bunch of who's got glasses, they'll be happy to let you have. Yeah, so Caspian is going to be our converged infrastructure platform that surfaces open stack natively and surfaces Hadoop for big data natively. Underneath the hood, it's going to run on our software defined storage products. And so, I mean, we see an open stack LAN, you know, two main problems. One is a customer saying, just make it work, right? Don't make me build a ninja cloud, i.e. step one, hire a team of ninjas. Step two, wrestle with infinite technology choice. Step three, stand up your cloud and watch your team lead. Customer saying, just deliver it to me. The other big problem that people are having in open stack, make the storage work, right? We're a storage company, we think it's awesome. We're going to bake it into the platform. It's coming. I tell you, you know, I've got lots of scars from what virtualization, server virtualization did to storage, you know, last year at Atlanta, I said, you know, Swift and Cinder in pretty good shape. And if open stack becomes that integration engine, you know, hopefully we won't have as many problems underneath, where are we with storage? Do you think it's in pretty good shape? Is it going to be a challenge or, you know, really have we learned from the sins of the past and it can move forward with storage a little bit easier this time? I mean, what I think is that customers really want, and this is what customers tell me over and over again, is that they want choice in the storage layer. They want storage tiering. They don't want to be locked in any particular technology. And so, you know, Swift has a place. We run some very large Swift clusters as part of cloud scaling. Swift is not highly performant. You look at it compared to ECS, right? You've got geo replication in the box. You've got awesome racer coding for, you know, compression. You've got, you know, high performance linear, you know, scale outs. You want to do 1,200 TPS per node. Like there's a different object storage answer. Ultimately, what customers want is a platform where they have some choice on the storage layer, right? Yeah, so, you know, we've been talking this week a lot about kind of the powered by open stack, interoperability, you know, how do we get that balance of, I want it to be able to be kind of portable and movable, but I want to get the performance, you know, and everything that I need. You know, I remember back in the 90s, you know, I've been a networking guy my career, but, you know, video conferencing. It was like there were standards and then standards plus and networking's had the same thing. Customers say they want interoperability, but at the end of the day, we need to solve the business, you know, we need the business outcomes that customers want, and therefore we tend to push the boundaries and kind of take open and go a little bit beyond it. How do we balance that? I think it's a hard question. It's one of those inescapable tensions that you have in these technologies, and I think the, you know, it's very easy to say, look, my object store, my whatever technology is XYZ, you know, API compliant. And then we all know that that's the marquee, and then you get digging down to it and you say, okay, well, what can I actually do? Because the API compliance is actually one of those things. When it's deeply API compliant, actually enables portability and flexibility for the customer. It says, look, I don't like this vendor, I don't like this architecture, I can get away. You know, one of the things that we did at CloudsGang was invested pretty heavily in the whole EC2 API compatibility. And, you know, our take was it wasn't just the APIs, it went down to the performance characteristics, right? So if it's not acting the same way, like the API is a steering wheel. But when I turned the steering wheel, does the car actually move the same way I would expect? Like that's compatibility. And ultimately that's the message of what, you know, choice customers want because they want that flexibility. All right, so, you know, we've been talking a lot this week about, you know, I think we're beyond the kind of why OpenStack and what it is. So, you know, why EMC plus OpenStack, what do you guys bring, you know, differentiates you guys from there? And, you know, how are the partnerships helping you do that? Yeah, no, I mean, I think it goes back to what we said. It's, you know, it's commitment, it's investment, it's execution, right? Where we went from a kind of a crawl to a walk and I think we're in a full sprint now, right? With the commitments into open source, right? So, you're going to see much more continued commitment to open source. You're going to see a growing ecosystem, not only the key partners I mentioned, but like removing beyond just the OpenStack, but also into management, orchestration, automation. There's some exciting partnerships that are happening there as well. And it's kind of, it's triangulating all those points of light into something that's a solution for the customer and you'll see it in different flavors, right? Look, at the end of the day, there's new buyers, right? There's, they're forming new applications and they want to buy it in new modes of consumption, right? I think EMC is evolving to really address those customers with products across, you know, again, engineered through reference architectures, right? So I think we're really well positioned and you're going to see a lot more commitment to the space, a lot more investment, more partnerships, you know, kind of more, more, more. No, I think when people, I can just jump on that real quick. Sure. People often, you know, forget that Pivotal is part of the EMC Federation, right? And so we're telling an open source story. You have to look over and say, look, here's a company that started Cloud Foundry, you know, the leading open source paths, you know, and our aspirations at EMC are to make sure that what we do with OpenStack and what happens with Cloud Foundry work pretty seamlessly, right? So you got to put those things together and that tells a larger open source story which really enables the platform three, you know, apps and development and DevOps and all that good stuff. All right, so, this is hilarious. Yeah, we, so, you know, other than, you know, robots walking around with, you know, people from Russia on the screen, give us a little flavor, you know, what have you seen in the show? What are the cool sessions? You know, what technologies are catching your eye and, you know, why the show is so important? I think the first thing is just to see the increasing, you know, ever increasing passion, power, engagement from this community. I mean, if you look around you, you can't help but say, oh my God, there's something really amazing going on here. And having watched it for, you know, the very early sessions now, it's just, you know, that trend line just goes up, up, up. I think, you know, the hottest topic here is obviously, you know, containers, Docker containers, Magnum, Cola, how do these two worlds, you know, collide with each other and what happens, right? And so I think, you know, what's really interesting to see is, you know, the sessions around containers, you know, are just packed, right? Yeah. I think for also just, you know, I think it's a great point, right? And again, and you know, kind of, King on your last question is, you know, this is an area that EMC is definitely interested as well. We're spending a lot of time looking at containers, right? There's a very interesting debate, but there's also stuff that EMC is doing. I mean, you go into the EMC code site, there's Dockerize, ScaleIO within, you know, the GitHub already that people can take advantage of, right? We're doing some work with some other partners in that ecosystem. So you're right, I think the debate there and what EMC is doing to, again, provide choice in that area is fascinating. I'd say one other takeaway for me is really, you know, last in Paris, I think it was 5,000, I think we're up to close to 7,000 this show, but the level of sort of enterprise customers that are starting to really use us at a production level is fascinating, right? I mean, having Walmart up on stage, talking about what they're doing and their commitments and CERN and some of these other big customers really kind of indicates to us that, look, it's gone beyond just sort of, you know, kicking the tires. It's over that tipping point and I think EMC is really well positioned to take advantage of that. All right, so I get is the center of the universe when it comes to developers. The website for you guys is emccode.github.io. People want to learn more, you know, what should they be looking for from EMC kind of through the rest of the year? Talk a little bit about Caspian, but what are the big shows you're at, big announcements that, you know, what should we be looking for towards the end of the year? Yeah, I mean, I think continued contributions, right? I mean, again, the commitment to the open source, we just scratched the surface here, right? Copperhead was kind of in some ways a tip of the spear. So again, I definitely recommend kind of looking into that. I think ScaleIO and having that free, spending more time, I think you're going to see much more migration in our software defined storage into that open source community, into the ability to kind of kick the tires. I mean, you know, we go to kind of the shows that we think are critically important. So you'll see us here, you'll see obviously EMC world, but, you know, VMworld and some of these other shows are really important, RSA is coming up real soon as well. So I think you'll see that. You know, there's going to be many more announcements. I know if you want to touch on it as well, but you know, you're going to see more announcements in that space from us coming up pretty soon. We'll be in Tokyo, obviously, you know, you'll see increasing participation and contribution both on Cloud Foundry and OpenStack as well. You know, we're not the only, Cloud Skinning guys are not the only OpenStack guys in EMC, so, you know, it's a growing army that's there. And just, I think you'll see engagement across the board. You know, and if people want to know more about Caspian, you know, of course, they can give us a call. All right, awesome. You know, they'll be able to find you online. Adam and Dorian, thanks so much guys for joining me. Lots of good insights here. We'll be right back with lots more coverage here. Day three, OpenStack 2015, right after this quick break. Thanks for watching.