 Live from San Francisco, California, it's the Cube at VMworld 2014. Brought to you by VMware, Cisco, EMC, HP, and Nutanix. Hi, welcome back to SiliconANGLE TV's live coverage from VMworld 2014 here in San Francisco. I'm Stu Miniman with wikibond.org. I've been digging into the networking space and going to talk about networking and convergence in this segment. Joining me is Mark Balch, who's the director of UCS Software and Solutions Product Management. Mark, first time on the Cube. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. It's great. All right, so, you know, convergence and hyperconvergence has been a big topic here. Of course, Pat Gelsinger got on the stage this morning and launched what they call Evo Rail. It just rolls right off the tongue and everything else like that. Of course, Cisco with the UCS product line really helped, in many ways, create much of the convergence marketplace. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, so wikibond, you know, we look at, you know, it's kind of oracle might have had the first kind of, you know, full stack. You know, the red stack has done quite well. But if you look at all the market shares, it's Cisco with your many partnerships from, of course, VCEV Block, NetUp with FlexPod, you know, Hitachi with UCP and, you know, many other storage partners that you've been doing. So can you give us a little bit about, you know, what's your role inside Cisco? Yeah, you know, we have 35,000 plus customers on UCS. It's a very broad business. It's a very broad industry. And for me, it really all starts with application requirements. The reason IT is here is to deliver applications and services to customers. And not all applications are the same and different applications require different types of infrastructure, different types of storage, compute, network, virtualization. And so what we do is we, first of all, we work with many technology partners to provide all those different options that are required for those applications. And most importantly, that we want to make sure that we can integrate that and make it work seamlessly. You know, one of the big problems that this industry has put on users over the decades is throwing a bunch of technology and saying you figure it out. And that's why the cost of IT has continued to escalate, or one of the reasons why. And so our approach over the last, you know, five years has been different to say that we're going to do some deep investments with our technology partners, with our ecosystem, and make sure that things work out of the box so you can have much greater reliability, much greater determinism. And so, you know, my responsibility and my team's responsibility is making sure that we can address those broad set of use cases that start with the application, but that ultimately involve infrastructure solutions and their delivery. Yeah, Mark, you know, I'm wondering, I don't know if you can share the data, but I've heard that, you know, more than half of all UCSs are sold into some kind of converged flavor, whether that be a reference architecture like, is that something you can share, is that about right? We don't break out aggregate numbers like that. We, you know, numbers have gone out for VBlock and Flexpod, for example, but I got to say, you know, and you know this very well, it's a large and very growing, very fast growing part of the industry. And again, I think that's because users want the ability to have a lot more determinism and control over their environments. But it's a really interesting area for us because it's not just about selling individual components. It's about really selling a whole use case to our customers. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you're right, billions of dollars already in the UCS portfolio that's driving that critical. I mean, I hear people always trying to say that, you know, Cisco's going to do the whole thing and, you know, they're not committed to some of the storage partners. And I said, no, no, this is a multi-billion dollar business. UCS has, you know, obviously been critical to the whole transformation of Cisco's, you know, data center practice. So can you talk a little bit about kind of the partnerships? I know there's one new one at the show that we want to dig in, but, you know, just for the people that, you know, don't watch it as closely as some of us, you know, how do you look at those storage partnerships? Yeah, you know, they are critical. I mean, every application needs storage. Right. So that's an understatement to say that it is important. And again, different applications have different requirements, and we're not going to pretend that there is one answer for every IT problem. And so that's where the storage partners come in. We do support an open ecosystem because ultimately, as you'll hear from any vendor here, customer choice wins. I mean, customers need the ability to make their own choices based on their economics, their requirements. And we've been very fortunate to be able to attract and work with, you know, leading the industry's top vendors in storage. And as new trends emerge, like hyperconvergence or, you know, converge systems in general, I think that just richens the playing field and gives customers a lot of latitude in how they decide to deliver IT services. Great. So can you explain that the new announcement this week was with SimpliVity? So, you know, what was that announcement and what can you say about that partnership? So, SimpliVity announced that they are putting their hardware and software integrating it with our UCS servers, and then it's going to be available in the channel partner community. It's something that they've really decided to drive. But we're very happy, right, because they are leveraging the UCS capabilities. Hyperconvergence is a clear trend in the industry. I think that's bigger than any one vendor here at the show today. And, you know, frankly, we encourage that open ecosystem. We work with lots of vendors, both big and small. And, you know, time will tell to see, you know, how different technologies prevail. But, you know, the fact that, you know, in just really five years, UCS has gone from, you know, just starting out to being a platform that partners like SimpliVity choose to base a lot of their, you know, strategy on is really very exciting, and we're happy to work with them. Okay, great. So, you know, one of the things that I always thought was really interesting is when Cisco got into the whole UCS business, you know, it really highlighted the fact that the connection between the physical and the virtual is going to be critical. I remember I think last year VMware got up and said, you know, we're actually the largest networking company out there because we have more virtual, you know, networking ports than anyone out there. Of course, that doesn't mean they had any revenue or anything like that. Of course, Cisco is the, you know, market leader by far in, you know, all the physical switching. So, what's happening from your standpoint at the UCS between the physical and virtual layer? Yeah, you know, that is, that topic is really central to our strategy. It's this idea that you need to deliver a whole use case to an IT consumer. And a whole use case is infrastructure in general. It's not just physical or virtual. It's the two coming together. And I think really Cisco is unique and our team is unique in that this is our viewpoint, is that you can't only deal with one layer in the stack. You have to bring it all together. And back to what I said earlier, for decades now, the IT reality has been here's a bunch of technologies, layer them all together, and you figure out how to make it all work together. You know, virtualization brings phenomenal benefits and flexibilities into the data center. But you have to make sure that the virtual overlay works with the physical infrastructure. And, you know, when I see solutions or offers that kind of only look at one piece of the puzzle, I know that my IT customers are going to say, okay, so that's great for some of it. What do I do for the rest of the environment? How do I make the whole thing work together? And so our approach is, let's say from a networking perspective, from a compute perspective, to have the complete stack, physical and virtual, all managed together, all fully integrated from day one, so that you can make sure that you're delivering the right level of performance and capability and economics, again, back to the application requirements, what they need. Yeah, so, Mark, let's just say the application requirements a couple of times. Things like big data, mobility, or changing a lot of the application portfolio, is that seeping its way into the UCS product line yet beyond kind of, you know, and I think when it first came out, really, you know, virtualization was the kind of the workload, which of course is varied workloads. But, you know, how is the application portfolio changing, and what are you doing in UCS to take advantage of that? Yeah, definitely. So analytics and big data is clearly exploding. It's a huge area for everyone. And we see very strong customer demand. You know, we are deploying clusters, hundreds of nodes, over a thousand nodes, clusters for big data. The challenge is on the infrastructure, how do you get infrastructure that's going to scale to that level to be manageable at a reasonable cost point. And what's really interesting about big data, since you bring up that example, is that look at where big data came from. It came from some of the big web houses where it's all about commodity hardware, right? But when we work with our enterprise customers, they care about things like manageability and ease of deployment, ease of scale. What we've been doing over the last couple of years is we've been integrating big data solutions into our portfolio, working with the software partners, working with major ISVs like Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR and others, to, first of all, characterize their software to show customers how easy it is to scale on the UCS, but then how easy it is to manage it, leveraging our built-in UCS management capabilities. In fact, we have been able to integrate the big data management capabilities into our stack so that when you're deploying the big data cluster, again, it's not just go-layer technologies and figure it out, Cisco is going to give you a completely integrated offer that includes the big data software as long as the management capabilities and the hardware all easy to use. And so it's about all different types of form factors of compute connected with a high quality, high performance fabric and network, and again, easy to manage, which is so important. So big data is really important. So Mark, we were talking before, we started the interview that from a management standpoint, Cisco went on an acquiring spree for a couple of years. Can you give us the update? Do you have all the pieces of the puzzle from a management standpoint, or are there things changing that you're supplementing today with partners or can you sum that up for us? The industry is changing rapidly. I don't think anyone can ever say we have all the pieces because things do change quickly. We have a lot of good pieces though, right? So let me kind of work backwards in chronological order. So about two years ago, we acquired a company called Clalpia, and that software is now a mainstay of our portfolio called UCS Director. UCS Director is how we deliver things like VBlock or FlexPod management, how we work with big data management, how we manage all different types of infrastructure from the network to the compute and storage and virtualization altogether. So that's been very successful and it's been really beneficial because it allows us to get above just the hardware level to be able to manage some of that software and the virtualization and services, the networking services that sit on top of the infrastructure. So that's worked out really well and you're going to see a lot more from us over the next few weeks literally talking about new capabilities there. Cisco also acquired a company called Newscale about a year before that which is the now Prime Service Catalog and that's broadly deployed at many large Fortune 100 companies globally providing catalog features for all different types of IT services. Going back before that, there was title software with the orchestration and the scheduling capabilities. So Cisco has done a lot of acquisitions for sure over the last few years and I wouldn't say that they're going to be the last because again, the industry changes way too rapidly. Something that we're talking about at the show also here is a OEM relationship with a company called Xenos. We are shipping a UCS performance manager software product which allows us to help customers again with that seamless end-to-end view of the physical and virtual infrastructure to know what's going on. When I've got all these different layers of technology storage connected to my compute through different types of networks, virtualization on top, all different types of services how do I know it's behaving as I need it to behave? So after a lot of customer feedback we decided to embark on this performance management program and we're just at the beginning of that so maybe next time we can we'll talk about how that's going but lots of innovation going on it's a very fast-paced industry. Okay, so Mark we're running low on time here so just want to give you the final word on it when you talk to users what's the takeaway you want them to have about VMworld in general and where UCS fits into the whole VMware ecosystem? When we launched UCS five years ago we launched with VMware support as the best platform for virtualization I think that was roughly the wording that was used and we still are the best platform for virtualization you look at things like density ease of management far and away we continue to grab market share we're now the number one blade product in the Americas and number two globally I think the thing which is really important for everyone to think about is think about the entire end-to-end use case what do I as an IT practitioner need to be able to do to deliver my service to the right specification to the right level of reliability and hopefully at the right level of cost and to do that you need to be able to look at all the different pieces in the stack that go into that delivery so you need to be able to manage physical infrastructure virtual infrastructure together keep those policies aligned make sure you can do that consistently at global scale wherever your business operates that's really what we've been focusing on I think customer feedback and traction has certainly born that out and you know I think there's a lot more to come just thinking about how all these things come together Mark really appreciate giving us the update on everything going on with the UCS family there this is Stu Miniman we'll be right back with our coverage from VMworld 2014 after this quick break