 Hi, this is Brian Gracely, Wikibon analyst, and with another Wikibon whiteboard, I'm joined by my co-host Stu Miniman. Today, we're going to talk about hybrid cloud, and we've talked in a number of videos about hybrid cloud. In this one, we want to talk about the offerings that are in the marketplace, the different types of hybrid cloud offerings, because there are a number of definitions, but also the pros and cons or some of the shortcomings of the different ways that some of the vendors and some customers are going about building that. Stu, let's talk a little bit about the challenge with hybrid cloud is, number one, it's not a physical thing. It's not like you can't point to your hybrid cloud data center. There's private and there's public, but everybody's got a different definition, and a lot of them are driven by the vendors. So let's talk about, without having to do in a specific, let's look at some of the different options. So probably one of the first options that I would say is you've got a mix of some set of hardware that's on-premises with integrated software, and then that exact same thing in typically that same vendor's public cloud. So you've got a link, you've got sort of consistency of hardware and software on-prem hardware and software in the public cloud. Okay, so great example of that is Microsoft been doing a bunch of announcements. We saw Satya Nadella in person at Dell World, and he was also on video at HP Discover, HPE Discover I should say. So the Dell stack, the HP stack in both environments, absolutely. Another example that Oracle, Oracle Exadata on-prem and in the Oracle cloud as well. Another way of doing that would be customer has some set of hardware, but really the thing that's the interconnecting piece is the same software in both locations. So an example of this would be Microsoft server and then the Azure pack that would go back to Azure. VMware, similar type of example where vCenter and the plugins in vCenter going back to vCloud Air. So not tied to the hardware, but trying to tie interoperability of the software in the private environment back to the public environment. Similar operations model, but a little bit of flexibility as to I can let my, I don't have to worry about my hardware when it's off site. Right, right. And the pros and cons of this, more flexibility in which hardware can run under the covers. Virtualization is sort of negated to a certain extent how much I have to think about it, it's done that. But at the same time, can I be absolutely sure for a certain given application exactly how it's gonna run? Maybe not, I can probably model it, but if somebody feels like they've gotta be exact in their hardware that may or may not be the same. And you begin to get into a situation where the timing of how frequently I update this hardware and how fast the public cloud does it may be out of sync. So people need to keep that in consideration. Another model that people have is they will say, well, I'm gonna do it at an API level. So people will talk about maybe running something like OpenStack, some distribution of OpenStack, maybe it's Red Hat's distribution of OpenStack here, and maybe they're using Rackspace's OpenStack Cloud. And so at that point, they're really talking about kind of technology interoperability at some point, but really they're trying to be interoperable at an API level, a storage API, a network API. Lots of openness in this, right? That's the whole point of things like OpenStack and some others. But the interoperability is still somewhat to be desired, but it does give you flexibility. This could run in this cloud or some other cloud somewhere else. It's not tied to any specific vendor. What are we seeing, what do you hear in the marketplace when people talk about something like OpenStack? Do they feel comfortable enough to where if they're using one distribution here versus there, do you hear much from customers around that yet? Yeah, so I definitely say, Brian, that's one of the limitations of OpenStack today is that I'm gonna buy one distribution and getting that interoperability is tough. At the last OpenStack summit, actually last summer in Vancouver, they talked about making it easier to make sure that I'm having more similarity between them because portability is something that OpenStack hasn't yet delivered on, but they're trying to put both the certifications in place and make sure that there's the oversight between if I get something stamped with, okay, I'm fully OpenStack, that I can take it from one of those and move it to another. But it's not quite there yet and that's, well, customers say I wanna go to things like OpenStack, I wanna go to things like containers because I'm worried about lock-in. There's some concern around OpenStack delivering on that promise yet. Right, right, and the same model would work if this was, say, let's say Docker. The portability in Feast and Theory is there. People can take advantage of multiple public clouds for the scale perspective. Another one that we're seeing from a hybrid perspective is we're beginning to see some companies that will sort of start here. They'll manage your environment. They might dedicate it just to you. It might be a multi-tenant that is off-premise. The whole thing is off-premise. And then they're beginning to say, some customers will say, well, I've got data I wanna keep on-premises. Can you give me an instance of that, of some sort that you remotely manage as well? So IBM acquired Bluebox. Bluebox does this. We're seeing Platform 9 as a company that does something like that. Again, another approach to where the operations is offloaded for you, which is the challenge for a lot of people, is how do I get that right? Yeah, it's one of those emerging trends that we've been trying to highlight, Brian, because one of the biggest challenges in the private cloud has been, even if I get the capex price down some, it's that operational model. I have to make that shift. Public cloud is, I just go to my portal, I choose something, I don't manage all the time, where's my hardware, how do I upgrade it? Somebody else takes care of that. That's handled really, as you said, kind of the API level or from a software level. So if I can start with a public cloud mindset and seeing a number of companies, you mentioned Platform 9, there's a converged infrastructure company that doesn't call themselves a converged infrastructure company, called ZeroStack that does the same thing. They were at AWS and saying, how would you like that operational model in your data center? And another one that we see, so the one thing that we see all the time, we talk to customers and we will do survey work, we talk to them at events, and we'll go, well, what is your hybrid cloud? What do you want your hybrid cloud to look like? And they'll tell us, well, on-premises I want, whatever, VMware, OpenStack, Docker, but I want to leverage AWS, I want to leverage Amazon, I might want to leverage Google. And that's the piece that we've talked about, we've written about from a maturity perspective, that's what customers would really like from a hybrid perspective, they'd like public cloud A, B and C, they'd like to be able to use those just as easily as they do VMware, and that would be a hybrid model that, you kind of have to have, maybe the simplest term is like a broker or a translator that can talk to all those different ones, but give you a single pane of glass, we joke sometimes, pane PAIN, but that's the piece that from a maturity perspective, customers would love, but isn't really there yet. Yeah, it was interesting, I was talking to VCE recently and they said, we said it's really tough to kind of get rid of complexity and they said that the number one thing you can do to get rid of complexity is to standardize on something, but unfortunately that's not what ITs wanted, in the data center it was, oh, every application gets its own temple and we'll build that its own way. So the public cloud knows this, Amazon builds everything for one data center, their own. Facebook has five different models of server that they do at any one time and they don't say let me over optimize for one thing, it's let me get close enough to do that. So I worry a little bit when I hear okay, I wanna have the world, it's like I'd love 32 flavors, but I'm not gonna eat them all together. Right, right. Yeah, so it's what people think they want and what's available and then I would say sort of the last model and a lot of this really is kind of based on the idea of infrastructure as a service and then bring your own application. You know, our public cloud survey data right now says two thirds of all the public cloud is SaaS and that's the only thing people wanna figure out is, you know, if I have a number of SaaS clouds out here, how do I manage those? You know, how do I either manage them? You know, does IT manage them, does a business manage them or do I have to integrate them back into some application that's back here? So you know, I think the simplest way to take this is two real big takeaways. One is hybrid clouds evolving, which is great. We're seeing lots of vendor driven things that we're seeing lots of different options for customers. But the other thing we're seeing is that, you know, the more you're consistent, so your VCE exam, the more consistent you are, the more possible it is to do a hybrid cloud today, the more variability you want in there, the more clouds you wanna use, the more applications, the more complex it is, the less mature that is today and that's where the industry is evolving. Yeah, and just to point a comment here, you know, we talk a lot about the infrastructure, but users today are looking for more sources of data. So we understand that from the analytics standpoint, you know, David Flauer wrote a piece talking about the mega data centers because if I live in my location, getting to other data sources is kind of tough. If I live in, you know, one of those giant environments that has 20 different clouds and I can just take a cable, throw it over a wall and I've got access to some community of data, I can do so much more with that and, you know, we think that's a huge opportunity for companies going forward. Yeah, and that's exactly why we're seeing so many companies, whether they're storage companies or cloud providers or who are partnering with people like Equinix and the various host, you know, kind of hosted companies because physically, they're right here, you know, they're in the last mile. So that's an important piece, especially if you wanna move large amounts of data or consume it. So we're gonna wrap that up. Lots of good options for customers that are out there, practitioners that are out there. Still a little bit of confusion sometimes, but you know, we're gonna have more and more research this year in 2016 about hybrid cloud. So thank you very much for that. Thank you for watching and stay tuned for more videos about hybrid cloud from Wikibon.