 Okay, welcome back everybody. We're here at VMworld 2013. And this is VMworld 2013 live in San Francisco. This is theCUBE. This is siliconangle.com's flagship program where we go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined by my cohost Dave Vellante, the co-founder of Wikibon.org. Hi, everybody. Ido Kadim is here. He is the director of data center technologies, Intel Corporation. We're going to be talking about the data center, the software defined data center, private cloud, virtualization security. Ido, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you to be here. So I always, you know, big companies never really know what the titles mean. So I have to tell us sort of what your role is at Intel. Yeah, my team develops solutions with the ecosystem to expose Intel technologies in ways that they deliver value for IT. Specifically for my team, it's in the areas of virtualization and security. Okay, so talk a little bit more about what that means. You got a robust set of technologies inside of Intel. So maybe you could be a little bit more specific on how you unlock, what are you unlocking the power of? Yeah, so let me give you an example. And you know, with all the conversation of abstraction, people forget that our applications and their virtualization platforms run on physical infrastructure. And that controlling and knowing stuff about that physical infrastructure is extremely important. So one example that I will give you is one of the initiative that we call Trusted Compute Pools, which is based on Intel TXT technology, Trusted Execution Technology. And basically the problem we want to solve is the lack of visibility that people have into their infrastructure in the cloud, which is creating barriers for people to take sensitive workloads and putting them in the cloud because they lack visibility and control into how their infrastructure is configured and how things actually run. So with Intel TXT, you can get a measurement and knowledge that the platform and including hardware, firmware, and the hypervisor are actually a known good, what you intended to run there. And you can use that as a foundation of trust. And by using an attestation server, you can promulgate this knowledge into management tools. And instead of managing an unknown cloud entity, you can manage a trusted server, even though it's a virtual, logical entity, but it's tied to known stuff about the infrastructure. Well, that's huge, especially in the context of security. I mean, it's an area that I know you're focused on because a lot of practitioners, you talk to say, well, what's that virtualized? I don't know what's happening. With physical, I know what ports connected to what device, and when I virtualize it, I don't know anymore. So. Yeah, and who owns it, and where is it? And it's a challenge that we want to solve. It's a hard problem. And actually we associate twists that kind of what I described also, the knowledge of where the server is in terms of geography, which is extremely important for many regulated workloads, in country regulations, and stuff like that. So you're doing that at the lowest level. I mean, you're doing that at the processor level. A lot of people feel like that's where the problem has to be solved. So where are you in terms of being able to promulgate that approach, that philosophy? I know you've been working on it for a while, but maybe take us through sort of the roadmap and where we are in terms of expectations. So in terms of the availability of, I'll take you through the stack so you'll get a sense of that pipe that goes from the IT administrator to the hardware, right? So I'll start from the hardware, and I'll say basically every server that ships today is enabled with the foundational technology. And VMware as a vSphere 5.1, so last year's release also supports the capability. So through the VMware stack, and in fact today not just through the VMware stack, we can create that trusted foundation on essentially any server that ships today. And then beyond that, trust, there are several software vendors with attestation servers that are shipping. Some examples are high trust, McAfee, Trapezoid has an interesting solution in that space. And I hope I'm not forgetting anyone, but they'll forgive me if I do. And then with that, that exposes an API that now can be consumed by essentially any management tool, so RSA has demonstrated support of this capability. Again, I'll remind, I'll mention McAfee, and basically... Anybody. Anybody. So one of the debates we had early on this morning, debates are not debates. Statements by Pat Gelsinger on me, I couldn't really debate Pat because Pat was taken back by the word hybrid. But we had the open stack guys on earlier, so I want you to define to me the definition of hybrid cloud versus private cloud because it's a semantic conversation right now, just want to get your perspective of how do you define private cloud infrastructure and hybrid cloud? Because VMware is promoting hybrid cloud, obviously, you know, cyber defined data center and hybrid cloud. So how do you define hybrid cloud and private cloud? Well, one, I think it's a confusing topic. I think private is about ownership of the data and the virtual infrastructure. No multi-tenancy. Correct. So that would be kind of like a maybe a variable. So okay, multi-tenancy is hybrid. Right, now many people actually associate private with also being on-premises. So on infrastructure that's physically owned by the tenant. Hybrid is when you combine that with a hosted infrastructure. It could be multi-tenant or single tenant in my mind, but once it's hosted, it becomes... Third party hosted. Yes, I think that to me is the definition of hybrid. Of course, the challenging part is when it's a multi-tenant third party. So the other thing that we talked about, Pat, and this is something that David and I have been talking about on theCUBE is when clouds started to hit the scene, you know, go back a decade ago or five years, seven years ago, oh, it's like a utility, a plug-in, you get your electricity, and we have an electrical grid that flows as standard, and Pat was like, it's standardized, there's really no issue in this, you know, it's an oversimplification of the complexity of an enterprise. You talk about virtualization technology, okay, check security data. I don't get bad electricity coming through my house. I don't have hackers coming through electrical grid. So, I mean, these are issues, and there's data too as well. So you're in that area. How do you view the security issue? And if that's a flawed analogy, what's a better analogy for the cloud? Yeah, you know, I'm pretty sure that in 1920, people didn't expect to get electricity flowing all the time. And, of course, technology moves much, much faster now, and the evolution is much faster. So, I don't think we're quite in 1920. So those outlets would be like APIs, right? So, or connectors, or... All right, so I think in terms of maturity, how should I say, you can make it work today. I think there are probably two main fields of challenge. One is technology. I think this whole software-defined infrastructure is really the necessary element, but how to use it is still, you know, people need to learn how to do it and trust it, which brings me to the human factor, which I think is the other big challenge, learning to trust this automated infrastructure and moving away from manual provisioning to automated provisioning, trust it in your policies, understanding that it actually provides a more secure infrastructure. And also, you know, utility is something that, to a large extent, you do get charged based on use. Well, at least sort of. I don't think IT has figured out how to do that yet. It's early. It's so early. And it's early, yeah. It's early. I mean, one of the things we would, you know, we do theCUBE, which is live broadcast, and not a lot of people do like things at theCUBE, and someone said to me last night, why are you, theCUBE is so popular, and I go, well, because people are tech fans now, and so, you know, just like the automotive industry had auto fans, people love cars, right? You know, they love cars, they love souped-up cars. Back in the days when cars were cars, now you got hybrids, and, you know, the engine is virtualization, and the people come to VMworld really care about the engine. They care about, like, the new horsepower, the new stuff, and dashboards could be the big data, the applications, the driver, if you want to kind of go there, but there are many kinds of cars, and there are shipping today, so OpenStack, for example, can do that. So if that's an analogy, where can we get better in this software-defined data center? If the engine is virtualization and software is going to be a key enabler, how do you view all that? Is it just incremental improvement? Is there still? Well, one, you know, I'm thinking about the analogy, and I'm having a little bit of a hard time with it. Okay. To me, virtualization is the wheel in the- It's a bad analogy, just say it. No, no, actually, I want to map it to my reference system, right? Not all of your analogy's a whole run job. We've got a lot of good ones. You know, I learned something from Pat as well, you know, I have my view. So I think the engine is infrastructure. It's servers, and it switches, and it's storage. And virtualization is the wheels and the gear. And the, you know, I am going to take this one step further. I think software-defined infrastructure will be at the end game when you can think of it as the self-driving car, right? Yeah, automation is an orchestration, a big thing right now. Right, so, you know, the driver will program where they want to go, but then they'll sit back and relax, and the car will take them there. I think that's a perfect analogy for the end game for IT on top of virtualization. You know, software-defined networking is not new as a concept, but it's new as something that is deployable. And the adoption curve is going to take time. There's a ton of legacy in IT. I think one of the big challenges that IT has is also there's all the legacy. There are the business units that go around IT into a pure public cloud, which creates a ton of risk for enterprises in terms of data leaks, in terms of compliance. You know, what do you do with stuff that went to Amazon, but not under control, right? How do you make sure that that is done safely? So I think IT is going to have to harness all of these technologies to become a really effective mediator for the actual users, which will use the cloud like we use cell phones in the IT environment. It's a great conversation, and there's all kinds of analogies. When we talked to Pat Gelsinger when he joined EMC, Dave and I had him on there, and we talked about the processor, Intel processor, had a lot of proprietary software in there, but it was a chip, and it was a hardened product. And that went into a PC, which was open. So everyone's trying to find the hardened top in cloud. Is there a hardened, is there a, okay, to get what's in there, it just works. And that's a debate we're kind of just starting to have in here from customers. They're like, hey, I want function. I want. You know, I think there's an evolution, and it's gradual. It doesn't go, you know, if you don't change address to the moon overnight, you know, it's many years since Neil Armstrong walked the first step. We're still not living on the moon. So I think, you know, first step is converge systems. Right? And then systems that can be configured in software. They're not just converged, but they're really software defined, and the configurations are software defined. And then it will be. You have to go. I do, I do. Oh my gosh. I'm giving you the hard stop. You asked us to get you out of here. I appreciate it, Dave. There you go, all right. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. Great conversation. Thank you very much. This is happening very fast here in the cloud. A lot of things happening. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Yes.