 The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid 2000s permanently changed the way we think about IT. At the heart of it, the cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs. More than half of IT budgets were spent on people and much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning, management, recovery, optimization and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud like model across all their application infrastructure irrespective of its physical location. This is not only cut cost but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone, my name is Dave Vellante and welcome to Simplifying Hybrid Cloud made possible by Cisco. Today we're going to explore Hybrid Cloud as an operating model for organizations. Now the definition of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services somewhere out in the clouds. No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud on premises infrastructure and it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale while at the same time preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where IT managers must think differently to deal with this complexity and the environment is constantly changing. The growth and diversity of applications continues and now we're living in a world where the workforce is remote. Hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIOs by Enterprise Technology Research, ETR, indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. So the challenge for IT managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem, public cloud and edge locations. This is the future of IT. Now today we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding hybrid cloud. First up is Didi Dasgupta who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next, we're going to hear from Manish Agarwal and Darren Williams who will help us unpack HyperFlex which is Cisco's hyper-converged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment will drill into Unified Compute. More than a decade ago, Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking and a single offering. Cisco frankly changed the legacy server market with UCS Unified Compute System. The X series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade and we'll explore how it fits into the world of hybrid cloud and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So thanks for being here. Let's go. Okay, let's start things off. Didi Dasgupta is back on theCUBE to talk about how we're going to simplify hybrid cloud complexity. Didi, welcome. Good to see you again. Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. Yeah, our pleasure here. Look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. Well, I think first off, every customer these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but every customer is looking to move workloads, new services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's one of the big things that we're seeing. While that is happening, we're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got bare-metal applications, you always have virtualized applications, and then most modern applications are containerized and you manage by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in the application landscape as well. And probably triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications and then the applications themselves, it's triggering a change in the IT organizations, in the development organizations, and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that I hear about when I talk to customers. Well, so it's interesting, I often say Cisco kind of changed the game in server and compute when it developed the original UCS. And you remember, there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team, and of course the storage team as well. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to the whole application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? No, I think you're right, they've back to the origins of all of UCS and why did the networking company build a server? Well, we just enabled with the best networking technology, so we do compute that. And now we're doing something similar on the software, actually the managing software for our network convergence, for our rack servers, for our blade servers. And even on this journey for about four years, the software is called InterSight. And we started out with InterSight being just the element manager of the management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. But then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that a customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software to manage the hardware, the underlying hardware. And then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then a third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization or cost optimization. A fourth tool to now manage Kubernetes and not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi-cluster, multi-cloud. They should not have to have a fifth tool that goes into observability anyway. I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that managed their infrastructure, but it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the Kubernetes infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, I mean, whether it's on-prem or in a cloud. So overall, that's the strategy. Bring it to a single platform. And a platform is a loaded word. We'll get into that a little bit in this conversation, but that's the overall strategy, simplify. Well, you brought a platform. I like to say platform beats products, but there was a day, and you could still point to some examples today in the IT industry where, hey, another tool, we can monetize that and another one to solve a different problem, we can monetize that. And so tell me more about how InterSight came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through, you said, we can do better. So tell us the story there. Yeah, absolutely. So look, it started with three or four guys getting in a room and saying, look, we've had this management software, UCS manager, UCS director, and these are just the Cisco's management for our softwares for our own platforms. Every company has their own flavor. We said, we took on this bold goal of like, we're not, when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service or we're going to create a SaaS offering because the same infrastructure built by us, whether it's on networking or compute or the cyber cloud software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SaaS services. Every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. They live and die by how their applications work or don't. And so we were like, we want to eat our own dog food here, right? We want to deliver this as a SaaS offering. And so that's how it started, being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. But it was a pretty big bold ambition because the big change with SaaS is your, as you're familiar, Dave, is the job of now managing this piece of software is not on the customer. It's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities. And we've learned so much along the way, whether it's around scalability, reliability, working with our own company's security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SaaS service. So again, it's just been a wonderful journey, but I wanted to point out we are in some ways eating our own dog food because we built a SaaS application that helps other companies deliver their SaaS applications. So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compare, of course, compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business. And obviously a very profitable company or a large company, you're growing faster than most of the traditional competitors. And so that means that you have more to invest. You can afford things like stock buybacks and you can invest in R&D. You don't have to make those hard trade-offs that a lot of your competitors have to make. So... I'm gonna have to keep my boss on the whole investment. Yeah, right. Never enough, right? Never enough. But in speaking of R&D and innovations that you're introducing, I'm specifically interested in how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud, the operations there and prove flexibility and things around cloud-native initiatives as well? Absolutely, absolutely. Well, look, I think one of the fundamental, where we're kind of philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is we don't need to build everything ourselves. We don't. I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's around searchability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around access control, multi-tenants. I need to create a really good platform and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and a half companies and then figure out how to stitch it all together because it's almost impossible. And if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's three times more difficult for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference how we went about building intersites. We've created a hardened platform that's always on. And then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is infrastructure partners, like some of our storage partners, like a NetApp or PR or others who want their conversion for structures also to be managed. Or there are other SaaS offerings and software vendors who have now become partners, like we did not write Terraform, but we partnered with Hashi and now Terraform service is available on the intersite platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem. We partnered with a company called Turbanomics. And so that's now an offering on the intersite platform. So that's where we're philosophically different in sort of how we have gone about this. And it actually dovetails well into some of the new things that I wanna talk about today that we're announcing on the intersite platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters which are not on-prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, soon coming on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer, if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters in AWS or Azure, stay there. But in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use intersite. And since you're using it on-prem, you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud or even manage VMs in an EC2 instance. So the fact that you mentioned storage pure, net app, so intersite can manage that infrastructure. Remember the Hashid deal and it caught my attention. I mean, of course a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco because you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move, TurboNomic you mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud. So a lot different than it was 10 years ago. So my last question is, how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud and it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve over the next few years? Well, I think it's the evolution of the model. And I really look at kind of cloud, two-data or three-data depending on how you're keeping count. But I think one thing has become very clear again, we've been meeting our own doctor. I mean, intersite is a hybrid cloud task application. So we've learned some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is for sure that customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the Polo, public cloud, on-prem, no data center, doesn't matter. They're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governance, for upgrades, for reliability. They're looking for a consistent operating model. What my guess will all tell me is, I think there's going to be a rise of more custom clouds. It's still going to be hybrid. So applications will want to reside wherever it makes most sense for them, which is close as good data, because moving data is the most expensive thing. So it's going to be co-located with the data that's on the edge, it's going to be on the edge. Polo, public cloud, doesn't matter. But you're basically going to see more custom clouds, more industry-specific clouds, whether it's for finance or transportation or retail, industry-specific. I think Solventry is going to play a huge role today. If you look at the cloud providers, it's a handful of American and Chinese companies that leaves the rest of the world out when it comes to making good digital citizens of their people, and whether it's data latency, data gravity, data software, I think that's going to play a huge role. Solventry is going to play a huge role. And the distributor cloud, it's also called Edge, is going to be the next frontier. And so that's where we are trying to line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really your cloud your way. Every customer is on a different journey. They will have their choice of like workloads, data, uptime reliability concerns. That's really what we are returning in need of our customers. You know, I think I agree with you on that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is, you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers. They're connecting their on-prem to their public cloud. They're doing that across clouds. And they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work and give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of. Because I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with it. I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco and your R&D to do that. Do you buy that? Absolutely. I think again it goes back to what I was talking about You got to give the world a solid, open, flexible platform. And flexible in terms of the technology, flexible in how they want to consume it. Some of our customers are fine with the SaaS software. But if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team, no, that does not work. And so how they want to consume it, they want it 100% air cap, you know, software that we talked about. So I think, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is to give the world an open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API to look at. But the last thing I will mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. And I think some of my colleagues are going to get into some of those, you know, details, whether it's on our X series, you know, platform or Hyperflex, but it's really, it's going to be software defined. So SaaS service, and then, you know, give the world an open, rock-solid platform. Got to run on something. All right, thanks, DD. Always a pleasure to have you in the Cube. Great to see you. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. In a moment, I'll be back to dig into Hyperconverged and where Hyperflex fits and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today.