 for a special editorial spotlight on cloud services and solutions and applications. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com. This is where we spend some time, we go in depth into specific solutions to get the unfiltered opinion and analysis around some of the applications for cloud. And I'm joined by co-hosts. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org and we are here with Jason Nolette who is a CUBE alum. Jason's with Brocade and he's the vice president. Jason, we were out in San Francisco a couple months ago now or a month or so ago talking about V-specs, big show here for Brocade. You guys got a great, great booth in the pavilion and seems like, saying off camera, you guys have always had a strong relationship with EMC. I mean, obviously you've ushered in the storage networking market but there seems to be a resurgence in your relationship. So anyway, congratulations on that and welcome to the CUBE again. Well thank you, it's good to be here again. We've had a great relationship with EMC for the last 14 years. As you pointed out, we pioneered the storage area networking market with EMC and some of our other partners and I think from an environment, kind of market landscape point of view, we probably have one of the cleanest relationships with EMC because there's not a lot of conflicting agendas and it's very straightforward and it has been a very strong relationship. I think the resurgence as you might refer to it has taken the form of solutions that we partnered with EMC recently. I mean you mentioned V-SPACs, the launch we did about 30 days ago jointly with them and a terrific solution that is focused at Small and Medium Enterprise to deliver a converged infrastructure, a proven infrastructure offering with compute, storage, network, kind of the whole stack but with a variety of choices that gives the customer the confidence of something that's pre-certified and tested but something that also gives them a best of breed opportunity and so we appreciate partnering with EMC and giving our joint customers that opportunity. Yeah, so I mean, there's obviously been a lot of talk about that single skew and here it is, any flavor you want as long as it's vanilla or chocolate, pick one. Right, the Henry Ford model. Yeah, Henry Ford model. Right, as long as it's black. And so now, a lot of people are talking about this notion of choice. So there's the positive side of that, which is choice, right, and it's more open and less lock in. Is there a drawback and how are you and your partner sort of navigating through those minefields? I mean, kind of the obvious drawback is that it really puts a lot of burden on the vendors that are contributing to these stacks to participate in the certification of a broader range of offerings, right? So in the case of eSpex, we came out initially with 10 different variants for different solutions and so there's an ongoing burden in terms of the combinations of technology but candidly we think it's such a compelling value proposition for the customer to have that range of choice that it makes sense for the vendors to take that on. So we were talking in our setup segment about cloud and how the attitudes toward cloud are changing. A year ago, we did a survey on Wikibon of our practitioner community and we found that a very small portion, actually we're making hybrid cloud their primary strategy. That number, just a short, 11 months later is up to 37%. It's the predominant strategy now. Are you seeing that in your customer base and what do you think the driver is there? You know, we are seeing that. I would say there's still a, I think a kind of a motivation with an enterprise accounts at least to start with a private cloud architecture and understand how they're going to deliver the same kind of service flexibility and faster time to deployment of new applications and service catalogs to their end users so that they can compete effectively with public cloud offerings because the end users in those enterprises have the ability to go around IT out and secure public cloud infrastructure, platform as a service, infrastructure as a service, whatever it might be. So I think IT shops are racing to figure out how to be that provider internally. But at the same time, as you point out, they're also looking to supplement their internal capability with some external offering whether it's Amazon or one of the other capabilities. Of course, just about every enterprise is utilizing some form of software as a service. So if you throw that into the mix of hybrid cloud then pretty much everybody's doing hybrid cloud of one form or another. Yeah, that's true. And we tried to explicitly exclude that because it is such a common factor. So talk about what Brocade's doing to facilitate that because when you think about hybrid cloud, you think about moving data, you think about moving data, you got to go to the network. Network is not the sole bottleneck, but it is one that often comes up. You see, we are detecting the network. As the cluster size gets bigger, you still got to go through the, it gets problematic. So small cluster's okay, but the bigger the cluster is, the harder it is. Yeah, so how are you guys addressing that? What kind of value are you bringing to that conversation? Yeah, I mean in the context of a data center, of course our big contribution is fiber channel sands for those customers who choose to continue to leverage that kind of dominant networking, storage networking technology. But on the ethernet side of the house, a technology that we pioneered about a year and a half ago and have been in the market for a year called Ethernet Fabrics. And I know you spent some time with Mike Placo talking about this just the other day. But the Ethernet Fabrics is really a technology that is built very specifically for virtualization, virtualized data centers, the ability to facilitate VM mobility within the data center, and then ultimately between data centers, right? So for a true hybrid cloud offering, eventually we want to get to the place where that public cloud infrastructure and that on-prem private cloud infrastructure want to be treated as one pool of resource where the customer can deploy and move workloads and move data. And obviously we've got a long heritage in the data replication portion of that, through our fiber channel offerings and our extension offerings. So when we couple that with Ethernet Fabrics and our VCS technology, we kind of get the best of both worlds. You get a very high performance, a very virtualization aware network within the data center LAN, but the ability to then couple that with multiple data centers or cross data centers and stretch that cloud environment. Jason, the customers out there, they all want the performance, they want the speeds and fees, they also want the robust flexibility to have this app environment that Ipad Gelsing was talking about earlier on about enabling the consumerization of IT. But they see you guys, they see Cisco, they see Juniper, they all got their own fabrics. Can you help demystify the fabric conversation? They know, how do you help someone navigate those waters? Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I think the good news for us is that, while we pioneered the term Ethernet Fabric and as I said, we've been in the market for over a year now, just about every other vendor has come forward with some notion of fabric at this point. So the good news for us is great validation, right? The industry's getting it, I think customers are getting it. Now the challenge is, who's got a better fabric and how do we compare? I won't talk a lot about my competition here, but I will say that one of the things that we focused on is a very, very high degree of both simplicity and very low cost. So while some of the competitors in this space are shooting for kind of hyperscale data centers in the biggest of the big, we're going after mainstream enterprise and really trying to help kind of your common enterprise deploy a fabric in support of their private cloud initiative and also on the service provider side where there's plenty of public cloud infrastructure providers who are new or traditional service providers who are now getting into public cloud infrastructure offerings that really can benefit from starting with an Ethernet framework. So for us, in contrast to competition, it's about simplicity, it's about automation, and it's about being able to get started for less than a million bucks. In the segment, you're going through the fat middle. Exactly, exactly. So everyone talks about North, South, East, West, obviously the challenges. So Top of Rack is now popular again for these big data deployments. You can put a nice big switch at the top of the rack, but outside of that, how many racks are you going to have? Now racks and racks of servers and data are comprising these huge clusters, say big data or whatever the data store is. How is that affecting some of the network architecture relative to the fabrics? What are you guys doing around that? It is certainly driving a lot of, I think you labeled it East-West traffic where traditionally these data center environments were very dominated by North, South, traffic client server technology and architecture. Now it's about server-to-server communication, it's about disaggregating applications, it's about big data and Hadoop clusters and the kind of data that traverses those environments. So very important to have a very low latency, kind of minimal number of devices, minimal number of hops, layer two fabric to facilitate kind of East-West traffic. So that's probably the biggest value prop I think of Ethernet fabrics and our technology in particular in those environments is to facilitate that new paradigm and traffic patterns in the data center. What do you think about some of the efforts around this whole software networking stuff that's going on? I think it's a great topic and a really interesting way for vendors like us to provide more innovation and differentiation. In fact, we just coincidentally did a press release this week around our vision and our strategy and software-defined networking and now it's support for open flow on one of our high-end runner platforms. You know, for us it's all about creating a platform for innovation where traditionally customers had to come to the network vendor to say, oh, look, I need new functionality, I need new capability. We had to bake it into the ASIC or bake it into the software on the Switch. Now we can unlock that by allowing customers to write applications and influence the behavior of the network from outside of the infrastructure. And while many vendors are a little afraid about, oh, will that commoditize the network infrastructure? We see it just the opposite. There's a way to differentiate in that space that allows us to provide SDN support better than the next guy. You know, Jason, I got to say that we talked to a lot of developers. We talked to a lot of clouds. And just yesterday I was talking to an engineer at Cloud Air and we're just talking about things like how they're interviewing for people and having knowledge of up and down the stack has really become kind of the cloud architect model. But you guys are really speaking to the DevOps guys. So you pioneered fabric concept, that's cool. Everyone else followed suit, kind of copied. But you guys are now talking to a whole another classification, these DevOps guys. You're talking about the software networking enabling that innovation. Now you got to go all the way to the top for applications. That's cloud. So what do you, do you realize that you guys realize that this DevOps thing is exploding? Obviously you're positioning in the cloud, puts you right there in the sweet spot. How do you address that internally? We do, it's really interesting. Something like SDN causes you to break down kind of traditional silos and administrative domains within the data center. So DevOps or otherwise. You're absolutely crossing a lot of boundaries and we're going to break a lot of kind of old paradigms for how customers are going to rise around this. But I will say that one thing that Brocade is very thoughtful about is we're a network infrastructure provider. That's what we do. That's what we focus on. We're experts in that. We've been doing it for a long time. And so we're careful to not kind of go past that and get into adjacencies where we might lose focus or we might try and do too much. And very good about partnering. I mean that's the heritage and the DNA of the company with the likes of EMC and others is to really have a very strong partnership philosophy. So where we have to cross those boundaries and go out and work with other layers in the stack. For us it's often a partnership model rather than a land grab from us because we want to stay focused on what we do best. And EMC is right in the groove swing for the DevOps too. We've been kind of hearing some rumblings that the next EMC world will probably have a much more DevOps flavor tool. You can almost connect the dots and go okay, next level the journey is that DevOps. You got bare metal being provisioned by Puppet, they announced that today. So it's interesting, right? It's all kind of coming together. So I think that's a unique thing that the cloud market hasn't yet packaged yet that the people involved in building the solutions and the architects behind it. The solution architects, the architecting it. The roles change. The roles change. The other one that's very interesting to me is big data. We talk a lot about the technology behind big data and what you have to do there. But the reality is there's likely to be a shortage of data scientists that can actually make use of all this and put it together in a meaningful format so that average guys like us can make use of it. So I think there's a lot of roles that are going to change and a lot of, like I said, kind of historical silos of organizational models that are going to break down over time. Well, we talk a lot about, as I do, the labor intensive IT economy. We spend more money on labor than anything else. And here we are supposed to be automating all this stuff. Right. And when you talk about the opportunities to transform roles of individuals, EMC is obviously talking a lot about it, the cloud architects, data scientists. I think the industry in general has been fearful about attacking that labor problem. Ooh, guys who buy from us are going to lose their jobs. But I think people are realizing, I love your feedback on this, that this wave of opportunity Joe Tucci calls it waves is now so large that actually they want to hop on that wave and they do want to transform themselves. And they're not as fearful about, oh, I'm going to, you know, the network admin or the storage admin, I'm going to hold onto my territory. I think they're seeing that, you know, with the cloud and the applications that they can run across the portfolio, there's a lot more opportunities than doing some of those basic management tasks. Yeah, I think what happens is, as people see these technologies really take hold and the opportunities that that presents to them, that's when they grow comfortable about, okay, I could change my role, I could do something different, I can move up the stack, I can become an automation expert rather than a guy who has to do all these things manually. So I think people, you know, get that, but it takes time sometimes, because some of these organizational models are very long standing, right? They've been, you know, prevalent for a long, long time. I think the other thing that we're very focused on with, you know, getting back to ethernet fabrics is, probably the single most important value proposition of an ethernet fabric is automation. It's making the network automatic so that you can scale it out, simply plug into switches, have them come up, self discover the topology, discover their configurations, very, very few manual configuration steps have to be taken place here. And the reason that we're, you know, so focused on that, other than, you know, automation is just good, is that all these new initiatives that are coming at IT organizations, whether it's BYOD or cloud initiative or whatever it might be, typically it's not coming with any more budget, right? People are having to face these new initiatives and finding a way to extract investment from existing infrastructure as a way to fund these things. And that's where we think network automation through ethernet fabrics is a great way to help a customer do that. Yeah, self-funding and gain sharing are big concepts now. Keeps coming up on all the surveys, budget constraints, budget constraints, that's not going to change. And in order for IT organizations to sort of close the gap between where they are, with their systems and processes and the new breed of cloud service providers, you know, they've got to really attack that problem. That's exactly right. I mean, they've got to offer the same kind of cost, the same kind of flexibility, the same kind of agility that, you know, an end user can go out and get in the public environment. So it's, you know, it's a bit of a wake-up call for IT. All right, Jason, thanks very much for coming back on theCUBE. It was my pleasure to have you here. Great to be here. Thanks very much. Great, thanks for sharing with us on the Spotlight. Dave, cloud is hot and it ranges from labor, the talent to build it, solution architects to all the technology, really the network layer and it's a collaborative model. So you're seeing this all come together. We're going to break this down a little further in the Spotlight right after this break.