 Hi, this is Dave Vellante and we're here at Wikibon headquarters with my co-host here Stu Miniman and Stu is just back from Interop last week. So Stu and I decided that we're going to sit down and share with you some of Stu's findings. Stu, how was the show? It was a great show, Dave. You know, I didn't actually get to see a whole lot of the show per se. I was in a lot of meetings, but it was a really great experience, a ton of new information I got there, and I'm really glad I could spend the time to swing down to New York City for a couple of days to attend. So for those people who don't know Interops, tell us a little bit about the event. So the show's been around for many years and it's gone through a lot of different names. So the last time I had been and probably been about five years ago, used to be NetWorld and Interop, like NetWorld plus Interop or N plus I as they called it. And now it's just called Interop and it's supposed to be like, you know, the largest high-tech conference covering everything from virtualization, green IT, cloud computing, data center. You know, it was kind of a catch-all in the industry. You know, obviously I was really focusing on primarily the networking and data center pieces of it, but that kind of bleeds over into cloud and some of the other pieces. How many people were there? Right. So I heard numbers everywhere ranging from 3,000 to 6,000, realized that you could get in for free and go to the trade show floor. And the trade show floor was really packed, especially on Wednesday when I was there when the free beer started going. It was really busy, but the sessions themselves actually weren't really all that crowded. So I only went to one panel and it was a great virtualization, I'm sorry, convergence panel. They had IBM, Cisco, IBM, Cisco, Amulex, and eGenera on the panel and there were only about 30 people in the room, which was really disappointing for some really good speakers and some good content. So the show was primarily geared toward the user audience? Absolutely. The end users there. There was a good vendor turnout, but a lot of end users. And it being in New York City, it's probably a little bit more regional. They have a bigger show in Las Vegas and I hear that that's still very well attended. So I would imagine the convergence was a big theme? Yeah, convergence was definitely a big theme for me covering, you know, hearing the latest on Ethernet, Fiber channel over Ethernet, converged infrastructure and all the flavors and how that really ties into cloud. Anything new that you picked up? Yeah, so a few things. So let's, I guess, go through some of the vendors I talked with. So I spent a lot of time talking with HP. So you were out in Barcelona and I think you got to see their pods. Yeah, in fact, we went inside a pod. It was very cool. We went in early in the morning, the morning we were supposed to fly out and so they had to power it up. And it takes like, I don't know, five, seven minutes to power it up. And when it powers up, the fans come on in a big way and we're standing there. So you're inside this. Did you see one? Did they have one there? No, they didn't have one there. Yeah, so imagine you're inside, you know, a trailer, almost like an airstream, you know, like a camper, but narrow where it feels narrow. It's probably wider in total, but it feels narrow because it's all servers and, you know, power and cooling in there. And just racked and stacked servers and storage. So yeah, so they were talking up the pod work? Yeah, definitely. So I got to speak with their vice president of Converged Infrastructure and it's Doug. I think it's Oat Hote is his last name. And he was talking to me a little bit about pods and he was also talking to me about kind of a future project that they've got coming called the HP Garage. What's interesting is they just got a $7.3 million grant from the Department of Energy. And if you think about how the pod is kind of like a whole trailer that you can create a whole data center, the garage is a smaller version of that that you'd be able to plop inside an existing data center. And you think about where we're going with power and cooling. It's going to use water cooling and it's going to use DC power on the inside and be able to do about four to eight racks inside a data center self-contained, much better efficiencies on the power and the cooling. And as we know, that's one of the biggest challenges in data center today is keeping those costs for power and cooling down. Yeah, so the cool thing about the pod that I saw is it basically, you order it, they announced this pod works. Now they say you can have one in as little as six weeks, but if you and I called up, we wouldn't have one in six weeks. It's got to be in their pipeline. And I know they've got a couple that went out to Microsoft and they probably planned for it. And once they plan for it and it's in the pipeline and they're going to have all the parts and the equipment, then they can do it in six weeks or, you know, six to 12 weeks, let's say. But the cool thing about the pod that I recall was that it has a PUE out of the box of 1.2. The average data center is probably between a PUE of probably between two and three. And what we mean is that normally data centers, they power the IT equipment. And so for every watt you use to power the IT equipment, you need additional watts to power the power and the cooling, the power distribution and the cooling. And the average data center is probably twice the IT equipment needs, maybe three times. And HP is saying it's only 20% additional power over the IT equipment to power these pods, which is very efficient. And I had a really interesting discussion talking about, you know, really where is the market for these pods? Because, you know, you've got the giant guys, I mean, the Googles out there, the Facebooks that have these just tremendously huge scalable data centers. Then you've got the service providers. And that's really where they think the pods are going to be going a lot, as well as they said there's certain companies that are going to be able to use this type of technology. It's what they call almost IT as a weapon. So rather than IT as a service, it's a weapon. So the companies that say, I want to be able to have massively scalable architectures, be able to provide these services, and, you know, even HP themselves are going to be a cloud provider using these kind of technologies. So it's going to be a while before these things go mainstream is what you're saying? Yeah, and I mean, I think if we look at any of these prepackaged solutions, these are not, you know, massively selling, you know, huge volumes of them. So, you know, pods and even the garage, there are certain enterprises that are going to do them. If you look at the VCE Coalition, Acadia's Vblocks, this is not something that, you know, every commercial account is going to buy. It starts in the enterprise and it kind of works its way down market as they make things make sense. Was VCE at the show? So VCE definitely had, they didn't have a booth. So EMC was there and Cisco was there. So I didn't see any Vblocks specifically, but Cisco was definitely talking about it and EMC was talking about it. I stopped by the EMC booth. It was the Ionix people. So they were talking about the latest in UIM 2.0. So that's the unified manager, which is specifically for Vblocks. So definitely you had pieces of it from both sides of the coalition. Who else did you see at the show? So the other big one there was Dell. So Dell actually had one of the keynotes on Thursday, Dario Zemarian, who is the new kind of czar general manager of the networking space. And I got to sit down with him, which was really quite interesting, because if you think from a networking standpoint, well, how does Dell really fit into that picture? And I asked him that question, and he was very kind of frank and honest in saying, I asked that same thing when I interviewed. Dell is not, they have their own kind of low consumer end product line, but mostly they're doing things through partnering. So their big partners are Juniper, Brocade, and Aruba Networks on the wireless side. And he said really his job is to give Dell some credibility in the space, first working with their partners and eventually growing, of course, probably their services with their Perot acquisition and trying to get into that space a little more as they build their converged infrastructures. So we saw Dell bought Equalogic, tried to buy three-part to do the high-end storage play. You just mentioned the Perot acquisition. Obviously, Dell is transforming itself. Do you see Dell actually acquiring a networking company? So I asked him that specifically. And if you look at the options that they have out there, they're not going to buy Juniper. Juniper is just way too big. It's $12 to $15 billion for that acquisition. They're not going to buy Brocade. It really doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's also $3 to $4 billion at least from what Brocade's market cap is. He said that if they made an acquisition, it would probably be something on the smaller side, something on the edge. So if you look at what IBM did recently with the Blade Network's B&T acquisition, that was rumored to be somewhere between the $300 and $400 million range. Or even look at what Cisco did a few years back with buying Linksys, which was about a $500 million acquisition. So if you look at where Dell plays in the marketplace, they're not going to get a core switch supplier. They're not going to be competing with the Cisco Nexus 7000 or some of the products that Juniper makes at the core. But at the edge, which is a little more defensive, and at the line where the server and networking and virtualization all play into space, there could be an acquisition or in the consumer space if it made sense. So OK, so you saw HP Dell. How about Cisco? Were they at the show? Cisco is definitely at the show. And talking a lot about UCS, talking about their networking, they had a lot of partners in there. And I mean, Cisco plays across the board. They've got a broad portfolio. They were partnering with everyone. So yeah, they're absolutely still strong. I talked to Mike Frato from Network Computing. And he said they had just done a survey of the networking group. And I think they found over 60% of everyone they surveyed said that no matter what, they're not going to switch from their existing vendors. So really good news for Cisco there, that they're well-entrenched. They've got good product line. And the second question was, what would make you switch from that? And it has to be a really large, significant change, not just in cost, but benefits as to how you can operate. And so it's going to be tough for people to unseat Cisco. So what do you think about HP's converged strategy? Do you think they'll be able to take Cisco on? So HP's really bought themselves into the number two spot. And they have the most number of pieces of the stack. They've really got a full stack. The only piece of the stack that you say they might not have is Fiber Channel. And to be honest, they're not interested in acquiring that. So I think HP's making some good moves. They've always bundled an automated solution. So if you want to buy a whole rack or buy a whole pod, buy it all from HP and they've got those pieces together and it's sticky. Does HP have the most robust stack for converged infrastructure, in your opinion? So you can always argue on each individual piece. I mean, from a storage standpoint, they've got some tough competition. And we'll see how this all shakes out with what's going on with three par from a networking standpoint. Everyone's got the same message today. We're flattening the network. We're going from a three tier network down to a two tier network. Virtualization is a big play in here. If you look at the advantage that Cisco has had for many years is they've got just a huge number of people that are certified for Cisco. There was a great article by Greg Farrow with therialmind.com saying that, hey networking folks, your job is not working for Cisco. And HP answered this really well recently. They just announced their new certification trainings that while you can be a CCIE or CCNA on Cisco, now you can get HP certified. And if you're already certified on Cisco, you kind of get credits towards working with HP products. So they said, if you're fully certified on Cisco and you have a similar product line on HP, you can get, I think it was 77% of your certification already done. So you just need to kind of wrap it up. It reminds me in college if you'd taken a course at one place and you just need to kind of pass an extra test. It makes it really easy for that infrastructure. And what HP took that a step further in saying, not only the networking certifications, but they have the server certifications and the storage certifications and you can become a fully cross trained certified professional, which is where we really think is the stacks coming together. We're gonna need those experts that can go across all the different technologies. Was Oracle at the show? I did not see Oracle at the show at all. Would Sun normally be at this event or not necessarily? You'd think you'd see Sun at the show, absolutely. I mean, they had the storage vendors there. They had the server vendors. IBM wasn't there. IBM, how about Juniper? Juniper wasn't there from a networking standpoint. Force 10 had a big booth there. Seemed to have a lot of people showing up, especially when they had t-shirts and trinkets. No Juniper, no Arista. What about QLogic? No QLogic. So I mean, QLogic's typically embedded for a lot of these technologies, but Emulex was there. Their CTO was giving a keynote. And if you talk about kind of the cross training, Emulex, I spoke with Sean Walsh, marketing from Emulex, and they were talking about this book that they had where if you're a storage guy or if you're a networking guy, yeah, you can learn about how to provision from either point of view. So kind of choose your own adventure almost. Okay, so some good education there. So we've seen a big thrust on training. So you're saying Emulex, HP, let's see, anything else we should know about the show? Any other big themes before we wrap? Yeah, I think, right, convergence, update fiber channel over ethernet is making progress. So we've talked about plenty Dave. Customers don't want a new protocol. If you look at where we are today, everybody was talking about kind of how fast people are moving to 10 gigabit ethernet. The reality is that we're today shipping more eight gig fiber channel ports today than we are 10 gigabit ethernet ports. And if you look, eight gig fiber channel is only just now starting to ship more ports than four gigs. So fiber channel is much bigger than 10 gigabit ethernet. Of course, one gigabit ethernet is something like eight times bigger than fiber channel today. So just when you talk scales of markets, the new stuff always gets the most hype, but the reality is most people are always trying to get the most out of what they have today, extend what they have. And these transitions take many years to kind of come to fruition. Well, we've said on Wikibon, there's $25 billion of assets built up around fiber channel. That's hardware and software assets, not even including all the processes and procedures around them. So people aren't just gonna rip and replace that. One other piece of news, I think last week was Q-Logic announced the new CEO, Simon Bittescomb. Yup. He's gonna be new CEO, taking over for HK. Absolutely. I guess on that, HK is hanging on his chairman? So yeah, HK is staying on his chairman and absolutely we expect that he'll be giving his vision going forward. So we've met Simon, he's been with a company for about three years now, I think. And actually, this is the second time that HK has stepped aside, but it does look that HK's really put together a good succession in place. When we got to go to the analyst's day, it was really showing off the deep bench that Q-Logic has there. So it's not just Simon, but all the people that they've got lined up in depth in the different organizations. And HK's a real visionary, right? And Simon's obviously an operational execution guy. Sure. Do you think this is a sign that they're maybe setting the company up for a sale? You know, I think if there was going to be any sale, it probably would have happened a year or two ago. So convergence is well on its way. Q-Logic's trying to position themselves as the number one adapter vendor when we go to 10 gigabit in convergence. And this is where the battle is. So Emile X is trying to be there. Q-Logic's trying to be there. Intel's trying to maintain that number one position. And Broadcom's also there. So I think we'll have a real battle over the next, you know, 18 to 24 months. Sean Walsh from Emile X said it's really, if you look at the next generation of Intel architecture, that's where the battle will be. So we're the Niantic today. And once we go to that next generation, that's where the design wins will really kick in and we'll have higher bandwidth. And we should have a little bit better clarity as to where the number one and number two players are. And then the also runs. Okay, we're live here from Wikibon headquarters with Stu Miniman. And Stu, thanks very much for the update on Interop and the vendor roundup. And I appreciate you spending a few minutes with us talking about the themes of the show. Thanks, Dave.