 Hi everybody, we're back, this is Dave Vellante and I'm with Wikibon.org, I'm here with my colleague and co-host this week, Stu Miniman, who's also with Wikibon. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous production of Dell Storage Form. Now theCUBE is a product that we bring to various events. We're currently on our summer tour. SiliconANGLE Wikibon is an independent media and research organization. Wikibon is the research side, SiliconANGLE has a number of publications and as I say, we come here as an independent entity and provide the perspectives we bring in, the smartest people that we can find, we extract the signal from the noise, we love to hear from you, you can tweet me, I'm at Dave Vellante, Stu is at Stu, Stu by the way, great Twitter handle, I don't know how you got that. And we're here with Arpit Joshpura, who is with Dell, he's the head of the networking side of the business, runs product management and product marketing, a former CMO of Force 10. Arpit, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, excited to be here. Yeah, Stu, I mean, we've been witnessing the whole convergence trend for the last several years. This is your wheelhouse. What do you make of all this? Yeah, so, it's exciting times. If you talk really, I think back about 10 years ago when really the server virtualization, you know, markets started to really explode, we saw that ripple effect through the infrastructure and converged infrastructure as an answer to a lot of that. So we saw changes in the storage realm, you know, all the acquisitions like equal logic and compelling on the Dell side and on the networking side we're starting to see that response to that. So I think Arpit, we're going to spend a little time talking about, you know, the changes in networking because, you know, for a long time for, you know, over a decade, you know, networking was kind of boring and people were saying there wasn't a lot of innovation there, it was really dominated by a single player. And now, of course, we've seen, you know, a slew of acquisitions, you know, IBM, HP, Dell all lining up with their networking pieces. So maybe can you frame it for us a little bit as to, you know, what do you see as the big challenges of the day in the networking industry? Absolutely. Networking has always been about a rigid network. The old way of doing things, mechanical, oversubscribe, and complex. Right? As you said, dominated by a single vendor. We at Dell and specifically, you know, with the forced acquisition, we want to simplify it. Right? We call it, you know, simplifying the complex. And what we are doing is introducing our point of view called virtual network architecture or VNA. And it's a framework, it's an open framework that is workload aware. And that just simplifies the networking. You know, in the same manner that servers were virtualized. Right? We want to virtualize the network and make it simple. Okay. So, Arpin, let's dig into that a little bit. Sure. Because when you talk, you know, I talked to customers and I have yet to find a customer that says, you know, oh, I need a fabric. It's the ripple effect of virtualization. So if you talk about where traffic's going now, virtual machines are not a static like a physical server. So we're moving, you know, traffic in between. So in the network world, what we call kind of the east west is kind of dominate versus the old north south. And for that, it's kind of high bandwidth either going on a backplane or really a mesh topology or what we're calling a fabric. And understanding the application is very important for that. At the high level, it seems like everybody's got their own fabric. You know, Cisco's got their fabric path. And even on the application aware side, you know, we were talking to HP last week about they don't have VNA, they have VAN, I think. I know. I wish they had three other acronyms. Lots of TLA's out there. It's very confusing for users as to which means so, you know, what differentiates, you know, what came from Force 10 to Dell? Okay. So let's start off at the very top, right, which is the role of a network is to connect an end user to an application or a workload. That's the role. And today's network has a lot of hierarchy. You got the rack, you got the top of rack, you got aggregation, you got the core. All these are typical networking technologies works, right? Historically, it has been about, you know, big chassis, 16,000 watts, huge, you know, 20 plus RU's, big form factors, right? Think of mainframes, right? That's what today's networking is. And instead of those mainframes, Dell has introduced a point of view with a Z9000 type product that is more of a pizza box. And we build a fabric out of it which has non-blocking connectivity within the rack, across the racks. So let's take a workload like Hadoop or, you know, a workload that is a demanding workload, right? Now what happens is when that causes a whole burst of east-west traffic, right, within or across the rack, you need a network, you need a fabric, you need an architecture that does not distinguish between the typical rigid boundaries, right? It allows the traffic in a non-blocking manner for that application to go at the highest throughput possible. That's the fabric. So specifically you're talking for the networking geeks out there, we're replacing Spanning Tree protocol. Spanning Tree is done with a simple Layer 2 and Layer 3 architecture open and interoperable with the leading players out there, right? With very high throughput. Just keep that in mind. 10 gig, 40 gig. As I always said, 2012 is the year of 10 gig, right? And with the converged launch that we just had at the Dell Storage Forum, it's 10 and 40 gig all the way. So, you know, there's obviously multiple ways to build a network and everybody's got their own flavor out there. Can you talk for a second about why would I choose kind of, you know, small kind of layout architecture versus just buying a single chassis where I can have, you know, a thousand ports and just have everything travel along the backplane? That's a very good question. You know, when the three things that come to mind from a customer perspective and we've had, you know, a lot of customers now going towards this architecture, which, you know, we call it distributed core. It's a leaf and spine class architecture. First one is obviously power. Significantly lower power. And, you know, we've done some math as low as one fourth, right? The power of a traditional chassis. Second is the pricing, obviously, right? Because, you know, the general assumption is it's cheaper to buy pizza boxes than to buy, you know, mainframe type chassis. And the third one is just the packaging. The footprint and the actual space that a data center takes is just, you know, significantly less, right? In terms of orders of magnitude. And you combine that with the non-blocking nature, right? Which gives you, you know, full reliability, right? No packets lost. No workloads lost. And the full automation, which is a server type plug and play, it's a no brainer. So, Arpit, the acquisition happened about a year ago, right? Can you give us some insight, you know, coming from 410 and now being part to Dell. What's been the customer response? What's different now when you were standalone company? That's a good question. I think the customer response has been fantastic. I hosted, you know, a huge technology advisory board about a couple of weeks ago, right? Both with existing 410 customers and some new potential customers. And, you know, it's like any other acquisition where the first quarter everybody's cautious. You know, large company, will it work? You know, will it not work? Will they slow down the pace of innovation? And what we are seeing is it's on the contrary the other way around. We have doubled the R&D, time and a half the sales specialist, right? We have, you know, almost double the investment. And you saw innovative products like the blade switch inside the 1000 chassis start to finish less than nine months of R&D, right? So, we have managed to sort of not only integrate very effectively, but to a customer, it gives them the full end-to-end view of server storage and networking coming together without losing the innovation and the speed and the agility as well as the disruptive ideas we have created in Silicon Valley with 410. Right? So it's best of both worlds. Great. So are there any proof points from a customer adoption standpoint? You know, what's the size of your install base and, you know, being as part of Silicon Valley, you know, in networking, you know, there's kind of three or four that have known market shares and everybody else is in the other. So two proof points, right? One is on the customer side. We have grown our customer base by 43% in the last nine months, right? So we're adding roughly about 600 new customers a quarter and 410... I'm sorry, how many? About 600 new customers a quarter. Great. And we have had an install base of about 1,500, you know, mid-high-end customers. So these are not like mom and pop. These are really, you know, mid-market and above kind of customers, right? So that's number one. And then a lot, about more than half have come back since the acquisition to buy more stuff from us, right? So this is really positive science. That's number one. That's great from an upgrade cycle. From an upgrade, above average and new customers. The second proof point is from a market share perspective. Did you know Dell Force 10 is number three on 10 gigabit Ethernet, right? Post-acquisition. And we are increasing market share. In fact, according to Dell RO, if you look at year over year, we had the highest points gained in the market share. So we're number three in 10 gig... So when you say 10 gig, is that counting switches and routers? So Ethernet switches. Ethernet switches in general. So enterprise Ethernet switches. So my understanding is a lot of that's down kind of the campus sides there. No, this is campus and data centers. Okay. Campus and a lot of the high-end data centers specifically in the web 2.0 have already gone to 10 gig. Okay, so number three if you look at it, Cisco has kind of the dominant market share. HP is number two with about 10% and Brocade and Juniper have been kind of about 3%. Well, we've separated from that crowd. Congratulations then. That is news to me. I'm looking forward to seeing from... 40 gig. We started off as number one last quarter just because Cisco didn't have a product, right? And now we're number two. Right globally. So 40 gig as it starts ramping up. Cisco is number one now? Yes. Okay, and IBM with their BNT stuff has 40 gig also. Distant number three. So we're number two in 40 gig. So if you look at the really high-end, you know, Dell's value is to make high performance and high-end available to the masses, right? You heard Darren talk about it today, right? That's what we're doing. Bringing the really high-end at a price performance power packaging at the mid-market. And in that process we'll gain customers and market share. Yeah, no, interesting. I looked about a year ago. I did a study looking at all the fabrics and you've got, you know, the Cisco's and Juniper's the world fighting at, you know, who's got the biggest fabric and it looks like you're not trying to have that kind of argument. It's no longer exciting. It's what solves customer problems for their workloads, their applications and tailor it to them. Okay, that's great. So, all right, our people, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and sharing the fantastic growth going on in the Dell networking business, the whole converged infrastructure trends. You guys are making some waves. Absolutely. We're excited. It's changing the landscape. I don't know where, really. Dell has become overnight a player. We've always known that Dell is a big player in servers, but overnight in networking and storage we've seen that transformation of Dell. So, again, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you for inviting me. We'll be back with our next guest. Thank you.