 brought from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Cover EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. And welcome back here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage from EMC World 2016 inside the Sands Expo here in beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. With us is a long time and a familiar face here on theCUBE, Jack Rondoni. Jack, good to see you. The Vice President of Storage Network here at Broadcade. I'm along with Stu Miniman here as well. First off, before we get into, you know, flash is the word here, Jack, this week, obviously, but you're feeling on the show, the vibe, just what's been your two-day take so far? Yeah, I know it's a good vibe. It's a good vibe. It's good to see, you know, the Dell insertion and all this and how that's been received very positively. So I think that was very reassuring to everybody involved and, you know, it's a good vibe. I mean, there's a lot of fun stuff happening in storage, which is near and dear to my heart. There's lots of fun, interesting things being done around, you know, the Unity launch, certainly, right? And so, you know, it's a great vibe. It's a great vibe. It's very much a key point of moving into the future with these two companies, right? And, you know, we're excited about that because we've had great partnerships with both EMC and Dell over the years and we're looking forward to leveraging that in the future. Well, I mentioned the outset of, you know, flash has been kind of one of the hot topics here. Sure. I'm going to let you pat yourself on the back here in just a bit. I mean, this was almost like the Babe Ruth moment. You called that shot a few years ago. Why don't you go ahead and play it back for us? Let's go back three years. It was June 10th of 13th on this show, right? I think Stu was there. And yeah, I basically said, because I really believed it at the time and I still believe it, I said flash will be as disruptive in the data center as server virtualization. That was my specific quote and you can find it on YouTube somewhere. And it's true. I mean, it's just flat out true, right? And I knew that before I had, you know, coming here because every customer I go to, if they don't already have a massive amount of flash in their environment, they have plans to move their entire environment to all flash, right? And the fascinating thing is it's not just all performance. Performance is a part of it. But what it does is allows better efficiencies. They reduce their storage footprint. They reduce their power consumption. It's just one of those few obvious value propositions that sticks in IT. There's a lot of them that have been talked about. They kind of don't make it or they become a buzzword bingo. But this one is it, right? And I felt that way back in three years ago and we've aligned a lot of our, almost the vast majority of our roadmap and our features and our capabilities towards that trend. And we're going to build on that in the future. So we're very excited about it. We're very excited about this transition to all flash because of what it means to our customers. And what does it mean? So going forward then, what's the trend mean to their requirements and what they're going to be needing? Yeah, so a couple of things. And I'm not going to start with performance. I'm going to start with performance. One is the network definitely needs to have the right kind of instrumentation built into it. Meaning that if you think about a fabric, you have a bunch of sensors, you have a bunch of telemetry into it. When you start running these very, very high speed performance devices, ensuring you have that end-to-end flow information working an instrument that you're even measuring, it's very important. And so what we always go to say, if you're going to go and upgrade your device to all flash, you got to upgrade the network, right? So that's one of the requirements. Automation built into it, right? You're getting efficiencies to this. You don't want to spend time on the network. I can't tell you how many customers have gone jack. The last thing I want to do is spend any time on your network. It should just plug in and work. We spend a lot of time on automation. And then obviously we spend time on performance. So you make an announcement with GEN6 flash channel switch that you've launched. No one improved, right? It's always no one improved. Why, how new and how improved? What distinguishes it from the product you had before? All right, so we launched our GEN6 fiber channel switch with EMC on April 11th of this year. So what's new is the instrumentation. It's got a lot of information coming out of the fabric to ensure that this Portia class kind of performance device can actually will not be bottlenecked by the network. That's one thing. It's got, you know, obviously it's got speeds and feeds. It's got 32 gig fiber channel connectivity. It's got 128 gig fiber channel connectivity, which I know some people said, what the heck am I going to do with that, right? But obviously ISLs are kind of the initial use case, but we're talking to some NVMe vendors down the road about how to maybe potentially use that. And so, you know, that's some of the key kind of capabilities, extra levels of automation, policy automation built into it. So you can just kind of want to like monitor environment one click and you're often kind of running with it. So, you know, we've aligned a lot of that. We've also aligned a lot of those capabilities with our IP products as well. So, you know, it's not just dominated by fiber channel. I mean, Extreme IOS got IP interfaces. We have a lot of customers that say, hey, I want this performance and I want my Ethernet network to perform like that as well. So on our VDX Ethernet fabric product line, we built in similar automation and storage specific instrumentation to go and really make those systems on. Yeah, so, Jack, maybe talk a little bit more about that because, you know, I said a number of years ago, the storage protocol wars are dead. They're over. Most customers I talk to, they buy a solution. Happen to have certain, you know, speeds, feeds, reasons why you have it. There's, of course, technical reasons why you might want to choose them. But most customers I talk to, you know, they go to their partners, they go buy a solution set and, you know, it varies what they need. But, you know, are you seeing that when you've got, you know, kind of both the fiber channel and the IP side? Absolutely. So I could not agree with you more. Any conversation that is, well, what about IP versus FC? Wrong conversation. Wrong conversation. In fact, most customers are not having that conversation. It's not an either or it's a both. And then in the end, it's going to be, well, what's the workload? You know, traditional workloads, a lot of them are built on fiber channel. They're going to stay around for some time. So you got to deal with fiber channel. A lot of the new, you know, platform three type of workloads are built only on IP. So you're going to only talk about IP. So that conversation is clearly a both conversation. And that's why Brocade's investing in both protocols for the foreseeable future, right? So fiber channel's obviously been such a driver, you know, in terms of innovation and storage. Why do you think Gen 6 is going to be the home run? I mean, what's going to be, I guess, the secret sauce there that that's really going to vault it to the kind of prominence that I'm getting from you that you feel is ahead of it? So a couple of things. One is, you know, those capabilities are an instrumentation performance that I talked about, right? It's just, it's unparalleled, right? Which is by the way, why, you know, according to Gartner and some other analysts, you get a higher attach rate, actually fiber channel on the off-flash than you've had on the hybrid arrays typically, right? You know, the other thing too is, you know, we're looking towards the future to make sure all of that plumbing work that we're doing and instrumentation work is going to be ready for NVMe over fabrics, right? And actually, I'm going to go out on a limb right now and say three or four years from now, NVMe is going to be about as disruptive to the data center as off-flash was. So we'll see if that plays out. But I certainly believe that because performance just, it creates opportunities. It's, and so what we're doing with our fabrics to make sure it's plumb for that future, we've demonstrated the ability to go do that over fiber channel today. We're working on our ethernet products as they sort out some of the standards issues to make sure that that works as well. But the phenomenal performers, you're going to be a microsecond, you know, kind of response times, right? And I think that's going to be a phenomenal transition as well. And we want to be a part of that. We want to make sure our fabrics, our data slash memory fabrics, right? Are optimized for that. And by the way, it'll still run your legacy workloads, right? So you don't have to go and shut off your 3000 applications that are running your business. You can go and you can move that forward than as basically as your business dictates. Yeah, so Jack, there's two ends of the spectrum I want you to give us a little bit of understandings to how NVMe and maybe fiber channel fit in. On one, you talked about super low latency. We're seeing architectures like EMC's DSSD that's pulling everything super close to the compute where today I really don't have much of a network. It's internal, it's doing that, maybe PCIE extension, something like that. On the other end, you've got kind of the hyperscale. You've got SaaS application, you've got public clouds where once again you said you usually go into IP. You know, how does that fit in? How do we see the market developing going forward? Yeah, I think it's a big question, right? And so let's start with kind of maybe the hyperscale kind of side of things. I think in the end it's all about how the application's built. If you build an application on Cloud Foundry, Platform as a Service where the inherent capabilities of the application can handle, let's say resiliency problems that can handle the performance problems, you can build on anything you want, right? And that's the power of that, right? But that's going to take a long time to kind of go get there, right? And once you can go get there, then you don't need the thousand engineers to make that stuff run perfectly, right? So I think that's kind of where that goes long term. And then I think on the, you know, NVMe from PCI Express, that performance, you know, certainly anytime you run anything in a DAZ kind of way, which is essentially as soon as you run a PCIA Express, it's kind of like that, you're going to get the phenomenal performance, right? But I will say this, at some point, when you're in tens of petabytes, right, of storage, you're going to want to share it at some level, right? You're going to want to centralize it at some level, the management costs eat up, right? Unless you can do some other things, inject it to the cloud or something else like that, right? And I think, you know, when I look at our fabrics, in particular, let's just start with the fire channel fabric, you know, our measured latencies are in hundreds of nanoseconds, right? One switch chip, it jumps at 700 nanoseconds. So even through an entire director, you're talking 2.1 microseconds. So that's some pretty dang good performance, even if you go and then across the fabric. Yes, you'll always get it better if you're hanging it right off the bus, but constructing that kind of fabric is a heck of a lot easier to try to construct a real fabric out of PCI Express. That's really an embedded, in my opinion, at least an embedded kind of bus structure. So, and Ethernet's going to be the same thing, right? You've got RDMA over Ethernet, you've got iWARP, they're going to jam the latencies out of these things. And I think the benefits of that and how I can manage it in a centralized way, I think in the end will probably win over at large scale. You touched on this at the beginning of the interview, but I'll go just a little bit deeper about the relationship with EMC and your thoughts about, especially going forward, you know, because there are going to be a few changes here and there, obviously. Oh, no, they haven't. But how would you characterize it then, the partnership? So, I would characterize the partnership as it's never been stronger. We've never been doing more things of the EMC in our history. We're a student and I were talking earlier about, you know, the early days of fire channel switching and stuff. And of course that business continues to run and continues to run well. But we have IP storage switches. We have solutions with VxREL. We have solutions in a number, a number of different areas. We've got Poxco with Scale.io. So the partnership has never been broader. And I think when we look at then the merger here coming with Dow, it's, to us, we look at it as a tremendous opportunity because, you know, beyond the technology, one thing our CEO always likes to say is, Brocade knows how to partner better than anybody. Right? And I really do believe that. We've not been a partner with EMC for 17 years if we were not a good partner. And guess what? There's lots of divorces that happen in the industry, right? So any marriage that's been hanging around for 17 years, that's something special, right? And by the way, we have a tremendous relationship with Dow as well. A tremendous relationship. So we look at it as an opportunity to strengthen it as those two become one to build upon our partnership. And we're very, very excited about it. All right. Great track record. Yeah, Jack, just bring us on home. You know, EMC world tends to be the biggest event of the year for Brocade. It's said very long history. You know, what's the Brocade present? Sessions, parties, events, you know? How many people you guys have here? Any cool giveaways? Can we get invited? You know, all of those things. Yeah, all of those things. So we always bring, you know, our best worldwide here. We got representatives from Europe, China, all of our field people, because all of our best customers come here, right? To Stu's point. As far as cool stuff on the floor, by the way, you walk in and what do you say? You know, you see Brocade right there. We got some fantastic kind of demonstration. Some of our analytics capabilities. Come by and see our analytics monitoring platform. It really will show you some insights into the data fabric you've never seen before. We're very excited about that. The giveaways, there's so many, honestly, you know, we don't have enough time to go through them all, right? But go to the booth, check out what's there. We got our gurus there. We got our subject matter experts there. You'll be very excited about the solutions we have and how well they're aligned with EMC and don't. You talk about giveaways, Stu, when I walked by the Brocade booth about an hour ago and I saw this line stretching all the way around the booth on how, if I must be free beer, free pizza, free something, Jeffrey Moore signing, crossing the chasm, and by far the most popular booth on the floor right now. Absolutely, and was that just like a great call for what's going on here? Right? What EMC's talking about, modernizing the data center, and it's that kind of, you know, just profound kind of thought, right? That I think really resonates. That's why you see that crowd all around the corner. We're very excited to have them here. Well, you called your shot three years ago. You called your shot today. We'll come back and see you in 2019 and see how it works. Four years, let's see how four years goes, right? A lot of room there, which is good, Jack. Thank you for being once again with us here on theCUBE. And we'll be back with more, some final thoughts actually coming up here from theCUBE and just a little bit from the Sands Expo here at EMC World 2016.