 Live from Palo Alto, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE, covering IO, brought to you by IO. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Peter Burns. Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're here live in Silicon Valley on Sand Hill Road at the Rosewood for a special live CUBE presentation for IO Conversations with IO Data Systems. We're here talking about the future of the data center, data center is a platform on our next guest, David Metler, VP of Sales and Market Development and Directing on the US, welcome to theCUBE. Well, thank you very much. Glad to be here. Good to see you, so obviously, you know, you guys have a great history, obviously understanding the data center and the modular stuff that you guys have done, huge innovation. I remember talking to George Slashman, the CEO years ago when Open Compute was just a twinkle in the eye of Facebook and then now the momentum around that has been phenomenal. These are the kind of trends that are seeing how are you guys adjusting to this? What's the company's update? What's the value proposition today for you guys? Sure, no, that's a great question. I think IO brings a different proposition to the market because of the modular data center aspect. We do the full range of traditional data center services. We have, you know, your traditional raised floor, but the modules allow us to provide in a standardized deployment, we can do high density, we can provide an integrated solution with our software system and it's something where we can deploy services quickly in a scalable fashion for our customers without doing sort of custom, you know, builds each time we deploy. And it's also the same delivery of service all around the world. So at this point in time, we have four data centers in the US and then we have Singapore in Asia and London for Europe. And for our customers, it's a nice value proposition in that they know exactly what they're gonna get in each location. It's the same presentation of service. And so what is the software in this? Because obviously as the data center as a service becomes the mode of operation that they want, customers want, you have to software to run it. So, you know, we heard from the thought leaders earlier today about the intelligence smart data center. How do you make the data center smarter? Certainly standardizing is step one. Where's the software angle on this? No, it's great. It's a great point. I mean, there's obviously been software in data centers for a long time, right? But I think the difference that we've done is really the integration of every layer of the data center from, not just from like the BMS system that's managing your chillers and your mechanical and electrical, but also within the actual between the PDUs, right? The whole looking at the data center being integrated with the IT stack and being able to provide information about from the chiller to the chip, right? So, because businesses want to understand what's the impact to the application within the data center. If something fails in the data center, what's the business impact at the application level, right? And that's where the software becomes very interesting because it can provide that type of information. Also, the software is the foundation for being able to deploy data centers autonomously in the future. I mean, that's the vision down the road, right? Is to be able to actually operate and control the data center through the software layer. And so for us, that's the vision that we have and the software kind of forms that foundation that allows our operating team to operate all of our facilities from sort of a single command center. We don't have disparate systems and different data centers that are different versions of software, different actual software manufacturers and you've got people at the facility who are the only ones who can really control it. It's all being able to be operated centrally because of this one system. Take a minute and if you can for the audience, just define what is data center as a service? What does that mean? What's the definition? Sure, I mean, I think at the most simplest level, it's the idea that you're buying co-location, right? As opposed to building your own data center and running it yourself. I mean, so it's really, it's the outsourcing of the data center and being able to procure space, power, cooling, security and information about all of that on a monthly basis. Well, but let's break that down a little bit. Sure. So I have my own data center. I have the cloud. All right. A lot of companies today are saying, man, not the data center. Yeah, the cloud, I'll do the cloud for some parts. This is an opportunity to not have to invest in the physical infrastructure associated with the data center, but yet still get some of the benefits of a data center. That's right. Right, so that you're not so much worrying about, say, you're not so much worried about multi-tenancy. You're not worrying about having somebody else's links go down. I'm not suggesting that some of the big cloud providers lose their infrastructure at any time, but you have at least a little bit more control for the workloads that you feel you need more control of. Either from a performance predictability standpoint or from a cost standpoint. Not wanting to have only buy what you need or from a security standpoint. So talk to us about the types of customers or the decision process that they go through when they think about doing something between on-premise, doing it themselves, and full-bore devotion to the cloud. Sure, and that's what we deal with every day. And the customers that are still managing their own IT on-premise, it ranges from very small startup companies who have decided that it's important for them to have their own IT as opposed to just starting in the cloud, because that's what a lot of people do now. So let's just start in the cloud. So, but there are companies that have started with their own IT and they look at it and as they've grown and as the closet that that IT sits in becomes more and more of a risk to the business, they say, well, you know what? We need to have redundant cooling. We need to have redundant power. If we lose some aspect of this environment, our business is down. That's the very simple case to say, this isn't what we do, but it's critical that this is operating correctly. So let's put this into a data center. And then you have companies that have built out their own data centers and they've come to kind of that end-of-life period and they're looking at it and they're saying, boy, there's a ton of money for us. It's a large capital expense to invest in the upgrades that we need to this facility. Is that the right use of our capital? Does that make sense right now for us to be doing, to be making those upgrades, or does it make more sense to go with a data center provider and do co-location and procure data center as a service as opposed to a business unit that we have operating our own data centers with our own staff and so forth? So you're effectively helping people not have to invest in the energy elements or the energy infrastructure, the cooling and environmental infrastructure and the facilities infrastructure necessary to run our own data center but providing the benefits of controlling our own data center destiny if they want. That's correct. You get the data center benefits but you don't have to pay for the energy, facilities and environmental infrastructure necessary to do it. That's right. You don't have to invest a large amounts of capital. You don't have to have the large amounts of capital in that stuff. Correct, correct. And in that non-IT, if you will, the things that have to run the data center. So Peter talks all the time about the physics and the network comes into the play here. So part of this data center service is a network component. Sure. And I want you to elaborate if you can share some insight around a topic that's being talked about in that as the cloud is just the data center that no one knows where the address is or it's basically co-location in the cloud. There's still a data center needed but the notion of moving the data and the compute around where the action is has been a big, big data conversation but software defined networking has been growing significantly. Absolutely. What's the impact to network performance from a cloud architecture standpoint when you start thinking about who to choose as customers start thinking about who to choose because that's the big question. I wanna have a facility partner that has great networking. What are the current things going on that you can elaborate on? Sure, no, I think that that's the question that most of the businesses we talk to today are trying to figure out. They're saying, well, there seems to be a lot of benefits of the cloud, the public cloud, other sort of more dedicated cloud service providers, the idea that we don't have to go out and procure our own IT stack and run and operate that ourselves. We can just drop our applications in. That's attractive but for a lot of companies they don't know what that means for their legacy environments. How do I migrate this legacy? What do I do with the legacy? So they're sort of trying to figure all that out. Having the connectivity from the data center into that public cloud provides optionality. It gives them that flexibility. They can have certain workloads that go to the cloud. It's there when they want to start something new and integrate it into the existing environment. Also, a lot of businesses, they've invested heavily in their own IT staff. That IT staff is very important to their business. And the proposition of the cloud, a lot of times the economics involve getting rid of your IT staff or reducing that IT staff dramatically. And the impact of the business then becomes unknown. If these people leave, these people have helped build out a lot of the technology that underlines our business. If now they leave, what does that do to us? And so they're kind of- There's a personnel component. Absolutely, the personnel component. And that's very real. And companies are trying to figure that out. And so from our perspective, we think it's very important to be able to offer a value proposition that says there's absolutely a place for co-location. There's a place for the public cloud. And there's a place for infrastructure as a service within the data center. So that would be our own dedicated cloud platform. So you can kind of provide those three levels of service, if you will, and the optionality where you don't have to make those decisions right now what everything's gonna be, but you can grow into it over time. It's an interesting proposition. And then we were just talking on our intro about some riffing on the idea of what is the notion of what does data center word mean? And Pat Gelsinger said at VMworld that most companies, if not all, want to be out of the data center business. But we were talking about they're in the data center business. So they want to be out of the facilities business per se, but they need to be in the data business. So what does this kind of fall down in the conversations that you're having with your customers? And what do they kind of weigh in on? What do they say? Yeah, I think that they're looking at and they're saying, we definitely do not want to be running chillers and we don't want to be retrofitting a facility to upgrade the power. We don't want to be doing these things and we want to get out of that. We want you to handle that. We don't want to have to worry about physical security. Those are the things that you guys do really well. And when they come in, they tour a facility like ours. I mean, you guys have been to our facilities, right? You've seen them, there's no way that they could achieve the type of technology and the scale and the sort of the way that we operate. They couldn't do that themselves. And they look at that and they say, boy, why even try? Right, it doesn't make sense. How do you manage the physical security piece? Because that's always going to be, it always is the fail point is usually a person, a human. I'm cracking the system. How do you guys handle that in physical security? I know that I've been there. So I know that you walk in, it's like going into the government building. It's really, I mean, there's some physical security but how do you ensure that that doesn't be a problem? Sure, well, so there's, I think you're gonna find in any of the top data center services that they have, the physical security is generally very strong, right? So you've got a perimeter fence, you have access control to get into the facility, you have your guards, right? You've got the cameras and you have the monitoring that's taking place. One of the things that differentiates us, and this is where the modular deployments become unique, is that there's a privacy element. If you come into our New Jersey data center or Phoenix as an example, you'll see just rows and rows of these modular data centers that we've deployed for our clients and you have no idea who's inside of them. Or you have no idea what's going on inside of them. We have, you know, we have customers who are very, very protective of their IP and the IP is actually the racks that they've designed and the way that they deploy within those racks. And so the idea that that's private, that can't be seen is very important. Versus a cage, right? Versus a cage on a raised floor where you can, you know, even if you have like a black kind of, you know, see-through screen, like a windscreen on a test court, right? Do you have that? So there's layers of security in the building? Well, there's a couple of things I'd say to add to that. One is, since most security problems are created by people, you reduce the number of people. That's number one. That's right. Number two is you anonymize the relationship between workloads and devices. Number three, you have great physical security. And number four, and you know, I think this is going to become increasingly important, you start to deploy technologies that allow you to take advantage of, for example, what's going on, not with Bitcoin per se, but a lot of the new binary mapping technologies that we see on the horizon for doing some of this stuff. So you deploy new security, this new technology that leads to better security. But at this point in time, there's one other really, really important point, and that is the absolute best security people on the planet cost an enormous amount of money. And they can be hired and paid by some companies and not by most general run-of-the-mill IT organizations. So it's a combination. And they have a security investment that they can provide for you. That's right. Fewer people get the right people. Versus me, the enterprise hiring some guru that have to vet costs a huge amount of money and he can walk out the door and jump in. That's right. You run the risk of that individual leaving in your security analysis. And he will. And so there's a... Voting alone is an interesting. Yeah, this is a major, for many years of this being the reason to not go to the cloud, this has now become a reason to go to the cloud. So the cloud in this case is more secure because of the tendency kind of models you're talking about. There's also compartmentalization. When you have a contained unit, as opposed to a cage again, right? I'm kind of making that comparison between the modular deployments that we have versus sort of traditional race four. If there is an event in that module, it's contained to that module. It's not the people right next door aren't impacted by that versus you're not gonna have the same. Well, great to have you stop by at theCUBE and share the insight of what's going on in the field. Obviously, the sales motions are always changing, but still the cloud is an enabler for you guys. So congratulations and good luck with your business. Great, thank you very much. Okay, we are here live in Silicon Valley on Sand Hill Road for IO Conversations. If you go to Twitter, search on the hashtag IOConversations, you'll see Bert Lattimore documenting the CUBE interviews. Join the conversation or just tweet us, ask any questions. We are here for the IO event. Data center as a service. This is theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris. We'll be right back with more after the short break.