 Live from San Francisco, extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering Oracle OpenWorld 2015 from Studio C, brought to you by Cisco. Now your host, Brian Grace Lee. Welcome back to Oracle OpenWorld. We're here in theCUBE, here down in what we call Studio C. Right in the middle of the solution center, 60,000 people here in San Francisco for Oracle OpenWorld. Really excited to have Bruno Messina, marketing manager for Cisco UCS. Welcome to theCUBE, first time on theCUBE. Thank you, thank you Brian, it's great to be here. So, we were talking earlier, you live and breathe Cisco UCS. I do. You talk to customers, you're working with partners. Give us a sense of what you work on and what really makes you passionate about UCS. Boy, the second part of the question is really interesting. I do product and solutions market in the outbound marketing for UCS servers and UCS integrated infrastructure, which is our servers, plus our Nexus, which is plus UCS director, which we call UCS integrated infrastructure. Take that as a whole, plus our storage partners. So, UCS integrated infrastructure plus FlexPod, I mean, plus NetApp is a FlexPod, plus Nimble is a smart stack, plus IBM storage is a versus stack, and so on. So, that's what I work on. The thing that really makes me passionate about UCS is, is it was an amazing innovation. Now, you're getting licensed. What Cisco saw, so, if we take a step back, in 2005, Cisco began this work. They saw this transition, and the transition was unified computing system, but what it is, it is hardware, right? We have E3, E5, E7 processors. Like, we have the same DRAM, we have pretty much the same disk as everybody else. The genius of it are two things. Cisco Single Connect, which is unified fabric, and the second thing, which is even more revolutionary than the first, is UCS manager. And what Cisco did was, instead of looking from the server out, they looked from the network in, and they were able to manage servers from the network, and they're able to take into account everything about the server. In that network, in that network switch, we call it Fabric Interconnect. There's a UCS manager. It has objects in it, software objects. These are called service profiles. They have attributes. These attributes in software now represent everything you need to provision and deploy servers. Hardware's not the right word for UCS. It should have been called software abstracted hardware because you provision and deploy hardware and software, and that's what makes me passionate because it entails a whole lot of possibilities in all kinds of benefits. And when I first heard it before I came to Cisco, someone described it to me, I didn't believe that they could do it. That's what makes me passionate. Yeah, no, that's fantastic. One of the things about Cisco, Cisco's always been a technical company. They've spoken to their users. Their users want to know how the technology works. You obviously know the product inside. Now it's got to come across and how you market that to customers. That's got to be a lot of fun. Take the things that get you excited. Somewhat is from an engineering part of your brain and turn that into things you're communicating to customers. I love that. For example, let's talk about those service profiles, right? One way I describe it to people who don't understand it or like to a non-technical person. It's like going from piecework to an assembly line, right? The way servers used to be, or in many cases, people who do it in the traditional sense, right? You put in a nick, you put in an HPA. You go call the networking person and you get your networking settings. You go into the firmware, you go into the BIOS, four or five different managers. You call the storage person, you get your storage settings. You know, in a day, maybe two or three days, you have a server up and going. What do you do with UCS? With UCS, you plug in a Blade or Racker, M-Series server. The Fabric Interconnect recognizes it. When it recognizes it, it doesn't have any state. It doesn't have a UUID, a MAC address, worldwide name, worldwide. All of it's given to it in software. So now, you go from an inconsistent, slow, error-prone process of provisioning and deploying compute hardware to something that's consistent, automated, and timely. And then there's all kinds of add-on benefits because everything is software. Yeah, so you're essentially, you're bringing the fabric of what cloud computing providers do and people are doing a demo. You're bringing that right to the infrastructure. Yeah, exactly. When you talk about the cloud, right? You're talking about massive scale of servers. That almost demands a software approach. And think about it. Say I have thousands of servers and I have to do a firmware update. Can you imagine going into each server? So what do you do in UCS? In UCS, they all have the same service profile. You can have an updating template. You change the firmware there. You instantiate it on all the servers. You bring them back up and they're all at the same level. You eliminate configuration drift. I mean, it makes too much sense. Everybody has to do this because it is the right way. It's obvious. That's what excites me. Well, and that was the thing that really shocked everybody. Cisco doing servers and Cisco doing software. People went, wait a second, that's not what they do. They do hardware, they do networking. That was really the innovation. That's what drove it. Let's talk a little bit. You're in the middle, you talked about you work with VersaStack. You worked with Flexpod. We've had a ton of the storage partners on here. You're not just working with Cisco. You get a really broad view of the ecosystem. You get a really broad view of customers. Give us a sense of how is the ecosystem evolving around UCS and how are customers liking the fact that you give them so much flexibility in deployment options. That's a great point. So we address almost all storage. So you have UCS, which is really software defined in infrastructure. You combine it with Nexus and the UCS director. Now you can manage storage as well and the hypervisors. So UCS director handles the UCS, the Nexus, and the storage and the hypervisors through orchestration and automation. So you have flexibility and choice. You have automation. You get all the benefits of the automation of UCS. And we have things called CVDs, Cisco Verified Designs. So we give you best practices, do the engineering so that you can deploy your entire infrastructure even faster. So it's almost like we've taken the Intel standard, we've standardized it, and then we've standardized it again at a higher level with our storage partners. It's all building blocks, but it's all in software. It's really incredible. So I was going to say, what you're doing is very, very interesting. But when it first got started, people were skeptical. And it was a different model. When things are different, people have to change. They have to change their thinking. You're in marketing, so you're getting feedback from the market, from customers. Do you think customers have grasped the power of what UCS can do? Do they grasp what's really possible yet? Do they understand it? Do you get a sense of that? I think when they hear a certain analogy and they understand that the hardware is, you can provision it, for example. I can give you a number of different use cases. Oracle Rack, right? Say you have a four node cluster, shared nothing. All nodes see all storage. One of them goes down. In the old days, one of those nodes goes down. That server goes down. It'll take you three days to bring that server back up. It was that piecework that I described. With UCS, you just instantiate that service profile on a spare blade, and it's up in 10 minutes. And it's an exact copy. So it's these kinds of use cases that really, when people get it, they get it. And it's so revolutionary that maybe they can't switch for whatever legacy reason, but they understand that it's the next step. And it is, it just makes too much sense. But the incredible thing was Cisco started doing that. It's not slideware. By the time I finished talking to you, people would have provisioned and deployed probably 40 or 50 servers around the world because we have 48,000 customers. We've gone from zero, none. We didn't have server customers in 2008 to 48,000. Because of this, it's software-defined computing. Yeah, well let's talk about it. You talked about an Oracle use case. You talked about Rack. Just give us a sense. Give us some interesting feedback from your customers, some data points around UCS plus Oracle applications. I heard something today at the show. Four node, and this is, again, Oracle Rack. Four node Oracle Rack cluster, right? They had to go from M3 blades, or already UCS customer, to M4. In the old days, it would take you two or three days to bring up this one server. And then you bring it into the cluster, you bring one down, you'd have three of the old and one of the new. Okay. Then there would be triage. This would be out of sync. You'd get a lot of garbage files. And it was a hugely painful process. Then they'd do it with the next node, and they would have all kinds of server admins, hardware people, software people around to do this. On UCS, they had the four M3s, four M4s. They took most of the service profile, changed it a little bit, had it ready for the M4. They took this down and instantiated the M4. It was a near exact copy of this. It came right in in 10 minutes, 10 minutes, and they were three old and one new. Nothing happened. They're still querying it. No problems. Same thing with the second one. Same thing with the third one. Same thing with the fourth one. You've totally gone to new hardware. Nothing. You've essentially done what virtualization does, but for bare metal applications, and there's still tons of bare metal applications out there, especially here around Oracle. Let's talk a little bit about cloud, right? Yeah, sure. Lots of talk about cloud. Where do you see your customers using the UCS system for cloud, whether it's private cloud or with service providers? Where do you see some people interested in those applications? Well, we have the inter-cloud fabric for when you want to leave a UCS, but many cloud providers are based on UCS. And it's for the same reason. It's like you can stamp out servers. You don't, you eliminate configuration drift. And these are the downstream benefits, right? In order for Cisco to do this, remember now, the management lives in the network. It has visibility to all the servers. Then you also have central that can be a manager of managers. So you can, since everything's abstracted in software, all the hardware is in software, you can query it. You can monitor it granularly. You can automate it. So then you can actually, with Cisco UCS, there are communities of scripts that are available on developers.cisco.com from other UCS customers to automate these different tasks like query and different hardware levels that you could never do. You're bringing the community to your, the community we've seen these communities build around open source. You're bringing communities from your customers to help other customers. That's powerful. Yeah. It's an amazing product. And now we've taken Jim McHugh's folk about this earlier. Now we can bring compute to the edge too. So we can manage geographically dispersed instances. We have hardware that's tailored to the edge. We have UCS Mini that can tailor to Robo. If you have 5,000 stores, right? And something happens to a store in Canada. And that Canada store is, or near Canada, but it's serviced out of the Albany branch office. In the old days, you drove from Albany to Canada, replaced a blade. What you do with UCS is you have a spare blade there. You just drop a new service profile on it. And on Monday morning, you're going to replace it. I mean, think about it. It's all software, but it's hardware. For folks who aren't here at Oracle OpenWare, there's a lot of energy here. There's a lot of, give me a sense of what you're hearing from customers just from this community about what they're interested in from UCS. What are they telling you about? What are they pushing you? What kind of challenges are they saying, I want this next? I think the basic fundamental goodness of it, the differentiation is there. I think there are smaller things that they want us to keep up with the latest generation of Intel. And we're doing that. They want us to maybe do a CVD in an area that we've not already done. And we're filling all that in. But there's a lot of use cases. There's a lot of permutations. There's a lot of combinations. But most of it is there. And those are the areas where we're being steered by our customers. And that's fantastic. You're listening to your customers. You're driving innovation. We had Intel on with Jim earlier. Great partnership there. Last word, give me a great example of a customer that's doing something that a couple years ago you'd have thought there's no way that could be done without UCS. Just what are your favorite customer stories? I have to say my favorite customer stories. All right, this is my favorite customer story. We had a customer that has a huge volume of UCS. This customer, so with UCS, remember, each blade has no state or rack. So you just plug them in, you cable it up, and then you don't have to recable it again because it's a unified fabric, a single connect technology. The UCS manager recognizes that you put blades in. So this guy had four new chassis, 32 new servers. They just cabled up the chassis, put in the power, put in the 10-giggy interfaces, hooked it up to the FI. He slid in the blades and went home. The next day, he was watching a football game and he provisioned and deployed 30 servers in the half of a football game because all the service profiles were set. It's just like an assembly line. You just instantiate them remotely as he dialed into the UCS central and just instantiated it on the blades. That's the power and the beauty of what Cisco did. Now, that's great. I'm gonna wrap up on that note. UCS has given people time to work on their fantasy football team. They can work on it from home. It's a fantastic story. Bruno Messina, I love the passion. We love when we get people to come on here and just absolutely passionate about the products they work on. You obviously have a ton of passion around this. Thank you so much for the conversation. Folks, we're gonna wrap this one up here at Oracle Open World 2015, here in San Francisco, 60,000 people, great energy. Bruno, thank you for being on. Thank you for watching.