 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE covering EMC World 2015, brought to you by EMC, Brocade and VCE. Welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here, GM of theCUBE. We are live in Las Vegas at EMC World 2015. Our sixth EMC World. We're really excited to be here. We've gone wall-to-wall for three days. We've had two Cubes. We'll do a whole lot of interviews. I don't know what the final count will be, Stu. I think we're well over 40 after a couple of days. So joining this next segment by my co-host, Stu Miniman. Thanks, Jeff. So, you know, we talk on theCUBE about cube alums, and I think what we actually need is we need some statuses. So we had Pat Gelsinger on earlier today. He's got a playlist. So our guest for this segment, Jason Nolette, has been on theCUBE many times. I think we kind of, you know, it's the veteran status or something like that. So, SVP of data center switching, routing and analytics with Brocade. Brocade, you know, huge presence at EMC World, as always. Love the sponsorship you guys, Jason, are doing with Charity Water here at the show. You know, the president analyst activity gets you there. I mean, you know, Brocade is everywhere at the show. So welcome back and thanks for joining us. Thank you. I appreciate the platinum frequent flyer status. It's awesome. Cards in the mail. Absolutely. So, you know, give us the 40,000 view of, you know, Brocade at this show and, you know, where things are with the company. Sure. I mean, a couple of things that we've announced in combination with EMC at the show is support or really continuing support for fiber channel connectivity and the V-specs offering reference architecture, converged infrastructure. This time, of course, extending that offering to the V-Max 3 array, which we think is a great extension and a natural compliment for fiber channel sand technology. But also, continued support for Xtreme IO and the new versions that EMC has come out with there. I mean, in that case, both connectivity through fiber channel sands, which is really important for customers who want to fold all flash arrays into existing sand environments, but also a new offering in combination with EMC, and that is around dedicated IP storage fabrics, where customers have realized the opportunity to build a dedicated network for very little cost, but one delivers a level of availability and performance that's very analogous to what they've had in fiber channel sand environments. So, Xtreme IO is supportive of that as well, and that's the new Connectrix VDX6740B that's part of the portfolio. Yeah. Well, I mean, Brocade's had a 15-year relationship with EMC on the fiber channel side. No surprise to me that the Ethernet sides there makes a whole lot of sense. I wonder if we can unpack a little bit that converged discussion that you had. You and I have talked for the last few years about, as we converge down, does that limit the ability for other suppliers to get in? Brocade's a supplier to the industry out there. Cisco, with their UCS, drove a lot into the market, but Brocade's been doing a good job and in more and more solutions. So, what have you seen change over the last couple of years in the converged and hyper-converged market? I think in terms of converged infrastructure and now hyper-converged infrastructure, that a lot of customers are opting for that middle ground of reference architectures. And that is, you know, between kind of a single SKU delivered by a single vendor and a full-do-it-yourself model, the in-between model is a reference architecture, and VSpecs is the poster child for that. And as you know, we were an original member in the launch of VSpecs, both with our fiber channel technology and our VDX Ethernet fabric technology. And what we hear continuously from customers is, I like the balance of having something that's tested, certified, delivered by a single vendor, single channel partner in the case of VSpecs, but one that gives them choice at every layer of the component. And we think that ultimately represents a great balance between all of the benefits and pros of converged infrastructure. So, reference architectures we think is the sweet spot, and that's resonating very strongly with customers. Yeah, and even the VSpecs flew, though, as an appliance, so that's really a single solution that EMC helps drive in your integral piece of that. It is, and we're included in that offering, and we're very happy to extend the partnership with EMC on that. We think that's another great opportunity to have customers leverage the innovation and the differentiation that EMC is now taking advantage of with the VDX technology and VCS fabric. Alright, so usually, Jason, EMC worlds the same week as Interop. This year, Interop was actually last week, so I've been out here in Vegas since Wednesday. But, you know, we've been talking for years about how, you know, Networkings have been changing, Brocade's branding on it as the new IP. So, help us, Wayne, to our audience, you know, what's Brocade's position on the new IP? You know, where are we going with the network? Yeah, it's a great question. I think, you know, the new IP is a term coined, I think, primarily by industry analysts and suppress, that essentially asserts that there is a new generation of networking technology that needs to be deployed in the data center in particular, but all parts of the network over time in support of the new megatrends that we see in the industry, whether it's big data analytics and the impact it has on traffic profiles, certainly cloud architectures, both private and public, are, you know, seeing adoption and customers are realizing the benefits of the flexibility and agility there. That has very direct implications on the network as well. And then things like mobility and the fact that, you know, any application, any data set wants to be accessed from any device at any time, anywhere, these are things that, you know, previous network technologies were never designed to accommodate. And so the new IP is this notion that there is a new architecture, there's a new philosophy around how you build next generation networks, data center and otherwise, to accommodate these megatrends in the industry. So, I believe I've asked you this question before, but how many of the enterprises are ready for this? One of the things I'm trying to, you know, help process and get your viewpoint as to what customers have is there's a certain size of customer that this makes complete sense for. And I wonder if you get down in kind of the mid or lower parts of the market, if it might make sense for them to just go to a co-located facility or allow somebody else to take care of some of the big networks. I mean, the whole SDM thing is hard. So, I want your thoughts on that. I think in the enterprise space and, you know, whether it's small, medium enterprise or even larger enterprise, it's a hybrid cloud world. It is today. Everybody's leveraging SaaS of one form or another. I do think, though, that customers and IT organizations in mid to large size enterprise are looking at their IT infrastructure and feeling this relevance gap. And the relevance gap is that they've got lines of businesses and user stakeholder communities in their businesses that are going around them out to public cloud infrastructure of one form or another. And the reason they're doing that is because it's faster, it's quicker, and in many cases it's cheaper. So, the IT organization and IT leadership are saying, how do I close that relevance gap? How do I be the internal service provider more consistently, more often to my constituency? And so, they're very hungry to solve that problem. So, they know they have to leverage many of the same architectural principles that the larger cloud service providers have adopted, but many things that are also unique to mid-size enterprise and the kinds of characteristics that they need around the network. So, we think ultimately that the new IP and the philosophy around open architectures and open source, the philosophies around a more software-centric architecture going forward, the notion that really customers want a very strong ecosystem of partnerships that can deliver best-of-breed technology at every layer of the stack, I think is what those customers believe now is the answer to this relevance gap and how they close that. And you didn't even mention Internet of Things. Internet of Things is a whole other thing that I think, ultimately also is one of those things that has very direct and concrete impact on the network and what the network needs to do. In that case, lots of volume, very bursty, very small kinds of data transmissions going on. So, I think the industry has yet to fully come to terms with that, but again, it's another proof point around why you can't rely on the network you built for client-server computing 10 years ago, you have to rethink that architecture to make sure it's future-proof for things like Internet of Things. Yeah, I mean, Jason, I kind of look at what the big networking guy out there pushes with their kind of IOE, IOT thing, and I feel like I'm scratching my head. I understand more devices are going to cause more traffic, but I don't yet understand what the network is doing uniquely to handle that. Is it just too early or are there things that I'm missing? What's your take on that? I think it's very early, but I would say that scale is obviously a natural parameter that has to be addressed in an Internet of Things kind of environment. That's frankly where we've been driving a very strong agenda around software-centric networking. The more we can deliver network services in software form factor rather than kind of the legacy purpose-built boutique appliances, the better it is for customers to be able to scale up that environment in real-time, and then essentially treat those network services like VMs, like they do with all their other applications where they can move them around, spin them up, spin them down, and be much more flexible than having to rack additional purpose-built appliances. That's one property of the new IP that I think lends itself very well to addressing the scale of Internet of Things. Jason, one of the undercurrents I've seen here at the show is we're talking about open source. We're talking about developers and the whole DevOps movement out here. If I look at Brocade, you've actually gotten a lot of new people on the team that are helping to build software heavily involved in things like open daylight and open stack, and we've managed to interview a lot of them on theCUBE. It's a really good collection of talents. First of all, goodos are bringing in all these people. Can you talk about the vision there? It's a little tough because I think of networking so much as a hardware-driven business, and that's a software offering that you guys have. It's both a software offering and it's a software skill set, I think is what you're pointing out. That is whether you refer to DevOps or now I think NetOps is another term that's being used often. We recognize that the more we rely on software as a delivery vehicle for value in the network, the more we have to have a software-centric skill set, the more we have to be able to accommodate programatics of the network, whether it's SDN or RESTful APIs or whatever else it might be. OpenStack is another great example. We're definitely building expertise and competency around ultimate automation and programatics of the network through things like DevOps and NetOps. When I look at some of the bleeding edge applications, I'm curious when you look at things like Hadoop or the container market, CoreOS Fest was this week, DockerCon's coming up. Networking is a critical component of that. What will it take on that? How does Procade help? I think Hadoop is a great example. Big Data is one of those new emerging workloads that ends up being very mission-critical for a lot of customers. If you're a retailer, if you're a financial services firm, even a healthcare provider, using Big Data Analytics as a means by which you can understand your clients, understand their behaviors, where they are, what they're purchasing, etc., it's going to be absolutely business-critical for these customers. The ability for the network to accommodate the properties of a Big Data Analytics application, sometimes very bursty, sometimes you have these any-to-one kind of traffic patterns in those applications I think is really important. One of the things that we've done with the VDX switch that's now part of the MC Connectorix family is to have twice the on-chip buffering than any other switch in the industry. I often get the question, what makes an IP storage switch different than a vanilla Ethernet switch? That's one good example. The ability to buffer those bursts and make sure you don't lose any traffic when you have scaled out Big Data Analytics applications. Jason, we're running low on time. I want to give you a chance to talk a little bit about the show and also there's a little fun thing that you did with EMC. We had Chad Sackich on yesterday. We're actually going to roll for our audience after this segment of video you did. Can you tell us how that came to be? I did not realize that your next career was going to be as a comedian. Yeah, I didn't either actually. I will say that maybe just to wrap up my thoughts on the show, I would say that Brocade's ability to continue to deepen the relationship with EMC on behalf of our joint customers is the best I've ever seen in years. The number of touch points, the number of collaboration opportunities, the number of integration opportunities we've got, VSpecs Blue, the work we're doing with VMAX and the extension here at the show. It's just amazing and so we feel like we continue to be the best company on the planet in terms of our ability to partner. It's foundational to our business model in EMC. The opportunity I had with Chad the other day was to do a Zach Galifianakis type of interview which was unscripted, totally ad hoc, and we had a lot of fun with it. I went into it thinking it would be like 50% serious content, 50% comedy. It was 99.9% comedy, as people will see from the clip. So it was a lot of fun. Chad's a great guy and we have a great partnership. That's great. Well, Jason, thanks for stopping by. I got to see that. I missed the tape. I got to see that tape. There's actually three sessions so you'll want to see all three. Three sessions, all right. We will make sure we get them on the playlist because we want to make sure we share them with the community. Thanks again for stopping by and being a good support. It was my pleasure. Thanks for having me, guys. Absolutely. So here with Jason, Stu Miniman, I'm Jeff Frick. We are day three at EMC World 2015. Going wall to wall. A few more segments yet to go, so stay with us. We'll be right back on our next guest after this short break.