 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering NetApp Insight 2017, brought to you by NetApps. Hello everyone, welcome back to our live coverage, exclusive coverage at NetApp Insight 2017. It's theCUBE's coverage. I'm John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media with my co-host Keith Townsend at CTO Advisor. Our next two guests is Gabe Chapman, senior manager NetApp HCI and Sydney Sonia, who's the IT Consulate at 4th and Bailey, also a member of the A team, a highly regarded top credentialed expert. Welcome to theCUBE guys, see you. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Pleasure to be here. So I love the shirt by the way, great logo, good font, good comes up great on camera. Thank you. We're talking about the rise of the cloud and everything in between, kind of the segment. As a NetApp, A team member and customer. It's here, cloud's here. Yes. But it's not yet baked in the minds of the enterprises because they got to, there's a path to get there. So there's public cloud going on, hybrid clouds, everyone gets that. There's a lot of work to do at home inside the data center. Yes there is, there's an extreme amount of work. And like you said, these are very exciting times because we have a blend of all of the technologies and being at an event like this allows us to look at those technologies, look at that fabric, look at that platform and how we can merge all of those things into an arena that can allow any customer to dynamically move on-prem, off-prem, public cloud, private cloud, but still be able to manage and securely keep all their data in one specific place. Gabe, I want to get your thoughts because he brings up a good point. Architecture's king, this is the cloud architect. DevOps has gone mainstream. Pretty much we all kind of can look at that and say, okay, QED done, everyone else put their plans together. But the enterprises and the folks doing cloud, cloud service providers and everyone else, they have issues and their plates are full. They have an application development mandate, get more developers, new kinds of developers, retraining, replatforming, new onboarding, open sources booming, they have security departments that are unbundling from IT in a way, getting fully staffed, reporting to the board of directors, top security challenges, data coverings, and then over the top is IoT, industrial IoT, man, their plates full. So architecture is huge and there's a lot of unknown things going on that need to be automated, so it's a real challenge for architects. What's your thoughts? My thoughts about that is I like to make this joke that there's no book called the joy of menial tasks and there are so many of those menial tasks that we do on a day in and day out basis in terms of the enterprise, whether it's storage, whether it's virtualization, whether it's whatever it is, right? And I think we've seen this massive shift towards automation and orchestration and fundamentally the technologies that we're provisioning today, APIs are king and they're going to be kind of the focal point as we move forward. Everything has to have some form of API in it. We have to be making a shift in transition towards infrastructure as code. At the end of the day, the hardware has relevance, it still does, it always will, but the reality is to extract away the need for that relevance and make it as simple as possible. That's where we have things like hyper-converged infrastructure being so at the forefront for so many organizations, NetApp making a foray into this space as well, is to push to simplify as much as possible the day-to-day minutia and the infrastructure provisioning and then transition those resources over towards getting those next generation data center applications up running and functional. Old adage that's been in the industry around making things simple as our company's like an aircraft carrier, but when you go below the water lines, everyone in little canoes paddling, bumping into each other, these silos, if you will. And this is really the dynamic around cloud architecture is where the operating model's changing, right? So you got to be prepared to handle things differently. And the storage in the old days is almost as easy, but you guys made it easy, a lot of great customers, NetApp has a long history of it, but it's not the storage anymore, it's the data fabric as you guys are talking about, it's the developer enablement. It's getting these customers to drive for themselves and it's not about the engine anymore, although you got to have a good engine, call it tech, hardware, software together, but the ultimate outcomes of people driving the solutions are app guys. They're just the lines of businesses are under huge pressure and huge need. I think you look at it this way, it's like, you know, we're kind of data-driven and you'll see Gene talk about that as part of our messaging. We can no longer be just a storage company, we need to be a data company and a data management organization as we start to have those conversations. Yes, you're still going to go in there and talk to the storage administrations and storage teams, but there are 95% of the other people inside the enterprise, inside information technology, with different lines of business, they're the ones that we have the most relevant discussions with. That's where our message probably resonates more strongly in the data-driven aspect of the management or analytics and all those other spaces. And I think that's the white space and growth area potential for NetApp is the fact that we can go in there and have very authoritative discussions with customers around their data needs and understanding governance. You have things like GPRD and Amia. That's a giant open ecosystem for it has so many requirements and restrictions around it and everybody's just now starting to wrap their head around it. So building a programmer on something like that as well. So there's challenges for everybody and there's even challenges for vendors like ourselves because we were mode one, now we're mode two. So it's kind of like making that transition. And the old speeds and feeds, we're always diligent. Hey, how fast can you go? What's this files look like? A verification, blah, blah, blah. Now you've got solid state storage, you've got solid fire. Now people want outcomes as a service, not outcomes anymore like a cliche. Things are happening very dynamically and last week at Big Data NYCR event around the big data world, you couldn't get any more clear that there's no more room for hype. They want real solutions now, real time is critical. And watching the keynotes here at NetApp, it's not speeds and feeds, although there's a lot of work going on on the under the hood. It's really about competitive advantage. You're hearing words like data as a competitive advantage. Yeah, Sydney, you're in the field, you're in the front lines. Makes sense of this. The sense that we have to make is made up some great points. Getting the business engaged is one thing because you still, with the cloud and the cloud architecture, you still have a lot of individuals who are not necessarily sold on it all the way. So even from a technical perspective, so those guys that are down in the bottom of the boat as so to speak, you still have to kind of convince them because they feel somewhat uncomfortable about it. They have not all the way accepted it, the business has kind of accepted it in pockets. So having been on the customer side and then going to more of a consulting side of things, you understand those pain points. So by getting those businesses engaged and then also engaging those guys to say, listen, it's freeing the relevance of cloud architecture is not to eliminate a position, it's more to move the mundane task that you were more accustomed to using and move you closer to the business so that you can be more effective and feel more of a participant and have more value in that business. So that's- So it's creating a value role for the non-differentiated tasks that were being mundane tasks as you call them. You can then put that person now on whether analytics or- Are those IOT things like you were mentioning on those advanced projects and use and leverage the dynamic capability of the cloud being able to go off-prem or on-prem. So what's the guiding principle for a cloud architect? Love to get your thoughts on this because we talked about in a segment earlier with Josh around, a good dev-ass person sees automation opportunities and they jump on it, like a grenade. There it is, take care of that business and automate it. How do you know what to automate? How do you architect around the notion of we might be continually automating things to shift the people and the process to the value? I think it boils down to is the good cloud architect looks and sees where there are redundancies, things that can be eliminated, things that can be minimized and sees where complexity is and focuses to simplify it as much of it as possible. So my goal has always been to abstract away the complexity, understand that it's there and have the requirements and the teams that can functionally build those things but then make it look to you as if it was your iPhone, right? I don't know how the app store works. I just download the apps and use it. A good cloud architect does the same thing for their customers internally and externally as well. So where does NetApp fit in there from a product perspective? As a cloud architect, you're always wondering what should I build versus what should I buy? When I look at the open source projects out there, I see a ton of them. Should I go out and dive head deep into one of these projects? Should I look towards a vendor like NetApp to bring to bear that simplified version? Where is the delineation for those? So the way we see it is traditionally is there's kind of four consumption models that exist. There's an as a service model or just in time model. There are, we see converge and hyperconverge as a consumption continuum that people leverage and utilize. There are best of breed solutions because if I want an object store, I want an object store and I want it to do exactly what it does, that's an engineered solution. But then there's the as a service, I'm sorry, there's a software defined component as well. And those are kind of the four areas. If you look at the NetApp product lines, we have an on tap set of products and we have an element OS set of products and we have solutions that fit into each one of those consumption continuums based on what the customer's characteristics are like. You may have a customer that likes configurability so they would look at a traditional flex pod with a FAS and say that that's a great idea for me for in terms of provisioning infrastructure. You may get other customers that are looking at I want the next generation data center, I want to provide block storage as a service so they would look at something like solid fire. Or you have the generalist team that looks at simplicity as a key running factor and time to value and they look at hyperconverge infrastructure. So there's a whole bosses. For me, when I have a conversation with a customer around build versus buy, I want to understand why they would like to build it versus buy it. Because I think that a lot of times people think, oh, I just download the software and I put it on a box. I'm like, well, right, that's awesome. Now you're in the supply chain management business. Is that your core competency? Because I don't think it is, right? And so there's a whole bunch of things like firmware management and all these things that we abstract away all of that complexity. And that's the reason we charge up for our product is the fact that we do all that heavy lifting for the customer, we provide them with an engineered solution. I saw a lot of that when we really focused significantly on the open stack space where we would come up and compete against SEF. And I'm like, well, how many engineers do you want to dedicate to keeping SEF up and running? I could give you a turnkey solution for a price premium, but you will never have to dedicate any engineers to it. So that's the trade off. So on that point, I want to just follow up on a follow up to that is you mentioned open stack, which big fans of, as you know, we love open stack in the beginning. The challenge with Hadoop and open stack early on, although they've kind of solved them, industries evolve, is that the early stages was a total cost of ownership problem, which means that you had the early tire kickers, early pioneers doing the work and they iterated through it. So the question around modernization, which came up as a theme here, what are some modernization practices that I could take as a potential customer or customer of NetApp, whether I'm an existing customer or a future customer? I want to modernize, but I want to manage cost of ownership, and I want to have an architect that's going to allow me to manage my data for that competitive advantage. So I want the headroom of knowing that, it's not just about putting a data lake out there. I got to make data real-time and I don't know when and where it's going to be available so I need kind of like a fabric or a layer, but I got to have a modern infrastructure. What do I do? What's the playbook? So that's where that data fabric again comes in. Just like one of the key notes we heard earlier in the general recession yesterday, we have customers now who are interested in buying infrastructure like we buy electricity or like we buy internet service at home. So by us having this fabric and it being associated with a brand like NetApp, it's opening up to the point where what do you really want to do? That's the question we come to you and ask. And if you're into the modernization, we can provide you all the modernization tools right within this fabric and seamlessly transition from one provider to the next or plug into another platform or the next or even put it on-prem or whatever you want to do, but this will allow the effective management of the entire platform in one location where you don't have to worry about a big team. You can take your existing team and that's where that internal support will come in and allow people to kind of concentrate and say, oh, this is some really interesting stuff. Coming from the engineering side of things, being and on that customer side and when you go into customers, you can connect with those guys and help them to leverage this knowledge that they already have because they're familiar with the products. They know the brand. So that makes it more palatable for them to accept. So from the cloud architects perspective, they're, you know, as you look at it, you look at the data driven fabric or data fabric and you're like, wow, this is a great idea. Practically, where's the starting point? You know, is this a set of products? Is it an architecture? Where do I start to bite into this effort? So ultimately, I think you look at it and I approach it the same way I would say, like I can't go just buy DevOps, right? But data fabric is still, it's a concept, but it's enabled by a suite of technology products. And we look at NetApp across our portfolio and see all the different products that we have, they all have a data fabric element to them, right? Whether it's a FAS and Snap Mirror and I'm snapping to an ONTAP cloud instance running in AWS, whether it's how we're going to integrate with Azure now with our NFS service that we're providing in there, whether it's hyper-converged infrastructure and the ability to move data off there. You know, our friend, David McCrory, talked about data having gravity, right? He coined that term and it does, it does have gravity and you need to be able to understand where it sits. We have analytics in place that help us craft that. We have a product called OCI that customers use and what it does, it gives them actionable intelligence about where their data sits, where things may be inefficient. We have to start making that transition to not just providing storage, but understanding what's in the storage, the value that it has and using it more like currency. I mean, we've heard George talk about data as currency. It really is kind of the currency and information is power, right? Yeah, Gabe, I mean, Gabe, this is right on the money. And crypto currency and blockchain is a tell sign of what's coming around the corner, a decentralized and distributed environment that's coming. That wave is way out there, but it's coming fast. So I want you to take a minute and talk about the cloud component because you mentioned cloud. Talk about your relationship to the clouds because multi-cloud is coming too, but it's not yet there yet, but just because you have a cloud, every cloud doesn't mean it's multi-cloud in the sense of moving stuff around. And then talk about the customer perspective because if I'm a customer, I'm saying to myself, okay, I have NetApp, I've had filers everywhere, I got on tab, they got understanding the management game, they got to manage data on-prem. But now I've got this cloud thing going on and I've got the shiny new toy startup over there that's promised me the moon. But I got to make a decision, you're laughing, I know what you're thinking about it. This is the dilemma, do I stay with what I know and what I know is that relevant for where I'm going? A lot of times stars will have that pitch. So address the cloud and then talk about the impact of the customer around the choice. Ultimately it boils down to me in many respects. When I have a conversation with a customer, if I'm going to go for the bright and shiny, there has to be a very compelling business interest to do so. If I've built a set of tools and processes around data governance, management, implementation, movement, et cetera, around a bunch of on-premises technologies and I want that same effect or that same look and feel in the public cloud, then that's how we transition there, right? I want to make it look like, I'm using it here locally but it's not on my side, it's somewhere else, it's being managed by somebody else from a physical standpoint. I'm just consuming that information. But I also want to have to go back and retool everything I've spent the last 15 and 20 years building because something new and neat comes along. If that new and neat thing comes along and abstracts away or it makes a significant cost reduction or something like that, then obviously you're going to validate that and look at and vet that technology out. But reality is, is that we kind of have these- Well, they don't want to re-code, they don't want to retool, they don't want to rewrite code but if you look at the clouds, AWS, Azure, and Google, top three in my mind, they all implement everything differently. They got S3 over there, they got over here and so I could run something on-prem but then I got to hire a DevOps team that's trained for Azure, Sydney, it's the reality. I mean, evolution might take care of this but right now, customers have to know that. We're at a point right now where customers, businesses we go to, real time is very important. Software as a service is the thing now. So if you have a customer who's just clicking on a button and if they can't see that website or whatever your business is, that's a problem. You're going to lose money, you're going to lose customers, you're going to lose revenue. So what you have to do is as a business, discover what you have internally and once you discover that and really understand it as a business, not just the tech team but the business actually understands that. Move that forward and then blend some cloud technology in that with a data fabric because you're leveraging what you already have. If most of the time they usually have some sort of net appliance of some sort and then some of the new appliances that we do have, you can either say have a small spin, put it next to an old appliance or use some of the OCI or something of that nature to help you migrate to a more dynamic. And the thing about it is, is to just make it more a fluent transition. That's what you're looking to do. Up time is everything. Yeah, totally. This fabric will allow you to have that up time so that you can propel your business and sustain your business because you want to be able to still use what you have and still get that ROI out of that technology. But at the same token, you want to be more dynamic than the competition so that you can increase that business and still grow the business but not lose any business. Sidney, you bring up a great point. In fact, we should do a follow up segment on this because what I'm hearing you say, and I've heard this many times in the queue but it's happening and certainly we're doing our part in the queue to help the tech guys, whether they're ops or devs, they're becoming more business savvy. They got to get closer to the business. You have to. But they don't want to get an MBA for sake but they have to become street MBA. They got to get that business degree through scar tissue. Yes. You can't just be the tech anymore. You have to understand why your business is making this effort, why it's investing this technology, why they would look to go to the public cloud if you can't deliver a service and try to emulate that. And we've seen that time and time again the concept of shadow IT and the shift away from resources. And if you want to be relevant long term and not just a guy that sits in the closet and plugs in the wires, start learning about your business, learn about how the business is run and how it generates revenue and see what you can do to affect that. Yeah, and the jobs aren't going away though. There's nonsense about automation killing jobs. No, it's not. And they use the main freemasoning example. Not really relevant but kind of, but there are other jobs. I mean, look at cyber security, huge data aspect that impacts storage. That paradigm is changing in real time. So good stuff, a lot of good business consciousness we should do a follow up on. I'll give you guys a final word in this segment that each could weigh in on what cloud architects should be doing right now. I mean, besides watching the queue and watching you guys here. I think they got to have the 20 mile stair. They got to understand the systems that are in place. It's almost like an operating system model. They got to see the big picture. Architecting on paper seems easy, but right now it's hard. What's your advice for cloud architects? I mean, I say continue to follow the trends. Continue to expose yourself to new technologies. I mean, I'm really interested in things like serverless and those types of technologies and how we integrate our platforms into those types of solutions because that's kind of the next wave of things that are coming along as we become more of an API driven ecosystem, right? So if the structure is code, if everything is just in time instances, spin up, how do I have the communications between those technologies? You just got to stay well ahead of the curve. And you know, Sidney, your thoughts? My thoughts are along those lines not only from a technical perspective, but also like you were talking about that business perspective. Understand your business needs because even though, and be able to provide a portfolio or a suite of tools that will help that business take the next step, and that's where that values. So it's kind of like a blend. You're more of a hybrid. Where you're coming in not only as a technical person, but you're coming in to assist the business and develop it and help it take its next steps. And IT is not a department anymore. It's everywhere. No, it's not. It is the business. It is the business, yes. Guys, great conversation here on the future of the cloud architect here inside theCUBE at NetApp Insight 2017. Here at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, theCUBE's coverage. We'll be right back with more after this short break.