 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE conversation in the Silicon Angles, Cube's Palo Alto studio, a little bit of a break in the crazy conference season so we can kind of fix the gear and tape things up and sit down in the context of a conversation outside of a show to really get the update. And we're really excited to be joined here by two guests who are now seeing a pretty exciting deal that's happening today. It's Huya Sheeta, CTO of Hitachi Datacismers. Welcome again to you. And Jack Mondoni, Vice President, Storage Networking at Brocade. Welcome. Thank you. So let's just jump right into it, tell everybody what happened today and why this is big news. Yeah, sure, I'll maybe start it. So what we're announcing today is Brocade's developed. It's next gen, called Gen Six, fiber channel switches, and it's a whole portfolio. And we're very excited that Hitachi, who resells the OEM, our product, to their customer base, is launching on the state as well. So we're very excited about that. And it's big news, right? And so you'll be able to buy this product today from Hitachi for all the great customers that we have out there today. And that's the big announcement. Excellent. And why is this important to your customers? Well, this is just the next evolution in fiber channel. I mean, 32 gigabit per second. We were just on 16 now, not long ago. And so it's gonna open up a lot of bandwidth, open up more workload being processed, provide new opportunities for new applications as well. So it's funny, a lot of talk on, are we the end of Moore's law? Are we gonna be able to squeak out more compute power out of these microprocessors and stuff? But it sounds like you guys are squeezing out a lot more performance on the networking side of the house. Yeah, absolutely. And one thing that, you mentioned earlier, which I thought was great, is when you get performance like this in the network and you just get performance in general, it enables consolidation, it enables efficiencies, right? And when flash is able to go and allow you to do, let's say the same or more amount of workloads with less cores, that's a good thing, right? And the network's then gotta be able to handle that. And it's that kind of efficiencies that when we can jointly bring to our customers, that allows them to then spend the time and think about how they transform their IT operations, right, into this digital transformation era and to enabling IT to be this strategic foundation to go drive the enterprise, right? And I know sometimes it's hard to make that connection all the way from Gen 6 fiber channel to that, that's how that connection goes. So it's been a proven winner to drive performance. It saves money, it saves, it enables innovation. And I think the commitment that Brocade and Hitachi have had to quality to the highest levels of reliability and customer service over the years has really been a cornerstone of our success. It's been a great partnership. I know our CEO likes to say we partner better than anybody in the industry, and that's absolutely true. And Hitachi's just been one of those fantastic partners for us for over a decade now. So let's unpack that a little bit. Why is partnership so important? And not only just specifically between the two companies here, but you know, we go to a ton of shows and every show now, even if it's a specific venture, like the Pentaho show, there's a whole ecosystem, right? Nobody can do it alone anymore. And there's a really kind of renewed focus around the ecosystem and everyone kind of coming together to at the end of the day, provide solutions to customers that are going to solve problems, so it's a very important piece of it. Yeah, and I think, you know, a great example of that is if it's really just a requirement, if you think about private cloud infrastructures and converged infrastructures, you're bringing so many elements together to deliver a total solution. And Hitachi UCP is a great example where you have, you know, great technologies from Hitachi in there. We've been able to participate some of our fiber channel, as well as our IP storage switches, we're able to participate with that. And so really, I think if you want to participate in a cloud type of architecture, whether it's public, private, hybrid, you're going to have to partner. You're going to have to partner because you may not have all the technologies, you may not have all the specialties, and customers are going to require that at some level. So that's kind of my take on it. Yes, I mean, you know, we could have tried to develop our own fiber channel switches, but you know, that would have taken a lot more effort and time and distraction from what our core competencies are, you know, I mean, Brocade has a competencies in networking, both IP and fiber channel networking. So it doesn't make any sense for us to try to do that. It's better to partner with that. So, and the future is going to be all about partnering and more toward open source too. Right, and the other thing that we find over and over again is really the changing expectations of the way software performs. And we hear it all the time, you know, that why doesn't the software at my work perform like the software on my phone? And why isn't it faster? Why isn't it more integrated with other sources of information? So the demand for better, faster, stronger applications is only going to increase, right? Nobody wants less data. Nobody wants less performance. Nobody wants less latency, and especially in kind of an API world where all these applications are now not just siloed stacks of applications, but they're pulling data from all sorts of places, the speed and latency really becomes critical. Yeah, absolutely right. And that's why I think this announcement and the construct of the, you know, the all flash data center and all the advancements happening with flash is so important. It's that linkage and then what the applications can do once they take advantage of that. You know, I always tell people, it's like, remember the first time your laptop went to all flash disk? Remember that experience? Like you had the old spinning disk and you're booting up all good old windows, right? And then you went to all flash. It was like that emotional experience of how great it was, right? You take that level at an enterprise level, right? Where you have thousands and thousands and thousands of disks running thousands of applications. And now you bring in flash and then around the corner you bring in NVMe. It's amazing to think about what's going to be coming down in the future, right? And we're very excited about our position and really being at the central point of that, if you will, where all this information flow has to go through the network. And, you know, whether it's fiber channel, whether it's IP, you know, we're going to keep to our core values, which is, you know, the highest levels of qualities and resiliency for bringing the analytics and partner partner with the top quality companies in the world, such as Satoshi. Yeah, and what was interesting about this release is you added a lot more in the eighties. A lot more manageability, a lot more reporting, a lot more visibility. You know, one of the big themes obviously in big data is to move from, you know, reactive to predictive to prescriptive, right? And so to have the management layer, to have kind of the extra amount of information that you can take advantage of because you've got excess capacity in the pipes, if you will, and better connectivity to the infrastructure enables a whole different layer of management is, which is, if you've talked about you in prior interviews, people have to manage a lot more, right? They're not managing individual boxes anymore. It's a whole different scale of management. You need to be able to automate that. And those management tools helps us to automate that infrastructure management. Also, the security part is very important. You know, the security that Brocade brings into their, right into the switch itself. Right. The security's an interesting point, right? Because that's, again, a consistent theme everywhere we go. It's the old moat just doesn't work anymore. The moat and the castle walls. Now you really have that security baked in all over the place and the data layer, the networking layer, all over the place. And what's the interesting thing is, if you think about Fiber Channel, right? Let's just talk about Fiber Channel's technology. It is fundamentally, right? More secure than Ethernet. Oh, we love Ethernet. We have great IP portfolio and everything. But if you think about Ethernet, or excuse me, Fiber Channel, when you plug it in, it's off by default. Well, first it's a separate network all together, right? So that's one layer secured, but it's off by default, meaning that just because you plug in doesn't mean you have access to anything. You know, you got to go through one mask, you got to go through your zone, you got to go through some other stuff. But some people say it's complexity, but you're at least now actively saying how are the communications going to happen within this network? Where Ethernet's really the opposite, right? Because the benefit of Ethernet, you plug it in and hey, everybody's connected, right? That's what you want. But when it comes to enterprise, let's say storage applications, that needs to really be thought about. Is that the behavior you want? That anything that just plugs into it all of a sudden now can connect. And that's one thing that gets kind of lost sometimes in the discussions of the modern data centers. I'm really glad that you brought it up and you jumped out of two, Jeff. It's we realize that we're adding more things into it, right? We're adding more capabilities for in-flight encryption. You mentioned forward error correction, some of the other capabilities were built in it. So we take security very seriously and inherently, I think that's another reason that the viability of fiber channel has remained for as long as it has been. Yeah, and then just to hone in one more time, what are some of the specific benefits that came out of you two working together for this launch? How are you really kind of taking advantage of each other's strengths to really provide a better solution today that people can go out and get? Well, one of the things is they offer backward compatibility for two generations, right? That's right, that's right. And that enables us, we have a lot of legacy things that we've got to bring forward. They don't just rip everything out and put it in all new styles. Turn the data center off for the weekend, right? That's my bonus. So, it gives us that easy transition migration into these higher technology levels. It's a big one. Yeah, it's a big one. Yeah, and I think when the important part too is, when we deliver our systems to Tachi, they test it with their latest and greatest storage. They do this full systems, total solution test. So when a customer then brings it into the environment, it's been fully tested completely and then by Brocade and Hitachi. And then to a huge point, it also then works, it's backward compatible with everything in the environment. Nothing's gonna, you know, not nothing will ever break, but you know, so much time and effort is put into making sure everything runs as seamless as possible. Because again, you gotta think about the environments that we're in, right? Those are mission critical, big environments. They gotta solve some serious problems. They're not up for science projects. They're not up for risk, right? Yes, they have to advance the technology, but it's gotta be done in a way that mitigates risk and it's done in a responsible way. And that's where I think when you bring their storage and our network together, as well as their servers, right? We have our technologies part of their server solutions as well. You get some very compelling solutions. All right. Well, congratulations to both of you and also to the teams. I'm sure there was a lot of work that went up into this day and it's always a relief to get here. So thanks for stopping by and sharing the story. Thank you, Jeff. Absolutely. Right, with Hugh and Jack, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. It's a CUBE conversation from Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.