 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE covering EMC World 2015, brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. World 2015, it's our sixth year of coming to EMC World. It's actually where we launched theCUBE in 2010, so we're always excited to come down here. And when we're at EMC World, we get our next guest on, Chris Wetzel, welcome from Rackspace. Yeah, thank you. It's great to be here. Yeah, I was doing a little research before he came on and looking up some of your old CUBE interviews. And at EMC World 2013, it was all about OpenStack. At EMC World 2014, it was all about storage. So what's the big thing for EMC World 2015? Yeah, lots of good stuff out there. You know, Rackspace, we love this show. A lot of the things that EMC's telling the world about hybrid computing, data lakes, all that stuff plays very well into what Rackspace does, in terms of delivering kind of managed value on top of clouds. So it's a great show for that. But still fanatical customer service. Absolutely, fanatical support. All right, so let's jump in. Specifically, what are some of the new things you have on the storage side that you guys are working on? Yeah, yeah. A lot of the same is one piece of it. We're very, very strong with EMC across the portfolio, VNX, VMAX. We've expanded our Icelon product with EMC. Data Lakes is a big, big place still. And you'll notice a lot of the conversations around here about how that helps you grow your storage over time, add services to it as you see fit, analytics or SMB or NFS or whatever you need, which is where Rackspace comes in with expertise. So a lot of good stuff. So let's dig into the data lake concept. We hear a lot about it here. And obviously, these are the people selling data lakes. You're out there delivering data lakes. How's the adoption going in the customer set? How do they like the concept? Are they able to execute it? Is it new and that different for them? Or is it kind of a natural progression? Yeah, I think it feels a little bit of both. I think shows like this absolutely help educate customers in terms of the value of the data lake, how to think about it. It's different than doing a kind of a Hadoop cluster and kind of ingesting the data that way. But I think what it comes down to, what we see is just the value of it. Not a one size fits all, but when you have a large data footprint, you want to be able to access our HDFS with it, being able to add compute to it is a huge value to customers. And not as many full adopters right now, a lot of conversations around how they'll grow into it, which is the other thing that we like about Iceland. You can start with a footprint and deliver file shares or whatever you need. And then as your business grows, you can add it, which is very, very powerful. Right, and as we were talking a little bit before we went live off camera, it's really horses for courses. What's the application space? What's the workload that you're trying to deal with? And then what's the appropriate technology? It's not one size fits all. Let's talk about Flash. Everyone's talking about Flash. A couple of great guests on earlier, how it's just really transforming the world. I wonder if you can share some interesting takes from your point of view and some of the customers you guys deal with. Yeah, and we see Flash is still kind of, it's an incredible product. I would say still an up and comer for us in terms of customers figuring out what it does for them. Kudos to the VNX team, very, very solid. We've been jamming SSDs into VNX for several years now. So it's that kind of progression. As customers reach those limits, Flash is a great answer for that. So we leverage the EMC partnership to help kind of solve that with customers together. And when those make sense, we can deliver that for those customers. Right, but then there's still IP Connected Storage, Sand Storage, there's still all these other different options. So what are some of the things when you talk to customers and help them decide which one to choose, why? What are some of those conversations? Yeah, and it's all over the map. What it really comes down to is the best ones for us are what are you trying to solve? What problem do you have? What is your application you want to kind of bring to Rackspace to the cloud? When those happen, we have our solutions experts that kind of engage with the customer and we can help architects. We have all the storage. That's not usually the problem. It's what you can afford. What do you need? Is it performance? Is it resiliency? Whatever. On the flip side, there are some customers that they know a ton about the storage themselves. And they come and say, here's what I want and here's what I need. And we have the ability to customize that forum and deliver that service to them as fast as we can. Right. We were talking again off camera a little bit about how when good enough is good enough and some of these evolving technologies that just continue to run, continue to run. There's always something kind of eating out of teals but it's like x86. It's the gift that keeps on giving. What do you see on that kind of a front in terms of some of the storage options? Yeah, the best one for me has been Fiber Channel. Every year I'm on here, we talk about is Fiber Channel going to die? What's Fiber Channel look like? At Rackspace, we continue. Just last year we worked with Rokade and came up with a phenomenal design for our latest data center that better performance, better scalability, better cost for us which really, really keeps that technology relevant. So it's chugging away and a year later, and I joke, I think I'm one of the few that believes it's going to stay around, but as long as it keeps making those advancements, it does the job. Right. And it's great for us. Right. And then talk about, you know, you guys have been in the data center space a long time, right? Fanatical service is really what started the company back in the day hosting and you've evolved quite dramatically since then, obviously, with OpenStack and more enterprise space. Talk about how the actual data center and the infrastructure is evolving in these recent times. Yeah. The nice thing for us is that we actually don't spend as much time talking to customers about our data center. In the background, we build them, we design them. We've got data centers across the world and it's really, whatever problems we're trying to solve at scale, is it room level, data center level, campus level, those are the things we're designing for now. So bigger data centers, being able to grow into, you know, tens and tens of megawatts over time is really where we need to figure out. That's what we have an awesome team that does that on a regular basis. Right. So we just opened one over in London last year, last year, yeah. Right. So that's the real challenge we have, is scale is just immense. You know, our first data center, we add that every week now, every day now. So how do we keep up with that pace? Right. Which clearly requires an increased level of automation. I'm sure there's a myriad of tasks. Absolutely. That were not automated that you guys are doing now. Yeah. Automation, simplification, trying to find commonalities and standards where we can so that we're not customizing every single thing is high, high on our radar. You know, there never is enough automation in terms of what we do. Storage and with, you know, EMC and Brocade both have been providing great tools for us to consume. Right. And, you know, we have a roadmap longer than my arm that will, you know, help us keep automating that stuff. Right. Let's shift gears a little bit and talk about big data. Yeah. A lot of talk about big data, a lot of things going on, a lot of POCs, a lot of tests. You know, everyone's constantly talking about we have the dean of big data on Bill Schmarzo. You know, find a project where you have a high probability of success that's not too big that you can execute and really build on that. I wonder if there's any examples you could share with some of the customers or what you're seeing really on the adoption and how people are finding success and getting started on their big data journey. Yeah. And we have what we call practice areas. We've pulled all of our services that kind of align with that, whether it's Hadoop or Mongo or Redis, together into kind of one greater team. They're really the ones that kind of work with customers and apply, again, our value there is the managed cloud is helping to provide the fanatical support and the expertise on top of that. So we're working with customers trying to help them figure out how to grow into it. How do you start with a POC? How do you evolve that over time? Right. So we do it every day with them and each one has a different chunk that they are trying to bring to us. So it's interesting though. So the other great topic, right? Cloud, obviously cloud, cloud, cloud, but kind of the hybrid cloud, right? Yeah. As we were talking a little bit earlier, really kind of, again, what's the workload? What's the right cloud? You know, you guys obviously a cloud company, but I'm sure you've got clients that have all types of clouds. They've got their own stuff that they had before they engage with you or a different type of workload and they probably got some stuff running on Amazon or Azure. So talk about kind of the reality of the hybrid cloud and how you see that kind of shaking out that it isn't the halfway house in the way to something. That hybrid is really going to be the solution because it's a distribution based on the workload. Yeah. And that's kind of where it's awesome to hear conferences like this where we talk about it because I think we've believed this for years now that there won't be one cloud for everything. One public cloud won't solve anything and one dedicated or private cloud won't and it's the ability to stitch those together. Every customer has a different problem associated with that and we can accommodate all of them both on our premise. We can support off our premise. You know, hypervisors from OpenStack to VMware to Microsoft. So our breadth there and expertise there really helps. Right. And we're not limited to one or the other. What you mentioned that we totally agree with is it will not be one size fits all and even those customers that start will grow differently over time and we're here to help kind of figure that out. Right. So you're the storage guy. I think I heard on one of the keynotes earlier in the last few days that something like 90% of all the data was created in the last two years. As you look ahead and figure out how are you going to scale as we have more connected devices, internet of things. We talked earlier today about, you know, connected socks that tell you are you running enough or you're getting enough perspiration or hydration or whatever it's down the street at the other show. What are some of the things you're thinking of? How are you getting out ahead of that curve as this just massive wave and acceleration of more data is hitting you, your clients and your data centers? Yeah. Multiple pronged approach. You know, partners like EMC absolutely help us with that and they're kind of helping us figure those pieces out. Leveraging the strength of public cloud where it makes sense, even with partners like EMC being able to scale into it. So I don't think there's any one answer for it. We do worry about that. How do we maintain the growth that we have with storage and make it economical enough that you can keep everything you want to keep tying analytics so that in the future you can actually apply analytics to it. So I'd say we're going to be, it's a great problem to have that we're going to be fighting for the next couple years. I didn't know about the SOCs but it will be awesome when the SOCs can start storing data in our cloud. Yeah. And then again, all the automation, right? Because you can't just keep throwing people at the problem. That's never the right answer. And the thing I love about is the one thing that I think is important is we can keep it all on a digital format on disk somewhere, somehow. It allows us to kind of bring it in and promote it back to add services to it a year or two in the future. So I encourage to try not to put stuff onto tape where I can just because I can do so. People still use the tape and tape is a great great great answer for some of the problems but thinking about it longer term it's a really challenge but we bring that expertise and we have some ideas that we can help with. So I've been at the show a couple of days what's the most interesting thing that you've seen since you've been here? You know, the one thing that I always love about this show and go to the key notes you go to the session I love talking to the customers in the session or after the session and how they're processing it. They hear something they didn't know what are they thinking and I have a handful of conversations today that just really amazed me at that how the broader customer base is really coming here to learn and taking away things that I hadn't thought of in a certain way. Can you share any of the details not necessarily that it was or specifically what they said? I think the best one for me has been the conversations around data lake. It's like yeah I kind of wanted to do an ice salon but didn't realize that I could do ABC or it helps me add services later or talking about the economics of it getting into kind of a TCO type discussion around doing a dedicated cluster versus this and very very thoughtful conversations but I love the fact that they actually left with something they didn't know and that's where it's right in our sweet spot and EMCs as well to help educate that next step. How do you then harness that value? So we're getting the hook so we had you in 2013 we had you in 2014 you're here today what do you think we're going to be talking about in 2016 when we get you back? We're still going to be talking about that scale problem. How are we helping? We're going to be talking about that and I think I'll be interested to see the whole discussion around flash and spinning disk and what it's looking like a year from now as our portfolio changed and how is that helping our customers? Great, well Chris thanks for taking a few minutes to stop by the Cube I always love having you on Chris Lettl from Rackspace Cube alumni EMC World Regular we love having you on the Cube Appreciate it, thank you I'm Jeff Frick and you're watching from Las Vegas it's EMC World 2015 we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break thanks for watching