 So, Brian Gracely from Cisco, he's actually a cloud evangelist for Cisco. So, excellent luck going on here at the event. Tons going on. It's amazing, you know, customer interactions, all kinds of stuff on convergence. Things are hot, things are heating up. So, all right, so Stu, I'm going to turn it over to you. Great, thanks, Dave. And thanks for coming on, Brian. Appreciate it. So, Brian, welcome back to theCUBE. As we said, Brian, you're a CUBE alum. I'm an alumni. Last year, I think you came on, you talked about VCEs, talked a little bit about private cloud, and the discussion's really kind of matured a little bit over the last year. Absolutely. Where we're talking about hybrid cloud, talking about service providers a lot. You know, so what have you been up to? So, I think since the last time we were here, I was, last time I was focused very much on VCE. We were getting VCE off the ground, we were trying to build teams. Since then, Cisco asked me to come back and sort of take a role around cloud strategy, around sort of driving cloud evangelism, talking to customers about what's possible, what's, you know, what they should do, what's realistic. And so a lot of what I do is both private cloud with enterprise customers trying to figure out how to really almost build better IT, and then a lot of talking to service providers, helping them figure out not so much how to build them, because they're getting very good at that. VBlock's a great format for doing that. But how do they go about talking to enterprise customers, talking to medium-sized customers about trust, about security, you know, how do they prove those types of things? And so I think we've moved past that stage of definitions, we've moved past the stage of talking about it, we're really in that stage of trying to make everything happen, and that's fun. So Brian, going on down the street right now is Interot. That's right. And there's a good contingency of the Cloud Erotti there. They had two days of cloud panels, and here we are at EMC, it's a, you know, traditionally a storage company, but really much more, virtualization, cloud computing, big data are all there, you know, have you been, what are you hearing from the customers that you're talking to here, the partners you're talking to here? I think the reality of what I hear from customers is, is a couple of things, it's probably very different than what the Cloud Erotti tend to talk about all the time. The first one is they're pretty confused, especially enterprise customers, they're pretty confused, they hear things going on, they wanna hear real life stories. So I tend to drive a lot of discussion first and foremost of real life stories. So whether we're talking about what Cisco IT does, what EMC IT is doing, you know, some friends of ours like Christian Riley, who's over at Bechtel and driving some private cloud types of things, to show them that stuff is possible. That's the first thing we do. And the second thing I think they're trying to figure out is how do I bring some of those best practices in-house? Is it possible to do that? I think the thing they're really, the number one question I get all the time is what happens to my data? You know, where does it go? How do I trust those guys? And so I think more so than anything, they wanna know are their standards gonna be in place for understanding how to audit data? Is there gonna be ways, is Cisco gonna help me cut through which service providers are capable, which ones aren't capable? That's the biggest thing is they wanna do it, but there's still some fear and uncertainty going on. So I definitely agree. I think we're making progress, hopefully getting past the definitions. Cloud's taken a couple of body blows recently. Huge body blows. Amazon, PlayStation, some of the other things. So our customers, I mean, security and management have always been the discussion points of what's maybe holding us back. So, you know, what about these recent issues? I think it's gonna be two things, right? If you're a customer yet, it scares you. If you were not on the bleeding edge, it's scaring you a little bit, or at least it's making you say, okay, what's gonna happen out there? You know, they're really trying to figure out, they may not have used Amazon before, but now they're really trying to figure out, like what are those guys doing in case I find out that my developers are using it? The other thing is, and I think this is more sort of the Clotorati or the public cloud side, those guys are having to take a hard look at themselves and figure out, how do I not make this happen? Is it better transparency so developers know what they're doing? Is it better process so that these things don't happen? And you know, Amazon's outage, I think we're all a little bit cautious to jump on the bandwagon and beat it up because it happens, you know, and I think we'll learn from it. And you know, what we may end up finding is we may end up finding that they drive more and more business because people realize that's an opportunity, it's out there, they moved quickly and they want it, they want to go experiment with it. I think we'll see a lot of more enterprise experiment with Amazon to figure out where it goes. Okay, so Brian, how's the relationship between the network and the storage guys working these days? So I've talked a lot about convergence for like the last four years. And you got the storage team and you got the network team and a lot of times they don't like to even talk to each other at the company picnic. So are we making any progress? What's happening to roles in the enterprise today? So you're right, yeah. The convergence story is always a little challenging because first and foremost, we talk about technology, we talk about protocols, you've talked about FCOE and convergence and I SCSI forever. At the end of the day, it's about people. And I think what we're seeing in more of the medium-sized shops, so with our product, the Cisco UCS, the medium-sized shops, those guys have less huge challenge in trying to blur the lines between them and they tend to be a lot of the early adopter customers because for them, they can see immediate value. For the really big shops, it's still a challenge and it's more a challenge of kind of the FC to FC conversion as it is just, can I start moving down this converge path? I don't know exactly what that tipping point's going to be. I think a lot of times Cisco tends to use the analogy that it's like when we were in the voiceover IP market and the data and the voice guys got together. The trick is, if your voice call failed, people had a natural human reaction that said, okay, well I'll call you back, right? It was annoying. When data starts failing or data starts getting corrupted, that's a whole different. Big difference between I can't lose my website versus that $10 million bank transaction. I gotta find that. So there's some work there and I don't think it's so much, I don't think it's so much a cross price point. I think it's going to be some people, I think what we'll end up seeing, because we're seeing probably 30, 35% attach rate for FCOE today, right? Across all of the UCS sales and so I think what we're probably seeing is people starting to experiment, figuring out how does that operationally work and as they feel comfortable with it, starting to migrate more of it. But yeah, you're right. It's still out there. The needle hasn't moved as much as quickly as we'd want it to. Yeah, it's interesting. When we look at kind of the whole block discussion, there's ice guzzy, there's fiber channel, there's FCOE and we're seeing convergence. I mean fiber channel and ethernet, I've been talking for the last couple of years as they're coming together. Cisco has unified ports now on the UCS so that it's not, I choose one protocol and I'm stuck with it forever, but I can actually change as my needs move on. So here's my question, right? So the Icelon guys had huge kind of presence here. All the growth, or people talk about all the growth is in unstructured data. Those guys fundamentally are sort of doing converged storage, right? It's over ethernet. Do you see, and I'll ask you, I'm being the interviewer, do you see those guys, because of what they're doing being so much bigger in a lot of cases, driving the big data explosion or driving new things, maybe being the catalyst for pushing things towards more convergence over ethernet or is that not the case? Well, so I think we're different applications. So as we like to say at Wikibon, it's horses for courses. So absolutely we see a huge growth in unstructured, semi-structured content and that's where big data is really playing today. So look at a green plum appliance, it's not a sand, it's gas, it's two-U Intel servers, put in a rack, processing and compute is where it's at. Yeah, pivot off of that a little bit. I guess EMC had Project Lightning talking about that they announced, talking about putting flash in the server and some are like, oh geez, EMC's moving towards the server, are they going to sell servers? I don't believe that's the case, but where they do sell servers is with partnering with Cisco and through VCE. So have any thoughts about kind of where flash is going with servers? So I think, I was listening pretty intently, a couple of weeks ago, there was a conference called Structure, so it was about big data. And the one thing that I kept hearing over and over again from the data scientists and the companies that were driving that was this, I've got to, instead of bringing the data to the network, it was I've got to bring basically the network and the compute to the data. And so whether or not EMC drives a stronger partnership with Cisco in this space around compute, we've got some pretty interesting compute platforms around tons of memory and obviously footprint for flash. I think the thing that I'm seeing more from EMC than ever before is this thing that they know, they sort of seeing these trends happen and they're starting to push that envelope. So I got to think project lightning, what we saw this week is just the tip of the iceberg. I got to imagine they're trying to push use cases and whether they get in the server business, they partner to get in the server business, or ultimately a year from now, this becomes a motherboard feature for Intel. I think what they're trying to do is say, big data is a thing, I've got to solve certain problems and I commend them for trying to push that envelope. I think it's less about are they going to get into a market, is are they making it easier for the guys that can drive money out of it, right? Yeah, interesting, maybe it's an orthogonal piece, but when I think of bringing data, bringing the content, the processing power to where the content is, I think about what we do at Wikibon is we want to bring the information to the community and allow them to work on it. And when I think about just creating more content and more information, you got into the podcasting business recently. Yeah, I'm in the media business now. Yeah, so welcome to, you've been a blogger for how many years now, Brian? Been a blogger for, I don't know, three or four years now. Okay, and can you tell us a little bit about the podcast you're doing with Aaron? Yeah, so myself and one of the guys from VCE, VExpert named Aaron Delp, we were sort of active bloggers, sort of active in the virtualization community and so many times we would get together after work, we'd get together over drinks or something and we'd be talking about cloud computing and there's so much that's changing in that space, the things about different sort of application platforms, different sort of business models and we flat-out said, you know, there is so much we don't know, we were talking one day and we said we should do a podcast, not to sort of jump on the podcast idea because it's cool to do, we said, what we'll do is you and I will basically call people that we know are smarter than us, that are in spaces that we don't really know, so whether it's platform as a service, how to do development, object-based storage, wherever it goes, call those folks up, we'll sort of do it in podcast format, we'll try and keep it interesting and then we'll give it back to the community, so is it wildly commercially successful? No, oh and by the way, it's called thecloudcast.net, it's at thecloudcast.net as a plug, but we're having fun with it and we're finding out that it's just like every other community, there's people, even though it's competitive, there's businesses, people want to share, they like talking about what they're doing and we try and find people that are actually doing stuff as opposed to the evangelist guys and it's been fun, so you know, we've been doing it for a couple of months, we're not that far into it. Right, so not just people talking about it, I notice you haven't had me on yet, but. We'll have you on soon. All right, no, thanks, I mean that's fundamentally what we look at the cube, the cube is just curating that information, getting smart people like yourself in there, sharing it with the community, getting it out there, because I think those of us that really live in the technology world, that's what gets our geek going. That's what we should be doing and we love having people that literally are on the bleeding edge and they may be religious about it, they may have made a decision that two years from now ends up being a non-standard, but at least you give somebody some motivation to go, that can be done and that's usually a big key. Hey, you know, a little controversy is a good thing, so having good constructive dialogue, arguing viewpoints without being dogmatic, I think are very good, you know, it's not, you know, cloud is not one definition. No. You know, so going back to the tech for a second, the latest, you know, cloud we've talked about for a bunch of years, the latest term where I've had a lot of pushback on is fabric. Fabric, yes. Networking space, Cisco has a fabric technology out now with the Matterhorn release last month. You know, what's your take on fabric? So our take on fabric is basically because of all this convergence or at least the potential for the convergence between compute, between network, the networks being kind of rebuilt or sort of reevaluated from hard layer three boundaries to more flat layer two boundaries or a mixture. Our definition of fabric tends to be that intersection between storage, between compute and between network and really trying to show customers that it's not a, it's not a rip and replace. It's not a, it's not a completely brand new thing because most of our customers, we see they're saying, look, I've got a mix of legacy applications, client server, north and south kind of traffic flows, virtualization is a big part of where I'm going. And I don't know, I might be going the big data route that they're completely parallel, you know, east and west traffic. And they're saying, look, I need, A, I need something that's going to help me through those transitions, which Cisco feels like we've got a pretty good story in that space around the Nexus platform or on UCS and so forth. But they're also saying, I need something that is going to allow me to make these transitions as I move along and both in terms of technology but also for people because that becomes the challenging piece. So what we've tried to build into the platform is the ability to say, if you want to sort of do things still in the legacy ways or the siloed ways you can do that, it's there, you can spin it, you can pull off fiber channel, you can, you know, run the servers in bare metal mode. But if you want to get into a much more unified mode, a much more converged mode, the capabilities are built into the technology. So you can virtualize the platforms, you can virtualize the network, you want to go flat layer two in spaces, that's fine. You want to go hierarchical layer three, that's fine. And for us, we feel like we're the only guys that are really doing that. We've been doing it for a couple of years. You know, some of our competition have come along all of a sudden and kind of usurped that term. But in most cases, those guys are completely new boxes, never really been in this space at scale. And so we feel like we're in a pretty good position even though right now there's a lot of buzz about, you know, do everything different, do everything new. Yeah, it's an interesting dilemma for Cisco. As, you know, I quoted last month when I wrote our article about the recent launch. Cisco guy, I'm trying to remember the guy's name, wrote the book, you know, doing both. It's not, you know, one way or another, it's, you know, customers are concerned. How do I take from my legacy environment to my legacy processes? But I want to be innovative, I want to change things. I don't want to spend 70% of my time, you know, maintaining and keeping the lights on. I want to, you know, turn that knob and be more innovative and take more things. But it's tough to, you know, I just can't, you know, wave a magic wand and poof, I'm doing everything well. So that's always the challenge. I mean, if in a perfect world, and this is why people are always drawn to startups, right? I don't want any legacy. I don't want any baggage. I just want to do the fun new stuff. And the reality is if that was really the case, you would see people flocking to public cloud like nobody's business because you could only focus on that. You could be like Netflix, right? You just completely change it. And the reality is, you know, most folks have got that legacy baggage and we call it baggage, but that's the stuff that makes people money, right? That's the stuff that processes their payments and builds stuff. So I want to get your opinion on something. So when I think about when private cloud started or when fabric started, I mean, when I dialed the clock back four or five years ago, you know, virtual data centers, next generation data centers, I feel a lot of it's kind of the same things we've been talking about. You know, I mean, you know, I'll talk to my friends back from the mainframe days. You know, there's nothing new under the sun. So how much of this is kind of incremental steps along the path that we've been going and how much of this is truly a revolution? You know, this is the new internet. This is the cloud era. You know, I think there's two things. I always joke around, I call something Grace Lee's theorem, which is basically 99% of all new stuff isn't anything new. It's just there's more bandwidth and there's more CPU processing. So you're right. A lot of this stuff is ideas that people had before that maybe didn't, the timing was wrong, the technology wasn't quite there. You know, I think from an infrastructure perspective, from where Cisco's playing, this is really just, it's an evolution. It's that next step of where are we going? It's, you know, I've got to be able to deal with mobile devices and mobile users and people want to, you know, they've got upgrades and bandwidth. I think some of the stuff that is sort of revolutionary and we haven't totally figured out the business models that go with it, is this idea of sort of these open platforms of service, right? So Paul talked about Cloud Foundry. You know, Red Hat made an announcement last week about, I think they call it Cloud Forms. The idea, and I think customers are really interested in this, the idea that they say, I can write applications to platforms, which they've been able to do forever, whether it was Ruby or Java or whatever. But I now have the portability to say, if I want to run it in-house, fantastic. And I think we'll see that a lot in these open paths. But, you know, if I want to partner with somebody and do that in service, that I think is pretty, pretty radical. Right? You know, I love in the innovation circles, they say it's the power of old ideas, is what they said. So there might not be nothing new, but there's new opportunities. So at the Stratoconference, Scott Yorah said, you know, if I can have, you know, 100x the compute, you know, and 100%, you know, I'm 100 times more compute and 100 times more storage when I put it in the cloud just, wow, there's some really amazing economies of scales and things, what new can I do with that? Yeah, and that's what's pretty exciting. And that's the fun question, just what could I do if I knocked down the barriers? It's not that, you know, the iPads mobile and light, it's like the touch interface kind of changes the way I can interact and do things. And I have some new opportunities there. It's funny, Chuck Hollis, I think had a tweet this morning where he basically was talking about Paul's keynote and he said, you know, I wish I was 20 years younger or 30 years younger and I was a brand new developer because this stuff is very cool. The interesting thing to us, and this is one of the things that Aaron and I talk about on the cloudcast all the time, is you've got this huge ecosystem of people with skills that have done things, maybe not traditionally, but they understand hierarchies, they understand traditional storage and compute and so forth. I was out at the OpenStack conference a couple of weeks ago and the thing that overwhelmed me was, you almost had to completely turn off your brain, forget everything you knew for a lot of these new models, whether it was like object storage or ways to design high availability that was only based on software and nothing in the infrastructure. And whether that ends up panning out or not, I think there's going to be a new generation of kids who will be talking to them and their perceptions of what you have to do versus what we've learned over the last 10, 15, 20 years, we're going to be like, I don't even know what language you're talking about, I don't know what planet you're from, which one's going to win, I'm not sure, but that stuff's pretty exciting. It's making a lot of people go, how do I learn this, how do I make sure I don't get left behind? Right, so OpenStack and Cloud Foundry, competitive to each other, complimentary, I'm trying to tease that out a little bit and they're both really new, so I'm curious your thoughts on that. I think at a really high level, you look at them as being complimentary. OpenStack is trying to figure out how to basically build the plumbing and the infrastructure and I think Cloud Foundry's trying to bigger applications and up. The challenge I think that's going to happen over time and this will be interesting to see how VMware drives this, how the rack space and Citrix Community Drive OpenStack is. You know, in every management transition, when we're seeing this in orchestration for private cloud is, you start in one space and then either customers start driving you to say, we'll do some more, blur the line between infrastructure as a service and platform as a service. But they're both interesting because they're both open source and fundamentally, if you talk to a lot of paying customers, they go the reason I buy from traditional vendor X, Y, or Z, technology might matter, it's support, right? I want to know I can call those guys and so it'll be interesting if we start getting this massive bifurcation between the startups and the totally new business models and traditional companies and if the two of them end up merging together. So, I mean, we were discussing earlier, kind of, you know, it's all about really the value that's created and how customers can get supported. So, I've been railing recently about, everybody trying to say who's opener from a standard standpoint or who has better open source. So, I mean, at the end of the day, how much do customers care about that? I mean, they want solutions that work, that solve their business problems and they will pay to have those kinds of solutions. So, it'll be interesting. I think if you're a customer right now and you're pretty open and you're innovative, the value that just fell into your lap between some of these open things is pretty amazing, right? I mean, you've got either pricing leverage that maybe you didn't have before but you've got the ability to go create some stuff. You know, the other thing that'll be interesting is, you know, EMC and the first day Joe announced or Pat announced, you know, they're going to start bundling Hadoop as an appliance. So, it'll be interesting to see if that model where you're taking a lot of these open source stacks, these open source projects, is there just a basic layer of companies like Cisco, like, you know, EMC, like VMware, packaging some of these things. So, customers go, great, I know it'll work. And at a basic level, I know it'll work and I want the openness. I don't know, we'll see how that works out. But, you know, that may just be the tipping point of where this stuff goes. All right, so this Stu Miniman with Wikibon, here with Brian Gracely from Cisco, EMC World 2011 in Las Vegas. Final question for you, Brian. You bet. Seen any cool new technologies? What's melted your mind the most here at the show? You know, I think the thing that's melted my mind more than anything is, you know, I've got a pretty good relationship with Chad's guys, the Chad's Armies, the V Specialist. What that team was able to build, completely distributed team, was able to build 300 seat, 200 seat, 25 lab, all those labs, all that automation done from scratch. The thing that was really kind of blew my mind is, all that was done based on open APIs. So, open APIs from EMC and from Cisco and from VMware to sort of plug us. But the fact that those guys were able to do that, do it in a distributed manner, it wasn't one guy or one team. That's a pretty powerful, like what you could do if you're willing to make the right sort of, like that, more than any individual product is sort of, you know, blown my mind to maybe look at things kind of differently. Awesome. Well, hey, Brian, thank you so much for joining us back here in theCUBE.