 and we're live here at AT&T Park, the NetApp customer event. NetApp each year, the last two years has brought its leading customers into AT&T Park. It's an unbelievable venue that they've set up. They really stepped it up this year. I'm Dave Vellante with Wikibon.org and this is theCUBE SiliconANGLE's production. What we do with theCUBE is we go to events like this. Wherever the tech athletes are, we find the best guests and we extract the signal from the noise and share with you our audience the information on the trends that are occurring in the business. One of the major trends that has occurred over the last three or four years is this notion of converged infrastructure. And NetApp and Cisco have had a very tight relationship. NetApp sees the day, they saw the opportunity to participate in that converged infrastructure space. Cisco, of course, aggressively trying to change the whole model of compute, bringing compute and networking together and of course, needed this storage piece as well. So I'm here with Jim McHugh, who's with Cisco, a CUBE alum, and also Adam Four with NetApp Gentlemen. Welcome to theCUBE. Good to be here. Thanks for having me, Dave. So it's a great venue. You guys are longtime partners. Why don't we kind of start there? Jim, why don't you talk a little bit about the partnership, the objectives that you guys set for several years ago now? Yeah, so if you go back three years or so ago, I believe it is, you know, we set out with an objective of how we're going to do a solution that's going to address multi-tenancy. And out of that grew a product that became known as FlexPod. So we've been actually doing incredible success where you have now over 2,800 customers, 2,800 customers, partner-based growing, everything's just really going well from that standpoint. But, you know, this last year as all good tech companies do, right? When you have a lot of success, you re-up. So we decided, you know, we actually needed to re-affirm our relationship and we said we're going to set out for another three-year journey and actually really drive the solutions that our customers are looking for. So when you say you re-up, so you committed publicly to doing sort of a three-year engagement, what is it? So what does that entail? You guys both putting resources in, talk about the resources that you guys put together. Maybe, Adam, you can take it from the NetApp side and then Jim can come through. Yeah, so we basically got together and actually planned out a roadmap. And in that roadmap, it includes kind of what we're doing on the engineering side, it includes what we're doing go-to-market and includes just how we're going to work together really at a strategic level. And so what we've done is defined a strategy and where we're going to take FlexBot over the next three years. New markets we're going to go into, different environments that it's going to work in and then now are moving toward executing on that. Yeah, so let's talk about some of those environments. When you start a project like this, Jim, you guys were sort of the new kid on the blog and the compute business and so I'm sure you've learned a lot. And actually, what are some of the things that surprised you about getting into that business and what are some of the pleasant or unpleasant surprises that you've been dealing with? Well, I mean, I don't know, surprised. I mean, I almost go that we surprised a lot of people in the market. I'm actually, I have to admit, when Cisco got into the server business, I wasn't at Cisco. And I was one of those guys on the outside saying, really, they're getting into this business? But clearly, they caught the market at a transition where compute and networking was going to come together first, right? There's a lot of value in that. And I think that was pretty revolutionary. But it didn't take long for us to say, look, networking makes a lot of sense, but you got to have storage, right? You got to bring those together. And that's when you start having some questions of integrated infrastructure, converged infrastructure, and really, that's become the game changer. So when I think, too, the evolution of NetApp, that I've been following now for several years, you guys evolved again from an infrastructure player and then started to get really into the application integration space. And I noticed that with FlexPod, and specifically in Cisco generally, you guys focusing more on applications. So Adam, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that thrust from a solution standpoint, what the uptake looks like, and we can maybe get into some of the major ones. Right, so with FlexPod, the kind of design point is to really build out a converged infrastructure, an entire kind of virtualized infrastructure. And that infrastructure is designed to support a multi-tenant environment with multiple applications. And so when you look at what we're doing with the applications, we're validating these different kind of enterprise applications on this virtualized infrastructure. So it's less about kind of building a silo, say for Oracle, but building a shared infrastructure that can support Oracle and Microsoft and SAP, and what's the design requirements and what's the system requirements that would actually allow you to support all these different items. So the work we do is how do you size and configure to support these different environments? So that's really the validation process we go through. So that's a nuance. You're not purpose-building infrastructure for those specific environments. You're building infrastructure that can, it's like the Dave Hitch chart that shows sort of... Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then maybe there's some applications that keep running on bare metal that might not be virtualized. But so you're basically saying to the customer, we've tested this configuration, it works. We can show you best practice documentation. Now, who does what in that whole thing? You guys get together, you got joint labs. How does that all work? Well, so I think there's a couple of things that are going there. So when we decide to set off one of what we call Cisco-validated designs and we do those with NetApp. So we start on our components, the compute networking. We bring in the NetApp part of the storage and add it in from there. But I think the thing that we do next and it's part of the flex of FlexPod, it's multiple platforms. So we're looking at, if it's an application that'll run better on Hyper-V, vSphere, it could run better on some of the open source stuff that's coming along and open stack, et cetera. Those are things we're looking at. How do we first best address the application through that infrastructure software? Then we test that all the way down, right down through every component and element of the infrastructure. So whether compute, network, and storage and have that all built in. So three years ago, we started in 2010, was our first cube at VMworld. Really, we weren't talking about Hyper-V. It was sort of VMware, had a clear lead. Still has a lead in a lot of situations toward the customers. But at the time, Hyper-V was sort of, Microsoft version one, right? You knew it was going to get better. But it has. So can you talk a little bit about what you're seeing in sort of other, whether it's hypervisors, other frameworks like open stack, how does that fit in to your guy's strategy? Maybe Adam, you could start and Jim. Yeah, I mean, the platform is designed to support all of those, right? So we actually validate VMware, always the latest versions of VMware. So we're trying to stay in sync with the latest releases, Microsoft, latest versions of Hyper-V. We'll also validate system center on top of that as well. So it's got the cloud orchestration of the automation included. Citrix, Zen server, along with Zen desktop. And it's also validated as a bare metal configuration. So you look at some of the validated designs, it'll actually be a mix of say, SAP on virtualized VMware infrastructure and then the database part of it on a bare metal. And so these are all, and they can all run simultaneously. So the whole point is that this is an open environment that you can mix and match these different technologies. And that extends to the management layer. You know, open stack, cloud stack. All those technologies are really built to, or not, the flux spot is built to really support those environments. Yeah, so you see a lot of demand today for bare metal, despite the sort of, you hear talk about, you know, we heard Carl up there today saying it's an imperative to get 100% virtualized. But, you know, most customers are moving in that direction, but there's still demand for bare metal. Well, even for some of the newer things coming out. SAP HANA runs better on bare metal and it doesn't run very well in a virtualized state right now. But it's a big trend, people are doing it. We're doing a lot of business together and going out and talking to customers about it. And then there's just some applications that yeah, that workload belongs on bare metal. Yeah, okay, so what are you seeing in terms of workload? I'll just take it from the sort of workload out now. We talked about the infrastructure and its ability to essentially support. It was pretty much workload agnostic is essentially what you're saying, but you've done some validation. Where are you seeing uptake in the market? I mean, obviously Microsoft, Oracle, VMware, not really a workload, but it's sort of a platform. But Microsoft and Oracle in particular, you're seeing a lot of uptake. How about, you know, big data? Talk a little bit about the applications that you guys are seeing. Yeah, we see all those. So, primarily a lot of the enterprise applications, so Oracle, SAP, all the Microsoft enterprise applications is probably the majority. We also see quite a bit of virtual desktops. Virtual desktops are appealing for this type of platform because people tend to want to deploy a kind of brand new infrastructure deployment. And sizing for virtual desktops can be very complicated. So if you've got an infrastructure that's been sized specifically for that environment and it's sized across the entire stack, it's kind of an easy decision, you know, that's going to work for the environment that you're looking for. And then your last point around big data, that's one of the new things that we just introduced. Now, big data actually, especially analytics in a dupe, actually has some different types of architectural requirements. There's design around compute nodes with direct attached storage. So there's a FlexPod platform that we've built specifically for that, we call FlexPod Select. And today we validated Cloudera Hadoop and Quartenworks Hadoop on that architecture. And it's really designed to provide kind of an enterprise class availability and delivery of Hadoop environments. Jim, I wonder if you could talk about cloud service providers. I mean, Cisco, enormous company, obviously, you know, powering a lot of CSPs. What's the uptake been like specifically for this initiative in the cloud service provider market? Actually, the uptake is really, really really strong. And I think both of us, when we look at it, we see IT as a future and we understand that some people are going to go to a service provider and consume services and some people are going to have things on premise. And really as IT becomes a broker, we know and we are setting out together to go after and give solutions that hit that service provider. They have different needs. And again, they're going to be looking for sort of different platforms because as they start building out applications that run more as a service or things that need to be in true multi-tenancy, high availability sort of situations, that may not be what an enterprise is going to be running in as their data center. So it could be a different platform on top of a FlexBot to solve that. Do you think, let's see, okay, so we're 2013. Do you feel like 2014, we've been talking about for a while, do you think 2014 will be the year of the hybrid cloud? There's always the year or something, isn't there? I mean, the concept was great when you first heard about it and then you start to think about the details and the implementation was a little stickier. But talking to customers, it's starting to become more real. Certainly for things like backup and disaster recovery, we're starting to see workloads and applications. What are you guys seeing? I think we may find that the word hybrid cloud, the definition needs to change. Like we talked about hybrid cloud, like it was this idea that I could have something here and I would burst out that same workload to the web and yeah, to the public cloud. Yeah, that's going to happen. But I think really the true hybrid cloud that's coming on is that you're going to have infrastructure that can support multiple platforms that are targeting applications in different locations that are going to enable customers to say, here's my hybrid cloud, I don't need to run this stuff in-house. Whether it's HR, payroll, my ERP, and this stuff I do need to run in-house and I want them to talk to each other and I want data to move around. That's a hybrid cloud of the future. So you see that hybrid as a service offering that's in the catalog, oh yeah, you want to run it in a public cloud lower cost or whatever, maybe it's not lower cost, maybe it's more flexible and faster as opposed to federating applications. Of course you could federate applications but I think we got lost and that was the goal. The goal is giving our customers the solutions they need and the way they run it and when you solve that problem and you help the service providers of them solve that problem as well, we have a better solution. Yeah and that's an infrastructure play where the federated applications, the business value there comes out, some kind of gets fuzzy because it's complicated, right? Anything you'd add to that, Adam? Yeah, I mean there's definitely a move toward the hybrid cloud or hybrid IT environments. It's going to take some time, there's definitely some challenges that need to be overcome, kind of managing across these different environments is still a big challenge. But I see a lot of vendors that are actually trying to address that. But as soon as that gap gets solved I think you'll see it accelerating even faster. So how would you guys characterize the first three years? You know, kind of the bumper sticker characterization and talk about the objectives for the next three years? Well I think the first three years was looking at solving this multi-tenant and building on a product, FlexBot, the architecture, how does it work? And the next three years we've kicked off by saying that there's actually several families of FlexBot, right? So we talked a bit about FlexBot Select, targeting workloads, FlexBot data center which we could almost call FlexBot Classic that everybody knows and loves. And then we have FlexBot Express which is more for branch office, mid-market, it's from there. So I think the next three years is preparing for giving customers no pun intended, the flexibility to roll out infrastructure that's going to help them grow their business. And it's not just about being agile because everybody talks about being agile, it's purposefully agile. What are you going to do with that agility? So anything you'd add to that in terms of objectives going forward? It's really extending that FlexBot model out to more areas, right? Sorting more workloads, extending it into the cloud, extending into small offices, multi-data center environments. Yeah, exactly. Super-sized, FlexBot, how big or smaller? FlexBot light, and all through the middle, all right. Jim and Adam, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Really appreciate it. And I'll enjoy the rest of the night, and we'll talk to you soon. All right, keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest. John Furry and I will be here all night. We'll be going till almost nine o'clock specific times. Keep it right there. This is theCUBE, right back.