 Okay, we're here at HP Discover 2012. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.tv's coverage of HP Discover. Walter Walby here for three days, getting all the stories, find out who's got what going on, talking to the smartest people we can find, extracting the signal from the noise and sharing that with you. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE.com, and I'm joined with my co-host with the segment, Stu Miniman. Stu, great to see you, covering for me yesterday inside theCUBE. Appreciate it. Another good day we got going on today. Thanks, John. Great to have you back here, and lots of excitement here for the next two days at HP Discover, and I'm happy to introduce Nick Goliadas, who's with Broadcom, excellent partner of HPs, and he's the CTO of the Infrastructure Networking Group. For people that aren't too familiar with Broadcom, they're really a lot of the components inside lots of the different pieces. Very broad portfolio. Nick touches the switches, the adapters, lots of different pieces here, and so, Nick, welcome on theCUBE. Thank you, Stu. Thank you, John. It's a pleasure to be here. You know, a lot of the infrastructure players like Broadcom and others, they're powering all that, and that's really why we love theCUBE, because we get to talk to the people who are making all the great stuff happen, and people know the brand names like Intel, and I'll see that huge marketing budget over the years, and they've done great work, but you guys are in the news today. Broadcom, big time announcement about the 5G Wi-Fi. So, congratulations. This is real testament to you guys' leadership, and it's great to see Broadcom kind of being highlighted in the gaming laptop. You guys just announced that product for us. So, can you tell us a little bit about that? I know it's a different group, but Broadcom has a company that's great leadership. So, we're calling this 5G, so this is the 802.11 AC, it's not a standard yet, it's a draft standard. We announced the access point solution back in March at Mobile World Congress, and now we've announced the client side. So, to actually take advantage of the 5G, you need to have both sides of the connection. So, there was company shipping our access point solution today, and now we're going to enable laptops with the client side as well. So now you have a true gigabit plus connection between a laptop and an access point. That's really going to enable high speed networking. Just in the keynotes here, we're hearing from Meg Whitman all the way down to even Intel is on stage today talking about big data, and big data's now hugely popular, right? For everyone's agenda. All the innovations happening around storage, obviously at the center of that, but at the network and all the device sides, there really needs to be this kind of innovation. This is just one example of the leadership. Can you just share what Broadcom's doing right now under the covers that's really kind of empowering this mobility and social networking, and the cloud, the cloud mobile and social, which is the hottest trends right now. At the nexus of all this is the data center, right? And the data center has to be scalable and have performance. And today's Broadcom is supplying adapters, NICs, controllers for the server infrastructure, as well as a high capacity switching infrastructure. These would be the top rack switches, the end of row switches. The silicon that goes into all those products is today Broadcom is the leader in providing those solutions to our customers. The OEM is like HP. In particular with HP with the Gen 8 server release, we are, we had five adapters go out in March and then we have three more that were announced here at the show. This is both 10 gigabit and one gigabit. Very high performance in terms of a CNA were 265% faster than our nearest competition that was been benchmarked by the MarTech and that's on multiple threads running simultaneously and then just some pure throughput were 37% faster than our nearest competitor. So that's the kind of performance you need to be able to run these social apps to be able to get the big data in and out of the servers in these next generation data centers. Okay, so Nick, first Dennis Martin, he's actually one of the original Wikibon contributors. Great to see his research being used. If you go to wikibon.org, you can find that. So I remember Broadcom really as the leader in the law market space, the Landon motherboard. And we've seen really a C-shift as you go to 10 gig. It used to be this solder down on the motherboard. You get the design win and you win everything after that. But if you look at with 10 gig, there's more flexibility. Avengers like HP is I can choose from multiple vendors. So, how are HP, who is your customer and how are the end users making their choices on this next generation of adapter? So the flexible arm is what HP is calling it is basically you get to choose the networking adapter when you configure the system. And Broadcom wants to be recognized for having the most complete software solution, time tested, we've been shipping Nick's now for over 10 years. So there's a lot of history there in quality and stability. We have the highest performance, so our customers can recognize that when they use a Broadcom controller in their system, they're getting the highest performance Nick that is available. And then the feature capabilities. Because of our architecture, we can provide features on existing hardware through software upgrades. So we have this ability because of our programmable controller to add functionality as new standards come out or new capabilities, let's say like new virtualization protocols. These are the VXLAN, NVGRE and L2GRE. As those come to the forefront, our controller has the ability to be upgraded in the field through a software upgrade to take advantage of those new protocols and HP embraces them in their products. So in the case of the users, I believe they should look at a Broadcom, Nick, as investment protection because it allows them to future-proof their servers going forward. And then all the features of functionality can invest in class performance. Nick, we've been hearing themes on theCUBE all year now and just recently here and early on in our summer tour that really there's two key themes around cloud, mobile and big data, and all those, we call the four horsemen of IT disruption. That's performance and integration and that translates to solutions. What are you guys doing with HP? Can you talk about some of those specific points with regard to your HP relationship and around performance and some of the integration that has to go on because these solution sets are becoming more complex. Just past two days, we were at the IBM Edge event in New York City. They've completely transformed their business model around storage, not as a silo, but as a full integrated portfolio. That seems to be the trend. Can you shed some light on what you guys are doing with HP specifically? Certainly. So we're part of the proactive insight architecture platform, the PIA. So this is an umbrella that HP has with their vendors to allow that devices will interoperate as part of a system and allow visibility into performance and faults through their architecture. So working within the PIA, Broadcom ensures that our products play within the system as a component that's well integrated. So that's the first aspect of it. We've had a very long relationship with HP going back many, many years. So it's not like we're just coming in and putting a product on the table and having them ship it. We've had a working relationship with them. We've been working on solutions with them. The most prominent one is Flex10. So Flex10 was co-developed with Broadcom and HP and we continue to support it today. That gives them flexibility to be able to reconfigure their blade server in different ways using this Flex10 technology. So by being a partner to HP versus just a vendor, we are able to work on solutions together that are cohesive, well-tested and future-proof. So Nick, the other big area that you're partnered with HP is on the switching. Broadcom's one of the leaders in merchant silicon. Every year we go to interop these days. You can see all the OEMs that Broadcom has there and HP is a strong one of those. Dave Donatelli and his keynote this morning was talking about HP trying to transform networking. Things like SDN, we're going to have Sargillai on later today to talk about that. So can you speak a little bit about your relationship on the switch side and where you see that market going? Correct. So SDN and people also refer to this as open flow. I think open flow is one instance. I think open flow is one component of SDN. And Broadcom was the early developer of platforms that ran open flow but SDN in general. My view on SDN is that SDN allows you to treat the network like a programmable platform. So no longer are you going out and trying to configure a box or switch for a particular set of attributes or push policy to it. Now you treat the network as a platform that you then are able to configure and able to run applications on top of. So let's say one example I like to use is let's say you have an energy monitoring application whose job is to go out and run across all the switches in this SDN framework and monitor their energy usage, their traffic. And then based upon the say traffic profile say I'm going to shut down this part of the network because there's low traffic. I'm going to move the workloads from one virtual machine instance to another and let's say move the VMs to let's say this cluster of servers shut down the switches here and turn down the servers over here and now be able to have an energy savings by just monitoring how the network and the servers are running and treating that as a platform versus trying to look at individual boxes and making decisions at that level. So a big portion of transforming the network is really we need to get off the CLI and really automate this environment. Being the underlying chip in a lot of these switches, do you have hooks into that or what's Broadcom's angle on that? We do have actually, we have hooks into that. We're also a leader in what's called energy efficient networking and one aspect of that is called energy efficient ethernet and we actually worked on a white paper with you guys on developing this technology. So it's very important. The ability to power down interfaces when they're not active is a key component of this. So now that the network becomes load power couple, meaning that as the traffic comes down, the power usage of the network goes down as well. So the energy efficient networking really turns down the power usage based upon load. So now as if you have busy periods, you're obviously using more power, but if there's like idle periods, the equipment actually goes into a lower power state and saves energy inside the network. Right, and a big piece of that is this is all automated. This isn't no longer the admin going in and having to tweak all these knobs and everything like that. Correct, it's done through a set of APIs that then can be exploited through SDM. Okay, great, so what else are you guys looking at? So Trident Plus is kind of the next generation to hear things like Trill or the other things people are talking about. So what can people expect to see coming forward from some of the Broadcom chips and the switches that they enable? So we tend to call this area the data center fabric and Trident Plus is the name of our, coding of our latest 64 port 10 gig switch and that device is the problem used in top of rack or under row configurations. That supports Trill and other multi-path protocols. So now you can build these large data center fabrics that are multi-path, so you have high cross-sectional bandwidth that allows a lot of the web and social media applications to have what's called cross-server communication. So there's cross-sectional bandwidth available so that the applications can communicate with each other horizontally is very important. And then this also gives you redundancy and a failover protection because you have multiple paths that are active and if one of them fails, you don't lose the network. And along those lines, where are we with 40 and 100 gig ethernet? So where we are today with 40 is becoming mainstream. Today, because of the economics of 10 gig, 40 is really four times 10 gig and then you get some packaging and density improvements with it. So actually 40 gig on a per gig of a basis is becoming more competitive than 10 gig if you want that capability. And 40 gig for today, you can actually deploy them as either four by 10 or one by 40. 100 gig is now starting to become more accepted in the forefront and we're working with the IEEE to standardize some next generation 100 gig technologies that's based on four by 25 gig and drive the cost of the optics down to be much more competitive with 10 gigabit ethernet. So now you can actually see the backbone of these next generation data centers moving to 100 gigabit because it's going to be class competitive. Nick, I want to ask you a couple of questions. Just kind of level up a little bit because of your unique position at the company and with the data center, all the action in the data center is really transforming. We've been covering HP for over a couple of years now. We've seen Gen 8, we've seen the Project Moonshot. A lot of the stuff that they're doing at the server level, the chip level has been pretty fantastic and there's always the power issues and cooling. What would you say to the folks out there? Share with them your perspective on the bottom line of what's happening because every vendor's got, it seems to have a different approach. You're seeing HP do some things, you're seeing IBM do some things, EMC doing some things with storage. Everyone's got kind of this different approach around performance and integration. Tell the folks out there what really matters. What are the three things that really matter right now when you talk about having that next generation server, the next generation networking and storage infrastructure as it all kind of converges in? I mean it's a half a trillion dollar market opportunity in this converging infrastructure. What are the top three things that really matter? So as a semiconductor vendor that sells into all these different OEMs and we are a foundation for their products. So you have to have a strong foundation. So the idea here is you want to have the highest performance underlying silicon that's very flexible because this is a dynamic marketplace today. There's new protocols being developed, new applications being developed and you want to make sure you have a foundation that is scalable and can be built upon with software. So our customers take our base silicon and they build their systems around it, they overlay their software on top of that and they rely on our devices to provide high performance and flexibility. The other aspect of this is energy efficiency. If we need today these massive data centers that are becoming the utility computing engines of the future need to be very energy efficient. So by moving to the latest process technologies and putting in things like this energy efficient ethernet allowing the components to actually scale power with usage is a very important aspect. And finally is cost competitiveness. Providing a cost effective solution because when you're building out data centers that are large in nature it's a big multiplier. So providing a very cost effective solution as that foundation is very important to our customers. So now out in the world of big data, storage, flash memory, a lot of new things really increase and we can put cores everywhere now. And Intel's out totally pumped about that. The finger pointing continues to go to the network. So what would you share about the network innovations that are happening because data being moving around the network, people saying the network's now the bottleneck. One, do you believe that to be true? And your news today with the 5G computer really kind of shows us really advancements there. So how do you address that? How do we just talk about that? Is the network truly the bottleneck? Is the open flow and like initiative you got Nasera out there doing some things. You got the software, you mentioned software is kind of playing a big role in it. Talk about that. The network, I don't believe is a bottleneck. I think there's plenty of network performance at throughput level. What I believe has to happen is the network has to become more application aware so that the appropriate prioritization and flows are sent through the network with the utmost urgency. And we're working on technologies today. We have what we call app IQ technology the ability to actually recognize what application is running on a particular flow versus just looking at the IP address or the MAC address. So now the network can become application aware and be able to prioritize traffic based upon what's running there and give the network administrative visibility into what's running in their network and understand what things may actually be hogging the network, right? So that's what happens. So what's the hottest area right now around this area? I mean, it's a good debate and it's kind of not really that critical but people are doing some new things. What's the hottest area within that network? Virtualization is very key here. So the ability to segment the data center network into sub networks that are tenant specific or workload specific is very important and having an infrastructure from the controller to the neck through the switch that is aware of what the virtualized entity is, the VM and be able to transport that traffic both inside the data center and intro data center. So you're now able to tie data centers together and have virtualized connections between them or in the hybrid model where you have an enterprise that wants to do a hybrid model that puts some of its compute resources in a cloud, some of it in-house and then tie those together using this virtualization so that inside the hosted data center it's their own domain. Okay, Nick is the CTO of infrastructure and networking at Broadcom. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us and giving us your perspective. Great to see Broadcom in the news innovating with the gaming laptop and the 5G networking, congratulations. We'll be right back with our next guest from HP Discover right after this short break. Thank you guys.