 The introduction of the modern public cloud in the mid 2000s permanently changed the way we think about IT. At the heart of it, the cloud operating model attacked one of the biggest problems in enterprise infrastructure, human labor costs. More than half of IT budgets were spent on people and much of that effort added little or no differentiable value to the business. The automation of provisioning, management, recovery, optimization and decommissioning infrastructure resources has gone mainstream as organizations demand a cloud like model across all their application infrastructure irrespective of its physical location. This is not only cut cost but it's also improved quality and reduced human error. Hello everyone, my name is Dave Vellante and welcome to Simplifying Hybrid Cloud made possible by Cisco. Today we're going to explore Hybrid Cloud as an operating model for organizations. Now the definition of cloud is expanding. Cloud is no longer an abstract set of remote services somewhere out in the clouds. No, it's an operating model that spans public cloud on premises infrastructure and it's also moving to edge locations. This trend is happening at massive scale while at the same time preserving granular control of resources. It's an entirely new game where IT managers must think differently to deal with this complexity and the environment is constantly changing. The growth and diversity of applications continues and now we're living in a world where the workforce is remote. Hybrid work is now a permanent state and will be the dominant model. In fact, a recent survey of CIOs by Enterprise Technology Research, ETR, indicates that organizations expect 36% of their workers will be operating in a hybrid mode splitting time between remote work and in office environments. This puts added pressure on the application infrastructure required to support these workers. The underlying technology must be more dynamic and adaptable to accommodate constant change. So the challenge for IT managers is ensuring that modern applications can be run with a cloud-like experience that spans on-prem, public cloud and edge locations. This is the future of IT. Now today we have three segments where we're going to dig into these issues and trends surrounding hybrid cloud. First up is Didi Dasgupta who will set the stage and share with us how Cisco is approaching this challenge. Next, we're going to hear from Manish Agarwal and Darren Williams who will help us unpack HyperFlex which is Cisco's hyper-converged infrastructure offering. And finally, our third segment will drill into Unified Compute. More than a decade ago, Cisco pioneered the concept of bringing together compute with networking and a single offering. Cisco frankly changed the legacy server market with UCS Unified Compute System. The X series is Cisco's next generation architecture for the coming decade and we'll explore how it fits into the world of hybrid cloud and its role in simplifying the complexity that we just discussed. So thanks for being here. Let's go. Okay, let's start things off. Didi Dasgupta is back on theCUBE to talk about how we're going to simplify hybrid cloud complexity. Didi, welcome. Good to see you again. Hey Dave, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. Yeah, our pleasure here. Look, let's start with big picture. Talk about the trends you're seeing from your customers. Well, I think first off, every customer these days is a public cloud customer. They do have their on-premise data centers, but every customer is looking to move workloads, new services, cloud native services from the public cloud. I think that's one of the big things that we're seeing. While that is happening, we're also seeing a pretty dramatic evolution of the application landscape itself. You've got bare-metal applications, you always have virtualized applications, and then most modern applications are containerized and you manage by Kubernetes. So I think we're seeing a big change in the application landscape as well. And probably triggered by the first two things that I mentioned, the execution venue of the applications and then the applications themselves, it's triggering a change in the IT organizations, in the development organizations, and sort of not only how they work within their organizations, but how they work across all of these different organizations. So I think those are some of the big things that I hear about when I talk to customers. Well, so it's interesting, I often say Cisco kind of changed the game in server and compute when it developed the original UCS. And you remember, there were organizational considerations back then bringing together the server team and the networking team, and of course the storage team as well. And now you mentioned Kubernetes, that is a total game changer with regard to the whole application development process. So you have to think about a new strategy in that regard. So how have you evolved your strategy? What is your strategy to help customers simplify, accelerate their hybrid cloud journey in that context? No, I think you're right, they've back to the origins of all of UCS and why did the networking company build a server? Well, we just enabled with the best networking technology, so we do compute that. And now we're doing something similar on the software, actually the managing software for our network convergence, for our rack servers, for our blade servers. And even on this journey for about four years, the software is called InterSight. And we started out with InterSight being just the element manager of the management software for Cisco's compute and hyperconverged devices. But then we've evolved it over the last few years because we believe that a customer shouldn't have to manage a separate piece of software to manage the hardware, the underlying hardware. And then a separate tool to connect it to a public cloud. And then a third tool to do optimization, workload optimization or performance optimization or cost optimization. A fourth tool to now manage Kubernetes and not just in one cluster, one cloud, but multi-cluster, multi-cloud. They should not have to have a fifth tool that goes into observability anyway. I can go on and on, but you get the idea. We wanted to bring everything onto that same platform that managed their infrastructure, but it's also the platform that enables the simplicity of hybrid cloud operations, automation. It's the same platform on which you can use to manage the Kubernetes infrastructure, Kubernetes clusters, I mean, whether it's on-prem or in a cloud. So overall, that's the strategy. Bring it to a single platform. And a platform is a loaded word. We'll get into that a little bit in this conversation, but that's the overall strategy, simplify. Well, you brought a platform. I like to say platform beats products, but there was a day, and you could still point to some examples today in the IT industry where, hey, another tool, we can monetize that and another one to solve a different problem, we can monetize that. And so tell me more about how InterSight came about. You obviously sat back, you saw what your customers were going through, you said, we can do better. So tell us the story there. Yeah, absolutely. So look, it started with three or four guys getting in a room and saying, look, we've had this management software, UCS manager, UCS director, and these are just the Cisco's management for our softwares for our own platforms. Every company has their own flavor. We said, we took on this bold goal of like, we're not, when we rewrite this or we improve on this, we're not going to just write another piece of software. We're going to create a cloud service or we're going to create a SaaS offering because the same infrastructure built by us, whether it's on networking or compute or the cyber cloud software, how do our customers use it? Well, they use it to write and run their applications, their SaaS services. Every customer, every customer, every company today is a software company. They live and die by how their applications work or don't. And so we were like, we want to eat our own dog food here, right? We want to deliver this as a SaaS offering. And so that's how it started, being on this journey for about four years, tens of thousands of customers. But it was a pretty big bold ambition because the big change with SaaS is your, as you're familiar, Dave, is the job of now managing this piece of software is not on the customer. It's on the vendor, right? This can never go down. We have a release every Thursday, new capabilities. And we've learned so much along the way, whether it's around scalability, reliability, working with our own company's security organizations on what can or cannot be in a SaaS service. So again, it's just been a wonderful journey, but I wanted to point out we are in some ways eating our own dog food because we built a SaaS application that helps other companies deliver their SaaS applications. So Cisco, I look at Cisco's business model and I compare, of course, compare it to other companies in the infrastructure business. And obviously a very profitable company or a large company, you're growing faster than most of the traditional competitors. And so that means that you have more to invest. You can afford things like stock buybacks and you can invest in R&D. You don't have to make those hard trade-offs that a lot of your competitors have to make. So... I'm gonna have to keep my boss on the whole investment. Yeah, right. Never enough, right? Never enough. But in speaking of R&D and innovations that you're introducing, I'm specifically interested in how are you dealing with innovations to help simplify hybrid cloud, the operations there and prove flexibility and things around cloud-native initiatives as well? Absolutely, absolutely. Well, look, I think one of the fundamental, where we're kind of philosophically different from a lot of options that I see in the industry is we don't need to build everything ourselves. We don't. I just need to create a damn good platform with really good platform services, whether it's around searchability, whether it's around logging, whether it's around access control, multi-tenants. I need to create a really good platform and make it open. I do not need to go on a shopping spree to buy 17 and a half companies and then figure out how to stitch it all together because it's almost impossible. And if it's impossible for us as a vendor, it's three times more difficult for the customer who then has to consume it. So that was the philosophical difference how we went about building intersites. We've created a hardened platform that's always on. And then the magic starts happening. Then you get partners, whether it is infrastructure partners, like some of our storage partners, like a NetApp or PR or others who want their conversion for structures also to be managed. Or there are other SaaS offerings and software vendors who have now become partners, like we did not write Terraform, but we partnered with Hashi and now Terraform service is available on the intersite platform. We did not write all the algorithms for workload optimization between a public cloud and on-prem. We partnered with a company called Turbanomics. And so that's now an offering on the intersite platform. So that's where we're philosophically different in sort of how we have gone about this. And it actually dovetails well into some of the new things that I wanna talk about today that we're announcing on the intersite platform where we're actually announcing the ability to attach and be able to manage Kubernetes clusters which are not on-prem. They're actually on AWS, on Azure, soon coming on GKE as well. So it really doesn't matter. We're not telling a customer, if you're comfortable building your applications and running Kubernetes clusters in AWS or Azure, stay there. But in terms of monitoring, managing it, you can use intersite. And since you're using it on-prem, you can use that same piece of software to manage Kubernetes clusters in a public cloud or even manage VMs in an EC2 instance. So the fact that you mentioned storage pure, net app, so intersite can manage that infrastructure. Remember the Hashid deal and it caught my attention. I mean, of course a lot of companies want to partner with Cisco because you've got such a strong ecosystem, but I thought that was an interesting move, TurboNomic you mentioned. And now you're saying Kubernetes in the public cloud. So a lot different than it was 10 years ago. So my last question is, how do you see this hybrid cloud evolving? I mean, you had private cloud and you had public cloud and it was kind of a tug of war there. We see these two worlds coming together. How will that evolve over the next few years? Well, I think it's the evolution of the model. And I really look at kind of cloud, two-data or three-data depending on how you're keeping count. But I think one thing has become very clear again, we've been meeting our own doctor. I mean, intersite is a hybrid cloud task application. So we've learned some of these lessons ourselves. One thing is for sure that customers are looking for a consistent model, whether it's on the edge, on the Polo, public cloud, on-prem, no data center, doesn't matter. They're looking for a consistent model for operations, for governance, for upgrades, for reliability. They're looking for a consistent operating model. What my guess will all tell me is, I think there's going to be a rise of more custom clouds. It's still going to be hybrid. So applications will want to reside wherever it makes most sense for them, which is close as good data, because moving data is the most expensive thing. So it's going to be co-located with the data that's on the edge, it's going to be on the edge. Polo, public cloud, doesn't matter. But you're basically going to see more custom clouds, more industry-specific clouds, whether it's for finance or transportation or retail, industry-specific. I think Solventry is going to play a huge role today. If you look at the cloud providers, it's a handful of American and Chinese companies that leaves the rest of the world out when it comes to making good digital citizens of their people, and whether it's data latency, data gravity, data software, I think that's going to play a huge role. Solventry is going to play a huge role. And the distributor cloud, it's also called Edge, is going to be the next frontier. And so that's where we are trying to line up our strategy. And if I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's really your cloud your way. Every customer is on a different journey. They will have their choice of like workloads, data, uptime reliability concerns. That's really what we are returning in need of our customers. You know, I think I agree with you on that custom clouds. And I think what you're seeing is, you said every company is a software company. Every company is also becoming a cloud company. They're building their own abstraction layers. They're connecting their on-prem to their public cloud. They're doing that across clouds. And they're looking for companies like Cisco to do the hard work and give me an infrastructure layer that I can build value on top of. Because I'm going to take my financial services business to my cloud model or my healthcare business. I don't want to mess around with it. I'm not going to develop, you know, custom infrastructure like an Amazon does. I'm going to look to Cisco and your R&D to do that. Do you buy that? Absolutely. I think again it goes back to what I was talking about You got to give the world a solid, open, flexible platform. And flexible in terms of the technology, flexible in how they want to consume it. Some of our customers are fine with the SaaS software. But if I talk to, you know, my friends in the federal team, no, that does not work. And so how they want to consume it, they want it 100% air cap, you know, software that we talked about. So I think, you know, job for an infrastructure vendor like ourselves is to give the world an open platform, give them the knobs, give them the right API to look at. But the last thing I will mention is, you know, there's still a place for innovation in hardware. And I think some of my colleagues are going to get into some of those, you know, details, whether it's on our X series, you know, platform or Hyperflex, but it's really, it's going to be software defined. So SaaS service, and then, you know, give the world an open, rock-solid platform. Got to run on something. All right, thanks, DD. Always a pleasure to have you on theCUBE. Great to see you. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. In a moment, I'll be back to dig into Hyperconverged and where Hyperflex fits and how it may even help with addressing some of the supply chain challenges that we're seeing in the market today. It used to be all your infrastructure was managed here. But things got more complex and distributed and now IT operations need to be managed everywhere. But what if you could manage everywhere from somewhere? One scalable place that brings together your teams, technology and operations, both on-prem and in the cloud. One automated place that provides full stack visibility to help you optimize performance and stay ahead of problems. One secure place where everyone can work better, faster and seamlessly together. That's the Cisco InterSight Cloud Operations Platform, the time-saving, cost-reducing, risk-managing solution for your whole IT environment. Now and into the future of this ever-changing world of IT. With me now are Manish Agarwal, Senior Director of Product Management for Hyperflex at Cisco, at Flash for All. Number four, I love that on Twitter. And Darren Williams, the Director of Business Development and Sales, for Cisco, Mr. Hyperflex, at Mr. Hyperflex on Twitter. Thanks guys. Hey, we're going to talk about some news in Hyperflex and what role it plays in accelerating the hybrid cloud journey. Gentlemen, welcome to the queue. Good to see you. Thanks a lot, Dave. Thanks a lot. All right, Darren, let's start with you. So for a hybrid cloud, you got to have on-prem connection, right? So you got to have basically a private cloud. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, we agree. You can't have a hybrid cloud without that private element. And you've got to have a strong foundation in terms of how you set up the whole benefit of the cloud model you're building in terms of what you want to try and get back from the cloud. You need a strong foundation. Hyperconvergence provides that. We see more and more customers requiring a private cloud and they're building it with hyperconvergence. In particular, Hyperflex. Now to make all that work, they need a good strong cloud operations model to be able to connect both the private and the public. And that's where we look at insight. We've got solution around that to be able to connect that around a SaaS offering. That looks around simplified operations, gives them optimization and also automation to bring both private and public together in that hybrid world. Darren, let's stay with you for a minute. When you talk to your customers, what are they thinking these days when it comes to implementing hyperconverged infrastructure in both the enterprise and at the edge? What are they trying to achieve? So there's many things they're trying to achieve. Probably the most brutal honest is they're trying to save money. That's probably the quickest answer. But I think they're trying to look at in terms of simplicity. How can they remove layers of components they've had before in their infrastructure? We see obviously collapsing of storage into hyperconvergence and storage networking. And we've got customers that have saved 80% worth of savings by doing that collapse into a hyperconversion infrastructure away from their three tier infrastructure. Also about scalability, they don't know the end game. So they're looking about how they can size for what they know now and how they can grow that with hyperconvergence. Very easy. It's one of the major factors and benefits of hyperconvergence. They also obviously need performance and consistent performance. They don't want to compromise performance around their virtual machines when they want to run multiple workloads. They need that consistency all the way through. And then probably one of the biggest ones is that around the simplicity model is the management layer, ease of management to make it easier for their operations. Again, we've got customers that have told us they've saved 50% of costs in their operations model by deploying Hyperflex. Also around the time savings they make, massive time savings which they can reinvest in their infrastructure and their operations teams in being able to innovate and go forward. And then I think probably one of the biggest pieces we've seen as people move away from the three tier architecture is the deployment elements. And the ease of deployment gets easy with hyperconverged, especially with Edge. Edge is a major key use case for us. And what our customers want to do is get the benefit of a data center at the Edge without the big investment. They don't want to compromise on performance and they want that simplicity in both management and deployment. And we've seen analysts recommendations around what their readers are telling them in terms of how management deployments key for IT operations teams and how much they're actually saving by deploying Edge and taking the burden away when they deploy hyperconversions. And as I said, the savings elements, the key bit. And again, not always, but obviously those are case studies around about public cloud being quite expensive at times over time for the wrong workloads. So by bringing them back, people can make savings. And we again have customers that have made 50% savings over three years compared to their public cloud usage. So I'd say that's the key things that customers are looking for, yeah. Great, thank you for that, Darren. Manish, we have some hard news. You've been working a lot on evolving the hyperflex line. What's the big news that you've just announced? Yeah, thanks, Dave. So there are several things that we are announcing today. The first one is a new offer called Hyperflex Express. This is Cisco Intersite led and Cisco Intersite managed eight hyperflex configurations that we feel are the fastest part to hybrid cloud. The second is we're expanding our server portfolio by adding support for HX on AMD rack, UCS AMD rack. And the third is a new capability that we are introducing that we are calling local containerized witness. And let me take a minute to explain what this is. This is a pretty nifty capability to optimize for edge environments. So this leverages the Cisco's ubiquitous presence of the networking products that we have in the environments worldwide. So the smallest hyperflex configuration that we have is a two-node configuration, which is primarily used in edge environments. Think of a back room in a department store or an oil rig or it might even be a smaller data center somewhere around the globe. For these two-node configurations, there is always a need for a third entity that industry term for that is either a witness or an arbitrator. We had that for hyperflex as well. And the problem that customers face is where do you host this witness? It cannot be on the cluster because it's the job of the witness is to when the infrastructure is going down. It basically breaks sort of arbitrates which node gets to survive. So it needs to be outside of the cluster but finding infrastructure to actually host this is a problem, especially in the edge environments where these are resource constrained environments. So what we've done is we've taken that witness, we've converted it into a container reform factor and then qualified a very large slew of Cisco networking products that we have right from ISR, ASR, Nexus, Catalyst, industrial routers, even a Raspberry Pi that can host this witness. Eliminating the need for you to find yet another piece of infrastructure or doing any care and feeding of that infrastructure, you can host it on something that already exists in the environment. So those are the three things that we are announcing today. So I want to ask you about hyperflex express. Obviously the whole demand and supply chain is out of whack. Everybody's the global supply chain issues are in the news. Everybody's dealing with it. Can you expand on that a little bit more? Can hyperflex express help customers respond to some of these issues? Yeah, indeed Dave, the primary motivation for hyperflex express was indeed an idea that one of the folks on my team had which was to build a set of hyperflex configurations that would have a shorter lead time. But as we were brainstorming, we were actually able to tag on multiple other things and make sure that there is something in it for customers, for sales, as well as our partners. So for example, for customers, we've been able to dramatically simplify the configuration and the install for hyperflex express. These are still hyperflex configurations and you would at the end of it get a hyperflex cluster but the part to that cluster is much, much simplified. Second is that we've added in flexibility where you can now deploy these. These are data center configurations but you can deploy these with or without fabric interconnects meaning you can deploy it with your existing top of rack. We've also added an attractive price line for these and of course, these will have better lead times because we've made sure that we are using components that we have clear line of sight from a supply perspective. For partner and sales, this represents a high velocity sales motion, a faster turnaround time and a frictionless sales motion for our distributors. This is actually a set of discreet friendly configurations which they would find very easy to stock and with a quick turnaround time, this would be very attractive for the distees as well. This is interesting, Manish. I'm looking at some fresh survey data. More than 70% of the customers that were surveyed, this is an ETR survey again, I mentioned them at the top, more than 70% said they had difficulty procuring server hardware and networking was also a huge problem. So that's encouraging. What about AMD? That's new for HyperFlex. What's that going to give customers that they couldn't get before? Yeah, Dave, so in the short time that we've had UCS-AMD rack support, we've had several record-breaking benchmark results that we've published. So it's a powerful platform with a lot of performance in it and HyperFlex, the differentiator that we've had from day one is that it has the industry-leading storage performance. So with this, we're going to get the fastest compute together with the fastest storage. And this we are hoping that it will basically unlock the unprecedented level of performance and efficiency but also unlock several new workloads that were previously locked out from the hyper-converged experience. Yeah, cool. So, Derek, can you give us an idea as to how HyperFlex is doing in the field? Sure, absolutely. So both me and Manisha have been involved right from the start, even before it was called HyperFlex. And we've had a great journey and it's very exciting to see where we're taking and where we've been with the technology. So we have over 5,000 customers worldwide and we're currently growing faster year-over-year than the market. The majority of our customers are repeat buyers, which is always a good sign in terms of coming back when they've proved the technology and are comfortable with the technology. They repeat buyer for expanded capacity, putting more workloads on. They're using different use cases on there and from an edge perspective, more numbers of sites. So really good endorsement of the technology. We get used across all verticals, all segments to house mission-critical applications as well as the traditional virtual server infrastructures. And we're the lifeblood of our customers around those mission-critical customers. Think one key example, and I apologize for the worldwide audience, but this resonates with the American audiences, the Super Bowl. So the SOFIC stadium that house the Super Bowl actually has Cisco HyperFlex running all the management services through from the entire stadium for digital signage, 4K video distribution, and it's completely cashless. So if that were to break during Super Bowl, that would have been a big news article, but it was run perfectly. We, in the design of the solution, were able to collapse down nearly 200 servers into a few nodes across a few racks and have 120 virtual machines running the whole stadium without missing a heartbeat. And that is mission-critical for you to run Super Bowl and not be on the front of the press afterwards for the wrong reasons. That's a win for us. So we really are really happy with HyperFlex where it's going, what it's doing, and some of the use cases we're getting involved in, we're very, very excited. Come on, Darren, Super Bowl, NFL, that's international now. It is, I follow NFL. It's invading London. Of course, I see the picture of the real football over your shoulder, but anyway. Last question for Manish. Give us a little roadmap. What's the future hold for HyperFlex? Yeah, so as Darren said, both Darren and I have been involved with HyperFlex since the beginning. But I think the best is to come. There are three main pillars for HyperFlex. One is Intasite is central to our strategy. It provides a lot of customer benefit from a single pane of glass management. But we're going to take this beyond the life cycle management, which is for HyperFlex, which is integrated into Intasite today, and element management. We're going to take it beyond that and start delivering customer value on the dimensions of AI ops, because Intasite really provides us a ideal platform to gather stats from all the clusters across the globe, do AML and do some predictive analysis with that and return it back as customer valued actionable insights. So that is one. The second is UCS expand the HyperFlex portfolio, go beyond UCS to third party server platforms and newer UCS server platforms as well. But the highlight there, one that I'm really, really excited about and think that there is a lot of potential in terms of the number of customers we can help is HX on X series. X series is another thing that we're going to, you know, get announcing a bunch of capabilities on in this particular launch. But HX on X series, we'll have that by the end of this calendar year. And that should unlock with the flexibility of X series of hosting a multitude of workloads and the simplicity of HyperFlex. We're hoping that would bring a lot of benefits to new workloads that were locked out previously. And then the last thing is HyperFlex data platform. This is the heart of the offering today. And you'll see the HyperFlex data platform itself, it's a distributed architecture, a unique distributed architecture, primarily where we get our, you know, recording performance from. You'll see it get faster, more scalable, more resilient and we'll optimize it for, you know, containerized workloads, meaning it'll get granular containerized, container granular management capabilities and optimized for public cloud. So those are some things that we are, the team is busy working on and we should see that come to fruition. I'm hoping that we'll be back at this forum in maybe before the end of the year and talking about some of these new capabilities. That's great. Thank you very much for that. Okay guys, we got to leave it there. And you know, Manisha was talking about the HX on X series, that's huge. Customers are going to love that and it's a great transition. Because in a moment I'll be back with Vikas Ratna and Jim Leach and we're going to dig into X series. Some real serious engineering went into this platform and we're going to explore what it all means. You're watching simplifying hybrid cloud on theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. The power is here and here, but also here and definitely here. Anywhere you need the full force and power of your infrastructure hyper converged. It's like having thousands of data centers wherever you need them, powering applications anywhere they live but managed from the cloud. So you can automate everything from here. Cisco HyperFlex goes anywhere. Cisco, the bridge to possible. Welcome back to theCUBE special presentation, simplifying hybrid cloud brought to you by Cisco. We're here with Vikas Ratna, who's the director of product management for UCS at Cisco and James Leach, who was director of business development at Cisco. Gents, welcome back to theCUBE, good to see you again. Hey, thanks for having us. Okay, Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers and as organizations as they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, what are the most common challenges that they faced? What are they telling you? How is Cisco specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? Well, first, I think that's a great question and customer-centric view is the way that we've taken, is kind of the approach we've taken from day one, right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for there are customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications, right? That's where the rubber meets your proverbial road with the customer. And I would say that what we're seeing is the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data-centric applications, for example, those require that we are able to move and process large data sets really in real time. And the other aspect of applications, I think to give our customers kind of some, post some challenges would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today or the day that they make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application, that application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can keep up with today. So that creates some challenges around, how do I build the infrastructure? How do I right-size it without over-provisioning, for example, but also there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planning those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements. And within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges, we see customers who are being forced to move away from the like a modular or blade approach, which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits. And they have to move to something like a rack server model for some applications because of these needs that these data-centric applications have. And that creates a lot of opportunity for siloing the infrastructure. And those silos in turn create multiple operating models within a data center environment that again drive a lot of complexity. So that complexity is definitely the enemy here. And then finally, I think life cycles, we're seeing this democratization of processing if you will, right? So it's no longer just CPU focus, we have GPU, we have FPGA, we have things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So when those life cycles don't align for a lot of our customers, they see a challenge in how they can manage this, these different life cycles and still make a purchase without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So that is kind of the other bucket. And then finally, I think management is huge, right? So management at its core is really right size for our customers and give them the most value when it meets the mark around scale and scope. Back in 2009, we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took management outside the chassis, right? We put it at the top of the rack and that worked great for the scale and scope we needed at that time. However, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed, right? So we're talking about a hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centers, across clouds and having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those operational pieces that touch the application, that touch the infrastructure but they're not the same tool. They tend to be disparate tools that have to be put together. So our customers don't really enjoy being in the business of building their own tools. So that creates a huge challenge and one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. Right. You know, Jim, I said in my open that you guys Cisco sort of changed the server game with the original UCS but the X series is the next generation, the generation of the next decade which is really important because you touched on a lot of things. These data intensive workloads, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs, the whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed. So how's it going with the X series? You made a big splash last year. What's the reception been in the field? Actually, it's been great. You know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our UCS X series story. I think that, you know, the main reason they relate to it is they helped create it, right? It was their feedback and their partnership that gave us really those problem areas, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add significant value. So, you know, since we brought UCS to market back in 2009, you know, we had this unique architectural paradigm that we created. And I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history in terms of growth. What we're seeing now as X series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake. We're seeing, you know, both in terms of, you know, the number of customers, but also more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using and the types of workloads are growing, right? So we're growing this modular segment that exists, not just, you know, bringing customers onto a new product, but we're actually bringing them into the product in the way that we had envisioned, which is one infrastructure that can run any application and do it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. I think the other piece, you know, that, you know, we judge ourselves as, you know, sort of not just within Cisco, but also within the industry. And I think right now is a, you know, a great example. You know, our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, at a, you know, kind of a new next architecture. And we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth, even faster than any of our competitors have seen when they announced something that was new to this space. So I think that the ground up work that we did is really paying off. And I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a LeapFrog game as it may have been in the past. X-series is out in front today. And, you know, we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers. And, you know, we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So as our competitors hit walls, I think we're, you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June when we launched X-series to the world. And, you know, as we continue to do that, we're seeing, you know, again, tremendous uptake from our customers. So thank you for that, Jim. So Vikas, I was just on Twitter just today, actually talking about the gravitational pull. You've got the public clouds pulling CXOs one way and, you know, on-prem pokes pulling them the other way and hybrid clouds. So organizations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away and they need infrastructure to support that. And I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that confusion with the X-series, right? I mean, so how so? Can you explain that? Sure, and that's the right context that you've built up right there, Dave. If you walk into Enterprise Data Center, you see plethora of compute systems spread all across because every application has its unique needs. And hence, you find drive node, drive dense system, memory dense system, GPU dense system, core dense system, and a variety of form factors, one you do you for you. And every one of them typically come with, you know, variety of adapters and cables and so forth. This creates the silence of resources, fabric is brought, the adapter is brought, the power and cooling implication, the rack, you know, the space challenges. And above all, the multiple management plane that they come up with, which makes it very difficult for IT to have one common center policy and enforce it all across the firmware and software and so forth. And then think about the great challenges of the silence makes it even more complex as these go through the great references of their own. As a result, we observe quite a few of our customers, you know, really seeing a slowness in their agility and high burden in the cost of overall ownership. This is where with the X-Series powered by IntroSight, we have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities, they become more agile and drive lower TCOs. And we are delivering it by doing three things, three aspects of simplification. First, simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure and infrastructure which removes the silence of our factory. And infrastructure which reduces the Rackphone footprint that is required. Infrastructure where power and cooling but it's served in the Lord. Second, we want to simplify it by delivering a cloud operating model where they can create the policy once across compute network storage and deploy it all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade and any platform evolution that they are going to go through in the next two, three years. So that's where the focus is on just driving down the simplicity and lowering down their TCOs. That's key, less friction is always a good thing. Now of course, because we heard from the Hyperflex guys earlier, they had news not to be outdone. You have hard news as well. What innovations are you announcing around X-Series today? Absolutely. So we are following up on the exciting X-Series announcement that we made in June last year, Dave and we are now introducing three innovation on X-Series with the goal of three things. First, expand the supported workload on X-Series. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third, dramatically reduce the complexities in the data center by driving down the number of adapters and cables that are needed. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU node using a cable less and very unique X-Fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPUs to the compute node in the modular form factor. Thereby, our customers can now power in AIML workload or any workload that need many more number of GPUs. Second, we are bringing in GPUs right onto the compute node. And thereby, our customers can now fire up the accelerated VDI workload, for example. And third, which is what we are extremely proud about is we are innovating again by introducing the fifth generation of our very popular unified fabric technology. With the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and densities that we have on the compute node, our customers can now fire up the big data workload, the FCI workload, the FDS workload. All these workloads that have historically not lived in the modular form factor can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric, we've become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 gig end-to-end single port bandwidth and there are multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our CI partners to deliver the benefit of these performance through our Cisco Validate design to our CI franchise. And third, the innovations in the fifth gen fabric will again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters, maybe Ethernet adapter, maybe PowerChannel adapters or maybe the other storage adapters. They've reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable. So very, very excited about these three big announcements that we are making in this past release. Great, a lot there, you guys have been busy. So thank you for that, Vikas. So Jim, you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have, customers are adopting. What problems are they telling you that X-Series addresses and how do they align with where they want to go in the future? That's a great question. If you go back to and think about some of the things that we mentioned before in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what Vikas mentioned, I think is really important, those pieces that we just announced really enhance that story and really move again to the next level of taking advantage of some of these problems solving for our customers. If you look at, I think Vikas mentioned accelerated VDI. That's a great example. These are where customers, they need to have this dense compute, they need video acceleration, they need tight policy management, and they need to be able to deploy these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X-Series right now. We're hitting the market in every single way. We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the very top end configurations of CPUs and a lot of room to grow. We have the, you know, the premier cloud based management, you know, hybrid cloud suite in the industry, right? So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that Vikas just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the, through the use of the X-Fiberk which is really critical to this launch as well. And, you know, I think finally the fifth generation of Fabric Interconnect and Virtual Interface Card and Intelligent Fabric Module go hand in hand and creating this 100 gig and to end bandwidth story that we can move a lot of data. Again, you know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it, right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere, to be able to get the bandwidth that they need, to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible to fit exactly their needs. This is huge, right? It solves a lot of the problems we can tick off right away. With the infrastructure, as I mentioned, X-Fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here. You know, we're talking about GPUs today but in the future, there are other elements that we can disaggregate like the GPUs that solve these lifecycle mismanagement issues. They solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues like it does for GPU. We can do that with storage or memory in the future. So that's gonna be huge, right? This is disaggregation that actually delivers, right? It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing. This is something that customers can really get value out of day one. And then finally, I think the future readiness here, you know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPUs going to evolve but the CPUs are gonna evolve, the drives, you know, the storage modules are gonna evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly. The fabric that stitches them together is critical and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the developments that are coming with CXL with some of the PCI Express changes that are coming in the very near future. So we're ready to go. And the X-Fabric is exactly the vehicle that's gonna be able to deliver those technologies to our customers, right? Our customers are out there saying that, you know, they wanna buy into something like X-Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming into the future, right? We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted, but use them to disrupt their competition as well. So, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today and I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X-Series brings and, you know, again, you know, stay tuned because it's gonna keep getting better as we go. Yeah, a lot of headroom for scale and the management piece is key there. Just have time for one more question because give us some nuggets on the roadmap. What's next for X-Series that we can look forward to? Absolutely, Dave. And as we talked about and Jim's also hinted, this is a future-ready architecture. So a lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up, no different place. And there we are looking into enabling the customer's journey as they transition from PCI generation four to five to six without repenter place, as they embrace CXL without repenter place, as they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the disaggregated memory, disaggregated PCI or NVMe based dense drives and so forth. We're also looking forward to X-Fabric next generation which will end out that a lot dynamic assignment that GPUs anywhere within the chassis and much more. So this is again all about focusing on the innovation that will make the enterprise data center operations a lot more simpler and write down the TCO by keeping them not only covered for today but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on Dave. Okay, thank you guys, we'll leave it there. In a moment, I'll have some closing thoughts. We're seeing a major evolution, perhaps even a bit of a revolution in the underlying infrastructure necessary to support hybrid work. Look, virtualizing compute and running general purpose workloads is something IT figured out a long time ago but just when you have it nailed down in the technology business, things change, don't they? You can count on that. The cloud operating model has bled into on-premises locations and is creating a new vision for the future which we heard a lot about today. It's a vision that's turning into reality and it supports much more diverse and data intensive workloads and alternative compute modes. It's one where flexibility is a watchword, enabling change, attacking complexity and bringing a management capability that allows for a granular management of resources at massive scale. I hope you've enjoyed this special presentation. Remember, all these videos are available on demand at thecube.net and if you want to learn more, please click on the information link. Thanks for watching Simplifying Hybrid Cloud brought to you by Cisco and theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech coverage. This is Dave Vellante. Be well and we'll see you next time.