 I'm here with Barton George of Dell, he's the director of marketing for web and tech. There's your colleague, Joseph George, is not in the room anyway, maybe joining us. I don't know where he is, exactly. Yeah, as I said, it'll be pretty obvious if he does join that we are not related, but. Well, we're glad we could get you guys on. I know, sort of, a last minute insertion, so thank you for coming. No, well, thanks for having us. Very happy to be here. So, everyone, you know, it was so cool about the Dell story with Hadoop is, you know, we talked to EMC, we talked to HP, they're all in the server business, all had proprietary servers. Dell made its move on being commodity, that people say commodity hardware, that was the PC. Hadoop is built for, quote, commodity hardware. But, I mean, Dell's got some high-performance machines. So, you guys must see a bit of uptick in cloud and Hadoop in particular, can you just share quick insight into, actually, the website, the website that business has been growing, now Hadoop's moving on to financial services and healthcare. What's the uptake been from your seat as a hardware vendor with Hadoop and big data? Well, just to roll the clock back a little bit, just to tell you how we got into this, about four years ago, we started a group called Data Center Solutions, and it was just because, just as you're saying, we're seeing this huge scale-out architecture taking hold, and it was people like Facebook, like Microsoft Bing, all these who are customers, that were designing in a way that enterprises weren't, which was basically, let's put the redundancy and availability in the software layer rather than the hardware layer, and then you scale out as you need to grow. So, we've had this business has been growing for about, it's been about five years now, and we've had a bunch of cloud solutions, and so as we start looking for other solutions that map well to the scale-out architecture, and then you look at what's happening in the world today in Web and Tech, and big data is a perfect fit. This whole idea that rather than scaling up, you're scaling out, so with something like Hadoop, you put it on these, as you say, come out of the hardware, the open hardware, and then as you need to run bigger and bigger batches, you just add servers as it goes along, so it maps really well to what we've been doing, so that's how we got into this whole area of Hadoop, and so we partnered with Cloudera, who are providing the distro, and then what we provide is we provide the servers, we provide the racks, the switches, and you can either get it, if you want it all done for you, we can rack and stack it for you and cable it ahead of time, or if you're more in the web space, we have a reference architecture, we have a deployment guide, and then you can do it yourself, and then there's the secret sauce, which is something we're kind of proud of, which is actually software that we've written, and most people don't think of Dell as a software provider, but there's a software framework called Crowbar, and I'm a walking advertisement for it here, it's the Crowbar shirt, but basically what we did was we took ops code Chef, and we wrapped it in software so that you can take it and you can deploy servers in hours as opposed to days, and so then what we did is you've got that software, which is... That was Chef? Excuse me? That was Chef? So they're Chef in the middle and the cookbooks, and then we wrapped it around it with what we call that as Crowbar, so Crowbar has Chef within it, the open source part of it, and then on top of it we have what is known as bar clamps, and so it allows you to use this Crowbar functionality for different things, so Cloud Foundry, VMware's Cloud Foundry is building a bar clamp now. We just announced this morning that we're open sourcing five of the bar clamps for Hadoop, so things like for Zookeeper, for Pig, for Cloud Dares Enterprise version, for Cloud Dares Community Edition, and then two more, and I forget which ones, but those are all, we're open sourcing those now, and so that's available. It actually started out life as a way to deploy OpenStack, so it was a cloud framework, and then we've taken it over and put it to use for Hadoop. We're going to ask you about OpenStack. Before I do, you guys have really gone after the open source movement. It seems like relatively recently, but maybe there's some other history there. Can you talk about how Dell sort of got into that and why, what was the motivation? Well, I think with open source in general, Dell has been a great platform for running, say Linux, if you wind the clock back about 10 years ago, it's a great platform for running Linux in other open source software, and so what we're doing is we're just looking out at what's available in the market and the way that Dell views our capabilities as we describe ourselves as open, capable, and affordable, and so we're looking for things that resonate with that, and so the whole idea of this whole ethos of being open and of allowing you to take what we have and combine it together in a non-proprietary way is some of the lens that we use to look at solutions with. So when we look at something like an OpenStack, we're one of the founding members of OpenStack from back of last July. In fact, before it was even a public developer conference, we were one of the initial people there alongside NASA and Rackspace and Citrix and a couple others, and so we've been involved with that since then, and then as I said, Crowbar was originally designed with OpenStack in mind. How do you get your OpenStack cloud deployed in hours as opposed to days or weeks? Well, so we're, you know, obviously, SiliconANGLE, we have a broad audience. We have up and down the stack kind of range of audience from executive to dev, down to the technical and developers. So we do a lot of developers watch and read our stuff. The big thing that everyone wants to know is developers love ease of use. So when you have hardware and software, usually you have very few developers who really understand both. So when you mention Chef, this is really I think of as provisioning, right? I mean, software developers love ease of use, right? So, I mean, how do you frame that? When, if you're Dell, you want to have that appeal to the software developers, obviously with OpenStack, you're kind of aligning with, you know, the whole onboarding of developers, because you want developers to just play, right? And compute, let that be kind of like taken care of. What strategies do you guys have for that? Is it to write more software? Is it to do more partnerships? How do you get those developers to love Dell and not look at you as just another box? And that's exactly what the team that I'm a part of the Web and Tech is focusing on, is developers. So there's other parts of Dell's a big company. We serve various verticals, banking, retail, et cetera. The vertical I'm looking at is Web and Tech. The key constituent within Web and Tech would be developers. So that's exactly what we're doing, is how do we appeal to developers and say that, hey, Dell understands what you need and how we can help you better. And so one of the obvious things are, as you say, developers like easy things, but only when it's in the boring part of it. So in the provisioning, that's where they want the help. Now, up in the analytics area, they want to build it themselves. That's where they really want to get, roll up their sleeves and get in and start designing. They don't want any waste any time on configuration management. Exactly, what they see is the drudgery. And so that's where we look at things. And virtualization to some point, a lot of configuration hassles. Well, it's getting much better than it was three years ago. Exactly, and that's the whole idea behind DevOps is on the operation side. And that's where we're starting to come up from is how do we make it easier to manage and deploy and to operate. And so that's the view that we're taking. And I think with everything we do, we're looking at a continuum from make, partner, or buy. So if you just take the cloud space, we've built our servers. We're writing the software for the deployment. We're partnering with people like the, people behind OpenStack or behind Joian. And then we purchase companies like Bumi or SecureWorks, who are other people. So it will depend for each and everything. We look at the opportunity and see where does it make the most sense. Does it make the most sense to partner, to builder, to buy? We got a question from Twitter. Okay. Mr. Twitter himself? Ask Barton how he intends to serve the market with cloud servers when the lead time for C2100 is sometimes one month plus. And so that's something that we're looking at is how do we operationalize that to make it quicker? Because that is something that you do need. You can't have a lead time of a month plus and be serving this market. And so that is something we're aware of and we're working to get down. Jeremy Carroll, at Jeremy underscore Carroll. Point is if you're gonna be elastic and flexible and fast time to market, you gotta be able to install infrastructure faster so you can dial it up. No, exactly. And because I think that's one of the biggest points here when you're talking about developers and you're talking about the companies we're talking about is the ramp time is, as you're pointing out, is really fast. And so if you aren't there to scale when they're ready to scale, then that's, then you're out of luck as I say. So I guess the answer for Jeremy is when you have them, unavailability, buy them. Get them, get them. There you go. And then charge a markup on eBay. And that'll get you through until they all source this out, right? But so we were talking earlier about how life can be a zero sum game. Yes, there's always some shrinkage in terms of more power. We saw HP launch moonshot, which is the initial strike into the low voltage, low power, arm chipset kind of deal. And that being kind of the new thing. But in general, yeah, you get better price value. But at the end of the day, whether you're buying boxes, Dell boxes as to be a provider enterprise or you move to the cloud, someone's got to buy the servers, right? So does that shift to the cloud service provider? So with OpenStack, what is your experience on the cloud service provider market? I mean, you know the enterprises love Dell. I mean, you've established a clear position, leadership position in enterprise. But as they stop buying servers or forecasted to do more virtualization and use more cloud, there's no magical server farm. People still got to buy more Dell servers. So how do you guys address that marketplace? And is that true? Well, yeah, so I think that there's a, it's a, once you say, again, as you say, the zero sum game. And so we're going to be looking to hosters and that actually falls within the web tech vertical. It does fall into vertical. Because it's that same type of scaled out architecture. So we're going to those people and saying, hey, we have the scaled out architecture. And on top of that, we can put OpenStack to help you with this. And so that's a big example of that is Dreamhost in Los Angeles. And we had a big sale to them. We have a case study with them and they're a big host down there and they're running OpenStack. And they're also writing a bar clamp for Crowbar for one of their languages that they're producing as well. So it's a good example of someone who is using all the components that we're putting together. And so we'll start looking more at those types of players. How is OpenStack evolving? How real is it? We've had some debates internally amongst the SiliconANGLE team and we've also participated with debates in the market. HP recently joined OpenStack and that was kind of like weird, okay, what's cloud strategy they're going with today. You guys have been pretty committed to this obviously with Rackspace. We've been really the founding father in the beginning. Where is it? Is it going to fork? Is it going to have its own little flavors? Are people going to hijack it? Is it going to be slowed down? Are there competing interests all of the above or none of the above or? Yeah, I think it's very... That's kind of the question everyone's mine. Is it marketing hype or is it like the real deal? I guess it depends on how much you believe what they're talking about. It's obviously the amount of progress that it has made in a little over a year is astounding. That being said is the marketing even more further out in front of that. So I think it depends on what the expectations are. We know that, yes. So I think, yes. If you were to look at any project... It's a great project. We simply would love it. Yes, it has come, but at the same time, it's not going to cure cancer tomorrow but I think some people are thinking that it will. And so I do believe you are going to see a little bit of the backlash because people are expecting so much for it. But at the same time, I think there is the reality that it is a true platform. So, yeah. Well, you know, one of the research projects that Dave and I are kicking off is actually, and we've been debating on theCUBE since when June with the HP Discover is, OpenStack and a lot of these open source projects are totally noble on their own, stand on their own merit. Really, you cannot support perfect, right? So just as involved hypervisors, no one wants Locke and no one wants Oracle but is there demand for, is the demand so much is so high that the open source still is too slow? So that's the thing that we're actually trying to put our finger on. We don't know the answer. So our thesis is that, you know, when you have demand, people want solutions today. So that's an issue. We're trying to get our arms around it. So what do you say to that is, because we're trying to look around here at the Dupro and look at the demand, is demand is so high that open source needs to go faster or everything's okay? Complicated question. But I do think that there's a lot of people who are working at it from many different angles. I think one of the things that we're learning from this conference is that for the people who are leading the PAC, the eBay's, the Etsy's, the Amazons, the Facebook's, the Googles, those people are using Hadoop to its capacity at this point. Then there's the other people, as the gentleman from J.P. Morgan this morning was talking about, which is there's this fear intrepidation as well with what's coming on. But they can't ignore it because it is going to provide true value. But it's not yet at that point where the average Joe or Josephine can pick up with it. So I think we're gonna see a lot of stuff that needs to be done to take what's been done by the cutting edge folks, the bleeding edge, and make it more available for prime time. And that's where the open source group has to fill in. I think at the cutting edge it's doing great. It just needs to provide more of that ease of use and knitting together. It will keep an eye on that. We're here inside the cube with Barton George from Dell.