 Okay, we're back here live inside theCUBE's Silicon Angle.com's flagship telecast. We go out to the events to extract a signal from the noise. This is our exclusive coverage of OpenStack Summit in Portland, Oregon. I'm John Furrier with Jeff Frick, my co-host today. And our guest is Jeff O'Neill from NetApp. You guys have some news here, breaking news here on theCUBE. It's fantastic. So let's jump in, you guys, and brought some code to the table. This is OpenStack Summit where all the top developers and big companies and emerging startups are coming together to build the foundation and tool, the tool chest for the cloud builders. So let's talk about your news real quick. So you guys announced some things to share us with the news. Okay, so we announced both the blueprint and prototype code to bring file shares, a file share service capability to OpenStack. That's, we've put that out and we want to really start the conversation about file shares. One of the things that we find very interesting about this is that if you look at OpenStack and its future role as the infrastructure to service platform going forward, that it's going to have to communicate with all different types of storage systems. And file shares is an open gap. There's a fun fact, right? 18 exabytes out of the 27 exabytes of total disk capacity that are shipped are shipped into file shares right now, file share service. So our customers are asking for it. There's a need for it. That's where we're going. Last night we were at, we had a little developer meetup with some developers and some analysts and the analysts kind of come in two flavor in this market. You have old school cloud analysts who've been covering public cloud, infrastructure as a service, and some platforms as a service. Then you have now other analysts looking at the implications for the large enterprise and large service providers. And their service level agreements and some of the compatibilities with existing stuff and storage is obviously a big part of it and still growing whether it's storing for big emails and or having stuff to store it. And then you get flash memory, all these new innovations going on storage. But why is NetApp such an important ingredient right now? Because I will say that your filers and your solutions are a nice now ingredient for these cloud builders. It's a really big tool in the tool chest. Why is it important in the context of OpenStack? Explain why the enterprises and large infrastructures need this OpenStack and how it relates to your announcement. So our customers are coming to us and asking for a few things. They're asking for some form of intelligent data protection. They've got varying SLAs. So that's one of the big things that they're after, right? So providing that is probably first and foremost in the requests. They're also looking for non-disruptive operations and how do we deliver against that? And finally, they're looking for predictable scale and they want scale. And then there's some other fun stuff that they're starting to look at so at varying performance level. So depending on the workload use case that they're after. So I'm going to read a quote here on the press release. NetApp is eager to work with the OpenStack community to establish the optimal path for bringing critical shared file service capabilities to the core of OpenStack. Can you explain to the folks out there why OpenStack Summit is very relevant today? Obviously, you guys also have relationships with Amazon. You guys will play, you're like the neutral third party when it comes to all these cloud wars going on. So you're playing on in different camps and you have supported open source in the past. Explain why the core of OpenStack needs this kind of a broach. Okay, well first and foremost, I mean, you saw the crowd out front, right? So it's really exciting. OpenStack is going to be one of the players going forward in infrastructure to service. Storage is underlying that. NetApp has always been an open source based company. We work very well. Yes, another fun fact that people don't realize is we've been committing since 2001 into the Linux kernel and we are the maintainers of NFS in the Linux kernel. So those are some of the things that, you know, where we're very much involved and we just see OpenStack as a natural migration. We're an innovation company. OpenStack is an innovation at the management plan for infrastructure to service. Not everyone gets to do the clean sheet of paper. I'm outside Facebook. I was talking earlier on the intro as a great example of a company that can start with a clean sheet of paper and they only have one app. It's called Facebook. So like, okay, they can build their own stuff, do the memcache, all that innovation. They're still buying industry standard gear, but not everyone has that clean sheet of paper. There's a lot of legacy, disaster recovery, policies. You have all kinds of these inherent issues and decades of practices, management software, management plan. So can you talk about the challenges that that brings to a large enterprise when they want to accelerate their build out of cloud infrastructure? And how does, and what should they be thinking about when they look at that? Well, it always goes, first thing I always think of it is it goes back to people, right? You may want to do something brand new. You may want to do something in green field, but you're working with people that have skill sets and as you said, have procedures in place and have exabytes of storage in place. And they're looking for ways to move to the brave new world. And we all see the efficiencies and the gains that are to be there. They're looking for a path from here to there. And you're right. If you start with a clean sheet of paper, fantastic. But most companies don't have a luxury. So Jeff, let me follow up on that. So what are some of the apps that you're seeing in the enterprise? I'm sure the CIO is kind of freaking out. He's trying to make this move. He's got a whole stack of stuff. Where do they, you know, where do they start? Where's kind of their, how do they get their feet wet in this brave new world? Where folks that we're talking to are kicking the tires is what we think of as a utility cloud. And so they're looking for ways to very cost effectively create a dev test environment under OpenStack control and build out a cloud. And that's a great way for them to get their feet wet. And from the numbers they're looking at, they can do this very effectively using an OpenStack approach. So they can almost take that blank sheet of paper approach, build this little environment for kind of specialty kind of instances where people are doing a little developer project or kind of standalone project. Yeah, tons of development activity going on and they can do that for their own use. So that's the kind of folks that have approached this earliest first. And where do you think some of the real breakthrough, heavy lifting, mission critical? Okay, we're really ready to jump in with both feet and adopt this methodology, if you will. What are some of the first couple tipping point apps you think might fall? Okay, so the, well, it's funny. I think of, I almost think of this as an app, right? From our point of view is a utility cloud is an app. You're enabling developers to do what they want when they want and giving them access to things like intelligent data protection so that they can actually write to what they need to accomplish from a business perspective. Okay, interesting. So it's thinking of it that way. Jeff, talk about, so I want to ask you about Flash. And obviously we were at IBM had an event last week. And obviously Flash memory is obviously going crazy right now. And it's creating a lot of opportunities in software. So the open source world is really gaining ground using storage as an enabler versus just storing stuff. So software is a key part of that. What's, how does that play into this? Cause storage is not going away. That's pretty clear. It's growing. So the new paradigm is scale out open source. And that's what people are trying to get to. And they might not get to an extreme level like a Facebook, but large enterprises want to reduce their footprint costs and increase their performance. And then doing it by throwing a lot more gear out there and storing stuff. So how does that play into the trend with OpenStack? So I'd say this is fun. This is early days, right? And we're all figuring this out as we go. So the notion you're really hitting on is how do you make varying performance levels available? So it's kind of that quality of service frontier and building SLAs in and making Flash available at one end of it and capacity. Right now OpenStack is a lot more focused on bringing up the capacity tier. The core building of the cloud. So I talked about a term you guys kick around called non-disruptive operations, which it's more of a categorical way to describe what everyone wants. I mean, no one wakes up in the morning and says, hey, how's your non-disruptive operations doing today? So let's unpack what non-disruptive operations means. There's a lot of stuff that's under the hood of that. I mean, that means people don't want to disrupt their operations when either automating, configuring, managing the fluidness of data. Right, so take me through what is non-disruptive and is it a goal? Is it a destination? Is it a state of mind? Is it technology all the above? Yeah, all the above, I'd say. I break it down. I keep it very simple for me is what did the customer ask me for? And this comes, when we started building out non-disruptive operations some years ago for clouds, it was the notion of I need to do things like tech refreshes and software upgrades and for data that has varying SLAs and various levels of protection have been incorporated into that. And I can't take, I've got hundreds of clients in a multi-tenant environment, right? I've got hundreds of clients sitting there running on top of this. How do I manage through that process underneath? And maintain integrity with the applications. So there's a bunch of magic that happens underneath that. It's not easy and it's not easy to do a scale and so that's the areas that we work at around non-disruptive operations. And talk about data protection because obviously that data integrity is not a clean black or white situation. What is the current state of the art when it comes to data protection in these cloud environments? Especially some security issues, there's a lot of compliance. There's a lot of management facts but also there's some technical factors. What are the key technical factors and management factors that you're seeing right now? So, for us it's the, trying to think about how to, I come at this from a different viewpoint. So things that we need to do is provide, it always goes back to how do you provide recovery in seconds for customers. They can't have downtime on their application. So it's rapid recovery of data. It's keeping the network open. Those are some of the issues that we see where we bring value to the current state of the art and OpenStack around just basic backup recovery but then you have disaster recovery and how do you move off site? How do you keep, the problems don't change just the way you go about solving them changes. Talk about the proposals you guys put forth this morning. So in your news release you mentioned that you put a proposal, you said you brought code to the table. Can you explain what that is? Yeah, sure. Basically we've proposed, there's about three pieces to it if you break it down. There is broadly the notion of an API that abstracts the file system and it will work with any file type but allows you to interface with any file type. And then there's two specific implications that we put in place. So the first we put in place was for generic Linux capability. So we can talk to Linux and the file component of Linux. And the other is a more specific implementation around that capabilities. And once you're there, then you get the advantages that NetApp has around managing files, moving files, protecting files, replicating files. So Jeff, I have a question on the business side. So when the CIOs are making this move to the cloud and they're putting in all this infrastructure and the investment, do you see it more as a, is it a carrot or is it a stick? Is it, you know, they're getting beat up on the other side and they know they have to get into this space or is there some economic models that you use or that they're pulling from that are just so compelling that they must go there soon? It's both. I mean, you know, it kind of depends on the CIO. It depends on the application. It's very compelling from a cost perspective and people see that possibility. And then they look at, well, do I have people that can execute against it? So they're being, as you would guess, cautious generally and looking for people they can trust to get to a solution that they can get started with and build out from. Okay. And still, are most of those experts coming from the product side, for coming from the companies like yours and that have experience with their infrastructure and how they're running and... We're there. We have, you know, certainly we're there. We have a lot of customers coming to us and we're working with them. There's an awful lot of great innovation going on here. I mean, that's what's so fun about this conference is there's small companies bringing innovations, big companies bringing innovations. Whoever's got a good idea gets a voice. It gets in. And that's really the benefit of the whole open source movement is there's a lot of collaborators, the innovation power, I would think just far outstripped in an individual company can do it. Yeah. If you bring code to the table, you can talk. If you can participate. And that's cool. Yeah. What about for the folks out there, what your take is on OpenStack? Because obviously you guys are big participant in the community. There are a lot of issues in the enterprise that quite frankly have to be addressed, you know, positives, compliance, NFS support, all the stuff that needs that no one, you know, they just have to be addressed and supported. And so you have this growth of an OpenStack community that's like a lot of, it's an open source project. You have the Cowboys, right? The Cowboys and, you know, pun intended, kind of with the rack space, you know, dig there. But, you know, it's a fast charging organization. NetApp is in these large enterprises, they're very conservative, and they need to have certain things. Why is this year's OpenStack different? Can you talk about the vibe here and why we think it's at an inflection point, which we stated earlier, I want to get your take on it. Is it at an inflection point and why is it so important this year? Well, again, you start with the crowds and you say, yeah, it's at an inflection point. You don't get this many people here this interested without that. The other thing I think that I think is the key is we're on the cusp, we're not there yet, but we're on the cusp of having a number of commercial distributions come out. And with those commercial distributions, you move it out of the science project and into pragmatic adoption by mere mortals, right? You can't underestimate that. It goes back to the people question. Yeah, and I was really critical about OpenStack. When, first of all, I was there before it started. We're talking to Rackspace, so I just saw the whole migration. But the thing that I was really critical on OpenStack at the beginning was, it was like a marketing pool part. Everyone's jumping in from a marketing, but what happened was it really got really interesting fast about a year and two years ago when software defined networking started hitting the scene when you saw real guys coming in saying, hey, if we collaborate and come together and build code, you mentioned bringing code to the table, stuff got done quick. It moved quickly from a hype to implementation. It really has. And can you comment on that and kind of where you see it going? Well, the first thing I see is it feels like the whole open source approach has matured and it's gotten more efficient, more effective, perhaps. We've been in OpenStack now. This is our fifth conference that we've participated in. We've been there. From the beginning. Yeah. Yeah, Rackspace has been a good partner for a long time. Many of the other players here are also partners. The, so to your cowboy comment. Rackspace Cowboys. That's Texas. It's here in Portland, though. Just closer to Seattle, not by accident. So I guess I go back to you have the common distribution. Our approach has been to be putting code in upstream from that. So you have that in these commercial distributions that are rolling out. We're there. I mean, that's been, our approach has always been technical. We always, we always try and under promise over deliver. I mean, that's kind of a. Yeah, and that's always been innovative in a typical Silicon Valley company. What would you share with the folks out there? What's your take to the CIO message? What's your CIO message with the folks out there around why OpenStack is important? Is it the build factor? Is it the fact that it's faster time to market for cloud? Is it a service plane? Is it, what is the key message to a CIO sitting there scratching their head going? You know, I'm trying to understand this OpenStack movement. You know, how should I put my arms around that? Okay, so as you think about building out the cloud, infrastructure service, you're building platforms on top of that. You may be building software as a service capability on top of that potentially, is the first thing you got to get to is that infrastructure service level and you need a management plane across that. And you need a management plane that's going to let everybody play because you want the innovation from the largest number of players. That's what OpenStack is delivering to the CIO, is you can start down that path with now a pretty well-defined management plane. You know, continue to... Certified by the crowd. Certified by the crowd, which is actually proven to be a pretty good model. And now with commercial distributions coming out, you have access to that. But again, it's the don't overthink it. It's a management plane for infrastructure as a service. It's the Lego blocks for cloud. Yeah. So you guys, obviously when big, obviously storage is important, you're fitting into that Lego blocks, is the big challenge from a white space standpoint going to be the automation configuration? Where are the major areas you see a lot of action going on in terms of the architecture and the tool chest, so to speak? So we're very involved in, I guess we're not supposed to use code names anywhere, sender, but the OpenStack block storage capability, we've been involved in that. It's a very big area that's going to continue to build. But then you look at areas like glance for image management, there's still a lot of work going on there. There's a lot of work going on in quantum, the networking game. I mean, all those pieces continue to evolve. And it's, well, it is all about automation. It's all about simplification. It's how do you get up and running with infrastructure to serve a stack? That's what it's about. We're here with Jeff O'Neill with NetApp, obviously breaking it down. Five years with the OpenStack was called the design summit back in the day. And again, this was really driven out of the rack spaces when they started getting in cloud, when they bought cloud sites and they realized how hard it was to build cloud, they realized that it had to be a group of people come together and provide those best practices and tools and code. So it's great momentum, it's a real inflection point, final parting question for you. Share with the folks through the five year history since you've been involved with NetApp. How does this relate to scaling up in terms of this community? There's a lot of folks that are looking at this community to join for OpenStack. It's got a lot of real credibility and momentum now, never seen before. It's really got some lift. What would you share with the folks that are either kind of tipping their toes on the waters, thinking about how to get involved? And that could be both developers and technology companies and enterprises. What would you share with them? Is the vibe right now? Where's the roadmap? Okay, so you got to realize I'm the OpenStack guy within NetApp. That's a biased question. That's okay, be biased. Share your opinion. I'm biased. I'm seeing a turn, it is turning right now. We're at the cusp. We really are at that inflection point as you've mentioned. It's time, if you're not already in POCs, and I mean, frankly, many, if not most of our customers are already in POCs. It's time to get your toes wet and work on this, and this is clearly there. You've got, I haven't heard the count yet, but you probably have it. There's a big crowd out there. Yeah, over 3,000 here in Portland. I mean, this has just taken on a life of its own. OpenStack is at an inflection point crossing over into what a mainstream enterprise service product telcos. Anyone who's investing in infrastructure and future solutions like mobile and software-led infrastructure as OpenStack is a key ingredient. Obviously, this modern era of the data center, software-defined data center, whatever you want to call it, you guys are going to do well on that as storage is not going away. But having storage that's flexible and adaptable and agile in the environment is critical. And I think this is where the futures have headed. Again, this is the beginning. We're excited to be here exclusively. This is SiliconANGLE's coverage from theCUBE. We'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.