 Okay, we're back live in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE.com. I'm here with my co-host. I'm Dave Vellante of Wikibon.org. We're here with Jason Nolette, who is the VP of the Data Center and Enterprise Networking Business at Brocade. Jason, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks. First time. Glad to be here. It's awesome. Pleasure to see you. So, sans lands, IP, it's all going crazy. You know, actually, interesting. Fiber Channel, I know, has been a little boon for you guys lately. It's been bumping up. I thought Fiber Channel was dead. What's going on? No, that business is alive and well. I mean, customers appreciate, you know, five or six nines of reliability and the fact that it's proven in 90% of Global 1000 data centers. And so, it's a very, very sticky technology with a lot of loyalty and we continue to grow that business and customers love it. But a lot changing in networking, right? People talk about North, South, East, West. Talk about what's changed in the last five to 10 years. Yeah, well, you mentioned, you know, changing traffic patterns. Obviously, data center networks have historically been built for client server traffic patterns. A lot of North, South, client makes a request, server gets it, spits out the response. All of that is changing with virtualization in the data center. And we're seeing a real transition to East-West traffic. And the question is, what kind of a network do you need for East-West traffic? Well, you need a network that's built for server-to-server communications. And this is where, you know, our offering in VCS fabrics and Ethernet fabric technology and our VDX switching product line, this part of the VSpecs offering that was announced today is purpose built for that environment. Purpose built to foster the notion of server-to-server communication based on things like VM mobility, based on things like the disaggregation of applications that used to be monolithic running on one physical server, now componentized, running across a number of different servers that creates a lot of inter-processed communication traffic that is East-West, and you need a network built for that. So talk a little bit more about your point of view on converged infrastructure. Sort of, you know, VCE got it started, you know, a couple years ago, and then the whole market's exploded. So how has Brocade participated in that? And where do you see it going? Well, I think the announcement that was made today is a perfect offer for the market that kind of balances the notion of pre-validated proven solutions but maintaining some flexibility and some choice for the customer. So where I think some customers may prefer to get that fully locked down, single skew kind of converged stack, I think more customers are going to appreciate the benefits of a VSpecs-like offering that gives them the flexibility of choice, best of breed componentry, and a much broader, you know, set of technologies to choose from as they're building these data center environments. Well, we've quantified it on Wikibon. We just did a study, and I'll share this with you, Mark. I don't know if you can pull it up again. It's figure one. So in fact, if you look at the market, John, for converged infrastructure, it's $400 billion TAM. Now that includes everything, servers and networking and storage and services and infrastructure management software. The biggest piece of that is what we call reference architectures, which is what you talked about today. Exactly. I mean, these guys might not like us calling it a reference architecture, but essentially it's that we would define it as such. It's the choice, the proven solution, the tested, and that's really probably four to five times larger than the single skew market. So you're obviously agreeing with that. Yeah, absolutely. The other thing I'd say about it is that it's a much more channel-friendly offer than the single skew approach. The single skew approach runs the risk of kind of disenfranchising the channel because they used to bring systems integration capabilities to that offer. I think the reference architecture, the V-specs kind of offer, gives the channel a greater opportunity to consult in that choice, to help the customer size the deployment, help them choose the best and breed componentry and really brings them back into the fold in terms of being an advisor to their customers. Yeah, I mean, a single skew business today is a lot of large deals, obviously, and that's cool, especially for customers that are comfortable with that and can maybe deal with some of the integration on their own, but the smaller and mid-sized businesses don't have that capabilities. We had a number of channel partners on today talking about the services opportunity, John, and that's been a huge... Yeah, I'd like to talk about more of that purpose-built, we've been hearing that going way back to our discussion around Oracle versus SAP and the choice, and we're seeing more and more purpose-built solutions out there. A lot of integrated components we heard from Citrix earlier, she's been in the business for years and talking about how the building blocks to build these solutions are harder and harder. Now with these purpose-built products, now purpose-built architectures is opening up, so I'd like to get your opinion. What behind machine to machine do you see as the other opportunities for these purpose-built products? Well, I think there's a number of specialized application that like the notion of a purpose-built product or purpose-built stack, and in fact, when I talk to customers about their choice around the single-skew architecture versus the reference architecture, what I hear is the single-skew architecture is appropriate for some applications that would benefit from that kind of environment, but on the flip side of that is the notion of vendor lock-in. If they're going to build broadly, their IT infrastructure based on only purpose-built and fully converged infrastructure, it doesn't leave them a lot of choice, and it creates a vendor lock-in scenario that they're afraid of. It's one of the rubs that we're starting to hear about blade servers today, is that blade servers are not as flexible for the customer in the end because it's not as easy to repurpose a blade on a server as it is a 1U rack server that can be deployed in a variety of other areas, so I think we're going to see more and more offers like V-specs that are given the customer the choice and we're going to see purpose-built infrastructure that is specialized for a given use case or a given application. Yes, lock-in is nuanced, right? And I think a lot of customers that I talk to say it's about pricing power, they're afraid of the single skew solution because they're afraid that while it's alluring, that they're going to lose their pricing power. What a lot of companies are doing, and you're seeing this with, certainly VCE is very aggressive, Exadata with Oracle, they'll put white glove service around there, and we know what that's all about, it's a land grab, and hey, the same thing's probably going to happen with V-specs, we were at IBM yesterday and they said we're not going to charge a premium for our converged solution, their integrated solution, so over time, there's a value, however, I guess I would argue, I'd love to point a view on this for integration. So over time, shouldn't customers expect to pay more for integration, especially if it's going to cut their labor cost? Well, I think it depends on the form of integration you're talking about, if it's a fully converged integrated stack without a lot of choice and componentry, then I think it certainly feels good up front as you're deploying that more quickly than you would if you had to string it all together yourself, but in the long run, you're going to suffer from the vendor lock and you described, you're going to suffer from lack of pricing flexibility and leverage. I think there's also a kind of a less subtle impact there and that's around innovation. If you think about what drives innovation today, it's the ability for any vendor to come to the table at any place in the stack and deliver something that's innovative or differentiating. It's unlikely that any one vendor, even the big guys, will be able to innovate at every layer in the stack. So locking up that entire stack under one vendor's brand, I think, can harm innovation. It's better to leave that open the way VSpecs does and give vendors the opportunity to integrate and innovate at any point in the stack. Yeah, that's a trade-off. Stu Miniman talks about this a lot in terms of a lot of customers are on different cycles. They buy the storage or the lease it sometimes on a three-year cycle and they've got their servers on a different cycle and networking maybe on a different cycle. You've seen that as well. Absolutely. So something like this will allow you to maybe, okay, I'll take this piece now and I can bring these pieces then and maybe give me some time to sync it up, learn about the technology and then start rolling it out. It's a great point because refresh cycles don't come in a kind of, I'm gonna refresh my entire infrastructure top to bottom. You typically get a refresh portions of the infrastructure. It might be the network, it might be the storage and I think again of VSpecs like offering gives the customer the flexibility to go change out a component or a layer in that stack without having to change out the whole stack. So what else is changing here? I mean, we've gone over the years, we've talked a lot about fiber channel over at Ethernet as a form of convergence. You guys are big in the fiber channel space. What are you seeing there and what's changing in your? Well actually Intel brought up this point. We were talking about, we've always been talking about fiber channels the systems component and Intel, Jim was not talking about the systems concept and the data center obviously is now a system and I wrote a post called operating system but I mean you can look at it as an operating system but at the end of the day, customers have to make it work in a coherent system. So that's kind of we were getting this notion of hey, you know, there's spots for tech that by itself may look old but they perform well in the scheme of the new operating system. So with that, with fiber channel for example, what scope of new architectures are out there that you see kind of a changing of the perception and the reality of what's viable in the data center? Well I guess, you know, it just may be tied into fiber channel. I would say there's a number of emerging technologies that I think are quite favorable to the continued deployment of fiber channel and you take flash storage for example. You know, customers or companies putting flash storage into arrays means the storage network must perform to a level that ensures that the network doesn't become a bottleneck and essentially new to the value of the flash portion of the array. Fiber channel is perfectly suited for that, right? We've just released just about a half a year ago our latest generation fiber channel technology, 16 gig technology that ups the ante in terms of bandwidth, ups the ante in terms of latency and IO performance. So as customers deploying these emerging technologies like SSD, you need a network that's gonna keep pace otherwise it becomes a bottleneck. Yeah, so David Fleur has written a lot about this, our CTO at Wikibon about the whole IO architecture changing and Jim Blakely from Intel also talked about it. We're seeing new applications really take advantage of this structure. You're certainly seeing it from the big guys like Google and Facebook and the like. Are you starting to see in the enterprise yet? I think we're seeing some of that in the enterprise. I mean, the number of customers that can go out kind of build their own and roll their own architecture and their own componentry is pretty small. You have to be a very big enterprise with a lot of resources to go do that. So I think it's still a limited number of companies that are doing this kind of thing, but clearly the move to some form of private cloud architecture has really taken hold. I think all of the hype is dissipated and people are seeing some real value there. And that's where we think we've got network infrastructure in the form of ethernet fabrics and in the form of continued investment fiber channel that's very well suited for those private cloud architectures. Yeah, so you've got your Brocade has its feet in both camps with the acquisition of Foundry. I mean, you're clearly now playing in the IP network space. How's that all shaking out? Talk about that a little bit. It's terrific because what we've done with ethernet fabrics in particular is we've taken the best of the technology from the fiber channel space, not being very specific here around both ASIC technology and software technology, combined it with new emerging standards in Ethernet, some of which we got with the Foundry acquisition, things like trills, replacement for spanning tree and data center bridging for lossless Ethernet, combine those two things into this new technology, this new architecture we're calling ethernet fabrics. Yeah, I mean, you guys obviously have a deep heritage. Fiber channel is hard, you know, and that's your core. You know, at the same time, the world's going to ethernet. So, and FCOE plays into that, but there's an interesting schism going on in the marketplace yet at the same time we talked about the top of this interview. Fiber channel recently has popped up, why? Why is that? Well, I think the hype around FCOE has largely dissipated along with the value, and that is there's just not a lot of companies who are interested in kind of disrupting the core of their data center environments, the core of fiber channel sands to take the chance on a technology like FCOE. So while we invested very heavily in FCOE technology, we continued to be, you know, a proponent, the reality is there's not a lot of adoption, there's almost no adoption of FCOE end to end. There's some adoption from the server to the first top of the network at the top of RAC, but the reality is fiber channel works. It's reliable, it's highly performant, it's low overhead in terms of managing those networks, and so there's not a lot of reason to displace it, and customers continue to invest. You talk to customers, they don't want to make change. Sure. They just don't, but at some point, isn't it inevitable? I mean, just the cable bulk just gets too big, right? Yeah, I mean, if you look at the studies that have been done around the potential cost savings of converging from two physical networks to one physical network, it's quickly overrun by the operational complexity you get by running all that traffic on a single infrastructure. And again, most customers, especially large customers who invested in fiber channel historically, are very, very resistant to the notion of tampering with and taking undue risk in that part of the network. I don't touch my sand. Yeah, exactly. I'll kill you. How does the EMC now, this new program that they're running with just their channel, their investment's pretty high, and Jeremy was on talking about the vision, and it's pretty solid in listening to the channel, which if you don't listen to the channel, it'll burn you, because they want to make money as I always say, Dave always points out. The channel wants to make money. So how are you guys driving that through with EMC in terms of getting the mind share of the channel? Because channel's about money, but to get there, them to make you money and them money, you gotta get their mind share. Sure. So what are you guys doing to get the mind share of the channel partners and the solution? Sure, well, first of all, I think from a brocade point of view, participating in these kinds of initiatives and these kinds of solutions gives us a lot of credibility and good tailwind as a result of some of the partnerships that we're bringing as part of all this. But obviously you have to put some more money in the channel partners pocket. You have to have programs, you have to have incentives, you have to have a reason for them to want to go there. Again, I think this particular offer feeds the appetite for channel partners to reinvest in their opportunity to consult to the customer and not just sell them a fully integrated SKU like you might get with some of these fully converged infrastructures. So I think there's a great opportunity to bring channel partners back into the fold and give them that service, that consult of opportunity and participate in that part of the space. Excellent, Jason, well listen, thanks very much for coming inside the CUBE, sharing your perspectives about brocade and converged infrastructure. We'll see you around the shows, I'm sure. You'll see we're all to do it again. I'll be there. We'll have the CUBE there as well. We had Mr. Claco on there last year. He seemed to enjoy it, so we'd love to have him back. Fantastic. All right, thanks guys. Thanks, okay, we'll be right back with our next interview after this short break. And finally, let's go out to Utah where EMC's newest state of the art global technical support center officially opened last month. The ceremony was attended by EMC president and COO for computing infrastructure and cloud services, Howard Elias and Utah governor, Gary Herbert. The 25,000 square foot center will serve federal agencies and companies desiring US based services as well as central and South American companies requiring Spanish and Portuguese language support for their information technology needs. The facility has been operating since December and expects to employ about 500 people with high tech and customer service skills from Utah's skilled IT workforce by the year 2015. Thank you so much for being here. I can't tell you how excited I am about today's events. It's, you know, a wonderful opportunity for us to celebrate the opening of our newest technology support center. Maybe it's the pioneer spirit of Utah. You know, we know how to work hard and put in an honest day's work for an honest day's pay. And our production is really a very good for our labor force. We are in fact high tech savvy. I'm Conor Lomalfa. I'm a level one technical support engineer with the Clarion team. I like the satisfaction of helping someone whether it be fixing something that's broken or, you know, helping them solve an issue which is their new trouble with. I enjoy helping the customer. By locating our newest customer support center here in Draper City, EMC is demonstrating not only our commitment to world-class customer support, but also to creating good jobs and strong career opportunities here in the United States, enabled by our growth worldwide. My name is Gavin Heenend. I'm the technical support manager currently managing the symmetric support team here in Utah. You know, when they announced the technical support center opening up in Utah, I immediately thought of the opportunities for both myself from a clear perspective and also the opportunities for my family and thought it would be exciting for them and also to get involved at the very early stages of the start of the technical support center. I thought it would be really exciting. The skilled workforce and favorable business climate, which cause location and linguistic capabilities, allow EMC to better support the unique requirements of our customers of all stripes from the U.S. federal government, our growing base of customers here in the U.S., throughout the Americas, and across the globe. My name is Emerson Sena. I work as a technical support engineer too here at EMC on a product called Clarion. As I'm a Brazilian, I speak Portuguese in my first language and Utah is the main center for multilingual support. So I never thought I would have an opportunity to speak Portuguese living in America, and that has been great for me. EMC also intends to be an active participant in Utah's business community and to help provide students of all ages in Utah with valuable career skills that are in demand in today's high-tech economy. To this end, our Academic Alliance works with more than 750 colleges and universities worldwide, including here in Utah, to prepare students for information technology-based professional roles that didn't even exist a few years ago, roles such as a cloud architect and a data scientist. So I congratulate you all for the work that's being done, for the results you're providing for us, for the future optimism that you bring. You are the example of that hope that we all have here in living the American dream and we're doing it here in Utah.