 It's theCUBE, covering OpenStack Summit 2016, brought to you by the OpenStack Foundation and headline sponsors Red Hat and Cisco. Now here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Graceley. Hi, this is Stu Miniman here with theCUBE's coverage of OpenStack 2016 here in Austin. Happy to have on the program. We've got John Ankhich who's not only the CTO of Rackspace, but was one of the 75 people that were at the first OpenStack Summit, of course, 7,500 here. And Darren Hanson, first time on the program, VP and general manager of the OpenStack private cloud. Darren, you were part of Rackspace then, but not one of the 75. Right, running it as part of the business, but part of OpenStack for the last four years. So guys, really appreciate you joining on the program. Of course, Rackspace, I always think back, it was Rackspace and NASA, the early days, been part of it. John, maybe give us a little bit of a personal reflection. 7,500 people, did you ever think this would be it? Is this what you thought it was like? Well, it certainly exceeded all of our expectations as an open source project and as a community. I mean, this thing has gone way beyond what we expected. We'd hoped that it would be super successful. We'd hoped that it would take on a life of its own and go everywhere, but when you start something like that, you really have no sense of what it's going to become. You want to get the community behind it. That was the whole point of this thing. And look where we've come, 7,500 people here and obviously a much larger community that couldn't be here necessarily, but a great story. Yeah, I always look, in our job, we have to kind of forecast. Forecasting something that doesn't exist is really tough, but all of us that have been around technology a while, we know these things take time. It's not like, oh, from, hey, we have this idea and we start building code. Well, 100% of the Fortune 500 should be using it for all of their environments in the next 12 to 24 months, right? It's like, it takes a little bit of time. Well, we're six years in and it's a pretty good track record for any open source project to go from zero to something that as large as OpenStack is and in that short of time, I think that's pretty telling that the community got behind it and really put their efforts into the project and built something great. So that's the most impressive thing to me is that six years in, you've got Fortune 100 companies running production. 50% of them, is that what they said? 50% running production workloads on this platform. I don't think that six years into the Linux operating system that many enterprises were serious about running Linux in production, so that's how fast it's running. When you take any popular operating system, and you say, how many of those over any five, six-year period released every cadence, every single time, didn't miss, and that's one company. You guys are dealing, the OpenStack foundation is what, 350 companies. It's a lot of contrarian views on things, a lot of dependencies. That's an amazing feat. Just in and of itself, and then you think about where it's gone. Jonathan talked about it's private cloud, it's public cloud, it's NFV, it's research. It's got huge reach. Truly. All right, so Darren, you've got a number of offerings. When you talk about kind of OpenStack private cloud from Rackspace, can you walk us through some of the various flavors and consumption options that you guys offered? Sure, so what makes Rackspace fundamentally different and differentiates us in the OpenStack space is the way that we deliver OpenStack as a service, and the way that customers and companies that we serve can really consume OpenStack with an operating partner that does a couple of things. We simplify OpenStack, we take a lot of the complexity and all the decisions and configuration choices out of your journey for you. So we have already deployed for over 100 customers, we know exactly what an effective reference architecture looks like, we know exactly how to help you scale, help you grow with your cloud, make sure that it meets your SLAs, make sure that it performs well. And then the second big barrier that we help customers overcome is the one of lack of talent in the industry, or lack of talent that they can hire, train and retain for their business. And so when you work with us and we deploy it as a service, you have access to, again, a founder of OpenStack and still by a factor of many, the world's foremost operator of this technology at scale. And so by delivering it as a service, reducing complexity and giving you access to the deepest bench of talent in the industry, we're able to deliver OpenStack for you with an SLA. So we also have the industry's first and still leading uptime SLA for the OpenStack APIs so that for the applications you're deploying, your application developers, your businesses, your consumers, your customers can be assured that you'll have a platform that's there for those applications. The couple of flavors you mentioned, we've always had our Rackspace Private Cloud powered by OpenStack, which is really focused on the open standard deaf core powered by OpenStack, where the software is all included and you're not paying anything additional for the software itself. And then we've also, through our long and deep history with Red Hat, we have a managed service offering around Red Hat's OpenStack platform, which is Rackspace Private Cloud powered by Red Hat. So if you have an affinity for Red Hat and investments in that technology, great. If you are passionate about the true OpenStandard and don't want to pay a subscription, great. And just one more add on to that. The option to consume OpenStack in a Rackspace data center or a customer premises data center or a Kolo partner, we call that OpenStack everywhere. And it's essentially the option to put it wherever you need it. And that helps customers with security, compliance. Data sovereignty. Data sovereignty, all the things that would be considerations for consuming a private cloud in the first place. We've really tried to cover those bases with our offer. Maybe if you can elaborate a little on that. When we've talked to customers today, it's like, what do you have? What's core to your business and where do you have the skill set there? So my CTO wrote a piece, got two years ago and he said, all you enterprise customers, you stink at data centers. Power, cooling, space. There's a certain number of customers that do this really well and do it at scale. They have greater PUEs and densities and know how to take care of all this. Most of us are kind of hacks at it. So that's an easy piece and as you move up the stack, there's more and more that you could say, well, is it important or do I do it? Where are we in that maturity as you're seeing with your customers? Well, I guess the big question is who are you? Are you a user of the cloud or are you a creator and maker and operator of the cloud? And most companies that we encounter have sort of come to the conclusion that they don't want to be makers and operators and owners of clouds, they want to be users of clouds, but there's still elements of the private cloud that are very attractive. I mean, we just talked about a few of them, but the point is that we should be able to accelerate companies to be able to be users and innovators. I mean, we talked today about disruption and on the, I guess the keynote stage was all about mode one versus mode two, IT and accelerating that innovation and disruption that users of clouds are trying to get there and be those leaders in the business, but they don't want to be in the weeds of running and owning and operating data centers. They don't even want to see the data center anymore. Most of the developers that are leading the way, they don't want to be down on those weeds. Now, there are people that work at Rackspace that definitely want to own and operate and run open stack clouds at scale and that's what we've become very, very good at. Well, we live in interesting times. You've got things like the kind of the outfall of what happened with Snowden and people wondering, where can I trust my data? Where is it in my country? We hear a lot of the large web-scale public cloud providers will talk about launching a new region and then you go, well, they've got 20-something regions, but they're not in those 18 countries or those 180 countries, what do you do? Talk a little bit about what those sort of things mean for companies, because some companies might be great in the United States, but when they want to expand overseas, they want to go through an M&A. How much does that come into play as you're talking to them? So that's a large part of open stack everywhere and how it has evolved as a product at Rackspace. So we've always had the ability to manage an open stack cloud in a customer's data center or another country, but it was always, their capital outlay, they buy the gear and we kind of have remote hands supporting it. With a major financial services provider in Canada was the first time that we saw demand for a different level of, I want you to deliver, almost a hosting model, I want you to deliver fanatical support, I want you to deliver open stack to my business, but I've already made a significant investment in a data center asset. I've got data sovereignty issues in the country of Canada where the data has to reside in Canada, so I want you to deliver what you do in one of your nine Rackspace data centers that are world-class, I just want you to happen to do it in my data center. So what does that look like? Where Rackspace owns the gear, Rackspace delivers a cabinet-level solution with everything that we need so that a Canada data center looks just like a Rackspace data center. So this is a company-owned data center that for any Racker that's managing that environment and managing open stack, it just looks like another Rackspace data center. So with the announcement we made 10 days ago, we can now start talking to institutions in Germany or France or Brazil or some place where because of data sovereignty and because of concerns over who's looking at my data, my country demands that I have control over my data. Now we can start talking about truly meeting customers where they are, both from the standpoint of the cloud journey and various, literally, geographically, where they are and where they need to be. I think Snowden, his revelations were just a wake-up call to everybody. It was kind of an eye-opening experience to sort of see what, pull back the covers and see what was going on. And I think countries and companies alike are really concerned about where their data sits. I just saw an article over the weekend where Mexico's voter data was exposed in the public cloud and it's like, well, why was it in the U.S. in the public cloud and somebody in that government's now scrambling to try to figure out what went wrong? Why didn't our data sovereignty policy work and why isn't that in a cloud in Mexico somewhere? And you've got to really think about that happening over and over again all over the world because it is. It's just, not all of them are hitting the press and the headlines, but somebody in that country is starting to think about where the data sits and what kind of data is going out and how are we leaking it and we're really going to have to, as a society, as a, you know, on the world scale, you really have to think about how this plays out over the next few years. I think public and private cloud are really the future, but those are our options. So sort of scary security stuff aside, like if you're talking to the folks that worry about budgets, what do the economics look like of either cloud anywhere or managed open, I mean, Boris from Morantis got up today and talked about it and he said, look, nine out of the 10 challenges are people in process. Those are hard to make go fast, right? You know, talk about what the economics look like when somebody else manages that sort of, maybe sometimes people call it nondifferentiated and you can focus on applications. The great thing about working with Rackspace and our fully open source kind of using the OpenStack Ansible deployment tools, everything open source, pulling from public gets and deploying true OpenStack. The benefit of that model is that the software is all built in. So what's really great about the keynote that talked about process and operations, we sell process and operations, we don't sell software. So that's really the economic benefit of working with Rackspace is we can help you deploy and take advantage of the power of all of this technology and do it in a way that we've proven can scale and can remain up and can perform for your workloads where you don't have to worry about paying for software because OpenStack, you would hope, is all about free and open source. So that really makes the economic model interesting from our perspective where it can scale really well if you're just talking about paying for process and operations, which is what we fundamentally focus on is helping you with that. Now we always have to have a conversation with customers, especially around legacy workloads. The conversation we have pretty typically with mid-market and enterprise companies is it's not as simple as just taking everything that you're running on traditional virtualization technologies and oh, OpenStack is cheaper than all this really expensive software that I pay VMware and others for. I'll just move my workloads over and save a lot of money. You do have to have a conversation with customers about the economics of application re-architecture and application re-platforming because you will eventually lose things like vMotion and what you're paying VMware for to do for your application. You need to teach your application to have the resilience and to be infrastructure aware. And so there's some upfront costs that I think customers have to be really aware of where it's not just a hey, you're going to be 50% less expensive tomorrow by moving everything in your business to OpenStack. But the economics, once you get the long tail payback and have done some of that upfront work are really compelling, especially when you're working with a partner that has been there before and is only monetizing the process and operations. Yeah, yeah. So we get a chance to talk to a lot of companies. People are trying to figure out, they sort of see a little bit of the future and they're trying to align it to technology. You guys obviously, it's OpenStack Summit, everything's OpenStack. You guys have offerings where you'll help companies manage to take advantage of other services that are in the cloud. Talk about what those conversations look like, you know, not so much as those, yeah. Can I start and then pivot to you? Because I think that the Red Hat relationship is one where Rackspace is all about fanatical support and process and operations and delivering service. We're also about working on the best technologies in the world and we're all about customer choice. So just within the OpenStack realm, we came to market with Rackspace Private Cloud powered by Red Hat so that we could offer all the process, operations, fanatical support. If you have a vested interest and large investments in a Red Hat partnership, we will go there for our customers because our customers want that choice. So John, you can talk about a lot of the other choices. And beyond OpenStack, I think customers are starting to think about what they're doing in the public cloud. The public cloud is also, you know, one of those that really, every kind, it's on the mind of every company. You know, those same 50 customers that are using OpenStack are probably using, you know, public cloud as well. There's just places where, you know, a thousand servers for machine learning for a week might make sense, you know. And it does, and it certainly does. Multi-cloud is a term that's emerged over the last, you know, maybe year and a half. In my conversations, many CIOs are struggling to figure out what the strategy is to manage across multiple footprints. Sometimes that's a private cloud, but often it's also a public cloud or multiple public clouds. It could be a Microsoft Azure cloud and Amazon AWS cloud or all of the above. And so, you know, Rackspace being a service company at its core, being the home of fanatical support and being a company that you mentioned has always delivered our services on top of the leading technologies. We've embraced those clouds. We've embraced the AWS cloud as a deployment target. And then also Microsoft Azure. We got a long-standing relationship with Microsoft. And now we can help customers manage workloads in all of those locations and give them one point of contact, one relationship and a single point of expertise where they can go to and ask for help on any of these things and help customers with that long-term strategy of how things shift and move and migrate from place to place over time. All right, are you certain to see customers look at, you know, do they think of themselves as, you know, coming to you as a cloud broker? Are they, you know, leveraging resources and services? It's like, well, you know, storage is, you know, data's tough to move, but there's services I might need to access and things I might need to do. Especially when you get them large data centers. You know? IT departments, IT leadership wants to be a cloud broker of sorts to their own internal constituents. They want to make sure that they've got the right options on the menu, so to speak. They want to give them the right flavor of storage for the right need or the right location, geographically or whatever it might be. You know, the right economics. It could just come down to the price of a particular solution and meeting a need. And so, you know, I think that word broker comes up once in a while. I think, you know, we're the partner to IT to help enable that. You know, we bring all of those clouds behind, you know, one, again, one relationship. We bring expertise on all of the above and we give the CIO or the IT leader the ability to tap into that with a very simple relationship. John, Darren, really appreciate you coming on here. I want to give you both, you know, just a chance for kind of a final word. People leave the show. You know, what do they think about, you know, open stack in general and kind of rack space positioning, you know, in open stack, which changed quite a bit since the early days. Sure, what I'll leave you with is there's clearly the conversation about open stacks maturity and will open stack make it and is open stack ready for the enterprise. Those conversations are all behind us at this point. There's still some fear, uncertainty and doubt around how do I make it successful for my business? How do I maximize what I can get out of this technology for my company? And there's two ways you can approach that. There's the DIY approach, which is you go after it yourself and you face all of those configuration choices and all of that complexity and the lack of talent in the industry and then there is deploying it as a service with a managed service partner. So what you need to know about rack space is we are here so that you're not alone in the room making all those choices for your business for the first time. You can work with someone who has made all those choices, has seen the impact of all those choices, has tested, has deployed, has managed and we can take a lot of the fear and uncertainty out of your deployment by giving you access to the world's deepest bench of talent to help make you successful. All right, last word for me is basically just how proud I am to be part of the OpenStack ecosystem, how proud I am to have OpenStack back in Texas where it was born. That's right. Right around the corner from this building. That's right. We've gone from 75 people to 7,500 in just a few short years and we're seeing OpenStack deployed at a scale around the world globally that we really just could never have imagined. So thank you all to the community. Thank you everybody that's been involved in building this really cool thing. Thank you guys for making sure that OpenStack had a voice in the world and that story was told. So those are the last words from me today. Thank you. All right, very good. John Ankeits, Darren Hansen, thank you so much for joining us. We'd love to be able to get back to the community here at OpenStack. Our fourth year here at the show, sixth year of the event here in North America and we'll be right back with lots more coverage here. OpenStack 2016 here in Austin, Texas. Thanks for watching. It's always fun to come back to theCUBE because, you know, the...