 Okay, we're back here live at EMC World. This is theCUBE, our flagship telecast, where we go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. We're here for three days of live coverage, exclusively here at EMC World. And I'm joining here with Stu Miniman, my co-host. And our next guest is Jason Nolet, VP of the Data Center Networking at Brocade. You've been on theCUBE before, we had a technology day in September. A lot's changed. I mean, one, the world spun in your direction with SDN. And now you have a new CEO, so what's up? And made an acquisition or two since then, so. We have, yeah, we've been very busy. I think, yeah, I mean, transformation is the only constant in this industry right now, that's for sure. I'll tell you, I think last time we got together, guys, we talked a fair bit about our Ethernet fabric offering, VCS fabrics. And maybe I'll start there, because we've seen an acceleration of adoption of momentum around that technology. We're now north of about 1300 production customers. And we're seeing a lot of traction in a couple of key segments that I think are, you know, interesting from a technology point of view. One of them is cloud providers, public cloud providers in particular. You know, they look at the stack and the data center technology choices as an opportunity to differentiate themselves, right? So best in breed, innovation, these are things that can be very meaningful to their business. And so we've seen a concentration of our VCS fabric technology in that public cloud sector. And then you follow that with financial services and higher education and other segments where, you know, you find early adopters typically and people who really want to take a bite out of that technology. So we're really excited about that. We think that's transformational in the data center. And then as you said, SDN, which is everybody's favorite topic right now. And I think we may be coming out of the hype cycle and actually starting to see some solutions and some problems for which that's a good technology. And we've got a bet in a number of areas there, whether it's programmatic control of the network environment through things like OpenFlow, we're believers in network virtualization. You'll see us deliver that both in partnership with companies like VMware and others, as well as native virtualization within the fabric. And then of course cloud orchestration environments are pretty important for customers thinking about how to move to the cloud. Let's talk about obviously your relationship with EMC. We talked about this last year in the cube when you guys were on. And also we thought about a little bit of technology, David, you have a long standing relationship with EMC. We do. We're, I think it's a year 17 for us with EMC. And you know, they're probably one of the best partners we have. It's a very clean partnership. There's not the traditional co-operative thing where you're trying to find that balance there. And obviously on the on the sand side of our portfolio, the fiber channel sand portfolio, you know, that's a long standing part of the relationship. And we continue to grow that business because customer demand continues to surface for fiber channel technology, but also with respect to Ethernet fabrics and our IP portfolio, where we're finding opportunities to work with EMC on things like these bags and other things where we can embed our Ethernet fabric technology and their solutions. So one of the things that you guys have had success with was the sand and the typical fabric. You guys, you know, your new CEO was on earlier. Lloyd was saying, you know, when he was doing due diligence for the position he was, he's a technologist. He was excited by the fabric. So how do you get the right people to look at the Ethernet fabric? You have a good, successful install base who love your technology and fabric. How do you get them to look at the Ethernet fabric and say, hey guys, look over here, it's value. Yeah, it's a great question. It's the thing that keeps the marketing team up all night. That's for sure. I'd say there's a couple of plays there. One is, again, you know, we go after early adopters because it is an innovative technology. It's something that is an architectural sell rather than just, you know, more ports at top of a rack. And so we find segments where we've got early adopter, you know, kind of personalities. And again, I'd go back to the public cloud providers. And we see a lot of success with customers who want, you know, have an appetite to innovate in that part of their data center. So that's one. Another is, you know, we have this massive sand install base of fabric technology. And we find a lot of customers who give us a lot of credit and a lot of license to go sell into the Ethernet part of their data centers because we've done so well on the fiber channel sand portfolio. You know, most customers enjoy six nines of uptime in their fiber channel sand environments. And they've scaled these out to 50, 60, 70,000 ports. So that builds a lot of credibility in a customer account and therefore you get license to go play in the produce. So you have good loyalty in that. You have good loyalty there. It's huge loyalty and that fiber channel sand technology is some of the stickiest I've ever come across. So we have a lot of advocates within, you know, these larger customer accounts that give us a shout on the Ethernet side of the data center. So on the Ethernet side, how are you guys competing and how would you compare and contrast with some of the alternative approaches? Because, you know, some have said that the competition might not be technically as strong but are doing too many things. They're trying to boil over the ocean a little bit too much. Yeah, I think, you know, that's the one thing that's perhaps unique about Brocade is we've chosen a position, we've chosen a technology in Ethernet fabric and our BCS fabric product offering that we think is both very, very focused. We're not trying to do conventional networking. We're all about fabrics, but also highly contrasted with the other offerings that are out in the space. I think we may have talked about this last time I was on and that is that, you know, when we introduced this concept of an Ethernet fabric almost two years ago now, just about every other competitor in the space came forward and said, yes, we believe in fabrics. We believe in a fabric based network approach. The good news for us is we had a lot of validation from the vendor community. You know, the better news for us is most of them have stumbled in terms of delivering that technology and I'm not going to name any names here but I think we've done a great job of both establishing a vision for fabric technology but also executing on it and delivering those, you know, 1300 production accounts that I talked about earlier. So Jason, when I think about Brocade one of the things that always sticks out to me is, you know, you've got a tight relationship with your administrators out there, that the people that install it and manage that environment. And as you said, we're undergoing a transformation. It's impressive to see Brocade not only involved in things like OpenStack but you're one of the first people out there with the open daylight. So as some of these initiatives comes out, what does that mean from your internal skill set looking at open source and also for your traditional, you know, people that, you know, buy and support and work with your products day to day? How are you helping them with that transition? That's a great question. And obviously when you start to engage in these open source industry, you know, community initiatives, you have to have a development philosophy and kind of a DNA within the company that helps you engage in that kind of environment. Because it is different from, you know, a proprietary development activity. It's one of the things candidly that the Viata acquisition brought to Brocade, you know, we closed that acquisition, you know, four or five months ago and they've really helped establish a better understanding of contributing to the open source community and developing product in that fashion. So that's been a really nice, I think side benefit of the Viata acquisition in addition to great, great technology. I think from a customer point of view, what's interesting is, customers need to figure out how they're going to kind of up level their IT expertise, if you will, right? It used to be that if you were the most seasoned, most expert CLI jockey in the place, that that was your badge of honor. You got a lot of credit for that. But the reality is that there's coming a time when, especially through programmatic control of these environments, whether it's the network or the rest of the data center, it's going to be the application developers and the people who are sitting much higher in the stack who are going to have the technical know-how and expertise to go do what they want to do within these networking environments. I mean, it's part of our job as network equipment vendors to abstract that for them. And in the case of virtualization, whether it's network virtualization or otherwise. And so I think there is going to be a skill set change required in some of these IT shops. Yeah, no, a great point is Dave Vellante says it's, how do IT departments and CLI's get rid of the undifferentiated, heavy lifting? Exactly. So if you talk the buzzword of the day, it's the software to find everything. You guys have a play in software to find storage. You just made an announcement today with the EMC on the Viper stuff, software to find networking, of course we talked about. And of course, you've been involved in the virtualization and compute virtualization. One of the things I'm wondering if you can comment on, there's still kind of the fiber channel side of the house and the ethernet side of the house. How do you see those, the kind of software to find everything falling out between those two? Or is it going to change that? Well, I think the commonality between a sand and an ethernet fabric is that both of those environments want to be abstracted and virtualized and managed at a higher level. So if you look at the work we've done in the OpenStack community, for example, we joined with a number of our partners, EMC included, to drive fiber channel blueprints into the OpenStack environment. Because we know that that large sand install base that we have wants to migrate those technologies into a cloud architecture and be able to use cloud management platform to provision and manipulate those environments. So I think the common thread between those two is at a higher level of virtualization abstraction, you want tools that can span that entire environment. And part of why we thought it was important to engage with EMC on their Viper Initiative is that ultimately, you have to have all the major data center assets, storage, compute, network, and services all live in this virtualized, abstracted, cloud orchestrated environment. Because if one of the major components doesn't, the whole thing kind of falls apart, right? Because you can't easily spin up all of the resources necessary to support a new application if one of them has to be dealt with manually. So we think that's an exciting development on EMC's part with the Viper announcement and we were there right from the get-go and making sure that our sand technology can fit in that environment. Yeah, so let's go back to fiber channel for a second. So Brocade has what you call the Gen 5 fiber channel, 16 gigabit fiber channel. Cisco just came out with their 16 gig fiber channel solution. I believe about two years beyond when you had come out with it, you talk a little bit about the competitive. What did you see over those last two years, the conversation traveling with customers? Is Cisco committed to fiber channel, do you think? And now that they've entered 16 gig, where do you see it today? And how is Brocade helping to drive forward on fiber channel? Yeah, this is one of my favorite questions because I have this conversation with customers all the time. I think, as we all know, Cisco had a very heavy agenda around trying to convince customers to completely physically converge on an ethernet network environment and displace their fiber channel environments. The reality is that customers have spoken with their wallets and while we see some adoption of fiber channel over ethernet from the server to the first hop of the network, on an end to end basis, fiber channel continues to be the dominant storage networking technology. So while we have enjoyed, as you said, this two year lead in terms of technology in the sand space, we're actually pretty satisfied with Cisco's deciding that ultimately the customer has spoken, they need to come out with a fiber channel purpose built fiber channel end to end product portfolio. Yeah, so if I look at fiber channel over ethernet, which I have some history with, of course where adoption is the most is in embedded solutions. So if I look every single V block that sells has it, just about every UCS that goes out has it. HP has sold a lot of it, even though they don't talk about it much and even IBM and Dell have sold plenty of FCU. Convergence is a big play for fiber channel over ethernet. And you guys are part of that marketplace, especially with EMC and the V specs. What's your update on the converge marketplace? Well, I think what customers have decided is that converging from the server, whether it's a blade server or rack mount server, to that first hop reduces adapters, reduces cabling, simplifies the situation in the rack. And so that makes some sense to them. But what we've seen, and we're very agnostic about this because we've got the ethernet fabric to support convergence as well. What we've seen customers tell us is that from an end-to-end point of view, running FCOA all the way to the storage targets is not something they want to entertain. And there's really two reasons for that. One is they're not convinced that they can realize the same reliability and uptime with an end-to-end FCOE network that they've got with FC today. And organizationally, it's a complicated notion for many customers because you have to take the same guys and the data center land guys, throw them into the same pool and have them go figure it out. So again, we support end-to-end FCOE along with many of our brethren in the industry, but customers have told us pretty consistently, they like it at the top of a rack, but they want to stay with fiber channel natively to the storage target. So outside of network convergence, what about converged infrastructure itself? V-specs, I know you guys have some deployments with them. Can you talk a little bit about that? We do, it's a great question. So I think we're on the same kind of track we were last time we talked, and that is we do see a fair bit of adoption of converged infrastructure. And of course there's a gamut of those, right? Everything from a single SKU, a single management model, and a single number to call all the way to reference architectures, which we think are ultimately the best balance of confidence delivered through testing and certification of a stack, but giving the customer choice. And V-specs is a great example of that. And one of the reasons that we were an early participant in that initiative is to give customers that balance of, it's tested, it's qualified, I know I can trust it all together, but I get to choose, so I get to choose my server, I get to choose my network, I get to choose the other components that go in the stack. So all in all, we think converged infrastructure continues to be a theme, but we think that reference architecture approached with choice is the most customer friendly. So on the internet, on the internet, a lot of people are talking about while on Twitter, the operating system being the data center. So take us through your mindset, go back in the history of Brocade, kind of where it was and where it is now. Again, the world spun in your direction with SDN, and that was a great thing, because you guys were right there, doing some great R&D now with the announcements today, on how you saw the evolution of Brocade's fabric to Ethernet and sand to fabric, and with FiberChannel in particular, what it was built for is now going to be used in a new way in these new convergent infrastructures. What are some of the possibilities that does that open up in the new architecture? If an operating system is there, where's the role of the FiberChannel? Yeah, well I think there's a number of ways to look at that, but ultimately we think the entire data center evolves to be virtualized and abstracted, and we made an announcement very recently around this concept of the on-demand data center, which is not wildly unique relative to something like the software-defined data center, but the idea is that the physical infrastructure needs to evolve to support a level of virtualization and abstraction across the board, network compute, server storage, the whole thing, services, and we believe that the physical infrastructure, an Ethernet fabric, a sand fabric, can evolve and innovate in ways to support that better than other networking technologies, and that's exactly where we're going with something like Ethernet fabrics and things like network virtualization. We're going to work with network virtualization providers to make an Ethernet fabric, our VCS fabric in particular, the best possible physical transport for that network virtualization environment. Jason, thanks for coming on The Cube. Jason, no lab VP of data center, networking at Brocade. We'll be right back with our next guest here inside The Cube. This is The Cube where we extract the signal from the noise here at EMC World Exclusive Coverage. I'm Silicon Angle, we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break.