 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the CloudNative Computing Foundation and ecosystem partners. Hi and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2020's virtual event. I'm Stu Miniman and happy to welcome back to the program two of our CUBE alumni. We're going to be talking about storage in this Kubernetes and container world. First of all, we have Sam Warner. He is the vice president of storage offering management at IBM and joining him is Brent Compton, senior director of storage and data architecture at Red Hat. Sam and Brent, thank you for joining us and we get to really dig in as to the kind of the combined IBM and Red Hat activity in this space. Of course, both companies very active in the space ahead of the acquisition. And so excited to hear about what's going forward. Sam, maybe if we could start with you as the TUP, both Red Hat and IBM have had their conferences this year. We've heard quite a bit about how Red Hat, the solutions they've offered, the open source activity is really a foundational layer for much of what IBM's doing. When it comes to storage, what does that mean today? First of all, I'm really excited to be virtually at KubeCon this year. And I'm also really excited to be with my colleague Brent from Red Hat. This is I think the first time that IBM Storage and Red Hat Storage have been able to get together and really articulate what we're doing to help our customers in the context of Kubernetes and also with OpenShift and the things we're doing there. So I think you'll find, as we talked today that there's a lot of work we're doing to bring together the core capabilities of IBM Storage that have been helping enterprises with their core applications for years alongside the incredible open source capabilities being developed by Red Hat and how we can bring those together to help customers continue moving forward with their initiatives around Kubernetes and rebuilding their applications to be developed once deploy anywhere, which runs into quite a few challenges for storage. So Brent and I are excited to talk about all the great things we're doing, excited about getting to share it with everybody else at KubeCon. Yes, so of course containers when they first came out were for stateless environments. And we knew that, we've seen this before, those of us that live through the wave of virtualization, you kind of have a first generation solution, what application, what environments can be used. But as we've seen the huge explosion of containers and Kubernetes, there's going to be a maturation of the stack, storage is a critical component of that. So yeah, Brent, if you could bring us up to speed, you're steeped and have a long history in this space. The challenges that you were hearing from customers and where are we today in 2020 for this set? Thanks, Stu. Stu, the most basic apps out there, I think are just traditional databases, apps that have databases like a Postgres, a long standing apps out there that have databases like DB2. So traditional apps that are moving towards a more agile environment. That's where we've seen, in fact, our collaboration with IBM and particularly the DB2 team. And that's where we've seen as they've gone to a microservices container-based architecture, we've seen a poll from the marketplace say, in addition to inventing new cloud native apps, we want our tried, true, and tested apps, I mean, such as DB2, such as MQ, we want those to have the benefits of a Red Hat OpenShift agile environment. And that's where the collaboration between our group and Sam's group comes in together, is providing the storage and data services for those state collapse. Great, Sam, you know, IBM, you've been working with this storage administrator for a long time. What challenges are they facing when we go to the new architectures? Is it still the same people? It might there be a different part of the organization where you need to start in delivering these solutions? That's a really, really good question. And it's interesting because I do spend a lot of time with storage administrators and the people who are operating the IT infrastructure. And what you'll find is that the decision maker isn't the IT operations or storage operations people. These decisions about implementing Kubernetes and moving applications to these new environments are actually being driven by the business lines, which is, I guess, not so different from any other major technology shift. And the storage administrators now are struggling to keep up. So the business lines would like to accelerate development. They want to move to a develop once deploy anywhere model. And so they start moving down the path of Kubernetes in order to do that. They start leveraging middleware and components that are containerized and easy to deploy. And then they're turning to the IT infrastructure teams and asking them to be able to support it. And when you talk to the storage administrators, they're trying to figure out how to do some of the basic things that are absolutely core to what they do, which is protecting the data in the event of a disaster or some kind of a cyber attack, being able to recover the data, being able to keep the data safe, ensuring governance and privacy of the data. These things are difficult in any environment, but now you're moving to a completely new world. And the storage administrators have a tough challenge ahead of them. And I think that's where IBM and Red Hat can really come together with all of our experience and our very broad portfolio with incredibly enterprise hardened storage capabilities to help them move from their more traditional infrastructure to a Kubernetes environment. All right, Brent, maybe if you could bring us up to date, when we look back at like OpenStack, Red Hat had a few projects from an open source standpoint actually meets an acquisition to help bolster the open source storage world. In the container world, we saw some of those get ported over. There's new projects. There's been a little bit of argument as to the various different ways to do storage. And of course we know storage has never been a single solution. There's lots of different ways to do things, but where are we with the options out there? What's the recommendation from Red Hat and IBM as to how we should look at that? I want to bridge your question to Sam's earlier comments about the challenges facing the storage admin. So if we start with the word agility, I mean, what does agility mean for in a data world? We're conscious for agility from an application development standpoint, but if you use the term, of course we've been used to the term DevOps, but if we use the term data ops, what does that mean? What does that mean to in the past four decades, when a developer or someone deploying in production wanted to create new storage or data resources, it typically, they typically filed a ticket and waited. So in the agile world of OpenShift and Kubernetes, it's everything is self-service and on-demand. What kind of constraints and demands does that place on the storage and data infrastructure? So now I'll come back to your questions, Stu. So yes, at the time that Red Hat was very heavily into OpenStack, Red Hat acquired Ceph, well acquired Ink Tank and a majority of the Ceph developers who are most active in the community. And that became the de facto software-defying storage for OpenStack, but actually from the last time that we spoke at KubeCon, the Rook project has become very popular there in the CNCF as a way effectively to make software-defying storage systems like Ceph simple. So effectively the power of Ceph made simple by Rook inside of the OpenShift operator framework. People want that power that Ceph brings, but they want the simplicity of self-service on-demand. And that's kind of the fusion, the coming together of traditional software-defying storage with agility in a Kubernetes world. So Rook, Ceph, OpenShift container storage. Wonderful, and I wonder if we could take that a little bit further. A lot of the discussion these days, and I hear it every time I talk to IBM and Red Hat, is how customers are using hybrid clouds. So obviously that has to have an impact on storage. Moving data is not easy. There's a little bit of nuance there. So how do we go from what you were just talking about into a hybrid environment? I guess I'll take that one to start. And Brent, please feel free to chime in on it. So first of all, from an IBM perspective, you really have to start at a little bit higher level and at the middleware layer. So IBM is bringing together all of our capabilities, everything from analytics and AI to application development and all of our middleware and packaging them up in something that we call cloud packs, which are pre-built catalogs of containerized capabilities that can be easily deployed in any OpenShift environment, which allows customers to build applications that can be deployed both on-premises and then within public cloud. So in a hybrid, multi-cloud environment. Of course, when you build that sort of environment, you need a storage and data layer, which allows you to move those applications around freely. And that's where the IBM storage suite for cloud packs comes in. We've actually taken the core capabilities of the IBM software-defined storage portfolio, which give you everything you need for high-performance block storage, scale-out file storage and object storage. And then we've combined that with the capabilities that we were just discussing from Red Hat, which, including OCS and Ceph, which allow you a customer to create a common agile and automated storage environment, both on-premises in the cloud, giving consistent deployment and the ability to orchestrate the data to where it's needed. I'll just add onto that. I mean, as Sam noted, and as probably most of you are aware, hybrid cloud is at the heart of the IBM acquisition of Red Hat with Red Hat OpenShift. The stated intent of Red Hat OpenShift is to become the default operating environment for the hybrid cloud. So effectively bring your own cloud wherever you run. So that is at the very heart of the synergy between our companies, made manifest by the very large portfolios of software which have been moved to many of which to run in containers and embodied inside of IBM CloudPacks. So IBM CloudPacks backed by Red Hat OpenShift on wherever you're running, on-premises in a public cloud. And now with this storage suite for CloudPacks that Sam referred to, also having a deterministic experience. That's one of the things as we work, for instance, deeply with the IBM DB2 team. One of the things that was critical for them is they couldn't have their customers when they run on AWS have a completely different experience than when they ran on-premises say on VMware or on-premises on Bermittal. Critical to the DB2 team to give their customers deterministic behavior wherever they ran. Right, so Sam, I think any of our audience that have followed this space have heard Red Hat's story about OpenShift and how it lives across multiple cloud environments. I'm not sure that everybody is familiar with how much of IBM's storage solutions today are really just software driven. So, and therefore, if I think about IBM, it's like, okay, I can buy storage or yes, they can live in the IBM cloud, but from what I'm hearing from Brent and you and from what I know from previous discussions, this is independent and can live in multiple clouds leveraging this underlying technology and can leverage the capabilities from those public cloud offer. That right, Sam? Yeah, that's right. And we have the most comprehensive portfolio of software-defined storage in the industry. Maybe to some it's a well-kept secret, but those that use it know the breadth of the portfolio. We have everything from the highest performing scale out file system to object store that can scale into the exabytes. We have our block storage as well, which runs within the public clouds and can extend back to your private cloud environment. When we talk to customers about deploying storage for hybrid multicloud in a container environment, we give them a lot of paths to get there. We give them the ability to leverage their existing sand and infrastructure through the CSI drivers container storage interface. So our whole physical on-prem infrastructure supports CSI today. And then all the software that runs on our arrays also supports running on top of the public clouds, giving customers then the ability to extend that existing sand infrastructure into a cloud environment. And now with storage suite for cloud packs, as Brent described earlier, we give you the ability to build a really agile infrastructure leveraging the capabilities from Red Hat that give you a fully extensible environment and common way of managing and deploying both on-prem and in the cloud. So we give you a journey with our portfolio to get from your existing infrastructure today. You don't have to throw it out, get started with that and build out an environment that goes both on-prem and in the cloud. Yeah, and Brent, I'm glad that you started with database because it's not something that I think most people would think about in a Kubernetes environment. Do you have any customer examples you might be able to give? Maybe anonymized, of course. Just talking about how those mission critical applications can fit into the new modern architectures. The big banks, I mean, just full stop, the big banks. But what I'd add to that, so that's kind of frequently where they start because applications based on structured data remain at the heart of a lot of enterprises. But I would say workload category number two are is all things machine learning, analytics, AI. And we're seeing an explosion of adoption within the OpenShift. And of course, IBM CloudPak for data is a key market participant in that machine learning and analytics space. So an explosion of the usage of OpenShift for those types of workloads. And I'm just going to touch just briefly on an example going back to our kind of data pipeline and how it started with databases but it just, it explodes. For instance, data pipeline automation where you have data coming into your apps that are Kubernetes based, that are OpenShift based. Well, maybe you'll end up inside of Watson Studio inside of IBM CloudPak for data. But along the way, there are a variety of transformations that need to occur. Let's say that you're at a big bank you need to effectively as it comes in you need to be able to run a CRC to ensure to attest that when you modify the data for instance in a real time processing pipeline that when you pass it on to the next stage that you can guarantee, well that you can attest that there's been no tampering of the data. So that's an illustration where it began very with the basics of basic applications running with structured data with databases where we're seeing the state of the industry today is tremendous use of these Kubernetes and OpenShift based architectures for machine learning analytics made more simple by data pipeline automation through things like OpenShift container storage through things like OpenShift serverless where you have scalable functions and whatnot. So yeah, it began there but boy I tell you what it's exploded since then. Yeah, it's great to hear not only traditional applications but as you said, so much interest and need for those new analytics use cases. So absolutely that's where it's going. Sam, one other piece of the storage story of course is not just that we have stateful usage but talk about data protection if you could and how things that I think of traditionally my backup restore and the like how does that fit into the whole discussion we've been having? Yeah, when you talk to customers it's one of the biggest challenges they have honestly in moving to containers is how do I get the same level of data protection that I use today? The environments are in many cases more complex from a data and storage perspective. You want to be able to take application consistent copies of your data that could be recovered quickly. And in some cases even reused you can reuse the copies for dev test for application migration, there's lots of or for actually AI or analytics there's lots of use cases for the data but a lot of the tools and APIs are still very new in this space. IBM has made prior doing data protection for containers a top priority for our spectrum protect suite and we provide the capabilities to do application aware snapshots of your storage environment so that a Kubernetes developer can actually build in the resiliency they need as they build applications and a storage administrator can get a pane of glass and visibility into all of the data and ensure that it's all being protected appropriately and provide things like SLA. So I think it's about the fact that the early days of Kubernetes tended to be stateless now that people are moving some of their more mission critical workloads the data protection becomes just as critical as anything else you do in the environment so the tools have to catch up. So that's a top priority of ours and we provide a lot of those capabilities today and you'll see if you watch what we do with our spectrum protect suite we'll continue to provide the capabilities that our customers need to move their mission critical applications to a Kubernetes environment. All right and Brent one other question looking forward a little bit we've been talking for the last couple of years about how serverless can plug into this entire Kubernetes ecosystem the K-Native project is one that IBM and Red Hat have been involved with. So for OpenShift and serverless I'm sure he's leveraging K-Native what is the update today? The update is effectively adoption inside of a lot of cases like the big banks but also other top the largest companies in the world and other industries as well. So if you take the words event driven architecture many of them are coming to us with that's kind of top of mind of them is the need to say I need to ensure that when data first hits my environment I can't wait, I can't wait for a scheduled batch job to come along and process that data and maybe run an inference. I mean the classic case is you're ingesting a chest X-ray and you need to immediately run that against an inference model to determine if the patient has pneumonia or COVID-19 and then kick off another serverless function to anonymize the data to send back in to retrain your model. So the need and so you mentioned serverless and of course people would say well I can handle that just by really smart batch jobs but kind of one of the other parts of serverless that sometimes people forget but smart companies are aware of is that serverless is inherently scalable. So zero to end scalability. So as data is coming in, hitting your Kafka bus, hitting your object store, hitting your database. I don't know if you picked up the community project Debezium where something hits your relational database and that can automatically trigger an event onto the Kafka bus so that your entire architecture becomes event-driven. All right, well, Sam, let me give you the final let me let you have the final word, excuse me on the IBM in this space and what you want them to have is takeaways from KubeCon 2020 Europe. I'm actually going to talk to I think the storage administrators if that's okay because if you're not involved right now in the Kubernetes projects that are happening within your enterprise, they are happening and there will be new challenges. You've got a lot of investments you've made in your existing storage infrastructure. We at IBM and Red Hat can help you take advantage of the value of your existing infrastructure, the capabilities, the resiliency, the security you've built into it for the years and we can help you move forward into a hybrid multicloud environment built on containers. We've got the experience and the capabilities between Red Hat and IBM to help you be successful because it's still a lot of challenges there but our experience can help you implement that with the greatest success. I appreciate it. All right, Sam and Brent, thank you so much for joining. It's been excellent to be able to watch the maturation in this space over the last couple of years. Thank you. All right, we'll be back with lots more coverage from KubeCon, CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, the virtual event, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the Kube.