 Okay, we're back here live at Brocade's technology analyst day for the big announcement of the Ethernet fabric simplicity, software defined networking, the whole emerging cloud mobile social, just in the lead of the VP of Data Center, Enterprise Networking for Brocade. Welcome back to theCUBE, you're a CUBE alumni. Thank you, I am, it's going to be back. You guys are hosting us here, a lot of activity, obviously a lot of news today, we've been covering a segment on the iPhone 5, which is great, it's great for you guys because it's such a great marketing tool for Brocade because everyone can see the benefits, LTE, more traffic, more bandwidth, more bits on the wire. More bits on the wire, but under the hood, there's a huge revolution going on in tech right now, specifically on the data center side and also on the service provider side. Obviously consumerization of IT has been kind of talked about for a long time, but really you're seeing a collision between service provider and data center, service providers want to be more like data centers, data centers want to be more like service providers, Mike Claco is just telling us, so that's requiring people to rethink architecture to take advantage of these new opportunities, so give us a state of the union from your perspective because you're out there leading the charge inside the company. Yeah, absolutely, I mean I couldn't agree more, I mean the data center is undergoing massive transformation right now and if you look at kind of any layer in the stack, you know there's opportunity to adopt emerging technology in any location in the data center because there's so much innovation going on. In our particular case of course it's about fabric technology and we've been leading the category for about two and a half years now, we were the first to introduce the term, we were the first to ship product, we're now on our third wave of deliverable in Ethernet fabric or what we call VCS fabric technology and today we're very excited to be announcing our new high end VDX switch that's an Ethernet fabric modular chassis, the VDX8770, you know it allows customers to scale up to 8,000 ports in a fabric, up to 380,000 VMs attached to a single fabric, you know very very low latency at 3.58 microseconds port to port, a four terabit per slot backplane to allow for the adoption of new data center technologies as they emerge such as 100 gigi which will be shipping next year on this platform and things like SDN which I know is a hot button for everybody but we built into the A6 on this platform support for overlay networking and tunneling protocols like VXLAN. I want to ask you about the VM where acquisition of this year because that's what everyone's talking about but as we were talking with your CEO Mike Claco about the investments you guys made, you made some really good bets and they're paying off, it's like the old expression skating through where the puck is you guys are right there right now, the market is spun in your direction and you've got a huge opportunity to just thrust upon you guys and you've got product and technology so two questions, one is comment on the VMware acquisition of this year, what that means to the industry because it's changing networking, it's changing that whole configuration and what people are doing and two, how you guys are addressing that right now. Yeah, well I think you know kind of first and foremost it certainly legitimizes the movement around network virtualization. I think prior to the acquisition there were a lot of startups in the space, there was a lot of kind of hype but not a lot of activity. I think VMware has put a big stake in the ground here and we've been partnering with them for many years so we're very supportive of what they're doing there. You know for us it means enabling the physical infrastructure to be a better kind of underlay if you will to that network virtualization layer. One of the challenges that customers are going to find and even NYSERA points this out in their own marketing literature is when you add network virtualization to an existing physical network infrastructure through tunneling protocols, STTV, X-Land, NVG, or EPIC-1 you're actually adding operational overhead to that environment because you have a whole another layer you're putting on top of the network. The question is how do you prevent that from just being a kind of a doubling up of operational administrative burden for the customer? Well one way is you simplify, you automate, you make more reliable the physical infrastructure under that overlay network and that's exactly what VCS Fabrics are intended to do so we see them as entirely complimentary VCS Fabrics and SDN whether it's VX-Land or OpenFlow. I'm joined by my co-host in this segment, Stu Miniman, analyst at Wikibon has been covering this area. Stu what's your take on this? I mean, what do you think? So John, you know one of the things that's kind of interesting to watch is if you look at one of Brocade's big strengths it was the go-to-market was through OEMs and they had great partnerships with a lot of technology partners and this year for the technology event we're actually sitting here in a pavilion which has a lot of partner solutions. So Jason I hear you talking about kind of the third generation of waves of Ethernet fabrics and making a lot of progress so some impressive stats on the product figure. Can you talk a little bit about your partner ecosystem, the solutions and what's changed in Brocade's go-to-market and who you're partnering with to get there? Yeah totally so we continue to leverage our long-standing OEM partnerships that we've had on the storage or networking side for many years. We continue to leverage that with our entire IP portfolio including the VDX product offering. But we're also having to establish new relationships and the relationship with VMware on VXLAN would be a great example where VMware is dependent on the networking infrastructure providers coming to the table and enabling VXLAN. They can't do it without us. They have to have things like VXLAN gateway capability. They have to have VXLAN switching, deep packet inspection, control of that traffic. That's where a fabric technology like VCS comes in because we've enabled that product to understand VXLAN natively. So no compromise on performance, no compromise on trade-offs between VXLAN functionality and other functionality. They simply work together. So my question on the innovation side, I want to get your industry and also your personal perspective obviously networking has been one of those areas that people have been pointing to and said, you know there's bottlenecks there and now with virtualization kind of becoming prevalent everywhere. And from an IT transformation standpoint that's been kicked around obviously transformation is happening. Where do you see the biggest action happening? Where's the biggest pivot points within the enterprise data center that is seeing the most pressure in terms of that there will be the lever of transformation? Yeah, I actually think it is the network and that'll sound self-serving of course since we're in the network space but I'll tell you why. I think server virtualization is well established. It's well entrenched. Even VMware will tell you they're up around 50, 60% virtualization now. So more to do there but there's no big transformation that's going to take place there. The network is the next battleground here. It's the next area of the data center where we can try more efficiency and more flexibility in particular through virtualization technologies like overlay networks. I think storage is also going to be a kind of a member of that party at some point and we're also working with VMware on some of their storage virtualization initiatives things like VVol and distributed storage architecture. You know these are areas where we obviously bring a lot to the party as well. Explain for the folks out there who are watching all the noise because there's a lot of noise right now obviously there's been a lot of noise because it's open flow. We've seen that from the beginning, from academic now, hitting the market very, very fast. Obviously the Nacera startup, billion dollar exit acquisition with VMware really brings this to the main stage. So people are looking at this for the first time and seeing a lot of smoke and fun and noise. So explain to them the reality of what is really going on here for the folks in an IT professional or a data scientist or someone who's in a classic data center role. Demystify and talk about what the hell is this software to find networking? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I had this question in the forum earlier today and somebody was asking about real customer adoption and the reality is that all of our customers that we're working with are in education mode, right? They're trying to figure out what's real, what's not real and why is the technology relevant to them? And I think you have to be careful not to use the term SDN too broadly because we tend to throw everything into that bucket, right? We throw network virtualization in that bucket, open flow, even cloud orchestration. You have to disaggregate that and take a look at each of the technologies individually. The thing I like about open flow is open flow really kind of unleashes the potential for innovation in the network infrastructure. Historically, that innovation has been entirely a function of network equipment vendors and how often they rev their firmware and the switches and what functionality they add. With the addition of open flow as a supplementary technology, you now have two points of innovation. You have the traditional switch firmware and the network equipment vendors adding more and more functionality but now you have open flow based applications that are able to influence network behavior again in a supplementary way to make the two of those more powerful. So now you have a whole new ecosystem possible of open flow application developers who are able to influence network behavior in a way they couldn't before. So that's a great example I think of where there's tangible benefits to a software defined network and specifically open flow. What are the biggest challenges in the data center from your standpoint around this migration to software defined infrastructure? I don't want to say software defined data center because it's really infrastructure because the classic enterprise is really turning into a service provider. They have to have more applications and act like a service provider rather than the buckled down siloed enterprise. So they got to be scalable, they got to be frictionless, there's got to be a lot of VMs going on. So what is the software defined infrastructure mean to you? You know I think, so the two challenges that I think customers are going to kind of realize here as they embark on this journey is in what I've already mentioned that is that when you add a new technology like open flow or network virtualization through overlay tunnel technology, you're not removing the physical infrastructure. It still needs to be scaled, it still needs to be managed, it still needs to be diagnosed, it still needs to be upgraded from time to time. So you're actually adding additional operational overhead administrative burden. Now that can be mitigated if you deploy an underlay physical network infrastructure like a VCS fabric that's more fully automated, more efficient, more reliable than historical legacy land architectures which were never built for the modern data center. The second challenge I think is that customers are probably confused about whether or not this new world of network virtualization open flow is exclusive to their legacy architectures or their legacy routing and forwarding technologies. And the reality is we think they're supplementary. Nobody's going to stop doing routing or stop doing traditional forwarding techniques in their established network for the sake of open flow. They're going to add it as a supplementary technology. And this is where our hybrid open flow support on the MLX router platform in particular allows a customer to say, look, I'm happy with all my traditional routing and forwarding, but I'd like to have some policy based routing behavior that's influenced through an open flow based application. That's exactly the approach we're taking. So it's very much incremental rather than having to rip and replace your entire forwarding infrastructure. So if someone says bottom line me Jason on the benefits, I have my staffs overworked, everyone's working around the clock, adding more gear, more switches, scaling our infrastructure. Where does Brocade help me? I mean, is it shifting people to analytics and helping staff move over here? Are you eliminating pain points, all the above? Well, so I would go back to the VCS Fabric Value Propositions. And first and foremost, it's the ability to automate the network, right? Through a variety of features that we have in terms of VM discovery and propagation of VM port profiles throughout the network, the ability to form automatic trunk groups, the ability to do equal cost load balancing and multipathing at all layers of the network. These are all capabilities that fully automate the infrastructure, the network infrastructure in particular, freeing the network administrative team to go off and do some new things, right? They're being tasked with all these new initiatives, but they typically don't get a lot of new budget to go do that. So we have to find ways to extract complexity out, extract cost out, more fully automate the network. So these guys have time to go do the new initiatives. And that's probably the best example. So Jason, we've been riding this wave of 10 gig adoption for the last 10 years now. When I heard most of the service providers that we have here, it was that transition from one gig to 10 gig that kind of gave you the opening. What I want to ask you about is 40 and 100 gig. The next steps here, Brocade has a nice 40 gig and 100 gig bandwidth on the new products. What are you seeing out in the marketplace? Who's driving you? Is it still 10 companies in the world that need the really high bandwidth? And what can users expect and when should they start paying attention? Yeah, well, I mean, the old adage about bandwidth is if you build it, they will come, right? The applications show up, use cases show up and people consume all the bandwidth you can give them. I think we made a strategic decision a couple of years ago to invest heavily in 10 gig and then invest in 100 gig. And the investment at 100 gig is really paying off in the service provider space. We're also seeing some high-end enterprise companies adopting 100 gig at this point too. Now we're going back and rounding out the portfolio with 40 gig. Curtis announced a 40 gig on the new VDX 8770, up to 96 ports of line-rate non-blocking 40 gig on that platform as part of a fabric deployment. And so we're kind of agnostic on this point. We think 10 makes sense, obviously it's well-established now, 40 is going to make sense and 100 is going to make sense. And we intend to lead at the very front end of all of that transition. Okay, management is obviously pretty critical. What do you see Brocade's role in the management ecosystem? Yeah, that's a great question because I think there are a couple of different dimensions you could take there. If you just think about network element management, then we clearly see ourselves delivering to customers a very holistic, very complete network element management solution. The whole life cycle of deployment, configuration, monitoring, operations, upgrades, the whole thing. When you talk about cloud orchestration and orchestrating all the assets in the data center, that's clearly a partnership play for us because if every network vendor came to the table with a different cloud orchestration framework, it would be a mess, right? So we're partnering with VMware on vCloud, vCloud director suite going forward. We're investing pretty heavily in OpenStack because we think that's a really interesting open source consortium approach to delivering a homogenous kind of cloud operating system or orchestration layer across all vendors. And so that's a partnership and an investment model for us with our partners going forward. Microsoft? Microsoft included, yes. Okay, that's, we're out of time. Jason, thanks for coming back on theCUBE. Congratulations on your launch. And like I said, I mean, you couldn't be in a better spot right now, the world spun in your direction, that investment's paying off and people are going to be re-architecting their data centers and iPhone 5's out. More and more stuff's happening. It's an exciting time in tech, both at the end user side and also under the hood. Congratulations. We'll be right back here at theCUBE, special broadcast here at Brocades Technology Analyst Day in Silicon Valley, California. This is SiliconANGLE TV, we'll be right back.