 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. We're not yet in real life. We're doing another remote interviews with two great guests, CUBE alumni. Of course, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got Jason McGee, IBM Fellow VP and CTO of IBM's cloud platform and Octavian. He's Senior Vice President, Hybrid Cloud Engineering at NetApp, both CUBE alumni. It's great to see you both. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Yeah, great to be here. Thanks for having us. So we were just talking before we came on camera that it feels like we've had this conversation a long time ago, we have. Hybrid Cloud has been on a trajectory for both of you guys and many times on theCUBE. So now it's mainstream. It's here in the real world, everyone gets it. It's not, there's no real debate. Now multi-cloud, people are debating that which means that's right around the corner. So Hybrid Cloud is here and now. Jason, this is really the focus and this also brings together NetApp in your partnership and talk about the relationship. First with Hybrid Cloud. Yeah, I mean, look, we've talked to a number of times together. I think in the industry, maybe a few years ago, people were debating whether Hybrid Cloud was a real thing. We don't have that conversation anymore. I think enterprises today, especially maybe in the face of COVID and kind of how we work differently, now realize that their cloud journey is going to be a mix of on-prem and off-prem systems, probably going to be a mix of multiple public cloud providers. And what they're looking for now is, how do I do that? How do I manage that hybrid environment? How do I have a consistent platform across the different environments I want to operate in? And then how do I get more and more of my workload into those environments? And it's been interesting, I think the first waves of cloud were infrastructure-centric and externally application-focused. They were easier things, and now we're moving into more mission-critical, more stateful, more data-oriented workloads. And that brings with it new challenges on where applications run and how we leverage the cloud. Octavia, you guys had a great relationship with IBM over the years. Data-centric company, NetApp, has always been great engineering team. You're on the cloud, Hybrid Cloud Engineering. What's the current status of the relationship? Give us an update on how it's vectoring into the Hybrid Clouds since you're Senior Vice President of Hybrid Cloud Engineering. Well, so first of all, I want to recognize 20 years of a successful partnership with IBM. I think NetApp and IBM have been companies that have embraced digital transformation and technology trends to enable that digital transformation for our customers. And we've been very successful. I think there is a very strong joint Hybrid Cloud value proposition for customers. NetApp's storage and data services complement what IBM does in terms of products and solutions, both for on-premise deployments in the cloud. I think together we can build more complete solutions, solutions that span data mobility, data governance for the new workloads that Jason has talked about. And how are some of the customer challenges that you're seeing, software-defined networking, software-defined storage, DevOps has now turned into DevSecOps. So you have now that programmability requirement for dynamic applications, application-driven infrastructure, all these buzzwords point to one thing, the infrastructure has to be resilient and respond to the applications. Yeah, I would say that infrastructure will continue to be top of mind for everybody, whether they're building a private cloud or whether they're trying to leverage something like IBM Cloud. I think people want to consume infrastructure as an API. I think they want simplicity, security. I think they want to manage their costs very well. I think we're very proud to be partnering with IBM Cloud to build such capabilities. Jason, how are you guys helping some of these customers as they look at new things and sometimes retrofitting and refactoring previous stuff that aren't transforming but also innovating at the same time? There's a lot of that going on. What are you guys doing to help with the hybrid challenges? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of dimensions to that problem but the one that I think has been kind of most interesting over the last year has been how kind of the consumption model of public cloud, API-driven self-service capabilities operated for you, how that consumption model is starting to spread because I think one of the challenges with hybrid and one of the challenges as customers are looking at these more mission critical, data-centric kind of workloads was, well, I can't always move that application to the public cloud data center or I need that application to live out on the network, closer to my end users, out where data is being generated maybe in an IoT context. And when you had those requirements, you had to kind of switch operating models. You had to kind of move away from a public cloud service consumption model to a software deployment model. And, you know, we have a common platform in things like OpenShift that can run everywhere but the missing piece was, how do I consume everything as a service everywhere? And so recently we've launched this thing called I've Been Plot Satellite which we've been working with my team and his team on, on how we can actually extend the public cloud experience back into the data center out to the edge and allow people to kind of mix both location flexibility with public cloud consumption. And when you do that, you of course run in a much more diverse infrastructure environment. You have to integrate with different storage environments and you wind up with like multi-tier applications, you know, some stuff on the edge and some stuff in the core. And so data replication and data management start to become really interesting because you're kind of distributing your workloads across this more complex environment. And we've seen that relationship between compute and storage change a lot over the past decade as the evolution goes, Octave I got to ask you, this is a critical path for companies. They want the storage ready infrastructure. You guys have been doing that for many, many decades, partnering with IBM for sure. But now they're all getting hybrid cloud big time. And it's not, it's a tribute to computing, it's what it is, it's an operating model. When someone asks you guys what your capabilities are, how do you answer that in today's world? Because you have storage, it's well known, you've got a great product, people know that. But what is NetApp's capabilities when I say I'm going all in on hybrid cloud, complete changeover. So what we have been doing is basically rewriting a lot of our software with a few design points in mind. Think software defined has been definitely, one of the key design points. The second is the hybrid cloud and the containerization of our operating system so they can run both in traditional environments as well as in the cloud. I think the last thing that we wanted to do, it's enable the speed of scale. And that has been by building intrinsically in the product, both support or in also using Kubernetes as an infrastructure to achieve that agility, that scale. Tell about this data fabric vision because to me, this comes up all the time in my conversations with practitioners. The number one problem that they're, and problem that they're solving to solve in the conversation tends to, I hear words like control plane, Kubernetes, horizontally scalable, this all points to data being available. So how do you create that availability? What does data fabric mean? What does all this mean in a hybrid context? Well, if you think about it, data fabric, it's a hybrid cloud concept, right? This is about enabling data governance, data mobility, data security in an environment where some of the applications will run on premises or at the edge of the smart edge. And many of the, perhaps data lakes and analytics, and services, rich services will be in a central locations or on many, or perhaps some large data centers. So you need to have the type of capabilities, data services to enable that mobility that governments that security across this continuum that spans the edge, the core and the cloud. Jason, you mentioned satellite before cloud satellite. Can you go into more detail on it? I know it's kind of a new product. What is that about? And tell me what's the benefits and why does it exist and what problems does it solve? Yeah, so in the most simple terms, cloud satellite is the capability to extend IBM's public cloud into on-prem infrastructure, infrastructure at the edge, or in a multicloud context to other public cloud infrastructures. And so you can consume all the services in the public cloud that you need to, to build your application, OpenShift as a service, databases, DevTools, AI capabilities, instead of being limited to only being able to consume those services in IBM's cloud regions, you can now add your private data center or add your Metro provider or add your AWS or Azure account. And now consume those services consistently across all those environments. And that really allows you to kind of combine the benefits of public cloud with the kind of location independence you see in hybrid and let's us solve new problems. Like, you know, it's really interesting. We're seeing like AI and data being a primary driver. You know, I need my application to live in a certain country or to live next to my mainframe or to live like, you know, in a Metro because all of my, you know, I'm doing like video analytics on a bunch of cameras and I'm not going to stream all that data back to, you know halfway across the country to some cloud region. And so it lets you extend out in that way. And when you do that, of course, you now move the cloud into a more diverse infrastructure environment. And so like we've been working with NetApp on how do we then expose NetApp storage into this environment? When I'm running in the data center or I'm running at the edge and I need to store that data, replicate the data, secure it. Well, how do I kind of plug those two things together? I think, John, at the beginning, you kind of alluded to this idea of, you know things are becoming more application centric, right? And we're trying to run an IT architecture that's more centered around the application. Well, by combining cloud's knowledge of kind of where everything's running with a common platform like OpenShift with a Kubernetes aware data fabric and storage layer you really can achieve that. You can have an application centric kind of management model that stands for those environments. Yeah, I want to come back to that whole impact on IT because this has come up as a major theme here. Think that the IT transformation is going to be more about cloud scale, but I want to get Octavian on the satellite on NetApp's role and how you compliment that. How do you guys fit in? He just mentioned that you guys are playing with cloud satellite. Obviously this looks like an operating model. How does NetApp fit in? Simply put, we extend and enable the capabilities that IBM satellite platform provides. I think Jason referred to the storage aspects and what we are doing, it's enabling not only storage but rich data services around tiering based on temperature or replicated snapshots or capabilities around caching, high availability, encryption and so forth. So we believe that our technology integrate very well with Red Hat OpenShift and the Kubernetes aspect enable the application mobility in that translation of really distributed computing at scale from the traditional data center to the edge and to the massive hubs that IBM is building. You know, I got to say, but watching you guys work together for many decades now and covering you with theCUBE for the past 10 years or 11 years now, been a great partnership. I got to say one thing that's obviously to me and our team and mainly the world is, now you got a new CEO over at IBM, you have a cloud focus that's unwavering. He, Arvin loves the cloud, we all know that. Ecosystems are changing with that. IBM already had a big ecosystem and partnerships. Now it seems to be moving to a level where you got to have that ecosystem really thrive in the cloud. So I guess we'll use the last couple of minutes if you guys don't mind explaining how the IBM NetApp relationship in the new context of this new partnership, a new ecosystem or a new kind of world helps customers and how you guys are working together. Yeah, I mean, I could start. I mean, I think you're right that, you know, cloud is all about platforms and about kind of the overall environment people operate in and the ecosystem is really critical. And I think things like satellite have given us new ways to work together. I mean, IBM and NetApp, as we said, have been working together for a long time. We rely on them a lot in our public cloud, for example, in our storage tiers, but with the kind of idea of distributed cloud and the boundaries of public cloud spreading to all these new environments, those are just new places where we can build really interesting valuable integrations for our clients so that they can deal with data, deal with these more complex apps, you know, in all the places that they exist. So I think it's been actually really exciting to kind of leverage that opportunity to find new ways to work together and deliver solutions for our clients. Octavian. I would say that data is the ecosystem and we all know that there is more data right now being created outside of the traditional data center be it in the cloud or at the edge. So our mission is to enable that hybrid cloud or that data mobility and enable persistence, rich data storage services, whatever data is being created. I think IBM's new satellite platform comes in and broadens the aperture of people being able to consume IBM's services at the edge and or a remote office. And I think that's very exciting. You guys are both experts and solely seasoned executives, dev ops, dev sec ops, dev data ops, whatever you want to call it, data's here, ecosystems. Yes, thanks for coming on theCUBE, really appreciate the insight. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, IBM Think, CUBE coverage. John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching.