 A good evening, brilliant community, and welcome back to the Windy City. We are at KubeCon CloudNativeCon. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined by my fabulous co-host, John Furrier. John, how you doing? Doing great, and day two, coming to an end. More energy, bringing it home. I know, I still feel, I feel like the energy level is still up from when we started yesterday. The gate's open. There's not even a happy hour tonight, and it's pulsing in here. It's up a thousand. We've got a fabulous segment for you coming up next with two longtime partners and friends of theCUBE. We've got Mike and Brandon. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. It's going to be great to be here. I know, it seems like you guys are doing great. I can feel the energy. You're having a good time. We are talking storage today, and I love what you said earlier. There's a myth that storage isn't important anymore. Dispel it. Yeah, when you, and I'll start out by telling a story. Yeah. Give us a story time. 2015, 2016, there was a desire to get persistent storage into Kubernetes, and Red Hat was extraordinarily interested in it because at the time we were doing battle with Cloud Foundry, and that was one of the big features over Cloud Foundry's storage persistence. And we brought all these storage vendors to the table, and they all had their idea of how that implementation should look like. And it's now CSI, how you do a snapshot, how you do replication, how you do encryption. It all had to be a generic API. Had to be a lot of strong opinions in that room. A lot of strong opinions. A lot of passionate people there. And you needed, you really needed an ecosystem, like the one we're sitting in today. The power of the Kubernetes, the power of KubeCon, the power of all these people coming together with an open heart and really driving the best outcome. And that's what happened, and that's how we got storage into Kubernetes. And you think about the storage now with all the AI stuff happening and all the potential data that's going to come out of, I would say that the data exhaust is now available for AI. That's going to be spinning a lot of gold. That's one of the big conversations here. And if you didn't have that storage set up in there, a lot of times like really flat footed. So I got to ask you, as you see the hyper convergence kind of come into the Kubernetes, what does that mean for customers? How should they be thinking about today moving forward? Because Kubernetes is kind of getting stable. People like it, they're operating with it. What do you guys see that going? Yeah. So I would say infrastructure in general, right? So it's both storage, but just infrastructure, right? So we're seeing the move from stateless to stateful containers tremendously, right? And they're looking to be more mission critical type of applications. And with that is the expectation of being able to have all the resiliency and the RTO RPO that you expect from a traditional standpoint. And one of the challenges that I think a lot of customers see is, okay, to build all of that from your own standup, right? If you're bringing your own servers, bringing your own networking, bringing your own storage, that's complex. Complex, expensive. Complex, expensive. And they're not focusing on what the outcome there. It's generally not infrastructure-led, right? It's application-led. So having infrastructure that can be rolled in, set up, and away you go with your cluster or clusters in a matter of days, not months, tremendous value. And that's one of the areas that we've really focused on from IBM. Absolutely. Do you think we're gonna see that time continue to drop here, or are we starting the plateau in terms of? I think we're very much starting to see that. And there's some key technologies that we're developing with Red Hat and the broader Kubernetes community in terms of multi-cluster and some of the things like hosted control plane that I think are fantastic enablers. Yeah. To really drive development and innovation. Yeah. I don't want to get too technical, but there's this concept of hosted control planes. And what you do is you take one Kubernetes cluster and in its namespaces you run the control plane of other Kubernetes clusters. And therefore you're hosting Kubernetes so it's called hosted control planes. Yeah. That really drives storage bonkers. Like where do you have the storage in the child clusters? Do you have it in the management clusters? Where do you put it? IBM's put a lot of time and consideration into what that design should look like. What are some of the state-of-the-art customer scenarios? Take us through the life of a customer. As they take this out, what are some of the common deployments? What's the operating model that you see that's most resonant with customers? Oh boy, that's a tough one. Because honestly we are seeing them kind of across the board. There's so many different use cases. One of the customers that I talked to just today is they're looking at developing kind of more of a containers as a service on-prem. So being able to, you know, again, spin up and spin down very quickly to provide it to whatever their, you know, business line is to take it from, you know, playing around and then being able to quickly move it into production, right? So that's definitely a use case that, you know, was top of mind because we talked to a customer about it today. Yeah, we see two big ones. Like, thank God for JNAI in storage, right? So the, I would say going into 2021, the AI market was very SaaS driven. You had a lot of people wanting to do BigQuery, a lot of people wanting to go and do those type of experiences. To really hit a home run with JNAI, you have to have your most intimate of data. You have to have stuff you don't share with people to really train those models and you're not necessarily going to put that up in a cloud today. And it's driving a lot of storage use cases for us. The other one is we're driving more virtual machines into Kubernetes clusters. This is the Kubevert project. That's causing a lot of need for live migration. And to do live migration efficiently, you need read-write storage instead of just block storage. And the clouds traditionally have not been excellent at read-write storage. They're great at block, not necessarily read-write. And fusion appliance really helps with that. You mentioned Kubevert, OpenShiftvert. Seems like you're having a lot of discussions. Tell me a little more about the, what's going on here. Well, so I mean, I think most companies have started from a VM landscape, right? So that's where they are today, but they're extremely invested in moving to the future with containers. And so the ability to have some flexibility across both landscapes is extremely important. Having silos is exactly what we're trying to get away from, right? So the ability to run VMs with containers harmoniously and managed in the same way, that's the nirvana, that's what they're going for. And I think we're getting really close to that kind of paradigm. I mean, the expensive part is the Argo CD, the Tecton, the developer experience, how you generate software and get it out there. If we, at the end of that, can say container or VM, that's a great solution. It's interesting, you mentioned Argo, you got Backstage, you have all these contributed systems coming in as open source and customers get to leverage that. Also the question of workload diversity is coming in too, so you got the combination of, okay, I could take some pre-existing stuff, take Backstage for instance, you guys are heavily involved in, or Argo CD, another great thing that came from Intuit. They were donated in. So everyone can leverage these open source tools. Okay, now I've got to run them. It's okay now, do I hire people just to run the systems? So again, the challenge of how do you get the talent? How do I get these diverse workloads that are going to come in from Genervai? They're going to tap data and storage? These are complex systems questions. Absolutely. How do customers navigate through this? Take us through, what's the mindset of the customer? Where's their attitude right now? Are they indifferent? Are they blown away? Are they leaning into it? Are they enthusiastic? Are they hostile? Yeah. Oh my God, I can't have any more of that. No, I mean, it could be daunting. Or they're enthusiastic. I mean, I think the comforts like this is obviously showcasing the enthusiasm, right? Yeah, yeah. Literally. But I think the thing that we're definitely recognizing is there's a lack of available skills across the board, right? So to the degree you can automate and simplify, provide a solution versus piece parts, I think especially as you're continuing to roll into more mid and larger enterprises, right? They're looking for solutions. They're not looking for piece parts, right? And so if you can provide that end to end solution and get them to focus on what their outcomes are, that's what they're looking for. No. And they're highly motivated right now. So when you look at just building software, you have that whole secure software, shift left thing happening. Open shift. A hot topic. Yeah, yeah. Open shift always want to solve those larger problems. That's why we put so much of the CNCF projects here into the box when you open that box. IBM has taken that and they've put it in a server for you with this IBM Fusion HCI appliance. So now it's really there for you without a lot of work. So at the end of the day, managing clusters is a big thing. You guys do a lot of that, right? So what's the challenge as you're seeing now? We've done some great scale. People are operating Kubernetes now. It's not how to figure out Kubernetes. It's really operating these clusters. This is one of the big things you guys do. What goes beyond next? Because Kubernetes is enabling technology. Yeah. How do you guys see that cluster management next level conversation use case? Yeah, so I'm going to say kind of twofold, right? So there's a little bit of lifecycle management, right? So how do you manage the code levels across the stack, right? And that can be somewhat complex. So automating that through tools and single experience, but then also it gets to a little bit of fleet management. So it's both cluster management and fleet management, right? And so tools like advanced cluster manager, right? Become important as you continue to scale from a few nodes to a few clusters to a whole enterprise. It might be quarter edge to cloud. Like that becomes complex and they need tools. They need automation. And I think that it takes an army and it takes really solutions to focus on that. At Redhead, he mentioned advanced cluster management. We also have advanced cluster security. It's our stack rocks acquisition that we made a little while back. We also have Ansible, which is a great automation platform for us. I love that event. You guys bundled Ansible Fest is now part of Redhead Summit, which we kind of combined this year. But what came up in May though at Redhead Summit was interesting. People wanted to move data across the applications to get a consistent set of services across the environments. That was a real hard problem to do. Could you guys elaborate on where that's at now? Because that essentially is a super cloud like kind of power dynamic. It's hard to move across multiple environments to have consistent services because they're not consistent. Well, first of all, multiple clouds. On-premise edge cloud. So I would say it takes sounds harder than it is. Even that sentence sounded hard. Well, so I think it takes two pieces there, right? So it's a common platform, right? So obviously OpenShift presides that common platform. So whether you're on-prem and to be honest, whether you're on-prem with x86 or PowerZ, especially in the IBM environments, right? Or in the cloud, or now we're starting to see more and more use cases of even arm, you know, where you're having edge type of devices. So you have the platform, but then you've got to have the data services, right? So being consistent across that, and that's where we've focused in a partnership, I would say, between Redhead and IBM because we have those skills and experience on how do you build above that layer with the data services as well. And there has been a lot of innovation in the CNCF around Ingress and egress type technologies. I was talking to a customer yesterday and his problem was he had API1 and API2. API1 couldn't talk to API2, but API2 lived in another cluster on another infrastructure and they needed to know to get over there. We have these investments and meshes. And a lot of API management is now getting into these Ingress controllers. And so now we have service registry happening on the fly, so we are starting to solve that at a network tier, the problem that you mentioned. Yeah, and the single platform approach works well when you want to have that control point. I think that becomes a very key. Well, I think it's also playing into what we've talked a lot is there's so many things happening all at once right now, a lot of moving pieces, a lot of different systems and stacks, but we need to have some sort of universality in terms of how people can use and trust that those APIs can talk to each other, or even for teams to collaborate and be able to jump into an environment and troubleshoot or build or whatever needs to happen next. So it is very cool. And especially in our open source community, you both work for very large companies. I just noticed your shirt, by the way, I just want to give you a shout out for the IBM and that is adorable. We do a swag segment here on theCUBE and that is a gem. So I'm not going to let the segment go any further without calling that out. What does the open source community mean to IBM and why is that so important? Yeah, so I mean, we've definitely adopted an open first mentality, right? And so I think that not only in an acquisition of Red Hat kind of further exacerbated that, right? Obviously, very open. And it's part of the commitment. Very open. But I mean, there's dozens and dozens of projects across IBM that we're focused very much on. Whether it's open source or just open technology in general, I think that that's the direction that we're going. And I think that it's important, especially as we get more and more into AI type of workloads, openness becomes very important. It's a trust in openness, right? Close systems become, you know, somewhat problematic and untrackable. Yeah. Oh, very much so. And I would assume that, me or two of you. Yeah. At Red Hat, when you look at open source, the community is probably the biggest aspect of it. And I worked half my career in proprietary and half my career in open source. And we- I like the left and right shoulder going on the whole time. We at Red Hat will not move forward. We'll burn the house down if we don't have the community with us. We'll sit there and we'll wait until we find consistency across a large group of vendors and people. And that's why our customers love us. That's why they turn to us. And that's why we've gotten to have so many wonderful conversations with you here on theCUBE. You guys are definitely open on content, too. I got to say, give you props to the team. You guys are always supported at theCUBE. You bring conversations in. You're not afraid to handle the tough questions. You bring all that data to the table. We really appreciate that. And it's been fun. So many fun, smart people, too. We had Sally, we had Emily. We've had a lot of great Red Hat guests that have just absolutely smashed us. We're open source right now. Okay, let's go. Well, IBM, I mean, the history of IBM, they were one of the first to put billion dollars behind Linux. What year was that? It feels like when I was 12. I was gonna say, was I even alive? I'm not sure I was living. I think I was 12 years old at that time. No, but I mean, you think about the Linux commit at that time, that was a very big move. So support Linux. And then look what happened with CNCF. And obviously Red Hat's DNA is all open source. So open source, it's funny, it's one. It's the software industry now. Sure. Yeah, I mean, you look at something as closer to the vest and proprietary as the mainframe, right? Think that that's got to be a closed system and how it's then also even embraced Linux and open source, right? So I mean, IBM across the board, I would say is really focused on ensuring open first and open to the core. Well, you can certainly tell by the conversations that we've had both of you with your customers between the collaboration, all of it. It's a beautiful thing to see. Thank you both so much for being here with us. I have one final question for you. I suspect we'll probably see you in Paris. What do you hope we can say in six months that you can't quite say yet? Oh boy. Oh yeah. That's a tough one. There's some interesting technology implementations that IBM is doing and their appliance that will be probably unveiled then. I'm guessing has to do with AI. A lot of AI. John, what an educated guess. I mean, there's a treasure trove. We know inside IBM, we've been covering IBM since the Cube's existence when they had a lot of different conferences. AI deep bench patents. I mean, it gives a little taste. What's coming? So there's a lot of things there. So I think we're looking to have some pieces around further integration, around appliances, but then when it comes to AI, I think there's a lot that's progressing between what we have with OpenShift AI and what we have with Watson X. The two are hand in hand, right? Self-driving infrastructure. Just build it. I'm gonna think it and it just happens. That's it. That could be dangerous, John. That could be very dangerous. I look forward to having that conversation and hopefully getting the chance to talk a little bit more about AI. Watson and who knows what else when we're in Paris. Mike Brennan, thank you so much for being here with us. John, always a pleasure to have your insights on my right. And thank all of you for tuning in to CubeCon and CloudNativeCon here in the Windy City. My name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for emerging tech news.