 Okay, we're back here live in San Francisco for the Red Hat Summit. This is theCUBE SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events, extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm joined with Stu Miniman, E-Bahn.org. And our next guest is Red Hesh, Paula Krishnan, general manager, virtualization of an open stack of Red Hat. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Congratulations, obviously, Dell is announcing some stuff. So tell us what your thoughts are of this show. So, you know, first of all, this is a day that we look for, or these days are the ones that we look for the most as Red Hat employees, because, you know, top customers across the globe come here. We get to share not just the finished products, but also the roadmap of where we are taking this. And so if you fundamentally believe in this community-powered innovation model, what better opportunity than to test the ideas, get feedback, and start delivering, you know, get back to our, you know, barn, if you will, and then start building things that customers ask for. So it's an all in all, it's a great opportunity to interact with customers and partners. Before we get into some of the open stack conversations, I want to just get your personal perspective. We were talking before we came on that the revolution of the computer industry, even going back to the 30th anniversary of the Mac where I was attending with Apple back in Cupertino, and we talked with IBM earlier, 50th anniversary of the mainframe, open source came on the scene with Linux big time. That operating system kind of decoupled from the hardware. Hey, interesting concept. Now today, that decoupling is going step further. How do you feel? What's your take on this? And how significant, and you live and breathe it every day with a lot of passion at Red Hat. Explain to the folks on how important this is. Why is this such a big deal? Yeah, so let me come at it from a slightly different perspective. You know, sometimes I wake up and pinch myself and really believe that, hey, it's real, right? Because 10 years ago, right, I have a history of having worked in a proprietary organization for a fairly large number of years. At that point in time, this open source was this unknown thing, unknown amount of risks, et cetera, et cetera. Now look at kind of the public cloud as a starting point. You're not going into open stack yet. Nine out of 10 clouds out there are built on open source technology. So it's not a, hey, can open source be there, but it's a, hey, what are we using it for? That's one thing. The second thing is any leading edge innovation that you talk about, be it big data, et cetera, et cetera, it's all in open world, right? It's almost like the planets have come in alignment at the perfect time, and I consider myself personally lucky, right? Really, I mean, I'm personally lucky to be at this juncture when the customers want to reinvent themselves, the industry is reinventing itself, and we have a very catalytic role to play, so. Padma Warrior said on stage yesterday, every company is now a technology company. They have to be, it's not just one little corner of the organization, it's everything. And this is changing the game. And the folks that have Red Hat, you guys have a lot of enterprise customers. That used Red Hat on a commercial basis and supported, et cetera, et cetera, and it's your business models doing so well. But now they want to extend that capability to the cloud, and they see Amazon out there. They put some stuff out there, do some shadow ID. Still, they complain about the lumpiness SLA, and that's all been talked about, well-documented. Amazon's trying to become more enterprise-grade. But OpenStack has been clearly the bridge for a lot of enterprises they want to cross for the flexibility. Where are you guys at OpenStack, and how baked out is it just standing up? Are people using it? Can you talk specifically about some successes around OpenStack and where you guys are at? Sure. I would parse your question into multiple parts if you don't mind. Just to frame the conversation, it's not almost as if customers are saying, hey, look, we want to get to OpenStack. Yes, there are some that say that too. We love them to death for that. The reality is customers are saying, look, I want to do two things in my infrastructure. Reduce the cost, bring in the agility, right? And at the same time, you make sure that the legacy infrastructure that is in there continues to deliver and SLA, et cetera. So our gambit in this is actually not just OpenStack, but also the other peace spots that are needed to make the transition from where they are to where they want to get to as soon as possible. It starts with KVM, it starts with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, starts with CloudForms as a technology to be able to manage a vSphere environment as well as a rev environment, and then enter OpenStack into the picture. You bring in a new breed of applications, new kind of infrastructure where you potentially are reviring and reinventing, you know, computer storage and network layers all over again, setting yourself up for the future, right? Now in that context, the beauty of all of that is you've finally been, you know, liberated from the tragedy of the past, which is you got shackled by one proprietary vendor or other, right? It's truly, truly open, right? So that's the context we are operating in. Now you had a question about, hey, where are we seeing fraction, et cetera, right? So if you look at the, you know, last year and change, in July is when we geared the product. So we announced two products in July last year at our summit, you know, we're doing it a little earlier this year. First is a combination of rel and OpenStack, engineered together so that the peace spots needed for you to have an environment that is predictable can come into an enterprise. The second one is a product called Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure. Now the beauty of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure is it's got traditional virtualization, it's got rel OpenStack platform, and it's got a common management across both. And the beauty of that is it can also manage public cloud resources as well as the sphere resources if you will, right? So finally we have an offering which is truly open that can help bridge what you have and what you can get to. And what we're seeing from customers is that if you look across the globe, we're engaged deeply with, you know, three digit number of customers, the cash registers I'm happy to say has already started ringing if you will. We're seeing traction in financial vertical which is sort of, you know, the home base fuel of Red Hat in general, telco vertical, fueled further by the whole NFV focus if you will, and then research and education. And you know, I'm hoping, you know, I can share some of the customer names as well. So if you look at NCI, which is the National Computing Institute in Australia, this is a research body which provides the infrastructure for weather research in Australia, for example. So, you know, they started with a couple of hundred nodes in terms of OpenStack, the eventual footprint is going to be 7,000 nodes or something like that. Or Midokura, which is an NFV provider, you know, they are private cloud, and as well as how they develop software and test and repro solutions is based on OpenStack. You know, talk about every company becoming a technology company and it's being embedded into the way you do business, that's a shining example as well. Or you know, we have a few ones like Nanyang Technical University in Singapore, or University of Portugal, etcetera, all doing fundamentally one thing which is, hey look, we have seen the pain points of the old infrastructure. We see the possibility of OpenStack. Now let's pick the use cases that make the most sense for us to bring OpenStack into and then think about a journey thereof. So it's a great place to be in from a traction and adoption perspective. And the cash register is your business model of, that's been tried and truised as a subscription. Same, no changes on the business model in terms of these deployments. Yeah, it's not just the business model which is the same, right? Look, an average Red Hat customer has trust on Red Hat for a couple of things. One is that the open innovation has been hardened enough so that they can deploy it in their production environment and actually, you know, not get fired and in fact get a promotion hopefully, right? So that's the first level of trust they have. Second is a truly wide partner ecosystem. You know, I just saw Sam talk a little bit earlier with you, right? Dell is a shining example of, you know, when Linux was trying to become rally, if you will, Michael Dell himself, you know, watered with his wallet to partner with Red Hat. I mean, that's the history and we kind of saw history repeating itself in December at Dell World when, you know, Dell and Michael Dell himself said, hey, look, we are picking Red Hat for open stack, right? So from a partner ecosystem perspective. And now he's a private company, he's got a lot more flexibility as not to chase the whole Wall Street mentality. He can do some innovative things. Absolutely, there are not too many companies claiming to be the world's largest, you know, start-ups, if you will, right? He can be creative again. Yeah. So what is some of the creativity you're seeing from folks like Dell who see the future and that's classic early adopters, people who know what they're doing. Michael certainly does. What kind of creativity are you seeing with Rell and OpenStack? Yeah, it fundamentally comes down to the jointly aligned mission and vision we have together, which is we as industrial leaders have the opportunity and it behooves us to make it enterprise-ready as possible. So now, let's parse what is enterprise-ready really mean. First is you need to have a product experience where you can install, configure, manage entire life cycle of it. So that's very, very important. Second is that you need to be able to piece it together with what you have as well as the newer stuff around SDN and other, you know, beautiful three-letter acronyms which are fueling further innovation in there. So if you look at both the counts, you know, we are so aligned that, you know, we're working so fast. I mean, it was December that we announced. Today I'm happy to say that we have generally available the joint solutions with, you know, Dell, right? That's the pace at which we are working together. You know, that's a lot of creativity, a lot of guts and a lot of purposefulness in terms of what we want to do that I'm seeing in Dell. You know, of course, we all work with Dell in one way or other in our history. It's reinvigorating to be engaging with Dell today. And you work for a priority advantage so you know the whole rip and replace argument. So here what's interesting is it's a very accurate and by the way, we love the vision. You got to deal with the legacy. And you got to bring in the new shiny, new, cool enabling tools that will help you go faster, but yet not on a rip and replace. It's on a refresh basis. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, exactly. And you know, so now let's, you know, talk one level down in terms of altitude of a technology implementation, right? So let's say you got vSphere implementation already. You got the traditional applications that are virtualized running on that. You realize the power of the new set of applications you can, you know, run on opens tag. But the reality is, is there a way I can technically, you know, know, can over talk to vSphere so that the control plane is still at open stack level so that I'm not having to go to separate schools because I have cloud in, right? So that opportunity has been already, you know, we've already delivered on that. You know, we worked with VMware. Of course, you know, they are the competitor as well. But as industry leaders, we work with them to make sure that we have a joint solution in place. So it all finally comes down to one thing we fundamentally wake up and believe in, which is start with the customer in mind, right? If you do that, you ain't going to go wrong, right? So that's basically it. So Radish, since you've brought up the VMware discussion, obviously, you know, Red Hat is a guest inside of VMware. One of the big drivers I've heard in the marketplace is that open stack should drive rev adoption also. Other than the push to open stack, can you tell me what other kind of real driving forces have been to adopt, you know, kind of KVM, your version of that besides just I want to get off of, you know, the VTACs, if you will. Right, right, right. Since you've all, you used all the, you know, punch lines on VTACs, I'm not going to belabor on that. Now, let's look at a snapshot of where rev as a product itself is. You know, first of all, the great starting point is that KVM is the best performing hypervisor on the planet period, right? So, look at spec word numbers, blow them off the chart. Now, rev as a product has been in market for now five plus years, and it's reached a level of maturity that, you know, month to month call volumes are dropping 10%, whereas the subscriptions are going northward. Now, you had a question about, hey, what is driving the growth of rev? It finally comes down to two things. One is that the attachment in rev and rel, right, because veering this business model where every year you go back to the customer to renew the, you know, rel subscriptions that they have. And given the VTACs, they realize that for starting with Linux workloads, it makes a ton of sense to use rev, right, so British Airways comes as an example to my mind. Or CERN, for example, as a customer using that. So these are, you know, big name customers talking about, you know, adding the second and third tier of workloads onto virtualization using rev, because, you know, you can set an hour of time and already have, you know, VMware, that's a fine thing. The second thing is from an architecture perspective, and this is where the cloud direction conversation we were having is pertinent, what we've done in the last release of rev and then ensuing releases will continue to build on that is, rev becomes a consumer of some of the networking and storage implementations that you do on open style. So which means that if an organization is investing in an open stack, rev gets a drag along with that because open stack is not architected for traditional workloads where, you know, the blinking lights have to be on all the time. So you have enough of those applications that can run on the rev side of the equation. Either you take the sort of the front end web server part or even net new applications on the open stack side, but unless technically you're bringing these together, it becomes too silent. So that's what you've done to make sure that it's not just open stack, which is that raw bridge for getting into more ref footprint, but also the rel installed base. So we've seen tremendous success on both the fronts. So another way to say it is, you know, open stack is the perfect tailwind that we needed to make sure that rev takes off in terms of adoption. Okay, so you're trying to make it pretty seamless even customers to move from rel to rev and straight to open stack. Absolutely, absolutely. So, you know, having lots of debates at this show about kind of the maturity of open stack, if we look at it, it's kind of like a four year old startup with lots of different people putting pieces into it. When we think about technology adoption in general, whether it be Linux, even virtualization with VMware, it takes a long time to go from those early test dev deployments to production environments. Now that Havana's out and Ice House is coming out pretty soon, where are we? What use cases do you see customers doing? I don't hear too many customers saying, I'm going all in, you know, with my environments, but, you know, what customer momentum can you talk about or specifics there? Right, so, you know, a couple of things to a vector here. Yes, indeed, it does take some time and you know, you add to that enterprise lifecycle for evaluation and proving and then, you know, finally cutting the check, if you will. You know, that's just the physics of it. We are going through that. But the heartening thing is that, you know, every six months there is a release of open stack that's going on right now, driving the pace of innovation so fast. You know, the gaps that you're talking about, enterprise readiness, et cetera, they're disappearing so fast. You know, just to give you a couple of examples. One thing that people do give us feedback consistently on is, hey look, they installed Configure Experience in open stack, you know, it does require you to have some tacit knowledge. Guess what, in the June release that we're going to come out which will be based on Ice House, we're going to solve that, right? Another one is about, hey, can you have high availability of the open stack services so that, you know, because this becomes the heartbeat of the enterprise, I want to make sure that it's up and running. We're delivering on HA across all levels, infrastructure, messaging, as well as database, stairs in the next release, et cetera. So we're going to systematically addressing the technical roadblocks to adoption. So that's one thing which is heartening. On the back of that, your question about use cases, what the use cases range from, you know, it's a normal curve just like any, you know, technology adoption. On the extreme end, we have seen pure play open stack adoption, especially in telco, for example, right? It could be NFV, for example, Alcatel Lucent has picked a real open stack platform as the platform for their cloud band solution. So every Alcatel Lucent customer by default is running open stack, it is our open stack and we're excited about that. So that's more a pure play, open stack only, the usages around network function, virtualization, et cetera. In the same bucket of sort of open stack only, we also see some of the research institutions that I shared the names, right? So where it's not about, hey, I have a legacy application or what have you, it's more about I'm creating new net new, either a business model and or new, you know, app experience, if you will, and open stack becomes a perfect candidate for that. If you kind of come towards the middle of the normal curve, that's where you see the customers either wanting to mix and match vSphere with open stack or rev and open stack and cloud forms, et cetera. So there's a lot of mix and match that's happening. And so all signs indicate that, you know, especially given that the number of customers in the middle of the pack are going beyond just the initial picking of the ties by the TTO to, hey, can you roll into production? This is going to just take off. And if you look at the next 12 to 18 month timeframe will be foundational and then, you know, it would be taking off, that's going to see you. So question I have for you is about the administrator. So, you know, one of the things I think VMware's done a really good job is they really built a new role. There's the virtualization administrator and VMware's trying to have them be the kind of the center of the universe. If you look at what they're doing with storage with vSan, with the NSX on the networking side they're trying to give them new tools to do this. You know, the Linux admin, you know, has a lot of great tools. And I've seen that extending into a lot of environments. Cumulus networks is creating, you know, Linux for networking and, you know, Linux is very kind of extensible and programmable from its very nature. So as you go from, you know, Linux to virtualization to cloud, can the Linux admin just do it all the way they have it or the new tools that, you know, you're building in to help them and, you know, help pull them along that spectrum. So it's sort of yes and yes, if you will, right? So, you know, the first part about, it's our remit, right? To make sure that the RELL administrators can graduate to the cloud with us, right? So that means even tactically down to training and certification, et cetera, we've got courses which take into mind, because we understand the persona what their needs are, so we've got that going. Now, there's also additional tooling and, you know, tool chain that needs to be made available because the context changes a little bit. Earlier it was just about compute. Now you got compute storage and networking to think about. So how do you, you know, have the right set of tools for managing life cycle, for example? So if you have an offering called Satellite which is for managing bare metal or virtualized RELL, now we are extending that into OpenStack too so that you have a similar tool chain that you can use for managing the life cycle of OpenStack as well. So we're connecting all the obvious dots in terms of their starting point there being our, you know, we love to death RELL administrators, if you will. Their tool chain, their learning roadmap, everything we're thinking through to make sure that they can graduate and being able to, you know, be at the center of the universe, which is the open universe as against the closed universe of people. So we're super excited about what's going on with you guys, especially with this container thing. So that came up earlier. Virtualization has changed the game, certainly at the infrastructure level, but as the abstraction line moves up, DevOps guys don't have to worry about virtualization. It just becomes this cool thing that happens under the covers or under the hood that works for them. Containers is the new enablement. So we'll get your take on that in context, OpenStack, because a lot of developers we talk to kind of piss and moan sometimes and say, hey, you know what, all this mud slinging around, OpenShift versus Cloud Foundry, it's just ridiculous. Just we'll OpenStack, just fix that. So I want to ask you, where are we on this whole OpenStack conversation? Because there is a battleground in pass that is going on. It seems to be a lot of fun going around. You guys are shipping product. You've got vendors stepping up and saying, hey, like Dell and others saying, it's shipping. What was needed to happen at OpenStack? What is going to move that conversation to a much more productive place? Right, so let's agree on the fundamentals here, which is that the convergence of IA's and pass is a given, right? So you look at Azure, you look at Amazon, look at Google, so you kind of take the math and apply it on on-prem, it's going to happen. So it's a given. Now that's a question of, hey, what's the best starting place? And that's a function of, which is your order of priority? Do you want pass and IA's today, or are you sequencing it in some fashion? Pass, first, or IA's first? I don't have any allegiance one way or other, right? Love them all. But so if you view from that perspective, then we have a great starting point with OpenStack from IA's perspective. We have OpenShift, which is an offering that's available today, both on-prem and off-prem that you could start. And the beauty of OpenNAS and the fact that if you got definitely a seat in the cockpit, if you will, on both, is that you're working to make sure that they can converge together as well, right? So the short answer is, there's a place for all of these to exist. And even the ultimate consumption model is not just going to be passed on IA's, because there's going to be enough, I can take it from, read my lips, definitely enough IA's only scenario that's going to be there. So we see a place for both. And you kind of touched upon Docker earlier and I can kind of touch on that aspect as well. Does Docker and containers connect to dots? So you're basically saying, hey, get the infrastructure service, that's solid, whatever version of that, pass, pick your approach. Does the containers connect to dots on that feature? Container can help connect the dots too. But the key is to realize that the journey from an infrastructure perspective that we've had has three stages in my head. First stage was, how do you get to an application ready infrastructure, which was the REL value proposition? You have ISV certified, the Apple run. So application ready infrastructure. Enter OpenStack. We have application aware infrastructure. You got things like heat where you can define an app and say, hey, the infrastructure knows, hey, I know the animal that's going to run on top of me. Sorry about the poor user language here, but you get the idea, right? You can definitely characterize it and make sure that it behaves elegantly. The next is application optimized infrastructure, where you're running enough of the operating system on top of a virtualized infrastructure so that the infrastructure's absolutely optimized. There's no silver bullet in all this. It's really about functionality. Exactly. I mean, you need all three depending on the use cases, right? So it's all about open and flexible in terms of choices. So I view personally container and Docker specifically as a shot in the arm, which will further the move away from the taxes that your colleague was referring to or the problem with having making proprietary choices and bringing application portability. That's been the holy grail you're after, right? Well, the portability is fantastic, but also speeds the delivery process on the app side too. So if I develop, I like containers. I add to that efficiency and the cost saving associated with that. And there's more, you know what I'm saying? So it's an amazing thing. I could talk about this forever. We're getting the hook, but I want to give you the final word. I really want to get this out there. There's been a lot of people saying, oh, OpenShift has got no traction. Clarify to the audience, the traction around OpenShift relative to OpenStack. Right, so I think my colleague, Shesh Badani, put out a blog a couple of days ago or like two weeks ago, which lists out a few things, which is the fact that, hey look, the number of apps that are there, the number of partners that we're working with, including Dell, I'm sure Sam would have touched upon that or Cisco for that matter, is just increasing day by day, right? So, you know, there's no stopping that train. And the beautiful thing is that the combination of OpenShift and OpenStack will make it into an express train if you will. So that's the bet we're taking. We're getting the hook. Thank you so much for spending your time here. I know you're super busy. You know, it's like a track and field meet here for you guys. It's the big event, 10 years, congratulations. Again, virtualization changed the world. You got containers, you got the cloud, got OpenStack. This is theCUBE, we're documenting it all. Here live in San Francisco, we'll be right back with our next guest after this short break. Thank you.