 Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering Red Hat Summit 2019, brought to you by Red Hat. It is so good to have you back with us here on theCUBE as we continue our live coverage here in the BCEC at Red Hat Summit 2019. Glad to have you watching wherever you might be, Eastern Time Zone or maybe out west. Stu Miniman, John Walls here. Our coverage continuing six year. We've been here at this summit. Eric Kern now joins us here, both from Lenovo, Eric and Steve Brown. Eric is an executive distinguished engineer and Steve is the managing partner in the software business unit and the ADEV-OPS practice leader. So gentlemen, good to have you with us here on theCUBE. Good to see you today. Thank you. No surprise that you're here, long-term partnership, very successful get together. First off, your ideas or your impressions of what you've heard and what you've seen so far here in the day and a half that we've been underway and whether it's keynote or maybe one of the side sessions, just what's your first impression of what's going on here? Yeah, I mean, it's great. There's a lot of people here, a lot of activity. I mean, we can see the expo behind us. You know, the food is great, lunch is great, so. Rub it in, a little bit. Okay, so a little bit of news this week with regard to what you're up to. And if you would, I'm not going to ask you to go terribly deep but just give us an idea of what some of the headlines are that you guys were sending out this week. Steve, why don't you take that? Yeah, so this week we announced six new reference designs and solutions, engineered solutions. But pretty excited about OpenShift 4 and certainly REL8 after a five-year, you know, I guess pause, if you will, on major releases. So that's, that's exciting. Yeah, so, you know, Eric, why don't we start with, you know, building on those partnerships, talk about some of the solutions you're talking to customers in, you know, some of the latest and greatest. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of interesting things we're doing. One of the things that we've been doing recently is around TrueScale. So TrueScale is our infrastructure as a service on-premise, right? And so one of the things that we do with it is we build overall solutions. So there's a number of reference architectures that we talked about with Red Hat, these solutions. Think about them as having an overall CapEx price and then we convert that into an OpEx price. Probably one of the neat novel things, and this is kind of the area that I really got into, right, is around how do we build a metering system that doesn't require us to install much of software and can be compatible with everything. So with TrueScale, what we've done is we've leveraged our, what's called our X-Clarity Controller, it's the chip basically on the motherboard. And that X-Clarity Controller has the ability to measure power. And measure power both at the overall input consumption, as well as measuring power in the CPU, the memory, and the IO. And we've built an infrastructure around that. We can actually tell you exactly what percentage the system is being used and consumed based on that. And we can charge for the overall system on a monthly basis. So we have a portal that's set up for that, whether it be our hardware on its own, or our hardware with the Red Hat software installed on top of it. So how's that affected the customer relationship then all of a sudden? Whether there was a, not say a dispute, but might have been questions about how much usage am I getting, how am I using this, why am I being billed as I'm being billed, so on and so forth. Now all of a sudden, you could just deliver the proofs and the pudding, right? You could say, this is exactly what you're doing with this. This is exactly how much you're consuming. And I would assume from a pricing standpoint, from that modeling standpoint, you give everybody a lot of comfort, I would think, right? You do, right? So not only do they see exactly what they're being charged for, they see exactly some of the usage on their own systems. And so a lot of times, they don't know how well-balanced or unbalanced their systems are. And so we're actually providing real usage data. It's different than what you get in public cloud. It's different than what you get in some other solutions where it's virtual allocation. So there's a difference in knowing exactly the physical utilization versus the allocated utilization. What a lot of people do, a lot of companies do when they're running public cloud infrastructure, is they spend a lot of time in automation to actually deallocate, right? So they're doing all this work just to try to save money. Whereas in the true skill model, you just run it like you normally run it and you save money because if you're not using it, you're not paying for it. You'll pay for it, right? Exactly, exactly. All right. Well, Steve, a lot of discussion at the show this week about OpenShift, not least this morning, OpenShift 4 was released. We've had a chance to talk to a number of customers. Bring us inside. Lenovo's worked with OpenShift for a while. Oftentimes we think about the application layer. It's like, oh, it's totally divorced. I don't need to think of it. Well, we understand there's integration work that happens there and I would love your insight as to what is happening at the integration, where it's progressed and any customer stories that you've got along those lines. Well, yeah, we've been doing a lot of work with OpenShift. I would say in upwards of more than two years, we started with Intel and Red Hat and we built a number of Intel Select solutions, reference designs, both bare metal and hyper-converged. We're on our fifth edition now of the OpenShift design on Cascade Lake. We're the, I want to say the pioneers in the industry. We have a center of competency in DevOps and with software, you know, to really promote software development solutions. And I mean, we're excited with OpenShift 4 because of the CoreOS integration as well as the auto-provisioning key things and it makes it so much easier to adopt and implement. Yeah, any customer deployments, you know, when they come to you, you know, what's the kind of aha moment that they have? Is it just the agility that it brings them? Is there anything you can share as to, you know, the customers that are actually doing this in the field? Well, I like to think that customers get the aha when they realize that there's an engineered platform that's been purpose-built and they're not cobbling software and tools together. You know, it helps with the CICD pipeline process, templating much more effectively. Overall, it's, I think, a lot more streamlined than it was in the earlier editions of OpenShift, it's actually open source. So we're pretty excited, you know, with comprehensive business support, I think that businesses feel comfortable. Kind of a simple question, but what are you, in terms of what TrueSkill operates now, what are you allowing people to do now that they didn't do before? The latest version here, what exactly is, where's you think this improvement or where's the new efficiency? You know, what are they getting out of it that would make me as a customer have that, if I haven't converted yet, or if I'm perhaps, you know, right for the taking, what would make me jump? Yeah, I mean, part of it is, is customers don't want to be managing their infrastructure, right? So this is why there's a big push to public cloud. They just want to be managing their applications. They just want to focus on what's paying the bills, right? And paying the bills or providing the IT service is all in the application layer for the most part. What TrueSkill allows them to do is to have that public cloud kind of management platform. So it's Lenovo premium support behind the scenes, so Lenovo is managing the hardware itself. Lenovo maintains the ownership of the hardware, so they're not even owning the hardware. Very similar to public cloud. And they can go and use it on-prem. So they don't have to worry about any kind of security issues with the public cloud. They don't have to worry about any kind of network issues, right, it's all in their data center. It's running just exactly the way they run CapEx, but they're running in the way that, you know, that they have really liked with the public cloud infrastructure. Right, so confidence, comfort, security, all that stuff, right? Yeah, which is, I'll pay for that. Sure. So, you know, we've seen software move heavily towards this model, you know, whether it be SAS or, you know, various moving from CapEx to OpEx. When I look at infrastructure, it's been a little bit of a slower move, especially, you know, I've got some background on the storage side, you know. If you look at storage, it's like, oh, okay, you know, I'm conditioned as a customer to think about my capacity, my performance, and how I'm tuning everything, and I need to make adjustments, and making changes usually takes a little bit longer. Red Hat's got a lot of software products in this storage space. Help us understand how this fits in, and, you know, our customer's getting more comfortable moving from the CapEx to the OpEx for the other pieces. No, no, good segue. So, Steph and Gluster are some really interesting storage products from Red Hat, and they fit right on our servers, right? And so, we install them, we build big solutions around both of them. I'm actually working on big architecture, you know, for another company, for another customer out in Germany. So, it's huge, Steph Gluster. The neat thing about it is our true scale model allows us to actually sell them on OpEx in a storage product, and what we're measuring is we're measuring the storage, what I call a storage in motion, versus the storage at rest. So, we see all the different usages of the different servers. The servers are acting as controllers, a multi, you know, tenant controller, and there's a lot of information that's being, you know, stored and transmitted through the systems. True scale's just accumulating all the usage of that, and, you know, Steve, maybe you want to talk about some of the software side of it from the storage perspective, but it's really, you know, the true scale fits right in real nicely with the storage side of it. I'd actually like to talk about it more comprehensively from the Red Hat software side of it. And let's talk about how there are already no certification needed. We're looking at all Red Hat applications in true scale, whether it's OpenShift or Rel8, Gluster, Ceph, Ansible. So, I'm really excited because we're not limited in the portfolio. Exactly, exactly. So, Steve, it's interesting because we used to think about, okay, you know, what boxes I'm buying, what licensing I'm doing. If you talk about a true software world, it should be a platform that unifies these things together. So, it sounds like you're saying we're getting there, I shouldn't have to think about, you know, give us a little bit kind of the old way and, you know, where customers are seeing it today. Yeah, well, we're not getting there, we're there. What that allows us to do is to take the reference designs that we have and the testing that we've previously validated with Intel and Red Hat and be able to snap pieces together. So, it's just a matter of what's different and unique for the client and the client's situation and their growth pattern. What's great about true scale in this model is that we can predictably analyze our consumption forward based on the business growth. So, for example, if you're using OpenShift and you start with a small cluster for, say, one or two lines of business, as they adopt DevOps methodologies going from either waterfall or agile, we can predictably analyze the consumption forward that they're going to need. So, they can plan years in advance as they progress. And as such, the other snap-ins, say, storage that they're going to need for data in motion or data at rest. So, it's actually smarter. And what that ends up doing is obviously saving them money, but it saves them time. You know, the typical model is going back to IT and saying, we need these servers, we need the storage and the software and bolt it all together and the IT guys are, you know, hair on fire running around already. So, they can, you know, as long as IT approves it, they can sort of bypass that big, heavy lift. So, from what you've heard this week, you know, the relay, the big launch last night, a lot of fun, right? Yeah. And then OpenShift 4 earlier today talked about what, fine, if there are elements to those two, either one of them, that you find most attractive or that really kind of jump off the page to you, is there anything out there that you're seeing or any through the demos that we saw today or last night even that you think, wow, that's cool, that's good, that this is going to be useful for us. Yeah, I mean, OpenShift is one of the things that we're seeing in the industry that's just, you know, really enabling the whole DevOps practice. So, OpenShift is interesting from the perspective of flexibility, automation, you know, tooling, you know, row eight, of course, you know, we've all been waiting for it, I guess, for a while now, probably. Right. It's just the next, you know, the next level, the next generation. The Red Hat software, you know, see, I'm a big fan of Ceph, I mean, I just like Ceph, it's just a neat storage product. It's been around for a while, you know, but it keeps getting better. It's kind of like the old storage product that, you know, first came out with some software-fine storage. But the whole ecosystem around Red Hat is just very appealing. I actually, you know, CloudForms is one, I think, is a little underutilized today. So, CloudForms is a real nice cloud management platform as well. So there's a lot of interesting Red Hat software. You know, Steve, I mean, you, you know, we've done all these reference architectures. Are there any, anyone to stick out to you when just kind of rattling off some ones that I like? Yeah. I really like the CoreOS integration. Because we now see that acquisition really taking shape in a true productization sense, in a practical use sense. And I think with Red Hat, you know, owning that asset and controlling the development, they can build out features as needed. They're not having to wait on the ecosystem or to spend different cycles for growth. So I think that's my highlight. I've been looking for that. On auto provisioning as well. I think that's a really key benefit to it just to make things more smooth and simple. Well, gentlemen, thanks for the time. Nice to meet you and look forward to seeing you down the road. We've been talking about Lenovo, Stu and I were there a couple of years ago, Ashton Kutra out in San Francisco. And so now we get the two of you guys. You're right there with Ashton, right? That's right. Same celebrity. Thanks. Thanks for sharing the time. Good to see you guys. Thank you. Back with more live here at Red Hat Summit 2019. We're in Boston and you're watching theCUBE.