 Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's coverage here in Orlando, Florida at Cisco Live 2018. Our first year here at Cisco Live, we were in Barcelona this past year. Again, Cisco transforming to a next generation set of networking capabilities while maintaining all the existing networks and all the security. I'm John Furrier, your host with Stu Miniman, my co-host for the next three days. Our next guest is Arun Garg, welcome to theCUBE. You are the director of product management for Converge Infrastructure Group at NetApp. Correct, thank you very much for having me on your show and it's a pleasure to meet with you. One of the things that we've been covering a lot lately is the NetApp's really rise in the cloud. I mean, NetApp's been doing a lot of work on the cloud. I mean, I've wrote stories back when Tom George was the CEO, when Amazon just came on the scene, NetApp has been really into the cloud from the customer standpoint. But now with storage and elastic resources and server lists, the customers are now starting to be mindful. Absolutely. Of how to maximize the scale and with all flash, kind of a perfect storm. What are you guys up to? What's your core thing that you guys are talking about here at Cisco Live? So absolutely, thank you. So George Kurian, our CEO at NetApp is very much in taking us to the next generation and the cloud. Within that, I take care of some of the expansion plans we have on FlexPod with Cisco. And in that, we've got two new things that we are announcing right now. One is the FlexPod for healthcare, which is in FlexPod, we've been doing horizontal applications so far, which are like the databases, tier one database, as well as applications from Microsoft and virtual desktops. Now we are going vertical. Within the vertical, our application, the first one we are looking in the vertical is healthcare. And so it's FlexPod for healthcare. And that's the first piece that we are addressing. What's the big thing with update on FlexPod? Obviously FlexPod has been very successful. What's the modernization aspect of it? Because Cisco's CEO is on stage, they're talking about Cisco's value proposition about the old way is now transitioning to a new network architecture in the modern era. What's the update on FlexPod? Take a minute to explain what are the cool new things going on with FlexPod. Correct, so the all flash fast, which is the underlying technology, which is driving the FlexPod, has really picked up over the last year. As customers keep wanting to improve the infrastructure with better latencies and better performance, the all flash fast has driven even the FlexPod into the next generation. So that's the place where we are seeing double digit growth over the last five quarters, consistently in FlexPod. So that's a very important development for us. We've also done more of the standard CVDs that we do on SAP and a few other are coming out. So those are all out there. Now we are going to make sure that all these assets can be consumed by the vertical industry in healthcare. And there's another solution we'll talk about the managed private cloud on FlexPod. Yeah, over and I'd love to talk about the private cloud. So yeah, I think back to when Cisco launched UCS, it was the storage partners that really helped drive that modernization for virtualization. Net up with FlexPod, very successful over the years doing that. As we know, virtualization isn't enough to really be a private cloud. All the things that Chuck Robbins was talking about on stage, how do I modernize? How do I get, you know, automation in there? So help us connect the dots as to how we got from, you know, a good virtualized platform to this is I think you said manage private cloud, FlexPod and Cisco. Absolutely. So everybody likes to consume a cloud. It's easy to consume a cloud. You go and you click on, I need a VM, small, medium, large and I just want to see a dashboard with how my VMs are doing. But in reality, it's more difficult to just build your own cloud. There's complexity associated with it. You need a service platform where you can give a ticket. Then you need an orchestration platform where you can set up the infrastructure. Then you need a monitoring platform which will show you all of the ways your infrastructure is working. You need a capacity planning tool. There's tens of tools that need to be integrated. So what we have done is we have partnered with some of the premium partners and some GSIs who have already built this. So the risk of a customer using their private cloud infrastructure is minimized. And therefore, these partners also have a managed service. So when you combine the fact that you have a private cloud infrastructure in the software domain as well as the managed service and you put it on the on-prem FlexPod that are already sold, then the customer benefits from having the best of both worlds. A cloud-like experience on their own premise. And that is what we are delivering with this FlexPod managed private cloud solution. Talk about the relationship with Cisco. So we're here at Cisco Live. You guys have a good relationship with Cisco. What should customers understand about the relationship? What are the top bullet points and value opportunities and what does it mean to the impact for the customer? So all these solutions, we work very closely with the Cisco business unit and we jointly develop these solutions. So within that, what we do is, there's the BU to BU interaction where the solution is developed and defined. There is a marketing to marketing interaction where the collateral gets created and reviewed by both parties. So you will not put a FlexPod brand unless the two companies have agreed. So it's tightly integrated. It's tightly integrated. The sales teams are aligned. The marketing, the communications team, the channel partner team, that's the whole value that the end customer gets because when a partner goes to a high-end enterprise customer, he knows that both Cisco and Narap teams can be brought to the table for the customer to showcase the value as well as help them through it. Yeah, over in one of the other areas that I've been talking about the show is if you talk about modernization, you talk about things like microservices. Containers are pretty important. How does that story of containerization fit into FlexPod? Absolutely. So containerization helps you get workloads. The cloud-native workloads are the type two native, type two workloads as Gartner calls them. So our mode two. What we do is we work with the Cisco teams and we already had a CVD design with a hybrid cloud with the Cisco Cloud Center platform which is a clicker acquisition and we showed a design with that. What we are now bringing to the table is the ability for our customers to benefit with a managed service on top of it. So that's the piece we're doing with the cloud teams. With the Cisco team, the ACI fabric is very important to them so that ACI fabric is visible and shown in our designs whether you do SAP, you do Oracle, you do VDI and you do basic infrastructure or you do the managed private cloud or FlexPod on healthcare. All of these have the core networking technologies from Cisco as well as the cloud technologies from Cisco in a form factor or in a manner that easily consumable by our customers. Arun, talk about the customer use cases. So let's say you've got a customer or she gets a lot of customers together with Cisco and they're doing some complex things with the technology but for the customer out there that has not yet kind of went down the NetApp Cisco route, what do they do? They have a storage guys looking at all flash. So check, you guys have that. They want great performance, check. But then they got to integrate. So what do you say to the folks watching that aren't yet customers about what they should look at and evaluate vis-a-vis your opportunity with them and save the competition? So yes, there are customers who are doing all this as separate silos but the advantage of taking a converge infrastructure approach is that you benefit from the years of man experience or person experience that we have put behind in our labs to architect this, make sure that everything is working correctly and therefore it reduces your deployment time and reduces the risk. And if you want to be agile and faster, even in the traditional infrastructure, while you're being asked to go to the cloud, you can do it with our FlexPod design guides. If you want the cloud-like experience, then you can do it with a managed private cloud solution on your premise. They got options and they got flexibility on migrating to the cloud or architecting that. Yes. Okay, great. I'm going to ask you another question that comes up a lot on theCUBE and certainly we see it in the industry. One of the trends is verticalization. So verticalization is not a new thing. Vertical industry, people go to market that way, they build products that are accustomed to verticals. But with cloud, one of the benefits of cloud and kind of a cloud operations is you have a horizontally scalable capability. So how do you guys look at that? Because these verticals, they got to get closer to the front lines and have apps that are customized. I mean, data that's fastly delivered to the app. How should verticals think about architecting storage to maintain the scale of horizontally scalable, but yet provide customization into the applications that might be unique to the vertical? Okay, so let me give a trend first and then I'll get to the specific. So in the vertical industry, the next trend is industry clouds. For example, you have healthcare clouds and you'll have clouds to specific industries. And the reason is because these industries have to keep the data on-prem. So the data gravity plays a lot of impact in all of these decisions and the security of the data. So that is getting into industry-specific clouds. The second piece is analytics. So customers now are finding that data is valuable and the insights you can get from the data are actually more valuable. So what they want is the data on their premise, they want the ability or in their control, so to say, they want the ability to not only run their production applications, but also the ability to run analytics on top of that. In the specific example for healthcare, what it does is when you have all flash fast, it provides you a faster response for the patient because the physician is able to get the diagnostics done better if he has some kind of analytics helping him. Plus, the first piece I talked about, the rapid deployment is very important because you want to get your infrastructure set up. So I can give an example on that too. Well, before we get to the example, this is an important point because I think this is really the big mega trend. It's not really kind of talked much about, but it's pretty happening is that what you just pointed out was it's not just about speeds and feeds and IOPS. The performance criteria to the industry cloud has other new things like data, the role of data, what they're using for the application. So it's just, you got to have table stakes of great fast storage, but it's got to be integrated into what is becoming a use case for the verticals. Did I get that right? Yes, absolutely. So I'll give two examples. One, I can name the customer. So they have come at our booth tomorrow in a mini theater. So LCMC Health, part of UMC, and they have the UMC Medical Center in. So when New Orleans had this Katrina disaster in Louisiana, so they came up with, they need a hospital fast and they decided on FlexPod, because within three months with the wire once architecture and replication, they could scale their whole IT data center for healthcare. So that has helped them tremendously to get up and running. Second is with the all flash fast, they're able to provide faster response to their customer. So that's a typical example that we see in these kind of industries. Arun, thanks for coming on theCUBE. I really appreciate it. You guys are doing a great job in following NetApp's recent success lately. As always, NetApp's always going the next level. Quick question for you to end the segment. What's your take of Cisco Live this year? What's some of the vibe of the show so far? I know it's day one, there's a lot more to come and you're just getting a sense of it. What's the vibe? What's coming out of the show this year? What's the big ha? So I attended the keynote today and it was very interesting because Cisco has taken networking to the next level with intent based networking. It's data and analytics where you can put on a subscription mode on all the pieces of the infrastructure networking. And that's exactly the same thing which NetApp is doing where we are going up in the cloud with this subscription base. And when you add the two subscription base, then for us, at least in the managed private cloud solution, we can provide the subscription base to the managed private cloud through a managed service provider. So knowing where the industry was going, knowing where Cisco was going and knowing where we want to go, we had come up with the solution which matches both the strengths of Cisco as well as NetApp. And the number of connected devices going up every day? Yes. More network connections, more geo domains. It's complicated. It is complicated, but if you do it correctly we can help you find a way through it. Arun, thank you for coming on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier here on theCUBE with Stu Miniman here with NetApp with Cisco Live 2018. Back with more live coverage after this short break.