 Welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California. We're talking open source, we're talking about the data center, we're talking about cloud scale, bringing that software benefits all to the table, all around the network, the network operating system and more. Got a great guest here, Sirap Kapoor. Director of Product Management, Dell Networking. Sirap, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you John, good to be here. Thanks for inviting me. You know, we were talking before we came on camera around how the networking business is changing, why hardware matters, why software is more important. And in all of this shift that's happening in the transition to fully distributed computing, which matters, you got the Edge, you got the data center, you got the cloud, all coming together, one of the common threads in all of this is open source. Okay, open source software, next generation's coming, you're seeing more and more new, cool things in open source, but also in parallel with the enterprise. And this is a huge kind of flashpoint to the next gen open source, enterprise convergence with open source software and the communities and all that good stuff. And you're in the middle of it. What's driving this moving source and the data center? We're seeing the levels of support like we've never seen before and specifically at the network level. Awesome, yeah. So about to set the context, let's start by looking at the story of compute evolution, right? In the 90s, the compute infrastructure was vertically integrated. There were multiple vendors, each offering their own operating system, usually a version of Linux on the proprietary hardware. If I wanted to run a Solaris operating system, I had to run that over a SunSpark processor and the applications were written especially for that architecture. So this represented multiple challenges back then, the customers were knocked in, several growth and innovation, developers had to recreate applications for different architectures and the interoperability was extremely difficult. But with the advent of x86 architecture and standardized operating systems like Windows and Linux, the stack got disaggregated, which allowed for flexibility, innovation, affordability, and finally expansion. We see a similar trend happening on the networking side now where the traditional networking solutions are not flexible, the switch, the network operating system, the APIs are all provided by the same vendor. So if a feature is needed, the user has to either wait for the vendor to deliver it or is forced to replace the entire infrastructure. But with the advent of open networking and open source networking-based solutions, we see an evolution that has paved the way for the customers to unlock their data center technologies and innovate. Modern data center is no longer centered around protocol stacks. It's about agility, flexibility, innovation, network automation, and simplicity. It's about how to make operations more agile, more effective, and bake it into an overall infrastructure. They are a large element of business arsenal behind open networking is that companies are moving towards application centricity and a true realization of as a service model, right? So that is where Sonic comes into the picture, right? With its large and diverse community around modular containers architecture and born in Microsoft Azure environment, Sonic is built for automation, telemetry, and scale. And the flexibility of this architecture allows you for, you know, in terms of running containers applications by providing that high level of redundancy. So basically, Sonic kind of check marks the requirements of a modern data center from open flexible architectures to cloud economics. And if you have to follow a computer evolution analogy, we believe that no switches is the server now and Sonic is the Linux for networking. It's like the kernel of networking. I mean, we've been reporting, we've had other CUBE conversations where Sonic's been mentioned and people have been saying things like it's taking the networking world by storm and all that with open source kind of ties it and scales it together. Can you take a minute to explain a little bit about what it is? What is Sonic? What does it stand for? Why is it important? What does it do? What's the benefit to the customers? And what are they, what's going on around Sonic? Take a minute to explain what is Sonic? Absolutely, yeah. So this is Sonic stands for software for open networking in the cloud. It's a brainchild of Microsoft. In 2016, they announced their contribution of Sonic to the open source community. And through this, the networking technology took a revolutionary step forward with yet another level of disaggregation by breaking the monolithic Knoss into multiple containers components. And through the use of condonization, Sonic provides the network managers, the plug and play extensibility, the ability to run third party property or open source application containers and perform those in-service updates with zero downtime. Sonic is primarily designed across four main principles. First one is the notion of control where Sonic is an open software, organizations are deploying it, working on it. The network managers can decide what features they want to ship on a switch. So that is less potential for bug and it's tailored for more of the use cases, right? Sonic was designed for extensibility for the developers to come and add new capabilities and roll those out rapidly on a platform. It was designed for agility, the ability to take changes, roll those out rapidly, whether it's a bug fix or a new feature coming out, which is significant. And finally, Sonic was designed around this notion of open collaboration with such a diverse community around, we have Silicon vendors, to ODM providers, individual contributors. The more people work on it, the better and more alive the software it becomes. Yeah, I mean, it has evolved considerably and since its inception, the growth is nurtured by an increasing set of users, a vibrant open source community. And then there's a long trail of falling from the non-hyperskillers where they like the value proposition of technology and they want to adapt it for their environment. Yeah, of course, we love Silicon here. It's Silicon angle on the cube, but this is the whole new thing. Silicon advances is still software, hardware matters. Dave Vellante is doing a big thing called on why hardware matters with our team. Hardware and software together with open source really is coming back and smaller, faster, cheaper. It's really good. So I want to ask you about Sonic, what types of customers would be looking to implement this? Is this more of a reset in the data centers at a cloud scale team? Is it distributed computing? What's the new look of the customer who are implementing the likes of Sonic? Well, it has evolved considerably since its inception, right? It was born into a hyperscalar environment and we see a big 10 half thing where there's a wider appeal that is across non-hyperskillers who want to emulate the best practices of the hyperscalers, but they want to do it on their own terms. They want a feature solution that is tailored for enterprise use cases. And looking at this whole context architecture, Sonic kind of fits the bill well, where providing a Linux NOS that can be managed by the same set of automation management tools. And then these are the same teams that have been acclimated to the world on the server side. Now, with all tool consolidation and consistent operations across the data center infrastructure, we see that Sonic brings a lot of value to these distributed application use cases, these modern data center environments where you have customers looking for cloud economics, multi-vendor ecosystem, open and flexible architectures. And in fact, we're told by the industry analysts that there's a strong possibility that during the next three to six years, Sonic is going to become analogous to Linux, allowing the enterprises to standardize on this NOS. And they also predict that 40% of the organizations that have large data centers or 200 plus switches will deploy Sonic in production. And the market is going to be approximately 2.5 billion by by 2025. You know, we've always been riffing about the network layer is always the last area to kind of get the innovation because it's still important. I mean, if you look at the advances of cloud and cloud scale, obviously Amazon did great work. Amazon went service with networking layer, what they did kind of in the cloud. But even in the enterprise, it's so locked down, it's so important. And things like policy, these are the concepts that have been moving up the stack, we see that. But also software's moving down the stack, right? So this notion of a network operating system kind of now is in play at the data center level, not just on the server. You're talking about like packets and observability monitoring, you know, more and more data coming in. So with data surging, tsunami of data, new agile architectures changing in real time, dynamic policy, this is what's happening. What's the role of Dell in all this? You guys got the hardware, you got the servers, now it's open source. It's got community. What does Dell bring into the table? What's your role in this development, the evolution of Sonic? And what do you guys bring into the table? Absolutely, so we announced enterprise sonic distribution by Dell Technologies, a commercial offering for Sonic in June last year. And our vision has been primarily to bridge the gap between hyperscale networking and enterprise networking. Right here, we're combining the strengths and value proposition of Sonic and Dell Technologies where the customers get an innovative, scalable open source NAS, which is hardened, supported, and backed by an industry leader in open networking. That has been our primary play into this. Where enterprise sonic by Dell, we customers get supporting deployment services. We work with the customers in building out a roadmap that is predictable software and hardware roadmap for them. We provide extended and validated use cases where they can leverage Sonic for their specific environments, whether it's a cloud environment or an enterprise environment. We've created a partner ecosystem with certain organizations that allow you to leverage the inherent automation telemetry capabilities in the NAS to enhance the usability of the software. We have created an intuitive CLI framework called management framework to allow you to better consume Sonic for your environment. We offer support for open config models and then also Ansible playbooks for network automation. So it's been a journey. We're making the solution ready for enterprise consumption. There's a big fan falling that is happening from the non-hyperscaler words and we've made significant contributions in the community as well. 1 million lines plus of code, what fix says and helping with the documentation. So we had the forefront of Sonic journey. So you're saying that you're saying Dell for the folks watching, you guys are putting the work in, you're investing in open source. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we are extending open source to the bottom market, making it enterprise ready with feature enhancements and building a partner ecosystem. We ensure that it runs through extensive internal testing and validation for the customers. And then in order to allow the customers to absorb this new technology in-house, we provide virtual demos. We have hands-on labs for customers and channel partners. We also help them with a lot of documentation and reference architecture so that it's a knowledge repository across the board that can be leveraged for the modern use cases. So that's been a journey with the customers and it's always in evolution where we get better with extended use cases and more capabilities on the portfolio. You know, I always talk with Michael Dell at the Dell tech worlds every year and sometimes we text back and forth. We kind of grew up together in the industry about the same age. And we joke about the early days of Dell how supply chain was really part of their advantage. And this is getting a little bit of a throwback. But if you look back back then, it was a systems architecture. You have suppliers, you have chips, you have boards, you build PCs, you build servers. And the DNA of Dell technology has always been around the system. And with open source and distributed computing, cloud, data center, edge, it's a system. And we're hearing words like supply chain in software. So when you start to think about Sonic and network operating systems and those kinds of systems, when you modernize it, it still has got to enable things to enable value. So what's the enabling value that Sonic has for the modern era here in computing as new kinds of supply chains emerge, new kinds of partnerships have to evolve. And the environment under the covers is changing too. You got cloud native, you got growth of containers. I think DACA was telling us that the container market there is pushing 20 million developers. I mean, massive cloud native activity and open-source growth. This is a system. No, absolutely. I mean, the modern world has changed so much from the proprietary infrastructure and stacks now. We had Dell becoming more software focused now because that's a real value that you bring to the customers. Now it's all about application centricity. Nobody is talking about protocol stacks. They want simplicity, they want ease of network management. And how do you expose all these capabilities? It's with software, right? Sonic being open software, there's so much happening in the community around it. We provide not bound interfaces that customers can hook up into their applications and get better at monitoring, get better at managing that entire CI CD pipeline in the infrastructure. So I think software is the core in the heart of the modern data center infrastructure today. And we've been at the forefront of this journey with Sonic and bringing the real choice and flexibility for the customers. It's certainly an exciting time if you're in the data center, you're in architecture, cloud architecture, you're in data engineering, a new growing field, not just data science, data as code. We did a big special on that recently in theCUBE, but also just overall scale. And so these are all new factors in CXOs are dealing with, obviously security is playing a big part and the role of data and also application developers all in play. The partner ecosystem becomes a really important part of it. So I have to ask you, can you expand a little bit more on your comment earlier about the partner ecosystem and the importance it pays in providing a best in class service because you're relying on others in open source, but you're commercializing Sonic with others. So there's an ecosystem play here. What's the, talk more about that and the importance of it? Right, right. Yes, sir, as I mentioned earlier, right? The modern data center is no longer centered on protocol stacks, right? So it's about agility, flexibility, choice, network automation, simplicity. And based on these needs, we built a portfolio with a plethora of options for, you know, integrations into open source tool chains and also building enterprise partnerships for with technologies that matter to the customers, right? So the ecosystem partners are, you know, Abstra, Juniper, Oktera, Dorado Cruz that offer solutions that simplify network management and monitoring of massive complex networks and leverage the inherent automation telemetry capabilities in Sonic. It comes to the open source tools. You know, these, these are tools that, you know, the product, the tier two clouds of this product is the large enterprises also want, you know, based on how they're moving towards an open source based ecosystem. So we have, you know, created Ansible modules for network automation. We have integrated into open source mounting tools like telegraph, kafana and Prometheus. And then we continue to, you know, scaling and expanding on these integrations and ecosystem partners to bring that choice, flexibility to the customers where, you know, they can leverage the inherent software capabilities and leverage it to their application business needs. Sirap, great to have you on theCUBE. Sirap Kapoor, Director of Product Management at Dell Tech, Dell Networking, Dell Technologies. Networking really important area. That's where the innovation is. It matters the most, latency. Can't change the laws of physics, but you can certainly change architectures. This is kind of the new normal going on. Final point, final comment. What can people expect to see around Sonic and where this goes? What, what happens next? How do you see this evolving? Well, there's a, you know, I think we start off a journey to an exciting, you know, evolution on, and networking happening with Sonic. There's so much this technology has to offer with, you know, a lot of technical value prop around microservices, container architecture, such a diverse community around it. There's a lot of future auditions, extended use cases that are coming up with Sonic, and we'll be actively engaging the community with a lot of future enhancements and also helping steer the community in a direction that, you know, brings Sonic to the wider market. So, you know, I think this is great. You know, start to a fantastic journey here and we look forward to the exciting things that are coming on the Sonic journey. Awesome, thanks for coming on. Great CUBE discussion. We'll follow up more. We'll track this Dell networking. Networking is important. Software operating systems. It's a system approach. Distribute to computing is back. Modernizing here with Dell technology. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Awesome, thank you John. I'm John Furrier with the CUBE here in Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching.