 And we're back, this is Stu Miniman, live with Silicon Angle TVs, live continuous coverage from Dell Storage 4, this is the cube where we go to the biggest tech events, find the smartest people in the industry we can find, separate the signal from the noise, and joining me for this segment is Roger Bouchard from Brocade. First of all, Roger, first time on theCUBE, welcome. Thank you. So, Roger's a global solution architect with Brocade, been with them a dozen years, based in Canada, and he's a bit of a security expert. So, we're going to spend some time talking on that. That's what they say. So, first of all, is this your first time at Dell Storage Forum, did you also come last year? It is, actually, no, it's my first time at Dell Storage Forum, it's been a great venue. So, have you had a chance to do the Expo floor, any of the sessions? Yeah, I had a session yesterday, we had a good turnout, we had book signing as well yesterday for my second edition of my security book. Book signing, nobody told you you're supposed to be able to bring your book and show it here, you know? I said, we're more the ESPN rather than the talk show, but you put it in, you show it. I'm sure I'll get another opportunity for Shane's plug. The title of your book is? Securing Fiber Channel Fabrics. Securing Fiber Channel Fabrics, that's a good easy one, you know the ISBN number offhand now? Oh, absolutely. So, it's good, security, you know, hot topic is, we kind of talk in the pundit world, it seems, if you talk about clients, in the pundit world, it seems, if you talk about cloud in general, and especially in networkings, you know, security and management are just the two big issues that kind of there. So, you know, can you kind of give us an intro? Where are we today with cloud and security? Yeah, sure, you know, I get to the opportunity to talk to hundreds of customers all over the world, talking about sand security. And it's kind of interesting, you know, I've seen, I've been up okay for 12 years now, almost, and I've seen the evolution starting, you know, 10 years ago when I started talking about security in the storage world, and most of the storage administrators, you know, you'd see their eyes kind of glaze over as you talk about security, and it was kind of the thing they just didn't want to talk about, and hopefully not have to deal with. And on the other side, you know, they had the security people that kind of saw the sand as his black box. You know, they knew it was a network, but didn't really understand it, so they kind of left the storage guys on, which is perfect, right? But definitely, as time has gone by, the security teams are realizing the importance of the data that's actually in the sand. I mean, there's so much vision-critical applications, so much sensitive data, whether it's personally identifiable information, personal health information, or just intellectual property, and they have to make sure that data's well protected. So what I've seen is kind of a shift where the security people are now talking to the storage people and asking them all kinds of questions. So the storage people have been reaching out to me, asking me all these questions that they're being, you know, bombarded with in the security team, and that really is what prompted actually the creation of the book, this sort of bridges gap between the two. But interestingly now, with the advent of cloud, we see really kind of a forcing of the issue of the security team and network people, and now the storage people, they're all kind of getting together now. And one of the serious issues that is a bit of an impediment to adoption of the cloud is security, particularly the confidentiality of the data. So, you know, particularly when we talk about a public cloud, you know, concern is we're going to send data over across a public network. We want to make sure that data stays confidential. So that's really the main concern, I think, from most of our customers. It's interesting, Roger. I think back to, you know, I started with Fiverr Channel a little over a dozen years ago, and you know, like the Brocade soap room 2800, here with security. You put it in a cabinet, you lock the cabinet, it has optical cabling, therefore it's very difficult from a physical standpoint. You know, so what is it about, kind of Fiverr Channel specifically, and storage area networks that makes it secure from the software standpoint, though? So, you know, there is a whole element that a data center typically is in a closed area, right? So there's a physical protection, the physical boundaries in place. So the equipment is fairly secure from that perspective. However, if we look at some other elements, first of all, the insiders, that is probably the biggest threat in the sand today. And the insiders may not necessarily be, you know, trusted employees. It could simply be, you know, vendors coming in doing maintenance work, it could be contract workers or summer students that are working there. But also, you know, the people that are actually working there can make mistakes. And security is not just about security countermeasures, specific technology countermeasures, but also about procedures and making sure that you reduce errors and that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Everybody knows that even the most secure environment, if somebody has access right to them and they're either malicious or stupid, you know, things can go wrong. Absolutely. As soon as you put a human in the equation, things invariably can go wrong, absolutely. Absolutely. So, you know, from Brocade's standpoint, so, you know, we followed Brocade really closely. We actually had your CEO, Mike Claykow, on a couple of weeks ago. Brocade's more than just, you know, fiber channel devices these days, obviously pushing the next generation, 16-eak fiber channel product lines out there, selling well. But can you talk a little bit more to, you know, what your experience has been to kind of the broader Brocade portfolio? Yeah, so definitely the new introduction of the new technology has really been designed to enable this whole cloud model, really. That's kind of what we're doing. So, there's a lot of things in the new generation technology that we've introduced. So, not only do we have twice a band with a 16 gigabit per second, which in itself is a huge enabler of virtualization technology. But we've also introduced features like encryption capabilities within the ASIC that allows you, again, to secure, for example, ISLs between two data centers when you're replicating data. We also added some diagnostic features that allow you to simplify the management of a cloud infrastructure. So, really, with a cloud infrastructure, it's kind of a game changer, but we have to have a certain flexibility. So, this whole concept of port-on-demand that we have allows you to grow your fabric as you require it to grow. Also, if this huge infrastructure, if it's not simple to manage, it's just going to cost you a lot more money, and one of the reasons we're doing cloud is to save money. So, all these additional management features that we're putting into place is really done to simplify that management so it can do more with less, and I have to have more people to manage this infrastructure. And, of course, the last part I think is very important is the reliability. So, moving to sort of a cloud infrastructure, it's not going to be successful unless you can have the guaranteed reliability level you had with the previous model. So, that's one of the things that Broca has been really well known for, to have very strongly reliable equipment and infrastructure. Okay, so can you speak a little bit to kind of the Broca Dell relationship? What's going on? What are you talking about at the show this week from the relationship standpoint? Sure, absolutely. I think our architecture, our model lends itself very well to the compelling architecture, which is, you know, the fluid architecture model. And the whole idea of us kind of scaling out and scaling up as the business requirements will fluctuate over a period of time. And our architecture is the same thing. So, every one of the Brocade fiber channel switch comes into multiple flavors. So, we have the entry level version, which is a nice entry point for most of our customers. And then when you reach the capacity that you have purchased, you can easily with a license get a new upgrade and get more physical ports in your switch. And of course, when you've filled out your switches, you can just simply add more switches into your environment and grow really to any size fabric that you need. So, we have customers with thousands and thousands of ports in single fabrics. So, I think our architecture is very flexible as well, which goes very well with the whole compelling fluid architecture model. Great. So, one of the big discussion points in the storage world and especially at this show has been flash, SSD. And there's the discussion of kind of latency and closeness. So, you know, fiber channel has always been a relatively low latency, you know, protocol, obviously not as low latency as putting it on the server bus. But, you know, what's Brocade's thoughts on the whole flash discussion? So, that's a great question actually. We actually did some testing and I think this whole latency issue certainly has been very prevalent in the industry lately. But, we've done some testing with the SSD and actually we're able to pull out a million IOPS with our switches, which is tremendous. It's unprecedented. So, you're saying pass through from between the storage going through your fiber channel switches up to the server. Exactly. So, you know, the SSD is great and very high performance, but if you can't feed it and get the data, pull the data out as fast, you know, as it can come in and the SSD can handle it, then you're still back to square one sort of. So, we've kind of eliminated that bottleneck with the 16 gig technology. So, we can really get some very high IOPS. And then ultimately, you know, with the application, I think that's what's important is to have those high IOPS for the application performance. Okay, so, we can't talk about fiber channel in general with, you know, what's your take on just kind of the macro discussion of fiber channel, you know, 16 gigs out there. It doesn't seem to get as much talk in the industry. We're all talking about flattening your ether networks and converging. So, you know, I'm on the record as saying that, you know, the fiber channel business, you know, has many strong years ahead of it and there's many applications that, you know, can use it quite well. On the other hand, unstructured environments, file and object, which typically aren't running on fiber channel, you know, are where the growth is in the industry. So, you know, where is the fiber channel industry? Well, all I can say, I certainly have heard these, you know, the hype in the market of where things are going and certainly Brocade has positioned in that market as well. We're looking at that and other technologies. So, we're well positioned for that, but we really haven't seen much of a market growth in that area at this point in time. In fact, the fiber channel growth has been tremendous. You know, year over year, we've had a 7% growth last year. Q4 of last year, we actually crossed the $500 million fiber channel sales in a single quarter and we actually had last quarter record sales on the fiber channel space. So, really, we're not seeing any kind of trends that suggest that fiber channel is going away anytime soon. You know, maybe three years down the road, four years down the road, things will be different, but certainly we're really not seeing any indication of that at the moment. We actually had Dario Zamarian who's the general manager of the networking group at Dell on early this week and he recommitted that, you know, Brocade's an important, you know, partner of Dell's and looking to continue on the fiber channel. So, you know, Roger, you know, any final thoughts you want to share with us or, you know, give us another plug for your book? Thanks to you. Yeah, definitely. I mean, you know, the security, it certainly is a concern on the cloud adoption, but there's a lot of things that can be done about it. I think it's more of an education than anything else. So a good sort of, obviously, would be my book, which really is designed, again, to bridge the gap between the security folks and the storage folks. So it's kind of a good starting point, but I don't think it should be a deterrent. I think there are a lot of solutions out there and countermeasures that we can use to sort of address these concerns, but it's really a question of knowing about it and getting the warm fuzzy that this is good. All right, well, Roger Bouchard, we always love having authors come on theCUBE. We'd like to find, you know, the tech athletes out there that are on the ground, you know, talking about the latest technologies and where the industry is going. So this is Stu Miniman with wikibon.org and we'll be right back with SiliconANGLE TVs, live continuous covered from Dell Storage Forum right after this break.