 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube, covering NetApp Insight 2017, brought to you by NetApps. Hello everyone, welcome back. We're live here in Las Vegas with NetApp Insight 2017. This is theCube's exclusive coverage. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCube, also co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, my co-host Keith Townsend, CTO advisor, talking about the channel, talking about services, talking about data fabric. Our next two guests is Mark Carlton, his group technical director, Concord Technology Group, and Adam Berg, who's the data center practice director at Presidio. Guys, you're on the front lines, got the A team shirts on, guys are on the A team, which is a very high bar at NetApp, so congratulations, we've had a few on today already. What's exciting is that this whole digital transformation kind of cliche, it's kind of legit, it's happening. No brainer on that. But it's not a buzzword anymore, it's actually happening. You guys are on the front lines. Share your perspective on what this means, because most of the folks that are adopting data realize that it's not an afterthought, it's fundamental foundational thinking. But they're busy, they're a lot on their plate. They got DevOps in the cloud and on-premise transformation. They got data governance architecture, they got security practices that are being unbundled from IT, internet of things over the top, all this stuff's happening. It's crazy. Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. So this concept of data transforming and data transformational services was sort of a buzzword three years ago, even when NetApp rolled out this concept of the data fabric, right? It really was just a buzzword, it was an idea of freely moving your data in and out of multiple clouds, not having siloed data, being able to move your data, where you need it, when you need it, when you need it. I mean, we're really finally at this point in time, this inflection point where this is a reality for our customers. And I actually want to kind of bring up what NetApp announced here today at Insight with ONTAP 9.3. So, a little history lesson. NetApp has been promising this data fabric where they're able to freely move data in and out of their different portfolio products. And one of that vision was to move data between their solid-fire platform and their ONTAP platform. So there's two major platforms that they have in the all-flash world. So with 9.3 and Element 10, which was also announced simultaneously, we actually have the ability now to move data between these two platforms to really start to envision this data fabric world. So I'm really excited that we're actually seeing this vision that was kind of laid out by NetApp three and four years ago. That's super hard, too, by the way. It's not easy, but I got to ask you, because again, in the cloud world, you see things like Kubernetes, certainly containers has been in the rage, but the orchestration aspect of cloud-native services and apps is key. You're bringing up an issue around the data. Orchestration of data, is it easy? How do you do it? Okay, I get the announcement. Solid-fire and ONTAP working well together in 9.3. Is it easy? Can you share your thoughts on how easy it is or what needs to be done to set up for that environment? I know we can talk about this, but I'm gonna because we saw it today. Cloud Orchestrator. So this is a gorgeous new interface that NetApp's putting out there to bring that reality of I'm going to click a button and I'm going to deploy a Kubernetes workload. I'm going to deploy Docker. I'm going to deploy workloads in Azure. I'm going to deploy a workload in ONTAP on-premises. I'm going to deploy a workload in AWS and I'm going to be able to freely move that data. I've got a button that's going to make this, the data orchestration happen. It's really fundamentally changing something that's very complex into something that's very easy and accessible to most customers. And that's, by the way, the premise of multi-cloud, too, by the way. So you're saying that they're going to be able to orchestrate and move data across clouds? Seamlessly? Yeah, across clouds. That's hard to do. Mark, you have a comment on that? And I think that's really given us the flexibility. By the way, it's not a lot of companies do this, probably. No, no, and that's where NetApp stands out. And this makes the conversation with customers really easy now today. When we're talking to customers, we're not talking about the technology all the time. We're talking about what you want to do. What do you want to do for your business? How do you want to use your data? How do you want to access your data? And the tools that NetApp's starting to bring out around this and giving us the capability and that flexibility to give control back to the customer to do what they want to do at that time, they don't have to make them decisions now. So, and having that so it's orchestrated across the multiple cloud platforms and be able to move that data as to where the data's best place to for what that business needs is a great conversation to have. We couldn't have that a few years ago. We weren't able to, you were talking about this with data. And now when I talk to customers, I talk about the data fabric, but I don't actually mention it's just a strategy in my head. So as I'm going through conversations, I'm starting to understand right here, what are you wanting to do? How are you wanting to point it out? It was from pipetreeing to reality, basically. All right, so let me just get this on and get it right. Because again, we've been looking at this, not a lot of people do it, so we're tracking it. Multi-cloud certainly is what people, customers want. It's hard to get there. So the question is, every cloud's got a different architecture. S3 and Amazon and then how you move the stack from there is different. It's also different on-prem. So you go back and look at like, I got Spark on this with Hadoop on this and I'm pipelining data here, but then they pipelined it differently. So do you have different clouds but then on-prem might be different? How does the customer says, okay, bottom line. On-prem, I can move data from on-prem to the cloud or is it only across clouds or both? So we can move data freely anywhere we want it to. Including on-premise. Today. So let me paint you a picture. Traditional architectures, I'm going to talk about something like a FlexPod architecture from NetApps in Cisco. That's your traditional, I'm running traditional workloads on-premises. I need some of that data now to flow up into AWS. I spin up instantaneously a cloud on-tap workload. I click a mouse button and I have a snap mirror to Amazon AWS. Wait a minute, I wanted that data over in Azure. I click a mouse button, I've spun up a cloud on-tap instance over in Azure and I've snap mirrored my data over there freely. I want that data back into an S3 type bucket down into on-premises. I'm going to spin up a storage grid web scale workload. I can bring that data into an object, S3 type data workload instantaneously. I have that data. So you're abstracting away the complexity of the cloud so I don't have to rewrite code. Absolutely. Doesn't for you. All right, I'm going to throw, you guys are good, you're cracking the host here. You guys are killing me here. Good, you're good. All right, here's a tough one. Okay, I got a policy question and I got region in Germany. My data's in Germany, but I replicated it into the US and I don't know what's going on over there. How does a customer deal with that? Because now in cloud, you've got regional issues. You've got GDPR now going on, so you knew what I'm talking about, so I checked the box and the policy. I'm okay in Germany, but my data center in Ireland has replicated data. Yeah. So this isn't really conflict in the privacy. How do you manage that? Is that managed? How do you guys handle that? Well, again you go down to what sort of data and what are they doing with that data at the time or what type of data you're collecting. The conversations I'm having with customers around the GDPR as such, because in the UK we're talking about it all the time. Every customer's wanting to talk about are they down the road? Where are they? Try to build that foundation and understanding of where they're holding on data. Was that the number one thing you're talking about the customers is GDPR right now? GDPR comes, I wouldn't say it comes up in every conversation and it has to. The main reason it has to is because now you've got that privacy by design, so you've got to start to understand as you're designing these solutions and as you're designing where this data's going to sit and the deadline's looming, right? I mean, I don't know the exact date. May the 28th, 2018 and it's creeping up and customers are still sad trying to think about GDPR. They're procrastinating, Joe, right? Yeah, and I will still walk into meetings and mention GDPR and people would look at me and go, ooh, what's that? Yeah. You're screwing. Yeah, and we're just getting to walk through. Oh boy. Y2K all over again. It is. And soon as you start getting some cloud conversations, but if you look at what Azure's doing around that in AWS and how they're strengthening that message, some people are moving to an Azure cloud platform because of the GDPR capabilities and the security capabilities it has and how that, and that goes for things like the Office 365 Suite and those sorts of areas because you're able to start moving the data and freely have that movement and then we go into things like cloud control and how you can back that up and how we can move the data. Again, from NetApp it's a software element that gives you the capability to back up an Office 365 Suite from one cloud to another cloud. So GDPR, you see as a big opportunity for cloud providers, like Azure? Or they bring something to the table, right? Yeah, they bring different things to the table. They bring, you have elements of data where you need that on-premise solution. You need to have control and you need to have that restriction about where that data sits. And some of the talks here that are going on at the moment is understanding, again, how critical and how risky is that data? What is it you're keeping and how high does that come up and how business value it is? So if that's going to be on your own-premise solution, there may be other data that can push out into the cloud, but I would say Azure, the AWS suites and Google, they are really pushing down that security, what you can do, how you can protect that data and you've got the capabilities of things like LSR or GSR and having that global reach or that local repositories for the object storage. So you can start to control by policies. You can write into this country, but you're not allowed to go to this country and you're not allowed to go to that one. And cloud does give you that to a certain element, but also then you have to step back into maybe such a thing like- So does that make cloud orchestrator more valuable or has it still got more work to do because under what Adam was saying is that the point and click is a great way to provision, right? You can move on to other things pretty quickly. So in your scenario, about the country nuances, does cloud orchestrator handle that too or? So the cloud orchestrator will, I mean, the promise is that you'll be able to pick and choose where you want your data to live. When you want it to move it tomorrow, you pick the data center, you pick the GL, you pick the AWS availability zone and that's where you move your data. You'll have a dropdown box that will show you a list of AWS availability zones, where your data will live. So if you have specific requirements, specific compliances that you need to abide by, that will be baked into the application and if specific requirements change, you can change with it very, very easily. You manage the policies through an interface. Managing the policies very easily. And the point being is that you can no longer build silos where your data is stuck in the space that it is. Because of some things like GDPR in Europe or other regulations, you need to have the ability to move that data when you need to, maybe even at a moment's notice. So I got to ask, this is obviously a pressing time in our country, obviously they attack, happen in Vegas. A lot of people aren't going to make the trip here. Not made the trip, so some people stayed at home. So I'd love to ask you guys, if you can just take a minute to each of you to share, what's exciting that's happening here? Because this is a cool announcement, cloud orchestration is getting a lot of good buzz, I've been watching the feedback on Twitter for some of the influencers and some of the practitioners. The previous guest mentioned it. What's AHA moment here for folks that should know about what's happening, might have missed it because they couldn't make it? So I don't know, for me, the AHA moment was when they, NetApp is finally delivering that, the real vision of NVMe over fabrics. So we've had a lot of, there's a lot of other storage partners out there that have been talking about NVMe as this game changing platform, but really what they're doing is NVMe on the back end. Really the promise of NVMe is the over the fabric portion of it. NetApp is building into their flagship on-tap platform, a check box that says, I'm going to make this NVMe over fabric. I'm going to make this storage class memory as a check box. And what's the impact of customers? Impact is ultra low latency, latencies that you can't even achieve with SSDs today, even with SSDs on NVMe on the back end of your controllers, it really is going to enable the high quality analytics, the data services that we just couldn't even achieve at one millisecond latency, we're down into sub millisecond, 0.1 millisecond latency. So huge performance gains, huge performance gains, it's really going to enable a whole new suite of ideas that we can't even think about. And developers will win on this too, it makes data more valuable and addressability. Mark, thoughts on what's exciting here for the folks that couldn't make it? I think from my point of view, is that going into orchestration and management point, so leaning on from really what Adam was saying then, you were going into developers and how they're going to get the benefit of working with a more performant kit, easier to manage, so they can start to develop that. The orchestration and management and the provisioning and being able to roll out these environments, there's the plug-ins to some of the areas that we talked about today and the expansion of that management suite and the ease of that management suite for multiple different users to be able to benefit from it. And so from a development and a customer side, the easier we make it to manage, the infrastructure you kind of forget about, which means you can start to concentrate on the application, how you deliver, what you deliver. And that's really where I see NetApps moving to. It's taking it away from, this is the infrastructure and you've got a FlexPod, taking it to the next level and going, right, okay, now let's show you what we can do on how you can use this infrastructure to be able to benefit your business. And that's one of the big things that I'm starting to see. The thing I'm excited about is the pub initiative, the netapp.io is the URL, on tap, pun intended, beer. The developer DevOps story is coming together. I think when you combine some of the NVIDIA Fabric issues, look at the developer pressures to make the infrastructure programmable. That's a huge challenge and automation's got to be enabled. So let's get your thoughts on how NetApp is positioned vis-a-vis what customers want to get to, which is, I call self-driving infrastructure, Larry Ellison calls it self-driving databases. But that's pretty much what they want. You want to have the under the hood stuff work. But it's the developers and it's using the data in a programmatic way to do automation, hit that machine learning, some of that bounded activities can be automated, but then the unbounded data analytics starts to kick in really nicely. So Element OS is really one of NetApps' strategies of what they're calling the next generation data center. And I kind of talk about it with my customers as we call it transparent infrastructure to your developers and DevOps teams. Infrastructure that they don't even have to care about, that it's highly scalable, highly performant, API driven, cloud-like architectures, but on-premises. So you don't have to worry about cloud, sort of data security issues, encryption issues up in the cloud. So you have that cloud-like transparent architecture. I mean, who knows what hardware runs in the cloud? Do you know what hardware runs in AWS Azure? We don't really care, right? It's their own. Yeah, we don't care. It works, right? It's transparent to the end user and that's what NetApp is promising really. Well, Serverless looks good too, right? Absolutely, interesting. That's really what we're talking about and that's Element OS from NetApp is really the heart of that sort of story. All right, so I take a step back. You guys are very successful, super smart. Thanks for sharing. It's great conversation, which we had more time. But the role of the channel is changing. It used to be move boxes through the channel back in the day. NetApp's no longer a storage company. They're a data company. I get that high-level message. I get the positioning, but the reality is you still need the gear to store the stuff on. So still some business there, but the role of the channel and the providers, whether you're home bars or global system integrators, you guys in particular have a lot of expertise. The cloud guys are very narrow. They get all the large-scale business, but as these solutions start to become vertical, you need data that's specialized to the app, but you want the horizontally scalable benefits of the infrastructure. So you got to balance specialism, which is domain expertise in a vertical, and general scalable cloud. So that means there's an opportunity for the channel to be basically cloud providers. So the question is, is that happening in your mind? Do you see that playing out? Because that means bringing technology to the table and using native clouds, not cloud native, like the native infrastructure as a service, because to action SaaS, everyone's going to be a SaaS company. We're fundamentally turning Presidio in from that traditional, hey, we're slinging hardware to a data services, a data management, a cloud consulting model where we're even developing our own cloud-based tools, our own cloud-based orchestration tools. So we're developing a tool called Cloud Concierge. So Cloud Concierge is something that we're not even going to charge for, but what it does is multi-cloud management on-premises, point and click, deployment models, single point of billing infrastructure for multi-cloud chargeback and other features like that. So that's where we really see the future of a company like Presidio is something like Cloud Concierge. You can bring a lot to the table, so why not build your own tech on top of clouds? Yeah, so we're really becoming a tool company where we're developing our own intellectual property. Kind of a loaded question, but you guys are on the front lines. It's really kind of a, it's more of a directional thing. Mark, do you see the same thing in the UK? Yeah, I want to say from my point of view, we, in our company that we have, we deliver infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, backup as a service. So there's lots of different cloud elements that we build within the company, and really that's driven through the conversations. Again, we're having with customers, and customers don't, or the customers we're talking to and the customers in the UK, a lot of them don't jump straight into a cloud, a cloud opportunity. They will either put a little bit of data, see what it does, make sure it's the right application. But again, that conversation, because it's changing, our business is having to change. Well, the purpose of sales channels is to have indirect sales, and companies can't hire people fast enough to actually know the domain-specific thing. So I see the trend really moving fast along the lines of these specialty channel partners now turning into actual technology partners. So that's going to be a threat to the centers of the world. And that's one of the key things. Customers, when I talk to them, they're not looking for a partner to sell them something. They're looking for a partner to help them strengthen their IT solutions. And cross the bridge to the future. Yeah, and that's it. And they want a partner that they can grow with and keep moving. Keith, you want to get a question in edge-wise here? Come on. It's pretty tough. Actually, I would like to bring it back to the technology. I'm a technologist at heart. And while this sounds great and magical, one of the practical problems we run into in this type of data mobility is cost. And just size of data. So let's operationalize this, bring this down to the ops guy. When at the end of the month, am I going to see a large egress bill from AWS Azure? At the end of the month, am I going to have the equivalent of bad MPV scores from my internal developers just saying, yeah, I asked for the data to be moved from AWS to Azure, but it was several terabytes and it took several days. So operationalize this from bring it down to the ops perspective. Where's the ops cost in this situation? NetApp has some really cool technologies around this. I want to talk about one or two real quick. NetApp Private Storage, this is your own hardware connected to multiple clouds. You want to take that cloud from IBM software to Azure to AWS, the data doesn't even have to move. You're basically making a cloud connect through an Equinex data center into multiple clouds. You have the ability to have zero egress charges and multi cloud hyperscaler access for that for those analytical services. That's one solution. Another one is what's rolling out in the new storage grid web scale 11.0 that NetApp just announced today. It's complete hooks into AWS for all their analytical tools that are prebuilt in AWS. So your data can live on-premises in your own S3 buckets, but you can make API calls into AWS when certain data changes where you have the analysis happening in the cloud on your data, but your data never leaves your own physical hardware where you control the data governance of that data. So there are solutions out there that NetApp is really on the forefront of solving these solutions where I want my data on-premises. I don't want to pay egress charges, but I still want to take advantage of these amazing services that AWS and Azure are putting together. So speed of light. I think we still need to answer that speed of light problem. You know, I have, let's say that I go with a CNF like Equinex and Equinex has data centers across the U.S. and the world, practically. But data still has gravity. I can't magically move terabytes of data from one facility, CNF, to another one. What are the limits of the technologies? Where can we go? Where can, what are other solutions we need to probably take a look at when it comes to sharing data across geographic regions? Yeah, so I would say from my point of view, this is when things come into such as object storage and you look at what we're doing with the S3 platforms and how they spread those out because their repositories are moving that data about and how you can drive that policy driven. You're writing it into one place in the background, then the data is seamlessly moving between different areas. If it's something like a migration where you're actually moving data from one platform to another, there's tools, if you think of things within the NPS solution, which Adam talked about earlier, those sat within an Equinex building and you had your express routes and you had your direct connects into the cloud providers that are there. You can use tools that are built into NetApp to actually be able to move that data between those cloud providers or change the VMs or such. So virtual machines from a VMware platform to a Hyper-V platform or whichever it be to be able to move that using an on-command shift tool. So no data is having to move. You're not having to add, you've got none of those costs. And I think from a management of because of how easy it is to move the data or how of the control we have over data now, using things like OCI and those tools to be able to manage and understand what your costs are, what the showbacks are, understand where you've got VMs. Do you use that data? A lot of customers don't have that insight. They will go, I need to move 10 terabytes because they think that's what they have. Realistically, eight terabytes of that data has been sat there, not touched for the last 10 years. And if you move all that eight terabytes, it's going to cost you money because it's just going to be sat there. You need to move the data that you need to work with. And that's one of the conversations I have with customers today. It's not about just throwing everything up into the cloud because that's not always the cost-effective solution. It's about putting the right data into the right place and the right cloud solution. So it might be one terabyte needs to go up there and, but it's what you're going to do with it. Are you going to use it to run analytics again since you have to use it to drive the business forward or is it a terabyte that you're going to sit there and archive? The cheapest data, the cheapest faster data transfer is that transfer you never had to make. So if you don't have to make the data transfer, you'll save money in both time and cost for moving that data. I really appreciate that feedback. Guys, thanks for coming on theCUBE. The AT and LoveWin are coming all together. I love the riff on the AT, but the bar is high. You guys are really smart. I love the conversation back and forth. You guys are answering all the tough questions. Final question for you is, you're out in the front lines. The world's changing. What's the advice to your peers out there that are watching, you know, how to attack this environment? Because how do you win under this pressure? It's a hard game right now. A lot of hard stuff being done, whether that's cloud architecting, that's on-prem private cloud, or moving to the cloud, a lot of heavy liftings going on. It looks easy. I want the magic. I want push button, cloud orchestration to consumer apps. Your advice? Find a strong partner. So, I mean, if you're going out there, you're not going to be able to learn everything yourself. You want to have a strong partner that's got a big team, a team that has the breadth and scope to deal with some of the big challenges out there that can put together best of breed solutions for multiple vendors. So, not just NetApp, not just our cloud partners, but someone who has the breadth and depth and scope. Find that right partner that's good for you and your organization. Mark? And I agree in the way of the partnership side of things. That's really what's going to drive customers in making sure that you've got a partner that you can rely on to be able to move forward. Make sure they can help you understand your business, but you clearly understand what your business is trying to achieve. So, I ask people today, what's your business? Do you understand your business? Do you understand your customers? And a lot of the time is, yeah, we understand what they do, but they don't understand the business. And it's key to understanding what you need to do, how you need to achieve it, and having a partner that can support you through that phase. Awesome, great. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. As the open source continues to grow, big part of it, being part of the community, being great partnerships, being transparent, it's theCUBE bringing all the data to you, here live in Las Vegas for NetApp Insight 2017. I'm John Furrier with Keith Townsend, more live coverage after this short break. Calling all barrier breakers, status quo measures, world changers.