EMC VirtuStream Interview - CTO037

Machine-generated from the episode audio and not hand-corrected, so names and technical terms may be imperfect. The audio is authoritative.

Hi, thank you for listening to episode 37 of the CTO advisor chats. com This week is a series of recordings from EMC world The first is with Brian Gallagher the president of the cloud platform team over at EMC so obviously he's responsible for probably most important cloud service within EMC in the Federation of companies and that's for virtual stream. We talked about the role of virtual stream within EMC What are the or least of future plans for? Virtual stream for the enterprise its relevance to the enterprise Its role in DevOps and how EMC is trying to help customers especially their legacy customers Enter DevOps or the DevOps movement.

Hope you enjoy the podcast. Thanks so over the next couple of years I think Today the enterprise in general when we talk about cloud native when we talk about Building applications for the next level data center I don't personally believe developers are ready for that in the enterprise at large So traditional use cases of where we're putting SAP workloads Offsetting kind of operational responsibility is a great use case for a virtual stream today Moving forward the next two to three years. What do you see?

Or how did you see enterprises consuming cloud? Yeah, great question. So Customers that we've talked to large enterprise know that DevOps is a key Strategic focus because they understand, you know how to differentiate their business through software, right? We see it every day. They're worried traditional enterprise is worried about being disrupted by the next, you know Airbnb or whoever the business might be and so they know that they need to do what they struggle with starting and Where you know our team has come in in conjunction with the Pivotal Labs teams is you start small, right?

And you know, there's a template to doing this and a lot of customers have already embarked on that journey. It's the bimodal IT model but getting going is the hardest part but Getting them to see tangible value is the most important thing and see tangible value Quickly so the methodology around build measure learn helps them to get easy wins up front But a lot of traditional IT is like I got to build a big IT program about it they want to dot every I cross every T and before they know it it becomes a megascale thing and They can never get going.

So You know what we've been doing in Conjunction with the Pivotal and Pivotal Labs team is helping customers get started on this journey Some enterprise customers are well down the path. Most of Pivotal Labs engagements now are mid to large enterprise more than 60% of those use cloud foundry as the platform to deploy and operate the Application and so I agree with you. I think it's you know, it is a journey Some of you know started further down the path as it relates to Virtustream What we've seen is, you know, look the systems of record, you know The SAP instances and Virtustream is the you know, the best alternative to house these enterprise workloads Specifically around their architecture and the micro VM and the advantages that that brings the connection of Pivotal cloud foundry in the platform is to build You know kind of those ancillary applications around the system of record, you know, for example You know, we use SAP, you know as our systems of record and we've got satellite You know applications that operate around them and that's a you know, a great You know kind of hunting ground if you will, you know for cloud native applications that center Center around your systems of record and if you can host those in the same environment, you know Then you have a win-win you cut down the latencies, you know across the network You have a single management interface to that simplifies the IT operation it kind of brings the bimodal aspects of bimodal IT closer together because typically it's the You know the traditional, you know, kind of IT operations team application development in conjunction with Conjunction with IT operations and it brings the DevOps model closer into that community You know by having the same kind of deployment mechanism like a virtual stream Public cloud where they can do their, you know, kind of cloud native applications along with their systems so coming out of lessons learned with virtual stream starting out with traditional SAP shops Pretty easy Concept I think to initially get into I'm going to host my SAP instances somewhere else I'm going to stop worrying about storage rate levels Etc.

I'm going to stop worrying about patch management That takes a little adjustment, but not a huge adjustment. You know, the value-add is still at the basis of layer and above But then when we start getting these mashup or answering apps around these cloud native apps to access the systems of record What are some of the pitfalls or kind of lessons learned you guys have noticed clients making when they try and mash up operations from This very fast culture to the SAP culture Which is you know what if we couldn't if we could install it once and not upgrade it for 20 years, we'd be fine Right.

What what's some of the lessons learned? Yeah, it's a great question So in Cambridge where our dojo is we've got the labs team co-located With us so we've got developers and the PM's that we talk to on a daily basis and they're they struggle with that I mean that that is you know, typical engagements that come in is Enterprise customer. Hey help me get going with DevOps, right and they struggle with you know Their team struggle with getting access to those systems of records.

So, you know, basically You know leveraging technology, you know Typically, it's around snap technology, you know, we can leverage a lot of production Whether it's a new DevOps environment or not getting access as access to production data Or it's always the hard you need the secret pinky swear right and all the all the you know, the the things, you know that the Keys to be able to unlock that a lot of times It's a relationship that the development team has with the operations team and the DevOps team, you know, basically You know starting small, you know with a small team that it cuts across Horizontally is a key to that where typically, you know IT has been building silos from you know The the business, you know to the application developers, you know You might have front-end silos back-end silos messaging silos data silos within development Then you've got your IT operations.

You've got your risk management and they're all building big silos so the method of you know, getting DevOps going is pick pairs from each of those organizations assemble them into a Small team and if you're a large enterprise Duplicate that team that becomes your platform team With let's say cloud foundry and the management platform say let's let's say extreme in the case of virtual stream And that platform be really that platform team really becomes your deployment team into production So they've got the secret pinky swear and all the keys to unlock the production data because they're tied directly into the production So it becomes a shared ownership model where that team has escalated Visibility into production into the product and they also have skin in the game They are going to answer the phone when something doesn't work.

So Let's call it month two month three of a customer coming on to virtual stream and they've moved their ECC OER their systems of record to virtual stream what's Pleasant surprises that they find when they Start to operate within this happens mom What from operations perspective? What are some of the pleasant surprises customer client? Oh, wow. We didn't expect this this advantage of moving to the cloud or to a Mini VM model I would say the so the direct experience is very similar to the VC experience, which is I Have not I now have less headaches to worry about I think you heard David This morning talk about our happiest customers are VC customers Why speed of deployment and they can rest they can sleep at night.

They don't have to worry about You know a lot of things that IT Operations has to worry about the you know, the benefits are seamless integration Things are qualified as a stack not as an individual components things are deployed You know, there's there's a one-stop shop for calls and escalations You don't have to triage between the different vendors and it's the same experience that our virtual stream customers see it's that enterprise class characteristics brought you know as a service right or as converged infrastructure if it's on-prem and That allows them to focus on other things and and literally when you look at my modal IT the benefit of DevOps is that You can do you can iterate faster, right?

the benefit of using a platform like cloud foundry is it takes a lot of the Infrastructure operations out of the equation. You don't have to worry. Hey are all my instances up and running You know if they aren't, you know, who's going to manage it? the maintenance is simplified in terms of how how the stack is, you know maintained in a In a platform operation and that allows them to spend more time on coding right you shorten that ops integration cycle because You know that as you built that app You've you know kind of hey it worked in my machine and you know, it will work in the production instance Because throughout the cycle you are building that, you know with the with the platform Underneath of it in the platform characteristics and that has shown that they can shorten their ops Component of it and they can iterate faster on software So as we talk about enterprise more and more enterprise class applications getting hosted in the cloud What becomes the ultimate vision for what virtual stream offers?

Does that become does that become the core kind of infrastructure as a True infrastructure as a service with pads on top and now I can go out the satellite cloud service providers to do these secondary apps or what's the I Guess what's the overall market for the enterprise data center? Do you want to become the replacement for you know post your AD or your Systems of record your messaging your file transfer apps the all these services that we the middleware and above or beneath the Pieces that us infrastructure folks consider is core.

Is that the target? I Would say it this way. I think there's two components and you heard about those this morning, which is the enterprise data You know through the virtual stream storage cloud and enter enterprise public Do we want you know kind of anybody's Application. No, we you know the hallmark of EMC for the past, you know, two and a half three decades has been We're the trusted provider in the data center and we want to carry that experience into the you know into the public cloud for enterprise applications from mid to large Being able to provide systems of record whether it be you know with classical You know systems of record around SAP or Oracle DB to you know things of that nature or or newer models You know as it relates to you know newer data types, whether it be, you know Cassandra MongoDB or others that are you know the hallmarks of let's say cloud native applications So I think the differentiated Position in the market is really about you know The enterprise public cloud and literally our customers ability to sleep at night.

They've entrusted us for decades You know building mission-critical systems. I spent most of my career at EMC, you know building those mission-critical systems the cornerstones of the data center now, we want to make you know, kind of the The hallmark of Virtustream, you know the cornerstone of the public cloud Hearing pretty consistent message EMC data company protect data From a security perspective where those the shared responsibility kind of demarked occur For SAP is kind of obvious. I can do it at the Oracle HANA and database level and we start to talk about cloud native applications What tools are you looking towards providing?

DevOps teams for providing constructs of security that resides with the data itself versus security that happens at the application Yeah, so our belief has always been You know security starts at the application That is by far the best place to put you know security is where the data originates and is consumed You know, but we found working with IT Organizations throughout the years is they don't necessarily have that luxury sometimes sometimes the developers You know can't even spell encryption and getting them all trained and certified on that So EMC has always felt hey look encryption at every level of the stack is critical Starting with encrypted data at rest in our storage platforms all the way up where we've encrypted at the network layer with our SAN technology years ago partnering with Brookhaven and Cisco, you know on that on those types of Technologies moving all the way up into the you know, kind of the software that manages the pathing, you know, we had Encryption capabilities up through the driver level As it relates to kind of cloud native.

I think there's a lot of opportunities with that we Have technology called cloud link We've integrated that into the enterprise hybrid cloud we're looking at deploying that within a Cloud foundry environment where we can secure not only the components of cloud foundry But we can also secure the applications and containers, you know that are deployed by cloud foundry So that's kind of, you know directionally where we want to go with that We've already contributed to UAA You know capabilities of the platform for authentication You know, you can see continual enhancements in the platform But ultimately we believe you know, the best part of security resides in the in the application And it's not just about you know data, you know You know, it's it's an evolving You know, it's an evolving science if you will You know the threats get stronger the capabilities, you know that You know people are It's not about prevention anymore.

It's about detection and quick response, you know, so forensics around security are important There's a lot of technology that's out there that can help you shorten the window Detection and provide much more rapid response around that You know, so I think it's not a it's not a singular answer, you know, RSA has got, you know, a lot of capabilities around Detection if you look at this IT spend, you know, it's less around prevention and it's more about detection and rapid response So, I think you'll see that You know more and more throughout the evolution, you know as we kind of embark into this cloud native world So a couple more questions one around Architecture and helping clients through the complexity of Kind of delving into cloud When I look at you know, I have a bunch of different options.

I can go From a I can look at cloud foundry I can look at AWS paths and infrastructures of service I can write I can start writing apps towards AWS proprietary API Foundry I can again just create an overlay and start and just create traditional apps and host them in in the cloud Where should customers start that journey of figuring out? Architectural direction for how they treat The next-gen data center or application Yeah, I would say this is that our you know, if you're an entrepreneur start up small to medium business you can go There's a lot of different options, right?

There's a lot of different ways to develop and deploy and operate when you're an enterprise chances are there's not a single solution and Meaning that it there's not a single answer right containers are where you know, the world is going But many customers say it's not just a you know a container only strategy. It's virtual machines and containers We're also, you know advancing the concept of unikernels in the environment because we believe Unikernels have a smaller footprint smaller surface area. They're more efficient They can be more secure because you're not carrying all the operating system Constructs into the into the application.

There's less Opportunity for security violation if you can narrow the surface area, right then you can you can create more secure applications So we believe that the answer is, you know containers and virtual machines We also believe that it's multi-cloud. It's not hey, I'm just public or I'm just private I'm probably hybrid or I'm multi public or multi private, right? So if you need VMs containers Multi-cloud you want open source? Then the only answer out there in the industry is cloud foundry.

Nobody else can claim that you look at kubernetes. You look at Mezzos, you look at other, you know kind of Container cluster managers. They just do containers You look at chef and puppet they can do a small scale very well a cloud foundry can manage containers VMs We're building a unikernel back end to cloud foundry It supports, you know, AWS virtual stream OpenStack Azure You know, it goes on and on we did a bare metal Deployment as well. So if customers want to do, you know containers on bare metal We can leverage rack HD and do a bare metal deployment of containers on it So, you know what we're trying to do is, you know, kind of educate customers on On the on the on the challenge, right, you know, and and the fact that you know DevOps is great, but it's not a panacea.

It's not a tool. It's not a job spec. It's a movement You know, it's by practitioners for practitioners, right people that actually do it You know, and it's a community-based movement, but there is this dichotomy of dev and ops and you will always will be Right the developers worry about efficiency speed You know velocity of the innovation they worry about performance of their application, you know the ability to iterate quickly on it Operations still worry about all the things that they've worried about for decades.

They still get you know paid on And our belief is that you know kind of cloud foundry brings these two worlds together better than most and specifically with like Developers platforms like spring and with pivotal cloud foundry. There's a You know an opinionated stack. They work very well together Giving developers, you know a lot of choices about what they can do, you know How they can architect software differently, you know and really, you know innovate a lot quicker than So Topic like hybrid cloud private cloud touches a lot of different Aspects of traditional enterprise.

There's networking. There's storage. There's compute. There's security we're asking to basically outsource or Have a partner in each different area EMC Traditionally has had a conversation with the infrastructure folks Who's the ear within the enterprise architect mean within the enterprise? Who are you guys initiating the conversation? You know what in in in cloud native it's typically It starts at the top I mean, we have had a number of CIOs come into their dojo and they struggle with how do I start?

They know they need to do it. So this is different. You know, if you look at EMC's history, we Constantly sold into the operations engineering and operations component not so much to the developer community And this starts I think, you know predominantly with the CIO or the line of business with the developer community and You know having the kind of conversation about how do they start? What are the things that they can do whether it's through an engagement with Pivotal Labs or or EMC global services?

You know and and you know, it tends to be more of a you know, kind of top of the house So last question Where's EMC cold in all of this conversation? I think it's you know, very relevant in that if you look at you know, EMC code You know, they're helping with the you know, the DevOps and environment they You know, I've obviously You know made some contributions work in the dojo we're leveraging some of the contributions around Rex rag so we enable we're working with pivotal and IBM on a on a persistence layer For Diego, which is the the droplet execution?

Engine for cloud fabric and so we can leverage You know kind of block and file storage underneath of that That work was contributed by the by the EMC code team You know and then I think they're also, you know focused around some other ecosystem partners around Mesosphere and kubernetes Which are important, you know, but also I'd say, you know as it relates to the collection of businesses of now the Dell Technologies, you know cloud foundry is one of the most key Open source projects that we have as a community you know, so that the You know, I'd say the the collaboration, you know that EMC code brings I think it's good You know, and then some of the components that they've contributed we're starting to leverage Cloud foundry core of the initiative EMC code specific view with it to EMC's product line and integration point All right, I will shake your hand but I just Appreciate