Govt can be an enormous catalyst for emerging technologies: VMware

The software defined data center (SDDC) is a concept that VMware introduced into the industry about 3-4 years ago. And it has proven to be one of the most powerful ideas in data center or cloud infrastructure in recent times. In an interview with EC’s Mohd Ujaley, VMware’s Executive Vice President and General Manager for Software-Defined Data Center Division, Raghu Raghuram tells, “Government can be an enormous catalyst for emerging technologies because it can take a long term view of infrastructure and it does things with scale that can spur a whole new range of innovation.”

What kind of work are you doing in the area of software defined data center (SDDC)?
The software defined data center is a concept that VMware introduced into the industry about 3-4 years ago. And it has proven to be one of the most powerful ideas in data center or cloud infrastructure in recent times.  It has been received very well by the marketplace. The basic idea with software defined data center is to turn your infrastructure services like compute, storage and networking into software based services plotting on industry’s standard architecture.  The benefits for customers are obvious–much lower cost; much better economics; but also a much better security model through software defined networking or network virtualization. And, also a faster speed to deploy applications and services to the end users.  These are the fundamental reasons why customers get interested on the software defined data center.

We have introduced all the building blocks of the software defined data center over the last couple of years. And, the last year has principally been about bringing these together and deploying them for customers.  So, we now have several thousand customers worldwide that are at various stages of deploying the software defined data center; including many here in India.

Effectively the fundamental business driver to all of these is the digitalization of business or government. Because the mobile platform has become the fundamental platform whether it is an end users, customers, employees, citizens consume services. So, today the question is how do you enable businesses to build and develop these services and deploy them in a rapid fashion? And, for that you need a different model of infrastructure to enable it and that is what the SDDC provides.

What are the key verticals that are driving the demand for SDDC, SDN and NFV?
With software defined networking, we are seeing demand from telcos service providers. Secondly, we are also seeing demand from high tech companies into offshore development, call centers and BPOs; and, thirdly, of course the financial sector.

For NFV demand is coming from the global network players like Vodafone and so on and so forth.  These are two different market segments for us. But software defined networking is particularly relevant; I mean, it is a horizontal value proposition but these categories of companies have jumped on it early because they fundamentally are at the forefront of this digital revolution. Which means they have lot of software developers in building and deploying new services and those guys cannot wait for infrastructure for these services.  Secondly, all these applications have to be secured and network virtualization is a fantastic way to secure these applications.  So, that is why we are seeing network virtualization which is a form of SDN taking root in these industries.

On other hand SDDC is SDN & NFV plus software defined storage, plus a new layer of automation and orchestration that we deliver with our vCloud Suite.  So, there we see a lot of interest from customers that are more interested in the automation piece of it; again, financial services is a big deal. In India, the government is also a key customer segment and we do have government oriented program.

SDDC is predominantly a top end enterprise play today. Compute is across the board, storage is starting to become more mainstream. But if I take the full SDDC stack which is compute, network, storage, the orchestration automation layers, all of that – that is predominantly a high-end enterprise.

With respect to SDDC, IT/ITeS is probably much further along the path than anybody else.  I would say that is the top sector – financial services was second but the telcos are moving at a very rapid pace with what is happening with all the outsourcing contracts in this country in the telcos.  They have been predominantly legacy UNIX environments.  As they are all moving to a commodity driven cloud, SDDC is becoming the architectural backbone of all of these environments. I think telcos will move much faster than everybody else in the next 12-18 months.

You seem to be very optimistic about telcos but their books are very tight as they have paid huge amount in recent spectrum auction which is likely to impact their plans for network modernisation?
Not necessarily, there are two interesting things happening with Telco, one is from the core IT and the second is on the network side.  So if you think about network function virtualization – the concept of a commodity cloud and a single Telco cloud that cuts across IT and the network functions is what draws them to it.  So there are huge economies of scale and cost savings that is to be had by moving to the SDDC architecture.  So yes, while it is an investment, there is a lot more money that Telcos will save by moving to a commodity cloud architecture versus if they look at the network today, it is all very appliance based models. It is a fairly large cost structure that they are dealing with.  So we are starting to see NFV, SDDC and IT all converge together, and it is a common platform.  See, earlier IT and network were separate. Now with the Telco cloud as a unifying cloud across the board, whether you run IT applications or network function applications on it, the underlying infrastructure becomes common.

There has been lot of debate around security of emerging technologies such as SDDC. How do you dispel the fear of enterprises?
This is in fact one of the reasons why NSX, our network virtualization technology, is proven to be so popular. Because what NSX allows you to do is to literally put a security boundary around each application or each virtual machine in a way that was never possible before and automatically program it dynamically.  So when you bring up the application, you can bring up the security boundary around it or it can be across a group of applications or a group of virtual desktops.

This security is beyond traditional perimeter.  One of the problems today is the traditional perimeter is at the entrance of the data center. Once that is breached attackers can freely go inside the data center of any application.  So the analogy that I would give is let us say you have an apartment building, full of apartments. The traditional perimeter security is a security to the building on the gate. It is not security in each apartment. Micro-segmentation which is enabled by the network virtualization is a technology that allows you to put a security on each apartment or in fact even within each door inside of an apartment.  You need that kind of a technology, it is only possible in this software because if you did this using traditional hardware you will have so many doors to protect but the cost becomes prohibitively expensive.  So, network virtualization is a right technology for the right time given the security conscious stance of most companies now.

With the evolution in data center, we are also witnessing matured debate around data sovereignty, privacy and security. What is your thought on that and how some of these issues can be addressed?
To me, in my mind, it is a very straightforward question to answer.  The customer owns the data.  So, if you are an end user, you are taking advantage of a service provided by a cloud provider; your data ultimately belongs to you. So the customer needs to consent, to get your consent, in order to use that data.  Similarly, if you are an enterprise the enterprise owns the data, not the cloud provider. And if the enterprise, wherever the enterprise chooses to put the data is up to them.

Most countries have at the governance level enforce data sovereignty policies. And data privacy regulations and so on. And then within certain industries like healthcare or financial services there are industry specific regulations as well and so as technology providers we need to enable enterprise customers to comply with those policies easily. We make it all automatic. We make it simple to make that happen. And that is one of the advantages of the modern cloud infrastructure is that you are now able to do those things quite easily.

What are the major technical trends are you witnessing across the globe that are likely to change the dynamic of IT industry?
Mobility and the cloud are the fundamental architectural transformation that are taking place right now.  When you have all services that enterprises provide, you will be provided with mobile devices, then there is an explosion in data, because there are billions, literally billions of mobile devices.  So Big Data becomes a kind of indispensable asset.  Once you have the data to be able to intelligently reason over the data, you will find patterns, how to predict patterns of usage. It becomes a very powerful skill and so analytics is a trend that we see. And there are lots of forms of analytics all the way from simple analysis to machine learning to an artificial intelligence, so on and so forth.  So these are some of the fundamental trends that we will see – mobility, cloud, analytics and data are things that are just at the starting stage of playing out. And I expect these to indicate lot of transitions.

Where does government stand among all theses emerging technologies?
I think the government can be an enormous catalyst for these things. Both because the government can take a long term view of infrastructure for smart cities and so on. And also because the government does these things with scale, it can spur a whole new range of innovation.  So absolutely these are the right things for the government to be doing.

One of the key core areas that you would like the government or Indian enterprise to focus on?
It is, use modern cloud infrastructure to support majority of the initiatives. That is where we see lot of Indian customers, enterprise customers, that are beginning to focus but they are all in the starting stage.   As this plays out, it is not just a technology issue, it is a people and process and training and skill-set and everything.  So those are the things I would say are needed at this point.

Generally there has been slow adoption of technology in India. How has been your experience with SDDC in India?
In technology adoption, the challenge is the awareness, the education and the cultural changes that have to happen.  So if there is one thing that would be helpful is for, whether it is a government or enterprise, is to start piloting new uses of emerging technologies. Find isolated problem areas where you can start to deploy these technologies and learn from them and then start to scale around rapidly.
India has traditionally been four to five years behind any technology adoption.  However, If we look at some of the use cases for SDDC, we are probably not more than 12 months behind most of the developed world.

Recently you have launched a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance called EVO: Rail. How has been the response?
It is very early days but it is performing. We are encouraged by the early uptake. EVO:Rail is a mechanism for us to simplify the task of setting up a virtualized cloud infrastructure.  Today, if you want to set up a virtualized cloud infrastructure; you, as a customer, will almost have to be a systems integrator putting together the server, storage, the network or you go to a systems integrator. What we have been able to do, because infrastructure is all software, we have been able to package it in a hardware form factor and ship it directly pre-installed to the customer and the customer literally has to assemble these blocks, instead of being a system integrator – we have done the work for them.  So this leads to a pretty significant simplification of the skill-set needed to build out an infrastructure.

Will there be any significant impact on the companies capex or opex if they opt for EVO:Rail?
It actually lowers the cost. Because integration cost goes away and we select the components and we optimize the performance of the software into the components. So, you as a customer are able to run a large number of applications on a large number of desktops on top of a single platform.

EVO:RAIL is something we call hyperconverged infrastructure. It is one generation ahead of convergence infrastructure.  In converged infrastructure, you still have a separate storage, a network and a compute as hardware capabilities and then the systems vendor brings it all the other.  In a hyperconverged infrastructure, you do not even have separate boxes. It is just all a single server and everything is provided by software, so it becomes even simpler but the answer to your question converged infrastructure suddenly is very powerful throughout the world and we have company within our EMC family of companies called VCE, that is a leader in converged infrastructure and they have reported pretty high growth throughout.

What is your GTM strategy for software defined data center in India?
It is targeted at the enterprise, so our go to market channels to the enterprise are obviously the direct sales force but we also have a rich set of relationships with system integrators and as well as system vendors. So those are the go to market partners that we have.