Transcript
Hi, Mike Matchett with Small World Big Data. And today we're going to talk about, I think, the inevitable future of it, which is getting everything into some cloud like shape, whether it's in an actual cloud, a private cloud or a public cloud, a colo cloud, whatever it is, we know it has to look more and more like a cloud all over the place. Well, we've got soft iron today and we're going to talk about just that. Hold on. Hey. Welcome, Andrew. Welcome to our show. Great. Thanks for having me, Mike. Good to be here. All right, so, uh, there's a lot to talk about when we get when we get discussing what you're bringing to market and offering, uh, because, you know, when you just say, like, hey, we're turning it into cloud, uh, there, you know, that covers everything. So we got, you know, every single discipline, every single piece of technology, every single thing. So let's let's just start a little bit back aways. Uh, why why did you get involved in soft iron. What did you see Soft Iron doing in the bigger scope that said, hey, this is this is the future. This is what got what gets you excited. Absolutely. So I've been with soft iron, uh, getting over four years now. And the reason that I got so excited by what, um, what the guys were doing is they're really taking a step back and saying, you know what? The way that we've been building it for the last two decades or more is kind of broken. We're always starting from the ground up, start trying to integrate lots of pieces of the puzzle together, creating masses of complexity, masses of inefficiency. And at this point in the history of it, we've got an opportunity now because cloud as an application model is really the new normal. It's the way that all new applications are being built, regardless of whether they're running on prem or in a public cloud. But of course, the on prem piece hasn't really changed. Everyone's still trying to knit together. All of these piece parts of technology and soft iron were trying to make a difference by taking a top down approach. If the answer is cloud, why on earth does on prem infrastructure still have to be so complicated? And that's really what got me very excited about what Soft Iron are doing with with Hyper Cloud. And years ago I would be working with people in it and saying, you know, you have to start thinking of yourself as a service provider. And this is when cloud is first kind of emerging and people are like, no, no, no, I'm in charge, I buy infrastructure, I do five year capacity planning, buys capital gain buys of storage, and I do I do these other things and I just deliver the infrastructure someone else can be concerned with. It's concerned with that. And you know, you come forward to to 2024 and lo and behold, that is the way things are turning out. It has to be not just a service provider, but everything they deliver has to have that cloud like, uh, utility, uh, feeling to it. But how do you do that? I mean, what are some of the options people are looking at? You know, I've been doing quite a lot of work with, uh, practices like FinOps recently. And I think the focus there has been around how do I get efficient use of public cloud resources? Because lo and behold, what happens if you give everybody access to public cloud? Everyone kind of creates efficient usage of it, and you need to rein in control. But no one's really solved the problem for how you do that in private cloud infrastructure as well. Um, and so options that people are looking at, I think many people started on a path a few years ago to try and build what they called a private cloud, but kind of got stuck when they got to the virtualization layer. No one could figure out, well, actually, how do I create that cloud experience, that consumption experience, the multi-tenancy, create some marketplaces to accelerate people's use of the of the technology, to create the build back, build back and the, uh, the chargeback and the showback. Um, and I think now we are ending up with, uh, some models that have consumption based fundamentally. So you pay for someone else to take all of that pain away and deliver it as a service. And now but what we're now trying to do is with hyper cloud and with Softline is actually solve the problems deep in the technology so that anybody can build and run their own private cloud and recreate that cloud experience on prem in their own infrastructure without needing an army of specialist skills. So so we're not we're not at the place where we were, you know, five, ten years ago where I have to integrate, uh, a big storage array and a bunch of compute nodes and then bring in a virtualization solution and build up that virtualization layer, and then hope that the virtualization management layer provided enough cloud like utility that it looked and smelled a little bit cloud like that. I could hand stuff out and make it all work. What people want to do now is just say, I want to implement cloud. That's the thing I want to buy and I want to I want that to be in my data center. There's a lot of cloud washing in the industry, I'd say at this point, and a lot of organizations that are really delivering very little more than just virtualized infrastructure are claiming what you're getting is is a cloud, and it doesn't really create that experience. And like we were saying at the beginning, you know, cloud applications are the new normal. So why does the infrastructure have to be so complicated. And the reason really, to be honest, is nobody is taking a step back and trying to build the whole thing. Top down in its entirety as a single product. And that's kind of what is so interesting and so exciting about soft iron. Literally manufacturing all of the hardware, literally creating all of the firmware, the operating system, everything as a single product that you can buy that works as a single product just with basic IT skills. And it's just a very fundamentally different way of creating IT infrastructure. All right. So let me get my hands around this and maybe help the audience. So when I talk about a soft iron, uh, project, I am getting a rack of infrastructure that you guys have custom built and worked works together. It has in it the storage it has in it, the software it has in it, the the management layer, it has in it, the the eventual user experience virtualization, virtualization, cloud, you know, marketplaces. And I check out an instance, I get all that stuff later. Uh, and then for the operator, it's, it's, it's a simplified thing. It's it's kind of like, you know, what Amazon must be doing internally when they offer cloud services. You're right. You know, Amazon and the hyperscalers, they literally have their own hardware built for them and created their own custom architecture. We've essentially replicated that to enable anyone to build and run their own cloud. And as you say, so within hyper cloud, you're buying physical nodes of compute, of storage and the interconnect to connect them together in single one you appliances, you buy as many of whatever flavor you need, as little as 88U of Rackspace. In a few hours, you can build a multi-tenant cloud and then you can add more compute, more storage in any combination and any flavor you like. Uh, to build out your cloud infrastructure, pretty much limitlessly, whether it's in one location or multiple locations, whether it's a lot of, uh, spinning disk type storage or a lot of high end compute, you know, GPU compute, for example, you can completely create your cloud your way on your turf. Um, and everything you need is in that product. No additional licenses, no need for a VMware license, for example. Um, everything you need you get when you buy your hyper cloud product, uh, and you get to own it and run it as a single entity, um, as one thing. So I'm trying to think of, you know, how big a rack is, but eight nodes is not is not that much of a rack. Uh, it's not a full rack, by far. And and you're saying for that much I can instantly take someone in it and make them and make them a cloud provider? Uh, yeah. On premise. Exactly. And when we say a cloud provider, you're literally providing, let's say eight you so normal rack is what, 4042 you um and in eight you of that and in a few hours really the most of the time it takes to install eight appliances, eight nodes in your rack, uh, you're, you're now a cloud provider for your organization, and you can create tenancies, you can create a marketplace, you can create templates to accelerate your developers, um, uh, ability to, to deliver applications, everything that you would normally expect to do via a hyperscaler, um, you can recreate now within your own organization for your own, uh, for your own engineers. And then they can build, um, either on prem applications or hybrid applications or whatever it is you need, using all the standard tools and tool sets that they use in any of the cloud native environments. Right? So as we say, cloud over and over again. And I just maybe it's a little bit me just trying to get my head around it. But when I turn this on I have cloud storage services, I have availability zoning. If I had multiples of these others, I have, uh, obviously different instances I can I can have configured and templated out for people to check out, uh, if I put things like GPUs and stuff in there. Is that also shared? Yeah. Exactly. So you've got access to all of those. So if you create, uh, your applications and they need those kind of resources, whether it's GPU. So the specialist resources in there like GPU nodes, like video transcoding nodes, as well as regular compute nodes and a whole range of storage nodes. But for your tenants, they just create an application and request the resources they need in the application layer, just as they would in any other cloud you know, in any other public cloud. But now they're using the infrastructure that you control, that you own, uh, in an extremely efficient and secure and resilient kind of way. All right. Let's take you out. Let's take this at face value here. So the tenants get this cloud experience that looks and feels like any other public cloud, but they're getting it from their IT provider. How does the IT person manage this internally. How do they make that use of that equipment efficient. Uh, how do they how do they keep control of, you know, the storage, the. Hardware storage and defining that. Is that is that a big challenge now for them or. Uh, yeah. Can they stay on top of it? Absolutely. So this is where us designing and building and manufacturing everything ourselves really starts to move the needle in terms of the simplicity it delivers for the operator, for the owner of this infrastructure. So there's a very, uh, these nodes are designed as one. They're all on this, built from the same architecture and designed to only operate, um, together to create your private cloud. And what it means is for the operator of that cloud, they're operating it as a single entity, regardless of whether it's eight nodes or 800 nodes or 8000 nodes. It's one cloud and you're operating as one cloud. So to give you a practical example, let's say, uh, there's a security update. Um, we provide that update to you that covers all of the software that's running in the entirety of your cloud infrastructure. The operator applies that once, and hyper cloud then delivers that across the entirety of your infrastructure. So you know that in any moment of time, the 100% of your cloud infrastructure is 100% patched. And every known vulnerability, every known CVE has been remediated. Now that is dramatically different. Normally, an upgrade like that or a patch like that would take weeks of planning and would be incredibly dangerous, if you like, or incredibly worrisome to to try and roll that out. Because Hyper Cloud is a completely integrated system. All of that challenge is remediated for you, and so it becomes incredibly easy for it to manage its infrastructure, whether it's physically located in their own data center or whether it's in a colo hundreds or thousands of miles away, it doesn't matter anymore. It operates as a single entity on your behalf. Yeah, I understand that you've worked hard to do some things, like having all the nodes, the compute nodes, you know, basically boot from the hyper cloud images and not from, you know, local disks where they're all different. Right? So there's there's a consistency now throughout. Uh, tell just tell me a little bit about security also what what have you done on that angle. Yeah. So secure by design is is a mantra within soft iron. Anyway, we many of us come from a security background, and a lot of the architecture that we deliver within hyper cloud comes from, um, a history of working in those kind of environments. And that's a great example. You know, the kV example where we're at our own CCNa, we're, uh, our own authority, uh, and we, we commit to fix, uh, every known vulnerability across the entire architecture, uh, with Fips 142, um, for example, with FedRAMP, um, FedRAMP high and a whole bunch of the US security standards, uh, we meet out of the box because it is a single architecture and because we designed it that way to start with. And so when you think about the organizations that run a lot of on prem infrastructure, often the reasons can be security, regulatory compliance, uh, resilience. And so those kind of capabilities become really important in delivering hyper cloud. Yeah. So this this does sound like, uh, you know, the future of where computing needs to go. I mean, I know there's this mid stage where we've got the HPC of the world, Dell and so on saying, hey, take, take this Greenlake architecture, take this apex architecture onto your in your space. But it's our stuff still, right? It's really it's really our cloud. And here we can say hey it you can actually deploy your cloud and then manage it and you get the efficiencies out of that. Not some other, some other player. Right. There's no middleman there. Like you get the efficiencies of running your own cloud. And this is the thing, you know, these consumption based models which are starting to become more prevalent, they're not based on any kind of technological breakthrough to deliver those. They're based on using brute force engineering to hide all of that complexity. And, you know, the ability of those large organizations to hire enough experts to obfuscate from you, the end consumer, all of that complexity. What we're doing with Hyper Cloud is are saying it's game over. You know, we need to build cloud cloud infrastructure. And if that's the end goal and we know the end goal, we can just create infrastructure that dramatically solves the complexity problem deep in the technology, make the technology do the work, not a, you know, dozens of engineers that ultimately you're going to pay for in that consumption based model. So yeah, so it now puts it back in control, uh, and enables them to deliver that experience. But without all of that complexity. Right. And I think, you know, somewhere in this messaging it's starting to spell the end of on premise. Integration work, where you bring in 16 different vendors products and say, I got to make these. I got to spend all this time to get it to work together, to get any project done. Now I have my own cloud. I just allocate the infrastructure out of that as I go, and I. Think the value moves. I think, I think there's always especially with what we're doing with Hyper Cloud, there's still immense value for for channel partners and consultants to add value. It just moves up the stack to being at the application level, where you can actually move the needle for the business much more quickly, not just about creating some great infrastructure that won't break. You know, it's like keeping the lights on isn't going to be a differentiator anymore. The value really is delivered in the application layer layer. And when you look at trends like low code, no code type app development, if you can build a cloud in in the morning, in half a day, and you can build an application in the afternoon, you've just dramatically changed the value proposition and the value for it in supporting the business as well. Right? It becomes more fungible and it becomes in your hands, uh, I, I would I would love to spend hours diving into this. Maybe we should get a demo at some point, too. Absolutely. But, uh, at this point, I think we're running to the end of our time slot. So, Andrew, if someone wants more information about soft iron, if they want to really dig into it, we know you've got a website. Is there anything special you'd point them at or call out? I definitely just go straight to the website. Soft iron com. Uh, lots of great content there, content there, lots of blog posts. We have a very active blog, uh, both, uh, with our engineers running technical content, as well as guys like me writing about some of the business aspects. Uh, but yeah, soft iron com, uh, is definitely the place to start. All right. Uh, thank you so much here. And, folks, you know what's happened with VMware. You know what's happening, uh, with, uh, virtualization at large. We know what's happening with all that hyper convergence stuff. Check out soft Iron because now you can go right to getting your own cloud, which sounds pretty cool to me. Take care of us.
