Transcript
Hi, Mike Matchett with Small World Big Data and we're talking about virtualization today. You know, basically we are all aware of what's going on with the Broadcom VMware acquisition. And people are scrambling in a lot of cases to find out what they should be doing when their license costs spiral out of control, or they just look around and say, like, this is not tenable to keep going forward on the path we're going. I've got SoftIron today here with me, and we're going to explore some of the things that you might want to think about when you're making your plan B up for virtualization. So just hold on a second. Yup, yup. Hey. Welcome, Charles. Welcome to our show. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks for having me. Uh, maybe maybe just explain to the audience. Introduce yourself a little bit. Explain to the audience why. Why did you get involved in this industry? In virtualization? Taking on Goliath. What was it? What was it that attracted you to coming in? And with a company like SoftIron here and saying, this is something we should do? Sure. So my, my title here at SoftIron is, is Fellow Cloud Architecture. I've been in it for, for 25 or so years and basically seen all of the different transitions from, from a technology standpoint over the last 25 years and in infrastructure and, you know, architecture and things such as that. And so, you know, virtualization is one of those ones where, um, it has revolutionized the way that we we do things in it and, you know, very, very easy to do much more with much less in general. And so to have, you know, the the different abstractions and things that we can do based on the different services and solutions that we have is very important. And so to kind of answer your question directly, what drew me to, you know, SoftIron with what they're doing? You know, SoftIron has a very unique product portfolio, if you will, in general. Um, we we make our own hardware and we make our own software. Uh, from, from a hardware standpoint. Um, the reason why we started to make our own hardware was because, you know, a lot of the, the, you know, commodity vendors and things like that, they, they usually outsource the, the manufacturing processes to external parties and things like that. And so what we did is we, you know, we wanted to be able to ensure that there's a provenance in not only the the supply chain, but also in the, the, the, the outcome of the systems that we produce. And so, uh, you know, whenever we make a server, it is built to do its job specifically and not some randomized function. So think a storage server. There are very minimal components in it or a compute server. There's no hard drives in it. Um, those types of things. Um, and so the, the thing that, that I guess to, to more directly answer your question, what drew me to SoftIron specifically from, from a cloud based standpoint, it comes down to that approach. You know, that that they wanted to take is, you know, making systems and solutions that are much simpler to, to use and to consume in general, and not only having a secure by design approach to, to that implementation, but, you know, also being able to ensure that the scalability and, you know, the growth capacity from a system based standpoint and a solution standpoint is very easy to to do in general. All right. So let's talk just just stay on that just for a second. So there are definitely public cloud providers out there where you can just go buy virtual resources, give them your credit card and pay a lot of money. And you could still run your own infrastructure and build your own components up there. But what we're really talking about here is really operating something that looks like a private cloud on behalf of your part of your organization. So there are a few. There are a few, you know, examples of private cloud technologies there. But tell me a little bit about what private cloud means to someone who's in it and running their own private cloud. Because virtualization is pretty complex, right? There's a lot of stuff going on there. What does it take to take like a, you know, just kind of this VMware operating environment that they might have had for years, but really change and morph it into a private cloud? What does that mean? Sure. Well, you know, the whole notion of, of a private cloud in general, you know, kind of comes down to certain attributes. Think things like your virtualization, automation, being able to pool your resources, self-service provisioning, you know, your typical data storage and management, elasticity in general, scalability in general. Being able to orchestrate your your different resources and manage them in a very simple way. So think things like your software defined networking, software defined storage in general, and then, you know, being able to kind of tie those into a resource usage billing and chargeback. Um, those are things that I begin to think of whenever I look at what a private cloud should be nine times out of ten. It's very difficult to to reach that that outcome or those those or get those properties using the typical solutions that we have today. And so that's that's kind of more of being able to take that experience that, that the public cloud providers have, have produced and have built and arguably spent billions of dollars on and have thousands and thousands of engineers to to kind of manage and maintain, to provide that single outcome. That's that's something that we're trying to to essentially target from, from a usage standpoint in the private cloud standpoint. All right. Let's pick on some names here. So we know I just I already pulled out VMware there. Uh, in in uh as a competitor that we have Nutanix. We have uh Cisco Nutanix bundles. You might see Hyper-V kind of in some places being called a private cloud. Uh, you have some people using open source and saying, hey, this is really a private cloud because it does this container Kubernetes thing. Uh, but there's, you know, you have with SoftIron built something that is I almost don't want to say cloud native because it's not in the public cloud, but it is a specifically for the cloud era. Can you tell us, like why? What technologically makes soft ion different or even philosophically different than what came before? Yeah, sure. Certainly. So, you know, the cloud native doesn't necessarily mean running those things in, you know, Azure or AWS or those sorts of things. It's really, you know, kind of pertains to the the simplicity of of the way that the solution is architected. So, you know, think things like containers and microservices and things like that. And so when when we set out to build a, a solution on premises, we took that notion as kind of the start. Now being able to take your, your as, as the cloud service providers call it legacy workloads or otherwise known as software that we've been running for decades. Take that and move it into a cloud native type of approach that takes a little bit of work and a very specific type of expertise. And so, you know, there really aren't a lot of options out there to kind of move away from, let's say, a VMware type of behavior, uh, and move into something that that seems similar or feels similar, but also gives you that platform to grow in the cloud native type of approach. And so we took that as, as, as our defining motion to be able to be the bridge between those, those quote unquote legacy solutions and give you the on ramp or the foundation to be able to move into that more of a cloud native type of behavior. So again, your microservices, your, your container based types of, of, uh, workloads and things such as that. All right. So kind of a kind of a glue in there. So hyper cloud, uh, involves, you know, somebody actually doing a fairly in-depth, uh, implementation in the sense of they've got to get hardware in place. They've got the software in place. So it's not it's not something casually done necessarily, but you've come up with, uh, Is something in the middle here for people. Why don't you tell us what that is? And I believe it's a aimed right at that VMware market. Sure. So, you know, the as you know, as you mentioned, kind of the difficulty, if you will, of, of Hypercloud is you have to actually take a server out of a box, plug it into a rack, connect it and power it on. Ultimately, that's the last thing you have to do. Um, from from that standpoint, it is really simple. And we tried to make it as simple as possible, but what ends up being a little bit difficult sometimes is, you know, users and customers and businesses have either, you know, um, contracts with some of the other, um, hardware vendors. So think your Dells, your HP's, your Supermicro, and they don't necessarily want to want to kill those, those contracts or those relationships in general. And so we created a solution called VM squared, which is able to run on commodity hardware, uh, on any of those commodity hardware. And it's very, very lightweight. It is an operating system. So it's going to consume the entire server in general. But it really is, as you kind of mentioned, an on ramp to that true private cloud. Um, you know, from a system based standpoint and a solution standpoint, you're still going to have to manage the hardware underneath it. So, you know, of course, the firmware and all the pieces that that go into the care and feeding of those specific hosts in general. Um, whereas from a hypercloud standpoint, you can install one binary to update the hypercloud and it's going to do all the firmware, all the, you know, out-of-band management, all the software in general for, you know, for you. But VM squared is our solution to kind of bridge the gap between what you have today and where you really should be going from a private cloud standpoint. All right. So you've taken a lot of the goodness from what you've done in Hypercloud and you've made it portable, I guess you would say. So. People can run it on their either existing or hardware that they can get outside there if they're still in a little bit more work to tweak that, to get it to work. Right. That sounds sounds fine. Uh, what Who would find VM squared really attractive? I guess in this talk specifically about VMware existing VMware customers. So I've got VMware in here. I know there's a licensing cost angle that you can probably address here, but what with that and what what else. Why would why would I look at VM squared as my next step. Sure. So you know, whenever you look at the different types of customers that VMware has in general, it really spans very small organizations to really large organizations and, you know, very small implementations, even, you know, 2 to 3 VMs or 4 or 5 VMs, and they don't need a lot of, of of footprint in general, all the way up to, you know, businesses with tens of thousands and, you know, hundreds of thousands of VMs. That's that's kind of the fantastic, uh, outcome that VMware has had over these last 25 years is they have built a massive and really valuable ecosystem that can satisfy all those different types of markets. And so the to answer your question, I guess more very directly. We're targeting all of them. So, you know, businesses that are very small are able to use VM squared in a way that is natural and functional for them based on what they know. Um, whereas, you know, to be able to have the flexibility and the scalability of, of being able to move into those multi hundreds and thousands of VMs for your infrastructure, also providing a platform for, again, your legacy solutions and your cloud native types of solutions and even a bridge between them. We're targeting everyone in that front in general. All right. I want to talk just a little bit about scale scaling. Scaling capabilities here. We know if we're running VMware, we've got certain limits on our cluster sizes and certain limits on the way we can manage things. Every node needs to be managed. But you've taken a slightly open, more open or enabling approach with Hyper Cloud. Can you tell us how that compares up when we talk about scaling out and scaling in and scaling up? Yeah, sure. Um. So, so from, you know, from a hyper cloud hypercloud standpoint, there's actually no limitation that we have currently from the number of hosts that you can have within a Hypercloud. The number in the database is 65,535, which is a, you know, a small integer. So we can actually tweak that number if we wanted to. We're hoping that someone will challenge us on that. So we'll be able to sell you hundreds of thousands of nodes in a single cluster. But the point there is that, you know, we've had all of these different types of clusters and small entities of systems that we've had to manage, and it really is an increase in, in the burden or really the architectural burden for having to be able to manage all of these. And so that's that's the view that we took in general from a hypercloud as well as a VM standpoint is, you know, being able to ensure that that that minimum cluster size can really be really large. So in fact, to answer that question as well, on the VM side of things, the largest cluster size currently is 1024 nodes. Um, we could extend that. It's kind of an arbitrary limit that we've added to it, because we kind of want to move people into the, you know, the hyper cloud world of things in general. But, uh, the, you know, VM sizes, the, the amount of storage that you can have for, um, like, like a single disk can have like 243PB of, of, you know, in, in size, which is kind of silly. Um, but with AI and ML these days, we're going to grow in general. So I think 8192, um, virtual CPUs is the limit currently, which is actually, you know, the limit in Linux. Uh, and then I think we can have like 4 to 4PB of memory, um, which again is the Linux kernel, uh, limitation. So it's not necessarily our limitation there. It's just what systems are built to do. So you really you really opened up opened up the architecture that someone has, uh, well past what VMware limits are. So not only can they get probably a better, better deal going on here. A simpler environment, but one that's operated like a cloud and one that is a lot more, uh, flexible, if you will, to take on whatever tomorrow's workloads are coming along here. Uh, I have another I have another note here, just kind of sideways here on on quantum and quantum cryptography. And you guys are doing something unique in that space. Can you tell us what that is? What's what's the concern with with security and quantumness? I mean, you're not putting quantum quantum bits in there yet, right? Well, so yeah. No, what basically what it does, you know, what we've implemented is, is what's called post-quantum cryptography. And it's basically taking the cryptographic modules for, you know, the different encryption functions, the different behaviors that we use to ensure that the storage data is, is encrypted, whether it's in transit or at rest, you know, on on the system. The reason why this is important Is because, well, you know, quantum computers are coming. Uh, there are a few that have already been built. And what what they have shown is they're able to to to break through our, uh, simple little passwords in seconds or milliseconds as opposed to, you know, what, what it should be from a security standpoint. And so, uh, our typical manner of or method of encryption, we utilize, you know, RSA, uh, as an example, um, those quantum computers can can hack those things in mere seconds. And so to have the protection for the future, we kind of needed to look at it today because we, you know, we didn't want to start from a position of, you know, on our heels to, to to take, you know, take care of a problem that's already in place. We wanted to ensure that it was cut out, uh, at the start. And that's ultimately what we implemented. So in both the Hypercloud operating system and the VMs operating system, we support, uh, post-quantum encryption and or post-quantum cryptography across the board. I mean, that's that's awesome. And just to just to emphasize this, folks, if you watching this, it's not about being ready for when quantum computers can break your passwords. We're pretty sure they're going to be able to do that someday. It's about all the data that you're putting around now that's encrypted with algorithms. And that can be broken in the future because people can just track that. People can copy down your encrypted stuff today and wait a couple of years till they can break it, if it even takes a couple of years. So you need to be encrypting everything you want protected today from that future, the future hacking attempts. And I don't think people are quite well aware of all the stuff in the past that's been put out there on the on the internets in vulnerable, encrypted forms, uh, in the past. But that that's a reckoning coming soon. Uh, it is. So we definitely want to be ahead of that. Uh, okay. So Veeam squared, Veeam squared attacking that. Um, uh, attacking that VMware sort of Broadcom problem that a lot of people are facing. Hyper cloud for when they really realize that they should be adopting. This is hyper cloud also good for like some MSPs CSPs and things like that. Is this something that you're moving in that market as well? Absolutely. I mean, so you know hyper cloud and NVMe squared both have have multi-tenancy as a base, you know, very strict multi-tenancy in general. The thing that makes makes hyper cloud very attractive though is is the the set it and forget it behavior. You don't have to worry about the hardware underneath. And in fact all of the nodes themselves are ephemeral. There's no boot drive in them, which basically if there's a problem, you reboot it and it'll it'll come back. Usually, as they say, a problem is not a problem unless it survives a reboot. Um, but then if something does fail, you just pull the node out and plug another one in and it just gets consumed. Kind of like the Borg. You know, whenever something's no longer working, you kick it out and bring a new one in and just kind of builds on itself from a VM squared standpoint. We tried to pull as many of those types of behaviors in as possible. So you're going to get a very simplified installation process. The manner of using the system itself is very easy and very simple to use. We use a templating system within the entire environment. We have a a marketplace that is able to be customized for your different tenancies as needed. So it's very, very MSP um, uh, attractive in general. We have a customer of ours that, that actually, uh, you know, bought a hypercloud to, to handle their, their core infrastructure and then decided to become a cloud service service provider because it just works so simply. Yeah, we've been in of course, the underlying message here is if you are an IT shop, you should already be an internal service provider to to your to your company's divisions, departments or whatever else. So if it's the same kind of solution that externally providing service providers are using. It should be exactly the thing you want to do as well and vice versa. So those are all great arguments back and forth. I'm loving. I'm loving the idea of of offering people both an option to not have to have their first step off the ledge, be a complete infrastructure based solution, but something they can do on their existing hardware. The existing contracts that you've got post. What is it post? I'm going to get this right. Quantum post-quantum cryptography that's embedded in there already, which makes it great, I assume, for the federal government markets who probably have a regulatory reliance on that as well as people who should everyone else should be post-quantum. Cryptography cryptographically safe. See, I said that, uh, on there, uh, if someone wants to learn more about these things, Charles, where would you point them at to find out a little bit deeper information, maybe kick the tires? Uh, yeah. Sure. In touch with folks. Where would you go? So, Software.com as our base website. We have a blog site as well. Blogspot. Com you can also shoot an email to info at com and someone will get back to you. Um, we do have a trial for VM squared. Obviously Hypercloud is a little bit more difficult to trial out of the gate because, you know, it's all inclusive, the hardware and the software. Whereas with VM squared you can kind of get a feel for the way the solution looks and how it works. Um, yeah. Shoot us an email. Hop, hop on the website. We'll we'll certainly give you a hand. All right. Great stuff. Thanks for coming here today, Charles. At some point. Thank you. I'm sure we'll have you back and talk a little bit more about how this is all going. I don't imagine that VMware Broadcom is going to be making inroads anymore. This all looks like retrograde stuff for them. So some big opportunities for you all. Thanks for being here. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Take care. Yum yum yum.
