>> Narrator: From the cube
Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought
leaders all around the world, this is The Cube Conversation. >> Hi, welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman and this
is the Cube Conversation. Digging in with Pensando. Talking about what they're
doing to help people. Really by bringing some
of the networking ideals at a cloud native environments
both in the clouds, in the data centers happy
to Welcome to the program, Krishna Doddapaneni, He is the Vice President
of software with Pensando. Krishna, thanks so much for joining. >> Thank you Stuart for talking to me. >> All right, so Krishna
the Pensando team, very well known in the industry. Innovation startup especially
in the networking world. Give us a little bit about
your background specifically how long you've been part of this team and what helped you and
the team start Pensando? >> So I'm VP of software in Pensando. Before founding Pensando, I worked in few startups in CMA Networks, Numa Systems and Greenfield Networks. All those three startups
have been acquired by Cisco. My recent role before this company was I was VP of engineering in Cisco. I was responsible for
a product called ACI. Which is Cisco's flagship SDN product. So why did we found Pensando? So when we were looking at the industry the last few years, the few trends that are becoming clear so obviously we have a lot
of enterprise background, we were watching you know ACN big deployed in the enterprise data centers. One sore point for customers
from operational point of view, was installing service
devices, network appliances or storage appliances. So not only the operational complexity that this device is bringing, it's also they don't give you
the performance and bandwidth and PPS that you expect but traffic especially from east-west. So that was one major issue and also if you look at where
the intelligence is going this being the trend, it's
been going to the edge. The reason for that is
the routers or switches or in the devices in the middle, they cannot handle the scale. I mean the bandwidths are growing, the scale is growing, the stateful stuff is going in the network and the switches and the appliances are not able to handle it, so you need something at the edge, close to the application that can handle this kind of services and bandwidth and the third thing is obviously X86, in few years back every two years you're getting more transistors. I mean obviously the Moore's Law ended and we know we know how
that that part is going. So the exciting cycles are more valuable and we don't want to use them
for all this network services including SDN or you know
firewalls or load balancers or NVMe virtualization. So it's looking at all
this trends in the industry we thought there is a
good opportunity to do a domain-specific processor for an I/O and build products around it, and that's how we started Pensando. >> So Krishna, it's always
fascinating to watch, if you look at startups, they are often product of
the time that they're in and the technologies that are available. Sometimes they're ideas that you know , it takes a few times and
maturation the technology and other times you know I'll
hear teams and they're like, Oh well, we did this, and then, oh wow there was
this next new innovation that came out that I wish I had that when I did this last time. So we do a 2 duo or 3 duo generation We've been talking about
distributed architectures for well over a decade. It's been a long time now, in many ways I feel aged computing is just the latest discussion of this. But when it comes to you
know you've got software under your purview, what
are some of the things that are available for Pensando, that might not have been in
your toolkit five years ago? >> Yes so the growth
of open-source software has been very helpful
for us because you know we build a scale out
micro-services case controller. In the last time around
when we were building that, we had to build our own
consensus algorithm. we had to build our own
tissue a database for metrics and human cell logs. So right now we have because
of open source thing, we leverage at CD, elastic influx and all this open source
technologies that you hear. Since we want to leverage
the carbon in this ecosystem now that helped us a lot. at the same time if you
think about it right, even the software which
is not open-source, closed source thing are maturing. I mean if you talk about SDN, seven, eight years back, it was like there are
end versions of doing SDN but now the industry standardized eVPN. which is one of the core
pieces of what we do. We do SDN solution with eVPN. So it's more of the industry
is coming to a place where these are the standards and
this is open source software that you could leverage
and quickly innovate. Compared to building
all of this from scratch which will be a big effort
for start-up to succeed and build it in time for
your customer success. >> And Krishna, you talk about open-source not only in the software
and the hardware standpoint. I think about things like open
compute or the proliferation of you know GPUs and CPUs
and everything along that. How is that impacted what you've built? >> So I mean it's a good
thing you talking about, for example, we are working
in the future and OCP card. It's a good thing that OCP
card goes into HP server, it goes into a Dell server. So pretty much you know we want to, our goal is to enable this platform that what we build in you
know all the use cases that customer could think of. So in that way hardware
standardization is a good thing for the industry and then
same thing if you go in how we program the (mumbling). We are about standards of
this before programming this is an industry consortium
led by a few people. We want to make sure that
we follow the standards for the customer whose coming in who wants to program it, it's good to have standards-based thing rather than doing something
completely proprietary. At the same time you're
enabling innovations and then those innovations here to push it back to the open-source. That's what we are trying to do with P4. >> Excellent. I've had some some real
good conversations about P4 and in the way Pensando is leveraging that maybe a little bit differently and that you know you talk about standards and open source oftentimes it's like well, is there differentiate? There's certain parts of the ecosystem that you say well, it
kind of been commoditized. Obviously you're taking a lot
of different technologies, putting them together, help share the uniqueness of Pensando. What differentiates what you're doing from what was available
in the market place or that I couldn't just
you know cobble together a bunch of open-source
hardware and software together? >> I mean if you look at technologies like the I think the networking that both of us are very familiar with, if you want to build an SDN solution or you can take OVS or you can use X86 and or take some much in silicon
and cobble it together, but the problem is you will
not get the performance and bandwidth that you're looking for. So let's say if you
want a high PPS solution or you want a high CPS solution because the number of
connections are growing for your IOT use case or 5G use case. If you cobble together
with an open-source thing without any assist from a
domain-specific processor, your performance will be low. So that's once of enterprise that in the cloud use case right, as you're trying to pack
as many BMS as containers in one server because
you know you get charged. I mean our customers
make money based on that. So you want to offload all of those things into a domain-specific
processor that what we built which we call the TAC, which will do all these services at pretty much no cost to X86. I mean X86 you will be using zero cycles for we're doing features
like security groups or VPCs or VPN or encryption or
storage virtualization. That's where our value comes in. I mean if you count the TCO
model using bunch of X86 cores or in a bunch of an ARM
cores or AMD cores compared to what we do, TCO model works
out great for our customers, I mean that's why you know
there's so much interest. >> Excellent. I'm proud you brought up customers. Krishna one of the challenges
I definitely have seen over the years with
networking is it tends to be a completely separate
language that we speak there. It's you know a lot of
acronyms and protocols and not necessarily
accessible to people outside of the silo of networking. I think back to SDN, people on the outside would be like, that stands for Stu does nothing, right? Is it like networking mumbo-jumbo there. For people outside of networking, when I think about if I
was going for the C-suite of an enterprise customer, they don't necessarily care about those networking protocols. they care about the business
results in the productivity. How do you help explain what Pensando does to those that aren't
steeped in the network? >> The way I look at it, what is customer looking? But yeah you're right. The customer doesn't
know what in cap you use. Customer is looking for
is operational simplicity and then he was looking for security and if you look at it sometimes
both are like in orthogonal if you make it very highly secure but you make it like ten
thousand operational procedure, before you deploy a workload, that doesn't work for the customer because in operational complexity
increases tremendously. So where we are coming in is that we want to simplify
this for the customer. There's a very simple
way to deploy policies. There is a simple way to deploy your networking infrastructure and in the way we do it is we don't care what your physical
network is in some sense. So because we are close to the server that's a very good advantage we have. We apply the policies before even the packet leaves the cell. So in that way he knows he's
fully secure environment and we and you don't want to
manage each one individually. We have this protocol PSM which manages all this service from a central place and it's easy to operationalize
the fabric whether you talk about upgrades or you talk about deploying new services, it's all driven with REST
API and you have agree So you can do it a single
place and that's where a customer's value is. Rather than talking
about end caps or exactly the raw throughput. That is not the main thing that they wake up every day thinking about it. We have a security risk
and in how easy for me is to deploy new services or
bring up new data centers. >> All right Krishna. You're also spanning with your product a few different worlds out there. Traditionally if I think about
an enterprise data center, versus a hyper scale public
cloud and edge sites. I comes to mind very different
skill sets for management, different types of deployments there. I understand you were going to play in all of those environments. Talk a little bit about
how exactly you do that and just where you sit in
that overall discussion. >> Yes so I mean number one
rule in sector companies, we're driven by customers. Now obviously our customers
success is our success. But having said that, what we try to do is that
we try to build a platform that is kind of you know programmable. obviously starting from before
what we talked about earlier, but it's also some software point of view it's kind of pluggable. So when we build a software, for example our cloud
customers in they use DSC. They use the same set of API. So GRPC or STAPS that DSC
provides the tier controller but when we shipped the same platform who are enterprise customers, we build our own controller
and we use the same DSC APS. So the way we are trying to do
is think this fully leveraged in what we do for enterprise
customers and cloud customers and we don't try to reinvent
the wheel obviously. At the same time if you look
at the highest level constructs from a network perspective
or even storage perspective what are you trying to do? You're trying to provide connectivity but you're trying provide isolation and you're trying to provide security. So all this constructs
we encapsulated in APIs which in some mostly like cloud like APIs and those APIs are used by cloud customers and enterprise customers and the software is built in a way where any layer is can be
removed or any layer can be add. Because it's in our interest we don't want to build
multiple different softwares for different customers. Then we will not scale. So the idea when we started
the software architecture is that how we make it pluggable and how we make a programmable
that customer says, I don't want this piece of it. He can put them third party piece on it and still integrate at a common
layer with using rest APIs. >> Yeah well Krishna, I have a little bit of appreciation where some of the hard
work that goes through what your team's been doing, a couple years in stealth
but really accelerating from the announcement coming out
of stealth at the end of 2019 to just about half a year your GA with a major OEM of HPE, definitely a lot of work
that needs to be done, bring us what are you most proud about from the work that your team is doing we don't need to hear any
you know major horror stories but there always are some of the not holes or challenges
that often get hidden behind the curtain. >> I mean personally I'm
most proud of the team that we've build so you know obviously
you know our executors have a good track record of you know disrupting the market multiple times but I'm most proud of the team because the team is not just worried about technology that there
are very senior technologists and they're great leaders
but they're also worried about a customer problem, right? So it's always about you
know getting the right mix of you know execution combined with technology is when you succeed that is what I mean most proud of you know we have a team with independent leaders running all these projects independently and then releasing almost we have a release every week if you look at all our customers, right? And then you know being a
small company doing that is pretty challenging in a way but we came up with methodologies where we fully believe in automation everything is automated and
whenever we release software we run through the full set of automation so that we are confident that customer is getting good quality code it's not like you know
we cooked up something and they should be worried
when they need to upgrade to this software, so I think that's the key
part if you want to succeed in this day and age developing the features of the velocity that
you will want to develop and still support all this
customers at the same time >> Absolutely, well
congratulations on that Krishna all right final question I have for you give us a little bit of
guidance going forward you know often when we see a company out and we you know try to say well this is what that company does you've got a very flexible architecture a lot of different types the solutions what kind of markets or services you know might we be looking at from Pensando down low down the
road a little bit please? >> I think we have a long journey so we have a platform right now we already mean we have a very baby we're shipping the
platforms already shipping in a storage provider we are integrating with
premier clouds public clouds and you know enterprise market we already deployed distributed firewall and some of our customers
deployed distributed firewall so if you take this platform it can be extendable to add in
all the services that you see in data centers on clouds, right? But primarily we are driven
from a customer perspective or customer priority point of view so where we will go is we will
try to add more edge services we will try to add more storage features and there's initial interest
in service provider market what we can do for 5G and IOT because we have the flexible platform we have to see you know
how to apply this platform to this new applications that's where probably will go in future >> All right well Krishna Doddapaneni, Vice President of software with Pensando thank you so much for joining. >> Thank you Stu was great talking to you. >> All right be sure to
check out the cube.net you can find lots of
interviews from Pensando I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the Cube (soft music)
