BBC Africa Eye investigates Black Axe, one of the most feared and powerful organized crime groups in Nigeria. For years, Nigerians have wondered if this court group is linked to politicians. The Independent National Electoral Commission on it, Professor Mahmoud Yocobu says, the commission requires 305 billionaires to prepare for the 2023 election and purchase materials needed to cover several by-elections across the country. Does this make economic sense? And as always, we will be reviewing the dailies with an analyst. And thank you for joining us on the Breakfast here on PLOS TV Africa. I am Osao Gie, of Bon Bon. And I am Messi Boko. I mean, it's good to have you back. Yes, great to be back. You know, pretty exciting. It's a build-up to Christmas Day. So the first already, I'm hoping that this year is going to be, you know, a lot better than last year's Christmas.  And so it was a little different. Well, it's not quite different from what we're expecting. I mean, we're just hoping that we don't have another lockdown because already it's been stated that we're in the fall term. We're experiencing the fall wave of COVID-19 with the Omicron variant right here. Of course for a lot of caution in the season and in the period where we're making merry and, you know, having a lot of great time. Yeah, just to quickly remind everyone, because I see a lot of people moving around Lagos and across the country, you know, like there's no pandemic anymore. But just to remind you that there still is COVID-19 everywhere.   You just might be COVID-19 positive. So go get tested. You know, of course, remember to stay safe as much as you can. Let's start with our top trending stories this morning. First of all, say congratulations to a young Nigerian, a 17-year-old Jamaima Marcus who became Lagos State Governor for one day yesterday. Of course, she won the Spelling Bee Competition across the state and that, of course, earns her the position as governor of Lagos State for one day. She's a student of Angus Memorial Secondary School in Shomolu, Lagos East. And, you know, so congratulations to her. And, you know, it's pretty interesting because this has gone on for a very, very long time. This had it in 2001 by Uluru M. E. Tinubu and has continued to be a tradition. Every year there is a Lagos State governor for one year. And it's a great thing. We've seen, you know, a couple of times it's been a male, sometimes female.  I'm not sure how much, you know, you will be able to achieve in one day as governor. If I was governor for one day, I would, you know, very likely assign some contracts. You know, well, usually, so I think to myself, I mean, because I haven't been in the sport, but usually I just think to myself, with one becoming a governor for one day, are they allowed to, apart from the fact that, yes, they observe all of the protocols, like yesterday she presided over, you know, the meeting and all of that.  You know, like, a governor for one day.   So, yes. So it's just a ceremonial function. It's a ceremonial thing, yes, absolutely. But I'm hoping that there are some perks, you know, to being governor for one day of a state as big as Lagos. Hopefully you can make some changes. I heard that she made some demands, you know, with regards funding for schools, secondary schools across Lagos, across the country and some of all of that. So I'm also also thinking that it's also a very good compensating because over time you hear the comparison where people begin to compare and say, when you have beauty pageants and all of the beauty contests across, and then you have the fact that people win a lot of cash with all of the reality TV shows and nothing has been, you know, given to those who are doing very well academically. And I think that this is a great one. I mean, it just goes, it would be in history that you were governor for one day even though it's a ceremonial function. I think it would go a long way, you know, in boosting the morale of those kids. Absolutely. And of course, you know, with the spelling bee competition also, you know, it also then tells you that there's still some interest in that competition which has been on for, what, about 20 years now and is still continuing to produce very, very brilliant minds. So let's see where, you know, some of these people who have won that competition eventually turn out, you know, later in life. Well, congratulations to her. We'll move away from there now and move to talk in the electricity matters where the Nigerian government has stated that three neighboring countries, Niger, Togo and Benet Republic, didn't pay a dime for the electricity they consumed from Nigeria for 2020. They were given a bill of 770 million Naira by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission and Nigerian Balk, sorry, Nigerian Balk Electricity Trading Company, 770 million Naira, but they didn't get to pay anything. And of course, this is blamed on the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic wars that it caused for those countries.  And it caused a lot of concern because one would rather think that, first of all, I really do not know why we're, if we're actually supposed to make money from it because at the end of the day, I mean, that's a lot of money, no sentiment whatsoever as business. And if you are engaged in business majorly, a lot of people want to make profits. So I'm just thinking, how do we as a country, we're not even able to, you know, produce the cater for the needs and the entire population as it is. I mean, the past situation is very epileptic. You want to talk about generation. And some people would say, yes, we are talking about privatization, but, you know, how privatize we, or how privatize is the private sector, I mean, the past sector, being that you still have, you know, the government on the other side. So before we get to the fact that we're also giving neighboring countries power and not even collecting, how did we even get to that point that we're not able to cater for our own need before we're now selling or, you know, giving power to neighboring countries? It is really, really bad. I think that we should just come back and find a way to see how we're able to mop up all of that cash. That's a lot of money. And it doesn't make sense. So for me, I would rather say discontinue. What's the essence of supply and power, and then you're not getting? And then we're making all of the excuses. And then we don't even have, because, you know, the past sector or the energy sector is very critical to economic development. Well, I mean, so I think, you know, it can be described as one of the things Nigeria has exported, you know, electricity, because we're able to generate some level of electricity here. Yes, you know, it's also, you know, good to place that argument in that, well, Nigerians themselves don't have enough electricity. Nigerians are seeking electricity for business. And, you know, it will improve greatly on the economy of the country if we can have a generating of electricity, 10,000, 20,000, 40,000, 50,000 megawatts for Nigeria's current population. There's, you know, there's a fair argument there. You know, but if we have enough, you know, that we can also export and generate income for the country, then I present the same thing wrong with it. What are the excuse, basically, that this is where I have a challenge, the excuse that, well, the economies of these countries have suffered so much in the last one or two years because of the pandemic, and that's the reason they've not been able to pay. That may not, you know, really, really sit well, you know, 100% with me, but I'm sure Nigerian government knows what it's doing. I'm sure that the Nigerian electricity, Nigerian bulk electricity trading company also, you know, understands what it's doing and will get their funds from these countries. Businesses, business sometimes is bad, you know, and I'm sure this happens to everybody. Well, I totally understand, you know, that particular path that, you know, business is business and sometimes is bad, but you also want to agree with me that within-debtedness and, you know, with the way the economy is going, we have cash, we have, okay, we have funds. People are all in this country, and it's time that we begin to get all of this money from wherever it is. So we're able, you know, to push them into infrastructure or development. Let's not even forget that the government is saying all in 2022, just in a few days to come, we will be introducing new taxes, not maybe in January, but maybe after the first quarter of 2022 and then you have new, you know, tax regime and all of that, which is not necessary rather than, you know, introduce new tax regime. I'm thinking that we have, you know, there are resources everywhere where we can just look at and then, you know, begin to see how we can retrieve all of that. That's not very fair for everyone.  But we also need to understand that if you are in business, profits is actually what it is. And we should find a way, you know, to get all of these resources back. So what are we going to do? Well, they need to come and talk to me. Anyway, away from Togo and DJ and, of course, by the Republic of Nigeria, 770 million are for electricity in 2020. Let's now, of course, talk about more of the effects of COVID-19, but something on a positive note. Of course, NAVDAC has given the Afebaba Lola University at Doiketi the license and the go-ahead to produce a herbal medicine, as it is, you know, popularly called, against COVID-19. They, of course, had done some trials in the past and eventually have given them the license to go ahead and produce it. This is not a vaccine now. This is instead a drug, an herbal drug, you know, that will help fight against the effects of COVID-19. You know, for, I think, for the last couple of months, we've continuously said that we've still not been able to understand exactly the peculiarities in Nigeria's COVID-19 story. You know, why we've, you know, seemingly been able to have better indices, better figures, very low death rates with regards to COVID-19. We've not been able to understand that. And so I believe that it's important that they continue to do whatever research is necessary, that they continue to understand exactly how the Nigerian society has been able to deal with COVID-19. And so it helps us to also produce our own medication if possible, because I know a lot of people have used herbal medicines in the past. There's still using herbal medicines today to fight COVID-19. There's still some concoctions that they mixed together, you know, to create some, you know, type of drug that will fight it. And these are happening in households across the country. A lot of people don't even bother, you know, going to the hospital or bother going to, you know, seek medical advice, you know, to get proper medication. They have some mango that they drink that helps. I mean, if it has been, if it has actually been helped. I'm thinking that it's just limited to, you know, COVID here now, because COVID is new. What's your trying to understand? Prior to this time, you know that there are a lot of traditional herbal stuff that people get to take, and then it works for them. Now, cherry is the word, you know. I'm really, I must say that this is good news for us because we have constantly talked about the fact that, you know, and I'm just very dependent on the Western world. So over time, when Omicron, you know, broke out again, of course, we started talking about Omicron, and then it got to me, it got me thinking, and I started asking questions. Why is it that we just have to follow everything? Because if you look at it, it's like you have the situation and then they say, okay, you have to do this. This is what it is. And then we say, okay, yes, it is what it is. It feels like we don't even go back to also do our research. It's like you constantly, I would want to cite an example where we're like going to church and then the pastor says, XYZ, you have to go back to your Bible and verify, or you go back to the Quran and find out if, you know, really that is what it is. So it's a good thing that we're, you know, taking, you know, going back to the drawing board, whatever it is, and we're trying to find a way, we're also trying to, you know, solve the problem. Whether or not we get it right, it's not even the solution. I mean, it's not even the point. The point is we're making an effort, we're trying, and it's commendable what is traditional because we need to find things that works for us. We need to find, you know, what works for us as a people because we're very unique. I completely agree. And that's why I said that it's important that we as a country understand exactly, you know, what the peculiarities are with our COVID-19 situation. We cannot continue to follow. And I totally agree with you. We can't continue to follow the trends across the world. They say, oh, there's a third wave. Nigeria says, oh, we're in a third wave. There's a fourth wave. We say, oh, we're in a fourth wave also. We're looking down. We're looking down. Exactly. We're looking down because every other place is looking down. But, you know, sadly we don't, and in my opinion, we don't even know exactly what the figures are, you know, to the letter, the exact figures with regards to COVID-19 in Nigeria. I don't think we're testing as much as we were testing in 2020 anymore. I don't think that we are, you know, doing as much research as we were doing before if we were doing any research. And so if we don't understand once again, South Africa has worse, you know, casualty figures with regards to COVID-19 and other African countries. But Nigeria somehow, it's either we do not know or we've somehow just been lucky or the government just needs to figure out what exactly is with the Nigerian system. So I'll constantly just make reference to, you know, that statement by Tony Blair at the time where he, there were concerns that, you know, in the entire continent, the entire continent at some point had recorded about 3,000 cases of COVID-19, if I'm not mistaken. And then when you begin to make the comparison, you juxtapose that with the number of deaths in the entire continent, it wasn't commensurate. So, you know, several arguments that are coming through, like maybe tacky, we're just been very tacky with data, you know, we're not being, there's something that couldn't really place it because if you look at the number of persons who have contracted the virus and then the number of deaths recorded, you know, there's a discrepancy and then you can't understand why you should not have because you're supposed to have more deaths. So at the time we're recording just 100 persons who have died in the entire continent. So yes, I'm thinking that it's time that the African Union, I said it before, because apart from, you know, COVID-19 as a health concern, I'm thinking that it's time that, you know, Africa as a continent come back, you know, look inward. If we're different, you know, look back and find out what is, you know, very peculiar with us. And let's just find a way to solve it and understand what it is because there's still a novel virus as long as we're concerned and we're still trying to understand how it will preach and we'll never, you know, it's not like we'll have a grab over it. And why we've been able to survive it. That's my own, you know. Exactly. Because, I mean, we had, you know, an expert health expert, a commissioner for health sometimes speaking on this platform some weeks back and she said something.   So what is, what is it about us? Is it that we're keeping to the protocols? I mean, you want to talk about vaccination only 2% of the entire population. So we need to sit back. It's a good one. It's brilliant one. Like I always say, I don't care what the end result is. I don't know what it is, but I just think that this is an effort and it's commendable. I care what the end result is. No, what I'm saying is, you know, at the end of the day, the fact that you're making an effort is commendable. So whether or not we get to that point that we're saying, oh, it's going to work or, you know, we're going to get, it's going to cure or it's going to solve any problem. But the fact that we have actually made an effort we're trying to understand we're trying to solve a problem is very commendable. I should give license to a bull sellers if that's what it is. I mean, if we're able to do enough research and we say that it is a way to or it is, you know... It sounds like you're very hungry this morning. You're just making... It's true that they sell across Lagos. It might be anything. It could really just be anything. But until we do enough research and then we're just going to continue, you know, doing trial and error with our healthcare system. Anyway, that's for top trending this morning. We'll take a short break. When we come back, we're going through the major newspapers across Nigeria this morning. Let's share with you what stories have made the headlines. We'll be back.


Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Wherever you're handling from, welcome to another episode of the Developer Experience Office Hours. I am Chris Short, executive producer of OpenShift TV, technical marketing manager here at Red Hat. I am joined by the one and only Ryan Jarvenan. Hey, how's it going? Good. How are you doing today, Ryan? Oh, man, hanging in there this new year's a wild ride. I don't know. I'm half expecting it to get suddenly better and then half like, but I better keep my expectations in line based on current trends, I don't know. Nice. Yeah, right. Awesome. We're also joined by a couple of folks. Andrea, how are you doing today, buddy? I'm good. Thanks. Still in Italy, a nice, nice weather. So enjoying, enjoying winter or winter. Ah, yes, winter in Italy. I bet that's beautiful. Natali, you have, you have made it. You have arrived. Thank you for joining us today. Hey, how's it going? Great. Great, man. Yeah, two, two Italian today. I know. All right. Like it's, it's 50-50. The Americans, the Italians, right? It's like the Olympics. Yeah. All right. So awesome. We've got like a little outline going here. Ryan, you want to kick it off talking about our developer sandbox environments? Yeah. Yeah. First thing I wanted to talk about is we have a new developer sandbox offering available. I will post a link to, oh, you got it in chat. Excellent. Well, you did too. Perfect. Yeah. All right. Well, yeah. If you are following along and chat, give it a look. It's available at developers.redhat.com slash developer hyphen sandbox. So I'm going to click on that link. I wonder if I can do a share my, share my desktop. Let's see if this. Oh, boy. Let me share. If I can figure out how to do this. You want me to do it? Maybe. Well, I'm going to give it a shot first. OK. Let's see. Where's the share screen button? And how about this one? Oh, they've all got warnings on them. Sure.  OK. So you want me to pop this open here? Let's see. Yeah. I haven't run through it with this laptop yet. OK. I got open system preferences and do all kinds of probably restart Zoom. That's fine. Let me do the screen share real quick. OK. But I will ignore all of my tabs, please, people. Don't freak out. I'm sorry if I'm giving you tab anxiety. I thought this was my desktop at first. Those tabs. So if you go to the developer sandbox page, right? You get this little red box here to launch your developer sandbox for Red Hat OpenShift. I'm going to click that here. The main thing you need is a developer account, a Red Hat developer account. They're free to sign up for. If you already have a Red Hat login, you are good to go. I think the manager logged in here. Hang on. There we go. And so this will give you a free access to a OpenShift development cluster, which has somewhat limited resources available, but it spins up really quickly and lasts a little bit longer than what you'd get from Catechota. The Catechota environments are one hour limit, and then they self-destruct. This will give you quite a bit more time. So you want to log in with the dev sandbox option. Cool. Oh, do you want to go through this or skip it? No, well, this is the main thing I wanted to show. Basically, you could skip the tour. Yeah, skip that tour, and you're right into the kind of add new things. So like, off you go, right? Like, you want to add something from Operator Hub. You can plug it in right there. You want to pull in something from your Git repo or container image or just drop the whole yaml from your application in. Off you go, right? There are limitations. Yeah, yeah, there are limitations on this environment. I don't know, since you're logging in with a developer credential, I don't know if you have full access to adding new operators that are not already installed. So there are some limitations, but if you're really just looking to do language-based development and not lose your entire progress every hour, this is definitely something that's worth looking into. I probably shouldn't have tabbed out of that, because now I can't find it, sorry. Oh, here we go. Apologies. Too many tabs. Too many tabs, yeah. So as far as operator back services go, there's... That's weird. Yeah, there we go. So there's plenty of stuff you can tinker with in here, right? Yeah, definitely plenty of solutions. But there's resource limitations and a couple other kind of stipulations on what you get out of this totally free service. I think it lasts for... I'm not exactly sure how long. I think they give you some heads up when you create the cluster. But I think you get about a week or so. There's more information on the landing page that we linked. Yeah, I think for the beta program started for two weeks and then it should be up to 30 days when it goes to GA. 30 days, you can work with this environment. The cool thing, you have three projects. So you start already from this in a mindset of promoting your container image across environment, like you have the dev environment, the stage environment. Then there is the code environment, because with this sandbox environment, we would like to see also people coding from the platform. I know it can feel like weird, but it's possible also to code here because there is already code ready workspaces available for your application. So when you start an application, you can just start coding in it and testing the thing. Let's say, quote it locally, local to this sandbox environment and then promoting your container image across all the projects. That's awesome. So if I can have this thing for two weeks, I can do a lot of tinkering, figuring things out. And if that gets extended to 30 days, what are we doing exactly to prevent people from running all their operations on these things? I mean, where are those limitations, right? Like, what are we not gonna see? I feel like it's a good question to ask. I'm gonna jump into the administrator view and see if I can, yeah, okay, there we go. Yeah, it's kind of locked down from the administrator side currently. You get some ability to use operators that have already been pre-installed, but you might not be able to add an operator that hasn't already been kind of made available for you. There's a couple other limitations, memory and CPU. I'm looking at those right now here on screen, right? Like CPU, you know, there's one memory 512 megs, right? Like it's a good way to get started and like figuring out how the OpenShift interface works. It is not something that you're gonna run your enterprise workloads on just from the resource constraints alone, right? You could run like development workloads, especially if you're dealing with a small development size database, you know, just for testing purposes, or if you're linking out to a shared database hosted somewhere else. Right, like you could totally set up rules for this environment to get to that environment and everything be happy. Exactly, yeah. I think potentially you drop in a Helm chart that already has some knowledge of how to bind to staging or something and you're in a real good spot with this type of offering. So it's new or still kind of testing the waters with this solution, but we would love to have you give it a look, give us some feedback, let us know what you think. And like we said, it's gonna be expanding over time. I don't know if we'll get to having like paid offerings or something where you can keep your environment for more than 30 days. I think that's more kind of out in the future. We'll see where it goes. We got a comment in the chat about programming on the platform from GNU Pasta. And yeah, that's totally one of the things we recommend on this show is doing development that is highly a lot of collaboration with the platform environment and take advantage of as much of that platform environment and that feedback from production grade, platform input output, all during your dev loop. So you spend less time making guesses about how production is going to perform when you're developing. So yeah, like if you just create a simple, you know, Node.js example here, off you go, right? Like it's waiting for the build. Yep, and you'll should end up with a public URL that you could share with anyone in any of your environments. Yeah, as you said, one of the cool things is that your inner loop runs also on Kubernetes. This is a kind of new and powerful, no? You also your inner loop run on Kubernetes, then also the outer loop, of course, but the inner loop itself can run on Kubernetes. And once you start your application, you can edit the code directly from the IDE inside the sandbox already installed. It is, of course, Eclipse chair in as the red dot product around this, it's a code ready workspaces based on a glitch seven addresses. But yeah, this is awesome, right? Like code ready workspaces right here. And that's dope. And it's based on Eclipse chair and it'll start initializing as, you know, you gave it the credentials you needed. We're not credentials, but just, you know, username, email, some kind of UID creation process there, I'm assuming. Yeah, this is the factory. And factory is a process around code ready workspaces reading the death file. We talked about the file with Ryan in the previous office hours. The death file are the same used by Odo, OpenShift2 CLI. So we are converging to a new version of those death files, which is the file number two, version two. But the death file is really the Docker file of your workspace or your developer sandbox, your developer environment. This is another things that unify all the, all these tools that we can use in the platform. That's awesome. Is this, you know, loading soon, graphic, any cooler? I mean, my son would freak out over this, right? Like he's all about cranes and everything like this. This would make him happy. The one last warning I have about this site, I think there is some capability to, if your URLs or your workloads are not being accessed externally or directly via the UI, I think we can potentially idle your pods and then bring them back later when you do start getting requests and interactions. So if you're expecting 100% uptime, this is more developer quality, you know, not production quality as far as the uptime and availability, but it's a great way to test things out. And when you do start interacting with it, you should get your services come back relatively quickly. Let me try. Let's see what happens here. Not as fast as serverless though, which will be our topic later in the show today. So that failed, interestingly enough. But you are in a workspace. You made it to code ready with a small exception, which might just be a timeout or some other. Yeah, the pod timed out was the error. So maybe it's gonna come online. Let's see. And this could be a stumbling block as if the pod has not loaded yet. Yeah, one cool, one smart thing to do if you plan to use this massively is to preload those space image for the work spaces. So if you plan to have lots of, you know, for instance, Go, Python, .NET, Java, you preload that with a pooler, let's say a demo set that can preload all the needed images. So developer can start straight away almost immediately. Otherwise, those images need to be pooled from the red dot registry or they'll get up whatever image you are using. And then you have to wait for this initialization between the agent inside the pod and the code ready for space server. You can optimize this time by pre-pooling those images. Right, and just to highlight another fact, right, this is pulling in Eclipse Shea, which is the in browser kind of, it looks a lot like VS Code kind of deal, but it is an Eclipse product, I guess, is the right way to phrase it, that is open source. So we make and contribute quite a bit of work in that regard to make this, yeah, I don't think this is gonna load, load. An alternative way of using code ready work spaces that we've covered on the show in the past, if you have a local, let's see, a local environment, am I saying this right? I think with a local code ready environment, you can spin up an embedded cluster running locally on your machine, given if you have enough system resources on your laptop. So this is the IDE hosted in a browser, but you have the potential to also run it locally if that's a better fit for you. Another option that we have covered on the show in the past is use your own IDE, or use VI, or whatever you have where you are currently maximizing your productivity and then link out to a hosted cluster, or... Right, like you could totally use the VS Code OpenShift Connector with these clusters and do your work through that, right? Like you don't have to necessarily muckety muck with this interface at all, right? Like all you need is the URL to connect to and off you go, right? Hopefully. Yeah, start with VS Code would be another option. Yeah. Okay, so I'm gonna back out of this. Yeah, yeah, go ahead and bail on this. I think some of this is going to be... This is working. Yeah, this is up in... Yeah, there you go. Welcome to Node.js on OpenShift. Yep. Got your default... Everybody can hit that, you know. If you're on the call right now, feel free, you're on the streams right now. Just go ahead and you can click that link and see exactly what I see. Yeah, I mean, that's pretty cool, right? Like a couple clicks later and off you go. Yeah, cool. You can also add a database at ease from the same catalog. So it's very easy to get started from a developer perspective from the dev console. In this sandbox environment, you basically have all you need to start with the plot, right? MongoDB, Postgres, MySQL, MyDB, or you can also use another database from Docker Hub, for instance. Right. Or an Elm chart. So you can plug and play. The cool thing to see, you can plug and play with all the Kubernetes components that you need for your inner loop, outer loop, your developer journey. Yeah, like if I wanted to hack around with some serverless bits, right? Like maybe, you know, figure out the right way to get Knative to adjust, you know, some stuff in my house, for example, right? Like, you know, I have Hue lights. I have, you know, smart devices and stuff like that. So, you know, I could totally hack together something like that here and bring it in to like a CRC instance running here in the house. Or, you know, I do have a cluster here in the house, like a real actual server cluster, six nodes, seven node deal. So yeah, you can, you know, do like the hard work here in this interface and then put it where you want it after the fact.  You could probably pre-bake something here and then bring it home and see, you know, how it works in your environment. So I haven't been watching chat. I'm assuming everybody else is. Is there anything else you want me to show in the UI here? Let's see, last call in chat. If I'm going to skim through it real quick. It looks like folks were enjoying the discussion on trade-offs, on whether you do development on the cluster or not. I think there's plenty of valid ways to do that. It really depends on how you're going to achieve your best productivity and best use of your time. So up to you to help map that, but we want to give you all the tools to line it up and whatever way makes sense for you. So thanks for the feedback in the chat. And yeah, feel free to pile in more questions if you have any as we move along. Yeah, let me go ahead and stop sharing my screen though. Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Thanks, Chris. Hey, no problem. Yeah. That's what I'm here for. Next topic we had, and you kind of were helping like lead us towards it a little bit. Setting up, if you did have IoT devices on your local network, we actually have a next topic coming up is to introduce the Q IoT project. And Andrea and Natali, I think we're going to lead that bit if you all are up for that. Yeah, sure. I was pleased to invite Andrea to talk about it. We did a Twitch session last time with Chris. We talked about the act fest and the result with winners. So we won't like to do today with Andrea to wrap up and see what's falling on after the act fest. What is going on on the project, Andrea? And can you recall to the people what is the Quarkus IoT project? Thanks, Natali. So the Quarkus for IoT hack fest was a marketing and enablement event. We've been running in September, so from September last year to October. And the goal of this long-term enablement event was to give to our EMEA partners the skills to implement the workload on the IoT devices and at the edge using our Reddit products and specifically with Quarkus framework. And this event was built on top of something new we implemented. So the capability of running Quarkus natively on ARM V8 devices and natively mean 64-bit and compiled natively using RLVM. So that's a big change from the edge computing and IoT perspective because that reduces dramatically the amount of resources required by the devices and low level edge servers to run on the servers. So to run the workload and that was amazing. From the business perspective, the enablement was being quite successful more than expected honestly because usually when we run enablement events they are part marketing, yes, partially marketing but more likely enablement events we don't expect an immediate return of the investment we did. So after one week of enablement through webinars and three weeks of this kind of challenge the act was brought to the partners we've got already the three winners running projects using our methodology and the technology and the skills we gave them during the event. Wait, did you say they're actually running them like in prod, like often running? No, well they are building the prod environment so they started some projects so they had enough material and skills and knowledge and understanding of the solution not just the Quarkus framework, right? In IoT and edge computing solution to propose to their end customers. So they are actually running the projects and I guess they will make it sooner or later. This year. Yeah, I mean it is one of those years still, right? Lucky us, edge computing projects, they are slightly different from the digital transformation projects. So when you want to implement something at the edge or involve a IoT device implementation it's, this is something new you designed from scratch, right? Digital transformation or replacing the existing infrastructure with OpenShift and cloud native infrastructure and workload it's much more complicated and expensive in terms of the resources and time. And that's from the business perspective. From the technical perspective, thanks to the OpenShift TV, thanks to other speeches we delivered in the last month we attracted enough people to form a community. So this is not just the QAOT hack test, now it's the QAOT project. So the, all the code Natale myself and a couple of other guys that support me during the implementation of the first version of this project. We donated everything to the community. Now we've got a project on GitHub and now the source code is available to everyone with several people bringing new ideas to make the project and the environment we implemented initially more IoT compliant meaning we are adding some strong and dynamic security. We are adding some components mainly to the data center side of this project to manage data differently to include more protocols that help IoT devices to communicate easily with the Quarkus-based services running on the data center. So it's getting bigger and bigger. Still looking for a nice and easy way to have fun together. So we haven't got a hard rock map because this is a community project. We are not meant to create any project for Red Hat. This is a project to bring people in and make everyone learn new things or contribute to the source code and the knowledge we can share. So we've got people who are always happy to play with small single board computers and who create stuff out of an Arduino board or just printing their own boards and flashing stuff on top of that. So it's amazing. That is pretty awesome. Yeah, I'm happy to share the link guys if you want or I don't know if you share. Yeah, we shared in the chat the link on Github, the Github project. If you have any other links, yeah, I prefer to share in the chat. Well, the community is actually forming and we are working on the web pages and some more introductory documents and papers in order to give this community a kind of goal and then we will work on the roadmap because we want to, of course, we want to improve the existing but we want to cover several additional areas. So just having, so just as a reminder, the basic technical project out of the QIT Hackfest was implementing some weather station or we call the measurement station that thanks to some sensors directly connected to the Raspberry Pi could collect telemetry around pollution and gas and send them to the data centers to the central servers for elaboration. So we have dashboards and stuff like this. We are keen and we are looking forward to cover more use cases in the manufacturing area, in the energy and utility area. So to fall into the same goal of attracting more people with several skills and expertise. So that's kind of important. You know what would be? The agent IoT space is very, very young. Yeah, it's very young and like this is a great opportunity for anyone watching out there to get in on like the ground floor or something, right? Like I can foresee a future when there is a sensor developed to detect COVID-19 in an area, right? And we will have the sensors spread out in a large way to some extent, right? Like I can see a future like that where it's like, okay, this room seems to have somebody in it that has COVID-19, right? Just from the air detection system, right? Like that would be an amazing IoT usage, right? To do something like that. Like he just put this thing in their lobby and you're good to go, right? Like that would be awesome. And you could see outbreaks kind of happening in real time at that point and kind of respond effectively in that nature, right? Like this is like me just like really riffing off the what is possible kind of thing. But yeah, that's possible here, you know? If once we get the right sensor to plug into, right? That would be the greatest invention of the humanity in this years. You heard it here on OpenShift TV, folks. Yeah, you have the copyright. You have the copyright. That is the greatest invention ever. Like, I mean, we have so many things and I've worked on some of these projects, right?  And, you know, radon, for example, right?   I feel like that is entirely possible. Yeah, the droplet is definitely possible for the droplet itself. I think a sensor with humidity, temperature and quantity of humidity then, let's say, the smallest droplet can be also that fine. So you can assume the droplet could contain also that. So you can study also the air movement for indoor. There's a science. Yeah, oh yeah. Yeah, that's gonna be cool. But also what the Hackfest did today, you know, measuring the pollution during COVID, that means all the restriction to traffic has been removed. So no restriction, all the most polluted car, all car circulating. So the expectation is that the world is more polluted because no limitation has been. So, and this is bad for also the health. Not only the COVID is in issues, a big issue, if we start having a more polluted city is another issue. So it's interesting also this research made by the Hackfest. And I would like to measure in Milan or my city how the pollution is going. I think it's going very bad, but I can contribute to the dashboard with such data. And like, you know, me here in Michigan, right? Like not a lot of travel happening here, but people are still using the major thoroughfares to go to the factories, you know, where they're making cars and trucks, you know? I mean, like those operations still continue. Both those are considered essential services. So yeah, like having that ability to just put a sensor outside, right? And just like just have it technically breathe, right? And get an idea of what's in the air, amazing. And like being able to contribute back into a database of such, that's awesome. Yeah. I tell you, Chris, that this is a small project, right? So we are trying to emulate some very big network of sensors around the world. So there are two or three already existing big networks. One of them is builds around the World Health Organization. So it's something we are doing in a very small portion, but still we demonstrated that thanks to Quarkus Technology and Red Hat Technology, the Java programming language is not a remote opportunity. Now we can challenge easily go, Python and the other competitors in terms of microservices and cloud native frameworks. So that was the big, big, big news. And this happens natively on ARM devices, right? If you think of what's going on in the hardware world with NVIDIA acquiring the ARM company and with Apple working on its own CPU, ARM-based CPU, that's gonna change. And we are demonstrating that Quarkus can easily run on top of those CPU architectures. That's awesome. That's fantastic, right? Do you have any more requirements around the kind of hardware runtime? I think Java and Quarkus can potentially be the platform, but I heard you mentioned Arduino. Is there any currently anything like Fedora IoT or any OS image that you've standardized on for these embedded platforms? Excellent question, Ryan. So to run Quarkus natively on an ARM device, the ARM device must be 64-bit native, it must support 64-bit. So that's why the minimum requirement when you use a Raspberry Pi, for example, is the version 3B+, because the CPU is 64-bit native, 3B+, and onward. So Arduino actually can run Quarkus applications but not native, because Arduino, I guess it's 32-bit as far as I recall. So yeah, every kind of, so 64-bit gives you an excellent performance, 32-bit gives you a kind of very good performance, but running natively is quite different. So you can add, so I'm working on other use cases. I'd love to implement in the project. For example, I'm working on some object motion recognition based on Java and using the NVIDIA Jetson, the latest version. Still, you need an excellent and stable and mature operating system. So yes, we used for the standard implementation Fedora IoT. Don't forget, Fedora IoT will be streamlined to a real faulty edge. So there's gonna be an enterprise version of it soon. So it's been announced and we want to give a stable official and enterprise version to what we have done. So yeah, Fedora IoT includes natively the container technology, because cork is native means you run cork is native application within a container. So we are using Pogman as a container technology. Nice. Keep it a nice and light, there you go, yeah. Completely stable, quite mature and this comes from the community to become an enterprise and stable from the business perspective and fully supported version of it simply. Nice. Andrei, I have a question. Just to join the argument of today, if I am excited about this idea and I want to get started, so I have the artwork, can I start with the send? Do you think I can start with a sandbox to put my backend, the dashboard, all the Huarcus IoT code and start trying it with developer sandbox? I guess so, yes, yes. So when I started implementing the project I made it possible to play with the Raspberry Pi without sensors, so you've got an emulator if you are not keen to spend 50 plus euros to purchase the sensor board to connect to Raspberry Pi. Everything runs within a container. So you can easily use a sandbox because the total amount of memory for the services running on the server side is a couple of gigs of RAM, not more, including the integration layer. So the tool you need to expose MQTT endpoint to make the Raspberry Pi so that the stations send the telemetry to the data center. The internal data flow through Kafka and the database implemented using in the first version MongoDB and all the other services that make the system scalable and perfectly integrated, they are based on Quarkus. So it's quite cheap to run. Cool, probably even less than two gigs. Everything is open source, everything can be found in the community. We're implementing the guides as well. Hopefully the developers are keen to join or just to try without contributing to the project. So more info and more news are coming, are available. Let me say guys, the first outcome of the community and I'm very proud of it is the opportunity, for example, and that certified now, the opportunity to compile Quarkus native application for ARM directly on a standard Intel CPU. Meaning just imagine you've got your enterprise environment with IoT devices or stations connected to it. You can easily make OpenShift compile the application supposed to run on ARM devices, make them available, push them into your enterprise repository and then communicate the Raspberry Pi's and new images available and the Raspberry Pi will automatically download the image without the need of having an ARM server dedicated to the compilation process for those images to be deployed on the IoT devices. So that's amazing. And we did it using standard container images, the UB images from Red Hat and basic standard GralPN. So this is something the community created to make everybody including the enterprise companies automating the generation of the official images for the devices, that's simply fantastic. And that reduces the costs of automation and provisioning of the images for the IoT devices. That's quite cool. And that's officially open source as well. That's amazing. Very cool, very, very cool indeed. I put a link in the chat to a provisioning service that I've used in the past in conjunction with Fedora IoT. So if you're interested in trying Fedora IoT and setting up devices on your home network, there's a service that'll help load your SSH keys and an ignition script onto that Raspberry Pi. I've used it in the past, it's still, I think in development, but that ignition script could load up Podman and start your workload and potentially be used to kind of bootstrap those hardware devices. So another thing to look into, I added a link in chat for you all. That's awesome, thank you for that. Actually Ryan, that's very important because unless you have a Linux-based host machine to flash directly using the tools provided by Fedora, Fedora IoT on the SD card, you have to use online tools to manage SSH keys and stuff like this, otherwise. Cool, awesome, all right. So what's next on the agenda here, Ryan? You know, I had a big section for today on let's review serverless and I've just crossed it all out in our planning doc. Yeah, no, this is great though, like I appreciate how much time we put to this, right? Like the sandbox important, the QIOT project important, right? Like these are things that are gonna help people in the long run, right? So I'm very happy that we talked as long as we did about both. And I'm really excited about projects that people can do on their own in their house since I'm stuck in my house with, you know, I'm like, what can I do to try to hack my environment? Hopefully other people are also inspired by similar tasks. So we'll try to have more on this topic in future sessions on the office hours. I have next up, we wanted to mention a couple upcoming topics. So there's a, let's see, this was actually a past topic. There was last week, I believe, a OpenShift Commons briefing on Knative. If you are not already up to speed on Knative and serverless technologies, I highly recommend giving this link a review, especially before our upcoming, let's see when we have it, if we have a date here. It looks like we will be having a Knative deep dive with Paul Maury from Red Hat on February 2nd. So we'll give you another reminder, but yeah, definitely take a look at the kind of introduction and ask me anything round on OpenShift Commons before we jump into the expert level presentation with Paul. Yeah, Paul's the Knative lead here at Red Hat and also a good friend of mine. So yeah, it's gonna be awesome to have him on the show talking about Knative and serverless. I have a lot of questions to do. That's right. I should throw some oddball questions at him. He's actually working on some code to mess with you lights and the house kind of deal. So that should be interesting. Like, you know, I'll both be able to run it if it all works. So I might be over promising here. It might just be terrible. We'll see. Anyway, exciting topic, guest speaker who's very active in the upstream community. So keep that in mind. We'll have it on the calendar of events. So take a look at the calendar at OpenShift TV. You can add it to your own set of calendars if you are inspired to do so. Yes, definitely click that plus on the bottom right there and add it to your calendar.  That's, sorry. Another topic we have coming up on Thursday this week. Yes. There's a deeper dive than what we did on the developer sandbox. So if you're interested in much more detail around that topic, definitely come back on Thursday, 10 a.m. Eastern time for much more information about the dev sandbox and how that project is likely to progress. Yeah, and I've already put that as a scheduled event on YouTube. So if you want to watch it on YouTube or just tune in here on Twitch, Facebook, wherever you're at right now, same place kind of deal. Go ahead, Ryan. Oh, I was gonna say the only other thing I have left on the lineup for today was to go through a, I wanted to get feedback from our viewers. Let's see, how many viewers we got today in chat? 42 totals, what it looks like across all services. Well, for the folks in chat, and I'll probably post this online later, we're very interested in hearing more about what you would like to see in these office hours sessions. In the past, we've had a variety of topics. One of them, Serena is here all the time showing us upcoming features from the future of what's coming down the engineering pipeline for us, what's coming up soon. So that's a reoccurring topic that we have been focused on quite a bit. I have that in the list. If you're enjoying that, give it a high score on the list of your preferred topics. Other things I listed in there, kind of just getting started with specific languages. I didn't really give you much choice to choose a specific language. There's just a category for getting started with languages. If there's a particular language that you really wanna see, put it in in the fill in the blank section at the bottom and let us know what particular language in addition to marking that category as one that you're interested in. Let's see, other topics I had on there. Console customization contest was one of our most watched shows last year. So let us know if that was a crowd favorite from your perspective. We could definitely do more kind of contests where folks are encouraged to come on and share what they've built. I think that's a, I don't know. I always enjoy lots of crowd interaction so I don't feel like I'm just stuck in my house. Thanks again to folks in chat for keeping things active for us. And let's see, I'm gonna pop open that form and take a look and see if there's anything else I've left out. Deep dive into specific technology stacks. So next week, Paul Maury with Knative and Serverless. Another option we have is interactive workshops. So we've done in the past, first hundred people all get seats, virtual seats and here's your user account. Let's all march through a introduction to Kubernetes. Since we have less than a hundred people in chat today, everyone could get a free seat, right? So that's something we could also consider doing. Definitely give us feedback in the form. We'd love to hear what you're interested in and what you've been enjoying so far. So there's a question in the chat. Do we have any, is there a serverless scenario for backups, for example, a function that downloads something to storage and other function to compress it in the storage array or wherever it's being stored and not relying on the host processing? Does anybody here on the call know of anything like that out there already? No, go, go, go. Oh, I was trying to listen to what you said but I should just read the chat. You were saying download backups and this is particular for serverless? Yeah, like they wanna know if there's like a serverless way of doing backups which is essentially two functions, right? Like move data from A to B and then compress data if need be. That would be interesting. My initial thought was don't use serverless, use just batch jobs, use the jobs abstraction. Yeah, like you could totally do it with Kubernetes jobs, yeah. And I think you should do a Kubernetes job just because you are violating the paradigm if you do this with serverless because serverless is a best effort by definition. So if you rely on backup, I think you want to rely on backups, you want them consistent. Those functions are best effort, let's say. So in the paradigm, there's no guarantee that they will go and they will finish. You have to care about it when you start the function and when you gather the results. If everything is wrong, you have to restart the function. So I don't think this is a consistent way to do backup. So much better doing rely on Kubernetes jobs because the Kubernetes scheduler will control that the job is executed at the end. And you'll get logs and you'll get alerts of fails and tell you exactly what went wrong whereas a function will just be like, here's the error, sorry, and you have to go hunt for it or set up alerting for it and everything else. Exactly. And when you think about the serverless or function as a service on a big memory pressure, those function can be killed because the paradigm say that it's not important that a function itself, it's important that you can scale them up massively when needed asynchronously. So they can be killed by the scheduler if there's some memory pressure. Right.  So yeah, if your environment is very lightweight, maybe you could get away with it, but I wouldn't recommend it, right? Yeah, yeah. Cool. Pros and cons of using a highly available system is it's designed for fault tolerance, right? But you need to be able to accommodate the faults in a consistent way. And so yeah, batch is probably the right abstraction or jobs is probably the right abstraction for this. Yeah, cool. And always there is, you know, OpenShift container storage, which has a lot of that functionality you just kind of built right in, you just tell it where to go dump things and that is all there for you. Yeah, so if there's no more questions, I'd like to wrap just a little early today so I can hop over to the OpenShift Commons briefing, which is gonna be talking about, I think Windows Containers today is what it is. Double checking, yes, Windows Containers and that's a hot topic on the channel too. So yeah. Excellent. Anybody got anything else for the call or for the audience before we jump off here? Thank you to everyone that joined the call and experienced this live stream with us. Really appreciate the audience as always. So thank you very much. Special thanks to Andrea for joining kind of with a short notice. Great to have you on today. Yeah, it was awesome to talk with you. Okay, Andrea, thank you. Thank you guys. All right, thanks everybody. We will see you next week or in a few minutes here with OpenShift Commons. Thanks all. See ya. Bye.


Live from the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE at Dell World 2014. Here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Dell World, everybody. This is theCUBE. Stu and I have been here all day. We'll be going all day tomorrow. Alan Atkinson is here. He's the Vice President and General Manager of Dell Storage. Alan, it's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Dave, well, it's great to see you. Still always great to see you.  We're going to get into it. But I wanted to first, I'm asking everybody, life is a private company. We've got Michael coming on tomorrow. He's been very vocal about that. You've worked at public companies. You've had your own startups. What's it like to be private again? That's that argument. You know, it's a degree of freedom, right? So, it's the beginning of November. I don't have to sit here and give you earnings reports and data about how the quarter did. It gives us the freedom to make certain investments and long-term decisions to go do some strategic things that, frankly, just are really difficult when you're running a 90-day shot clock with Wall Street.  And I'll tell you what, the company is really energized. I don't know if you're getting that vibe when you're talking with folks at Dell, but the energy's there. All right. So, we talk about a number of things that you guys got going on. One, in particular, is the announcements that you guys made today around all-flash arrays. And what I wanted to ask you about is, you like some others, or unlike some others, chose not to go out and buy an all-flash array company. There are some other examples of that, but certainly, IBM bought TMS, EMC had to buy Extreme IO. You guys chose not to buy a company, and you're an acquisitive company. We are. Why is that, and what does that say about the zillion all-flash array companies out there? Well, you know, I really can't speak for what other companies felt they needed to go do in the market. But, you know, when we looked at our portfolio, we really felt like, you know, first of all, we have a fully virtualized infrastructure. So that's a huge advantage. We don't move bits and bytes around on physical disks. So, it wasn't that big of a stretch for us. Now, to be totally honest, we did have to rewrite all of our tiering software, right? So, it wasn't like we just said, hey, let's shove an SSD in there and see what happens. You know, we rewrote it all so that we could really take advantage of multiple tiers of flash. And, you know, Dave, if you look at what we actually do inside of the box, we're actually using that tiering algorithms that made us so famous back in, from the compelling days on forward. And obviously, we're leveraging a single-stack architecture now, which is exciting as we've brought the ecological and compelling families together. But that tiering algorithm is giving us an opportunity to use different types of flash that others can't use because we can control the rights. And so, effectively, what's happening is we're writing into a high-right endurance type of flash, and then we aggregate the rights and push them down into a much lower-cost, read-intensive type of flash. And this is totally transparent to the end user, but it gives us a huge cost advantage. And then beyond that, once we do that again, because we have the IP for all the tiering, we can then push down the spinning disk very, very easily, and we do. So you're tiering at the flash layer as well as the cheapest and deepest spinning disk layer, but you're writing to the flash first, correct? That's correct. And if you look at sort of under the hood, you can obviously buy it in an all-flash configuration or you can buy it in a hybrid configuration. It's essentially just a multi-tier architecture. So, if you were to buy a hybrid version, what you would end up with is two flavors of flash, plus a spinning flavor, probably a high-capacity disk. So, the reason I'm asking about the right to first, we've done some work sort of modeling out the impact at scale when you start to scale out on writing to flash first. And at smaller scales, it's not as big a deal, but the resources that are required to support an application when you scale out, if you have a right first flash first architecture, are significantly less, so the performance goes through the roof. What have you seen there? Yeah, I mean, our performance numbers are really staggering. That box that we announced today at a $25,000 entry price, I mean, that box will scale up to close to 200,000 IOPS, which is pretty remarkable at that price point. Right. You know, and obviously you can add more boxes and you can aggregate and get more IOPS. But, you know, if you look at it on a cost per IOPS basis, it's pretty attractive. Well, the interesting thing is, too, I've been around and talked to a lot of customers. I must have talked to five or 600 customers between, you know, April and June this year, just sort of roundtables, talking a lot about flash, and most of them were still early days for flash. Now, they put flash inside their existing array, sort of bolted on, if you will, but their big concern was still cost. Yep. It sounds like you're attacking that head-on. Yeah, absolutely right. We want to bring flash to the masses, if you will. I mean, if you look at it, I think we've actually gotten to a point where certainly a year ago, six months ago, maybe even today, flash is largely a performance-based conversation, but what I've discovered from talking to lots of customers is that's actually morphing. And, you know, I look at it as analogous to where we were, you know, maybe 10 or 12 years ago with flat-screen TVs, right? There was a vendor that was pretty dominant in the TV space that made, you know, CRT-based, very nice TVs, and then a couple Korean manufacturers came in with much lower-cost flat screens, and in the space of about 24 to 36 months, they had won the TV market. And, you know, people didn't really need a flat-screen TV, but they wanted it. And we're seeing the same thing with flash. People want flash. The only reason they don't buy it is cost. That's it. And if you can solve that problem, they'll buy your product. Even getting close, you would think, given the performance benefits, it's going to flip. Absolutely. But I think we can do better than close. Yeah. Now, why? Because you can do data reduction, you know, right in the platform? So, I think, you know, data reduction is a good thing, and it helps. But I think it's the ability to use multiple tiers and multiple types of flash where we can use very inexpensive flash that doesn't have great write endurance cycles because we don't write hardly ever there. We write it a different layer of flash. We aggregate the writes and push them down. And the performance difference between those layers is essentially no. So, the architecture is fully virtualized. So, you're gaining benefits there from an efficiency standpoint.  So, you save a lot there as well. And you are doing data reduction inside the platform as well? So, today we're doing data reduction on all of our secondary data, right? Yeah, okay. And that's about, you know, your mileage may vary as is the case with data reduction technologies. And you're going to see us continue to iterate on that pretty rapidly as we go out. Okay, so that's another knob that you could turn, which is futures. What do you make of all the flash? I mean, it's great. I don't mean to disparage the flash startups and the VC money that's going on. It's wonderful because it's innovation. But I wonder if the flash vendors of today are going to be able to achieve escape velocity the same way that compelling and say three-par and even isolan were able to achieve escape velocity and get to be public companies. Some of these companies will go public, but the virtualization guys did it during the downturn. You know, and then some got in there like Phil Soren and David Scott before the music stopped. They raised up a ton of dough. And when the economy tanked, back to after the dot-com blow-up, the big guys sort of sat in their hands and really didn't innovate and were waiting around. And then they said, okay, we got to do virtualization. It seems like the large companies, I'll include yourself, have responded to flash a lot more quickly than they have to the virtualization trend. I wonder if you could comment on that. Well, I think there's been some lessons learned, right? So, and to be fair, there have been acquisitions in the flash space and some companies have reached escape velocity, if you will. Yeah, but not 2.5 billion or 2 billion or 1.8 billion. No, 1.2 billion. You know, I'm not smart enough to know what happens when, as you said, the music ends, but it seems to me that flash is just becoming ubiquitous. And if I look at kind of what's going on with price curves and density curves and where I think we'll be in a year with just flash technology, it just seems to me that it's going to be ubiquitous in all of the products. Now, some vendors are going to do it better than others. I think we do it particularly well. And I think, you know, our market gains this year would indicate that's true. But, you know, it's anybody's guess, but I will say it's a timed game and the time is drawing nine. I know Stu's dying to talk about your Nutanix deal. Yeah, so thanks, Alan. Glad Dave only took the first 20 minutes of the interview. But, you know, when I look at Dell, Dell is really in a unique position at this blurring of the line between the compute and the storage. When even at Dell World here, I walk and look around the show floor, you've got people that use Dell hardware, like SolidFire and Scale Computing. You've got, you know, various investments in OEMs, like the Nutanix deal we want to talk about. You've got investments in Accenta.  Yeah, I could probably go for the next 20 minutes, at least on that too. So, you know, software-defined storage is one of those things that's on everybody's tip of the tongue, right? You know, you can't talk to a customer without, hey, what do you think about this company or that company or what's your software-defined storage strategy? And by the way, it's not very different in networking and it's not very different in infrastructure. Software-defined is kind of, you know, one of the hottest topics you got to have a position on. You know, we announced our project Blue Thunder effort over the summer, which was really our umbrella label for what we were doing with software-defined. And if you think about it, you know, we have the perfect platform for software-defined, as we like to say, your path, our platform, which is PowerEdge. And we talked about a couple variants of that today here at Dell World with the FX2 coming out and some of the other platforms. In fact, you just mentioned it. A lot of the biggest SDS providers out there actually are on Dell, which is kind of an interesting statement. We're very proud of that. We have a very, very healthy OEM business that, you know, we're very proud of and we design with that type of thing in mind. But, you know, when you really think about, okay, what is the value of software-defined? Some people say cost. I mean, I've got to tell you, I'm not entirely convinced of that. But one of the things that it is is it's very workload-specific. It's almost impossible to have a good software-defined conversation without also having a workload conversation. And as such, you're going to run the right stack for the right workload. So a good example of that would be Hadoop, right? You're probably not going to run Hadoop as a general-purpose file system. You're going to run HDFS because you've got a big data analytics problem and you're going to run MapReduce, right? So that's one example. There's others. You mentioned Accento and sort of what they can do with their ZFS-based technology and some of their other newer technologies. Nutanix being a great example of scale-out. So our view is that we've got to have a healthy partner ecosystem. Of course, that includes some of our premier partners such as VMware and Microsoft as well, right? And I think that doesn't mean everything to everybody, but it does mean partnering with the best-of-breed folks so that we can offer an NN PowerEdge-based solution that includes support, integration, and all those things. In the case of the Nutanix partnership, this one is a very deep OEM partnership. It's one of the ones that's fully Dell-branded and we don't have a ton of those. The Dell XC series is in every way a Dell product powered by the Nutanix web-scale software. And it's a very tight partnership, and we're super excited about it. You know, I think the Nutanix web-scale software is one of the biggest plays I've seen in enterprise infrastructure in many, many years.  They really do solve the problem. And of course, we're also going to be developing our own IP in the software-defined space. So you can expect us to have a hybrid, if you will, of, you know, tight partnerships with premier vendors as well as Dell IP-based solutions. And, you know, it's all of the above because, as I said, it is workload specific. Yeah, Alan, just a comment. I think you're right. It's applications and where it's at. And the problem we've had with infrastructure for as long as I've been in IT is we started with an application, then we had to make some bespoke hardware and I had to have my IT staff spend, you know, tweaking dials and adjusting configurations to fit that application as opposed to we want infrastructure that's built to support that application without having to do all of that extra work. Alan, from our understanding, you were, you know, instrumental in that OEM relationship with Nutanix and from what I've heard, it was really fast from making the decision all the work that's been happening over the last couple of months. I hear the engineering teams between Dell and Nutanix had a big party last night. Can you give us a little bit insight because out of all the solutions that were out there, Nutanix was one of the only ones that didn't use Dell hardware. So how did that one come to fruition and how did that partnership happen? So you said a bunch of things there. Let me see if I can knock down a couple of those, right? So first of all, you know, I'd like to think that we do things pretty rapidly at Dell these days. If you look at how many product introductions we've gotten out in the last 12 months and the pace at which we've moved, I think it's safe to say, you know, we're pretty motivated and, you know, as a private company we're moving pretty fast. So that's the first one. The second one is, you know, we went out and we talked to lots of customers and we talked to lots of the Silicon Valley companies and honestly, Nutanix just had a unique level of buzz around them. I mean, their pedigree from the early Silicon Valley to scale out data centers, their buzz in the industry, their customer penetration, frankly made them the type of company we wanted to partner with. And then I'll also tell you that the teams just had a very good synergy and, you know, I'll let the Nutanix folks speak for their side of it, but the Dell team and the Nutanix team really developed a really good symbiotic relationship and, you know, we're excited about, you know, taking this forward. So you did that deal, you and others, but you initiated it, right? It was sort of something that you helped catalyze. Let's put it that way. I think that's a fair way. Okay, so now where does it sit inside the Dell organization? So it is in the storage group, right? So the relationships own an enterprise and specifically in the storage group, but also tell you increasingly, you know, the lines get so blurry between compute, networking and storage, you know, even internally with our products and the way we think about things and the way we develop things that, I wouldn't read too much into that, but it does live in the storage group from a product management point of view where we bring out platforms and those sorts of things. And it's sold through the Dell channels, correct? It's sold through the Dell channels and direct both. And direct, but Nutanix does not sell the solution or does it? Nutanix does sell their solution, right? Yeah, right. So they're going to keep a Nutanix branded product out there, but the Dell product that includes Dell support, includes PowerEdge, includes the things that we think, you know, most companies find attractive. You know, is a Dell product that can be bought, anyway you buy Dell products, which means channel or direct. Now, I want to also ask you about sort of the, you mentioned ecologic before and compelling, those two worlds have come together. Can you talk about that? Where are you, I know you're at the single stack now, but how did that come about? What does that look like now? Yeah, so, you know, one of the things that we really wanted to do in order to get more leverage, more wood buying in the arrow, if you would, was to get everyone in Dell Storage pulling in the same direction. So we wanted to finish integrating the acquisitions. I mean, Dell Storage is really a collection of five acquisitions. So, compelling ecologic, perhaps the best known ones, but also RNA on the PCIE attached flash, which is a really innovative, cool product. That's the Fluid Cash for Sand product now. Exanet, which is our Fluid FS. And Ocarino, which is our data reduction technology. And so the mission was really, let's bring them all together in a way where everybody's protected. If you're an ecologic customer, you can use the combined stack. If you're a compelling customer, you can use the combined stack. So we're not all the way there yet, but we are beginning to bring out the 4020 being the most recent example. New products that are based on a single architecture, the SC series in this case. And we have announced very clearly that we're going to be providing common management between both existing ecologic component and the new products, as well as replication between all the products and common management. So everybody's investment is fully protected and it should be nothing but upside for customers. So essentially, that's where your R&D really is, is the net integration, right? That's where you put a lot of your emphasis. Well, integration and acceleration. We've added a lot of new features, things like data reduction, things like improvements in our failover technology, things like huge performance increases, things like rewriting for flash, right? So that we can support multiple tiers of flash. And I could go on and on. I mean, our feature list is very rich, but you can do more features when you have more engineers working on the same thing, right? Right, right. Okay, but it's fair to say, Alan, that a big chunk of that R&D was on integration. As you say, you added some other pieces. And the integration was also a lot of leverage in the model there. So the reason I'm asking that is, as you've, I mean, early on, you had to bring in big assets. You had to swallow ecologic and that was not trivial. Will the R&D then naturally shift toward other innovations? What can we expect there? Well, never say never, right? But I think for as far as I can see, we're going to keep the same or more, in fact, we just opened up a new design center last year on the existing technology. Now my caveat there is, as things like software defined become, you know, even more ubiquitous, we definitely want to have our own IP there. And there's multiple ways to get there, right? So I'm certainly not going to say that we may not redirect some efforts to the software defined side, but kind of the way we're seeing the Dell IP version of software defined is we want it to be fully integrated with our mainstream stack. So we think it makes sense to have the same folks working on that. You know, I think the value for customers is really if you can buy a product, a Dell storage product that comes in small, medium, large, or software only. That's got an awful lot of value. Especially if you happen to have a really good market sharing service. Well, right. So, okay. So that software only piece. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Can we expect you to sort of extract the function out of the hardware and allow that to reside? Well, I'm not announcing anything today, Dave, but you know, we're certainly thinking about, you know, hey, what would a software encapsulation of our technology enable? Now, again, we're not announcing anything. That's not something I have today. First, you know, priority is let's get this fully integrated family now. But, you know, as we think about the way things go forward, software to find is clearly a force to be reckoned with. And it's clearly an area where I think the Nutanix and XC series is a pretty good existence proof. This is an area where we're going to apply. Well, speaking more generically about the industry, I mean, we've seen for years that you take a disk drive that you could get from whomever for a buck and we in the enterprise to sell it for ten. Now, the reason we're able to sell it for ten is because there's all that function in the controller, which is software. The industry seems to be wanting to to extract that and then, of course, charge for that. That's fine. It doesn't really... Does it change the economics you said before? Not really about the economics, necessarily. I kind of agree with you. I think that's mostly hyped, Dave. And I agree with that because you got R&D and you got to pay for that somehow. You got innovation has to get paid for. I agree it's mostly hyped.  And as densities improve and technology prices come down, that's happening anyway. For as long as the storage business has been out there. Yeah, so in the course of cloud, maybe there's this other little wild card. So you're going to continue to see an economic curve. It's going to provide more IOPS and more capacity for the dollar. No question about that. But is SDS going to be a driver to really move that? I think it's going to be a driver to get much closer to the application and much more workload driven. That's what I think it's going to bring. Yeah, really. That workload driven piece and automating that the knowledge to be able to apply resources to given workloads and orchestrating that is, that's new. Now, what that does, I guess it is economic from this standpoint is it attacks the biggest problem in IT, which is the labor cost. Yeah. Right. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean, you know, the industry revenues are going to drop. It won't. What it does mean is that IT organizations will be able to spend money elsewhere. Do you buy that? Yeah. You know, I think so, but again, the data center is morphing so rapidly and flash technologies are making things so much more dense that I think people are going to use this in ways that are pretty imaginative. I mean, I certainly, you know, given our server share, I'm very excited to make sure that we're a leader in this space and I think things will get redeployed and maybe labor costs come down because you're going to have less physical footprint, data center maintenance is less and some of those variables change around but it's actually pretty complicated when I start managing, I don't know, five, six, seven workload specific stacks, you know, one for my big data problems and I've got to put another one out there for my cheap and deep and I put another one out there for object storage and I put, I mean that is what we're talking about, right? Yeah. So, okay, so let me, let me, because you're a former practitioner, so this is, you got street cred here, so that's interesting what you said. We might be just sort of shuffling the labor deck but maybe not so much on what some people call non-differentiated heavy lifting of hardware and configuration. Well, Dave, let me tell you the way we're thinking about it and, you know, again, this is, you know, I keep repeating that this is a very emerging area so some of this stuff is maturing right before our eyes, right? If you look at what we talked about when we announced Blue Thunder, it was you know, if you start with a common platform, right, and that platform is PowerEdge you're already building in a common management infrastructure at the hardware level. Okay, so that's interesting to begin with because now I can buy the same hardware for all those storage stacks. Okay, that's new, right? Second thing is well, if I'm starting to build in sort of state-of-the-art orchestration technologies I'm putting RESTful APIs and all these I'm working with vendors and most of the open source platforms already have this some of the proprietary ones do and some of them don't but we start making them in a way that they can be instrumented in a common fashion that we can use tools like ASM or other things to leverage orchestration across them. You can make the problem better. In a perfect world you would have common infrastructure and you could mix and match those storage stacks as your workloads dictated, right? That would be perfect. We're certainly not there today. Right, and you could do that based on policy or based on whatever analytics you can pull from the system. So you could take the can you take the humans in the future? Will you be able to take the humans out of that provisioning equation? I think provisioning will get far, far more automated. I actually have little doubt about that. If you look at even our XC series that we just announced, the Nutanix relationship it's so easy to provision there I mean you can do it in minutes, right? It's extremely easy. And so the ratio of person to box is very, very attractive. And I think you'll see those type of things happen in a wider area, but I don't think there's storage specific to it. I think you've got to instrument that together with the workload and with the hardware. Yeah, so I want to tap on your practitioner experience from your days in the financial services industry. When you think about cloud and forget about the sole security and governance and on-premises or off-premises just forget about that for a second. And I know that stuff exists and it's important. From an economic standpoint, do you feel like your customers will be able to replicate the cost structure of the big cloud guys? Well, okay, so somewhat of a loaded question. Who's cost structure? I don't think that the private guys are going to be able to get stuff as cheap as the public guys just because of scale, right? But I do think that ultimately private cloud has economic advantages to off-prem. Okay. I think you'll probably see some combination of hybrid. I believe that. But when you look at at least all the cost studies that I've seen and I don't claim to be an exhaustive expert on this. Unless you're at a very small scale, when you factor in management costs, networking costs of moving the data back and forth and all the rest, it still ultimately ends up cheaper to do it as a private cloud or at least a hybrid, not entirely private. Renting is more expensive than owning at some scale. At some scale, right? Yeah, and of course it's hard to figure out because there's all these artificial, I mean even with Amazon, it's hard to figure out what pricing looks like. You saw when Google, you know, took a shot at Amazon and said, hey, they announced price cuts every, you know, three times or four breakfast, but in reality hardware prices have come down a lot faster and you guys take advantage of that hardware price. You guys cut hardware prices all the time. Yeah, I mean, look, the industry's price curves only go down for price performance capacity, right? It's amazing industry we live in. It's been that case forever, right? So, and that's a great thing for consumers. I mean, look at the amount of power you have on your mobile device these days. Right, okay, so probably not being able to replicate the cost structure of the public cloud, but when you look at a certain scale, the overall costs, and you factor back in, I remember my proviso security and governance, all this stuff, you get close enough that the business case for on-premises cloud is going to be really compelling. You know, I think so, right? You know, barring some other major movement, of course, you've got to factor people into that equation. Somebody's got to administer that cloud, and so I do think there's an issue of scale. If you're not at a certain scale, I think public cloud probably wins. Right, and well, and again, workload dependent. So, all right, Alan, we've got to leave it there, but I'll give you the last word. Thinking about your storage business, I wonder if you could, you can't give us gross margin by product, but if you could just talk generally as to how the business is doing, and then what are the takeaways for Dell World 2014? Great questions, Faith, thank you. So, I mean, look, our business is, I am really excited about how well we've done. I think you heard in Michael's keynote, you know, number one worldwide in capacity now. I mean, so we've passed everybody, right? And a lot of that is the movement towards software to find, and people moving data internally to servers, and big dense servers, and watching that shift. But, you know, we're gaining share across every measure you want to manage. You want to mention, right? You want to look at external, you want to look at price bands, we're gaining share. And that's exciting, right? I think the strategy we have in place is resonating, disrupting the usage that people get their heads around things like the flash announcement of 25K that's not hard to understand. So, very excited about that. And I think that excitement if you're walking around here at Dell World to answer your second question, you know, this is my third Dell World. And I can tell you the excitement, the momentum, the morale at each one has just built and built. I mean, last year it was right after they go private, people were pretty happy about that. That was a tough battle, right? Got that done. And this year, a year in, I don't know how many folks you've talked to here, but people are pumped. People are pumped, no doubt. I was here two years ago and the mood here is, it was good then, but it's even greater here. So, congratulations down. I love talking to you because like I said, you got practitioner chops, you're seasoned exec, and I think they put the right guy in the job. So congratulations on the success and I know you're not done. We'll be watching. Thanks, Dave. Thanks very much. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Stu and I will be back to wrap. We're here live at Dell World. This is the Cube. Right back.


update. Okay, good afternoon, folks. Larry Pessivan for T FNN for your afternoon update. We've got three of the major indices are down on the day. The only one up is Russell, the second most popular S and P first, NASDAQ third, Russell second, and of course the Dow Jones, which is the weakest today is the fourth most popular one. We had the earnings come out from the Nvidia yesterday, quite nice returns, but evidently the market has sold it off a little bit. That caused a NASDAQ to come down about 120 handles from the high that we had had the other day. It was amazing the fact that the S and P could not get above our target of 4224. It got to 4223 and is now trading about 40 you have 40 handles under that so far today. The NASDAQ of course giving up the most today with virtually no rally, which is quite unusual because it went straight up and now as the market always says what can go straight down can also go straight up and vice versa. The other thing that's important is the fact that the Treasury bonds have sold off again for the 13th day. Right rates have been increasing now for 13 days. The T bill rate has gone through the roof again. They are taking more protection that the fact that there may be a default in the debt cycle that's going on. Folks if there's a default in that debt cycle it's going to be a what we call one for the media because to think that the United States is not going to pay their bills they might be late paying them by a week or two or something. But they will pay the bills. There's plenty of money out there. They just have to get it into the coffers for heaven's sakes and that we've gone through this like I've said a hundred hundred and 16 times over the past hundred and 16 years and they've raised the rates 96 times the debts have been raised. And that's why we have a 20 or 32 trillion dollar debt overlooking us right now. So those are some of the things we're going to be talking about on the show today. Our guest today will be Mike Moore of More Analytics whose specialty happens to be crude oil. He's always got some great stuff for us. So stay tuned<PHONE_NUMBER> and we'll be right back.