Covering the Alibaba Cloud annual conference.

Brought to you by Intel.

Now, here's John Furrier...

>> Hello everyone, welcome to exclusive coverage with SiliconANGLE, Wikibon, and theCUBE here

in Hangzhou, China for Alibaba Cloud's annual event here in Cloud City, the whole town is

a Cloud.

This is their event with developers, music festivals, and again, theCUBE coverage.

Our next guest is Dhiraj Mallick, who is the Vice President of the Data Center Group, and

the General Manager of Innovation, Pathfinding, and Architecture Group.

That's a mouthful.

Basically the CTO of the Data Center Group, trying to figure out the next big thing.

>> That's right, John.

>> Thanks for spending the time.

>> It's my pleasure.

>> We're here in China, it's-- You know in the U.S., we're looking at China, and we say

okay, the fourth largest Cloud, Alibaba Cloud?

>> Yes.

>> Going outside of Mainland China, going global.

You guys are strategic partners with them.

>> Yes.

>> They need a lot of compute, they need a lot of technology.

Is this the path that you're finding for Intel?

>> Yeah, so we've been collaborators with Alibaba for over 10 years, and we view them

as a very strategic partner.

They're one of the Super Seven, which is our top seven Cloud providers, and certainly in

China, they're a very relevant customer for many years.

We engage with them on a variety of fronts.

On the technology side, we engage with them on what their key pinpoints are, what is the

problems they want to be solving three to five years out, and then we co-develop, or

co-architect solutions with them.

>> So, I want to get your take on the event here in China, and how it relates to the global

landscape, because I, it's my first time here, and I was taken back by the booth.

I walked through Alibaba's booth, and obviously Jack Ma is inspirational.

Steve Jobs like the culture, and artistry and science coming together, but I walked

through the booth, it's almost too good to be true.

They've got Quantum Computing, a Patent Wall, they've got Hybrid Cloud, they got security,

they have IoT examples with The City Brain, a lot of great tech here at Alibaba Cloud.

>> So I think the technologies that they're investing in are very, very impressive.

Most cloud companies are probably not as far along as them, and looking at such a broad

range of technologies, the Brain Project is really exciting, because it's going to be

the Nexus of smart cities, both in China, as well as globally.

The second thing that's very interesting is their research and investments in Quantum.

While Quantum is not here today, it's certainly on the frontier, and Intel also has significant

investments in sort of unpacking where Quantum will go, and what promises it offers to address.

>> What I find interesting is that also hearing the positioning of, I kind of squint through

the positioning, they're almost talking Cloud-native, DevOps, but they have all this goodness under

the hood, and they're kind of talking IT-transitioning to Data Technology.

Everything's about data to these guys, not just collecting data, using data with software.

Now, that's really critical, because isn't that software-defined, data-driven is a hot

trend?

>> Yes, software-defined and data-driven is a very hot trend, in fact at Intel our CEO

and us all believe that we've entered the data economy, and that the explosion in data

is, and the thirst for analyzing that data to be able to drive smart business analytics

is really the key to this digital revolution.

I was reading an industry report by one of the analysts that said by 2019 there would

have been over 100 billion dollars spent on business intelligence.

And so, the real key is this data economy.

>> The intersection of things, and even industrial internet, IIot, Industrial Iot, with artificial

intelligence AI, intelligence Intel inside that word, interesting play on words--

>> Yes.

>> Is coming together, and we've covered what you guys were doing on Mobile World Congress

this year, where 5G was clearly an end-to-end architecture.

You got FPGAs, all this goodness here going on.

So that's 5G, and that's going to fuel a lot of IoT if you think of it like that way, but

now AI.

>> Yes.

>> It's Software.

How does that connect?

Because that's the path we see forward on the Wikibon analyst side, we see software

eating the world, but data eating software.

And now you got 5G creating more data.

>> Yeah, so the way we look at it at Intel is, we have data-center technologies that

are fueled by the growth at the Edge by IoT devices, because they're creating demand for

more processing capability to be able to unpack and analyze that information, and it's a self-fulfilling

circle.

We call it the virtual cycle of growth, because the data center feeds IoT demand and then

IoT feeds the data center.

And so it's the combination of those.

What 5G does, is 5G forms the connectivity fabric between the data center and the Edge.

It allows data to be pre-positioned at the correct places in the network, so that you

minimize latencies through the network, and can process or do the analytics on it as quickly

as you possibly can.

>> So we were talking before we came on camera about Jack Ma, they call him Jackie Ma here,

keynote being very inspirational, and talking moving to a new industrial era, a digital

economy, all that good stuff, very, very inspirational.

Let's translate that into the data center transformation, because we're seeing the data

center and the Cloud with Hybrid Cloud become really critical to support what you were just

talking about which is, how do you put it all together?

It sounds so easy, but it really is difficult.

>> It is, and so our vision is that in order to be able to fulfill this data economy, we

will need to have five key innovations in the data center.

The first innovation, in no particular order, is that the data center will be frictionless.

And what I mean by frictionless, is that there will be zero to low latencies in order to

provide that real-time experience at the Edge.

So latency is extremely critical, and the way we believe that that can be achieved is

by moving from copper to light.

And Intel has significant investments in leadership products and silicon photonics that will enable

switches to be based on photonics.

It'll enable CPUs, and server hosts to be based on light.

So we believe that light is a critical aspect to this success.

The second aspect of frictionless is the need for liquid cooling and that was in the keynotes

from Simon Hu this morning, that the liquid cooling is going to be essential to be able

to enable a lot more horsepower in these data centers to be able to handle the volume of

data that's coming.

>> So you guys obviously with the photonics and the liquid cooling, you guys have been

working on this in your labs for a long time, it's great R&D, but you need the connective

tissue because with 5G you're now talking about a ubiquitous RF cloud, powering autonomous

vehicles.

We're seeing the Brain Project here, ET Brain, the City Brain--

>> Yes.

>> Which is essentially IoT and big data being a big application that they're showcasing.

What's the connective tissue?

How does that work, from the data center, to the Edge?

What's Intel's position?

How do you see it?

And what's going to unfold in front of our eyes?

>> Yeah, so two things, so number one, I believe that the data center is boundary-less.

It's not based on four physical walls.

It's a connected link between the data center, and all the Edge devices that you called IoT.

In order to fulfill this, you have to have 5G technology.

We're invested in Silicon, in radio technologies, as well as in driving the 5G industry in consortia,

to be able to bring 5G solutions to market.

We think that 5G, as well as a tiered architecture between the Edge to the center, where you

do some processing at the Edge, the radio stations, some in intermediate data centers,

and then some in the back end Cloud data center, is what's going to be essential, and Intel

has significant investments, both in developing this distributed hierarchical architecture,

as well as in 5G.

>> That's a great point.

I want to just unpack that, and double-click on it a little bit, because you mentioned

data at the Edge, and you also said earlier, low latency.

Okay, a lot of people have been talking about, it costs you speed and time to move data around.

So there's no real one general architecturing, where you have to kind of decide the architecture

for the use case.

>> Yes.

>> So, the beauty is in the eye of the beholder, whoever has the workloads or the equipment.

>> Yes.

>> How do you look at that, because now you're thinking about, if I don't want to move data

around, maybe you shouldn't, maybe you want to move data around.

How does that fit with the Cloud of model, because we're seeing Cloud being a great use

case for IoT in one instance, and maybe not in another.

How do you think about that?

How should practitioners think about the data architecture?

>> Yeah, so our vision is that the Cloud changes from a centralized Cloud, to a distributed

Cloud, and is amorphoused between the Edge where the IoT devices are, and the backend,

and the way to think about it perhaps, is to say that storage as people have envisioned

it, as being centralized, that paradigm has to change, and storage has to become distributed,

such that data is available at different points in the network, and my vision is that you

don't want to move data around, you want to minimize data movement for most use cases,

and you want to have it pre-positioned on the 5G network, and you want to move the compute

to the data, that's more energy-efficient.

>> So I got to ask you, as someone who's doing the path-finding, which is the future path

for Intel, and innovation and architecture.

I was talking with some practitioners recently at another event, and trying to find someone,

because I don't speak Chinese very well.

But they asked me the same question.

It matters what's in my Cloud.

And what they mean by their Cloud, either on-premise private Cloud that they're putting

together, operating model of their business, now going Cloud-like.

But also as they pick their Cloud provider, they want to have multi-Cloud, and so what's

in their Cloud, and their Cloud provider's matters.

You guys are the inside of the Cloud across many spectrums, Intel.

>> Yes.

>> How should a customer think about that question?

What's in my Cloud?

Why should it matter, and it should matter.

What's your take on that, and what should they look for?

>> Yeah, so my take is that for years we've had the debate of whether it's public Cloud,

or private Cloud, or on-prem Cloud.

Our view is that the world is Hybrid, which is why we are big supporters of Alibaba, and

the Hybrid Cloud movement, and as such, if it's Hybrid, it sort of suggests that the

end state is that there'll be about an equal amount of applications that run on public

versus private, and so I think the number of applications have an affinity to move into

the public Cloud, like mail, and then there's other applications that you might care more

about the compliance and security that you would say have an affinity to being on-prem.

>> Also you mentioned that there's no walls, it's boundary-less in the data center.

Okay, there's no door, there's no mote, you can't put a firewall on that door, unlimited

access surface area for security.

Obviously security hacks are big.

We found out today that Israel had hacked, and notified the NSA.

Hacking is a huge problem.

Equifax is going to be another one.

How should customers protect themselves?

>> It's a very fair question John.

This is one of the side-effects of saying that the data center will be boundary-less.

We now have to have security technologies that can, we've effectively expanded the attacks

of security in a significant way, but I don't think the answer is to say we need to move

backwards and not adopt this boundary-less Cloud.

I think we want to adopt it, and we want to develop technologies.

So at Intel, we are developing multiple isolation technologies that allow different VM and container

tenants to be isolated from other tenants.

>> And this was your point earlier, making the device more intelligent, whether that's

more on-board memory, and more chips.

>> Yes.

>> That's what you were kind of referring to, is that right?

>> That's correct.

>> Okay great, so I want to get one kind of off-the-wall question, since I have you on

here.

It's just a brain trust here from Intel, which it's great to have him here.

Distributed computing has been around for awhile, we know all about that.