[Music] hello everyone i welcome you to today's conversation in all about data and today my conversation i'm hosting at my home officeas we begin i acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land of biblical people that we're on today and i pay my respects to the elders past present and emerging so with that i welcome my guest today ming prince um data center specialist sc from cisco welcoming thank you russia happy to be here thank you for coming and you know having this conversation in my home office this is so great yes it's exciting it'sthe first that's happened so i'm very excitedum hey um hey could you tell us our tell our audience a little bit about yourself you know yourself what do you do what is your role like and anything else you want to share yeah so my name is ming prince i am a data center specialist sc in cisco we actually changed your name to cloud infrastructure software group just to be more aligned with the hybrid cloud movementyeahand i have been with cisco for 11 years i spent some time in the tech as a support engineer and then i also and then i moved across to preserves to support our disabled customers in their deployment and i guess architectural solutions yeah sure so 11 years that was around that time was when i first started my first job out of uni did you start at cisco as a grad engineer as well yes i actually started as an intern when i was in uni oh wow i joined the graduate program and yeahit's kind of just move around in cisco yeah different roles yeahthat's amazing and you know i'm i feel very grateful to have you here today um because one of the reasons that i chose um you knownetworkengineering was because you know at the time cisco was everywhere and i got to do a ccna course and that was when i was like oh out of all the subjects that i've done in my four years of uni i thought yeah i am definitely you know a network kind of person so that's what kind of guided my career direction so it's so great to be having a conversation with a fellow you know um engineeryou know who's had a similar path right at cisco but very similar so thank you for sharing that hey um given your role as a data center um sc specialist ssc you know if i can be so audacious i'm gonna challenge you a little bit okay um most of my conversations today with the most common customers are around cloud you know whether it's hybrid cloud whether it's all cloud where it's hybrid multi-cloudand so and so with you specializing data center solutions how does that come into that play when people are talking all about cloud where does dance center sit in that yeah ilove this question because i think it's something that a lot of people have in their mind and hopefully didn't want to bring that up so i'm so glad that you bring this up i guess in the olden days data center used to be within four walls it's all secure lock-in but nowadays the data is where i guess i mean the data center is where the data sits so um we are actually probably i guess we look at it in more like a hyper-cloud environment you know your on-prem environment can be your uh private cloud and then you have public cloud workloads as well and uh but the there's a lot of things we have to consider in terms of how do we connect them because all those are not isolated anymore and you also have to think about how do you use how do you secure your data it doesn't matter where it sits security is always top of mind yeah andthe also thing is i mean when we work with it team we always think about how do they do their day-to-day job just because a cloud is such a popular thing or this is top of mind but you're thinking about how do you implement it how do you do a day-to-day how do you have visibility inyour infrastructure it doesn't matter it's on-prem or in the cloud yeah and how we're not overloading the team because there's already so much on their play we don't want to uh because yeah complexity is definitely something that we want to tackle yeahso there's a lot of effort that we would never put in to make sure customers work low is secure is easy to operate and yeah it's really solving their business challenges yeah ilove that last point you mentioned right business challenges and i guess yesthere is a lot of um you know plus that you get out of cloud and a lot of customers see that it's consumption model you know youhave different sort of capabilities across different clouds and you're using that um but we see you know a lot of customers would have started in data center um or some or a lot of the customers newcustomers now have started all in cloud but does it make sense to overcome your business challenges if you go all in you know and that's why there's the hybrid level and in that hybrid a big part of that is data center isn't it um and i really love the fact that you touched on visibility as well right irrespective of where your data is how are you making sure you've got the visibility and the control um and how are you making use of that data right yeah exactly i mean we are all just i guess take a step back we are at the moment we are not lack of data we actually overloaded with data yeah and sometimes if you open a um iguess they pick some tools and then you open this like hundreds of thousands of alerts what would happen you'll be just too overwhelmed for you to take any actions yeah so what we need is actually inside we need ability to translate those data this noise and then into something that is actionable something that actually makes sense uh to me to my network yeah and now tell me the next step that i should take so this is really um i guess it's very interesting because um it's definitely thecomplexity of data is kind of your human scale yeah but um uh leveraging ai and ammo is definitely helping us to get to the actionable insight quicker yeahabsolutely you know and um netapp and cisco has had a really long working partnership you know and um if we think about you know each of the companies we were both traditional you know data center sort of specialist vendors and you know netapp has a lot of cloud capability offerings cisco's got it we bought together have a very good you know hyper um conversion infrastructure that we combine this you know help our customers deploy in their data center which is great but then you know we're not just limited to that data center space there's so much more that we can um we can do right so um i guess even in your role you're running as a data center specialist but you're not limited to just that data center design tell us a bit about you know what does your role involve like what kind of conversations are you having with customers surely it's not just like oh i'm a data center specialist and i'm gonna um give you a bunch of hardware to deploy in data center yeah exactly iguess overall my career is always about just finding the problems yeah and digging a bit deeper into what is the problem what is usually trying to solve and then wego and have a look at our turkey to seize anything that we can uh offer to solve the problem yeah and a lot of time is also about a collaborative approach with our alliance our partners um because yeah because we're we don't do everything um but wehave a really umreally good partnership with netapp and a lot of our alliance partners even some backup partners as well so it's really about coming together to understand customers pain points understand where customers want to go yeah and then we kind of come together with a plan of designing the best solution about the customer yeah i love that point i mean um it yeah it is not a bad just uh you know oh i am cisco or netapp and i've got this you know toolkit and i'm gonna solve everything ireally love what you said you know we have our capabilities and it's i think it's for both netapp and cisco as well right but then um when we work with a customer they don't just want what we offer they want everything else especially when it even in data center they could be virtualization there could be something else and then what are you consuming in the cloud um not all organizations offer everything so you gotta have that ecosystem of support working together collaboration um yeah i love that and you know ii'm okay so here's something and we've had a couple of conversations in the past and i know i love your analogies around you know everything that you talk about give us something around you know what do you see as this asa as the trend or you know transformation that's going on in the hybrid cloud can you compare that with anything else that you see in an everydaylife yeah so um i guess when i try to explain to um this is especially someone who is probably outside yeah likemy mom orthe kids about what is hybrid cloud what is or different thing it's like we all have a car yeah right yeah but sometimes when we go to the city i'll just take maybe we'll take uber because too how to find parking and i just want to probably want a few drinks yes so i will use this umso this is a bit like a public cloud yeah but um it doesn't mean i gave it off my car because i still appreciate theconvenience that i can drop in a car whenever i want it at the car seat for my kids yeah so it'sa kind of a special workload that i can't really take the closet with me everywhereyeah uber yeah and then when i go travel i probably just ran a car instead because that is another different use case yeah i use so it's not really about which one is better on you know why share or having your own car basically about what is my need of the day andwhat and what kind of tool do i use and it's just great that i have all these tools like i guess available for you and then there's also public transport as well because um you know sometimes it's easier to get to places with public transport yeah so an energy that i would probably put in is google map is pretty smart like theydon't sell car they don't do russia they have all the information correlated in one page yes real time yeah telling me well today traffic's really bad i would suggest to take the public transport yeah then yeah our recommendation yeah so you've got the different options but then you've got one platform to go actually you know here's what i want to go from point a to point b what's the best route right now on the day oh i love that you surprise me with your analogy every single time i'm like every time i'm talking with me it's like oh what is she going to come up with next this is like right i feel like because technology at the base of technology is really solving problems human problems business run by human so it'sjust interesting at this time to see technologies everywhere you might even you might be using it every day but you don't have to know that how does the ai ml work as long as you are enjoying the benefit of it yes that's right yeah well thank you so much uh for being with me today ming and you know it's amazing to have a an expert in the field as my guest um you know but also a fellow women in tech you know and to see and witness your journey and what you've achieved and um you know it's really great so it's thank you so much for your time and the inside and friendship really yeah thank you my pleasure yeah it's just great to have these sessions with you and i love to i mean we can talk all day on all topics but yeah it's definitely a pleasure to be here thank you may thank you all thank you