(upbeat music) >> With cloud computing, programmable infrastructure, open source momentum with things like Terraform and software defined everything, people have been asking, "Does hardware still matter?" The obvious answer is software has to run on something but why does hardware still matter specifically? What customer value is there in advanced hardware architectures and what are some of the less frequently discussed nuances of hardware that make software run better and businesses run more efficiently and securely at scale. Welcome to the Cube's ongoing series where we explore the importance of hardware its evolution over the decades and its future outlook with me is longtime cubilam, Shannon Champion. Who's the vice president of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Welcome Shannon. >> Thank you. Glad to be here. >> Yeah, it's always great to collaborate with you. Shannon, you've had a pretty impressive career. You've got this killer combination of you have an engineering degree, multiple engineering degrees actually combined with business education. You've worked as a semiconductor engineer, a quality engineer, product manager, product marketing exec, et cetera. And you now have responsibility for a variety of hardware and software led infrastructure at Dell. How have you seen hardware evolve over the years? >> Well, first of all, thank you. I appreciate that intro Dave. Yeah, it's been a fun journey. I think there's two things. I think there's a product led evolution and then there's customer evolution. And obviously those go hand in hand. If you think about the technology from a hardware perspective, it's become more advanced, more specialized and the diversification of chip architectures is really what's driving that. It's gone from general purpose CPUs to GPUs, to specialty processors like, DPUs and purpose-built accelerators. And with all that specialization, obviously more and more software is required to really knit it together. We believe Dell is uniquely positioned to do that. >> Awesome. So I want to just come right out and ask you, you know, with cloud and software defined and hyper-converged why specifically does hardware still matter? >> Well, if you know anything about Dell, you know we are driven by customer first mindset. So I'm going to go back to that customer evolution I talked about and from a customer perspective, purchase decisions used to be more about feature function, Like how much compute memory storage can you pack in and get the best performance characteristics. Of course, people still care about this and almost every customer, if you look at the widespread surveys that have been done in the industry projections are still going to be making data center infrastructure purchases for the foreseeable future, but more and more, these sort of like traditional hardware capabilities are table stakes. And what customers are making purchase decisions on are the software driven capabilities that provide the differentiating capabilities to allow them to do more with less. So with that sort of comes a refocusing of where IT adds value for their organizations. We know maintaining and managing the infrastructure is not what differentiates companies and makes them stand out from the crowd. So that's what this whole notion of IT Transformation is all about. Our customers are pulling us into a broader set of problems and their purchase criteria is moving away from hardware feature function to differentiated solution and software value decision making with more focus on how they can drive business value beyond the infrastructure. So it's really the combination of hardware with software that optimizes and delivers the best outcomes and the tighter the link we can create between them the more seamless the experience for customers. >> Gotcha and I mean, this is more important than ever with the push toward digital transformation. And everybody's trying to get digital right. Now thinking about Dell as a company and its broader strategy, the majority of revenue comes from what most people would think of as hardware but as Jeff Clark often points out, the vast majority of engineers are software engineers. Can you explain how that dynamic works and what role hardware plays in that equation? >> Yeah, totally. So if you think about IT transformation infrastructure is the enabler of that transformation, but infrastructure needs to be smarter, easier, more automated, more secure. And that's done with software and our software engineering focus is nothing new. I think Dave, we were together five years ago talking about the latest version of HCI on the 14th generation of power edge servers. And at that time we were talking about how our hardware platform engineers were working with the software engineers to design in software defined storage capabilities within the power edge platform. So, you know, we, that we are not new to this. We've been looking at ways we can use software to exploit the underlying hardware features and capabilities and do that in a differentiated way because it delivers value for customers. And honestly, they're willing to pay a premium for that. >> Yeah. I remember that well, 14G now 15G, soon we're going to be talking about 16G. Can you give me an example of where hardware differentiation has created value for your customers beyond, you know what a straight software only solution running on generic white boxes might bring? >> Yeah, I have a couple of examples. The first is easily VxRail, right? VxRail, our jointly engineered HCI system with VMware. It provides full stack integration of hardware and software for that consistent operations in VMware environments. And when you think about evolution of infrastructure VxRail is actually a cool story. When it was introduced six years ago its scalability and performance, you know had it be rapidly adopted mainly in the data center but customer demands have evolved and they wanted to extend that operational efficiency to a broader and broader set of workloads. Not only in the data center, but in the cloud at the edge. So VxRail grew and its portfolio today has maximum flexibility. You can choose the best platform to meet performance, storage, graphics, IO, cost requirements a range of processor types and NVMe drives and graphics cards. So it really is the most configurable HCI system to meet any workload demand. And we recently introduced some new node types. That's hardware based, right? VxRail dynamic nodes and satellite nodes and our customers and partners are really excited about these, the dynamic nodes, as you know add the capability to scale compute and storage independently and extend to primary storage like power store and the satellite nodes are single nodes for the edge. So that's all hardware stuff, but the secret to VxRail really is more about the software. So I'm going to go back there. The VxRail HCI system software is what makes VxRail more seamless and simple than any other HCI system. And when managing your environment is easier and more automated and your workloads can stay up and running, leveraging that intelligent life cycle management customers pay attention. So again, it's that combination of hardware and software and for VxRail customers it's how we're delivering that truly curated experience like we like to call it that they can't get anywhere else. >> Awesome. So last question. Anything else you want to bring into the discussion before we close? >> Yeah. Two things, actually I have another good example of hardware differentiation and how it creates value for customers. And this one is based upon PowerStore. So PowerStore inline data reduction uses Intel quick assist technology and it performs hardware accelerated compression. So it's basically handling data reduction in hardware. We offload the compute intensive workloads of compression and conserve the CPU cycles for storage IO tasks that save application and storage processing time, cycles and costs. So it's a more consistent way to do storage efficiency and leverage power storage advance inline compression and it's always on, and it doesn't compromise performance of other services. So, with PowerStore using this hardware differentiated approach to inline data reduction, customers get an average four to one data reduction across all their workloads, don't compromise performance or services. And honestly, a lot of times we see them achieving up to 20 to 1 or more depending on the data type. So yeah, I just wanted to throw out that other example. >> Great. >> The last thing I'll say is we just launched a trifecta storage innovation at Dell Technologies World. We have over 500 new high value software enhancements that bring out the best in our storage hardware platforms and that's across PowerStore, PowerMax and PowerFlex. So I encourage folks to go check that out and you know obviously let us know what you think. >> Yeah. We can put a link to those in the show notes. And I was there at Dell Tech World. It was actually quite amazing. Shannon, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your insights really appreciate it. >> My pleasure. >> All right. And thank you for watching this Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Thanks Peter. We're back for the deep dive. Beth Phalen is joining us again and Ruya Barret who's the vice president of marketing for Dell EMC's data protection division. Thanks guys for coming on. Ruya let me start with you. Why are customers, what are they telling you in terms of why they're acquiring your data protection solutions? >> Well Beth talked a little bit about the engineering effort and collaboration we've been putting in place and so did Yang Ming with Vmware. So whether that's integration into vCenter or vSphere, or vRealize operations manager, vRealize automation or vCloud director. All of this work, all of this engineering effort and engineering hours is really to do two things deliver simply powerful data protection for VMware customers. >> What do you mean by simple? >> Simple. Well simple comes in two types of approaches, right? Simple is through automation. One of the things that we've done is really automate across the data protection stack for VMware, whereas 99% of the market solutions really leave it off at policy management, so they automate the policy layer. We automate not only the policy layer but the vProxy deployment, as well as the data movement. We have five types of data movement capabilities that have been automated, whether you're going directly from storage, to protection storage, whether you're doing client to protection storage, whether you're doing application to protection storage, or whether you're doing hypervisor direct to application storage. So it really is to automate and to maximize the performance of to meet the customer's service levels. So automation is critical when you're doing that. The other part of automation could be in how easy Cloud is for the admins and users. It really has to do with being able to orchestrate all of the activities, you know, very simply and easily. Simplicity is also management. We are hearing more and more that the admins are taking on the role of doing the backups and restores so our efforts with VMware have been to really simplify the management so that they can use their native tools. We've integrated with VMware for the V admins to be able to take backup and restore just a part of their daily operational tasks. >> So when you talk about power, is that performance? You've referenced performance but is it just performance or is it more than that? >> That's also a great question Dave, thank you. Power really, in terms of data protection, is three-fold. It's power in making sure that you have a single powerful solution that really covers a comprehensive set of applications and requirements, not only for today, but also tomorrow as needs. So that comprehensive coverage, whether you're on premise or in the Cloud is really critical. Power means performance, of course it means performance. Being able to deliver the highest performing protection and more importantly restores, is critical to our customers. Power also means not sacrificing efficiency to get that performance. So efficiency we have the best source side deduplication technology in the market. That, coupled with the performance is really critical to our customers. So all of these, the simplicity, the comprehensive coverage, the performance, the efficiency, also drives the lowest cost to protect for our customers. >> All right. I want to bring Beth Phalen into the conversation. Beth, let's talk about Cloud a little bit. A lot of people feel as though I can take data, I can dump it into an object store in the Cloud, and I'm protected. Your thoughts. >> Yeah, we hear that same misconception, and in fact the exact opposite is true. It's even more important that people have world class data protection when they're bringing Cloud into their IT environment. They have to know where their data is and how is it protected and how to restore it. So we have a few innovations that are going on here. For a long time we've had our hyper Cloud extensions. You can do Cloud tearing directly from data domain, and now we've also extended what you can do if you're a VMware Cloud AWS customer so that you can use that for your Cloud DR configuration, fail over to AWS with VMware Cloud, and then fail back with Vmotion if you choose to, and that's great for customers who don't want to have a second site, but do want to have confidence that they can recover if there's a disaster. On top of that we've also been doing some really great work with VMware with VCloud director integration. Data protection as a service is growing like crazy. It's highly popular around the globe as a way to consume data protection, and so now you can integrate both your VMware tasks and your data protection tasks from one UI in the cloud director. These are just a few of the things that we're doing. Comprehensively bringing data protection to the cloud is essential. >> Great, okay. Dell EMC just recently made an announcement. The IDPA DP4400. Ruya, what's it all about? Explain it. >> Absolutely. So what we announced is really an integrated data protection appliance turn key, purpose built, to meet the specific requirements of mid-size customers. It's really to bring that enterprise sensibility and protection to our mid-size customers. It's all-inclusive in terms of capabilities so if you're talking about backup, restore, replication, disaster recovery, Cloud disaster recovery and Cloud long-term retention. All at your fingertips, all included, as well as all of the capabilities we talked about in terms of enabling VM admins to be able to do all of their daily tasks and operations through their own native tools and UIs. So it's really all about bringing simply powerful data protection to mid-size customers at the lowest cost to protect, and we now also have a guarantee under our future proof loyalty program, we are introducing a 55 to one deduplication guarantee for those exact customers. >> Okay. Beth, I wonder if you could talk about the motivation for this product. Why did you build it and why is it relevant for mid-size customers? >> So we're known as number one in enterprise data protection. We're known for our world class, best in the class, best in the world dedu capabilities, and what we've done is we've taken the learnings and the IP that we have that served enterprise customers for all of these years and then we're making that accessible to mid-size customers, and there are so many companies out there that can take advantage of our technology that maybe couldn't before these announcements. So by building this we've created a product that a mid-size company may have a small IT staff. Like I said at the beginning, may have VM admins who are also responsible for data protection. Now they can have what we bring to the market with best in class data protection. >> I want to follow up with you on simple and powerful. What is your perspective on simple? What does it mean for customers? >> I mean if you break it down, simple means simple to deploy two times faster than traditional data protection. Simple means easier to manage with modern HTML five interfaces that include the data protection, day to day tasks, also include reporting. Simple means easier to grow, growing in place from 24 terabytes up to 96 terabytes with just a simple software license to add at 12 terabyte increments. So all of those things come together to reduce the amount of time that an IT admin has to spend on data protection. >> So when I hear powerful and I hear mid-size customers I'm thinking, okay I want to bring enterprise class data protection down to the mid-size organization. Is that what it means? Can you actually succeed in doing that? >> If I'm an IT admin, I want to make sure that I can protect all of my data as quickly and efficiently as possible, and so we have the broadest support matrix in the industry. I don't have to bring in multiple products to support protection of my different applications, that's key. That's one thing. The other thing is I want to be able to scale. I don't want to have to be forced to bring in new products. With this, you have a logical five terabytes on prim. You can grow to protecting additional 10 terabytes in the Cloud, so that's another key piece of it, scalabililty. >> Petabytes, sorry, Petabytes. >> Petabytes. >> You said terabytes. (laughs) >> Of course, yes. What am I thinking? And then, last but not least, it's just performance. It runs on a 14G powered server. You're going to get the efficiency. You can protect five times as many VMs as you could without this kind of product. So all of those things come together for power, scalability, support matrix, and performance. >> Great, thank you. Okay, Ruya, let's talk about the business impact. Start with this sort of IT operations person. What does it mean for that individual? >> Yeah absolutely. So first, you're going to get your weekends back, right? So the product is just faster. We talked about it's simpler. You're not going to have to get a PhD on how to do data protection to be able to do your business. You're going to enable your V admins to be able to take on some of the tasks. So it's really about freeing up your weekends, having that sound mind that data protection is just happening, it works. We've already tried and tested this with some of the most crucial businesses with the most stringent service level requirements. It's just going to work, and by the way, you're going to look like a hero because with this 2U appliance, you're going to be able to support 15 petabytes across the most comprehensive coverage in the data center. So your boss is going to think you're just a super hero. >> Petabytes. >> Exactly. Petabytes, exactly. So it's tremendous for the IT user and also the business user. >> Wait, wait, what about the boss? What about the line of business? What does it mean to that individual? >> So if I'm the CEO or the CIO I really want to think about where am I putting my most skilled personnel, and my most skilled personnel, especially as IT is becoming so core to the business, is probably not best served doing data protection. So just being able to free up those resources to really drive applications or initiatives that are driving revenue for the business is critical. Number two, if I'm the boss, I don't want to overpay for data protection. Data protection is insurance for the business. You need it, but you don't want to overpay for it. So I think that lowest cost is a really critical requirement. The third one is really minimizing risk and compliance issues for the business. If I have the sound mind and the trust that this is just going to work, then I'm going to be able to recover my business no matter what the scenario, and that it's been tried and true in the biggest accounts across the world. I'm going to rest assured that I have less exposure to my business. >> Great. Ruya, Beth, thank you very much. Don't forget, we have an ask me anything crowd chat at the end of this session. So you can go in, login with Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook and ask any question. All right, let's take a look at the product and then we're going to come back and get the analysts' perspective. Keep it right there. (electronic music)

>> From Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube, covering WTG Transform 2018. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. >> Welcome back to The Cube here at WTG Transform 2018, I'm Stu Miniman and happy to welcome to the program, a first time guest, Claude Lavigne, who's the director of product management and servers at Dell EMC. Claude, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> All right, so I had David Singer on this morning, who is from the EMC legacy side of things >> Yes. >> talking about storage, so you're from the legacy Dell side, if we will. You know we're working on servers. So tell us a little bit about your background and what you work on these days. >> So yes, so I'm doing planning for several powers. I've been on the server team for about 18 years. So, all the way from the beginning to now I'm #1 in the world, so it feels very, very good after 18 years. But yeah, that's why we do it. So I'm based in Austin with the product group over there and our role is to optimize and plan the best possible road map and portfolio of servers for rack towers and module. >> Yeah, it's funny, I remember back, you go back 5-10 years ago >> Yes >> and some people were like: wait, Dell does servers? You know, aren't they, you know, here's a Dell laptop sitting in front of me, and it was like Dell's done a lot of servers. I mean, I remember when Dell's Blade server first came out. A lot of pieces, but you know, so get us at a high level. You know, what's Dell's position in the marketplace these days? >> I mean, #1, but also to me, at the profile level #1, but at the platform level, we have one rack, the rack, the R740, our mainstream rack. It's the #1 server sold in the world. So, we're #1 profile, even at the platform level, and the 740 is used across, it's kind of a bedrock, it's used for as a server, but also in all of the EMC solution. It's used for virtualization, VDI, so that platform is kind of the, it's doing very, very well these days. >> Yeah, it's one of those things: see, people sometimes forget that a server isn't just something that does the compute for, you know, when an operating system sits on it, there's servers in lots of devices. Every year when I go to Dell World, I would see that giant OEM rack, >> Yes. >> and it was servers, OEM storage, OEM, HCI of course all has servers inside of it. And it was one of those things when the acquisition was initially announced of EMC, it was like, well, look, EMC both in their products and bundled with their solutions really pushes a lot of servers >> Yes. >> that didn't get talked about, you know, in the discussion. >> So now it's great for us. We have the full portfolio. I mean, every day you're going to see new announcements. We're going to have the best VFC solution, the best VxRail. We have best in class, you know, performance, and all that, I mean, the big part I mean, it's the research of years and investments and the system management we have at the server level. Because we have a great automation and system management, we're able to kind of reimagine or create profile on our servers, so it can be a VDI server again, but the best VSUN server or the best VxRail server. And all that because we have a great system management engine called the iTrack 9 inside our servers. And that's years of engineering and6 development, but now finally, now you have the hardware on the system management. We get the reconnection from the customers, and I think that's what made us #1. I mean, we see a lot of acceptance in 14G, a lot of demand for our security and system management capabilities. So I think that's the overall solution that help us, I mean, get to the point. >> All right, so Claude actually as an industry the server business is doing pretty well. >> Yeah. >> Especially for the last few quarters. What's driving growth? You're working on the product strategy, you know, what are some of the interesting nuggets in the portfolio? >> All, I mean, so how much we have to call. So the, like I just mentioned, the one year and two year servers but there is a couple pockets on innovations, so that's what we did in the last few months. So, I mean, the first one is, you see different key or card architecture that something to be very interesting not on the AMD, so we're trying to balance the portfolio to really showcase each of the goodness of this architecture. So that's why we launched the full AMD portfolio not a long time ago. Then, the other one is in the full circuit. What's really interesting, something I've never seen in 15 years, more and more people are doing, not on the database, machine learning, AI on full server, they're requiring more chip use and all flash solution within the server to get the best possible performance. So that's what we did, we announced that a month ago at the award and now in the future, it's the, we're moving to kinetic architectures. So we had a preview at the award of our Annex platform that we're going to launch later this year. And that one is really going to take the IT infrastructure to the next level. So, it's designed for the next 10 years of, again, modular, flexible, kinetic architecture that not only can optimize the right balance between compute and storage, but future technology like all flash and in-memory compute with the right fabric. So that's what you're going to see from us. It's going from the traditional rack servers to this advanced, modular architecture for the big design for the next 10 years. >> Claude, maybe give us a little compare and contrast. How is the module architecture different from what we saw on traditional racks or even blade servers? >> Yeah, so the traditional blade servers, I mean the, we don't blade for, I don't know, 10-15 years. And in the past it was, compute and then outer storage will external to a send. It was very traditional, but now with scale out storage, #1, scale out storage and all this HCI solution, customers asking us have very flexible computer and storage architecture. So that's kind of the first step and most of the blade architecture today are out there. It's like storage and compute, but moving forward we're going to go way beyond that. It's, we're going to have blocks of memory and GPU and flash storage, you know, and different cares of, you know, architecture ahead of the traditional storage. And if you look at the modular architecture, nobody else can deal with that today. Annex is going to be the first platform that can handle all that. It's not going to happen in the next three months, but the chassis is designed to be ready for this architecture of the future. Because we have very unique design in the bag. You know, we're getting rid of the traditional midplane that we have in the past and our competition is still using today. So it's going to be much more open to future, flexible, connectivity in the back of the chassis. So, that's why they never asked us to be ready for these next 10 years of IT innovation. >> Alright, so, Claude we're here at the Winslow Technology user event. What kind of feedback are you hearing from Winslow and their customers and what kind of things are you talking to the channel about these days? >> I mean, we've been in this conference for the last few years and we still think it's a great, great poniverse and they are part of what we call the technical council back in Austin. So, they are CTO sits with us on the PG side to help us plan future warmups, so they are very, very close now. And that's what we're doing, I mean, this, we're trying to optimize the portfolio with these guys. But right now, it's mostly the trying to improve the server, I mean, around storage and compute. So what you're going to see us launching toward the end of the year on the storage side. We're going to have a, remember the #1 server mentioned the alt 740, #1 in the world. Again, talking to the Winslow team and their customers, that server is great, but not good enough, so you're going to see us later this year, based on that feedback launching a new, improved version that will still base, use the 740 base, but be even more optimized for HCI and this several story solution. And that's the perfect example of the feedback we're getting from the Winslow team that we're integrating into the roadmap. So yeah, we are here every year because, I mean these guys are very sharp, they are good. >> Claude, last thing I wanted to ask you is, you know, for a very long time when you thought about the server market, it was, let's watch the intel, the tick-tock, the roadmap. So every few months you could expect something happened. That was what drove the innovation. >> Yes. >> What's the cadence today and what's driving innovation going forward? >> I mean, the cadence is getting faster, so for serving planning it makes it a little bit difficult. Also, now you have again you have these two vendors. Before it's really the innovation and I think that's what made us #1 is beyond the server, beyond the two processors and the storage solution. It's how we manage, how we make sure we have the best security end-to-end. So, our system management, the way we can provision servers, make sure we can do the update in the most secure way. The premise, that's kind of what makes a difference for PowerEdge and I think that's why, I mean, it took years of investment from, you know, the pitching team but I think that's what is making a difference, and the differentiation right now. It's like, you know, our servers are not just like any other servers. They're much easier to, much more secure, much easier to manage, you know, through the entire life cycle. So, I think that's the key differentiation is how we manage the server, you know, so not just at the server level, but we have deployments of thousands of servers. So we have a new console called OpenManage Enterprise. We just launched that, I think that was, what, six months ago, and that's the latest and greatest of one too many managements of servers and it's free. I mean, it's, that's another good think about PowerEdge. You can get OpenImage Enterprise for free. >> Alright, well Claude Lavigne really appreciate the update on everything happening in the server world. Lots more coverage. Check out theCUBE.net for everything we're doing, as well as, we actually take some of the key analysis from the shows that we go to, put that in our podcast that's called theCUBE Insights. Find that on iTunes, GooglePlay, Spotify, your favorite podcast player. I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, SilconANGLE's premier live streaming show where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise we are live day two of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, welcoming back a CUBE alumni, Gil Shneorson Senior Vice President of VxRail and GM at Dell EMC. Hey Gil. >> Thank you for having me back. >> Well we're excited to talk to you. So looking at some of the announcements that came out today where Dell EMC says they're the number one market leader in global hyper-converged infrastructure, and you've said that's happened really quickly. Tell us a little bit about that leadership. >> I think we found a way to take a systems approach to what is otherwise a software-defined world. So we found a way to get all of the economical benefits of hyper-converged driven by software, at the same time own the responsibility for those systems to be up and running and life cycle managed, taking away more of the responsibility then customers would have to do it on their own and I think that recipe has led us to a leadership position very, very quickly. >> So, you know we talked earlier today, can you expand upon some of that responsibility alleviating from customers, specifically around SLAs, around IO when you software-define or software-deliver storage, kind of the operating model changes. Can you expand upon that? >> Yeah, that's a very good point. So look at software-defined storage technology, for example. We happen to work with VSAN, which is the leading software-defined technology, but when customers choose to deploy software-defined solutions on their own, they're doing something that they haven't been doing in many, many years, which is take on the responsibility for up timing. It used to be that storage vendors, you know held responsibility for storage up time, for IOPs, for performance. So I think what we're doing is we found the balance. We've been getting a lot of benefits of hyper-converged and software defined, but at the same time own the responsibility from an operations standpoint to make it more like a traditional architecture and what they know. And that combination is very, very important. So for example, the ability to look at the entire system from software to driver to firmware, and always deliver a known good package because something that customers would have to do on their own, and they're all capable of doing it, but if they could choose not to do it why not offload it to somebody like us that does it for them. And so while there are two deployment models, we have a very massive growth in the systems approach, model (music drowns out voice) and I think people hand off things that they could do but they choose not to because they can focus on other things in the IT shop. For example, digital transformation and really the path to the multicloud by adding more and more layers on top of infrastructure that they can trust. >> Speaking of multicloud, I was in Jeff Clarke's opening session this morning. He was talking about, he gave a stat, I think it was 50 plus to 56% of users surveyed are using more than one cloud. So one of the things I also saw in the press release about the advancements of VxRail and VxRack, giving customers a clear path to adopt VMWare-based multiclouds. What is that clear path? How was that differentiated? So let's remember that both of those products, VxRail and VxRack SDDC are products that are built on the VMWare stack. They're optimized for VMWare users. They're not agnostic to anything. They're really VMWare on VMWare with automation and hardware and packaging that we do as a system. By delivering that robust infrastructure in one of the announcements that we made was that we created the VMWare validated design to add the rest of the VMWare stack and create an infrastructure as a service environment. That inherently comes with the ability to offload workloads to VMWare's service provider, cloud service provider, including Amazon and Google and the likes, but really a very vast network. So you take an infrastructure that's based on VMWare and harden is designing the system, you add on top of it to a prescriptive VVD exactly how to add the layered toppings like VRealize Automation, and through that inherently you get the entire VMWare value proposition going from a local solution to multicloud. And so the announcement was that validated design, which is very important, and then the announcement also included all sorts of hardware innovations or small evolutions like NVMe drives and 25 gigabyte ethernet, and higher memory CPUs. All of those are just to make sure that the infrastructure itself is ready to support that software stack that ultimately leads them to a full IO solution and offloading to the multicloud that are available to them. >> So big announcement or big set of education last year at VM World was the VCF. VMWare Cloud Foundation. It is the foundation of VMWare's infrastructure cloud play. Can you help talk through the importance in how VCF differentiates VMWare, VxRail, VxRack from competitors. >> So VCF is a software bundle. It's also an orchestrator that allows customers to manage multiple VMWare clusters within context. It's called a workload domain, and they can manage those clusters, and they can deploy them, they can life cycle management, they can microsegment them with NSX, and they can move workloads between them and to the cloud. VxRack SDDC is a system that basically lays down the VCF bits on a system premanufactured, and that's how we benefit from VCF as a differentiator. What we've done in addition we've announced 14G servers to be supported in that architecture. And we've also extended it to a, for example, a dial home on a system level. A lot of serviceability features, a physical view of the service as part of the graphic user interface. So not only does VCF differentiate VMWare by having the ability to finally leverage the entire stack, our value add is in taking that in the physical to virtual integration, if you will, life cycle management, and serviceability around servicing all of the system, which makes it a very robust infrastructure. So today customers have two choices. They can buy VxRack with VCF on top of it, or they can get to the same outcome with VxRail following a VVD prescriptive. And so what we do is we let them choose. If they're not ready for an NSX deployment they'd start with one, if they are they'll start with the other. Either way the outcome is going to be a full (music drowns out voice) from VMWare that can offload to multicloud. We just give them choices of how to get there. >> So want to kind of play off the value add for a second. We're at this event, the event theme Make It Real, making digital transformation real is a mandatory for businesses, right? They have the opportunity to take and apply data to multiple cases, use cases, within their organization to deliver differentiation. So you talked about a lot of the value out of the choices that you're giving customers from an IT perspective, what are some of the business, when you're sitting there with customers, what are some of the business outcomes they're looking for this technology to help them deliver? >> So that's a good question. So two levels of an answer. One is that by getting an automated infrastructure, IT itself can free up cycle to actually implement the (mumbles). It also frees up time for those organizations who are embarking on native cloud application development. For example, to deploy pivotal Cloud Foundry on top of (mumbles) Which is another prescriptive reference cycle actually that we have out there. And allow them to innovate. What I'm most interested in when I visit customers is what workloads are running on HCI. And I ask them and they say, is it testive, is it mission critical? And I'm happy to see that by now HCI, and specifically our products, have become mission critical, data centered, so all the way from the core to the edge running, banking applications a scale, running trading applications scale, running manufacturing application scale, running ports all over the world. I mean there's one customer that runs ports with automated trucks where the AI that runs those trucks is running on a VxRail. I mean, it's very, very exciting to see how our technology has been adopted into mainstream, into mainstream application compute. I think that's very exciting. And IT can enable more of those applications run and develop more because they have to do less in managing the physical infrastructure across multi companies. >> So Lee Caswell, Senior Vice President of Products over at VMWare brought in his customer from Celtic yesterday, and he validated that. They went all in from a legacy three tier architecture on Dell SE, they were Dell customer before, went with the Xrack, sorry VxRail, mission critical applications out the gate. So I'm seeing a shift. Last year around this time we were doing education and saying, you know, what is HCI versus a traditional architecture? Are you seeing that same thing at the show, as a shift that customers are no longer asking oh what is VxRail or VxRack, but that very thing is how can we accelerate digital transformation using VxRail or VxRack? >> Yeah, we have a very large percentage of the meetings, in fact almost 200 meetings that were requested to review the technology with us initial. That's a lot, that shows a lot of interest. There are a few customers that still don't know, and we've met some of those at the show. There are a few customers who are still contemplating whether HCI is right for them. And by the way, to those customers we say, don't rush into it, you have choices. If that's what you used to, what the economics were for you, there is no reason to rush into HCI. It's just depending on if you're going to get a better outcome than what you have today. But a very common question from customers is okay, then why do I need traditional storage? And for somebody from my vantage point, let's say there's a lot of bare-metal computing out there that requires traditional. But we think that traditional storage becomes more specialized, you know specific DR use cases, very large ratios between compute and storage and requires shared storage, but the HCI type of technology is definitely, and we see it with market growth, right? The market is growing at 60 to 70%. We're growing over 150% and taking share in this growing market, but we're still very, very small if you compare it to the whole IT tam. So there's a lot of way to go. Partly is that we still need to work on the last mile, being sure that our products are more mature, that we figure out how to operate them in a real life environment. So there's work to do, but the economical benefits are so strong that customers are making the choice more and more and more, and they trust us to know how to close the gaps that we still have. And it's a very collaborative effort between our and our customers. We listen, we respond very quickly, and so we can keep the machine going. >> It sounds like a momentum that we talked about with you I think at VM World back in eight or so months ago continues. And we want to thank you for stopping by theCUBE, sharing what's new with VxRack, VxRail, and how customers can be successful there. >> Absolutely. >> Thanks, Gil. >> Thank you for having me again. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live in a concert at Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We'll be right back with our next guest after a short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to theCUBE We continue our coverage here live. We are in the Sands at Dell Technologies World 2018. Big show, 14,000 plus they're expecting here. 4,000 just in the business partners summit alone. So a very impressive turnout here in day one, as I said, of three days of coverage on theCUBE. Along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walls. We're now joined by Lee Caswell who's a VP of Products at VMWare. Lee, good to see you, sir. >> Great to be here, yes. >> John: Every year we get together like this, right? >> Well, you know, there's always something new to talk about, right? >> John: Absolutely, and we're also joined by Chris Stanley here, who's the IT Manager at the Celtic Manor Resorts in Newport, Wales. Chris, the first person from Wales I think I've ever met, as a matter of fact. >> Chris: (laughs) A privilege; thank you. >> For me it is, but thank you for being here. We appreciate the time. So we're talking about your migration, and, really, it wasn't a migration, it was like your head-first dive into the hyper-converged environment. You didn't tiptoe around it, you didn't wade into the water, You guys just dove right in. >> Chris: We're fearless, yes. >> What was the driver of that decision to be so fearless? >> Chris: As an organization, we've grown very quickly the last few years, and we've got significant growth in new hotels and a new conference center coming on board. And we're bursting at the seams in our existing environment, so we needed a platform that we could grow into this new environment very quickly and with predictive costs as best as we could. >> And so, Lee, walking them through this, >> Yeah, >> I mean, there's no convincing to be done here, but you do have to inspire some confidence, right? So somebody who's making a pretty bold move like this how did you approach that, and what did you do as far as assigning? >> Lee: You know, our partnership with Dell EMC is just a great testament here, right? I mean, you've taken the latest of 14G servers, for example, as part of VxRail. So you've got the best in hardware combined with VMWare underlying VCN software packaged up together, right, in a single point of support in a way that really makes us able to drop in and get started. Right, when you think about this, this is also interesting, in that here's a customer you know, in this case, you were using converged infrastructure in the past. >> It really is. Yeah. >> That's very common, right? So people who are looking for the advantage of like, how did I get the operational efficiencies? And now what you find is hyper-converge changes the operational model, and so it's around speed and agility, right? More than cost, right? And so, together, that's kind of the, our partnership is so powerful for customers looking to go and basically drive that kind of efficiency. >> Chris: Definitely, yeah. >> Keith: So, Chris, talk to us about that decision process. In typical organizations, this is Wired U, You're on theCUBE and it's so special. It's easy to talk about use cases on the edge VDI, specific, non-mission critical applications. But when it comes to stuff that runs the business, if it's down, the CIO, the CFO is at someone's desk asking when it's going to be back up. How did this discussion start? Was it from the bottom up, or was it from the top down? Exactly which teams said, "You know what? We need more agility, HCI, go!" >> Chris: Definitely from a bottom up perspective, but supported from top down when we came for it. We could see it in our environment, in our growing environment. We're a 24 hour business in a resort hotel, and we have little downtime Or, sorry, little time to do any upgrades, etc. So resilience within that environment was key to us for our uptime, so failing over with VMWare we use, with the VxWare we get now DRS and the Enterprise version which it comes with which we hadn't in our converged. So there is that automation of balancing your workloads, not having someone there watching it all the time so that has freed up a lot of time for my guys. Going forward there will be a lot more free time as well so we've got more time to concentrate on the guests and how we can make their experience better. >> So the story behind Converged systems, you know you have SAP, Oracle, BASSP, all these mission critical apps mission critical runs on CI and then everything else to run on, even from a vendor support, you know you talk to all the major software vendors, they say you all CI is the best opportunity. How did that conversation go with vendors when you said you know what, we're going to run mission critical on, I'm assuming vSAN? >> Lee: This is on vSAN in VxRail. >> vSAN, you know, we can't see your TR1 software providers and you know what, we're all vSAN, global size and scope, global? >> What, as an environment? >> Yes. >> It's a global environment really of over four hotels at the moment but growing into a bigger environment. We're going for an international conference center so kind of this sort of size, not quite as big as this but we're definitely not support from the hyper converged. And all our core systems are written on it, yes. Big Oracle databases, SQL, and our exchange service and there was a split between two clusters now in VxRail so we can, we can fail over to a node in VxRail, we can fail over to a cluster as well so as an SLE for up time we're business critical and the guys at the top of Celtic Manor have seen how that is for business you know. If we're not serving people or taking money then we're giving money back in a case for disruption. >> All right so you've been into this for a little bit less than a year now, correct? >> Correct, yes. >> I know Lee's sitting right next to you but let's just for a moment. I'm sure there has been at least a troubling moment of that transition or at least a hiccup somewhere that you had to settle, you had a problem, right? Something came up, if someone's watching this, thinking I wonder what they got hit with and how they handled it, how did you work around that, how did you adapt that, what would that be? What was the, maybe the one little hiccup right now that you've successfully- >> With deployment? >> Yeah. >> Nothing much but when we were migrating from a Converged infrastructure to a hyperconverged we added on the SANs to the hyperconverged so we could see them migrate over. A couple of servers didn't take too well to that one being motioned over. Nothing of the critical ones thankfully. But they, it was either a Windows update or once they restarted, it was only two of the servers but, we used the recover point then within VxRail and literally go back five, 10 minutes, which we did and up and running again, switched over, and we were you know, back up and running, but it was we had the decision there of, how long do we troubleshoot it for or do we just, that was our first instance of using recover point so we hadn't done it in a live environment so it was kind of, okay and pretty much out but it worked and it filled us with a lot of confidence now that we could do, we have that resilience going forward in an environment. >> Well let's talk about day two. >> I was just going to comment Ray, that this is part of the partnership that's so powerful for us right, is, you know I think VMWare learn that supporting storage systems, as we know, it's a little different than just computing. You know this, right, I mean, you know the idea of like, hey listen, a purple screen isn't the worst that can happen, 'cause you can reboot, right? It's really about, like, my data. And so when you start thinking about that, the ability for us to partner with Dell AMC who understands what it means to be supporting in a datacentric world, like that element, right is so powerful for us, right, because we've got a partner here who really understands the ability and that's part of the powerful concept of VxRail. >> So we had Tom Burns earlier and we were talking about VI and the importance of CI and there's still a great, I think, desire and temptation, and valid that CI gets you on the ground, running quickly, complex systems, easily deployed relative to traditional architectures. Talk to me about the practical of HCI, Day 2 Operations, CI, relatively easy to deploy but you still have some traditional operations concerns. What specifically did you guys see as the advantage Day two once you went to ACI? What's saving you all this time? >> Purely I think the time saver is the management of the system or the lack of management that we now need to do. There's, you've got one pane of glass to see everything which is very nice, you haven't got something separate for your SANs, your SX hosts, your networking and that support that you have, you know, there's one of them to call. You're not fighting between different entities saying it's your fault, it's your fault, there you go, sort it, so again that has freed up a lot of time, you know not knowing who to call or where to call but, you know, having one person who's going to sort it out and take ahold of that and fix it for you. And the remote support then, which is very good you know, you've got someone else monitoring your systems if you enable it, so you've got Dell support there and they can potentially see something before you do so I kind of gained another IT person for in this solution which is very nice. >> Yeah, we kind of joke you know, that a lot of people talk about hyperconvergence as if it's about us, but hyperconvergence is about you. When you think about it, right, it's about hyperconverging the IT staff. If you can hyperconverge the staff, right, that's when hyperconvergence does well, when we have one team, it's a converged team and people are like, hey listen, I'm going to go to a VMcentric management model. Now I can go and debug things right from a single console which is V center. That model works really fast, right? And where Converged still does a good job, right, is where I've got storage scaling at big scale but separate from compute separate. Hyperconvergence is about, it's about the organizational environment right? >> Very much so, bringing it all together, yeah. And it's simplistic in VMWare being so tightly integrated with VxRail was our main call against the other vendors, as a big call to, while they, you know, it's the best chef with the best ingredients, let's use that, not a dessert chef with the best ingredients >> Yeah, we have 500,000 customers who are familiar with V Center, right, and if you know V Center you know V SAN, you know VxRail, right? >> You can get simplistic again, so you already know it. >> Yeah, right. >> Well we could talk about this til we're blue in the face. I think we need to go see it in operation, don't you Keith? >> We'll set you up with some golf >> Now we're talking, be careful Chris, what you offer. Lee, Chris, good to see you guys. Thanks for being with us, we appreciate you sharing the story. Thank you very much. Back with more, here from Dell Technologies World we are live on theCUBE in Las Vegas.

>> Presenter: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2018! Brought to you by Dell EMC, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Cube! We are live at Day One of Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, and we are joined by two guests. We have Shannon Champion, Product Marketing of HCI at Dell EMC, and we have her customer, from Celtic Manor, Chris Stanley, IT Manager. Hey Chris! >> Hi. >> Welcome to the Cube, you guys! >> Thank you, thank you very much! >> And we just timed this perfect music intro for you! >> They knew, they knew! >> So Chris, Celtic Manor, you're based in Wales, talk to us about Celtic Manor, what it is that you do, before we start talking about your IT and Digital Transformations. >> Yeah sure, so we're a collection of hotels, four, in South Wales. Within that four, there is a resort hotel, with a conference center. We offer lots of facilities to our guests, golf courses, spas, all the niceties, bars, restaurants, and as well as the conference business being quite a big side of that. And we've got a lot of growth coming on with new hotels and a new convention center. Yeah, and we've got a staff of around about a thousand at the moment, half of those being PC end-users, and a small IT team of eight supporting all those people. >> So a lot of locations, a lot of stuff, a lot of data. Talk to us about what you're doing with Dell EMC, where did you start from, infrastructure-wise? And where are you now? >> Infrastructure-wise, we've been a Dell Partner probably since 2014. That was, we were the previous vendor before, and now at Dell EMC House, always good news, eh! (chuckles) And, our VxRail journey has begun, probably the last eight months, with a new convention center opening, which is an international one, International Convention Center Wales, a joint venture with the Welsh government there. And it's something that's, whereas we've got a lot of conference business now, we do very well at it, we have to turn away a lot of conference business because we're not big enough. So this facility can offer up to 4,000 people in the main room, 1,500-seat auditorium, as well as other breakout rooms. So sort of 6,000 potential guests on-site. And we needed some technology to support that, so we engaged with Dell EMC, and VxRail was our choice. We briefly evaluated others, but Dell EMC, we had a proven past with a great support and strategic partnership, so it was an easy decision. >> So we're going to get into sort of the details there, but Shannon, let me bring you into the conversation. Last time we really spent any time together was in the 14G Launch. You helped orchestrate a lot of the messaging of that, so give us the update on HCI and VxRail, did that awesome marketing package that you put together, is it living up to the marketplace! (all laughing) >> Well thank you for that softball, Dave! Yes, yeah! So in November we were talking to you about HCI and 14th-generation PowerEdge servers, and how PowerEdge is really designed with software-defined storage in mind, and how that really set itself up well for HCI. And what it does is open up doors to being applicable for even more mainstream workloads and applications because of the power and predictability that provides, and Celtic Manor is a perfect example of that, in terms of, initially, using VxRail to scale quickly and reliably for a majority of their workloads and applications, actually. And now, are moving to VDI where, historically, VDI has really been the entry point for HCI. So it's really exciting to see that sort of flip-flop use case here. >> Right, it was like the obligatory workload or use case, right? >> Chris: We like to be different. (laughing) >> Well, I mean, your business is different, right? >> Yes! >> I wonder if you could start with some of the business drivers, right? I mean, obviously, very competitive industry, but you've got some unique differentiators, right, experiences that you're offering customers is somewhat different. But what's driving your business? Speed, digital disruption, maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Organizational growth was a key one. With new hotels and conference centers coming on we were bursting at the seams with our current environment. >> Good problem! >> Yeah, so we're all very good. But it was supporting that for customers going forward as well as our staff, supporting with the systems and reliability that we can, to ensure that we get the businesses doing, you know, its utmost. And then, yeah, going on from there, we offer all these different kinds of facilities on-site, golf, bedrooms, spas, all needing different systems, from booking systems through to your VOIP systems, your big databases, Oracle databases, on these servers. So quite a hard workload on them. And we're looking for something that was easy for us to manage, you know, going forward. >> So Chris in terms of IT transformation, Michael Dell talked this morning about these four transformative elements that a company should take to be successful. Digital, IT, workforce, security, talking about the opportunity for IT innovation, to really convert IT into a profit center. And where IT innovation is successful is where customers are looking at it as a business strategy. Talk to us about the stakeholders, maybe, from the CFO's perspective, of, "Hey, we have a great opportunity here "to capture more business and be more competitive." What was that conversation like, the IT folks to the CFO to get budget and approval to help transform? >> Always a tough conversation. (chuckling) Going from the past experience where we'd initially gone with a converge solution back in 2014 with Dell, that alone saved us a significant amount in power alone, so it was something that paid for itself. >> So the CFO was already like, "Alright guys"-- >> Yeah, you know what you're doing, so yeah. We took that, we could see where our pain points were in the environment we currently had, and with it, all the additional hotels, conference centers, coming on, we were at a key stage where we needed to, from the core, build outwards. So VxRail was and obvious-er choice, I should say, in the end. But it was key to transformation, because it enables us now to look at other methods. It's freed up a lot of time for IT staff, so we're looking at deploying a virtual desktop solution now which we don't currently have. And that could be initially anything from up to 300 virtual desktops, so big load, but we now have the core capacity there to do it. And we're looking at other things for our guests, where we can give them a better experience. So Artificial Intelligence, AI, is very big on the agenda, so we look at everything. There's face recognition systems now that can recognize the guests when they come in, ping a message, we haven't deployed these yet, we're still looking at them. But it's enabled us to look at these now with the power behind us of the 14G service. So it's all, it's a key enabler for us, the VxRail solution. >> Opening up the potential for emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning... >> Yes, very much so. >> How do you differentiate from your HCI competition? What are some of the touchpoints there? >> Well, from a VMware focus perspective, you know, Celtic Manor has deployed VxRail. Our differentiator is that we're the only provider through our strategically-aligned business relationship that is jointly engineered with VMware. And so what that means, from a customer point of view, is a more seamless experience, right. Familiar tools they already know and love, that they use day to day, from a VMware perspective, for day-to-day management. But then also the automation that's built in. Automated deployment, ability to upgrade with one click, seamless process to scale quickly when you have new hotels coming online, for example. And then have a single point of support. So we take one single call, whether it's hardware or software, for VxRail. If there's an issue, call Dell EMC and a lot of customers find a lot of value in that. >> So, okay, Chris, now I've got to ask you. So you heard that from Dell EMC, but a lot of companies would say, "Well, we get along great with VMware, "we get the SDKs early, "yeah, those guys overplay all that stuff." What, from your perspective, how important is what Shannon just laid out? And how real is it? >> It's very real. And Shannon basically, yeah, all those points there were literally what we were struggling with. We had the one support telephone company to call, imperative to us. We'd been ringing, in the past we'd be ringing Sand Storage, we were ringing ESX, VMware, all blaming each other, and you're going back and forth and you're wasting key time. With one support number now, you know, you've one call, you've got a one-stop-shop to sort it. So that was a big, big call for us. The 14G service as well, we also get the recover points which enables us to have two environments where we can lose one, and one total environment lost, but still operate as a business. So all of these, keeping, giving us uptimes to close to 100% as we can. >> Have your had to test that yet? Or, when I say test, has it actually, have you had to fail over? I mean, you probably tested it, hopefully you tested it, but-- >> We have-- >> Dave: Has it tested you yet, let me put it that way! >> Yeah, we have failed over servers. We haven't failed over a whole cluster, because you hope it's one of the things you hope you never have to do. (Shannon laughing) We've tested the procedure between nodes, as you would, and there is, we have tested recently with the Recover Point software, where we have lost servers, and it's a decision then, do we try to troubleshoot the problem or do we just go back a few minutes when it was working and we just, we gave it an hour to sort it out, it was impacting, so we just rolled back as if it never happened! >> It worked! >> Yeah, which was a nice reaffirmation that what we did was right! >> So Shannon you talked about resiliency, speed. There was an analyst report, recently, that I'd like you to kind of enlighten us on. And kind of look at one of the thing Chris said, in terms of getting back to the business cost savings. How does Celtic Manor's achievement so far kind of align with what you're seeing in terms of customers being able to leverage HCI to be more budget friendly? >> Yeah, so, I think you're referring to our IT Maturity Study. And what we're seeing is that the majority of customers, almost all of them, are telling us that if they don't transform in their industry, then they'll no longer be competitive. So I think all of our customers are kind of coming to that realization. One of the key aspects to that is that a year ago, when we asked the same question, a significantly lower number was mentioned. So I think that just speaks to the speed and the urgency that customers are coming to the realization that it's really important to transform, and we need to do it sooner rather than later. We have a lot of proof points around VxRail, particularly, in terms of the automation. You know, 73% faster to deploy, that means value to customers. That's money that they're saving, directly. And lower serviceability costs overall, over 40% lower. So that translates into real TCO, goes back to the CFO, you know, that helps understand the investment that they're making, lets them reprioritize in other areas of the business that helps them transform and stay innovative in their industry. >> I want to follow up on that last point that Shannon just made. And a lot of times, when you're bringing in some kind of consolidation, the staff says, "Uh oh, "that means I'm going to lose my job, "because I'm really good at revisioning LANs" or whatever it is. How did you address that, was there organizational tension, what did you do with the time that was freed up? >> Yeah, I think it's helped transform the IT team. If anything, it's freed up time, but that time is now taken, it's given us more time to look at innovative products and going forwards. There is, our staff has a tendency to specialize more as opposed to generalize, which is nice. As in, the VxRail has sat there, and it's pretty much doing what you would do with minimal amounts of watching over them, with the remote support, who also watch your environment, if you enable it. If you have any outages there, they can potentially draw your attention to it before you even know. So lots of time's been freed up, and now you can see the staff are embracing it there, they're happy they've got this additional time not to be doing the not-so-important stuff, as we say, although it is very important, to keep it going. But they have more time now to specialize in what they mostly enjoy. So it's brought it on full circle now, so it's really, yeah, we're really seeing some positives. >> And hang out with their families on the weekends. (everyone speaking at once in agreement) So since they're not doing that, and they have more time to innovate, where are you on this data center modernization journey? And where, we talked about VDI, but where do you think you are in that journey? >> With respect to, with VDI, we are imminently doing it. We finished deploying the second VxRail cluster, the five S Series nodes, probably only a couple weeks ago, after a full migration of all the existing VMs. So it's now enabling us to look at VDI, which, ironically, when we get back, the week I get back, we have a meeting with Dell EMC on, do we need another node, all flash, or do we, we have specced within five nodes, some capacity for virtual desktops. But it's, again, something that, with all these additional hotels coming on, the conference centers, virtual desktop is the way to go. Even centralizing the data more so people aren't taking all data off of their laptops, so we're a more secure environment. So again, a great enabler for us, and finally, after four or five years, I get the virtual desktop! Done it the other way around, but-- >> Do you golf? >> I used to golf a lot. >> Okay, so you know what a mulligan is. >> Yeah. >> So, if you had a mulligan, what would you do differently? >> Um, what would I do differently? Good question! >> I mean, specific to this project. (chuckling) >> Nothing, really. I think everything pretty much has been done as I would expect. When we first deployed the conference center, the new conference center environment, it was a bit disjointed, because the conference center wasn't built and in full use. It kind of gave us some time to test the environment fully, which we also did with the Dell VxRail test drives, which I know the guys offer you were you can go into a classroom facility for a day and see it in action before you actually purchase and use it. >> Same question, different spin. Advice for your peers. Because obviously you had some successes. What would you tell them, to be successful? >> Just go for it! If you're thinking it, I mean, it is, as far as I can see, it is the future product, and it's not going to go in any other direction. The management side of things is far more simplistic than everything else we've experienced in the past. And it's baked-in VMware so, you know, you have the best chef and the best ingredients with the best thing as opposed to another chef taking the best ingredients and trying to do something. So yeah, it's just seamless integration now, and it gives us a lot of confidence that we have everything there with Dell, and this environment, to go forward and grow even bigger as a business. >> And then we've cued your outro music. >> Perfect! >> Timed that perfectly! Chris, thank you so much for sharing what you're doing at Celtic Manor to innovate, making your IT transformation. Shannon, thank you for sharing what's new with HCI. Dave, thank you for sharing with me the word "mulligan", I just looked it up. In case you don't know what a mulligan is, it is an extra stroke allowed after a poor golf shot. I probably would be like the mulligan queen. >> You get a few. (chuckles) >> We want to thank you for watching the Cube, we are live on Day One of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, stick around, we'll be right back after a short break. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante, and Stu Miniman. >> For several years now, the analysts at WikiBound have been talking about taking the cloud, the public cloud, operating model, and bringing it to your data, wherever that data lives. Hey everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Welcome to HCI: A Foundation For IT Transformation. We're here with Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management and Marketing, at Dell EMC. Chad, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, glad to be here, good to spend time with you guys. >> So, we talk a lot about, you know, VxRail, speaking of foundations. Give us a quick update. What is it, and what's new with VxRail? >> Okay, well big news in VxRail land, right, we just completed our transition under the 14th generation of Dell Power Edge servers, so this gives us a substantially more powerful platform, a substantially more predictable performance, and a lot more configuration options that make it fit a lot of different workloads that our customers have, so it really makes it prime time for HCI. >> So, where is the power and performance come from? Is that predominantly, kind of, new compute? >> That's a big piece of it. Some of that is software as well, right? vSAN underlies VxRail as a software defined storage layer, and we've seen pretty amazing increases in performance, just from software, from our 13G, to our 14G transition, but when we look at that performance now, on 14G servers, with the Intel Skylake chipset, we're seeing 2x performance over the last generation, and we're seeing latencies that are very, very low. And that has to do with, more and faster memory channels, more threads, overall faster processors, so really off the hook, in terms of the performance that we're seeing. >> Chad, when we look at HCI, it's really about the software layer, often, it gets overlooked, you know, what actually has to happen between the software and that underlying hardware? Are there optimizations, does it matter if I'm using the software, you know, what's optimized for that next generation Intel chip? >> Yeah, it's all about the software, or so our software vendor would say, but we know that when you're treating something as a system, you need that hardware and that software to work together, in perfect unison, as a system, and, you know, we've done a lot in this generation, working with the PowerEdge team to make sure that we have the right hardware, hooks, and design points that are focused on HCI. That goes from things like the devices that we use to boot up, and where we would execute the hypervisor kernel, to network connectivity, and really importantly, to the inband channels that we use to update all of the little pieces of firmware that operate the hardware inside the system, right? You need to be able to treat those as a system, update, lifecycle manage those, all in context of one another, so having direct and deep, meaningful access into that hardware is critically important when you're operating a system like this. >> When we've looked at, kind of, our cloud strategy, in general, it's about the data. We talk about data, it's things like predictability and latency, it's about, kind of, the power of the underlying thing, maybe, give us a little bit more specifics, as to what you're getting in this generation. >> So, the big difference here, above and beyond the performance, which is about 2x what we saw from the last generation, if we look at the same hardware, the same software, running on the two different pieces of hardware, about 100% better. But that's really just part of the story. It's the predictability of latency that's critically important. If you're going to migrate Tier 1 workloads under this infrastructure, you need to ensure that other workloads are not going to disturb that performance. So when we look at this, we look at how the IOs per second increases, and we look at the overall latency. How long does that latency line stay flat, right? So when we look at this generation, we see over 2x the IOPS, but the horizontal line where we look at the response time in latency, it stays flat nine times longer in this generation than in the last. So if you've got that sub-millisecond response time, even at very high IOPS, you can put a lot of different workloads on that same infrastructure, and still get predictable performance. >> I think, the other thing that people don't understand, is that, oh, HCI, it's just like, it's that little LEGO block you build, but it's not just one LEGO block, what have you seen from customers, what's kind of, the portfolio, what are the decisions that they have to make, to kind of, pick the right configuration? >> Sure, so yeah, when you're a kid and you get your first LEGO set, you get a lot of pretty generalized blocks, they're all, you know, square and some are rectangle, but not a lot of variability. When you get up into the big leagues of the LEGO Star Wars set, right, you've got a lot of specialized parts, and you can do really advanced, really cool things. That's really where we're at with HCI right now. If you want to really tune the infrastructure for the workloads that you have, you need a lot of variability in the processors you choose, the amount of memory, the speed of memory, and even the storage. It could be hybrid, some people still choose hybrid HDDs, but even within flash, people will choose SAS or SATA drives depending on the performance and cost benefits that they want to realize. So being able to scale up and down the processors, the memory, different types of storage, is critically important, so you can fit it into those different workloads. Also, a lot more people use this for VDI, and for high end imaging. So the ability to pack these things full of graphical processing units, and still be able to power and cool the things, is critically important. We have a lot of applications in those verticals where there's video processing and these are required. So, we don't just have one model of VxRail, we've got a number of different VxRail models, all of which can scale up, and then of course, HCI can intrinsically scale out. So that lets you really fine-tune it and get to that expert level, in terms of your LEGO building blocks. >> So Chad, a minute ago, you mentioned workloads. So as you're bringing this sort of 14th generation server technology to VxRail, how has it affected workloads, what are you seeing is the sweet spot for workloads? >> So if I were to think back a year, the question that every customer would ask, is how do I know which workload is right for HCI? And a lot of times they even lack the vocabulary and taxonomy to say, okay, that fits, that doesn't fit. What's happened in the meantime though, are the software's gotten so much better, the hardware's gotten so much faster and more predictable, that the question is, well, what workloads are not right for HCI yet? And there are very few that aren't. So, we've seen people generally start off with one workload, right? Maybe it's VDI, maybe it's a database, and then they start to move other, as they get comfortable with it, they move other workloads over to it. Obviously, we've got a big install block, or install base of VxBlock, and Vblock. We see a lot of those customers start to migrate workloads from there onto a layer of HCI. And more and more, those are becoming Tier One workloads. Crate & Barrel is a great example, a great customer of ours. They're moving their point of sale systems onto VxRail. Now for a retailer, your point of sale system, that's about as mission critical as you can possibly get, so they and others now have the confidence to start to move these things over. The only outliers that we see are some of these very big data applications that are hugely write intensive, and we actually usually end up selling a layer of hyper-converge with our Isilon arrays, to store that data, and then put a layer of hyper-converge compute around it, because in some ways, hyper-converged is just a better way to server, if you know what I mean. >> Wondering if you can talk about the business impact, what a customer's seeing, how are they quantifying the value of these systems, share some stories, or color there. >> Sure, it's all about operational expense savings, right? How much more efficiently am I going to be able to operate this infrastructure? It's not so much about capital acquisition costs. So when you look at the typical operational expense savings, and that comes from us doing all the lifecycle management of the hardware, of the software, of the cluster as a system, you see those costs go down. Really good example, is First Credit of British Columbia. Another one of our good customers. Now, they've deployed this, they've seen 30% OPEX savings and they've seen 50% power and space savings. You get a smaller package because you don't have separate storage array, separate servers, but, you also have really, one function that needs to operate your environment and that's the virtual administrator. He or she is the one that really operates everything, you don't have separate storage, separate compute, separate virtualization teams that have to look after the infrastructure. So, that first run is very easy, very fast to deploy, but it's day two through 700 and day 900 where you see that recurring operational expense saving where it really pays off for customers, all the updates and updates and life cycle management. >> Yeah, so Chad you talk about the success and all the customers. What about the customers that haven't looked at kind of the HCI space yet? What are they missing? You know, what do you say to those customers that maybe, you know, aren't sure if the waters right to jump in yet? >> So there's really three ways that you're going to encounter a customer who's going to consider HCI. You're either going to refresh a server, you know, your servers are up for maintenance and you're going to take a look at HCI as the next step in your evolution of your compute strategy. Or you're going to refresh your storage, and you're going to look at hyperconvergence as the next step in the evolution of your storage strategy. Or you've got that one workload that's probably net new and it's going to be, sort of, an isolated case and they need an infrastructure and they need to stand if up fast. That third case is really the one that drove the initial adoption of HCI, I can't tell you how many of our customers started with VDI. I mean, it's so cliched now to talk about VDI as killer app for HCI, but that's how so many people started. Because it's, you know, a very bound, isolated infrastructure and from there they get comfortable with it and they start to bring other workloads onto it. So, if you're thinking about refreshing your servers and if you're thinking about refreshing storage, it's time to kick the tires onto HCI. If you've got a workload that you need to stand up quickly and you don't know how big it's going to be, you know, one, two, three years down the road. It's another opportunity to look at HCI. Because you can start with a very small infrastructure, but you can grow it to a very very large one. >> What if we could talk a little bit about digital transformation, I mean, everybody's talking about digital transformation, and to us, digital transformation is all about how you leverage data and the edges exploding. We've envisioned sort of a three tier data model. You've got the edge, you've got maybe an aggregation point and you bring it back to the cloud. And that cloud can be a public cloud or it can be on-prem. So you've got to have some kind of cloud infrastructure to manage all this data. So where does this fit in the context of transformations and why does hardware matter? >> Yep, well let's go from the end and work back to the beginning. Hardware matters because of form factor, for one. As you start to push compute out to the edge, right, you want form factors that are small, don't consume a lot of power but, you know, still have a lot of processing power and can manipulate that data. Right, the whole internet of things phenomenon that is, creating all this data out at the edge, you know, presents us with a conundrum right? The data itself is not that valuable, the insights that we get from the data are immensely valuable. Bringing all that data back to the core to do something with is not cost effective. So, it's how do we turn the data at the edge into information and then how do we funnel that valuable information back to the core and leave the unvaluable data out where it is. hyper-converge fits really well there because you can have, you know, devices of very small form factors that are very quick to deploy, very easy to manage remotely. At the aggregation point you can have, simply, larger versions of the same thing or more of the same thing. And then finally at the core you can have very large clusters of hyperconverged appliances, like VxRail, to do your processing. Now the key is from an operational perspective you've still got a single pane of glass that manages everything. Right, it's still the same set of tools, it's still the same hardware and software lifecycle management process that happens out at the edge, at the aggregation point and at the core. So again, it comes back to the operational expense of making decisions closer to the data and then managing everything with a consistent set of tools. >> So I wondered if we could also talk about the competition and when Stu and I think about competition in this sphere we look at, first of all this all sort of software defined, everything can moved into software defined. So we see two vectors, one is head to head competition with other software defined suppliers, and the second big competitor is, hey, I'm just going to roll on my own. >> Chad Dunn: Right >> So let's start with the former, why Delium C vs vendor A, B, C or D? >> Sure, sure it really gets down to what your goal is as a customer and we obviously have multiple options within our own portfolio and those perfectly, you know, find solutions for a lot of people. But, you know, number one if you're a VMware user and you want to optimize around the VMware user experience, then VxRail is the way to go. Because we do co-engineer this with Vmware, it's not just a regular partnership, we have engineers and marketing people and product managers at Vmware that functionally role up to our team and so we do behave as one engineering and one product management organization to really optimize the user experience for VMware. Secondly, architecturally from a VCM perspective, this is a service that's baked into the kernal of vSphere. So, in terms of performance and the overhead that it creates on CPU, memory, et cetera. This is the best game in town. We can do more IO more predictably with flatter latency than really any other solution that's on the market in the HCI space. Every other one takes a virtual storage appliance approach where they have something running on top of the hypervisor. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> The very long and circuitous data path, we'll performance test against solutions like that all day long, every day, that doesn't worry us at all. So, if you're a vSphere customer, VMware customer it's the most obvious choice and from a performance perspective you're not giving up anything right? We don't want users to have to sacrifice the storage functionality, the performance, the compute functionality. Just because it's hyper-converge and you scale out doesn't mean you can compromise on any to those axis. >> Okay, what about the guys who like to change their own oil in the car and the spark plugs and tune it up and they want to roll on their own. >> (laughs) It's been a long time since I've been able to work on my own car. So I encounter these kind of customers all the time. It's the build your own crowd and it's what they've been doing for a long time. And it's great, alright, I build my own computers at home and I have my own ESX server that I put together. I can't afford a VxRail. (laughing) There's no employee discount. So I'll tell you a story that will hopefully make sense, my first job when I got into this business, I went to Boston College, my first job and work study was to keep a spreadsheet that had all the MAC addresses and all the IP addresses for every host on the BC network and keep those in sync. >> You're really good at that I bet. >> I was excellent at that. That is not a skill set that is in demand right now. Or really even at that time. But when you think about what it means to take a software defined storage product like VMware vSAN and take an x86 server and put those together. Yes, you're getting to the same destination of running vSphere on a host with software defined storage. You're missing the systemness, right? We go to a lot of trouble to make sure we're managing all of things things in the context of the cluster level. All of the little pieces of firmware, and they're roughly 12 or so pieces of firmware that we have to take care of. From the BIOS to the drive controller firmware, the drives, the boss card, which is our boot media, the iDRAC firmware, the backplane, power supplies. In legacy EMC we spent 30 years building arrays. We had all those same challenges with all the different pieces of firmware and software that all had to function as a system, we did that. And we guaranteed that it would live up to 5/9ths of availability for the customer. That's exactly what we do when we deliver VxRail's hyperconverge. If you want to choose to build those things yourself that's fine if you have the skills and that's how you want to operate your business. The 5/9ths is now on you though. Right, because you're the one responsible for bringing all those parts together. So, yeah it's certainly a valid path for others but, the market is shifting and we see more often than not, people are moving towards a buy approach rather than build. >> You bring up a great point. I remember back in the early days before we even called it HCI, you think about vSAN, oh well is the storage admin going to buy it? Is the virtualization admin going to take that over? What's excited me about this wave is the oh, heres the cool stuff that companies are doing now that they're not spending their time keeping spreadsheets of MAC addresses. >> Chad Dunn: Yeah, yeah exactly. >> What is the kind of, you know, owner of this, look like in your environment? And any cool stories you're hearing from customers transforming their organization. >> By and large the operator is your virtual admin. The person who is at home in vCenter and vROps, you know, maybe even vRA if they're going full infrastructure as a service. That's really the user of this, and the dynamic you mention is similar to what we had with Vblock, right. Customers who went Vblock, who said, I'm going to change my operating model to a virtual administrator versus compute, storage, network. You know, customers who didn't change the operating model were not happy Vblock customers. Ones that did change the model did. And, I'll tell ya a real off script anecdote, recently I was traveling in Europe, and I started playing a game with the sales guy we were traveling with. Because in Europe, very often, they have more of an affinity to putting their logos on the sides of buildings in a lot of European cities. So, as we would go to these different cities and we went from Stockholm all the way down to Rome, to Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You know, we're just spotting VxRail customers, right, whose going to spot the most. And the one really interesting one is we checked into a hotel, you know, late night in Switzerland. Next morning we meet for breakfast and he goes, "Did you spot the rail customer?" I said "Who was it?" We went into the bathroom and they have these, you know, squeeze bottles that have the soap in the shower and it's a cosmetics company and they're located in Germany. And they do, obviously, a ton of business all over Europe, and they had outsourced a lot of their IT because, you know, their core competency is not IT, it's cosmetics. And they now have one guy that looks after all of IT for this company rather than outsource it to two different companies to manage all this and he runs it all on VxRail. So, transformative yes, to that company very transformative. But, at a very small scale, but that pattern sort of repeats itself the higher that you scale. >> Alright we're out of time but where can people go to get more information on this and other products your HTI strategy. >> If I were them I'd go to dellemc.com/hci. >> Excellent, Chad, thanks very much, Stu appreciate you co-hosting with me and check out videos on thecube.net, this and other videos will be up there. Thanks for watching everybody, Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman we'll see you next time! (techno music)

>> Narrator: From Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Super Computing '17, brought to you by Intel. Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Super Computing 2017, Denver, Colorado, 12,000 people talking about big iron, big questions, big challenges. It's really an interesting take on computing, really out on the edge. The key note was, literally, light years out in space, talking about predicting the future with quirks and all kinds of things, a little over my head for sure. But we're excited to kind of get back to the ground and we have Ravi Pendekanti. He's the Senior Vice President of Product Management and Marketing, Server Platforms, Dell EMC. It's a mouthful, Ravi great to see you. Great to see you too Jeff and thanks for having me here. Absolutely, so we were talking before we turned the cameras on. One of your big themes, which I love, is kind of democratizing this whole concept of high performance computing, so it's not just the academics answering the really, really, really big questions. You're absolutely right. I mean think about it Jeff, 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, when people talk about high performance computing, it was what I call as being in the back alleys of research and development. There were a few research scientists working on it, but we're at a time in our journey towards helping humanity in a bigger way. The HPC has found it's way into almost every single mainstream industry you can think of. Whether it is fraud detection, you see MasterCard is using it for ensuring that they can see and detect any of the fraud that can be committed earlier than the perpetrators come in and actually hack the system. Or if you get into life sciences, if you talk about genomics. I mean this is what might be good for our next set of generations, where they can probably go out and tweak some of the things in a genome sequence so that we don't have the same issues that we have had in the past. Right. Right? So, likewise, you can pick any favorite industry. I mean we are coming up to the holiday seasons soon. I know a lot of our customers are looking at how do they come up with the right schema to ensure that they can stock the right product and ensure that it is available for everyone at the right time? 'Cause timing is important. I don't think any kid wants to go with no toy and have the product ship later. So bottom line is, yes, we are looking at ensuring the HPC reaches every single industry you can think of. So how do you guys parse HPC verses a really big virtualized cluster? I mean there's so many ways that compute and store has evolved, right? So now, with cloud and virtual cloud and private cloud and virtualization, you know, I can pull quite a bit of horsepower together to attack a problem. So how do you kind of cut the line between Navigate, yeah. big, big compute, verses true HPC? HPC. It's interesting you ask. I'm actually glad you asked because people think that it's just feeding CPU or additional CPU will do the trick, it doesn't. The simple fact is, if you look at the amount of data that is being created. I'll give you a simple example. I mean, we are talking to one of the airlines right now, and they're interested in capturing all the data that comes through their flights. And one of the things they're doing is capturing all the data from their engines. 'Cause end of the day, you want to make sure that your engines are pristine as they're flying. And every hour that an engine flies out, I mean as an airplane flies out, it creates about 20 terabytes of data. So, if you have a dual engine, which is what most flights are. In one hour they create about 40 terabytes of data. And there are supposedly about 38,000 flights taking off at any given time around the world. I mean, it's one huge data collection problem. Right? I mean, I'm told it's like a real Godzilla number, so I'll let you do the computation. My point is if you really look at the data, data has no value, right? What really is important is getting information out of it. The CPU on the other side has gone to a time and a phase where it is hitting the, what I call as the threshold of the Moore's law. Moore's law was all about performance doubles every two years. But today, that performance is not sufficient. Which is where auxiliary technologies need to be brought in. This is where the GPUs, the FBGAs. Right, right. Right. So when you think about these, that's where the HPC world takes off, is you're augmenting your CPUs and your processors with additional auxiliary technology such as the GPUs and FBGAs to ensure that you have more juice to go do this kind of analytics and the massive amounts of data that you and I and the rest of the humanity is creating. It's funny that you talk about that. We were just at a Western Digital event a little while ago, talking about the next generation of drives and it was the same thing where now it's this energy assist method to change really the molecular way that it saves information to get more out of it. So that's kind of how you parse it. If you've got to juice the CPU, and kind of juice the traditional standard architecture, then you're moving into the realm of high performance computing. Absolutely, I mean this is why, Jeff, yesterday we launched a new PowerEdge C4140, right? The first of it's kind in terms of the fact that it's got two Intel Xeon processors, but beyond that, it also can support four Nvidia GPUs. So now you're looking at a server that's got both the CPUs, to your earlier comment on processors, but is augmented by four of the GPUs, that gives immense capacity to do this kind of high performance computing. But as you said, it's not just compute, it's store, it's networking, it's services, and then hopefully you package something together in a solution so I don't have to build the whole thing from scratch, you guys are making moves, right? Oh, this is a perfect lead in, perfect lead in. I know, my colleague, Armagon will be talking to you guys shortly. What his team does, is it takes all the building blocks we provide, such as the servers, obviously looks at the networking, the storage elements, and then puts them together to create what are called solutions. So if you've got solutions, which enable our customers to go back in and easily deploy a machine-learning or a deep-learning solution. Where now our customers don't have to do what I call as the heavy lift. In trying to make sure that they understand how the different pieces integrate together. So the goal behind what we are doing at Dell EMC is to remove the guess work out so that our customers and partners can go out and spend their time deploying the solution. Whether it is for machine learning, deep learning or pick your favorite industry, we can also verticalize it. So that's the beauty of what we are doing at Dell EMC. So the other thing we were talking about before we turned turned the cameras on is, I call them the itys from my old Intel days, reliability, sustainability, serviceability, and you had a different phrase for it. >> Ravi: Oh yes, I know you're talking about the RAS. The RAS, right. Which is the reliability, availability, and serviceability. >> Jeff: But you've got a new twist on it. Oh we do. Adding something very important, and we were just at a security show early this week, CyberConnect, and security now cuts through everything. Because it's no longer a walled garden, 'cause there are no walls. There are no walls. It's really got to be baked in every layer of the solution. Absolutely right. The reason is, if you really look at security, it's not about, you know till a few years ago, people used to think it's all about protecting yourself from external forces, but today we know that 40% of the hacks happen because of the internal, you know, system processes that we don't have in place. Or we could have a person with an intent to break in for whatever reason, so the integrated security becomes part and parcel of what we do. This is where, with in part of a 14G family, one of the things we said is we need to have integrated security built in. And along with that, we want to have the scalability because no two workloads are the same and we all know that the amount of data that's being created today is twice what it was the last year for each of us. Forget about everything else we are collecting. So when you think about it, we need integrated security. We need to have the scalability feature set, also we want to make sure there is automation built in. These three main tenets that we talked about feed into what we call internally, the monic of a user's PARIS. And that's what I think, Jeff, to our earlier conversation, PARIS is all about, P is for best price performance. Anybody can choose to get the right performance or the best performance, but you don't want to shell out a ton of dollars. Likewise, you don't want to pay minimal dollars and try and get the best performance, that's not going to happen. I think there's a healthy balance between price performance, that's important. Availability is important. Interoperability, as much as everybody thinks that they can act on their own, it's nearly impossible, or it's impossible that you can do it on your own. >> Jeff: These are big customers, they've got a lot of systems. You are. You need to have an ecosystem of partners and technologies that come together and then, end of the day, you have to go out and have availability and serviceability, or security, to your point, security is important. So PARIS is about price performance, availability, interoperability, reliability, availability and security. I like it. That's the way we design it. It's much sexier than that. We drop in, like an Eiffel Tower picture right now. There you go, you should. So Ravi, hard to believe we're at the end of 2017, if we get together a year from now at Super Computing 2018, what are some of your goals, what are your some objectives for 2018? What are we going to be talking about a year from today? Oh, well looking into a crystal ball, as much as I can look into that, I thin that-- >> Jeff: As much as you can disclose. And as much as we can disclose, a few things I think are going to happen. >> Jeff: Okay. Number one, I think you will see people talk about to where we started this conversation. HPC has become mainstream, we talked about it, but the adoption of high performance computing, in my personal belief, is not still at a level that it needs to be. So, if you go down next 12 to 18 months, lets say, I do think the adoption rates will be much higher than where we are. And we talk about security now, because it's a very topical subject, but as much as we are trying to emphasize to our partners and customers that you've got to think about security from ground zero. We still see a number of customers who are not ready. You know, some of the analysis show there are nearly 40% of the CIOs are not ready in helping and they truly understand, I should say, what it takes to have a secure system and a secure infrastructure. It's my humble belief that people will pay attention to it and move the needle on it. And we talked about, you know, four GPUs in our C4140, do anticipate that there will be a lot more of auxiliary technology packed into it. Sure, sure. So that's essentially what I can say without spilling the beans too much. Okay, all right, super. Ravi, thanks for taking a couple of minutes out of your day, appreciate it. = Thank you. All right, he's Ravi, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from Super Computing 2017 in Denver, Colorado. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Voiceover: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts it's theCUBE. (upbeat techno music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. (upbeat techno music) >> The research analysts at Wikibon tell us that the market for what they call true private cloud, that is on-prem infrastructure that substantially mimics public cloud infrastructure, the market for true private cloud is growing at 30% compound annual growth rate. Twice the rate of infrastructure as a service in public cloud. Why is that? It's because HCI is really a foundation for IT transformation and private cloud, true private cloud as we call it at Wikibon. Hi, everybody, my name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Colin Gallagher who's the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Dell EMC. Colin, good to see you again. >> Thanks, good to be here again, Dave. >> So, we're going to get into it, and we're going to talk a lot about VxRail, which was announced well over a year ago. Give us the update on VxRail. >> So, yeah. It's actually almost been two years. It'll be two years this coming February. And it's been a tremendous ride. We have seen tremendous customer adoption, primary for some of the reasons you just mentioned. Customers looking to build private cloud on an agile, kind of modern transformative infrastructure. And to date we've sold over 17,000 nodes. That's over a whopping 165,000 cores, and over 190 petabytes of storage. So, tremendous amount of success. All of this great customer interest has helped propel Dell EMC to be number one in hyperconverged. And we haven't just been selling the same product for the last two years. We've been continually innovating over the course of these last two years driving a tremendous pace of innovation. We've introduced new software capabilities. We had hybrid-only configurations to start and rapidly introduced all flash. After Dell acquired EMC, we moved to a Dell-based hardware infrastructure, obviously. >> Quickly. >> Very quickly, very quickly. >> Almost as fast as the logos changed. >> Yes, almost. (laughter) Within two months. And what we're announcing today is that we're building the next generation and selling the next generation of VxRail appliances based on the 14th generation PowerEdge servers. >> Okay, so you mentioned a lot of that was driven by, of course, the acquisition. But tell us more about 14G sort of and VxRail. What's the synergy? People say, "Eh, it's just another server." Is that the case? >> Absolutely not, Dave. By leveraging the 14th generation PowerEdge servers, we are able to deliver a tremendously powerful, a tremendously purposeful, and tremendously polished appliance experience. What do I mean by powerful? With VxRail we can deliver two times the IOPS than we could on previous generation servers. That allows us to power tremendous mission-critical workloads. But what do we mean by purposeful? We can deliver over a million combinations of configurations for customers. And yes, it's over a million. Me and my team counted, and they hate me for it. (laughs) Yes. >> Really? Did you use a supercomputer to do all that counting? >> No, just Excel spreadsheets and a lot of elbow grease. But by tailoring this, by delivering allows customers to buy exactly what they need to master specific configurations. And by polished we can deliver a highly predictable system. We can deliver over nine times more predictable system than we could in previous generations. And we can maintain sub-millisecond latency for a wide variety of workloads. >> So, I'm interested in this specific contribution of PowerEdge. You're basically saying that it's essentially built for this type of environment. It's not just a generic sort of server that you're popping in. >> Absolutely. You know, the fallacy that people assume when we talk about hyperconverge, which is built on top of software-defined storage, is that hardware doesn't matter. And while yes, a tremendous amount of the power comes from the software, hardware does make a difference. You know, you get a very different experience when you have purpose-built hardware that takes advantage and integrates well with the software-defined layer than if you just throw it on top of a white box server. Think about the hard thing we used to do for storage array. Someone still needs to do that work. You know, software isn't going to cover all of that. And these PowerEdge 14th generation servers have over 150 custom requirements from us, the software-defining ACI teams. Things like how you boot. That needs to be done differently in hyperconverge appliances. The drive choices that we select, they need to be very different than you would find in just a standard server. Even things like power and cooling are slightly different based on the needs of hyperconverge. So, what you've got with a 14th gen server is purpose-built hardware for hyperconverge. You know, the net-net is hardware matters. >> So, you mentioned a lot of permutations. What are some of the configuration options that people should know about here? >> So, I believe we have one of the widest if not the widest selection of CPU choices. Again, why does that matter? Customers want to buy the CPUs that match their specific needs. Nothing more, nothing less, right? If you buy more, you're overspending. If you buy less, you have to buy two or three nodes to get the same level of performance. By offering this tremendous breadth of CPU capability, we allow customers to fine tune their needs to exactly what they want. We also offer an additional set of drive types now. We're doubling our drive choices by offering SATA SSDs as an addition to SAS. SATA allows us to offer lower price points yet still deliver an all flash experience. And because in hyperconverge networking matters, we are significantly increasing our network connectivity options, allowing customers to get more granular control and/or more ports as needed. Oh, and we're introducing 25 gig networking as well. >> Okay, great. I want to maybe come back and talk about some of those points. But before we do that, I talked about at the top of the segment about how this all fits into cloud, and our true private cloud definition, and so forth. What makes this offering cloud? Can you give us some detail or an example or two? >> Yeah, I think when you go and buy a cloud service, you are specifying a certain configuration that's based on, hey, I want this number of IOPS, this capacity. You're not specifying drive types. You're not specifying network connectivity, ports options. You know, that's something you can only ... And when you want to replicate that experience on-prem, you need an infrastructure that consolidates all those things together. Trying to build on-prem cloud infrastructure on top of traditional infrastructure is a huge hurdle. By going to hyperconverge where you've consolidated storage and compute together, you can build a very simple experience on top of it, layer your service catalog on top of it, and not have to worry about managing the underlying components separately. >> You know, I want to talk about the guys who aren't doing hyperconverge. I mean when you see it ... We were early on looking at the market, and understanding the benefits. But still, there's still a lot of folks who want to roll their own. You know, maybe it's a channel affinity. Or maybe it's some server affinity Or maybe they just like doing heavy lifting. I don't know. But what are you seeing in the marketplace in terms of why people aren't moving to hyperconverge? And what would you tell those people? >> Well, I think I'll disagree with you on that, Dave. You know, depending on which analyst you listen to, somewhere between two-thirds to three-quarters of customers are actively looking at deploying hyperconverge in the near future, within one to two years. So, people are interested. But you're right. That's one-third or a quarter of the market who's not. And for both of them, when I talk to them I say that the key benefits are that you cannot do IT transformation without buying a transformative product. If you're still buying the same, old components piece by piece and assembling themselves, you're going to be spending all of your time doing that assembly and the maintenance of that yourself. You need an infrastructure product that frees up those resources to deliver better business value. What we do with hyperconverge appliances like VxRail is that we take on that burden of integration. We take on that burden of testing. Yeah, you know longer need to maintain a full test lab because we've done the full certification ourselves. And we deliver that lower TCO, fully-automated experience that you can't get by doing it yourself. Some of our competitors focus on doing the same thing, but they focus a lot on the day zero value. You know, how fast it is to install. You know, how fast it is to get the first VM. What we found in hyperconverge is the real benefit is the lifecycle and automation that comes from day one, day two, and beyond. By building that automation lifecycle management qualification, testing, allows us to deliver a truly transformative experience. Buying VxRail can lower your TCO by 30%. That's a three-year TCO. This isn't marketing magic, marketing numbers. This is a full three-year TCO lowers by 30%, and can lower your support costs by 42% You know, that's something you can't get by buying servers and building your own. >> Well, I would totally agree with that because our data suggests that there's over $100 billion over the next 10 years. 150 billion, actually, that's coming out of sort of undifferentiated heavy lifting of deployment of infrastructure. But again, people still ... You know, it's like you said, a third of the market. I don't know. Is it because old habits die hard? What do you think it is? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm giving a secret away. I'm writing a blog post on this, but I've been late on it. So, I'll use it here now, >> Great. >> and then maybe it'll force me to actually publish the post by the time this comes out. (laughter) You know, I get those questions when I talk to customers. There's always one in four customers says, "Well, I can do that. I know how to do it. I've got the processes down." And my response to them is always. What does it say on your resume? On your resume does it say rack and stack servers? Does it say deploy vCenter and vSphere? Does it say cable networking? I doubt it. Your job description today on your resume probably says, "I develop applications as support, and x revenue business." You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. >> Digital transformation. >> Colin: Digital transformation. Exactly right. >> Enabler. >> So, if you're not doing that, and you're saying your value is racking and stacking, cabling, installing software, right? You're lying on your resume. (Dave laughs) What I'm giving you on VxRail is the ability not to lie on your resume. (laughter) It'll allow you to actually focus on the digital transformation. >> Well, I think every customer we talk to is going through some kind of, not only transformation, IT transformation, but a big digital transformation. They're trying to move resources up the stack. There's this sort of bromide. But it's true. To whatever, AI, data, analytics, or application development that's going to drive revenue. >> Yeah, and hyperconverge is perfect for all that. You know I used to say either hyperconverge was ready for all virtualized workloads. That you could buy a VxRail and run any virtualized workload on it. With the power that we get, the predictability, and the configurations that we get from 14th generation PowerEdge servers, we're not just ready for virtualized workload, we're ready for any workloads, mission-critical workloads, anything customers want to deploy on it. >> Yeah, this is really important. Look, IT is a very labor-intensive business that's too labor intensive. And that has actually stifled some innovation. And now we're finally seeing some light at the end of that tunnel. And hyperconverge infrastructure is an enabler there. Okay, when can I buy this stuff? >> We are actively taking orders right now. It's available to order now. And it will be shipping within 30 days. >> Dave: Okay, great. Let's see, a little commercial for a CrowdChat that's coming up, #nextgenhci which is on December 1st. Where else can I get info? >> You can go to dellemc.com/hci. That's a full page where you can find out about all of our HCI solutions, including VxRail. >> All right. >> And we've got some great there. We're going to have some cool videos, including this. And hopefully, some other ones. But yep. >> Well, Colin, congratulations on this success. A massive number, 17,000 nodes, 165,000 cores, 190 petabytes, and presumably more to come. So, well done. >> Looking forward. >> All right, thanks for coming on. >> Colin: Thanks, Dave. >> All right. Thanks for watching, everybody. This is theCUBE Conversation with Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Cube. Our continuing coverage of Vmworld 2017 continues. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're excited to be joined next by Jason Brown a Cube alumni consultant and product marketing for Dell EMC ScaleIO. Welcome back to the Cube Jason. >> Thank you for having me. >> Good to have you here, so day two of the event, lot's of announcements, lots of buzz. Talk to us about ScaleIO. What's the current state of the business. >> Well, it's actually really exciting right now. We're doing really well. We're seeing great customer adoption. We're seeing massive petabytes of ScaleIO deployed in data centers, and were here at the show really to talk to you about customers for ScaleIO for Vmware. 'Cause everyone here's above E10, obviously, they're doing awesome. We love it. They're doing great. But there's some differences and similarities between the two products that people get confused about, so we're here at the show really trying to help, you know, ease confusion, talk about how it's like peanut butter and jelly, right? Some people like peanut butter, some people like jelly but most people like 'em both, so we're just trying to help people out and understand when to choose which and sometimes it's both. >> Alright, Jason, I've got a history watching ScaleIO since before the acquisition, you know, service providers that usually kind of fit their model a little bit more than VSAN, so when I think scale, I tend to think ScaleIO. I interviewed ADP yesterday. Big customer, rolling out like 30,000 nodes of compute with VSAN. So, scales >> Yeah >> not only one piece of it. Maybe, help us kind of understand some of the, you know, of course there's going to be places that overlap, but what is the, you know, kind of ideal ScaleIO customer, what are they looking for, and how's that differ from the VSAN? >> Sure, so in particular if you're looking at ScaleIO for VMware, there's a few things you need to understand. First and foremost, with ScaleIO we're talking about consolidating resources across the data center. So we're talking data center grade software to find storage which can run in a hyperconverged model or not. And that's really key differentiating, 'cause if you look at these enterprises, especially, these large enterprises that built an IT organization of past 20 years, right? And so when you introduce HCI to them, you're transforming the architecture of the data center but also the IT operating environment. And that's scary for a lot of people who have spent millions of dollars having a server team, a network team, and the storage team. So one of the key things for ScaleIO in a VMware environment is, if you want to transform the architecture to software defined, but preserve that IT operating model, this two layer deployment, we call it, you can do that with ScaleIO. But on the flip side you can also do a more modern architecture with hyperconverged as well. So you can get the best of both worlds. So whether today you're ready to go all the way with the service providers, they'll go hyperconverged, you know out of the gate, but enterprises usually start more traditional and then move to that hyperconverged and ScaleIO provides that pathway to get there. >> Yeah, bring us inside those customers a little. 'Cause I've talked to a couple of very large customers of ScaleIO actually, did a case study at Citi and Citi told me, internally, we're just not ready to go fully hyperconverged. >> Jason: Exactly. >> So they kept that. They're massive scale. Talked to a large global hospitality company that, once again, looked more at kind of the storage usage of what they're doing so, I mean hyperconverged VSAN seems to be having, you know they've got 10,000 customers, they're all in that-- model. >> Exactly. >> So, what is it that gets a customer ready for that? What kind of pushes or pulls them towards being ready for, you know, embracing? >> Well, I think it's understanding your business goals and your desired outcomes. So with something like ScaleIO you're looking at simplicity in the data centers. So you're looking for scale, you know, not tens of nodes where traditional, I hear this said that traditional VSAN deployment is eight to 16 nodes, 'cause they're you know, VMware's everywhere, right? There's a lot of ROBO, SMB, VDI, use scales right there, and that's not really where ScaleIO plays. ScaleIO is about data center, so Tier 1 application, databases, data analytics. It's looking at things like containers and microservices, Splunk, NoSQL. Applications like that. So when you look at those types of applications and workloads, you have to understand that your scale will probably go from tens to hundreds of nodes. Your performance may go from a million IOPS to tens of millions of IOPS. You may need six nines availability 'cause again, you're running in the data center. Customers are replacing their SAN arrays with ScaleIO. So you need all that enterprise class, data center grade functionality with the scale performance and flexibility, the key thing is flexibility as well, if you want to run multiple workloads on a cluster, you need to be able to support VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, Linux, Windows, so and ScaleIO enables all of those things. And therefore, that's why when you look at your business goals, your business ops and what your data center looks like, you need to understand that functionality. Then you decide okay, is it going to be VSAN or ScaleIO or is it going to be both, 'cause I have both of those use cases there. >> So you talked about VSAN and ScaleIO, peanut butter and jelly. Michael Dell on main stage with Pat Gelsinger said VMware and Dell EMC are like peanut butter and chocolate. Both, all good flavors, in my opinion. I'd love to hear an example though, of where, like to your point, before I asked the question. We just had the CTO of Dell EMC storage, speaking with Stu and I a few minutes ago and one year post-combination, and he said customers are starting to understand now the value of Dell EMC-- >> Yes. >> Together. So with that, you know, a year later and customers now understanding the value proposition of this company that now also owns VMware, how much easier is the conversation, you know, away from VSAN verses ScaleIO? I'd love to understand where are you seeing where they both, those peanut butter and jelly sandwiches play together. What are some of the maybe industries or key use cases where a customer would need ScaleIO and VSAN? >> Sure. So if you think about financial services, Citi as Stu mentioned, one of the larger ones there, definitely plays there, in healthcare there's a few large big partner network companies that have come together to be successful there. Telco, Verizon, Comcast, right? Not only just private Cloud but public Clous as well, so when you look at your data center, you got to look at the whole thing. So, for your VDI, your ROBO, your SMB and maybe for a few of your enterprise applications that only need you know, 50,000 in an IOPS performance for your VMs then VSAN is going to be great there, but then you look to the other side of your data center and you've got something like SAP, you know HANA, I think any other, in fact, ORACLE, etc or you're looking to build a private cloud of hundreds of nodes, well that's where ScaleIO is going to sit. Over in that corner, you know? So, it really is understanding what your workloads are and where they play. You know, it's important to know too that for ScaleIO our primary use cases are array consolidation, so you've got silos of arrays in your data center and you want to stop managing silos of arrays, and you want to bring everything together into a single resource, a single cluster, boom, ScaleIO. You want to build the cloud environment whether you're a service provider building a public cloud like Swisscom for example, who built a public cloud based off of ScaleIO, or a private cloud like CitiGroup for example. It's pretty much a private cloud; mix of array consolidation as well. And then something like a gaming company that we've worked with where they are doing this next generation DevLogs containers, microservices, well ScaleIO's great for that too, 'cause it has the flexibility to start small and grow and support the various things that they need to be able to deploy their applications 32% faster. So you know, it really encompasses the whole data center. >> Yeah, a bunch of interesting points that I want to unpack a little bit there. Specifically, you're talking about all the new applications and the new technologies that people are doing. One of the challenges most people have, you know, the stack we've been using, I think, for my entire IT career is, you know, we spend what, somewhere between 70 and 90% of our time keeping the lights on. >> Jason: Yes. >> And the wave of kind of software-defined, you know, all of these type things, supposed to be, we need to simplify our environment, you know and, therefore I can take those resources and reallocate them, retrain them, put them on cool new things. What are you seeing from the customers, you know, just organizationally from what happens to the storage people as well as how do they take advantage of some of these tougher things like application modernization? >> Good question. Good question. So, you know it depends on the company right? There are, like you said, there are some customers that want to keep them separated and that's perfectly fine you know, there are tools that you can use with ScaleIO so that you can manage the storage independently of the compute. But then you've got things like our tight integration with vSphere, where the VMadmin can manage the storage as well. So, it depends on the preferences as well as the maturity of the organization and the skillset of the folks that are managing it as well. If you can have a storage admin become more agile and be able to manage the compute and the VMs as well then perfect. They become more generalists, right? We've talked about how these specialties becomes more generalists in these types of HCI and NextGen environments. So if they have that skillset then perfect and both ScaleIO and VSAN can enable that. And then if you're looking at app modernization, you know what do you need from an infrastructure storage perspective to achieve that, and how can you enable your application developers access that storage even faster? And that's really was ScaleIO does with the whole automation points behind everything. With, be able to add resources on the fly, remove resources on the fly, reallocate on the fly. So being able to be flexible for what they need when they all of a sudden are ramping up a new application is really critical. >> Yeah. I guess, I'm wondering if you have any specific examples. One of the critiques if you talk about, you know, storage, admins, fast is not something that usually, you think of. Flash is fast and everything like that but, how do we keep up with the pace change, how do I move things? How does ScaleIO help change that equation? Even just specifically for storage? >> Well I think that in order to be able to keep up with that change, right, it's about, as you said, simplifying their job and making it easier. So, if you've got the tools and the, just the functionality in the product itself, to be able to help them learn faster, be able to press a button as opposed to being able to allocate an array group and (murmurs) things that have an architecture, that makes that be able to achieve that as well, that's really how you do it. You know I haven't talked to any storage admins lately, unfortunately. So I can't give you a specific example, but that's really what we see at kind of the one on one level. >> And from a buyer's train of perspective, so much has changed and shifted towards this C-Suite. When we look at things like data protection, we, you know, some announcements about that yesterday, storage, and you said you haven't spoken with storage admins in a while. There's a lot of data that show that data protection storage isn't an IT problem, it's a business problem. So how has the conversation now with Dell EMC with respect to whether it's ScaleIO or whatnot, shifted upstream if you will, talking to more senior executives, rather than the storage guys and gals that are managing specific pieces? Tell us about that-- >> Sure. >> Conversation and maybe cultural shift. >> Well when you talk to any C level executive, what's the top of mind, right? Security, saving, cost savings, budget, right? So when we're talking to executives, where they talk about data center transformation, how software defines storage and enables that both at the architectural level and at the IT level, but also about how we can make their business easier to run and how it can save them money. so if you're able to get all this great flexibility and scalability and all this you know, performance, but then be able to preserve the features that you need, like compression and snapshots and being able to connect to your data protections suites as well? So if you can tell them all that and say hey and you know what, we have customers saving 50% five year TCO by doing that, without needing to do data migration or tech refreshers anymore. They're like alright, sign me up. Because you have to understand too, when you talk to them, they don't need to go buy an array the next day, and spend a couple million dollars they maybe be will be able to utilize in the future or not. They can start very small. Three nodes, four nodes, and have this pay as you go licensing so they love that as well because it grows on their terms. Not on our terms, on their terms. And that's really important for you know people that in those C level suites that are trying to maximize the efficiency of the business. >> Alright, Jason, one thing's when customers buy into a solution like this, it's more of a platform discussion these days and of course one of the things they're looking for is where are you taking me down the road? So it's great, here's what I can do today, one of the things I love this whole wave of it, is, you know, upgrades and migrations were like, you know, the four letter words for anybody in storage. >> Dirty words. >> And I said, you know, when we have a pool of resources and I can kind of add and remove nodes it was like, oh my God, that was, we conservatively estimated like five years ago that 30% of the overall TCO was based on that alone and. Wow. Scrap that. Last time you're ever going to need to, you know, migrate once you get on this platform. But, I want you to talk to us a little bit about, you know a little bit, kind of the vision and roadmap. What are >> Sure. >> You talking to customers about. >> Absolutely. So, you know with a product like this, it's constantly evolving and innovating so when we talk to customers about what's in the future, well you have to first be thinking about data services. Data services are always very important and with ScaleIO, you know, admittedly, we're a little short on some data services because we more focus on scalability and performance and making sure that we have a six nines architecture. So, the first and biggest thing that's coming very soon, if you were at Dell EMC with ScaleIO is compression. So being able to, you know for your block storage workloads, being able to maximize the efficiency of your storage even more with some in line compression? Very important. So we're doing that. We're also enhancing our snapshot's functionality so that, you know when you talk snapshots and SDS, you know, you compare it to an enterprise array, probably not up to snuff. Well what we're doing now with our snapshot keeping in relation to ScaleIO is we're actually going to have them be better or even much better than something you'd find in like an all flash array. You know, where you can have you know, thousands of snapshots in a v-tree and things like that. But it also goes to hardware as well. 'Cause there's always hardware, right? And with the innovation within Dell EMC with Dell PowerEdge servers with our friends in CPSD, we're able to innovate a lot faster with ScaleIO and SDS. So, 14G was announced. Well ScaleIO's going to be one of the first products within Dell EMC through our ScaleIO Ready Node to support mV dims and MVME. So as you know we support MVME today, one of the few software device storage platforms out there today that supports it, in a roll your own server model. With the Ready Node 14G coming out later this year, with the ScaleIO Ready Node, immediately out of the gate mVdim and MVME technology in a ScaleIO Dell EMC hardware product, 'cause it's already you know its Dell PowerEdge servers and ScaleIO software. And then helping our management keep our management keep (murmurs) as well so, introducing VVols for our VMware customers, being able to provide something called AMS which is our automated management services for the Ready Node so that you can deploy, configure, manage, upgrade, not only the storage software but the firmware as well as the EXS hypervisor all in a single button, in all a single interface, so we're doing that as well. So it's all about, you know, taking advantage of NextGeneration functionality from the hardware perspective, simplifying the management, then introducing critical features and functionality that our customers have been asking for. >> Just to make sure I'm 100% on this, things like the data services, that's software, so everybody that's got it today, will be able to upgrade it. Obviously the next generation of hardware always helps along the way, but you know, you manage those a little bit separate even though you want to handle both of those vectors. >> Yes, exactly. So when you upgrade to ScaleIO.next when it comes out you'll get that feature functionality. Now there's a few things you need to understand, right? You should have Mvdims and some type of flash media to support it. >> Stu: Sure. >> Because you're trying to maximize scalability and performance while providing these features, there's some dependencies there. But yeah, out of the gate, those features will be available. That's why it's called software-defined storage. It's all in the software, all this world of goodness is. >> Okay so take me upstream. Lot of new features, functionality coming out; what are the new business benefits if I'm the CEO of Swisscom, that I'm going to be able to achieve from that? >> Well I think definitely increased performance. Definitely increased efficiency of your storage with things like compression and snapshots. Now, if you're able to compress that data, get more out of your system-- >> But what kind of like, in terms of TCL. How am I going to be able to reduce. >> Oh, well. >> What are the factors of-- (grunts loudly) >> You know, we haven't run the numbers yet, but you know, the fact that we already can achieve 50% TCO, it can only get better from there when we're introducing these types of features, where you're maximizing efficiency, so, we expect it to bump up a bit. We're hoping we can work with you guys to get some good numbers that come out of it. >> Excellent. So continued strengthening of those-- business outcomes is, >> Yeah, that's it. You know, making sure, >> what you're talking about. >> Makings sure that the customers that want to move to software-defined storage in their data center, are able to achieve that in the most seamless way, and be able to reap the benefits. >> Fantastic. Well Jason, thanks so much for sharing your insights what's happening, um, peanut butter and jelly. Makes me hungry. I think it's time for lunch. >> It is lunch time, yeah. >> We thank you so much for coming back-- on the Cube. >> Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. >> And for my co-host Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin you are watching the Cube live, day two of our continuing coverage from VMworld 2017. Stick around. We'll be right back after a short break. (electronic music)

>> Commentator: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering VM World 2017. Brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partner. >> Welcome back to The Cube, we are live covering VMWorld 2017, day two of coverage. I'm Lisa Martin with my co host Stu Miniman, we've had a great morning, main stage, Michael Dell, Patt Gelsinger, Google, et cetera. We're excited to be joined by Doctor Sadir, Sadir is kind of awesome, the CTO of Dell EMC, Stewart, welcome to The Cube! >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> We're excited to have you here, so you were an EMC guy, we talked about that. When people think of Dell, they think of, well maybe used to, PCs, when they think of EMC they think of storage arrays, talk to us about, you know, one year post combination almost, how has your customers' perception changed, what have you heard in the last year? >> Sure yeah, it's been a pretty dramatic change, I would say in the sense of about a year ago when the deal was, or actually two years ago when the deal was first announced that it would be happening there was a lot of skepticism in the customer base obviously around A, what does this mean, how's it going to come together? I think a year into it people started to see some initial signs of better together. And now a year later we're seeing dramatic, dramatic positive energy and feedback from customer base on how, when they're actually seeing the products and solutions coming together in a combined solution I think that's, I mean we used to joke in the old days where our products, you know, EMC's got our portfolio, and our products would only come together on the PO, that was the common joke inside. And I think that perception is changing quite a lot now. >> So bring us into the storage group, because it was one that you know, if you look there were a lot of places where there were no overlaps. Storage, there was a long partnership between Dell and EMC then Dell had acquired a couple of companies, EMC, as you said already had a very large portfolio so bring us inside a little bit, especially kind of with your, you know, your CTO, your technologist. What are those lenses you look through and where are we into, you know, things coming together soon? >> Sure, I think it's a great question, I know and thank you because one of the things that people miss is that the portfolio strategy is a conscious strategy, right? It is really hard to cover the entire spectrum of work loads, use cases with a single widget, if you will. And a lot of our competitors will try to convince customers of that and they're finding that out themselves that it's really hard to cover that gamut so I think fundamentally, first and foremost the portfolio strategy is very important now that said, it is acknowledged and I'll admit that it is perhaps more in the portfolio right now than perhaps is needed. And so that in fact is one of our first, one of our big priorities for this year is to simplify the portfolio because it's confusing for our customers and so we're definitely working towards that. You'll see that roll out starting next year. And then over the next few years. >> So on that front, and sort of maybe waiting things out to simplify, from an innovation perspective Michael Dell also talked on main stage this morning about the importance of customer innervation but I'd love to understand how if you can take us kind of more through that, how is Dell EMC innovating internally so that you can be leaders in innovation-- >> Yeah, that's a great question, it's a great question because you know when you have a multi billion dollar business everybody assumes it's really really hard to innovate and it is, there's no question because you've got a big business to sustain. Now but the, I completely agree with Michael, what he said on stage and what he said to us privately which is in fact Dick Egan used to say the same thing. Founder of EMC he was, if there's one thing that you should be comfortable with, it's change and because this industry is changing like crazy, and I've been in the industry now for what, coming up on 20 years. Seen a lot, you know from FDDI to wherever you're at today. And I'm still constantly amazed by how much change is going on even now. So we do believe in change, we believe in actually innovating constantly, and Jeff Budrow, one of my manager he's a big believer in change as well, we're working on a lump number of innovations internally, organic innovations, big innovations. I can't tell you much about that today but we'll hopefully as we get closer to the next year we'll be able to talk more about it. That said, we're innovating on our existing products as well, we've refreshed our entire portfolio at Dell EMC World earlier this year. At VMWorld just now we announced our availability of our X2 platform which is the next generation of the XGMIL platform, so we're constantly innovating and as a result it's more of a rolling thunder as opposed to like a big bang. >> So I kind of look at it, there's kind of two ways that things are changing along storage. Number one there's kind of the underneath pieces, so you talked about going from FDDI, you know when we saw from disk to flash for EMC was you know, early on that that kind of reemergence of flash after a couple of decades of it being you know, not used for awhile. We've got things like NVME, NVME over fabric coming out so we're going to start there, maybe by one o'clock after there's kind of the operating model on how we change things because we've converged and cloud and all those but on some of those underlying pieces which I know keep the storage people kind of really engaged, you know where are we today with some of those transitions, what are some of the things that you're looking at over the next kind of 12, 24, 36 months? >> Terrific, I mean I see actually three vectors of change impacting the storage business and impacting us. One is the media like you said, there's NVME and we'll talk a little bit more about that. There's actually a whole bunch of stuff beyond NVME right, storage class memory, persistent memory coming out. Second set of things is consumption models, what we call consumption model round, whether it's a cloud consumption model, where if you think of cloud actually more as a consumption model as opposed to a destination. And software defined is a big thing, I think that's going to dramatically change the game, especially when you combine it with things like persistent memory. And then the third thing I think is the new wave of applications as well, that's generating a whole new class of data and adds a whole new set of requirements. For example, real time streaming analytics, right, that changes the, you can't deal with block and file and object in those worlds, you're dealing with new semantics. So those are some of the vectors that we're looking at in terms of. >> So let's start with kind of the low level, the media, you know some of those things right, what is data, what is memory, you know all those things blurring. Where you know, I hear, there seems to be so many people NVME, NVME over fabrics seems to be-- >> Hey look, so let me hit that off right in front. Right so it was 10 years ago that Dell and EMC independently before obviously we were one company actually co founded the contortion that invented NVME so we saw the meat of this technology, the limitations of SAS and SATA 10 years ago, we saw this coming. We helped drive the standards including NVME over fabric standard, and that's like, well before some of these companies that are claiming NVME today weren't actually even born. So NVME to me is a journey, right there's the there's the bus, changing from the SAS bus to the NVME bus. That's one part, then there's the media that stands behind them all, the NVME transport. Things like 3D cross point that are starting to come out, and then even beyond that you get to really persistent memory type of applications. So we see this as a journey, we're going to be rolling our NVME in all our products across the entire portfolio starting this year, later this year. For first, today scale IO already supports NVME devices in 14G, so we're going to, you're going to see that. >> Yeah, I guess my follow up, just to dig in a little deeper because when we got the CTO you've got to dig down. There were some, when flash came out, they were like oh yeah, whatever, I'm going to throw a couple of percentage in, well we saw flash greatly change architectures, it changed some of those application considerations-- >> Absolutely. >> Especially you know, Wikibon's David Floyer has been beating on let's really look at databases, let's do this. NVME, is it an extension and kind of evolution or will this be a similar revolution to what we saw with flash? >> I think it's a similar revolution. It's a similar but perhaps less of a quantum leap, I would say. And the reason is because you're going from like 10s of milliseconds or milliseconds of latency with spinning media to sub millisecond with flash. Now you're going from sub millisecond to sub sub millisecond but you know, it's getting diminishing. I think where you're going to see a lot of dramatic is as it's more on the latency as you get as the applications get closer and closer to the servers. Right so I think you're going to see a lot of pretty dramatic change in that space. >> Speaking of change and revolution, the three vectors that you talked about, media, consumption models, this new wave of applications, how, ST to you are you seeing the buyers' journey change as a result of these vectors? >> So that's actually part two of the question that Stu was just asking is while I agree that it's going to be a revolution, what I've also seen in 20 years is that these things don't happen instantly, yes flash was a big change. But even today, over 40, 40, 50% of our revenue still comes from hybrid systems. Mixed flash and, so these things take time, right? So customers are taking leaps I would say I'm seeing a spread of the early adopters and, we're probably in the big medium, in the big, the bell curve right now and then there's some laggards as well that are still buying you know, pure HDD only systems. >> Do you see a difference there, sorry, with respect to industries, maybe healthcare or financial services that are early adopters? >> Definitely, I think, there's industries and there's also size of customer, right, the bigger the customer the more, eager we see they are in doing this digital transformation so we're seeing a lot of them going all in on software defined, right, so we're definitely seeing that shift from buying purpose build arrays to software defined. Now it's not going to be instantaneous, again it's going to be over many years, similarly in the mid range and below we're seeing a shift from, modular systems to hyper converged systems as well. So we're seeing that as well, we're seeing a lot of shift from purely on prem to a hybrid solution of on prem plus cloud, so all of our products are now attaching to the cloud as well. So we're definitely seeing all of these transitions. >> When it comes to the cloud native piece, there are some that have said well, it's kind of could be a kind of completely different way of doing things, really focused on the developers and won't that just live in the public cloud, or you know will SAS applications you know, be where a lot of those live, so you know what do you say to the, you've improved media, you've improved consumption models but, maybe they're just, it's easier for me not to own some of these pieces, one of the company, small companies, I don't want to deal with infrastructure at all, let me, you know, let me yeah-- >> Yeah that's another great, great question. What we are seeing I would say is definitely some of that. Especially as you said in the smaller companies it's easy for them to get started, right, with minimal initial expenses they can get started in the public cloud so we definitely see that. But as you get larger, what we're seeing is the economics of running everything in the cloud on a sustained basis, just don't work out, it's much more cost effective to run things on ground, so I think for cost reasons when you're running over a sustained operations as well as for security reasons, we're still seeing a lot of hesitation and especially as you get to the higher end of the market, people are concerned especially with all the breaches and things like that, that they're concerned about where their assets are. So we actually at Dell Technologies I would say, and Dell EMC in particular, we're seeing a pretty significant opportunity popping up where customers want to run on prem data centers just like the cloud. And that's where things like software defined storage become really important because hey, the public clouds are running all the software defined, that's their, one of the secrets to their agility and speed. Why can't we have that prem and we actually absolutely see that in fact today's announcement of PKS is right on the money for that. >> So we're here at VMWorld, with respect to that, seeing more customers want to bring things on prem maybe kind of the true private cloud that Wikibon's been talking about. What are you guys doing now with VM or to align that, we've heard a number of things about, yesterday with AWS you mentioned Pivotal today, Google, what's going on today with Dell EMC and WM Ware to help customers really build a solid on prem solution? >> Yeah so I think Pivotal is certainly a key piece of that, Pivotal, VM Ware, so the whole VM Ware cloud foundation, cloud suite is a key piece of that. The integration with PCF is actually going to be very key because what customers need, especially the traditional customers, if you will, who don't quite have the expertise yet to build cloud native applications, they need a platform, not just an infrastructure. So I think that's why Pivotal is very important. And we're working very closely with, as Dell EMC we're working closely with both of those partners in delivering those solutions, VX Rail is a good example of that. VX Rail, VX Rack are good examples of the two technologies coming together. And so those are the kinds of things, I think that's where software defined storage, you'll see a lot more integration between Dell EMC's software defined portfolio, with the VM Ware and Pivotal ecosystems. >> So the storage group you've talked about you have a lot of options, we've been talking about software defined storage, how that you know is driving a lot of the change there, gives a lot of flexibility there. How does the storage team look at things like VMAX and Extreme IO compared to the software defined storage these days? >> Yeah so I think we, I presume everybody's seen the famous chart where there's the traditional infrastructure and then there's the cloud native, the new world. And that's a transition that's going to happen and we think it's going to be a really long transition, right. Mainframes are not dead, right, so they're still alive. And there's a reason, because people are running their absolute mission critical application on those infrastructures so we think there's definitely going to be a place for both, and it isn't all or nothing. And that's, I think, going back to innovation, your question about it, where is Dell EMC innovating, we're the only company that's actually embracing these changes, this transition to software defined, right? Where with products like ECS and Scale IO and so on and so forth, so we see that the transitions will happen slowly but there's going to be a lot of opportunity for highly reliable, you know, six, seven, nines reliable infrastructure based on purpose built infrastructure. >> Yeah, it definitely matches a lot of as you said the true private cloud report that we have on Wikibon. >> Well thank you so much, Sadir, for joining us on The Cube, we now bring you into The Cube alumni, the illustrious Cube alumni category. >> Glad to be here. >> Lisa: And thank you for sharing your insights as CTO on what you're doing with customers and innovation. >> Sadir: Thank you very much. >> And we want to thank you for watching, I'm Lisa Martin. From my cohost Stu Miniman we are live covering day two of VM World 2017 from Las Vegas, stick around, we will be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back everyone, we are live here in Las Vegas for Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier with the Cube, and my co-host here is Keith Townsend, @CTOAdvisor on Twitter. Our next guest is David Goulden, the president of Dell EMC infrastructure business. Great to see you. Our eighth consecutive year covering EMC World, now Dell EMC World, the first Dell EMC World, kind of a seminal moment watershed event here. You've been to all of them, you've seen the movie with EMC now. Now eight months after the close, it's Dell EMC World, but it still feels like EMC World. What's your reaction, I mean, all the same? >> No, John, it's very different, it may maybe because it's in Vegas and it's in May. So those two things are common, but the content, the breadth of the message, you mentioned it, it's eight, nine months after the closing transaction, but of course bear in mind, we had a year before that of planning after we announced, so it's really quite some time into the concept of this transaction and to a larger extent, this week for us is the coming out party. It gives us a chance to demonstrate to the world what we've spent the last nine months and the year before that planning and doing, and actually investing in, and you saw just from my remarks this morning the breadth of technology we're bringing to our customers, and the amount of innovation, and the better together story coming real, I think it's exciting. >> You know, David, I'm always complimenting you and talking behind your back when you're not around as well, but the compliment is, you're a great operational person but you're also a strategic chess player as well in terms of the industry. The Dell EMC strategy's pretty clear on the existing traditional infrastructure, data center, whatever you want to call it. It's a mature market, it's consolidating, win that business, be the number one supplier in that market, we see that playing out. However, you got to have the growth strategy. That's the future revenues that are going to come down the pipe. Describe for a minute the strategy, 'cause pretty obvious the mature market on the data center is moving to hybrid cloud, and there's a pathway there, so you lock it and load it on that being number one fast 14 generation servers, we see that, cool. Growth strategy, what's the growth strategy for Dell EMC? >> Well, don't rule out growth in on-prem data centers, right, so, let's not put that into pure mature, no growth. >> I mean it's not hockey stick. >> Right, but the market is still a massive marketplace in on-prem data centers. It's true that all the infrastructure growth, so if you look at the infrastructure marketplace, $110 billion dollars that's served by service storing networking data protection. You look at that marketplace in total and you say where's all the growth? The growth is in off-prem, we'll come back to that in a second. But the on-prem, the data center is still over sixty percent of that marketplace. And in total that market isn't growing but the consolidation opportunity you talked about is huge. And segments of it like moving to a private cloud like hyper-converged infrastructure, there are rocket ships occurring inside of that big target adjustable market. That's $60 billion dollars our data center IT spend. So there is growth for us in that. And there is growth in being the largest most capable player to consolidate, pick up share, be stronger in the newer segments than we even were in the more mature segments. So I wouldn't rule off growth there. From an infrastructure point of view, of course there's a lot of growth off-prem. Now off-prem is a very fragmented marketplace. As soon as people think off-premises, they go immediately to the web scale public cloud providers. And they're certainly a part of it, but there's the SAS companies, there is the outsource integrators, the ITS and service companies. There's a huge opportunity there. >> I mean everyone is a cloud service provider. Everyone will be, I mean, Riot Games which does League of Legends, they're a cloud company, right? I mean, everyone's kind of a cloud company or a SAS company these days, or they're trying to get there. >> That's because the whole IT industry's moving to cloud. Because cloud is an operating model, not a place. And cloud is about delivering IT at all levels, application, infrastructure, networking, whatever you think about it. It's delivering IT as a service that can be monitored and metered and charged based upon use. That's a very simple definition of a cloud and everybody wants to do that. Whether you are an on-prem data center, whether you are a third party service provider, everybody wants to offer cloud. So we shouldn't get too confused about the cloud opportunity, it is the redefinition of the IT industry. >> So David as we talked through the opportunity within the data center, one of the obvious things when you look at Dell EMC is the breadth of products, the depth of capability compared to your competitors... Traditional knowledge would tell us that, you know what, you guys have the potential to really dominate this thing, but when you're coming to customers, what's the clear message that you're bringing when it comes to specific products and the core of that growth? >> So the message to customers is we are investing for the longterm and we're investing heavily. Our strategy is not to just be good enough, it's to be the number one, so we don't want to just be the number one market share player, but also have the best technology. So our message to customers is hey, Mr. Customer, Ms. Customer, you've got a lot of things to worry about in your IT world. Ultimately, you want to be providing IT services to your customers. You need an infrastructure partner, you want a company who can be that essential infrastructure company who can provide the vast vast majority of all the things you need to be able to equip your IT shop to provide services to your customers. That's the message, and it's very powerful. Because it spans the client, through the data center, and into the cloud. And it encompasses security and all other elements of the infrastructure plate. So it's a very very powerful message. And the final thought I would tell you is relative to that, is I haven't had a customer in the last two years who told me they want more IT suppliers. They want fewer and they want them to be strategic and more capable. And that's our plate. >> Great, I want to double down on that comment. They don't want more suppliers, I buy that, and I think end-to-end you're seeing architectures, we saw Intel on stage, you're seeing 5G being end-to-end with IOT. They like the end-to-end, they like the supplier consolidation. But the other thing we're hearing in the hallways here at the event is, and this is the question for you because you manage the product portfolio, is I don't want more products, I want less products or skews if you will, whatever you want to call it. So there's a product overlap certainly with the Dell EMC combination, there's been some overlap. People have been talking about that. So how are you managing that? I know we talked about it a little bit last year just getting the roadmap cleaned up, but what specifically are you doing to manage the product overlap with respect to some of the products that kind of are overlapping between the two companies? >> Well first of all, your earlier comment was right. Customers want outcomes, and we'll come back to that. But specifically, relative to your question on overlap. The beauty of this combination is we come with one of everything and two of almost nothing, which is most unusual in a large scale tech merger. The only area we had any overlap was in the mid-tier of our storage family. Where there was the Dell SC Compellents and there was the EMC Unity family. Now, if they'd both been mature at the end of their product cycle, it could have been a longer issue. But the point is they'd just gone through a full investment to create new versions of each one. So what do you do? You roll them out, you support your customers, and you look for convergence opportunities down the road. So we didn't have to make any short term keep one, kill one, type choices because it was a very fortuitous stage. Both had been through that cycle. But that's the only part of the entire portfolio where there's any overlap. The rest is all about... >> And you're saying it's opportunistic for you because there's no real conflicting overlap. >> There's no conflict. We have two mid-range storage products, one from each family. Big deal. Most customers don't want to be confused so if they were a Unity customer we sell them Unity. If they're a Compellent customer, we sell them Compellent and we say don't worry, we're going to bring you a converged solution in the future. It's really quite simple. Everywhere else, Dell came with their technology, EMC came with ours, and we can focus upon how you create the power of more. >> Okay, so back to the end-to-end conversation because you mentioned they want less suppliers is the trend, I agree. >> And more partners. >> Multi-cloud? For technical reasons, latency and things, I think it's not ready for prime time. But certainly the direction, hybrid clouds front and center, I see that. Talking with the CEO of Oracle last week, and his briefing with me, they want to be the supplier. Everybody wants to be the end-to-end supplier. So multi-cloud implies multiple vendors, so there is still a multi-vendor. Can you just share with us your vision on that? Because it's not a one vendor take all world. Certainly an end-to-end life cycle is good, but how are you guys dealing with this multi-vendor, multi-cloud scenario and how should customers look at that in dealing with Dell EMC? >> Well first of all, we didn't say we want to be anybody's exclusive IT provider, we want to be their most strategic. Everybody has a number of IT vendors, and this is one of the challenges that most IT operations have, they have tens of vendors. In some cases they have tens of vendors for just one piece of the stack, like their management tools. So they're looking for fewer, more capable partners. And what we want to do is to position ourselves to be the most strategic amongst their handful of key partners. As it comes to multi-cloud, that all ties back to applications. So this whole conversation about cloud is often mixed up with a question around applications. I was with a customer, a large financial services customer, after lunch we were having a conversation about cloud. I asked them how many applications they had. 6,900. And that by the way, that's after they've done two years of application rationalization. So what they now want to do is figure out a strategy for those applications. Well they're not all going to sit on one cloud, they're going to sit on multiple places. Some will sit upon an internal cloud. They may have a couple different flavors of internal cloud. They're going to have some SAS vendors, they're going to have some public cloud. So multi-cloud is a reality for anybody with more than, let's say, 50 to 100 applications. It's just a way of life, particularly when you take my definition of cloud or our definition of cloud as being an offering bowl and our place. >> In the final minutes we have I know Keith's got another question that he wants to ask, but I got to ask you, 'cause you've been on the EMC side, you've been running that business with the team there, the federation over the years. You had a good trajectory, you looked at the roadmap, you've seen the growth rates. Now with the combination, I'd like you to spend a minute talking about what's different now and be specific, because now you have so much more opportunity on the revenue side with the combination. So talk about, and Michael made a comment to me just now this morning, they're winning more business. So you're winning business, you're seeing some successes, NSX with VMWare is doing great, the convergence stuff is going great, got some good product announcements. What specific wins are you having that illustrate this new growth opportunity that wasn't there before the combination? >> We're having a number of wins. We're having a number of situations where, in the data center for example, a strong dell server customer may not have much EMC storage, and we're winning the storage footprint. Conversely, we're having a lot of wins where we've got a strong storage footprint in the data center with EMC's strength and we're winning significant server deals on the back of that. So we're seeing this cross synergy occurring just on the back of having a number one position on both sides. We're also seeing our ability to bring brand new products to the market like VxRail that includes a PowerEdge, that includes VMware, that includes EMC software. So we're winning because we have the broader portfolio, and we're winning because we're creating new products to leverage the best of both. And of course, a big piece of what I talked about this morning was 14G service. That is going to be the next generation bedrock of the data center. We'll incorporate that across our entire portfolio. >> Why is that important? Quickly, what's the value proposition? >> What's the value proposition for 14G? >> Yeah. >> It's been designed for the digital transformation of the future. It's been designed not only to host existing applications but to host those scale-out high performance applications of the future. And we can uniquely provide the scalability, the performance, the security those applications need. So it's built for the next generation. It's built thinking about things like machine learning, deep learning, artificial intelligence. It's the platform for those applications, and that's really powerful to have that inside the portfolio. >> So David, digital transformation, a lot of time to value, a lot of buzzwords I've heard today that I've generally heard from my management consultant days. Dell EMC is now the leader in the infrastructure space. You guys are now having conversations with much different people. CMO, COO, CEO, CIO... What lends Dell technologies, Dell EMC, the credibility to come to these new contacts within enterprise? >> Keith, I'd say a couple things. So first of all, we have the world's most advanced platform as a service tool with Pivotal. There are more cloud native applications being built on the Pivotal framework than any other single framework out there. >> Keith: I'm a big fan of Pivotal. >> So am I. And it lets customers become software businesses and everybody talks about becoming a software business. And it creates not just a platform but a toolkit, and also through Pivotal labs, the ability to train people. So Pivotal gives us the credibility to have that software conversation. And then on the back of Pivotal, and just on the back of what we're doing in the infrastructure business, we recognize that there's IT transformation and there's digital transformation. And we're building infrastructure that is aligned to support both of those. So we're building applications for big data Hadoop. We're building infrastructure for IOT. We're building applications for next generation digital transformations. So the infrastructure side of the business is able to address IT transformation and digital transformation at an infrastructure layer and then we've got the best tool out there for the digital transformation applications. So I think that gives us a lot of credibility, and so we're having that conversation. >> David final question, take your president of Dell EMC hat off for a second and put your personal David Goulden hat on. And I'd like to have you just reflect in your own words what surprises you about this combination? It's been historic, you've got the entrepreneurial led CEO Michael Dell, your private. It feels good, we haven't heard really any horror stories about the integrations. There's been some bumps but no major horror stories, so congratulations. But in your own words, what's the biggest surprise that you've seen given the history you have with EMC and as the senior executive at Dell EMC, what's the biggest surprise that folks might not know about in this massive combination? >> I think you've hit upon a couple of them, John. So one, we planned for contingencies that didn't happen. You put a big merger together you expect some things to go wrong in the night. They didn't, touch wood. So that perhaps is an attribute to the planning and the integration that went on. And then on the other side, it's just how quickly we've been able to bring things together. I thought it was going to take us another six to nine months before we could really have customers turn around to us and say we are now viewing you as our most strategic partner. And that's happening to me today, and I really didn't think we'd be there within the first Dell EMC World. I thought it would be the Dell EMC World a year later when we could have those conversations. I think when you just look at the amount of innovation and the progress we've made in a short period of time, because I think what's happened here is we've hit a little bit on an inflection point. We are touching upon a real requirement those customers have, and maybe even more than we ever realized. They really want a technology innovator who is broadly based, who is not constrained by some of the conventional models out there who can push the envelope with them. >> You must have those moments where you kind of pinch yourself and say wow, look where we are, kind of how the industry's changed over the years, how you guys have a nice pole position. Interesting times. >> We're excited about it and we think, also more importantly, we're playing a long term game. We view that in three to five years time the industry becomes even more consolidated. And we think that we have this unique position as this essential infrastructure broad based platform company that can just continue to grow from here. >> Michael Dell says the same thing, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, ten years of innovation is what it pretty much takes to kind of make things happen. Congratulations on your success David, great to see you inside the Cube. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for your candid commentary. We really don't talk behind your back, I mentioned that earlier. We have to say good things about you. David Goulden, president of Dell EMC infrastructure here inside the Cube. I'm John Furrier with Keith Townsend live from Las Vegas, we'll be back with more coverage, stay with us.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back everyone, we are here live in Las Vegas for a wrap up on day three of three days of wall-to-wall coverage with theCUBE coverage at Dell EMC World, our eighth year covering EMC World Now, first year covering Dell EMC World. It's part of the big story of Dell and EMC combining entities, forming Dell Technologies, all those brands. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE. My co-hosts this week, Paul Gillin and Keith Townsend, CTO Advisor. Guys, great week, I thought I'd be wrecked at this point. But, I mean, a lot of energy here but we heard every story. We heard all the commentary, we heard the EMC people trotting in, about their customer references. We hear the executives on message. Bottom line, let's translate it for everybody. (laughing) All the messaging, pretty tight. >> Yes. >> All singing the same songs. My take away real quickly on messaging, they want to portray that this is all good. Everything's fine. No icebergs ahead. We are going to help customers try to move from speeds to feeds, a bigger message. Not getting there yet. Still speeds and feeds. 14 (mumbles), 14G, that's kind of the high level, thoughts? >> This company wants to dominate. I mean, what we heard again and again these last few days is number one, number one. They want to own the top market share in every market in which they play, and they have a broad array of products to do that. They have a huge mix of products, maybe too many products, but with some overlap, but that's okay, but they clearly are trying to blanket or carpet bomb those markets where they think they can win. Interestingly, there are some markets like big data, like software or cloud infrastructure where they are choosing not to be a big player, and that's okay too. It means they are focused. >> John: Keith, your thoughts. >> So, again, I agree with you, tight marketing. They wanted to get out this message. I think if the present analysts get together at the beginning, they emphasized 310 analysts, from analysts and press, from all over the world. They get out the message. They get these guys and gals in here to cover that message that Dell Technologies, Dell EMC, is the leader in this space. You know what? When big mergers like this happen, I can't think of one that happened well. They are usually rocky to begin with. We haven't seen those rocks at the beginning. We haven't see that at the show. It seems like the messaging has been consistent, the customers more or less get it, and that we can't detect the chinks in the armor, so I think they did a great job of getting that out there, and portraying the stress of the brand, and throughout the show. It was a great show for them. >> They have a good story. Their story better together, obviously that's the whole theme. My impression is, in weaving through all the messaging, is generally, authentically the people are pretty happy with it. I think EMC people have been trying to break out of this, we're a storage company, you know, and I won't say they had a little bit of VMware envy, but VM World events were always different than the EMC World, so those culture clashes weren't necessarily too divergent, but different. You had storage guys, and you had VMware developers, right, so I think EMC was always trying to break out and be bigger, and just couldn't get there. Dell wanted to be more enterprise, right, so I think the two together actually is better, in my opinion. Now will it work? I still think your post is still open. They merged for the right reasons, but look it, they're not done. They got a boat-load of work to do. >> I think they're aware, to Keith's point, they are aware that history is against them, that mega mergers don't work, never have worked in this industry, and so that creates a lot of pressure to make this one work, and the good thing about that for both companies is that they're aware of what went wrong in the past. I mean, we had Howard Elias on this show the first day. Howard Elias went through two of the worst tech mega mergers in history with Compaq Digital and HP Compaq, knows where a lot of those landmines are, so they seemed hyper aware of getting everyone on message, getting everyone talking positively about synergy, and as you said John, the language was consistent from the start. >> Alright, I want to ask you guys a pointed question on that point cause it kind of brings out the next question. Management team, do they have the chops, because, to your point, history's against them, okay? We sat down with Michael Dell, founder, lead entrepreneur, still at the helm. He's a billionaire. They're private, so no shot clock on the public markets. Marius Haas, he's a pro. Howard Elias, a pro. Goulden, he does his thing. On and on and on. I think they got a pretty deep bench. I mean, your thoughts guys? >> So, let's think about that. How many bad mergers has EMC gone through? Data domain >> Paul: Home run. >> Incredible. >> Paul: Home run. >> Home run. >> Paul: DSSD. >> DSSD, well, not so much, but that wasn't really that big of a merger. >> They kind of cleaned that up pretty quickly. >> Yeah, they did, what doesn't work they get it out quick, so great management team understands the complexities of mergers. VMware merger, or acquisition, probably one of the best in the history of tech, so the management team has the chops to understand where the value is added, extract that value, and expand it. >> That's a great point. And they know when to leave stuff alone too. >> John: Yeah, engineering lead but they're also, because we heard Jeff Boudreau on talking about the storage challenges. He's like, we know what to do, we took the lumps trying to, late to the game on Flash, we're not going to be late to the game in these other areas, and he is very hyper focused. But the other thing that we didn't talk about is that EMC has just been an impeccably, credible sales organization. They know how to sell, they know how to motivate sales people. They know how to tell the tell the enterprise sales motion, which is the biggest challenge in today's industry. Every company I talked to, startup to growing IPO is we need better enterprise sales. Look at Google. Look what they're doing in the cloud. They are struggling because they have great tech and horrid sales people. They are hiring young people doing phone work. Enterprise sales is a tricky game. >> Arguably the best enterprise sales force on the planet was EMC. I mean, these are the guys who would get on a plane at midnight, would charter a plane at midnight, to get to the customer's site to fix a problem, and no other company does it like that, and Dell has a lot to learn from that. If Dell can really take that knowledge and that culture and absorb it into their own enterprise sales force, they are going to have huge opportunity with their server division. >> I want to take a minute just to thank our sponsors for their awesome CUBE coverage. You guys did great. Dell EMC, Toshiba, Virtustream, Cisco, Dato, Nutanix, Druva, and VMware. Thanks to your support, we had two CUBEs covering VM World, 20 plus videos a day, for 3 straight days. All that's on youtube.com/siliconangle. Of course, siliconangle.com for all the journalism and reporting. Wikibon.com for all the great research, and also a shoutout to Keith at @CTOAdvisor. Check him out on Twitter, always part of the conversation, super influential. Guys, great job this week. Just high level marks. My take away? Hyper converge, big time focus on these guys. VMware is the glue, Hybrid Cloud, and they're defensively using Pivotal to hold the line on Amazon, so thoughts on that point? I see you rolling your eyes. >> I just got out with James Watters, the SVP within that business unit. Pivotal is a key part of this. You know Michael has stressed on theCUBE, on Twitter, how important Pivotal is to their long term success. One of Dell's challenges, Dell EMC's, and this is not just Dell EMC, it's infrastructure companies throughout the landscape, is getting out of that conversation with their VP of infrastructure, getting into the offices of the CIOs, COs, CMO, and having these business conversations, and it's going to take a Pivotal type of solution to get that done. I thought Michael made a very great point that that white glove services, that's basically their service organization, is basically the older EMC services organization that's used to getting on a flight, solving the problem. Whatever the original statement at work was, they are willing to tear that up, and get down, get dirty, and get that done. They need to translate that >> The question for you then is this, without Pivotal, they have no play for the app developers? >> Keith: None. >> Amazon would mop that up and they'd have no positions, so I would say it is certainly a placeholder, a good one, I'm not going to deny that. The question is how big is that market for them. Can they get there, can they hold the line on Pivotal and bring in some resources and cavalry to keep that going, thoughts? >> This is where VMware comes into play. VMware has the relationship with the software layer at least, and they have a great story to tell. They need to get in front of the right people and tell that story, that CrossCloud story of being able to develop using CF and then move that to any cloud using NSX. Great story, but John, to your point, they have to get into the right rooms and have the right conversations, >> Yeah. >> Keith: That's a tough thing to do. >> I also got to give them some time. I mean, this merger happened eight months ago. I think it's pretty remarkable what they have pulled off here in such a short time, and to think about the developers are probably not their first priority right now. >> Alright, so we are going to do the metadata segment of our wrap up, which I just made up since it's such a good name, metadata, in the spirit of surveillance. What metadata can you pull out of your interviews, guys, that's a tea leaf that we could read and just nuance points, I'll start. Pat Gelsinger talked about Pivotal sharing, in between the conversations kind of weaved in, yeah, we had to spin out Pivotal, but I could almost see it in his eyes, he didn't say it specifically, but he's like, we shouldn't have sold it, right? And they had to because he said he had to work on the foundational stuff, get NSX done, get that right, but you can almost see that now as, I'd like to bring that back in, although a separate company. To me, I find that a very interesting data point, that that actually makes a lot of sense to your point about VMware. That might be an interesting combination. Why take Pivotal public, roll it into VMware. >> Yeah, I think that is going to be a interesting space to watch over the next few months. VMware and Pivotal have started to once again come back together with solutions. This NSX, CrossCloud talk makes it very compelling. It's hard to predict Dell EMC being relevant long term. They understand the value short term. They have a short rope to take advantage of this cross selling between the Dell and EMC customer. They can grow this business, get revenue short term, but there will be a cliff where they need to make that transition. Cisco is trying to make that transition into a services company, a software company, and it's hard to turn down one knob and turn the other one up. We'll see if Pat, Michael Dell, and the team have the chops to get it done. >> Cisco has to endure the public markets while they are doing that, which is one advantage Dell has. >> Data point that you can extract that you take away from this? >> Synergy, synergy. I mean when two companies this big come together, you're looking at a lot of product line overlap. I came out of this, though, thinking that there really isn't that much product line overlap. You've got a company that's strong in the mid market, with the small companies, a company that's strong in the enterprise, storage, servers, not a lot of overlap there. The big question for me, so I think the synergy question is this merger makes sense from that perspective, and the big question is software, what are they going to do with those software assets, and to your point, the future is going to be, software defined everything, and that's not a story they're telling yet. >> Keith, extracted insight that you observed that was notable that you kind of picked out of the pile of the interviews. Anything notable to you? Something obscure that made you go, wow I didn't know that, oh that's a good piece of the puzzle to put together. >> You know what, just the scale of, you look at the merger, 57 billion dollars, and on paper you are like, okay that's interesting, but a lot of the numbers coming out, you know, we talked to the senior VP of marketing and he says, you know, my guys are making bank, actually that's to paraphrase him. You said that John, that they are making bank, and one of the things that I worried about was the culture, the sales culture between Dell and EMC. Dell sales culture, very web based, very, you know I had a Dell rep and there was not an awful lot of value add, EMC >> Paul: Value add. >> The value add, and those guys earned their money, and bringing those two together and making sure that customers don't miss a beat and still get that EMC value, but Dell is able to maintain that same cost structure, I thought that was a really complicated thing to do. It seems like they are executing really well on that, and I thought from a customer's perspective, you want your supplier to make money and you want it to not be too disruptive, but you know, you want to see some value. >> Great point, that was one of highlights of my take aways, Marius Haas' interview around sales and comp and structure. They are used to a lot of bank, those sales guys, and now it's like, hey we're going to give you a haircut, what? I was about to make a million dollars on commissions this year. >> This merger will not work unless the sales organization is in sync. >> Other notables for me, just that jumped out at me, that kind of made me go, that amplifies a point, that's memorable is Michael Dell's interview hits home the point of entrepreneur founder, lead guy, and there's only three left in the industry, Ellison, Dell, and Bezos, in my mind that are billionaires that are actively, not mailing it in, they are actively driving their business, have a great ethos and culture that is creating durability. I find that the key point for me, that was a moment. I think he does sell Pivotal a little too much, which gives me a little red flag, like hmm, why is he pushing Pivotal so much, what is he hiding, but that's a different story. Michael Dell, founder. Gelsinger shared some personal commentary around his personal life. 2016 was the hardest year of his life. >> Keith: That was a mean story. >> Personal and business. Almost got fired. Remember last year? >> Yeah. >> Pat Gelsinger, you're fired. So, he had a tough year, now he's kicking ass, taking names, evaluation's on the rise. That jumped out at me. And finally, the little nuance in this merger is the alliance opportunity. Dell had the Intel, wintel, Microsoft relationships from day one, that history, Intel was on stage. EMC's had it, but not at the deep level that Dell did. So I see the alliance teams really grooving here, so that's going to impact channel marketing, SIs. I think you are going to see a massive power base, to your scale point, around alliances in the industry, the ecosystem. It's either going to blow up big or blow up bad. Either way its high octane power, Intel. >> Keith: It is a big bet. >> It's a big bet. Those are my points. Anything that jumped out at you, final thoughts, interviews? >> Jeff Townsend threw off an interesting statistic, 70% of the traffic on the internet will be video by 2020. I never heard that one before, but that has some pretty interesting implications for how infrastructure has to manage it. >> Yeah, great for our business. We're doing video right now. Keith, anything that jumped out at you, anything else? >> The scale of this show compared to, I've been at Dell World, I've been to EMC World. The energy is different here. I can say that for sure, from the EMC Worlds and the Dell Worlds that I've been at. Customers, I think, are wide eyed. I've been to plenty of VM World's. It doesn't quite have the flavor of a VM World, but I think customers are starting to understand the scale of Dell EMC, the entire portfolio. You walk the show floor, you're like, wow I didn't know >> John: The relevance has increased. >> Just little bits of this larger Dell technologies that customers are picking up on, that they're keying on that there's value there. >> The 800 pound gorilla, the very relevant impact, people are taking notice. >> If you are a one product Dell customer or a one product EMC customer and you are coming to the show for the first time, I think you're a little bit wowed. >> Alright, guys, great job. Keith, great to have you host theCUBE. Great job, as always. Really appreciate you bringing the commentary to theCUBE. Great stuff. >> Always great being here. >> Paul, great editorial, great insight, great questions. Great to work with you guys. Great to the team. Thanks to our sponsors. Go to siliconangle.com, wikibon.com, and go to youtube.com/siliconeangle and check out all the videos and the playlists, more coverage, great. Thanks for watching our special coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. See you next time.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for Dell EMC World 2017. This is theCUBE's eighth year of covering, since the inception of theCUBE. EMC World, which is now called Dell EMC, with the first year of the combination coming together. Exciting, a lot of storylines here. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE, and my co-host with SiliconANGLE, Paul Gillin. Our next guest, Jeff Boudreau, who's the president of Dell EMC Storage Division. It sounds weird to say that because EMC used to be a storage company. Now, they're a part of Dell Technologies with a zillion brands. Jeff, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you for having me. >> So first, explain quickly what the storage division is, because Chad Sakac does converge infrastructure, but, you own all the storage. >> Jeff: Correct. >> So just quickly, just. >> Yeah, real quick, keeping it simple, if you think about the components and the building blocks, you have Ashley running compute, you have Tom Burns running network, you have myself running storage, and you have Beth Phalen running data protection, and then Chad's the converge platform, so when we integrate the solution, Chad has that piece. So yes, all storage, and that would be Legacy or Heritage Dell storage, but also Heritage and Legacy EMC storage. All that came together so, just massive revenue, massive amounts of customers, and then obviously tons of engineers around the world. >> You got a lot of work to do. Obviously storage is not going away. It's changing radically and in different ways. Certainly cloud is accelerating it. The data center world is changing. They call it data center. They don't call it server center. They call it the data center 'cause there's more data coming. So I got to ask you, one of my favorite quotes in your keynote this morning was, "We have self-driving cars. "Why don't we have self-driving storage "or autonomous storage?" Which is provocative, but also very relevant. Can you explain what you meant by that, and let's dig deeper into that. >> Yeah. I mean, actually, it's one of my favorite topics, actually. So I have these notions of the pillars of innovation, right? And I want to start looking at, to your point, things are changing in the markets and in the way customers are using our products, and I want to embrace that change and innovate around that change. The notion of the day in the life of the storage admin, or the day in the life of the data center admin, and the day in the life of just about anybody using the product. We got to make it simpler, right? It goes back to consumer simplicity, a lot of this stuff. What we're trying to do there is actually make the storage be smart enough to actually just take care of itself. It's kind of the set it and forget it notion. So, as part of autonomous storage, we look at four attributes simplistically, in regards to how you would have a self-driving system. The first one is about being application-centric, 'cause, at the end of the day, it's all about the app and the workload. We all know that, right, and that's what the users care about. So the way I kind of looked at that this morning is, the example is, that's like telling your car where you want to go, or is it a turn-by-turn decision, right, that you would give it? The second thing is about being policy driven. I'm not going to say, hey listen, do I want to take the fastest route or do I want to take the scenic route? >> John: Yep. >> Right, simplistically. And then, I'm going to be honest, that stuff's relatively easy and we do a bunch of that stuff today. Really when it starts to get the next level is when this stuff becomes self-aware, right? Understanding its resources, and then understanding if you're in or out of those boundaries. So, am I, you know, swerving out of my lane? Do I have enough gas? Dot, dot, dot, right, as an example. And then where it gets really powerful is the fourth component for me, is self-optimization. That's being able to understanding what, you're self-aware and then making a better outcome for your customer. At the end of the day, that could be, hey, there's not enough charging stations to get to your destination, or you don't have enough charge, or better yet, the storage will actually or the system would tell you, hey take this path. There's enough charging stations. I'll get you there on time and safely, right? >> So you'd be very happy if you had the brand bumper sticker of the Tesla of storage. >> Absolutely. >> To your point about the stations, you know, people love Teslas. It's very sexy and it's relevant. I got to ask you about machine learning. It's obviously AIs hyped-up. We call it, not artificial intelligence, more augmented intelligence. That's a better definition because artificial intelligence is this weak, weak word. (laughing) It doesn't really exist, it's kind of out there. But, augmentation of value is about machine learning and deep learning. These are the learning systems you mentioned. Self-optimization, that's basically learning machines. >> That's right. >> What are you guys doing around big data, I meant big data machine learning and some of these things? >> So we're doing a handful of things. So along the keynote, I mentioned builtin analytics. That's two things, you know. Dell EMC, we store, protect and secure more data than anybody else in the world, par or not. So, you know and I used to joke, EMC used to be known for where information lives. Dell Technologies and Dell EMC has to be known for where information comes alive, right? And actually providing value or generating value for our customers. So, what we're going to do is, we're going to have builtin capabilities into the array, but also we're going to plug into the broader ecosystem, you know, with analytics and service providers to really help drive that value and that creation. So, you'll see a lot more around the storage itself around that self-learning and understanding. That kind of, the core components of an array. What makes it run healthy or unhealthy enables the customer to better utilize and add more value to their stack. Then also, going into that broader ecosystem, making sure that they can really drop that value to their customers and to their business. >> What pieces will you be delivering first? >> On the storage side itself, specifically, we'll be, we already have a lot of products that have probably two or three of the capabilities. So between app-centric, policy driven, and self-awareness, those are the ones we're on right now, big time. And I have a team focused on the machine learning, so we can really start self-optimizing. We actually just, we mentioned, I don't know if the guys that were on, where all the folks we've had on the show talked about a thing called cloud IQ? >> Paul: Yes, they did. >> That was something that we built a SAS model in the cloud, which is all about machine learning. >> So, that's part of this whole rollout, is moving to the cloud eventually. >> Oh, absolutely. It's critical. >> So another quote that I have off from your keynote, because it had some great soundbites, Isilon, one of the products in your portfolio, "Isilon is known to be the gold standard "for storage in the genome sequencing." Obviously, with the massive amounts of computers available, certainly cloud computing has now made it possible to do amazing things with the data, and make that literally come alive, and hopefully people could live longer. But, genome sequencing is actually doable, and price points at. >> It's crazy, probably the last two years alone, it's dramatically and drastically just reduced. >> But why is Isilon the gold standard for sequence? What specifically is it that's great about it? >> Well, it basically, in regards to the data structure and how we can process that big data, and make sense of it quickly as we analyze it, there's nothing faster in the market. And it'd be interesting, and now that we've brought out the Isilon All-Flash array with the new infinity platform, we've taken something that, two years ago took weeks, down to days, down to hours, and with the All-Flash array we've taken it down to minutes, 22 minutes to be exact. >> So I got to to ask you, I'll let you think about the portfolio question and I'm going to ask in about a minute how you're going to rectify all that, where the overlap is or isn't, so you can work on that, but the next question is, the industry, you're not seeing a lot of start-ups trying to do what Isilon did. You heard Isilon guys leaving, starting companies, and everyone's kind of pivoting, but you are seeing startups in the white spaces, data protection, so question, how hard is it to do a startup right now and get venture funding, because it seems to be scale is the issue, and it's hard to be a, quote, pure storage company, pun intended. Pure Storage was the last company to challenge you guys. (laughing) >> You know, I've also thrown that app in there as well, it's standing on their own, regardless of that. But, let's be clear, this market is consolidating. That's good for us, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. So, with our size and scale, Dell and EMC, and Dell Technologies together, our size, our scale, our buying power, unmatched by anybody. It's going to be hard, for you know, there's a lot of companies. >> Hard nut to crack, for a start up to come in and it could be the table stakes are too high. >> So in regards, the innovation, spending R&D, value chain that we get, efficiency, buying power, intel, I mean think about all the stuff around the whole ecosystem, it's just really hard to do, so this market is consolidating. We're good with that. What I want to do is consolidate this market faster, and I want to drive more share of this market in regards to that, and I think it's really tough. So, you've seen small guys be bought recently. Some guys that aren't doing well. Some people, >> Acquihires. >> Maybe some of these orange people are really in the red, going back to your pun. So, they're struggling, right, some of these guys are struggling, so I really think this is an opportunity, as we force this market as it consolidates, for us, I think it's a real big thing. >> Alright, so the question on the consolidation, sorry Paul to interrupt, but okay. I get the consolidation. Now the growth, we're going to put the pedal to the medal. It's going to come from where? You got a mature market, you're consolidating. You lock that in, so that's big dollars by the way. It's not like small numbers, and the table stakes are high so, storage going to crack that nut. Then you got to have the growth strategy where there's a hockey stick opportunity. >> Yeah, so, from a storage perspective, let's be clear, they're going to have the growth. It's going to come through things like HTI. It's going to come through things like software-defined, in regards to how we do that, right? That's obviously part of, software-defined is part of my portfolio as well, so, it will be a journey in regards to where we grow. The traditional space is huge, let's be very clear. It's massive, right. We have to do that and do that extremely well, and protect that, and make sure our customers are taken care of, but as they go on their journey, if it's software-defined, or cloud, or what have you, we want to make sure we're relevant can help with that. So, one will be taking share in that space, there'll be opportunities as the consumption models, the technology, and the deployment models change, we'll be front and center in all of those. >> Speaking of software-defined, essentially that can deposition some of the storage elements below it. Cisco is wrestling with that right now. Where they sort of held off for a couple of years on software-defined network, and they're finally embracing it. What are you doing to balance the need for your, the elements of your portfolio to shine, with also the need to get customers to software definition? >> Absolutely, so, right now, I mean, it's a journey. Let's be clear, right, so, I have a, actually, a large customer that was on stage with me. I'll leave their name out, if anyone wants to watch who I talked to on day one, they'll know who I'm talking about. They're on a journey. Right now, today, they're probably one of the, I would say, leaders in software-defined storage and driving software-defined storage is part of their IT transformation and their data centers. They're 20% software-defined, 80% still traditional physical infrastructure. They have a big stake in the ground. In three or four short years, 2020, they're going to be 50/50. Right, and these the guys that are leading and driving. So just give the folks a little bit of balance in regards to yes, that's where their growth will come from, this is where the appeal is, but it will be a journey in how we get through that, but also for me, going back to scale and Dell Technologies, I have products like Scale IO. I have virtual Isilon, I have virtual Unity. In regards to what we do with ECS, that's an object store, so file blocker object, we have it. And then I have wonderful 14G servers from my friend Ashley in the compute team. Go well together. >> So, Pat Gelsinger's talking about a developer-ready infrastructure. You've mentioned on your keynote, I thought was clever, the cloud-ready storage. Talk about that dynamic because, love this soundbite, "Storage has to be cloud ready, cloud connected, "build out on off prim, and live in a multi-cloud world." Don't comment on the multi-cloud. We think that's going to happen. Not ready for primetime right now. I'm pretty certainly it is happening. Their is some latency issues on multi-cloud. >> Sure >> We don't want to digress. But hybrid is definitely happening, but multi-cloud is the gateway, hybrid cloud is the gateway to multi-cloud. Dealing with legacy to cloud native, that gap with hybrid. How do you look at that, cause that's truly going to be a great opportunity for you, and being cloud storage ready, I'm sorry, cloud ready. >> Cloud ready. >> Ready storage, how do you make that happen? >> Yeah, so, cloud connections is one of the big ones for me. So, the ability to connect to the cloud and allow people to move, seamlessly move data in and out of the cloud. So depending if it's a traditional on prim or off prim, so we have great technologies for file, we have CTA, which is a cloud tiering appliance, all file based, gets rave reviews from our customers and we're able to help them not only on our products but actually on some competitor file products to move it off to the cloud if need be, which has actually been a pretty big win for us. In addition to that, Isilon has a notion of cloud pools that people haven't seen, but again it's a transparent seamless data mobility from Isilon, from core to the cloud, if you will. Then, lastly we have a cloud array, which is a block device that allows us to move block data from a traditional asset into the cloud as well, so, we have a handful of products or features that are natively in certain products today. We'll be evolving that over time. >> You got everything! >> Well we'll be evolving that over time too, so we want to have a more coherent simple storage for our customers, right? It doesn't matter what the data type is, we want to be able to present it to the cloud. >> But you, by that I mean EMC, were late to the Flash market, but have caught up, are now the leaders in the Flash market. Phenomenal growth year over year. What did you do to pull that off? That's kind of counter-intuitive. >> Focus and energy, and a lot of great engineers. I'll be honest with you, alright. And then a great sales team behind it as well. So, we were late to the game. We made some decisions to lead with certain products and drive certain products where if we, you know if you took a step back, I think we'd said, "Hey, listen, we all agreed Flash was critical. Flash will be everywhere, compute, storage, network." And then you could debate on the consumption model, if it would be all Flash systems versus hybrid systems, or what have you. At the end of the day, Flash was pretty critical, and I think we're all on the same page there, in regards to how you want to attack the problem, if it's a hybrid or all Flash, that's maybe where we got a little stuck in our own way. But then focus from all the teams, if it was Bemax or Midrange or Xtreme IO, Isilon now. Teams have done an amazing job catching up, and then working with Billy and Marius, and the go-to-market teams, they've been phenomenal. It's been a huge shape with our. >> Well that's a good point to my portfolio question, is you guys really worked that problem hard. I think it was a two year window, we saw all kinds of architecture, but that was good timing on that, because you were early on the trend architecturally was happening in a real sense, although late to the game. Things kind of played out and you kind of shaped your portfolio up during that time. Kind of a forcing function. One, is that what happened, and two, what is the current view of the portfolio right now? Do you feel comfortable about the overlap, gaps, things that you think about? >> Yeah absolutely, so let me take the media one first, and go back to Flash specifically. We learned a lot, and yes that did help us shape our portfolios and go forward and actually try to focus specific architectures to specific-use cases to make our customers successful. We also learned is we didn't ever want to be late again. That's why, with NVME specifically, that we actually were major contributors and actually a codeveloper on NVME. Which others can talk about NVME in their marketing material. They weren't actually at the table codeveloping. >> You get the scar tissue, saying if we don't get out in this, we're going to. (laughing) >> That's right, so we've learned and I don't want it to happen again. I want to be a learning organization. I don't want it to happen again, so we're going to be driving that, and we'll be a leader in NVME, and as more media transitions happen in Flash, there'll be more, trust me, a few years down the road beyond that, we're already looking at, we'll continue to make sure that we're a leader in that space. Now on the portfolio, I talk to customers all the time. They love the portfolio in the sense of, that they understand, they believe in the fact that there's no, one size does not fit all. They have said, though, "Hey you got a lot of products "and you have to simplify." In full transparency that's something we've been working through and we'll continue to work through that. We will have overlap, and we want overlap, it's good. >> John: Better to have overlaps than gaps. >> And Joe Tucci was a huge person and I couldn't support more but we want it to be planned overlap versus unplanned overlap, because we want to be making sure we want to make our customers successful, and we say hey, and that we can articulate clearly to our customers why they'd use a product and the value its going to drive for their use-case, for their application. Same thing our sales guys, same thing for our service guys, same thing for our own engineers. We want to keep people aligned and focused on what we're trying to do. So that way, we can provide a better outcome on the other side. >> Are you looking at, when you're looking out at the future, do you see anything disruptive on the horizon? Is there anything that could change this industry fundamentally? >> Obviously, I always keep cloud in the back of mind. It's still something, you know. Depending on how people want to portray it or look at it. People call it a destination, some people call it a media, what have you. I call it a virtual infrastructure. Depending on how you want to define it, there's different ways. >> A mainframe in the sky. >> You know, I say that one always keeps me up at night, depending on how things go, but there's a lot of cool things going on in storage actually where I think, first, let's be clear, storage in general maybe hesitant. It's lost some of the sex appeal, if you will, the attractiveness of it. I think that's starting to come back with some of the things like NVME and cloud-ready and multi-dimensional scaling. There's a whole bunch of things going around there that actually is going to kind of drive that back. Now in addition to that, though, we all know internet of things, machine learning, you know, video, it's exploding. So let's be very clear there'll be a lot, >> Storage is not going away, but the machine learning certainly is going to be a nice jolt in the arm for optimization and automation. >> There's a huge opportunity there, in regards to that. Cloud is one of the big ones, but I think there's a lot of things, I guess the had-wins stay at wins, there's a lot of things in favor to really kind of push us forward. >> Jeff Boudreau, thank you for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate the insight, and candid commentary and analysis and insight into your business. Appreciate it. You got the storage, it's not going away. It's called the data center and the cloud for a reason. It's all about the data and the value of business will be data driven. This is theCUBE bringing data to you here live from Las Vegas at Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier with Paul Gillin. Back with more, stay with us after the short break. (lively music)