(upbeat music) >> Kubernetes is maturing for example moving from quarterly releases to three per year, it's adding many of the capabilities that early on were avoided by Kubernetes committers, but now are going more mainstream, for example, more robust security and better support from mobile cluster management and other functions. But core Kubernetes by itself, doesn't get organizations where they need to go. That's why the ecosystem has stepped up to fill the gaps in application development. Developers as we know, they don't care about infrastructure, but they do care about building new apps, they care about modernizing existing apps, leveraging data, scaling, they care about automation look, they want to be cloud native. And one of the companies leading the ecosystem charge and building out more robust capabilities is Red Hat. And ahead of KubeCon Spain. It's our pleasure to welcome in Stu Miniman director of market insights at Red Hat to preview the event, Stu, good to see you, how you been? >> I'm doing awesome, Dave. Thanks for having me, great to be here. >> Yeah. So what's going on in Kube land these days? >> So it's funny Dave, if you were to kind of just listen out there in the marketplace, the CNCF has a survey that's like 96% of companies running Kubernetes production, everybody's doing it. And others will say, oh no, Kubernetes, only a small group group of people are using it, it's already probably got newer technologies that's replacing it. And the customers that I'm talking to Dave, first of all, yes, containers of Kubernetes, great growth growth rate, good adoption overall, I think we've said more than a year or two ago, we've probably crossed that chasm, the Jeff Moore, it's longer the early people just building all their own thing, taking all the open source, building this crazy stack that they need to had to do a lot of work we used to say. Chewing glass to be able to make it work right or anything, but it's still not as easy as you would like, almost no company that I talk to, if you're talking about big enterprises has Kubernetes just enterprise wide, and a hundred percent of their applications running on it. What is the tough challenge for people? And I mean, Dave, something, you and I have covered for many, many years, , that application portfolio that I have, most enterprises, hundreds, thousands of applications modernizing that having that truly be cloud native, that that's a really long journey and we are still in the midst of that, so I still still think we are in that, that if you look at the cross in the chasm that early majority chunk, so some of it is how do we mature things even better? And how do we make things simpler? Talk about things like automation, simplicity, security, we need to make sure they're all there so that it can be diffused and rolled out more broadly. And then we also need to think about where are we? We talk about the next million cloud customers, where does Kubernetes and containers and all the cloud native pieces fit into that broader discussion. Yes, there's some maturity there and we can declare victory on certain things, but there's still a lot, a lot of work that everyone's doing and that leads us into the show. I mean, dozens of projects that are already graduated, many more along that process from sandbox through a whole bunch of co-located events that are there, and it's always a great community event which Red Hat of course built on open source and community projects, so we're happy to have a good presence there as always. >> So you and I have talked about this in the past how essentially container's going to be embedded into a lot of different places, and sometimes it's hard to find, it's hard to track, but if you look at kind of the pre DevOps world skillsets like provisioning LANs, or configuring ports, or troubleshooting, squeezing more, server utilism, I mean, those who are really in high demand. If that's your skillset, then you're probably out of a job today. And so that's shifted toward things like Kubernetes. So you see and you see in the ETR data, it's along with cloud, and RPA, or automation, it is right up there I mean, it's top, the big four if you will, cloud, automation, RPA, and containers. And so we know there's a lot of spending activity going on there, but sometimes, like I said, it's hard to track I mean, if you got cloud growing at 35% a year, at least for the hyperscalers that we track, Kubernetes should be growing faster than that, should it not? >> Yeah, Dave, I would agree with you when I look at the big analyst firms that track this, I believe they've only got the container space at about a 25 per percent growth rate. >> Slower than cloud. But I compare that with Deepak Singh who runs at AWS, he has the open source office, he has all the containers and Kubernetes, and has visibility in all of that. And he says, basically, containers of the default when somebody's deploying to AWS today. Yes, serverless has its place, but it has not replaced or is not pushing down, slowing down the growth of containers or Kubernetes. We've got a strong partnership, I have lots of customers running on AWS. I guess I look at the numbers and like you, I would say that I would expect that that growth rate to be north of where just cloud in general is because the general adoption of containers and Kubernetes, we're still in the early phases of things. >> And I think a lot of the spendings Stu is actually in labor resources within companies and that's hard to track. Let's talk about what we should expect at the show. Obviously this whole notion of secure supply chain was a big deal last year in LA, what's hot? >> Yeah, so security Dave, absolutely. You said for years, it's a board level discussion, it's now something that really everyone in the organization has to know about the dev sec ops movement, has seen a lot of growth, secure supply chain, we're just trying to make sure that when I use open source, there's lots of projects, there is the huge ecosystem in marketplaces that are out there. So I want to make sure that as I grab all of the pieces that I know where they got came from the proper signature certification to make sure that the full solution that I build, I understand it. And if there are vulnerabilities, I know if there's an issue, how I patch it in the industry, we talk about CBEs, so those vulnerabilities, those exploits that come out, then everybody has to do a quick runaround to understand wait, hey, is my configuration? Am I vulnerable? Do I have to patch things? So security, absolutely still a huge, huge thing. Quick from a Red Hat standpoint, people might notice we made an acquisition a year ago of StackRox. That product itself also now has a completely fully open source project itself, also called StackRox. So the product is Red Hat advanced cluster security for Kubernetes, there's an open source equivalent for that called StackRox now, open source, community, there's a monthly office hour live streaming that a guy on my team actually does, and so there'll be a lot of activity at the show talking about security. So many other things happening at the show Dave. Another key area, you talked about the developers and what they want to worry about and what they don't. In the container space, there's a project called Knative. So Google helped create that, and that's to help me really have a serverless operational model, with still the containers and Kubernetes underneath that. So at the show, there will be the firs Knative con. And if you hadn't looked at Knative in a couple of years, one of the missing pieces that is now there is eventing. So if I look at functions and events, now that event capability is there, it's something I've talked to a lot of customers that were waiting for that to have it. It's not quite the same as like a Lambda, but is similar functionality that I can have with my containers in Kubernetes world. So that's an area that's there and so many others, I mean, GitOps are super hot at the last show. It's something that we've seen, really broad adoption since Argo CD went generally available last year, and lots of customers that are taking that to help them. That's both automation put together because I can allow GitHub to be my single source of truth for where I keep code, make sure I don't have any deviation from where the kind of the golden image if you will, it lives. >> So we're talking earlier about, how hard it is to track this stuff. So with the steep trajectory of growth and new customers coming on, there's got to be a lot of experimentation going on. That probably is being done, somebody downloads the open source code and starts playing with it. And then when they go to production that I would imagine Stu that's the point at which they say, hey, we need to fill some of these gaps. And they reach out to a company like yours and say, now we got to have certifications and trust., Do you. see that? >> So here's the big shift that happened, if we were looking four or five years ago, absolutely, I'd grab the open source code and some people might do that, but what cloud really enabled Dave, is rather than just grabbing, going to the dot the GitHub repo and pulling it down itself, I can go to the cloud so Microsoft, AWS, and Google all have their Kubernetes offering and I click a button. But that just gives me Kubernetes so there's still a steep learning curve. And as you said to build out out that full stack, that is one of the big things that we do with OpenShift is we take dozens of projects, pull them in together so you get a full platform. So you spend less time on curating, integrating, and managing that platform. And more time on the real value for your business, which is the application stack itself, the security and the like. And when we deliver OpenShift in the cloud, we have an SRE team that manages that for you. So one of the big challenges we have out there, there is a skillset gap, there are thousands of people getting certified on Kubernetes. There are, I think I saw over a hundred thousand job openings with Kubernetes mentioned in it, we just can't train people up fast enough, and the question I would have as an enterprise company is, if I'm going to the cloud, how much time do I want to build having SREs, having them focus on the infrastructure versus the things that are business specific. What did Amazon promise Dave? We're going to help you get rid of undifferentiated heavy lifting. Well, I just consume things as a service where I have an SRE team manage that environment. That might make more sense so that I can spend more time focusing on my business activities. That's a big focus that we've had on Red Hat, is our offerings that we have with the cloud providers to do and need offering. >> Yeah, the managed service capability is key. We saw, go back to the Hadoop days, we saw that's where Cloudera really struggled. They had to support every open source project. And then the customers largely had to figure it out themselves. Whereas you look at what data bricks did with spark. It was a managed service that was getting much greater adoption. So these complex areas, that's what you need. So people win sometimes when I use the term super cloud, and we getting little debates on Twitter, which is a lot of fun, but the idea is that you create the abstraction layer that spans your on-prem, your cloud, so you've got a hybrid. You want to go across clouds, what people call multi-cloud but as you know, I've sort of been skeptical of multi-cloud is really multi-vendor. But so we're talking about a substantial experience that's identical across those clouds and then ultimately out to the edge and we see a super Paas layer emerging, And people building on top of that, hiding the underlying complexity. What are your thoughts on that? How does Kubernetes in your view fit in? >> Yeah, it's funny, Dave, if you look at this container space at the beginning, Docker came out of a company called dotCloud. That was a PaaS company. And there's been so many times that that core functionality of how do I make my developers not have to worry about that underlying gank, but Dave, while the storage people might not have to worry about the LANs, somebody needs to understand how storage works, how networking works, if something breaks, how do I make sure I can take care of it. Sometimes that's a service that the SRE team manages that away from me. so that yes, there is something I don't need to think of about, but these are technically tough configurations. So first to one of your main questions, what do we see in customers with their hybrid and multi-cloud journey? So OpenShift over 10 years old, we started OpenShift before Kubernetes even was a thing. Lots of our customers run in what most people would consider hybrid, what does that mean? I have something in my data center, I have something in the cloud, OpenShift health, thanks to Kubernetes, I can have consistency for the developers, the operators, the security team, across those environments. Over the last few years, we've been doing a lot in the Kubernetes space as a whole, as the community, to get Kubernetes out to the edge. So one of the nice things, where do containers live Dave? Anywhere Linux does, is Linux going to be out of the edge? Absolutely, it can be a small footprint, we can do a lot with it. There were a lot of vendors that came out with it wasn't quite Kubernetes, they would strip certain things out or make a configuration that was smaller out at the edge, but a lot of times it was something that was just for a developer or something I could play with, and what it would break sometimes was that consistency out at the edge to what my other environments would like to have. And if I'm a company that needs consistency there. So take for example, if I have an AI workload where I need edge, and I need something in the cloud, or in my data center of consistency. So the easy use case that everybody thinks about is autonomous vehicles. We work with a lot of the big car manufacturers, I need to have when my developer build something, and often my training will be done either in the data center or in the public cloud, but I need to be able to push that out to the vehicle itself and let it run. We've actually even got Dave, we've got Kubernetes running up on the ISS. And you want to make sure that we have a consistency. >> The ultimate edge. >> Yeah, so I said, right, it's edge above and beyond the clouds even, we've gone to beyond. So that is something that the industry as a whole has been working at, from a Red Hat standpoint, we can take OpenShift to a really small footprint. Last year we launched was known as single node OpenShift. We have a project called micro shift, which is also fully open source that it has less pieces of the overall environment to be able to fit onto smaller and smaller devices there. But we want to be able to manage all of them consistently because you talked about multi cluster management. Well, what if I have thousands or 10 of thousands of devices out of the edge? I don't necessarily have network, I don't have people, I need to be able to do things from an automated standpoint. And that's where containers and Kubernetes really can shine. And where a lot of effort has been done in general and something specifically, we're working on it, Red Hat, we've had some great customers in the telecommunication space. Talk about like the 5G rollout with this, and industrial companies that need to be able to push out at the edge for these type of solutions. >> So you just kind of answered my next question, but I want to double click on it which was, if I'm in the cloud, why do I need you? And you touched on it because you've got primitives, and APIs, and AWS, Google, and Microsoft, they're different, if you're going to hide the underlying complexity of that, it takes a lot of RND and work, now extend that to a Tesla. You got to make it run there, different use case, but that's kind of what Linux and OpenShift are design to do, so double click on that. >> Yeah, so right. If I look at the discussion you've been having about super clouds is interesting because there are many companies that we work with that do live across multiple environments. So number one, if I'm a developer, if my company came to me and said, hey, you've got all your certifications and you got years of experience running on Amazon, well, we need you to go run over on Google. That developer might switch companies rather than switch clouds because they've got all of their knowledge and skillset, and it's a steep learning curve. So there's a lot of companies that work on, how can we give you tools and solutions that can live across those environments? So I know you mentioned companies like Snowflake, MongoDB, companies like Red Hat, HashiCorp, GitLab, also span all of those environments. There's a lot of work, Dave, to be different than not just, I say, I don't love the term like we're cloud agnostic, which would mean, well, you can use any cloud. >> You can run on any cloud. >> That's not what we're talking about. Look at the legacy that Red Hat has is, Red Hat has decades of running in every customer's data center and pick your X 86 server of choice. And we would have deep relationships when Dell, HP, IBM, Lenovo, you name it, comes out with a new piece of hardware that was different. We would have to make sure that the Linux primitives work from a Red Hat standpoint. Interesting Dave, we're now supporting OpenShift on Azure Stack Hub. And I talked to our head of product management, and I said, we've been running OpenShift in Azure for years, isn't Azure Stack Hub? Isn't that just Azure in your data center. He's like, yeah, but down at the operating system level, we had to change some flags and change some settings and things like that, so what do we know in IT? It's always the yeah, at the high level, it looks the same, it acts the same, it feels the same. >> Seamless. >> It's seamless in everything when you get down to the primitives level, sometimes that we need to be able to do that. I'll tell you Dave, there's things even when I look at A cloud, if I'm in US East One, or US West One, there actually could be some differences in what services are there or how things react, and so therefore we have a lot of deep work that goes into all of those environments, and it's not just Red Hat, we have a marketplace and an ecosystem, we want to make sure you've got API compatibility across all of those. So we are trying to help lift up this entire ecosystem and bring everybody along with it because you set it at the upfront, Kubernetes alone won't do it, oo one vendor gives you an entire, everything that you need for your developer tool chain. There's a lot that goes into this, and that's where we have deep commitment to partnerships. We build out and support lots of ecosystems. And this show itself is very much a community driven show. And, and therefore, that's why Red Hat has a strong presence at it, 'cause that's the open source community and everything that we built on. >> You guys are knee deep in it. You know I wrote down when you were talking about Snowflake and Mongo, HashiCorps, another one, I wrote down Dell, HP, Cisco, Lenovo, that to me, that should be their strategy. NetApp, their strategy should be to basically build out that abstraction layer, the so-called super cloud. So be interesting to see if they're going to be at this show. It requires a lot of R and D number one, number two, to your point, it requires an ecosystem. So you got all these guys, most of them now do in their own as a service, as a service is their own cloud. Their own cloud means you better have an ecosystem that's robust. I want to ask you about, do you ever think about what's next beyond Kubernetes? Or do you feel like, hey, there's just so much headroom in Kubernetes and so many active projects, we got ways to go. >> Yeah, so the Kubernetes itself Dave, should be able to fade into the background some. In many ways it does mirror what happened with Linux. So Linux is just the foundation of everything we have. We would not have the public cloud providers if it wasn't for Linux. I mean, Google, of course you wouldn't have without Linux, Amazon. >> Is on the internet. >> Right, but you might not have a lot of it. So Kubernetes, I think really goes the same way is, it is the foundational layer of what so much of it is built on top of it, and it's not really. So many people think about that portability. Oh, Google's the one that created it, and they wanted to make sure that it was easy if I want to go from the cloud provider that I had to use Kubernetes on Google cloud. And while that is a piece of it, that consistency is more important. And what I can build on top of it, it is really more of a distributed systems challenge that we are solving and that we've been working on in industry now for decades. So that is what we help solve, and what's really nice, containers and Kubernetes, it's less of an abstraction, it's more of new atomic unit of how we build things. So virtualization, I don't know what's underneath, and we spent like a decade fixing the storage networking components underneath so that the LANs matched right, and the network understood what was happening in the virtual machine. The atomic unit of a container, which is what Kubernetes manages is an application or a piece of an application. And therefore that there is less of an abstraction, more of just a rearchitecting of how we build things, and that is part of what is needed, and boy, Dave, the ecosystem, oh my God, yes, we've gone to only three releases a year, but I can tell you our roadmaps are all public on the internet and we talk heavily about them. There is still so many things that just at the basic Kubernetes piece, new architectures, arm devices are now in there, we're now supporting them, Kubernetes can support them too. So there are so many hardware pieces that are coming, so many software devices, the edge, we talked about it a bit, so there's so much that's going on. One of the areas that I love hearing about at the show, we have a community event called OpenShift Comments, which one of the main things of OpenShift Comments, is customers coming to talk about what they've been doing, and not about our products, we're talking about the projects and their journey overall. We've got a at Flenty Show, Airbus and Telefonica, are both going to be talking about what they're doing. We've seen Dave, every industry is going through their digital transformation journey. And it's great to hear straight from them what they're doing, and one of the big pieces in area, we actually spend a bunch of time on that application journey. There's a group of open source projects under what's known as Konveyor, that's conveyor with a K, Konveyor.io. It's modernization in migration. So how do I go from a VM to a container? How do I go from my data center to a cloud? How do I switch between services, open source projects to help with that journey? And, oh my gosh, Dave, I mean, you know in the cloud space, I mean that's what all the SIs and all the consultancies are throwing thousands of people at, is to help us get along that curve of that modernization journey. >> Okay, so let's see May 16th, the week of May 16th is KubeCon in Valencia Spain. theCUBE's going to be there, there was a little bit of a curfuffle on Twitter because the mask mandate was lifted in Spain and people had made plans thinking, okay, it's safe everybody's going to be wearing masks. Well, now I mean, you're going to have to make your own decisions on that front. I mean, you saw that you follow Twitter quite closely, but hey, this is the world we live in. So I'll give you the last word. >> Yeah, we'll see if Twitter still exists by the time we get to that show with. >> Could be private. What happens, but yeah, no, Dave, I'll be participating remotely, it is a hybrid event, so one of the things we'll be watching is, how many people are there in person LA was a pretty small show, core contributors, brought it back to some of the early days that you covered heavily from theCUBE standpoint, how Valencia will be? I know from Red Hat standpoint, we have people there, many of them from Europe, both speaking, we talked about many of the co-located events that are there, so a lot of pieces all participate remotely. So if you stop by the OpenShift commons event, I'll be part of the event just from a hybrid standpoint. And yeah, we've actually got the week before, we've got Red Hat Summit. So it's nice to actually to have back to back weeks. We'd had that a whole bunch of times before I remember, back to back weeks in Boston one year where we had both of those events and everything. That's definitely. >> Connective tissue. >> Keeps us busy there. You've got a whole bunch of travel going on. I'm not doing too much travel just yet, Dave, but it's good to see you and it's great to be connected with community. >> Yeah, so theCUBE will be there. John Furrier is hosting with Keith Townsend. So if you're in Valencia, definitely stop by. Stu thanks so much for coming into theCUBE Studios I appreciate it. >> Thanks, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching. We'll see you the week of May 16th in Valencia, Spain. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World. Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience. I am Lisa Martin and I've got a couple of guests joining me. Please welcome Puneet Dhawan, the Director of Product Management, Hyper-converged infrastructure for Dell Technologies. Puneet great to see you today. >> Thank you, for having me over. >> And we've got a customer that's going to be articulating all the value that Puneet's going to talk about. Please welcome Greg Altman, the IT infrastructure manager from Swiff-Train. Hey, Greg, how are you today? >> I'm doing well. Thank you. >> Excellent. All right guys. So Puneet, let's start with you, give us a little bit of an overview of your role. You lead product management, for Dell Technologies partner aligned HCI systems. Talk to us about that? >> Sure, absolutely. Um so, you know, it's largely about providing customers the choice. My team specifically focuses on developing Hyper-converged infrastructure products for our customers that are aligned to key technologies from our partners, such as Microsoft, Nutanix, et cetera. And that, you know, falls very nicely with meeting our customers on what technology they want to pick on, what technology they want to go with, whether it's VMware, Microsoft, Nutanix, we have to source from the customers. >> Let's dig into Microsoft. Talk to us about Azure Stack HCI. How is Dell Tech working with them to position this in the market? >> Sure, um, this is largely about following the customer journey towards digital transformation. So both in terms of where they are in digital transformation and how they want to approach it. So for example, we have a large customer base who's looking to modernize their legacy Hyper-V architectures, and that's where Azure Stack HCI fits in very nicely, and not only our customers are able to modernize the legacy architectures using the architectural benefits of simplicity, high performance, simple management, scalability. (Greg breathes heavily) For HCI for Hyper-V, at the same time, they can connect to Azure to get the benefits of the bullet's force. Now on the other end, we have a large customer base who started off in Azure, you know, they have cloud native applications, you know, kind of born in the cloud. But they're also looking to bring some of the applications down to on-prem, or things like disconnected scenarios, regulatory concerns, data locality reasons. And for those customers, Microsoft and Dell have a department around Dell EMC Integrated solutions for Azure Stack Hub. And that's what essentially brings Azure ecosystem, on-prem so it's like running cloud in your own premises. >> So you mentioned a second ago giving customers choice, and we always talk about that at pretty much every event that we do. So tell me a little bit about how the long standing partnership that Dell Technologies has with Microsoft decades. How is that helping you to really differentiate the technology and then show the customers the different options, together these two companies can deliver? >> Sure, so we've had a very long standing partnerships, actually over three decades now. Across the spectrum whether we talk about our partnership more on the Windows 10 side, and the modernization of the workforce, to the level of hybrid cloud and cloud solutions, and helping even customers, you know, run their applications on Azure to our large services offerings. Over the past several years, we have realized how important is hybrid cloud and multicloud for customers. And that's where we have taken our partnership to the next level, to co-develop, co-engineer and bring to the market together our full portfolio of Azure Stack Hybrid Solutions. And that's where I've said, meeting customers on where they are either bringing Azure on-prem, or helping customers on-prem, modernize on-prem architectures using Azure Stack HCI. So, you know, there's a whole lot of core development we have done together to simplify how customers manage on-prem infrastructures on a day-to-day basis, how do they install it, even how they support it, you know, we have joined support agreements with Microsoft that encompassed and bearing the entirety of the portfolio so that customers have one place to go, which is Dell Technologies to get not only the product, either in US or worldwide, to a very secure supply chain to Dell EMC, at the same time for all their support consulting services, whether they're on-prem or in the cloud. We offer all those services in very close partnership with Microsoft. >> Terrific. Great. Let's switch over to you now, probably we talk about what Swiff-Train is doing with its Azure Stack HCI, tell our audience a little bit about Swiff-Train what you guys are what you do. >> Well, Swiff-Train is a full covering flooring wholesaler, we sell flooring across Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, even into Florida. And we're an 80 year old company, 80 plus. And we've been moving forward with kind of hybridizing our infrastructure, making use of cloud where it makes sense. And when it came to our on-prem infrastructure, it was old, well five, six years old, running Windows 2012 2016, it was time to upgrade. And when we look at doing a large scale upgrade, like that, we called Dell and say, you know, this is what we're trying to do, and what's the new technologies that we can do that makes the migration work easier. And that's where we wound up with Azure Stack. >> So from a modernization perspective, you mentioned 80 plus year old company, I was looking on the website 1937. I always like to talk to companies like that, because modernizing when you've been around for that long it's challenging, it's challenging culturally , it's challenging historically, But talk to us a little bit about some of the specifics, that you guys were looking to Dell and Microsoft to help modernize. And was this really to drive things like, you know, operational simplicity, allow the business to have more agility so that it can expand in some of those other cities, like we talked about? >> Absolutely. We were dealing with a long maintenance window five or six hours every week patching, updating. Since we moved to Azure Stack HCI, we have virtually zero downtime. That allows our night shifts or weekend crews to be able to keep working. And the system is just bulletproof. It just does not go down. And with the lifecycle management tools that we get with Windows Admin Center, and Dell's OpenManage Plug-in, I log into one pane of glass in the morning, and I look and I say, "Hey, all my servers are going great. Everything's in the green." I know that that day, I'm not going to have any infrastructure issues, I can deal with other issues that make the business money. >> And I'm sure they appreciate that. Tell us a little bit about the the actual implementation and the support as, as Puneet talked about all of the core development, the joint support that these two powerhouses deliver. Tell us about that implementation. And then for your day to day, what's your interaction with Dell and or Microsoft like? >> Well, for the implementation, we worked with our Dell representative. And we came up with a sizing plan. This is what we needed to do, we had eight or nine physical servers that we wanted to get rid of. And we wanted to compress down. Now we're definitely went from eight or nine to you servers down to three rack units of space with an edge, including the extra switches and stuff that we had to do. So I mean we were able to get rid of a lot of storage space or rack space. And as far as the implementation was really easy. Dell literally has a book, you follow the book and it's that simple. (Puneet chuckles) >> I like that I think more of us these days, can you somewhat write a book that we can just follow? That would be fantastic. One more question, Greg for you, before we go back to Puneet. As Puneet talked about in the beginning from describing his role, that you know, Dell Technologies works with a lot of other vendors. Why Azure Stack HCI for Swiff-Train? >> Well, it made sense for us. We were already moving, several of our websites were already moved to Azure, we've been a Hyper-V user for many years. So it was just kind of a natural evolution to migrate in that direction, because it kind of pulls all of our management tools into one, well you know, a one pane of glass type of scenario. >> Excellent. All right Puneet back to you. With some of the things that you talked about before and that Greg sort of articulated about simplifying day-to-day. Greg, I saw in my notes that you had this old aging infrastructure, you were spending five hours a week patching maintain, that you say is now virtually eliminated, Puneet, Dell Technologies and Microsoft had done quite a bit of work to simplify the operational experience. Talk to us about that, and what are some of the measurable improvements that you guys have made? >> Sure. It all starts with neither on how we approach the problem, and we have always taken a very product-centric approach at Azure Stack HCI. You know, unlike, some of our competition, which had followed. There is a reference architecture, you can put Windows Server 2019 on it and go run your own servers, and the Hyper-converged Stack on it, but we have followed a very different approach where we have learned quite a lot, you know, we are the number one vendor in HCI space, and we know a thing or two about HCI and what customers really need there. So that's why from the very beginning, we have taken a product-centric approach, and doing that allows us to have product type offers in terms of our Kx notes that are specifically designed and built for Azure Stack HCI. And on top of that, we have done very specific integration to the management Stack, we've been doing Admin Center, that is the new management tool for Microsoft to manage, both on-prem, Hyper-converged infrastructure, your Windows servers, as well as any VM's that you're running on Azure, to provide customers a very seamless, you know, a single pane of glass for both the on-prem as well as infrastructure on public cloud services. And in doing that, our customers have really appreciated how simple it is to keep their clusters running, to reduce the maintenance windows, based on some of our internal testing that we have done. IT administrators can reduce the time they spend on maintaining the clusters by over 90%. Over 40% reduction in the maintenance window itself. And all that leads to your clusters running in a healthy state. So you don't have to worry about pulling the right drivers, right founder from 10 different places, making sure whether they are qualified or not when running together, we provide one single pane of glass that customers can click on, and you know, see whether their questions are compliant or not, and if yes go update. And all this has been possible by a joint engineering with Microsoft. >> Can you just describe the difference between an all in one validated HCI solution, which is what you're delivering, versus competitors that are only delivering a reference architecture? >> Absolutely. So if you're running just a reference architecture, you are running an operating system, systems Stack on a server, we know that when it comes to running HCI, that means running also business critical applications on a clustered environment. You need to make sure that all the hardware, the drivers, the founder, the hard drives, the memory configuration, the network configurations, all that can be very complex very easily. And if you have reference architectures, there is no way to know, but then running certified components in my note are not. How do you tell then? If a part fails? How do which part to sell or send, you know, for a replacement? If you're just running a reference architecture, you have no way to say the part the hard drive that failed, the one that was sent to the customer to replace whether that is certified for Azure Stack HCI or not? You know, what, how do you really make a determination, what is the right firmware that needs to be applied to a cluster of what other drivers that apply to be cluster, that are compliant and tested for Azure Stack HCI. None of these things are possible, if you just have a reference architecture approach. That's why we have been very clear that our approach is a product-based approach. And, you know, very frankly this is how we have... that's the feedback we've provided the Microsoft to, and we've been working very, you know, closely together. And you see that, now in terms of the new Azure Stack HCI, that Microsoft announced at Inspirely this year, that brings Microsoft into the mainstream HCI space as a product offering, and not just as a feature or a few features within the Windows Server program. >> Greg, I saw in the notes with respect to Swiff-Train that you guys have with Azure Stack HCI, you have reduced Rackspace by 50%, you talked about some of the Rackspace benefits. But you've also reduced energy by 70%. Those are big, impactful numbers, impacting not just your day-to-day but the overall business. >> That's true, >> Last question for you, Greg. If you think about how can you just describe the difference between an all in one validated HCI solution versus a reference architecture. For your peers watching in any industry. what's your... what are your top recommendations for going with a validated all in one solution? >> Well, we looked at doing the reference architecture's path, if you will, because we're hands on we like to build things and I looked at it and like Puneet said, "Drivers and memory and making sure that everything is going to work well together." And not only that everything is going to work well together. But when something fails, then you get into the finger pointing between vendors, your storage vendor, your process vendor, that's not something that we need to deal with. We need to keep a business running. So we went with Dell, it's one box, you know, but one box per unit and then you Stack two of them together you have a cluster. >> You make it sound so easy. >> Let us question-- >> I put together children's toys that were harder than building the Stack I promise you, I did it in an afternoon. >> Music to my ears Greg, thank you. (Greg giggles) >> It was that easy >> That is gold >> Easier to put together Azure Stack HCI than some, probably even opening the box of some children's toys I can imagine. (all chuckling) >> We should use that as a tagline. >> Exactly. You should, I think you have a new tagline there. Greg, thank you. Puneet, well last question for you, Would Dell Technologies World sessions on hybrid cloud benefits with Dell and Microsoft? Give us a flavor of what some of the things are that the audience will have a chance to learn. >> Yeah, this is a great session with Microsoft that essentially provides our customers an overview of our joint hybrid cloud solutions, both for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub, Azure stack HCI as well as our joint solutions on VMware in Azure. But much more importantly, we also talk about what's coming next. Now, especially with Microsoft as your Stack at CIO's a full blown product. Hyper hybrid, you know, HCI offering that will be available as, Azure service. So customers could run on-prem infrastructure that is Hyper-converged but managed pay bill for as an Azure service, so that they have always the latest and greatest from Microsoft. And all the product differentiation we have created in terms of a product-centric approach, simpler lifecycle management will all be applicable, in this new hybrid, hybrid cloud solution as well. And that led essentially a great foundation for our customers who have standardized on Hyper-V, who are much more aligned to Azure, to not worry about the infrastructure on-prem. But start taking advantages of both the modernization benefits of HCI. But much more importantly, start coupling back with the hybrid ecosystem that we are building with Microsoft, whether it's running an Azure Kubernetes service on top to modernize the new applications, and bringing the Azure data services such as Azure SQL Server on top, so that you have a consistent, vertically aligned hybrid cloud infrastructure Stack that is not only easy to manage, but it is modern, it is available as a pay as you go option. And it's tightly integrated into Azure, so that you can manage all your on-prem as well as public cloud resources on one single pane of glass, thereby providing customers whole lot more simplicity, and operational efficiency. >> And as you said, the new tagline said from, beautifully from Greg's mouth, "The customer easier to put together than many children's toys." Puneet, thank you so much for sharing with us what's going on with Azure Stack HCI, what folks can expect to learn and see at Dell Tech World of virtual experience. >> Thank you. >> And Greg, thank you for sharing the story, what you're doing. Helping your peers learn from you. And I'm going to say on behalf of Dell Technologies, that awesome new tagline. That was cool. (Greg chuckles) (Lisa chuckles) >> Thank you. 'Preciate your time. >> We're going to use it for sure. (Greg chuckles) >> All right, for Puneet Dhawan and Greg Altman. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the Digital Experience. (soft music)