>> 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 to our live coverage here. Day three at Dell Technologies World 2018. We are live in Las Vegas. Hope you've been with us for the first two days. We have a great lineup here for you on day three. I'm John Wallace, along with Stu Miniman. Glad to have you along, Stu, it's always great to work with you. >> Thanks, John. Same for you. >> Good week so far for you? >> It's been excellent, my voice is holding up, it's been a long week. >> You're a busy man. >> Excited to get all of this, and heck, I'll be seeing Dan again next week at the big show. >> Dan McConnell's becoming like, he's like not even an annual visitor, you're like a bimonthly visitor here on theCUBE, right? VP of Converged Platforms. >> Stu: Fifth time, you get a free sandwich. >> Yeah, that's right, I got to punch card, I got to sign and get it punched each time. >> Yeah, nice to have you, Dan. Nice to have you back, good to see you again. Alright, let's just talk about the show, first off. Here we are, day three, we talked a little bit yesterday about customer discussions, conversations, so now you've had a little bit of time to soak this in and what you've heard from folks, and what would be your takeaway here? >> Sure, may spin this one a little bit, may have an angle here. Tremendous interest in HCI, and I'm not saying that just because I'm in HCI. No, but it's a lot of good, solid feedback from customers. It's starting to shift more in the mainstream, right? So as we see customers deploy it, more workloads get deployed on top of it. There's a tremendous amount of interest in HCI. When we look at all the graphs of customer interviews we're doing and analyst discussions we're doing, HCI is right there at the top of the list, in terms of subjects that we're talking about. >> Can you quantify that? Are numbers at all out there floating around, in terms of growth, in terms of what... >> Oh, from the HCI side, yeah. Most analysts will agree, it's about 70 to 80 percent in growth year over year. I'd say, from a Dell perspective, we're doing 138 percent, so we're actually growing faster than market. A lot of that's due to, we've got a, one, we've been in the HCI business for a while, two, we take a portfolio approach. There's never any one size fits all, so we actually take a portfolio approach to HCI. We've got what are multiple different consumption models, one that is an appliance, this is the server, the hardware, the software, lifecycle managed in an appliance. And then the next layer is what we call rack scale. Obviously, HCI puts some pressure on the network, right? High network dependency. Rack scale, what rack scale does is include the networking components in that engineered system attribute. Pretested, pre-designed, inclusion of both the physical, as well as the virtual network, and across both of those consumption models, we have a stack that is very VMware-centric, right? VxRail, VxRack SDDC, and we have a stack that is what we call Open HCI. Supports multiple hypervisors, that is XC series on the appliance and VxRack Flex on the rack-scale solution, so portfolio approach, cover the whole market, and we're really seeing it blow up, it's great. >> Dan, it's interesting. I think back to when people were first trying to wrap their brains around this whole HCI thing, it was like, oh, okay, I took server and storage, kind of smashed it together, some software maybe in there, but it was, oh, this is small-end thing, it's maybe four nodes, maybe getting to eight nodes, but you talked about the VxRack Flex, which we've been watching ScaleIO since before the acquisition, and all that solutions. Much larger configuration, some people said, oh, it's not even HCI, because I've talked to some customers, well, I can do a storage-only configuration or I can do a full hyperconverged configuration. We've seen maturation and some segmentation in the marketplace, so you know, bring us inside that, from, you know, the Flex business, just what you're seeing, what differentiates it from some of the other options. >> Absolutely, I'd say it's flexible. (dog barking) Dog barking next door. >> John: On cue. >> On cue. >> There he is again. It's one of the philanthropic Dell outreach programs, it's comfort pets. >> Therapy dogs. >> Therapy dogs, thank you. So we're right next door, no reflection at all on the guests or the program or whatever. >> They're in day three, too. It's been a long conference for them. >> We're getting punchy, alright, back to Flex. >> Back to Flex. >> Just explaining, yeah. >> So, back to your point. Flex... is flexible. We've got customers from four nodes, all the way up to over, large enterprise customers over a thousand nodes. Matter of fact, about 45 percent of our business comes from Fortune 500, so when you think HCI, like you said, HCI started in what was VDI. We're going to pick a workload, VDI's kind of linearly scalable, HCI was a good fit. Nowadays, it's multiple workloads, right? That flexibility, agility, ease-of-scale, people are putting more and more workloads on top of it. VxRack Flex, we've got, when you talk about scalable, up to a thousand nodes, literally 30 million IOPS, right? So, performance, I think we've got it covered. So it's definitely maturing, some of those larger customers are running anywhere from database, all the way to mission-critical applications. >> Dan, I actually did a case-study of one of your larger global financial companies a few years ago. Want you to talk about what they saw this solution at. This was a foundation for their private cloud. They use, in certain regions, public cloud makes sense, but in a lot of areas, this is the foundational layer of private cloud. A lot of times, people, oh, HCI, it is what it is, it's some boxes and some software, but talk about the private cloud angle. >> This customer, it's actually a very interesting storyline. They started off doing what we would call do-it-yourself, build-your-own, and loved the technology, as is predominant with HCI, continued to scale. Bought a lot, added on, added on, and as they continued to add, continued having discussions with them, and they actually love the technology, would love to be able to automate more, would love to spend less time setting it up as it comes in. So they actually moved up that consumption pyramid into VxRack Flex, which comes, as opposed to do-it-yourself, comes shrink-wrapped, roll it in. So they actually designed their infrastructure, their data center around what they call pods. Fairly large pods, but they've changed the consumption units on how they consume IT. They'll actually wheel in Flex pods, that's their new unit of consumption. Now, a Flex pod is... >> Not to be confused with another product called FlexPod. >> Oh, gosh, yes, VxRack Flex pods. Yes, absolutely. >> We unfortunately have run out of words in our industry here, so yeah. >> I'm sure you'll find something in the vernacular that will apply here. >> I'll try and burn that one from my memory, but good catch. >> So that's one use case. Just in general now, so what is the value prop for a customer today, as opposed to what kind of flexibility you're giving them, we've heard about performance, but how are people actually putting it to use for them, and what are they doing better, do you think, because of that? >> I'll start off, one, which is an architectural discussion, and I'll crunch this down pretty small. In the beginning, there was DAS, direct-attached storage, and it was fast, and it was easy to manage, as long as you had to manage one. You get a hundred units, and it was siloed storage, and it was hard, so the world came up with SAN. It's consolidated storage, it's great. I can carve it up, I can manage it from one place, and then we came up with flash, SSD, blindingly fast, and that storage controller started to be a choking point, so we moved the storage back into the server, a la HCI. >> Actually, we called it Server SAN for that specific reason. >> Exactly right, exactly right. Initial ventures into some of HCI, you could only scale the storage or only scale the HCI clusters as big as one given cluster. So you started building somewhat of silos of HCI. One of the beauties of Flex and VxFlex OS storage software is it can scale across multiple clusters. Those clusters can be VMware, they can be BareMetal, they can be Linux, so you start to gain all the advantages of HCI, flexibility, agility, kind of incremental scaling, pay as you grow, with all of the advantages of storage consolidation. I no longer have pools of siloed storage, I can carve up ones as needed, when needed, I can manage it all as one combined storage pool. From a Flex perspective, it's got some pretty nice architectural attributes, which give you the best of HCI and agility and scale, as well as storage consolidation. So we're seeing a lot of success there. >> Dan, I hear things like open, flexible, some of those environments, and I think about the service providers and requirements that they have for how they need to simplify their environments, super conscious on cost, how's this been doing in the service provider market recently? >> Absolutely, funny you bring that up. We actually talk internally, we've got a service provider team inside Dell, they focus on servicing the large telcos and other service providers, and we've noticed that their underlying infrastructure is very very similar with Flex, so we're in discussions to see how we land what they do on top of what we do as a standardized offering. Even right now, a lot of our customers are in the service provider space. That large growth, flexibility, and some of the underlying storage stack has multi-tenancy capabilities, where you can carve up and isolate, that lend itself very very well to service providers. >> Oh, go ahead, Stu. >> For people that know ScaleIO, anything new that they should be understanding? I understand it's this packaging as like a hardware model. Organizationally, it lives under the server team now, I believe it is. >> Absolutely, so two things there. One, organizationally, all the HCI stuff came in up under Ashley Gorakhpurwalla so it came in up under the server side, and then, so, ScaleIO is up under Jeff Boudreau, under Dan Embar, it's storage stack, it's in under the storage division. We work very very closely together. Second thing that's happening, there's a, one, we've been in the HCI world for a while, in the CI world for a while. We've quickly determined we can drive much better customer experience, much better customer outcomes, as we lean more towards an appliance or an engineered system versus a do-it-yourself kind of model. With ScaleIO, what we're trying to do is push it more into an appliance model, push it more into rack scale model, VxRack Flex. There's a outbound shift away from, kind of, what was ScaleIO as a software only and into more of an engineered system appliance offering, so with that shift, you'll see a rebrand from ScaleIO to VxFlex OS. It's just a rebrand of the software. >> So I'm glad Stu talked about organization, because you had to kind of reorg not too long ago, and so we had Ashley on yesterday, we talked to Jeff yesterday, as well. So from your perspective, now that you've had a few months to settle in, find your groove, how much of a difference do you think, as far as customer-facing, is this making in terms of responding to those kinds of needs and those desires. >> Sticking HCI with the server team has an awful lot of synergy. Obvious, compute-centric, scale, from a business scale perspective. So there's an awful lot of goodness in living in that same organization. Ashley's done it pretty well to make sure there's a lot of alignment, but we're also keeping a lot of the engineered system special sauce focus on the HCI side. So we're able to, one, better leverage a lot of the, what I would call, supply chain scale, the processes and go-to-market capabilities of an engine that is built around hundreds and thousands of units, right? That stretches across services, that stretches across factory and supply chain. Obviously, we want to drive HCI, we want to drive HCI in the mainstream and scale. Sitting right there in the server organization, they do scale, right? So lot of good learnings, lot of good synergy and leverage across teams. >> It's coming together for you. Nicely done. Thanks for joining us again, good to see you. You going to see each other next week, you said? >> That's right. >> We down in New Orleans, is that... yeah. >> Yeah. >> Alright, enjoy, and stay out of trouble, both of you. >> Absolutely, you know, one week in Vegas... >> Vegas one week, New Orleans the next, that's a recipe for an interesting time. >> Yes, that it is. >> Dan McConnell, thanks for being with us here on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Back with more from Las Vegas right after this. You're watching theCUBE from Dell Technologies World 2018. (upbeat techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell EMC World 2017 brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. We are here with theCUBE live coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Keith Townsend. We're joined by Jon Siegel. He is the Vice President of product marketing for Dell EMC. Thanks so much for joining us. >> You're welcome, pleasure to be here, as always. >> You're a CUBE veteran. We're always happy to have repeat customers, yes. >> It's one of the highlights of the week every time. >> Yes, excellent. So, I want to start out by talking about who your customer is and what his or her problems are. IT professionals are juggling a lot of different responsibilities and pressures. How do you approach your customer? >> I think what it starts down to is, I'm with the converged platforms and solutions division. It's a lot of a war helping customers with throughout the end of the day, is how they spend a lot less time integrating and maintaining their infrastructure, and more time supporting their end-user's right. And what we hear more often than anything else, the one word I keep hearing all week has been agility. How do I have more agility? How can I be more responsive to the business? In terms of, for example, developing applications more quickly, and faster to market. Whether it's bringing new initiatives to market, new products to market, et cetera. So, it's all about speed and agility from an IT perspective. And what they can't do is, they can't keep up the agility when they're spending so much time integrating. Right? So, our user really tends to be the ones that are more forward looking, bold, and are really looking to make a mark on their company, and on the business. >> So it's agility, it's speed, as well as cost pressures, too. So, what are you coming out with? Tell us about some of the big announcements you've made. >> We're with the converged platforms and solutions division. Really, the fastest growing part of the IT industry today, really, is around hyper-converged and converged. It's all about helping companies spending much more time innovating and much less time integrating. And with that in mind, we have solutions and products that are turnkey in that way. So customers no longer have to spend their time trying to figure out, how do I build this logical infrastructure to actually support my applications and users? And then how do I maintain it? Whereas, we actually provide a turnkey solution, which allows our customers to spend a lot less time fiddling, if you will, with their integration and infrastructure. >> So, let's talk about the history of HCI. It's called converged infrastructure, or hyper-converged infrastructure. From the beginning to where we're at today and the announcements around it, you guys have made around VX Rack. We started out with that basic three-note model. We were solving basic problems in a data center around BDI, the speed of specific applications, enterprises. We got a taste of that, we want a little bit more of it. And now, it sounds like VX Rack is that little bit more. >> That's a great point, yeah. So, as you said, HCI, or hyper-converged really is taking off in the industry. And I think that is the answer to agility. I think it's really that response to agility. And how it's softer to find, if you will, in that approach. So, what we found now is that hyper-converged has now been adopted by 50 or 60% of enterprises in some form or fashion. Because they like the idea of software defined. They like the idea of it's cloud. It's really a good foundation for the cloud, by the end of the day, that's what it is. But what we're finding is now some customers are saying, you know what, I need a little more software defined, I actually want to go all in on software defined. This is where we find the bolder, if you will, CIOs of the world, that actually want to go all in on software defined. And that's where they want to start to adopt, in order to adopt hyper-converged and software defined at scale, you need to consider the network. The network needs to be a part of that equation. You need to consider not just the compute and the storage part elements of it, but the network as well, is part of that. So, what VX Rack addresses, it's actually to treat the network as part of the system design. This is really funny how this is happening. This headset is nothing. Just don't tell Keith about this. >> So, let's talk about the network. And hopefully I can help frame the network while your headset is getting fixed. Traditionally, that three-model HCI solution has challenged the network teams and the server teams and the storage teams. We enjoy the simplicity of HCI because we can consume it easily. But when we went to scale, we found that we ran into storage performance issues. Which then affected the virtual machines. Then, of course, that impacted the application. So HCI up to a certain point was all about storage and compute, and nothing about networking. So VX Rack addresses that network bottleneck. >> That's exactly right. And I think what we've found is that a lot of customers have underestimated, if you will, the importance of the network when it comes to an HCI solution, you're right. So, what the appliance has done, we have HCI appliances today, and customers bring their own network, if you will. And that works fine for smaller deployments. But you're right. Once you get up to eight, ten appliances or more, eight nodes, that's when the network becomes really critical. Because you have much more east-west traffic, and north-south traffic going across the nodes, and between systems and between cabinets. Suddenly, that network, as you know, that's what affects the availability, the performance of the applications at the end of the day, which is what it's all about. >> So, what are you seeing from your most successful customers? In terms of solutions, in terms of the ones who aren't underestimating the importance of the network. What are you seeing from them and what would you like to see replicated across industries? >> I think our customers today that are adopting HCI at scale, or software defined at rack scale, oftentimes, we have everything from service providers, as you might imagine. Those that actually want to provide a HCI foundation for their cloud, IAS, it's a really good foundation for that. Because if they want to support a wide range of applications what VX Rack does is, it allows customers to support a wide range. Whether it's enterprise workloads, traditional workloads or cloud-native workloads. Or customers that want to not just support, for example, VMware Hypervisor, but also, maybe hypervisors such as Hyper-V from Microsoft. They may even want to go BareMetal, and support containerized applications and containers. What we find, it's the customers that actually have a broad set of applications in particular, that want to go all in on hyper-converged. They want to modernize their infrastructure. They want to save money. They want to simplify operations. Those are the customers that we're seeing really succeed here. >> So, we hear this term as customers, cloud customers, whether it's enterprises, proper community clouds, puppet clouds. What's the market for VX Rack, VX Reel compared to the traditional three box solution. Are we limited to just enterprises deploying private clouds? Or are you guys actually in the public cloud market with your vCloud network. Are they adopting VX Rack? >> So, VX Rack, and hyper-converge in general is actually being adopted everywhere. It's being adopted by, not just medium sized companies, but large enterprises as well, like you said. And it is really a starting point for customers that want to start to build that foundation for the cloud. They may want a hybrid cloud. What hyper-converge really does is, it provides a really agile onprem solution with a nice opportunity to leverage the public cloud as well. So it is being leveraged heavily in what we call hybrid cloud solutions and areas by both medium and larger companies. We also have a number of service providers now, that are leveraging, if you will, VX Rack as a solution. Because, what they're able to do is basically spin up new applications, new users very easily, that they wouldn't be able to do with traditional infrastructure. >> Rebecca: Jon Siegel, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure having you. >> You're welcome, it was a pleasure to be here. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, from my co-host Keith Townsend, we will have more from Dell EMC World coming up after this.