(upbeat music) >> We're back at SC22 SuperComputing Conference in Dallas. My name's Paul Gillan, my co-host, John Furrier, SiliconANGLE founder. And huge exhibit floor here. So much activity, so much going on in HPC, and much of it around the chips from AMD, which has been on a roll lately. And in partnership with Dell, our guests are Brian Payne, Dell Technologies, VP of Product Management for ISG mid-range technical solutions, and Raghu Nambiar, corporate vice president of data system, data center ecosystem, and application engineering, that's quite a mouthful, at AMD, And gentlemen, welcome. Thank you. >> Thanks for having us. >> This has been an evolving relationship between you two companies, obviously a growing one, and something Dell was part of the big general rollout, AMD's new chip set last week. Talk about how that relationship has evolved over the last five years. >> Yeah, sure. Well, so it goes back to the advent of the EPIC architecture. So we were there from the beginning, partnering well before the launch five years ago, thinking about, "Hey how can we come up with a way to solve customer problems? address workloads in unique ways?" And that was kind of the origin of the relationship. We came out with some really disruptive and capable platforms. And then it continues, it's continued till then, all the way to the launch of last week, where we've introduced four of the most capable platforms we've ever had in the PowerEdge portfolio. >> Yeah, I'm really excited about the partnership with the Dell. As Brian said, we have been partnering very closely for last five years since we introduced the first generation of EPIC. So we collaborate on, you know, system design, validation, performance benchmarks, and more importantly on software optimizations and solutions to offer out of the box experience to our customers. Whether it is HPC or databases, big data analytics or AI. >> You know, you guys have been on theCUBE, you guys are veterans 2012, 2014 back in the day. So much has changed over the years. Raghu, you were on the founding chair of the TPC for AI. We've talked about the different iterations of power service. So much has changed. Why the focus on these workloads now? What's the inflection point that we're seeing here at SuperComputing? It feels like we've been in this, you know run the ball, get, gain a yard, move the chains, you know, but we feel, I feel like there's a moment where the there's going to be an unleashing of innovation around new use cases. Where's the workloads? Why the performance? What are some of those use cases right now that are front and center? >> Yeah, I mean if you look at today, the enterprise ecosystem has become extremely complex, okay? People are running traditional workloads like Relational Database Management Systems, also new generation of workloads with the AI and HPC and actually like AI actually HPC augmented with some of the AI technologies. So what customers are looking for is, as I said, out of the box experience, or time to value is extremely critical. Unlike in the past, you know, people, the customers don't have the time and resources to run months long of POCs, okay? So that's one idea that we are focusing, you know, working closely with Dell to give out of the box experience. Again, you know, the enterprise applicate ecosystem is, you know, really becoming complex and the, you know, as you mentioned, some of the industry standard benchmark is designed to give the fair comparison of performance, and price performance for the, our end customers. And you know, Brian and my team has been working closely to demonstrate our joint capabilities in the AI space with, in a set of TPCx-AI benchmark cards last week it was the major highlight of our launch last week. >> Brian, you got showing the demo in the booth at Dell here. Not demo, the product, it's available. What are you seeing for your use cases that customers are kind of rallying around now, and what are they doubling down on. >> Yeah, you know, I, so Raghu I think teed it up well. The really data is the currency of business and all organizations today. And that's what's pushing people to figure out, hey, both traditional workloads as well as new workloads. So we've got in the traditional workload space, you still have ERP systems like SAP, et cetera, and we've announced world records there, a hundred plus percent improvements in our single socket system, 70% and dual. We actually posted a 40% advantage over the best Genoa result just this week. So, I mean, we're excited about that in the traditional space. But what's exciting, like why are we here? Why, why are people thinking about HPC and AI? It's about how do we make use of that data, that data being the currency and how do we push in that space? So Raghu mentioned the TPC AI benchmark. We launched, or we announced in collaboration you talk about how do we work together, nine world records in that space. In one case it's a 3x improvement over prior generations. So the workloads that people care about is like how can I process this data more effectively? How can I store it and secure it more effectively? And ultimately, how do I make decisions about where we're going, whether it's a scientific breakthrough, or a commercial application. That's what's really driving the use cases and the demand from our customers today. >> I think one of the interesting trends we've seen over the last couple of years is a resurgence in interest in task specific hardware around AI. In fact venture capital companies invested a $1.8 billion last year in AI hardware startups. I wonder, and these companies are not doing CPUs necessarily, or GPUs, they're doing accelerators, FPGAs, ASICs. But you have to be looking at that activity and what these companies are doing. What are you taking away from that? How does that affect your own product development plans? Both on the chip side and on the system side? >> I think the future of computing is going to be heterogeneous. Okay. I mean a CPU solving certain type of problems like general purpose computing databases big data analytics, GPU solving, you know, problems in AI and visualization and DPUs and FPGA's accelerators solving you know, offloading, you know, some of the tasks from the CPU and providing realtime performance. And of course, you know, the, the software optimizes are going to be critical to stitch everything together, whether it is HPC or AI or other workloads. You know, again, as I said, heterogeneous computing is going to be the future. >> And, and for us as a platform provider, the heterogeneous, you know, solutions mean we have to design systems that are capable of supporting that. So if as you think about the compute power whether it's a GPU or a CPU, continuing to push the envelope in terms of, you know, to do the computations, power consumption, things like that. How do we design a system that can be, you know, incredibly efficient, and also be able to support the scaling, you know, to solve those complex problems. So that gets into challenges around, you know, both liquid cooling, but also making the most out of air cooling. And so we're seeing not only are we we driving up you know, the capability of these systems, we're actually improving the energy efficiency. And those, the most recent systems that we launched around the CPU, which is still kind of at the heart of everything today, you know, are seeing 50% improvement, you know, gen to gen in terms of performance per watt capabilities. So it's, it's about like how do we package these systems in effective ways and make sure that our customers can get, you know, the advertised benefits, so to speak, of the new chip technologies. >> Yeah. To add to that, you know, performance, scalability total cost of ownership, these are the key considerations, but now energy efficiency has become more important than ever, you know, our commitment to sustainability. This is one of the thing that we have demonstrated last week was with our new generation of EPIC Genoa based systems, we can do a one five to one consolidation, significantly reducing the energy requirement. >> Power's huge costs are going up. It's a global issue. >> Raghu: Yeah, it is. >> How do you squeeze more performance too out of it at the same time, I mean, smaller, faster, cheaper. Paul, you wrote a story about, you know, this weekend about hardware and AI making hardware so much more important. You got more power requirements, you got the sustainability, but you need more horsepower, more compute. What's different in the architecture if you guys could share like today versus years ago, what's different in as these generations step function value increases? >> So one of the major drivers from the processor perspective is if you look at the latest generation of processors, the five nanometer technology, bringing efficiency and density. So we are able to pack 96 processor cores, you know, in a two socket system, we are talking about 196 processor cores. And of course, you know, other enhancements like IPC uplift, bringing DDR5 to the market PC (indistinct) for the market, offering overall, you know, performance uplift of more than 2.5x for certain workloads. And of course, you know, significantly reducing the power footprint. >> Also, I was just going to cut, I mean, architecturally speaking, you know, then how do we take the 96 cores and surround it, deliver a balanced ecosystem to make sure that we can get the, the IO out of the system, and make sure we've got the right data storage. So I mean, you'll see 60% improvements and total storage in the system. I think in 2012 we're talking about 10 gig ethernet. Well, you know, now we're on to 100 and 400 on the forefront. So it's like how do we keep up with this increased power, by having, or computing capabilities both offload and core computing and make sure we've got a system that can deliver the desired (indistinct). >> So the little things like the bus, the PCI cards, the NICs, the connectors have to be rethought through. Is that what you're getting at? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Paul: And the GPUs, which are huge power consumers. >> Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, cooling, we introduce, and we call it smart cooling is a part of our latest generation of servers. I mean, the thermal design inside of a server is a is a complex, you know, complex system, right? And doing that efficiently because of course fans consume power. So I mean, yeah, those are the kind of considerations that we have to put through to make sure that you're not either throttling performance because you don't have you know, keeping the chips at the right temperature. And, and you know, ultimately when you do that, you're hurting the productivity of the investment. So I mean, it's, it's our responsibility to put our thoughts and deliver those systems that are (indistinct) >> You mention data too, if you bring in the data, one of the big discussions going into the big Amazon show coming up, re:Invent is egress costs. Right, So now you've got compute and how you design data latency you know, processing. It's not just contained in a machine. You got to think about outside that machine talking to other machines. Is there an intelligent (chuckles) network developing? I mean, what's the future look like? >> Well, I mean, this is a, is an area that, that's, you know, it's fun and, you know, Dell's in a unique position to work on this problem, right? We have 70% of the mission housed, 70% of the mission critical data that exists in the world. How do we bring that closer to compute? How do we deliver system level solutions? So server compute, so recently we announced innovations around NVMe over Fabrics. So now you've got the NVMe technology and the SAN. How do we connect that more efficiently across the servers? Those are the kinds, and then guide our customers to make use of that. Those are the kinds of challenges that we're trying to unlock the value of the data by making sure we're (indistinct). >> There are a lot of lessons learned from, you know, classic HPC and some of the, you know big data analytics. Like, you know, Hadoops of the world, you know, you know distributor processing for crunching a large amount of amount of data. >> With the growth of the cloud, you see, you know, some pundits saying that data centers will become obsolete in five years, and everything's going to move to the cloud. Obviously data center market that's still growing, and is projected to continue to grow. But what's the argument for captive hardware, for owning a data center these days when the cloud offers such convenience and allegedly cost benefit? >> I would say the reality is that we're, and I think the industry at large has acknowledged this, that we're living in a multicloud world and multicloud methods are going to be necessary to you know, to solve problems and compete. And so, I mean, you know, in some cases, whether it's security or latency, you know, there's a push to have things in your own data center. And then of course growth at the edge, right? I mean, that's, that's really turning, you know, things on their head, if you will, getting data closer to where it's being generated. And so I would say we're going to live in this edge cloud, you know, and core data center environment with multi, you know, different cloud providers providing solutions and services where it makes sense, and it's incumbent on us to figure out how do we stitch together that data platform, that data layer, and help customers, you know, synthesize this data to, to generate, you know, the results they need. >> You know, one of the things I want to get into on the cloud you mentioned that Paul, is that we see the rise of graph databases. And so is that on the radar for the AI? Because a lot of more graph data is being brought in, the database market's incredibly robust. It's one of the key areas that people want performance out of. And as cloud native becomes the modern application development, a lot more infrastructure as code's happening, which means that the internet and the networks and the process should be programmable. So graph database has been one of those things. Have you guys done any work there? What's some data there you can share on that? >> Yeah, actually, you know, we have worked closely with a company called TigerGraph, there in the graph database space. And we have done a couple of case studies, one on the healthcare side, and the other one on the financial side for fraud detection. Yeah, I think they have a, this is an emerging area, and we are able to demonstrate industry leading performance for graph databases. Very excited about it. >> Yeah, it's interesting. It brings up the vertical versus horizontal applications. Where is the AI HPC kind of shining? Is it like horizontal and vertical solutions or what's, what's your vision there. >> Yeah, well, I mean, so this is a case where I'm also a user. So I own our analytics platform internally. We actually, we have a chat box for our product development organization to figure out, hey, what trends are going on with the systems that we sell, whether it's how they're being consumed or what we've sold. And we actually use graph database technology in order to power that chat box. So I'm actually in a position where I'm like, I want to get these new systems into our environment so we can deliver. >> Paul: Graphs under underlie most machine learning models. >> Yeah, Yeah. >> So we could talk about, so much to talk about in this space, so little time. And unfortunately we're out of that. So fascinating discussion. Brian Payne, Dell Technologies, Raghu Nambiar, AMD. Congratulations on the successful launch of your new chip set and the growth of, in your relationship over these past years. Thanks so much for being with us here on theCUBE. >> Super. >> Thank you much. >> It's great to be back. >> We'll be right back from SuperComputing 22 in Dallas. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas. It's The Cube. Covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> And the band played on. You might be able to hear the guitar player off in the distance. It's that time of day here at Dell EMC World 2017, along with John Furrier. I'm John Walls. Glad to have you here on The Cube. We are officially, John and I now, Node-O-Ramas. (laughing) We have joined the blue button club. We'll explain that in just a little bit. Tell you what it's all about. Here with me to do that is Armughan Ahmad, who is the SVP of Blueprint Solutions and Alliances of Dell EMC. Just had a launch. >> Yeah. Had to be one of the two. And Brian Payne who is the VP of Product Management in the server division at Dell EMC. Brian, thank you for being with us. >> Absolutely. Thanks for having me >> All right, so first off, let's talk 14G. Big server news, you guys make. I'm sure that's really had a lot of your attention this week. A lot of people want to know, Brian, what's up? Tell me about the excitement you generate with that announcement. >> Absolutely, it's generated a ton of excitement and it's not just been this week. It's been a lot of build up for driving a new generation of servers into the market. We start with what our customers are telling us that they're interested in, and with this generation we focused on the typical things you would expect, like how can we run workloads more effectively than the current generation of technology. However, as we look into the landscape as people drive digital transformation, the workloads are changing, right? There are a lot of new workloads. There's a lot of new technology that our customers need to sort out and figure out, where do I apply where in order to run things more effectively? And so we're focused on that in terms of delivering portfolio breadth so that our customers will have the capability when they need it to run their applications well. So that's one thing that is exciting and new. But aside from that, which is running our customers' applications, we're also focused on how can we make our customers more agile and effective through the automation tools that we've designed into this generation of servers? And then, lastly, security has been a big focus. And it's not bolted on security; it's integrated security built into the server throughout the supply chain and throughout the life cycle of the server. Those are the big things that have resonated with our customers as we've announced the next generation of servers. >> I was kind of kidding on the top there talking about the Node-O-Rama buttons. Both of you are wearing yours. So tell us what is that all about? What's Node-O-Rama going on there? >> So Janet Moore, who's actually in our product marketing group, came up with Node-O-Rama because as we were getting ready to launch 14G, awesome servers, Poweredge 14 Generation, we wanted to be ready for VSAN ready nodes 'cause customers really wanted to take storage and take that software-defined storage and ensuring when you take software-defined storage you want to really run it on a server platform to drive the next generation of IT transformation and digital transformation eventually. But we also wanted to the same thing with Microsoft Spaces Direct. We also wanted to do the same thing with our ScaleIO, software-defined scale out storage capability. But then not just stop there. We also have SAP HANA ready node, which is our SAP HANA for commercial and midsize customers. So that's where Node-O-Rama really came in. We've got a lot of nodes. So right now we're launching our Microsoft Spaces Direct ready node that got launched on Monday. So we're totally excited. We have the most ready nodes in the industry right now. >> So we were talking in our intro this morning on our other set, David Floyer, analyst at Wikibon, and Keith Townsend, another analyst. We were kind of looking at this announcement here. The big takeaways were really, really strong hyper-converged ACI message. Seeing that across the board. VMware is the glue layer between all this. And then finally, reality of hybrid cloud. So we were just talking about the ready systems. How does this all work? Because now, those are three nice areas developing. How does Node-O-Rama fit in that? How should they think about ready nodes, the context of that scene? >> Well, one thing that I mentioned a moment ago is just this idea of complexity that customers are dealing with. We still have, through our ready systems, we're able to offer simplicity for customers that want to buy a full system-level solution, but not everyone is, for a variety of reason, is ready to do that. However, they're left with saying, "Okay, I can buy servers from Dell, Poweredge Servers "and go run my workload, "but what do I pick? "I want to move to a software-defined storage. "I want to run something like SAP HANA. "Can somebody simplify that process for me?" And that's where ready nodes come in. It really streamlines the selection of technology where we've done the testing. We've done the validation to figure out what's going to run well and then we can point customers in that direction. And we can also streamline the services, the service offering around that. So it's really about making it simpler for out customers throughout the lifecycle of picking the technology and then deploying and managing. >> What about operational support? Efficiency, ease of use there? What's your position on that? >> Absolutely, operational support is streamlined and then if you have an issue with a ready node and you call up Dell services, they're going to immediately recognize what you have and be able to get you back up and running and working more effectively, more quickly. >> So where's the Nexus here, alliances and then what you're doing there? How's that coming together? >> Yes, so I lead our solutions business unit that is powered by our technology alliance partners, so VMware VSAN ready node, Microsoft Spaces Direct ready node. ScaleIO happens to be our own IP, so that's a ready node, and then SAP. So those are the alliance partnerships. And then what my group does is we work very close with Brian Payne and Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, whose at GM, for our server division, and Robbie Penaganti. That server division, it's all about the server right in the center of it so if you are going to drive a software-defined data center, you have to get a server right in the middle and make sure that server's not only scalable, it's intelligent, but it's also secure. So what we do is we actually take that server that's ready from their side and they certify it. We then take that in my group. We validate it, we make sure that the firmware that needs to be changed, the buyout that needs to be changed. The service capability, the sales enablement that we have to put out there. So it becomes a ready node, right? >> So tell me about the old days. I'm just kind of going, "Wow! "That sounds really easy" but it's not. They, in essence, have to build a server that's going to be ready for whatever composed solution you put together, whether it's VMware, Edge, or whatever. >> Armughan: Yeah. >> They have to then make the enablement happen. >> Armughan: Yeah. >> So in the old days, what was it like? Compare and contrast what it was in the old days. Go to the server guy and say, "I need these servers to support this, this and this" and then they go do it. >> Brian: Yeah. >> And months later. Take us through why is this different for the customer? >> It actually starts very early in the process as we look at the technology landscape, working with Armughan's team to figure out what technologies are going to change and transform the efficiency of how we run applications. It starts with defining the servers arm-in-arm with the team that's responsible for delivering those applications, figuring out what's going to work, develop it, and then bring it to market. And then it's really about streamlining that selection process for our customers. How can we make it easy for them to pick the right things and then quickly procure that and deploy that in their environment and start getting the business results that they're after? >> So time to market for the solution is optimized in that scenario? >> Brian: Oh yeah. >> You call in for the server, 14G. (finger snap) You have it all prepared, ready for you to go. >> So John, in the past, let's go back a few years, right? Our 13G servers at that time, or any other servers in the industry, were really developed for multi-workloads. They weren't developed for specific workloads. What we have now done at Dell EMC, and this is the synergy that Marius was talking about earlier that you were mentioning, which is we take our server group, we work hand-in-hand in our server group right up front, so that's 14G, as our 14th generation of Poweredge servers were being designed, Brian Payne and I, and our teams work very close together to say, "Okay, what are the top workload orientations "that we want to go after?" So software-defined storage, definitely top priority. Now, who should we be working with? VMware VSAN, of course. Microsoft Hyper-v Spaces Direct. Our ScaleIO business, because we know a lot of the customers want to do that. But then, in addition to that, we said, "Okay, ready nodes is good. "That's fantastic." But we know customers go from build to buy continue. So they'll be customers who would want SAP workload orientation, they would want Oracle workload orientation. They want Sequel workload orientation. But then those are your traditional apps. But now you're moving into the next generation apps of machine learning, AI, which is starting with high-due clusters and analytics clusters. So our partnership between server product group and our solutions product group. My product group does not exist without server product group. We have to ensure, and by the way, same thing goes for storage product group, our data protection product group, and our networking product group, as well as our CI and ACI product group. What we do is we, essentially, work right up front and make sure that that workload orientation is start through right in the beginning. >> John: What's the customer reaction? >> You want to take that. >> Yeah, sure, I was just going to add one piece and I'll address that. Conversely, the server isn't going to do anything without the application running on top of it. So that's where we go hand-in-glove here. Customers are very pleased with it. The adoption rates have been very strong of what's been in the market and then as we're bringing a breath of fresh air with the next generation technology, customers are very eager to begin adopting. >> John: What's the reaction to this announcement because the 14G had the fanfare yesterday when it was talked about, but what is the reaction to the 14G and the ready server nodes now? >> I'll give you an example, first of all, on our revenue growth. So we actually picked some major workload so VSAN ready node. We'd announced that about six months ago and our VSAN ready node business is through the roof right now on 13G. 14G launches as soon as the summer. Ashley Gorakhpurwalla mentioned on stage sometime this summer. As soon as that launches, we will be ready with 14G. But right now we have ready nodes already in the market on our 13th generation platforms. And as soon as we started launching these solutions we're finding that our customers, more importantly our channel partners as well, because they find that it's much easier, John, for them to deploy that. We're also seeing that same 13G to now 14G migration related to high-performance computing. A lot of customers are taking that on and the growth has been really fabulous. >> Yeah, I think if you rewind the clock before ready nodes and say, "What was the world like?" We had customers that were deploying and trying to deploy things like VSAN or other software-defined storage, and they were running into problems and us, VMware, we're trying to help customers navigate that, but what we found was there were dependencies in that stack in the underlying infrastructure, and so the ready nodes really came out of that how can we improve that customer experience and make sure that what we deliver is going to be trusted and reliable. >> And shipping around the summer, which is right around the corner. >> That is 14G is going to ship but right at the same time, our ready nodes for VSAN ready node and Microsoft Spaces Direct ready node and ScaleIO ready node will ship at the exact same time 14G Poweredge servers ship, right? But keep in mind, we're already selling all of the 13G-based platforms for ready nodes, ready bundles, and ready systems. >> John: I tell you, just knowing the channel partners, they're going to love this. >> Oh yeah. >> Because it's so peaked and not a lot of training involved and they can pick up the training and services (finger snap) right out of the gate, target workloads, good engagement of customers. Makes a lot of sense. Hangs together in my mind. Congratulations. >> Brian: Thank you. >> All right, so Node-O-Rama, this is the button here. >> Armughan: It's right here. >> Check out the ready nodes. It just sounds great. Ready, alert, fire jets go. (laughter) Take off in the aircraft carrier. >> There is nothing like being an honorary Node-O-Rama. So thank you very much for the pleasure. >> Getting ready to Rama. >> Always good seeing you guys. >> Thanks for being with us. >> Armughan: Thank you. >> Back with more coming up here. Dell EMC World 2017 Live from Las Vegas. You're watching The Cube. (techno music)