>> "theCube" presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone, Welcome back to "theCube's" continuing coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. Live from the show floor in Las Vegas. We have been here since Monday evening. About seven to 8,000 folks here. It's been a fantastically well-attended event that Dell has done. Lots of talk about announcements, including APEX. Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante are going to unpack more of APEX with our next two Cube alumni who are returning, Akanksha Mehrotra, VP of APEX product marketing joins us, and Chad Dunn, VP of product management APEX. Guys, welcome back. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> It is really great to be back. >> So just in case there's anybody out there that's been under a rock since Monday, APEX has now been what GA for a year, celebrating a momentous year and some big news. Akanksha, walk us through that and then talk about some of the feedback that you've gotten on what you guys announced just two days ago. >> Yeah. So it's been an exciting week like you said. APEX just for sort of background is our portfolio of as-a-service solutions, we introduced it a year ago. We have now 10 plus services in our portfolio. We added our very first full stack managed service for cyber recovery this week. The feedback from customers over the past year and then the conversations we've had, you know, over the course of this week has been phenomenal. If I had to really summarize it, I would say the pain point that we're looking to solve, helping organizations manage data across disparate and fragmented environments across a variety of clouds, you know, on-premises, in a co-lo, on the far edge, at a hyperscale or in the telco edge is resonating. This is a pain point... This is very real pain point for them. And our goal in our vision to create a consistent and a secure experience across all of these different, you know, silos of data, if you will. It's something that they really want more of from us. >> Chad, talk a little bit about the influence of the customer in the last couple of years. Well, in the last year, in terms of releasing the cyber recovery solution on APEX, we have seen the threat landscape massively change. >> It increases every day. >> It increases every day, ransomware is no longer a... Is it going to happen too? It's a matter of when? >> Yes. >> Talk to us about the influence of the customer of this being the first full stack solution on APEX. >> Sure, like I don't think there's a boardroom in the world where this isn't being discussed as just such a high risk environment for cyber techs. It's damaging to lose your data. It's damaging to your reputation, it's financially damaging. So it's incredibly important into our customers. And we're finding that, you know, many of them don't necessarily have all the expertise to be able to defend against it themselves. And so that's where an as-a-service solution, like the one that we're offering really makes sense to them, right? They're much more apt to consume as-a-service when the competency doesn't necessarily already exist in their IT organizations. So we've been doing this for a few years as a solution with managed services. And in fact, we've deployed over 2000 of these, and making that a standardized offering with T-shirt sizing, subscription basis, really seems to be a winner. And every customer I've talked to has been absolutely over the moon with it. >> All right, so we have Chad in product management, Akanksha, you're in product marketing. So you knew going into this, that it was going to be different. So I'm interested in kind of what your learnings were, that internal transformation, which is ongoing now, I understand that, but how did it change how you manage, you know, deploy the life cycle of the product and communicate that. >> I'll get us started and I'm sure Chad will add on. So, you know, to your point, when we started this journey internally before we started it externally, we knew this was going to be a multi-year transformation for us. And a multi-year transformation that affects every part of the company, how we build products, how we market products, how we bring them to market, how we sell them, et cetera. And so we made a very conscious effort to kind of secure that buy-in early on. And it starts Michael on down. This is a strategic priority for him as I'm sure both of you know. And each function has kind of established, you know, areas where they know they need to transform and a north star goal for where they want to get to. So I'll speak for marketing as a place that's, you know, close to my heart. One, we know as we get into this space, we're going to be talking to different types of folks and having conversations with different types of personas within an account than we have had before. Using cyber recovery solution as an example, yes, we want to talk to, you know, IT administrators and CIO who we've been talking to. But as Chad said, this is something that CISOs care about. This is something that security teams care about. That those are a different set of personas for us to market to, to communicate with, whose pain points we need to understand better. So that's an example of a change. Another one is moving from a... I mean, events like this are great, and we certainly love to be back in person, but in as-a-service model, you want to have much more frequent communication with your intended audiences. So we've moved to more of an always on-marketing motion leveraging our blog, leveraging other vehicles. And that's that has also been a transformation for us. >> On the marketing side, I'm curious, sorry, Dave. Chad, you brought up one of the big things that is a huge challenge for any organization and any industry with respect to the cybersecurity in that threat landscape is brand reputation. >> Yeah. >> Are you having more conversations at the CMO level? I'm just curious if they're involved in this. We got to make sure that we don't have... We're not the next one on the news because customers will churn like crazy. Is that at all part of the conversation than persona change? >> It is certainly part of it. But, you know, we don't want to be motivated by fear, right? We want to be motivated by preparation and securing the business and growing the business. So, you know, it is a sea level discussion to, you know, understand how we need to protect our critical data. But it's really from a lens of, you know, how do we grow and we grow more quickly? And you know, if you look at APEX overall, yes, we've made a lot of internal changes to get where we are and we're going to continue to make those. And I'll talk through some examples. But this is also a journey for our customers, right? The change to, you know, consuming by the drip, consuming APEX, consuming as-a-service, you could take two companies with identical size and an identical vertical, and they're going to have different priorities about how they want to consume this infrastructure and these services. So we're on that journey with them just as we have to transform ourselves internally, from the way that we do accounting, from the way that we do sales compensation, from the way that we actually build product. And in fact, we just changed up the model by which we're, you know, developing product in APEX today. So I'm about 90 days into my role in APEX. I came from the HCI business. And I'm here with my engineering leader who was also in the HCI business. So we were able to be fortunate enough to work in an organization that went from zero to 4 billion in pretty quickly. So, Hey, let's see if we can apply some of that learning to this. But it's an incredible partnership inside of Dell with people like Dell Digital and our transformation office. Because we've done things roughly the same way for about 30 years. And this is all very new to us. So it's pretty amazing journey. >> I'm interested in what's different. You weren't first to market. The public cloud guys might say, "Eh, it's not cloud." >> No. >> Okay, so how are you different than public cloud and how are you different from your traditional on-prem competitors? >> Again, I'll get us started and chime in. I would say... I'll take your first example. I want to go back to kind of what our customers... Where they want help from us and what are they're asking us for. As I said, the debate is over. They have told us pretty definitively, and our data and your data shows it, that they will and the data will continue to grow in all these different fragmented silos. What they want is an experience that orchestrated across all of these different environments, by a vendor that they trust, right? And that's what we are committed to delivering to them. That's our north star, that's where we're going. I would argue that any one of the hyperscalers don't have incentives to kind of make that same experience happen across all those different environments. A vendor like Dell, who has been trusted by many years... You know, for many years from our customer, who doesn't have a single dog in the race, but is looking to partner with folks across the entire ecosystem, is looking to innovate with our software, our services, and our infrastructure is best positioned to help them orchestrate across. >> Yeah. Well, you know, if you're wondering what's different, you really have to look at what the value proposition is for public clouds versus keeping data on-prem or keeping it in a place where it's accessible to multiple clouds. You know, I think if you haven't been under a rock here at the show, you know it is all about multi-cloud, and you know that we're, you know, absolutely embracing it from, you know, Project Alpine where we're putting storage endpoints in public cloud, to what we're doing with APEX and our data storage services and the move of our customers into co-locations where the data can be accessible to multiple clouds. I think that getting the commerce capabilities in place that we've done over the course of the last year is a great first step. But look for us to double down on the day two management and operations, using that platform that we've created for APEX. And that's going to allow us to create more velocity and bring more solutions into the fold more quickly, and then provide more day two management optimization operation of the solutions by our customers. >> Okay. Sorry. So definitely agree with the public cloud. And I got to trust them to do my multi-cloud or what I call super-cloud. What about your traditional competitors? Is it the normal sort of what we'd expect for the Dell differentiators portfolio, supply chain, et cetera, or are there APEX specific differentiators? >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so there are absolutely the Dell differentiators of the breadth of our sales force through both our direct sales teams as well as our partners, our secure supply chain, our services team, and the expertise that they've built, which we're obviously bringing to bear with this market and this offer. Those are kind of the Dell wide advantages that we bring to bear with this. But specifically for APEX against the traditional on-prem competitors, I would say the simplicity with which we are bringing our offers to market is a differentiator for us. And it's one that our customers in the past year have retreated back to us. So the commerce experience that Chad was just talking about, we have made very conscious efforts to simplify and abstract the way that complexity from our customers, so that they are picking very easy to understand outcomes that they care about. And then not really worry about the peace parts, whether it's the hardware, the software, or the services that help make that service level outcome happen. I would argue, you know, some of the other competitors, traditional competitors that we have haven't done that. And it's more of a... You know, that complexity is still there. And what we hear from our customers is, I want the simplicity and agility that public cloud provides. That's something that hyperscalers did get right. And we're bringing that experience to our infrastructure. >> Yeah. Like I think the other way that we'll differentiate ourselves is going to be by the breadth of the solutions, right? So we've got a tremendous amount of IP in solutions like cyber recovery, right? This wasn't a new thing for us. This is something we've been doing for a few years as there's tremendous consulting capabilities, services capabilities, the underlying products of course. Well, there's a pipeline of solutions lined up behind that. So as we move into high performance computer as-a-service, MLOps as-a-service, we can draw on those solutions that we've offered, but in a very custom way in the past now at a high velocity manner in the console. >> Well, the high velocity these days is critical. As we've seen the last two years, things have changed so dramatically for customers in every industry that needed to pivot with speed and accelerate their transformation. >> And the transparency. Right? So going back to his example, having that price transparency. You can go to our website and look at the pricing, pick in the two or three very simple options and see it right there and order it through the console. In a matter of minutes versus, you know, wait for two weeks to get the code and then wait for a month to get the hardware, and then wait for the services team to show up. So what we are hearing... I mean, we have truly been able to take deployments that used to take several months to a matter of days. And so that's how the simplicity kind of, you know, pays off not only in that initial deployment, but over the course of the subscription, the day two operations that Chad was just talking about and the innovation and the work that we're doing to simplify their lives in that process, allow them to focus in other areas. >> Oh, absolutely. That time to value, time to market has never been more critical. And the ability, to your point, Akanksha, to allow folks to be able to focus more on the strategic initiatives that will actually help move the business for... Add value, move the business forward and allow it to be competitive and differentiate itself is critical for everybody in every industry. Chad, I wanted to kind of pivot on multi-cloud for a second. You talked about that. And we had Chuck Whit on yesterday. He was talking about, you know, multi-cloud. A lot of organizations, many, many, many in multi-cloud by default. But what Dell wants to do is change that, multi-cloud by design. Is APEX going to be a facilitator of multi-cloud by design? Talk to us about that for customers. >> We absolutely will be. So if you look at what made customers multi-cloud by default, it's them going for the services that exist in the cloud and looking for best of breed services. Whether it's machine learning, speech recognition, database, they're going to those best of breed players. And so the value proposition for us is since you're in those clouds, you want access to your data and you want it centrally, so you can see it, leverage it, use it from any of those clouds, but you may have other reasons for keeping your data or even your compute on-prem or in a co-location. It could be data sovereignty, it could be policy compliance, it could be data gravity. So we want to make the concept of having your workloads or your data anywhere, very seamless for our customers, right? So it's really embracing the concept of multi-cloud and making it easier. >> The cyber recovery solution is really interesting to me. I was talking to one of the partners here and they said, "Dave, this was a really good show for us." And they probably had a quasi competitive solution. I don't really know. But like a lot of customers and, you know, got a lot of leads out of it. So it's the hot topic and that's what they said. This is cyber, everybody wants cyber. So how did that solution come together? Because I know you... You really... You've always been security conscious. But I never really full cracked the security solution. And now here it is in APEX, it's like, boom, out of the box or out of the service. How'd that come about? >> It really started back in 2014, specifically. It's funny when you can point to an event where, you know, something started like this. So there was a fairly high profile ransomware attack in 2014. And that caused us to look at the assets that we had from our data protection portfolio, from a software and storage perspective and say, "Hey, we can put something together that can really address this, right? Through novel use of existing technology." So we built out reference architectures. We built out the consulting service on how you protect your data. We partnered and built software to be able to secure the data in an air gaped imutable vault and offer the services to be able to manage that, monitor that, restore the data when needed. So we did that in a very custom way for years. In fact, as I said, over 2,000 systems deployed this way. So having a vehicle like APEX that has the as-a-service capability built in, the subscription capability built in, the ease and velocity of purchasing and operating was really a natural fit. So you know, we expect this is going to be a very high volume solution for us. >> Great. Awesome. >> Akanksha, can you talk a little bit about the partner ecosystem involved here in APEX? You know, when I think about ransomware in data protection, I think organizations need to be able to protect apps, users, data platforms. But we think of how data is so spread out, customers want that single pane of glass to be able to manage all that and know that that data is protected. Talk to us about how you're working with partners. I know the partner ecosystem at Dell's huge. How are you working with partners and how can they build upon APEX? >> Yeah So our partners are a very important part of our ecosystem. They help expand our reach. They also help complement our capabilities. You know, for example, in specific verticals. They may have services or expertise in a particular area. For the APEX portfolio, we actually offer a wide variety of ways for partners to engage with us. Starting out, they could refer our solutions and refer, you know, some of our services, if they want to take more of an advisory role in some capacity. They could resell our services with additional services included. In this scenario, for example, they would leverage our console, include some of their services in there and then offer it to their end customers. They could host APEX offers in their own data center or in a co-lo data center and build their practice on top of it. A lot of our partners and customers, we've got kind of joint customer partners that for example, have built a healthcare practice on top of an APEX solution, where they've added their services or built their business on top of it. And then finally, there's of course, technology and ISV partners, right? And that is where we might leverage, you know, some of their technology, built it to be part of a service or a solution that we're doing and join the go-to market. So I think the answer is lots of ways for partners to engage with APEX. And we absolutely are engaging with them in a wide variety of ways. And I think cyber recovery is no different. >> Well, there must be not a dull moment with what you guys have going on with APEX. Thank you for taking some time to talk to us about that. Sounds like the momentous year that you've had is going to continue. And it sounds like you've gotten great feedback from the customers and the partner so far. Thank you for joining "theCube" and telling us what's going on. And we can't wait to hear more next year. I'm sure there will be lots more next year. >> Yes indeed. >> Absolutely. Thank you very much. >> For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching "theCube's" coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022, live from Las Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

live from San Francisco celebrating ten years of high-tech coverage it's the cube covering vmworld 2019 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners welcome to day two of the cubes coverage of VMworld 2019 double vowels two sets going on on our other set day Volante and John Fourier they're talking to Michael Dell they're talking to passenger but over here we know where the hot action is talking about even Steve Young you know the Hall of Fame quarterback from the 49ers knows what hyper-converged infrastructure is and they're from well I'm excited to welcome back to the program Chad Dunn who is the vice president of product management and hyper-converged infrastructure for Delly MC Chad great to see you great to be back soon and also I want to also welcome my guest host for this segment who is Bobby Allen coming up to us from Charlotte North Carolina a cube alum now flipping the desk and gonna be asking some questions with me so Chad well my first question is why did you put me up against Michael and Pat well because we knew you could take it you know some people would be like oh that's the other Chad even but Ron you know HCI you know still a big story it's a big piece of what goes into VMware's vfc yeah story there you know VMware's talking about there's 20,000 deployments that they have a v san and i believe you might know who the number one partner is in the number one solution set out of those 20 thousands I think I might and I think that's also the leading product in terms of volume and the leading product in terms of revenue in the hyper-converged market as a blast so I will give you a second you know give us some of the you know you know the the drum beat the chest thumping of how the VX RL product line and and your portfolio is doing the the portfolio is doing great and the integration of V CF on VX rail is just throwing gasoline on to the fire in terms of adoption you know we see hyper-converged now mainstream moving into the data center mission-critical applications are being run on it infrastructure as a service right alongside container as a service so a few things that we announced this week in addition to you know the latest update of VCF on rail we added fibre channel 2 to V X rail a move that people are very is very polarizing move for people to chat why we have people who continue to love their primary storage arrays that are fiber channel connected and very often we're selling to someone who's refreshing servers but they have life left on the the array they want to preserve it they want to migrate data so they demanded fiber channel we gave them fiber right so if I understand this though it's that I've seen certain HD eyes where there's like you know a faucet on the side that I can plug in I scuzzy now you're just saying there's that it's not like you haven't a V X rail that is you know fiber dole baked in through and through so there's a server architect there's still v Santa at the core of VX rail but we give you the option now attaching primary storage either in the context of VCF or or in standalone other big news is we've recently refreshed a product line to the next generation of Xeon processor the cascade Lake version that gives us about a 28 to 30 percent performance increase and Intel opt in cache drives so there are lots of hardware updates along with software updates that that accelerate our LCM or lifecycle management process so Chad thank you for the update but I've got a different question I want to go in a different direction I talk to customers all the time cxos what would you tell the ciock so who's who's scared to invest more in the data center because public cloud seems like the one is in its sales but obviously Dell has a story to tell how do you help them defend their their turf well III I don't think they should get territorial about that every customer that I engaged with has a hybrid cloud strategy and very often it's more than one public cloud there's always a champion challenger relationship right we as CX know you want to keep your vendors honest correct right so you may have multiple public clouds you may have multiple infrastructure providers but VMware and in VCF on the X rail can be that common thread between the two so I can use tools like VMware Cloud Health to determine where it makes sense to run the workload I think very seamlessly move that workload from a VCF on VX rail deployment into a public cloud when it makes sense I can bring it back when it makes sense I can move it to Amazon to Azure to Google to any one of the VMware cloud providers and really hedge my bets right in terms of where it's best to run that workload so we encourage public cloud are you seeing customers actually take advantage of those capabilities yet or is it something they're still kind of waiting to see how that develops in terms of hybrid multi-cloud we see customers taking advantage of it right away so I'll give you an example I have a large retail customer right now and they've got about 900 different workloads that are existing virtual machines so they're looking at how they either refactor those into cloud native and move them into the cloud or whether they rationalize some of those away which is sort of a natural process with the Dell technologies cloud platform which is based on VCF on the X rail they can effectively put off that decision and they can move those workloads into the public cloud as virtual machines and start to enjoy those economics while they decide which ones to refactor while they decide which ones to rationalize away yeah so chata tell tech world we talked a bunch about how I have you know V X rel is the underpinning for the VMware cloud on Dell EMC right here at the show you know we talk a lot about cloud and even you know kubernetes was mentioned just a few times a couple of times in the keynote there was some guy in the audience you know Hootin Hollerin about some of that but you know help us you know draw the line you know where your customers today what are they starting to do and you know where does that put this portfolio extend to in the future great well first of all I'm gonna do a session tomorrow morning at 9:30 and we're gonna be talking about the business aspect of containers of service and kubernetes to customers so a good session to check out if if the viewers can but from our perspective we see customers at different points in that journey toward container as a service or cloud native on their premises or in a hybrid cloud scenario and it's funny one of the slides that I'll do tomorrow says that about 71 percent of customers are spending their budgets on operating their infrastructures and services are traditional VMs when they want to be able to reinvest some of that money and move to cloud native now this is almost the exact same slide and same percentage that we use you know five six eight years ago to talk about keeping the lights on with 70 percent of IT budgets it was 8020 back then so it's the exact same dynamic we're seeing it really be mainstreamed now every dtw or EMC world that I would go to I would always ask how much of your workload is cloud native they would always say 1% how much is it going to be in five years they say we have no idea now they're telling us about what those projects are and and they're rapidly adopting them but the nice thing about the VCF on rail is you can create workload domains that are traditional infrastructure as a service with virtual machines but you can also spin up container as a service workload domain with d KS and NS xt and so as you start to refactor those applications and there's that balance changes you simply increase the number and the size of your cloud native workload domains and you shrink your infrastructure as a service so you're in an ideal spot to be able to run virtual infrastructure workload domains virtual desktop workload domains cloud native workload domains consistent operating model across-the-board consistent hardware layer which is VX rail so you get those economics and as your business demands change you as an IT operator are able to serve those DevOps organizations within your company because if you're not providing them a kubernetes dial-tone they're gonna find it right and you're gonna see shadow IT spring up and they're gonna be in the public cloud before you know what happens so Chad want one of the things that I'm curious about so this is a software conference obviously right we're talking about a lot of the goodness that's hypervisor and above yep what would you say to the person who says doesn't matter what sort of hardware I'm running is that a commodity what is Dells differentiate a value in this software-defined world if I wanted to be a smart aleck I would tell you to look at some of the other hyper-converged competitors who went software only and then go take a look at their market cap but if I wanted to be serious I would say that hardware really does matter and when you look at you know how we need to lifecycle manage that infrastructure and make it seamless and effortless for the customer it means that you need to think about that hardware layer so if I look inside a PowerEdge server for example there are between nine and twelve different programmable parts from BIOS to HBAs to drive firmware backplane power supply you name it all those things have dependencies on the software drivers that you use being able to look at that all in context and be able to update that all at once so users don't have to worry about the bits and bytes of drivers and and firmware compatibility really saves them money saves them time and effort and lets them concentrate on things they're gonna differentiate their business and we see customers making that switch daily now and understanding that they can now redeploy some of that cost and resources toward things that are more differentiated like you know moving to cloud native so Chad what about the folks that have a they've got a Dell footprint they've got some other competitors and that how do you help them where there may be in the midst of changing over right they've got some other manufacturers that provided hardware before some of that story may not be as consistent so what can they do when they may be in the midst of a change over so you really need to look at what that operating expense savings is gonna be so we we certainly want to get as much life out of that existing infrastructure as we can and then provide migration fibre channel and and IP attached storage is an example of that right where people are not necessarily ready to move away from those arrays so say great right continue to leverage those assets but also if it's an existing VC on infrastructure based on bare metal servers the migration from one VC on environment to another is a pretty seamless one right because you preserve that storage policy based management as you make the migration so you know it typically is a pretty easy migration for customers to move on to hyper conversion they think and obviously we'll provide whatever professional services are necessary right if you look it by the way and I'll plug VMware since I'm at at VMworld if you look at VMware HDX if we're doing migration across these environments either to or from a public cloud or from a legacy environment to a next-generation HCI environment that's one of the coolest tools out there for doing that migration and preserving all the policies security and Software Defined Networking policies and micro segmentation from one environment to the other so really impressed with with what VMware has done there yeah definitely a theme we've heard it this show is you know VMware talk to their install base and says oh my gosh you look at all these cloud native things out there and kubernetes is super hard so you know we're gonna build it enable it in there um when I've looked at the you know Dell and VMware family there's been a few different kubernetes options out there help gives a little clarity where that fits into your world and you know where we are today where it's going kind of yeah future yeah there has been a sort of a dichotomy of you know cloud native ins inside VMware and cloud native inside pivotal for example and we've worked with with both of those organizations in fact we've been very successful with what platform and container as a service on the x rail going to market with pivotal but now that PKS is moving into VMware and really all of pivotal is moving into VMware it sort of unifies that strategy and if you look at the acquisitions that VMware is making with hep tio and others and actually embedding kubernetes into ESX I I mean that's a game changer an absolutely game-changer so now we have all of the the software assets to you know build run and manage cloud native were closed all within the VMware portfolio now the great thing about VX rail is we inherit all that work natively and build that natively into our hyper-converged platform so you know we sort of get that for free so you know not only can we now be the the leading hyper-converged infrastructure player for infrastructure as a service of traditional VMs we now can expand that and be the number one player in the new container world and you know as you saw with the the performance discussion that Pat had yesterday they actually see these things running faster in a virtualized ESXi environment than we do on bare metal only single digits but that's pretty impressive right it's very counter intuitive right so we're really happy to be able to take advantage of that and we have still have the pivotal labs team which really gets engaged with these customers to make it more transformational in terms of how they develop and how they deliver applications to their end users and by the way I mean not to preview something that's pretty far down the road we're looking at how we change up how we deliver software updates in VX rail and how we architect the software to make it a continuous integration continuous delivery pipeline because we need to make the infrastructure more intelligent and more agile and products like VX rail ace which we just announced a dtw does exactly that right it gives us the ability to pull back telemetry from VX rail apply machine learning and in an artificial intelligence to it in our own cloud and then push that data back out to our VX rail users to Auto remediating problems so the infrastructure is going to get more agile and it's going to get more intelligent as we go yeah um we've been talking a bit about some of the future stuff before we go but want to bring back to you know one of the core things that we wanted to do in this space it was simplification how do we make it super easy when I talk to most people that do HCI it's like you know where is that it's like I don't know it got installed and I've never touched it since then my understanding you're doing some things even on the management side to make things even easier there's some virtual reality in there too no we like to think everything is real reality yeah we are doing things to to even further simplify our lifecycle management process to make that that infrastructure something that that operators don't need to worry about so we're now doing pre staging of updates future scheduling of updates pause and resume of updates to fit within customers maintenance windows more effectively we'll be doing updates that are delivered via the cloud through the ACE platform coming up in in a release that's that's about to ship so again the idea is to you know simultaneously make the the product more flexible but maintain the simplicity because as I said we've moved into these core data center deployments where people are buying you know six hundred eight hundred thousand units at a time and deploying its scale and they expect flexibility you know all the flexibility you would get with an ESXi server with all the simplification and and day 2 operations that you get from HDI so we're in a constant state of trying to balance those two things and optimize for both use cases and by the way at the same time software-defined networking containers are coming at us at light speed the VMware has acquired more more companies in the last three months and then I can name I can name them all so it's a very fast-moving space yeah I don't think I can keep over the last week all right Bobby final question I guess quick sound bite what should people know about VMware cloud on Dale that they don't know VMware cloud on Dell EMC formerly project to mention right the extension of the MC on the customer premises I think this is incredibly strategic for us and for VMware because it gives you that cloud consumption model on-premises in an operating expense model so just into two initial access with that beta customers are turned up and the feedback has been extremely positive vmware dell technologies cloud platform which is VCF on VX rail really off to the races on that right we've had huge uptake in that we're seeing deals of literally hundreds of nodes at a time data centers at a time are consuming this deploying it we're demoing it here at the show if you go to the nvidia booth all the VDI demos are being run on VCF on VX rail that's sitting over in a hotel across the street it's a very hot hotel room cuz we get a lot of GPUs in those but it's also something that users can actually go see it live and working nice alright and just a quick tip for you if you haven't made it to VM world or even if you came here Chad mentioned he's doing a session this week they do make all of those available to people out there and of course all of our content is always available on the cube net Chad Dunn always great to catch up with you Bobby Allen thanks so much for joining me for this segment and my audience as always thanks for watching the Q

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante. Welcome to this special CUBE conversation. We're gonna be talking today about hyper conversion infrastructure. HCI really brought together compute, storage, and networking to simplify management and operations. But the networking piece has always been, you know, a little bit to the side, right? Because you bring your own network to HCI. And the integration has not always been there. So we're gonna talk today about simplifying cloud on VMWare and transforming the network. This week is VMWorld Europe. Chad Dunn is here. He's the vice president of product management for HCI at Dell EMC. Chad, thanks for coming on to talk about this. >> Hey Dave, always glad to be with you. >> So, HCI is hot, it's smoking. VxRail is a leader there. We're gonna talk about that. >> Yep. >> Based on some of the market numbers from IDC and others. So give us the update, what's new with VxRail? >> Well obviously for VxRail, the big new is, unless you've been under a rock, you know the market is growing like crazy. Now VxRail is now achieving a growth rate that's roughly twice the overall market. And so we've moved into this market leadership position. And now it's about how we start to differentiate the product even further, and pull further away from the pack. And that deeper integration with networking and some of the other VMWare components are keys for us to be able to achieve that. >> And that growth, those are IDC numbers, Gartner numbers. >> Those are IDC numbers if you look at the overall market growth rate. >> What do you attribute that growth from? You guys came out of nowhere to take the market leadership. Why? Where's that coming from? >> You know, it's a pretty easy question. When we look at who the market leader is in terms of the hypervisor, in terms of virtualization, it's clearly VMWare. And the value proposition to a customer is a very simple question. Are you a VMWare customer? Do you intend to continue to be a VMWare customer? Do you like the tools? Do you like the hypervisor? Do you like the ecosystem around it? And you know, nine and a half times out of ten, the answer is yes. And if it's time to go hyperconverged, we believe and I think most customers believe we have the best hyperconverged solution to be able to do that within the VMWare experience. >> So, Dell, obviously a huge portfolio. Since the merger, you guys have done a lot of work together. And now you're really focusing on network automation. What are you guys doing, specifically, and why is it important? >> Yeah. Well, the integration with Dell, I've become one of the biggest Dell fanboys there is at this point. Because, first of all, I started with a hyperconverged product that was not based on Dell. We became part of Dell. Now I have a world-class X86 portfolio to build on top of. But I also now have access to an amazing portfolio of open networking products. And so the next logical step, after integrating with Dell computers, is to integrate with Dell networking. And when we look at the challenges that people have in adopting and deploying hyperconverged infrastructure, a lot of times, it has to do with the network. So we said "what can we do between these two organizations, "to make it a lot easier for our customers" "to adopt hyperconverged." And that really means network automation. So that means that, in Dell OS10 enterprise-based switches, we've created an auto-detect and auto-configuration feature between VxRail and those switches. >> So let's break that down a little bit. So as I was saying at the top, hyperconverge really has been about bringing storage. And well actually in some cases, networking and compute together. And then sort of storage bringing in. Or storage and compute, and then the networking is "bring your own," right? Everything is "bring your own network." And then what, you put a top-of-rack switch in? >> Yep >> But so why is this simpler? What specifically are you guys automating? >> Well there's two things. One is organizational. So very often, in customers, we encounter the virtualization team, the server team, storage team, networking team, different organizations. Now, largely hyperconverge, and even before that, converge was sort of an excuse for many of those functions to come together. But networking is sort of the last one where those organizations are coming together with our customers. And that's really prompted by hyperconverge. But then at the technical level, how do you make that real for a customer? So at the risk of getting into the weeds, the way this works is if you take a Dell OS10 enterprise-based switch, and you have a single command to put it in VxRail mode, from then on the switches and VxRails will discover one another through an in-line protocol. VxRail manager will access the switch via API's. We'll configure all the ports. We'll configure all the VLANS. We'll configure the connection up to the customer's network. And then from there on out, we're able to detect new VxRails as they enter the network, automatically plumb those together with the existing cluster. So when we look at the steps that you would normally take to deploy hyperconverged just on the network side, it's about a 98% savings in terms of the number of steps that you have to go through to be able to stand that environment up. And then from there on out, we also wanna look at operational savings. So you will now be able to manage that switch also within vCenter. So we have a philosophy in VxRail that says every time a user has to leave the VMWare user experience, that's a bad thing and we want to minimize that. So as we implement the Dell networking portion of the solution, you'll be able to now manage that from vCenter just as you'll be able to manage VxRail from vCenter. >> Is this degree of networking automation unique in the marketplace? Are you guys ahead of the pack? Are you playing catch-up? >> We feel like we're ahead of the pack in this. I think that a lot of folks are certainly focusing on integration with software-defined networking. And in fact, we did that first. You know our integration with NSX. Both v, NSXv for infrastructures of service. And now increasingly NSX-T, especially when we're in a container, or cloud-native environments. So there's been a lot of focus there. But I think our focus on the configuration and management of the physical network, I think is unique. >> Talk more about the Dell, EMC, and VMWare relationship. Obviously, you guys are part of the same sort of company. Even though VMWare of course is a separate public company. But you guys work closer together. VMWare works with everybody. What's unique about what you guys are doing? Give us some double-click on that. >> Sure. If I think back previous to Dell, you know, we had our cousins at VMWare that we worked pretty closely with. And I think that our success is sort of born out the concept that we were able to collaborate more effectively than most other EMC and VMWare projects that we've done in the past. So, it's been very successful for both companies. Then along comes Dell, and Michael has a saying that says, "I'm happy but I'm not satisfied." So he looked at this. Jeff Clark looked at this. Pat Gelsinger looked at this, the collaboration that we have and said "We're happy. We're not satisfied. Do more of it." "Do it harder. Do it faster." And that's what we've done. And that top-down directive has really driven us to collaborate much more broadly and deeply with VMWare, and in fact Pivotal, than we have in the past. And I think that's shown a lot of benefits. Not just in the networking integration. But we're moving all of the graphical user interface out of VxRail manager into vCenter plug-ins. So our focus is really around robust API's that can be leveraged across different VMWare management properties as well as third party properties to give you the best possible VMWare user experience when you use VxRail. >> What does that mean for customers? Let's talk about the business impact. I mean you mentioned 98% time savings before. I mean, that's enormous. But let's talk a little bit about the customer impact. >> I think if you look at the customer impact that we're observing, the five-year TCO empirically is running about 600% in terms of ROI. So I think we're very successful in that. And the key to that success is not creating new panes of glass, or new management paradigms for a customer who is a VMWare customer. We want to be in lock-step with the way the VMWare develops. Not only the hypervisor, but certainly VSAN, and certainly the rest of the Vrealize assets as well as software-defined networking. To that end, one of the biggest changes that we made was something internally we call SimShip with VMWare. Now if you think about where we've come from, the lag time between when we would ship a new version of VMWare on VxRail versus when VMWare releases it was pretty variable, right? Could be three months, six months, nine months, it really depends on how the development schedules would align. And that was something that, quite frankly, to Michael and Pat and Jeff was not acceptable. If we want this to be the premier hyperconverged experience for a VMWare user, we need to be simultaneous with VMWare. And so now you're gonna see very regular tight integration between the release schedules of software on VxRail and the release of the underlying software from VMWare. So that's enabled us to shift a lot of that up-front development and engineering work left into VMWare so we can be much more quick to adopt new VMWare technology. >> So if I could, I'd like to stay on this business impact for a moment. You're talking about 600% ROI over a five-year period. I'm presuming that ROI comes predominately from the simplified infrastructure management and simplified labor costs. I'm not focused on heavy-lifting. I'm shifting to more strategic things, presumably. And there may also be some capex savings as well. But where is it coming from? >> I think it's primarily operational. I think, depending on what the competing solution might be, or the legacy solution might be, there may be some capex savings there. But it's really around operations. Now we have seen customers fundamentally shift from simple virtualization and consolidation of virtual machines onto hyperconverged like VxRail to implementing full infrastructures of service stacks right up through the Vrealize suite. But also platform and containers of service as well as we collaborate with Pivotal and VMWare. So it's that infrastructure as a service deployment methodology that I think leads to most of that capex saving, right? Three years ago, hyperconverged was all about VDI and sort of point applications, and islands of applications. Now it's predominately about infrastructures of service, containers of service, platforms of service. And that's where you really start to see those operational efficiencies shine through. >> Well, you know, in our experience the VDI, while nice, was largely a benefit for IT. Didn't really have a huge impact on the business. But when you start to talk about things like Pivotal, and the impact of moving from say Waterfall to an Agile environment. Now you're talking about business impact in terms of time to deployment and accelerating the time to value, which may or may not be in that 600%, I'm not sure. But those are oftentimes considered soft dollars. But to the business, it's not. It's competitive. >> Those are real dollars. Those are real resources working on those things. And just as we saw a shift in terms of constructing versus consuming IT resources, we see that up the stack. As VxRail automates things like software and firmware updates, our customers don't have to do that anymore. Now we look to see how can we can we drive those same kinds of benefits further up into the stack in terms of deployment, management of virtual machines, management of cloud-native workloads. >> So coming off of VMWorld U.S. a couple months ago, a lot of talk about VMWare Cloud Foundation, a lot of buzz about multi-cloud. That's kind of the hot topic right now. What's going on with VCF? We're hearing a lot of buzz leading up to VMWorld Europe. What's going on in that space? >> There's a lot going on between us and VMWare on the multi-cloud strategy. One thing that we heard in the last VMWorld was the integration between us and Cloud Assembly. This is a really important and strategic solution for us. Because what we found, especially with smaller customers who wanted to get those efficiencies of infrastructures of service, there is a fairly high upfront capital cost. Because you simply needed all the hardware to run the cloud management platform. And then you needed the tenant nodes to actually run the virtual machines. And very often, that was a high entry point, a high entry cost for those customers. What VMWare has done with Cloud Assembly is basically turn that cloud management platform into software as a service, so it lives in the cloud. And now with an agent that VxRail automatically installs, you can now point that CMP at your tenant nodes and start getting that infrastructure of service benefit. So that was one that we talked about at the last VMWorld. We also talked about our partnership with VMWare around Project Dimension, which basically takes the VMWare-managed cloud providers, The VMC providers, and extends that management paradigm, and that update paradigm to on-premises. So you have effectively got a cloud service that could run at a cloud provider but could simultaneously run on your premises. So are the two really good examples of how we're collaborating more broadly and deeply with VMWare to lower the overall operational cost, and in some cases, even the capital cost of implimenting infrastructure as a service. With respect to cloud foundation, in VxRack SDDC, which is the other product that I look after, we've had that partnership underway for over two years now and that's been very successful for us. And it tends to be the larger customers who want to buy everything as a fully-integrated system, a fully turn-key racked, stacked, cabled, and ready to deploy. But with regard to what you're teasing, I think where you're going is "well what's gonna be next?" and "what's unique about what we're doing" "with Cloud Foundation?" And there are a lot of dimensions to that. And I think the first one is what we've done around the VMWare validated design and the certified partner architecture. So if a customer wants to achieve a VMWare software-defined data center, the VMWare-validated design for VxRail gives them the exact prescription of how to get there. It can be delivered by us, can be delivered by VMWare, could be delivered by our channel partners who are certified to do so. And that gives you this nice consistent deployment architecture that we can continue to life-cycle manage as a customer moves forward. But it preserves all the VxRail value add in terms of our cluster management, our life-cycle management capability, all of that automation. Now as we move forward, we'll add more and more automation into the VVD deployment toolkit to make that even easier for customers. And so then the next logical question is VxRack and Cloud Foundation versus VxRail. We effectively have two hyperconverged solutions. That doesn't make a lot of sense. So what you'll start to see us do, and I think what some people have already started to see us do is to start to bring those solutions together, bring those products together. So in fact, even now, if you have a VxRack SDDC, if you open up that cabinet, well guess what. Those are VxRails inside there. And those software stacks will ultimately converge as well. So you can go from a build-to-consume continuum even within hyperconverged where you've got VxRails with VVD's. But the VVD basically defines deployment architecture that is compatible with Cloud Foundation. And just as we've preserved a lot of those value-add features for VxRail in the VVD, we'll be doing the same thing with Cloud Foundation. So, you know, stay tuned for that. But, as I mentioned a little bit earlier on, when we look at the management paradigm for VxRail, my directive to the product management team and the engineering team is "your first three priorities" "are API, API, and then user interface," right? So that's where we're placing a lot of that effort. And because, in may cases when we approach our collaboration with VMWare, we want to look for opportunities to be first best and only. I think as you see us bring VxRail and VCF together, that's gonna be one of those "best and only" sorts of solutions. But you have to stay tuned for further details on that. >> But that makes a lot of sense, simplifying that portfolio. But the big takeaway to me, Chad, and we've talked about this in the past, is what we call the "true private cloud" or even "true hybrid cloud" is bringing the cloud experience to your data no matter where it lives. Whether it's on PRIM in your private cloud. The VMWare AWS deal, obviously simplifies the sort of public cloud piece. Or you're in a service provider, and you've now got a homogenous experience that really is much more cloud-like than we've seen over the years. >> Well, you look at the old saying about cloud-native applications, "write it once," "and I don't care where it runs." Well as the multi-cloud strategy evolves, whether that's running in a VMC cloud provider, whether that's running on premise, our users shouldn't have to care. There may be things that they want to keep on premise for perfectly good reasons. There's may be things that they want to have in the cloud. Great example, we just got our certification for SAP HANA on VxRail. Now that's a workload that, just because of the latency requirements, and the kind of data they're processing, very likely that's gonna stay on premise for quite a while. So there are good reasons to have that construct where we don't necessarily care where the workload is. But we wanna provide a consistent user experience that really lowers that opex for customers. >> Great. How do people learn more about this? >> Come see us at VMWorld in Barcelona. We've got presence all over the show. And then hit us up on the cloud marketplace on dellemc.com, find out more about VxRail and VxRack SDDC as our primary cloud platforms. >> Alright Chad, you've been busy. Congratulations on the announcement. And thanks for watching everybody, Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (electronic music)

live from Las Vegas it's the queue covering Dell technologies world 2018 brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners welcome back to the cubes coverage of Dell technologies world I'm Lisa Martin we're in Vegas I'm with Keith Townsend and we have a couple of guests here joining us as we wrap up day - we've got Chad Dunn a cube alumni VP of Product Management at Dell EMC and Matt Harris senior director of product marketing at VMware welcome so guys lots of news coming out today saw in the press release Dell EMC now is the number one market leader in global hyper-converged infrastructure announcements 2vx rail VX rack sddc what's new obviously there's a lot new I mean really happy with with the market share and the and the traction that we're getting with both of the products in the VMware hyper-converged portfolio VX rail VX rack at CDC on VX rail we added new capabilities like 25 gig Ethernet nvme drives new security capabilities new graphical processing unit high density memory on the VX rack side we're now on Dell 14 G servers in fact that hardware is basically VX rail inside VX rack SD DC so you can sort of start to see how these things come together as we move forward in the roadmap and we also announced a VMware validated design on VX rail and again we're starting to sort of merge the divisions of these two products so they become consumption models of the same technology so met helped paint a picture for what this means for VMware and typical vmware vsphere we abstracted away the hardware so the hardware doing no longer matters right yeah well that's a great analogy actually so I'm a longtime vmware employee and one of the things that's Jean about vSphere is it really brought together more than one component for the underlying virtualization infrastructure so what cloud formations really doing it's like the next iteration of East here it's bringing together the storage compute network and management layers that make up our entire sddc solution and delivering that as a automated and and a two operated system the customers get the maximum value out of that and when we partner up with somebody like Dell I was able to bring unique value on their hardware platforms that's cognizant of all of those capabilities and Clapp foundation we're able to really get a lot of traction in the marketplace and hardware always matters we're literally nothing without it first Dell technologies world in the name change an indicator alone of the incorporation of the EMC Federation companies what we'll say power does that are you hearing from the customers and the partners that are here in terms of the strengthening of what that means for Dell EMC and VMware well I think the the obvious thing that everybody sees is the power of the portfolio that we now have ya know me as a product owner of a hyperconvergence platform I was doing that job at EMC and I didn't have a server there are a lot - OH - MS do to get servers to build our product but now you know I've got the best x86 portfolio in the market yeah right here under the same roof and now I have product managers who work for me are now in Round Rock or integrated with those teams so having the power both internally and npower for our customers to tap into all the things across the portfolio VMware pivotal RSA secure works virtuous dream I mean it's a really amazing IT portfolio and the great thing about coming to a show like this is I've seen a lot of the same faces of people I've known for years I've been here 11 years and I'm seeing a lot of new faces and getting them reenergized about the technology so Matt let's execute a similar question pre-merger one of the things that on the customer side you know I had an EMC rep rep I had a vmworld rep generally speaking never suck we've never met together can you talk about the cultural change if any with the relationship with dale emc versus the previous emc where the pro folio was limited to mainly storage products yeah well so the reality is vmware has always had a great relationship with obviously emc where i owned us but also with dell I mean if I think about my years in the field with customers Dell was the easiest partner for us to go to market with together they had a great sales organization and great products that customers loved it was always the easiest to walk into a customer account with the Dell Rob that's only gotten easier and because my product that I'm responsible for Clapp foundation is one that lands very specifically on unique capabilities from Dells solutions that just makes that conversation more meaningful it's a great story between us and VMware because we're actually able to to leverage some of the IP that we created for VX rail and now bring that into our cloud foundation instantiation which is VX RAC sddc so you don't think our group and we're pretty proud of the fact that we probably collaborate more closely with vmware in more places than anybody else in WMC we've had a long-standing collaboration on VX rail and now with cloud foundation it gets even better and what's the business value that you're seeing from VCS in the customer service in light of this strong new collaboration that's that's a great question so you know you know virtualization is great but what really customers are looking for is something that's adapting to the new realities of the way datacenters actually exist today it's not just private and public cloud the dimensions of the datacenter expanding all over the place edge systems are important as public and private cloud and what the value proposition we're seeing is having a ubiquitous consistent and transparent underlying infrastructure that can exist across all of those streamlets operations it adds agility to organizations to actually be able to deploy workload consistently across all of those different platforms and and you know if you combine it with something that we're doing together with Dell then all of those customers are benefiting across multiple parts of what they consider their data center I'm a great example this is the kind of work they were doing around IOT with Dell and that's another possible profile of workload that could live on top of class foundation now you've got multiple business value points traversing both of our solutions so I can take the extra lvx rack instead of setting up a POC of open source software to find data centers I'm sure customers have tried that and attempted it talk about that conversation when they come back either through the Dell channel or back to VMware and say you know what we tried this this is where it was good and this is why we're having this second set of conversations where are the pain points that VCF but on top of vehicle rack it's all well start from the bottom up and think about the things that we worry about so that you as the customer don't have to there are between nine and twelve different programmable firmware devices inside of PowerEdge server do you really want to track all those and make sure they match up with all your VMware drivers no of course not right you want something that's automated that lives in the system that knows how to upgrade those drivers out upgrade that firmware connect it to the right bits in in the VMware stack and make sure that you're always in a known good state and you're gonna get peak performance so we want to take those things that nobody really wants to do and let us do them for you when people tried to do it themselves they quickly find out that we were doing a lot of stuff that we didn't always talk about that made their lives easier so that's not on the hardware side on the software side yeah so I will tell you that there's no way to really deploy applications across multiple points of presence hybrid cloud for example is not doable unless you can really remove make the infrastructure invisible in a way and that's what this collaboration is really done and that's a critical pain point that you know customers have always derived benefit from NSX the Santa Ana VCR but to have these things all integrated into one product with the cloud foundation that was a game-changer for bringing these solutions together for lifecycle management day to operations as I mentioned that's unique capability there that is differentiated than just doing a ad hoc deployment of any of these technologies so the theme of the event make it real if you look at a financial services institution for example together what are you making a reality for them as it relates to IT transformation or digital transformation what is that reality that you're helping them achieve yeah well so one thing I'll say is that the reality of any workload across multiple clouds delivered to any user to any mobile device or desktop device that's a real capability that we're delivering for example Clapp foundation can instantiate through this concept called workload domain both traditional infrastructures of service applications and VDI the virtual desktops so this is real work that we're doing with real customers today together yeah just not with 1:00 this morning and they're now migrating about 500 virtual machines per week on to their VX rack sddc infrastructure and I believe they just crossed the 5500 VM mark and there'll be 8,000 VMs when they complete the project so that's real and and from the business outcomes perspective what does it allow that customer to achieve that then allows them to you know transition from where they are today which is about 60 percent virtualized to 95 percent virtualized when they when they reach the end of this journey and because we offload a lot of the tasks around managing the hardware managing the software on all of those lifecycle things and the automation that comes from the cloud management platform you can start to redeploy some of those resources to things that differentiate the business right instead of worrying about all the you know the bits and pieces that are in your infrastructure so what's next what was one on the horizon for the relationship what our customers asking for 200 meetings this week I'm sure there's been requests from customers tons of requests they want to see more automated lifecycle management they want to see vx rail releases in VMware releases get closer together in time they want us to be simultaneously shipping which is something that we're working on they want latest and greatest everybody wants to talk about nvme you know now we have nvme faster connectivity for the devices so you know the platform roadmap will continue but I think what Matt and I what we talk about quite frequently you can start to see us foreshadowing this strategy as we have the x-ray oh and we have the X rack sddc and we have cloud foundation doesn't need to be - right how do these come together is this consumption model it's just a different consumption model for the same technology so we're looking to see what synergies can we bring across those two products - to build a better portfolio for the VMware I've converged use case and I would say for our part we look to continue this partnership and I love what Chad was saying about the idea of you know VX rail and in VX rack having you know the same underlying components and how can we bring those things together I'll also say that looking out into the future I mentioned multiple workload profiles data analytics IOT NFV in addition to traditional high as it would be very interesting for us to work together to see how can we move up the stack for from an automated perspective can we automate the applique underlying application infrastructure in a way that will make customers more agile and that's something we could definitely look to try to do together in the future well guys thanks so much for stopping by talking about what's new how you're enabling cuz to really facilitate the IT transformation enabling that digital transformation and delivering a differentiated way of doing that to be here thank you we want to thank you for watching the queue we are live at day two or finishing day two I should say of Delft technologies world in Las Vegas I'm Lisa Martin for Keith Townsend thanks for watching we'll see you tomorrow

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World, 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Vegas, everybody. We're rocking. We are rocking. Dave Vellante here with Keith Townsend. This is theCUBE, the leader, get into it! Live tech coverage. (laughing) >> We in the club! >> We are in the club. The Chads are here, Chad Dunn, Chad Sakac. Chad Dunn is VP of Product Management and Marketing at Dell EMC, and Chad Sakac, needs no introduction, although new role with Pivotal. >> Sakac: Yeah. >> Awesome. >> It's exciting man, it's great to be back, like come on, some things change, some things stay the same. It's always good to be on theCUBE. >> So tell us about the new role, let's start there. I know you've talked a lot about it, but you haven't with me, so. >> Yeah, so, in a nutshell, as I was trying to think what do I do next in my career? You know, we had built amazing things in the converged platform and solutions division, VxRail, massive success. >> Dunn: Yep. >> Those things moving into the parts of Dell EMC for more scale and velocity, which is simple. If you imagine the future of tomorrow, you'd go and say, what percentage of infrastructure going to be hyper-converged? Answer, a lot, and it's going to need to have a velocity that's very similar to a server, because what percentage of servers are going to be HCI? Answer, a lot. And so it was a very natural kind of, time to go and say, how do we optimize this thing? And then that gave me a weird, unique, once in a lifetime moment, where I could go and say, what do I want to do? My wife said, I'm telling you a long answer, and you probably want the short one. My wife said-- >> Dunn: You don't know any other kind. (laughing) >> This is Chad skills. >> "Chad, you've been on the road for 13 years, "your children are now 12 and 14, "they're going to be here in the nest "for like another four years, "take time off, I'll go out to work, "you be a stay-at-home dad." That was actually, like, option A. Option B was, there's so much cool stuff going on in the ecosystem, join a startup, do a CEO gig, whatever, and then stay in the family and a ton of support from Michael and from Jeff Clarke and from Pat Gelsinger and Rob Mee, and there was, like, do this at Dell EMC, do this at VMware, do this at Pivotal. And what I realized was the Pivotal thing gave me the opportunity to do the startup-like thing, discover some new parts of my own career, so move up the stack, and do one thing that I've always done, which is be at the intersection of the companies. Because PKS is, fundamentally, an effort that is 50/50, VMware and Pivotal, just like VxRail is a 50/50, VMware, Dell EMC effort. >> Right, right. >> So it was the obvious choice and then I had to have that uncomfortable discussion with my wife that said, "Unfortunately, sweetheart, "I'm back on the road." She said, "Fine! "But at least take one month off "before you go from one thing to the other." We went to Hawaii, surfed. >> Oh nice. >> It was awesome. >> You bring the kids? >> Oh, yeah. >> Beautiful. >> It was awesome. But in any case, it's a, you know, in the same way that when we started VxRail, we were like, how do we go from a market where we're currently not the leader, and quickly accelerate, become number one, in a two-year period? And that requires running fast and iterating. The same thing goes with PKS, PCF and PAS is number one for that universe, but we're not currently number one for the enterprise container distribution. So, that's OK, I like that, now I'm determined and stubborn to make sure that PKS is the best enterprise Kubernetes and container platform. >> Chad D, you were talking off camera about the interest in VxRail, sounds like it's off the charts. >> Absolutely. I mean a ridiculous number of customer meetings that we have here at the show this week. I think it's over 200 customer meetings, just on VxRail, and VxRack SDDC, you know, the VMware hyper-converged stack. And, you know, more and more on Pivotal PCF and PKS. >> Yeah so let's talk about that. You got the guys that are sort of, born Cloud-native and the guys that are trying to transform, they need infrastructure to help them do both, they need partnerships, so lay it out for us. >> So, Keith, you and I have gone on Twitter and talked about this, there's this nature amongst the IT ecosystem, where everybody wants the answer to be A or B. >> Keith: Yes, we do. >> Right, A or B. >> Keith: Yes. >> Yeah A sucks, B is awesome. And you know, debates raged about, you remember like, the era of Doka is going to destroy VMware, you remember that? >> I remember that, seems like just yesterday. >> Because it was just yesterday. (laughing) But what's happened now is everyone's realized that's stupid, that the reality is that Kernel-Mode VMs and containers are going to co-exist, and in fact, the majority of containers are actually going to be deployed on Kernel-Mode hypervisors. >> Netflix's biggest story is optimizations from AWS. They're able to save tons of money by running containers inside of VMs. >> Sakac: Yeah. >> Dunn: Absolutely. >> And, you know, I was laughed at a couple of years ago, when I said, you know what, containers and VMs go together, like peanut-butter and jelly, and it does. >> It does and so, look, does it change what people want from the Kernel-Mode virtualization layer? Yeah. So, things like DRS, that are really important if all you do is a Kernel-Mode VM is less important, when resource management is done by something like Kubernetes, but that's a refinement. And so, what we're trying to do now is now that everyone's gotten over the emotion, and what I call the bar-fights, where we're getting into stupid arguments, you know, that are not about something that matters, and now people are getting down to the brass tacks of, how do I make this go? They're realizing, I'm going to use off-prem and on-prem, I'm going to have Kernel Mode VM's and I'm going to have containers, how do I make that work, how do I build a hybrid model that will work for both of those scenarios? And then, frankly, our job as IT practitioners and the vendor ecosystem is to make this as easy as we can. >> Well, you guys know this better than I do, people want to use existing processes and procedures, they don't want to throw that stuff out, I mean I think of it, I remember Big Data and Hadoop that the killer application was sequel. Right, I mean even in the Blockchain world now. >> Sakac: Yep. >> Everybody's talking about writing in JavaScript, right, you've got expertise built up, you don't throw that away. >> No, and I think when you look at the people who are trying to deploy containers on premises, they don't want to worry about the infrastructure, right, they want to look at the new, play with the new, cool things, they want to play with Kubernetes, they want to play with containers as service. They don't want to talk about, OK, well what infrastructure do I need, how do I make those choices? They want something that is very much automated and very much scale-out so it can react the same way that their application does. >> So let's talk about that, let's talk about VxRail, Kubernetes, PKS. If I'm a Cloud-Native guy, I don't care about infrastructure but there has to be infrastructure. So where's the meeting of that conversation? Dell technologies run best on Dell technologies. >> So, again, I'm going to try and force myself to give short answers, because it's so not natural for me. I'm sorry, fellas. When Pivotal engages with the customer, we go and we say, "We give you a platform, PaaS, PKS "and the Function Service," and they say, "What should I run it on?" And the first answer that comes out of someone's mouth is it doesn't matter, you can run it on any cloud you want, which is true on one level. But then if you look at our on-premises projects, the thing that's the biggest holdup is infrastructure that is too rigid, too slow, doesn't work right, is busted. And they're like, damn it, if I want to focus my energies elsewhere, I have to have a base-stack that is just easy and done, right? >> So, help break up the long chat answers. One argument is, you know what, just give someone 128 gig VM, a bunch of vCPUs, and that simplifies the infrastructure. Where does that break? >> It breaks immediately when someone says, I need to add more total compute, or storage, or network, or memory, to my Kubernetes pot. Kubernetes goes, great, I'd like to basically make the cluster bigger, because I've got this resource demand. Then it looks down and says, infrastructure, are you there? And if the answer is, no, it's like, wah wah. Right? (laughing) So what we've managed to do is we've managed with VxRail to go and say, we've made an easy button based off of the customer-standard which is the VMware stack, it's not only something they can count on, they can easily add it, so if they want to add raw compute, storage, or network. It also adds in small increments, so you don't have to have a giant block of infrastructure to go in, you know, so you can grow your Kubernetes cluster, you can grow your physical infrastructure, simple, easy, done. And the biggest part is that Kubernetes makes deploying containers easy, however, PKS makes deploying and versioning Kubernetes easy, VxRail makes deploying and versioning the vSphere stack easy. Easy, plus easy, plus easy, equals easy. >> So is it like a quasi-elastic-beanstalk here? >> Elastic beanstalk, OK. (laughs) >> Is that fair? >> Or maybe a plastic beanstalk, where, you know, it could hold its shape. >> You know, elastic beanstalk is a PaaS, right, but the long and the short of it is is that if you get the abstraction that you need, Kernel Mode VM or container, the container is in a VM, if the whole stack is prescriptive and easy and works, then you can redeploy time, money, and resources, on the things that matter. And that Pivotal ready architecture, which is PCF, on VxRail, is that easy button on-prem. >> So, Chad, the production staff may regret me asking this question, but I have to know this. You're known in the industry for these blog polls talking about face-melting technologies. (laughing) What is face-melting about PKS, and VxRail, gimme some classic Chad. >> I'll give you face-melting. Facemelting to someone who's looking at a container platform and you're looking at Kubernetes is that without them knowing, without them knowing or doing anything, the Bosch part of what PKS does- >> Keith: Oh, Bosch. >> Is basically doing updates, like four times a day, blowing up the entire environment and recreating it and no-one has touched a damn thing, step one. The next thing that's face-melting is that their ability to update the infrastructure, can be done at tens of thousands of sites via API calls. So I'll give you another fascinating example. Kubernetes is generally thought-of as mostly a data-center thing, we've had fascinating interest from retail and other use cases, where they're like, look I get it, I want a Kubernetes, that I could deploy in a store. >> Keith: Yeah. >> And then you go and say, well, do you have a great DevOps practice in the store, in Topeka, Kansas? The answer is, no. But if I say I can basically drive all of the platform updates, including the infrastructure, at thousands of stores around the globe, that's pretty face-melting, no-one else can do that. >> Exactly, and look we see, you know, lots of pockets of Cloud Native popping up in accounts, and a lot of times IT doesn't even know where they're at. You know, these are things that are going to go from a line of business, and all of a sudden become production, have to become production, and IT needs a way to manage that. Rail gives them a way to go in and manage that infrastructure, at a scalable way, and move it from a line of business, into production. >> I'll give you another face-melting, do you mind? >> I'm not calling the shots. >> Bring it on. >> Is your face OK? >> My face is getting there. >> I want to see it like, melted Keith, just melted. People have asked me is that a good thing? And, yeah, it's a great thing. (laughing) So, we were talking about a particular customer, I dunno whether we can name them, can we name them? >> I don't know if we could, I haven't asked. >> OK so-- >> What industry? >> Financial Services. >> And, basically, they use the PCF stack on VxRail, and they're currently using it, for pre-prod. >> Exactly, so they're building all the testing applications to test their classic applications, that are running on VxBlock. >> So they've got a production environment that's like, big, classic, VxBlock, also my former baby, so and I love all my children equally, right. What they are finding is that the simplicity of the PCF on the VxRail Model, is so wonderful and fast and great. But when they want to try and do a capacity add on a VxBlock, or to do an update, like an RCM, it's a lot harder here than it is over here, right. I guarantee at that customer, what they're eventually going to discover is this has been awesome, we're going to keep using VxBlock for something else, but we're not going to deploy PCF, PaaS and PKS, on a VxBlock. >> Exactly, and this is going to trigger refactoring of all those workloads, that say, can I refactor these to be Cloud Native, right. If I can iterate my testing that quickly, can I iterate my production applications that quickly. >> And the ROI on that refactoring is? Fill in the blank. >> No, no it is like a thousand to one. So, again, this is a very hard thing to imagine. >> Talk about business impact. Not financial, but-- >> I'll give you one example that I'm so happy that they actually posted this to YouTube, because the customer's voice in this is incredible. If you YouTube, From zero to 12 million, T-mobile. OK, so this is not me saying it, you can go and you can see it themselves. T-mobile basically, and to all of you T-mobile, you know, subscribers out there, anyone of you guys use T-mobile? I use T-mobile, so, in any case, they have a single, giant, Java app that has a thousand functions in it, right. So, just imagine one app, sitting on a app server, like web-sphere or whatever, and inside that app, there's a thousand API calls, functions, and purposes, right. And because it's so big and monolithic, but this is critical, this is like the thing that runs their ordering systems and like, subscriber functions. It's the heart of the business that any time they needed to update it, to do like a patch, would take seven months. If they wanted to scale it, so like the iPhone launch is coming up, we need to get like three times as much capacity to handle all these iPhone orders in September, it would take them seven months of planning, work et cetera et cetera. >> Sure. >> Sakac: Everyone goes, I could visualize that. Right? >> Right. >> They took one function, just one, and pulled it out, and they said, we're going to do a project, we're going to take this function called, Get Usage, which, as you can imagine, basically pulls up the subscriber's usage data, and we're going to make it into a small micro-service, and we're going to run it on a PaaS, OK. Within five months, that function was getting used 12 million times a day, and they were able to do three CVE updates, so in other words, a Critical Vulnerability Patch, comes out, they were able to do it in real-time. They have eight platform operators, just eight, that are supporting 5,000 developers, sorry 500 developers. Eight, 500. Now, if you look at that and go, what does it mean for them? Well, they reduced the number of outages by almost 90%, the time for an outage went down by 63%, the developers and the dev-ops team are now happy, because this thing auto-scales itself. >> Dave: Ching ching. >> Ching ching, ching, right? >> Right, dudes, we got to go. Chad squared, thank you so much for coming on. >> Thank you, Guys. >> You OK? >> I'm good. >> Your face is melted. >> Your face melted? >> I have water. >> Splash it on your face to bring it back. >> Really, always great seeing you guys, thank you so much. >> Thanks, Dave, it's always good to be on here. >> Thanks very much. Keep right there, everybody, we'll be right back to wrap, right after this short break. (soft music)

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

from the cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cute conversation hi I'm Stu minimun and welcome to this special presentation we have a launch from Dell technologies updates to the BX rail family we're gonna do things a little bit different here we actually have a launch video from Janet champion of Dell technologies and the way we do things a lot of times is analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things you might have questions on it though rather than me just walking it are you watching herself I actually brought in a couple of Dell technologies expert two of our cube alumni happy to welcome back to the program Jonathan Segal he is the vice president of product marketing and Chad Dunn who's the vice president at price today of product management both of them with Dell technologies gentlemen thanks so much for joining us it was too great to be here all right and so what we're gonna do is we're gonna be rolling the video here I've got a button I'm gonna press Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit go into some questions when we're all done we're actually holding a crowd chat where you will be able to ask your questions talk to the expert and everything and so a little bit different way to do a product announcement hope you enjoy it and with that it's VX rail taking API to the extremes is is the theme we'll see you know how what that means and everything but without any further ado it but let's look fanon take the video away hello and welcome my name is Shannon champion and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with the ex rail let's get started we have a lot to talk about our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the core edge and cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options as well as the latest in software innovations so let's jump right in before we talk about our announcements let's talk about where customers are adopting the ex rail today first of all on behalf of the entire Dell technologies and BX Rail teams I want to thank each of our over 8,000 customers big and small in virtually every industry who have chosen the x rail to address a broad range of workloads deploying nearly a hundred thousand nodes to date thank you our promise to you is that we will add new functionality improve serviceability and support new use cases so that we deliver the most value to you whether in the core at the edge or for the cloud in the core the X rail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VX rail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment now we can support even more demanding applications such as in-memory databases like s AP HANA and more AI and ML applications with support for more and more powerful GPUs at the edge video surveillance which also uses GPUs by the way is an example of a popular use case leveraging the X rail alongside external storage and right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing and as it relates to VDI the X Rail has always been a great option for that in the cloud it's all about kubernetes and how dell technologies cloud platform which is VCF on the x rail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and cloud native applications and we're doing that together with VMware the X ray o is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments designed to enhance the native VMware experience this joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers all right so Shannon talked a bit about you know the important role of IP of course right now with the global pandemic going on it's really you know calling in you know essential things you know putting you know platforms to the test so I'd really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers also you know VDI of course you know in the early days it was HDI only does VDI now we know there are many solutions but remote work is you know putting that back front and center so John why don't we start with you is you know what you're absolutely so first of all us - thank you I want to do a shout out to our BX real customers around the world it's really been humbling inspiring and just amazing to see the impact of our bx real customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here you know just for a few examples there are genomics companies that we have running the X rail that have a row about testing at scale we also have research universities out in the Netherlands on doing the antibody detection the US Navy has stood up a hosta floating Hospital >> of course care for those in need so look we are here to help that's been our message to our customers but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this so just just a pleasure there but as you mentioned just to hit on the the VDI comments so it's your points do you know HCI and vxr8 EDI that was initially use case years ago and it's been great to see how many of our existing VX real customers have been able to inhibit very quickly leveraging via trail to add and to help bring their remote workforce you know online and support them with your existing VX rail because V it really is flexible it is agile to be able to support those multiple workloads and in addition to that we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost-effective catered to everything from knowledge workers to multimedia workers you name it you know from 250 desktops up to a thousand but again back to your point BX rail ci is well beyond video it had crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually and you know where VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads any of our customers out there it supports now a range of workloads as you heard from Shannon whether it's video surveillance whether it's general purpose only to mission-critical applications now with SAV ha so you know this is this has changed the game for sure but the range of workloads and the flexibility of yet rail is what's really helping our existing customers from this pandemic we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments from the ones that we serve all knew and loved back in the the initial days of of HCI now the mission-critical things now to cloud native workloads as well and you know sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI and specifically VX rail gives them that ability to pivot when these you know shall we say unexpected circumstances arise and I think if that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IT strategies look like as they move forward they want that same level of agility and the ability to react quickly with our overall infrastructure excellent want to get into the announcements what I want my team actually your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo so maybe they can dig up that footage talk about how fast they pivoted you know using VX rail to really spin up things fast so let's hear from the announcements first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later so let's get to the actual news that and it's gonna share okay now what's new I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms to further enable IT modernization across core edge and cloud I will cover each of these announcements in more detail demonstrating how only the X rail can offer the breadth of platform configurations automation orchestration and lifecycle management across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent simple side operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications I'll start with hybrid cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell technologies cloud announcements just a few weeks ago related to VMware cloud foundation on the X rail then I'll cover two brand new VX rail hardware platforms and additional options and finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VX rail HCI system software capabilities for lifecycle management let's get started with our new cloud offerings based on the ex rail you xrail is the HCI foundation for dell technologies cloud platform bringing automation and financial models similar to public cloud to on-premises environments VMware recently introduced cloud foundation for dotto which is based on vSphere 7 as you likely know by now vSphere 7 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release in keeping with our synchronous release commitment we introduced the XR l 7 based on vSphere 7 in late April which was within 30 days of VMware's release two key areas that VMware focused on were embedding containers and kubernetes into vSphere unifying them with virtual machines and the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere lifecycle manager or VL CM I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how the X rail fits in in a moment for V cf4 with tansu based on vSphere 7 customers now have access to a hybrid cloud platform that supports native kubernetes workloads and management as well as your traditional vm based workloads and this is now available with VCF 4 on the ex rel 7 the X rails tight integration with VMware cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid cloud but also to deliver kubernetes a cloud scale with one complete automated platform the second cloud announcement is also exciting recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid cloud because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture and with that Dell technologies cloud platform can now be deployed with a four node configuration lowering the cost of an entry-level hybrid cloud this enables customers to start smaller and grow their cloud deployment over time VCF on the x rail can now be deployed in two different ways for small environments customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture it's ideal for getting started with an entry-level cloud to run general-purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost but still with a consistent cloud operating model for larger environments we're dedicated resources and role based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred you can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at 8 nodes for independent management and workload domains a standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes horizon VDI and vSphere with kubernetes all right John there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware's doing with vSphere 7 understand if you wanted to use the kubernetes piece you know it's it's VCF as that so we you know we've seen the announcements delt partnering there helped us connect that story between you know really the the VMware strategy and how they've talked about cloud and how you know where does the X rail fit in that overall Delta cloud story absolutely so so first of all is through the x-ray of course is integral to the Delta cloud strategy you know it's been VCF on bx r l equals the delta cloud platform and this is our flagship on-prem cloud offering that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any cloud right whether it's on prem in the edge or in a public cloud and we've seen the delta cloud platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons one is it offers the fastest hybrid cloud deployment in the market and this is really you know thanks to a new subscription on offer that we're now offering out there we're at less than 14 days it can be set up and running and really the deltek cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models overall comes to the extra secondly I would say is fast and easy upgrades I mean this is this is really this is what VX real brings to the table for all our clothes if you will and it's especially critical in the cloud so the full automation of lifecycle management across the hardware and software stack boss the VMware software stack and in the Dell software however we're supporting that together this enables essentially the third thing which is customers can just relax right they can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated and always be in a continuously validated state and this this is the kind of thing that you know those three value propositions together really fit well with with any on print cloud now you take what Shannon just mentioned and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same the x-ray link structure alongside traditional applications this is a game changer yeah it I love you know I remember in the early days that about CI how does that fit in with cloud discussion and align I've used the last couple years this you know modernize the platform then you can modernize the application though as companies are doing their full modernization this plays into what you're talking about all right let's get you know can't let ran and continue get some more before we dig into some more analysis that's good let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases first up I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new delhi MCB x rail series the DS series this is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of the x rail for workloads at the edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas the X ray LD series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the BX rail portfolio with simplicity agility and lifecycle management but in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches it's a durable form factor that's extremely temperature resilient shock resistant and easily portable it even meets mil spec standards that means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VX rail HCI system software and 24 by 7 single point of support enabling you to rapidly react to business needs no matter the location or how harsh the conditions so whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base running real-time GPS mapping on-the-go or implementing video surveillance in remote areas you can ensure availability integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VX Rail ruggedized D series had would love for you to bring us in a little bit you know that what customer requirement bringing bringing this to market I I remember seeing you know Dell servers ruggedized of course edge you know really important growth to build on what John was talking about clouds so yeah Chad bring us inside what was driving this piece of the offering sure Stu yeah you know having the the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important and that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these edges or some of the more exotic locations you know whether that's manufacturing plants oil rigs submarine ships military applications in places that we've never heard of but it's also been extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VX rails you're managing your edges the same way using the same set of tools so you don't need to learn anything else so operational simplicity is is absolutely key here but in those locations you can take a product that's designed for a data center where you're definitely controlling power cooling space and take it to some of these places where you get sand blowing or sub-zero temperatures so we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat extreme cold extreme altitude but still offer that operational simplicity if you look at the the resistance that it has to heat it can go from around operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range but it can do an excursion up to 55 °c or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours it's also resisted the heats and dust vibration it's very lightweight short depth in fact it's only 20 inches deep this is a smallest form factor obviously that we have in the BX rail family and it's also built to to be able to withstand sudden shocks it's certified it was stand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation it's pretty high and you know this is this is sort of like where were skydivers go to when they weren't the real real thrill of skydiving where you actually the oxygen to to be a put that out to their milspec certified so mil-std 810g which i keep right beside my bed and read every night and it comes with a VX rail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment and we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for for naval chakra quirements EMI and radiation immunity of all that yeah you know it's funny I remember when weights the I first launched it was like oh well everything's going to white boxes and it's going to be you know massive you know no differentiation between everything out there if you look at what you're offering if you look at how public clouds build their things what I call it a few years poor is there's a pure optimization so you need scale you need similarities but you know you need to fit some you know very specific requirements lots of places so interesting stuff yeah certifications you know always keep your teams busy alright let's get back to Shannon we are also introducing three other hardware based editions first a new VX rail eseries model based on were the first time AMD epic processors these single socket 1u nodes offered dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from 8 to 64 cores up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer-aided design next the addition of the latest NVIDIA Quadro RT X GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional workflows designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering deep learning and visual computing workloads and Intel obtain DC persistent memory is here and it offers high performance and significantly increase memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity even when power is lost enabling quicker recovery and less downtime with support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like sa P Hana alright let's finally dig into our HCI system software which is the core differentiation for the xrail regardless of your workload or platform choice our joint engineering with VMware and investments in the x-ray HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers under the covers the xrail offers best-in-class Hardware married with VMware HCI software either vcn or VCF but what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two Dell technologies has a dedicated VX rail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper-converged system that team has also developed our unique the X rail HDI system software which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver a seamless automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere the key components of the x rail HDI system software are shown around the arc here that include the X rail manager full stack lifecycle management ecosystem connectors and support I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today but if you're interested in learning more I encourage you to meet our experts and I will tell you how to do that in a moment I touched on VLC M being a key feature to vSphere seven earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of the xrail lifecycle management the LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them with the X ray all customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business customers tell us that lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively and that it isn't the most efficient economically Automation of lifecycle management in VX Rail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure but as shown here our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages and reduced overall cost of operations with the xrail HCI system software intelligent lifecycle management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated keeping clusters in continuously validated States while minimizing risks and operational costs how do we ensure continuously validated States Furby xrail the x-ray labs execute an extensive automated repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customer's choosing across their VX rail environment the VX rail labs are constantly testing analyzing optimising and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack all the while the x rail is backed by Delhi MCS world-class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software IT productivity skyrockets with single-click non-disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing taking you to the next VX rail version of your choice while always in a continuously validated state you can also confidently execute automated VX rail upgrades no matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster they don't have to all be the same and upgrades with VX rail are faster and more efficient with leap frogging simply choose any VX rail version you desire and be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between only the ex rail can do that all right so Chad you know the the lifecycle management piece that Jana was just talking about is you know not the sexiest it's often underappreciated you know there's not only the years of experience but the continuous work you're doing you know reminds me back you know the early V sand deployments versus VX rail jointly develop you know jointly tested between Dell and VMware so you know bring us inside why you know 2020 lifecycle management still you know a very important piece especially in the VL family yeah let's do I think it's sexy but I'm pretty big nerd yes even more the larger the deployments come when you start to look at data centers full of VX rails and all the different hardware software firmware combinations that could exist out there it's really the value that you get out of that VX r l HTI system software that Shannon was talking about and how its optimized around the VMware use case very tightly integrated with each VMware component of course and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware all of the drivers all of the software altogether tremendous value to our customers but to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment so she Anna mentioned we've run about twenty five thousand hours of testing across each major release four patches Express patches that's about seven thousand hours for each of those so obviously there's a lot of parallelism and and we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality one of the key things that were able to do as Shannon mentioned is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state we've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously a huge amount of automation and then when we talk about that investment to execute those tests that's well north of sixty million dollars of investment in our lab in fact we've got just over two thousand VH rail units in our testbed across the u.s. Shanghai China and corn island so a massive amount of testing of each of those those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state yeah well you know absolutely it's super important not only for the day one but the day two deployments but I think this actually be a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to so we've got the CIO of Amarillo Texas he was an existing VX rail customer and he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work from home initiative as well as you know we get to hear in his words the value of what lifecycle management means though Andrew if we could queue up that that customer segment please it was it's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it you know as we mature and they I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments but this instance really justified why I was driving progress so so fervently why it was so urgent today three years ago we the answer would have been no there would have been we wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt with it with the x-ray all in place you know in a week we spun up hundreds of instant phones we spawned us a seventy five person call center in a day and a half for our public health we will allow multiple applications for Public Health so they could do remote clinics it's given us the flexibility to be able to to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive and it's not only been apparent to my team but it's really made an impact on the business and now what I'm seeing is those those are my customers that were a little lagging or a little conservative or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well all right so rich you talked to a bunch about the the efficiencies that they tie put place how about that that overall just managed you know you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances you need to be able to do things much simpler so you know how does the overall lifecycle management fit into this discussion it makes it so much easier and you know in the in the old environment one it took a lot of man-hours to make change it was it was very disruptive when we did make change this it overburdened I guess that's the word I'm looking for it really over overburdened our staff it cost disruption to business it was it cost-efficient and then you simple things like you know I've worked for multi billion-dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production simply can't afford that at local government you know having the sort of environment lets me do a scaled-down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change as I said earlier it's allow us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on lifecycle management because it's greatly simplified and move those resources and rescale them in in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business it's hard to be innovated when a hundred percent of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat all right well you know nothing better than hearing straight from the end-user you know public sector reacting very fast to the Cova 19 and you know you heard him he said if this had hit his before he had run this project he would not have been able to respond so I think everybody out there understands if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology you know it would be much harder all right I'm looking forward to doing the crowd chat and everybody else digging with questions and get follow-up but a little bit more I believe one more announcement he came and got for us though let's roll the final video clip in our latest software release the x-ray of 4.7 dot 510 we continue to add new automation and self-service features new functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch this is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window of course running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates we are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific the xrail version or down Rev one or more more nodes that may be shipped at a higher Rev than the existing cluster this enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in cluster to sum up all of our announcements whether you are accelerating data center modernization extending HCI to harsh edge environments deploying an on-premises Dell technologies cloud platform to create a developer ready kubernetes infrastructure BX Rail is there delivering a turnkey experience that enables you to continuously innovate realize operational freedom and predictably evolve the x rail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations automation and lifecycle management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across core edge and cloud I now invite you to engage with us first the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about the ex rails new features and functionality and score some sweet digital swag while you're at it it delivered via an automated via an augmented reality app all you need is your device so go to the x-ray is slash passport to get started and secondly if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VX rail meet the experts sessions available for a limited time first-come first-served just go to the x-ray dot is slash expert session to learn more you all right well obviously with everyone being remote there's different ways we're looking to engage so we've got the crowd chat right after this but John gives a little bit more is that how Del's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got firfer options for them yeah absolutely so as Shannon said so in lieu of not having Dell tech world this year in person where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions whether it's in the booth or you know in in meeting rooms you know we are going to have these meet the experts sessions over the next couple of weeks and look we're gonna put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to to everyone out there so again definitely encourage you we're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we could still stay in touch answer questions be responsive and really looking forward to you know having these conversations over the next couple weeks all right well John and Chad thank you so much we definitely look forward to the conversation here in int in you'd if you're here live definitely go down below do it if you're watching this on demand you can see the full transcript of it at crowd chat /vx rocks sorry V xrail rocks for myself Shannon on the video John and Chad Andrew man in the booth there thank you so much for watching and go ahead and join the crowd chat

>> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation. We have a launch from Dell Technologies updates from the VxRail family. We're going to do things a little bit different here. We actually have a launch video Shannon Champion, of Dell Technologies. And the way we do things a lot of times, is, analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things. You might have questions on it. So, rather than me just wanting it, or you wanting yourself I actually brought in a couple of Dell Technologies expertS two of our Cube alumni, happy to welcome you back to the program. Jon Siegal, he is the Vice President of Product Marketing, and Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management, both of them with Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Great to be here. >> All right, and so what we're going to do is we're going to be rolling the video here. I've got a button I'm going to press, Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit, go into some questions when we're all done. We're actually holding a crowd chat, where you will be able to ask your questions, talk to the experts and everything. And so a little bit different way to do a product announcement. Hope you enjoy it. And with that, it's VxRail. Taking HCI to the extremes is the theme. We'll see what that means and everything. But without any further ado, let's let Shannon take the video away. >> Hello, and welcome. My name is Shannon Champion, and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with VxRail. Let's get started. We have a lot to talk about. Our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the Core, Edge and Cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options, as well as the latest in software innovations. So let's jump right in. Before we talk about our announcements, let's talk about where customers are adopting VxRail today. First of all, on behalf of the entire Dell Technologies and VxRail teams, I want to thank each of our over 8000 customers, big and small in virtually every industry, who've chosen VxRail to address a broad range of workloads, deploying nearly 100,000 nodes today. Thank you. Our promise to you is that we will add new functionality, improve serviceability, and support new use cases, so that we deliver the most value to you, whether in the Core, at the Edge or for the Cloud. In the Core, VxRail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation. Many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VxRail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment. Now we can support even more demanding applications such as In-Memory databases, like SAP HANA, and more AI and ML applications, with support for more and more powerful GPUs. At the Edge, video surveillance, which also uses GPUs, by the way, is an example of a popular use case leveraging VxRail alongside external storage. And right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing. And as it relates to VDI, VxRail has always been a great option for that. In the Cloud, it's all about Kubernetes, and how Dell Technologies Cloud platform, which is VCF on VxRail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and Cloud native applications. And we're doing that together with VMware. VxRail is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments, designed to enhance the native VMware experience. This joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. >> Alright, so Shannon talked a bit about, the important role of IT Of course right now, with the global pandemic going on. It's really, calling in, essential things, putting, platforms to the test. So, I really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers. Also, VDI, of course, in the early days, it was, HCI-only-does-VDI. Now, we know there are many solutions, but remote work is putting that back front and center. So, Jon, why don't we start with you as the what is (muffled speaking) >> Absolutely. So first of all, Stu, thank you, I want to do a shout out to our VxRail customers around the world. It's really been humbling, inspiring, and just amazing to see The impact of our VxRail customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here. Just for a few examples, there are genomics companies that we have running VxRail that have rolled out testing at scale. We also have research universities out in the Netherlands, doing the antibody detection. The US Navy has stood up a floating hospital to of course care for those in need. So we are here to help that's been our message to our customers, but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this. So just just a pleasure there. But as you mentioned, just to hit on the VDI comments, so to your points too, HCI, VxRail, VDI, that was an initial use case years ago. And it's been great to see how many of our existing VxRail customers have been able to pivot very quickly leveraging VxRail to add and to help bring their remote workforce online and support them with their existing VxRail. Because VxRail is flexible, it is agile, to be able to support those multiple workloads. And in addition to that, we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost effective cater to everything from knowlEdge workers to multimedia workers. You name it, you know from 250, desktops up to 1000. But again, back to your point VxRail, HCI, is well beyond VDI, it crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually. And VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads, any of our customers out there, it supports now a range of workloads that you heard from Shannon, whether it's video surveillance, whether it's general purpose, all the way to mission critical applications now with SAP HAN. So, this has changed the game for sure. But the range of work loads and the flexibility of the actual rules which really helping our existing customers during this pandemic. >> Yeah, I agree with you, Jon, we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments, from the ones that we sure all knew and loved back in the initial days of HCI. Now, the mission critical things now to Cloud native workloads as well, and the sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI. And specifically, VxRail gives them that ability to pivot. When these, shall we say unexpected circumstances arise? And I think that that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IP strategies look like as they move forward. They want that same level of agility, and ability to react quickly with their overall infrastructure. >> Excellent. Now I want to get into the announcements. What I want my team actually, your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo, so maybe they can dig up that footage, talk about how fast they pivoted, using VxRail to really spin up things fast. So let's hear from the announcement first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later. So let's get to the actual news that Shannon's going to share. >> Okay, now what's new? I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms, to further enable IT modernization across Core, Edge and Cloud. I will cover each of these announcements in more detail, demonstrating how only VxRail can offer the breadth of platform configurations, automation, orchestration and Lifecycle Management, across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent, simplified operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications. I'll start with hybrid Cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell Technologies Cloud announcements just a few weeks ago, related to VMware Cloud foundation on VxRail. Then I'll cover two brand new VxRail hardware platforms and additional options. And finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VxRail HCI system software capabilities for Lifecycle Management. Let's get started with our new Cloud offerings based on VxRail. VxRail is the HCI foundation for Dell Technologies, Cloud Platform, bringing automation and financial models, similar to public Cloud to On-premises environments. VMware recently introduced Cloud foundation for Delta, which is based on vSphere 7.0. As you likely know by now, vSphere 7.0 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release. In keeping with our synchronous release commitment, we introduced VxRail 7.0 based on vSphere 7.0 in late April, which was within 30 days of VMware's release. Two key areas that VMware focused on we're embedding containers and Kubernetes into vSphere, unifying them with virtual machines. And the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere Lifecycle Manager or VLCM. I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how VxRail fits in in a moment for VCF 4 with Tom Xu, based on vSphere 7.0 customers now have access to a hybrid Cloud platform that supports native Kubernetes workloads and management, as well as your traditional VM-based workloads. So containers are now first class citizens of your private Cloud alongside traditional VMs and this is now available with VCF 4.0, on VxRail 7.0. VxRail's tight integration with VMware Cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid Cloud, but also to deliver Kubernetes at Cloud scale with one complete automated platform. The second Cloud announcement is also exciting. Recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid Cloud, because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture. And with that Dell Technologies Cloud platform can now be deployed with a four-node configuration, lowering the cost of an entry level hybrid Cloud. This enables customers to start smaller and grow their Cloud deployment over time. VCF and VxRail can now be deployed in two different ways. For small environments, customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes. Since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture, it's ideal for getting started with an entry level Cloud to run general purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point. Both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost, but still with a Consistent Cloud operating model. For larger environments where dedicated resources and role-based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred. You can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at eight nodes for independent management and workload domains. A standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes Horizon, VDI, and vSphere with Kubernetes. >> Alright, Jon, there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware is doing with vSphere 7.0. understand if you wanted to use the Kubernetes piece, it's VCF as that so we've seen the announcements, Dell, partnering in there it helps us connect that story between, really the VMware strategy and how they talk about Cloud and where does VxRail fit in that overall, Delta Cloud story? >> Absolutely. So first of all Stu, the VxRail course is integral to the Delta Cloud strategy. it's been VCF on VxRail equals the Delta Cloud platform. And this is our flagship on prem Cloud offering, that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any Cloud, whether it's On-prem, in the Edge or in the public Cloud. And we've seen the Dell tech Cloud Platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons. One is it offers the fastest hybrid Cloud deployment in the market. And this is really, thanks to a new subscription offer that we're now offering out there where in less than 14 days, it can be still up and running. And really, the Dell tech Cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models, overall when it comes to VxRail. Secondly, I would say is fast and easy upgrades. This is what VxRail brings to the table for all workloads, if you will, into especially critical in the Cloud. So the full automation of Lifecycle Management across the hardware and software stack across the VMware software stack, and in the Dell software and hardware supporting that, together, this enables essentially the third thing, which is customers can just relax. They can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated, and always be in a continuously validated state. And this is the kind of thing that those three value propositions together really fit well, with any on-prem Cloud. Now you take what Shannon just mentioned, and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same VxRail infrastructure alongside traditional applications. This is a game changer. >> Yeah, I love it. I remember in the early days talking with Dunn about CI, how does that fit in with Cloud discussion and the line I've used the last couple years is, modernize the platform, then you can modernize the application. So as companies are doing their full modernization, then this plays into what you're talking about. All right, we can let Shannon continue, we can get some more before we dig into some more analysis. >> That's good. >> Let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates. that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options. covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases. First up, I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new Dell EMC VxRail series, the D series. This is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of VxRail for workloads at the Edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas. VxRail D series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the VxRail portfolio with simplicity, agility and lifecycle management. But in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches, it's adorable form factor that's extremely temperature-resilient, shock resistant, and easily portable. It even meets milspec standards. That means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VxRail HCI system software and 24 by seven single point of support, enabling you to rapidly react to business needs, no matter the location or how harsh the conditions. So whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base, running real-time GPS mapping on the go, or implementing video surveillance in remote areas, you can ensure availability, integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VxRail ruggedized D series. >> All right, Chad we would love for you to bring us in a little bit that what customer requirement for bringing this to market. I remember seeing, Dell servers ruggedized, of course, Edge, really important growth to build on what Jon was talking about, Cloud. So, Chad, bring us inside, what was driving this piece of the offering? >> Sure Stu. Yeah, yeah, having been at the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important. And that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these Edges or some of the more exotic locations. whether that's manufacturing plants, oil rigs, submarine ships, military applications, places that we've never heard of. But it's also about extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VxRails you're managing your Edges the same way using the same set of tools. You don't need to learn anything else. So operational simplicity is absolutely key here. But in those locations, you can take a product that's designed for a data center where definitely controlling power cooling space and take it some of these places where you get sand blowing or seven to zero temperatures, could be Baghdad or it could be Ketchikan, Alaska. So we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme altitude, but still offer that operational simplicity. Now military is one of those applications for the rugged platform. If you look at the resistance that it has to heat, it operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range, but it can do an excursion up to 55 C or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours. It's also resistant to heat sand, dust, vibration, it's very lightweight, short depth, in fact, it's only 20 inches deep. This is a smallest form factor, obviously that we have in the VxRail family. And it's also built to be able to withstand sudden shocks certified to withstand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation. Pretty high. And this is sort of like wherever skydivers go to when they want the real thrill of skydiving where you actually need oxygen to, to be for that that altitude. They're milspec-certified. So, MIL-STD-810G, which I keep right beside my bed and read every night. And it comes with a VxRail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment. And we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for naval shock requirements. EMI and radiation immunity often. >> Yeah, it's funny, I remember when we first launched it was like, "Oh, well everything's going to white boxes. "And it's going to be massive, "no differentiation between everything out there." If you look at what you're offering, if you look at how public Clouds build their things, but I called it a few years or is there's a pure optimization. So you need to scale, you need similarities but you know you need to fit some, very specific requirements, lots of places, so, interesting stuff. Yeah, certifications, always keep your teams busy. Alright, let's get back to Shannon to view on the report. >> We are also introducing three other hardware-based additions. First, a new VxRail E Series model based on where the first time AMD EPYC processors. These single socket 1U nodes, offer dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from eight to 64 Cores, up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer aided design. Next, the addition of the latest Nvidia Quadro RTX GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional work flows. Designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible, working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering, deep learning and visual computing workloads. And Intel Optane DC persistent memory is here, and it offers high performance and significantly increased memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price. Data persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity, even when power is lost, enabling quicker recovery and less downtime. With support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like SAP HANA. Alright, let's finally dig into our HCI system software, which is the Core differentiation for VxRail regardless of your workload or platform choice. Our joining engineering with VMware and investments in VxRail HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. Under the covers, VxRail offers best in class hardware, married with VMware HCI software, either vSAN or VCF. But what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two. Dell Technologies has a dedicated VxRail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper converged system. That team has also developed our unique VxRail HCI system software, which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver seamless, automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere. The key components of VxRail HCI system software shown around the arc here that include the extra manager, full stack lifecycle management, ecosystem connectors, and support. I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today, but if you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to meet our experts. And I will tell you how to do that in a moment. I touched on the LCM being a key feature to the vSphere 7.0 earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of VxRail Lifecycle Management. The LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers, but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them. With VxRail customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf, freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business. Customers tell us that Lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure, and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff, that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively, and that it isn't the most efficient economically. Automation of Lifecycle Management and VxRail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective, and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure. But as shown here, our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies, they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages, and reduced overall cost of operations. With VxRail HCI system software, intelligent Lifecycle Management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated, keeping clusters and continuously validated states while minimizing risks and operational costs. How do we ensure Continuously validated states for VxRail. VxRail labs execute an extensive, automated, repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customers choosing across their VxRail environment. The VxRail labs are constantly testing, analyzing, optimizing, and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack. All the while VxRail is backed by Dell EMC's world class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software. IT productivity skyrockets with single click non disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing. taking you to the next VxRail version of your choice, while always in a continuously validated state. You can also confidently execute automated VxRail upgrades. No matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster. They don't have to all be the same. And upgrades with VxRail are faster and more efficient with leapfrogging simply choose any VxRail version you desire. And be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between. Only VxRail can do that. >> All right, so Chad, the lifecycle management piece that Shannon was just talking about is, not the sexiest, it's often underappreciated. There's not only the years of experience, but the continuous work you're doing, reminds me back the early vSAN deployments versus VxRail jointly developed, jointly tested between Dell and VMware. So bring us inside why, 2020 Lifecycle Management still, a very important piece, especially in the VM family line. >> Yes, Stu, I think it's sexy, but, I'm pretty big nerd. (all laughing) Yeah, this is really always been our bread and butter. And in fact, it gets even more important, the larger the deployments come, when you start to look at data centers full of VxRails and all the different hardware software, firmware combinations that could exist out there. It's really the value that you get out of that VxRail HCI system software that Shannon was talking about and how it's optimized around the VMware use case. Very tightly integrated with each VMware component, of course, and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware, all of the drivers, all the software all together in tremendous value to our customers. But to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment. So as Shannon mentioned, we run about 25,000 hours of testing across Each major release for patches, express patches, that's about 7000 hours for each of those. So, obviously, there's a lot of parallelism. And we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality. And one of the key things that we're able to do, as Shannon mentioned, is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state. We've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously, a huge amount of automation. And we've talked about that investment to execute those tests. That's one worth of $60 million of investment in our lab. In fact, we've got just over 2000 VxRail units in our testbed across the US, Shanghai, China and Cork, Ireland. So a massive amount of testing of each of those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state. >> Yeah, well, absolutely, it's super important not only for the day one, but the day two deployments. But I think this actually a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to. So we've got the CIO of Amarillo, Texas, he was an existing VxRail customer. And he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work-from-home initiative, as well as we get to hear in his words the value of what Lifecycle Management means. So Andrew, if we could queue up that customer segment, please? >> It's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we mature, I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments. But this instance, really justified why I was driving progress. So fervently why it was so urgent today. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt With VxRail in place, in a week we spun up hundreds of instant balls. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half, for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business. And now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that work, a little lagging or a little conservative, or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> Alright, so great, Richard, you talked a bunch about the the efficiencies that that the IT put in place, how about that, that overall just managed, you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. need to be able to do things much simpler? So how does the overall Lifecycle Management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. And in the old environment, one, It took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive, when we did make change, it overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. That wasn't cost efficient. And then simple things like, I've worked for multi billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production, simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on Lifecycle Management because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and rescale them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> All right, well, nothing better than hearing it straight from the end user, public sector reacting very fast to the COVID-19. And, if you heard him he said, if this is his, before he had run this project, he would not have been able to respond. So I think everybody out there understands, if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology, it would be much harder. All right, I'm looking forward to doing the CrowdChat letting everybody else dig in with questions and get follow up but a little bit more, I believe one more announcement he can and got for us though. Let's roll the final video clip. >> In our latest software release VxRail 4.7.510, We continue to add new automation and self service features. New functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades, to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch. This is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows, as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window. Of course, running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates. We are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific VxRail version, or down rev one or more nodes that may be shipped at a higher rate than the existing cluster. This enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in a cluster. To sum up all of our announcements, whether you are accelerating data sets modernization extending HCI to harsh Edge environments, deploying an on-premises Dell Technologies Cloud platform to create a developer ready Kubernetes infrastructure. VxRail is there delivering a turn-key experience that enables you to continuously innovate, realize operational freedom and predictably evolve. VxRail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations, automation and Lifecycle Management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid Cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across Core, Edge and Cloud. I now invite you to engage with us. First, the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about VxRail new features and functionality and sCore some sweet digital swag while you're at it. Delivered via an augmented reality app. All you need is your device. So go to vxrail.is/passport to get started. And secondly, if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation, we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VxRail Meet The Experts sessions available for a limited time. First come first served, just go to vxrail.is/expertsession to learn more. >> All right, well, obviously, with everyone being remote, there's different ways we're looking to engage. So we've got the CrowdChat right after this. But Jon, give us a little bit more as to how Dell's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got for options for them. >> Yeah, absolutely. So as Shannon said, so in lieu of not having done Tech World this year in person, where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions, whether it's in the booth or in meeting rooms, we are going to have these Meet The Experts sessions over the next couple weeks, and we're going to put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to everyone out there. So again, definitely encourage you. We're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we can still stay in touch, answer questions, be responsive, and really looking forward to, having these conversations over the next couple of weeks. >> All right, well, Jon and Chad, thank you so much. We definitely look forward to the conversation here and continued. If you're here live, definitely go down below and do it if you're watching this on demand. You can see the full transcript of it at crowdchat.net/vxrailrocks. For myself, Shannon on the video, Jon, Chad, Andrew, man in the booth there, thank you so much for watching, and go ahead and join the CrowdChat.

>> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation. We have a launch from Dell Technologies updates from the VxRail family. We're going to do things a little bit different here. We actually have a launch video Shannon Champion, of Dell Technologies. And the way we do things a lot of times, is, analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things. You might have questions on it. So, rather than me just wanting it, or you wanting yourself I actually brought in a couple of Dell Technologies expertS two of our Cube alumni, happy to welcome you back to the program. Jon Siegal, he is the Vice President of Product Marketing, and Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management, both of them with Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Great to be here. >> All right, and so what we're going to do is we're going to be rolling the video here. I've got a button I'm going to press, Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit, go into some questions when we're all done. We're actually holding a crowd chat, where you will be able to ask your questions, talk to the experts and everything. And so a little bit different way to do a product announcement. Hope you enjoy it. And with that, it's VxRail. Taking HCI to the extremes is the theme. We'll see what that means and everything. But without any further ado, let's let Shannon take the video away. >> Hello, and welcome. My name is Shannon Champion, and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with VxRail. Let's get started. We have a lot to talk about. Our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the Core, Edge and Cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options, as well as the latest in software innovations. So let's jump right in. Before we talk about our announcements, let's talk about where customers are adopting VxRail today. First of all, on behalf of the entire Dell Technologies and VxRail teams, I want to thank each of our over 8000 customers, big and small in virtually every industry, who've chosen VxRail to address a broad range of workloads, deploying nearly 100,000 nodes today. Thank you. Our promise to you is that we will add new functionality, improve serviceability, and support new use cases, so that we deliver the most value to you, whether in the Core, at the Edge or for the Cloud. In the Core, VxRail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation. Many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VxRail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment. Now we can support even more demanding applications such as In-Memory databases, like SAP HANA, and more AI and ML applications, with support for more and more powerful GPUs. At the Edge, video surveillance, which also uses GPUs, by the way, is an example of a popular use case leveraging VxRail alongside external storage. And right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing. And as it relates to VDI, VxRail has always been a great option for that. In the Cloud, it's all about Kubernetes, and how Dell Technologies Cloud platform, which is VCF on VxRail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and Cloud native applications. And we're doing that together with VMware. VxRail is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments, designed to enhance the native VMware experience. This joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. >> Alright, so Shannon talked a bit about, the important role of IT Of course right now, with the global pandemic going on. It's really, calling in, essential things, putting, platforms to the test. So, I really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers. Also, VDI, of course, in the early days, it was, HCI-only-does-VDI. Now, we know there are many solutions, but remote work is putting that back front and center. So, Jon, why don't we start with you as the what is (muffled speaking) >> Absolutely. So first of all, Stu, thank you, I want to do a shout out to our VxRail customers around the world. It's really been humbling, inspiring, and just amazing to see The impact of our VxRail customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here. Just for a few examples, there are genomics companies that we have running VxRail that have rolled out testing at scale. We also have research universities out in the Netherlands, doing the antibody detection. The US Navy has stood up a floating hospital to of course care for those in need. So we are here to help that's been our message to our customers, but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this. So just just a pleasure there. But as you mentioned, just to hit on the VDI comments, so to your points too, HCI, VxRail, VDI, that was an initial use case years ago. And it's been great to see how many of our existing VxRail customers have been able to pivot very quickly leveraging VxRail to add and to help bring their remote workforce online and support them with their existing VxRail. Because VxRail is flexible, it is agile, to be able to support those multiple workloads. And in addition to that, we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost effective cater to everything from knowlEdge workers to multimedia workers. You name it, you know from 250, desktops up to 1000. But again, back to your point VxRail, HCI, is well beyond VDI, it crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually. And VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads, any of our customers out there, it supports now a range of workloads that you heard from Shannon, whether it's video surveillance, whether it's general purpose, all the way to mission critical applications now with SAP HAN. So, this has changed the game for sure. But the range of work loads and the flexibility of the actual rules which really helping our existing customers during this pandemic. >> Yeah, I agree with you, Jon, we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments, from the ones that we sure all knew and loved back in the initial days of HCI. Now, the mission critical things now to Cloud native workloads as well, and the sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI. And specifically, VxRail gives them that ability to pivot. When these, shall we say unexpected circumstances arise? And I think that that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IP strategies look like as they move forward. They want that same level of agility, and ability to react quickly with their overall infrastructure. >> Excellent. Now I want to get into the announcements. What I want my team actually, your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo, so maybe they can dig up that footage, talk about how fast they pivoted, using VxRail to really spin up things fast. So let's hear from the announcement first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later. So let's get to the actual news that Shannon's going to share. >> Okay, now what's new? I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms, to further enable IT modernization across Core, Edge and Cloud. I will cover each of these announcements in more detail, demonstrating how only VxRail can offer the breadth of platform configurations, automation, orchestration and Lifecycle Management, across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent, simplified operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications. I'll start with hybrid Cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell Technologies Cloud announcements just a few weeks ago, related to VMware Cloud foundation on VxRail. Then I'll cover two brand new VxRail hardware platforms and additional options. And finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VxRail HCI system software capabilities for Lifecycle Management. Let's get started with our new Cloud offerings based on VxRail. VxRail is the HCI foundation for Dell Technologies, Cloud Platform, bringing automation and financial models, similar to public Cloud to On-premises environments. VMware recently introduced Cloud foundation for Delta, which is based on vSphere 7.0. As you likely know by now, vSphere 7.0 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release. In keeping with our synchronous release commitment, we introduced VxRail 7.0 based on vSphere 7.0 in late April, which was within 30 days of VMware's release. Two key areas that VMware focused on we're embedding containers and Kubernetes into vSphere, unifying them with virtual machines. And the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere Lifecycle Manager or VLCM. I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how VxRail fits in in a moment for VCF 4 with Tom Xu, based on vSphere 7.0 customers now have access to a hybrid Cloud platform that supports native Kubernetes workloads and management, as well as your traditional VM-based workloads. So containers are now first class citizens of your private Cloud alongside traditional VMs and this is now available with VCF 4.0, on VxRail 7.0. VxRail's tight integration with VMware Cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid Cloud, but also to deliver Kubernetes at Cloud scale with one complete automated platform. The second Cloud announcement is also exciting. Recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid Cloud, because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture. And with that Dell Technologies Cloud platform can now be deployed with a four-node configuration, lowering the cost of an entry level hybrid Cloud. This enables customers to start smaller and grow their Cloud deployment over time. VCF and VxRail can now be deployed in two different ways. For small environments, customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes. Since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture, it's ideal for getting started with an entry level Cloud to run general purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point. Both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost, but still with a Consistent Cloud operating model. For larger environments where dedicated resources and role-based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred. You can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at eight nodes for independent management and workload domains. A standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes Horizon, VDI, and vSphere with Kubernetes. >> Alright, Jon, there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware is doing with vSphere 7.0. understand if you wanted to use the Kubernetes piece, it's VCF as that so we've seen the announcements, Dell, partnering in there it helps us connect that story between, really the VMware strategy and how they talk about Cloud and where does VxRail fit in that overall, Delta Cloud story? >> Absolutely. So first of all Stu, the VxRail course is integral to the Delta Cloud strategy. it's been VCF on VxRail equals the Delta Cloud platform. And this is our flagship on prem Cloud offering, that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any Cloud, whether it's On-prem, in the Edge or in the public Cloud. And we've seen the Dell tech Cloud Platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons. One is it offers the fastest hybrid Cloud deployment in the market. And this is really, thanks to a new subscription offer that we're now offering out there where in less than 14 days, it can be still up and running. And really, the Dell tech Cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models, overall when it comes to VxRail. Secondly, I would say is fast and easy upgrades. This is what VxRail brings to the table for all workloads, if you will, into especially critical in the Cloud. So the full automation of Lifecycle Management across the hardware and software stack across the VMware software stack, and in the Dell software and hardware supporting that, together, this enables essentially the third thing, which is customers can just relax. They can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated, and always be in a continuously validated state. And this is the kind of thing that those three value propositions together really fit well, with any on-prem Cloud. Now you take what Shannon just mentioned, and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same VxRail infrastructure alongside traditional applications. This is a game changer. >> Yeah, I love it. I remember in the early days talking with Dunn about CI, how does that fit in with Cloud discussion and the line I've used the last couple years is, modernize the platform, then you can modernize the application. So as companies are doing their full modernization, then this plays into what you're talking about. All right, we can let Shannon continue, we can get some more before we dig into some more analysis. >> That's good. >> Let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates. that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options. covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases. First up, I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new Dell EMC VxRail series, the D series. This is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of VxRail for workloads at the Edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas. VxRail D series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the VxRail portfolio with simplicity, agility and lifecycle management. But in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches, it's adorable form factor that's extremely temperature-resilient, shock resistant, and easily portable. It even meets milspec standards. That means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VxRail HCI system software and 24 by seven single point of support, enabling you to rapidly react to business needs, no matter the location or how harsh the conditions. So whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base, running real-time GPS mapping on the go, or implementing video surveillance in remote areas, you can ensure availability, integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VxRail ruggedized D series. >> All right, Chad we would love for you to bring us in a little bit that what customer requirement for bringing this to market. I remember seeing, Dell servers ruggedized, of course, Edge, really important growth to build on what Jon was talking about, Cloud. So, Chad, bring us inside, what was driving this piece of the offering? >> Sure Stu. Yeah, yeah, having been at the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important. And that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these Edges or some of the more exotic locations. whether that's manufacturing plants, oil rigs, submarine ships, military applications, places that we've never heard of. But it's also about extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VxRails you're managing your Edges the same way using the same set of tools. You don't need to learn anything else. So operational simplicity is absolutely key here. But in those locations, you can take a product that's designed for a data center where definitely controlling power cooling space and take it some of these places where you get sand blowing or seven to zero temperatures, could be Baghdad or it could be Ketchikan, Alaska. So we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme altitude, but still offer that operational simplicity. Now military is one of those applications for the rugged platform. If you look at the resistance that it has to heat, it operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range, but it can do an excursion up to 55 C or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours. It's also resistant to heat sand, dust, vibration, it's very lightweight, short depth, in fact, it's only 20 inches deep. This is a smallest form factor, obviously that we have in the VxRail family. And it's also built to be able to withstand sudden shocks certified to withstand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation. Pretty high. And this is sort of like wherever skydivers go to when they want the real thrill of skydiving where you actually need oxygen to, to be for that that altitude. They're milspec-certified. So, MIL-STD-810G, which I keep right beside my bed and read every night. And it comes with a VxRail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment. And we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for naval shock requirements. EMI and radiation immunity often. >> Yeah, it's funny, I remember when we first launched it was like, "Oh, well everything's going to white boxes. "And it's going to be massive, "no differentiation between everything out there." If you look at what you're offering, if you look at how public Clouds build their things, but I called it a few years or is there's a pure optimization. So you need to scale, you need similarities but you know you need to fit some, very specific requirements, lots of places, so, interesting stuff. Yeah, certifications, always keep your teams busy. Alright, let's get back to Shannon to view on the report. >> We are also introducing three other hardware-based additions. First, a new VxRail E Series model based on where the first time AMD EPYC processors. These single socket 1U nodes, offer dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from eight to 64 Cores, up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer aided design. Next, the addition of the latest Nvidia Quadro RTX GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional work flows. Designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible, working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering, deep learning and visual computing workloads. And Intel Optane DC persistent memory is here, and it offers high performance and significantly increased memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price. Data persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity, even when power is lost, enabling quicker recovery and less downtime. With support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like SAP HANA. Alright, let's finally dig into our HCI system software, which is the Core differentiation for VxRail regardless of your workload or platform choice. Our joining engineering with VMware and investments in VxRail HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. Under the covers, VxRail offers best in class hardware, married with VMware HCI software, either vSAN or VCF. But what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two. Dell Technologies has a dedicated VxRail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper converged system. That team has also developed our unique VxRail HCI system software, which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver seamless, automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere. The key components of VxRail HCI system software shown around the arc here that include the extra manager, full stack lifecycle management, ecosystem connectors, and support. I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today, but if you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to meet our experts. And I will tell you how to do that in a moment. I touched on the LCM being a key feature to the vSphere 7.0 earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of VxRail Lifecycle Management. The LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers, but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them. With VxRail customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf, freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business. Customers tell us that Lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure, and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff, that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively, and that it isn't the most efficient economically. Automation of Lifecycle Management and VxRail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective, and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure. But as shown here, our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies, they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages, and reduced overall cost of operations. With VxRail HCI system software, intelligent Lifecycle Management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated, keeping clusters and continuously validated states while minimizing risks and operational costs. How do we ensure Continuously validated states for VxRail. VxRail labs execute an extensive, automated, repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customers choosing across their VxRail environment. The VxRail labs are constantly testing, analyzing, optimizing, and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack. All the while VxRail is backed by Dell EMC's world class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software. IT productivity skyrockets with single click non disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing. taking you to the next VxRail version of your choice, while always in a continuously validated state. You can also confidently execute automated VxRail upgrades. No matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster. They don't have to all be the same. And upgrades with VxRail are faster and more efficient with leapfrogging simply choose any VxRail version you desire. And be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between. Only VxRail can do that. >> All right, so Chad, the lifecycle management piece that Shannon was just talking about is, not the sexiest, it's often underappreciated. There's not only the years of experience, but the continuous work you're doing, reminds me back the early vSAN deployments versus VxRail jointly developed, jointly tested between Dell and VMware. So bring us inside why, 2020 Lifecycle Management still, a very important piece, especially in the VM family line. >> Yes, Stu, I think it's sexy, but, I'm pretty big nerd. (all laughing) Yeah, this is really always been our bread and butter. And in fact, it gets even more important, the larger the deployments come, when you start to look at data centers full of VxRails and all the different hardware software, firmware combinations that could exist out there. It's really the value that you get out of that VxRail HCI system software that Shannon was talking about and how it's optimized around the VMware use case. Very tightly integrated with each VMware component, of course, and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware, all of the drivers, all the software all together in tremendous value to our customers. But to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment. So as Shannon mentioned, we run about 25,000 hours of testing across Each major release for patches, express patches, that's about 7000 hours for each of those. So, obviously, there's a lot of parallelism. And we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality. And one of the key things that we're able to do, as Shannon mentioned, is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state. We've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously, a huge amount of automation. And we've talked about that investment to execute those tests. That's one worth of $60 million of investment in our lab. In fact, we've got just over 2000 VxRail units in our testbed across the US, Shanghai, China and Cork, Ireland. So a massive amount of testing of each of those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state. >> Yeah, well, absolutely, it's super important not only for the day one, but the day two deployments. But I think this actually a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to. So we've got the CIO of Amarillo, Texas, he was an existing VxRail customer. And he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work-from-home initiative, as well as we get to hear in his words the value of what Lifecycle Management means. So Andrew, if we could queue up that customer segment, please? >> It's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we mature, I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments. But this instance, really justified why I was driving progress. So fervently why it was so urgent today. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt With VxRail in place, in a week we spun up hundreds of instant balls. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half, for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business. And now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that work, a little lagging or a little conservative, or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> Alright, so great, Richard, you talked a bunch about the the efficiencies that that the IT put in place, how about that, that overall just managed, you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. need to be able to do things much simpler? So how does the overall Lifecycle Management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. And in the old environment, one, It took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive, when we did make change, it overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. That wasn't cost efficient. And then simple things like, I've worked for multi billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production, simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on Lifecycle Management because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and rescale them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> All right, well, nothing better than hearing it straight from the end user, public sector reacting very fast to the COVID-19. And, if you heard him he said, if this is his, before he had run this project, he would not have been able to respond. So I think everybody out there understands, if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology, it would be much harder. All right, I'm looking forward to doing the CrowdChat letting everybody else dig in with questions and get follow up but a little bit more, I believe one more announcement he can and got for us though. Let's roll the final video clip. >> In our latest software release VxRail 4.7.510, We continue to add new automation and self service features. New functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades, to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch. This is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows, as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window. Of course, running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates. We are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific VxRail version, or down rev one or more nodes that may be shipped at a higher rate than the existing cluster. This enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in a cluster. To sum up all of our announcements, whether you are accelerating data sets modernization extending HCI to harsh Edge environments, deploying an on-premises Dell Technologies Cloud platform to create a developer ready Kubernetes infrastructure. VxRail is there delivering a turn-key experience that enables you to continuously innovate, realize operational freedom and predictably evolve. VxRail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations, automation and Lifecycle Management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid Cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across Core, Edge and Cloud. I now invite you to engage with us. First, the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about VxRail new features and functionality and sCore some sweet digital swag while you're at it. Delivered via an augmented reality app. All you need is your device. So go to vxrail.is/passport to get started. And secondly, if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation, we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VxRail Meet The Experts sessions available for a limited time. First come first served, just go to vxrail.is/expertsession to learn more. >> All right, well, obviously, with everyone being remote, there's different ways we're looking to engage. So we've got the CrowdChat right after this. But Jon, give us a little bit more as to how Dell's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got for options for them. >> Yeah, absolutely. So as Shannon said, so in lieu of not having done Tech World this year in person, where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions, whether it's in the booth or in meeting rooms, we are going to have these Meet The Experts sessions over the next couple weeks, and we're going to put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to everyone out there. So again, definitely encourage you. We're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we can still stay in touch, answer questions, be responsive, and really looking forward to, having these conversations over the next couple of weeks. >> All right, well, Jon and Chad, thank you so much. We definitely look forward to the conversation here and continued. If you're here live, definitely go down below and do it if you're watching this on demand. You can see the full transcript of it at crowdchat.net/vxrailrocks. For myself, Shannon on the video, Jon, Chad, Andrew, man in the booth there, thank you so much for watching, and go ahead and join the CrowdChat.