>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back. We are live here in Las Vegas. We're in the Sands right now of day two of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm John Walls along with Stu Miniman, and it's a pleasure now to welcome Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, who is the President and GM of Server and Infrastructure Systems at Dell EMC. Ashley, good afternoon to you. >> Thank you, great pronunciation of my last name. >> Well, thank you very much, I've worked-- >> Not an easy thing to do. >> I worked on that, how about that? Stu and I were just talking briefly with you. What a cool exhibit floor, right? >> It really is. >> There's just a lot of-- What have you seen out there that's kind of caught your eye so far? >> Well, we brought in a lot of customers this time to show their outcomes. So I'm a car guy, so you know I went straight for the McLaren. >> How 'about that McLaren out there, right? Yeah. >> My son would love the F1 setup with the gaming, virtual reality. Top Golf is a great VxRail customer. We have GoalControl. Try to beat the AI and see if you can score a goal. I mean, there's some very cool demos back there. >> And then overall, just I'm curious about your thoughts about the show then because that's a part of it. >> That's a part of it. >> A lot of client relations you're doing here, business relations. >> Sure. We're only about half way through, but so far very, very positive energy I get. I don't know if you caught or already talked to Michael after the keynote, but certainly. >> Stu did today. Certainly, Michael was on fire at the keynote, and I really, really enjoyed the discussion with Dr. Chip Plater about, and Jeffrey Wright about, how technology connects to helping people. A lot of times engineers, stuck in a lab, looking at R&D, trying to figure out a problem, lose sight of what they're doing. Great opportunity for the team to see that and kind of expand and understand where their technology is going, what it's doing for the world, what the impact is that they're having. >> So, Ashley, your team's been real busy leading up to this, seeing some of the new products in the announcement. Before we get into this though, your role expanded a little bit since the last time we talked about, talked to Tom Burns yesterday as there was the group formerly known as VCE that turned into CPSG, It was split into some pieces, and HCI is now under your domain. >> That's right. So in addition to our server businesses, which are kind of the mainstream PowerEdge business, our Extreme Scale business, our OEM business. We had a reorganization to really kind of unlock the potential that we have in a great product set, a product set before my organization was already number one. It's a position of strength. What we're trying to do is accelerate from that. So if you think about the HCI marketplace, I think you have to be in the server business to win in the HCI business. I don't envy anyone trying to do this from a position of weakness or trying to adopt other people's technology. Our supply chain, our reach, our global services and support, and then the underlying ability to invest in the server technology and beyond and differentiate, innovate on top of that is what it's going to take to win, and maybe not tomorrow, but in the future as HCI takes off. We wanted to really accelerate that by shortening the decision-making loop, making it one mission for the team, and so that came in. In addition, maybe a quick call-out to the storage and data protection platform engineering team who also came into my group to, again, really put our best hardware and platform of systems engineers together from servers and data protection storage and kind of create a powerhouse of R&D. >> Yeah, Ashley, it's actually, it's not surprising to us, From our research side at Wikibon, we actually called it server SAN because it was really taking the functionality and what customers wanted as a business outcome from the SAN and was pulling it closer to the server. But at its core, it's really about software. One of the things that has struck me in the last few years, comparing this to EMC worlds in the past and now Dell, is what I used to see at Dell World, which was Dell is a platform that lots of things live on. So there's lots of storage partners that live on side of Dell. There's HCI partners. Of course, you've got a broad portfolio all from the Dell families, and then OEMs and other partners that fit there. 'Cause you're a team, it makes sense that HCI comes in there because you've got that platform at the server, >> Right. >> and it grows from there. >> If you circle back to just the Dell Legacy world perhaps, much more platform oriented, infrastructure at our heart, bringing that value with prop to our customers. And I've said it before, I think if you give any segment or capability time, I think a standard kind of open infrastructure hardware platform wins. It may not be a server, but it's going to look something like a server going forward. And the specialization and the value move into the IP stack and into the software. So you better be a company that can do the scale of a standards-based platform. You better have the IP, the specialized stacks, as we do in our VM-ware stacks, in our IP stacks or in data protection, storage, networking. You can see where Michael's kind of putting those two together. It's not a tomorrow thing but five, 10 years from now. We've seen it in the carrier space. We've seen it in storage. Everywhere you go, the commoditization curve takes us to standards, infrastructure, and IP in the software. >> You made an interesting point there, saying it might not necessarily be a server. Give us kind of, if you could step back for a second, the state of compute. >> Sure. >> There's compute in the cloud, there's compute at the edge, there's (chuckles) compute all over the place. A few years ago, it was like, ah, it's all going white box and undifferentiated. And in the public cloud, I say, there's probably more skews and compute in the public cloud than if I went to Dell and picked that up there. Whether that's a good or bad thing, you could probably have some insight on. But give us your view on kind of the state of compute in the industry today. >> Sure. So if I think back 10 years when we started our business with the hyper-scale, building those infrastructures as a service, multi-tenant public clouds, there really wasn't any other choice. You either did it in a legacy mode with your IT, maybe slightly modernizing, but you're still probably siloed. You probably had storage admins and networking admins, compute admins, or you went cloud. And it was such a different experience. Since then, what customers have said consistently is, why am I having to make that choice? I either go to this rent version, which is very expensive as I scale up, or I own it or I have to own it and it's different. So multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, private cloud, however you want to instantiate it. And something like hyper converged infrastructure just didn't exist. They didn't have a choice. Now, with a pushing of a few buttons, you can scale up your infrastructure, perhaps on prem or in a hosted environment. That is fairly seamless with that, and now you have that portability. >> Yeah, and I'm sorry, Ashley. I wasn't trying to poke at the cloud piece. Compute at edge use cases is a little bit different than traditional-- >> Yep, absolutely. >> Servers, what's happening with the Blade market. Definitely need to, I know we need to talk about the new PowerEdges. But there's the MX we're going to cover, too, but was just kind of, if there are form factors of servers. >> You bring up a good point. It's maybe emerging, so there's probably a little bit more hype than there is reality behind it. But there are going to be billions of sensors, trillions of sensors or things that create data outside of data center environments. That's where all the data's going to be produced, and that's where decisions are going to be made. Today, the theory is, it has to go back somewhere, although I don't think any of us are getting in an autonomous car if it has to talk back to a data center and decide what to do. >> Right. >> So there's already examples of what I would call edge compute. But what if your data center has to live at a base of a cell tower at the end of a 30 mile dirt road where someone only visits 45 days apart, and they're not an IT individual? How do you extend that infrastructure, that management domain, that security domain? How do you bring it all the way out there? How do you ruggedize it? Well, you're probably going to start with a company that's been doing fresh air cooling with 13, 14 billion server hours now, operating in fresh air environments. We understand how to bring that environment the way we've been working on that remote management, lights out management style, our security. I'll give you another emerging trend that's going to come out of that. Just at the time where we're going to extend our environments out of the safety of the data center, we're also going to go back to a stateful compute. With persistent memory, nonvolatile memory, storage class memories, and security paradigms are already shifting. We're getting ahead of that with our customers of what if it wasn't just the hard drive you had to protect but almost everything in that edge device. So the form factors will change, the connectivity will change, but what we know is, you'll likely gather as much data as you can. You'll throw some of it away 'cause it won't be useful. Right now, there's a sensor telling this building that these lights are on. Until they go off, it's not useful data. But in a car, it's very useful data. Some of that data will go back, it'll get trained because humans won't be able to take in all this data. You'll need a machine. You can't write the algorithm ahead of time. You have to learn something. Back goes that IP into the edge, and then decisions will be made at that stage. >> Before we head off, we've talked about some new products. You've alluded a little bit. So you've had a launch this week. Just run through that, if you would, real quick. >> Ashley: Sure, sure, we had a few things. >> It's nice to have a new baby to talk about. >> Sure, it's pretty exciting. And it really does stem from what we just talked about. So if I start on the PowerEdge side, if you have a strategy that is to help your customers with that digital transformation from cloud to data center and core all the way to edge, you can start to see why we're launching certain products and why they have certain technologies in them and innovations. So starting with the 940 XA, extreme acceleration, might have to rename it if you watched the keynote. Jeff called it extreme performance. He is the boss, so I think it's XP now. (Stu and John laughing) No, we'll keep it at extreme acceleration for now. That really is about large datasets training very quickly in database environments. So you want host to GPGPU to be a one-to-one ratio. You want large datasets to be local, so you need massive storage, 32 drives for instance. And you need the capability to, again, make sure it brings the tenets of security, manageability, the ecosystem with it. So, very excited about that one. I think there's some use cases we're just not even ready for. We've already have the technology today to put eight FPGAs in that system, direct connect. And there's very few workloads or even talent in the customer set to be able to enable that, but you got to get there first with the technology to allow that innovation to happen. And we want to stoke that. Then on the R840, this really was about, once you get the data in, you're going to have to make decisions. You need, still, that processing power. Maybe you don't need 20,000 cores in the box like a 940 XA. Maybe you need a little bit less, but you do need a massive storage localized in VME direct connect. That's more direct connect that any server, I think, period in the industry. And it's really about streaming those analytics, making those realtime choices. So it really fits into the strategy that we're undertaking. >> All right, Ashley, last thing I wanted to cover. It's a bit of preview that you showed at the show. The PowerEdge MX. >> Yep. >> Modular infrastructure, no midplane, should be able to upgrade it a lot more. So are we beyond where Blade Servers have gone? Do you consider this to fit into, some call it composable infrastructure. How would you position this kind of-- >> Well, I don't have some positioning yet. It's just a sneak peek. But let me tell you how we thing about it. Is it a Blade Server or not? I'm not sure the question is something we've considered yet. It's a form factor that we think for the future is really necessary, which is, we want to get to a stage, and we're putting our research into a stage of a journey where we want to get to the point where you can utilize the resources that you bring into your environment, whether they be your environment or someone else's. Today, so much is stranded connected to a CPU, and it's just the architecture that we have today. Whether it's memory, source class memory, persistent memory, GPGPUs, heterogeneous compute FPGAs, ASICs, memory semantics, IO semantics, have to leave the box. Then we can get you things like pooled up resources that can be utilized unbound, put together, then composed, if you want to use your word, or really just aligned around a workload then retired and put back in. APIs and software, we're starting to build that out. It's starting to emerge from certain management orchestration layers we have today. But we're going to need that fabric. And so, as you know, we're showing actually here today a Gen-Z demo where we're starting to build that fabric that has the latency, almost a memory-like latencies from load to store and usage, all the way out to it has the memory semantics that go all the way through from CPU all the way out to memory so that, all sudden, the node no longer traps and stands the resources. How do you do that? You better have an architecture that treats everything in the box, not just the compute part, as a first class citizen for power, for thermals, for management. Second thing, if you have a midplane, you have a point of failure, but you also are not upgradeable to these fabrics that are coming and these capabilities that are on the horizon, some of which are not even in Silicon or in a lab just yet. So when you build infrastructure, let me call it infrastructure for a second, people want it as an investment. That's the part we've talked about. There's a lot more to come, so the team's excited to get it out there. I tried to hold them back a little bit, but we cheated a little bit a showed it. >> A little demo goes a long way. Ashley, thanks for being with us. Thanks for telling your story, we appreciate the time. Look forward to seeing you down the road. >> Appreciate it, thanks, guys. >> You bet. Back with more. We are live here in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World 2018. (electronic musical flourish)