>> Narrator: From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> You know, businesses have a staggering number of options today to support mission-critical applications. And much of the world's mission-critical data happens to live on converged infrastructure. Converged infrastructure is really designed to support the most demanding workloads. Words like resilience, performance, scalability, recoverability, et cetera. Those are the attributes that define converged infrastructure. Now with COVID-19 the digital transformation mandate, as we all know has been accelerated and buyers are demanding more from their infrastructure, and in particular converged infrastructure. Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this power panel where we're going to explore converged infrastructure, look at its past, its present and its future. And we're going to explore several things. The origins of converged infrastructure, why CI even came about. And what's its historic role been in terms of supporting mission-critical applications. We're going to look at modernizing workloads. What are the opportunities and the risks and what's converged infrastructures role in that regard. How has converged infrastructure evolved? And how will it support cloud and multicloud? And ultimately what's the future of converged infrastructure look like? And to examine these issues, we have three great guests, Trey Layton is here. He is the senior vice president for converged infrastructure and software engineering and architecture at Dell Technologies. And he's joined by Joakim Zetterblad. Who's the director of the SAP practice for EMEA at Dell technologies. And our very own Stu Miniman. Stu is a senior analyst at Wikibon. Guys, great to see you all welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great. >> Trey, I'm going to start with you. Take us back to the early days of converged infrastructure. Why was it even formed? Why was it created? >> Well, if you look back just over a decade ago, a lot of organizations were deploying virtualized environments. Everyone was consolidated on virtualization. A lot of technologies were emerging to enhance that virtualization outcome, meaning acceleration capabilities and storage arrays, networking. And there was a lot of complexity in integrating all of those underlying infrastructure technologies into a solution that would work reliably. You almost had to have a PhD and all of the best practices of many different companies integrations. And so we decided as Dell EMC, Dell Technologies to invest heavily in this area of manufacturing best practices and packaging them so that customers could acquire those technologies and already integrated fully regression tested architecture that could sustain virtually any type of workload that a company would run. And candidly that packaging, that rigor around testing produced a highly reliable product that customers now rely on heavily to operationalize greater efficiencies and run their most critical applications that power their business and ultimately the world economy. >> Now Stu, cause you were there. I was as well at the early days of the original announcement of CI. Looking back and sort of bringing it forward Stu, what was the business impact of converged infrastructure? >> Well, Dave as Trey was talking about it was that wave of virtualization had gone from, you know, just supporting many applications to being able to support all of your applications. And especially if you talk about those high value, you know business mission, critical applications, you want to make sure that you've got a reliable foundation. What the Dell tech team has done for years is make sure that they fully understand, you know the life cycle of testing that needs to happen. And you don't need to worry about, you know, what integration testing you need to do, looking at support major CS and doing a lot of your own sandbox testing, which for the most part was what enterprises needed to do. You said, okay, you know, I get the gear, I load the virtualization and then I have to see, you know, tweak everything to figure out how my application works. The business impact Dave, is you want to spend more time focusing on the business, not having to turn all the dials and worry about, do I get the performance I need? Does it have the reliability uptime that we need? And especially if we're talking about those business critical applications, of course, these are the ones that are running 24 by seven and if they go down, my business goes down with it. >> Yeah, and of course, you know, one of the other major themes we saw with conversion infrastructure was really attacking the IT labor problem. You had separate compute or server teams, storage teams, networking teams, they oftentimes weren't talking together. So there was a lot of inefficiency that converged infrastructure was designed to attack. But I want to come to the SAP expert. Joakim, that's really your wheelhouse. What is it about converged infrastructure that makes it suitable for SAP application specifically? >> You know, if you look at a classic SAP client today, there's really three major transformational waves that all SAP customers are faced with today, it's the move to S/4HANA, the introduction of this new platform, which needs to happen before 2027. It's the introduction of a multicloud cloud or operating model. And last but not least, it is the introduction of new digitization or intelligent technologies such as IOT, machine learning or artificial intelligence. And that drove to the need of a platform that could address all these three transformational waves. It came with a lot of complexity, increased costs, increased risk. And what CI did so uniquely was to provide that Edge to Core to Cloud strategy. Fully certified for both HANA, non HANA workloads for the classical analytical and transactional workloads, as well as the new modernization technologies such as IOT, machine learning, big data and analytics. And that created a huge momentum for converged in our SAP accounts. >> So Trey, I want to go to you cause you're the deep technical expert here. Joakim just mentioned uniqueness. So what are the unique characteristics of converged infrastructure that really make it suitable for handling the most demanding workloads? >> Well, converged infrastructure by definition is the integration of an external storage array with a highly optimized compute platform. And when we build best practices around integrating those technologies together, we essentially package optimizations that allow a customer to increase the quantity of users that are accessing those workloads or the applications that are driving database access in such a way where you can predictably understand consumption and utilization in your environment. Those packaged integrations are kind of like. You know, I have a friend that owns a race car shop and he has all kinds of expertise to build cars, but he has a vehicle that he buys is his daily driver. The customization that they've created to build race cars are great for the race cars that go on the track, but he's building a car on his own, it didn't make any sense. And so what customers found was the ability to acquire a packaged infrastructure with all these infrastructure optimizations, where we package these best practices that gave customers a reliable, predictable, and fully supported integration, so they didn't have to spend 20 hour support calls trying to discover and figure out what particular customization that they had employed for their application, that had some issue that they needed to troubleshoot and solve. This became a standard out of the box integration that the best and the brightest package so that customers can consume it at scale. >> So Joakim, I want to ask you let's take the sort of application view. Let's sort of flip the picture a little bit and come at it from that prism. How, if you think about like core business applications, how have they evolved over the better part of the last decade and specifically with regard to the mission-critical processes? >> So what we're seeing in the process industry and in the industry of mission-critical applications is that they have gone from being very monolithic systems where we literally saw a single ERP components such as all three or UCC. Whereas today customers are faced with a landscape of multiple components. Many of them working both on and off premise, there are multicloud strategies in place. And as we mentioned before, with the introduction of new IOT technologies, we see that there is a flow of information of data that requires a whole new set of infrastructure of components of tools to make these new processes happen. And of course, the focus in the end of the day is all on business outcomes. So what industries and companies doesn't want to do is to focus all their time in making sure that these new technologies are working together, but really focusing on how can I make an impact? How can I start to work in a better way with my clients? So the focus on business outcome, the focus on integrating multiple systems into a single consolidated approach has become so much more important, which is why the modernization of the underlying infrastructure is absolutely key. Without consolidation, without a simplification of the management and orchestration. And without the cloud enabled platform, you won't get there. >> So Stu that's key, what Joakim just said in terms of modernizing the application as being able to manage them, not as one big monolith, but integration with other key systems. So what are the options? Wikibon has done some research on this, but what are the options for modernizing workloads, whether it's on-Prem or off-prem and what are some of the trade offs there? >> Yeah, so Dave, first of all, you know, one of the biggest challenges out there is you don't just want to, you know, lift and shift. If anybody's read research for it from Wikibon, Dave, for a day, for the 10 years, I've been part of it talks about the challenges, if you just talk about migrating, because while it sounds simple, we understand that there are individual customizations that every customer's made. So you might get part of the way there, but there's often the challenges that will get in the way that could cause failure. And as we talked about for you, especially your mission-critical applications, those are the ones that you can't have downtime. So absolutely customers are reevaluating their application portfolio. You know, there are a lot of things to look at. First of all, if you can, certain things can be moved to SaaS. You've seen certain segments of the market. Absolutely SaaS can be preferred methodology, if you can go there. One of the biggest hurdles for SaaS of course, is there's retraining of the workforce. Certain applications they will embracing of that because they can take advantage of new features, get to be able to use that wherever they are. But in other cases, there are the SaaS doesn't have the capability or it doesn't fit into the workflow of the business. The cloud operating model is something we've been talking about it with you Dave, for many years. When you've seen rapid maturation of what originally was called "private cloud", but really was just virtualization plus with a little bit of a management layer on top. But now much of the automation that you build in AI technologies, you know, Trey's got a whole team working on things that if you talk to his team, it sounds very similar to what you had the same conversation should have with cloud providers. So "cloud" as an operating model, not a destination is what we're going for and being able to take advantage of automation and the like. So where your application sits, absolutely some consideration. And what we've talked about Dave, you know, the governance, the security, the reliability, the performance are all reasons why being able to keep things, you know, under my environment with an infrastructure that I have control over is absolutely one of the reasons why I might keep things more along a converged infrastructure, rather than just saying to go through the challenge of migration and optimizing and changing to something in a more of a cloud native methodology. >> What about technical debt? Trey, people talk about technical debt as a bad thing, what is technical debt? Why do I want to avoid it? And how can I avoid it? And specifically, I know, Trey, I've thrown a lot of questions at you yet, but what is it about converged infrastructure and its capabilities that helped me avoid that technical debt? >> Well, it's an interesting thing, when you deploy an environment to support a mission-critical application, you have to make a lot of implementation decisions. Some of those decisions may take you down a path that may have a finite life. And that once you reached the life expectancy of that particular configuration, you now have debt that you have to reconcile. You have to change that architecture, that configuration. And so what we do with converged infrastructure is we dedicate a team of product management, an entire product management organization, a team of engineers that treat the integrations of the architecture as a releases. And we think long range about how do we avoid not having to change the underlying architecture. And one of the greatest testaments to this is in our conversion infrastructure products over the last 11 years, we've only saw two major architectural changes while supporting generational changes in underlying infrastructure capabilities well beyond when we first started. So converged infrastructure approach is about how do we build an architecture that allows you to avoid those dead-end pathways in those integration decisions that you would normally have to make on your own. >> Joakim, I wanted to ask you, you've mentioned monolithic applications before. That's sort of, we're evolving beyond that with application architectures, but there's still a lot of monoliths out there so. And a lot of customers want to modernize those application and workloads. What, in your view, what are you seeing as the best path and the best practice for modernizing some of those monolithic workloads? >> Yeah, so Dave, as clients today are trying to build a new intelligent enterprise, which is one of SAP's leading a guidance today. They needed to start to look at how to integrate all these different systems and applications that we talked about before into the common business process framework that they have. So consolidating workloads from big data to HANA, non HANA systems, cloud, non-cloud applications into a single framework is an absolute key to that modernization strategy. The second thing which I also mentioned before is to take a new grip around orchestration and management. We know that as customers seek this intelligent approach with both analytical data, as well as experience and transactional data, we must look for new ways to orchestrate and manage those application workloads and data flows. And this is where we slowly, slowly enter into the world of a enterprise data strategy. And that's again, where converged as a very important part to play in order to build these next generation platforms that can both consolidate, simplify. And at the same time enable us to work in a cloud enabled fashion with our cloud operating model that most of our clients seek today. >> So Stu, why can't I just shove all this stuff into the public cloud and call it a day? >> Yeah, well, Dave, we've seen some people that, you know, I have a cloud first strategy and often those are the same companies that are quickly doing what we call "repatriation". I bristle a little bit when I hear these, because often it's, I've gone to the cloud without understanding how I take advantage of it, not understanding the full financial ramifications what I'm going to need to do. And therefore they quickly go back to a world that they understand. So, cloud is not a silver bullet. We understand in technology, Dave, you know, things are complicated. There's all the organizational operational pieces they do. There are excellent cloud services and it's really it's innovation. You know, how do I take advantage of the data that I have, how I allow my application to move forward and respond to the business. And really that is not something that only happens in the public clouds. If I can take advantage of infrastructure that gets me along that journey to more of a cloud model, I get the business results. So, you know, automation and APIs and everything and the Ops movement are not something that are only in the public clouds, but something that we should be embracing holistically. And absolutely, that ties into where today and tomorrow's converge infrastructure are going. >> Yeah, and to me, it comes down to the business case too. I mean, you have to look at the risk-reward. The risk of changing something that's actually working for your business versus what the payback is going to be. You know, if it ain't broken, don't fix it, but you may want to update it, change the oil every now and then, you know, maybe prune some deadwood and modernize it. But Trey, I want to come back to you. Let's take a look at some of the options that customers have. And there are a lot of options, as I said at the top. You've got do it yourself, you got a hyper-converged infrastructure, of course, converged infrastructure. What are you seeing as the use case for each of these deployment options? >> So, build your own. We're really talking about an organization that has the expertise in-house to understand the integration standards that they need to deploy to support their environment. And candidly, there are a lot of customers that have very unique application requirements that have very much customized to their environment. And they've invested in the expertise to be able to sustain that on an ongoing basis. And build your own is great for those folks. The next in converged infrastructure, where we're really talking about an external storage array with applications that need to use data services native to a storage array. And self-select compute for scaling that compute for their particular need, and owning that three tiers architecture and its associated integration, but not having to sustain it because it's converged. There are enormous number of applications out there that benefit from that. I think the third one was, you talked about hyper-converged. I'll go back to when we first introduced our hyper-converged product to the market. Which is now leading the industry for quite some time, VxRail. We had always said that customers will consume hyper-converged and converged for different use cases and different applications. The maturity of hyper-converged has come to the point where you can run virtually any application that you would like on it. And this comes down to really two vectors of consideration. One, am I going to run hyper-converged versus converged based on my operational preference? You know, hyper-converged incorporates software defined storage, predominantly a compute operating plane. Converge as mentioned previously uses that external storage array has some type of systems fabric and dedicated compute resources with access into those your operational preference is one aspect of it. And then having applications that need the data services of an external storage, primary storage array are the other aspect of deciding whether those two things are needed in your particular environment. We find more and more customers out there that have an investment of both, not one versus the other. That's not to say that there aren't customers that only have one, they exist, but a majority of customers have both. >> So Joakim, I want to come back to the sort of attributes from the application requirements perspective. When you think about mission-critical, you think about availability, scale, recoverability, data protection. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about those attributes. And again, what is it about converged infrastructure that that is the best fit and the right strategic fit for supporting those demanding applications and workloads? >> Now, when it comes to SAP, we're talking about clients and customers, most mission-critical data and information and applications. And hence the requirements on the underlying infrastructure is absolutely on the very top of what the IT organization needs to deliver. This is why, when we talk about SAP, the requirements for high availability protection disaster recovery is very, very high. And it doesn't only involve a single system. As mentioned before, SAP is not a standalone application, but rather a landscape of systems that needs to be kept consistent. And that's what a CI platform does so well. It can consolidate workloads, whether it's big data or the transactional standard workloads of SAP, ERP or UCC. The converged platforms are able to put the very highest of availability protection standards into this whole landscape and making a really unique platform for CI workloads. And at the same time, it enables our customers to accelerate those modernization journeys into things such as ML, AI, IOT, even blockchain scenarios, where we've built out our capabilities to accelerate these implementations with the help of the underlying CI platforms and the rest of the SAP environment. >> Got it. Stu, I want to go to you. You had mentioned before the cloud operating model and something that we've been talking about for a long time and Wikibon. So can converged infrastructure substantially mimic that cloud operating model and how so? What are the key ingredients of being able to create that experience on-prem? >> Yeah, well, Dave as, we've watched for more than the last decade, the cloud has looked more and more like some of the traditional enterprise things that we would look for and the infrastructure in private clouds have gone more and more cloud-like and embrace that model. So, you know, I got, I think back to the early days, Dave, we talked about how cloud was supposed to just be, you know, "simple". If you look at deploying in the cloud today, it is not simple at all that. There are so many choices out there, you know, way more than I had an initial data center. In the same way, you know, I think, you know, the original converged infrastructure from Dell, if you look at the feedback, the criticism was, you know, oh, you can have it in any color you want, as long as black, just like the Ford model T. But it was that simplicity and consistency that helped build out most of what we were talking about the cloud models I wanted to know that I had a reliable substrate platform to build on top of it. But if you talk about Dave today and in the future, what do we want? First of all, I need that operating model in a multicloud world. So, you know, we look at the environments that can spread, but beyond just a single cloud, because customers today have multiple environments, absolutely hybrid is a big piece of that. We look at what VMware's doing, look at Microsoft, Red Hat, even Amazon are extended beyond just a cloud and going into hybrid and multicloud models. Automation, a critical piece of that. And we've seen, you know, great leaps and bounds in the last couple of generations of what's happening in CI to take advantage of automation. Because we know we've gone beyond what humans can just manage themselves and therefore, you know, true automation is helping along those environments. So yes, absolutely, Dave. You know, that the lines are blurred between what the private cloud and the public cloud. And it's just that overall cloud operating model and helping customers to deal with their data and their applications, regardless of where it lives. >> Well, you know, Trey in the early days of cloud and conversion infrastructure, that homogeneity that Stu was talking about any color, as long as it's black. That was actually an advantage to removing labor costs, that consistency and that standardization. But I'm interested in how CI has evolved, its, you know, added in optionality. I mean Joakim was just talking about blockchain, so all kinds of new services. But how has CCI evolved in the better part of the last decade and what are some of the most recent innovations that people should be thinking about or aware of? >> So I think the underlying experience of CI has remained relatively constant. And we talk about the experience that customers get. So if you just look at the data that we've analyzed for over a decade now, you know, one of the data points that I love is 99% of our customers who buy CI say they have virtually no downtime anymore. And, that's a great testament. 84% of our customers say that they have that their IT operations run more efficiently. The reality around how we delivered that in the past was through services and humans performing these integrations and the upkeep associated with the sustaining of the architecture. What we've focused on at Dell Technologies is really bringing technologies that allow us to automate those human integrations and best practices. In such a way where they can become more repeatable and consumable by more customers. We don't have to have as many services folks deploying these systems as we did in the past. Because we're using software intelligence to embed that human knowledge that we used to rely on individuals exclusively for. So that's one of the aspects of the architecture. And then just taking advantage of all the new technologies that we've seen introduce over the last several years from all flash architectures and NVMe on the horizon, NVMe over fabric. All of these things as we orchestrate them in software will enable them to be more consumable by the average everyday customer. Therefore it becomes more economical for them to deploy infrastructure on premises to support mission-critical applications. >> So Stu, what about cloud and multicloud, how does CI support that? Where do those fit in? Are they relevant? >> Yeah, Dave, so absolutely. As I was talking about before, you know, customers have hybrid and multicloud environments and managing across these environments are pretty important. If I look at the Dell family, obviously they're leveraging heavily VMware as the virtualization layer. And VMware has been moving heavily as to how support containerized and incubates these environments and extend their management to not only what's happening in the data center, but into the cloud environment with VMware cloud. So, you know, management in a multicloud world Dave, is one of those areas that we definitely have some work to do. Something we've looked at Wikibon for the last few years. Is how will multicloud be different than multi-vendor? Because that was not something that the industry had done a great job of solving in the past. But you know, customers are looking to take advantage of the innovation, where it is in the services. And you know, the data first architecture is something that we see and therefore that will bring them to many services and many places. >> Oh yeah, I was talking before about in the early days of CI and even a lot of organizations, some organizations, anyway, there's still these sort of silos of, you know, storage, networking, compute resources. And you think about DevOps, where does DevOps fit into this whole equation? Maybe Stu you could take a stab at it and anybody else who wants to chime in. >> Yeah, so Dave, great, great point there. So, you know, when we talk about those silos, DevOps is one of those movements to really help the unifying force to help customers move faster. And so therefore the development team and the operations team are working together. Things like security are not a bolt-in but something that can happen along the entire path. A more recent addition to the DevOps movement also is something like FinOps. So, you know, how do we make sure that we're not just having finance sign off on things and look back every quarter, but in real time, understand how we're architecting things, especially in the cloud so that we remain responsible for that model. So, you know, speed is, you know, one of the most important pieces for business and therefore the DevOps movement, helping customers move faster and, you know, leverage and get value out of their infrastructure, their applications and their data. >> Yeah, I would add to this that I think the big transition for organizations, cause I've seen it in developing my own organization, is getting IT operators to think programmatically instead of configuration based. Use the tool to configure a device. Think about how do we create programmatic instruction to interacts with all of the devices that creates that cloud-like adaptation. Feeds in application level signaling to adapt and change the underlying configuration about that infrastructure to better run the application without relying upon an IT operator, a human to make a change. This, sort of thinking programmatically is I think one of the biggest obstacles that the industry face. And I feel really good about how we've attacked it, but there is a transformation within that dialogue that every organization is going to navigate through at their own pace. >> Yeah, infrastructure is code automation, this a fundamental to digital transformation. Joakim, I wonder if you could give us some insight as you talk to SAP customers, you know, in Europe, across the EMEA, how does the pandemic change this? >> I think the pandemic has accelerated some of the movements that we already saw in the SAP world. There is obviously a force for making sure that we get our financial budgets in shape and that we don't over spend on our cost levels. And therefore it's going to be very important to see how we can manage all these new revenue generating projects that IT organizations and business organizations have planned around new customer experience initiatives, new supply chain optimization. They know that they need to invest in these projects to stay competitive and to gain new competitive edge. And where CI plays an important part is in order to, first of all, keep costs down in all of these projects, make sure to deliver a standardized common platform upon which all these projects can be introduced. And then of course, making sure that availability and risks are kept high versus at a minimum, right? Risk low and availability at a record high, because we need to stay on with our clients and their demands. So I think again, CI is going to play a very important role. As we see customers go through this pandemic situation and needing to put pressure on both innovation and cost control at the same time. And this is where also our new upcoming data strategies will play a really important part as we need to leverage the data we have better, smarter and more efficient way. >> Got it. Okay guys, we're running out of time, but Trey, I wonder if you could, you know break out your telescope or your crystal ball, give us some visibility into the futures of converged infrastructure. What should we be expecting? >> So if you look at the last release of this last technology that we released in power one, it was all about automation. We'll build on that platform to integrate other converged capability. So if you look at the converged systems market hyper-converged is very much an element of that. And I think that we're trending to is recognizing that we can deliver an architecture that has hyper-converged and converged attributes all in a single architecture and then dial up the degrees of automation to create more adaptations for different type of application workloads, not just your traditional three tier application workloads, but also those microservices based applications that one may historically think, maybe it's best to that off premises. We feel very confident that we are delivering platforms out there today that can run more economically on premises, provide better security, better data governance, and a lot of the adaptations, the enhancements, the optimizations that we'll deliver in our converged platforms of the future about colliding new infrastructure models together, and introducing more levels of automation to have greater adaptations for applications that are running on it. >> Got it. Trey, we're going to give you the last word. You know, if you're an architect of a large organization, you've got some mission-critical workloads that, you know, you're really trying to protect. What's the takeaway? What's really the advice that you would give those folks thinking about the sort of near and midterm and even longterm? >> My advice is to understand that there are many options. We sell a lot of independent component technologies and data centers that run every organization's environment around the world. We sell packaged outcomes and hyper-converged and converged. And a lot of companies buy a little bit of build your own, they buy some converged, they buy some hyper-converged. I would employ everyone, especially in this climate to really evaluate the packaged offerings and understand how they can benefit their environment. And we recognize that everything that there's not one hammer and everything is a nail. That's why we have this broad portfolio of products that are designed to be utilized in the most efficient manners for those customers who are consuming our technologies. And converged and hyper-converge are merely another way to simplify the ongoing challenges that organizations have in managing their data estate and all of the technologies they're consuming at a rapid pace in concert with the investments that they're also making off premises. So this is very much the technologies that we talked today are very much things that organizations should research, investigate and utilize where they best fit in their organization. >> Awesome guys, and of course there's a lot of information at dell.com about that. Wikibon.com has written a lot about this and the many, many sources of information out there. Trey, Joakim, Stu thanks so much for the conversation. Really meaty, a lot of substance, really appreciate your time, thank you. >> Thank you guys. >> Thank you Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> And everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> You know, businesses have a staggering number of options today to support mission-critical applications. And much of the world's mission-critical data happens to live on converged infrastructure. Converged infrastructure is really designed to support the most demanding workloads. Words like resilience, performance, scalability, recoverability, et cetera. Those are the attributes that define converged infrastructure. Now with COVID-19 the digital transformation mandate, as we all know has been accelerated and buyers are demanding more from their infrastructure, and in particular converged infrastructure. Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this power panel where we're going to explore converged infrastructure, look at its past, its present and its future. And we're going to explore several things. The origins of converged infrastructure, why CI even came about. And what's its historic role been in terms of supporting mission-critical applications. We're going to look at modernizing workloads. What are the opportunities and the risks and what's converged infrastructures role in that regard. How has converged infrastructure evolved? And how will it support cloud and multicloud? And ultimately what's the future of converged infrastructure look like? And to examine these issues, we have three great guests, Trey Layton is here. He is the senior vice president for converged infrastructure and software engineering and architecture at Dell Technologies. And he's joined by Joakim Zetterblad. Who's the director of the SAP practice for EMEA at Dell technologies. And our very own Stu Miniman. Stu is a senior analyst at Wikibon. Guys, great to see you all welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great. >> Trey, I'm going to start with you. Take us back to the early days of converged infrastructure. Why was it even formed? Why was it created? >> Well, if you look back just over a decade ago, a lot of organizations were deploying virtualized environments. Everyone was consolidated on virtualization. A lot of technologies were emerging to enhance that virtualization outcome, meaning acceleration capabilities and storage arrays, networking. And there was a lot of complexity in integrating all of those underlying infrastructure technologies into a solution that would work reliably. You almost had to have a PhD and all of the best practices of many different companies integrations. And so we decided as Dell EMC, Dell Technologies to invest heavily in this area of manufacturing best practices and packaging them so that customers could acquire those technologies and already integrated fully regression tested architecture that could sustain virtually any type of workload that a company would run. And candidly that packaging, that rigor around testing produced a highly reliable product that customers now rely on heavily to operationalize greater efficiencies and run their most critical applications that power their business and ultimately the world economy. >> Now Stu, cause you were there. I was as well at the early days of the original announcement of CI. Looking back and sort of bringing it forward Stu, what was the business impact of converged infrastructure? >> Well, Dave as Trey was talking about it was that wave of virtualization had gone from, you know, just supporting many applications to being able to support all of your applications. And especially if you talk about those high value, you know business mission, critical applications, you want to make sure that you've got a reliable foundation. What the Dell tech team has done for years is make sure that they fully understand, you know the life cycle of testing that needs to happen. And you don't need to worry about, you know, what integration testing you need to do, looking at support major CS and doing a lot of your own sandbox testing, which for the most part was what enterprises needed to do. You said, okay, you know, I get the gear, I load the virtualization and then I have to see, you know, tweak everything to figure out how my application works. The business impact Dave, is you want to spend more time focusing on the business, not having to turn all the dials and worry about, do I get the performance I need? Does it have the reliability uptime that we need? And especially if we're talking about those business critical applications, of course, these are the ones that are running 24 by seven and if they go down, my business goes down with it. >> Yeah, and of course, you know, one of the other major themes we saw with conversion infrastructure was really attacking the IT labor problem. You had separate compute or server teams, storage teams, networking teams, they oftentimes weren't talking together. So there was a lot of inefficiency that converged infrastructure was designed to attack. But I want to come to the SAP expert. Joakim, that's really your wheelhouse. What is it about converged infrastructure that makes it suitable for SAP application specifically? >> You know, if you look at a classic SAP client today, there's really three major transformational waves that all SAP customers are faced with today, it's the move to S/4HANA, the introduction of this new platform, which needs to happen before 2027. It's the introduction of a multicloud cloud or operating model. And last but not least, it is the introduction of new digitization or intelligent technologies such as IOT, machine learning or artificial intelligence. And that drove to the need of a platform that could address all these three transformational waves. It came with a lot of complexity, increased costs, increased risk. And what CI did so uniquely was to provide that Edge to Core to Cloud strategy. Fully certified for both HANA, non HANA workloads for the classical analytical and transactional workloads, as well as the new modernization technologies such as IOT, machine learning, big data and analytics. And that created a huge momentum for converged in our SAP accounts. >> So Trey, I want to go to you cause you're the deep technical expert here. Joakim just mentioned uniqueness. So what are the unique characteristics of converged infrastructure that really make it suitable for handling the most demanding workloads? >> Well, converged infrastructure by definition is the integration of an external storage array with a highly optimized compute platform. And when we build best practices around integrating those technologies together, we essentially package optimizations that allow a customer to increase the quantity of users that are accessing those workloads or the applications that are driving database access in such a way where you can predictably understand consumption and utilization in your environment. Those packaged integrations are kind of like. You know, I have a friend that owns a race car shop and he has all kinds of expertise to build cars, but he has a vehicle that he buys is his daily driver. The customization that they've created to build race cars are great for the race cars that go on the track, but he's building a car on his own, it didn't make any sense. And so what customers found was the ability to acquire a packaged infrastructure with all these infrastructure optimizations, where we package these best practices that gave customers a reliable, predictable, and fully supported integration, so they didn't have to spend 20 hour support calls trying to discover and figure out what particular customization that they had employed for their application, that had some issue that they needed to troubleshoot and solve. This became a standard out of the box integration that the best and the brightest package so that customers can consume it at scale. >> So Joakim, I want to ask you let's take the sort of application view. Let's sort of flip the picture a little bit and come at it from that prism. How, if you think about like core business applications, how have they evolved over the better part of the last decade and specifically with regard to the mission-critical processes? >> So what we're seeing in the process industry and in the industry of mission-critical applications is that they have gone from being very monolithic systems where we literally saw a single ERP components such as all three or UCC. Whereas today customers are faced with a landscape of multiple components. Many of them working both on and off premise, there are multicloud strategies in place. And as we mentioned before, with the introduction of new IOT technologies, we see that there is a flow of information of data that requires a whole new set of infrastructure of components of tools to make these new processes happen. And of course, the focus in the end of the day is all on business outcomes. So what industries and companies doesn't want to do is to focus all their time in making sure that these new technologies are working together, but really focusing on how can I make an impact? How can I start to work in a better way with my clients? So the focus on business outcome, the focus on integrating multiple systems into a single consolidated approach has become so much more important, which is why the modernization of the underlying infrastructure is absolutely key. Without consolidation, without a simplification of the management and orchestration. And without the cloud enabled platform, you won't get there. >> So Stu that's key, what Joakim just said in terms of modernizing the application as being able to manage them, not as one big monolith, but integration with other key systems. So what are the options? Wikibon has done some research on this, but what are the options for modernizing workloads, whether it's on-Prem or off-prem and what are some of the trade offs there? >> Yeah, so Dave, first of all, you know, one of the biggest challenges out there is you don't just want to, you know, lift and shift. If anybody's read research for it from Wikibon, Dave, for a day, for the 10 years, I've been part of it talks about the challenges, if you just talk about migrating, because while it sounds simple, we understand that there are individual customizations that every customer's made. So you might get part of the way there, but there's often the challenges that will get in the way that could cause failure. And as we talked about for you, especially your mission-critical applications, those are the ones that you can't have downtime. So absolutely customers are reevaluating their application portfolio. You know, there are a lot of things to look at. First of all, if you can, certain things can be moved to SAS. You've seen certain segments of the market. Absolutely SAS can be preferred methodology, if you can go there. One of the biggest hurdles for SAS of course, is there's retraining of the workforce. Certain applications they will embracing of that because they can take advantage of new features, get to be able to use that wherever they are. But in other cases, there are the SAS doesn't have the capability or it doesn't fit into the workflow of the business. The cloud operating model is something we've been talking about it with you Dave, for many years. When you've seen rapid maturation of what originally was called "private cloud", but really was just virtualization plus with a little bit of a management layer on top. But now much of the automation that you build in AI technologies, you know, Trey's got a whole team working on things that if you talk to his team, it sounds very similar to what you had the same conversation should have with cloud providers. So "cloud" as an operating model, not a destination is what we're going for and being able to take advantage of automation and the like. So where your application sits, absolutely some consideration. And what we've talked about Dave, you know, the governance, the security, the reliability, the performance are all reasons why being able to keep things, you know, under my environment with an infrastructure that I have control over is absolutely one of the reasons why am I keep things more along a converged infrastructure, rather than just saying to go through the challenge of migration and optimizing and changing to something in a more of a cloud native methodology. >> What about technical debt? Trey, people talk about technical debt as a bad thing, what is technical debt? Why do I want to avoid it? And how can I avoid it? And specifically, I know, Trey, I've thrown a lot of questions at you yet, but what is it about converged infrastructure and its capabilities that helped me avoid that technical debt? >> Well, it's an interesting thing, when you deploy an environment to support a mission-critical application, you have to make a lot of implementation decisions. Some of those decisions may take you down a path that may have a finite life. And that once you reached the life expectancy of that particular configuration, you now have debt that you have to reconcile. You have to change that architecture, that configuration. And so what we do with converged infrastructure is we dedicate a team of product management, an entire product management organization, a team of engineers that treat the integrations of the architecture as a releases. And we think long range about how do we avoid not having to change the underlying architecture. And one of the greatest testaments to this is in our conversion infrastructure products over the last 11 years, we've only saw two major architectural changes while supporting generational changes in underlying infrastructure capabilities well beyond when we first started. So converged infrastructure approach is about how do we build an architecture that allows you to avoid those dead-end pathways in those integration decisions that you would normally have to make on your own. >> Joakim, I wanted to ask you, you've mentioned monolithic applications before. That's sort of, we're evolving beyond that with application architectures, but there's still a lot of monoliths out there so. And a lot of customers want to modernize those application and workloads. What, in your view, what are you seeing as the best path and the best practice for modernizing some of those monolithic workloads? >> Yeah, so Dave, as clients today are trying to build a new intelligent enterprise, which is one of SAP's leading a guidance today. They needed to start to look at how to integrate all these different systems and applications that we talked about before into the common business process framework that they have. So consolidating workloads from big data to HANA, non HANA systems, cloud, non-cloud applications into a single framework is an absolute key to that modernization strategy. The second thing which I also mentioned before is to take a new grip around orchestration and management. We know that as customers seek this intelligent approach with both analytical data, as well as experience and transactional data, we must look for new ways to orchestrate and manage those application workloads and data flows. And this is where we slowly, slowly enter into the world of a enterprise data strategy. And that's again, where converged as a very important part to play in order to build these next generation platforms that can both consolidate, simplify. And at the same time enable us to work in a cloud enabled fashion with our cloud operating model that most of our clients seek today. >> So Stu, why can't I just shove all this stuff into the public cloud and call it a day? >> Yeah, well, Dave, we've seen some people that, you know, I have a cloud first strategy and often those are the same companies that are quickly doing what we call "repatriation". I bristle a little bit when I hear these, because often it's, I've gone to the cloud without understanding how I take advantage of it, not understanding the full financial ramifications what I'm going to need to do. And therefore they quickly go back to a world that they understand. So, cloud is not a silver bullet. We understand in technology, Dave, you know, things are complicated. There's all the organizational operational pieces they do. There are excellent cloud services and it's really it's innovation. You know, how do I take advantage of the data that I have, how I allow my application to move forward and respond to the business. And really that is not something that only happens in the public clouds. If I can take advantage of infrastructure that gets me along that journey to more of a cloud model, I get the business results. So, you know, automation and APIs and everything and the Ops movement are not something that are only in the public clouds, but something that we should be embracing holistically. And absolutely, that ties into where today and tomorrow's converge infrastructure are going. >> Yeah, and to me, it comes down to the business case too. I mean, you have to look at the risk-reward. The risk of changing something that's actually working for your business versus what the payback is going to be. You know, if it ain't broken, don't fix it, but you may want to update it, change the oil every now and then, you know, maybe prune some deadwood and modernize it. But Trey, I want to come back to you. Let's take a look at some of the options that customers have. And there are a lot of options, as I said at the top. You've got do it yourself, you got a hyper-converged infrastructure, of course, converged infrastructure. What are you seeing as the use case for each of these deployment options? >> So, build your own. We're really talking about an organization that has the expertise in-house to understand the integration standards that they need to deploy to support their environment. And candidly, there are a lot of customers that have very unique application requirements that have very much customized to their environment. And they've invested in the expertise to be able to sustain that on an ongoing basis. And build your own is great for those folks. The next in converged infrastructure, where we're really talking about an external storage array with applications that need to use data services native to a storage array. And self-select compute for scaling that compute for their particular need, and owning that three tiers architecture and its associated integration, but not having to sustain it because it's converged. There are enormous number of applications out there that benefit from that. I think the third one was, you talked about hyper-converged. I'll go back to when we first introduced our hyper-converged product to the market. Which is now leading the industry for quite some time, VxRail. We had always said that customers will consume hyper-converged and converged for different use cases and different applications. The maturity of hyper-converged has come to the point where you can run virtually any application that you would like on it. And this comes down to really two vectors of consideration. One, am I going to run hyper-converged versus converged based on my operational preference? You know, hyper-converged incorporates software defined storage, predominantly a compute operating plane. Converge as mentioned previously uses that external storage array has some type of systems fabric and dedicated compute resources with access into those your operational preference is one aspect of it. And then having applications that need the data services of an external storage, primary storage array are the other aspect of deciding whether those two things are needed in your particular environment. We find more and more customers out there that have an investment of both, not one versus the other. That's not to say that there aren't customers that only have one, they exist, but a majority of customers have both. >> So Joakim, I want to come back to the sort of attributes from the application requirements perspective. When you think about mission-critical, you think about availability, scale, recoverability, data protection. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about those attributes. And again, what is it about converged infrastructure that that is the best fit and the right strategic fit for supporting those demanding applications and workloads? >> Now, when it comes to SAP, we're talking about clients and customers, most mission-critical data and information and applications. And hence the requirements on the underlying infrastructure is absolutely on the very top of what the IT organization needs to deliver. This is why, when we talk about SAP, the requirements for high availability protection disaster recovery is very, very high. And it doesn't only involve a single system. As mentioned before, SAP is not a standalone application, but rather a landscape of systems that needs to be kept consistent. And that's what a CI platform does so well. It can consolidate workloads, whether it's big data or the transactional standard workloads of SAP, ERP or UCC. The converged platforms are able to put the very highest of availability protection standards into this whole landscape and making a really unique platform for CI workloads. And at the same time, it enables our customers to accelerate those modernization journeys into things such as ML, AI, IOT, even blockchain scenarios, where we've built out our capabilities to accelerate these implementations with the help of the underlying CI platforms and the rest of the SAP environment. >> Got it. Stu, I want to go to you. You had mentioned before the cloud operating model and something that we've been talking about for a long time and Wikibon. So can converged infrastructure substantially mimic that cloud operating model and how so? What are the key ingredients of being able to create that experience on-prem? >> Yeah, well, Dave is, we've watched for more than the last decade, the cloud has looked more and more like some of the traditional enterprise things that we would look for and the infrastructure in private clouds have gone more and more cloud-like and embrace that model. So, you know, I got, I think back to the early days, Dave, we talked about how cloud was supposed to just be, you know, "simple". If you look at deploying in the cloud today, it is not simple at all that. There are so many choices out there, you know, way more than I had an initial data center. In the same way, you know, I think, you know, the original converged infrastructure from Dell, if you look at the feedback, the criticism was, you know, oh, you can have it in any color you want, as long as black, just like the Ford model T. But it was that simplicity and consistency that helped build out most of what we were talking about the cloud models I wanted to know that I had a reliable substrate platform to build on top of it. But if you talk about Dave today and in the future, what do we want? First of all, I need that operating model in a multicloud world. So, you know, we look at the environments that can spread, but beyond just a single cloud, because customers today have multiple environments, absolutely hybrid is a big piece of that. We look at what VMware's doing, look at Microsoft, Red Hat, even Amazon are extended beyond just a cloud and going into hybrid and multicloud models. Automation, a critical piece of that. And we've seen, you know, great leaps and bounds in the last couple of generations of what's happening in CI to take advantage of automation. Because we know we've gone beyond what humans can just manage themselves and therefore, you know, true automation is helping along those environments. So yes, absolutely, Dave. You know, that the lines are blurred between what the private cloud and the public cloud. And it's just that overall cloud operating model and helping customers to deal with their data and their applications, regardless of where it is. >> Well, you know, Trey in the early days of cloud and conversion infrastructure, that homogeneity that Stu was talking about any color, as long as it's black. That was actually an advantage to removing labor costs, that consistency and that standardization. But I'm interested in how CI has evolved, its, you know, added in optionality. I mean Joakim was just talking about blockchain, so all kinds of new services. But how has CCI evolved in the better part of the last decade and what are some of the most recent innovations that people should be thinking about or aware of? >> So I think the underlying experience of CI has remained relatively constant. And we talk about the experience that customers get. So if you just look at the data that we've analyzed for over a decade now, you know, one of the data points that I love is 99% of our customers who buy CI say they have virtually no downtime anymore. And, that's a great testament. 84% of our customers say that they have that their IT operations run more efficiently. The reality around how we delivered that in the past was through services and humans performing these integrations and the upkeep associated with the sustaining of the architecture. What we've focused on at Dell Technologies is really bringing technologies that allow us to automate those human integrations and best practices. In such a way where they can become more repeatable and consumable by more customers. We don't have to have as many services folks deploying these systems as we did in the past. Because we're using software intelligence to embed that human knowledge that we used to rely on individuals exclusively for. So that's one of the aspects of the architecture. And then just taking advantage of all the new technologies that we've seen introduce over the last several years from all flash architectures and NVMe on the horizon, NVMe over fabric. All of these things as we orchestrate them in software will enable them to be more consumable by the average everyday customer. Therefore it becomes more economical for them to deploy infrastructure on premises to support mission-critical applications. >> So Stu, what about cloud and multicloud, how does CI support that? Where do those fit in? Are they relevant? >> Yeah, Dave, so absolutely. As I was talking about before, you know, customers have hybrid and multicloud environments and managing across these environments are pretty important. If I look at the Dell family, obviously they're leveraging heavily VMware as the virtualization layer. And VMware has been moving heavily as to how support containerized and incubates these environments and extend their management to not only what's happening in the data center, but into the cloud environment with VMware cloud. So, you know, management in a multicloud world Dave, is one of those areas that we definitely have some work to do. Something we've looked at Wikibon for the last few years. Is how will multicloud be different than multi-vendor? Because that was not something that the industry had done a great job of solving in the past. But you know, customers are looking to take advantage of the innovation, where it is in the services. And you know, the data first architecture is something that we see and therefore that will bring them to many services and many places. >> Oh yeah, I was talking before about in the early days of CI and even a lot of organizations, some organizations, anyway, there's still these sort of silos of, you know, storage, networking, compute resources. And you think about DevOps, where does DevOps fit into this whole equation? Maybe Stu you could take a stab at it and anybody else who wants to chime in. >> Yeah, so Dave, great, great point there. So, you know, when we talk about those silos, DevOps is one of those movements to really help the unifying force to help customers move faster. And so therefore the development team and the operations team are working together. Things like security are not a built-in but something that can happen along the entire path. A more recent addition to the DevOps movement also is something like FinOps. So, you know, how do we make sure that we're not just having finance sign off on things and look back every quarter, but in real time, understand how we're architecting things, especially in the cloud so that we remain responsible for that model. So, you know, speed is, you know, one of the most important pieces for business and therefore the DevOps movement, helping customers move faster and, you know, leverage and get value out of their infrastructure, their applications and their data. >> Yeah, I would add to this that I think the big transition for organizations, cause I've seen it in developing my own organization, is getting IT operators to think programmatically instead of configuration based. Use the tool to configure a device. Think about how do we create programmatic instruction to interacts with all of the devices that creates that cloud-like adaptation. Feeds in application level signaling to adapt and change the underlying configuration about that infrastructure to better run the application without relying upon an IT operator, a human to make a change. This, sort of thinking programmatically is I think one of the biggest obstacles that the industry face. And I feel really good about how we've attacked it, but there is a transformation within that dialogue that every organization is going to navigate through at their own pace. >> Yeah, infrastructure is code automation, this a fundamental to digital transformation. Joakim, I wonder if you could give us some insight as you talk to SAP customers, you know, in Europe, across the EMEA, how does the pandemic change this? >> I think the pandemic has accelerated some of the movements that we already saw in the SAP world. There is obviously a force for making sure that we get our financial budgets in shape and that we don't over spend on our cost levels. And therefore it's going to be very important to see how we can manage all these new revenue generating projects that IT organizations and business organizations have planned around new customer experience initiatives, new supply chain optimization. They know that they need to invest in these projects to stay competitive and to gain new competitive edge. And where CI plays an important part is in order to, first of all, keep costs down in all of these projects, make sure to deliver a standardized common platform upon which all these projects can be introduced. And then of course, making sure that availability and risks are kept high versus at a minimum, right? Risk low and availability at a record high, because we need to stay on with our clients and their demands. So I think again, CI is going to play a very important role. As we see customers go through this pandemic situation and needing to put pressure on both innovation and cost control at the same time. And this is where also our new upcoming data strategies will play a really important part as we need to leverage the data we have better, smarter and more efficient way. >> Got it. Okay guys, we're running out of time, but Trey, I wonder if you could, you know break out your telescope or your crystal ball, give us some visibility into the futures of converged infrastructure. What should we be expecting? So if you look at the last release of this last technology that we released in power one, it was all about automation. We'll build on that platform to integrate other converged capability. So if you look at the converged systems market hyper-converged is very much an element of that. And I think that we're trending to is recognizing that we can deliver an architecture that has hyper-converged and converged attributes all in a single architecture and then dial up the degrees of automation to create more adaptations for different type of application workloads, not just your traditional three tier application workloads, but also those microservices based applications that one may historically think, maybe it's best to that off premises. We feel very confident that we are delivering platforms out there today that can run more economically on premises, provide better security, better data governance, and a lot of the adaptations, the enhancements, the optimizations that we'll deliver in our converged platforms of the future about colliding new infrastructure models together, and introducing more levels of automation to have greater adaptations for applications that are running on it. >> Got it. Trey, we're going to give you the last word. You know, if you're an architect of a large organization, you've got some mission-critical workloads that, you know, you're really trying to protect. What's the takeaway? What's really the advice that you would give those folks thinking about the sort of near and midterm and even longterm? >> My advice is to understand that there are many options. We sell a lot of independent component technologies and data centers that run every organization's environment around the world. We sell packaged outcomes and hyper-converged and converged. And a lot of companies buy a little bit of build your own, they buy some converged, they buy some hyper-converged. I would employ everyone, especially in this climate to really evaluate the packaged offerings and understand how they can benefit their environment. And we recognize that everything that there's not one hammer and everything is a nail. That's why we have this broad portfolio of products that are designed to be utilized in the most efficient manners for those customers who are consuming our technologies. And converged and hyper-converge are merely another way to simplify the ongoing challenges that organizations have in managing their data estate and all of the technologies they're consuming at a rapid pace in concert with the investments that they're also making off premises. So this is very much the technologies that we talked today are very much things that organizations should research, investigate and utilize where they best fit in their organization. >> Awesome guys, and of course there's a lot of information at dell.com about that. Wikibon.com has written a lot about this and the many, many sources of information out there. Trey, Joakim, Stu thanks so much for the conversation. Really meaty, a lot of substance, really appreciate your time, thank you. >> Thank you guys. >> Thank you Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> And everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi I'm Stu minimun with wiki bond and welcome to another wiki bond the cube digital community event this one sponsored by Dell EMC of course it's a big week in the industry VMware is having their big European show in Barcelona VMworld and while we are not there in person we have some news that we want to dig into with Dell EMC so like all of our digital community events we're gonna have about 25 minutes of video and then afterwards we're going to have a crowd chat we're gonna have a panel where you have the opportunity to dig in ask your questions give us your viewpoint and talk about everything that's going on so it's important to pay attention think about what questions participate in the crowd chat afterward and thanks so much for joining us talk about the business issues of the day to help us frame this discussion I'm happy to welcome back to the program Pete manka who's the senior vice president with converged infrastructure and solutions engineering at Dell MC Pete great to see you great see you Tuesday all right so Pete converged infrastructures come a long way you and I have a lot of history in this space you know more than a decade now we've been in here so but from a customer standpoint you know this has matured a lot I wouldn't want you to start out give us the customer perspective you know what was convergent restrictor designed to do how is it living up to that and you know what's the state of it today sure well as you said we've got a long history in this and ten years ago we started this business to really simplify IT operations for our customers and we tried to remove the silos between storage compute and networking management and we're doing that we created this market called converged infrastructure by converging the management of those three siloed operations in doing so we added a tremendous amount of value for our customers fast forward now over the years earlier this year we come up with a product that the BX block 1000 that allows us to scale considerably greater within a single environment adding more value to our customer we're very customer driven at Dell EMC as you know and so we talked to our customers again and said what else do you want what else do you want and they pushed us for more automation in more monitoring support for the product and that's really what we're here to talk about today is how we get from simplifying IT operations for customers through allowing scale architectures to eventually automating the customers environment for them yeah when you talk about simplification that the the industry has really been really galvanized gotten really excited at hyper-converged infrastructure and I hear simple that's kind of what HCI is gonna do Dell of course has both converged and hyper-converged we've talked a lot as to how they both fit maybe now you know give give us the update as to you know the relevance of CI today while HCI is still continuing to grow really that sure yeah HDI is a hot market obviously and it is growing fast and customers should be excited about HDI because it's a great solution right it enables the customers get an application up and running very quickly and it's great for scale out architectures you want to add symmetric type nodes and skill oh you're at your application your architecture it's great for that but like all architectures it doesn't fit all solutions or all problems for the customers and there's a place for CI and there's a place for HCI the end you think about HCI versus CI CI is great for asymmetrically scaling architectures you want to have more storage more networking more memory inside your servers more compute you can do that through a CI portfolio and for customers who need that asymmetrical scaling for customers who need high availability very efficient scale type storage environments scale of compute environments you can do that through a CI platform much more efficiently than you can through other platforms in the market alright Pete you mentioned that there was announcement earlier in the year that the VX block 1000 so for those that don't have hauled of history like us that followed from the V block of the BX block and now the 1000 helped remind us what was different about this from things in the past sure when we first started out in the conversion structure business we had blocks that were specific to storage configurations if you wanted a unity or v-max you had to buy a specific model of our of our VX block product line that's great but we realize customers and customers told us they wanted a mix environment they wanted to have a multi-use environment in their block so we created the VX block 1000 announced in February and it allows you to mix and match your storage sand bar along with your compute environment and scales out at a much greater capacity than we could through the original block design so and we're providing the customer a much larger footprint managed by within a single block but also a choice allowing them to have multiple application configurations within the same block all right so people now what what's Del DMC doing to bring converged infrastructure for it even more how are we expanding you know what it's gonna do for customers and the problems they're looking to solve yeah right so again we went back to our customers that said ok tell us your experience with block you tell us what you like tell us what you don't like and they love the product it's been a very successful product they said we want more automation we want more monitoring you want the ability to see what's happening as well as automate workflows and procedures that we have to do to get our workloads up and running quicker and more automated fashion so what we're gonna talk about today is how we're going to do that we're going to provide more automation capabilities and the ability to monitor through our VM work you realize suite toolset alright great Pete I appreciate you helping kind of lay the groundwork we're gonna be back in a quick second one of your peers from Dell MC to dig into the product so stay with us we'll be back right after this this quick break [Music] vx block system 1000 simplifies IT accelerates the pace of innovation and reduces operating costs storage compute networking and virtualization components are all unified in a single system transforming operations and delivering better business outcomes faster this is achieved by five foundational pillars that set Dell EMC apart as the leading data center solutions provider each VX blocks system 1000 is engineered manufactured managed sustained and supported as one welcome back joining me to dig into this announcement is Dan Mita who's the vice president of converged infrastructure engineering at Dell EMC damn thanks for joining us thanks for having me all right so Pete kind of teased out of what we're doing here talked about what we've been building on for the last ten years in the converging infrastructure industry please elaborate you know what this is and shuttle from there yeah absolutely so to your point we know customers have been buying VX blocks and V blocks for the last ten years and there's lots of good reasons behind all of that we also know that customers been asking us for better monitoring better reporting and more orchestration capabilities we this announcement we think we're meeting those challenges so there's three things that I'd like to talk about one is we're gonna help customers raise the bar around awareness of what's going on within the environment we'll do that through health checks and dashboards performance dashboarding real-time alerting for the first time the second thing we'll talk about is we talked about a different level of automation than we've ever had before when it comes to orchestration we'll be introducing the ability to set up the services necessary to run orchestrated workflows and then our intention is to bring to market those engineered workflows and lastly would be you know analytics deeper analytics for customers that want to go even further into why their system is drifted from a known good state we're gonna give them the capabilities to see that great so Dan I think back from the earliest days that you know Vblock was always architected to you know transform the way operations are done what really differentiates this you know how important is there are things like the analytics of you're doing yeah sure so you're right today our customers use element managers to do most of that what this tool will allow them to do is kind of abstract a lot of the complexity folk in the element managers themselves if you think about an example where our customer wants to provision an ESXi host add it to a cluster and you say a Power Max bulan we know there's about a dozen manual steps to do that it cuts across four element managers and that also means you're going to be touching your administrators across compute network storage and virtualization with this single tool that will guide you first by checking the environment taking you through an orderly set of questions or inputs and then lastly validating the environment we know that we're going to help customers eliminate any undue harm that might do to an environment but we're also gonna save them time effort and money by getting it done quicker ok so Dan it sounds like there's a new suite of software explain it exactly what is it and how do all these pieces fit together yeah so there's three pieces in this week foundational is what we call the X blocks central so the X Box central is going to go out mandatory with all new VX blocks we're also going to make it available to our customers running older 300 500 and 700 family the X blocks and we'll provide a migration path for customers that are using vision today that's the tool that's going to allow them to do that performance health and RCM compliance dashboarding as well as do metrics based in real-time alerting one loved one step up from that one layer up from that is what we call the X block orchestration so this this product is being built underneath the V realize operations or excuse me orchestration tool and it's essentially like I said it's going to provide those all of those tools for setting up the services to run the workflows and then we'll provide those workflows so that example that I gave just a minute ago about provisioning that host will have a workflow from that right out of the gate ok so you mentioned the the vir ops thing you know VMware has always been a you know a very important piece of the whole stack there's yeah be in front of everything in the product line while you're announcing it this week at you know vmworld your and you know explain a little bit more that integration between the VMware pieces so you mentioned V Rob's and that's the third piece in this suite right so that is that it's going to provide us the dashboarding to provide all of that detailed analytics so if you think about it we're using V realized opera orchestra ssin as a workflow engine we're using V ROPS for that intelligent insight into the operations as a framework for the things that we're doing but essentially what we've given customers at this point is a framework for a cloud management or a cloud operations model sitting on top of a converged infrastructure alright Dan thanks for explaining all that now we're gonna throw it over to a customer to really hear what they think of this announcement when we started to talk about the needs to innovate within business technology and move forward with the business we knew we had to advance our technology offerings standardize our data center and help bring all our technology to current date vs block allowed us to do that in one purchase and also allowed us to basically bring our entire data center ten years forward with one step the benefits we've seen from the X block from my side of the house I now have that sleep at night capability because I have full high availability I have industry-leading technology the performance is there their applications are now more available we now have a platform where we can modernize our entire system we can add blades we can add storage we can add networking as we need it out of the box all knowing that it's been engineered and architected to work together it has literally set it and forget it for us we go about our daily business and now we've transitioned from a maintenance time set and a maintenance mindset to now we can participate in meetings to help drive business innovation help drive digital transformation within our company and really be that true IT strategic partner the business is looking for with the implementation of VX blocks central upcoming we should be able to get a better idea of what's going on in our VX block through one dashboard we're very sensitive about the number of dashboards we try to view do the whole death bi dashboard situation especially for a small team we really believe yes block central is going to be beneficial for us to have a quick health overview of our entire unit encompassing all components as we discussed additional features coming out for the VX block one of the more interesting ones for me was to see the integration of VMware's be realized product into the VX block most importantly focused around orchestration and analytics that's something that we don't do a lot of right now but as our company continues to grow and we continue to expand our VX block into additional offerings I can see that being beneficial especially for our small team being able to you know or orchestrate and automate kind of daily tasks that we do now may benefit our team in the future and then the analytics piece as we continue to be a almost a service provider for our business partners having that analytic information available to us could be very beneficial from a from a cost revenue standpoint for us to show kind of the return on investment for our company one of the things that we kind of look forward to that the opportunities of VX block is going to give us given the feature set that's coming out is the ability to use automation for some of our daily business tasks that maybe is something as simple as moving a virtual machine from one host to another that seems pretty mundane at this point but as our company grows and workloads get more complex having the automation availability to be able to do that and have VMware do that on its own it's going to benefit our team always love hearing from customers I'm Peter Burris here in our Palo Alto studios let's also hear from a very important partner in this overall announcement that's VMware we've got OJ Singh who's a senior vice president and general manager the cloud management business unit at VMware with us AJ welcome to the cube thank you Peter of that to be here so Archie we've been hearing a lot of great new technology about you know converged infrastructure and how you do better automation and how you do better you know discovery and whatnot associated with it but these technologies been for around for a while and VMware has been a crucial partner of this journey for quite some time give us a little bit about the history absolutely you know this is a as you rightly pointed a long history with a VMware and Dell EMC goes back over a decade ago I started with Vblock in those days and we literally defined the converged infrastructure market at that point and and this partnership has continued to evolve and so this announcement we are really excited to be here you know to continue to announce our joint solutions to our common customers you know in this whole VX blocks 1000 along with the vitalife suite well the VX block Hardware foundation with VMware software foundation was one of the first places where customers actually started building what we now call private clouds tell us a little bit about how that technology came together and how that vision came together and how your customers have been responding to this combinations partnership for a while absolutely if you think about it from a customer standpoint they love the fact that it is a pre engineered solution and you know they have to put less effort and doing the lifecycle management maintenance of the solution so as part of kind of making it a pre engineered solution what we've done is you know made it such that the integrations between the VX block and visualize are out of the box so we put some critical components you know are of course the vSphere and NSX in there but in addition to that for the virial I set we have vro Orchestrator already built in there we have a special management pack that gets into detail dashboards that are related to the hardware associated with the X block also pre integrated in there so that if via ops runs in there it'll automatically kind of figure that as a dashboard out and can configure them and then finally we have VRA or you know an industry-leading automation platform that allows you self-service and literally build a private cloud on top of the X block so the VX central software has been letting or is now allows a customer to make better use of VMware yes similarly some of the new advancements that you're making within VMware are going to help VX bar customers get more out of their devices as well tell us a little bit about some of the recent announcements you've made that are very complimentary absolutely you know to some extent you know the V realized journey has been a journey about at the end of the day in enabling our customers to set up a self-managed private cloud and do large extent we're heading in the direction of what we say self-driving operations using machine learning technologies and all of that so in that kind of direction in that vision if you may we've actually now released with a great integration between VRA and via ops that for the first time closes the loop between the two solutions so that you can start to do intelligent workload placement right depending upon if I'm trying to optimize for cost I'm trying to optimize for tier of service you know whether it's bronze silver gold tier service I'm trying to optimize for software license management you know Oracle license is only going on Oracle tier etcetera this closed-loop with policy ensures you do that and that's the first step in this direction of self-driving that's a very important direction because customers are gonna try to build more complex systems based on or support more complex applications without at the same time seeing that complexity show up in the administration side now that leaves the last question I have because ultimately the two of you are working to make together to make customers successful so tell us a little bit about how your track record your history and your direction of working together in support in service to customers is going and where you think it's gonna go absolutely so we continue to work very closely in partnership and as partners we are committed to support our customers through thick and thin you know to make sure that they can have these engineered pre-engineered clouds set up so they can get the benefits of these clouds lower cost to serve you know in terms of highly efficient workload the fact as much as possible in the you know let me tell about of hardware that's available and at the same time the automation and the self-service that enables the agility so the development teams can build software quickly I think provision software really fast so those are the kind of benefits lower cost agility but in partnership jointly serving our customers RJ Singh senior vice president general manager of the VMware cloud management business unit thanks again for beyond the cube thank you Peter glad to be here Stu back to you all right thanks Peter for sharing that VMware perspective to help understand a little bit more some of the customer implications we're back with Dan and Pete Pete we talked about there's new management there's a few different software packages is this exclusively for the new generation of VX block 1000 or you know who the existing customers will be able to use this sure I mean obviously advanced management features are important to all of our customers so we specifically designed the Xbox central to run both on existing VX block customers and of course in our new VX blocks that were a lot of the factor as well alright so Dan we've talked about the progress we've made the the you know great maturation in these solutions set what's next what customers expect and what should we be looking for from Dellums in the future so this the thing with us is always data center operations simplification if you think about it what we're introducing today is all about simplifying and provisioning and management of the existing system within the system we've heard also from customers what they look for us next to do is to try to improve the upgrade process simplify that as well so we've already got some development efforts working on that we'll be excited and news for later this year or early next year janna follow-up went dance that we always talked to our customers about what they're looking for in addition to more automation and we're monitoring support they want to go to consume their resources in a more agile environment cloud like a farm and even on-premises so that combined with the be realized suite of products we're going to be providing more cloud live experience to our customers for their yeah walks in the future alright Pete and Dan thank you so much for sharing this news we're gonna now turn it over to the community so you've heard about the announcement we've been talking for quite a long time at wiki bond about how automation and tools are gonna hopefully help make your job easier so want you to dig in ask the questions what do you like what do you want to see more of and so everybody let's growl chat great

>> We're back with Trey Layton, who's the senior vice president and CTO of Converged at Dell EMC. Trey, it's always a pleasure, good to see you. >> Dave, good to see you as well. >> We're at eight years into Vblock. Take us back to the converged infrastructure early days. What problems were you trying to solve with CI? >> Well, one of the problems with IT in general is it's been hard, and one of the reasons why it's been hard is all the variability that customers consume, and how do you integrate all that variability in a sustaining manner to maintain the assets so it can support the business? The thing that we've learned is, the original recipe that we had for Vblock was to go at and solve that very problem. We have referred to that as lifecycle. Manage the lifecycle services of the data center assets that you're deploying. We have created some great intellectual property, some great innovation around helping minimize the complexity associated with managing the lifecycle of a very complex integration by way of one of the largest data center assets that people operate in their environments. >> So, yeah, thousands and thousands of customers. They're telling you lifecycle management is critical, but what are they doing? They're shifting their labor resource to more strategic activities? Is that what's going on? >> Well, there's so much variation and complexity in just maintaining the different integration points that they're spending an inordinate amount of their time, a lot of nights and weekends, on understanding and figuring out which software combinations, which configuration combinations that need to operate. What we do as an organization and have done since inception is, we manage that complexity for them. We deliver them an outcome-based architecture that is pre-integrated, and we sustain that integration over its life, so they spend less time doing that and letting the experts who actually build the components focus on maintaining those integrations. >> As an analyst, I always looked at converged infrastructure as an evolutionary trend, bringing together storage servers, networking, bespoke components. My question is, where's the innovation underneath converged infrastructure? >> I would say innovation is in two areas. We're blessed with a lot of technology innovations that come from our partner and our own companies, Dell EMC and Cisco. Cisco produces wonderful innovations in the space of networking compute in the context of Vblock. Dell EMC, storage innovations, data protection, et cetera. We harmonize all of these very complex integration in a manner where an organization can put those advanced integrations into solving business problems immediately. There's two vectors of innovation. There are the technology components that we're acquiring to solve business problems, and there's the method in which we integrate them to get to the business of solving problems. >> Okay, let's get into the announcement. What are you announcing, what's new, why should we care? >> The announcement is, we are announcing the VxBlock 1000. The interesting thing about Vblocks over the years is they have been individual systems architectures. A compute technology integrated with a particular storage architecture would produce a model of Vblock. With VxBlock 1000, we're actually introducing an architecture that provides a full gamut of array optionality for customers. Both blade and rack server options for customers on the UCS compute side, and before, we would integrate data protection technologies as an extension or an add-on into the architecture. Data protection is native to the offer. In addition to that, unstructured data storage. So, being able to include unstructured data into the architecture as one singular architecture, as opposed to buying individualized systems. >> Okay, so you're just further simplifying the underlying infrastructure, which is going to save me even more time, is that right? >> Producing a standard which can adapt to virtually any use case that a customer has in a data center environment, giving them the ability to expand and grow that architecture as their workload dictates in their environment, as opposed to buying a system to accommodate one workload, buying another system to accommodate another workload. This is breaking the barriers of traditional CI and moving it forward so that we can create an adaptive architecture that can accommodate not only the technologies available today, but the technologies on the horizon tomorrow. >> Okay, so it's workload diversity, which means greater asset leverage from that underlying infrastructure. >> Trey: Absolutely. >> Can you give us some examples? How do you envision customers using this? >> I would talk specifically about customers that we have today, and when they deploy, have deployed Vblocks in the past. We've done wonderful by building architectures that accommodate, or they're tailor-made for certain types of workloads. A customer environment would end up acquiring a Vblock model 700 to accommodate an SAP workload, for example. They would acquire a Vblock 300 or 500 to accommodate a VI workload. And then, as those workloads would grow, they would grow those individualized systems. What it did was, it created islands of stranded resource and capacity. Vblock 1000 is about bringing all those capabilities into a singular architecture where you can grow the resources based on pools. As your workload shifts in your environment, you can reallocate resources to accommodate the needs of that workload, as opposed to worrying about stranded capacity in the architecture. >> Where do you go from here with the architecture? Can you share with us, to the extent that you can, a little roadmap? Give us a vision as to how you see this playing out over the next several years. >> Well, one of the reasons why we did this was to simplify and make it easier to operate these very complex architectures that everyone's consuming around the world. Vblock has always been about simplifying complex technologies in the data center. There are a lot of innovations on the horizon. NVMe, for example. Next-generation compute platforms. There are new-generation fabric services that are merging. VxBlock 1000 is the place at which you will see all of these technologies introduce, and our customers won't have to wait on new models of Vblock to consume those technologies. They will be resident in them upon their availability to the market. >> The buzzword from the vendor community is "Futureproof," but you're saying you'll be able to, if you buy today, you'll be able to bring in things like NVMe and these new technologies down the road? >> The architecture inherently supports the idea of adapting to new technologies as they emerge, and will consume those integrations as a part of the architectural standard footprint for the life of the architecture. >> All right, excellent. Trey, thanks very much for that overview. Cisco, obviously, a huge partner of yours, with this whole initiative, many, many years. A lot of people have questioned where that goes, so we have a segment from Cisco Live. Stu Miniman's out there. Let's break to Stu, and then we'll come back and pick it up from there. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello everyone welcome to this special presentation, The Future of Converged Infrastructure, my name is David Vellante, and I'll be your host, for this event where the focus is on Dell EMC's converged infrastructure announcement. Nearly a decade ago, modern converged infrastructure really came to the floor in the marketplace, and what you had is compute, storage, and network brought together in a single managed entity. And when you talk to IT people, the impact was roughly a 30 to 50% total cost of ownership reduction, really depending on a number of factors. How much virtualization they had achieved, how complex their existing processees were, how much they could save on database and other software licenses and maintenance, but roughly that 30 to 50% range. Fast forward to 2018 and you're looking at a multibillion dollar market for converged infrastructure. Jeff Boudreau is here, he's the President of the Dell EMC Storage Division, Jeff thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're welcome. So we're going to set up this announcement let me go through the agenda. Jeff and I are going to give an overview of the announcement and then we're going to go to Trey Layton, who's the Chief Technology Officer of the converged infrastructure group at Dell EMC. He's going to focus on the architecture, and some of the announcement details. And then, we're going to go to Cisco Live to a pre-recorded session that we did in Barcelona, and get the Cisco perspective, and then Jeff and I will come back to wrap it up. We also, you might notice we have a crowd chat going on, so underneath this video stream you can ask questions, you got to log in with LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook, I prefer Twitter, kind of an ask me anything crowd chat. We have analysts on, Stu Miniman is hosting that call. We're going to talk about what this announcement is all about, what the customer issues are that are being addressed by this announcement. So Jeff, let's get into it. From your perspective, what's the state of converged infrastructure today? >> Great question. I'm really bullish on CI, in regards to what converged infrastructure and kind of the way the market's going. We see continued interest in the growth of the market of our customers. Driven by the need for simplicity, agility, elasticity of those on-prem resources. Dell EMC pioneered the CI market several years ago, with the simple premise of simplify IT, and our focus and commitment to our customers has not changed of simplifying IT. As our customers continue to seek for new ways to simplify and consolidate infrastructure, we expect more and more of our customers to embrace CI, as a fast and easy way to modernize their infrastructure, and transform IT. >> You talk about transformation, we do a lot of events, and everybody's talking about digital transformation, and IT transformation, what role does converged infrastructure play in those types of transformations, maybe you could give us an example? >> Sure, so first I'd say our results speak for themselves. As I said we pioneered the CI industry, as the market leader, we enabled thousands of customers worldwide to drive business transformation and digital transformation. And when I speak to customers specifically, converged infrastructure is not just about the infrastructure, it's about the operating model, and how they simplify IT. I'd say two of the biggest areas of impact that customers highlight to me, are really about the acceleration of application delivery, and then the other big one is around the increase in operational efficiencies allowing customers to free up resources, to reinvest however they see fit. >> Now since the early days of converged infrastructure Cisco has been a big partner of yours, you guys were kind of quasi-exclusive for awhile, they went out and sought other partners, you went out and sought other partners, a lot of people have questions about that relationship, what's your perspective on that relationship. >> So our partnership with Cisco is strong as ever. We're proud of this category we've created together. We've been on this journey for a long time we've been working together, and that partnership will continue as we go forward. In full transparency there are of course some topics where we disagree, just like any normal relationship we have disagreements, an example of that would be HCI, but in the CI space our partnership is as strong as ever. We'll have thousands of customers between the two of us, that we will continue to invest and innovate together on. And I think later in this broadcast you're going to hear directly from Cisco on that, so we're both doubling down on the partnership, and we're both committed to CI. >> I want to ask you about leadership generally, and then specifically as it relates to converged infrastructure and hyper converged. My question is this, hyper converged is booming, it's a high growth market. I sometimes joke that Dell EMC is now your leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrants, 101 Gartner Magic Quadrants out of the 99. They're just leading everything and I think both the CI and the HCI categories, what's your take, is CI still relevant? >> First I'd say it's great to come from a leadership position so I thank you for bringing that up, I think it's really important. As Micheal talks about being the essential infrastructure company, that's huge for us as Dell Technologies, so we're really proud of that and we want to lean into that strength. Now on HCI vs CI, to me it's an AND world. Everybody wants to get stock that's in either or, to me it's about the AND story. All our customers are going on a journey, in regards to how they transform their businesses. But at the end of the day, if I took my macro view, and took a step back, it's about the data. The data's the critical asset. The good news for me and for our team is data always continues to grow, and is growing at an amazing rate. And as that critical asset, customers are really kind of thinking about a modern data strategy as they drive foreword. And as part of that, they're looking at how to store, protect, secure, analyze, move that data, really unleashing that data to provide value back to their businesses. So with all of that, not all data is going to be created equal, as part of that, as they build out those strategies, it's going to be a journey, in regards to how they do it. And if that's software defined, vs purpose built arrays, vs converged, or hyper converged, or even cloud, those deployment models, we, Dell EMC, and Dell Technologies want to be that strategic partner, that trusted advisor to help them on that journey. >> Alright Jeff, thanks for helping me with the setup. I want to ask you to hang around a little bit. >> Jeff: Sure. >> We're going to go to a video, and then we're going to bring back Trey Layton, talk about the architecture so keep it right there, we'll be right back. >> Announcer: Dell EMC has long been number one in converged infrastructure, providing technology that simplifies all aspects of IT, and enables you to achieve better business outcomes, faster, and we continue to lead through constant innovation. Introducing, the VxBlock System 1000, the next generation of converged infrastructure from Dell EMC. Featuring enhanced life cycle management, and a broad choice of technologies, to support a vast array of applications and resources. From general purpose to mission critical, big data to specialized workloads, VxBlock 1000 is the industry's first converged infrastructure system, with the flexible data services, power, and capacity to handle all data center workloads, giving you the ultimate in business agility, data center efficiency, and operational simplicity. Including best-of-breed storage and data protection from Dell EMC, and computer networking from Cisco. (orchestral music) Converged in one system, these technologies enable you to flexibly adapt resources to your evolving application's needs, pool resources to maximize utilization and increase ROI, deliver a turnkey system in lifecycle assurance experience, that frees you to focus on innovation. Four times storage types, two times compute types, and six times faster updates, and VME ready, and future proof for extreme performance. VxBlock 1000, the number one in converged now all-in-one system. Learn more about Dell EMC VxBlock 1000, at DellEMC.com/VxBlock. >> We're back with Trey Layton who's the Senior Vice President and CTO of converged at Dell EMC. Trey it's always a pleasure, good to see you. >> Dave, good to see you as well. >> So we're eight years into Vblock, take us back to the converged infrastructure early days, what problems were you trying to solve with CI. >> Well one of the problems with IT in general is it's been hard, and one of the reasons why it's been hard is all the variability that customers consume. And how do you integrate all that variability in a sustaining manner, to maintain the assets so it can support the business. And, the thing that we've learned is, the original recipe that we had for Vblock, was to go at and solve that very problem. We have referred to that as life cycle. Manage the life cycle services of the biggest inner assets that you're deploying. And we have created some great intellectual property, some great innovation around helping minimize the complexity associated with managing the life cycle of a very complex integration, by way of, one of the largest data center assets that people operate in their environment. >> So you got thousands and thousands of customers telling you life cycle management is critical. They're shifting their labor resource to more strategic activities, is that what's going on? Well there's so much variation and complexity in just maintaining the different integration points, that they're spending an inordinate amount of their time, a lot of nights and weekends, on understanding and figuring out which software combinations, which configuration combinations you need to operate. What we do as an organization, and have done since inception is, we manage that complexity for them. We delivery them an outcome based architecture that is pre-integrated, and we sustain that integration over it's life, so they spend less time doing that, and letting the experts who actually build the components focus on maintaining those integrations. >> So as an analyst I always looked at converged infrastructure as an evolutionary trend, bringing together storage, servers, networking, bespoke components. So my question is, where's the innovation underneath converged infrastructure. >> So I would say the innovation is in two areas. We're blessed with a lot of technology innovations that come from our partner, and our own companies, Dell EMC and Cisco. Cisco produces wonderful innovations in the space of networking compute, in the context of Vblock. Dell EMC, storage innovations, data protection, et cetera. We harmonize all of these very complex integrations in a manner where an organization can put those advanced integrations into solving business problems immediately. So there's two vectors of innovation. There are the technology components that we are acquiring, to solve business problems, and there's the method at which we integrate them, to get to the business of solving problems. >> Okay, let's get into the announcement. What are you announcing, what's new, why should we care. >> We are announcing the VxBlock 1000, and the interesting thing about Vblocks over the years, is they have been individual system architectures. So a compute technology, integrated with a particular storage architecture, would produce a model of Vblock. With VxBlock 1000, we're actually introducing an architecture that provides a full gamut of array optionality for customers. Both blade and rack server options, for customers on the UCS compute side, and before we would integrate data protection technologies as an extension or an add-on into the architecture, data protection is native to the offer. In addition to that, unstructured data storage. So being able to include unstructured data into the architecture as one singular architecture, as opposed to buying individualized systems. >> Okay, so you're just further simplifying the underlying infrastructure which is going to save me even more time? >> Producing a standard which can adapt to virtually any use case that a customer has in a data center environment. Giving them the ability to expand and grow that architecture, as their workload dictates, in their environment, as opposed to buying a system to accommodate one workload, buying another system to accommodate another workload, this is kind of breaking the barriers of traditional CI, and moving it foreword so that we can create an adaptive architecture, that can accommodate not only the technologies available today, but the technologies on the horizon tomorrow. >> Okay so it's workload diversity, which means greater asset leverage from that underlying infrastructure. >> Trey: Absolutely. >> Can you give us some examples, how do you envision customers using this? >> So I would talk specifically about customers that we have today. And when they deploy, or have deployed Vblocks in the past. We've done wonderful by building architectures that accommodate, or they're tailor made for certain types of workloads. And so a customer environment would end up acquiring a Vblock model 700, to accommodate an SAP workload for example. They would acquire a Vblock 300, or 500 to accommodate a VDI workload. And then as those workloads would grow, they would grow those individualized systems. What it did was, it created islands of stranded resource capacities. Vblock 1000 is about bringing all those capabilities into a singular architecture, where you can grow the resources based on pools. And so as your work load shifts in your environment, you can reallocate resources to accommodate the needs of that workload, as opposed to worrying about stranded capacity in the architecture. >> Okay where do you go from here with the architecture, can you share with us, to the extent that you can, a little roadmap, give us a vision as to how you see this playing out over the next several years. >> Well, one of the reasons why we did this was to simplify, and make it easier to operate, these very complex architectures that everyone's consuming around the world. Vblock has always been about simplifying complex technologies in the data center. There are a lot of innovations on the horizon in VME, for example, next generation compute platforms. There are new generation fabric services, that are emerging. VxBlock 1000 is the place at which you will see all of these technologies introduced, and our customers won't have to wait on new models of Vblock to consume those technologies, they will be resident in them upon their availability to the market. >> The buzz word from the vendor community is future proof, but your saying, you'll be able to, if you buy today, you'll be able to bring in things like NVME and these new technologies down the road. >> The architecture inherently supports the idea of adapting to new technologies as they emerge, and will consume those integrations, as a part of the architectural standard footprint, for the life of the architecture. >> Alright excellent Trey, thanks very much for that overview. Cisco obviously a huge partner of yours, with this whole initiative, many many years. A lot of people have questioned where that goes, so we have a segment from Cisco Live, Stu Miniman is out there, let's break to Stu, then we'll come back and pick it up from there. Thanks for watching. >> Thanks Dave, I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at Cisco Live 2018 in Barcelona, Spain. Happy to be joined on the program by Nigel Moulton the EMEA CTO of Dell EMC, and Siva Sivakumar, who's the Senior Director of Data Center Solutions at Cisco, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining me. >> Thanks Stu. >> Looking at the long partnership of Dell and Cisco, Siva, talk about the partnership first. >> Absolutely. If you look back in time, when we launched UCS, the very first major partnership we brought, and the converged infrastructure we brought to the market was Vblock, it really set the trend for how customers should consume compute, network, and storage together. And we continue to deliver world class technologies on both sides and the partnership continues to thrive as we see tremendous adoption from our customers. So we are here, several years down, still a very vibrant partnership in trying to get the best product for the customers. >> Nigel would love to get your perspective. >> Siva's right I think I'd add, it defined a market, if you think what true conversion infrastructure is, it's different, and we're going to discuss some more about that as we go through. The UCS fabric is unique, in the way that it ties a network fabric to a compute fabric, and when you bring those technologies together, and converge them, and you have a partnership like Cisco, you have a partnership with us, yeah it's going to be a fantastic result for the market because the market moves on, and I think, VxBlock actually helped us achieve that. >> Alright so Siva we understand there's billions of reasons why Cisco and Dell would want to keep this partnership going, but talk about from an innovation standpoint, there's the new VxBlock 1000, what's new, talk about what's the innovation here. >> Absolutely. If you look at the VxBlock perspective, the 1000 perspective, first of all it simplifies an extremely fast successful product to the next level. It simplifies the storage options, and it provides a seamless way to consume those technologies. From a Cisco perspective, as you know we are in our fifth generation of UCS platform, continues to be a world class platform, leading blade service in the industry. But we also bring the innovation of rack mount servers, as well as 40 gig fabric, larger scale, fiber channel technology as well. As we bring our compute, network, as well as a sound fabric technology together, with world class storage portfolio, and then simplify that for a single pane of glass consumption model. That's absolutely the highest level of innovation you're going to find. >> Nigel, I think back in the early days the joke was you could have a Vblock anyway you want, as long as it's black. Obviously a lot of diversity in product line, but what's new and different here, how does this impact new customers and existing customers. >> I think there's a couple of things to pick up on, what Trey said, what Siva said. So the simplification piece, the way in which we do release certification matrix, the way in which you combine a single software image to manage these multiple discreet components, that is greatly simplified in VxBlock 1000. Secondly you remove a model number, because historically you're right, you bought a three series, a five series, and a seven series, and that sort of defined the architecture. This is now a system wide architecture. So those technologies that you might of thought of as being discreet before, or integrated at an RCM level that was perhaps a little complex for some people, that's now dramatically simplified. So those are two things that I think we amplify, one is the simplification and two, you're removing a model number and moving to a system wide architecture. >> Want to give you both the opportunity, gives us a little bit, what's the future when you talk about the 1000 system, future innovations, new use cases. >> Sure, I think if you look at the way enterprise are consuming, the demand for more powerful systems that'll bring together more consolidation, and also address the extensive data center migration opportunities we see, is very critical, that means the customers are really looking at whether it is a in-memory database that scales to, much larger scale than before, or large scale cluster databases, or even newer workloads for that matter, the appetite for a larger system, and the need to have it in the market, continues to grow. We see a huge install base of our customers, as well as new customers looking at options in the market, truly realize, the strength of the portfolio that each one of us brings to the table, and bringing the best-of-breed, whether it is today, or in the future from an innovation standpoint, this is absolutely the way that we are approaching building our partnership and building new solutions here. >> Nigel, when you're talking to customers out there, are they coming saying, I'm going to need this for a couple of months, I mean this is an investment they're making for a couple years, why is this a partnership built to last. >> An enterprise class customer certainly is looking for a technology that's synonymous with reliability, availability, performance. And if you look at what VxBlock has traditionally done and what the 1000 offers, you see that. But Siva's right, these application architectures are going to change. So if you can make an investment in a technology set now that keeps the premise of reliability, availability, and performance to you today, but when you look at future application architectures around high capacity memory, adjacent to a high performance CPU, you're almost in a position where you are preparing the ground for what that application architecture will need, and the investments that people make in the VxBlock system with the UCS power underneath at the compute layer, it's significant, because it lays out a very clear path to how you will integrate future application architectures with existing application architectures. >> Nigel Moulton, Siva Sivakumar, thank you so much for joining, talking about the partnership and the future. >> Siva: Thank you. >> Nigel: Pleasure. >> Sending back to Dave in the US, thanks so much for watching The Cube from Cisco Live Barcelona. >> Thank you. >> Okay thanks Stu, we're back here with Jeff Boudreau. We talked a little bit earlier about the history of conversion infrastructure, some of the impacts that we've seen in IT transformations, Trey took us through the architecture with some of the announcement details, and of course we heard from Cisco, was a lot of fun in Barcelona. Jeff bring it home, what are the take aways. >> Some of the key take aways I have is just I want to make sure everybody knows Dell EMC's continued commitment to modernizing infrastructure for conversion infrastructure. In addition to that was have a strong partnership with Cisco as you heard from me and you also heard from Cisco, that we both continue to invest and innovate in these spaces. In addition to that we're going to continue our leadership in CI, this is critical, and it's extremely important to Dell, and EMC, and Dell EMC's Cisco relationship. And then lastly, that we're going to continue to deliver on our customer promise to simplify IT. >> Okay great, thank you very much for participating here. >> I appreciate it. >> Now we're going to go into the crowd chat, again, it's an ask me anything. What make Dell EMC so special, what about security, how are the organizations affected by converged infrastructure, there's still a lot of, roll your own going on. There's a price to pay for all this integration, how is that price justified, can you offset that with TCO. So let's get into that, what are the other business impacts, go auth in with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, Twitter is my preferred. Let's get into it thanks for watching everybody, we'll see you in the crowd chat. >> I want IT to be dial tone service, where it's always available for our providers to access. To me, that is why IT exists. So our strategy at the hardware and software level is to ruthlessly standardize leverage in a converged platform technology. We want to create IT almost like a vending machine, where a user steps up to our vending machine, they select the product they want, they put in their cost center, and within seconds that product is delivered to that end user. And we really need to start running IT like a business. Currently we have a VxBlock that we will run our University of Vermont Medical Center epic install on. Having good performance while the provider is within that epic system is key to our foundation of IT. Having the ability to combine the compute, network, and storage in one aspect in one upgrade, where each component is aligned and regression tested from a Dell Technology perspective, really makes it easy as an IT individual to do an upgrade once or twice a year versus continually trying to keep each component of that infrastructure footprint upgraded and aligned. I was very impressed with the VxBlock 1000 from Dell Technologies, specifically a few aspects of it that really intrigued me. With the VxBlock 1000, we now have the ability to mix and match technologies within that frame. We love the way the RCM process works, from a converged perspective, the ability to bring the compute, the storage, and network together, and trust that Dell Technologies is going to upgrade all those components in a seamless manner, really makes it easier from an IT professional to continue to focus on what's really important to our organization, provider and patient outcomes.

Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to Wikibon's Action Item. (electronic music) Every week, we bring together the Wikibon research team and we present the action items that we believe are most crucial for users to focus on against very important topics. This week, I'm joined by George Gilbert, David Floyer, here in the Cube studios in Palo Alto. And on the phone we have Ralph Phinos, Dave Vellante, and Jim Kobielus. Thank you guys, thank you team for being part of today's conversation. What were going to talk about today in Action Item is the notion of what we're calling enterprise hyperscale. Now we're going to take a route to get there that touches upon many important issues, but fundamentally the question is, at what point should enterprises choose to deploy their own hardware at scale to support applications that will have a consequential business impact on their shareholder, customer, and employee value? Now to kick us off here, 'cause this is a very complex topic, and it involves a lot of different elements, David Floyer, first question to you. What is the core challenge that enterprises face today as they think about build, buy, or rent across this increasingly mushed hardware continuum, or system continuum? >> So the biggest challenge from the traditional way that enterprises have put together systems is that the cost and the time to manage these systems is going up and up. And as we go from just systems of record, to with analytic systems being mainly in bash mode, towards systems of intelligence where the real-time analytics are going to combine in with the systems of record. So the complexity of the systems and the software layers are getting more and more complicated. And it takes more and more time and effort and elapsed time to keep things current. >> Why is it that not everybody can do this, David? Is there a fundamental economic reason to play here? >> Well, if you take systems, and build them yourself and put them together yourself, you'll always end up with the cheapest system. The issue is that the cost of maintaining those systems, and even more, the elapsed time cost of maintaining those systems, the time to value to putting in new releases, etc., has been extending. And there comes a time when that cost of delaying implementing new systems overwhelms the cost that you can save in the hardware itself. >> So there's some scale efficiencies in thinking about integration from a time standpoint. Dave Vellante, we've been looking at this for quite some time, and we think about true private could, for example. But if you would, kind of give us that core dynamic in simple terms between what is valuable to the business, what isn't valuable to the business, and the different options between renting and buying your cells, what is that kind of core dynamic at play? >> OK, so as we talked about a lot in our true private cloud research, hyper-converged systems are an attempt to substantially mimic public cloud environments on-prem. And this creates this bifurcated buying dynamic that I think is worth exploring a little bit. The big cloud players, as everybody talks about, have lots of engineers running around, they have skill, and they have time. So they'll spend time to build proprietary technologies and use their roll-your-own components to automate processes. In other words, they'll spend time to save money. And this is essentially the hyperscale as a form of their R&D, and they have an end-year lead, whatever it's five, six, four years on the enterprise. And that's not likely to change, that dynamic. The enterprise buyers, on the other hand, they don't have the resources, they're stretched thin, so they'll spend money to save time. So enterprises they want to cut labor costs, and shift useless IT labor to so-called vendor R&D. To wit, our forecasts show that about $150 billion is going to come out of low-value IT operations over the next ten years, and will shift to integrated products. >> So ultimately we end up seeing the vendors effectively capturing a lot of that spend that otherwise had been internally. Now this raises a new dynamic, when we think about this, David Floyer, in that there are still vendors that have to return something to their shareholders. There's this increased recognition that businesses or enterprises want this cloud experience, but not everybody is able to offer it, and we end up then with some really loosely-defined definitions. What's the continuum of where systems are today, from traditional all the way out to cloud, what does that look like? >> So a useful way of looking at it is to see what has happened over time and where we think it's going. We started with separate systems completely. Converged systems then came in, where the vendor put them together and reduced the time a little bit to value. But really the maintenance was still a responsibility of-- >> [Peter] But what was brought together? >> [David F] It was the traditional arrays, it was the servers-- >> Racks, power supplies-- >> All of that stuff put together, and delivered as a package. The next level up was so-called hyper-converged, where certainly some of the hyperconverged vendors went and put in software for each layer, software for the storage layer, software for the networking layer, put in more management. But a lot of vendors really took hyperconverged as being the old stuff with a few extra flavors. >> So they literally virtualized those underlying hardware sources, got some new efficiencies and economies. >> That's right, so they software virtualized each of those components. When you look at the cloud vendors, just skipping one there, they have gone hyperscale. And they have put in, as Dave spoke earlier, they have put in all of their software to make that hyperscale work. What we think in the middle of that is enterprise hyperscale, which is coming in, where you have the what we call service end. We have that storage capability, we have the networking capability, and the CPU capabilities, all separated, able to be scaled in whatever direction is required, and any processor to be able to get at any data through that network, with very, very little overhead. And it's software for the storage, it's software and firmware for the networking. The processor is relieved of all that processing. We think that architecture is going to mimic what the hyperscale have. But the vendors now have an opportunity of putting in the software to emulate that cloud experience, and take away from the people who want on-site equipment, take away all of the work that's necessary to keep that software stack up to date. The vendors are going to maintain that software stack as high as they can go. >> So David, is this theory, or are there practical examples of this happening today? >> Oh, absolutely, there are practical examples of those happening. There are practical examples at the lower levels, with people like Micron and SolidScale. That's at a technology level, when we're talking about hyperscale-- Well if you're looking at it from a practical point of view, ARCOL have put it into the marketplace. ARCOL cloud on-premises, ARCOL converged systems, where they are taking the responsibility of maintaining all of the software, all the way up to the database stack. And in the future, probably beyond that, towards the ARCOL applications as well. So they're taking that approach, putting it in, and arguing, persuasively, that the customer should focus on time to value as opposed to cost of just the hardware. >> Well we can also look at SaaS vendors right, who many of the have come off of infrastructure as a service, deployed their own enterprise hyperscale, increasingly starting to utilize some of this hyperscale componentry, as a basis for building things out. Now one of the key reasons why we want to do this, and George I'll turn it to you, is because as David mentioned earlier, the idea is we want to bring analytics and operations more closely together to improve automation, augmentation, other types of workloads. What is it about that effort that's encouraging this kind of adoption of these new approaches? >> [George] Well databases typically make great leaps forward when we have changes in the underlying trade-offs or relative price performance of compute storage and networking. What we're talking about with hyperscale, I guess either on-prem or the cloud version, is that we can build scale out that databases can support without having to be rewritten, so that they work just the way they did on tightly-coupled symmetric multiprocessors, shared memory. And so now they can go from a few nodes, or half a dozen nodes, or even say a dozen nodes, to thousands. And as David's research has pointed out, they have latency to get to memory in any node from any node in five microseconds. So building up from that, the point is we can now build databases that really do have the horsepower to handle the analytics to inform the transactions in the same database. Or, if you do separate them, because you don't want to touch a current system of record, you have a very powerful analytic system that can apply more data and do richer analytics to inform a decision in the form of a transaction, than you could with traditional architectures. >> So it's the data that's driving the need for a data-rich system that's architected in the context of data needs, that's driving a lot of this change. Now, David Floyer, we've talked about data tiering. We've talked about the notion of primary, secondary, and tertiary data. Without revisiting that entirely, what is it about this notion of enterprise hyperconverge that's going to make it easier to naturally place data where it belongs in the infrastructure? >> Well underlying this is that moving data is extremely expensive, so you want to, where possible, move the processing to the data itself. The origin of that data may be at the edge, for example, in IOT. It may be in a large central headquarters. It may be in the cloud, it may be operational data, end-user data, for people using their phones, which is available from the cloud. So there are multiple sources. So you want to place the processing as close to that data as possible so that you have the least cost of both moving it, and you have the lowest latency. And that's particularly important when you've got systems of intelligence where you want to combine the two. >> So Jim Kobielus, it seems as though there's a compelling case to be made here to focus on time, time to value, time to deploy, on the one hand, as well as another aspect of time, the time associated with latency, the time associated with reducing path length, and optimizing for path length. Which again has a scale impact. What are developers thinking? Are developers actually going to move the market to these kinds of solutions, or are they going to try to do something different? >> I think what developers will do is that they will begin to move the market towards hyperconverged systems. Much of the development that's going on now is for artificial intelligence, deep learning, and so forth, where you're building applications that have an increasing degree of autonomy, being able to make decisions based on system of record data, system of engagement data, system of insight data, in real time. What that increasingly requires, Peter, is a development platform that combines those different types of data bases, or data stores, and also combines the processing for deep learning, machine learning, and so forth. On devices that are increasingly tinier and tinier, and embedded in mobile devices and what not. So what I'm talking about here is an architecture for development where developers are going to say, I want to be able to develop it in the cloud, I'm going to need to. 'Cause we have huge teams of specialists who are building and training and deploying and iterating these in a cloud environment, a centralized modeling context, but then deploying their results of their work down to the smallest systems where these models will need to run, if not autonomously, in some loosely-coupled fashion with tier two and tier three systems, which will also be hyperconverged. And each of those systems in each of those tiers will need a self-similar data fabric, and an AI processing fabric. So what developers are saying is, I want to be able to take it and model it, and deploy it to these increasingly nano-scopic devices at the edge, and I need each of those components at every tier to have the same capabilities and hyperconverged form factors, essentially. >> For hyperscale, so here's where we are, guys. Where we are is that there are compelling economic reasons why we're going to see this notion of enterprise hyperscale emerge. It appears that the workloads are encouraging that. Developers seem to be moving towards adopting these technologies. But there's another group that we haven't talked about. Dave Vellante, the computing industry is not a simple go-to-market model. There's a lot of reasons why channels, partnerships, etc. are so complex. How are they going to weigh in on this change? >> [Dave Vellante] Well the cloud clearly is having an impact on the channel. I mean if you look at sort of the channel guys, you got the sort of box sellers, which still comprises most of the channel. You got more solution orientation, and then increasingly, you know, the developers are becoming a form of a channel. And I think the channel still has a lot of influence over how customers buy, and I think one of the reasons that people buy roll-your-own still, and it's somewhat artificial, is that the channel oftentimes prefers it that way. It's more complicated, and as their margins get squeezed, the channel players can maintain services, on top of those roll-your-own components. So I think buyers got to be careful, and they got to make sure that their service provider's motivations align with, you know, their desired outcomes, and they're not doing the roll-your-own bespoke approach for the wrong reasons. >> Yeah, and we've seen that a fair amount as we've talked to senior IT folks, that there's a clear misalignment, often, between what's being pushed from a technology standpoint and what the application actually requires, and that's one of the reasons why this question is so rich and so important. But Ralph Phinos, kind of sum up, when you think about some of these issues as they pertain to where to make investments, how to make investments. From our perspective, is there a relatively simple approach to thinking this through, and understanding how best to put your money to get the most value out of the technologies that you choose? (static hissing) Alright, I think we've lost Ralph there, so I'll try to answer the question myself. (chuckles) (David laughs) So here's how we would look at it, and David Floyer, help me out and see if you disagree with me. But at the end of the day, what we're looking for is we're suggesting to customers that have a cost orientation should worry a little bit less about risk, a little bit less about flexibility, and they can manage how that cost happens. And the goal is to try to reduce the cost as fast as possible, and not worry so much about the future options that they'll face in terms of how to reduce future types of cost out. And so that might push them more towards this public hyperscale approach. But for companies that are thinking in terms of revenue, that have to ensure that their systems are able to respond to competitive pressures, customer needs, that are increasingly worried about buying future options with today's technology choices. That there's a scale, but that's the group that's going to start looking more at the enterprise hyperscale. Clearly that's where SAS players are. Yeah. And then the question is and what requires further research is, where's that break point going to be? So if I'm looking at this from an automation, from a revenue standpoint, then I need a little bit greater visibility in where that break point's going to be between controlling my own destiny, with the technology that's crucial to my business, versus not having to deal with the near-term costs associated with doing the integration myself. But this time to value, I want to return to this time to value. >> [David] It's time to value that is the crucial thing here, isn't it? >> [Peter] Time to value now, and time to future value. >> And time to future value, yes. What is the consequence of doing everything yourself is that the time to put in new releases, the time to put in patches, the time to make your system secure, is increasingly high. And the more that you integrate systems into systems of intelligence, with the analytics and the systems of record, the more you start to integrate, the more complex the total environment, the more difficult it's going to be for people to manage that themselves. So in that environment, you would be pushing towards getting systems where the vendor is doing as much of that integration as they can-- And that's where they get the economies from. The vendors get the economies of scale because they can feed back into the system faster than anybody else. Rather than taking a snowflake approach, they're taking a volume approach, and they can feed back for example artificial intelligence in operational efficiency, in security. There's many, many opportunities for vendors to push down into the marketplace those findings. And those vendors can be cloud vendors as well. If you look at Microsoft, they can push down into their Azure Stack what they're finding in terms of artificial intelligence and in terms of capabilities. They can push those down into the enterprises themselves. So the more that they can go up the stack into the database layers, maybe even into the application layers, the higher they can go, the lower the cost, the lower the time to value will be for them to deploy applications using that. >> Alright, so we've very quickly got some great observations on this important dynamic. It's time for action items. So Jim Kobielus, let me start with you. What's the action item for this whole notion of hyperscale? Action items, Jim Kobielus. >> Yeah, the action item for hyperscale is to consider the degree of convergence you require at the lowest level of the system, the edge device. How much of that needs to be converged down to a commoditized component that can be flexible enough that you can develop a wide range of applications on top of that-- >> Excellent, hold on, OK. George Gilbert, action item. >> Really quickly you have to determine, are you going to keep your legacy system of record database, and add like an analytic database on a hyperscale infrastructure, so that you're not doing a heart and lung transplant on an existing system. If you can do that and you can manage the latency between the existing database and culling to the analytic database, that's great. Then there's little disruption. Otherwise you have to consider integrating the analytics into a hyperscale-ready legacy database. >> David Vellante, action item. >> Tasks like LUN management, and server provisioning, and just generally infrastructure management, and non-strategic. So as fast as possible, shift your "IT labor resources" up the stack toward more strategic initiatives, whether they're digital initiatives, data orientation, and other value-producing activities. >> David Floyer, action item. >> Well I was just about to say what Dave Vellante just said. So let me focus a little bit more on a step in order to get to that position. >> So Dave Floyer, action item. (David laughs) >> So the action item that I would choose would be that you have to know what your costs are, and you have to be able to, as senior management, look at those objectively and say, "What is my return on spending all of "this money and making the system operate?" The more that you can reduce the complexity, buy in, converge systems, hyperconverge systems, hyperscale systems, that are going to put that responsibility onto the vendors themselves, the better position you're going to be to really add value to the bottom line of applications that really can start to use all of this capability, advanced analytics that's coming into the marketplace. >> So I'm going to add an action item before I do a quick summary. And I'm just going to insert it. My action item, the relationship that you have with your vendors is going to change. It used to be focused on procurement and reducing the cost of acquisition. Increasingly, for those high-value, high-performing, revenue-producing, differentiating applications, it's going to be strategic vendor management. That implies a whole different range of activities. And companies that are going to build their business with technology and digital are going to have to move to a new relationship management framework. Alright, so let's summarize today's action item meeting. First of I want to thank very much George Gilbert, David Floyer, here in the studio with me. David Vellante, Ralph Phinos, Jim Kobielus on the phone. Today we talked about enterprise hyperscale. This is part of a continuum that we see happening, because the economics of technology are continuing to assert themselves in the marketplace, and it's having a significant range of impacts on all venues. When we think about scale economies, we typically think about how many chips we're going to stamp out, or how many copies of an operating system is going to be produced, and that still obtains, and it's very important. But increasingly users have to focus their attention to how we're going to generate economies out of the IT labor that's necessary to keep the digital businesses running. If we can shift some of those labor costs to other players, then we want to support those technology sets that embed those labor costs directly in the form of technology. So over the next few years, we're going to see the emergence of what we're calling enterprise hyperscale that embeds labor costs directly into hyperscale packaging, so that companies can focus more on generating revenue out of technology, and spend less time on the integration of work. The implications of that is that the traditional buying process of trying to economize on the time to purchase, the time to get access to the piece parts, is going to give way to a broader perspective on time to ultimate value of the application or of the outcome that we seek. And that's going to have a number of implications that CIOs have to worry about. From an external standpoint, it's going to mean valuing technology differently, valuing packaging differently. It means less of a focus on the underlying hardware, more of a focus on this common set of capabilities that allow us to converge applications. So whereas converge technology talked about converging hardware, enterprise hyperscale increasingly is about converging applications against common data, so that we can run more complex and interesting workloads and revenue-producing workloads, without scaling the labor and management costs of those workloads. A second key issue is, we have to step back and acknowledge that sometimes the way products go to market, and our outcomes or our desires, do not align. That there is the residual reality in the marketplace that large numbers of channel partners and vendors have an incentive to try to push more complex technologies that require more integration, because it creates a greater need for them and creates margin opportunities. So ensure that as you try to achieve this notion of converged applications and not converged infrastructure necessarily, that you are working with a partner who follows that basic program. And the last thing is I noted a second ago, that that is going to require a new approach to thinking about strategic vendor management. For the last 30 years, we've done a phenomenal job of taking cost out of technology, by focusing on procurement and trying to drive every single dime out of a purchase that we possibly could. Even if we didn't know what that was going to mean from an ongoing maintenance and integration and risk-cost standpoint, what we need to think about now is what will be the cost to the outcome. And not only this outcome, but because we're worried about digital business, future outcomes, that are predicated on today's decisions. So the whole concept here is, from a relationship management standpoint, the idea of what relationship is going to provide us the best time to value today, and streams of time to value in the future. And we have to build our relationships around that. So once again I want to thank the team. This is Peter Burris. Thanks again for participating or listening to the Action Item. From the Cube studios in Palo Alto, California, see you next week. (electronic music)

>> Live from Los Vegas. It's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Los Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our wall-to-wall coverage. We're wrapping up day one. I'm Dave Alonte, my cohost here at this segment is Stu Miniman. Jon Siegal is here as the vice president of product marketing, cubulum from Dehli MC. Good to see you again Jon. >> Great to be back as always guys! >> And I love that you brought a customer, Suzan Pickett is here. >> That's what I do, by the way. You realize that, that's my new thing. >> Suzan is the VP and director of Converged Infrastructure at US Bank. >> Thank you for having me. >> Welcome, one of my banks. I got a lease with US Bank. You guys are great. >> Thank you. >> Great to have you guys. >> Let's start with a customer, if that's okay? >> Absolutely. >> Tell us about your role, you got CI in your title that's interesting. >> I do. >> That's a relatively new trend, explain that. >> Yeah absolutely, so I've been at the bank a couple years now and my teams focus on Converged and Hyperconverged Infrastructure, delivering solutions and infrastructure as a service for our business. >> You guys have been working together for a while if I understand it Jon, right? Talk a little bit about what's happening here at the show maybe give us a quick overview of what's happening in CI and HCI in your world. >> Absolutely, so a lot going on as you saw today in Dell Tech cloud announcement. HCI was a key pillar there. Really VxRail, in particular, was featured as the simple and fast foundation for the Dell Tech cloud both as the on-prem manage version as well as, as you heard, the Data Center as a service. So really exciting to see how HCI continues to evolve and it's use cases around cloud and infrastructure as a service, as well as platform as a service as well. So a lot of exciting announcements there. In addition to that, just this past week, by the way, we also, since you mentioned CI, Converged Infrastructure, we just announced that we re-upped our agreement with Cisco, a new multiyear agreement extension to continue to innovate with Cisco on the VxBlock, which, as you know, was the pioneer in this, Converged Infrastructure space and with all the recent integrations we've done now with VMware, VxBlock as well as HCI, is really built to be a on-prem foundation for the cloud. >> Yeah so, this goes back to 2009, when Cisco and VMware and EMC got together and created this concept of Converged Infrastructure. There were other competitors in the market, but you guys kind of lead that trend, and so when you go back to that years ago, that's our storage and networking and compute, they were different parts of the organization. I presume you guys went through a similar journey. You had to put all that together. Herd some calves. And what did that do for your business? What was your journey like to CI? >> I think we're still on that journey, but I think it's also evolving as we go more Agile and more DevOps, more software-defined, we're seeing a lot more blending of the teams as well so we're creating a lot of virtual teams that encompass not just infrastructure but security, developers, networking as well and really being able to deliver that infrastructure's service, platform as a service, end-to-end provisioning for our business lines. >> Suzan, I love that story because I remember talking to, when this started, you talk to the storage group and they'd say, "Oh my gosh, you're going to take away my job." I'm like, "You know that security thing that they've been yelling at you to fix for a while? You talk about the new business apps that we need to do. These are the types of jobs that we want you to do." I heard you talk about Agile and DevOps and all these things. Talk a little bit about, what are the pressures you're facing from the business and the relationship between your group that help you to meet those now. >> Sure, well the first thing we did was we created an infrastructure automation services team and people looked at us like we're a little crazy to do that and we pull those highly, highly motivated potentials from within the organization that we already had to focus on automation and get the foundation for infrastructure as a service and get that part right. Something as basic as provisioning a virtual machine would take 12 weeks or longer and through our journey with Kubernetes today, containers, vRealize Automation Suite, on both Converge and Hyperconverge, VxFlex. We're now reducing that down to about three days and we anticipate, with a lot of our sprints and iterations, that we're going to be getting that down to less than a day within the next quarter. >> So John Furry says that automation is the killer app for infrastructure, so are you guys, are you building essentially out on infrastructure as a service platform, where people used to call it private cloud. I don't know if you use that term still. I think it's still valid. >> We do, yeah. >> How's that going? What's been the business impact of that so-called private cloud? >> We had a Business Critical Application that would often take year release cycles, more than 12 weeks to get a server, primarily focusing on physical servers, and now what we're doing is we're partnering with them with not only the business, the application folks, the developers, the middleware teams, networks, security, but also all of the infrastructure teams to deliver that faster speed to market, and so now they're down to days now to provision. They actually gave us a stat the other day that said, "By using our automation with Kubernetes on Hyperconverge VxFlex, that they were able to have cost avoidance of hiring a bunch of people to build physical servers. So that in and of itself was a huge win, but the fact that we can repurpose and releverage that automation, those workflows, the orchestration models, means that we can continue this conversation with the next business line and the next business line and keep telling that story and it's a good one. >> Jon I'd live to hear from what Suzan was saying and there's so many of the modern things that they're doing. When you look at your customer base, how are they doing on that journey? We used to always ask, in the earlier days, it was like, alright how much was I just eliminating sub-silos but pretty much doing the same apps and same processes before or have I really gone through some transformation? >> I tell you what, we've seen quite a bit of transformation in our customer base because they had to. You look at now, as you see with US Banks, they're now transforming their organization to support DevOps, right? That's an entirely new realm for them to focus on. That means they need to make infrastructure easier and simpler so we're finding that is really, I think, that's the catalyst and that they're realizing that the way to do this is let's make infrastructure as simple as possible. Infrastructure service. Make that platform as a service available so our customers can spend less, wait, our IT department can spend less time on the speeds and fees, if you will, of maintaining infrastructure, more time innovating up the stack versus down the stack, right? >> Alright Suzan, I got to ask a question Jon probably doesn't want me to ask you. You're trying to simplify, 'cause you're doing all this stuff that's not really adding value to your business, you want to do stuff that's going to make you more competitive. Well why don't you just throw all this stuff in the cloud? >> Good question and I think that eventually we will have a multicloud strategy, but it is a bank and we don't want to be in the news for a data breach and that's the real answer but also because we want to, again, lay that foundation for an on-premise, solid infrastructure as a service with service catalogs at the business. We can then drive that product taxonomy and they know that they get a good, solid product from IT and then we extend that into the cloud so as much as we can do that, and maybe there will be some cloud native apps down the road that go 100% in the public cloud. I don't have a crystal ball. I suspect there will be, but again we want to do it right and we think this is the right foundation to lay for that. >> You want to have total control over, certainly, your mission critical apps, I'm presuming, right? Maybe put some stuff up. I'm sure you have plenty of stuff in the cloud. Well why Dell EMC? >> I think it goes back to our strategic partnership. It's always been that strong partnership, that enablement, and that continuous feedback loop. We need something, we go talk to our product teams. We get that back, we get it back from our product teams, so it's not always perfect, and there are competitors out there, but at the end of the day, when we look at the Dell Technologies family and that ecosystem and our ability to integrate, iterate, automate within that family, it just helps us stream like that and standardize. >> We've heard this morning from a lot of folks. Michael Dell talked about it. Jeff Clark talked about it. Companies want to consolidate the number of suppliers, certainly infrastructure suppliers, throwing sass forget it, so many apps now. Are you seeing that? Is there pressure to consolidate the number of suppliers, or do you still have, in certain cases, where you really want to go best of breed, so-called best of breed, for some niche app, or do you want to consolidate suppliers? >> So I always want to standardize because that's going to help our automation story, but I still want best of breed, and so that's one of the primary reasons that we're standardized on Dell Technologies today. VxFlex being one of them and Converged Infrastructure being another. There are use cases for multi-vendor strategy, but again, you would look at the right solution for the right job at the right time. >> Okay Jon, that was a totally loaded question, so can you be both a portfolio company like yours and still be best of breed and if so, how so? >> Well I think what we are, we certainly are a portfolio company in the way that, but I think we have leading infrastructure, leading solutions in each case. You take things like Hyperconverge and Converge, great example of that, and I think what we see at the US Bank is that that porfolio of solutions is what's actually enabling US Bank to essentially address all other challenges, right? Whether it's the IS, whether it's the crown jewel applications that Suzan's trying to support, whether it's the DevOps that they're trying to actually build out right now. We've got best of breed solutions for each of those as well within our portfolio. And also, I would say that we're really focused on, ultimately, a portfolio with a purpose meaning that we're taking our networking, for example, portfolio, you just talk to Drew Shulkin. Together with out HCI portfolio, and we're ensuring that they work really seamlessly together so that in the case of, for example, working with, say VxRail or VxRack, we're able to automate all the networking for a HCI environment or at least 98% of it. That's really, again, taking but that's because we're best of breed and porfolio at the same time. >> Yeah so, I'm throwing all kinds of loaded questions out here, and I want to understand this because as independent observers you get Company A says this, Company B says that, but the customer's ultimately the arbiter. How do you, maybe not define, but how do you look at best of breed, what is best of breed to you? >> I look at the technology that's going to make me look good and that's going to make my teams look good and that's not just day one, that's day two and I think that's where the differentiator is as well. We've always found that Dell Technologies is there to support us. Stuff breaks, right? Your car needs oil, your tires need rotating, and it's the same with equipment in the Data Center. How those companies react and they support and they have your back when that happens, I think is the key differentiator and we always found Dell Technologies to be there for us. >> So I'm hearing the breadth, the porfolio. We haven't talked about services but I know that's a key part of it. >> Well, Suzan I hear you talking about day two. CI helped simplify that day one and then, as it matured, it worked more on the day two, and HCI even more. When you talk about the cloud solutions from Dell EMC, that cloud operating model. When you think about public cloud, I don't think about what version I'm on, it takes care of that. When I hear some of the solutions from Dell, it's getting to that model. How are they doing along that that spectrum, I guess, from the, "Okay I need to do the RCM and manage when I do the updates" to "I don't even think about it anymore." >> Sure, I think it is still something that we all care about as much as we're told we shouldn't care about it, I care. I want to make sure that we're doing the right things at the right time. I think it's a journey. I think we've come a long way in the last few years and I think that every year it gets better and as we start extending to that multicloud, obviously that's going to drive some of that solutioning as well. I think we'll continue to see improvement in that area. >> What is something that you'd like to see Jon do to make your life better? (laughs) Besides cut prices, you can't say cut prices. >> Alright, cut prices. >> Every year you cut prices. >> Let's talk about that deal. I think just continuing to be there, continuing to represent, bringing forth the products, the products team, helping us be strategic and also be very tactical. While I have this one last opportunity 'cause I don't know where we are timewise. I just want to shout out to my team. Right, so it's not just the Dell Technologies team that's bringing all this to the table, it's my team and the organization and my peer teams as well. We just keep sharing, we keep collaborating, and we keep iterating. >> Yeah Jon, one of the things, talk about collaboration, my understanding is Suzan's part of one of the user groups here. You know, big community. >> Yes. >> We always talk about at these shows. Maybe you can share that. >> Yeah so Suzan is actually a new board member for our Converge user group which has been around for several years now and she just joined a few months ago. >> I did. >> And I think that we talk about collaboration and feedback. Suzan is representing not just her own team, she's representing teams around IT around the world. And I think she's a great example of providing feedback, not just at Dell EMC directly, but to other users as well, and best practices and tips and tricks. We have a user group tomorrow at three o'clock. I think couple big executives might be there as well, so it's going to be a lot of fun. So tomorrow at three o'clock. I think it's, at least, our sixth annual that we've had here. But the user group itself, I think exemplifies as much as you've been talking about 'cause that's evolved from being what used to just be about a user group just about blocks, VxBlocks, now it's about CI, it's about HCI, it's about VxBlock, it's about Dell Tech cloud. We have VMware on the panel as well as Dell EMC so I think you see the user group has evolved with our customers and with our portfolio. >> It's a community, it's a mechanism for people to say, "How did you do that" or "How should I do this" or "How do I get my team motivated" or "How do I collaborate with security?" These are tough questions and so I think just having that network of people that can come together and ask those questions and be transparent and be authentic, that's what it's about. >> Appearance, problem-solving, sharing ideas. >> Yeah. >> You've been a Converged Infrastructure client, customer for a number of years. >> I have. >> So you've seen pre-acquisition, how has the Dell EMC merger affected your perception of the company and your relationship with them? >> I think in the last year, or the previous year, we were all waiting to see where things fell and what was going to happen, and I think now it's found it's feet, right? We're starting to see some announcements in both the Converged and the VxFlex space, and it's really starting to come together and I think that story, the Dell Technologies family story is really starting to come together where maybe in the last 12, 18 months, there was a little bit of unknown there and so, we just kind of sitting back and waiting and curious but keep doing what we're doing using that best of breed, the best practices that we have on the floor. >> Alright awesome. Suzan, Jon, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a great segment. >> Thank you. >> I appreciate it. Alright, that's a wrap for day one. Dave Alonte, Stu Miniman, John Furry's over there. Lisa Martin, Rebecca Knight is here. This is day one, we got wall-to-wall coverage. Tomorrow, day two and day three. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Michael Dell's coming on tomorrow. We got Pat Kelsey going to be on tomorrow. Tom Sweet's coming on later on in the week. Awesome coverage, check out thecube.net. This is Dave Alonte, Stu Miniman. We'll see you tomorrow, thanks for watching.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's coverage here in Orlando, Florida at Cisco Live 2018. Our first year here at Cisco Live. We were in Barcelona this past year. Again, Cisco transforming to a next generation set of networking capabilities while maintaining all the existing networks and all the security. I'm John Furrier your host with Stu Miniman my co-host for the next three days. Our next guest is Arun Garg. Welcome to theCUBE. You are the Director of Product Management Converged Infrastructure Group at NetApp. >> Correct, thank you very much for having me on your show and it's a pleasure to meet with you. >> One of the things that we've been covering a lot lately is the NetApp's really rise in the cloud. I mean NetApp's been doing a lot of work on the cloud. I mean I've wrote stories back when Tom Georges was the CEO when Amazon just came on the scene. NetApp has been really into the cloud and from the customer's standpoint but now with storage and elastic resources and server lists, the customers are now startin' to be mindful. >> Absolutely. >> Of how to maximize the scale and with All Flash kind of a perfect storm. What are you guys up to? What's your core thing that you guys are talking about here at Cisco Live? >> So absolutely, thank you. So George Kurian, our CEO at NetApp, is very much in taking us to the next generation and the cloud. Within that I take care of some of the expansion plans we have on FlexPod with Cisco and in that we have got two new things that we are announcing right now. One is the FlexPod for Healthcare which is in FlexPod we've been doing horizontal application so far which are like the data bases, tier one database, as well as applications from Microsoft and virtual desktops. Now we are going vertical. Within the vertical our application, the first one we're looking in the vertical is healthcare. And so it's FlexPod for Healthcare. That's the first piece that we are addressing. >> What's the big thing with update on FlexPod? Obviously FlexPod's been very successful. What's the modernization aspect of it because Cisco's CEO was onstage today talking about Cisco's value proposition, about the old ways now transitioning to a new network architecture in the modern era. What's the update on FlexPod? Take a minute to explain what are the cool, new things going on with FlexPod. >> Correct, so the All Flash FAS, which is the underlying technology, which is driving the FlexPod, has really picked up over the last year as customers keep wanting to improve their infrastructure with better latencies and better performance the All Flash FAS has driven even the FlexPod into the next generation. So that's the place where we are seeing double-digit growth over the last five quarters consistently in FlexPod. So that's a very important development for us. We've also done more of the standard CVDs that we do on SAP and a few other are coming out. So those are all out there. Now we are going to make sure that all these assets can be consumed by the vertical industry in healthcare. And there's another solution we'll talk about, the managed private cloud on FlexPod. >> Yeah, Arun, I'd love to talk about the private cloud. So I think back to when Cisco launched UCS it was the storage partners that really helped drive that modernization for virtualization. NetApp with FlexPod, very successful over the years doing that. As we know, virtualization isn't enough to really be a private cloud. All the things that Chuck Robbins is talking about onstage, how do I modernize, how do I get you know, automation in there? So help us connect the dots as to how we got from you know, a good virtualized platform to this is, I think you said managed private cloud, FlexPod in Cisco. >> Absolutely. So everybody likes to consume a cloud. It's easy to consume a cloud. You go and you click on I need a VM, small, medium, large, and I just want to see a dashboard with how my VMs are doing. But in reality it's more difficult to just build your own cloud. There's complexity associated with it. You need a service platform where you can give a ticket, then you need an orchestration platform where you can set up the infrastructure, then you need a monitoring platform which will show you all of the ways your infrastructure's working. You need a capacity planning tool. There's tens of tools that need to be integrated. So what we have done is we have partnered with some of the premium partners and some DSIs who have already built this. So the risk of a customer using their private cloud infrastructure is minimized and therefore these partners also have a managed service. So when you combine the fact that you have a private cloud infrastructure in the software domain as well as a managed service and you put it on the on-prem FlexPod that are already sold then the customer benefits from having the best of both worlds, a cloud-like experience on their own premise. And that is what we are delivering with this FlexPod managed private cloud solution. >> Talk about the relationship with Cisco. So we're here at Cisco Live you guys have a good relationship with Cisco. What should customers understand about the relationship? What are the top bullet points and value opportunities and what does it mean to the impact for the customer? >> So we, all these solutions we work very closely with the Cisco business unit and we jointly develop these solutions. So within that what we do is there's the BU to BU interaction where the solution is developed and defined. There is a marketing to marketing interaction where the collateral gets created and reviewed by both parties. So you will not put a FlexPod brand unless the two companies agree. >> So it's tightly integrated. >> It's tightly integrated. The sales teams are aligned, the marketing, the communications team, the channel partner team. That's the whole value that the end customer gets because when a partner goes to a high-end enterprise customer he knows that both Cisco and NetApp teams can be brought to the table for the customer to showcase the value as well as help them through it all. >> Yeah, over in one of the other areas that's been talked about this show we talk about modernization. You talk about things like microservices. >> Yes. >> Containers are pretty important. How does that story of containerization fit into FlexPod? >> Absolutely. So containerization helps you get workloads, the cloud-native workloads or the type two native. Type two workloads as Gartner calls them. So our mode two. What we do is we work with the Cisco teams and we already had a CVD design with a hybrid cloud with a Cisco cloud center platform, which is the quicker acquisition. And we showed a design with that. What we are now bringing to the table is the ability for our customers to benefit with a managed service on top of it. So that's the piece we are dealing with the cloud teams. With the Cisco team the ACI fabric is very important to them. So that ACI fabric is visible and shown in our designs whether you do SAP, you do Oracle, you do VDI and you do basic infrastructure or you do the managed private cloud or FlexPod on Healthcare. All of these have the core networking technologies from Cisco, as well as the cloud technologies from Cisco in a form factor or in a manner that easily consumable by our customers. >> Arun, talk about the customer use cases. So say you've got a customer, obviously you guys have a lot of customers together with Cisco, they're doing some complex things with the technology, but for the customer out there that has not yet kinda went down the NetApp Cisco route, what do they do? 'Cause a lot of storage guys are lookin' at All Flash, so check, you guys have that. They want great performance, check. But then they gotta integrate. So what do you say to the folks watching that aren't yet customers about what they should look at and evaluate vis-a-vis your opportunity with them and say the competition? >> So yes, there are customers who are doing all this as separate silos, but the advantage of taking a converged infrastructure approach is that you benefit from the years of man experience or person experience that we have put behind in our labs to architect this, make sure that everything is working correctly and therefore is reduces their deployment time and reduces the risk. And if you want to be agile and faster even in the traditional infrastructure, while you're being asked to go to the cloud you can do it with our FlexPod design guides. If you want the cloud-like experience then you can do it with a managed private cloud solution on your premise. >> So they got options and they got flexibility on migrating to the cloud or architecting that. >> Yes. >> Okay, great, now I'm gonna ask you another question. This comes up a lot on theCUBE and certainly we see it in the industry. One of the trends is verticalization. >> Yes. >> So verticalization is not a new thing. Vertical industry, people go to market that way, they build products that are custom to verticals. But with cloud one of the benefits of cloud and kind of a cloud operations is you have a horizontally scalable capability. So how do you guys look at that, because these verticals, they gotta get closer to the front lines and have apps that are customized. I mean data that's fastly delivered to the app. How should verticals think about architecting storage to maintain the scale of horizontally scalable but yet provide customization into the applications that might be unique to the vertical? >> Okay, so let me give a trend first and then I'll get to the specific. So in the vertical industry, the next trend is industry clouds. For example, you have healthcare clouds and you'll have clouds to specific industries. And the reason is because these industries have to keep their data on-prem. So the data gravity plays a lot of impact in all of these decisions. And the security of their data. So that is getting into industry-specific clouds. The second pieces are analytics. So customers now are finding that data is valuable and the insight you can get from the data are actually more valuable. So what they want is the data on their premise, they want the ability all in their control so to say, they want the ability to not only run their production applications but also the ability to run analytics on top of that. In the specific example for health care what it does is when you have All Flash FAS it provides you a faster response for the patient because the physician is able to get the diagnostics done better if he has some kind of analytics helping him. [Interviewer] - Yeah. >> Plus the first piece I talked about, the rapid deployment is very important because you want to get your infrastructure set up so I can give an example on that too. >> Well before we get to the example, this is an important point because I think this is really the big megatrend. It's not really kinda talked much about but it's pretty happening is that what you just pointed out was it's not just about speeds and feeds and IOPs, the performance criteria to the industry cloud has other new things like data, the role of data, what they're using for the application. >> Correct. >> So it's just you've gotta have table stakes of great, fast storage. >> Yes. >> But it's gotta be integrated into what is becoming a use case for the verticals. Did I get that right? >> Yes, absolutely. So I'll give two examples. One I can name the customer. So they'll come at our booth tomorrow, in a minute here. So LCMC Health, part of UMC, and they have the UMC Medical Center. So when New Orleans had this Katrina disaster in Louisiana, so they came up with they need a hospital, fast. And they decided on FlexPod because within three months with the wire one's architecture and application they could scale their whole IT data center for health care. So that has helped them tremendously to get it up and running. Second is with the All Flash FAS they're able to provide faster response to their customer. So that's a typical example that we see in these kind of industries. >> Arun, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. You guys are doing a great job. In following NetApps recent success lately, as always, NetApp's always goin' the next level. Quick question for you to end the segment. What's your take of Cisco Live this year? What's some of the vibe of the show? So I know it's day one, there's a lot more to come and you're just getting a sense of it. What's the vibe? What's coming out of the show this year? What's the big ah-ha? >> So I attended the keynote today and it was very interesting because Cisco has taken networking to the next level within 10 base networking, its data and analytics where you can put on a subscription mode on all the pieces of the infrastructure networking. And that's exactly the same thing which NetApp is doing, where we are going up in the cloud with this subscription base. And when you add the two subscription base then for us, at least in the managed private cloud solution we can provide the subscription base through the managed private cloud through our managed service provider. So knowing where the industry was going, knowing where Cisco was going and knowing where we want to go, we have come up with this solution which matches both these trends of Cisco as well as NetApp. >> And the number of connected devices going up every day. >> Yes. >> More network connections, more geo domains, it's complicated. >> It is complicated, but if you do it correctly we can help you find a way through it. >> Arun, thank you for coming on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier here on theCUBE with Stu Miniman here with NetApp at Cisco Live 2018. Back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Hello everyone, welcome to this special presentation, "The Future of Converged Infrastructure". My name is Dave Volante and I'll be your host for this event where the focus is on Dell EMC's converged infrastructure announcement. Nearly a decade ago, modern converged infrastructure really came to the fore in the marketplace and what you had is compute, storage, and network brought together in a single managed entity. And when you talk to IT people, the impact was roughly a 30 to 50% total cost of ownership reduction really depending on a number of factors. How much virtualization they had achieved, how complex their existing processes were, how much they could save on database and other software licenses and maintenance, but roughly that 30 to 50% range. Fast forward to 2018 and you're looking at a multi-billion dollar market for converged infrastructure. Jeff Boudreau is here, he's the president of the Dell EMC storage division, Jeff thanks for coming on today. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're welcome, so we're going to set up this announcement. Let me go through the agenda. So Jeff and I are going to give an overview of the announcement and then we're going to go to Trey Layton who's the Chief Technology Officer of the converged infrastructure group at Dell EMC, where he's going to focus on the architecture and some of the announcement details, and then we're going to go to Cisco Live to a pre-recorded session that we did in Barcelona and get the Cisco perspective and then Jeff and I will come back to wrap it up. We also you might notice if you're in a crowd chat, we have a crowd chat going on, so underneath this video stream you can ask questions, you got to login with LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. I prefer Twitter. Kind of an ask me anything crowd chat. We have analysts on, Stu Miniman is hosting that call. We're going to talk about what this announcements is all about, what the customer issues are that are being addressed by this announcement. So Jeff, let's get into it. From your perspective, what's the sort of state of converged infrastructure today? >> Oh, great question, so I'm really bullish on CI in regards to converged infrastructure and kind of the way the market's going. We see continued interest in the growth of the market of our customers, driven by the need for simplicity, agility, elasticity of those on-prem resources. Dell EMC pioneered the CI market several years ago with the simple premise of simplify IT, and our focus and our commitment to our customers has not changed of simplifying IT. And as our customers continue to seek for new ways to simplify consolidate infrastructure, we as expect more and more of our customers to embrace CI as a fast and easy way to modernize their infrastructure and transform IT. >> You talk about transformation, we do a lot of events and everybody's talking about digital transformation and IT transformation. What role does converged infrastructure play in those types of transformations, maybe you could give us some examples. >> Sure, I mean so first I would say our results speak for themselves, as I said we pioneered the CI industry. As the market leader, we enabled thousands of customers who are allowed to drive kind of business transformation and digital transformation. And when I speak to customers specifically, converged infrastructure is not about just the infrastructure, it's about the operating model, and how they simplify IT. I'd say two of the biggest areas of impacts that customers highlight to me are really about the acceleration of application delivery, and then the other big one is around the increase of operational efficiencies allowing customers to free up resources, to reinvest however they see fit. >> Now since the early days of converged infrastructure, Cisco has been a big partner of yours. You guys were kind of quasi-exclusive for awhile, they went out and sought other partners, you went out and sought other partners, a lot of people have questions about that relationship. What's your perspective on that relationship? >> So our partnership with Cisco is as strong as ever. We're proud of this category that we created together. We've been on this journey for a long time and we've been working together and that partnership will continue as we go forward. In full transparency there are of course some topics where we disagree, just like any normal relationship where we have disagreements. An example of that would be HCI. But in the CI space our partnership is as strong as ever. We'll have thousands of customers between the two of us that we will continue to invest and innovate together on, and I think later in this broadcast you're going to hear directly from Cisco on that, so we're both doubling down on the partnership and we're both committed to CI. >> I want to ask you about sort of leadership generally and specifically as it relates to converged infrastructure and hyperconverged. My question is is hyperconverged is booming. It's a high growth market, I sometimes joke that Dell EMC is now- you're a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrants, 101 Gartner Magic Quadrants out of the 99, (Boudreau laughs) you're just leading everything in I think both CI and the HCI categories. What's your take - is CI still relevant? >> First I'd say it's great to come from a leadership position so I thank you for bringing that up, I think it's really important and as Michael talks about being the essential infrastructure company, that's huge for as Dell Technology so we're really proud of that and we want to lean into that strength. Now, on HCI versus CI, to me it's an "and" world. Right everybody wants to get stuck into "either" "or". To me it's about the "and" story. All our customers are going on a journey in regards to kind of how they transform their businesses. At the end of the day, if I took my macro view and took a step back it's about the data. The data's the critical asset right, the good news for me and for our teams is data always continues to grow and is growing at an amazing rate. And as that critical asset- customers are really kind of thinking about a modern data strategy as they drive forward. As part of that they're looking how to store, protect, secure, analyze, move that data, really unleashing that data to provide value back to their businesses. So with all of that not all data is going to be created equal, as part of that is they built up those strategies. It's going to be a journey in regards to how they do it and that's software defined versus purpose-built arrays, versus converged or hyperconverged or even cloud, those deployment models. We, Dell EMC and Dell Technologies want to be that strategic partner that trust and advise them to help on that journey. >> Alright Jeff thanks for helping with the setup, I want to ask you to hang around a little bit-- >> Sure. >> We're going to go to a video, and then we're going to bring back Trey Layton, talk about the architecture so keep it right there, we'll be right back.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VM World 2017, brought to you by VM Ware, and it's eco system partners. >> Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris and we are here at VM World 2017 in Las Vegas. This is the eighth year of the Cube doing VM World, it started in Moscow and Moscow is under construction. So we're here back in Vegas. Although they've had VM World in Vegas a couple times. Collin Gallagher is here. He's the senior director of product marketing for Hyper Converged Infrastructure at Dell EMC. Collin, great to see you, thanks for coming to the Cube. >> Thanks Dave, thanks for having me. >> So first of all, how's the show going for you? >> Fantastic. Incredibly busy. As you can see, Hyper Converged is the hot thing yet again. I think last year was a big thing. But it's nice to see it's being... Customers are asking about it, you're seeing it in the keynotes. You know, the products being mentioned, Vsan, VXrail, et cetera. And just being swamped and busy and having a little bit of fun as well. >> So before we get into the announcements and we want to do that and give you the opportunity to talk about that, Peter and I and folks in the Cube have been talking all week, really all year. >> Peter: Yeah. >> About how customers are coming to the reality that I can't just reform my business and try to stuff it into the cloud, I really got to understand the realities of my business and bring the cloud model to the extent that I can, to the business. So what role does Hyper Converged play, in that context of bringing the cloud to my business? >> Well, I think Hyper Converged is the technology that allows you to do that. But as you bring out, as you mentioned, you have to also rethink about how you maintain your business, right? Because Hyper Converged consolidates you compute, your storage, your networking into one system. But that means that you may have to think about consolidating your storage teams, your compute teams and your networking teams as well. Right? And if you're going to keep them separate but merge the technology, there's going to be some impedance mismatched there. So Hyper Converged is an enabler for that, but it requires you to transform not just the technology, but also how you manage and staff your business as well. >> So I remember, I guess it was three years ago now, at VM World, you guys made the sort of first announcement of sort of software defined true Hyper Converged product and it's really evolved quite dramatically from then so maybe bring us up to where we are today and talk about some of the announcements that you made. >> Yeah, so... Yes, when Hyper Converged was announced a couple years ago, in a couple different products, but the point I was making a little bit earlier is that Hyper Converged is not just a single product. It's enabling technology. And much like Flash was five to seven year ago, it's going everywhere. >> Peter: It's a design approach. >> It's a design, exactly. >> Yeah, it's a design approach. And you're seeing it in appliances that have been very successful today, you're seeing it in larger rack scale systems, you're seeing it in software only systems, it depends on how and much, as you said, Dave, you want to transform right? You can do some of your build your own Hyper Converged stuff and not transform very much at all. You can do full turn-key cloud built on Hyper Converged, but that's going to require a vast degree of not just infrastructure transformation, but also work force transformation to go with it. >> Now, one of the things we've observed, Collin, and get some feedback from you on this is that... Cause we totally agree. In fact, we wrote a piece of research we called the Iron Triangle of IT and the fact that there is this very tight linking between people with skills, the automation that they use to manage products, that dictate the skills that dictate the automation, and breaking that as well. And a lot of our CIO clients are telling us, that you guy don't understand. The biggest problem I got is getting my people to work differently together. New processes, new approach to doing things. So one of the forcing funtions has been is historically when we think about designing systems to run work loads, we started with the CPU. We sized the CPU and then we did everything else. Now we start thinking about a lot of these data driven, digital oriented kinds of systems. We're thinking about something different. That catalyzed with this enormous performance improvements and storage over the last few year through Flash, vSAN related types of things. What are some of the new design principles that people have to factor as they start thinking about the role that Hyper Converged is going to play? >> So let me play off that. So yes, people design for the CPU because that was the bottle neck, right? Then as CPU performance grew, 5X, 10X, et cetera, they started designing for storage because that became the bottle neck, right? So part of your question is what's going to be the next bottleneck? Right? And I think you just had Chad talking on before. I think the network may be that upcoming bottleneck right now. You know, particularly in the Hyper Converged world where everything is connected through the network. That's your back plan. It's a different approach to storage. So designing around your network capabilities or your network infrastructure, you know, deploying Hyper Converged in a branch office with one GIG is very different than deploying Hyper Converged in a data center with 25 GIG and how you do it. So that's one, but I think Hyper Converged is all about balance in general, right. There's a fixed ratio depending on the product implementation of storage to compute, right? And generally they like to be in the Goldilocks zone, right? Not too much CPU, just... Not too CPU heavy or not too much storage heavy. And I think as Hyper Converged is going more mainstream and more normal, it's pushing those subtle boundaries there. And I think things like flexing out to the cloud when you need additional storage or additional compute capability, is one of those design considerations you need to take into account as you're deploying Hyper Converged because, as you said, you're designing around constraints and there's some physical constraints you have to manage and you have to figure out how you can tap into some of the extra ones. >> So literally it's start with the outcomes, identify the data that's associated with those outcomes, figure out the physical characteristics necessary to apply and process and move that data or not move it. And use that as the starting point for the design considerations. Being very cognitive, going back to what Chad was talking about, that at the end of the day, it's the network that's binding these things and how far out is a protocol going to go, local versus wide area. >> I'm going to steal something that I read on Twitter the other day, that data is the new oil. Alright, and that's how you run your business. And just like how you ship oil to and from, from a well to a refinery, to finally to your gas station pump, you have to think of it, what's your data chain and how you get it and where you need to move it. >> So that's a term that we started using in the Cube in, I don't know, 2010. But what we found is that data is plentiful, but insights aren't. And so you see organizations really spending a lot of time, money, energy, trying to get to those insights, to give them competitive advantage and a new infrastructure emerging to support those. So I wonder, Collin, if you could talk about the portfolio, the products that you sort of look after and tie it into some of the things that you've announced this week. >> Yeah. So I look after our VM or Hyper Converged systems so Vxrail and Vxrack SDDC. You know, both jointly developed with VM Ware. I'm sure you've heard Pat and everybody else talk about them so if you've been watching any of the keynotes. But we also have a much larger portfolio. We have our Vsan ready nodes for customers who want to do it themselves, want to build their own systems. And again, that's, as we talk about degree of transformation, that allows customers to get into the Hyper Converged space, but not significantly transform how they're managing their business. We have the appliances. Obviously our Vxrail systems. So by the way, the news with the Vsan ready nodes is we're announcing them available on the Dell Poweredge 14G Platforms. Those are available now to order. On our Vxrail appliances, and the rest of the portfolio that'll be out on the 14G platform by the end of the year. But what's new with Vxrail, we're announcing Vxrail 4 dot 5, which provides life cycle management orchestration for the latest and greatest VM Ware software stacks. So Vsan, 6 dot 5, Vsan 6 dot 6 Vsphere 6 dot 5. So both of those are out now and available. With all the great goodness that you've seen and heard about them. We're also announcing new configuration options for our Vxrack SDDC platform. So that's our much larger, it's the big brother to Vxrail, fully turn-key, you know, software defined data center infrastructure including NSX, all managed under one umbrella. >> So a higher-end solution? >> It's a much higher-end solution. Much higher for larger... Not necessarily scale because you know, it's not necessarily scale because you can start pretty small. As low as-- >> Peter: But still organized, coherent, well-packaged. >> But you have to, again, if we're talking about degrees of transformation, if you go with an appliance, okay you manage your compute and storage together. If you're going with a rack scale system, your managing the network as part of that as well. So that's another degree of transformation you have to be willing to make. So that's what's really the big difference between the two. New configuration options, up to 40 different hardware configs available now for that so really driven by customer choice. I want lower powered CPU's for certain workloads, I want higher powered CPU's, I want more all Flash choices, so really flush that portfolio out. And then lastly, we're announcing, our EHC and NHC platforms from Dell EMC are available built on Vxrack SDDC as well. >> EHC acronym? >> Collin: Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. >> And? >> Native Hybrid Cloud. EHC and NHC, sorry. Both of those two systems, which had run on our Vblock infrastructure before, are now running on Vxrack SDDC as well. So you get fully turn-key hybrid cloud built on top of an HCI system. >> And when you think of a EHC, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, and Native Hybrid Cloud, NHC, can you talk about the work loads? That customers should think about putting on each? >> Yeah, so EHC is much more for traditional workloads. For customers who are looking to get into hybrid cloud. Actually, we see a lot of, our number one customer for someone who buys EHC, is they've tried to build cloud on their own and failed. They want something turn-key, they don't want to make the same mistakes again, they have the scars, and they want something easier and simpler than building it themselves. But that is traditional workloads, your traditional data center workloads managed in a cloud environment. NHC, our Native Hybrid Cloud product is for cloud native workloads, it's actually turn-key pivotal systems. So it's PSC based so if you're deploying workloads that will run in pivotal and you want it as a test dev system in house, or you want to run that in house and then migrate it later to the cloud, that's what NHC is for. >> Okay, we got to leave it there. But I'll give you a last word on VM World 2017, cloud, Hyper Converged, a lot of new innovation. What's your bumper sticker, Collin, on the show? >> My bumper sticker is again, HCI is primetime, it's here, I used to say that, customers, when I started this job two years ago would tell me, "tell me why I need HCI?" And what customers are asking me now is, last year was, "tell me how I use HCI?" and this year it's "tell me where I can't use HCI?" So there's been this waterfall shift in how they're looking at doing it. >> Dave: So they like it, they're trying to apply it. >> Peter: What is it? How it works? And what's the impact? >> Dave: And I want to apply it in as many places as possible. Where are my blind spots? >> Yeah, where doesn't it fit? What are the constraints where it doesn't fit? >> Collin Gallagher, thanks so much for coming back in the Cube. >> Oh, my pleasure. Thanks, Dave. >> Keep right there, everybody. We'll be back, this is Dave Vellante. For Peter Burris, this is the Cube. We're live at VM World 2017 and we'll be right back.

>> A cube at DMC World twenty fourteen is brought to you by D. M. C. Redefine, see innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing brocade. Say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. >> Welcome back to the Cube. This silken angle TVs live wall to wall Coverage of DMC World twenty fourteen here in the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas. We've got three days to stage is over eighty guests. Lots of practitioners, execs, business leaders got a special segment. I'm bringing you today, bringing onto two thirds of the geek whispers, podcasts, Those in the story for the virtual ization and Claude Communities. No art is to guess. Well, let me introduce it's John Troyer, who's making his debut as the founder of tech reckoning. >> Thanks for having me. >> And we've got Amy Lewis influence marketing from Cisco. Name is your first time on the Cube, so, you know, welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having me on. >> All right, so So, guys, you know, we've been to a lot of conferences way we've hung out with, You know, the various influencers bloggers. It's changed a lot. This is my twelfth year coming M. C World. If you had told me twelve years ago some of things I'd be doing at this show, I wouldn't have believed you. I mean, I was one of the guys in a polo that only got out of out of the office once a year to give a presentation and, you know, talks in people about some cool tak um, and you know, social media is one of those things that, you know turn my career. Eleven. So you know what? Let's have a conversation about what's going on in the industry with kind of community influences and everything. John, maybe you could start us often. You know, Maybe if it leads in tow your new gigs? >> Sure, sure, on one on one, and things have changed. On the other hand, the same dynamics are playing out. Buying the buying cycle has changed. The buying process has changed. Customers are looking much more to their peers and not to traditional media analysts. Marketing folks, they can't find more ads. You can't send out more E mail. So what do you do? You need to get part of the conversation. We've been saying that for five or ten years, that's actually happened. Now the folks that were early on into the blogging space have turned themselves into communicators as well as technologists. We've seen, you know, their careers have have gone and all sorts of interesting places, for instance, you. But I think now that even we could talk about his art Is blogging dead? But I think now we're seeing it. We're seeing social media not as a trade or a practice practice, but simply a tool set that we all use. So that's all I'm saying is it's a It's more of a it spread throughout our organization. Not so much in one tiny niche, right? >> Yeah, Jonah, I love that point. I I I've been preaching for a bunch of years that this is an important skill, something you have to have their wonderful tools. But you've been doing community for a lot longer than Social Media has been around, and, you know, so it's peace, Amy, your influence marketing. What would please way out on this? >> Yeah, I chose the title, actually myself on purpose. To say it's not just social media, think social Media is very important, but like John was saying that to me is a set of tools. They're important platforms or important communications channels, but influencers the people who between the term citizen analysts they are unpaid analyst. But people are very passionate about technology, and they want to write on block and share, really engage their community. That's an important group of people. It's a really a buying center, and we have to find new ways to address them. So community is more important than >> ever. Citizen analysts thought, Let's focus that >> some of the >> people you know, I say some people goto event and they get it, get it, get wined and dined and they get to, you know, write about a bunch of stuff I'm like, you know you're better than journalists, you know, you'll You know you do some really good stuff and sometimes it's a little bit too friendly to the people that are doing it. So you know where do you see the role of kind of the press? You know, the analyst and the influencer? >> It's a great question I've been checking. We need to abstract the or chart. It is. It is a complicated question, but I think the traditional presses really trained and rightfully so in giving us that neutrality. So that is still a very important role. I think the analysts are paid Tio Tio, analyze particular sets, etcetera. They have nation specialty. I think the citizen analyst is interesting because they are what you don't know about the neutrality. But you do know that there are people who roll up their sleeves and really touched the technology. So that becomes a very interesting set because they really care about the technology Kazakh but could become their problem if they don't, you know, raise our voice and sort of engaged with technology and let the community know what, what the new trends are, what they need, what business needs. Our etcetera gives us a really applied version, the PR in the e R outside. >> Don't you want to comment on matter? >> I mean, these are the folks that they lose their jobs if they picked the wrong technology. So they have much more. Their discussions have it. They have more skin in the game. >> Aye, that's right. If you've got the practitioner, you know whether it be the end user sometime times it's the you know channel guy that they do that that's good, You know? What about the people inside the corporations that are also using these? >> I'm super bullish about the use of employees as advocates and evangelists in our community, both for technical education. And for the commercial part of our conversation in the enterprise space, we don't sell solutions with Russia. Your hair's a pressure and very nice calm. Give me a call. We sell it with relationships with people. I've been working on the social media since it existed, I suppose. And what we've seen over and over again is the social channels are really great for getting the word out. But without that personal component, it's like just handing out brochures. So you need your employees out there. You need your employees talking to folks. You need your employees without their representing your brand, just like they would have an event. I've seen that at something. On one hand, it's something that's so trivial that we all agree it's true. On the other hand, I don't. I think a lot of people are just realizing that now. >> So, John, you know, there's some some big companies, you know, creative certification programs to do some of this. There's some companies that just, you know, sign everybody up and, you know, it could be kind of an echo chamber or things like that. You know what? What do you see in these days? To kind of help out. You know the community >> well. There's a lot of software and a lot of programmatic things you could do. Those may be useful in terms of organizing you. It comes down to the people in the culture of the company and help much. You trust your people to go out. I think the best thing we can do is sit up platform for folks to be able to, to communicate. I think that's actually what Amy does really well at Cisco. >> X. It's, um I always talk about influence marketing as being people, platforms in content. And so I agree. I think that we sorted out some of the platform issues as we've learned about social media and grew up with it. I think that we are still working out the people in the content side and what's appropriate, how we can join together and do that and how we can creates a mute platforms may be using the tools of social tio to drive the conversation forward. >> All right. So, I mean, I got one for you. You know, how do we balance the kind of creation of information and kind of the community and fund? I mean, you do a lot of fun event you've got, you know, awful club this week. You've got, you know, bacon, stack and B bacon and bacon. I e I mean, I can't keep track of you, deport vacants and everything. And, you know, there'd be some executives here that would be like that, That social stuff. And they're playing games and things like that. So how do we balance kind of attic business value and greeting, you know, value to the community. And, you know, having fun in building community. >> No, it's a great question. A couple of years ago, I got a text in the middle of the night that said, Please explain to me how the bacon is a marketing play. Please explain this and you know, I need a power point slide. So if you've never had to explain, be bacon on the power points, I for that challenge out to everyone. But I think in the last couple of years people started to see it more and more as we're, uh, we're similar to the sales role, and that's how we've sort of changed the language. So I perform a sales like function, except I don't carry a quota. So it is about building the relationship like John was saying, and it is about balancing fun with your intent. So I think that if you create a fun environment, if you create an openness and willingness to listen, then the good things will follow. So you form the relationships of people. You open up their ability to create content with you because they don't feel under attack. They're ready to share. And again, it's it's kind of a magical formula. Be nice and create opportunity. >> Yeah, so >> I think we'll part of it's a generational ship. I think part of it a generational shift and part of it is a temperamental she So tradition again, going back to sales traditional enterprise sales. You might go and play golf with somebody, cause that's what you enjoy doing for our kind of geeks. Our golf is eating bacon and talking about the duplication strategies, right? That's where we're having the most fun. So it's It's just it's same sort of thing. Just a shift in generations. >> Yeah, I wonder if you know what, what role this community help in kind of careers. You know, I think you know, we're talking so much of these shows about, you know, if your storage admin. If you're networking admin and you know you're down there, you know, configuring Luns or setting up the land, you know, we're going to have a job in a couple of years because automation is gonna change. You know, how much does the community help in kind of those career paths and education? >> So, John, I think we should interview stew on this one. Should we have the geek whispers takeover. I think this is your great example. You've talked about you, you were on a career path and we hear this a lot, and when you raise your hand to volunteer, we sort of jokingly call the spokes uniforms. You both really enjoy the technology and like to communicate about it. When you raise your hand and make yourself known to the community, to your employers, to the world at large, it gives you different opportunities. And I think I don't think you go into technology really without wanting to have an evolving, exciting career. So I think that he's becoming proficient in these tools. Joining your community is an opportunity to learn from your peers to get back to your peers and to raise her profile and open yourself up to the possibility of a new opportunity or a new idea or different engagement. A new way to learn >> In today's business environment, communication is a key part of whatever you do, even if you're the guy sitting there configuring the lungs, because if you're not communicating with your teams and the application teams and the storage of network virtualization team, you're not going to succeed so I think that's an important part of it, right? Being a communicator, absolutely critical and art. Barney. >> All right, so either one of you feel free to answer, but I think back to my early days, you know, two thousand eight, I was so excited when I got invited to a couple of conferences. A blogger, you could kind of get a pass, and I would, You know, ten might take my own vacation time and usually spend that on expenses because my employer at the time didn't get it. It was this innovation conference in, like, in a New York City with four hundred people, and it was like, kind of amazing. I've seen people go to B m world on their own dime where they can get a pass. I mean, you know, it's great to see when you when you got the passion. So I guess the question I wanted to ask is, you know, with companies today, who should they be inviting? How do they do it? You know? You know. Is it you know, the blogger Or is it the, you know, empty Alexis co expert? You know, bm where be expert, you know, What? How's that? How's that changing? Or is it >> changing? Well, I think what you've seen happen over the years is something that was a little more unstructured, which was a kind of blogger relations program. Working with both customers partners, employees in your ecosystem has turned into something a little more formal. We created the V Expert program in two thousand nine to formalize what we were already doing. It's an analogy to the endless relations, press relations, investor relations, sorts of programs. So I mean, it's it's it's a little more buttoned up. It's a little more of a membership thing, but we I know both of DMC and BM where and it Cisco, Francisco champions to try to embrace all the folks that are out there blogging. I think you know, if you're a market or you need to make sure that you're keep your eyes open and you don't just talk to the people that you've gathered in your living room, Bye. You know, a lot of it's pretty easy if you're enthusiastic about technology, if you're engaged with the technology, if you put some effort into it, it's actually pretty easy to get involved with one of these programs there, there, there and there, there, fourth of people in them right there. They're not there to say the glory of the emcee and glory of Cisco and glory of'em, where they're there to help you with your career. They're there to give you tools to give you networking and, you know, hopefully get you to places like this. So I encourage everybody that that's interested in starting, you know, go ahead and get started. It's easier than you think to get involved. >> I agree with that, and I think that way want to be almost like an airline program that you'd actually want to participate. And it's sort of my job like this is a customer service activity, and I often talk about if you talk about the large pool of influencers. Maybe they haven't identified yet. Or maybe they prefer to stay independent. Or maybe they do have interest in a lot of different technologies. Me for them to engage in one of these programs, that stolen, important set of people that you have to deal with the mark, you know, and again set up these blogger days have longer briefings. But like John was saying, When you have the group of people that you name and give it a program name, this is a little bit of inside baseball if we don't talk about giving program a name and funding can follow. So if you're working in a corporate marketing environment, it's really important to explain to people that marketing structure behind what you're doing and when you treat them as a class, it gives you some advantage is you can scale out a little easier. You can provide more assets to those individuals, and it frees you up to Dio. What I love to do, which is is to really engage with those individuals and create content with them. So, >> yeah, so how is engagement these days? You know, I think back, you know, that you know, ten years ago, you talk. You know, one percent of the community would, you know, be doing almost all the contribution. Ten percent might be a little active and everybody else's lurker. You know, when we founded Wicked Bond Day, Volonte actually has on his business card that he's a one percenter which goes back to you know it. It's, you know, the one percent that causes all the trouble, the one percent that causes all all of the commotion. So, you know, with this wave, I mean, we were founded off of, you know, economics in crowd sourcing and everything else, and the Cube is all about, you know, sharing information. We put it all out there. We want everybody to contribute and, you know, give that feedback. You know, How are we along now? You know that that journey to get more people involved. >> I think the opportunity is there more than ever. I think you're right. I mean, there's always gonna be a percentage of people who want to raise her hand, the class that want to give up their PTO to go to a conference that that had this other life they just can't help themselves. And so in some ways it's finding the most impassioned and giving them opportunities. But I think that with the platforms and the scale, there is a greater opportunity for people. They don't want to start their own block. For instance, one of the things we do it Cisco champions is allowed people to guess, block or allow them to come post a podcast. So I think there are more more ways to and there, you know, that's one example. There's lots of other groups that provide people again a little bit a dose of it so they might not want to run a full media company on their own. They don't wanna build Q, but they want to participate. And I think that we have so many more opportunities for them to do that that we're seeing group. >> We're seeing platform ships over the years. I think we as technologists human beings have a tendency to forget their past relatively quickly, as people have moved from the MySpace world to the Facebook Twitter world. I think actually, we're headed for I don't call it I don't want to call it post Facebook, but it certainly is. A multi platform world made >> it just like >> it's a multi device world. We're not opposed PC world in that. I think you're seeing the rise of more specialized communities. They come back again from from our from our origins back ten or twenty years ago. I think we're seeing that people want more deeper engagement along the company. A lot of the report building and kind of conversation. And hey, how are you? Goes on on Twitter. But I think people are really looking for a place where they can have a better conversation, more interaction, more lasting death that might not be on their own. Blogger in their own kind of indie web sort of style, roll your own block. But there are more and more platforms that people are making available for this kind of connection again. What was once niche eventually permeates the whole >> yes. So, you know, the concern I have is it's tough because it is so dispersed right now, you know? You know, I love Twitter, you know? Hi, I'm stew, you know, on Twitter. And I know you guys are big on it, too. And I don't love the multi platform discussion. You know, I always love when you dropped that kind information on the community. But, you know, how >> do we How do we get that >> depth? It's one of the things I always worry about is, you know, people will read the headline and, you know, just react at it and, you know, they might even share it a bunch, but they haven't read it. Uh, so how do we get that deeper engagement? Deeper understanding. I mean, you know, I always say, you know, the I'm too busy is a poor excuse because, you know, you know Michelangelo and I'd sign that many hours in the day way we did and, you know, sure they didn't have their phone buzzing all over >> the place. >> I actually think we should do less. Not more. I think I think too much information, too many channels, too many corporate channels, too many personal channels, too much bad content. The world does not need more crappy content. So whether you're a individual, blogger or marketer, I'd say just turn the dial back a little bit. Did work on better, longer pieces that add more? I think that's the only way that we can shift the conversation. >> Yeah, long for love it. Oh, no, absolutely. I still read so >> well. It's a curatorial function as well, that we have to be responsible. And that's yet one more way people can participate. We see people rise and in the community because they're really great curator Sze, because they syndicate the content in ways are interesting to others because time is of a value so that becomes a real asset. And the skill is Well, >> yeah, great. Great point. Could you know, so many times I'm like I really like to do a thousand word post on this, but, you know, sometimes all I'll come out of this show and take, you know, I did a year ago. I did it. I didn't article on the federation. You know, the ZPM were pivotal and coming out of the show, I've got a lot of new data, and I could really quickly take some photos. I've done. Takes some of the notes. I take some of the tweets and, you know, put together an order. Won't take me as long. I mean, I'll probably do it on the plane ride home. So what I wanna ask next is, you know, you guys see a lot of things out there. What coolest thing you're seeing either at a at a conference or event or you know what? What? What's catching, right? What? What's interesting? Done. >> There's a whole new side out there called Tech, right? I don't know what's cool out there again. I'm seeing multi channel multi, a lot of experiments. There's some cool stuff going on with the indie web. There's I mean, everything is mobile. I don't know. There's just a lot of places. It >> sounds like you Let's give the plug. Integrity has finally cool things and, you know, solid. But something >> like that tech reckoning is a site that's gonna bring. It's an independent site. It's not associate with any vendor. It's going to bring some of the community and enterprise community together to talk about some of these things about Where is it going as a whole? Where's technology going, where our career is going to try to help us get to whatever this you know, it is a service. Third platform, Whatever you wanna call it, where the heck were going? It looks pretty interesting, and it looks like it isn't gonna be quite the same thing. So we're trying to bring together a set of people and just tackle some of those problem and also work together and collaborate. It's so much easier with open source with cloud. With all the tools we have available, it's so cheap and easy to build new pieces of technology, not just a type of each other words online, but to actually build stuff that I'm very excited about. The power taking going far. This from open source, right? Taking the power of people to come together and build cool new stuff. That's what I would like to. >> Still, I'm just angry that you scooped Matt and I on getting to interview John first about >> tech recognition. So, Amy, you you do some cool things that some of events we talk about, the waffle bacon, you What have you seen out there that that's kind of interesting? Or, you know, how do you find some of the cool new ideas? >> Yeah, I think you always I'm working with a really talented events team right now. And I think one of the things I've seen them sort of transform is that social is not other, you know? And we're seeing the social and this concept of community permeate and really think about our audience to really engage that core base, those those tech enthusiasts, and to see what you can do to in engage them. So I'm saying it in real life and in these community platforms. So I think that's been one of the other great trends is watching people band together and various kinds of consortiums. I won't name names, but there's a few folks outlook community. We're seeing a lot of this happen where they're sort of grouping together, and they're saying if they pull their resource is what happens, they might be able to gather enough money to go to a conference or to fund a buddy or to get a hotel room that they've got extra spaces somebody can crash. So I'm saying it's very cool, sort of stitching together opportunity and working together to learn more. So again, the combination of the platforms, using the technology and then in real life connection. >> All right, so I've been asking all the questions here. So before we wrap up, you know, Amy, anything you want, Johnny, when as me, John same, we throw it open. When Whenever >> you first signed up for your Twitter account, did you think it would lead you here because you have the best Twitter >> account? No, actually, a friend of mine for me and Steve Todd, who was blogging before I was, and he said, You know, when there's trepidation when you're gonna get published and you never know where it leads. And we were talking about this after he and I were on the stage at Radio City Music Hall right after Bill Clinton had been on because they brought the bloggers down when we were there. And it's like, Come on, you know, I'm, you know, I'm an engineer by training, you know, I've done. You know, I've done some sales. I've done engineering. I've done you no operations. Technologist is hard. So you know, some of the places the people I've met. I mean, if you just reach out to people, it still, even though there's so many people on Twitter, you know, the people that right and our authors and bloggers, If you comment or you reach out to them, a lot of them reach back. I mean, you know, I still amazed at some of the people I've met get to rub elbows with. No, just just have had a blast with him. So >> get another one. So do you think unicorns can be trained? Do you think people have to be born with the skill set, Or do you think you can be a uniformed rancher? >> No, I think I think I think they could be trained. You know, it's absolutely it's Ah, it's a tough skill set. I mean, you know, doing video is not easy. First couple of times you do it. It's different there's there's all these muscles. You know, Writing is one of those things that you know. I thought I was an okay writer, but hadn't done a lot of it. They're things you do. So try it out. And that thing I tell you, you got to stick with it for a while. I thought Twitter was pretty stupid. First Go on it. But, you know, I stuck on it for another six months and have some fun with it. No, here we are six years later and you know it is a lot and, you know, blocking of writing and blogging and everything else you know all over. I >> like the muscle memory idea. >> It's hard. You were on camera, have remember not to scratch my face. Strange. He'll set, I ask. I actually, I'm seeing a lot of interest in short form video. I know the kids are all doing it. I mean, obviously, we're doing it here. You do it. It's part of your practice. But in talking with people about our new activities, it's just so easy to take a chair. I think that's actually, even though it's been coming up for years, I think where I think that's an interesting thing >> on all right now, I'll give one of those inside tips videos. Great. Some people don't like to watch video. Yeah, broadcaster great. Some people don't like to listen to him, you know, writing's great. Some people won't read. So you know what? One of the early lessons I had is when I was, you know, being a, you know, active member on standard evangelizing of solution. I did it everywhere it you know that give presentations that shows you put it up on slide chair. You do you two videos, you blogged about it. You talk to everybody, you bet that you can everywhere. And you know, it just permeates out there. It could be a bunch of works and then there's tools that are out there. >> They're all connected events, right? I've discovered recently, and I can't believe I just realized this. But it was with the conversation with Amy on our Christmas broadcast that even though I've been part of an online group for years, I'm part of digital marketing for BM. Where for years, Uh, actually, most of my work. Half of my work is off line having my workers meeting people in person, getting to meet them and connecting that online and offline. And the synergy there is just is immense. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, other than the keynotes, my phone stays in my pocket for the most time. Unless I'm going between events. It's the in real life and nearly getting to know things. I was joking, You know, Twitter went away. Tomorrow might be a little sad, but I can connect the most. All those people, we got him on LinkedIn, Facebook and, you know, email. I still use something. Don't taking their holds. Absolutely. So you know, to wrap. I guess if you want to, just You know what people find more on your podcast. Find your website. You know Amy, Like it start? Well, >> where >> are Equus? Versace, of course. Geek hyphen whispers dot com on way, published every week. So give us a listen. See what you think. And I'm >> Matthew Brender. Sorry you couldn't join this time, but it's a lot as it were. A DMC world and you two are here in Matthew's. >> It's hard. We're going toe to toe. It's true. We're going to record with him like it's a Max headroom figure on a yes tomorrow, so and also I'm on Twitter as calms mention and I block under that same constantly dot com girls have engineers. That's true. I have engineers, unplug dot com as well. And now sixty second Tech, the short first on the popcorn version >> and I. J. Troia on Twitter and tech reckoning dot com. I went inside. >> Hey, Amy, John. Thanks so much. We We love taking the podcast. Inception. Sile inside the Cube. Look forward to seeing you lost events connecting with the community and everybody. Definitely check out their stuff. I'm at stew on Twitter with yvonne dot org's is where most of my articles go, and, of course, silicon angled on TV is where you can find all the video. Thanks for joining us. We will be back with the rest of DMC world covered.

the cube at emc world 2014 is brought to you by emc redefine b.c.e innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing brocade say goodbye to the status quo and hello to rokade okay welcome back everyone here live in las vegas for emc world 20 at 2040 i was going to say vmworld because you're a new CEO of vm role here I'm John for a bounder still hanging with Dave vellante my co-host he would Pat Gelsinger cube alumni friend of the cube it's our fifth season we opened up at emc world 2010 in Boston Pat was on the cube then set a great time ever since pad welcome back to the cube just got off the plane from Istanbul how do you feel I feel a little bit yet like that's been a long long day okay we'll get a lot of information out of you did so first time I ask you about the D SSD acquisition I'll see you you known Andy for a while what does that all mean for the industry software at the center of the value proposition is is the hardware and compute going to be this abundant resource that no one ever sees what's your take on all this well i think you know first I think of Andy is like the Rembrandt of hardware design right you know he's just done all the amazing system design work in the industry for many years he's been a friend for many years and just great great respect for him individually obviously d SSD is doing some great work you know I think it's going to prove to be a critical technology in the entire converged infrastructure space and clearly this high-performance flash capacity there's going to be a game changer for what you're able to do in the rack and obviously with bills participation from sa p they see it as a very very critical capability for in-memory environments and some of the data analytics that they want to do so i think this is a a bold move by emc i was a fully supportive of it and i think it's going to yield very very powerful hardware for software to take advantage they bring you in on a deal like that and consult with you is it is it it's about hey Pat we need your advice I saw the board meetings I sit in the M&A meetings and I'm an Oni and so for decades okay yeah so it wasn't just a cursory glance a little bit more than it's been in the works for a while so we've been fine we'll get more information we'll be digging for home sources I'll talk about cloud I've seen last time we're at vmworld we talked about the cloud I said hey is hybrid cloud really going to be the destination you like what are you talking about it's going to be the destination it is the hybrid cloud is the way here at ian's emc world you hear joe tucci up there even using the words AWS disruption amazon is clearly on the radar public cloud is still it is out there as a viable alternative and the words like reinvent which is the conference name for amazon redefine is this conference it's ok to have amazon out there but hybrids cloud is still the deal with containers and what not I mean has a hybrid cloud narrative change for you amplified straight narrow foot pedal to the metal ya know we are absolutely convinced hybrid is the answer and maybe start with a few facts I mean it's always good to ground ourselves in a little bit of data and today on premise is ninety two percent of IT spent so eight percent is in the cloud whereas sales pass so you sort of say wow great and predictions would say by 2020 it's seventy-five percent on-premise the twenty-five percent in the public cloud so you look at that and say boy you know even just from the spin perspective it's going to be hybrid and then you look at facts like security privacy governance s la's liability cost performance all of those things will keep people on premise so it's clearly a hybrid world right where it is the on and off premise and we've clearly seen that as we've laid out this positioning of hybrid the industry is following us we're seeing amazon talk about we're seeing Microsoft talk about or seeing google talk about it all the other big cloud players are saying yo yo VMware got it right hybrid is the answer it seems they all the territory is being claimed now it's like we almost seen in almost not bubble bursts are you seeing box pull there s one obviously their economic of buying customers isn't working so I see that the pullback for they're you're seeing some other companies get massive valuations that aren't publicly traded yeah there's really kind of know really market there and then other companies in the flash marker fusion-io by the memory kind of sub that wasted well below but the container technology so I got to ask you about some of the new stuff that you seeing one valuations and also the new containers we heard da cars pretty hot right now what do you make sense of the containers in particular well on the first of the valuations I mean clearly the Pease of these very high growth you know early stage not money-making companies were just out of control and I have comment on that before at the Wall Street Journal CIO event that they were just way out of range and it's good to see those coming into more reasonable ranges now and I think that will wash through the entire industry because there was this mini bubble of you know just crazy Pease you know and you know with respect to docker and some of the other container technologies that clearly is you know enthusiasm around some of the lightweight stateless mechanisms but what I'll point out is that there have been different container approaches over the last 30 years and the only one that has had sustained architectural influence and investment has been the vm and our effort is continuing to pound the overhead continue to add value security networking management you know all the things that we've been able to build around that's idea of the vm container and of course if people are really you know see lightweight containers is valuable but we'll stick a bunch of them in a vm i mean it's just another management model for a lightweight deployment of stateless apps so John I've been thinking about you know Joe's waves right and we think okay with this next wave that we're in what's different about this way you've laid out a 50 billion dollar tam you just talked about how much of that the public clouds going to get I wonder if we could make an observation to get your feedback on it the economics of cloud they start to look so you've got software economics ninety percent gross margins hardware you know the economics at volume the marginal economics are talking about you know aren't as attractive but they're still good and then services is negative you know but diseconomies of scale if you will it seems like in the cloud that online cloud services are now taking shape the same way software is so at volume you're getting software like economics so the question is how does VMware and VMware you know cloud vcloud hybrid service get to that scale and that volume so that you can participate in that so first of all is it is it a reasonable premise to note and can you get to that scale and how do you get to that scale yeah and you know you'll see a little bit of my keynote tomorrow I'll talk about this a little bit more one is you know we're investing we're growing very rapidly as we expand the number of presences in the u.s. you know second we're very aggressively partnering and we announced their first partnership with savvis you'll see us announce other partnerships like that that we're going to leverage their capital as well right and who invests the most in capital of any industry in the room service providers all right they blow away everybody else so partnering with them the other view of that would be with vGHS is is that we also have our bspp program where you know i'll give some of the stats in the keynote tomorrow but we have an overwhelming right Brett for those vs PP partners that already has us very much at scale as one of the largest clouds not just what we do but through this broad range of partnerships that we form so overall you know we have a very powerful strategy when you add up all of those and given our business model of software and services you know it's very unique and combine that with these statistics I was giving you up on and off-premise and the private cloud you have 40 million VMs 500,000 customers you know we bring a lot to the table once all about a AirWatch so big acquisition the Federation helped a little bit o financing that's absurd yet right so talk about the importance of air watch you know where it fits into the end-user computing strategy and and what gives you excitement about air watch well you know I think one is in the whole end-user computing space you know two years ago people viewed it like VMware had a hobby you know hey we're selling these fear and a you know growing some of this yeah yeah well and you know hiring Sanjay rebuilding the leadership team investing in our end user computing sales force and now the air watch acquisition everybody realizes this ain't a hobby anymore we are taking the space very very seriously and really redefining the industry quite rapidly with the breadth of what we've done with horizon six plus the inorganic move with air watch you know we are here to win in this space and taking share substantially from Citrix and others in the category yo secondly and as part of the whole secular shift not just the cloud but it's the mobile cloud era so it's to redefine and deliver that PC experience but it's also uniquely right to enable the secure managed experience for all the mobile devices as well that's where AirWatch is clearly you know tearing up the track and you know we believe it's separating from the rest of the industry of players as that leader and really gives us the unrivaled portfolio of assets now I talked about the obviously the compute trend is moving to the data center you're seeing the commoditization now the data centers want to do the same way you talk about that publicly so with the software at the software-defined enterprises joe tucci calls we've called the sava define data center how does that change from your standpoint from a focus standpoint because you mentioned you got AirWatch is no longer a hobby you're building a you know business got a tam expansion strategy aggressively investing you have an ecosystem that you've kind of had from your hobby days now you're kind of nurturing it and expanding it what is the focus and from a software-defined perspective what is that focus specifically and how do you keep your troops marching to the cadence of that focus yeah we laid out our three areas for VMware over a year ago we said we're going to do three things software-defined data center virtualized the whole data center second do the hybrid cloud this on and off-premise and then go from the data center to the device pcs and mobile devices you know with what we've done we have all the pieces in place now the acquisitions are all in place the execution and that consistency that we've laid out now for almost a year and a half you know has really resonated both internally to my teams you know to our sales teams through our customers and our partners as well and they get it and you know that consistency has really gotten us more and more momentum we're seeing all of those limits you know really firing on all cylinders at this point so I saw the news that Gould is no longer involved kind of he was kind of cuz he's now the CEO of e mc2 you're the free captain of VMware and the Federation of the ship what is that like for you now and what are you tapping into the Federation what is pure VMware can you kind of square that off in terms of Aussie VMware what are you tap to the Federation what do you have available to you sure sure and you know with the Federation perspective you know we got a lot of benefit from I will say you know the layer that emc provides you know I call up Joe we have a shareholders meeting right yoyo cage oh yeah I'm okay good done shareholders really finish I mean yo some of those things are just elegant definitely right you know we can get things done by John date and at the same time yeah we're accountable to the street for all the financial metrics all the things that you want to be accountable to public shareholders for you know we also get the benefit like you saw an air watch your the cash position we're better aligning ourselves and global accounts were both of us our prep presence so we get the leverage of both sales teams the capacity that we have you're seeing some of the solutions work that we're doing be pivotal assets recently right you know moving things around to you know best position things for the different players as customers or seeing that you know to line those assets between it between us and also very very clearly saying okay you know here are the areas and i'll hit on this in my keynote tomorrow right this is how the vmware assets work with the emc assets and we're going to leverage each other as we go forward but as we say you know the Federation motto is strategically aligned right you know while remain you know loosely coupled so continuing to be able to go partner right with others in the industry to facilitate that flexible ecosystem I want to ask you about Silicon Valley right so obviously you have a great campus VMware means one of the most beautiful campuses in Silicon Valley well done it's fits into the hillside there my favorite areas but as you guys go global Silicon Valley's also going global and there's also kind of like a let's say bubble ish environment out there right now evaluation we just talked about control Silicon Valley's changing what's your take of the currents data Silicon Valley in terms of the innovation I know you're going to be talking with Stanford University and Mark injuries and coming up on a panel has it changed over the past few years and it does it still have that innovation and visit is it bringing it back Alan's of cycles change which you're taken so that well we're going to have a nice campus opening you know beautiful VMware a campus we're gonna have a little party yes I don't know this is the cube invited okay thanks i hope so yes so we're going to be the ribbon cutting ceremony ins and that's going to be great and mark is going to be there john hennessy my thesis advisor now the president of Stanford is going to be there Joe the board so we're gonna have a great event talking about that exact question right and really talking about the future of the valley unquestionably today it remains the hottest bed of innovation anywhere in the world but I think you always look at that and say you know where the recipe is still there as you look to the future and you know competition for labor is intense you know tax rates you know people move out of the valley because of justification and San Francisco big discussion yeah right you know toyota just moved to texas I mean there's always this you know you know do you still have that recipe right nowhere else has even close to the valley and that today race you that in your travels oh absolutely absolutely but every place in the world says I want to be like the valley right every place in the world is saying what do I need to do to create that same recipe you know whether that's bangalore or whether that's beijing or shenzhen right or whether that's a israel or you know many spots in the world well Silicon Valley export that knowledge and is that is that a good thing you know I don't think silicon but you know knowledge ideas right you know this is bubbling cauldron but there's something special about the valley that it's been able to maintain now for you know three decades and it doesn't look like it's coming to an end hey Chuck house is pretty excited about v san are you as excited oh very excited about these why what why you so excited what does it all mean well you know if you're a V admin right which you know is the heart of our customer base you say check find me local disk check provision local disk well I've just done storage right it's powerful it is you know amazingly simple and gives great performance and it redefines the hot edge right for you know via for virtual storage a new tier of storage so we're very excited about it certainly doesn't replace all of storage but it gives a new cheer a new capacity that for a virtual admin is just perfect is that new tier incremental I mean must replace some storage of sexually it's right you know I mean the good news is storage continues to grow right you know it's one of the right the areas of IT that just continues to grow as capacity grows an application demands take and I'm of course there's going to be some trade-offs to the some places and we do see lower capacity lower end of the market test dead some vb i use cases dr use cases where hey people might trade it off versus other all tournaments good news for you MC obviously they're mostly up market right is where their strength is but so we're very excited about be San and really see it as a critical new component of the vmware family and we stream i/o acquisition you made seems to be working out okay you happy about that yeah yeah nothing's been tons of time on extreme I oh these days but you made that that was all a lot of the acquisitions they did at the MC we're doing just fine hey you know and I cheer my team on back there when I meet it was like huh why did that would slip so that's not what the JC we were talking earlier the dream team is now kind of spread thin running their own little ships if you will in the Federation but back when 2010 we started doing the cube it was all kind of under one roof and we kind of said hey you got to get the meat on the bone we talked about in the queue hey the product portfolio is in transition you talk about some of the acquisitions looking back what are you most proud of for the team not just yourself but the group what you guys made some of those calls that might have been on the fence what was some of the highlights you look back and then where you are today well you think about some of the key decisions that we made and you know we did green pump that's now in the center of a pivotal now we did I salon that's performed extremely well we have done the data domain and clearly the whole back up space is performed very well we've also laid some of the seeds for the future right like extreme i/o like Viper were done when I was there so all these things you don't it's done well EMC gained significant share since I joined and they have the tools to really be positioned to help go through this next phase of the transition and obviously under David and his team's a leadership you know the industry remains in transition and that's still affecting EMC and they're having to you know carefully navigate that next phase and I think you've heard a lot from him today we love pulling the sound bites out I have a quote here 430 two days ago from you but I want to don't talk about that now but the quote we had on the cube you said is that if you don't get out from that next wave you'll be driftwood Joe Tucci said today if you don't take an offensive approach with this platform you're going to wither away so let's talk about that getting out in front that next wave in your mind share it the folks out there in your world words why at this point in time so important from an industry perspective you seen in movies before you've seen the massive inflection points you've seen Moore's Law at full tilt you know try to compare where we are today from irrelevance and making sense of the excitement and controversy opportunity yeah well we are as we would say as we're going that you know from client server to mobile cloud right this will be tectonic shifts and write the amount that's going to shift to cloud the amount that's going to shift away from PCs to mobile devices in the industry and all the vendors that have their value propositions tied to a hardware defined approach guess what yeah that's going to be a secular decline where people are going to be competing for a premise based the revenue that way into the mime ironmen that's going to be flat to down right and there's going to be no possibility of growth and you look at what's happened right you know consecutive quarters at IBM for instance boy you know they're feeling the pain right of this transition and the cloud transition it's barely underway right mobile is just scratching the surface yeah you know so these trends are just about to get started you know the analogy I'll give them my keynote tomorrow is 1989 and we're Digital Equipment Corporation and over the next seven years guess what right the entire business is going to shift that guessing always great to have you on the cube just any final parting words about what you're going to work on this week some things you're highlighting customer events us you keynote what do you expect to see here at emc world this week well you know I always see OEMC role is a great place and you know just feel incredibly embraced and our partners at emc and just happy that they give me the opportunity to address the audience here that's always a great joy and it is this period of extraordinary transition and everybody here right as the conference's has to redefine themselves on the other side of these tectonic shifts that are underway and EMC is you know doing that and there you know to all of their partners and customers saying here's what you need to do to go with us event in August right around the corner fat thank you inside of you when he finds one of my closest friends off we love talking with you and we'll see you at your event we're going to be actually attending the ribbon-cutting ceremony I was talking to the folks but getting the cube they're going back and forth but we'll get it done Pat Gessling you inside the cube the CEO VMware friend of the cube would love having you on be right back after this short break Pat glad to see you're like I could see it you