(uptempo orchestral music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Wikibon theCUBE special feature. A special digital community event on the relationship between AI, infrastructure and business value. Now it's sponsored by DDN with participation from NIVIDA, and over the course of the next hour, we're going to reveal something about this special and evolving relationship between sometimes tried and true storage technologies and the emerging potential of AI as we try to achieve these new business outcomes. So to do that we're going to start off with a series of conversations with some thought leaders from DDN and from NVIDIA and at the end, we're going to go into a crowd chat and this is going to be your opportunity to engage these experts directly. Ask your questions, share your stories, find out what your peers are thinking and how they're achieving their AI objectives. That's at the very end but to start, let's begin the conversation with Kurt Kuckein who is a senior director of marketing at DDN. >> Thanks Peter, happy to be here. >> So tell us a little bit about DNN at the start. >> So DDN is a storage company that's been around for 20 years. We've got a legacy in high performance computing, and that's what we see a lot of similarities with this new AI workload. DDN is well known in that HPC community. If you look at the top 100 super computers in the world, we're attached to 75% of them. And so we have the fundamental understanding of that type of scalable need, that's where we're focused. We're focused on performance requirements. We're focused on scalability requirements which can mean multiple things. It can mean the scaling of performance. It can mean the scaling of capacity, and we're very flexible. >> Well let me stop you and say, so you've got a lot of customers in the high performance world. And a lot of those customers are at the vanguard of moving to some of these new AI workloads. What are customer's saying? With this significant engagement that you have with the best and the brightest out there. What are they saying about this transition to AI? >> Well I think it's fascinating that we have a bifurcated customer base here where we have those traditionalist who probably have been looking at AI for over 40 years, and they've been exploring this idea and they've gone to the peaks and troughs in the promise of AI, and then contraction because CPUs weren't powerful enough. Now we've got this emergence of GPS in the super computing world. And if you look at how the super computing world has expanded in the last few years. It is through investment in GPUs. And then we've got an entirely different segment which is a much more commercial segment, and they may be newly invested in this AI arena. They don't have the legacy of 30, 40 years of research behind them, and they are trying to figure out exactly what do I do here. A lot of companies are coming to us. Hey, I have an AI initiative. Well, what's behind it? We don't know yet but we've got to have something, and they don't you understand where is this infrastructure going to come from. >> So a general availability of AI technologies and obviously flash has been a big part of that. Very high speed networks within data centers. Virtualization certainly helps as well. Now opens up the possibility for using these algorithms, some of which have been around for a long time that require very specialized bespoke configurations of hardware to the enterprise. That still begs the question. There are some differences between high performance computing workloads and AI workloads. Let's start with some of the, what are the similarities and let's explore some of the differences. >> So the biggest similarity I think is it's an intractable hard IO problem. At least from the storage perspective, it requires a lot of high throughput. Depending on where those idle characteristics are from. It can be a very small file, high opt intensive type workflows but it needs the ability of the entire infrastructure to deliver all of that seamlessly from end to end. >> So really high performance throughput so that you can get to the data you need and keep this computing element saturated. >> Keeping the GPU saturated is really the key. That's where the huge investment is. >> So how do AI and HPC workloads differ? >> So how they are fundamentally different is often AI workloads operate on a smaller scale in terms of the amount of capacity, at least today's AI workloads, right? As soon as a project encounter success, what our forecast is is those things will take off and you'll want to apply those algorithm games bigger and bigger data sets. But today, we encounter things like 10 terabyte data sets, 50 terabyte data sets, and a lot of customers are focused only on that but what happens when you're successful? How you scale your current infrastructure to petabytes and multi petabytes when you'll need it in the future. >> So when I think of HPC, I think of often very, very big batch jobs. Very, very large complex datasets. When I think about AI, like image processing or voice processing whatever else it might be. Like for a lot of small files randomly access that require nonetheless some very complex processing that you don't want to have to restart all the time and the degree of some pushing that's required to make sure that you have the people that can do. Have I got that right? >> You've got that right. Now one, I think misconception is on the HPC side, that whole random small file thing has come in in the last five, 10 years, and it's something DDN have been working on quite a bit. Our legacy was in high performance throughput workloads but the workloads have evolved so much on the HPC side as well, and as you posited at the beginning so much of it has become AI and deep learning research. >> Right, so they look a lot more alike. >> They do look a lot more alike. >> So if we think about the revolving relationship now between some of these new data first workloads, AI oriented change the way the business operates type of stuff. What do you anticipate is going to be the future of the relationship between AI and storage? >> Well, what we foresee really is that the explosion in AI needs and AI capability is going to mimic what we already see, and really drive what we see on the storage side. We've been showing that graph for years and years of just everything going up into the right but as AI starts working on itself and improving itself, as the collection means keep getting better and more sophisticated, and have increased resolutions whether you're talking about cameras or in life sciences, acquisition. Capabilities just keep getting better and better and the resolutions get better and better. It's more and more data right and you want to be able to expose a wide variety of data to these algorithms. That's how they're going to learn faster. And so what we see is that the data centric part of the infrastructure is going to need the scale even if you're starting today with a small workload. >> Kurt, thank you very much, great conversation. How did this turn into value for users? Well let's take a look at some use cases that come out of these technologies. >> DDN A3I within video DGX-1 is a fully integrated and optimized technology solution that provides an enable into acceleration for a wide variety of AI and the use cases in any scale. The platform provides tremendous flexibility and supports a wide variety of workflows and data types. Already today, customers in the industry, academia and government all around the globe are leveraging DDN A3I within video DGX-1 for their AI and DL efforts. In this first example used case, DDN A3I enables the life sciences research laboratory to accelerate through microscopic capture and analysis pipeline. On the top half of the slide is the legacy pipeline which displays low resolution results from a microscope with a three minute delay. On the bottom half of the slide is the accelerated pipeline where DDN A3I within the video DGX-1 delivers results in real time. 200 times faster and with much higher resolution than the legacy pipeline. This used case demonstrates how a single unit deployment of the solution can enable researchers to achieve better science and the fastest times to results without the need to build out complex IT infrastructure. The white paper for this example used case is available on the DDN website. In the second example used case, DDN A3I with NVIDIA DGX-1 enables an autonomous vehicle development program. The process begins in the field where an experimental vehicle generates a wide range of telemetry that's captured on a mobile deployment of the solution. The vehicle data is used to train capabilities locally in the field which are transmitted to the experimental vehicle. Vehicle data from the fleet is captured to a central location where a large DDN A3I within video DGX-1 solution is used to train more advanced capabilities, which are transferred back to experimental vehicles in the field. The central facility also uses the large data sets in the repository to train experimental vehicles and simulate environments to further advance the AV program. This used case demonstrates the scalability, flexibility and edge to data center capability of the solution. DDN A3I within video DGX-1 brings together industry leading compute, storage and network technologies, in a fully integrated and optimized package that makes it easy for customers in all industries around the world to pursue break from business innovation using AI and DL. >> Ultimately, this industry is driven by what users must do, the outcomes if you try to seek. But it's always is made easier and faster when you got great partnerships working on some of these hard technologies together. Let's hear how DDN and NVIDIA are working together to try to deliver new classes of technology capable of making these AI workloads scream. Specifically, we've got Kurt Kuckein coming back. He's a senior director of marketing for DDN and Darrin Johnson who is global director of technical marketing for NVIDIA in the enterprise and deep learning. Today, we're going to be talking about what infrastructure can do to accelerate AI. And specifically we're going to use a relationship. A virgin relationship between DDN and NVIDIA to describe what we can do to accelerate AI workloads by using higher performance, smarter and more focused infrastructure for computing. Now to have this conversation, we've got two great guest here. We've got Kurt Kuckein, who is the senior director of marketing at DDN. And also Darrin Johnson, who's the global director of technical marketing for enterprise at NVIDIA. Kurt, Darrin, welcome to the theCUBE. >> Thank you very much. >> So let's get going on this 'cause this is a very, very important topic, and I think it all starts with this notion of that there is a relationship that you guys put forward. Kurt, why don't you describe. >> Sure, well so what we're announcing today is DDNs, A3I architecture powered by NVIDIA. So it is a full rack level solution, a reference architecture that's been fully integrated and fully tested to deliver an AI infrastructure very simply, very completely. >> So if we think about why this is important. AI workloads clearly put special stress on underline technology. Darrin talk to us a little bit about the nature of these workloads and why in particular things like GPUs, and other technologies are so important to make them go fast? >> Absolutely, and as you probably know AI is all about the data. Whether you're doing medical imaging, whether you're doing natural language processing. Whatever it is, it's all driven by the data. The more data that you have, the better results that you get but to drive that data into the GPUs, you need greater IO and that's why we're here today to talk about DDN and the partnership of how to bring that IO to the GPUs on our DGX platforms. >> So if we think about what you describe. A lot of small files often randomly distributed with nonetheless very high profile jobs that just can't stop midstream and start over. >> Absolutely and if you think about the history of high performance computing which is very similar to AI, really IO is just that. Lots of files. You have to get it there. Low latency, high throughput and that's why DDNs probably, nearly 20 years of experience working in that exact same domain is perfect because you get the parallel file system which gives you that throughput, gives you that low latency. Just helps drive the GPU. >> So you mentioned HPC from 20 years of experience. Now it use to be that HPC, you'd have a scientist with a bunch of graduate students setting up some of these big, honking machine. but now we're moving with commercial domain You don't have graduate students running around. You have very low cost, high quality people. A lot of administrators, nonetheless quick people but a lot to learn. So how does this relationship actually start making or bringing AI within reach of the commercial world? Kurt, why you don't you-- >> Yeah, that's exactly where this reference architecture comes in. So a customer doesn't need to start from scratch. They have a design now that allows them to quickly implement AI. It's something that's really easily deployable. We fully integrated the solution. DDN has made changes to our parallel file system appliance to integrate directly with the DGX-1 environment. Makes the even easier to deploy from there, and extract the maximum performance out of this without having to run around and tuning a bunch of knobs, change a bunch of settings. It's really going to work out of the box. >> And NVIDIA has done more than the DGX-1. It's more than hardware. You've don't a lot of optimization of different AI toolkits et cetera so talk a little bit about that Darrin. >> Talking about the example that used researchers in the past with HPC. What we have today are data scientists. A scientist understand pie charts, they understand TensorFlow, they understand the frameworks. They don't want to understand the underlying file system, networking, RDM, a InfiniBand any of that. They just want to be able to come in, run their TensorFlow, get the data, get the results, and just keep turning that whether it's a single GPU or 90 DGXs or as many DGXs as you want. So this solution helps bring that to customers much easier so those data scientist don't have to be system administrators. >> So roughly it's the architecture that makes things easier but it's more than just for some of these commercial things. It's also the overall ecosystem. New application fires up, application developers. How is this going to impact the aggregate ecosystem is growing up around the need to do AI related outcomes? >> Well, I think one point that Darrin was getting to there in one of the bigg effects is also as these ecosystems reach a point where they're going to need to scale. There's somewhere where DDN has tons of experience. So many customers are starting off with smaller datasets. They still need the performance, a parallel file system in that case is going to deliver that performance. But then also as they grow, going from one GBU to 90 GXs is going to be an incredible amount of both performance scalability that they're going to need from their IO as well as probably capacity, scalability. And that's another thing that we've made easy with A3I is being able to scale that environment seamlessly within a single name space, so that people don't have to deal with a lot of again tuning and turning of knobs to make this stuff work really well and drive those outcomes that they need as they're successful. In the end, it is the application that's most important to both of us, right? It's not the infrastructure. It's making the discoveries faster. It's processing information out in the field faster. It's doing analysis of the MRI faster. Helping the doctors, helping anybody who is using this to really make faster decisions better decisions. >> Exactly. >> And just to add to that. In automotive industry, you have datasets that are 50 to 500 petabytes, and you need access to all that data, all the time because you're constantly training and retraining to create better models to create better autonomous vehicles, and you need the performance to do that. DDN helps bring that to bear, and with this reference architecture is simplifies it so you get the value add of NVIDIA GPUs plus its ecosystem software plus DDN. It's match made in heaven. >> Kurt, Darrin, thank you very much. Great conversation. To learn more about what they're talking about, let's take a look at a video created by DDN to explain the product and the offering. >> DDN A3I within video NVIDIA DGX-1 is a fully integrated and optimized technology solution that enables and accelerates end to end data pipelines for AI and DL workloads of any scale. It is designed to provide extreme amounts of performance and capacity backed by a jointly engineered and validated architecture. Compute is the first component of the solution. The DGX-1 delivers over one petaflop of DL training performance leveraging eight NVIDIA tester V100 GPUs in a 3RU appliance. The GPUs are configured in a hybrid cube mesh topology using the NVIDIA and VLink interconnect. DGX-1 delivers linearly predictable application performance and is powered by the NVIDIA DGX software stack. DDN A31 solutions can scale from single to multiple DGX-1s. Storage is a second component of the solution. The DDN and the AI200 is all NVIDIA parallel file storage appliance that's optimized for performance. The AI200 is specifically engineered to keep GPU computing resources fully utilized. The AI200 ensures maximum application productivity while easily managing to update data operations. It's offered in three capacity options and a compact tour U chassis. AI200 appliance can deliver up to 20 gigabytes a second of throughput and 350,000 IOPS. The DDN A3I architecture can scale up and out seamlessly over multiple appliances. The third component of the solution is a high performance, low latency, RDM capable network. Both EDR and InfiniBand, and 100 gigabit ethernet options are available. This provides flexibility, interesting seamless scaling and easy integration of the solution within any IT infrastructure. DDN A3I solutions within video DGX-1 brings together industry leading compute, storage and network technologies in a fully integrated and optimized package that's easy to deploy and manage. It's backed by deep expertise and enables customers to focus on what really matters. Extracting the most value from their data with unprecedented accuracy and velocity. >> Always great to hear the product. Let's hear the analyst's perspective. Now I'm joined by Dave Vellante, who's now with Wikibon, colleague here at Wikibon and co-CEO of SiliconANGLE. Dave welcome to theCUBE. Dave a lot of conversations about AI. What is it about today that is making AI so important to so many businesses? >> Well I think it's three things Peter. The first is the data we've been on this decade long aduped bandwagon and what that did is really focused organizations on putting data at the center of their business, and now they're trying to figure okay, how do we get more value of that? So the second piece of that is technology is now becoming available, so AI of course have been around forever but the infrastructure to support that, GPUs, the processing power, flash storage, deep learning frameworks like TensorFlow have really have started to come to the marketplace. So the technology is now available to act on that data, and I think the third is people are trying to get digital right. This is it about digital transformation. Digital meets data. We talked about that all the time and every corner office is trying to figure out what their digital strategy should be. So there try to remain competitive and they see automation, and artificial intelligence, machine intelligence applied to that data as a lynch pan of their competitiveness. >> So a lot of people talk about the notion of data as a source value in some and the presumption that's all going to the cloud. Is that accurate? >> Oh yes, it's funny that you say that because as you know, we're done a lot of work of this and I think the thing that's important organizations have realized in the last 10 years is the idea of bringing five megabytes of compute to a petabyte of data is far more valuable. And as a result a pendullum is really swinging in many different directions. One being the edge, data is going to say there, and certainly the cloud is a major force. And most of the data still today lives on premises, and that's where most of the data os likely going to stay. And so no all the data is not going to go into the cloud. >> It's not the central cloud? >> That's right, the central public cloud. You can redefined the boundaries of the cloud and the key is you want to bring that cloud like experience to the data. We've talked about that a lot in the Wikibon and Cube communities, and that's all about the simplification and cloud business models. >> So that suggest pretty strongly that there is going to continue to be a relationship between choices about hardware infrastructure on premises, and the success at making some of these advance complex workloads, run and scream and really drive some of that innovative business capabilities. As you think about that what is it about AI technologies or AI algorithms and applications that have an impact on storage decisions? >> Well, the characteristics of the workloads are going to be often times is going to be largely unstructured data that's going to be small files. There's going to a lot of those small files, and they're going to be randomly distributed, and as a result, that's going to change the way in which people are going to design systems to accommodate those workloads. There's going to be a lot more bandwidth. There's going to be a lot more parallelism in those systems in order to accommodate and keep those CPUs busy. And yeah, we're going to talk about but the workload characteristics are changing so the fundamental infrastructure has to change as well. >> And so our goal ultimately is to ensure that we keep these new high performing GPUs saturated by flowing data to them without a lot of spiky performance throughout the entire subsystem. We've got that right? >> Yeah, I think that's right, and that's when I was talking about parallelism, that's what you want to do. You want to be able to load up that processor especially these alternative processors like GPUs, and make sure that they stay busy. The other thing is when there's a problem, you don't want to have to restart the job. So you want to have real time error recovery, if you will. And that's been crucial in the high performance world for a long, long time on terms of, because these jobs as you know take a long, long time to the extent that you don't have to restart a job from ground zero. You can save a lot of money. >> Yeah especially as you said, as we start to integrate some of these AI applications with some of the operational applications that are actually recording your results of the work that's being performed or the prediction that's being made or the recommendation that's been offered. So I think ultimately, if we start thinking about this crucial role that AI workloads is going to have in business and that storage is going to have on AI, move more processes closer to data et cetera. That suggest that there's going to be some changes in the offering for the storage industry. What are your thinking about how storage interest is going to evolve over time? >> Well there's certainly a lot of hardware stuff that's going on. We always talk about software define but they say hardware stuff matters. If obviously flash doors changed the game from a spinning mechanical disc, and that's part of this. Also as I said the day before seeing a lot more parallelism, high bandwidth is critical. A lot of the discussion that we're having in our community is the affinity between HPC, high performance computing and big data, and I think that was pretty clear, and now that's evolving to AI. So the internal network, things like InfiniBand are pretty important. NVIDIA is coming onto the scene. So those are some of the things that we see. I think the other one is file systems. NFS tends to deal really well with unstructured data and data that is sequential. When you have all the-- >> Streaming. >> Exactly, and you have all this what we just describe as random nature and you have the need for parallelism. You really need to rethink file systems. File systems are again a lynch pan of getting the most of these AI workloads, and the others if we talk about the cloud model. You got to make this stuff simple. If we're going to bring AI and machine intelligence workloads to the enterprise, it's got to be manageable by enterprise admins. You're not going to be able to have a scientist be able to deploy this stuff, so it's got to be simple or cloud like. >> Fantastic, Dave Vellante, Wikibon. Thanks for much for being on theCUBE. >> My pleasure. >> We've had he analyst's perspective. Now tells take a look at some real numbers. Not a lot of companies has delivered a rich set of bench marks relating AI, storage and business outcomes. DDN has, let's take a video that they prepared describing the bench mark associated with these new products. >> DDN A3I within video DGX-1 is a fully integrated and optimized technology solution that provides massive acceleration for AI and DL applications. DDN has engaged extensive performance and interoperable testing programs in close collaboration with expert technology partners and customers. Performance testing has been conducted with synthetic throughputs in IOPS workloads. The results demonstrate that the DDN A3I parallel architecture delivers over 100,000 IOPS and over 10 gigabytes per second of throughput to a single DGX-1 application container. Testing with multiple container demonstrates linear scaling up to full saturation of the DGX-1 Zyo capabilities. These results show concurrent IO activity from four containers with an aggregate delivered performance of 40 gigabytes per second. The DDN A3I parallel architecture delivers true application acceleration, extensive interoperability and performance testing has been completed with a dozen popular DL frameworks on DGX-1. The results show that with the DDN A3I parallel architecture, DL applications consistently achieve a higher training throughput and faster completion times. In this example, Caffe achieves almost eight times higher training throughput on DDN A3I as well it completes over five times faster than when using a legacy file sharing architecture and protocol. Comprehensive test and results are fully documented in the DDN A3I solutions guide available from the DDN website. This test illustrates the DGX-1 GPU utilization and read activity from the AI 200 parallel storage appliance during a TensorFlow training integration. The green line shows that the DGX-1 be used to achieve maximum utilization throughout the test. The red line shows the AI200 delivers a steady stream of data to the application during the training process. In the graph below, we show the same test using a legacy file sharing architecture and protocol. The green line shows that the DGX-1 never achieves full GPU utilization and that the legacy file sharing architecture and protocol fails to sustain consistent IO performance. These results show that with DDN A3I, this DL application on the DGX-1 achieves maximum GPU product activity and completes twice as fast. This test then resolved is also documented in the DDN A3I solutions guide available from the DDN website. DDN A3I solutions within video DGX-1 brings together industry meaning compute, storage and network technologies in a fully integrated and optimized package that enables widely used DL frameworks to run faster, better and more reliably. >> You know, it's great to see real benchmarking data because this is a very important domain, and there is not a lot of benchmarking information out there around some of these other products that are available but let's try to turn that benchmarking information into business outcomes. And to do that we've got Kurt Kuckein back from DDN. Kurt, welcome back. Let's talk a bit about how are these high value outcomes That seeks with AI going to be achieved as a consequence of this new performance, faster capabilities et cetera. >> So there is a couple of considerations. The first consideration, I think, is just the selection of AI infrastructure itself. Right, we have customers telling us constantly that they don't know where to start. Now they have readily available reference architectures that tell them hey, here's something you can implement, get installed quickly, you're up and running your AI from day one. >> So the decision process for what to get is reduced. >> Exactly. >> Okay. >> Number two is, you're unlocking all ends of the investment with something like this, right. You're maximizing the performance on the GPU side, you're maximizing the performance on the ingest side for the storage. You're maximizing the throughput of the entire system. So you're really gaining the most out of your investment there. And not just gaining the most out of your investment but truly accelerating the application and that's the end goal, right, that we're looking for with customers. Plenty of people can deliver fast storage but if it doesn't impact the application and deliver faster results, cut run times down then what are you really gaining from having fast storage? And so that's where we're focused. We're focused on application acceleration. >> So simpler architecture, faster implementation based on that, integrated capabilities, ultimately, all revealing or all resulting in better application performance. >> Better application performance and in the end something that's more reliable as well. >> Kurt Kuckein, thanks so much for being on theCUBE again. So that's ends our prepared remarks. We've heard a lot of great stuff about the relationship between AI, infrastructure especially storage and business outcomes but here's your opportunity to go into crowd chat and ask your questions get your answers, share your stories, engage your peers and some of the experts that we've been talking with about this evolving relationship between these key technologies, and what it's going to mean for business. So I'm Peter Burris. Thank you very much for listening. Let's step into the crowd chat and really engage and get those key issues addressed.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, day three in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World. I am Lisa Martin with John Troyer. We have been here for three days, there's over 14,000 people here, 30,000 plus more engaging with video content livestream on demand. We're excited to welcome back to theCUBE, not just back to theCUBE, but back today for a second appearance, he's so in demand, Ravi Pendekanti, Senior Vice President, Servers and Systems Product Management and Marketing at Dell EMC, welcome back! >> Thank you, Lisa, great to be here. >> So, you have so much energy for day three, but so much excitement, lots of announcements. >> Ravi: Yes. >> The theme of this event, "Make It Real," is provocative. We've heard a lot of >> Yes it is. >> Lisa: Interpretations about what that means for different customers and different industries who are looking to take advantage of emerging technologies: AI, machine learning, deep learning, IoT, to make digital transformation real. What's going on in the world of AI and machine learning? >> Lisa, a lot. Now, having said that, I don't think there's a single industry in the, in any part of the world today that we talk to that's not interested in AI, machine learning, for that matter, deep learning. Why is that so? Just think about the fact that each one of us today is probably creating and generating two and a half times more data than a year ago. It's huge. I mean, when I started out, people used to think megabytes is huge, then it went to terabytes, petabytes, exabytes, and now I think very soon we're going to talk about zettabytes, right? I'll leave it to you guys to talk about the number of zeros, but setting that aside, data by itself again, the second they went, so of much of data is being created, data in my view has absolutely no value until you create information out of it. >> Lisa: Absolutely. >> And that's where I think companies are becoming more aware of the fact that you need to start getting some information out of it, wherein starts the whole engine, first of all about going about collecting all of the data. And we have all kinds of data. We have got structured data, unstructured data, and now it's important that we actually get all of the disparate data into a format that can now be executed upon. So that's first and foremost what customers are trying to figure out. And then from there comes all the elements that the data analytics part, and then you can go into the machine learning and deep learning. So that's the way people are looking at it, and you made an interesting comment, Lisa, which is making it real. This is where people are looking at things beyond the buzzwords, right? It's sufficed to say AI is not a new term. I recall as a kid, we used to talk about AI. But now is when businesses are depending on it to ensure they have the competitive edge. >> So, Ravi, you know the pendulum swings, right, and ten years ago, >> It does. >> John: Software is eating the world and the cloud is coming, and at one point it looked like a future of undifferentiated x86 compute somewhere. It turns out, hardware actually matters, and as our application and data needs have grown, the hardware matters. >> It does. >> John: And so, part of your portfolio is the PowerEdge set of PowerEdge servers. I mean, how are you approaching that of making the needs of this new generation of software, this massive data parallelism and throughput real? >> Great question, John. It's interesting, yes, the pendulum keeps swinging, right? And the beauty is, as... It's my only hope that, as the pendulum swings, we're actually learning, too, and we're not making the same thing, the same mistakes. Thankfully, we are not. Now, when people talk about cloud, guess what? To your point, it has to run on something, software has to run on something. So, obviously the hardware. Now, to keep up with the changing tide and the needs, some of the recent things we have done, as an example, with our R840 launch yesterday, you know, NVMe is the talk of the town, too, talking about some of the new technologies. And customers want us to go out and provide a better way and a faster way for them to get access to the data in a much more faster way closer to the compute, so that's where the NVMe drives come in. We have got 24 NVMe drives on R840 today, which is two times more than the closest competitor. More into the R940xa; xa stands for extreme acceleration. Again, we have never had an xa product, this is the first of its kind that we are bringing out, and the beauty of this is, we wanted to makes sure there is a one to one relationship between the GPU and the CPU. So, for every CPU you have a GPU. It's a one to one relationship. If you look at the R940 we introduced earlier, it had, just to give the context to your question, John, it had, it could support four CPUs but only two GPUs. So if we are, think of it this way, if we are doubling the number of GPUs, and that's not it, we are actually enabling our customers to add up to eight FPGAs if they want. Nobody else does it, and this goes back to, I think Lisa, I think when we start to talk about FPGAs, too, and therein comes the issue, wherein customers don't have the flexibility in most of the cases in a lot of products out there. We have decided that flexibility has to be given to our customers because the changing, workload's changing, technologies, and even most customers today, they go in thinking that that's all they need, but sooner or later they realize that they need more than what they planned for. So our goal is to ensure that there is enough of scalability and headroom to enable that to happen. So that's how we, as PowerEdge Team, are building servers today, which actually enables us to provide our customers with an ability to have a headroom and at the same time give them the flexibility to change, whether it is NVMe drives or any kind of SSD drive, GPUs, FPGAs, so there's all the flexibility built into it along with ease of management. >> A couple things that you mention that I think are really important is that data doesn't have any value unless you're able to extract insights from it. >> Ravi: Yeah. >> Companies that are transforming digitally well are able to combine and recombine the same data using it as catalysts across many different applications within a business, that agility is key, that speed is key. >> Ravi: Yes. >> How are you, what are some of the things that you're hearing from the 14,000 plus people that I'm sure are all lined up to want to talk to you this week about what, for example, PowerEdge is going to enable them to do? You talked about flexibility, you talked about speed, what are some of the real applications that you're hearing feedback-wise from some of these new features that you've announced? >> Oh, great, so I think, again, an excellent question in terms of how the customers are reacting to and what are we doing. So now, talking about AI machine learning, think of it this way, right, the permutations and combinations are way too many. And the reason I say that is, keeping the hardware aside, when you talk about frameworks that are available today for most of the AI or machine learnings applications, people talk about TensorFlow, people talk about Caffe2, people talk about CNTK, I mean, there's a whole plethora of frameworks. And then there are different neural network methodologies, right? You hear of DNN, deep neural network, right? And then you hear of things called RNN, there is something called CNN, my point is, there is so many permutations and combinations in the mix that what our customers have come back and told us, going back to where we were earlier, talking about the flexibility in the architecture that we are providing, where we provide seamless scalability on any of the vectors, that they actually love that we are giving them the flexibility because when there are so many software options with frameworks and every other methodology, we wanted to make sure that we also provided the flexibility and the scalability. And our scalability comes in, whether it is the I/O connectability, we talked about PowerEdge MX that's going to be coming up soon that was a preview, but that's where we talked about something called the kinetic infrastructure, which essentially enables our customers to go out and run multiple workloads on the same modular infrastructure. Never happened before, right? Or, you know, the seamless way we do it now is a lot better than anything else. Likewise, to go back into the R940xa. We have the ability to go out and support hard drives, SSDs, FPGAs, GPUs, so the feedback has been that our customers are really excited about the fact that we're giving them the flexibility and agility to go out and match to the needs of their different workloads and the different options they have. So, they love it. >> Ravi, I was talking to some of your team yesterday and I was really impressed as they talked about the product development cycle. They said that we start with the customers and we start with applications. >> Ravi: Yes. >> And then we figure out what technologies are now appropriate to build in what combinations. They don't just start from let's throw the newest thing in because we can. As you talk to CIOs and enterprise architects, it used to be if you just do a server refresh and just check the box and push the button, now you've got to look at cloud readiness and what I keep on prim and what I keep off prim and what's going to fit my applications. What are you hearing from customers and how are you trying to educate them on how to approach their next refresh, well, I think even refresh is probably a bad frame, their next set of applications that they're going to have to build in this digital transformation? >> You know, John, this is actually no different, I mean let's step aside from the compute world for a minute, let's pick up an automobile industry, right? If you get into the automobile industry, a family might say they need a sedan, or a family of five or six with young kids might say they want a minivan, right? And maybe now the kids are grown up or you're still in your 20s or 30s and some of the folks would love to have a sports car, like the McLaren that up >> I'll take that one! >> Ravi: On the stage with Jeff; I know, I would love that too, right? (Lisa laughing) So my point is, when people are trying to decide on what is it they really want to buy, they actually know what they're looking for, right? A family of four doesn't go in and say, "I need a two-seat car," for example. It's a similar thing here, as people start looking at the workload first, they come in and start looking at mapping, "Hey, this is the kind of workload we have now," now let's start looking at what infrastructure can we provide behind it? You know, even if you look at our, something that we have announced in the past, but the 740xd. So, we have a 740 version and 740xd version; xd there stands for extreme density. So, if customers want a 2-CPU box, a 2-U box, a server, but they want more storage, then they have xd version. But they decide that storage is not really crucial, they just need the compute, then we provide the 740 on its own, the R740. So my point being that, accentuating the point you raised, is it's always nice to look at the application, look at what its needs are, whether it's memory, whether it's storage, whether it's the GPUs, the CPUs, and then look at how it transposes itself over the next few years because you really don't want to acquire something and then really decide later that you've run out of room. It's like buying a home and then you know you're going to have your kids or you're going to raise a family, you don't probably want to start off with a single bedroom and you know you're going to have a family in a couple of years. My point again being that, that is where the planning becomes absolutely important. So we are planning, and the planning phase is crucial because once you have that right, you now can rest at ease for the next few years and as we do that, one of the other fundamental design principles of PowerEdge is that we want to really support the platforms for multiple generations. Case in point, when we came out with our PowerEdge m1000e, we said that we will guarantee support for three generations of processors. We actually are up to the fifth generation as we speak right now. And our customers love it, because nobody really wants to go ahead and buy more servers every few years if they can go back with their investment they have made and ensure that there is room to grow. So, to your point, absolutely the right spot to start is start looking at the workload, start looking, once you have pegged it, then start looking at really at growing and what your needs could be. And then start connecting the dots and I think you would be coming out with the better outcome for the long run. >> We had the opportunity to talk, John and I just an hour or two ago, with the CIO, with Bask Iyer, and one of the things that was interesting is we talked to him about how the role of the CIO is changing to be really part of corporate strategy, >> Ravi: Yeah. >> And business strategy; as you talk with customers about building this infrastructure, to set them up for the flexibility and the agility that they need, allowing them to make the right decisions for what they need but also scale it over time, how much are you seeing the boots on the street that you're talking to have to sell this up the stack as this is fundamental to transforming IT, which is fundamental to transforming our business into a digital business? >> Very, very true. By the way, Bask is a great friend and a collaborator, we certainly look to, as the saying goes, "Eat your own dog food." So we work with Bask and team very closely because, as a CIO for a large corporation himself, we learn a lot; there's nothing better than trying to walk in the shoes of our customers so, going back to the comment you made, Lisa, is most of the, by the way, most of the customers today, the CIOs, who are now becoming not cost centers, they're becoming profit centers >> Profit centers, >> Lisa: That's what Michael Dell said on Monday. >> Absolutely, and he's absolutely right, Michael is absolutely right because most of the organizations we speak to today on an average, I would think that the number of CIOs we talk to has probably been dialed up, because we see the kind of questions that they're being asked of, right, to the point that we're making earlier, they're not looking at making point purchases for something that will satisfy them for the next 12 months or 18 months. They're looking at the next horizon, they're looking at a long-term strategy, and then they're looking back at the ROI. So what is it I'm able to go back in and provide to my customers internally, whether it is in terms of the number of users or the performance, whatever the SLAs, the Service Level Agreements may be internally, that's what they're looking for. So, towards that end, the whole concept of ROI and TCO, the total cost of ownership and the return of investment nowadays is probably a much bigger talking point that we need to support with the right factoids. I think that's becoming crucial, and the CIOs are getting more engaged in the discussions than ever in the past, and so it's just not about feeds and speeds, which I guess anyone can look at spec sheets, not as exciting, but at things beyond that that I think are getting more crucial. >> Well, Bask said, "Drinking your own champagne, eating your own dog food." I like champagne and dogs, although I'll go with both. >> I, why not. I just... >> We've got the therapy dogs next door. >> Therapy dogs, exactly. >> Lisa: Isn't that fantastic? >> They're great, they're great. >> So, last question in the last 30 seconds or so, biggest event, 14,000 as I said, expected live over the last three days, and tens of thousands more engaging, any one thing really stand out to you at this inaugural Dell Technologies World? >> The most important thing that has stuck for me is that human progress is indeed possible through technology. And this is the best showcase possible, and when you can enable human progress, which cuts across boundaries of nationality, and boundaries of any other kind, I think we are in the winning streak. >> Well said. Ravi, thanks so much for coming back today, couple times in hanging out with us on theCUBE and sharing some of the insights that you're seeing and that you're enabling your customers to achieve. >> Thank you, Lisa; thank you, John, it's been awesome. It's always wonderful being with you guys, so thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE again. Lisa Martin with John Troyer live, day three of Dell Technologies World. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break. (upbeat music)