>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018, brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome to our live coverage here. Day three at Dell Technologies World 2018. We are live in Las Vegas. Hope you've been with us for the first two days. We have a great lineup here for you on day three. I'm John Wallace, along with Stu Miniman. Glad to have you along, Stu, it's always great to work with you. >> Thanks, John. Same for you. >> Good week so far for you? >> It's been excellent, my voice is holding up, it's been a long week. >> You're a busy man. >> Excited to get all of this, and heck, I'll be seeing Dan again next week at the big show. >> Dan McConnell's becoming like, he's like not even an annual visitor, you're like a bimonthly visitor here on theCUBE, right? VP of Converged Platforms. >> Stu: Fifth time, you get a free sandwich. >> Yeah, that's right, I got to punch card, I got to sign and get it punched each time. >> Yeah, nice to have you, Dan. Nice to have you back, good to see you again. Alright, let's just talk about the show, first off. Here we are, day three, we talked a little bit yesterday about customer discussions, conversations, so now you've had a little bit of time to soak this in and what you've heard from folks, and what would be your takeaway here? >> Sure, may spin this one a little bit, may have an angle here. Tremendous interest in HCI, and I'm not saying that just because I'm in HCI. No, but it's a lot of good, solid feedback from customers. It's starting to shift more in the mainstream, right? So as we see customers deploy it, more workloads get deployed on top of it. There's a tremendous amount of interest in HCI. When we look at all the graphs of customer interviews we're doing and analyst discussions we're doing, HCI is right there at the top of the list, in terms of subjects that we're talking about. >> Can you quantify that? Are numbers at all out there floating around, in terms of growth, in terms of what... >> Oh, from the HCI side, yeah. Most analysts will agree, it's about 70 to 80 percent in growth year over year. I'd say, from a Dell perspective, we're doing 138 percent, so we're actually growing faster than market. A lot of that's due to, we've got a, one, we've been in the HCI business for a while, two, we take a portfolio approach. There's never any one size fits all, so we actually take a portfolio approach to HCI. We've got what are multiple different consumption models, one that is an appliance, this is the server, the hardware, the software, lifecycle managed in an appliance. And then the next layer is what we call rack scale. Obviously, HCI puts some pressure on the network, right? High network dependency. Rack scale, what rack scale does is include the networking components in that engineered system attribute. Pretested, pre-designed, inclusion of both the physical, as well as the virtual network, and across both of those consumption models, we have a stack that is very VMware-centric, right? VxRail, VxRack SDDC, and we have a stack that is what we call Open HCI. Supports multiple hypervisors, that is XC series on the appliance and VxRack Flex on the rack-scale solution, so portfolio approach, cover the whole market, and we're really seeing it blow up, it's great. >> Dan, it's interesting. I think back to when people were first trying to wrap their brains around this whole HCI thing, it was like, oh, okay, I took server and storage, kind of smashed it together, some software maybe in there, but it was, oh, this is small-end thing, it's maybe four nodes, maybe getting to eight nodes, but you talked about the VxRack Flex, which we've been watching ScaleIO since before the acquisition, and all that solutions. Much larger configuration, some people said, oh, it's not even HCI, because I've talked to some customers, well, I can do a storage-only configuration or I can do a full hyperconverged configuration. We've seen maturation and some segmentation in the marketplace, so you know, bring us inside that, from, you know, the Flex business, just what you're seeing, what differentiates it from some of the other options. >> Absolutely, I'd say it's flexible. (dog barking) Dog barking next door. >> John: On cue. >> On cue. >> There he is again. It's one of the philanthropic Dell outreach programs, it's comfort pets. >> Therapy dogs. >> Therapy dogs, thank you. So we're right next door, no reflection at all on the guests or the program or whatever. >> They're in day three, too. It's been a long conference for them. >> We're getting punchy, alright, back to Flex. >> Back to Flex. >> Just explaining, yeah. >> So, back to your point. Flex... is flexible. We've got customers from four nodes, all the way up to over, large enterprise customers over a thousand nodes. Matter of fact, about 45 percent of our business comes from Fortune 500, so when you think HCI, like you said, HCI started in what was VDI. We're going to pick a workload, VDI's kind of linearly scalable, HCI was a good fit. Nowadays, it's multiple workloads, right? That flexibility, agility, ease-of-scale, people are putting more and more workloads on top of it. VxRack Flex, we've got, when you talk about scalable, up to a thousand nodes, literally 30 million IOPS, right? So, performance, I think we've got it covered. So it's definitely maturing, some of those larger customers are running anywhere from database, all the way to mission-critical applications. >> Dan, I actually did a case-study of one of your larger global financial companies a few years ago. Want you to talk about what they saw this solution at. This was a foundation for their private cloud. They use, in certain regions, public cloud makes sense, but in a lot of areas, this is the foundational layer of private cloud. A lot of times, people, oh, HCI, it is what it is, it's some boxes and some software, but talk about the private cloud angle. >> This customer, it's actually a very interesting storyline. They started off doing what we would call do-it-yourself, build-your-own, and loved the technology, as is predominant with HCI, continued to scale. Bought a lot, added on, added on, and as they continued to add, continued having discussions with them, and they actually love the technology, would love to be able to automate more, would love to spend less time setting it up as it comes in. So they actually moved up that consumption pyramid into VxRack Flex, which comes, as opposed to do-it-yourself, comes shrink-wrapped, roll it in. So they actually designed their infrastructure, their data center around what they call pods. Fairly large pods, but they've changed the consumption units on how they consume IT. They'll actually wheel in Flex pods, that's their new unit of consumption. Now, a Flex pod is... >> Not to be confused with another product called FlexPod. >> Oh, gosh, yes, VxRack Flex pods. Yes, absolutely. >> We unfortunately have run out of words in our industry here, so yeah. >> I'm sure you'll find something in the vernacular that will apply here. >> I'll try and burn that one from my memory, but good catch. >> So that's one use case. Just in general now, so what is the value prop for a customer today, as opposed to what kind of flexibility you're giving them, we've heard about performance, but how are people actually putting it to use for them, and what are they doing better, do you think, because of that? >> I'll start off, one, which is an architectural discussion, and I'll crunch this down pretty small. In the beginning, there was DAS, direct-attached storage, and it was fast, and it was easy to manage, as long as you had to manage one. You get a hundred units, and it was siloed storage, and it was hard, so the world came up with SAN. It's consolidated storage, it's great. I can carve it up, I can manage it from one place, and then we came up with flash, SSD, blindingly fast, and that storage controller started to be a choking point, so we moved the storage back into the server, a la HCI. >> Actually, we called it Server SAN for that specific reason. >> Exactly right, exactly right. Initial ventures into some of HCI, you could only scale the storage or only scale the HCI clusters as big as one given cluster. So you started building somewhat of silos of HCI. One of the beauties of Flex and VxFlex OS storage software is it can scale across multiple clusters. Those clusters can be VMware, they can be BareMetal, they can be Linux, so you start to gain all the advantages of HCI, flexibility, agility, kind of incremental scaling, pay as you grow, with all of the advantages of storage consolidation. I no longer have pools of siloed storage, I can carve up ones as needed, when needed, I can manage it all as one combined storage pool. From a Flex perspective, it's got some pretty nice architectural attributes, which give you the best of HCI and agility and scale, as well as storage consolidation. So we're seeing a lot of success there. >> Dan, I hear things like open, flexible, some of those environments, and I think about the service providers and requirements that they have for how they need to simplify their environments, super conscious on cost, how's this been doing in the service provider market recently? >> Absolutely, funny you bring that up. We actually talk internally, we've got a service provider team inside Dell, they focus on servicing the large telcos and other service providers, and we've noticed that their underlying infrastructure is very very similar with Flex, so we're in discussions to see how we land what they do on top of what we do as a standardized offering. Even right now, a lot of our customers are in the service provider space. That large growth, flexibility, and some of the underlying storage stack has multi-tenancy capabilities, where you can carve up and isolate, that lend itself very very well to service providers. >> Oh, go ahead, Stu. >> For people that know ScaleIO, anything new that they should be understanding? I understand it's this packaging as like a hardware model. Organizationally, it lives under the server team now, I believe it is. >> Absolutely, so two things there. One, organizationally, all the HCI stuff came in up under Ashley Gorakhpurwalla so it came in up under the server side, and then, so, ScaleIO is up under Jeff Boudreau, under Dan Embar, it's storage stack, it's in under the storage division. We work very very closely together. Second thing that's happening, there's a, one, we've been in the HCI world for a while, in the CI world for a while. We've quickly determined we can drive much better customer experience, much better customer outcomes, as we lean more towards an appliance or an engineered system versus a do-it-yourself kind of model. With ScaleIO, what we're trying to do is push it more into an appliance model, push it more into rack scale model, VxRack Flex. There's a outbound shift away from, kind of, what was ScaleIO as a software only and into more of an engineered system appliance offering, so with that shift, you'll see a rebrand from ScaleIO to VxFlex OS. It's just a rebrand of the software. >> So I'm glad Stu talked about organization, because you had to kind of reorg not too long ago, and so we had Ashley on yesterday, we talked to Jeff yesterday, as well. So from your perspective, now that you've had a few months to settle in, find your groove, how much of a difference do you think, as far as customer-facing, is this making in terms of responding to those kinds of needs and those desires. >> Sticking HCI with the server team has an awful lot of synergy. Obvious, compute-centric, scale, from a business scale perspective. So there's an awful lot of goodness in living in that same organization. Ashley's done it pretty well to make sure there's a lot of alignment, but we're also keeping a lot of the engineered system special sauce focus on the HCI side. So we're able to, one, better leverage a lot of the, what I would call, supply chain scale, the processes and go-to-market capabilities of an engine that is built around hundreds and thousands of units, right? That stretches across services, that stretches across factory and supply chain. Obviously, we want to drive HCI, we want to drive HCI in the mainstream and scale. Sitting right there in the server organization, they do scale, right? So lot of good learnings, lot of good synergy and leverage across teams. >> It's coming together for you. Nicely done. Thanks for joining us again, good to see you. You going to see each other next week, you said? >> That's right. >> We down in New Orleans, is that... yeah. >> Yeah. >> Alright, enjoy, and stay out of trouble, both of you. >> Absolutely, you know, one week in Vegas... >> Vegas one week, New Orleans the next, that's a recipe for an interesting time. >> Yes, that it is. >> Dan McConnell, thanks for being with us here on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Back with more from Las Vegas right after this. You're watching theCUBE from Dell Technologies World 2018. (upbeat techno music)