>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas. We're about hitting the midway point of three days wall-to-wall live coverage on two sets. I'm Stu Miniman. My co-host is John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program, first of all, a first time guest whose company was mentioned by Pat Gelsinger in the opening keynote, Chris Gregg, the CIO of Mercy Ships. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> And also happy to welcome back a regular on the program, John Siegal, who's the vice president product marketing with Dell EMC on the Infrastructure Solution Group. John, great to see you. >> Always glad to be here Stu, as you know. >> All right. So, always excite not only a customer but a customer, as Pat said, "doing good." So, tell us a little bit about Mercy Ships' mission. >> Thank you, Stu. It is great to be here. Super excited to have Pat mention us on the stage yesterday morning. Great great opportunity. We meet the need that Pat mentioned, the five billion people in this world who don't have access to safe and affordable surgical care. More than 30 percent of the deaths in this world are a result of that lack of that access. So, we meet that need. We operate hospital ships that provide surgical care in the developing world and support the countries by providing training and capacity building in those areas. >> It is a great mission. It's one of those things that, you know, we've had a few examples here at the show. Malala Yousafzai this morning was very inspiring. Just talk about the company itself, how big, where do you operate around the globe. >> So, we operate in primarily West and Southern and Eastern Africa. That's where you find many of the countries or most of the countries that are the least developed in this area. We're headquartered in the US. We have offices around the world for fund raising and recruiting. Our organization is a non-profit. We are funded entirely by donation and our hospital ships are staffed entirely by volunteers. >> Alright, and you've got the CIO hat on. >> I do. >> So talk to us a little bit about IT. I lived on the vendor side. I actually remember designing gear that was okay for those kind of environments. Ruggedizd and military and things like that. So, tell us your role inside and what that encompasses. >> Well, for us the most important thing is ensuring that the organization is efficient and that we are putting the, delivering the best for our patients, for the people we're serving in Africa. So, we want our IT to be effective, efficient, simple. Particularly with ships being staffed as volunteers, we want to maximize the effort onboard. And we don't want to spend a lot of time supporting IT, if you like. So, much of what we're doing and where we're going is around simplifying and that's where VxRails come in for us. >> Alright, well John, he's a straight man. He set you up. >> He set me up, right? >> Thank you for bringing us, you know, we love CIOs. We love missions for good here. So, yeah, he set you up on the Dell connecting. >> It doesn't get more inspirational than this though, does it, right? And so, of course, we've been focused with hyper-converged on simplifying IT now for years. And, you know, whether it's helping companies refocus there energies and there resources to innovate or it's helping non-profits literally save lives. I mean this is, to me, this is what inspires us to do good and actually, really to double down on really driving more and more simplicity into our products. >> Well, Chris, I'm really interested in some of the technical details because we heard a lot here at VMworld about the Edge, right? The Edge has a lot of different meanings and connotations but not everything can live up in a regional data center, up in the public cloud, right? And, you know, a ship is probably a canonical example. So I'm kind of fascinated with like, what kinds of things do you encounter that you wouldn't encounter were you in AWS east or something. What do you have to do on the ship? And you're all self-contained and etc.? >> Yeah, our primary constraint is availability of bandwidth. So, going back a couple years, we were relying purely on satellite, had a maybe about five meg connection for a full hospital ship, 400 people. We've gone up to about 100 meg now. So, we're still tiny. So that really constrains. We have this hybrid environment of a on premise on ship, with live-live data centers on ship, two data centers on a ship. Headquarters as well and then we're starting to look at what we can take into the cloud. So, the concept of a hybrid approach, especially with one vendor partnered with Vmware and Dell bringing it all together in one place and one support model is really fantastic for us. >> Yeah, you have amphibious cloud, is I think what you have, right? >> Yes, yes. (laughs) >> So, John, are there any special things that you have to do from a gear standpoint? From their standpoint? >> Well, it's interesting, you know. I think from their requirements perspective. So, first of all they're looking for small footprint, of course. And hyper-converts, by nature, is smaller. And so we've done that there. But in addition to that, I think as we've talked about too, is we're also helping them hyper-converge their operations as well, right? As he mentioned, as Chris mentioned, they have IT volunteers on staff that are literally coming, they're volunteering their own time. They don't stay for, what? A couple months at a time? >> Three months >> Three months at a time. Constant rotation of new staff. They can't be experts on storage, and servers and networking and all that. What they need is to be able to hyper-converge operations into more of a generalist type of approach. And so that's really where our efforts have really helped them, is I think has enabled them to have IT generalists be able to handle all the upgrades and the deployments so that it just works. But beyond that, from a hardware standpoint, no, nothing specific there other than the small footprint. >> But from a personnel standpoint, you want that easy button, right? >> Absolutely. >> You don't have to, right, training them up, maintaining it. I know when I talk to a lot of HCI customers they never touch the box. It's "oh great I've got some interface and I can do that". What's your experience been? How long have you had the solution? >> So, we've had the solution in headquarters for about a year. And we are building a new ship. It's ready to be launched in 2020. It's actually another aspect for us is, when we started looking at this in 2016, we were looking out four years, really, for the time it takes to build a ship and thinking forward to what would be coming four years time. What do we need to put our bets on, if you life. So, looking at VxRail when it started coming into play. We've actually started building the data centers for the new ship. Had a good experience so far. We're getting ready to pack that up and be sending out to be installed on the ship next year. >> As we've talked about, the faster you can deploy one of these floating hospitals, the quicker you can help patients. Right, so this is kind of giving a whole new meaning to the ability to really simplify deployment as well as the whole life cycle. And saving them. >> What are some of the workloads that you're running that on, on these active-active data centers. That's kind of interesting as well. >> Yeah, on ship we have, it's interesting we have such a mix. And we operate a hospital, of course. And we operate services to maintain plants, the machinery and all that sort of stuff. There's not too much IoT at this point, although our new ship will have some more. In the hospital you've got these radiology, patient records, all those sorts of things. We operate a school on board as well, There's the general office support as well. On the ship it's quite mixed and varied. >> Alright. >> But it really was the flexibility, right? I think the flexibility of hyper-converge that allows you to run some of your kind of run of the mill, the basic applications. But also, this ship's going to be deployed several years from now as well with the similar technologies. So it's important to be able to support not just today's applications, but some of the next-gen applications >> Absolutely that are coming down the pike to help you improve care. >> And with new ship we'll be deploying VDI as well. So we'll be taking that step as well with Horizon. >> I was curious that with the teaching and everything, there's lots of use cases-- >> Absolutely, yeah. >> that come to mind there. John, what does Dell do for the non-profits that obviously, HDI's designed to be affordable to begin with but for this class of customer anything special? Or is it just part of the regular future-proofing and everything like that that makes this possible? >> I think this is just a great opportunity to hear this and to see how simplicity is really being achieved and helping save lives. So, I think from that perspective we couldn't be happier. I think, also, what we've really poured is our heart and soul and energy into this product so that it just works. And I think a lot of what I think also Chris looked at was wanting to make sure he had a single vendor. So, we've made sure that we have everything from data protection to the actual infrastructure itself. We have Dell EMCI still on in there as well. But providing a single point of contact to support that whole stack so that you have volunteers onsite, on the ship, giving a whole new meaning to on-prem, by the way, on ship and yet, if there is an issue, they have the peace of mind to know that it's one call to Dell EMC to support that entire stack. So, again, that's really what we're proud of, is to see the value proposition that we envisioned years ago start to really be realized in a situation like this where it's really helping save lives. >> Chris, I understand it's your first time at this show-- >> It is, yes. >> We always, it's a very welcoming community. What's your impressions been so far? And you probably have a slightly different experience than the average person's not usually mentioned by the CEO of the company-- >> Yes. >> Up on the keynotes. >> Yes, it's been quite the introduction to be mentioned. We were brought in and sat right in the front row in the keynote. And that was very exciting, too. It's been fantastic to be here. Really inspiring to see some of the things that are coming along in the future. I've had lots of ideas, thinking about what we can do next and how we could continue to improve what we're doing so that can continue to serve more people, have a bigger impact for our organization. >> It's amazing. I was actually just looking at your volunteer page. You know, the beautiful thing about VMworld is that it's a, although there are a couple VM, there's a VMworld in Europe and a VMworld here, but this community is global. There are people here from all over the world. And some of them might be able to take a couple months off, right? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> And so what kind? I see you're looking. I see IS systems administrator, support specialist, all sorts of stuff. >> Yeah, so there's two vacancies in our team at the moment, as you mentioned. A system admin and a support specialist. Our website, mercyships.org, has all the volunteer opportunities. Last year we had volunteers from 68 countries. All sorts of skill, not just medical obviously, administrative, all sorts. So, go and have a look at the website. >> That's awesome. >> Chris, one thing I always like to talk to CIO's these days, how's your role changing? When you look at what's happen the last couple years, change is evident from everything you see at this show. What are you seeing from yourself and when you talk to your peers as to how things are moving? >> For me the role has really moved into trying to understand how Mercy Ships can multiply our impact and looking how technology can be a part of that. It's looking at how we optimize and make our operations more efficient. As an organization funded by donors, we want to make sure that we maximize those dollars to be delivering patient care. So, looking at how, as an organization, we can really double down and multiply what we do through technology. >> That's great. Look, IT used to be very internally focused. Mercy Ships' mission, obviously, very much looking external on the CIO. John, you talk to a lot of customers at this show. This is a great story. Any other things from the show... >> I got to say, as we were just talking about here though, it is such an inspiring story and it is an opportunity now for all the vcenter administrators here at the show. By the way, because VxRail, of course, you can just use familiar tools like vcenter, VMware Tools, this is a pretty good recruiting area for you right now. Again, it's all coming together for us here. And I think the opportunity for us to give back in a way here as Dell Technologies, as VMware together, this is what we envisioned. And we're just happy to be able to have a storyline like this. And we look forward to maybe being on theCUBE again with Chris in the future as they bring the next ship online as well. >> By the way, our studios are always open for the non-profits. No charge, have them in. We've got Palo Alto. We've got Boston area. We do love to be able to support that as we can. >> Alright, want to give you both the final word. Things looking forward, takeaways from your experience so far. >> Yeah, so, one of the things that really interesting for me is thinking through how we can start integrating Workplace One. So, looking at, with a turnover of volunteer staff, we want to make sure the Edge is really simple, that we can support that. Also, thinking through what we want to do to increase our resilience and dr capabilities. And starting to look at how we can use the Cloud more, particularly Hybrid cloud with multiple different providers. So, yeah, really exciting. Thank you so much for the opportunity. It's really been good to be here. And mercyships.org is the place to go and find out more. >> I'd just add to that again. We're honored to be able to be part of this story with you across the Dell Technologies family. And we look forward to continuing, to providing the best experience you can have for your ships going forward. Now we'll be continuing our partnership. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you. >> John and Chris, thank you so much. Be sure, check out mercyships.org for those volunteer opportunities. And check out theCUBE.net where you can find all of the video content from this show and all the others. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2018. You're watching theCUBE.