>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, SilconANGLE's premier live streaming show where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise we are live day two of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, welcoming back a CUBE alumni, Gil Shneorson Senior Vice President of VxRail and GM at Dell EMC. Hey Gil. >> Thank you for having me back. >> Well we're excited to talk to you. So looking at some of the announcements that came out today where Dell EMC says they're the number one market leader in global hyper-converged infrastructure, and you've said that's happened really quickly. Tell us a little bit about that leadership. >> I think we found a way to take a systems approach to what is otherwise a software-defined world. So we found a way to get all of the economical benefits of hyper-converged driven by software, at the same time own the responsibility for those systems to be up and running and life cycle managed, taking away more of the responsibility then customers would have to do it on their own and I think that recipe has led us to a leadership position very, very quickly. >> So, you know we talked earlier today, can you expand upon some of that responsibility alleviating from customers, specifically around SLAs, around IO when you software-define or software-deliver storage, kind of the operating model changes. Can you expand upon that? >> Yeah, that's a very good point. So look at software-defined storage technology, for example. We happen to work with VSAN, which is the leading software-defined technology, but when customers choose to deploy software-defined solutions on their own, they're doing something that they haven't been doing in many, many years, which is take on the responsibility for up timing. It used to be that storage vendors, you know held responsibility for storage up time, for IOPs, for performance. So I think what we're doing is we found the balance. We've been getting a lot of benefits of hyper-converged and software defined, but at the same time own the responsibility from an operations standpoint to make it more like a traditional architecture and what they know. And that combination is very, very important. So for example, the ability to look at the entire system from software to driver to firmware, and always deliver a known good package because something that customers would have to do on their own, and they're all capable of doing it, but if they could choose not to do it why not offload it to somebody like us that does it for them. And so while there are two deployment models, we have a very massive growth in the systems approach, model (music drowns out voice) and I think people hand off things that they could do but they choose not to because they can focus on other things in the IT shop. For example, digital transformation and really the path to the multicloud by adding more and more layers on top of infrastructure that they can trust. >> Speaking of multicloud, I was in Jeff Clarke's opening session this morning. He was talking about, he gave a stat, I think it was 50 plus to 56% of users surveyed are using more than one cloud. So one of the things I also saw in the press release about the advancements of VxRail and VxRack, giving customers a clear path to adopt VMWare-based multiclouds. What is that clear path? How was that differentiated? So let's remember that both of those products, VxRail and VxRack SDDC are products that are built on the VMWare stack. They're optimized for VMWare users. They're not agnostic to anything. They're really VMWare on VMWare with automation and hardware and packaging that we do as a system. By delivering that robust infrastructure in one of the announcements that we made was that we created the VMWare validated design to add the rest of the VMWare stack and create an infrastructure as a service environment. That inherently comes with the ability to offload workloads to VMWare's service provider, cloud service provider, including Amazon and Google and the likes, but really a very vast network. So you take an infrastructure that's based on VMWare and harden is designing the system, you add on top of it to a prescriptive VVD exactly how to add the layered toppings like VRealize Automation, and through that inherently you get the entire VMWare value proposition going from a local solution to multicloud. And so the announcement was that validated design, which is very important, and then the announcement also included all sorts of hardware innovations or small evolutions like NVMe drives and 25 gigabyte ethernet, and higher memory CPUs. All of those are just to make sure that the infrastructure itself is ready to support that software stack that ultimately leads them to a full IO solution and offloading to the multicloud that are available to them. >> So big announcement or big set of education last year at VM World was the VCF. VMWare Cloud Foundation. It is the foundation of VMWare's infrastructure cloud play. Can you help talk through the importance in how VCF differentiates VMWare, VxRail, VxRack from competitors. >> So VCF is a software bundle. It's also an orchestrator that allows customers to manage multiple VMWare clusters within context. It's called a workload domain, and they can manage those clusters, and they can deploy them, they can life cycle management, they can microsegment them with NSX, and they can move workloads between them and to the cloud. VxRack SDDC is a system that basically lays down the VCF bits on a system premanufactured, and that's how we benefit from VCF as a differentiator. What we've done in addition we've announced 14G servers to be supported in that architecture. And we've also extended it to a, for example, a dial home on a system level. A lot of serviceability features, a physical view of the service as part of the graphic user interface. So not only does VCF differentiate VMWare by having the ability to finally leverage the entire stack, our value add is in taking that in the physical to virtual integration, if you will, life cycle management, and serviceability around servicing all of the system, which makes it a very robust infrastructure. So today customers have two choices. They can buy VxRack with VCF on top of it, or they can get to the same outcome with VxRail following a VVD prescriptive. And so what we do is we let them choose. If they're not ready for an NSX deployment they'd start with one, if they are they'll start with the other. Either way the outcome is going to be a full (music drowns out voice) from VMWare that can offload to multicloud. We just give them choices of how to get there. >> So want to kind of play off the value add for a second. We're at this event, the event theme Make It Real, making digital transformation real is a mandatory for businesses, right? They have the opportunity to take and apply data to multiple cases, use cases, within their organization to deliver differentiation. So you talked about a lot of the value out of the choices that you're giving customers from an IT perspective, what are some of the business, when you're sitting there with customers, what are some of the business outcomes they're looking for this technology to help them deliver? >> So that's a good question. So two levels of an answer. One is that by getting an automated infrastructure, IT itself can free up cycle to actually implement the (mumbles). It also frees up time for those organizations who are embarking on native cloud application development. For example, to deploy pivotal Cloud Foundry on top of (mumbles) Which is another prescriptive reference cycle actually that we have out there. And allow them to innovate. What I'm most interested in when I visit customers is what workloads are running on HCI. And I ask them and they say, is it testive, is it mission critical? And I'm happy to see that by now HCI, and specifically our products, have become mission critical, data centered, so all the way from the core to the edge running, banking applications a scale, running trading applications scale, running manufacturing application scale, running ports all over the world. I mean there's one customer that runs ports with automated trucks where the AI that runs those trucks is running on a VxRail. I mean, it's very, very exciting to see how our technology has been adopted into mainstream, into mainstream application compute. I think that's very exciting. And IT can enable more of those applications run and develop more because they have to do less in managing the physical infrastructure across multi companies. >> So Lee Caswell, Senior Vice President of Products over at VMWare brought in his customer from Celtic yesterday, and he validated that. They went all in from a legacy three tier architecture on Dell SE, they were Dell customer before, went with the Xrack, sorry VxRail, mission critical applications out the gate. So I'm seeing a shift. Last year around this time we were doing education and saying, you know, what is HCI versus a traditional architecture? Are you seeing that same thing at the show, as a shift that customers are no longer asking oh what is VxRail or VxRack, but that very thing is how can we accelerate digital transformation using VxRail or VxRack? >> Yeah, we have a very large percentage of the meetings, in fact almost 200 meetings that were requested to review the technology with us initial. That's a lot, that shows a lot of interest. There are a few customers that still don't know, and we've met some of those at the show. There are a few customers who are still contemplating whether HCI is right for them. And by the way, to those customers we say, don't rush into it, you have choices. If that's what you used to, what the economics were for you, there is no reason to rush into HCI. It's just depending on if you're going to get a better outcome than what you have today. But a very common question from customers is okay, then why do I need traditional storage? And for somebody from my vantage point, let's say there's a lot of bare-metal computing out there that requires traditional. But we think that traditional storage becomes more specialized, you know specific DR use cases, very large ratios between compute and storage and requires shared storage, but the HCI type of technology is definitely, and we see it with market growth, right? The market is growing at 60 to 70%. We're growing over 150% and taking share in this growing market, but we're still very, very small if you compare it to the whole IT tam. So there's a lot of way to go. Partly is that we still need to work on the last mile, being sure that our products are more mature, that we figure out how to operate them in a real life environment. So there's work to do, but the economical benefits are so strong that customers are making the choice more and more and more, and they trust us to know how to close the gaps that we still have. And it's a very collaborative effort between our and our customers. We listen, we respond very quickly, and so we can keep the machine going. >> It sounds like a momentum that we talked about with you I think at VM World back in eight or so months ago continues. And we want to thank you for stopping by theCUBE, sharing what's new with VxRack, VxRail, and how customers can be successful there. >> Absolutely. >> Thanks, Gil. >> Thank you for having me again. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live in a concert at Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We'll be right back with our next guest after a short break.