>> Announcer: From Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE, covering Super Computing 17. Brought to you by Intel. (soft electronic music) Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're gettin' towards the end of the day here at Super Computing 2017 in Denver, Colorado. 12,000 people talkin' really about the outer limits of what you can do with compute power and lookin' out into the universe and black holes and all kinds of exciting stuff. We're kind of bringin' it back, right? We're all about democratization of technology for people to solve real problems. We're really excited to have our last guest of the day, bringin' the energy, Armughan Ahmad. He's SVP and GM, Hybrid Cloud and Ready Solutions for Dell EMC, and a many-time CUBE alumni. Armughan, great to see you. >> Yeah, good to see you, Jeff. So, first off, just impressions of the show. 12,000 people, we had no idea. We've never been to this show before. This is great. >> This is a show that has been around. If you know the history of the show, this was an IEEE engineering show, that actually turned into high-performance computing around research-based analytics and other things that came out of it. But, it's just grown. We're seeing now, yesterday the super computing top petaflops were released here. So, it's fascinating. You have some of the brightest minds in the world that actually come to this event. 12,000 of them. >> Yeah, and Dell EMC is here in force, so a lot of announcements, a lot of excitement. What are you guys excited about participating in this type of show? >> Yeah, Jeff, so when we come to an event like this, HBC-- We know that HBC is also evolved from your traditional HBC, which was around modeling and simulation, and how it started from engineering to then clusters. It's now evolving more towards machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence. So, what we announced here-- Yesterday, our press release went out. It was really related to how our strategy of advancing HBC, but also democratizing HBC's working. So, on the advancing, on the HBC side, the top 500 super computing list came out. We're powering some of the top 500 of those. One big one is TAC, which is Texas Institute out of UT, University of Texas. They now have, I believe, the number 12 spot in the top 500 super computers in the world, running an 8.2 petaflops off computing. >> So, a lot of zeros. I have no idea what a petaflop is. >> It's very, very big. It's very big. It's available for machine learning, but also eventually going to be available for deep learning. But, more importantly, we're also moving towards democratizing HBC because we feel that democratizing is also very important, where HBC should not only be for the research and the academia, but it should also be focused towards the manufacturing customers, the financial customers, our commercial customers, so that they can actually take the complexity of HBC out, and that's where our-- We call it our HBC 2.0 strategy, off learning from the advancements that we continue to drive, to then also democratizing it for our customers. >> It's interesting, I think, back to the old days of Intel microprocessors getting better and better and better, and you had Spark and you had Silicon Graphics, and these things that were way better. This huge differentiation. But, the Intel I32 just kept pluggin' along and it really begs the question, where is the distinction now? You have huge clusters of computers you can put together with virtualization. Where is the difference between just a really big cluster and HBC and super computing? >> So, I think, if you look at HBC, HBC is also evolving, so let's look at the customer view, right? So, the other part of our announcement here was artificial intelligence, which is really, what is artificial intelligence? It's, if you look at a customer retailer, a retailer has-- They start with data, for example. You buy beer and chips at J's Retailer, for example. You come in and do that, you usually used to run a SEQUEL database or you used to run a RDBMS database, and then that would basically tell you, these are the people who can purchase from me. You know their purchase history. But, then you evolved into BI, and then if that data got really, very large, you then had an HBC cluster, would which basically analyze a lot of that data for you, and show you trends and things. That would then tell you, you know what, these are my customers, this is how many times they are frequent. But, now it's moving more towards machine learning and deep learning as well. So, as the data gets larger and larger, we're seeing datas becoming larger, not just by social media, but your traditional computational frameworks, your traditional applications and others. We're finding that data is also growing at the edge, so by 2020, about 20 billion devices are going to wake up at the edge and start generating data. So, now, Internet data is going to look very small over the next three, four years, as the edge data comes up. So, you actually need to now start thinking of machine learning and deep learning a lot more. So, you asked the question, how do you see that evolving? So, you see an RDBMS traditional SQL evolving to BI. BI then evolves into either an HBC or hadoop. Then, from HBC and hadoop, what do you do next? What you do next is you start to now feed predictive analytics into machine learning kind of solutions, and then once those predictive analytics are there, then you really, truly start thinking about the full deep learning frameworks. >> Right, well and clearly like the data in motion. I think it's funny, we used to make decisions on a sample of data in the past. Now, we have the opportunity to take all the data in real time and make those decisions with Kafka and Spark and Flink and all these crazy systems that are comin' to play. Makes Hadoop look ancient, tired, and yesterday, right? But, it's still valid, right? >> A lot of customers are still paying. Customers are using it, and that's where we feel we need to simplify the complex for our customers. That's why we announced our Machine Learning Ready Bundle and our Deep Learning Ready Bundle. We announced it with Intel and Nvidia together, because we feel like our customers either go to the GPU route, which is your accelerator's route. We announced-- You were talking to Ravi, from our server team, earlier, where he talked about the C4140, which has the quad GPU power, and it's perfect for deep learning. But, with Intel, we've also worked on the same, where we worked on the AI software with Intel. Why are we doing all of this? We're saying that if you thought that RDBMS was difficult, and if you thought that building a hadoop cluster or HBC was a little challenging and time consuming, as the customers move to machine learning and deep learning, you now have to think about the whole stack. So, let me explain the stack to you. You think of a compute storage and network stack, then you think of-- The whole eternity. Yeah, that's right, the whole eternity of our data center. Then you talk about our-- These frameworks, like Theano, Caffe, TensorFlow, right? These are new frameworks. They are machine learning and deep learning frameworks. They're open source and others. Then you go to libraries. Then you go to accelerators, which accelerators you choose, then you go to your operating systems. Now, you haven't even talked about your use case. Retail use case or genomic sequencing use case. All you're trying to do is now figure out TensorFlow works with this accelerator or does not work with this accelerator. Or, does Caffe and Theano work with this operating system or not? And, that is a complexity that is way more complex. So, that's where we felt that we really needed to launch these new solutions, and we prelaunched them here at Super Computing, because we feel the evolution of HBC towards AI is happening. We're going to start shipping these Ready Bundles for machine learning and deep learning in first half of 2018. >> So, that's what the Ready Solutions are? You're basically putting the solution together for the client, then they can start-- You work together to build the application to fix whatever it is they're trying to do. >> That's exactly it. But, not just fix it. It's an outcome. So, I'm going to go back to the retailer. So, if you are the CEO of the biggest retailer and you are saying, hey, I just don't want to know who buys from me, I want to now do predictive analytics, which is who buys chips and beer, but who can I sell more things to, right? So, you now start thinking about demographic data. You start thinking about payroll data and other datas that surround-- You start feeding that data into it, so your machine now starts to learn a lot more of those frameworks, and then can actually give you predictive analytics. But, imagine a day where you actually-- The machine or the deep learning AI actually tells you that it's not just who you want to sell chips and beer to, it's who's going to buy the 4k TV? You're makin' a lot of presumptions. Well, there you go, and the 4k-- But, I'm glad you're doin' the 4k TV. So, that's important, right? That is where our customers need to understand how predictive analytics are going to move towards cognitive analytics. So, this is complex but we're trying to make that complex simple with these Ready Solutions from machine learning and deep learning. >> So, I want to just get your take on-- You've kind of talked about these three things a couple times, how you delineate between AI, machine learning, and deep learning. >> So, as I said, there is an evolution. I don't think a customer can achieve artificial intelligence unless they go through the whole crawl walk around space. There's no shortcuts there, right? What do you do? So, if you think about, Mastercard is a great customer of ours. They do an incredible amount of transactions per day, (laughs) as you can think, right? In millions. They want to do facial recognitions at kiosks, or they're looking at different policies based on your buying behavior-- That, hey, Jeff doesn't buy $20,000 Rolexes every year. Maybe once every week, you know, (laughs) it just depends how your mood is. I was in the Emirates. Exactly, you were in Dubai (laughs). Then, you think about his credit card is being used where? And, based on your behaviors that's important. Now, think about, even for Mastercard, they have traditional RDBMS databases. They went to BI. They have high-performance computing clusters. Then, they developed the hadoop cluster. So, what we did with them, we said okay. All that is good. That data that has been generated for you through customers and through internal IT organizations, those things are all very important. But, at the same time, now you need to start going through this data and start analyzing this data for predictive analytics. So, they had 1.2 million policies, for example, that they had to crunch. Now, think about 1.2 million policies that they had to say-- In which they had to take decisions on. That they had to take decisions on. One of the policies could be, hey, does Jeff go to Dubai to buy a Rolex or not? Or, does Jeff do these other patterns, or is Armughan taking his card and having a field day with it? So, those are policies that they feed into machine learning frameworks, and then machine learning actually gives you patterns that they can now see what your behavior is. Then, based on that, eventually deep learning is when they move to next. Deep learning now not only you actually talk about your behavior patterns on the credit card, but your entire other life data starts to-- Starts to also come into that. Then, now, you're actually talking about something before, that's for catching a fraud, you can actually be a lot more predictive about it and cognitive about it. So, that's where we feel that our Ready Solutions around machine learning and deep learning are really geared towards, so taking HBC to then democratizing it, advancing it, and then now helping our customers move towards machine learning and deep learning, 'cause these buzzwords of AIs are out there. If you're a financial institution and you're trying to figure out, who is that customer who's going to buy the next mortgage from you? Or, who are you going to lend to next? You want the machine and others to tell you this, not to take over your life, but to actually help you make these decisions so that your bottom line can go up along with your top line. Revenue and margins are important to every customer. >> It's amazing on the credit card example, because people get so pissed if there's a false positive. With the amount of effort that they've put into keep you from making fraudulent transactions, and if your credit card ever gets denied, people go bananas, right? The behavior just is amazing. But, I want to ask you-- We're comin' to the end of 2017, which is hard to believe. Things are rolling at Dell EMC. Michael Dell, ever since he took that thing private, you could see the sparkle in his eye. We got him on a CUBE interview a few years back. A year from now, 2018. What are we going to talk about? What are your top priorities for 2018? >> So, number one, Michael continues to talk about that our vision is advancing human progress through technology, right? That's our vision. We want to get there. But, at the same time we know that we have to drive IT transformation, we have to drive workforce transformation, we have to drive digital transformation, and we have to drive security transformation. All those things are important because lots of customers-- I mean, Jeff, do you know like 75% of the S&P 500 companies will not exist by 2027 because they're either not going to be able to make that shift from Blockbuster to Netflix, or Uber taxi-- It's happened to our friends at GE over the last little while. >> You can think about any customer-- That's what Michael did. Michael actually disrupted Dell with Dell technologies and the acquisition of EMC and Pivotal and VMWare. In a year from now, our strategy is really about edge to core to the cloud. We think the world is going to be all three, because the rise of 20 billion devices at the edge is going to require new computational frameworks. But, at the same time, people are going to bring them into the core, and then cloud will still exist. But, a lot of times-- Let me ask you, if you were driving an autonomous vehicle, do you want that data-- I'm an Edge guy. I know where you're going with this. It's not going to go, right? You want it at the edge, because data gravity is important. That's where we're going, so it's going to be huge. We feel data gravity is going to be big. We think core is going to be big. We think cloud's going to be big. And we really want to play in all three of those areas. >> That's when the speed of light is just too damn slow, in the car example. You don't want to send it to the data center and back. You don't want to send it to the data center, you want those decisions to be made at the edge. Your manufacturing floor needs to make the decision at the edge as well. You don't want a lot of that data going back to the cloud. All right, Armughan, thanks for bringing the energy to wrap up our day, and it's great to see you as always. Always good to see you guys, thank you. >> All right, this is Armughan, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from Super Computing Summit 2017. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (soft electronic music)

>> Narrator: From Denver, Colorado, it's theCUBE. Covering Super Computing '17, brought to you by Intel. Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Super Computing 2017, Denver, Colorado, 12,000 people talking about big iron, big questions, big challenges. It's really an interesting take on computing, really out on the edge. The key note was, literally, light years out in space, talking about predicting the future with quirks and all kinds of things, a little over my head for sure. But we're excited to kind of get back to the ground and we have Ravi Pendekanti. He's the Senior Vice President of Product Management and Marketing, Server Platforms, Dell EMC. It's a mouthful, Ravi great to see you. Great to see you too Jeff and thanks for having me here. Absolutely, so we were talking before we turned the cameras on. One of your big themes, which I love, is kind of democratizing this whole concept of high performance computing, so it's not just the academics answering the really, really, really big questions. You're absolutely right. I mean think about it Jeff, 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, when people talk about high performance computing, it was what I call as being in the back alleys of research and development. There were a few research scientists working on it, but we're at a time in our journey towards helping humanity in a bigger way. The HPC has found it's way into almost every single mainstream industry you can think of. Whether it is fraud detection, you see MasterCard is using it for ensuring that they can see and detect any of the fraud that can be committed earlier than the perpetrators come in and actually hack the system. Or if you get into life sciences, if you talk about genomics. I mean this is what might be good for our next set of generations, where they can probably go out and tweak some of the things in a genome sequence so that we don't have the same issues that we have had in the past. Right. Right? So, likewise, you can pick any favorite industry. I mean we are coming up to the holiday seasons soon. I know a lot of our customers are looking at how do they come up with the right schema to ensure that they can stock the right product and ensure that it is available for everyone at the right time? 'Cause timing is important. I don't think any kid wants to go with no toy and have the product ship later. So bottom line is, yes, we are looking at ensuring the HPC reaches every single industry you can think of. So how do you guys parse HPC verses a really big virtualized cluster? I mean there's so many ways that compute and store has evolved, right? So now, with cloud and virtual cloud and private cloud and virtualization, you know, I can pull quite a bit of horsepower together to attack a problem. So how do you kind of cut the line between Navigate, yeah. big, big compute, verses true HPC? HPC. It's interesting you ask. I'm actually glad you asked because people think that it's just feeding CPU or additional CPU will do the trick, it doesn't. The simple fact is, if you look at the amount of data that is being created. I'll give you a simple example. I mean, we are talking to one of the airlines right now, and they're interested in capturing all the data that comes through their flights. And one of the things they're doing is capturing all the data from their engines. 'Cause end of the day, you want to make sure that your engines are pristine as they're flying. And every hour that an engine flies out, I mean as an airplane flies out, it creates about 20 terabytes of data. So, if you have a dual engine, which is what most flights are. In one hour they create about 40 terabytes of data. And there are supposedly about 38,000 flights taking off at any given time around the world. I mean, it's one huge data collection problem. Right? I mean, I'm told it's like a real Godzilla number, so I'll let you do the computation. My point is if you really look at the data, data has no value, right? What really is important is getting information out of it. The CPU on the other side has gone to a time and a phase where it is hitting the, what I call as the threshold of the Moore's law. Moore's law was all about performance doubles every two years. But today, that performance is not sufficient. Which is where auxiliary technologies need to be brought in. This is where the GPUs, the FBGAs. Right, right. Right. So when you think about these, that's where the HPC world takes off, is you're augmenting your CPUs and your processors with additional auxiliary technology such as the GPUs and FBGAs to ensure that you have more juice to go do this kind of analytics and the massive amounts of data that you and I and the rest of the humanity is creating. It's funny that you talk about that. We were just at a Western Digital event a little while ago, talking about the next generation of drives and it was the same thing where now it's this energy assist method to change really the molecular way that it saves information to get more out of it. So that's kind of how you parse it. If you've got to juice the CPU, and kind of juice the traditional standard architecture, then you're moving into the realm of high performance computing. Absolutely, I mean this is why, Jeff, yesterday we launched a new PowerEdge C4140, right? The first of it's kind in terms of the fact that it's got two Intel Xeon processors, but beyond that, it also can support four Nvidia GPUs. So now you're looking at a server that's got both the CPUs, to your earlier comment on processors, but is augmented by four of the GPUs, that gives immense capacity to do this kind of high performance computing. But as you said, it's not just compute, it's store, it's networking, it's services, and then hopefully you package something together in a solution so I don't have to build the whole thing from scratch, you guys are making moves, right? Oh, this is a perfect lead in, perfect lead in. I know, my colleague, Armagon will be talking to you guys shortly. What his team does, is it takes all the building blocks we provide, such as the servers, obviously looks at the networking, the storage elements, and then puts them together to create what are called solutions. So if you've got solutions, which enable our customers to go back in and easily deploy a machine-learning or a deep-learning solution. Where now our customers don't have to do what I call as the heavy lift. In trying to make sure that they understand how the different pieces integrate together. So the goal behind what we are doing at Dell EMC is to remove the guess work out so that our customers and partners can go out and spend their time deploying the solution. Whether it is for machine learning, deep learning or pick your favorite industry, we can also verticalize it. So that's the beauty of what we are doing at Dell EMC. So the other thing we were talking about before we turned turned the cameras on is, I call them the itys from my old Intel days, reliability, sustainability, serviceability, and you had a different phrase for it. >> Ravi: Oh yes, I know you're talking about the RAS. The RAS, right. Which is the reliability, availability, and serviceability. >> Jeff: But you've got a new twist on it. Oh we do. Adding something very important, and we were just at a security show early this week, CyberConnect, and security now cuts through everything. Because it's no longer a walled garden, 'cause there are no walls. There are no walls. It's really got to be baked in every layer of the solution. Absolutely right. The reason is, if you really look at security, it's not about, you know till a few years ago, people used to think it's all about protecting yourself from external forces, but today we know that 40% of the hacks happen because of the internal, you know, system processes that we don't have in place. Or we could have a person with an intent to break in for whatever reason, so the integrated security becomes part and parcel of what we do. This is where, with in part of a 14G family, one of the things we said is we need to have integrated security built in. And along with that, we want to have the scalability because no two workloads are the same and we all know that the amount of data that's being created today is twice what it was the last year for each of us. Forget about everything else we are collecting. So when you think about it, we need integrated security. We need to have the scalability feature set, also we want to make sure there is automation built in. These three main tenets that we talked about feed into what we call internally, the monic of a user's PARIS. And that's what I think, Jeff, to our earlier conversation, PARIS is all about, P is for best price performance. Anybody can choose to get the right performance or the best performance, but you don't want to shell out a ton of dollars. Likewise, you don't want to pay minimal dollars and try and get the best performance, that's not going to happen. I think there's a healthy balance between price performance, that's important. Availability is important. Interoperability, as much as everybody thinks that they can act on their own, it's nearly impossible, or it's impossible that you can do it on your own. >> Jeff: These are big customers, they've got a lot of systems. You are. You need to have an ecosystem of partners and technologies that come together and then, end of the day, you have to go out and have availability and serviceability, or security, to your point, security is important. So PARIS is about price performance, availability, interoperability, reliability, availability and security. I like it. That's the way we design it. It's much sexier than that. We drop in, like an Eiffel Tower picture right now. There you go, you should. So Ravi, hard to believe we're at the end of 2017, if we get together a year from now at Super Computing 2018, what are some of your goals, what are your some objectives for 2018? What are we going to be talking about a year from today? Oh, well looking into a crystal ball, as much as I can look into that, I thin that-- >> Jeff: As much as you can disclose. And as much as we can disclose, a few things I think are going to happen. >> Jeff: Okay. Number one, I think you will see people talk about to where we started this conversation. HPC has become mainstream, we talked about it, but the adoption of high performance computing, in my personal belief, is not still at a level that it needs to be. So, if you go down next 12 to 18 months, lets say, I do think the adoption rates will be much higher than where we are. And we talk about security now, because it's a very topical subject, but as much as we are trying to emphasize to our partners and customers that you've got to think about security from ground zero. We still see a number of customers who are not ready. You know, some of the analysis show there are nearly 40% of the CIOs are not ready in helping and they truly understand, I should say, what it takes to have a secure system and a secure infrastructure. It's my humble belief that people will pay attention to it and move the needle on it. And we talked about, you know, four GPUs in our C4140, do anticipate that there will be a lot more of auxiliary technology packed into it. Sure, sure. So that's essentially what I can say without spilling the beans too much. Okay, all right, super. Ravi, thanks for taking a couple of minutes out of your day, appreciate it. = Thank you. All right, he's Ravi, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from Super Computing 2017 in Denver, Colorado. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nice, France, It's theCUBE, covering .Next Conference 2017 Europe brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching SiliconANGLE Media's production of The Cube here inside the Acropolis Conference Center in Nice, France. Beautiful location, happy to welcome back to the program off the keynote stage this morning, Sudheesh Nair, President with Nutanix, and a first-time guest, someone I've gotten to know through the industry, Dan McConnell, Vice-President of the CPSD group inside DELL EMC. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. >> Dan: Thanks for having us. Sudheesh needs no introduction, but Dan, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background, your role inside of DELL EMC. Sure, I guess, I've been at DELL for about, I don't know, 18 years, in various forms, engineering, CTO, product management. Nowadays I've got a collection of the CPSD businesses. Chad will refer to it as the horizontal businesses but basically all the things that are multi-hypervisor in nature. XC series, clearly one of those products, one of the long relationships we've had with Nutanix, very successful. Matter of fact, coming off Q2 was our strongest quarter ever. We're still closing Q3 so I can't talk about that, but safe to say these last six months will be six months of the strongest we've had with Nutanix and the XC series. I've got a collection of products from Block to FlexTech C Series. Yeah, so you come from what was the DELL side of DELL EMC, in through, of course, the DELL VMware relationship, been a strong one, driven a lot of joint revenue for the companies, yeah. Yep, absolutely, it's been great. Been good getting to know Sudheesh over the years. It's been multiple years at this point. >> Sudheesh: Almost four years now. But it's been a great relationship. Sudheesh, please. Yeah, first of all, thank you for having us. It's always nice to see you. And I still am amazed by all this equipment and how professional you are when it comes to doing these sort of things. It's very nice to be here with Dan. He's one of the nicest guys in the company and I'm not just saying because he's sitting here. A very good human being, it's always been a pleasure. It's almost four years we've been working together. Sudheesh, our audience loves when, they're looking forward to this session because, come on, DELL EMC, Nutanix, wait, they're friends, no they're competitors. No, yeah, they're, you know, it's a mix together. They say it's like the macaroons. It's, a couple of pieces go together, some of the flavors you like, some maybe you don't as much. Probably a bad analogy. Bring us up to speed as to kind of the Dell relationship. You know, how important is it to Nutanix? I know it's something that I talk to customers that are running Dell EMC and say, "Does it concern you at all?" And it is something that at least is on the radar for most customers. I'll try to give a shorter answer. It's a long answer question. The first thing is, this is a relationship that is built to last. I know that it is not an easy relationship, but let me also be honest about, look inside the industry and tell me a single relationship that is absolutely black and white. I mean, it's not that long ago when in one of the VMworlds, I don't remember who exactly, but someone from VMware actually said, "We're not going to lose to a bookseller," right? And then in the last-- >> Stu: Yeah, he's a VC now, so doing quite well for himself. Yeah, he's a great guy, it was his call, yeah. Again, it's a point in time of opinion, and I would do the same thing because we all compete with our heart and mind. It's not about that point. The fact that the company evolved, and in the last VMworld I think the CEOs of both AWS and VMware were hugging it out. Does that mean they've built a relationship that will not have conflicts? Absolutely not. I fundamentally don't think that the relationships in IT industry specifically will no longer be black and white, and it will always be shades of gray. The question is, should we be focused on customers who wants us to stop bickering and deliver what's right for them, and continue to focus on the overlaps of interest as opposed to focus on the conflicts that will arise. Absolutely well said. It's clear, and Dell's always been focused on a strategy of customer choice and flexibility. One of our key strengths at DELL EMC now is the portfolio, the fact that we've got multiple offers, the fact that it's a focus on the customer, what the customer wants, giving them flexibility as opposed to always trying to pigeonhole a specific product. It's interesting because I've been watching since the first days of the relationship. Dell's goal is to be leader in infrastructure. Nutanix's goal, be an iconic software company. Well, you're not going to be a server manufacturer, there's room there. So, Dan, why is Nutanix best on Dell? That's a great question. So one, the long relationship, right? So, we actually have teams of people who focus on integrating the platform and the software. There's a software stack in there, we call Power Tools internally that, long story short, manages all of the firmware stacks as well as, essentially lifecycle management of the hardware up underneath Nutanix. So, one piece is the hardware integration. The second piece, which we talked about a year ago at .Next, that we would be focused on integrating the broader Dell EMC portfolio, namely data protection. So, you'll see in upcoming weeks, we've already announced it formally, it gets turned on here in a few weeks, tight integration of Data Domain and Avamar with the XC series. Not just to reference architecture, but actual integration into the management. So, full lifecycle integration of data protection leveraging Data Domain, Avamar, tightly integrated into XC series, keeping that focus of ease of use, lifecycle management not only around the infrastructure, but also from data protection. So, hardware integration as well as tight integration of other pieces of the ecosystem. One other piece there, not to take too long, but not only data protection but we're also leveraging our relationship with Microsoft, and you'll see us integrate XC series into Azure with things like OMS, with our Log Analytics solution, so building out that ecosystem around the infrastructure. Yeah, Sudheesh, the Microsoft relationship's an interesting one, of course. You know, Dell, very long, strong relationship. I remember Satya Nadella up onstage with Michael Dell at Dell World years ago. It seems like a good opportunity for even deeper partnership. I think it's not just Microsoft. I think Dell EMC is the single largest vendor in this space and ecosystem, for example Pivotal. The innovative things that Pivotal is doing, Nutanix has an opportunity to partner with that because of the ecosystem. The global support, the global reach that Dell has, we have access to that. Customers get choice. Pretty much every customer who's buying anything in this industry probably have a contract with Dell. We have access to that. So, it requires a level of maturity for the business to sort of turn off the noise and listen to the music. We have been able to do that, and I know that people would love to see a fight, and yes, sometimes we have friction, and I think that is healthy. But by and large both companies have figured out the most important thing is to focus on customers, do right by them. So, Sudheesh, I think it would be fair to say that both companies have a sales culture that many outside call a bit aggressive. And especially where it's been interesting and sometimes challenging to watch is when it hits the channel. So, I know a number of channel providers, love Dell, love Nutanix, and have felt pressure sometimes from the Dell side to move to some of the other products, many have stuck. How do you balance that to kind of keep the channel happy, keep them working on that? You're absolutely right. I think both companies have a sales-driven culture, no question about it. And Nutanix, even though we are a younger company, much smaller in size, I don't think our aspirations and the fighting spirit is any less. In fact, in some cases it might even be out there. However, what we have done is we always focused on partners as part of the customer in the same ecosystem. That is, do right by the customer, do right by the partner. And I think that applies to both companies. What we have done early on is actually put together some guard rails between companies, how do we approach when those sort of conflicts arises, number one. Number two, we put together processes in the field when it comes to dual registration which is somewhat convoluted on the back end, but extremely delightful on the front end. Now, that doesn't mean there won't be friction. What we've done is we made sure that number one, the frictions are exceptions, not an example always, and second, when it comes up, we talk. So, he's on my WhatsApp. When something really blows up he will say, "Sudheesh, what's going on?" It's less and less now because our people have actually done a pretty good job of managing it. But ultimately, the one thing that'll continue to sustain and grow this relationship would be trust and communication. In the last four years, we know the people. We have built the communication, we speak the language, and because of that we are able to overcome all those problems. Yeah, the key is when those arise, getting the right people involved and ultimately doing right by the customer. There's always going to be conflict, this, that in the field. It's getting the right people involved early managing it and making sure we're putting customers first, not getting them in the middle of it. >> Sudheesh: Absolutely. Alright, so Dan, one of the things we heard from Nutanix today and I've been hearing all week, Intel Skylake. You've got 14 Gs available. Since it's not announced yet as the date, what kind of guidance can you give, and how's that rollout going to look for customers? Especially, I love your viewpoint as you know the server world forever, and you've got a broad portfolio. How does customer adoption across the various buying modes happen? I'll dance around this a bit and say stay tuned, very soon you'll hear some announcement around the 14th Generation PowerEdge. >> Stu: If you're watching the replay, call your rep now, it might be ready. Exactly right, so yes, stay tuned, very, very soon. We've already talked about it back at Dell EMC World. You can expect us to fully embrace the 14th Generation PowerEdge. We've already having some conversations with folks in the field. Obviously, we've got the PowerEdge line out there already. It's actually, the adoption of 14 G has been very, very strong, so we expect that to pick up here on the XC series very shortly. So, like I said, stay tuned. I have to dance around a little bit, but it'll be very, very soon. But one point, it's not available any later on the XC than it is on the other hyperconverged offerings that you have, correct? Correct. Yeah, so that's, I think, kind of the main thing. But that also tells you that we don't just take the same server and ship it out. We actually go through a different process to make sure that this can actually run mission critical applications. That's part of the problem as well, we have to do this right. Take a lot of time hardening that, what we would call standard server, so that's what's in process now, and almost done. I'd like to give you both a last word. Talk about customers, talk about anything we should be looking at down the road from the partnership. Dan, we'll start with you. Sure, you'll see continued, what I'll say tight integration, focus on the ecosystem. I think big steps with data protection integration, focus on Microsoft. You'll see more integration in that vein filling out that overall ecosystem. Partnership continues to be strong. I think it's a very good combination of software, hardware, and ecosystem. So, on the Dell EMC side you'll see us bring that ecosystem focus, and continue working with these guys. Obvious integrations on the hardware side with some exciting technologies like NVNE and RDMA. So, we'll continue to leverage the hardware technology to promote HCI and to drive HCI, make it stronger, and continue to focus on the overall ecosystem. So, we're excited for the relationship, and I'll hand it over to Sudheesh. Yeah, I think, see Nutanix, we always were a software company. But taking a product like this without the help of an appliance form factor would not be feasible, because any problem happened, it would be our problems. But now that we have the last five years behind us, we know how to make it work. What sort of products do we need to build to support the installation process, the upgrade process, lifecycle management, all of those things are done. Now starting next year, you'll see Nutanix making a conscious decision to become a truly software company, without the reliance of being, pushing through hardware. Our sales organization will be retooled and restructured to become, and incentivized to focus more and more on software, and less and less on appliances, which will bring companies like Dell EMC and Nutanix closer, because they have the footprint. Some of the conflicts used to arise basically because we had our own appliances as well. And once the sales organization is differently incentivized, you will see the trust building faster between the resellers and the companies. So, I am very optimistic because of not just the technology vision. Nutanix with hyperconverged, and the Calm and Xi, and everything else that we laid out. We know that for us, hyperconverged is just the foundation, and the support for everything that we're building. That fully aligns with Dell EMC's aspirations on how Nutanix should proceed. So, we're pretty excited, but always cautious about what could go wrong, focused on those things. As long as we talk and communicate, and we focus on customers and partners, I am pretty confident on the future. Sudheesh Nair, Dan McConnell, thank you so much for catching up. Welcome to The Cube alumni. Much appreciated. He's a pro already. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix .Next in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching The Cube. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Midtown Manhattan. It's the CUBE. Covering Big Data New York City 2017. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media and its ecosystem sponsor. (electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back everyone, live here in New York. This is the CUBE here in Manhattan for Big Data NYC's three days of coverage. We're one day three, things are starting to settle in, starting to see the patterns out there. I'll say it's Big Data week here, in conjunction with Hadoop World, formerly known as Strata Conference, Strata-Hadoop, Strata-Data, soon to be Strata-AI, soon to be Strata-IOT. Big Data, Mike Maccaux who's the Global Big Data Practice Lead at Dell EMC. We've been in this world now for multiple years and, well, what a riot it's been. >> Yeah, it has. It's been really interesting as the organizations have gone from their legacy systems, they have been modernizing. And we've sort of seen Big Data 1.0 a couple years ago. Big Data 2.0 and now we're moving on sort of the what's next? >> Yeah. >> And it's interesting because the Big Data space has really lagged the application space. You talk about microservices-based applications, and deploying in the cloud and stateless things. The data technologies and the data space has not quite caught up. The technology's there, but the thinking around it, and the deployment of those, it seems to be a slower, more methodical process. And so what we're seeing in a lot of enterprises is that the ones that got in early, have built out capabilities, are now looking for that, how do we get to the next level? How do we provide self-service? How do we enable our data scientists to be more productive within the enterprise, right? If you're a startup, it's easy, right? You're somewhere in the public cloud, you're using cloud based API, it's all fine. But if you're an enterprise, with the inertia of those legacy systems and governance and controls, it's a different problem to solve for. >> Let's just face it. We'll just call a spade a spade. Total cost of ownership was out of control. Hadoop was great, but it was built for something that tried to be something else as it evolved. And that's good also, because we need to decentralize and democratize the incumbent big data warehouse stuff. But let's face it, Hadoop is not the game anymore, it's everything else. >> Right, yep. >> Around it so, we've seen that, that's a couple years old. It's about business value right now. That seems to be the big thing. The separation between the players that can deliver value for the customers. >> Matt: Yep. >> And show a little bit of headroom for future AI things, they've seen that. And have the cloud on premise play. >> Yep. >> Right now, to me, that's the call here. What do you, do you agree? >> I absolutely see it. It's funny, you talk to organizations and they say, "We're going cloud, we're doing cloud." Well what does that mean? Can you even put your data in the cloud? Are you allowed to? How are you going to manage that? How are you going to govern that? How are you going to secure that? So many organizations, once they've asked those questions, they've realized, maybe we should start with the model of cloud on premise. And figure out what works and what doesn't. How do users actually want to self serve? What do we templatize for them? And what do we give them the freedom to do themselves? >> Yeah. >> And they sort of get their sea legs with that, and then we look at sort of a hybrid cloud model. How do we be able to span on premise, off premise, whatever your public cloud is, in a seamless way? Because we don't want to end up with the same thing that we had with mainframes decades ago, where it was, IBM had the best, it was the fastest, it was the most efficient, it was the new paradigm. And then 10 years later, organizations realized they were locked in, there was different technology. The same thing's true if you go cloud native. You're sort of locked in. So how do you be cloud agnostic? >> How do you get locked in a cloud native? You mean with Amazon? >> Or any of them, right? >> Okay. >> So they all have their own APIs that are really good for doing certain things. So Google's TensorFlow happens to be very good. >> Yeah. Amazon EMR. >> But you build applications that are using those native APIS, you're sort of locked. And maybe you want to switch to something else. How do you do that? So the idea is to-- >> That's why Kubernetes is so important, right now. That's a very key workload and orchestration container-based system. >> That's right, so we believe that containerization of workloads that you can define in one place, and deploy anywhere is the path forward, right? Deploy 'em on prem, deploy 'em in a private cloud, public cloud, it doesn't matter the infrastructure. Infrastructure's irrelevant. Just like Hadoop is sort of not that important anymore. >> So let me get your reaction on this. >> Yeah. So Dell EMC, so you guys have actually been a supplier. They've been the leading supplier, and now with Dell EMC across the portfolio of everything. From Dell computers, servers and what not, to storage, EMC's run the table on that for many generations. Yeah, there's people nippin' at your heels like Pure, okay that's fine. >> Sure. It's still storage is storage. You got to store the data somewhere, so storage will always be around. Here's what I heard from a CXO. This is the pattern I hear, but I'll just summarize it in one conversation. And then you can give a reaction to it. John, my life is hell. I have application development investment plan, it's just boot up all these new developers. New dev ops guys. We're going to do open source, I got to build that out. I got that, trying to get dev ops going on. >> Yep. >> That's a huge initiative. I got the security team. I'm unbundling from my IT department, into a new, difference in a reporting to the board. And then I got all this data governance crap underneath here, and then I got IOT over the top, and I still don't know where my security holes are. >> Yep. And you want to sell me what? (Matt laughs) So that's the fear. >> That's right. >> Their plates are full. How do you guys help that scenario? You walk in, actually security's pretty much, important obviously you can see that. But how do you walk into that conversation? >> Yeah, it's sort of stop the madness, right? >> (laughs) That's right. >> And all of that matters-- >> No, but this is all critical. Every room in the house is on fire. >> It is. >> And I got to get my house in order, so your comment to me better not be hype. TensorFlow, don't give me this TensorFlow stuff. >> That's right. >> I want real deal. >> Right, I need, my guys are-- >> I love TensorFlow but, doesn't put the fire out. >> They just want spark, right? I need to speed up my-- >> John: All right, so how do you help me? >> So, what we'd do is, we want to complement and augment their existing capabilities with better ways of scaling their architecture. So let's help them containerize their big data workload so that they can deploy them anywhere. Let's help them define centralized security policies that can be defined once and enforced everywhere, so that now we have a way to automate the deployment of environments. And users can bring their own tools. They can bring their data from outside, but because we have intelligent centralized policies, we can enforce that. And so with our elastic data platform, we are doing that with partners in the industry, Blue Talent and Blue Data, they provide that capability on top of whatever the customer's infrastructure is. >> How important is it to you guys that Dell EMC are partnering. I know Michael Dell talks about it all the time, so I know it's important. But I want to hear your reaction. Down in the trenches, you're in the front lines, providing the value, pulling things together. Partnerships seem to be really important. Explain how you look at that, how you guys do your partners. You mentioned Blue Talent and Blue Data. >> That's right, well I'm in the consulting organization. So we are on the front lines. We are dealing with customers day in and day out. And they want us to help them solve their problems, not put more of our kit in their data centers, on their desktops. And so partnering is really key, and our job is to find where the problems are with our customers, and find the best tool for the best job. The right thing for the right workload. And you know what? If the customer says, "We're moving to Amazon," then Dell EMC might not sell any more compute infrastructure to that customer. They might, we might not, right? But it's our job to help them get there, and by partnering with organizations, we can help that seamless. And that strengthens the relationship, and they're going to purchase-- >> So you're saying that you will put the customer over Dell EMC? >> Well, the customer is number one to Dell EMC. Net promoter score is one of the most important metrics that we have-- >> Just want to make sure get on the record, and that's important, 'cause Amazon, and you know, we saw it in Net App. I've got to say, give Net App credit. They heard from customers early on that Amazon was important. They started building into Amazon support. So people saying, "Are you crazy?" VMware, everyone's saying, "Hey you capitulated "by going to Amazon." Turns out that that was a damn good move. >> That's right. >> For Kelsinger. >> Yep. >> Look at VM World. They're going to own the cloud service provider market as an arms dealer. >> Yep. >> I mean, you would have thought that a year ago, no way. And then when they did the deal, they said, >> We have really smart leadership in the organization. Obviously Michael is a brilliant man. And it sort of trickles on down. It's customer first, solve the customer's problems, build the relationship with them, and there will be other things that come, right? There will be other needs, other workloads. We do happen to have a private cloud solution with Virtustream. Some of these customers need that intermediary step, before they go full public, with a hosted private solution using a Virtustream. >> All right, so what's the, final question, so what's the number one thing you're working on right now with customers? What's the pattern? You got the stack rank, you're requests, your deliverables, where you spend your time. What's the top things you're working on? >> The top thing right now is scaling architectures. So getting organizations past, they've already got their first 20 use cases. They've already got lakes, they got pedabytes in there. How do we enable self service so that we can actually bring that business value back, as you mentioned. Bring that business value back by making those data scientists productive. That's number one. Number two is aligning that to overall strategy. So organizations want to monetize their data, but they don't really know what that means. And so, within a consulting practice, we help our customers define, and put a road map in place, to align that strategy to their goals, the policies, the security, the GDP, or the regulations. You have to marry the business and the technology together. You can't do either one in isolation. Or ultimately, you're not going to be efficient. >> All right, and just your take on Big Data NYC this year. What's going on in Manhattan this year? What's the big trend from your standpoint? That you could take away from this show besides it becoming a sprawl of you know, everyone just promoting their wares. I mean it's a big, hyped show that O'Reilly does, >> It is. >> But in general, what's the takeaway from the signal? >> It was good hearing from customers this year. Customer segments, I hope to see more of that in the future. Not all just vendors showing their wares. Hearing customers actually talk about the pain and the success that they've had. So the Barclay session where they went up and they talked about their entire journey. It was a packed room, standing room only. They described their journey. And I saw other banks walk up to them and say, "We're feeling the same thing." And this is a highly competitive financial services space. >> Yeah, we had Packsotta's customer on Standard Bank. They came off about their journey, and how they're wrangling automating. Automating's the big thing. Machine learning, automation, no doubt. If people aren't looking at that, they're dead in my mind. I mean, that's what I'm seeing. >> That's right. And you have to get your house in order before you can start doing the fancy gardening. >> John: Yeah. >> And organizations aspire to do the gardening, right? >> I couldn't agree more. You got to be able to drive the car, you got to know how to drive the car if you want to actually play in this game. But it's a good example, the house. Got to get the house in order. Rooms are on fire (laughs) right? Put the fires out, retrench. That's why private cloud's kicking ass right now. I'm telling you right now. Wikibon nailed it in their true private cloud survey. No other firm nailed this. They nailed it, and it went viral. And that is, private cloud is working and growing faster than some areas because the fact of the matter is, there's some bursting through the clouds, and great use cases in the cloud. But, >> Yep. >> People have to get the ops right on premise. >> Matt: That's right, yep. >> I'm not saying on premise is going to be the future. >> Not forever. >> I'm just saying that the stack and rack operational model is going cloud model. >> Yes. >> John: That's absolutely happening, that's growing. You agree? >> Absolutely, we completely, we see that pattern over and over and over again. And it's the Goldilocks problem. There's the organizations that say, "We're never going to go cloud." There's the organizations that say, "We're going to go full cloud." For big data workloads, I think there's an intermediary for the next couple years, while we figure out operating pulse. >> This evolution, what's fun about the market right now, and it's clear to me that, people who try to get a spot too early, there's too many diseconomies of scale. >> Yep. >> Let the evolution, Kubernetes looking good off the tee right now. Docker containers and containerization in general's happened. >> Yep. >> Happening, dev ops is going mainstream. >> Yep. >> So that's going to develop. While that's developing, you get your house in order, and certainly go to the cloud for bursting, and other green field opportunities. >> Sure. >> No doubt. >> But wait until everything's teed up. >> That's right, the right workload in the right place. >> I mean Amazon's got thousands of enterprises using the cloud. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> It's not like people aren't using the cloud. >> No, they're, yeah. >> It's not 100% yet. (laughs) >> And what's the workload, right? What data can you put there? Do you know what data you're putting there? How do you secure that? And how do you do that in a repeatable way. Yeah, and you think cloud's driving the big data market right now. That's what I was saying earlier. I was saying, I think that the cloud is the unsubtext of this show. >> It's enabling. I don't know if it's driving, but it's the enabling factor. It allows for that scale and speed. >> It accelerates. >> Yeah. >> It accelerates... >> That's a better word, accelerates. >> Accelerates that horizontally scalable. Mike, thanks for coming on the CUBE. Really appreciate it. More live action we're going to have some partners on with you guys. Next, stay with us. Live in Manhattan, this is the CUBE. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Washington D.C. it's theCUBE, covering .conf2017. Brought to you by Splunk. (techno music) >> Well welcome back here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage at .conf2017. Splunks get together here in the nation's capital, Washington D.C. We are live here on theCUBE along with Dave Vellante. I'm John Walls. Glad to have you with us here for two days of coverage. We're joined now by Team Dell EMC I guess you could say. Colin Gallagher, who's the Senior Director of VxRail Product Marketing. Colin, good to see you, sir. >> Likewise. >> And Cory Minton, many time Cuber. Colin, you're a Cuber, as well. Principle Engineer, Data Analytical Leader at Dell EMC, and BigDataBeard.com, right? >> Yes, sir. >> Alright, and just in case, you have a special session going on. They're going to be handing these out a little bit later. So, I'm going to let you know that I'm prepared >> Cory: I love that, that's perfect. >> With you and your many legions of fans, allow me to join the club. >> That's awesome. Well welcome, we're so glad to have you. You've got a big data beard. You don't have to have a beard to talk big data at Dell EMC, but it certainly is not frowned upon if you do. >> John: Alright, well this would be the only way I'd ever grow one. >> There you go. >> I can promise you that. >> Looks good on you. >> I like the color, though, too. Anyway, they'll be handing these out at the special session. That'll be a lot of fun. Fellows, big announcement last week where you've got a marriage of sorts with Splunk technology and what Dell EMC is offering on VxRail. Tell us a little bit about that. Ready Systems is how you're branding this new offer. >> So we announced our Ready Systems for Splunk. These are turnkey offerings of Dell EMC technology pre-certified and pre-validated with Splunk and pre-sized. So we give you the option to buy from us both your Splunk solution and the underlying infrastructure that's been certified and validated in a wide variety of flavors based on top of VxRail, based on top of VxRack, based on top of some of our other storage products, as well, that gives you a full turnkey implementation for Splunk. So as Splunk is moving from the land of the hoodies and the experimenters to more mainstream running the business, these are the solutions that IT professionals can trust from both brands that IT professionals (mumbles). >> So you're both a Splunk reseller and a seller of infrastructure, is that right? >> Indeed. So we actually, we joined Splunk in a partnership as a strategic alliance partner a little over a year ago. And that gave us the opportunity to act as a reseller for Splunk. And we've recently gone through a rationalization of their catalog, so we actually have now an expanded offering. So, customers have more choice with us in terms of the offers that we provide from Splunk. And then part of our alliance relationship is that not only are we a reseller, but because of our relationship they now commit engineering and resources to us to help validate our solutions. So we actually work hand in hand with their partner engineering team to make sure that the solutions that we're designing from an infrastructure perspective at least meet or exceed the hardware requirements that Splunk wants to see their platform run on top of. >> Dave: Okay, cool. So you're a data guy. >> Indeed. >> You've been watching the evolution of things like Hadoop. When I look at the way in which customers deal with Hadoop, you know, ingest, you know, clean or transform, analyze, etc., etc., operationalize, there seem to be a lot of parallels between what goes on in that big data world and then the Splunk world, although Splunk is a package, it seems to be an integrated system. What are the similarities? What are the differences? And, what are the requirements for infrastructure? >> I think that the ecosystems, like you said, it's open source versus a commercial platform with a specific objective. And if you look at Splunk's deployment and their development over the years they've really started going from what was really a Google search for log, as Doug talked about today in the kickoff, to really being a robust analytics platform. So I think there's a lot of parallels in terms of technology. We're still ... It's designed to do many of the same things, which is I need to ingest data into somewhere, I need to make sense of it. So, we index it or do some sort of curation process to where then I can ask questions of it. And whether you choose to go the open source route, which is a very popular route, or you choose to go a commercial platform like Splunk, it really depends on your underlying call it ethos, right? It's that fundamental buy versus build, right? For somebody to achieve some of the business outcomes of like deploying a security event and information management tool like Splunk can do, to do that in open source may require some development, some integration of disparate open source platforms. I think Splunk is really good about focusing specifically on the business outcome that they're trying to drive and speeding their customers' time to value with that specific outcome in mind, whereas I think the open source community, like the Hadoop community, I think it offers maybe some ability to do some things that Splunk maybe wouldn't be interested in, things like rich media analytics, things that aren't good for Splunk indexing. >> Are there unique attributes of a data rich workload that you've accommodated that's maybe different from a traditional enterprise workload, and what are those? >> Yeah, so at the end of the day any application is going to have specific bottlenecks, right? One of the basis of performance engineering is move the bottleneck, right? In enterprise applications we had this evolution of originally they were kind of deployed in a server, and then we saw virtualization and shared storage really come in vogue for a number of years. And that's true in these applications, these data rich applications, as well. I think what we're starting to see is that regardless of what the workload is, whether it's a traditional business application like Oracle, SAP, or Microsoft or it's a data application like Splunk, anytime it becomes critical to the operation of a business organizations have to start to do things that we've done to every enterprise IT app in the past, which is we align it to our strategy. Is it highly available? Is it redundant? Is it built on hardware that we can be confident in that's going to be up and running when we need it? So I think from a performance and an engineering perspective, we treat each workload special, right? So we look at what Splunk requirements are and we understand that their requirements may be slightly different than running SAP or Oracle, and that's why we build the bespoke systems like our Ready System for Splunk specifically, right? It's not a catch all that hey it works for everything. It is a specifically designed platform to run Splunk exceptionally well. >> So Colin, a lot of the data practitioners that I talk to at this show and other data oriented shows like, "Ah, infrastructure. "I don't care about infrastructure." Why should they care about infrastructure? Why does infrastructure matter, and what are the things that they should know? >> Infrastructure does matter. I mean infrastructure, if youre infrastructure isn't there, if your infrastructure isn't highly available, as Cory said, if it lets you down in the middle of something, your business is going to shut down, right? Any user can say, "Talk about what happened "the last time you had a data center event, "and how long were you offline, "and what did that really mean for your business? "What's the cost of downtime for you?" And everything we build at an application level and a software level really rests on an infrastructure foundation, right? Infrastructure is the foundation of your data center and the foundation of your IT, and so infrastructure does matter in the sense that, as Cory said, as you build mission critical platforms on it the infrastructure needs to be highly reliable, highly available, and trusted, and that's what we really focus on bringing. And as applications like Splunk evolve more into that mainstream world, they need to be built on that mission critical, reliable, managed infrastructure, right? It's one thing for infrastructure development, and this kind of happens in the history of IT, as well. It happened in client server back in the day. You know, new applications ... Even the web environment I remember a company was running, one of my clients was running a web server under their secretary's desk, and she was administering in half time. You would never have a large company doing that. >> They'd be back up (mumbles). Before you leave. >> As it becomes more important it becomes more central, but also it becomes more important to centrally manage those, right? I'm a 15 year storage veteran, for good or for worse, and what we really sell in storage is selling centralized management of that storage. That's the value that we bring from centralized infrastructure versus a bunch of servers that are sitting distributed around the environment under someone's desk is that centralized management, the ability to share the resources across them, the ability to take one down while the others keep running, shift that workload over and shift it back. And that's what we can do with our Ready Systems. We can bring that level of shared management, shared performance management, to the Splunk world. >> I'll tell you, one of the things that we talked about, we talked about in a number of sessions this week, is application owners, specifically the folks that are here at this conference, need to understand that when they decide to make changes at the application level, whether they like infrastructure or they think it's valuable or not, what they need to understand is that there are impacts, and that if you look at the exciting things that were announced today around Enterprise Security updates, right? Enterprise Security is an interesting app from Splunk, but if a customer goes from just having Splunk Enterprise to running Enterprise Security as a premium application, there's significant downstream impacts on infrastructure that if the application team doesn't account for they can basically put themselves in a corner from a performance and a capacity perspective that can cause serious problems and slow down the business outcome that they're trying to achieve because they didn't think about the infrastructure impacts. >> Well, and what they want really is they want infrastructure that they can code, right? And we talked about this at VMworld we were talking about off camera that cloud model, bringing that cloud model to your data as oppose to trying to force your business into the cloud. So what about Ready Systems mimics that cloud model? Is it a cloud like infrastructure? Wondering if you could talk-- >> Yeah, I think it's that cloud like experience. Because we know we're in a multi cloud world, right? Cloud is not a place, cloud is an operating model, right? And so I think that the Ready Systems specifically provides a couple of things that are that cloud like experience, which is simple ordering and configuration and consumption that is aligned to the application, right? So we actually align the sizing of the system to the license size and the expected experience that this one customer would have so they get that very curated bespoke system that's designed specifically for them, but in a very easy to consume fashion that's also validated by the software vendor, in this case Splunk, that they say, "These are known good configurations "that you will be successful with." So we give customers that comfort that, "Hey, this is a proven way "to deploy this application successfully, "and you don't have to go through "a significant architecture design concept "to get to that cloud like experience." Then you layer in the fact that what makes up the Ready System, which is it is a platform powered by, in the VxRail case powered by VMware, right, ESX and vSAN, which obviously if you look at any of the cloud providers everything is virtualized at the end of the day for the most part, or at least most of the environments are. And so we give, and VMware has been focused on that for years and years of giving that cloud like experience to their customers. >> You talk about, you mentioned selling, sort of reseller, you've got this partnership growing, you're a customer. So, you have all these hats, right, and connections with Splunk. What does that do for you you think just in general? What kind of value do you put on that having these multiple perspectives to how they operate whether it's in your environment or what you're doing for your customers using their insights? >> Yeah, I think at the end of the day we're here to make it simpler for customers. So if we do the work, and we invest the time and energy and resources in this partnership, and we go do the validation, we do the joint engineering, we do the joint certification, that's work that customers don't have to do, and that's value that we can deliver to them that whatever reason they buy Splunk for whatever workload or business outcome they're trying to achieve, we accelerate it. That's one of the biggest values, right? And then you look at who do they interact with in the field? Well, it's engineers from our awesome presales team from around the world that we've actually trained in Splunk. So we have now north of 25 folks that have Splunk SE certifications that are actually Dell EMC employees that are out working with Splunk customers to build platforms and achieve that value very, very quickly. And then them understanding that, "Oh, by the way, Dell EMC is also a user of Splunk, "a great customer of Splunk "and a number of interesting use cases "that we're actually replatforming now "and drinking our own Kool Aid so to say," that I think it just lends credibility to it. And that's a lot of the reason why we've made the investments in being part of this awesome show, but also in doing things like providing the applications. So we actually have four apps in Splunkbase that are available to monitor Dell EMC platforms using Splunk. So I think customers just get a wholistic experience that they've got a technology partner that wants to see them be successful deploying Splunk. >> I wonder if we could talk about stacks, because I've heard Chad Sack-edge talk about stack wars, tongue and cheek, but his point is that customers have to make bets. You've heard him talk about this. You've got the cloud stacks, whether it's Azure or AWS or Google. Obviously VMware has a prominent stack, maybe the most prominent stack. And there's still the open source, whether it's Hadoop or OpenStack. Should we be thinking about the Splunk stack? Is that emerging as a stack, or is it a combination of Splunk and these other? >> You know, we actually had that conversation today with some of the partner engineering team, and I don't know that I would today. I think Splunk continues to be, it's its own application in many cases. And I actually think that a lot of what Splunk is about is actually making sure that those stacks all work. So there was even announcements made today about a new app. So they have a new app for Pivotal Cloud Foundry, right? So if you think about stacks for application development, if you're going to hit push on a new application you're going to need to monitor it. Splunk is one of those things that persistent. The data is persistent. You want to keep large amounts of data for long periods of time so that you can build your models, understand what's really going on in the background, but then you need that real time reporting of, "Hey, if I hit push on a Cloud Foundry app "and all of a sudden I have an impact "to the service that's underlying it "because there's some microservice that gets broken, "if I don't have that monitoring platform "that can tell me that and correlate that event "and give me the guidance to not only alert against it "but actually go investigate it and act against it, "I'm in trouble." The stacks, I think many of them have their own monitoring capabilities, but I think Splunk has proven it that they are invested in being the monitoring and the data fabric that I think is wanting to help all the stacks be successful. So I don't necessarily put it in the stack. And I kind of don't put Hadoop in its own stack, either, because I think at the end of the day Hadoop needs a stack for deployment models. So you may see it go from a physical construct of being, a bit trying to be its own software that controls the underlying hardware, but I think you're seeing abstraction layers happen everywhere. They're containerizing Hadoop now. Virtualization of Hadoop is legit. Most of the big cloud providers talk about the decoupling of compute from storage in Hadoop for persistent and transient clusters. So I think the stacks will be interesting for application development, and applications like Splunk will be one of two things. They'll either consume one of those stacks for deployment or they'll be a standalone monitoring tool that makes us successful. >> So you don't see in the near term anyway Splunk becoming an application development platform the way that a lot of the-- >> Cory: They may have visions of it. That's not, yeah. >> They haven't laid that out there. It's something that we've been bounding around here. >> Yeah, I think it's interesting. Again, I think it goes back to .. Because the flexibility in what you can do with Splunk. I mean we've developed some of our own applications to help monitor Dell EMC storage platforms, and that's, it's interesting. But in terms of building what we'd I guess we'd consider like traditional seven factor app development, I don't know that it provides it. >> Yeah, well it's interesting because, I'm noodling here, Doug Merritt said, "Hey, we think we're going to be the next five billion, "10 billion, 20 billion dollar ecosystem slash company," and so you start to wonder, "Okay, how does that TAM grow to that point? That's one avenue that we considered. I want to talk about the anatomy of a transaction and how that's evolved. Colin, you mentioned Client Server, and you think about data rich applications going from sort of systems of record and the transactions associated with that. And while there were many going to Client Server and HTTP, and then now mobile apps really escalated that. And now with containers, with microservices, the amount of data and the complexity of transactions is greater and greater and greater. As a technologist, I wonder if you could sort of add some color to that. >> Yeah, I think as we kind of go down a path of application stacks are interesting, but at the end of the day we're still delivering a service, right? At the end of the day it's always about how do I deliver service, whether it's a business service, it's a mobile application, which is a service where I could get closer to my customer, I could transact business with them on a different model, I think all of it ... Because everything has gone digital, everything we do is digital, you're seeing more and more machines get created, there's more and more IP addressed devices out there on the planet that are creating data, and this machine generated data deluge that we're under right now it ain't slowing down, right? And so as we create these additional devices, somebody has got to make sense of this stuff. And if you listen to a lot of the analysts they talk about machine data is the most target rich in terms of business value, and it's their fastest growing. And it's now at a scale because we've now created so many devices that are creating their own logs, creating their own transactional data, right, there's just not that many tools that out of the box make it simple to collect the data, search the data, and derive value from it in the way that Splunk does. You can get to a lot of the things that Splunk can deliver from an outcome other ways with other platforms, but the simplicity and the ability to do it with a platform that out of the box does it and has a vibrant community of folks that will help you get there, it's a pretty big deal. So I think it's, you know, it's interesting. I don't know, like under the covers microservices are certainly interesting. They're still services. They're just smaller and packaged slightly differently and shared in a different way. >> And a lot more of them. >> Yeah, and scaled differently, right? And I totally get that, but at the end of the day we're still from a Splunk perspective and from a data perspective, we've still got to make sense of all of it. >> Right, well, I think the difference is just the amount of data. You talked about kind of new computing models, serverless sort of, stateless, IoT coming into play. It's just the data curve is reshaping. >> Well, it's not just the amount of data, it's the number of sources. The data is exploding, but also, as Cory mentioned, it's exploding because it's coming from so many places. Your refrigerator can generate data for you now, right? Every single ... Everything that generates Internet, anything doing anything now really has a microprocessor in it. I don't know if you guys saw my escape room at VMworld. There were 12 microprocessors running this escape room. So one of the things we played about doing was bring it here and trying to Splunk the escape room to actually see real time what the data was doing. And we weren't able to ship it back from Barcelona in time, but it would've been interesting to see, because you can see just the centers that are in that room real time and being able to correlate all that. And that's the value of Splunk is being able to pull that from those disparate sources altogether and give you those analytics. >> Yeah, it's funny you talk about an IoT use case. So we've got these... Our partner, who's a joint partner of both Dell EMC and Splunk, we actually have these Misfit devices that are activity trackers. And we're actually-- >> Misfit device? >> Misfit. Yeah, it's a brand. >> John: Love it. >> It's fitting, I think. But we have these devices that we gave away to a number of the attendees here, and we actually asked them if they're willing to participate. They can actually use the app on your phone to grab the data. And by simply going to a website they can allow us to pull the data from their device about their activity, about their sleep. And so we actually have in our booth and in Arrow's booth we're Splunking Conf and it's called How Happy is Conf? And so you can actually see Splunk running, and by the way, it's running in Arrow's lab. It's running on top of Dell EMC infrastructure designed for Splunk. You can actually see us Splunking how happy conf attendees are. And we're measuring happiness by their sleep. How much sleep-- >> John: Sleep quality and-- >> The exercise, the number of steps, right? So we have a little battle going between-- >> Is more sleep or less sleep happy? >> Are consumption behaviors also tracked on that? I just want to know. I'm curious. >> It's voluntary. You'd have to provide that. >> Alright, because that's another measure of happiness. >> It certainly is. But it's just a great use case where we talk about IoT and the number of sources of data that Splunk as a platform ... It's very, very simple to deploy that platform, have a web service that's able to pull that data from an API from a platform that's not ours, right, but bring that data into our environment, use Splunk to ingest and index that data, then actually create some interesting dashboards. It's a real world use case, right? Now, how much people really want to (mumbles) Splunk health devices we'll determine, but in the IoT context it's an absolute analog for what a lot of organizations are trying to do. >> Interesting, good stuff. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us. We appreciate that. Cory, it's probably not the real deal, but as close as I'm going to go. Good luck with your session. We appreciate the time to both of you, and you and your Misfit. Back with more here on theCUBE coming up in just a bit here in Washington D.C. (techno music)

>> Speaker: Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Yeah we're here live the Cube coverage at VMworld 2017. Behind us is the floor of the VMvillage. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Our next two guest Beth Phalen who's the President and General Manager of Data Protection Division at Dell EMC and Yanbing Li who's the Senior Vice President General Management with Storage and Availability at VMware, vSAN, all the greatness; Welcome back to the Cube. Great to see you guys. >> Yeah, great to see you. >> Got the heavy hitters here, data protection, AWS lot of great relationships synergies happening. >> Yeah. >> Give us the update. >> Yeah well go ahead yeah. >> We've been working together for a long time but recently we've really amped it up to the next level. Great discussions around enabling data protection for vSAN and as announced this week you know with Dell EMC will be first vendor to have data protection for VMware cloud on AWS. So it's a really exciting time to be here and I've been in this business for a long time. This is the best VMworld that I've seen so far and so it's just really great to be here with Yanbing. >> It's been very cohesive, I want to just stay on that for a second. This is the big milestone for VMware. >> It is. >> To have this shipping of the general availability especially with on the heels of the vCloud Air and all that controversy. Andy Jassy's on stage from Amazon web services. >> Yeah. >> Really kind of looking right at the audience and saying we got your back, this is a real deal, and the bridge to the future. I'm paraphrasing, he didn't say those exact words. >> Yeah yeah yeah. >> How do you get that data protection? Because that data protection in the cloud is hard. >> Yeah, well the nice thing is that since we've got all of our data protection running in a cloud environment now we could then use that to build the connections with VMC. So we had Data Domain Virtual Edition running, we have Data Protection Suite running in the cloud. So people can use the same technology they used on prem but now in AWS in conjunction with VMC. >> So you kind have hyper converged infrastructure meets cloud data protection. Yanbing, what is the difference? I mean what's the requirement of hyper converged infrastructure data protection? How does it differ from traditional storage and how is it evolving? >> Ah, great questions you know Beth and I we've known each other for quite a few years. I have to say our relationship hasn't been, you know, this close is and it's getting closer and closer. So coming back to your question in terms of hyper converged infrastructure. We're seeing two fundamental shifts around data protection. One is, the blurring of the boundary between backup and DR and these two really coming together as unified data protection. I think there has been a lot of discussion around this for a long time but this become even more compelling; now we talk about hyper converged infrastructure where you know our customers they so enjoy the benefit of having compute and storage combined together in a common management experience, they're looking for the same for data protection. So we're really seeing customers want to see data protection as a feature of hyper converged, as a capability that's part of that rather than yet another silo they have to manage separately. You know they want policy that manage storage, compute, and backup and DR altogether. So that's why you know that's really drive our partnership so much closer. >> You know it's interesting many of the clients that we've worked with over the years they'll have a backup strategy but they don't really have a DR strategy and they sleep with one eye open at night and they're afraid to go to the board because it's so expensive, it's expensive insurance. So you're seeing that there, sounds like they're blending those 2 together kind of killing 2 birds with one stone. Are there trade offs or things that customers should think about in that regard? How do they sort of go from where they are today which is sort of a backup bolt on to that integrated DR and backup? >> I think one of the key is the technology that we're leveraging now and we leverage something that has like CDP continuous data protection you can use that one to have data path to the secondary storage and you can use that same code to also initiate disaster recovery with near 0 RPO and RTO. So another thing that we announced this week is with our DPS for apps next edition that we now have hypervisor direct back up and what that means is that we're integrated directly with ESX and we are leveraging ProtectPoint through VM's to move data to data domain. That same technology is also leverage within RecoverPoint through VM's and so you can see the engine, the internal engine of the data movements, can be applied both to disaster recovery and to back up with different windows of RTO and RPO. >> I'm glad you said near 0 RPO causes no such thing as 0 RPO but you're seeing, more pressure to get as close to 0 as possible. What's driving that pressure and how are you meeting it? >> Well I think with all of us we know that an industry customers are expecting 24 by, you know 24 by 7 up time right. So they have many many applications that they need to have the confidence that if it does go down for any reason they're going to be able to bring it back up within minutes or hours not days. So that's really the drive for continuous availability. Getting as close to that as possible. >> If I may one more John, the challenge in data protection has always been it's, it's largely been a one size fits all and it's either I'm either under protected or I'm spending and breaking the bank. So are you able to through your technology and process improvements improve the level of granularity for different workloads that require different service levels. >> Two things come to mind, One, we're seeing more and more interesting customers integrating data protection directlywith their applications. Whether it SQL or Oracle and or the VM itself. So that's one thing. So we can custom the data protection to particular application and then on the second piece of that is where the different interfaces that VM offers we're able to do either V80P level integration or more fine grained integration like we do with CheckPoint through VM. So we are getting to the point that we can make different choices either application specific or something that is fine tuned based on the level of mission critical capabilities that application requires. >> I will get you guys perspective just a high level ballistic view for a second. We're seeing convergence of two worlds. The cloud native world that have no walls, have no perimeters they operate in a mindset of there's a security holes everywhere. Then the protections hard. >> They think of a differently. >> Yeah On prem the traditional methods, how are those coming together? Because you have customers that run VMware and do stuff with data protection and then one of them VMware in the cloud. What's different, what do customers need to know that are we on either side of that equation? If I'm on prem and I now want to use VMware in the cloud on AWS. How does data protection fit in that? Is it the same, is there tweaks, how they think about it? >> You want to answer that? >> In terms of on prem or VMware in AWS you know a big value prop is reading at the consistency in the operating model. I'm sure you have heard about this a million times said. >> Yes, talking about it all week. >> All week long. From data protection we're trying to do exactly the same. So for example VMware cloud on AWS, the very first data protection that we certify on that platform is from [Vast 00:07:39] organization is Avamar networker being the first set of solution certified and our customers definitely love the continuity of I already have the experience and licensing associated with my own prem protection solution and they want to carry that forward in today's cloud. >> So same operating module, so from the customers perspective I've been doing it this way >> Exactly. >> With VMware and Dell Data Protection, now it's the same in the cloud. No change in. >> Yeah I mean I think that's really the beauty of it, even with DDVE I mean you can have applications or you can do through different; You know you can have application in the cloud as well as another level of protection of your secondary storage. >> I think some of the changes probably not necessary. So RPD model consistency, Dave we touch upon, hyper convergence is driving a lot of functionality into a single control plate as opposed to these different silos and you know we would like to see that happen in the cloud as well and along that line you know best organization and my organizing are really looking at how we viewed the best next generation integrated technology that truly leverages the strengths of both organizations. >> That's simple and easy to use. >> Simple, easy to use, policy base, you know turn key solutions, so this is, you know what we're doing something pretty innovative by truly bring our engineering together and try to boost our next generation solution. >> Since the synergies that Michael was talking about when we interviewed Michael yesterday he's like look, the synergies are well beyond its expectations. Just it seems to be flowing nicely in the culture. When EMC had the federation there was always kind of like an interesting but now things are flowing differently. It seems to be smoother you guys. >> They are. >> Every action. >> I totally agree with what you said. I mean it feels different and I think as we go forward we have even more opportunities but we're not even a year into it and there was a distinct difference in terms of recognition around the joint opportunity and like you said the smoothness of the conversation I think is >> It's clear, it's clarity. >> It's really helpful. >> Well also you know, the rising tide floats all boats, well VMware stock as gone like this. >> It makes us all happy. >> Its got a nice slope to it. >> I definitely want to hackle Beth on that and the type of collaboration we're seeing between our two organizations, might be you is actually having multiple touch point into Dell and Dell EMC organization whether it's our VxRail and you know the vSAN based collaboration or the data protection angle and we're really seeing that happen across different functions. So we are starting from go to market collaboration you know how we provide the best set of solutions to our customers in joint go to market effort. vSAN is gaining a lot of free print in mission critical workloads and a critical requirement is data protection. So so we're doing a lot of joint solution, joint selling together. And really in the next step is that joint engineering effort leveraging the best of both worlds to build next generation products that's optimized for hyper converged, that's optimized for the cloud. >> For the software defined data centers. >> If I dial back a decade let's say as virtualization generally in VMware specifically saw its ascendancy, data protection totally changed. For a number of reasons, you had less physical resources but backup was still very resource intensive application and so; That's really where Avarmar came before. He walked the floor, back up and data protection is exploding again. It's like the hottest area. So two part question. Why is that and then how does Dell EMC with you know its large portfolio, its big install base, how do you maintain competitiveness with all that new emerging innovation? >> Yeah well I think the first question and I want to hear your answer too but what I would say is because the industry is changing so dramatically it's requiring data protection to change just as dramatically. >> Right. >> Right, so that is a lot of people are seeing opportunity there. Where is maybe, I've had people say, you know, well you don't really have to protect data in the cloud it's all stuff that's magically protected, I've had customers say that to me and I think that we're now beyond that, right and people are realizing, wow you know, just as much of a need or more of a need than it was before. So I think there's plenty of you know companies appreciate opportunity and they see opportunity right now as data protection evolves quickly to address the new IT world that we live in. On anything you would add to the first answer? >> Yeah so I think, several years ago VMworld feels like a storage shelf you know. I think there is still a lot of exciting interesting storage company but there has been quite a bit of consolidation you know. Software defined storage it seems like that market's landscape is becoming clearer and clearer and we're definitely seeing that spreading into secondary storage is now right for a disruption and we're also seeing that is disruption around secondary storage isalso impacting data protection software. It's not just the secondary storage element but you know extent to the entire software stack. I think it's very exciting and also thinking about you know what is going to be the economical benefit of cloud and how do we take best advantage of that and this is why you know our AWS relationship. You know we are rejuvenizing our DR effort. We have successful on prem product like SRM but we're seeing tremendous new opportunity to look at that in the context of cloud to truly leveraging the economy is scale of what cloud has to offer. So lots of driving factors to really revitalize that. >> It's a cloud show and you have no cloud. >> Okay Beth second part of my question is how do you keep pace, it's a pretty tremendous innovations going on, how do you keep pace, what are your thoughts on all that? >> So the really cool thing is because where you know we're Dell Technologies we have not only data protection assets, we also have servers, we also have switches, we have everything we need to build a full integrated stack which we now have without EPA. So within a integrated data protection appliance we have the best of data domain, we have the best of our software, we're leveraging also power at servers and dellium C switches. So we have everything that we need to build that end to end best in class integrated appliance and as customers change how they consume data protection to more like a converged consumption model or hyper converged consumption model we have all the pieces that we need to make that a reality and then to continue to move forward. So when you combine that with our relationship with VMware and the ability that we have to drive innovation jointly I have no doubt that we're going to be really moving ahead into you know modern data protection. >> Final question before we rap. R&D comes up, Micheal also mention and so do Pat, billions of dollars now are in R&D. Free cash was a billion dollars. Three billion for VMware. A lot of observations this week that we kind of looked and read the tea leaves one of them was at least for me was the stack a collision between hardware software stacks as IoT and servers and devices, you have hardware stacks and software stacks. Untested scenario certainly in vSAN; You see a lot of activity around untested new use cases and so it's going to put pressure on engineers. So the question is what's the vision for the R&D for you guys around data protection, because it's not just data protection anymore it's a fundamental linchpin in the equation of cloud >> Yeah. >> Thoughts on engineering road map I mean engineering R&D. >> One thing we're doing actually right now this week is we're restructuring our EMC lab dellium c lab back in Hopkinton to move to more of an open shared pivotal type environment. So you know it's clear that as we go forward doing things like pere programming on test driven development. You know enabling continuous always good known stayed like there is definitely advancements happening in software development that are accelerating innovation and so as we take advantage of that, that's how we keep pace with what's going on around us. Because you're right the number of things to get involved in is endless. >> I just want to point out before we end the segment you guys are very inspirational women in tech. I think you guys are amazing. We talk about the engineer resources. >> Thank you John. Your thoughts on the industry, as there's a lot of controversy in Silicon Valley and around the world around STEM and women in tech. Thoughts that you'd like to share to all the men watching and all the folks and young girls who might inspiration. You know it's passionate for us. >> Yeah, I'll start. So I think, first of all I want to tank the Cube for having such awareness in this topic and you know constantly featuring women in tech on your shows. You guys have been doing a great job raising the visibility women leaders. >> Thank you >> Thanks >> in the industry. Thank you. So certainly this is a topic very dear and near to my heart. This week you know we can still see not only our employee base but our customer base is heavily men dominated. But I think we're seeing unprecedented levels of awareness and attention to this topic in Silicon Valley and across the world. Really I do think we are starting to see much better transparency metric. We're seeing increased accountability in business and business leadership. So I think those and we're seeing a lot of social awareness I think those are going to drive a positive change. So let me give you a concrete example of fuzz for example things we do in VMware, we just gone through bonus allocation and compensation adjustment. I would get a report from it make sure, comparing the percentage of what we have done for the men population and women population and so you get a real time feedback in data and when we see the data is actually quite shocking hopefully we do see, unconsciously you know we may be allocating those >> Unconscious bias if you will. >> Yeah those differently. But because of those real time data and feedback we're good able to you know keep ourself accountable. So just you know this is no longer just talk this is a real data you know in the real HR practices that we are already building into our day to day practice. So I think I'm very optimistic, this will take time but this is you know we're moving in the right direction. >> Historical moment in the world if you think about it. This is super important time. The inspiration and also the young women out there too and also for the men. They need to be aware as well because inclusion includes not just women it's everyone. That seems to be >> Absolutely. >> In fact a trend we had an interview on the Cube and our Simpson who works for Mozilla she's doing some work for Tech Nation, she said they're changing it from diversity inclusion to inclusion and diversity. They're flipping it around where inclusion leads diversity cause they want to lead with the message of inclusion; >> Yeah. >> as a primary message with diversity. So it's not just the diversity message it's inclusion. >> Yeah. >> Love that. >> Yeah the only thing I would add would be the phrase "She can be it if she sees it" I think having people like myself and Yanbing be visible role models it's very impactful, especially for young women to see you know women in tech leadership positions. It's hard to imagine yourself in a role if you don't see anyone similar to in a role. So I think the more that people like us and our peers get out there and really put an effort into being visible. >> Do you see the networks forming more, I mean is there more action flowing happen. Can you compare and contrast just even a few years ago is it on the rise significantly? >> I think it's on the rise. >> Yeah I do get us to be involved in a lot of opportunistic situations, yeah. >> And of course your Twitter handle puts it right out there, @ybhighheels. >> Yeah. >> Right, your not shy about it. >> Yeah, there's nothing shy about it. I realize you know Beth and I, we are both addressed in very feminine way. I do think. >> Your capabilities are off to chart you to great and impressive executives. >> Society is increasingly more inclusive about their notions of female tech leader. It's not just one size fits all and I think it's encouraging us to show who we really are and the authentic self and I think that's very important for young girls to see because I remember when I was a young girl I didn't go into tech expecting I do not get to be who I am >> Yeah and that shouldn't reflect your capability of anyway any kind and that seem to be the greater awareness. The Google memo that went around as all of it so getting us some great videos on Silicon Angle on that topic. Again you guys are great inspiration. We love working with you you guys are great executives. >> Thank you. >> Its great content. >> Your welcome. >> We super passionate about it. We'll be at Grace Hopper for our 4th year we do that. >> Fantastic. >> As we show every year, we're learning more and more and we're going to do a podcast for guys too. >> Nice. >> Different angle. >> Love that. >> A lot of guys want to do what to do. >> Okay that's great. >> Inclusion and diversity of course; I need the help. I'm John Furrier With Dave Vellante Here. Live at Vmworld. More coverage coming after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is VMworld 2017, and this is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm with my co-host, Peter Burr. Colin Gallagher is back. He's the senior director of hyper-converged infrastructure marketing at Dell EMC and he's joined by Josh Holst, who's the vice president of information services at Hills Bank and Trust Gentlemen, welcome to The Cube. Good to see you. >> Thanks for having me back. >> So Colin, give us the update from when we last talked. What's happening at the show, a bunch of parties last night. How's the vibe? >> Colin: Huh, were there? >> Responses from customers to your announcements, give us the update. >> Nah, I couldn't go to any parties because I knew I had to be with you guys today. Had to keep my voice. Shame. >> Dave: I went, I just didn't talk. >> Smart man. No, I mean, I've been talking to a lot of customers, talking to customers about what they think of the show, and what the messages are and how they're resonating with them. I think so far, you know, most of the keynotes and topics have been really on point with what customers' concerns are. Also been talking to a lot of people about hyper-converge, because that's what I do for a living. You know, and I brought Josh along to talk about his experiences with hyper-converged. But I've been having a really great time at the show, hearing what people are concerned about, and hearing how a lot of what we're delivering at the show is really resonating with them. >> So Josh, tell us about Hills Bank and Trust. What are they all about, what's your role? >> Sure. Hills Bank and Trust was founded in 1904. We're still headquartered in Hills, Iowa, if anybody's familiar with that. We're a full services bank. We provide all the services we can to our customers. And we primarily serve those out of eastern Iowa, but we have customers throughout the U.S. as well. >> And your role? >> I'm a VP of information systems, so I oversee IT infrastructure. >> Okay. So maybe paint a picture, well, let me start here. What do you think about the business challenges and the drivers of your business, and how they ripple through to IT? What are those drivers and how are you responding? >> Yeah, what we're seeing a lot is a big shift within the financial services world, with the FinTechs, the brick and mortarless banking, robo-advisories, digital currencies, and just an increased demand of what our customers want. So what we're trying to do from an IT infrastructure standpoint is build that solid foundation, where we can quickly adapt and move where our industry's taking us. >> Yeah, so things like Blockchain and Crypto, and you guys launching your own currency any time soon? >> Josh: Nope. We are monitoring it, but nothing like that. >> So how do those, I mean somebody said to me one time, it was a banking executive, you know, we think about, we know our customers need banking, but do they need banks? I was like wow, that's a pretty radical statement. And everybody talks about digital transformation. How does that affect your decisions in IT? Is it requiring you to speed things up, change your skill profile, maybe paint a picture there. >> Yeah, what we're seeing from the digital space within banking is that we definitely have to speed things up. We need to be more nimble and quicker within the IT infrastructure side, and be able to, again, address those customer demands and needs as they arise. And plus also we've got an increase government's regulations and compliance we have to deal with, so staying on top of that, and then cybersecurity is huge within the banking field. >> So maybe paint a picture of your infrastructure for us if you could. >> Sure. You know, prior to VxRail, we were traditional IT stack, server, storage, dedicated networking specific for that. As we were going through a review of Refresh, hyper-converged came out and it just really made a lot of sense. The simplified infrastructure to allow us to run our business and be able to operate in the way we need to. >> So can you talk a little bit more about that? Maybe the before and the after. What did things look like before in terms of maybe the complexity, and how many of these and those, or whatever detail you're comfortable with. >> Josh: Sure. >> And what happened afterwards? >> Yeah, before the VxRail platform, I mean, we just had racks of servers and storage. We co-located our data center facilities, so that was becoming a pretty hefty expense as we continued to grow within that type of simplified, or that traditional environment. By moving to the VxRail platform, we've been able to reduce rack space. I think at my last calculation, we went from about 34 to 40 U of rack space down to four, and we're running the exact same work load at a higher performance. >> How hard was it to get the business to buy into what you wanted to do? >> It was a lengthy process to kind of go through the review, the discussions, the expense associated with it. But I think being able to sell the concept of a simpler IT infrastructure, meaning that IT can provide quicker services, and not always be the in the weeds, or the break fix type group. We want to be able to provide more services back to our business. >> So you went to somebody, CFO, business, whoever, to ask for money, because you had a new project. But you would have had to do that anyway, correct? >> Josh: Yes, yes. >> Okay, so... >> Was it easier? >> Was it easier with the business case or were you nervous about that, because you were sticking your neck out? >> No, I think it was easier from the business line. That executive team does trust kind of my judgment with it, so what I brought forward was well-vetted, definitely had our partners involved, the relationship we have with Dell EMC, and they just really were there the entire step of the way. >> And what was the business impact? Or the IT impact, from your standpoint? >> Well, the IT impact is we are performing at a faster pace right now. You know, we're getting things done quicker within that environment. Our data protection has gotten a lot better with the addition of data domain, and the data protection software. >> Peter: Is that important in banking? >> (laughs) You want to make sure that people check your data, right? >> If it's my bank, yeah. >> So it's very important to how we operate and how we do things. >> So one of the things we've heard from our other CIO clients who like the idea of hyper-converged or converged, is that, yeah, I can see how the technology can be converged, but how do I converge the people? That it's not easy for them that they launch little range wars inside. Who's going to win? How did that play out at Hills Bank and Trust? >> You know, it wasn't that big of a shift within our environment. We're a very small IT team. I've got a systems group, a networking group, and a security group, so transforming or doing things differently within that IT space with the help of VxRail just wasn't a large impact. The knowledge transfer and the ramp-up time to get VxRail up and running was very minimal. >> You still have a systems group, a network group and a security group? >> At this point, we're still kind of evaluating that, and what's the right approach, right structure for IT within the bank? But at this point we're still operating within that. >> Did the move to VxRail affect in any way your allocation of labor? Whether it's FTE's, or how they spent their time? >> We're spending a little less time actually managing that infrastructure, and more focusing in on our critical line of business applications. And that's kind of been my whole goal with this, is to be able to introduce an infrastructure set that allows IT to become more of a service provider, and not just an operational group that fixes servers and storage. >> So you're saying a little less? >> A little less. >> It wasn't a dramatic change? >> We're still transforming though, so we still have this traditional IT structure within our group, so I do expect as we start to transform IT more, we'll get there, but I had to start with that hardware layer first. >> What do you think is achievable and what do you want to do in terms of freeing up resource, and what do you want to do with that resource? >> Again, I just want to be able to provide those services back to the bank. We have a lot of applications owned within the line of businesses. I'd like to be able to free up resources on my team to bring those back into IT. Again, more for the control and the structure around it, change management, compliance, making sure we're patching systems appropriately, things along those lines. >> And any desire to get more of your weekends back, or spend more time with your family, or maybe golf a little bit more? >> Exactly. Golf is always good. You know, we've actually seen a reduction in the amount of time we do have to spend managing these platforms, or at least the hardware standpoint, firmware upgrades, and doing the VxRail platform upgrades have gone really well with this, compared to upgrading our server firmware, making sure it matches the storage firmware, and then we've got to appropriately match the storage side or the networking side of it. >> And the backup comment. Easier to back up, more integrated? >> It's definitely more integrated and a lot easier. We've seen tremendous improvements in backup performance by implementing data domain with the data protection software, and it's just really simplified it, so backup is just a service that runs. It's not something we really manage anymore. >> Are you guys getting excited about being able to target their talents and attentions to some other problems that might serve the business? >> Exactly. You know, one of the themes I've picked up here at VMworld has been the digital workspace transformation. That's huge within our realm. We're very traditional banking, but there is a lot of demand internally and from our customers to be more mobile and provide more services in a channel they prefer. >> We're out of time, but two quick questions. Why Dell EMC? Why that choice? >> You know, we had an existing relationship with EMC pre-merger, and it was a solid relationship. They'd been there the entire way during the merger, every question was answered. It wasn't anything that was, oh, let me go check on this. They had everything down. We felt very comfortable with it. And again, it's the entire ecosystem within our data center. >> So trust, really. >> Josh: Absolutely. >> And then if you had to do it over again, anything you'd do differently, any advice you'd give your fellow peers? >> You know, I don't think so. Again, it's just the entire relationship, the process we went through was very well done. The engagement we had from the management team with Dell EMC was just spot on. >> Why do you think that was, sorry, third question. Why do you think that was so successful, then? What did you do up front that led to that success? >> You know, it was just a lot of relationship-building. In Iowa, we're all about building relationships and trust. We do that with our customers at the bank as well. We want to build long-lasting, trusting relationships, and Dell EMC does that exact same thing. >> All right, gents. Thanks very much for coming back to The Cube. >> Josh: Thanks, guys. Good to be here. >> Thanks, Josh, take care. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, you're welcome. Keep it right there, buddy. We'll be right back with our next guest at The Cube. We're live from Vmworld 2017. Be right back.

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Good night everybody, this is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris and we are live here at VMworld 2017. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Kevin Gray is here as the director of product marketing for hybrid cloud platforms at Dell EMC. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks. >> OK, so, we're here talking cloud, everybody's cloud crazy, but it seems like, as Peter said, the technology has matured. >> Kevin: Yeah. >> And we're actually at a point where we can deliver what we've been talking about for the past five or six years. So how does that relate to what you guys have, what are you showing here at the event, and what are customers saying? >> Peter: Yeah, what are the announcements? What's happening? >> Well, one of the things we're announcing is enhancements to Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. You've heard a lot at VMware about VMware Cloud Foundation with added support for the extract SDDC, which is our turnkey VMware cloud foundation platform. We've also enhanced support for VxRail, so we've added multi-site capabilities, so we now support up to four data center sites, and we've also added support for disaster recovery through Recover Point VM. We're also added support for native hybrid cloud, so with native hybrid cloud we now have a support for... we have a new turnkey platform for VxRail, and we're supporting our new access testing tool, which is really focused on helping developers, right? So what the access testing tool does is it really focuses on when companies are going through and really looking at re-factoring applications for things like when they're going to microservices, it has that ability to really go out and test to make sure the dependencies and services are still there. We also have a capability around called our Application Deployment Tool, which really pushes, as you look to push an application out to multiple instances of foundations of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, you can actually help, it does that in one push. So if you look at PCF, you can use a CF pushkim, and push it out to multiple instances, and in this case, it'll do that in one step. >> So that's all the things that you've done on an individual announcements basis in the tools, but Kevin, let's step back. Let's take the customer's perspective for a second. When you summarize all this-- >> Right. >> So you're standing in front of a customer and you're saying to the customer, "We are pointing towards this vision." >> Right. >> "We want you to be here with us." What is that here? Where do you want them to be as you start to think about designing and priority for this broad portfolio that you have? >> So you heard Bob talk a little bit about sort of customers buying more outcomes, per se, and one of the things you'll see, with for instance our native hybrid cloud, is that ability to really get a repeatable process with Pivotal Cloud Foundry. So if you look at Pivotal Cloud Foundry, they're moving real fast, right? They have a release every 90 days, pretty much, and you need to be on the latest release within nine months-- >> Let me make sure that I understand this. >> When you say "repeatable process "with Pivotal Cloud Foundry," what you're talking about is that the organization, the shop, can think about developing an application in Pivotal, deploying it out on Cloud Foundry, and then running it on whatever underlying hybrid or conversion for structure that they might want and being able to do that over and over and over, so they can increase their focus on the application function that they're generatng. Is that basically what you mean? >> Absolutely, and-- >> So it's that level of repeatability. Focus on the business problem, build it, and then take the pain and suffering out of deploying it wherever it needs to be. >> Absolutely, and maintaining it. So if we look at large customers, as I mentioned, one large financial institution was looking at how do they do this repeatably across multiple data center sites, right? And how do they keep pace with that change over time, you know? That's not an easy process when you're moving really fast, and it's just one of those things where they tried to do it themselves for a while and realized it's better to buy that outcome than to try and create it on their own. >> You know, Dave, I was talking to a large user here on the show floor not too long ago, yesterday, in fact, about the fact that DevOps is not taking the world by storm the way that many people thought it might, and he identified specifically, one of the reasons is because there's not enough support from the technology companies to start packaging and organizing their capabilities, their technology set, their product sets, to support a DevOps mentality. It almost sounds, you haven't said this, Kevin, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it almost sounds as if what you guys are saying is, we're going to start designing and packaging and organizing our systems to support that sort of DevOps orientation so the system administrators can evolve in the way that they need to evolve as the business demands new change. >> Yeah, so if you look at our hybrid cloud platforms, they're really intended to be that easy button for deploying either a full vRealize Suite, vRealize Suites stacked in our Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, or Pivotal Cloud Foundry for native hybrid cloud. Another thing we introduced this week was our ready systems. We have ready systems for VMware and we have ready systems for Pivotal. If you look at the VMware ready system, one of the things we found, for VMware, one of the things we found was that many customers, if you look at Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, it gives you a lot of benefits that a lot of our large enterprise customers are looking for, so, it supports multiple sites, it supports disaster protection, and it supports a turnkey platform where it's an engineered system, but for a lot of customers, it meant that you were always a couple of releases behind. So we give them that experience, right? And we make it a little bit, we give them an opportunity with the ready system to get that support from VMware, where we'll take on the HCI piece and support it. Same thing with native hybrid cloud and our Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Pivotal ready system, you know, they'll get their support from PCF, from Pivotal, but they'll build it on HCI. And we're also introducing a Pivotal ready system based on PKS. And I think PKS is interesting, simply because if you look at the Kubernetes environment and the work that's been done with Kubo, it's really a platform that's more likely where people are going to want to build, right? If you look at those people that are doing it, they want more control over, you know, their build process and their pipeline, and therefore they're more likely to build, and with the PKS system, the ready system based on Pivotal, Pivotal ready system, they can get that outcome. >> So at the end of the day it's all about changing the operating model, >> Kevin: Absolutely. >> And having a business impact. Peter, we were in our Palo Alto studio, and one of our clients was in, very prominent end user and market practitioner, saying if you can't change the operating model, you know, you might get a little bit of business benefit, but if you're a large company, you're never going to take a billion dollars of cost out. So my question is, what are you guys seeing, are you being able to affect the operating model, and can you share any of your favorite examples or even generic sort of proof points? >> Sure, absolutely. We had one customer, CICC, they're a large HR outsourcer in China, and by implementing Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, they were able to accelerate the time it took to get new application services by 60%. This is simply a means of taking IT out of the middle and really being able to accelerate delivery of-- >> Peter: We're taking certain tasks-- >> Exactly. >> Peter: That IT performs. It's not necessarily taking IT out, it's taking those low-value tasks out, right? >> Kevin: Absolutely. You know, self-service portal pieces, exactly, so-- >> Dave: And then maybe re-deploying those resources to higher-value activities. >> Kevin: Absolutely. Right. So those are the types of outcomes. We also see, if you look at Pivotal and some of the capabilities they have, if you look at sort of traditional IT infrastructure we see many customers moving to, you know, daily, weekly releases, as opposed to, if you think of a traditional model, it would be a much longer process, so that's the type of outcome we see as well. >> Dave: Well, one of the things you've been saying for years, I think Benioff stole it from you, is there's going to be way more SAAS companies coming out of non-tech companies than tech companies to your point, everybody's now a software company, and they're releasing code on a constant basis, but they're not technology companies, so they need help, right? >> He might not have stolen it from me, but it's a nice validation point. And I think we said it before he did. >> Just kidding, Marc. Alright, Kevin, hey thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate having you. >> Appreciate it. Thanks. >> Alright, keep right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from Las Vegas Mandalay Bay. Day three, VMworld 2017. We'll be right back. >> Thank you.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMWorld 2017, brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to VMWorld 2017 everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my co-host, Peter Burris. Bob Wambach is here. He's the Vice President of Marketing for Converged Platforms and Solutions at Dell EMC. Bob, good to see you again. >> Good to see you, guys. Always a pleasure. >> It's been a good week, you guys have had a lot going on. We were at the Influencer reception last night. Great shindig, thank you for that. >> Peter: Very much. >> Lot of momentum in this ecosystem: VMWAre, financials are looking good. We just had Pat Gelsinger on, he has a spring in his step. What's going on from your perspective? >> You know I see the spring in Pat's step, and I look at it and, you know I know the stock's up, everything's going great for them, but what I really see is the plan they've put in place, right? And this is a long time coming. If you remember last year you remember Pat was talking about, it's a multi-cloud world, right? And everything VMWare has been doing for the last couple of years has been leading up to some of these announcements that you're seeing now. So I see a guy who's really happy because, made some big bets, had a plan, and the bets are paying off. And most of the benefit is actually going to be in the future. And as you see, Michael's looking pretty happy too this week, right? (laughter) So I think if you heard Pat in the opening keynote, one of the things that struck me is he said we're going from data centers to center of data. And it's really recognizing that there's this explosion of data going on and this data has to be handled in different fashion, and that's a cloud operating model. It's not a cloud. the cloud's an operating model not a place, and it's a multi-cloud world out there. So, you look at most large companies, maybe they have Concur, they have ADP, they have Salesforce.com. There's multiple SaaS providers that they have and then they use on premise equipment, they want to cloud-ify that, right? Is how do I get to, I've got my own journey to cloud. Our job is to really help them both on their journey for on premise equipment, but then working with VMWare, working with Pivotal, is making easy to utilize and navigate the multi-cloud world as well. >> So, we've been talking all week, Peter is really sort of driving our research at Wikibon, helping us think through the customer implications and one of the things we've been talking all week is the reality of that data and not being able to move that data into the cloud, bringing that cloud operating model, as you were just pointing out to the data. But, the implication there, as you've talked about many times Peter, is you've got to have the simplicity and other attributes of the cloud in order to make that brand promise come true, what we call true private cloud. So, what are you guys doing in that regard to achieve that vision? >> First, it's listening. Michael Dell likes to say, and it's very frequently that he says, we have big ears to us. Our job is to really listen to customers, understand their business. You need to understand their business and then once you understand your business, you better know how to help them. And, there's also preferences. They've got capex versus opex preferences. They're going to make decisions of on premises versus off premises based upon data gravity, based upon governance, based upon SLA's, latency. All these things that have to do with the characteristics of the data; data movement. And, then you have a, there's actually a preference for, I want to build it myself. Or, I'm actually very focused on my business and I'd like to be nearly out of the IT business. So, we look at this, everybody's a builder, you're a builder at some level. If you are a builder down at the component level, where you want to pick your servers, you're going to pick vSAN. Then we have our Ready portfolio. vSAN Ready Nodes covers that, right? So, it's the easiest way to buy vSAN in a PowerEdge server. And, if you start going up the stack and you want that packaged with software, we have Ready bundles. And then we start moving into where people are realizing I don't add a lot of value to the business by putting together pieces of hardware and software. So, I want to rely on Dell EMC to do some of that for us. That's where our VxRail, VxRack, VxBlock comes in. Where we own the engineering, manufacturing, management, support, sustaining of that. All the life cycle assurance, single contact support. That's from us. Then there's customers further up that say, well I want a stack, a software stack. We increasingly see that the world's evolving into, sometimes people refer to it as stack wars. And VmWare is doing exceptionally well in the stack wars. They're very prevalent in on premise and now they also have the integrations with the Googles, with AWS, with IBM Cloud. Our announcement this week about the Ready system is taking Dell EMC's expertise in hyper-converged infrastructure, which we co-engineered, co-developed with VMWare, and VMWare taking the lead on how do you package up vSphere, NSX and vSAN together with it and vRealize. They control the roadmap for that, they know how to do the lifecycle automation updates, so what we do is we provide the hyper-converged infrastructure and it's actually a simple overall environment for customers when they combine these. When Michael talks about peanut butter and chocolate a couple of times, and that's really what I think about the Ready systems. There's VMWare, we have for Pivotal, we'll also have Pivotal Ready system that can give you either a Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the easiest way to get a Pivotal Cloud Foundry environment on our hyper-converged infrastructure, or the Pivotal Container Services, PKS on hyper-converged infrastructure. >> So Bob, you mentioned early on of having different overview of the portfolio, you mentioned early on that VMWare had a plan, and they've been executing about that plan. But, you also got a plan within the hyper-converged team, within the whole enterprise cloud team. So, software and hardware are once again co-mingled in ways that they haven't been for a long time. The kind of normal separation, just get the hardware and then you get the software. But, now we're seeing that because of the complexities of trying to bring all this together, talk a little bit about how you're influencing the VMWare plan and the VMWare plan is influencing the hardware side of things. >> You know it's a great question. I think there's been a great learning experience. As you know for several years, we've had Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. Enterprise Hybrid Cloud started with a request from customers to make it easier to create a full cloud. People were realizing, I've been trying to build my cloud. It's super hard. I actually don't want to spend my best people and my time and money on this. So, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud initially started working with some very large enterprises. And, it was a way to take any type of converged or hyper-converged infrastructure and bring the whole VMWare portfolio to market with full turn key system. Full stop, it's we own it, we will make this stuff work. So, the goodness there is that the customers would get something that was incredibly rich, and remember this, a lot of this started out on converged infrastructure, so you basing it on a SAN fabric, VMAX, All-Flash, XtremeIO data domain. So you have all the flexibility and option of the data services, rich data services and data protection. Now it turns out Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is really really hard, right? We don't have magic software to do this. There's hundreds of people that are making all this stuff work so that when it goes into these large enterprises it adapts to their environment and it's very reliable, robust, scalable, flexible. The other side of the coin is, it takes so long to test and QA the new VMWare, perfectly fine, very solid VMWare features, that they don't show up to market for a long time. The largest enterprises understand this, but for many customers, you end up having this misalignment, where VMWare's saying, "I want you to take these features now", and we're saying, "That's six months away in Enterprise Hybrid Cloud." So, what you've seen develop in the Ready systems are perfect example of this is if we constrain down for most people, most people are not the largest banks in the world, there's not the largest pharmas or governments. Hyper-converged infrastructure is ready for the vast majority of work loads today and they need a pretty well defined set of features and functionality. So, VMWare more takes the lead, on this is how we're going to package these up. This is our software suite. We know how to do life cycle. Together, you work on the hyper-converged infrastructure, which is also co-developed with them. And, it ends up being a very good path to get these into the hands of many more customers. We're talking 10x customers, if you think about hundreds of people that are likely EHC, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud candidates, versus many thousands that are VMWare Ready system candidates. So, I think it's a great example of how we work together to figure out what is the sweet spot for volume and velocity of being able to provide value very quickly to the largest number of customers. >> So, we Chad on theCube yesterday and we asked, Dave and I asked him a series of questions, and one of them was, so tell us about how the cloud experience is going to manifest itself through Dell EMC products. One of the things he said was, in anticipation of these cloud wars, or in these platform wars, I think was his term, that increasingly it is going to be about how well you bind between different clouds. Interesting, I was walking through the show earlier and I saw one of our big user clients and I stopped and said hi to him. And, the two things that he mentioned when I asked him what he's looking for is, one, he used the same word, bind, how well does this bind to that, tell me about how your platform is going to bind to other platforms. And, automation was the second one. He said, I want to see, increasingly we're going to bring new technology in based on its demonstrable automated characteristics. What do you think about that, as you think about building platforms and how the portfolio is going to evolve against those two dimensions. The ability to bind things better and the ability to automate things more. >> Right, so, I think it's spot on, first of all. And, if we look at two different use cases. The one use case of most customers today, VMWare customers, they're using the VMWare suite, environment on premises. VMWare actually now binds those to AWS, to IBM Cloud, to Google Cloud. And, for me the killer app is NSX, right? If you think about, you want to traverse, navigate these different clouds. You want to do it securely, protected, segmentation and all of the richness of security and control over that. NSX is really the way to do that. When we talk about automation, VMWare is the best company to take the lead in how to automate that binding it together. So, whereas in the past, with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, we, and that continues to go on, we did all the automation, there's a much more efficient path for most customers with VMWare doing that. And, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud still remains the realm of, I'm going to say, hundreds of customers where these are huge deals. These are $50 Million and up deals. Where you're providing incredible value all in, for all their different applications, right? And, most, you know the vast majority of customers today clearly not on hyper-converged infrastructure, but they could be and if the value prop is so compelling, it's so compelling that it's definitely, that's where things are going. So, we look at where things are going and try to optimize for that. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is also something that, in my view, binds the developer environment together. You develop it once and then you can publish this wherever you want. So there is a strategy within Dell Technologies companies to work together to do this and the more we work together, another great thing happens, is that your field teams end up being aligned and telling the same story. So, whereas with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud we would have inherit conflict. Because we'd be speaking about the virtues of Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, but VMWare is telling them you need these new features, right? And this is where, when that little friction goes away and you have full alignment, so we're all on the same page, we're all the saying the same things, it's far more credible. >> Well, it also accelerates the customer. >> Bob: It sure does. >> And, I think that's probably one of the most important things. At the end of the day, it's to get the customers going. >> Yeah, we got to wrap, but somebody said the other day that VMWare is moving at the speed of the CIO. Robin Matlock today said today, yeah, but the CIO has to move faster, but it's hard. So, you're right, you're trying to accelerate that. And, to I guess my last point is when you were talking about, we've been talking about, forming the cloud model to your business, when you were describing sort of what you do for Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, that's not a trivial exercise. It requires a lot of expertise and a lot of process, and a lot of good thinking. >> Right, and it is very, it's by definition, customizable. You end up doing something different for every customer. Whereas, Ready, the Ready solutions portfolio I think are going to be huge. Just huge in the coming year. And the whole idea is to make it easy. It's ready for wherever you are on this journey. If you are ready for more of a, I want to jump into cloud and I see this path, I'm ready to move, then it's Ready Systems, right? If you are more of a, I want to put the software elements together myself and build that, then we have Ready bundles. And, high performance computing has been huge for us. Data analytics, increasingly I think those are connected together. So, there's synergy between the two of them. Then, the Ready nodes, for people who are, I really want to build this stuff myself, this is the path that I'm going down. And it takes all of the, we have an opinion, right? Our opinion is we want you moving quickly because we see the customers benefiting from it. Ultimately, all our customers are trying to be very competitive and successful at whatever their mission is, and we know the further up the stack you go, we can help you be more competitive. But, it takes the conflict out of the relationship when they know that I can help you wherever you are, we have something that is right for you. >> Alright, we got to wrap. Thanks Bob for coming on. Taking you on a journey of Vmworld 2017. Bob Wambach, thanks for coming back in theCube. >> Thanks. >> You're welcome. Keep right there buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCube. We're live from VMworld 2017. Be right back. (exciting music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering VMWorld 2017 brought to you by VMWare. And its ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Okay welcome back everyone we are live here in Las Vegas for VMWorld 2017. We are on the floor. I'm John Furrier with the Cube with Dave Vellante our next guest is Juan Vega director ready solutions product manager for Dell EMC. Welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you. For my first time, really looking forward to it. >> Okay first what's ready solutions mean? >> So ready solutions are literally a bunch of services that we apply to infrastructure to help build confidence, convenience, and a better customer experience. For folks who are consuming a do-it-yourself, who want to take a do-it-yourself approach to converge systems or SDDS. >> John: So I got the button that says Node-a-Rama. What does that that button? >> Node-a-Rama well, we're launching a bunch of nodes this year right. We have a lot of nodes that we're putting out there for a variety of workloads including vSAN right and with vSAN we're introducing 14 G technology to this you know this show. We just launched it recently and we're bringing lots of new performance technologies in that 14 G space. It'll help a bunch with software defined storage. >> Node-a-Rama, John likes developers, he thought it was node JS or something, he was getting excited. So I wonder if you could talk to something that we've been addressing all week here on the Cube. You see in VM Ware's results a lot of momentum and it's not just, doesn't look like it's a one quarter, I mean three quarters of growth appears to be some momemtum. The AWS deal sort of clarified for customers the Cloud strategy and I think the other piece that we've been talking about is the reality that customers have that you're not able to reform their business and stick it in the Cloud. They're really trying to take the Cloud model and bring it to their data and in order to do that they need simplification. So first of all do you buy that and what are you guys doing to facilitate that? >> I absolutely buy it. I mean if I look at Dell EMC's capabilities across the spectrum right, there's a broad variety of services that we can offer a customer to help them adopt that technology right. We call it sort of absorbing their tech debt as it were. And we can do that from very basic do-it-yourself hardware infrastructure right all the way up through you talked to Colin earlier today and we talked about VxRail and VxRack. We're actually providing sort of life cycle management for those environments. With ready nodes and ready bundles, between those two. There's a little bit more service, a little bit more confidence, a little bit more convenience, a little faster time to value right, on that infrastructure, without really moving the customer to a, an environment where we manage it for them. >> Okay and so why do you need to do that you know? I though VMWare was so simple, push a button and go. Talk about sort of how you're closing that gap. >> It can be simple and once you're in the virtualization layer it absolutely is simple but there's a relationship between the virtualization layer and the hardware that has to be maintained. So why is there an HCL right? Why is, why do we that? Because there's a known relationship between that software and that hardware that enables that virtualization. We're making that easier and easier for customers all the time. >> And virtualization does not equate to Cloud. >> Juan: Of course. >> So how do you look at Cloud. How do you sort of, I don't want to get into what do you define as Cloud but, at what point do customers say yes, this is a viable alternative for me to attack my IT labor problem, to for me to tick the box with my management that I'm you know cutting cost. You know et cetera, what are those attributes that you are driving toward that you see customers demanding today? >> Well I see that space evolving right. And the part that we're focusing on ready nodes, is really focused on that software defined storage component. So as that piece of the puzzle evolves, all right we're trying to remove complexity in that environment right. Go back to that ability to confidently present you with a hardware solution that is absolutely adapted for that software environment. Make it faster time to value so that it's showing up pre-configured with services that help you enable that environment more quickly right and then should something need to be done, you know downstream, say a drive fails or whatever right, we can provide a better support experience by contextualizing that hardware in that environment. So it's a space for customers who are still very much doing it themselves, very much building their own environment right in the software defined storage space. But we're providing a set of services that increase that confidence for them right and make it more convenient, give them a better experience. >> It's interesting you know, this is our eighth VM World. Dave and I have been here since 2010. It's been great run, thank everyone for watching the Cube, we love coming every year. But it's been interesting watching the journey. Software defined data center, the hype was what five years ago? Maybe four years ago. But now it's reality. NSX is baked in there, crown jewel. Crowd native coming in over the top. vSAN has been like this rising star. Server SAN from Wikibon has crushed it on the research side. But I got to ask you, now we're hearing customers deploy new use cases under digital transformation that merged software stacks with hardware stacks. What is the biggest challenge that customers have 'cause they want more vSAN. How are you guys helping customers get more vSAN and what are some of the key challenges that you guys solve. >> Well I think there's a couple things that we're doing. First of all we're enabling a very broad set of hardware including cutting edge technologies that are helping them improve the performance, improve the reliability of their implementations in this space. So today we're looking at six different hardware platforms with about 15 different configurations on the HCL and we're expanding that this month significantly. All of those can be delivered. >> John: On the hardware side. >> On the hardware side. >> Okay got it. >> All those can be delivered in a way that they fit seamlessly into a data center environment that's deploying software defined storage. So, I think helping them simplify that is really how we're trying to make this more of a reality and Dell has always brought strong operationalization to any customer we worked with. >> So I got to ask you on the software side, again software's eating the world, Wikibon's true private Cloud report really validating a lot of the success that vSAN's having. I mean all the actions on premise. Transforming the Cloud operating model which is to be more agile. What is the key software piece of it because now you've got DevOps, the Cloud native side saying hey infrastructure is code. I want you to run invisible. The Ops guys saying wait a minute, we got hardware stacks, you got software stacks, they got to come together. >> Absolutely, so our open manage enterprise solution is our software connection for helping manage that hardware in the vSan vCenter environment. And it allows them to actually move all of the controls for updating and managing that system into one pane of glass which is their vSAN vCenter pane of glass. And so we're really trying to help drive that automation, enable that capability for the do-it-yourself customer. Now if the customer wants to have significantly less tech debt then we're happy to talk to them about VxRail and VxRack where we start adding more management software capabilities to help drive an even better experience. >> One more thing you mentioned tech debts. I want to get that on the table. Real issue is technology debt meaning trying to move faster, take some short cuts or you know move the needle too fast. What are some of the technical debts that customers are getting into and where's, what's good technical debt and what's a bad technical debt? >> Oh that's a tough question. I think that in terms of good, of bad technical debt, let's start there right. Anything is going to be sort of routine, spread across lots of different customers within a base that could be off, offloaded to a service provider who can provide that sort of scale is bad technical debt. So things like driver updates, managing your HCL, paying attention to how to go about replacing a hard drive in a server that's gone down in a node. Right those are sort of bad technical debt. You shouldn't be wasting your resources that are focused on your business outcomes on that sort of technical debt. And even at our most basic level, the ready node, we're starting to provide that level of service to the customer. And I think we advance that even more as we get into our rails and racks. In terms of good technical debt, yet to be determined but I would suspect that a lot of that has to do with developing the code. >> John: Debt you can pay back. >> Right, that you can pay back. >> As I tell Dave, we don't want to take on too much debt and then can't pay it back. We'll be bankrupt. >> And that's the sort of code that's directly tied to your environment right. So for example all of the AI infrastructure that they were building in the keynote today for the pizza company right. That's a good example of I'm developing code that's intellectual property for my business, that's good technical debt. I'm going to pay it off. Gives me a competitive advantage. >> That you could use. >> Exactly right. >> Dave: To pay off the... >> Precisely. >> The investments that you've made. So you, you're a disrupter of sets. I mean you've got John talked about the server SAN. We, it's something we published years ago. And basically you're disrupting an install base that you guys own. Right? >> Sounds like a story I heard a long time ago when virtualization first came on the scene. Oh we're going to be running out of servers. That didn't happen, we're selling more servers than we ever have. >> Oh yeah not that you'll stop selling but you, you've got this massive install base and you're essentially, where appropriate migrating that install base to a new way. >> Of course. >> I wonder if you could talk about that dynamic and what those customer conversations are like. >> Well I think it's important to us to be a trusted advisor to our customers. It's always been Dell's sort of way of doing business right. We roll up our sleeves and we get to work with you. So as this transition is applying, is happening to the industry, I think it's up to us to provide those kind of you know feet on the street services that make it easier for customers to absorb and deal with that transition right. And again I know I sound like the broken record here but it's about helping them have confidence that as they move into this transition, they're not having to deal with all the vagaries of mismatched hardware and software incompatibilities. It's about being able to get faster time to value because we did some of the basic steps like pre-configuring that system so it's just ready to go right. >> And what about workloads? How do you see those evolving? 'Cause that's one piece is simplification and you know tacking the IT labor problem with non-differentiated patching and other stuff. The bad technical debt you guys were talking about. What about workloads, what are you seeing emerge in terms of the types of workloads that have an affinity to these types of systems. >> Well I think you know we heard Chad talk earlier about how the network was becoming sort of the bottleneck right. And I think that we're seeing more and more storage, workloads with an affinity for storage moving into the Cloud space, right into the converted space as that technology begins to evolve. And we're seeing things like the new NVME drives in our 14 G servers. All right we have six X the capacity that we had before which means applications, workloads that have a storage affinity are able to actually start moving into this more, I know you'd only use the work virtualized, but this more software defined space. >> Right. >> All right bottom line if a customer's ready node, you guys are doing some good stuff, vSAN's hot, Gelsinger said the world's going to get much faster, today's the slowest day of your life going forward, or something along those lines. There's the implying that it's going to get pretty crazy. Peter Burris head of research for Wikibon.com said the whole computer industry's been turned upside down, it's going to be landing on the table and it's going to re-sort itself out. When you deal with customers, how, what's that conversation like because they're scrambling to lock down their true private Cloud on on premise. They see hybrid Cloud as that pathway to multi Cloud. That's their end stage but right now they got to take care of business at home. That's like cleaning up their own house in IT, what are some of those conversations when that kind of disruption, chaos, complexity. >> Sure, I think everyone's looking for a little bit more of that confidence right and the whole relationship with their supply chain. We're doing it, our customers are doing it and every time we have that conversation with them it basically boils down to what can you do for me that is going to make it easier for me to deal with this transition. How can I trust that these-- >> So ease of use. Is a big thing. >> Juan: I'm sorry? >> Ease of use. Pretty big deal? >> Not just ease of use, but trust that I'll be supported downstream right. So a ready node builds that for example into its value proposition. We want to make sure that you understand that downstream we know what you're using it for and we're able to help you in that context and that's a real key example of how I think we help build that trust with our customers. >> Michael Dell, final question for you talk about just really, final question for you is that Michael Dell was mentioning the technology synergy between Dell technologies cross the portfolio including VMWare. So the question for you is what are some of the synergies that you guys are getting with VMWare? How does that put it to motion? >> Sure, there are several actually. We've done a lot of our development work in the VxRail space around management in conjunction with VMWare. I think that the evolution of the software defined space is being driven by them and we're happy to participate in it in every way we can. So I think there's a lot of, a lot of development and tech support opportunities that we're finding in that relationship. >> So positive outcomes you guys are having a good time. Certainly VMWare's doing great. Good to see Pat Gelsinger on the upslope in terms of stock prices up over a hundred and four. As of yesterday, I haven't even checked what it was today but certainly clarity in the community, clarity in the ecosystem, clarity in the product. Cloud and IoT Edge. I mean the wave slide is pretty much baked at this point. >> Yup. >> And execution. >> And I'm excited to see Dell EMC having a presence across that whole breadth. >> Yeah Dave was commenting it seems like that new Dell technologies is much more sanity now in the community, it's all sorted out. Looking good, congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you very much. >> Juan Vega director, ready solutions with Dell EMC's product management. He's the product czar. Thanks for spending the time. It's the Cube coverage live here at VMWorld 2017, day two of three days of wall to wall coverage. Be right back with more after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware, and it's Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas. We're at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Peter Burris. Mike Arterbury is here, he's the Vice President of Technology Alliances at DELLEMC, Mike, welcome to theCUBE. >> Dave, thanks. Peter, great to see you guys again. >> The Ecosystem is absolutely exploding. VMware is on fire, the data center is on fire, you know, the technology business is just, as Pat and Michael were saying this morning, this is going to be the most boring time ever, relative to the future. >> Right. >> What's happening in the Ecosystem, bring us up to date. >> Well I think as Michael and Pat have talked about this week, pretty proficiently, is the fact that technology transitions are all out in front of us right? It's a new world, the opportunity for both On-prem and Off-prem infrastructure is all out in front of the companies, the family of companies, and we're putting together some of the best offers, the best combinations of technology. The DELLEMC infrastructure, VMware, Infrastructure Management, and a host of ISVs that, whose workloads we combined with all of our infrastructure and platform technology, to drive customer outcomes. >> It, it-- >> Well actually, let me jump in on this real quick if I may. So one of the things about Ecosystems, is that there's a danger in the metaphor of the Ecosystem, because an Ecosystem evolves in response to a number of things. But Ecosystems in the Tech industry require care and feeding. They have to be set up, they have to, contracts have to be written, programs have to be put in place. This is really, really hard work, and it's undervalued by customers too much. So tell us, talk to us a little bit about the work that goes into forming an Ecosystem, sustaining an Ecosystem, and then creating new degrees of freedom, in some of these partnerships, as these new problems emerge, and these new types of complexities, and these interesting problems, get to be solved. >> Well, so I'll start at the start, which is, we've got the vestige of two great partnering companies, Dell classically, and EMC classically. EMC classically partnered much more deeply at a technology level, and Dell partnered at a go-to-market level right? They could monetize in a high-velocity way, these partnerships. When you put the two companies together, you get both the monetization and the technology, the deep technical alignment between the partner, and Dell, but you can start at the very simplest instantiation of a solution. A vSAN Ready Node, or a VxRail, a hyper-converged appliance. Basically we take VMware, goodness, in their storage, software-defined storage offer, and we combine that with a very tightly configured set of offers from our PowerEdge Server lineup, and our VxRail lineup, and we test the configurations, and we test them and tighten them, and test them and tighten them, so that we can give customers a very prescriptive understanding of what their outcome's going to be, when they deploy a hyper-converged offer, running on DELLEMC infrastructure. >> So for what that means, if I can, sorry Dave, what that means is that in your... So the partnership then becomes measured, not just in terms of whether the logos are together, but whether or not it's been engineered together. Whether it's been tested together-- >> Tested together, validated, you bet. >> Whether it's court regimes are put in place, and that's different from how we used to think about partnerships. >> Well, and that's a critical point, and Andy Jassy on stage this week, basically said, "Hey, this is not a Barney deal," Barney being I love you, you love me, let's do a press release. It's got substantive engineering going on, and so that's really what differentiates a core partnership that has teeth, versus one that's just what we call a Barney deal. But I wanted to ask you to go back to the sort of different cultural nuances that you mentioned, Dell, high-volume, high-velocity, EMC, very high-touch, bring those two worlds together. Are there inherent conflicts there, or were you able to, are you in the process of sort of re-engineering how you form those partnerships? >> You know, interestingly enough, in the 2000s, I managed the partnership between Dell and EMC from the Dell side, and we created a lot of good customer outcomes, by combining their storage platforms, our go-to-market prowess but, but it was all learnings that we could transform the business with, when we actually did a hard-core marriage between the two companies. So I would tell you then, it was two companies trying to play nice together. Now, it's one company, and we're playing really effectively together so-- >> Well, I tell ya something there, I talked to Chad about this at a show recently, and asked Michael Dell about it as well. If you look back, that was an epic partnership that you entered, and the outcomes were tremendous, and I argued that in fact, if Michael had had a mulligan, that he would've just bought EMC sooner, and drive the, drove that integration sooner, he essentially said, "Yeah I wish I could've "Bought EMC sooner." But I think that to your point, you had, you know a partnership, and now that you're one company, you can really drive some outcomes that you couldn't through you know, smaller tuck-in acquisitions are you seeing that? >> Absolutely, so what we have today, because of the combination, because of the marriage, is one portfolio. Compute, storage, networking, combined with the goodness from our family of offers, whether it's VMware or Pivotal, you heard a great announcement about Pivotal today, and what they're doing with Kubernetes. So we're going to be able to combine all of those things, the breadth of our portfolio, in a way that we never could before when it was a partnership based on siloed offerings. Now we can really build solutions, and we've got a whole family of products, which we call Ready Solutions, that combine cross business unit portfolios, and our family of products as well. >> So can you talk about the scope of some of the technology partnerships, maybe get specific on, on some of the ones that you're exited about, I mean, I know you're excited about them all but-- >> Sure, sure-- >> In the time we have maybe you could address it-- >> So principally, I would start with VMware. While VMware is a family member of ours, we still manage the relationship much like we would a partnership, where you have to play team ball, and drive your technologies together, and test them, and ruggedize them. But once you get past the infrastructural software of virtualization, customers don't stop at virtualization, they run workloads on that virtual infrastructure, so you look at SAP, and what we're doing with Hanna, and IoT, and Leonardo. You look at what we're doing frankly, with Microsoft, what we're doing with some of the public Cloud providers, in connecting both our infrastructure on premises, with the capabilities of the Public Cloud, in a way that leverages the most appropriate Cloud to run a particular piece of software, and a particular workload in. Those workloads are going to gravitate towards the best usage model for a customer, but we want to have a full compliment of offering so that we can offer the right Cloud for the right customer at the right time, and the right price. >> So I got two quick questions for you, and one draws off of what you just said, and that is the, I really like that notion of technology partnership, and go-to-market partnership, and the expertise at EMC, and the expertise at Dell. Customers want invention, which is the engineering element, the technology partnership. But they also want the innovation side, which is, it's been applied to my business, and I'm adopting it, and it's creating business value for me, and I'm finding, are you finding, that as Dell broadens it's, or DELLEMC broadens this notion that even the technology partnerships are becoming informed by the innovation, or the go-to-market partnerships, so that it's making the technology side that much more successful? >> Absolutely, so we want, every day in the hardware business you have to fight commoditization, you fight that by simply adding value right? It could be business model value, it could be technology value. We add innovation everywhere we can. So those combinations both of our technology, and our partners technology, but in a way that doesn't just combine it, it doesn't make it any easier to buy, it makes it easier to operate. It makes it easier to understand, it makes it easier for a seller to sell it, and a customer to buy it and consume it. So you'll hear Chad talk about an easy button a lot. That is our mission in solutions, is to combine those things in a way that makes it easy for everyone. >> So here's the second question I have. And it's going to be a challenge out to you, because increasingly as companies become more digital businesses, and recognize the role that these technologies play in driving their business models and their go forward, they are struggling with this question of partnership. They are still driving with procurement, driving with taking cost out, et cetera, when in fact, they have to find ways to drive with partnership and strategy, and whatnot. What can DELLEMC do to train this industry about how to do partnership better? >> Well, I think you demonstrate the value that you create for a customer, for a partner, for a seller in these combinations. If you can show that you create real value through your innovation, through your great partnering, then that's value that any one of those constituents can align to. You create value, you let them harvest that value, and they will come back to you again, and again, and again. >> So we have to go Mike, but last question is, how do you see, or do you see your Ecosystem of technology partners sort of reforming, not only to the new DELLEMC, but also to this new Cloud reality, that I'm not going to put everything in the Cloud, I'm going to bring the Cloud model to my data? >> Right, I think VMware's going to play a pivotal role in that right, because they are the-- >> Unintended right? >> They are unintended. They are the kings of workload management today, and what customers really want, from the Public Cloud, or the Private Cloud, is a way to move those virtual machines around in a very seamless way. So at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter where you operate that workload, you're going to operate it in the location that it best serves your mission as a customer. And so I think they're going to play a very instrumental role in how we do that going forward. >> Mike Arterbury, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. But really Peter, to your point, this is hard work, and customers generally undervalue it, but they expect it, and it adds a lot of value, so thanks very much for sharing your perspectives. >> Thank you guys. >> Your welcome, alright keep it right there everybody, we're going wall to wall, this is day two, two sets here at SiliconANGLE, theCUBE, and WikiBond. We'll be back, right after this short break. (alternative music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Cube. Our continuing coverage of Vmworld 2017 continues. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're excited to be joined next by Jason Brown a Cube alumni consultant and product marketing for Dell EMC ScaleIO. Welcome back to the Cube Jason. >> Thank you for having me. >> Good to have you here, so day two of the event, lot's of announcements, lots of buzz. Talk to us about ScaleIO. What's the current state of the business. >> Well, it's actually really exciting right now. We're doing really well. We're seeing great customer adoption. We're seeing massive petabytes of ScaleIO deployed in data centers, and were here at the show really to talk to you about customers for ScaleIO for Vmware. 'Cause everyone here's above E10, obviously, they're doing awesome. We love it. They're doing great. But there's some differences and similarities between the two products that people get confused about, so we're here at the show really trying to help, you know, ease confusion, talk about how it's like peanut butter and jelly, right? Some people like peanut butter, some people like jelly but most people like 'em both, so we're just trying to help people out and understand when to choose which and sometimes it's both. >> Alright, Jason, I've got a history watching ScaleIO since before the acquisition, you know, service providers that usually kind of fit their model a little bit more than VSAN, so when I think scale, I tend to think ScaleIO. I interviewed ADP yesterday. Big customer, rolling out like 30,000 nodes of compute with VSAN. So, scales >> Yeah >> not only one piece of it. Maybe, help us kind of understand some of the, you know, of course there's going to be places that overlap, but what is the, you know, kind of ideal ScaleIO customer, what are they looking for, and how's that differ from the VSAN? >> Sure, so in particular if you're looking at ScaleIO for VMware, there's a few things you need to understand. First and foremost, with ScaleIO we're talking about consolidating resources across the data center. So we're talking data center grade software to find storage which can run in a hyperconverged model or not. And that's really key differentiating, 'cause if you look at these enterprises, especially, these large enterprises that built an IT organization of past 20 years, right? And so when you introduce HCI to them, you're transforming the architecture of the data center but also the IT operating environment. And that's scary for a lot of people who have spent millions of dollars having a server team, a network team, and the storage team. So one of the key things for ScaleIO in a VMware environment is, if you want to transform the architecture to software defined, but preserve that IT operating model, this two layer deployment, we call it, you can do that with ScaleIO. But on the flip side you can also do a more modern architecture with hyperconverged as well. So you can get the best of both worlds. So whether today you're ready to go all the way with the service providers, they'll go hyperconverged, you know out of the gate, but enterprises usually start more traditional and then move to that hyperconverged and ScaleIO provides that pathway to get there. >> Yeah, bring us inside those customers a little. 'Cause I've talked to a couple of very large customers of ScaleIO actually, did a case study at Citi and Citi told me, internally, we're just not ready to go fully hyperconverged. >> Jason: Exactly. >> So they kept that. They're massive scale. Talked to a large global hospitality company that, once again, looked more at kind of the storage usage of what they're doing so, I mean hyperconverged VSAN seems to be having, you know they've got 10,000 customers, they're all in that-- model. >> Exactly. >> So, what is it that gets a customer ready for that? What kind of pushes or pulls them towards being ready for, you know, embracing? >> Well, I think it's understanding your business goals and your desired outcomes. So with something like ScaleIO you're looking at simplicity in the data centers. So you're looking for scale, you know, not tens of nodes where traditional, I hear this said that traditional VSAN deployment is eight to 16 nodes, 'cause they're you know, VMware's everywhere, right? There's a lot of ROBO, SMB, VDI, use scales right there, and that's not really where ScaleIO plays. ScaleIO is about data center, so Tier 1 application, databases, data analytics. It's looking at things like containers and microservices, Splunk, NoSQL. Applications like that. So when you look at those types of applications and workloads, you have to understand that your scale will probably go from tens to hundreds of nodes. Your performance may go from a million IOPS to tens of millions of IOPS. You may need six nines availability 'cause again, you're running in the data center. Customers are replacing their SAN arrays with ScaleIO. So you need all that enterprise class, data center grade functionality with the scale performance and flexibility, the key thing is flexibility as well, if you want to run multiple workloads on a cluster, you need to be able to support VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, Linux, Windows, so and ScaleIO enables all of those things. And therefore, that's why when you look at your business goals, your business ops and what your data center looks like, you need to understand that functionality. Then you decide okay, is it going to be VSAN or ScaleIO or is it going to be both, 'cause I have both of those use cases there. >> So you talked about VSAN and ScaleIO, peanut butter and jelly. Michael Dell on main stage with Pat Gelsinger said VMware and Dell EMC are like peanut butter and chocolate. Both, all good flavors, in my opinion. I'd love to hear an example though, of where, like to your point, before I asked the question. We just had the CTO of Dell EMC storage, speaking with Stu and I a few minutes ago and one year post-combination, and he said customers are starting to understand now the value of Dell EMC-- >> Yes. >> Together. So with that, you know, a year later and customers now understanding the value proposition of this company that now also owns VMware, how much easier is the conversation, you know, away from VSAN verses ScaleIO? I'd love to understand where are you seeing where they both, those peanut butter and jelly sandwiches play together. What are some of the maybe industries or key use cases where a customer would need ScaleIO and VSAN? >> Sure. So if you think about financial services, Citi as Stu mentioned, one of the larger ones there, definitely plays there, in healthcare there's a few large big partner network companies that have come together to be successful there. Telco, Verizon, Comcast, right? Not only just private Cloud but public Clous as well, so when you look at your data center, you got to look at the whole thing. So, for your VDI, your ROBO, your SMB and maybe for a few of your enterprise applications that only need you know, 50,000 in an IOPS performance for your VMs then VSAN is going to be great there, but then you look to the other side of your data center and you've got something like SAP, you know HANA, I think any other, in fact, ORACLE, etc or you're looking to build a private cloud of hundreds of nodes, well that's where ScaleIO is going to sit. Over in that corner, you know? So, it really is understanding what your workloads are and where they play. You know, it's important to know too that for ScaleIO our primary use cases are array consolidation, so you've got silos of arrays in your data center and you want to stop managing silos of arrays, and you want to bring everything together into a single resource, a single cluster, boom, ScaleIO. You want to build the cloud environment whether you're a service provider building a public cloud like Swisscom for example, who built a public cloud based off of ScaleIO, or a private cloud like CitiGroup for example. It's pretty much a private cloud; mix of array consolidation as well. And then something like a gaming company that we've worked with where they are doing this next generation DevLogs containers, microservices, well ScaleIO's great for that too, 'cause it has the flexibility to start small and grow and support the various things that they need to be able to deploy their applications 32% faster. So you know, it really encompasses the whole data center. >> Yeah, a bunch of interesting points that I want to unpack a little bit there. Specifically, you're talking about all the new applications and the new technologies that people are doing. One of the challenges most people have, you know, the stack we've been using, I think, for my entire IT career is, you know, we spend what, somewhere between 70 and 90% of our time keeping the lights on. >> Jason: Yes. >> And the wave of kind of software-defined, you know, all of these type things, supposed to be, we need to simplify our environment, you know and, therefore I can take those resources and reallocate them, retrain them, put them on cool new things. What are you seeing from the customers, you know, just organizationally from what happens to the storage people as well as how do they take advantage of some of these tougher things like application modernization? >> Good question. Good question. So, you know it depends on the company right? There are, like you said, there are some customers that want to keep them separated and that's perfectly fine you know, there are tools that you can use with ScaleIO so that you can manage the storage independently of the compute. But then you've got things like our tight integration with vSphere, where the VMadmin can manage the storage as well. So, it depends on the preferences as well as the maturity of the organization and the skillset of the folks that are managing it as well. If you can have a storage admin become more agile and be able to manage the compute and the VMs as well then perfect. They become more generalists, right? We've talked about how these specialties becomes more generalists in these types of HCI and NextGen environments. So if they have that skillset then perfect and both ScaleIO and VSAN can enable that. And then if you're looking at app modernization, you know what do you need from an infrastructure storage perspective to achieve that, and how can you enable your application developers access that storage even faster? And that's really was ScaleIO does with the whole automation points behind everything. With, be able to add resources on the fly, remove resources on the fly, reallocate on the fly. So being able to be flexible for what they need when they all of a sudden are ramping up a new application is really critical. >> Yeah. I guess, I'm wondering if you have any specific examples. One of the critiques if you talk about, you know, storage, admins, fast is not something that usually, you think of. Flash is fast and everything like that but, how do we keep up with the pace change, how do I move things? How does ScaleIO help change that equation? Even just specifically for storage? >> Well I think that in order to be able to keep up with that change, right, it's about, as you said, simplifying their job and making it easier. So, if you've got the tools and the, just the functionality in the product itself, to be able to help them learn faster, be able to press a button as opposed to being able to allocate an array group and (murmurs) things that have an architecture, that makes that be able to achieve that as well, that's really how you do it. You know I haven't talked to any storage admins lately, unfortunately. So I can't give you a specific example, but that's really what we see at kind of the one on one level. >> And from a buyer's train of perspective, so much has changed and shifted towards this C-Suite. When we look at things like data protection, we, you know, some announcements about that yesterday, storage, and you said you haven't spoken with storage admins in a while. There's a lot of data that show that data protection storage isn't an IT problem, it's a business problem. So how has the conversation now with Dell EMC with respect to whether it's ScaleIO or whatnot, shifted upstream if you will, talking to more senior executives, rather than the storage guys and gals that are managing specific pieces? Tell us about that-- >> Sure. >> Conversation and maybe cultural shift. >> Well when you talk to any C level executive, what's the top of mind, right? Security, saving, cost savings, budget, right? So when we're talking to executives, where they talk about data center transformation, how software defines storage and enables that both at the architectural level and at the IT level, but also about how we can make their business easier to run and how it can save them money. so if you're able to get all this great flexibility and scalability and all this you know, performance, but then be able to preserve the features that you need, like compression and snapshots and being able to connect to your data protections suites as well? So if you can tell them all that and say hey and you know what, we have customers saving 50% five year TCO by doing that, without needing to do data migration or tech refreshers anymore. They're like alright, sign me up. Because you have to understand too, when you talk to them, they don't need to go buy an array the next day, and spend a couple million dollars they maybe be will be able to utilize in the future or not. They can start very small. Three nodes, four nodes, and have this pay as you go licensing so they love that as well because it grows on their terms. Not on our terms, on their terms. And that's really important for you know people that in those C level suites that are trying to maximize the efficiency of the business. >> Alright, Jason, one thing's when customers buy into a solution like this, it's more of a platform discussion these days and of course one of the things they're looking for is where are you taking me down the road? So it's great, here's what I can do today, one of the things I love this whole wave of it, is, you know, upgrades and migrations were like, you know, the four letter words for anybody in storage. >> Dirty words. >> And I said, you know, when we have a pool of resources and I can kind of add and remove nodes it was like, oh my God, that was, we conservatively estimated like five years ago that 30% of the overall TCO was based on that alone and. Wow. Scrap that. Last time you're ever going to need to, you know, migrate once you get on this platform. But, I want you to talk to us a little bit about, you know a little bit, kind of the vision and roadmap. What are >> Sure. >> You talking to customers about. >> Absolutely. So, you know with a product like this, it's constantly evolving and innovating so when we talk to customers about what's in the future, well you have to first be thinking about data services. Data services are always very important and with ScaleIO, you know, admittedly, we're a little short on some data services because we more focus on scalability and performance and making sure that we have a six nines architecture. So, the first and biggest thing that's coming very soon, if you were at Dell EMC with ScaleIO is compression. So being able to, you know for your block storage workloads, being able to maximize the efficiency of your storage even more with some in line compression? Very important. So we're doing that. We're also enhancing our snapshot's functionality so that, you know when you talk snapshots and SDS, you know, you compare it to an enterprise array, probably not up to snuff. Well what we're doing now with our snapshot keeping in relation to ScaleIO is we're actually going to have them be better or even much better than something you'd find in like an all flash array. You know, where you can have you know, thousands of snapshots in a v-tree and things like that. But it also goes to hardware as well. 'Cause there's always hardware, right? And with the innovation within Dell EMC with Dell PowerEdge servers with our friends in CPSD, we're able to innovate a lot faster with ScaleIO and SDS. So, 14G was announced. Well ScaleIO's going to be one of the first products within Dell EMC through our ScaleIO Ready Node to support mV dims and MVME. So as you know we support MVME today, one of the few software device storage platforms out there today that supports it, in a roll your own server model. With the Ready Node 14G coming out later this year, with the ScaleIO Ready Node, immediately out of the gate mVdim and MVME technology in a ScaleIO Dell EMC hardware product, 'cause it's already you know its Dell PowerEdge servers and ScaleIO software. And then helping our management keep our management keep (murmurs) as well so, introducing VVols for our VMware customers, being able to provide something called AMS which is our automated management services for the Ready Node so that you can deploy, configure, manage, upgrade, not only the storage software but the firmware as well as the EXS hypervisor all in a single button, in all a single interface, so we're doing that as well. So it's all about, you know, taking advantage of NextGeneration functionality from the hardware perspective, simplifying the management, then introducing critical features and functionality that our customers have been asking for. >> Just to make sure I'm 100% on this, things like the data services, that's software, so everybody that's got it today, will be able to upgrade it. Obviously the next generation of hardware always helps along the way, but you know, you manage those a little bit separate even though you want to handle both of those vectors. >> Yes, exactly. So when you upgrade to ScaleIO.next when it comes out you'll get that feature functionality. Now there's a few things you need to understand, right? You should have Mvdims and some type of flash media to support it. >> Stu: Sure. >> Because you're trying to maximize scalability and performance while providing these features, there's some dependencies there. But yeah, out of the gate, those features will be available. That's why it's called software-defined storage. It's all in the software, all this world of goodness is. >> Okay so take me upstream. Lot of new features, functionality coming out; what are the new business benefits if I'm the CEO of Swisscom, that I'm going to be able to achieve from that? >> Well I think definitely increased performance. Definitely increased efficiency of your storage with things like compression and snapshots. Now, if you're able to compress that data, get more out of your system-- >> But what kind of like, in terms of TCL. How am I going to be able to reduce. >> Oh, well. >> What are the factors of-- (grunts loudly) >> You know, we haven't run the numbers yet, but you know, the fact that we already can achieve 50% TCO, it can only get better from there when we're introducing these types of features, where you're maximizing efficiency, so, we expect it to bump up a bit. We're hoping we can work with you guys to get some good numbers that come out of it. >> Excellent. So continued strengthening of those-- business outcomes is, >> Yeah, that's it. You know, making sure, >> what you're talking about. >> Makings sure that the customers that want to move to software-defined storage in their data center, are able to achieve that in the most seamless way, and be able to reap the benefits. >> Fantastic. Well Jason, thanks so much for sharing your insights what's happening, um, peanut butter and jelly. Makes me hungry. I think it's time for lunch. >> It is lunch time, yeah. >> We thank you so much for coming back-- on the Cube. >> Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. >> And for my co-host Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin you are watching the Cube live, day two of our continuing coverage from VMworld 2017. Stick around. We'll be right back after a short break. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to VMworld 2017, everybody. This is theCUBE, and my name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Peter Burris. This is our eighth year at VMworld. Day two, Jon Siegal is here. He's the VP of product marketing at Dell EMC. Jon, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be here, yeah. >> So we've been talking a little earlier this morning about the bottlenecks and how that's evolved. It was originally the compute, that was the constraint. Spinning rust became very, very clearly, five, six years ago it was very clear that it was a major problem. VMware did a great job putting forth APIs. It solved that problem, then flash came in. Now the bottleneck, Jon, is shifting to the network. What's going on there? Give us some context. >> Absolutely. Loud and clear, I think, to your point, to the keynotes this week, I think Pat Gelsinger made it very clear, I think, that the era of the hypervisor, we moved beyond that now, in terms of where the monitorization, where a lot of the innovation's happening. And next up to your point is really the network. The era of the network over the next decade. Really, what's important there is assuring that we have a network that is software to find, that can orchestrate resources to put them in the right place at the right time. And so, what we have, is we have a solution called Vscale, actually, which is very relevant to this space, which has a very solid fabric and supports NSX, and uses NSX at its core. Really, what this is about is taking the turnkey experience that customers prefer to have today in the system level, if you will, like we have with VxBlock, for example, and extending that, now, to the data center and actually multiple data centers. I think this is very, very relevant. This is a data center, modern data center type of approach for the future. >> So, Pat, not Pat, but Chad, we had Chad on earlier, we asked Chad, "What's going to be that kind of Dell EMC Cloud experience?" And he went through a couple things. He made the observation that there's going to be, we're on the verge of significant platform competition. Not something that we haven't seen in a while. One of the things that we agreed to, or agreed on, was the idea that, increasingly, we're going to evaluate platforms based on how well they bind to other platforms in the context of what the business needs, workload needs, the realities of the data. One of the things it gets at least me excited about Vscale is that it starts from the premise of, this is how you're going to bind CI and HCI and traditional, you're going to bind it together using this fabric, this set of technologies. Talk a little bit about that. >> Absolutely. I think, to your point here, with Vscale, I often try to paint a picture for customers, what if you could actually move your workloads around, across the infrastructure as you need to? What if you could share resources across CI and HCI? By resources, I mean data protection resources. Could be compute, could be storage, could be network resources. >> Security. >> Security, exactly, across that. What if you could assure that the upgrades, the expansions, the patches are fully interoperable across the data center? That's the experience of Vscale. That's the modern data center approach. And to your point, this is where the future is going for data centers. It allows customers to take what they have today, and legacy infrastructure, and marry that to modern infrastructure in such a way by, on top of that, using orchestration policies and software to find networking. >> And that's different from the sort of original, it's an evolution from the original Vblock, and then that was a block of infrastructure, and you managed that block. And now you're talking about what you called a binding technology across the data center. Is that the fundamental difference, and am I missing something? >> No, that's a great point. I think, to take step back for a second, seven years ago, we jointly engineered, jointly pioneered the CI space with VMware and Cisco. We did that, first of all, what was our premise? Our premise was, how do we simplify IT? How do we help our customers spend a lot less time maintaining and managing and sustaining infrastructure, spend more time delivering IT services, delivering applications faster to market, and those types of things. And the answer was Vblock and VxBlock, to your point. That was essentially a converged infrastructure with compute, storage, networking, and the ability to manage and sustain that across a lifecycle. On one hand, that was at a single system level, but now customers are saying, "What if we could do that across the data center?" That's what Vscale is. It's the same approach. The ability to now sustain that and lifecycle that infrastructure across the data center, and we do that jointly by engineered solutions with Cisco and with VMware. >> I want to share something with you. Peter, you said something to me the other day which I thought was quite instructive. You said, "Look, the technology for this stuff "has largely matured. "It's the people and process behind it, now, "that we really have to worry about." When converged infrastructure first came out, I remember, I wrote a piece talking about the organizational implications, 'cause you had a storage person, a server person, networking person, and advised my readers, get your house in order organizationally beforehand. And as I started to talk to more customers, I met one, an insurance company who was a big Vblock customer. He said, "You got it all wrong. "Here's how a change agent does it. "You put the stuff in, "and the organization will figure itself out." Which I thought was pretty radical. I bring that forward today-- >> But it only works some of the time. (Dave laughing) >> So, what are the organizational implications, as to Peter's point? The technology's maturing, it's maybe been demystified. What are you seeing, in terms of that people and process evolution? >> Well, first of all, we're seeing more and more focus and investment when it comes to IT moving up the stack. Again, what we're trying to do is say, "Do you really want to spend time which, frankly, "isn't necessarily a competitive differentiator "on maintaining that infrastructure, "or do you want to actually hire resources "that can develop the new applications, "develop the services, and move across data centers, "and actually bring new customers on-flight faster "if you're a service provider, "bring new applications online faster "if you're any enterprise out there today "that's trying to make a difference?" What we're seeing here is, I think, the level and sophistication of the IT personnel that's getting hired is different now. And I think what we're seeing is that fewer resources are required to do the day-to-day routine tasks. It's actually become a great opportunity for IT to move up the stack. For example, Inovalon. That's an example of a customer, actually, I think you may have met them, Peter, at Cisco Live. They are a healthcare data analytics provider. So, in a healthcare space, big data's making a big impact. It's about, how do they improve patient outcomes? Big data can do that. Inovalon's at the heart of that. They're a service provider providing data analytics, big data solutions for healthcare providers. They needed a way to, first of all, get to market faster with their solutions. They needed to be able to onboard new customers faster. And, by the way, they didn't have the investments to hire new people. So what they had to do is they had to find a way to triple their infrastructure without adding any resources. And, by the way, they did that. They did that with Vscale. >> Peter: Tripled their capacity? >> Yeah, their capacity, exactly. Their capacity, their capacity in the infrastructure-- >> Not the physical assets, the capacity. >> Exactly, the capacity to do so. That shows you that we're the investment, and that allows them to innovate more and up and up the stack, and that's what we're seeing more and more. >> So, in many respects, what I see you saying, and let me see if I got this right, is that it used to be that the server was the primary citizen, and you configured everything around. And then it became other things. Where we are now is increasingly, the data is the primary citizen, and what we need to be able to do is put in place technologies that can allow the data to be where it needs to be, but very rapidly and quickly share it appropriately based on the workloads, and the only way to do that is look at how you're going to connect data resources together, including applications. To me, anyway, Vscale is this interesting technology that allows you to think in terms of designing your infrastructure around the placement of the data. >> Jon: That's exactly right. >> What about it is so interesting to you? Maybe you could elaborate on that? >> Well, because, at the end of the day, Dave, again, we're trying to look at these data assets, we're trying to figure out how can we create value? I talked to Colin last time. People like to talk about data as the new oil. Well, the problem with that is that oil still follows the rules of scarcity. I use oil here, I can't use it there. With data, I can use data here and I can use it there if I have that fabric in place, that very facile way to connect those data resources together, and that's why I get the amplification on the value of the data, The value of the infrastructure assets that I have in place and the value of the IT organization. That's going to amplify it. What Vscale's allowing people to at least start thinking about, and doing, is to say, "I can share these resources in new ways "if I think in terms of how they bind together "in under control, under management, "so I can very quickly start putting these resources, "reconfiguring these resources in a way "that allows me to generate new levels of business value." >> That's exactly right. >> What's always interested me about just convergence in general was what you were talking about, Jon, and Peter, to tie it to what you just said is, that IT labor problem. I think we're way, way beyond IT management, operations people trying to hold on to their jobs. It really talks to the business value that they're delivering. When you talk to people about, what'd you do with those resources that you freed up, they got their weekends back, or they shifted people into development, application development enablement roles. Maybe not coding, but they're getting into facilitating. >> Oftentimes, what I find is that, in CI, for example, can be a career development path. It can enable career development paths for a lot of IT organizations out there today who are looking as they need to find ways, they can't actually hire additional resources, but what they can do is if they can actually at least help to greatly simplify the day-to-day tasks that they're doing, they can now start to spend a lot less time on those mundane tasks and more time on how they can differentiate the business, which is up the stack, which is developing new applications, developing new services. Exactly right. I think, what we do find, though, is that if CI, if convergent infrastructure in general, and hyperconverge is put in, but the organization doesn't change. >> Let me build on that for one second. I know we got to go. This is really important to me, and I want to test with you very quickly, and then we got to wrap. The computing model. When we talk about computation model, or the computing model, we talk not just about the technology, but the way we think about a problem. The way we approach a problem with technology. What's so interesting about this is that converged, hyperconverged, Vscale, and these technologies are not only a new way of thinking about technology, but they enable a new way of thinking about how we're going to solve a problem. And that to me is the career path for today's infrastructure geeks who've been focused on a product, because they can become more relevant if they help the business think new ways of solving problems, that new computational model. >> And leveraging that data in new ways. I think you're right. Basically, we're creating a fabric, an ecosystem, if you will, to connect all the resources together, and then we have the ability to do software to find, if you will, orchestration. >> And we need those people inside the business. >> And the business benefits because there's a talent war going on, and they get to retain them. So, Jon, we do have to go. Thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. >> Absolutely, it's a pleasure as always. >> All right, Dave Vellante for Peter Burris. This is theCUBE. We're live from VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (fast electronic music)

>> 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.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to VMworld. You are watching theCUBE here, live on day two, continuing coverage from the show this year. I'm Lisa Martin, my cohost is Stu Miniman, and we're very excited to welcome our next guest. First time on theCUBE is Scott Delandy. >> First time. >> Lisa: First time technology director at Dell EMC. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thrilled to be here. >> We're thrilled to have you, and you have a couple of really interesting things that I want to kick off with. First off all, you played vodgeball. If you're not familiar, vodgeball is a really cool, starts on the Sunday right before VMworld, benefits Wounded Warriors, which is fantastic, but it's a serious game. I've played before, I was terrified for my life. What was your experience like this year? >> It's a great event and they've been doing it for the last several years, I mean, so it was my first time I was able to participate, but it basically is a lot of the partners and exhibitors here, they put a team together, and it's to support the Wounded Warrior Foundation, so it's a great charity and a great cause. But yeah, it was very intense, because when they asked me to play, I was like, "Dodgeball, vodgeball, how hard could it be, right? "You just pick up the ball "and you just throw it at somebody, right?" I had no idea that this is like a legit thing. There's referees, there's rules, there's strategy. I mean, it was intense. And, you know, we had fun. I think everybody had fun, but I will say there were, there were some teams that were very serious and very determined to do well. And they did. >> Nobody injured, I hope. >> Not that I recall. Oh, no, there was one injury, there was one injury. Somebody was going backwards and fell into somebody who was taking a picture and there was blood. Yeah, there was a little bit of blood. But hey, again, for a good cause, right? >> The people at VMworld, they're serious about whatever they're doing. >> Very serious. >> There you go. >> That's for sure. >> Something also that interests me about your background is you have a really interesting connection with an industry that people wouldn't think, oh, there's a similarity between wrestling, WWE, and Dell EMC. On the customer experience side, you've talked with John Cena, who I admire for what he does on TV. Tell us about the similarities that you and he discussed about the customer experience. >> Yeah, so it was last year. There's an event, it's actually a legit thing, called Customer Experience Day. And so, at Dell EMC, we had, you know, different events planned at the different locations, and there were speakers that came in. Matter of fact, if you were in the Santa Clara area, they had Matthew McConaughey, was the individual that they had come there. But we had John Cena, which I think we probably got a better deal out of that. But your point, it's like, what's the similarities, and I even asked him as we were getting ready to do the interview, I was chatting with him a bit, and I was like, "You probably have no idea what we do," and "Why are you here? "This is like completely different." And he was like, "Absolutely not, "I am so looking forward to this because "I'm going to talk to new people that "I've never talked to before. "What we do and what you do is very similar "because it really is about that customer experience "and making sure that people enjoy it, "you connect with those customers, "you connect with those users out there. "It's all about, you know, how the technology "on our side is getting consumed "and what our users are able to do, "but it's also the products that they're putting out there, "just from an entertainment perspective." And he got up there and he spoke for 20 minutes, and it was amazing. I mean, he just did such a great job. >> So, Scott, I actually worked with you at EMC, and you've been at EMC for just a few years. I still have to say, it's now Dell EMC, 'cause for some reason, LinkedIn says I worked for Dell EMC for 10 years. I worked for EMC Corporation. Those of us in Massachusetts, EMC had a profound impact on technology, but how long's it been now, you've been there? And tell us how you got to your current roles. >> With EMC and now Dell EMC, I just hit my 27th year, so going on 28 years now. Badge number 399, for anybody that's still keeping score. >> Lisa: You started as a child, right? >> I was 11 when I started. It was before they changed the child labor laws. But no, it's great. I mean, you think about how the company's changed and evolved in that period of time, and I think the thing that I've always loved and continued to love about the company and the organization is just how we continued to evolved, we continued to change, we continued to adapt to what's happening in the technology space because, you know, as you know, things are constantly moving, and I think that the difference over the last several years is that the rate of change has completely accelerated, with new ways to be able to deliver IT, new ways to basically consume the things that we've been developing for years. I come on the storage side of things, and just from a company perspective, the portfolio has expanded to include pretty much anything from a technology perspective. So it's really, really cool to be able to be a part of that. >> Okay, so, Scott, you know, there are many in the storage industry that have perspective, but I mean, you've been there since, like, I guess day one of Symmetrix. And Symmetrix, through DMX, through VMAX, it's still a product line, it's still going strong. You know, why is VMAX important in enterprise tech today? >> You know, you think about it, and it really is cool, and it's something that I work closely with throughout my career, but you think about examples of technology that have been available on the market for 30 or so years. I mean, I can only come up with two. If you can come up with one, let me know, but I think of mainframes, and I think of Symmetrix VMAX, right? And they're still a key part of technology because there's a tremendous amount of trust. The world's most mission-critical workloads run on those environments. It's a proven platform that still continues to be really, really, a core part of an IT infrastructure for many, many organizations. >> Yeah, it always resonated with me. You talk to anyone in that storage organization, and they've all ready Only the Paranoid Survive. So, you know, until microprocessor's going strong, you know, lots of discussion about where Moore's Law is going. But right, you know, I think back to the early days of things like SRDF, really changed what's going on. But now, I mean, you know, Flash is the discussion. We've just been talking to some of your peers about software-defined storage. What are some of those key customer conversations you're seeing these days out there in the market? >> I think, you know, from a modernization perspective, clearly Flash is becoming the predominant way people want to store their information, right? That's, you know, you think about Flash when it was initially introduced years and years ago, it provided a solution for high performance requirements. It was really, really fast, much faster than mechanical media at the time, but it was also really, really expensive, and I think what's changed is kind of two things. Number one, the media costs have come down pretty dramatically, right? But still more expensive than spinning drives. But the arrays themselves have also become much more efficient in terms of how they're able to take advantage of Flash. You think of things like data reduction technologies, compression, dedupe, fim provisioning, snapshots, all of these types of things, where we typically see about a four to one space efficiency. So if I've got 100 terabytes, I'm paying for that 100 terabytes of capacity, but through all of these technologies, I can make that look like 400 terabytes to the outside world. So that dramatically changes the cost curb and makes it way more efficient, way more affordable than what people have previously done with things like hybrid arrays or even spinning drives. So it's cool, and, you know, you think of what's happening in the future, there are different memory-based technologies, storage class memory technologies that are going to start to become available in the marketplace, and it'll be interesting to see architecturally how that's going to impact some of the things that are available in the marketplace today, so it's going to be very interesting, I think, in the next couple of years, as the technology continues to evolve, and you're able to do things from a performance density capacity perspective that, you know, today you're just kind of getting to sort of the tip of the iceberg in terms of some of the niche technologies that are out there. These are things that are going to become much, much more mainstream going forward. So, again, people often think that storage, snoreage, right? It's the boring stuff, right? The only time people care about storage is if something breaks, right? They just assume that it's going to work. But again, there's a lot of really cool things happening from an innovation, from a technology perspective, and again, being on the technology side and getting to work very closely with the engineering guys, and the product managers, and then being able to talk to customers and users and understand kind of what challenges they're facing today and where they see things going in the future. Again, it's a great opportunity because you get to see all of this stuff coming together. So, it continues to be fun. I don't know if I can do another 27 years, but I'm hoping to get at least a couple more good ones. >> You've got like another 30 before retirement age. >> Right, right. >> Yeah, I think you're right. I'll do the math on that. Maybe not quite 30, but I appreciate it anyway, Stu. >> So, speaking of innovation, Michael Dove was talking about that this morning, and I thought it was cool that he and Pat shared some laughs on, you know, now that the accommodation is done with Dell EMC and they own VMware, there's competitors that are now partners, et cetera. Can you talk to us, you talked about kind of talking with product groups. How are you facilitating innovation and integration, say, with the VMAX with VMware? How is that kind of going? >> So, VMware is definitely a big, obviously, partner for us. But they also, their customers, in the use cases that they have, fit in very well with our technology and our systems, specifically, I'll talk specifically around VMAX. You know, you look at some of the really large environments that are out there. I know customers that have 50,000 plus VMs running on a single storage system, right? And, you know, you think of just how massive that is, and you put 50,000 anything on one storage system, you know, you need to make sure that you've got the performance, you've got the scale, you've got the reliability, you've got the data services. Those are the things that people need to be able to do consolidation at that scale, and that's where certainly VMAX is kind of the technology that continues to be core for those types of workloads. But again, there's always new things that are coming up, and there's also, you know, a set of new challenges that users are always looking at. And again, Flash is a good example where, you know, you're starting to hit the limits in terms of what you can do with traditional mechanical media, but the Flash was still too expensive at the time. But again, taking advantage of that data reduction technology and building it into the system, and being able to do it in a way that doesn't compromise any of the data services, it doesn't impact performance, it doesn't change the reliability, or the availability of the applications and the workloads. I mean, that's what kind of users sort of expect from us, and that's what we deliver. >> I think you've still got 30 years in you just, you know, with this passion and excitement that you're talking about now. >> We'll see, we'll see. Well, maybe you guy will have me back next year and we can see where we are then. >> Well, we are so thankful to you for stopping by theCUBE for your first time. You're now part of theCUBE alumni. >> Awesome, I am so thrilled. >> I don't think we have John Cena on. We do have a few professional athletes. I've interviewed a couple of former Patriots, and the like. >> As I told John when I interviewed him, he may be bigger than me, but I have better hair, I think at least. >> By far, by far. Well, Scott Delandy, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing some of the innovations that you're doing, and we'll look forward to seeing you on theCUBE next time. >> Scott: Awesome, thank you. >> All right, and for Scott, my co-host Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching day two, live from VMworld 2017 from Las Vegas. Stick around, we will be right back.

(exciting upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem partner. >> Okay, we're back in Las Vegas. This is VMworld 2017, and this is theCUBE. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris, and this is the second segment with Chad Sakac who's the president of Dell EMC. We're going to dig into what the cloud looks like in the next decade, you know, 2022 time frame. Chad, again, welcome back. Thanks for spending some time. >> It's great to be back. No one's got a crystal ball a decade out, but I think we've got a pretty good idea of what we think the next five years look like. >> Well, you know, we do like at Wikibon to look further out, and say okay, what are your assumptions about how the business is going to evolve, knowing that any kind of ten year forecast is going to be wrong. But it does shape your thinking and your assumptions. >> Yep. >> So what's your vision? What's Dell EMC's vision for how the cloud is going to evolve and shape, and look like in the next five years? >> I think the following things are a near certainty and they're driving our strategy. Basically customers will consume platforms. They will pick the best platform on a temporal basis and on a space basis. So time and space (chuckles) right? So I'll give you an example. Today if you said, "What is the best place and time "to do AI and machine learning "for work that is against data that is not in-house?" The answer would be Google cloud platform in a heartbeat. Their core capabilities as a platform around AI and machine learning are head and shoulders above everything else. Right? >> Yep. >> That's a platform that people consume. Likewise, if you said, "Okay, what's the platform that I use for my "applications that basically need a little more "traditional care and feeding around them?" That's going to be an evolution of the VMware stack that the customers are using today. It powers 80% of what they do today. It's the platform that runs the core of their business today, and that platform, as you can see this week, is expanding and expanding and expanding. Now what'll happen over the next decade is that platform will be independent of place. So if you imagine what we're going to do with that capability now, it's not an announcement, it's a platform that customers can buy around VMware cloud on AWS, you can see that we just broke the "Is something on or off?" is now not the question. The question is what's the right platform and services to use for a given set of workloads? >> I want to build on that for a second Chad, if I can. So the vision that I think you articulated the core experience is Look that what you love about the cloud is you love the get in small, grow fast, or grow according to the workload needs, >> Chad: Yep, elasticity. >> Yeah, don't lock in a whole bunch of financial assets. Lower assets, specificity, be able to apply it to a lot of different things. You love that. But the problem is, the physical, legal, and IP realities of your business dictate that you're not going to put it all in there. So the common experience is, get that dependent upon the workload, and have it all run simply in a straightforward manner that serves the business. Right? >> Bingo. So the word platform is independent of space. >> Right? >> Right. The other thing that I think we'll see over the next decade is that any technologies that bind multiple platforms together are incredibly compelling. And you can actually see this driving both the R and D strategy and the M and A strategy of the leaders, right? So let me give you an example of things that bind together platforms, and themselves are platforms. Cloud Foundry is one of the best binders and spanners that exists. Because people use Cloud Foundry on Azure, on AWS, on their own private cloud all day long. In fact, it won the award for basically, at Microsoft Ignite, for the most popular used thing on Azure outside Microsoft's own core services. So it's a binder. It gives customers mobility and flexibility across these different platforms. Another example, we're going all in on Kubernetes. We think that Kubernetes as the container abstraction that spans these different clouds is in essence, game over of chaos, and game beginning of standardization and movement forward. I'll give you another example. I think that ten years from now the debates that we're having around SDN today will be so over, and everyone will go, "Of course you're going to have a software-defined "network that abstracts," because networking is something that needs to span platforms. So, core idea number one, people will make platform choices and there will be multiple platforms. Those platforms will be independent of on off prem, independent of Capex, Opex choices. Those platforms will exist in all of those modes. >> But be tied to the characteristics, the benefits that they provide to workloads. >> Bingo. The library of connectors, of things that span and bind these platforms, will grow in value and importance to the customers. I'll give you another example of a binding thing that links together multiple platforms. And you can see its success even today. ServiceNow is the thing that binds and connects at the ITSM layer, all of these different topologies. So it's not just things that are all just in our family (chuckles) right? But you can see these ideas continuing to march forward. The thing that I think you'll also see is the explosion of the edge is going to create this whole world that is the opposite pendulum swing of centralization that you can kind of already see happening. The number of edge devices that will exist, the amount of data that they're going to need to process locally, and the amount of data that they're going to need to process that's centralized in one of these platforms is going to be immense. >> So the edge, does the edge create a new cloud? >> Yes. You know, people are already talking about that like it's the fog or whatever. Again, buzz words can sometimes make people underestimate very important things that are actually happening in an industry right now. The last thing I'll say is, and this is a dream and an aspiration, and a vision, but a dream and an aspiration. There are amazing problems to crack in the domain of security. And that itself needs to become a core platform element that transits all of these other platforms. >> Peter: That's a key binder. >> It's a binding element that has to transit all these different platforms that people consume. And I think you can see the edges of the industry, us tackling these problems in new ways, and I'm very hopeful about that actually. >> So the infrastructure requirements of that new cloud, customers have to make bets. We were talking about that earlier. There's new stack choices that are emerging. What's your point of view there and how does it all relate to bring it back to how you get from point A to point B? >> There's a great risk in saying stuff on camera Dave. (men chuckle) But you know-- >> Peter: But take the risk Chad. >> But to hell with it (laughs). See it here on theCUBE first. >> So look, I think that we're entering into an era of stack wars. And that sounds too militaristic. That's not what I mean. >> Peter: Let's call it stack competition. >> I think that what is happening is that the need for customers to choose platforms and make platform level bets in exchange for simplification and speed is basically forcing them, and it's forcing the market and everyone in it, including us, to think, what is our opinionated stack? That doesn't mean closed, right? However, even though there's open connections all over the place, increasingly you're seeing people take the Lego components and go (makes building sounds) This works with this, which works with this, which works with this, and they're built all together. And the thing that I'm finding, and I don't know whether you guys see this in your customer conversation. It's weird, people are schizophrenic. They're really worried about what that means for them on premises. Because they're used to hand-assembling everything under the sun, and then are frustrated it doesn't all work together easily, right? And yet, they have no issue at all about saying "I'm putting everything in, you know, "in Office 365." I was talking with a customer, with the procurement person, and you can imagine the procurement person's reaction when I say, "I think that the world is moving "towards vertically integrated stacks." And there is decidedly an open ecosystem, but also an opinionated, pivotal, VMware, Dell, EMC stack. A Dell technology stack. The procurement guy lost his mind. He did not like to hear that from me. >> Of course. >> He started to get angry. >> Well, would you rather have what occurred with the Dupe? >> Yeah, and-- (Dave laughs) >> Well, what he wants is he is being told, "You got to take "five points off of every transaction." >> Yeah, of course. >> And he wants to see all these transactions be distinct, and what you're saying, Chad, is that we're moving where the transactions start to accrete value, accrete strategic importance, >> Yep. >> and accrete risk. And the procurement guy's looking at that saying (makes terrified sound) But it requires hard core, realistic vendor management that's well-defined and treated by the business as an asset. >> I think that we're entering into an era of consolidation. Customers are going to have to make platform bets that are business bets. >> For themselves. >> That's right. >> So bring it back to a topic that is more 2017, hyperconverged infrastructure. >> Chad: Yep. >> Is that the model for the future cloud? Or does it need to go beyond that? Beyond the virtual machine parlance that we tend to talk about? >> So, we have years of experience working with customers, trying to build clouds out of traditional infrastructure stacks. >> Dave: Right. >> And we're there as their partner to make it work. It is freaking hard! Frankly, nearly impossible. And again, they talk to vendor after vendor who's like, "Buy our new cloud management platform "and we'll be able to automate all of your crapola." >> Buy our hammer, and we'll fix all your cloud nails. >> And the reality of it is that every layer that you build one of these stacks on, the more variation that you have at this layer, it complicates the life cycle management of this layer. And then the more variation you have at this layer, the more it complicates the life cycle management of this layer. And that's what I mean about the stackification where the stacks are starting to bowl together. Driven not by vendor, but driven by customer need for simplification and speed. >> Peter: And workload. >> They're just not consciously making the connection yet that says it's time for me to make strategic choices. Right? So hyperconverge infrastructure has proven an ability. It's no longer in weirdo VDI only use cases (laughs). It is now proving itself to be a material simplification at the bottom layer of the stack. And it's not rocket science. It is basically the same lesson that hyperscalers and SASS startups realized, which is that you need to have something which is much more industry standard, much more software defined, much more rigid in a sense about how it's constructed so you actually life cycle it and make the next stack up simpler. >> All right, so we got to wrap. Let me summarize what I heard, and maybe you guys can fill in any gaps. So platforms essentially be products is what I heard. Those are my words not yours. >> Totally, yeah. >> And platforms will be place-independent, and a key value creator will be this binding platforms together. >> Chad: Yes. >> Which is going to become very very compelling. You gave the example of Cloud Foundry, Kubo, Kubernetes. >> I'll give you one more, Boomi. >> Boomi, and even SDN which is basically a fait de complis >> Yeah. >> is essentially what you're saying. An explosion at the edge will create a new cloud. The infrastructure requirements are going to evolve to support that cloud. And security is going to be a core platform element, a key binder as you said. Anything I missed? >> And that literally, customers have to be as simple as they can. And what they need to accept, and make choices, I'm not forcing them down the path with us or whomever. They need to accept that simplicity and speed means choosing platforms and platform partners. >> So here's what I'd add. 'Cause I think you're right Chad. I would add just a couple of refinements, that the quality of the platform is going to be a function of how well it binds. >> Chad: Yep. >> And that that security becomes a crucial binder. And the other thing that I'd say is that the edge, it's not so much a new cloud. I hate the term fog. >> Yeah. >> Because if there's anywhere where business is going to need clarity, it's going to be at the edge. >> I totally agree. >> That's a vendor way of looking at things. The customer way is, "I need clarity here you guys. "Don't talk to me about cloud." In fact, we like to say that when Andreessen said, "Software's going to eat the world," the right way of saying it, "Software's going to eat the edge." >> Right. >> That the edge is going to make a lot more of these choices clear. >> And just, again, I know we got to go but, It always sounds like hyperbole. The amount of stuff that we're doing around trying to make the edge clear, like basically the EdgeX Foundry, which is basically trying to standardize this mess of proprietary protocols and devices. That stuff is happening like now. The Pulse IoT stuff that we talked about, that's happening now. But those are just in early, early days. If you look out over a few years, that stuff will be a new platform. >> That's absolutely right. >> Yeah. And Dell hasn't fully played it's edge card, I suspect. >> We will see more there. >> Yeah. >> All right, Chad, first of all, awesome content. Peter, thank you very much. Virtual Geek is Chad's blog. If you're into this stuff, go subscribe to that. It's a fantastic resource. >> Thanks man. >> So thanks again. Really appreciate it. >> My pleasure guys. >> All right, keep right there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from VMworld 2017 from Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (electronic music)