>> From the Silicon Angle Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, It's theCUBE. (upbeat music) Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's Boston area studio; our actually brand-new studio, and I'm really excited to have I believe is a first-time guest, a long-time caller, you know, a long time listener >> Yeah, yep. first time caller, good buddy of mine Dave Graham, who is the director, is a director of emerging technologies: messaging at Dell Technologies. Disclaimer, Dave and I worked together at a company some of you might have heard on the past, it was EMC Corporation, which was a local company. Dave and I both left EMC, and Dave went back, after Dell had bought EMC. So Dave, thanks so much for joining, it is your first time on theCUBE, yes? >> It is the first time on theCUBE. >> Yeah, so. >> Lets do some, Some of the first times that I actually interacted with, with this team here, you and I were bloggers and doing lots of stuff back in the industry, so it's great to be able to talk to you on-camera. >> Yeah, same here. >> All right, so Dave, I mentioned you were a returning former EMC-er, now Dell tech person, and you spent some time at Juniper, at some startups, but give our audience a little bit about your background and your passions. >> Oh, so background-wise, yep, so started my career in technology, if you will, at EMC, worked, started in inside sales of all places. Worked my way into a consulting/engineer type position within ECS, which was, obviously a pretty hard-core product inside of EMC now, or Dell Technologies now. Left, went to a startup, everybody's got to do a start up at some point in their life, right? Take the risk, make the leap, that was awesome, was actually one of those Cloud brokers that's out there, like Nasuni, company called Sertis. Had a little bit of trouble about eight months in, so it kind of fell apart. >> Yeah, the company did, not you. >> The company did! (men laughing) I was fine, you know, but the, yeah, the company had some problems, but ended up leaving there, going to Symantec of all places, so I worked on the Veritas side, kind of the enterprise side, which just recently got bought out by Avago, evidently just. >> Broadcom >> Broadcom, Broadcom, art of the grand whole Avago. >> Dave, Dave, you know we're getting up there in years and our tech, when we keep talking about something 'cause I was just reading about, right, Broadcom, which was of course Avago bought Broadcom in the second largest tech acquisition in history, but when they acquired Broadcom, they took on the name because most people know Broadcom, not as many people know Avago, even those of us with backgrounds in the chip semiconductor and all those pieces. I mean you got Brocade in there, you've got some of the software companies that they've bought over the time, so some of those go together. But yeah, Veritas and Symantec, those of us especially with some storage and networking background know those brands well. >> Absolutely, PLX's being the PCI switched as well, it's actually Broadcom, those things. So yeah, went from Symantec after a short period of time there, went to Juniper Networks, ran part of their Center of Excellence, kind of a data center overlay team, the only non-networking guy in a networking company, it felt like. Can't say that I learned a ton about the networking side, but definitely saw a huge expansion in the data center space with Juniper, which was awesome to see. And then the opportunity came to come back to Dell Technologies. Kind of a everything old becoming new again, right? Going and revisiting a whole bunch of folks that I had worked with 13, you know, 10 years ago. >> Dave, it's interesting, you know, I think about, talk about somebody like Broadcom, and Avago, and things like that. I remember reading blog posts of yours, that you'd get down to some of that nitty-level, you and I would be ones that would be the talk about the product, all right now pull the board out, let me look at all the components, let me understand, you know, the spacing, and the cooling, and all the things there, but you know here it's 2019, Dave. Don't you know software is eating the world? So, tell us a little bit about what you're working on these days, because the high-level things definitely don't bring to mind the low-level board pieces that we used to talk about many years ago. >> Exactly, yeah, it's no longer, you know, thermals and processing power as much, right? Still aspects of that, but a lot of what we're focused on now, or what I'm focused on now is within what we call the emerging technology space. Or horizon 2, horizon 3, I guess. >> Sounds like something some analyst firm came up with, Dave. (Dave laughing) >> Yeah, like Industry 4.0, 5.0 type stuff. It's all exciting stuff, but you know when you look at technologies like five, 5G, fifth generation wireless, you know both millimeter waves, sub six gigahertz, AI, you know, everything old becoming new again, right? Stuff from the fifties, and sixties that's now starting to permeate everything that we do, you're not opening your mouth and breathing unless you're talking about AI at some point, >> Yeah, and you bring up a great point. So, we've spent some time with the Dell team understanding AI, but help connect for our audience that when you talk high AI we're talking about, we're talking about data at the center of everything, and it's those applications, are you working on some of those solutions, or is it the infrastructure that's going to enable that, and what needs to be done at that level for things to work right? >> I think it's all of the above. The beauty of kind of Dell Technologies that you sit across, both infrastructure and software. You look at the efforts and the energies, stuff like VMware buying, BitFusion, right, as a mechanism trying to assuage some of that low-level hardware stuff. Start to tap into what the infrastructure guys have always been doing. When you bring that kind of capability up the stack, now you can start to develop within the software mindset, how, how you're going to access this. Infrastructure still plays a huge part of it, you got to run it on something, right? You can't really do serverless AI at this point, am I allowed to say that? (man laughing) >> Well, you could say that, I might disagree with you, because absolutely >> Eh, that's fine. there's AI that's running on it. Don't you know, Dave, I actually did my serverless 101 article that I had, I actually had Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, who is the General Manager of Dell servers, holding the t-shirt that "there is no serverless, it's just, you know, a function that you only pay the piece that you need when you need and everything there." But the point of the humor that I was having there is even the largest server manufacturer in the world knows that underneath that serverless discussion, absolutely, there is still infrastructure that plays there, just today it tends to primarily be in AWS with all of their services, but that proliferation, serverless, we're just letting the developers be developers and not have to think about that stuff, and I mean, Dave, the stuff we've had background, you know, we want to get rid of silos and make things simpler, I mean, it's the things we've been talking about for decades, it's just, for me it was interesting to look at, it is very much a developer application driven piece, top-down as opposed to so many of the virtualization and infrastructure as a service is more of a bottom-up, let me try to change this construct so that we can then provide what you need above it, it's just a slightly different way of looking at things. >> Yeah, and I think we're really trying to push for that stuff, so you know you can bundle together hardware that makes it, makes the development platform easy to do, right? But the efforts and energy of our partnerships, Dell has engaged in a lot of partnerships within the industry, NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Graphcore, you name it, right? We're out in that space working along with those folks, but a lot of that is driven by software. It's, you write to a library, like Kudu, or, you know pyEight, you know, PyTorch, you're using these type of elements and you're moving towards that, but then it has to run on something, right? So we want to be in that both-end space, right? We want to enable that kind of flexibility capability, and obviously not prevent it, but we want to also expose that platform to as many people within the industry as possible so they can kind of start to develop on it. You're becoming a platform company, really, when it comes down to it. >> I don't want to get down the semantical arguments of AI, if you will, but what are you hearing from customers, and what's some kind of driving some of the discussions lately that's the reality of AI as opposed to some of just the buzzy hype that everybody talks about? >> Well I still think there's some ambiguity in market around AI versus automation even, so what people that come and ask us are well, "you know, I believe in this thing called artificial intelligence, and I want to do X, Y, and Z." And these particular workloads could be better handled by a simple, not to distill it down to the barest minimum, but like cron jobs, something that's, go back in the history, look at the things that matter, that you could do very very simply that don't require a large amount of library, or sort of an understanding of more advanced-type algorithms or developments that way. In the reverse, you still have that capability now, where everything that we're doing within industry, you use chat-bots. Some of the intelligence that goes into those, people are starting to recognize, this is a better way that I could serve my customers. Really, it's that business out kind of viewpoint. How do I access these customers, where they may not have the knowledge set here, but they're coming to us and saying, "it's more than just, you know, a call, an IVR system," you know, like an electronic IVR system, right? Like I come in and it's just quick response stuff. I need some context, I need to be able to do this, and transform my data into something that's useful for my customers. >> Yeah, no, this is such a great point, Dave. The thing I've asked many times, is, my entire career we've talked about intelligence and we've talked about automation, what's different about it today? And the reality is, is it used to be all right. I was scripting things, or I would have some Bash processes, or I would put these things together. The order of magnitude and scale of what we're talking about today, I couldn't do it manually if I wanted to. And that automation is really, can be really cool these days, and it's not as, to set all of those up, there is more intelligence built into it, so whether it's AI or just machine learning kind of underneath it, that spectrum that we talk about it, there's some real-use cases, a real lot of things that are happening there, and it definitely is, order of magnitudes more improved than what we were talking about say, back when we were both at EMC and the latest generation of Symmetrix was much more intelligent than the last generation, but if you look at that 10 years later, boy, it's, it is night and day, and how could we ever have used those terms before, compared to where we are today. >> Yeah it's, it's, somebody probably at some point coined the term, "exponential". Like, things become exponential as you start to look at it. Yeah, the development in the last 10 years, both in computing horsepower, and GPU/GPGPU horsepower, you know, the innovation around, you know FPGAs are back in a big way now, right? All that brainpower that used to be in these systems now, you now can benefit even more from the flexibility of the systems in order to get specific workloads done. It's not for everybody, we all know that, but it's there. >> I'm glad you brought up FPGAs because those of us that are hardware geeks, I mean, some reason I studied mechanical engineering, not realizing that software would be a software world that we live in. I did a video with Amy Lewis and she's like, "what was your software-defined moments?" I'm like, "gosh, I'm the frog sitting in the pot, and, would love to, if I can't network-diagram it, or put these things together, networking guy, it's my background! So, the software world, but it is a real renaissance in hardware these days. Everything from the FPGAs you mentioned, you look at NVIDIA and all of their partners, and the competitors there. Anything you geeking out on the hardware side? >> I, yeah, a lot of the stuff, I mean, the era of GPU showed up in a big way, all right? We have NVIDIA to thank for that whole, I mean, the kudos to them for developing a software ecosystem alongside a hardware. I think that's really what sold that and made that work. >> Well, you know, you have to be able to solve that Bitcoin mining problem, so. >> Well, you know, depending on which cryptocurrency you did, EMD kind of snuck in there with their stuff and they did some of that stuff better. But you have that kind of competing architecture stuff, which is always good, competition you want. I think now that what we're seeing is that specific workloads now benefit from different styles of compute. And so you have the companies like Graphcore, or the chip that was just launched out of China this past week that's configurable to any type of network, enteral network underneath the covers. You see that kind of evolution in capability now, where general purpose is good, but now you start to go into reconfigurable elements so, I'll, FPGAs are some of these more advanced chips. The neuromorphic hardware, which is always, given my background in psychology, is always interesting to me, so anything that is biomorphic or neuromorphic to me is pinging around up here like, "oh, you're going to emulate the brain?" And Intel's done stuff, BraincChip's done stuff, Netspace, it's amazing. I just, the workloads that are coming along the way, I think are starting to demand different types or more effectiveness within that hardware now, so you're starting to see a lot of interesting developments, IPUs, TPUs, Teslas getting into the inferencing bit now, with their own hardware, so you see a lot of effort and energy being poured in there. Again, there's not going to be one ring to rule them all, to cop Tolkien there for a moment, but there's going to be, I think you're going to start to see the disparation of workloads into those specific hardware platforms. Again, software, it's going to start to drive the applications for how you see these things going, and it's going to be the people that can service the most amount of platforms, or the most amount of capability from a single platform even, I think are the people who are going to come out ahead. And whether it'll be us or any of our August competitors, it remains to be seen, but we want to be in that space we want to be playing hard in that space as well. >> All right Dave, last thing I want to ask you about is just career. So, it's interesting, at Vmworld, I kind of look at it in like, "wow, I'm actually, I'm sitting at a panel for Opening Acts, which is done by the VMunderground people the Sunday, day before VMworld really starts, talking about jobs and there's actually three panels, you know, careers, and financial, and some of those things, >> I'm going to be there, so come on by, >> Maybe I should join startin' at 1 o'clock Monday evening, I'm actually participating in a career cafe, talking about people and everything like that, so all that stuff's online if you want to check it out, but you know, right, you said psychology is what you studied but you worked in engineering, you were a systems engineer, and now you do messaging. The hardcore techies, there's always that boundary between the techies and the marketings, but I think it's obvious to our audience when they hear you geeking out on the TPUs and all the things there that you are not just, you're quite knowledgeable when it comes about the technology, and the good technical marketers I find tend to come from that kind of background, but give us a little bit, looking back at where you've been and where you're going, and some of those dynamics. >> Yeah, I was blessed from a really young age with a father who really loved technology. We were building PCs, like back in the eighties, right, when that was a thing, you know, "I built my AMD 386 DX box" >> Have you watched the AMC show, "Halt and Catch Fire," when that was on? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, so there was that kind of, always interesting to me, and I, with the way my mind works, I can't code to save my life, that's my brother's gift, not mine. But being able to kind of assemble things in my head was kind of always something that stuck in the back. So going through college, I worked as a lab resident as well, working in computer labs and doing that stuff. It's just been, it's been a passion, right? I had the education, was very, you know, that was my family, was very hard on the education stuff. You're going to do this. But being able to follow that passion, a lot of things fell into place with that, it's been a huge blessing. But even in grad school when I was getting my Masters in clinical counseling, I ran my own consulting business as well, just buying and selling hardware. And a lot of what I've done is just I read and ask a ton of questions. I'm out on Twitter, I'm not the brightest bulb in the, of the bunch, but I've learned to ask a lot of questions and the amount of community support in that has gotten me a lot of where I am as well. But yeah, being able to come out on this side, marketing is, like you're saying, it's kind of an anathema to the technical guys, "oh those are the guys that kind of shine the, shine the turd, so to speak," right? But being able to come in and being able to kind of influence the way and make sure that we're technically sound in what we're saying, but you have to translate some of the harder stuff, the more hardcore engineering terms into layman's terms, because not everybody's going to approach that. A CIO with a double E, or an MS in electrical engineering are going on down that road are very few and far between. A lot of these folks have grown up or developed their careers in understanding things, but being able to kind of go in and translate through that, it's been a huge blessing, it's nice. But always following the areas where, networking for me was never a strong point, but jumping in, going, "hey, I'm here to learn," and being willing to learn has been one of the biggest, biggest things I think that's kind of reinforced that career process. >> Yeah, definitely Dave, that intellectual curiosity is something that serves anyone in the tech industry quite well, 'cause, you know, nobody is going to be an expert on everything, and I've spoken to some of the brightest people in the industry, and even they realize nobody can keep up with all of it, so that being able to ask questions, participate, and Dave, thank you so much for helping me, come have this conversation, great as always to have a chat. >> Ah, great to be here Stu, thanks. >> Alright, so be sure to check out the theCUBE.net, which is where all of our content always is, what shows we will be at, all the history of where we've been. This studio is actually in Marlborough, Massachusetts, so not too far outside of Boston, right on the 495 loop, we're going to be doing lot more videos here, myself and Dave Vellante are located here, we have a good team here, so look for more content out of here, and of course our big studio out of Palo Alto, California. So if we can be of help, please feel free to reach out, I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thanks for watching theCUBE. (upbeat electronic 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. 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.