(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Boston, MA it's theCUBE covering Red Hat Summit 2019. Brought to you by Red Hat. (upbeat music continues) >> It is so good to have you back with us here on theCUBE as we continue our live coverage here at the BCEC at Red Hat Summit 2019. Glad to have you watching wherever you might be, Eastern Time Zone or maybe out West. Stu Miniman, John Walls here. Our coverage continuing; sixth year we've been at this summit. Eric Kern now joins us here. Both from Lenovo, Eric and Steve Brown. Eric is the Executive Distinguished Engineer. And Steve is the Managing Partner in the Software Business Unit and the DevOps practice leader. So gentlemen good to have you with us on theCUBE. Good to see you today! >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> No surprise, right, that you're here; long term partnership, very successful get together. First off, I want your ideas or your impressions of what you've hear or what you've seen so far here in the day and a half that we've been underway. And whether it's keynote or maybe one of the side sessions, just what's your first impression of what's goin' on here? >> Yeah, I mean it's great. There's a lot of people here, a lot of activity. I mean we can see the Expo behind us. You know the food is great, lunch is great so- (laughter) >> Rub it in. (laughter continues) Rub it in just a little bit. Okay, so a little bit of news this week with regard to what you're up to. And if you would, I'm not gonna ask you to go terribly deep, but just give us an idea of what some of the headlines are you guys were sending out this week. Steve, why don't you take that? >> Yeah, so this week we announced six new reference designs and solutions, engineered solutions. But pretty excited about OpenShift 4 and certainly Rel8 after a five year I guess pause, if you will, on major releases. So that's exciting. >> So, Eric, why don't we start with building on those partnerships, talk about some of the solutions your talking to customers and some of the latest and greatest? There's a lot of interesting things we're doing; one of the things we've been doing recently is around TruScale. So TruScale is our infrastructure as a service on premise. So one of the things we do with it is we build overall solutions. So there's a number of reference architectures that we talked about with Red Hat. These solutions, think about them as having an overall CapEx price and then we convert that into a OpEx price. Probably one of the neat novel things, and this is kind of the area that I really got into, right, is around how do we build a metering system that doesn't require us to install a bunch of software and can be compatible with everything? So with TruScale what we've done is we've leveraged our what's called our xclarity controller, it's the chip basically on the motherboard, and that xclarity controller has the ability to measure power. And measure power both at the overall input consumption, as well measuring power in the CPU, the memory and the eye out. And we built an infrastructure around that. We can actually tell you exactly what percentage the system is being used and consumed based on that. And we can charge for the overall system on a monthly basis. So we have a portal that's set up for that, whether it be our hardware on its own or our hardware with the Red Hat software installed on top of it. >> So how's that effect the customer relationship then? All the sudden your- whether there was a- not I'd say a dispute, but might of been questions about how much usage am I getting? How am I using this? Why am I being billed as I'm being billed? So on and so forth. Now all the sudden you can just deliver the proof's in the pudding, right? You can say this is exactly what you're doing with this, this is exactly how much you're consuming. And I would assume from a pricing standpoint for that modeling standpoint, you give everybody a lot of comfort, I would think; right? >> You do, right. Not only do they see exactly what they're being charged for, they see exactly some of the usage on their own systems. A lot of times they don't know how well-balanced or unbalanced their systems are. And so we're actually providing real usage data. It's different than what you get in public cloud. It's different in what you get in other solutions where it's virtual allocation. So there's a difference in knowing the physical utilization versus the allocated utilization. What a lot of people do, a lot of companies do when they're renting public cloud infrastructure is they spend a lot of time in automation to actually deallocate. Right, so they're doing all this work just to try to save money. Whereas in the TruScale model, you just run it like you normally run it and you save money because you know, if you're not using it, you're not paying for it. >> John: You don't pay for it. >> Exactly, exactly. >> All right, well Steve, a lot of discussion at the show this week about OpenShift, not least this morning, OpenShift 4 was released. We've had a chance to talk to a number of customers, bring us inside, you know, Lenovo's worked with OpenShift for awhile. Oftentimes we think about the application layers like oh, it's totally divorced, I don't need to think of it. Well, we understand there's integration work that happens there and would love your insight into what is happening at he integration, where it's progressed, and any customer stories that you've got along those lines. >> Well, yeah, we've been doing a lot of work with OpenShift. I would say for an upwards of more than two years. We started with Intel and Red Hat and built a number of Intel Select solutions, reference designs, both bare metal and hyper converged. We are on our fifth edition now of the OpenShift design on Cascade Lake. We're the, I wanna say the pioneers in the industry. We have a center of competency in DevOps with software to really promote software development solutions. And we're excited with OpenShift 4 because of the CoreOS integration as well as the auto-provisioning. Key things, it makes it so much easier to adopt and integrate. >> Any customer deployments? When they come to you, what's the kind of a-ha moment that they have? Is it just the agility that it brings them? Is there anything you can share as to the customers that are actually doing this in the field? >> Well, I like to think the customers get the a-ha when they realize that there is an engineered platform that's been purpose built and they're not coddling software and tools together. It helps with the CI/CD pipeline process templating much more effectively. Overall it's, I think, a lot more streamlined than it was in the earlier editions of OpenShift, especially Open Source. So we're pretty excited with comprehensive business support. I think that businesses feel comfortable. >> Kind of a simple question, but what do you, in terms of what TruScale operates now, what is the- what are you allowing people to do now that they didn't do before? In the latest version here, what exactly is- where's, you think, this improvement? Or where's the new efficiency? What are they getting out of it that would make me, as a customer, have that- if I haven't converted yet, or if I'm perhaps ripe for the taking, what would make me jump? >> Part of it is customers don't want to be managing their infrastructure. And so this there's a big push to public cloud. They just wanna be managing their applications. They just wanna focus on what's paying the bills, right? And paying the bills are providing the IT service is all in the application layer for the most part. What TruScale allows them to do is to have that public cloud kind of management platform. So it's Lenovo premium support behind the scenes; so Lenovo is managing the hardware itself, Lenovo maintains the ownership of the hardware, so they're not even owning the hardware, very similar to public cloud. And they can go and use it on FREM. So they don't have to worry about any security issues with the public cloud. They don't have to worry about any kind of network issues, right, it's all in their data center. It's running just exactly the way they'd run CapEx, but they're running in the way that they have really liked with the public cloud infrastructure. >> So confidence, comfort, security and all that stuff right? >> Eric: There ya go. Yeah. >> Yeah, that's just- I'll pay for that! >> Sure! (laughter) So, we've seen software move heavily towards this model whether it be SaaS or various moving CapEx to OpEx. When I look at infrastructure it's been a little bit of a slower move, especially, I've got some background on the storage side, if you look at storage, it's like oh okay. I'm conditioned as a customer to think about my capacity, my performance, and how I'm tuning everything, and I need to make adjustments, and making changes usually takes a little bit longer. Red Hat's got a lot of software products in the storage space. Help us understand how this fits in and are customers gettin' more comfortable moving from the CapEx to the OpEx for their uses? >> Yeah, good segue. So Ceph and Gluster are some really interesting storage products from Red Hat. And they fit right on our servers, and so we install them; we build big solutions around both of them. I'm actually working on big architecture for another company, for another customer out in Germany. So it's huge stuff cluster. The neat thing about it is our TruScale model allows us to actually sell them on OpEx in a storage product. And what we're measuring is the storage, what I call storage in motion versus the storage at rest. So we see all the different usages of the different servers. The servers are acting as controllers, a multi-tenant controller. And there's a lot of information that's being stored and transmitted through the systems. TruScale's just accumulating all the usage of that. And Steve, maybe you want to talk about some of the software side of it from the storage perspective, but it's really, TruScale fits right in real nicely with the storage side of it. >> I'd actually like to talk about it more comprehensively from the Red Hat software side of it. Anywho, let's talk about how they're already no certification needed. We're looking at all Red Hat applications on TruScale; whether it's OpenShift, or Rel8, Gluster, Ceph, Ansible. So we're really excited because we're not limited in the portfolio. >> Exactly. Exactly. >> Yeah. >> So, Steve, it's interesting, you used to think about, okay, what boxes am I buying, what license I'm doing. If you talk about a real true software world it should be a platform that unifies these things together. So it sounds like you're saying we're getting there. I shouldn't have to think about- give us a little bit, kind of the old way and where customers are seeing it today. >> Yeah, well we're not getting there. We're there. What that allows us to do is to take the reference designs that we have and the testing that we've previously validated with Intel and Red Hat and be able to snap pieces together. So it's just a matter of what's different and unique for the client and the client's situation and their growth pattern. What's great about TruScale is that in this model we can predicatively analyze their consumption forward based on the business growth. So for example, if you're using OpenShift and you start with a small cluster for one or two lines of business, as they adopt DevOps methodologies going from either Waterfall or Agile, we can predicatively analyze the consumption forward that they're gonna need. So they can plan years in advance as they progress. And as such, the other snap-ins, say storage, that they're gonna need for data in motion or data at rest. So it's actually smarter. And what that ends up doing is obviously saving them money, but it saves them time. The typical model is going back to IT and saying we need these severs, we need the storage and the software, and bolt it altogether. And the IT guys are hair on fire running around already. So they can, as long as IT approves it, they can sort of bypass that big, heavy lift. >> So from what you've heard of this week, with Rel8, the big launch last night, a lot of fun, right? >> Steve: Yeah. >> And then OpenShift 4 earlier today talked about- >> Yeah. >> What if there are elements to those two, either one of them, that you find most attractive? Or that really kinda jump off the page to you? Is there anything out there that you're seein' or through the demos that we saw today, or last night even that you think wow, that's cool, that's good, that this is gonna be useful for us? >> OpenShift is one of the things that we're seeing in the industry that's just really enabling the whole DevOps practice. So OpenShift is interesting from the perspective of flexibility, automation, the tooling. Rel8, of course, we've all been waiting for it, I guess for a while now probably. >> Host: Right. >> It's just the next level, the next generation. The Red Hat software, see I'm a big fan of Ceph. I mean I just like Ceph, it's just a neat storage product. It's been around for awhile, but it keeps getting better. It's kinda like the old storage product that first came out with some soft-refined storage. But the whole ecosystem around Red Hat is just very appealing. I actually, Cloudforms is one I think is a little under-utilized today. Cloudforms is a real nice cloud management platform as well. So there's a lot of interesting Red Hat software. Steve, we've done all these reference architectures, are there any ones that stick out to you? I've just been kind of rattling off some of the ones that I like. >> Yeah, I really like the CoreOS integration, 'cause we now see that acquisition really taking shape in a true productization sense, in a practical use sense. I think with Red Hat owning that asset and controlling the development, they can build out features as needed. They're not having to wait on the ecosystem or to spin different cycles for growth. So I think that's my highlight. I've been looking for that. And auto-provisioning as well. I think that's a really key benefit to it, just to make things more smooth and simple. >> Well gentlemen, thanks for the time. >> Guest: Sure. >> Nice to meet you. Look forward to seeing you down the road. We were talkin' about Lenovo, Stu and I were there a couple of years ago, Ashton Kutcher out in San Francisco, so now we get the two of you guys. You're right there with Ashton, right? (laughter) >> That's right. >> Same celebrity! Thanks for sharing the time. Good to see you guys. >> Eric: Thank you. >> Steve: You too. >> Back with more live here at Red Hat Summit 2019, we're in Boston, and you're watching theCube. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Well, good afternoon, or good evening if you're watching back in the Eastern Time Zone. Good to have you here live as theCUBE continues our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm John Walls, along with Stu Miniman and we now welcome Jeff Boudreau, who's the president and GM of storage at Dell EMC. >> Thank you! >> John: Jeff, good to see you. >> Good to see you guys, thank you for having me. >> Alright, it's been like a solid six hours since you launched your new product. >> That's right. >> The PowerMax. >> What's been, I'm curious, what's been the reaction and what do people want to know from you when they get a little face time? >> Well, the big things I have is one, the reaction's been fantastic since we launched this morning. Obviously Jeff Clarke on stage with my good friend Bob Decrescenzo, PowerMax Bob, now known and understood, and Bob did a great job today announcing the product. The feedback has been phenomenal. People really want to understand, I kind of frame it as, we talk about the future of enterprise storage, and I kind of put some bold statements out there saying it's the fastest storage array, it's the most intelligent storage array, and it's the most resilient storage array in the market today. And I kind of go through that, and a lot of people want to understand a lot around what we've done around NVME as an interface. NVME in the protocol stack and also with the media itself and understand that and truly unleashing the power of doing what I would call NVME right. As you kind of think about where we are and where we want to go with storage class memory, and making sure you unleash the whole value, so that's a big one customers talk to me about. The other big one is around a lot of the ML in the AI. So, we've done a lot of great work. The team's done an amazing job with the OS and the PowerMax operating system, and we do a lot of work with the application hinting, if you will. So we have some technology that we built that actually understands the applications, almost like putting a fingerprint on it, if you will. And then we have algorithms and heuristics within the array that understands the pattern recognition across that and that really understands that. So last year I talked a lot about autonomous storage, this is the realest first step of actually trying to be truly autonomous storage. >> Yeah, Jeff, it's really interesting. The people that have watched the storage industry, there's certain things that have kind of, this is where we are. SCSI has been with us for-- >> Ever. >> Longer than my career. >> Jeff: Mine too. >> You look at NVME and storage class memory and we're starting to get beyond that. I talked with Adnan earlier and saying intelligent storage is something that I've seen lots of product announcements over the other top two intelligent storage! >> Yeah. >> But when you talk about billions of decisions being made by arrays underneath, bring us inside the product team a little bit and how much effort goes into this and the effort. >> The team, number one, is a phenomenal team. I think they're world-class in everything they do and all the products they build, it's been phenomenal. And they've done a ton of work underneath around the algorithms and heuristics. I mean, we've been doing, if you think of our install base and how much data that we store, protect, and secure, at the end of the day we do more than anybody else. So the team's done a lot of work around our data scientists and our engineers have done a lot of work to understand the I/O patterns, heuristics off the drives, the telemetry streams, and then actually build the algorithms to really make sense of that data and provide useful insights. So, it's not easy, to your point, it's a lot of great work by a great team. So, Adnan, I'm glad you had him, because he's one of the key guys to make sure that it all works and comes together. And then, understand the use case of that application tied back to the system is where the magic happens, really connecting that and really putting that forward. >> You know, we talk about faster, and you probably can, maybe you can hear the music, it's got louder. >> It's loud. >> If not faster. How so, and what was your measurement for success there? How did you say, okay, this is the goal, this is what we're shooting for, or did you take technology and say, what can we squeeze out of this? >> Well, it's kind of funny, when we built the architecture, we actually do a lot of prototyping and we do a, actually we do a lot of paperwork up front as we understand the customer requirements, the use cases we're trying to drive, we actually write a lot of that down on paper and say okay, what do we need to do to hit that market need? And then we look at what we need to do from a hardware and software standpoint as we architect the system. And that's what the team really did here. So, what we're looking at is what the customers are looking at, not only for today, but into the future, so as you think about where we are today, and you heard Michael talk about 2020, I've actually been talking a lot about 2030. If you think about IoT, you think about AI, and machine learning and all the sensa data, structured and unstructured, data's exploding. And at the end of the day is, how is our customers going to, it's one thing to store and protect and secure that data, we got to do a lot more than that. And this goes back to how do we make, get in real-time, make it accessible, but also extract the value of that data to provide useful insights back to our customers. They can provide them to their customers, either for better business decisions or more value, or what have you. And that's really where the power comes from. So I've been focusing a lot on the data, and to me it's really about the data, the data explosion that's coming. The customers really understand how big that's going to be, and the period of time, and so what we worked on today, focused on what we're trying to do tomorrow, we want to make sure that we have a clear path to help our customers on that journey. So, going back to some of the performance characteristics that we looked at is not only what we model for today, making sure that we're the best in the industry, best in the market, we also want to look forward saying okay, as data explodes over the next few years, can this technology evolve and support that growth and that data? And a lot of it's going to go back to the machine learning and AI because there's going to be a lot of compute required to actually do a lot of that and provide that intelligence going back. So some big claims I think probably the team talked to you about today, we're 2x anybody in the industry bar-none on this base, so it's ten million IOPS on an 8,000, you're talking 150 gigabytes per second for bandwidth. I mean just the latency and the performance is just phenomenal in its box and it's got so much horsepower behind it. And we also did some creative things around efficiency, as hopefully Adnan and them talked to you guys about it, but we did inline denuke, inline compression, we offload that engine so that way we could have no impact on the data services and really offload on the card, so we don't impact performance for our customers. >> Yeah, Jeff, loved that discussion of data, I think there's been a great trend the last few years talking, it's not just about storing, whether it's structured, unstructured, block, file, object, it's about how businesses can leverage that data, get it in the business. Big in the themes, the keynotes, IT and business, we really really bring it together, maybe look at your storage portfolio, how is that transforming businesses? How is the, not just storage, but data impacting what's going on? >> I mean, to me data is the precious metal, it's the crucial asset, right? You can debate if it's the most important asset for our customers, between their people and their data, you can debate. For me, if you step back, data's the most crucial asset they have, so you've got to treat it as such. To me, it's about what can we do to unleash the power of that data to enable them to be more successful? And so, I think you're dead on, it's not just about infrastructure. Infrastructure's interesting, it's cool, it's modern, we have to make sure that we enable through that way, but it's really about having a data strategy and how they want to do it. So, if you think about having the right data in the right place at the right SLA, this thing's around how you manage the mobility, the infrastructure support and all of the things that you would do to drive that, and I think that's critical. So, we want to make sure we as Dell Technologies and we as Dell EMC, and me as the storage guy, make sure that we unleash the value of that data to enable our customers to make better business decisions to add more value to their businesses, and that's what we're driving, and that's the whole strategy of what we're working on. >> All right, Jeff, talking about PowerMax, >> Jeff: Yeah. >> I've talked to the team about the X2, >> Jeff: Awesome. >> announcement, step back for a second, give us a snapshot of what's happening with the storage portfolio, and you came from what I guess we would call the legacy EMC side. >> Correct. >> Now that we've had more than a year under our belts, between the company together, give us that update on the portfolio. >> Yeah, so we still believe in the power of the portfolio and no ifs, ands, or buts, so I'm not going to shy away from that, in regards to that, brings us a lot of strengths, but it also provides some weaknesses in regards to complexity. And the big thing I think Michael talked about a year ago is we're going to leave no customer behind, and we're completely living up to that. So, you've seen launches recently on Unity, you've seen launches recently on SC, you've seen launches recently on X2 and what have you, and we're going to continue to do that because our customers, we have a large and loyal install base of legacy Dell or legacy EMC customers, which are obviously the most important people, direct and indirect sellers that have some biases or confidence in certain things, and we want to make sure we take care of them. To be clear, simplification is part of our strategy and it will be. So, going from a lot of brands to less than brands, we're absolutely going to do it, and I'm happy to share that in more detail when we have more detail. But we are working through that. But my commitment to the customer is going back to Michael's point, is really two-fold, one is on the data migration and the data mobility, it will be native and it will be seamless to move data from point A to point B. So, I want to be clear, everything will have a next gen, it might not be the same brand or tattoo that they were used to before, it will be a system that meets the market need, the customer requirements and the architecture and the future functions to support that. We'll provide the mobility natively. In addition to that we're going to provide our Loyalty Programs, so not only on the technology side we'll make sure that they're whole, but on the Loyalty Program, so our investment protection that our customers want, need, and demand, and deserve, we're going to provide that as well. So we're going to take care of them on the technology side, but we're also going to take care of them on the business side. But, like I said, I'll share more details when we're here, probably more so next year. >> Right. (laughing) Simple, predictable, profitable, right? >> That's right. >> Keep it simple. >> It's really that simple. >> That's a good formula. Jeff, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time. >> Awesome, thank you for having me. >> Jeff Boudreau from Storage at Dell EMC. Back with more and we are live here in the Sands at Dell Technologies World 2018. (upbeat music)