>> Narrator: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante, and Stu Miniman. >> For several years now, the analysts at WikiBound have been talking about taking the cloud, the public cloud, operating model, and bringing it to your data, wherever that data lives. Hey everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Welcome to HCI: A Foundation For IT Transformation. We're here with Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management and Marketing, at Dell EMC. Chad, good to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, glad to be here, good to spend time with you guys. >> So, we talk a lot about, you know, VxRail, speaking of foundations. Give us a quick update. What is it, and what's new with VxRail? >> Okay, well big news in VxRail land, right, we just completed our transition under the 14th generation of Dell Power Edge servers, so this gives us a substantially more powerful platform, a substantially more predictable performance, and a lot more configuration options that make it fit a lot of different workloads that our customers have, so it really makes it prime time for HCI. >> So, where is the power and performance come from? Is that predominantly, kind of, new compute? >> That's a big piece of it. Some of that is software as well, right? vSAN underlies VxRail as a software defined storage layer, and we've seen pretty amazing increases in performance, just from software, from our 13G, to our 14G transition, but when we look at that performance now, on 14G servers, with the Intel Skylake chipset, we're seeing 2x performance over the last generation, and we're seeing latencies that are very, very low. And that has to do with, more and faster memory channels, more threads, overall faster processors, so really off the hook, in terms of the performance that we're seeing. >> Chad, when we look at HCI, it's really about the software layer, often, it gets overlooked, you know, what actually has to happen between the software and that underlying hardware? Are there optimizations, does it matter if I'm using the software, you know, what's optimized for that next generation Intel chip? >> Yeah, it's all about the software, or so our software vendor would say, but we know that when you're treating something as a system, you need that hardware and that software to work together, in perfect unison, as a system, and, you know, we've done a lot in this generation, working with the PowerEdge team to make sure that we have the right hardware, hooks, and design points that are focused on HCI. That goes from things like the devices that we use to boot up, and where we would execute the hypervisor kernel, to network connectivity, and really importantly, to the inband channels that we use to update all of the little pieces of firmware that operate the hardware inside the system, right? You need to be able to treat those as a system, update, lifecycle manage those, all in context of one another, so having direct and deep, meaningful access into that hardware is critically important when you're operating a system like this. >> When we've looked at, kind of, our cloud strategy, in general, it's about the data. We talk about data, it's things like predictability and latency, it's about, kind of, the power of the underlying thing, maybe, give us a little bit more specifics, as to what you're getting in this generation. >> So, the big difference here, above and beyond the performance, which is about 2x what we saw from the last generation, if we look at the same hardware, the same software, running on the two different pieces of hardware, about 100% better. But that's really just part of the story. It's the predictability of latency that's critically important. If you're going to migrate Tier 1 workloads under this infrastructure, you need to ensure that other workloads are not going to disturb that performance. So when we look at this, we look at how the IOs per second increases, and we look at the overall latency. How long does that latency line stay flat, right? So when we look at this generation, we see over 2x the IOPS, but the horizontal line where we look at the response time in latency, it stays flat nine times longer in this generation than in the last. So if you've got that sub-millisecond response time, even at very high IOPS, you can put a lot of different workloads on that same infrastructure, and still get predictable performance. >> I think, the other thing that people don't understand, is that, oh, HCI, it's just like, it's that little LEGO block you build, but it's not just one LEGO block, what have you seen from customers, what's kind of, the portfolio, what are the decisions that they have to make, to kind of, pick the right configuration? >> Sure, so yeah, when you're a kid and you get your first LEGO set, you get a lot of pretty generalized blocks, they're all, you know, square and some are rectangle, but not a lot of variability. When you get up into the big leagues of the LEGO Star Wars set, right, you've got a lot of specialized parts, and you can do really advanced, really cool things. That's really where we're at with HCI right now. If you want to really tune the infrastructure for the workloads that you have, you need a lot of variability in the processors you choose, the amount of memory, the speed of memory, and even the storage. It could be hybrid, some people still choose hybrid HDDs, but even within flash, people will choose SAS or SATA drives depending on the performance and cost benefits that they want to realize. So being able to scale up and down the processors, the memory, different types of storage, is critically important, so you can fit it into those different workloads. Also, a lot more people use this for VDI, and for high end imaging. So the ability to pack these things full of graphical processing units, and still be able to power and cool the things, is critically important. We have a lot of applications in those verticals where there's video processing and these are required. So, we don't just have one model of VxRail, we've got a number of different VxRail models, all of which can scale up, and then of course, HCI can intrinsically scale out. So that lets you really fine-tune it and get to that expert level, in terms of your LEGO building blocks. >> So Chad, a minute ago, you mentioned workloads. So as you're bringing this sort of 14th generation server technology to VxRail, how has it affected workloads, what are you seeing is the sweet spot for workloads? >> So if I were to think back a year, the question that every customer would ask, is how do I know which workload is right for HCI? And a lot of times they even lack the vocabulary and taxonomy to say, okay, that fits, that doesn't fit. What's happened in the meantime though, are the software's gotten so much better, the hardware's gotten so much faster and more predictable, that the question is, well, what workloads are not right for HCI yet? And there are very few that aren't. So, we've seen people generally start off with one workload, right? Maybe it's VDI, maybe it's a database, and then they start to move other, as they get comfortable with it, they move other workloads over to it. Obviously, we've got a big install block, or install base of VxBlock, and Vblock. We see a lot of those customers start to migrate workloads from there onto a layer of HCI. And more and more, those are becoming Tier One workloads. Crate & Barrel is a great example, a great customer of ours. They're moving their point of sale systems onto VxRail. Now for a retailer, your point of sale system, that's about as mission critical as you can possibly get, so they and others now have the confidence to start to move these things over. The only outliers that we see are some of these very big data applications that are hugely write intensive, and we actually usually end up selling a layer of hyper-converge with our Isilon arrays, to store that data, and then put a layer of hyper-converge compute around it, because in some ways, hyper-converged is just a better way to server, if you know what I mean. >> Wondering if you can talk about the business impact, what a customer's seeing, how are they quantifying the value of these systems, share some stories, or color there. >> Sure, it's all about operational expense savings, right? How much more efficiently am I going to be able to operate this infrastructure? It's not so much about capital acquisition costs. So when you look at the typical operational expense savings, and that comes from us doing all the lifecycle management of the hardware, of the software, of the cluster as a system, you see those costs go down. Really good example, is First Credit of British Columbia. Another one of our good customers. Now, they've deployed this, they've seen 30% OPEX savings and they've seen 50% power and space savings. You get a smaller package because you don't have separate storage array, separate servers, but, you also have really, one function that needs to operate your environment and that's the virtual administrator. He or she is the one that really operates everything, you don't have separate storage, separate compute, separate virtualization teams that have to look after the infrastructure. So, that first run is very easy, very fast to deploy, but it's day two through 700 and day 900 where you see that recurring operational expense saving where it really pays off for customers, all the updates and updates and life cycle management. >> Yeah, so Chad you talk about the success and all the customers. What about the customers that haven't looked at kind of the HCI space yet? What are they missing? You know, what do you say to those customers that maybe, you know, aren't sure if the waters right to jump in yet? >> So there's really three ways that you're going to encounter a customer who's going to consider HCI. You're either going to refresh a server, you know, your servers are up for maintenance and you're going to take a look at HCI as the next step in your evolution of your compute strategy. Or you're going to refresh your storage, and you're going to look at hyperconvergence as the next step in the evolution of your storage strategy. Or you've got that one workload that's probably net new and it's going to be, sort of, an isolated case and they need an infrastructure and they need to stand if up fast. That third case is really the one that drove the initial adoption of HCI, I can't tell you how many of our customers started with VDI. I mean, it's so cliched now to talk about VDI as killer app for HCI, but that's how so many people started. Because it's, you know, a very bound, isolated infrastructure and from there they get comfortable with it and they start to bring other workloads onto it. So, if you're thinking about refreshing your servers and if you're thinking about refreshing storage, it's time to kick the tires onto HCI. If you've got a workload that you need to stand up quickly and you don't know how big it's going to be, you know, one, two, three years down the road. It's another opportunity to look at HCI. Because you can start with a very small infrastructure, but you can grow it to a very very large one. >> What if we could talk a little bit about digital transformation, I mean, everybody's talking about digital transformation, and to us, digital transformation is all about how you leverage data and the edges exploding. We've envisioned sort of a three tier data model. You've got the edge, you've got maybe an aggregation point and you bring it back to the cloud. And that cloud can be a public cloud or it can be on-prem. So you've got to have some kind of cloud infrastructure to manage all this data. So where does this fit in the context of transformations and why does hardware matter? >> Yep, well let's go from the end and work back to the beginning. Hardware matters because of form factor, for one. As you start to push compute out to the edge, right, you want form factors that are small, don't consume a lot of power but, you know, still have a lot of processing power and can manipulate that data. Right, the whole internet of things phenomenon that is, creating all this data out at the edge, you know, presents us with a conundrum right? The data itself is not that valuable, the insights that we get from the data are immensely valuable. Bringing all that data back to the core to do something with is not cost effective. So, it's how do we turn the data at the edge into information and then how do we funnel that valuable information back to the core and leave the unvaluable data out where it is. hyper-converge fits really well there because you can have, you know, devices of very small form factors that are very quick to deploy, very easy to manage remotely. At the aggregation point you can have, simply, larger versions of the same thing or more of the same thing. And then finally at the core you can have very large clusters of hyperconverged appliances, like VxRail, to do your processing. Now the key is from an operational perspective you've still got a single pane of glass that manages everything. Right, it's still the same set of tools, it's still the same hardware and software lifecycle management process that happens out at the edge, at the aggregation point and at the core. So again, it comes back to the operational expense of making decisions closer to the data and then managing everything with a consistent set of tools. >> So I wondered if we could also talk about the competition and when Stu and I think about competition in this sphere we look at, first of all this all sort of software defined, everything can moved into software defined. So we see two vectors, one is head to head competition with other software defined suppliers, and the second big competitor is, hey, I'm just going to roll on my own. >> Chad Dunn: Right >> So let's start with the former, why Delium C vs vendor A, B, C or D? >> Sure, sure it really gets down to what your goal is as a customer and we obviously have multiple options within our own portfolio and those perfectly, you know, find solutions for a lot of people. But, you know, number one if you're a VMware user and you want to optimize around the VMware user experience, then VxRail is the way to go. Because we do co-engineer this with Vmware, it's not just a regular partnership, we have engineers and marketing people and product managers at Vmware that functionally role up to our team and so we do behave as one engineering and one product management organization to really optimize the user experience for VMware. Secondly, architecturally from a VCM perspective, this is a service that's baked into the kernal of vSphere. So, in terms of performance and the overhead that it creates on CPU, memory, et cetera. This is the best game in town. We can do more IO more predictably with flatter latency than really any other solution that's on the market in the HCI space. Every other one takes a virtual storage appliance approach where they have something running on top of the hypervisor. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> The very long and circuitous data path, we'll performance test against solutions like that all day long, every day, that doesn't worry us at all. So, if you're a vSphere customer, VMware customer it's the most obvious choice and from a performance perspective you're not giving up anything right? We don't want users to have to sacrifice the storage functionality, the performance, the compute functionality. Just because it's hyper-converge and you scale out doesn't mean you can compromise on any to those axis. >> Okay, what about the guys who like to change their own oil in the car and the spark plugs and tune it up and they want to roll on their own. >> (laughs) It's been a long time since I've been able to work on my own car. So I encounter these kind of customers all the time. It's the build your own crowd and it's what they've been doing for a long time. And it's great, alright, I build my own computers at home and I have my own ESX server that I put together. I can't afford a VxRail. (laughing) There's no employee discount. So I'll tell you a story that will hopefully make sense, my first job when I got into this business, I went to Boston College, my first job and work study was to keep a spreadsheet that had all the MAC addresses and all the IP addresses for every host on the BC network and keep those in sync. >> You're really good at that I bet. >> I was excellent at that. That is not a skill set that is in demand right now. Or really even at that time. But when you think about what it means to take a software defined storage product like VMware vSAN and take an x86 server and put those together. Yes, you're getting to the same destination of running vSphere on a host with software defined storage. You're missing the systemness, right? We go to a lot of trouble to make sure we're managing all of things things in the context of the cluster level. All of the little pieces of firmware, and they're roughly 12 or so pieces of firmware that we have to take care of. From the BIOS to the drive controller firmware, the drives, the boss card, which is our boot media, the iDRAC firmware, the backplane, power supplies. In legacy EMC we spent 30 years building arrays. We had all those same challenges with all the different pieces of firmware and software that all had to function as a system, we did that. And we guaranteed that it would live up to 5/9ths of availability for the customer. That's exactly what we do when we deliver VxRail's hyperconverge. If you want to choose to build those things yourself that's fine if you have the skills and that's how you want to operate your business. The 5/9ths is now on you though. Right, because you're the one responsible for bringing all those parts together. So, yeah it's certainly a valid path for others but, the market is shifting and we see more often than not, people are moving towards a buy approach rather than build. >> You bring up a great point. I remember back in the early days before we even called it HCI, you think about vSAN, oh well is the storage admin going to buy it? Is the virtualization admin going to take that over? What's excited me about this wave is the oh, heres the cool stuff that companies are doing now that they're not spending their time keeping spreadsheets of MAC addresses. >> Chad Dunn: Yeah, yeah exactly. >> What is the kind of, you know, owner of this, look like in your environment? And any cool stories you're hearing from customers transforming their organization. >> By and large the operator is your virtual admin. The person who is at home in vCenter and vROps, you know, maybe even vRA if they're going full infrastructure as a service. That's really the user of this, and the dynamic you mention is similar to what we had with Vblock, right. Customers who went Vblock, who said, I'm going to change my operating model to a virtual administrator versus compute, storage, network. You know, customers who didn't change the operating model were not happy Vblock customers. Ones that did change the model did. And, I'll tell ya a real off script anecdote, recently I was traveling in Europe, and I started playing a game with the sales guy we were traveling with. Because in Europe, very often, they have more of an affinity to putting their logos on the sides of buildings in a lot of European cities. So, as we would go to these different cities and we went from Stockholm all the way down to Rome, to Switzerland, to Amsterdam. You know, we're just spotting VxRail customers, right, whose going to spot the most. And the one really interesting one is we checked into a hotel, you know, late night in Switzerland. Next morning we meet for breakfast and he goes, "Did you spot the rail customer?" I said "Who was it?" We went into the bathroom and they have these, you know, squeeze bottles that have the soap in the shower and it's a cosmetics company and they're located in Germany. And they do, obviously, a ton of business all over Europe, and they had outsourced a lot of their IT because, you know, their core competency is not IT, it's cosmetics. And they now have one guy that looks after all of IT for this company rather than outsource it to two different companies to manage all this and he runs it all on VxRail. So, transformative yes, to that company very transformative. But, at a very small scale, but that pattern sort of repeats itself the higher that you scale. >> Alright we're out of time but where can people go to get more information on this and other products your HTI strategy. >> If I were them I'd go to dellemc.com/hci. >> Excellent, Chad, thanks very much, Stu appreciate you co-hosting with me and check out videos on thecube.net, this and other videos will be up there. Thanks for watching everybody, Dave Vellante for Stu Miniman we'll see you next time! (techno music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi, Dave Vellante here, with John Siegel, Vice President of product marketing at Dell EMC. John, what does it mean to be a leader in hyperconversion infrastructure? >> First of all, thanks for asking. It's been quite a year, 2017, for us. Just this past quarter, we became the leader, Dell EMC did, and the number one leader in hyperconversion infrastructure, and we want to thank, certainly, our customers out there, as well, We think it was also due to the fact that we have a full portfolio at HCI, and really strong partnerships with folks like the VMware. >> OK, so, how about workload progression? VDI was really sort of the initial sweet spot, it's true, of hyperconversion. Has it evolved, and how has it evolved? >> It has evolved quite a bit, really, I think over the past coupl years we've seen it evolve from HCI really addressing, like you said, VDI workloads, small consolidation-type projects, text EV, really, to a majority of virtualized workloads in the data center. In fact, with the announcement this week, with the support now of 14th generation PowerEdged servers, we think we've taken it to another level where, because of 14th generation power servers, we have the ability to now provide the power, if you will. The performance, and the predictable performance in particular, that workloads require, mission-critical workloads require in the data center. >> OK, so we've ticked the performance box. What about the economics piece? How is hyperconversion infrastructure helping IT operations lower cost? >> Ya know, it's I think that's one of the main reasons that HCI crossed the chasm in the past year. It's because it's become a no-brainer, from an economics perspective. As customers look to transform IT and move away from traditional IT, the TCO advantage relative to traditional IT is 30-40%. I mean, you name it. I think Wikibon's done a number of studies this year, as well. I mean, you name it, across the board. So, it's really become a no-brainer there. And it's also become very compelling relative to public cloud, as well. The on-prem model. So, if you look at whether it's traditional IT, or whether you look at public cloud, I think what we're finding now is true private cloud built on, if you will, HCI portfolio is becoming a compelling way for customers to transform their data center, and to build on top of that cloud-operating model. >> OK, so speaking of public cloud, what's Dell EMC's point of view on cloud generally? >> So, our view is that the cloud is an operating model. It's not a place. So, really, what it's all about is providing that turn-key, self service-type experience, regardless of where your data is, if you will. Whether it's off-prem, whether it's on-prem, I mean, clearly, we don't have a strong opinion of that, other than that we want to make the on-prem experience as cloud-like as possible, and we think that starts with a critical foundation of HCI. >> OK, John. You mentioned PowerEdged servers before, a lot of people say it's just servers, it's a commodity, what say you? >> I'll tell you what. So, first of all, HCI is defined by software, right? And then I think we've talked about in the past, but it's really the combination of software with hardware that really delivers that turn-key outcome that customers expect when it comes to hyperconversed infrastructure. And this announcement is really about that combination of software and hardware, and the hardware, in particular, is the star of the show. It's 14th generation PowerEdged servers. What this brings to the table is powerful, predictable performance, first and foremost. The ability, now, to support mission-critical workloads. This is something that we haven't had the ability to really do before in the past. It can now support mission-critical workloads in the data center, first and foremost. So, it's powerful from that perspective. It's purposeful, in that it can now support any configuration. We actually can support up to 20 million different configurations, I'm not kidding here, when it comes to PowerEdged configurations with VXRail, as an example. And PowerEdged, 14th generation servers are actually purpose-built for HCI. They're addressing over 150 different customer requirements out there, from performance, to reliability, to manageability, to deployment, because, typically, a commodity server's really built as a compute engine. Instead, what PowerEdge servers are about, the 14th generation ones, is they're really, literally, custom-built for HCI, and that's why we think this is going to help take HCI to a whole new level, and allow customers to now start to deploy HCI across their data center to build that foundation for the cloud. >> Excellent. I think you nailed it. To give you the last word, just maybe summarize the announcement, final thoughts, HCI, wherever you want to go. >> I'll tell you what. I mean, we're just so excited. I think HCI has, as I said, become the foundation for the cloud. And, we've got a full portfolio. We give customers choice. You know, regardless of the type of use case they have, regardless of the type of workload they have, we have an HCI answer for our customers. Some customers, for example, want to start small and grow with appliances, others want to actually transform their network, as well. So, we have VxRack, as an example, there, where customers that want to transform more of the stack. We're excited to have that as an option for customers, too. So really, across the board, we're providing anything from Ready Nodes, where customers can do a little more of the work themselves, to appliances like VXRail and Xe series, where it's a turnkey experience across a server the compute and storage, all the way up to VxRacks, where we're making the entire data center, if you will, turnkey, as a foundation for that cloud-operating model. >> OK, awesome. Let's see, I lied. Last word is mine. CrowdChat on December 1, where it's kind of an ask me anything on the announcement. >> Ask me, ask Chad, ask whoever anything. >> Great, and then where do people go to get more information? >> Dellemc.com/HCI. We keep it simple, my friend. >> That's great. John, thanks very much. Appreciate ya comin. All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see ya next time. (upbeat music)

>> From the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Prior to the historic merger between Dell and EMC, Dell had a relationship with Nutanix, a pioneer in hyper conversion infrastructure. After the merger, many people questioned whether that relationship would continue. Hi everybody, my name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with John Shirley who's the director of product management at Dell EMC, and we're here to talk about the continuation of that relationship, Hi John, good to see you. >> Good to see you as well, thanks for having me. >> You've got a new announcement today, it's the XC series, tell us all about it. >> Yeah, so the XC series, what we're announcing, this is our third generation of powered server deployments for XC series and, what we're announcing is that the two most popular models for XC series are going to be refreshed in 14th generation servers. Those specifically are XC640, which is really designed for compute intensive things like VDI, private cloud, some remote office application, as well as the XC740XD, which is more for storage intensive applications, so think share point, big data application things like that. Now all of the new platforms that we'll release will have new technologies like MVME, they'll have faster networking options like 25 gig ethernet, and a whole bunch of other features that are really going to help propel this into more mainstream applications. >> Okay, so it's not just faster, better price, performance, there's some other innovations that you mentioned in MVME that are coming in that you're integrating and engineering into the solution. >> Absolutely, so we have a really tight relationship between our Power Edge, as well as what we do on the XC series, and in addition to that, we have a really tight relationship with our Nutanix engineering counterparts as well. We're really designing these all into a single application. >> Okay, so the marketing, I'm sorry to interrupt. So the marketing gurus at Dell EMC are throwing around this term, purposeful. >> Yes. >> What does that mean? >> I love this term because it really takes into account all the additional efforts that we do around the solution, we have years and years of experience of deploying SDS solutions on top of servers, and what we really realize is that you want to design these solutions, again to be purposeful as the name implies. It's things like controlling everything, all the way from orderability to manufacturing, to serviceability to ensure that you get a really tight and clean experience with a customer. So things like CPU, memory, hard drive configuration, designed specifically for hyper converge, and that flows all the way through to support. So it's a much cleaner experience for the customer. >> So what does that mean, designed specifically for hyper converge, I mean can you unpack that a little bit? What's different about hyper converge that requires that different design? >> Yeah, well hyper converge, as you probably well know, and I'm not sure how many of the users out there know, but it was really designed around the cloud experience. So taking a look at the hyper scale vendors, and designing similar models for data centers, and really what that entails is things about taking a power edge platform, designing the technologies to be fault tolerant, to be scalable, and we've taken that to the next level. So on the XC series, we've designed some software and some Dell IP that really harnesses a lot of the capabilities of the power edge. We call it the Power Tools SDK, and it really allows for software defined solutions like Nutanix to sit on top of Power Edge. By the way, we use it for our other platforms as well within the portfolio, but it really shows that it is purposefully built and designed for SDS solutions. >> Okay, so Dell was the first to do an OEM relationship with Nutanix, and subsequently they've done maybe a couple of others, but what makes you guys special? >> Well first off, the power edge platform is the leading platform out there in the marketplace, so that alone right there gives us a lot of strength from a manufacturing, procurement, all that ecosystem. That's one of the benefits that we get. We also do things like develop our own IP around this power tools SDK, as well as other IP that we have on the platform. So that's another one right there. Collectively, within the group, we have hundreds of hours of experience, not only designing storage, but also compute around the hypervisor, and around networking, so we've brought all that expertise into the group to really design this hyperconverge platform. And that's something that no one else can really do on the marketplace. >> So in the early days of HCI, which obviously, the workloads were, VDI was a popular workload, and a lot of the knockoffs were, it's a nice infrastructure for a remote office, or small or mid sized businesses. Can you address scalability? Where are we today in terms of scale? >> On the scale, like I said it was one of the design tenets, so I'll give you a good example. If a customer has bought previous versions of XC series, whether it's the 12th generation or the 13th generation, they can now come and buy the 14th generation from us, and put that into the existing ecosystem. Right into the same cluster, and so talk about a mind shift from traditional architectures that would require essentially ripping out the old gear and putting in the new gear, now you can grow as the technology grows, and you can do that in a very seamless fashion without any downtime, and it's very scalable in a very linear sense. >> Can you talk about the portfolio a little bit? Dell EMC has one of everything, if I want it, you probably have it. >> M-hm. >> But sometimes, analysts and independent observers, customers, probably sales guys, it's confusing. So where does this fit in the portfolio, relative to some of the other things that you've announced today and have in the portfolio? >> We get that question all the time, and it's a great question. But it's a pretty clean answer for us. For customers who are standardized on VM1 and they want that experience, we have VXRL, right? Great product. For customers now who want choice of hypervisors, or if they're already standardized on Nutanix platform, then we have XC series, and we have a lot of customers out there who want to go to a model that sits on top of a power edge base because of the power of power edge, so we've got that to offer to our customers, and in particular when we talk about hypervisor choice, we know that Hyper-V is a very fast growing portion of the market, and we are focused on that part of the market for customers who want to do multiple different hypervisors. >> I wonder if I could ask you, you know when you're separate companies, and you're trying to do engineering, you make it happen. Look what you guys did with VCE. How has the experience been at the engineering level, in terms of getting higher levels of integration, now that you guys are one company? Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yeah, so I'm going to take a step back and not just, just focus on the engineering. It's really end to end, and it goes all the way from the engineering up front, but then it trickles down to the marketing and the product managers, and all the sales teams so everything, end to end, needs to fit well together. What I'll tell you is me, personally, I talk to my product management counterparts, my sales counterparts over on the Nutanix side on a nearly daily basis, so the relationships got to be strong and we've really strengthened that over the years. >> Okay, Nutanix's got to be happy because they've got a massive distribution channel. You guys, Michael Dell was very clear on this from the early days that you guys were going to continue the relationship because that's what customers want. Can you talk about culturally your focus on customers, and EMC's always been very customer focused, Dell, Michael Dell personally was very customer focused, is that really the sort of genesis of the continuation of this relationship? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, we are maniacally focused on customers, so if you look at the new platforms that we're shipping, give you a data point. We talk to the customers and we have somewhere around 150 new design features specifically for the XC series platform because of those conversations with customers and because we've done this for three generations, we have a lot of those inputs leading into the product, and so yes we are very focused on the customers, and what we know is that the customers want to have that choice. Not all of them do, right? A lot of customers are going to go over to the Xrell, it's a great product, it's growing really quickly, but we also know that a number have really standardized again on the Hyper-V, or on the Nutanix platform. >> Well because of the size of your install space, you have a huge observation base, we like to call it, and you obviously collect a lot of data. It sounds like you've been able to leverage that for competitive advantage and to add additional value for your customers. >> Yes, it's always nice to have a product and a portfolio that can win. >> Alright so we got to wrap, so we got a crowd chat coming up on December first. First half, #NextGenHCI, it's kind of an AMA on this announcement. Where can I get additional information on this? >> So you can go to www.Dell.com/HCI. >> Excellent, well, John, thanks very much. >> Thank you. >> For coming to the Cube. Alright, thanks for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time. (light techno music)

>> Announcer: From the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, Dave Vellante. I'm here with Colin Gallagher, who's the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Dell EMC. And we're talking about next generation VxRail product came out almost two years ago. Colin, I want to poke at it a little bit and challenge you somewhat. A lot of people would say great, you know, you've got a great portfolio, awesome company, you're number one, but you're really trying to lock me into VMware at your sister company. You know, Michael Dell owns both companies, what do you say to that? >> Well, I mean, VxRail is jointly developed with VMware. That's a fact. It is the, as such, is the best hyper-converged appliance for VMware environments. And it does require you to run vSphere. But, that isn't necessarily a lock-in. When I talk to customers about this, I always phrase it as, it's a matter of ecosystem choice. And whatever product you purchase today, be it a laptop, be it a phone, you're not just choosing that product, you're choosing the ecosystem behind it. And, the VMware ecosystem is incredible. It's huge, the number of developers, the number of third-party applications, all the support for it is incredible. So, it's not about vendor lock-in, it's about are you choosing an ecosystem that is large enough to support you? Are you choosing an ecosystem that has all of the other third-party vendors? You know, to go to the phone analogy, right, I mean there are phones that die. You know, we can talk about Blackberry or some of the Microsoft phones, that die because there was no app ecosystem for them, right. And again, you want to buy into the ecosystem that gives you the best choice. And VMware certainly is that, and that's why it's the market leader in hypervisors. >> Okay, great, okay let's talk about networking. So, one of the concepts that we talk about a lot at Wikibon is this notion of a single-managed entity, fluid pools of infrastructure, whether it's compute or storage or networking. Now when I think about VxRail, am I correct that you're basically, the networking is not fully-integrated using top-of-rack switch choice, but it's not this sort of hyper-converged infrastructure as I just described it with this single manage entity. Can you address that? >> Absolutely, the network is not included by design. What we find when talking to customers is that not all of them are ready to transform the network. So for customers who want to get started with hyperconverge, who want to consolidate their compute and storage, we have our appliance line, including VxRail. That allows customers a tremendous amount of transformation and tremendous amount of benefit. When customers are ready to transform their network as well, or if they're ready today, we have a sister product, VxRack that allows them to do that. So it's not, unlike other competitors, where they have one solution and they're pushing that one solution, we have a range of products on our portfolio that tailor where customers are along their HCI journey. >> Okay, great, another sort of knock off, if you will, is file support. It's not been something that you've offered before. Where is file? >> It has been a ding on us today. There are customers that want to do file on top of hyper-converge. And some of our competitors have beat us to market on that. However, we're announcing, along with this announcement, the ability to run IsilonSD Edge on top of VxRail. Isilon is the leading file solution on the market. Their SD Edge capability runs on top of VxRail, seamlessly integrates with the VMware environment there. Key use cases for this are edge deployments, where customers want to run compute and file together. And SD Edge has a unique advantage that no one else on the market has, is if you want to do file to core replication, you want to have a bunch of file sites in various remote locations and then you want to consolidate all back to a core location, you can do that running SD Edge on VxRail at the edge and Isilon at your core data center. >> Well, that's awesome, okay, great. I'll give you the last word. What should we know, take aways, why Dell EMC? Wherever you'd like to go. >> We didn't get to be number one in this market by accident. We started out two years ago not number two, not number three, woefully behind. And in the course of two years, through our rapid pace of innovation, really focusing on key customer requirements, not getting distracted by some of the noise in the market, and leveraging the power of our portfolio, we've delivered solutions that customers are adopting, and that are driving us to be number one on the market. >> Excellent, well Colin, thanks for your honest assessment and addressing some of these critical questions. Appreciate it. All right, thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: From the Silicon Angle Media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Prior to the historic merger between Dell and EMC, Dell had a relationship with a company called Nutanix. Nutanix was a pioneer in so called hyperconverged infrastructure and a lot of people questioned whether that relationship would continue after the merger. Hi, everybody, I'm Dave Vellante, and I'm here with John Shirley who's the Director of Product Management at Dell EMC and we're going to talk about that. Welcome, John. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So, the XC Series you are continuing the innovation there, tell us about what you are announcing today. >> Yeah, so this is our third generation, so this is the third generation of the XC Series and what we are announcing is that our most popular models are available now, and the most popular models are the XC640, which is more of a compute intensive node that will be targeted at VDI compute intensive remote offices, things like that. And we're also announcing the XC740XD which is more for storage intensive and performance applications. Think big data, SharePoint, exchange, those kind of things. >> Okay, so we're seeing the evolution of the workloads that can be supported by hyperconvergent infrastructure. And this is more evidence, right? >> Absolutely, and to that point, where we started off, we saw a lot of VDI deployments but now very quickly, once those companies adopt the technology, they are growing that more to mainstream. >> Okay, so I see this term, marketing gurus at Dell EMC throw around this term, purposeful. Okay, let's put some meat on the bone, what does that mean? >> I love the term because it really helps describe what we do, right. This isn't just take things like SDS offers, in this case Nutanix, throw it on some PowerEdge and validate it. Those are really core, important steps. But we go above and beyond that so purposeful really is kind of end to end view of what the solution is. So it's things all the way from configuration to manufacturing and supportability. Things like processor choices, SSD selection, memory types, you can kind of go down the list and we've really designed this purposefully for ACI market. >> Okay, so Dell, of course, was the first to do an OEM relationship with Nutanix, there are others. Can you talk about your differentiation, what's special about Dell EMC and Nutanix. >> Yes, so you know, I think if I go back to the three points that I had before. You have a server, you have SDS solutions and you do some validation around it. Very important steps. We really feel that we have the strongest server in the world and so that's point number one for us. Nutanix, great partnership there. And then the validation steps which we have a very strong engineering team to go after now. If we take that a step further, Dell has created some soft or some IP that really helps kind of glue everything together. We call it the Power Tools SDK. And that's really years worth of experience working with SDS solutions that we know how to integrate into the server and really load that software on top of it so we can do things like life cycle management, we can have recovery options, and there's a whole list of options that are available with the Power Tools SDK. So that's one of them. And the final one is we're Dell EMC and the great part about being this new company is that we have this great, great portfolio of technologies. So it's things like integration with data protection, right. Now that we have Avamar Data Domain, we have the ability to create new products. In fact, that's one of the new things that we have as well. We are announcing a new data protection solution that is taking the Avamar software and taking Data Domain and we're integrating that right into the prism interface so if you listen to Nutanix, they say one click simplicity, well we're introducing a one click back-up, one click back-up automation into the portfolio. >> I love that, because a lot of times back-up is an after thought. You know, oh I got this new infrastructure, how am I going to back up the data. Okay, let's bolt this on. So let me ask you a follow up to that. As Dell EMC, you know one company, sometimes when you're two companies it's hard to do that type of engineering, can you talk about as Dell EMC as one, how the engineering culture and results, the outcomes have improved or changed? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm not just going to focus on engineering, because I really want to take a look at the entire organization. So it goes all the way from engineering, marketing product management, sales, it's that whole eco-system. You can even talk about the support organization, the quality and we really have tight relationship between Nutanix and the Dell EMC counterparts. So to give you a good example, I talk with my product management counterparts and I talk with the sales leaders on a nearly daily basis and we want to make sure that relationship is really strong and that we evolve the relationship over time. >> Can we talk a little bit about scalability? We talked earlier at the top about work loads, VDI was very popular, remote office was kind of a sweet spot of hyperconvergent the early days. It's evolved, but scalability is always been a question. Where are we at with regards to scalability of hyperconvergent infrastructure? >> That's a great question. So, HCI came from the big Cloud providers and that technology was really meant to bring the tenants of what we saw with the scale of Cloud providers into the mainstream data centers. And so to that end, scalability is a core attribute. I'll give you a good example here, when the 14th generation of XC Series comes out, we'll be able to plug that in to customers existing eco-systems. So let's say a customer has a 12th generation or a 13th generation Power Edge XC series, we can now plug that technology right into the same cluster and if you talk about reusing technology, integrating technology into the data center, and really providing great value, and making sure customers don't have to throw away say older or medium term technology like the 13th generation, now they can just use the new technology right in place with the existing. >> John can you talk about the portfolio a little bit I mean, you guys got one of everything. If I want it, you probably have it. But a lot of times that gets confusing for customers and partners, probably sales reps. Where does the XC Series and these new announcements, where does it fit in the portfolio relative to some of the other things you are announcing? >> We get this question all the time. In my mind, it's really clear. For customers who have standardized on VMware, we have the xRail. For customers now who want say a choice of hyper visor or for customers who have already standardized on Nutanix software, we have XC Series. So there's absolutely room for both. We know the market is really big and it's growing fast and we have options for customers now whether they want to run on VMware or they want to run on say on Hyper-V as a good example. >> Let's see, when can I get this stuff? Can I buy it today or soon? >> It's available now, it's available now. And we have customers who are anxiously waiting because the new technologies are on their platforms. So it's available now and shipping now as well. >> Excellent. All right, we got to break, but I'll give you last word. Things like key take aways, you know, what should we be thinking about with this announcement, with the partnership? >> Absolutely, I think the key things here is the partnership is still growing strong, and we really feel that the best way to consume Nutanix software is on the XC series in combination with Dell and really getting the best out of both worlds. Out of the Nutanix relationship, out of the Dell relationship. >> Excellent, right, we got to go, but let's see CrowdChat coming up, #NextGenHCI, CrowdChat.net/NextGenHCI on Decemeber first. Where can I get more information about these products? >> If you go to DellEMC.com/HCI. >> Simple. All right, John, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts it's theCUBE. (upbeat techno music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. (upbeat techno music) >> The research analysts at Wikibon tell us that the market for what they call true private cloud, that is on-prem infrastructure that substantially mimics public cloud infrastructure, the market for true private cloud is growing at 30% compound annual growth rate. Twice the rate of infrastructure as a service in public cloud. Why is that? It's because HCI is really a foundation for IT transformation and private cloud, true private cloud as we call it at Wikibon. Hi, everybody, my name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with Colin Gallagher who's the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Dell EMC. Colin, good to see you again. >> Thanks, good to be here again, Dave. >> So, we're going to get into it, and we're going to talk a lot about VxRail, which was announced well over a year ago. Give us the update on VxRail. >> So, yeah. It's actually almost been two years. It'll be two years this coming February. And it's been a tremendous ride. We have seen tremendous customer adoption, primary for some of the reasons you just mentioned. Customers looking to build private cloud on an agile, kind of modern transformative infrastructure. And to date we've sold over 17,000 nodes. That's over a whopping 165,000 cores, and over 190 petabytes of storage. So, tremendous amount of success. All of this great customer interest has helped propel Dell EMC to be number one in hyperconverged. And we haven't just been selling the same product for the last two years. We've been continually innovating over the course of these last two years driving a tremendous pace of innovation. We've introduced new software capabilities. We had hybrid-only configurations to start and rapidly introduced all flash. After Dell acquired EMC, we moved to a Dell-based hardware infrastructure, obviously. >> Quickly. >> Very quickly, very quickly. >> Almost as fast as the logos changed. >> Yes, almost. (laughter) Within two months. And what we're announcing today is that we're building the next generation and selling the next generation of VxRail appliances based on the 14th generation PowerEdge servers. >> Okay, so you mentioned a lot of that was driven by, of course, the acquisition. But tell us more about 14G sort of and VxRail. What's the synergy? People say, "Eh, it's just another server." Is that the case? >> Absolutely not, Dave. By leveraging the 14th generation PowerEdge servers, we are able to deliver a tremendously powerful, a tremendously purposeful, and tremendously polished appliance experience. What do I mean by powerful? With VxRail we can deliver two times the IOPS than we could on previous generation servers. That allows us to power tremendous mission-critical workloads. But what do we mean by purposeful? We can deliver over a million combinations of configurations for customers. And yes, it's over a million. Me and my team counted, and they hate me for it. (laughs) Yes. >> Really? Did you use a supercomputer to do all that counting? >> No, just Excel spreadsheets and a lot of elbow grease. But by tailoring this, by delivering allows customers to buy exactly what they need to master specific configurations. And by polished we can deliver a highly predictable system. We can deliver over nine times more predictable system than we could in previous generations. And we can maintain sub-millisecond latency for a wide variety of workloads. >> So, I'm interested in this specific contribution of PowerEdge. You're basically saying that it's essentially built for this type of environment. It's not just a generic sort of server that you're popping in. >> Absolutely. You know, the fallacy that people assume when we talk about hyperconverge, which is built on top of software-defined storage, is that hardware doesn't matter. And while yes, a tremendous amount of the power comes from the software, hardware does make a difference. You know, you get a very different experience when you have purpose-built hardware that takes advantage and integrates well with the software-defined layer than if you just throw it on top of a white box server. Think about the hard thing we used to do for storage array. Someone still needs to do that work. You know, software isn't going to cover all of that. And these PowerEdge 14th generation servers have over 150 custom requirements from us, the software-defining ACI teams. Things like how you boot. That needs to be done differently in hyperconverge appliances. The drive choices that we select, they need to be very different than you would find in just a standard server. Even things like power and cooling are slightly different based on the needs of hyperconverge. So, what you've got with a 14th gen server is purpose-built hardware for hyperconverge. You know, the net-net is hardware matters. >> So, you mentioned a lot of permutations. What are some of the configuration options that people should know about here? >> So, I believe we have one of the widest if not the widest selection of CPU choices. Again, why does that matter? Customers want to buy the CPUs that match their specific needs. Nothing more, nothing less, right? If you buy more, you're overspending. If you buy less, you have to buy two or three nodes to get the same level of performance. By offering this tremendous breadth of CPU capability, we allow customers to fine tune their needs to exactly what they want. We also offer an additional set of drive types now. We're doubling our drive choices by offering SATA SSDs as an addition to SAS. SATA allows us to offer lower price points yet still deliver an all flash experience. And because in hyperconverge networking matters, we are significantly increasing our network connectivity options, allowing customers to get more granular control and/or more ports as needed. Oh, and we're introducing 25 gig networking as well. >> Okay, great. I want to maybe come back and talk about some of those points. But before we do that, I talked about at the top of the segment about how this all fits into cloud, and our true private cloud definition, and so forth. What makes this offering cloud? Can you give us some detail or an example or two? >> Yeah, I think when you go and buy a cloud service, you are specifying a certain configuration that's based on, hey, I want this number of IOPS, this capacity. You're not specifying drive types. You're not specifying network connectivity, ports options. You know, that's something you can only ... And when you want to replicate that experience on-prem, you need an infrastructure that consolidates all those things together. Trying to build on-prem cloud infrastructure on top of traditional infrastructure is a huge hurdle. By going to hyperconverge where you've consolidated storage and compute together, you can build a very simple experience on top of it, layer your service catalog on top of it, and not have to worry about managing the underlying components separately. >> You know, I want to talk about the guys who aren't doing hyperconverge. I mean when you see it ... We were early on looking at the market, and understanding the benefits. But still, there's still a lot of folks who want to roll their own. You know, maybe it's a channel affinity. Or maybe it's some server affinity Or maybe they just like doing heavy lifting. I don't know. But what are you seeing in the marketplace in terms of why people aren't moving to hyperconverge? And what would you tell those people? >> Well, I think I'll disagree with you on that, Dave. You know, depending on which analyst you listen to, somewhere between two-thirds to three-quarters of customers are actively looking at deploying hyperconverge in the near future, within one to two years. So, people are interested. But you're right. That's one-third or a quarter of the market who's not. And for both of them, when I talk to them I say that the key benefits are that you cannot do IT transformation without buying a transformative product. If you're still buying the same, old components piece by piece and assembling themselves, you're going to be spending all of your time doing that assembly and the maintenance of that yourself. You need an infrastructure product that frees up those resources to deliver better business value. What we do with hyperconverge appliances like VxRail is that we take on that burden of integration. We take on that burden of testing. Yeah, you know longer need to maintain a full test lab because we've done the full certification ourselves. And we deliver that lower TCO, fully-automated experience that you can't get by doing it yourself. Some of our competitors focus on doing the same thing, but they focus a lot on the day zero value. You know, how fast it is to install. You know, how fast it is to get the first VM. What we found in hyperconverge is the real benefit is the lifecycle and automation that comes from day one, day two, and beyond. By building that automation lifecycle management qualification, testing, allows us to deliver a truly transformative experience. Buying VxRail can lower your TCO by 30%. That's a three-year TCO. This isn't marketing magic, marketing numbers. This is a full three-year TCO lowers by 30%, and can lower your support costs by 42% You know, that's something you can't get by buying servers and building your own. >> Well, I would totally agree with that because our data suggests that there's over $100 billion over the next 10 years. 150 billion, actually, that's coming out of sort of undifferentiated heavy lifting of deployment of infrastructure. But again, people still ... You know, it's like you said, a third of the market. I don't know. Is it because old habits die hard? What do you think it is? >> Yeah, I mean, I'm giving a secret away. I'm writing a blog post on this, but I've been late on it. So, I'll use it here now, >> Great. >> and then maybe it'll force me to actually publish the post by the time this comes out. (laughter) You know, I get those questions when I talk to customers. There's always one in four customers says, "Well, I can do that. I know how to do it. I've got the processes down." And my response to them is always. What does it say on your resume? On your resume does it say rack and stack servers? Does it say deploy vCenter and vSphere? Does it say cable networking? I doubt it. Your job description today on your resume probably says, "I develop applications as support, and x revenue business." You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. >> Digital transformation. >> Colin: Digital transformation. Exactly right. >> Enabler. >> So, if you're not doing that, and you're saying your value is racking and stacking, cabling, installing software, right? You're lying on your resume. (Dave laughs) What I'm giving you on VxRail is the ability not to lie on your resume. (laughter) It'll allow you to actually focus on the digital transformation. >> Well, I think every customer we talk to is going through some kind of, not only transformation, IT transformation, but a big digital transformation. They're trying to move resources up the stack. There's this sort of bromide. But it's true. To whatever, AI, data, analytics, or application development that's going to drive revenue. >> Yeah, and hyperconverge is perfect for all that. You know I used to say either hyperconverge was ready for all virtualized workloads. That you could buy a VxRail and run any virtualized workload on it. With the power that we get, the predictability, and the configurations that we get from 14th generation PowerEdge servers, we're not just ready for virtualized workload, we're ready for any workloads, mission-critical workloads, anything customers want to deploy on it. >> Yeah, this is really important. Look, IT is a very labor-intensive business that's too labor intensive. And that has actually stifled some innovation. And now we're finally seeing some light at the end of that tunnel. And hyperconverge infrastructure is an enabler there. Okay, when can I buy this stuff? >> We are actively taking orders right now. It's available to order now. And it will be shipping within 30 days. >> Dave: Okay, great. Let's see, a little commercial for a CrowdChat that's coming up, #nextgenhci which is on December 1st. Where else can I get info? >> You can go to dellemc.com/hci. That's a full page where you can find out about all of our HCI solutions, including VxRail. >> All right. >> And we've got some great there. We're going to have some cool videos, including this. And hopefully, some other ones. But yep. >> Well, Colin, congratulations on this success. A massive number, 17,000 nodes, 165,000 cores, 190 petabytes, and presumably more to come. So, well done. >> Looking forward. >> All right, thanks for coming on. >> Colin: Thanks, Dave. >> All right. Thanks for watching, everybody. This is theCUBE Conversation with Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Seattle, Washington it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018 brought to you by Red Hat the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and it's Ecosystem Partners. >> Well, everyone welcome back to theCube's live coverage here in Seattle for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. Three days of coverage around the Cloud Native growth, around the Ecosystem around open source, and the role of micro servers in the cloud. Our next guest is Roland Barcia who's the IBM Distinguished Engineer for IBM's Hybrid Cloud. Welcome to theCube. >> Thank you, glad to be here. >> Thanks for joining us. Being a Distinguished Engineer of IBM is a pretty big honor so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> it means you got technical chops so we can get down and dirty if we want to. >> Sure. >> I want to get your take on this because a lot of companies in IT are transforming and then that's been called digital transformation, it's happening and cloud has developed scale. And the wish list if you had the magic wand that could make things do better is actually happening. Supernetting's actually creating some goodness that if you had the magic wand, if I asked that question three years ago, if you had a magic wand what would an environment look like? Seamless operations around the cloud, so it's kind of happening. How are you guys positioned for this? Talk about the IBM cloud, what you're doing here, and how you see this cloud native market exploding. It's almost 8,000 people here up from 4,000 last year. >> Yeah, that's a great question I think. I work a lot with our enterprise clients. I'm part of what's called the IBM Cloud Garage, so I'm very customer facing. And often times, we're seeing that there is different paces of a journey. And so for example, I worked with a client that started building a cloud native application. They built about 60 micro services. And at the end of that, they were deploying it as one job which means they defeated the whole purpose of micro service architecture. And so what we really need to think about is an end to end journey. I think the developers are probably the more modern role in an enterprise, but we're starting to see modernization of an operations team for example, and adopting culture, and cutting down the walls of IT organizational groups into mixed squads, adopting something like a Spotify model. And I think a lot of the challenges in adopting kubernetes is really in cultural aspects and in enterprise. Does that make sense? >> Yeah. And because network guys are different than the app guys, and now they have policy knobs on kubernetes they can play with. Network guys love policy. >> Yeah, and they're fighting over ownership, right? >> Roland indeed. We look at that modernization, the application modernization really is that long home intent. And what we hear here is you need to be able to meet customers where they are. Sure, there's some stuff they're building shiny and new and have the developers, but enterprises have a lot of application and therefore there's a grand spectrum. What do you hear from customers? What's the easy part and where's the parts they're getting stuck? >> Yeah, so I think the easy part is writing the application. I think where they're getting stuck is really scaling it to the enterprise, doing the operations, doing the DevOps. I always tell people that a modernization journey might be better started by taking a certain class of applications like middleware where we have a WebSphere heritage from IBM, and saying why don't we take a look at containerizing that. We've built tools like Transformation Advisor that'll scan your WebSphere applications and tell you what do you need to change in that middleware application to make it behave well in a containerized platform. Then from there, you build your DevOps engine, your DevOps pipeline and you really start to get your operations teams going in delivering containers, delivering applications as containers. And then getting your policies and your standards in place. Then you can start opening up around innovation and start really driving towards building cloud native new applications in addition to that. >> One of those areas we've been talking about in the industry for decades is automation. The conversation's a little bit different these days. Maybe you can bring us up to speed about what's different than say it was earlier days. >> Yeah, I think IT organizations have always done a bit of automation. I think they write scripts, they automate builds. I think the mantra that I use is automate everything, right? Organizations need to really start to automate in a new way. How I deliver containers, but delivering the app is not enough. I need to automate all levels of testing in a modern way. Test driven development is big. At the IBM Cloud Garage, we have something we call the IBM Cloud Garage Method which really takes a set of practices like test driven development, pair programming, things out of lean startup, extreme programming, and really start to help enterprises adopt those practices. So I say why can't we automate end to end performance testing in the pipeline, and functional testing, and writing them early and in the beginning of projects? That way, as I'm deploying containers which are very dynamic, along with configuration, and along with policy you're testing it continuously. And I think that level of automation is what we need to get to. >> Talk about security as well 'cause security's one of those things where it's got to be baked in upfront. You got to think about it holistically. It's also now being pulled out of IT, it's more of a board function because the risk management is one hack you could get crushed. And so you got to have security. And the container there's a security boundary issue, so it's important. >> Last week we met with an insurance company. We did a workshop. And they walked us through all the compliant steps that they need to go through today. How they do it with traditional middleware and virtual machines and hardware and it was a very, what I'm going to say governance driven process. And so a lot of checks and balances, stop don't move forward, which is really the industry for developing and innovating is going the opposite way: self service and enabling. And there's a lot of risk with that. And so what we're really trying to do with technology is like Multicloud Manager, technology we have around multicluster, management is how do I do things like I want to check which clusters are Hipaa compliant and which ones are out. How do i force that policy? >> That's smart. >> Now that everything is software driven, software developed, there's an opportunity to really automate those checks. >> So your point automate everything. >> Yeah, I want to automate everything. >> Governance is a service. (laughing) >> Yeah, that's right. And actually, that can help get away from error prone human checks where they had all these tons of documents of all different policies they have to go through can now be automated in a seamless way. >> So compliance and governance could be a stumbling block or it can be just part of the software. That's what you're getting at here. >> That's right, that's what I'm getting at. I think the transition is look at it as an opportunity now that everything is software driven, use software disciplines that developers are used to in those security roles and those CSO roles, etc. >> So I want to ask you a question. So one of the things we're seeing obviously with the cloud is it's great for certain things, and then on premises it has latency issues. We saw Amazon essentially endorse this by saying RDS on VMware on premises. They announced Outpost had reinvent oh, latency. Things aren't moving into the cloud as fast. So you're going to see this hybrid environment. So hybrids, we get that, it's been around, check. No real discussion other than it's happening. The real trend is multicloud, right? >> That' right. >> And so multicloud is just a modern version of the word multi vendor about the client server days. So systems were a multi vendor man choice. This is a fundamental thing. It's not so much about multicloud as it is about choice. How do you guys see that? You are in an environment where you have a lot of customers who don't have one cloud, so this is a big upcoming trend in 2019. >> Most of our clients have at least five different clouds that they deal with, whether it be an IaaS, a PaaS, a SaaS base solution. What we're seeing as a trend is we talked about on premise and private and enterprise is I think is 80% of workloads are still in the data center. And so they want to build that private cloud environment as a transitionary point to public, but what we're seeing across the multicloud space is I'm going to say a new integration space. So if you really think 15 years ago, SOA and enterprise service bosses in a very centralized fashion, I think there's a new opportunity for integration across clouds and on-prem in a more decentralized way. So I think integration is kind of the next trend that we're seeing in this multicloud space because the new applications that we're seeing with cognitive data AI are mixing data sources from multiple clouds and on-prem and needing to control that in a hybrid control plane is key. >> It's funny, the industry always talks about these buzzwords, multicloud. If we're talkin' about multicloud, then it's a problem. The idea of infrastructure as code it's not even use the word multicloud. I mean, if you think about it, if you're programming the infrastructure and enabling the stuff under the covers, why even talk about cloud? It should be automated, so that's the future state, but in reality, that's kind of what enterprisers are tryin' to think about. >> They are, and I think it's a tension between innovation and moving fast and control, right? The enterprisers want to move fast, but they want to make sure that they don't break security protocol, that they don't break resiliency that they're maybe have used to with their existing customers and applications. I do think the challenge is how operations teams and management teams start to act like developers to get to that point. And I think that's part of the journey. >> Open source obviously a big part of this show, and that's open source, people contribute upstream It's great stuff. IBM is a big contributor, and it'll be even more when Red Hat gets into the mix. So upstream's great, but as you got 8,000 people here, you're startin' to see people talkin' about business issues, and other things. One of the downstream impacts of this conference being so open source centric is the IT equation and then just the classic developer. So you have multiple personas now kind of interacting. You got the developer, you got the IT architect, cloud architect pro whatever, and then you got the open source community members. Melting pot: good, challenges, thoughts? >> So I think it's so developers love that, right? I think from an enterprise perspective, there are issues. We're seeing a lot of our clients with our private cloud platform ask us to build out what's called air gapped environment which is how do I build up an open source style ecosystem within my enterprise. So things like getting an artifactory registry or a Docker registry or whatever type of registry where I get certified, open source packages in my enterprise that I've gone and done security vulnerability scans with, or that I've made sure that I look at every layer from the Linux kernel all the way up to whatever software is included. So what we're seeing is how do I open the aperture a bit, but do it in a more responsible fashion I think is the key. >> Yeah, and that's for stability, right? So Stu, one of things I've been talkin' about and want to get your thoughts on this role is that you got the cloud as a scalable system then one of the things that's being discussed in Silicon Valley now for the first time, we've been sitting on theCube for years, is the cloud's a system. It's just some architecture, it's network distributing, computing, art paradigm, all that computer science has been around for awhile, right? >> Yes, yes. >> So if you've been a systems person whether hardware or whatever, operating systems, you get cloud. But also you got the horizontal specialism of applications that are using machine learning and data and applications which is unique on top. So you have the collision of those two worlds. This is kind of a modern version of two worlds that we used to call systems and apps, but they're happening in a real dynamic way. What's your thoughts on this? Because you got the benefits of horizontally scalable cloud and you now have the ability to power that so we're seeing things like AI, which has been around for a long, long time, have a renaissance because now you got a lot of compute. >> That's right, and I think data is the real big challenge we're seeing with a lot of our clients. They have a lot of it in their enterprise, they don't want to unlock it all right away. We recently did what's called IBM Cloud Private for Data, in which we brought in a set of technologies around our AI, our Watson core to really start leveraging some of those tools in a private manner. And then what we're seeing is a lot of applications that are moving to the cloud have a data drag. It might start as something as simple as caching data and no SQL databases, but very quickly they want to learn a lot more about that data. So we're seeing that mix happening all the time. >> We've had it, we've had someone say in theCube ML's the new SQL. >> Yeah. >> Because you're starting to see SQL abstraction layers are a beautiful thing if they're connected. So I want to get your thoughts on this because everyone's kind of in discovery mode right now. Learning, there's a lot of education. I mean, we're talkin' about real, big time players. Architects are becoming cloud architects. Sysadmins are becoming operators for large infrastructure scale. You see network guys goin' wait a minute, if I don't get on the new network programmable model I'm going to be irrelevant. So a lot of persona changes in the enterprise. How are you guys handling that with customers? I know you guys have the expert program. Comment on that dynamic. >> I think what we're doing is we use the IBM Cloud Garage to bring in practices like the Spotify method where we start pushing things like >> What's the Spotify method? >> Spotify method is a way of doing kind of development where rather than having your disciplines of architects, development, operations, we're now splitting teams, let's say functionally, where I have mixed disciplines in a squad and maybe saying hey, the person building the account team has an SRE, an ops guy, a dev guy all within their same squad. And then maybe have guilds across disciplines, right? And so what we do at the Garage is we bring 'em in to one of the Garages. We have four team locations worldwide. Maybe do your first project. Then we build enablement and education around that, bring it back to the enterprise and start making that viral. And that's what we're doing in the IBM Cloud Garage. >> So not a monolithic thing, breakin' it down, integrating multiple disciplines, kind of like a playlist. >> Yeah, that's right. And I think the best way to do it is to practice it, right, in action. Let's pick a project rather than talking about it. >> If I had to ask you in 2019, what is the IT investment going to look like with kubernetes impact? How does kubernetes change the IT priorities and investments for an enterprise? >> Yeah, so I think you'll see kubernetes become a vehicle for enterprises to deliver content. So one, the whole area around helm and other package managers as a way to bundle software. I think as people build more clusters, multicluster management is going to be the big trend of how do I deal now with clusters that I have in public cloud and private cloud, all different clouds? And I think that integration layer that I talked about where what does modern integration look like across kubernetes based applications. >> Someone asked me last week at Reinvent hey, can't we just automate kubernetes? And then I was like, well it's kind of automated now. What's your thoughts on that? >> So I think when someone asks a question what does it mean to automate that I think the kubernetes stack really sits on top of IaaS infrastructure. And so for example, our IBM Cloud Private you can run it on zLinux or Power. And we have a lot of IBM folks that run multi architecture clusters. And therefore, they still need a level of automating how I create clusters over IaaS and there's technologies like Terraform and others that help with that, but then there's also automating standing up the DevOps stack, automating deployment of the applications over that stack. And I think they mean automating how I use kubernetes in an environment. >> So 2019, the year of programmability and automation creating goodness around kubernetes. >> Yeah, absolutely, >> Roland, thanks for comin' >> Thank you, it was great. >> on theCube, thanks for that smart insight. TheCube coverage here, day two winding down. We got day three tomorrow. This is theCube covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018. We'll be right back with more day two coverage after this short break. (happy electronic music)