from the cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cute conversation hi I'm Stu minimun and welcome to this special presentation we have a launch from Dell technologies updates to the BX rail family we're gonna do things a little bit different here we actually have a launch video from Janet champion of Dell technologies and the way we do things a lot of times is analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things you might have questions on it though rather than me just walking it are you watching herself I actually brought in a couple of Dell technologies expert two of our cube alumni happy to welcome back to the program Jonathan Segal he is the vice president of product marketing and Chad Dunn who's the vice president at price today of product management both of them with Dell technologies gentlemen thanks so much for joining us it was too great to be here all right and so what we're gonna do is we're gonna be rolling the video here I've got a button I'm gonna press Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit go into some questions when we're all done we're actually holding a crowd chat where you will be able to ask your questions talk to the expert and everything and so a little bit different way to do a product announcement hope you enjoy it and with that it's VX rail taking API to the extremes is is the theme we'll see you know how what that means and everything but without any further ado it but let's look fanon take the video away hello and welcome my name is Shannon champion and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with the ex rail let's get started we have a lot to talk about our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the core edge and cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options as well as the latest in software innovations so let's jump right in before we talk about our announcements let's talk about where customers are adopting the ex rail today first of all on behalf of the entire Dell technologies and BX Rail teams I want to thank each of our over 8,000 customers big and small in virtually every industry who have chosen the x rail to address a broad range of workloads deploying nearly a hundred thousand nodes to date thank you our promise to you is that we will add new functionality improve serviceability and support new use cases so that we deliver the most value to you whether in the core at the edge or for the cloud in the core the X rail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VX rail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment now we can support even more demanding applications such as in-memory databases like s AP HANA and more AI and ML applications with support for more and more powerful GPUs at the edge video surveillance which also uses GPUs by the way is an example of a popular use case leveraging the X rail alongside external storage and right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing and as it relates to VDI the X Rail has always been a great option for that in the cloud it's all about kubernetes and how dell technologies cloud platform which is VCF on the x rail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and cloud native applications and we're doing that together with VMware the X ray o is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments designed to enhance the native VMware experience this joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers all right so Shannon talked a bit about you know the important role of IP of course right now with the global pandemic going on it's really you know calling in you know essential things you know putting you know platforms to the test so I'd really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers also you know VDI of course you know in the early days it was HDI only does VDI now we know there are many solutions but remote work is you know putting that back front and center so John why don't we start with you is you know what you're absolutely so first of all us - thank you I want to do a shout out to our BX real customers around the world it's really been humbling inspiring and just amazing to see the impact of our bx real customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here you know just for a few examples there are genomics companies that we have running the X rail that have a row about testing at scale we also have research universities out in the Netherlands on doing the antibody detection the US Navy has stood up a hosta floating Hospital >> of course care for those in need so look we are here to help that's been our message to our customers but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this so just just a pleasure there but as you mentioned just to hit on the the VDI comments so it's your points do you know HCI and vxr8 EDI that was initially use case years ago and it's been great to see how many of our existing VX real customers have been able to inhibit very quickly leveraging via trail to add and to help bring their remote workforce you know online and support them with your existing VX rail because V it really is flexible it is agile to be able to support those multiple workloads and in addition to that we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost-effective catered to everything from knowledge workers to multimedia workers you name it you know from 250 desktops up to a thousand but again back to your point BX rail ci is well beyond video it had crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually and you know where VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads any of our customers out there it supports now a range of workloads as you heard from Shannon whether it's video surveillance whether it's general purpose only to mission-critical applications now with SAV ha so you know this is this has changed the game for sure but the range of workloads and the flexibility of yet rail is what's really helping our existing customers from this pandemic we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments from the ones that we serve all knew and loved back in the the initial days of of HCI now the mission-critical things now to cloud native workloads as well and you know sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI and specifically VX rail gives them that ability to pivot when these you know shall we say unexpected circumstances arise and I think if that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IT strategies look like as they move forward they want that same level of agility and the ability to react quickly with our overall infrastructure excellent want to get into the announcements what I want my team actually your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo so maybe they can dig up that footage talk about how fast they pivoted you know using VX rail to really spin up things fast so let's hear from the announcements first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later so let's get to the actual news that and it's gonna share okay now what's new I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms to further enable IT modernization across core edge and cloud I will cover each of these announcements in more detail demonstrating how only the X rail can offer the breadth of platform configurations automation orchestration and lifecycle management across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent simple side operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications I'll start with hybrid cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell technologies cloud announcements just a few weeks ago related to VMware cloud foundation on the X rail then I'll cover two brand new VX rail hardware platforms and additional options and finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VX rail HCI system software capabilities for lifecycle management let's get started with our new cloud offerings based on the ex rail you xrail is the HCI foundation for dell technologies cloud platform bringing automation and financial models similar to public cloud to on-premises environments VMware recently introduced cloud foundation for dotto which is based on vSphere 7 as you likely know by now vSphere 7 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release in keeping with our synchronous release commitment we introduced the XR l 7 based on vSphere 7 in late April which was within 30 days of VMware's release two key areas that VMware focused on were embedding containers and kubernetes into vSphere unifying them with virtual machines and the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere lifecycle manager or VL CM I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how the X rail fits in in a moment for V cf4 with tansu based on vSphere 7 customers now have access to a hybrid cloud platform that supports native kubernetes workloads and management as well as your traditional vm based workloads and this is now available with VCF 4 on the ex rel 7 the X rails tight integration with VMware cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid cloud but also to deliver kubernetes a cloud scale with one complete automated platform the second cloud announcement is also exciting recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid cloud because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture and with that Dell technologies cloud platform can now be deployed with a four node configuration lowering the cost of an entry-level hybrid cloud this enables customers to start smaller and grow their cloud deployment over time VCF on the x rail can now be deployed in two different ways for small environments customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture it's ideal for getting started with an entry-level cloud to run general-purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost but still with a consistent cloud operating model for larger environments we're dedicated resources and role based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred you can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at 8 nodes for independent management and workload domains a standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes horizon VDI and vSphere with kubernetes all right John there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware's doing with vSphere 7 understand if you wanted to use the kubernetes piece you know it's it's VCF as that so we you know we've seen the announcements delt partnering there helped us connect that story between you know really the the VMware strategy and how they've talked about cloud and how you know where does the X rail fit in that overall Delta cloud story absolutely so so first of all is through the x-ray of course is integral to the Delta cloud strategy you know it's been VCF on bx r l equals the delta cloud platform and this is our flagship on-prem cloud offering that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any cloud right whether it's on prem in the edge or in a public cloud and we've seen the delta cloud platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons one is it offers the fastest hybrid cloud deployment in the market and this is really you know thanks to a new subscription on offer that we're now offering out there we're at less than 14 days it can be set up and running and really the deltek cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models overall comes to the extra secondly I would say is fast and easy upgrades I mean this is this is really this is what VX real brings to the table for all our clothes if you will and it's especially critical in the cloud so the full automation of lifecycle management across the hardware and software stack boss the VMware software stack and in the Dell software however we're supporting that together this enables essentially the third thing which is customers can just relax right they can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated and always be in a continuously validated state and this this is the kind of thing that you know those three value propositions together really fit well with with any on print cloud now you take what Shannon just mentioned and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same the x-ray link structure alongside traditional applications this is a game changer yeah it I love you know I remember in the early days that about CI how does that fit in with cloud discussion and align I've used the last couple years this you know modernize the platform then you can modernize the application though as companies are doing their full modernization this plays into what you're talking about all right let's get you know can't let ran and continue get some more before we dig into some more analysis that's good let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases first up I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new delhi MCB x rail series the DS series this is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of the x rail for workloads at the edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas the X ray LD series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the BX rail portfolio with simplicity agility and lifecycle management but in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches it's a durable form factor that's extremely temperature resilient shock resistant and easily portable it even meets mil spec standards that means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VX rail HCI system software and 24 by 7 single point of support enabling you to rapidly react to business needs no matter the location or how harsh the conditions so whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base running real-time GPS mapping on-the-go or implementing video surveillance in remote areas you can ensure availability integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VX Rail ruggedized D series had would love for you to bring us in a little bit you know that what customer requirement bringing bringing this to market I I remember seeing you know Dell servers ruggedized of course edge you know really important growth to build on what John was talking about clouds so yeah Chad bring us inside what was driving this piece of the offering sure Stu yeah you know having the the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important and that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these edges or some of the more exotic locations you know whether that's manufacturing plants oil rigs submarine ships military applications in places that we've never heard of but it's also been extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VX rails you're managing your edges the same way using the same set of tools so you don't need to learn anything else so operational simplicity is is absolutely key here but in those locations you can take a product that's designed for a data center where you're definitely controlling power cooling space and take it to some of these places where you get sand blowing or sub-zero temperatures so we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat extreme cold extreme altitude but still offer that operational simplicity if you look at the the resistance that it has to heat it can go from around operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range but it can do an excursion up to 55 °c or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours it's also resisted the heats and dust vibration it's very lightweight short depth in fact it's only 20 inches deep this is a smallest form factor obviously that we have in the BX rail family and it's also built to to be able to withstand sudden shocks it's certified it was stand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation it's pretty high and you know this is this is sort of like where were skydivers go to when they weren't the real real thrill of skydiving where you actually the oxygen to to be a put that out to their milspec certified so mil-std 810g which i keep right beside my bed and read every night and it comes with a VX rail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment and we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for for naval chakra quirements EMI and radiation immunity of all that yeah you know it's funny I remember when weights the I first launched it was like oh well everything's going to white boxes and it's going to be you know massive you know no differentiation between everything out there if you look at what you're offering if you look at how public clouds build their things what I call it a few years poor is there's a pure optimization so you need scale you need similarities but you know you need to fit some you know very specific requirements lots of places so interesting stuff yeah certifications you know always keep your teams busy alright let's get back to Shannon we are also introducing three other hardware based editions first a new VX rail eseries model based on were the first time AMD epic processors these single socket 1u nodes offered dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from 8 to 64 cores up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer-aided design next the addition of the latest NVIDIA Quadro RT X GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional workflows designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering deep learning and visual computing workloads and Intel obtain DC persistent memory is here and it offers high performance and significantly increase memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity even when power is lost enabling quicker recovery and less downtime with support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like sa P Hana alright let's finally dig into our HCI system software which is the core differentiation for the xrail regardless of your workload or platform choice our joint engineering with VMware and investments in the x-ray HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers under the covers the xrail offers best-in-class Hardware married with VMware HCI software either vcn or VCF but what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two Dell technologies has a dedicated VX rail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper-converged system that team has also developed our unique the X rail HDI system software which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver a seamless automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere the key components of the x rail HDI system software are shown around the arc here that include the X rail manager full stack lifecycle management ecosystem connectors and support I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today but if you're interested in learning more I encourage you to meet our experts and I will tell you how to do that in a moment I touched on VLC M being a key feature to vSphere seven earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of the xrail lifecycle management the LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them with the X ray all customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business customers tell us that lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively and that it isn't the most efficient economically Automation of lifecycle management in VX Rail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure but as shown here our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages and reduced overall cost of operations with the xrail HCI system software intelligent lifecycle management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated keeping clusters in continuously validated States while minimizing risks and operational costs how do we ensure continuously validated States Furby xrail the x-ray labs execute an extensive automated repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customer's choosing across their VX rail environment the VX rail labs are constantly testing analyzing optimising and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack all the while the x rail is backed by Delhi MCS world-class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software IT productivity skyrockets with single-click non-disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing taking you to the next VX rail version of your choice while always in a continuously validated state you can also confidently execute automated VX rail upgrades no matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster they don't have to all be the same and upgrades with VX rail are faster and more efficient with leap frogging simply choose any VX rail version you desire and be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between only the ex rail can do that all right so Chad you know the the lifecycle management piece that Jana was just talking about is you know not the sexiest it's often underappreciated you know there's not only the years of experience but the continuous work you're doing you know reminds me back you know the early V sand deployments versus VX rail jointly develop you know jointly tested between Dell and VMware so you know bring us inside why you know 2020 lifecycle management still you know a very important piece especially in the VL family yeah let's do I think it's sexy but I'm pretty big nerd yes even more the larger the deployments come when you start to look at data centers full of VX rails and all the different hardware software firmware combinations that could exist out there it's really the value that you get out of that VX r l HTI system software that Shannon was talking about and how its optimized around the VMware use case very tightly integrated with each VMware component of course and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware all of the drivers all of the software altogether tremendous value to our customers but to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment so she Anna mentioned we've run about twenty five thousand hours of testing across each major release four patches Express patches that's about seven thousand hours for each of those so obviously there's a lot of parallelism and and we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality one of the key things that were able to do as Shannon mentioned is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state we've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously a huge amount of automation and then when we talk about that investment to execute those tests that's well north of sixty million dollars of investment in our lab in fact we've got just over two thousand VH rail units in our testbed across the u.s. Shanghai China and corn island so a massive amount of testing of each of those those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state yeah well you know absolutely it's super important not only for the day one but the day two deployments but I think this actually be a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to so we've got the CIO of Amarillo Texas he was an existing VX rail customer and he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work from home initiative as well as you know we get to hear in his words the value of what lifecycle management means though Andrew if we could queue up that that customer segment please it was it's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it you know as we mature and they I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments but this instance really justified why I was driving progress so so fervently why it was so urgent today three years ago we the answer would have been no there would have been we wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt with it with the x-ray all in place you know in a week we spun up hundreds of instant phones we spawned us a seventy five person call center in a day and a half for our public health we will allow multiple applications for Public Health so they could do remote clinics it's given us the flexibility to be able to to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive and it's not only been apparent to my team but it's really made an impact on the business and now what I'm seeing is those those are my customers that were a little lagging or a little conservative or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well all right so rich you talked to a bunch about the the efficiencies that they tie put place how about that that overall just managed you know you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances you need to be able to do things much simpler so you know how does the overall lifecycle management fit into this discussion it makes it so much easier and you know in the in the old environment one it took a lot of man-hours to make change it was it was very disruptive when we did make change this it overburdened I guess that's the word I'm looking for it really over overburdened our staff it cost disruption to business it was it cost-efficient and then you simple things like you know I've worked for multi billion-dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production simply can't afford that at local government you know having the sort of environment lets me do a scaled-down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change as I said earlier it's allow us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on lifecycle management because it's greatly simplified and move those resources and rescale them in in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business it's hard to be innovated when a hundred percent of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat all right well you know nothing better than hearing straight from the end-user you know public sector reacting very fast to the Cova 19 and you know you heard him he said if this had hit his before he had run this project he would not have been able to respond so I think everybody out there understands if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology you know it would be much harder all right I'm looking forward to doing the crowd chat and everybody else digging with questions and get follow-up but a little bit more I believe one more announcement he came and got for us though let's roll the final video clip in our latest software release the x-ray of 4.7 dot 510 we continue to add new automation and self-service features new functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch this is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window of course running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates we are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific the xrail version or down Rev one or more more nodes that may be shipped at a higher Rev than the existing cluster this enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in cluster to sum up all of our announcements whether you are accelerating data center modernization extending HCI to harsh edge environments deploying an on-premises Dell technologies cloud platform to create a developer ready kubernetes infrastructure BX Rail is there delivering a turnkey experience that enables you to continuously innovate realize operational freedom and predictably evolve the x rail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations automation and lifecycle management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across core edge and cloud I now invite you to engage with us first the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about the ex rails new features and functionality and score some sweet digital swag while you're at it it delivered via an automated via an augmented reality app all you need is your device so go to the x-ray is slash passport to get started and secondly if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VX rail meet the experts sessions available for a limited time first-come first-served just go to the x-ray dot is slash expert session to learn more you all right well obviously with everyone being remote there's different ways we're looking to engage so we've got the crowd chat right after this but John gives a little bit more is that how Del's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got firfer options for them yeah absolutely so as Shannon said so in lieu of not having Dell tech world this year in person where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions whether it's in the booth or you know in in meeting rooms you know we are going to have these meet the experts sessions over the next couple of weeks and look we're gonna put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to to everyone out there so again definitely encourage you we're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we could still stay in touch answer questions be responsive and really looking forward to you know having these conversations over the next couple weeks all right well John and Chad thank you so much we definitely look forward to the conversation here in int in you'd if you're here live definitely go down below do it if you're watching this on demand you can see the full transcript of it at crowd chat /vx rocks sorry V xrail rocks for myself Shannon on the video John and Chad Andrew man in the booth there thank you so much for watching and go ahead and join the crowd chat

>> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation. We have a launch from Dell Technologies updates from the VxRail family. We're going to do things a little bit different here. We actually have a launch video Shannon Champion, of Dell Technologies. And the way we do things a lot of times, is, analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things. You might have questions on it. So, rather than me just wanting it, or you wanting yourself I actually brought in a couple of Dell Technologies expertS two of our Cube alumni, happy to welcome you back to the program. Jon Siegal, he is the Vice President of Product Marketing, and Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management, both of them with Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Great to be here. >> All right, and so what we're going to do is we're going to be rolling the video here. I've got a button I'm going to press, Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit, go into some questions when we're all done. We're actually holding a crowd chat, where you will be able to ask your questions, talk to the experts and everything. And so a little bit different way to do a product announcement. Hope you enjoy it. And with that, it's VxRail. Taking HCI to the extremes is the theme. We'll see what that means and everything. But without any further ado, let's let Shannon take the video away. >> Hello, and welcome. My name is Shannon Champion, and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with VxRail. Let's get started. We have a lot to talk about. Our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the Core, Edge and Cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options, as well as the latest in software innovations. So let's jump right in. Before we talk about our announcements, let's talk about where customers are adopting VxRail today. First of all, on behalf of the entire Dell Technologies and VxRail teams, I want to thank each of our over 8000 customers, big and small in virtually every industry, who've chosen VxRail to address a broad range of workloads, deploying nearly 100,000 nodes today. Thank you. Our promise to you is that we will add new functionality, improve serviceability, and support new use cases, so that we deliver the most value to you, whether in the Core, at the Edge or for the Cloud. In the Core, VxRail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation. Many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VxRail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment. Now we can support even more demanding applications such as In-Memory databases, like SAP HANA, and more AI and ML applications, with support for more and more powerful GPUs. At the Edge, video surveillance, which also uses GPUs, by the way, is an example of a popular use case leveraging VxRail alongside external storage. And right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing. And as it relates to VDI, VxRail has always been a great option for that. In the Cloud, it's all about Kubernetes, and how Dell Technologies Cloud platform, which is VCF on VxRail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and Cloud native applications. And we're doing that together with VMware. VxRail is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments, designed to enhance the native VMware experience. This joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. >> Alright, so Shannon talked a bit about, the important role of IT Of course right now, with the global pandemic going on. It's really, calling in, essential things, putting, platforms to the test. So, I really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers. Also, VDI, of course, in the early days, it was, HCI-only-does-VDI. Now, we know there are many solutions, but remote work is putting that back front and center. So, Jon, why don't we start with you as the what is (muffled speaking) >> Absolutely. So first of all, Stu, thank you, I want to do a shout out to our VxRail customers around the world. It's really been humbling, inspiring, and just amazing to see The impact of our VxRail customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here. Just for a few examples, there are genomics companies that we have running VxRail that have rolled out testing at scale. We also have research universities out in the Netherlands, doing the antibody detection. The US Navy has stood up a floating hospital to of course care for those in need. So we are here to help that's been our message to our customers, but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this. So just just a pleasure there. But as you mentioned, just to hit on the VDI comments, so to your points too, HCI, VxRail, VDI, that was an initial use case years ago. And it's been great to see how many of our existing VxRail customers have been able to pivot very quickly leveraging VxRail to add and to help bring their remote workforce online and support them with their existing VxRail. Because VxRail is flexible, it is agile, to be able to support those multiple workloads. And in addition to that, we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost effective cater to everything from knowlEdge workers to multimedia workers. You name it, you know from 250, desktops up to 1000. But again, back to your point VxRail, HCI, is well beyond VDI, it crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually. And VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads, any of our customers out there, it supports now a range of workloads that you heard from Shannon, whether it's video surveillance, whether it's general purpose, all the way to mission critical applications now with SAP HAN. So, this has changed the game for sure. But the range of work loads and the flexibility of the actual rules which really helping our existing customers during this pandemic. >> Yeah, I agree with you, Jon, we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments, from the ones that we sure all knew and loved back in the initial days of HCI. Now, the mission critical things now to Cloud native workloads as well, and the sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI. And specifically, VxRail gives them that ability to pivot. When these, shall we say unexpected circumstances arise? And I think that that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IP strategies look like as they move forward. They want that same level of agility, and ability to react quickly with their overall infrastructure. >> Excellent. Now I want to get into the announcements. What I want my team actually, your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo, so maybe they can dig up that footage, talk about how fast they pivoted, using VxRail to really spin up things fast. So let's hear from the announcement first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later. So let's get to the actual news that Shannon's going to share. >> Okay, now what's new? I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms, to further enable IT modernization across Core, Edge and Cloud. I will cover each of these announcements in more detail, demonstrating how only VxRail can offer the breadth of platform configurations, automation, orchestration and Lifecycle Management, across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent, simplified operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications. I'll start with hybrid Cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell Technologies Cloud announcements just a few weeks ago, related to VMware Cloud foundation on VxRail. Then I'll cover two brand new VxRail hardware platforms and additional options. And finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VxRail HCI system software capabilities for Lifecycle Management. Let's get started with our new Cloud offerings based on VxRail. VxRail is the HCI foundation for Dell Technologies, Cloud Platform, bringing automation and financial models, similar to public Cloud to On-premises environments. VMware recently introduced Cloud foundation for Delta, which is based on vSphere 7.0. As you likely know by now, vSphere 7.0 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release. In keeping with our synchronous release commitment, we introduced VxRail 7.0 based on vSphere 7.0 in late April, which was within 30 days of VMware's release. Two key areas that VMware focused on we're embedding containers and Kubernetes into vSphere, unifying them with virtual machines. And the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere Lifecycle Manager or VLCM. I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how VxRail fits in in a moment for VCF 4 with Tom Xu, based on vSphere 7.0 customers now have access to a hybrid Cloud platform that supports native Kubernetes workloads and management, as well as your traditional VM-based workloads. So containers are now first class citizens of your private Cloud alongside traditional VMs and this is now available with VCF 4.0, on VxRail 7.0. VxRail's tight integration with VMware Cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid Cloud, but also to deliver Kubernetes at Cloud scale with one complete automated platform. The second Cloud announcement is also exciting. Recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid Cloud, because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture. And with that Dell Technologies Cloud platform can now be deployed with a four-node configuration, lowering the cost of an entry level hybrid Cloud. This enables customers to start smaller and grow their Cloud deployment over time. VCF and VxRail can now be deployed in two different ways. For small environments, customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes. Since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture, it's ideal for getting started with an entry level Cloud to run general purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point. Both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost, but still with a Consistent Cloud operating model. For larger environments where dedicated resources and role-based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred. You can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at eight nodes for independent management and workload domains. A standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes Horizon, VDI, and vSphere with Kubernetes. >> Alright, Jon, there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware is doing with vSphere 7.0. understand if you wanted to use the Kubernetes piece, it's VCF as that so we've seen the announcements, Dell, partnering in there it helps us connect that story between, really the VMware strategy and how they talk about Cloud and where does VxRail fit in that overall, Delta Cloud story? >> Absolutely. So first of all Stu, the VxRail course is integral to the Delta Cloud strategy. it's been VCF on VxRail equals the Delta Cloud platform. And this is our flagship on prem Cloud offering, that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any Cloud, whether it's On-prem, in the Edge or in the public Cloud. And we've seen the Dell tech Cloud Platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons. One is it offers the fastest hybrid Cloud deployment in the market. And this is really, thanks to a new subscription offer that we're now offering out there where in less than 14 days, it can be still up and running. And really, the Dell tech Cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models, overall when it comes to VxRail. Secondly, I would say is fast and easy upgrades. This is what VxRail brings to the table for all workloads, if you will, into especially critical in the Cloud. So the full automation of Lifecycle Management across the hardware and software stack across the VMware software stack, and in the Dell software and hardware supporting that, together, this enables essentially the third thing, which is customers can just relax. They can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated, and always be in a continuously validated state. And this is the kind of thing that those three value propositions together really fit well, with any on-prem Cloud. Now you take what Shannon just mentioned, and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same VxRail infrastructure alongside traditional applications. This is a game changer. >> Yeah, I love it. I remember in the early days talking with Dunn about CI, how does that fit in with Cloud discussion and the line I've used the last couple years is, modernize the platform, then you can modernize the application. So as companies are doing their full modernization, then this plays into what you're talking about. All right, we can let Shannon continue, we can get some more before we dig into some more analysis. >> That's good. >> Let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates. that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options. covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases. First up, I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new Dell EMC VxRail series, the D series. This is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of VxRail for workloads at the Edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas. VxRail D series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the VxRail portfolio with simplicity, agility and lifecycle management. But in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches, it's adorable form factor that's extremely temperature-resilient, shock resistant, and easily portable. It even meets milspec standards. That means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VxRail HCI system software and 24 by seven single point of support, enabling you to rapidly react to business needs, no matter the location or how harsh the conditions. So whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base, running real-time GPS mapping on the go, or implementing video surveillance in remote areas, you can ensure availability, integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VxRail ruggedized D series. >> All right, Chad we would love for you to bring us in a little bit that what customer requirement for bringing this to market. I remember seeing, Dell servers ruggedized, of course, Edge, really important growth to build on what Jon was talking about, Cloud. So, Chad, bring us inside, what was driving this piece of the offering? >> Sure Stu. Yeah, yeah, having been at the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important. And that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these Edges or some of the more exotic locations. whether that's manufacturing plants, oil rigs, submarine ships, military applications, places that we've never heard of. But it's also about extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VxRails you're managing your Edges the same way using the same set of tools. You don't need to learn anything else. So operational simplicity is absolutely key here. But in those locations, you can take a product that's designed for a data center where definitely controlling power cooling space and take it some of these places where you get sand blowing or seven to zero temperatures, could be Baghdad or it could be Ketchikan, Alaska. So we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme altitude, but still offer that operational simplicity. Now military is one of those applications for the rugged platform. If you look at the resistance that it has to heat, it operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range, but it can do an excursion up to 55 C or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours. It's also resistant to heat sand, dust, vibration, it's very lightweight, short depth, in fact, it's only 20 inches deep. This is a smallest form factor, obviously that we have in the VxRail family. And it's also built to be able to withstand sudden shocks certified to withstand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation. Pretty high. And this is sort of like wherever skydivers go to when they want the real thrill of skydiving where you actually need oxygen to, to be for that that altitude. They're milspec-certified. So, MIL-STD-810G, which I keep right beside my bed and read every night. And it comes with a VxRail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment. And we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for naval shock requirements. EMI and radiation immunity often. >> Yeah, it's funny, I remember when we first launched it was like, "Oh, well everything's going to white boxes. "And it's going to be massive, "no differentiation between everything out there." If you look at what you're offering, if you look at how public Clouds build their things, but I called it a few years or is there's a pure optimization. So you need to scale, you need similarities but you know you need to fit some, very specific requirements, lots of places, so, interesting stuff. Yeah, certifications, always keep your teams busy. Alright, let's get back to Shannon to view on the report. >> We are also introducing three other hardware-based additions. First, a new VxRail E Series model based on where the first time AMD EPYC processors. These single socket 1U nodes, offer dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from eight to 64 Cores, up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer aided design. Next, the addition of the latest Nvidia Quadro RTX GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional work flows. Designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible, working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering, deep learning and visual computing workloads. And Intel Optane DC persistent memory is here, and it offers high performance and significantly increased memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price. Data persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity, even when power is lost, enabling quicker recovery and less downtime. With support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like SAP HANA. Alright, let's finally dig into our HCI system software, which is the Core differentiation for VxRail regardless of your workload or platform choice. Our joining engineering with VMware and investments in VxRail HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. Under the covers, VxRail offers best in class hardware, married with VMware HCI software, either vSAN or VCF. But what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two. Dell Technologies has a dedicated VxRail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper converged system. That team has also developed our unique VxRail HCI system software, which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver seamless, automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere. The key components of VxRail HCI system software shown around the arc here that include the extra manager, full stack lifecycle management, ecosystem connectors, and support. I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today, but if you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to meet our experts. And I will tell you how to do that in a moment. I touched on the LCM being a key feature to the vSphere 7.0 earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of VxRail Lifecycle Management. The LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers, but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them. With VxRail customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf, freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business. Customers tell us that Lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure, and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff, that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively, and that it isn't the most efficient economically. Automation of Lifecycle Management and VxRail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective, and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure. But as shown here, our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies, they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages, and reduced overall cost of operations. With VxRail HCI system software, intelligent Lifecycle Management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated, keeping clusters and continuously validated states while minimizing risks and operational costs. How do we ensure Continuously validated states for VxRail. VxRail labs execute an extensive, automated, repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customers choosing across their VxRail environment. The VxRail labs are constantly testing, analyzing, optimizing, and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack. All the while VxRail is backed by Dell EMC's world class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software. IT productivity skyrockets with single click non disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing. taking you to the next VxRail version of your choice, while always in a continuously validated state. You can also confidently execute automated VxRail upgrades. No matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster. They don't have to all be the same. And upgrades with VxRail are faster and more efficient with leapfrogging simply choose any VxRail version you desire. And be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between. Only VxRail can do that. >> All right, so Chad, the lifecycle management piece that Shannon was just talking about is, not the sexiest, it's often underappreciated. There's not only the years of experience, but the continuous work you're doing, reminds me back the early vSAN deployments versus VxRail jointly developed, jointly tested between Dell and VMware. So bring us inside why, 2020 Lifecycle Management still, a very important piece, especially in the VM family line. >> Yes, Stu, I think it's sexy, but, I'm pretty big nerd. (all laughing) Yeah, this is really always been our bread and butter. And in fact, it gets even more important, the larger the deployments come, when you start to look at data centers full of VxRails and all the different hardware software, firmware combinations that could exist out there. It's really the value that you get out of that VxRail HCI system software that Shannon was talking about and how it's optimized around the VMware use case. Very tightly integrated with each VMware component, of course, and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware, all of the drivers, all the software all together in tremendous value to our customers. But to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment. So as Shannon mentioned, we run about 25,000 hours of testing across Each major release for patches, express patches, that's about 7000 hours for each of those. So, obviously, there's a lot of parallelism. And we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality. And one of the key things that we're able to do, as Shannon mentioned, is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state. We've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously, a huge amount of automation. And we've talked about that investment to execute those tests. That's one worth of $60 million of investment in our lab. In fact, we've got just over 2000 VxRail units in our testbed across the US, Shanghai, China and Cork, Ireland. So a massive amount of testing of each of those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state. >> Yeah, well, absolutely, it's super important not only for the day one, but the day two deployments. But I think this actually a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to. So we've got the CIO of Amarillo, Texas, he was an existing VxRail customer. And he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work-from-home initiative, as well as we get to hear in his words the value of what Lifecycle Management means. So Andrew, if we could queue up that customer segment, please? >> It's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we mature, I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments. But this instance, really justified why I was driving progress. So fervently why it was so urgent today. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt With VxRail in place, in a week we spun up hundreds of instant balls. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half, for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business. And now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that work, a little lagging or a little conservative, or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> Alright, so great, Richard, you talked a bunch about the the efficiencies that that the IT put in place, how about that, that overall just managed, you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. need to be able to do things much simpler? So how does the overall Lifecycle Management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. And in the old environment, one, It took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive, when we did make change, it overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. That wasn't cost efficient. And then simple things like, I've worked for multi billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production, simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on Lifecycle Management because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and rescale them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> All right, well, nothing better than hearing it straight from the end user, public sector reacting very fast to the COVID-19. And, if you heard him he said, if this is his, before he had run this project, he would not have been able to respond. So I think everybody out there understands, if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology, it would be much harder. All right, I'm looking forward to doing the CrowdChat letting everybody else dig in with questions and get follow up but a little bit more, I believe one more announcement he can and got for us though. Let's roll the final video clip. >> In our latest software release VxRail 4.7.510, We continue to add new automation and self service features. New functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades, to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch. This is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows, as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window. Of course, running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates. We are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific VxRail version, or down rev one or more nodes that may be shipped at a higher rate than the existing cluster. This enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in a cluster. To sum up all of our announcements, whether you are accelerating data sets modernization extending HCI to harsh Edge environments, deploying an on-premises Dell Technologies Cloud platform to create a developer ready Kubernetes infrastructure. VxRail is there delivering a turn-key experience that enables you to continuously innovate, realize operational freedom and predictably evolve. VxRail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations, automation and Lifecycle Management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid Cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across Core, Edge and Cloud. I now invite you to engage with us. First, the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about VxRail new features and functionality and sCore some sweet digital swag while you're at it. Delivered via an augmented reality app. All you need is your device. So go to vxrail.is/passport to get started. And secondly, if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation, we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VxRail Meet The Experts sessions available for a limited time. First come first served, just go to vxrail.is/expertsession to learn more. >> All right, well, obviously, with everyone being remote, there's different ways we're looking to engage. So we've got the CrowdChat right after this. But Jon, give us a little bit more as to how Dell's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got for options for them. >> Yeah, absolutely. So as Shannon said, so in lieu of not having done Tech World this year in person, where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions, whether it's in the booth or in meeting rooms, we are going to have these Meet The Experts sessions over the next couple weeks, and we're going to put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to everyone out there. So again, definitely encourage you. We're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we can still stay in touch, answer questions, be responsive, and really looking forward to, having these conversations over the next couple of weeks. >> All right, well, Jon and Chad, thank you so much. We definitely look forward to the conversation here and continued. If you're here live, definitely go down below and do it if you're watching this on demand. You can see the full transcript of it at crowdchat.net/vxrailrocks. For myself, Shannon on the video, Jon, Chad, Andrew, man in the booth there, thank you so much for watching, and go ahead and join the CrowdChat.

>> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation. We have a launch from Dell Technologies updates from the VxRail family. We're going to do things a little bit different here. We actually have a launch video Shannon Champion, of Dell Technologies. And the way we do things a lot of times, is, analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things. You might have questions on it. So, rather than me just wanting it, or you wanting yourself I actually brought in a couple of Dell Technologies expertS two of our Cube alumni, happy to welcome you back to the program. Jon Siegal, he is the Vice President of Product Marketing, and Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management, both of them with Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Great to be here. >> All right, and so what we're going to do is we're going to be rolling the video here. I've got a button I'm going to press, Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit, go into some questions when we're all done. We're actually holding a crowd chat, where you will be able to ask your questions, talk to the experts and everything. And so a little bit different way to do a product announcement. Hope you enjoy it. And with that, it's VxRail. Taking HCI to the extremes is the theme. We'll see what that means and everything. But without any further ado, let's let Shannon take the video away. >> Hello, and welcome. My name is Shannon Champion, and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with VxRail. Let's get started. We have a lot to talk about. Our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the Core, Edge and Cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options, as well as the latest in software innovations. So let's jump right in. Before we talk about our announcements, let's talk about where customers are adopting VxRail today. First of all, on behalf of the entire Dell Technologies and VxRail teams, I want to thank each of our over 8000 customers, big and small in virtually every industry, who've chosen VxRail to address a broad range of workloads, deploying nearly 100,000 nodes today. Thank you. Our promise to you is that we will add new functionality, improve serviceability, and support new use cases, so that we deliver the most value to you, whether in the Core, at the Edge or for the Cloud. In the Core, VxRail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation. Many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VxRail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment. Now we can support even more demanding applications such as In-Memory databases, like SAP HANA, and more AI and ML applications, with support for more and more powerful GPUs. At the Edge, video surveillance, which also uses GPUs, by the way, is an example of a popular use case leveraging VxRail alongside external storage. And right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing. And as it relates to VDI, VxRail has always been a great option for that. In the Cloud, it's all about Kubernetes, and how Dell Technologies Cloud platform, which is VCF on VxRail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and Cloud native applications. And we're doing that together with VMware. VxRail is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments, designed to enhance the native VMware experience. This joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. >> Alright, so Shannon talked a bit about, the important role of IT Of course right now, with the global pandemic going on. It's really, calling in, essential things, putting, platforms to the test. So, I really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers. Also, VDI, of course, in the early days, it was, HCI-only-does-VDI. Now, we know there are many solutions, but remote work is putting that back front and center. So, Jon, why don't we start with you as the what is (muffled speaking) >> Absolutely. So first of all, Stu, thank you, I want to do a shout out to our VxRail customers around the world. It's really been humbling, inspiring, and just amazing to see The impact of our VxRail customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here. Just for a few examples, there are genomics companies that we have running VxRail that have rolled out testing at scale. We also have research universities out in the Netherlands, doing the antibody detection. The US Navy has stood up a floating hospital to of course care for those in need. So we are here to help that's been our message to our customers, but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this. So just just a pleasure there. But as you mentioned, just to hit on the VDI comments, so to your points too, HCI, VxRail, VDI, that was an initial use case years ago. And it's been great to see how many of our existing VxRail customers have been able to pivot very quickly leveraging VxRail to add and to help bring their remote workforce online and support them with their existing VxRail. Because VxRail is flexible, it is agile, to be able to support those multiple workloads. And in addition to that, we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost effective cater to everything from knowlEdge workers to multimedia workers. You name it, you know from 250, desktops up to 1000. But again, back to your point VxRail, HCI, is well beyond VDI, it crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually. And VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads, any of our customers out there, it supports now a range of workloads that you heard from Shannon, whether it's video surveillance, whether it's general purpose, all the way to mission critical applications now with SAP HAN. So, this has changed the game for sure. But the range of work loads and the flexibility of the actual rules which really helping our existing customers during this pandemic. >> Yeah, I agree with you, Jon, we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments, from the ones that we sure all knew and loved back in the initial days of HCI. Now, the mission critical things now to Cloud native workloads as well, and the sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI. And specifically, VxRail gives them that ability to pivot. When these, shall we say unexpected circumstances arise? And I think that that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IP strategies look like as they move forward. They want that same level of agility, and ability to react quickly with their overall infrastructure. >> Excellent. Now I want to get into the announcements. What I want my team actually, your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo, so maybe they can dig up that footage, talk about how fast they pivoted, using VxRail to really spin up things fast. So let's hear from the announcement first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later. So let's get to the actual news that Shannon's going to share. >> Okay, now what's new? I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms, to further enable IT modernization across Core, Edge and Cloud. I will cover each of these announcements in more detail, demonstrating how only VxRail can offer the breadth of platform configurations, automation, orchestration and Lifecycle Management, across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent, simplified operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications. I'll start with hybrid Cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell Technologies Cloud announcements just a few weeks ago, related to VMware Cloud foundation on VxRail. Then I'll cover two brand new VxRail hardware platforms and additional options. And finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VxRail HCI system software capabilities for Lifecycle Management. Let's get started with our new Cloud offerings based on VxRail. VxRail is the HCI foundation for Dell Technologies, Cloud Platform, bringing automation and financial models, similar to public Cloud to On-premises environments. VMware recently introduced Cloud foundation for Delta, which is based on vSphere 7.0. As you likely know by now, vSphere 7.0 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release. In keeping with our synchronous release commitment, we introduced VxRail 7.0 based on vSphere 7.0 in late April, which was within 30 days of VMware's release. Two key areas that VMware focused on we're embedding containers and Kubernetes into vSphere, unifying them with virtual machines. And the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere Lifecycle Manager or VLCM. I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how VxRail fits in in a moment for VCF 4 with Tom Xu, based on vSphere 7.0 customers now have access to a hybrid Cloud platform that supports native Kubernetes workloads and management, as well as your traditional VM-based workloads. So containers are now first class citizens of your private Cloud alongside traditional VMs and this is now available with VCF 4.0, on VxRail 7.0. VxRail's tight integration with VMware Cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid Cloud, but also to deliver Kubernetes at Cloud scale with one complete automated platform. The second Cloud announcement is also exciting. Recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid Cloud, because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture. And with that Dell Technologies Cloud platform can now be deployed with a four-node configuration, lowering the cost of an entry level hybrid Cloud. This enables customers to start smaller and grow their Cloud deployment over time. VCF and VxRail can now be deployed in two different ways. For small environments, customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes. Since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture, it's ideal for getting started with an entry level Cloud to run general purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point. Both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost, but still with a Consistent Cloud operating model. For larger environments where dedicated resources and role-based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred. You can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at eight nodes for independent management and workload domains. A standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes Horizon, VDI, and vSphere with Kubernetes. >> Alright, Jon, there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware is doing with vSphere 7.0. understand if you wanted to use the Kubernetes piece, it's VCF as that so we've seen the announcements, Dell, partnering in there it helps us connect that story between, really the VMware strategy and how they talk about Cloud and where does VxRail fit in that overall, Delta Cloud story? >> Absolutely. So first of all Stu, the VxRail course is integral to the Delta Cloud strategy. it's been VCF on VxRail equals the Delta Cloud platform. And this is our flagship on prem Cloud offering, that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any Cloud, whether it's On-prem, in the Edge or in the public Cloud. And we've seen the Dell tech Cloud Platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons. One is it offers the fastest hybrid Cloud deployment in the market. And this is really, thanks to a new subscription offer that we're now offering out there where in less than 14 days, it can be still up and running. And really, the Dell tech Cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models, overall when it comes to VxRail. Secondly, I would say is fast and easy upgrades. This is what VxRail brings to the table for all workloads, if you will, into especially critical in the Cloud. So the full automation of Lifecycle Management across the hardware and software stack across the VMware software stack, and in the Dell software and hardware supporting that, together, this enables essentially the third thing, which is customers can just relax. They can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated, and always be in a continuously validated state. And this is the kind of thing that those three value propositions together really fit well, with any on-prem Cloud. Now you take what Shannon just mentioned, and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same VxRail infrastructure alongside traditional applications. This is a game changer. >> Yeah, I love it. I remember in the early days talking with Dunn about CI, how does that fit in with Cloud discussion and the line I've used the last couple years is, modernize the platform, then you can modernize the application. So as companies are doing their full modernization, then this plays into what you're talking about. All right, we can let Shannon continue, we can get some more before we dig into some more analysis. >> That's good. >> Let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates. that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options. covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases. First up, I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new Dell EMC VxRail series, the D series. This is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of VxRail for workloads at the Edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas. VxRail D series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the VxRail portfolio with simplicity, agility and lifecycle management. But in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches, it's adorable form factor that's extremely temperature-resilient, shock resistant, and easily portable. It even meets milspec standards. That means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VxRail HCI system software and 24 by seven single point of support, enabling you to rapidly react to business needs, no matter the location or how harsh the conditions. So whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base, running real-time GPS mapping on the go, or implementing video surveillance in remote areas, you can ensure availability, integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VxRail ruggedized D series. >> All right, Chad we would love for you to bring us in a little bit that what customer requirement for bringing this to market. I remember seeing, Dell servers ruggedized, of course, Edge, really important growth to build on what Jon was talking about, Cloud. So, Chad, bring us inside, what was driving this piece of the offering? >> Sure Stu. Yeah, yeah, having been at the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important. And that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these Edges or some of the more exotic locations. whether that's manufacturing plants, oil rigs, submarine ships, military applications, places that we've never heard of. But it's also about extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VxRails you're managing your Edges the same way using the same set of tools. You don't need to learn anything else. So operational simplicity is absolutely key here. But in those locations, you can take a product that's designed for a data center where definitely controlling power cooling space and take it some of these places where you get sand blowing or seven to zero temperatures, could be Baghdad or it could be Ketchikan, Alaska. So we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme altitude, but still offer that operational simplicity. Now military is one of those applications for the rugged platform. If you look at the resistance that it has to heat, it operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range, but it can do an excursion up to 55 C or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours. It's also resistant to heat sand, dust, vibration, it's very lightweight, short depth, in fact, it's only 20 inches deep. This is a smallest form factor, obviously that we have in the VxRail family. And it's also built to be able to withstand sudden shocks certified to withstand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation. Pretty high. And this is sort of like wherever skydivers go to when they want the real thrill of skydiving where you actually need oxygen to, to be for that that altitude. They're milspec-certified. So, MIL-STD-810G, which I keep right beside my bed and read every night. And it comes with a VxRail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment. And we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for naval shock requirements. EMI and radiation immunity often. >> Yeah, it's funny, I remember when we first launched it was like, "Oh, well everything's going to white boxes. "And it's going to be massive, "no differentiation between everything out there." If you look at what you're offering, if you look at how public Clouds build their things, but I called it a few years or is there's a pure optimization. So you need to scale, you need similarities but you know you need to fit some, very specific requirements, lots of places, so, interesting stuff. Yeah, certifications, always keep your teams busy. Alright, let's get back to Shannon to view on the report. >> We are also introducing three other hardware-based additions. First, a new VxRail E Series model based on where the first time AMD EPYC processors. These single socket 1U nodes, offer dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from eight to 64 Cores, up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer aided design. Next, the addition of the latest Nvidia Quadro RTX GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional work flows. Designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible, working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering, deep learning and visual computing workloads. And Intel Optane DC persistent memory is here, and it offers high performance and significantly increased memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price. Data persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity, even when power is lost, enabling quicker recovery and less downtime. With support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like SAP HANA. Alright, let's finally dig into our HCI system software, which is the Core differentiation for VxRail regardless of your workload or platform choice. Our joining engineering with VMware and investments in VxRail HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. Under the covers, VxRail offers best in class hardware, married with VMware HCI software, either vSAN or VCF. But what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two. Dell Technologies has a dedicated VxRail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper converged system. That team has also developed our unique VxRail HCI system software, which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver seamless, automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere. The key components of VxRail HCI system software shown around the arc here that include the extra manager, full stack lifecycle management, ecosystem connectors, and support. I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today, but if you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to meet our experts. And I will tell you how to do that in a moment. I touched on the LCM being a key feature to the vSphere 7.0 earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of VxRail Lifecycle Management. The LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers, but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them. With VxRail customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf, freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business. Customers tell us that Lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure, and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff, that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively, and that it isn't the most efficient economically. Automation of Lifecycle Management and VxRail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective, and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure. But as shown here, our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies, they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages, and reduced overall cost of operations. With VxRail HCI system software, intelligent Lifecycle Management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated, keeping clusters and continuously validated states while minimizing risks and operational costs. How do we ensure Continuously validated states for VxRail. VxRail labs execute an extensive, automated, repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customers choosing across their VxRail environment. The VxRail labs are constantly testing, analyzing, optimizing, and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack. All the while VxRail is backed by Dell EMC's world class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software. IT productivity skyrockets with single click non disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing. taking you to the next VxRail version of your choice, while always in a continuously validated state. You can also confidently execute automated VxRail upgrades. No matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster. They don't have to all be the same. And upgrades with VxRail are faster and more efficient with leapfrogging simply choose any VxRail version you desire. And be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between. Only VxRail can do that. >> All right, so Chad, the lifecycle management piece that Shannon was just talking about is, not the sexiest, it's often underappreciated. There's not only the years of experience, but the continuous work you're doing, reminds me back the early vSAN deployments versus VxRail jointly developed, jointly tested between Dell and VMware. So bring us inside why, 2020 Lifecycle Management still, a very important piece, especially in the VM family line. >> Yes, Stu, I think it's sexy, but, I'm pretty big nerd. (all laughing) Yeah, this is really always been our bread and butter. And in fact, it gets even more important, the larger the deployments come, when you start to look at data centers full of VxRails and all the different hardware software, firmware combinations that could exist out there. It's really the value that you get out of that VxRail HCI system software that Shannon was talking about and how it's optimized around the VMware use case. Very tightly integrated with each VMware component, of course, and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware, all of the drivers, all the software all together in tremendous value to our customers. But to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment. So as Shannon mentioned, we run about 25,000 hours of testing across Each major release for patches, express patches, that's about 7000 hours for each of those. So, obviously, there's a lot of parallelism. And we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality. And one of the key things that we're able to do, as Shannon mentioned, is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state. We've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously, a huge amount of automation. And we've talked about that investment to execute those tests. That's one worth of $60 million of investment in our lab. In fact, we've got just over 2000 VxRail units in our testbed across the US, Shanghai, China and Cork, Ireland. So a massive amount of testing of each of those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state. >> Yeah, well, absolutely, it's super important not only for the day one, but the day two deployments. But I think this actually a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to. So we've got the CIO of Amarillo, Texas, he was an existing VxRail customer. And he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work-from-home initiative, as well as we get to hear in his words the value of what Lifecycle Management means. So Andrew, if we could queue up that customer segment, please? >> It's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we mature, I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments. But this instance, really justified why I was driving progress. So fervently why it was so urgent today. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt With VxRail in place, in a week we spun up hundreds of instant balls. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half, for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business. And now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that work, a little lagging or a little conservative, or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> Alright, so great, Richard, you talked a bunch about the the efficiencies that that the IT put in place, how about that, that overall just managed, you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. need to be able to do things much simpler? So how does the overall Lifecycle Management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. And in the old environment, one, It took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive, when we did make change, it overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. That wasn't cost efficient. And then simple things like, I've worked for multi billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production, simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on Lifecycle Management because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and rescale them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> All right, well, nothing better than hearing it straight from the end user, public sector reacting very fast to the COVID-19. And, if you heard him he said, if this is his, before he had run this project, he would not have been able to respond. So I think everybody out there understands, if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology, it would be much harder. All right, I'm looking forward to doing the CrowdChat letting everybody else dig in with questions and get follow up but a little bit more, I believe one more announcement he can and got for us though. Let's roll the final video clip. >> In our latest software release VxRail 4.7.510, We continue to add new automation and self service features. New functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades, to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch. This is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows, as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window. Of course, running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates. We are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific VxRail version, or down rev one or more nodes that may be shipped at a higher rate than the existing cluster. This enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in a cluster. To sum up all of our announcements, whether you are accelerating data sets modernization extending HCI to harsh Edge environments, deploying an on-premises Dell Technologies Cloud platform to create a developer ready Kubernetes infrastructure. VxRail is there delivering a turn-key experience that enables you to continuously innovate, realize operational freedom and predictably evolve. VxRail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations, automation and Lifecycle Management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid Cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across Core, Edge and Cloud. I now invite you to engage with us. First, the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about VxRail new features and functionality and sCore some sweet digital swag while you're at it. Delivered via an augmented reality app. All you need is your device. So go to vxrail.is/passport to get started. And secondly, if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation, we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VxRail Meet The Experts sessions available for a limited time. First come first served, just go to vxrail.is/expertsession to learn more. >> All right, well, obviously, with everyone being remote, there's different ways we're looking to engage. So we've got the CrowdChat right after this. But Jon, give us a little bit more as to how Dell's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got for options for them. >> Yeah, absolutely. So as Shannon said, so in lieu of not having done Tech World this year in person, where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions, whether it's in the booth or in meeting rooms, we are going to have these Meet The Experts sessions over the next couple weeks, and we're going to put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to everyone out there. So again, definitely encourage you. We're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we can still stay in touch, answer questions, be responsive, and really looking forward to, having these conversations over the next couple of weeks. >> All right, well, Jon and Chad, thank you so much. We definitely look forward to the conversation here and continued. If you're here live, definitely go down below and do it if you're watching this on demand. You can see the full transcript of it at crowdchat.net/vxrailrocks. For myself, Shannon on the video, Jon, Chad, Andrew, man in the booth there, thank you so much for watching, and go ahead and join the CrowdChat.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube. (techno music) Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this special Cube Insights, powered by ETR. We've been running these Breaking Analysis Segments and today we're going to talk about some spending data that shows that there's continued interest in hyperconverged infrastructure. So we've been running these segments over the last several weeks with our partner ETR. They've got a database of about 4,500 IT Practitioners and CIOs. They go out quarterly and ask spending intentions. So we've been sharing that, along with our opinions. These are completely independent segments. I want to disclose that a number of the companies that we're talking about today: Nutanix, VMware, Dell EMC, Cisco, HPE. They sponsor theCube, but they have absolutely no input into editorial. They don't affect our opinion in any way, shape or form. So let's get into it. I'm here with Stu Miniman. Stu is an expert in this field. He's covered the space. Stu, let's look at some of the fundamentals. What do people need to know... Alex, if ya put up the slide, Stu, maybe you could talk to it. >> Yeah. Dave, thanks. I've been watching you have some fun with this. I enjoyed swimming in some of the data here and as you know, Dave, we've been watching since before hyperconverged infrastructure, or HCI, was a term that everybody talked about. We've been looking at how these hyperscale trends are going to impact the Enterprise. We put out our server SAN research years and years ago, so we know all these companies really well. And despite the latest AI and cloud and everything, the data shows, HCI, the simplification of the data center, building out what we would call True Private Cloud is important today. So right, we wanted to know when you look at the data, first of all, how are the vendors doing? Who are the leaders in this space here? There were a whole number of startups that came in this space. When we first analyzed the market it was companies like Microsoft and VMware that owned the operating system we thought would be hugely important. If you look in the big names this environment: Dell partnered with everyone, of course they bought Dell, bought EMC, which included a stake in VMware. What's that relationship with Nutanix? How is that shaping the market? As well as how is cloud impacting things? Both from a spending standpoint, has cloud sucked away revenue from HCI as that specter has overhung everybody in the IT space? And also, how does HCI fit into multicloud and how does that fit? >> Okay, great. So thanks for that setup, Stu, now let's get into some of the data. Alex, if you bring up the slide, the next slide. This is spending intentions for Nutanix, VMware and some other vendors. I'll go through that. But it's basically showing Nutanix and VMware are fighting it out. You know they're in this internecine battle and in social, and (chuckles) there's a war goin' on, because there's big money to be made here. So for those of you who are familiar with these segments, this is data from Enterprise Technology Research, from their July 2019 Spending Intentions Survey. So they're asking about spending intentions for the second half of 2019. The end of the survey, out of the 4,500 people in the panel, 1,068 responded to this survey. So on the left hand side you see the vendors: Nutanix, VMware with vSAN, Dell EMC with VxRail, specifically. Then SimpliVity, and then Springpath, or Cisco. So what the chart shows is what we call, Net Score. And net score is calculated by taking the red, on the bar, which is, we're going to leave the platform, that's the dark red. The lighter red, which is, we're going to spend less in the second half. The gray, which their spending's going to be flat. The dark green, or the evergreen, which says, we're going to increase spending. And the lime green, which I'm going to add to the platform. You take the green, minus the red, you get net score. Higher the net score, the better. You can see, Nutanix and VMware with vSAN are leading the pack. And then we'll go through that. But then you see, Shared Accounts. That's the number of indications for spending that they received out of those 1068. So Stu, what is this data telling you? >> So first of all, Dave, it confirmed kind of the general market share numbers that we hear out there. The vendors that track that on quarterly. VMware has the most customers, has the largest revenue, and their largest partner for that, of course, is Dell. VMware and Dell go to market, joint product development, joint engineering, joint go to market and it's the biggest piece of vSAN, so that's where we specifically wanted to look at the VxRail. And vSAN and VxRail, doing very well. They're adding new customers; was interesting to me that you saw VxRail kind of ramping up a little more on the, attracting new companies, but also looked to be losing some on the tail end of the dark red. As opposed to vSAN in general, is a little bit more stable. We know how many thousands of customers they have out there, and Vmware's a software story as opposed to VxRail is that full appliance. Nutanix is the second horse in this two-horse race that we're really talking about here, from HCI. There's some discussion in the marketplace after two quarters being down, is Nutanix showing weakness? What's happening there? The most recent quarter announcement was that Nutanix is doing well, seems to... They had a little bit of change as they're going through their move to a software model and sorting things out with sales and marketing in their channel. The data here shows that the second half of the year looks good for Nutanix. So to some of the questions I asked in the first slide, Dave, Nutanix and VMware, of course the clear leaders in this space. SimpliVity, which was of course bought be HP, Springpath which is the hyperflex from Cisco, are far behind those two out there. And it seems that even though Dell and VMware are fighting, very much with Nutanix, that is not heavily dampening Nutanix's from the respondents in this survey. >> Okay, and just a word on the data, so you see 184 shared accounts for Nutanix, 174 for VMware and down the line. Only 42 for SimpliVity and only 18 for Springpath, and Cisco. It's an indication of the size of the install base, obviously the more shared accounts, the more mentions, the larger the install base. Again, they're statistically significant; ETR does a very good job of that. Let's look Stu, at... Oh, actually I want to make another point here. So how are these net scores? Well let's put 'em in context. The hottest net scores we've seen recently are: Snowflake, and UiPath, with 80% plus, net score. Okay, so that's really, they're off the charts, they're growing like crazy. We saw Salesforce with 55%, so, and Workday sort of in there as well. Companies that are growing share. So SAP in the 30% range, and so you see the Dell EMC, VxRail, that's kind of holding serve. It's not like, dramatically gaining share, but they're growing a little bit and then-- >> And I think it's a lot, Dave, it shows to the maturity of this market. HCI is not new, both Nutanix and VMware have thousands of customers, specifically with V's then we're talking VMware. So it was more, when I saw some of your charts, Microsoft has a similar net score. >> Right >> Well liked, good install based, still growing and the like. And brings in the discussion of when we did some cross section of the analysis looking at cloud companies and how does this impact their public cloud spend; is this detracting if this customer's also doing public cloud? And the long and the short of it is VMware and Nutanix are pretty much the same if not actually a little bit better when you talk about a customer that's looking at their overall cloud spend. So to me that really signals that both VMware and Nutanix are doing a good job into how their solution fits into the customer's overall hybrid cloud strategy. >> All right, let's take a look at the next slide, which talks to time series. So this is hyperconverged infrastructure spending intentions again, for the second half of 2019, over time. So the July '19 Survey you can see is the most recent one. We go all the way back to January '17 and you can see Nutanix on the top, VMware or vSAN on the bottom. We just selected those two. We're just repeating the net score and the shared accounts. And you can see these things tend to bounce around a little bit. You can see Nutanix maintains a lead, but the market's startin' to converge. These two companies are coming together. We hear a lot about vSAN doing very well, it's kind of held on. You can see a slight downward pressure in July, in the July survey. It's unclear what that means. That could be an indication of just some uncertainty in the marketplace. Some economic macro concerns. Tariffs, potential headwinds there, so there could be some uncertainty there. But what do you takeaway from this slide, Stu? >> Yeah, first of all right. As you show, Dave, VMware is a bit more steady, Nutanix gone up for bit and come down. Both of them stayed relatively stable. Somewhere between kind of the 45 and 55 lately. A little bit, if you look at the overall trend, Nutanix is down. VMware could surpass them from the net score in the future, if this trend holds. But both of them doing quite well. When you looked at all the other vendors in there, of course the scale is just showing 40-70%, if you put all the others, which are down much lower, you can see once again, that kind of the clear leadership. These two companies, just strong lead. Does not look like there any challengers in this space that are ready to be a clear number three yet, in the market. >> But Nutanix at one point had no competition. >> Yeah. >> Okay, now vSAN comes in and of course-- >> Oh no, absolutely. So no, SimpliVity and Scale Computing, and there were a whole host of startups. There's all the brand new startups in the space. Everything from little companies like Diamante, Pivot3, who was around doing this before it came. So there's always been a lot there, but Nutanix is the one that separated from the pack. The only one in this space that's gone IPO. But VMware's there, Microsoft won that, they rebranded their Azure Stack HCI for what they put in the data center last year. So expect Microsoft partnering with all of the big server manufacturers to push farther into HCI, but really has not directly impacted this market too much, just yet. >> But there's definitely been some pressure on Nutanix from an earning standpoint, the stock's been hit. You've had some executive departures. There's some rumors about acquisition with Google. Your thoughts on-- >> Yeah, definitely. So John Furrier just had Dheeraj Pandey, the CEO of Nutanix, in our Palo Alto studio, leading up to the Copenhagen show for Nutanix that I will be at. Sure. Sunil Potti who was basically the number two at Nutanix, is now working for Thomas Kurian, TK, over at Google Cloud. My indication from what I hear, he is not over there to help broker a deal. Sunil had a great run at Nutanix, there was a clean break there, but there is a mostly new executive team at Nutanix. Now a couple of years past the IPO and the team at Nutanix, they have their platform. The have a bunch of SaaS offerings that they're doing there. Do they have a relationship with Google? Absolutely! They had Diane Greene at one of their events a couple of years ago. They did joint engineering. But I actually saw that engineering effort cool off a little bit in the last year or so since the new regime came on in Google Cloud. So does Nutanix have a lot of Enterprise accounts and know how to work with the Enterprise and could that be a boon to Google? Absolutely! But the personnel of a Nutanix executive over at Google, and Brian Stevens who's the CTO of Google Cloud being on the Board of Nutanix? I do not think that that is telegraphing that an acquisition is going to happen. It could. We see lots of big acquisitions. Nine or 10 billion dollars from Nutanix could be interesting for Nutanix and help them get in a lot of places and help Google. But Dave, I goin' on record say, I don't think it's going to happen. I don't think Cisco is going to buy Nutanix. Infrastructure's not the real push for Chuck Robbins and that team. And at the Google Cloud event, Dave, that we were at, we saw Sanjay Poonen from VMware up on stage touting how deeply VMware was going to partner. So both VMware and Nutanix are partnering with all of the clouds. VMware of course has a very deep relationship with VMware. They're going deeper with Google, they are even partnering with the old enemy of Microsoft, so I would give VMware definitely has a deeper and more public relationship with all the public cloud providers but Nutanix is also partnering and expanding their portfolio to give themselves good growth beyond just the core HCI market. >> HP's another one. So Nutanix and HPE are workin' together. Kind of the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Nutanix was not at VMworld this year; they're kind of booted out. So they belly up to HP. >> Yeah, HP loves having, they have their, "As a service offerings," and Nutanix is one of those as well as Nutanix can sell the HP. So as the, right, the Dell relationship is likely going to die down over time, as Michael Dell on the team, want to sell more Dell hardware with VMware software. HPE is another... And they also partner with Lenovo on the Nutanix side. >> All right, Stu, bring it home. What are the key takeaways on this cube Insights. >> Okay, so HCI, who is a two-horse race right now. There are interesting companies to look at beyond the two, but if you want to understand who the leaders are in the space it is: VMware, especially with their VxRail and Nutanix, are the two leaders in that space. Really looking and understanding how they're expanding into multicloud and hybrid cloud solutions. VMware very much with their VCF offering, which packages vSAN to go into the VMware cloud offerings. And Nutanix with an interesting strategy, both with how they really spread some of their services like what they're doing with Xi Cloud, as well as some SaaS offerings, which some of them really have a disconnect. Not in a bad way, but just are not tied directly to the hardware. What the infrastructure companies have tried to do for years. Both of them, VMware's done tons of acquisitions. Nutanix has done quite a few acquisitions too. >> So your second point here, what's the impact of Dell VMware versus the Nutanix battle? You say not a significant impact on spending intentions yet. I mean there's clearly some evidence that those two markets are comin' together, that VMware's pressuring Nutanix. But why do you say, yet? What do you expect? I mean is it the OEM deal with Dell? >> It's the OAM relationship. There is huge pipeline of Dell hardware with Nutanix software and they're at loggerheads. So absolutely, the Dell family: Dell, EMC and VMware are doing all they can to dial that down. So they put pressure on the channel. And even some of the most loyal Nutanix channel partners that work with Dell, have had pressure to do more and more VxRail. So I expect it to have impact, but just as, Dave, I'll dial back the clock. You probably remember when EMC had a relationship with HP and HP killed the OEM of EMC storage. EMC stormed back and got a lot of those accounts. Same thing happened when EMC and Dell broke up a couple of years before the acquisition. So Nutanix is storming to go with HPE as one of their server partners, and (mumbles). So can Nutanix keep their growth and momentum going as Dell is no longer their biggest partner? >> Well, they're fighting a two-front war. They've got one with Dell VMware and they're also fighting the war with the public cloud guys, even though they're partnering with the public cloud guys. All right, they're sort of taking that cloud model but of course it's on prim. So you say how this public cloud affects HCI spending; not a significant impact on spending intentions yet. Can I infer from that that you do expect there to be pressure on that second front? >> Yeah, so as I've talked about before Dave, when we look at VMware and VMware gives the VMware cloud in AWS. Some say, "Great, that gives me a nice path to be able to use public cloud. But maybe I don't need some of this VMware licensing and software in there." The question for Nutanix is very similar. What services do they have? How do they become more sticky in customer environments? And absolutely, they're driving a roadmap for that in working with their customers. >> Well the thing about Nutanix is that customer's really happy. The customer's really like Nutanix. They like the simplicity. I've talked to a number of Nutanix customers that are very happy in that regard. And they have a leading product in that regard. But they're aiming at the multicloud space and can they play there? >> And Dave, you make a really good point. The killer use case, what did HCI deliver? It delivered simplicity. Today, if you talk about public cloud in general or even hybrid or multicloud, (chuckles) simplicity is not how you would describe this. So can the customers, the companies that did HCI, so, VMware, Nutanix, HPE and Cisco, they're all fighting for that hybrid and multicloud environment. And if they can help deliver simplicity of management, simplicity of leveraging my data, they can be successful in that space. >> Okay, so you're sort of positive on the multicloud, their position in multicloud. Even though they're not one of the big five. >> Yeah, and the good news for a Nutanix is that they're growing off of a much smaller base then say VMware, when you say they have five or 600,000 customers. Hey, how big of an impact will public cloud have on them? >> All right, so we don't pick stocks. We're not making recommendations. (laughs) But, do you feel like it's overdone, that it's undervalued? Independent of the macro. Do you feel like the pressure on Nutanix is warranted, or do you feel like it's got legs? >> So I feel Wall Street tends to over adjust when they go through things. When I talk to my friends on the Wall Street stuff. Definitely Nutanix took more of a beating probably then they should have. But they had two quarters that weren't great. And some of that was the management changes, they blamed that they couldn't hire sales and marketing fast enough. Something we'd asked, if you're a company in the Valley and you've gone from a few hundred people to a few thousand people. How do you keep adding good quality people? That's challenging. So yes, I think we've actually seen Dave, in the last week, or so Nutanix has been one of the fastest growing stocks in the tech market. So they're adjusting some. So I still think Nutanix has plenty of room for growth. The question is, what's their path to say, two billion dollars? Or is it an exit for 9-10 billion dollars down the road? >> All right, Stu, some great stuff. Thank you for that analysis. And thank you for watching this episode of theCube Insights, powered by ETR. This is Dave Vellante, for Stu Miniman, we'll see ya next time. (techno music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante. Welcome to this special CUBE conversation. We're gonna be talking today about hyper conversion infrastructure. HCI really brought together compute, storage, and networking to simplify management and operations. But the networking piece has always been, you know, a little bit to the side, right? Because you bring your own network to HCI. And the integration has not always been there. So we're gonna talk today about simplifying cloud on VMWare and transforming the network. This week is VMWorld Europe. Chad Dunn is here. He's the vice president of product management for HCI at Dell EMC. Chad, thanks for coming on to talk about this. >> Hey Dave, always glad to be with you. >> So, HCI is hot, it's smoking. VxRail is a leader there. We're gonna talk about that. >> Yep. >> Based on some of the market numbers from IDC and others. So give us the update, what's new with VxRail? >> Well obviously for VxRail, the big new is, unless you've been under a rock, you know the market is growing like crazy. Now VxRail is now achieving a growth rate that's roughly twice the overall market. And so we've moved into this market leadership position. And now it's about how we start to differentiate the product even further, and pull further away from the pack. And that deeper integration with networking and some of the other VMWare components are keys for us to be able to achieve that. >> And that growth, those are IDC numbers, Gartner numbers. >> Those are IDC numbers if you look at the overall market growth rate. >> What do you attribute that growth from? You guys came out of nowhere to take the market leadership. Why? Where's that coming from? >> You know, it's a pretty easy question. When we look at who the market leader is in terms of the hypervisor, in terms of virtualization, it's clearly VMWare. And the value proposition to a customer is a very simple question. Are you a VMWare customer? Do you intend to continue to be a VMWare customer? Do you like the tools? Do you like the hypervisor? Do you like the ecosystem around it? And you know, nine and a half times out of ten, the answer is yes. And if it's time to go hyperconverged, we believe and I think most customers believe we have the best hyperconverged solution to be able to do that within the VMWare experience. >> So, Dell, obviously a huge portfolio. Since the merger, you guys have done a lot of work together. And now you're really focusing on network automation. What are you guys doing, specifically, and why is it important? >> Yeah. Well, the integration with Dell, I've become one of the biggest Dell fanboys there is at this point. Because, first of all, I started with a hyperconverged product that was not based on Dell. We became part of Dell. Now I have a world-class X86 portfolio to build on top of. But I also now have access to an amazing portfolio of open networking products. And so the next logical step, after integrating with Dell computers, is to integrate with Dell networking. And when we look at the challenges that people have in adopting and deploying hyperconverged infrastructure, a lot of times, it has to do with the network. So we said "what can we do between these two organizations, "to make it a lot easier for our customers" "to adopt hyperconverged." And that really means network automation. So that means that, in Dell OS10 enterprise-based switches, we've created an auto-detect and auto-configuration feature between VxRail and those switches. >> So let's break that down a little bit. So as I was saying at the top, hyperconverge really has been about bringing storage. And well actually in some cases, networking and compute together. And then sort of storage bringing in. Or storage and compute, and then the networking is "bring your own," right? Everything is "bring your own network." And then what, you put a top-of-rack switch in? >> Yep >> But so why is this simpler? What specifically are you guys automating? >> Well there's two things. One is organizational. So very often, in customers, we encounter the virtualization team, the server team, storage team, networking team, different organizations. Now, largely hyperconverge, and even before that, converge was sort of an excuse for many of those functions to come together. But networking is sort of the last one where those organizations are coming together with our customers. And that's really prompted by hyperconverge. But then at the technical level, how do you make that real for a customer? So at the risk of getting into the weeds, the way this works is if you take a Dell OS10 enterprise-based switch, and you have a single command to put it in VxRail mode, from then on the switches and VxRails will discover one another through an in-line protocol. VxRail manager will access the switch via API's. We'll configure all the ports. We'll configure all the VLANS. We'll configure the connection up to the customer's network. And then from there on out, we're able to detect new VxRails as they enter the network, automatically plumb those together with the existing cluster. So when we look at the steps that you would normally take to deploy hyperconverged just on the network side, it's about a 98% savings in terms of the number of steps that you have to go through to be able to stand that environment up. And then from there on out, we also wanna look at operational savings. So you will now be able to manage that switch also within vCenter. So we have a philosophy in VxRail that says every time a user has to leave the VMWare user experience, that's a bad thing and we want to minimize that. So as we implement the Dell networking portion of the solution, you'll be able to now manage that from vCenter just as you'll be able to manage VxRail from vCenter. >> Is this degree of networking automation unique in the marketplace? Are you guys ahead of the pack? Are you playing catch-up? >> We feel like we're ahead of the pack in this. I think that a lot of folks are certainly focusing on integration with software-defined networking. And in fact, we did that first. You know our integration with NSX. Both v, NSXv for infrastructures of service. And now increasingly NSX-T, especially when we're in a container, or cloud-native environments. So there's been a lot of focus there. But I think our focus on the configuration and management of the physical network, I think is unique. >> Talk more about the Dell, EMC, and VMWare relationship. Obviously, you guys are part of the same sort of company. Even though VMWare of course is a separate public company. But you guys work closer together. VMWare works with everybody. What's unique about what you guys are doing? Give us some double-click on that. >> Sure. If I think back previous to Dell, you know, we had our cousins at VMWare that we worked pretty closely with. And I think that our success is sort of born out the concept that we were able to collaborate more effectively than most other EMC and VMWare projects that we've done in the past. So, it's been very successful for both companies. Then along comes Dell, and Michael has a saying that says, "I'm happy but I'm not satisfied." So he looked at this. Jeff Clark looked at this. Pat Gelsinger looked at this, the collaboration that we have and said "We're happy. We're not satisfied. Do more of it." "Do it harder. Do it faster." And that's what we've done. And that top-down directive has really driven us to collaborate much more broadly and deeply with VMWare, and in fact Pivotal, than we have in the past. And I think that's shown a lot of benefits. Not just in the networking integration. But we're moving all of the graphical user interface out of VxRail manager into vCenter plug-ins. So our focus is really around robust API's that can be leveraged across different VMWare management properties as well as third party properties to give you the best possible VMWare user experience when you use VxRail. >> What does that mean for customers? Let's talk about the business impact. I mean you mentioned 98% time savings before. I mean, that's enormous. But let's talk a little bit about the customer impact. >> I think if you look at the customer impact that we're observing, the five-year TCO empirically is running about 600% in terms of ROI. So I think we're very successful in that. And the key to that success is not creating new panes of glass, or new management paradigms for a customer who is a VMWare customer. We want to be in lock-step with the way the VMWare develops. Not only the hypervisor, but certainly VSAN, and certainly the rest of the Vrealize assets as well as software-defined networking. To that end, one of the biggest changes that we made was something internally we call SimShip with VMWare. Now if you think about where we've come from, the lag time between when we would ship a new version of VMWare on VxRail versus when VMWare releases it was pretty variable, right? Could be three months, six months, nine months, it really depends on how the development schedules would align. And that was something that, quite frankly, to Michael and Pat and Jeff was not acceptable. If we want this to be the premier hyperconverged experience for a VMWare user, we need to be simultaneous with VMWare. And so now you're gonna see very regular tight integration between the release schedules of software on VxRail and the release of the underlying software from VMWare. So that's enabled us to shift a lot of that up-front development and engineering work left into VMWare so we can be much more quick to adopt new VMWare technology. >> So if I could, I'd like to stay on this business impact for a moment. You're talking about 600% ROI over a five-year period. I'm presuming that ROI comes predominately from the simplified infrastructure management and simplified labor costs. I'm not focused on heavy-lifting. I'm shifting to more strategic things, presumably. And there may also be some capex savings as well. But where is it coming from? >> I think it's primarily operational. I think, depending on what the competing solution might be, or the legacy solution might be, there may be some capex savings there. But it's really around operations. Now we have seen customers fundamentally shift from simple virtualization and consolidation of virtual machines onto hyperconverged like VxRail to implementing full infrastructures of service stacks right up through the Vrealize suite. But also platform and containers of service as well as we collaborate with Pivotal and VMWare. So it's that infrastructure as a service deployment methodology that I think leads to most of that capex saving, right? Three years ago, hyperconverged was all about VDI and sort of point applications, and islands of applications. Now it's predominately about infrastructures of service, containers of service, platforms of service. And that's where you really start to see those operational efficiencies shine through. >> Well, you know, in our experience the VDI, while nice, was largely a benefit for IT. Didn't really have a huge impact on the business. But when you start to talk about things like Pivotal, and the impact of moving from say Waterfall to an Agile environment. Now you're talking about business impact in terms of time to deployment and accelerating the time to value, which may or may not be in that 600%, I'm not sure. But those are oftentimes considered soft dollars. But to the business, it's not. It's competitive. >> Those are real dollars. Those are real resources working on those things. And just as we saw a shift in terms of constructing versus consuming IT resources, we see that up the stack. As VxRail automates things like software and firmware updates, our customers don't have to do that anymore. Now we look to see how can we can we drive those same kinds of benefits further up into the stack in terms of deployment, management of virtual machines, management of cloud-native workloads. >> So coming off of VMWorld U.S. a couple months ago, a lot of talk about VMWare Cloud Foundation, a lot of buzz about multi-cloud. That's kind of the hot topic right now. What's going on with VCF? We're hearing a lot of buzz leading up to VMWorld Europe. What's going on in that space? >> There's a lot going on between us and VMWare on the multi-cloud strategy. One thing that we heard in the last VMWorld was the integration between us and Cloud Assembly. This is a really important and strategic solution for us. Because what we found, especially with smaller customers who wanted to get those efficiencies of infrastructures of service, there is a fairly high upfront capital cost. Because you simply needed all the hardware to run the cloud management platform. And then you needed the tenant nodes to actually run the virtual machines. And very often, that was a high entry point, a high entry cost for those customers. What VMWare has done with Cloud Assembly is basically turn that cloud management platform into software as a service, so it lives in the cloud. And now with an agent that VxRail automatically installs, you can now point that CMP at your tenant nodes and start getting that infrastructure of service benefit. So that was one that we talked about at the last VMWorld. We also talked about our partnership with VMWare around Project Dimension, which basically takes the VMWare-managed cloud providers, The VMC providers, and extends that management paradigm, and that update paradigm to on-premises. So you have effectively got a cloud service that could run at a cloud provider but could simultaneously run on your premises. So are the two really good examples of how we're collaborating more broadly and deeply with VMWare to lower the overall operational cost, and in some cases, even the capital cost of implimenting infrastructure as a service. With respect to cloud foundation, in VxRack SDDC, which is the other product that I look after, we've had that partnership underway for over two years now and that's been very successful for us. And it tends to be the larger customers who want to buy everything as a fully-integrated system, a fully turn-key racked, stacked, cabled, and ready to deploy. But with regard to what you're teasing, I think where you're going is "well what's gonna be next?" and "what's unique about what we're doing" "with Cloud Foundation?" And there are a lot of dimensions to that. And I think the first one is what we've done around the VMWare validated design and the certified partner architecture. So if a customer wants to achieve a VMWare software-defined data center, the VMWare-validated design for VxRail gives them the exact prescription of how to get there. It can be delivered by us, can be delivered by VMWare, could be delivered by our channel partners who are certified to do so. And that gives you this nice consistent deployment architecture that we can continue to life-cycle manage as a customer moves forward. But it preserves all the VxRail value add in terms of our cluster management, our life-cycle management capability, all of that automation. Now as we move forward, we'll add more and more automation into the VVD deployment toolkit to make that even easier for customers. And so then the next logical question is VxRack and Cloud Foundation versus VxRail. We effectively have two hyperconverged solutions. That doesn't make a lot of sense. So what you'll start to see us do, and I think what some people have already started to see us do is to start to bring those solutions together, bring those products together. So in fact, even now, if you have a VxRack SDDC, if you open up that cabinet, well guess what. Those are VxRails inside there. And those software stacks will ultimately converge as well. So you can go from a build-to-consume continuum even within hyperconverged where you've got VxRails with VVD's. But the VVD basically defines deployment architecture that is compatible with Cloud Foundation. And just as we've preserved a lot of those value-add features for VxRail in the VVD, we'll be doing the same thing with Cloud Foundation. So, you know, stay tuned for that. But, as I mentioned a little bit earlier on, when we look at the management paradigm for VxRail, my directive to the product management team and the engineering team is "your first three priorities" "are API, API, and then user interface," right? So that's where we're placing a lot of that effort. And because, in may cases when we approach our collaboration with VMWare, we want to look for opportunities to be first best and only. I think as you see us bring VxRail and VCF together, that's gonna be one of those "best and only" sorts of solutions. But you have to stay tuned for further details on that. >> But that makes a lot of sense, simplifying that portfolio. But the big takeaway to me, Chad, and we've talked about this in the past, is what we call the "true private cloud" or even "true hybrid cloud" is bringing the cloud experience to your data no matter where it lives. Whether it's on PRIM in your private cloud. The VMWare AWS deal, obviously simplifies the sort of public cloud piece. Or you're in a service provider, and you've now got a homogenous experience that really is much more cloud-like than we've seen over the years. >> Well, you look at the old saying about cloud-native applications, "write it once," "and I don't care where it runs." Well as the multi-cloud strategy evolves, whether that's running in a VMC cloud provider, whether that's running on premise, our users shouldn't have to care. There may be things that they want to keep on premise for perfectly good reasons. There's may be things that they want to have in the cloud. Great example, we just got our certification for SAP HANA on VxRail. Now that's a workload that, just because of the latency requirements, and the kind of data they're processing, very likely that's gonna stay on premise for quite a while. So there are good reasons to have that construct where we don't necessarily care where the workload is. But we wanna provide a consistent user experience that really lowers that opex for customers. >> Great. How do people learn more about this? >> Come see us at VMWorld in Barcelona. We've got presence all over the show. And then hit us up on the cloud marketplace on dellemc.com, find out more about VxRail and VxRack SDDC as our primary cloud platforms. >> Alright Chad, you've been busy. Congratulations on the announcement. And thanks for watching everybody, Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (electronic music)

>> Presenter: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE! Covering Dell Technologies World 2018! Brought to you by Dell EMC, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Cube! We are live at Day One of Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, and we are joined by two guests. We have Shannon Champion, Product Marketing of HCI at Dell EMC, and we have her customer, from Celtic Manor, Chris Stanley, IT Manager. Hey Chris! >> Hi. >> Welcome to the Cube, you guys! >> Thank you, thank you very much! >> And we just timed this perfect music intro for you! >> They knew, they knew! >> So Chris, Celtic Manor, you're based in Wales, talk to us about Celtic Manor, what it is that you do, before we start talking about your IT and Digital Transformations. >> Yeah sure, so we're a collection of hotels, four, in South Wales. Within that four, there is a resort hotel, with a conference center. We offer lots of facilities to our guests, golf courses, spas, all the niceties, bars, restaurants, and as well as the conference business being quite a big side of that. And we've got a lot of growth coming on with new hotels and a new convention center. Yeah, and we've got a staff of around about a thousand at the moment, half of those being PC end-users, and a small IT team of eight supporting all those people. >> So a lot of locations, a lot of stuff, a lot of data. Talk to us about what you're doing with Dell EMC, where did you start from, infrastructure-wise? And where are you now? >> Infrastructure-wise, we've been a Dell Partner probably since 2014. That was, we were the previous vendor before, and now at Dell EMC House, always good news, eh! (chuckles) And, our VxRail journey has begun, probably the last eight months, with a new convention center opening, which is an international one, International Convention Center Wales, a joint venture with the Welsh government there. And it's something that's, whereas we've got a lot of conference business now, we do very well at it, we have to turn away a lot of conference business because we're not big enough. So this facility can offer up to 4,000 people in the main room, 1,500-seat auditorium, as well as other breakout rooms. So sort of 6,000 potential guests on-site. And we needed some technology to support that, so we engaged with Dell EMC, and VxRail was our choice. We briefly evaluated others, but Dell EMC, we had a proven past with a great support and strategic partnership, so it was an easy decision. >> So we're going to get into sort of the details there, but Shannon, let me bring you into the conversation. Last time we really spent any time together was in the 14G Launch. You helped orchestrate a lot of the messaging of that, so give us the update on HCI and VxRail, did that awesome marketing package that you put together, is it living up to the marketplace! (all laughing) >> Well thank you for that softball, Dave! Yes, yeah! So in November we were talking to you about HCI and 14th-generation PowerEdge servers, and how PowerEdge is really designed with software-defined storage in mind, and how that really set itself up well for HCI. And what it does is open up doors to being applicable for even more mainstream workloads and applications because of the power and predictability that provides, and Celtic Manor is a perfect example of that, in terms of, initially, using VxRail to scale quickly and reliably for a majority of their workloads and applications, actually. And now, are moving to VDI where, historically, VDI has really been the entry point for HCI. So it's really exciting to see that sort of flip-flop use case here. >> Right, it was like the obligatory workload or use case, right? >> Chris: We like to be different. (laughing) >> Well, I mean, your business is different, right? >> Yes! >> I wonder if you could start with some of the business drivers, right? I mean, obviously, very competitive industry, but you've got some unique differentiators, right, experiences that you're offering customers is somewhat different. But what's driving your business? Speed, digital disruption, maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Organizational growth was a key one. With new hotels and conference centers coming on we were bursting at the seams with our current environment. >> Good problem! >> Yeah, so we're all very good. But it was supporting that for customers going forward as well as our staff, supporting with the systems and reliability that we can, to ensure that we get the businesses doing, you know, its utmost. And then, yeah, going on from there, we offer all these different kinds of facilities on-site, golf, bedrooms, spas, all needing different systems, from booking systems through to your VOIP systems, your big databases, Oracle databases, on these servers. So quite a hard workload on them. And we're looking for something that was easy for us to manage, you know, going forward. >> So Chris in terms of IT transformation, Michael Dell talked this morning about these four transformative elements that a company should take to be successful. Digital, IT, workforce, security, talking about the opportunity for IT innovation, to really convert IT into a profit center. And where IT innovation is successful is where customers are looking at it as a business strategy. Talk to us about the stakeholders, maybe, from the CFO's perspective, of, "Hey, we have a great opportunity here "to capture more business and be more competitive." What was that conversation like, the IT folks to the CFO to get budget and approval to help transform? >> Always a tough conversation. (chuckling) Going from the past experience where we'd initially gone with a converge solution back in 2014 with Dell, that alone saved us a significant amount in power alone, so it was something that paid for itself. >> So the CFO was already like, "Alright guys"-- >> Yeah, you know what you're doing, so yeah. We took that, we could see where our pain points were in the environment we currently had, and with it, all the additional hotels, conference centers, coming on, we were at a key stage where we needed to, from the core, build outwards. So VxRail was and obvious-er choice, I should say, in the end. But it was key to transformation, because it enables us now to look at other methods. It's freed up a lot of time for IT staff, so we're looking at deploying a virtual desktop solution now which we don't currently have. And that could be initially anything from up to 300 virtual desktops, so big load, but we now have the core capacity there to do it. And we're looking at other things for our guests, where we can give them a better experience. So Artificial Intelligence, AI, is very big on the agenda, so we look at everything. There's face recognition systems now that can recognize the guests when they come in, ping a message, we haven't deployed these yet, we're still looking at them. But it's enabled us to look at these now with the power behind us of the 14G service. So it's all, it's a key enabler for us, the VxRail solution. >> Opening up the potential for emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning... >> Yes, very much so. >> How do you differentiate from your HCI competition? What are some of the touchpoints there? >> Well, from a VMware focus perspective, you know, Celtic Manor has deployed VxRail. Our differentiator is that we're the only provider through our strategically-aligned business relationship that is jointly engineered with VMware. And so what that means, from a customer point of view, is a more seamless experience, right. Familiar tools they already know and love, that they use day to day, from a VMware perspective, for day-to-day management. But then also the automation that's built in. Automated deployment, ability to upgrade with one click, seamless process to scale quickly when you have new hotels coming online, for example. And then have a single point of support. So we take one single call, whether it's hardware or software, for VxRail. If there's an issue, call Dell EMC and a lot of customers find a lot of value in that. >> So, okay, Chris, now I've got to ask you. So you heard that from Dell EMC, but a lot of companies would say, "Well, we get along great with VMware, "we get the SDKs early, "yeah, those guys overplay all that stuff." What, from your perspective, how important is what Shannon just laid out? And how real is it? >> It's very real. And Shannon basically, yeah, all those points there were literally what we were struggling with. We had the one support telephone company to call, imperative to us. We'd been ringing, in the past we'd be ringing Sand Storage, we were ringing ESX, VMware, all blaming each other, and you're going back and forth and you're wasting key time. With one support number now, you know, you've one call, you've got a one-stop-shop to sort it. So that was a big, big call for us. The 14G service as well, we also get the recover points which enables us to have two environments where we can lose one, and one total environment lost, but still operate as a business. So all of these, keeping, giving us uptimes to close to 100% as we can. >> Have your had to test that yet? Or, when I say test, has it actually, have you had to fail over? I mean, you probably tested it, hopefully you tested it, but-- >> We have-- >> Dave: Has it tested you yet, let me put it that way! >> Yeah, we have failed over servers. We haven't failed over a whole cluster, because you hope it's one of the things you hope you never have to do. (Shannon laughing) We've tested the procedure between nodes, as you would, and there is, we have tested recently with the Recover Point software, where we have lost servers, and it's a decision then, do we try to troubleshoot the problem or do we just go back a few minutes when it was working and we just, we gave it an hour to sort it out, it was impacting, so we just rolled back as if it never happened! >> It worked! >> Yeah, which was a nice reaffirmation that what we did was right! >> So Shannon you talked about resiliency, speed. There was an analyst report, recently, that I'd like you to kind of enlighten us on. And kind of look at one of the thing Chris said, in terms of getting back to the business cost savings. How does Celtic Manor's achievement so far kind of align with what you're seeing in terms of customers being able to leverage HCI to be more budget friendly? >> Yeah, so, I think you're referring to our IT Maturity Study. And what we're seeing is that the majority of customers, almost all of them, are telling us that if they don't transform in their industry, then they'll no longer be competitive. So I think all of our customers are kind of coming to that realization. One of the key aspects to that is that a year ago, when we asked the same question, a significantly lower number was mentioned. So I think that just speaks to the speed and the urgency that customers are coming to the realization that it's really important to transform, and we need to do it sooner rather than later. We have a lot of proof points around VxRail, particularly, in terms of the automation. You know, 73% faster to deploy, that means value to customers. That's money that they're saving, directly. And lower serviceability costs overall, over 40% lower. So that translates into real TCO, goes back to the CFO, you know, that helps understand the investment that they're making, lets them reprioritize in other areas of the business that helps them transform and stay innovative in their industry. >> I want to follow up on that last point that Shannon just made. And a lot of times, when you're bringing in some kind of consolidation, the staff says, "Uh oh, "that means I'm going to lose my job, "because I'm really good at revisioning LANs" or whatever it is. How did you address that, was there organizational tension, what did you do with the time that was freed up? >> Yeah, I think it's helped transform the IT team. If anything, it's freed up time, but that time is now taken, it's given us more time to look at innovative products and going forwards. There is, our staff has a tendency to specialize more as opposed to generalize, which is nice. As in, the VxRail has sat there, and it's pretty much doing what you would do with minimal amounts of watching over them, with the remote support, who also watch your environment, if you enable it. If you have any outages there, they can potentially draw your attention to it before you even know. So lots of time's been freed up, and now you can see the staff are embracing it there, they're happy they've got this additional time not to be doing the not-so-important stuff, as we say, although it is very important, to keep it going. But they have more time now to specialize in what they mostly enjoy. So it's brought it on full circle now, so it's really, yeah, we're really seeing some positives. >> And hang out with their families on the weekends. (everyone speaking at once in agreement) So since they're not doing that, and they have more time to innovate, where are you on this data center modernization journey? And where, we talked about VDI, but where do you think you are in that journey? >> With respect to, with VDI, we are imminently doing it. We finished deploying the second VxRail cluster, the five S Series nodes, probably only a couple weeks ago, after a full migration of all the existing VMs. So it's now enabling us to look at VDI, which, ironically, when we get back, the week I get back, we have a meeting with Dell EMC on, do we need another node, all flash, or do we, we have specced within five nodes, some capacity for virtual desktops. But it's, again, something that, with all these additional hotels coming on, the conference centers, virtual desktop is the way to go. Even centralizing the data more so people aren't taking all data off of their laptops, so we're a more secure environment. So again, a great enabler for us, and finally, after four or five years, I get the virtual desktop! Done it the other way around, but-- >> Do you golf? >> I used to golf a lot. >> Okay, so you know what a mulligan is. >> Yeah. >> So, if you had a mulligan, what would you do differently? >> Um, what would I do differently? Good question! >> I mean, specific to this project. (chuckling) >> Nothing, really. I think everything pretty much has been done as I would expect. When we first deployed the conference center, the new conference center environment, it was a bit disjointed, because the conference center wasn't built and in full use. It kind of gave us some time to test the environment fully, which we also did with the Dell VxRail test drives, which I know the guys offer you were you can go into a classroom facility for a day and see it in action before you actually purchase and use it. >> Same question, different spin. Advice for your peers. Because obviously you had some successes. What would you tell them, to be successful? >> Just go for it! If you're thinking it, I mean, it is, as far as I can see, it is the future product, and it's not going to go in any other direction. The management side of things is far more simplistic than everything else we've experienced in the past. And it's baked-in VMware so, you know, you have the best chef and the best ingredients with the best thing as opposed to another chef taking the best ingredients and trying to do something. So yeah, it's just seamless integration now, and it gives us a lot of confidence that we have everything there with Dell, and this environment, to go forward and grow even bigger as a business. >> And then we've cued your outro music. >> Perfect! >> Timed that perfectly! Chris, thank you so much for sharing what you're doing at Celtic Manor to innovate, making your IT transformation. Shannon, thank you for sharing what's new with HCI. Dave, thank you for sharing with me the word "mulligan", I just looked it up. In case you don't know what a mulligan is, it is an extra stroke allowed after a poor golf shot. I probably would be like the mulligan queen. >> You get a few. (chuckles) >> We want to thank you for watching the Cube, we are live on Day One of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, stick around, we'll be right back after a short break. (electronic music)

>> 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 SiliconANGLE Media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi, everybody, Dave Vellante here. We're having a CUBE conversation about hyperconverged infrastructure with John Shirley, director of product management at Dell EMC. John, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, so we're going to get right into it. I want to ask you some things about the relationship with Nutanix. When DELL and EMC merged, everybody said okay this relationship is toast. What do you say to that? >> Oh, absolutely not. The relationship is pretty strong out there right now. In fact, I talk to my counterparts everyday and we're planning for years in the future so everything's going pretty good. >> Okay, so I mean EMC used to compete with Nutanix and you guys have competitiveness in your DNA. What was that like when you kind of transitioned in to Dell and what changed? >> I'm not going to tell you it was the smoothest, but things are going pretty well right now. What I will say, if we take a look at the portfolio where things go well, especially when we talk about things in the field, right? Whether it's any kind of conflict that's going on in the field, what works best is when we have the teams talking to each other. And when I say the teams, I'm talking about the Nutanix sales team and the Dell sales team. Making sure there's good communication and good relationship there. >> And you feel like that's top to bottom from execs on down. But when a customer says, John, I'm really concerned that you guys are going to just throw Nutanix out, what do you point to. Do you point to some quote by Michael Dell or just the amount of business you guys are doing or both? >> I'll point to the 14th generation of XC Series that we just announced. We're investing heavily in this product and we wouldn't do that if we were going to throw it away. >> Okay, how 'about conflict with the sellers in particular. You got Nutanix, you know, competing and partnering. How do you address that? >> Yeah, the best way to address that is again going back to the relationship. If the sales teams have that relationship with their Nutanix counterpart in the field, that's going to make everything better. And we might not always win, and we might not always be able to go into those deals, but at least having the discussion and having the relationship, will make that process so much better and it will avoid a lot of the conflict that we could see. >> Okay, so you guys have your own sort of hyperconverged you know, the home grown VxRail, how does that fit with the XC Series? >> Really clear on this one. The VxRail is intended for customers who have standardized on VMware, on vSphere. For customers who want choice, or for customers who've already deployed with Nutanix, then we have XC Series for them. >> Okay, so the target for XC is the install base of existing Nutanix customers or those that don't want to just do VMware. >> Correct. And we have plenty of customers out there who want to do things like, let's say hyper-v. Hyper-v is very quickly growing in our portfolio right now, cause we're spending a lot of effort around marketing and around product development for hyper-v applications, environments. >> Yeah, Microsoft doing well, growing in the Cloud. Got a good hybrid story and you guys have been long time partners. Both companies, both Dell and EMC. That continues. All right, John, I'll give you the last word. Final thoughts? >> Final thoughts? Well just really excited for this 14th generation product to hit the market. We're already seeing a lot of excitement from our customers for the new technologies including NVMe and the new CPU options, and faster networking so it's going to be a really fun year. >> Excellent. All right, Dave Vellante, John Shirley. Thanks for watching everybody, see you next time. (upbeat 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 SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> A couple of years ago the research analysts at Wikibon coined the term "true private cloud" and it was based on the recognition from talking to practitioners in our community, that they weren't really able to reshape and reform their business and stuff it into the cloud. Rather, what they wanted to do was bring the cloud experience, the cloud operating model, to their data, wherever that data existed. My name is Dave Vellante. Welcome everybody to this Cube Conversation. HCI, the fundamental foundation for IT transformation. I'm here with Jon Siegal who's the Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell EMC. Good to see you again. Thanks for coming out. >> Yeah, good to see you as always. >> So what's happening in the world of HCI? It's hot, it's exploding. Give us the update. >> Wow, is it hot. I mean 2017 has been quite a year when it comes to the hyper-converged infrastructure. It's the hottest IT infrastructure segment in terms of growth right now. 40, 50, 60% a year, depending on who you talk to. Regardless, it's big. A couple billion dollars this year and it's going to be up to 10 billion dollars by 2021. So we're talking big, big, big. And I think really what this has to do is the fact that it's really gone mainstream. Right? It's really crossed the chasm and for a couple reasons. One is I think what you just referred to is what you're calling the "true private cloud," if you will, experience that customers want. This is really a de facto, HCI is the de facto now, foundation for what customers really need to build a private cloud, number one. >> Okay, so what about HCI, I mean, I understand why it's growing because it essentially does bring that cloud experience. What about HCI makes it that foundation for cloud? Can you elaborate a little bit? >> Absolutely, first of all it's software-defined. It's dirt simple. We essential make it a Turn-Key. So really what we're helping customers do is build a foundation so they can build an IAS, or a platform as a service on top. In order to build the foundation, you have to make it as simple and Turn-Key as possible. So what we've done is, we've made sure that there's a single throat to choke. We made sure that we it there the automation for deployment, for day-to-day management, all the way through lifecycle management. We made sure that we have a platform, if you will, that now allows it now to enable self-service. You can start small and grow. The pay-as-you-grow model, for example, that has really been, I think, widely received very positively in the cloud space. As you said, we're bringing the cloud-like attributes to on prem with HCI as a foundation. >> So let's unpack those a little bit. So, one of the things you think about with the cloud vendor, public cloud. I swipe the credit card. I have a relationship with that vendor. It's a single throat to choke. Is that the relationship that I have with you when I do business with you? >> Yes. So, Dell EMC, and one of the reasons that Dell EMC has become number one in this space, is because we've made it simple for customers. We have the HCI appliance called VxRail. It's the only HCI appliance on the market that's co-engineered with VMware, to insure that we have that single throat to choke for our customers. >> Okay, so there's an integration component. I mean, you don't go all the way up to the highest level application, but from an infrastructure standpoint, services are fully integrated. Is that right? And you come in, and when I install it, all those services are there? It's not like I'm rolling my own? >> This is fully integrated in Turn-Key. Really what, you know, again, the reason I think we're seeing HCI take off like we are, is because we've taken a lot of that pain, and the aggravation that customers have to spend trying to build to maintain their core infrastructure, We've taken that on. Right? And we're actually doing that for them. So that when it arrives, from day one, all the way through day 365, we've taken care of the automation for them, and this allows them to spend much more time focused up the stack. Right? So they can actually start to figure out where hey can differentiate their business with IT, because IT plays a critical role in how customers are going to transform their business and go from really a traditional IT model, to a digital transformation model. In order to do that, they need to spend less time building and maintaining the infrastructure, and that's really what HCI has done for our customers. >> Well, I think that's a really important point, and it's a big reason why it's growing so fast. Just to throw some data in there, we see about 150 billion dollars over the next 10 years exiting, what you were talking about, that low level infrastructure management, shifting labor resource up to whatever, AI, or, doing other types of application development work, digital business transformation. So let me ask you, am I correct that you can manage your hyper converged products as a single entity of pools of resource? >> Exactly right. So really what we've done is we've simplified the infrastructure, like I said. What we're doing is, we're bringing the cloud like experience to on prem, like you said. And that means we need to simplify management, as well, and that's a key part of it. So that the entire virtual infrastructure, right, can be easily managed by a VMware administrator. >> So let's test that a little bit. There are two attributes that people in our community talk about when they talk about the cloud and all. There's the self service component, and the pay by the drink. >> Yes. >> Can I actually use your products to create that type of capability for my business? >> Absolutely. So, we have a couple different options here. So, first of all, HCI, the basic premise of HCI, is that it allows customers to start small and grow. Right? And we're basically able to tailor the hyper converged, configuration to whatever our customers need. So they only buy what they need, and then they can easily grow, and seems to grow to what they want, number one. Number two, is we have capabilities, things like cloud flex, flexible financing models, and financing structures, so that customers can literally pay as they grow, much like they do in the cloud space. >> How about hybrid? Is the, I mean, everybody talks about hybrid. Hybrid cloud is the future, but can you accommodate, sort of, hybrid models with HCI? >> Absolutely. So again, HCI is that foundation for the cloud, and then we seamlessly integrate with tools, with VMwear, for example, like vRealize automation, and other things like that. And that allows things like self service which allow customers to first of all, manage their on prem, like a cloud. And then we also have capabilities for customers to even tier their data, if you will, to public clouds, as well. >> Can you give us a little bit more detail, Jon, on the underlying technology here. What are the key enablers? You mentioned, software defined. How should we think about the technology enablers to HCI? >> I think the technology enablers t6o HCI first and forward is software defined. It is based on software defined capabilities out there. VCN's a very popular one, as an example, which is really greatly simplifying moving customers away from that three tier, kind of, infrastructure model, to a new two tier model. Right? And customers really can appreciate the simplicity of this. So this allows them, again, from day one all the way through day 365, to be able to automate the deployment, automate the management, automate the life cycle management, all the way across the board. >> How about the family? You're part of Dell, now, Dell Technologies. What's that like? What's Dell bring to the HCI conversation? Talk about that a little bit. >> It's been tremendous. First and foremost, what we've done with HCI is we've leveraged, essentially, our partnerships across the Dell technologies companies. For example, I don't think there's a better example at Dell Technologies of where their groups are working together.6 We have, for example, VxRail is a perfect example of how we have Vmware and Dell EMC working, essentially, very, very closely together to ensure that we have a seamless experience for our customers. It's the only co-engineered, HCI appliance on the market with VMware, number one. Number two is we're also working very closely with Pivotal, because what customers need is they build that on prem cloud. They start with HCI, and then on top of that you can then add Turn-Key IAS which his our integration with Vmware. You can add Turn-Key platform as a service which is integration with Pivotal. So, all together what we're trying to do is enable our customers to have that on prem, cloud experience. >> All right, give us the summary. So, specifically the announcements, and what's the portfolio look like, post announcement? >> Yeah, so, what we're announcing today, we're real excited about. We're taking the simplicity, if you will, of HCI, and marrying that to the power and the flexibility of 14th generation PowerEdge servers, because what's really interesting is that, yes, HCI is defined by software. But really what it's all about is how well you integrate the software with the hardware, to ensure a Turn-Key experience for our customers, and that's what we've done introducing our VxRail and XC series appliances based on 14th generation PowerEdge6 servers. >> Okay, so you've got, sort of, horses for courses, I like to say. Different work loads are going to require different configurations. You know Dell EMC, you've been known for your large portfolio. The saying is, "Better to have overlap, than it is to have gaps." You feel like you've got the gambit covered, here? >> We do. So up until now, I think, we've seen HCI, as I said, cross the chasms. For HCI, last couple of years, was traditionally used for noncritical workloads, whether it was VDI projects, it could be test DEV. Sometimes it was small consolidation projects, and then we've started to see over the past year, it started to be applied to the majority of virtualized workloads. And now with this announcement, we think it now can apply to all workloads across the data center. That's because what 14th generation PowerEdge servers bring to the table, is first and foremost, it brings together powerful, and predictable performance. We're talking double the IOPs. Right? We're talking more predictable performance where actually customers can now expect less than a millisecond response time for their key applications. Applications like online transaction processing which in the past, hadn't necessarily been applied to HCI. So really what I think this announcement is doing overall, is we set HCI as the foundation for the on prem cloud, and up until now, we've support some workloads in the data center. But now, with this announcement, with 14th generation PowerEdge servers running our HCI solutions, we can now extend HCI across the data center, and extend that cloud like experience now, to all the applications in the data center. >> Great. Okay, let's wrap. Where do people go to find more information and dig into the product details? >> Oh, yeah. We make it really simple Again, that's HCI, it's simple, right? So, DellEMC.com/HCI is where you can go. We're also going to have a crowd chat, hashtag Nextgenhci. I believe it's going to be December 1st, so we'd love to have customers tune in and check that out, and participate, as well. >> Excellent, Jon, thanks very much for coming back to theCUBE. >> All right. >> Great to see you again. >> Great as always, thanks a lot. >> Appreciate it. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante. We're out. (upbeat jazz music)

>> 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)

>>In late 2009 when the industry was just beginning to offer so-called converged infrastructure, CI Nutanix was skating to the puck, so to speak, meaning unlike conversion infrastructure, which essentially bolted together compute and networking and storage into a single skew that was very hardware centric. Nutanix was focused on creating HCI hyperconverged infrastructure, which was a software led architecture that unified the key elements of data center infrastructure. Now, while both approaches saved time and money, HCI took the concept to new heights of cost savings and simplicity. Hyperconverged infrastructure became a staple of private clouds creating a cloudlike experience. OnPrem. As the public cloud evolved and grew, more and more customers are now taking a cloud first approach to it. So the challenge becomes how do you remodel your IT house so that you can connect your on-prem workloads to the cloud, to both simplify cloud migration, while at the same time creating an identical experience across your estate? >>Hello, and welcome to this special program, Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft Made Possible by By Nutanix and produced by the Cube. I'm Dave Ante, one of your hosts today. Now, in this session, we'll hear how Nutanix is evolving its initial vision of simplifying infrastructure, deployment and management to support modern applications by partnering with Microsoft to enable that consistent experience that we talked about earlier, to extend hybrid cloud to Microsoft Azure and take advantage of cloud native tooling. Now, what's really important to stress here, and you'll hear this in our second segment, substantive engineering work has gone into this partnership. A lot of partnerships are sealed with a press release. We sometimes call it a Barney deal. You know, I love you, you love me. Like Barney, the once popular children's dinosaur character. We dig into the critical engineering aspects that enable that seamless connection between on-prem infrastructure and the public cloud. >>Now, in our first segment, Lisa Martin talks to Alro Salise, who is the vice president of Global ISD Commercial Solutions at Microsoft, and Michael Les Chica, who is the vice president of business development for the cloud and database partner ecosystem at Nutanix. Now, after that, Lisa will kick it back to me in our Boston studios to speak with Eric Lockard, who is the corporate vice president of Microsoft Azure specialized, along with Thomas Cornell, who is the senior vice president of products at Nutanix. And Indu Carey, who's the senior vice president of of engineering for NCI and NNC two at Nutanix. And we'll dig deeper into the announcement and it's salient features. Thanks for being with us. We hope you enjoy the program. Over to Lisa. >>Hi everyone. Welcome to our event Accelerate Hybrid Cloud with Nutanix and Microsoft. I'm your host Lisa Martin, and I've got two great guests here with me to give you some exciting news. Please welcome Alva Salise, the Vice President of Global ISD Commercial Solutions at Microsoft, and Michael Les Chika, VP of Business Development Cloud and database partner ecosystem at Nutanix. Guys, it's great to have you on the program. Thanks so much for joining me today. Great to be here. >>Thank you, Lisa. Looking forward, >>Yeah, so let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to me from your lens, what are you seeing in terms of the importance of the role of the the ISV ecosystem and really helping customers make their business outcomes successful? >>Oh, absolutely. Well, first of all, thank you for the invitation and thank you Michael and the Nutanix team for the partnership. The the ISV ecosystem plays a critical role as we support our customers and enable them in their data transformation journeys to create value, to move at their own pace, and more important to be sure that every one of them, as they transform themselves, have the right set of solutions for the long term with high differentiation, cost effectiveness and resiliency, especially given the times that we're living. >>Yeah, that resiliency is getting more and more critical as each day goes on. Ava was sticking with you. We got Microsoft Ignite going on today. What are some of the key themes that we should expect this year and how do they align to Microsoft's vision and strategy? >>Ah, great question. Thank you. When you think about it, we wanna talk about the topics that are very relevant and our customers have asked us to go deeper and, and share with them. One of them, as you may imagine, is how can we do more with less using Azure, especially given the current times that we're living in the, the business context has changed so much, they have different imperative, different different amount of pressure and priorities. How can we help? How can we combine the platform, the value that Microsoft can bring and our Microsoft ISV partner ecosystem to deliver more value and enable them to have their own journey? Actually, in that frame, if I may, we are making this announcement today with Nutanix. I, the Nutanix cloud clusters are often the fastest way on which customers will be able to do that journey into the cloud because it's very consistent with environments that they already know and use on premise. And once they go into the cloud, then they have all the benefit of scale, agility, resiliency, security, and cost benefits that they're looking for. So that topic and this type of announcements will be a big part of what we doing. Ignite, >>Exciting. Michael, let's bring you into the conversation now. Big milestone of our RDTs that the general availability of Nutanix Cloud clusters on Azure. Talk to us about that from Nutanix's perspective and also gimme a little bit of color, Michael, on the partnership, the relationship. >>Yeah, sure, absolutely. So we actually entered a partnership couple years ago, so we've been working on this solution quite a while, but really our ultimate goal from day one was really to make our customers journeys to hybrid cloud simpler and faster. So really for both companies, I think our goal is really being that trusted partner for our customers in their innovation journey. And as mentioned, you know, in the current macroeconomic conditions, really our customers really care about, but they have to be mindful of their bottom line as well. So they're really looking to leverage their existing investments in technology skill sets and leverage the most out of that. So the things like, for example, cost to operations and keeping those things consistent, cost on premises and the cloud are really important as customers are thinking about growth initiatives that they wanna implement. And of course, going to Azure public cloud is an important one as they think about flexibility, scale and modernizing their apps. >>And of course, as we look at the customer landscape, a lot of customers have an on on footprint, right? Whether that's for regulatory reasons for business or other technical reasons. So hybrid cloud has really become an ideal operating model for a lot of the customers that we see today. So really our partnership with Microsoft is critical because together, I really do see our US together simplifying that journey to the public cloud and making sure that it's not only easy but secure and really seamless. And really, I see our partnership as bringing the strengths of each company together, right? So Nutanix, of course, is known in the past versus hyperconverge infrastructure and really breaking down those silos between networking, compute, storage, and simplifying that infrastructure and operations. And our customers love that for the products and our, our NPS score of 90 over the last seven years. And if you look at Azure, at Microsoft, they're truly best in class cloud infrastructure with cutting edge services and innovation and really global scale. So when you think about those two combinations, right, that's really powerful for customers to be able to take their applications and whether they're on or even, and really combining all those various hybrid scenarios. And I think that's something that's pretty unique that we're to offer customers. >>Let's dig into that uniqueness of our, bringing you back into the conversation. You guys are meeting customers where they are helping them to accelerate their cloud transformations, delivering that consistency, you know, whether they're on-prem in Azure, in in the cloud. Talk to me about, from Microsoft's perspective about the significance of this announcement. I understand that the, the preview was oversubscribed, so the demand from your joint customers is clear. >>Thank you, Lisa. Michael, personally, I'm very proud and at the company we're very proud of the world that we did together with Nutanix. When you see two companies coming together with the mission of empowering customers and with the customer at the center and trying to solve real problems in this case, how to drive hybrid cloud and what is the best approach for them, opening more opportunities is, is, is extremely inspiring. And of course the welcome reception that we have from customer reiterates that we generating that value. Now, when you combine the power of Azure, that is very well known by resiliency, the scale, the performance, the elasticity, and the range of services with the reality of companies that might have hundreds or even thousands of different applications and data sources, those cloud journeys are very different for each and every one of them. So how do we combine our capabilities between Nutanix and Microsoft to be sure that that hybrid cloud journey that every one is gonna take can be simplified, you can take away the risk, the complexity on that transformation creates tones of value. >>And that's what a customers are asking us today. Either because they're trying to move and modernize their environment to Azure, or they're bringing their, you know, a enable ordinate services and cluster and data services on premise to a Nutanix platform, we together can combine and solve for that adding more value for any scenario that customers may have. And this is not once and done, this is not that we building, we forget it. It's a partnership that keeps evolving and also includes work that we do with our solution sales alliances that go to market seems to be sure that the customers have diverse service and support to make, to create the outcomes that they're asking us to deliver. >>Talk to me a little bit about the customers that were in the beta, as we mentioned, Alva, the, the preview was oversubscribed. So as I talked about earlier, the demand is clearly there. Talk to me about some of the customers in beta, you can even anonymize them or maybe talk about them by industry, but what, what were some of the, the key things they came to these two companies looking to, to solve, get to the cloud faster, be able to deliver the same sets of services with familiarity so that from a, they're able to do more with less? >>Maybe I could take that one out of our abital lines. It did. It means, but yeah, so like, like we, like you mentioned Lisa, you know, we've had a great preview oversubscribe, we had lots of, of cu not only customers, but also partners battle testing the solution. And you know, we're obviously very pleased now to have GN offered to everyone else, but one of our customers, Camper J was really looking forward to seeing how do they leverage Ncq and Azure to, like I mentioned, reduce that work workload, my, my migration and a risk for that and making sure, hey, some of the applications, maybe we are going to go and rewrite them, refactor them to take them natively to Azure. But there's others where we wanna lift and shift them to Azure. But like I mentioned, it's not just customers, right? We've been working with partners like PCs and Citrix where they share the same goal as Microsoft and Nutanix provides that superior customer experience where whatever the operating model might be for that customer. So they're going to be leveraging NC two on Azure to really provide those hybrid cloud experiences for their solutions on top of building on top of the, the work that we've done together. >>So this really kind of highlights the power of that Alva, the power of the ISV ecosystem and what you're all able to do together to really help customers achieve the outcomes that they individually need. >>A absolutely, look, I mean, we strongly believe that when you partner properly with an V you get to the, to the magical framework, one plus one equals three or more because you are combining superpowers and you are solving the problem on behalf of the customer so they can focus on their business. And this is a wonderful example, a very inspiring one where when you see the risk, the complexity that all these projects normally have, and Michael did a great job framing some of them, and the difference that they have now by having NC to on Azure, it's night and day. And we are fully committed to keep driving this innovation, this partnership on service of our customers and our partner ecosystem because at the same time, making our partners more successful, generating more value for customers and for all of us. >>Abar, can you comment a little bit on the go to market? Like how, how do your joint customers engage? What does that look like from their perspective? >>You know, when you think about the go to market, a lot of that is we have, you know, teams all over the world that will be aligned and working together in service of the customer. There is marketing and demand generation that will be done, that will be also work on enjoying opportunities that we will manage as well as a very tight connection on projects to be sure that the support experience for customers is well aligned. I don't wanna go into too much detail, but I will like to guarantee that our intent is not only to create an incredible technological experience, which the, the development teams are done, but also a great experience for the customers that are going through these projects, interacting with both teams that will work as one in service to empower the customer to achieve the outcomes that they need. >>Yeah, and just to comment maybe a little bit more on what Albar said, you know, it's not just about the product integration or it's really the full end to end experience for our customers. So when we embarked on this partnership with Microsoft, we really thought about what is the right product integration and with our engineering teams, but also how do we go and talk to customers with value prop together and all the way down through to support. So we actually been worked on how do we have a single joint support for our customers. So it doesn't really matter how the customer engages, they really see this as an end to end single solution across two companies. >>And that's so critical given just the, the natural challenges that that organizations face and the dynamics of the macro economic environment that we're living in. For them, for customers to be able to have that really seamless single point of interaction, they want that consistent experience on-prem to the cloud. But from an engagement perspective that you're, what sounds like what you're doing, Michael and Avaro is, is goes a long way to really giving customers a much more streamlined approach so that they can be laser focused on solving the business problems that they have, being competitive, getting products to market faster and all that good stuff. Michael, I wonder if you could comment on maybe the cultural alignment that Nutanix and Microsoft have. I know Microsoft's partner program has been around for decades and decades. Michael, what does that cultural alignment look like from, you know, the sales and marketing folks down to engineering, down to support? >>Yeah, I think honestly that was, that was something that kind of fit really well and we saw really a long alignment from day one. Of course, you know, Nutanix cares a lot about our customer experience, not just within the products, but again, through the entire life cycle to support and so forth. And Microsoft's no different, right? There's a huge emphasis on making sure that we provide the best customer experience and that we're also focusing on solving real world customer problems, right? And really focusing on the biggest problems that customers have. So really culturally it felt, it felt really natural. It felt like we were a single team, although it's, you know, two bar organizations working together, but I really felt like a single team working day in, day out on, on solving customer problems together. >>Yeah, >>Let, go ahead. >>No, I would say, well say Michael, the, the one element that we complement, the, I think the answer was super complete, is the, the fact that we work together from the outside in, look at it from the customer lenses is extremely powerful and inspire, as I mentioned, because that's what it's all about. And when you put the customer at the center, everything else falls in part on its its own place very, very quickly. And then it's hard work and innovation and, you know, doing what we do best, which is combining over superpowers in service of that customer. So that was the piece that, you know, I, I cannot emphasize enough how inspiring he's been. And again, the, the response for the previous is a great example of the opportunity that we have in there. >>And you've taken a lot of complexity out of the customer environment and I can imagine that the GA of Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure is gonna be a huge benefit for customers in every industry. Last question guys, I wanna get both your perspectives on Michael, we'll start with you and then Lvra will wrap with you. What's next? Obviously a lot of exciting stuff. What's next for the partnership of these, these two superheroes together, Michael? >>Yeah, so I think our goal doesn't change, right? I think our North star is to continue to make it easy for our customers to adopt, migrate and modernize their applications, leveraging Nutanix and Microsoft Azure, right? And I think NC two and Azure is just the start of that. So kind of maybe more immediate, like, you know, we mentioned obviously we have, we announced the ga that's J in Americas, but kind of the next more immediate step over the next few months look for us to continue expanding beyond Americas and making sure that we have support across all the global regions. And then beyond that, you know, again, as of our mentioned, it's working from kind of the s backwards. So we're, we're not, no, we're not waiting for ega. We're already working on the next set of solutions saying what are other problems that customer facing, especially across, they're running their workload cross on premises and public cloud, and what are the next set of solutions that we can deliver to the market to solve those real challenges for. >>It sounds really strongly that, that the partnership here, we're talking about Nutanix and Microsoft, it's really Nutanix and Microsoft with the customer at this center. I think you've both done a great job of articulating that there's laser focus there. Our last word to you, what excites you about the momentum that Microsoft and Nutanix have for the customers? >>Well, thank you Lisa. Michael, I will tell you, when you hear the customer feedback on the impact that you're having, that's the most inspiring part because you know you're generating value, you know, you're making a difference, especially in these complex times when the, the partnership gets tested where the, the right, you know, relationship gets built. We're being there for customers is extremely inspiring. Now, as Michael mentioned, this is all about what customer needs and how do we go even ahead of the game, being sure that we're ready not for what is the problem today, but the opportunities that we have tomorrow to keep working on this. We have a huge TA task ahead to be sure that we bring this value globally in the right way with the right quality. Every word, which is a, is never as small fist as you may imagine. You know, the, the world is a big place, but also the next wave of innovations that will be customer driven to keep and, and raise the bar on how, how much more value can we unlock and how much empowerment can we make for the customer to keep in innovating at their own pace, in their own terms. >>Absolutely that customer empowerment's key. Guys, it's been a pleasure talking to you about the announcement Nutanix cloud clusters on Azure of our Michael, thank you for your time, your inputs and helping us understand the impact that this powerhouse relationship is making. >>Thank you for having Lisa and thank you AAR for joining >>Me. Thank you Lisa, Michael, it's been fantastic. I looking forward and thank you to the audience for being here with us. Yeah, stay >>Tuned. Thanks to the audience. Exactly. And stay tuned. There's more to come. We have coming up next, a deeper conversation on the announcement with Dave and product execs from both Microsoft. You won't wanna.

>>The cybersecurity landscape continues to be one characterized by a series of point tools designed to do a very specific job, often pretty well, but the mosaic of tooling is grown over the years causing complexity in driving up costs and increasing exposures. So the game of Whackamole continues. Moreover, the way organizations approach security is changing quite dramatically. The cloud, while offering so many advantages, has also created new complexities. The shared responsibility model redefines what the cloud provider secures, for example, the S three bucket and what the customer is responsible for, eg properly configuring the bucket. You know, this is all well and good, but because virtually no organization of any size can go all in on a single cloud, that shared responsibility model now spans multiple clouds and with different protocols. Now, that of course includes on-prem and edge deployments, making things even more complex. Moreover, the DevOps team is being asked to be the point of execution to implement many aspects of an organization's security strategy. >>This extends to securing the runtime, the platform, and even now containers, which can end up anywhere. There's a real need for consolidation in the security industry, and that's part of the answer. We've seen this both in terms of mergers and acquisitions as well as platform plays that cover more and more ground. But the diversity of alternatives and infrastructure implementations continues to boggle the mind with more and more entry points for the attackers. This includes sophisticated supply chain attacks that make it even more difficult to understand how to secure components of a system and how secure those components actually are. The number one challenge CISOs face in today's complex world is lack of talent to address these challenges, and I'm not saying that SecOps pros are now talented. They are. There just aren't enough of them to go around, and the adversary is also talented and very creative, and there are more and more of them every day. >>Now, one of the very important roles that a technology vendor can play is to take mundane infrastructure security tasks off the plates of SEC off teams. Specifically, we're talking about shifting much of the heavy lifting around securing servers, storage, networking, and other infrastructure and their components onto the technology vendor via r and d and other best practices like supply chain management. And that's what we're here to talk about. Welcome to the second part in our series, A Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure Made Possible by Dell Technologies and produced by the Cube. My name is Dave Ante, and I'm your host now. Previously, we looked at what trusted infrastructure means >>And the role that storage and data protection play in the equation. In this part two of the series, we explore the changing nature of technology infrastructure, how the industry generally in Dell specifically, are adapting to these changes and what is being done to proactively address threats that are increasingly stressing security teams. Now today, we continue the discussion and look more deeply into servers networking and hyper-converged infrastructure to better understand the critical aspects of how one company Dell is securing these elements so that devs SEC op teams can focus on the myriad new attack vectors and challenges that they faced. First up is Deepak rang Garage Power Edge security product manager at Dell Technologies, and after that we're gonna bring on Mahesh Naar oim, who was a consultant in the networking product management area at Dell. And finally, we're closed with Jerome West, who is the product management security lead for HCI hyperconverged infrastructure and converged infrastructure at Dell. Thanks for joining us today. We're thrilled to have you here and hope you enjoy the program.

>>The cybersecurity landscape continues to be one characterized by a series of point tools designed to do a very specific job, often pretty well, but the mosaic of tooling is grown over the years causing complexity in driving up costs and increasing exposures. So the game of Whackamole continues. Moreover, the way organizations approach security is changing quite dramatically. The cloud, while offering so many advantages, has also created new complexities. The shared responsibility model redefines what the cloud provider secures, for example, the S three bucket and what the customer is responsible for eg properly configuring the bucket. You know, this is all well and good, but because virtually no organization of any size can go all in on a single cloud, that shared responsibility model now spans multiple clouds and with different protocols. Now that of course includes on-prem and edge deployments, making things even more complex. Moreover, the DevOps team is being asked to be the point of execution to implement many aspects of an organization's security strategy. >>This extends to securing the runtime, the platform, and even now containers which can end up anywhere. There's a real need for consolidation in the security industry, and that's part of the answer. We've seen this both in terms of mergers and acquisitions as well as platform plays that cover more and more ground. But the diversity of alternatives and infrastructure implementations continues to boggle the mind with more and more entry points for the attackers. This includes sophisticated supply chain attacks that make it even more difficult to understand how to secure components of a system and how secure those components actually are. The number one challenge CISOs face in today's complex world is lack of talent to address these challenges. And I'm not saying that SecOps pros are not talented. They are. There just aren't enough of them to go around and the adversary is also talented and very creative and there are more and more of them every day. >>Now, one of the very important roles that a technology vendor can play is to take mundane infrastructure security tasks off the plates of SEC off teams. Specifically we're talking about shifting much of the heavy lifting around securing servers, storage, networking, and other infrastructure and their components onto the technology vendor via r and d and other best practices like supply chain management. And that's what we're here to talk about. Welcome to the second part in our series, A Blueprint for Trusted Infrastructure Made Possible by Dell Technologies and produced by the Cube. My name is Dave Ante and I'm your host now. Previously we looked at what trusted infrastructure means and the role that storage and data protection play in the equation. In this part two of the series, we explore the changing nature of technology infrastructure, how the industry generally in Dell specifically, are adapting to these changes and what is being done to proactively address threats that are increasingly stressing security teams. >>Now today, we continue the discussion and look more deeply into servers networking and hyper-converged infrastructure to better understand the critical aspects of how one company Dell is securing these elements so that dev sec op teams can focus on the myriad new attack vectors and challenges that they faced. First up is Deepak rang Garage Power Edge security product manager at Dell Technologies. And after that we're gonna bring on Mahesh Nagar oim, who was consultant in the networking product management area at Dell. And finally, we're close with Jerome West, who is the product management security lead for HCI hyperconverged infrastructure and converged infrastructure at Dell. Thanks for joining us today. We're thrilled to have you here and hope you enjoy the program. Deepak Arage shoes powered security product manager at Dell Technologies. Deepak, great to have you on the program. Thank you. >>Thank you for having me. >>So we're going through the infrastructure stack and in part one of this series we looked at the landscape overall and how cyber has changed and specifically how Dell thinks about data protection in, in security in a manner that both secures infrastructure and minimizes organizational friction. We also hit on the storage part of the portfolio. So now we want to dig into servers. So my first question is, what are the critical aspects of securing server infrastructure that our audience should be aware of? >>Sure. So if you look at compute in general, right, it has rapidly evolved over the past couple of years, especially with trends toward software defined data centers and with also organizations having to deal with hybrid environments where they have private clouds, public cloud locations, remote offices, and also remote workers. So on top of this, there's also an increase in the complexity of the supply chain itself, right? There are companies who are dealing with hundreds of suppliers as part of their supply chain. So all of this complexity provides a lot of opportunity for attackers because it's expanding the threat surface of what can be attacked, and attacks are becoming more frequent, more severe and more sophisticated. And this has also triggered around in the regulatory and mandates around the security needs. >>And these regulations are not just in the government sector, right? So it extends to critical infrastructure and eventually it also get into the private sector. In addition to this, organizations are also looking at their own internal compliance mandates. And this could be based on the industry in which they're operating in, or it could be their own security postures. And this is the landscape in which servers they're operating today. And given that servers are the foundational blocks of the data center, it becomes extremely important to protect them. And given how complex the modern server platforms are, it's also extremely difficult and it takes a lot of effort. And this means protecting everything from the supply chain to the manufacturing and then eventually the assuring the hardware and software integrity of the platforms and also the operations. And there are very few companies that go to the lens that Dell does in order to secure the server. We truly believe in the notion and the security mentality that, you know, security should enable our customers to go focus on their business and proactively innovate on their business and it should not be a burden to them. And we heavily invest to make that possible for our customers. >>So this is really important because the premise that I set up at the beginning of this was really that I, as of security pro, I'm not a security pro, but if I were, I wouldn't want to be doing all this infrastructure stuff because I now have all these new things I gotta deal with. I want a company like Dell who has the resources to build that security in to deal with the supply chain to ensure the providence, et cetera. So I'm glad you you, you hit on that, but so given what you just said, what does cybersecurity resilience mean from a server perspective? For example, are there specific principles that Dell adheres to that are non-negotiable? Let's say, how does Dell ensure that its customers can trust your server infrastructure? >>Yeah, like when, when it comes to security at Dell, right? It's ingrained in our product, so that's the best way to put it. And security is nonnegotiable, right? It's never an afterthought where we come up with a design and then later on figure out how to go make it secure, right? Our security development life cycle, the products are being designed to counter these threats right from the big. And in addition to that, we are also testing and evaluating these products continuously to identify vulnerabilities. We also have external third party audits which supplement this process. And in addition to this, Dell makes the commitment that we will rapidly respond to any mitigations and vulnerability, any vulnerabilities and exposures found out in the field and provide mitigations and patches for in attacking manner. So this security principle is also built into our server life cycle, right? Every phase of it. >>So we want our products to provide cutting edge capabilities when it comes to security. So as part of that, we are constantly evaluating what our security model is done. We are building on it and continuously improving it. So till a few years ago, our model was primarily based on the N framework of protect, detect and rigor. And it's still aligns really well to that framework, but over the past couple of years we have seen how computers evolved, how the threads have evolved, and we have also seen the regulatory trends and we recognize the fact that the best security strategy for the modern world is a zero trust approach. And so now when we are building our infrastructure and tools and offerings for customers, first and foremost, they're cyber resilient, right? What we mean by that is they're capable of anticipating threats, withstanding attacks and rapidly recurring from attacks and also adapting to the adverse conditions in which they're deployed. The process of designing these capabilities and identifying these capabilities however, is done through the zero press framework. And that's very important because now we are also anticipating how our customers will end up using these capabilities at there and to enable their own zero trust IT environments and IT zero trusts deployments. We have completely adapted our security approach to make it easier for customers to work with us no matter where they are in their journey towards zero trust option. >>So thank you for that. You mentioned the, this framework, you talked about zero trust. When I think about n I think as well about layered approaches. And when I think about zero trust, I think about if you, if you don't have access to it, you're not getting access, you've gotta earn that, that access and you've got layers and then you still assume that bad guys are gonna get in. So you've gotta detect that and you've gotta response. So server infrastructure security is so fundamental. So my question is, what is Dell providing specifically to, for example, detect anomalies and breaches from unauthorized activity? How do you enable fast and easy or facile recovery from malicious incidents? >>Right? What is that is exactly right, right? Breachers are bound to happen. And given how complex our current environment is, it's extremely distributed and extremely connected, right? Data and users are no longer contained with an offices where we can set up a perimeter firewall and say, Yeah, everything within that is good. We can trust everything within it. That's no longer true. The best approach to protect data and infrastructure in the current world is to use a zero trust approach, which uses the principles. Nothing is ever trusted, right? Nothing is trusted implicitly. You're constantly verifying every single user, every single device, and every single access in your system at every single level of your ID environment. And this is the principles that we use on power Edge, right? But with an increased focus on providing granular controls and checks based on the principles of these privileged access. >>So the idea is that service first and foremost need to make sure that the threats never enter and they're rejected at the point of entry. But we recognize breaches are going to occur and if they do, they need to be minimized such that the sphere of damage cost by attacker is minimized. So they're not able to move from one part of the network to something else laterally or escalate their privileges and cause more damage, right? So the impact radius for instance, has to be radius. And this is done through features like automated detection capabilities and automation, automated remediation capabilities. So some examples are as part of our end to end boot resilience process, we have what they call a system lockdown, right? We can lock down the configuration of the system and lock on the form versions and all changes to the system. And we have capabilities which automatically detect any drift from that lockdown configuration and we can figure out if the drift was caused to authorized changes or unauthorized changes. >>And if it is an unauthorize change can log it, generate security alerts, and we even have capabilities to automatically roll the firm where, and always versions back to a known good version and also the configurations, right? And this becomes extremely important because as part of zero trust, we need to respond to these things at machine speed and we cannot do it at a human speed. And having these automated capabilities is a big deal when achieving that zero trust strategy. And in addition to this, we also have chassis inclusion detection where if the chassis, the box, the several box is opened up, it logs alerts, and you can figure out even later if there's an AC power cycle, you can go look at the logs to see that the box is opened up and figure out if there was a, like a known authorized access or some malicious actor opening and chain something in your system. >>Great, thank you for that lot. Lot of detail and and appreciate that. I want to go somewhere else now cuz Dell has a renowned supply chain reputation. So what about securing the, the supply chain and the server bill of materials? What does Dell specifically do to track the providence of components it uses in its systems so that when the systems arrive, a customer can be a hundred percent certain that that system hasn't been compromised, >>Right? And we've talked about how complex the modern supply chain is, right? And that's no different for service. We have hundreds of confidence on the server and a lot of these form where in order to be configured and run and this former competence could be coming from third parties suppliers. So now the complexity that we are dealing with like was the end to end approach. And that's where Dell pays a lot of attention into assuring the security approach approaching. And it starts all the way from sourcing competence, right? And then through the design and then even the manufacturing process where we are wetting the personnel leather factories and wetting the factories itself. And the factories also have physical controls, physical security controls built into them and even shipping, right? We have GPS tagging of packages. So all of this is built to ensure supply chain security. >>But a critical aspect of this is also making sure that the systems which are built in the factories are delivered to the customers without any changes or any tapper. And we have a feature called the secure component verification, which is capable of doing this. What the feature does this, when the system gets built in a factory, it generates an inventory of all the competence in the system and it creates a cryptographic certificate based on the signatures presented to this by the competence. And this certificate is stored separately and sent to the customers separately from the system itself. So once the customers receive the system at their end, they can run out to, it generates an inventory of the competence on the system at their end and then compare it to the golden certificate to make sure nothing was changed. And if any changes are detected, we can figure out if there's an authorized change or unauthorize change. >>Again, authorized changes could be like, you know, upgrades to the drives or memory and ized changes could be any sort of temper. So that's the supply chain aspect of it. And bill of metal use is also an important aspect to galing security, right? And we provide a software bill of materials, which is basically a list of ingredients of all the software pieces in the platform. So what it allows our customers to do is quickly take a look at all the different pieces and compare it to the vulnerability database and see if any of the vulner, which have been discovered out in the wild affected platform. So that's a quick way of figuring out if the platform has any known vulnerabilities and it has not been patched. >>Excellent. That's really good. My last question is, I wonder if you, you know, give us the sort of summary from your perspective, what are the key strengths of Dell server portfolio from a security standpoint? I'm really interested in, you know, the uniqueness and the strong suit that Dell brings to the table, >>Right? Yeah. We have talked enough about the complexity of the environment and how zero risk is necessary for the modern ID environment, right? And this is integral to Dell powered service. And as part of that like you know, security starts with the supply chain. We already talked about the second component verification, which is a beneath feature that Dell platforms have. And on top of it we also have a silicon place platform mode of trust. So this is a key which is programmed into the silicon on the black service during manufacturing and can never be changed after. And this immutable key is what forms the anchor for creating the chain of trust that is used to verify everything in the platform from the hardware and software integrity to the boot, all pieces of it, right? In addition to that, we also have a host of data protection features. >>Whether it is protecting data at risk in news or inflight, we have self encrypting drives, which provides scalable and flexible encryption options. And this couple with external key management provides really good protection for your data address. External key management is important because you know, somebody could physically steam the server, walk away, but then the keys are not stored on the server, it stood separately. So that provides your action layer of security. And we also have dual layer encryption where you can compliment the hardware encryption on the secure encrypted drives with software level encryption. Inion to this we have identity and access management features like multifactor authentication, single sign on roles, scope and time based access controls, all of which are critical to enable that granular control and checks for zero trust approach. So I would say like, you know, if you look at the Dell feature set, it's pretty comprehensive and we also have the flexibility built in to meet the needs of all customers no matter where they fall in the spectrum of, you know, risk tolerance and security sensitivity. And we also have the capabilities to meet all the regulatory requirements and compliance requirements. So in a nutshell, I would say that, you know, Dell Power Service cyber resident infrastructure helps accelerate zero tested option for customers. >>Got it. So you've really thought this through all the various things that that you would do to sort of make sure that your server infrastructure is secure, not compromised, that your supply chain is secure so that your customers can focus on some of the other things that they have to worry about, which are numerous. Thanks Deepak, appreciate you coming on the cube and participating in the program. >>Thank you for having >>You're welcome. In a moment I'll be back to dig into the networking portion of the infrastructure. Stay with us for more coverage of a blueprint for trusted infrastructure and collaboration with Dell Technologies on the cube. Your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage.

>>We're back with Jerome West, product management security lead at for HCI at Dell Technologies Hyper-converged infrastructure. Jerome, welcome. >>Thank you, David. >>Hey, Jerome, In this series, A blueprint for trusted infrastructure, we've been digging into the different parts of the infrastructure stack, including storage, servers and networking, and now we want to cover hyperconverged infrastructure. So my first question is, what's unique about HCI that presents specific security challenges? What do we need to know? >>So what's unique about Hyperconverge infrastructure is the breadth of the security challenge. We can't simply focus on a single type of IT system, so like a server or a storage system or a virtualization piece of software. I mean, HCI is all of those things. So luckily we have excellent partners like VMware, Microsoft, and internal partners like the Dell Power Edge team, the Dell storage team, the Dell networking team, and on and on. These partnerships, in these collaborations are what make us successful from a security standpoint. So let me give you an example to illustrate. In the recent past, we're seeing growing scope and sophistication in supply chain attacks. This mean an attacker is going to attack your software supply chain upstream so that hopefully a piece of code, malicious code that wasn't identified early in the software supply chain is distributed like a large player, like a VMware or Microsoft or a Dell. So to confront this kind of sophisticated hard to defeat problem, we need short term solutions and we need long term solutions as well. >>So for the short term solution, the obvious thing to do is to patch the vulnerability. The complexity is for our HCI portfolio. We build our software on VMware, so we would have to consume a patch that VMware would produce and provide it to our customers in a timely manner. Luckily, VX Rail's engineering team has co engineered a release process with VMware that significantly shortens our development life cycle so that VMware will produce a patch and within 14 days we will integrate our own code. With the VMware release, we will have tested and validated the update and we will give an update to our customers within 14 days of that VMware release. That as a result of this kind of rapid development process, Vxl had over 40 releases of software updates last year for a longer term solution. We're partnering with VMware and others to develop a software bill of materials. We work with VMware to consume their software manifest, including their upstream vendors and their open source providers to have a comprehensive list of software components. Then we aren't caught off guard by an unforeseen vulnerability and we're more able to easily detect where the software problem lies so that we can quickly address it. So these are the kind of relationships and solutions that we can co engineer with effective collaborations with our, with our partners. >>Great, Thank you for that. That description. So if I had to define what cybersecurity resilience means to HCI or converged infrastructure, and to me my takeaway was you gotta have a short term instant patch solution and then you gotta do an integration in a very short time, you know, two weeks to then have that integration done. And then longer term you have to have a software bill of materials so that you can ensure the providence of all the components help us. Is that a right way to think about cybersecurity resilience? Do you have, you know, a additives to that definition? >>I do. I really think that site cybersecurity and resilience for hci, because like I said, it has sort of unprecedented breadth across our portfolio. It's not a single thing, it's a bit of everything. So really the strength or the secret sauce is to combine all the solutions that our partner develops while integrating them with our own layer. So let me, let me give you an example. So hci, it's a, basically taking a software abstraction of hardware functionality and implementing it into something called the virtualized layer. It's basically the virtual virtualizing hardware functionality, like say a storage controller, you could implement it in a hardware, but for hci, for example, in our VX rail portfolio, we, or our vxl product, we integrate it into a product called vsan, which is provided by our partner VMware. So that portfolio strength is still, you know, through our, through our partnerships. >>So what we do, we integrate these, these security functionality and features in into our product. So our partnership grows to our ecosystem through products like VMware, products like nsx, Verizon, Carbon Black and Bsphere. All of them integrate seamlessly with VMware. And we also leverage VMware's software, par software partnerships on top of that. So for example, VX supports multifactor authentication through bsphere integration with something called Active Directory Federation services for adfs. So there is a lot of providers that support adfs, including Microsoft Azure. So now we can support a wide array of identity providers such as Off Zero or I mentioned Azure or Active Directory through that partnership. So we can leverage all of our partners partnerships as well. So there's sort of a second layer. So being able to secure all of that, that provides a lot of options and flexibility for our customers. So basically to summarize my my answer, we consume all of the security advantages of our partners, but we also expand on that to make a product that is comprehensively secured at multiple layers from the hardware layer that's provided by Dell through Power Edge to the hyper-converged software that we build ourselves to the virtualization layer that we get through our partnerships with Microsoft and VMware. >>Great. I mean that's super helpful. You've mentioned nsx, Horizon, Carbon Black, all the, you know, the VMware component OTH zero, which the developers are gonna love. You got Azure identity, so it's really an ecosystem. So you may have actually answered my next question, but I'm gonna ask it anyway cuz you've got this software defined environment and you're managing servers and networking and storage with this software led approach, how do you ensure that the entire system is secure end to end? >>That's a really great question. So the, the answer is we do testing and validation as part of the engineering process. It's not just bolted on at the end. So when we do, for example, the xra is the market's only co engineered solution with VMware, other vendors sell VMware as a hyperconverged solution, but we actually include security as part of the co-engineering process with VMware. So it's considered when VMware builds their code and their process dovetails with ours because we have a secure development life cycle, which other products might talk about in their discussions with you that we integrate into our engineering life cycle. So because we follow the same framework, all of the, all of the codes should interoperate from a security standpoint. And so when we do our final validation testing when we do a software release, we're already halfway there in ensuring that all these features will give the customers what we promised. >>That's great. All right, let's, let's close pitch me, what would you say is the strong suit summarize the, the strengths of the Dell hyperconverged infrastructure and converged infrastructure portfolio specifically from a security perspective? Jerome? >>So I talked about how hyper hyper-converged infrastructure simplifies security management because basically you're gonna take all of these features that are abstracted in in hardware, they're now abstracted in the virtualization layer. Now you can manage them from a single point of view, whether it would be, say, you know, in for VX rail would be b be center, for example. So by abstracting all this, you make it very easy to manage security and highly flexible because now you don't have limitations around a single vendor. You have a multiple array of choices and partnerships to select. So I would say that is the, the key to making it to hci. Now, what makes Dell the market leader in HCI is not only do we have that functionality, but we also make it exceptionally useful to you because it's co engineered, it's not bolted on. So I gave the example of, I gave the example of how we, we modify our software release process with VMware to make it very responsive. >>A couple of other features that we have specific just to HCI are digitally signed LCM updates. This is an example of a feature that we have that's only exclusive to Dell that's not done through a partnership. So we digitally sign our software updates so you, the user can be sure that the, the update that they're installing into their system is an authentic and unmodified product. So we give it a Dell signature that's invalidated prior to installation. So not only do we consume the features that others develop in a seamless and fully validated way, but we also bolt on our own specific HCI security features that work with all the other partnerships and give the user an exceptional security experience. So for, for example, the benefit to the customer is you don't have to create a complicated security framework that's hard for your users to use and it's hard for your system administrators to manage. It all comes in a package. So it, it can be all managed through vCenter, for example, or, and then the specific hyper, hyper-converged functions can be managed through VxRail manager or through STDC manager. So there's very few pains of glass that the, the administrator or user ever has to worry about. It's all self contained and manageable. >>That makes a lot of sense. So you got your own infrastructure, you're applying your best practices to that, like the digital signatures, you've got your ecosystem, you're doing co-engineering with the ecosystems, delivering security in a package, minimizing the complexity at the infrastructure level. The reason Jerome, this is so important is because SecOps teams, you know, they gotta deal with cloud security, they gotta deal with multiple clouds. Now they have their shared responsibility model going across multiple, They got all this other stuff that they have to worry, they gotta secure containers and the run time and, and, and, and, and the platform and so forth. So they're being asked to do other things. If they have to worry about all the things that you just mentioned, they'll never get, you know, the, the securities is gonna get worse. So what my takeaway is, you're removing that infrastructure piece and saying, Okay guys, you now can focus on those other things that is not necessarily Dell's, you know, domain, but you, you know, you can work with other partners to, and your own teams to really nail that. Is that a fair summary? >>I think that is a fair summary because absolutely the worst thing you can do from a security perspective is provide a feature that's so unusable that the administrator disables it or other key security features. So when I work with my partners to define, to define and develop a new security feature, the thing I keep foremost in mind is, will this be something our users want to use in our administrators want to administer? Because if it's not, if it's something that's too difficult or onerous or complex, then I try to find ways to make it more user friendly and practical. And this is a challenge sometimes because we are, our products operate in highly regulated environments and sometimes they have to have certain rules and certain configurations that aren't the most user friendly or management friendly. So I, I put a lot of effort into thinking about how can we make this feature useful while still complying with all the regulations that we have to comply with. And by the way, we're very successful in a highly regulated space. We sell a lot of VxRail, for example, into the Department of Defense and banks and, and other highly regulated environments, and we're very successful >>There. Excellent. Okay, Jerome, thanks. We're gonna leave it there for now. I'd love to have you back to talk about the progress that you're making down the road. Things always, you know, advance in the tech industry and so would appreciate that. >>I would look forward to it. Thank you very much, Dave. >>You're really welcome. In a moment I'll be back to summarize the program and offer some resources that can help you on your journey to secure your enterprise infrastructure. I wanna thank our guests for their contributions and helping us understand how investments by a company like Dell can both reduce the need for dev sec up teams to worry about some of the more fundamental security issues around infrastructure and have greater confidence in the quality providence and data protection designed in to core infrastructure like servers, storage, networking, and hyper-converged systems. You know, at the end of the day, whether your workloads are in the cloud, OnPrem or at the edge, you are responsible for your own security. But vendor r and d and vendor process must play an important role in easing the burden faced by security devs and operation teams. And on behalf of the cube production content and social teams as well as Dell Technologies, we want to thank you for watching a blueprint for trusted infrastructure. Remember part one of this series as well as all the videos associated with this program, and of course, today's program are available on demand@thecube.net with additional coverage@siliconangle.com. And you can go to dell.com/security solutions dell.com/security solutions to learn more about Dell's approach to securing infrastructure. And there's tons of additional resources that can help you on your journey. This is Dave Valante for the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. We'll see you next time.