>> Announcer: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Covering Red Hat summit 2017. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of the Red Hat summit here in Boston, Massaachusetts. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Armughan Ahmad, he is the senior vice president and general manager solutions and alliances at Dell EMC. Thanks so much for joining us. >> It's my pleasure, good to see you, Rebecca. >> So we've had you on the program before, but your role has changed a bit at Dell EMC since then. Tell us what you're doing now. >> Sure, I have the pleasure to now lead our solutions business unit that we have under infrastructure solutions group. What we drive is focus areas of customer outcomes. Work load orientation around high performance computing. Driving data analytics, business critical applications, software defined solutions, and then also hybrid cloud. So those are our five big priorities. >> It's a big mandate. >> It is a big mandate, right? And as you know, Dell EMC is Number one in everything. That's all we talk about. You'll hear this at Dell EMC World next week. But you know, at Red Hat summit, we're really having this discussion, right, Red Hat open stack summit, which is really around our differentiation, how we're driving human progress forward, social innovation forward. So that's exciting. So as we take our applications and partner with our alliance partners, that's the differentiation we're excited to share with customers and partners here at Red Hat summit as well. >> So Dell EMC, as you said, is uniquely suited to do these things and lead in this way. But how do you make deployment easier? I mean, that's the big question that customers and partners need to know. >> Yeah, absolutely. So you as you know, being number One in everything, when I joked about this, not joking about this, if you really think about our market share in compute or servers, if you look at our market share in storage, external storage, internal storage, you look at our market share in converge infrastructure, hyperconverge infrastructure, if you see our market share in data protection, or our market share in open networking, right, so we're all the way to the far top right of the Gartner magic quadrants, number one in market shares and revenue. That's all interesting, but what's fascinating for the customers is really more about how do you make all of this real? If you envision like a pyramid almost, and you think that the bottom is all of these infrastructure layers, the next one above that is virtualization, the next one above that is orchestration, but really on the top, is a platform, top of the pyramid, that's where the business sits. Business wants a platform, and what we're doing is trying to make all of that easy. We know that customers will build and they would want to do a DIY solution. And we obviously have that, we've been doing it for decades. But we're really trying to move to that top end of the pyramid with our hybrid could solutions, our converge solutions, but more the solutions that my organization leads is the blueprint solutions. And the whole idea about blueprint solutions is that how can we offer ready offerings to customers so that they don't have to really worry about the bottom of the pyramid, but the top of a platform so that's it's easy to deploy. >> And customized for their business. >> Absolutely. >> Armughan, in the keynote on day one, we heard that one of the top priorities for customers is figuring out their cloud strategy. Now, at Dell EMC, you have a number of offerings, can you bring us up to date, where does open stack fit into that, and of course, we're going to want to talk about the Red Hat joint solution that you're after. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, open stack, let me take it even a step back, you know Michael, 31 years ago, since he founded Dell, has always stood for choice for customers, open ecosystems for customers. And even though we have Dell technologies now, the acquisition of so many of the other assets that are under Dell technologies, we're really delighted to partner and ensure that we have the right kind of choice that we're offering to our customers. So open stack, Stu, puts a very big differentiation forward. You know, I'm here with our Dell EMC team at Red Hat open stack summit and our customers are telling us in a very, very clear way, and the channel partners who are here, is that they're looking for Dell EMC to really provide open source based solutions in telecom markets, in, you know, when you take a look at telecom and it's moving from 3G to 4G to now 5G coming on, it's really going to be the applications and how those applications become scaled out versus just infrastructure becoming scaled out. So now the evolution of open stack and how Dell EMC contributes to it, we never really wanted to build our own ecosystem of open stack like some of our other competitors have done. We've always stood by Red Hat open stack based solutions to say hey, if they're number one in open stack markets and they're already tuning that, why can't we tune our infrastructure solutions the exact same way so that one plus one equals five for the customers, and it becomes much easier for them to deploy that. >> Great, so absolutely, you mentioned some of the telecoms. NFV was probably the most talked about use case for open stack at last year's summit. We've got the open stack summit here in Boston next week, we'll be covering it. Is that a top use case for your solution with Red Hat, what are the real business drivers for people doing open stack, is it just private cloud solutions that they offer that you said mentioned the open source, people are still trying to figure out where this open stack fits compared to some of the other options that they have. >> Stu, what I'm finding, and you and I have had these discussions several times across the stack of server storage networking and others, the largest cost associated with deploying or consuming IT is really your OPEX cost. So if you envision for a second a pie chart and you look at a customer spend, a capital spend, about 25% of that is CAPEX oriented, which is how much you pay for infrastructure or software. About 75% of that is OPEX oriented, which is your human cost of managing it, your serviceability and others. The whole idea about us talking about this Dell EMC ready bundle solution that we're taking to market, so we announced yesterday our opportunity to really go out and simplify all of this for customers, for cloud solutions, or for their NFV or NFVI solutions, as we're seeing NFVI-- >> And for our audience that doesn't know NFVI, what's the differentiation there? >> Our opportunity to take network function virtualization, then taking VNF capabilities, and then also making sure that we're virtualizing a lot of those aspects on NFVI so that our customers are driving service provider opportunities to then containerize these opportunities as part of open shift and others. And we feel that our differentiation at Dell EMC really, then, ends up becoming our tested validated offerings so that customers don't really have to worry about the infrastructure layer, or even the software layer for that matter, and we can just give them a platform that I was referring to earlier. So that ready bundle for open stack that we have offered, and I will be taking about it in my keynote today, that whole ready bundle at Dell EMC solution has been validated, tested. It's got not just reference architectures, but deployment guides, run books. But we've also taken it one step forward, we actually internally called it jetstream. And the whole idea of jetstream internal codename was, if you guys are familiar with jetstreams around the world, and you catch one of those jetstreams, they usually go from west to east. And if you go from Boston to London, you can get there pretty quickly if you hit one of those because it's 160 miles an hour. That's why we selected the name jetstream. And the whole idea is if you actually imagine if you put a concord in that jetstream, you can actually do that trip now in three hours, or you could've done it in concords around at the time. So if we can actually create that concord-like style of a ready bundle solution that is running open stack platform, we can not only get the customers to deploy much faster and reduce their OPEX, but there's a tooling that's required. So for example, the customer wants to deploy an open stack solution. We actually created a jetpack, jetstream, jetpack, and the whole idea of a jetpack is very quickly us providing sizing tools and deployment tools for customers so that they can get to their destination very, very fast. >> And how fast are we talking here? >> So we're talking, I'll actually have a customer, East Carolina University, on stage with me. Something that would take three weeks, they've got it done in three days using this jetpack solution. So us creating these ready bundles and deploying open stack much faster, either for cloud environments or environments for NFV and eventually for NFVI. And then we're also working with our Dell EMC code group, which is now looking at containerization solutions as well. So that's sort of the differentiations that we're talking about. >> And Armughan, I know, we're really good usually at quantifying that kind of deployment, that shrinking months to days or days to hours, that operational efficiency though, once it's in there, do you have any metrics or cost savings that your customers in general are seeing of rolling this out versus the old kind of putting it together themselves. >> Great question, Stu, so we all measured, Rebecca, you know this, you've written for HBR, which is really about ROI, TCOs for customers, what is your return on investment and your total cost of ownership. And really, what we're finding is that we can do this about 30% more effective. I'd love to say it's 80% more effective where we can take your OPEX down and others. But realistically, if you really look at East Carolina University or many of the other customers who are deploying this, they're seeing on average about 30% improvement in their operating costs. Now, it's not just related to cloud or it's not just related to NFV and NFVI. We're also seeing a huge use case of open stack now as part of high performance computing. So as high performance computing is evolving from traditional research and moving more into machine learning and AI frameworks, we're also seeing customers leverage open stack in that environment as well. >> and I wonder also, I mean, just talking about the difficulties with calculating ROI, but talking about how it's having this big impact on high performance computing, what about high performance teams, the people who are actually doing the work? >> Absolutely, and so talking about high performance team, right, the web tech, it started in Silicon Valley, now it's in Dublin, Ireland, or it's in China or all of these other places, they've really figured out, right, how do you drive efficiency. I mean, at Facebook, I think one server admin manages 50,000 physical servers or something like that. That's a scale out ways. >> And the thing we always say, it's that person's job is varied, it's not just that their doing three orders of magnitude more than the poor guy running around the data center, they've changed really how they focus on the application, and that job is very different. So they don't really even have server admins, they just have the number of head count that they need. >> The number of head count that's required. >> Hyperscale model, very different from what we have in the enterprise world. >> Absolutely, absolutely. But there are lessons to be learned from the hyperscale model. And if you can drive, I mean, according to IDC, one server admin manages about 40 physical servers, somewhere between 30 to 40 physical servers versus the number that I just shared with you, right, from these big web tech providers. So if we can even improve that to 100 or 1,000 to one admin. I think sys admins still should continue to exist even though this whole public cloud is coming in. But the rise of edge computing for us is also a big, big phenomenon. And we want to ensure that the rise of edge computing, Dell EMC is at the forefront of ensuring that we're providing analytic solutions to our customers. And a lot of the analytics are really happening at the edge 'cause you need to make those analytics decisions very quick 'cant really have a lot of latency back to public cloud for that. So our hybrid cloud solutions, working very closely with open stack to drop OPEX costs down, all of that really matters to customer right now. >> Armughan, I want to go back to something you talked about in the very beginning, which is this element of human progress. It's a professional and personal passion of yours to use technology for good, to solve some of the world's most complex problems, educating young women, working in developing countries, curing cancer. Talk a little bit about what you're doing. >> You know, Rebecca, that's a huge passion of not just mine, but Michael, and all of our executive leadership team at Dell EMC. We were talking earlier before this interview started, it's a passion of yours and Stu's. We all love to, as human beings, contribute to society. And human progress is really technologies impacting human progress in different ways. Right, if you talk about manufacturing jobs versus what automation is. But at the same time, technology is also helping in many different areas. So if you look at developing countries, now I'm personally involved in girls' education in third world countries where they're not prioritized, and what can technology do at schools to really get them to learn coding and get a differentiation out very, very quickly. But at the same time, our Dell initiatives, we call it the legacy for good. The Dell initiatives are really, not just about diversity and inclusion, it's also about improving the human progress. I'll give you an example. We have a great customer, T-Gen. And T-Gen is in the healthcare field and they drive genome sequencing solutions, so they have scientists who drive genome sequencing. Now, if you think about genome sequencing before technology, how long it would take somebody to sequence certain genomes for the purpose of cancer research, that would take you years. Now, if you can get that done in minutes, and that technology will learn, and then next time you do it, it would be even seconds for the same platform. So we actually developed a life sciences genome sequencing high performance computing cluster for this customer. And now they're able to very quickly help young girls and young kids improve their longevity with their cancer treatment that they're going through. So those are the things that really matter to our teams. And I know it matters to our customers and our partners. Because now we're not talking about just open stack or Dell EMC and our great number one in everything solutions we have. Those are fantastic, but how do you relate that social innovation, how do you relate that to human progress. To me, that is really the differentiation that we all collectively need to continue to drive and talk about this a little bit more. But we do need to find more connection points that we know that technology can help, but it's really those medical professionals and those researchers, they're really the brainiacs who use our technology, our opportunity as tech geeks, or I call myself a geek, at least, is how do we take that and then take that out to them and then real researchers can build their platforms on top of it to cure cancer. Or to go drive manufacturing jobs for social innovation purposes in middle America or around the world. That's the difference and those are the solutions that my team, along with many others at Dell EMC, along with our partners with Red Hat, we're focused on, we talk about that a lot. And Jim Witers talked about social innovation and how Red Hat is also making that a priority this morning in his keynote. >> Armughan, it sounds like your team is quite busy. And I know you've got your big event coming up next week, so you finish the keynote here, you'll be jetting our to Las Vegas. Rebecca, a big set of our Cube team will all be out in Vegas to cover the show. So give our audience a little bit of a preview of what you can about what we should expect for the new Dell EMC world as kind of taking together what EMC world has been doing for many years and Dell world in the past. >> You know, we're really excited, Stu, about Dell EMC world because this is the first time Dell world and EMC world comes together in Vegas. So we'll look forward to having you guys there. We have great speakers lined up, it's really focused for customers and technical audiences. We've got lots of partners there. But more importantly, we're showcasing all the solutions and the culmination of Dell EMC merger that has happened along with our Dell technologies group of companies like Pivotal along with VMWare along with Secureworks along with Virtustream. And how do we differentiate not just the Dell brand, which is our client computing group that we have, but also our Dell EMC, that's server storage networking, and then with VMWare and Pivotal and others. What you'll see is not just great keynotes, but some great speakers, great entertainment. I don't know if that's been released, I think it's been released. Gwen Stefani, I think she's-- >> Andy Grammar, and yeah, Gwen Stefani. >> Gwen Stefani, yeah, so that's going to be pretty cool, so we're excited about that. But the speakers that we have lined up on main stage along with, I'm more excited, I geek out, I'm a nerd, I love going into these technical breakouts where we've got lab equipment set up where people can actually get to enjoy and, I call it enjoyment, which is really geek out with understanding what are all of those solutions that we have, kind of, you know, put together. And those blueprint solutions, what are they. We have obviously, our server storage networking and data protection. But then how do you get into those labs and run some demos and proof of concepts, that makes it easy for the customers. So we're excited about that as you can see. >> Well, we're looking forward to it, we'll see you there. >> Yeah, we look forward to hosting you there. >> Armughan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you, my pleasure. >> This has been Rebecca Knight and Stu Miniman, we will return with more from Red Hat summit after this.