>> Instructor: From around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of Dell technologies world, digital experience brought to you by Dell technologies. >> Hi, welcome to the cubes coverage of Dell technologies world 2020, the virtual experience. I am Lisa Martin and I've got a couple of guests joining me. One of them is a longtime cube alumni. Jon Siegel is back the VP of product marketing for Dell technologies. Jon, it's great to see you. >> Great to be back (indistinct), thank you. >> And also joining us is Troy Massey the director of enterprise engagements from iron bow technologies. Troy, welcome to the cube. >> Hi, thank you for having me. >> So we're going to be talking about VxRail, how it's driving the future of HCI to the edge, but first let's get choice perspective. I would like the audience to understand who iron build technologies is and what you do. And then we'll kind of look at it as what you're doing with the extra rail, as well as your channel partner business with Dell technologies. So Troy, take it away. >> Yeah. So IML is a global company, we're a value added reseller. Having partnered with Dell. We have people physically living from Europe all the way through Korea from kind of based the globe, primarily in wherever there's DOD or federal government agencies. >> And tell me about from a channel partner perspective what you guys are doing together. >> Yeah, so we have a lot of efforts going on channel partner together. Specifically ,iron (murmurs) is a huge effort to what we're doing together. It's a on-premise cloud that's it's basis VxRail, VMware cloud foundation on top with Intel all throughout, so there's Intel Xeon processors with Optane drives. So just the perfect elegant On-Prem cloud and hybrid cloud solution Dell, I remember driving together. >> So let's talk about the edge cause a big focus of Dell technologies world this year is about the edge. How do you see Troy iron bow extending services to the edge? And what do you anticipate from your customers in terms of what their needs are as they're changing? >> Great, great question. So for one I've got to talk a little bit about what the edge and what the edges and the edge is different things to different people. So I'm going to explain a little bit of the edge and what we're seeing and in the federal government. So I'll give you one example and that's you know, (indistinct). So they have a an entire squadron that does all of the firefighting, the large fires you see across California or whatever state and Gulfton fires that year where they take the entire squadron of airplanes out. When they, they sort of water overall the whole fire, they don't just bring planes. They bring entire squatters of military personnel to help communicate with the police and with the local fire and all of that takes information. So they need to bring information data with them. Is there a building over there? Do people live over there where? We got to actually concentrate on site and that's higher priority wise? So it doesn't make a lot of sense to try to do that remotely over satellite it's large, large chunks of data that needs to be local to the customer. So VxRail is the power in the HCI world. So a VxRail at that edge provides and what's the performance I need to get that job (indistinct). >> I think that's going to be a new segment here in Silicon Valley. That thinking about all the fires we've had and it's really VxRail at the edge that's helping fight the fires. (Murmurs)That's thanks for sharing that. (indistinct chatting) >> So there's all kinds of workings in that same deal. They need to know where to go rescue those people and it's all data. >> Exactly, it's going to be data that's, that as you said it was not delayed sent over the wire but obviously being able to be transmitted in real time so that actions can be taken which is one of the things we talk about with data all the time you have to be able to get the insight and act on it quickly. So Jon, the theme of this year's virtual Dell technologies world is the edge is a big part of the theme. So talk to us about driving the future of HCI at the edge with VxRail, how there's been a lot of growth I think 9,600 plus customers so far. So talk to us about the future of HCI at the edge with VxRail as a driver of that. >> Absolutely. So first of all, I want to thank iron bow for being one of our nearly 10,000 customers for VxRail and you know, absolutely. So, you know, overall the edge is going to be a major theme for Dell tech world this week. And specifically for VxRail, we of course continue to play with VxRail, a key role in modernizing data centers, as well as hybrid cloud. And this week we really want to highlight some of the recent innovations we have around extending the simplified operations of VxRail that many like iron bow and others are experiencing today in the core or in the cloud in extending those that automation to the edge. And you heard a lot about what the edge can do in the implications and the value of the edge. While we have lots of customers today including (indistinct) that are using VxRail at their edge locations, we have others like large retail, home improvement chains, financial institutions. We expect the edge to soon explode. We like to think that we are at the edge of the edge opportunity in IT. In fact, IDC recently stated that by 2023 over 50% of new enterprise data that is generated can going to be generated outside the core data center and outside the cloud. That's up in 10% today. So this is, this is massive edge locations. Of course come with their own challenges, whether it's sometimes less than ideal conditions around power and cooling or they may not have typically skilled IT staff at the edge, right? So they need, they need new special configurations, they need operational efficiencies. And I think VxRail is uniquely positioned to help address that. >> Let's kind of dig into this operational challenges because in the last seven months so much of what we all do has become remote and a good amount of that is going to be probably permanent, right? So when you think about the volume of remote devices that VxRail can potentially manage. Jon, how do you see the actual being able to help in this sort of very distributed environment that might be very well much permanent? >> Yeah, I know. And like you said, it's going to just grow and grow the distributed environment and what that means for each company might be slightly different but regardless of what they do need to seamless operations across all of those different edge locations and again, a big focus for us. So we're really doing three things to extend the automated operations of VxRail to the edge and doing so at scale. The first thing I want to say, talk about is that we did unveil just two VxRail platforms designed specifically for the edge, the new VxRail E Series, which is ideal for remote office locations, where space is limited the remote, the VxRail D series. I think of D as in durable, this is our ruggedized platform built from the ground up for harsh environments. You know, such as DOD environments like in the, in the desert. And both of these VxRail platforms are fully automated. They automate everything from deployment to expansions to life cycle management overall. And now what we're doing now with extending that automation is the second thing we doing you know, to the edge from an operational perspective. And what we're doing first and foremost is we are introducing a new software as a service multi cluster management. This is part of the VxVRail ACI system software that we deliver today as part of the X rail. This not only provides a global view of the infrastructure performance and capacity analysis across all the locations, but even more importantly it actively ensures that all the clusters and the remote locate locations always stay in a continuously validated state. This means that I can automatically determine which software components need to be upgraded you know, and also automatically execute the full stack upgrades, right? Without any technical expertise at the site, it can be done centrally further automating the lifecycle management process and process that we do at the core and the cloud, and now extending out to the edge. So imaginely the operational efficiencies for customers with tens or hundreds or even thousands of edge sites. So this is we think truly a game changer from that perspective. And then in addition to that, we're also adding the support for BCF on VxRail. So just at VMware, just a couple of weeks ago VMware announced remote edge cluster support for BCF. So those customers that run them on BCF on VxRail now can get the, they can enjoy a consistent cloud operating model you know, for those edge locations. So you know, in somewhere you're getting consistency you're getting automation regardless of where your VxRail is located. >> And this is something that I saw in the notes, Jon is described as a curated experience. Can you describe what that is if I think of reference architectures and things of that what is a curated experience and how is it different? >> Yeah, I know I'm curious to experience for the exhale, really what it is it's about seamless. It's about we, we have taken the burden if you were integrating infrastructure off of the customer's shoulders and onto ours right? So what we do is we ensure VxRail is, in fact the only jointly engineered ATI system in the market, that's doing engineering with VMware, for VMware to enhance VMware environments. And so what we've done there is, we have a pre-integrated full stack experience that we're providing the customer from deployment to again to everyday operations, to making changes, et cetera. We've essentially what we've done here is that we've taken again, that burden off our customers and allowed them to spend more time innovating in less, you know, less time integrating. >> That sounds good to everyone, right? Simplifying less time to troubleshoot more time to be able to be strategic and innovative, especially in such a rapidly changing world. Troy overview now. Oh, go ahead Jon >> As you can say, to add to that you know, we've seen a real acceleration this year to digital transformation to your point earlier just with remote everything. And I think a lot of the projects and so including a shift that we've seen to consuming infrastructure overall, whether you know, and that's the onset of the cloud and wherever that cloud might be, right, it could be on-prem, it could be on premises, could be off premises. And so, you know, that focused on consuming infrastructure versus in that preference for consuming infrastructure versus building and maintaining it is something that we're going to continue to see accelerate over time. >> You're right, that digital transformation acceleration has been one of the biggest topics in the last seven months and looking at which businesses really are set up and have the foundation and the culture to be able to make those changes quickly to not just survive in this environment, but win tomorrow. So let's talk over to you for a second, in terms of, of the edge. What are your thoughts on as a partner, with VxRail got a solution built on it? What are your thoughts about what VxRail is going to be able to deliver enable you to deliver at the edge? You know you gave us that great example of the air force reserve but what are iron boast thoughts there, what do you envision going forward? >> Yeah absolutely, thank you. And first expand a little bit on what Jon was paying for a picture. You talked about tens, hundreds even thousands of different sites that all need their data. They all need processing compute, but those types of scale of sites don't necessarily need to have an IT on staff at those sites, (murmurs) army Corps of engineers. They have to have one or two people out at every dam to monitor the dam but that doesn't mean that justifies it. And then 19 staff are out there with them. So the idea to remotely manage that VxRail they're, they're just industry leaders in the ability to deploy this somewhere where there's not an IT person and be able to manage it but not just manage it predictive analysis on when they're starting to run out of storage give alerts so that we can, we can start the operating. So, we see that as part of our path forward with our iron target on-premise cloud is the ability to get people back to doing their job away from doing IT. >> And Jon, I'm curious what your thoughts are in Del tech thoughts are about, some of these really interesting DOD use cases that Troy talked about really compelling. What do you see in terms of influence into the enterprise space or the consumer space as the world is so different now as we go into 2021? >> Yeah I mean, I think you know, as I mentioned earlier, I think the you know, we're talking a lot about the edge today and I think what I described earlier about the trend towards the, in the preference to consume infrastructure versus build and maintain it is something that we're seeing you know, of course, you know across highly distributed environments, more and more now. And I think that use cases are going to continue to expand whether it's financial institutions with edge, edge offices spread across the world, you know, to manufacturing, to you know logistics companies, et cetera, et cetera. These are retail's another great example. We have a number of retail companies that are going to leverage and want to have data again processed and analyzed more importantly at the edge to make more informed decisions more quickly. And this, and that's just the beginning. I mean, obviously the automotive industries and other one that frequently comes up, it's something that can take full advantage of the edge where decisions need to be made in real time at the edge. So where, you know, I think the use cases are endless and the promises is just beginning now. We're really excited to help companies of all shapes and sizes, you know, really thrive in this new world. >> Speaking of excitement, I'm sure exciting Dell technologies world obviously challenging to not be able to gather in one place in Las Vegas with what 14,000 or so, folks including many many partners. Jon talked to us about the engagement that you're expecting your customers to have with Dell technologies during this virtual events. >> Absolutely, I think so. First of all, yeah virtual is different, but there's lot of advantages to that. One of them is that we can have an ongoing dialogue during a number of the sessions that we have why some of the sessions might be prerecorded. There are alive chats all the way through including a number of breakouts on VxRail specifically, as well as the edge, as well as a number of different topics that you can imagine. We've also just launched a new game a fun game for mobile called data center sin where customers can have some fun learning about VxRail, the experience, the takes and balancing the budget and staffing and capacity to address the needs of the business. So we're always looking for fun and engaging ways to experience the real life benefits of our HCI platform, such as VxRail. And so customers can check that out as well by searching their app store of choice for Dell technologies data center sin and have at it and have some fun. But again, whether it's playing the game online through it, augmented reality experience or it's, you know connecting directly with any of our subject matter experts there's going to be a lot of opportunity to learn more about how VxRail and HCI can help our customers thrive. >> Excellent, I like that game idea. Well, Troy and Jon, thank you for joining me today and letting me know what you guys are doing with VxRail. What's coming with the edge. And the fact that they use cases are just going to proliferate. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you as well. >> For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of Dell technologies world 2020. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018 brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners. >> And we are back live here at Dell Technologies World 2018. We're at the Sands this week. Day one of three days of coverage here on the CUBE. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls, and this is really kind of the John segment, if you will. Got John Grieco and Jon Siegal with us. John Grieco is the CTO of the University of Vermont Health Network. John, good to see you, sir. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> John W.: You bet, and Jon Siegal, VP of product marketing at Dell EMC. Jon, pleasure to have you aboard as well. >> Glad to be here again. >> Alright, let's talk about the university, if you will. I can imagine health, obviously, critical data. What's your data center environment like and how's cloud playing into that? >> Yeah, right now we are a seven hospital system with seven data centers managed by seven different IT organizations. So the role I have is really how do we take those >> John W.: You still have hair too, by the way. >> I do, but every day it's getting thinner and thinner. And I'm going to be able to tell with these cameras I hear. But what we're trying to do is really start working as one cohesive system. Give the patient the same experience as they travel through our system, and how do we do that with technology? And what we're trying to do is really simplify and standardize everything we do. Consolidate and centralize our data centers. So we're going from a seven data center infrastructure growth to a two data center platform, one in New York and one in Vermont. But most likely over time, pushing as many of our workloads to the cloud. Really creating that triangle, where you have your private cloud that has rigor and resilience with our clinical most critical workloads close to our IT shop, and we leverage a lot of the nontrivial nonvalue add applications into the cloud. >> John, you threw out a term, private cloud. >> Yes. >> Can you help define for us what that means to your organization? >> Absolutely. It's just like a public cloud, like Google, Amazon, or Microsoft Azure, but you're doing it in your local data center itself. So what we're doing at the University of Vermont Health Network is we're trying to make our private cloud that's local in our data centers act and become more of a private cloud look and feel. We understand that many of our users are leveraging the public cloud, even in their home use. So how do we bring some of that into the private data center that we own and manage, but give our users the look and feel of that public cloud? >> Alright, Jon Siegal, you chuckled a little bit when I said private cloud. It's one of those things we've debated for awhile. We don't need to get into semantics, but underneath Dell EMC provides some of the infrastructure, the platform for those. Maybe give us a little bit of insight as to what are doing there. >> Yeah, as you know, as we've talked about before, cloud is an operating model, right? Not a place. And I think John, and what he's done at the University of Vermont Health Network, really I think shows that. And it takes a change agent, by the way, too, not just technology to do that, I think. You know, he's making it sound easy, but he can tell us a little bit how he's done that. But it's a combination of technology, how you modernize the infrastructure, but also, what are you doing to actually transform that organization to deliver IT as a service. Right, because it's not just a plug and play. You just, you know, plug in a new infrastructure product line and then boom, it works, right? It's not that simple. >> Absolutely. We want to really put a lot of our IT talent into what I call above the value line. In my business, it's closer to the bedside. The new IT is really enabling the business to provide, in my business, better care. So how do we get them out of the data center per se and into the business to enable what they do each and every day? The way we do that is really standardizing on a ruthless infrastructure like Block, Rack, and Rail, and on top of that, automating everything we do within IT from a workflow perspective. >> Give me an example, a real world example. 'Cause you're talking about the patient experience. You have seven hospitals, seven data centers, seven sets of patients, if you will. But are you talking about as people migrate from one healthcare facility to another, something's not going with them or what exactly are you trying to improve in terms of real life care for people that this migration's going to let you facilitate? >> Absolutely. On one of our converged platforms, we're running a vendor neutral archive, and it's going to allow our patients, anytime we have them scan an image, it immediately goes to a central repository where any one of our hospitals can then take a look at that image. And what you're going to see over time is specializing our seven hospitals into certain treatments. So if we have a radiology department that we want to spend send some of our patients to, we want to make sure that they have the data and are reading that data before the patient's there. So the ability to take the image once and read the image while our patient is in transit to get that care. So when they arrive at that hospital, we are ready to take on that patient and immediately provide them the care they're there for. Running on one platform, sharing that platform across our seven hospital system. >> And so what currently happens? What's the situation now for a patient? >> Right now a patient would get an image at one hospital, travel to the other hospital. The image would not be there. We would then retake another image at that hospital, and go through the same exercise. So not only is the patient there when they don't want to, but we're going through repetitive questions and answering. >> John W.: Same song and dance. >> And the outcome is a negative patient experience, which we're avoiding through IT. >> You threw out Blocks, Rails, and Racks. I recognize those as the Dell EMC products. What does hyper converged infrastructure, converged infrastructure, you know, how does that impact what you're doing? And if I saw right, you use some of each, so how do you sort that out? You know, how do you integrate those pieces together? >> Really what drives is the requirements of the applications you're managing. So we do a deep dive with the applications we take in and we decide, based on the requirements of that application, which of those three platforms run the best. What I've seen is a lot of our critical mission, critical have to keep up 24/7 365 workloads, we are leveraging the VX Block for a lot of that. We're seeing a lot of those medium to low-end workloads on Rack or Rail, where we have the ability to really scale out quick and dynamically with those smaller type applications that are mini in size, where we're trying to standardize with our clinical ones more on our Block. So really the application requirement drives where that application sits in our environment. >> Alright, so Jon, how do customers like John you know manage that, this environment then? We want things to get simpler and, you know, even if they've got some various products of yours, how do we pull them all together? >> Well, as you know, I think the promise of converge and hyper converge is to simplify IT, right? And I think this is what you're seeing here, so. A lot of it is automating everything, or at least helping to really simplify everything from deployment, right, to managing the entire infrastructure as one. As well as sustaining it and life cycle managing it as one as well, right? And actually simplifying the upgrade path because I think that's, that can be the most time consuming thing, right? But that's the promise of converged infrastructure. Seven or eight years ago when we came out with VX Block or V Block at the time, it was about, how do we help customers like you get out of the infrastructure business day to day, the mundane business if you will? So you can spend more time, really upleveling your staff to do other more business critical and mission critical tasks. Is that fair? >> It is. We have to. I think we're being asked to move the needle within the business. As Michael Dell says, the business strategy really is the IT strategy. And for that to happen, we really have to bring our IT talent up the stack into where it's really enabling the business. And that's usually at that application layer, not at that infrastructure. We want to leverage our partners, like Dell Technologies, and their technology, to really run the business for us while our IT is more in the transfer informative, innovative and growth of that business. >> Alright. So I loved that you started out with seven data centers and the seven and seven and seven. What's the after state? You know, how does your IT team, you know, look at your operations and your technology? >> What we're doing is we're trying to create one shared service model. Even though we'll have people sitting at the seven hospitals, we are all working in unison. We're all leveraging the same workflows, the same technology, the same skill set. So in essence, we become a dynamic IT shop that I can leverage wherever there's a need. I can take IT personnel and have them move to another and it's the same look and feel. Just like the experience we want to give our users, the same look and feel as they travel, we want to do the same for IT. One logical shared service vision of a department that offers services to our hospitals that they consume, all like for like. >> And Jon just touched on this. He was talking about the mundane, right? And removing that and letting you basically to get a little more creative, but I think take on a different set of challenges. So how do you work with your staff in order to get them to change that mindset so that they can shift? Because it's not just you at the top, you've got to plant this vision, right, for people. So I'm taking this away from you, this is what I do. But now we're going to take what you know and we're going to let you do something else. But you got to get 'em there. So for people maybe watching that share that challenge, maybe, what would you say to them about how you've done that? >> Well as Jon mentioned, you need a change agent, you need a champion, most likely at the senior level, that's going to really ride through this journey, through the ebbs and flows of the challenges you have to deal with. And when you look at people, process, technology, as you mentioned, changing the mind of a person is probably the hardest thing to do of the three. But what we're trying to do is really change one mind at a time. If I can change one mind at a time persistently as a champion of where we're going, and answer the why and the awareness and the desire of someone wanting to go on that journey with us, on behalf of that patient, each and every day is how we're going to do it. Case by case, opportunity by opportunity, mind by mind. We will eventually get them to look at what we're doing and understand this is where I want IT to be. That's how we're going to do it at the University. >> I think the University of Vermont has the right guy for the job. >> Thank you. >> John, thank you for being, John, and Jon, both of you. Thank you for being with us here. We appreciate the time. >> Thank you very much. >> Yeah, and good luck down the road. Well that's it, wrapping up our coverage here on the CUBE. Thanks for joining us for day one. We are back tomorrow. Days two and three, live here at the Sands. Until then, for Stu Miniman and the rest of our CUBE crew, have a good night. (upbeat music)

(bright music) >> Hello, and welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, here in Palo Alto, California. It's a hybrid world, we're still doing remote in news. Of course, events are coming back in person, but more importantly conversations continue. We've got two great guests here, John Siegal, SVP ISG Marketing at Dell Technologies, and Dave McGraw, office of the CTO at VMware. Gentlemen, great to see you moving forward. Dell Technologies and VMware great partnership. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be back. >> Yeah, hi, John, thanks for having us. >> You know, the world's coming back to kind of real life, Omnicon virus is out there, but people say it's not going to be as bad as we think, but it looks like events are happening. But more importantly, the cloud native, cloud operations is definitely forcing lots of great new things happening, new innovations on-premises and at the Edge. A lot of new things happening in Dell and VMware, both have been working together for a long time now. VMware a separate company, we'll get to that in a second, but let's get to the partnership. What's new, what's changed with the relationship? >> Yeah, so I mean, just to kick that off and certainly Dave can chime in, but I think in a word, you know, John, nothing changes in terms of my customer's perspective. I mean, in many ways our joint relationship has never been stronger. We've put a ton of investment in both joint engineering innovation, Joint Go To Market over the last several years. And we're really been making what was our vision a couple of years ago a reality, and we only expect that to continue. And I think much of the reason we expect that to continue is because we have a shared vision of this distributed multi-cloud, you know, cloud native, modern app environment that customers want to drive. >> Yeah, and John, I would add that we've been building platforms together for the last five years, a great example is VxRail. You know, it's a market-leading technology that we've co-engineered together. And now it's a platform that we're actually building out use cases on top of whether it's multi-cloud solutions, whether it's private and hybrid cloud or including Tansu for developer environments. You know, we're using the investments we made and then we're layering in and building more value into those investments together. And we put agreements in place by the way that, you know, multi-year agreements around commercial arrangements and partnering together as well as our technology collaboration together. So we feel really confident about the future and that's what we're communicating to our customer base. >> Yeah, indeed just go ahead sorry, John. >> No, good. >> I was going to say just to build on that, as he said, I really, when I say not much changes, I mean, VMware has always been an open ecosystem partner, right? With its OEM vendors out there. And I think the difference here is Dell has made a strategic choice and a decision to make a significant investment in joint innovation, joint engineering, joint testing for VMware environments. And so I think a lot of this comes down to the commitment and focus that we've already made. You mentioned VxRail, which is a fantastic example where we at Dell, we've invested our own IP. You know, HCI systems software, that's sort of the secret ingredient that the secret sauce that delivers that single click, you know, automated lifecycle management experience. And we're investing lots of dollars in test labs just to ensure that customers always have that, you know, that seamless experience. >> You know, one of the benefits of doing theCUBE for 11 years now, it's just been that long, both EMC World and Dell World back in the day was our first events we went to. We've watched you guys together over the years. One of the things that strikes to be consistently the same is this focus of end to end, but also modularity, but also interoperability and kind of componentizing kind of the solution, not to oversimplify it, but this is kind of the big discussion right now as cloud scale, horizontal scale is with cloud resources are being put into the development stream where modern applications now are clear using only cloud native operations. That doesn't mean it's just cloud. I mean, it's cloud everywhere, but it's distributed computing. So this is kind of the original vision if you go back even five years or more. You guys have been working on this. This is kind of an important inflection point because now it's well known that the modern application is going to have to be programmable under the hood. Meaning everything's going to be scaling and rise of superclouds or new Edge technologies, which is coming fast. This is the new normal. This is not something that we were talking about mainstream five years ago, but you guys have been working on this kind of simplicity solutions-based approach. What's your reaction? >> That's right, John, I'll tell you, you might remember at VMworld a couple of years ago we announced Project Monterey. And now this was really a redefining architecture for not only data center, core data centers, but also for cloud and Edge environments. And so it's leveraging technology, you know, data processing units also known as smart NICs. You know, we're essentially redefining what that infrastructure looks like, making it more efficient, more performance, depending on the use case. So we've been partnering very closely with Dell to develop that technology and it's going to really transform what you see at the Edge and what you also see in core data centers going forward. >> Yeah, and there's so many of those. I mean, I think it seems Monterey is a great example of one that we continue to invest in. I think there's also NBME over TCP is another, if you will key ingredient to how customer is going to essentially get the performance they need out of the infrastructure going forward. And so we were proud to be a partner there, at most recent VMware where we announced, you know, the ability to essentially automate the integration of MBME over TCP with Dell EMC system integrated with vSphere. And that's a great example as well, right? I think there's countless. >> John: Yeah. >> And I'll tell you, we are so excited to see what Dell has done in the storage business with PowerStore X, where they've integrated vSphere ESXi into a storage array. And, you know, that creates all kinds of opportunities going forward for better integration and really for plug and play of, you know, the storage technology into cloud infrastructure. >> What's interesting about what you guys talking about is remember the old DevOps moving infrastructure as code. Okay, that became DevSecOps. That's big part of Tansu and security. Now it's all about devs, right? So now devs have all that built in and now the operations are the big conversation because one of the things we pointed out in the theCUBE recently is that, you know, VMware has owned the IT operations world, in our opinion for a long, long time. Dell has owned the enterprise for a very long time in terms of infrastructure in front solutions. The operational efficiency of cloud hybrid is really kind of what's the gateway to multi-cloud. This has been a big part of IT transformation. Can you guys share how you guys were working together to make that flexibility to transform from the old IT to the new IT? And what are some of the things that you're seeing with your customers that can give them a map of how to do this? >> Yeah, so I would say, you know, one area in particular that we're really coming together is around APEX, right? From an as a service perspective. I think what APEX is really doing is really unifying much of what you just described. It's taking as a service, it's taking multi-cloud, it's taking cloud native development if you will, and modern app development. And we together partner to ensure that's a consistent experience for customers. And we have a number of new APEX cloud services that keep that in mind and that are built on joint innovations, like frankly, VxRail at the bottom of that as they've said earlier. So for customers are looking to get, you know, item managing infrastructure altogether, which we, you know, we're seeing more and more now, we recently announced the APEX Cloud Services With VMware Cloud you know, which is again, a joint solution that'll be available soon. And it's one that is managed by Dell, but, you know, it gives customers that simplicity and scale of the public cloud, but certainly that control and security and performance, if you will, that they prefer to have in the private club. >> Yeah, and I think because, you know, the APEX Cloud Service is designed with the VMware Cloud, you have a capability that drives consistency and portability of workloads for customers. So they don't have to re-skill and retrain to be able to manage the environment. They also are not locked in to any particular solution. They have this ability to move workloads depending on what their needs are; economically, performance, you know, logistics requirements, and they can react accordingly as they digitize their business going forward. >> It's interesting, you guys are talking about this demand in a way, addressing this demand for as a service, which is, you know, it can be one cloud or multiple clouds, but it's really more of an abstraction layer of what you deploy to essentially create that connective tissue between what's existing, what's new and how to make it all work together to again, satisfy the developer 'cause the new apps are coming, right? They want more data is coming into them. So this has been, is this the as a service focus, is that what's happening? >> Yes, absolutely, yeah. The, as a service focus is, you know, at the end of the day is how are we going to really simplify this. We've been on this journey now for at least a year and much more to go. And VMware has been a key partner here, you know, on that journey. So a number of cloud services. We've had APEX Hybrid Cloud, APEX Private Cloud, you know, out there for some time. In fact, that's where we're getting a lot of the traction right now, and this new offering that's going to come out soon that we just mentioned with VMware cloud is just going to build on that. >> And VMware is a super cloud, isn't it Dave? Because you guys would be considered by our new definition of Supercloud because you can sit on Amazon. You also have other clouds too, so your customers can operate on any cloud. >> Our view is that, you know, from a multi-cloud future for customers to be able to be on-premises with a, you know, APEX service, to be able to be operating in a Colo, to be able to operate in one of many different hyperscalers, you know, providing that consistency and flexibility is going to be key. And I think also you mentioned Tansu earlier, John. You know, being able to have the customer have choice around whether they're operating with VMs and containers is really key as well. So, you know, what Dell has done with APEX is they set up again, another platform that we can just provide our SASE offerings to very simply and easily and deliver that value to customers in a consistent fashion going forward here. >> You know, I just love the term Supercloud. Actually, I called it subclass, but Dave Vellante called them Superclouds. But the idea is that you can have all the super power in the cloud capabilities, but it's also distributed clouds, right? Where you have Edge, you've got the Core and the notion of a cloud isn't like one place in which there's distributed computing. This is what the world now realizes. Again, we've talked about in theCUBE many times. So let's discuss this whole Core to Edge dynamic because if everything's cloudified, if you will, or cloud operations, you've got devs and ops kind of working together with security, all that good stuff. Now you have almost a seamless environment where code can run anywhere, data should traverse anywhere, but the idea of an Edge changes dramatically and certainly with 5G. So can you guys tie that Edge computing story together how Dell and VMware are addressing this massive growth at the Edge? >> Yeah, I would say, you know, first and foremost, we are seeing a major shift. As you mentioned today, the data being generated at the Edge it's, I think Michael Dell has actually gone on record talking about the next frontier, right? So it's especially happening because we're seeing all these smart monitoring capabilities, IOT, right? At almost any end point now from retail, traffic lights, manufacturing floors, you name it. I think anywhere where data is being acted upon to generate critical insights, right? That's considered an Edge now and we're expecting to see, as ITC has already gone out there on record as saying 50% of the new infrastructure out there will be deployed at the Edge in the next couple of years, so. And it's a different world, right? I mean, I think in terms of what's needed and what the challenges are, there's certainly a lack of specialized technical resources, typically at the Edge, there's typically a scaling issue. How do you manage all those distributed endpoints and do so successfully? And how do you ensure you lay any concerns around security as well? So, you know, once again, we've had a very collaborative approach when it comes to working on challenges like Edge, and, you know, we, again, common theme here, but the VxRail, which is a leading, you know, joint ACI off in the market is the foundation of many of our Edge offerings out there in the market today. The new satellite nodes that we just announced just a few months ago, extends VxRail's, you know, value proposition to the Edge, using a single node deployment. And it's really perfect for customers that don't have that local technical resource expertise or specialized resources. And it still has cyber resilience built right in. >> And John, just to follow up on that real quick, before Dave chimes in. On the Edge, compute has been a huge issue. And I've talked with you guys about this too. You guys have the compute, you have the integrated systems now, any update there on what VxRail is doing different or other Edge power (John laughs) PowerEdge sounds familiar? We need some more power at the Edge. So what's new there? >> Well, you know, first of all, we had new PowerEdge platforms of course, come out in this past year, and, you know, there's, we're building on that. I mean, the latest VxRail is of course, leveraged that power of PowerEdge. Yeah, lots of a good naming arrogance, right? PowerEdge. >> John: I love that. And, but, you know, it's, you know, it's at the heart of much of what we're doing. We're taking a lot of our capabilities that have been IP, like streaming data platform, which enables streaming, video and real-time analytics and running that on a VxRail or PowerEdge platform. You know, we're doing the same thing, you know, with, in the manufacturing side. We're working with partners that have IOT Edge platforms, you know, and running those on VxRail and PowerEdge. So we are taking very much the idea here that, yes, you're right with our rich resources of infrastructure, both with PowerEdge and VxRail, you know, building on that. But working with partners like VMware and others to collapse an integrated solution for the Edge. And so we're seeing really good uptake so far. >> Dave, what's your take on the Dell Edge with VMware, because automation is big theme, not moving data across an internet that's obviously huge. And you got to have that operational stability there. >> Absolutely, and, you know, to your point, being able to do the processing at the Edge and move results around versus moving massive amounts of data around is really key to the future going forward. And, you know, we've taken an approach with Dell where we're working with customers, we're having detailed conversations, really using a "Tiger Team Approach" around the use cases; manufacturing and retail being two of the real key focuses, healthcare another one where we're understanding customer requirements, it's both today and where they want to go. And, you know, so it's about distributed computing, certainly at the Edge. Dell is coming out with some great new platforms that we're integrating our software with. At the same time, we have technology in STWIN and SASE that become part of that solution as well, with VeloCloud. And we're developing a global network of points of presence that really will help support distributed application environments and Edge-native Application environments working with Dell going forward. >> That's great stuff. The next ending question is what's next. I want to just tee that up by bringing up what you kind of made me think of there, Dave, and this is key supply chain on both hardware and software talking about security. So when you say those things you're talking about in terms of functionality, the question is security, right? Both hardware and software supply chain with open source, with automation. I mean, this is a big discussion. What do you guys react to that about what's next.. >> Yeah, I can tell you from a central engineering perspective, you know, we're looking at security compliance and privacy every day, we're working closely with Dell. In fact, we're in the middle of meetings today in this area. And, you know, I look at a few key areas of investment that we're making collectively together. One is in the area of end to end encryption of data. For virtualized environments or containerized environments, being able to have end-to-end encryption and manage a very efficient way, the keys and maintain the data compression and deduplication capabilities for customers, you know, efficiency and cost purposes while being very secure. The second area we're working closely on is in Zero Trust. You know, being able to develop Zero Trust infrastructure across Edge, to Core, to Colo, to Cloud and making sure that, you know, we have reference designs available to customers with procedures, policies, best practices, to be able to drive Zero Trust environments. >> John what you're (indistinct) is huge and you guys have, literally could be the keys to the kingdom pun intended. You guys are doing a lot of great security at the Edge too, whether the traffic stays with the Edge or goes across the network. >> That's all right, I'm as curious, like you said, it's been a joint focus and initiative across much of our portfolio for quite a while now. And I think, you know, you asked what's next and I think, you know, sky's the limit right now. I mean, we've got the shared vision, right? I think at the end of the day, you know, we've shared a number of joint initiatives that are ongoing right now with Project Monterrey. Obviously our integration with Tansu and a number of solutions we have there, work around APEX, et cetera. I think we have complimentary capabilities. You mentioned, you know, areas like supply chain, areas like security, you know, and I think these are all things that we both do well together. And the thing I will say that I think is probably the most key to us sustaining this great execution together is our collaborative cultures. I think, you know, there's something to be said for what we built, you know, all these last several years, you know, around these collaborative cultures, working together on joint roadmaps and focusing on really end of the day solving our customer's biggest challenges, whatever those may be, you know? And so at the end of the day behind us, we have the greatest supply chains, you know, services, support, and innovation engines. But I think, you know, I think that the passion, our groups working together I think is going to be key to us going forward. >> Well, great stuff moving forward together with Dell Technologies and VMware. David, thanks for coming on. John, great to see you. Thanks for sharing insight. Great CUBE conversation talking encryption, we've spoken about Edge and supply chain as well. Great stuff, great conversation. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you >> Thank you so much, John. >> Okay, this is theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, with theCUBE. You're watching CUBE coverage. Thank you so much for watching. (bright music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas. We're about hitting the midway point of three days wall-to-wall live coverage on two sets. I'm Stu Miniman. My co-host is John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program, first of all, a first time guest whose company was mentioned by Pat Gelsinger in the opening keynote, Chris Gregg, the CIO of Mercy Ships. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> And also happy to welcome back a regular on the program, John Siegal, who's the vice president product marketing with Dell EMC on the Infrastructure Solution Group. John, great to see you. >> Always glad to be here Stu, as you know. >> All right. So, always excite not only a customer but a customer, as Pat said, "doing good." So, tell us a little bit about Mercy Ships' mission. >> Thank you, Stu. It is great to be here. Super excited to have Pat mention us on the stage yesterday morning. Great great opportunity. We meet the need that Pat mentioned, the five billion people in this world who don't have access to safe and affordable surgical care. More than 30 percent of the deaths in this world are a result of that lack of that access. So, we meet that need. We operate hospital ships that provide surgical care in the developing world and support the countries by providing training and capacity building in those areas. >> It is a great mission. It's one of those things that, you know, we've had a few examples here at the show. Malala Yousafzai this morning was very inspiring. Just talk about the company itself, how big, where do you operate around the globe. >> So, we operate in primarily West and Southern and Eastern Africa. That's where you find many of the countries or most of the countries that are the least developed in this area. We're headquartered in the US. We have offices around the world for fund raising and recruiting. Our organization is a non-profit. We are funded entirely by donation and our hospital ships are staffed entirely by volunteers. >> Alright, and you've got the CIO hat on. >> I do. >> So talk to us a little bit about IT. I lived on the vendor side. I actually remember designing gear that was okay for those kind of environments. Ruggedizd and military and things like that. So, tell us your role inside and what that encompasses. >> Well, for us the most important thing is ensuring that the organization is efficient and that we are putting the, delivering the best for our patients, for the people we're serving in Africa. So, we want our IT to be effective, efficient, simple. Particularly with ships being staffed as volunteers, we want to maximize the effort onboard. And we don't want to spend a lot of time supporting IT, if you like. So, much of what we're doing and where we're going is around simplifying and that's where VxRails come in for us. >> Alright, well John, he's a straight man. He set you up. >> He set me up, right? >> Thank you for bringing us, you know, we love CIOs. We love missions for good here. So, yeah, he set you up on the Dell connecting. >> It doesn't get more inspirational than this though, does it, right? And so, of course, we've been focused with hyper-converged on simplifying IT now for years. And, you know, whether it's helping companies refocus there energies and there resources to innovate or it's helping non-profits literally save lives. I mean this is, to me, this is what inspires us to do good and actually, really to double down on really driving more and more simplicity into our products. >> Well, Chris, I'm really interested in some of the technical details because we heard a lot here at VMworld about the Edge, right? The Edge has a lot of different meanings and connotations but not everything can live up in a regional data center, up in the public cloud, right? And, you know, a ship is probably a canonical example. So I'm kind of fascinated with like, what kinds of things do you encounter that you wouldn't encounter were you in AWS east or something. What do you have to do on the ship? And you're all self-contained and etc.? >> Yeah, our primary constraint is availability of bandwidth. So, going back a couple years, we were relying purely on satellite, had a maybe about five meg connection for a full hospital ship, 400 people. We've gone up to about 100 meg now. So, we're still tiny. So that really constrains. We have this hybrid environment of a on premise on ship, with live-live data centers on ship, two data centers on a ship. Headquarters as well and then we're starting to look at what we can take into the cloud. So, the concept of a hybrid approach, especially with one vendor partnered with Vmware and Dell bringing it all together in one place and one support model is really fantastic for us. >> Yeah, you have amphibious cloud, is I think what you have, right? >> Yes, yes. (laughs) >> So, John, are there any special things that you have to do from a gear standpoint? From their standpoint? >> Well, it's interesting, you know. I think from their requirements perspective. So, first of all they're looking for small footprint, of course. And hyper-converts, by nature, is smaller. And so we've done that there. But in addition to that, I think as we've talked about too, is we're also helping them hyper-converge their operations as well, right? As he mentioned, as Chris mentioned, they have IT volunteers on staff that are literally coming, they're volunteering their own time. They don't stay for, what? A couple months at a time? >> Three months >> Three months at a time. Constant rotation of new staff. They can't be experts on storage, and servers and networking and all that. What they need is to be able to hyper-converge operations into more of a generalist type of approach. And so that's really where our efforts have really helped them, is I think has enabled them to have IT generalists be able to handle all the upgrades and the deployments so that it just works. But beyond that, from a hardware standpoint, no, nothing specific there other than the small footprint. >> But from a personnel standpoint, you want that easy button, right? >> Absolutely. >> You don't have to, right, training them up, maintaining it. I know when I talk to a lot of HCI customers they never touch the box. It's "oh great I've got some interface and I can do that". What's your experience been? How long have you had the solution? >> So, we've had the solution in headquarters for about a year. And we are building a new ship. It's ready to be launched in 2020. It's actually another aspect for us is, when we started looking at this in 2016, we were looking out four years, really, for the time it takes to build a ship and thinking forward to what would be coming four years time. What do we need to put our bets on, if you life. So, looking at VxRail when it started coming into play. We've actually started building the data centers for the new ship. Had a good experience so far. We're getting ready to pack that up and be sending out to be installed on the ship next year. >> As we've talked about, the faster you can deploy one of these floating hospitals, the quicker you can help patients. Right, so this is kind of giving a whole new meaning to the ability to really simplify deployment as well as the whole life cycle. And saving them. >> What are some of the workloads that you're running that on, on these active-active data centers. That's kind of interesting as well. >> Yeah, on ship we have, it's interesting we have such a mix. And we operate a hospital, of course. And we operate services to maintain plants, the machinery and all that sort of stuff. There's not too much IoT at this point, although our new ship will have some more. In the hospital you've got these radiology, patient records, all those sorts of things. We operate a school on board as well, There's the general office support as well. On the ship it's quite mixed and varied. >> Alright. >> But it really was the flexibility, right? I think the flexibility of hyper-converge that allows you to run some of your kind of run of the mill, the basic applications. But also, this ship's going to be deployed several years from now as well with the similar technologies. So it's important to be able to support not just today's applications, but some of the next-gen applications >> Absolutely that are coming down the pike to help you improve care. >> And with new ship we'll be deploying VDI as well. So we'll be taking that step as well with Horizon. >> I was curious that with the teaching and everything, there's lots of use cases-- >> Absolutely, yeah. >> that come to mind there. John, what does Dell do for the non-profits that obviously, HDI's designed to be affordable to begin with but for this class of customer anything special? Or is it just part of the regular future-proofing and everything like that that makes this possible? >> I think this is just a great opportunity to hear this and to see how simplicity is really being achieved and helping save lives. So, I think from that perspective we couldn't be happier. I think, also, what we've really poured is our heart and soul and energy into this product so that it just works. And I think a lot of what I think also Chris looked at was wanting to make sure he had a single vendor. So, we've made sure that we have everything from data protection to the actual infrastructure itself. We have Dell EMCI still on in there as well. But providing a single point of contact to support that whole stack so that you have volunteers onsite, on the ship, giving a whole new meaning to on-prem, by the way, on ship and yet, if there is an issue, they have the peace of mind to know that it's one call to Dell EMC to support that entire stack. So, again, that's really what we're proud of, is to see the value proposition that we envisioned years ago start to really be realized in a situation like this where it's really helping save lives. >> Chris, I understand it's your first time at this show-- >> It is, yes. >> We always, it's a very welcoming community. What's your impressions been so far? And you probably have a slightly different experience than the average person's not usually mentioned by the CEO of the company-- >> Yes. >> Up on the keynotes. >> Yes, it's been quite the introduction to be mentioned. We were brought in and sat right in the front row in the keynote. And that was very exciting, too. It's been fantastic to be here. Really inspiring to see some of the things that are coming along in the future. I've had lots of ideas, thinking about what we can do next and how we could continue to improve what we're doing so that can continue to serve more people, have a bigger impact for our organization. >> It's amazing. I was actually just looking at your volunteer page. You know, the beautiful thing about VMworld is that it's a, although there are a couple VM, there's a VMworld in Europe and a VMworld here, but this community is global. There are people here from all over the world. And some of them might be able to take a couple months off, right? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> And so what kind? I see you're looking. I see IS systems administrator, support specialist, all sorts of stuff. >> Yeah, so there's two vacancies in our team at the moment, as you mentioned. A system admin and a support specialist. Our website, mercyships.org, has all the volunteer opportunities. Last year we had volunteers from 68 countries. All sorts of skill, not just medical obviously, administrative, all sorts. So, go and have a look at the website. >> That's awesome. >> Chris, one thing I always like to talk to CIO's these days, how's your role changing? When you look at what's happen the last couple years, change is evident from everything you see at this show. What are you seeing from yourself and when you talk to your peers as to how things are moving? >> For me the role has really moved into trying to understand how Mercy Ships can multiply our impact and looking how technology can be a part of that. It's looking at how we optimize and make our operations more efficient. As an organization funded by donors, we want to make sure that we maximize those dollars to be delivering patient care. So, looking at how, as an organization, we can really double down and multiply what we do through technology. >> That's great. Look, IT used to be very internally focused. Mercy Ships' mission, obviously, very much looking external on the CIO. John, you talk to a lot of customers at this show. This is a great story. Any other things from the show... >> I got to say, as we were just talking about here though, it is such an inspiring story and it is an opportunity now for all the vcenter administrators here at the show. By the way, because VxRail, of course, you can just use familiar tools like vcenter, VMware Tools, this is a pretty good recruiting area for you right now. Again, it's all coming together for us here. And I think the opportunity for us to give back in a way here as Dell Technologies, as VMware together, this is what we envisioned. And we're just happy to be able to have a storyline like this. And we look forward to maybe being on theCUBE again with Chris in the future as they bring the next ship online as well. >> By the way, our studios are always open for the non-profits. No charge, have them in. We've got Palo Alto. We've got Boston area. We do love to be able to support that as we can. >> Alright, want to give you both the final word. Things looking forward, takeaways from your experience so far. >> Yeah, so, one of the things that really interesting for me is thinking through how we can start integrating Workplace One. So, looking at, with a turnover of volunteer staff, we want to make sure the Edge is really simple, that we can support that. Also, thinking through what we want to do to increase our resilience and dr capabilities. And starting to look at how we can use the Cloud more, particularly Hybrid cloud with multiple different providers. So, yeah, really exciting. Thank you so much for the opportunity. It's really been good to be here. And mercyships.org is the place to go and find out more. >> I'd just add to that again. We're honored to be able to be part of this story with you across the Dell Technologies family. And we look forward to continuing, to providing the best experience you can have for your ships going forward. Now we'll be continuing our partnership. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you. >> John and Chris, thank you so much. Be sure, check out mercyships.org for those volunteer opportunities. And check out theCUBE.net where you can find all of the video content from this show and all the others. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2018. You're watching theCUBE.