>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of data automated and event. Siri's Brought to You by Iot Tahoe Welcome, everyone to the second episode in our data automated Siri's made possible with support from Iot Tahoe. Today we're gonna drill into the data lifecycle, meaning the sequence of stages that data travels through from creation to consumption to archive. The problem, as we discussed in our last episode, is that data pipelines, they're complicated, They're cumbersome, that disjointed, and they involve highly manual processes. Ah, smart data lifecycle uses automation and metadata to approve agility, performance, data quality and governance and ultimately reduce costs and time to outcomes. Now, in today's session will define the data lifecycle in detail and provide perspectives on what makes a data lifecycle smart and importantly, how to build smarts into your processes. In a moment, we'll be back with Adam Worthington from ethos to kick things off, and then we'll go into an export power panel to dig into the tech behind smart data life cycles, and it will hop into the crowdchat and give you a chance to ask questions. So stay right there. You're watching the cube innovation impact influence. Welcome >>to the Cube disruptors. Developers and practitioners learn from the voices of leaders who share their personal insights from the hottest digital events around the globe. Enjoy the best this community has to offer on the Cube, your global leader. >>High tech digital coverage. Okay, we're back with Adam Worthington. Adam, good to see you. How are things across the pond? >>Thank you, I'm sure. >>Okay, so let's let's set it up. Tell us about yourself. What? Your role is a CTO and >>automatically. As you said, we found a way to have a pretty in company ourselves that we're in our third year on. Do we specialize in emerging disruptive technologies within the infrastructure? That's the kind of cloud space on my phone is the technical lead. So I kind of my job to be an expert in all of the technologies that we work with, which can be a bit of a challenge if you have a huge for phone is one of the reasons, like deliberately focusing on on also kind of pieces a successful validation and evaluation of new technologies. >>So you guys really technology experts, data experts and probably also expert in process and delivering customer outcomes. Right? >>That's a great word there, Dave Outcomes. That's a lot of what I like to speak to customers about. >>Let's talk about smart data, you know, when you when you throw in terms like this is it kind of can feel buzz, wordy. But what are the critical aspects of so called smart data? >>Help to step back a little bit, seen a little bit more in terms of kind of where I can see the types of problems I saw. I'm really an infrastructure solution architect trace on and what I kind of benefit we organically. But over time my personal framework, I focused on three core design principal simplicity, flexibility, inefficient, whatever it was designing. And obviously they need different things, depending on what the technology area is working with. But that's a pretty good. So they're the kind of areas that a smart approach to data will directly address. Reducing silos that comes from simplifying, so moving away from conflict of infrastructure, reducing the amount of copies of data that we have across the infrastructure and reducing the amount of application environments that need different areas so smarter get with data in my eyes anyway, the further we moved away from this. >>But how does it work? I mean, how do you know what's what's involved in injecting smarts into your data lifecycle? >>I think one of my I actually did not ready, but generally one of my favorite quotes from the French lost a mathematician, Blaise Pascal. He said, If I get this right, I have written a short letter, but I didn't have time. But Israel, I love that quite for lots of reasons >>why >>direct application in terms of what we're talking about, it is actually really complicated. These developers technology capabilities to make things simple, more directly meet the needs of the business. So you provide self service capabilities that they just need to stop driving. I mean, making data on infrastructure makes the business users using >>your job. Correct me. If I'm wrong is to kind of put that all together in a solution and then help the customer realize that we talked about earlier that business out. >>Yeah, enough if they said in understanding both sides so that it keeps us on our ability to deliver on exactly what you just said is big experts in the capabilities and new a better way to do things but also having the kind of the business understanding to be able to ask the right questions. That's how new a better price is. Positions another area that I really like his stuff with their platforms. You can do more with less. And that's not just about using data redundancy. That's about creating application environments, that conservative and then the infrastructure to service different requirements that are able to use the random Io thing without getting too kind of low level as well as the sequential. So what that means is you don't necessarily have to move data from application environment a do one thing related, and then move it to the application environment. Be that environment free terms of an analytics on the left Right works. Both keep the data where it is, use it or different different requirements within the infrastructure and again do more with less. And what that does is not just about simplicity and efficiency. It significantly reduces the time to value of that as well. >>Do you have examples that you can share with us even if they're anonymous customers that you work with that are maybe a little further down on the journey. Or maybe not >>looking at the you mentioned data protection earlier. So another organization This is a project which is just kind of hearing confessions moment, huge organization. They're literally petabytes of data that was servicing their back up in archive. And what they have is not just this realization they have combined. I think I different that they have dependent on the what area of infrastructure they were backing up, whether it was virtualization, that was different because they were backing up PC's June 6th. They're backing up another database environment, using something else in the cloud knowledge bases approach that we recommended to work with them on. They were able to significantly reduce complexity and reduce the amount of time that it systems of what they were able to achieve and what this is again. One of the clients have They've gone above the threshold of being able to back up for that. >>Adam, give us the final thoughts, bring us home. In this segment, >>the family built something we didn't particularly such on, that I think it is really barely hidden. It is spoken about as much as I think it is, that agile approaches to infrastructure we're going to be touched on there could be complicated on the lack of it efficient, the impact, a user's ability to be agile. But what you find with traditional approaches and you already touched on some of the kind of benefits new approaches there. It's often very prescriptive, designed for a particular as the infrastructure environment, the way that it served up the users in kind of a packaged. Either way, it means that they need to use it in that whatever wave in data bases, that kind of service of as it comes in from a flexibility standpoint. But for this platform approach, which is the right way to address technology in my eyes enables, it's the infrastructure to be used. Flexible piece of it, the business users of the data users what we find this capability into their innovating in the way they use that on the White House. I bring benefits. This is a platform to prescriptive, and they are able to do that. What you're doing with these new approaches is all of the metrics that we touched on and pass it from a cost standpoint from a visibility standpoint, but what it means is that the innovators in the business want really, is to really understand what they're looking to achieve and now have to to innovate with us. Now, I think I've started to see that with projects season places. If you do it in the right way, you articulate the capability and empower the business users in the right ways. Very significantly. Better position. The advantages on really matching significantly bigger than their competition. Yeah, >>Super Adam in a really exciting space. And we spent the last 10 years gathering all this data, you know, trying to slog through it and figure it out. And now, with the tools that we have and the automation capabilities, it really is a new era of innovation and insights. So, Adam or they didn't thanks so much for coming on the Cube and participating in this program. >>Exciting times with that. Thank you very much Today. >>Now we're going to go into the power panel and go deeper into the technologies that enable smart data life cycles. Stay right there. You're watching the cube. Are >>you interested in test driving? The i o ta ho platform Kickstart the benefits of data automation for your business through the Iot Labs program. Ah, flexible, scalable sandbox environment on the cloud of your choice with set up a service and support provided by Iot. Top. Click on the Link and connect with the data engineer to learn more and see Iot Tahoe in action. >>Welcome back, everybody to the power panel driving business performance with smart data life cycles. Leicester Waters is here. He's the chief technology officer from Iot Tahoe. He's joined by Patrick Smith, who was field CTO from pure storage. And is that data? Who's a system engineering manager at KohI City? Gentlemen, good to see you. Thanks so much for coming on this panel. >>Thank you. >>Let's start with Lester. I wonder if each of you could just give us a quick overview of your role. And what's the number one problem that you're focused on solving for your customers? Let's start with Lester Fleet. >>Yes, I'm Lost Waters, chief technology officer for Iot Tahoe and really the number one problem that we're trying to solve for our customers is to understand, help them understand what they have, because if they don't understand what they have in terms of their data. They can't manage it. They can't control it. The cap monitor. They can't ensure compliance. So really, that's finding all you can about your data that you have. And building a catalog that could be readily consumed by the entire business is what we do. >>Patrick Field, CTO in your title That says to me, You're talking to customers all the time, so you got a good perspective on it. Give us your take on things here. >>Yeah, absolutely. So my patches in here on day talkto customers and prospects in lots of different verticals across the region. And as they look at their environments and their data landscape, they're faced with massive growth in the data that they're trying to analyze and demands to be able to get insight our stuff and to deliver better business value faster than they've ever had to do in the past. So >>got it. And is that of course, Kohi City. You're like the new kid on the block. You guys were really growing rapidly created this whole notion of data management, backup and and beyond. But I'm assistant system engineering manager. What are you seeing from from from customers your role and the number one problem that you're solving. >>Yeah, sure. So the number one problem I see time and again speaking with customers. It's around data fragmentation. So do two things like organic growth, even maybe budgetary limitations. Infrastructure has grown over time very piecemeal, and it's highly distributed internally. And just to be clear, you know, when I say internally, that >>could be >>that it's on multiple platforms or silos within an on Prem infrastructure that it also does extend to the cloud as well. >>Right Cloud is cool. Everybody wants to be in the cloud, right? So you're right, It creates, Ah, maybe unintended consequences. So let's start with the business outcome and kind of try to work backwards to people you know. They want to get more insights from data they want to have. Ah, Mawr efficient data lifecycle. But so let's let me start with you were thinking about like the North Star for creating data driven cultures. You know, what is the North Star or customers >>here? I think the North Star, in a nutshell, is driving value from your data. Without question, I mean way, differentiate ourselves these days by even nuances in our data now, underpinning that, there's a lot of things that have to happen to make that work out. Well, you know, for example, making sure you adequately protect your data, you know? Do you have a good You have a good storage sub system? Do you have a good backup and recovery point objectives? Recovery time objective. How do you Ah, are you fully compliant? Are you ensuring that you're taking all the boxes? There's a lot of regulations these days in terms with respect to compliance, data retention, data, privacy and so forth. Are you taking those boxes? Are you being efficient with your, uh, your your your data? You know, In other words, I think there's a statistic that someone mentioned me the other day that 53% of all businesses have between three and 15 copies of the same data. So you know, finding and eliminating does is it is part of the part of the problem is when you do a chase, >>um, I I like to think of you're right, no doubt, business value and and a lot of that comes from reducing the end in cycle times. But anything that you guys would would add to that. Patrick, Maybe start with Patrick. >>Yeah, I think I think in value from your data really hits on tips on what everyone wants to achieve. But I think there are a couple of key steps in doing that. First of all, is getting access to the data and asked that, Really, it's three big problems, firstly, working out what you've got. Secondly, looking at what? After working on what you've got, how to get access to it? Because it's all very well knowing that you've got some data. But if you can't get access to it either because of privacy reasons, security reasons, then that's a big challenge. And then finally, once you've got access to the data making sure that you can process that data in a timely manner >>for me, you know it would be that an organization has got a really good global view of all of its data. It understands the data flow and dependencies within their infrastructure, understands that precise legal and compliance requirements, and you had the ability to action changes or initiatives within their environment to give the fun. But with a cloud like agility. Um, you know, and that's no easy feat, right? That is hard work. >>Okay, so we've we've talked about. The challenge is in some of the objectives, but there's a lot of blockers out there, and I want to understand how you guys are helping remove them. So So, Lester. But what do you see as some of the big blockers in terms of people really leaning in? So this smart data lifecycle >>yeah, Silos is is probably one of the biggest one I see in business is yes, it's it's my data, not your data. Lots of lots of compartmentalization. Breaking that down is one of the one of the challenges. And having the right tools to help you do that is only part of the solution. There's obviously a lot of cultural things that need to take place Teoh to break down those silos and work together. If you can identify where you have redundant data across your enterprise, you might be able to consolidate those. >>So, Patrick, so one of the blockers that I see is legacy infrastructure, technical debt, sucking all the budget you got. You know, too many people have having to look after, >>as you look at the infrastructure that supports people's data landscapes today for primarily legacy reasons. The infrastructure itself is siloed. So you have different technologies with different underlying hardware and different management methodologies that they're there for good reason, because historically you have to have specific fitness, the purpose for different data requirements. And that's one of the challenges that we tackled head on a pure with with the flash blade technology and the concept of the data, a platform that can deliver in different characteristics for the different workloads. But from a consistent data platform >>now is that I want to go to you because, you know, in the world in your world, which to me goes beyond backup. And one of the challenges is, you know, they say backup is one thing. Recovery is everything, but as well. The the CFO doesn't want to pay for just protection, and one of things that I like about what you guys have done is you. You broadened the perspective to get more value out of your what was once seen as an insurance policy. >>I do see one of the one of the biggest blockers as the fact that the task at hand can, you know, can be overwhelming for customers. But the key here is to remember that it's not an overnight change. It's not, you know, a flick of a switch. It's something that can be tackled in a very piecemeal manner on. Absolutely. Like you said, You know, reduction in TCO and being able to leverage the data for other purposes is a key driver for this. So, you know, this can be this can be resolved. It would be very, you know, pretty straightforward. It can be quite painless as well. Same goes for unstructured data, which is very complex to manage. And, you know, we've all heard the stats from the the analysts. You know, data obviously is growing at an extremely rapid rate, but actually, when you look at that, you know how is actually growing. 80% of that growth is actually in unstructured data, and only 20% of that growth is in unstructured data. S o. You know, these are quick win areas that customers can realize immediate tco improvement and increased agility as well >>paint a picture of this guy that you could bring up the life cycle. You know what you can see here is you've got this this cycle, the data lifecycle and what we're wanting to do is inject intelligence or smarts into this, like like life cycles. You see, you start with ingestion or creation of data. You're you're storing it. You got to put it somewhere, right? You gotta classify it. You got to protect it. And then, of course, you want to reduce the copies, make it, you know, efficient on. And then you want to prepare it so that businesses can actually sumit. And then you've got clients and governance and privacy issues, and I wonder if we could start with you. Lester, this is, you know, the picture of the life cycle. What role does automation play in terms of injecting smarts into the lifecycle? >>Automation is key here, especially from the discover it catalog and classify perspective. I've seen companies where they geo and will take and dump their all of their database scheme is into a spreadsheet so that they can sit down and manually figure out what attributes 37 means for a column names, Uh, and that's that's only the tip of the iceberg. So being able to do automatically detect what you have automatically deduced where what's consuming the data, you know, upstream and downstream. Being able to understand all of the things related to the lifecycle of your data. Back up archive deletion. It is key. And so we're having having good tool. IShares is very >>important. So, Patrick, obviously you participate in the store piece of this picture s I wonder if you could talk more specifically about that. But I'm also interested in how you effect the whole system view the the end end cycle time. >>Yeah, I think Leicester kind of hit the nail on the head in terms of the importance of automation because the data volumes are just just so massive. Now that you can, you can you can effectively manage or understand or catalog your data without automation. Once you understand the data and the value of the data, then that's where you can work out where the data needs to be at any point in >>time, right? So pure and kohi city obviously partner to do that and of course, is that you guys were part of the protect you certainly part of the retain. But Also, you provide data management capabilities and analytics. I wonder if you could add some color there. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, like you said, you know, we focused pretty heavily on data protection. Is just one of our one of our areas on that infrastructure. It is just sitting there, really? Can, you know, with the legacy infrastructure, It's just sitting there, you know, consuming power, space cooling and pretty inefficient. And what, if anything, that protest is a key part of that. If I If I have a modern data platform such as, you know, the cohesive data platform, I can actually do a lot of analytics on that through application. So we have a marketplace for APS. >>I wonder if we could talk about metadata. It's It's increasingly important. Metadata is data about the data, but Leicester maybe explain why it's so important and what role it plays in terms of creating smart data lifecycle. A >>lot of people think it's just about the data itself, but there's a lot of extended characteristics about your data. So so imagine if or my data life cycle I can communicate with the backup system from Kohi City and find out when the last time that data was backed up or where is backed up to. I can communicate exchange data with pure storage and find out what two years? And is the data at the right tier commensurate with its use level pointed out and being able to share that metadata across systems? I think that's the direction that we're going in right now. We're at the stage where just identifying the metadata and trying to bring it together and catalog the next stage will be OK using the AP eyes it that that we have between our systems can't communicate and share that data and build good solutions for customers to use. >>It's a huge point that you just made. I mean, you know, 10 years ago, automating classification was the big problem, and it was machine intelligence, you know, obviously attacking that, But your point about as machines start communicating to each other and you start, it's cloud to cloud. There's all kinds of metadata, uh, kind of new meta data that's being created. I often joke that someday there's gonna be more metadata than data, so that brings us to cloud and that I'd like to start with you. >>You know, I do think, you know, having the cloud is a great thing. And it has got its role to play, and you can have many different permutations and iterations of how you use it on. Um, you know, I may have sort of mentioned previously. You know, I've seen customers go into the cloud very, very quickly, and actually recently, they're starting to remove workloads from the cloud. And the reason why this happens is that, you know, Cloud has got its role to play, but it's not right for absolutely everything, especially in their current form as well. A good analogy I like to use on this may sound a little bit cliche, but you know, when you compare clouds versus on premises data centers, you can use the analogy of houses and hotels. So to give you an idea so you know, when we look at hotels, that's like the equivalent of a cloud, right? I can get everything I need from there. I can get my food, my water, my outdoor facilities. If I need to accommodate more people, I can rent some more rooms. I don't have to maintain the hotel. It's all done for me. When you look at houses the equivalent to on premises infrastructure, I pretty much have to do everything myself, right. So I have to purchase the house. I have to maintain it. I have to buy my own food and water. Eat it. You have to make improvements myself. But then why do we all live in houses? No, in hotels. And the simple answer that I can I can only think of is, is that it's cheaper, right. It's cheaper to do it myself. But that's not to say that hotels haven't got their role to play. Um, you know? So, for example, if I've got loads of visitors coming over for the weekend, I'm not going to go build an extension to my house just for them. I will burst into my hotel into the cloud, um, and use it for, you know, for for things like that. So what I'm really saying is the cloud is great for many things, but it can work out costlier for certain applications, while others are a perfect >>It's an interesting analogy. I hadn't thought of that before, but you're right because I was going to say Well, part of it is you want the cloud experience everywhere, but you don't always want the cloud experience especially, you know, when you're with your family, you want certain privacy that I've not heard that before. He's out. So that's the new perspective s Oh, thank you, but but But Patrick, I do want to come back to that cloud experience because, in fact, that's what's happening. In a lot of cases, organizations are extending the cloud properties of automation on Prem. >>Yeah, I thought, as I thought, a really interesting point and a great analogy for the use of the public cloud. And it really reinforces the importance of the hybrid and multi cloud environment because it gives you the flexibility to choose where is the optimal environment to run your business workloads? And that's what it's all about and the flexibility to change which environment you're running in, either for more months to the next or from one year to the next. Because workloads change and the characteristics that are available in the cloud change, the hybrid cloud is something that we've we've lived with ourselves of pure, So our pure one management technology actually sits in hybrid cloud and what we we started off entirely cloud native. But now we use public cloud for compute. We use our own technology at the end of a high performance network link to support our data platform. So we get the best of both worlds and I think that's where a lot of our customers are trying to get to. >>Alright, I want to come back in a moment there. But before we do, let's see, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about compliance, governance and privacy. I think the Brits hung on. This panel is still in the EU for now, but the you are looking at new rules. New regulations going beyond GDP are where does sort of privacy governance, compliance fit in the data lifecycle, then, is that I want your thoughts on this as well. >>Yeah, this is this is a very important point because the landscape for for compliance, around data privacy and data retention is changing very rapidly. And being able to keep up with those changing regulations in an automated fashion is the only way you're gonna be able to do it. Even I think there's a some sort of Ah, maybe ruling coming out today or tomorrow with the changed in the r. So this is things are all very key points and being able to codify those rules into some software. Whether you know, Iot Tahoe or or your storage system or kohi city, it will help you be compliant is crucial. >>Yeah. Is that anything you can add there? I mean, it's really is your wheelhouse. >>Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I think anybody who's watching this probably has gotten the message that, you know, less silos is better. And it absolutely it also applies to data in the cloud is where as well. So you know, my aiming Teoh consolidate into fewer platforms, customers can realize a lot better control over their data. And the natural effect of this is that it makes meeting compliance and governance a lot easier. So when it's consolidated, you can start to confidently understand who's accessing your data. How frequently are they accessing the data? You can also do things like, you know, detecting anomalous file access activities and quickly identify potential threats. >>Okay, Patrick, we were talking. You talked earlier about storage optimization. We talked to Adam Worthington about the business case, the numerator, which is the business value, and then the denominator, which is the cost and what's unique about pure in this regard. >>Yeah, and I think there are. There are multiple time dimensions to that. Firstly, if you look at the difference between legacy storage platforms that used to take up racks or aisles of space in the data center, the flash technology that underpins flash blade way effectively switch out racks rack units on. It has a big play in terms of data center footprint, and the environmental is associated with the data center. If you look at extending out storage efficiencies and the benefits it brings, just the performance has a direct effect on start we whether that's, you know, the start from the simplicity that platform so that it's easy and efficient to manage, whether it's the efficiency you get from your data. Scientists who are using the outcomes from the platform, making them more efficient to new. If you look at some of our customers in the financial space there, their time to results are improved by 10 or 20 x by switching to our technology from legacy technologies for their analytics, platforms. >>The guys we've been running, you know, Cube interviews in our studios remotely for the last 120 days is probably the first interview I've done where haven't started off talking about Cove it, Lester. I wonder if you could talk about smart data lifecycle and how it fits into this isolation economy. And hopefully, what will soon be a post isolation economy? >>Yeah, Come. It has dramatically accelerated the data economy. I think. You know, first and foremost, we've all learned to work at home. You know, we've all had that experience where, you know, people would have been all about being able to work at home just a couple days a week. And here we are working five days. That's how to knock on impact to infrastructure, to be able to support that. But going further than that, you know, the data economy is all about how a business can leverage their data to compete in this New World order that we are now in code has really been a forcing function to, you know, it's probably one of the few good things that have come out of government is that we've been forced to adapt and It's a zoo. Been an interesting journey and it continues to be so >>like Lester said, you know, we've We're seeing huge impact here. Working from home has pretty much become the norm. Now, you know, companies have been forced into basically making it work. If you look online retail, that's accelerated dramatically as well. Unified communications and videoconferencing. So really, you know the point here, is that Yes, absolutely. We're you know, we've compressed, you know, in the past, maybe four months. What already would have taken maybe even five years, maybe 10 years or so >>We got to wrap. But Celester Louis, let me ask you to sort of get paint. A picture of the sort of journey the maturity model that people have to take. You know, if they want to get into it, where did they start? And where are they going to give us that view, >>I think, versus knowing what you have. You don't know what you have. You can't manage it. You can't control that. You can't secure what you can't ensure. It's a compliant s so that that's first and foremost. Uh, the second is really, you know, ensuring that your compliance once, once you know what you have. Are you securing it? Are you following the regulatory? The applicable regulations? Are you able to evidence that, uh, how are you storing your data? Are you archiving it? Are you storing it effectively and efficiently? Um, you know, have you Nirvana from my perspective, is really getting to a point where you you've consolidated your data, you've broken down the silos and you have a virtually self service environment by which the business can consume and build upon their data. And really, at the end of the day, as we said at the beginning, it's all about driving value out of your data. And ah, the automation is is key to this, sir. This journey >>that's awesome and you just described is sort of a winning data culture. Lester, Patrick, thanks so much for participating in this power panel. >>Thank you, David. >>Alright, So great overview of the steps in the data lifecycle and how to inject smarts into the process is really to drive business outcomes. Now it's your turn. Hop into the crowd chat, please log in with Twitter or linked in or Facebook. Ask questions, answer questions and engage with the community. Let's crowdchat, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(upbeat music) >> Voiceover: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Data Automated. An event series brought to you by Io-Tahoe. >> Welcome everyone to the second episode in our Data Automated series made possible with support from Io-Tahoe. Today, we're going to drill into the data lifecycle. Meaning the sequence of stages that data travels through from creation to consumption to archive. The problem as we discussed in our last episode is that data pipelines are complicated, they're cumbersome, they're disjointed and they involve highly manual processes. A smart data lifecycle uses automation and metadata to improve agility, performance, data quality and governance. And ultimately, reduce costs and time to outcomes. Now, in today's session we'll define the data lifecycle in detail and provide perspectives on what makes a data lifecycle smart? And importantly, how to build smarts into your processes. In a moment we'll be back with Adam Worthington from Ethos to kick things off. And then, we'll go into an expert power panel to dig into the tech behind smart data lifecyles. And, then we'll hop into the crowd chat and give you a chance to ask questions. So, stay right there, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music) >> Voiceover: Innovation. Impact. Influence. Welcome to theCUBE. Disruptors. Developers. And, practitioners. Learn from the voices of leaders, who share their personal insights from the hottest digital events around the globe. Enjoy the best this community has to offer on theCUBE. Your global leader in high tech digital coverage. >> Okay, we're back with Adam Worthington. Adam, good to see you, how are things across the pond? >> Good thank you, I'm sure our weather's a little bit worse than yours is over the other side, but good. >> Hey, so let's set it up, tell us about yourself, what your role is as CTO and--- >> Yeah, Adam Worthington as you said, CTO and co-founder of Ethos. But, we're a pretty young company ourselves, so we're in our sixth year. And, we specialize in emerging disruptive technology. So, within the infrastructure data center kind of cloud space. And, my role is a technical lead, so I, it's kind of my job to be an expert in all of the technologies that we work with. Which can be a bit of a challenge if you have a huge portfolio. One of the reasons we got to deliberately focus on. And also, kind of pieces of technical validation and evaluation of new technologies. >> So, you guys are really technology experts, data experts, and probably also expert in process and delivering customer outcomes, right? >> That's a great word there Dave, outcomes. I mean, that's a lot of what I like to speak to customers about. >> Let's talk about smart data you know, when you throw out terms like this it kind of can feel buzz wordy but what are the critical aspects of so-called smart data? >> Cool, well typically I had to step back a little bit and set the scene a little bit more in terms of kind of where I came from. So, and the types of problems I've sorted out. So, I'm really an infrastructure or solution architect by trade. And, what I kind of, relatively organically, but over time my personal framework and approach. I focused on three core design principles. So, simplicity, flexibility and efficiency. So, whatever it was I was designing and obviously they need different things depending on what the technology area is that we're working with. So, that's for me a pretty good step. So, they're the kind of areas that a smart approach in data will directly address both reducing silos. So, that comes from simplifying. So, moving away from complexity of infrastructure. Reducing the amount of copies of data that we have across the infrastructure. And, reducing the amount of application environment for the need for different areas. So, the smarter we get with data it's in my eyes anyway, the further we move away from those traditional legacy. >> But, how does it work? I mean, how, in other words, what's involved in injecting smarts into your data lifecycle? >> I think one of my, well actually I didn't have this quote ready, but genuinely one of my favorite quotes is from the French philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal and he says, if I get this right, "I'd have written you a shorter letter, but I didn't have the time." So, there's real, I love that quote for lots of reasons. >> Dave: Alright. >> That's direct applications in terms of what we're talking about. In terms of, it's actually really complicated to develop a technology capability to make things simple. Be more directly meeting the needs of the business through tech. So, you provide self-service capability. And, I don't just mean self-driving, I mean making data and infrastructure make sense to the business users that are using it. >> Your job, correct me if I'm wrong, is to kind of put that all together in a solution. And then, help the customer you know, realize what we talked about earlier that business out. >> Yeah, and that's, it's sitting at both sides and understanding both sides. So, kind of key to us in our abilities to be able to deliver on exactly what you've just said, is being experts in the capabilities and new and better ways of doing things. But also, having the kind of, better business understanding to be able to ask the right questions to identify how can you better approach this 'cause it helps solve these issues. But, another area that I really like is the, with the platforms you can do more with less. And, that's not just about reducing data redundancy, that's about creating application environments that can service, an infrastructure to service different requirements that are able to do the random IO thing without getting too kind of low level tech. As well as the sequential. So, what that means is, that you don't necessarily have to move data from application environment A, do one thing with it, collate it and then move it to the application environment B, to application environment C, in terms of an analytics kind of left to right workload, you keep your data where it is, use it for different requirements within the infrastructure and again, do more with less. And, what that does, it's not just about simplicity and efficiency, it significantly reduces the times of value that that faces, as well. >> Do you have examples that you can share with us, even if they're anonymized of customers that you've worked with, that are maybe a little further down on the journey. Or, maybe not and--- >> Looking at the, you mentioned data protection earlier. So, another organization this is a project which is just coming nearing completion at the moment. Huge organization, that literally petabytes of data that was servicing their backup and archive. And, what they had is not just this reams of data. They had, I think I'm right in saying, five different backup applications that they had depending on the, what area of infrastructure they were backing up. So, whether it was virtualization, that was different to if they were backing up, different if they were backing up another data base environment they were using something else in the cloud. So, a consolidated approach that we recommended to work with them on. They were able to significantly reduce complexity and reduce the amount of time that it took them. So, what they were able to achieve and this was again, one of the key departments they had. They'd gone above the threshold of being able to backup all of them. >> Adam, give us the final thoughts, bring us home in this segment. >> Well, the final thoughts, so this is something, yeah we didn't particularly touch on. But, I think it's kind of slightly hidden, it isn't spoken about as much as I think it could be. Is the traditional approaches to infrastructure. We've already touched on that they can be complicated and there's a lack of efficiency. It impacts a user's ability to be agile. But, what you find with traditional approaches and we've already touched on some of the kind of benefits to new approaches there, is that they're often very prescriptive. They're designed for a particular firm. The infrastructure environment, the way that it's served up to the users in a kind of a packaged kind of way, means that they need to use it in that, whatever way it's been dictated. So, that kind of self-service aspect, as it comes in from a flexibility standpoint. But, these platforms and these platform approaches is the right way to address technology in my eyes. Enables the infrastructure to be used flexibly. So, the business users and the data users, what we find is that if we put in this capability into their hands. They start innovating the way that they use that data. And, the way that they bring benefits. And, if a platform is too prescriptive and they aren't able to do that, then what you're doing with these new approaches is get all of the metrics that we've touched on. It's fantastic from a cost standpoint, from an agility standpoint. But, what it means is that the innovators in the business, the ones that really understand what they're looking to achieve, they now have the tools to innovate with that. And, I think, and I've started to see that with projects that we've completed, if you do it in the right way, if you articulate the capability and you empower the business users in the right way. Then, they're in a significantly better position, these businesses to take advantages and really sort of match and significantly beat off their competition environment spaces. >> Super Adam, I mean a really exciting space. I mean we spent the last 10 years gathering all this data. You know, trying to slog through it and figure it out and now, with the tools that we have and the automation capabilities, it really is a new era of innovation and insight. So, Adam Worthington, thanks so much for coming in theCUBE and participating in this program. >> Yeah, exciting times and thank you very much Dave for inviting me, and yeah big pleasure. >> Now, we're going to go into the power panel and go deeper into the technologies that enable smart data lifecyles. And, stay right there, you're watching theCUBE. (light music) >> Voiceover: Are you interested in test-driving the Io-Tahoe platform? Kickstart the benefits of Data Automation for your business through the IoLabs program. A flexible, scalable, sandbox environment on the cloud of your choice. With setup, service and support provided by Io-Tahoe. Click on the link and connect with a data engineer to learn more and see Io-Tahoe in action. >> Welcome back everybody to the power panel, driving business performance with smart data lifecyles. Lester Waters is here, he's the Chief Technology Officer from Io-Tahoe. He's joined by Patrick Smith, who is field CTO from Pure Storage. And, Ezat Dayeh who is Assistant Engineering Manager at Cohesity. Gentlemen, good to see you, thanks so much for coming on this panel. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Yes. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Let's start with Lester, I wonder if each of you could just give us a quick overview of your role and what's the number one problem that you're focused on solving for your customers? Let's start with Lester, please. >> Ah yes, I'm Lester Waters, Chief Technology Officer for Io-Tahoe. And really, the number one problem that we are trying to solve for our customers is to help them understand what they have. 'Cause if they don't understand what they have in terms of their data, they can't manage it, they can't control it, they can't monitor it, they can't ensure compliance. So, really that's finding all that you can about your data that you have and building a catalog that can be readily consumed by the entire business is what we do. >> Patrick, field CTO in your title, that says to me you're talking to customers all the time so you've got a good perspective on it. Give us you know, your take on things here. >> Yeah absolutely, so my patch is in the air and talk to customers and prospects in lots of different verticals across the region. And, as they look at their environments and their data landscape, they're faced with massive growth in the data that they're trying to analyze. And, demands to be able to get inside are faster. And, to deliver business value faster than they've ever had to do in the past, so. >> Got it and then Ezat at Cohesity, you're like the new kid on the block. You guys are really growing rapidly. You created this whole notion of data management, backup and beyond, but from Assistant Engineering Manager what are you seeing from customers, your role and the number one problem that you're solving? >> Yeah sure, so the number one problem I see you know, time and again speaking with customers it's all around data fragmentation. So, due to things like organic growth you know, even maybe budgetary limitations, infrastructure has grown you know, over time, very piecemeal. And, it's highly distributed internally. And, just to be clear you know, when I say internally you know, that could be that it's on multiple platforms or silos within an on-prem infrastructure. But, that it also does extend to the cloud, as well. >> Right hey, cloud is cool, everybody wants to be in the cloud, right? So, you're right it creates maybe unattended consequences. So, let's start with the business outcome and kind of try to work backwards. I mean people you know, they want to get more insights from data, they want to have a more efficient data lifecyle. But, so Lester let me start with you, in thinking about like, the North Star, creating data driven cultures you know, what is the North Star for customers here? >> I think the North Star in a nutshell is driving value from your data. Without question, I mean we differentiate ourselves these days by even the nuances in our data. Now, underpinning that there's a lot of things that have to happen to make that work out well. You know for example, making sure you adequately protect your data. You know, do you have a good storage system? Do you have a good backup and recovery point objectives, recovering time objectives? Do you, are you fully compliant? Are you ensuring that you're ticking all the boxes? There's a lot of regulations these days in terms, with respect to compliance, data retention, data privacy and so fourth. Are you ticking those boxes? Are you being efficient with your data? You know, in other words I think there's a statistic that someone mentioned to me the other day that 53% of all businesses have between three and 15 copies of the same data. So you know, finding and eliminating those is part of the problems you need to chase. >> I like to think of you know, you're right. Lester, no doubt, business value and a lot of that comes from reducing the end to end cycle times. But, anything that you guys would add to that, Patrick and Ezat, maybe start with Patrick. >> Yeah, I think getting value from data really hits on, it hits on what everyone wants to achieve. But, I think there are a couple of key steps in doing that. First of all is getting access to the data. And that's, that really hits three big problems. Firstly, working out what you've got. Secondly, after working out what you've got, how to get access to it. Because, it's all very well knowing that you've got some data but if you can't get access to it. Either, because of privacy reasons, security reasons. Then, that's a big challenge. And then finally, once you've got access to the data, making sure that you can process that data in a timely manner. >> For me you know, it would be that an organization has got a really good global view of all of its data. It understands the data flow and dependencies within their infrastructure. Understands the precise legal and compliance requirements. And, has the ability to action changes or initiatives within their environment. Forgive the pun, but with a cloud like agility. You know, and that's no easy feat, right? That is hard work. >> Okay, so we've talked about the challenges and some of the objectives, but there's a lot of blockers out there and I want to understand how you guys are helping remove them? So, Lester what do you see as some of the big blockers in terms of people really leaning in to this smart data lifecycle. >> Yeah silos, is probably one of the biggest one I see in businesses. Yes, it's my data not your data. Lots of compartmentalization. And, breaking that down is one of the challenges. And, having the right tools to help you do that is only part of the solution. There's obviously a lot of cultural things that need to take place to break down those silos and work together. If you can identify where you have redundant data across your enterprise, you might be able to consolidate those. >> Yeah so, over to Patrick, so you know, one of the blockers that I see is legacy infrastructure, technical debt sucking all the budget. You got you know, too many people having to look after. >> As you look at the infrastructure that supports peoples data landscapes today. For primarily legacy reasons, the infrastructure itself is siloed. So, you have different technologies with different underlying hardware, different management methodologies that are there for good reason. Because, historically you had to have specific fitness for purpose for different data requirements. >> Dave: Ah-hm. >> And, that's one of the challenges that we tackled head on at Pure. With the flash plate technology and the concept of the data hub. A platform that can deliver in different characteristics for the different workloads. But, from a consistent data platform. >> Now, Ezat I want to go to you because you know, in the world, in your world which to me goes beyond backup and one of the challenges is you know, they say backup is one thing, recovery is everything. But as well, the CFO doesn't want to pay for just protection. Now, one of the things that I like about what you guys have done is you've broadened the perspective to get more value out of your what was once seen as an insurance policy. >> I do see one of the biggest blockers as the fact that the task at hand can you know, be overwhelming for customers. But, the key here is to remember that it's not an overnight change, it's not you know, the flick of the switch. It's something that can be tackled in a very piecemeal manner. And, absolutely like you've said you know, reduction in TCO and being able to leverage the data for other purposes is a key driver for this. So you know, this can be resolved. It can be very you know, pretty straightforward. It can be quite painless, as well. Same goes for unstructured data, which is very complex to manage. And you know, we've all heard the stats from the analysts, you know data obviously is growing at an extremely rapid rate. But, actually when you look at that you know, how is it actually growing? 80% of that growth is actually in unstructured data and only 20% of that growth is in structured data. So you know, these are quick win areas that the customers can realize immediate TCO improvement and increased agility, as well. >> Let's paint a picture of this guys, if I can bring up the lifecyle. You know what you can see here is you've got this cycle, the data lifecycle and what we're wanting to do is inject intelligence or smarts into this lifecyle. So, you can see you start with ingestion or creation of data. You're storing it, you've got to put it somewhere, right? You've got to classify it, you've got to protect it. And then, of course you want to you know, reduce the copies, make it you know, efficient. And then, you want to prepare it so that businesses can actually consume it and then you've got compliance and governance and privacy issues. And, I wonder if we could start with you Lester, this is you know, the picture of the lifecycle. What role does automation play in terms of injecting smarts into the lifecycle? >> Automation is key here, you know. Especially from the discover, catalog and classify perspective. I've seen companies where they go and we'll take and dump all of their data base schemes into a spreadsheet. So, that they can sit down and manually figure out what attribute 37 means for a column name. And, that's only the tip of the iceberg. So, being able to automatically detect what you have, automatically deduce where, what's consuming the data, you know upstream and downstream, being able to understand all of the things related to the lifecycle of your data backup, archive, deletion, it is key. And so, having good toolage areas is very important. >> So Patrick, obviously you participate in the store piece of this picture. So, I wondered if you could just talk more specifically about that, but I'm also interested in how you affect the whole system view, the end-to-end cycle time. >> Yeah, I think Lester kind of hit the nail on the head in terms of the importance of automation. Because, the data volumes are just so massive now that you can't effectively manage or understand or catalog your data without automation. Once you understand the data and the value of the data, then that's where you can work out where the data needs to be at any point in time. >> Right, so Pure and Cohesity obviously partnered to do that and of course, Ezat you guys are part of the protect, you're certainly part of the retain. But also, you provide data management capabilities and analytics, I wonder if you could add some color there? >> Yeah absolutely, so like you said you know, we focus pretty heavily on data protection as just one of our areas. And, that infrastructure it is just sitting there really can you know, the legacy infrastructure it's just sitting there you know, consuming power, space, cooling and pretty inefficient. And, automating that process is a key part of that. If I have a modern day platform such as you know, the Cohesity data platform I can actually do a lot of analytics on that through applications. So, we have a marketplace for apps. >> I wonder if we could talk about metadata. It's increasingly important you know, metadata is data about the data. But, Lester maybe explain why it's so important and what role it plays in terms of creating smart data lifecycle. >> A lot of people think it's just about the data itself. But, there's a lot of extended characteristics about your data. So, imagine if for my data lifecycle I can communicate with the backup system from Cohesity. And, find out when the last time that data was backed up or where it's backed up to. I can communicate, exchange data with Pure Storage and find out what tier it's on. Is the data at the right tier commencer with it's use level? If I could point it out. And, being able to share that metadata across systems. I think that's the direction that we're going in. Right now, we're at the stage we're just identifying the metadata and trying to bring it together and catalog it. The next stage will be okay, using the APIs and that we have between our systems. Can we communicate and share that data and build good solutions for customers to use? >> I think it's a huge point that you just made, I mean you know 10 years ago, automating classification was the big problem. And you know, with machine intelligence you know, we're obviously attacking that. But, your point about as machines start communicating to each other and you start you know, it's cloud to cloud. There's all kinds of metadata, kind of new metadata that's being created. I often joke that some day there's going to be more metadata than data. So, that brings us to cloud and Ezat, I'd like to start with you. >> You know, I do think that you know, having the cloud is a great thing. And, it has got its role to play and you can have many different you know, permutations and iterations of how you use it. And, you know, as I've may have sort of mentioned previously you know, I've seen customers go into the cloud very, very quickly and actually recently they're starting to remove workloads from the cloud. And, the reason why this happens is that you know, cloud has got its role to play but it's not right for absolutely everything. Especially in their current form, as well. A good analogy I like to use and this may sound a little bit clique but you know, when you compare clouds versus on premises data centers. You can use the analogies of houses and hotels. So, to give you an idea, so you know, when we look at hotels that's like the equivalent of a cloud, right? I can get everything I need from there. I can get my food, my water, my outdoor facilities, if I need to accommodate more people, I can rent some more rooms. I don't have to maintain the hotel, it's all done for me. When you look at houses the equivalent to you know, on premises infrastructure. I pretty much have to do everything myself, right? So, I have to purchase the house, I have to maintain it, I have buy my own food and water, eat it, I have to make improvements myself. But, then why do we all live in houses, not in hotels? And, the simple answer that I can only think of is, is that it's cheaper, right? It's cheaper to do it myself, but that's not to say that hotels haven't got their role to play. You know, so for example if I've got loads of visitors coming over for the weekend, I'm not going to go and build an extension to my house, just for them. I will burst into my hotel, into the cloud. And, you use it for you know, for things like that. So, what I'm really saying is the cloud is great for many things, but it can work out costlier for certain applications, while others are a perfect fit. >> That's an interesting analogy, I hadn't thought of that before. But, you're right, 'cause I was going to say well part of it is you want the cloud experience everywhere. But, you don't always want the cloud experience, especially you know, when you're with your family, you want certain privacy. I've not heard that before, Ezat. So, that's a new perspective, so thank you. But, Patrick I do want to come back to that cloud experience because in fact that's what's happening in a lot of cases. Organizations are extending the cloud properties of automation on-prem. >> Yeah, I thought Ezat brought up a really interesting point and a great analogy for the use of the public cloud. And, it really reinforces the importance of the Hybrid and the multicloud environment. Because, it gives you that flexibility to choose where is the optimal environment to run your business workloads. And, that's what it's all about. And, the flexibility to change which environment you're running in, either from one month to the next or from one year to the next. Because, workloads change and the characteristics that are available in the cloud change. The Hybrid cloud is something that we've lived with ourselves at Pure. So, our Pure management technology actually sits in a Hybrid cloud environment. We started off entirely cloud native but now, we use the public cloud for compute and we use our own technology at the end of a high performance network link to support our data platform. So, we're getting the best of both worlds. I think that's where a lot of our customers are trying to get to. >> All right, I want to come back in a moment there. But before we do, Lester I wonder if we could talk a little bit about compliance and governance and privacy. I think the Brits on this panel, we're still in the EU for now but the EU are looking at new rules, new regulations going beyond GDPR. Where does sort of privacy, governance, compliance fit in for the data lifecycle. And Ezat, I want your thought on this as well? >> Ah yeah, this is a very important point because the landscape for compliance around data privacy and data retention is changing very rapidly. And, being able to keep up with those changing regulations in an automated fashion is the only way you're going to be able to do it. Even, I think there's a some sort of a maybe ruling coming out today or tomorrow with a change to GDPR. So, this is, these are all very key points and being able to codify those rules into some software whether you know, Io-Tahoe or your storage system or Cohesity, it'll help you be compliant is crucial. >> Yeah, Ezat anything you can add there, I mean this really is your wheel house? >> Yeah, absolutely, so you know, I think anybody who's watching this probably has gotten the message that you know, less silos is better. And, it absolutely it also applies to data in the cloud, as well. So you know, by aiming to consolidate into you know, fewer platforms customers can realize a lot better control over their data. And, the natural affect of this is that it makes meeting compliance and governance a lot easier. So, when it's consolidated you can start to confidently understand who's accessing your data, how frequently are they accessing the data. You can also do things like you know, detecting an ominous file access activities and quickly identify potential threats. >> Okay Patrick, we were talking, you talked earlier about storage optimization. We talked to Adam Worthington about the business case, you've got the sort numerator which is the business value and then a denominator which is the cost. And, what's unique about Pure in this regard? >> Yeah, and I think there are multiple dimensions to that. Firstly, if you look at the difference between legacy storage platforms, they used to take up racks or aisles of space in a data center. With flash technology that underpins flash played we effectively switch out racks for rack units. And, it has a big play in terms of data center footprint and the environmentals associated with a data center. If you look at extending out storage efficiencies and the benefits it brings. Just the performance has a direct effect on staff. Whether that's you know, the staff and the simplicity of the platform so that it's easy and efficient to manage. Or, whether it's the efficiency you get from your data scientists who are using the outcomes from the platform and making them more efficient. If you look at some of our customers in the financial space their time to results are improved by 10 or 20 x by switching to our technology. From legacy technologies for their analytics platforms. >> So guys, we've been running you know, CUBE interviews in our studios remotely for the last 120 days. This is probably the first interview I've done where I haven't started off talking about COVID. Lester, I wondered if you could talk about smart data lifecycle and how it fits into this isolation economy and hopefully what will soon be a post-isolation economy? >> Yeah, COVID has dramatically accelerated the data economy. I think you know, first and foremost we've all learned to work at home. I you know, we've all had that experience where you know, people would hum and har about being able to work at home just a couple of days a week. And, here we are working five days a week. That's had a knock on impact to infrastructure to be able to support that. But, going further than that you know, the data economy is all about how a business can leverage their data to compete in this new world order that we are now in. COVID has really been a forcing function to you know, it's probably one of the few good things that have come out of COVID is that we've been forced to adapt. And, it's been an interesting journey and it continues to be so. >> Like Lester said you know, we're seeing huge impact here. You know, working from home has pretty much become the norm now. You know, companies have been forced into making it work. If you look at online retail, that's accelerated dramatically, as well. Unified communications and video conferencing. So, really you know, that the point here is that, yes absolutely we've compressed you know, in the past maybe four months what probably would have taken maybe even five years, maybe 10 years or so. >> We've got to wrap, but so Lester let me ask you, sort of paint a picture of the sort of journey the maturity model that people have to take. You know, if they want to get into it, where do they start and where are they going? Give us that view. >> Yeah, I think first is knowing what you have. If you don't know what you have you can't manage it, you can't control it, you can't secure it, you can't ensure it's compliant. So, that's first and foremost. The second is really you know, ensuring that you're compliant once you know what you have, are you securing it? Are you following the regulatory, the regulations? Are you able to evidence that? How are you storing your data? Are you archiving it? Are you storing it effectively and efficiently? You know, have you, nirvana from my perspective is really getting to a point where you've consolidated your data, you've broken down the silos and you have a virtually self-service environment by which the business can consume and build upon their data. And, really at the end of the day as we said at the beginning, it's all about driving value out of your data. And, automation is key to this journey. >> That's awesome and you've just described like sort of a winning data culture. Lester, Patrick, Ezat, thanks so much for participating in this power panel. >> Thank you, David. >> Thank you. >> All right, so great overview of the steps in the data lifecyle and how to inject smarts into the processes, really to drive business outcomes. Now, it's your turn, hop into the crowd chat. Please log in with Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook, ask questions, answer questions and engage with the community. Let's crowd chat! (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back covering AWS Storage Day 2022 with Ashish Palekar. Who's the general manager of AWS EBS Snapshot and Edge and Cami Tavares. Who's the head of product at Amazon EBS. Thanks for coming back in theCube guys. Great to see you again. >> Great to see you as well, Dave. >> Great to see you, Dave. Ashish, we've been hearing a lot today about companies all kinds of applications to the cloud and AWS and using their data in new ways. Resiliency is always top of mind for companies when they think about just generally their workloads and specifically the clouds. How should they think about customers think about data resiliency? >> Yeah, when we think about data resiliency it's all about making sure that your application data, the data that your application needs is available when it needs it. It's really the ability for your workload to mitigate disruptions or recover from them. And to build that resilient architecture you really need to understand what kinds of disruptions your applications can experience. How broad the impact of those disruptions is, and then how quickly you need to recover. And a lot of this is a function of what the application does, how critical it is. And the thing that we constantly tell customers is, this works differently in the cloud than it does in a traditional on-premises environment. >> What's different about the cloud versus on-prem? Can you explain how it's different? >> Yeah, let me start with a video on-premises one. And in the on-premises one, building resilient architectures is really the customer's responsibility, and it's very challenging. You'll start thinking about what your single points of failure are. To avoid those, you have to build in redundancy, you might build in replication as an example for storage and doing this now means you have to have provision more hardware. And depending on what your availability requirements are, you may even have to start looking for multiple data centers, some in the same regions, some in different geographical locations. And you have to ensure that you're fully automated, so that your recovery processes can take place. And as you can see that's a lot of owners being placed on the customer. One other thing that we hear about is really elasticity and how elasticity plays into the resiliency for applications. As an example, if you experience a sudden spike in workloads, in a on-premises environment, that can lead to resource saturation. And so really you have two choices. One is to sort of throttle the workload and experience resiliency, or your second option becomes buying additional hardware and securing more capacity and keeping it fair low in case of experiencing such a spike. And so your two propositions that are either experiencing resiliency, challenges or paying really to have infrastructure that's lying around. And both of those are different really when you start thinking about the cloud. >> Yeah, there's a third option too, which is lose data, which is not an option. Go ahead- >> Which is not, yeah, I pretty much as a storage person, that is not an option. The reason about that that we think is reasonable for customers to take. The big contrast in the cloud really comes with how we think about capacity. And fundamentally the the cloud gives you that access to capacity so you are not managing that capacity. The infrastructure complexity and the cost associated with that are also just a function of how infrastructure is built really in the cloud. But all of that really starts with the bedrock of how we design for avoiding single points of failure. The best way to explain this is really to start thinking about our availability zones. Typically these availability zones consist of multiple data centers, located in the same regional area to enable high throughput and low latency for applications. But the availability zones themselves are physically independent. They have independent connections to utility power, standalone backup power resources, independent mechanical services and independent network connectivity. We take availability zone independence extremely seriously, so that when customers are building the availability of their workload, they can architect using these multiple zones. And that is something that when I'm talking to customers or Tami is talking to customers, we highly encourage customers to keep in mind as they're building resiliency for their applications. >> Right, so you can have within an availability zone, you can have, you know, instantaneous, you know when you're doing it right. You've got, you've captured that data and you can asynchronously move to outside of that in case there's, the very low probability, but it does happen, you get some disasters. You're minimizing that RPO. And I don't have to worry about that as a customer and figuring out how to do three site data centers. >> That's right. Like that even further, now imagine if you're expanding globally. All those things that we described about like creating new footprint and creating a new region and finding new data centers. As a customer in an on-premises environment, you take that on yourself. Whereas with AWS, because of our global presence, you can expand to a region and bring those same operational characteristics to those environments. And so again, bringing resiliency as you're thinking about expanding your workload, that's another benefit that you get from using the availability zone region architecture that AWS has. >> And as Charles Phillips, former CEO of Infor said, "Friends, don't let friends build data center," so I don't have to worry about building the data center. Let's bring Cami into the discussion here. Cami, think about elastic block storage, it gives, you know customers, you get persistent block storage for EC2 instances. So it's foundational for any mission critical or business critical application that you're building on AWS. How do you think about data resiliency in EBS specifically? I always ask the question, what happens if something goes wrong? So how should we think about data resiliency in EBS specifically? >> Yeah, you're right Dave, block storage is a really foundational piece. When we talk to customers about building in the cloud or moving an application to the cloud, and data resiliency is something that comes up all the time. And with EBS, you know EBS is a very large distributed system with many components. And we put a lot of thought and effort to build resiliency into EBS. So we design those components to operate and fail independently. So when customers create an EBS volume for example, we'll automatically choose the best storage nodes to address the failure domain and the data protection strategy for each of our different volume types. And part of our resiliency strategy also includes separating what we call a volume life cycle control plane. Which are things like creating a volume, or attaching a volume to an EC2 instance. So we separate that control plane, from the storage data plane, which includes all the components that are responsible for serving IO to your instance, and then persisting it to durable media. So what that means is once a volume is created and attached to the instance, the operations on that volume they're independent from the control point function. So even in the case of an infrastructure event, like a power issue, for example, you can recreate an EBS volume from a snapshot. And speaking of snapshots, that's the other core pillar of resiliency in EBS. Snapshots are point in time copies of EBS volumes that would store in S3. And snapshots are actually a regional service. And that means internally we use multiple of the availability zones that Ashish was talking about to replicate your data so that the snapshots can withstand the failure of an availability zone. And so thanks to that availability zone independence, and then this builtin component independence, customers can use that snapshot and recreate an EBS following another AZO or even in another region if they need to. >> Great so, okay, so you touched on some of the things EBS does to build resiliency into the service. Now thinking about over your right shoulders, you know, Joan Deviva, so what can organizations do to build more resilience into their applications on EBS so they can enjoy life without anxiety? >> (laughs) That is a great question. Also something that we love to talk to customers about. And the core thing to think about here is that we don't believe in a one size fits all approach. And so what we are doing in EBS is we give customers different tools so that they can design a resiliency strategy that is custom tailored for their data. And so to do this, this resiliency assessment, you have to think about the context of this specific workload and ask questions like what other critical services depend on this data and what will break if this data's not available and how long can can those systems withstand that, for example. And so the most important step I'll mention it again, snapshots, that is a very important step in a recovery plan. Make sure you have a backup of your data. And so we actually recommend that customers take the snapshots at least daily. And we have features that make that easier for you. For example, Data Lifecycle Manager which is a feature that is entirely free. It allows you to create backup policies, and then you can automate the process of creating the snapshot, so it's very low effort. And then when you want to use that backup to recreate a volume, we have a feature called Fast Snapshot Restore, that can expedite the creation of the volume. So if you have a more, you know a shorter recovery time objective you can use that feature to expedite the recovery process. So that's backup. And then the other pillar we talked to customers about is data replication. Just another very important step when you're thinking about your resiliency and your recovery plans. So with EBS, you can use replication tools that work at the level of the operating system. So that's something like DRBD for example. Or you can use AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery, and that will replicate your data across availability zones or nearby regions too. So we talked about backup and replication, and then the last topic that we recommend customers think about is having a workload monitoring solution in place. And you can do that in EBS, using cloud watch metrics. So you can monitor the health of your EBS volume using those metrics. We have a lot of tips in our documentation on how to measure that performance. And then you can use those performance metrics as triggers for automated recovery workflows that you can build using tools like auto scaling groups for example. >> Great, thank you for that advice. Just quick follow up. So you mentioned your recommendation, at least daily, what kind of granularity, if I want to compress my RPO can I go at a more granular level? >> Yes, you can go more granular and you can use again the daily lifecycle manager to define those policies. >> Great, thank you. Before we go, I want to just quickly cover what's new with EBS. Ashish, maybe you could talk about, I understand you've got something new today. You've got an announcement, take us through that. >> Yeah, thanks for checking in and I'm so glad you asked. We talked about how snapshots help resilience and are a critical part of building resilient architectures. So customers like the simplicity of backing up their EC2 instances, using multi volume snapshots. And what they're looking for is the ability to back up only to exclude specific volumes from the backup, especially those that don't need backup. So think of applications that have cash data, or applications that have temporary data that really doesn't need backup. So today we are adding a new parameter to the create snapshots API, which creates a crash consistent set of snapshots for volumes attached to an EC2 instance. Where customers can now exclude specific volumes from an instance backup. So customers using data life cycle manager that can be touched on, can automate their backups. And again they also get to exclude these specific volumes. So really the feature is not just about convenience, but it's also to help customers save on cost. As many of these customers are managing tens of thousands of snapshots. And so we want to make sure they can take it at the granularity that they need it. So super happy to bring that into the hands of customers as well. >> Yeah, that's a nice option. Okay, Ashish, Cami thank you so much for coming back in theCube, helping us learn about what's new and what's cool and EBS, appreciate your time. >> Thank you for having us Dave. >> Thank you for having us Dave. >> You're very welcome now, if you want to learn more about EBS resilience, stay right here because coming up, we've got a session which is a deep dive on protecting mission critical workloads with Amazon EBS. Stay right there, you're watching theCube's coverage of AWS Storage Day 2022. (calm music)

>> theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. >> Hey everyone. Happy afternoon. Welcome back to theCUBE. This is Lisa Martin with Dave Vallante. We are on day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World live from Las Vegas with about 7,000- 8,000 people here. It's been a great two and a half days. Lots of people are still here. We're going to be talking more about Dell Services. I got a couple of guys from Dell Technologies joining us next. Please welcome Patrick Mooney, Senior Vice President of Services Product Management at Dell and Satish Iyer, Vice President of Emerging Services at Dell. Guys, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. Good evening. Great to be here to you. >> Happy to be here. >> So isn't it great to be back in person? >> So great. >> Those hallway conversations you just can't replicate it for video conferencing, right? >> Yeah. >> Priceless. >> It is priceless, I agree. Patrick, let's start with you. Talk to us about from a customer's perspective. What are some of the key services they've been looking for the last couple of years particularly, and how has Dell changed its strategic direction to deliver? >> Great question. Customers want outcomes and services are at the heart of outcomes. So when we look at customers transforming we're continually transforming and modernizing what we do and everything we're doing is centered around making it easy to buy, easy to consume and just centered around the customer. >> What are people looking for these days, Satish? I mean, what's the top three or four priorities. And we know cyber's up there. The cloud. One is when customers are consuming cloud, now there is more and more what we call as customers are looking for full stack solutions. So they start with giving me the best infrastructure on the platforms. Now they're saying, "I'm going to use those infrastructure to drive X, Y, and Z. "Now Mr. Dell, can you come and gimme those tags? "So I don't need to worry about anything "and I can actually consume it in the cloud like way." That's been massive for us. >> So, how do you guys respond to that? I mean, things in our little business things change so fast. And we can, but we're little. We can move fast. Customers are saying, okay, pandemic forced match to digital and now we got to figure it out. And now we got to modernize our HQ. How are you able to keep up? How are you changing your strategy as your customers pull you in different directions? What's going on inside the organization to enable that? >> Yeah. I think the key is that we meet customers where they are and help them plot out where they want to be. And then bring them along that journey. And we've really spent a lot of time developing four practices to help get there. One's around data and applications another around multi-cloud, another around workforce and another around security and resiliency. And no matter where they want to be, whether they want to do it themselves. They want us to help them do it or they want us to do it for them, we're there for them and we'll help them get where they want to be. >> Do you have like formal customer councils or how do you actually, especially the last couple years staying engaged with those customers? >> Absolutely. We're always talking to customers. It is critical to the model and we got a lot of ideas and customers have a lot of ideas and we want to vet those and talk through them. So no matter what point we're at in our product development cycle, we're always talking with customers, "Hey, do we hear you right? "Is this the value you're looking for?" And as we're developing it, can you help us test it? And so on. And we do that through regular conversations, field testing, customer insight councils, and it just feels so great to be having face to face conversations again as well. >> What is- >> Oh, go ahead. >> I was going to say, what are some of the things that you've heard face to face this week in terms of the direction, what Dell Services is delivering? >> Well, one big one for sure is that remote workforce is here to stay. And in our workforce pillar we spent a lot of time around how do we make it easy for customers to manage a remote workforce? It's a big challenge. So we've recently we announced here at Dell World, Lifecycle Hub Services where we it's a managed service where we're helping customers manage their entire device lifecycle around their PC. So imagine this you have a new hire joint or somebody leaves, how do you get 'em that PC? Have it ready? Let Dell take care of all the logistics, we'll we'll store it. We'll configure it. We'll send it to 'em we'll take the old machines back, we'll kit it for 'em anything that's needed and fully integrated it from the customer system into our system. So it's all automated. >> Okay. And all the patching, et cetera, >> Everything. Okay. So you got four pillars, data and apps multi-cloud, workforce and resiliency. What you just described, the automation, does IP and what's the IP portfolio look like? How does it map into those four pillars? >> Sure, you want to take that? >> Sure, so obviously when you look at growth areas and services, it's absolutely important for us to develop sustainable IP. If you look at one of the areas where we have invested and we are growing is cloud managed services platform. So Dell is unique in terms of managing our customer services. We actually do full lifecycle management of the customers. So we invested quite a bit of, I would say time and energy and engineering efforts to basically solve problems in engineered way. So the customer cloud managed services platform allows us to actually bring both, you talked about apex before to our other colleagues. So it allows us to both bring apex services to our customers and also allows us to bring non apex services in terms of fully managed to our customers. >> So multi-cloud must be a rich opportunity's probably almost infinite. There's a lot of gaps there for IP development. What are you seeing and hearing from customer with regard to those gaps? >> So one of the key areas when you talk about multi-cloud is we talk to customers about is the solution things we talked about. So we launched, we announced three solutions one we already launched. And the two of them will be announced is customers want that end-to-end outcome, right? 'Cause they are saying, well we are currently where we started today. We announced cyber security as a service. As you guys know, within the current geopolitical climate, cyber attacks are common, ransomware is common. So, and this is something which we are doing today to customers. What customers want is the simplicity of offering. They're like, you can help us with cyber security when something happens I have an insurance policy, so I can actually go I know where my data sets are. I can record from it, but can you streamline it for me? I don't want all the headaches. Can you make sure that it's easily consumable and Dell can take care of everything for me. And we are also investing on other LED solutions like machine learning, high performance compute. And we are also looking at vertical areas. So our customers, especially in telco, Edge and enterprise applications. So we are looking at those as a full stack offerings so that we can actually educate and take our customers on the journey on our MacCloud platforms. >> I going to talk about Dell Services as a facilitator of multi-cloud Chuck Whitton was on stage, He was here yesterday talking about multi-cloud is here by default. Well, Dell wants to change that to multi-cloud by design. How can Dell Services be a facilitator of that transformation that customers in telco or whatever industry have going from, We've got it by default to now it's actually by design, facilitating that? >> Yeah. I'll jump in and let you take it, we have a a robust consulting practice which can help you come in and understand where you're at and where you want to be and design that future. So that it's not, as you said by default, it's absolutely multi-cloud by design. Anything you want to add? >> Yeah. I mean, look again Dell has been doing multi-cloud for a long time. We just didn't call it multi-cloud. I would probably say 2014, 2015, Dell's been there. We know our customers have a choice. We want to operationalize. We want to help our customers run workloads wherever they want to run. Now, we have a term for it. We have a dedicated way of talking about it. And again, more automation more IP development, more software. And again, taking a lot of the people part away from services and driving more innovation, more IPs where we are going to be able to differentiate. >> So you're a large and pretty sophisticated services organization. We've talked about some of your IP. You now bring that to your customers. What are some of the adoption barriers that they have? How are you addressing those, in terms of taking your IP and your ideas? And you probably say, "Hey, we got this, you can apply this". What are they not ready for? That you sort of advise them, okay you got to do, these are some maybe, some out scope things that you haven't talked about or thought about. >> Yeah. I mean, I'll take one. And I know Patrick will probably touch on, I would say two big ones. I can think about the one is data. One is on security, right? I'll give you the data use case. So data has gravity, right? When customers think about, multi-cloud think about solution, think about these services. It's not easy to take petabytes and terabytes of data and shift all over the place. It's very, very expensive. So a lot of their cloud strategy really hinges on where the data is, and how they're going to optimize those data for the outcomes they want to decide. And that's something a lot of our customers initially don't think about it as we actually go and talk to them about this specific use case and application that actually becomes forefront of the discussion. >> Yeah. On the security front, customers are just overwhelmed with the number of options in a very fragmented, extremely important space. So we've tried to make that very easy for them with our managed detection and response services, bringing the best of the industry and Dell Services together to give them a one stop shop managed service, let us watch for you so that you can run your business. And when we detect something, we'll advise you and help you respond. >> What's the tooling like there. I mean, you have, do you have your preferred tooling? Are the customers saying, well we got to use this vendor or that vendor, how do you manage all that complex? >> Of course we have our preferred tooling and we partner greatly with secure works to do it as well as some other company, but that said what's important to us with the service is that a customer meets specific, they're green in five different categories. And if they're green in those categories, then we're good to help them. And if they don't know how to do that, then we'll come in and do a security assessment to help them get there. And just taking what's very complicated and making it easy. >> On the security front. We've been talking about the cyber skills gap, massive skills gap that's been around for years. How is Dell Services facilitator of organizations being able to close that gap? >> Sure. In a few ways, one, we can just do it for you, right? Two, if you want to do it yourself, we can supplement you with security residents to help you manage through the complexity and cross train while as part of your staff. And then three, we have our Dell Education Services where we can come in and train you as well. So lots of different options on how you want to do it. >> Yeah. >> No matter what you choose, we're here for you. (panelists laughing) >> That people option's important. I mean, people being the biggest threat factor that there is, right. >> Absolutely. >> For sure. >> That's probably one of the hardest ones to augment. >> Yeah. I mean, that's the reason why when you look at cyber security customers, want somebody else to manage it because you don't want the same folks making the same mistake on an insurance policy. So they're like Dell, you manage it for me. So I don't have the same actor is doing same things. So I have somebody managing my data but somebody managing my record option. So in case something goes wrong I know it's a different handset different people who are much more relaxed when things go back >> That's always nice to have somebody that's relaxed in a crisis. >> Absolutely. And I think I'll take that in my personal life too. Guys thank you for joining Dave and me talking about what's new with Dell Services the modernization that you're undergoing and how your customers are really helping to evolve this strategy. We appreciate your insight. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thank you so much for your time. Great seeing you. >> Right. Likewise for Dave Vallante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. This is day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World, live from Las Vegas, stick around Dave and I will be right back with our next guest. (bright music)

>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage here in Washington D. C. For a W. S. Public sector summit. I'm john fraser host of the queues and in person event but of course we have remote guests. It's a hybrid event as well. Amazon is streaming amazon web services, streaming all the teams, some of the key notes of course all the cube interviews are free and streaming out there as well on the all the cube channels and all the social coordinates. Our next guest is Melissa Pavlik President and Ceo POV con joining me here to talk about predictive maintenance, bringing that to life for the U. S. Air Force melissa. Thanks for coming in remotely on our virtual cube here at the physical event. >>Excellent, thank you. Good morning >>Show. People have been been um face to face for the first time since 2019. A lot of people remote calling in checking things out kind of an interesting time, right? We're living in so uh what's your, what's your take on all this? >>Sure. I mean it's a new way of doing business, right? Um I will say, I guess for us as a company we always have been remote so it's not too much of a change but it is definitely challenging, especially trying to engage with such a large user community such as the United States Air Force who isn't always used to working as remotely. So it's definitely a unique challenge for sure. >>Well let's get into, I love this topic. You had a real success story. There is a case study with the U. S. Air Force, what's the relationship take us through what you guys are doing together? >>Sure. Absolutely. So we started working with the Air Force now about five years ago on this subject and predictive maintenance. Sometimes you might hear me catch myself and say CBM plus condition based maintenance. They're synonymous. They mean the exact same thing basically. But about five years ago the Air Force was contemplating how do we get into a space of getting ahead of unscheduled maintenance events? Um if the military they're big push always his readiness how do we improve readiness? So to do that it was a big ask of do we have the data to get ahead of failures? So we started on this journey about five years ago as I said and frankly we started under the radar we weren't sure if it was going to work. So we started with two platforms. And of course when I think a lot of people here predictive maintenance, they immediately think of sensor data and sensors are wonderful data but unfortunately especially in an entity such as the Air Force not all assets are censored. So it also opened up a whole other avenue of how do we use the data that they have today to be able to generate and get ahead of failures. So it did start a really great partnership working not only with the individual, I'll say Air Force entities that Air Force Lifecycle Management Center but we also worked across all the major commands, the individual units, supply control, logistics and everyone else. So it's been a really great team effort to bring together all of those but typically would be rather segregated operations together. >>Yeah, they're getting a lot of props lately on a lot of their projects across the board and this one particular, how did you guys specifically help them modernize and with their and get this particular maintenance thing off the ground? >>Absolutely. I think quite simply it was what really we put their existing data to work. We really wanted to get in there and think about they already had a ton of data. There wasn't a need to generate more. We're talking about petabytes of information. So how do we use that and put it into a focus of getting ahead of failure? We said we established basically three key performance parameters right from the beginning it was, we knew we wanted to increase availability which was going to directly improve readiness. We needed to make sure we were reducing mission aborts and we wanted to get ahead of any kind of maintenance costs. So for us it was really how do we leverage and embrace machine learning and ai paired with just big data analytics and how do we take frankly what is more of a World War Two era architecture and turn it into something that is in the information age. So our modernization really started with how do we take their existing data and turn it into something that is useful and then simultaneously how do we educate the workforce and helping them understand what truly machine learning and AI offer because I think sometimes there's everyone has their own opinions of what that means, but when you put it into action and you need to make sure that it's something that they can take action on, right, it's not just pushing a dot moving numbers around, it's really thinking about and considering how their operations are done and then infusing that with the data on the back end, >>it's awesome. You know the old workflows in the cloud, this is legit, I mean physical assets, all kinds of things and his legacy is also but you want the modernization, I was gonna ask you about the machine learning and ai component, you brought that up. What specifically are you leveraging their from the ai side of the machine learning side? >>Absolutely for us, most and foremost we're talking about responsible a i in this case because unfortunately a lot of the data in the Air Force is human entry, so it's manual, which basically means it's open and rife for a lot of error into that data. So we're really focused heavily on the data integrity, we're really focused on utilizing different types of machine learning because I think on the surface the general opinion is there's a lot of data here. So it would open itself naturally into a lot of potential machine learning techniques, but the reality situation is this data is not human understandable unless you are a prior maintainer, frankly, it's a lot of codes, there's not a whole lot of common taxonomy. So what we've done is we've looked at those supervised and unsupervised models, we've taken a whole different approach to infusing it with truly, what I would say arguably is the most important key element, domain expertise. You know, someone who actually understands what this data means. So that way we can in in End up with actionable output something that the air force can actually put into use, see the results coming out of it. And thus far it's been great. Air mobility command has come back and said we've been able to reduce their my caps, which are parts waiting for maintenance by 18%. That's huge in this space. >>Yeah, it's interesting about unsupervised and supervised machine learning. That's a big distinct because you mentioned there's a lot of human error going on. That's a big part. Can you explain a little bit more because that was that to solve the human error part or was it the mix and match because the different data sets, but why the why both machine learning modes. >>So really it was to address both items frankly. When we started down this path, we weren't sure we were going to find right, We went in with some hypotheses and some of those ended up being true and others were not. So it was a way for us to quickly adjust as we needed to again put the data into actionable use and make sure we were responsibly doing that. So for us a lot of it, because it's human understanding and human error that goes into this natural language processing is a really big area in this space. So for us, adjusting between and trying different techniques is really where we were able to discover and find out what was going to be the most effective and useful in this particular space as well as cost effective. Because for us there's also this resistance, you have to have resist the urge to want to monitor everything. In this case we're talking about really focusing on those top drivers and depending on the type of data that we had, depending on the users that we knew were going to get involved with it as well as I would say, the historical information, it really would help us dictate on supervised versus supervised and going the unsupervised route. In some cases there's just still not ready for that because the data is just so manual. Once we get to a point where there is more automation and more automated data collection, unsupervised will definitely no doubt become more valuable right now though, in order to get those actionable. That supervised modeling was really what we found to be the most valuable >>and that makes total sense. You've got a lot of head room to grow into with Unsupervised, which is actually harder as you as you know, everyone, everyone everyone knows that. But I mean that's really the reality. Congratulations. I gotta ask you on the AWS side what part do they play in all this? Obviously the cloud um their relationship with the Air Force as well, what's their what's their role in this particular maintenance solution? >>Sure, absolutely. And I'll just say, I mean we're really proud to be a partner network with them and so when we started this there was no cloud, so today a lot of opportunity or things we hear about in the Air Force where like cloud one platform one, those weren't in existence, you know, five years ago or so. So for us when we started down this path and we had to identify very quickly a format and a host location that would allow us not only handle large amounts of data but do all of the deep analysis we needed to AWS GovCloud is where that came in. Plus it also is awesome that they were already approved at I. L. Five to be able to host that we in collaboration with them host a nist 801 +71 environment. And so it's really allowed us to to grow and deliver this this impact out over 6000 users today on the Air Force side. So for us with a W. S. Has been a great partnership. They obviously have some really great native services that are inside their cloud as well as the pairing and easy collaboration among not only licensed products but also all that free and open source that's out there because again, arguably that's the best community to pull from because they're constantly evolving and working in the space. But a W has been a really great partner for us and of course we have some of our very favorite services I'm happy to talk about, but they've been really great to work with >>what's the top services. >>So for us, a lot of top services are like ec two's work spaces, of course S three and Glacier um are right up there, but you really enjoy working across glue Athena were really big on, we find a commercial service we're looking for that's not yet available in Govcloud. And we pull in our AWS partners and ask, hey, you know when it's going to get into the gulf cloud space and they move pretty quickly to get those in there. So recent months are definitely a theme in blue. Well, >>congratulations, great solution, I love this application because it highlights the power of the cloud, What's the future in store for the U. S. Air Force when it comes to predictive maintenance. >>Sure. I mean, I think at this point they are just going to continue adding additional top driver analyses you through our work for the past couple years. We've identified a lot of operational and functional opportunities for them. So there's gonna be some definitely foundational changing coming along, some enabling new technologies to get that data integrity more automated as well so that there isn't such a heavy lift on the downstream, we're talking about data cleansing, but I think as far as predictive maintenance goes, we're definitely going to see more and more improvements across the readiness level, getting rid of and eliminating that unscheduled event that drives a lot of the readiness concerns that are out there. And we're also hoping to see a lot more improvement and I'd say enhancement across the supply chain because we know that's also an area that really they could get ahead on your part of our other work as we developed a five year long range supply forecast and it's really been opening some eyes to see how they can better plan, not only on the maintenance side but also supporting maintenance from a logistics and supply, >>great stuff melissa. Great to have you on President Ceo Path Con, you're also the business owner. Um how's things going with the business? The pandemic looks like I'm gonna come out of it stronger. Got the tailwind with cloud technology. The modernization boom is here in, in Govcloud, 10 years celebrating Govcloud birthday here at this event. How's business house? How are you doing >>good. Everything has actually been, we were, I guess fortunate, as I mentioned the very beginning, we were remote companies. So fortunately for us the pandemic did not have that much of an operational hiccup and being that a lot of our clients are in the federal space, we were able to continue working and amazingly we actually grew during the pandemic. We added quite a bit of a personnel to the team and so we're looking forward to doing some more predictive maintenance across, not only explaining the Air Force but the other services as well. >>You know, the people who were Agile had some cloud action going on, we're productive and they came out stronger melissa. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you for coming in remotely and joining our face to face event from the interwebs. Thank you so much for coming on cuba >>All right, thank you, john have a great rest of your day. >>Okay. I'm john for here at the cube with a W. S. Public sector summit in person and remote bringing guest on. We've got the new capability of bringing remotes in. We do in person. I'll see you face to face hear the cube and it's like to be here at the public sector summit. Thanks for watching. Mhm. Mhm >>robert, Herjavec

>> Instructor: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> And welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. I'm John Furrier your host. This is theCUBE virtual. Special coverage of the public sector. Today Rebecca Wetherly, Director of Worldwide Public Sector System Integrator Partners for AWS. Great to see you. Welcome to theCUBE virtual. >> Thanks, John. I'm glad to be here. >> So just the news we've been covering all through re:Invented priors, just the growth in public sector. The acceleration with the pandemic, it's just that this acceleration has been massive. So I want to just get get your take. It's been hard but also, it's been an opportunity for partners. >> You leading the Integrators. >> Sure. >> They're on the front lines. I got to ask you, (chuckling) what is AWS doing to support their partners, as the business models are forced really upon them to move faster? >> Yeah, sure. Thank you. Let me start with saying that, companies are really building a business in partnering with us. Because of global needs such as the pandemic. But we also have many partners that are coming to us because of our customer demand outside of COVID. Because we're a leader in cloud innovation, and because we've got a global field engagement and go-to-market strategy. You know AWS is a customer driven company, and our partners are also our customers. We have a full suite of programs for our partners and whether they be a consulting partner or a technology partner. We have tens of thousands of partners all across the globe, with more than 35,000 new partners since January 2016. And in our public sector space, we have over 1,500 partners with solutions and experience, delivering on a combination of government, education, and nonprofit customer missions all around the world. Consulting partners are really professional services firms. That help customers of all types and sizes design, architect, build, migrate and manage workloads and applications on AWS. They accelerate the journey to the cloud for our customers. And they often are implementing technology solutions. As you referred to around COVID, that our technology partners are actually developing. So consulting partners are SIs that I work with, Strategic Consultant Partners, Managed Service Providers, and also resellers. And they are providing really great value to our customers by providing strategic advisory services, implementation and migration services, Staffog. They also have great specialty depth and machine learning or AI. IOT, data lakes and analytics. And even in things like communication tools using technologies like we're doing today on zoom, and taking those to our customers. Our technology partners on the other hand they deliver hardware, connectivity services and software solutions that are hosted or integrated with AWS cloud. And they deliver components to broad customer solutions, often via our consulting partners. We have a great, a great way of delivering technology through our AWS Marketplace and we'll talk about that in a minute. But I will say, that our tech partners are helping our customers decrease their deployment times, provide cost optimization and infrastructure for DevOps and production workloads. They're also lowering their costs on code development by using our broad portfolio of services. And oftentimes for our public sector customers they are helping shorten the path to achieving regulatory requirements for our public sector needs. >> That's awesome. You guys have a lot to do there to support your partners. Obviously the main concern is, how do I maintain that profitability in the fast pace. And then making sure that their customers can also transition and ride the digital transformation wave. So I have to ask you, what programs are you guys offering to help these partners succeed because certainly it's beyond just the profitability. it's this new business model of Cloud-scale. So what programs specifically are you guys offering? >> Yeah, we have a lot of different programs at AWS. The first stop is really the AWS Partner Network. Which I'll refer to as the APN. This is really our global partner program for technology and consulting businesses to leverage Amazon Web Services to build solutions and services for customers. The APN is the first place where companies can build, market, and sell their offerings, and provide valuable business, technical, and opportunities for marketing with their customers. Our programs provide promotional support. We provide visibility throughout our website. We give partners opportunities to engage with customers for events, social media. And we provide access to funding and go-to market opportunities. I touched on briefly our AWS Marketplace . And this is really a great program offering to our customers both consulting partners and technology partners. The AWS Marketplace simplifies procurement and entitlement of provisioning software across 50 different categories. And we have more than 8,000 transactional listings. That marketplace connects customers with more than 1,000 different ISBs or independent software vendors to help meet their business needs. And we have more than 300,000 customers using software from the AWS Marketplace. The Marketplace is also available on 24 different regions. So when a customer chooses to use the Marketplace they have the opportunity to procure their software from our consulting partners and leverage the software and the technology from our from our tech partners. Other really cool programs we have are our Partner Transformation Program or SaaS Factory Program, and also our Migration Acceleration Program. >> Awesome. Great programs. What else are you guys besides programs, Are you guys doing >> Yeah. >> to help partners succeed. Because I know there's a lot of touches, there's some new things going on. What else do you guys do? >> Yeah, I think we have a lot of great resources available to our partners. Most of our partners have Partner Development Managers that are working with them on a daily basis. Access to our business development and sales teams, solutions architects and other subject matter experts. Really getting deep into the technology and having access to those folks to help our partners design, build, architect and validate a purchase with customers. Also our Professional Services Teams.Right? They are deep subject matter experts that our partners have the ability to tap into. And then of course, because of the way we go to market in public sector, access and engagement with our capture, bid, and proposal teams are super important. We also have to consider access for our partners to be trained and become certified. That's a real requirement that our customers need to help them achieve their goals. We offer digital and classroom training for our partners to be able to learn at their own pace or via an AWS instructor. And AWS training and certification helps our partners build competence, confidence, and credibility with our customers. We also have AWS competencies. And our competency program is designed to identify, validate, and promote APN partners that have demonstrated technical expertise and proven customer success. One of the most critical competencies for us is and these days is around our migration. Migration competencies allows our partners to accelerate their customer's cloud adoption journey by providing strategy, personnel tools, education, and tech support to their customers. One of those customers and partners is InterVision. They're a consulting firm that provide strategic advisory services to organizations to help them run, grow, and transform their business needs with the cloud via modern IT services. Their experts have a deep history in technology solutions and they have a deep bench of certified engineers and data scientists to excel delivering Managed Services and Migration Services to both public sector and commercial customers. And with the California Department of Technology. Which is a state agency that provides authority and responsibility over all aspects of technology for California state governments, they selected InterVision to work with them due to their expertise and their proprietary offering called Cloud Migration Lifecycle Assurance. And that offering provided that CDT, the ability, pardon me. To take advantage of their Cloud Migration operations and optimization specialty. So our partners are really getting great opportunities to build their business and to accelerate their their work with us through a variety of programs, and by really digging deep and leveraging all of the programs that are available to them. >> It's nice with the mix of programs, plus the field support, plus the care they're nurtured that, grow that. As you know in these in these markets where you have partnerships and channels and relationships. You need to be profitable. And profitability is about happy customers. >> Rebecca: Sure. >> And margins.(chuckles) Making money. >> Rebecca: Yeah. Sure. >> You got to make money to stay in business. So, this is a big opportunity as the new economics of cloud come into the channel. This is really a big conversation. Moving fast, scaling up, new kinds of services. The integrators are really having a good time here. And these are new practices. How can someone learn more? What's out there? How does someone get engaged with you guys? What information can they, is there a site? Is there a program? How does someone get the resources? What would they do? >> Yeah. Well, I will tell you. The first stop is really our website. And that may sound trivial but that is the best place to get started for us. You're going to find there by visiting https://aws.amazon.com. You can register to become an AWS partner very easily. Right there you're going to get step-by-step instructions and learning paths, as well as tutorials and how to get your business up and running, and how to become a partner. And the journey largely looks like this. Right? One. get on board. Get familiar. Establish your relationship and join the Amazon Partner Network. Go through some very basic training and get familiar with their services. Second. Develop those technical and sales skills. Develop a business model where AWS lends the greatest value to your partner business. And as you move through the tiers of maturity, we will co-invest in your business to help you scale. And then three, really go to market. Establish the pathways to your customers. Build out your differentiated approach. Look at the competencies we offer and decide which ones are going to be the most relevant to you. We want you to leverage the funding mechanisms we have, and we want you also to think about how we co-market together. There are so many roads to success and AWS offers lots of different partner programs and opportunities to develop your unique roadmap John. >> Yeah, that's great enablement. That is super valuable. Having the co-funding, the go marketing, and the tools and the programs. All there to enable services to be successful. Rebecca, thanks for sharing that program. >> My pleasure. >> Great to have you on. Rebecca Wetherly, >> Thank you so much. Director of the Worldwide Public Sector System Integrator Partners. A big growing part of the public sector when we need it the most, which is now and it's growing. So check them out. Thanks for watching. This is theCUBE coverage. CUBE virtual, for AWS re:Invent reinvent public sector, special coverage. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of VMworld 2020 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stuart Miniman and this is theCUBES's coverage of VMworld 2020. Our 11th year doing the show and happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE's alums. Somebody that's is going to VMworld longer than we have been doing it for theCUBE. So Vaughn Stewart he is the Vice President of Technology Alliances with Pure Storage Vaughn, nice to see you. How you doing? >> Hey, Stu. CUBE thanks for having me back. I miss you guys I wish we were doing this in person. >> Yeah, we all wish we were in person but as we've been saying all this year, we get to be together even while we're apart. So we look to you on little screens and things like that rather than bumping into each other at some of the after parties or the coffee shops all around San Francisco. So Vaughn, obviously you know Pure Storage long, long, long partnership with VMware. I think back the first time that I probably met with the Pure team, in person, it probably was around Moscone, having a breakfast having a lunch, having a briefing or the likes. So just give us the high level. I know we've got a lot of things to dig into. Pure and VMware, how's the partnership going these days? >> Partnership is growing fantastic Pure invests a lot of engineering resources in programs with VMware. Particularly the VMware design partner programs for vVols, Container-Native Storage et cetera. The relationship is healthy the business is growing strong. I'm very excited about the investments that VMware is making around VMware Cloud Foundation as a replatforming of what's going on MPREM to help better enable hybrid cloud and to support Tanzu and Kubernetes platforms. So a lot going on at the infrastructure level that ultimately helps customers of all to adopt cloud native workloads and applications. >> Wonderful. Well a lot of pieces to unpack that. Of course Tanzu big piece of what they're talking about. But let's start. You mentioned VCF. You know what is it on the infrastructure side, that is kind of driving your customer adoption these days, and the some of the latest integrations that you're doing? >> Yeah you know VCF has really caught the attention of our mid to large or mid to enterprise size customers. The focus around, as I use the phrase replatform is planning out with VMworld phrase. But the focus on simplifying the lifecycle management, giving you a greater means to connect to the public cloud. I don't know if you're aware, but all VMware public cloud offerings have the VCF framework in terms of architectural framework. So now bringing that back on-prem, allowing customers on a per workload domain basis to extend to a hybrid cloud capability. It's a really big advancement from kind of the base vSphere infrastructure, which architecturally hasn't had a significant advancement in a number of years. What's really big around VCF besides the hybrid connectivity, is the couple of new tools SDDC Manager and vSphere Lifecycle Manager. These tools can actually manage the infrastructure from bare metal up to workload domains and then from workload domains you're now handing off to considered like delegated vCenter Servers right? So that the owner of a workload if you will and then that person can go ahead and provision virtual machines or containers, based on whatever is required to run their workloads. So for us the big gain of this is the advancement in the VMware management. They are bringing their strength in providing simplicity, and end-to-end hardwared application management to disaggregated architectures. Where the focus of that capability has been with HCI over say the past five or six years. And so this really helps close that last gap, if you will, and completes a 360 degree view of providing simplified management across dissimilar architecture and it's consistent and it's standardized by VMware. So HCI, disaggregated architecture, public cloud, it all operates the same. >> So Vaughn, you made a comment about not a lot of changes. If I remember our friends at VMware they made a statement vSphere 7 was the biggest architectural change in over a decade. Of course bringing in Kubernetes it's a major piece of the Tanzu discussion. Pure. Your team's been pretty busy in the Kubernetes space too. Recent acquisition of Portwox to help accelerate that. Maybe let's talk a little bit about you know cloud native. What you're hearing from your customers. (chuckles) And yeah, like we've Dave Vellante had a nice interview with, Pure and Portwox CEOs. Give the VMworld audience a little bit of an update as you know where you all fit in the Kubernetes space. >> Yeah and actually, there was a lot that you shared there kind of in connecting the VCF piece through to vSphere 7 and a lot of changes there in driving into Tanzu and containers. So maybe we're going to jump around here a bit but look we're really excited. We've been working with VMware, but in addition to all of our application partners, you are seeing nearly every traditional enterprise application being replatformed to support containers. I'd love to share with you more details, but there's a lot of NDAs I'd be breaking in that. But the way for enterprise adoption of containers is right upon us. And so the timing for VMware Tanzu is ideal. Our focus has always been around providing a rich set of data services. One that provides faster provisioning, simplified fleet management, and the ability to move that container and those data services between different clouds and different cloud platforms, Be it on-prem, or in the public cloud space. We've had a lot of success doing that with the Pure Service Orchestrator Version 6.0 enables CSI compliant persistent storage capabilities. And it does support Tanzu today. The addition or I should say the acquisition of Portworx is really interesting. Because now we're bringing on an enhanced set of data services that not only run on a Pure Storage storage products, but runs universally regardless of the storage platform, or the Cloud architecture. The capabilities within Portworx are above and beyond what we had in PSO. So this is a great expansion of our capabilities. And ultimately we want to help customers. Whether they want to do containers solely on Tanzu, or if they're going to mix Tanzu with say Amazon EKS, or they've got some department that does development on OpenShift. Whatever it might be. You know that the focus of storage vendors is obviously to help customers make that data available on these platforms through a consistent control plane. >> Yeah. Vaughn it's a great acquisition. Think a nice fit. Anybody that's been talking to Pure the last year or so you've been. How do we take the storage make it more cloud native if you will. So you've got code. Obviously, you've got a great partnership with VMware, but as you said, in Amazon and some of the other hyper clouds those clouds, those storage services, no matter where a customer is, so that that core value, of course we know, is this the software underneath it. And that's what Portworx is. So you know not only Pure's, but other hardware, other clouds and the likes. So a really interesting space You know Vaughn, you and I've been covering this, since the early days of VMware. Hey this software is kind of a big deal and you know (chuckles) cloud in many ways is an extension of what we're doing. I know we used to joke how many years was it that VMworld was storage world? You know. >> Ooh yeah. >> There was talk about like big architectural changes, you know vVols When that finally came out, it was years of hard work by many of the big companies, including your previous and current you know employer. What's the latest? My understanding is that there are some updates there when it comes to the underlying vVols. What are the storage people need to know? >> Yeah. So great question and VMware is always been infrastructure world really Right? Like it is a showcase for storage. But it's also been a showcase for the compute vendors and every Intel partner. From a storage perspective, a lot is going on this year that should really excite both VMware admins and those who are storage centric in their day-to-day jobs. Let's start with the recent news. vVols has been promoted within VCF to being principal storage. For those of you who maybe are unfamiliar with this term 'principal storage' VMware Cloud Foundation supports any form of storage that's supported by vSphere. But SDDC manager tool that I was sharing with you earlier that really excites large scale organizations around it's end-to-end simplicity and management. It had a smaller, less robust support list when it comes to provisioning external storage. And so it had two tiers. Principal and secondary. Principal meant SDDC manager could provision and deprovision sub-tenants. So the recent news brings vVols both on Fiber Channel and iSCSI up to that principal tier. Pure Storage is a VMware design partner around vVols. We are one of the most adopted vVols storage platforms, and we are really leaning in on VCF. So we are very happy to see that come to fruition for our customers. Part of why VMware partners with Pure Storage around VCF, is they want VCF enabled on any Fabric. And you know some vendors only offer ethernet only forms of connectivity. But with Pure Storage, we don't care what your Fabric is right. We just want to provide the data services be it ethernet, fiber channel or next generation NVMe over Fabric. That last point segments into another recent announcement from from VMware. Which is the support for NVMe over Fabric within vSphere 7. This is key because NVMe over Fabric allows the IO path to move away from SCSI based form of communication one to a memory based form of communication. And this unleashes a new level of performance, a way to better support those business and mission critical applications. Or a way to drive greater density into a smaller form factor and footprint within your data center. Obviously Fabric upgrades tend to not happen in conjunction with hypervisor upgrades, but the ability to provide customers a roadmap and a means to be able to continually evolve their infrastructure non disruptively, is our key there. It would be remiss of me to not point out one kind of orthogonal element, which is the new vMotion capabilities that are in vSphere 7. Customers have been tried for a number of years, probably from vSphere 4 through six to virtualize more performance centric and resource intense applications. And they've had some challenges around scale, particularly with the non-disruptive. The ability to non disruptively move a workload. VMware rewrote vMotion for vSphere 7 so it can tackle these larger more performance centric workloads. And when you combine that along with the addition of like NVMe over Fabric support, I think you're truly at a time where you can say, almost every workload can run on a VMware platform, right? From your traditional two two consolidation where you started to looking at performance centric AI, in machine learning workloads. >> Yeah. A lot of pieces you just walked through Vaughn, I'm glad especially the NVMe over Fabric piece. Just want to drill down one level there. As you said, there's a lot of pieces to make sure that this is fully worked. The standards are done, the software is there, the hardware, the various interconnects there and then okay, when's does the customer actually ready to upgrade that? How much of that is just you know okay hitting the update button. How much of that is do I need to do a refresh? And we understand that the testing and purchasing cycles there. So how many customers are you talking to that are like, "Okay I've got all the pieces, "we're ready to roll, "we're implementing in 2020." And you know, what's that roadmap look like for kind of the typical enterprise, which I know is a bit of an oxymoron? (laughs) >> So we've got a handful. I think that's a fair way to give you a size without giving you an exact number. We had a handful of customers who have NVMe over Fabric deployments today. The deployments tend to be application or workload centric versus ubiquitous across the data center. Which I think does bear an opportunity for VMware adoption to be a little bit earlier than across the entire data center. Because most VMware architectures today are based on top of rack switching. Whether that switching is fiber channel or ethernet base, I think the ability to then upgrade that switch. Either you've got modern hardware and it just needs a firmware update, or you've got to replace that hardware and implement NVMe over Fabric. I think that's very attractive. Particularly that you can do so in a non disruptive manner with a flash array or with flash deck. We expect to see the adoption really start to take take hold in 2021. But you probably won't see large market gains until 2022 or 23. >> Well that's super helpful Vaughn especially Pure Storage you've got customers that have some of the most demanding performance environments out there. So they are some of the early adopters that you would expect go into adopting this new technology. All right. I guess last piece, listening to the keynote looking at all the announcements that they have you know, VMware obviously has a big push into the cloud native space they've made a whole lot of acquisitions. We touched on a little bit before but what's your take as to what you are hearing from your customers, where they are with adoption into really modernizing and accelerating their businesses today? >> I think for the majority of our customers and again I would consider more of a commercial or mid market centric up through enterprise. They've particularity enterprise, they've adapted cloud native technologies particularity in developing their own internal or customer facing applications. So I don't think the technology is new. I think where it's newer is this re platforming of enterprise applications and I think that what's driving the timeline for VMware. We have a number of Pivotal deployments that run up here. Very large scale Pivotal deployments that run on Pure. And hopefully as you audience knows Pivotal is what VMware Tanzu has been rebranded as. So we've had success there. We've have had success in the test and development and in the web facing application space. But now this is a broader initiative from VMware supporting enterprise apps along with you know the cloud native disaggregated applications that have been built over the last say five to 10 years. But to provide it though a single management plane. So I'm bullish, I'm really bullish I think they are in a unique position compared to the rest of our technology partners you know they own the enterprise virtualization real estate and as so their ability to successfully add cloud native application to that, I think it's a powerful mix . For us the opportunity is great. I want to thank you for focusing on the fact that we've been able to deliver performance. But performances found on any flash product. And it's not to demote our performance by any means, but when you look at our customers and what they purchase us in terms of the repeat purchases, it's around simplicity, it's around the native integration with VMware and the extending of that value prop through our capabilities whether it's through the end-to-end infrastructure management, through data protection extending in the hybrid cloud. That's where Pure Storage customers fall in love with Pure Storage. And so it's a combination of performance, simplicity and ultimately, you know, economics. As we know economics drive most technical decisions not the actual technology itself. >> Well, Vaughn Stewart thank you so much for the update, congratulation on all the new things that are being brought out in the partnership >> Thank you Stu appreciate being on theCUBE, big shout out to VMware congratulations on VMworld 2020, look forward to seeing everybody soon >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage VMworld 2020 I'm Stu Miniman and that you for watching theCUBE. (bright upbeat music)

>> 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.

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering OSIsoft PI World, 2018. Brought to you by OSIsoft. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in downtown San Francisco at the OSIsoft show, it's called PI World. It's been going on for over 15 years. We've never been here before, we're excited to be here. Really is coming at it from the operations point of view, and they've been worrying about operations and operations efficiency for years. There's people walking around with 15-year pins, which is pretty amazing. I got my first one-year pin, so that's good. So we're excited to be here and dive into the details, because we've talked about IoT and industrial IoT, and kind of coming at it from the IT side, but these guys have been working at it from the OT side for years and years and years, almost 40 years. So our first guest is joining us. He's Remi Duquette, the Global Head - Applied AI and Datacenter at Clarity Lifecycle, it's a mouthful, for Maya Heat Transfer Technologies. Remi, nice to meet you. >> Very nice meeting you, thank you for having me. >> So, give us a little bit more detail on what Maya Heat Transfer is all about, and then we'll dive into some of the specific stuff you're working on. >> So Maya Heat Transfer started about 28 years ago in the simulation of heat and getting rid of all that heat that's being emitted by a lot of data centers, all the servers and the density that's occurring these days. And we've involved into developing a software solution, leveraging the PI infrastructure for real-time monitoring, and extended it beyond, for forecasting and doing all sorts of advanced analytics from that data. >> Right, so heat is the historical enemy of electronics, and has been forever. >> Yes, continuing to be so, for sure. >> And continuing to be so, and the data centers, you know, it's an interesting evolution in the data center space, because on one hand, they're consolidating data centers, or shutting down data centers, you've got this public cloud phenomenon. On the other hand, it's density, density, density, density, density, which probably is good opportunity for you guys. >> A great opportunity. Unfortunately, you know, the problems kind of are accentuated by exactly those phenomenon of consolidation, and the cloud, and the virtualization projects that are going on. So all of that combined, makes for a really big cocktail of heat and that heat needs to be dissipated somehow. And of course, the energy efficiency of all the machines are getting better and better, but at some point, it needs to be optimized, and that's where the software component, to remove the human in the loop, really to optimize that heat distribution and removal. >> So one of the big themes here at this show is finding inefficiency. This kind of continual quest for better efficiency and using data, and big data specifically, and sensor data, to be able to get that, find the inefficiency and act on the inefficiency. So what are some of the things that you guys look at? You've been at it for a long time, but there's still a lot more opportunities to find inefficiencies. Where are you still finding inefficiencies? >> Well, I mean, the main aspect is we have a lot of building automation systems and cooling loop systems, that have been programed to try and get to the best situation in any circumstances. And, really, when you look at what we're doing now, is applying artificial intelligence to augment the abilities of those systems, to better control and get to even a better place from an energy efficiency perspective. So that's really the latest evolution, to use that big data, to learn from that data, and then further optimize your cooling environment and your heat distribution. >> Right, now I'm curious what kind of new learnings came out of kind of the hyperscale players. Obviously, big public cloud players, Amazon and Azure, Google Cloud, have giant data centers, not only for their own core businesses, but now they're building them out as public clouds. Much bigger scale than the traditional corporate data centers. They're just operating at a whole different level. >> A whole new, yeah (laughs). >> So what are some of the things that have come out of those experiences that are different than the world pre-public cloud? >> Well, if you look at the pre-public, private cloud and public cloud, you had maybe, on average, five to six kilowatt per rack in a data center, was the average power consumed by those racks. Now we're looking, you know, some of our clients have up to 50 kilowatt per rack and now you need water-cooled elements into that rack, or other cooling elements that are being, helping the situation, 'cause those kinds of densities are producing a huge amount of heat, and that's really a big concern and a big shift from the enterprise level data center that was a little bit less of a consumer of that power. >> Right, now do you guys do anything outside of the data center? I know that's your area of specialties, but we've been doing a lot of autonomous vehicle shows, and one of the things that comes over and over and over is kind of the harsh environment for compute in a car or a truck or a bus or whatever. It's not a beautifully controlled with a lot of great backup power and diesel and air conditioning. Very rough environment. So what are some of the applications that you guys can use to help get that compute power in these vehicles? >> Well, actually the evolution for us more on the software side, was to apply our deep learning, artificial intelligence components and agents to other industries. So we're leveraging the forecasting capabilities of these deep learning agents to apply to other areas. So discrete manufacturing was one example, fleet optimization, so to go back to those edge devices, so we do a lot of fleet optimization, fuel optimization on these components. And that's completely outside the data center, but it's based on the same type of deep learning technologies that we've developed for the data center. >> And all the forecasts are, as more and more the compute and the store moves out to the edge, and you've got all the industrial devices running around in the centers, it's not new news for the group at this organization, >> No, clearly (chuckles). >> But you know, you're kind of shifting that load of the heat management from the data center out to the edge. >> To the edge, correct. So it does relieve a little bit of the, let's call it the pressure, inside the data center, but at the end of the day, the density of those cloud providers is just being accentuated by the sheer number of devices. So we thought there might be a shift towards the edge from a power, let's say a removal from the core data center, but in the end, it's actually the opposite that's happening. The power is really getting denser and denser inside the data center itself. >> So, last question before I let you go. What's your take on the vibe of the show, what's happening here at PI World? It's amazing, the international flavor as I'm walking around the halls. I'm seeing badges and hearing all kinds of languages. I mean, this is pretty hard-core, industrial internet happening right here. >> Oh yeah, I mean the operational technologies and the various applications and industries in which PI is used and leveraged worldwide is phenomenal. And it's a very vibrant show. It's actually quite good, when it comes down to it, a lot of people, the exchange between the end users together from different industries share their tips and tricks on how they've deployed, their various stories are just amazing. So a great, great, great PI World conference for sure. >> All right, good. Well thank you for taking a few minutes and sitting down and sharing the Maya story with us. >> Thank you for having me. >> Absolutely. All right, he's Remi, I'm Jeff. We are at OSIsoft PI World 2018 in downtown San Francisco, we'll be right back, thanks for watching. (electronic music)

(electronic music) >> Narrator: From Gillette stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2018 presented by SiliconANGLE. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and we're at the VTUG Winter Warmer 2018. Always love at these user conferences, and we get to talk to a lot of the users, and we've had a bunch. Next user we have on the program is Erik Kurlanska, who's a systems engineer at MMC. Thanks so much for joining us, Erik. >> Thanks. >> Alright, tell us a little bit about your background. You're coming down here from Maine. The people that run this event are also from Maine. >> Yeah, I mean, it's a nice event. I've been for the past four years, and I learn something new every year. It's a good time. It's a good networking moment for a bunch of people, and there's always something new on the horizon. That's what I like. >> So you're a systems engineer. >> Tell us a little bit about what you do in your role, the industry you're in, things like that. >> Yeah, I'm in the healthcare industry in Maine and like you said, what I do is basically one of the lead virtualization people in my group and we're just basically every day working on VMware and new products coming in, new applications, building them up and testing and that kind of great stuff. >> Can you give us just thumbnail sketches to kind of location, number of servers, number of people on your team? >> Erik: Sure, yeah. >> How do you manage it as to number of VMs or however? >> On our team right now there's three of us and that's just the virtualization team. We have a couple thousand VMs, probably 110 servers, Blades, all Cisco Blades nowadays. And that's the extent of what we have, and for storage we have many, many petabytes of storage. >> Okay, tell me. You're in healthcare. You've got virtualization. The good thing is, there's nothing changing in your environment, right? >> (laughs) Right. >> There's not new requirements from the business. I'm sure they're throwing tons of money at you, and the government stays completely out of your way. So what are some of the challenges you're facing? >> Exactly. The challenges there are, again, it's money. What can you do for such a small amount of money? Again, we're trying to find very good tools to monitor our everything, networking, servers, virtualization. That's one piece that we've had trouble in the past with a good tool to monitor everything across the board. We're just having a hard time trying to find that, to be honest, so it's a struggle. >> Yeah, tell me what tools have you worked through and what's the gap? I always love to hear, it's like, "Okay, hey vendors. "You're listening. Here's a user that saying you are failing "To meet the requirements that they have." So come on, give them product requirements. >> We've tried a few big ones, and we want a monitor. So for instance, from VMware, we've just stood up vRealize, We have vRealize Business, vRealize Operations, Log Insight, bringing all that in now and personally I think some of that should have been just part of the product to start. So it is what it is. But that's a whole subset of tools that we need just to manage our virtualization environment. We also have another tool called Turbonomic. We've used that for years, and it's done pretty well for us. But again on the networking side, that's a whole different department. So those guys have their own separate tools. They use WhatsUp Gold. They've had challenges with that, and all along the way, every different vendor, like we have Epic for one of our major EMRs, and they have their own sets of monitoring tools for just Epic, so it's tough to get one straight answer from one company. We also have another product called ControlUp. I don't know if you're familiar with that one. For all of them to give us one concise answer, it's nearly impossible. >> Yeah, unfortunately we have this joke that single pane of glass is spelled P-A-I-N. >> Exactly. >> Because that is what IT feels when they're trying to do this these days. If you were to have the magic wand out there, what are you looking for? Obviously it needs to be free and support everything, but what are some of the big gaps that you see? >> Part of it is, integration with the management interface tools. We have Cisco's UCS Manager. That's one interface. You have to go to manage this. You can't get there from here kind of thing. I'm from Maine, so. (Stu chuckles) You can't manage your Cisco stuff right from VMware, and then you have ControlUp that you need to go to another pane. There's just 10 panes of glass. You can spend all day looking at 10 different things and get eight to ten different answers. >> I thought vCenter should be at the center of a lot of things there. Don't most of the vendors kind of integrate well? I would think especially all the VMware products would have a similar look and feel now. >> They should. They should. >> They're just not meeting up to what they need to. >> I think they're trying with like Lifecycle Manager for instance from VMware. They're trying to get there, but it's not there yet. It really isn't. If you start greenfield, I would say, and you start with Lifecycle Manager, and you bring in all those products in one fell swoop, it'll probably work great, but for us, that hasn't been the case. >> Okay. Talk about what brings you to an event here. What have you seen so far? What interests you in the keynotes? When are you going to go to the breakouts? I'm sure the hallway conversations are of use. >> Sure. The hallway conversations are one of the big things for us because you meet people in the industry, a lot of them are doing the same thing, using the same tools, having the same problems, and it's great to talk about them and come up with solutions between ourselves and converse in that fashion. It's a great experience to come to these. You learn a lot from a lot of people. >> Any specific technologies or areas that you're specifically interested in digging into? >> So Hyper-Converged, we're trying to get into that a little bit more, and there's three or four major players, and we're evaluating all of them now. I've spoken to other people at other hospitals locally that have some Hyper-Converged, and they're happy with one product versus another, so I'm just trying to, pros and cons of that, see what we can. >> Let me ask, is there a certain business challenge just to simplify overall going into Hyper-Converged? Is the economics of it, the management of it, what's kind of the business objective to look at that space? >> We have a couple smaller hospitals, and they have a lot of legacy storage, a lot of legacy servers and Blades, and again, Hyper-Converged is a good fit for them because they can just plop everything in one unit and call it good, and so we're trying to do that for a couple smaller hospitals and kind of bring them into the fold that way. >> How does cloud fit in your overall picture, or does it fit into your discussion today? Cloud, the SaaS application, everybody's using some, public cloud regulations might be hurting you. But what is the cloud scenario for you? >> Right now we have just a few apps that are cloud-based. And that's it. Not a lot in the cloud because we're healthcare so far. >> Alright, Erik, anything else from kind of the hallway conversation that you're hearing, some of the big challenges you're seeing, or what people are excited about these days? >> I think right now the big thing is the Spectre/Meltdown thing. Nobody really knows what it's going to do. UCS, we're still waiting for Cisco to come out with firmware for the Blades and kind of to go through that testing. VMware came out with some patches, they pulled them back. So it's kind of a big mess, and it worries us a bit. However, all of our Blades, everything is RAM-bound basically for us. We even have most of our Blades have 768 gigs of RAM, but CPUs at 20%. The memory's 90% used, so that's what it is. >> So just if I hear you right, if all of a sudden they said, "Hey, you're going to get 30% less "performance there," you'd be like, "Yawn. That really didn't impact us." >> Exactly. >> It's more the security gaps that you need fixed now. >> And we can't fix them because the solution isn't there. So, yeah. >> Stu: Hoo, boy. >> It's tough. It's a new challenge every day. >> (laughs) Yeah, just last thing. How do you keep up with everything that's going on? >> Well that's, again, a great question. I think it's hard. It gets harder and harder, and they want you to do more with less every day. I'm not sure how we keep up, really. Get a tool that can do everything. That just doesn't exist yet. >> Erik Kurlanska, really appreciate you sharing with your peers, which is really a main function of a user group like this. We're thrilled to be able to share this with our community. I'm Stu Miniman. You're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)