>> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE covering Cisco Live 2018. Brought to you by Cisco, NetApp and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's coverage here in Orlando, Florida at Cisco Live 2018. Our first year here at Cisco Live. We were in Barcelona this past year. Again, Cisco transforming to a next generation set of networking capabilities while maintaining all the existing networks and all the security. I'm John Furrier your host with Stu Miniman my co-host for the next three days. Our next guest is Arun Garg. Welcome to theCUBE. You are the Director of Product Management Converged Infrastructure Group at NetApp. >> Correct, thank you very much for having me on your show and it's a pleasure to meet with you. >> One of the things that we've been covering a lot lately is the NetApp's really rise in the cloud. I mean NetApp's been doing a lot of work on the cloud. I mean I've wrote stories back when Tom Georges was the CEO when Amazon just came on the scene. NetApp has been really into the cloud and from the customer's standpoint but now with storage and elastic resources and server lists, the customers are now startin' to be mindful. >> Absolutely. >> Of how to maximize the scale and with All Flash kind of a perfect storm. What are you guys up to? What's your core thing that you guys are talking about here at Cisco Live? >> So absolutely, thank you. So George Kurian, our CEO at NetApp, is very much in taking us to the next generation and the cloud. Within that I take care of some of the expansion plans we have on FlexPod with Cisco and in that we have got two new things that we are announcing right now. One is the FlexPod for Healthcare which is in FlexPod we've been doing horizontal application so far which are like the data bases, tier one database, as well as applications from Microsoft and virtual desktops. Now we are going vertical. Within the vertical our application, the first one we're looking in the vertical is healthcare. And so it's FlexPod for Healthcare. That's the first piece that we are addressing. >> What's the big thing with update on FlexPod? Obviously FlexPod's been very successful. What's the modernization aspect of it because Cisco's CEO was onstage today talking about Cisco's value proposition, about the old ways now transitioning to a new network architecture in the modern era. What's the update on FlexPod? Take a minute to explain what are the cool, new things going on with FlexPod. >> Correct, so the All Flash FAS, which is the underlying technology, which is driving the FlexPod, has really picked up over the last year as customers keep wanting to improve their infrastructure with better latencies and better performance the All Flash FAS has driven even the FlexPod into the next generation. So that's the place where we are seeing double-digit growth over the last five quarters consistently in FlexPod. So that's a very important development for us. We've also done more of the standard CVDs that we do on SAP and a few other are coming out. So those are all out there. Now we are going to make sure that all these assets can be consumed by the vertical industry in healthcare. And there's another solution we'll talk about, the managed private cloud on FlexPod. >> Yeah, Arun, I'd love to talk about the private cloud. So I think back to when Cisco launched UCS it was the storage partners that really helped drive that modernization for virtualization. NetApp with FlexPod, very successful over the years doing that. As we know, virtualization isn't enough to really be a private cloud. All the things that Chuck Robbins is talking about onstage, how do I modernize, how do I get you know, automation in there? So help us connect the dots as to how we got from you know, a good virtualized platform to this is, I think you said managed private cloud, FlexPod in Cisco. >> Absolutely. So everybody likes to consume a cloud. It's easy to consume a cloud. You go and you click on I need a VM, small, medium, large, and I just want to see a dashboard with how my VMs are doing. But in reality it's more difficult to just build your own cloud. There's complexity associated with it. You need a service platform where you can give a ticket, then you need an orchestration platform where you can set up the infrastructure, then you need a monitoring platform which will show you all of the ways your infrastructure's working. You need a capacity planning tool. There's tens of tools that need to be integrated. So what we have done is we have partnered with some of the premium partners and some DSIs who have already built this. So the risk of a customer using their private cloud infrastructure is minimized and therefore these partners also have a managed service. So when you combine the fact that you have a private cloud infrastructure in the software domain as well as a managed service and you put it on the on-prem FlexPod that are already sold then the customer benefits from having the best of both worlds, a cloud-like experience on their own premise. And that is what we are delivering with this FlexPod managed private cloud solution. >> Talk about the relationship with Cisco. So we're here at Cisco Live you guys have a good relationship with Cisco. What should customers understand about the relationship? What are the top bullet points and value opportunities and what does it mean to the impact for the customer? >> So we, all these solutions we work very closely with the Cisco business unit and we jointly develop these solutions. So within that what we do is there's the BU to BU interaction where the solution is developed and defined. There is a marketing to marketing interaction where the collateral gets created and reviewed by both parties. So you will not put a FlexPod brand unless the two companies agree. >> So it's tightly integrated. >> It's tightly integrated. The sales teams are aligned, the marketing, the communications team, the channel partner team. That's the whole value that the end customer gets because when a partner goes to a high-end enterprise customer he knows that both Cisco and NetApp teams can be brought to the table for the customer to showcase the value as well as help them through it all. >> Yeah, over in one of the other areas that's been talked about this show we talk about modernization. You talk about things like microservices. >> Yes. >> Containers are pretty important. How does that story of containerization fit into FlexPod? >> Absolutely. So containerization helps you get workloads, the cloud-native workloads or the type two native. Type two workloads as Gartner calls them. So our mode two. What we do is we work with the Cisco teams and we already had a CVD design with a hybrid cloud with a Cisco cloud center platform, which is the quicker acquisition. And we showed a design with that. What we are now bringing to the table is the ability for our customers to benefit with a managed service on top of it. So that's the piece we are dealing with the cloud teams. With the Cisco team the ACI fabric is very important to them. So that ACI fabric is visible and shown in our designs whether you do SAP, you do Oracle, you do VDI and you do basic infrastructure or you do the managed private cloud or FlexPod on Healthcare. All of these have the core networking technologies from Cisco, as well as the cloud technologies from Cisco in a form factor or in a manner that easily consumable by our customers. >> Arun, talk about the customer use cases. So say you've got a customer, obviously you guys have a lot of customers together with Cisco, they're doing some complex things with the technology, but for the customer out there that has not yet kinda went down the NetApp Cisco route, what do they do? 'Cause a lot of storage guys are lookin' at All Flash, so check, you guys have that. They want great performance, check. But then they gotta integrate. So what do you say to the folks watching that aren't yet customers about what they should look at and evaluate vis-a-vis your opportunity with them and say the competition? >> So yes, there are customers who are doing all this as separate silos, but the advantage of taking a converged infrastructure approach is that you benefit from the years of man experience or person experience that we have put behind in our labs to architect this, make sure that everything is working correctly and therefore is reduces their deployment time and reduces the risk. And if you want to be agile and faster even in the traditional infrastructure, while you're being asked to go to the cloud you can do it with our FlexPod design guides. If you want the cloud-like experience then you can do it with a managed private cloud solution on your premise. >> So they got options and they got flexibility on migrating to the cloud or architecting that. >> Yes. >> Okay, great, now I'm gonna ask you another question. This comes up a lot on theCUBE and certainly we see it in the industry. One of the trends is verticalization. >> Yes. >> So verticalization is not a new thing. Vertical industry, people go to market that way, they build products that are custom to verticals. But with cloud one of the benefits of cloud and kind of a cloud operations is you have a horizontally scalable capability. So how do you guys look at that, because these verticals, they gotta get closer to the front lines and have apps that are customized. I mean data that's fastly delivered to the app. How should verticals think about architecting storage to maintain the scale of horizontally scalable but yet provide customization into the applications that might be unique to the vertical? >> Okay, so let me give a trend first and then I'll get to the specific. So in the vertical industry, the next trend is industry clouds. For example, you have healthcare clouds and you'll have clouds to specific industries. And the reason is because these industries have to keep their data on-prem. So the data gravity plays a lot of impact in all of these decisions. And the security of their data. So that is getting into industry-specific clouds. The second pieces are analytics. So customers now are finding that data is valuable and the insight you can get from the data are actually more valuable. So what they want is the data on their premise, they want the ability all in their control so to say, they want the ability to not only run their production applications but also the ability to run analytics on top of that. In the specific example for health care what it does is when you have All Flash FAS it provides you a faster response for the patient because the physician is able to get the diagnostics done better if he has some kind of analytics helping him. [Interviewer] - Yeah. >> Plus the first piece I talked about, the rapid deployment is very important because you want to get your infrastructure set up so I can give an example on that too. >> Well before we get to the example, this is an important point because I think this is really the big megatrend. It's not really kinda talked much about but it's pretty happening is that what you just pointed out was it's not just about speeds and feeds and IOPs, the performance criteria to the industry cloud has other new things like data, the role of data, what they're using for the application. >> Correct. >> So it's just you've gotta have table stakes of great, fast storage. >> Yes. >> But it's gotta be integrated into what is becoming a use case for the verticals. Did I get that right? >> Yes, absolutely. So I'll give two examples. One I can name the customer. So they'll come at our booth tomorrow, in a minute here. So LCMC Health, part of UMC, and they have the UMC Medical Center. So when New Orleans had this Katrina disaster in Louisiana, so they came up with they need a hospital, fast. And they decided on FlexPod because within three months with the wire one's architecture and application they could scale their whole IT data center for health care. So that has helped them tremendously to get it up and running. Second is with the All Flash FAS they're able to provide faster response to their customer. So that's a typical example that we see in these kind of industries. >> Arun, thanks for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate it. You guys are doing a great job. In following NetApps recent success lately, as always, NetApp's always goin' the next level. Quick question for you to end the segment. What's your take of Cisco Live this year? What's some of the vibe of the show? So I know it's day one, there's a lot more to come and you're just getting a sense of it. What's the vibe? What's coming out of the show this year? What's the big ah-ha? >> So I attended the keynote today and it was very interesting because Cisco has taken networking to the next level within 10 base networking, its data and analytics where you can put on a subscription mode on all the pieces of the infrastructure networking. And that's exactly the same thing which NetApp is doing, where we are going up in the cloud with this subscription base. And when you add the two subscription base then for us, at least in the managed private cloud solution we can provide the subscription base through the managed private cloud through our managed service provider. So knowing where the industry was going, knowing where Cisco was going and knowing where we want to go, we have come up with this solution which matches both these trends of Cisco as well as NetApp. >> And the number of connected devices going up every day. >> Yes. >> More network connections, more geo domains, it's complicated. >> It is complicated, but if you do it correctly we can help you find a way through it. >> Arun, thank you for coming on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier here on theCUBE with Stu Miniman here with NetApp at Cisco Live 2018. Back with more live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hello everyone welcome to this special presentation, The Future of Converged Infrastructure, my name is David Vellante, and I'll be your host, for this event where the focus is on Dell EMC's converged infrastructure announcement. Nearly a decade ago, modern converged infrastructure really came to the floor in the marketplace, and what you had is compute, storage, and network brought together in a single managed entity. And when you talk to IT people, the impact was roughly a 30 to 50% total cost of ownership reduction, really depending on a number of factors. How much virtualization they had achieved, how complex their existing processees were, how much they could save on database and other software licenses and maintenance, but roughly that 30 to 50% range. Fast forward to 2018 and you're looking at a multibillion dollar market for converged infrastructure. Jeff Boudreau is here, he's the President of the Dell EMC Storage Division, Jeff thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're welcome. So we're going to set up this announcement let me go through the agenda. Jeff and I are going to give an overview of the announcement and then we're going to go to Trey Layton, who's the Chief Technology Officer of the converged infrastructure group at Dell EMC. He's going to focus on the architecture, and some of the announcement details. And then, we're going to go to Cisco Live to a pre-recorded session that we did in Barcelona, and get the Cisco perspective, and then Jeff and I will come back to wrap it up. We also, you might notice we have a crowd chat going on, so underneath this video stream you can ask questions, you got to log in with LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook, I prefer Twitter, kind of an ask me anything crowd chat. We have analysts on, Stu Miniman is hosting that call. We're going to talk about what this announcement is all about, what the customer issues are that are being addressed by this announcement. So Jeff, let's get into it. From your perspective, what's the state of converged infrastructure today? >> Great question. I'm really bullish on CI, in regards to what converged infrastructure and kind of the way the market's going. We see continued interest in the growth of the market of our customers. Driven by the need for simplicity, agility, elasticity of those on-prem resources. Dell EMC pioneered the CI market several years ago, with the simple premise of simplify IT, and our focus and commitment to our customers has not changed of simplifying IT. As our customers continue to seek for new ways to simplify and consolidate infrastructure, we expect more and more of our customers to embrace CI, as a fast and easy way to modernize their infrastructure, and transform IT. >> You talk about transformation, we do a lot of events, and everybody's talking about digital transformation, and IT transformation, what role does converged infrastructure play in those types of transformations, maybe you could give us an example? >> Sure, so first I'd say our results speak for themselves. As I said we pioneered the CI industry, as the market leader, we enabled thousands of customers worldwide to drive business transformation and digital transformation. And when I speak to customers specifically, converged infrastructure is not just about the infrastructure, it's about the operating model, and how they simplify IT. I'd say two of the biggest areas of impact that customers highlight to me, are really about the acceleration of application delivery, and then the other big one is around the increase in operational efficiencies allowing customers to free up resources, to reinvest however they see fit. >> Now since the early days of converged infrastructure Cisco has been a big partner of yours, you guys were kind of quasi-exclusive for awhile, they went out and sought other partners, you went out and sought other partners, a lot of people have questions about that relationship, what's your perspective on that relationship. >> So our partnership with Cisco is strong as ever. We're proud of this category we've created together. We've been on this journey for a long time we've been working together, and that partnership will continue as we go forward. In full transparency there are of course some topics where we disagree, just like any normal relationship we have disagreements, an example of that would be HCI, but in the CI space our partnership is as strong as ever. We'll have thousands of customers between the two of us, that we will continue to invest and innovate together on. And I think later in this broadcast you're going to hear directly from Cisco on that, so we're both doubling down on the partnership, and we're both committed to CI. >> I want to ask you about leadership generally, and then specifically as it relates to converged infrastructure and hyper converged. My question is this, hyper converged is booming, it's a high growth market. I sometimes joke that Dell EMC is now your leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrants, 101 Gartner Magic Quadrants out of the 99. They're just leading everything and I think both the CI and the HCI categories, what's your take, is CI still relevant? >> First I'd say it's great to come from a leadership position so I thank you for bringing that up, I think it's really important. As Micheal talks about being the essential infrastructure company, that's huge for us as Dell Technologies, so we're really proud of that and we want to lean into that strength. Now on HCI vs CI, to me it's an AND world. Everybody wants to get stock that's in either or, to me it's about the AND story. All our customers are going on a journey, in regards to how they transform their businesses. But at the end of the day, if I took my macro view, and took a step back, it's about the data. The data's the critical asset. The good news for me and for our team is data always continues to grow, and is growing at an amazing rate. And as that critical asset, customers are really kind of thinking about a modern data strategy as they drive foreword. And as part of that, they're looking at how to store, protect, secure, analyze, move that data, really unleashing that data to provide value back to their businesses. So with all of that, not all data is going to be created equal, as part of that, as they build out those strategies, it's going to be a journey, in regards to how they do it. And if that's software defined, vs purpose built arrays, vs converged, or hyper converged, or even cloud, those deployment models, we, Dell EMC, and Dell Technologies want to be that strategic partner, that trusted advisor to help them on that journey. >> Alright Jeff, thanks for helping me with the setup. I want to ask you to hang around a little bit. >> Jeff: Sure. >> We're going to go to a video, and then we're going to bring back Trey Layton, talk about the architecture so keep it right there, we'll be right back. >> Announcer: Dell EMC has long been number one in converged infrastructure, providing technology that simplifies all aspects of IT, and enables you to achieve better business outcomes, faster, and we continue to lead through constant innovation. Introducing, the VxBlock System 1000, the next generation of converged infrastructure from Dell EMC. Featuring enhanced life cycle management, and a broad choice of technologies, to support a vast array of applications and resources. From general purpose to mission critical, big data to specialized workloads, VxBlock 1000 is the industry's first converged infrastructure system, with the flexible data services, power, and capacity to handle all data center workloads, giving you the ultimate in business agility, data center efficiency, and operational simplicity. Including best-of-breed storage and data protection from Dell EMC, and computer networking from Cisco. (orchestral music) Converged in one system, these technologies enable you to flexibly adapt resources to your evolving application's needs, pool resources to maximize utilization and increase ROI, deliver a turnkey system in lifecycle assurance experience, that frees you to focus on innovation. Four times storage types, two times compute types, and six times faster updates, and VME ready, and future proof for extreme performance. VxBlock 1000, the number one in converged now all-in-one system. Learn more about Dell EMC VxBlock 1000, at DellEMC.com/VxBlock. >> We're back with Trey Layton who's the Senior Vice President and CTO of converged at Dell EMC. Trey it's always a pleasure, good to see you. >> Dave, good to see you as well. >> So we're eight years into Vblock, take us back to the converged infrastructure early days, what problems were you trying to solve with CI. >> Well one of the problems with IT in general is it's been hard, and one of the reasons why it's been hard is all the variability that customers consume. And how do you integrate all that variability in a sustaining manner, to maintain the assets so it can support the business. And, the thing that we've learned is, the original recipe that we had for Vblock, was to go at and solve that very problem. We have referred to that as life cycle. Manage the life cycle services of the biggest inner assets that you're deploying. And we have created some great intellectual property, some great innovation around helping minimize the complexity associated with managing the life cycle of a very complex integration, by way of, one of the largest data center assets that people operate in their environment. >> So you got thousands and thousands of customers telling you life cycle management is critical. They're shifting their labor resource to more strategic activities, is that what's going on? Well there's so much variation and complexity in just maintaining the different integration points, that they're spending an inordinate amount of their time, a lot of nights and weekends, on understanding and figuring out which software combinations, which configuration combinations you need to operate. What we do as an organization, and have done since inception is, we manage that complexity for them. We delivery them an outcome based architecture that is pre-integrated, and we sustain that integration over it's life, so they spend less time doing that, and letting the experts who actually build the components focus on maintaining those integrations. >> So as an analyst I always looked at converged infrastructure as an evolutionary trend, bringing together storage, servers, networking, bespoke components. So my question is, where's the innovation underneath converged infrastructure. >> So I would say the innovation is in two areas. We're blessed with a lot of technology innovations that come from our partner, and our own companies, Dell EMC and Cisco. Cisco produces wonderful innovations in the space of networking compute, in the context of Vblock. Dell EMC, storage innovations, data protection, et cetera. We harmonize all of these very complex integrations in a manner where an organization can put those advanced integrations into solving business problems immediately. So there's two vectors of innovation. There are the technology components that we are acquiring, to solve business problems, and there's the method at which we integrate them, to get to the business of solving problems. >> Okay, let's get into the announcement. What are you announcing, what's new, why should we care. >> We are announcing the VxBlock 1000, and the interesting thing about Vblocks over the years, is they have been individual system architectures. So a compute technology, integrated with a particular storage architecture, would produce a model of Vblock. With VxBlock 1000, we're actually introducing an architecture that provides a full gamut of array optionality for customers. Both blade and rack server options, for customers on the UCS compute side, and before we would integrate data protection technologies as an extension or an add-on into the architecture, data protection is native to the offer. In addition to that, unstructured data storage. So being able to include unstructured data into the architecture as one singular architecture, as opposed to buying individualized systems. >> Okay, so you're just further simplifying the underlying infrastructure which is going to save me even more time? >> Producing a standard which can adapt to virtually any use case that a customer has in a data center environment. Giving them the ability to expand and grow that architecture, as their workload dictates, in their environment, as opposed to buying a system to accommodate one workload, buying another system to accommodate another workload, this is kind of breaking the barriers of traditional CI, and moving it foreword so that we can create an adaptive architecture, that can accommodate not only the technologies available today, but the technologies on the horizon tomorrow. >> Okay so it's workload diversity, which means greater asset leverage from that underlying infrastructure. >> Trey: Absolutely. >> Can you give us some examples, how do you envision customers using this? >> So I would talk specifically about customers that we have today. And when they deploy, or have deployed Vblocks in the past. We've done wonderful by building architectures that accommodate, or they're tailor made for certain types of workloads. And so a customer environment would end up acquiring a Vblock model 700, to accommodate an SAP workload for example. They would acquire a Vblock 300, or 500 to accommodate a VDI workload. And then as those workloads would grow, they would grow those individualized systems. What it did was, it created islands of stranded resource capacities. Vblock 1000 is about bringing all those capabilities into a singular architecture, where you can grow the resources based on pools. And so as your work load shifts in your environment, you can reallocate resources to accommodate the needs of that workload, as opposed to worrying about stranded capacity in the architecture. >> Okay where do you go from here with the architecture, can you share with us, to the extent that you can, a little roadmap, give us a vision as to how you see this playing out over the next several years. >> Well, one of the reasons why we did this was to simplify, and make it easier to operate, these very complex architectures that everyone's consuming around the world. Vblock has always been about simplifying complex technologies in the data center. There are a lot of innovations on the horizon in VME, for example, next generation compute platforms. There are new generation fabric services, that are emerging. VxBlock 1000 is the place at which you will see all of these technologies introduced, and our customers won't have to wait on new models of Vblock to consume those technologies, they will be resident in them upon their availability to the market. >> The buzz word from the vendor community is future proof, but your saying, you'll be able to, if you buy today, you'll be able to bring in things like NVME and these new technologies down the road. >> The architecture inherently supports the idea of adapting to new technologies as they emerge, and will consume those integrations, as a part of the architectural standard footprint, for the life of the architecture. >> Alright excellent Trey, thanks very much for that overview. Cisco obviously a huge partner of yours, with this whole initiative, many many years. A lot of people have questioned where that goes, so we have a segment from Cisco Live, Stu Miniman is out there, let's break to Stu, then we'll come back and pick it up from there. Thanks for watching. >> Thanks Dave, I'm Stu Miniman, and we're here at Cisco Live 2018 in Barcelona, Spain. Happy to be joined on the program by Nigel Moulton the EMEA CTO of Dell EMC, and Siva Sivakumar, who's the Senior Director of Data Center Solutions at Cisco, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining me. >> Thanks Stu. >> Looking at the long partnership of Dell and Cisco, Siva, talk about the partnership first. >> Absolutely. If you look back in time, when we launched UCS, the very first major partnership we brought, and the converged infrastructure we brought to the market was Vblock, it really set the trend for how customers should consume compute, network, and storage together. And we continue to deliver world class technologies on both sides and the partnership continues to thrive as we see tremendous adoption from our customers. So we are here, several years down, still a very vibrant partnership in trying to get the best product for the customers. >> Nigel would love to get your perspective. >> Siva's right I think I'd add, it defined a market, if you think what true conversion infrastructure is, it's different, and we're going to discuss some more about that as we go through. The UCS fabric is unique, in the way that it ties a network fabric to a compute fabric, and when you bring those technologies together, and converge them, and you have a partnership like Cisco, you have a partnership with us, yeah it's going to be a fantastic result for the market because the market moves on, and I think, VxBlock actually helped us achieve that. >> Alright so Siva we understand there's billions of reasons why Cisco and Dell would want to keep this partnership going, but talk about from an innovation standpoint, there's the new VxBlock 1000, what's new, talk about what's the innovation here. >> Absolutely. If you look at the VxBlock perspective, the 1000 perspective, first of all it simplifies an extremely fast successful product to the next level. It simplifies the storage options, and it provides a seamless way to consume those technologies. From a Cisco perspective, as you know we are in our fifth generation of UCS platform, continues to be a world class platform, leading blade service in the industry. But we also bring the innovation of rack mount servers, as well as 40 gig fabric, larger scale, fiber channel technology as well. As we bring our compute, network, as well as a sound fabric technology together, with world class storage portfolio, and then simplify that for a single pane of glass consumption model. That's absolutely the highest level of innovation you're going to find. >> Nigel, I think back in the early days the joke was you could have a Vblock anyway you want, as long as it's black. Obviously a lot of diversity in product line, but what's new and different here, how does this impact new customers and existing customers. >> I think there's a couple of things to pick up on, what Trey said, what Siva said. So the simplification piece, the way in which we do release certification matrix, the way in which you combine a single software image to manage these multiple discreet components, that is greatly simplified in VxBlock 1000. Secondly you remove a model number, because historically you're right, you bought a three series, a five series, and a seven series, and that sort of defined the architecture. This is now a system wide architecture. So those technologies that you might of thought of as being discreet before, or integrated at an RCM level that was perhaps a little complex for some people, that's now dramatically simplified. So those are two things that I think we amplify, one is the simplification and two, you're removing a model number and moving to a system wide architecture. >> Want to give you both the opportunity, gives us a little bit, what's the future when you talk about the 1000 system, future innovations, new use cases. >> Sure, I think if you look at the way enterprise are consuming, the demand for more powerful systems that'll bring together more consolidation, and also address the extensive data center migration opportunities we see, is very critical, that means the customers are really looking at whether it is a in-memory database that scales to, much larger scale than before, or large scale cluster databases, or even newer workloads for that matter, the appetite for a larger system, and the need to have it in the market, continues to grow. We see a huge install base of our customers, as well as new customers looking at options in the market, truly realize, the strength of the portfolio that each one of us brings to the table, and bringing the best-of-breed, whether it is today, or in the future from an innovation standpoint, this is absolutely the way that we are approaching building our partnership and building new solutions here. >> Nigel, when you're talking to customers out there, are they coming saying, I'm going to need this for a couple of months, I mean this is an investment they're making for a couple years, why is this a partnership built to last. >> An enterprise class customer certainly is looking for a technology that's synonymous with reliability, availability, performance. And if you look at what VxBlock has traditionally done and what the 1000 offers, you see that. But Siva's right, these application architectures are going to change. So if you can make an investment in a technology set now that keeps the premise of reliability, availability, and performance to you today, but when you look at future application architectures around high capacity memory, adjacent to a high performance CPU, you're almost in a position where you are preparing the ground for what that application architecture will need, and the investments that people make in the VxBlock system with the UCS power underneath at the compute layer, it's significant, because it lays out a very clear path to how you will integrate future application architectures with existing application architectures. >> Nigel Moulton, Siva Sivakumar, thank you so much for joining, talking about the partnership and the future. >> Siva: Thank you. >> Nigel: Pleasure. >> Sending back to Dave in the US, thanks so much for watching The Cube from Cisco Live Barcelona. >> Thank you. >> Okay thanks Stu, we're back here with Jeff Boudreau. We talked a little bit earlier about the history of conversion infrastructure, some of the impacts that we've seen in IT transformations, Trey took us through the architecture with some of the announcement details, and of course we heard from Cisco, was a lot of fun in Barcelona. Jeff bring it home, what are the take aways. >> Some of the key take aways I have is just I want to make sure everybody knows Dell EMC's continued commitment to modernizing infrastructure for conversion infrastructure. In addition to that was have a strong partnership with Cisco as you heard from me and you also heard from Cisco, that we both continue to invest and innovate in these spaces. In addition to that we're going to continue our leadership in CI, this is critical, and it's extremely important to Dell, and EMC, and Dell EMC's Cisco relationship. And then lastly, that we're going to continue to deliver on our customer promise to simplify IT. >> Okay great, thank you very much for participating here. >> I appreciate it. >> Now we're going to go into the crowd chat, again, it's an ask me anything. What make Dell EMC so special, what about security, how are the organizations affected by converged infrastructure, there's still a lot of, roll your own going on. There's a price to pay for all this integration, how is that price justified, can you offset that with TCO. So let's get into that, what are the other business impacts, go auth in with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, Twitter is my preferred. Let's get into it thanks for watching everybody, we'll see you in the crowd chat. >> I want IT to be dial tone service, where it's always available for our providers to access. To me, that is why IT exists. So our strategy at the hardware and software level is to ruthlessly standardize leverage in a converged platform technology. We want to create IT almost like a vending machine, where a user steps up to our vending machine, they select the product they want, they put in their cost center, and within seconds that product is delivered to that end user. And we really need to start running IT like a business. Currently we have a VxBlock that we will run our University of Vermont Medical Center epic install on. Having good performance while the provider is within that epic system is key to our foundation of IT. Having the ability to combine the compute, network, and storage in one aspect in one upgrade, where each component is aligned and regression tested from a Dell Technology perspective, really makes it easy as an IT individual to do an upgrade once or twice a year versus continually trying to keep each component of that infrastructure footprint upgraded and aligned. I was very impressed with the VxBlock 1000 from Dell Technologies, specifically a few aspects of it that really intrigued me. With the VxBlock 1000, we now have the ability to mix and match technologies within that frame. We love the way the RCM process works, from a converged perspective, the ability to bring the compute, the storage, and network together, and trust that Dell Technologies is going to upgrade all those components in a seamless manner, really makes it easier from an IT professional to continue to focus on what's really important to our organization, provider and patient outcomes.

>> Announcer: Live from San Fransisco It's theCUBE Covering PURE Accelerate 2017. Brought to you by PURESTORAGE. >> Welcome back to PURE Accelerate. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Stu Miniman. This is PURE Accelerate. We're here at Pier 70. Brian McDaniel is here he's an infrastructure architect at the Baylor College of Medicine, not to be confused with Baylor University in Waco Texas, anymore. Brian Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me appreciate it. >> You're very welcome. Tell us about the Baylor College of Medicine. >> So, Baylor College of Medicine is a, first and foremost, a teaching facility but also the leader in research and development for healthcare in the Texas Medical Center in Houston Texas. We currently employ roughly 1,500 physicians and so they occupy a multitude of institutions, not only at Baylor but other facilities and hospitals in and around the Texas Medical Center. >> So, it's kind of' healthcare morning here Stu. We've been talking about electronic medical records, meaningful use, the Affordable Care Act, potential changes there, HIPAA, saving lives. These are big issues. >> We're not at the HIMSS Conference Dave? >> We should be at HIMMS. So these are big issues for any organization in healthcare. It's just exacerbates the challenges on IT. So, I wonder if you can talk about some of the drivers in your business, compliance, and in new tech and maybe share with us some of the things that you're seeing. >> Absolutely so first and foremost, we are an Epic system shop. That's our EMR. So, from a enterprise and clinical operation, that is our number one mission critical application. It provides your electronic medical records to our staff, regardless of where they're physically located at. So that alone is a demanding type of solution if you will, the mobility aspect of it. Delivering that in a fast manner and a repeatable manner is upmost important to our physicians because they're actually seeing patients and getting to your records and being able to add notes and collaborate with other institutions if necessary. So, time to market is very important and accessibility is also up there. >> Right so, you mentioned that collaboration and part of that collaboration is so much data now, being able to harness that data and share it. Data explodes everywhere but in healthcare, there's so much data to the extent we start instrumenting things. What are you guys doing with all that data? >> Right now, it lives within the clinical application, right in Epic, but as you pointed out that is where the value is. that is where your crown jewels so to speak are at. That data is now being looked at as a possible access point outside of the clinical operation. So, it's environment is going to be even more important going forward, when you look to branch out into some of the basic sides in more of a research, to gain access to that clinical data. That historically has been problematic for the research to be done accessing that information. >> So, in the corporate we like to think of, from an IT perspective, you got to run the business, you got to grow the business, you got to transform the business. It's a little different in healthcare. You kind of got to comply. A lot of your time is spent on compliance and regulation changes and keeping up with that. And then there's got to be a fair amount that's at least attempting to do transformation and in kind of keeping up with the innovations. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Absolutely, particularly on the innovation side, we work closely with out partners at Epic and we work to decide roadmaps and how that fits into the Baylor world. Case in point, a year ago we were set to go to the new version of Epic, which was 2015. And Epic is nice enough to lay out requirements for you and say, here's what your system needs to meet in order to comply with Epic standards. So, they give you a seal of approval, so to speak. And there's monetary implications for not meeting those requirements. So it's actually dollars and cents. It's not just , we want you to meet this. If you do then there's advantages to meeting it. So, they provided that to us and went though the normal testing phases and evaluations of our current platform, both from compute and storage. And honestly we struggled to meet their requirements with our legacy systems. So the team was challenged to say well, what can we do to meet this? We have our historical infrastructures, so if we're going to deviate from that, let's really deviate and look at what's available to the market. So, Flash comes to mind immediately. So, there's a multitude of vendors that make Flash storage products. So we started meeting with all of 'em, doing our fact finding and our data gathering, meeting with all of 'em. First and foremost, they have to be Epic certified. That eliminated a couple of contenders right off the bat. Right? You're not certified. >> I would expect some of the startups especially. >> It did. Some of the smaller, Flash vendors, for example, one of 'em came in and we said, well, what do you do with Epic? And they said what's Epic. And you kind of scratch your head and say thank you. >> Thank you for playing. >> Here's the door. So, it eliminates people but then when we meet with PURE, and we talked to them and we meet 'em and you get to really know that the family and the culture that they bring with the technology. Yes it's got to be fast but Flash is going to be fast. What else can you do? And that's where you start learning about how it was born on Flash, how it was native to Flash and so you get added benefits to the infrastructure by looking at that type of technology, which ultimately led us there, where we're at running Epic on our Flash arrays. >> And Brian, you're using the Flash stack configuration of converge infrastructure. It sounds like it was PURE that lead you that way as opposed to Cisco? Could you maybe walk us through that? >> That's very interesting, so we're a UCS shop. We were before PURE. So when PURE came in, the fact that they had a validated design with the Flash stack infrastructure, made it all that more easier to implement the PURE solution because it just is modular enough to fit in with our current infrastructure. That made it very appealing that we didn't have to change or alter much. We just looked at the validated design that says, here's your reference architecture, how it applies to the Flash stack. You already have UCS. We love it, we're a big fan. And here's how to implement it. And it made the time to market, to get production work loads on it, very quick. >> And the CVD that you got from Cisco, that's Cisco plus PURE but was it healthcare Epic specific or was that the PURE had some knowledge for that that they pulled in? >> So, that was one of the value adds that we feel PURE brought was the Epic experience. And whether that's scripting, the backups, and if you're familiar with Epic, the environmental refreshes that they have to do. There's seven Epic environments. And they all have to refresh off of each other and play off of each other so, >> So you have a window that you have to hit right. >> And you do right? And historically that window's been quite large. And now, not so much which makes everybody happy. >> Hey, that's what weekends are for. >> Absolutely, yeah, our DBAs attest to that right? So, we would like to think we've made their world and life a little bit more enjoyable 'cause those weekends now, they're not having to babysit the Epic refreshes. Back to the point of Epic experience, that was instrumental in the decision makings from a support with the PURESTORAGE help desk, awareness of what it takes to run Epic on PURE, and then going forward knowing that there's a partnership behind Epic and PURE and certainly Baylor College of Medicine as we continue to look at the next versions of Epic, whether that's 2018 and on to 2020, whatever that decision is, we know that we have a solid foundation now to grow. >> And Brian I'm curious, you've been a Cisco shop for a while, Cisco has lots of partnerships as well as, they've got a hyper-converged offering that they sell themselves. What was your experience working with Cisco and do they just let you choose and you said, I want PURE and they're like, great? Do you know? What was that like? >> To your point, there's validated designs for many customers and Cisco is kind of at the hub of that, that core with the compute and memory of the blade systems, the UCS. They liked the fact that we went with PURE 'cause it does me a validated design. And they have others with other vendors. The challenge there is how do they really integrate with each other from tools to possibly automation down the road, and how do they truly integrate with each other. 'Cause we did bring in some of the other validated design architecture organizations and I think we did our due diligence and looked at 'em to see how they differentiate between each other. And ultimately, we wanted something that was new and different approach to storage. It wasn't just layering your legacy OS on a bunch of Flash drives and call it good. Something that was natively born to take advantage of that technology. And that's what ultimately led us to PURE. >> Well, PURE has a point of view on the so called hyper-converged space. You heard Scott Dietzen talking this morning. What's your perspective on hyper-convergence? >> Hyper-converge is one of those buzz words that I think gets thrown out of there kind of off the cuff if you will. But people hear it and get excited about it. But what type of workloads are you looking to take advantage of it? Is it truly hyper-converged or is it just something that you can say you're doing because it sounds cool? I think to some degree, people are led astray on the buzzwords of the technology where they get down to say, what's going to take advantage of it? What kind of application are you putting on it? If your application, in our case, can be written by a grad student 20 years ago that a lab is still using, it does it make sense to put it on hyper-converged? No, because it can't take advantage of the architecture or the design. So, in a lot of ways, we're waiting and seeing. And the reason we didn't go to a hyper-converged platform is a, Epic support and b, we were already changing enough to stay comfortable with the environment and knowing that come Monday morning, doctors will be seeing patients and we're already changing enough, that was another layer that we chose not to change. We went with a standard UCS configuration that everyone was already happy with. That made a significant difference from an operational perspective. >> Essentially, your processes are tightly tied to Epic and the workflow associated with that. So from an infrastructure perspective, it sounds like you just don't want it to be in the way. >> We don't. The last thing we want in infrastructure getting in the way. And quite frankly, it was in the way. Whether that was meeting latency requirements or IOPS requirements from the Cache database or the Clarity database within the Epic system, or if was just all of are just taking a little bit longer than they expect. We don't want to be that bottleneck, if you will, we want them to be able to see patients faster, run reports faster, gain access to that valuable data in a much faster way to enable them to go about their business and not have to worry about infrastructure. >> Brian, PURE said that they had, I believe it's like 25 new announcements made this morning, a lot of software features. Curious, is there anything that jumped out at you, that you've been waiting for and anything still on your to do list that you're hoping for PURE or PURE and it's extended ecosystem to deliver for you? >> Great question, so at the top of that list is the replication of the arrays, whether that's in an offsite data center or a colo and how that applies to an Epic environment that has to go through this flux of refreshes, and from a disaster or business continuity standpoint, we're actively pursuing that, and how that's going to fit with Baylor. So, we're very excited to see what our current investment, free of charge by the way, once you do the upgrade to 5.0, is to take advantage of those features, with replication being one of 'em. >> And then, I thought I heard today, Third Sight is a service. Right? So you don't have to install your own infrastructure. So, I'm not sure exactly what that's all about. I got to peel the onion on that one. >> To be determined right? When we look at things like that, particularly with Epic, we have to be careful because that is the HIPAA, PHI, that's your records, yours and mine, medical records right? You just don't want that, if I told you it's going to be hosted in a public cloud. Wait a minute. Where? No it's not. We don't want to be on the 10 o'clock news right? However, there's things like SAP HANA and other enterprise applications that we certainly could look at leveraging that technology. >> Excellent, we listen, thank you very much Brian for coming on theCUBE. We appreciate your perspectives and sort of educating us a little bit on your business and your industry anyway. And have a great rest of the show. >> Yeah, thank you very much. Appreciate it. >> You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody. This is theCUBE. We're back live right after this short break from PURE Accelerate 2017. Be right back.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for day two of three days of exclusive coverage from the Cube here at HPE Discover 2017. Our two next guests is Bill Mannel, VP and General Manager of HPC and AI for HPE. Bill, great to see you. And Dr. Nick Nystrom, senior of research at Pittsburgh's Supercomputer Center. Welcome to The Cube, thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> My pleasure >> Thanks for having us. >> As we wrap up day two, first of all before we get started, love the AI, love the high performance computing. We're seeing great applications for compute. Everyone now sees that a lot of compute actually is good. That's awesome. What is the Pittsburgh Supercomputer Center? Give a quick update and describe what that is. >> Sure. The quick update is we're operating a system called Bridges. Bridges is operating for the National Science Foundation. It democratizes HPC. It brings people who have never used high performance computing before to be able to use HPC seamlessly, almost as a cloud. It unifies HPC big data and artificial intelligence. >> So who are some of the users that are getting access that they didn't have before? Could you just kind of talk about some of the use cases of the organizations or people that you guys are opening this up to? >> Sure. I think one of the newest communities that's very significant is deep learning. So we have collaborations between the University of Pittsburgh life sciences and the medical center with Carnegie Mellon, the machine learning researchers. We're looking to apply AI machine learning to problems in breast and lung cancer. >> Yeah, we're seeing the data. Talk about some of the innovations that HPE's bringing with you guys in the partnership, because we're seeing, people are seeing the results of using big data and deep learning and breakthroughs that weren't possible before. So not only do you have the democratization cool element happening, you have a tsunami of awesome open source code coming in from big places. You see Google donating a bunch of machine learning libraries. Everyone's donating code. It's like open bar and open source, as I say, and the young kids that are new are the innovators as well, so not just us systems guys, but a lot of young developers are coming in. What's the innovation? Why is this happening? What's the ah-ha moment? Is it just cloud, is it a combination of things, talk about it. >> It's a combination of all the big data coming in, and then new techniques that allow us to analyze and get value from it and from that standpoint. So the traditional HPC world, typically we built equations which then generated data. Now we're actually kind of doing the reverse, which is we take the data and then build equations to understand the data. So it's a different paradigm. And so there's more and more energy understanding those two different techniques of kind of getting two of the same answers, but in a different way. >> So Bill, you and I talked in London last year. >> Yes. With Dr. Gho. And we talked a lot about SGI and what that acquisition meant to you guys. So I wonder if you could give us a quick update on the business? I mean it's doing very well, Meg talked about it on the conference call this last quarter. Really high point and growing. What's driving the growth, and give us an update on the business. >> Sure. And I think the thing that's driving the growth is all this data and the fact that customers want to get value from it. So we're seeing a lot of growth in industries like financial services, like in manufacturing, where folks are moving to digitization, which means that in the past they might have done a lot of their work through experimentation. Now they're moving it to a digital format, and they're simulating everything. So that's driven a lot more HPC over time. As far as the SGI, integration is concern. We've integrated about halfway, so we're at about the halfway point. And now we've got the engineering teams together and we're driving a road map and a new set of products that are coming out. Our Gen 10-based products are on target, and they're going to be releasing here over the next few months. >> So Nick, from your standpoint, when you look at, there's been an ebb and flow in the supercomputer landscape for decades. All the way back to the 70s and the 80s. So from a customer perspective, what do you see now? Obviously China's much more prominent in the game. There's sort of an arms race, if you will, in computing power. From a customer's perspective, what are you seeing, what are you looking for in a supplier? >> Well, so I agree with you, there is this arms race for exaflops. Where we are really focused right now is enabling data-intensive applications, looking at big data service, HPC is a service, really making things available to users to be able to draw on the large data sets you mentioned, to be able to put the capability class computing, which will go to exascale, together with AI, and data and Linux under one platform, under one integrated fabric. That's what we did with HPE for Bridges. And looking to build on that in the future, to be able to do the exascale applications that you're referring to, but also to couple on data, and to be able to use AI with classic simulation to make those simulations better. >> So it's always good to have a true practitioner on The Cube. But when you talk about AI and machine learning and deep learning, John and I sometimes joke, is it same wine, new bottle, or is there really some fundamental shift going on that just sort of happened to emerge in the last six to nine months? >> I think there is a fundamental shift. And the shift is due to what Bill mentioned. It's the availability of data. So we have that. We have more and more communities who are building on that. You mentioned the open source frameworks. So yes, they're building on the TensorFlows, on the Cafes, and we have people who have not been programmers. They're using these frameworks though, and using that to drive insights from data they did not have access to. >> These are flipped upside down, I mean this is your point, I mean, Bill pointed it out, it's like the models are upside down. This is the new world. I mean, it's crazy, I don't believe it. >> So if that's the case, and I believe it, it feels like we're entering this new wave of innovation which for decades we talked about how we march to the cadence of Moore's Law. That's been the innovation. You think back, you know, your five megabyte disk drive, then it went to 10, then 20, 30, now it's four terabytes. Okay, wow. Compared to what we're about to see, I mean it pales in comparison. So help us envision what the world is going to look like in 10 or 20 years. And I know it's hard to do that, but can you help us get our minds around the potential that this industry is going to tap? >> So I think, first of all, I think the potential of AI is very hard to predict. We see that. What we demonstrated in Pittsburgh with the victory of Libratus, the poker-playing bot, over the world's best humans, is the ability of an AI to beat humans in a situation where they have incomplete information, where you have an antagonist, an adversary who is bluffing, who is reacting to you, and who you have to deal with. And I think that's a real breakthrough. We're going to see that move into other aspects of life. It will be buried in apps. It will be transparent to a lot of us, but those sorts of AI's are going to influence a lot. That's going to take a lot of IT on the back end for the infrastructure, because these will continue to be compute-hungry. >> So I always use the example of Kasperov and he got beaten by the machine, and then he started a competition to team up with a supercomputer and beat the machine. Yeah, humans and machines beat machines. Do you expect that's going to continue? Maybe both your opinions. I mean, we're just sort of spitballing here. But will that augmentation continue for an indefinite period of time, or are we going to see the day that it doesn't happen? >> I think over time you'll continue to see progress, and you'll continue to see more and more regular type of symmetric type workloads being done by machines, and that allows us to do the really complicated things that the human brain is able to better process than perhaps a machine brain, if you will. So I think it's exciting from the standpoint of being able to take some of those other roles and so forth, and be able to get those done in perhaps a more efficient manner than we're able to do. >> Bill, talk about, I want to get your reaction to the concept of data. As data evolves, you brought up the model, I like the way you're going with that, because things are being flipped around. In the old days, I want to monetize my data. I have data sets, people are looking at their data. I'm going to make money from my data. So people would talk about how we monetizing the data. >> Dave: Old days, like two years ago. >> Well and people actually try to solve and monetize their data, and this could be use case for one piece of it. Other people are saying no, I'm going to open, make people own their own data, make it shareable, make it more of an enabling opportunity, or creating opportunities to monetize differently. In a different shift. That really comes down to the insights question. What's your, what trends do you guys see emerging where data is much more of a fabric, it's less of a discreet, monetizable asset, but more of an enabling asset. What's your vision on the role of data? As developers start weaving in some of these insights. You mentioned the AI, I think that's right on. What's your reaction to the role of data, the value of the data? >> Well, I think one thing that we're seeing in some of our, especially our big industrial customers is the fact that they really want to be able to share that data together and collect it in one place, and then have that regularly updated. So if you look at a big aircraft manufacturer, for example, they actually are putting sensors all over their aircraft, and in realtime, bringing data down and putting it into a place where now as they're doing new designs, they can access that data, and use that data as a way of making design trade-offs and design decision. So a lot of customers that I talk to in the industrial area are really trying to capitalize on all the data possible to allow them to bring new insights in, to predict things like future failures, to figure out how they need to maintain whatever they have in the field and those sorts of things at all. So it's just kind of keeping it within the enterprise itself. I mean, that's a challenge, a really big challenge, just to get data collected in one place and be able to efficiently use it just within an enterprise. We're not even talking about sort of pan-enterprise, but just within the enterprise. That is a significant change that we're seeing. Actually an effort to do that and see the value in that. >> And the high performance computing really highlights some of these nuggets that are coming out. If you just throw compute at something, if you set it up and wrangle it, you're going to get these insights. I mean, new opportunities. >> Bill: Yeah, absolutely. >> What's your vision, Nick? How do you see the data, how do you talk to your peers and people who are generally curious on how to approach it? How to architect data modeling and how to think about it? >> I think one of the clearest examples on managing that sort of data comes from the life sciences. So we're working with researchers at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and the Institute for Precision Medicine at Pitt Cancer Center. And there it's bringing together the large data as Bill alluded to. But there it's very disparate data. It is genomic data. It is individual tumor data from individual patients across their lifetime. It is imaging data. It's the electronic health records. And trying to be able to do this sort of AI on that to be able to deliver true precision medicine, to be able to say that for a given tumor type, we can look into that and give you the right therapy, or even more interestingly, how can we prevent some of these issues proactively? >> Dr. Nystrom, it's expensive doing what you do. Is there a commercial opportunity at the end of the rainbow here for you or is that taboo, I mean, is that a good thing? >> No, thank you, it's both. So as a national supercomputing center, our resources are absolutely free for open research. That's a good use of our taxpayer dollars. They've funded these, we've worked with HP, we've designed the system that's great for everybody. We also can make this available to industry at an extremely low rate because it is a federal resource. We do not make a profit on that. But looking forward, we are working with local industry to let them test things, to try out ideas, especially in AI. A lot of people want to do AI, they don't know what to do. And so we can help them. We can help them architect solutions, put things on hardware, and when they determine what works, then they can scale that up, either locally on prem, or with us. >> This is a great digital resource. You talk about federally funded. I mean, you can look at Yosemite, it's a state park, you know, Yellowstone, these are natural resources, but now when you start thinking about the goodness that's being funded. You want to talk about democratization, medicine is just the tip of the iceberg. This is an interesting model as we move forward. We see what's going on in government, and see how things are instrumented, some things not, delivery of drugs and medical care, all these things are coalescing. How do you see this digital age extending? Because if this continues, we should be doing more of these, right? >> We should be. We need to be. >> It makes sense. So is there, I mean I just not up to speed on what's going on with federally funded-- >> Yeah, I think one thing that Pittsburgh has done with the Bridges machine, is really try to bring in data and compute and all the different types of disciplines in there, and provide a place where a lot of people can learn, they can build applications and things like that. That's really unusual in HPC. A lot of times HPC is around big iron. People want to have the biggest iron basically on the top 500 list. This is where the focus hasn't been on that. This is where the focus has been on really creating value through the data, and getting people to utilize it, and then build more applications. >> You know, I'll make an observation. When we first started doing The Cube, we observed that, we talked about big data, and we said that the practitioners of big data, are where the guys are going to make all the money. And so far that's proven true. You look at the public big data companies, none of them are making any money. And maybe this was sort of true with ERP, but not like it is with big data. It feels like AI is going to be similar, that the consumers of AI, those people that can find insights from that data are really where the big money is going to be made here. I don't know, it just feels like-- >> You mean a long tail of value creation? >> Yeah, in other words, you used to see in the computing industry, it was Microsoft and Intel became, you know, trillion dollar value companies, and maybe there's a couple of others. But it really seems to be the folks that are absorbing those technologies, applying them, solving problems, whether it's health care, or logistics, transportation, etc., looks to where the huge economic opportunities may be. I don't know if you guys have thought about that. >> Well I think that's happened a little bit in big data. So if you look at what the financial services market has done, they've probably benefited far more than the companies that make the solutions, because now they understand what their consumers want, they can better predict their life insurance, how they should-- >> Dave: You could make that argument for Facebook, for sure. >> Absolutely, from that perspective. So I expect it to get to your point around AI as well, so the folks that really use it, use it well, will probably be the ones that benefit it. >> Because the tooling is very important. You've got to make the application. That's the end state in all this That's the rubber meets the road. >> Bill: Exactly. >> Nick: Absolutely. >> All right, so final question. What're you guys showing here at Discover? What's the big HPC? What's the story for you guys? >> So we're actually showing our Gen 10 product. So this is with the latest microprocessors in all of our Apollo lines. So these are specifically optimized platforms for HPC and now also artificial intelligence. We have a platform called the Apollo 6500, which is used by a lot of companies to do AI work, so it's a very dense GPU platform, and does a lot of processing and things in terms of video, audio, these types of things that are used a lot in some of the workflows around AI. >> Nick, anything spectacular for you here that you're interested in? >> So we did show here. We had video in Meg's opening session. And that was showing the poker result, and I think that was really significant, because it was actually a great amount of computing. It was 19 million core hours. So was an HPC AI application, and I think that was a really interesting success. >> The unperfect information really, we picked up this earlier in our last segment with your colleagues. It really amplifies the unstructured data world, right? People trying to solve the streaming problem. With all this velocity, you can't get everything, so you need to use machines, too. Otherwise you have a haystack of needles. Instead of trying to find the needles in the haystack, as they was saying. Okay, final question, just curious on this natural, not natural, federal resource. Natural resource, feels like it. Is there like a line to get in? Like I go to the park, like this camp waiting list, I got to get in there early. How do you guys handle the flow for access to the supercomputer center? Is it, my uncle works there, I know a friend of a friend? Is it a reservation system? I mean, who gets access to this awesomeness? >> So there's a peer reviewed system, it's fair. People apply for large allocations four times a year. This goes to a national committee. They met this past Sunday and Monday for the most recent. They evaluate the proposals based on merit, and they make awards accordingly. We make 90% of the system available through that means. We have 10% discretionary that we can make available to the corporate sector and to others who are doing proprietary research in data-intensive computing. >> Is there a duration, when you go through the application process, minimums and kind of like commitments that they get involved, for the folks who might be interested in hitting you up? >> For academic research, the normal award is one year. These are renewable, people can extend these and they do. What we see now of course is for large data resources. People keep those going. The AI knowledge base is 2.6 petabytes. That's a lot. For industrial engagements, those could be any length. >> John: Any startup action coming in, or more bigger, more-- >> Absolutely. A coworker of mine has been very active in life sciences startups in Pittsburgh, and engaging many of these. We have meetings every week with them now, it seems. And with other sectors, because that is such a great opportunity. >> Well congratulations. It's fantastic work, and we're happy to promote it and get the word out. Good to see HP involved as well. Thanks for sharing and congratulations. >> Absolutely. >> Good to see your work, guys. Okay, great way to end the day here. Democratizing supercomputing, bringing high performance computing. That's what the cloud's all about. That's what great software's out there with AI. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante bringing you all the data here from HPE Discover 2017. Stay tuned for more live action after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube covering Interconnect 2017, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to Interconnect 2017 from Las Vegas everybody, this is the Cube the leader in live tech coverage. Bina Halmann is here, she's a Cube alumn and the vice president of offering management for storage and software defined at IBM and she's joined by Tahir Ali, who's the director of Enterprise Architecture at the City of Hope Medical Center. Folks, welcome to the Cube- >> Tahir: Thank you very much. >> Thanks so much for coming on. >> Bina: Thanks for having us. >> So Bina we'll start with you been on the cube a number of times. >> Yes. >> Give us the update on what's happening with IBM and Interconnect. >> Yeah, no it's a great show. Lots of exciting announcements and such. From an IBM perspective storage we've been very busy. Filling out our whole flash portfolio. Adding a complete set of hybrid cloud capabilities to our software defined storage. It's been a great 2016 and we're off to a great start in 2017 as well. >> Yeah [Inaudible] going to be here tomorrow >> That's right. so everbody's looking forward to that. So Tahir, let's get into City of Hope. Tell us about the organization and your role. >> Sure, so City of Hope if one of the forty seven comprehensive cancer centers in the nation. We deal with cancer of course, HIV, diabetes and other life threatening diseases. We are maybe 15 to 17 miles east of Los Angeles. My role in particular, I'm a Director of Enterprise Architecture so all new technologies, all new applications that land on City of Hope, we go through all the background. See how the security is going to be, how it's going to implement in our environment, if it's even possible to implement it. Making sure we talk to our business owners, figure out if there's a disaster recovery requirement if they have a HA requirement, if it's a clinical versus a non-clinical application. So we look at a whole stack and see how a new application fits into the infrastructure of City of Hope. >> So you guys to a lot of research there as well or? >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> So we are research, we are the small EDU and we are the medical center so- >> So a lot of data. >> A whole lot of data. Data just keeps coming and keeps coming and it's almost like never ending stream of data. Now with the data it's not only just data- Individual data is also growing. So a lot of imaging that happens for cancer research, or cancer medical center, gets bigger and bigger per patient as the three dimensional imaging is here. We look at resolution that is so much more today than it used to be five years. So every single image itself is so much bigger today than it used to be five years ago. Just a sheer difference in the resolution and the dimensions of the data. >> So what are the big drivers in your industry, and how is it affecting the architecture that you put forward? >> Right, so I think that a couple of huge things that are maybe two or three huge conversion points, or the pivot points that we see today. One of them is just the data stream as I mentioned earlier. The second is because a lot of the PHI and hipaa data that we have today- Security is a huge concern in a lot of the healthcare environment. So those two things, and it's almost like a catch 22. More data is coming in you have to figure out where you're going to put that data. But at the same time you got to make sure every single bit is secured enough. So there's a catch 22 where its going, where you have to make sure that data keeps coming and you keep securing the same data. Right so, those two things that we see pivoting the way we strategize around our infrastructure. >> It's hard, they're in conflict in way, >> Tahir: Absolutely. >> Because you've got to lock the data up but then you want to provide accessibilty... >> Tahir: Absolutely. >> as well. So paint a picture of your infrastructure and the applications that it's supporting. >> Right, so our infrastructure is mainly in-house, and our EMR is currently off-prem. A lot of clinical and non-clinical also stay in-house with us in our data center on-prem. Now we are kind of starting to migrate to cloud technologies more and more, as just things are ballooning. So we are in that middle piece where some of our infrastructure in in-house, slowly we are migrating to cloud. So we are at like at a hybrid currently. And as things progress I think more and more is going to go to the cloud. But for a medical center security is everything. So we have to be very careful where our data sits. >> So Bina when you hear that from a client >> Bina: Mm-hmm (affirmative) >> how do you respond? And you know, what do you propose? >> Bina: Yeah. >> How does it all... >> Yeah well- >> come about. >> You know as we see clients like Tahir, and some of the requirements in these spaces. Security is definitely a key factor. So as we develop our products, as we develop capabilities we ensure that security is a number one focus area for us. Whether it's for the on-prem storage, whether it's for the data that's in motion from moving from the on-prem into the cloud, and secure completely all the way through where the client has the control on the security, the keys et cetera. So a lot goes into making sure as we architect these solutions for our clients, that we focus on security. And of course some of the other requirements, industry specific requirements, are all also very important and we focus in on those as well. Whether it's regulatory or compliance requirements, right. >> So from a sort of portfolio standpoint what do you guys do when there's all kinds of innovations over that last four or five years coming in with flash, we heard about object stores this morning, we got cloud, you got block, you've got file, what are you guys doing? >> So we do a lot of different things, so from having filers in-house to doing block storage from- And the worst thing now these days with big data is, as the data is growing the security needs are growing but the end result with the researchers and our physicians the data availability needs to be fast. So now comes a bigger catch 22, where the data is so huge but at the same time they want that all of that very quickly on their fingertips. So now what do you do? That's where we bring in a lot of the flash to upfront it. 10 to 12 percent of our infrastructure has flash in the front, this way all the rendering, or all the rights that happen or- First land on the flash. So everybody who writes, feels like it's a very quick write. But there's a petabytes and petabytes behind the scene that could be on-prem, it could be on the cloud, but they don't need to know that. Its, everything lands so fast that it looks like it's just local and fast. So there's a lot of crisscross that is happening, and started maybe four five years ago with the speed of data is not going to be slow. The size of data increasing like crazy and then security is becoming a bigger and bigger concern as you know. Maybe every month or month and a half there's a breach somewhere that people have to deal with. So we have to handle all of that in one shot. So you know, it's more than just infrastructure itself. There's policies, there's procedures, there's a lot that goes around. >> So when you think about architecting, obviously you think about workloads and- >> Tahir: Of Course. >> what the workload requirement is, it's no a one size fits all. >> Tahir: Right right. >> So where do you start, do you start with- >> Tahir: Sure. >> Sort of, you know a conversation with the business? >> Sure, sure. >> How much money do you got? >> So we don't really deal with the money at all. We provide the best possible solution for that business requirement. So the conversation happens, "tell us what you're looking for." "We're looking for a very fast XYZ." "Okay tell us what exactly you need." "Here's the application, we want it available all the time, "and this is how it's going to look like, "it can't be down because our patients are depending on it". So on and so forth. We take that, we talk to our vendors. We look at exactly how it's architected. If it's- Let's just say it's three-tiered. There's a web, there's an app and then there's a database. You already know by default that if it's a database it's going to go on a high transactional IO where either it's a flash or a very fast spinning disc with a lot of spindles. From there you get the application. Could be a virtual machine, could not be a virtual machine. From there you get to a web tier. Web tiers are usually always on a virtual infrastructure. Then you realize if you want to put it on a DMZ so people from outside can get to it, or it's only for internal use. Then you draw the entire architecture diagram out. Then you price it out, you said "Okay if you want this to be "always on, maybe you need a database that is always on." Right, or you need a database that replicates 24/7. That has a cost associated to that. If you have an application- If wanted two application maybe it's a costier application it could be HA it could not be HA, so there's a cost to that. Web servers are kind of, you know cheaper tier of virtual machines. And then there's a architecture diagram, all the requirements are met in there. And there's a cost associated to that, saying business unit here is how much it's going to cost and this is what you will have. >> Okay so that's where the economics, >> Exactly >> comes into play. Okay this is what your requirements are >> Yep. >> This is, based on that what we would advise. >> Exactly, yeah. >> And then essentially it's can you afford it. >> Right right. (laughs) If you want to buy a house that is a three bedrooms and three bathrooms in Palo Alto, versus a six bedrooms and then seven bathrooms in Palo Alto it's going to be a financial impact that you might not like. (laughs) So it's one of those, right. So what you want has a financial impact on your end solution and that's what we provide. We don't force somebody to get something. We just give them- Hey how many kids do you have? Four kids, then maybe you need a five bedroom house. Right so we kind of do that. >> Is it common discussion? >> Yeah it is, it is. And that's, as you know, some of the things we do focus on. Right, as we- In addition to the security aspect of it of course, is around the automation, around driving in the efficiencies. Because at the end of the day, you know, whether as capital expands or operational expands you want to optimize for both of those. And that's where as we architect the solutions, develop the offerings, we ensure that we build-in capabilities, whether it's storage efficiency capabilities like virtualization, or de-dupe or compression. But as well as this automated tiering. Tiering off from flash to lower tier, whether it's on-prem lower, slower- >> Tahir: Could be a disc. >> speed disc or tape or even off to the cloud, right. And being able to do that, provide that I think addresses many of our clients' needs. That's a common requirement that we do hear. >> And as mentioned 10 to 12 percent of it if flash. >> Tahir: Right. >> The rest, you know ninety percent or so is something else. That's economics, correct? >> Right so- >> And how do you see that changing? >> So I think the percentage won't really change. I think the data size will change. So you have to just think about things, just in generality. Just what you do today. You know when you take a picture, maybe you look at it the first three days, even if you have a phone. After three days, maybe you look at it maybe once every two months. After three months, guess what? You will always never look at them. They're kind of moved away from even your memory banks in your head. Then you say, "Oh I was looking through it". And then maybe once in awhile you look at it. So you have to look at the behavior. A lot of the applications have the same behavior, where the new data is required right away. The older the data gets, the more archival state it gets. It gets warmer and then it gets colder. Now, as a healthcare institute we have to devise something that is great financially, also has the security, and put away in a way where we can pull it without having pain to put it back. So that's where the tiering comes to play. Doesn't matter how we do it. >> And your planning assumption is that the cost disparity between flash and other forms of storage will remain. That other- >> So- >> forms will remain cheaper. >> Right, so we are hoping, but I think the hybrid model of flash- So once you do a hybrid with flash and disc, then it becomes a little more economically suitable for a lot of the people. They do the same thing, they do tiering, but they make it look like a bigger platform. So it's like, "We can give you a petabyte "but it's going to look like flash." It doesn't work like that. They might have 300 terabyte of flash, 700- but it's so integrated quickly, that they can pull it and push it. Then there's a read-aheads write-aheads that takes that advantage to make it look like it. That will drop your pricing. The special sauce that transfer the data between slower and flash discs. >> Two questions for you. >> Sure. >> What do you look for in a supplier? And what drives you nuts about a supplier, that you don't want a supplier to do? >> Sure. So personally speaking, this is just my personal opinion. A stable environment a tried and true vendor is important. Somebody who has a core competency of doing this for a longer term is what I personally look at. There's a lot of new players who come in, they stay for a couple of years, they explode, somebody takes them over or they just kind of vanish. Or certain people outside of their core competency. So if Toyota started to make- Because they wanted to save money they said, "Hey Toyota from now on will make "the tires that are called Toyota." But Toyota is not a tire company. Other companies, Bridgestone and Michelin's have been making tires for a very long time. So the core competency of Toyota is building the cars and not the tires. So when I see these people, or the vendors saying, "Okay I can give you this this this this and this and that and the security and that. Maybe three out of those five things are not their core competency. So I start to wonder if the whole stack is worth it because there's going to be some weakness because they don't have the core competency. That's what I look at. What drives me crazy is, every single time somebody comes to meet with me they want to sell me everything and the kitchen sink under one umbrella. And the answer is one single pane of glass to manage everything. Life is not that easy, I wish it was but it really is not. (laughs) So those two things are- >> Selling the fantasy right. Now Bina we'll give you the last word. Interconnect, give us your final thoughts. What should we know about what's going on in software-defined and IBM storage. >> Yeah you know lots of announcements at Interconnect. You heard, as you talked about, cloud optic storage we've got great new pricing models and capabilities and overall software-defined storage. We're continuing to innovate, continue add capabilities like analytics and you'll see us doing more and more on cognitive. Cognitive storage management to get more out of the data, help clients get more and more information and value out of their data. >> What's the gist of the new pricing models, just um- >> Flexible pricing model depending on how the both hybrid as well as the three tiered on-prem and in between. But really cold as well as a flexible pricing model where depending on how you use the data you know you get consistent pricing so between on-prem and in the cloud. >> So more cloud-like pricing >> Yes, exactly. >> Great. >> Yep. >> Easier consumption, excellent. Well Bina Tahir thanks very much for coming to the cube. >> Yes yes thank you. >> Dave: Pleasure having you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> Dave: You're welcome. Alright keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest and a wrap, right after this short break. Right back. (upbeat music)