live from San Francisco celebrating ten years of high-tech coverage it's the cube covering vmworld 2019 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners welcome to day two of the cubes coverage of VMworld 2019 double vowels two sets going on on our other set day Volante and John Fourier they're talking to Michael Dell they're talking to passenger but over here we know where the hot action is talking about even Steve Young you know the Hall of Fame quarterback from the 49ers knows what hyper-converged infrastructure is and they're from well I'm excited to welcome back to the program Chad Dunn who is the vice president of product management and hyper-converged infrastructure for Delly MC Chad great to see you great to be back soon and also I want to also welcome my guest host for this segment who is Bobby Allen coming up to us from Charlotte North Carolina a cube alum now flipping the desk and gonna be asking some questions with me so Chad well my first question is why did you put me up against Michael and Pat well because we knew you could take it you know some people would be like oh that's the other Chad even but Ron you know HCI you know still a big story it's a big piece of what goes into VMware's vfc yeah story there you know VMware's talking about there's 20,000 deployments that they have a v san and i believe you might know who the number one partner is in the number one solution set out of those 20 thousands I think I might and I think that's also the leading product in terms of volume and the leading product in terms of revenue in the hyper-converged market as a blast so I will give you a second you know give us some of the you know you know the the drum beat the chest thumping of how the VX RL product line and and your portfolio is doing the the portfolio is doing great and the integration of V CF on VX rail is just throwing gasoline on to the fire in terms of adoption you know we see hyper-converged now mainstream moving into the data center mission-critical applications are being run on it infrastructure as a service right alongside container as a service so a few things that we announced this week in addition to you know the latest update of VCF on rail we added fibre channel 2 to V X rail a move that people are very is very polarizing move for people to chat why we have people who continue to love their primary storage arrays that are fiber channel connected and very often we're selling to someone who's refreshing servers but they have life left on the the array they want to preserve it they want to migrate data so they demanded fiber channel we gave them fiber right so if I understand this though it's that I've seen certain HD eyes where there's like you know a faucet on the side that I can plug in I scuzzy now you're just saying there's that it's not like you haven't a V X rail that is you know fiber dole baked in through and through so there's a server architect there's still v Santa at the core of VX rail but we give you the option now attaching primary storage either in the context of VCF or or in standalone other big news is we've recently refreshed a product line to the next generation of Xeon processor the cascade Lake version that gives us about a 28 to 30 percent performance increase and Intel opt in cache drives so there are lots of hardware updates along with software updates that that accelerate our LCM or lifecycle management process so Chad thank you for the update but I've got a different question I want to go in a different direction I talk to customers all the time cxos what would you tell the ciock so who's who's scared to invest more in the data center because public cloud seems like the one is in its sales but obviously Dell has a story to tell how do you help them defend their their turf well III I don't think they should get territorial about that every customer that I engaged with has a hybrid cloud strategy and very often it's more than one public cloud there's always a champion challenger relationship right we as CX know you want to keep your vendors honest correct right so you may have multiple public clouds you may have multiple infrastructure providers but VMware and in VCF on the X rail can be that common thread between the two so I can use tools like VMware Cloud Health to determine where it makes sense to run the workload I think very seamlessly move that workload from a VCF on VX rail deployment into a public cloud when it makes sense I can bring it back when it makes sense I can move it to Amazon to Azure to Google to any one of the VMware cloud providers and really hedge my bets right in terms of where it's best to run that workload so we encourage public cloud are you seeing customers actually take advantage of those capabilities yet or is it something they're still kind of waiting to see how that develops in terms of hybrid multi-cloud we see customers taking advantage of it right away so I'll give you an example I have a large retail customer right now and they've got about 900 different workloads that are existing virtual machines so they're looking at how they either refactor those into cloud native and move them into the cloud or whether they rationalize some of those away which is sort of a natural process with the Dell technologies cloud platform which is based on VCF on the X rail they can effectively put off that decision and they can move those workloads into the public cloud as virtual machines and start to enjoy those economics while they decide which ones to refactor while they decide which ones to rationalize away yeah so chata tell tech world we talked a bunch about how I have you know V X rel is the underpinning for the VMware cloud on Dell EMC right here at the show you know we talk a lot about cloud and even you know kubernetes was mentioned just a few times a couple of times in the keynote there was some guy in the audience you know Hootin Hollerin about some of that but you know help us you know draw the line you know where your customers today what are they starting to do and you know where does that put this portfolio extend to in the future great well first of all I'm gonna do a session tomorrow morning at 9:30 and we're gonna be talking about the business aspect of containers of service and kubernetes to customers so a good session to check out if if the viewers can but from our perspective we see customers at different points in that journey toward container as a service or cloud native on their premises or in a hybrid cloud scenario and it's funny one of the slides that I'll do tomorrow says that about 71 percent of customers are spending their budgets on operating their infrastructures and services are traditional VMs when they want to be able to reinvest some of that money and move to cloud native now this is almost the exact same slide and same percentage that we use you know five six eight years ago to talk about keeping the lights on with 70 percent of IT budgets it was 8020 back then so it's the exact same dynamic we're seeing it really be mainstreamed now every dtw or EMC world that I would go to I would always ask how much of your workload is cloud native they would always say 1% how much is it going to be in five years they say we have no idea now they're telling us about what those projects are and and they're rapidly adopting them but the nice thing about the VCF on rail is you can create workload domains that are traditional infrastructure as a service with virtual machines but you can also spin up container as a service workload domain with d KS and NS xt and so as you start to refactor those applications and there's that balance changes you simply increase the number and the size of your cloud native workload domains and you shrink your infrastructure as a service so you're in an ideal spot to be able to run virtual infrastructure workload domains virtual desktop workload domains cloud native workload domains consistent operating model across-the-board consistent hardware layer which is VX rail so you get those economics and as your business demands change you as an IT operator are able to serve those DevOps organizations within your company because if you're not providing them a kubernetes dial-tone they're gonna find it right and you're gonna see shadow IT spring up and they're gonna be in the public cloud before you know what happens so Chad want one of the things that I'm curious about so this is a software conference obviously right we're talking about a lot of the goodness that's hypervisor and above yep what would you say to the person who says doesn't matter what sort of hardware I'm running is that a commodity what is Dells differentiate a value in this software-defined world if I wanted to be a smart aleck I would tell you to look at some of the other hyper-converged competitors who went software only and then go take a look at their market cap but if I wanted to be serious I would say that hardware really does matter and when you look at you know how we need to lifecycle manage that infrastructure and make it seamless and effortless for the customer it means that you need to think about that hardware layer so if I look inside a PowerEdge server for example there are between nine and twelve different programmable parts from BIOS to HBAs to drive firmware backplane power supply you name it all those things have dependencies on the software drivers that you use being able to look at that all in context and be able to update that all at once so users don't have to worry about the bits and bytes of drivers and and firmware compatibility really saves them money saves them time and effort and lets them concentrate on things they're gonna differentiate their business and we see customers making that switch daily now and understanding that they can now redeploy some of that cost and resources toward things that are more differentiated like you know moving to cloud native so Chad what about the folks that have a they've got a Dell footprint they've got some other competitors and that how do you help them where there may be in the midst of changing over right they've got some other manufacturers that provided hardware before some of that story may not be as consistent so what can they do when they may be in the midst of a change over so you really need to look at what that operating expense savings is gonna be so we we certainly want to get as much life out of that existing infrastructure as we can and then provide migration fibre channel and and IP attached storage is an example of that right where people are not necessarily ready to move away from those arrays so say great right continue to leverage those assets but also if it's an existing VC on infrastructure based on bare metal servers the migration from one VC on environment to another is a pretty seamless one right because you preserve that storage policy based management as you make the migration so you know it typically is a pretty easy migration for customers to move on to hyper conversion they think and obviously we'll provide whatever professional services are necessary right if you look it by the way and I'll plug VMware since I'm at at VMworld if you look at VMware HDX if we're doing migration across these environments either to or from a public cloud or from a legacy environment to a next-generation HCI environment that's one of the coolest tools out there for doing that migration and preserving all the policies security and Software Defined Networking policies and micro segmentation from one environment to the other so really impressed with with what VMware has done there yeah definitely a theme we've heard it this show is you know VMware talk to their install base and says oh my gosh you look at all these cloud native things out there and kubernetes is super hard so you know we're gonna build it enable it in there um when I've looked at the you know Dell and VMware family there's been a few different kubernetes options out there help gives a little clarity where that fits into your world and you know where we are today where it's going kind of yeah future yeah there has been a sort of a dichotomy of you know cloud native ins inside VMware and cloud native inside pivotal for example and we've worked with with both of those organizations in fact we've been very successful with what platform and container as a service on the x rail going to market with pivotal but now that PKS is moving into VMware and really all of pivotal is moving into VMware it sort of unifies that strategy and if you look at the acquisitions that VMware is making with hep tio and others and actually embedding kubernetes into ESX I I mean that's a game changer an absolutely game-changer so now we have all of the the software assets to you know build run and manage cloud native were closed all within the VMware portfolio now the great thing about VX rail is we inherit all that work natively and build that natively into our hyper-converged platform so you know we sort of get that for free so you know not only can we now be the the leading hyper-converged infrastructure player for infrastructure as a service of traditional VMs we now can expand that and be the number one player in the new container world and you know as you saw with the the performance discussion that Pat had yesterday they actually see these things running faster in a virtualized ESXi environment than we do on bare metal only single digits but that's pretty impressive right it's very counter intuitive right so we're really happy to be able to take advantage of that and we have still have the pivotal labs team which really gets engaged with these customers to make it more transformational in terms of how they develop and how they deliver applications to their end users and by the way I mean not to preview something that's pretty far down the road we're looking at how we change up how we deliver software updates in VX rail and how we architect the software to make it a continuous integration continuous delivery pipeline because we need to make the infrastructure more intelligent and more agile and products like VX rail ace which we just announced a dtw does exactly that right it gives us the ability to pull back telemetry from VX rail apply machine learning and in an artificial intelligence to it in our own cloud and then push that data back out to our VX rail users to Auto remediating problems so the infrastructure is going to get more agile and it's going to get more intelligent as we go yeah um we've been talking a bit about some of the future stuff before we go but want to bring back to you know one of the core things that we wanted to do in this space it was simplification how do we make it super easy when I talk to most people that do HCI it's like you know where is that it's like I don't know it got installed and I've never touched it since then my understanding you're doing some things even on the management side to make things even easier there's some virtual reality in there too no we like to think everything is real reality yeah we are doing things to to even further simplify our lifecycle management process to make that that infrastructure something that that operators don't need to worry about so we're now doing pre staging of updates future scheduling of updates pause and resume of updates to fit within customers maintenance windows more effectively we'll be doing updates that are delivered via the cloud through the ACE platform coming up in in a release that's that's about to ship so again the idea is to you know simultaneously make the the product more flexible but maintain the simplicity because as I said we've moved into these core data center deployments where people are buying you know six hundred eight hundred thousand units at a time and deploying its scale and they expect flexibility you know all the flexibility you would get with an ESXi server with all the simplification and and day 2 operations that you get from HDI so we're in a constant state of trying to balance those two things and optimize for both use cases and by the way at the same time software-defined networking containers are coming at us at light speed the VMware has acquired more more companies in the last three months and then I can name I can name them all so it's a very fast-moving space yeah I don't think I can keep over the last week all right Bobby final question I guess quick sound bite what should people know about VMware cloud on Dale that they don't know VMware cloud on Dell EMC formerly project to mention right the extension of the MC on the customer premises I think this is incredibly strategic for us and for VMware because it gives you that cloud consumption model on-premises in an operating expense model so just into two initial access with that beta customers are turned up and the feedback has been extremely positive vmware dell technologies cloud platform which is VCF on VX rail really off to the races on that right we've had huge uptake in that we're seeing deals of literally hundreds of nodes at a time data centers at a time are consuming this deploying it we're demoing it here at the show if you go to the nvidia booth all the VDI demos are being run on VCF on VX rail that's sitting over in a hotel across the street it's a very hot hotel room cuz we get a lot of GPUs in those but it's also something that users can actually go see it live and working nice alright and just a quick tip for you if you haven't made it to VM world or even if you came here Chad mentioned he's doing a session this week they do make all of those available to people out there and of course all of our content is always available on the cube net Chad Dunn always great to catch up with you Bobby Allen thanks so much for joining me for this segment and my audience as always thanks for watching the Q