>> From the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Prior to the historic merger between Dell and EMC, Dell had a relationship with Nutanix, a pioneer in hyper conversion infrastructure. After the merger, many people questioned whether that relationship would continue. Hi everybody, my name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with John Shirley who's the director of product management at Dell EMC, and we're here to talk about the continuation of that relationship, Hi John, good to see you. >> Good to see you as well, thanks for having me. >> You've got a new announcement today, it's the XC series, tell us all about it. >> Yeah, so the XC series, what we're announcing, this is our third generation of powered server deployments for XC series and, what we're announcing is that the two most popular models for XC series are going to be refreshed in 14th generation servers. Those specifically are XC640, which is really designed for compute intensive things like VDI, private cloud, some remote office application, as well as the XC740XD, which is more for storage intensive applications, so think share point, big data application things like that. Now all of the new platforms that we'll release will have new technologies like MVME, they'll have faster networking options like 25 gig ethernet, and a whole bunch of other features that are really going to help propel this into more mainstream applications. >> Okay, so it's not just faster, better price, performance, there's some other innovations that you mentioned in MVME that are coming in that you're integrating and engineering into the solution. >> Absolutely, so we have a really tight relationship between our Power Edge, as well as what we do on the XC series, and in addition to that, we have a really tight relationship with our Nutanix engineering counterparts as well. We're really designing these all into a single application. >> Okay, so the marketing, I'm sorry to interrupt. So the marketing gurus at Dell EMC are throwing around this term, purposeful. >> Yes. >> What does that mean? >> I love this term because it really takes into account all the additional efforts that we do around the solution, we have years and years of experience of deploying SDS solutions on top of servers, and what we really realize is that you want to design these solutions, again to be purposeful as the name implies. It's things like controlling everything, all the way from orderability to manufacturing, to serviceability to ensure that you get a really tight and clean experience with a customer. So things like CPU, memory, hard drive configuration, designed specifically for hyper converge, and that flows all the way through to support. So it's a much cleaner experience for the customer. >> So what does that mean, designed specifically for hyper converge, I mean can you unpack that a little bit? What's different about hyper converge that requires that different design? >> Yeah, well hyper converge, as you probably well know, and I'm not sure how many of the users out there know, but it was really designed around the cloud experience. So taking a look at the hyper scale vendors, and designing similar models for data centers, and really what that entails is things about taking a power edge platform, designing the technologies to be fault tolerant, to be scalable, and we've taken that to the next level. So on the XC series, we've designed some software and some Dell IP that really harnesses a lot of the capabilities of the power edge. We call it the Power Tools SDK, and it really allows for software defined solutions like Nutanix to sit on top of Power Edge. By the way, we use it for our other platforms as well within the portfolio, but it really shows that it is purposefully built and designed for SDS solutions. >> Okay, so Dell was the first to do an OEM relationship with Nutanix, and subsequently they've done maybe a couple of others, but what makes you guys special? >> Well first off, the power edge platform is the leading platform out there in the marketplace, so that alone right there gives us a lot of strength from a manufacturing, procurement, all that ecosystem. That's one of the benefits that we get. We also do things like develop our own IP around this power tools SDK, as well as other IP that we have on the platform. So that's another one right there. Collectively, within the group, we have hundreds of hours of experience, not only designing storage, but also compute around the hypervisor, and around networking, so we've brought all that expertise into the group to really design this hyperconverge platform. And that's something that no one else can really do on the marketplace. >> So in the early days of HCI, which obviously, the workloads were, VDI was a popular workload, and a lot of the knockoffs were, it's a nice infrastructure for a remote office, or small or mid sized businesses. Can you address scalability? Where are we today in terms of scale? >> On the scale, like I said it was one of the design tenets, so I'll give you a good example. If a customer has bought previous versions of XC series, whether it's the 12th generation or the 13th generation, they can now come and buy the 14th generation from us, and put that into the existing ecosystem. Right into the same cluster, and so talk about a mind shift from traditional architectures that would require essentially ripping out the old gear and putting in the new gear, now you can grow as the technology grows, and you can do that in a very seamless fashion without any downtime, and it's very scalable in a very linear sense. >> Can you talk about the portfolio a little bit? Dell EMC has one of everything, if I want it, you probably have it. >> M-hm. >> But sometimes, analysts and independent observers, customers, probably sales guys, it's confusing. So where does this fit in the portfolio, relative to some of the other things that you've announced today and have in the portfolio? >> We get that question all the time, and it's a great question. But it's a pretty clean answer for us. For customers who are standardized on VM1 and they want that experience, we have VXRL, right? Great product. For customers now who want choice of hypervisors, or if they're already standardized on Nutanix platform, then we have XC series, and we have a lot of customers out there who want to go to a model that sits on top of a power edge base because of the power of power edge, so we've got that to offer to our customers, and in particular when we talk about hypervisor choice, we know that Hyper-V is a very fast growing portion of the market, and we are focused on that part of the market for customers who want to do multiple different hypervisors. >> I wonder if I could ask you, you know when you're separate companies, and you're trying to do engineering, you make it happen. Look what you guys did with VCE. How has the experience been at the engineering level, in terms of getting higher levels of integration, now that you guys are one company? Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yeah, so I'm going to take a step back and not just, just focus on the engineering. It's really end to end, and it goes all the way from the engineering up front, but then it trickles down to the marketing and the product managers, and all the sales teams so everything, end to end, needs to fit well together. What I'll tell you is me, personally, I talk to my product management counterparts, my sales counterparts over on the Nutanix side on a nearly daily basis, so the relationships got to be strong and we've really strengthened that over the years. >> Okay, Nutanix's got to be happy because they've got a massive distribution channel. You guys, Michael Dell was very clear on this from the early days that you guys were going to continue the relationship because that's what customers want. Can you talk about culturally your focus on customers, and EMC's always been very customer focused, Dell, Michael Dell personally was very customer focused, is that really the sort of genesis of the continuation of this relationship? Maybe you can talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, we are maniacally focused on customers, so if you look at the new platforms that we're shipping, give you a data point. We talk to the customers and we have somewhere around 150 new design features specifically for the XC series platform because of those conversations with customers and because we've done this for three generations, we have a lot of those inputs leading into the product, and so yes we are very focused on the customers, and what we know is that the customers want to have that choice. Not all of them do, right? A lot of customers are going to go over to the Xrell, it's a great product, it's growing really quickly, but we also know that a number have really standardized again on the Hyper-V, or on the Nutanix platform. >> Well because of the size of your install space, you have a huge observation base, we like to call it, and you obviously collect a lot of data. It sounds like you've been able to leverage that for competitive advantage and to add additional value for your customers. >> Yes, it's always nice to have a product and a portfolio that can win. >> Alright so we got to wrap, so we got a crowd chat coming up on December first. First half, #NextGenHCI, it's kind of an AMA on this announcement. Where can I get additional information on this? >> So you can go to www.Dell.com/HCI. >> Excellent, well, John, thanks very much. >> Thank you. >> For coming to the Cube. Alright, thanks for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time. (light techno music)

>> Announcer: From the Silicon Angle Media office, in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Prior to the historic merger between Dell and EMC, Dell had a relationship with a company called Nutanix. Nutanix was a pioneer in so called hyperconverged infrastructure and a lot of people questioned whether that relationship would continue after the merger. Hi, everybody, I'm Dave Vellante, and I'm here with John Shirley who's the Director of Product Management at Dell EMC and we're going to talk about that. Welcome, John. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> So, the XC Series you are continuing the innovation there, tell us about what you are announcing today. >> Yeah, so this is our third generation, so this is the third generation of the XC Series and what we are announcing is that our most popular models are available now, and the most popular models are the XC640, which is more of a compute intensive node that will be targeted at VDI compute intensive remote offices, things like that. And we're also announcing the XC740XD which is more for storage intensive and performance applications. Think big data, SharePoint, exchange, those kind of things. >> Okay, so we're seeing the evolution of the workloads that can be supported by hyperconvergent infrastructure. And this is more evidence, right? >> Absolutely, and to that point, where we started off, we saw a lot of VDI deployments but now very quickly, once those companies adopt the technology, they are growing that more to mainstream. >> Okay, so I see this term, marketing gurus at Dell EMC throw around this term, purposeful. Okay, let's put some meat on the bone, what does that mean? >> I love the term because it really helps describe what we do, right. This isn't just take things like SDS offers, in this case Nutanix, throw it on some PowerEdge and validate it. Those are really core, important steps. But we go above and beyond that so purposeful really is kind of end to end view of what the solution is. So it's things all the way from configuration to manufacturing and supportability. Things like processor choices, SSD selection, memory types, you can kind of go down the list and we've really designed this purposefully for ACI market. >> Okay, so Dell, of course, was the first to do an OEM relationship with Nutanix, there are others. Can you talk about your differentiation, what's special about Dell EMC and Nutanix. >> Yes, so you know, I think if I go back to the three points that I had before. You have a server, you have SDS solutions and you do some validation around it. Very important steps. We really feel that we have the strongest server in the world and so that's point number one for us. Nutanix, great partnership there. And then the validation steps which we have a very strong engineering team to go after now. If we take that a step further, Dell has created some soft or some IP that really helps kind of glue everything together. We call it the Power Tools SDK. And that's really years worth of experience working with SDS solutions that we know how to integrate into the server and really load that software on top of it so we can do things like life cycle management, we can have recovery options, and there's a whole list of options that are available with the Power Tools SDK. So that's one of them. And the final one is we're Dell EMC and the great part about being this new company is that we have this great, great portfolio of technologies. So it's things like integration with data protection, right. Now that we have Avamar Data Domain, we have the ability to create new products. In fact, that's one of the new things that we have as well. We are announcing a new data protection solution that is taking the Avamar software and taking Data Domain and we're integrating that right into the prism interface so if you listen to Nutanix, they say one click simplicity, well we're introducing a one click back-up, one click back-up automation into the portfolio. >> I love that, because a lot of times back-up is an after thought. You know, oh I got this new infrastructure, how am I going to back up the data. Okay, let's bolt this on. So let me ask you a follow up to that. As Dell EMC, you know one company, sometimes when you're two companies it's hard to do that type of engineering, can you talk about as Dell EMC as one, how the engineering culture and results, the outcomes have improved or changed? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm not just going to focus on engineering, because I really want to take a look at the entire organization. So it goes all the way from engineering, marketing product management, sales, it's that whole eco-system. You can even talk about the support organization, the quality and we really have tight relationship between Nutanix and the Dell EMC counterparts. So to give you a good example, I talk with my product management counterparts and I talk with the sales leaders on a nearly daily basis and we want to make sure that relationship is really strong and that we evolve the relationship over time. >> Can we talk a little bit about scalability? We talked earlier at the top about work loads, VDI was very popular, remote office was kind of a sweet spot of hyperconvergent the early days. It's evolved, but scalability is always been a question. Where are we at with regards to scalability of hyperconvergent infrastructure? >> That's a great question. So, HCI came from the big Cloud providers and that technology was really meant to bring the tenants of what we saw with the scale of Cloud providers into the mainstream data centers. And so to that end, scalability is a core attribute. I'll give you a good example here, when the 14th generation of XC Series comes out, we'll be able to plug that in to customers existing eco-systems. So let's say a customer has a 12th generation or a 13th generation Power Edge XC series, we can now plug that technology right into the same cluster and if you talk about reusing technology, integrating technology into the data center, and really providing great value, and making sure customers don't have to throw away say older or medium term technology like the 13th generation, now they can just use the new technology right in place with the existing. >> John can you talk about the portfolio a little bit I mean, you guys got one of everything. If I want it, you probably have it. But a lot of times that gets confusing for customers and partners, probably sales reps. Where does the XC Series and these new announcements, where does it fit in the portfolio relative to some of the other things you are announcing? >> We get this question all the time. In my mind, it's really clear. For customers who have standardized on VMware, we have the xRail. For customers now who want say a choice of hyper visor or for customers who have already standardized on Nutanix software, we have XC Series. So there's absolutely room for both. We know the market is really big and it's growing fast and we have options for customers now whether they want to run on VMware or they want to run on say on Hyper-V as a good example. >> Let's see, when can I get this stuff? Can I buy it today or soon? >> It's available now, it's available now. And we have customers who are anxiously waiting because the new technologies are on their platforms. So it's available now and shipping now as well. >> Excellent. All right, we got to break, but I'll give you last word. Things like key take aways, you know, what should we be thinking about with this announcement, with the partnership? >> Absolutely, I think the key things here is the partnership is still growing strong, and we really feel that the best way to consume Nutanix software is on the XC series in combination with Dell and really getting the best out of both worlds. Out of the Nutanix relationship, out of the Dell relationship. >> Excellent, right, we got to go, but let's see CrowdChat coming up, #NextGenHCI, CrowdChat.net/NextGenHCI on Decemeber first. Where can I get more information about these products? >> If you go to DellEMC.com/HCI. >> Simple. All right, John, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)