(cheerful music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AMD's 4th Generation EPYC launch. I'm Dave Nicholson, and I'm here in our Palo Alto studios talking to Greg Gibby, senior product manager, data center products from AMD, and Mohan Rokkam, technical marketing engineer at Dell. Welcome, gentlemen. >> Mohan: Hello, hello. >> Greg: Thank you. Glad to be here. >> Good to see each of you. Just really quickly, I want to start out. Let us know a little bit about yourselves. Mohan, let's start with you. What do you do at Dell exactly? >> So I'm a technical marketing engineer at Dell. I've been with Dell for around 15 years now and my goal is to really look at the Dell powered servers and see how do customers take advantage of some of the features we have, especially with the AMD EPYC processors that have just come out. >> Greg, and what do you do at AMD? >> Yeah, so I manage our software-defined infrastructure solutions team, and really it's a cradle to grave where we work with the ISVs in the market, so VMware, Nutanix, Microsoft, et cetera, to integrate the features that we're putting into our processors and make sure they're ready to go and enabled. And then we work with our valued partners like Dell on putting those into actual solutions that customers can buy and then we work with them to sell those solutions into the market. >> Before we get into the details on the 4th Generation EPYC launch and what that means and why people should care. Mohan, maybe you can tell us a little about the relationship between Dell and AMD, how that works, and then Greg, if you've got commentary on that afterwards, that'd be great. Yeah, Mohan. >> Absolutely. Dell and AMD have a long standing partnership, right? Especially now with EPYC series. We have had products since EPYC first generation. We have been doing solutions across the whole range of Dell ecosystem. We have integrated AMD quite thoroughly and effectively and we really love how performant these systems are. So, yeah. >> Dave: Greg, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, I would say the other thing too is, is that we need to point out is that we both have really strong relationships across the entire ecosystem. So memory vendors, the software providers, et cetera, we have technical relationships. We're working with them to optimize solutions so that ultimately when the customer buys that, they get a great user experience right out of the box. >> So, Mohan, I know that you and your team do a lot of performance validation testing as time goes by. I suspect that you had early releases of the 4th Gen EPYC processor technology. What have you been seeing so far? What can you tell us? >> AMD has definitely knocked it out of the park. Time and again, in the past four generations, in the past five years alone, we have done some database work where in five years, we have seen five exit performance. And across the board, AMD is the leader in benchmarks. We have done virtualization where we would consolidate from five into one system. We have world records in AI, we have world records in databases, we have world records in virtualization. The AMD EPYC solutions has been absolutely performant. I'll leave you with one number here. When we went from top of Stack Milan to top of Stack Genoa, we saw a performance bump of 120%. And that number just blew my mind. >> So that prompts a question for Greg. Often we, in industry insiders, think in terms of performance gains over the last generation or the current generation. A lot of customers in the real world, however, are N - 2. They're a ways back, so I guess two points on that. First of all, the kinds of increases the average person is going to see when they move to this architecture, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's even more significant than a lot of the headline numbers because they're moving two generations, number one. Correct me if I'm wrong on that, but then the other thing is the question to you, Greg. I like very long complicated questions, as you can tell. The question is, is it okay for people to skip generations or make the case for upgrades, I guess is the problem? >> Well, yeah, so a couple thoughts on that first too. Mohan talked about that five X over the generation improvements that we've seen. The other key point with that too is that we've made significant process improvements along the way moving to seven nanocomputer to now five nanocomputer and that's really reducing the total amount of power or the performance per watt the customers can realize as well. And when we look at why would a customer want to upgrade, right? And I want to rephrase that as to why aren't you? And there is a real cost of not upgrading. And so when you look at infrastructure, the average age of a server in the data center is over five years old. And if you look at the most popular processors that were sold in that timeframe, it's 8, 10, 12 cores. So now you've got a bunch of servers that you need in order to deliver the applications and meet your SLAs to your end users, and all those servers pull power. They require maintenance. They have the opportunity to go down, et cetera. You got to pay licensing and service and support costs and all those. And when you look at all the costs that roll up, even though the hardware is paid for just to keep the lights on, and not even talking about the soft costs of unplanned downtime, and, "I'm not meeting your SLAs," et cetera, it's very expensive to keep those servers running. Now, if you refresh, and now you have processors that have 32, 64, 96 cores, now you can consolidate that infrastructure and reduce your total power bill. You can reduce your CapEx, you reduce your ongoing OpEx, you improve your performance, and you improve your security profile. So it really is more cost effective to refresh than not to refresh. >> So, Mohan, what has your experience been double clicking on this topic of consolidation? I know that we're going to talk about virtualization in some of the results that you've seen. What have you seen in that regard? Does this favor better consolidation and virtualized environments? And are you both assuring us that the ROI and TCO pencil out on these new big, bad machines? >> Greg definitely hit the nail on the head, right? We are seeing tremendous savings really, if you're consolidating from two generations old. We went from, as I said, five is to one. You're going from five full servers, probably paid off down to one single server. That itself is, if you look at licensing costs, which again, with things like VMware does get pretty expensive. If you move to a single system, yes, we are at 32, 64, 96 cores, but if you compare to the licensing costs of 10 cores, two sockets, that's still pretty significant, right? That's one huge thing. Another thing which actually really drives the thing is we are looking at security, and in today's environment, security becomes a major driving factor for upgrades. Dell has its own setups, cyber-resilient architecture, as we call it, and that really is integrated from processor all the way up into the OS. And those are some of the features which customers really can take advantage of and help protect their ecosystems. >> So what kinds of virtualized environments did you test? >> We have done virtualization across primary codes with VMware, but the Azure Stack, we have looked at Nutanix. PowerFlex is another one within Dell. We have vSAN Ready Nodes. All of these, OpenShift, we have a broad variety of solutions from Dell and AMD really fits into almost every one of them very well. >> So where does hyper-converged infrastructure fit into this puzzle? We can think of a server as something that contains not only AMD's latest architecture but also latest PCIe bus technology and all of the faster memory, faster storage cards, faster nicks, all of that comes together. But how does that play out in Dell's hyper-converged infrastructure or HCI strategy? >> Dell is a leader in hyper-converged infrastructure. We have the very popular VxRail line, we have the PowerFlex, which is now going into the AWS ecosystem as well, Nutanix, and of course, Azure Stack. With all these, when you look at AMD, we have up to 96 cores coming in. We have PCIe Gen 5 which means you can now connect dual port, 100 and 200 gig nicks and get line rate on those so you can connect to your ecosystem. And I don't know if you've seen the news, 200, 400 gig routers and switchers are selling out. That's not slowing down. The network infrastructure is booming. If you want to look at the AI/ML side of things, the VDI side of things, accelerator cards are becoming more and more powerful, more and more popular. And of course they need that higher end data path that PCIe Gen 5 brings to the table. GDDR5 is another huge improvement in terms of performance and latencies. So when we take all this together, you talk about hyper-converged, all of them add into making sure that A, with hyper-converged, you get ease of management, but B, just 'cause you have ease of management doesn't mean you need to compromise on anything. And the AMD servers effectively are a no compromise offering that we at Dell are able to offer to our customers. >> So Greg, I've got a question a little bit from left field for you. We covered Supercompute Conference 2022. We were in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, and there was a lot of discussion of the current processor manufacturer battles, and a lot of buzz around 4th Gen EPYC being launched and what's coming over the next year. Do you have any thoughts on what this architecture can deliver for us in terms of things like AI? We talk about virtualization, but if you look out over the next year, do you see this kind of architecture driving significant change in the world? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It has the real potential to do that from just the building blocks. So we have our chiplet architecture we call it. So you have an IO die and then you have your core complexes that go around that. And we integrate it all with our infinity fabric. That architecture allows you, if we wanted to, replace some of those CCDs with specific accelerators. And so when we look two, three, four years down the road, that architecture and that capability already built into what we're delivering and can easily be moved in. We just need to make sure that when you look at doing that, that the power that's required to do that and the software, et cetera, and those accelerators actually deliver better performance as a dedicated engine versus just using standard CPUs. The other things that I would say too is if you look at emerging workloads. So data center modernization is one of the buzzwords in cloud native, right? And these container environments, well, AMD'S architecture really just screams support for those type of environments, right? Where when you get into these larger core accounts and the consolidation that Mohan talked about. Now when I'm in a container environment, that blast radius so a lot of customers have concerns around, "Hey, having a single point of failure and having more than X number of cores concerns me." If I'm in containers, that becomes less of a concern. And so when you look at cloud native, containerized applications, data center modernization, AMD's extremely well positioned to take advantage of those use cases as well. >> Yeah, Mohan, and when we talk about virtualization, I think sometimes we have to remind everyone that yeah, we're talking about not only virtualization that has a full-blown operating system in the bucket, but also virtualization where the containers have microservices and things like that. I think you had something to add, Mohan. >> I did, and I think going back to the accelerator side of business, right? When we are looking at the current technology and looking at accelerators, AMD has done a fantastic job of adding in features like AVX-512, we have the bfloat16 and eight features. And some of what these do is they're effectively built-in accelerators for certain workloads especially in the AI and media spaces. And in some of these use cases we look at, for example, are inference. Traditionally we have used external accelerator cards, but for some of the entry level and mid-level use cases, CPU is going to work just fine especially with the newer CPUs that we are seeing this fantastic performance from. The accelerators just help get us to the point where if I'm at the edge, if I'm in certain use cases, I don't need to have an accelerator in there. I can run most of my inference workloads right on the CPU. >> Yeah, yeah. You know the game. It's an endless chase to find the bottleneck. And once we've solved the puzzle, we've created a bottleneck somewhere else. Back to the supercompute conversations we had, specifically about some of the AMD EPYC processor technology and the way that Dell is packaging it up and leveraging things like connectivity. That was one of the things that was also highlighted. This idea that increasingly connectivity is critically important, not just for supercomputing, but for high-performance computing that's finding its way out of the realms of Los Alamos and down to the enterprise level. Gentlemen, any more thoughts about the partnership or maybe a hint at what's coming in the future? I know that the original AMD announcement was announcing and previewing some things that are rolling out over the next several months. So let me just toss it to Greg. What are we going to see in 2023 in terms of rollouts that you can share with us? >> That I can share with you? Yeah, so I think look forward to see more advancements in the technology at the core level. I think we've already announced our product code name Bergamo, where we'll have up to 128 cores per socket. And then as we look in, how do we continually address this demand for data, this demand for, I need actionable insights immediately, look for us to continue to drive performance leadership in our products that are coming out and address specific workloads and accelerators where appropriate and where we see a growing market. >> Mohan, final thoughts. >> On the Dell side, of course, we have four very rich and configurable options with AMD EPYC servers. But beyond that, you'll see a lot more solutions. Some of what Greg has been talking about around the next generation of processors or the next updated processors, you'll start seeing some of those. and you'll definitely see more use cases from us and how customers can implement them and take advantage of the features that. It's just exciting stuff. >> Exciting stuff indeed. Gentlemen, we have a great year ahead of us. As we approach possibly the holiday seasons, I wish both of you well. Thank you for joining us. From here in the Palo Alto studios, again, Dave Nicholson here. Stay tuned for our continuing coverage of AMD's 4th Generation EPYC launch. Thanks for joining us. (cheerful music)

(energetic music) >> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, the ESPN of tech. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are here live in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World, the 10th anniversary of theCUBE being here at this conference. We have two guests for this segment. We have Jeff Woolsey, the Principal Program Manager Windows Server/Hybrid Cloud, Microsoft. Welcome, Jeff. >> Thank you very much. >> And Bob Ward, the principal architect at Microsoft. Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks, glad to be here. >> It's a pleasure. Honor to be here on the 10th anniversary, by the way. >> Oh is that right? >> Well, it's a big milestone. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> I've never been to theCUBE. I didn't even know what it was. >> (laughs) >> Like what is this thing? >> So it is now been a couple of days since Tatiana Dellis stood up on that stage and talked about the partnership. Now that we're sort of a few days past that announcement, what are you hearing? What's the feedback you're getting from customers? Give us some flavor there. >> Well, I've been spending some time in the Microsoft booth and, in fact, I was just chatting with a bunch of the guys that have been talking with a lot of customers as well and we all came to the consensus that everyone's telling us the same thing. They're very excited to be able to use Azure, to be able to use VMware, to be able to use these in the Azure Cloud together. They feel like it's the best of both worlds. I already have my VMware, I'm using my Office 365, I'm interested in doing more and now they're both collocated and I can do everything I need together. >> Yeah it was pretty interesting for me 'cause VMware and Microsoft have had an interesting relationship. I mean, the number one application that always lived on a VM was Microsoft stuff. The operating system standpoint an everything, but especially in the end using computer space Microsoft and VM weren't necessarily on the same page to see both CEOs, also both CUBE alums, up there talking about that really had most of us sit up and take notice. Congratulations on the progress. >> For me, being in a SQL server space, it's a huge popular workload on VMware, as you know and virtualization so everybody's coming up to me saying when can I start running SQL server in this environment? So we're excited to kind of see the possibilities there. >> Customers, they live in a heterogeneous environment. Multicloud has only amplified that. It's like, I want to be able to choose my infrastructure, my Cloud, and my application of choice and know that my vendors are going to rally around me and make this easy to use. >> This is about meeting our customers where they are, giving them the ability to do everything they need to do, and make our customers just super productive. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So, Jeff, there's some of the new specific give us the update as to the pieces of the puzzle and the various options that Microsoft has in this ecosystem. >> Well, a lot of these things are still coming to light and I would tell people definitely take a look at the blog. The blog really goes in in depth. But key part of this is, for customers that want to use their VMware, you get to provision your resources using, for example, the well known, well easy to use Azure Infrastructure and Azure Portal, but when it's time to actually do your VMs or configure your network, you get to use all of the same tools that you're using. So your vCenter, your vSphere, all of the things that a VMware administrator knows how to do, you continue to use those. So, it feels familiar. You don't feel like there's a massive change going on. And then when you want to hook this up to your Azure resources, we're making that super easy, as well, through integration in the portal. And you're going to see a lot more. I think really this is just the beginning of a long road map together. >> I want to ask you about SQL 19. I know that's your value, so-- >> That's what I do, I'm the SQL guy. >> Yeah, so tell us what's new. >> Well, you know, we launched SQL 19 last year at Ignite with our preview of SQL 19. And it'll be, by the way, it'll be generally available in the second half of this calendar year. We did something really radical with SQL 19. We did something called data virtualization polybase. Imagine as a SQL customer you connecting with SQL and then getting access to Oracle, MongoDB, Hadoop data sources, all sorts of different data in your environment, but you don't move the data. You just connect to SQL Server and get access to everything in your corporate environment now. We realize you're not just going to have SQL Server now in your environment. You're going to have everything. But we think SQL can become like your new data hub to put that together. And then we built something called big data clusters where we just deploy all that for you automatically. We even actually built a Hadoop cluster for you with SQL. It's kind of radical stuff for the normal database people, right? >> Bob, it's fascinating times. We know it used to be like you know I have one database and now when I talk to customers no, I have a dozen databases and my sources of data are everywhere and it's an opportunity of leveraging the data, but boy are there some challenges. How are customers getting their arms around this. >> I mean, it's really difficult. We have a lot of people that are SQL Server customers that realize they have those other data sources in their environment, but they have skills called TSQL, it's a programming language. And they don't want to lose it, they want to learn, like, 10 other languages, but they have to access that data source. Let me give you an example. You got Oracle in a Linux environment as your accounting system and you can't move it to SQL Server. No problem. Just use SQL with your TSQL language to query that data, get the results, and join it with your structured data in SQL Server itself. So that's a radical new thing for us to do and it's all coming in SQL 19. >> And what it helps-- what really helps break down is when you have all of these disparate sources and disparate databases, everything gets siloed. And one of the things I have to remind people is when I talk to people about their data center modernization and very often they'll talk about you know, I've had servers and data that's 20, 30, even, you know, decades old and they talk about it almost like it's like baggage it's luggage. I'm like, no, that's your company, that's your history. That data is all those customer interactions. Wouldn't it be great if you could actually take better advantage of it. With this new version of SQL, you can bring all of these together and then start to leverage things like ML and AI to actually better harvest and data mine that and rather than keeping those in disparate silos that you can't access. >> How ready would you say are your customers to take advantage of AI and ML and all the other-- >> It's interesting you say that because we actually launched the ability to run R and Python with SQL Server even two years ago. And so we've got a whole new class of customers, like data scientists now, that are working together with DBAs to start to put those workloads together with SQL Server so it's actually starting to come a really big deal for a lot of our community. >> Alright, so, Jeff, we had theCUBE at Microsoft Ignite last year, first time we'd done a Microsoft show. As you mentioned, our 10th year here, at what used to be EMC World. It was Interesting for me to dig in. There's so many different stack options, like we heard this week with Dell Technologies. Azure, I understood things a lot from the infrastructure side. I talked to a lot of your partners, talked to me about how many nodes and how many cores and all that stuff. But very clearly at the show, Azure Stack is an extension of Azure and therefore the applications that live on it, how I manage that, I should think Azure first, not infrastructure first. There's other solutions that extend the infrastructure side, things like WSSD I heard a lot about. But give us the update on Azure Stack, always interest in the Cloud, watching where that fits and some of the other adjacent pieces of the portfolio. >> So the Azure Stack is really becoming a rich portfolio now. So we launched with Azure Stack, which is, again, to give you that Cloud consistency. So you can literally write applications that you can run on premises, you can move to the Cloud. And you can do this without any code change. At the same time, a bunch of customers came to us and they said this is really awesome, but we have other environments where we just simply need to run traditional workloads. We want to run traditional VMs and containers and stuff like that. But we really want to make it easy to connect to the Cloud. And so what we have actually launched is Azure Stack HCI. It's been out about a month, month and a half. And, in fact, here at Dell EMC Dell Technology World here, we actually have Azure Stack HCI Solutions that are shipping, that are on the marketplace right now here are the show as well and I was just demoing one to someone who was blown away at just how easy it is with our admin center integration to actually manage the hyper converged cluster and very quickly and easily configure it to Azure so that I can replicate a virtual machine to Azure with one click. So I can back up to Azure in just a couple clicks. I can set up easy network connectivity in all of these things. And best yet, Dell just announced their integration for their servers into admin center here at Dell Technologies World. So there's a lot that we're doing together on premises as well. >> Okay, so if I understand right, is Dell is that one of their, what they call Ready Nodes, or something in the VxFlex family. >> Yes. >> That standpoint. The HCI market is something that when we wrote about it when it was first coming out, it made sense that, really, the operating system and hypervisor companies take a lead in that space. We saw VMware do it aggressively and Microsoft had a number of different offerings, but maybe explain why this offering today versus where we were five years ago with HCI. >> Well, one of the things that we've been seeing, so as people move to the Cloud and they start to modernize their applications and their portfolio, we see two things happen. Generally, there are some apps that people say hey, I'm obviously going to move that stuff to Azure. For example, Exchange. Office 365, Microsoft, you manage my mail for me. But then there are a bunch of apps that people say that are going to stay on Prem. So, for example, in the case of SQL, SQL is actually an example of one I see happening going in both places. Some people want to run SQL up in the Cloud, 'cause they want to take advantage of some of the services there. And then there are people who say I have SQL that is never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to the Cloud because of latency or for governance and compliance. So I want to run that on modern hardware that's super fast. So this new Dell Solutions that have Intel, Optane DC Persistent Memory have lots of cores. >> I'm excited about that stuff, man. >> Oh my gosh, yes. Optane Persistent Memory and lots of cores, lots of fast networking. So it's modern, but it's also secure. Because a lot of servers are still very old, five, seven, ten years old, those don't have things like TPM, Secure Boot, UEFI. And so you're running on a very insecure platform. So we want people to modernize on new hardware with a new OS and platform that's secure and take advantage of the latest and greatest and then make it easy to connect up to Azure for hybrid cloud. >> Persistent Memory's pretty exciting stuff. >> Yes. >> Actually, Dell EMC and Intel just published a paper using SQL Server to take advantage of that technology. SQL can be I/O bound application. You got to have data and storage, right? So now Dell EMC partnered together with SQL 19 to access Persistent Memory, bypass the I/O part of the kernel itself. And I think they achieved something like 170% faster performance versus even a fast NVNMe. It's a great example of just using a new technology, but putting the code in SQL to have that intelligence to figure out how fast can Persistent Memory be for your application. >> I want to ask about the cultural implications of the Dell Microsoft relationship partnership because, you know, these two companies are tech giants and really of the same generation. They're sort of the Gen Xers, in their 30s and 40s, they're not the startups, been around the block. So can you talk a little bit about what it's like to work so closely with Dell and sort of the similarities and maybe the differences. >> Sure. >> Well, first of all, we've been doing it for, like you said, we've been doing this for awhile. So it's not like we're strangers to this. And we've always had very close collaboration in a lot of different ways. Whether it was in the client, whether it's tablets, whether it's devices, whether it's servers, whether it's networking. Now, what we're doing is upping our cloud game. Essentially what we're doing is, we're saying there is an are here in Cloud where we can both work a lot closer together and take advantage of the work that we've done traditionally at the hardware level. Let's take that engineering investment and let's do that in the Cloud together to benefit our mutual customers. >> Well, SQL Server is just a primary application that people like to run on Dell servers. And I've been here for 26 years at Microsoft and I've seen a lot of folks run SQL Server on Dell, but lately I've been talking to Dell, it's not just about running SQL on hardware, it's about solutions. I was even having discussions yesterday about Dell about taking our ML and AI services with SQL and how could Dell even package ready solutions with their offerings using our software stack, but even addition, how would you bring machine learning and SQL and AI together with a whole Dell comp-- So it's not just about talking about the servers anymore as much, even though it's great, it's all about solutions and I'm starting to see that conversation happen a lot lately. >> And it's generally not a server conversation. That's one of the reasons why Azure Stack HCI is important. Because its customers-- customers don't come to me and say Jeff, I want to buy a server. No, I want to buy a solution. I want something that's pre configured, pre validated, pre certified. That's why when I talk about Azure Stack HCI, invariably, I'm going to get the question: Can I build my own? Yes, you can build your own. Do I recommend it? No, I would actually recommend you take a look at our Azure Stack HCI catalog. Like I said, we've got Dell EMC solutions here because not only is the hardware certified for Windows server, but then we go above and beyond, we actually run whole bunch of BurnInTests, a bunch of stress tests. We actually configure, tune, and tune these things for the best possible performance and security so it's ready to go. Dell EMC can ship it to you and you're up and running versus hey, I'm trying to configure make all this thing work and then test it for the next few months. No, you're able to consume Cloud very quickly, connect right up, and, boom, you got hybrid in the house. >> Exactly. >> Jeff and Bob, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Our pleasure. Thanks for having us. Enjoyed it, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more of theCUBEs live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit.

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi, Dave Vellante here, with John Siegel, Vice President of product marketing at Dell EMC. John, what does it mean to be a leader in hyperconversion infrastructure? >> First of all, thanks for asking. It's been quite a year, 2017, for us. Just this past quarter, we became the leader, Dell EMC did, and the number one leader in hyperconversion infrastructure, and we want to thank, certainly, our customers out there, as well, We think it was also due to the fact that we have a full portfolio at HCI, and really strong partnerships with folks like the VMware. >> OK, so, how about workload progression? VDI was really sort of the initial sweet spot, it's true, of hyperconversion. Has it evolved, and how has it evolved? >> It has evolved quite a bit, really, I think over the past coupl years we've seen it evolve from HCI really addressing, like you said, VDI workloads, small consolidation-type projects, text EV, really, to a majority of virtualized workloads in the data center. In fact, with the announcement this week, with the support now of 14th generation PowerEdged servers, we think we've taken it to another level where, because of 14th generation power servers, we have the ability to now provide the power, if you will. The performance, and the predictable performance in particular, that workloads require, mission-critical workloads require in the data center. >> OK, so we've ticked the performance box. What about the economics piece? How is hyperconversion infrastructure helping IT operations lower cost? >> Ya know, it's I think that's one of the main reasons that HCI crossed the chasm in the past year. It's because it's become a no-brainer, from an economics perspective. As customers look to transform IT and move away from traditional IT, the TCO advantage relative to traditional IT is 30-40%. I mean, you name it. I think Wikibon's done a number of studies this year, as well. I mean, you name it, across the board. So, it's really become a no-brainer there. And it's also become very compelling relative to public cloud, as well. The on-prem model. So, if you look at whether it's traditional IT, or whether you look at public cloud, I think what we're finding now is true private cloud built on, if you will, HCI portfolio is becoming a compelling way for customers to transform their data center, and to build on top of that cloud-operating model. >> OK, so speaking of public cloud, what's Dell EMC's point of view on cloud generally? >> So, our view is that the cloud is an operating model. It's not a place. So, really, what it's all about is providing that turn-key, self service-type experience, regardless of where your data is, if you will. Whether it's off-prem, whether it's on-prem, I mean, clearly, we don't have a strong opinion of that, other than that we want to make the on-prem experience as cloud-like as possible, and we think that starts with a critical foundation of HCI. >> OK, John. You mentioned PowerEdged servers before, a lot of people say it's just servers, it's a commodity, what say you? >> I'll tell you what. So, first of all, HCI is defined by software, right? And then I think we've talked about in the past, but it's really the combination of software with hardware that really delivers that turn-key outcome that customers expect when it comes to hyperconversed infrastructure. And this announcement is really about that combination of software and hardware, and the hardware, in particular, is the star of the show. It's 14th generation PowerEdged servers. What this brings to the table is powerful, predictable performance, first and foremost. The ability, now, to support mission-critical workloads. This is something that we haven't had the ability to really do before in the past. It can now support mission-critical workloads in the data center, first and foremost. So, it's powerful from that perspective. It's purposeful, in that it can now support any configuration. We actually can support up to 20 million different configurations, I'm not kidding here, when it comes to PowerEdged configurations with VXRail, as an example. And PowerEdged, 14th generation servers are actually purpose-built for HCI. They're addressing over 150 different customer requirements out there, from performance, to reliability, to manageability, to deployment, because, typically, a commodity server's really built as a compute engine. Instead, what PowerEdge servers are about, the 14th generation ones, is they're really, literally, custom-built for HCI, and that's why we think this is going to help take HCI to a whole new level, and allow customers to now start to deploy HCI across their data center to build that foundation for the cloud. >> Excellent. I think you nailed it. To give you the last word, just maybe summarize the announcement, final thoughts, HCI, wherever you want to go. >> I'll tell you what. I mean, we're just so excited. I think HCI has, as I said, become the foundation for the cloud. And, we've got a full portfolio. We give customers choice. You know, regardless of the type of use case they have, regardless of the type of workload they have, we have an HCI answer for our customers. Some customers, for example, want to start small and grow with appliances, others want to actually transform their network, as well. So, we have VxRack, as an example, there, where customers that want to transform more of the stack. We're excited to have that as an option for customers, too. So really, across the board, we're providing anything from Ready Nodes, where customers can do a little more of the work themselves, to appliances like VXRail and Xe series, where it's a turnkey experience across a server the compute and storage, all the way up to VxRacks, where we're making the entire data center, if you will, turnkey, as a foundation for that cloud-operating model. >> OK, awesome. Let's see, I lied. Last word is mine. CrowdChat on December 1, where it's kind of an ask me anything on the announcement. >> Ask me, ask Chad, ask whoever anything. >> Great, and then where do people go to get more information? >> Dellemc.com/HCI. We keep it simple, my friend. >> That's great. John, thanks very much. Appreciate ya comin. All right, thanks for watching, everybody. We'll see ya next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMWorld 2017, brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to VMWorld 2017 everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my co-host, Peter Burris. Bob Wambach is here. He's the Vice President of Marketing for Converged Platforms and Solutions at Dell EMC. Bob, good to see you again. >> Good to see you, guys. Always a pleasure. >> It's been a good week, you guys have had a lot going on. We were at the Influencer reception last night. Great shindig, thank you for that. >> Peter: Very much. >> Lot of momentum in this ecosystem: VMWAre, financials are looking good. We just had Pat Gelsinger on, he has a spring in his step. What's going on from your perspective? >> You know I see the spring in Pat's step, and I look at it and, you know I know the stock's up, everything's going great for them, but what I really see is the plan they've put in place, right? And this is a long time coming. If you remember last year you remember Pat was talking about, it's a multi-cloud world, right? And everything VMWare has been doing for the last couple of years has been leading up to some of these announcements that you're seeing now. So I see a guy who's really happy because, made some big bets, had a plan, and the bets are paying off. And most of the benefit is actually going to be in the future. And as you see, Michael's looking pretty happy too this week, right? (laughter) So I think if you heard Pat in the opening keynote, one of the things that struck me is he said we're going from data centers to center of data. And it's really recognizing that there's this explosion of data going on and this data has to be handled in different fashion, and that's a cloud operating model. It's not a cloud. the cloud's an operating model not a place, and it's a multi-cloud world out there. So, you look at most large companies, maybe they have Concur, they have ADP, they have Salesforce.com. There's multiple SaaS providers that they have and then they use on premise equipment, they want to cloud-ify that, right? Is how do I get to, I've got my own journey to cloud. Our job is to really help them both on their journey for on premise equipment, but then working with VMWare, working with Pivotal, is making easy to utilize and navigate the multi-cloud world as well. >> So, we've been talking all week, Peter is really sort of driving our research at Wikibon, helping us think through the customer implications and one of the things we've been talking all week is the reality of that data and not being able to move that data into the cloud, bringing that cloud operating model, as you were just pointing out to the data. But, the implication there, as you've talked about many times Peter, is you've got to have the simplicity and other attributes of the cloud in order to make that brand promise come true, what we call true private cloud. So, what are you guys doing in that regard to achieve that vision? >> First, it's listening. Michael Dell likes to say, and it's very frequently that he says, we have big ears to us. Our job is to really listen to customers, understand their business. You need to understand their business and then once you understand your business, you better know how to help them. And, there's also preferences. They've got capex versus opex preferences. They're going to make decisions of on premises versus off premises based upon data gravity, based upon governance, based upon SLA's, latency. All these things that have to do with the characteristics of the data; data movement. And, then you have a, there's actually a preference for, I want to build it myself. Or, I'm actually very focused on my business and I'd like to be nearly out of the IT business. So, we look at this, everybody's a builder, you're a builder at some level. If you are a builder down at the component level, where you want to pick your servers, you're going to pick vSAN. Then we have our Ready portfolio. vSAN Ready Nodes covers that, right? So, it's the easiest way to buy vSAN in a PowerEdge server. And, if you start going up the stack and you want that packaged with software, we have Ready bundles. And then we start moving into where people are realizing I don't add a lot of value to the business by putting together pieces of hardware and software. So, I want to rely on Dell EMC to do some of that for us. That's where our VxRail, VxRack, VxBlock comes in. Where we own the engineering, manufacturing, management, support, sustaining of that. All the life cycle assurance, single contact support. That's from us. Then there's customers further up that say, well I want a stack, a software stack. We increasingly see that the world's evolving into, sometimes people refer to it as stack wars. And VmWare is doing exceptionally well in the stack wars. They're very prevalent in on premise and now they also have the integrations with the Googles, with AWS, with IBM Cloud. Our announcement this week about the Ready system is taking Dell EMC's expertise in hyper-converged infrastructure, which we co-engineered, co-developed with VMWare, and VMWare taking the lead on how do you package up vSphere, NSX and vSAN together with it and vRealize. They control the roadmap for that, they know how to do the lifecycle automation updates, so what we do is we provide the hyper-converged infrastructure and it's actually a simple overall environment for customers when they combine these. When Michael talks about peanut butter and chocolate a couple of times, and that's really what I think about the Ready systems. There's VMWare, we have for Pivotal, we'll also have Pivotal Ready system that can give you either a Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the easiest way to get a Pivotal Cloud Foundry environment on our hyper-converged infrastructure, or the Pivotal Container Services, PKS on hyper-converged infrastructure. >> So Bob, you mentioned early on of having different overview of the portfolio, you mentioned early on that VMWare had a plan, and they've been executing about that plan. But, you also got a plan within the hyper-converged team, within the whole enterprise cloud team. So, software and hardware are once again co-mingled in ways that they haven't been for a long time. The kind of normal separation, just get the hardware and then you get the software. But, now we're seeing that because of the complexities of trying to bring all this together, talk a little bit about how you're influencing the VMWare plan and the VMWare plan is influencing the hardware side of things. >> You know it's a great question. I think there's been a great learning experience. As you know for several years, we've had Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. Enterprise Hybrid Cloud started with a request from customers to make it easier to create a full cloud. People were realizing, I've been trying to build my cloud. It's super hard. I actually don't want to spend my best people and my time and money on this. So, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud initially started working with some very large enterprises. And, it was a way to take any type of converged or hyper-converged infrastructure and bring the whole VMWare portfolio to market with full turn key system. Full stop, it's we own it, we will make this stuff work. So, the goodness there is that the customers would get something that was incredibly rich, and remember this, a lot of this started out on converged infrastructure, so you basing it on a SAN fabric, VMAX, All-Flash, XtremeIO data domain. So you have all the flexibility and option of the data services, rich data services and data protection. Now it turns out Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is really really hard, right? We don't have magic software to do this. There's hundreds of people that are making all this stuff work so that when it goes into these large enterprises it adapts to their environment and it's very reliable, robust, scalable, flexible. The other side of the coin is, it takes so long to test and QA the new VMWare, perfectly fine, very solid VMWare features, that they don't show up to market for a long time. The largest enterprises understand this, but for many customers, you end up having this misalignment, where VMWare's saying, "I want you to take these features now", and we're saying, "That's six months away in Enterprise Hybrid Cloud." So, what you've seen develop in the Ready systems are perfect example of this is if we constrain down for most people, most people are not the largest banks in the world, there's not the largest pharmas or governments. Hyper-converged infrastructure is ready for the vast majority of work loads today and they need a pretty well defined set of features and functionality. So, VMWare more takes the lead, on this is how we're going to package these up. This is our software suite. We know how to do life cycle. Together, you work on the hyper-converged infrastructure, which is also co-developed with them. And, it ends up being a very good path to get these into the hands of many more customers. We're talking 10x customers, if you think about hundreds of people that are likely EHC, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud candidates, versus many thousands that are VMWare Ready system candidates. So, I think it's a great example of how we work together to figure out what is the sweet spot for volume and velocity of being able to provide value very quickly to the largest number of customers. >> So, we Chad on theCube yesterday and we asked, Dave and I asked him a series of questions, and one of them was, so tell us about how the cloud experience is going to manifest itself through Dell EMC products. One of the things he said was, in anticipation of these cloud wars, or in these platform wars, I think was his term, that increasingly it is going to be about how well you bind between different clouds. Interesting, I was walking through the show earlier and I saw one of our big user clients and I stopped and said hi to him. And, the two things that he mentioned when I asked him what he's looking for is, one, he used the same word, bind, how well does this bind to that, tell me about how your platform is going to bind to other platforms. And, automation was the second one. He said, I want to see, increasingly we're going to bring new technology in based on its demonstrable automated characteristics. What do you think about that, as you think about building platforms and how the portfolio is going to evolve against those two dimensions. The ability to bind things better and the ability to automate things more. >> Right, so, I think it's spot on, first of all. And, if we look at two different use cases. The one use case of most customers today, VMWare customers, they're using the VMWare suite, environment on premises. VMWare actually now binds those to AWS, to IBM Cloud, to Google Cloud. And, for me the killer app is NSX, right? If you think about, you want to traverse, navigate these different clouds. You want to do it securely, protected, segmentation and all of the richness of security and control over that. NSX is really the way to do that. When we talk about automation, VMWare is the best company to take the lead in how to automate that binding it together. So, whereas in the past, with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, we, and that continues to go on, we did all the automation, there's a much more efficient path for most customers with VMWare doing that. And, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud still remains the realm of, I'm going to say, hundreds of customers where these are huge deals. These are $50 Million and up deals. Where you're providing incredible value all in, for all their different applications, right? And, most, you know the vast majority of customers today clearly not on hyper-converged infrastructure, but they could be and if the value prop is so compelling, it's so compelling that it's definitely, that's where things are going. So, we look at where things are going and try to optimize for that. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is also something that, in my view, binds the developer environment together. You develop it once and then you can publish this wherever you want. So there is a strategy within Dell Technologies companies to work together to do this and the more we work together, another great thing happens, is that your field teams end up being aligned and telling the same story. So, whereas with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud we would have inherit conflict. Because we'd be speaking about the virtues of Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, but VMWare is telling them you need these new features, right? And this is where, when that little friction goes away and you have full alignment, so we're all on the same page, we're all the saying the same things, it's far more credible. >> Well, it also accelerates the customer. >> Bob: It sure does. >> And, I think that's probably one of the most important things. At the end of the day, it's to get the customers going. >> Yeah, we got to wrap, but somebody said the other day that VMWare is moving at the speed of the CIO. Robin Matlock today said today, yeah, but the CIO has to move faster, but it's hard. So, you're right, you're trying to accelerate that. And, to I guess my last point is when you were talking about, we've been talking about, forming the cloud model to your business, when you were describing sort of what you do for Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, that's not a trivial exercise. It requires a lot of expertise and a lot of process, and a lot of good thinking. >> Right, and it is very, it's by definition, customizable. You end up doing something different for every customer. Whereas, Ready, the Ready solutions portfolio I think are going to be huge. Just huge in the coming year. And the whole idea is to make it easy. It's ready for wherever you are on this journey. If you are ready for more of a, I want to jump into cloud and I see this path, I'm ready to move, then it's Ready Systems, right? If you are more of a, I want to put the software elements together myself and build that, then we have Ready bundles. And, high performance computing has been huge for us. Data analytics, increasingly I think those are connected together. So, there's synergy between the two of them. Then, the Ready nodes, for people who are, I really want to build this stuff myself, this is the path that I'm going down. And it takes all of the, we have an opinion, right? Our opinion is we want you moving quickly because we see the customers benefiting from it. Ultimately, all our customers are trying to be very competitive and successful at whatever their mission is, and we know the further up the stack you go, we can help you be more competitive. But, it takes the conflict out of the relationship when they know that I can help you wherever you are, we have something that is right for you. >> Alright, we got to wrap. Thanks Bob for coming on. Taking you on a journey of Vmworld 2017. Bob Wambach, thanks for coming back in theCube. >> Thanks. >> You're welcome. Keep right there buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCube. We're live from VMworld 2017. Be right back. (exciting music)