>> From the Silicon Angle media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCube. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. Happy to welcome back to the program Trey Layton who's the SVP of engineering with Dell EMC. Trey, great to see you. >> Hi Stu, how are you? >> I'm doing fantastic, thank you. So there's the devil technology summit happening in Austin, Texas. Let's not hide the lead, there's some news around things you've been working on for a while. Why don't you share the update with our audience? >> Well, myself and my team have been working on a new product that we are announcing at Dell technology summit called PowerOne and we are positioning in the market is autonomous infrastructure. It's a great combination of all the wonderful products in the Dell technologies portfolio combined with some very innovative automation that makes integrating the product an autonomous outcome. >> All right, first of all with the name power in it, we know that that's the branding that Dell likes. Something that's going to be with us for a while. You talk about all-in-one. You've got some history, we have some history back pulling various solution together, talk about compute, network and storage, what back in the day we called converged infrastructure. Explain how all-in-one you know, what what is the all in the all in one? >> So first of all, it's a system where you can get all of Dell technologies in one package. The next thing is about building on that decade's worth of experience of building converged products and learning about the different intricacies of integrating those products and instead of relying upon humans to integrate those technologies together to deliver an outcome for a customer, embedding that intelligence and software to make it easy for an operator to drive a configuration, to deliver an outcome for a customer to operate a modern data center environment. >> So it's exciting stuff Trey 'cause you know, the design principle before was let's simplify as much as we can, let's that entire rack if you will, be the unitive infrastructure that people manage, but what I hear you talking about, the automation and software and even you know, we're not replacing the humans, we're augmenting what they're doing by having automation take over. That's powerful stuff. We've talked about intelligence and automation for I'd say all of our careers. So explain a little bit do you know, this autonomous, what really you know, where is that automation and how come it is different today than it might have been five or 10 years ago? >> Well, you think about all the things that we've learned in 10 years of building a packaged product to actually deliver an outcome for a customer. Requiring some degree of manual intervention, but a significant amount of simplicity that we've built in those products to deliver an outcome. One of the things that's true about today is that as organizations are on a digital transformation journey, they are struggling with a high degree of intake of technology, while also maintaining the products that they manage on a daily basis to, quote-unquote keep the lights on. What we have done is say how can we take the innovations that we've built in our products that our infrastructure is code and how can we build software intelligence that understands based on the the operators desired outcome for an integration, we employ Dell engineering best practices to deliver that outcome. So a key element of the product is housing this intelligence and software that drives this automated outcome through best practices for how we engineer products together. >> All right Trey, you've got engineering. Bring us in a little aside of the team you know, building now in 2019. What are the pieces that you had? What's different about the team that you had to build this and is there a unique IP that your team and this product brings beyond what was already available in the marketplace? >> Yes, so first of all the team is a global team that we've actually been in the process of hiring in the last year plus, a year and a half plus and it's a very young team, different skill set. We learned very early on that if we're going to build a product with embedded automation, you needed to have experience and understanding, what are the best practices for integrating the technologies in the product, but simultaneously you needed people who understood how to write code that made that outcome possible and so really bringing and building a global team of DevOps minded individuals that understood open source technologies, that understood our VMware ecosystem, that understood the Dell EMC ecosystem and more importantly, the larger Dell technologies ecosystem for bringing those products together and I'll tell you, it's a diverse culture of individuals. What I'm most excited about is while we're very much focused on delivering VMware outcomes in this first release, the product that we've built is capable of delivering any type of outcome. Whether it be another type of virtualization environment or another type of application outcome. The software is designed to deliver an integration that is designed to support a customer's production operation. The intelligence or the product that we built to do that is called the PowerOne controller and embedded in that is software that a customer can drive either through a user interface or they can use automation technologies that they have in-house to call on this controller programmatically to execute those outcomes as opposed to being chained to a user interface that an operator has to learn as a new element of their environment. >> Yeah Trey, really reminds me of the conversations I've been having with customers over the last decade or more is that core understanding and building my computer infrastructure, my storage infrastructure, my networking infrastructure. I still need to understand some of those pieces, but it is much more about the software, the operating model and it's, as soon as we know, we're living in a software world. >> Well, it's interesting that you say that because you and I both know based on our history that there are complexities that we've worked to make simpler to operate, but a customer today struggles to have expertise dedicated to how do I build an underlying network fabric, how do I deploy a software virtualization layer on top of that Network fabric, how do I deploy storage arrays in a manner where the i/o is optimized not only for performance, but also for survivability. How do I carve up my computer sources in a manner that most efficiently supports the virtualization or container outcome that I'm deploying. There's a tremendous amount of skill that you need to have to employ the best practices to integrate all those technologies together and what we are doing is merely bringing those capabilities in software, so that an operator can say, I want to deploy this many cores with this much memory and associated to this much capacity of external storage and all the underlying in order configuration dependencies happen through the intelligence that we've built in automation to drive the right outcome for the customer. >> Okay, so Trey, when I've been digging into the software world and you talk to the people that are building applications, observability something that's been coming up a bunch. It's not just understanding what I have, but with the flows of information, Ansible, New Relic, that all talking about in a containerized micro-services world, there are different ways that I need to look at the entire system. How does that the kind of mindset and thinking fit into the design of PowerOne? >> Well, it's actually an age-old problem that we've had as we've began to have shared infrastructure to run, whether they be containerized services or virtualized services or contain running in virtualized services. It's how do we associate what's running to the underlying infrastructure so that if we have a problem in the underlying infrastructure that we're managing, that we target a resolution and that resolution could be increased performance so that that service can run better or it could be some type of underlying failure that we want to ensure that as survivability is kicked in, that we employ more resource to support expansion or just a continuation and burst of capability that's needed. When we build PowerOne, we thought about, it is a system. How do we give observability of that system in the context of a system to understand the associated dependencies so that we could quickly guide the operator to identifying the area that they needed to look at from an infrastructure perspective and either influence or simply respond to, instead of a more traditional mode of on-premises management is let me go find where the problem is and see if this fixes it. We have given observability to specifically identify where the issue is and enable the operator to go target that. >> All right, so Trey, you mentioned the traditional model of doing things. What does PowerOne mean for, say for example the X block is something you know, over a decade out there on the market, there's been lots of discussions forever. The Cisco stack, the Dell stack and VMware, you know, all those challenges. So tell us what this means for VX block? >> So first of all, I couldn't say enough good things about the V block team. It's a part of the organization that I'm in. We are very much committed to VxBlock engineering going forward and PowerOne is an expansion of our portfolio as opposed to a replacement of. We value our partnership with Cisco significantly, customers are committed to acquiring Cisco technologies in concert with our storage and data production products and Vxblock is all about giving customers an ability to have a converged experience with our storage technologies and a very unique experience that surrounds the offers that we deliver in that space. I will tell you that the automation that we're building in PowerOne is also something that we're targeting at our entire portfolio as opposed to just isolating into this one product. The dawn of autonomous infrastructure in our minds is not about isolating that technology to one product, but it's about bringing it to our entire portfolio of products to make our customers experiences better in managing and consuming the technologies they buy from us. >> Well, definitely something we've heard from Jeff Clark, Jeff Boudreau and the the team is the portfolio inside Dell EMC is going through a lot of simplification. So the whole autonomous infrastructure, PowerOne, how should we be thinking about where this fits kind of in the overall market? >> So it's very much includes our purpose-built storage portfolio technologies, our data protection, it includes our networking technologies and some unique automation capabilities that we've built in it to enable the IT operator to not have to worry about programming the fabric that we actually sense and understand the changes in the virtualization environment and deploy those configurations to the underlying network infrastructure and it's all about using our power edge portfolio of servers. So PowerOne is very much about consuming our data center technologies all in one package. That positioning in the market is complementary to customers who want to acquire VX block and are looking to pair Cisco technologies with Dell storage and more importantly, our HCI portfolio is a key element of our total offer to customers, where customers are looking to deploy infrastructure with software-defined storage characteristics and a very unique management experience and simplified operations, the HCI portfolio is there as well. So I often engage, specifically as we talk about the exclusively Dell portfolio. It's not an or conversation, it's an and. It's which applications are you deploying in your data center environment? What use cases are you deploying? How is the underlying infrastructure optimized to best address the goals that you have for that deployment? And so that's why we've taken a portfolio approach as opposed to one product to address every use case that's in the market. >> All right so Trey, we've talked a lot about operations and the way we design things. We haven't talked about cloud you know, and very much we believe cloud is as much an operating model as it is a place. It's a journey, not a destination, hybrid cloud is what most customers have today. They have multiple clouds, but we think one of the challenges of the day is is helping to get more value out of the some of what you have then, the individual pieces would be on their own. So where does PowerOne fit into the Dell Tech cloud story and we'd love to also hear just where it fits into the kind of the broader cloud discussions that we have when we're at a Dell show, a VMware show or beyond. >> Yeah, so it's an interesting discussion 'cause I think we begin to drift into saying a thing is cloud and I think more outcomes are cloud and it's a combination of software and infrastructure. PowerOne is an infrastructure element that is very much a part of the Dell technologies cloud strategy, but Dell technologies cloud is more about our entire portfolio of software and infrastructure participating in a common ecosystem to deliver that cloud outcome for customers and so Dell Tech, so PowerOne is absolutely a part of the Dell technologies cloud and we're excited about continuing down the automation enhancements path to make those outcomes more possible for customers as we go throughout time. So initially, PowerOne is very much an infrastructure resource in Dell technologies cloud. Over time, you're going to see even greater enhancements as you will see enhancements across our entire portfolio of technologies in participating in the larger Dell technologies cloud ecosystem story. >> Okay, and just to connect the dots 'cause when I look at those pieces and we talked about, as customers are doing hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, if they're VMware shop VCF is an important piece of that and that is part of VMware cloud on AWS, what they're doing with Azure, with Google. So this plugs in if you, you know, my words into that broader multi cloud, hybrid cloud discussion that customers are having. >> Absolutely, you think about it in layers. We are building an infrastructure layer at Dell EMC that enables that Dell technologies cloud layer to be possible through the VMware ecosystem of technologies, making that multi-cloud, that private cloud functionality realized. The VMware ecosystem is robust in its approach to supporting multi cloud environments as well as deploying the virtualization and container technologies that are critical for building in a modern enterprise and so we are an element of that strategy as opposed to the exclusive pinpoint resource in the strategy. All of the infrastructure products in the portfolio will participate in the Dell technologies cloud and we're excited about the innovation that we can bring and making the Dell technology strategy and vision more easily realized by our customers. >> Okay and Trey, when I think of PowerOne, what market segments do we think are going to kind of be the first customer for this and any specific rules or inside a customer that should be the ones looking at this? >> Yeah, that's a great question. So as we look at markets, you look at organizations who are looking to deploy a data center resource. We go as small as four servers, but candidly, if you're deploying a data center with four servers, there are other items in our portfolio that are better positioned like hyper-converged to start in that place, but if you're looking to deploy data center where you're looking to go 10s, 20s, hundreds of servers and you want external storage in the offer, then PowerOne is a great starting point. If you think about the scalability and we haven't touched on it, that we've built in PowerOne, at launch, we're going to support 270 servers in the architecture. Very quickly, we will expand into supporting what's described as a multi pod architecture where we will get beyond 700 servers and then move into thousands of servers where the architecture is actually designed to support over 7,600 servers. In concert with that, at day one, we will support multiple storage arrays as well. So deploying multiple Power Mac storage raised as a storage domain to support this. So when we talk about markets, we talk about the ability to address medium sized organizations data center use cases all the way up to the largest enterprises or service providers in the world data center deployments in an all Dell technology stack. >> All right, Trey, give us the final word on this. One or two things you want people to understand and know about PowerOne as they walk away. >> So I think the most important thing to take away is that this is a way to acquire Dell technologies products all in one place, in one package, in a incredible user experience. The way we're going to sustain that user experience and maintain that value proposition to customers is around the autonomous infrastructure packaging that we've built in the software that we're delivering. Utilizing some of the most advanced automation characteristics that are out there on the market, combined with some of the brightest minds to integrate these technologies together. Customers just need to get to production operations and when you can acquire a product that houses the intelligence to get to that outcome faster, there's a greater return on your invested capital when you're buying this product and that's the most important thing I think to walk away from. We are committed to helping get our our customers get to operational outcomes faster and these technologies that we've built in this product are delivering on that promise. >> Well Trey, congratulations to you and the team. We always love to see when you go behind the scenes, we kind of rebuild from a clean sheet of paper building on the history that you have, listening to your customer strongly and having somethings ready for today's modern era. Thanks so much. >> Thanks Stu. >> All right, be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all our coverage. I'm Stu Miniman, as always, thanks for watching theCUBE. (light electronic music)

>> 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. >> We're at 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? 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 lifecycle. Manage the lifecycle services of the data center assets that you're deploying. We have created some great intellectual property, some great innovation around helping minimize the complexity associated with managing the lifecycle of a very complex integration by way of one of the largest data center assets that people operate in their environments. >> So, yeah, thousands and thousands of customers. They're telling you lifecycle management is critical, but what are they doing? 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 that need to operate. What we do as an organization and have done since inception is, we manage that complexity for them. We deliver them an outcome-based architecture that is pre-integrated, and we sustain that integration over its life, so they spend less time doing that and letting the experts who actually build the components focus on maintaining those integrations. >> As an analyst, I always looked at converged infrastructure as an evolutionary trend, bringing together storage servers, networking, bespoke components. My question is, where's the innovation underneath converged infrastructure? >> I would say 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 integration in a manner where an organization can put those advanced integrations into solving business problems immediately. There's two vectors of innovation. There are the technology components that we're acquiring to solve business problems, and there's the method in 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? >> The announcement is, we are announcing the VxBlock 1000. The interesting thing about Vblocks over the years is they have been individual systems architectures. 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, is that right? >> 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 breaking the barriers of traditional CI and moving it forward 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? >> I would talk specifically about customers that we have today, and when they deploy, 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. 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 VI workload. And then, as those workloads would grow, they would grow those individualized systems. What it did was, it created islands of stranded resource and capacity. Vblock 1000 is about bringing all those capabilities into a singular architecture where you can grow the resources based on pools. As your workload 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. >> 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. NVMe, for example. Next-generation compute platforms. There are new-generation fabric services that are merging. VxBlock 1000 is the place at which you will see all of these technologies introduce, 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 buzzword from the vendor community is "Futureproof," but you're 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. >> All right, 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's out there. Let's break to Stu, and then we'll come back and pick it up from there. Thanks for watching.

>>Mhm Yes. Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm john Kerry host of the cube here in Palo alto California. We've got two great guests all the way from Ohio and here in the bay area with sequence securities is our focus on cloud growth companies. Sri and met a co founder and CTO of sequence security and Jason Kent hacker in residence at sequence security. We're gonna find out what that actually means in the second but this is a really important company in the sense of A P. I. S. As they are starting to be the connective tissue between systems and and data. Um you're starting to see more vulnerabilities, more risk but also more upside. So risk, reward is high. And anyone who's doing things in the cloud obviously deals with the A. P. I. So Trey and Jason. Thanks for let's keep conversation. >>Happy to be here >>guys. Let's let's talk about A P. I. Security. And but first before we get there trans what does sequence security do? What do you guys specifically build? And what do you sell >>sequences in the business protecting your web and um A P. I. S from various kinds of attacks? Uh We protect from business logic attacks, A P. I. Uh do your api inventory, uh also the detect and defend against things like a town taker. Where's fake account creation, scraping pretty much anything and everything. An application on a PDA is exposed to from from the Attackers. >>Jason. What do you what do you do there as hacker and residents? I also want to get your perspective on api security from the point of view of, you know, uh attack standpoint from a vector. How are people doing it? So first explain what you do and uh love the title hacker and residents. But also what does that actually mean from a security standpoint? >>Yeah. So we can't be in the business that we're in without having an adversarial approach to where our customers are deployed and how we look at them. So a lot of times I spend my time trying to be on the client's backdoors and and try to hit their A. P. I. S. With as many kinds of attacks that I can. It helps us understand how an attacker is going to approach a specific client as well as helps us tune for our machine learning models to make sure that we can defend against those kinds of things. Um as a hacker and residents, my mostly my position is client facing. But I do spend an awful lot of time being research and looking for the next api threat that's out there. >>You gotta stay ahead of the bad guys. But let's bring up some kind of cutting edge relevant topics. One is all over the news cycle. You heard peloton, very highly visible company, It represents that new breed of digital companies that have a new approach and it's absolutely doing very, very well. The new consumers like this product and you're seeing a lot more peloton, like companies out there that are leveraging technology, so they're fully integrated, they had an A. P. I. Issue recently. Um what does it mean? Is that, is that something we're gonna see more of these kind of leaks in these kind of vulnerabilities? What do you guys think about this political thing, >>You know, from an attacker's perspective as a really boring attack? Um, but it led to a huge amount of data leaking out. Same with, you know, the news has been been right with this lately, right, john Deere got hit. Um We've seen yet another credit bureau got hit right. Um and these attacks are coming off as fairly simple attacks that are dumping huge amounts of data, just proving that the FBI attack surface is really a great place to get a rich amount of data, but you have to have a good understanding of how the application works so you can spend a little bit of time on it. But once you've taken a look at how the data flows, you end up with, you know, pretty rich data set as an attacker. I go after them just by simply utilizing their products, utilizing the programs and understanding how they work. And then I drag out all the pieces that I think are going to be interesting and start plucking away at it. If I see a like a profile, for instance, that I can edit, I wonder can I edit someone else's profile. And this is how the peloton attack work. I'm logged in, I'm allowed to see my things, what other things can I see? And it turns out they can see everything. >>So we also saw a hack with clubhouse, which is the hot app now I think just opened up to android users, but they were simply calling it back and Agora, which is, you know, I've seen china, but once you've understood that the tokens work, once you understood what they were doing, you could essentially go in and figure things out. There seems to be like pretty like trivial stuff, but it gets exposed. No one kind of thinks it through. How does someone protect themselves against these things? Because that's the real issue, like just make it less secure. Our Api is gonna be more secure in the future. What can customers do about what do you guys to think about this? >>Yeah, but the reality is, I mean that's just uh too many babies out there. I mean if you see the transition that is happening and that is the transformation where it used to be like a one app or two apps before and now there are like hundreds and thousands of applications driven by the devops world, a child development and and what matters is, I mean the starting point really is you cannot protect what, you cannot see what used to be. Uh an up hosted in your data center is now being hosted in the cloud environments, in the virtual environments, in several less environments and coordinators, you name it, they're out there. So the key is really to understand your attack surface, that's your starting point. So you're you're tooling your applications need to uh I need to be able to provide that visibility that that that is needed to protect these applications and you can't rely just on your developers to do this for you. So you need a right tool that can secure these applications, >>Jason what's the steps that an attacker takes to uncover vulnerabilities? What goes through the mind of the attacker? Um I mean the old days you used to just do port scans and try to penetrate you get through the perimeter. Now with this no perimeter mindset, the surface area Schramm was talking about is huge. What what's going on the mind of the attacker here and the A P I S and vulnerabilities. >>So the very first thing that we do is we sign up for an account, we use the thing, right? We look at all the different endpoints. Um I've got scripts running in my attack tools that do things like show me comments uh in case the developer left some comments in there to tell me where things are. Um I basically I'm just going to poke around using it like a regular user, but in that I'm going to look for places. That makes sense to try to do an attack. So the login screen is a really easy thing. Everybody understands that you put in a user name, you put in a password, you can't go. What I'm gonna do is put in a bad username and a bad password. I'm gonna put in a good user name and a bad password and I'm gonna see what changes, what are the different things that your application is telling me. And so when we look at an application for flaws and ways to get to the data on the back end, all we're doing is seeing what data do you present me on standard use. And then I'm going to look at, well, how can I change these parameters or what are the things that I can change in my requests to get a different response? So in the early phases of an attack, Attackers are very difficult to a seat. Right. They just look like a regular user just doing regular things. It's when we decide. All right. I've found something that starts to get actually interesting and we start to try to pull data out. >>What are some of the common vulnerabilities and risks that you guys see in the A. P. I is when you look when you poke at them that people are are doing is that they're not really doing their homework. Doing good. Security designers are just more of tech risk. What's the most common vulnerabilities and risks? >>Well, so for me, I I've noticed a lot of the OAS KPI top 10, the first couple of things you see them on almost all applications, so broken object level authorization is the first one. It's mouthful. Um but basically all it is is I log onto the platform, I'm authorized to be there, but I can see someone else's stuff and that's exactly what happened in peloton. Um that and what we call insecure direct object reference where I don't have to be logged in, I can just make the request without any authentication and get information back. So those are pretty common areas um that you know people need to focus on, but there's a few others that are outside the top 10 that really make a lot more sense as a defender strains probably has a little better answer to me. >>Yeah. So um I'm like like we said um creating that inventories is key, but where are they being hostess? Another another aspect of things. So so when when Jason spoke about um like hackers are actually probing, trying to figure out what are the different entry points? It could be your production environment, it could be your QA environment staging environment and you're not even aware of, but once you've actually figured out those entry points, the next step of attack was like at peloton and and other places is really eggs filtering. Exfiltrate ng that that information. Right. Is it, is it the O P II information, ph I information um and and you don't want to exfiltrate as a hacker, just one person's information. You you're automating that business logic that is behind it ability to protect and defend against those kinds of attacks, giving that visibility, even though you might not have instrumented that application for for that kind of visibility is key. Once you are bubbling up those behaviors, then you can go ahead and and and protect from these kinds of attacks. And it could be about just simply enumerating through I. D. S. Uh that paladin might have or uh experience might have and just enumerate through that and exfiltrate the information behind it. So the tools need to be able to protect from those kinds of attacks out there. >>Yeah, I think I was actually on clubhouse when um that went down that hole enumerating through the I. D. S. Room I. D. S. And then the people just querying once they got an I. D. They essentially just sucked all the content out because they were just calling the back end. It was just like the most dumbest thing I've ever seen, but they didn't think about, I mean, you know, they were just rushing really fast. So So the question I have for transit and on a defense basis, people are going first party um with a P. I. S. A. P. I. First strategies because it's just some benefits there as we were talking about what do I need to do to protect myself? So I don't have that clubhouse problem or the pelton problem. Is there a Is there a playbook or is their software tools that I could use? How do I build? My apologies from day one and my principles around it to be good hygiene or good design? What's the what's the >>yeah. So aPI security is sort of a looking uh less known given that it's constantly evolving and changing. And the adoption of A P. S. Have gone up significantly. So what you need to start with effectively is the runtime security aspect of things. When a an aPI is live, how do I actually protected? And it ranges from simple syntactic protection things around people. Can can go ahead and break these ap is by providing sort of uh going after endpoints that you don't think exist anymore or going after certain functions by giving large values that they're not sort of coded to accept and so on so forth. Once you've done that runtime protection from a syntactic aspect, you also need to protect from a business logic aspect. I mean, mps will will expose uh information, interact with the customers and partners, what what business logic are they actually exposing and how can it be abused? Understanding that is another big aspects and then you can go ahead and protect from a runtime uh from a long time security perspective, once you've done that and understood that, well then you can start shifting lap things, invest in your uh sort of uh Dass tools or static analysis tools which can catch these things early so that they don't bubble up all the way, but none of them are actually silver bullets, right? So that you have a good uh time security tools, so I don't need to invest in dust or assessed whatever I have invested in my shift left aspect of things and uh and nothing will flow through. So you you need to start shifting left uh but covered all your bases properly, >>you can't shift left, there's nothing to shift from. I mean if you don't have that baseline foundation, what does that even mean to shift left and get that built into the Ci cd pipeline? So that's a great point. How does how does someone and some companies and teams set that foundation with the run time? Do you think it's a critical problem right now or most people are do a good job or they just get get lazy or just lose track of it or you know what, what's what's the common um, use case? Do you see behavior behaviorally inside these enterprises? >>Yeah. So what, what we're seeing is adoption of new technologies and environments um, and they're not um, well suited for the traditional way of doing that time. Security. Like if if you have an app running in your kubernetes environment, if you have an app running in in in a serval less environment, how do you actually protected with the traditional appliance based approach? So I think being able to get that visibility into these environments, understanding the the user behavior, how these applications are interacted with being able to differentiate from that uh, normal human behavior or even sometimes legitimate automation uh from from the malicious intents or or the the probing and the business logic attacks is key to understanding and defending these applications. >>Before we wrap up, I want to just get your expert opinion since you guys are both here around, you know, the next level of of innovation. Also you got cloud public cloud showed us a P. I. S are great. Now you're starting to see cloud operations, they call day two operations or whatever you call it A IOP. There's all kinds of buzz words are for it, but hybrid cloud and multi cloud, Edge five G. These are all basically pointing to distributed computing systems, basically distributed cloud. So that means more A P. I. Is gonna be out there. Um So in a way the surface area of a piece is increasing. What's your what's your view on this as a market? I mean, early days developing fast and what's, what's the, what's the landscape look like? What do you guys see from a attack and defense standpoint? >>Well, just from the attacker's perspective, you know, I see a lot more traffic going, what we call east west traffic, where it's traveling inside the application, it's a P is feeding a ps more data. Um, but what is really happening is we're trying to figure out how to hook third parties into our api is more and more. The john Deere attack was just simply their development api platform that they open up for other organizations to integrate with them. Um, you know, it's, it's very beneficial for John Deere to be able to say I planted this seed at an inch and a half of depth and later, uh, I harvested 280 bushels of corn off that acres. So I know that's perfect. I can feed that back to my seed guy. Well that kind of data flow that's going around from AP to AP means that there's far more attack surface and we're going to see it more and more. I I don't think that we're going to have less Ap is communicating in the near future. I think this is the foundation that we're building for what it's gonna look like for almost every business in the near term. >>I mean this is the plumbing of integration. I mean as people work with each other data transfer, data knowledge format, you mentioned syntax and all these basic things in computer science are coming to A PS which was supposed to be just a dumb pipe or just, you know, rest api those glory days now it's not there. They're basically, it's basically connections. >>Yeah. You're absolutely right. John, I mean like what Jason mentioned earlier, uh, in terms of the way the A. P. I. S are going to grow and the bad guys are going to go after it. You need to think like a bad guy, what are they going to go after? Uh, these assets that are going to be in the cloud, in your hybrid environment, in in your own prem environment. And, and it's, it's a flip of a switch where an internal API can be externally exposed or, or just a new api getting rolled out. So all those things you need to be able to protect, um, and get that visibility first and then being then protect these environments. >>That's awesome. You guys represent the new kind of company that's going to take advantage of the cloud scale and as people shift to the new structural change and people are re factoring security, This is an area that's going to be explosive in development. Obviously the upside is huge. Um Quickly before to end, you guys take a minute to give a plug for the company. Um This is pretty cool. I love love what you guys do. I think it's very relevant and cool at the same time. So sequence security. What are you guys doing funding hiring? What's the plug? Tell folks about it. >>Yeah. So uh we we we started about six years ago but we like starting in the the body defense space by focusing on obscenity ice. And from then we we've grown and we've grown significantly in terms of our customer base, the verticals that we're going after in financial retail social media, you name it, we are there because pretty much all these these uh articles depends on A. P. I. S. To interact with their customers. Uh We've we've raised our cities we last year we've we've grown our customer base. Uh Just in the last year when there was a lockdown people were all these retailers were transforming from brick and mortar to online. Social media also also grew and we grew with them. So >>Jason your thoughts. >>I think that sequence is his ability to scale out to any size environment. We've got a customer that does a billion and a half transactions a month. Um That are ap is from 1000 other clients of theirs. Being able to protect environments that are confusing and cloudy like that. Um Is really it makes what we do shine. We use a lot of machine learning models and ai in order to surface real problems. And we have a lot of great humans behind all of that, making sure that the bad guy maybe they're right now, but they're going away and we're going to keep them away. >>It's super, super awesome. I think it's a combination of more connections, distributed computing at large scale with a data problem. That's, that's playing out. You guys are solving great stuff and hey, you know when the cube studio ap I gets built, we're gonna need to call you guys up to to help us secure the cube data. >>Absolutely right. Absolutely. >>Hey, thanks for coming on the q Great uh, great insight and thanks for sharing about sequence. Appreciate you coming on, >>appreciate the time. >>Okay. It's a cube conversation here in Palo alto with remote guests. I'm john for your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public sector Welcome back to the cubes coverage. This is the Cube virtual in our coverage of AWS reinvent with special coverage of the worldwide public sector day. I'm your host, John Firrea. We are the Cube, and I'm joined by Trayvon's hyper scaler partner. Leave with Red Hat. Trey, Welcome to the Cube. >>Thank you. Great to be here, John. Very happy to be at my first virtual reinvent, but probably my third in a row reinvented itself. >>You know, it's super exciting and usually were in person, as you mentioned. But the Cube virtual your virtual. We gotta do it virtual this year, but the game is still the same. It's about learning is about getting updates on what's relevant for customers with the pandemic. A lot of things have been highlighted, and this has been the big fun of reinvent because you mentioned three years. This is our eighth year. We've been there every year since the since the except for the first year, but you just look at the growth right, but it's still the same cadence of more news, more announcements, more higher level services, you know, with with open shift We've been following that with kubernetes and containers Service meshes. You're seeing micro services. All this coming together around open source and public sector is the main benefit of that. Right now, if you look at most interviews that I've done, the mandate for change in public sector is multifold in every vertical education to military, right. So So there's a need to get off your butt and get going with cloud if you're in public sector, um, tell us more about Red hat and the partnership around public sector, because I think that's really what we want to dig into. >>Absolutely. And there definitely have been, uh, changes this year that have inspired innovation. Uh, Red hat native us have been on a path for innovation for quite a while. Red hat in working with the open source community and taking an iterative approach to what we call upstream first, which is essentially, uh, to develop, uh, in the open source communities to mature those into enterprise grade products and then thio iterative Lee, take those findings back to the open source community. So Red Hat and eight of us have had a long history of collaboration. Starting all the way back in 2007 with Red Hat Enterprise Linux being available within the AWS console continue on to things like AWS Quick starts, which are reference architectures for how to deploy products that you're managing yourself on then, More recently, recent being the last say, four years, Uh, Thio offer a open shift managed service within a W s. And now continuing that with a joint offering that's gonna be forthcoming. That's the Red had open shift service on AWS, which will be the first native offering and joint offering with a W s by A by a third party such as ourselves. So there's a history of innovation there in a history of collaboration, and I think we'll talk a little bit later on in the interview specifically about how that relates to public sector and their unique needs. >>Yeah, well, let's just get in there. What are the some of the unique needs? Because there's value in your partnership with AWS. You laid out a bunch of those services, so certainly there's customers that are in need. What specific requirements are there. Can you tell us how Red Hat and A W s work together to meet these challenges? >>Sure. So the public sector group is composed of many organizations and agencies both. When I think of public sector, I think of the federal civilian space. I think about the D. O. D uh, the state and local and education. All of those elements of public sector have different needs. But there are some standards that are very pervasive in the public sector, things like Phipps and how you articulate your compliance with particular validated cryptographic modules or with how you express a control statement using something like the uh minus 853 which is critically important for cloud service offerings. And so those are some of the things that Red Hat native us have a heritage of working together on also providing deep explanations for those organizations and their mission so that they can comfortably move into the cloud, do digital transformation by taking applications that maybe on Prem today and having the confidence to move those into the cloud with security and compliance at the forefront. So when I think about the overall mission of government and then the threats to that mission, whether they be state actors, you know, individuals there are serious. They're serious solutions that have been developed both in the open source community to provide greater visibility into security. And there are things that the government has done to kind of create frameworks for compliance. And those are things that we work with, uh, in the open. So we have, ah, process that we call Compliance is code which can be found both inside of repositories like git Hub. But also on our website, where we articulate how our products actually work with those compliance frameworks, uh, the cryptographic a while authorizations and some of the certifications for technology that the government's put forward. >>So if it's compliance, is code like infrastructure is code, which is Dev Ops. What do you call it? Gov. Dev Ops or Gove ops Compliant ops. It's kind of get a little Dev ops vibe there. I mean, this is a really real question. I mean, you're talking about making compliance, automated. This is what Dev ops is all about, right? And this is this is kind of where it's going. How do you how do you expand more on that? Take a minute to explain. >>Sure. So it's a red hat. Over the last 20 plus years has been doing things that are now called Dev Ops or Dev SEC ops any number of combinations of those words. But the reality is that we've worked in in things like small teams. We've worked to make things like micro services, where you have a very well defined and discreet service that could be scaled up and then that's been incorporated into our products. But not only that, we release those things back Thio the open source community to make the broader Linux platform, for example, the broader kubernetes platform to make those things, uh stronger onto also get more visibility to some of those security items. So that there is a level of trust that you can have in the software supply chain is being created not only with ease, but the things that the customers of building based on these solutions. >>Yeah, that's a good point. Trust and all that compliance is, too. But also when you have that trust, now you have a product you wanna actually deploy it or have customers consume it. Um, it hasn't always been easy trade and cover. You got Fed ramp. I mean, I talked to Teresa cross about this all the time at a W s. You know, there's all kinds of, you know, things. You got hoops you gotta jump through. How are you guys making that? Easier, Because again, that's another concern you got. You guys got a great channel. You got the upstream. First, you've got the open source. Um, you know, enterprises certainly do great. And now you're doing great in public sector. How you guys making it easier for partners to on Ram Pinto. All these Fed programs? >>Yeah. So what I think about the application transformation that organizations are going through we have, especially in the open shift environment. We have what we call the operator framework, which allows operational knowledge to be used as code on. That's gonna be a kind of a running theme for us, but to be able to do these things as code, uh, whether it's things like our compliance operator, which allow you to do testing of a production environment, uh, testing of operational elements of your infrastructure to be able to test them for compliance is Phipps enabled our cryptographic libraries being used, and at what levels are they being used by simply the operating system where they're being used in the kubernetes environment? Are they even being used toe access AWS services? So one of the big things that is important for redhead customers that are moving into the cloud is the depth at which we can leverage the cloud provider services such as the AWS services, but also bring new application services that the customer may be familiar with on Prem, bring those into the environment and then be able to test. So you trust. But you verify on you provide that visibility and ultimately that accountability to the customer that is interested in using your solution in the cloud. And that's what one of those success criterias is gonna bay. >>Yeah, and speed to is a big theme. We're hearing speed agility. I mean, Julie has been talked about all time with Dev ops deficit cops, and you know all these ops automation, but speed deployment. This brings up to the point about we kind of teed up a little bit of the top of the interview, but there's been a big year for disruption, pandemic uncertainty, polarized political environment. Geopolitical. You got stuff in space congestion contention. There you got the edge of the network exploding. So we all new paradigm shifting going on everywhere, right? So, you know, and all the all the turmoil pandemic specifically has been driving a lot of change. How has all this disruption accelerated the public sector cloud journey? Because we were talking earlier, You know, the public sector and didn't have a big I T budget that was never super funded. Like enterprises, they're not flush with cash on board. The motivation was to kind of go slow. Not anymore. Sure anymore, >>I think. Ah, lot of organizations have drawn inspiration from those factors, right? So you have these factors that say that you have a limited budget on that necessity brings out the innovation right, And the especially for government organizations, the the the spirit of the innovation is something that runs deep in the culture. And when faced with those kinds of things, they actually rise to the occasion. And so I think about things like the US Navy's compiled to combat 24 program which were part of and that program is leveraging things like automation, dep, SEC ops and the agile methods to create new capabilities and new software on, as the program name says, it's compiled to combat in 24 hours. So the idea is that you can have software that is created a new capability deployed and in theater, uh, within a short period of time. That's very agile, and it's also ah, very innovative thing, and that's all leveraging red hats portfolio of products. But it's also their vision that and their methodology to actually bring that toe life. So we're very fortunate and very glad to be a part of that and continue to iterating that that way. >>It's nice to be on the road map of the product requirements that are needed now. They're never because the speed is super important and the role of data and all the things that you're doing and open source drives that trade Great to have you on sharing your insight. What? Just a personal question. Hyper scale partner leaders, your title. What does that mean? It means you're going to hyper scales. You're hyper scale who your partner is. Just take a minute to explain what you do it. It's fascinating. It >>definitely means that I'm hyper scale 100% thea Other thing It means we view the cloud service providers as hyper scale er's right. They have capacity on demand pay As you go this very elastic nature to what they do, they offer infrastructure a za service that you can then use for the foundations of your solutions. So as a hyper scale partner leader, what I do is I worked very closely with the AWS team. I actually super long story short. I came from a W S after spending about three years there, so understand it pretty well on, uh, in this particular case, I am working with them to bring the whole portfolio of red hat products, uh, not only onto the cloud for customers to consume in a self directed manner, but also as we build out more of these managed services across application services A i m l A Z you mentioned with things like co vid, uh, there are discrete examples of things like business process, management decision making, that air used in hospitals and inside of, uh, places within the government. You know, uh, that are really wrestling with these decisions. So I'm very pleased with, you know, the relationship that we have with a W s. They're great partner. It's a great opportunity to talk. Especially now it reinvent So these are all really good things and really excited Thio be the hyper scale partner leader. >>That's great that you have that they had the DNA from the best. You know how to do the working backwards stuff. You know, the cultures, both technical cultures. So very customer centric. So nice fit. Thank you for sharing that. And thanks for the insight into, uh, reinvent and red hat. Thank you. >>All right, that was great to be here and look forward to learning a lot. This reinvent >>great. We'll see on the interwebs throughout the next couple of weeks. Trayvon's hyper scale partner manager Really putting in the cloud to Red Hat and customers and public sector. This is our special coverage of the public sector day here at reinvent and ongoing coverage Cube virtual throughout the next couple weeks. John, for your host. Thanks for watching. Yeah,

>> Narrator: From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> You know, businesses have a staggering number of options today to support mission-critical applications. And much of the world's mission-critical data happens to live on converged infrastructure. Converged infrastructure is really designed to support the most demanding workloads. Words like resilience, performance, scalability, recoverability, et cetera. Those are the attributes that define converged infrastructure. Now with COVID-19 the digital transformation mandate, as we all know has been accelerated and buyers are demanding more from their infrastructure, and in particular converged infrastructure. Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this power panel where we're going to explore converged infrastructure, look at its past, its present and its future. And we're going to explore several things. The origins of converged infrastructure, why CI even came about. And what's its historic role been in terms of supporting mission-critical applications. We're going to look at modernizing workloads. What are the opportunities and the risks and what's converged infrastructures role in that regard. How has converged infrastructure evolved? And how will it support cloud and multicloud? And ultimately what's the future of converged infrastructure look like? And to examine these issues, we have three great guests, Trey Layton is here. He is the senior vice president for converged infrastructure and software engineering and architecture at Dell Technologies. And he's joined by Joakim Zetterblad. Who's the director of the SAP practice for EMEA at Dell technologies. And our very own Stu Miniman. Stu is a senior analyst at Wikibon. Guys, great to see you all welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great. >> Trey, I'm going to start with you. Take us back to the early days of converged infrastructure. Why was it even formed? Why was it created? >> Well, if you look back just over a decade ago, a lot of organizations were deploying virtualized environments. Everyone was consolidated on virtualization. A lot of technologies were emerging to enhance that virtualization outcome, meaning acceleration capabilities and storage arrays, networking. And there was a lot of complexity in integrating all of those underlying infrastructure technologies into a solution that would work reliably. You almost had to have a PhD and all of the best practices of many different companies integrations. And so we decided as Dell EMC, Dell Technologies to invest heavily in this area of manufacturing best practices and packaging them so that customers could acquire those technologies and already integrated fully regression tested architecture that could sustain virtually any type of workload that a company would run. And candidly that packaging, that rigor around testing produced a highly reliable product that customers now rely on heavily to operationalize greater efficiencies and run their most critical applications that power their business and ultimately the world economy. >> Now Stu, cause you were there. I was as well at the early days of the original announcement of CI. Looking back and sort of bringing it forward Stu, what was the business impact of converged infrastructure? >> Well, Dave as Trey was talking about it was that wave of virtualization had gone from, you know, just supporting many applications to being able to support all of your applications. And especially if you talk about those high value, you know business mission, critical applications, you want to make sure that you've got a reliable foundation. What the Dell tech team has done for years is make sure that they fully understand, you know the life cycle of testing that needs to happen. And you don't need to worry about, you know, what integration testing you need to do, looking at support major CS and doing a lot of your own sandbox testing, which for the most part was what enterprises needed to do. You said, okay, you know, I get the gear, I load the virtualization and then I have to see, you know, tweak everything to figure out how my application works. The business impact Dave, is you want to spend more time focusing on the business, not having to turn all the dials and worry about, do I get the performance I need? Does it have the reliability uptime that we need? And especially if we're talking about those business critical applications, of course, these are the ones that are running 24 by seven and if they go down, my business goes down with it. >> Yeah, and of course, you know, one of the other major themes we saw with conversion infrastructure was really attacking the IT labor problem. You had separate compute or server teams, storage teams, networking teams, they oftentimes weren't talking together. So there was a lot of inefficiency that converged infrastructure was designed to attack. But I want to come to the SAP expert. Joakim, that's really your wheelhouse. What is it about converged infrastructure that makes it suitable for SAP application specifically? >> You know, if you look at a classic SAP client today, there's really three major transformational waves that all SAP customers are faced with today, it's the move to S/4HANA, the introduction of this new platform, which needs to happen before 2027. It's the introduction of a multicloud cloud or operating model. And last but not least, it is the introduction of new digitization or intelligent technologies such as IOT, machine learning or artificial intelligence. And that drove to the need of a platform that could address all these three transformational waves. It came with a lot of complexity, increased costs, increased risk. And what CI did so uniquely was to provide that Edge to Core to Cloud strategy. Fully certified for both HANA, non HANA workloads for the classical analytical and transactional workloads, as well as the new modernization technologies such as IOT, machine learning, big data and analytics. And that created a huge momentum for converged in our SAP accounts. >> So Trey, I want to go to you cause you're the deep technical expert here. Joakim just mentioned uniqueness. So what are the unique characteristics of converged infrastructure that really make it suitable for handling the most demanding workloads? >> Well, converged infrastructure by definition is the integration of an external storage array with a highly optimized compute platform. And when we build best practices around integrating those technologies together, we essentially package optimizations that allow a customer to increase the quantity of users that are accessing those workloads or the applications that are driving database access in such a way where you can predictably understand consumption and utilization in your environment. Those packaged integrations are kind of like. You know, I have a friend that owns a race car shop and he has all kinds of expertise to build cars, but he has a vehicle that he buys is his daily driver. The customization that they've created to build race cars are great for the race cars that go on the track, but he's building a car on his own, it didn't make any sense. And so what customers found was the ability to acquire a packaged infrastructure with all these infrastructure optimizations, where we package these best practices that gave customers a reliable, predictable, and fully supported integration, so they didn't have to spend 20 hour support calls trying to discover and figure out what particular customization that they had employed for their application, that had some issue that they needed to troubleshoot and solve. This became a standard out of the box integration that the best and the brightest package so that customers can consume it at scale. >> So Joakim, I want to ask you let's take the sort of application view. Let's sort of flip the picture a little bit and come at it from that prism. How, if you think about like core business applications, how have they evolved over the better part of the last decade and specifically with regard to the mission-critical processes? >> So what we're seeing in the process industry and in the industry of mission-critical applications is that they have gone from being very monolithic systems where we literally saw a single ERP components such as all three or UCC. Whereas today customers are faced with a landscape of multiple components. Many of them working both on and off premise, there are multicloud strategies in place. And as we mentioned before, with the introduction of new IOT technologies, we see that there is a flow of information of data that requires a whole new set of infrastructure of components of tools to make these new processes happen. And of course, the focus in the end of the day is all on business outcomes. So what industries and companies doesn't want to do is to focus all their time in making sure that these new technologies are working together, but really focusing on how can I make an impact? How can I start to work in a better way with my clients? So the focus on business outcome, the focus on integrating multiple systems into a single consolidated approach has become so much more important, which is why the modernization of the underlying infrastructure is absolutely key. Without consolidation, without a simplification of the management and orchestration. And without the cloud enabled platform, you won't get there. >> So Stu that's key, what Joakim just said in terms of modernizing the application as being able to manage them, not as one big monolith, but integration with other key systems. So what are the options? Wikibon has done some research on this, but what are the options for modernizing workloads, whether it's on-Prem or off-prem and what are some of the trade offs there? >> Yeah, so Dave, first of all, you know, one of the biggest challenges out there is you don't just want to, you know, lift and shift. If anybody's read research for it from Wikibon, Dave, for a day, for the 10 years, I've been part of it talks about the challenges, if you just talk about migrating, because while it sounds simple, we understand that there are individual customizations that every customer's made. So you might get part of the way there, but there's often the challenges that will get in the way that could cause failure. And as we talked about for you, especially your mission-critical applications, those are the ones that you can't have downtime. So absolutely customers are reevaluating their application portfolio. You know, there are a lot of things to look at. First of all, if you can, certain things can be moved to SaaS. You've seen certain segments of the market. Absolutely SaaS can be preferred methodology, if you can go there. One of the biggest hurdles for SaaS of course, is there's retraining of the workforce. Certain applications they will embracing of that because they can take advantage of new features, get to be able to use that wherever they are. But in other cases, there are the SaaS doesn't have the capability or it doesn't fit into the workflow of the business. The cloud operating model is something we've been talking about it with you Dave, for many years. When you've seen rapid maturation of what originally was called "private cloud", but really was just virtualization plus with a little bit of a management layer on top. But now much of the automation that you build in AI technologies, you know, Trey's got a whole team working on things that if you talk to his team, it sounds very similar to what you had the same conversation should have with cloud providers. So "cloud" as an operating model, not a destination is what we're going for and being able to take advantage of automation and the like. So where your application sits, absolutely some consideration. And what we've talked about Dave, you know, the governance, the security, the reliability, the performance are all reasons why being able to keep things, you know, under my environment with an infrastructure that I have control over is absolutely one of the reasons why I might keep things more along a converged infrastructure, rather than just saying to go through the challenge of migration and optimizing and changing to something in a more of a cloud native methodology. >> What about technical debt? Trey, people talk about technical debt as a bad thing, what is technical debt? Why do I want to avoid it? And how can I avoid it? And specifically, I know, Trey, I've thrown a lot of questions at you yet, but what is it about converged infrastructure and its capabilities that helped me avoid that technical debt? >> Well, it's an interesting thing, when you deploy an environment to support a mission-critical application, you have to make a lot of implementation decisions. Some of those decisions may take you down a path that may have a finite life. And that once you reached the life expectancy of that particular configuration, you now have debt that you have to reconcile. You have to change that architecture, that configuration. And so what we do with converged infrastructure is we dedicate a team of product management, an entire product management organization, a team of engineers that treat the integrations of the architecture as a releases. And we think long range about how do we avoid not having to change the underlying architecture. And one of the greatest testaments to this is in our conversion infrastructure products over the last 11 years, we've only saw two major architectural changes while supporting generational changes in underlying infrastructure capabilities well beyond when we first started. So converged infrastructure approach is about how do we build an architecture that allows you to avoid those dead-end pathways in those integration decisions that you would normally have to make on your own. >> Joakim, I wanted to ask you, you've mentioned monolithic applications before. That's sort of, we're evolving beyond that with application architectures, but there's still a lot of monoliths out there so. And a lot of customers want to modernize those application and workloads. What, in your view, what are you seeing as the best path and the best practice for modernizing some of those monolithic workloads? >> Yeah, so Dave, as clients today are trying to build a new intelligent enterprise, which is one of SAP's leading a guidance today. They needed to start to look at how to integrate all these different systems and applications that we talked about before into the common business process framework that they have. So consolidating workloads from big data to HANA, non HANA systems, cloud, non-cloud applications into a single framework is an absolute key to that modernization strategy. The second thing which I also mentioned before is to take a new grip around orchestration and management. We know that as customers seek this intelligent approach with both analytical data, as well as experience and transactional data, we must look for new ways to orchestrate and manage those application workloads and data flows. And this is where we slowly, slowly enter into the world of a enterprise data strategy. And that's again, where converged as a very important part to play in order to build these next generation platforms that can both consolidate, simplify. And at the same time enable us to work in a cloud enabled fashion with our cloud operating model that most of our clients seek today. >> So Stu, why can't I just shove all this stuff into the public cloud and call it a day? >> Yeah, well, Dave, we've seen some people that, you know, I have a cloud first strategy and often those are the same companies that are quickly doing what we call "repatriation". I bristle a little bit when I hear these, because often it's, I've gone to the cloud without understanding how I take advantage of it, not understanding the full financial ramifications what I'm going to need to do. And therefore they quickly go back to a world that they understand. So, cloud is not a silver bullet. We understand in technology, Dave, you know, things are complicated. There's all the organizational operational pieces they do. There are excellent cloud services and it's really it's innovation. You know, how do I take advantage of the data that I have, how I allow my application to move forward and respond to the business. And really that is not something that only happens in the public clouds. If I can take advantage of infrastructure that gets me along that journey to more of a cloud model, I get the business results. So, you know, automation and APIs and everything and the Ops movement are not something that are only in the public clouds, but something that we should be embracing holistically. And absolutely, that ties into where today and tomorrow's converge infrastructure are going. >> Yeah, and to me, it comes down to the business case too. I mean, you have to look at the risk-reward. The risk of changing something that's actually working for your business versus what the payback is going to be. You know, if it ain't broken, don't fix it, but you may want to update it, change the oil every now and then, you know, maybe prune some deadwood and modernize it. But Trey, I want to come back to you. Let's take a look at some of the options that customers have. And there are a lot of options, as I said at the top. You've got do it yourself, you got a hyper-converged infrastructure, of course, converged infrastructure. What are you seeing as the use case for each of these deployment options? >> So, build your own. We're really talking about an organization that has the expertise in-house to understand the integration standards that they need to deploy to support their environment. And candidly, there are a lot of customers that have very unique application requirements that have very much customized to their environment. And they've invested in the expertise to be able to sustain that on an ongoing basis. And build your own is great for those folks. The next in converged infrastructure, where we're really talking about an external storage array with applications that need to use data services native to a storage array. And self-select compute for scaling that compute for their particular need, and owning that three tiers architecture and its associated integration, but not having to sustain it because it's converged. There are enormous number of applications out there that benefit from that. I think the third one was, you talked about hyper-converged. I'll go back to when we first introduced our hyper-converged product to the market. Which is now leading the industry for quite some time, VxRail. We had always said that customers will consume hyper-converged and converged for different use cases and different applications. The maturity of hyper-converged has come to the point where you can run virtually any application that you would like on it. And this comes down to really two vectors of consideration. One, am I going to run hyper-converged versus converged based on my operational preference? You know, hyper-converged incorporates software defined storage, predominantly a compute operating plane. Converge as mentioned previously uses that external storage array has some type of systems fabric and dedicated compute resources with access into those your operational preference is one aspect of it. And then having applications that need the data services of an external storage, primary storage array are the other aspect of deciding whether those two things are needed in your particular environment. We find more and more customers out there that have an investment of both, not one versus the other. That's not to say that there aren't customers that only have one, they exist, but a majority of customers have both. >> So Joakim, I want to come back to the sort of attributes from the application requirements perspective. When you think about mission-critical, you think about availability, scale, recoverability, data protection. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about those attributes. And again, what is it about converged infrastructure that that is the best fit and the right strategic fit for supporting those demanding applications and workloads? >> Now, when it comes to SAP, we're talking about clients and customers, most mission-critical data and information and applications. And hence the requirements on the underlying infrastructure is absolutely on the very top of what the IT organization needs to deliver. This is why, when we talk about SAP, the requirements for high availability protection disaster recovery is very, very high. And it doesn't only involve a single system. As mentioned before, SAP is not a standalone application, but rather a landscape of systems that needs to be kept consistent. And that's what a CI platform does so well. It can consolidate workloads, whether it's big data or the transactional standard workloads of SAP, ERP or UCC. The converged platforms are able to put the very highest of availability protection standards into this whole landscape and making a really unique platform for CI workloads. And at the same time, it enables our customers to accelerate those modernization journeys into things such as ML, AI, IOT, even blockchain scenarios, where we've built out our capabilities to accelerate these implementations with the help of the underlying CI platforms and the rest of the SAP environment. >> Got it. Stu, I want to go to you. You had mentioned before the cloud operating model and something that we've been talking about for a long time and Wikibon. So can converged infrastructure substantially mimic that cloud operating model and how so? What are the key ingredients of being able to create that experience on-prem? >> Yeah, well, Dave as, we've watched for more than the last decade, the cloud has looked more and more like some of the traditional enterprise things that we would look for and the infrastructure in private clouds have gone more and more cloud-like and embrace that model. So, you know, I got, I think back to the early days, Dave, we talked about how cloud was supposed to just be, you know, "simple". If you look at deploying in the cloud today, it is not simple at all that. There are so many choices out there, you know, way more than I had an initial data center. In the same way, you know, I think, you know, the original converged infrastructure from Dell, if you look at the feedback, the criticism was, you know, oh, you can have it in any color you want, as long as black, just like the Ford model T. But it was that simplicity and consistency that helped build out most of what we were talking about the cloud models I wanted to know that I had a reliable substrate platform to build on top of it. But if you talk about Dave today and in the future, what do we want? First of all, I need that operating model in a multicloud world. So, you know, we look at the environments that can spread, but beyond just a single cloud, because customers today have multiple environments, absolutely hybrid is a big piece of that. We look at what VMware's doing, look at Microsoft, Red Hat, even Amazon are extended beyond just a cloud and going into hybrid and multicloud models. Automation, a critical piece of that. And we've seen, you know, great leaps and bounds in the last couple of generations of what's happening in CI to take advantage of automation. Because we know we've gone beyond what humans can just manage themselves and therefore, you know, true automation is helping along those environments. So yes, absolutely, Dave. You know, that the lines are blurred between what the private cloud and the public cloud. And it's just that overall cloud operating model and helping customers to deal with their data and their applications, regardless of where it lives. >> Well, you know, Trey in the early days of cloud and conversion infrastructure, that homogeneity that Stu was talking about any color, as long as it's black. That was actually an advantage to removing labor costs, that consistency and that standardization. But I'm interested in how CI has evolved, its, you know, added in optionality. I mean Joakim was just talking about blockchain, so all kinds of new services. But how has CCI evolved in the better part of the last decade and what are some of the most recent innovations that people should be thinking about or aware of? >> So I think the underlying experience of CI has remained relatively constant. And we talk about the experience that customers get. So if you just look at the data that we've analyzed for over a decade now, you know, one of the data points that I love is 99% of our customers who buy CI say they have virtually no downtime anymore. And, that's a great testament. 84% of our customers say that they have that their IT operations run more efficiently. The reality around how we delivered that in the past was through services and humans performing these integrations and the upkeep associated with the sustaining of the architecture. What we've focused on at Dell Technologies is really bringing technologies that allow us to automate those human integrations and best practices. In such a way where they can become more repeatable and consumable by more customers. We don't have to have as many services folks deploying these systems as we did in the past. Because we're using software intelligence to embed that human knowledge that we used to rely on individuals exclusively for. So that's one of the aspects of the architecture. And then just taking advantage of all the new technologies that we've seen introduce over the last several years from all flash architectures and NVMe on the horizon, NVMe over fabric. All of these things as we orchestrate them in software will enable them to be more consumable by the average everyday customer. Therefore it becomes more economical for them to deploy infrastructure on premises to support mission-critical applications. >> So Stu, what about cloud and multicloud, how does CI support that? Where do those fit in? Are they relevant? >> Yeah, Dave, so absolutely. As I was talking about before, you know, customers have hybrid and multicloud environments and managing across these environments are pretty important. If I look at the Dell family, obviously they're leveraging heavily VMware as the virtualization layer. And VMware has been moving heavily as to how support containerized and incubates these environments and extend their management to not only what's happening in the data center, but into the cloud environment with VMware cloud. So, you know, management in a multicloud world Dave, is one of those areas that we definitely have some work to do. Something we've looked at Wikibon for the last few years. Is how will multicloud be different than multi-vendor? Because that was not something that the industry had done a great job of solving in the past. But you know, customers are looking to take advantage of the innovation, where it is in the services. And you know, the data first architecture is something that we see and therefore that will bring them to many services and many places. >> Oh yeah, I was talking before about in the early days of CI and even a lot of organizations, some organizations, anyway, there's still these sort of silos of, you know, storage, networking, compute resources. And you think about DevOps, where does DevOps fit into this whole equation? Maybe Stu you could take a stab at it and anybody else who wants to chime in. >> Yeah, so Dave, great, great point there. So, you know, when we talk about those silos, DevOps is one of those movements to really help the unifying force to help customers move faster. And so therefore the development team and the operations team are working together. Things like security are not a bolt-in but something that can happen along the entire path. A more recent addition to the DevOps movement also is something like FinOps. So, you know, how do we make sure that we're not just having finance sign off on things and look back every quarter, but in real time, understand how we're architecting things, especially in the cloud so that we remain responsible for that model. So, you know, speed is, you know, one of the most important pieces for business and therefore the DevOps movement, helping customers move faster and, you know, leverage and get value out of their infrastructure, their applications and their data. >> Yeah, I would add to this that I think the big transition for organizations, cause I've seen it in developing my own organization, is getting IT operators to think programmatically instead of configuration based. Use the tool to configure a device. Think about how do we create programmatic instruction to interacts with all of the devices that creates that cloud-like adaptation. Feeds in application level signaling to adapt and change the underlying configuration about that infrastructure to better run the application without relying upon an IT operator, a human to make a change. This, sort of thinking programmatically is I think one of the biggest obstacles that the industry face. And I feel really good about how we've attacked it, but there is a transformation within that dialogue that every organization is going to navigate through at their own pace. >> Yeah, infrastructure is code automation, this a fundamental to digital transformation. Joakim, I wonder if you could give us some insight as you talk to SAP customers, you know, in Europe, across the EMEA, how does the pandemic change this? >> I think the pandemic has accelerated some of the movements that we already saw in the SAP world. There is obviously a force for making sure that we get our financial budgets in shape and that we don't over spend on our cost levels. And therefore it's going to be very important to see how we can manage all these new revenue generating projects that IT organizations and business organizations have planned around new customer experience initiatives, new supply chain optimization. They know that they need to invest in these projects to stay competitive and to gain new competitive edge. And where CI plays an important part is in order to, first of all, keep costs down in all of these projects, make sure to deliver a standardized common platform upon which all these projects can be introduced. And then of course, making sure that availability and risks are kept high versus at a minimum, right? Risk low and availability at a record high, because we need to stay on with our clients and their demands. So I think again, CI is going to play a very important role. As we see customers go through this pandemic situation and needing to put pressure on both innovation and cost control at the same time. And this is where also our new upcoming data strategies will play a really important part as we need to leverage the data we have better, smarter and more efficient way. >> Got it. Okay guys, we're running out of time, but Trey, I wonder if you could, you know break out your telescope or your crystal ball, give us some visibility into the futures of converged infrastructure. What should we be expecting? >> So if you look at the last release of this last technology that we released in power one, it was all about automation. We'll build on that platform to integrate other converged capability. So if you look at the converged systems market hyper-converged is very much an element of that. And I think that we're trending to is recognizing that we can deliver an architecture that has hyper-converged and converged attributes all in a single architecture and then dial up the degrees of automation to create more adaptations for different type of application workloads, not just your traditional three tier application workloads, but also those microservices based applications that one may historically think, maybe it's best to that off premises. We feel very confident that we are delivering platforms out there today that can run more economically on premises, provide better security, better data governance, and a lot of the adaptations, the enhancements, the optimizations that we'll deliver in our converged platforms of the future about colliding new infrastructure models together, and introducing more levels of automation to have greater adaptations for applications that are running on it. >> Got it. Trey, we're going to give you the last word. You know, if you're an architect of a large organization, you've got some mission-critical workloads that, you know, you're really trying to protect. What's the takeaway? What's really the advice that you would give those folks thinking about the sort of near and midterm and even longterm? >> My advice is to understand that there are many options. We sell a lot of independent component technologies and data centers that run every organization's environment around the world. We sell packaged outcomes and hyper-converged and converged. And a lot of companies buy a little bit of build your own, they buy some converged, they buy some hyper-converged. I would employ everyone, especially in this climate to really evaluate the packaged offerings and understand how they can benefit their environment. And we recognize that everything that there's not one hammer and everything is a nail. That's why we have this broad portfolio of products that are designed to be utilized in the most efficient manners for those customers who are consuming our technologies. And converged and hyper-converge are merely another way to simplify the ongoing challenges that organizations have in managing their data estate and all of the technologies they're consuming at a rapid pace in concert with the investments that they're also making off premises. So this is very much the technologies that we talked today are very much things that organizations should research, investigate and utilize where they best fit in their organization. >> Awesome guys, and of course there's a lot of information at dell.com about that. Wikibon.com has written a lot about this and the many, many sources of information out there. Trey, Joakim, Stu thanks so much for the conversation. Really meaty, a lot of substance, really appreciate your time, thank you. >> Thank you guys. >> Thank you Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> And everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> You know, businesses have a staggering number of options today to support mission-critical applications. And much of the world's mission-critical data happens to live on converged infrastructure. Converged infrastructure is really designed to support the most demanding workloads. Words like resilience, performance, scalability, recoverability, et cetera. Those are the attributes that define converged infrastructure. Now with COVID-19 the digital transformation mandate, as we all know has been accelerated and buyers are demanding more from their infrastructure, and in particular converged infrastructure. Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this power panel where we're going to explore converged infrastructure, look at its past, its present and its future. And we're going to explore several things. The origins of converged infrastructure, why CI even came about. And what's its historic role been in terms of supporting mission-critical applications. We're going to look at modernizing workloads. What are the opportunities and the risks and what's converged infrastructures role in that regard. How has converged infrastructure evolved? And how will it support cloud and multicloud? And ultimately what's the future of converged infrastructure look like? And to examine these issues, we have three great guests, Trey Layton is here. He is the senior vice president for converged infrastructure and software engineering and architecture at Dell Technologies. And he's joined by Joakim Zetterblad. Who's the director of the SAP practice for EMEA at Dell technologies. And our very own Stu Miniman. Stu is a senior analyst at Wikibon. Guys, great to see you all welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Great. >> Trey, I'm going to start with you. Take us back to the early days of converged infrastructure. Why was it even formed? Why was it created? >> Well, if you look back just over a decade ago, a lot of organizations were deploying virtualized environments. Everyone was consolidated on virtualization. A lot of technologies were emerging to enhance that virtualization outcome, meaning acceleration capabilities and storage arrays, networking. And there was a lot of complexity in integrating all of those underlying infrastructure technologies into a solution that would work reliably. You almost had to have a PhD and all of the best practices of many different companies integrations. And so we decided as Dell EMC, Dell Technologies to invest heavily in this area of manufacturing best practices and packaging them so that customers could acquire those technologies and already integrated fully regression tested architecture that could sustain virtually any type of workload that a company would run. And candidly that packaging, that rigor around testing produced a highly reliable product that customers now rely on heavily to operationalize greater efficiencies and run their most critical applications that power their business and ultimately the world economy. >> Now Stu, cause you were there. I was as well at the early days of the original announcement of CI. Looking back and sort of bringing it forward Stu, what was the business impact of converged infrastructure? >> Well, Dave as Trey was talking about it was that wave of virtualization had gone from, you know, just supporting many applications to being able to support all of your applications. And especially if you talk about those high value, you know business mission, critical applications, you want to make sure that you've got a reliable foundation. What the Dell tech team has done for years is make sure that they fully understand, you know the life cycle of testing that needs to happen. And you don't need to worry about, you know, what integration testing you need to do, looking at support major CS and doing a lot of your own sandbox testing, which for the most part was what enterprises needed to do. You said, okay, you know, I get the gear, I load the virtualization and then I have to see, you know, tweak everything to figure out how my application works. The business impact Dave, is you want to spend more time focusing on the business, not having to turn all the dials and worry about, do I get the performance I need? Does it have the reliability uptime that we need? And especially if we're talking about those business critical applications, of course, these are the ones that are running 24 by seven and if they go down, my business goes down with it. >> Yeah, and of course, you know, one of the other major themes we saw with conversion infrastructure was really attacking the IT labor problem. You had separate compute or server teams, storage teams, networking teams, they oftentimes weren't talking together. So there was a lot of inefficiency that converged infrastructure was designed to attack. But I want to come to the SAP expert. Joakim, that's really your wheelhouse. What is it about converged infrastructure that makes it suitable for SAP application specifically? >> You know, if you look at a classic SAP client today, there's really three major transformational waves that all SAP customers are faced with today, it's the move to S/4HANA, the introduction of this new platform, which needs to happen before 2027. It's the introduction of a multicloud cloud or operating model. And last but not least, it is the introduction of new digitization or intelligent technologies such as IOT, machine learning or artificial intelligence. And that drove to the need of a platform that could address all these three transformational waves. It came with a lot of complexity, increased costs, increased risk. And what CI did so uniquely was to provide that Edge to Core to Cloud strategy. Fully certified for both HANA, non HANA workloads for the classical analytical and transactional workloads, as well as the new modernization technologies such as IOT, machine learning, big data and analytics. And that created a huge momentum for converged in our SAP accounts. >> So Trey, I want to go to you cause you're the deep technical expert here. Joakim just mentioned uniqueness. So what are the unique characteristics of converged infrastructure that really make it suitable for handling the most demanding workloads? >> Well, converged infrastructure by definition is the integration of an external storage array with a highly optimized compute platform. And when we build best practices around integrating those technologies together, we essentially package optimizations that allow a customer to increase the quantity of users that are accessing those workloads or the applications that are driving database access in such a way where you can predictably understand consumption and utilization in your environment. Those packaged integrations are kind of like. You know, I have a friend that owns a race car shop and he has all kinds of expertise to build cars, but he has a vehicle that he buys is his daily driver. The customization that they've created to build race cars are great for the race cars that go on the track, but he's building a car on his own, it didn't make any sense. And so what customers found was the ability to acquire a packaged infrastructure with all these infrastructure optimizations, where we package these best practices that gave customers a reliable, predictable, and fully supported integration, so they didn't have to spend 20 hour support calls trying to discover and figure out what particular customization that they had employed for their application, that had some issue that they needed to troubleshoot and solve. This became a standard out of the box integration that the best and the brightest package so that customers can consume it at scale. >> So Joakim, I want to ask you let's take the sort of application view. Let's sort of flip the picture a little bit and come at it from that prism. How, if you think about like core business applications, how have they evolved over the better part of the last decade and specifically with regard to the mission-critical processes? >> So what we're seeing in the process industry and in the industry of mission-critical applications is that they have gone from being very monolithic systems where we literally saw a single ERP components such as all three or UCC. Whereas today customers are faced with a landscape of multiple components. Many of them working both on and off premise, there are multicloud strategies in place. And as we mentioned before, with the introduction of new IOT technologies, we see that there is a flow of information of data that requires a whole new set of infrastructure of components of tools to make these new processes happen. And of course, the focus in the end of the day is all on business outcomes. So what industries and companies doesn't want to do is to focus all their time in making sure that these new technologies are working together, but really focusing on how can I make an impact? How can I start to work in a better way with my clients? So the focus on business outcome, the focus on integrating multiple systems into a single consolidated approach has become so much more important, which is why the modernization of the underlying infrastructure is absolutely key. Without consolidation, without a simplification of the management and orchestration. And without the cloud enabled platform, you won't get there. >> So Stu that's key, what Joakim just said in terms of modernizing the application as being able to manage them, not as one big monolith, but integration with other key systems. So what are the options? Wikibon has done some research on this, but what are the options for modernizing workloads, whether it's on-Prem or off-prem and what are some of the trade offs there? >> Yeah, so Dave, first of all, you know, one of the biggest challenges out there is you don't just want to, you know, lift and shift. If anybody's read research for it from Wikibon, Dave, for a day, for the 10 years, I've been part of it talks about the challenges, if you just talk about migrating, because while it sounds simple, we understand that there are individual customizations that every customer's made. So you might get part of the way there, but there's often the challenges that will get in the way that could cause failure. And as we talked about for you, especially your mission-critical applications, those are the ones that you can't have downtime. So absolutely customers are reevaluating their application portfolio. You know, there are a lot of things to look at. First of all, if you can, certain things can be moved to SAS. You've seen certain segments of the market. Absolutely SAS can be preferred methodology, if you can go there. One of the biggest hurdles for SAS of course, is there's retraining of the workforce. Certain applications they will embracing of that because they can take advantage of new features, get to be able to use that wherever they are. But in other cases, there are the SAS doesn't have the capability or it doesn't fit into the workflow of the business. The cloud operating model is something we've been talking about it with you Dave, for many years. When you've seen rapid maturation of what originally was called "private cloud", but really was just virtualization plus with a little bit of a management layer on top. But now much of the automation that you build in AI technologies, you know, Trey's got a whole team working on things that if you talk to his team, it sounds very similar to what you had the same conversation should have with cloud providers. So "cloud" as an operating model, not a destination is what we're going for and being able to take advantage of automation and the like. So where your application sits, absolutely some consideration. And what we've talked about Dave, you know, the governance, the security, the reliability, the performance are all reasons why being able to keep things, you know, under my environment with an infrastructure that I have control over is absolutely one of the reasons why am I keep things more along a converged infrastructure, rather than just saying to go through the challenge of migration and optimizing and changing to something in a more of a cloud native methodology. >> What about technical debt? Trey, people talk about technical debt as a bad thing, what is technical debt? Why do I want to avoid it? And how can I avoid it? And specifically, I know, Trey, I've thrown a lot of questions at you yet, but what is it about converged infrastructure and its capabilities that helped me avoid that technical debt? >> Well, it's an interesting thing, when you deploy an environment to support a mission-critical application, you have to make a lot of implementation decisions. Some of those decisions may take you down a path that may have a finite life. And that once you reached the life expectancy of that particular configuration, you now have debt that you have to reconcile. You have to change that architecture, that configuration. And so what we do with converged infrastructure is we dedicate a team of product management, an entire product management organization, a team of engineers that treat the integrations of the architecture as a releases. And we think long range about how do we avoid not having to change the underlying architecture. And one of the greatest testaments to this is in our conversion infrastructure products over the last 11 years, we've only saw two major architectural changes while supporting generational changes in underlying infrastructure capabilities well beyond when we first started. So converged infrastructure approach is about how do we build an architecture that allows you to avoid those dead-end pathways in those integration decisions that you would normally have to make on your own. >> Joakim, I wanted to ask you, you've mentioned monolithic applications before. That's sort of, we're evolving beyond that with application architectures, but there's still a lot of monoliths out there so. And a lot of customers want to modernize those application and workloads. What, in your view, what are you seeing as the best path and the best practice for modernizing some of those monolithic workloads? >> Yeah, so Dave, as clients today are trying to build a new intelligent enterprise, which is one of SAP's leading a guidance today. They needed to start to look at how to integrate all these different systems and applications that we talked about before into the common business process framework that they have. So consolidating workloads from big data to HANA, non HANA systems, cloud, non-cloud applications into a single framework is an absolute key to that modernization strategy. The second thing which I also mentioned before is to take a new grip around orchestration and management. We know that as customers seek this intelligent approach with both analytical data, as well as experience and transactional data, we must look for new ways to orchestrate and manage those application workloads and data flows. And this is where we slowly, slowly enter into the world of a enterprise data strategy. And that's again, where converged as a very important part to play in order to build these next generation platforms that can both consolidate, simplify. And at the same time enable us to work in a cloud enabled fashion with our cloud operating model that most of our clients seek today. >> So Stu, why can't I just shove all this stuff into the public cloud and call it a day? >> Yeah, well, Dave, we've seen some people that, you know, I have a cloud first strategy and often those are the same companies that are quickly doing what we call "repatriation". I bristle a little bit when I hear these, because often it's, I've gone to the cloud without understanding how I take advantage of it, not understanding the full financial ramifications what I'm going to need to do. And therefore they quickly go back to a world that they understand. So, cloud is not a silver bullet. We understand in technology, Dave, you know, things are complicated. There's all the organizational operational pieces they do. There are excellent cloud services and it's really it's innovation. You know, how do I take advantage of the data that I have, how I allow my application to move forward and respond to the business. And really that is not something that only happens in the public clouds. If I can take advantage of infrastructure that gets me along that journey to more of a cloud model, I get the business results. So, you know, automation and APIs and everything and the Ops movement are not something that are only in the public clouds, but something that we should be embracing holistically. And absolutely, that ties into where today and tomorrow's converge infrastructure are going. >> Yeah, and to me, it comes down to the business case too. I mean, you have to look at the risk-reward. The risk of changing something that's actually working for your business versus what the payback is going to be. You know, if it ain't broken, don't fix it, but you may want to update it, change the oil every now and then, you know, maybe prune some deadwood and modernize it. But Trey, I want to come back to you. Let's take a look at some of the options that customers have. And there are a lot of options, as I said at the top. You've got do it yourself, you got a hyper-converged infrastructure, of course, converged infrastructure. What are you seeing as the use case for each of these deployment options? >> So, build your own. We're really talking about an organization that has the expertise in-house to understand the integration standards that they need to deploy to support their environment. And candidly, there are a lot of customers that have very unique application requirements that have very much customized to their environment. And they've invested in the expertise to be able to sustain that on an ongoing basis. And build your own is great for those folks. The next in converged infrastructure, where we're really talking about an external storage array with applications that need to use data services native to a storage array. And self-select compute for scaling that compute for their particular need, and owning that three tiers architecture and its associated integration, but not having to sustain it because it's converged. There are enormous number of applications out there that benefit from that. I think the third one was, you talked about hyper-converged. I'll go back to when we first introduced our hyper-converged product to the market. Which is now leading the industry for quite some time, VxRail. We had always said that customers will consume hyper-converged and converged for different use cases and different applications. The maturity of hyper-converged has come to the point where you can run virtually any application that you would like on it. And this comes down to really two vectors of consideration. One, am I going to run hyper-converged versus converged based on my operational preference? You know, hyper-converged incorporates software defined storage, predominantly a compute operating plane. Converge as mentioned previously uses that external storage array has some type of systems fabric and dedicated compute resources with access into those your operational preference is one aspect of it. And then having applications that need the data services of an external storage, primary storage array are the other aspect of deciding whether those two things are needed in your particular environment. We find more and more customers out there that have an investment of both, not one versus the other. That's not to say that there aren't customers that only have one, they exist, but a majority of customers have both. >> So Joakim, I want to come back to the sort of attributes from the application requirements perspective. When you think about mission-critical, you think about availability, scale, recoverability, data protection. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about those attributes. And again, what is it about converged infrastructure that that is the best fit and the right strategic fit for supporting those demanding applications and workloads? >> Now, when it comes to SAP, we're talking about clients and customers, most mission-critical data and information and applications. And hence the requirements on the underlying infrastructure is absolutely on the very top of what the IT organization needs to deliver. This is why, when we talk about SAP, the requirements for high availability protection disaster recovery is very, very high. And it doesn't only involve a single system. As mentioned before, SAP is not a standalone application, but rather a landscape of systems that needs to be kept consistent. And that's what a CI platform does so well. It can consolidate workloads, whether it's big data or the transactional standard workloads of SAP, ERP or UCC. The converged platforms are able to put the very highest of availability protection standards into this whole landscape and making a really unique platform for CI workloads. And at the same time, it enables our customers to accelerate those modernization journeys into things such as ML, AI, IOT, even blockchain scenarios, where we've built out our capabilities to accelerate these implementations with the help of the underlying CI platforms and the rest of the SAP environment. >> Got it. Stu, I want to go to you. You had mentioned before the cloud operating model and something that we've been talking about for a long time and Wikibon. So can converged infrastructure substantially mimic that cloud operating model and how so? What are the key ingredients of being able to create that experience on-prem? >> Yeah, well, Dave is, we've watched for more than the last decade, the cloud has looked more and more like some of the traditional enterprise things that we would look for and the infrastructure in private clouds have gone more and more cloud-like and embrace that model. So, you know, I got, I think back to the early days, Dave, we talked about how cloud was supposed to just be, you know, "simple". If you look at deploying in the cloud today, it is not simple at all that. There are so many choices out there, you know, way more than I had an initial data center. In the same way, you know, I think, you know, the original converged infrastructure from Dell, if you look at the feedback, the criticism was, you know, oh, you can have it in any color you want, as long as black, just like the Ford model T. But it was that simplicity and consistency that helped build out most of what we were talking about the cloud models I wanted to know that I had a reliable substrate platform to build on top of it. But if you talk about Dave today and in the future, what do we want? First of all, I need that operating model in a multicloud world. So, you know, we look at the environments that can spread, but beyond just a single cloud, because customers today have multiple environments, absolutely hybrid is a big piece of that. We look at what VMware's doing, look at Microsoft, Red Hat, even Amazon are extended beyond just a cloud and going into hybrid and multicloud models. Automation, a critical piece of that. And we've seen, you know, great leaps and bounds in the last couple of generations of what's happening in CI to take advantage of automation. Because we know we've gone beyond what humans can just manage themselves and therefore, you know, true automation is helping along those environments. So yes, absolutely, Dave. You know, that the lines are blurred between what the private cloud and the public cloud. And it's just that overall cloud operating model and helping customers to deal with their data and their applications, regardless of where it is. >> Well, you know, Trey in the early days of cloud and conversion infrastructure, that homogeneity that Stu was talking about any color, as long as it's black. That was actually an advantage to removing labor costs, that consistency and that standardization. But I'm interested in how CI has evolved, its, you know, added in optionality. I mean Joakim was just talking about blockchain, so all kinds of new services. But how has CCI evolved in the better part of the last decade and what are some of the most recent innovations that people should be thinking about or aware of? >> So I think the underlying experience of CI has remained relatively constant. And we talk about the experience that customers get. So if you just look at the data that we've analyzed for over a decade now, you know, one of the data points that I love is 99% of our customers who buy CI say they have virtually no downtime anymore. And, that's a great testament. 84% of our customers say that they have that their IT operations run more efficiently. The reality around how we delivered that in the past was through services and humans performing these integrations and the upkeep associated with the sustaining of the architecture. What we've focused on at Dell Technologies is really bringing technologies that allow us to automate those human integrations and best practices. In such a way where they can become more repeatable and consumable by more customers. We don't have to have as many services folks deploying these systems as we did in the past. Because we're using software intelligence to embed that human knowledge that we used to rely on individuals exclusively for. So that's one of the aspects of the architecture. And then just taking advantage of all the new technologies that we've seen introduce over the last several years from all flash architectures and NVMe on the horizon, NVMe over fabric. All of these things as we orchestrate them in software will enable them to be more consumable by the average everyday customer. Therefore it becomes more economical for them to deploy infrastructure on premises to support mission-critical applications. >> So Stu, what about cloud and multicloud, how does CI support that? Where do those fit in? Are they relevant? >> Yeah, Dave, so absolutely. As I was talking about before, you know, customers have hybrid and multicloud environments and managing across these environments are pretty important. If I look at the Dell family, obviously they're leveraging heavily VMware as the virtualization layer. And VMware has been moving heavily as to how support containerized and incubates these environments and extend their management to not only what's happening in the data center, but into the cloud environment with VMware cloud. So, you know, management in a multicloud world Dave, is one of those areas that we definitely have some work to do. Something we've looked at Wikibon for the last few years. Is how will multicloud be different than multi-vendor? Because that was not something that the industry had done a great job of solving in the past. But you know, customers are looking to take advantage of the innovation, where it is in the services. And you know, the data first architecture is something that we see and therefore that will bring them to many services and many places. >> Oh yeah, I was talking before about in the early days of CI and even a lot of organizations, some organizations, anyway, there's still these sort of silos of, you know, storage, networking, compute resources. And you think about DevOps, where does DevOps fit into this whole equation? Maybe Stu you could take a stab at it and anybody else who wants to chime in. >> Yeah, so Dave, great, great point there. So, you know, when we talk about those silos, DevOps is one of those movements to really help the unifying force to help customers move faster. And so therefore the development team and the operations team are working together. Things like security are not a built-in but something that can happen along the entire path. A more recent addition to the DevOps movement also is something like FinOps. So, you know, how do we make sure that we're not just having finance sign off on things and look back every quarter, but in real time, understand how we're architecting things, especially in the cloud so that we remain responsible for that model. So, you know, speed is, you know, one of the most important pieces for business and therefore the DevOps movement, helping customers move faster and, you know, leverage and get value out of their infrastructure, their applications and their data. >> Yeah, I would add to this that I think the big transition for organizations, cause I've seen it in developing my own organization, is getting IT operators to think programmatically instead of configuration based. Use the tool to configure a device. Think about how do we create programmatic instruction to interacts with all of the devices that creates that cloud-like adaptation. Feeds in application level signaling to adapt and change the underlying configuration about that infrastructure to better run the application without relying upon an IT operator, a human to make a change. This, sort of thinking programmatically is I think one of the biggest obstacles that the industry face. And I feel really good about how we've attacked it, but there is a transformation within that dialogue that every organization is going to navigate through at their own pace. >> Yeah, infrastructure is code automation, this a fundamental to digital transformation. Joakim, I wonder if you could give us some insight as you talk to SAP customers, you know, in Europe, across the EMEA, how does the pandemic change this? >> I think the pandemic has accelerated some of the movements that we already saw in the SAP world. There is obviously a force for making sure that we get our financial budgets in shape and that we don't over spend on our cost levels. And therefore it's going to be very important to see how we can manage all these new revenue generating projects that IT organizations and business organizations have planned around new customer experience initiatives, new supply chain optimization. They know that they need to invest in these projects to stay competitive and to gain new competitive edge. And where CI plays an important part is in order to, first of all, keep costs down in all of these projects, make sure to deliver a standardized common platform upon which all these projects can be introduced. And then of course, making sure that availability and risks are kept high versus at a minimum, right? Risk low and availability at a record high, because we need to stay on with our clients and their demands. So I think again, CI is going to play a very important role. As we see customers go through this pandemic situation and needing to put pressure on both innovation and cost control at the same time. And this is where also our new upcoming data strategies will play a really important part as we need to leverage the data we have better, smarter and more efficient way. >> Got it. Okay guys, we're running out of time, but Trey, I wonder if you could, you know break out your telescope or your crystal ball, give us some visibility into the futures of converged infrastructure. What should we be expecting? So if you look at the last release of this last technology that we released in power one, it was all about automation. We'll build on that platform to integrate other converged capability. So if you look at the converged systems market hyper-converged is very much an element of that. And I think that we're trending to is recognizing that we can deliver an architecture that has hyper-converged and converged attributes all in a single architecture and then dial up the degrees of automation to create more adaptations for different type of application workloads, not just your traditional three tier application workloads, but also those microservices based applications that one may historically think, maybe it's best to that off premises. We feel very confident that we are delivering platforms out there today that can run more economically on premises, provide better security, better data governance, and a lot of the adaptations, the enhancements, the optimizations that we'll deliver in our converged platforms of the future about colliding new infrastructure models together, and introducing more levels of automation to have greater adaptations for applications that are running on it. >> Got it. Trey, we're going to give you the last word. You know, if you're an architect of a large organization, you've got some mission-critical workloads that, you know, you're really trying to protect. What's the takeaway? What's really the advice that you would give those folks thinking about the sort of near and midterm and even longterm? >> My advice is to understand that there are many options. We sell a lot of independent component technologies and data centers that run every organization's environment around the world. We sell packaged outcomes and hyper-converged and converged. And a lot of companies buy a little bit of build your own, they buy some converged, they buy some hyper-converged. I would employ everyone, especially in this climate to really evaluate the packaged offerings and understand how they can benefit their environment. And we recognize that everything that there's not one hammer and everything is a nail. That's why we have this broad portfolio of products that are designed to be utilized in the most efficient manners for those customers who are consuming our technologies. And converged and hyper-converge are merely another way to simplify the ongoing challenges that organizations have in managing their data estate and all of the technologies they're consuming at a rapid pace in concert with the investments that they're also making off premises. So this is very much the technologies that we talked today are very much things that organizations should research, investigate and utilize where they best fit in their organization. >> Awesome guys, and of course there's a lot of information at dell.com about that. Wikibon.com has written a lot about this and the many, many sources of information out there. Trey, Joakim, Stu thanks so much for the conversation. Really meaty, a lot of substance, really appreciate your time, thank you. >> Thank you guys. >> Thank you Dave. >> Thanks Dave. >> And everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

thanks Dave I'm Stu minimun and we're here at Cisco live 2018 in Barcelona Spain happy to be joined on the program by Nigel Moulton the AMIA CTO of Dell EMC and Siva Siva Kumar who is the senior director of data center solutions at Cisco gentlemen thanks so much for joining me thank you great so looking at you know a long partnership of Dell and Cisco Siva talk about the partnership first said absolutely I mean if you look back in time when we launched UCS the very first major partnership we brought and the converged infrastructure we brought at the market was we blocked it is 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 yeah Nigel would love to get your perspective so I she was right I think I'd adds it defined a market if you think what true conversion infrastructure is it's different and we're going to discuss them all about that as we go through the UCS fabric is unique in the way that it ties a network fabric to a to 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 gonna be a fantastic result for the market because the market moves on and I think Vblock the X block actually helped us achieve that all right so so Steve oh we understand there's billions of reasons why Cisco and Dell would want to keep this partnership going but talk about from an innovate innovation standpoint there's the new BX block 1000 what's new talk about what would what's the innovation here absolutely if you look at the VX block perspective the 1,000 perspective first of all it simplifies an extremely fast successful product to the next level it simplifies the 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 mark blade servers in the Indus but we also bring the innovation of rack mount servers as well as fatigue fabric larger-scale fibre channel technology as well as we bring our compute network as well as a SAN 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 gonna fight Nigel I think back in the early days the joke was you can have a V block any way you want as long as it's black yeah it's obviously a lot of diversity product line but what's new and different here how is this impact new customers and existing custom so I think there's a couple of things to pick up on what Trey said what would shiver sets of a 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 discrete components that is greatly simplified in BX well in V Xbox one thousands secondly you remove a model number because historically you're right you bought a three series of five series of seven series and that sort of defined the architecture this is now a system-wide architecture so those technologies that you might have thought of as being discrete before or integrated at an RCM level that was perhaps a little complex for some people that's now dramatically simplified so those are the two things I think that we'd amplify one is a simplification and two you're moving a model number and moving to a system-wide architecture I want to give you both the opportunity give us a little bit you know what what's the future when you talk about the 1,000 system future innovations new use cases sure you know I think if you look at the very enterprise are consuming the demand for more powerful systems that will 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 you know in-memory database that scales to much larger scale than before or in a large scale cluster databases or even newer workloads for that matter the appetite for a larger system and they 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 bring to the table and bringing the Best of Breed whether it is today or in the future from our innovation standpoint is is absolutely the way that we are approaching building our partnership and building new solutions here Nigel I mean when you're talking to customers out there or they come in saying hey I'm gonna need this for a couple of months I mean if this is investment they're making for a couple years why is this a partnership built to last so an enterprise-class customer certainly is looking for a technology that's synonymous with reliability availability performance and if you look at what we x-block has traditionally done what the 1,000 offers you see that right but shippers write these application architectures are going to change so if you can make an investment in their technology set now that keeps the premise of reliability and available performance to you today but when you look at future application architectures around high-capacity memory adjacent to our 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 vx box system with the UCS power underneath it the computer is significant because it lays out a very clear path to how you will integrate future application architectures with existing application object Nigel Moulton Siva Siva Kumar thank you so much for joining talking about the partnership in the future so thank you pleasure sending it back to Dave in the u.s. st. thanks so much for watching the cube from Cisco live Barcelona thank you

>> 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.

>> 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 transformation. Trey took us through the architecture and some of the announcement details, and of course, we heard from Cisco, it's a lot of fun in Barcelona. Jeff, bring it home, what are the takeaways? >> Some of the key takeaways that I have is just make sure that everybody Dell EMC's continued commitment to modernizing infrastructure for conversion infrastructure. In addition to that, we have a strong partnership with Cisco as you heard me and you also heard from Cisco, that we're both continuing to invest and innovate in these spaces. In addition to that, 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 and Cisco's 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 over to the Crowd Chat. Again, it's an Ask Me Anything. What makes Dell EMC so special? What about security? How are the organizations affected by conversion 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? Again, (mumbles) with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Twitter is my preferred. Let's get into, thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you in the Crowd Chat.

>> Hello everyone, welcome to this special presentation, "The Future of Converged Infrastructure". My name is Dave Volante 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 fore 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 processes 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 multi-billion dollar market for converged infrastructure. Jeff Boudreau is here, he's the president of the Dell EMC storage division, Jeff thanks for coming on today. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're welcome, so we're going to set up this announcement. Let me go through the agenda. So 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, where 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 if you're in a crowd chat, we have a crowd chat going on, so underneath this video stream you can ask questions, you got to login 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 announcements 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 sort of state of converged infrastructure today? >> Oh, great question, so I'm really bullish on CI in regards to 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 our commitment to our customers has not changed of simplifying IT. And as our customers continue to seek for new ways to simplify consolidate infrastructure, we as 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 some examples. >> Sure, I mean so first I would say our results speak for themselves, as I said we pioneered the CI industry. As the market leader, we enabled thousands of customers who are allowed to drive kind of business transformation and digital transformation. And when I speak to customers specifically, converged infrastructure is not about just the infrastructure, it's about the operating model, and how they simplify IT. I'd say two of the biggest areas of impacts that customers highlight to me are really about the acceleration of application delivery, and then the other big one is around the increase of 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 as strong as ever. We're proud of this category that we created together. We've been on this journey for a long time and 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 where 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 sort of leadership generally and specifically as it relates to converged infrastructure and hyperconverged. My question is is hyperconverged is booming. It's a high growth market, I sometimes joke that Dell EMC is now- you're a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrants, 101 Gartner Magic Quadrants out of the 99, (Boudreau laughs) you're just leading everything in I think both 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 and as Michael talks about being the essential infrastructure company, that's huge for as Dell Technology so we're really proud of that and we want to lean into that strength. Now, on HCI versus CI, to me it's an "and" world. Right everybody wants to get stuck into "either" "or". To me it's about the "and" story. All our customers are going on a journey in regards to kind of how they transform their businesses. 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 right, the good news for me and for our teams 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 forward. As part of that they're looking 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 is they built up those strategies. It's going to be a journey in regards to how they do it and that's software defined versus purpose-built arrays, versus converged or hyperconverged or even cloud, those deployment models. We, Dell EMC and Dell Technologies want to be that strategic partner that trust and advise them to help on that journey. >> Alright Jeff thanks for helping with the setup, I want to ask you to hang around a little bit-- >> 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.