>> 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.

>> 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)

>> 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.

>> 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.