>> Announcer: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome to the Fira in Barcelona, everybody. This is theCUBE's coverage of MWC 23, day one of that coverage. We have four days of wall-to-wall action going on, the place is going crazy. I'm here with Dave Nicholson, Lisa Martin is also in the house. Today's ecosystem day, and we're really excited to have Manish Singh who's the CTO of the Telecom Systems Business unit at Dell Technologies. He's joined by Doug Wolf who's the head of strategy for the Telecom Systems Business unit at Dell. Gents, welcome. What a show. I mean really the first major MWC or used to be Mobile World Congress since you guys have launched your telecom business, you kind of did that sort of in the Covid transition, but really exciting, obviously a huge, huge venue to match the huge market. So Manish, how did you guys get into this? What did you see? What was the overall thinking to get Dell into this business? >> Manish: Yeah, well, I mean just to start with you know, if you look at the telecom ecosystem today, the service providers in particular, they are looking for network transformation, driving more disaggregation into their network so that they can get better utilization of the infrastructure, but then also get more agility, more cloud native characteristics onto their, for their networks in particular. And then further on, it's important for them to really start to accelerate the pace of innovation on the networks itself, to start more supply chain diversity, that's one of the challenges that they've been having. And so there've been all these market forces that have been really getting these service providers to really start to transform the way they have built the infrastructure in the past, which was legacy monolithic architectures to more cloud native disaggregated. And from a Dell perspective, you know, that really gives us the permission to play, to really, given all the expertise on the work we have done in the IT with all the IT transformations to leverage all that expertise and bring that to the service providers and really help them in accelerating their network transformation. So that's where the journey started. We've been obviously ever since then working on expanding the product portfolio on our compute platforms to bring Teleco great compute platforms with more capabilities than we can talk about that. But then working with partners and building the ecosystem to again create this disaggregated and open ecosystem that will be more cloud native and really meet the objective that the service providers are after. >> Dave Vellante: Great, thank you. So, Doug the strategy obviously is to attack this market, as Manish said, from an open standpoint, that's sort of new territory. It's like a little bit like the wild, wild west. So maybe you could double click on what Manish was saying from a, from a strategy standpoint, yes, the Telecos need to be more flexible, they need to be more open, but they also need this reliability piece. So talk about that from a strategy standpoint of what you guys saw. >> Doug: Yeah, absolutely. As Manish mentioned, you know, Dell getting into open systems isn't something new. You know, Dell has been kind of playing in that world for years and years, but the opportunity in Telecom that came was opening of the RAN, the core network, the edge, all of these with 5G really created a wide opening for us. So we started developing products and solutions, you know, built our first Telecom grade servers for open RAN over the last year, we'll talk about those at the show. But you know, as, as Manish mentioned, an open ecosystem is new to Telecom. I've been in the Telecom business along with Manish for, you know, 25 plus years and this is a new thing that they're embarking on. So started with virtualization about five, six years ago, and now moving to cloud native architectures on the core, suddenly there's this need to have multiple parties partner really well, share specifications, and put that together for an operator to consume. And I think that's just the start of really where all the challenges are and the opportunities that we see. >> Where are we in this transition cycle? When the average consumer hears 5G, feels like it's been around for a long time because it was hyped beforehand. >> Doug: Yeah. >> If you're talking about moving to an open infrastructure model from a proprietary closed model, when is the opportunity for Dell to become part of that? Is it, are there specific sites that have already transitioned to 5G, therefore they've either made the decision to be open or not? Or are there places where the 5G transition has taken place, and they might then make a transition to open brand with 5G? Where, where are we in that cycle? What does the opportunity look like? >> I'll kind of take it from the typology of the operator, and I'm sure Manish will build on this, but if I look back on the core, started to get virtualized you know, back around 2015-16 with some of the lead operators like AT&T et cetera. So Dell has been partnering with those operators for some years. So it really, it's happening on the core, but it's moving with 5G to more of a cloud-like architecture, number one. And number two, they're going beyond just virtualizing the network. You know, they previously had used OpenStack and most of them are migrating to more of a cloud native architecture that Manish mentioned. And that is a bit different in terms of there's more software vendors in that ecosystem because the software is disaggregated also. So Dell's been playing in the core for a number of years, but we brought out new solutions we've announced at the show for the core. And the parts that are really starting that transition of maybe where the core was back in 2015 is on the RAN and on the edge in particular. >> Because NFV kind of predated the ascendancy of cloud. >> Exactly, yeah. >> Right, so it really didn't have the impact that people had hoped. And there's some, when you look back, 'cause it's not same wine, new bottle as the open systems movement, there are a lot of similarities but you know, you mentioned cloud, and cloud native, you really didn't have, back in the nineties, true engineered systems. You didn't really have AI that, you know, to speak of at the sort of volume of the data that we have. So Manish, from a CTO's perspective, how are you attacking some of those differences in bringing that to market? >> Manish: Yeah, I mean, I think you touched on some very important points there. So first of all, the duck's point, a lot of this transformation started in the core, right? And as the technology evolution progress, the opportunities opened up. It has now come into the edge and the radio access network as well, in particular with open RAN. And so when we talk about the disaggregation of the infrastructure from the software itself and an open ecosystem, this now starts to create the opportunity to accelerate innovation. And I really want to pick up on the point that you'd said on AI, for example. AI and machine learning bring a whole new set of capabilities and opportunities for these service providers to drive better optimization, better performance, better sustainability and energy efficiency on their infrastructure, on and on and on. But to really tap into these technologies, they really need to open that up to third parties implementation solutions that are coming up. And again, the end objective remains to accelerate that innovation. Now that said, all these things need to be brought together, right? And delivered and deployed in the network without any degradation in the KPIs and actually improving the performance on different vectors, right? So this is what the current state of play is. And with this aggregation I'm definitely a believer that all these new technologies, including AI, machine learning, and there's a whole area, host area of problems that can be solved and attacked and are actually getting attacked by applying AI and machine learning onto these networks. >> Open obviously is good. Nobody's ever going to, you know, argue that open is a bad thing. It's like democracy is a good thing, right? At least amongst us. And so, but, the RAN, the open RAN, has to be as reliable and performant, right, as these, closed networks. Or maybe not, maybe it doesn't have to be identical. Just has to be close enough in order for that tipping point to occur. Is that a fair summarization? What are you guys hearing from carriers in terms of their willingness to sort of put their toe in the water and, and what could we expect in terms of the maturity model of, of open RAN and adoption? >> Right, so I mean I think on, on performance that, that's a tough one. I think the operators will demand performance and you've seen experiments, you've really seen more of the Greenfield operators kind of launch. >> Okay. >> Doug: Open RAN or vRAN type solutions. >> So they're going to disrupt. >> Doug: Yeah, they're going to disrupt. >> Yeah. >> Doug: And there's flexibility in an open RAN architecture also for 5G that they, that they're interested in and I think the Brownfield operators are too, but let's say maybe the Greenfield jump first in terms of doing that from a mass deployment perspective. But I still think that it's going to be critical to meet very similar SLAs and end user performance. And, you know, I think that's where, you know, maturity of that model is what's required. I think Brownfield operators are conservative in terms of, you know, going with something they know, but the opportunities and the benefits of that architecture and building new flexible, potentially cost advantaged over time solutions, that's what the, where the real interest is going forward. >> And new services that you can introduce much more quickly. You know, the interesting thing about Dell to me, you don't compete with the carriers, the public cloud vendors though, the carriers are concerned about them sort of doing an end run on them. So you provide a potential partnership for the carriers that's non-threatening, right? 'Cause you're, you're an arms dealer, you're selling hardware and software, right? But, but how do you see that? Because we heard in the keynote today, one of the Teleco, I think it was the chairman of Telefonica said, you know, cloud guys can't do this alone. You know, they need, you know, this massive, you know, build out. And so, what do you think about that in terms of your relationship with the carriers not being threatening? I mean versus say potentially the cloud guys, who are also your partners, I understand, it's a really interesting dynamic, isn't it? >> Manish: Yeah, I mean I think, you know, I mean, the way I look at it, the carriers actually need someone like Dell who really come in who can bring in the right capabilities, the right infrastructure, but also bring in the ecosystem together and deliver a performance solution that they can deploy and that they can trust, number one. Number two, to your point on cloud, I mean, from a Dell perspective, you know, we announced our Dell Telecom Multicloud Foundation and as part of that last year in September, we announced what we call is the Dell Telecom Infrastructure Blocks. The first one we announced with Wind River, and this is, think of it as the, you know, hardware and the cashier all pre-integrated with lot of automation around it, factory integrated, you know, delivered to customers in an integrated model with all the licenses, everything. And so it starts to solve the day zero, day one, day two integration deployment and then lifecycle management for them. So to broaden the discussion, our view is it's a multicloud world, the future is multicloud where you can have different clouds which can be optimized for different workloads. So for example, while our work with Wind River initially was very focused on virtualization of the radio access network, we just announced our infrastructure block with Red Hat, which is very much targeted and optimized for core network and edge, right? So, you know, there are different workflows which will require different capabilities also. And so, you know, again, we are bringing those things to these service providers to again, bring those cloud characteristics and cloud native architecture for their network. >> And It's going to be hybrid, to your point. >> David N.: And you, just hit on something, you said cloud characteristics. >> Yeah. >> If you look at this through the lens of kind of the general world of IT, sometimes when people hear the word cloud, they immediately leap to the idea that it's a hyperscale cloud provider. In this scenario we're talking about radio towers that have intelligence living on them and physically at the base. And so the cloud characteristics that you're delivering might be living physically in these remote locations all over the place, is that correct? >> Yeah, I mean that, that's true. That will definitely happen over time. But I think, I think we've seen the hyperscalers enter, you know, public cloud providers, enter at the edge and they're dabbling maybe with private, but I think the public RAN is another further challenge. I think that maybe a little bit down the road for them. So I think that is a different characteristic that you're talking about managing the macro RAN environment. >> Manish: If I may just add one more perspective of this cloud, and I mean, again, the hyperscale cloud, right? I mean that world's been great when you can centralize a lot of compute capability and you can then start to, you know, do workload aggregation and use the infrastructure more efficient. When it comes to Telecom, it is inherently it distributed architecture where you have access, you talked about radio access, your port, and it is inherently distributed because it has to provide the coverage and capacity. And so, you know, it does require different kind of capabilities when you're going out and about, and this is where I was talking about things like, you know, we just talked, we just have been working on our bare metal orchestration, right? This is what we are bringing is a capability where you can actually have distributed infrastructure, you can deploy, you can actually manage, do lifecycle management, in a distributed multicloud form. So it does require, you know, different set of capabilities that need to be enabled. >> Some, when talking about cloud, would argue that it's always been information technology, it always will be information technology, and especially as what we might refer to as public cloud or hyperscale cloud providers, are delivering things essentially on premises. It's like, well, is that cloud? Because it feels like some of those players are going to be delivering physical infrastructure outside of their own data centers in order to address this. It seems the nature, the nature of the beast is that some of these things need to be distributed. So it seems perfectly situated for Dell. That's why you guys are both at Dell now and not working for other Telecom places, right? >> Exactly. Exactly, yes. >> It's definitely an exciting space. It's transformed, the networks are under transformation and I do think that Dell's very well positioned to, to really help the customers, the service providers in accelerating their transformation journey with an open ecosystem. >> Dave V.: You've got the brand, and the breadth, and the resources to actually attract an ecosystem. But I wonder if you could sort of take us through your strategy of ecosystem, the challenges that you've seen in developing that ecosystem and what the vision is that ultimately, what's the outcome going to be of that open ecosystem? >> Yeah, I can start. So maybe just to give you the big picture, right? I mean the big picture, is disaggregation with performance, right, TCO models to the service providers, right? And it starts at the infrastructure layer, builds on bringing these cloud capabilities, the cast layer, right? Bringing the right accelerators. All of this requires to pull the ecosystem. So give you an example on the infrastructure in a Teleco grade servers like XR8000 with Sapphire, the new intel processors that we've just announced, and an extended array of servers. These are Teleco grade, short depth, et cetera. You know, the Teleco great characteristic. Working with the partners like Marvel for bringing in the accelerators in there, that's important to again, drive the performance and optimize for the TCO. Working then with partners like Wind River, Red Hat, et cetera, to bring in the cast capabilities so you can start to see how this ecosystem starts to build up. And then very recently we announced our private 5G solution with AirSpan and Expeto on the core site. So bringing those workloads together. Similarly, we have an open RAN solution we announce with Fujitsu. So it's, it's open, it's disaggregated, but bringing all these together. And one of the last things I would say is, you know, to make all this happen and make all of these, we've also been putting together our OTEL, our open Telecom ecosystem lab, which is very much geared, really gives this open ecosystem a playground where they can come in and do all that heavy lifting, which is anyways required, to do the integration, optimization, and board. So put all these capabilities in place, but the end goal, the end vision again, is that cloud native disaggregated infrastructure that starts to innovate at the speed of software and scales at the speed of cloud. >> And this is different than the nineties. You didn't have something like OTEL back then, you know, you didn't have the developer ecosystem that you have today because on top of everything that you just said, Manish, are new workloads and new applications that are going to be developed. Doug, anything you'd add to what Manish said? >> Doug: Yeah, I mean, as Manish said, I think adding to the infrastructure layers, which are, you know, critical for us to, to help integrate, right? Because we kind of took a vertical Teleco stack and we've disaggregated it, and it's gotten a little bit more complex. So our Solutions Dell Technology infrastructure block, and our lab infrastructure with OTEL, helps put those pieces together. But without the software players in this, you know, that's what we really do, I think in OTEL. And that's just starting to grow. So integrating with those software providers with that integration is something that the operators need. So we fill a gap there in terms of either providing engineered solutions so they can readily build on or actually bringing in that software provider. And I think that's what you're going to see more from us going forward is just extending that ecosystem even further. More software players effectively. >> In thinking about O-RAN, are they, is it possible to have the low latency, the high performance, the reliability capabilities that carriers are used to and the flexibility? Or can you sort of prioritize one over the other from a go to market and rollout standpoint and optimize one, maybe get a foothold in the market? How do you see that balance? >> Manish: Oh the answer is absolutely yes you can have both We are on that journey, we are on that journey. This is where all these things I was talking about in terms of the right kind of accelerators, right kind of capabilities on the infrastructure, obviously retargeting the software, there are certain changes, et cetera that need to be done on the software itself to make it more cloud native. And then building all the surrounding capabilities around the CICD pipeline and all where it's not just day zero or day one that you're doing the cloud-like lifecycle management of this infrastructure. But the answer to your point, yes, absolutely. It's possible, the technology is there, and the ecosystem is coming together, and that's the direction. Now, are there challenges? Absolutely there are challenges, but directionally that's the direction the industry is moving to. >> Dave V.: I guess my question, Manish, is do they have to go in lockstep? Because I would argue that the public cloud when it first came out wasn't nearly as functional as what I could get from my own data center in terms of recovery, you know, backup and recovery is a perfect example and it took, you know, a decade plus to get there. But it was the flexibility, and the openness, and the developer affinity, the programmability, that attracted people. Do you see O-RAN following a similar path? Or does it, my question is does it have to have that carrier class reliability today? >> David N.: Everything on day one, does it have to have everything on day one? >> Yeah, I mean, I would say, you know, like again, the Greenfield operators I think we're, we're willing do a little bit more experimentation. I think the operators, Brownfield operators that have existing, you know, deployments, they're going to want to be closer. But I think there's room for innovation here. And clearly, you know, Manish came from, from Meta and we're, we've been very involved with TIP, we're very involved with the O-RAN alliance, and as Manish mentioned, with all those accelerators that we're working with on our infrastructure, that is a space that we're trying to help move the ball forward. So I think you're seeing deployments from mainstream operators, but it's maybe not in, you know, downtown New York deployment, they're more rural deployments. I think that's getting at, you know, kind of your question is there's maybe a little bit more flexibility there, they get to experiment with the technology and the flexibility and then I think it will start to evolve >> Dave V.: And that's where the disruption's going to come from, I think. >> David N.: Well, where was the first place you could get reliable 4K streaming of video content? It wasn't ABC, CBS, NBC. It was YouTube. >> Right. >> So is it possible that when you say Greenfield, are a lot of those going to be what we refer to as private 5G networks where someone may set up a private 5G network that has more functions and capabilities than the public network? >> That's exactly where I was going is that, you know, that that's why you're seeing us getting very active in 5G solutions that Manish mentioned with, you know, Expeto and AirSpan. There's more of those that we haven't publicly announced. So I think you'll be seeing more announcements from us, but that is really, you know, a new opportunity. And there's spectrum there also, right? I mean, there's public and private spectrum. We plan to work directly with the operators and do it in their spectrum when needed. But we also have solutions that will do it, you know, on non-public spectrum. >> So let's close out, oh go ahead. You you have something to add there? >> I'm just going to add one more point to Doug's point, right? Is if you look on the private 5G and the end customer, it's the enterprise, right? And they're, they're not a service provider. They're not a carrier. They're more used to deploying, you know, enterprise infrastructure, maintaining, managing that. So, you know, private 5G, especially with this open ecosystem and with all the open run capabilities, it naturally tends to, you know, blend itself very well to meet those requirements that the enterprise would have. >> And people should not think of private 5G as a sort of a replacement for wifi, right? It's to to deal with those, you know, intense situations that can afford the additional cost, but absolutely require the reliability and the performance and, you know, never go down type of scenario. Is that right? >> Doug: And low latencies usually, the primary characteristics, you know, for things like Industry 4.0 manufacturing requirements, those are tough SLAs. They're just, they're different than the operator SLAs for coverage and, you know, cell performance. They're now, you know, Five9 type characteristics, but on a manufacturing floor. >> That's why we don't use wifi on theCUBE to broadcast, we need a hard line. >> Yeah, but why wouldn't it replace wifi over time? I mean, you know, I still have a home phone number that's hardwired to align, but it goes to a voicemail. We don't even have handset anymore for it, yeah. >> I think, well, unless the cost can come down, but I think that wifi is flexible, it's cheap. It's, it's kind of perfect for that. >> Manish: And it's good technology. >> Dave V.: And it works great. >> David N.: For now, for now. >> Dave V.: But you wouldn't want it in those situations, and you're arguing that maybe. >> I'm saying eventually, what, put a sim in a device, I don't know, you know, but why not? >> Yeah, I mean, you know, and Dell offers, you know, from our laptop, you know, our client side, we do offer wifi, we do offer 4G and 5G solutions. And I think those, you know, it's a volume and scale issue, I think for the cost structure you're talking about. >> Manish: Come to our booth and see the connected laptop. >> Dave V.: Well let's, let's close on that. Why don't you guys talk a little bit about what you're going on at the show, I did go by the booth, you got a whole big lineup of servers. You got some, you know, cool devices going on. So give us the rundown and you know, let's end with the takeaways here. >> The simple rundown, a broad range of new powered servers, broad range addressing core, edge, RAN, optimized for those with all the different kind of acceleration capabilities. You can see that, you can see infrastructure blocks. These are with Wind River, with Red Hat. You can see OTEL, the open telecom ecosystem lab where all that playground, the integration, the real work, the real sausage makings happening. And then you will see some interesting solutions in terms of co-creation that we are doing, right? So you, you will see all of that and not to forget the connected laptops. >> Dave V.: Yeah, yeah, cool. >> Doug: Yeah and, we mentioned it before, but just to add on, I think, you know, for private 5G, you know, we've announced a few offers here at the show with partners. So with Expeto and AirSpan in particular, and I think, you know, I just want to emphasize the partnerships that we're doing. You know, we're doing some, you know, fundamental integration on infrastructure, bare metal and different options for the operators to get engineered systems. But building on that ecosystem is really, the move to cloud native is where Dell is trying to get in front of. And we're offering solutions and a much larger ecosystem to go after it. >> Dave V.: Great. Manish and Doug, thanks for coming on the program. It was great to have you, awesome discussion. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson and Lisa Martin. We're seeing the disaggregation of the Teleco network into open ecosystems with integration from companies like Dell and others. Keep it right there for theCUBE's coverage of MWC 23. We'll be right back. (upbeat tech music)

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi I'm Stu minimun with wiki bond and welcome to another wiki bond the cube digital community event this one sponsored by Dell EMC of course it's a big week in the industry VMware is having their big European show in Barcelona VMworld and while we are not there in person we have some news that we want to dig into with Dell EMC so like all of our digital community events we're gonna have about 25 minutes of video and then afterwards we're going to have a crowd chat we're gonna have a panel where you have the opportunity to dig in ask your questions give us your viewpoint and talk about everything that's going on so it's important to pay attention think about what questions participate in the crowd chat afterward and thanks so much for joining us talk about the business issues of the day to help us frame this discussion I'm happy to welcome back to the program Pete manka who's the senior vice president with converged infrastructure and solutions engineering at Dell MC Pete great to see you great see you Tuesday all right so Pete converged infrastructures come a long way you and I have a lot of history in this space you know more than a decade now we've been in here so but from a customer standpoint you know this has matured a lot I wouldn't want you to start out give us the customer perspective you know what was convergent restrictor designed to do how is it living up to that and you know what's the state of it today sure well as you said we've got a long history in this and ten years ago we started this business to really simplify IT operations for our customers and we tried to remove the silos between storage compute and networking management and we're doing that we created this market called converged infrastructure by converging the management of those three siloed operations in doing so we added a tremendous amount of value for our customers fast forward now over the years earlier this year we come up with a product that the BX block 1000 that allows us to scale considerably greater within a single environment adding more value to our customer we're very customer driven at Dell EMC as you know and so we talked to our customers again and said what else do you want what else do you want and they pushed us for more automation in more monitoring support for the product and that's really what we're here to talk about today is how we get from simplifying IT operations for customers through allowing scale architectures to eventually automating the customers environment for them yeah when you talk about simplification that the the industry has really been really galvanized gotten really excited at hyper-converged infrastructure and I hear simple that's kind of what HCI is gonna do Dell of course has both converged and hyper-converged we've talked a lot as to how they both fit maybe now you know give give us the update as to you know the relevance of CI today while HCI is still continuing to grow really that sure yeah HDI is a hot market obviously and it is growing fast and customers should be excited about HDI because it's a great solution right it enables the customers get an application up and running very quickly and it's great for scale out architectures you want to add symmetric type nodes and skill oh you're at your application your architecture it's great for that but like all architectures it doesn't fit all solutions or all problems for the customers and there's a place for CI and there's a place for HCI the end you think about HCI versus CI CI is great for asymmetrically scaling architectures you want to have more storage more networking more memory inside your servers more compute you can do that through a CI portfolio and for customers who need that asymmetrical scaling for customers who need high availability very efficient scale type storage environments scale of compute environments you can do that through a CI platform much more efficiently than you can through other platforms in the market alright Pete you mentioned that there was announcement earlier in the year that the VX block 1000 so for those that don't have hauled of history like us that followed from the V block of the BX block and now the 1000 helped remind us what was different about this from things in the past sure when we first started out in the conversion structure business we had blocks that were specific to storage configurations if you wanted a unity or v-max you had to buy a specific model of our of our VX block product line that's great but we realize customers and customers told us they wanted a mix environment they wanted to have a multi-use environment in their block so we created the VX block 1000 announced in February and it allows you to mix and match your storage sand bar along with your compute environment and scales out at a much greater capacity than we could through the original block design so and we're providing the customer a much larger footprint managed by within a single block but also a choice allowing them to have multiple application configurations within the same block all right so people now what what's Del DMC doing to bring converged infrastructure for it even more how are we expanding you know what it's gonna do for customers and the problems they're looking to solve yeah right so again we went back to our customers that said ok tell us your experience with block you tell us what you like tell us what you don't like and they love the product it's been a very successful product they said we want more automation we want more monitoring you want the ability to see what's happening as well as automate workflows and procedures that we have to do to get our workloads up and running quicker and more automated fashion so what we're gonna talk about today is how we're going to do that we're going to provide more automation capabilities and the ability to monitor through our VM work you realize suite toolset alright great Pete I appreciate you helping kind of lay the groundwork we're gonna be back in a quick second one of your peers from Dell MC to dig into the product so stay with us we'll be back right after this this quick break [Music] vx block system 1000 simplifies IT accelerates the pace of innovation and reduces operating costs storage compute networking and virtualization components are all unified in a single system transforming operations and delivering better business outcomes faster this is achieved by five foundational pillars that set Dell EMC apart as the leading data center solutions provider each VX blocks system 1000 is engineered manufactured managed sustained and supported as one welcome back joining me to dig into this announcement is Dan Mita who's the vice president of converged infrastructure engineering at Dell EMC damn thanks for joining us thanks for having me all right so Pete kind of teased out of what we're doing here talked about what we've been building on for the last ten years in the converging infrastructure industry please elaborate you know what this is and shuttle from there yeah absolutely so to your point we know customers have been buying VX blocks and V blocks for the last ten years and there's lots of good reasons behind all of that we also know that customers been asking us for better monitoring better reporting and more orchestration capabilities we this announcement we think we're meeting those challenges so there's three things that I'd like to talk about one is we're gonna help customers raise the bar around awareness of what's going on within the environment we'll do that through health checks and dashboards performance dashboarding real-time alerting for the first time the second thing we'll talk about is we talked about a different level of automation than we've ever had before when it comes to orchestration we'll be introducing the ability to set up the services necessary to run orchestrated workflows and then our intention is to bring to market those engineered workflows and lastly would be you know analytics deeper analytics for customers that want to go even further into why their system is drifted from a known good state we're gonna give them the capabilities to see that great so Dan I think back from the earliest days that you know Vblock was always architected to you know transform the way operations are done what really differentiates this you know how important is there are things like the analytics of you're doing yeah sure so you're right today our customers use element managers to do most of that what this tool will allow them to do is kind of abstract a lot of the complexity folk in the element managers themselves if you think about an example where our customer wants to provision an ESXi host add it to a cluster and you say a Power Max bulan we know there's about a dozen manual steps to do that it cuts across four element managers and that also means you're going to be touching your administrators across compute network storage and virtualization with this single tool that will guide you first by checking the environment taking you through an orderly set of questions or inputs and then lastly validating the environment we know that we're going to help customers eliminate any undue harm that might do to an environment but we're also gonna save them time effort and money by getting it done quicker ok so Dan it sounds like there's a new suite of software explain it exactly what is it and how do all these pieces fit together yeah so there's three pieces in this week foundational is what we call the X blocks central so the X Box central is going to go out mandatory with all new VX blocks we're also going to make it available to our customers running older 300 500 and 700 family the X blocks and we'll provide a migration path for customers that are using vision today that's the tool that's going to allow them to do that performance health and RCM compliance dashboarding as well as do metrics based in real-time alerting one loved one step up from that one layer up from that is what we call the X block orchestration so this this product is being built underneath the V realize operations or excuse me orchestration tool and it's essentially like I said it's going to provide those all of those tools for setting up the services to run the workflows and then we'll provide those workflows so that example that I gave just a minute ago about provisioning that host will have a workflow from that right out of the gate ok so you mentioned the the vir ops thing you know VMware has always been a you know a very important piece of the whole stack there's yeah be in front of everything in the product line while you're announcing it this week at you know vmworld your and you know explain a little bit more that integration between the VMware pieces so you mentioned V Rob's and that's the third piece in this suite right so that is that it's going to provide us the dashboarding to provide all of that detailed analytics so if you think about it we're using V realized opera orchestra ssin as a workflow engine we're using V ROPS for that intelligent insight into the operations as a framework for the things that we're doing but essentially what we've given customers at this point is a framework for a cloud management or a cloud operations model sitting on top of a converged infrastructure alright Dan thanks for explaining all that now we're gonna throw it over to a customer to really hear what they think of this announcement when we started to talk about the needs to innovate within business technology and move forward with the business we knew we had to advance our technology offerings standardize our data center and help bring all our technology to current date vs block allowed us to do that in one purchase and also allowed us to basically bring our entire data center ten years forward with one step the benefits we've seen from the X block from my side of the house I now have that sleep at night capability because I have full high availability I have industry-leading technology the performance is there their applications are now more available we now have a platform where we can modernize our entire system we can add blades we can add storage we can add networking as we need it out of the box all knowing that it's been engineered and architected to work together it has literally set it and forget it for us we go about our daily business and now we've transitioned from a maintenance time set and a maintenance mindset to now we can participate in meetings to help drive business innovation help drive digital transformation within our company and really be that true IT strategic partner the business is looking for with the implementation of VX blocks central upcoming we should be able to get a better idea of what's going on in our VX block through one dashboard we're very sensitive about the number of dashboards we try to view do the whole death bi dashboard situation especially for a small team we really believe yes block central is going to be beneficial for us to have a quick health overview of our entire unit encompassing all components as we discussed additional features coming out for the VX block one of the more interesting ones for me was to see the integration of VMware's be realized product into the VX block most importantly focused around orchestration and analytics that's something that we don't do a lot of right now but as our company continues to grow and we continue to expand our VX block into additional offerings I can see that being beneficial especially for our small team being able to you know or orchestrate and automate kind of daily tasks that we do now may benefit our team in the future and then the analytics piece as we continue to be a almost a service provider for our business partners having that analytic information available to us could be very beneficial from a from a cost revenue standpoint for us to show kind of the return on investment for our company one of the things that we kind of look forward to that the opportunities of VX block is going to give us given the feature set that's coming out is the ability to use automation for some of our daily business tasks that maybe is something as simple as moving a virtual machine from one host to another that seems pretty mundane at this point but as our company grows and workloads get more complex having the automation availability to be able to do that and have VMware do that on its own it's going to benefit our team always love hearing from customers I'm Peter Burris here in our Palo Alto studios let's also hear from a very important partner in this overall announcement that's VMware we've got OJ Singh who's a senior vice president and general manager the cloud management business unit at VMware with us AJ welcome to the cube thank you Peter of that to be here so Archie we've been hearing a lot of great new technology about you know converged infrastructure and how you do better automation and how you do better you know discovery and whatnot associated with it but these technologies been for around for a while and VMware has been a crucial partner of this journey for quite some time give us a little bit about the history absolutely you know this is a as you rightly pointed a long history with a VMware and Dell EMC goes back over a decade ago I started with Vblock in those days and we literally defined the converged infrastructure market at that point and and this partnership has continued to evolve and so this announcement we are really excited to be here you know to continue to announce our joint solutions to our common customers you know in this whole VX blocks 1000 along with the vitalife suite well the VX block Hardware foundation with VMware software foundation was one of the first places where customers actually started building what we now call private clouds tell us a little bit about how that technology came together and how that vision came together and how your customers have been responding to this combinations partnership for a while absolutely if you think about it from a customer standpoint they love the fact that it is a pre engineered solution and you know they have to put less effort and doing the lifecycle management maintenance of the solution so as part of kind of making it a pre engineered solution what we've done is you know made it such that the integrations between the VX block and visualize are out of the box so we put some critical components you know are of course the vSphere and NSX in there but in addition to that for the virial I set we have vro Orchestrator already built in there we have a special management pack that gets into detail dashboards that are related to the hardware associated with the X block also pre integrated in there so that if via ops runs in there it'll automatically kind of figure that as a dashboard out and can configure them and then finally we have VRA or you know an industry-leading automation platform that allows you self-service and literally build a private cloud on top of the X block so the VX central software has been letting or is now allows a customer to make better use of VMware yes similarly some of the new advancements that you're making within VMware are going to help VX bar customers get more out of their devices as well tell us a little bit about some of the recent announcements you've made that are very complimentary absolutely you know to some extent you know the V realized journey has been a journey about at the end of the day in enabling our customers to set up a self-managed private cloud and do large extent we're heading in the direction of what we say self-driving operations using machine learning technologies and all of that so in that kind of direction in that vision if you may we've actually now released with a great integration between VRA and via ops that for the first time closes the loop between the two solutions so that you can start to do intelligent workload placement right depending upon if I'm trying to optimize for cost I'm trying to optimize for tier of service you know whether it's bronze silver gold tier service I'm trying to optimize for software license management you know Oracle license is only going on Oracle tier etcetera this closed-loop with policy ensures you do that and that's the first step in this direction of self-driving that's a very important direction because customers are gonna try to build more complex systems based on or support more complex applications without at the same time seeing that complexity show up in the administration side now that leaves the last question I have because ultimately the two of you are working to make together to make customers successful so tell us a little bit about how your track record your history and your direction of working together in support in service to customers is going and where you think it's gonna go absolutely so we continue to work very closely in partnership and as partners we are committed to support our customers through thick and thin you know to make sure that they can have these engineered pre-engineered clouds set up so they can get the benefits of these clouds lower cost to serve you know in terms of highly efficient workload the fact as much as possible in the you know let me tell about of hardware that's available and at the same time the automation and the self-service that enables the agility so the development teams can build software quickly I think provision software really fast so those are the kind of benefits lower cost agility but in partnership jointly serving our customers RJ Singh senior vice president general manager of the VMware cloud management business unit thanks again for beyond the cube thank you Peter glad to be here Stu back to you all right thanks Peter for sharing that VMware perspective to help understand a little bit more some of the customer implications we're back with Dan and Pete Pete we talked about there's new management there's a few different software packages is this exclusively for the new generation of VX block 1000 or you know who the existing customers will be able to use this sure I mean obviously advanced management features are important to all of our customers so we specifically designed the Xbox central to run both on existing VX block customers and of course in our new VX blocks that were a lot of the factor as well alright so Dan we've talked about the progress we've made the the you know great maturation in these solutions set what's next what customers expect and what should we be looking for from Dellums in the future so this the thing with us is always data center operations simplification if you think about it what we're introducing today is all about simplifying and provisioning and management of the existing system within the system we've heard also from customers what they look for us next to do is to try to improve the upgrade process simplify that as well so we've already got some development efforts working on that we'll be excited and news for later this year or early next year janna follow-up went dance that we always talked to our customers about what they're looking for in addition to more automation and we're monitoring support they want to go to consume their resources in a more agile environment cloud like a farm and even on-premises so that combined with the be realized suite of products we're going to be providing more cloud live experience to our customers for their yeah walks in the future alright Pete and Dan thank you so much for sharing this news we're gonna now turn it over to the community so you've heard about the announcement we've been talking for quite a long time at wiki bond about how automation and tools are gonna hopefully help make your job easier so want you to dig in ask the questions what do you like what do you want to see more of and so everybody let's growl chat great