(light techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Covering ZertoCon 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. >> This is The Cube. We're at ZeratoCon 2018, Hines Convention Center in Boston. My name's Paul Gillin. My guest is John White, the VP of Product Strategy at Expedient. Why don't you start off by giving us just the elevator pitch on what Expedient is all about. >> Sure, Expedient is a cloud-service provider as well as managed service provider, and we also have data centers that we operate here mainly on the east coast. We have seven cities and 11 data centers. Those are in Boston here, locally as well as Baltimore, Maryland, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Memphis, Tennessee. And then we actually, we'll put our private cloud services really anywhere. So we actually will put 'em on the customer's premises to meet that need as well as in partner data centers anywhere over the world, if they have to deal with compliance, security, whatever it might be, we'll go and tackle those problems for them. So our goal is to be an infrastructure as a service provider for, you know, really all the enterprise. >> So, when would a company do business with you verses a Microsoft or an Amazon? >> Yeah, so, if you kind of look at really three ways to kind of go cloud, right? You can still do it yourself. You can build some cloud-based services. And that's, again, you're in it on your own. You can go all the way to the extreme, which is the AWS or the Azures, and that's more, again, you're kind of in a do-it-yourself type of mentality. And your support structure there is a little bit different. It's maybe a little bit more mechanical, a little bit more robotical. If you need help in transitioning and figuring out where your workload should sit, and maybe creating more of a hybrid cloud so it's maybe on your premises, it's inside one of our data centers, and then maybe it's even in one of those AWS or Azures. You're going to work with a company like Expedient to go and help you figure out where you should put your workloads, first off. And then how to create that long-term strategy so you get the best of all worlds that are out there, not just one prescriptive cloud. >> So, you're kind of a high-touch cloud provider then. >> Very, very high touch, yeah. Our whole product service is actually a la carte menus. So you pick and choose what you want. We can manage servers, we can provide virtual infrastructure, we can do things like DR as a service, backups as a service, all those pieces. So you build, basically, your perfect IT strategy with us. And then direct connects into AWS and Azure and some other cool products coming soon to kind of make your life a little bit easier, consuming and running your work loads in public clouds. >> Well we hear a lot these days about multi-cloud, about customers wanting to shift their work load seamlessly around between multiple back-end cloud providers. Certainly vendors talk about that a lot. Do you hear customers talking about it? >> Yeah, we have some customers starting to talk about it. And, you know, in the beginning, they just wanted to see, okay, I'm running workloads in AWS, I'm running workloads in Expedient, I'm multi-cloud. And then they start to understand. well, our management's really hard. And the network's really hard, and the security's really hard. And we're doing backups another way than we've done it traditionally. And we're helping customers bridge that gap and saying, we can take some of the security policies that we've been running internally in our data center, and maybe you've been doing inside your data center, and take those out into the public cloud. Simplifying things with networking. We're a pretty big VM or NXS shop. So doing something where you can create tagging and policies local inside the Expedient data center, and then being able to translate those up into AWS and Azure, to make it, basically, one seamless network, is really, really big and key for our customers. It's something that I think is still new. We have a handful of customers that we're working on a lot of cool research projects on. But I think it's going to be something that's going to be the dominant force here in the next few years. >> You mention disaster recovery as a service. Now is that where Zerto fits into your plan? >> Correct, yeah. We've been working with Zerto for quite some time now really since they were just comin' to Boston. And we worked and spent a ton of time with them getting them to understand the needs of service providers, 'cause they were traditionally enterprise focused. And that partnership that we've built over the years has done tremendous value for not only our customers but our businesses. And we've actually had two year-over-year growth for the last three years with them. And actually, we just won the Service Partner Growth Partner of the Year Award with them. So we're creating some pretty cool solutions around DR as a service, and taking some of our network background and actually simplifying DR for our customers that way. So, we use Zerto as well as VM Ware, and some of our own product connectivity, NSX, to actually simplify the package of DR to get the recovery time objective down into 10, 15 minutes, instead of four hours or eight hours or multiple days that really most people are experiencing right now. >> So when you look at the landscape, there are a lot of disaster recovery solution providers you could've worked with. What does Zerto do that's really different? >> The part, well, on a technology wise, watching them take a look at the change block that's occurring that's out of the VM1 environment, making an agnostic from a storage layer, that was really big for us in the beginning on the technical tip-in. And then the partnership, as of late, really since the beginning, was the big value differentiator that we just couldn't find in other companies that're out there. We locked arms with their product management team and their product strategy team right away. We gave them literally two sheets of paper and said these are the things we need to be successful as a service provider using your software. They went down, checked 'em all off. We started goin' at it, and we started then growing that year-over-year for the last three years. So, it's been an amazing partnership. They have a strategic team that understands where the marketing industry's going. And we're going to use them, and leverage them, as much as we possibly can to help out our customers, give 'em the best outcomes they can possibly get. >> When your customers talk to you about backup, where do you see them going? Where is that market headed? >> So backup, traditional backup is something we've been doin' for quite some time. We do petabytes of backups every year for customers. Still using tape, believe it or not, as well. We have a lot of discs-- >> Tape will never die. >> Tape is still out there. I actually have a bumper sticker that I think EMC made when they bought Avamar saying Tape is Dead. And I don't think it's going to die anytime soon. >> Mainframe was dead, too. >> Yeah, right, mainframe has been dead and we still roll new ones into our data centers on a regular basis and then put cloud beside it. But on the backup side of it, if you look at some of the new disasters, right? Look at Atlanta. Their disaster was different. It wasn't a natural disaster, it was a-- >> Radsomeware attack. >> Ransomeware attack. Right, that's a new disaster. We're going to find new disasters, and you can't go and restore back from 24 hours ago and think that that's good. We don't live in that world anymore. It needs to be from five minutes, seven minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it might be. So, we use their journaling today to actually get those quick recoveries. And if they can extend that out, I think it's going to be pretty powerful for customers to say, okay, I want to go back to two years, three days, and six hours from now. And say, gimme that point in time, snap. That's the way I want to actually restore that data. Succeeding in that vision I think will definitely change the game for how we actually look at doing backup and restores in the future. >> A lot of talk at this conference about resilience. >> John: Um hmm. >> Is that a concept that you think customers, your customers, have really internalized? They understand what that means? >> They're getting it, yeah, definitely. I mean, DR even was something that we had to kind of walk them into. But now, if they have an outage, it's not just money that they're losing. It's the reputation. And as we all know now, reputation is key. And you look at Twitter. When somebody has an outage, or has a problem, I mean, their users essentially just blow 'em up and there's memes and all kinds of other stuff. There's a lot of funny ones for the airlines, from Delta and Southwest havin' those challenges. And so, our customers today are realizing that yeah, we can't go a day or two without having service to our customers. We can maybe go a minute or two, but that's about it. We need to make sure we're being resilient with our data. We need to make sure we're protecting it, we'll be able to create ways to quickly roll it back to make sure our customers are up on line. Because they just can't go down anymore. >> How important is security as a driver of resilience and spending on disaster recovery now? >> Yeah, security is definitely, with being able to quickly restore from like a ransomware, it's startin' to bring that infrastructure that has been, security's been a little different there, and where network security's been a little bit different, kind of bringing them together to create, say, we need to have a full package. We not only need to figure out how we're blocking it at the edge and blocking it internally east west, but we need to figure out, if we're going to get breached, 'cause we're going to get breached, how can we quickly restore from that? How can we make sure we're not being held ransom for Bitcoin or whatever the next currency's going to be that they're going to be held ransom for that they just can't pay because maybe it would knock them out of business. >> So, John, Expedient, being a small, specialized cloud service provider, you're kind of dancing with elephants when you're out there with Amazon and Microsoft. What's the secret? What keeps you guys successful and how do you keep viable? >> There's a lot of different things. I think the way we focus on technologies is a little bit unique. I mean, we're there to design the best technical solution for that customer. And not maybe fit them into a one-size-fits-all outfit. The other side of it is, a lot of our customers like the local touch and feel. Majority of our customers are at and around our data centers. That way they can get to learn the facility, they can, even if they're running cloud services with us, they know where it lives. That maybe eases their minds from a compliance standpoint, security standpoint. Or just in a trust, saying, I'm going to take my data that's been living inside of my data center, that's key to my business, and I'm going to give it to somebody, I at least want a face and a name so I can know who to call and who to talk to if there is ever a problem. >> Face to face still matters. >> It does, and I think it's always going to matter. And I think we're always going to have some sort of high interaction with every enterprise out there. And that's what they're going to need. 'Cause this stuff can never commoditize all the way. Creating the solution is still hard. Maybe the bits and pieces underneath it are a little bit easier, but the whole packages is going to always be unique and really hard to define in a one-size-fits-all for a lot of those enterprises. >> John White, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> We'll be back from Zertocon 2018 here in Boston. I'm Paul Gillin, this is The Cube. (light techno music)

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