>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas It's theCube covering Dell Technologies World 2018 brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCube's live coverage of the Inaugural Dell Technologies World 2018 here in Las Vegas. Getting to the end of three days of wall-to-wall live coverage from two sets I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host John Troyer, and for those of you that haven't attended one of these shows, sometimes like "Oh, you're going to Vegas, this is some boondoggle," but I'm really happy, I've got a customer, one of the Dell EMC employees, here. A lot of stuff goes on. There's learning, there's lotsa meetings, there's, you know, you come here, you kind of, you know, get as much out of it as you can. So, first, Stephen Herzig, who's the Director of Enterprise Systems at the University of Arkansas, >> Correct, yes. >> Stu: You had a busy week so far. >> I have. >> Thank you for joining us >> You bet. >> Stu: Also, Andrew McDaniel, who's the Senior Director of Ready Solutions for VDI with Dell EMC, thank you for joining us-- >> Thanks guys >> Alright, so, Stephen, first of all, give us a little bit about your background and University of Arkansas, I think most people know the Razorbacks-- >> Stephen: That's right, the Razorbacks! >> Talk about your org and your role there. >> Yeah, I'm Director of Enterprise Systems, as you mentioned. We're an R1 University, we have about 27,000 students, about 5,000 faculty and staff in the university. And, so my organization is responsible for maintaining, as I said, all the enterprise systems, essentially everything in the data center on the floor to support all the educational activities. Now there is some distributed or commonly known as shadow IT organizations throughout the university and we work quite closely with them, too. >> Okay, you stamp out all that shadow IT stuff and pull it all back in, right? >> Stephen: (laughs) No, no! No, absolutely not. >> We'll get a, Andrew, before we get into more about the university, tell us a little bit about your role and your org, inside Dell EMC. >> So my organization basically develops the end-to-end VDI solutions that Dell EMC sell globally. So, we work with partners such as VMware and Citrix, to put together the industry leading solutions for VDI. Tested, validated, engineered, to give real good confidence in the solution the customer's going to buy. >> Okay, John and I spent many years looking at these, you know, memes in the industry, all that, you know, but uh, Stephen, before we get into the VDI piece, give us, what are some of the challenges that you're facing in the University? We've had, you know, from an IT standpoint, we know the technology requirements are more than ever. While tuitions go up, budgets are always a challenge. So, when you're talking to your peers, what are the things you're all commiserating about or, you know, working at. >> Yeah, like any IT organization, it's a challenge to do more with less. We're constantly being required to support more systems, more technology, and technology is becoming more and more an integral part of the educational process. We also have students coming from very diverse backgrounds, and so the kinds of computing devices that they're able to bring to the university with them, some can afford high-end, some not, and so, it's a challenge for us to deliver that, the applications to them, no matter what kind of device they happen to bring. >> Alright, so, sounds like VDI is something that fits there-- >> Yes >> Before we get into the actual solution, tell us, what was the struggle you were facing, what led to that, what was there, was there a mandate? How did you get to the solution that you were-- >> Well, really, we were struggling with those challenges We're a very small IT team, and as those things grew, we knew we had to find a way to reduce the number of resources that we're supporting, all the end points, all the machines in the labs, all the machines on faculty and staff desks, and again, like I said, the students bring their own devices, which we had to support as well. >> Alright, so, you ended up choosing a Dell Solution, maybe give us a little bit about that, that process and walk us through the project some. >> Yeah, we really needed a solution. We could not go out and assemble pieces, parts, from a lot of different vendors, and we needed a solution that was tailored to our needs, that fit, VDI is complex by its nature, but some vendors made it really complex. So, we had to find one that was right for our environment, for what we were trying to achieve, and of course, at the right price point. Higher education, we're not flush with cash. >> That's always been really hard, I think that's been the hard thing about VDI, right? It's always been kind of complicated and hard to do, at least back in the day, and then when you did it, half the things didn't work, and the things that didn't work were really weird, and the user was very confused. "This application works, but this one doesn't." And, "where's my cursor?" and "Everything went wonky all of a sudden and I can't login at 9am." I mean, I'm kind of curious, what is necessary maybe, from eye-level in a modern VDI solution stack, that makes it easy? You know, is it the hypervisor, the end clients? >> I think, John, you know we've seen such great advances in the software side of it, right? So, if you look at Horizon, as a broker, VMware Horizon, the advances that they've made in things like protocols, right, so Blast Extreme, for example, one of the big challenges that we've always had, is things like Link or Skype, in a VDI environment. It was, it made a disaster for many customers, right? So, that has been solved by VMware and the advances that they did, above and beyond what was capable in PC over IP. So, that's one of the things. From a hardware perspective, you know, one of the challenges we frequently had in VDI, was poor user experience, right? And it was typically because the graphics requirement for the application could not be delivered by the CPU alone, right, so GPUs, Nvidia, K1, K2's, then it went to the M10, M60's, and moving forward into the P4 and P40's, they've really helped us to improve that user experience, and it's starting to get to a point where GPUs are a standard delivery within any VDI employment. So, you get really good experience moving forward. And as you know, if you can't deliver a good user experience, the project is dead before it even starts. Alright, so that's a big challenge. >> Stephen, do you have any commentary on some of the challenges that we faced before? What was your experience like? >> Yeah, it, that's exactly right. We made the decision early on to include GPU in every session that we served up. And we weren't quite sure, 'cause it is an additional expense, but it was one of the best decisions that we've made. It really does make all the difference. >> Was there something specific from the application or user-base, and how they were using it, that led you to that? >> Well, we are all Windows 10, and Windows 10 just looks better, it runs better, the video, scrolling through a Word document, the text, some are very nuanced, but it makes a big difference in the user experience. And of course, we have higher-end users using CAD programs, things like that, you know, in the School of Engineering, they needed the GPU for what they were doing. >> Andrew, wondering if you could give us, little bit of an update on the stack, So, I think back to, on the EMC side, I watched everything from the Flash on the converge side. On the Dell side, there was the Wyse acquisition of course, EMC and VM were coming together, so, a long journey, but even the first year we did theCube, you know, Dell had some big customers doing large scale, cost-effective VDI, because, had that, you know, to give some of the marketing terms I've heard here, it's end to end, but you add the devices all the way through. So, bring us up to 2018. >> Yeah, so, I guess, you know, one of the challenges that Stephen spoke about is the, previously, the hassle of having to go and buy each of the individual components from multiple different vendors. So, you're buying your storage from one vendor, compute from another, GPUs from another, hypervisor from another, broker from another, and so on. So, it gets very complicated to manage all of that. And so, we had lots of customers who had run into scenarios where, say a BIAS firmware and a driver revision were not compatible, and so we'd run into those kinds of problems that we were talking about earlier on, right? So, I think, you know, bringing all of that together, in Dell Technologies, we can now deliver every single aspect of what you need for a VDI deployment. So, we created a bundle called VDI Complete. It uses vSAN ReadyNodes or VxRail, right? So, hyper-converged, massive from a VDI perspective, and I'll come back to that in a second. It pairs then, Horizon Advanced or Horizon Enterprise, with those base platforms, and the Dell Wyse Thin clients. So, every aspect, true end to end, is delivered by Dell Technologies, and there's simply no other vendor in the market who can do that. So, what that basically does is it gives the customer confidence that everything that has been tested can be owned, from a support perspective, by Dell Technologies. Alright, so, if you've got a problem, we're not going to hand you off to another company to go solve that issue, or lay blame with somebody else. It's fully our stack, and as a result, we take full responsibility for it. And that's one of the benefits that we have with customers like University of Arkansas. >> And that was important to us. That single point of contact for support was really important to us. >> Stephen, I wonder if you could talk about, from an operational standpoint, you said, you've got a small team. One of the challenges, at least years ago, was like "Oh, wait! I have the guy that walked around "and did the desktops, now I centralized it, "who owns it, you know, how do we sort through this? "You know, we've got a full stack there. "Simplicity's one of the big messages of HCI," but what was the reality for your team and the roles, how did you change? >> Well one of the first areas, or actually, the first area that we implemented VDI in was in the labs. Hundreds of end points across the campus. And, before VDI, you would walk into the lab, and a certain percentage of the machines would always be down. They needed updating, there was a virus, somebody spilled a coffee on the machine, you know, that kind of thing. After VDI, when you walked into the lab, 100% of the end points were always up, and there was no noise in the lab, except when somebody printed. So, the maintenance required, the resources for my team, and these distributed IT teams was reduced drastically. As a matter of fact, some of the distributed teams had 50% of their resources reduced. That could then go and do more high-value projects and deliver high-value services to their colleges. >> From the student and faculty perspective, it sounds like the uptake has been good, and the satisfaction level high. I mean, user experience is everything with VDI, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, the students came, we installed during spring break, and they came back from spring break, went into the labs with these beautiful new 27-inch monitors, sat down, logged on, and it looked almost the same as before. Which was exactly what we were after. We wanted that same high-quality experience in VDI that they had with a laptop or a desktop. >> The monitors are an important thing to consider, right, 'cause a lot of customers will think about the data center side of VDI, right, so, get lots of compute, good, high-performing storage, good network, and then they put a really poorly designed thin client or an old desktop PC, or something like that, on the end, and wonder why they're not getting good performance, right? So, we just launched yesterday the Dell Wyse 5070. It's the first thin client in the market that can have six monitors attached to it, four of those can be 4K, and two 2K, right? So, it's immense from a display perspective, and this is what our customers are demanding. Especially in financial services, for example, or in automotive design, you know, in CAD labs, for example, you need three or four really good, high-quality screens attached. >> Well, I'm saying, I'll date myself, I wish I had that when I was playing Doom when I was in college in the labs. >> That too! >> That does bring into question, your upgrade and scenarios, moving on to the future, right? You used to have all those janky old PC's that you'd kind of, maybe they'd slide out the back door, maybe they'd get recycled, or whatever, but now it's a different refreshed cycle, and maybe even different use cases. >> Yeah, the lifespan of the endpoints is much longer with the VDI solution. >> John: It's got to be good, yeah. I was curious, you mentioned the converged infrastructure, too, Andrew. I mean, how does that play into it? (muffled) >> Yeah, so I mean, you know, traditionally, a SAN infrastructure was used in VDI, alright? So, for us, that would have been Equallogic Compellent, historically. Now, we're seeing that VDI market almost totally transition to hyperconverged. Alright, so vSAN has really revolutionized VDI, okay? I'd say, you know, a good 30, 35% of all VxRail and vSan deployments that we do, are in the VDI space. So, it's really, and I would say about 90, 95% of our VDI deployments are on hyperconverged rather than a traditional SAN infrastructure. That's really where VDI has moved now. 'Cause it gives customers the ability to scale on demand. Instead of having to go and buy another half-million dollar storage rate, add another thousand users, you can simply add in a couple of more compute nodes with the storage built in. For us, hybrid works very well. So, a hybrid-disc configuration is working very well in most VDI deployments. Some customers require all flash, it depends on the applications and the other kind of performance that they want to get from it. But for a majority of customers, hyperconverged with the hybrid configuration works brilliantly. >> So, Stephen, I want to give you the final word. Sounds like everything went really well, but one of the things we always like to understand, when you're talking with your peers, they said "Hey, what did you learn? "What would you do a little different, "either internally, or configuration-wise, or roll-out," What would you tell your peers? >> Well, when we implemented VDI it was just before VDI Complete came out. So, the work that's done in the VDI Complete solution, we didn't have. So, as we look to the future, and we want to expand, and grow our environment, VDI Complete will be a huge help. Had we had that, it only took us about four months to stand it up, which, considering what we accomplished, was very short time, but, if we had had VDI Complete, that time would've been much more compressed. So, looking to the future, we're looking to expand using VDI Complete. >> Just to, Andrew, maybe you can tie the knot on this bow for us, is sounds like this could, if I've got VDI, I don't have to start brand new, it can fit with existing environments, how does that all work? >> Absolutely, I mean we've got lots of customers who've already done Citrix or VMware deployments, right? Ideally, you want to connect with one broker. So you want to stick with one broker. But, we can bring in a hyperconverged VDI solution into your existing user estate, and merge into that. So, that's pretty common. >> Alright, well, Andrew and Stephen, thank you so much for sharing the story. Really great to always get the customer stories. We're getting towards the end of three days of live coverage here at the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas, at Dell Technologies World 2018. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCube. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, it's a beautiful day here in Las Vegas and this is theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman and happy to welcome, fresh off the keynote stage and for the first time on our program Jeff Clark, who is the Vice-Chairman of Products and Operations at Dell Technologies. Jeff, great to see you Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks, Stu. Thanks for having me. >> All right, so first of all Jeff, you know, you'll be a CUBE alum when we finish this, so for our audience that's not familiar-- >> Jeff: Do I get a badge? >> I've got a sticker for you actually. >> A sticker will work. >> Absolutely. Tell us a little bit about your background, you've been at Dell for a number of years. You now own really kind of the client and ISG businesses. >> Jeff: Sure. >> Which is a huge chunk of Michael's business. Give us your background. >> I'm an electrical engineer, by training. I went to the University of Texas at San Antonio. Got my double E degree. Out of school went to work for Motorola. And I joined what was PC's Limited when that was the first private name of Dell in 1987. I've been here for 31 years. And I've done a variety of things all on the engineering and product side. I've had the fortunate opportunity, I started in the factory as a process/test/quality/reliability engineer, we were Jacks of many trades at that time. Went to product development in 1989 and have been in that side ever since. I've worked in every kind of product that we had at the core design roles. I got to start a business, one of the funnest things I've ever done. I started the Precision business in 1997 from ground zero, me and a few of our top engineers and building that into the business that it is today. Expanded responsibilities, had a stint of running our enterprise business back in 2002 through 2005. Actually got to work with EMC back then. Dave Donatelli and many others back in the day. And now I lead a combined products and operations organization that has our CSG PC peripheral portfolio and ISG portfolio, our infrastructure products, as well as the fundamental supply chain that runs the company. >> Yeah, so Jeff, you've done it all and you've seen Michael through well, an amazing journey. >> We've worked together for a long time and it's been a heck of a ride. And to be honest, I think the ride's not over and the ride in front of us I think is more exciting than the past 30 years. >> Yeah, as we always say, it's a good thing, nothing's changing. There's nothing new to get those that love technology excited about, right? >> If there's any constant in our industry, and certainly in our company, it is change. And thinking about what's unfolded in my three plus decades at this is amazing to where we are today. But again, the future, as Bob DeCrescenzo said today, wicked cool. >> Wicked cool, absolutely. When you get up to Boston a little bit more, you can get a Boston accent. Yeah, exactly. Jeff, if we look at the Dell Technologies family, client side of the business is about half, the ISG is another 37%, so you know, you own major, major chunk of what's going on inside. Maybe give us a little bit of how you look at this portfolio. Are there interactions between the client side and the enterprise side? You know, we've seen most of the other big tech players that had both, either shed or split or, you know, kept the HPs and the IBMs of the world, no longer have both of those together. >> Yeah, those are interesting thoughts. You know, for us, our customers are asking us to provide a more set of comprehensive solutions. They want more end to end. And I don't see how you provide an end to end solution if you don't have one of the ends. And as trite as that may sound, I think it's the core fabric of what we're doing and certainly the role I have now leading this organization of being able to cultivate and build, I think, the world's leading and innovative PC products and peripherals around them. Same thing on the infrastructure side, where we have the privilege of being a leader in a number of categories. And then beginning to bring them together in new and unique ways. I referenced in my keynote this morning about how new entrants to the workforce are pressuring conventional definitions of how we do work and we deploy technology. So we have leadership, products, and now you capture or able to tie that together with VMware Workspace ONE or an AirWatch or RSA class of products and you begin to modernize the experience. How could you not do that if you're not integrating the pieces? Or a VDI experience where you take a thin client, or VxRail infrastructure, and some VMware Horizon software and build out a solution set. That's what our customers are asking us to do. And I think we're in a very unique position. In fact, I know we are, 'cause no one else has all of what I just described. >> Jeff, there was a main theme you talked about in your keynote, that IT can drive and change business and it resonated from what I'm hearing with customers. But if you dial back a few years ago, it was IT wasn't getting it done, IT wasn't listening to the business, we had Stealth IT. Why are things different now? What's the role of IT going forward? And how does Dell fit into that big picture? >> You know, Michael touched on it in his opening yesterday about IT and business have become much much more closely integrated to compete in this modern world. And I suspect some of this goes back to we've always thought of IT as a cost center, OPEX. Yet, over the past decade, we've seen some fundamental disruption of business that has been fundamentally IT-led. New technology-led. New business models that have been fueled by new technology. I think that modernization, whether it's modernization of applications, taking advantage of information at your disposal and turning that into useful insights to make better business decisions, is a catalyst for a reframing, if you will, of what IT does. And the role of IT in a business, and a role that IT can help companies be more competitive, or at a minimum, help them not get disrupted by someone who's doing it, as well. So I think that's what's changing and I think you're seeing companies embrace that. And as soon as you do, you begin to I think challenge what have you invested in, where are you going, how am I taking advantage of some of the new trends that I outlined maybe this morning. And it gets I think a pretty interesting time in front of us. >> Yeah, you know, you actually went through immersive and collaborative computing, IOT, multi-clouded options, offer to find anything and AI and ML. So a lot of new things. One area I'd like to touch on, we heard some great side from Allison Dew earlier this week. It's great when we have the new tools and the new technology but sometimes we wonder how does adoption go and how does that impact productivity and people's engagement? And I'm curious how we help the enterprise and help the client side, not just do something new but be more productive and move their business forward. >> Look, if start with the client side, I think it's pretty easy to think about productivity. Particularly if you believe this boundary between work and the workplace is fundamentally changed and think about where people do work. You're actually getting a much more productive workforce by allowing people to work when the want to work, where they want to work. And that traditional boundary of eight to five, whatever it might be, physically in the office. You now have access to all 168 hours in a week and people want to work when they want to work. And we find that the work more, particularly if you put technology in their hand that makes them more productive and they have access to what they need to do their job. You cast that forward into the enterprise and I think, look, at some level IT is hard and we have a huge role in making it much easier. How to simplify. How to make it more automated so IT practitioners can actually migrate to how do I configure this LAN? How do I set up this server? And interesting things and still important things, but can migrate to how do I take this data and turn it into information that helps my business unit, my company win. That's where I think, again, I think this migrates, too and we play a huge role in helping that. >> Yeah, there's a theme that, another thing came up in the keynote, data really at the center of everything and not just talking about storage, but you had McClaren up on stage talking about that. How do you see the role of data changing? How do we capture for companies? How valued data is? >> A tie back to Michael's opening, he talked about data being, if you will, the rocket fuel for this rocket change and digitization of our world, the digital transformation that's underway. And between Michael, Pat, and myself, we all talked about that happening at the edge in a decentralized manner. I tried to build upon that and say you hadn't seen nothing yet, there's a whole lot more coming. Well, if believe that, you have to start preparing today, and anticipating that. And again, I think we play a role in helping companies do that. I think it requires a modern approach. It requires an approach to understand how that information is coming in to be able to do something with it. That's where we're focusing, as I mentioned. In fact, I think I specifically said it's sort of the heart of our vision for IT transformation. The data's the gold. In fact, Pat may have said that yesterday. Now, the challenge will be how do you take all of that data sort through it, figure out which pieces are most valuable and then get them to where they're supposed to go to make decisions. That's yet to be seen how we do that but I'm encouraged, given our track record in this industry. We'll find ways to do that. Engines like AI and machine or capabilities like artificial intelligence and machine learning are certainly a vast step forward of making sense of all that stuff. >> Yeah. Jeff, I wonder if you could bring us inside some of your customers. You know, where do you find some of the strategic discussions happening? I think back to early PC or server days, you know, who bought boxes versus now, it seems like more of a C level discussion for some of these large trends that you're seeing. What are some of the big changes that you're seeing in the customers and what are some of the biggest challenges that they're having today? >> I think you mentioned it. One of the things that I've seen in the customer interactions I've had in this new role and getting to see more and more each and every month. The conversations I have, or participate in, are seldom, if ever, about the speeds and feeds of this, the performance of that. It's about here's my business problem, how do you help me? How do you help me get this done? How do you provide me a set of solutions to get to where I want to go? By the way, if you have advice, recommendation to help us, they want to hear that. So they want to access our technical knowledge base across our organization. But again, I think this theme that I tried to say a couple of times this morning around outcomes, so it's an outcome-driven discussion. It's solutions. It's end to end. And how can you help me? Probably, I guess, I could generalize them to fit those four attributes. >> Great. Last thing, you talked about the modern data center. What's that mean for your customers? >> To me, it's all about putting at the disposal of our customers a set of technologies and infrastructure solutions and services that allows 'em to take advantage of that data. Allow them to have the data services they need and the underlying horsepower to do it in a fairly intelligent way. Hopefully automating a few of those tasks and giving them the agility and flexibility they need. >> Yeah. Jeff, wonder if you could speak to really, the engineering culture inside of Dell. Think back to before Dell made a lot of exhibitions, it's like, oh well Dell was a supply chain company, people would say. And then a number of acquisitions came through, you know, you lived with a lot of the engineers, you've got more engineers through the EMC merger. Sometimes people that don't understand, they're like oh, it's just all going to commodity stuff, software defined anything means that infrastructure doesn't matter. You know, where does the Dell engineering culture differentiate and position you in the market? >> You know, it might not surprise you, given my background, that certainly we are a supply chain company. We were doing hardcore engineering for a long time. I look at some of the advancements we made back in the day in leading the industry. I think we have a long distinguished track record of doing that. And now with the combination of the two companies, I look at this organization and the engineering capability we have, I like my hand, we like our hand. The trick is, is to getting our teams to innovate where we can differentiate, where we can help customers solve problems. And part of what I've been doing across this community of engineers, is doing that. Pivoting resources to the most important things. Pivoting resources to where we can differentiate. Pivoting resources where our innovation can actually distinguish, or shine against the competitive set. We've seen this in every category, PC, server, storage. And many of these cases, we start from the privileged position of being the leader. So think about when we get everything aligned to be able to innovate and differentiate, I like my hand. >> All right. Jeff, I want to give you the final word, coming away from Dell Technologies World this year. There's a lot of product announcements, people are going to learn a lot in the sessions, but what do you want people to come away with? Understanding the Dell portfolio and Dell as a company, as a partner? >> Well, if I could leave any parting statement, and make it very specific to the ISG portfolio, I talked about power, our power brand now being the brand of our future state ISG products, walk away with a commitment to build a power branded portfolio that is going to be innovative, differentiated in the marketplace, and something that helps our customers with. That's our commitment and that's what we'll deliver going forward. >> All right. Jeff Clark, thank you for sharing with us all the information, your update. Your first time on theCUBE, but I'm sure we'll have you on many times in the future. >> My pleasure, thanks for having me. >> All right. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching theCUBE.