>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. And it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here at the Sands Expo in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman, we are joined by Lewie Newcomb he is the Vice President, Server Storage and HCI Engineering Dell EMC. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE >> Thank you. >> For the first time ever. >> For the first time, I'm excited. Very excited about it. >> Yes well we're happy to have you. So we're talking VxFlex and we have not talked a lot about VxFlex on the show, I now you had a segment earlier. Tell us about your news today. >> Okay, well the big news for the show this week is we've launched an appliance. So traditionally we do a rack level product with VxFlex. So we've launched an appliance, so basically, think half-rack without networking. And then we did some updates to our software that we can talk about. And we also still, and we've added some more platforms. So we added the 840 PowerEdge server. So all of our products are on PowerEdge servers. And the 840 with 4-socket, we now have a great platform for SAP HANA. >> So Lewie let's take it back a sec, because VxFlex, there are some new products, but a main piece of this, this was a rebranding of some of the other pieces in the CI and HCI family. So maybe those people that have a little history, if you can help put this into context as to which brands are gone and under this umbrella. >> Yeah, so I'll just start with the new brands. VxFlex is the brand, VxFlex Ready Nodes, VxFlex Appliance is the new product, VxFlex Integrated Rack. VxFlex OS and VxFlex Manager. So a lot of parts there. >> Simplicity. >> Okay. (laughs) >> The naming is very simple and it's easier to talk about. I think a big improvement over our previous brands. And then, I'll go into some of the details. So, I talked about the Appliance, think about new consumption model, little bit smaller chunk there. But we also updated the software, the OS, so the VxFlex OS we added compression in this release, it's VxFlex 3.0 is the revision, it's shipping today. We added compression and we changed the data layout so we actually have higher performance and small granularity and snapshots. So some storage features were added. We also have many new certifications. So I mentioned the SAP HANA, we also have Epic, both VDI and the database. We also have SAS Analytics has a great white paper talking about our product and the benefits of our product. And we're really a performant product. If you think about, it's a pure software SAN And we can also do HCI, we can also combine the software SAN with the HCI we call that two-layers, the way we refer to the software SAN. >> Alright, so this week there's a lot of discussion about VxRail, so maybe use that a touch point for people to understand. VxRail, joint integration between VMware and Dell. VMware Hypervisor, give us a little compare and contrast as to some of those pieces. >> Great question, the VxRail as you said, it's our, integrated in an entire VMware stack. And some great announcements, I love ACE, if you seen the ACE announcement. So the Flex though is a product that's out there because not all customers are in a VMware environment. We also support bare metal. >> Or even if they use VMware they're not 100% VMware. >> Not 100%, and many of our customers actually have both. For high performance databases they might pick Flex. For more general purpose VDI and things they might pick the Rail and so customers as we talk to 'em, they different needs and we have different products for those, so we give them that choice. >> Well, let's actually walk us through a little bit about the VxFlex customer and sort of, so this customer what are their needs and why is VxFlex the choice? >> And you've been doing software defined for a long time so I always see it this way, you start out with a customer that's transforming their business, they want to get into software defined, they want to prepare themselves for the future. Well that's where we start, we're software defined. And the next thing we look at is, do they need performance? Do need they need some one millisecond latency across you know, 50 nodes, 1000 nodes, we can do that. We're very high performance, so that's why I mentioned the databases. And the other things is, we just talked about is that choice they may not want to use just vSphere, they might want to use other hypervisors, so we support those hypervisors. And then the real interesting thing is that two-layer, because as you know with HCI we combine the application and the stored services all on one node. So in our product we can actually separate those, so you can scale storage and compute separately. And it's still all in one storage pool. So it's a very flexible product that fits that kind of customer's needs. >> Okay, simplicity is really one of the key words that we've heard in this whole trend there. It's interesting having had discussion from CI all the way through HCI, some of the software that allows me to manage it, really makes invisible some of those choices. You just said, well HCI was, I can have some choices between the computing storage, but usually they did go in blocks together versus scaling them separately. Can you talk a little bit about the management suite and what that means from a customer administrator and the infrastructure team as to how they look at this spectrum of offerings. >> Sure, so we have the VxFlex Manager, I mentioned that in the beginning, so that manager is starting to automate that management orchestration. So from deployment to serviceability to provisioning, we launched several new features in that, in this current release 3.2 release. So it, more granularity round the service of the drives and things like that. We'll continue to evolve that. You mentioned that you're hearing that, every customer I talked to this week, number one thing we talk about is more automation, more ease of use, so as they're going into software defined, they're all asking for the same thing and we're going to support that with the VxFlex Manager. >> Alright, great so talk a little bit about the application, you talk about high performance environment, one of the things we've been looking in this space especially is, what are some of the new areas, things like containerization, Kubernetes, is this platform that the customer builds ready for that environment and how do we span from kind of what I have and where I'm going. >> Yeah, so we just launched our Kubernetes plugin, the CSI plugin, so we have some customers already testing that beta and because we have bare metal, we can also support that in that native environment, So most customers they are still using that in a virtualization environment. But they're preparing for the future, they're looking at different options, so it gives them that flexibility if they want to go bare metal. >> So you're 15 years at Dell and you've really spent your career in storage and we're talking about the big customer... Customer list of what they want, they want ease of use, they want simplicity, they want speed. >> They want performance. >> They want performance, so what are the kinds of things that you're thinking about for the next year's? >> Yeah well next year, we're still building out some of the storage services. So later in the year we'll add some new storage services, like we just added compression, so our launch this week was compression and we'll add more and more storage services more data protection, more replication. We'll continue in that path, and more and more management. The management is going to be a key area focus for us. >> Right, can you take us inside some of those customer conversations, good excitement, 15,000 people here. I'm sure you've talked to a lot of customers, what are some of the key concerns that are raising to them and what's the feedback you're getting? >> A lot of the customers the reason they want automation is they want to manage their full environment, 'cause remember at the rack level we've integrated the switching. So they want a predictable outcome and when they have drift, when they want to do security updates, that's most of our conversations, they want us to do more and more automation around that. Compliance against the product itself and then when a security patch comes in. And by the way I'll mention the two-layer, another great advantage of two-layer, a lot of times, these security patches come in only on the compute side. So we can do a security patch on the compute side without disrupting the storage pool, so it's a big advantage so that's 90% of the conversations we're having. >> Yeah, maybe touch on one of the big concerns, you talk about, I want that cloud operating model. When I'm running in any of the public clouds, I don't have to think about what version I'm running. The old days of, oh I had to manage it to in the VCE days, it was the compatibility matrix and then the RCM documentation, how are we doing towards getting to that simple push button, you know I take care of it, securities patches come I don't have to worry about scrambling I've got that taken care of. >> That's nirvana, that's our north star. We're working on that and we're using the Flex Manager as that platform and more and more we're taking those requirements in the Flex Manager and we'll be rolling it out. Our goal is to have that one click upgrade right? That one button, our goal is to be able to do compliance and quick updates, and it's a journey. And it's the most complex part as you know, you mentioned, some older products, it's the most complex part of the solution, is keeping that compliance and that performance where you need it. >> So how do you manage that? I mean as you said it's a huge challenge that your company's facing and yet also all your clients are facing too. >> Well luckily we have a lot smart people. (laughs) and we have great customers. The nice thing you know, Dell's direct, the interaction we've had with customers this week, I mean they're designing with us, they're telling us what they need. And we're not a large large scale business in relative to a server business and using computing. So we have relationships with almost all of our customers. And we go and show them our roadmaps, we go get feedback from them, they help us define what they need and we follow our customers. >> Well it's really interesting, because we know that Dell's turning 35 very soon and middle age is the time where you start to get a little more set in your ways, a little older, a little creakier, but what you're describing is this real collaborative relationship with your customers and not sort of this my way or the highway kind of thing. >> I feel I work in a startup, we're agile, we're listening to our customers, we're doing the right things. We're not focused all just on our business, we're focused on our customer outcomes. We made a big ship this year on my product line of talking about the databases and the certifications and we're really trying to help our customers through those decisions without them having to make all those decisions themselves. >> Yeah, what about the consumption model, some of the other product lines we're talking to are going to manage their services as well as moving towards that OPEX model. How's that fit into the VxFlex? >> Yeah, we're not there yet, of course we're going to lead with our Dell Technologies portfolio, We have some great products in that portfolio. But we'll get there over time. Today, you saw the announcements on day one with VMware, Dell EMC and the cloud platforms. We'll continue to build infrastructure, we'll continue to stay in our lane, where we do really really well and the customers love us. But We'll eventually get to different consumption models. >> So tell us a little bit about this show for you. This is not your first rodeo here at Dell Technologies World. >> And I hope and you're seeing this, this feel like we're one big company now right? We've been three years in the making. And coming to Dell Tech this year, I feel like we're one. And Michael's key note was, the first customer I talked to, you know, everything Michael said, resonated so well with me and so it really feels that way. And just the vibe back there and in the solution expo, it's just, you know at level 10. >> Well right, so we're passed the Dell EMC integration point, but the big thing we've been talking about this week is, you know those seven logos up on the banner behind you there are acting like one. So VxRail designed together, sold together. Can you talk a little bit about where do some of the other pieces of the portfolio fit into place. >> Pivotal Cloud Foundry right? Almost all of us are parting with Pivotal Cloud Foundry and building that stack and offering that service to our customer, you know Secureworks RSA, we all need security right? We're all working there too. And even now, so I work in the PowerEdge team, you know, storage product, so we're working, we're taking PowerEdge and putting it everywhere. So all of our data protection products, RSA, our storage products, we're working PowerEdge everywhere and leveraging that. And the beauty about that is you saw the VxRail ACE announcement right? That's a platform, that's a analytics platform that now we can build on and designing PowerEdge. We can put requirements into PowerEdge to make that a much richer telemetry box and really start getting some analytics in that solve some problems, predictive analysis and things like that. So yeah, it's been fun, I've been on the tip of the spear of this, you know, coming from the storage side, and I'm starting to see it really really come together this year, here at this show. >> Alright, so want to give you the final word, VxFlex I know people, if they went through the expo hall they could see it, touch it and the like. For those that didn't make it to the show, what do you want the key takeaway for VxFlex? >> So we're pure software defined, we're very high performance, we're ideal for your databases, we're ideal for scale, we can scale up to 1000 nodes or higher. And we have many many customers doing that. We have running in the show this week, a database running at six nodes over a million IOPS, sub one millisecond latency. So... >> A good note to end on, (laughs) powerful. >> Bang yeah. (laughs) >> Lewie thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, appreciate it, it's been fun. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, we will have so much more of day three of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell EMC World 2017 brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. We are here with theCUBE live coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Keith Townsend. We're joined by Jon Siegel. He is the Vice President of product marketing for Dell EMC. Thanks so much for joining us. >> You're welcome, pleasure to be here, as always. >> You're a CUBE veteran. We're always happy to have repeat customers, yes. >> It's one of the highlights of the week every time. >> Yes, excellent. So, I want to start out by talking about who your customer is and what his or her problems are. IT professionals are juggling a lot of different responsibilities and pressures. How do you approach your customer? >> I think what it starts down to is, I'm with the converged platforms and solutions division. It's a lot of a war helping customers with throughout the end of the day, is how they spend a lot less time integrating and maintaining their infrastructure, and more time supporting their end-user's right. And what we hear more often than anything else, the one word I keep hearing all week has been agility. How do I have more agility? How can I be more responsive to the business? In terms of, for example, developing applications more quickly, and faster to market. Whether it's bringing new initiatives to market, new products to market, et cetera. So, it's all about speed and agility from an IT perspective. And what they can't do is, they can't keep up the agility when they're spending so much time integrating. Right? So, our user really tends to be the ones that are more forward looking, bold, and are really looking to make a mark on their company, and on the business. >> So it's agility, it's speed, as well as cost pressures, too. So, what are you coming out with? Tell us about some of the big announcements you've made. >> We're with the converged platforms and solutions division. Really, the fastest growing part of the IT industry today, really, is around hyper-converged and converged. It's all about helping companies spending much more time innovating and much less time integrating. And with that in mind, we have solutions and products that are turnkey in that way. So customers no longer have to spend their time trying to figure out, how do I build this logical infrastructure to actually support my applications and users? And then how do I maintain it? Whereas, we actually provide a turnkey solution, which allows our customers to spend a lot less time fiddling, if you will, with their integration and infrastructure. >> So, let's talk about the history of HCI. It's called converged infrastructure, or hyper-converged infrastructure. From the beginning to where we're at today and the announcements around it, you guys have made around VX Rack. We started out with that basic three-note model. We were solving basic problems in a data center around BDI, the speed of specific applications, enterprises. We got a taste of that, we want a little bit more of it. And now, it sounds like VX Rack is that little bit more. >> That's a great point, yeah. So, as you said, HCI, or hyper-converged really is taking off in the industry. And I think that is the answer to agility. I think it's really that response to agility. And how it's softer to find, if you will, in that approach. So, what we found now is that hyper-converged has now been adopted by 50 or 60% of enterprises in some form or fashion. Because they like the idea of software defined. They like the idea of it's cloud. It's really a good foundation for the cloud, by the end of the day, that's what it is. But what we're finding is now some customers are saying, you know what, I need a little more software defined, I actually want to go all in on software defined. This is where we find the bolder, if you will, CIOs of the world, that actually want to go all in on software defined. And that's where they want to start to adopt, in order to adopt hyper-converged and software defined at scale, you need to consider the network. The network needs to be a part of that equation. You need to consider not just the compute and the storage part elements of it, but the network as well, is part of that. So, what VX Rack addresses, it's actually to treat the network as part of the system design. This is really funny how this is happening. This headset is nothing. Just don't tell Keith about this. >> So, let's talk about the network. And hopefully I can help frame the network while your headset is getting fixed. Traditionally, that three-model HCI solution has challenged the network teams and the server teams and the storage teams. We enjoy the simplicity of HCI because we can consume it easily. But when we went to scale, we found that we ran into storage performance issues. Which then affected the virtual machines. Then, of course, that impacted the application. So HCI up to a certain point was all about storage and compute, and nothing about networking. So VX Rack addresses that network bottleneck. >> That's exactly right. And I think what we've found is that a lot of customers have underestimated, if you will, the importance of the network when it comes to an HCI solution, you're right. So, what the appliance has done, we have HCI appliances today, and customers bring their own network, if you will. And that works fine for smaller deployments. But you're right. Once you get up to eight, ten appliances or more, eight nodes, that's when the network becomes really critical. Because you have much more east-west traffic, and north-south traffic going across the nodes, and between systems and between cabinets. Suddenly, that network, as you know, that's what affects the availability, the performance of the applications at the end of the day, which is what it's all about. >> So, what are you seeing from your most successful customers? In terms of solutions, in terms of the ones who aren't underestimating the importance of the network. What are you seeing from them and what would you like to see replicated across industries? >> I think our customers today that are adopting HCI at scale, or software defined at rack scale, oftentimes, we have everything from service providers, as you might imagine. Those that actually want to provide a HCI foundation for their cloud, IAS, it's a really good foundation for that. Because if they want to support a wide range of applications what VX Rack does is, it allows customers to support a wide range. Whether it's enterprise workloads, traditional workloads or cloud-native workloads. Or customers that want to not just support, for example, VMware Hypervisor, but also, maybe hypervisors such as Hyper-V from Microsoft. They may even want to go BareMetal, and support containerized applications and containers. What we find, it's the customers that actually have a broad set of applications in particular, that want to go all in on hyper-converged. They want to modernize their infrastructure. They want to save money. They want to simplify operations. Those are the customers that we're seeing really succeed here. >> So, we hear this term as customers, cloud customers, whether it's enterprises, proper community clouds, puppet clouds. What's the market for VX Rack, VX Reel compared to the traditional three box solution. Are we limited to just enterprises deploying private clouds? Or are you guys actually in the public cloud market with your vCloud network. Are they adopting VX Rack? >> So, VX Rack, and hyper-converge in general is actually being adopted everywhere. It's being adopted by, not just medium sized companies, but large enterprises as well, like you said. And it is really a starting point for customers that want to start to build that foundation for the cloud. They may want a hybrid cloud. What hyper-converge really does is, it provides a really agile onprem solution with a nice opportunity to leverage the public cloud as well. So it is being leveraged heavily in what we call hybrid cloud solutions and areas by both medium and larger companies. We also have a number of service providers now, that are leveraging, if you will, VX Rack as a solution. Because, what they're able to do is basically spin up new applications, new users very easily, that they wouldn't be able to do with traditional infrastructure. >> Rebecca: Jon Siegel, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure having you. >> You're welcome, it was a pleasure to be here. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, from my co-host Keith Townsend, we will have more from Dell EMC World coming up after this.