>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston Massachusetts, it's the CUBE. Now here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante. Welcome to this special CUBE conversation. We're gonna be talking today about hyper conversion infrastructure. HCI really brought together compute, storage, and networking to simplify management and operations. But the networking piece has always been, you know, a little bit to the side, right? Because you bring your own network to HCI. And the integration has not always been there. So we're gonna talk today about simplifying cloud on VMWare and transforming the network. This week is VMWorld Europe. Chad Dunn is here. He's the vice president of product management for HCI at Dell EMC. Chad, thanks for coming on to talk about this. >> Hey Dave, always glad to be with you. >> So, HCI is hot, it's smoking. VxRail is a leader there. We're gonna talk about that. >> Yep. >> Based on some of the market numbers from IDC and others. So give us the update, what's new with VxRail? >> Well obviously for VxRail, the big new is, unless you've been under a rock, you know the market is growing like crazy. Now VxRail is now achieving a growth rate that's roughly twice the overall market. And so we've moved into this market leadership position. And now it's about how we start to differentiate the product even further, and pull further away from the pack. And that deeper integration with networking and some of the other VMWare components are keys for us to be able to achieve that. >> And that growth, those are IDC numbers, Gartner numbers. >> Those are IDC numbers if you look at the overall market growth rate. >> What do you attribute that growth from? You guys came out of nowhere to take the market leadership. Why? Where's that coming from? >> You know, it's a pretty easy question. When we look at who the market leader is in terms of the hypervisor, in terms of virtualization, it's clearly VMWare. And the value proposition to a customer is a very simple question. Are you a VMWare customer? Do you intend to continue to be a VMWare customer? Do you like the tools? Do you like the hypervisor? Do you like the ecosystem around it? And you know, nine and a half times out of ten, the answer is yes. And if it's time to go hyperconverged, we believe and I think most customers believe we have the best hyperconverged solution to be able to do that within the VMWare experience. >> So, Dell, obviously a huge portfolio. Since the merger, you guys have done a lot of work together. And now you're really focusing on network automation. What are you guys doing, specifically, and why is it important? >> Yeah. Well, the integration with Dell, I've become one of the biggest Dell fanboys there is at this point. Because, first of all, I started with a hyperconverged product that was not based on Dell. We became part of Dell. Now I have a world-class X86 portfolio to build on top of. But I also now have access to an amazing portfolio of open networking products. And so the next logical step, after integrating with Dell computers, is to integrate with Dell networking. And when we look at the challenges that people have in adopting and deploying hyperconverged infrastructure, a lot of times, it has to do with the network. So we said "what can we do between these two organizations, "to make it a lot easier for our customers" "to adopt hyperconverged." And that really means network automation. So that means that, in Dell OS10 enterprise-based switches, we've created an auto-detect and auto-configuration feature between VxRail and those switches. >> So let's break that down a little bit. So as I was saying at the top, hyperconverge really has been about bringing storage. And well actually in some cases, networking and compute together. And then sort of storage bringing in. Or storage and compute, and then the networking is "bring your own," right? Everything is "bring your own network." And then what, you put a top-of-rack switch in? >> Yep >> But so why is this simpler? What specifically are you guys automating? >> Well there's two things. One is organizational. So very often, in customers, we encounter the virtualization team, the server team, storage team, networking team, different organizations. Now, largely hyperconverge, and even before that, converge was sort of an excuse for many of those functions to come together. But networking is sort of the last one where those organizations are coming together with our customers. And that's really prompted by hyperconverge. But then at the technical level, how do you make that real for a customer? So at the risk of getting into the weeds, the way this works is if you take a Dell OS10 enterprise-based switch, and you have a single command to put it in VxRail mode, from then on the switches and VxRails will discover one another through an in-line protocol. VxRail manager will access the switch via API's. We'll configure all the ports. We'll configure all the VLANS. We'll configure the connection up to the customer's network. And then from there on out, we're able to detect new VxRails as they enter the network, automatically plumb those together with the existing cluster. So when we look at the steps that you would normally take to deploy hyperconverged just on the network side, it's about a 98% savings in terms of the number of steps that you have to go through to be able to stand that environment up. And then from there on out, we also wanna look at operational savings. So you will now be able to manage that switch also within vCenter. So we have a philosophy in VxRail that says every time a user has to leave the VMWare user experience, that's a bad thing and we want to minimize that. So as we implement the Dell networking portion of the solution, you'll be able to now manage that from vCenter just as you'll be able to manage VxRail from vCenter. >> Is this degree of networking automation unique in the marketplace? Are you guys ahead of the pack? Are you playing catch-up? >> We feel like we're ahead of the pack in this. I think that a lot of folks are certainly focusing on integration with software-defined networking. And in fact, we did that first. You know our integration with NSX. Both v, NSXv for infrastructures of service. And now increasingly NSX-T, especially when we're in a container, or cloud-native environments. So there's been a lot of focus there. But I think our focus on the configuration and management of the physical network, I think is unique. >> Talk more about the Dell, EMC, and VMWare relationship. Obviously, you guys are part of the same sort of company. Even though VMWare of course is a separate public company. But you guys work closer together. VMWare works with everybody. What's unique about what you guys are doing? Give us some double-click on that. >> Sure. If I think back previous to Dell, you know, we had our cousins at VMWare that we worked pretty closely with. And I think that our success is sort of born out the concept that we were able to collaborate more effectively than most other EMC and VMWare projects that we've done in the past. So, it's been very successful for both companies. Then along comes Dell, and Michael has a saying that says, "I'm happy but I'm not satisfied." So he looked at this. Jeff Clark looked at this. Pat Gelsinger looked at this, the collaboration that we have and said "We're happy. We're not satisfied. Do more of it." "Do it harder. Do it faster." And that's what we've done. And that top-down directive has really driven us to collaborate much more broadly and deeply with VMWare, and in fact Pivotal, than we have in the past. And I think that's shown a lot of benefits. Not just in the networking integration. But we're moving all of the graphical user interface out of VxRail manager into vCenter plug-ins. So our focus is really around robust API's that can be leveraged across different VMWare management properties as well as third party properties to give you the best possible VMWare user experience when you use VxRail. >> What does that mean for customers? Let's talk about the business impact. I mean you mentioned 98% time savings before. I mean, that's enormous. But let's talk a little bit about the customer impact. >> I think if you look at the customer impact that we're observing, the five-year TCO empirically is running about 600% in terms of ROI. So I think we're very successful in that. And the key to that success is not creating new panes of glass, or new management paradigms for a customer who is a VMWare customer. We want to be in lock-step with the way the VMWare develops. Not only the hypervisor, but certainly VSAN, and certainly the rest of the Vrealize assets as well as software-defined networking. To that end, one of the biggest changes that we made was something internally we call SimShip with VMWare. Now if you think about where we've come from, the lag time between when we would ship a new version of VMWare on VxRail versus when VMWare releases it was pretty variable, right? Could be three months, six months, nine months, it really depends on how the development schedules would align. And that was something that, quite frankly, to Michael and Pat and Jeff was not acceptable. If we want this to be the premier hyperconverged experience for a VMWare user, we need to be simultaneous with VMWare. And so now you're gonna see very regular tight integration between the release schedules of software on VxRail and the release of the underlying software from VMWare. So that's enabled us to shift a lot of that up-front development and engineering work left into VMWare so we can be much more quick to adopt new VMWare technology. >> So if I could, I'd like to stay on this business impact for a moment. You're talking about 600% ROI over a five-year period. I'm presuming that ROI comes predominately from the simplified infrastructure management and simplified labor costs. I'm not focused on heavy-lifting. I'm shifting to more strategic things, presumably. And there may also be some capex savings as well. But where is it coming from? >> I think it's primarily operational. I think, depending on what the competing solution might be, or the legacy solution might be, there may be some capex savings there. But it's really around operations. Now we have seen customers fundamentally shift from simple virtualization and consolidation of virtual machines onto hyperconverged like VxRail to implementing full infrastructures of service stacks right up through the Vrealize suite. But also platform and containers of service as well as we collaborate with Pivotal and VMWare. So it's that infrastructure as a service deployment methodology that I think leads to most of that capex saving, right? Three years ago, hyperconverged was all about VDI and sort of point applications, and islands of applications. Now it's predominately about infrastructures of service, containers of service, platforms of service. And that's where you really start to see those operational efficiencies shine through. >> Well, you know, in our experience the VDI, while nice, was largely a benefit for IT. Didn't really have a huge impact on the business. But when you start to talk about things like Pivotal, and the impact of moving from say Waterfall to an Agile environment. Now you're talking about business impact in terms of time to deployment and accelerating the time to value, which may or may not be in that 600%, I'm not sure. But those are oftentimes considered soft dollars. But to the business, it's not. It's competitive. >> Those are real dollars. Those are real resources working on those things. And just as we saw a shift in terms of constructing versus consuming IT resources, we see that up the stack. As VxRail automates things like software and firmware updates, our customers don't have to do that anymore. Now we look to see how can we can we drive those same kinds of benefits further up into the stack in terms of deployment, management of virtual machines, management of cloud-native workloads. >> So coming off of VMWorld U.S. a couple months ago, a lot of talk about VMWare Cloud Foundation, a lot of buzz about multi-cloud. That's kind of the hot topic right now. What's going on with VCF? We're hearing a lot of buzz leading up to VMWorld Europe. What's going on in that space? >> There's a lot going on between us and VMWare on the multi-cloud strategy. One thing that we heard in the last VMWorld was the integration between us and Cloud Assembly. This is a really important and strategic solution for us. Because what we found, especially with smaller customers who wanted to get those efficiencies of infrastructures of service, there is a fairly high upfront capital cost. Because you simply needed all the hardware to run the cloud management platform. And then you needed the tenant nodes to actually run the virtual machines. And very often, that was a high entry point, a high entry cost for those customers. What VMWare has done with Cloud Assembly is basically turn that cloud management platform into software as a service, so it lives in the cloud. And now with an agent that VxRail automatically installs, you can now point that CMP at your tenant nodes and start getting that infrastructure of service benefit. So that was one that we talked about at the last VMWorld. We also talked about our partnership with VMWare around Project Dimension, which basically takes the VMWare-managed cloud providers, The VMC providers, and extends that management paradigm, and that update paradigm to on-premises. So you have effectively got a cloud service that could run at a cloud provider but could simultaneously run on your premises. So are the two really good examples of how we're collaborating more broadly and deeply with VMWare to lower the overall operational cost, and in some cases, even the capital cost of implimenting infrastructure as a service. With respect to cloud foundation, in VxRack SDDC, which is the other product that I look after, we've had that partnership underway for over two years now and that's been very successful for us. And it tends to be the larger customers who want to buy everything as a fully-integrated system, a fully turn-key racked, stacked, cabled, and ready to deploy. But with regard to what you're teasing, I think where you're going is "well what's gonna be next?" and "what's unique about what we're doing" "with Cloud Foundation?" And there are a lot of dimensions to that. And I think the first one is what we've done around the VMWare validated design and the certified partner architecture. So if a customer wants to achieve a VMWare software-defined data center, the VMWare-validated design for VxRail gives them the exact prescription of how to get there. It can be delivered by us, can be delivered by VMWare, could be delivered by our channel partners who are certified to do so. And that gives you this nice consistent deployment architecture that we can continue to life-cycle manage as a customer moves forward. But it preserves all the VxRail value add in terms of our cluster management, our life-cycle management capability, all of that automation. Now as we move forward, we'll add more and more automation into the VVD deployment toolkit to make that even easier for customers. And so then the next logical question is VxRack and Cloud Foundation versus VxRail. We effectively have two hyperconverged solutions. That doesn't make a lot of sense. So what you'll start to see us do, and I think what some people have already started to see us do is to start to bring those solutions together, bring those products together. So in fact, even now, if you have a VxRack SDDC, if you open up that cabinet, well guess what. Those are VxRails inside there. And those software stacks will ultimately converge as well. So you can go from a build-to-consume continuum even within hyperconverged where you've got VxRails with VVD's. But the VVD basically defines deployment architecture that is compatible with Cloud Foundation. And just as we've preserved a lot of those value-add features for VxRail in the VVD, we'll be doing the same thing with Cloud Foundation. So, you know, stay tuned for that. But, as I mentioned a little bit earlier on, when we look at the management paradigm for VxRail, my directive to the product management team and the engineering team is "your first three priorities" "are API, API, and then user interface," right? So that's where we're placing a lot of that effort. And because, in may cases when we approach our collaboration with VMWare, we want to look for opportunities to be first best and only. I think as you see us bring VxRail and VCF together, that's gonna be one of those "best and only" sorts of solutions. But you have to stay tuned for further details on that. >> But that makes a lot of sense, simplifying that portfolio. But the big takeaway to me, Chad, and we've talked about this in the past, is what we call the "true private cloud" or even "true hybrid cloud" is bringing the cloud experience to your data no matter where it lives. Whether it's on PRIM in your private cloud. The VMWare AWS deal, obviously simplifies the sort of public cloud piece. Or you're in a service provider, and you've now got a homogenous experience that really is much more cloud-like than we've seen over the years. >> Well, you look at the old saying about cloud-native applications, "write it once," "and I don't care where it runs." Well as the multi-cloud strategy evolves, whether that's running in a VMC cloud provider, whether that's running on premise, our users shouldn't have to care. There may be things that they want to keep on premise for perfectly good reasons. There's may be things that they want to have in the cloud. Great example, we just got our certification for SAP HANA on VxRail. Now that's a workload that, just because of the latency requirements, and the kind of data they're processing, very likely that's gonna stay on premise for quite a while. So there are good reasons to have that construct where we don't necessarily care where the workload is. But we wanna provide a consistent user experience that really lowers that opex for customers. >> Great. How do people learn more about this? >> Come see us at VMWorld in Barcelona. We've got presence all over the show. And then hit us up on the cloud marketplace on dellemc.com, find out more about VxRail and VxRack SDDC as our primary cloud platforms. >> Alright Chad, you've been busy. Congratulations on the announcement. And thanks for watching everybody, Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, SilconANGLE's premier live streaming show where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise we are live day two of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, welcoming back a CUBE alumni, Gil Shneorson Senior Vice President of VxRail and GM at Dell EMC. Hey Gil. >> Thank you for having me back. >> Well we're excited to talk to you. So looking at some of the announcements that came out today where Dell EMC says they're the number one market leader in global hyper-converged infrastructure, and you've said that's happened really quickly. Tell us a little bit about that leadership. >> I think we found a way to take a systems approach to what is otherwise a software-defined world. So we found a way to get all of the economical benefits of hyper-converged driven by software, at the same time own the responsibility for those systems to be up and running and life cycle managed, taking away more of the responsibility then customers would have to do it on their own and I think that recipe has led us to a leadership position very, very quickly. >> So, you know we talked earlier today, can you expand upon some of that responsibility alleviating from customers, specifically around SLAs, around IO when you software-define or software-deliver storage, kind of the operating model changes. Can you expand upon that? >> Yeah, that's a very good point. So look at software-defined storage technology, for example. We happen to work with VSAN, which is the leading software-defined technology, but when customers choose to deploy software-defined solutions on their own, they're doing something that they haven't been doing in many, many years, which is take on the responsibility for up timing. It used to be that storage vendors, you know held responsibility for storage up time, for IOPs, for performance. So I think what we're doing is we found the balance. We've been getting a lot of benefits of hyper-converged and software defined, but at the same time own the responsibility from an operations standpoint to make it more like a traditional architecture and what they know. And that combination is very, very important. So for example, the ability to look at the entire system from software to driver to firmware, and always deliver a known good package because something that customers would have to do on their own, and they're all capable of doing it, but if they could choose not to do it why not offload it to somebody like us that does it for them. And so while there are two deployment models, we have a very massive growth in the systems approach, model (music drowns out voice) and I think people hand off things that they could do but they choose not to because they can focus on other things in the IT shop. For example, digital transformation and really the path to the multicloud by adding more and more layers on top of infrastructure that they can trust. >> Speaking of multicloud, I was in Jeff Clarke's opening session this morning. He was talking about, he gave a stat, I think it was 50 plus to 56% of users surveyed are using more than one cloud. So one of the things I also saw in the press release about the advancements of VxRail and VxRack, giving customers a clear path to adopt VMWare-based multiclouds. What is that clear path? How was that differentiated? So let's remember that both of those products, VxRail and VxRack SDDC are products that are built on the VMWare stack. They're optimized for VMWare users. They're not agnostic to anything. They're really VMWare on VMWare with automation and hardware and packaging that we do as a system. By delivering that robust infrastructure in one of the announcements that we made was that we created the VMWare validated design to add the rest of the VMWare stack and create an infrastructure as a service environment. That inherently comes with the ability to offload workloads to VMWare's service provider, cloud service provider, including Amazon and Google and the likes, but really a very vast network. So you take an infrastructure that's based on VMWare and harden is designing the system, you add on top of it to a prescriptive VVD exactly how to add the layered toppings like VRealize Automation, and through that inherently you get the entire VMWare value proposition going from a local solution to multicloud. And so the announcement was that validated design, which is very important, and then the announcement also included all sorts of hardware innovations or small evolutions like NVMe drives and 25 gigabyte ethernet, and higher memory CPUs. All of those are just to make sure that the infrastructure itself is ready to support that software stack that ultimately leads them to a full IO solution and offloading to the multicloud that are available to them. >> So big announcement or big set of education last year at VM World was the VCF. VMWare Cloud Foundation. It is the foundation of VMWare's infrastructure cloud play. Can you help talk through the importance in how VCF differentiates VMWare, VxRail, VxRack from competitors. >> So VCF is a software bundle. It's also an orchestrator that allows customers to manage multiple VMWare clusters within context. It's called a workload domain, and they can manage those clusters, and they can deploy them, they can life cycle management, they can microsegment them with NSX, and they can move workloads between them and to the cloud. VxRack SDDC is a system that basically lays down the VCF bits on a system premanufactured, and that's how we benefit from VCF as a differentiator. What we've done in addition we've announced 14G servers to be supported in that architecture. And we've also extended it to a, for example, a dial home on a system level. A lot of serviceability features, a physical view of the service as part of the graphic user interface. So not only does VCF differentiate VMWare by having the ability to finally leverage the entire stack, our value add is in taking that in the physical to virtual integration, if you will, life cycle management, and serviceability around servicing all of the system, which makes it a very robust infrastructure. So today customers have two choices. They can buy VxRack with VCF on top of it, or they can get to the same outcome with VxRail following a VVD prescriptive. And so what we do is we let them choose. If they're not ready for an NSX deployment they'd start with one, if they are they'll start with the other. Either way the outcome is going to be a full (music drowns out voice) from VMWare that can offload to multicloud. We just give them choices of how to get there. >> So want to kind of play off the value add for a second. We're at this event, the event theme Make It Real, making digital transformation real is a mandatory for businesses, right? They have the opportunity to take and apply data to multiple cases, use cases, within their organization to deliver differentiation. So you talked about a lot of the value out of the choices that you're giving customers from an IT perspective, what are some of the business, when you're sitting there with customers, what are some of the business outcomes they're looking for this technology to help them deliver? >> So that's a good question. So two levels of an answer. One is that by getting an automated infrastructure, IT itself can free up cycle to actually implement the (mumbles). It also frees up time for those organizations who are embarking on native cloud application development. For example, to deploy pivotal Cloud Foundry on top of (mumbles) Which is another prescriptive reference cycle actually that we have out there. And allow them to innovate. What I'm most interested in when I visit customers is what workloads are running on HCI. And I ask them and they say, is it testive, is it mission critical? And I'm happy to see that by now HCI, and specifically our products, have become mission critical, data centered, so all the way from the core to the edge running, banking applications a scale, running trading applications scale, running manufacturing application scale, running ports all over the world. I mean there's one customer that runs ports with automated trucks where the AI that runs those trucks is running on a VxRail. I mean, it's very, very exciting to see how our technology has been adopted into mainstream, into mainstream application compute. I think that's very exciting. And IT can enable more of those applications run and develop more because they have to do less in managing the physical infrastructure across multi companies. >> So Lee Caswell, Senior Vice President of Products over at VMWare brought in his customer from Celtic yesterday, and he validated that. They went all in from a legacy three tier architecture on Dell SE, they were Dell customer before, went with the Xrack, sorry VxRail, mission critical applications out the gate. So I'm seeing a shift. Last year around this time we were doing education and saying, you know, what is HCI versus a traditional architecture? Are you seeing that same thing at the show, as a shift that customers are no longer asking oh what is VxRail or VxRack, but that very thing is how can we accelerate digital transformation using VxRail or VxRack? >> Yeah, we have a very large percentage of the meetings, in fact almost 200 meetings that were requested to review the technology with us initial. That's a lot, that shows a lot of interest. There are a few customers that still don't know, and we've met some of those at the show. There are a few customers who are still contemplating whether HCI is right for them. And by the way, to those customers we say, don't rush into it, you have choices. If that's what you used to, what the economics were for you, there is no reason to rush into HCI. It's just depending on if you're going to get a better outcome than what you have today. But a very common question from customers is okay, then why do I need traditional storage? And for somebody from my vantage point, let's say there's a lot of bare-metal computing out there that requires traditional. But we think that traditional storage becomes more specialized, you know specific DR use cases, very large ratios between compute and storage and requires shared storage, but the HCI type of technology is definitely, and we see it with market growth, right? The market is growing at 60 to 70%. We're growing over 150% and taking share in this growing market, but we're still very, very small if you compare it to the whole IT tam. So there's a lot of way to go. Partly is that we still need to work on the last mile, being sure that our products are more mature, that we figure out how to operate them in a real life environment. So there's work to do, but the economical benefits are so strong that customers are making the choice more and more and more, and they trust us to know how to close the gaps that we still have. And it's a very collaborative effort between our and our customers. We listen, we respond very quickly, and so we can keep the machine going. >> It sounds like a momentum that we talked about with you I think at VM World back in eight or so months ago continues. And we want to thank you for stopping by theCUBE, sharing what's new with VxRack, VxRail, and how customers can be successful there. >> Absolutely. >> Thanks, Gil. >> Thank you for having me again. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live in a concert at Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We'll be right back with our next guest after a short break.