>> Welcome back to the program. My name is Dave Vellante and in this session we're going to explore one of the more interesting topics of the day. IoT for smart factories and with me are Todd Edmunds, the global CTO of Smart Manufacturing, Edge and Digital Twins, at Dell Technologies. That is such a cool title. (Todd laughs) I want to be you. And Dr. Aditi Banerjee, who's the Vice President General Manager for Aerospace Defense and Manufacturing at DXC Technology. Another really cool title. Folks, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks Dave. >> Thank you. Great to be here. >> Well- >> Nice to be here. >> Todd, let's start with you. We hear a lot about Industry 4.0, smart factories, IIoT. Can you briefly explain, like, what is Industry 4.0 all about and why is it important for the manufacturing industry? >> Yeah, sure Dave. You know, it's been around for quite a while and it's got, it's gone by multiple different names. As you said, Industry 4.0, smart manufacturing, industrial IoT, smart factory. But it all really means the same thing. It's really applying technology to get more out of the factories and the facilities that you have to do your manufacturing. So being much more efficient. Implementing really good sustainability initiatives. And so we really look at that by saying, "Okay, what are we going to do with technology to really accelerate what we've been doing for a long, long time"? So it's really not, it's not new. It's been around for a long time. What's new is that manufacturers are looking at this, not as a one-off, two off individual use case point of view, but instead they're saying, "We really need to look at this holistically, thinking about a strategic investment in how we do this." Not to just enable one or two use cases, but enable many, many use cases across the spectrum. I mean, there's tons of 'em out there. There's predictive maintenance and there's OEE, overall equipment effectiveness, and there's computer vision. And all of these things are starting to percolate down to the factory floor, but it needs to be done in a little bit different way. And really to to really get those outcomes that they're looking for in smart factory, or Industry 4.0, or however you want to call it. And truly transform. Not just throw an Industry 4.0 use case out there, but to do the digital transformation that's really necessary and to be able to stay relevant for the future. You know, I heard it once said that you have three options. Either you digitally transform and stay relevant for the future or you don't and fade into history like 52% of the companies that used to be on the Fortune 500 since 2000, right. And so really that's a key thing and we're seeing that really, really being adopted by manufacturers all across the globe. >> Yeah, so Aditi, that's like digital transformation is almost synonymous with business transformation. So is there anything you'd add to what Todd just said? >> Absolutely, though, I would really add that what really drives Industry 4.0 is the business transformation. What we are able to deliver in terms of improving the manufacturing KPIs and the KPIs for customer satisfaction, right. For example, improving the downtime, you know, or decreasing the maintenance cycle of the equipments or improving the quality of products, right. So I think these are lot of business outcomes that our customers are looking at while using Industry 4.0 and the technologies of Industry 4.0 to deliver these outcomes. >> So Aditi, one, if I could stay with you and maybe this is a bit esoteric, but when I first started researching IoT and Industrial IoT 4.0, et cetera, I felt, you know, while there could be some disruptions in the ecosystem, I kind of came to the conclusion that large manufacturing firms, aerospace defense companies, the firms building out critical infrastructure, actually had kind of an incumbent advantage and a great opportunity. Of course, then I saw on TV, somebody now, they're building homes with 3D printers. It like blows your mind. So that's pretty disruptive. But. So, but they got to continue, the incumbents have to continue to invest in the future. They're well capitalized. They're pretty good businesses. Very good businesses. But there's a lot of complexities involved in kind of connecting the old house to the new addition that's being built, if you will. Or there's transformation that we're talking about. So my question is how are your customers preparing for this new era? What are the key challenges that they're facing in the blockers, if you will? >> Yeah, I mean the customers are looking at Industry 4.0 for greenfield factories, right. That is where the investments are going directly into building the factories with the new technologies with the new connectivities, right, for the machines, for example. Industry IoT, Having the right type of data platforms to drive computational analytics and outcomes, as well as looking at edge versus cloud type of technologies, right. Those are all getting built in the greenfield factories. However, for the install-based factories, right, that is where our customers are looking at how do I modernize, right. These factories. How do I connect the existing machine? And that is where some of the challenges come in on, you know, the legacy system connectivity that they need to think about. Also, they need to start thinking about cybersecurity and operation technology security, right, because now you are connecting the factories to each other, right. So cybersecurity becomes top of mind, right. So there is definitely investment that is involved. Clients are creating roadmaps for digitizing and modernizing these factories and investments in a very strategic way, right. So perhaps they start with the innovation program. And then they look at the business case and they scale it up, right. >> Todd, I'm glad Aditi brought up security because if you think about the operations technology, you know folks, historically they air gapped, you know, the systems. That's how they created security. That's changed. The business came in and said, "Hey, we got to connect. We got to make it intelligent." So that's got to be a big challenge as well. >> It absolutely is Dave. And, you know, you can no longer just segment that because really to get all of those efficiencies that we talk about, that IOT and industrial IoT and Industry 4.0 promise, you have to get data out of the factory but then you got to put data back in the factory. So no longer is it just firewalling everything is really the answer. So you really have to have a comprehensive approach to security, but you also have to have a comprehensive approach to the cloud and what that means. And does it mean a continuum of cloud all the way down to the edge, right down to the factory? It absolutely does because no one approach has the answer to everything. The more you go to the cloud, the broader the attack surface is. So what we're seeing is a lot of our customers approaching this from, kind of, that hybrid, you know, write once, run anywhere on the factory floor down to the edge. And one of things we're seeing too is to help distinguish between what is the edge and that. And bridge that gap between, like Dave, you talked about IT and OT, and also help that what Aditi talked about is the greenfield plants versus the brownfield plants, that they call it, that are the legacy ones and modernizing those, is it's great to kind of start to delineate. What does that mean? Where's the edge? Where's the IT and the OT? We see that from a couple of different ways. We start to think about, really, two edges in a manufacturing floor. We talk about an industrial edge that sits, or some people call it a far edge or a thin edge, sits way down on that plant. Consists of industrial hardened devices that do that connectivity, the hard stuff, about how do I connect to this obsolete legacy protocol and what do I do with it? And create that next generation of data that has context. And then we see another edge evolving above that which is much more of a data and analytics and enterprise grade application layer that sits down in the factory itself that helps figure out where we're going to run this. Is... Does it connect to the cloud? Do we run applications on-prem? Because a lot of times that on-prem application is needs to be done because that's the only way it's going to work. Because of security requirements. Because of latency requirements, performance, and a lot of times, cost. It's really helpful to build that multiple edge strategy because then you consolidate all of those resources, applications, infrastructure, hardware, into a centralized location. Makes it much, much easier to really deploy and manage that security. But it also makes it easier to deploy new applications, new use cases, and become the foundation for DXC's expertise in applications that they deliver to our customers as well. >> Todd, how complex are these projects? I mean, I feel like it's kind of the digital equivalent of building the Hoover Dam. I mean, it... So, yeah, how long does a typical project take? I know it varies, but what, you know, what are the critical success factors in terms of delivering business value quickly? >> Yeah, that's a great question in that we're, you know, like I said at the beginning, this is not new smart factory and Industry 4.0 is not new. It's been... It's people have been trying to implement the holy grail of smart factory for a long time. And what we're seeing is a switch, a little bit of a switch or quite a bit of a switch, to where the enterprise and the IT folks are having a much bigger say and have a lot to offer to be able to help that complexity. So instead of deploying a computer here and a gateway there and a server there. I mean, you go walk into any manufacturing plant and you can see servers sitting underneath someone's desk or a PC in a closet somewhere running a a critical production application. So we're seeing the enterprise have a much bigger say at the table. Much louder voice at the table to say, "We've been doing this enterprise all the time. We know how to really consolidate, bring hyper-converged applications, hyper-converged infrastructure, to really accelerate these kind of applications. Really accelerate the outcomes that are needed to really drive that smart factory." And start to bring that same capabilities down into the Mac on the factory floor. That way, if you do it once to make it easier to implement you can repeat that. You can scale that. You can manage it much easily. And you can then bring that all together because you have the security in one centralized location. So we're seeing manufacturers... Yeah, that first use case may be fairly difficult to implement and we got to go down in and see exactly what their problems are. But when the infrastructure is done the correct way, when that... Think about how you're going to run that and how are you going to optimize the engineering. Well, let's take that what you've done in that one factory and then set. Let's that, make that across all the factories including the factory that we're in, but across the globe. That makes it much, much easier. You really do the hard work once and then repeat almost like a cookie cutter. >> Got it, thank you. Aditi, what about the skillsets available to apply these to these projects? You got to have knowledge of digital, AI, data, integration. Is there a talent shortage to get all this stuff done? >> Yeah, I mean, definitely. Different types of skillsets are needed from a traditional manufacturing skillset, right. Of course, the basic knowledge of manufacturing is important. But the digital skillsets, like, you know, IoT. Having a skillset in different protocols for connecting the machines, right. That experience that comes with it. Data and analytics, security, augmented virtual reality, programming. You know, again, looking at robotics and the digital twin. So, you know, it's a lot more connectivity software data-driven skillsets that are needed to smart factory to life at scale. And, you know, lots of firms are, you know, recruiting these types of resources with these skillsets to, you know, accelerate their smart factory implementation as well as consulting firms like DXC technology and others. We recruit. We train our talent to provide these services. >> Got it. Aditi, I wonder if we could stay on you. Let's talk about the partnership between DXC and Dell. What are you doing specifically to simplify the move to industry 4.0 for customers? What solutions are you offering? How are you working together, Dell and DXC, to bring these to market? >> Yeah, I... Dell and DXC have a very strong partnership, you know, and we work very closely together to create solutions, to create strategies, and how we are going to jointly help our clients, right. So. Areas that we have worked closely together is edge compute, right. How that impacts the smart factory. So we have worked pretty closely in that area. We're also looked at vision technologies, you know. How do we use that at the edge to improve the quality of products, right. So we have several areas that we collaborate in and our approach is that we want to bring solutions to our client and as well as help them scale those solutions with the right infrastructure, the right talent, and the right level of security. So we bring a comprehensive solution to our clients. >> So, Todd, last question. Kind of similar but different. You know, why Dell DXC? Pitch me. What's different about this partnership? You know, where are you confident that, you know, you're going to deliver the best value to customers? >> Absolutely, great question. You know, there's no shortage of bespoke solutions that are out there. There's hundreds of people that can come in and do individual use cases and do these things and just... And that's where it ends. What Dell and DXC Technology together bring to the table is we do the optimization of the engineering of those previously bespoke solutions upfront, together. Right. The power of our scalables, enterprise grade, structured, you know, industry standard infrastructure as well as our expertise in delivering package solutions that really accelerate with DXC's expertise and reputation as a global trusted advisor. Be able to really scale and repeat those solutions that DXC is so really, really good at. And Dell's infrastructure and our, what, 30,000 people across the globe that are really, really good at that scalable infrastructure to be able to repeat. And then it really lessens the risk that our customers have and really accelerates those solutions. So it's, again, not just one individual solutions. It's all of the solutions that not just drive use cases but drive outcomes with those solutions. >> Yeah, you're right. The partnership has gone... I mean, I first encountered it back in, I think, it was 2010, May of 2010. We had you guys both on the queue... I think we were talking about converged infrastructure and I had a customer on, and it was actually manufacturing customer. Was quite interesting. And back then it was how do we kind of replicate what's coming in the cloud? And you guys have obviously taken it into the digital world. Really want to thank you for your time today. Great conversation. And love to have you back. >> Thank you so much. >> Absolutely. >> It was a pleasure speaking with you. >> I agree. >> All right, keep it right there for more discussions that educate and inspire on theCUBE.

(electronica music) >> Hello everybody. This is Dave Volante and we are covering HPE's big GreenLake announcements. We've got wall-to-wall coverage, a ton of content. We've been watching GreenLake since the beginning. And of one of the things we said early on was let's watch and see how frequently, what the cadence of innovations that HPE brings to the market. Because that's what a cloud company does. So, we're here to welcome you. Keith White is here as the Senior Vice President General Manager of GreenLake cloud services. He runs the commercial business. Keith, thanks for coming on. Help me kick off. >> Thanks for having me. It's awesome to be here. >> So you guys got some momentum orders, 40% growth a year to year on year. You got a lot of momentum, customer growth. >> Yeah, it's fantastic. It's 46%. >> Kyle, thank you for that clarification. And in 46. Big different from 40 to 46. >> No, I think what we're seeing is we're seeing the momentum happen in the marketplace, right? We have a scenario where we're bringing the cloud experience to the customer on their premises. They get to have it automated. Self-serve, easy to consume. They pay for what they use. They can have it in their data center. They can have it at the edge. They can have it at the colo, and, we can manage it all for them. And so they're really getting that true cloud experience and we're seeing it manifest itself in a variety of different customer scenarios. You know, we talked about at Discover, a lot of work that we're doing on the hybrid cloud side of the house, and a lot of work that we're doing on the edge side of things with our partners. But you know, it's exciting to see the explosion of data and how now we're providing this data capability for our customers. >> What are the big trends you're hearing from customers? And how is that informing what you're doing with Green? I mean, I feel like in a lot of ways, Keith, what happened last year, you guys were, were in a better position maybe than most. But what are you hearing and how is that informing your go forward? >> Yeah, I think it's really three things with customers, right? First off, Hey, we're trying to accelerate our digital transformation and it's all becoming about the data. So help us monetize the data, help us protect that data. Help us analyze it to make decisions. And so, you know, number one, it's all about data. Number two is wow, this pandemic, you know, we need to look for cost savings. So, we still need to move our business forward. We've got to accelerate our business, but help me find some cost savings with respect to what I can do. And third, what we're hearing is, hey, we're in a situation, where there's a lot of different capabilities happening with our workforce. They're working from home. They're working hybrid. Help us make sure that we can stay connected to those folks, but also in a secure way, making sure that they have all the tools and resources they need. So those are sort of three of the big themes that we're seeing that GreenLake really helps manifest itself, with the data we're doing now. With all the hybrid cloud capabilities. With the cost savings that we get with respect to our platform, as well as with solutions such as VDI or workforce enablements that we've, we create from a solution standpoint. . >> So, what's the customer reaction, I mean, I mean, everybody now, who's has a big on-premise state, has an as a service capability. A customer saying, oh yeah, oh yeah, how do you make it not me too? In the customer conversations? >> Yeah. I think it turns into, you know, you have to bring the holistic solution to the customer. So yes, there's technology there and we're hearing from, you know, some of the competitors out there. Yeah, we're doing as a service as well, but maybe it's a little bit of storage here. Maybe it's a little bit of networking there. Customers need that end to end solution. And so as you've seen us announce over time, we've got the building blocks, of course, compute storage and networking, but everything runs in a virtual machine. Everything runs in a container or everything runs on the bare metal itself. And that package that we've created for customers means that they can do whatever solution, or whatever workload they want So, if you're a hospital and you're running Epic for your electronic medical records, you can go that route. If you're upgrading SAP and you're using virtual machines at a very large scale, you can use this, use a GreenLake for that as well. So, as you go down the list, there's just so many opportunities with respect to bring those solutions to our customers. And then you bring in our point-next capabilities to support that. You bring in our advisory and professional services, along with our ecosystem to help enable that. You bring in our HPE financial services to help fund that digital transformation. And you've got the complete package. And that's why customers are saying, hey, you guys are now partners of us. You're not just a hardware provider, you're a partner you're helping us solve our business problems and helping us accelerate our business. >> So what should people expect today? You guys got some announcements. What should people look for? >> Well, I think this is, as we've talked about, you know, now we're sort of providing much more capabilities around the data side of the house. Because data is so such, it's the gold, if you will, of a customer's environment. So first off we want to do analytics. So we want an open platform that provides really a unified set of analytics capabilities. And this is where we have a real strong, sweet spot with respect to some of the, the software that we've built around Esperal. But also with the hardware capabilities. As you know, we have all the way up to the Cray supercomputers that, that are doing all of the analytics for whether this or, or financial data that. So, I think that's one of the key things. The second is you got to protect that data. And, and so if it's going to be on prem, I want to know that it's protected and secured. So how do I back it up? How do I have a disaster recovery plan? How do I watch out for ransomware attacks, as well? So we're providing some capabilities there. And then I'd say, lastly, because of all the experience we have with our customers now implementing these hybrid solutions, they're saying, hey, help me with this edge to cloud framework and how do I go and implement that on my own? And so we've taken all the experience and we've bucketed that into our edge to cloud adoption framework to provide that capability for our customers. So we, you know, we're really excited about, again, talking about solutions, talking about accelerating your business, not just talking about technology. >> I said up the top, Keith, that one of the ways I was evaluating you as the pace and the cadence of the innovations. And, and is that, is that fair? How do you guys think about that internally? Are you, you know, you're pushing yourself to go faster, I'm sure you are, but what's that conversation like? >> I think it's a great question because in essence, we're now pivoting the company holistically to being a cloud services and a software company. And that's really exciting and we're seeing that happen internally. But this pace of innovation is really built on what customers are asking us for us. So now that we've grown over 1200 customers worldwide. You know, over $5 billion of total contract value. You know, signing some, some large deals in a variety of solutions and workloads and verticals, et cetera. What we're now seeing is, hey, this is what we need. Help me with my internal IT out to my business groups. Help me with my edge strategy as I build the factory of the future, or, you know, help me with my data and analytics that I'm trying to accomplish for my, you know, diagnosis of, of x-rays and, and capabilities such as Carestream, if you will. So it's, it's exciting to see them come to us and say, this is the capabilities that we're requiring, and we've got our foot on the gas to provide that innovation. And we're miles ahead of the competition. >> All right, we've got an exciting day ahead. We got all kinds of technology discussions, solution discussions. We got, we got, we're going to hear from the analyst community. Really bringing you the, the full package of announcements here. Keith, thanks for helping me set this up. >> Always. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. >> I look forward today. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Tons of content coming your way. You're watching The Cubes coverage of HP's big GreenLake announcement. Right back. (electronica music)

>>Mhm Hello, I'm jennifer with the cube. We're here at Rogers vice president of EC two Product Manager, NWS raj. Thanks for coming off its quick cube conversation. Um Congratulations on your 15th birthday of E C two. You get the keys to the kingdom of one of the hottest products. The most important product you look at. I look at our billets. Ec two is the highest, it's always the best everyone focuses on. It's the compute a lot of other goodness with amazon cloud. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me. >>So, can you break down the graviton two processor overview? Why is custom Silicon important and why should architects and developers understand the opportunity with graviton to these are the other opportunities within 80 bucks. What's the, what's the magic do it we should that they think about as the architect their cloud. >>Yeah. So, I mean, I think why it's important is what you said like so much uh the workloads that they're running at the end of the day is running on EC two, whether it's running on Ec two directly or running on one of the other AWS services that's built on a C two and when you have, when you're able to, when we're able to innovate and deliver a very significant price performance advantage, not just lowers their costs. So like there, It's hardly a day of industry where you're able to go and do a pretty simple migration and get a 40% price performance improvement and that's huge and I think that's why this is, you know, raising a lot of interest. Is that um, customers, I found it relatively easy to go and do this migration and get that benefit. >>That's awesome mirage. I gotta ask you ec two offers more than 400 instant types with different combinations of compute memory, networking and storage, which is obviously the backbone of the cloud. A lot of people that are coming in learning about clouds, what does it mean that there's all these instances that because it's just more combinations, different workloads, why 400 instance types? What does that mean for someone learning about clouds? Does it mean anything to you actually? Would you explain the difference of instance types of 400 of them? >>Yeah. So, I mean when you think about an instance type, it's essentially configuration of a virtual machine, there's a certain amount of memory, there's a certain amount of processing power. Uh there could be a certain amount of disk and workloads, uh, the different ratios of these uh, dimensions, these characteristics. So by offering selection across a wide variety of instances were really able to optimize the compute that particular workload needs. The customers could essentially uh, increase their performance and have a more optimized price for what they want to get done. So ultimately, that's what that's what it's about having the right form factor for a given workload and the more configurations that we have, the more we're able to tune for those workloads. >>It's like having a driver riding a car you want the driver type to match the road, match the engine. So the instance has to match the profile of the app, the workload and kind of, and is that kind of where you're getting at getting met? You can do that. >>Yeah. And you know, and one of the things that we're also investing in at the same time as tools to enable customers to realize and learn what the right instance is. So, you know, we launched about a year ago uh capability called compute optimizer that lets customers look at their workloads, you know, in flight essentially and make recommendations saying, hey, instead of this instance, you know, you could Move to um this other instance type and save 50% or you know, as an example. So, um, you know, part of it, creating the selection and the other part of it is creating the tools. So customers, do you know what the right fit is for them so that they can really optimize their thin >>Well Roger, I really preach this is going to ask me anything guru question, but here's the simple one. What is gravitas to, at the end of the day when someone asks you what is graviton too? >>Yeah. So I mean grandma can do is a processor, it's a chip, it's a CPU um and so what that means essentially is and it's an arm. Basic. So um, you know, with, with are just like you have intel and AMG processors, these are the, the circuitry and the computer that does the work. Right. And um with, with Gravitas on we support arm which is a different architecture set but one that has been around long enough and it's pretty ubiquitous across mobile devices and servers now. So the operating systems that you know, you know all the Linux operating system, the tools that you know, they all work and are able to run on Graviton too. So this means that when you have applications, you can very easily take it from the same AMG or intel X 86 platform and move it over and just get the efficiencies that gravity to offers with lower power envelope and higher performance >>there it is many master class here at raj. Pie Vice President Ec two product management laying down the graviton to knowledge and for folks learning about cloud and architects really want to know the difference. It's a 40% performance improvement, lower power envelope, 20% less than cost. I believe something those range about right about in the same territory there. So basically high performance, lower costs, better power. So for workloads that demanded you got the option raj. Thank you for sharing. Thank you. All right. I'm john for, with the cube Thanks for watching. Mhm mm

from around the globe it's thecube presenting the convergence of file and object brought to you by pure storage we're back with the convergence of file and object a special program made possible by pure storage and co-created with the cube so in this series we're exploring that convergence between file and object storage we're digging into the trends the architectures and some of the use cases for unified fast file and object storage uffo with me is matt burr who's the vice president general manager of flashblade at pure storage hello matt how you doing i'm doing great morning dave how are you good thank you hey let's start with a little 101 you know kind of the basics what is unified fast file and object yeah so look i mean i think you got to start with first principles talking about the rise of unstructured data so when we think about unstructured data you sort of think about the projections 80 of data by 2025 is going to be unstructured data whether that's machine generated data or you know ai and ml type workloads you start to sort of see this i don't want to say it's a boom uh but it's sort of a renaissance for unstructured data if you will where we move away from you know what we've traditionally thought of as general purpose nas and and file shares to you know really things that focus on uh fast object taking advantage of s3 cloud native applications that need to integrate with applications on site um you know ai workloads ml workloads tend to look to share data across uh you know multiple data sets and you really need to have a platform that can deliver both highly performant and scalable fast file and object from one system so talk a little bit more about some of the drivers that you know bring forth that need to unify file an object yeah i mean look you know there's a there's there's a real challenge um in managing you know bespoke uh bespoke infrastructure or architectures around general purpose nas and daz etc so um if you think about how a an architect sort of looks at an application they might say well okay i need to have um you know fast daz storage proximal to the application um but that's gonna require a tremendous amount of dabs which is a tremendous amount of drives right hard drives are you know historically pretty pretty pretty unwieldy to manage because you're replacing them relatively consistently at multi-petabyte scale so you start to look at things like the complexity of das you start to look at the complexity of general purpose nas and you start to just look at quite frankly something that a lot of people don't really want to talk about anymore but actual data center space right like consolidation matters the ability to take you know something that's the size of a microwave like a modern flash blade or a modern um you know uffo device replaces something that might be you know the size of three or four or five refrigerators so matt why is is now the right time for this i mean for years nobody really paid much attention to object s3 already obviously changed you know that course most of the world's data is still stored in file formats and you get there with nfs or smb why is now the time to think about unifying object and and file well because we're moving to things like a contactless society um you know the the things that we're going to do are going to just require a tremendous amount more compute power network and quite frankly storage throughput and you know i can give you two sort of real primary examples here right um you know warehouses are being you know taken over by robots if you will um it's not a war it's a it's a it's sort of a friendly advancement in you know how do i how do i store a box in a warehouse and you know we have we have a customer who focuses on large sort of big box distribution warehousing and you know a box that carried a an object uh two weeks ago might have a different box size two weeks later well that robot needs to know where the space is in the data center in order to put it but also needs to be able to process hey i don't want to put the thing that i'm going to access the most in the back of the warehouse i'm going to put that thing in the front of the warehouse all of those types of data you know sort of real time you can think of the robot as almost an edge device uh is processing in real time unstructured data and its object right so it's sort of the emergence of these new types of workloads and i give you the opposite example the other end of the spectrum is ransomware right you know today you know we'll talk to customers and they'll say quite commonly hey if you know anybody can sell me a backup device i need something that can restore quickly if you had the ability to restore something in 270 terabytes an hour or 250 terabytes an hour that's much faster when you're dealing with a ransomware attack you want to get your data back quickly you know so i want to actually i was going to ask you about that later but since you brought it up what is the right i guess call it architecture for for for ransomware i mean how and explain like how unified object and file would support me i get the fast recovery but how would you recommend a customer uh go about architecting a ransomware proof you know system yeah well you know with with flashblade and and with flasharray there's an actual feature called called safe mode and that safe mode actually protects uh the snapshots and and the data from uh sort of being is a part of the of the ransomware event and so if you're in a type of ransomware situation like this you're able to leverage safe mode and you say okay what happens in a ransomware attack is you can't get access to your data and so you know the bad guy the perpetrator is basically saying hey i'm not going to give you access to your data until you pay me you know x in bitcoin or whatever it might be right um with with safe mode those snapshots are actually protected outside of the ransomware blast zone and you can bring back those snapshots because what's your alternative if you're not doing something like that your alternative is either to pay and unlock your data or you have to start retouring restoring excuse me from tape or slow disk that could take you days or weeks to get your data back so leveraging safe mode um you know in either the flash for the flash blade product is a great way to go about uh architecting against ransomware i got to put my i'm thinking like a customer now so safe mode so that's an immutable mode right can't change the data um is it can can an administrator go in and change that mode can he turn it off do i still need an air gap for example what would you recommend there yeah so there there are still um uh you know sort of our back or rollback role-based access control policies uh around who can access that safe mode and who can right okay so uh anyway subject for a different day i want to i want to actually bring up uh if you don't object a topic that i think used to be really front and center and it now be is becoming front and center again i mean wikibon just produced a research note forecasting the future of flash and hard drives and those of you who follow us know we've done this for quite some time and you can if you could bring up the chart here you you could see and we see this happening again it was originally we forecast the the death of of quote unquote high spin speed disk drives which is kind of an oxymoron but you can see on here on this chart this hard disk had a magnificent journey but they peaked in volume in manufacturing volume in 2010 and the reason why that is is so important is that volumes now are steadily dropping you can see that and we use wright's law to explain why this is a problem and wright's law essentially says that as you your cumulative manufacturing volume doubles your cost to manufacture decline by a constant percentage now i won't go too much detail on that but suffice it to say that flash volumes are growing very rapidly hdd volumes aren't and so flash because of consumer volumes can take advantage of wright's law and that constant reduction and that's what's really important for the next generation which is always more expensive to build and so this kind of marks the beginning of the end matt what do you think what what's the future hold for spinning disc in your view uh well i can give you the answer on two levels on a personal level uh it's why i come to work every day uh you know the the eradication or or extinction of an inefficient thing um you know i like to say that inefficiency is the bane of my existence uh and i think hard drives are largely inefficient and i'm willing to accept the sort of long-standing argument that um you know we've seen this transition in block right and we're starting to see it repeat itself in in unstructured data um and i'm willing to accept the argument that cost is a vector here and it most certainly is right hdds have been considerably cheaper uh than than than flash storage um you know even to this day uh you know up to this point right but we're starting to approach the point where you sort of reach a 3x sort of you know differentiator between the cost of an hdd and an sdd and you know that really is that point in time when uh you begin to pick up a lot of volume and velocity and so you know that tends to map directly to you know what you're seeing here which is you know a slow decline uh which i think is going to become even more rapid kind of probably starting around next year where you start to see sds excuse me ssds uh you know really replacing hdds uh at a much more rapid clip particularly on the unstructured data side and it's largely around cost the the workloads that we talked about robots and warehouses or you know other types of advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence type applications and workflows you know they require a degree of performance that a hard drive just can't deliver we are we are seeing sort of the um creative innovative uh disruption of an entire industry right before our eyes it's a fun thing to live through yeah and and we would agree i mean it doesn't the premise there is it doesn't have to be less expensive we think it will be by you know the second half or early second half of this decade but even if it's a we think around a 3x delta the value of of ssd relative to spinning disk is going to overwhelm just like with your laptop you know it got to the point where you said why would i ever have a spinning disc in my laptop we see the same thing happening here um and and so and we're talking about you know raw capacity you know put in compression and dedupe and everything else that you really can't do with spinning discs because of the performance issues you can do with flash okay let's come back to uffo can we dig into the challenges specifically that that this solves for customers give me give us some examples yeah so you know i mean if we if we think about the examples um you know the the robotic one um i think is is is the one that i think is the marker for you know kind of of of the the modern side of of of what we see here um but what we're you know what we're what we're seeing from a trend perspective which you know not everybody's deploying robots right um you know there's there's many companies that are you know that aren't going to be in either the robotic business uh or or even thinking about you know sort of future type oriented type things but what they are doing is greenfield applications are being built on object um generally not on not on file and and not on block and so you know the rise of of object as sort of the the sort of let's call it the the next great protocol for um you know for uh for for modern workloads right this is this is that that modern application coming to the forefront and that could be anything from you know financial institutions you know right down through um you know we've even see it and seen it in oil and gas uh we're also seeing it across across healthcare uh so you know as as as companies take the opportunity as industries to take this opportunity to modernize you know they're modernizing not on things that are are leveraging you know um you know sort of archaic disk technology they're they're they're really focusing on on object but they still have file workflows that they need to that they need to be able to support and so having the ability to be able to deliver those things from one device in a capacity orientation or a performance orientation while at the same time dramatically simplifying the overall administration of your environment both physically and non-physically is a key driver so the great thing about object is it's simple it's a kind of a get put metaphor um it's it scales out you know because it's got metadata associated with the data uh and and it's cheap the drawback is you don't necessarily associate it with high performance and and as well most applications don't you know speak in that language they speak in the language of file you know or as you mentioned block so i i see real opportunities here if i have some some data that's not necessarily frequently accessed you know every day but yet i want to then whether end of quarter or whatever it is i want to i want to or machine learning i want to apply some ai to that data i want to bring it in and then apply a file format uh because for performance reasons is that right maybe you could unpack that a little bit yeah so um you know we see i mean i think you described it well right um but i don't think object necessarily has to be slow um and nor does it have to be um you know because when you think about you brought up a good point with metadata right being able to scale to a billions of objects being able to scale to billions of objects excuse me is of value right um and i think people do traditionally associate object with slow but it's not necessarily slow anymore right we we did a sort of unofficial survey of of of our of our customers and our employee base and when people described object they thought of it as like law firms and storing a word doc if you will um and that that's just you know i think that there's a lack of understanding or a misnomer around what modern what modern object has become and perform an object particularly at scale when we're talking about billions of objects you know that's the next frontier right um is it at pace performance wise with you know the other protocols no but it's making leaps and grounds so you talked a little bit more about some of the verticals that you see i mean i think when i think of financial services i think transaction processing but of course they have a lot of tons of unstructured data are there any patterns you're seeing by by vertical market um we're you know we're not that's the interesting thing um and you know um as a as a as a as a company with a with a block heritage or a block dna those patterns were pretty easy to spot right there were a certain number of databases that you really needed to support oracle sql some postgres work etc then kind of the modern databases around cassandra and things like that you knew that there were going to be vmware environments you know you could you could sort of see the trends and where things were going unstructured data is such a broader horizontal um thing right so you know inside of oil and gas for example you have you know um you have specific applications and bespoke infrastructures for those applications um you know inside of media entertainment you know the same thing the the trend that we're seeing the commonality that we're seeing is the modernization of you know object as a starting point for all the all of the net new workloads within within those industry verticals right that's the most common request we see is what's your object roadmap what's your you know what's your what's your object strategy you know where do you think where do you think object is going so um there isn't any um you know sort of uh there's no there's no path uh it's really just kind of a wide open field in front of us with common requests across all industries so the amazing thing about pure just as a kind of a little you know quasi you know armchair historian the industry is pure was really the only company in many many years to be able to achieve escape velocity break through a billion dollars i mean three part couldn't do it isilon couldn't do it compellent couldn't do it i could go on but pure was able to achieve that as an independent company uh and so you become a leader you look at the gartner magic quadrant you're a leader in there i mean if you've made it this far you've got to have some chops and so of course it's very competitive there are a number of other storage suppliers that have announced products that unify object and file so i'm interested in how pure differentiates why pure um it's a great question um and it's one that uh you know having been a long time puritan uh you know i take pride in answering um and it's actually a really simple answer um it's it's business model innovation and technology right the the technology that goes behind how we do what we do right and i don't mean the product right innovation is product but having a better support model for example um or having on the business model side you know evergreen storage right where we sort of look at your relationship to us as a subscription right um you know we're gonna sort of take the thing that that you've had and we're gonna modernize that thing in place over time such that you're not rebuying that same you know terabyte or you know petabyte of storage that you've that you that you've paid for over time so um you know sort of three legs of the stool uh that that have made you know pure clearly differentiated i think the market has has recognized that um you're right it's it's hard to break through to a billion dollars um but i look forward to the day that you know we we have two billion dollar products and i think with uh you know that rise in in unstructured data growing to 80 by 2025 and you know the massive transition that you know you guys have noted in in in your hdd slide i think it's a huge opportunity for us on you know the other unstructured data side of the house you know the other thing i'd add matt and i've talked to cause about this is is it's simplicity first i've asked them why don't you do this why don't you do it and the answer is always the same is that adds complexity and we we put simplicity for the customer ahead of everything else and i think that served you very very well what about the economics of of unified file and object i mean if you bringing additional value presumably there's a there there's a cost to that but there's got to be also a business case behind it what kind of impact have you seen with customers yeah i mean look i'll i'll go back to something i mentioned earlier which is just the reclamation of floor space and power and cooling right um you know there's a you know there's people people people want to search for kind of the the sexier element if you will when it comes to looking at how we how you derive value from something but the reality is if you're reducing your power consumption by you know by by a material percentage um power bills matter in big in big data centers you know customers typically are are facing you know a paradigm of well i i want to go to the cloud but you know the clouds are not being more expensive than i thought it was going to be or you know i've figured out what i can use in the cloud i thought it was going to be everything but it's not going to be everything so hybrid's where we're landing but i want to be out of the data center business and i don't want to have a team of 20 storage people to match you know to administer my storage um you know so there's sort of this this very tangible value around you know hey if i could manage um you know multiple petabytes with one full-time engineer uh because the system uh to your and kaza's point was radically simpler to administer didn't require someone to be running around swapping drives all the time would that be a value the answer is yes 100 of the time right and then you start to look at okay all right well on the uffo side from a product perspective hey if i have to manage a you know bespoke environment for this application if i have to manage a bespoke environment for this application and a spoke environment for this application and this focus environment for this application i'm managing four different things and can i actually share data across those four different things there's ways to share data but most customers it just gets too complex how do you even know what your what your gold.master copy is of data if you have it in four different places or you try to have it in four different places and it's four different siloed infrastructures so when you get to the sort of the side of you know how do we how do you measure value in uffo it's actually being able to have all of that data concentrated in one place so that you can share it from application to application got it i'm interested we use a couple minutes left i'm interested in the the update on flashblade you know generally but also i have a specific question i mean look getting file right is hard enough uh you just announced smb support for flashblade i'm interested in you know how that fits in i think it's kind of obvious with file and object converging but give us the update on on flashblade and maybe you could address that specific question yeah so um look i mean we're we're um you know tremendously excited about the growth of flashblade uh you know we we we found workloads we never expected to find um you know the rapid restore workload was one that was actually brought to us from from a customer actually um and has become you know one of our one of our top two three four you know workloads so um you know we're really happy with the trend we've seen in it um and you know mapping back to you know thinking about hdds and ssds you know we're well on a path to building a billion dollar business here so you know we're very excited about that but to your point you know you don't just snap your fingers and get there right um you know we've learned that doing file and object uh is is harder than block um because there's more things that you have to go do for one you're basically focused on three protocols s b nfs and s3 not necessarily in that order um but to your point about s b uh you know we we are on the path through to releasing um you know smb full full native smb support in in the system that will allow us to uh service customers we have a limitation with some customers today where they'll have an smb portion of their nfs workflow um and we do great on the nfs side um but you know we didn't we didn't have the ability to plug into the s p component of their workflow so that's going to open up a lot of opportunity for us um on on that front um and you know we continue to you know invest significantly across the board in in areas like security which is you know become more than just a hot button you know today security's always been there but it feels like it's blazing hot today and so you know going through the next couple years we'll be looking at uh you know developing some some uh you know pretty material security elements of the product as well so uh well on a path to a billion dollars is the net on that and uh you know we're we're fortunate to have have smb here and we're looking forward to introducing that to to those customers that have you know nfs workloads today with an s b component yeah nice tailwind good tam expansion strategy matt thanks so much we're out of time but really appreciate you coming on the program we appreciate you having us and uh thanks much dave good to see you all right good to see you and you're watching the convergence of file and object keep it right there we'll be back with more right after this short break [Music]

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of VMworld 2020 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stuart Miniman and this is theCUBES's coverage of VMworld 2020. Our 11th year doing the show and happy to welcome back to the program one of our CUBE's alums. Somebody that's is going to VMworld longer than we have been doing it for theCUBE. So Vaughn Stewart he is the Vice President of Technology Alliances with Pure Storage Vaughn, nice to see you. How you doing? >> Hey, Stu. CUBE thanks for having me back. I miss you guys I wish we were doing this in person. >> Yeah, we all wish we were in person but as we've been saying all this year, we get to be together even while we're apart. So we look to you on little screens and things like that rather than bumping into each other at some of the after parties or the coffee shops all around San Francisco. So Vaughn, obviously you know Pure Storage long, long, long partnership with VMware. I think back the first time that I probably met with the Pure team, in person, it probably was around Moscone, having a breakfast having a lunch, having a briefing or the likes. So just give us the high level. I know we've got a lot of things to dig into. Pure and VMware, how's the partnership going these days? >> Partnership is growing fantastic Pure invests a lot of engineering resources in programs with VMware. Particularly the VMware design partner programs for vVols, Container-Native Storage et cetera. The relationship is healthy the business is growing strong. I'm very excited about the investments that VMware is making around VMware Cloud Foundation as a replatforming of what's going on MPREM to help better enable hybrid cloud and to support Tanzu and Kubernetes platforms. So a lot going on at the infrastructure level that ultimately helps customers of all to adopt cloud native workloads and applications. >> Wonderful. Well a lot of pieces to unpack that. Of course Tanzu big piece of what they're talking about. But let's start. You mentioned VCF. You know what is it on the infrastructure side, that is kind of driving your customer adoption these days, and the some of the latest integrations that you're doing? >> Yeah you know VCF has really caught the attention of our mid to large or mid to enterprise size customers. The focus around, as I use the phrase replatform is planning out with VMworld phrase. But the focus on simplifying the lifecycle management, giving you a greater means to connect to the public cloud. I don't know if you're aware, but all VMware public cloud offerings have the VCF framework in terms of architectural framework. So now bringing that back on-prem, allowing customers on a per workload domain basis to extend to a hybrid cloud capability. It's a really big advancement from kind of the base vSphere infrastructure, which architecturally hasn't had a significant advancement in a number of years. What's really big around VCF besides the hybrid connectivity, is the couple of new tools SDDC Manager and vSphere Lifecycle Manager. These tools can actually manage the infrastructure from bare metal up to workload domains and then from workload domains you're now handing off to considered like delegated vCenter Servers right? So that the owner of a workload if you will and then that person can go ahead and provision virtual machines or containers, based on whatever is required to run their workloads. So for us the big gain of this is the advancement in the VMware management. They are bringing their strength in providing simplicity, and end-to-end hardwared application management to disaggregated architectures. Where the focus of that capability has been with HCI over say the past five or six years. And so this really helps close that last gap, if you will, and completes a 360 degree view of providing simplified management across dissimilar architecture and it's consistent and it's standardized by VMware. So HCI, disaggregated architecture, public cloud, it all operates the same. >> So Vaughn, you made a comment about not a lot of changes. If I remember our friends at VMware they made a statement vSphere 7 was the biggest architectural change in over a decade. Of course bringing in Kubernetes it's a major piece of the Tanzu discussion. Pure. Your team's been pretty busy in the Kubernetes space too. Recent acquisition of Portwox to help accelerate that. Maybe let's talk a little bit about you know cloud native. What you're hearing from your customers. (chuckles) And yeah, like we've Dave Vellante had a nice interview with, Pure and Portwox CEOs. Give the VMworld audience a little bit of an update as you know where you all fit in the Kubernetes space. >> Yeah and actually, there was a lot that you shared there kind of in connecting the VCF piece through to vSphere 7 and a lot of changes there in driving into Tanzu and containers. So maybe we're going to jump around here a bit but look we're really excited. We've been working with VMware, but in addition to all of our application partners, you are seeing nearly every traditional enterprise application being replatformed to support containers. I'd love to share with you more details, but there's a lot of NDAs I'd be breaking in that. But the way for enterprise adoption of containers is right upon us. And so the timing for VMware Tanzu is ideal. Our focus has always been around providing a rich set of data services. One that provides faster provisioning, simplified fleet management, and the ability to move that container and those data services between different clouds and different cloud platforms, Be it on-prem, or in the public cloud space. We've had a lot of success doing that with the Pure Service Orchestrator Version 6.0 enables CSI compliant persistent storage capabilities. And it does support Tanzu today. The addition or I should say the acquisition of Portworx is really interesting. Because now we're bringing on an enhanced set of data services that not only run on a Pure Storage storage products, but runs universally regardless of the storage platform, or the Cloud architecture. The capabilities within Portworx are above and beyond what we had in PSO. So this is a great expansion of our capabilities. And ultimately we want to help customers. Whether they want to do containers solely on Tanzu, or if they're going to mix Tanzu with say Amazon EKS, or they've got some department that does development on OpenShift. Whatever it might be. You know that the focus of storage vendors is obviously to help customers make that data available on these platforms through a consistent control plane. >> Yeah. Vaughn it's a great acquisition. Think a nice fit. Anybody that's been talking to Pure the last year or so you've been. How do we take the storage make it more cloud native if you will. So you've got code. Obviously, you've got a great partnership with VMware, but as you said, in Amazon and some of the other hyper clouds those clouds, those storage services, no matter where a customer is, so that that core value, of course we know, is this the software underneath it. And that's what Portworx is. So you know not only Pure's, but other hardware, other clouds and the likes. So a really interesting space You know Vaughn, you and I've been covering this, since the early days of VMware. Hey this software is kind of a big deal and you know (chuckles) cloud in many ways is an extension of what we're doing. I know we used to joke how many years was it that VMworld was storage world? You know. >> Ooh yeah. >> There was talk about like big architectural changes, you know vVols When that finally came out, it was years of hard work by many of the big companies, including your previous and current you know employer. What's the latest? My understanding is that there are some updates there when it comes to the underlying vVols. What are the storage people need to know? >> Yeah. So great question and VMware is always been infrastructure world really Right? Like it is a showcase for storage. But it's also been a showcase for the compute vendors and every Intel partner. From a storage perspective, a lot is going on this year that should really excite both VMware admins and those who are storage centric in their day-to-day jobs. Let's start with the recent news. vVols has been promoted within VCF to being principal storage. For those of you who maybe are unfamiliar with this term 'principal storage' VMware Cloud Foundation supports any form of storage that's supported by vSphere. But SDDC manager tool that I was sharing with you earlier that really excites large scale organizations around it's end-to-end simplicity and management. It had a smaller, less robust support list when it comes to provisioning external storage. And so it had two tiers. Principal and secondary. Principal meant SDDC manager could provision and deprovision sub-tenants. So the recent news brings vVols both on Fiber Channel and iSCSI up to that principal tier. Pure Storage is a VMware design partner around vVols. We are one of the most adopted vVols storage platforms, and we are really leaning in on VCF. So we are very happy to see that come to fruition for our customers. Part of why VMware partners with Pure Storage around VCF, is they want VCF enabled on any Fabric. And you know some vendors only offer ethernet only forms of connectivity. But with Pure Storage, we don't care what your Fabric is right. We just want to provide the data services be it ethernet, fiber channel or next generation NVMe over Fabric. That last point segments into another recent announcement from from VMware. Which is the support for NVMe over Fabric within vSphere 7. This is key because NVMe over Fabric allows the IO path to move away from SCSI based form of communication one to a memory based form of communication. And this unleashes a new level of performance, a way to better support those business and mission critical applications. Or a way to drive greater density into a smaller form factor and footprint within your data center. Obviously Fabric upgrades tend to not happen in conjunction with hypervisor upgrades, but the ability to provide customers a roadmap and a means to be able to continually evolve their infrastructure non disruptively, is our key there. It would be remiss of me to not point out one kind of orthogonal element, which is the new vMotion capabilities that are in vSphere 7. Customers have been tried for a number of years, probably from vSphere 4 through six to virtualize more performance centric and resource intense applications. And they've had some challenges around scale, particularly with the non-disruptive. The ability to non disruptively move a workload. VMware rewrote vMotion for vSphere 7 so it can tackle these larger more performance centric workloads. And when you combine that along with the addition of like NVMe over Fabric support, I think you're truly at a time where you can say, almost every workload can run on a VMware platform, right? From your traditional two two consolidation where you started to looking at performance centric AI, in machine learning workloads. >> Yeah. A lot of pieces you just walked through Vaughn, I'm glad especially the NVMe over Fabric piece. Just want to drill down one level there. As you said, there's a lot of pieces to make sure that this is fully worked. The standards are done, the software is there, the hardware, the various interconnects there and then okay, when's does the customer actually ready to upgrade that? How much of that is just you know okay hitting the update button. How much of that is do I need to do a refresh? And we understand that the testing and purchasing cycles there. So how many customers are you talking to that are like, "Okay I've got all the pieces, "we're ready to roll, "we're implementing in 2020." And you know, what's that roadmap look like for kind of the typical enterprise, which I know is a bit of an oxymoron? (laughs) >> So we've got a handful. I think that's a fair way to give you a size without giving you an exact number. We had a handful of customers who have NVMe over Fabric deployments today. The deployments tend to be application or workload centric versus ubiquitous across the data center. Which I think does bear an opportunity for VMware adoption to be a little bit earlier than across the entire data center. Because most VMware architectures today are based on top of rack switching. Whether that switching is fiber channel or ethernet base, I think the ability to then upgrade that switch. Either you've got modern hardware and it just needs a firmware update, or you've got to replace that hardware and implement NVMe over Fabric. I think that's very attractive. Particularly that you can do so in a non disruptive manner with a flash array or with flash deck. We expect to see the adoption really start to take take hold in 2021. But you probably won't see large market gains until 2022 or 23. >> Well that's super helpful Vaughn especially Pure Storage you've got customers that have some of the most demanding performance environments out there. So they are some of the early adopters that you would expect go into adopting this new technology. All right. I guess last piece, listening to the keynote looking at all the announcements that they have you know, VMware obviously has a big push into the cloud native space they've made a whole lot of acquisitions. We touched on a little bit before but what's your take as to what you are hearing from your customers, where they are with adoption into really modernizing and accelerating their businesses today? >> I think for the majority of our customers and again I would consider more of a commercial or mid market centric up through enterprise. They've particularity enterprise, they've adapted cloud native technologies particularity in developing their own internal or customer facing applications. So I don't think the technology is new. I think where it's newer is this re platforming of enterprise applications and I think that what's driving the timeline for VMware. We have a number of Pivotal deployments that run up here. Very large scale Pivotal deployments that run on Pure. And hopefully as you audience knows Pivotal is what VMware Tanzu has been rebranded as. So we've had success there. We've have had success in the test and development and in the web facing application space. But now this is a broader initiative from VMware supporting enterprise apps along with you know the cloud native disaggregated applications that have been built over the last say five to 10 years. But to provide it though a single management plane. So I'm bullish, I'm really bullish I think they are in a unique position compared to the rest of our technology partners you know they own the enterprise virtualization real estate and as so their ability to successfully add cloud native application to that, I think it's a powerful mix . For us the opportunity is great. I want to thank you for focusing on the fact that we've been able to deliver performance. But performances found on any flash product. And it's not to demote our performance by any means, but when you look at our customers and what they purchase us in terms of the repeat purchases, it's around simplicity, it's around the native integration with VMware and the extending of that value prop through our capabilities whether it's through the end-to-end infrastructure management, through data protection extending in the hybrid cloud. That's where Pure Storage customers fall in love with Pure Storage. And so it's a combination of performance, simplicity and ultimately, you know, economics. As we know economics drive most technical decisions not the actual technology itself. >> Well, Vaughn Stewart thank you so much for the update, congratulation on all the new things that are being brought out in the partnership >> Thank you Stu appreciate being on theCUBE, big shout out to VMware congratulations on VMworld 2020, look forward to seeing everybody soon >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage VMworld 2020 I'm Stu Miniman and that you for watching theCUBE. (bright upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE in our Palo Alto studios. We're here with our quarantine crew, doing all the remote interviews, getting all the stories that matter. The great guest, Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Caitlin, CUBE alumni, welcome back remotely. We didn't make it to the Dell Technologies World got moved to the fall. We'll see you certainly virtually, but thank you for coming on remotely, appreciate it. >> Thank you so much for having me again, it's great to be here. >> So storage is on the upswing. We're seeing a lot of activity. We're going to talk about data protection specifically. But first, we want to find out what's going on with you guys. There's been some changes in your organization within Dell, can you take a minute to explain what they are? >> Yeah, absolutely. What we found is certainly a lot of our conversations in the storage space end up talking about data protection and data protection, talking about storage. And what we've decided to do is actually really bring those parts to the business together. So specifically now I've been in the storage business for a few years, I spent a long time in data protection before that. So now we've brought the gang back together, and we've got storage and data protection really brought together as an organization all the way through engineering, and product marketing. Product Management really help us collaborate and really attack problems for customers cohesively. So we're really early days here, but it's exciting. We've been really busy on the storage side, and we've got some exciting things coming here on the data protection side as well. >> I want to get your thoughts 'cause almost every interview I do in the past four months is just doesn't stop. It's COVID impact. It's one of those things that we've talked about data protection. I've had so many great conversations, continuous operations, non-disruptive operations, it couldn't ask for more disruption than people being asked to work at home. So it's caused some IT divides, this is something that we didn't see coming. Business still needs to go on. So I want to get your thoughts, we're seeing cloud obviously become highlighted in this pandemic, that's obviously impacting the data protection. What's going on in the data protection front on your side, because obviously, cloud is showing everyone, "Hey, I can use modern technologies in the cloud, but I still got to do my business, I still got to protect my data." What's going on? >> Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think we've seen a lot accelerate with this whole situation we're all in with a global pandemic, with the challenges that all businesses and people are having. But the digital transformation has been compressed, right? It would have taken people years, but now they've been forced to do that in months. Things like containers are really exploding and the requirement to protect Kubernetes is really something that we now more and more are having conversations about. Cyber ransomware has really unfortunately, only accelerated in this increasingly digital world that we're now all exclusively living in. So cyber resiliency has become a lot more important conversation. And then being able to protect data, certainly on-prem, but also across multiple public clouds and having that consistent experience is probably more important than it's ever been before as well. So it's really just put the accelerant on a lot of conversations that we were having before, and now they've become even more important. >> Talk about the innovations around the protect product, you've got the PowerProtect, it's agile, there's been some developments, what's the new additions? What's being highlighted? What are the key features? >> Yeah, so it's actually pretty exciting month for us here. PowerProtect Data Manager has been in the market for a full year. So believe it or not full year and again, as you mentioned, agile development. So it was introduced a year ago, we've had a number of enhancements over that year in the space of adding workloads, our cloud integration, we've added cloud Dr to both Azure and AWS. You have three click failover, two click failback. Really simple cloud disaster recovery, the availability and AWS marketplace for in-cloud data protection. As well, we have integration with our cyber recovery solutions, so again that ransomware protection and recovery is an important part. As well as a number of enhancements for supporting additional workloads, SAP Hana, CR Microsoft Exchange, we have broad workload support, we've really really enhanced that a lot. And then most recently, just this month, we now have a brand new data protection of PowerProtect Data Manager offer which includes all of our cloud capabilities, all inclusive, available in a subscription. So again, as we talked about the way not only people are using their data protection solutions, but how they're consuming and purchasing that, we've really transformed also now the way that people will be purchasing that. >> That's awesome, congratulations. Subscription is the format people want. And Amazon marketplace that shows they can consume if you're amazon customer, you just go in the marketplace, you get it, that's awesome. Congratulations, that's the way the world wants to consume. So that's awesome news. The thing I want to get your thoughts on and you guys have been busy. The cyber recovery and resilience piece you mentioned, can you talk about that because, we're hearing a lot more that work at home is not going to be more permanent. More permanent in the sense of, as we come out of the pandemic, people will say, "Hey, I can be productive at home." So you get to see the at home, not just a, "Here's some extra expense for your bandwidth." Is going to be more thought through. There's going to be more cyber attacks, just the attacks just on the COVID scams alone has been a problem at a personal level. But from a business standpoint, I got to have a VPN, I got to have my connections, I got to be secure. How do you guys look at that because organizations are putting a focus on it? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, cyber resiliency is something we've focused on actually for a number of years and it started in the obvious places, right. The banks of the world, the financial institutions and the healthcare organizations. Where they always had to have data really protected, and they were kind of some of the more early targets. But now we've seen ransomware. And these digital attacks really get worse and worse. I think all businesses, including our own, are really ramping up to make sure that we are protecting in every way we can. And from our data protection portfolio, we have a fully air-gapped solution. So you have that protection. And it does two things, it first helps mitigate against the attack in the first place by actually being able to do full content scanning to detect if an attack has happened. And just as importantly, if an attack happens, being able to quickly in an automated way, recover from that attack. I think it's something that we are really finding that our entire sales team, is having conversations about. It's no longer focused on the financial institutions of the world. It's every organization, and a lot of people really appreciate that we've come with that expertise and that knowledge to be able to help them prevent, and then, unfortunately, in many cases recover from these attacks. >> That's to me, it's table stakes, I'd have to agree with you. The question I have for you on that, you've doubled speed piece because one of the speed to recovery has always been a big feature. Now with the at home situation, how does that play into, how you guys have been on that speed to recovery aspect of that? Can you share some thoughts on that? >> Yeah, and it's specifically with cyber because we have a fully air-gapped solution, and it's in a secure enclave. That recovery is automated, and it's all within that secure enclave. So you have that security, you have the confidence, and you have the speed of that recovery. So it's really important the way we've implemented that, it's not attack on to an existing, it's truly a fully secure enclave, a full air-gapped solution so that you can recover quickly, but just as importantly, you can recover securely as well. >> One of the quotes that's been kicked around in the industry is, in the past two months, we've seen more digital transformation than the past two years. And I think that's rightfully articulate 'cause of COVID. And we're seeing all the warts and scabs out there, and the infrastructure whether it was investments lacking, the ones that made the right investments were doing well. And it becomes around cloud native, some of the things you guys saw with your success with agility. What is going on with a container based architecture, because that to me is becoming one of those things where it's accelerating development teams, at the same time providing some of those business values that people have to keep the lights on for. So, what do you guys look at that? How do you look at this container architecture? What specifically in the portfolio you guys have to address that? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think containers we found accelerating in the past couple years and then in the past few months, is a huge, huge requirement. And although we didn't think so pretty recently, containers are part of production applications. They need to be stored persistent storage on the storage side, but they probably even more critically and urgently they need to be protected. We've done a number of integrations and work specifically, with VMware to be able to support Kubernetes, and being able to support those workloads and protect Kubernetes workload. A lot of advanced integration, being able to protect and recover those clusters natively, and having that deep integration with VMware, as well as other other distributions as well. 'Cause we have really found that containers are exploding, the ecosystem is obviously very much evolving, but we are really keeping up with the bleeding edge of that to ensure that as these cloud native applications are developed, that the containers are truly being protected, just as physical applications of past had been. We need to make sure that certainly VMs but even more importantly, those containers alongside, are being protected. >> I've always been a big fan of containers and certainly Kubernetes that keeps the legacy alive and until you can transition, the new end and the old, and sometimes they can work together. With that, I want to get your thoughts specifically around this idea of technical debt. A lot of customers we talked to said, "Hey, I want more end-to-end, I want some cloud native, I got to have the versatility, I got to have the agility and the speed, I got to be multi cloud. So multi cloud's on the horizon, it's certainly hybrids today. I don't want my infrastructure to be the technical debt for tomorrow." That's the question that comes up. How do you answer that, and how do you talk to that specifically? >> Yeah, it's interesting, you bring that up, especially in the storage side, too. We've been talking about that a lot. That was a pretty centralized message about how we architected power store, and it's pretty central to everything that we're designing. Is that, investment with our Dell EMC Infrastructure with Dell Technologies, is investing for what you need today, but more importantly, is going to bring you into the future. And what we have with PowerProtect Data Manager is something that is rooted in the innovation and the proven architecture to provide support for all these broad workloads and all of these broad clouds, but also also be able to protect these new modern cloud native applications, and help you bridge that gap in your own environment, so you have that. And even just as important as supporting modern applications is that support for multiple clouds, AWS and Azure. We all know that, that technical debt can also come in the form of being locked into a single public cloud, you need that flexibility to be able to leverage that public cloud of choice, whether it's for disaster recovery, backup to cloud, long term retention to cloud, having that flexibility is also just as an important part of that equation as it is for your on-prem investments as well. >> Well, congratulations on that data protection on the product front. Having the bright mix. Having that certainly is going to be key as the buying cycle start to ramp up again. I want to get back to the business 'cause I'll check on the technology. Congratulations, I love cloud native, you know that. But check on the technology business model. You mentioned subscriptions. So can you talk about the trend on your customer side, the move from CapEx and OpEx. Because if you go cloud, the consumption will be subscription, there'll be more operating expenses. How does that impact the IT budgets? How do you guys align there? What's your answer to that, can you explain? >> Yeah, absolutely. We announced, late last year, so in the fall of last year, Dell technology is on demand family, and that's really our effort to focus more on our cloud like experience and consumption and product offerings. And part of that is our subscription, pay as you go model. And what we've found, and I'd love your perspective on this as well, is that, the moving from CapEx and OpEx has been a conversation and certainly when it comes to infrastructure, there's been some set of customers over the past 12 months that have been moving in that direction. We're seeing that accelerate, certainly in the infrastructure space, but as we all know, software is where that's already pretty well established. As I think you've said, that's table stakes. So we've seen that that's really the methodology, both from our standpoint and our customers' and our partners' is, when we're selling software, that's got to be really honest subscription basis. So that's why obviously, with PowerProtect Data Manager, it makes all the sense in the world to really focus there. And that's really part of our bigger initiative overall, to move towards more of these consumption based as a service OpEx models for our customers. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up I'd love to share my opinion, because I do have opinion on this. And one of the things that's coming out of some of the COVID interviews with the practitioners and the customers and the insiders is, it's a developer lead market. So cloud native, we've been talking about for years and it certainly happened. But as the pandemic has shown, people are going to be coming out of this. They have to have a growth strategy, they got to have the foundational product sets and technologies in place. But the customers, your customers, have to have a growth strategy. They got to refactor. They got to look at what they want to double down in, and kind on what they want to cut back. Some things are pretty obvious now, what not to do. So it's clear there's lines of sight around certain things, but it's developer led. The applications are going to drive value of the business, and so I'm seeing the alignment between that trend of developer led with a flex of consumption based resource. So yeah, you get the foundational services. And then hey, if the app successful, you're just still in business. I mean, people are really worried about, even, making sure they come out of this not on a downward trajectory. They want to be on an upward trajectory. That's a really key thing for 'em, your reaction. >> Yeah, I mean, that really resonates. I think it's and when we look at just to go back to the technology a little, 'cause, I never can resist, is if you look even just PowerProtect Data Manager, one of the things that's so important is that, we've have built that to be both controllable by the application and users so they can do their own protection, but then have that centralized view. And that being able to have that consolidated and centralized management of data from a single console for IT. And I think that gets to the now the next level with developers is, we need to enable developers as seamlessly as possible in their own language to be able to protect, to be able to store data, so IT can feel good about it. But we have to be able to enable them in the way that they are needing to develop these applications as quickly as possible, and from an IT perspective, that means being able to do that on-prem, or even do that in the cloud, so that we can keep all of those policies in place and keep that centralized governance, but really support the acceleration and the digital transformation that those folks are driving. So I think it makes a lot of sense and it really resonates with our product strategy. >> I think there's going to be a slew of new applications that are going to need to have all kinds of strategies built in countermeasures, recovery, all new things are going to emerge. So you guys certainly will be certainly more busy than ever. I want to get your product kind of view on something why I got you here, because I think this is kind of key. As you look at your portfolio, you mentioned the tech and the tech, all the features that you have, what are the few that resonate the most, it means classic product marketing, I mean, everyone wants to know, we've got all these features, which is great. Which ones do you say, Caitlin, are jumping out right now that are resonating the most? 'Cause sometimes it's a feature that might not be that heavy tech, or it's something that's really differentiated, but the customers will glob onto key features, what are some of the things that you're seeing that are rising to the top in terms of the feature set? >> Yeah, and it's not the speeds and feeds of yesterday. And I think this, more broadly across storage and data protection is what we're finding. The speeds and feeds are good, and some people do want to have that conversation. But we've gotten to a point from a technology from an industry standpoint, that we're able to meet latency, the bandwidth, the throughput that people need. But what's more interesting and is more compelling and important to the business is, how can you help me change the way I'm running my data center, and inter-operate with the cloud, and therefore change the way I'm running my business. And some of the pieces that come in there, is automation. I think automation within systems to systems across the enterprise, across edge and cloud, that is so incredibly critical. The AI that we're building into platforms, the integration with whether it's VMware based with VRO, whether it's Ansible modules, intelligence, and this idea of having an autonomous data center that then has that connectivity to cloud and inter-operate then also with the edge, is so incredibly compelling. And again, not just for the large enterprises, but more and more for smaller ones. Because in this world, we need to help our customers have their data center run itself as much as possible, and whatever does require administration is as simple as possible, right? We've all gotten used to technology being as simple as our smartphones, this consumerization of IT has really changed the requirement of what people think simple means. So the things that you don't necessarily think about, and we don't necessarily market even that actively about, how important the number of clicks and the user interface and the seamless transition to products, as well as automation, is so critical. And I think the other ones we've already hit on, integration with multiple public clouds, that flexibility, support for containers, and Kubernetes and deep VMware integration are increasingly critical. And I think, for someone who's been in product marketing for 15 years, I couldn't be happier that our conversations have kind of moved off of speeds and feeds and into these much more compelling and business centric conversation, because, I think we can add a lot more value to the business that way. >> It also shows the strategic nature, you mentioned edge, these new environments. It's a multi environment that you have to have build products for. So it's not so much, how fast packets are moving back and forth, or this or that. It's really about the business value. >> Yeah, it's about the business value, the locality, the value of the data, it's really all about the data and how we can help our customers better manage that across all locations. But do that in a very, very simple way. But the requirement for what simple really means, has really, really raised the bar on that, and we're going to continue to push ourselves and challenge ourselves on that as well. >> Caitlin, I'll give you the final word, talk about choice. Choice has always been a big part of what you guys have offered customers, Dell Technologies has great storage. In this day and age, what does that mean for a customer? What have the choice mean? >> Yeah, and I think it's a delicate balance. And we've gone through quite a transformation over the past couple years here. And this summer was an exciting one for many reasons, but, we just recently completed that full simplification of our portfolio and we have our full portfolio of power solutions, all the way from PowerMax to PowerVolt, PowerStore, PowerScale, PowerFlex, and of course, the one we talked about today, PowerProtect. We now have that all in market. And I bring that up because, that is our simple portfolio to give customers best in class products across all of these different categories. And the fact that we have that choice, but, we've simplified that choice down to as few choices as possible, coming back to what we were just talking about. It's critical that we have solutions that meet the requirements of all of our different customers, but also that we don't give them more than that. That we need to give them choices that will meet their needs, but also not give them so many choices, that it's overwhelming. You don't want to be the cheesecake factory and not be able to choose what you want, you need to just be able to choose from what the options that really makes sense. And that's why I think it's really exciting now as we move into the second half of this year and look into next, we have that portfolio now, and we can focus on, which is the right combination of solutions for you. >> During the pandemic, people are reading a book, doing a hobby, you guys are updating your product portfolio. Congratulations on all the hard work, Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product. Great to see you. Thank you for spending the time, giving us an update on the data protection stuff. And again, congratulations for being so productive during a tough time and stay safe, thank you. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me, good to see you. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage with Dell Technologies. Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product Marketing giving us the breakdown. Very productive for them during this time, and again, companies want a growth strategy when they come out of the pandemic. More than ever, infrastructure has to enable the software for the new solutions. Just to keep coverage, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE in our Palo Alto studios. We're here with our quarantine crew, doing all the remote interviews, getting all the stories that matter. The great guest, Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Caitlin, CUBE alumni, welcome back remotely. We didn't make it to the Dell Technologies World got moved to the fall. We'll see you certainly virtually, but thank you for coming on remotely, appreciate it. >> Thank you so much for having me again, it's great to be here. >> So storage is on the upswing. We're seeing a lot of activity. We're going to talk about data protection specifically. But first, we want to find out what's going on with you guys. There's been some changes in your organization within Dell, can you take a minute to explain what they are? >> Yeah, absolutely. What we found is certainly a lot of our conversations in the storage space end up talking about data protection and data protection, talking about storage. And what we've decided to do is actually really bring those parts to the business together. So specifically now I've been in the storage business for a few years, I spent a long time in data protection before that. So now we've brought the gang back together, and we've got storage and data protection really brought together as an organization all the way through engineering, and product marketing. Product Management really help us collaborate and really attack problems for customers cohesively. So we're really early days here, but it's exciting. We've been really busy on the storage side, and we've got some exciting things coming here on the data protection side as well. >> I want to get your thoughts 'cause almost every interview I do in the past four months is just doesn't stop. It's COVID impact. It's one of those things that we've talked about data protection. I've had so many great conversations, continuous operations, non-disruptive operations, it couldn't ask for more disruption than people being asked to work at home. So it's caused some IT divides, this is something that we didn't see coming. Business still needs to go on. So I want to get your thoughts, we're seeing cloud obviously become highlighted in this pandemic, that's obviously impacting the data protection. What's going on in the data protection front on your side, because obviously, cloud is showing everyone, "Hey, I can use modern technologies in the cloud, but I still got to do my business, I still got to protect my data." What's going on? >> Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think we've seen a lot accelerate with this whole situation we're all in with a global pandemic, with the challenges that all businesses and people are having. But the digital transformation has been compressed, right? It would have taken people years, but now they've been forced to do that in months. Things like containers are really exploding and the requirement to protect Kubernetes is really something that we now more and more are having conversations about. Cyber ransomware has really unfortunately, only accelerated in this increasingly digital world that we're now all exclusively living in. So cyber resiliency has become a lot more important conversation. And then being able to protect data, certainly on-prem, but also across multiple public clouds and having that consistent experience is probably more important than it's ever been before as well. So it's really just put the accelerant on a lot of conversations that we were having before, and now they've become even more important. >> Talk about the innovations around the protect product, you've got the PowerProtect, it's agile, there's been some developments, what's the new additions? What's being highlighted? What are the key features? >> Yeah, so it's actually pretty exciting month for us here. PowerProtect Data Manager has been in the market for a full year. So believe it or not full year and again, as you mentioned, agile development. So it was introduced a year ago, we've had a number of enhancements over that year in the space of adding workloads, our cloud integration, we've added cloud Dr to both Azure and AWS. You have three click failover, two click failback. Really simple cloud disaster recovery, the availability and AWS marketplace for in-cloud data protection. As well, we have integration with our cyber recovery solutions, so again that ransomware protection and recovery is an important part. As well as a number of enhancements for supporting additional workloads, SAP Hana, CR Microsoft Exchange, we have broad workload support, we've really really enhanced that a lot. And then most recently, just this month, we now have a brand new data protection of PowerProtect Data Manager offer which includes all of our cloud capabilities, all inclusive, available in a subscription. So again, as we talked about the way not only people are using their data protection solutions, but how they're consuming and purchasing that, we've really transformed also now the way that people will be purchasing that. >> That's awesome, congratulations. Subscription is the format people want. And Amazon marketplace that shows they can consume if you're amazon customer, you just go in the marketplace, you get it, that's awesome. Congratulations, that's the way the world wants to consume. So that's awesome news. The thing I want to get your thoughts on and you guys have been busy. The cyber recovery and resilience piece you mentioned, can you talk about that because, we're hearing a lot more that work at home is not going to be more permanent. More permanent in the sense of, as we come out of the pandemic, people will say, "Hey, I can be productive at home." So you get to see the at home, not just a, "Here's some extra expense for your bandwidth." Is going to be more thought through. There's going to be more cyber attacks, just the attacks just on the COVID scams alone has been a problem at a personal level. But from a business standpoint, I got to have a VPN, I got to have my connections, I got to be secure. How do you guys look at that because organizations are putting a focus on it? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, cyber resiliency is something we've focused on actually for a number of years and it started in the obvious places, right. The banks of the world, the financial institutions and the healthcare organizations. Where they always had to have data really protected, and they were kind of some of the more early targets. But now we've seen ransomware. And these digital attacks really get worse and worse. I think all businesses, including our own, are really ramping up to make sure that we are protecting in every way we can. And from our data protection portfolio, we have a fully air-gapped solution. So you have that protection. And it does two things, it first helps mitigate against the attack in the first place by actually being able to do full content scanning to detect if an attack has happened. And just as importantly, if an attack happens, being able to quickly in an automated way, recover from that attack. I think it's something that we are really finding that our entire sales team, is having conversations about. It's no longer focused on the financial institutions of the world. It's every organization, and a lot of people really appreciate that we've come with that expertise and that knowledge to be able to help them prevent, and then, unfortunately, in many cases recover from these attacks. >> That's to me, it's table stakes, I'd have to agree with you. The question I have for you on that, you've doubled speed piece because one of the speed to recovery has always been a big feature. Now with the at home situation, how does that play into, how you guys have been on that speed to recovery aspect of that? Can you share some thoughts on that? >> Yeah, and it's specifically with cyber because we have a fully air-gapped solution, and it's in a secure enclave. That recovery is automated, and it's all within that secure enclave. So you have that security, you have the confidence, and you have the speed of that recovery. So it's really important the way we've implemented that, it's not attack on to an existing, it's truly a fully secure enclave, a full air-gapped solution so that you can recover quickly, but just as importantly, you can recover securely as well. >> One of the quotes that's been kicked around in the industry is, in the past two months, we've seen more digital transformation than the past two years. And I think that's rightfully articulate 'cause of COVID. And we're seeing all the warts and scabs out there, and the infrastructure whether it was investments lacking, the ones that made the right investments were doing well. And it becomes around cloud native, some of the things you guys saw with your success with agility. What is going on with a container based architecture, because that to me is becoming one of those things where it's accelerating development teams, at the same time providing some of those business values that people have to keep the lights on for. So, what do you guys look at that? How do you look at this container architecture? What specifically in the portfolio you guys have to address that? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think containers we found accelerating in the past couple years and then in the past few months, is a huge, huge requirement. And although we didn't think so pretty recently, containers are part of production applications. They need to be stored persistent storage on the storage side, but they probably even more critically and urgently they need to be protected. We've done a number of integrations and work specifically, with VMware to be able to support Kubernetes, and being able to support those workloads and protect Kubernetes workload. A lot of advanced integration, being able to protect and recover those clusters natively, and having that deep integration with VMware, as well as other other distributions as well. 'Cause we have really found that containers are exploding, the ecosystem is obviously very much evolving, but we are really keeping up with the bleeding edge of that to ensure that as these cloud native applications are developed, that the containers are truly being protected, just as physical applications of past had been. We need to make sure that certainly VMs but even more importantly, those containers alongside, are being protected. >> I've always been a big fan of containers and certainly Kubernetes that keeps the legacy alive and until you can transition, the new end and the old, and sometimes they can work together. With that, I want to get your thoughts specifically around this idea of technical debt. A lot of customers we talked to said, "Hey, I want more end-to-end, I want some cloud native, I got to have the versatility, I got to have the agility and the speed, I got to be multi cloud. So multi cloud's on the horizon, it's certainly hybrids today. I don't want my infrastructure to be the technical debt for tomorrow." That's the question that comes up. How do you answer that, and how do you talk to that specifically? >> Yeah, it's interesting, you bring that up, especially in the storage side, too. We've been talking about that a lot. That was a pretty centralized message about how we architected power store, and it's pretty central to everything that we're designing. Is that, investment with our Dell EMC Infrastructure with Dell Technologies, is investing for what you need today, but more importantly, is going to bring you into the future. And what we have with PowerProtect Data Manager is something that is rooted in the innovation and the proven architecture to provide support for all these broad workloads and all of these broad clouds, but also also be able to protect these new modern cloud native applications, and help you bridge that gap in your own environment, so you have that. And even just as important as supporting modern applications is that support for multiple clouds, AWS and Azure. We all know that, that technical debt can also come in the form of being locked into a single public cloud, you need that flexibility to be able to leverage that public cloud of choice, whether it's for disaster recovery, backup to cloud, long term retention to cloud, having that flexibility is also just as an important part of that equation as it is for your on-prem investments as well. >> Well, congratulations on that data protection on the product front. Having the bright mix. Having that certainly is going to be key as the buying cycle start to ramp up again. I want to get back to the business 'cause I'll check on the technology. Congratulations, I love cloud native, you know that. But check on the technology business model. You mentioned subscriptions. So can you talk about the trend on your customer side, the move from CapEx and OpEx. Because if you go cloud, the consumption will be subscription, there'll be more operating expenses. How does that impact the IT budgets? How do you guys align there? What's your answer to that, can you explain? >> Yeah, absolutely. We announced, late last year, so in the fall of last year, Dell technology is on demand family, and that's really our effort to focus more on our cloud like experience and consumption and product offerings. And part of that is our subscription, pay as you go model. And what we've found, and I'd love your perspective on this as well, is that, the moving from CapEx and OpEx has been a conversation and certainly when it comes to infrastructure, there's been some set of customers over the past 12 months that have been moving in that direction. We're seeing that accelerate, certainly in the infrastructure space, but as we all know, software is where that's already pretty well established. As I think you've said, that's table stakes. So we've seen that that's really the methodology, both from our standpoint and our customers' and our partners' is, when we're selling software, that's got to be really honest subscription basis. So that's why obviously, with PowerProtect Data Manager, it makes all the sense in the world to really focus there. And that's really part of our bigger initiative overall, to move towards more of these consumption based as a service OpEx models for our customers. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up I'd love to share my opinion, because I do have opinion on this. And one of the things that's coming out of some of the COVID interviews with the practitioners and the customers and the insiders is, it's a developer lead market. So cloud native, we've been talking about for years and it certainly happened. But as the pandemic has shown, people are going to be coming out of this. They have to have a growth strategy, they got to have the foundational product sets and technologies in place. But the customers, your customers, have to have a growth strategy. They got to refactor. They got to look at what they want to double down in, and kind on what they want to cut back. Some things are pretty obvious now, what not to do. So it's clear there's lines of sight around certain things, but it's developer led. The applications are going to drive value of the business, and so I'm seeing the alignment between that trend of developer led with a flex of consumption based resource. So yeah, you get the foundational services. And then hey, if the app successful, you're just still in business. I mean, people are really worried about, even, making sure they come out of this not on a downward trajectory. They want to be on an upward trajectory. That's a really key thing for 'em, your reaction. >> Yeah, I mean, that really resonates. I think it's and when we look at just to go back to the technology a little, 'cause, I never can resist, is if you look even just PowerProtect Data Manager, one of the things that's so important is that, we've have built that to be both controllable by the application and users so they can do their own protection, but then have that centralized view. And that being able to have that consolidated and centralized management of data from a single console for IT. And I think that gets to the now the next level with developers is, we need to enable developers as seamlessly as possible in their own language to be able to protect, to be able to store data, so IT can feel good about it. But we have to be able to enable them in the way that they are needing to develop these applications as quickly as possible, and from an IT perspective, that means being able to do that on-prem, or even do that in the cloud, so that we can keep all of those policies in place and keep that centralized governance, but really support the acceleration and the digital transformation that those folks are driving. So I think it makes a lot of sense and it really resonates with our product strategy. >> I think there's going to be a slew of new applications that are going to need to have all kinds of strategies built in countermeasures, recovery, all new things are going to emerge. So you guys certainly will be certainly more busy than ever. I want to get your product kind of view on something why I got you here, because I think this is kind of key. As you look at your portfolio, you mentioned the tech and the tech, all the features that you have, what are the few that resonate the most, it means classic product marketing, I mean, everyone wants to know, we've got all these features, which is great. Which ones do you say, Caitlin, are jumping out right now that are resonating the most? 'Cause sometimes it's a feature that might not be that heavy tech, or it's something that's really differentiated, but the customers will glob onto key features, what are some of the things that you're seeing that are rising to the top in terms of the feature set? >> Yeah, and it's not the speeds and feeds of yesterday. And I think this, more broadly across storage and data protection is what we're finding. The speeds and feeds are good, and some people do want to have that conversation. But we've gotten to a point from a technology from an industry standpoint, that we're able to meet latency, the bandwidth, the throughput that people need. But what's more interesting and is more compelling and important to the business is, how can you help me change the way I'm running my data center, and inter-operate with the cloud, and therefore change the way I'm running my business. And some of the pieces that come in there, is automation. I think automation within systems to systems across the enterprise, across edge and cloud, that is so incredibly critical. The AI that we're building into platforms, the integration with whether it's VMware based with VRO, whether it's Ansible modules, intelligence, and this idea of having an autonomous data center that then has that connectivity to cloud and inter-operate then also with the edge, is so incredibly compelling. And again, not just for the large enterprises, but more and more for smaller ones. Because in this world, we need to help our customers have their data center run itself as much as possible, and whatever does require administration is as simple as possible, right? We've all gotten used to technology being as simple as our smartphones, this consumerization of IT has really changed the requirement of what people think simple means. So the things that you don't necessarily think about, and we don't necessarily market even that actively about, how important the number of clicks and the user interface and the seamless transition to products, as well as automation, is so critical. And I think the other ones we've already hit on, integration with multiple public clouds, that flexibility, support for containers, and Kubernetes and deep VMware integration are increasingly critical. And I think, for someone who's been in product marketing for 15 years, I couldn't be happier that our conversations have kind of moved off of speeds and feeds and into these much more compelling and business centric conversation, because, I think we can add a lot more value to the business that way. >> It also shows the strategic nature, you mentioned edge, these new environments. It's a multi environment that you have to have build products for. So it's not so much, how fast packets are moving back and forth, or this or that. It's really about the business value. >> Yeah, it's about the business value, the locality, the value of the data, it's really all about the data and how we can help our customers better manage that across all locations. But do that in a very, very simple way. But the requirement for what simple really means, has really, really raised the bar on that, and we're going to continue to push ourselves and challenge ourselves on that as well. >> Caitlin, I'll give you the final word, talk about choice. Choice has always been a big part of what you guys have offered customers, Dell Technologies has great storage. In this day and age, what does that mean for a customer? What have the choice mean? >> Yeah, and I think it's a delicate balance. And we've gone through quite a transformation over the past couple years here. And this summer was an exciting one for many reasons, but, we just recently completed that full simplification of our portfolio and we have our full portfolio of power solutions, all the way from PowerMax to PowerVolt, PowerStore, PowerScale, PowerFlex, and of course, the one we talked about today, PowerProtect. We now have that all in market. And I bring that up because, that is our simple portfolio to give customers best in class products across all of these different categories. And the fact that we have that choice, but, we've simplified that choice down to as few choices as possible, coming back to what we were just talking about. It's critical that we have solutions that meet the requirements of all of our different customers, but also that we don't give them more than that. That we need to give them choices that will meet their needs, but also not give them so many choices, that it's overwhelming. You don't want to be the cheesecake factory and not be able to choose what you want, you need to just be able to choose from what the options that really makes sense. And that's why I think it's really exciting now as we move into the second half of this year and look into next, we have that portfolio now, and we can focus on, which is the right combination of solutions for you. >> During the pandemic, people are reading a book, doing a hobby, you guys are updating your product portfolio. Congratulations on all the hard work, Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product. Great to see you. Thank you for spending the time, giving us an update on the data protection stuff. And again, congratulations for being so productive during a tough time and stay safe, thank you. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me, good to see you. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage with Dell Technologies. Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product Marketing giving us the breakdown. Very productive for them during this time, and again, companies want a growth strategy when they come out of the pandemic. More than ever, infrastructure has to enable the software for the new solutions. Just to keep coverage, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Everyone, welcome to the Cube special coverage of the AWS Summit San Francisco, North America all over the world, and most of the parts Asia, Pacific Amazon Summit is the hashtag. This is part of theCUBE Virtual Program, where we're going to be covering Amazon Summits throughout the year. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. And of course, we're not at the events. We're here in the Palo Alto Studios, with our COVID-19 quarantine crew. And we got a great guest here from AWS, Dave Brown, Vice President of EC2, leads the team on elastic compute, and its business where it's evolving and most importantly, what it means for the customers in the industry. Dave, thanks for spending the time to come on theCUBE virtual program. >> Hey John, it's really great to be here, thanks for having me. >> So we got the summit going down. It's new format because of the shelter in place. They're going virtual or digital, virtualization of events. And I want to have a session with you on EC2, and some of the new things they're going on. And I think the story is important, because certainly around the pandemic, and certainly on the large scale, SaaS business models, which are turning out to be quite the impact from a positive standpoint, with people sheltering in place, what is the role of data in all this, okay? And also, there's a lot of pressure financially. We've had the payroll loan programs from the government, and to companies really looking at their bottom lines. So two major highlights going on in the world that's directly impacted. And you have some products, and news around this, I want to do a deep dive on that. One is AppFlow, which is a new integration service by AWS, that really talks about taking the scale and value of AWS services, and integrating that with SaaS Applications. And the migration acceleration program for Windows, which has a storied history of database. For many, many years, you guys have been powering most of the Windows workloads, ironic that you guys are not Microsoft, but certainly had success there. Let's start with the AppFlow. Okay, this was recently announced on the 22nd of April. This is a new service. Can you take us through why this is important? What is the service? Why now, what was the main driver behind AppFlow? >> Yeah, absolutely. So with the launcher AppFlow, what we're really trying to do is make it easy for organizations and enterprises to really control the flow of their data, between the number of different applications that they use on premise, and AWS. And so the problem we started to see was, enterprises just had this data all over the place, and they wanted to do something useful with it. Right, we see many organizations running Data Lakes, large scale analytics, Big Machine Learning on AWS, but before you can do all of that, you have to have access to the data. And if that data is sitting in an application, either on-premise or elsewhere in AWS, it's very difficult to get out of that application, and into S3, or Redshift, or one of those services, before you can manipulate it, that was the challenge. And so the journey kind of started a few years ago, we actually launched a service on the EC2 network, inside Private Link. And it was really, it provided organizations with a very secure way to transfer network data, both between VPCs, and also between VPC, and on-prem networks. And what this highlighted to us, is organizations say that's great, but I actually don't have the technical ability, or the team, to actually do the work that's required to transform the data from, whether it's Salesforce, or SAP, and actually move it over Private Link to AWS. And so we realized, while private link was useful, we needed another layer of service that actually provided this, and one of the key requirements was an organization must be able to do this with no code at all. So basically, no developer required. And I want to be able to transfer data from Salesforce, my Salesforce database, and put that in Redshift together with some other data, and then perform some function on that. And so that's what AppFlow is all about. And so we came up with the idea about a little bit more than a year ago, that was the first time I sat down, and actually reviewed the content for what this was going to be. And the team's been hard at work, and launched on the 22nd of April. And we actually launched with 14 partners as well, that provide what we call connectors, which allow us to access these various services, and companies like Salesforce and ServiceNow, Slack, Snowflake, to name a few. >> Well, certainly you guys have a great ecosystem of SaaS partners, and that's you know well documented in the industry that you guys are not going to be competing directly with a lot of these big SaaS players, although you do have a few services for customers who want end to end, Jassy continues to pound that home on my Cube interviews. But I think this, >> Absolutely. is notable, and I want to get your thoughts on this, because this seems to be the key unlocking of the value of SaaS and Cloud, because data traversal, data transfer, there's costs involved, also moving traffic over the internet is unsecure, and unreliable. So a couple questions I wanted to just ask you directly. One is did the AppFlow come out of the AWS Private Link piece of it? And two, is it one directional or bi-directional? How is that working? Because I'm guessing that you had Private Link became successful, because no one wants to move on the internet. They wanted direct connects. Was there something inadequate about that service? Was there more headroom there? And is it bi-directional for the customer? >> So let me take the second one, it's absolutely bi-directional. So you can transfer that data between an on-premise application and AWS, or AWS and the on-premise application. Really, anything that has a connector can support the data flow in both directions. And with transformations, and so data in one data source, may need to be transformed, before it's actually useful in a second data source. And so AppFlow takes care of all that transformation as well, in both directions, And again, with no requirement for any code, on behalf of the customer. Which really unlocks it for a lot of the more business focused parts of an organization, who maybe don't have immediate access to developers. They can use it immediately, just literally with a few transformations via the console, and it's working for you. In terms of, you mentioned sort of the flow of data over the internet, and the need for security of data. It's critically important, and as we look at just what had happened as a company does. We have very, very strict requirements around the flow of data, and what services we can use internally. And where's any of our data going to be going? And I think it's a good example of how many enterprises are thinking about data today. They don't even want to trust even HTTPS, and encryption of data on the internet. I'd rather just be in a world where my data never ever traverses the internet, and I just never have to deal with that. And so, the journey all started with Private Link there, and probably was an interesting feature, 'cause it really was changing the way that we asked our customers to think about networking. Nothing like Private Link has ever existed, in the sort of standard networking that an enterprise would normally have. It's kind of only possible because of what VPC allows you to do, and what the software defined network on AWS gives you. And so we built Private Link, and as I said, customers started to adopt it. They loved the idea of being able to transfer data, either between VPCs, or between on-premise. Or between their own VPC, and maybe a third party provider, like Snowflake, has been a very big adopter of Private Link, and they have many customers using it to get access to Snowflake databases in a very secure way. And so that's where it all started, and in those discussions with customers, we started to see that they wanted us to up level a little bit. They said, "We can use Private Link, it's great, "but one of the problems we have is just the flow of data." And how do we move data in a very secure, in a highly available way, with no sort of bottlenecks in the system. And so we thought Private Link was a great sort of underlying technology, that empowered all of this, but we had to build the system on top of that, which is AppFlow. That says we're going to take care of all the complexity. And then we had to go to the ecosystem, and say to all these providers, "Can you guys build connectors?" 'Cause everybody realized it's super important that data can be shared, and so that organizations can really extract the value from that data. And so the 14 of them at launch, we have many, many more down the road, have come to the party with with connectors, and full support of what AppFlow provides. >> Yeah us DevOps purists always are pounding the fist on the table, now virtual table, API's and connectors. This is the model, so people are integrating. And I want to get your thoughts on this. I think you said low code, or no code on the developer simplicity side. Is it no code, or low code? Can you just explain quickly and clarify that point? >> It's no code for getting started literally, for the kind of, it's basic to medium complexity use case. It's not code, and a lot of customers we spoke to, that was a bottleneck. Right, they needed something from data. It might have been the finance organization, or it could have been human resources, somebody else in organization needed that. They don't have a developer that helps them typically. And so we find that they would wait many, many months, or maybe even never get the project done, just because they never ever had access to that data, or to the developer to actually do the work that was required for the transformation. And so it's no code for almost all use cases. Where it literally is, select your data source, select the connector, and then select the transformations. And some basic transformations, renaming of fields, transformation of data in simple ways. That's more than sufficient for the vast majority of use cases. And then obviously through to the destination, with the connector on the other side, to do the final transformation, to the final data source that you want to migrate the data to. >> You know, you have an interesting background, was looking at your history, and you've essentially been a web services kind of guy all your life. From a code standpoint software environment, and now I'll say EC2 is the crown jewel of AWS, and doing more and more with S3. But what's interesting, as you build more of these layers services in there, there's more flexibility. So right now, in most of the customer environments, is a debate around, do I build something monolithic, and or decoupled, okay? And I think there's a world where there's a mutually, not mutually exclusive, I mean, you have a mainframe, you have a big monolithic thing, if it does something. But generally people would agree that a decoupled environment is more flexible, and more agile. So I want to kind of get to the customer use case, 'cause I can really see this being really powerful, AppFlow with Private Link, where you mentioned Snowflake. I mean, Snowflake is built on AWS, they're doing extremely, extremely well, like any other company that builds on AWS. Whether it's theCUBE Cloud, or it's Snowflake. As we tap those services, customers, we might have people who want to build on our platform on top of AWS. So I know a bunch of startups that are building within the Snowflake ecosystem, a customer of yours. >> Yeah. >> So they're technically a customer of Amazon, but they're also in the ecosystem of say, Snowflake. >> Yes. >> So this brings up an interesting kind of computer science problem, which is architecturally, how do I think about that? Is this something where AppFlow could help me? Because I certainly want to enable people to build on a platform, that I build if I'm doing that, if I'm not going to be a pure SaaS turnkey application. But if I'm going to bring partners in, and do integration, use the benefits of the goodness of an API or Connector driven architecture, I need that. So explain to me how this helps me, or doesn't help me. Is this something that makes sense to you? Does this question make sense? How do you react to that? >> I think so, I think the question is pretty broad. But I think there's an element in which I can help. So firstly, you talk about sort of decoupled applications, right? And I think that is certainly the way that we've gone at Amazon, and been very, very successful for us. I think we started that journey back in 2003, when we decoupled the monolithic application that was amazon.com. And that's when our service journey started. And a lot of that sort of inspired AWS, and how we built what we built today. And we see a lot of our customers doing that, moving to smaller applications. It just works better, it's easier to debug, there's ownership at a very controlled level. So you can get all your engineering teams to have very clear and crisp ownership. And it just drives innovation, right? 'Cause each little component can innovate without the burden of the rest of the ecosystem. And so that's what we really enjoy. I think the other thing that's important when you think about design, is to see how much of the ecosystem you can leverage. And so whether you're building on Snowflake, or you're building directly on top of AWS, or you're building on top of one of our other customers and partners. If you can use something that solves the problem for you, versus building it yourself. Well that just leaves you with more time to actually go and focus on the stuff that you need to be solving, right? The product you need to be building. And so in the case of AppFlow, I think if there's a need for transfer of data, between, for example, Snowflake and some data warehouse, that you as an organisation are trying to build on a Snowflake infrastructure. AppFlow is something you could potentially look at. It's certainly not something that you could just use for, it's very specific and focused to the flow of data between services from a data analytics point of view. It's not really something you could use from an API point of view, or messaging between services. It's more really just facilitating that flow of data, and the transformation of data, to get it into a place that you can do something useful with it. >> And you said-- >> But like any of our services-- (speakers talk over each other) Couldn't be using any layer in the stack. >> Yes, it's a level of integration, right? There's no code to code, depending on how you look at it, cool. Customer use cases, you mentioned, large scale analytics, I thought I heard you say, machine learning, Data Lakes. I mean, basically, anyone who's using data is going to want to tap some sort of data repository, and figure out how to scale data when appropriate. There's also contextual, relevant data that might be specific to say, an industry vertical, or a database. And obviously, AI becomes the application for all this. >> Exactly. >> If I'm a customer, how does AppFlow relate to that? How does that help me, and what's the bottom line? >> So I think there's two parts to that journey. And depending on where customers are, and so there's, we do have millions of customers today that are running applications on AWS. Over the last few years, we've seen the emergence of Data Lakes, really just the storage of a large amount of data, typically in S3. But then companies want to extract value out of, and use in certain ways. Obviously, we have many, many tools today, from Redshift, Athena, that allow you to utilize these Data Lakes, and be able to run queries against this information. Things like EMR, and one of our oldest services in the space. And so doing some sort of large scale analytics, and more recently, services like SageMaker, are allowing us to do machine learning. And so being able to run machine learning across an enormous amount of data that we have stored in AWS. And there's some stuff in the IoT, workload use space as well, that's emerging. And many customers are using it. There's obviously many customers today that aren't using it on AWS, potential customers for us, that are looking to do something useful with data. And so the one part of the journey is taking up all of that infrastructure, and we have a lot of services that make it really easy to do machine learning, and do analytics, and that sort of thing. And then the other problem, the other side of the problem, which is what AppFlow is addressing is, how do I get that data to S3, or to Redshift, to actually go and run that machine learning workload? And that's what it's really unlocking for customers. And it's not just the one time transfer of data, the other thing that AppFlow actually supports, is the continuous updating of data. And so if you decide that you want to have that view of your data in S3, for example, and Data Lake, that's kept up to date, within a few minutes, within an hour, you can actually configure AppFlow to do that. And so the data source could be Salesforce, it could be Slack, it could be whatever data source you want to blend. And you continuously have that flow of data between those systems. And so when you go to run your machine learning workload, or your analytics, it's all continuously up to date. And you don't have this problem of, let me get the data, right? And when I think about some of the data jobs that I've run, in my time, back in the day as an engineer, on early EC2, a small part of it was actually running the job on the data. A large part of it was how do I actually get that data, and is it up to date? >> Up to date data is critical, I think that's the big feature there is that, this idea of having the data connectors, really makes the data fresh, because we go through the modeling, and you realize why I missed a big patch of data, the machine learnings not effective. >> Exactly. >> I mean, it's only-- >> Exactly, and the other thing is, it's very easy to bring in new data sources, right? You think about how many companies today have an enormous amount of data just stored in silos, and they haven't done anything with it. Often it'll be a conversation somewhere, right? Around the coffee machine, "Hey, we could do this, and we can do this." But they haven't had the developers to help them, and haven't had access to the data, and haven't been able to move the data, and to put it in a useful place. And so, I think what we're seeing here, with AppFlow, really unlocking of that. Because going from that initial conversation, to actually having something running, literally requires no code. Log into the AWS console, configure a few connectors, and it's up and running, and you're ready to go. And you can do the same thing with SageMaker, or any of the other services we have on the other side that make it really simple to run some of these ideas, that just historically have been just too complicated. >> Alright, so take me through that console piece. Just walk me through, I'm in, you sold me on this. I just came out of meeting with my company, and I said, "Hey, you know what? "We're blowing up this siloed approach. "We want to kind of create this horizontal data model, "where we can mix "and match connectors based upon our needs." >> Yeah. >> So what do I do? I'm using SageMaker, using some data, I got S3, I got an application. What do I do? I'm connecting what, S3? >> Yeah, well-- >> To the app? >> So the simplest thing is, and the simplest place to find this actually, is on Jeff Bezos blog, that he did for the release, right? Jeff always does a great job in demonstrating how to use our various products. But it literally is going into the standard AWS console, which is the console that we use for all of our services. I think we have 200 of them, so it is getting kind of challenging to find the ball in that console, as we continue to grow. And find AppFlow. AppFlow is a top level service, and so you'll see it in the console. And the first thing you got to do, is you got to configure your Source-Connect. And so it's a connector that, where's the data coming from? And as I said, we had 14 partners, you'll be able to see those connectors there, and see what's supported. And obviously, there's the connectivity. Do you have access to that data, or where is the data running? AppFlow runs within AWS, and so you need to have either VPN, or direct connect back to the organization, if the data source is on-premise. If the data source happens to be in AWS, and obviously be in a VPC, and you just need to configure some of that connectivity functionality. >> So no code if the connectors are there, but what if I want to build my own connector? >> So building your own connector, that is something that we working with third parties with right now. I could be corrected, but not 100% sure whether that's available. It's certainly something I think we would allow customers to do, is to extend sort of either the existing connectors, or to add additional transformations as well. And so you'd be able to do that. But the transformations that the vast majority of our customers are using are literally just in the console, with the basic transformations. >> It comes bigger apps that people have, and just building those connectors. How does a partner get involved? You got 14 partners now, how do you extend the partner base contact in Amazon Partner Manager, or you send an email to someone? How does someone get involved? What are you recommending? >> So there are a couple of ways, right? We have an extensive partner ecosystem that the vast majority of these ISVs are already integrated with. And so, we have the 14 we launched with, we also pre announced SAP, which is going to be a very critical one for the vast majority of our customers. Having deep integration with SAP data, and being able to bring that seamlessly into AWS. That'll be launching soon. And then there's a long list of other ones, that we're currently working on. And they're currently working on them themselves. And then the other one is going to be, like with most things that Amazon, feedback from customers. And so what we hear from customers, and very often you'll hear from third party partners as well, who'll come and say, "Hey, my customers are asking me "to integrate with the AppFlow, what do I need to do?" And so, you know, just reaching out to AWS, and letting them know that you'd be interested in integrating, that you're not part of the partner program. The team would be happy to engage, and bring you on board, so-- >> (mumbles) on playbook, get the top use cases nailed down, listen to customers, and figure it out. >> Exactly. >> Great stuff Dave, we really appreciate it. I'm looking forward to digging in AppFlow, and I'll check on Jeff Bezos blog. Sure, it's April 22, was the launch day, probably had up there. One of the things that want to just jump into, now moving into the next topic, is the cost structure. A lot of pressure on costs. This is where I think this Migration Acceleration Program for Windows is interesting. Andy Jassy always likes to boast on stage at Reinvent, about the number of workloads of Windows running on Amazon Web Services. This has been a big part of the customers, I think, for over 10 years, that I can think of him talking about this. What is this about? Are you still seeing uptake on Windows workloads, or, I mean,-- >> Absolutely. >> Azure has got some market share, >> Absolutely. >> but now you, doesn't really kind of square in my mind, what's going on here. Tell us about this migration service. >> Yeah, absolutely, on the migration side. So Windows is absolutely, we still believe AWS is the best place to run a Windows workload. And we have many, many happy Windows customers today. And it's a very big, very large, growing point of our business today, it used to be. I was part of the original team back in 2008, that launched, I think it was Windows 2008, back then on EC2. And I remember sort of working out all the details, of how to do all the virtualization with Windows, obviously back then we'd done Linux. And getting Windows up and running, and working through some of the challenges that Windows had as an operating system in the early days. And it was October 2008 that we actually launched Windows as an operating system. And it's just been, we've had many, many happy Windows customers since then. >> Why is Amazon so peak to run workloads from Windows so effectively? >> Well, I think, sorry what did you say peaked? >> Why is Amazon so in well positioned to run the Windows workloads? >> Well, firstly, I mean, I think Windows is really just the operating system, right? And so if you think about that as the very last little bit of your sort of virtualization stack, and then being able to support your applications. What you really have to think about is, everything below that, both in terms of the compute, so performance you're going to get, the price performance you're going to get. With our Nitro Hypervisor, and the Nitro System that we developed back in 2018, or launched in 2018. We really are able to provide you with the best price performance, and have the very least overhead from a hypervisor point of view. And then what that means is you're getting more out of your machine, for the price that you pay. And then you think about the rest of the ecosystem, right? Think about all the other services, and all the features, and just the breadth, and the extensiveness of AWS. And that's critically important for all of our Windows customers as well. And so you're going to have things like Active Directory, and these sort of things that are very Windows specific, and we can absolutely support all of those, natively. And in the Windows operating system as well. We have things like various agents that you can run inside the Windows box to do more maintenance and management. And so I think we've done a really good job in bringing Windows into the larger, and broader ecosystem of AWS. And it really is just a case of making sure that Windows runs smoothly. And that's just the last little bit on top of that, and so many customers enterprises run Windows today. When I started out my career, I was developing software in the banking industry, and it was a very much a Windows environment. They were running critical applications. And so we see it's critically important for customers who run Windows today, to be able to bring those Windows workloads to AWS. >> Yeah, and that's certainly-- >> We are seeing a trend. Yeah, sorry, go ahead. >> Well, they're certainly out there from a market share standpoint, but this is a cost driver, you guys are saying, and I want you to just give an example, or just illustrate why it costs less. How is it a cost savings? Is it just services, cycle times on EC2? I mean what's the cost savings? I'm a customer like, "Okay, so I'm going to go to Amazon with my workloads." Why is it a cost saving? >> I think there are a few things. The one I was referring to in my previous comment was the price performance, right? And so if I'm running on a system, where the hypervisor is using a significant portion of the physical CPU that I want to use as well. Well there's an overhead to that. And so from a price performance point of view, I look at, if I go and benchmark a CPU, and I look at how much I pay for that per unit of that benchmark, it's better on AWS. Because with our natural system, we're able to give you 100% of the floor. And so you get a performance then. So that's the first thing is price performance, which is different from this price. But there's a saving there as well. The other one is a large part, and getting into the migration program as well. A large part of what we do with our customers, when they come to AWS, is supposed to be, we take a long look at their license strategy. What licenses do they have? And a key part of bringing in Windows workloads AWS, is license optimization. What can we do to help you optimize the licenses that you're using today for Windows, for SQL Server, and really try and find efficiencies in that. And so we're able to secure significant savings for many of our customers by doing that. And we have a number of tools that they use as part of the migration program to do that. And so that helps save there. And then finally, we have a lot of customers doing what we call modernization of their applications. And so it really embraced Cloud, and some of the benefits that you get from Cloud. Especially elasticities, so being able to scale for demand. It's very difficult to do that when you bound by license for your operating system, because every box you run, you have to have a license for it. And so tuning auto scaling on, you've got to make sure you have enough licenses for all these Windows boxes you've seen. And so the push the Cloud's bringing, we've seen a lot of customers move Windows applications from Windows to Linux, or even move SQL Server, from SQL server to SQL Server on Linux, or another database platform. And do a modernization there, that already allows them to benefit from the elasticity that Cloud provides, without having to constantly worry about licenses. >> So final question on this point, migration service implies migration from somewhere else. How do they get involved? What's the onboarding process? Can you give a quick detail on that? >> Absolutely, so we've been helping customers with migrations for years. We've launched a migration program, or Migration Acceleration Program, MAP. We launched it, I think about 2016, 2017 was the first part of that. It was really just a bringing together of the various, the things we'd learned, the tools we built, the best strategies to do a migration. And we said, "How do we help customers looking "to migrate to the Cloud." And so that's what MAP's all about, is just a three phase, we'll help you assess the migration, we'll help you do a lot of planning. And then ultimately, we help you actually do the migration. We partner with a number of external partners, and ISVs, and GSIs, who also worked very closely with us to help customers do migrations. And so what we launched in April of this year, with the Windows migration program, is really just more support for Windows workload, as part of the broader Migration Acceleration Program. And there's benefits to customers, it's a smoother migration, it's a faster migration in almost all cases, we're doing license assessments, and so there's cost reduction in that as well. And ultimately, there's there's other benefits as well that we offer them, if they partner with us in bringing the workload to AWS. And so getting involved is really just reaching out to one of our AWS sales folks, or one of your account managers, if you have an account manager, and talk to them about workloads that you'd like to bring in. And we even go as far as helping you identify which applications are easiest to migrate. And so that you can kind of get going with some of the easier ones, while we help you with some of the more difficult ones. And strategies' about removing those roadblocks to bring your services to AWS. >> Takes the blockers away, Dave Brown, Vice President of EC2, the crown jewel of AWS, breaking down AppFlow, and the migration to Windows services. Great insights, appreciate the time. >> Thanks. >> We're here with Dave Brown, VP of EC2, as part of the virtual Cube coverage. Dave, I want to get your thoughts on an industry topic. Given what you've done with EC2, and the success, and with COVID-19, you're seeing that scale problem play out on the world stage for the entire population of the global world. This is now turning non-believers into believers of DevOps, web services, real time. I mean, this is now a moment in history, with the challenges that we have, even when we come out of this, whether it's six months or 12 months, the world won't be the same. And I believe that there's going to be a Cambrian explosion of applications. And an architecture that's going to look a lot like Cloud, Cloud-native. You've been doing this for many, many years, key architect of EC2 with your team. How do you see this playing out? Because a lot of people are going to be squirreling in rooms, when this comes back. They're going to be video conferencing now, but when they have meetings, they're going to look at the window of the future, and they're going to be exposed to what's failed. And saying, "We need to double down on that, "we have to fix this." So there's going to be winners and losers coming out of this pandemic, really quickly. And I think this is going to be a major opportunity for everyone to rally around this moment, to reset. And I think it's going to look a lot like this decoupled, this distributed computing environment, leveraging all the things that we've talked about in the past. So what's your advice, and how do you see this evolving? >> Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, I think, just the speed at which it happened as well. And the way in which organizations, both internally and externally, had to reinvent themselves very, very quickly, right? We've been very fortunate within Amazon, moving to working from home was relatively simple for the vast majority of us. Obviously, we have a number of our employees that work in data centers, and performance centers that have been on the front lines, and be doing a great job. But for the rest of us, it's been virtual video conferencing, right? All about meetings, and being able to use all of our networking tools securely, either over the VPN, or the no VPN infrastructure that we have. And many organizations had to do that. And so I think there are a number of different things that have impacted us right now. Obviously, virtual desktops has been a significant sort of growth point, right? Folks don't have access to the physical machine anymore, they're now all having to work remote, and so service like Workspaces, which runs on EC2, as well, has being a critical service data to support many of our largest customers. Our client VPN service, so we have within EC2 on the networking side, has also been critical for many large organizations, as they see more of their staff working everyday remotely. It has also seen, been able to support a lot of customers there. Just more broadly, what we've seen with COVID-19, is we've seen some industries really struggle, obviously travel industry, people just aren't traveling anymore. And so there's been immediate impact to some of those industries. They've been other industries that support functions like the video conferencing, or entertainment side of the house, has seen a bit of growth, over the last couple of months. And education has been an interesting one for us as well, where schools have been moving online. And behind the scenes in AWS, and on EC2, we've been working really hard to make sure that our supply chains are not interrupted in any way. The last thing we want to do is have any of our customers not be able to get EC2 capacity, when they desperately need it. And so we've made sure that capacity is fully available, even all the way through the pandemic. And we've even been able to support customers with, I remember one customer who told me the next day, they're going to have more than hundred thousand students coming online. And they suddenly had to grow their business, by some crazy number. And we were able to support them, and give them the capacity, which is way outside of any sort of demand--. >> I think this is the Cambrain explosion that I was referring to, because a whole new set of new things have emerged. New gaps in businesses have been exposed, new opportunities are emerging. This is about agility. It's real time now. It's actually happening for everybody, not just the folks on the inside of the industry. This is going to create a reinvention. So it's ironic, I've heard the word reinvent mentioned more times now, over the past three months, than I've heard it representing to Amazon. 'Cause that's your annual conference, Reinvent, but people are resetting and reinventing. It's actually a tactic, this is going on. So they're going to need some Clouds. So what do you say to that? >> So, I mean, the first thing is making sure that we can continue to be highly available, continue to have the capacity. The worst scenario is not being able to have the capacity for our customers, right? We did see that with some providers, and that honesty on outside is just years and years of experience of being able to manage supply chain. And the second thing is obviously, making sure that we remain available, that we don't have issues. And so, you know, with all of our stuff going remote and working from home, all my teams are working from home. Being able to support AWS in this environment, we haven't missed a beat there, which has been really good. We were well set up to be able to absorb this. And then obviously, remaining secure, which was our highest priority. And then innovating with our customers, and being able to, and that's both products that we're going to launch over time. But in many cases, like that education scenario I was talking about, that's been able to find that capacity, in multiple regions around the world, literally on a Sunday night, because they found out literally that afternoon, that Monday morning, all schools were virtual, and they were going to use their platform. And so they've been able to respond to that demand. We've seen a lot more machine learning workloads, we've seen an increase there as well as organizations are running more models, both within the health sciences area, but also in the financial areas. And also in just general business, (mumbles), yes, wherever it might be. Everybody's trying to respond to, what is the impact of this? And better understand it. And so machine learning is helping there, and so we've been able to support all those workloads. And so there's been an explosion. >> I was joking with my son, I said, "This world is interesting." Amazon really wins, that stuff's getting delivered to my house, and I want to play video games and Twitch, and I want to build applications, and write software. Now I could do that all in my home. So you went all around. But all kidding aside, this is an opportunity to define agility, so I want to get your thoughts, because I'm a bit a big fan of Amazon. As everyone knows, I'm kind of a pro Amazon person, and as other Clouds kind of try to level up, they're moving in the same direction, which is good for everybody, good competition and all. But S3 and EC2 have been the crown jewels. And building more services around those, and creating these abstraction layers, and new sets of service to make it easier, I know has been a top priority for AWS. So can you share your vision on how you're going to make EC2, and all these services easier for me? So if I'm a coder, I want literally no code, low code, infrastructure as code. I need to make Amazon more programmable and easier. Can you just share your vision on, as we talk about the virtual summits, as we cover the show, what's your take on making Amazon easier to consume and use? >> It's been something we thought a lot over the years, right? When we started out, we were very simple. The early days of EC2, it wasn't that rich feature set. And it's been an interesting journey for us. We've obviously become a lot more, we've written, launched local features, which narrative brings some more complexity to the platform. We have launched things like Lightsail over the years. Lightsail is a hosting environment that gives you that EC2 like experience, but it's a lot simpler. And it's also integrated with a number of other services like RDS and ELB as well, basic load balancing functionality. And we've seen some really good growth there. But what we've also learned is customers enjoy the richness of what ECU provides, and what the full ecosystem provides, and being able to use the pieces that they really need to build their application. From an S3 point of view, from a board ecosystem point of view. It's providing customers with the features and functionality that they really need to be successful. From the compute side of the house, we've done some things. Obviously, Containers have really taken off. And there's a lot of frameworks, whether it's EKS, or community service, or a Docker-based ECS, has made that a lot simpler for developers. And then obviously, in the serverless space, Landers, a great way of consuming EC2, right? I know it's serverless, but there's still an EC2 instance under the hood. And being able to bring a basic function and run those functions in serverless is, a lot of customers are enjoying that. The other complexity we're going after is on the networking side of the house, I find that a lot of developers out there, they're more than happy to write the code, they're more than happy to bring their reputation to AWS. But they struggle a little bit more on the networking side, they really do not want to have to worry about whether they have a route to an internet gateway, and if their subnets defined correctly to actually make the application work. And so, we have services like App Mesh, and the whole mesh server space is developing a lot. To really make that a lot simpler, where you can just bring your application, and call it on an application that just uses service discovery. And so those higher level services are definitely helping. In terms of no code, I think that App Mesh, sorry not App Mesh, AppFlow is one of the examples for already given organizations something at that level, that says I can do something with no code. I'm sure there's a lot of work happening in other areas. It's not something I'm actively thinking on right now , in my role in leading EC2, but I'm sure as the use cases come from customers, I'm sure you'll see more from us in those areas. They'll likely be more specific, though. 'Cause as soon as you take code out of the picture, you're going to have to get pretty specific in the use case. You already get the depth, the functionality the customers will need. >> Well, it's been super awesome to have your valuable time here on the virtual Cube for covering Amazon Summit, Virtual Digital Event that's going on. And we'll be going on throughout the year. Really appreciate the insight. And I think, it's right on the money. I think the world is going to have in six to 12 months, surge in reset, reinventing, and growing. So I think a lot of companies who are smart, are going to reset, reinvent, and set a new growth trajectory. Because it's a Cloud-native world, it's Cloud-computing, this is now a reality, and I think there's proof points now. So the whole world's experiencing it, not just the insiders, and the industry, and it's going to be an interesting time. So really appreciate that, they appreciate it. >> Great, >> Them coming on. >> Thank you very much for having me. It's been good. >> I'm John Furrier, here inside theCUBE Virtual, our virtual Cube coverage of AWS Summit 2020. We're going to have ongoing Amazon Summit Virtual Cube. We can't be on the show floor, so we'll be on the virtual show floor, covering and talking to the people behind the stories, and of course, the most important stories in silicon angle, and thecube.net. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Think brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, there, this is Dave Vellante. We're back at the IBM Think 2020 Digital Event Experience are socially responsible and distant. I'm here in the studios in Marlborough, our team in Palo Alto. We've been going wall to wall coverage of IBM Think, Kit Chee here is the Vice President, and general manager of Cloud and Enterprise sales at Intel. Kit, thanks for coming on. Good to see you. >> Thank you, Dave. Thank you for having me on. >> You're welcome, and Evaristus Mainsah, Mainsah is here. Mainsah, he is the general manager of the IBM Cloud Pack Ecosystem for the IBM Cloud. Evaristus, it's good to see you again. Thank you very much, I appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Dave. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome, so Kit, let me start with you. How are you guys doing? You know, there's this pandemic, never seen it before. How're things where you are? >> Yeah, so we were quite fortunate. Intel's had an epidemic leadership team. For about 15 years now, we have a team consisting of medical safety and operational professionals, and this same team has, who has navigated as across several other health issues like bad flu, Ebola, Zika and each one and one virus then navigating us at this point with this pandemic. Obviously, our top priority as it would be for IBM is protecting the health and well being of employees while keeping the business running for our customers. The company has taken the following measures to take care of it direct and indirect workforce, Dave and to ensure business continuity throughout the developing situation. They're from areas like work from home policies, keeping hourly workers home and reimbursing for daycare, elderly care, helping with WiFi policies. So that's been what we've been up to Intel's manufacturing and supply chain operations around the world world are working hard to meet demand and we are collaborating with supply pains of our customers and partners globally as well. And more recently, we have about $16 Million to support communities, from frontline health care workers and technology initiatives like online education, telemedicine and compute need to research. So that's what we've been up to date. Pretty much, you know, busy. >> You know, every society that come to you, I have to say my entire career have been in the technology business and you know, sometimes you hear negative toward the big tech but, but I got to say, just as Kit was saying, big tech has really stepped up in this crisis. IBM has been no different and, you know, tech for good and I was actually I'm really proud. How are you doing in New York City? >> Evaristus: No, thank you, Dave, for that, you know, we are, we're doing great and, and our focus has been absolutely the same, so obviously, because we provide services to clients. At a time like this, your clients need you even more, but we need to focus on our employees to make sure that their health and their safety and their well being is protected. And so we've taken this really seriously, and actually, we have two ways of doing this. One of them is just on to purpose as a, as a company, on our clients, but the other is trying to activate the ecosystem because problems of this magnitude require you to work across a broad ecosystem to, to bring forth in a solution that are long lasting, for example, we have a call for code, which where we go out and we ask developers to use their skills and open source technologies to help solve some technical problems. This year, the focus was per AVADA initiatives around computing resources, how you track the Coronavirus and other services that are provided free of charge to our clients. Let me give you a bit more color, so, so IBM recently formed the high performance computing consortium made up of the feYderal government industry and academic leaders focus on providing high performance computing to solve the COVID-19 problem. So we're currently we have 33 members, now we have 27 active products, deploying something like 400 teraflops as our petaflop 400 petaflops of compute to solve the problem. >> Well, it certainly is challenging times, but at the same time, you're both in the, in the sweet spot, which is Cloud. I've talked to a number of CIOs who have said, you know, this is really, we had a cloud strategy before but we're really accelerating our cloud strategy now and, and we see this as sort of a permanent effect. I mean, Kit, you guys, big, big on ecosystem, you, you want frankly, a level playing field, the more optionality that you can give to customers, you know, the better and Cloud is really been exploding and you guys are powering, you know, all the world's Clouds. >> We are, Dave and honestly, that's a huge responsibility that we undertake. Before the pandemic, we saw the market through the lens of four key mega trends and the experiences we are all having currently now deepens our belief in the importance of addressing these mega trends, but specifically, we see marketplace needs around key areas of cloudification of everything below point, the amount of online activities that have spiked just in the last 60 days. It's a testimony of that. Pervasive AI is the second big area that we have seen and we are now resolute on investments in that area, 5G network transformation and the edge build out. Applications run the business and we know enterprise IT faces challenges when deploying applications that require data movement between Clouds and Cloud native technologies like containers and Kubernetes will be key enablers in delivering end to end data analytics, AI, machine learning and other critical workloads and Cloud environments at the edge. Pairing Intel's data centric portfolio, including Intel's obtain SSPs with Red Hat, Openshift, and IBM Cloud Paks, enterprise can now break through storage bottlenecks and have unconstrained data availability in the hybrid and multicloud environments, so we're pretty happy with the progress we're making that together with IBM. >> Yeah, Evaristus, I mean, you guys are making some big bets. I've, you know, written and discussed in my breaking analysis, I think a lot of people misunderstand IBM Cloud, Ginni Rometty arm and a bow said, hey, you know, we're after only 20% of the workloads are in cloud, we're going after the really difficult to move workloads and the hybrid workloads, that's really the fourth foundation that Arvin you know, talks about, that you and IBM has built, you know, your mainframes, you have middleware services, and in hybrid Cloud is really that fourth sort of platform that you're building out, but you're making some bets in AI. You got other services in the Cloud like, like blockchain, you know, quantum, we've been having really interesting discussions around quantum, so I wonder if you can talk a little bit about sort of where you're allocating resources, some of the big bets that, that you're making for the next decade. >> Well, thank you very much, Dave, for that. I think what we're seeing with clients is that there's increasing focus on and, and really an acceptance, that the best way to take advantage of the Cloud is through a hybrid cloud strategy, infused with data, so it's not just the Cloud itself, but actually what you need to do to data in order to make sure that you can really, truly transform yourself digitally, to enable you to, to improve your operations, and in use your data to improve the way that you work and improve the way that you serve your clients. And what we see is and you see studies out there that say that if you adopt a hybrid cloud strategy, instead of 2.5 times more effective than a public cloud only strategy, and Why is that? Well, you get thi6ngs such as you know, the opportunity to move your application, the extent to which you move your applications to the Cloud. You get things such as you know, reduction in, in, in risk, you, you get a more flexible architecture, especially if you focus on open certification, reduction and certification reduction, some of the tools that you use, and so we see clients looking at that. The other thing that's really important, especially in this moment is business agility, and resilience. Our business agility says that if my customers used to come in, now, they can't come in anymore, because we need them to stay at home, we still need to figure out a way to serve them and we write our applications quickly enough in order to serve this new client, service client in a new way. And well, if your applications haven't been modernized, even if you've moved to the Cloud, you don't have the opportunity to do that and so many clients that have made that transformation, figure out they're much more agile, they can move more easily in this environment, and we're seeing the whole for clients saying yes, I do need to move to the Cloud, but I need somebody to help improve my business agility, so that I can transform, I can change with the needs of my clients, and with the demands of competition and this leads you then to, you know, what sort of platform do you need to enable you to do this, it's something that's open, so that you can write that application once you can run it anywhere, which is why I think the IBM position with our ecosystem and Red Hat with this open container Kubernetes environment that allows you to write application once and deploy it anywhere, is really important for clients in this environment, especially, and the Cloud Paks which is developed, which I, you know, General Manager of the Cloud Pak Ecosystem, the logic of the Cloud Paks is exactly that you'll want plans and want to modernize one, write the applications that are cloud native so that they can react more quickly to market conditions, they can react more quickly to what the clients need and they, but if they do so, they're not unlocked in a specific infrastructure that keeps them away from some of the technologies that may be available in other Clouds. So we have talked about it blockchain, we've got, you know, Watson AI, AI technologies, which is available on our Cloud. We've got the weather, company assets, those are key asset for, for many, many clients, because weather influences more than we realize, so, but if you are locked in a Cloud that didn't give you access to any of those, because you hadn't written on the same platform, you know, that's not something that you you want to support. So Red Hat's platform, which is our platform, which is open, allows you to write your application once and deploy it anyways, particularly our customers in this particular environment together with the data pieces that come on top of that, so that you can scale, scale, because, you know, you've got six people, but you need 600 of them. How do you scale them or they can use data and AI in it? >> Okay, this must be music to your ears, this whole notion of you know, multicloud because, you know, Intel's pervasive and so, because the more Clouds that are out there, the better for you, better for your customers, as I said before, the more optionality. Can you6 talk a little bit about the rela6tionship today between IBM and Intel because it's obviously evolved over the years, PC, servers, you know, other collaboration, nearly the Cloud is, you know, the latest 6and probably the most rel6evant, you know, part of your, your collaboration, but, but talk more about what that's like you guys are doing together that's, that'6s interesting and relevant. >> You know, IBM and Intel have had a very rich history of collaboration starting with the invention of the PC. So for those of us who may take a PC for granted, that was an invention over 40 years ago, between the two companies, all the way to optimizing leadership, IBM software like BB2 to run the best on Intel's data center products today, right? But what's more germane today is the Red Hat piece of the study and how that plays into a partnership with IBM going forward, Intel was one of Red Hat's earliest investors back in 1998, again, something that most people may not realize that we were in early investment with Red Hat. And we've been a longtime pioneer of open source. In fact, Levin Shenoy, Intel's Executive Vice President of Data Platforms Group was part of COBOL Commies pick up a Red Hat summit just last week, you should definitely go listen to that session, but in summary, together Intel and Red Hat have made commercial open source viable and enterprise and worldwide competing globally. Basically, now we've65 used by nearly every vertical and horizontal industr6y. We are bringing our customers choice, scalability and speed of innovation for key technologies today, such as security, Telco, NFV, and containers, or even at ease and most recently Red Hat Openshift. We're very excited to see IBM Cloud Packs, for example, standardized on top of Openshift as that builds the foundation for IBM chapter two, and allows for Intel's value to scale to the Cloud packs and ultimately IBM customers. Intel began partnering with IBM on what is now called Pax over two years ago and we 6are committed to that success and scaling that, try ecosystem, hardware partners, ISVs and our channel. >> Yeah, so theCUBE by the way, covered Red Hat summit last week, Steve Minima and I did a detailed analysis. It was awesome, like if we do say so ourselves, but awesome in the sense of, it allowed us to really sort of unpack what's going on at Red Hat and what's happening at IBM. Evaristus, so I want to come back to you on this Cloud Pack, you got, it's, it's the kind of brand that you guys have, you got Cloud Packs all over the place, you got Cloud Packs for applications, data, integration, automation, multicloud management, what do we need to know about Cloud pack? What are the relevant components there? >> Evaristus: I think the key components is so this is think of this as you know, software that is designed that is Cloud native is designed for specific core use cases and it's built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Red Hat Openshift container Kubernetes environment, and then on top of that, so you get a set of common services that look right across all of them and then on top of that, you've got specific both open source and IBM software that deals with specific plant situations. So if you're dealing with applications, for example, the open source and IBM software would be the run times that you need to write and, and to blow applications to have setups. If you're dealing with data, then you've got Cloud Pack to data. The foundation is still Red Hat Enterprise Linux sitting on top of with Red Hat Openshift container Kubernetes environment sitting on top of that providing you with a set of common services and then you'll get a combination of IBM zone open, so IBM software as well as open source will have third party software that sits on top of that, as well as all of our AI infrastructure that sits on top of that and machine learning, to enable you to do everything that you need to do, data to get insights updates, you've got automation to speed up and to enable us to do work more efficiently, more effectively, to make your smart workers better, to make management easier, to help management manage work and processes, and then you've got multicloud management that allows you to see from a single pane, all of your applications that you've deployed in the different Cloud, because the idea here, of course, is that not all sitting in the same Cloud. Some of it is on prem, some of it is in other Cloud, and you want to be able to see and deploy applications across all of those. And then you've got the Cloud Pack to security, which has a combination of third party offerings, as well as ISV offerings, as well as AI offerings. Again, the structure is the same, REL, Red Hat Openshift and then you've got the software that enables you to manage all aspects of security and to deal with incidents when, when they arise. So that gives you data applications and then there's integration, as every time you start writing an application, you need to integrate, you need to access data security from someplace, you need to bring two pipes together for them to communicate and we use a Cloud Pack for integration to allow us to do that. You can open up API's and expose those API so others writing application and gain access to those API's. And again, this idea of resilience, this idea of agility, so you can make changes and you can adapt data things about it. So that's what the Cloud Pack provides for you and Intel has been an absolutely fantastic partner for us. One of the things that we do with Intel, of course, is to, to work on the reference architectures to help our certification program for our hardware OEMs so that we can scale that process, get many more OEMs adopt and be ready for the Cloud Packs and then we work with them on some of the ISV partners and then right up front. >> Got it, let's talk about the edge. Kity, you mentioned 5G. I mean it's a really exciting time, (laughs) You got windmills, you got autonomous vehicles, you got factories, you got to ship, you know, shipping containers. I mean, everything's getting instrumented, data everywhere and so I'm interested in, let's start with Intel's point of view on the edge, how that's going to evolve, you know what it means to Cloud. >> You know, Dave, it's, its definitely the future and we're excited to partner with IBM here. In addition to enterprise edge, the communication service providers think of the Telcos and take advantage of running standardized open software at the Telco edge, enabling a range of new workloads via scalable services, something that, you know, didn't happen in the past, right? Earlier this year, Intel announced a new C on second generation, scalable, atom based processes targeting the 5G radio access network, so this is a new area for us, in terms of investments going to 5G ran by deploying these new technologies, with Cloud native platforms like Red Hat Openshift and IBM Cloud Packs, comm service providers can now make full use of their network investments and bring new services such as Artificial Intelligence, augmented reality, virtual reality and gaming to the market. We've only touched the surface as it comes to 5G and Telco but IBM Red Hat and Intel compute together that I would say, you know, this space is super, super interesting, as more developed with just getting started. >> Evaristus, what do you think this means for Cloud and how that will evolve? Is this sort of a new Cloud that will form at the edge? Obviously, a lot of data is going to stay at the edge, probably new architectures are going to emerge and again, to me, it's all about data, you can create more data, push more data back to the Cloud, so you can model it. Some of the data is going to have to be done in real time at the edge, but it just really extends the network to new horizons. >> Evaristus: It does exactly that, Dave and we think of it and which is why I thought it will impact the same, right? You wouldn't be surprised to see that the platform is based on open containers and that Kubernetes is container environment provided by Red Hat and so whether your data ends up living at the edge or your data lives in a private data center, or it lives in some public Cloud, and how it flows between all of them. We want to make it easy for our clients to be able to do that. So this is very exciting for us. We just announced IBM Edge Application Manager that allows you to basically deploy and manage applications at endpoints of all these devices. So we're not talking about 2030, we're talking about thousands or hundreds of thousands. And in fact, we're working with, we're getting divided Intel's device onboarding, which will enable us to use that because you can get that and you can onboard devices very, very easily at scale, which if you get that combined with IBM Edge Application Manager, then it helps you onboard the devices and it helps you divide both central devices. So we think this is really important. We see lots of work that moving on the edge devices, many of these devices and endpoints now have sufficient compute to be able to run them, but right now, if they are IoT devices, the data has been transferred to hundreds of miles away to some data center to be processed and enormous pass and then only 1% of that actually is useful, right? 99% of it gets thrown away. Some of that actually has data residency requirements, so you may not be able to move the data to process, so why wouldn't you just process the data where the data is created around your analytics where the data is spread, or you have situations that are disconnected as well. So you can't actually do that. You don't want to stop this still in the supermarket, because there's, you lost connectivity with your data center and so the importance of being able to work offline and IBM Edge Application Manager actually allows you so it's tournament so you can do all of this without using lots of people because it's a process that is all sort or automated, but you can work whether you're connected or you're disconnected, and then you get replication when you get really, really powerful for. >> All right, I think the developer model is going to be really interesting here. There's so many new use cases and applications. Of course, Intel's always had a very strong developer ecosystem. You know, IBM understands the importance of developers. Guys, we've got to wrap up, but I wonder if you could each, maybe start with Kit. Give us your sense as to where you want to see this, this partnership go, what can we expect over the next, you know, two to five years and beyond? >> I think it's just the area of, you know, 5G, and how that plays out in terms of edge build out that we just touched on. I think that's a really interesting space, what Evaristus has said is spot on, you know, the processing, and the analytics at the edge is still fairly nascent today and that's growing. So that's one area, building out the Cloud for the different enterprise applications is the other one and obviously, it's going to be a hybrid world. It's not just a public Cloud world on prem world. So the whole hybrid build out What I call hybrid to DoD zero, it's a policy and so the, the work that both of us need to do IBM and Intel will be critical to ensure that, you know, enterprise IT, it has solutions across the hybrid sector. >> Great. Evaristus, give us the last word, bring us home. >> Evaristus: And I would agree with that as well, Kit. I will say this work that you do around the Intel's market ready solutions, right, where we can bring our ecosystem together to do even more on Edge, some of these use cases, this work that we're doing around blockchain, which I think you know, again, another important piece of work and, and I think what we really need to do is to focus on helping clients because many of them are working through those early cases right now, identify use cases that work and without commitment to open standards, using exactly the same standard across like what you've got on your open retail initiative, which we're going to do, I think is going to be really important to help you out scale, but I wanted to just add one more thing, Dave, if you if you permit me. >> Yeah. >> Evaristus: In this COVID era, one of the things that we've been able to do for customers, which has been really helpful, is providing free technology for 90 days to enable them to work in an offline situation to work away from the office. One example, for example, is the just the ability to transfer files and bandwidth, new bandwidth is an issue because the parents and the kids are all working from home, we have a protocol, IBM Aspera, which will make available customers for 90 days at no cost. You don't need to give us your credit card, just log on and use it to improve the way that you work. So your bandwidth feels as if you are in the office. We have what's an assistant that is now helping clients in more than 18 countries that keep the same thing, basically providing COVID information. So those are all available. There's a slew of offerings that we have. We just want listeners to know that they can go on the IBM website and they can gain those offerings they can deploy and use them now. >> That's huge. I knew about the 90 day program, I didn't realize a sparrow was part of that and that's really important because you're like, Okay, how am I going to get this file there? And so thank you for, for sharing that and guys, great conversation. You know, hopefully next year, we could be face to face even if we still have to be socially distant, but it was really a pleasure having you on. Thanks so much. Stay safe, and good stuff. I appreciate it. >> Evaristus: Thank you very much, Dave. Thank you, Kit. Thank you. >> Thank you, thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for theCUBE, our wall to wall coverage of the IBM Think 2020 Digital Event Experience. We'll be right back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

>>Yeah, >>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston. It's the Cube covering IBM. Think brought to you by IBM. >>Welcome back, everybody. This is Dave Vellante of the Cube, and you're watching our continuous coverage of the IBM think Digital 2020 experience. And we're really pleased to have Rob High here. He's not only an IBM fellow bodies. He runs the vice president CTO of the IBM Edge Computing Initiative. Rob, thanks so much for coming on the Cube. Good to see you. Which we're face to face, but yeah, that time to be safe and healthy, I guess. And did so edge obviously hot topic. Everybody has this sort of point of view would be interested in how IBM looks at edge. You define it and what your thoughts are on. It's evolution. >>Yeah, well, you know, there's ah really kind of two fairly distinct ways of thinking about the edge of the telcos. Our, ah, you know, they're creating edge capabilities in their own network facilities. We call that the network edge on the other side of the edge they that I think matters a lot to our enterprise businesses is there's remote on premise locations where they actually perform the work that they do, where the majority of people are, where the data that actually gets created is first formed and where the actions that they need to operate on are being taken. That is a lot of interest, because if we can move work workloads, Iot workloads to where that data is being created, where those actions are being taken Uh, not only can we dramatically reduce the late and see to those decisions, uh, but we can also ensure continuous operations and the failed in the presence of perhaps network failures. We can manage the growth of increasing demand for network bandwidth as Maura born data gets created and we can optimize the efficiency of both the business operations as well as the I t operations before that. So for us edge computing at the end of the day is about movie work where the data and the actions are being taken >>well, so this work from home, you know, gives a result of this pandemic is kind of creating a new stresses on networks and people are putting, you know, pouring money actually into beefing up that infrastructure is sort of an extension of what we used to think about edge. But I wonder if you could talk about some of the industries and the use cases that you guys we are seeing and notwithstanding, though assay that >>work from home pivot. Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, look, we have seen ah, the need for placing workloads close to where it is being created and where actions have been picking in virtually every industry, the ones that are probably easier for us to think about and more common in terms of our mindset. Our is manufacturing. If you think about all the things that go on in a factory floor that need to be able to perform analytic in, uh, in the equipment and the processes that are performing in the affection for, If you think, for example, production quality. Uh, you know, if you've got a machine that's putting out parts and maybe it's welding seams on metal boxes, uh, you know, you want to be able to look at the quality of that seem at the moment that is being performed, so that if there are any problems, you can remediate that immediately rather than having that box move on down the line and find that you know the quality issues they were created earlier on now have exacerbated in other ways. Um, you know, so quality, productive quality. Ah, inspection production optimization in our world of Covic Cover 19 and worker safety and getting workers back to work and ensuring that you know people wearing the masks and are exercising social distancing. This is on the factory floor. Worker Insight is another major use case that we're seeing surface of lake with a lot of interest in using whether that's infrared cameras or Bluetooth beacons or infrared cameras. Any variety of devices that could be employed in the work area to help ensure that factories are operating efficiently, that workers are safe. Ah, and whether that's in a factor situation or even in an office situation or e a r in a warehouse or distribution center. And all these scenarios the the utility, the edge computing to bring to those use cases is tremendous. >>And a lot of these devices are unattended or infrequently attended. I always use the windmill example. Um, you know, you don't want to have to do a truck roll to figure out you know what the dynamics are going on, that at the windmill s, so I can instrument that. But what about the management of those devices you know from an autonomous standpoint? And and are you? What are you doing? Or are you doing anything in the autonomous managed space? >>Yeah. In fact, that's really kind of key here, because when you think about the scale, the diversity and the dynamic dynamism of equipment in these environments And as you point out, Dave, you know the lack of I t resource lack of skills on the factory floor, or even in the retail store or hotel or distribution center or any of these environments. The situation is very similar. You can't simply manage getting the right workloads to the right place at the right time. In sort of the traditional approach is, you have to really think about another autonomous approach to management and, you know, let the system the side for you. What software needs to be placed out there? Which software to put their If it's an analytic algorithm, what models to be associated with that software and getting to the right place at the right place at the right Time is a key Part of what we do in this thing that we call IBM Edge application manager is that product that we're really kind of bringing to market right now in the context of edge computing that facilitates this idea of autonomous management. >>You know, I wonder if you could comment Robb on just sort of the approach that you're taking with regard to providing products and services. I mean, we've seen a lot of, uh, situations where people are just essentially packing, packaging traditional, you know, compute and storage devices and sort of throwing it over the fence at the edge. Uh, and saying, Hey, here's our edge computing solution and another saying there's not a place for that. Maybe that will help flatten the network and, you know, provide Ah, gateway for storing on maybe processing information. But it seems to us that that that a bottoms up approach is going to be more appropriate. In other words, you've got engineers, you know who really understand operations, technology, people, maybe a new breed of developers emerging. How do you see the evolution you know of products and services and architectures at >>the edge? Yeah, so First of all, let me say IBM is taking a really pretty broad approach to edge computing we have. What I just described is IBM Edge Application Manager, which is the if you will the platform or the infrastructure on which we can manage the appointment of workloads out to the edge. But then add to that we do have a whole variety of edge and Nevil enabled applications that are being created are global service of practices and our AI applications business all are creating, um, variations of their product specific to address and exploit edge computing and to bring that advantage to the business. And of course, then we also have global services Consulting, which is a set of skilled resource, is who know we understand the transformations that business need to go through when they went, take advantage of edge computing and how to think about that in the context of both their journey to the cloud as well as now in this case, the edge. But also then how to go about implementing and delivering that, uh and then firmly further managing that now you know, coupled out then with at the end of the day you're also going to need the equipment, the devices, whether that is an intelligent automobile or other vehicle, whether that is an appellate, a robot or a camera, Um, or if those things are not intelligent. But you want to bring intelligence to them that how you augment that with servers and other forms of cluster computing that resides resident with the device. All of those are going to require participation from a very broad ecosystem. So we've been working with partners of whether that is vendors who create hardware and enabling that hardware in certifying that hardware to work with our management infrastructure or whether those are people who bring higher order services to the table that provide support for, let's, say, data cashing and facilitating the creation of applications, or whether those are device manufacturers that are embedding compute in their device equipment. All of that is part of our partnership ecosystem, Um, and then finally, you know, I need to emphasize that, you know, the world that we operate in is so vast and so large. There are so many edge devices in the marketplace, and that's growing so rapidly, and so many participants in that likewise There are a lot of other contributors to this ecosystem that we call edge computing. And so for all of those reasons, we have grounded IBM education manager on open source. We created an open source project called Open Rise, and we've been developing that, actually now, for about 4.5 years just recently, the Linux Foundation has adopted Stage one adoption of Open arising as part of its Lennox Foundation edge LF edge, uh, Reg X Foundry project. And so we think this is key to building out, Um, a ecosystem of partners who want to both contribute as well consumed value and create ecosystems around this common idea of how we manage the edge. >>Yeah, I'm glad you brought up the ecosystem, and it's too big for any one company toe to go it alone. But I want to tap your brain on just sort of architectures. And there's so many diverse use cases, you know, we don't necessarily see one uber architecture emerging, but there are some characteristics that we think are important at the edge you mentioned sort of real time or near real time. In many cases, it has to be real time you think about autonomous vehicles? Um, yeah. A lot of the data today is analog, and maybe it doesn't have to be digitized, but much of it will be, um, it's not all gonna be sent back to the cloud. It may not all have to be persisted. So we've envisioned this sort of purpose built, you know, architecture for certain use cases that can support real time. That maybe have, you know, arm based processors. Ah, or other alternative processors there that can do real time analytics at the edge and maybe sending portions of the data back. How do you see the architectures evolving from a technologist? >>Well, so certainly one of the things that we see at the edge is a tremendous premium being placed on things like energy consumption. So architectures they're able to operate efficiently with less power is ah is certainly an advantage to any of those architectures that are being brought aboard. Um, clearly, you know x 86 is a dominant architecture in any information technology endeavor. More specifically at the edge. We're seeing the emergence of lot of arm based architecture chips out there. In fact, I would guess that the majority of the edge devices today are not being created with, um, arm architectures, but it's the you know, but some of this is about the underlying architecture of the compute. But also then the augmentation of that compute the the compute Thea the CP use with other types of processing units. Whether those GPS, of course, we're seeing, you know, a number of deep use being created that are designed to be low power consuming, um, and have a tremendous amount of utility at the edge. There are alternate processing units, architectures that have been designed specifically for AI model based analytics. Uh, things like TP use and infuse and and, uh, and set around, which are very purpose built for certain kinds of intellect. And we think that those are starting to surface and become increasingly important. And then on the flip side of this is both the memory storage in network architectures which are sort of exotically different. But at least in terms of capacity, um have quite variability. Specifically, five G, though, is emerging and five g. While it's not necessarily the same computing, there is a lot of symbolism between edge and five G and the kinds of use cases that five G envisions are very similar to those that we've been talking about in the edge world as well. >>Rob, I want to ask you about sort of this notion of program ability at the edge. I mean, we've seen the success of infrastructure as code. Um, how do you see program ability occurring at the edge in terms of fostering innovation and maybe new developer bottles or maybe existing developer models at the edge? Yeah, >>we found a lot of utility in sort of leveraging what we now think of as cloud computing or cloud computing models. Uh, you know, the idea of continue ization extends itself very easily into the edge. Whether that is running a container in a docker runtime, let's say on an edge device which is, you know, resource constrained and purpose built and needs to focus on sort of a very small footprint or even edge clusters edge servers where we might be running a cluster of containers using our kubernetes platform called open shift. Um, you know the course of practices of continuous integration, continuous delivery. What we write a Otherwise think of his Dev ops. Ah, and, of course, the benefits they continue. Realization brings to the idea of component architectures. Three. Idea of loose coupling. The separation of concerns, the ability to mix and match different service implementations to be opposed. Your application are all ideas that were matured in the cloud world but have a lot of utility in the edge world. Now we actually call it edge native programming. But you can think of that as being mostly cloud native programming, with a further extension that there are certain things you have to be aware of what you're building for the edge. You have to recognize that resource is air limited. Unlike the cloud where we have this notion of infinite resource, you don't have that at the edge. Find and constrained resources. Be worried about, you know, Layton sees and the fact that there is a network that separates the different services and that network can be and reliable. It can introduce his own forms of Layton sees it, maybe bandwidth constrained and those air issues that you now have to factor into your thinking as you build out the logic of your application components. But I think by building on the cloud native programming about me paradigm. You know, we get to exercise sort of all of the skills that have been developing and maturing in the cloud world. Now, for the edge >>that makes sense. My last question is around security. I mean, I've often sort of tongue in cheek said, you know, building a moat around the castle doesn't work anymore. The queen i e. The data has left the castle. She's everywhere. So what about the security model? I mean, I feel like the edge is moving so fast you feel confident or what gives you confidence >>that we can secure the edge. You know, the edges does introduce some very interesting and challenging concerns with respect to security because, frankly, the compute is out there in the wild. You know, you've got computers in the store you've got, you know, people walking around the kiosks you have in the manufacturing site, you know, workers that are, you know, in the midst of all of this compute capability and so the attack surface is substantially bigger. And that's been a big focus for us, is how to the only way validate in 30 of the software that was But it also takes advantage of one of the key characters with edge computing to bring to the table, which is, if you think about it. You know, when you've got personal and private information being entered into quote system, the more often you move that personal private data around, and certainly the more that you move it to a central location and aggregate that with other data, the more of a target becomes more vulnerable, exposed that data becomes and by using edge computing, which moves the workloads out to the edge where that did has been created in some sense, you can process on it there and then move it back. They need central location, you don't have to aggregate it. And that actually in itself is a counterbalance of all of the other issues that we also describe about security by essentially not moving the personal privacy and in protecting by keeping it exactly where it began. >>You know, Rob, this is an exciting topic. Is a huge opportunity for IBM and Ginny in and talk about the trillion dollar opportunity and hybrid cloud and the Edge is a multi $1,000,000,000 opportunity for IBM and, uh So you just got to go get her done. But I really appreciate you coming on the Cube and sharing your insights. That awesome topic in the best interest of the David. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for the thank you. Stay safe and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the Cube. This is our coverage of IBM. Think 2020 the digital. Think >>we'll be right back after this short break? >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> 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)

>> (dramatic orchestral music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco. It's the Cube. Covering Red Hat Summit 2018. Brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello welcome back everyone. Day three of wall-to-wall coverage here at Red Hat Summit 2018 live in San Francisco, California, here at Moscone West. I'm John Furrier, your co-host of The Cube with John Troyer, analyst, co-host this week. He's the co-founder of TechReckoning, and advisory and community development firm. Our next guest is our (mumble) of the senior Vice President General Manager of Hewlett Packard Enterprises Pointnext HPE. Great to see you. >> Great to see you as well. Thank you. >> So there's not secret HPE been partnering with companies for many generations. And Red Hat is one of the big strategic partners. Lot of services opportunity, a lot of transformation happening, and the biggest thing is that true Private Cloud and Hybrid Cloud, and Public Clouds all happening an IOT Edge is kind of seeing pretty clearly what's happening. On-Premise isn't going away. >> No! >> It'll look like Cloud is going to run like a Cloud. >> Yeah. >> Has to work with the Cloud or Clouds plural, and then you got the IOT Edge out there-- >> That's right. >> All kind of coming together with software Kubernetes containers all kind of being glue layers in here. So, you know, must be good for you guys okay, customers can now see what you guys have been promoting. So what is HP doing with their ad? How's that tie into that-- >> Sure, sure >> You know, transformation with the cloud? >> You said it very well John. In fact when we talked to our customers weather they realized it or not, it's the Hybrid world, and the environments are hybrid, and like you said, probably private (mumble) are not going anywhere. In fact we did the CTPF acquisition, Red Pexia acquisition, and this is really all to help clients on the Cloud journey. Doesn't really matter to us whether the workload ends up in AWS, Google, Azure, on Prime or dedicated infrastructure. So, that's actually been a huge plus for us to really have a seat at the table, to have a discussion on the customers workload strategy. Now a partner like Red Hat, who have been together working together for probably 18 years now, and it's been a long steady partnership. Who they're number one OAM partner but also the point you made I think from a services standpoint that's just a huge opportunity you know, customers tell us anyone can do infrastructure service or they're looking for platforming service. So in jointly with our consumption capabilities, and Red Hat Open Shift. Now who giving them true Container Product Service. >> Containerization, how we were talking yesterday in our wrap-up. You can bring in the new without killing the old and but it's really fundamental because people want Cloud scale, they want the horizontal scalable application, devops and programing infrastructures code. But they can't just throw out their legacy stuff. Containers which allows them to nurture those applications and workload, and let it take it's natural course. This is actually good for services cause you can take-- there's a solution there. >> That's right! There's absolutely. In fact customers tell us when they looking for the platform, it's not just to help them on their new build. They're looking for help also to run the existing environment and most of the times it's not practical to re-factor, re-architect every single of the Legacy applications, and cause some of them applications, as you know, they were done to leverage the performance optimization on the underlying infrastructure piece of it, and so one of the things we're doing join to the Red Hat is leverage Containerization to provide the portability for the applications. To move between the different environments and whether it's Private Cloud, Public Cloud, but the key thing is portability, and mobility and that's sweet spot for containerization. >> Give some use cases of customers. Take us through a day-in-the-life of maybe a couple different examples where you guys are engaging with Red Hat where you coming in the customer is like, "Okay, here's my situation". What are some of the trends and patterns that you see with customers? What specifically are you, is it workload, moving it to the mobile clouds? Is it more re-platforming On-Premise. >> Yeah! >> What are some of the things that you guys are doing? >> I would say that the bulk of our engagement, and that's one thing that we feel really good about joining Red Hat. We have really shifted our engagement model to be much more outcome driven. So the discussions with the client is always start off with like a workshop, and within that workshop we're actually understanding where the customer is really trying to go, what business outcomes they're trying to achieve? Before we start we going to push a specific technology or stack with specific solution set, and by having that alignment, in in fact, we talk about that IT means to be embedded with the business. Not alignment, embedded with the business, and because the role of IT has changed. So when we talk about workload, right, it's about no longer, and I talked about this earlier today, you no longer running workload just within the Forward Data Center, and the traditional view of that IT owns and operates the Forward Data Center, that's just dead. So, it's really more about managing the supply chain. We talk about the overall workload strategy. Which workloads make the most sense to go on Public Cloud, Private Cloud, and then the discussion also centers around their application portfolio and really understanding which applications truly need to be Cloud Native. Which ones really need to be left in shift, and this whole portability concept comes into play and that's one thing joining with Red Hat because Red Hat is really good joining with us on driving this kind of innovation workshops. Then you heard this earlier today as well, and that's just the fun of if. When no longer you talking about PowerPoint presentation, this and that. It's getting in a room, getting on a White Board and talking about what kind of journey really make sense for that party-- >> That's been really notable here, this week at this conference, right. There a lot of tech, a lot of software talked about, but also on the keynote a lot of people talking about culture, transformation, getting beyond your process, and the places you get stuck as IT professionals. So that's a great way to approach it. Right, nobody starts with a list of skews-- >> No! And absolutely, the other point is that one of the things that always gets missed is the focus on the management of change, and that's one of the key pieces we emphasize that not just the business process, but the culture, the people. How you going to bring them along the change journey. So, we actually put lot of emphasis on the whole area around management of change. We actually have a practice that this is one of the keys areas they focus on. So, you're absolutely right. Key focus area. >> I did want to flip to the products for a second. There was an announcement here now and talk a little bit about HP Synergy, Composable Infrastructure, with Open Shift. Maybe if you have a headline on exactly how you guys describe Synergy and then maybe how we working with Open Shift. >> So the HP Synergy the best way I can describe it is it is truly industry first composable infrastructure, and it gives you the ability to pull fluid resources and with software intelligence built in, and Unified API. It really gives you the ability to pull the resource that you need for specific applications. In fact, I use the analogy, it's kind of like building Legos and you can pull together based on what you going to do at a given moment, and then you decompose it and build something new. So it's all done via a software and truly gives you that flexibility that customers have been seeking. So it's just to me its got a great market traction across the globe and we'll just see continued momentum when joining with the Red Hat. What we've done is now with the announcing new solutions like the one you referenced to, to support ansible automation of the Red Hat Open Shift on the Synergy platform from the three part and the Nimble product lines and it just helps scale the Open Shift and while making container operation simple, scalable and more importantly repeatable. >> I want to make sure that I get this out there, because you guys were early with composable. Dave Valata and I had a debate on this at one of your HP Discovers where, I was really lov'n the composable message. Although it was kind of for a different massage but at that time Devos was really picking up steam. But, it's actually happening now three years later the level of granularity to services level as microservices as it comes the architecture of the future. The services model is literally, "What do you want?" it's not, "Here's the solution", it's like< "What do you need?" so, you're buying off the menu, if you will, so that changes the game. So congratulations on having that composable method first. I got to ask you, the impact to the engagements. So you now have menu of services. Does that change how you guys go to market? You mention that you do kick of meeting, you do the needs assessment, so I get that. Check! good approach. But the customers now, they just want to make sure that it's custom for them. How does that change your engagement? >> At the CXO level, the discussion, no mater which way you start the discussion it tends to kind of follow into a few buckets. Rather it's about generating additional revenue, going to market quicker, or it's about safe to invest, reducing their operating expenses, or it's about securing their information network. One of the thing we find is especially if you take a look at even the containers, applications deploying it. It's one thing to deploy in the corporate environment but if you're trying to scale that with an enterprise. If the enterprises look for added features for their security, whether it's persistent storage and again the focus always turns into what can you do to help drive the total cost of ownership down. I think with Red Hat this is one thing that works great with Open standards. The focus is really much more around not just the simplicity, reducing costs, it's also about improving performance. Rather it's the physical virtual environment. So, you're right, the menu of services. Whether it's you talking about IOT Use Scape and I think you going to see more and more of that with the user experience, the focus that we talked about. Context of our apps. I use the example of going to the airport, getting into whatever transportation you using these days, but the point from point A to point B, you're no longer fumbling through cash or credit cards. It's a very easy experience, much more personalized much more usable and a lot of what some of the hospitality franchises are doing, whether you look at Starwood Properties, Marriott. Now you use a mobile device to access your room, and as soon as you get into some of the hotel property, as soon as you access their Wifi coverage all of a sudden you can actually, the hotel property picks you up. They can provide you with the navigation, how to get to your room and depending on your profile, and whether you opted in or opted out, they will push and their partners will push some specific services to you. So, how you are able to create that kind of experience and drive additional revenue and all that is possible to the point he just make, it's truly a flourishing eco-system of micro services and apps driven by the-- >> I think that business now seeing that which is great about that having a clear line of site that these new apps and new experiences is going to drive top line revenue for your customers. I got to ask you about the services now. With more services comes more delivery, right? So, options, ecosystems, you guys have a pretty big ecosystem right as a lot of other providers. You guys always worked will with multiple companies. How are you guys engaging with Pointnext with now new sets of service providers and your network. You got Cloud Service and you have someone actually maybe could be an intergrater, could be a software developer. How do you deal with this new stake holder in your equation? >> After all the spin mergers have been completed now and I think after DXC1 it really open up the door to get a lot of the system (mumble) back on the table because they don't really view us as competitor anymore. Because we no longer have a large the EDS acquisition that we had now the DXE. So whether you look at Accenture or whether you look at Deloitte and the other (mumble) we're actually partnering with them very well both in joint submission creation but also when we talk about true additions transformation for our client a lot of expertise they bring to us is very complimentary to what we have. So one of the thing we do very well is really around the technology advisor services. (mumble) bring more of the business advisory services as well as the specific vertical depth around the specific vertical whether it's emphasized retail. So when somebody talking about retail of the future or something like that. You marry the two together and you have a strong value proposition. I think the area that we have to put a lot more emphasis upon is more around program management, and because now you actually are trying to show that one outcome for the client, so it's very important whether you working with the ISB or whet ever you working with DSI or whether you working with the other intergraters, and your own resources how you going to bring that pool together around specific tracks and deliver a one common objective for the clients? The Program Manager plays a huge role in this process. >> For the folks watching. What should they know about HP Pointnext that they many or may not know about or should know about that that highlights what you guys are doing. Can you simplify, what is the value proposition that Pointnext is bring to customers? >> As the brand itself states, the Pointnext, it's really about working with the clients finding what's next in their journey. One of the thing I would say and a lot of people get surprised by this, even with after all the spin merge. We are twenty-five thousand people plus strong and we have a lot of great and deep appreciation when it comes to some of these solution and one thing we do very well is partner. Whether it's Red Hat and other SI and bring some unique innovative solution to the market and one of the thing Jim talked about here is all about accelerating user driven innovation, and when you take a look at some of the use cases we're rolling out and I talked about the analytics and the one AI project and how we're helping manufacturing clients or other use cases to truly analyze patterns and predict failures and increase productivity. These discussions customers truly trust us. With the (mumble) and CTP acquisitions we no longer just having On-Premise discussions. We have a strong public hard knowledge. It doesn't matter whether you cloud journey involves AWS, Google, Azure and what not. We are able to actually provide a very objective road map for the workload strategy and the transmission journey. >> The users in the communities as Jim pointed out in the meeting yesterday. The communities in Open Source are now also your customers. >> Right. >> So your customers are also participating in these projects upstream. Are you guys doing an Open Source work? What Pointnext doing? Are you guys relying on that community? Is there a crossover between your customers and those users in the Open Source community? >> Yeah, we always had a very strong (mumble) with the Open Source community. We contributed a lot to the Open Source communities and if you take a look at now as we working with the number of this next generation of partners, whether it's darker, scale it and Red Hat and others it's truly opened up the boundaries as to what can we push to drive new kind of solution there. I love what some of the speakers said yesterday. You remember the example from the Boston Children's Hospital where they talked about they didn't want to deal with the complexity, they'd rather focus on what they do best and so one of the thing we're focused on in the Open Source Continuity is the driving more standardization and automation. So you can run applications as scale. You can run analytics as scale. I think those are somethings we can bring to the table. >> Great! You know the thing about what's going on now with these abstraction layers is an opportunity to create new services and accelerate the services, and congratulations. Great to have you on the program. Thanks for sharing the update. >> Absolutely! >> Congratulation on your deep partnership with Red Hat. Go to see HP Pointnext doing well. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much. >> Live coverage here in San Francisco California. Red Hat Summit 2018 will continue. I'm John Furrier John Troyer. Stay with us more coverage after this short break. >> (electronic music) >> Often times a communities all ready know about facilities that are problematic, because they smell it, they see it but

live from San Francisco it's the cube covering Red Hat summit 2018 brought to you by Red Hat welcome back everyone we're here live in San Francisco for the Red Hat summit 2018 events the cubes exclusive coverage I'm John for the coast of the Q with John Troy you're my Coast analyst as we blues co-founder of tech reckoning advisory and Community Development firm meniscus is ranked at Rangachari vice president general manager Red Hat storage for you to see you again welcome back to the cube thank you thank you invited me again so Steve a lot they said storage is where all the action is with wellness data to be stored somewhere with the cloud yeah it's still important you guys have a new concept yeah on storage yeah I'm storage what is the unstirred you know I think essentially when we got into the storage business the status quo was your traditional storage mainframe so wheeling a piece of gear and it's to scale up and have things workloads running there but with the movement towards cloud especially with hybrid cloud where you really can't take a physical box and move it into a public cloud and in the last year or so with containers the common theme that's emerging is things like agility things like scale things like almost having ubiquitous storage all around the place is becoming more and more important so our thought is it almost turns a storage the phenomenal storage industry upside down on its head because the things that people cared about decade ago on the workloads are no longer relevant or less relevant than where they are today so and you know it seems to be people seem to get it so we're pretty I mean we've seen the strain on servers server less storage less so in a way this the recent resource pool is not just you know a box and provision the LUNs more like okay I need storage exact a button I don't care where it comes from is that we're kind of getting to somebody that's exactly what it is right I think in a in a different way right one of the customers said I want storage to be everywhere but nowhere right in that they want storage to be a pervasive but it has to be invisible so they don't have to worry about things like zoning and LAN masking on one piece hardware and do the same thing with twenty other pieces what our solution offers offers is truly a scalable storage platform that's running on any kind of footprint physical virtual private a public cloud but it's a common user experience across all these different footprints and that's why and the other part of this thing which is also different is yes it does appeal to the storage admins but more importantly as you become as organizations of all the cloud architects and DevOps know what they care about is like I want storage to be as invisible as possible but yet I want to make the devil developers more and more productive so I think we are I feel really right track in appealing to how storage needs to be viewed it's a no brainer in my mind if you're DevOps you want to go total cloud horizontally scalable you need gel apps stores just to be available programmable all that's great stuff question I have for you is what's the impact of customers who have been buying boxes for decades so what's the impact of them with Red Hat so I'm still gonna need boxes and still gonna put them somewhere and so it's an on-prem cloud operation so I still need storage bits cloud obviously those guys have their own storage but I mean but you still gotta plug it in and put storage in sure what's the impact of the customer well I think they I mean we do we are practical enough and we rarely realize that no customer is gonna pull the plug one day and move on to the next infrastructure what we are seeing more and more is as those new workloads which are dramatically different the previous workloads as they come into play then they have to rethink how they develop deploy provisioned storage infrastructure so that's where we come in so it's not about in either/or it's about how do you are meant your existing storage infrastructure but think about it in a modern way think about how you can future-proof your architectures so that it scales so that's the way we think about it wrong how should people be thinking about storage at different levels of the architecture there's actually a lot of storage here there's been a lot of sessions and the ecosystem expo there's a lot of storage providers but you've got the we've been talking a lot about open shift and an open shift on OpenStack here at the show this is this year so if you're at the OpenStack lair versus on the open shift layer how should you be thinking about storage and and what and what products are plugging in at those layers yes so you know think with OpenShift a couple of days ago earlier this week we announced our 150 customers we're actually deploying our product which is called containing nearly storage CNS for short and what that does is it enables it's essentially the storage infrastructure for open shaft so wherever open ship goes the storage footprint follows along whether you're running it on Prem on top of virtualized infrastructure or you're running any of these public clouds and the most interesting part of that is you know getting back to the earlier conversation we try to make it as invisible as possible so you we as vendors don't have to say you've got to deploy it here so make it as invisible as possible and as seamless as possible now with OpenStack it's a different set of experience because that's kind of infrastructure up right and the advantage for us is if you look at the OpenStack community in general almost 70% of the OpenStack community in one way shape or form uses a safe project so it's almost become I wouldn't call it almost de facto standard on how people manage the storage infrastructure with an open stack but even there the cardinal rules are still the same which is when they think about spinning up a machine the storage has to be attached automatically to it and then scale as their computer in the storage infrastructure scales and this the scale is the question we're living in a new era of cloud economics scale is key and we here the customers here Red Hat Red Hat's customers talking about things like horizontally scalable asynchronous micro sets of micro services levels of granularity this is the programmable new fabric that is a new infrastructure of the Internet you know 30 year old statuses from e-commerce DNS they're you know gonna be abstracted away with a new abstraction layer yes hello opens yes hello you know new things kubernetes and in containers so with that being said there's an opportunity yes so when you that's kind of like the state of the yard now but you're welcome to an enterprise like what's kubernetes again so you got some enterprises are learning about kubernetes and it's good news for them learning about containers where they don't have to throw away anything you just containerize it how is that impacting the classic definition of software-defined datacenter yeah and software-defined storage because those are the two important trends that have been happening in Software Defined does it accelerate it does it change it a little bit what's your thoughts on those do you know I think it accelerates it and here's why that's a great question right because when you look at organizations especially in the container era right where there are certain companies who are actually I would argue even bypassing you know and building it container first strategy as opposed to a cloud first strategy right so that's that's the way they are thinking about this and when you talk about route through that lens storage essentially is an application as opposed to infrastructure so you have to talk as three or you have to talk whatever protocol it is so it just becomes part and parcel of that so the challenge or what vendors or customers are looking at us is how can you make it as seamless as possible so that they can get the acceleration can happen because a year ago I think nine months ago there was a survey that was done where customers said the top two issues with moved to accelerated move the containers were storage or persistent storage and security well I think we have a firm handle on what we need to do to really help our customers at least address the storage part of that discussion what's up what and what's the make of the use cases right now how many customers are deploying this roughly order of magnitude mean let's go into details but I mean you know you know how's the migration okay the early adopters and in mode now is it fast followers is it the rest of the market I think it's still in the early adoption in the truest definition I think you know using the baseball analogy we're at the top of the first inning right and most of the workloads tend to be new workloads right there are some left cloud native but there's some but as far as the use cases it is you know across the board you know no sequel databases see I see Dee Jenkins type of environment so we surprised vertical centric either because storage your Stora just used by everybody yes there is one layer where there's certain I is free apps that tend to be focused on certain verticals but they happen right by our availability or I ah she might need financial services or stretch clusters and all those kinds of things okay cool I love the concept of unstitch but that does leave in the cold a little bit the people that we used to call storage admins right so now multi cloud hybrid cloud a lot of examples and blood demonstration operators operators done does the job of the storage the person you who used to be in charge of storage it seems like that that changes now even with unstitch a lot of automation a lot of fabric a lot of pooling does it itself but you still are on a lot of different clouds and things like that how do you how are you talking to customers about that so you know I think one of the I think the term that people have started to use as generalists right if you look at it you know five years ago or seven years ago you had a silo of systems administrators storage administrators and network administrators now the whole vertical store the silos have been in a way normalized so now you have a pool of people might be the major is in storage but the minor is a networking by the major isn't compute their minor is in storage so it really helped her all the organizations that we talked to now they say look I have a collective pool that can help me where I need to get to so this plays really well what about that audience absolutely it does and the hybrid cloud equation in your thoughts there cuz lastly we'll keep on did a great piece of research on true private cloud and there and they are looking for more folks to first rating the next set of surveys so I'd love to introduce you to the Peter verse over there but the point is was true private cloud report showed that on-premise cloud if occasion whatever you want to call it action was much higher and growing it's not so much on premise has been dying or being reduced its transitioning to on-premise cloud operations which is essentially cloud it's a fat edge or you know and the cloud is that what is the cloud so you're seeing still a lot of work being done on premises where there we recasting reimagining cloud so how is that impacting the hybrid cloud because I've been cause it's not really a product it's a yes it's a journey it's a connection between two clouds so storage data the data plane control planes are all kind of like evolving your thoughts on multi cloud and as hybrid starts to accelerate that's the path I'll see open shift but your thoughts on so the I think the way we think about this right is hybrid cloud it's not so much that everything is running on app I absolutely agree with the research right but the customers that we talk to they are still building the foundational business on I got a you know keep the private cloud make it as seamless and as efficient as possible but there are certain workloads that lend themselves well to running on a public cloud now it's not so much as a disjointed these two universes never talk to each other it's how do we the Red Hat try to bring the two together so the user experience you almost in a way try to minimize where it actually runs right now so that's that's an open shift is a classic example of that right where you're running it on Prem but you're also running on these public clouds if certain workloads that are great on a public cloud an example of that is one of the largest airports and Europe so they use OpenShift on Prem but they also use OpenShift on a couple of other public clouds and our CNS product which is a continuous tourist product run runs along all those three environments so to the end-user it's essentially a seamless experience and that's you know as the journey unfolds I think that's what you're going to see more and more is about how do we start to know that the storage foundation is built how do we start to exposed some data services that can run across all these different that's gonna be killer so here's an update in the business how's the business what's the road map looked like what are the things that you guys are working on what's the priorities so business is like we announced on Monday 150 net new customers over the last 12 months and that's just on one specific strategic imperative which is containing native storage or help the customers with a container journey besides that I think there are two other pillars we are focused on one is around hybrid cloud right which is how do you really provide the best storage substrate for customers building private clouds and hybrid clouds and the third part is hyperconvergence because I think what our customers are asking for is they've seen the power of hyperconvergence but they want an open-source variant of hyperconvergence for their environment and stay tuned on that front we got some exciting stuff going on and we'll keep you folks updated on the final question what's going on the show here for you what's notable but the folks that are watching who couldn't make it here what's the vibe what's the hall way conversation what's the customer conversate with steer some color of what's happening here at breadhead summit here in san francisco so a lot of things but then I wish we had time but I know we're short of time here but the few things I want to highlight one is all the technology demos that we did yesterday today and some in the tomorrow or tomorrow timeframe you'll see are containing native storage or a storage portfolio be an integral part of every one of the teams that we are talking about so that's you know and we've got very positive feedback on that we have over two dozen text sessions and my understanding is I don't go to those my understandings they've all been standing room only so there is definite customer interest in where we are what we're doing so we this show has been awesome so for us yeah storage is the gift that keeps on giving now it's going to be storage less than unstirred whatever word you want I like storage list because it sounds like server list which doesn't mean anything either but it sounds good but it's a full of resource gratulations I play it's a hot area certainly having programmable infrastructure means better development time and certainly making it you know elastic and making it horizontally scalable is the dream we all want to get to fast so be there more live coverage bringing you all the action here in the in the open here at Moscone you're in the mill the floors the cube coverage of Red Hat Summer 2018 I'm John Fourier with John Troy your stay with us we back with more after this short break thanks John

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, here on theCUBE, our live coverage continues here at Dell Technologies World 2018. We're at the Sands Exposition Center. Along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walsh. Glad to have you here with us on day one of our three days of coverage here. We're now joined by David Shacochis, who is the Vice President of Product IT Solutions and New Market Development at CenturyLink, and Jim Aluotto. Did I get it right, Jim? >> Jim Aluotto. >> Aluotto. We practiced this many times. Who is the Director of Cloud Provider Business, Americas, at VMware. Gentlemen, in all seriousness, thank you both for being with us. >> Jim: Thank you. >> We certainly appreciate your time. So talking software-defined data centers. First off, let's step really high level here, and just talk about main attributes, qualities. How would you, if your elevator speech would be about what the SDDC would be, how would you describe it, and what are the features? >> Sure, well I'll jump in front of the company that sort of coined the term, and get my answer first, and then let Jim expound from there. Really, I think we can sort of sum up the software-defined data center in a lot of what we've learned in creating a Managed Private Cloud, based on what you would call a software-defined data center platform, in that it minimizes the number of moving parts. We've been doing Managed Private Cloud for as long as Managed Private Cloud has been a thing. And what that used to mean, five, six, years ago, was provision to the network, provision to security devices, maybe it's a converge device, maybe it isn't, maybe it's two different vendors. Sure, you've got vSphere in the middle of it all, but now you're talkin' of different storage tiers. If you want different flavors of storage, you're talkin' to multiple vendors back there. Piecing together a private cloud solution used to mean talkin' to a number of different technology stacks, a number of different API frameworks. And so software-defined data center, where the rubber hits the road, and sort of, from the cold face, means just a simplified view of being able to automate all that together, have it all orchestrated, and have it be one common stack. >> Jim: Nicely done. >> Okay, well, you go do the bookish version. >> Well really, in its most simplistic form, spinning up end-to-end complete automation across compute, network, and storage assets. And lately we've gone to market with VMware Cloud Foundation, that CenturyLink is now spinning up as the root of their service that they're going to market with. And so we've gone through an evolutionary process over the years, where we've proven to the world the advantages of virtualization, virtualize and compute. VMware, in its Act II, is now virtualizing the network. We're virtualizing storage now with VSAN taking off like wildfire. But now we're stitching it all together, in the form of a complete, end to end, automated and provisioned, encapsulated, virtualized data center. >> And that's the big efficiency here, right? It's one-stop shop, basically. You don't have to go out and as you said, look for a number of different avenues, or different pieces of this puzzle. >> So it does, it drives efficiencies in the data center, but it also drives efficiencies and opportunities around the way you operate it. And one of the things that we've been seeing, and it's sort of foundational to our managed services practice, is that the software-defined data center actually drives software-defined managed services. You have to change the way you do managed services to take advantage of all that capability. We have a service we call Cloud Application Manager, which is really our tool that we use to model applications, deploy managed tooling to that application for 24/7 monitoring and management, and uptime and stability support, and then do analytics on that application, to be able to show cost-savings opportunities, best-practice opportunities, in more of an aggregated, reported way. So Cloud Application Manager is a much more automated version of managed services. It's not ITIL from 10 years ago, right? It's not up/down, just base-level ticketing. You need to be able to change the way you do managed services, and you can only do that if you have a reliable underpinning platform. So less moving parts, a software-defined data center lets you change that, let's you change the way you deliver managed services. >> So the CenturyLink has incredible technical chops. There's always a point where you have to decide, build versus buy. CenturyLink, you can choose to build all of this. You can take parts from the open source community, build extremely custom solutions. Why VMware? When you guys have the technical ability to build it, make a differentiating offering, why start with VMware as the base? >> Yeah, I think you go back to what VMware's been in the market doing, and I even sort of talked past it a second ago. The vSphere's foundation is really solid, right? The device, the flexibility you have with the hardware layer, the flexibility you have at the real core or nucleus of your compute and memory virtualization stack is super important. And then really the idea of building out into the software-defined very common ownership stack, and why VMware was great to partner with, with regards to building out our next-gen Managed Private Cloud offering, is because they've wired everything to work together. And you said there are things you could go and try to build on your own? I think it's interesting. What we're starting to see is that, just to use somethin' like OpenStack, as an example, building a private cloud out of OpenStack is certainly possible, but there's no one company owning it all end to end. And if you're a service provider, it's up to you to go figure it all out. Or you can go and work with maybe one integrator partner, but they're making their own set of choices, and now you're basically locked in to that particular deployment model. So I think working with VMware, what we found is, first off, they've accelerated our time to market, and our time to value around a Managed Private Cloud offering. There's a lot of interoperability in there. There's a lot we're able to do around hybrid applications, because something you deploy to VMware inside VCF is very similar to something you deploy in your own home-grown environment, to one of the Managed Private Clouds that we've been running for five or six years, where there's just a very clean migration and upgrade path with that interoperability. >> And really it's all about the market opportunity that VMware brings to the table. Our cloud strategy is incredibly simplistic, but yet it has such a compelling business and value proposition, not only to our mutual customers that we're going to market in joint pursuit with, but also to our cloud providers, 500,000 plus enterprise customers using VMware. As we take them along the journey, building out their private clouds, that represents over 60 million workloads, with the inevitability of them moving out to the cloud. So what we've teed up is a cloud provider community with our most strategic partner, like CenturyLink, to increase the odds of that, capturing those workloads onto a VMware platform. The market opportunity that we bring to the table for somebody like CenturyLink is quite extensive, let alone all the benefits that the mutual customer gets. They get to protect their data center, their data and application assets, all the reliability, compatibility, security, that they would expect from their own VMware infrastructure, they would expect from a VMware cloud provider, like CenturyLink. >> Well David, let's talk about the interface into CenturyLink. One of the things that customers are startin' to realize is that they have to differentiate, based on just internal IP. So there's the API to everything, now. What's, if you could describe, well, maybe there is. What's the API to CenturyLink, as I'm consuming this software-defined data center that you guys provide? >> Okay, so sure, so that's actually a really exciting opportunity for us, and it's one that we've been sort of pivoting. If you sort of look at the history of CenturyLink, there was a, and this sort of goes back 10 years, but there was a huge spike of CenturyLink's entry into the business to business market. Acquiring quests, getting the business that basically announced their entrance into the B2B marketplace. Then there was a number of more technology oriented and virtualization management oriented acquisitions, because it recognized two things: one, we needed to be in IT solutions, in cloud, in data center, but also that the network was heading towards a highly virtualized, highly orchestrated, highly software-defined model. The network of the 21st century was not going to be about buying a ton of big iron and putting it into pops anymore, it was going to be increasingly around managing x86 virtualization. So that set off a period of time within CenturyLink where we were acquiring managed services companies, IT solution companies, virtualization companies, that were helping really to increase two things: our ability to virtualize and manage virtualization, and then, secondly, develop software in new ways, and become much more familiar at the application layer. We spent about five or six years with companies like SAVAS, and Tier3, and Cognilytics, really adding to the company in terms of brain power, and know how, and workload fluency. And then now we've just recently closed on the merger and acquisition with Level 3. So now we're very much on a network scale ascendency. The interface into CenturyLink is really taking a lot of those assets that we've built up, and moving them together into more of a platform topology, which is re-architecting the way that we work. We've bought cloud companies, and we invested in virtualization to help us reorganize exactly what you're talking about, which is the way of interfacing with CenturyLink, driving customer experience, being able to have a common user experience, whether you're interacting with it at a CLI, or via an API call, or with a tutorial that you're following via an online interface, and having a common look and feel across those services. So it's a journey. We're still on our way there, but we have the very beginnings of a lot of commonality that's starting to occur, whereby if you log in to our public cloud management service, Cloud Application Manager, or if you log in to our network interconnect service, Network Exchange and Cloud Connect Solutions, or if you log in to our public and private cloud offerings, very common look and feel across the piece, where it's one identity, one billing collection, but then we allow each of those individual services to go and innovate on their own. And that's the key thing. You can go drive common user experience. That's super, but if you're waiting on a portal team to go design your UI for you, you're slowing down. And so we're really bein' able to design a framework whereby there's one common UI, but it's more design patterns that every internal team picks up and works with, and then integrates into their release. >> And it's very important for VMware as well, as we develop our IP that's relevant for cloud provider use cases, is to open up those APIs to do just that, give you the opportunity to own that customer experience and differentiate yourself within the marketplace. >> I think we talked about this last time, too, where VMware's entree into the service provider world really taught them some lessons, and they started adding things to their product that make it easier to be a service provider. And some of the things, like with vCloud Director, and some of the ways that you can now work with that at an HTML5 layer, and sort of create your own version around it, almost interact with vCloud Director at an API level, allows us to factor it in to that mentality of design pattern, thinking in a common UI across all of our services. Right now we're working with a lot of those features on vCloud Director to enable our Managed Private Cloud service. >> So what if the conversation is being then able to show it's all about making it real? What have the real conversations been? >> Yeah, so the real conversations with our customers that we're starting to have are really, and just to tie it a little bit back to this idea of a software-defined data center, I think they're excited by the possibilities. They're certainly looking to really drive instrumentation at more places than they ever were able to drive instrumentation before. And there's the obvious industry examples of IoT, and sensors, and things like that, but even things like business process, and being able to theoretically just rework the way a particular system works, turn it into a micro service, or an application that they can factor in to their overall IT strategy, but then have that start to feed in to a broader data lake that they can then start making business analytical decisions from. That's one of the big patterns that we see, whether it's occurring with a lot of our customers that we work with in the built environment, but in working with the customers that work with CenturyLink, in some of the most deep and influential ways, are the ones that are out there sort of "in space". And I don't mean in space, I mean out there in a geographic spread, like retail solutions, and physical facilities, and things like that, where you have people coming to your location, and you're tryin' to gather all that data back into more of a centralizing motion. That's where we're having some of our most interesting conversations, with those retail brands, with bigger facilities that we want to be able to bring on net, and basically have them turn into data sources for their data lake, that they can then start moving forward and analyzing with some either professional services or tooling, to go and start looking for where those insights lie. >> So for me this is music. What I'm seeing, customers want to wane off of IT functions altogether. They want to invest their resources around their core business. >> John: Their business, right. >> Yeah, exactly. So what they're doin' is, they're relying on the subject matter experts now. The whole notion of being concerned about security, and reliability out in the cloud, that's long gone. They recognize that folks like CenturyLink can deliver at greater economies of scale, more secure, highly available. >> Yeah, and one of the things, one of the best ways we can facilitate those conversations is to share a little bit of our own journey. And it's not because we want to stare at our own product catalog, and walk through it page by page, but to share some of our own journey with the perspective of realizing a long time ago that in our managed security business, it was a big data problem. It's not an implementation and controls problem. And so we've been driving a whole lot more of our story, and some of our service strategy is, not only is it, we feel a lot of these are very valuable services in their own right, but they show off a pattern of: instrument it, drive it back to a data lake, and then take more of an analytical approach to it to add value, as opposed to just being very transactional. >> We talked about the journey. It's been a good one, right? And continued success with that. >> Indeed. >> Thanks for joining us here on theCUBE, and we appreciate the time. >> Okay. >> Good, thank you very much Dave and Jim. Back with more. You're watching theCUBE. We are live, here at Dell Technologies World 2018 in Las Vegas. (percussive music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back everyone, live here in Las Vegas it's AWS re:Invent, it's theCUBE exclusive coverage of re:Invent 2017, our 5th year covering Amazon, watching the explosive growth. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media, with Justin Warren my co-host here for this segment. Our next guest is Raejeanne Skillern, Vice President of the Data Center Group and also General Manager of the Cloud Service Provider, part of Intel. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, it's nice to be here again. >> So, Intel inside the Cloud is big growth for you, what's the numbers look like, your earnings look pretty good, what's the business update? >> You know, it is growing, and it's growing in so many different angles, it's coming from multiple fronts. Part of it is just these killer workloads that are driving the need for change. Artificial Intelligence, immersive media, network transformation to handle all the data. It is causing this real spur in growth, from both the very largest of Cloud service providers across the ecosystem, and one of the things when I look at the growth, I try to say, now where is it really coming from? Yes, Amazon is just insanely growing fast and the big guys are doing well, their global expansion, But, also, the next wave of Cloud service providers, and regions, and different countries, are doing really well too, they're actually growing faster, so the whole ecosystem is growing with demand. >> Yeah, it's certainly not slowing down. I can't see any way in which that it would slow down at all, if anything it's just gonna get faster. >> I think so, and when I track trends like CapEx spending and analyst predictions on the future, consumer demand, everything indicates we're gonna see another strong 5-10 years. >> Justin: Yep. >> So how do the Cloud service providers shake out because if you look at this creativity of software renaissance, the interactivity, all the amazing use cases, from Thorn, finding missing exploited children, to, you know, high end HPC scientists, genome sequencing stuff. Massive use cases. >> Raejeanne: Right. >> So that's going to be a tsunami of software developers, Changing. How does that shape the Cloud providers, does it segment them into tiers, how are you guys looking at that business? >> Well I think it breeds a lot of new opportunity. So, yes, you see more and more new services and capabilities to enable developers to more easily develop code, to more quickly, to get better utilization out of their code. But I also think just the concept of a mocking performance and ease, means new insights, new services, new capabilities, things that we just couldn't, a developer, we could not have done before. So it's that, just like electricity, when you make it cheaper and easier to consume, we use more of it. I think Cloud computing is the same way. So we're seeing kind of a natural tam expansion, market expansion, around these things you just couldn't do without the Cloud. >> And new workloads, too. >> And new workloads. >> And all of those workloads, Intel is basically completely repositioning itself from just being a chip company, it's like, you're a data company now. So, what are some of the things that Intel's doing to help people understand how they can make use of these new software techniques, and these new tools, and the capabilities of the Intel chips they're dependent on. So what are some of the things that Intel's doing there? >> So obviously it starts at the bottom, with the best silicon, not just compute, but compute, network, and storage, and accelerators, for all different workloads. We move up to the platforms, we do a lot of hardware engineering with the ecosystem, with our top CSPs, actually many top CSPs, we do direct engineering work to get better systems of architecture. We have a host of libraries we're creating that ease of use, and mocking performance out of it. Reference architectures, co-partners, and solutions. So for us when we talk about being a data company, we can't do it from just even being a chip, we have to be a solutions partner, with Cloud service providers, enterprise, IOT edge solutions, we try to be there. >> You guys always enabled some very cool demos in the day, even back on the PC you always had interactivity, you pioneered multimedia. You always had that eye on the applications. Okay, on stage today all this greatness is out there: NFL demos, all this cool stuff. That's really powering your business, so talk about your relationship with Amazon web services, what's it like, how do you guys engage with them, what's the relationship, 'cause you guys are power engine for AWS. >> Yeah, well we try to be. We wanna be the best performance into their data center. We've had a many, many, many year deep relationship with Amazon. It started from simple co-development and engineering, and is extended much more pervasively across their environment and it poured sometimes into the services. We just, we want to one, make sure that what we're delivering today has been already optimized specifically for their unique environment, and that means we have to start a year or two before, if not earlier, to really understand where they're going, and get their feedback, so that when we either optimize a product or technology across compute network or storage, or create something potentially custom for them, right, it takes a number of years of work, so our partnership has a lot of in-depth engineering, it has a lot of future and near-term enabling, and then we hope to see an expansion. What we really want to do is use our technology to differentiate Amazon. We want their services better because of the technologies or capabilities we put in, so wherever they wanna align in terms of strategic investment and growth markets, we wanna make sure the silicon can enable it. >> Intel always marched to the cadence of Moore's law, and you guys have always been a rapid machine, execution. Amazon looks good, I mean, they're executing. >> Raejeanne: They're fast. >> I mean, what's it like? Share some story, I mean, they're years ahead, what's it like working with Amazon? >> Well I think, I mean, they are fast. It's amazing how quickly they can move and innovate, how rapidly those innovations roll out to the market. I will be honest, there are times where we miss windows because we are slow, and they just look at us like, "Well we told you "this four weeks ago, here it is, right?" (laughing) >> Can't design a chip in four weeks. We don't have kubernetes, no containers for chips. >> I mean they are just, they have it down. So what we're trying to do is part of this transition from being a client company, to a Cloud and data center company, and IOT company, means everything we have to do is faster. So we have to design our chips more quickly, we have to put in more modularity for faster derivatives, and we have to move at Cloud speed, not classic Intel speed. >> Right, yeah. So what are some of the lessons that other companies can take from Intel, I mean it's a hardware company, or it was originally a hardware company, and now you've transitioned to being a Cloud company, and you're being pushed by Amazon to move faster and faster. So what are some of the lessons that you can share with other companies who are trying to start moving at Cloud speed? >> You know, I think, I love Jeff Bezos' approach, customer-obsessed. If you aren't understanding how the end customers, starting with Amazon's customers, but also then my customer, Amazon, how they're using and consuming technology, we can't really create good technology. I would say a lot of companies create a great thing and then try to go sell it at markets, >> Yep. >> Versus starting with the market, and creating the specific thing. The other thing we've learned, I mean, Intel is a very data driven company, both in our decision making, as well as our company growth, this is, and we talk about it from a developer envirogroup, but it's the same iterate fast. Fail quickly and move on. You don't need perfect. This is one of our learnings, right? Don't wait six months for perfect, move fast, get 70-80% of the way there, I've heard governments say they get 40-50 way percent of there, make decisions, because they have to move that quickly. For military or other exercises. So what we're trying to do is match that type of speed as well. >> It's a world of compute now, I mean, I was at Alibaba Conference, they had their Cloud coachings hearing it here, the same message: more compute. They're not saying I need more little chips, they're saying I want more horsepower. >> Raejeanne: Right. >> And you guys just announced the C5 instance, recently, a couple weeks. >> And the budget. >> What is that gonna do? I mean, it's fairly new. >> Raejeanne: Yes. >> What does that mean? Is that gonna be an IOT edge opportunity? Is it all workloads? That's gonna be like, a pretty big deal. What's your take on it? >> It is, their C instant line has always been for high performances growing workloads. We're seeing like, for HPC workloads, anywhere from two to four-and-a-half X the performance moving from C4 to C5, right? This is an instance that can handle the most demanding workloads from high performance compute to artificial Intelligence to others. So, you know, we have our latest and greatest Intel ZN scalable process in there, a very high performant one, that we customized specifically for their environment, but then they do all this amazing software work and efficiency work around it, to really unlock. I was really glad to see when they talked about those C5 instances launching, 25% on workload's price performance up to 50% price performance improvements on some others. So, I mean, once again, when you can take more compute and make it more cost effective, it's just a lot more things people can do in the industry, so we're very excited about that instance. >> What's the biggest thing in the past five years that jumped out at you in the massive change in the industry? Application, startups, business growth? What amazes you? >> Yeah, there's so much, I would kind of combine it under what the industry calls Digital Transformation. You know, when I look at it, one of the points that always sticks in my mind, is CEOs, 70% of them have digital transformation at the heart because the data suggests that by the end of 2018, the top 40% of the top 20, 40% of the top 20 industries are gonna be disrupted. So that to me, that amount of disruption happening, and the company's trying to disrupt themselves whether it's healthcare, retail, manufacturing, oil and glass, the use and pervasiveness of where technology and Cloud can fit has really kind of astonished me and I love, once again, I love that they're making what they do today better. But the new things that they're doing, I mean, in healthcare, right? It's just amazing. >> I mean, we used to use the word back in the day when I broke into the biz in the '80s, Data Processing Department. I mean, the Cloud is one big data processor. >> It is. It is a compute power. We call it the brain, right? If Cloud is now ubiquitous, right? It is, from public Cloud to private to Edge, and everything in between, it's that brain, right? >> John: It's the brain. >> That's enabling the compute, so we have to-- >> You people have always been on the inside of everything, so congratulations on your success, on the Cloud growth. General manager of the Cloud service provider and Vice President of Data Center Group, Raejeanne Skillern, here inside theCUBE with Intel, I'm Jeff Furrier with Justin Warren, back with more live coverage, here in Las Vegas, for Amazon web services 2017 re:Invent. More after this short break. (techno music)

>> SiliconANGLE Media presents theCUBE! Covering the Alibaba Cloud annual conference. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier... >> Hello everyone, welcome to exclusive coverage with SiliconANGLE, Wikibon, and theCUBE here in Hangzhou, China for Alibaba Cloud's annual event here in Cloud City, the whole town is a Cloud. This is their event with developers, music festivals, and again, theCUBE coverage. Our next guest is Dhiraj Mallick, who is the Vice President of the Data Center Group, and the General Manager of Innovation, Pathfinding, and Architecture Group. That's a mouthful. Basically the CTO of the Data Center Group, trying to figure out the next big thing. >> That's right, John. >> Thanks for spending the time. >> It's my pleasure. >> We're here in China, it's-- You know in the U.S., we're looking at China, and we say okay, the fourth largest Cloud, Alibaba Cloud? >> Yes. >> Going outside of Mainland China, going global. You guys are strategic partners with them. >> Yes. >> They need a lot of compute, they need a lot of technology. Is this the path that you're finding for Intel? >> Yeah, so we've been collaborators with Alibaba for over 10 years, and we view them as a very strategic partner. They're one of the Super Seven, which is our top seven Cloud providers, and certainly in China, they're a very relevant customer for many years. We engage with them on a variety of fronts. On the technology side, we engage with them on what their key pinpoints are, what is the problems they want to be solving three to five years out, and then we co-develop, or co-architect solutions with them. >> So, I want to get your take on the event here in China, and how it relates to the global landscape, because I, it's my first time here, and I was taken back by the booth. I walked through Alibaba's booth, and obviously Jack Ma is inspirational. Steve Jobs like the culture, and artistry and science coming together, but I walked through the booth, it's almost too good to be true. They've got Quantum Computing, a Patent Wall, they've got Hybrid Cloud, they got security, they have IoT examples with The City Brain, a lot of great tech here at Alibaba Cloud. >> So I think the technologies that they're investing in are very, very impressive. Most cloud companies are probably not as far along as them, and looking at such a broad range of technologies, the Brain Project is really exciting, because it's going to be the Nexus of smart cities, both in China, as well as globally. The second thing that's very interesting is their research and investments in Quantum. While Quantum is not here today, it's certainly on the frontier, and Intel also has significant investments in sort of unpacking where Quantum will go, and what promises it offers to address. >> What I find interesting is that also hearing the positioning of, I kind of squint through the positioning, they're almost talking Cloud-native, DevOps, but they have all this goodness under the hood, and they're kind of talking IT-transitioning to Data Technology. Everything's about data to these guys, not just collecting data, using data with software. Now, that's really critical, because isn't that software-defined, data-driven is a hot trend? >> Yes, software-defined and data-driven is a very hot trend, in fact at Intel our CEO and us all believe that we've entered the data economy, and that the explosion in data is, and the thirst for analyzing that data to be able to drive smart business analytics is really the key to this digital revolution. I was reading an industry report by one of the analysts that said by 2019 there would have been over 100 billion dollars spent on business intelligence. And so, the real key is this data economy. >> The intersection of things, and even industrial internet, IIot, Industrial Iot, with artificial intelligence AI, intelligence Intel inside that word, interesting play on words-- >> Yes. >> Is coming together, and we've covered what you guys were doing on Mobile World Congress this year, where 5G was clearly an end-to-end architecture. You got FPGAs, all this goodness here going on. So that's 5G, and that's going to fuel a lot of IoT if you think of it like that way, but now AI. >> Yes. >> It's Software. How does that connect? Because that's the path we see forward on the Wikibon analyst side, we see software eating the world, but data eating software. And now you got 5G creating more data. >> Yeah, so the way we look at it at Intel is, we have data-center technologies that are fueled by the growth at the Edge by IoT devices, because they're creating demand for more processing capability to be able to unpack and analyze that information, and it's a self-fulfilling circle. We call it the virtual cycle of growth, because the data center feeds IoT demand and then IoT feeds the data center. And so it's the combination of those. What 5G does, is 5G forms the connectivity fabric between the data center and the Edge. It allows data to be pre-positioned at the correct places in the network, so that you minimize latencies through the network, and can process or do the analytics on it as quickly as you possibly can. >> So we were talking before we came on camera about Jack Ma, they call him Jackie Ma here, keynote being very inspirational, and talking moving to a new industrial era, a digital economy, all that good stuff, very, very inspirational. Let's translate that into the data center transformation, because we're seeing the data center and the Cloud with Hybrid Cloud become really critical to support what you were just talking about which is, how do you put it all together? It sounds so easy, but it really is difficult. >> It is, and so our vision is that in order to be able to fulfill this data economy, we will need to have five key innovations in the data center. The first innovation, in no particular order, is that the data center will be frictionless. And what I mean by frictionless, is that there will be zero to low latencies in order to provide that real-time experience at the Edge. So latency is extremely critical, and the way we believe that that can be achieved is by moving from copper to light. And Intel has significant investments in leadership products and silicon photonics that will enable switches to be based on photonics. It'll enable CPUs, and server hosts to be based on light. So we believe that light is a critical aspect to this success. The second aspect of frictionless is the need for liquid cooling and that was in the keynotes from Simon Hu this morning, that the liquid cooling is going to be essential to be able to enable a lot more horsepower in these data centers to be able to handle the volume of data that's coming. >> So you guys obviously with the photonics and the liquid cooling, you guys have been working on this in your labs for a long time, it's great R&D, but you need the connective tissue because with 5G you're now talking about a ubiquitous RF cloud, powering autonomous vehicles. We're seeing the Brain Project here, ET Brain, the City Brain-- >> Yes. >> Which is essentially IoT and big data being a big application that they're showcasing. What's the connective tissue? How does that work, from the data center, to the Edge? What's Intel's position? How do you see it? And what's going to unfold in front of our eyes? >> Yeah, so two things, so number one, I believe that the data center is boundary-less. It's not based on four physical walls. It's a connected link between the data center, and all the Edge devices that you called IoT. In order to fulfill this, you have to have 5G technology. We're invested in Silicon, in radio technologies, as well as in driving the 5G industry in consortia, to be able to bring 5G solutions to market. We think that 5G, as well as a tiered architecture between the Edge to the center, where you do some processing at the Edge, the radio stations, some in intermediate data centers, and then some in the back end Cloud data center, is what's going to be essential, and Intel has significant investments, both in developing this distributed hierarchical architecture, as well as in 5G. >> That's a great point. I want to just unpack that, and double-click on it a little bit, because you mentioned data at the Edge, and you also said earlier, low latency. Okay, a lot of people have been talking about, it costs you speed and time to move data around. So there's no real one general architecturing, where you have to kind of decide the architecture for the use case. >> Yes. >> So, the beauty is in the eye of the beholder, whoever has the workloads or the equipment. >> Yes. >> How do you look at that, because now you're thinking about, if I don't want to move data around, maybe you shouldn't, maybe you want to move data around. How does that fit with the Cloud of model, because we're seeing Cloud being a great use case for IoT in one instance, and maybe not in another. How do you think about that? How should practitioners think about the data architecture? >> Yeah, so our vision is that the Cloud changes from a centralized Cloud, to a distributed Cloud, and is amorphoused between the Edge where the IoT devices are, and the backend, and the way to think about it perhaps, is to say that storage as people have envisioned it, as being centralized, that paradigm has to change, and storage has to become distributed, such that data is available at different points in the network, and my vision is that you don't want to move data around, you want to minimize data movement for most use cases, and you want to have it pre-positioned on the 5G network, and you want to move the compute to the data, that's more energy-efficient. >> So I got to ask you, as someone who's doing the path-finding, which is the future path for Intel, and innovation and architecture. I was talking with some practitioners recently at another event, and trying to find someone, because I don't speak Chinese very well. But they asked me the same question. It matters what's in my Cloud. And what they mean by their Cloud, either on-premise private Cloud that they're putting together, operating model of their business, now going Cloud-like. But also as they pick their Cloud provider, they want to have multi-Cloud, and so what's in their Cloud, and their Cloud provider's matters. You guys are the inside of the Cloud across many spectrums, Intel. >> Yes. >> How should a customer think about that question? What's in my Cloud? Why should it matter, and it should matter. What's your take on that, and what should they look for? >> Yeah, so my take is that for years we've had the debate of whether it's public Cloud, or private Cloud, or on-prem Cloud. Our view is that the world is Hybrid, which is why we are big supporters of Alibaba, and the Hybrid Cloud movement, and as such, if it's Hybrid, it sort of suggests that the end state is that there'll be about an equal amount of applications that run on public versus private, and so I think the number of applications have an affinity to move into the public Cloud, like mail, and then there's other applications that you might care more about the compliance and security that you would say have an affinity to being on-prem. >> Also you mentioned that there's no walls, it's boundary-less in the data center. Okay, there's no door, there's no mote, you can't put a firewall on that door, unlimited access surface area for security. Obviously security hacks are big. We found out today that Israel had hacked, and notified the NSA. Hacking is a huge problem. Equifax is going to be another one. How should customers protect themselves? >> It's a very fair question John. This is one of the side-effects of saying that the data center will be boundary-less. We now have to have security technologies that can, we've effectively expanded the attacks of security in a significant way, but I don't think the answer is to say we need to move backwards and not adopt this boundary-less Cloud. I think we want to adopt it, and we want to develop technologies. So at Intel, we are developing multiple isolation technologies that allow different VM and container tenants to be isolated from other tenants. >> And this was your point earlier, making the device more intelligent, whether that's more on-board memory, and more chips. >> Yes. >> That's what you were kind of referring to, is that right? >> That's correct. >> Okay great, so I want to get one kind of off-the-wall question, since I have you on here. It's just a brain trust here from Intel, which it's great to have him here. Distributed computing has been around for awhile, we know all about that. Network effects, distributed computing, the computer industry. But now we're seeing a trend with decentralization. Blockchain is one shining example. Russia just banned cryptocurrency. This poses a architectural challenge. What's your thoughts on the decentralization, and distributed architectures that are emerging? Opportunity is scary. How should customers think about decentralization? >> Well certainly there's a security challenge, as we just spoke, related to this. But I think the computer industry has oscillated, depending on the era and the needs between centralized and decentralized a number of times now. And we're going through an era where decentralization makes sense, because we expect 30 to 50 billion devices at the Edge, and so you can't handle that with a centralized model, primarily due to three reasons, number one, just moving that volume of data would be very expensive to do over the network. Second there'll be a number of applications that are latency-sensitive. And third, you might care about data federation, and crossing country boundaries in a number of cases. So I think for the use case that we have with IoT, we have to adopt decentralized and distributed. >> So, if The Brain is processing and data, and you've got plenty of it at Intel with more compute power, what's the central nervous system, the metadata? >> Well, actually look at the central nervous system as the 5G distributed network that enables the end-points, or the nerve endings if you will, to be connected to the spinal cord. >> Okay so a final question for you, I really appreciate you spending the time. >> Sure, it's been a pleasure. >> Intel's been a wave company in its generation, and obviously Moore's law, it's not well documented. It seems that Moore's law is every year some journalist claims Moore's law is dead, and that it never goes away, so we expect more and more innovation coming from Intel. You guys have surfed many waves. In your opinion, what waves are coming? Because it feels like the waves are big now, but a lot of people think that there's bigger waves coming. That the big wave set is coming in. What's the technology wave that you're looking at from a path-finding, innovation standpoint, that customers should look for, maybe prepare for. It could be further out coming in. What's the big wave coming in, obviously AI was seeing these things. What's your focus on that? >> So, a number of them. I think, you know distributed computing is not a solved problem yet. But certainly it needs to be solved to be able to address these end-point challenges. Another great example I think, is around visual computing. So in the past, most of the type of data that people handled, was textual. But that's moving to visual very rapidly, and there's so many examples. You brought up the City Brain Project as an example. But video and analyzing images, requires a different kind of art. Different compression techniques. If a human doesn't need to see it, you perhaps don't have to have as high a resolution, and so there's a number of ships in the assumption space. And so I think for me, visual computing is a great opportunity, as well as a wave, that's coming at us. >> And the software too. So the final question, final, final question. Alibaba here, are connecting the dots. You can see where it's going. How do you see the Cloud service provider opportunity, because obviously they're a Cloud service provider on paper, but they're big, they're a Native Cloud now, like with the big guys like Amazon, Google, Microsoft. But we're seeing an emergence of new class of Cloud service provider. Certainly our research is showing that what was a very thin neck in the power laws, now expanding into a much bigger range, where VARs and value-edited software developers are going to start doing their own Cloud-like solutions with the Native Clouds, because they need horizontally scalable data infrastructure, connective tissue, and Edge devices from Intel, but they're going to provide software expertise that's vertically specialized, whether it's traffic, IoT, or oil and gas, or financial, Fintech. The specialism of application developers combined with horizontally scalable Cloud, it seems like a renaissance in the Cloud service provider market. Do you see that as well, and how should the industry think about this potential renaissance? >> So I think there's two possibilities. One is for the vast majority of functions that people run in the public Cloud, I think one possibility is that there's a consolidation amongst a few players. But I think your point's a very good one. That they are specialized services that companies are able to provide, where they're able to carve out a niche, and become a Cloud provider for that particular set of functions, as well as there's a second reason that motivates regional Cloud providers to succeed, again, because of data federation requirements, as well as local proximal, proximity to the end-points. I think these two phenomena are likely to drive the emergence of regional Clouds, as well as specialized Clouds, like you described to perform certain functions. >> And potentially a new kind of ecosystem development. >> Yes. >> And this is, then you guys are all about ecosystems, so is Alibaba. >> That's right. >> Dhiraj, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, this is exclusive CUBE coverage with SiliconANGLE, and Wikibon here in China with Intel's booth here. Talking about AI, and the future of the data center and Cloud. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.