>> And I'm here at Dell's Presence at MWC with vice president of marketing for telecom and Edge Computing, Aaron Chaisson. Aaron, how's it going? >> Doing great. How's it going today, Dave? >> It's going pretty well. Pretty excited about what you've got going here and I'm looking forward to getting the tour. You ready to take a closer look? >> Ready to do it. Let's go take a look! For us in the telecom ecosystem, it's really all about how we bring together the different players that are innovating across the industry to drive value for our CSP customers. So, it starts really, for us, at the ecosystem layer, bringing partners, bringing telecommunication providers, bringing (stutters) a bunch of different technologies together to innovate together to drive new value. So Paul, take us a little bit through what we're doing to- to develop and bring in these partnerships and develop our ecosystem. >> Uh, sure. Thank you Aaron. Uh, you know, one of the things that we've been focusing on, you know, Dell is really working with many players in the open telecom ecosystem. Network equipment providers, independent software vendors, and the communication service providers. And, you know, through our lines of business or open telecom ecosystem labs, what we want to do is bring 'em together into a community with the goal of really being able to accelerate open innovation and, uh, open solutions into the market. And that's what this community is really about, is being able to, you know, have those communications, develop those collaborations whether it's through, you know, sharing information online, having webinars dedicated to sharing Dell information, whether it's our next generation hardware portfolio we announced here at the show, our use case directory, our- how we're dealing with new service opportunities, but as well as the community to share, too, which I think is an exciting way for us to be able to, you know- what is the knowledge thing? As well as activities at other events that we have coming up. So really the key thing I think about, the- the open telecom ecosystem community, it's collaboration and accelerating the open industry forward. >> So- So Aaron, if I'm hearing this correctly you're saying that you can't just say, "Hey, we're open", and throw a bunch of parts in a box and have it work? >> No, we've got to work together to integrate these pieces to be able to deliver value, and, you know, we opened up a- (stutters) in our open ecosystem labs, we started a- a self-certification process a couple of months back. We've already had 13 partners go through that, we've got 16 more in the pipeline. Everything you see in this entire booth has been innovated and worked with partnerships from Intel to Microsoft to, uh, to (stutters) Wind River and Red Hat and others. You go all the way around the booth, everything here has partnerships at its core. And why don't we go to the next section here where we're going to be showing how we're pulling that all together in our open ecosystems labs to drive that innovation? >> So Aaron, you talked about the kinds of validation and testing that goes on, so that you can prove out an open stack to deliver the same kinds of reliability and performance and availability that we expect from a wireless network. But in the opens- in the open world, uh, what are we looking at here? >> Yeah absolutely. So one of the- one of the challenges to a very big, broad open ecosystem is the complexity of integrating, deploying, and managing these, especially at telecom scale. You're not talking about thousands of servers in one site, you're talking about one server in thousands of sites. So how do you deploy that predictable stack and then also manage that at scale? I'm going to show you two places where we're talkin' about that. So, this is actually representing an area that we've been innovating in recently around creating an integrated infrastructure and virtualization stack for the telecom industry. We've been doing this for years in IT with VxBlocks and VxRails and others. Here what you see is we got, uh, Dell hardware infrastructure, we've got, uh, an open platform for virtualization providers, in this case we've created an infrastructure block for Red Hat to be able to supply an infrastructure for core operations and Packet Cores for telecoms. On the other side of this, you can actually see what we're doing with Wind River to drive innovation around RAN and being able to simplify RAN- vRAN and O-RAN deployments. >> What does that virtualization look like? Are we talking about, uh, traditional virtual machines with OSs, or is this containerized cloud native? What does it look like? >> Yeah, it's actually both, so it can support, uh, virtual, uh-uh, software as well as containerized software, so we leverage the (indistinct) distributions for these to be able to deploy, you know, cloud native applications, be able to modernize how they're deploying these applications across the telecom network. So in this case with Red Hat, uh, (stutters) leveraging OpenShift in order to support containerized apps in your Packet Core environments. >> So what are- what are some of the kinds of things that you can do once you have infrastructure like this deployed? >> Yeah, I mean by- by partnering broadly across the ecosystem with VMware, with Red Hat, uh, with- with Wind River and with others, it gives them the ability to be able to deploy the right virtualization software in their network for the types of applications they're deploying. They might want to use Red Hat in their core, they may want to use Wind River in their RAM, they may want to use, uh, Microsoft or VMware for their- for their Edge workloads, and we allow them to be able to deploy all those, but centrally manage those with a common user interface and a common set of APIs. >> Okay, well I'm dying to understand the link between this and the Lego city that the viewers can't see, yet, but it's behind me. Let's take a look. >> So let's take a look at the Lego city that shows how we not deploy just one of these, but dozens or hundreds of these at scale across a cityscape. >> So Aaron, I know we're not in Copenhagen. What's all the Lego about? >> Yeah, so the Lego city here is to show- and, uh, really there's multiple points of Presence across an entire Metro area that we want to be able to manage if we're a telecom provider. We just talked about one infrastructure block. What if I wanted to deploy dozens of these across the city to be able to manage my network, to be able to manage, uh, uh- to be able to deploy private mobility potentially out into a customer enterprise environment, and be able to manage all of these, uh, very simply and easily from a common interface? >> So it's interesting. Now I think I understand why you are VP of marketing for both telecom and Edge. Just heard- just heard a lot about Edge and I can imagine a lot of internet of things, things, hooked up at that Edge. >> Yeah, so why don't we actually go over to another area? We're actually going to show you how one small microbrewery (stutters) in one of our cities nearby, uh, (stutters) my hometown in Massachusetts is actually using this technology to go from more of an analyzed- analog world to digitizing their business to be able to brew better beer. >> So Aaron, you bring me to a brewery. What do we have- what do we have going on here? >> Yeah, so, actually (stutters) about- about a year ago or so, I- I was able to get my team to come together finally after COVID to be able to meet each other and have a nice team event. One of those nights, we went out to dinner at a- at a brewery called "Exhibit 'A'" in Massachusetts, and they actually gave us a tour of their facilities and showed us how they actually go through the process of brewing beer. What we saw as we were going through it, interestingly, was that everything was analog. They literally had people with pen and paper walking around checking time and temperature and the process of brewing the beer, and they weren't asking for help, but we actually saw an opportunity where what we're doing to help businesses digitize what they're doing in their manufacturing floor can actually help them optimize how they build whatever product they're building, in this case it was beer. >> Hey Warren, good to meet you! What do we have goin' on? >> Yeah, it's all right. So yeah, basically what we did is we took some of their assets in the, uh, brewery that were completely manually monitored. People were literally walking around the floor with clipboards, writing down values. And we censorized the asset, in this case fermentation tanks and we measured the, uh, pressure and the temperature, which in fermentation are very key to monitor those, because if they get out of range the entire batch of beer can go bad or you don't get the consistency from batch to batch if you don't tightly monitor those. So we censorized the fermentation tank, brought that into an industrial I/O network, and then brought that into a Dell gateway which is connected 5G up to the cloud, which then that data comes to a tablet or a phone, which they, rather than being out on the floor and monitor it, can look at this data remotely at any time. >> So I'm not sure the exact date, the first time we have evidence of beer being brewed by humanity... >> Yep. >> But I know it's thousands of years ago. So it's taken that long to get to the point where someone had to come along, namely Dell, to actually digitally transform the beer business. Is this sort of proof that if you can digitally transform this, you can digitally transform anything? >> Absolutely. You name it, anything that's being manufactured, sold, uh, uh, taken care of, (stutters) any business out there that's looking to be able to be modernize and deliver better service to their customers can benefit from technologies like this. >> So we've taken a look at the ecosystem, the way that you validate architectures, we've seen an example of that kind of open architecture. Now we've seen a real world use case. Do you want to take a look a little deeper under the covers and see what's powering all of this? >> We just this week announced a new line of servers that power Edge and RAN use cases, and I want to introduce Mike to kind of take us through what we've been working on and really what the power of what this providing. >> Hey Mike, welcome to theCube. >> Oh, glad- glad to be here. So, what I'd really like to talk about are the three new XR series servers that we just announced last week and we're showing here at Mobile World Congress. They are all short depth, ruggedized, uh, very environmentally tolerant, and able to withstand, you know, high temperatures, high humidities, and really be deployed to places where traditional data center servers just can't handle, you know, due to one fact or another, whether it's depth or the temperature. And so, the first one I'd like to show you is the XR7620. This is, uh, 450 millimeters deep, it's designed for, uh, high levels of acceleration so it can support up to 2-300 watt, uh, GPUs. But what I really want to show you over here, especially for Mobile World Congress, is our new XR8000. The XR8000 is based on Intel's latest Sapphire Rapids technology, and this is- happens to be one of the first, uh, EE boost processors that is out, and basically what it is (stutters) an embedded accelerator that makes, uh, the- the processing of vRAN loads very, uh, very efficient. And so they're actually projecting a, uh, 3x improvement, uh, of processing per watt over the previous generation of processors. This particular unit is also sledded. It's very much like, uh, today's traditional baseband unit, so it's something that is designed for low TCO and easy maintenance in the field. This is the frew. When anything fails, you'll pull one out, you pop a new one in, it comes back into service, and the- the, uh, you know, your radio is- is, uh, minimally disrupted. >> Yeah, would you describe this as quantitative and qualitative in terms of the kinds of performance gains that these underlying units are delivering to us? I mean, this really kind of changes the game, doesn't it? It's not just about more, is it about different also in terms of what we can do? >> Well we are (stutters) to his point, we are able to bring in new accelerator technologies. Not only are we doing it with the Intel, uh, uh, uh, of the vRAN boost technologies, but also (stutters) we can bring it, too, but there's another booth here where we're actually working with our own accelerator cards and other accelerator cards from our partners across the industry to be able to deliver the price and performance capabilities required by a vRAN or an O-RAN deployment in the network. So it's not- it's not just the chip technology, it's the integration and the innovation we're doing with others, as well as, of course, the unique power cooling capabilities that Dell provides in our servers that really makes these the most efficient way of being able to power a network. >> Any final thoughts recapping the whole picture here? >> Yeah, I mean I would just say if anybody's, uh, i- is still here in Mobile World Congress, wants to come and learn what we're doing, I only showed you a small section of the demos we've got here. We've got 13 demos across on 8th floor here. Uh, for those of you who want to talk to us (stutters) and have meetings with us, we've got 13 meeting rooms back there, over 500 costumer partner meetings this week, we've got some whisper suites for those of you who want to come and talk to us but we're innovating on going forward. So, you know, there's a lot that we're doing, we're really excited, there's a ton of passion at this event, and, uh, we're really excited about where the industry is going and our role in it. >> 'Preciate the tour, Aaron. Thanks Mike. >> Mike: Thank you! >> Well, for theCube... Again, Dave Nicholson here. Thanks for joining us on this tour of Dell's Presence here at MWC 2023.

(modern music) >> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco for VMware Explore, formerly VMworld. theCUBE's been here 12 years today, we've been watching the evolution of the user conference. It's been quite a journey to see and, you know, virtualization just explode. We got two great guests here, we're going to break it all down. Ash McCarty, director of Multicloud Product Management Dell Technologies, no stranger to the VMworld, now VMware Explore, and Josh Prewitt, Chief Product Officer at Rackspace Technology. Great to see you guys, thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, thanks so much, thanks for having us. >> So, you know, the theme this year is multicloud, but it's really all about vSphere 8's out, you got VxRail, you got containers, you got the magic going on around cloud native, which it really points to the future state of where this is going, which is agile enterprises, infrastructure as code, high performance under the hood, I mean, all the things that you guys have been doing for many, many years and decades and business, but now with VMware putting it all together, it feels like, this year, it's like you got visibility into the value proposition, people have clear line of sight into where the performances are from the hardware software and now Cloud, it's kind of coming together, feels like it's coming together. Let's talk about that and the relationship between you guys, Rackspace and Dell and VMware. >> Perfect. That sounds great. Well, thanks so much for having us. You know, I'll sort of kick that off. We've got a huge lifelong partnership and relationship with Dell and VMware and the technologies that these guys create that we're able to put in front of our customers are really what allows us to go drive those business outcomes. So, yeah, happy to dive into it. >> Yeah, and I think to add to that, we understand that customers have a tremendously complex challenge ahead of them on managing their infrastructure. That's why with VxRail, we have intelligent infrastructure. We want it to simplify the outcomes for customers no matter if they're managing VMware or if they're managing the actual hardware infrastructure underneath it. >> Yeah, one of the things that we always talk about, you know, you read about it on the blogs and the news and the startup world, is "Oh, product-market fit," and, well, it kind of applies here, if you think about what's going on on the product side with the Edge emerging, hybrid cloud on pace with private cloud, and obviously, cloud native is great too if you have native applications in there, but now, putting it all together, you're hearing things like the telco cloud, I hear buzzwords like that, I hear supercloud, which we promoting, which you see in companies becoming cloud themselves, with the CapEx being handled by either public cloud or optimized on premise or hosted hardware. I mean, this is now, this is not all about everything's going to the cloud, this is now cloud operations on premise and in hosting hardware, so I'd love to get your perspective on that because you guys are huge hosting, you've got huge experience there, modernizing all the time. What does the modern era look like for the customer? >> Yeah, yeah, so, I mean, I think it's very clear to everybody that it's a multicloud world, right? I think the main question is, are you multicloud as a strategy, or are you multicloud as a situation? Because everybody's multicloud. That ship has sailed, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> And so, when I look at the capabilities that we have with the partnership with Dell and the VxRail technologies, you know, life-cycle management that you have to go and perform across your fleet can be extremely difficult, and whenever you take something like the VxRail and you add, you know, you have the hardware and you have the software all fully integrated there, it makes it much easier to do life-cycle management, so for a company like Rackspace, where we have tens of thousands of nodes that we're managing for customers across 29 global data centers, and we're all over the place, the ability to have that strength with Dell's hardware, the VMware platform improve life-cycle management makes it so much easier for us to manage our fleet and be able to deliver those outcomes even faster for customers. >> So assuming that VxRail isn't a virtual railroad that delivers data to Rackspace data centers, if it's not that, what is it, Ash? Give us a little premier on what VxRail is. >> Well, VxRail is the first and only jointly engineered HCI system with VMware, so everything we do with VMware is better. >> So hyperconverged infrastructure. >> Hyperconverged infrastructure. >> What we used to call a server because all the bits are in the box, right? >> All the storage is computed in there. >> Everything's in there. Right. >> Simplifies management. And we built in with the VxRail HCI system software, which is really our secret sauce, we built in to actually add those automation capabilities with VMware, so it allows you to scale out very quickly, scale up very quickly. And one of our big capabilities is our life-cycle management, which is full stack, meaning it life-cycles the entire vSphere stack as well as the hardware infrastructure underneath as one continuously validated state, meaning that customers can focus more on their business outcomes and driving their business forward versus spending time managing their infrastructure. >> And when you talk about customers, it's also the value proposition that's flowing through Rackspace because Rackspace, when you install these systems, how long does it take to spin up to have a VM available for use when you install one of these systems? >> Oh, so you can have the system up and running very quickly. So we automate all the day one deployment, so you can have the system up and running in your labs, in your data centers in 45 minutes, and you can have VMs up in provision very shortly after that. >> So what do you do with that kind of agility? >> Oh my gosh, so we've actually taken that, and we've taken the VxRail platform and we've created what we call Rackspace Services for VMware Cloud, and this is our platform that is based on VxRail, it's based on vCloud Director from VMware, and by having the VxRail is already RackStacked, ready to go for our customers, we're able to sign a customer up today, and then, within a matter of minutes, give them access to a vCloud Director portal where they can go in and spin up a new VM anytime they want, but then, it also integrates into all of those cloud management platforms and tools, right? It integrates into your Terraform, so you've got, you know, your full CI/CD pipeline, and so you have that full end-to-end capability. If you want to go click around on a portal, you can using vCloud Director and using vSphere and all that great stuff. If you want to automate it, you can do that too. And we do it all in the backs of that VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure. >> Talk about the DPU dynamic. We're hearing a lot about DPUs. VxRail, you guys have some HCI-like vibe there with DPUs. How is that impacting performance, can you guys see? 'Cause we're hearing a lot of buzz around the VxRail and the VMware DPUs really making things much faster. >> I mean, it's the thing we talk about most with customers now is their challenges with scaling their infrastructure, and VxRail is going to be the first and only jointly engineered system that will have vSphere 8 with DPUs functionality and will have the full life-cycle management, and what this really empowers customers to do is, as they're growing their environments that they're scaling out their workloads in the data center, they need a way to scale to that next generation of networking and network security, and that's what DPUs allow you to do. They give you that offload and that high performance capability. >> Talk about the... I'd love to get your guys' perspective, while we're just riffing on this real quick sidebar for a second, if VxRail has these capabilities which you guys are promoting it does and some of the things go on in the modern era, the next gen apps are going to look a lot different. We're kind of calling it supercloud, if you will, for lack of a better description. Yeah, multicloud is a state, I agree. It's a situation and a state, but supercloud is really the functionality of what cloud does. So what do you guys see as, maybe it's tea leaves reading now or dots connecting, what are some of those next gen apps? I mean the Edge is there with, "Oh, the Edge is going to explode," and I can see the Edge having new kinds of apps that we've never seen before, whether it's on premise building lights and however they work or IoT changing. What do you guys see as the next gen app/apps coming out that's not looking the same as now, or how are apps today changing for next gen? 'Cause you get more performance at the Edge, you get more action, you get more co-locations in GEOS, so it's clear multicloud multi-presence is happening too, right? So what are you guys seeing? What's this... >> Yeah, I would say two areas that resonate most with customers is customers transitioning to their cloud native journey, so beginning it and using things like Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations, which we fully support and have a white paper out there list for customers, another area is really in the AIML space, so we've been partnering with both VMware and Nvidia to simplify how customers deploy new AIML infrastructure. I mean, it's challenging, complex, a lot of customers are wanting to dive in because it really enables them to better operate and operate on insights and analytics they get from running their business. >> Josh? >> And, you know, I think it really comes down to, whether you want to call it Edge or IoT or, you know, smart things, whatever, right? It all comes down to how we are expected, now, to capture all of the data to create a better user experience, and that's what we're seeing the modern applications being built around, right, is how do you leverage all of the data that's now at your fingertips, whether it's from wearables, machine vision, whatever it may be, and drive that improved user experience. And so that's the apps that we're seeing now, right? You know, of course, you still have all your business apps, all your ERP capabilities that need to exist and all of that great stuff, but at the same time, I also expect that, whenever, you know, now, whenever I'm walking into a store and their machine vision picks me up and they're pinging my phone and pushing me push notifications, I expect to have a better user experience. >> And do a database search on you too, by the way. >> Yeah, exactly, right? >> No search warrants out for 'em, you know, you're good. >> That's exactly it, so, you know, you kind of expect that better user experience and that's where I'm seeing a lot of the new app development. >> Yeah, it's fun, as these cases are intoxicating to think about all the weird coolness around it. The thing that I want to get your thoughts on is, we were just talking on the analyst session earlier in theCUBE, if DevOps is here and won, which we believe it has and infrastructure as code is happening, the cloud native discussion, shifting left CI/CD pipeline, that's DevOps in my mind, that's like cloud native developers, that's like traditional IT in my mind, so that's all part of the coding. DataOps and Security Ops seem to be the most robust areas of conversations where that's the new Ops, right? So, I mean, I made the term up, but new Ops, in terms of the focus, what are you making more efficient? What are you optimizing for? What's your guys reaction to that? Because all the conversations that we talk about is data, security, and then the rest seems to be cool, all good on the developer's side. Yeah, shift left events happening up there, Kubernetes containers, but all the action on the Ops side seems to be data and security. >> Yeah. >> What's your reaction to that? Is that right? >> So personally, I do think that it's right. I think that, you know with great power comes great responsibility, right? And so the clouds have brought that to us, all of your infrastructure as code has brought that to us. We have that great power now, right? But then you start to see, kind of, the pipeline attacks that are starting to become more and more popular. And so how you secure something that is as complex as, you know, a cloud native development pipeline is really hard, it's really challenging, so I do think that it warrants the attention. Then on the data side, I think that that matters because when I talked about those examples of a better user experience, I don't want my better user experience tomorrow, I don't want it 20 minutes from now. I want that real time capability, and so with that comes massive requirements from a compute and hardware perspective, massive requirements from a software perspective, and from, you know, what folks are now calling DataOps perspective >> Data addressability, having the data available to be delivered in real time. >> You know, there there's been a lot of talk, here at the conference, about the disaggregation of, you know, the brainularism, if we're going to make up words, you know, the horsepower that's involved, CPU, DPU, GPU. I'll make up another word. We're familiar with the thermometers used during COVID to measure temperature. Pretend that I've invented a device called a Care-o-meter and I'm pointing at various people's foreheads, who needs to care about DPUs and GPUs and CPUs? You know, John was referencing the idea of security at the Edge, data. Well, wow, we've got GPUs that can do things. Who needs to care about that? Obviously, we care about it. You care about it. You care about it. You're building this stuff, you're deploying this stuff, but at what level in the customer stack do they need to care about it? Are you going in, is RackSpace engaging customers and saying, "Look, here's the value proposition: we understand your mission to be this. We believe we can achieve your mission." How far down in the organization do you go before you get to someone where you have to have the DPU conversation? 'Cause we didn't even define DPU yet here, which is always offensive to me. >> I think I defined it actually. >> Did you define DPU? Good. Thank you John. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But so who should care? Who should really care about that? >> Oh, that's such a complex question, right? Because everybody, Rackspace included >> But a good one. But a good question. >> Oh, it's a great question. >> Thank you. >> Great question. (laughing) >> Everybody, Rackspace included, is talking about selling business outcomes, right? And ultimately, that is what matters. It is what matters, is selling those business outcomes to the customer. And so of course we're dealing with our business buyers who are just looking for, "Hey, improve my KPIs, make this run faster, better, stronger, all of that great stuff," but ultimately you get down to an IT staff, and to the IT staff, these things matter because the IT staff, they all have budgets that they have to hit. The realities start to hit them and they can't just go and spend whatever they want, you know, trying to hit the KPIs of the marketing department or the finance department, right? And so you have your business buyers that do care significantly about buying their outcomes, and so we're having, you know, the business outcomes conversations with them and then, oftentimes, they will come back to us and say, "Okay, but now we need you to talk to this person over in our IT organization. We need you to talk with our CIO, with our VP of infrastructure," whatever that may be, where we really get down to the nuts and bolts and we talk about how, you know, we can stretch the hardware coming from Dell, we can stretch the software coming from VMware, and we can deliver a higher caliber experience, a lower TCO, by taking advantage of some of the new technologies coming out. >> Yeah, so there's a reason why I ask that awesome question, and it's because I can imagine a scenario where, and this speaks to RackSpace's position in the market today and moving forward and what your history has been, people want to know, "Well, why should I work with Rackspace instead of some mega-hyper-monster-cloud?" If part of the answer is: well, it's because, for very specific application environments, like healthcare we talked about earlier, that might be a conversation where you're actually bringing in Dell to have a conversation about how you are specifically optimizing hardware and software to achieve things that otherwise can't be achieved with t-shirt sizes of servers in a hyperscale cloud. I mean, is that part of the Rackspace value proposition moving forward, that you can do things like that with partners like Dell that the other folks aren't going to focus on? >> Absolutely, it is, right? And a lot of the power of Rackspace is that, you know, we're the best-in-class pure play cloud solutions provider, and we can talk to you about your AWS, your Azure, your GCP, all of that great stuff, but we can also talk to you about private cloud solutions that are built on the backs of Dell Technologies, and in this multicloud world, you don't have that one size fits all for every single application. There are some things that run great in a hyperscale provider, and we can help you get there, but just exactly like you said, there are these verticals where you have applications that don't necessarily run all that well or they're not modernized, they haven't been refactored to be able to take advantage of cloud native services. And if all you're going to do is run that on bare metal in VMs, a hosted private cloud is, by far, the best way to do that, right? And Rackspace provides that hosted private cloud on the backs of Dell technology, on the backs of VMware technology, and we can go deliver those custom bespoke solutions to customers. >> So the infrastructure and the hardware still matters, Ash, yes? >> Absolutely, and I think he just highlighted, while what he does with his customers and what's important to his internal organization is being to deliver faster outcomes, better outcomes, give those customers, to meet those KPIs of those customers consuming their infrastructure at Rackspace, so I think, really, what the DPU and the underlying infrastructure enables is all that full stack integration to allow them to quickly scale to the demands of those customers and what they need in their infrastructure. >> Guys, while we got you here, what do you think about this year's VMware Explore, a lot of anticipation around how many people are going to show up and, you know, all kinds of things around the new name and Broadcom. Big attendance here, I mean, I was very surprised about the size of the attendance and the show floor, the ecosystem, this train is not stopping. I mean, this is VMware's third act, no matter what the contextual situation is. What's your observation of the show? Do you agree, or is there anything that you could want to share about for folks who didn't make it, what they missed? >> Yeah, I mean it really highlights, I mean, you've seen the breadth of the show, I know people that aren't here that aren't able to see it are really missing the excitement. So there's a lot of great announcements around multicloud, around all the announcements, around the vSphere 8 with the DPUs, the vSAN Express Storage architecture, ton of new exciting technologies that are really empowering how customers, you know, the future of how customers are going to consume their workloads in their data centers. >> Josh, they're not short on products and stuff. A lot of moving parts. vSphere 8, a bunch of new stuff. And the cloud native stuff's looking pretty good too, off the tee. >> You know, it does feel like a focus on the core, though, in a way. So I don't think there's been a lot of peripheral noise at the show. Sometimes it's, you know, "And we got this, and this, and this, and this." It's vSphere 8, vSAN 8, cloud software, you know, really hammering it home and refining it. >> But you don't think of it as a little bit of a circus act. I mean the general keynote was theatrical, I thought, I mean, I thought they did a good job on that. I think vSphere 8 was buried a little bit, I thought they could have... They checked the box at the beginning. >> That's true, that's true. >> I mean, they mentioned it, but we didn't see the demos. You know? Demos are usually great. But that's my only criticism. >> Well, that's why we supplemented it with the VxRail announcements, right? With our big announcements around vSphere 8 and with the DPUs as well as the vSAN Express Storage architecture being integrated into VxRail, so I think, you know, it's always that ongoing partnership and, you know, doing what's best for our customers, showing them the next generation and how they consume that technology. >> Yeah, you guys got good props on VxRail. We had a great chat about it yesterday. Rackspace, you guys doing good? Quick update on what's happening with you guys. Give a quick plug. What's going on at Rackspace? What's hot? What's going on? Give a quick plug for what the services are and the products you got going on there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we are that end-to-end cloud provider, right? And so we've got really exciting offers in market, helping customers take advantage of all the hyperscale providers, and then giving them that private cloud experience. We've got everything from single-tenant running in our data centers on the backs of vSphere, vCloud Director, and VxRails, all the way through to, like, multi-tenant burstable capability that runs within our own data centers as well. It's a really exciting time for technology, a really exciting time for Rackspace. >> Congratulations, we've been following your journey for a long time. Dell, you guys do continue to do a great job and end-to-end phenomenal work. The telco thing's a huge opportunity, we didn't even go there. But Ash, thanks. Josh, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> Okay, thanks for watching theCUBE. We're live, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Two sets here in Moscone West on the ground level, in the lobby, checking out all the action. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (modern music)

>> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation. We have a launch from Dell Technologies updates from the VxRail family. We're going to do things a little bit different here. We actually have a launch video Shannon Champion, of Dell Technologies. And the way we do things a lot of times, is, analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things. You might have questions on it. So, rather than me just wanting it, or you wanting yourself I actually brought in a couple of Dell Technologies expertS two of our Cube alumni, happy to welcome you back to the program. Jon Siegal, he is the Vice President of Product Marketing, and Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management, both of them with Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Great to be here. >> All right, and so what we're going to do is we're going to be rolling the video here. I've got a button I'm going to press, Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit, go into some questions when we're all done. We're actually holding a crowd chat, where you will be able to ask your questions, talk to the experts and everything. And so a little bit different way to do a product announcement. Hope you enjoy it. And with that, it's VxRail. Taking HCI to the extremes is the theme. We'll see what that means and everything. But without any further ado, let's let Shannon take the video away. >> Hello, and welcome. My name is Shannon Champion, and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with VxRail. Let's get started. We have a lot to talk about. Our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the Core, Edge and Cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options, as well as the latest in software innovations. So let's jump right in. Before we talk about our announcements, let's talk about where customers are adopting VxRail today. First of all, on behalf of the entire Dell Technologies and VxRail teams, I want to thank each of our over 8000 customers, big and small in virtually every industry, who've chosen VxRail to address a broad range of workloads, deploying nearly 100,000 nodes today. Thank you. Our promise to you is that we will add new functionality, improve serviceability, and support new use cases, so that we deliver the most value to you, whether in the Core, at the Edge or for the Cloud. In the Core, VxRail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation. Many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VxRail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment. Now we can support even more demanding applications such as In-Memory databases, like SAP HANA, and more AI and ML applications, with support for more and more powerful GPUs. At the Edge, video surveillance, which also uses GPUs, by the way, is an example of a popular use case leveraging VxRail alongside external storage. And right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing. And as it relates to VDI, VxRail has always been a great option for that. In the Cloud, it's all about Kubernetes, and how Dell Technologies Cloud platform, which is VCF on VxRail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and Cloud native applications. And we're doing that together with VMware. VxRail is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments, designed to enhance the native VMware experience. This joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. >> Alright, so Shannon talked a bit about, the important role of IT Of course right now, with the global pandemic going on. It's really, calling in, essential things, putting, platforms to the test. So, I really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers. Also, VDI, of course, in the early days, it was, HCI-only-does-VDI. Now, we know there are many solutions, but remote work is putting that back front and center. So, Jon, why don't we start with you as the what is (muffled speaking) >> Absolutely. So first of all, Stu, thank you, I want to do a shout out to our VxRail customers around the world. It's really been humbling, inspiring, and just amazing to see The impact of our VxRail customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here. Just for a few examples, there are genomics companies that we have running VxRail that have rolled out testing at scale. We also have research universities out in the Netherlands, doing the antibody detection. The US Navy has stood up a floating hospital to of course care for those in need. So we are here to help that's been our message to our customers, but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this. So just just a pleasure there. But as you mentioned, just to hit on the VDI comments, so to your points too, HCI, VxRail, VDI, that was an initial use case years ago. And it's been great to see how many of our existing VxRail customers have been able to pivot very quickly leveraging VxRail to add and to help bring their remote workforce online and support them with their existing VxRail. Because VxRail is flexible, it is agile, to be able to support those multiple workloads. And in addition to that, we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost effective cater to everything from knowlEdge workers to multimedia workers. You name it, you know from 250, desktops up to 1000. But again, back to your point VxRail, HCI, is well beyond VDI, it crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually. And VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads, any of our customers out there, it supports now a range of workloads that you heard from Shannon, whether it's video surveillance, whether it's general purpose, all the way to mission critical applications now with SAP HAN. So, this has changed the game for sure. But the range of work loads and the flexibility of the actual rules which really helping our existing customers during this pandemic. >> Yeah, I agree with you, Jon, we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments, from the ones that we sure all knew and loved back in the initial days of HCI. Now, the mission critical things now to Cloud native workloads as well, and the sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI. And specifically, VxRail gives them that ability to pivot. When these, shall we say unexpected circumstances arise? And I think that that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IP strategies look like as they move forward. They want that same level of agility, and ability to react quickly with their overall infrastructure. >> Excellent. Now I want to get into the announcements. What I want my team actually, your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo, so maybe they can dig up that footage, talk about how fast they pivoted, using VxRail to really spin up things fast. So let's hear from the announcement first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later. So let's get to the actual news that Shannon's going to share. >> Okay, now what's new? I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms, to further enable IT modernization across Core, Edge and Cloud. I will cover each of these announcements in more detail, demonstrating how only VxRail can offer the breadth of platform configurations, automation, orchestration and Lifecycle Management, across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent, simplified operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications. I'll start with hybrid Cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell Technologies Cloud announcements just a few weeks ago, related to VMware Cloud foundation on VxRail. Then I'll cover two brand new VxRail hardware platforms and additional options. And finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VxRail HCI system software capabilities for Lifecycle Management. Let's get started with our new Cloud offerings based on VxRail. VxRail is the HCI foundation for Dell Technologies, Cloud Platform, bringing automation and financial models, similar to public Cloud to On-premises environments. VMware recently introduced Cloud foundation for Delta, which is based on vSphere 7.0. As you likely know by now, vSphere 7.0 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release. In keeping with our synchronous release commitment, we introduced VxRail 7.0 based on vSphere 7.0 in late April, which was within 30 days of VMware's release. Two key areas that VMware focused on we're embedding containers and Kubernetes into vSphere, unifying them with virtual machines. And the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere Lifecycle Manager or VLCM. I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how VxRail fits in in a moment for VCF 4 with Tom Xu, based on vSphere 7.0 customers now have access to a hybrid Cloud platform that supports native Kubernetes workloads and management, as well as your traditional VM-based workloads. So containers are now first class citizens of your private Cloud alongside traditional VMs and this is now available with VCF 4.0, on VxRail 7.0. VxRail's tight integration with VMware Cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid Cloud, but also to deliver Kubernetes at Cloud scale with one complete automated platform. The second Cloud announcement is also exciting. Recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid Cloud, because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture. And with that Dell Technologies Cloud platform can now be deployed with a four-node configuration, lowering the cost of an entry level hybrid Cloud. This enables customers to start smaller and grow their Cloud deployment over time. VCF and VxRail can now be deployed in two different ways. For small environments, customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes. Since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture, it's ideal for getting started with an entry level Cloud to run general purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point. Both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost, but still with a Consistent Cloud operating model. For larger environments where dedicated resources and role-based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred. You can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at eight nodes for independent management and workload domains. A standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes Horizon, VDI, and vSphere with Kubernetes. >> Alright, Jon, there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware is doing with vSphere 7.0. understand if you wanted to use the Kubernetes piece, it's VCF as that so we've seen the announcements, Dell, partnering in there it helps us connect that story between, really the VMware strategy and how they talk about Cloud and where does VxRail fit in that overall, Delta Cloud story? >> Absolutely. So first of all Stu, the VxRail course is integral to the Delta Cloud strategy. it's been VCF on VxRail equals the Delta Cloud platform. And this is our flagship on prem Cloud offering, that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any Cloud, whether it's On-prem, in the Edge or in the public Cloud. And we've seen the Dell tech Cloud Platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons. One is it offers the fastest hybrid Cloud deployment in the market. And this is really, thanks to a new subscription offer that we're now offering out there where in less than 14 days, it can be still up and running. And really, the Dell tech Cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models, overall when it comes to VxRail. Secondly, I would say is fast and easy upgrades. This is what VxRail brings to the table for all workloads, if you will, into especially critical in the Cloud. So the full automation of Lifecycle Management across the hardware and software stack across the VMware software stack, and in the Dell software and hardware supporting that, together, this enables essentially the third thing, which is customers can just relax. They can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated, and always be in a continuously validated state. And this is the kind of thing that those three value propositions together really fit well, with any on-prem Cloud. Now you take what Shannon just mentioned, and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same VxRail infrastructure alongside traditional applications. This is a game changer. >> Yeah, I love it. I remember in the early days talking with Dunn about CI, how does that fit in with Cloud discussion and the line I've used the last couple years is, modernize the platform, then you can modernize the application. So as companies are doing their full modernization, then this plays into what you're talking about. All right, we can let Shannon continue, we can get some more before we dig into some more analysis. >> That's good. >> Let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates. that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options. covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases. First up, I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new Dell EMC VxRail series, the D series. This is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of VxRail for workloads at the Edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas. VxRail D series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the VxRail portfolio with simplicity, agility and lifecycle management. But in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches, it's adorable form factor that's extremely temperature-resilient, shock resistant, and easily portable. It even meets milspec standards. That means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VxRail HCI system software and 24 by seven single point of support, enabling you to rapidly react to business needs, no matter the location or how harsh the conditions. So whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base, running real-time GPS mapping on the go, or implementing video surveillance in remote areas, you can ensure availability, integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VxRail ruggedized D series. >> All right, Chad we would love for you to bring us in a little bit that what customer requirement for bringing this to market. I remember seeing, Dell servers ruggedized, of course, Edge, really important growth to build on what Jon was talking about, Cloud. So, Chad, bring us inside, what was driving this piece of the offering? >> Sure Stu. Yeah, yeah, having been at the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important. And that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these Edges or some of the more exotic locations. whether that's manufacturing plants, oil rigs, submarine ships, military applications, places that we've never heard of. But it's also about extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VxRails you're managing your Edges the same way using the same set of tools. You don't need to learn anything else. So operational simplicity is absolutely key here. But in those locations, you can take a product that's designed for a data center where definitely controlling power cooling space and take it some of these places where you get sand blowing or seven to zero temperatures, could be Baghdad or it could be Ketchikan, Alaska. So we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme altitude, but still offer that operational simplicity. Now military is one of those applications for the rugged platform. If you look at the resistance that it has to heat, it operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range, but it can do an excursion up to 55 C or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours. It's also resistant to heat sand, dust, vibration, it's very lightweight, short depth, in fact, it's only 20 inches deep. This is a smallest form factor, obviously that we have in the VxRail family. And it's also built to be able to withstand sudden shocks certified to withstand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation. Pretty high. And this is sort of like wherever skydivers go to when they want the real thrill of skydiving where you actually need oxygen to, to be for that that altitude. They're milspec-certified. So, MIL-STD-810G, which I keep right beside my bed and read every night. And it comes with a VxRail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment. And we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for naval shock requirements. EMI and radiation immunity often. >> Yeah, it's funny, I remember when we first launched it was like, "Oh, well everything's going to white boxes. "And it's going to be massive, "no differentiation between everything out there." If you look at what you're offering, if you look at how public Clouds build their things, but I called it a few years or is there's a pure optimization. So you need to scale, you need similarities but you know you need to fit some, very specific requirements, lots of places, so, interesting stuff. Yeah, certifications, always keep your teams busy. Alright, let's get back to Shannon to view on the report. >> We are also introducing three other hardware-based additions. First, a new VxRail E Series model based on where the first time AMD EPYC processors. These single socket 1U nodes, offer dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from eight to 64 Cores, up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer aided design. Next, the addition of the latest Nvidia Quadro RTX GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional work flows. Designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible, working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering, deep learning and visual computing workloads. And Intel Optane DC persistent memory is here, and it offers high performance and significantly increased memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price. Data persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity, even when power is lost, enabling quicker recovery and less downtime. With support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like SAP HANA. Alright, let's finally dig into our HCI system software, which is the Core differentiation for VxRail regardless of your workload or platform choice. Our joining engineering with VMware and investments in VxRail HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. Under the covers, VxRail offers best in class hardware, married with VMware HCI software, either vSAN or VCF. But what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two. Dell Technologies has a dedicated VxRail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper converged system. That team has also developed our unique VxRail HCI system software, which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver seamless, automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere. The key components of VxRail HCI system software shown around the arc here that include the extra manager, full stack lifecycle management, ecosystem connectors, and support. I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today, but if you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to meet our experts. And I will tell you how to do that in a moment. I touched on the LCM being a key feature to the vSphere 7.0 earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of VxRail Lifecycle Management. The LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers, but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them. With VxRail customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf, freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business. Customers tell us that Lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure, and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff, that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively, and that it isn't the most efficient economically. Automation of Lifecycle Management and VxRail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective, and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure. But as shown here, our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies, they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages, and reduced overall cost of operations. With VxRail HCI system software, intelligent Lifecycle Management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated, keeping clusters and continuously validated states while minimizing risks and operational costs. How do we ensure Continuously validated states for VxRail. VxRail labs execute an extensive, automated, repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customers choosing across their VxRail environment. The VxRail labs are constantly testing, analyzing, optimizing, and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack. All the while VxRail is backed by Dell EMC's world class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software. IT productivity skyrockets with single click non disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing. taking you to the next VxRail version of your choice, while always in a continuously validated state. You can also confidently execute automated VxRail upgrades. No matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster. They don't have to all be the same. And upgrades with VxRail are faster and more efficient with leapfrogging simply choose any VxRail version you desire. And be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between. Only VxRail can do that. >> All right, so Chad, the lifecycle management piece that Shannon was just talking about is, not the sexiest, it's often underappreciated. There's not only the years of experience, but the continuous work you're doing, reminds me back the early vSAN deployments versus VxRail jointly developed, jointly tested between Dell and VMware. So bring us inside why, 2020 Lifecycle Management still, a very important piece, especially in the VM family line. >> Yes, Stu, I think it's sexy, but, I'm pretty big nerd. (all laughing) Yeah, this is really always been our bread and butter. And in fact, it gets even more important, the larger the deployments come, when you start to look at data centers full of VxRails and all the different hardware software, firmware combinations that could exist out there. It's really the value that you get out of that VxRail HCI system software that Shannon was talking about and how it's optimized around the VMware use case. Very tightly integrated with each VMware component, of course, and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware, all of the drivers, all the software all together in tremendous value to our customers. But to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment. So as Shannon mentioned, we run about 25,000 hours of testing across Each major release for patches, express patches, that's about 7000 hours for each of those. So, obviously, there's a lot of parallelism. And we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality. And one of the key things that we're able to do, as Shannon mentioned, is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state. We've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously, a huge amount of automation. And we've talked about that investment to execute those tests. That's one worth of $60 million of investment in our lab. In fact, we've got just over 2000 VxRail units in our testbed across the US, Shanghai, China and Cork, Ireland. So a massive amount of testing of each of those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state. >> Yeah, well, absolutely, it's super important not only for the day one, but the day two deployments. But I think this actually a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to. So we've got the CIO of Amarillo, Texas, he was an existing VxRail customer. And he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work-from-home initiative, as well as we get to hear in his words the value of what Lifecycle Management means. So Andrew, if we could queue up that customer segment, please? >> It's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we mature, I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments. But this instance, really justified why I was driving progress. So fervently why it was so urgent today. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt With VxRail in place, in a week we spun up hundreds of instant balls. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half, for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business. And now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that work, a little lagging or a little conservative, or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> Alright, so great, Richard, you talked a bunch about the the efficiencies that that the IT put in place, how about that, that overall just managed, you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. need to be able to do things much simpler? So how does the overall Lifecycle Management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. And in the old environment, one, It took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive, when we did make change, it overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. That wasn't cost efficient. And then simple things like, I've worked for multi billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production, simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on Lifecycle Management because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and rescale them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> All right, well, nothing better than hearing it straight from the end user, public sector reacting very fast to the COVID-19. And, if you heard him he said, if this is his, before he had run this project, he would not have been able to respond. So I think everybody out there understands, if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology, it would be much harder. All right, I'm looking forward to doing the CrowdChat letting everybody else dig in with questions and get follow up but a little bit more, I believe one more announcement he can and got for us though. Let's roll the final video clip. >> In our latest software release VxRail 4.7.510, We continue to add new automation and self service features. New functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades, to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch. This is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows, as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window. Of course, running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates. We are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific VxRail version, or down rev one or more nodes that may be shipped at a higher rate than the existing cluster. This enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in a cluster. To sum up all of our announcements, whether you are accelerating data sets modernization extending HCI to harsh Edge environments, deploying an on-premises Dell Technologies Cloud platform to create a developer ready Kubernetes infrastructure. VxRail is there delivering a turn-key experience that enables you to continuously innovate, realize operational freedom and predictably evolve. VxRail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations, automation and Lifecycle Management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid Cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across Core, Edge and Cloud. I now invite you to engage with us. First, the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about VxRail new features and functionality and sCore some sweet digital swag while you're at it. Delivered via an augmented reality app. All you need is your device. So go to vxrail.is/passport to get started. And secondly, if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation, we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VxRail Meet The Experts sessions available for a limited time. First come first served, just go to vxrail.is/expertsession to learn more. >> All right, well, obviously, with everyone being remote, there's different ways we're looking to engage. So we've got the CrowdChat right after this. But Jon, give us a little bit more as to how Dell's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got for options for them. >> Yeah, absolutely. So as Shannon said, so in lieu of not having done Tech World this year in person, where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions, whether it's in the booth or in meeting rooms, we are going to have these Meet The Experts sessions over the next couple weeks, and we're going to put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to everyone out there. So again, definitely encourage you. We're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we can still stay in touch, answer questions, be responsive, and really looking forward to, having these conversations over the next couple of weeks. >> All right, well, Jon and Chad, thank you so much. We definitely look forward to the conversation here and continued. If you're here live, definitely go down below and do it if you're watching this on demand. You can see the full transcript of it at crowdchat.net/vxrailrocks. For myself, Shannon on the video, Jon, Chad, Andrew, man in the booth there, thank you so much for watching, and go ahead and join the CrowdChat.

>> Announcer: From the Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCube Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And welcome to this special presentation. We have a launch from Dell Technologies updates from the VxRail family. We're going to do things a little bit different here. We actually have a launch video Shannon Champion, of Dell Technologies. And the way we do things a lot of times, is, analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things. You might have questions on it. So, rather than me just wanting it, or you wanting yourself I actually brought in a couple of Dell Technologies expertS two of our Cube alumni, happy to welcome you back to the program. Jon Siegal, he is the Vice President of Product Marketing, and Chad Dunn, who's the Vice President of Product Management, both of them with Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Great to be here. >> All right, and so what we're going to do is we're going to be rolling the video here. I've got a button I'm going to press, Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit, go into some questions when we're all done. We're actually holding a crowd chat, where you will be able to ask your questions, talk to the experts and everything. And so a little bit different way to do a product announcement. Hope you enjoy it. And with that, it's VxRail. Taking HCI to the extremes is the theme. We'll see what that means and everything. But without any further ado, let's let Shannon take the video away. >> Hello, and welcome. My name is Shannon Champion, and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with VxRail. Let's get started. We have a lot to talk about. Our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the Core, Edge and Cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options, as well as the latest in software innovations. So let's jump right in. Before we talk about our announcements, let's talk about where customers are adopting VxRail today. First of all, on behalf of the entire Dell Technologies and VxRail teams, I want to thank each of our over 8000 customers, big and small in virtually every industry, who've chosen VxRail to address a broad range of workloads, deploying nearly 100,000 nodes today. Thank you. Our promise to you is that we will add new functionality, improve serviceability, and support new use cases, so that we deliver the most value to you, whether in the Core, at the Edge or for the Cloud. In the Core, VxRail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation. Many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VxRail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment. Now we can support even more demanding applications such as In-Memory databases, like SAP HANA, and more AI and ML applications, with support for more and more powerful GPUs. At the Edge, video surveillance, which also uses GPUs, by the way, is an example of a popular use case leveraging VxRail alongside external storage. And right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing. And as it relates to VDI, VxRail has always been a great option for that. In the Cloud, it's all about Kubernetes, and how Dell Technologies Cloud platform, which is VCF on VxRail can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and Cloud native applications. And we're doing that together with VMware. VxRail is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments, designed to enhance the native VMware experience. This joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. >> Alright, so Shannon talked a bit about, the important role of IT Of course right now, with the global pandemic going on. It's really, calling in, essential things, putting, platforms to the test. So, I really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers. Also, VDI, of course, in the early days, it was, HCI-only-does-VDI. Now, we know there are many solutions, but remote work is putting that back front and center. So, Jon, why don't we start with you as the what is (muffled speaking) >> Absolutely. So first of all, Stu, thank you, I want to do a shout out to our VxRail customers around the world. It's really been humbling, inspiring, and just amazing to see The impact of our VxRail customers around the world and what they're having on on human progress here. Just for a few examples, there are genomics companies that we have running VxRail that have rolled out testing at scale. We also have research universities out in the Netherlands, doing the antibody detection. The US Navy has stood up a floating hospital to of course care for those in need. So we are here to help that's been our message to our customers, but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this. So just just a pleasure there. But as you mentioned, just to hit on the VDI comments, so to your points too, HCI, VxRail, VDI, that was an initial use case years ago. And it's been great to see how many of our existing VxRail customers have been able to pivot very quickly leveraging VxRail to add and to help bring their remote workforce online and support them with their existing VxRail. Because VxRail is flexible, it is agile, to be able to support those multiple workloads. And in addition to that, we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers more cost effective cater to everything from knowlEdge workers to multimedia workers. You name it, you know from 250, desktops up to 1000. But again, back to your point VxRail, HCI, is well beyond VDI, it crossed the chasm a couple years ago actually. And VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads, any of our customers out there, it supports now a range of workloads that you heard from Shannon, whether it's video surveillance, whether it's general purpose, all the way to mission critical applications now with SAP HAN. So, this has changed the game for sure. But the range of work loads and the flexibility of the actual rules which really helping our existing customers during this pandemic. >> Yeah, I agree with you, Jon, we've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments, from the ones that we sure all knew and loved back in the initial days of HCI. Now, the mission critical things now to Cloud native workloads as well, and the sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI. And specifically, VxRail gives them that ability to pivot. When these, shall we say unexpected circumstances arise? And I think that that's informing their their decisions and their opinions on what their IP strategies look like as they move forward. They want that same level of agility, and ability to react quickly with their overall infrastructure. >> Excellent. Now I want to get into the announcements. What I want my team actually, your team gave me access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo, so maybe they can dig up that footage, talk about how fast they pivoted, using VxRail to really spin up things fast. So let's hear from the announcement first and then definitely want to share that that customer story a little bit later. So let's get to the actual news that Shannon's going to share. >> Okay, now what's new? I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms, to further enable IT modernization across Core, Edge and Cloud. I will cover each of these announcements in more detail, demonstrating how only VxRail can offer the breadth of platform configurations, automation, orchestration and Lifecycle Management, across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent, simplified operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications. I'll start with hybrid Cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell Technologies Cloud announcements just a few weeks ago, related to VMware Cloud foundation on VxRail. Then I'll cover two brand new VxRail hardware platforms and additional options. And finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VxRail HCI system software capabilities for Lifecycle Management. Let's get started with our new Cloud offerings based on VxRail. VxRail is the HCI foundation for Dell Technologies, Cloud Platform, bringing automation and financial models, similar to public Cloud to On-premises environments. VMware recently introduced Cloud foundation for Delta, which is based on vSphere 7.0. As you likely know by now, vSphere 7.0 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release. In keeping with our synchronous release commitment, we introduced VxRail 7.0 based on vSphere 7.0 in late April, which was within 30 days of VMware's release. Two key areas that VMware focused on we're embedding containers and Kubernetes into vSphere, unifying them with virtual machines. And the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere Lifecycle Manager or VLCM. I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how VxRail fits in in a moment for VCF 4 with Tom Xu, based on vSphere 7.0 customers now have access to a hybrid Cloud platform that supports native Kubernetes workloads and management, as well as your traditional VM-based workloads. So containers are now first class citizens of your private Cloud alongside traditional VMs and this is now available with VCF 4.0, on VxRail 7.0. VxRail's tight integration with VMware Cloud foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid Cloud, but also to deliver Kubernetes at Cloud scale with one complete automated platform. The second Cloud announcement is also exciting. Recent VCF for networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid Cloud, because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture. And with that Dell Technologies Cloud platform can now be deployed with a four-node configuration, lowering the cost of an entry level hybrid Cloud. This enables customers to start smaller and grow their Cloud deployment over time. VCF and VxRail can now be deployed in two different ways. For small environments, customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes. Since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture, it's ideal for getting started with an entry level Cloud to run general purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point. Both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost, but still with a Consistent Cloud operating model. For larger environments where dedicated resources and role-based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred. You can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at eight nodes for independent management and workload domains. A standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes Horizon, VDI, and vSphere with Kubernetes. >> Alright, Jon, there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware is doing with vSphere 7.0. understand if you wanted to use the Kubernetes piece, it's VCF as that so we've seen the announcements, Dell, partnering in there it helps us connect that story between, really the VMware strategy and how they talk about Cloud and where does VxRail fit in that overall, Delta Cloud story? >> Absolutely. So first of all Stu, the VxRail course is integral to the Delta Cloud strategy. it's been VCF on VxRail equals the Delta Cloud platform. And this is our flagship on prem Cloud offering, that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any Cloud, whether it's On-prem, in the Edge or in the public Cloud. And we've seen the Dell tech Cloud Platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons. One is it offers the fastest hybrid Cloud deployment in the market. And this is really, thanks to a new subscription offer that we're now offering out there where in less than 14 days, it can be still up and running. And really, the Dell tech Cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models, overall when it comes to VxRail. Secondly, I would say is fast and easy upgrades. This is what VxRail brings to the table for all workloads, if you will, into especially critical in the Cloud. So the full automation of Lifecycle Management across the hardware and software stack across the VMware software stack, and in the Dell software and hardware supporting that, together, this enables essentially the third thing, which is customers can just relax. They can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated, and always be in a continuously validated state. And this is the kind of thing that those three value propositions together really fit well, with any on-prem Cloud. Now you take what Shannon just mentioned, and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same VxRail infrastructure alongside traditional applications. This is a game changer. >> Yeah, I love it. I remember in the early days talking with Dunn about CI, how does that fit in with Cloud discussion and the line I've used the last couple years is, modernize the platform, then you can modernize the application. So as companies are doing their full modernization, then this plays into what you're talking about. All right, we can let Shannon continue, we can get some more before we dig into some more analysis. >> That's good. >> Let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates. that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options. covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of the actual use cases. First up, I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new Dell EMC VxRail series, the D series. This is a ruggedized durable platform that delivers the full power of VxRail for workloads at the Edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas. VxRail D series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the VxRail portfolio with simplicity, agility and lifecycle management. But in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches, it's adorable form factor that's extremely temperature-resilient, shock resistant, and easily portable. It even meets milspec standards. That means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VxRail HCI system software and 24 by seven single point of support, enabling you to rapidly react to business needs, no matter the location or how harsh the conditions. So whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base, running real-time GPS mapping on the go, or implementing video surveillance in remote areas, you can ensure availability, integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VxRail ruggedized D series. >> All right, Chad we would love for you to bring us in a little bit that what customer requirement for bringing this to market. I remember seeing, Dell servers ruggedized, of course, Edge, really important growth to build on what Jon was talking about, Cloud. So, Chad, bring us inside, what was driving this piece of the offering? >> Sure Stu. Yeah, yeah, having been at the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important. And that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these Edges or some of the more exotic locations. whether that's manufacturing plants, oil rigs, submarine ships, military applications, places that we've never heard of. But it's also about extending that operational simplicity of the the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VxRails you're managing your Edges the same way using the same set of tools. You don't need to learn anything else. So operational simplicity is absolutely key here. But in those locations, you can take a product that's designed for a data center where definitely controlling power cooling space and take it some of these places where you get sand blowing or seven to zero temperatures, could be Baghdad or it could be Ketchikan, Alaska. So we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme altitude, but still offer that operational simplicity. Now military is one of those applications for the rugged platform. If you look at the resistance that it has to heat, it operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range, but it can do an excursion up to 55 C or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours. It's also resistant to heat sand, dust, vibration, it's very lightweight, short depth, in fact, it's only 20 inches deep. This is a smallest form factor, obviously that we have in the VxRail family. And it's also built to be able to withstand sudden shocks certified to withstand 40 G's of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation. Pretty high. And this is sort of like wherever skydivers go to when they want the real thrill of skydiving where you actually need oxygen to, to be for that that altitude. They're milspec-certified. So, MIL-STD-810G, which I keep right beside my bed and read every night. And it comes with a VxRail stick hardening package is packaging scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment. And we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for naval shock requirements. EMI and radiation immunity often. >> Yeah, it's funny, I remember when we first launched it was like, "Oh, well everything's going to white boxes. "And it's going to be massive, "no differentiation between everything out there." If you look at what you're offering, if you look at how public Clouds build their things, but I called it a few years or is there's a pure optimization. So you need to scale, you need similarities but you know you need to fit some, very specific requirements, lots of places, so, interesting stuff. Yeah, certifications, always keep your teams busy. Alright, let's get back to Shannon to view on the report. >> We are also introducing three other hardware-based additions. First, a new VxRail E Series model based on where the first time AMD EPYC processors. These single socket 1U nodes, offer dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from eight to 64 Cores, up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI analytics and computer aided design. Next, the addition of the latest Nvidia Quadro RTX GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional work flows. Designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible, working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering, deep learning and visual computing workloads. And Intel Optane DC persistent memory is here, and it offers high performance and significantly increased memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price. Data persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity, even when power is lost, enabling quicker recovery and less downtime. With support for Intel obtain DC persistent memory customers can expand in memory intensive workloads and use cases like SAP HANA. Alright, let's finally dig into our HCI system software, which is the Core differentiation for VxRail regardless of your workload or platform choice. Our joining engineering with VMware and investments in VxRail HCI system software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. Under the covers, VxRail offers best in class hardware, married with VMware HCI software, either vSAN or VCF. But what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two. Dell Technologies has a dedicated VxRail team of about 400 people to build market sell and support a fully integrated hyper converged system. That team has also developed our unique VxRail HCI system software, which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver seamless, automated operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere. The key components of VxRail HCI system software shown around the arc here that include the extra manager, full stack lifecycle management, ecosystem connectors, and support. I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today, but if you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to meet our experts. And I will tell you how to do that in a moment. I touched on the LCM being a key feature to the vSphere 7.0 earlier and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of VxRail Lifecycle Management. The LCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers, but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them. With VxRail customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf, freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business. Customers tell us that Lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure, and then it tends to lead to overburden IT staff, that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively, and that it isn't the most efficient economically. Automation of Lifecycle Management and VxRail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective, and offers operational freedom from maintaining infrastructure. But as shown here, our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies, they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages, and reduced overall cost of operations. With VxRail HCI system software, intelligent Lifecycle Management upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated, keeping clusters and continuously validated states while minimizing risks and operational costs. How do we ensure Continuously validated states for VxRail. VxRail labs execute an extensive, automated, repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customers choosing across their VxRail environment. The VxRail labs are constantly testing, analyzing, optimizing, and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack. All the while VxRail is backed by Dell EMC's world class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software. IT productivity skyrockets with single click non disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing. taking you to the next VxRail version of your choice, while always in a continuously validated state. You can also confidently execute automated VxRail upgrades. No matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster. They don't have to all be the same. And upgrades with VxRail are faster and more efficient with leapfrogging simply choose any VxRail version you desire. And be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between. Only VxRail can do that. >> All right, so Chad, the lifecycle management piece that Shannon was just talking about is, not the sexiest, it's often underappreciated. There's not only the years of experience, but the continuous work you're doing, reminds me back the early vSAN deployments versus VxRail jointly developed, jointly tested between Dell and VMware. So bring us inside why, 2020 Lifecycle Management still, a very important piece, especially in the VM family line. >> Yes, Stu, I think it's sexy, but, I'm pretty big nerd. (all laughing) Yeah, this is really always been our bread and butter. And in fact, it gets even more important, the larger the deployments come, when you start to look at data centers full of VxRails and all the different hardware software, firmware combinations that could exist out there. It's really the value that you get out of that VxRail HCI system software that Shannon was talking about and how it's optimized around the VMware use case. Very tightly integrated with each VMware component, of course, and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware, all of the drivers, all the software all together in tremendous value to our customers. But to deliver that we really need to make a fairly large investment. So as Shannon mentioned, we run about 25,000 hours of testing across Each major release for patches, express patches, that's about 7000 hours for each of those. So, obviously, there's a lot of parallelism. And we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we as we introduce new functionality. And one of the key things that we're able to do, as Shannon mentioned, is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state. We've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously, a huge amount of automation. And we've talked about that investment to execute those tests. That's one worth of $60 million of investment in our lab. In fact, we've got just over 2000 VxRail units in our testbed across the US, Shanghai, China and Cork, Ireland. So a massive amount of testing of each of those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state. >> Yeah, well, absolutely, it's super important not only for the day one, but the day two deployments. But I think this actually a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to. So we've got the CIO of Amarillo, Texas, he was an existing VxRail customer. And he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work-from-home initiative, as well as we get to hear in his words the value of what Lifecycle Management means. So Andrew, if we could queue up that customer segment, please? >> It's been massive and it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. As we mature, I think they embrace the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments. But this instance, really justified why I was driving progress. So fervently why it was so urgent today. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. We wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt With VxRail in place, in a week we spun up hundreds of instant balls. We spun up a 75-person call center in a day and a half, for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business. And now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that work, a little lagging or a little conservative, or understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business because it makes them adaptable as well. >> Alright, so great, Richard, you talked a bunch about the the efficiencies that that the IT put in place, how about that, that overall just managed, you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. need to be able to do things much simpler? So how does the overall Lifecycle Management fit into this discussion? >> It makes it so much easier. And in the old environment, one, It took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive, when we did make change, it overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. That wasn't cost efficient. And then simple things like, I've worked for multi billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production, simply can't afford that at local government. Having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled down QA environment and still get the benefit of rolling out non disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on Lifecycle Management because it's greatly simplified, and move those resources and rescale them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. >> All right, well, nothing better than hearing it straight from the end user, public sector reacting very fast to the COVID-19. And, if you heard him he said, if this is his, before he had run this project, he would not have been able to respond. So I think everybody out there understands, if I didn't actually have access to the latest technology, it would be much harder. All right, I'm looking forward to doing the CrowdChat letting everybody else dig in with questions and get follow up but a little bit more, I believe one more announcement he can and got for us though. Let's roll the final video clip. >> In our latest software release VxRail 4.7.510, We continue to add new automation and self service features. New functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades, to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch. This is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows, as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window. Of course, running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates. We are also offering more flexibility and getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific VxRail version, or down rev one or more nodes that may be shipped at a higher rate than the existing cluster. This enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in a cluster. To sum up all of our announcements, whether you are accelerating data sets modernization extending HCI to harsh Edge environments, deploying an on-premises Dell Technologies Cloud platform to create a developer ready Kubernetes infrastructure. VxRail is there delivering a turn-key experience that enables you to continuously innovate, realize operational freedom and predictably evolve. VxRail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations, automation and Lifecycle Management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid Cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across Core, Edge and Cloud. I now invite you to engage with us. First, the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about VxRail new features and functionality and sCore some sweet digital swag while you're at it. Delivered via an augmented reality app. All you need is your device. So go to vxrail.is/passport to get started. And secondly, if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation, we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VxRail Meet The Experts sessions available for a limited time. First come first served, just go to vxrail.is/expertsession to learn more. >> All right, well, obviously, with everyone being remote, there's different ways we're looking to engage. So we've got the CrowdChat right after this. But Jon, give us a little bit more as to how Dell's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got for options for them. >> Yeah, absolutely. So as Shannon said, so in lieu of not having done Tech World this year in person, where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions, whether it's in the booth or in meeting rooms, we are going to have these Meet The Experts sessions over the next couple weeks, and we're going to put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to everyone out there. So again, definitely encourage you. We're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we can still stay in touch, answer questions, be responsive, and really looking forward to, having these conversations over the next couple of weeks. >> All right, well, Jon and Chad, thank you so much. We definitely look forward to the conversation here and continued. If you're here live, definitely go down below and do it if you're watching this on demand. You can see the full transcript of it at crowdchat.net/vxrailrocks. For myself, Shannon on the video, Jon, Chad, Andrew, man in the booth there, thank you so much for watching, and go ahead and join the CrowdChat.

(lively music) >> Narrator: Live, from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2019! Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Okay, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage in VMworld 2019. We're in San Francisco. We're in Moscone North Lobby. I'm John Frer, my co Stu Miniman, here covering all the action of VMworld, two sets for theCUBE, our tenth year, Stu. Keeping it going. Two great guests, John Fanelli, CUBE Alumni, Vice President of Product, Virtual GPUs at NVIDIA Kevin Gray, Director of Product Marketing, Dell EMC. Thanks for coming back on. Good to see you. >> Awesome. >> Good to see you guys, too. >> NVIDIA, big news, we saw your CEO up on the keynote videoing in. Two big announcements. You got some stats on some Windows stats to talk about. Let's talk about the news first, get the news out of the way. >> Sure, at this show, NVIDIA announced our new product called NVIDIA Virtual Compute Server. So for the very first time anywhere, we're able to virtualize artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning, and data analytics. Of course, we did that in conjunction with our partner, VMware. This runs on top of vSphere and also in conjunction with our partner at Dell. All of this Virtual Compute Server runs on Dell VxRail, as well. >> What's the impact going to be for that? What does that mean for the customers? >> For customers, it's really going to be the on-ramp for Enterprise AI. A lot of customers, let's say they have a team of maybe eight data scientists are doing data analytics, if they want to move through GPU today, they have to buy eight GPUs. However, with our new solution, maybe they start with two GPUs and put four users on a GPU. Then as their models get bigger and their data gets bigger, they move to one user per GPU. Then ultimately, because we support multiple GPUs now as part of this, they move to a VM that has maybe four GPUs in it. We allow the enterprise to start to move on to AI and deep learning, in particular, machine learning for data analytics very easily. >> GPUs are in high demand. My son always wants the next NVIDIA, in part told me to get some GPUs from you when you came on. Ask the NVIDIA guy to get some for his gaming rig. Kidding aside, now in the enterprise, really important around some of the data crunching, this has really been a great use case. Talk about how that's changed, how people think about it, and how it's impacted traditional enterprise. >> From a data analytics perspective, the data scientists will ingest data, they'll run some machine learning on it, they'll create an inference model that they run to drive predictive business decisions. What we've done is we've GPU-accelerated the key libraries, the technologies, like PyTorch, XGBoost to use a GPU. The first announcement is about how they can now use Virtual Compute Server to do that. The second announcement is that workflow is, as I mentioned, they'll start small, and then they'll do bigger models, and eventually they want to train that scale. So what they want to do is they want to move to the cloud so they can have hundreds or thousands of GPUs. The second announcement is that NVIDIA and VMware are bringing Virtual Compute Server to VMware Cloud running on AWS with our T4 GPUs. So now I can scale virtually starting with fractional GPU to single GPU to multi GPU, and push a button with HCX and move it directly into AWS T4 accelerated cloud. >> That's the roadmap so you can get in, get the work done, scale up, that's the benefit of that. Availability, timing, when all of this is going to hit in-- >> So Virtual Compute Server is available on Friday, the 29th. We're looking at mid next year for the full suite of VMware Cloud on top of Aws T4. >> Kevin, you guys are supplier here at Dell EMC. What's the positioning there with you guys? >> We're working very closely with NVIDIA in general on all of their efforts around both AI as well as VDI too. We'll work quite a bit, most recently on the VDI front as well. We look to drive things like qualifying the devices. There's both VDI or analytics applications. >> Kevin, bring us up-to-date 'cause it's funny we were talking about this is our 10th year here at the show. I remember sitting across Howard Street here in 2010 and Dell, and HP, and IBM all claiming who had the lowest dollar per desktop as to what they were doing in VDI. It's a way different discussion here in 2019. >> Absolutely. Go ahead. >> One of the things that we've learned with NVIDIA is that it's really about the user experience. It's funny we're at a transition point now from Windows 7 to Windows 10. The last transition was Windows XP to Windows 7. What we did then is we took Windows 7, we tore everything out of it we possibly could, we made it look like XP, and we shoved it out. 10 years later, that doesn't work. Everyone's got their iPhones, their iOS devices, their Android devices. Microsoft's done a great job on Windows 10 being immersive. Now we're focused on user experience. When the VDI environment, as you move to Windows 10, you may not be aware of this, but from Windows 7 to Windows 10, it uses 50% more CPU, and you don't even get that great of a user experience. You pop a GPU in there, and you're good. Most of our customers together are working on a five-year life cycle. That means over the next five years, they're going to get 10 updates of Windows 10, and they're going to get like 60 updates of their Office applications. That means that they want to be future-proof now by putting the GPUs in to guarantee a great user experience. >> On the performance side too, obviously. In auto updates, this is the push notification world we live in. This has to built in from day one. >> Absolutely, and if you look at what Dell's doing, we really built this into both our VxRails and our VxBlocks. GPUs are just now part of it. We do these fully qualified. It stacks specifically for VDI environments as well. We're working a lot with the n-vector tools from VM which makes sure we're-- >> VDI finally made it! >> qualifying user experience. >> All these years. >> Yes, yes. In fact, we have this user experience tool called n-vector, which actually, without getting super technical for the audience, it allows you to look at the user experience based on frame-rate, latency, and image quality. We put this tool together, but Dell has really been taking a lead on testing it and promoting it to the users to really drive the cost-effectiveness. It still is about the dollar per desktop, but it's the dollar per dazzling desktop. (laughing) >> Kevin, I hear the frame-rate in there, and I've got all the remote workers, and you're saying how do I make sure that's not the gaming platform they're using because I know how important that is. >> Absolutely. There's a ton of customers that are out there that we're using. We look at folks like Guillevin as like the example of a company that's worked with us and NVIDIA to truly drive types of applications that are essential to VDI. These types of power workers doing applications like Autodesk, that user experience and that ability to support multiple users. If you look at Pat, he talked a little bit about any cloud, any application, any device. In VDI, that's really what it's about, allowing those workers to come together. >> I think the thing that the two of you mentioned, and Stu you pointed out brilliantly was that VDI is not just an IT thing anymore. It really is the expectation now that my rig, if I'm a gamer, or a young person, the younger kids, if you're under 25, if you don't have a kick-ass rig, (laughs) that's what they call it. Multiple monitors, that's the expectation, again, mobility. Work experience, workspace. >> Exactly, along those same lines, by the way. >> This is the whole category. It's not just like a VDI, this thing over here that used to be talked about as an IT thing. >> It's about the workflow. So it's how do I get my job done. We used to use words like "business worker" and "knowledge worker." It's just I'm a worker. Everybody today uses their phone that's mobile. They use their computer at home, they use their computer at work. They're all running with dual monitors. Dual monitors, sometimes dual 4K monitors. That really benefits as well from having a GPU. I know we're on TV so hopefully some of you guys are watching VDI on your GPU-accelerated. It's things like Skype, WebEX, Zoom, all the collaboration to 'em, Microsoft Teams, they all benefit from our joint solution, like the GPU. >> These new subsystems like GPUs become so critical. They're not just subsystem, they are the main part because the offload is now part of the new operating environment. >> We optimized together jointly using the n-vector tool. We optimized the server and operating environment, so that if you run into GPU, you can right-size your CPU in terms of cores, speed, etc., so that you get the best user experience at a most cost effective way. >> Also, the gaming world helps bring in the new kind of cool visualization. That's going to move into just the workflow of workers. You start to see this immersive experience, VR, ARs obviously around the corner. It's only going to get more complex, more needs for GPUs. >> Yes, in fact, we're seeing more, I think, requirements for AR and VR from business than we are actually for gaming. Don't you want to go into your auto showroom at your house and feel the fine Corinthian leather? >> We got to upgrade our CUBE game, get more GPU focused and get some tracing in there. >> Kevin, I know I've seen things from the Dell family on levering VR in the enterprise space. >> Oh, absolutely. If you look at a lot of the things that we're doing with some of the telcos around 5G. They're very interested in VR and AR. Those are areas that'll continue to use things like GPUs to help accelerate those types of applications. It really does come down to having that scalable infrastructure that's easy to manage and easy to operate. That's where I think the partnership with NVIDIA really comes together. >> Deep learning and all this stuff around data. Michael Dell always comes on theCUBE, talks about it. He sees data as the biggest opportunity and challenge. In whatever applications coming in, you got to be able to pound into that data. That's where AI's really shown... Machine learning has kind of shown that that's helping heavy lifting a lot of things that were either manual. >> Exactly. The one thing that's really great about data analytics that are GPU-accelerated is we can take a job that used to take days and bring it down to hours. Obviously, doing something faster is great, but if I take a job that used to take a week and I can do it in one day, that means I have four more days to do other things. It's almost like I'm hiring people for free because I get four more extra work days. The other thing that's really interesting as our joint solution is you can leverage that same virtual GPU technology. You can do VDI by day and at night, you run Compute. So when your users aren't at work, you migrate them off, you spin up your VMs that are doing your data analytics using our RAPIDS technology, and then you're able to get that platform running 24 by seven. >> Productivity gains just from an infrastructure. Even the user too, up and down, the productivity gains are significant. So I'll get three monitors now. I'm going to get one of those Alienware curved monitors. >> Just the difference we had, we have a suite here at the show, and just the difference, you can see such a difference when you insert the GPUs into the platform. It's just makes all the difference. >> John, I got to ask you a personal question. How many times have people asked you for a GPU? You must get that all the time? >> We do. I have a NVIDIA backpack. When I walk around, there's a lot of people that only know NVIDIA for games. So random people will always ask for that. >> I've got two sons and two daughters and they just nerd out on the GPUs. >> I think he's trying to get me to commit on camera on giving him a GPU. (laughing) I think I'm in trouble here. >> Yeah, they get the latest and greatest. Any new stuff, they're going to be happy to be the first on the block to get the GPU. It's certainly impacted on the infrastructure side, the components, the operating environment, Windows 10. Any other data you guys have to share that you think is notable around how all this is coming together working from user experience around Windows and VDI? >> I think one piece of data, again, going back to your first comment about cost per desktop. We're seeing a lot of migration to Windows 10. Customers are buying our joint solution from Dell which includes our hardware and software. They're buying that five-year life cycle, so we actually put a program in place to really drive down the cost. It's literally like $3 per month to have a GPU-accelerated virtual desktop. It's really great Value for the customers besides the great productivity. >> If you look at doing some of these workloads on premises, some of the costs can come down. We had a recent study around the VxBlock as an example. We showed that running GPUs and VDI can be up as much as 45% less on a VxBlock at scale. When you talk about the whole hybrid cloud, multi-cloud strategy, there's pluses and minuses to both. Certainly, if we look at some of the ability to start small and scale out, whether you're going HCI or you're going CI, I think there's a VDI solution there that can really drive the economics. >> The intense workloads. Is there any industries that are key for you guys in terms of verticals? >> Absolutely. So we're definitely looking at a lot of the CAD/CAM industries. We just did a certification on our platforms with Dassault's CATIA system. That's an area that we'll continue to explore as we move forward. >> I think in the workstation side of things, it's all the standard, it's automotive, it's manufacturing. Architecture is interesting. Architecture is one of those companies that has kind of an S and B profile. They have lots of offices, but they have enterprise requirements for all the hard work that they do. Then with VDI, we're very strong in financial services as well as healthcare. In fact, if you haven't seen, you should come by. We have a Bloomberg demo for financial services about the impact for traders. I have a virtualized GPU desktop. >> The speed is critical for them. Final question. Take-aways from the show this year, 2019 VMworld, Stu, we got 10 years to look back, but guys, take-aways from the show that you're going to take back from this week. >> I think there's still a lot of interest and enthusiasm. Surprisingly, there's still a lot of customers that haven't finished there migration to Windows 10 and they're coming to us saying, Oh my gosh, I only have until January, what can you do to help me? (laughing) >> Get some GPUs. Thoughts from the show. >> The multi-cloud world continues to evolve, the continued partnerships that emerge as part of this is just pretty amazing in how that's changing in things like virtual GPUs and accelerators. That experience that people have come to expect from the cloud is something, for me is a take-away. >> John Fanelli, NVIDIA, thanks for coming on. Congratulations on all the success. Kevin, Dell EMC, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for the insights. Here on theCUBE, Vmworld 2019. John Furrier, Stu Miniman, stay with us for more live coverage after this short break. (lively music)

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

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas. We're about hitting the midway point of three days wall-to-wall live coverage on two sets. I'm Stu Miniman. My co-host is John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program, first of all, a first time guest whose company was mentioned by Pat Gelsinger in the opening keynote, Chris Gregg, the CIO of Mercy Ships. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, Stu. >> And also happy to welcome back a regular on the program, John Siegal, who's the vice president product marketing with Dell EMC on the Infrastructure Solution Group. John, great to see you. >> Always glad to be here Stu, as you know. >> All right. So, always excite not only a customer but a customer, as Pat said, "doing good." So, tell us a little bit about Mercy Ships' mission. >> Thank you, Stu. It is great to be here. Super excited to have Pat mention us on the stage yesterday morning. Great great opportunity. We meet the need that Pat mentioned, the five billion people in this world who don't have access to safe and affordable surgical care. More than 30 percent of the deaths in this world are a result of that lack of that access. So, we meet that need. We operate hospital ships that provide surgical care in the developing world and support the countries by providing training and capacity building in those areas. >> It is a great mission. It's one of those things that, you know, we've had a few examples here at the show. Malala Yousafzai this morning was very inspiring. Just talk about the company itself, how big, where do you operate around the globe. >> So, we operate in primarily West and Southern and Eastern Africa. That's where you find many of the countries or most of the countries that are the least developed in this area. We're headquartered in the US. We have offices around the world for fund raising and recruiting. Our organization is a non-profit. We are funded entirely by donation and our hospital ships are staffed entirely by volunteers. >> Alright, and you've got the CIO hat on. >> I do. >> So talk to us a little bit about IT. I lived on the vendor side. I actually remember designing gear that was okay for those kind of environments. Ruggedizd and military and things like that. So, tell us your role inside and what that encompasses. >> Well, for us the most important thing is ensuring that the organization is efficient and that we are putting the, delivering the best for our patients, for the people we're serving in Africa. So, we want our IT to be effective, efficient, simple. Particularly with ships being staffed as volunteers, we want to maximize the effort onboard. And we don't want to spend a lot of time supporting IT, if you like. So, much of what we're doing and where we're going is around simplifying and that's where VxRails come in for us. >> Alright, well John, he's a straight man. He set you up. >> He set me up, right? >> Thank you for bringing us, you know, we love CIOs. We love missions for good here. So, yeah, he set you up on the Dell connecting. >> It doesn't get more inspirational than this though, does it, right? And so, of course, we've been focused with hyper-converged on simplifying IT now for years. And, you know, whether it's helping companies refocus there energies and there resources to innovate or it's helping non-profits literally save lives. I mean this is, to me, this is what inspires us to do good and actually, really to double down on really driving more and more simplicity into our products. >> Well, Chris, I'm really interested in some of the technical details because we heard a lot here at VMworld about the Edge, right? The Edge has a lot of different meanings and connotations but not everything can live up in a regional data center, up in the public cloud, right? And, you know, a ship is probably a canonical example. So I'm kind of fascinated with like, what kinds of things do you encounter that you wouldn't encounter were you in AWS east or something. What do you have to do on the ship? And you're all self-contained and etc.? >> Yeah, our primary constraint is availability of bandwidth. So, going back a couple years, we were relying purely on satellite, had a maybe about five meg connection for a full hospital ship, 400 people. We've gone up to about 100 meg now. So, we're still tiny. So that really constrains. We have this hybrid environment of a on premise on ship, with live-live data centers on ship, two data centers on a ship. Headquarters as well and then we're starting to look at what we can take into the cloud. So, the concept of a hybrid approach, especially with one vendor partnered with Vmware and Dell bringing it all together in one place and one support model is really fantastic for us. >> Yeah, you have amphibious cloud, is I think what you have, right? >> Yes, yes. (laughs) >> So, John, are there any special things that you have to do from a gear standpoint? From their standpoint? >> Well, it's interesting, you know. I think from their requirements perspective. So, first of all they're looking for small footprint, of course. And hyper-converts, by nature, is smaller. And so we've done that there. But in addition to that, I think as we've talked about too, is we're also helping them hyper-converge their operations as well, right? As he mentioned, as Chris mentioned, they have IT volunteers on staff that are literally coming, they're volunteering their own time. They don't stay for, what? A couple months at a time? >> Three months >> Three months at a time. Constant rotation of new staff. They can't be experts on storage, and servers and networking and all that. What they need is to be able to hyper-converge operations into more of a generalist type of approach. And so that's really where our efforts have really helped them, is I think has enabled them to have IT generalists be able to handle all the upgrades and the deployments so that it just works. But beyond that, from a hardware standpoint, no, nothing specific there other than the small footprint. >> But from a personnel standpoint, you want that easy button, right? >> Absolutely. >> You don't have to, right, training them up, maintaining it. I know when I talk to a lot of HCI customers they never touch the box. It's "oh great I've got some interface and I can do that". What's your experience been? How long have you had the solution? >> So, we've had the solution in headquarters for about a year. And we are building a new ship. It's ready to be launched in 2020. It's actually another aspect for us is, when we started looking at this in 2016, we were looking out four years, really, for the time it takes to build a ship and thinking forward to what would be coming four years time. What do we need to put our bets on, if you life. So, looking at VxRail when it started coming into play. We've actually started building the data centers for the new ship. Had a good experience so far. We're getting ready to pack that up and be sending out to be installed on the ship next year. >> As we've talked about, the faster you can deploy one of these floating hospitals, the quicker you can help patients. Right, so this is kind of giving a whole new meaning to the ability to really simplify deployment as well as the whole life cycle. And saving them. >> What are some of the workloads that you're running that on, on these active-active data centers. That's kind of interesting as well. >> Yeah, on ship we have, it's interesting we have such a mix. And we operate a hospital, of course. And we operate services to maintain plants, the machinery and all that sort of stuff. There's not too much IoT at this point, although our new ship will have some more. In the hospital you've got these radiology, patient records, all those sorts of things. We operate a school on board as well, There's the general office support as well. On the ship it's quite mixed and varied. >> Alright. >> But it really was the flexibility, right? I think the flexibility of hyper-converge that allows you to run some of your kind of run of the mill, the basic applications. But also, this ship's going to be deployed several years from now as well with the similar technologies. So it's important to be able to support not just today's applications, but some of the next-gen applications >> Absolutely that are coming down the pike to help you improve care. >> And with new ship we'll be deploying VDI as well. So we'll be taking that step as well with Horizon. >> I was curious that with the teaching and everything, there's lots of use cases-- >> Absolutely, yeah. >> that come to mind there. John, what does Dell do for the non-profits that obviously, HDI's designed to be affordable to begin with but for this class of customer anything special? Or is it just part of the regular future-proofing and everything like that that makes this possible? >> I think this is just a great opportunity to hear this and to see how simplicity is really being achieved and helping save lives. So, I think from that perspective we couldn't be happier. I think, also, what we've really poured is our heart and soul and energy into this product so that it just works. And I think a lot of what I think also Chris looked at was wanting to make sure he had a single vendor. So, we've made sure that we have everything from data protection to the actual infrastructure itself. We have Dell EMCI still on in there as well. But providing a single point of contact to support that whole stack so that you have volunteers onsite, on the ship, giving a whole new meaning to on-prem, by the way, on ship and yet, if there is an issue, they have the peace of mind to know that it's one call to Dell EMC to support that entire stack. So, again, that's really what we're proud of, is to see the value proposition that we envisioned years ago start to really be realized in a situation like this where it's really helping save lives. >> Chris, I understand it's your first time at this show-- >> It is, yes. >> We always, it's a very welcoming community. What's your impressions been so far? And you probably have a slightly different experience than the average person's not usually mentioned by the CEO of the company-- >> Yes. >> Up on the keynotes. >> Yes, it's been quite the introduction to be mentioned. We were brought in and sat right in the front row in the keynote. And that was very exciting, too. It's been fantastic to be here. Really inspiring to see some of the things that are coming along in the future. I've had lots of ideas, thinking about what we can do next and how we could continue to improve what we're doing so that can continue to serve more people, have a bigger impact for our organization. >> It's amazing. I was actually just looking at your volunteer page. You know, the beautiful thing about VMworld is that it's a, although there are a couple VM, there's a VMworld in Europe and a VMworld here, but this community is global. There are people here from all over the world. And some of them might be able to take a couple months off, right? >> Absolutely, yeah. >> And so what kind? I see you're looking. I see IS systems administrator, support specialist, all sorts of stuff. >> Yeah, so there's two vacancies in our team at the moment, as you mentioned. A system admin and a support specialist. Our website, mercyships.org, has all the volunteer opportunities. Last year we had volunteers from 68 countries. All sorts of skill, not just medical obviously, administrative, all sorts. So, go and have a look at the website. >> That's awesome. >> Chris, one thing I always like to talk to CIO's these days, how's your role changing? When you look at what's happen the last couple years, change is evident from everything you see at this show. What are you seeing from yourself and when you talk to your peers as to how things are moving? >> For me the role has really moved into trying to understand how Mercy Ships can multiply our impact and looking how technology can be a part of that. It's looking at how we optimize and make our operations more efficient. As an organization funded by donors, we want to make sure that we maximize those dollars to be delivering patient care. So, looking at how, as an organization, we can really double down and multiply what we do through technology. >> That's great. Look, IT used to be very internally focused. Mercy Ships' mission, obviously, very much looking external on the CIO. John, you talk to a lot of customers at this show. This is a great story. Any other things from the show... >> I got to say, as we were just talking about here though, it is such an inspiring story and it is an opportunity now for all the vcenter administrators here at the show. By the way, because VxRail, of course, you can just use familiar tools like vcenter, VMware Tools, this is a pretty good recruiting area for you right now. Again, it's all coming together for us here. And I think the opportunity for us to give back in a way here as Dell Technologies, as VMware together, this is what we envisioned. And we're just happy to be able to have a storyline like this. And we look forward to maybe being on theCUBE again with Chris in the future as they bring the next ship online as well. >> By the way, our studios are always open for the non-profits. No charge, have them in. We've got Palo Alto. We've got Boston area. We do love to be able to support that as we can. >> Alright, want to give you both the final word. Things looking forward, takeaways from your experience so far. >> Yeah, so, one of the things that really interesting for me is thinking through how we can start integrating Workplace One. So, looking at, with a turnover of volunteer staff, we want to make sure the Edge is really simple, that we can support that. Also, thinking through what we want to do to increase our resilience and dr capabilities. And starting to look at how we can use the Cloud more, particularly Hybrid cloud with multiple different providers. So, yeah, really exciting. Thank you so much for the opportunity. It's really been good to be here. And mercyships.org is the place to go and find out more. >> I'd just add to that again. We're honored to be able to be part of this story with you across the Dell Technologies family. And we look forward to continuing, to providing the best experience you can have for your ships going forward. Now we'll be continuing our partnership. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you. >> John and Chris, thank you so much. Be sure, check out mercyships.org for those volunteer opportunities. And check out theCUBE.net where you can find all of the video content from this show and all the others. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2018. You're watching theCUBE.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas, Nevada. We'll go back to San Francisco next year, but here in Vegas, third year in a row, and I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost is John Troyer. Welcome back to the program Gil Shneorson, who's the SVP and VxRail general manager with Dell EMC. Gil, great to see you. >> Great to see you, it's still great to see you, John. >> All right, so I caught up with you at Dell World just a few months ago, down the strip. At that point, we couldn't take an autonomous vehicle. But since then, that Lyft now has like autonomous vehicles, so we know things can change pretty fast in the area. Why don't you give us, what's the update on your end? What's changed since last we talked? >> Thanks for asking. As you know, we're moving very fast. We're moving very fast, picking up many, many new customers every quarter, but the reason for that is because we keep innovating. So for example, in the show we announced a new G Series, a new 560 which is a new two-by-four Dell-based model, with more memory, more CPU, more capacity. Very popular form factor by our customers. We announced that we are now doing a simship with VMware, we're calling it synchronous releases. Our customers told us that they don't want to wait between a vSAN release and a VxRail release. We announced VxRail participation in Dell's customer loyalty program, which is a lot of features for future proof. We just included VxRail in the network fabric design center, which is kind of a sign for things to come, as where do we need the whole solution to be with networking inclusion. More configurability for VxRack SDDC, in other words, we keep moving forward very quickly. >> Gil, we've had the chance to document this since day one. So vSAN, I said when it was first announced, this was the rising tide that will really raise all the ships in what we launched as the hyperconverged environment. VxRail was, at the time, EMC and VMware creating a team together, took the product people, took some various components and made a product that really accelerated the marketplace and was very successful, thousands of customers. vSAN's got 15,000 customers, you've got to be one of the top deployments out. You're all under the Dell family, but is it still made up of those people and how does that teamwork and innovation between various groups work today? >> Look, when we did this there was no runbook. How do you take two teams from two companies? But we discovered all the time that what we've created is extremely powerful. We were growing three times the market. And usually that's not a simple thing and so on both of our sides we're doubling down. On the roadmap, the integration between the companies. And as I said, synchronous shipping is an investment, because what you really have to do is move more things towards the VMware side so testing are done quickly because you don't want to forego quality. So we're very happy with this model, and I think customers are happy with this model. You take the software, you put it with a specific configuration, you automate it to match, and you get something that's very resilient, and I think both of us know that and both of us keep investing it because it's working. >> That's great. Gil, I wanted to kind of follow on with what you said about the VMware and the Dell teams coming together. So my tribe is on the VMware side, right? And the VMware admins have always been very involved with storage. And for the last couple years they had been very involved cross-training on vSAN. So I'm kind of curious about the demand for VxRail and where it's coming from. Is it the VMware folks that are saying, "Hey, let's look at this"? Is it the C-level, is it the old storage team, is it the business unit? What's driving this transformation? >> Yeah, I'll tell you. Two years ago you needed to talk to people about why HCI. More and more, the conversation is why you're HCI. And we have a very unique position because we are part of the VMware stack. And in fact, maybe we'll touch on it later but HCI has its place, but we're already looking at what multiclouds means from infrastructure standpoint, right? And so, if it's a transformative conversation it would be some sort of an architect in that environment that's transforming. And they'd have a cloud project and they'll have a name for me, Cloud One, My Cloud, one of those. But most of the cases it's still a tech refresh, they're moving from a three-tier architecture, to a consolidated hyperconverge. And vAdmins have a lot to say. The server admins have a lot to say. And the reason they buy an appliance or basically buy our automation, because they realize that it saves them time, and it takes away risk. And many of them, by the way, choose to deploy vSAN on their own with servers which we call ReadyNodes, and they're also very successful. In other words, it's how much value you want on top of vSAN that you're willing to pay for and they're voting with their wallets. >> Yeah, Gil, I'm really glad you brought up multicloud because it's one of the big themes of the show. And it's funny, because we know that vSAN is a critical component of the VMware Cloud Foundation, the VCF stuff. But I hadn't really thought about, VxRail is just built with vSAN. So I still, even though I know it's a software thing, I think of it as an appliance and something coming from Dell. Talk to us about how VxRail fits into the multicloud world for customers. >> So VxRail, today we have VxRail and we have VxRack. They differ only in parts of the management stack on top of them. There's VxRail manager, there is an SDDC manager that comes from VCF. And by the way, those over time will find their way into somewhere of a consolidated stack. And the reason I'm talking about multicloud today is because we have not, we keep innovating with the vSAN team. We keep benefiting from their innovation, we keep adding on top of it. But more and more you'll see us integrate with other parts of the VMware stack. So for example, I think Pat touched on our future or upcoming integration with our Cloud Assembly services. So you can take a software-based management vRealize and manage VxRails that you own as a service. So our current roadmap in investments are not only to invest in being the most resilient, robust, vSAN-based infrastructure, but tying to every part of the VMware stack so we can really be that infrastructure for multicloud. So between VxRail and VxRack and the different touchpoints across the stack, we're really weaving it into the entire stack. That's our strength, we are a VMware product essentially. And so we realize that we need to take the whole breadth of the VMware stack and integrate as appropriate at every level, so this choice becomes a no-brainer for customers. >> Gil, since VxRail is an appliance, how often does it get updated and are people capable of taking those updates since it's an engineered system like that? >> Yeah, look, in the past, when people wanted a lot of things to work together, they'd qualify them, they'd test them and then they'd go upgrade them manually. Piece by piece through a recipe, if you will. What we've done in the appliance model, we've added our own IP which basically takes all of that and automates it. So what our customers get is a downloadable package from Dell EMC that includes the entire VMware stack update, all of the drivers, all of the firmware involved, and does a one-boot update for each node in the cluster and cycles through it automatically. So, because we now are synchronously shipping with VMware, and by the way, customers are concerned with express patches. Those we do within seven days, or even faster. So every time VMware moves forward, every time we move forward, we package it all up and we make it downloadable and upgradeable automatically. So it happens as fast as they need it to be, you know what I mean? There's no limitation because it's an appliance, it's the same thing as having a stack. >> Gil, I'm wondering if we can talk a little bit up the stack. The early customers that I've talked to, we know that modernizing your applications can be really challenging. A pattern that I've seen from a number of customers is step one, modernize the platform, step two, start modernizing the applications. What are you seeing from your rack and rail customers as they go through that kind of transition? >> That's a good question. (chuckles) I think most of the customers we're talking to today are still modernizing the infrastructure. That's the reality. They need a more agile environment because they need to take care of things up the stack and go into development models of all sorts. You can also see that there's a lot of success with our joint work with Pivotal on Pivotal Ready Architecture. And so Pivotal and us have created the Ready Architecture, based on VxRail. The value in that is really Cloud Foundry and what it brings to the table, and the design. And we see a lot of adoption for that, so people are adopting Cloud Foundry as a development model and a deployment model. They're using VxRail as an infrastructure, and obviously because of its ability to migrate across environments, that infrastructure transcends, it makes sense. So there are two angles, but I think a lot of people are still modernizing their base infrastructure to be ready for greater things. >> Absolutely. All right, Gil, want to give you the final word. What should we be looking for from your group as we go through the rest of 2018? >> We're going to keep moving, we're going to keep innovating. We're going to make sure that the solutions fit into the existing VMware environments in a more seamless way every time we work on it. And I got to say, if there are customers watching this Cube interview, I keep reaching out to customers saying, look, we have many, many thousands of customers now. We do not want to lose the intimate relationship with them. So if anybody's watching and they're interested in a conversation telling us what they wish to see on the roadmap, voicing their opinions directly to the product group, I know my title and Twitter handle are going to be here at the bottom, I invite people to reach out and talk to us. >> All right, great closing point. Gil, we're always loving fostering conversations and feedback. So, Gil Shneorson, his Twitter handle's on a screen in case Shneorson doesn't come off your keyboard nice and easy. John Troyer, and I'm Stu Miniman, we're also, always love the feedback when you send it on Twitter. And we'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2018, thank you for watching theCUBE. >> Thank you. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat tech music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman here with my co-host Justin Warren, And we're at vmworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE worldwide leader in tech coverage. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Juan Gaviria who's with ADP, and he's the senior director of technical systems engineering. Juan, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. >> So vmworld, it's my 8th year coming to the show. I've been part of the community for a long time, but one of the things that people love at this show, about 20,000 maybe a little north of that, it's peers talking to peers. People that dig into the technology, find out what works and how to do things better and everything. Tell us a little bit about your role. I think most of us know ADP. We've gotten checks with the logo on it, or lots of areas of other services. But what's you're role inside the org? >> Yeah, sure. So really quick about ADP to your point, the logo is pretty well known. We actually pay one in six people in the United States, so over 25 million employees we pay. We have over 650,000 clients, and our mobile app, which is really the way I recommend you look at your pay stubs, 401K, benefits, etc., has been downloaded over 12 million times. So the ADP brand is doing well. It's a healthy business. My role specifically is that I manage all computer at ADP, so think about servers, server operating systems, and server virtualization; that's my role. >> Yeah, you brought up mobile, so maybe start there. Pat Gelsinger this morning was talking about kind digital transformation. We look at financial services, how do you reach those users? What does that kind of ripple through to all of the things that you manage? How long have you been there, and what changes have you been seeing? >> I've been there 15 years, and I've seen a lot of changes. >> Stu: 15 years ago they probably weren't even virtualized so... >> No, no, in fact, I remember rolling out ESX2.X and using the good ole mooey, so we've come a long way. And mobile has just been explosive. Ya know, from a product perspective the goal now, it's mobile first, right? So even now if you think about your benefits, when you go enroll in your benefits every year, the goal is to make that experience translate to mobile, and that's a little harder than it seems, but that's the goal for ADP. It's everything mobile. >> Bring us in. What's kind of the scope of what you manage? You said ADP globally what you handle, but what's kind of the team size? How many devices or VMs or however you manage, what are you listed in? >> Sure, so my team is responsible for computers, I mentioned, so think of everything from demand management through operations. We have globally about 50 associates that are responsible for that. We have over 3000 ESXI hosts deployed across seven global data centers with well over 40000 VMs. So it's a pretty good size infrastructure. >> And bring us inside VMware. How long have you been using it? What pieces of VMware in the ecosystem have you been using? >> We have been using VMware, again, since the early days of server virtualization. We're a VROPS customer, a VRA customer, in fact, VRA, we're leveraging it for infrastructure as service to our deaf community. We have, for ADP, thousands and thousands of developers, so just the amount of churn in our private cloud is tremendous. Airwatch, we're a big Airwatch customer, as well. >> Expand a little bit on the developer piece. What do they look for? How does that impact what you're doin? >> Yeah, sure. I don't know what they're looking for cause it's always changing to be honest with you. But we have somewhere around 6000 developers, and they're obviously developing ADP's next generation products. So they're just looking for us to get out of their way, right? They want VMs; they want 'em now. They want containers; they want 'em now. And every day I turn around they want bigger VMs, bigger containers, and it's getting harder and harder. So through VRA, we provide those pools of capacity and then they're able to spin up, tear down, rebuild VMs as needed. On a monthly basis what I see through VRA just in the developer community lab is about 3000 or so actions a month. So it's pretty high amount of change in that environment. >> Based on what was announced in the Kali, particularly around the partnership with AWS, do you thing that's going to resonate with the developers? >> Yeah, absolutely. Most of our, not most, but a fair amount of our next generation products are being developed on AWS, right? So everyone wants to be on AWS. In fact, we're bringing in a lot of college hires, and as soon as they come in they say, "I want to work on AWS." So for us it resonates because what ADP does, security is key, and we want to have a hybrid cloud, so we were actually part of the Lighthouse Program. So we were an early customer. Got to see the logo during the KeyNote which was nice. So, yeah we plan on leveraging that relationship to help us. For example, burst in that DevCloud. >> Unpack that for us. One of the things we look at, when I hear hybrid cloud I need you to explain that because every customer I talk to, it means different things to me, especially, you mention things like bursting that's a little scary sometimes. So maybe explain what that actually means in your environment. >> Yeah, so, in the Dev environment specifically, what it means is, as I mentioned, we get requests that come out of left field, right? I need a 300 gig memory VM and 10 terabytes of storage. You're just like, "Where, I don't have this," right? I don't have hundreds of those. So we can put that capacity out on AWS much faster, and as those projects materialize, we can then bring that back in. So that's what I mean by hybrid cloud for us. >> So you're using the VMware on AWS, you've been testing that out, you said? My understanding is you're also using Vsan, is that separate from that? Cause Vsan's part of the VMware Cloud or cloud foundation suite, a piece of it, so what's your interest been in Vsan, and how does that fit into the entire picture? >> So it is different. For us, the AWS relationship is going to be more of a manage service, obviously. We're actually going to become a consumer. So we're going to feel like our own customers. To answer your question on Vsan, yeah, we've made a huge investment in Vsan, so all of our VM storage, which again is 40000 VMs worth, which is well over 4+ petabytes of storage, we're moving that all to Vsan. >> What's happenin to all those arrays? >> They're going to be gone. >> Yeah? >> They're going to be gone. >> That's a really big move. Can you, you got to take us back, ya know. How did you is this a top-down or, ya know, bottoms-up walk us through some of that. >> Yeah what started that? Like how did you come to even begin contemplating replacing all of your storage? >> So it's been both to answer your first question. Both top-down and bottom-up. We've been looking at the technologies for a while, and just kind of keepin close to them. At this point, they're mature enough that we feel they can run our business-critical products. And it's been a journey, right? For the last year, we've spent looking at all the different market leading technologies and figuring out which ones make sense in an environment our size. How do we operationalize this thing? So it's been a journey and this is the beginning for us, so we're actually, as I speak, we're starting to deploy our first Vsan clusters in production and we're deploying it in hundreds of servers at a time so it's exciting and interesting times for the team and I. >> Yeah, one of the interesting things, some people look at Vsan and they're like "Oh well it's kind of small deployments," but we had some of the VMware people on earlier today, and they're like, "We're deploying internally," but it's lots of clusters because if you tell me hundreds of servers, I'm like, "Well that's not a single cluster that's lots of clusters." How do you carve that up? How do you manage that? How do you roll that out? What does that look like? >> That's the trickiest part, right? And, by the way, as we look at different solutions, the cluster size became one of the reasons why we chose Vsan. >> Okay. >> A lot of the other solutions that are out there will limit you to about eight node clusters, and to your point, we have thousands of hosts. That's hundreds of clusters. So Vsan gives us the ability to have slightly larger clusters. Today we're going to look at about 16 node clusters to start. That seems to be where VMware is going as well, so we'll follow their lead. We figure they know what they're doin'. And we'll manage that using Vroms as well. >> Yeah I was curious as to what was actually driving the change to Vsan, and what was it about Vsan that said, "Yes! This is great! "This is the one that we're going to pick." You've mentioned cluster size, were there other things that made you sort of decide that Vsan was the right choice for you? >> So to me, the way I look at Vsan from a Vsphere perspective is that they've made storage a feature. And our Vsphere administrators, they know how to run Vsphere and now they just have another feature. So that was one of the main reasons, just the operational efficiencies from a team perspective. There are a lot of other reasons as well. Security: some of the other competitors out there, for example, didn't have encryption when we were looking at it, which is, everything we do revolves around security, so that was another key reason for Vsan for us. And what drove us at first was really, with the traditional models, we found ourselves to not be very agile. Because our business is growing so fast, we're building about six months of capacity at a time, and if you can think about the cost of that much capacity at a shot it's millions of dollars, it's kind of sitting idle. So with HCI technologies and Vsan, specifically, we think we're going to be much more modular in our approach and closer to just in time. So we expect significant capital benefits from that. >> So if I hear you right, it's the pooled nature of what you're doing and that the building blocks are small enough that you're not getting to what people usually have is like, "Oh yeah, I have all this capacity and I'm three years in "and I'm still not using a lot of what I run into, "ya know, I overbuy so much because of that." >> Exactly, and think about that first purchase. You've got to sit with finance and say, "Hey I've got to go buy an array "and I've got to go buy a couple hundred servers." Now I don't have to buy that much up front so it's a huge benefit for us. >> And it sounds like it's going to be cord deployments as well, cause there are a lot of like the HCI deployments, traditionally, have been for remote office things, or just particular work loads like VDI will be one thing that it runs on, but it sounds like this is going to underpin pretty much everything that you do. >> Pretty much everything, yeah. And in addition to VDI we have a very large VDI deployment that supports all of our customer support reps, and it's going to underpin that in addition to underpinning all of the business products that you use to view your pay statement. >> Alright, so you talked about the finance people, what about the storage people? I have to imagine you had storage admins, you look at it and you say, "Okay are they out of a job? "Are they going to work on new challenges?" Can you walk us through how you approach them? How they've looked at this whole migration? And what happens to them versus the VMware people? The virtualization admins I should say. >> It's a funny question cause I've become a little bit more popular now with the storage scene. They've actually knocked on my door and said, "Hey, anything we can help you with?" But, no, it's a good partnership. My peer and I who run storage, we actually built a team together that's going to help us roll out Vsan so we know that there are skills in the storage team that we can leverage, and our vision of it is that we're no longer going to have Vsphere administrators or storage administrators. We're going to have cloud engineers, and they have to know, compute network storage really cause we view the skills as converging as well. It's not just the software and the hardware. >> How about the management of that though? Are you essentially going to be managing a team together rather than it being separate people managing different people? >> Correct it's one team. >> One team? >> It's really interesting, Juan, I'm just curious, in your kind of evaluation phase, what did you learn that if you had known it at the beginning might have either accelerated or you might have positioned things a little bit differently now that you're ready to kind of this massive roll out? >> I think I would have had maybe stricter entrance criteria. You think about a company our size and all the partners we have. We looked at a lot of different solutions. We spent a lot of time in the lab. Where in the end we knew that, for example, an eight node cluster, or not having encryption, were showstoppers, but yet we spent the time in the lab to do that, so my recommendation or advice to my peers out there is come up with good criteria that you know you have to have, and then from there, do the paper exercise and bring in the ones that you know will actually be able to get to production. >> What was that entire kind of evaluation phase? How long did that take? >> More than six months. >> And can I ask what underlying deployment you're going to use for Vsan? >> From a hardware perspective? >> Yeah. >> Sure, HP servers. DL360s. >> Okay, and what led you to choose that versus, ya know, the Dell people are all lined up to say, ya know, come on we own VMware, ya know, you should do VXrails? >> Vxrail to me is a little bit different than just Vsan, but yeah absolutely Dell was pretty interested in that business as well, and the beauty of Vsan is that it gives us the choice. We've been a long-time, happy HP customer, so for this first phase we'll continue to be with HP, and for some reason, if something changes we know with Vsan we have that flexibility. >> You've been with VMware for quite a while, I'm sure you've been watching Vsan. What are you still asking them for? They've had a very aggressive road map. I think they've got most of the basic check blocks done. I've heard a little bit about the road map, but what's on your to-do list for Vsan or any kind of the associated pieces? >> You mentioned VXrail as an example and the automation that they've brought with rail is significant. It's very valuable. I think they need to bring some of that same automation to Vsan's standalone. So as I think about patching thousands of hosts with Vsan and the drivers and that entire matrix of things. They've got to help us there. I think they've got some work to do in terms of improving the performance management of that because environments this size, managing that manually is too much work. So I think we've got some work to do there. But they've been a great partner. They've been listening to us, so I'm pretty happy about where they're headed. >> Earlier you mentioned deploying VMs and containers, is that like Docker or how do containers fit in? >> So Docker has been sort of a religious debate internally to be honest. Do you deploy it on bare metal? Do you deploy it on VMs? I think right now, we're settled on deploying Docker on VMs, but very large VMs. We're thinking 200 gigs, and the goal will be, we're going to try to do that on Vsan. So we're still in early development there, but that seems to be where we're finally landing on. >> Interesting, and I'm assuming that's Linux on top of the VMs to allow that. >> Yes. >> Alright, well, Juan Gaviria, really appreciate you sharing that really interesting use case. I wish ya best of luck on the rollout, and thank you for being on theCUBE. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me. >> Alright, for Justin, I'm Stu, and we'll be back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2017, you're watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: It's the Cube. Covering Sapphire Now 2017. Brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform. And HANA Enterprise Cloud. (electronic music) >> Welcome to the Cube everyone. We're here for the special exclusive Sapphire Now 2017 coverage from Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier, three days of Sapphire coverage. Our next guest is Jason Kotsaftis who's with Senior Director Database Solutions at EMC. Who came in here in Palo Alto. You guys have some news down there, full team down there. I know, normally we cover SAP, it's our first year we're doing it from our studio. But EMC's always been on the cube. You guys had a great relationship with SAP. I think our first year we've done the cube in 2010. >> Jason: That's right, yes, I remember. >> You were that SAP Sapphire. >> You guys were. You were on the Cube. You've been with us for awhile, but the relationship with an SAP, and EMC, now Dell EMC, it's pretty significant. What's the big news you guys have going on? >> Yeah, I mean, it's a huge relationship for us. We've been, even before we were merged with Dell, one of our top partnerships. Now it's even bigger. We've been amazed at how much Dell had been doing with SAP, and we're bringing the best of the two companies together right now. So, yeah, we have a huge presence at Sapphire as you mentioned. We saw Michael Dell do a brief speech at the show, and I thought that really helped set the stage for, not just Dell and EMC with SAP, but even some of the words he said were a good microcosm of Dell and EMC talking about the importance of bringing together people and processes. And we're going through that right now, and we're we're going through how we're going to merge the portfolio to go after Cloud, go after HANA, internet of things, data center transformation, all of those major things. >> Well surely SAP, the theme is Cloud, Multi-Cloud is a big message. >> SAP Cloud platform, we had Dan Lahl on the Cube. We also interviewed the HANA Enterprise Cloud group there also, got a huge alliance with Amazon Web Service, Terry Wise, there. We all saw Century Link. So you start to see the industry formation going on. The fog is lifting, you're starting to get some clear visibility on swim lanes, tactics, we'll help people with settling in. Whatever metaphor you want to use, people are finding it. Dell EMC is just absolutely just a monster now. I mean that in a good way, I don't mean that in a bad way. But it's so big. EMC was already very powerful, and winning in the storage business. Great enterprise jobs, the sales force, the culture, really well, great culture as you know, we know them. Dell has been lean and mean, like a speed boat. Great with channels, great with operations, very lean and efficient. EMC, the direct selling, you bring them together and now the supplier relationships are changed. I was talking with your team. Dell brings to the table deep Microsoft Intel relations. Not that you guys didn't have them, but they have deep relationships. >> Correct. >> You guys bring deep relationships. How has that new culture dealings changed your relationship? And specifically, what's the impact to SAP? >> Sure, you know, great question. First of all, it's been very complimentary. And we felt that going into the merger. I've been at EMC for 21 years right. So I had worked with Dell 10-15 years ago. Very, very complimentary, and you nailed it. They're very good at one segment of the market historically, we're very good at another. You know, for the most part I think it's been a really, really good matching, made sense from merger perspective. If we think about SAP for a second, one of the first things that we've been bringing together is, we have two very complimentary HANA portfolios. So, HANA is obviously a huge focus for SAP customers. I was just at Dell EMC world last week, every single customer that I talked to, whether they were running Oracle or Microsoft, they're all asking about HANA. We had a great focus at EMC with our enterprise HANA systems. And at Dell they have a very good packaged appliances and Scale Up bundles. And right now we feel like we can address the whole breath of what people may want to do with HANA. Whether it's, TDI, Scale Up, Scale Out. Very, very strong and >> John: Where does HANA fit in, because I want you to just take a minute to explain this, because it used to be a blanket word, even when they were kind of getting it out early. It was great marketing from the beginning, You know, it has legacy to it, but as the market changed, HANA changed. And as SAP changed, they changed from their positioning. Specifically, they used to call it HANA Cloud Platform. And they have HANA Enterprise Cloud. Now they've renamed it to SAP Cloud Platform, which is the platform as a service, the cloud native stuff. And then HANA Enterprise Cloud, which is really the managed service. So from your perspective, how do you define what HANA is today. And where is is settling in? Is it just the core engine of SAP? But how's it relate to all these new things? >> Yeah, for us it's really a platform. So if we think about where HANA began when we started working with SAP, it was all about analytics. Collecting data, analyzing data, making better business decisions. Now with S4 on the horizon, and the inevitable cut over to that from all the other enterprise applications of SAP, we really view it as a platform. And it's going to have big implications. If we look at our own SAP install base at EMC, there's a lot of customers that run Oracle underneath their SAP apps. So it's part of the HANA transformation, where we're going to be getting them, hopefully, on the road to, not just take advantage of HANA today, but as they go forward how are they going to get ready for S4 and have, hopefully, a smooth migration path to that. >> Obviously their cloud platform, I mean, their cloud strategy, or cloud direction. I don't know if you can have a cloud strategy. As Michael Dell said, Clouds like the internet, it's everything. >> Jason: Right. >> So, there's no real strategy, it's just the way life is. They're going to be on premise and off premise. And they're clearly targeting multiple Clouds, unlike say Oracle, for instance. But neither here nor there. The point is, is that on premise there's still going to be a 10 year plus journey, nothing's going to be disappearing over night. So the on prem Cloud dynamic is interesting, cuz they used the word mission critical. That was a big buzz word with when I talked to Michael Dell, He banged home mission critical. A lot of the teams in Dell EMC World last week was around mission critical work loads and choice. So you guys have that same mojo going on with SAP, how is that translating for you guys? Big new business, new opportunities? >> Great question. So one of the big things that we've acquired and focused on in the SAP space was Virtustream. So they've been a really big off premise cloud provider for us, but at the same time, when you look at what we've been building at EMC even before that we had our own enterprise hybrid cloud offering. One of the things that we're talking about this week at Sapphire is actually bringing those two together. So we can have people have an off premise and an on premise experience, a single view of their data, a uniform way to manage SAP in the cloud, and to the point of mission critical like you said is, as much as we see people moving to the cloud, there are still people that want to have for certain production systems they want to control that. They don't want to give it off to the cloud yet. They may not want to control the hardware but they certainly want to control the data. And with this new relationship that we're blending in the EHC and Virtustream we can actually allow them to have that choice to your point. >> John: What's EHC? >> The EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. So that's our own self service automation of software framework that we put around the cloud. >> Which cloud, your cloud or other people's cloud? >> Right now it's our cloud offering. >> So you have a public cloud. >> We have a cloud offering that's a hybrid cloud offering. That you can deploy on premise or off premise, and Virtustream has been historically used off premise. >> So you use Virtustream as your off premise component of that piece? >> Correct. >> That makes sense. Cuz you bought them in January, I get that. >> That's right, and we had to bring the two together, and that's been a big new step for us. In that regard we think it's very, very complementary for SAP, that's one option we provide, right. We also work through SAP's own offerings to make sure we give them the right and the best infrastructure behind what they're trying to do with their own cloud. I was at a large partner of ours recently, OpenText, and we were talking about content archive, all the things that they do there, they're very deep in the SAP cloud, so we're working with them to start to potentially build the right archiving and capabilities behind that. >> So what's the big news for SAP this year, obviously we saw the coverage, we got some folks calling in, we had some folks down on the floor giving us some input, but from an SAP EMC, Dell, now Dell EMC relationship, what's the big news, what's the big story for you guys? What are you leading with, what's the announcements, be specific. >> The big news is we're all about the cloud. The bringing together of the on premise and off premise EMC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud Virtustream, giving them that uniform way to consume SAP in a cloud based model, whether it be on premise or off premise, that is absolutely our biggest new highlight. >> You guys released that was a hard news that went out for you guys or... >> Yeah it was part of an EHC evolution story that we brought out, the other things that we have that are not necessarily formally announced but are more things that help the day to day administration of SAP applications, we often forget about that. We're pushing people to the cloud and we all talk about cloud. >> So there's no big splash in the pool like, hey we're releasing a new VxRail version of whatever, it's momentum specific. >> Correct. >> What are the big momentum's you plan, you can look back now and we've seen a lot of the evolution, we've seen the relationship with SAP grow, we've seen the converge infrastructure movement, now going to a whole nother level, hybrid cloud and converge infrastructure is happening. What's the new wave that you guys are riding with SAP together besides the cloud, it's generically cloud. What's specifically, can the customer pinpoint that you guys have solved? >> I think you just touched upon it, it's the whole build versus buy model. So historically if you look at where the SAP customers spend the most of their money, it's the op ex. It's the operational expense of administering and maintaining the SAP landscapes. >> You mean like total cost of ownership stuff, just like, easing some of the pain between deployment and costing. >> Workflow automation, copy clone refresh, backup recovery, performance automation, disaster recovery, all the things that you got to do to keep the SAP applications generating value to the business is heavy operational cost to them. That holds them back from doing innovation and investments. >> Those are the details you got to get down and dirty on. >> Yeah. We've done some great studies with you guys on this, one of the things that, there's different ways to go about tackling that. One of the ways that we believe is good is to simplify what you can. And so one way to do that is, well from an infrastructure perspective, you should have the ability to basically buy the infrastructure as an outcome, not have to build all the components and get it together. >> All the provisioning pain that goes with it. >> Yeah, and so when we were just EMC, we had one choice. We had what was called a Vblock, and then we build VxRacks and VxRails. >> Vblock was so successful, it really was, you did a good job of that. >> Yeah, a lot of customers from the SAP. Now that we're Dell though, we have the PowerEdge family, and we've been bringing that in to not only Racks and Rails, but looking at that in terms of building what we call Ready Bundles, where we can actually deliver as a single... >> Think about this ready solution, because the thing that got me at Dell EMC World was two things. The purpose built mission continued, I mean that in a good way. And two, the disruption of data backup protection and backup with the cloud. With the cloud as a new disruptor. For some reason backup and recoveries, clearly different in the cloud than it is on prem. So we've seen a lot of action in there too. Those are the two ready areas, and then also, dynamic changes going on with backup and recovery. >> Yeah, ready solutions was a huge thing, and this is part of the merger we rebranded our solutions organizations into one. Our whole, as the name implies, the whole goal is to deliver a ready infrastructure to the customer that they can just deploy, so they can focus on their applications and their business and not worry about the server, the network, the storage, which ones do I put together for what reason. We want to give them that menu of choice, whether it's a single node, a bundle of components, or an actual system, and deploy that in any way they want. >> What can we expect from Dell EMC, from your team VZB, with respect to SAP? Next couple months, next year, what's the plans, what's the continued momentum playbook? >> Some things that you'll be seeing more of if you go to the Dell blueprints page where we have all our solutions. You'll be seeing some new and refreshed offerings around HANA, you'll be seeing some new things around SAP landscapes, and you'll be seeing much more formal communication around the cloud offering I talked about. >> And cloud seems to be, again, cloud is taking it outside the four walls, which is different, great capabilities, people going in analytics, putting a lot of analytics in the cloud. So seeing that being the first wave beyond dev tests. Dev tests, even though Oracle says dev tests is really going to be around for a long, long time, people are already moving to analytics in the cloud. That's interesting for instrumenting for backup and recovery, what's possible. Quick thoughts on the changes there, in the landscape between the old way of thinking about backup and recovery, and by the way you guys have some of the best solutions out there that will data domain, scratch record goes to history, but now it goes to the cloud. What's the tricky parts that you guys are watching? >> Well I think on the one hand there'll be people that want to worry about their mission critical, like you said we have great integrated offerings to the workload, so you can have a backup team handle it or you can have your workload team handle it, it's really up to you. As people go into the cloud I think they have to decide, what's the tiering strategy they want to approach that, what's the retention data strategies that they need, how's that going to, >> Where the hell is the data going? >> Where's the data going, is it safe and secure, and how does that relate to how they're protecting their on premise data. I mean from our perspective, and back to the SAP example of where we have this uniform cloud approach, we have the backup capabilities built into that. Whether it's long term data retention, short term backup and recovery, yep. >> Question for you, this is a test, a real time cube test. I'm sure you'll pass with flying colors. What is the most, what are the biggest two waves that the customers should be surfing in the enterprise, top two most important waves? >> I think one of them we've already talked about, which is certainly cloud. I think if you look at the whole digital transformation, which I know is related to cloud, but the whole digital transformation wave I think is separate from that. So if you look at big data and analytics and machine data, every customer, whether it's a traditional RDBMS environment or what have you, they're all looking at how to harness that data. I think when you get into that and look at all the data in your data center that you may not be using today, you may not have been trying to take advantage of, with technologies like Splunk and other things that are out there to help you do that, that's a great thing to look at. We're seeing heavy.. >> So data basically, cloud and data are the two big waves. >> Yeah, digital transformation of data and taking advantage of that data. >> Well they go hand in hand, cuz you got the scale of the cloud for compute and other things, data drives the digital chest of digitalized data, digital assets are data, right, everything's data. So you would agree, cloud and data, two big waves. >> Yes. >> Jason, thanks so much for coming on the Cube special coverage and final comment, I'll give you the last word on SAP Sapphire, I know you got a relationship, you're probably going to be like oh yeah, SAP, everything's great. Be straight, what's going on with SAP. What's the outlook for SAP from your perspective. >> I think there's a great opportunity to your point, but there's also a good challenge, cuz we're going through a merger. I think we're making great progress to bring the two portfolios together, and SAP's being a great partner helping working with us. >> And you're cool with them now, you guys feel good about SAP. >> We feel great about them, we use them in our own environment at Dell as Michael talked about, to run our own business. So it's a great relationship >> Jeremy's been a remote telecast performer at EMC World. >> As you know, these partnerships in the industry go up and down, we talked a little bit about Oracle over the years, that's fluctuated. >> I was dating myself the other day on a Cube gig, and I said, oh it's a Barney deal, which my language was, you know, no real deal, cuz Barney was a character that kids watched, my kids watched, you know, I love you, you love me, it's kind of a love fest, but nothing happens. It's called a Barney deal. I need a new meme now because most of the people in the industry don't know who Barney is. >> Oh I remember, we used to joke about him when I was in alliances, we called them Barney meetings. You got a good meeting with a partner, you'd all talk and nothing would happen. >> You guys do not have a Barney deal with SAP, it's pretty deep across the board, SAP has good relationships, I got to say, they tend to do really, really good. They're either in or they're not, it's pretty obvious. Thank you Jason, so much. Jason Kotsaftis, who's the senior director of the database solutions group with Dell EMC joining us for a special three day coverage of Sapphire now from our studio. Great week, we had Informatica World in San Francisco, Google IO going on today as well, we've got live coverage today with Rob Hove, also VeeamOn is in New Orleans, Dave Vellante is there, and I'm in SAP Sapphire. A lot of coverage for events for the Cube, stay with us more for live coverage after this short break. (techno music)