>>The Cube Presents HPD Discovered 2020 >>two. >>Brought to You by H. P E >>Good >>Morning Live from the Venetian Expo Centre Lisa Martin Day Volonte Day two of the Cubes Coverage of HP Discover 22 We've had some great conversations yesterday. Today, full day, a content coming your way. We've got one of our alumni back with us. Neil MacDonald joins us, the executive vice president and general manager of Compute at HPD Neale, Great to have you back on the Cube. >>It's great to be back. And how cool is it to be able to do this face to face again instead of on zoom. Right. So >>great. Great. The keynote yesterday absolutely packed, so refreshing to see that many people eager to hear what HP has been doing. It's been three years since we've all gotten together in person. >>It is, and we've been busy. We've been busy. We've got to share some great news yesterday about some of the work that we're doing with HB Green Lake Cloud Platform and really bringing together all the capabilities across the company in a very unified, cohesive way to enable our customers to embrace that as a service experience we committed to Antonio three years ago, said we were gonna deliver everything we do as a company as a service through Green Lake and we've done it. And it's fantastic to see the momentum that that's really building and how it's breaking down the silos from different types of infrastructure and offer to really create integrated solutions for our customers. So that's been a lot of fun. >>Give us the scope of your role, your areas of responsibility. And then I'd love to hear some feedback. You've been a couple of days here around customers. What some of the feedback help us understand that. >>So at HP, I lead the Compute business, which is our largest business. That includes our hardware and software and services in the compute space. Both, um, what flows through the green late model, but also what throws flows through a traditional purchase model. So, um, that's, uh, that's about $13 billion business for the company and the core of so much of what we do, and it's a real honour to be leading a business that's such a a legacy in a franchise with with 30 years of innovation for our customers in an ocean of followers. Um and it's great to be able to start to share some of the next chapters in that with our customers this week. >>Well, it's almost half the business H p e and as we've talked about, it's an awesome time to be in the computer business. What are you seeing in terms of the trends? Obviously you're all in on as a service. But some customers say, Tell me I got a lot of capital. Yeah, absolutely. I'm fine with Capex. What are you hearing from customers in that regard? And presumably you're happy to sell them in a kind of Capex model? >>Absolutely. And in the current environment, in particular with with some of the economic headwinds that we're starting to stare down here, it's really important for organisations to continue to transform digitally but to be able to match their investments with the revenues as they're building new services and new capabilities. And for some organisations, the challenge of investing all the Capex up front is a big lift and there's quite a delay before they can really monetise all of that. So the power of HP Green Lake is enabling them to match their investment in the infrastructure on a pay as you go basis with the actual revenue they're going to generate from their new capability. So for lots of people that works. But for many other customers, it's it's much more palatable to continue in a Capex purchase, but and we're delighted to do that. A lot of my business still is in that mode. What's changing the or what are the needs, whether you're in the green light environment or in the Capex environment? Um, increasingly, the edge has become a bigger and bigger part of all of our worlds, right, the edges where we all live and work. We've all seen over the last couple of years enormous change in how that work experience and how the shape of businesses has changed, and that creates some challenges for infrastructure. So one of the things that we've announced and we shared some more details of this week is HP Green Light for Computer Ops Management, which is a location agnostic, cloud based management set up that enables you to automate and lifecycle, manage your physical compute infrastructure wherever it lies, so that might be in a distributed environment in hotel locations or out at the edge for so much more data is now being gathered and has to be computed on. So we're really excited about that. And the great thing is because it's fully integrated with HP. Green Light Cloud Platform is in there alongside the storage, alongside the connectivity alongside all the other capabilities. And we can bring those together in a very cohesive infrastructure view for our customers and then build workloads and services and tops. And that's that's really exciting. How have >>your customer conversations evolved, especially over the last couple of years as the edge has exploded? But we've been living in such uncertain times. Are you seeing a change there in the stakeholders rising up the C suite stack in terms of how do we really fine tune this? Because we've got to be competitive. We've got to be a data company. >>Well, that's so true because everybody has seen seen data as a currency and is desperately innovating and Modernising their business model, and with it, the underlying infrastructure and how they think about development. And nowhere is that truer than in enterprises that really becoming digital. First, organisations more and more companies are doing their own in house full stack, cloud native development and pivoting hard from a more traditional view of in house enterprise i t. And in that regard, >>let's >>start to look a lot like a Saas company or a service provider in terms of the needs of the infrastructure you want linear performance scaling. You want to be very sensitive not just to the cost, as you call it, but also to the environmental cost and the power efficiency. And so yesterday we were really thrilled to announce the HBP Reliant are all 300 General Live in, which is the first of our general living platforms. And that's in partnership with Ampere is the first of several things that we're gonna go do together. We're looking forward to building out the rest of our Gen 11 portfolio broadly with all of our industry partners in the in the coming quarters. But we're thrilled about the feedback that we're starting to get from some of our customers about the gains in power efficiency that they're getting from using this new server line that we've developed with amber. >>So, you know, this is an area that I'm very interested in what I write about this a lot. So tell us the critical aspects of Gen 11, where ampere fits, is it is it being used for primarily offloads and there's a core share with us. So >>if you look at the opportunity here is really as a core compute tool for organisations that are doing that in house full snack cloud native development and in that environment, being able to do it with great power efficiency at a great cost point is the great combination. The maturity of the ecosystem, um, is really, really improving to the point where is much, much more accessible for those loads? And if you consider how the infrastructure evolves underneath it, the gains that you get from power efficiency multiply. It's a TCO benefit. It's obviously an environmental benefit, and we all have much, much more to do as an industry on that journey. But every little helps, and we're really excited about being able to bring that to market. The other thing that we've done is recognising the value that we bring in the prelim experience, everything with our integrated lights out management, all of the security, the, uh, hardware root of trust, the secure boot chains, all of that Reliant family values we brought to that platform, just as we do with our others. But we've also recognised that for some of our service provider customers, there's a lot of interest in leveraging open BMC and being able to integrate the management plane and control that in house and tie it to whatever orchestrations being done in the service product. So we have full support for open BMC out of the box out of the gate with Janna Levin. And that's one of the ways that we're evolving. Are offering to meet our customers where they are, including not just the assassin service providers but the enterprises who are starting to adopt more and more of those practises as they build out digital. First, >>tell us more about the architecture. If you would kneel. I mean, so where does ampere and that partnership add value? That's incremental to what you what you might think is a traditional server architecture. How's that evolving? >>Well, it's another alternative for certain workloads in that full stack in house proud Native Development model. Um, it's another choice. It's another option and something that's very excited about >>That's the right course for the horse, for the course that was back in internal development because it's just more efficient. It's lower power, more sustainable. All those things exactly. >>And the wonderful thing for us in the uh in this juncture in the market is there is so much architectural innovation. There are so many innovators out there in the industry creating different optimizations in technology with the lesson silicon or other aspects of the system. And that gives us a much broader palette to paint from as we meet our customers' needs as their businesses involving the requirements are evolving, we can be much more creative as we bring this all together. It's a real thrill to be able to bring some of these technologies into the HP reliant space because we've always felt that compute matters. We've always known that hardware matters, and we've been leading and innovating and meeting these needs as they've evolved over the decades, and it's really fun to be able to continue to do that. Hardware still >>matters. It doesn't matter. We know that here on the Cube, talk about the influence of the customer with so much architectural innovation. There's a lot of choice for customers in every industry. When you're in customer conversations, how are you helping them make decisions? One of the key differentiators that you articulate that's going to really help them achieve outcomes that they have to achieve? >>Well, I think that's exactly as you say. It's about the outcome. Too often, I think the conversation can get down into the lower level details of component, tree and technology and our philosophy. HP has always been focused on what it is that the customer is trying to achieve. How are they trying to serve their customers? What are their needs? And then we can bring an opinionated point of view on the best way to solve that problem, whether that's recommendations on the particular Capex, infrastructure and architecture to build or increasingly, the opportunity to serve that through HP Green Lake, either as hard or as a service. Or is HP Green Lake services further up the stack? Because when you start talking about what is the outcome you're trying to achieve, you have you have a much, much better opportunity to focus the technology to serve the business and not get wrapped up in managing the infrastructure and that's what we love to do. >>So where? Give us the telescope vision. Maybe not to tell a binocular vision as to where compute is going. We're clearly seeing more diversity in silicon. Uh, it's not just a you know x 86 CPU world anymore. There's all these other supporting components new workloads coming in. Where do you you mentioned Edge, whole new ballgame ai inference sing. And that was kind of new workloads, offloads and things of that. Where do you see it all going in the next 3 to 5 years? >>I think it's gonna be really, really exciting time because more and more of our data is getting captured to the edge. And because of the experiences that companies are trying to deliver and organisations are trying to deliver that requires more and more stories are more and more compute at the edge. The edge is not just about connectivity, and again, that's why with the F B green light cloud platform, the power of bringing together the connectivity with the compute with the storage with the other capabilities in that integrated way gives us the ability to serve that combined need at the edge in a very, very compelling way. The room moves a lot of friction and a lot of work for our customers. But as you see that happen, you're going to see more and more combining of functionalities. The silos are going to start to break down between different classes of building block in the data centre, and you've already seen shifts with more and more software to find more and more hybrid offerings running across a computing substrate. But perhaps delivering storage services are analytic services or other workloads, and you're gonna see that to conduct that continue to evolve. So it's gonna be very fun over the next few years to see that, uh, that diversification and a much more opinionated set of offers for particular use cases and workloads and at our job and value is going to be simplifying that complexity because choices great right up to the point where you're paralysed by too many choices. So the wonderful thing about the world that's been done here is that we're able to bring that opinionated point of view and help guide, and again it's all about starting with what are you trying to achieve. What are the outcomes you're trying to deliver? And if you start there were having a great time helping our customers find the right path forward. >>Wow, it sounds like a fun job. Talk to me about, you know, maybe one of your favourite examples that you really think articulates the value of of the choice and the opportunities that HP can deliver to customers, maybe favourite customer example where you think we really nailed it here and they're achieving some incredible outcomes. >>Well, we're really excited about this week as I was chatting with the CEO of Cloud Sigma, which is a global ideas and pass provider who's actually been using our new HP per client moral 300 general live in Are you on purpose? Server line? And, uh, their CEO was reporting to me yesterday that based on his benchmarking, they're seeing a significant improvement in power efficiency, and that's that's that's cool to an engineer. But what's even better is the next thing, he said. That's enabling them to deliver better cost to their customers and advanced their sustainability goals, which is such a core part of what we as an industry and we as society are going to have to continue to make stepwise progress against over the next decade in order to confront those challenges in the environment so that that's that's really fulfilling, not just to see the tech, which is always interesting to an engineer but actually see the impact that it's having an enabling that outcome foreclosed signal >>so many customers, including Cloud Sigma and customers in every industry. E S G is an incredibly important initiative. And so it's vital for companies that have a core focus on E. S G to partner with companies like HP who will help them facilitate that actually demonstrate outcomes to their own users. >>It's such an important journey and it's gonna be a journey of many steps together. But I think it's one of the most critical partnerships that as an industry and as an ecosystem, we still have a lot of work to do and we have to stay focused on it every day, continuing, moving the bar. >>You >>know, to your point about E. S G. You see these E s G reports. Now that they're unbelievable, the data that is in them and the responsibility that organisations mid and large organisations have to actually publish that and be held accountable. It's actually kind of daunting, but there's a lot of investments going on there. You're absolutely right. The >>accountability is key, and it's it's it's necessary to have an accountability partner and ecosystem that can facilitate that. Exactly. >>We just published last week our Own Living Progress report this year, talking about some of the steps that we're making the commitments that we pulled in in time. Um, and we're looking forward to continue to work on that with our customers and with the industry, because it's so critical that we make faster progress together on that >>last question. What's your favourite comment that you've heard the last couple of days being back in person with about 8000 customers, partners and execs? It's >>not. It's not the common. It's the sparkles in the eyes. It's the energy. It is so great to be back together, face to face. I think we, uh, we've soldiered through a couple of tough years. We've done a lot of things remotely together, but there's no substitute for being back together, and the energy is just palpable and it's it's fantastic to be able to share some of what we've been up to in the interim and see the excitement about getting adopted by customers and partners. >>I agree the energy has been fantastic. We were talking about that yesterday. You brought it today, Neil, Thank you so much for joining us. We're excited about Antonio coming up next, going to unpack all the announcements. Really good customers. Perspective from the top of H P E for Neil and Dave Volonte. I'm Lisa Martin joins us in just a few minutes as the CEO of HP, Antonio Neary joins us next.

from the cube studios in palo alto in boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation welcome to the cube lisa martin here i'm having the opportunity to speak with one of dell technologies customers joining me from all the way down under in melbourne australia is kevin pritchard the head of it and business systems from janna investment advisors hi kevin nice to have you on the program thanks lisa a pleasure to be here so tell us about jonah investments who you guys are what you do all the types of data that you're dealing with jana is uh an asset consultant uh we consult to what we call in australia the superannuation industry which is the equivalent of your 401 k our clients are the actual funds themselves the pension funds we advise on both the accumulation and then the pension stage of those to those funds we have under advice across all our clients approximately 500 billion aud so that's a significant responsibility our decisions our research our recommendations probably affects between two to three out of five australians retirement outcomes all right so business critical data kevin i imagine there's compliance requirements not just in australia but if you're doing business with any clients in the americas or in uh europe primarily our markets australia but the regulatory overlays that we and our clients face into are significant and growing the superannuation sector in australia is now at around three trillion dollars it's a significant amount of money i think it's the second or third largest in the world um don't quote me on that but it's a significant amount of money so let's talk about data as a business critical asset and also from a brand reputation perspective talk to me about your it environment how you were managing data before and what some of the challenges were that you wanted to resolve i've been with jana for 14 years and in that time the demands and the complexity of our environment have increased we have to address a growing accumulation of business critical data our data forms our ip it's the core of our advice and it's not just what we're doing today it's what we've done five years ago 10 years ago it has to be there for ready reference it's a critical business asset i like how you said it's really your data is really your ip so talk to me about your it environment before on-prem cloud virtualize what does that landscape look like so we run a a data center we have a it's it's a more economical footprint but nevertheless it's the core of what we do as a business on a day-to-day some data we can't put in the cloud the regulatory overlays really don't permit it and privacy and you know we can better protect in a data center uh we we occupy a space in a dedicated space in a tier 4 data center in australia but that said we are increasingly moving into cloud now the cloud is super important to us it's but it's not easy to migrate into people just say oh let's just go to the cloud you really do have to think about things you have to think about how it's implemented you have to think about data security uh they're very good the cloud providers but it's all care no responsibility it ultimately comes back to you but the the nexus between cloud and on-prem is something that you have to think about and if i'm thinking about backup and dr and i can think of it from a number of perspectives you know it's not just backing up in case we've got failure of hardware but it's about cyber security it's about protection from things like air gapping ensuring um you know that your backups are actually aware of the malware for example uh we've we've had incidents uh and i'm sure the u.s had as well in australia where organizations have found six months down the track that their backups have been compromised we can't afford to do that our regulators our clients i myself have to give assurances to our clients that we're resilient that we're meeting the increasingly stringent benchmarks in your case study i was reading about uh really jonah was on a quest to become more data driven and also it sounded to me like the board was heavily invested and had a vested interest in data protection talk to me about how dell technologies is helping you meet some of those goals becoming more data driven and enabling you to ensure to your cfo et cetera the board that our data is secure yeah as i was saying [Music] at the beginning of this journey i would have thought back up how hard can it be right you you take a backup it's a tape it's a disc you put it into a secure repository something somewhere offside you have a problem you phone someone up they bring it take back and you restore those days have gone and when you really look into it it's a very specialist area how do you back up data especially the size of the data that we have how do you restore it in a timely manner how do you protect it against as i'm saying compromise you need to test it you need easy ways to test it it's complex now when i looked at this problem three years ago i think well okay we're no longer part of a big bank um we've got to stand on our own feet what's the best solution do you research the market um i i've worked with dell for a long time and they're in the mix in the end dell offered the best solution and they showed that they had the understanding of my environment and more broadly where industry is going so that data protection mix of products between the the visibility the dashboards and what happens in the cloud in terms of testing your workloads that are up there because testing is something that my board really really insists upon we have a an annual testing program it runs the full 12 months where we're testing various aspects of uh recovery so talk to me about you're talking about the complexity of a person in the beginning i thought back up in recovery how how difficult can that be you talked about the complexity though and as we talked about with with probably i would say increasing scrutiny from a regulations perspective aboard the cfo how did dell technologies how did power protect actually help you simplify because i actually saw a quote from you in your case study about it being easy help us understand how that was possible yeah you've always got to be careful using the word easy but let's take that perspective from what it would be if it wasn't easy so our prior solution was essentially relying on the dis backup multi-volume disk backup that was stored by a suitable company now i was looking at the dell uh the power protect data protect dashboard the other day and i was surprised we have 27 terabytes of data stored in the cloud which is sent up there daily i get a report card each day it's all green thankfully i can see that on average you know the change the delta of what the data we store on particular servers is on average around seven to ten percent a day those statistics are really important and uh and the deduplication compression ratios you know 97 98 are outstanding um that is really helpful so the point i was trying to make in my previous comments is that visibility is very important that's where it gets easy because i don't have to rely on an expert who's sitting over there he may be in or out telling me what's the status of where we are in day-to-day backup it's it's a critical part of bau it's a pretty critical part of data protection and our clients are greatly comforted by it absolutely when you were describing your previous environment i thought wow one of the things you probably you couldn't have had is complete visibility let alone maybe even good visibility so now with the dell uh power protect series can you look through like a single pane of glass management and see all the backups on file servers virtual machines all of that iep that you talked about that's core to the business uh the short answer is yes now there was another part of our previous setup where we used you what would be classical we had a warm site and we would replicate data one of the problems with that is i didn't know if replication was occurring i didn't know if you know if i if i had had a and we haven't but if we had a ransomware attack then it infects the server and it actually it replicates to your secondary side there was no air gap air gap your backup protected these old solutions of running a you know for an organization outside the the expanding the maintenance required to run a secondary side are just too much one of the things that sounds like you now have is confidence that what you're protecting with dell is in fact protected it's secure and you talked about ransomware a second ago and now in the age of kobe i read the other day that there's a ransomware attack happens every 11 seconds phishing is getting more personal and more sophisticated so that's a big challenge now that sounds like you've got a pretty resilient infrastructure that i i'm going to speak for you gives you the confidence that you're in a pretty good situation with respect to ensuring that that data is indeed safe i have a great deal more confidence and i'm being cautious and cynical i'm you'd never want to say 100. all right because the backup gods will frown upon you but i'm now more confident i can provide my c-suite i can provide the board with a ready snapshot view of where we stand are there any issues um not just cost effectiveness but the visibility of what's going on and look i i was absolutely surprised that an organization outside had 27 terabytes of data that's a lot of data for someone outside and that's important because really at the end of the day this boils down to brand reputation the ability to guarantee to the regulators your clients that all of the data that you talked about it's a lot for a company of your size is indeed secure and protected and that you can as you said you have pretty strong confidence i agree with you saying 100 is always one of those challenging kind of areas to be in but but i think from from a business outcomes perspective this isn't just about protecting the data that's sitting on file servers and virtual machines this is protecting and helping to reinforce the reputation of the brand of janna yes reputation our reputation is so important and we need to ensure to to guarantee to our clients that we stand head and shoulders above i've had funds come to me we we do our uh audits they've come in they've looked at our processes procedures you are miles ahead of us you put us to shame what's your advice to those folks who are coming in saying what you're doing kevin is putting us to shame you say here's how i would advise you to modernize your environment what's your advice well backup is no longer in d i's just look at the bcp and the dr thing it's no longer just about anticipating a hardware failure hub is very reliable but it can still fail network failure malware and malware is increasingly something we have to protect again that your your database is must be insured so you've got to think about it what's the best strategy and that and so you start with those primary objectives standing vms up in the cloud is you know you've got to understand cloud environments so seek good advice really research and and go for the solution that really offers hide the complexity if you can because at least if you guys make sure you can have someone over there that does all the the cloud stuff someone over there that knows all the hardware and then they can all get into a room and we can but most companies now are looking for that single pane of glass and you if you plan right and size your requirements then you you'll be okay in that respect and and it is an endorsement to dell [Music] um implementation phase well they're very good through the through the investigation phase their proposals were very very sound the um the costings the financial benefits were all laid out for me i was able to take a very firm recommendation to my board and we were able to secure that funding and then the implementation kevin that's great advice do do your due diligence and i'm sure now in this very dynamic different world that you're in you're in a much better position than you would have been had this not been able to be moved forward under your leadership we thank you so much for joining us on thecube today and sharing the successes that you're having at janna pleasure for kevin pritchard i'm lisa martin you're watching the cube

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] hi I'm Stu minimun with wiki bond and welcome to another wiki bond the cube digital community event this one sponsored by Dell EMC of course it's a big week in the industry VMware is having their big European show in Barcelona VMworld and while we are not there in person we have some news that we want to dig into with Dell EMC so like all of our digital community events we're gonna have about 25 minutes of video and then afterwards we're going to have a crowd chat we're gonna have a panel where you have the opportunity to dig in ask your questions give us your viewpoint and talk about everything that's going on so it's important to pay attention think about what questions participate in the crowd chat afterward and thanks so much for joining us talk about the business issues of the day to help us frame this discussion I'm happy to welcome back to the program Pete manka who's the senior vice president with converged infrastructure and solutions engineering at Dell MC Pete great to see you great see you Tuesday all right so Pete converged infrastructures come a long way you and I have a lot of history in this space you know more than a decade now we've been in here so but from a customer standpoint you know this has matured a lot I wouldn't want you to start out give us the customer perspective you know what was convergent restrictor designed to do how is it living up to that and you know what's the state of it today sure well as you said we've got a long history in this and ten years ago we started this business to really simplify IT operations for our customers and we tried to remove the silos between storage compute and networking management and we're doing that we created this market called converged infrastructure by converging the management of those three siloed operations in doing so we added a tremendous amount of value for our customers fast forward now over the years earlier this year we come up with a product that the BX block 1000 that allows us to scale considerably greater within a single environment adding more value to our customer we're very customer driven at Dell EMC as you know and so we talked to our customers again and said what else do you want what else do you want and they pushed us for more automation in more monitoring support for the product and that's really what we're here to talk about today is how we get from simplifying IT operations for customers through allowing scale architectures to eventually automating the customers environment for them yeah when you talk about simplification that the the industry has really been really galvanized gotten really excited at hyper-converged infrastructure and I hear simple that's kind of what HCI is gonna do Dell of course has both converged and hyper-converged we've talked a lot as to how they both fit maybe now you know give give us the update as to you know the relevance of CI today while HCI is still continuing to grow really that sure yeah HDI is a hot market obviously and it is growing fast and customers should be excited about HDI because it's a great solution right it enables the customers get an application up and running very quickly and it's great for scale out architectures you want to add symmetric type nodes and skill oh you're at your application your architecture it's great for that but like all architectures it doesn't fit all solutions or all problems for the customers and there's a place for CI and there's a place for HCI the end you think about HCI versus CI CI is great for asymmetrically scaling architectures you want to have more storage more networking more memory inside your servers more compute you can do that through a CI portfolio and for customers who need that asymmetrical scaling for customers who need high availability very efficient scale type storage environments scale of compute environments you can do that through a CI platform much more efficiently than you can through other platforms in the market alright Pete you mentioned that there was announcement earlier in the year that the VX block 1000 so for those that don't have hauled of history like us that followed from the V block of the BX block and now the 1000 helped remind us what was different about this from things in the past sure when we first started out in the conversion structure business we had blocks that were specific to storage configurations if you wanted a unity or v-max you had to buy a specific model of our of our VX block product line that's great but we realize customers and customers told us they wanted a mix environment they wanted to have a multi-use environment in their block so we created the VX block 1000 announced in February and it allows you to mix and match your storage sand bar along with your compute environment and scales out at a much greater capacity than we could through the original block design so and we're providing the customer a much larger footprint managed by within a single block but also a choice allowing them to have multiple application configurations within the same block all right so people now what what's Del DMC doing to bring converged infrastructure for it even more how are we expanding you know what it's gonna do for customers and the problems they're looking to solve yeah right so again we went back to our customers that said ok tell us your experience with block you tell us what you like tell us what you don't like and they love the product it's been a very successful product they said we want more automation we want more monitoring you want the ability to see what's happening as well as automate workflows and procedures that we have to do to get our workloads up and running quicker and more automated fashion so what we're gonna talk about today is how we're going to do that we're going to provide more automation capabilities and the ability to monitor through our VM work you realize suite toolset alright great Pete I appreciate you helping kind of lay the groundwork we're gonna be back in a quick second one of your peers from Dell MC to dig into the product so stay with us we'll be back right after this this quick break [Music] vx block system 1000 simplifies IT accelerates the pace of innovation and reduces operating costs storage compute networking and virtualization components are all unified in a single system transforming operations and delivering better business outcomes faster this is achieved by five foundational pillars that set Dell EMC apart as the leading data center solutions provider each VX blocks system 1000 is engineered manufactured managed sustained and supported as one welcome back joining me to dig into this announcement is Dan Mita who's the vice president of converged infrastructure engineering at Dell EMC damn thanks for joining us thanks for having me all right so Pete kind of teased out of what we're doing here talked about what we've been building on for the last ten years in the converging infrastructure industry please elaborate you know what this is and shuttle from there yeah absolutely so to your point we know customers have been buying VX blocks and V blocks for the last ten years and there's lots of good reasons behind all of that we also know that customers been asking us for better monitoring better reporting and more orchestration capabilities we this announcement we think we're meeting those challenges so there's three things that I'd like to talk about one is we're gonna help customers raise the bar around awareness of what's going on within the environment we'll do that through health checks and dashboards performance dashboarding real-time alerting for the first time the second thing we'll talk about is we talked about a different level of automation than we've ever had before when it comes to orchestration we'll be introducing the ability to set up the services necessary to run orchestrated workflows and then our intention is to bring to market those engineered workflows and lastly would be you know analytics deeper analytics for customers that want to go even further into why their system is drifted from a known good state we're gonna give them the capabilities to see that great so Dan I think back from the earliest days that you know Vblock was always architected to you know transform the way operations are done what really differentiates this you know how important is there are things like the analytics of you're doing yeah sure so you're right today our customers use element managers to do most of that what this tool will allow them to do is kind of abstract a lot of the complexity folk in the element managers themselves if you think about an example where our customer wants to provision an ESXi host add it to a cluster and you say a Power Max bulan we know there's about a dozen manual steps to do that it cuts across four element managers and that also means you're going to be touching your administrators across compute network storage and virtualization with this single tool that will guide you first by checking the environment taking you through an orderly set of questions or inputs and then lastly validating the environment we know that we're going to help customers eliminate any undue harm that might do to an environment but we're also gonna save them time effort and money by getting it done quicker ok so Dan it sounds like there's a new suite of software explain it exactly what is it and how do all these pieces fit together yeah so there's three pieces in this week foundational is what we call the X blocks central so the X Box central is going to go out mandatory with all new VX blocks we're also going to make it available to our customers running older 300 500 and 700 family the X blocks and we'll provide a migration path for customers that are using vision today that's the tool that's going to allow them to do that performance health and RCM compliance dashboarding as well as do metrics based in real-time alerting one loved one step up from that one layer up from that is what we call the X block orchestration so this this product is being built underneath the V realize operations or excuse me orchestration tool and it's essentially like I said it's going to provide those all of those tools for setting up the services to run the workflows and then we'll provide those workflows so that example that I gave just a minute ago about provisioning that host will have a workflow from that right out of the gate ok so you mentioned the the vir ops thing you know VMware has always been a you know a very important piece of the whole stack there's yeah be in front of everything in the product line while you're announcing it this week at you know vmworld your and you know explain a little bit more that integration between the VMware pieces so you mentioned V Rob's and that's the third piece in this suite right so that is that it's going to provide us the dashboarding to provide all of that detailed analytics so if you think about it we're using V realized opera orchestra ssin as a workflow engine we're using V ROPS for that intelligent insight into the operations as a framework for the things that we're doing but essentially what we've given customers at this point is a framework for a cloud management or a cloud operations model sitting on top of a converged infrastructure alright Dan thanks for explaining all that now we're gonna throw it over to a customer to really hear what they think of this announcement when we started to talk about the needs to innovate within business technology and move forward with the business we knew we had to advance our technology offerings standardize our data center and help bring all our technology to current date vs block allowed us to do that in one purchase and also allowed us to basically bring our entire data center ten years forward with one step the benefits we've seen from the X block from my side of the house I now have that sleep at night capability because I have full high availability I have industry-leading technology the performance is there their applications are now more available we now have a platform where we can modernize our entire system we can add blades we can add storage we can add networking as we need it out of the box all knowing that it's been engineered and architected to work together it has literally set it and forget it for us we go about our daily business and now we've transitioned from a maintenance time set and a maintenance mindset to now we can participate in meetings to help drive business innovation help drive digital transformation within our company and really be that true IT strategic partner the business is looking for with the implementation of VX blocks central upcoming we should be able to get a better idea of what's going on in our VX block through one dashboard we're very sensitive about the number of dashboards we try to view do the whole death bi dashboard situation especially for a small team we really believe yes block central is going to be beneficial for us to have a quick health overview of our entire unit encompassing all components as we discussed additional features coming out for the VX block one of the more interesting ones for me was to see the integration of VMware's be realized product into the VX block most importantly focused around orchestration and analytics that's something that we don't do a lot of right now but as our company continues to grow and we continue to expand our VX block into additional offerings I can see that being beneficial especially for our small team being able to you know or orchestrate and automate kind of daily tasks that we do now may benefit our team in the future and then the analytics piece as we continue to be a almost a service provider for our business partners having that analytic information available to us could be very beneficial from a from a cost revenue standpoint for us to show kind of the return on investment for our company one of the things that we kind of look forward to that the opportunities of VX block is going to give us given the feature set that's coming out is the ability to use automation for some of our daily business tasks that maybe is something as simple as moving a virtual machine from one host to another that seems pretty mundane at this point but as our company grows and workloads get more complex having the automation availability to be able to do that and have VMware do that on its own it's going to benefit our team always love hearing from customers I'm Peter Burris here in our Palo Alto studios let's also hear from a very important partner in this overall announcement that's VMware we've got OJ Singh who's a senior vice president and general manager the cloud management business unit at VMware with us AJ welcome to the cube thank you Peter of that to be here so Archie we've been hearing a lot of great new technology about you know converged infrastructure and how you do better automation and how you do better you know discovery and whatnot associated with it but these technologies been for around for a while and VMware has been a crucial partner of this journey for quite some time give us a little bit about the history absolutely you know this is a as you rightly pointed a long history with a VMware and Dell EMC goes back over a decade ago I started with Vblock in those days and we literally defined the converged infrastructure market at that point and and this partnership has continued to evolve and so this announcement we are really excited to be here you know to continue to announce our joint solutions to our common customers you know in this whole VX blocks 1000 along with the vitalife suite well the VX block Hardware foundation with VMware software foundation was one of the first places where customers actually started building what we now call private clouds tell us a little bit about how that technology came together and how that vision came together and how your customers have been responding to this combinations partnership for a while absolutely if you think about it from a customer standpoint they love the fact that it is a pre engineered solution and you know they have to put less effort and doing the lifecycle management maintenance of the solution so as part of kind of making it a pre engineered solution what we've done is you know made it such that the integrations between the VX block and visualize are out of the box so we put some critical components you know are of course the vSphere and NSX in there but in addition to that for the virial I set we have vro Orchestrator already built in there we have a special management pack that gets into detail dashboards that are related to the hardware associated with the X block also pre integrated in there so that if via ops runs in there it'll automatically kind of figure that as a dashboard out and can configure them and then finally we have VRA or you know an industry-leading automation platform that allows you self-service and literally build a private cloud on top of the X block so the VX central software has been letting or is now allows a customer to make better use of VMware yes similarly some of the new advancements that you're making within VMware are going to help VX bar customers get more out of their devices as well tell us a little bit about some of the recent announcements you've made that are very complimentary absolutely you know to some extent you know the V realized journey has been a journey about at the end of the day in enabling our customers to set up a self-managed private cloud and do large extent we're heading in the direction of what we say self-driving operations using machine learning technologies and all of that so in that kind of direction in that vision if you may we've actually now released with a great integration between VRA and via ops that for the first time closes the loop between the two solutions so that you can start to do intelligent workload placement right depending upon if I'm trying to optimize for cost I'm trying to optimize for tier of service you know whether it's bronze silver gold tier service I'm trying to optimize for software license management you know Oracle license is only going on Oracle tier etcetera this closed-loop with policy ensures you do that and that's the first step in this direction of self-driving that's a very important direction because customers are gonna try to build more complex systems based on or support more complex applications without at the same time seeing that complexity show up in the administration side now that leaves the last question I have because ultimately the two of you are working to make together to make customers successful so tell us a little bit about how your track record your history and your direction of working together in support in service to customers is going and where you think it's gonna go absolutely so we continue to work very closely in partnership and as partners we are committed to support our customers through thick and thin you know to make sure that they can have these engineered pre-engineered clouds set up so they can get the benefits of these clouds lower cost to serve you know in terms of highly efficient workload the fact as much as possible in the you know let me tell about of hardware that's available and at the same time the automation and the self-service that enables the agility so the development teams can build software quickly I think provision software really fast so those are the kind of benefits lower cost agility but in partnership jointly serving our customers RJ Singh senior vice president general manager of the VMware cloud management business unit thanks again for beyond the cube thank you Peter glad to be here Stu back to you all right thanks Peter for sharing that VMware perspective to help understand a little bit more some of the customer implications we're back with Dan and Pete Pete we talked about there's new management there's a few different software packages is this exclusively for the new generation of VX block 1000 or you know who the existing customers will be able to use this sure I mean obviously advanced management features are important to all of our customers so we specifically designed the Xbox central to run both on existing VX block customers and of course in our new VX blocks that were a lot of the factor as well alright so Dan we've talked about the progress we've made the the you know great maturation in these solutions set what's next what customers expect and what should we be looking for from Dellums in the future so this the thing with us is always data center operations simplification if you think about it what we're introducing today is all about simplifying and provisioning and management of the existing system within the system we've heard also from customers what they look for us next to do is to try to improve the upgrade process simplify that as well so we've already got some development efforts working on that we'll be excited and news for later this year or early next year janna follow-up went dance that we always talked to our customers about what they're looking for in addition to more automation and we're monitoring support they want to go to consume their resources in a more agile environment cloud like a farm and even on-premises so that combined with the be realized suite of products we're going to be providing more cloud live experience to our customers for their yeah walks in the future alright Pete and Dan thank you so much for sharing this news we're gonna now turn it over to the community so you've heard about the announcement we've been talking for quite a long time at wiki bond about how automation and tools are gonna hopefully help make your job easier so want you to dig in ask the questions what do you like what do you want to see more of and so everybody let's growl chat great