>> 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.

>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Barcelona, Spain, everyone. It's theCUBE live at MWC '23, day three of four days of CUBE coverage. It's like a cannon of CUBE content coming right at you. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. We've got Dell and VMware here. Going to be talking about the ecosystem partnerships and what they're doing to further organizations in the telco industry. Please welcome Jared Woodrey, Director of Partner Engineering Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab, OTEL. Odded Solomon is here as well, Director of Product Management, VMware Service Provider and Edge Business Unit at VMware. Guys, great to have you on the program. >> Thank you for having me. >> Welcome to theCUBE. So Jared, first question for you. Talk about OTEL. I know there's a big announcement this week, but give the audience context and understanding of what OTEL is and how it works. >> Sure. So the Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab is physically located at Round Rock, Texas, it's the heart and soul of it. But this week we also just announced opening up the Cork, Ireland extension of OTEL. The reason for our existence is to to try and make it as easy as possible for both partners and customers to come together and to re-aggregate this disaggregated ecosystem. So that comes with a number of automation tools and basically just giving a known good testing environment so that tests that happen in our lab are as close to real world as they possibly can be and make it as transparent and open as possible for both partners like VMware as well as customers. >> Odded, talk about what you're doing with Dell and OTEL and give us a customer example of maybe one that you're working with or even even mentioning it by a high level descriptor if you have to. >> Yeah. So we provide a telco cloud platform, which is essentially a vertical in VMware. The telco cloud platform is serving network function vendors, such as Ericsson, Nokia, Mavenir, and so on. What we do with Dell as part of this partnership is essentially complementing the platform with some additional functionality that is not coming out of the box. We used to have a data protection in the past, but this is no longer our main business focus. So we do provide APIs that we can expose and work together with Dell PPDM solution so customer can benefit from this and leverage the partnership and have overall solution that is not coming out of the box from VMware. >> I'm curious, from a VMware perspective. VMware is associated often with the V in VMware, virtualization, and we've seen a transition over time between sort of flavors of virtualization and what is the mix currently today in the telecom space between environments that are leveraging what we would think of as more traditional virtualization with full blown Linux, Windows operating systems in a VM versus the world of containerized microservices? What does that mix look like today? Where do you see it going? >> Yeah, so the VMware telco cloud platform exists for about eight years. And the V started around that time. You might heard about open stack in addition to VMware. So this has definitely helped the network equipment providers with virtualizing their network functions. Those are typically VNF, virtualized network functions, inside the VMs. Essentially we have 4G applications, so core applications, EPC, we have IMS. Those are typically, I would say maybe 80 or 90% of the ecosystem right now. 5G is associated with cloud native network functions. So 5G is getting started now, getting deployed. There is an exponential growth on the core side. Now, when we expand towards the edge of the network we see more potential growth. This is 5G ran, we see the vRAN, we see the open RAN, we see early POCs, we see field trials that are starting. We obviously has production customer now. You just spoke to one. So this is really starting, cloud native is really starting I would say about 10 to 20% of the network functions these days are cloud native. >> Jared, question for you. You mentioned data protection, a huge topic there obviously from a security perspective. Data protection used to be the responsibility of the CSPs. You guys are changing that. Can you talk a little bit about how you're doing that and what Dell's play there is? >> Yeah, so PowerProtect Data Management is a product, but it's produced by Dell. So what this does is it enables data protection over virtual cloud as well as the physical infrastructure of specifically in this case of a telecoms ecosystem. So what this does is enables an ability to rapidly redeploy and back up existing configurations all the way up to the TCP and TCA that pulls the basis of our work here with VMware. >> So you've offloaded that responsibility from the CSPs. You freed them from that. >> So the work that we did, honestly was to make sure that we have a very clear and concise and accurate procedures for how to conduct this as well. And to put this through a realistic and real world as if it was in a telecoms own production network, what did that would actually look like, and what it would take to bring it back up as well. So our responsibility is to make sure that when we when we provide these products to the customers that not only do they work exactly as their intended to, but there is also documentation to help support them and to enable them to have their exact specifications met by as well. >> Got it. So talk about a little bit about OTEL expansion into Cork. What you guys are doing together to enable CSPs here in EMEA? >> Yeah, so the reason why we opened up a facility in Cork Island was to give, for an EMEA audience, for an EMEA CSPs and ability to look and feel and touch some of the products that we're working on. It also just facilitates and ease especially for European-based partners to have a chance to very easily come to a lab environment. The difference though, honestly, is the between Round Rock, Texas and Cork Island is that it's virtually an extension of the same thing. Like the physical locations can make it easier to provide access and obviously to showcase the products that we've developed with partners. But the reality is that it's more than just the physical location. It's more about the ability and ease by which customers and partners can access the labs. >> So we should be expecting a lot of Tito's vodka to be consumed in Cork at some point. Might change the national beverage. >> We do need to have some international exchange. >> Yeah, no, that's good to know. Odded, on the VMware side of things. There's a large group of folks who have VMware skillsets. >> Odded: Correct. >> The telecom industry is moving into this world of the kind of agility that those folks are familiar with. How do people come out of the traditional VMware virtualization world and move into that world of cloud native applications and serve the telecom space? What would your recommendation be? If you were speaking at a VMUG, a VMware Users Group meeting with all of your telecom background, what would you share with them that's critical to understand about how telecom is different, or how telecom's spot in its evolution might be different than the traditional IT space? >> So we're talking about the people with the knowledge and the background of. >> Yeah, I'm a V expert, let's say. And I'm looking into the future and I hear that there are 80,000 people in Barcelona at this event, and I hear that Dell is building optimized infrastructure specifically for telecom, and that VMware is involved. And I'm an expert in VMware and I want to be involved. What do I need to do? I know it's a little bit outside of the box question, but especially against the backdrop of economic headwinds globally, there are a lot of people facing transitions. What are your thoughts there? >> So, first of all, we understand the telco requirements, we understand the telco needs, and we make sure that what we learn from the customers, what we learn from the partners is being built into the VMware products. And simplicity is number one thing that is important for us. We want the customer experience, we want the user experience to be the same as they know even though we are transitioning into cloud native networks that require more frequent upgrades and they have more complexity to be honest. And what we do in our vertical inside VMware we are focusing on automation, telco cloud automation, telco cloud service assurance. Think of it as a wrapper around the SDDC stack that we have from VMware that really simplifies the operations for the telcos because it's really a challenge about skillset. You need to be a DevOps, SRE in order to operate these networks. And things are becoming really complex. We simplify it for them with the same VMware experience. We have a very good ability to do that. We sell products in VMware. Unlike our competition that is mostly selling professional services and support, we try to focus more on the products and delivering the value. Of course, we have services offering because telcos requires some customizations, but we do focus on automation simplicity throughout our staff. >> So just follow up. So in other words the investment in education in this VMware ecosystem absolutely can be extended and applied into the telecom world. I think it's an important thing. >> I was going to add to that. Our engagement in OTEL was also something that we created a solutions brief whether we released from Mobile World Congress this week. But in conjunction with that, we also have a white paper coming out that has a much more expansive explanation and documentation of what it was that we accomplished in the work that we've done together. And that's not something that is going to be a one-off thing. This is something that will stay evergreen that we'll continue to expand both the testing scope as well as the documentation for what this solution looks like and how it can be used as well as documentation on for the V experts for how they can then leverage and realize the the potential for what we're creating together. >> Jared, does Dell look at OTEL as having the potential to facilitate the continued evolution of the actual telco industry? And if so, how? >> Well, I mean, it would be a horrible answer if I were to say no to that. >> Right. >> I think, I honestly believe that one of the most difficult things about this idea of having desired ecosystem is not just trying to put it back together, but then also how to give yourself choice. So each time that you build one of those solution sets like that exists as an island out of all the other possibilities that comes with it. And OTEL seeks to not just be able to facilitate building that first solution set. Like that's what solutions engineering can do. And that's generally done relatively protected and internally. The Open Telecom Ecosystem seeks to build that then to also provide the ability to very easily change specific components of that whether that's a hardware component, a NIC, whether a security pass just came out or a change in either TCP or TCA or we talked a little bit about for this specific engagement that it was done on TCP 2.5. >> Odded: Correct. >> Obviously there's already a 2.7 and 3.0 is coming out. It's not like we're going to sit around and write our coattails of what 2.7 has happened. So this isn't intended to be a one and done thing. So when we talk about trying to make that easier and simpler and de-risk all of the risk that comes from trying to put all these things together, it's not just the the one single solution that you built in the lab. It's what's the next one? And how do I optimize this? And I have specific requirements as a CSP, how can I take something you built that doesn't quite match it, but how do I make that adjustment? So that's what we see to do and make it as easy and as painless as possible. >> What's the engagement model with CSPs? Is it led by Dell only, VMware partner? How does that work? >> Yeah, I can take that. So that depends on the customer, but typically customers they want to choose the cloud vendor. So they come to VMware, we want VMware. Typically, they come from the IT side. They said, "Oh, we want to manage the network side of the house the same way as we manage the IT. We don't want to have special skill sets, special teams." So they move from the IT to the network side and they want VMware there. And then obviously they have an RSP process and they have hardware choices. They can go with Dell, they can go with others. We leverage vSphere, other compatibility. So we can be flexible with the customer choice. And then depending on which customer, how large they are, they select the network equipment provider that the runs on top. We position our platform as multi-vendor. So many of them choose multiple network functions providers. So we work with Dell. So assuming that the customer is choosing Dell. We work very closely with them, offering the best solution for the customer. We work with them sometimes to even design the boxes to make sure that it fits their use cases and to make sure that it works properly. So we have a partnership validation certification end-to-end from the applications all the way down to the hardware. >> It's a fascinating place in history to be right now with 5G. Something that a lot of consumers sort of assume. It's like, "Oh, hey, yeah, we're already there. What's the 6G thing going to look like?" Well, wait a minute, we're just at the beginning stages. And so you talk about disaggregation, re-aggregation, or reintegration, the importance of that. Folks like Dell have experience in that space. Folks at VMware have a lot of experience in the virtualization space, but I heard that VMware is being acquired by Broadcom, if it all goes through, of course. You don't need to comment on it. But you mentioned something, SDDC, software-defined data center. That stack is sometimes misunderstood by the public at large and maybe the folks in the EU, I will editorialize for a moment here. It is eliminating capture in a way by larger hyperscale cloud providers. It absolutely introduces more competition into the market space. So it's interesting to hear Broadcom acknowledging that this is part of the future of VMware, no matter what else happens. These capabilities that spill into the telecom space are something that they say they're going to embrace and extend. I think that's important for anyone who's evaluating this if they're concern. Well, wait a minute. Yeah, when I reintegrate, do I want VMware as part of this mix? Is that an unknown? It's pretty clear that that's something that is part of the future of VMware moving forward. That's my personal opinion based on analysis. But you brought up SDDC, so I wanted to mention that. Again, I'm not going to ask you to get into trouble on that at all. What should we be, from a broad perspective, are there any services, outcomes that are going to come out of all of this work? The agility that's being built by you folks and folks in the open world. Are there any specific things that you personally are excited about? Or when we think about consumer devices, getting data, what are the other kinds of things that this facilitates? Anything cool, either one of you. >> So specific use cases? >> Yeah, anything. It's got to be cool though. If it's not cool we're going to ask you to leave. >> All right. I'll take that challenge. (laughs) I think one of the things that is interesting for something like OTEL as an exist, as being an Open Telecom Ecosystem, there are going to be some CSPs that it's very difficult for them to have this optionality existing for themselves. Especially when you start talking about tailoring it for specific CSPs and their needs. One of the things that becomes much more available to some of the smaller CSPs is the ability to leverage OTEL and basically act as one of their pre-production labs. So this would be something that would be very specific to a customer and we would obviously make sure that it's completely isolated but the intention there would be that it would open up the ability for what would normally take a much longer time period for them to receive some of the benefits of some of the changes that are happening within the industry. But they would have immediate benefit by leveraging specifically looking OTEL to provide them some of their solutions. And I know that you were also looking for specific use cases out of it, but like that's a huge deal for a lot of CSPs around the world that don't have the ability to lay out all the different permutations that they are most interested in and start to put each one of those through a test cycle. A specific use cases for what this looks like is honestly the most exciting that I've seen for right now is on the private 5G networks. Specifically within mining industry, we have a, sorry for the audience, but we have a demo at our booth that starts to lay out exactly how it was deployed and kind of the AB of what this looked like before the world of private 5G for this mining company and what it looks like afterwards. And the ability for both safety, as well as operational costs, as well as their ability to obviously do their job better is night and day. It completely opened up a very analog system and opened up to a very digitalized system. And I would be remiss, I didn't also mention OpenBrew, which is also an example in our booth. >> We saw it last night in action. >> We saw it. >> I hope you did. So OpenBrew is small brewery in Northeast America and we basically took a very manual process of checking temperature and pressure on multiple different tanks along the entire brewing process and digitized everything for them. All of that was enabled by a private 5G deployment that's built on Dell hardware. >> You asked for cool. I think we got it. >> Yeah, it's cool. >> Jared: I think beer. >> Cool brew, yes. >> Root beer, I think is trump card there. >> At least for folks from North America, we like our brew cool. >> Exactly. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what Dell, OTEL, and VMware are doing together, what you're enabling CSPs to do and achieve. We appreciate your time and your insights. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you. >> All right, our pleasure. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You watching theCUBE live from MWC '23. Day three of our coverage continues right after a short break. (upbeat music)

(intro music) >> Narrator: "theCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (gentle music) >> Hey everyone, welcome back to "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage. As you well know, we are live at MWC23 in Barcelona, Spain. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Day three of our coverage, as you know, 'cause you've been watching the first two days. A lot of conversations about ecosystem, a lot about disruption in the telco industry. We're going to be talking about Open RAN. You've heard some of those great conversations, the complexities, the opportunities. Two guests join Dave and me. Abdullah Abuzaid, Technical Product Manager at Dell, and Gil Hellmann, VP Telecom Solutions Engineering and Architecture at Wind River. Welcome to the program guys. >> Thank you. >> Nice to be here. >> Let's talk a little bit about Dell and Wind River. We'll each ask you both the same question, and talk to us about how you're working together to really address the complexities that organizations are having when they're considering moving from a closed environment to an open environment. >> Definitely. Thank you for hosting us. By end of the day, the relationship between Dell and Wind River is not a new. We've been collaborating in the open ecosystem for long a time enough. And that's one of the, our partnership is a result of this collaboration where we've been trying to make more efficient operation in the ecosystem. The open environment ecosystem, it has the plus and a concern. The plus of simplicity, choice of multiple vendors, and then the concern of complexity managing these vendors. Especially if we look at examples for the Open RAN ecosystem, dealing with multiple vendors, trying to align them. It bring a lot of operational complexity and TCO challenges for our customers, from this outcome where we build our partnership with Wind River in order to help our customer to simplify, or run deployment, operation, and lifecycle management and sustain it. >> And who are the customers, by the way? >> Mainly the CSP customers who are targeting Open RAN and Virtual RAN deployments. That digital transformation moving towards unified cloud environment, or a seamless cloud experience from Core to RAN, these are the customers we are working with them. >> You'll give us your perspective, your thoughts on the partnership, and the capabilities that you're enabling, the CSPs with that. >> Sure. It's actually started last year here in Barcelona, when we set together, and started to look at the, you know, the industry, the adoption of Open RAN, and the challenges. And Open RAN brings a lot of possibilities and benefit, but it does bring a lot of challenges of reintegrating what you desegregate. In the past, you purchase everything from one vendor, they provide the whole solution. Now you open it, you have different layers. So if you're looking at Open RAN, you have, I like to look at it as three major layers, the management, application, and the infrastructure. And we're starting to look what are the challenges. And the challenges of integration, of complexity, knowledge that operator has with cloud infrastructure. And this is where we basically, Dell and Winder River set together and say, "How can we ease this? "How we can make it simpler?" And we decided to partner and bring a joint infrastructure solution to market, that's not only integrated at a lab at the factory level, but it basically comes with complete lifecycle management from the day zero deployment, through the day two operation, everything done through location, through Dell supported, working out of the box. So basically taking this whole infrastructure layer integration pain out, de-risking everything, and then continuing from there to work with the ecosystem vendor to reintegrate, validate the application, on top of this infrastructure. >> So what is the, what is the Wind River secret sauce in this, in this mix, for folks who aren't familiar with what Wind River does? >> Yes, absolutely. So Wind River, for many, many don't know, we're in business since 1981. So over 40 years. We specialize high performance, high reliability infrastructure. We touch every aspect of your day and your life. From the airplane that you fly, the cars, the medical equipment. And if we go into the telco, most of the telco equipment that it's not virtualized, not throughout the fight today, using our operating system. So from all the leading equipment manufacturers and even the smaller one. And as the world started to go into desegregation in cloud, Wind River started to look at this and say, "Okay, everything is evolving. Instead of a device that included the application, the hardware, everything fused together, it's now being decomposed. So instead of providing the operating environment to develop and deploy the application to the device manufacturer, now we're providing it basically to build the cloud. So to oversimplify, I call it a cloud OS, okay. It's a lot more than OS, it's an operating environment. But we took basically our experience, the same experience that, you know, we used in all those years with the telco equipment manufacturer, and brought it into the cloud. So we're basically providing solution to build an on-premises scalable cloud from the core all the way to the far edge, that doesn't compromise reliability, doesn't compromise performance, and address all the telco needs. >> So I, Abdullah, maybe you can a answer this. >> Yeah. >> What is the, what does the go-to-market motion look like, considering that you have two separate companies that can address customers directly, separately. What does that, what does that look like if you're approaching a possible customer who is, who's knocking on the door? >> How does that work? >> Exactly. And this effort is a Dell turnkey sales service offering, or solution offering to our customers. Where Dell, in collaboration with Wind River, we proactively validate, integrate, and productize the solution as engineered system, knock door on our customer who are trying to transform to Open RAN or open ecosystem. We can help you to go through that seamless experience, by pre-validating with whatever workload you want to introduce, enable zero touch provisioning, and during the day one deployment, and ensure we have sustainable lifecycle management throughout the lifecycle of the product in, in operate, in operational network, as well as having a unified single call of support from Dell side. >> Okay. So I was just going to ask you about support. So I'm a CSP, I have the solution, I go to Dell for support. >> Exactly. >> Okay. So start with Dell, and level one, level two. And if there are complex issues related to the cloud core itself, then Wind River will be on our back supporting us. >> Talk a little bit about a cust, a CSP example that is, is using the technology, and some of the outcomes that they're able to achieve. I'd love to get both of your perspectives on that. >> Vodafone is a great example. We're here in Barcelona. Vodafone is the first ora network in Europe, and it's using our joint solution. >> What are some of the, the outcomes that it's helping them to achieve? >> Faster time to market. As you see, they already started to deploy the ORAN in commercial network, and very successful in the trials that they did last year. We're also not stopping there. We're evolving, working with them together to improve like stuff around energy efficiency. So continue to optimize. So the outcome, it's just simplifying it, and you know, ready to go. Using experience that we have, Wind River is powering the first basically virtualized RAN 5G network in the world. This is with Verizon. We're at the very large scale. We started this deployment in late '20 and '19, the first site. And then through 2020 to 2022, we basically rolled in large scale. We have a lot of experience learning from it, which what we brought into the table when we partnered with Dell. A lot of experience from how you deploy at scale. Many sites from a central location, updates, upgrade. So the whole day two operation, and this is coming to bearing the solution that basically Vodafone is deploying now, and which allowed them... If I, if I look at my engagement with Verizon, started years before we started. And it took quite some time until we got stuff running. And if you look at the Vodafone time schedule, was significantly compressed compared to the Verizon first deployment. And I can tell you that there are other service providers that were announced here by KDI, for example. It's another one moving even faster. So it's accelerating the whole movement to Ora. >> We've heard a lot of acceleration talk this week. I'd love to get your perspective, Abdullah, talking about, you know, you, you just mentioned two huge names in Telco, Vodafone and Verizon. >> Yep. >> Talk a little bit about Dell's commitment to helping telecommunications companies really advance, accelerate innovation so that all of us on the other end have this thing that just works wherever we are 24 by 7. >> Not exactly. And this, we go back to the challenges in Open ecosystem. Managing multiple vendors at the same time, is a challenge for our customers. And that's why we are trying to simplify their life cycle by have, by being a trusted partner, working with our customer through all the journey. We started with Dish in their 5G deployment. Also with Vodafone. We're finding the right partners working with them proactively before getting into, in front of the customer to, we've done our homework, we are ready to simplify the process for you to go for it. If you look at the RAN in particular, we are talking with the 5g. We have ran the simplification, but they still have on the other side, limited resources and skillset can support it. So, bringing a pro, ahead of time engineer system, with a zero touch of provisioning enablement, and sustainable life cycle management, it lead to the faster time to market deployment, TCO savings, improved margins for our customers, and faster business revenue for their end users. >> Solid outcomes. >> And, and what you just just described, justifies the pain associated with disaggregating and reintegrating, which is the way that Gill referenced it, which I think is great because you're not, you're not, you're not re-aggregating, (laughs) you're reintegrating, and you're creating something that's better. >> Exactly. >> Moving forward. Otherwise, why would you do it? >> Exactly. And if you look at it, the player in the ecosystem, you have the vendors, you have the service integrators, you have the automation enablers, but kind of they are talking in silos. Everyone, this is my raci, this is what I'm responsible for. I, I'm not able, I don't want to get into something else while we are going the extra mile by working proactively in that ecosystem to... Let's bring brains together, find out what's one plus one can bring three for our customers, so we make it end-to-end seamless experience, not only on the technical part, but also on the business aspect side of it. >> So, so the partnership, it's about reducing the pen. I will say eliminating it. So this is the, the core of it. And you mentioned getting better coverage for your phone. I do want to point out that the phones are great, but if you look at the premises of a 5G network, it's to enable a lot more things that will touch your life that are beyond the consumer and the phone. Stuff like connected vehicles. So for example, something as simple as collision avoidance, the ability for the car that goes in front of you to be able to see what's happening and broadcast this information to the car behind that have no ability to see it. And basically affect our life in a way that makes our driving safer. And for this, you need a ultra low, reliable low latency communication. You need a 5G network. >> I'm glad you brought that up, because you know, we think about, "Well we just have to be connected all the time." But those are some of the emerging technologies that are going to be potentially lifesaving, and, and really life transforming that you guys are helping to enable. So, really great stuff there, but so much promise coming down the road. What's next for Dell and Wind River? And, and when you're in conversations with prospective CSP's, what is the superpower that you deliver together? I'd love to get both of your perspectives. >> So, if you look at it, number one, customers look at it, last savings and their day-to-day operation. In 5G nature, we are talking the introduction of ORAN. This is still picking up. But there is a mutualization and densification of ORAN. And this is where we're talking on monetizing my deployment. Then the third phase, we're talking sustainability and advanced service introduction. Where I want to move not only ORAN, I want to bring the edge at the same side, I want to define the advanced use cases of edge, where it enables me with this pre-work being done to deliver more services and better SLA services. By end of the day, 5G as a girl mentioned earlier, is not about a good better phone coverage, or a better speed robot, but what customized SLA's I can deliver. So it enables me to deliver different business streams to my end users. >> Yeah. >> So yeah. I will say there are two pens. One, it's the technology side. So for an example, energy efficiency. It's a very big pin point. And sustainability. So we work a lot around this, and basically to advance this. So if you look at the integrated solution today, it's very highly optimized for resource consumption. But to be able to more dynamically be able to change your power profile without compromising the SLA. So this is one side. The other side, it's about all those applications that will come to the 5G network to make our life better. It's about integrating, validating, certifying those applications. So, it's not just easy to deploy an ORAN network, but it's easy to deploy those applications. >> I'd be curious to get your perspective on the question of ROI in this, in this space. Specifically with the sort of the macro headwinds (clears throat) the economies of the world are facing right now, if you accept that. What does the ROI timeline look like when you're talking about moving towards ORAN, adopting VRAN, an amazing, you know, a plethora of new services that can be delivered, but will these operators have the appetite to take that, make that investment and take on that risk based upon the ROI time horizon? Any thoughts on that? >> Yeah. So if you look at the early days or ORAN introduction in particular, most of the entrepreneurs of ORAN and Virtual RAN ran into the challenges of not only the complexity of open ecosystem, but the integration, is like the redos of the work. And that's where we are trying to address it via pre-engineered system or building an engineer system proactively before getting it to the customers. Per our result or outcomes we get, we are talking about 30 to 50% savings on the optics. We are talking 110 ROI for our customers, simply because we are reducing the redos, the time spent to discover and explore. Because we've done that rework ahead of time, we found the optimization issues. Just for example, any customer can buy the same components from any multiple vendors, but how I can bring them together and give, deliver for me the best performance that I can fully utilize, that's, that's where it brings the value for our customer, and accelerate the deployment and the operation of the network. >> Do you have anything to add before we close in the next 30 seconds? >> Yeah. Yeah. (laughs) >> Absolutely. I would say, we start to see the data coming from two years of operation at scale. And the data supports performance. It's the same or better than traditional system. And the cost of operation, it's as good or better than traditional. Unfortunately, I can't provide more specific data. But the point is, when something is unknown in the beginning, of course you're more afraid, you take more conservative approach. Now the data starts to flow. And from here, the intention needs to go even better. So more efficiency, so cost less than traditional system, both to operate as well as to build up. But it's definitely the data that we have today says, the, ORAN system is at part, at the minimum. >> So, definite ROI there. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about how you're helping organizations not just address the complexities of moving from close to open, but to your point, eliminating them. We appreciate your time and, and your insights. >> Thank you. >> All right. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE," the leader in live and emerging tech coverage. Live from MWC23. We'll be back after a short break. (outro music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone; I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLE NEWS and host of theCUBE, and welcome to our SiliconANGLE NEWS MWC NEWS UPDATE in Barcelona where MWC is the premier event for the cloud telecommunication industry, and in the news here is Red Hat, Red Hat announcing a collaboration with NVIDIA, Samsung and Arm on Efficient Open Networks. Red Hat announced updates across various fields including advanced 5G telecommunications cloud, industrial edge, artificial intelligence, and radio access networks, RAN, and Efficiency. Red Hat's enterprise Kubernetes platform, OpenShift, has added support for NVIDIA's converged accelerators and aerial SDK facilitating RAND deployments on industry standard service across hybrid and multicloud platforms. This composable infrastructure enables telecom firms to support heavier compute demands for edge computing, AI, private 5G, and more, and just also helps network operators adopt open architectures, allowing them to choose non-proprietary components from multiple suppliers. In addition to the NVIDIA collaboration, Red Hat is working with Samsung to offer a new vRAN solution for service providers to better manage their open RAN networks. They're also working with UK chip designer, Arm, to create new networking solutions for energy efficient Red Hat Open Source Kubernetes-based Efficient Power Level Exporter project, or Kepler, has been donated to the open Cloud Native Compute Foundation, allowing enterprise to better understand their cloud native workloads and power consumptions. Kepler can also help in the development of sustainable software by creating less power hungry applications. Again, Red Hat continuing to provide OpenSource, OpenRAN, and contributing an open source project to the CNCF, continuing to create innovation for developers, and, of course, Red Hat knows what, a lot about operating systems and the telco could be the next frontier. That's SiliconANGLE NEWS. I'm John Furrier; thanks for watching. (monotone music)

>> TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Spain, everybody. We're here at the Theater Live and MWC 23. You're watching theCUBE's Continuous Coverage. This is day two. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Dave Nicholson. Lisa Martin is also in the house. John Furrier out of our Palo Alto studio covering all the news. Check out silicon angle.com. Okay, we're going to dig into the core infrastructure here. We're going to talk a little bit about servers. Manya Rastogi is here. She's in technical marketing at Dell Technologies. And Abdel Bagegni is technical program manager at the Telecom Infra Project. Folks, welcome to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> Thank you. >> Abdel, what is the Telecom Infras Project? Explain to our audience. >> Yeah. So the Telecom Infra Project is a US based non-profit organization community that brings together different participants, suppliers, vendors, operators SI's together to accelerate the adoption of open RAN and open interface solutions across the globe. >> Okay. So that's the mission is open RAN adoption. And then how, when was it formed? Give us the background and some of the, some of the milestones so far. >> Yeah. So the telecom infra project was established five years ago from different vendor leaders and operators across the globe. And then the mission was to bring different players in to work together to accelerate the adoption of, of open RAN. Now open RAN has a lot of potential and opportunities, but in the same time there's challenges that we work together as a community to facilitate those challenges and overcome those barriers. >> And we've been covering all week just the disaggregation of the network. And you know, we've seen this movie sort of before playing out now in, in telecom. And Manya, this is obviously a compute intensive environment. We were at the Dell booth earlier this morning poking around, beautiful booth, lots of servers. Tell us what your angle is here in this marketplace. >> Yeah, so I would just like to say that Dell is kind of leading or accelerating the innovation at the telecom edge with all these ruggedized servers that we are offering. So just continuing the mission, like Abdel just mentioned for the open RAN, that's where a lot of focus will be from these servers will be, so XR 8000, it's it's going to be one of the star servers for telecom with, you know, offering various workloads. So it can be rerun, open run, multi access, edge compute. And it has all these different features with itself and the, if we, we can talk more about the performance gains, how it is based on the Intel CPUs and just try to solve the purpose like along with various vendors, the whole ecosystem solve this challenge for the open RAN. >> So Manya mentioned some of those infrastructure parts. Does and do, do you say TIP or T-I-P for short? >> Abdel: We say TIP. >> TIP. >> Abdel: T-I-P is fine as well. >> Does, does, does TIP or T-I-P have a certification process or a, or a set of guidelines that someone like Dell would either adhere to or follow to be sort of TIP certified? What does that look like? >> Yeah, of course. So what TIP does is TIP accredits what solutions that actually work in a real commercial grade environment. So what we do is we bring the different players together to come up with the most efficient optimized solution. And then it goes through a process that the community sets the, the, the criteria for and accepts. And then once this is accredited it goes into TIP exchange for other operators and the participants and the industry to adopt. So it's a well structured process and it's everything about how we orchestrate the industry to come together and set those requirements and and guidelines. Everything starts with a use case from the beginning. It's based on operators requirements, use cases and then those use cases will be translated into a solution that the industry will approve. >> So when you say operator, I can think of that sort of traditionally as the customer side of things versus the vendor side of things. Typically when organizations get together like TIP, the operator customer side is seeking a couple of things. They want perfect substitutes in all categories so that they could grind vendors down from a price perspective but they also want amazing innovation. How do you, how do you deliver both? >> Yeah, I mean that's an excellent question. We be pragmatic and we bring all players in one table to discuss. MNO's want this, vendors can provide a certain level and we bring them together and they discuss and come up with something that can be deployed today and future proof for the future. >> So I've been an enterprise technology observer for a long time and, you know, I saw the, the attempt to take network function virtualization which never really made much of an impact, but it was a it was the beginning of the enterprise players really getting into this market. And then I would see companies, whether it was Dell or HPE or Cisco, they'd take an X 86 server, put a cool name on it, edge something, and throw it over the fence and that didn't work so well. Now it's like, Manya. We're starting to get serious. You're building relationships. >> Manya: Totally. >> I mentioned we were at the Dell booth you're actually building purpose built systems now for this, this segment. Tell us what's different about this market and the products that you're developing for this market than say the commercial enterprise. >> So you are absolutely right, like, you know, kind of thinking about the journey, there has been a lot of, it has been going for a long time for all these improvements and towards going more open disaggregated and overall that kind of environment and what Dell brings together with our various partners and particularly if you talk about Intel. So these servers are powered by the players four gen intel beyond processors. And so what Intel is doing right now is providing us with great accelerators like vRAN Boost. So it increases performance like doubles what it was able to do before. And power efficiency, it has been an issue for a long, long time and it still continues but there is some improvement. For example 20% reduction overall with the power savings. So that's a step forward in that direction. And then we have done some of our like own testing as well with these servers and continuing that, you know it's not just telecom but also going towards Edge or inferencing like all these comes together not just X 30,000 but for example XR 56 10, 70, 76 20. So these are three servers which combines together to like form telecom and Edge and covers altogether. So that's what it is. >> Great, thank you. So Abdel, I mean I think generally people agree that in the fullness of time all radio access networks are going to be open, right? It's just a matter of okay, how do we get there? How do we make sure that it has the same, you know, quality of service characteristics. So where are we on on that, that journey from your perspective? And, and maybe you could project what, what it's going to look like over this decade. 'Cause it's going to take, you know, years. >> It's going to take a bit of time to mature and be a kind of a plug and play different units together. I think there was a lot, there was a, was a bit of over-promising in a few, in the last few years on the acceleration of open RAN deployment. That, well, a TIP is trying to do is trying to realize the pragmatic approach of the open run deployment. Now we know the innovation cannot happen when you have a kind of closed interfaces when you allow small players to be within the market and bring the value to, to the RAN areas. This is where the innovation happens. I think what would happen on the RAN side of things is that it would be driven by use cases and the operators. And the minute that the operators are no longer can depend on the closed interface vendors because there's use cases that fulfill that are requires some open RAN functionality, be the, the rig or the SMO layers and the different configurations of the rUSE getting the servers to the due side of things. This kind of modular scalability on this layer is when the RAN will, the Open RAN, would boost. This would happen probably, yeah. >> Go ahead. >> Yeah, it would happen in, in the next few years. Not next year or the year after but definitely something within the four to five years from now. >> I think it does feel like it's a second half of the decade and you feel like the, the the RAN intelligent controller is going to be a catalyst to actually sort of force the world into this open environment. >> Let's say that the Rick and the promises that were given to, to the sun 10 years ago, the Rick is realizing it and the closed RAN vendors are developing a lot on the Rick side more than the other parts of the, of the open RAN. So it will be a catalyst that would drive the innovation of open RAN, but only time will tell. >> And there are some naysayers, I mean I've seen some you know, very, very few, but I've seen some works that, oh the economics aren't there. It'll, it'll never get there. What, what do you, what do you say to that? That, that it won't ever, open RAN won't ever be as cost effective as you know, closed networks. >> Open RAN will open innovations that small players would have the opportunity to contribute to the, to the RAN space. This opportunity is not given to small players today. Open RAN provides this kind of opportunity and given that it's a path for innovation, then I would say that, you know, different perspectives some people are making sure that, you know the status quo is the way forward. But it would certainly put barriers on on innovation and this is not the way forward. >> Yeah. You can't protect the past in the future. My own personal opinion is, is that it doesn't have to be comparable from a, from a TCO perspective it can be close enough. It's the innovative, same thing with like you watch the, the, the adoption of Cloud. >> Exactly. >> Like cloud was more expensive it's always more expensive to rent, but people seem to be doing public Cloud, you know, because of the the innovation capabilities and the developer capabilities. Is that a fair analogy in this space, do you think? >> I mean this is what all technologies happens. >> Yeah. >> Right? It starts with a quite costly and then the the cost will start dropping down. I mean the, the cost of, of a megabyte two decades ago is probably higher than what it costly terabyte. So this is how technology evolves and it's any kind of comparison, either copper or even the old generation, the legacy generations could be a, a valid comparison. However, they need to be at a market demand for something like that. And I think the use cases today with what the industry is is looking for have that kind of opportunity to pull this kind of demand. But, but again, it needs to go work close by the what happens in the technology space, be it, you know we always talk about when we, we used to talk about 5G, there was a lot of hypes going on there. But I think once it realized in, in a pragmatic, in a in a real life situation, the minutes that governments decide to go for autonomous vehicles, then you would have limitations on the current closed RAN infrastructures and you would definitely need something to to top it up on the- >> I mean, 5G needs open RAN, I mean that's, you know not going to happen without it. >> Exactly. >> Yeah, yeah. But, but what is, but what would you say the most significant friction is between here and the open RAN nirvana? What are, what are the real hurdles that need to be overcome? There's obviously just the, I don't want to change we've been doing this the same way forever, but what what are the, what are the real, the legitimate concerns that people have when we start talking about open RAN? >> So I think from a technology perspective it will be solved. All of the tech, I mean there's smart engineers in the world today that will fix, you know these kind of problems and all of the interability, interruptability issues and, and all of that. I think it's about the mindset, the, the interfaces between the legacy core and RAN has been became more fluid today. We don't have that kind of a hard line between these kind of different aspects. We have the, the MEC coming closer to the RAN, we have the RAN coming closer to the Core, and we have the service based architectures in the Core. So these kind of things make it needs a paradigm shift between how operators that would need to tackle the open RAN space. >> Are there specific deployment requirements for open RAN that you can speak to from your perspective? >> For sure and going in this direction, like, you know evolution with the technology and how different players are coming together. Like that's something I wanted to comment from the previous question. And that's where like, you know these servers that Dell is offering right now. Specific functionality requirements, for example, it's it's a small server, it's short depth just 430 millimeters of depth and it can fit anywhere. So things like small form factor, it's it's crucial because if you, it can replace like multiple servers 10 years ago with just one server and you can place it like near a base band unit or to a cell site on top of a roof wherever. Like, you know, if it's a small company and you need this kind of 5G connection it kind of solves that challenge with this server. And then there are various things like, you know increasing thermals for example temperatures. It is classified like, you know kind of compliant with the negative 5 to 55 degree Celsius. And then we are also moving towards, for example negative 20 to 65 degree Celsius. Which is, which is kind of great because in situations where, which are out of our hands and you need specific thermals for those situations that's where it can solve that problem. >> Are those, are those statistics in those measurements different than the old NEB's standards, network equipment building standards? Or are they, are they in line with that? >> It is, it is a next step. Like so most of our servers that we have right now are negative five to five degree Celsius, for especially the extremely rugged server series and this one XR 8,000 which is focused for the, it's telecom inspired so it's focused on those customers. So we are trying to come up like go a step ahead and also like offering this additional temperatures testing and yeah compliance. So, so it is. >> Awesome. So we, I said we were at the booth early today. Looks like some good traffic people poking around at different, you know, innovations you got going. Some of the private network stuff is kind of cool. I'm like how much does that cost? I think I might like one of those, you know, but- >> [Private 5G home network. >> Right? Why not? Guys, great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for sharing. Appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much. >> Okay. For Dave Nicholson and Lisa Martin this is Dave Vellante, theCUBE's coverage. MWC 23 live from the Fida in Barcelona. We'll be right back. (outro music)

(energetic music) >> Welcome to the Silicon Angle News update Mobile World Congress theCUBE coverage live on the floor for four days. I'm John Furrier, in the studio here. Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin onsite. Intel in the news, Intel accelerates 5G network virtualization with radio access network boost for Xeon processors. Intel, well known for power and computing, they today announced their integrated virtual radio access network into its latest fourth gen Intel Xeon system on a chip. This move will help network operators gear up their efforts to deliver Cloud native features for next generation 5G core and edge networks. This announcement came today at MWC, formerly knows Mobile World Congress. In Barcelona, Intel is taking the latest step in its mission to virtualize the world's networks, including Core, Open RAN and Edge. Network virtualization is the key capability for communication service providers as they migrate from fixed function hardware to programmable software defined platforms. This provides greater agility and greater cost efficiency. According to Intel, this is the demand for agile, high performance, scalable networks requiring adoption. Fully virtualized software based platforms run on general purpose processors. Intel believes that network operators need to accelerate network virtualization to get the most out of these new architectures, and that's where it can be made its mark. With Intel vRAN Boost, it delivers twice the capability and capacity gains over its previous generation of silicon with the same power envelope with 20% in power savings that results from an integrated acceleration. In addition, Intel announced new infrastructure power manager for 5G core reference software that's designed to work with vRAN Boost. Intel also showcased its new Intel Converged Edge media platform designed to deliver multiple video services from a shared multi-tenant architecture. The platform leverages Cloud native scalability to respond to the shifting demands. Lastly, Intel announced a range of Agilex 7 Field Programmable Gate Arrays and eASIC N5X structured applications specific integrated circuits designed for individual cloud communications and embedded applications. Intel is targeting the power consumption which is energy and more horsepower for chips, which is going to power the industrial internet edge. That's going to be Cloud native. Big news happening at Mobile World Congress. theCUBE is there. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news and special report and live feed on theCUBE.net. (energetic music)

>> Welcome to "theCUBE's" coverage of "Compute Engineered for Your Hybrid World" sponsored by HPE and Intel. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE" with the new fourth gen Intel Z on scalable process being announced, HPE is releasing four new HPE ProLiant Gen 11 servers and here to talk about the feature of those servers as well as the partnership between HPE and Intel, we have Darren Anthony, director compute server product manager with HPE, and Suzi Jewett, general manager of the Zion products with Intel. Thanks for joining us folks. Appreciate you coming on. >> Thanks for having us. (Suzi's speech drowned out) >> This segment is about NextGen enhanced scale of process. Obviously the Zion fourth gen. This is really cool stuff. What's the most exciting element of the new Intel fourth gen Zion processor? >> Yeah, John, thanks for asking. Of course, I'm very excited about the fourth gen Intel Zion processor. I think the best thing that we'll be delivering is our new ong package accelerators, which you know allows us to service the majority of the server market, which still is buying in that mid core count range and provide workload acceleration that matters for every one of the products that we sell. And that workload acceleration allows us to drive better efficiency and allows us to really dive into improved sustainability and workload optimizations for the data center. >> It's about al the rage about the cores. Now we got the acceleration continued to innovate with Zion. Congratulations. Darren what does the new Intel fourth Gen Zion processes mean for HPE from the ProLiant perspective? You're on Gen 11 servers. What's in it? What's it mean for you guys and for your customers? >> Well, John, first we got to talk about the great partnership. HPE and Intel have been partners delivering innovation for our server products for over 30 years, and we're continuing that partnership with HP ProLiant Gen 11 servers to deliver compelling business outcomes for our customers. Customers are on a digital transformation journey, and they need the right compute to power applications, accelerate analytics, and turn data into value. HP ProLiant Compute is engineered for your hybrid world and delivers optimized performance for your workloads. With HP ProLiant Gen 11 servers and Intel fourth gen Zion processors, you can have the performance to accelerate workloads from the data center to the edge. With Gen 11, we have more. More performance to meet new workload demands. With PCI Gen five which delivers increased bandwidth with room for more data and graphics accelerators for workloads like VDI, our new demands at the edge. DDR5 memory springs greater bandwidth and performance increases for low latency and memory solutions for database and analytics workloads and higher clock speed CPU chipset combinations for processor intensive AI and machine learning applications. >> Got to love the low latency. Got to love the more performance. Got to love the engineered for the hybrid world. You mentioned that. Can you elaborate more on engineered for the hybrid world? What does that mean? Can you elaborate? >> Well, HP ProLiant Compute is based on three pillars. First, an intuitive cloud operating experience with HPE GreenLake compute ops management. Second, trusted security by design with a zero trust approach from silicone to cloud. And third, optimize for performance for your workloads, whether you deploy as a traditional infrastructure or a pay-as-you-go model with HPE GreenLake on-premise at the edge in a colo and in the public cloud. >> Well, thanks Suzi and Darren, we'll be right back. We're going to take a quick break. We're going to come back and do a deep dive and get into the ProLiant Gen 11 servers. We're going to dig into it. You're watching "theCUBE," the leader in high tech enterprise coverage. We'll be right back. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone. Welcome back continuing coverage of "theCUBE's" "Compute Engineered for Your Hybrid World" with HP and Intel. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE'" joined back by Darren Anthony from HPE and Suzie Jewitt from Intel. as we continue our conversation on the fourth gen Zion scalable processor and HP Gen 11 servers. Suzi, we'll start with you first. Can you give us some use cases around the new fourth gen, Intel Zion scalable processors? >> Yeah, I'd love to. What we're really seeing with an ever-changing market, and you know, adapting to that is we're leading with that workload focus approach. Some examples, you know, that we see are with vRAN. For in vRAN, we estimate the 2021 market size was about 150 million, and we expect a CAG of almost 30% all the way through 2030. So we're really focused on that, on, you know deployed edge use cases, growing about 10% to over 50% in 2026. And HPC use cases, of course, continue to grow at a study CAGR around, you know, about 7%. Then last but not least is cloud. So we're, you know, targeting a growth rate of almost 20% over a five year CAGR. And the fourth G Zion is targeted to all of those workloads, both through our architectural improvements that, you know deliver node level performance as well as our operational improvements that deliver data center performance. And wrapping that all around with the accelerators that I talked about earlier that provide that workload specific improvements that get us to where our customers need to operationalize in their data center. >> I love the focus solutions around seeing compute used that way and the processors. Great stuff. Darren, how do you see the new ProLiant Gen 11 servers being used on your side? I mean obviously, you've got the customers deploying the servers. What are you seeing on those workloads? Those targeted workloads? (John chuckling) >> Well, you know, very much in line with what Suzi was talking about. The generational improvements that we're seeing in performance for Gen 11. They're outstanding for many different use cases. You know, obviously VDI. what we're seeing a lot is around the analytics. You know, with moving to the edge, there's a lot more data. Customers need to convert that data into something tangible. Something that's actionable. And so we're really seeing the strong use cases around analytics in order to mine that data and to make better, faster decisions for the customers. >> You know what I love about this market is people really want to hear about performance. They love speed, they love the power, and low power, by the way on the other side. So, you know, this has really been a big part of the focus now this year. We're seeing a lot more discussion. Suzi, can you tell us more about the key performance improvements on the processors? And Darren, if you don't mind, if you can follow up on the benefits of the new servers relative to the performance. Suzi? >> Sure, so, you know, at a standard expectant rate we're looking at, you know, 60% gen over gen, from our previous third gen Zion, but more importantly as we've been mentioning is the performance improvement we get with the accelerators. As an example, an average accelerator proof point that we have is 2.9 times improvement in performance per wat for accelerated workloads versus non-accelerated workloads. Additionally, we're seeing really great and performance improvement in low jitter so almost 20 to 50 times improvement versus previous gen in jitter on particular workloads which is really important, you know to our cloud service providers. >> Darren, what's your follow up on this? This is obviously translates into the the gen 11 servers. >> Well, you know, this generation. Huge improvements across the board. And what we're seeing is that not only customers are prepared for what they need now you know, workloads are evolving and transitioning. Customers need more. They're doing more. They're doing more analytics. And so not only do you have the performance you need now, but it's actually built for the future. We know that customers are looking to take in that data and do something and work with the data wherever it resides within their infrastructure. We also see customers that are beginning to move servers out of a centralized data center more to the edge, closer to the way that where the data resides. And so this new generation really tremendous for that. Seeing a lot of benefits for the customers from that perspective. >> Okay, Suzi, Darren, I want to get your thoughts on one of the hottest trends happening right now. Obviously machine learning and AI has always been hot, but recently more and more focus has been on AI. As you start to see this kind of next gen kind of AI coming on, and the younger generation of developers, you know, they're all into this. This is really the one of the hottest trends of AI. We've seen the momentum and accelerations kind of going next level. Can you guys comment on how Zion here and Gen 11 are tying into that? What's that mean for AI? >> So, exactly. With the fourth gen Intel Zion, we have one of our key you know, on package accelerators in every core is our AMX. It delivers up to 10 times improvement on inference and training versus previous gens, and, you know throws the competition out of the water. So we are really excited for our AI performance leading with Zion >> And- >> And John, what we're seeing is that this next generation, you know you're absolutely right, you know. Workloads a lot more focused. A lot more taking more advantage of AI machine learning capabilities. And with this generation together with the Intel Zion fourth gen, you know what we're seeing is the opportunity with that increase in IO bandwidth that now we have an opportunity for those applications and those use cases and those workloads to take advantage of this capability. We haven't had that before, but now more than ever, we've actually, you know opened the throttle with the performance and with the capabilities to support those workloads. >> That's great stuff. And you know, the AI stuff also does all lot on differentiated heavy lifting, and it needs processing power. It needs the servers. This is just, (John chuckling) it creates more and more value. This is right in line. Congratulations. Super excited by that call out. Really appreciate it. Thanks Suzi and Darren. Really appreciate. A lot more discuss with you guys as we go a little bit deeper. We're going to talk about security and wrap things up after this short break. I'm John Furrier, "theCUBE," the leader in enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to "theCUBE's" coverage of "Compute Engineered for Your Hybrid World." I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE" joined by Darren Anthony from HPE and Suzi Jewett from Intel as we turn our discussion to security. A lot of great features with the new Zion scalable processor's gen four and the ProLiant gen 11. Let's get into it. Suzi, what are some of the cool features of the fourth gen Intel Zion scalable processors? >> Sure, John, I'd love to talk about it. With fourth gen, Intel offers the most comprehensive confidential computing portfolio to really enhance data security and ingest regulatory compliance and sovereignty concerns. A couple examples of those features and technologies that we've included are a larger baseline enclave with the SGX technology, which is our application isolation technology and our Intel CET substantially reduces the risk of whole class software-based attacks. That wrapped around at a platform level really allows us, you know, to secure workload acceleration software and ensure platform integrity. >> Darren, this is a great enablement for HPE. Can you tell us about the security with the the new HP ProLiant Gen 11 servers? >> Absolutely, John. So HP ProLiant engineered with a fundamental security approach to defend against increasingly complex threats and uncompromising focus on state-of-the-art security innovations that are built right into our DNA, from silicon to software, from the factory to the cloud. It's our goal to protect the customer's infrastructure, workloads, and the data from threats to hardware and risk from third party software and devices. So Gen 11 is just a continuation of the the great technological innovations that we've had around providing zero trust architecture. We're extending our Silicon Root of Trust, and it's just a motion forward for innovating on that Silicon Root of Trust that we've had. So with Silicon Root of Trust, we protect millions of lines of firmware code from malware and ransomware with the digital footprint that's unique to the server. With this Silicon Root of Trust, we're securing over 4 million HPE servers around the world and beyond that Silicon, the authentication of and extending this to our partner ecosystem, the authentication of platform components, such as network interface cards and storage controllers just gives us that protection against additional entry points of security threats that can compromise the entire server infrastructure. With this latest version, we're also doing authentication integrity with those components using the security protocol and data model protocol or SPDM. But we know that trusted and protected infrastructure begins with a secure supply chain, a layer of protection that starts at the manufacturing floor. HP provides you optimized protection for ProLiant servers from trusted suppliers to the factories and into transit to the customer. >> Any final messages Darren you'd like to share with your audience on the hybrid world engineering for the hybrid world security overall the new Gen 11 servers with the Zion fourth generation process scalable processors? >> Well, it's really about choice. Having the right choice for your compute, and we know HPE ProLiant servers, together, ProLiant Gen 11 servers together with the new Zion processors is the right choice. Delivering the capabilities to performance and the efficiency that customers need to run their most complex workloads and their most performance hungry work workloads. We're really excited about this next generation of platforms. >> ProLiant Gen 11. Suzi, great customer for Intel. You got the fourth generation Zion scalable processes. We've been tracking multiple generations for both of you guys for many, many years now, the past decade. A lot of growth, a lot of innovation. I'll give you the last word on the series here on this segment. Can you share the the collaboration between Intel and HP? What does it mean and what's that mean for customers? Can you give your thoughts and share your views on the relationship with with HPE? >> Yeah, we value, obviously HPE as one of our key customers. We partner with them from the beginning of when we are defining the product all the way through the development and validation. HP has been a great partner in making sure that we deliver collaboratively to the needs of their customers and our customers all together to make sure that we get the best product in the market that meets our customer needs allowing for the flexibility, the operational efficiency, the security that our markets demand. >> Darren, Suzi, thank you so much. You know, "Compute for an Engineered Hybrid World" is really important. Compute is... (John stuttering) We need more compute. (John chuckling) Give us more power and less power on the sustainability side. So a lot of great advances. Thank you so much for spending the time and give us an overview on the innovation around the Zion and, and the ProLiant Gen 11. Appreciate your time. Appreciate it. >> You're welcome. Thanks for having us. >> You're watching "theCUBE's" coverage of "Compute Engineered for Your Hybrid World" sponsored by HPE and Intel. I'm John Furrier with "theCUBE." Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(soft music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version, my name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE and we're here with Guido Appenzeller, who is the CTO of the Data Platforms Group at Intel. Guido, welcome to theCUBE, come on in. >> Aww, thanks Dave, I appreciate it. It's great to be here today. >> So I'm interested in your role at the company, let's talk about that, you're brand new, tell us a little bit about your background. What attracted you to Intel and what's your role here? >> Yeah, so I'm, I grew up with the startup ecosystem of Silicon Valley, I came from my PhD and never left. And, built software companies, worked at software companies worked at VMware for a little bit. And I think my initial reaction when the Intel recruiter called me, was like, Hey you got the wrong phone number, I'm a software guy, that's probably not who you're looking for. And, but we had a good conversation but I think at Intel, there's a realization that you need to look at what Intel builds more as this overall system from an overall systems perspective. That the software stack and then the hardware components are all getting more and more intricately linked and, you need the software to basically bridge across the different hardware components that Intel is building. So again, I was the CTO for the Data Platforms Group, so that builds the data center products here at Intel. And it's a really exciting job. And these are exciting times at Intel, with Pat, I've got a fantastic CEO at the helm. I've worked with him before at VMware. So a lot of things to do but I think a very exciting future. >> Well, I mean the, the data centers the wheelhouse of Intel, of course your ascendancy was a function of the PCs and the great volume and how you change that industry but really data centers is where, I remember the days people said, Intel will never be at the data center, it's just the toy. And of course, you're dominant player there now. So your initial focus here is really defining the vision and I'd be interested in your thoughts on the future what the data center looks like in the future where you see Intel playing a role, what are you seeing as the big trends there? Pat Gelsinger talks about the waves, he says, if you don't ride the waves you're going to end up being driftwood. So what are the waves you're driving? What's different about the data center of the future? >> Yeah, that's right. You want to surf the waves, that's the way to do it. So look, I like to look at this and sort of in terms of major macro trends, And I think that the biggest thing that's happening in the market right now is the cloud revolution. And I think we're well halfway through or something like that. And this transition from the classic, client server type model, that way with enterprises running all data centers to more of a cloud model where something is run by hyperscale operators or maybe run by an enterprise themselves of (indistinct) there's a variety of different models. but the provisioning models have changed. It's much more of a turnkey type service. And when we started out on this journey I think the, we built data centers the same way that we built them before. Although, the way to deliver IT have really changed, it's going through more of a service model and we really know starting to see the hardware diverge, the actual silicon that we need to build and how to address these use cases, diverge. And so I think one of the things that is probably most interesting for me is really to think through, how does Intel in the future build silicon that's built for clouds, like on-prem clouds, edge clouds, hyperscale clouds, but basically built for these new use cases that have emerged. >> So just a quick, kind of a quick aside, to me the definition of cloud is changing, it's evolving and it used to be this set of remote services in a hyperscale data center, it's now that experience is coming on-prem it's connecting across clouds, it's moving out to the edge it's supporting, all kinds of different workloads. How do you see that sort of evolving cloud? >> Yeah, I think, there's the biggest difference to me is that sort of a cloud starts with this idea that the infrastructure operator and the tenant are separate. And that is actually has major architectural implications, it just, this is a perfect analogy, but if I build a single family home, where everything is owned by one party, I want to be able to walk from the kitchen to the living room pretty quickly, if that makes sense. So, in my house here is actually the open kitchen, it's the same room, essentially. If you're building a hotel where your primary goal is to have guests, you pick a completely different architecture. The kitchen from your restaurants where the cooks are busy preparing the food and the dining room, where the guests are sitting, they are separate. The hotel staff has a dedicated place to work and the guests have a dedicated places to mingle but they don't overlap, typically. I think it's the same thing with architecture in the clouds. So, initially the assumption was it's all one thing and now suddenly we're starting to see like a much cleaner separation of these different areas. I think a second major influence is that the type of workloads we're seeing it's just evolving incredibly quickly, 10 years ago, things were mostly monolithic, today most new workloads are microservice based, and that has a huge impact in where CPU cycles are spent, where we need to put an accelerators, how we build silicon for that to give you an idea, there's some really good research out of Google and Facebook where they run numbers. And for example, if you just take a standard system and you run a microservice based an application but in the microservice-based architecture you can spend anywhere from I want to say 25 in some cases, over 80% of your CPU cycles just on overhead, and just on, marshaling demarshaling the protocols and the encryption and decryption of the packets and your service mesh that sits in between all of these things, that created a huge amount of overhead. So for us might have 80% go into these overhead functions really all focus on this needs to be on how do we enable that kind of infrastructure? >> Yeah, so let's talk a little bit more about workloads if we can, the overhead there's also sort of, as the software as the data center becomes software defined thanks to your good work at VMware, it is a lot of cores that are supporting that software-defined data center. And then- >> It's at VMware, yeah. >> And as well, you mentioned microservices container-based applications, but as well, AI is coming into play. And what is, AI is just kind of amorphous but it's really data-oriented workloads versus kind of general purpose ERP and finance and HCM. So those workloads are exploding, and then we can maybe talk about the edge. How are you seeing the workload mix shift and how is Intel playing there? >> I think the trends you're talking about is definitely right, and we're getting more and more data centric, shifting the data around becomes a larger and larger part of the overall workload in the data center. And AI is getting a ton of attention. Look if I talk to the most operators AI is still an emerging category. We're seeing, I'd say five, maybe 10% percent of workloads being AI is growing, they're very high value workloads. And they're very challenging workloads, but it's still a smaller part of the overall mix. Now edge is big and edge is two things, it's big and it's complicated because of the way I think about edge is it's not just one homogeneous market, it's really a collection of separate sub markets It's, very heterogeneous, it runs on a variety of different hardware. Edge can be everything from a little server, that's fanless, it's strapped to a phone, a telephone pole with an antenna on top of it, to aid a microcell, or it can be something that's running inside a car, modern cars has a small little data center inside. It can be something that runs on an industrial factory floor, the network operators, there's pretty broad range of verticals that all looks slightly different in their requirements. And, it's, I think it's really interesting, it's one of those areas that really creates opportunities for vendors like HPE, to really shine and address this heterogeneity with a broad range of solutions, very excited to work together with them in that space. >> Yeah, so I'm glad you brought HPE into the discussion, 'cause we're here at HPE Discover, I want to connect that. But so when I think about HPE strategy, I see a couple of opportunities for them. Obviously Intel is going to play in every part of the edge, the data center, the near edge and the far edge, and I gage HPE does as well with Aruba. Aruba is going to go to the far edge. I'm not sure at this point, anyway it's not yet clear to me how far, HPE's traditional server business goes to the, inside of automobiles, we'll see, but it certainly will be at the, let's call it the near edge as a consolidation point- >> Yeah. >> Et cetera and look the edge can be a race track, it could be a retail store, it could be defined in so many ways. Where does it make sense to process the data? But, so my question is what's the role of the data center in this world of edge? How do you see it? >> Yeah, look, I think in a sense what the cloud revolution is doing is that it's showing us, it leads to polarization of a classic data into edge and cloud, if that makes sense, it's splitting, before this was all mingled a little bit together, if my data centers my basement anyways, what's the edge, what's data center? It's the same thing. The moment I'm moving some workloads to the clouds I don't even know where they're running anymore then some other workloads that have to have a certain sense of locality, I need to keep closely. And there are some workloads you just can't move into the cloud. There's, if I'm generating lots of all the video data that I have to process, it's financially a completely unattractive to shift all of that, to a central location, I want to do this locally. And will I ever connect my smoke detector with my sprinkler system be at the cloud? No I won't, this stuff, if things go bad, that may not work anymore. So I need something that's that does this locally. So I think there's many reasons, why you want to keep something on premises. And I think it's a growing market, it's very exciting, we're doing some very good stuff with friends like HPE, they have the ProLiant DL, one 10 Gen10 Plus server with our latest a 3rd Generation Xeons on them the Open RAN, which is the radio access network in the telco space. HP Edgeline servers, also a 3rd Generation Xeons there're some really nice products there that I think can really help addressing enterprises, carriers and a number of different organizations, these edge use cases. >> Can you explain, you mentioned Open RAN, vRAN, should we essentially think of that as kind of the software-defined telco? >> Yeah, exactly. It's software-defined cellular. I actually, I learned a lot about that over the recent months. When I was taking these classes at Stanford, these things were still done in analog, that doesn't mean a radio signal will be processed in an analog way and digest it and today typically the radio signal is immediately digitized and all the processing of the radio signal happens digitally. And, it happens on servers, some of them HPE servers. And, it's a really interesting use case where we're basically now able to do something in a much, much more efficient way by moving it to a digital, more modern platform. And it turns out you can actually virtualize these servers and, run a number of different cells, inside the same server. And it's really complicated because you have to have fantastic real-time guarantees versus sophisticated software stack. But it's a really fascinating use case. >> A lot of times we have these debates and it's maybe somewhat academic, but I'd love to get your thoughts on it. And debate is about, how much data that is processed and inferred at the edge is actually going to come back to the cloud, most of the data is going to stay at the edge, a lot of it's not even going to be persisted. And the counter to that is, so that's sort of the negative is at the data center, but then the counter that is there going to be so much data, even a small percentage of all the data that we're going to create is going to create so much more data, back in the cloud, back in the data center. What's your take on that? >> Look, I think there's different applications that are easier to do in certain places. Look, going to a large cloud has a couple of advantages. You have a very complete software ecosystem around you, lots of different services. You'll have first, if you need very specialized hardware, if I wanted to run the bigger learning task where somebody needed a 1000 machines, and then this runs for a couple of days, and then I don't need to do that for another month or two, for that is really great. There's on demand infrastructure, having all this capability up there, at the same time it costs money to send the data up there. If I just look at the hardware cost, it's much much cheaper to build it myself, in my own data center or in the edge. So I think we'll see, customers picking and choosing what they want to do where, and that there's a role for both, absolutely. And so, I think there's certain categories. At the end of the day why do I absolutely need to have something at the edge? There's a couple of, I think, good use cases. One is, let me actually rephrase a little bit. I think it's three primary reasons. One is simply a bandwidth, where I'm saying, my video data, like I have a 100 4K video cameras, with 60 frames per second feeds, there's no way I'm going to move that into the cloud. It's just, cost prohibitive- >> Right. >> I have a hard time even getting (indistinct). There might be latency, if I need want to reliably react in a very short period of time, I can't do that in the cloud, I need to do this locally with me. I can't even do this in my data center. This has to be very closely coupled. And, then there's this idea of fade sharing. I think, if I want to make sure that if things go wrong, the system is still intact, anything that's sort of an emergency kind of a backup, an emergency type procedure, if things go wrong, I can't rely on the big good internet connection, I need to handle things, things locally, that's the smoke detector and the sprinkler system. And so for all of these, there's good reasons why we need to move things close to the edge so I think there'll be a creative tension between the two but both are huge markets. And I think there's great opportunities for HP ahead to work on all these use cases. >> Yeah, for sure, top brand is in that compute business. So before we wrap up today, thinking about your role, part of your role is a trend spotter. You're kind of driving innovation righty, surfing the waves as you said, skating to the puck, all the- >> I've got my perfect crystal ball right here, yeah I got. >> Yeah, all the cliches. (Dave chuckles) puts a little pressure on you, but, so what are some of the things that you're overseeing that you're looking towards in terms of innovation projects particularly obviously in the data center space, what's really exciting you? >> Look, there's a lot of them and I pretty much all the interesting ideas I get from talking to customers. You talk to the sophisticated customers, you try to understand the problems that they're trying to solve and they can't solve right now, and that gives you ideas to just to pick a couple, one thing what area I'm probably thinking about a lot is how can we build in a sense better accelerators for the infrastructure functions? So, no matter if I run an edge cloud or I run a big public cloud, I want to find ways how I can reduce the amount of CPU cycles I spend on microservice marshaling demarshaling, service mesh, storage acceleration and these things like that. And so well clearly, if this is a large chunk of the overall cycle budget, we need to find ways to shrink that to make this more efficient. So then I think, so this basic infrastructure function acceleration, sounds probably as unsexy as any topic would sound but I think this is actually really, really interesting area and one of the big levers we have right now in the data center. >> Yeah, I would agree Guido, I think that's actually really exciting because, you actually can pick up a lot of the wasted cycles now and that drops right to the bottom line, but please- >> Yeah, exactly. And it's kind of funny we're still measuring so much with SPEC and rates of CPU's performances, it's like, well, we may actually be measuring the wrong thing. If 80% of the cycles of my app are spent in overhead, then the speed of the CPU doesn't matter as much, it's other functions that (indistinct). >> Right. >> So that's one. >> The second big one is memory is becoming a bigger and bigger issue, and it's memory cost 'cause, memory prices, they used to sort of decline at the same rate that our core counts and then clock speeds increased, that's no longer the case. So we've run to some scaling limits, there's some physical scaling limits where memory prices are becoming stagnant. And this has become a major pain point for everybody who's building servers. So I think we need to find ways how we can leverage memory more efficiently, share memory more efficiently. We have some really cool ideas in that space that we're working on. >> Well, yeah. And Pat, let me just sorry to interrupt but Pat hinted to that and your big announcement. He talked about system on package and I think is what you used to talk about what I call disaggregated memory and better sharing of that memory resource. And that seems to be a clear benefit of value creation for the industry. >> Exactly. If this becomes a larger, if for our customers this becomes a larger part of the overall costs, we want to help them address that issue. And the third one is, we're seeing more and more data center operators that effectively power limited. So we need to reduce the overall power of systems, or maybe to some degree just figure out better ways of cooling these systems. But I think there's a lot of innovation that can be done there to both make these data centers more economical but also to make them a little more Green. Today data centers have gotten big enough that if you look at the total amount of energy that we're spending, this world as mankind, a chunk of that is going just to data center. And so if we're spending energy at that scale, I think we have to start thinking about how can we build data centers that are more energy efficient that are also doing the same thing with less energy in the future. >> Well, thank you for laying those out, you guys have been long-term partners with HP and now of course HPE, I'm sure Gelsinger is really happy to have you on board, Guido I would be and thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> It's great to be here and great to be at the HP show. >> And thanks for being with us for HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version, you're watching theCUBE the leader in digital tech coverage, be right back. (soft music)

(soft music) >> Welcome back to HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version, my name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE and we're here with Guido Appenzeller, who is the CTO of the Data Platforms Group at Intel. Guido, welcome to theCUBE, come on in. >> Aww, thanks Dave, I appreciate it. It's great to be here today. >> So I'm interested in your role at the company, let's talk about that, you're brand new, tell us a little bit about your background. What attracted you to Intel and what's your role here? >> Yeah, so I'm, I grew up with the startup ecosystem of Silicon Valley, I came from my PhD and never left. And, built software companies, worked at software companies worked at VMware for a little bit. And I think my initial reaction when the Intel recruiter called me, was like, Hey you got the wrong phone number, I'm a software guy, that's probably not who you're looking for. And, but we had a good conversation but I think at Intel, there's a realization that you need to look at what Intel builds more as this overall system from an overall systems perspective. That the software stack and then the hardware components are all getting more and more intricately linked and, you need the software to basically bridge across the different hardware components that Intel is building. So again, I was the CTO for the Data Platforms Group, so that builds the data center products here at Intel. And it's a really exciting job. And these are exciting times at Intel, with Pat, I've got a fantastic CEO at the helm. I've worked with him before at VMware. So a lot of things to do but I think a very exciting future. >> Well, I mean the, the data centers the wheelhouse of Intel, of course your ascendancy was a function of the PCs and the great volume and how you change that industry but really data centers is where, I remember the days people said, Intel will never be at the data center, it's just the toy. And of course, you're dominant player there now. So your initial focus here is really defining the vision and I'd be interested in your thoughts on the future what the data center looks like in the future where you see Intel playing a role, what are you seeing as the big trends there? Pat Gelsinger talks about the waves, he says, if you don't ride the waves you're going to end up being driftwood. So what are the waves you're driving? What's different about the data center of the future? >> Yeah, that's right. You want to surf the waves, that's the way to do it. So look, I like to look at this and sort of in terms of major macro trends, And I think that the biggest thing that's happening in the market right now is the cloud revolution. And I think we're well halfway through or something like that. And this transition from the classic, client server type model, that way with enterprises running all data centers to more of a cloud model where something is run by hyperscale operators or maybe run by an enterprise themselves of (indistinct) there's a variety of different models. but the provisioning models have changed. It's much more of a turnkey type service. And when we started out on this journey I think the, we built data centers the same way that we built them before. Although, the way to deliver IT have really changed, it's going through more of a service model and we really know starting to see the hardware diverge, the actual silicon that we need to build and how to address these use cases, diverge. And so I think one of the things that is probably most interesting for me is really to think through, how does Intel in the future build silicon that's built for clouds, like on-prem clouds, edge clouds, hyperscale clouds, but basically built for these new use cases that have emerged. >> So just a quick, kind of a quick aside, to me the definition of cloud is changing, it's evolving and it used to be this set of remote services in a hyperscale data center, it's now that experience is coming on-prem it's connecting across clouds, it's moving out to the edge it's supporting, all kinds of different workloads. How do you see that sort of evolving cloud? >> Yeah, I think, there's the biggest difference to me is that sort of a cloud starts with this idea that the infrastructure operator and the tenant are separate. And that is actually has major architectural implications, it just, this is a perfect analogy, but if I build a single family home, where everything is owned by one party, I want to be able to walk from the kitchen to the living room pretty quickly, if that makes sense. So, in my house here is actually the open kitchen, it's the same room, essentially. If you're building a hotel where your primary goal is to have guests, you pick a completely different architecture. The kitchen from your restaurants where the cooks are busy preparing the food and the dining room, where the guests are sitting, they are separate. The hotel staff has a dedicated place to work and the guests have a dedicated places to mingle but they don't overlap, typically. I think it's the same thing with architecture in the clouds. So, initially the assumption was it's all one thing and now suddenly we're starting to see like a much cleaner separation of these different areas. I think a second major influence is that the type of workloads we're seeing it's just evolving incredibly quickly, 10 years ago, things were mostly monolithic, today most new workloads are microservice based, and that has a huge impact in where CPU cycles are spent, where we need to put an accelerators, how we build silicon for that to give you an idea, there's some really good research out of Google and Facebook where they run numbers. And for example, if you just take a standard system and you run a microservice based an application but in the microservice-based architecture you can spend anywhere from I want to say 25 in some cases, over 80% of your CPU cycles just on overhead, and just on, marshaling demarshaling the protocols and the encryption and decryption of the packets and your service mesh that sits in between all of these things, that created a huge amount of overhead. So for us might have 80% go into these overhead functions really all focus on this needs to be on how do we enable that kind of infrastructure? >> Yeah, so let's talk a little bit more about workloads if we can, the overhead there's also sort of, as the software as the data center becomes software defined thanks to your good work at VMware, it is a lot of cores that are supporting that software-defined data center. And then- >> It's at VMware, yeah. >> And as well, you mentioned microservices container-based applications, but as well, AI is coming into play. And what is, AI is just kind of amorphous but it's really data-oriented workloads versus kind of general purpose ERP and finance and HCM. So those workloads are exploding, and then we can maybe talk about the edge. How are you seeing the workload mix shift and how is Intel playing there? >> I think the trends you're talking about is definitely right, and we're getting more and more data centric, shifting the data around becomes a larger and larger part of the overall workload in the data center. And AI is getting a ton of attention. Look if I talk to the most operators AI is still an emerging category. We're seeing, I'd say five, maybe 10% percent of workloads being AI is growing, they're very high value workloads. So (indistinct) any workloads, but it's still a smaller part of the overall mix. Now edge is big and edge is two things, it's big and it's complicated because of the way I think about edge is it's not just one homogeneous market, it's really a collection of separate sub markets It's, very heterogeneous, it runs on a variety of different hardware. Edge can be everything from a little server, that's (indistinct), it's strapped to a phone, a telephone pole with an antenna on top of it, to (indistinct) microcell, or it can be something that's running inside a car, modern cars has a small little data center inside. It can be something that runs on an industrial factory floor, the network operators, there's pretty broad range of verticals that all looks slightly different in their requirements. And, it's, I think it's really interesting, it's one of those areas that really creates opportunities for vendors like HPE, to really shine and address this heterogeneity with a broad range of solutions, very excited to work together with them in that space. >> Yeah, so I'm glad you brought HPE into the discussion, 'cause we're here at HPE Discover, I want to connect that. But so when I think about HPE strategy, I see a couple of opportunities for them. Obviously Intel is going to play in every part of the edge, the data center, the near edge and the far edge, and I gage HPE does as well with Aruba. Aruba is going to go to the far edge. I'm not sure at this point, anyway it's not yet clear to me how far, HPE's traditional server business goes to the, inside of automobiles, we'll see, but it certainly will be at the, let's call it the near edge as a consolidation point- >> Yeah. >> Et cetera and look the edge can be a race track, it could be a retail store, it could be defined in so many ways. Where does it make sense to process the data? But, so my question is what's the role of the data center in this world of edge? How do you see it? >> Yeah, look, I think in a sense what the cloud revolution is doing is that it's showing us, it leads to polarization of a classic data into edge and cloud, if that makes sense, it's splitting, before this was all mingled a little bit together, if my data centers my basement anyways, what's the edge, what's data center? It's the same thing. The moment I'm moving some workloads to the clouds I don't even know where they're running anymore then some other workloads that have to have a certain sense of locality, I need to keep closely. And there are some workloads you just can't move into the cloud. There's, if I'm generating lots of all the video data that I have to process, it's financially a completely unattractive to shift all of that, to a central location, I want to do this locally. And will I ever connect my smoke detector with my sprinkler system be at the cloud? No I won't (Guido chuckles) this stuff, if things go bad, that may not work anymore. So I need something that's that does this locally. So I think there's many reasons, why you want to keep something on premises. And I think it's a growing market, it's very exciting, we're doing some very good stuff with friends like HPE, they have the ProLiant DL, one 10 Gen10 Plus server with our latest a 3rd Generation Xeons on them the Open RAN, which is the radio access network in the telco space. HP Edgeline servers, also a 3rd Generation Xeons there're some really nice products there that I think can really help addressing enterprises, carriers and a number of different organizations, these edge use cases. >> Can you explain, you mentioned Open RAN, vRAN, should we essentially think of that as kind of the software-defined telco? >> Yeah, exactly. It's software-defined cellular. I actually, I learned a lot about that over the recent months. When I was taking these classes at Stanford, these things were still done in analog, that doesn't mean a radio signal will be processed in an analog way and digest it and today typically the radio signal is immediately digitized and all the processing of the radio signal happens digitally. And, it happens on servers, some of them HPE servers. And, it's a really interesting use case where we're basically now able to do something in a much, much more efficient way by moving it to a digital, more modern platform. And it turns out you can actually virtualize these servers and, run a number of different cells, inside the same server. And it's really complicated because you have to have fantastic real-time guarantees versus sophisticated software stack. But it's a really fascinating use case. >> A lot of times we have these debates and it's maybe somewhat academic, but I'd love to get your thoughts on it. And debate is about, how much data that is processed and inferred at the edge is actually going to come back to the cloud, most of the data is going to stay at the edge, a lot of it's not even going to be persisted. And the counter to that is, so that's sort of the negative is at the data center, but then the counter that is there going to be so much data, even a small percentage of all the data that we're going to create is going to create so much more data, back in the cloud, back in the data center. What's your take on that? >> Look, I think there's different applications that are easier to do in certain places. Look, going to a large cloud has a couple of advantages. You have a very complete software ecosystem around you, lots of different services. You'll have first, if you need very specialized hardware, if I wanted to run the bigger learning task where somebody needed a 1000 machines, and then this runs for a couple of days, and then I don't need to do that for another month or two, for that is really great. There's on demand infrastructure, having all this capability up there, at the same time it costs money to send the data up there. If I just look at the hardware cost, it's much much cheaper to build it myself, in my own data center or in the edge. So I think we'll see, customers picking and choosing what they want to do where, and that there's a role for both, absolutely. And so, I think there's certain categories. At the end of the day why do I absolutely need to have something at the edge? There's a couple of, I think, good use cases. One is, let me actually rephrase a little bit. I think it's three primary reasons. One is simply a bandwidth, where I'm saying, my video data, like I have a 100 4K video cameras, with 60 frames per second feeds, there's no way I'm going to move that into the cloud. It's just, cost prohibitive- >> Right. >> I have a hard time even getting (indistinct). There might be latency, if I need want to reliably react in a very short period of time, I can't do that in the cloud, I need to do this locally with me. I can't even do this in my data center. This has to be very closely coupled. And, then there's this idea of fade sharing. I think, if I want to make sure that if things go wrong, the system is still intact, anything that's sort of an emergency kind of a backup, an emergency type procedure, if things go wrong, I can't rely on the big good internet connection, I need to handle things, things locally, that's the smoke detector and the sprinkler system. And so for all of these, there's good reasons why we need to move things close to the edge so I think there'll be a creative tension between the two but both are huge markets. And I think there's great opportunities for HP ahead to work on all these use cases. >> Yeah, for sure, top brand is in that compute business. So before we wrap up today, thinking about your role, part of your role is a trend spotter. You're kind of driving innovation righty, surfing the waves as you said, skating to the puck, all the- >> I've got my perfect crystal ball right here, yeah I got. >> Yeah, all the cliches. (Dave chuckles) puts a little pressure on you, but, so what are some of the things that you're overseeing that you're looking towards in terms of innovation projects particularly obviously in the data center space, what's really exciting you? >> Look, there's a lot of them and I pretty much all the interesting ideas I get from talking to customers. You talk to the sophisticated customers, you try to understand the problems that they're trying to solve and they can't solve right now, and that gives you ideas to just to pick a couple, one thing what area I'm probably thinking about a lot is how can we build in a sense better accelerators for the infrastructure functions? So, no matter if I run an edge cloud or I run a big public cloud, I want to find ways how I can reduce the amount of CPU cycles I spend on microservice marshaling demarshaling, service mesh, storage acceleration and these things like that. And so well clearly, if this is a large chunk of the overall cycle budget, we need to find ways to shrink that to make this more efficient. So then I think, so this basic infrastructure function acceleration, sounds probably as unsexy as any topic would sound but I think this is actually really, really interesting area and one of the big levers we have right now in the data center. >> Yeah, I would agree Guido, I think that's actually really exciting because, you actually can pick up a lot of the wasted cycles now and that drops right to the bottom line, but please- >> Yeah, exactly. And it's kind of funny we're still measuring so much with SPEC and rates of CPU's performances, it's like, well, we may actually be measuring the wrong thing. If 80% of the cycles of my app are spent in overhead, then the speed of the CPU doesn't matter as much, it's other functions that (indistinct). >> Right. >> So that's one. >> The second big one is memory is becoming a bigger and bigger issue, and it's memory cost 'cause, memory prices, they used to sort of decline at the same rate that our core counts and then clock speeds increased, that's no longer the case. So we've run to some scaling limits, there's some physical scaling limits where memory prices are becoming stagnant. And this has become a major pain point for everybody who's building servers. So I think we need to find ways how we can leverage memory more efficiently, share memory more efficiently. We have some really cool ideas in that space that we're working on. >> Well, yeah. And Pat, let me just sorry to interrupt but Pat hinted to that and your big announcement. He talked about system on package and I think is what you used to talk about what I call disaggregated memory and better sharing of that memory resource. And that seems to be a clear benefit of value creation for the industry. >> Exactly. If this becomes a larger, if for our customers this becomes a larger part of the overall costs, we want to help them address that issue. And the third one is, we're seeing more and more data center operators that effectively power limited. So we need to reduce the overall power of systems, or maybe to some degree just figure out better ways of cooling these systems. But I think there's a lot of innovation that can be done there to both make these data centers more economical but also to make them a little more Green. Today data centers have gotten big enough that if you look at the total amount of energy that we're spending, this world as mankind, a chunk of that is going just to data center. And so if we're spending energy at that scale, I think we have to start thinking about how can we build data centers that are more energy efficient that are also doing the same thing with less energy in the future. >> Well, thank you for laying those out, you guys have been long-term partners with HP and now of course HPE, I'm sure Gelsinger is really happy to have you on board, Guido I would be and thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> It's great to be here and great to be at the HP show. >> And thanks for being with us for HPE Discover 2021, the virtual version, you're watching theCUBE the leader in digital tech coverage, be right back. (soft music)