 From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. Happy to welcome back to the program, Trey Layton, who's the SVP of Engineering with Dell EMC. Trey, great to see you. Hi, Stu, how are you? I'm doing fantastic, thank you. So, there's the Dell Technology Summit happening in Austin, Texas. Let's not hide the lead. There's some news around things you've been working on for a while, why don't you share the update with our audience? Well, myself and my team have been working on a new product that we are announcing at Dell Technology Summit called Power One, and we are positioning in the market as autonomous infrastructure. It's a great combination of all the wonderful products in the Dell Technologies portfolio, combined with some very innovative automation that makes integrating the product an autonomous outcome. All right, first of all, with the name Power in it, we know that that's the branding that Dell likes, something that's going to be with us for a while. You talk about all in one. You've got some history, we have some history, back pulling various solutions together, talk about compute, network and storage, what back in the day we called converged infrastructure. Explain how all in one, what is the all in the all in one? So first of all, it's a system where you can get all of Dell Technologies in one package. The next thing is about building on that decades worth of experience of building converged products and learning about the different intricacies of integrating those products. And instead of relying upon humans to integrate those technologies together to deliver an outcome for a customer, embedding that intelligence and software to make it easy for an operator to drive a configuration to deliver an outcome for a customer to operate a modern data center environment. So it's exciting stuff, Trey, because the design principle before was, let's simplify as much as we can. Let's get that entire rack, if you will, be the unit of infrastructure that people manage. But what I hear you talking about, automation and software and even, we're not replacing the humans, we're augmenting what they're doing by having automation takeover. That's powerful stuff. We've talked about intelligence and automation for, I'd say all of our careers. So explain a little bit, this autonomous, what really, where is that automation and how come it is different today than it might have been five or 10 years ago? Well, you think about all the things that we've learned in 10 years of building a packaged product to actually deliver an outcome for a customer. Requiring some degree of manual intervention but a significant amount of simplicity that we've built in those products to deliver an outcome. One of the things that's true about today is that as organizations are on a digital transformation journey, they are struggling with a high degree of intake of technology, while also maintaining the products that they manage on a daily basis, quote, unquote, keep the lights on. What we have done is say, how can we take the innovations that we've built in our products that our infrastructure is code? And how can we build software intelligence that understands based on the operator's desired outcome for an integration, we employ Dell engineering best practices to deliver that outcome. So a key element of the product is housing this intelligence and software that drives this automated outcome through best practices for how we engineer products together. All right, Trey, you've got engineering. Bring us in a little side of the team. Building now in 2019, what are the pieces that you had? What's different about the team that you had to build this? And is there any unique IP that your team and this product brings beyond what was already available in the marketplace? Yeah, so first of all, the team is a global team that we've actually been in the process of hiring in the last year plus, year and a half plus. And it's a very young team, different skillset. We learned very early on that if we're going to build a product with embedded automation, you needed to have experience in understanding what are the best practices for integrating the technologies in the product. But simultaneously, you needed people who understood how to write code that made that outcome possible. And so really bringing and building a global team of DevOps-minded individuals that understood open source technologies, that understood our VMware ecosystem, that understood the Dell EMC ecosystem, and more importantly, the larger Dell technologies ecosystem for bringing those products together. And I'll tell you, it's a diverse culture of individuals. What I'm most excited about is while we're very much focused on delivering VMware outcomes in this first release, the product that we've built is capable of delivering any type of outcome, whether it be another type of virtualization environment or another type of application outcome, the software is designed to deliver an integration that is designed to support a customer's production operation. The intelligence or the product that we built to do that is called the Power One Controller. And embedded in that is software that a customer can drive either through a user interface, or they can use automation technologies that they have in-house to call on this controller programmatically to execute those outcomes as opposed to being chained to a user interface that an operator has to learn as a new element of their environment. Yeah, Trey, it really reminds me of the conversations I've been having with customers over the last decade or more is that core understanding and building my compute infrastructure, my storage infrastructure, my networking infrastructure. I still need to understand some of those pieces, but it is much more about the software, the operating model, and it's, as we know, we're living in a software world. Well, it's interesting that you say that because you and I both know, based on our history, that there are complexities that we've worked to make simpler to operate, but a customer today struggles to have expertise dedicated to how do I build an underlying network fabric? How do I deploy a software virtualization layer on top of that network fabric? How do I deploy storage arrays in a manner where the IO is optimized not only for performance, but also for survivability? How do I carve up my compute resources in a manner that most efficiently supports the virtualization or container outcome that I'm deploying? There's a tremendous amount of skill that you need to have to employ the best practices to integrate all those technologies together and what we are doing is merely bringing those capabilities in software so that an operator can say, I want to deploy this many cores with this much memory and associate it to this much capacity of external storage and all the underlying in order configuration dependencies happen through the intelligence that we've built in automation to drive the right outcome for the customer. So, Trey, when I've been digging into the software world and you talk to the people that are building applications, observability is something that's been coming up a bunch. It's not just understanding what I have, but where's the flows of information, Ansible, New Relic, all talking about, in a containerized micro services world, there are different ways that I need to look at the entire system. How does that kind of mindset and thinking fit into the design of Power One? Well, it's actually an age old problem that we've had as we've began to have shared infrastructure to run whether they be containerized services or virtualized services or containers running in virtualized services. It's how do we associate what's running to the underlying infrastructure so that if we have a problem in the underlying infrastructure that we're managing that we target a resolution and that resolution could be increased performance so that that service can run better or it could be some type of underlying failure that we want to ensure that as survivability is kicked in that we employ more resource to support expansion or just a continuation and burst of capability that's needed. When we built Power One, we thought about it is a system. How do we give observability of that system in the context of a system to understand the associated dependencies so that we could quickly guide the operator to identifying the area that they needed to look at from an infrastructure perspective and either influence or simply respond to instead of a more traditional mode of on-premises management is let me go find where the problem is and see if this fixes it. We have given observability to specifically identify where the issue is and enable the operator to go target that. All right. So Trey, you mentioned the traditional model of doing things. What does Power One mean for, say for example, VxBlock as something over a decade out there on the market. There's been lots of discussions forever. The Cisco stack, the Dell stack, and VMware, all those challenges. So tell us what this means for VxBlock. So first of all, I couldn't say enough good things about the Vblock team. It's a part of the organization that I'm in. We are very much committed to Vblock engineering going forward and Power One is an expansion of our portfolio as opposed to a replacement of. We value our partnership with Cisco significantly. Customers are committed to acquiring Cisco technologies in concert with our storage and data protection products. And Vblock is all about giving customers an ability to have a converged experience with our storage technologies and a very unique experience that surrounds the offers that we deliver in that space. I will tell you that the automation that we're building in Power One is also something that we're targeting at our entire portfolio, as opposed to just isolating into this one product. The dawn of autonomous infrastructure in our minds is not about isolating that technology to one product, but it's about bringing it to our entire portfolio of products to make our customers' experiences better and managing and consuming the technologies they buy from us. Well, definitely something we've heard from Jeff Clark, Jeff Boudreau and the team is the portfolio inside of Dell EMC is going through a lot of simplification. So the whole autonomous infrastructure, Power One, how should we be thinking about where this fits kind of in the overall market? So it's very much includes our purpose-built storage portfolio technologies, our data protection. It includes our networking technologies and some unique automation capabilities that we've built in it to enable the IT operator to not have to worry about programming the fabric that we actually sense and understand the changes in the virtualization environment and deploy those configurations to the underlying network infrastructure. It's all about using our PowerEdge portfolio of servers. So Power One is very much about consuming our data center technologies all in one package. That positioning in the market is complimentary to customers who want to acquire VX Block and are looking to pair Cisco technologies with Dell Storage. And more importantly, our HCI portfolio is a key element of our total offer to customers where customers are looking to deploy infrastructure with software defined storage characteristics and a very unique management experience and simplified operations. The HCI portfolio is there as well. So I often engage specifically as we talk about the exclusively Dell portfolio, it's not an or conversation, it's an and. It's which applications are you deploying in your data center environment? What use cases are you deploying? How is the underlying infrastructure optimized to best address the goals that you have for that deployment? And so that's why we've taken a portfolio approach as opposed to one product to address every use cases in the market. All right, so Trey, we've talked a lot about operations and the way we design things. We haven't talked about cloud, very much we believe cloud is as much an operating model as it is a place, it's a journey, not a destination. Hybrid cloud is what most customers have today. They have multiple clouds, but we think one of the challenges of the day is helping to get more value out of the sum of what you have than the individual pieces would be on their own. So where does power one fit into the Dell cloud story? And I would love to also hear just where it fits into the kind of the broader cloud discussions that we have when we're at a Dell show, a VMware show or beyond. Yeah, so it's interesting discussion because I think we begin to drift into saying a thing is cloud. And I think more outcomes are cloud and it's a combination of software and infrastructure. Power one is an infrastructure element that is very much a part of the Dell Technologies Cloud strategy. But Dell Technologies Cloud is more about our entire portfolio of software and infrastructure participating in a common ecosystem to deliver that cloud outcome for customers. And so power one is absolutely a part of the Dell Technologies Cloud. And we're excited about continuing down the automation enhancement path to make those outcomes more possible for customers as we go throughout time. So initially power one is very much an infrastructure resource in Dell Technologies Cloud. Over time, you're going to see even greater enhancements as you will see enhancements across our entire portfolio of technologies in participating in the larger Dell Technologies Cloud ecosystem story. Okay, and just to connect the dots because when I look at those pieces and we talk about as customers are doing hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, if they're VMware shop VCF is an important piece of that. And that is part of VMware Cloud on AWS, what they're doing with Azure, with Google. So this plugs in, if you know my words into that broader multi-cloud hybrid cloud discussion that customers are having. Absolutely, you think about it in layers. We are building an infrastructure layer at Dell EMC that enables that Dell Technologies Cloud layer to be possible through the VMware ecosystem of technologies making that multi-cloud, that private cloud functionality realized. The VMware ecosystem is robust in its approach to supporting multi-cloud environments as well as deploying the virtualization and container technologies that are critical for building in a modern enterprise. And so we are an element of that strategy as opposed to the exclusive pinpoint resource in the strategy. All of the infrastructure products in the portfolio will participate in the Dell Technologies Cloud. And we're excited about the innovation that we can bring in making the Dell Technology strategy and vision more easily realized by our customers. Okay, and Trey, when I think of Power One, what market segments do we think are kind of be the first customer for this and any specific roles are inside a customer that should be the ones looking at this? Yes, great question. So as we look at markets, you look at organizations who are looking to deploy a data center resource. We can go as small as four servers, but candidly, if you're deploying a data center with four servers, there are other items in our portfolio that are better positioned like hyperconverged to start in that place. But if you're looking to deploy a data center where you're looking to go tens, 20s, hundreds of servers and you want external storage in the offer, then Power One is a great starting point. If you think about the scalability and we haven't touched on it that we've built in Power One at launch, we're going to support 270 servers in the architecture. Very quickly, we will expand into supporting what's described as a multipod architecture where we will get beyond 700 servers and then move into thousands of servers where the architecture is actually designed to support over 7,600 servers. In concert with that, at day one, we will support multiple storage arrays as well. So deploying multiple Power Mac storage arrays as a storage domain to support this. So when we talk about markets, we talk about the ability to address medium-sized organizations, data center use cases, all the way up to the largest enterprises or service providers in the world, data center deployments and an all Dell technology stack. All right, Trey, give us the final word on this. One or two things you want people to understand and know about Power One as they walk away. So I think the most important thing to take away is that this is a way to acquire Dell technologies, products all in one place in one package in a incredible user experience. The way we're going to sustain that user experience and maintain that value proposition to customers is around the autonomous infrastructure packaging that we've built in the software that we're delivering. Utilizing some of the most advanced automation characteristics that are out there on the market combined with some of the brightest minds to integrate these technologies together. Customers just need to get to production operations and when you can acquire a product that houses the intelligence to get to that outcome faster, there's a greater return on your invested capital when you're buying this product and that's the most important thing I think to walk away from. We are committed to helping get our customers get to operational outcomes faster and these technologies that we've built in this product are delivering on that promise. Well, Trey, congratulations to you and the team. We always love to see when, you know, go behind the scenes, we kind of rebuild from a clean sheet of paper, building on the history that you have, listening to your customer strongly and having something that's ready for today's modern era. Thanks so much. Thanks, Stu. All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all our coverage. I'm Stu Miniman as always. Thanks for watching thecube.