 from Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE, covering WTG Transform 2018. Brought to you by Winslow Technology Group. Welcome back to theCUBE here at WTG Transform 2018. I'm Stu Miniman and happy to welcome to the program a first time guest, Claude Levine, who's the director of product management and servers at Dell EMC. Claude, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you Stu. All right, so I had David Singer on this morning who was from the EMC legacy side of things, talking about storage. So you're from the legacy Dell side, if we will. You know, we're working on servers. So tell us a little bit about your background and what you work on these days. So yeah, so I'm doing planning for server powerage. I've been on the server team for about 18 years. So all the way from the beginning to now number one in the world. So it feels very, very good after 18 years. But yeah, that's what we do. So I'm based in Austin with the product group over there. And our role is to optimize and plan the best possible roadmap and portfolio of servers for rack towers and modular. Yeah, it's funny. I remember back, you go back five, 10 years ago and some people were like, wait, Dell does servers? You know, aren't they the, you know, here's a Dell laptop sitting in front of me. And it was like, Dell's done a lot of servers. I remember when Dell's blade server first came out, a lot of pieces, but you know, so give us a high level. You know, what's Dell's position in the marketplace these days? I mean, number one, but also to me at the portfolio number one, but at the platform level, we have one rack, the rack, the R740 that our mainstream rack is the number one server sold in the world. So we're number one portfolio, even at the platform level. And the 740 is used across, it's kind of our bedrock. It's used for as a server, but also in all the EMC solution is used for virtualization, VDI. So that platform is kind of the, it's doing very, very well these days. Yeah, it's one of those things. See, people sometimes forget that a server isn't just something that does the compute for, you know, when operating system sits on it. There's servers in lots of devices. Every year when I go to Dell world, I would see that giant OEM rack. And it was servers, OEM, storage OEM, HCI of course, all has servers inside of it. And it was one of those things when the acquisition was initially announced of EMC, it was like, well, look, EMC, both in their products and bundled with their solutions really pushes a lot of servers that just didn't get talked about in the discussion. So now it's great for us. We have that full portfolio. I mean, every day you're going to see new announcement. We're going to have the best vSAN solution, the best VX rail. We have best in class performance and all that. I mean, the big part, I mean, it's the result of years of investment in the system management. We have at the server level because we have a great automation and system management. We're able to kind of a remage or create profile on our server. So it can be a VDI server again, but the best VSAN server, the best VX rail server. And all that because we have a great system management engine called the iDRAC9 inside of our servers. And that's years of engineering and development. But now finally, not only on the hardware, but on the system management, we get that recognition from the customers. And I think that's what made us number one. I mean, we see a lot of acceptance in 14G, a lot of demand for our security and system management capabilities. So I think that's the overall solution that help us, I mean, get to that point. So that was great. Claude actually, as an industry, the server business has been doing pretty well. Especially the last few quarters. What's driving growth? You're working on the product strategy. You know, what are some of the interesting nuggets in the portfolio? I mean, so how much we have the core? So the, like I just mentioned, the 1U and 2U servers, but there is a couple of pockets on innovation. So that's what we did in the last few months. So I mean, the first one is, you see different key core architecture that are starting to be very interesting, not only Intel but AMD. So we're trying to balance the portfolio to really showcase each of the goodness of this architecture. So that's why we launched a full AMD portfolio not a long time ago. Then the other one is in the full socket was really interesting. Something I've never seen in 15 years. More and more people are doing machine, not only database, but machine learning, AI on full server. They're requiring more GPUs and all flash solution within the server to get the best possible performance. So that's what we did. We announced that a month ago at Delworld. And now in the future is the, we're moving to our kinetic architectures. So we had a preview of Delworld of our MX platform that we're going to launch later this year. And that one is really going to take the IT infrastructure to the next level. So it's designed for the next 10 years of, again, modular, flexible, connected architecture that not only can optimize the right balance between compute and storage, but future technology like off-flash and in-memory compute with the right fabric. So that's what you're going to see from us. Let's go from the traditional rack servers to this advanced modular architecture for that big design for the next 10 years. So... Claude, maybe give us a little compare contrast today. How is the modular architecture different from what we saw in traditional racks or even blade servers? Yeah, so the traditional blade servers, I mean, we don't blade for, I don't know, 10, 15 years. And in the past it was compute and then all the storage were external to your send. That was very traditional. But now with a scale out storage, number one, scale out storage and all this HCI solution, customers asking us to have very flexible compute and storage architecture. So that's kind of the first step. And most of the blade architecture today are there, such as storage and compute. But moving forward, we're going to go way beyond that. We're going to have blocks of memory and GPU and flash storage and different tiers of architecture ahead of the traditional storage. And if you look at the modular architecture, nobody else can deal with that today. MX is going to be the first platform that can enable that. It's not going to happen in the next three months, but the chassis is designed to be ready for this architecture of the future. Because we have a very unique design in the back. You know, we're getting rid of the traditional midplane that we had in the past and our competition is still using today. So it's going to be much more open to future flexible connectivity in the back of the chassis. So that's what enables us to be ready for these next 10 years of IT innovation. All right, so Claude, we're here at the Winslow technology user event. What kind of feedback are you hearing from Winslow and their customers and what kind of things are you talking to the channel about these days? I mean, we've been in this conference for the last few years and Winslow is a great, great partner of us and they are part of what we call the technical council back in Austin. So their CTO sits with us on the PG side to help us plan future roadmap. So they're very, very close partner. And I mean, that's what we're doing. I mean, we're trying to optimize the portfolio with these guys. Right now it's mostly trying to improve the server, improve the server around storage and compute. So what you're gonna see us launching toward the end of the year on the storage side, we're gonna have a, remember the number one server I mentioned, the R740, number one in the world. Again, talking to the Winslow team and their customers, that server is great, but not good enough. So you're gonna see us later this year based on that feedback, launching a new improved version that we still base, use the 740 base, but even more optimized for HCI and this server storage solution. And that's a perfect example of the feedback we're getting from the Winslow team that we're integrating into the roadmap. So yeah, we are here every year because I mean, these guys are very sharp down. Claude, last thing I wanted to ask you is, you know, for a very long time when you thought about the server market, it was, let's watch the Intel, the TikTok, you know, roadmap. So every 18 months, you know, you could expect something happened. That was what drove the innovation. Yes. What's the cadence today and what's driving innovation going forward? I mean, the cadence is getting faster. So for a server planning makes it a little bit difficult. Also now you have again these two vendors. But for us, really the innovation, and I think that's what made us number one, it's beyond the server, beyond the, you know, the two processors and the storage solution is how we manage, how we make sure we have the best security end-to-end. So our system management, the way we can provision servers, make sure we can do the update the most secure way. Pretty much that's kind of what makes a difference for PowerEdge and I think that's why, I mean it took years of investment from, you know, the PG team, but I think that's what is making a difference and the differentiation right now is like, you know, our servers are not just like any other servers are much easier to, much more secure, much easier to manage, you know, through the entire life cycle. So I think that's the key differentiation is how we manage a server and also not just at the server level, but we have deployments of thousands of servers. So we have a new console called Open Management Enterprise. We just launched that, I think that was what, six months ago, and that's the latest and greatest as far as one too many management of servers and it's free, I mean it's, that's another good thing about PowerEdge, you can get Open Management Enterprise for free. All right, well, Claude Levine really appreciated the update on everything happening in the server world, lots more coverage, check out thecube.net for everything we're doing, as well as we actually take some of the key analysis from the shows that we go to, put that on a podcast, it's called The Cube Insights, find that on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, your favorite podcast player. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching The Cube.