 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. The research analysts at Wikibon tell us that the market for what they call true private cloud, that is on-prem infrastructure that substantially mimics public cloud infrastructure, that the market for true private cloud is growing at 30% compound annual growth rate, twice the rate of infrastructure as a service in public cloud. Why is that? It's because HCI is really a foundation for IT transformation and private cloud, true private cloud, as we call it at Wikibon. Hi, everybody, my name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Colin Gallagher, who's a senior director of product marketing at Dell EMC. Colin, good to see you again. Thanks, good to be here again, Dave. So we're going to get into it, and we're going to talk a lot about VxRail, which was announced over, well over a year ago. Give us the update on VxRail. So, yeah, it's actually almost been two years. It'll be two years just coming February, and it's been a tremendous ride. We have seen tremendous customer adoption, primarily for some of the reasons you just mentioned, customers looking to build private cloud on an agile, kind of modern, transformative infrastructure. To date, we've sold over 17,000 nodes, that's over a whopping 165,000 cores, and over 190 petabytes of storage. So tremendous amount of success. All of this great customer interest has helped propel Dell EMC to be number one in hyperconverged. And, you know, we haven't just been selling the same product for the last two years. We've been continually innovating over the course of these last two years, driving a tremendous pace of innovation. We've introduced new software capabilities. We had hybrid only configurations to start, and rapidly introduce all flash. We, after Dell acquired EMC, we moved to a Dell-based hardware infrastructure, obviously. Quickly, very quickly. Almost as fast as the logo's changed. I'm up, within two months. And what we're announcing today is that we're building the next generation and selling the next generation of VxRail appliances based on the 14th generation powered servers. Okay, so you mentioned, a lot of that was driven by, of course, the acquisition, but tell us more about sort of 14G and VxRail. What's the synergy, is it? People say, yeah, it's just another server. Is that the case? Absolutely not, Dave. By leveraging the 14th generation powered servers, we're able to deliver a tremendously powerful, a tremendously purposeful, and tremendously polished appliance experience. What do we mean by powerful? With VxRail, we can deliver two times the IOPS, then we could on previous generation servers. That allows us to power tremendous mission-critical workloads. But what do we mean by purposeful? We can deliver over a million combinations of configurations for customers. And yes, it's over a million. Me and my team counted, and they hate me for it, yes. Really? Did you use a supercomputer to do all that counting? No, just Excel spreadsheets and a lot of elbow grease. But by tailoring this, by delivering, it allows customers to buy exactly what they need to master specific configurations. And by polished, we can deliver a highly predictable system. We can deliver over nine times more predictable system than we could in previous generations, and we can maintain sub-millisecond latency for a wide variety of workloads. So I'm interested in this specific contribution of PowerEdge. You're basically saying that it's essentially built for this type of environment. It's not just a generic server that you're popping in. Absolutely. The fallacy that people assume when we talk about hyperconverge, which is built on top of software-defined storage, is that hardware doesn't matter. And while, yes, a tremendous amount of the power comes from the software, hardware does make a difference. You get a very different experience when you have purpose-built hardware that takes advantage and integrates well with the software-defined layer than if you just throw it on top of a white-box server. Think about the hard thing we used to do for a storage array. Someone still needs to do that work. Software isn't going to cover all of that. And these PowerEdge 14-generation servers have over 150 custom requirements from us, the software-defined and ACI teams. Things like how you boot that needs to be done differently in hyperconverged appliances. The drive choices that we select, they need to be very different than you would find in a standard server. Even things like power and cooling are slightly different based on the needs of hyperconverge. So what you've got with the Fortune-Generate servers is purpose-built hardware for hyperconverged. The net net is hardware matters. So you mentioned a lot of permutations. What are some of the configuration options that people should know about here? So I believe we have one of the widest, if not the widest selection of CPU choices. Again, why does that matter? You know, customers want to buy the CPUs that match their specific needs. Nothing more, nothing less, right? If you buy more, you're overspending. If you buy less, you have to buy two or three nodes to get the same level of performance. By offering this tremendous breadth of CPU capability, we allow customers to fine-tune their needs to exactly what they want. We also offer an additional set of drive types this now. We're doubling our drive choices by offering SATA SSDs as addition to SAS. SATA allows us to offer a lower price point to get still-deliver-and-off-flash experience. And because in hyperconverged networking matters, we are significantly increasing our network connectivity options, allowing customers to get more granular control and or more ports as needed. Oh, and we're introducing 25-gig networking as well. Okay, great. I want to maybe come back and talk about some of those points. But so before we do that, I talked about at the top of the segment about how this all fits into cloud and our true private cloud definition and so forth. What makes this offering cloud? Can you give us some detail or an example or two? Yeah, I think, you know, when you go and buy a cloud service, right? You are specifying a certain configuration that's based on, hey, I want this number of IOPS at this capacity. You're not specifying drive types. You're not specifying, you know, network connectivity ports options. That, you know, that's something you can only, and when you want to replicate that experience on-prem, you need an infrastructure that consolidates all those things together. Trying to build on-prem cloud infrastructure on top of traditional infrastructure is a huge hurdle. By going to hyper-converge, where you've consolidated storage and compute together, you actually have that, you can build that very simple experience on top of it, layer your service catalog on top of it, and not have to worry about managing the underlying components separately. You know, I want to talk about the guys who aren't doing hyper-converge. I mean, when you see it, I mean, we were early on, you know, looking at the market and understanding, I think the benefits, but still there's a lot of folks who still want to roll their own. You know, maybe it's a channel affinity or maybe it's some server affinity or maybe they just like doing heavy lifting, I don't know, but what are you seeing in the marketplace in terms of why people aren't moving to hyper-converge, and what would you tell those people? Well, I think, I'll disagree with you on that, Dave, you know, depending on which analysts you listen to, somewhere between two-thirds to three-quarters of customers are actively looking at deploying hyper-converge in the near future, you know, within one to two years. So people are interested, but you're right, that's two, it's one-third of a quarter of the market who's not. And for both of them, you know, what I talked to them, I say, the key benefits are that you cannot do IT transformation without buying a transformative product. If you're still buying the same old components piece by piece in assembling themselves, you're gonna be spending all of your time doing that assembly and the maintenance of that yourself. You need an infrastructure product that allows, frees up those resources to deliver better business value, right? What we do with hyper-converged appliances like VxRail is we take on that burden of integration. We take on that burden of testing. You know, you no longer need to maintain a full test lab because we've done the full certification ourselves. And we deliver that, you know, lower TCO, fully automated experience that you can't get by doing it yourself. You know, some of our competitors focus on, do the same thing, but they focus a lot on the day zero value. What, you know, how fast it is to install, you know, how fast it is to get the first VM. What we found in hyper-converged is the real benefit is the life cycle automation that comes from day one, day two and beyond. By building that automation, life cycle management, qualification, testing allows us to deliver a truly transformative experience. You know, buying VxRail can lower your TCO by 30%, can lower you, it's at three UTCO. This isn't marketing numbers. The full three UTCO loads by 30% and can lower your support cost by 42%. You know, that's something you can't get by buying servers and building your own. Well, I would totally agree with that, because, you know, our data suggests that there's over a hundred billion dollars over the next 10 years, 150 billion actually, that it's coming out of, sort of, you know, undifferentiated, heavy lifting of deployment of infrastructure. But again, people still, you know, it's like I say, a third of the market. I don't know, is it because they're just, old habits die hard or what do you think it is? Yeah, I mean, I'm actually giving this a secret away. I'm writing a blog post on this, but I've been late on it, so I'll use it here now and then maybe force me to actually publish the post by the time this comes out. But, you know, I get those questions when I talk to customers. There's always, you know, one in four customers says, well, you know, I can do that. You know, I know how to do it. I've got the processes down and my response to them is always, what does this say on your resume? On your resume, does it say rack and stack servers? Does it say deploy vCenter and vSphere? Does it say, you know, cable networking? I was like, I doubt it. You know, your job description today on your resume probably says, I develop applications that support, you know, an X-revenue business, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Digital transformation. Digital transformation, exactly right. Right, so if you're not doing that and you're actually, you're saying your value is racking and stacking, cabling, you know, installing software, right? You're lying on your resume. What I'm giving you with vX-Rail is the ability not to lie on your resume, right? How about I'll actually allow you to focus on the digital transformation? Well, I mean, I think every customer we talk to is going through some kind of not only transformation, IT transformation, but a big digital transformation. They're trying to move resources up the stack, you know, as the sort of bromide, but it's true to whatever, AI, you know, data, analytics, or just application development that's going to drive revenue. And hyperconverge is perfect for all that. You know, I used to say that hyperconverge was ready for all virtualized workloads. You could buy a vX-Rail and run any virtualized workload on it with the power that we get, the predictability and the configurations that we get from 14 generation powered servers. We're not just ready for virtualized workloads. We're ready for any workloads, mission critical workloads, you know, anything customers wanted to apply on it. Yeah, this is really important. I mean, look, IT is a very labor intensive business. It's too labor intensive and that has actually stifled some innovation and we're finally seeing some light at the end of that tunnel and hyperconverge infrastructure is an enabler there. Okay, when can I buy this stuff? We are actively taking orders right now. It's available to order now and it will be shipping within 30 days. Okay, great. Let's see, look commercial for a crowd chat that's coming up, hashtag next gen HCI, which is on December 1st. Where else can I get info? You can go to delemc.com slash HCI. That's a full page where you can find out about all our HCI solutions, including VxRail. All right. And we've got some great assets there. We're going to have some cool videos, including this and hopefully get some other ones, but yeah. Well, Colin, congratulations on the success of a massive number of 17,000 nodes, 165,000 cores, 190 petabytes and presumably more to come. So well done. Number four. All right, thanks for coming on. Thanks, Dave. All right, thanks for watching everybody. This is theCUBE conversation with Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time.