 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of the inaugural Dell Technologies World 2018 here in Las Vegas. Getting to the end of three days of wall-to-wall live coverage for two sets. I'm Stu Miniman, joined by my co-host, John Troyer. And for those of you that haven't attended one of these shows, sometimes like, oh, you're going to Vegas, this is a boondoggle. But I'm really happy to have, I've got a customer and one of the Dell EMC employees here. A lot of stuff goes on, there's learning, there's lots of meetings. There's, you know, you come here, you kind of get as much out of it as you can. So first, Stephen Herzig, who's the Director of Enterprise Systems at the University of Arkansas. You've had a busy week so far. Thank you for joining us. Look at that. Also Andrew McDaniel, who's the Senior Director of Ready Solutions for VDI with Dell EMC. Thank you for joining us. Thanks guys. All right, so Stephen, first of all, give us a little bit about your background and, you know, University of Arkansas. I think most people know the Razorbacks, but talk about your organ and your role there. Yeah, I'm Director of Enterprise Systems, as you mentioned. We're an R1 University. We have about 27,000 students, about 5,000 faculty and staff on the university. And so my organization is responsible for maintaining, as I said, all the enterprise systems, essentially everything in the data center on the floor to support all the educational activities. Now there are some distributed or commonly known as shadow IT organizations throughout the university, and we work quite closely with them too. Okay, you stamp out all that shadow IT stuff and pull it all back in, right? No, no, no, absolutely not. We'll get into it. Drew, before we get into more about the university, tell us a little bit about your role in your work. So my organization basically develops the end-to-end VDI solutions that Dell EMC sell globally. So we work with partners such as VMware and Citrix to put together the industry-leading solutions for VDI. Okay. They're tested, validated, engineered to give real good confidence in the solution that the customer's going to buy. John and I spent many years looking at these, you know, the memes in the industry, all that, you know, but Stephen, before we get into the VDI piece, give us, what are some of the challenges that you're facing at the university? We've had, you know, from an IT standpoint, we know the technology requirements are more than ever. Well, tuitions go up, budgets are always a challenge. So when you're talking to your peers, what are the things you're all commiserating about or, you know, working out? Like any IT organization, it's a challenge to do more with less. We're constantly being required to support more systems, more technology, and technology is becoming more and more an integral part of the educational process. We also have students coming from very diverse backgrounds, and so the kinds of computing devices that they're able to bring to the university with them, some can afford high-end, some not, and so it's a challenge for us to deliver that the applications to them no matter what kind of device they happen to bring. All right, so it sounds like VDI is something that fits there before we get into the actual solution. Tell us, what was the struggle you were facing? What led to that? You know, was there a mandate? How do you get to the solution that you were looking for? Well, really, we were struggling with those challenges. We were a very small IT team, and as those things grew, we knew that we had to find a way to reduce the number of resources that were supporting all the endpoints, all the machines in the labs, all the machines on faculty and staff desks, and again, like I said, the students bring their own devices, which we had to support as well. All right, so you ended up choosing a Dell solution, maybe give us a little bit about that process and walk us through their project some. Yeah, we really needed a solution. We could not go out and assemble pieces parts from a lot of different vendors, and we needed a solution that was tailored to our needs, that fit, VDI is complex by its nature, but some vendors made it really complex. So we had to find one that was right for our environment, for what we were trying to achieve, and of course, at the right price point. Higher education, we're not flush with cash. That's always been really hard. I think that's been the hard thing about VDI, right? It's always been kind of complicated and hard to do, or at least back in the day, and then when you did it, half the things didn't work, and the things that didn't work were really weird, and the end user was very confused. This application works, but this one doesn't, and where's my cursor, and everything went wonky all of a sudden, and I can't log in at 9 a.m.? I mean, I'm kind of curious, so what is necessary maybe from a high level in a modern VDI solution stack that makes it easy? The hypervisor, I mean the end clients? I think, John, we've seen such great advances in the software side of it, right? So, if you look at Horizon as a broker, VMware Horizon, the advances that they've made in things like protocols, right? So Blast Extreme, for example, one of the big challenges that we've always had is things like Link or Skype in a VDI environment. It was an unmitigated disaster for many customers, right? So that has been solved by VMware and the advances that they did above and beyond what was capable in PC over IP, right? So that's one of the things. From a hardware perspective, one of the challenges we frequently had in VDI was poor user experience, right? And it was typically because the graphics requirement for the application could not be delivered by the CPU alone. So GPUs, Nvidia, K1, K2s, now into the M10, M60s and moving forward into the P4 and P40s, they've really helped us to improve that user experience. And it's starting to get to a point where GPUs are a standard delivery within any VDI deployment. So you get really good user experience moving forward. And as you know, if you can't deliver the good user experience, the project is dead before it even starts, right? So that's a big challenge. Stephen, do you have a commentary on some of the challenges that we've faced before? What was your experience like? Yeah, that's exactly right. We made the decision early on to include GPU in every session that we served up. And we weren't quite sure because it is an additional expense, but it was one of the best decisions that we made. It really does make all the difference. Was there something specific from the application or user base and how they were using it that led you to that? Well, we are all Windows 10. And Windows 10 just looks better and runs better. The video, the scrolling through a Word document, the text, some are very nuanced, but it makes a big difference in the user experience. And then of course we have higher end users using CAD programs, things like that, in the School of Engineering. They needed the GPU for what they were doing. All right. Yeah. Andrew, I was wondering if you could give us a little bit of the up and down on the stack. So I think back to on the EMC side, I watched everything from the Flash and Convert side. On the Dell side, there's the Wwise acquisition, of course, EMC and VMware coming together. So a long journey, but even the first year we did theCUBE, Dell had some big customers doing large scale cost effective VDI because you had that, you know, to give some of the marketing terms I've heard here, it's end to end, but you had the devices all the way through. So bring us up to 2018. Yeah, so I guess, you know, one of the challenges Stephen spoke about is the previously, the hassle of having to go and buy each of the individual components from multiple different vendors. So you're buying your storage from one vendor, compute from another, GPUs from another, hypervisor from another, broker from another, and so on. It's very complicated to manage all of that. And so we had lots of customers who'd run into scenarios where, say, a bias firmware and a driver revision were not compatible. And so we'd run into those kind of problems that we were talking about earlier on, right? So I think, you know, bringing all of that together in Dell Technologies, we can now deliver every single aspect of what you need for a VDI deployment. So we created a bundle called VDI complete. It uses VSAN ready nodes or VX rail, right? So hyperconverged, massive from a VDI perspective, and I'll come back to that in a second. It pairs then Horizon Advanced or Horizon Enterprise with those base platforms and the Dell-wise thin clients, right? So every aspect, true end-to-end is delivered by Dell Technologies. And there's simply no other vendor in the market who can do that, right? So what that basically does is it gives the customer confidence that everything that has been tested can be owned from a support perspective by Dell Technologies, right? So if you've got a problem, we're not going to hand you off to another company to go solve that issue, okay? Or lay blame on somebody else. It's fully our stack, and as a result, we take full responsibility for it. And that's one of the benefits that we had with customers like the University of Arkansas. And that was important to us. That single point of contact for support was really important to us. Steven, I wonder if you could talk about from an operational standpoint. You said you've got a small team. One of the challenges at least years ago was like, oh wait, I had the guy that walked around into the desktops. Now I centralized it. Who owns it? You know, how do we sort through this? You know, we've got a full stack there. Simplicity is one of the big messages of HCI. But what was the reality for your team and the roles? How did you change? Well, one of the first areas, or actually the first area that we implemented VDI in was in the labs. Hundreds of endpoints across the campus. And before VDI, you would walk into a lab and a certain percentage of the machines would always be down. They needed updating. There was a virus. Somebody spilled the coffee on the machine. You know, that kind of thing. After VDI, when you walked into the lab, 100% of the endpoints were always up. And there was no noise in the lab, except when somebody printed. So the maintenance required, the resources from my team and these distributed IT teams was reduced drastically. As a matter of fact, some of the distributed teams had 50% of their resources reduced. That could then go and do more high value projects and deliver high value services to their colleges. From the student and faculty perspective, it sounds like the uptake has been good and the satisfaction level high. I mean, user experience is everything with VDI, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The students came, we installed during spring break and they came back from spring break, went into the labs with these beautiful new 27 inch monitors, sat down, logged on and it looked almost the same as before, which was exactly what we were after. We wanted that same high quality experience in VDI that they had with a laptop or a desktop. The monitors are an important thing to consider, right? Because a lot of customers will think about the data center side of VDI, right? So get lots of compute, good high performing storage, good network, and then they put a really poorly designed, thin client or an old desktop PC or something like that on the end and wonder why they're not getting good performance, right? So we just launched yesterday, the Dell Wise 5070. It's the first thin client in the market that can have six monitors attached to it. Four of those can be 4K and 2,2K, right? So it's immense from a display perspective and this is what our customers are demanding, especially in financial services, for example, right? Or in automotive design. In CAD labs, for example, you need three or four really good, high quality screens attached. Well, yeah, I'll say, I'll date myself. I wish I had that when I was playing Doom when I was in college. That too, yes. That does bring into question that your upgrade and scenarios are moving on to the future, right? You used to have all those janky old PCs that you'd kind of, maybe they'd slide out the back door, maybe they'd get recycled or whatever, but now it's probably a different refresh cycle and maybe even a different use case. The lifespan of the endpoints is much longer with the VDI solution. That's got to be good, yeah. I was curious, you mentioned the converged infrastructure too, Andrew. I mean, how does that play into it? I'm just back to the balance. Yeah, so I mean, you know, traditionally a SAN infrastructure was used in VDI, right? So for us, that would have been ecologic, compelling historically, right? Now we're seeing that VDI market almost totally transitioned to hyper-converged, right? So VSAN has really revolutionized VDI, okay? I'd say a good 35% of all VxRail and VSAN deployments that we do are in the VDI space. So it's really, and I would say about 95% of our VDI deployments are on hyper-converged rather than a traditional SAN infrastructure. That's really where VDI has moved now because it gives customers the ability to scale on demand. Instead of having to go and buy, you know, another half million dollar storage array to add another thousand users, you can simply add in a couple of more compute nodes with the storage built in, you know? For us, hybrid works very well. So a hybrid disk configuration is working very well in most VDI deployments. Some customers require all flash. It depends on the applications and the other kind of performance that they want to get from it. But for majority customers, hyper-converged with a hybrid configuration works brilliantly. All right, so Stephen, I want to give you the final word. Sounds like everything went really well, but one of the things we always like to understand when you're talking to your peers, they said, hey, what do you learn? What would you do a little different, either internally or configuration-wise or rollout? What would you tell your peers? Well, when we implemented VDI is just before VDI complete came out. So the work that's done in the VDI complete solution, we didn't have. So as we look to the future and we want to expand and grow our environment, VDI complete will be a huge help. Had we had that, it only took us about four months to stand it up, which considering what we accomplished was a very short time. But if we had had VDI complete, that time would have been much more compressed. So looking to the future, we're looking to expand using VDI complete. Okay, and just to Andrew, maybe you could tie the knot on this bow for us. Sounds like this could, if I've got VDI, I don't have to start brand new, that could fit with existing environments. How does that all work? Absolutely, I mean, we've got lots of customers who've already done Citrix or VMware deployments, right? Ideally, you want to connect with one broker, so you want to stick with one broker. But we can bring in a hyperconverged VDI solution into your existing user estate and merge into that. So that's pretty common. All right, well, Andrew and Stephen, thank you so much for sharing this story. Really, really, really great to always get to customer stories. We're getting towards the end of three days of live coverage here at the Stands Convention Center in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World 2018. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for watching theCUBE.