 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Prior to the historic merger between Dell and EMC, Dell had a relationship with a company called Nutanix. Nutanix was a pioneer in so-called hyper-converged infrastructure, and a lot of people questioned whether that relationship would continue after the merger. Hi, everybody, I'm Dave Vellante, and I'm here with John Shirley, who's the director of product management at Dell EMC, and we're going to talk about that. Welcome, John. Thank you, thanks for having me. So, the XC series, you're continuing the innovation there. Tell us about what you're announcing today. Yeah, so this is our third generation. So this is the third generation XC series, and what we're announcing is that our most popular models are available now, and the most popular models are the XC640, which is more of a compute-intensive node that will be targeted at VDI, compute-intensive, remote offices, things like that, and we're also announcing the XC740XD, which is more for storage intensive and performance applications. Think big data, SharePoint, exchange, those kind of things. Okay, so we're seeing the evolution of the workloads that can be supported by hyper-converged infrastructure, and this is more evidence, right? Absolutely, and to that point, where we started off, we saw a lot of VDI deployments, but now very quickly, once those companies adopt the technology, they're growing that more into the mainstream. Okay, so I see this term, marketing gurus at Dell EMC, throw it around this term, purposeful. Okay, let's put some meat on the bone. What does that mean? I love the term, because it really helps describe what we do, right? This isn't just take things like SDS software, in this case, Nutanix, throw it on some PowerEdge and validate it. Now, those are really core important steps, but we go above and beyond that, so purposeful really is kind of end-to-end, an end-to-end view of what the solution is. So it's things all the way from configuration to manufacturing and supportability. Things like processor choices, SSD selection memory types, you can kind of go down the list, and we've really designed this purposely for HCI market. Okay, so Dell, of course, was the first to do a VM relationship with Nutanix. There are others. Can you talk about your differentiation of what's special about Dell EMC and Nutanix? Yeah, so I think if I go back to the three points that I had before, right? It's you have a server, you have SDS solutions, and you just some validation around it. Very important steps. We really feel that we have the strongest server in the world, and so that's point number one for us. Nutanix, great partnership there. And then the validation steps, which we have a very strong engineering team to go after. Now, if we take that a step further, Dell has created some software, some IP, that really helps kind of glue everything together. We call it the Power Tools SDK. And that's really years worth of experience working with SDS solutions, that we know how to integrate into the server and really load that software on top of it so we can do things like life cycle management, we can have recovery options, and there's a whole list of things that are available with the Power Tools SDK. So that's one of them. And the final one is, we're Dell EMC and the great part about being this new company is that we have this great, great portfolio of technologies. So it's things like integration with data protection, right? Now that we have Avomar data domain, we have the ability to create new products. And in fact, that's one of the new things that we have as well. We are announcing a new data protection solution that is taking the Avomar software and taking data domain. And we're integrating that right into the Prism interface. So, if you listen to Nutanix, they say one click simplicity, or we're introducing a one click backup, one backup automation into the portfolio. Well, I love that because a lot of times backup is an afterthought. Oh, I got this new infrastructure. How am I going to backup the data? Okay, let's bolt this on. So let me ask you a follow-up to that. As Dell EMC, one company, sometimes when you're two companies, it's hard to do that type of engineering. Can you talk about, as Dell EMC has won, how the engineering culture and results, the outcomes have improved or changed? Yeah, absolutely. So I'm not just going to focus on engineering because I really want to take a look at the entire organization. So it goes all the way from engineering, marketing, product management, sales. It's that whole ecosystem. You can even talk about the sport organization, the quality, and we really have tight relationship between Nutanix and the Dell EMC counterparts. So I'll give you a good example. I talk with my product management counterparts, and I talk with the sales leaders on a nearly daily basis. And we want to make sure that that relationship is really strong and that we evolve the relationship over time. Can we talk a little bit about scalability? We talked earlier at the top about workloads of the VDI was very popular. Remote office was kind of a sweet spot of hyperconversion in the early days. It's evolved, but scalability has always been a question. Where are we at with regard to scalability of hyperconversion infrastructure? That's a great question. So HCI came from the big cloud providers. And that technology was really meant to bring the tenants of what we saw with the scale of cloud providers into the mainstream data centers. And so to that end, scalability is a core attribute. I'll give you a good example here. When the 14th generation of XC series comes out, we'll be able to plug that in to customers' existing ecosystem. So let's say a customer has a 12th generation or 13th generation PowerEdge XC series. We can now plug that technology right into the same cluster. And if you talk about reusing technology, integrating technology into the data center and really providing great value and making sure customers don't have to throw away, say older medium term technology like the 13th generation, now they can just use a new technology right in place with the existing. John, can you talk about the portfolio a little bit? You guys got one of everything. If I want it, you'd probably have it. But a lot of times that gets confusing for customers and partners, probably sales reps. Where does the XC series and these new announcements, where does that fit in the portfolio relative to some of the other things you're announcing? We get this question all the time. And in my mind, it's really clear. For customers who have standardized on VMware, we have VxRel. For customers now who want, say a choice of hypervisor or for customers who have already standardized on Nutanix software, we have XC series. So there's absolutely room for both. We know the market is really big and it's growing fast and we have options for our customers now. Whether they want to run on VMware or if they want to run, say on Hyper-V is a good example. Let's see, when can I get this stuff? Can I buy it today or soon? It's available now. It's available now. And we have customers who are anxiously waiting because of the new technology that are in the platforms. And so it's available now, shipping now as well. Excellent, all right. We got a break, but I'll give you the last word. Things, key takeaways. What should we be thinking about with this announcement, with the partnership? Yeah, absolutely. So I think the key things here is the partnership is still growing strong. And we really feel the best way to consume Nutanix software is on the XC series in combination with Dell and really getting the best out of both worlds of Nutanix relationship on Dell relationship. Excellent, all right, we got to go. But so let's see, CrowdChat coming up, hashtag nextgenHCI, crowdchat.net slash nextgenHCI on December 1st. Where can I get more information about these products? If you go to dellemc.com slash HCI. Simple. All right, John, thanks very much for coming to theCube. Appreciate it. All right, thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time.