 And I'm here at Dell's presence at MWC with Vice President of Marketing for Telecom and Edge Computing Aaron Chason. Aaron, how's it going? Doing great. How's it going today Dave? It's going pretty well. Pretty excited about what you've got going here and I'm looking forward to getting the tour. Are you ready to take a closer look? Ready to do it. Let's go take a look. For us in the Telecom ecosystem it's really all about how we bring together the different players that are innovating across the industry to drive value for our CSP customers. So it starts really for us at the ecosystem layer, bringing partners, bringing telecommunication providers, bringing a bunch of different technologies together to innovate together to drive new values. So Paul, take us a little bit through what we're doing to to develop and bring in these partnerships and develop our ecosystem. Sure, thank you Aaron. You know one of the things that we've been focusing on, you know Dell is really working with many players in the open telecom ecosystem. Network equipment providers, independent software vendors, and the communication service providers. And you know through our lines of business or open telecom ecosystem labs what we want to do is bring them together into a community with the goal of really being able to accelerate open innovation and open solutions into the market. And that's what this community is really about is being able to you know have those communications, develop those collaborations, whether it's through you know sharing information online, having webinars dedicated to sharing Dell information, whether it's our next generation hardware portfolio we announced here at the show, our use case directory, how we're dealing with new service opportunities, but as well as the community to share too which I think is an exciting way for us to be able to you know what is the knowledge thing as well as activities at other events that we have coming up. So really the key thing I think about the the open telecom ecosystem community it's collaboration and accelerating the open industry forward. So Aaron if I'm hearing this correctly you're saying that you can't just say hey we're open and throw a bunch of parts in a box and have it work. No we've got to work together to integrate these pieces to be able to deliver value and you know we opened up in in our open ecosystem labs we started a self certification process a couple of months back. We've already had 13 partners go through that we've got 16 more in the pipeline. Everything you see in this entire booth has been innovated and worked with partnerships from Intel to Microsoft to to Wind River and Red Hat and others. You go all the way around the booth everything here has partnerships at its core. And why don't we go to the next section here where we're going to be showing how we're pulling that all together in our open ecosystems labs to drive that So Aaron you talked about the kinds of validation and testing that goes on so that you can prove out an open stack to deliver the same kinds of reliability and performance and availability that we expect from a wireless network but in the open in the open world what are we looking at here? Yeah absolutely so one of the one of the challenges to a very big broad open ecosystem is the complexity of integrating deploying and managing these especially at telecom scale. You're not talking about thousands of servers in one site you're talking about one server and thousands of sites. So how do you deploy that predictable stack and then also manage that at scale I'm going to show you two places where we're talking about that. So this is actually representing an area that we've been innovating in recently around creating an integrated infrastructure and virtualization stack for the telecom industry. We've been doing this for years in IT with V blocks and VxRails and others. Here what you see is we've got Dell hardware infrastructure. We've got an open platform for virtualization providers. In this case we've created an infrastructure block for Red Hat to be able to supply an infrastructure for core operations and packet cores for telecoms. On the other side of this you can actually see what we're doing with WinRiver to drive innovation around RAN and being able to simplify V RAN and O RAN deployments. What does that virtualization look like? Are we talking about traditional virtual machines with OSs or is this containerized cloud native? What does it look like? It's actually both. So we can support virtual software as well as containerized software so we leverage the Kubernetes distributions for these communities and able to deploy cloud native applications and be able to modernize how they're deploying these applications across the telecom network. So in this case with Red Hat it's going to be leveraging OpenShift in order to support containerized apps and your packet core environments. So what are some of the kinds of things that you can do once you have infrastructure like this deployed? Yeah I mean by partnering broadly across the ecosystem with VMware, with Red Hat, with WinRiver and with others it gives them the ability to be able to deploy the right virtualization software in their network for the types of applications they're deploying. They might want to use Red Hat in their core, they may want to use WinRiver in their RAN, they may want to use a Microsoft or a VMware for their for their edge workloads and we allow them to be able to deploy all those but centrally manage those with a common user interface and a common set of APIs. Okay well I'm dying to understand the link between this and the Lego City that the viewers can't see yet but behind me let's take a look. So let's take a look at the Lego City that shows how we not deploy just one of these but dozens or hundreds of these at scale across the cityscape. So Aaron I know we're not in Copenhagen. What's all the Lego about? Yeah so the Lego City here is to show in a really there's multiple points of presence across an entire metro area that we want to be able to manage if we're a telecom provider. We just talked about one infrastructure block. What if I wanted to deploy dozens of these across the city to be able to manage my network to be able to manage to be able to deploy private mobility potentially out into a customer enterprise environment and be able to manage all of these very simply and easily from a common interface. So it's interesting now I think I understand why you are VP of marketing for both telecom and edge. Just heard just heard a lot about edge and I can imagine a lot of internet of things things hooked up at that edge. Yeah so why don't we actually go over to another area where actually to show you how one small micro brewery and in one of our cities nearby my hometown in Massachusetts is actually using this technology to go from more of an analog world to digitizing their business to be able to brew better beer. So Aaron you bring me to a brewery what do we have what do we have going on here? Yeah so actually about about a year ago or so I was able to get my team to come together finally after COVID to be able to meet each other and have a nice team event. One of those nights we went out to dinner at a brewery called exhibit A in Massachusetts and they actually gave us a tour of their facilities and showed us how they actually go through the process of brewing beer. What we saw as we were going through it interestingly was everything was analog. They literally had people with pen and paper walking around checking time and temperature and the process of brewing the beer and they weren't asking for help but we actually saw an opportunity where what we're doing to help businesses digitize what they're doing in their manufacturing floor can actually help them optimize how they build whatever product they're building. In this case it was beer. Hey Warren good to meet you. What do we have going on? That's alright so yeah basically what we did is we took some of their assets in the brewery that were completely manually monitored. People were literally walking around the floor with clipboards writing down values and we sensorized the asset in this case fermentation tanks and we measured the pressure and the temperature which in fermentation are very key to monitor those because if they get out of range the entire batch of beer can go bad or you don't get the consistency from batch to batch if you don't tightly monitor those. So we sensorized the fermentation tank brought that into an industrial IO network and then brought that into a Dell gateway which is connected 5G up to the cloud which then that data comes to a tablet or a phone which they rather than being out on the floor and monitoring can look at this data remotely at any time. So I'm not sure the exact date the first time we have evidence of beer being brewed by humanity but I know it's thousands of years ago so it's taken that long to get to the point where someone had to come along namely Dell to actually digitally transform the beer business. Is this sort of proof that if you could digitally transform this you can digitally transform anything? Absolutely. You name it anything that's being manufactured, sold, taken care of any business out there that's looking to be able to modernize and deliver better services to their customers can benefit from technologies like this. So we've taken a look at the ecosystem the way that you validate architectures. We've seen an example of that kind of open architecture. Now we've seen a real-world use case. Do you want to take a look a little deeper under the covers and see what's powering all of this? We just this week announced a new line of servers the PowerEdge and RAN use cases and I want to introduce Mike to kind of take us through what we've been working on and really what the power of what this is providing. Hey Mike welcome to the Cube. Glad to be here. So what I'd really like to talk about are the three new XR series servers that we just announced last week and we're showing here at Mobile World Congress. They are all short-depth, ruggedized, very environmentally tolerant and able to withstand high temperatures, high humidities, and really be deployed to places where traditional data center servers just can't handle. You know, due to one factor or another whether it's depth or the temperature. And so first one I'd like to show you is the XR7620. This is 450 millimeters deep. It's designed for high levels of acceleration so it can support up to two 300 watt GPUs. But what I really want to show you over here, especially from Mobile World Congress, is our new XR8000. The XR8000 is based on Intel's latest Sapphire Rapids technology and this is happens to be one of the first EE Boost processors that it's out. And basically what it is, it's an embedded accelerator that makes the processing of VRAN loads very efficient. And so they're actually projecting a 3x improvement of processing per watt over the previous generation of processors. This particular unit is also sletted. It's very much like today's traditional baseband unit. So it's something that is designed for low TCO and easy maintenance in the field. This is the fruit. When anything fails, you pull one out, you pop a new one in, it comes back into service, and your radio is minimally disrupted. Would you describe this as quantitative and qualitative in terms of the kinds of performance gains that these underlying units are delivering to us? I mean this really kind of changes the game, doesn't it? It's not just about more. Is it about different also in terms of what we can do? Well, to his point, we are able to bring in new accelerator technologies. Not only are we doing it with the Intel, the VRAN Boost technologies, but also, we didn't bring it to you, but there's another booth here where we're actually working with our own accelerator cards and other accelerator cards from our partners across the industry to be able to deliver the price and performance capabilities required by a VRAN or an ORAN deployment in the network. So it's not just the chip technology, it's the integration and innovation we're doing with others, as well as, of course, the unique power cooling capabilities that Dell provides in our servers that really makes these the most efficient way of being able to power a network. Any final thoughts recapping the whole picture here? Yeah, I mean, I would just say if anybody is still here at Mobile World Congress, wants to come and learn what we're doing, I only showed you a small section of the demos we've got here. We've got 13 demos across on the floor here. For those of you who want to talk to us and have meetings with us, we've got 13 meeting rooms back there, over 500 customer and partner meetings this week. We've got some whisper suites for those of you who want to come and talk to us about what we're innovating on going forward. So, you know, there's a lot that we're doing. We're really excited. There's a ton of passion at this event, and we're really excited about where the industry is going in our role in it. Appreciate the tour, Aaron. Thanks, Mike. Well, for the cube, again, Dave Nicholson here. Thanks for joining us on this tour of Dell's presence here at MWC 2023.