 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital experience. I'm Lisa Martin and I've got a couple of guests joining me. Please welcome Kunit Dewan, the Director of Product Management, Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Dell Technologies. Kunit, great to see you today. Thank you for having me over. And we've got a customer that's going to be articulating all the value that Kunit's going to talk about. Please welcome Greg Altman, the IT Infrastructure Manager from Swiftrain. Hey, Greg, how are you today? Doing well, thank you. Excellent. All right guys, so Kunit, let's start with you. Give us a little bit of an overview of your role. You lead product management for Dell Technologies Partner-Lined HDI Systems. Talk to us about that. Sure, absolutely. So it's largely about providing customers the choice. My team specifically focuses on developing hyperconverged infrastructure products for our customers that are aligned to key technologies from our partners, such as Microsoft, Nutanix, et cetera. And that falls very nicely with meeting our customers on what technology they wanna pick on, what technology they wanna go with, whether it's VMware, Microsoft, Nutanix, we have the choice for the customers. Let's dig into Microsoft. Talk to us about Azure Stack HCI. How is Dell Tech working with them to position this in the market? Sure, Lisa is largely about following the customer's journey towards digital transformation. So both in terms of where they are in digital transformation and how they wanna approach it. So for example, we have a large customer base who's looking to modernize their legacy Hyper-V architectures. And that's where Azure Stack HCI fits in very nicely. And not only are customers are able to modernize the legacy architectures using architectural benefits of simplicity, high performance, simple management, scalability for HCI for Hyper-V. At the same time, they can connect to Azure to get the benefits of the both worlds. Now on the other end, we have a large customer base who started off in Azure. They have cloud native applications, they're kind of born in the cloud, but they're also looking to bring some of the applications down to on-prem or things like disconnected scenarios, regulatory concerns, data locality reasons. And for those customers, Microsoft and Dell have partnered around, they let them see the good solutions for Azure Stack Hub. And that's what essentially brings Azure ecosystem on-prem, such like running cloud in your own premises. So you mentioned a second ago, giving customers choice. And we always talk about that at pretty much every event that we do. So tell me a little bit about how the longstanding partnership that Dell Technologies has with Microsoft decades, how is that helping you to really differentiate the technology and show the customers the different options to gather these two companies can deliver? Sure, so we've had a very long-standing partnership it's actually over three decades now, across the spectrum, whether you talk about our partnership on the Windows 10 side and the modernization of the workforce to the level of hybrid cloud and cloud solutions and helping even customers, run their applications on Azure through our large services offerings. Over the past several years, we have realized how important it's hybrid cloud and multi-cloud for customers. And that's where we have taken our partnership to the next level, to co-develop, co-engineer and bring to the market together our full portfolio of Azure Stack hybrid solutions. And that's where I've said, meeting customers on where they are, either bringing Azure on-prem or helping customers modernize on-prem architectures using Azure Stack at CI. So there's a whole lot of co-development we have done together to simplify how customers manage on-prem infrastructures on a day-to-day basis, how do they install it, even how they support it. We have joint support agreements with Microsoft that encompass the entirety of the portfolio so that customers have one place to go which is Dell Technologies to get not only the product either in the U.S. or worldwide to a very secure supply chain through Dell EMC. At the same time for all their support and consulting services, whether they're on-prem or in the cloud, we offer all those services in very close partnership with Microsoft. Terrific, great. Let's switch over to you now before we talk about what Swiftrain is doing with its Azure Stack HCI. Tell our audience a little bit about Swiftrain, what you guys are, what you do. Well, Swiftrain is a full-covering flooring wholesaler. We sell flooring across Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, even into Florida and we're an 80-year-old company, 80-plus and we've been moving forward with kind of hybridizing our infrastructure, making use of cloud where it makes sense and when it came to our on-prem infrastructure, it was old, five, six years old, running Windows 2012, 2016. It was time to upgrade and when we look at doing a large-scale upgrade like that, we call Dell and say, this is what we're trying to do and what's the new technologies that we can do that makes the migration work easier and that's where we wound up with Azure Stack. So from a modernization perspective, you mentioned 80-plus-year-old company I was looking on the website, 1937. I always like to talk to companies like that because modernizing when you've been around for that long is challenging, it's challenging culturally, it's challenging historically, but talk to us a little bit about some of the specifics that you guys were looking to Dell and Microsoft to help modernize and was this really to drive things like operational simplicity, allow the business to have more agility so that it can expand into some of those other cities like we talked about? Absolutely, we were dealing with a long maintenance window, five or six hours every week, patching, updating. Since we moved to Azure Stack HCI, we have virtually zero downtime. That allows our night shifts, our weekend cruise to be able to keep working and the system's just bulletproof. It just does not go down and with the lifecycle management tools that we get with Windows Admin Center and Dell's OpenManage plugin, I log into one pane of glass in the morning and I look and I say, hey, all my servers are going great, everything's in the green. I know that that day, I'm not gonna have any infrastructure issues, I can deal with other issues that make the business money. And I'm sure they appreciate that. Tell us a little bit about the actual implementation and the support as Puneet talked about all of the co-development, the joint support that these two powerhouses deliver. Tell us about that implementation and then for your day-to-day, what's your interaction with Dell and or Microsoft-like? Well, for the implementation, we worked with our Dell representative and we came up with a sizing plan. This is what we needed to do. We had eight or nine physical servers that we wanted to get rid of and we wanted to compress down. Now we're dead, we went from eight or nine to use servers down to three rack units of space with an extra, including the extra switches and stuff that we had to do. So I mean, we were able to get rid of a lot of storage space or rack space. And as far as the implementation was really easy, Dell literally has a book. You follow the book and it's that simple. I like that. More of us these days can use someone, write a book that we can just follow. That would be fantastic. One more question, Greg, for you before we go back to Puneet. As Puneet talked about in the beginning from describing his role, Dell Technologies works with a lot of other vendors. Why Azure Stack HCI for Swiftrain? Well, it made sense for us. We were already moving, several of our websites were already moved to Azure. We've been a Hyper-V user for many years. So it was just kind of a natural evolution to migrate in that direction because it kind of pulls all of our management tools into one pain of glass type of scenario. Excellent. All right, Puneet, back to you. Some of the things that you talked about before and that Greg sort of articulated about simplifying day to day, Greg, I saw in my notes that you had this old aging infrastructure. You were spending five hours a week patching, maintaining that you say is now virtually eliminated. Puneet, Dell Technologies and Microsoft had done quite a bit of work to simplify the operational experience. Talk to us about that and what are some of the measurable improvements that you guys have made? Sure, it all starts with neither on how we approach the problem. And we have always taken a very product-centric approach at Azure Stack HCI. Unlike some of our competition, which had followed, here's a reference architecture you can put Windows over 20.19 on it and go run your own servers and the hyper-converge stack on it. But we have followed a very different approach where we have run quite a lot. We are the number one vendor in HCI space and we know a thing or two about HCI and what customers really need there. So that's why from the very beginning we've taken a product-centric approach. And doing that allows us to have productized offers in terms of our AX nodes that are specifically designed and built for Azure Stack HCI. And on top of that, we have done very specific integration to the management stack with Windows Admin Center. That is the new management tool for Microsoft to manage both on-prem hyper-converge infrastructure, your Windows servers, as well as any VMs that are running on Azure. To provide customers that have already seen less single pane of glass for both their on-prem as well as infrastructure on public cloud services. And in doing that, our customers are really appreciated how simple it is to keep their clusters running, to reduce the maintenance with those. Based on some of our internal testing that we have done, IT administrators can abuse the time they spent on maintaining the clusters by over 90%, over 40% reduction in the maintenance window itself. And all that leads to your clusters running in a healthy state. So you don't have to worry about pulling the right drivers, right firmware from then different places, making sure whether they're all qualified or not when running together. We provide one single pane of glass that customers can click on and see whether the clusters are compliant or not. And if yes, go update. And all this has been possible by our joint engineering with Microsoft. Can you just describe the difference between an all-in-one validated HCI solution, which is what you're delivering, versus competitors that are only delivering a reference architecture? Absolutely. So if you're running just a reference architecture, you are running an operating system stack on a server. We know that when it comes to running HCI, that means running also business critical applications on a clustered environment. You need to make sure that all the hardware, the drivers, the firmware, the hard drives, the memory configuration, the network configurations, all that could be very complex very easily. And if you have reference architecture, there is no way to know, but I'm running certified components in my node or not. How do you tell that? If a part fails, how do you know which part to send for our replacement? If you're just running a reference architecture, you have no way to say the part that hard drive that failed, the one that was sent to the customer to replace whether that is certified for Azure Stack at CI or not. How do you really make a determination what is the right firmware that needs to be applied to a cluster or what are the drivers that apply to the cluster that are compliant and tested for Azure Stack at CI? None of these things are possible if you just have a reference architecture approach. That's why we have been very clear that our approach is a product-based approach. And very frankly, this is how we have, that's the feedback we've provided to Microsoft too, and we've been working very closely together and you see that now in terms of the new Azure Stack at CI that Microsoft announced at Inspire earlier this year that brings Microsoft into the mainstream at CI space as a product offering and not just as a feature or a few features within the Windows Server program. Greg, I saw in the nodes with respect to both train that you guys have with Azure Stack at CI, you have reduced rack space by 50%. You talked about some of the rack space benefits, but you've also reduced energy by 70%. Those are big, impactful numbers impacting not just your day-to-day, but the overall business. Last question for you, Greg. If you think about how Pune just described the difference between an all-in-one validated HCI solution versus a reference architecture. For your peers watching in any industry, what are your top recommendations for going with a validated all-in-one solution? Well, we looked at doing the reference architecture path, if you will, because we're hands-on. We like to build things. And I looked at it and like Puneet said, drivers and memory and making sure that everything's going to work well together and not only that everything's gonna work well together, but when something fails, then you get into the finger pointing between vendors, your storage vendor, your process vendor. That's not something that we need to deal with. We need to keep a business running. So we went with Dell. It's one box, well, one box per unit. And then when you stack two of them together, you have a cluster. You make it sound so easy. Last question. I put together children's toys that were harder than building the stack. I promise you, I did it in an afternoon. It's music of my year, Greg. Thank you. It was that easy. Easier to put together Azure Stack, HCI than some probably even opening the box of some children's toys, I can imagine. We could use that as a tagline. Exactly, you should. I think you have a new tagline there. Great, thank you Puneet. Last question for you. Dell Technologies World sessions on hybrid cloud benefits with Dell and Microsoft. Give us a flavor of what some of the things are that the audience will have a chance to learn. Yeah, this is a great session with Microsoft that essentially provides our customers an overview of our joint hybrid cloud solutions, both for Microsoft Azure Stack Hub, Azure Stack at CI, as well as our joint solutions around VMware in Azure. But much more importantly, we also talk about what's coming next. Now, especially with Microsoft's Azure Stack at CIOS, a full-born product hybrid at CI offering that will be available as Azure service so customers could run on-prem infrastructure that is hyper-converged, but managed, paid, built for as an Azure service so that they have always the latest and greatest from Microsoft. And all the product differentiation we have created in terms of a product-centric approach, simpler lifecycle management will all be applicable in this new hybrid cloud solution. And that lays essentially a great foundation for our customers who have standardized on Hyper-V who are much more aligned to Azure to not worry about the infrastructure on-prem but to start taking advantages of both the modernization benefits of at CI. But much more importantly, start coupling that with the hybrid ecosystem that we are building with Microsoft, whether it's running an Azure Kubernetes service on top to modernize new applications and bringing the Azure data services such as Azure SQL Server on top so that you have a consistent, vertically aligned hybrid cloud infrastructure stack that is not only easy to manage, but it is modern. It is available as a pay-as-you-grow option. And it's tightly integrated into Azure so that you can manage all your on-prem as well as public cloud resources from one single pane of glass, thereby providing customers a whole lot more simplicity and operational efficiency. And as you said, the new tagline said beautifully from Greg's note, the customer easier to put together than many children's toys. Puneet, thank you so much for sharing with us what's going on with Azure Stack, HCI, what folks can expect to learn and see at Dell Tech World, the virtual experience. Thank you. And Greg, thank you for sharing the story, what you're doing, helping your peers learn from you. And I'm gonna say on behalf of Dell Technologies, that awesome new tagline, that was cool. Appreciate your time. We're gonna use it for sure. All right. For Puneet DeWon and Greg Altman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, The Digital Experience.