 Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2023. Live from the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante. Day three of our wall-to-wall coverage of all the stuff going on at this event. There's about 8,000-plus people here that have been here, so definitely even bigger than last year. We're going to have some great conversations coming out the rest of our day. Please welcome one of our alumnus back with us, Ash McCarty, the director of multi-cloud product management at Dell Technologies. Ash, thank you so much for being back on theCUBE. Of course, great to be here. Thanks for your invite. Yeah, so you and your team are responsible for Dell's multi-cloud portfolio, including the X-Rail, Apex Cloud Platforms. Talk a little bit about your team, your roles and responsibilities, and then we'll dig into the technology. Yeah, absolutely. So our team is responsible for, we run the entire VxRail business. We also, a lot of the Apex announcements you heard this week, our team is delivering on the Apex Cloud Platforms, and we partner with the rest of the team who's delivering kind of the Apex Cloud announcements we make across the portfolio. So kind of the nine announcements that we made is, well, our team's all engaged in and working diligently to make that a reality for customers. I was going to say, you've been busy. Yeah, very, very busy. Congratulations, Ray. Congratulations, Ray. Yeah, thank you. Between VxRail and the Apex portfolio announcements, tremendous amount of work the team's done. How's that feel? What's that feel like giving birth to nine? Yeah, it's actually, it's both, a realization of all the feedback we've gotten from customers. They've been asking us saying, hey, how can you simplify our journey to Multicloud? So that's great to be able to talk to them about that and now explore all the benefits we can provide. But also just to announce and get off our chest, say, hey, here's what we're going to go deliver. Now we have to go actually go, make sure it happens to the way our customers expect. Cool. I know that's not the topic of conversation today. We're talking about sustainability at the edge. Which, you know, we're talking about, we just met with the cooling guys, the liquid cooling folks. We're talking about data center and heat and supercomputers. I imagine, yeah, at the edge, it's just as important because collectively, probably consuming more power. But what's the key issue? Help us frame it, Ash. Yeah, so I think there's a couple of issues. One is if you look at the distributed nature of the edge versus when you're managing in your core data center, it's centralized. So all your infrastructure's centralized. When you move out to the edge, that just amplifies the problem because you're talking about potentially dozens, hundreds of sites, so you're talking about a lot of power. But also typically at some of these edge environments, customers don't have the same level of infrastructure for their power that they would have in the core data center. So you can't effectively manage it the same way. So some of those problems they have and they need to solve with sustainability are just even more of a concern. So what's the sort of standard? Where are you seeing VxRail be deployed? I mean, I think edge, I think this, you know? But this can't do what VxRail can do. So what are the types of use cases that you're seeing? Yeah, so I think the value prop that we've been working together with our customers to address is really around the edge can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different folks. I'm sure you hear that all the time. We have customers in the retail vertical who are deploying it in automotive locations and they're loading in stores across the nation. So we have a big concern around scalability. We have customers in the defense vertical that are now wanting to load on naval ships or in submarines, on aircraft, in theater. We have customers in manufacturing who are doing it on, you know, getting data from analytics on their robotics or on their manufacturer equipments and need to ship that somewhere. So a variety of different environments, but the key thing that comes together on all of it is customers are looking to simplify the problems they're seeing at the edge, which are problems with managing at scale, problems with updating at scale, security concerns, how can they get the most effective efficiencies out of their resources so they don't have to assign resources to do hundreds of different sites. They want to be able to scale effectively. And how is VxRail enabling you guys to solve those challenges that so many customers in different industries, as you talked about, are facing? Yeah, so I think we're kind of approaching a multifaceted approach. It's not one answer that fits every problem. But the key unifier that's helping customers solve this is the VxRail HCI system software. So that's our value-add software that's integrated into the appliance. And if you look at the value of that, it doesn't matter if a customer's running it, VxRail on the cloud with VCF on VxRail, they're running it on-prem or out to the edge, that software enables them automated operations, automated management, and we have the capability to scale with integrations into our cloud IQ platform so they can perform not only health, inventory operations at scale, but also lifecycle, update, and patch at massive scale as well, thousands of sites. So that's being a great enabler for our customers. So I would imagine at scale, the business case just keeps getting better and better and better. You get that operating leverage curve. Can you talk about the business case in general? Specifically, how are customers thinking about the business case? What are the elements that they're looking at? I know you guys have done some studies with, with how you see, how, what are the dimensions of cost and value that they're looking at? Yeah, great question. So I think when I step back and look at the evolution of VxRail, the journey we've had over the last seven years, it, you know, when customers start their data center modernization journey, the work that they were utilizing VxRail for were primarily general virtualization use cases, you know, VDI, and over time we've expanded into the cloud with VCF on VxRail, enabling Kubernetes workloads to be deployed on VxRail at the edge. But kind of what's essentially been common and consistent across the entire deployment types with VxRail has been that VxRail HCI system software and that's provided a tremendous amount of business value. We've been telling customers about this and we've been saying, hey, you know, look at all the things you can automate and all the things how you can manage our infrastructure. But the key takeaway is don't just trust us. We wanted to go characterize that for customers. So we worked with IDC to put together a study and a research study interviewing our customers to kind of put a dollar amount and say, hey, what is the business value you can achieve with VxRail? And so some of the numbers have been pretty awesome and so we're excited to share in kind of a report we just published in April. And looking at the value of the VxRail software and the platform as a general, you save about $54,000 annually per node. So kind of what that allows you to achieve is kind of a payback period is you pay for VxRail itself in 11 months, but most of our customers are using VxRail around five years as their tech refresh cycle. So you're looking at an ROI of around 460% ROI over that five years. And really that's based on the fact that the maturity of the platform eliminates downtime. They can automate operations like deployment. They can automate updates. The servicing experience and the performance of the platform, that's where all that savings is coming from. They kind of off the ball question here, but as interest rates rise, are customers kind of rethinking their business case? Because when they do their free cash flow or their net cash flows and the present value, the DCF discounted cash flows, are they rethinking it? Is it harder today to get IT projects approved? We hear that quite frequently from customers and the way we've been approaching that is two ways. One is to talk about if they're looking to purchase as like a capex purchase up front, which to your point is coming increasingly more difficult. We try to talk about not only the initial implementation costs, but also the OPEC savings that you can improve on over the course of the platform. It's kind of the things we've just characterized with the IDC study, but also we give customers the flexibility to buy VxRail through different ways. So we have flex on demand so customers can consumption base so they can defer that up front cost and instead purchase it as an OPEC's expenditure. So a lot of customers have pursued that path to enable them to get the infrastructure in place and then at a smaller increment for their overhead on their budget and then pay for it over time. As today's point as the economy is changing and we're all living with that, I'm just curious how customer conversations are changing, elevating up the stack as customers have to do so much more with less in every industry. And is your value prop adjusting as a result of some of these new business initiatives that customers have, hey I got to be more with less. How is Dell kind of fine tuning that value prop to meet current market landscape? Yeah, so much of the innovation that we drive into VxRail and I think you heard Jeff talk about this yesterday in his keynote is really, we have big ears. I heard Michael Dell talk about that and that's key to what we drive into the portfolio is hearing the challenges customers have and responding to them. And so some of the value we've driven into VxRail is, and I have a couple of good examples really with some recent customers, some of the APIs that we, the restful APIs we have on VxRail that allow you to automate the operations. We've seen one customer who's a logistics company who started with 12 engineers that were managing their entire state and they had a state of over 3,000 VxRail nodes. They implemented infrastructure as code on our VxRails to allow them to scale effectively to those 3,000 sites and what they were able to do is take those 12 engineers and we're just a four, move those eight engineers off to other more business critical operations and then so they were able to streamline all that and that simplifies how they can scale their business. And that's not trivial that resource reallocation and utilization that you talk about. That's very impactful to businesses. Yeah, I hear it from every customer is there's not a single customer I've talked to that they say, hey, I have just free resources available for me at all times. They're all being asked to do more and they're wanting to focus less on managing the infrastructure, which is what we provide being able to automate, but they also want to focus more on their strategic business outcomes and that's what we're trying to empower them to be able to do. I see some bragging points here that I want to dig into if we can. It says the first and only embedded hardware witness node, I don't know what that is so I would like you to explain it. It's built specifically for vSAN 2 node deployments. Can you explain that? Yeah, so we introduced our VxRail VD-4000 which was our next gen edge optimized platform. We launched that in March and it's resonating with customers for a variety of reasons. It's ruggedized so it can run in different environments, hotter, cooler environments. It's shock resistant so that's why I talked about the defense industry's really excited about that because they can put it in the back of a Humvee and it gets shaked around. But one of the most innovative capabilities we launched was the embedded vSAN witness. So think of the challenges customers have today with the 2 node deployment. They need a witness for quorum. And today it was very challenging for them to have dedicated infrastructure that they have to install somewhere, they have to have a physical space that to manage the power and cooling, the cost with it, what we've done has solved that for the customers. So with the VD-4000 you have a dedicated purpose built witness. It's a hardware witness sled that slides into the chassis so it's self contained in the chassis with the actual compute sleds. And then what it also provides is the VxRail software that we talked about, the same automation, the same management that we provide for the actual compute. You now can manage the witness the same way. So that's the first and only capability we have in the industry today that can do that. And I also see, you can also add a GPU assuming you can get one or multiples for AI and other edge processor inferencing at the edge. You could do that inside of the VxRail configuration now. Oh yeah, and I think you probably saw a lot of the announcements yesterday and the fact that they had chat DTW, they were talking about that and all the generative AI announcements. That's the shipping product that Jeff talked about. Oh yeah, yeah, we're fine tuning that you saw, but generative AI is a huge growth area for our customers, and particularly a lot of this generation of this data that they need to basically inference on once they've done their training in their core data center will be done at the edge. So the VD-4000 actually has two PCI slots that you can use and you can put up to two NVIDIA GPUs in or one larger GPU depending on your use case and that allows you to perform inferencing at the edge, which is pretty powerful for a lot of customers. Share how we talked with Chuck Whitten yesterday. We were in the keynote on Monday as well, multi-cloud by default to multi-cloud by design. How is VxRail, I presume it's an enabler of customers going from that default which might be chaotic to the design. How is it fueling that transformation? Yeah, so VxRail has always had a significant partnership and we jointly engineer it with VMware, so it's always better together with VMware. And so as part of our multi-cloud by design, VMware ties in, excuse me, VxRail ties in very closely to VMware's multi-cloud software portfolio. So whether that's VMC or enabling private cloud with VCF on VxRail, it's kind of been our go-to portfolio with tightly integrated environments with VMware. So it just really extends the portfolio with all the announcements you saw. Today really extends some of the value we've already started to build on VxRail into these new Apex announcements as well. So you guys achieved your leadership in HCI, that category over a couple, I don't know what the period was, but the ascendancy was pretty fast. How did you do that, what were the key ingredients to getting that leadership position in the marketplace? Yeah, I mean, I will say that, honestly we'll go back to the Big Ears statement. That really was a big part of it. So early on as we built the product, we listened to customers, but we also saw a need in the industry, especially early on in HCI, customers were having to do it on their own. There was a lot of competing products out there, but they really didn't fully automate all of the capabilities that the mundane task that most system administrators will tell you is challenging for them. They'd rather focus on the business critical areas and business critical outcomes. And so by driving the automation into all layers of the VxRail HCI system software, so everything from deployment, to managing your day-to-day operations, to automating the lifecycle updates, to the serviceability and the single point of contact support, those are all things that customers said, you know, we don't like doing that, or we wish it would be better this way, or we wish it could be faster, so we don't have to spend the weekend patching. So we don't have to, when we call someone up, we get the right person to solve our problem right away. And I think that I could characterize that as a key reason why you saw such a ramp, because customers really, it resonated the value with customers on the differentiation between our competitors. We've been talking a lot about Dell's Big Ears the last couple of days. Last question for you is, as you've been walking around the show floor, we mentioned, you know, 8,500 North or so people here at this event, what are some of the things that your Big Ears have heard that are going to inspire you when you get back to Round Rock and continue moving forward with your role? Yeah, I think it's, if you look at the breadth of the announcements that we had this week, I mean, tremendous amount of announcements. I think the general consensus from customers is they cannot believe what we've achieved since last year, and I think Jeff characterized it very well. On stage, he said we made it real. And across multi-cloud, across security, I'm seeing a ton of excitement. Customers are really excited about generative AI. The work we're doing at Project Helix. So all of that tying together, and much of that value we're bringing to the portfolio, especially around security, multi-cloud, will extend to VxRail and some of our existing portfolio as well. So it's not all just new stuff. A lot of the capabilities we're developing are going to be broadly used across the portfolio. So customers are going to be able to realize that value. Yeah, we had the chance to talk with Jeff first thing this morning, and he did a great job kind of just double click on the keynote that he gave yesterday and talking about all the innovations and really going from projects to products within that time period. And it's no wonder that there's so much trust that your customers have with Dell. Ash, thank you so much for coming on the program today. Give us the rundown of what's new with the X-Rail at the edge and the performance and sustainability benefits you guys are helping customers deliver. Thank you very much. We appreciate it. All right, for our guest and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. Another segment coming up, we're going to dig into Dell's XR class of servers and how and why their purpose built for the edge. We'll see you in a minute.