 From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Hi, everybody, I'm Dave Vellante. Welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. We're going to be talking today about hyper-converged infrastructure. HCI really brought together compute, storage, and networking to simplify management and operations. But the networking piece has always been, you know, a little bit to the side, right? Because you bring your own network to HCI, and the integration has not always been there. So we're going to talk today about simplifying cloud on VMware and transforming the network. This week is VMworld Europe. Chad Dunn is here. He's the vice president of product management for HCI at Dell EMC. Chad, thanks for coming on to talk about this. Hey, Dave, always glad to be with you. So HCI is hot, it's smoking. VxRail is a leader there. We're going to talk about that based on some of the market numbers from IDC and others. But so give us the update. What's new with VxRail? Well, obviously for VxRail, the big news is the, unless you've been under a rock, you know the market is growing like crazy. You know, VxRail is now achieving a growth rate that's roughly twice the overall market. And so we've moved into this market leadership position. And now it's about how we start to differentiate the product even further and pull further away from the pack and that deeper integration with networking and some of the other VMware components are keys for us to be able to achieve that. And that growth, those are IDC numbers, Gartner numbers. Those are IDC numbers, if you look at the overall market growth rate. What do you attribute that growth from? You guys came out of nowhere to take the market leadership. Why, where does that come from? You know, it's a pretty easy question. When we look at who the market leader is in terms of the hypervisor, in terms of virtualization, it's clearly VMware. And the value proposition to a customer is a very simple question. Are you a VMware customer? Do you intend to continue to be a VMware customer? Do you like the tools? Do you like the hypervisor? Do you like all the ecosystem around it? And nine and a half times out of 10, the answer is yes. And if it's time to go hyper-converged, we believe, and I think most customers believe, we have the best hyper-converged solution to be able to do that within the VMware experience. So Dell, obviously a huge portfolio. Since the merger, you guys have done a lot of work together. And now you're really focusing on network automation. What are you guys doing specifically and why is it important? Yeah, well, the integration with Dell, I've become one of the biggest Dell fanboys there is at this point, because first of all, I started with a hyper-converged product that was not based on Dell. We became part of Dell. Now I have a world-class X86 portfolio to build on top of, but I also now have access to an amazing portfolio of open networking products. And so the next logical step after integrating with Dell computers integrate with Dell networking. And when we look at the challenges that people have in adopting and deploying hyper-converged infrastructure, a lot of times it has to do with the network. So we said, what can we do between these two organizations to make it a lot easier for our customers to adopt hyper-converged? And that really means network automation. So that means that in Dell OS 10 Enterprise-based switches, we've created an auto-detect and auto-configuration feature between VxRail and those switches. So let's break that down a little bit. So as I was saying at the top, hyper-converged really has been about bringing storage and, well actually in some cases, networking and compute together and then sort of storage bringing in, or storage and compute and then the networking is bring your own, right? Everything is bring your own network. And then what? You put a top of rack switch in. But so why is this simpler? What specifically are you guys automating? Well, there's two things. One is organizational. So very often in customers we encounter the virtualization team, the server team, storage team, networking team, different organizations. Now, largely hyper-converged and even before that, converge was sort of an excuse for many of those functions to come together. But networking is sort of the last one where those organizations are coming together with our customers and that's really prompted by hyper-converged. But then at the technical level, how do you make that real for a customer? So at the risk of getting into the weeds, the way this works is if you take a Dell OS X Enterprise based switch, you have a single command to put it in VX Rail mode. From then on, the switches and VX Rails will discover one another through an inline protocol. VX Rail manager will access the switch via APIs, will configure all the ports, will configure all the VLANs, will configure the connection up to the customer's network. And then from there on out, we're able to detect new VX Rails as they enter the network, automatically plumb those together with the existing cluster. So when we look at the steps that you would normally take to deploy hyper-converged just on the network side, it's about a 98% savings in terms of the number of steps that you have to go through to be able to stand that environment up. And then from there on out, we also want to look at operational savings. So you will now be able to manage that switch also within V Center. So we have a philosophy in VX Rail that says every time a user has to leave the VMware user experience, that's a bad thing. And we want to minimize that. So as we implement the Dell networking portion of the solution, you'll be able to now manage that from V Center just as you'll be able to manage VX Rail from V Center. Is this degree of networking automation unique in the marketplace? Are you guys ahead of the pack? Are you playing catch up? We feel like we're ahead of the pack in this. I think that a lot of folks are certainly focusing on integration with software defined networking. And in fact, we did that first, our integration with NSX, both V, NSX V for infrastructure as a service. And now increasingly NSXT, especially when we're in a container or cloud native environment. So there's been a lot of focus there. But I think our focus on the configuration and management of the physical network, I think is unique. Talk more about the Dell EMC and VMware relationship. Obviously you guys are part of the same sort of company. Yeah, yeah. Even though VMware of course is a separate public company, but you guys work closely together, VMware works with everybody. What's unique about what you guys are doing? Give us some double click on that. Sure. If I think back previous to Dell, we had our cousins at VMware that we were pretty closely with. And I think that our success has sort of borne out the concept that we were able to collaborate more effectively than most other EMC and VMware projects that we've done in the past. So been very successful for both companies. Then along comes Dell and Michael has a saying that says, I'm happy, but I'm not satisfied. So he looked at this, Jeff Clark looked at this, Pat Gelsinger looked at the collaboration that we have and said, we're happy, we're not satisfied, do more of it, do it harder, do it faster. And that's what we've done. And that top down directive has really driven us to collaborate much more broadly and deeply with VMware and in fact Pivotal than we have in the past. And I think that's shown a lot of benefits, not just in the networking integration, but we're moving all of the graphical user interface out of VxRail manager into vCenter plugins. So our focus is really around robust APIs that can be leveraged across different VMware management properties as well as third party properties to give you the best possible VMware user experience when you use VxRail. What does that mean for customers? Let's talk about the business impact. You mentioned 98% time savings before, that's enormous. But let's talk a little bit about the customer impact. I think if you look at the customer impact that we're observing, the five year TCO empirically is running about 600% in terms of ROI. So I think we're very successful in that and the key to that success is not creating new panes of glass or new management paradigms for a customer who is a VMware customer. We want to be in lockstep with the way that VMware develops, not only the hypervisor, but certainly vSAN and certainly the rest of the vRealize assets as well as software to find networking. Now to that end, one of the biggest changes that we made was something internally we call simship with VMware. Now if you think about where we've come from, the lag time between when we would ship a new version of VMware on VxRail versus when VMware releases it was pretty variable. Could be three months, six months, nine months. It really depends on how the development schedules would align and that was something that quite frankly to Michael and Pat and Jeff was not acceptable. If we want this to be the premier hyperconverged experience for a VMware user we need to be simultaneous with VMware. And so now you're going to see very regular tight integration between the release schedules of software on VxRail and the release of the underlying software from VMware. So that's enabled us to shift a lot of that upfront development and engineering work left into VMware so we can be much more quick to adopt new VMware technology. So if I could, I'd like to stay in this business impact for a moment. You're talking about 600% ROI over a five year period. I'm presuming that ROI comes predominantly from the simplified infrastructure management and simplified labor costs. I'm not focused on heavy lifting. I'm shifting to more strategic things, presumably. And there may also be some CapEx savings as well but where's it coming from? I think it's primarily operational. I think depending on what the competing solution might be or the legacy solution might be there may be some CapEx savings there but it's really around operations. Now we've seen customers fundamentally shift from simple virtualization and consolidation of virtual machines onto hyperconverge like VxRail to implementing full infrastructure as a service stacks right up through the V realized suite but also platform and container as a service as well as we collaborate with Pivotal and VMware. So it's that infrastructure as a service deployment methodology that I think leads to most of that CapEx savings. Three years ago, hyperconverge was all about VDI and sort of point applications and islands of applications. Now it's predominantly about infrastructures as a service, container as a service, platform as a service and that's where you really start to see those operational efficiencies shine through. Well, and in our experience that the VDI, well nice was a largely benefit for IT. Didn't really have a huge impact on the business but when you start to talk about things like Pivotal and the impact of moving from say waterfall to an agile environment. Now you're talking about business impact in terms of time to deployment and accelerating the time to value which may or may not be in that 600%, I'm not sure but those are oftentimes considered soft dollars but to the business it's not, it's competitive. Those are real dollars, those are real resources working on those things and just as we saw a shift in terms of constructing versus consuming IT resources, we see that up the stack. I mean, as VxRail automates things like software and firmware updates, our customers don't have to do that anymore and well now we look to see how can we drive those same kinds of benefits further up into the stack in terms of deployment, management of virtual machines, management of cloud native workloads. So coming off of VMworld US a couple months ago, a lot of talk about VMware cloud foundation, a lot of buzz about multicloud that's kind of a hot topic right now. What's going on with VCF? We're hearing a lot of buzz leading up to VMworld Europe. What's going on in that space? There's a lot going on between us and VMware on the multicloud strategy. One thing that we heard in the last VMworld was the integration between us and cloud assembly. This is a really important and strategic solution for us because what we found, especially with smaller customers who wanted to get those efficiencies of infrastructure as a service, there was a fairly high upfront capital cost because you simply needed all the hardware to run the cloud management platform and then you needed the tenant nodes to actually run the virtual machines and very often that was a high entry point or high entry cost for those customers. What VMware has done with cloud assembly is basically turn that cloud management platform into software as a service so it lives in the cloud and now with an agent that VxRail automatically installs you can now point that CMP at your tenant nodes and start getting that infrastructure as a service benefit. So that was one that we talked about at the last VMworld. We also talked about our partnership with VMware around project dimension which basically takes the VMware managed cloud providers, the VMC providers and extends that management paradigm and that update paradigm to on premises. So you've effectively got a cloud service that could run at a cloud provider but could simultaneously run on your premises. So those are two really good examples of how we're collaborating more broadly and deeply with VMware to lower the overall operational cost and in some cases even the capital cost of implementing infrastructure as a service. With respect to cloud foundation in VxRack SDDC which is the other product that I look after, we've had that partnership underway for over two years now and that's been very successful for us and it tends to be the larger customers who want to buy everything as a fully integrated system, fully turnkey, rack stacked, cabled and ready to deploy. But with regard to what you're teasing, I think where you're going is well what's going to be next and what's unique about what we're doing with cloud foundation and there are a lot of dimensions to that and I think the first one is what we've done around the VMware validated design and the certified partner architecture. So if a customer wants to achieve a VMware software defined data center, the VMware validated design for VxRail gives them the exact prescription of how to get there. It can be delivered by us, can be delivered by VMware, could be delivered by our channel partners who are certified to do so. And that gives you this nice consistent deployment architecture that we can continue to lifecycle manage as a customer moves forward but it preserves all the VxRail value add in terms of our cluster management or lifecycle management capability, all of that automation. Now as we move forward, we'll add more and more automation into the VVD deployment toolkit to make that even easier for customers. And so then the next logical question is, VxRack and cloud foundation versus VxRail. We effectively have two hyperconverged solutions. That doesn't make a lot of sense. So what you'll start to see us do and I think what some people have already started to see us do is to start to bring those solutions together, bring those products together. So in fact, even now, if you have a VxRack SDDC, if you open up that cabinet, well guess what? Those are VxRails inside there. And those software stacks will ultimately converge as well. So you can go from a build to consume continuum even within hyperconverged where you've got VxRails with VVDs. But the VVD basically defines the deployment architecture that is compatible with cloud foundation. And just as we've preserved a lot of those value add features for VxRail in the VVD, we'll be doing the same thing with cloud foundation. So stay tuned for that. But as I mentioned a little bit earlier on when we look at the management paradigm for VxRail, my directive to the product management team and the engineering team is your first three priorities are API, API, and then user interface. So that's where we're placing a lot of that effort. And because in many cases when we approach our collaboration with VMware, we want to look for opportunities to be first, best, and only. I think as you see us bring VxRail and VCF together, that's going to be one of those best and only sorts of solutions. But you have to stay tuned for further details on that. But that makes a lot of sense, simplifying that portfolio. But the big takeaway to me, Chad, is, and we've talked about this in the past, is what we call Wikibon, the true private cloud or even true hybrid cloud, is bringing the cloud experience to your data no matter where it lives, whether it's on-prem in your private cloud, whether it with the VMware, AWS, TL obviously, simplifies the sort of public cloud piece or you're in a service provider and you've now got a homogeneous experience that really is much more cloud-like than we've seen over the years. Yeah, well, look, I mean, you look at the old saying about cloud-native applications right at once and I don't care where it runs. Well, as the multi-cloud strategy evolves, whether that's running in a VMC cloud provider or whether that's running on-premise, our users shouldn't have to care. There may be things that they want to keep on-premise for perfectly good reasons and there may be things that they want to have in the cloud. Great example, we just got our certification for SAP HANA on VxRail. Now that's a workload that just because of the latency requirements and the kind of data they're processing, very likely that's going to stay on-premise for quite a while. So there are good reasons to have that construct where we don't necessarily care where the workload is but we want to provide a consistent user experience that really lowers that OPEX for customers. Great. How do people learn more about this? Well, look, come see us at VMworld in Barcelona. We've got presence all over the show and then hit us up on the cloud marketplace on delemc.com. Find out more about VxRail and VxRack SDDC as our primary cloud platforms. All right Chad, you've been busy. Congratulations on the announcement and thanks for watching everybody. Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time.