 Hi, I'm Lisa Martin here with theCUBE. You're watching our coverage of Dell Technologies World, the digital virtual experience. I've got two guests with me here today. We're going to be talking about the University of Pisa and how it is leaning into all flash to the links powered by Dell Technologies. One of our alumni is back, Maurizio Davinia, the CTO of the University of Pisa. Maurizio, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you, you're always welcome. Very excited to talk to you today. Kaushik Ghosh is here as well, the Director of Product Management at Dell Technologies. Kaushik, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. So here we are at this virtual event again. Maurizio, you were last on theCUBE at VMworld a few months ago, the virtual experience as well. But talk to our audience a little bit before we dig into the technology and some of these demanding workloads that the university is utilizing. Talk to me a little bit about your role as CTO and about the university. So my role as CTO at the University of Pisa is regarding data-server operations and scientific computing support. That is the main occupation that they have. Then they support also the technological choices that University of Pisa is doing during the latest two or three years. Talk to me about some, so this is in terms of students, we're talking about 50,000 or so students, 3,000 faculty. And the campus is distributed around the town of Pisa. Is that correct Maurizio? The University of Pisa is sort of a town campus in the sense that we have 20 departments that are located inside a medieval town. But due to the choices that University of Pisa has done in the last nineties, we are owner of a private fiber network connecting all our departments and all our centers. And so we can use the town as a sort of whiteboard to design new services, new kind of support for teaching and so on. So you've really modernized the data infrastructure for the university that was founded in the Middle Ages. Talk to me now about some of the workloads, Maurizio, that are generating massive amounts of data and then we'll get into what you're doing with Dell Technologies. Oh, so the University of Pisa has a quite old history on HPC, my traditional HPC. So we are supporting the traditional workloads from CAE or engineering or chemistry or oil and gas simulations. Of course, during the pandemic years, last year, especially, we have new kind of workloads coming. Some related to the fast movement of the HPC workload from let's say traditional HPC to AI and machine learning. And also the request to support a lot of remote activities coming from distance learning to remote eyes, remote eyes laboratories or stations or whatever was held in presence in the past. And so the impact either on the infrastructure or and especially on the storage part was significant. So you talked about utilizing the high performance computing environments for a while and for scientific computing and things. I saw a case study that you guys have done with Dell. But then during the pandemic, the challenge and the use case of remote learning brought additional challenges to your environment. From that perspective, how were you able to transfer your curriculum to online and enable the scientists, the physicists, the oil and gas folks doing research to still access that data at the speed that they needed to? You know, for what regard distance learning, of course, we were based on cloud services that were not provided internally by us. So we were based on Microsoft services on Google services and so on. For what regards internal support, scientific computing was completely remote eyes either on support or experience because how can I bring some examples? For example, laboratory activities were remote eyes. The access to the laboratories was held from remote as much as possible. We designed a special network to connect to all the laboratories and to give the researcher the possibility of accessing the data on this special network. So a sort of collector of data inside our university network. You can imagine that virtualization, for example, was a key factor for us because virtualization was for us a flexible way to deliver new services in an easy way, especially if you have to administer systems for remote. So as I told you before about the network as a whiteboard, also the computing infrastructure was VMware virtualization treated as a sort of right. We were designing new services either for interactive services or especially for scientific computing. For example, we have an experience with virtualization of HPC workloads, storage and so on. Talk to me about the storage impact because as we know, we talk about these very demanding unstructured workloads, AI, machine learning and those are difficult for most storage systems to handle. Mauricio, talk to us about why you leaned into all flash with Dell Technologies and talk to us a little bit about the technologies that you've implemented. So if I have to think about our storage infrastructure before the pandemic, I have to think about Isilon because our HPC workloads was mainly based on the Isilon as a storage infrastructure. Together with some parallel effect system, as you can imagine, we're deploying in-house. During the pandemic, but especially with the explosion of the AI with the footprint of the storage request changed a lot because what we had until then, and in our case, it was an hybrid Isilon solution didn't fit so well for AI workloads. And this is why we started the migration that was, it was not really migration, but a sort of integration of the power scale or flash machine inside our environment because the power scale or flash and especially I hope in the future, the NVMe support is a key factor for the AI storage, storage support. We already have experienced some of the NVMe possibilities on the power banks that we have here. Think of other Facebook loads and part for VDI support but for flash is the minimum and NVMe is what we need to support in the right way the AI workloads. Kashuk, talk to me about what Dell Technologies has seen the uptick in the demand for this. As Mauricio said, they were using Isilon before adding in power scale. What are some of the changing demands that Dell Technologies has seen and how does technologies like power scale and the F 900 facilitate these organizations being able to rapidly change their environment so that they can utilize and extract the value from data? Yeah, absolutely. Artificial intelligence is an area that continues to amaze me and personally I think the potential here is immense. As Mauricio said, the data sets with artificial intelligence have grown significantly and not only the data has become larger, the AI models that are used have become more complex. For example, one of the studies suggests that for a modeling of natural language processing, one of the fields in AI, the number of parameters used could exceed like a trillion in a few years, so almost the size of a human brain. So not only that means that there is a lot of amount to be data to be processed, but the process stored ingested but probably has to be done in the same amount of time as before or perhaps even a smaller amount of time. So larger data, same time or perhaps even a smaller amount of time. So absolutely, I agree. I mean, those type of, for these type of workloads, you need a storage that gives you that high performance access but also being able to store that data economically. And Kaushik, how does Dell Technologies deliver that? The ability to scale, the economics, what's unique and differentiated about PowerScale? So PowerScale is our all flash system. It's a, it's a, it's bed uses the technology, some of the same capabilities that the Icelon products used to offer the 1FS file system capability, some of the capabilities that Maurizio has used and loved in the past. So some of those same capabilities are brought forward now on this PowerScale platform. There are some changes. Like for example, our new PowerScale platform supports NVIDIA GPU Direct, right? So for artificial intelligence workloads, you do need these GPU capable machines and the PowerScale supports that those high performance GPU Direct machines through the different technologies that we offer. And the PowerScale F 900, which we are going to launch very soon, is our best high performance all flash and the most economical all flash to date. So it is, it not only is our fastest but also offers the most economical way of storing the data. So ideal for these type of high performance workloads like AIML, deep learning and so on. Excellent. Maurizio, talk to me about some of the results that the university is achieving so far. I did read a 3x improvement in IO performance. You were able to get nearly 100% of the curriculum online pretty quickly. But talk to me about some of the other impacts that Dell Technologies has helping the university to achieve. Well, we are an old Dell customer. And if you give a look at what we have inside our data centers, we typically joking, we define as a sort of Dell Technologies supermarket in the sense that the grid part of our servers storage environment comes from Dell Technologies. Several generations of PowerEdge servers, PowerMax, Isilon, PowerScale, PowerStore. So we are using a lot of Dell Technologies here here. And of course in the past our traditional workloads were well supported by Dell Technologies and Dell Technologies is driving us versus what we call the next generation workloads because we are accompanying us in the transition versus the next generation computing that we hope to host here. And this is what our researchers are looking for. Because if I have to give a look to what we are doing mostly here, healthcare workloads, deep learning, data analysis, image analysis, image reconstruction, everything have to be supported especially from the data center, especially from the next generation servers typically equipped with GPUs. This is why GPU director is so important for us. But also supported on the networking side because the speed of the storage must be tied to the next generation networking. Low latency, high performance because at the end of the day you have to bring the data to the storage. And typically you do it by working. So the rewamp of the low latency high performance if they're connected is also a side effect. For these new workloads. And of course, Dell Technologies is with us in this transition. I love how you described your data centers as a Dell Technologies supermarket. Maybe a different way of talking about a center of excellence. Kashi, I want to ask you about, I know that the University of Pisa is a COE for Dell. Talk to me about in the last couple of minutes we have here what that entails and how Dell helps customers become a center of excellence. Yeah, so Dell, like Maurizio has talked about, has a lot of the Dell products today. And in fact, he mentioned about the PowerEd servers. The PowerScale F900 is actually based on a PowerEd server. So you can see, so a lot of these technologies are sort of interlinked with each other. They've talked to each other to work together. And that sort of helps customers manage the entire ecosystem lifecycle, data lifecycle together versus SP spots, because we have solutions that solve all aspects of our customer like Maurizio's needs, right? So yeah, I'm glad Maurizio is leveraging Dell and I'm happy we are able to help help Maurizio solve all his use cases end to end. Excellent, Maurizio, last question. Are you going to be using AI and machine learning powered by Dell to determine if the Tower of Pisa is going to continue to lean or if it's going to stay where it is? The leaning tower is an engineering miracle. Some years ago, an incredible engineering work was able to fix the leaning for a while. And let's hope that the Tower of Pisa stay there because it's one of our beauty that you can come to visit. And that's one part of Italy I haven't been to. So this pandemic, I got to add that to my travel plans. Maurizio and Kaushik, it's been a pleasure talking to you about how Dell is partnering with the University of Pisa to really help you power AI machine learning workloads to facilitate many use cases. We are looking forward to hearing what's next. Thanks for joining me this morning. Thank you. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the digital event experience.