 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this special presentation. We have a launch from Dell Technologies, updates to the VxRail family. We're going to do things a little bit different here. We actually have a launch video from Shannon Champion of Dell Technologies and the way we do things a lot of times is analysts get a little preview or when you're watching things, you might have questions on it. So rather than me just watching it or you watching yourself, I actually brought in a couple of Dell Technologies expert, two of our CUBE alumni. Happy to welcome back to the program, Jonathan Siegel. He is the Vice President of Product Marketing and Chad Dunn who's the Vice President of Product Management, both of them with Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Good to see you Stu. Great to be here. All right, and so what we're going to do is we're going to be rolling the video here. I've got a button I'm going to press, Andrew will stop it here and then we'll kind of dig in a little bit, go into some questions when we're all done, we're actually holding a crowd chat where you will be able to ask your questions, talk to the expert and everything and so a little bit different way to do a product announcement. Hope you enjoy it and with that, it's VxRail taking HCI to the extremes is the theme, we'll see what that means and everything but without any further ado, let's let Shannon take the video away. Hello and welcome. My name is Shannon Champion and I'm looking forward to taking you through what's new with VxRail. Let's get started. We have a lot to talk about. Our launch covers new announcements addressing use cases across the core, Edge and cloud and spans both new hardware platforms and options as well as the latest in software innovation. So let's jump right in. Before we talk about our announcements, let's talk about where customers are adopting VxRail today. First of all, on behalf of the entire Dell Technologies and VxRail teams, I want to thank each of our over 8,000 customers, big and small in virtually every industry who have chosen VxRail to address a broad range of workloads deploying nearly 100,000 nodes to date. Thank you. Our promise to you is that we will add new functionality, improve serviceability and support new use cases so that we deliver the most value to you, whether in the core, at the Edge or for the cloud. In the core, VxRail from day one has been a catalyst to accelerate IT transformation. Many of our customers started here and many will continue to leverage VxRail to simply extend and enhance your VMware environment. Now we can support even more demanding applications such as in-memory databases like SAP HANA and more AI and ML applications with support for more and more powerful GPUs. At the Edge, video surveillance, which also uses GPUs by the way, is an example of a popular use case leveraging VxRail alongside external storage. And right now we all know the enhanced role that IT is playing. And as it relates to VDI, VxRail has always been a great option for that. In the cloud, it's all about Kubernetes and how Dell Technologies Cloud Platform, which is VCF on VxRail, can deliver consistent infrastructure for both traditional and cloud-native applications and we're doing that together with VMware. VxRail is the only jointly engineered HCI system built with VMware for VMware environments designed to enhance the native VMware experience. This joint engineering with VMware and investments in software innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. All right, so Shannon talked a bit about the important role of IT of course right now with the global pandemic going on. It's really calling in essential things, putting platforms to the test. So I'd really love to hear what both of you are hearing from customers. Also, VDI of course, in the early days, it was HCI only does VDI. Now we know there are many solutions, but remote work is putting that back front and center. So John, why don't we start with you as to what you're saying about the data. Absolutely, so first of all, Stu, thank you. I want to do a shout out to our VxRail customers around the world. It's really been humbling, inspiring, and just amazing to see the impact of our VxRail customers around the world and what they're having on human progress here. Just for a few examples, there are genomics companies that we have running VxRail that have rolled out testing at scale. We also have research universities out in the Netherlands doing antibody detection. The US Navy has stood up a floating hospital to of course care for those in need. So look, we are here to help. That's been our message to our customers, but it's amazing to see how much they're helping society during this. So just a pleasure there. But as you mentioned, just to hit on the VDI comments. So two points to HCI and VxRail, VDI, that was initial use case years ago. And it's been great to see how many of our existing VxRail customers have been able to pivot very quickly, leveraging VxRail to add and to help bring their remote workforce online and support them with their existing VxRail. Because VxRail is flexible, it is agile to be able to support those multiple workloads. And in addition to that, we've also rolled out some new VDI bundles to make it simpler for customers, more cost effective, catered to everything from knowledge workers to multimedia workers. You name it, you know, from 250 desktops up to 1,000. But again, back to your point, VxRail HCI has moved well beyond VDI. It had, it crossed the chasm a couple of years ago, actually. And, you know, where VDI now is less than a third of the typical workloads, any of our customers out there, it supports now a range of workloads that you heard from Shannon, whether it's video surveillance, whether it's general purpose, going to mission critical applications now with SAP, huh? So, you know, this has changed the game for sure, but the range of workloads and the flexibility of VxRail is what's really helping our existing customers from this pandemic. Yeah, I agree with you, John. We've seen customers really embrace HCI for a number of workloads in their environments from the ones that we sort of all knew and loved back in the initial days of HCI, now to mission critical things, now to cloud native workloads as well. And, you know, sort of the efficiencies that customers are able to get from HCI and specifically VxRail gives them that ability to pivot when these, you know, shall we say unexpected circumstances arise. And I think that that's informing their decisions and their opinions on what their IT strategies look like as they move forward. They want that same level of agility and the ability to react quickly with their overall infrastructure. Excellent, well, I want to get into the announcement what I want, my team actually, your team gave the access to the CIO from the city of Amarillo. So maybe if they can dig up that footage, talk about how fast they've pivoted, you know, using VxRail to really spin up things fast. So let's hear from the announcement first and then definitely want to share that customer story a little bit later. So let's get to the actual news that Shannon's going to share. Okay, now what's new? I am pleased to announce a number of exciting updates and new platforms to further enable IT modernization across core edge and cloud. I will cover each of these announcements in more detail, demonstrating how only the X-Rail can offer the breadth of platform configurations, automation, orchestration and lifecycle management across a fully integrated hardware and software full stack with consistent simplified operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications. I'll start with hybrid cloud and recap what you may have seen in the Dell Technologies cloud announcements just a few weeks ago, related to VMware cloud foundation on VxRail. Then I'll cover two brand new VxRail hardware platforms and additional options and finally circle back to talk about the latest enhancements to our VxRail HCI system software capabilities for lifecycle management. So let's get started with our new cloud offerings based on VxRail. VxRail is the HCI foundation for Dell Technologies cloud platform, bringing automation and financial models similar to public cloud to on-premises environments. VMware recently introduced cloud foundation 4.0, which is based on vSphere 7. As you likely know by now, vSphere 7 was definitely an exciting and highly anticipated release. In keeping with our synchronous release commitment, we introduced vXRail 7 based on vSphere 7 in late April, which was within 30 days of VMware's release. Two key areas that VMware focused on were embedding containers and Kubernetes into vSphere, unifying them with virtual machines. And the second is improving the work experience for vSphere administrators with vSphere lifecycle manager or VLCM. I'll address the second point a bit in terms of how vXRail fits in in a moment. For vCF4 with Tanzu, based on vSphere 7, customers now have access to a hybrid cloud platform that supports native Kubernetes workloads and management, as well as your traditional VM-based workloads. And this is now available with vCF4 on vXRail 7. vXRail's tight integration with VMware Cloud Foundation delivers a simple and direct path not only to the hybrid cloud, but also to deliver Kubernetes at cloud scale with one complete automated platform. The second cloud announcement is also exciting. Recent vCF4 networking advancements have made it easier than ever to get started with hybrid cloud because we're now able to offer a more accessible consolidated architecture. And with that, Dell Technologies Cloud Platform can now be deployed with a four-node configuration, lowering the cost of an entry-level hybrid cloud. This enables customers to start smaller and grow their cloud deployment over time. vCF4 and vXRail can now be deployed in two different ways. For small environments, customers can utilize a consolidated architecture which starts with just four nodes. Since the management and workload domains share resources in this architecture, it's ideal for getting started with an entry-level cloud to run general-purpose virtualized workloads with a smaller entry point, both in terms of required infrastructure footprint as well as cost, but still with a consistent cloud operating model. For larger environments where dedicated resources and role-based access control to separate different sets of workloads is usually preferred, you can choose to deploy a standard architecture which starts at eight nodes for independent management and workload domains. A standard implementation is ideal for customers running applications that require dedicated workload domains that includes Horizon VDI and vSphere with Kubernetes. All right, John, there's definitely been a lot of interest in our community around everything that VMware's doing with vSphere 7. Understand if you wanted to use the Kubernetes piece, it's vCF as that. So, we've seen the announcements Dell partnering there. Help us connect that story between really the VMware strategy and how they talk about cloud and how, where does VxRail fit in that overall Dell Tech Cloud story? Absolutely, so first of all, Stu, VxRail, of course, is in a role to the Dell Tech Cloud strategy. It's been vCF on VxRail equals the Dell Tech Cloud Platform and this is our flagship on-prem cloud offering that we've been able to enable operational consistency across any cloud, right? Whether it's on-prem in the edge or in the public cloud. And we've seen the Dell Tech Cloud Platform embraced by customers for a couple key reasons. One is it offers the fastest hybrid cloud deployment in the market. And this is really, you know, thanks to a new subscription offer that we're now offering out there where in less than 14 days it can be stood up and running. And really the Dell Tech Cloud does bring a lot of flexibility in terms of consumption models overall when it comes to VxRail. Secondly, I would say is fast and easy upgrades. I mean, this is what VxRail brings to the table for all workloads, if you will. And it's especially critical in the cloud. So the full automation of life cycle management across the hardware and software stack, across the VM-ware software stack and the Dell software and hardware supporting that together, this enables essentially the third thing, which is customers can just relax, right? They can be rest assured that their infrastructure will be continuously validated and always be in a continuously validated state. And this is the kind of thing that, you know, those three value propositions together really fit well with any on-prem cloud. Now you take what Shannon just mentioned and the fact that now you can build and run modern applications on the same VxRail infrastructure alongside traditional applications. This is a game changer. Yeah, I love, you know, I remember in the early days talking with Chad about, you know, CI, how does that fit in with cloud discussion and the line I've used the last couple of years is, you know, modernize the platform, then you can modernize the application. So as companies are doing their full modernization, this plays into what you're talking about. All right, let's get, you know, let Shannon continue, get some more before we dig into some more analysis. That's good. Let's talk about new hardware platforms and updates that result in literally thousands of potential new configuration options, covering a wide breadth of modern and traditional application needs across a range of VxRail use cases. First up, I am incredibly excited to announce a brand new Dell EMC VxRail series, the D-Series. This is a ruggedized, durable platform that delivers the full power of VxRail for workloads at the edge in challenging environments or for space constrained areas. VxRail D-Series offers the same compelling benefits as the rest of the VxRail portfolio with simplicity, agility and lifecycle management, but in a lightweight short depth at only 20 inches, it's a durable form factor that's extremely temperature resilient, shock resistant and easily portable. It even meets mill spec standards. That means you have the full power of lifecycle automation with VxRail HCI system software and 24 by seven single point of support enabling you to rapidly react to business needs no matter the location or how harsh the conditions. So whether you're deploying a data center at a mobile command base, running real time GPS mapping on the go or implementing video surveillance in remote areas, you can ensure availability, integrity and confidence for every workload with the new VxRail ruggedized D-Series. All right Chad, I would love for you to bring us in a little bit, that what customer requirements for bringing this to market. I remember seeing Dell servers ruggedized, of course, edge really important growth to build on what John was just talking about cloud. So Chad, bring us inside what was driving this piece of the offering. Sure, Stu. Yeah, having the hardware platforms that can go out into some of these remote locations is really important. And that's being driven by the fact that customers are looking for compute performance and storage out at some of these edges or some of the more exotic locations. Whether that's manufacturing plants, oil rigs, summering ships, military applications and places that we've never heard of. But it's also about extending that operational simplicity of the sort of way that you're managing your data center that has VxRails. You're managing your edges the same way using the same set of tools. You don't need to learn anything else. So operational simplicity is absolutely key here. But in those locations you can't take a product that's designed for a data center where you're carefully controlling power cooling space and take it to some of these places where you've got sand blowing or subzero temperatures. So we built this D series that was able to go to those extreme locations with extreme heat, extreme cold, extreme altitude but still offer that operational simplicity. If you look at the resistance that it has to heat it can go from or it operates at a 45 degrees Celsius or 113 degrees Fahrenheit range but it can do an excursion up to 55C or 131 degrees Fahrenheit for up to eight hours. It's also resistant to heat, sand, dust, vibration. It's very lightweight, short depth. In fact, it's only 20 inches deep. This is the smallest form factor obviously that we have in the VxRail family. And it's also built to be able to withstand sudden shocks. It's certified to withstand 40 Gs of shock and operation of the 15,000 feet of elevation. It's pretty high. And, you know, this is sort of the height wherever skydivers go to when they went the real thrill of skydiving where you actually need oxygen to be up to that altitude. They're mill spec certified. So mill STD 810G, which I keep right beside my bed and read every night. And it comes with a VxRail stick hardening packages, package and scripts so that you can auto lock down the rail environment. And we've got a few other certifications that are on the roadmap now for naval shock requirements, EMI and radiation immunity of all things. Yeah, you know, it's funny. I remember when HCI first launched, it was like, oh, well, everything's going to white boxes and it's just going to be, you know, massive, you know, no differentiation between everything out there. If you look at what you're offering, if you look at how public clouds build their things, what I called it a few years for is there's hyper optimization. So you need scale, you need similarities, but you know, you need to fit some, you know, very specific requirements, lots of places. So interesting stuff, yeah, certifications, you know, always keep your teams busy. All right, let's get back to Shannon to continue on with the talk. We are also introducing three other hardware-based editions. First, a new VxRail E-Series model based on, for the first time, AMD Epic processors. These single socket 1U nodes offer dual socket performance with CPU options that scale from eight to 64 cores up to a terabyte of memory and multiple storage options, making it an ideal platform for desktop VDI, analytics and computer-aided design. Next, the addition of the latest NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs brings the most significant advancement in computer graphics in over a decade to professional workflows. Designers and artists across industries can now expand the boundary of what's possible, working with the largest and most complex graphics rendering, deep learning, and visual computing workloads. And Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory is here, and it offers high performance and significantly increased memory capacity with data persistence at an affordable price. Data persistence is a critical feature that maintains data integrity even when power is lost, enabling quicker recovery and less downtime. With support for Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory, customers can expand in-memory intensive workloads and use cases like SAP HANA. All right, let's finally dig into our HCI System Software, which is the core differentiation for VxRail regardless of your workload or platform choice. Our joint engineering with VMware and investments in VxRail HCI System Software Innovation together deliver an optimized operational experience at reduced risk for our customers. Under the covers, VxRail offers best-in-class hardware married with VMware HCI Software, either VCAN or VCF, but what makes us different stems from our investments to integrate the two. Dell Technologies has a dedicated VxRail team of about 400 people to build, market, sell, and support a fully integrated hyperconverged system. That team has also developed our unique VxRail HCI System Software, which is a suite of integrated software elements that extend VMware native capabilities to deliver a seamless, automated, operational experience that customers cannot find elsewhere. The key components of VxRail HCI System Software are shown around the arc here that include VxRail Manager, full-stack lifecycle management, ecosystem connectors, and support. I don't have time to get into all the details of these elements today, but if you're interested in learning more, I encourage you to meet our experts, and I'll tell you how to do that in a moment. I touched on VLCM being a key feature to vSphere 7 earlier, and I'd like to take the opportunity to expand on that a bit in the context of VxRail lifecycle management. VLCM adds valuable automation to the execution of updates for customers, but it doesn't eliminate the manual work still needed to define and package the updates and validate all of the components prior to applying them. With VxRail, customers have all of these areas addressed automatically on their behalf, freeing them to put their time into other important functions for their business. Customers tell us that lifecycle management continues to be a major source of the maintenance effort they put into their infrastructure, and that it tends to lead to overburden IT staff, that it can cause disruptions to the business if not managed effectively, and that it isn't the most efficient economically. Automation of lifecycle management in VxRail results in the utmost simplicity from a customer experience perspective and offers operational freedom for maintaining infrastructure. But as shown here, our customers not only realize greater IT team efficiencies, they have also reduced downtime with fewer unplanned outages and reduced overall costs of operations. With VxRail HCI system software, intelligent lifecycle management, upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack are automated, keeping clusters in continuously validated states while minimizing risk and operational costs. How do we ensure continuously validated states for VxRail? VxRail labs execute an extensive, automated, repeatable process on every firmware and software upgrade and patch to ensure clusters are in continuously validated states of the customers choosing across their VxRail environment. The VxRail labs are constantly testing, analyzing, optimizing, and sequencing all of the components in the upgrade to execute in a single package for the full stack. All the while, VxRail is backed by Dell EMC's world-class services and support with a single point of contact for both hardware and software. IT productivity skyrockets with single-click, non-disruptive upgrades of the fully integrated hardware and software stack without the need to do extensive research and testing, making you to the next VxRail version of your choice while always in a continuously validated state. You can also confidently execute automated VxRail upgrades no matter what hardware generation or node types are in the cluster. They don't have to all be the same. And upgrades with VxRail are faster and more efficient with leapfrogging. Simply choose any VxRail version you desire and be assured you will get there in a validated state while seamlessly bypassing any other release in between. Only VxRail can do that. All right, so Chad, the life-cycle management piece that Shannon was just talking about is not the sexiest, it's often underappreciated. There's not only the years of experience, but the continuous work you're doing. Reminds me back, the early V-SAN deployments versus VxRail jointly developed, jointly tested between Dell and VMware. So bring us inside why 2020 life-cycle management is still a very important piece, especially in the VxRail family. Yeah, well, Stu, I think it's sexy, but I'm pretty big nerd. Yeah, this has really always been our bread and butter. And in fact, it gets even more important the larger the deployments come when you start to look at data centers full of VxRails and all the different hardware, software, firmware combinations that could exist out there. It's really the value that you get out of that VxRail HCI system software that Shannon was talking about and how it's optimized around the VMware use case. Very tightly integrated with each VMware component, of course, and the intelligence of being able to do all the firmware, all of the drivers, all of the software, all together, tremendous value to our customers. But to deliver that, we really need to make a fairly large investment. So as Shannon mentioned, we run about 25,000 hours of testing across each major release for patches, express patches. That's about 7,000 hours for each of those. So obviously there's a lot of parallelism and we're always developing new test scenarios for each release that we need to build in as we introduce new functionality. One of the key things that we're able to do, as Shannon mentioned, is to be able to leapfrog releases and get you to that next validated state. We've got about 100 engineers just working on creating and executing those test cases on a continuous basis and obviously a huge amount of automation. And when we talk about that investment to execute those tests, that's well north of $60 million of investment in our lab. In fact, we've got just over 2,000 VxRail units in our test bed across the U.S., Shanghai, China and Cork, Ireland. So a massive amount of testing of each of those components to make sure that they operate together in a validated state. Yeah, well, absolutely. It's super important, not only for the day one, but the day two deployments. But I think this would actually be a great place for us to bring in that customer that Dell gave me access to. So we've got the CIO of Amarillo, Texas. He was an existing VxRail customer and he's going to explain what happened as to how he needed to react really fast to support the work from home initiative, as well as, you know, we get to hear in his words, the value of what life cycle management means. So Andrew, if we could queue up that customer segment, please. It's been massive. And it's been interesting to see the IT team absorb it. You know, as we matured, they, I think they embraced the ability to be innovative and to work with our departments. But this instance really justified why I was driving progress so fervently, why it was so urgent to me. Three years ago, the answer would have been no. There would have been, we wouldn't have been in a place where we could adapt with VxRail in place. You know, in a week, we spun up hundreds of instant clones. We spun up a 75 person call center in a day and a half for our public health. We rolled out multiple applications for public health so they could do remote clinics. It's given us the flexibility to be able to roll out new solutions very quickly and be very adaptive. And it's not only been apparent to my team, but it's really made an impact on the business. And now what I'm seeing is those of my customers that were a little lagging or a little conservative are understanding the impact of modernizing the way they do business, because it makes them adaptable as well. All right, so Rich, you talked a bunch about the efficiencies that HCI put in place. How about that, that overall just management? You know, you talked about how fast you spun up these new VDI instances. You need to be able to do things much simpler. So how does the overall lifecycle management fit into this discussion? It makes it so much easier. And you know, in the old environment, one it took a lot of man hours to make change. It was very disruptive when we did make change. This overburdened, I guess that's the word I'm looking for. It really overburdened our staff to cause disruption to business. It wasn't cost efficient. And then you simple things like, you know, I've worked for multi-billion dollar companies where we had massive QA environments that replicated production. Simply can't afford that at local government. You know, having this sort of environment lets me do a scaled down QA environment and still get the benefit of wiggling out non-disruptive change. As I said earlier, it's allowed us to take all of those cycles that we were spending on lifecycle management because it's greatly simplified and move those resources and rescale them in other areas where we can actually have more impact on the business. It's hard to be innovative when 100% of your cycles are just keeping the ship afloat. All right, well, you know, nothing better than hearing straight from the end user, you know, public sector reacting very fast to the COVID-19. And you know, you heard him, he said, if this had hit his before he had run this project, he would not have been able to respond. So I think everybody out there understands if I didn't have access to the latest technology, you know, it would be much harder. All right, I'm looking forward to doing the crowd chat letting everybody else dig in with questions and get follow-up, but a little bit more, I believe one more announcement even Shannon's got for us. So let's roll the final video clip. In our latest software release, VxRail 4.7.510, we continue to add new automation and self-service features. New functionality enables you to schedule and run upgrade health checks in advance of upgrades to ensure clusters are in a ready state for the next upgrade or patch. This is extremely valuable for customers that have stringent upgrade windows as they can be assured the clusters will seamlessly upgrade within that window. Of course, running health checks on a regular basis also helps ensure that your clusters are always ready for unscheduled patches and security updates. We are also offering more flexibility in getting all nodes or clusters to a common release level with the ability to reimage nodes or clusters to a specific VxRail version or down rev one or more nodes that may be shipped at a higher rev than the existing cluster. This enables you to easily choose your validated state when adding new nodes or repurposing nodes in a cluster. To sum up all of our announcements, whether you are accelerating data center modernization, extending HCI to harsh edge environments, deploying an on-premises Dell Technologies Cloud platform to create a developer-ready Kubernetes infrastructure, VxRail is there, delivering a turnkey experience that enables you to continuously innovate, realize operational freedom, and predictably evolve. VxRail provides an extensive breadth of platform configurations, automation, and lifecycle management across the integrated hardware and software full stack and consistent hybrid cloud operations to address the broadest range of traditional and modern applications across core, edge, and cloud. I now invite you to engage with us. First, the virtual passport program is an opportunity to have some fun while learning about VxRail's new features and functionality and score some sweet digital swag while you're at it. It delivered via an augmented reality app, all you need is your device. So go to vxrail.is-passport to get started. And secondly, if you have any questions about anything I talked about or want a deeper conversation, we encourage you to join one of our exclusive VxRail Meet the Expert sessions available for a limited time. First come, first served. Just go to vxrail.is-expert-session to learn more. All right, well, obviously with everyone being remote, there's different ways we're looking to engage. So we've got the crowd chat right after this, but John, give us a little bit more as to how Dell's making sure to stay in close contact with customers and what you've got for options for them. Yeah, absolutely. So as Shannon said, so in lieu of not having Dell Tech World this year in person, where we could have those great in-person interactions and answer questions, whether it's in the booth or in meeting rooms, we are going to have these Meet the Expert sessions over the next couple of weeks. And Lika, we're going to put our best and brightest from our technical community and make them accessible to everyone out there. So again, definitely encourage you, we're trying new things here in this virtual environment to ensure that we can still stay in touch, answer questions, be responsive. And really looking forward to having these conversations over the next couple of weeks. All right, well, John and Chad, thank you so much. We definitely look forward to the conversation here and continued. If you're here live, definitely go down below and do it. If you're watching this on demand, you can see the full transcript of it at crowdchat.net slash VxRox, Vx, sorry, VxRailRox for myself. Shannon on the video, John, Chad, Andrew Mann in the booth there. Thank you so much for watching and go ahead and join the crowd chat.