 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partner. Hi everybody, we're back. This is Dave Vellante with Peter Burris and we are here at VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas. This is the eighth year of theCUBE doing VMworld, started in Moscone, Moscone's under construction. So we're here back in Vegas. Although they've had VMworld in Vegas a couple of times, Colin Gallagher is here as the Senior Director of Product Marketing for Hyperconverged Infrastructure at Dell EMC. Colin, great to see you. Thanks for coming to theCUBE. Thanks Dave, thanks for having me. So first of all, how's the show going for you? Fantastic, incredibly busy. As you can see, hyperconverged is the hot thing yet again. I think last year was the big thing, but it's nice to see it's being, customers are asking about it. You're seeing it in the keynotes, the products being mentioned, VSAN, VxRail, et cetera. And just being swamped and busy and having a little bit of fun as well. So before we get into the announcements and we want to do that and give you an opportunity to talk about that, Peter and I and folks in theCUBE, we've been talking all week, really all year, about how customers are coming to the reality that I can't just reform my business and try to stuff it into the cloud. I've really got to understand the realities of my business and bring the cloud model to the extent that I can to the business. So what role does hyperconverged play in that context of bringing the cloud to my business? I think hyperconverged is the technology that allows you to do that. But as you bring out, as you mentioned, you have to also rethink about how you maintain your business, right? Because hyperconverged consolidates your compute, your storage, your networking into one system. But that means you may have to think about consolidating your storage teams, your compute teams and your networking teams as well. And if you're not, if you're going to keep them separate but merge the technology, there's going to be some impedance mismatch there. But so hyperconverged is an enabler for that, but it requires you to transform not just the technology but also how you manage and staff your business as well. I remember, I guess it was three years ago now at VMworld, you guys made the sort of first announcement of a sort of software-defined, true hyperconverged product, and it's really evolved quite dramatically from then. So maybe bring us up to where we are today and talk about some of the announcements that you made. So yes, and hyperconverged was announced a couple years ago in a couple different products, but the point I was making a little bit earlier is that hyperconverged is not just a single product. It's an enabling technology. And much like Flash was five to seven years ago, it's going everywhere. It's a design approach. It's a design, exactly, yes, it's a design approach. And you're seeing it in appliances that have been very successful today. You're seeing in larger rack scale systems. You're seeing in software-only systems. It depends on how and much, as you said, Dave, you want to transform, right? You can do kind of some build your own hyperconverged stuff and not transform very much at all. You can do full turnkey cloud built on hyperconverged, but that's going to require a vast degree of not just infrastructure transformation, but also workforce transformation to go with it. Now, one of the things that we've observed, Colin, and get some feedback from you on this is that, because we totally agree. In fact, we wrote a piece of research we called the Iron Triangle of IT, and the fact that there is this very tight linking between people with skills, the automation that they use to manage products that dictate the stills, that dictate the automation, and breaking that is tough. And a lot of our CIO clients are telling us that you guys don't understand. The biggest problem I got is getting my people to work differently together, new processes, new approaches to doing things. So one of the forcing functions has been historically, when we think about designing systems to run workloads, we started with the CPU. We sized the CPU, and then we did everything else. Now we start thinking about a lot of these data-driven, digital-oriented kinds of systems. We're thinking about something different. That catalyzed with this enormous performance, improvements in storage over the last few years through flash, vSAN-related types of things. What are some of the new design principles that people have to factor as they start thinking about the role that hyper-converge is going to play? So let me play off that. So yes, people designed for the CPU because that was the bottleneck, right? Then as CPU performance grew, 5x, 10x, et cetera, they started designing for storage because that became the bottleneck, right? So part of your question is, what's going to be the next bottleneck, right? There you go. And I think you just had a chat talking about it before, and I think the network may be that upcoming bottleneck right now, particularly in the hyper-converge world where everything is connected through the network. That's your backplane, right? It's a different approach to storage. So designing around your network capabilities and your network infrastructure, deploying hyper-converged in a branch office with one gig is very different than deploying hyper-converged in a data center with 25 gig, and how you do that. So that's one, but I think, as hyper-converged is all about balance in general, right? There's a fixed ratio, depending on the product or implementation of storage to compute, right? And generally they like to be in the Goldilocks zone, right? Not too much CPU, not too much CPU heavy or not too much storage heavy. And I think as hyper-converged is going more mainstream and more normal, it's pushing those subtle boundaries there. And I think things like flexing out to the cloud when you need additional storage or additional compute capability is one of those design considerations you need to take into account as you're deploying hyper-converged because as you said, you're designing around constraints and there's some physical constraints you have to manage and you got to figure out how you can tap into some of the extra ones. So literally it's start with, start with the outcomes, identify the data that's associated with those outcomes, figure out the physical characteristics necessary to apply and process and move that data or not move it and use that as the starting point for the design considerations, being very cognizant going back to what Chad was talking about, that at the end of the day, it's the network that's binding these things and how far out is the protocol going to go, local versus wide area. I'm going to steal something I read on Twitter the other day that data is the new oil, right? And that's how you run your business and just like how you ship oil to and from, from a well to a refinery to finally do your gas station pump, you have to think about what's your data chain and how you get it and where you need to move it. So that's a term that we started using in the cube in 2010 and what we found is that data is plentiful, but insights aren't. And so you see organizations really spending a lot of time, money, energy, trying to get to those insights to give them competitive advantage and a new infrastructure emerging to support those. So I wonder Colin, if you could talk about the portfolio, the products that you sort of look after and tie it into some of the things that you've announced. Yeah, so I look after our VMware hyperconverged on the system, so VxRail and VxRack SCDC, you know, both jointly developed with VMware. I'm sure you've heard Pat and everybody else talk about them, so if you've been watching any of the keynotes. But we also have a much larger portfolio. We have our vSAN ready nodes for customers who want to do it themselves, want to build their own systems. And again, as we talk about degree of transformation, that allows customers to get into the hyperconverged space but not significantly transform how they're managing their business. We have the appliances, obviously our VxRail systems. Also by the way, the news with the vSAN ready nodes is we're announcing them available on the Dell PowerEdge 14G platforms. Those are available now to order. On our VxRail appliances and the rest of the portfolio, they'll be out on the 14G platform by the end of the year. But what's new with VxRail, we're announcing VxRail 4.5 which provides life cycle management orchestration for the latest and greatest VMware software stacks. So vSAN 6.6 and vSphere 6.5. So both of those are out now and available with all the great goodness that you've seen and heard about them. We're also announcing new configuration options for our VxRack SCDC platform. So that's the big brother to VxRail, fully turnkey, software-defined data center infrastructure, including NSX, all managed under one umbrella. So a higher end solution? It's a much higher end solution, much higher end solution for larger, not necessary scale, because it's not a set scale because you can start pretty small as low as. But still organized, coherent, well packaged. But you have to, again, if we're talking about degrees of transformation, if you go with an appliance, okay, you're managing computing storage together. If you're going with a rack scale system, you're managing the network as part of that as well. So that's another degree of transformation you have to be willing to make. So that's what's really the big difference between the two. New configuration options, up to 40 different hardware configs available now for that. So really driven by customer choice. I want lower powered CPUs for certain workloads. I want higher powered CPUs. I want more all flash choices. So really flush that portfolio out. And then lastly, we're announcing our EHC and NHC platforms from Dell AMC are available built on VxRack STDC as well. EHC acronym? Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, Native Hybrid Cloud, EHC and NHC, sorry. Both of those two systems which had run on our Vblock infrastructure before are now running on VxRack STDC as well. So you get fully turnkey hybrid cloud built on top of an HCI system. And when you think of an EHC Enterprise Hybrid Cloud and Native Hybrid Cloud, NHC, can you talk about the workloads that customers should think about putting on each? Yeah, so EHC is much more for traditional workloads, for customers who are looking to get into hybrid cloud. Actually, we see a lot of, our number one customer for someone who buys EHC is they've tried to build cloud on their own and failed. And they want something tricky. They don't want to make the same mistakes again. They've bent, they have the scars. And they want something, you know, easier and simpler than building it themselves. But that is traditional workloads, your traditional data center workloads managing the cloud environment. NHC, our Native Hybrid Cloud product is for cloud native workloads. It's actually turnkey pivotal systems. So it's PCS-based. So if you're deploying workloads that will run in pivotal and you want to either as a test dev system in-house or you want to run that in-house and then migrate it later to a cloud, that's what NHC is for. Okay, we got to leave it there. But I'll give you a last word on VMworld 2017, you know, cloud, hyperconverged, a lot of new innovation. What's your bumper sticker calling on the show? My bumper sticker is again, is HCI's prime time. It's here. I used to say that customers, when I started this job two years ago, it would tell me, tell me why I need HCI. And what customers are asking me now is, tell me, last year it was, tell me how I use HCI. And this year it's, tell me where I can't use HCI. So there's been this waterfall shift in how they're looking at doing it. So they like it, they're trying to apply it. It's how it works, what's the impact. And I want to apply it as many places as possible. Where are my blind spots? Yeah, where doesn't it fit? What are the constraints where it doesn't fit? Colin Gallagher, thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. No, my pleasure, thanks, Dave. All right, keep right there, everybody. We'll be back. This is Dave Vellante for Peter Burris. This is theCUBE. We're live at VMworld 2017 and we'll be right back.