 Hi, welcome to Cube Conversations. I'm Stu Miniman here at the Wikibon Home Office in Marlboro, Massachusetts. Back from VMworld, right in the middle of the fall 2015 tour and happy to have back to theCUBE, Suresh Jastrasariya, who's with the Dell Product Management Team, focused on the software-defined storage, hyper-convergence. Suresh, welcome back to the program. Thank you, Stu. Thank you for inviting me. So you and I bumped into each other on the way to VMworld, and we said, hey, it would be really good to kind of get together, talk about what we learned at the show. Hyper-convergence, of course, was one of the biggest topics at the show, as well as really get an update, because last time you came here nine months ago, it was the original GA of the Dell XC series, which is the Nutanix OEM, got one to really dig into and unpack that piece of solution. But first of all, how was VMworld for you? Thanks for inviting me again, and it was good to bump into you at Logan. So at VMworld, we had great reception of our technologies that we were showcasing in the Dell booth, as well as in the Nutanix booth, specifically the hyper-convergence platform, the Dell XC series. There was a lot of interest from customers from all over the world, as well as in all industries. And one of the things that I noticed is that VMworld, this year, there were so many, so many booths which were showing storage-related technologies. So it felt to me that VMworld was all about storage, as opposed to about virtualization. Yeah, actually, I saw somebody had done a highlight of how many sponsors and how many booths there were talking about storage, and we know that storage has historically been the largest dollar amount when we talk about a virtualization environment. But hyper-convergence even was even bigger. Last year, I think there were five or six booths I had counted that talked about hyper-convergence and just coming out of the woodworks. On theCUBE, we did interviews with VMware with what they're doing with VirtualSan or VSan. We had Nutanix on, had some new startups like Springpath on, and of course, you've got SimpliVity NimBox, a whole bunch of other startups in this space, and hyper-converged backup from Cohesity, so many companies that are glomming on to this what we call serverSan in the Wikibon community and what we typically call the hyper-converged infrastructure. Definitely a hot topic, and let's talk a little bit about kind of the market dynamic itself, Suresh. So when we put out our first definition now about a year and a half ago, there were a lot of people that said, wow, there's some really important trends and we like what you've done, but we were met with some skepticism as to how much of the market this was gonna penetrate and how fast it was gonna grow, and it's kind of funny to me in a year and a half, everybody's coming up to us and talking to us even more because it's growing even faster than we predicted. What have you been hearing across the industry? Absolutely, absolutely, Stu. Wikibon had done some work about a year and a half ago on serverSan, and at that time, when we looked at the serverSan market, we saw that this was growing, but boy, we have seen that whatever Wikibon was saying about a year and a half ago has been corroborated now this past summer, IDC as well as Gartner have come out with the forecast for hyperconversion. Both of them are saying that this hyperconversion market is growing at a 65% north of 65% cagger in the next four or five years, and let me just give you my perspective as well as Dell's perspective into where this hyperconversion market is going. So every 10 to 12 years, there is always a new technology that comes up and replatforming of the data center happens. We saw that in the 80s from mainframe to client server. In the 90s, we saw that in terms of software and servers and internet. And in the last decade, we saw that in virtualization. And now we are seeing is that there is a replatforming of the data center that is happening for hyperconverged and cloud. And this is where I think that the bigger opportunity is that hyperconvergence is a term right now. But the real story is about the replatforming of the data center that is happening. And that's where this technology, the Dell XC series as well as the Nutanix technology is gonna play out and we will see a lot more growth. In fact, Gartner and IDC are now saying the same thing that you were saying that in the next one to two years, this market is growing 100% year-to-year over year. Okay, so Suresh, you bring up a lot of points there. I wanna poke at the cloud bit because a lot of people, they don't kind of understand how cloud and the hyperconvergence goes together. So I'm wondering if you can kind of explain from a Dell standpoint how you think, and I know Wikibon, we've got some pretty strong held beliefs as to how this works. Absolutely, let me make it simple. So a lot of people are interested in cloud and what are the things that cloud offers? What cloud offers is if you have a workload and if you have an elastic workload specifically, what cloud offers is you can start very quickly. You can rent, swipe your credit card and rent the IT infrastructure on the cloud. You can start very quickly. You can grow very quickly because it allows you to scale up and down very quickly. So start very quickly and grow very quickly. If you can provide, and these two characteristics for some of your workloads in the data center, right? You will see that there is an economics that happens between elastic workload and stationary workload, the workloads that are consistent every year, right? Because it's the same economics that happens when you are trying to rent, buy, or lease, right? With real estate. The same economics is gonna happen for those workloads which are static or constant and predictable. And what we are gonna say, we are seeing is that in the data center, most of the customers who have this kind of workload, they're seeing that they can save a lot of money by going from the traditional IT where you have server consolidated using virtualization, you have storage consolidated using NAS or CN. But that complexity of three tier architecture is now simplified in the hyper-converged architecture and customers are seeing that they can save a lot of money by going to this in the predictable workloads and for elastic workloads, this technology is providing the elasticity to take the workload from on-premise to the public cloud using things like containers. So this technology is ripe for re-platforming the data centers over the next five years. Yeah, and there's a lot of pieces there and we don't have time to get into all of it, but one of the things that we point out from Wikibon's server-sand research is just architecturally, if we look at the storage there, look at the biggest cloud guys. They don't buy storage arrays. What they typically did is they created pools of resources that sometimes compute and storage were separate, but they buy lots of x86 servers and they put storage as needed in there and they don't do storage as a separate discipline. They focus on the application and they put it through. What David Floyer calls this is the hyperscale server-sand and some of those same lessons learned or when Nutanix built their architectures, they took the Google file system, they looked at those architectures and that was one of the underpinnings of how they built their software. We're seeing some of the same type of architectures that are in Facebook, Google and Amazon in these hyper-converged environments that are gonna fit in the enterprise and as you pointed out, it's simplicity that people need. They want flexibility. They don't want, I mean, the number one complaint we hear from storage people for the last decade has been, oh my God, getting it in, spinning it up, moving it out, all of those migration things that I had to do, those just kill me from an operational standpoint and the total cost of what I'm doing. I thought it was really interesting actually that EMC, who is the leader in storage and has a long history selling storage area networks when they came out with their new announcement with a product called ScaleIO and they gave the ScaleIO note and they quoted one of their customers that said just the cost of storage and the operational efficiencies was half the cost of what it would have been on the traditional environment. So if you see one of the leaders in who drove and delivered storage area networks now explaining how much cheaper it is to go to this environment, this trend is real and you're really gonna see this wave of everybody in the industry pushing for it. So any kind of comments on that piece? Absolutely, I mean, what I have seen in the past years, last time when I was here, we had just announced the product in the past year. We have seen that, we started out with one application, one workload, VDI, which was quick to start, easy to consume and the efficiency that it provided, what was provided with the kind of cloud workloads provide and most of the customers were latching on who were trying to do VDI, were latching on to this Dell XC series but in the last six to nine months, what we have seen is that other workloads are coming and server virtualization, private cloud, SQL and I can see that big data and collaboration workloads are ripe for picking for this architecture and in the next year to two years, what you're gonna see is that most of these other workloads that are consuming a large amount of footprint in the data center are gonna move to this architecture and Dell is ready for it. If you take a look at this to where we have been selling in the past 12 months and if it is across all geographies, we see the adoption of Dell XC series across all geographies, across all verticals and especially in the last quarter, we have seen exactly the revenue jump multiple falls. So Suresh, we're actually showing the slide that you brought showing kind of the worldwide adoption of the Dell XC series. So first of all, congratulations, this looks great geographical spread. I'm guessing the larger purple dots are the ones where you're doing more revenue and more deals, is that the case? Well, definitely, I mean, as you can see, early adopters are especially in the Western hemisphere and the Western world and the US and Western Europe as well as in Australia but Japan, Korea, South America, India, they're all kicking in and coming to the Dell XC series. Are there any specific stats you can say, number of customers, revenue growth or how many countries you're in? Well, we are now offering Dell XC series worldwide, everywhere we offer servers, Dell XC series is available and the number of customer growth is now in terms of a couple of thousand now, customers who have adopted this technology and the growth of revenue is, as I said, it's multiple fold from last quarter to the previous quarter to last quarter is multiple fold. And if you take a look at the market forecast that Gardner and IDC are saying the overall market for XC hyper-converged this year is going to be about a billion dollars. So if you subtract out just to know who are the market readers and where we are going, you will see that we are tracking to that market growth and we are taking a bigger chunk of the market share. So Suresh, I'm wondering if you can give us a little color. I think what something that people really underestimate is how it takes kind of not only the customer to adopt this, but the channel to understand how to position this and how to put in the environment. It's something we saw both in the original converged infrastructures, things like Flexpod and Vblock through the hyper-converged is it's not, oh, hey, let's just pull out your storage and put in this new thing because it's wait, is it storage, is it compute? How do I put it together? What budget, who owns it? That takes a little bit of time to help position it. So what have you seen and why is Dell starting to see the growth increasing at such a great rate? Very good question, Stu. As I explained earlier, the market always 10 to 12 years, every 10 to 12 years, the market presents itself with this opportunity and this decade is gonna be for hyper-convergence and it's becoming more and more clear. And people who see the trend, the channel partners, the customers who see the trend, they always, and the vendors as well, who see this trend, they can see how to make money in this. They have done it in the past when we went from mainframe to client server, to internet, to now it's the software defined. And they will find out the ways that they can save the money and they can make the money in selling this technology because as proven by one of your white papers that we did with you as well as with the, there are evidence that we have from our existing customers and we are coming out with all these stories now that the total cost of ownership on this product line is the ROI is almost 510% over five years and it pays back itself within seven months to a year and a half. Do you have any specific case studies you can share with us? Absolutely. Williams F1 is one of the customers in the UK there in the motorsport business. They started out with a clear problem statement that their data sets were growing because they were capturing more and more data from more and more points on their car and they wanted to make sure that they can make decisions in quick timeframe based on the larger data sets. The other technologies, the three tier technologies like SAN and NAS that they were having they could not make it work with that. And when they started looking at the Dell XC series and the Nutanix technology they could use this technology to save a lot of money first of all because they could transport that their footprint was much smaller so whenever they would go to a race they have to carry less equipment and as a result they were saving almost $150,000 per trip. And secondly, in terms of using the larger data sets and making the decisions quickly they were able to bring in all the larger data sets and make the decision that they wanted to make from three minutes it came down to a few seconds. So that's the kind of transformation that they saw and we're seeing that this is the kind of transformation that is happening not only in one industry but multiple industries across geographies. Yeah, we love that. What a great example of a customer that understands the value of going fast, right? Absolutely. With the F1. So yeah, and leveraging data is a huge theme that we've seen, not just saving costs but taking information allowing us to transform a business. All right, so VMworld's in the rearview mirror. We've got Dell World coming up in a couple of weeks. Anything you share as to what to expect from Dell World and really Dell in the XC series through the rest of the year? Absolutely, you're gonna see an exciting show of Dell XC series at Dell World. We started out, we saw this trend back in 2013. We started out understanding as to who the players are which software we can, we were the early adopters in terms of vendors to come out with this technology, one of the larger vendors. We partnered with Nutanix in 2014 and we announced it about a year ago at Dell World. Since then we have come a long way. We announced the 12G platform, we announced the 13G platform and now we have a GPU node as well as a short depth node that is coming out and you will be able to see both of those as well as we have announced our four node 2U appliance that is coming out for larger data centers as well as service providers and you'll be able to see that at Dell World. So we have completely done an overall of our appliances and going forward in the last 12 months we were focused on getting our customers the appliances but now in the next 12 months what you're gonna see is that the focus on integrating it with the Dell ecosystem, the Dell IDRAC that we have that makes the management of servers much easier, the Dell's technologies for open manage essentials. So integrating the IDRAC chip with the Prism software that Nutanix has as well as with the Acropolis software that Nutanix has is gonna bring the value that these customers and you will see all of that at Dell World. All right, well Suresh, really appreciate you coming to the office here looking forward to Dell World. Of course, be sure to check out all the video from Dell World on siliconangle.tv and lots more on hyperconvergence, what Wikibon, the server sand can be found on wikibon.com. Thank you for joining us for this segment of CUBE Conversations. Thank you.