 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. We're back at Dell Technologies World. All the action, 15,000 people here. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. Wall-to-wall coverage, Drew Schilke is here, Vice President of Networking Product Management Dell Technologies, good to see you, Drew. Yeah, thanks for having us. You're very welcome. Thanks for coming on. So we're going to talk in networking. It's been an exploding business for you guys. I mean, it's one of the really shining stars of the portfolio. We're going to talk a little bit about why, but go back a little bit. Talk about some of the trends in networking over the past several years. Obviously, cloud is changing the way people are looking at networks. You hear this multi-cloud thing. What's going on? Well, I think you rewind the clock back five years ago because that's when I think we had this seminal moment in networking where we as at the time Dell and now Dell EMC took an unprecedented step to say we want to disaggregate the networking stack where we want the hardware discussion and the software discussion around networking to be distinct. And it wasn't novel for the network at the time, but for the rest of the IT industry, if you think about the way storage and servers and virtualization had evolved, not really novel. So we were really kind of playing catch up from a networking perspective. And that really opened up a whole new era of networking for us. In terms of what we were doing as a networking vendor, you also look at what some of the big hyper scale companies were trying to do with their own networks. And there was this great synergy to put together this cloud computing era networking stack that was fundamentally different than what we've seen for the past 20 years. And we've just seen a massive wave of adoption and moving to this open, disaggregated and software-defined network ever since. So Stu's more of a networking guy than I am. He explained to me years ago how, Dave, with the clouds, the network's going to flatten, traffic's going to go east-west, not so much north-south, he would draw the diagrams. What did that mean from a product perspective for you guys? So what it meant from a product perspective for us is that we wanted to focus on, to your point, this modern networking design, which is, you're going to hear us talk about the fabrics. It's all about the fabrics, which is the way we put together that network in the data center to facilitate all that east-west traffic. And done correctly, it can scale to a massive scale. This is what all the biggest hyper-skills are out there running today, to support their cloud data centers, which have thousands of servers and thousands of switches behind it. So it's a proven model. It can be very, very effective. And ultimately, just in terms of its approach and architecture, the total cost of ownership is significantly lower than what we saw for the previous 20 years in the networking space. True, it's really interesting. The challenger of time is absolutely these distributed systems, and it is disaggregating. At the same time, customers are looking for it to be simplified, and if you can pull things together, and you look at what I heard on the stage this morning, is a lot of the cloud messaging was it was Dell plus VMware and partners there to put together that entire solution from a customer. I can't say, okay, well let me get a box and let me load some operating system and take all these other pieces. I can't be building the stack and putting all of these pieces together. So, explain how, while you're disaggregating, at the end of the day, this is going to be simpler for customers, and operationally, it's something that they shouldn't have to touch too much. Yeah, so by disaggregating, we let the software guys do what the software guys do, which is software. And software is a powerful tool when it comes to the network. That was never really fully tapped until we opened up the switch and allowed it to be agnostic to the software that was running on top of it. So let me bring up a case in point, big switch, a big partner of ours who had a big announcement a couple days ago where we're actually entering into an OEM agreement that they've got a strong presence here. You know, through their software in that fabric, that very, very large and complex fabric, they've done a great job in terms of making that fabric appear to be much simpler than it really is. And it's all about the way you present it in terms of this complexity and how do we manage that? And so our mission in working with companies like Big Switch is to bring a level of simplicity to a piece of the data center that quite frankly, for the longest time has been thriving on complexity where people kind of got paid by understanding how complex things were and it really doesn't have to be that way. Software can be powerful, software can make lives easier, software can be an integral part of that IT transformation story and networking is no different when it comes to that. So you got some hard news at the show today. Why don't you talk about that? Yeah, so a couple of things we have going on. So for one, today we announced a new branding of our networking hardware portfolio. So given that we are powering some of the biggest data centers in the world, we are embracing the power adjective here and going with the power-sprich brand of networking switches. So joining some of our fellow Dell EMC product lines with that power theme on it, I think it's a great transition and so we're really excited about that and we're going to have some nice themes around flipping the switch from a power perspective to open networking which a lot of our customers are already doing today. So that's a big one that we have today. Another one that we have is we're announcing a couple of new power switches in that portfolio, some 25 gig switches that we're bringing to market really focused on a hyperconverged, software-defined storage use case where in a great many cases there's a small cluster that's small in size in terms of number of nodes but has a high degree of bandwidth that's required to make it perform. So we've introduced a couple of small port count 25 gig switches as well at the show. So very excited about those being the first two flagship power switches that we're bringing to the market. Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, I worked at EMC and when we worked on some of the package solutions, there were storage networking pieces but networking in general, I had advocated for years, we need to be able to bundle this together. You want to be able to have that easy button so that I can pre-configure and put everything together there. Can you explain that? People think HCI, they're like, oh, isn't that have networking all bundled in? How is it tied together? But yet, usually these are kind of separate pieces. I'd say up until a few months ago, networking was an afterthought from an HCI perspective and that's an industry statement not just from a Dell EMC perspective but leading up to that few months ago, we'd been working heavily, for example, with the VX rail team. Because while hyperconvergence has a great storyline around collapsing compute and storage together and the value prop there was really, really compelling, networking was this kind of, well, it's just going to sort of work. But if you took some deep conversations with our customers around problems they saw on deployment and areas where they might be holding themselves back in terms of performance of those systems, networking was a common theme. And so for us, it was a no-brainer to sit down with the VX rail team and say, how do we force the best practice in terms of the network and just automate the heck out of it? And so what we did is develop a deep set of integrations with VX rail manager where our OS 10 operating system can do a handshake with VX rail manager and take the number of steps to deploy an HCI network and reduce it by 96%. So that's pretty compelling in terms of automation and we're doing it in such a way that it's always going to be that best practice every time. So there's no guessing on, did I do it correctly? Am I going to have a performance issue? Why not just automate that and make it really seamless? So great advancements there. Excited about even taking that further with them and additional work down the road next year. One of the things we're hearing from executives at Dell, certainly heard it from Jeff Clark in the analyst breakout this morning is alignment across the portfolio of Dell companies. Obviously VMware is a linchpin of your multi-cloud strategy. You can't talk with VMware executives, talk to them without hearing about NSX. So what are you doing with it in regard to NSX and NSX integration? Yeah, great question. So the great story that we have about NSX is in terms of what it's expecting of what we call the underlay or the physical network that's actually powering the network is they want it to be fabric-based, they want it to be good at transport and easy to manage. And so a lot of the work that we've been trying to do with them is how do we present that network into an NSX environment so that that physical and virtual network come together in a seamless way? So that's an area that we were spending a lot of time with them. Another area, moving beyond NSX into other elements that fall within their networking and security and business unit is what they're doing at the wide area network. So another big announcement that we have coming out today that I'm really excited to talk about is we've been teaming up with the VeloCloud business within VMware to deploy what we're calling the SD-WAN edge powered by VMware. So this is going to be a turnkey appliance coming preloaded with the VeloCloud software on it, running on our new virtual edge products which is a portfolio of products we added to the networking portfolio about a year ago. And what we believe it's going to go do is enable a significant transformation story of customers that want to shift to this software-defined WAN. And the economics behind this, I mean, we don't have enough time on the interviewer to go into it, but the savings that customers can gain moving to a software-defined WAN strategy just in the transport cost alone over the wide area network are compelling. Yeah, so Drew, just to put a point on that, when we've looked at multicloud, SD-WAN is one of those areas that, customers said, oh, this is a real enabler. I can't really do multicloud. I can have a bunch of pieces, but if I want to tie it together, if I want to really do anything there, SD-WAN's enablement. Can you explain kind of why that is? Yeah, I mean, because at the end of the day, look at, you're sitting there on your, what's called that an endpoint device, and think about the traffic padding that you're generating as an employee. Some of that traffic is going to public cloud A, some is going to public cloud B, some is going to a centralized data center. These traffic patterns, they're becoming more complex. They're carrying more and more traffic as we crank up the bandwidth in terms of what we're trying to support. And so our customers, when they look at that, how do they bring order to that? And if you don't have a software-defined approach where you can bring some level of centralization, a policy, and end-to-end visibility of all those endpoints, it's going to become unruly, which is what it's become for a great many customers. So it's very rare that I come across a customer that doesn't want to have an SD-WAN conversation to your point because the pain points are there. Traffic continues to grow. The multi-cloud story means I have to direct it to several different clouds, including my own, including to others, and I got to have an effective way to go do that. What is this flip-to-switch meme? Flip-to-switch, yeah, great. So you'll see some people walking around with flip-to-switch shirts. So in commemoration of our PowerSwitch brand that we're announcing today, we want to encourage our customers to flip the switch to open networking, to embrace the modern network design that we've been talking about for the past five years, that a great many of our customers have been flipping the switch to. So we've been consistently growing about 2X the market in the data center space with what we've been doing with this open networking approach, and we want to crank it up even higher, so we're inviting all our customers to flip the switch over to open networking, so. Give us the bottom line. Why Dell Networking? Summarize it forward. Why Dell Networking? Because we are going to be the company that's going to have the conversation around a modern network that's going to enable you to be a software-defined and live in that multi-cloud world. Full stop. That's it. Everything we do from the lowest piece of hardware to every piece of software that we work to the partners that we partner with are all about enabling that journey, and it's a really simple strategy. Awesome, Drew, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Great to have you. Appreciate it. All right, keep it right there, everybody. Back with our next guest right after this short break. Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back.