 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas. We're about hitting the midway point of three days wall to wall life coverage on two sets. I'm Stu Miniman. My co-host is John Troyer. Happy to welcome to the program, first of all, a first time guest whose company was mentioned by Pat Gelsinger in the opening keynote. Chris Gregg, the CIO of Mercy Ships. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you Stu. And also happy to welcome back a regular on the program, John Siegel, who's the Vice President of Product Marketing with Dell EMC on the Infrastructure Solution Group. John, great to see you. Always glad to be here Stu, as you know. All right, so always excited. Not only a customer, but a customer as Pat said, doing good. So tell us a little bit about Mercy Ships mission. Thank you Stu. It was great to be here. I was super excited to have Pat mention us on the stage yesterday morning. Great opportunity. We meet the need that Pat mentioned. There are five billion people in this world who don't have access to safe and affordable surgical care. More than 30% of the deaths in this world are a result of lack of that access. So we meet that need. We operate hospital ships that provide surgical care in the developing world and support the countries by providing training and capacity building in those areas. It is a great mission. It's one of those things that, we've had a few examples here at the show. Malala Yousef, this morning was very inspiring. Talk to the company itself. How big, where do you operate around the globe? So we operate in primarily West and Southern and Eastern Africa. That's where you find many of the countries or most of the countries that are the least developed in this area. We're headquartered in the US. We have offices around the world for fundraising and recruiting. Our organization is a nonprofit. We are funded entirely by donation and our hospital ships are staffed entirely by volunteers. All right, and you've got the CIO hat on. So talk to us a little bit about IT. I lived on the vendor side. It's like, I actually remember in designing gear that was okay for those kind of environments, ruggedized and military and things like that. So tell us your role inside and what that encompasses. Well, for us the most important thing is ensuring that the organization is efficient and that we are delivering the best for our patients so the people we're serving in Africa. So we want our IT to be effective, efficient, simple, particularly with the ships being staffed as volunteers. We want to maximize the effort on board and we don't want to spend a lot of time supporting IT, if you like. So much of what we're doing and where we're going is around simplifying. And that's where VxRail has come in for us. All right, well, John, he's a straight man. He set you up. He set me up, right? Thank you for bringing us. We love CIOs. We love missions for good here. So yeah, he set you up on the Dell Connect. It doesn't get more inspirational than this though, does it, right? And so we've been, of course, we've been focused with Hyperconverged on simplifying IT now for years. And whether it's helping companies refocus their energies and their resources to innovate or it's helping nonprofits literally save lives. I mean, this is to me, this is what inspires us to do good and actually really to double down on really driving more and more simplicity into our products. Well, Chris, I'm really interested in some of the technical details because we heard a lot here at VMworld about the edge, right? The edge has a lot of different meanings and connotations but not everything can live up in a regional data center, up in the public cloud, right? And a ship is probably a canonical example. So I'm kind of fascinated with what kinds of things do you encounter that you wouldn't encounter? Were you in, you know, AWS East or something like? What do you have to do on this ship and you're all self-contained and et cetera? Yeah, our primary constraint is availability of bandwidth. So going back a couple of years, we were relying purely on satellite, had a maybe about five meg connection for a full hospital ship, 400 people. We've gone up to about a hundred meg now. So we're still tiny. So that really constrained. So we have this hybrid environment of on-premise on-ship with a live, live data centers, two data centers on-ship, headquarters as well. And then we're starting to look at what we can take into the cloud. So the concept of a hybrid approach, especially with one vendor, a partner with VMware and Dell, bringing it all together in one place and one support model is really fantastic for us. Yeah, you have amphibious cloud, is I think what you have, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so, you know, John, are there any special things that you have to do from a gear standpoint, from their standpoint? Well, it's interesting, you know, I think from their requirements perspective, so first of all, they're looking for small footprint, of course, and hyper-converged by nature is smaller. And so we've done that there. And, you know, but in addition to that, I think, as we've talked about too, we're also helping them hyper-converge their operations as well, right? I mean, as he mentioned, as Chris mentioned, they have IT volunteers on staff that are literally coming, you know, they're volunteering their own time, they don't stay for, what, a couple months at a time? Three months at a time. Constant rotation of new staff, they can't be experts on storage and servers and networking and all that. What they need is to be able to hyper-converge operations into more of a generalist type of approach. And so that's really where we, you know, where our effort to really help them is, I think, is enable them to have IT generalists be able to handle all the upgrades and the deployments so that it just works. But beyond that, from a hardware standpoint, no, nothing specific there other than the small footprint. Yeah, but from a personnel standpoint, you want that easy button, right? Absolutely, yeah. You don't have to, right, training them up, maintaining it. I know when I talk to a lot of HCI customers, you know, they never touch the box. It's like, great, I've got some interface and I can do that. You know, what's your experience been? How long have you had the solution? So we've had the solution in headquarters for about a year and we're building a new ship ready to be launched in 2020. It's actually another aspect for us is when we started looking at this in 2016, we were looking out four years, really, for the time it takes to build a ship and thinking forward to what would be coming four years time, what do we need to put our bets on, if you like. So looking at VxRail when it started coming into play. So we've actually started building the data centers for the new ship, had a good experience so far. We're getting ready to pack that up and be sending out to be installed on the ship next year. Yeah, as we've talked about, the faster you can deploy one of these floating hospitals, the quicker you can help patients, right? So this is kind of giving a whole new meeting to, you know, the ability to really simplify deployment as well as the whole life cycle and saving them. What are some of the workloads that you're running then on these active, active data centers? That's kind of interesting as well. So on the ship we have, it's interesting, we have such a mix. We operate a hospital, of course. We operate services to maintain plants or machinery and all that sort of stuff. So there's not too much IoT at this point, although our new ship will have some more. There's, so in the hospital you've got things like radiology, patient records, all those sorts of things. We operate a school on board as well. We have a small general office support as well. So on the ship it's quite mixed and varied. All right. But it really was the flexibility, right? I think the flexibility of hyperconverge that allows you to run, some of your kind of running the basic applications. But also this ship's going to be deployed, you know, several years from now as well with the similar technologies. So it's important to be able to support not just today's applications, but some of the next gen applications that are coming down the pipe to help you improve care, right? And with the new ship we'll be deploying VDI as well. So we'll be going that step as well with Horizon. I was curious with like the teaching and everything there, there's lots of use cases that come to mind there. John, what does Dell do for the non-profits? So you know, obviously HCI is designed to be affordable to begin with, but you know, for this class of customer anything special or it's just part of the regular future proofing and everything like that that makes this possible. Yeah, I mean, I think what we're doing for now, I mean, again, I think this is just a great opportunity to work, to hear this and to see the how simplicity is really being achieved and helping save lives. So I think from that perspective, we couldn't be happier. I think also, you know, what we've really poured is a heart and soul and energy into this product so that it just works, right? And I think, you know, a lot of what I think also Chris looked at was having, wanted to make sure he had a single vendor. So we've made sure that we have everything from data protection, right, to the actual infrastructure itself, to we actually have DLMC Isilon in there as well, but providing a single point of contact to support that whole stack so that, you know, you have volunteers on site, on the ship, giving a whole new meaning to on-prem, by the way, right, on ship. And yet, if there is an issue, they have the peace of mind to know that is one call to Dell EMC, right, to support that entire stack. So again, that's really what, you know, we're proud of is to see the value proposition that we envisioned years ago start to really, you know, be realized in a situation like this where it's really helping save lives. Chris, I understand it's your first time at the show. We always, you know, it's a very welcoming community, but what's your impressions been so far? And, you know, you probably have a slightly different experience than the average person. It's not usually mentioned by the CEO of the company. Yes, it's been quite the introduction to be mentioned. We were brought in and sat right in the front row in the keynote and that was very exciting too. So it's been fantastic to be here. Really inspiring to see some of the things that are coming along in the future. I've had lots of ideas thinking about what we could do next and how we could continue to improve what we're doing so that we can continue to serve more people, have a bigger impact for our organization. It's amazing. I was actually just looking at the volunteer page. You know, the beautiful thing about VMworld is it is, although there are a couple of VM, there's a VMworld in Europe and a VMworld here, but this community is global, right? There are people here from all over the world and some of them might be able to take a couple months off. Absolutely, yeah. And so, I mean, what kind, I see, I ask systems administrator and support specialist, all sorts of stuff. I mean, it's- Yes, so there's two vacancies in our team at the moment. As you mentioned, the system admin and the support specialist, our website, mercyships.org has all the volunteer opportunities. Last year we had volunteers from 68 countries. All sorts of skills, not just medical, obviously. Administrative, all sorts. So go and have a look at the website. That's awesome. Chris, one thing I always like to talk to CIOs these days. How's your role changing when you look at what's happened the last couple of years? Change is evident from everything you see at this show. What are you seeing from yourself and when you talk to your peers as to how things are moving? For me, the role has really moved into trying to understand how mercyships can multiply our impact and looking at how technology can be a part of that. It's looking at how to optimize and make our operations more efficient. As an organization funded by donors, we want to make sure that we maximize those dollars to be delivering patient care. So looking at how as an organization we can really double down and multiply what we do through technology. Yeah. All right, that's great. You look, IT used to be very internally focused. Mercyships mission, obviously, very much looking external on the CIO. John, want to give you, you talked to a lot of customers at this show. This is a great story. Any other things from the show? I got to say, as we're just talking about here though, it is such an inspiring story and it is an opportunity now for all the vCenter administrators here at the show. By the way, because VX Real Course, you can just use familiar tools like vCenter, VMware Tools. This is a pretty good recruiting area for you right now. Again, it's all coming together for us here and I think the opportunity for us to give back and away here as Dell Technologies, as VMware together, this is what we envisioned and we're just happy to be able to have a storyline like this and we look forward to maybe being on the cube again with Chris in the future as they bring the next ship online as well. Yeah, always, by the way, our studios are always open for the nonprofits. No charge, have them in. We've got Palo Alto, we've got Boston Area. We do love to be able to support that as we can. All right, I want to give you both a final word. Things looking forward, takeaways from your experience so far. Yeah, so one of the things that's really interesting for me is thinking through how we can start integrating Workplace One. So looking at, with the turnover of volunteer staff, we want to make sure the edge is really simple that we can support that. Also thinking through what we want to do to increase our resilience and DR capabilities and starting to look at how we can use the cloud more. Particularly, hybrid cloud with multiple different providers. So yeah, really exciting. Thank you so much for the opportunity. I've really been good to be here and mostly ships.org is the place to go and find out more. Yeah, just to add to that again. So I mean, we're just, we're honored to be able to be part of this story with you across the Dell Technologies family and we look forward to continue to providing the best experience you can have for your ships going forward and I hope we can continue our partnership. Thank you, John, thank you. John and Chris, thank you so much. Be sure to check out mercyships.org for those volunteer opportunities and check out thecube.net where you can find all of the video content from the show and all the others. For John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with lots more coverage here from VMworld 2018. 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