 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital experience. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm pleased to welcome back a CUBE alumni and a new CUBE member to the program today. Chandumai Mondal is back with us, Director of Solutions Marketing for Dell Technologies. Chandumai, it's great to see you at Dell Technologies World, even though we are very socially distanced. Happy to be back. Thank you, Lisa. And Thomas Henson is joining us for the first time, Global Business Development Manager for AI and Analytics. Thomas, welcome to theCUBE. Hey, I'm excited to be here. It's my first virtual CUBE. Well, well, you better make it a good one. All right guys, so we're talking about AI. So, so much has changed. Chandumai, the last time I saw you, we probably were sitting a lot closer together. So much has changed in the last six, seven months, but a lot has changed with the adoption of AI. Thomas, kick us off. What are some of the big things fueling AI adoption right now? Yeah, I would have to say the two biggest things right now are as we look at accelerated compute. And by accelerated compute, we're not just talking about the continuation of Moore's law, but how in data analytics, we're actually doing more processing now with GPUs, which give us faster insights. And so now we have the ability to get quicker insights in jobs that may have taken weeks to months as long as we were measuring. And then the second portion is when we start to talk about the innovation going on in the software and framework world, right? So no longer do you have to know C++ or a lower level language, you can actually do it in Python and even pull it off of GitHub and it's all part of that open source community. So we're seeing more folks in the field of data science and deep learning that can actually implement some code. And then we've got faster compute to be able to process that. Tanya, what are your thoughts? The thing I want to add is the explosive growth of data and that's actually fueling the AI adoption. Think of like all the devices we have, the IoT and edge devices doing data or pumping data into the pipeline, high resolution satellite imagery, all social media generating data. Now, all of this data are actually helping the adoption of AI because now we have very granular data to train the AI model, make the AI models much better precise. So the combination of both in data, the power of like GPU powered servers are coupled with the innovations in the AI software and tools helping fuel the AI growth that we are seeing today. Chandra Mai, one of the things that we've known for a while now is that it's for AI to be valuable, it's about extracting value from that data. You talked about the massive explosion in data, but yet we know for a long time, we've been talking about AI for decades, initiatives can fail. What can Dell technologies do now to help companies have successful AI projects? Yeah, so as you were saying, Lisa, what we are seeing is the companies are trying to adopt AI technologies to drive value and extract value from their data set. Now, the way it needs to be framed is there is a business challenge that customers are trying to solve. The business challenge gets transformed into a data science problem that data scientist is going to work with the AI technology train the model. That data science problem gets to the data science solution and then it needs to be mapped to production deployment as a business solution. What happens a lot of the time is the companies do not plan for how to transition from small scale proof of concept that data scientists are playing with like a smaller set of data to when it goes to the large production deployment dealing with terabytes to terabytes of data. Now, that's where we come in. At Dell Technologies, we have end to end solutions for the AI solution in the customer's journey starting from a proof of concept to production. And it is all seamless, modular, and very scalable. So if some of the challenges there are just starting with iterations. Thomas, question for you as business development manager, those folks that Tondemai talked about, the data scientists, the business, how are you helping them come together from the beginning so that when the POC is initiated it actually can go on the right trajectory to be successful? No, that's a great point. And just to kind of build off of what Shondemai was talking about, we call it that last mile, right? Like, hey, I've got a great POC. How do I get into production? Well, if you have executive sponsorship and it's like, hey, everybody was on board but it's gonna take six months to a year. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're gonna lose some momentum. So where we help our customers is by partnering with them to show them how to build from an IT and an infrastructure perspective what that AI architecture looks like, right? So we have multiple solutions around that. And at the end of the day, it's about just like Shondemai was saying, we may start off with a project that maybe it's only half a terabyte, maybe it's 10 terabytes, but once you go into production, if it turns out to be three petabytes, four petabytes, nobody really has the infrastructure built unless they've built on those solid practices. And that's where our solutions come in. So we can go from small scale laboratory all the way to large scale production without having to move any of that data, right? So at the heart of that is power scale and giving you that ability to scale your data and no more data migration so that you can handle one PC or multiple PCs as those models continue to improve as you start to move into production. And I was sticking with you for a second. Oh, sorry, Shondemai, go ahead. So I was going to add that just like Thomas said, right? So if you are a data scientist, you are working with these data science workstations but getting the data from Dell EMC power scales, the scale out platform. And as it is growing from POC to large scale production, data can stay in place with the power scale platform. You can add nodes and it can grow to petabytes and you can add in not just the workstations but also Dell PowerEdge servers which is building out our entire AI-ready solutions AI-ready solution for your production giving a very seamless experience from the data scientist to the IT. Shondemai, we'll stick with you then. I'm curious to know in the last six to seven months since 2020 has gone in a very different direction than we all would have predicted our last Dell Technologies world together. What are you seeing, Shondemai, in terms of acceleration or maybe different industries? What are customers needs? How they changed, I guess I should say, in 2020? So in 2020, we are seeing the adoption of AI even more rapidly. If you think about customers ranging from like say media and entertainment industry to the customer services of any organization to the healthcare and life sciences where lots of genome analysis going on in all of these places where we are dealing with large data sets, we are seeing a lot of adoption, faster processing of AI technologies giving with say all the research that these biosciences organizations are happening. Thomas, I know like you are working with like a customer, so can you give us a little bit more example in there? Yes, one of the areas, you know, if we're talking about 2020, one of the things that we're seeing more and more is just the expansion of just look at the need for customer support, right? There are more folks working remotely, there are more folks that are learning remotely. I know my child is going through virtual schools. So think about your IT organization and how many calls you're having now to expand. And so this is a great area where we're starting to see innovation within AI and model building to be able to have, let's call it the next generation of chatbots, right? So you can actually build these models off the data to augment those support systems because you have two choices, right? You can either expand out your call center for we're not sure how long or you can use AI and analytics to help augment, to help maybe answer some of those first baseline questions. The great thing about customers who are choosing PowerScale and Dell Technologies that are partner is they already have the resources to be able to hold on to that data that's going to help them train those models to help. So Thomas, whenever we're talking about data and the explosions, it brings to mind compliance, protection, security, and we've seen ransomware really skyrocket in 2020. Just the other week there was the VA was hit. I think there was also social media, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, 235 million users because there was an unsecured cloud database so that threat vector is expanding. How can you help customers accelerate their AI projects while ensuring compliance and protection and security of that data? Really, that's the sweet spot for PowerScale when we're talking with customers, right? Built on 1FS with all the security features in mind. And I too came from the analytics world. So I remember in the early days of Hadoop where as a software developer, we didn't need security, right? We were doing researchy stuff, but then when we took it to the customer and we were pushing to production, well, what about all the security features we needed? Same thing for artificial intelligence, right? We want to make sure that we're putting those security features and compliances in. And that's where from an AI architecture perspective, by starting with 1FS at the heart of that solution, you can know that you're protecting for all the enterprise features that you need, whether it be from compliance to data strategy, to backup and recovery as well. So when we're talking about big data volumes, Chandra Mai, we have to talk about the hyperscalers. Talk to us about, you know, they each offer Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, hundreds of AI services. So how does Dell help customers use the public cloud, the data that's created outside of it and use all of those, use the right AI services to extract that value? Yeah, now, as you mentioned, all of these hyperscalers, they differentiate with services like AI, ML, deep learning technologies, right? And as a customer, you want to leverage best of all the cloud has to offer and not stuck with one particular cloud provider. However, we are talking about terabytes of data, right? So if you are happy with doing service A from cloud provider, say Google, but you want to move to take advantage of another service of Azure, it comes with a very high industry migration risk and time it will take to move the data itself. Now, that's not good, right? As the customer, we should be able to leverage best of breed cloud services for AI and for that matter for anything across the board. Now, how we help customers is you can have all of your data, say in a managed cloud service provider running on PowerScale, but then you can connect from this managed cloud service provider directly to any of the hyperscalers. You can connect to AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and even like even the in place analytics that PowerScale offers, you can run those, I mean run those cloud AI services directly on that data simultaneously from these three. And I'll add like one more thing, right? These deep learning technologies need GPU powered servers, right? And cloud, even within like one cloud it is not a homogeneous environment. Like sometimes you'll find a US East has more GPU powered servers but like you are in West and same for other providers. Now, with our technologies cloud PowerScale for multi-cloud, PowerScale is sitting outside of those hyperscalers connected directly to any of this and then you can burst into different clouds, like advantage of our spot instances and like leverage all the GPUs not from one particular service provider but all of those are hyperscalers. So those are some examples of the work we are doing in the multi-cloud world for AI. So that's, you're talking about data there. So PowerScale for multi-cloud for data that's created outside the public cloud but tell us what about for data that's created inside the cloud? How does Dell help with that? Yeah, so this year we actually released a solution in conjunction with GCP. So within Google Cloud you can have PowerScale for 1FS, right? And so that's that native feature. So goes through all the compliance and all the features within being a part of that GCP natively. So counts towards your credits and your Google billing as well but it's still all the features that you have. And so we've been running actually some benchmarks. So we've got a couple of light papers out there that kind of detail what we can do from an artificial intelligence perspective. Back to Shandomai's example where he was talking about being able to use more and more GPUs. So we've done that to run some of our AI benchmarks against that and then also jumped into the Hadoop space because that's one area from a PowerScale perspective customers are really interested and they have been for years. And then really the awesome portion about this is for customers that are looking for a hybrid solution or maybe it's their first kickoff to it. So back Lisa to those compliance features that we were talking about, those are still inherent within that native Google GCP 1FS version but then also for customers that have it on-prem you can use those same features to burst your data into your Isilon cluster using all the same native tools that you've been using for years within your enterprise. Got it. So starting out for PowerScale for Google Cloud. Shandomai, back to you kind of wrapping things up here. What are some of the things that we're going to see next from Dell, from an AI solutions perspective? Yes, so we are working on many different interesting projects ranging from the latest NVIDIA surfers that they have announced DTX-A100 and in fact, two weeks ago at GTC NVIDIA announced the super parts with DTX-A100 surfers. We are part of that ecosystem and we are working with leading solutions to benchmark our AI environments for all the storage, ensuring like we are providing like all the throughput and scalability that we have to offer. Shandomai's finishing with you from a customer perspective as we talked about so many changes this year alone as we approach calendar year 2021, what are some of the things that Dell is doing with its customers, with its partners, the hyperscalers and NVIDIA for example, do you think customers are really going to be able to truly accelerate successful AI projects? Yeah, so the first thing I'd like to talk about is what we're doing with the DTX-A100. So this month at GTC, you saw our solution for our reference architecture for the DTX-A100 plus PowerScale. So you talk about speed and how we can move customers' insights. I mean, some of the numbers that we're seeing off of that are really amazing, right? And so this gives the customers the ability to still take all the features and use Icelon and 1FS like they have in the past, but now combined with the speed of the A100 still be able to speed up how fast they're using those, building out those deep learning models. And then secondly with that, that gives them the ability to scale too. So there's some features inherent within this reference architecture that allow for you to make more use, right? So bring more data scientists and more modelers, GPUs, because that's one thing you don't see data scientists turning away, right? They're always like, hey, I mean, this project here needs a GPU. And so from a PowerScale 1FS perspective, we want to be able to make sure that we're supporting that so that as that data continues to grow, which we're seeing as one of the large factors, whenever we're talking about artificial intelligence is the scale for the data, we want them to be able to continue to build out that data consolidation area for all these multiple different workloads that are coming in. Excellent, Thomas. Thanks for sharing that. Hopefully next time we get to see you guys in person and we can talk about a customer who has done something very successful with you guys. Shona, may always great to talk to you. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. For Chondame Mondal and Thomas Henson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020.