 Welcome back everyone. theCUBE's live coverage here, our 13th year covering VMworld, now VMware Explorer, VMware Explorer in its second year. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE with Rob Stratche, Dave Vellante, and Lisa Martin are on our other set. We've got two sets, two channels, live feed, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. But a great conversation here with Dell Technologies and new Belgium Brewery, that Brewery, Ash McCarthy, Director of Product Management at Dell Technology. Ash, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Enterprise, Adam Little, Enterprise Security and Compliance Manager, new Belgium Brewery. Yeah. Great to have you on. It's 12 o'clock somewhere. Let's, almost 12 o'clock. About beer time. It's beer o'clock. Yeah. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Big topic here, obviously, is multi-cloud AI, VMware transforming, you get the Broadcom acquisition looming, they got a big portfolio from chips to the apps that are coming on. Modern applications are coming, right? We're seeing the AI app wave, it was a cloud wave, which was kind of not in the chart, but AI wave's coming, the app's got to sit somewhere. And the quote on stage here at the keynote that was really compelling, kind of nuanced, we picked up on it, is Jensen, the CEO of NVIDIA, said, quote, the runtime of AI in these modern apps, in quotes, you didn't say that, but that's what he meant, is multi-cloud. This means it's an operating environment, which is like, it's kind of getting out there, Ash. It's just like time. You got it. Yeah, so I think the big thing is, is how you look at the relationship between Dell and VMware, specifically on VxRail, the joint engineering model that we have. This is a great event for me, because when I talk to our customers, it's all about pairing VxRail and with all the VMware technologies. So all these announcements are always apical to VxRail. So how we look at it is the capabilities that VMware is exposing to our customer base, they can then deploy those on VxRail and get all the automated infrastructure outcomes that we make available to customers and the value that they can drive into the product. Awesome, and all beer jugs aside, New Belgium brewery, great brewery. I've driven for a very good, strong opportunity there. What's the story with you guys? Why are you here? What's the use case? Yeah, so I think for us, there was a pretty big appetite for our business to standardize our infrastructure. You know, kind of, we're always going to have on-prem hardware, because we're a brewery. We manufacture things, and there's things like PLCs and valve controls and things that we wouldn't risk running those somewhere that was off-site. So for us, it was about getting that cloud-like delivery of on-premise infrastructure, which obviously at the root of that is VxRail with VMware and Dell, co-engineered solution. So as we migrated adding new sites, just trying to really get that foundation, that's going to be our infrastructure solution of choice and understanding how we right-size all those data centers. Because our biggest challenge now is we're growing fast enough that it's hard to understand what beer should we make where? How can we get that to our products, products to our customers faster? This is probably some of the same challenges all businesses are facing, and figuring out those logistics. We joke that we did IoT before anyone called it IoT. If you're your neighbor brewery and they make a batch of your beer and something goes wrong, they'll probably blend it with something else or they'll find some way to make it a bespoke one-off. When we're making 1,000 hectiliters of fat tire and something goes wrong, we need to flush down half a million dollars worth of product. So that can't go wrong, right? So any of the data we can use to make those changes along the way to make sure we get the outcome. Well, this is exactly kind of the cost of ownership. The consequences of a bad batch is huge. You can quantify it. And so this is where you got to get into this joint engineering solution. Talk about the joint engineering solution. How do you guys pull together that whole piece? Yeah, so it's permeates all part of the relationship between us and VMware. I think when you think about the jointly engineering model, it starts up front on just planning strategy on what are our demands, what are our needs for our customers, but also downstream even as we do the development work. So I think if you look at the value that it delivers to customers is that we have that joint engineering and validation for the product. So we can ensure that reliability. So when Adam and his team are making all that beer, the likelihood of any issue occurring is minimized, right? We provide the automation of the outcomes so they can focus on making delicious beer and not have to focus on the boring task of managing firmware updates and managing lifecycle updates. We take care of all that. And for us, just to add onto that, the trust we have in VMware solution and Dell solutions has really helped us build a foundation of we know we don't need a double and triple check. The validation work's been done for us, right? That's not value add work, is looking at compatibility matrices and trying to make sure you're planning those upgrades. But I think what's really interesting and I think you only scratched the surface of it and I think this is what's key to a lot of people and I know VMware is going to talk about it, I think in the keynote tomorrow, but we'll kind of give a little bit of a preview here is that the fact that they're going to talk about edge and they're going to talk about specific industries and manufacturing is one of their big pushes and in fact, in some pre-briefings, we actually talked about a Dell system which was a very small system that could run VxRail basically with the quorum and everything like that in there was a two node system, almost like one rack. Tell us about those locations you're putting this into. Yeah, so I think the next big steps for us as a company, we've been fortunate that our key locations in Fort Collins and Asheville are office locations. So we've been, we have talented staff there to manage those data centers that are on those sites, but as we acquire other sites, we don't necessarily have that skilled staffing there. So it's important that that is very easily remotely managed and trustworthy, right? A platform that we're not driving three hours to get to the next site. As we brought on Bell's Brewing in Michigan, they joined our family. We deployed a VxRail there in Comstock and they were very impressed with the performance and the ability to scale that and back to the planning what to brew where we need a platform that can grow with us because we're going 110 miles an hour and you can't get out of the car, right? Like we got to keep moving. So our newest acquisition was in Daleville, Virginia and it's a facility with no staffing there. So we're training our crew there to, well, some brewing staffing, but no IT staffing there. So for us, we were initially looking at the VD-4000 that could run on the shop floor if we needed it to because there was no server room. But as we look at our five year plan for they really want to accelerate that site, it's like, okay, get out there and install air conditioning, get a nice server room, get a bigger VxRail cluster because we might need eight nodes in two years, right? So the four that we deployed initially. So really understanding solutions that can scale with your business, right? Yeah, I think that totally makes sense. And I think that again, two-hearted and Bell's is another favorite of mine. So it's very good stuff. I like those acquisitions. And I think when you start to look at it, it plays to that strength. I think that even with Broadcom coming in here, I think Broadcom plays to that edge type of and networking type of flavors. So I think you're in good company from that perspective, I think from VMware. I think when you see this, is it really the combination of the VxRail software and how it integrates in with the VMware stack that's really been key, you're getting your ROI out of this, right? For sure. And I think that for our folks, our engineers, VMware is what they're comfortable with, right? So why, a lot of the reasons that people went to cloud solutions was the ease of delivery, but then they're also stuck in this position of, am I going to learn this environment? What if we need to move it to another cloud provider? So a lot of the solutions that VMware enables is, hey, stick with VMware. That's what we know with vCenter and everything that you're used to with VMware. And if we can extend that and get that same level of delivery or same level of elastic growth if we need it, then great. That's the best of both worlds. So I think that's, as we're seeing those solutions grow now with some of the announcements they made today with AI and ML, and that's super interesting to talk about generative AI and how we could use that for supply chain optimization. Just really get you going, thinking about what you should be doing to enable your business. And I think for a lot of folks, that's an uncomfortable but a needed shift of, hey, that's not value add we're keeping the lights on. Let's, how do we transform our business? How do we enable new technologies on a platform we can trust? As you guys, this was vSphere 8 into VxRail, and there's the vSAN Express Storage Architecture. And they talk about some of the integrations, some of the new things. Sure, yeah. As part of that joint engineering I talked about with VMware, we're always looking to work with VMware to integrate some of the latest and greatest features and some of the key temple ones that I think about when I talk to customers is vSphere 8 with DPUs. So last year that was introduced right at the entrance of vSphere 8, also the vSAN 8 with their Express Storage Architecture. The DPUs is kind of a game changer for a lot of customers because it's a new way to deploy and manage vSphere on a DPU. And so what we're seeing from customers is the ability to move some of their networking to that DPU. You know, not only does it improve the performance of the whole system, accelerates those workloads, but also security is a big thing. Now you have the east-west traffic that no longer goes into the host. So that's been key. And we basically automate the whole entire process. So this was Project Monterey. It's what we're talking about. This is the first time we've heard about it this week, so that's good. We're talking code names now, yeah. Yeah, well, it was gonna say that it was the card, almost a system on a card that was kind of competitive to what Nitro was with AWS. So it's good to hear that in the wild. Oh yeah, you guys are using it? We are not using it. We have lots of customers that are actually deployed and using it. And again, all those values is we automate all that. So customers don't have to worry about the DPU. The other piece of this is vSAN ESA. And so their ExpressStorage architecture, while customers are very receptive to it, is not only does it deliver that performance, right? So it's very, very powerful in that aspect. All NVMe systems, high performance, low latency, but also kind of the efficiency of the data services. So a lot of customers are now saying, hey, before I had to run my system with RAID 1, now I can run RAID 5, RAID 6, get that same level of capabilities. And so we've enabled them to do that on our VxRail systems, having the different flexibility of configurations, working with VMware to get those enabled and in the portfolio. You know, it's interesting, I've been in this industry so long. I love hardware, I admit that. Love software too, that's what I was trained on. But you look at all the AI conversations, it's really about IO. I mean, all the processing, the training, the information is all about performance in a way that's data center like. And when I say that, I mean like systems. So when you've got VxRail, the AI equation has to plug into that. And if you're good at IO, dealing with latency and moving data around. So that becomes a big tailwind. Yeah, so I think one thing that's often, let that conversation, cause it's not sexy, right? Like the hardware is not sexy. I've lived that well for a long time. And customers want to focus on the software. And there's a lot of awesome announcements today and I'm sure we're getting more. But we've been playing in this space with NVIDIA and VMware. Well, when they announced the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software, so we've supported on rail, we've been working with customers. It's really been super charged in the last, six months since everyone's, Gen AI, you can't go anywhere without them, it's in Gen AI chat. I think Gen AI and chat to you here are like synonymous at this point, like Kleenex is. But the key thing is that customers are telling us, hey, VMware's come out with new software capability to help us automate and deploy easier. Now we can pair that with VxRail, so we can automate the infrastructure and then you can have the flexibility to have that workhorse on the back end to deliver the high performance for your inferencing, for your training of those workloads. So it's really delivering that capability to customers. So one question, cause you have security and compliance in your title. How does this help you with that? What are the things that other customers should consider when they're looking at this? I mean, I think that being a co-engineered solution with Dell and VMware right, being deployed in the VMware validated design checks a lot of boxes for us cause I think a lot of times on the security level of some of your infrastructure, it's not often, you know, malice that was intended, it was an accidental misconfiguration of something that leaves something open. You can trust that every time we're doing an update, it's resetting that configuration. It's back into that validated design. And then there's obviously big support for VMware Stig hardening packs on the X-Rail, which we leveraged to lock down some of the logins and just do some different things that really help on the security side. But for us, it was really about going back to the business and saying, hey, we're not going to have this where we acquire some facility and they're running something that nobody knows out of support. We don't know if it's insecurity compliance, right? It's become part of our acquisition strategy that that is our enterprise solution and we will migrate that site as soon as possible to that solution to kind of keep that in check with our internal security controls. Adam, how's the relationship been with Dell? Give a quick plug, been good with support. You get feedback to their product roadmap. They're responsive. Yeah, so I'm on the customer advisory council for them and it's really encouraging to see that feedback loop go from customers to engineers to into the product. And the same thing with VMware, right? You guys, this is a co-engineered solution. So it's great to see a lot of the software features get turned on that we've been looking for with that. But yeah, we could not grow our business without that combined approach to this infrastructure that we're using, so. Successful. Yeah, very successful. And these relationships is, you call them design parties, we call them joint customers. What's the category? Yeah, so to me, it's just customer input, customer voice, right? So listen to the customer voice. So Adam's been tremendous. Our entire customer base has been tremendous. So, you know, we have over $19,000 customers on DXRail, so we get a lot of input. And all of that feeds back into our development process. And so when you look at the forward, you know, the areas where customers are challenged in their business and how we can help them and help help Adam, it's driving some of that input into the product, right? Enhancing some of the things where they come to us and key words we listen for is, oh man, I don't like doing that or we have to click that button a bunch of times. We take that as, hey, how can we automate that? How can we make it easier? So they don't have to work on click and buttons. They can click one button, it does it for them, auto remediates it and they can go back to doing whatever they need to be successful. You turn up more breweries, make them more efficient, the acquisitions, grow your company, you set the table. Yeah, so we definitely hit a pinch point earlier this year where we could not make enough voodoo ranger to fulfill customer demand. So that's a good spot to be in, but also a bad spot to say, hey, we're leaving money on the table, right? So trying to buy some more VXRail. Ash, where's that VXRail, so pedal harder. I was just glad when Ashville opened up and we could actually get, you know, all of this out in Massachusetts, which has really arcane distribution laws, but it was still great to see you guys come to town. Absolutely, it's one of those interesting things that every state has different rules, but really for us, you know, helping the business push and make better decisions with that data of like, to your point, can we get you fresher beer in Massachusetts now coming out of Michigan? Maybe instead of Ashville, coming out of Virginia because we're getting closer to you. Do we need to make that next site acquisition up there in those New England states because that's where we're pushing those products? Well, we certainly want to put an idea out there for you for the Cube jointly developed Dell brewery product called The Edge, you know. Co-engineered beer, 9% alcohol. Come on, let's go. Cube, yeah, we can. Cube. Quad. Adam Ash, congratulations. Congratulations on the success of VXRail. I'm glad to see that. Any new product features coming out that you can want to share or let folks know about? Yeah, absolutely. So two big announcements. One, just in the last month, we introduced the VXRail 16G platforms. These are based on the 16G powered portfolio. So when you think about, we talked about the next gen AI capability, so very fast nicks, very fast CPUs, very fast memory is what's going to need to be driven these gen AI workloads. Another piece of that is also looking forward in the path and saying, hey, what are customers telling us they need and they need more GPUs? Working with NVIDIA, obviously, get access to those GPUs because I know they're backlogged on that, but trying to get systems with more densely packed GPUs. Another area is specifically around the BCF5 introduction. So BCF5 was introduced by VMware. We've now incorporated that on BCF on VXRail and that's been a tremendous amount of success. Congratulations, Adam. Great to have you on. Always a great conversation with customers. Thanks for coming on. I'm John Furrier, hosting with Rob Streche. Breaking it all down, getting the data, sharing the stories. 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