 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, and welcome to a special presentation of theCUBE. I'm your host, Stu Miniman, and I'm happy to be welcomed by John Siegel, Vice President of Product Marketing in the Dell EMC CPSD Group. John, great to see you. Hey, great to see you again, Stu, as well. So, John, you've now matched me in how many EMC worlds you've been to. I missed my first one in 15 years. I said every 15 years, I think I got it. I think I got to take one off. So, yeah, first, give us your impression. You've been, you know, back when it was EMC World, back when it was called something, even before that, ETS and things like that. Dell EMC World, for our audience, give us a little bit of, you know, what was different, what was exciting? Absolutely, well, first of all, it didn't lose its original feel, which is really about for the technologist, right, at the end of the day. So we really still felt that, but at the same time, this was the first time Dell EMC came together, right? This was the first Dell EMC world in Vegas. And let's say that, in addition to all the technologist sessions and such, that were really focused on really dealing to the best practices and everything else around the technologies, we also had a lot of exciting keynotes as well. And I don't think anyone's ever seen a Captain Canada superhero flying through the sky to land as we did with Chad Sackage on day three. So again, it was an exciting show. I think that just, that capped it off, but a real exciting show. Yeah, well, in the history of Chad in keynotes, I remember when they gave up Bobbleheads, used to do videos of people flying out of planes and music videos and things like that. So your group with Chad Runes always keeps it interesting. It does, and hey, it wasn't the same without you though. Next year? Yeah, I do plan to be there next year. Thank you, and look, we had tons of videos there. Want to capture some of the things that we didn't get at the show. Of course, the new generation of servers coming out has a ripple effect through the product line, but one of the highlights, and it's not just because I focus on it and you work on it, but that maturation of kind of converged, hyper-converged infrastructure, laying some of the foundational pieces for really modern infrastructure. Talk to us a little bit about the announcements that you had there, some of the key takeaways. Absolutely, so first and foremost, as you said, a lot of really Dell EMC World this year did focus on essentially taking the mix of technologies that we have, for example, with software to find, HCI, NextGen, we had the 14 generation power edge announce as well, and actually when you combine those and integrate those into a turn key system and solution, VXRAC for example, that was real exciting news as well. So we had exciting news where you're basically taking hyper-converged at rack scale, which as we've talked about, this can become essentially the on-prem cloud of the future, and this is where we see it going now. We see the future five to 10 years out where customers are going to have a hybrid cloud. They're going to have workloads that are running on the public cloud. They're going to have workloads that they prefer to have on their on-prem as well. We see and we hear from customers, and we're seeing it in the numbers as well in terms of customer adoption. Customers are moving very, very quickly to HCI and software to find. Yeah, maybe some people look at, they said, Dell and EMC, they partnered together for many years, then they had a breakup, and when you put it together, is it just Dell servers being skewed into everything there? Give us a little bit of insight as to what that means. What stays the same and what changes when you talk about the CPSD portfolio? Yeah, quite the contrary. So the way we talk about it too is there's really a continuum that customers actually consider. They can do everything from build out their own cloud themselves, or they can actually consume it, right? And the way they consume it is through term key systems. So what we do in the Converge Platform and Solutions Division is we don't just package things together, that's a simple task. Certainly we have that option for customers, but rather what we do is we create an integrated term key system and experience that really lays the foundation for the on-prem cloud, right, and ultimately the hybrid cloud as well. And that's what we do, right? So we take server networking, storage, compute, virtualization, technologies, and we basically, we design it as a system. We don't design each one separately. In fact, what we have really are folks that look at the data center overall, what's required from a scaling perspective in making sure that we pre-validate the system and also take essentially the burden, if you will, of life cycle management off of the customer's shoulders, and we take it onto our shoulders to ensure that over time, not just the initial implementation of a term key system, but overall over five to 10 years, we take all that life cycle management headache off of the customer as well. One of the things that excited me when we talk about that wave of HCI is customers used to have that horrible thing which was called the upgrade cycle. That's right. And it would be like, wait, this year came up, somebody in finance says, hey, you have X number of dollars allocated for this bucket. And they're like, but maybe I didn't even need that bucket this year. Maybe I needed another bucket. It was how I bought it and what I bought was kind of dictated not by the business, not by the technologist, but it was just the way we bought things and hyper-converged infrastructure and the whole software defined category is changing the way we buy things. I've talked to some very large customers of Dell EMC that say it's not about, it's great that I can buy a very small incremental piece when I start building out the VX Rack Flex. That's right. But it's, how do I architect? My on-premises cloud, this is the applications I'm running. This is the data center. Here's the governance and compliance that I need and it's the platform that they build their IT infrastructure. Oh, and it happens to have server storage, networking, the pieces that need to come out. So, take us a little bit inside that, what you're seeing, some of the key things you wanted people to take away from the show. Absolutely, absolutely. So I think, again, as I said, HCI is just so popular. In fact, if we look at all the sessions that we had around hyper-converged, whether it was the hands-on labs or the technology breakouts, the HCI sessions specifically and the cloud sessions were just standing remotely. And I think the reason for that was, first and foremost, customers want to modernize now. They're ready to move. And I think we've seen through our own surveys and through other surveys, anywhere from 60 to essentially 90% of customers now have some form of hyper-converged or converged in their environment. They will have it by the end of this year. I mean, that's how fast it's moving. So why is that? I think it's agility, you mentioned that. The ability to start small and grow. I hear from time and time again. Customers don't want to ever do another migration again. They are sick and tired of migrations. That's probably the number one reason I hear for why customers want to move towards a hyper-converged model as opposed to using a more traditional infrastructure model. And also, I think, and what actually I think really lends the credence to our Dell EMC coming together is they love the idea of HCI and the ability to leverage the latest and greatest from Intel, for example. And so what's nice about hyper-converged infrastructure is essentially it's a cluster. You can create pools of resources, et cetera. And you can take advantage of the Intel roadmap, for example, much more quickly by simply taking the new processing technologies, the latest and greatest, and added that to the existing pools of resources you have as opposed to you have to start fresh and do a tech refresh into that. So it's a safe bet for customers that allows them to actually accelerate their transition ultimately to that on-prem cloud. Yeah, connect the dots for us, though. Hyper-converged infrastructure, everybody's going there. They're also, I think, around the same percentage, 80% are sorting out what their cloud strategy is. Is HCI, in your work viewpoint, we're pretty opinionated at Wikibon as to how we think it fits in, but what I want to get your views on it first is how HCI fits into the whole cloud picture. I think it's a great question. So what we're moving towards now is more and more essentially standardizing around using HCI as the basis for the future of our hybrid cloud platforms. For example, VxRail, VxRack, those are the becoming the go-to, if you will, platforms. The reason for that is a lot of what I just mentioned already. It's the agility of the systems. It's the ability to, again, start small and grow them easily. It's the ability to integrate into an existing ecosystem very easily as well with software defined. So our customers, whether it's simplicity, agility, and just, they also want to take advantage of the latest and greatest modern technology. So this has things like all flash, it has scale out capabilities, it has the ability to integrate into a existing cloud stack. These are all the things that customers really want and know they need for the future. We're using that as the foundation for our hybrid cloud platforms. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. David Foyer wrote a piece recently looking actually at the VxRack Flex and said, traditional storage, I believe the number is 47% more expensive, just kind of taking white box storage. We always love taking white box because people hear white box and they think it's going to be cheaper. That's right. And of course, when you put all the pieces together, kind of understand the integration and it's not even, we kind of think it's like, oh wait, it's just because, is it going to be simpler and therefore I'm cutting headcount but it really is the total cost on things. It can be less expensive if we go to the more granular pieces. We get greater utilization of the equipment we had, which when I was buying kind of the monolithic storage, I couldn't do that. Definitely feedback we heard for years from customer. It doesn't even count in there that migration costs. We say if you take the lifetime of any storage rate, it's at least 30% of the storage cost. And gosh, if you can eliminate that, but not as the headaches to the storage people and everybody else, it's no, no, we'll get there. I know we have that box sitting there for two or three months. We're almost ready to use it. Right. And the second one piece, time to value. It's, I believe, numbers about five times faster. Yes. Time to value. Six times time to value, faster. You know, you had a lot of customers talking at the event. Any kind of hero numbers that stood out for you or case studies that you love when we can talk about some of the brand name customers that are using some of the solutions. Yeah, absolutely. So I may not use all the names but certainly a lot of great stories. So VXRackFlex, which I'll focus on here, we've got, you know, now, you know, over a hundred deployments of that right now out in the marketplace. And it's a very flexible architecture, by the way. So it focuses and it supports everything from traditional workloads to cloud native workloads. In fact, that's what a lot of our customers like about it and it allows them to move towards that modern data center. We've, you know, we got customer stories galore. So one of the largest hotel chains, right? Which I know you and I have apps for on our phone. They recently went with a web-based reservation system. They needed to actually have an enormous amount of IOPS. You would think traditional sand. No, they actually went with a VXRackFlex. What they were able to do is take all the different nodes, leveraging skill IO is basically the back-end engine, if you will, for this. And basically take all the resources in the oomph if you will in power of 30, 40 nodes and point them to one application to get millions of IOPS. That's the flexibility that you can get from a VXRackFlex. And then at the same time, we've got a service provider in EMEA, for example. Next Gen. And what they're using VXRackFlex for essentially is there for their cloud. They're running a smart, it's called a smart city initiative. They need to actually deploy new services, literally in hours, sometimes minutes for different government agencies, et cetera. What they like about this is the ability to actually, literally, very quickly spin up new applications, new services on the fly without any problems, any disruption, any availability concerns at all. And what they're running on this is Pivotal Cloud Foundry. So you got everything from, and by the way, that other IOPS application, OLTP, that was running on bare metal. You got bare metal, you can run bare metal on it, you can run any hypervisor, for example, or you can run Pivotal Cloud Foundry. Yeah, I remember when we put out our research on server sand, the second or third year into it, I wrote, one of the things that worried me a little bit is I was seeing people just taking their virtualized sand environment and just putting it in a different form factor. Same apps, slight improvement, but kind of step function. Where was the application modernization and where is that driving it? So this data center scale type solution where I can use modern apps, the cloud native if you will, is exciting to see. Yeah, and the other one too is we have an insurance agency as well and a financial institution is actually using 500 VXRAC flex nodes. And the importance of showing this is the scale, like you said, the data center scale. And they're using this for a number of reasons, but first and foremost for the ease of scale, it's the ease of scale. And when I mean ease of scale, that means everything in the data center means not just the compute, not just the storage, but that networking is part of that design criteria as well as part of the system design. So we were able to actually help them really accelerate the deployment of that. In addition to that, we actually now manage the life cycle of that as well. So all the firmware updates and software updates on the networking side, for example, we take care of as well. So all the East West traffic that you can imagine occurs. We have cabinets and cabinets with hundreds and hundreds of nodes. We take care of that as well. Yeah, you talked to, you said you've got over a hundred customers compared to the number of VBlock customers or VMware vSAN, it's a small number. How come you guys are so excited about it? We're excited because it's, a lot of us, it's leveraging all the latest and greatest new technologies, right? So it's leveraging software defined from ScaleIO, which is proven out there. So while we may only have a hundred deployments of VX or a more VX RAP flex, there are hundreds and hundreds of deployments of ScaleIO, for example, out there today. So it's very much proven. It's also leveraging the greatest from PowerEdge. So the new 14G, 14 generation, it's going to leverage the scale and performance improvements of that, right? And leveraging NVME, which is, was actually, by the way, a big crowd pleaser as well at Dell EMC world. So it's leveraging really the best of our software defined, the best of the server technologies out there. And it's really leveraging this trend of customers that have started to adopt HCI and now they're ready to go all in. We're starting to hear customers. And so customers that want to go all in on software defined and HCI across their data center and run the vast majority of the x86 workloads, they want to make sure that they have the whole data center in mind from a design perspective. And that's why VX RAP flex, in particular, is becoming a really hot topic. Okay, I want you to put an exclamation point on this, John. I know when EMC bought ScaleIO, Wikibon, many other analyst firms out there thought that intriguing technology, especially for kind of service providers, one of the first customers I talked to was I-Trika who loved it, but took him months to kind of put the pieces together, validate some of the pieces there, but love the technology. As a service provider, he could build his business on it, put the exclamation point on why VX RAP flex pulls it all together for you. Our goal and our vision is to see VX RAP can run any workload in the next three to five years, literally any workload in the customer's data center. That's why we're really excited about it. It's the flexibility to run anything from a cloud-native workload all the way up to a traditional workload. Customers want that flexibility. VX RAP flex provides that. ScaleIO is the foundation provides that. It's proven out there. It's running in some of the largest financial institutions, transportation companies, manufacturing companies. This is proven technology that we're applying to just a different consumption model. That's all we're doing. And making sure we deliver it in a term key way. And I tell you what, customers are voting with their wallet and they're really excited about it. And if the attendance at Dell EMC World Sessions is any indication, we get an exciting year to come. All right. Always one of the most exciting shows of the year. John Single, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you still. And thank you for watching theCUBE. Be sure to check out siliconangle.tv for all the coverage and thanks for watching.