 Open Source Research Company. Actually, I believe the very first open source research company in the planet. Everything available on the site is available under a copy left. Check out wikibond.org. You got questions, we got answers. We just wrote a big report on software-led infrastructure. It's the new big trend, so check that out. We're covering Dell World. Last week we were at HP, Frankfurt. Tons of material on the site about that event. And what large companies are doing to participate and compete in that whole software-led world. We're here at Dell World 2012. We're down in Austin, Texas. It's a great venue, awesome city. The keynotes are coming up this morning. Michael Dell and Bill Clinton, everybody's awaiting them. The keynotes have actually been moved till 1130, Bill Clinton. Maybe taking a nap in his hotel room, we're not really sure, but he's a little late so the schedule's being adjusted. But we're here, this is theCUBE. SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of Dell World 2012. This is our 27th event in 2012. We're proud to be here. I'm Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host. Hi, this is Stu Miniman. I'm also with Wikibon.org. Dave, as you were talking about, software-led infrastructures, really one of the primary focuses that Wikibon has. And one of the components of software-led infrastructure is converged infrastructure. Trend that's near and dear to my heart. I've been tracking for a long time. And our guest joining us for this segment is Ben Tao. And Ben's a CUBE alum. He's also the marketing director of converged infrastructure for Dell. So Ben, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you very much, Stu. Thank you very much, Dave. I appreciate being here. Yeah, so you know, Bill Clinton's not quite ready to be on theCUBE. We will have Michael Dell at three o'clock, but let's dig into convergence. So last time we had you on a Dell storage forum, VSTART had made some enhancements to the portfolio, kind of broadening the spectrum, adding things like blade servers. You got both the compelling and equal logic on the storage. So since that time, the new announcement is Active Systems a month ago. And so can you bring us up to speed? You know, what's changed? Michael Dell talked about the modernization of environment and converged infrastructures, a big piece of that. So yeah, tell us where is convergence from Dell? Yeah, absolutely. So in October, we announced the name of Dell's family of converged infrastructure solutions that we call Active Infrastructure. And so part of that family is the VSTART product lineup that you mentioned. And when you look at VSTART, it really was Dell's first evolution from a converged infrastructure standpoint. And it focused on packaging. How do we take existing platforms and some of our existing systems management tools that are well suited to virtualization? And how do we package that into a pre-integrated offering that's focused on giving a customer very fast time to value? How can they implement brand new virtualization infrastructure in less than 30 days versus the three to six months it normally takes? What we announced in October as part of the Active Infrastructure family is a new offering called Active System. And so Active System really builds on the experience we had with VSTART. And so there's a pre-integrated version of Active System that we call the Active System 800. In that case it's actually based on our blades just like the VSTART 1000 but it uses ecologic storage on the back end. But Active System is an enhancement of just packaging and it goes to the whole concept of that we engineered the converged infrastructure offering at the overall solution level. So at the solution level we optimize it for convergence. We introduce a new manager that manages this converged infrastructure in a very holistic manner that we call Active System Manager. Yeah, can you give us a little color on that? Because obviously it's the piece parts and Dell has the board portfolio all of the pieces in-house Dell's own IP. Absolutely. But if we look at converged infrastructure the difference between, one of the major differences between buying it independent, just stick it in a rack is how do I manage that whole piece? So what's different from the VSTART to the new stuff? So with regards to VSTART we use some existing management tools. We use some of our integrations for instance with VMware vCenter to manage the infrastructure. With Active System we created a brand new management tool that we call Active System Manager that manages that converged infrastructure as a single virtualized compute unit. One really big focus area for us relative to some of our competition is we took a very intuitive and simplistic approach to converging the management. So unlike other platforms that converge all the management functionality across server storage networking into a single console which simplifies it, it's a single console. Some of those consoles are really complex because it every single dial and knob and setting within that single console. What Dell did was we focused on converging all the common tasks that an admin does day to day. So 10 to 20% of the functions they do to day to day but they do 80, 90% of the time. And so that results in a very streamlined, simplistic way to manage this converged infrastructure again for the day to day tasks that the admin is primarily focused on. So Ben, one of the benefits obviously I actually prefer to this converged infrastructure. A lot of times it's cloud infrastructure, right? I mean it's kind of what it's designed to do. Absolutely. Multiple diverse workloads, scale up, scale down. So I want to ask you about scaling. In particular, thinking about the whole notion of dialing up and dialing down. I want to scale from two to four to six. That's not a problem. I want to go from four to 50 and then back down. Where do you see the industry generally and Dell specifically in terms of the ability to do that with converged infrastructure? Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of people think about converged infrastructure as far as scaling up rapidly. When you look at converged infrastructure it's really focused on changing workloads. So the scale down is a really important piece of that. So when you think about all the workload demands you may be able to satisfy that with a fixed set of capacity but you want to change the type of workloads that you're running on a certain percentage of that. So converged infrastructure, yes, it allows you to scale up very rapidly because I can punch out one blade server or I can punch out 20 blade servers using the exact same tool. I just say one instead of 20 or 20 instead of one and press a button and the template pushes all that infrastructure out or the settings for that infrastructure out. But more importantly allows me to change that infrastructure from running the settings necessary for exchange to running a SharePoint server to running an Apache server. So really it's the rate of change that allows that converged infrastructure is really good about about changing the configuration infrastructure depending on what workloads really want to run on it. Okay, and you feel as though that Dell has an advantage there or are you sort of on par with the others? Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, I think Dell has an advantage in that because we own all elements of the infrastructure because we own server storage and networking I can come up with an optimized design across server storage and networking that really is designed to seamlessly scale the virtualized workload very rapidly as opposed to just focusing on being able to scale just the compute element of the networking element. What do you make of some of the upstarts? Obviously, you know, you can't go wrong watching startups right because they're innovative, they move fast. You actually, somewhat to my surprise you're seeing some upstarts come into this space. And Stu, I mean obviously we talk about Nutanix there's one on scalability, there are others. You obviously look at those guys, you know, they're innovative, I mean Dell's buying companies up doing a lot of tuck-ins. Where do you see those guys adding value? Can they compete with the big whales? Yeah, so, you know, those companies are primarily software-centric approach in their model. So, they can certainly add a lot of value because they can support multiple vendors' platforms. The challenge is we think for a well-designed converged infrastructure solution it's not a matter if there's a software layer and there's a hardware layer. We think there are absolute dependencies between those two. So that software is managed as my hardware in a more efficient, more rapid manner. And so while those upstarts as you characterize them bring some really interesting things because they're a software-only model, we don't think they can broadly impact the entire TCO that a solution from Dell may be able to bring. Incidentally, Dell is interested in some of those startups. We announced a couple of weeks ago that we actually bought one of those software startups called Gale Technology. And you know, we'll have a lot more to say about Gale Technology, but one thing that Gale does bring to Dell is this notion of being able to manage platforms beyond Dell. That's one of the capabilities they have was the heterogeneous capability. And if you look at Gale Technology one of the things they also focused on was beyond just managing the physical infrastructure, they did some management and provisioning of the actual workload. So with Gale Technologies, they were able to punch out a virtual cluster, they were able to punch out a virtual SharePoint farm, and that some capability will be able to roll in to the active infrastructure family over time because of that acquisition. So you guys have a new organization, we had Dario on before, he was talking about that. I'm always contented, you got to get the organization right, if you don't. And everybody struggled a little bit with the organization of this converse infrastructure. You saw it with VCE, you certainly saw it up until recently with IBM, they didn't have a leader. You guys, how do you see that affecting your go-to-market, your effectiveness, and essentially your market share and your ability to go penetrate this? Yeah, so let me speak about it from a product development standpoint. Because you have a dedicated team that actually looks at engineering at the solution level, we're not necessarily holding to the server piece of the business, storage piece of the business, or networking business, we can actually optimize the solution level and actually build something that's best for the customer and drive requirements down to the server storage networking team. The second thing is when you look at Dario's organization, there are three key solution areas that he's focused on, converged infrastructure, private cloud, and workloads. Back to your earlier point that you think converged infrastructure is just an element of a private cloud, because we're all part of one group, there's interdependencies on how you build a workload solution, a converged infrastructure solution, a private cloud solution, and so we can optimize beyond the converged infrastructure level to build out a private cloud solution that is designed to deliver modern workloads that is built upon converged infrastructure. And so there's synergy across those three solution areas that we bring, and that flows from a go-to-market standpoint too, we can have a much more focused effort around converged infrastructure, but more broadly how that's enabled from a private cloud or from a workload standpoint. So Ben, that organizational challenge isn't just internal to the vendors, the customers, if they want to adopt convergence, usually have to go to a similar kind of justification. What we've seen is a lot of times, even if you want to have converged infrastructure for multiple applications, they'll pick a new application, and the one that seems to be leading the pack there is VDI, because VDI was who managed it, the server guy, the compute guy, the storage guy, the desktop guy, so let me put in converged infrastructure, boot it up for VDI, and then I can add other pieces or add other blocks, so where do you see the customer adoption of convergence, what applications, what verticals, where are they being successful? So I think there's four ways customers consume can introduce converged infrastructure. To your point, it's typically one of the main places it's a new application or upgrading an application, moving from Exchange 2003 to 2010. To speak to VDI specifically, that absolutely is one of the solutionaries we're focused on, and if you go up from a Dell perspective because we have the wise capability, the wise acquisition, I would make the contention that Dell actually has the broadest VDI solution that it can bring to market based on our converged infrastructure offering. You know, back to the earlier point, VDI is actually an ideal workload for converged infrastructure because VDI workloads typically have a big rate of change. You spin up some desktops, you send them down, perfect workload match to converged infrastructure. Some areas where I think converged infrastructure is a good match is, as I mentioned earlier, as part of a broader private cloud initiative. Another area is part of a data center modernization, data center consolidation, net new data center, and then the last area is part of any sort of infrastructure operations efficiency initiative. So many customers have ongoing initiatives to improve infrastructure or operations efficiency. This is a natural tool to use as part of that broader strategic initiative. Excellent, so I wanted to talk a little bit about the landscape. So we were the first to come out and quantify the size of the TAM, right? You might have seen that. We pegged it at 400 billion, and I know now, I think Gartner's starting to track the market. I think IDC is launching a tracker, so that's cool. You guys, I'm sure everybody will step up to that. We'll look at that, and that's good. We love to be able to be first and get those other guys coming along. So what you're seeing is a real transition from, see we had Steve Foskin on before, and he said, if you had to develop infrastructure today, from scratch, you'd never do it the way we've done it for the past 10 years. Absolutely. How would you do it? Obviously you'd do it with a converged infrastructure. Approach, so the market's huge, right? So do you see this as a potential disruption where some of the market share shifts can occur? Or do you see it as more of an evolution to what's going on in the server and storage and networking business? I mean, a little bit of both. I mean, when you think about converged infrastructure, it's not necessarily a net new addition to the overall storage market to your point. So you'd definitely some element of mixed shift, although there's probably going to be some growth. But I think it is going to be an evolutionary path. You know, back to Steve's point, there are some operational changes that have to occur. It's not a matter of just switching from server vendor A to server vendor B. And so when you're talking about operational changes, what Dell likes to call people process changes, it is going to be a little bit more of an evolutionary path. And that in fact, how we have enabled our converged infrastructure solution. So I can buy an active system as is today. That's a fully converged solution. But the way we designed it, we designed it with a little more flexibility in that if you want to buy active system compliant infrastructure without moving to the active system operational model and using active system manager, you can do that. You can buy the M1008, you can use these existing blades, you can use a certain blade eye module before you actually transition to that operational model. So part of our design point is allowing customers to have that more evolutionary model before they change their actual operations. Yeah, you've got a spectrum. I mean, you can do reference architecture and you can bring in other components. And obviously you're going to try to get people to use the all Dell approach. You can do the pre-integrated. What about that? There's always tension, even with the supposed single SKU guys. There's always tension to unbundle. I got to imagine you're seeing that in the channel in the field. How do you address that? Is it an incentive based system? Is it, you know, you're sending your sales guys? Is it just educating people on the benefits of better together? Talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so it's less about incentive. Dell's always been a very customer-focused company. We take great pride in having a sales team that really listens to the customer and tries to engineer the best solution for them. And so be it pre-integrated, pre-it reference architecture, it could be either. What we try to help the account teams do is, and our sales teams in the channel do, is really understand what the underlying customer problem is and then help them understand, okay, in that particular case, pre-integrated makes sense. And so for existing V-star customers, the biggest thing they've focused on with regards to V-star are two-fold. One, they really want that fast time to value. I have a project where I need to stand up something very quickly, or I don't necessarily have time to hire staff to be able to handle that new type of project. So this fast time to value, even relative to like solutions like VCEV block, you know, we've demonstrated superior time to value. The other part of it is, for customers who have adopted virtualization to some extent, but now really want to go big time and introduce it in a major way into their production environment, they want to know they have a production-ready architecture that they can get from Dell versus having to do it from a trial and error standpoint on their own. And so that's where something like a fully pre-integrated solution that's been engineered with best practices around how you do virtual infrastructure is a really good fit for those type of customers. So you mentioned, Ben, you mentioned VDI as a predominant use case. The other area where you see a lot of uptake with conversion infrastructure is in the cloud. You guys are a massive supplier to cloud service providers. Can you talk about what's happening with CSPs with regard to conversion infrastructure? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, you make the point that we've been talking a lot about conversion infrastructure, but if you take your lens a little bit back and look at data center infrastructure overall, certainly we think a lot of general-purpose workloads could run on conversion infrastructure. We do think that there are a sub-segment of applications that may be very specific to an industry, maybe a competitive differentiator on a homegrown app for a company that they may need much more customized, non-converged infrastructure for a lack of a term, and Dell could certainly provide that. And then we think there's this whole different architecture for the very large cloud service providers called, what we call revolutionary cloud architecture. So architectures that were designed to run Web 2.0 apps. And these are the architectures that the Google's, the Amazon's, the Yahoo's of the world use. It's a very different architecture than the conventional conversion infrastructure offering that most customers have. It really is a scale-out architecture, leveraging platforms like Dell's PowerEdge C platform. And so we think for especially for the largest cloud service providers, really think that scale-out modern Web 2.0 hardware infrastructure that, again, the largest cloud providers in the world use is the most appropriate platform, and Dell's a leader in that space. So depending on what your need is, there's sort of at least three different architectures Dell can provide, and we, again, want to map that to what the customer's trying to do is essentially from an application standpoint. So we were talking earlier about the organizational challenges of converged infrastructure. And I said, everybody has had them. I had to figure it out a little bit, it's new. So I can imagine if it's taking the vendor side that long to figure it out, it's going to take even longer for the buyers. Now you sell to big, medium, and small. So you got a really good visibility on this. Your observation space is quite good. My question is, are you seeing, I mean, certainly in large organizations, there's still a lot of stovepipes between networking and storage and service. But because you sell so much into the small and mid-sized businesses where they don't necessarily have as many stovepipes or they don't have any resources, are you seeing that they're in a position to better adopt converged infrastructure in number one? And number two, do they actually believe they need it? Yeah, so your points are spot on. So I like to joke that I think the number one provider of converged infrastructure is homegrown. Yeah, right. So if you look at global corporations, they've been building converged infrastructure. They've been building their own systems management tools or doing the integration so they can manage that infrastructure in a holistic, converged manner. And because of their legacy environments, because of their specialized workloads, I would assume that a lot of those larger companies are probably going to be a little slower to adopt a pre-integrated or pre-engineered converged infrastructure offering for those reasons. To your point, that mid-market customer is already used to buying things a little more prepackaged. To your point, from an operational standpoint, it may be one admin already managing all that virtual infrastructure. So there is an incentive for them to adopt converged infrastructure because there isn't the politics, number one, and number two, because that management experience is much more simplified, why wouldn't they want to do that? And they also understand that they can leverage the expertise of large OEMs like Dell, who was number one, a big user virtualization, number two, a large seller virtualization. While Dell takes that expertise and packages up, and a lot of our mid-market and smaller customers understand, why don't I just leverage that expertise that Dell already has? So it was roll your own, your biggest competitor? Yeah, you know, today, at least for the larger global segments, I think roll your own is your biggest competitor. Set a different way, we have to make sure that our converged infrastructure solutions integrate well into their existing environments. So making sure our management tools have the APIs necessary to integrate with the systems management capabilities that they already have. Making sure that from an infrastructure standpoint, we can support integration into an existing data center fabric, integration or usage of third-party storage that they may already have in the environment. So yes, roll your own, but we have to be thoughtful on how we build our solutions so they actually map to what those large customers already have there. And you'll certify those components, is that right? So we won't necessarily certify as an interesting word, but I think from a management perspective, we want to make sure we provide a good management experience for select third-party platforms over time. And again, that was one of the most motivations behind the Gale Technologies acquisition. All right, Ben, thank you very much for coming on theCUBE. We really appreciate your time and looking forward to the big keynotes here in about 20 minutes. Great discussion, good to see you again. Thanks, appreciate it. All right, everybody, keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage. We'll be back right after this short break. First time on theCUBE, baby. Rock and roll.