 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at day one of Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and we are joined by two guests. We have Shannon Champion, Product Marketing of HCI at Dell EMC, and we have customer from Celtic Manor, Chris Stanley, IT Manager. Hey, Chris. Hi. Welcome to theCUBE, you guys. Thank you, thank you very much. And we just had time this perfect music intro for you. They knew, they knew. So, Chris, Celtic Manor, you're based in Wales. Talk to us about Celtic Manor, what it is that you do before we start talking about your IT and digital transformation. Yeah, sure, so we're a collection of hotels of four in South Wales. Within that four there is a resort hotel with a conference center. We offer lots of facilities to our guests, golf courses, spas, all the niceties, bars, restaurants, and as well as the conference business being quite a big side of that. And we've got a lot of growth coming on with new hotels and a new convention center. Yeah, and we've got a staff of around about a thousand at the moment, half of those being PC end users and a small IT team of eight supporting all those people, so. So a lot of locations, a lot of stuff, a lot of data. Talk to us about what you're doing with Dell EMC. Where did you start from infrastructure-wise and where are you now? Infrastructure-wise, we've been a Dell partner probably since 2014. That was, we were the previous vendor before and now a Dell EMC house. Always good news, eh? And our VX rail journey has begun probably the last eight months with a new convention center opening, which is an international one, international convention center, Wales. A joint venture with the Welsh government there and it's something that's, whereas we've got a lot of conference business, now we do very well at it, we have to turn away a lot of conference business because we're not big enough, so this facility can offer up to 4,000 people in the main room, 1,500 people auditorium, as well as other breakout rooms, so sort of 6,000 potential guests on site. And we needed some technology to support that, so we engaged with Dell EMC and VX rail was our choice. We briefly evaluated others, but Dell EMC was, we had a proven pass within a great support and strategic partnership, so it was an easy decision. So we're going to get into sort of the details there, but Shannon, let me bring you into the conversation. Last time we really spent any time together was in the 14G launch. You helped orchestrate a lot of the messaging of that, so give us the update on HCI and VX rail and did that awesome marketing package that you put together, is it living up into the marketplace? Well, thank you for that softball, Dave, yes. Yeah, so in November, we were talking to you about HCI on 14th generation power edge servers and how power edge is really designed with software defined storage in mind and how that really set itself up well for HCI. And what it does is open up doors to being applicable for even more mainstream workloads and applications because of the power and the predictability that that provides and Celtic Manor is a perfect example of that in terms of initially using VX rail to scale quickly and reliably for a majority of their workloads and applications, actually, and now are moving to VDI where historically VDI has really been the entry point for HCI, so it's really exciting to see that sort of flip-flop use case here. It was like the obligatory workload or use case, right? Like to be different. Well, I mean, your business is different, right? I mean, I wonder if you could start with some of the business drivers, right? Obviously, very competitive industry, but you've got some unique differentiators, right? The experiences that you're offering customers are somewhat different, but what's driving your business? Speed, digital disruption, maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Organizational growth was a key one with new hotels and conference centers coming on. We were bursting at the seams with our current environment. Good problem. Yeah, so all very good, but it was supporting that for customers going forward and as well as our staff, supporting with the systems and reliability that we can to ensure that the business is doing, you know, it's utmost. And then, yeah, going on from there, we offer all these different kind of facilities on site, golf, bedrooms, spas, all needing different systems from booking systems through to your VoIP systems, your big databases, Oracle databases on these servers. So quite a hard workload on them and we're looking for something that was easy for us to manage, you know, minimalistic going forward. So Chris, in terms of IT transformation, Michael Dell talked this morning about, you know, these four transformative elements that a company should take to be successful, digital, IT, workforce, security, talking about the opportunity for IT innovation to really convert IT into a profit center. And where IT innovation is successful is where customers are looking at it as a business strategy. Talk to us about the stakeholders, maybe from the CFO's perspective of, hey, we have a great opportunity here to capture more business and to be more competitive. What was that conversation like the IT folks to the CFO to get budget and approval to help transform? Always a tough conversation. Going from the past experience where we'd initially gone with a converged solution back in 2014 with Dell, we, that loan center saved us a significant amount of money to empower a loan. So it was something that paid for itself. So the CFO was already like, all right guys. Yeah, you know what you're doing. So yeah, so we took that, we could see where our pain points were in the environment that we currently had and with all the additional hotels, conference centers coming on, we were at a key stage where we needed from the core build outwards. So the X-Rail was an obvious choice I should say in the end, but it was key to transformation because it enabled us now to look at other methods. It's freed up a lot of time for IT staff. So we're looking at deploying a virtual desktop solution now, which we currently don't have. And that could be initially from anything up to 300 virtual desktops. So big load, but we now have the core capacity there to do it. And we're looking at other things for our guests where we can give them a better experience. So artificial intelligence AI is very big on the agenda. So we look at everything some, there's face recognition systems now that can recognize the guests when they come in, ping a message. We haven't deployed these yet, we're still looking at them. But it's enabled us to look at these now with the power behind us of the 14G service. So it's a key enabler for us, the VX-Rail solution. Opening up the potential for emerging technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning. Yes, very much so, so yeah. Shannon, how do you differentiate from your HCI competition? What are some of the touch points there? Well, from a VMware-focused perspective, Celtic Manor has deployed VX-Rail. Our differentiator is that we're the only provider through our strategically aligned business relationship that is jointly engineered with VMware. And so what that means from a customer point of view is a more seamless experience, right? Familiar tools that they already know and love that they use day to day from a VMware perspective for day to day management, but then also the automation that's built in, right? Automated deployment, ability to upgrade with one-click seamless process to scale quickly when you have new hotels coming online, for example. And then have a single point of support. So we take one single call, whether it's hardware or software for VX-Rail. If there's an issue, call Dell EMC and a lot of customers find a lot of value in that. So okay, Chris, now I got to ask you. So you heard that from Dell EMC, but a lot of companies would say, well, we get along great with VMware, we get the STKs early. Yeah, those guys overplay all that stuff. From your perspective, how important is what Shannon just laid out and how real is it? It's very real. Shannon basically covered, yeah, all those points there were literally what we were struggling with when the one supports telephone coming to call. Imperative to us, we've been ringing, in the past we'd be ringing sand storage, we'd be ringing air sex, VMware, all blaming each other. And you're going from back and forth and you're wasting key time. With one support number now, you've got one call there, you've got one stop shop to sort it. So that was a big, big call for us. The 14G servers as well, we've also get the recover points, which enables us to have two environments where we can lose one in one total environment loss, but still operate as a business. So all of these are giving us up times to close to 100% as we can. Have you had to test that yet? Or when I say test, I mean, has it actually, have you had to fail over? I mean, you probably tested it, hopefully you've tested it, but we've, we haven't. Has it tested you yet? It always tests me, yeah. We have failed over servers, we haven't failed over a whole cluster because it's one of the things I hope you would never have to do. We've tested between nodes as you would. And we have tested recently with the recover point software where we have lost servers and it's a decision then, do we try and troubleshoot the problem or do we just go back a few minutes when it was working and hit the point? And we just, we gave it an hour to sort it out, it was impacting, so we just rolled back and as if it was never happened, yeah, which was a nice reformation of what we did was right. So Shannon, you talked about resiliency, speed. There was an analyst report recently that I'd like you to kind of enlighten us on and kind of look at one of the things Chris said in terms of getting back to the business, cost savings. How does Celtic Manor's achievements so far kind of align with what you were seeing in terms of customers being able to leverage ACI to be more budget friendly? Yeah, so I think you're referring to our IT maturity study and what we're seeing is that the majority of customers, almost all of them are telling us that if they don't transform in their industry, then they'll no longer be competitive. So I think all of our customers are kind of coming that realization that one of the key aspects to that is that a year ago when he asked the same question, a significantly lower number was mentioned. So I think that just speaks to the speed and the urgency that customers are coming to the realization that it's really important to transform and we need to do it sooner rather than later. We have a lot of proof points around VxRail particularly in terms of the automation, 73% faster to deploy. That means value to customers. That's money that they're saving directly. And lower serviceability costs overall, over 40% lower. So that translates into real TCO, goes back to the CFO, helps them understand the investment that they're making, lets them reprioritize in other areas of the business that helps them transform and stay innovative in their industry. I want to follow up on that last point that Shannon just made. A lot of times when you're bringing in some kind of consolidation, the staff says, uh-oh, that means I'm going to lose my job because I'm really good at provisioning loans or whatever it is. How did you address that? Was there organizational tension? What did you do with the time that was freed up? Yeah, I think it's helped transform the IT team, if anything, it's freed up time, but that time has now taken, it's given us more time to look at innovative products and going forwards. There is, our staff has tended to specialize more as opposed to generalize, which is nice, as in the VxRail has sat there and it's pretty much in what you would do with minimal amount of watch and over with the remote support who also watch your environment if you enable it. So if you're getting outages, they can potentially draw your attention to it before you even know. So lots of times we've freed up and now you can see the staff embracing it there. They're happy that they've got this additional time now not to be doing the not so important stuff as we say, although it is very important and to keep us going, but they have more time now to specialize in what they mostly enjoy. So it's brought it on full circle now, so we're really seeing some positives. And hanging out with their families on the weekends. Or it's like all for going to the spa. That's like, yeah, exactly. So since they're not doing that and they have more time now to innovate, where are you on this data center modernization journey? We talked about VDI, but where do you think you are in that journey? With respect, with VDI, we are imminently doing it. We finished deploying the second VxRail cluster to the five S-series nodes, probably only a couple of weeks ago, after a full migration of all the existing VMs. So it's now enabling us now to look at VDI, which ironically, if you want to get back, that we can get back. We have a meeting with Dell EMC on, do we need another node and all flash? Or do we have spec'd within our five nodes some capacity for virtual desktop? But it's again something that with all these other additional hotels coming on in the conference centers, virtual desktop is the way to go. Even centralizing the data more, so people aren't taking all the data off in their laptops or in a more secure environment. So again, a great enabler for us. And finally, after four or five years, I get there to virtual desktop. Done it the other way around, but... Did you golf? I used to golf a lot. Yeah. So you know what a mulligan is? Yeah. So if you had a mulligan, what would you do differently? What would I do differently? Good question. I mean, it's specific to this project. Nothing really. I think everything pretty much has been done as I would expect. When we first deployed the conference center, the new conference center environment, it was a bit disjointed, but because the conference center wasn't built in full use, it kind of gave some time to test the environment fully. And which we also did with the Dell VX4L test drives, which I know the guys offer you where you can go in and to a classroom kind of facility for a day and see it in action before you actually purchase and use it. Same question, different spin. Advice for your peers that because obviously you had some successes, what would you tell them to be successful? Just go for it if you're thinking it. I mean, it is, as far as I can see, it is a future product and it's not going to go in any other direction. The management side of things is far more simplistic than what everything else that we've experienced in the past. And it's baked in with VMware. So you have the best chef with the best ingredients doing the best thing as opposed to another chef taking the best ingredients and trying to do something. So yeah, it's just seamless integration now and it gives us a lot of confidence that we have everything there with Dell and this environment that to go forward and grow even bigger as a business. I knew we've cued your outro music. Find that perfectly. Chris, thank you so much for sharing what you're doing at Celtic Manor to innovate, making your IT transformation a real shame. And thank you for sharing what's new with HCI. Dave, thank you for sharing with me the word mulligan. I just looked it up. In case you don't know what a mulligan is, it is an extra stroke allowed after a poor golf shot. I'd probably be like the mulligan queen. Get a few. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live on day one of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Stick around. We'll be right back after a short break.