Intel and Dell EMC VxRail Joint Engineering
Transcript
(jazzy saxophone music) >> Hey, you're watching yet another sponsored video by Intel. This time we actually have someone from Intel on, Chris Murphy, we'll call him Murph. global account manager for Intel and Rick Reddy, who you've seen on Tech Field Day videos. So if he looks familiar to you, that's what you know him from, product manager from Dell Technologies, Rick and Murph, welcome to the program. >> Great to be here. >> So we're talking more VxRail, more importantly, the two teams are going to talk about their years long collaboration.
I'll hand it over to, who's going to drive Rick or Murph? >> I think I'll start off Keith. Thank you very much, my name is Rick Reddy, and I run product management for VxRail at Dell technologies, thank you for inviting us to speak to you and your viewers about the innovation that we do jointly with Intel on our product line. I'd like to lead in for those of you who don't know about VxRail with what we are. We're a jointly engineered solution for VMware environments with VMware.
And when we started our journey with VxRail, we were at a company, EMC, that was acquired by Dell four years ago. But prior to the acquisition, we partnered extensively with Intel to develop our first VxRail platforms. And it was an Intel designed platform and an Intel built platform. And since that time, we've grown to almost 10,000 customers over $2 billion in annual revenue with over 100,000 nodes of VxRail out there. It's been a truly amazing journey. And Intel's been a strategic partner throughout this entire process.
>> So Rick, hold on, you know you've presented to me at Tech Field Day before, so you know what when you come with slides, you know what's going to come, which is the, I think the bottom line question my viewers want to know, Intel, Dell, even going back to the EMC days no matter how much of the VMware Aurora you put around it, Dell is still a hardware company. Intel is a hardware company and on this green you guys have Cloud, Kubernetes, et cetera.
Let's cut to the chase, software is eating the world. Where is the software value of this Intel and Dell relationship? >> Keith, that's an excellent question. As you know, and your viewers know, software cannot run by itself it has to run on hardware. And the job of VxRail is to provide an automated, validated cloud-like experience to our customers where they don't have to time worrying about all the underlying BIOS and firmware and driver updates on the hardware nor do they have to worry about the VMware software defined stack updates.
We take all of those updates, bring them together and validate them as a single update package that our customers can seamlessly use to get them from one version of VMware software to another. >> All right, so again we're not scared to ask taboo questions on the CTO Advisor even with Intel sponsoring this, you know, it doesn't matter from an Intel perspective in my mind whether or not I'm consuming Intel Optane and driving my HANA installation on Intel scalable, running on Dell Ready Nodes or on VxRail nodes.
I mean, from a end of the day perspective x86 is x86, am I wrong, what am I missing? >> We have over 400 engineers in the VxRail business unit that work on utilizing specific configuration. specific products whether they be NVME drives, Optane drives you know, Optane persistent memory, all the different Xeon processors to solve different use cases and we run it through extensive, not only validation testing but performance testing to make sure that when a customer wants to buy a solution to run one of these workloads, we optimize what they get for specifically for that workload.
So if they want to do HANA, we run extensive tests on that and we will take care of updating all of the underlying environment that HANA runs on top of >> Okay Rick, you're you're talking my language from a SAP HANA perspective. It is painful for me to take, in my data center today. I'm the CTO of Advisor Hybrid infrastructure and my Dell 730 XDs which are near end of life, I need to one, shut down my vSAN and my VMware's vSAN and vSphere environment, I need to research which firmware is compatible with what storage controller with what part of the HCI stack for vSAN et cetera.
So you're telling me the value of VxRail. You guys are doing that and automating that process? >> That is correct, so all the different components inside the hardware platform, we're not only validating with, you know, what is, what should be run with a VMware on their hardware compatibility list, but you know, the hardware compatibility list has a lot of things on there, because we're part of Dell, we are picking specific versions of drivers. We know what firmware we should have on the drives, on the controllers and then also how they interact with VMware and then we package that and then we run it through 25,000 hours of additional testing to make sure that it's complete.
And then when it's complete and validated we provide you a very easy one-click way to non-disruptively update your entire cluster >> We just update the firmware and vSphere packs on our pod a few weeks ago, don't tell my engineer that. He's not going to be happy. >> And Keith I'll line up a couple of things here, 'cause I think what's interesting if you look at what Rick and the team are doing, they are like fine chefs. I mean, anyone can have the ingredients right?
Anyone, but putting them together and making sure they taste right, that takes expertise and that's why history matters. Frankly, if you look at what Rick and I started doing what was that, five years ago? When we started the first VxRail I think in the back room somewhere, we had two conference rooms and whiteboards and went at it, but what's interesting to see it come full circle like this, the amount of hardware engineering that goes on, yes is extensive. It was built on a bedrock of PowerEdge servers, right?
But you've got to take that and add to it. You have to add layer upon layer because the devil is in the details, it's always a piece of firmware or this firmware and that firmware not working right together, and the experience these guys have over the years of engineering and collaboration really does come to bear when you integrate something like this and then make it seamless and automated for updates. I think the life cycle management piece that you guys had, you had nailed it, nobody does it better 'cause having that system be able to basically take care of itself, I mean, it's really a unique thing.
>> So Murph, it's interesting that you mention that because a few months ago, when I did the look back at 2019, there was another sponsored video for Intel. We talked about the Intel and AWS relationship and how AWS kind of held that Intel relationship up as an example of you can't do the things at scale that AWS does without this longterm relationship. So there's value in this past performance not just with Dell, but in other Intel partnerships. So, you know I can buy that, I'll go ahead and Rick, let you go ahead with your presentation.
You know how I feel about slides, but. >> I have two more, so please bear with me. You know, I just want to touch upon briefly, we were saying, you know, what is the value of VxRail? We're bringing together the VMware software defined data stack, we are doing all the full stack life cycle management. We have our VxRail manager. We have ecosystem connectors and APIs because you know we're not the last place that the information needs to reside. There needs to be an external management.
Usually where, you know, large companies bring their own they want to control things with APIs. It could be Ansible, it could be vRealize. It could be homegrown, we provide all the API connectors for that and of course you get the world-class single support from Dell right? Because we're providing all of the hardware and all of the software to the customers. And if the customers choose, they can package it all on our VMware Cloud Foundation as the umbrella and were tightly integrated with Cloud Foundation such that when Cloud Foundation wants to execute a command or perform an update of clusters in the Cloud Foundation landscape, it issues API calls to VxRail to go through and do the automated lifecycle management.
>> So Rick, I won't beat you up too much on this slide. We talked about this at Tech Field Day. I'll link the Tech Field Day video in which we really went at Rick talking about the different layers of automation little old, but I think it's still as relevant. >> I agree it's still relevant because people still want to deploy kind of an automated infrastructure. Now they're doing more around containers and this is where things like VMware Tanzu come into play.
You want to set up a real good dev environment using Tanzu. You don't want to be spending all of your time managing the underlying infrastructure. You want it to run on top of VCF, on top of VxRail, out of the box. >> You know what we didn't talk about this, but now that you mentioned it, you know I think about applications such as SAP HANA. Did you guys have customers who buy VxRail specifically for this experience, because I know VMware customers have a tendency of you know, lagging back on updates because it's a maturer platform, but I could easily see customers buying a pot of this just to get Tanzu >> In the new modern application world, we're going to have a mix of traditional VMs and containers.
Those can live together on top of a Cloud Foundation. and in Cloud Foundation will allow customers not only to connect to the cloud and host the different types of applications, but automates the entire infrastructure. And like I said before, it's really around having your on premises infrastructure behave like the public cloud. You don't worry about the infrastructure at AWS or Azure. You run your applications on top of it. Amazon and Microsoft take care of all of the updates for you.
>> Sounds good. >> We think so and our customers do as well. And customers do, by the way, buy VxRail to run all of these modern applications it's not just for kind of a VDI applications, which is where hyper-converged, started its journey. It was a very logical place, but now it's all sorts of mission-critical applications and running from the data center environments out to the very far edge. They have a single platform with a single management experience that can incorporate the vast majority of their use cases.
It really helps them simplify their entire IT landscape. >> So talk to me about this relationship in some detail around what do I get when I marry VxRail with Intel? Obviously I'm going to get Intel Scalable Processors and VxRail, but beyond Intel Scalable Processors what am I getting expected, 'cause I saw in the first slide you had some AI there you had some ML and you know my favorite, SAP HANA when I will throw HANA at a thing, I'm thinking about some pretty big systems >> Like quad socket systems with >> 12 terabytes of RAM.
>> Terabytes of RAM. >> Sure, sure and did you know by the way that that VxRail was the first hyper-converged platform to be certified for SAP HANA? And we did that with Intel Optane persistent memory, because that's the use case that most of our customers have been asking for >> Come on Rick, I was one of those customers asking for that, so yes, I do know that. >> We appreciate that, I think it's interesting the journey we've been on with this Rick as well.
I think you came out with persistent memory, maybe July timeframe, and I think it was we've been working on that for what, three years? and I think what's interesting as I look at this slide or all the slides is there's always hardware there but you know all the hardware on the left is built on software, really. If you think about the instructions in the processor you think about the integration that has to take place between different components, different software stacks, and more importantly the workloads that have to run on them.
And 90% of what we do is actually software The work we do together with VMware. The work we do together, you know yes, developing awesome hardware absolutely and integrating that stuff, and making it easy is absolutely a key part of what we do, but the software work we do is probably the bigger part of our effort and I think in bringing out Optane persistent memory is a great example of something that had to start quite a while ago to make sure when it was ready, it was mission-critical ready, and could run on these platforms at scale.
So it's been a great journey and we are very excited to have you folks launch in the HCI space first. It was a very, very big deal to us and then we look forward to even the next launch, which I think you're coming out. Yes, it's just next month. Am I allowed to talk about your next thing at all? >> Please go right ahead. >> Okay so if you look at the Optane persistent memory technology, clearly you can get a lot more memory in your system than you can with traditional DRAM.
And that's a really a game changer when you look at how we architect these systems, because if you look at where the bottlenecks are and you think about this when we engineer this stuff There's always a bottleneck somewhere. So we go over there and fix that problem just to go chase the bottleneck somewhere else. And one of the bottlenecks we've been dealing with really over the years as processors have scaled and core counts have scaled is the memory piece. The memory piece just hasn't scaled the same.
And that's why Intel is bringing this kind of technology to market to really break those barriers of not just having, you know, bigger memory, but having new use cases to have memory that's persistent. So when you shut the system off and turn it back on again your data's still in memory, that's a big deal, right? So you think about these large in-memory databases not to have to read to that when you restart a system or a VM, that's a big deal. So it's been very exciting and we now bring out this other mode using this technology called memory mode which you folks will launch I think it's just next month and that's going to be really cool.
We're going to see some really, really great use cases where you can, you can talk about taking VM consolidation to a whole new level like 25% better consolidation and you're not going to pay any more than you did before. So more for the same price is always a good equation to us. So those are the kinds of things we deliver working on these technologies and it's been a fun journey. There's a lot more to come too, as we look forward >> Or if you really set up a different video that we did with Greg Coburn, where he went into some good detail about we championed SAP HANA running on Intel Optane, but he went into some detail on how even Microsoft has moved the needle with SQL Server 2016 and 2019 and leveraging Intel Optane persistent memory.
It is surprising, I did best of Dell World judging last month, Intel Optane won Best of Show for Innovation and one of the things that the judges debated on was persistent memory kind of ready for the market? And I love the work that both you, Dell, and other OEMs have brought to bear especially at the software layer. So I poked fun at you guys at the beginning talking about two hardware companies, where's the software? There's an incredible amount of software to make PMEM work because you're taking two very different technologies, putting them together and optimizing overall system performance, that doesn't happen unless there's a major investment in software.
So I really appreciate both of you guys coming on, sharing the partnership, Intel for sponsoring the video. So Rick and Murph, thanks again for joining. I know I'm not the easiest interview not even when the video is sponsored at the end of the day, our customers really want to know what's what with this technology and whether it's sponsored, editorial we get after you here at the CTO Advisor. You want to learn more about the CTO Advisor. com. If there's pushback, if I wasn't hard enough on Intel and Dell, two hardware companies, hit me up on Twitter @CTOAdvisor, we can have that debate.
Talk to you next CTO Dose. (jazzy saxophone music)
