Why is Dell EMC at SAP Sapphire?
Transcript
[Music] all right you're watching more coverage of s ap sapphire 2019 Orlando Florida it is nice humid I'm glad Justin Jones your hair is doing a lot better than mines we have Justin Jones from the first infrastructure team at Dale EMC thank you again del MC for sponsoring the CTO dose Justin we're gonna get right off to it you're gonna kind of give me a presentation that you guys have been giving your customers in a booth but there is you know the ultimate question you're going
to answer this question for me I think of why is Dale Technologies the creator of the Vblock 1000 here it at a show that is progressively more about cloud but this is I don't think this is a conversation about cloud it's more of about business capability early share I think with me that story yeah absolutely thanks for having us and you're not the first person to kind of ask me that question today we've had a few people come by and go like but it actually it's
a pretty good story everything ties together and it really ties together under some of the announcements we had last week around hybrid cloud and why that's making a difference for our customers but what I'd like to do is probably dial it back just a little bit all right and we'll get to that hybrid cloud piece but let's start by talking about you know we'll touch on kind of what of the xblock is and why we think the story does matter to folks here at sapphire so
when we go talk to our customers we're really having four main conversations right one is around simplification so a lot of our customers still live in this siloed world where they have storage running in one place they have compute running in another place and they're looking for a way to make that life a little easier and that's some place where converged and hyper-converged really come into play for them and you talk about specifically on-premises and we'll tie that into that hybrid cloud storage so let's talk
about I think some of that complexity right the bat I've been in environments where we've had v-max arrays we've had hp-ux itanium-based systems we've had networking from Cisco and trying to manage that all is truly silos the especially when you're thinking about sa P which is I've been in organizations we've called it a data center within the data center there is a whole team dedicated to running s AP s ap infrastructure versus the rest of the infrastructure so Wow s AP itself from operational perspective wasn't
a silo the individual components itself was a silo and I can tell you from experience it is complex oh yeah so I grew up in the data center and I remember the first time I met these people named basis administrator basis administrator this makes no sense it's kind of sorry you met madam well they've changed my life and a lot of good ways yes but yeah you know you take that complexity so you think about all these silos and and how do you manage all of
that do you have separate teams to run your v-max as opposed to your HP storage you know your compute side you may have multiple different areas there and you've got to have different teams trained in different ways to manage all of these different systems so that adds to your optics it adds to the just the complexity of that administration you think about trying to back all that up how are you going to protect all that data if they're in different machines is your network gonna handle
that load and not just backup but business continuity in general it makes life more difficult when you've got all that complexity and we can we'll talk some more about that here in just a minute - one of the other really great conversations we're having is about migration you know everybody's got a top of mind right 2025 it's this looming date it's this this big black hole in future what are they gonna do with it we don't necessarily want to force people over or feel like they
have to be forced right away to go to s4 in a V X block which is a piece of converged infrastructure you can actually run things in a traditional manner and you can also run side by side in that that s4 in kind of an isolated area making sure that you're hitting the KPIs correctly to ensure the TDI certifications and all that good stuff it that makes sa P say hey yeah keep running it in here this is great we're having conversations about maybe people don't
want to move to the cloud but they want to run it like a cloud they want that automation they want that simplicity they want to make life easier so we start having discussions around landscape manager plus V realize plus hooks into the infrastructure and we dive more into that too and then the fourth conversation we're having quite a bit is around that complete IOT solution right pulling data in and trying to understand it that's not new for anybody right everybody's been doing it for the last
40 years we just didn't have a great way to do it we've gotten a lot better the strategies that sa P is introducing are getting more refined so we're seeing better ways to do this so we talked about that whole edge to core story between gateways shipping the data maybe sorting a little bit then shipping it over then you know checking out in the core or looking at it in in SA P world and Leonardo so there's a number of conversations we're having we're having these
conversations based on this V X block right so I'll give you a quick idea of what it is if you take that complex three-tier infrastructure you have the network the storage the compute and that virtualization over the top wrap it all up deliver it as a turnkey system and now you have something that you can run immediately right it's it's it's delivered ready to run and then the other really nice piece about it is that going forward on day 2 to day 720 today you know
650 that's bad math you know what I mean you have a sequenced delivery of the firmware the software that keep all of your components in line insured they're gonna run right so it's engineered at the start and it's engineered as you move forward to so let's dive in yeah so the way we start our conversations typically with our customers is to give just a little bit of lay of the land and and here at sa p at sapphire there's so much more knowledgeable about this so
we don't spend much time here but you know we do touch on kind of where you start with our three and that that move over to s4 as a foundational element right you may not be there today but you've got to move to it soon so you may need to get some infrastructure that's ASAP Hana ready RS for Hana ready so no I guess that's hate to interrupt wait let's kind of put this nail in the coffin can I run r3 on s for ready hardware
like is this something that I have to segment can I do it can I have can I grow into the s for infrastructure or do I have to you know just have you know this wasted hardware for saving there for one or two years why my export project is delayed no that's that's a great question and that's actually the story we're we're starting to have in our in our booth and and with our customers over and over and you can run them in the same infrastructure
and that's really a highlight of the VX block when you think about it as a three-tier infrastructure it still has a raise with rich data services industry regulation basically written around some of these things to cater to them it still has massive computability and it's all wrapped into a network so you can run that traditional r3 infrastructure and then write in the same same infrastructure you can isolate out your sa p Hana delivery so you can run that in the same piece of infrastructure leveraging network
leveraging cabinets leveraging space leveraging power right so it's it's not an exclusive story it's a very inclusive story and I guess the isolation is super important I guess I know that the isolation is super important because when I call s ap support you know the first thing they're gonna ask me well there's TDI and the appliance model you know what what am i running if it's certified so I still get that certification for both R 3 and s 4 in this in this platform yes and
then the next conversations we have really we just talked about since s4 is that foundation if you want to run Leonardo if you want to just really dive into the IOT angle you got to have s4 first if you want the management hub you know you've got to have s4 first so that's really kind of the lay of the land that we have then we typically move on pretty quickly to what what are the what are the migration stories that our customers are talking through and
talking about right and really I think we kind of covered it a little bit already we got a little heavy ourselves but it it goes to talk about being able to run R 3 and s 4 in the same in the same beta infrastructure and then the other piece of that though too is where R it's more than just R 3 to s 4 right it could be an OS migration it could be a platform migration when you're looking at the type of infrastructure so what
we didn't talk about is the details around data movement we talked about this a lot with the EMC storage team last week at Dale technology's world when I need to get what I need to perform analysis one data I need that data to be close to the computer and the migrations I don't think that's any different if I'm going to move from an R 3 disc based database to an in-memory database if it's on the same platform it makes a big difference from speed of migration
to be able to have that data right literally right next to in this case on the same system that is going to be migrated on yeah yeah because you don't even have to go out onto basically your spine Network right right all the traffic within the VX block itself and that's not just something that applies to those types of migrations think about system copy refresh and cloning you can keep it within that same system right keeping that that all of that data transfer off of your
larger network and improving the speed and the ability to do that so um then this is so we start diving into that that conversation about modernization I think we already talked about this right that that siloed approach that a lot of our customers have and we're trying to get through that so we end up having four really good discussions with them so when we talk about modernizing these solutions right and I think we already covered some of this we talked about those siloed the siloed units
of storage and compute we talked about how that adds complexity it adds heartache to the operations it adds affects the conversations that we end up having with our customers at Dell EMC really revolve around predictable performance for these mixed workloads at scale so when you're looking at a VX block right you can start with a few nodes of compute and you can expand to thousands of nodes you can start with a few petabytes and expand to hundreds of petabytes which makes a lot of sense when
you start thinking about data lakes and and just tearing some of that data out of that in-memory database and you just don't want to cater to all of that high-end memory in there we have conversations around simplifying and accelerating the the SI P maintenance right so it comes back into having this whole thing networked within it as a system again you can you can manage si P a little bit easier you have you're not porting out across the network all the time we even have a
story line there that that goes back to talk about the VX block and how we have a we provide a bit of life cycle or we do provide life cycle management in there right so the firmware and the software is constantly upgraded and managed engineered which D risks your entire solution for si P and lets you kind of focus on your basis administration your ability to take care of the the landscapes and then we touched on application driven data protection right so you still have access
to everything across the board from easy easy but backup and replication that goes from data domain and avemar all the way up to you know V Plex s RDF things that let you really enable that that active active type environment are always on I guess is what we would call it and then that kind of ties into the last piece of the discussion we have with our customers which is you know everything lives not just at the core but at the edge and in the web
and it becomes a 24 by 7 environment it's always on so that's the last piece of that conversation and all of those are kind of strengths of converged infrastructure in general so let's talk about the whole deltek better together story you I heard this repeatedly at vmworld I've heard it again at deltek world last week with Pat and Michael on stage tell me a little bit about VX block integration with VMware like what gasps do anything with that am I using a my telemetry my VMware
investment when it comes to VX block yeah absolutely so we have we described VX blocks central it's the tie-ins directly into the infrastructure we tie that directly into V realized which then of course is tied up to landscape manager from s AP so we're able to give you that that complete story from llama all the way down into the to the VX bak itself but let's talk more about storage the VX block is a very flexible piece of equipment I mean we could put a Power
Max in there v-max Isilon extreme IO unity arrays and what we find is our customers typically will start with something on the hiring like a Power Max to you know make sure they're giving sa P all of the performance it needs all of the rich data services that Power Max provides but then we need to scale this thing out and they're looking for a more cost-effective solution so we can put a nice Alon array right into this and provide that network attached storage that will grow
and grow and grow with our customers giving them a place to archive and store data so for those of us that's not familiar with the dil EMC storage product line this is surprising because I'm familiar with the line when I think of VX plot I think of the biggest fastest thing that you can build so I automatically think of param X and V Max both enterprise data center quality consolidation platforms but then when you you throw in the names isoline when you throw in the name
V and X or the or I'm assuming even the unity platform when you throw in these more mid-range torch arrays they also have a purpose and also integrated into this the I story absolutely yeah and that was a lesson we learned over time right and and you go back to like what's that intrinsic value of the V X block it's all these lessons we've learned over the last ten years you know it's been ten years since we made the VX block there's that surprisingly long way
I didn't notice that yeah right it was shocking to me too because I've been around for a while in it that complexity doesn't just magically disappear it's got to go someplace right what we're really doing is removing it from our customers right so all those boxes of complexity all those connections of complexity all that administration of complexity we're pulling a lot of that out of our customers way and making it easier for them to do business for those wanting more information about the X block what
can they visit and what we're kind of go in a way of the finding well if you come to a Dell website and you search the X block you will have no shortage of information out there I guarantee I'm sure and I think the marketing folks will appreciate that that's it for this episode of the CTO toast if I'm out more about the CTO adviser he conveys a visit us on the web the CTO adviser calm you can fire me find me on Twitter CTO advisor
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