>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas
it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018,
brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners.
(bright music)
>> Welcome back to Las Vegas.
I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend.
We are with Dell Technologies World
and about 14,000 other people here.
You're watching theCUBE.
We are excited to welcome back to theCUBE
Scott Delandy, the Technical Director of Dell EMC.
Hey, Scott!
>> Hey guys, how are you?
>> And you have a featured guest, Mike Bollman,
the Director of Server and Storage Architecture
from Enterprise Products Company, welcome!
>> Thanks for having me.
>> So you guys are a leader in oil and gas.
I hear some great things.
Talk to us about what it is that you're doing
and how you're working with Dell EMC
to be innovative in the oil and gas industry.
>> So we're actually a Dell EMC storage customer
for about the last two years now,
and working with them on how we can bring in
a lot of the data that we have from the field.
The buzzword today is Internet of Things, or IoT.
We've been doing it for many, many years, though,
so we pull that data in and we look and analyze it
and figure out how we can glean more information out of it.
How can we tune our systems?
As an example, one of the things that we do
is we model a product as it flows through a pipeline
because we're looking for bubbles.
And bubbles mean friction and friction means less flow
and we're all about flow.
The more product we can flow the more money we can make.
So it's one of the interesting things that we do
with the data that we have.
>> And Scott, talk to us about specifically oil and gas
in terms of an industry that is helping Dell EMC
really define this next generation of technology
to modernize data centers and enable companies
to kind of follow along the back of one
and start doing IoT as well.
>> Yeah, so the things that Mike has been able to accomplish
within Enterprise Products is amazing
because they truly are an innovator
in terms of how they leverage technology
to not just kind of maintain sort of the core applications
that they need to support
just to keep the business up and running
but how they're investing in new applications,
in new concepts to help further drive the business
and be able to add value back into the organization.
So we love working with Enterprise and users like Mike
just because they really push technology,
they're, again, very innovative in terms of the things
that they're trying to do,
and they provide us incredible feedback
in terms of the things that we're doing,
the things that we're looking to build
and helping us understand what are the challenges
that users like Mike are facing
and how do we take our technology and adapt it
to make sure that we're meeting his requirements.
>> So unlike any other energy, oil and gas,
you guys break scale.
I mean you guys define scale
when it comes to the amount of data
and the need to analyze that data.
How has this partnership allowed you to,
what specifically have you guys leveraged
from Dell EMC to move faster?
>> So we've done a number of things.
Early on when we first met with Scott and team at Dell EMC
we said we're not looking to establish
a traditional sales-customer relationship.
We want a two-way business partnership.
We want to be able to take your product,
leverage it in our data centers, learn from it,
provide feedback, and ask for enhancements,
things that we think would make it better
not only for us but for other customers.
So one of the examples if I can talk to it.
>> Scott: Please.
>> One of the examples was early on
when PowerMax was kind of going through
its development cycle, there was talk about
introducing data deduplication.
And one of the things that we knew from experiences
is that there are some workloads
that may not do well with data dedup,
and so we wanted some control over that
versus some of the competitor arrays
that just say everything's data dedup,
good, bad, or indifferent, right?
And we have some of that anecdotal knowledge.
So that was a feature that the team listened to
and introduced into the product.
>> Yeah, yeah, I mean it was great
because we were able to take the feedback
and because we worked so closely with the engineering teams
and because we really value
the things that Mike brings to the table
in terms of how he wants to adopt the technology
and the things that he wants to support
from a functionality perspective,
we were able to basically build that into the product.
So the technology that we literally announced
earlier this morning, there are pieces of code
that were specifically written into that system
based on some of the comments that Mike had provided
a year plus ago when we were in
the initial phases of development.
>> So being an early adopter
and knowing that you were going to have
this opportunity to collaborate and really establish
this symbiotic relationship that allows you to test things,
allows Dell EMC to get that information
to make the product better,
what is it that your company saw in Dell EMC
to go, "Yeah, we're not afraid to send them back,"
or, "Let's try this together and be that leading edge"?
>> I think honestly it came down to
the very first meeting that we had.
We had a relationship with some of the executives
inside of EMC from other business relationships years ago,
and we reached out and said,
"Look, we want to have a conversation,"
and we literally put together
a kind of a bullet-pointed list
of here's how we want to conduct business
and here's what we want to talk about.
And they brought down some of their best and brightest
within the engineering organization
to have a open discussion with us.
And really we're very open and honest
with what we were trying to accomplish
and how they could fit in,
and then, again, we had that two-way dialogue back
of, "Okay, well what about this,"
or, "What about that?"
And so from day one it has been truly a two-way partnership.
>> So Lisa's all about relationships and governance.
I'm all about speeds and feeds.
(Mike laughing) I'm a geek,
and I want to hear some numbers, man.
(Mike laughing)
So you guys got the PowerMax.
We had Caitlin Gordon on earlier.
She's Product Marketing for the PowerMax,
very, very proud of the product,
but you're a customer that had it in your data center.
Tell us the truth. (Mike laughing)
How is, is it...
Is it what you need to move forward?
>> It is unbelievably fast in all honesty.
So early on we brought it into our lab environment
and we got it online and we stood it up,
and so we were basically
generating simulated workloads, right?
And so you've got all of these basically host machines
that are just clobbering it as fast as you can.
We ran into a point where we just didn't have
any more hardware to throw at it.
The box just kept going,
and it's like okay, well we're measuring 700,000 IOPS,
it's not breaking a sweat.
It's submillisecond (laughs) leads.
It's like well, what else do we have? (laughs)
And so it just became one of those things.
Well, all right, let's start throwing snapshots at it
and let's do this and let's do that.
It truly is a remarkable box.
And keep in mind we had the smallest configurable system
you could get.
We had the what is now, I guess,
the PowerMax 2000, >> The 2000, yeah.
yeah, in a very, very small baseline configuration.
And it was just phenomenal in what it could do.
>> So I would love to hear a little bit more about that.
When we look at things such as the VMAX,
incredible platform which had been positioned
as a data center consolidator,
but a lot of customers I saw using that as purpose-built
for a mission critical set of applications,
subset of applications in the data center.
Sounds like the PowerMax,
an example of the beta relationship you guys have,
is a true platform that you can run an entire data center on
and realistically get mission critical support
out of a single platform.
>> Absolutely, yeah, so even today
in our production data center
we have VMAX 450, VMAX 950s in today running.
And we have everything from Oracle databases,
SQL databases, Exchange, various workloads,
a tremendous number of virtual iServers running on there,
I mean hundreds and hundreds
or actually probably several thousand.
And it doesn't matter how we mix and match those.
I have Exchange running on one array
along with an Oracle database
and several dozen SQL databases
and hundreds of VMs all on one array
and it's no problems whatsoever.
There's no competition for I/O
or any latency issues that are happening.
It just works really well.
>> And I think one of the other powerful use cases,
if I could just talk to this,
in your environment specifically
there's some of the things you're doing around replication
where you're doing multi-site replication,
and on a regular basis you're doing
failover, recovery, failback as part of the testing process.
>> Mike: Absolutely.
>> So it's not just running the I/O
and getting the performance of the system,
it's making sure that from a service-level perspective
from the way the data's being protected
being able to have the right recovery time objectives,
recovery point objectives for all of the applications
that you're running in your environment,
to be able to have the infrastructure in place
that could support that.
>> Lisa: So I want to, oh.
>> Go head.
>> Sorry, thanks Keith.
So I want to, I'm going to go ahead and go back up a little bit.
>> Mike: Sure.
>> One of the announcements that came out today
from Dell Technologies was about
modernizing the data center.
You've just given us a great overview
of what you're doing at the technical level.
Where are you in developing a modern data center?
Are you where you want to be?
What's next steps for that?
>> So I don't think we're ever where we want to be.
(Keith laughing) There's always something else
so we're always chasing things.
But where we are today is that there's a lot of talk
for the last several years around cloud,
cloud this, cloud that.
Everybody has a hardware, software,
or service offering that's cloud-something.
We look at cloud more as an operational model.
And so we're looking at how can we streamline
our internal business taking advantages of, say,
RESTful APIs that are in PowerMax
and basically automating end to end
from a provisioning or a request perspective
all the way through the provisioning
all the way to final deployment
and basically pulling the people out of that,
the touchpoints, trying to streamline our operations,
make them more efficient.
It's been long said that we can't get more people in IT.
It's just do more for less and that's not stopping.
>> And if I could just make another plug for Mike,
so I visited Mike in his data center
it was about a year ago or something like that.
And I've been in a lot of data centers
and I've seen all kinds of organizations
of all different size and scale
and still today I talk about the lab tour that we went on
because just the efficiency in how everything was racked,
how everything was labeled,
there was no empty boxes scattered around.
Just the operational efficiency that you've built
into the organization is,
and it's part of the culture there.
That's what gives Mike the ability
to do the types of things that he's able to do
with what's really a pretty limited staff of resources
that support all of those different applications.
So it's incredibly impressive
not just in terms of what Mike has been able to do
in terms of the technology piece
but just kind of the people
and the operational side of things.
It's really, really impressive.
I would call it a gold standard
(Mike laughing) from an IT organization.
>> And you're not biased about it.
(Lisa and Mike laughing)
>> Mental note, complete opposite
of any data center I've ever met.
(Lisa, Mike, and Scott laughing)
Okay, so Mike, talk to us about this automation piece.
We hear a lot about
the first step to modernization is automation,
but when I look at the traditional data center
and I look at all the things that could be automated
how do you guys prioritize where to go first?
>> So we look at it from where are we spending our time,
so it's really kind of simple of looking at
what are your trouble tickets
and what are your change control processes
or trouble control tickets that are coming in
and where are you spending the bulk of your time.
And it's all about bang for the buck.
So you want to do the things
that you're going to get the biggest payback on first
and then the low-hanging fruit,
and then you go back and you tweak
further and further from there.
So from our perspective we did an analysis internally
and we found that we spent a lot of time
doing basic provisioning.
We get a tremendous number of requests
from our end users, from our app devs and from our DBAs.
They're saying, "Hey, I need 10 new servers by Monday,"
and it's Friday afternoon, that sort of request.
And so we spend the time jumping through hoops.
It was like, well, why?
We can do better than that.
We should do better than that.
>> So PowerMax built in modern times
for the modern data center.
Have you guys seen advantages
for this modern platform for automation?
Have you looked at it and been like, "Oh, you know what?
"We love that Dell EMC took this angle
"towards building this product
"because they had the modern data center in mind"?
>> So again I think it goes back to largely around REST APIs.
So with PowerMax OS 5978
there's been further enhancements there.
So pretty much anything that you could do before
with SIM CLI or through the GUI
has now been exposed to the REST API
and everybody in the industry's kind of moving that way
whether you're talking about a storage platform
or a server platform,
even some of the networking vendors.
I had a meeting earlier today
and they're moving that way as well.
It's like whoa, have you seen what we're doing with REST?
So from an infrastructure standpoint,
from a plumbing perspective,
that's really what we're looking at in tracking--
>> And if I can add to that
I think one of the other sort of core enablers for that
is just simply to move to an all flash-based system
because in the world of spinning drives,
mechanical systems, hybrid systems,
an awful lot of administrative time
is spent in kind of performance tuning.
How do I shave off milliseconds of response time?
How do I minimize those response time peaks
during different parts of the day?
And when you move to the all flash
there's obviously a boost in terms of performance.
But it's not just the performance,
it's the predictability of that performance
and not having to go in and figure out
okay, what happened Tuesday night between four and six
that caused this application to go from here to here?
What do we have to do to go and run the analysis
to figure all of that out?
You don't see that type of behavior anymore.
>> Yeah, it's that indirect operational savings.
So before when flash drives
kind of first got introduced to the market
we had these great things like FaaS
where you could go in and you could tune stuff
and these algorithms that would watch those workloads
and make their best guesses
at what data to move when and where.
Without flash, that's out the window.
There's no more coming in on Monday
and all of a sudden
then something got tuned over the weekend
down to a lower tier storage and it's too slow
for the performance requirements Monday morning.
That problem's gone.
>> And when you look under the covers of the PowerMax
we talked a lot today about some of the machine learning
and the predictive analytics that are built into that system
that help people like Mike to be able to consolidate
hundreds, thousands of applications onto this single system.
But now to have to go in and worry about
how do I tune, how do I optimize
not just based on a runtime of applications
but real-time changes that are happening
into those workloads
and the system being able to automatically adjust
and to be able to do the right thing
to be able to maintain the level of performance
that they require from that environment.
>> Last question, Scott, we just have a few seconds left.
Looking at oil and gas and what Mike and team have done
in early adoption context,
helping Dell EMC evolve this technology,
what are some of the other industries
that you see that can really benefit
from this early adopter in--
>> I, what I would say is there are lots of industries
out there that we work with
and they all have sort of unique challenges
and requirements for the types of things
that they're trying to do to support their businesses.
What I would say, the real thing is to be able to
build the relationships and to have the trust
so that when they're asking for something on our side
we're understanding what that requirement
and if there are things that we can do to help that
we can have that conversation.
But if there are things that we can't control
or if there are things that are very, very specific
to a small set of customers but require huge investments
in terms of R&D and resources to do the development,
we can have that honest conversation and say,
"Hey Mike, it's a really good idea
"and we understand how it helps you here,
"but we're still a business.
"We still have to make money."
So we can do some things but we have to be realistic
in terms of being able to balance helping Mike
but still being able to run a business.
>> Sure, and I wish we had more time to keep going,
but thanks, guys, for stopping by,
talking about how Dell EMC and Enterprise Products Company
are collaborating and all of the anticipated benefits
that will no doubt proliferate among industries.
We want to thank you for watching theCUBE.
I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend.
We're live, day two of Dell Technologies World in Vegas.
Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break.
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