>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco,
celebrating ten years of high-tech coverage,
it's the CUBE.
Covering VMworld 2019.
Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners.
>> Welcome back, we're here at Moscone North
for VMworld 2019, tenth year of the CUBE
covering VMworld, I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost is John Troyer
and welcome to the program.
Two guests from Dell Technologies,
sitting to my right is Chhandomay Mandal,
who's the Director of Storage Sollutions
and sitting to his right is David Nguyen,
who's Senior Director of Server Product Planning
and Management, also with Dell.
Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us.
>> Happy to be here. >> Thanks for having us guys.
>> All right, so we've got Server and Storage
and going to talk about something that we've been talking about
for a while, on the server side
it's been delivered for a bit
and on the storage is now rolling out so,
everybody's favorite topic, Non-Volatile Memory Express
or NVMe as it rolls off the tongue.
Storage Class Memory or SCM and lots of other things,
you know, down that are really helping
a big transformational wave that really changes
how our applications interact with the infrastructure.
Chhandomay, you know, bring us up to date on the latest.
>> Sure and let's start where you ended.
We are seeing explosion of applications, right?
And in fact, in morning's keynote,
Pat Gelsinger had a statistic,
there are 352 million enterprise applications today
and it will be 792 million in three years.
Now as the applications are growing exponentially
we cannot keep growing the infrastructure at that rate.
So, NVMe
is the way
we can consolidate a lot of the infrastructure.
If you can think about end-to-end NVMe,
starting from the server NVMe over Fabrics
to the storage array down to the back-end with NVMe SSD's.
This actually can put together a great platform,
where you can consolidate a lot of the applications
and delivering the high performance,
low latency that we'll need,
while meeting various surface-level objectives.
So, we can go over a little bit of the details,
but I think it all starts from NVMe over Fabrics,
coming from the server to the storage array,
so probably like that's the first step we need to consider.
>> David, you know, I love this discussion
when we get to talk at the application layer because,
you know, flash changed the market a lot, you know,
it's like much better energy
and it's much faster and everything but,
you know, this inflection point that we're talking about
for application modernization, you know,
NVMe is one of those enablers there
and something I know
your team's been working on for a while.
>> Yeah actually on the PowerEdge side we've been, you know,
we've been embracing the benefits of NVMe
for quite some years now, right?
We started out by introducing NVMe
in our 12th generation servers, you know,
front-loaded hot serviceable drives
and then of course we branch out from there
and then today, you know,
a lot of the servers from the PowerEdge family
all support NVMe devices.
So the benefit there is really giving the customer choices
in terms of what kind of storage,
what kind of tiering they want
for the application's needs, right?
Now one of the things that's great about,
you know, NVMe over Fabrics
is it's more than just a flash storage itself.
It's about enabling the standards, you know,
across the host, across the data fabric
down to the storage, really to deliver
on the overall performance that, you know,
the application needs
and by improving IOPS and lower latency overall,
from a server perspective this just means
that we're releasing more CPU cycles
back into the application so that it can run
different types of work loads.
And for us this is a great story from PowerEdge
as well as from PowerMax coming together
to enable this NVMe over Fabrics.
>> You know, I'm kind of slow about some of these things
but if you kind of squint at the history
and you know we went from our, you know,
the PC revolution and then we had the, you know,
we had SANs and arrays and then we had
centralized storage, shared storage.
Last couple years a lot of interest and still, right,
hyper converged and you had a lot of pizza boxes
with the storage right there.
I mean I now think, right, I'm following the thread
I think which is we now can have a rack
with, again a fabric and again now we can focus
on our NVMe storage.
Our NVMe over Fabrics driven solid-state storage
somewhere below my servers that are handling computes
somewhere else, is that the future we're headed towards now?
>> Yes I mean everything has it's place
but to give you the perspective right,
it's not just coming down to the storage array,
but how this is enabling the future storage as well.
And the storage class memory is the perfect example
and as David said, let's take PowerMax as an example,
right, so in PowerMax it is like end-to-end NVMe ready,
like you get NVMe over Fabrics at the front-end.
But then we have NVMe SSDs in the back-end.
The thing is, now it is also the NVMe
is enabling technologies like storage-class memory
which is bringing in very high performance
very less latencies, latency is going down
in the order of tenths of microseconds.
Now, this is as close as you can get to the, like,
DRAM with persistence storage however, you need a balance.
This is like order of magnitude costlier.
Now, look at PowerMax what we are doing
in terms of first it's NVMe done right.
What do I mean by that?
You have, like, multi-controller architecture
that can actually do this level of parallel processing
and concurrency and then we have both, like, SCN
or storage class memory and NVMe SSDs
and we are doing intelligent tiering based on
the built-in machine learning engine that we have.
And it is looking at 40 million data sets, real-time,
to decide which set of workloads should go on
these SCM drives, which should go on NVMe SSDs
and on top of it, you add quality of service,
so this platform gives you service level objectives.
You can choose from diamond, platinum,
gold, silver or bronze
and you can constantly get a lot of those 352 million
different types of applications, on this array
guarantying you are going to meet all of your SLS
no matter what type of applications
you are consolidating to.
>> Okay, I'm wondering if you could both, you know,
bring us into what this means for VMware customers
and break it in to two pieces.
One is kind of a traditional virtualized job
and secondly, you know, spent a lot of time
in the keynote this morning talking about
the cloud-native containerized,
you know, type of environment.
Will there be any difference from both of your worlds?
>> Yeah, absolutely, I'm glad you brought that up because,
you know, from our perspective right,
what we've seen with the enablement
of NVMe in our platforms.
You know, John you brought up a very interesting point,
right, it seems like, you know,
past couple years we went from moving storage onto the host
and now with NVMe over Fabrics we're actually
taking the storage away from the host again, right,
and that's exactly true because
the first statement you brought up Stu
was about how flash enabled different applications
to run better on the host.
Well we see that still, right, and so with NVMe, you know,
we see the lower response time,
enabling our customers to run more jobs
or more VMs per server.
That's one aspect of it.
You know, we've seen this benefit,
a lot of our platforms today
are used in various different applications
and solutions and you talk about VxRail,
that's a vSAN story for Dell.
You talk about vSAN ready nodes
for customers who want to build it themselves, right?
Our platforms enable what NVMe backplane,
NVMe storage allows them to use
NVMe or SAS, SAT or whatever they want, but,
the point is here is that when they're using NVMe flash
for instance and I'll talk a little bit about
the PowerEdge MX with its all flash NVMe backplane
in a case, in a study that we did with vSAN application
running an OLTP type of work load
we saw the response time with NVMe over traditional SAS
from a competitor improved by 56%, right?
Which means that from that same particular
solution build-out, we were able to add 44%
more VMs on the platform.
Now, at the same time,
we increased the overall orders per minute
by roughly over 600 000 OPMs
for that type of benchmark
over our nearest competitor.
So that right there is the benefit that we see
from a virtualized, from a VMware perspective.
>> And I'll add from the storage perspective in two ways.
In fact, in last VMworld in EMEA,
we demonstrated end-to-end
NVMe over Fabrics with special build of this field
supporting NVMe over Fabrics
and storage class memory with NVMe drives.
What it gives regular,
like vSphere-based environment is that
you have the ability to move your VMs around
like the applications where the highest performance
and latency is critical.
It will be on those special surface levels
and special data stores.
In fact the demonstration was, like,
SCM data store and NVMe SSD data stores .
So in the same Fabric within PowerMax
you can move things around
whether it's regular fiber channel or SCN.
And then, the other part I want to add
in the morning we saw the announcement that now Kubernetes
is built-in, or will be built-in
with the ESXI platform, right?
And, ESXI is bread and butter
of all the storage customers that we have.
Now with, like, when you consider those things built-in
on the vSphere platform, think about,
like, how many applications,
how many virtualized workloads you can run.
Whether it's on Primis or VMware Cloud on AWS.
All of those consolidation,
as well as the performance needs
while reducing your footprint,
that's the benefit the VMware shops,
the VMware admins are going to see from the storage side.
>> Again I'm not following the parts but what kind of,
I mean we're not talking
a couple of megabytes here anymore right?
What size parts are shipping these days?
How much? >> So from our perspective,
up to seven gigabyte, actually I'm sorry,
seven terabyte drives are available
on the market today for NVMe.
Now whether customers buy those drives,
it depends on the economic factor, but yeah,
it's something that's available from Dell today.
>> So, and I'll add to what David said for SCM drives,
750 gig to 1.5 terabyte SCM drives
and dual ported Optane drives that will be available
in the PowerMax as well as 15 terabyte NVMe SSDs
so this is the capacity we are talking about
and again the latencies at the application level,
like from the storage, you are going to see
less than 300 micro seconds, that's the power
we are bringing in with this technology to the market.
>> Great, give as a little look forward we talked about
NVMes been shipping for a bit on the servers,
now it's really rolling out on the storage side.
SoD, there's a lot of start-ups in the space, you know,
one recent acquisition that got some people talking
what should we be looking for from both of you
over kind of the next 6 to 12 months?
>> So, over next 6 to 12 months
you will see a lot of innovation in this space
from the storage side where the order of magnitude,
I mean the one single array, I mean today it supports,
say like 10 million IOPs less than 500 microseconds latency,
I cannot give you the exact details
but within a short time, these numbers are going to go up
by more than, like, 50% latency is going to get reduced.
The thru put we'll be driving will actually more than double
so, you'll see a lot these innovations
and kind of like evolution in terms of the drive capacities
both from the SCM drive's perspective and NVMe SSDs,
those will continue to expand,
leading to faster performance,
better consolidation for all the workloads.
>> Yeah, from our perspective I mean the data growth
is going to continue, we all know that and for us it's like
designing systems based on what the customers need,
what the applications needs, right?
And that's why we have different types
of storage that's available today.
So, for us, you know, while we're doing a lot of things
from a direct attached storage perspective,
customers continue to have a need for shared storage.
NVMe over Fabrics, just provides a better, you know,
end-to-end story for us really from a PowerEdge
and PowerMax perspective but,
in the future you asked what we're going to do well,
we see the need to probably decouple
storage class memory from the host again.
And really what's preventing us from doing it today
is really having the right fabric in place
to be able to deliver to that
performance level that applications needs.
NVMe over Fabrics, fiber channel, ethernet,
whatever, these are some of the things
that we're looking forward to
in the future to make that leap.
>> All right, well it's really been great to see technology
and other people that build your products
have been excited about for many years but rolling out into,
you know, real world deployment for customers
that will transform what they're doing.
So for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman
back with lots more coverage here
from VMworld 2019 thanks for watching the CUBE.
(upbeat techno music)