[Music] everyone welcome to this special cube conversation i'm john furrier your host of thecube here in our special napa valley remote location connecting with palo alto as well as in massachusetts and at vmware in palo alto we've got a great conversation around edge technology with dell technologies vmware on the cube of course here look at uh pierre luca chiodelli vice president product manager at the edge at dell and munib vp of edge computing at vmware joining me for this edge conversation gentlemen thank you for joining us on thecube thank you thank you pleasure to be here yeah so it's like the edge is the hottest thing we've been talking about until forever now it's important because you're starting to see the technologies come together with multi-cloud on the horizon but hybrid cloud in full enterprise mode right now with 5g consumer size expanding but on the business side connecting the edge is becoming a cloud product cloud operations product that also includes the on-premises components so we're in full distributed computing mode right now and everyone's not denying this at all everyone's agreeing on it so it's happening so let's get into what's going on at the edge how do you guys see edge evolving in the marketplace right now yeah let me get started there john pleasure to be here and partnering with your lucca um what's you know what's happened through the pandemic you know i know you kind of said we're all sitting far apart and talking right so um a lot of the edge has been here forever but uh the pandemic has accelerated a lot of the edge initiatives right so people started working from home remotely workload's now starting to move towards towards the edge so as every industry retailers think about socially disintermediated omni-channel retail experiences manufacturers think about you know localized supply chains and you know efficiencies of that as their global supply chains get all stressed they're all you know inventing and doing few things at the edge so what's this driven even though edge has been there all along it's true driving innovation towards the edge business processes outcomes you know new applications we call them edge native applications are being built now purpose for business outcomes at the edge that's kind of a big change in acceleration the last you know 15 months that we've seen what's the trends driving this because you know obviously that is making a lot of sense modernization of the enterprise it's happening a lot faster than many people have predicted you know day one operations day two opportunities are buzzwords now i mean day one just basically means cloud and innovation but now there's an operating aspect to this what's the trend driving this edge native mindset and product requirement can you guys share that that thought on reaction to that yeah absolutely i think the main trend as as many said the acceleration uh is bring because the use case and the transformation that needs to happen at the edge this is was not thinking before right uh all of us uh when we go to a store now we interact in different way uh when we buy online when we do all the normal things in life that we're doing today we're doing different this is required to bring more things at the edge if we look at some data we know that fifty 50 of what is going to be uh happening in 2023 will be at the edge with 90 percent of what is from an application point of view exploding at the edge to your point wise that is important as you see around all the verticals manufacturing and also other verticals for example the machinery manufacturing was not connected because at that time there was no need to be connected now we see more and more machinery need to be connected not only on the manufacturing floor but also sell things outside of manufacturing floor connected to other computers so the necessity to bring more clothes and in dell we have this notion of what is the edge you heard a lot what is the edge the edge is everything where you need to act on the information that you create it really makes sense to bring things more there because you need to add on them and so the necessity to have more compute latency it's very big things that we need to solve security and uh also the day zero operation day one day two operation and be able to drive everything from the cloud to the edge in the same way and same experience yeah look at that i mean you basically laid out the enterprise requirements for most things which is pretty complicated but has to run at scale um but also you know me was mentioning edge native so i want to get your guys reaction to our thoughts around this concept i love this edge native conversation but as customers much migrate to the cloud okay migration workloads with containerization stateful data these are real issues so migrating is one thing but now if i migrate what's different in migrating an app or workloads versus edge native and how does someone get from migrating or re-platforming to edge native can you guys share your thoughts on on this evolution of migrating and then becoming truly engineered yeah john i think it's an interesting thing right so it's not it's easy to say i have a continuum from data center to the public cloud to the edge what we're finding is some of the applications you've migrated to the cloud if you think about it both data center and clouds are very centralized compute models right so when you actually re-platforming refactoring applications for the cloud what you're doing is you're fundamentally you know building for elastic scale elastic growth to compute elastic shrinkage compute when you're actually moving so it's more compute heavy and you know elasticity of compute when you're actually moving these workloads towards the edge they're actually data dense they're data heavy because to what pure liquid was saying before as well there's a huge volume of data coming at you that volume of data needs to be processed that volume of data needs to be you know in real time and and streamed and outcomes driven out of that now do you want to take a lot of that data and then push it all the way in the cloud or the data center to get processed or do you want to get it processed locally and and come to some actions now like pure luca's example of the manufacturing plant that time delay and latency could cost you millions of dollars of bad quality product because you missed the quality control in not replacing parts fast enough so what we're seeing in this emergence of this new edge native applications is people are having to re-platform refactor applications to work them at the edge because of the attributes being different higher data density real-time process requirements scale we talked about scale we're all used to doing thousands of maybe hundreds of data centers but not tens of thousands of edge locations right so it's a different level of scale and security that you need and that's where you know when we call edge native is fundamentally it has to operate very closely with operation technology rather than the typical id stands we take here look i mean tell about the product features and the requirement there because you know i mentioned you mentioned a few things there i'll just pick one thing out which is data moving data around is very expensive and everyone knows that but you got to move compute now with serverless okay and in the cloud you want that same kind of agility and capability at the edge so you got to have you got to have the devices at the edge be smart enough and be software enabled to handle this how do you you deal with this in the product management side of things because you've got to prioritize all this absolutely john and to take on what we need will say we think why someone should look at dell and vmware together is because for be successful there are a lot of poc going on and a lot of try and buy and a lot of also verticalization of the use case so what are we here to offer is really what they say generate inside where they need and also consolidate the edge because we hear more as many pointed out you know you buy on the edge for the outcome you guy for you buy for uh you know security you buy foreign outcome for example for predictive maintenance now that buy of the outcome also prescribe a certain orchestration in a certain hardware and software that need to run right a certain deployment model now in the same place you can buy an outcome for example for smart building all of us that we haven't advanced there most of them head on right now but think about the buildings where you need to control all of that we have solar panel and stuff like that so that outcome if you buy today he runs on another thing so you end up with a very uh silos approach where you have a qualification actually of infrastructure what we are proposing here is really that we need to simplify we need to start with the building block approach that allow us to also bring this security as you can thinking as the devices expand as the computer you pointed out to expand in thousands or hundreds of thousands security becomes a big deal and in some place you need to also be our gut insulated because you don't want even to go to the internet at all so that's very important is this is how we perceive the things that we need to simplify the edge for our customer that's great let's get specific now how can customers whether they're dell technologies and vmware customers or new customers leverage the combination of vmware and dell technologies for the edge what is the solution what can they can they do what are the things they can start with today here luca you want to get started with the platform over here on the app side um today what what really is the plot the approach we have is a building block approach as i said so in dell we can cover a lot of things for the edge we can cover from a small as a gateway to large to a cluster to multiple clusters from an entire data center and connect all of that and then don't forget about our apex project where you can buy all of these as a service as well so with that layer that we have where we have ruggedized server we have um the gateways we have also software asset that they are very important for the like our streaming data platform so you need to collect this data we need to stream this data and collect and have insight about this data so we can bring our streaming data platform and all of this by the way it runs on top of vmware so that's where vmware is coming to play yeah no i think you know building on the foundation there john is really about you know us providing then having the platform t-shirt sizing as you know pure luca went from small to large is important because what we recognize is not one size fits all at the edge because they're going to be all sizes requirements second what we're doing is providing the multi-cloud connectivity multi-cloud services that vmware knows so bringing our software layer on top providing developers to build applications both vms and containers on the edge when they can use services from any cloud provider to build those applications so vmware provides that you know multi-cloud you know platform which gives ability for folks to build applications and know going to get services from any choice of their you know cloud providers and run it on top of dell you know uh portfolio and and connect that all together with very importantly i would say you know distributed lifecycle management and operations everywhere because you're not going to find it skill sets at the edge this is at the retail stores at the manufacturing plan so what you don't get is very you know skilled i.t skill sets so the control plane happens to be in the cloud which is centrally operated whereas the data plane is all running at the edge and we're able to between vmware and dell bring our portfolios together to effectively you know deliver upon this and provide what i would call a secure software supply chain you can build applications securely and you know deliver them from the data center to the cloud to the edge and manage it provision it troubleshoot it end to end that's only possible with you know vmware and dell technologies right and and john let me call it out that um one of the most important things obviously with vmware our vxrail product obviously is our running horse for most of the edge use case including our server ruggedized server but i will say that on the vmware we are spending with the satellite nodes that they are basically nodes that you can put in your edge location and centralize you can manage and you can do all the life cycle management also if you don't need the storage path so that's a a key things that expand us uh with the common um also reference if you guys will follow our session we have a joint customer actually explain our scotch industry how you will run the entire things with the edge and run vmware across with vxrail so great great example it's a great it's a great call out too one of the things that's impressive and i think this better together message comes out in that in that conversation is that you have a building block approach to a platform these two things work together and i think one of the things that's interesting to me just as you know student of the industry over the years that it's kind of an operating system in itself it's the cloud right it's like it's one big thing so you could the customers can build applications on top of it and get the benefits of it i think this is kind of a systems thinking mindset not just design thinking but it's a systems architecture if you will i mean it's not directly a systems like a computer system but holistically you can look at it as a systems design problem so customers are having more and more of these conversations around systems thinking can you guys share your reaction to that because we all saw the benefits of design thinking oh yeah design thinking you know create a movement now we're in a new era i think we're starting to see people talk about systems thinking you actually it's a great thing john i think you have to you have to have system thinking just everything we've been talking about so far is if you don't have system thinking you won't scale to tens of thousands of locations you know systematically right so design thinking is brilliant because it gives you very user interface user experiences where users and developers get in and and have a flexibility and usage and all of that what you're talking about here is tens of thousands of locations and those locations don't have any skilled i.t folks so we're not used to breaking things down so what you want to think about is more a scalable system design which is like cookie cutter push it out and then you know it's got zero touch provisioning you know zero trust for uh architecture with security built in and you know life's distributed life cycle management so you are making it making the edge simple to operate for that to happen you need system thinking where it is you know scalable secured you know and scalable not large small and highly distributed in a lot of locations you have a proper systems thinking and design system put in then you know it'll operate itself this is how we've done industry for a long time right yeah and and the consequences have to be factored in if something breaks there's consequences and systems it's a ripple effect it's a network of all kinds of things are going on great stuff um you're looking comment on the system's thinking i'd love to get your reaction to that yeah let me let me say one things about the system thing so i think systems is very important also on top of the solution that we put together as we discussed before right normally in the vertical like the manufacturing people buy outcome so at the end of the day the people they interact directly with the with the outcome they look at the solution and we will offer together the solution so we have the vmware layer we are partnering with other people to to offer an end-to-end solution too many points the manufacturing floor person will not really care if his interact with the dxtrail or a vmware but he wants to interact with the end application so that's why it's very important beside that we need to make the uh infrastructure transparent and easy so that's that's really good point that's how the things go that's why you need to system architect the things and system thinking i think this edge conversation brings up was is bringing up a new modern era of opportunity and there are problems to solve and work the problem the data is one we talked earlier are there considerations that you guys see out there for how architects in the enterprise who are thinking about the future of their business how they want to set themselves up for the modern era it's coming as here for edge for low latency built-in security these are table stake enterprise features now so is there new cons and data obviously the cost of data and the tsunami of more data local data to be processed leveraging the benefits of the cloud in a systematic way these are all new hard problems that if solved create huge opportunities or as jerry chen former vmware uh cto of the cloud said castle's on the cloud you can have the best of the cloud if you do this right what are some considerations that people should think about from an architecture standpoint i i think uh from my prospect and then left money speaking about this but um think about how you can standardize from the beginning so don't end up with the thousands of different options because danny is difficult to manage and then um every wide approach look at all the different edge uh sites as a building block of that big edge thing and also um look at how you can not only scale but bring security in in all the things that you think right this is fundamental uh in the past we always left security as the last things that we thought about at the edge is fundamental and edge is changing the requirement as i explained at the beginning of this interview edge has a very different requirement and if we satisfy those requirements then we are successful not only at the edge but we are successful at the core and in the cloud because we can bring as we need to say that application in and out in and out where it's needed so with that we need you want to say something about sure thanks thanks for luca and i think uh you know your pure look was absolutely right i think you have to standardize you have to scale only then you can standardize easily without doing the spoke the you know as an architect one of the key things to consider also there is you know i think you know john you you brought up 5g at the beginning but we didn't follow up with that right so we actually do believe that the service provider market who are building out the next generation 5g they have capacity they have connectivity closest to the edge as well so i actually do think that as architects think about it a player as you build out your data center your cloud and now towards the edge the last mile between the the cloud and the edge is actually owned by the service providers the service providers will play a critical role in you know placing these workloads closer to the edge but not necessarily all far away from the cloud so you know architect design think about scalability intrinsic security and you know having you know different sizes but one important factor i actually do believe that the service providers have the opportunity of a lifetime in front of them to become like the hyperscalers for the edge because if they can provide not just infrastructure network services i ask pass and sas they will be able to deliver extensively whole amount of edge compute services for the enterprises which is something that architects have to think about to actually not make a bottleneck to all go up to the cloud but they can actually be distributed as a service provider yeah and i totally agree on the service part they have the real estate they got the facilities they got the connectivity at the edge and the footprint what used to be a base station is becoming smaller and smaller and higher density so like you're going to start to see by the way and there's more more edges it's it's not the one tower anymore it's everywhere these little points of access points are thousands of points of millions of points of light if you will kind of to the network huge okay gentlemen thank you so much i want to just say i really appreciate this conversation uh systems thinking edge it's the future an edge is an architectural shift where there's only advantages not a lot of downside if you plan it right the opportunity with the cloud is amazing so thank you so much for coming on sharing your insights here on thecube conversation thank you thank you very much john thank you i'm john furrier with thecube here in napa remotely in palo alto and palo alto in massachusetts for a remote interview great conversation with great guests thanks for watching [Music] you
2021-11-20