The Future is Modular: Disaggregating the Data Center

00:02 Courtney Hughes

Hello and welcome back to the Dell Technologies forum, podcast series where ideas and innovation meet acceleration. In this series, we bring together Dell's brightest minds and industry pioneers to help you navigate the ever evolving landscape of technology. I'm your host, Courtney Hughes, and today we're kicking off our third season, diving into a topic that's transforming how enterprises think about their data centers, modular infrastructure.
Joining me is Varun Chhabra, Senior Vice President of infrastructure and telecom marketing at Dell Technologies. Varun, welcome to the show. 

00:39 Varun Chhabra

Thanks, Courtney. Great to be here. 

00:42 Courtney Hughes

I'm super excited to have you! First, I would like for us to start with the basics, disaggregated infrastructure. It's a term that we're hearing more often, but what does it actually mean? 

00:51 Varun Chhabra

Great question. Courtney, if you think about traditionally, how infrastructure in data centers has been, the architectures that are being followed there, they really fall into two categories. You've had a traditional three tier architecture where compute, storage and networking were provided by different vendors. Gave you a little bit of flexibility, because you could move things around. If you don't like your compute, you move it, you can upgrade the compute independently from storage and from networking. But because these were all from different vendors, managing them was very complex. You would have to manage the compute separately from the storage and networking, et cetera, et cetera, and then running workloads on top of it could be complex because then you're having to manage that infrastructure underneath those workloads, separately. This provided flexibility, but was not very simple. 

The other dominant model that we saw was hyper-converged infrastructure, or HCI, which takes an opinionated point of view on the architecture, compute, storage, networking and the virtualization software all working together. This made it a lot simpler to manage, because now the compute, storage and networking and the software they're really built to work together, but because this was an opinionated stack for specific virtualization providers, what it did was it actually limited flexibility. 

So on one hand, you had three tier that was flexible but not simple, and then you have HCI, which is simple but not flexible. And that's really what was driving the need for disaggregated now. The new world, what our customers need is something that is simple and flexible. So it's disaggregated, brings the best of three tier with the simplicity, so the flexibility of three tier with the simplicity of HCI. 

02:35 Courtney Hughes

So it's not just a tech shift, really. It's also a mindset shift.

02:39 Varun Chhabra

Absolutely. And what's really driving this Courtney is that the workload mix in our customers environment is changing faster than ever before, right? Not only are they having to manage their traditional workloads, such as virtual machines, databases, ERP, CRMs, line of business applications, but they're also increasingly investing in this other thing you may have heard about, artificial intelligence, AI, and that is the combination of the requirements that AI and other modern workloads are driving along with having to manage the traditional workloads. Customers are just telling us, hey, it's too complicated to manage these things separately. I want one approach for all of these, and disaggregated is really, really well suited for traditional and modern workloads to be managed together. 

03:25 Courtney Hughes

Okay, can you talk to me some about how Dell is differentiated in our approach to disaggregated infrastructure? 

03:32 Varun Chhabra

Absolutely. So really, there's two parts to this answer. Why is Dell's approach to disaggregated better than other vendors? The first thing really starts with the infrastructure, the actual infrastructure, the storage, the compute, the networking, the cyber resilience capabilities. You know, that's the foundation of disaggregated infrastructure. And Dell has the industry's best end-to-end infrastructure portfolio. We're number one in storage, number one in Compute, we're number one in backup and data protection. And when you're making a recipe, Courtney, right? Or when you're making something, the recipe is really, really good ingredients, right? You have to start with the best ingredients for the food to taste really good. And the best ingredients in this situation are really the infrastructure components that Dell is providing to customers. So when customers are betting on disaggregated infrastructure, they have to start with the best ingredients for their recipe, and that's really what the Dell infrastructure layer provides. Now on top of that, you also have to make it simple. As I was saying, customers want this to be simple and easy to consume. What makes it simple is really the work that we're doing in the software layer to bring in automation, simplified management and simplified orchestration for our customers. So that is really where the, you know, if I go back to my cooking analogy, it's really where the skill of the cook and how they mix the ingredients together really comes into this. And, you know, who knows our infrastructure better than us? And since customers who are going to bet on Dell disaggregated infrastructure are going to be able to look to Dell for end to end, storage, compute, networking and cyber resilience. We're actually going to be able to bring that all together with software that is built to pull these individual components together into one cohesive experience. And then finally, the other thing that really differentiates us is we're building our disaggregated infrastructure solutions for an open ecosystem. Courtney, as you know, Dell, has had its history and heritage in really enabling open ecosystems for our customers throughout our history, right, whether it was with PCs, with servers, with storage, and we're taking that into our approach for disaggregated infrastructure as well. So we're working to make sure that customers have the maximum amount of choice for whatever ISV or software stack they want to enable on top of our disaggregated infrastructure so that they're not backed into a corner, they can avoid vendor lock in, and they can make the right decisions for their business, at the right time. 

05:53 Courtney Hughes

Yeah, Varun, the first thing you mentioned was industry leading infrastructure, right? How does that fit into Dell's approach to disaggregated infrastructure.

06:03 Varun Chhabra

Absolutely. Courtney, as I said, when you're building a good dish, you need the best ingredients, and that's really where our industry leading infrastructure comes in. I'll give you some specific examples if you know, on the storage side, it begins with Powerstore. Powerstore is the industry's leading primary storage array. It provides advanced data services. It has five is to one deduplication capabilities, which means that you can be very efficient with your data and have a smaller storage footprint for the amount of data that's growing for everybody. And then this obviously all provides exceptional efficiency and performance. And then recently at Dell Tech World Courtney, we also announced advanced ransomware protection being built directly into Powerstore so that cybersecurity threats and the data that's sitting on Powerstore is protected from cybersecurity threats. You don't need a separate solution for that. We're bringing those capabilities into Powerstore itself, and it also builds on what we're doing with Power Edge and compute, because that's our industry leading servers. Compute servers, the latest generation of Power Edge can help customers consolidate their data center footprint. Upgrading from an older generation of Power Edge servers to the latest generation that we just announced this year, we can consolidate up to seven servers into one servers with the advancements we're making with processing capabilities, cooling, power management, et cetera. So that's compute and storage and how we bring this together. We make it really easy for customers to build their workloads. One example of this is our new Dell private cloud. 

07:32 Courtney Hughes

Interesting. Can you share more about the Dell private cloud? 

07:36 Varun Chhabra

Absolutely. Courtney, so Dell private cloud is really a brand new solution that we announced at Dell Tech World this past May. It's designed to empower organizations with greater flexibility and control over their private cloud environments. What we're finding Courtney, as we talk to customers, is one of the big requirements that they're asking for as they're looking to deploy their private cloud or manage their private cloud environments, is that they want to design their private clouds in such a way so as to reduce vendor lock in. They don't want to be backed into a corner. They don't want to be dealing with high licensing fees at the time of renewal. They want that flexibility, that to be able to choose the right software vendor for their business needs. And the Dell private cloud is really built to be the private cloud solution for the disaggregated world, so it allows businesses to deploy, manage and scale private cloud ecosystems on our Dell disaggregated infrastructure. It has the key aspects of the disaggregated infrastructure that I was telling you about. It has software based automation to help you deploy these private clouds faster and more simply than ever before. The software also allows you to manage these workloads on an ongoing basis in a simple and automated fashion. And then, as I said before, open ecosystem is at the heart of what we do with disaggregated infrastructure. What we're doing with Dell private cloud, and the open ecosystem is a great example of it. What we're doing here is we're providing customers with the flexibility to be able to deploy the latest and leading private cloud solutions on top of Dell private cloud, whether it's VMware, whether it's Red Hat, Nutanix or doing it with open source solutions, Dell private cloud gives customers an adaptable and a streamlined solution for their needs. And if they change their mind and they want to switch from one private cloud software to another or a hypervisor to another down the line, they can actually reuse the automation software and the infrastructure that we provide to them with the new solution. They just have to bring the new Cloud OS license or the hypervisor license, but they can reuse the Dell private cloud infrastructure and the automation software that we're providing for the new hypervisor or private cloud stack as part of Dell private cloud. 

09:39 Courtney Hughes

Yeah, one of the things I always like to do is, like, break these things down to especially for our listeners as well. So can you share a real world example of how this is playing out? 

09:50 Varun Chhabra

Absolutely. I will give you two examples. I think. One is, let's we just talked about private cloud. What's really actually happening in the industry today when we look at the latest surveys and data coming back from customers. 89% of organizations are now saying that evaluating and using multiple hypervisor options is a strategic priority for them. 89% that's a massive, massive number, right? So this ties into just what we were saying before customers want that flexibility. So Dell private cloud, we're having countless conversations with customers that are saying, where customers are saying, Hey, I've built my private cloud around one hypervisor vendor or one private cloud solution. I want to open it up. It could be I want new workloads to be on this different hypervisor solution, because I want that flexibility in the future. Some of them might say, Listen, I want to stick with the same virtualization or private cloud provider that I have from a software perspective, but I want to build in more flexibility so that when it's renewal time, maybe in two or three years down the line, I have the flexibility to be able to move to another software stack if I want to. And for some customers, they've decided they want to rip out their software stack today and build their private cloud with a completely different software vendor. You can see that 89% is people that are all along that spectrum. Dell private cloud is going to help those customers make the choice regardless of where in those in that spectrum they fall. 

Let me take a step back and give you a specific example around the general conversation around this aggregated infrastructure. Oregon State University is one of our customers. They're based out of Oregon, and the Oregon State University has a world class climate research that they're doing, and the one of the ways they do this is they have these ships that they're using that have incredible amount of instrumentation and are taking samples of data that then gets fed into climate research that Oregon State University is doing. And these ships have an incredible amount of sophisticated instrumentation and what they're using to actually manage the data, what Oregon State University is using to manage the data is really the disaggregated infrastructure at its heart, right? Dell compute, our storage capabilities to really be able to manage the data, to process the data, and to be able to keep it safe and safeguarded. Oregon State University is really taking the kind of disaggregated infrastructure approach to heart and, and building that into their design.

12:06 Courtney Hughes

Oh, I love that. And before we wrap Varun, what is one takeaway that you want CIOs and IT architects to remember?

12:14 Varun Chhabra

Courtney really what I tell customers when I meet them is that ultimately, they know their business better than anybody else. Our job as Dell is to be a trusted advisor for our customers, and really we want to help customers take that strategic decisions that are right for their business. We support an open ecosystem. We support multiple deployment capabilities. We support multiple payment options. We're all about flexibility, and we're dedicated to really help our customers make the best investments for their business, both now and in the future. 

12:44 Courtney Hughes

Well said Varun, thank you so much for joining us today. 

12:47 Varun Chhabra

Thanks, Courtney. It's always a pleasure to be with you. 

12:50 Courtney Hughes

And that brings us to the end of today's episode, whether you're managing infrastructure, making tech decisions, or just exploring what's next. Thanks for spending your time with us. If today's conversation sparks some ideas, we'd love to keep it going. Check out the Dell Technologies forum. We're hosting events in cities across the globe, and it's the best way to connect, learn and see these innovations in action. You can find the closest one and register online at the link in our website. And if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to follow and share it with your team. Thanks again for listening. We'll meet you back here soon.