The future of storage is here at Dell Technologies with powerful, efficient, and intelligent enterprise arrays. Hear from subject matter experts on the Dell Technologies advantage and how it can accelerate your transformations with multi-dimensional data storage, protection, and much more!
Speaker 1: On behalf of Dell Technologies and Carahsoft, we would like to welcome you to today's podcast focused around the future of storage for workloads, where subject matter experts, Steve, to me in Justin Sanders speak on the Dell Technologies advantage and how it can accelerate your transformations, with multi-dimensional data storage, protection, and much more.
Stephen Tuomey: Well, thank you very much. My name is Steve Tuomey, and I'm a data center account executive. And basically, what that means is I'm here to help you, in all of your data center technologies, I'm here to help advise you, I'm here to help move you forward, I'm here to help you solve the problems that you have a achieving the missions that you're responsible for. Along with me today, I do have Justin Sanders, who will be presenting towards the end here on a specific use case within one of our civilian agencies. So again, with that, let's kick this off. Today, we have a ton of material to be covering. So we're gonna be covering again, just a really quick overview of Dell Technologies, who we are today, and how we aligned to the federal government and how you guys hopefully we'll be looking at technology is move forward, we're gonna hit on the presidential Executive Order around Zero Trust just to go through that description and how Dell Technologies can help you. We're gonna do a very, very quick review of our Dell Technologies PowerEdge. And we're going to introduce this idea of data center workloads, as the next way to view what's going on within our data centers. Because let's be honest, it's no longer about our data centers, our data centers are no longer singular, or just a data center in a coop, we have data centers, we have coops, we have our applications in the cloud. We even have cloud-based data centers. Today, we're going to do a very high-level look at the Dell Technologies portfolio. And again, this is very high level, we're not going to go into details about our products, we're just going to list off what they are in some of their basic capabilities. We're going to look at Dell Technologies, data protection, and then we're going to specify and move into the workloads and how our the workloads can be satisfied by our technologies. We're going to introduce Justin again. And we're going to be going through an agency use case, and then we'll wrap this up. So, with that as our agenda, let's move this forward. And again, my name is Steve Toomey, and Dell Technologies is not the Dell from 10, 15 years ago, Dell Technologies is a new technology family. And it's a family made up of leading technology companies. As you can see, it's part VMware part Dell itself, in part, Dell, EMC, that amalgam of Dell Technologies, PowerEdge servers, and the EMC storage solutions, its virtual stream are online in the cloud presents Boomi, the application migration and secure works, the ability to secure and monitor all of the applications and all of the hardware within your data centers. But as any technologist will know, these companies come and go. And so, what Michael Dell in the leadership have done is they've taken these technology companies and this technology family and aligned it into four basic messaging platforms. And the first is what we're doing here today, working in learning from anywhere, have to maintain the ability to get our users to get you in touch with your applications in touch with the data that you need to do your job. The second is increasing agility with the multi cloud. As I opened with our data centers are no longer a singular place. We're everywhere, all of our applications exist across multiple balance. And so, we need to take that and look at it holistically put the applications in the data where they correctly belong. And Dell Technologies is a leader, not only in the messaging, but also a leader in that ability to move and migrate and watch all of the clouds together. We have the idea behind creating new value. There is so much storage out there on our data centers and on our cloud platforms that we within the IT community are creating value. We're looking at that data in new ways to come back to the mission to accelerate it to make the mission objectives more obtainable by making our own departments more efficient with the way they handle everything. But each one of these messaging platforms whether I can work and learn from any nearby connectivity, whether I have multiple data centers, or even just a singular, and whether I'm creating new value are all threatened. And the idea is we need to be able to achieve cyber resilience need to be able to protect our data. And so that Intrinsic Security that Dell Technologies brings through our hardware platforms, through our software platforms, and through the technology, family itself, becomes a very, very important message for everything to be wrapped up together. But I'm gonna be honest, I talk with you, our customers on a fairly weekly basis, I have many meetings with customers. And no one's ever actually said, Steve, I need to increase my agility. And so, what I've done is I've taken these messaging platforms, and I've put in the words that I use every day that you guys use, our customers use every single day. And so, in the conversations, if we're talking data protection, or systems will probably aligning closely to that increasing agility message. If I'm looking at data, or I need to go digital, it's creating that new value. Looking at the artificial intelligence and machine languages. We're looking at cloud native and containers. And we all now work with our app dev teams. We're talking 5g and containers, we need the messaging around both creating that new intrinsic value, but also looking at agility. And, of course, with executive orders. And with the security paradigms that we all live with in today's world access in an audit, authentication and logging is a huge message that we all need to understand. And we need to understand how the products that we use in our data centers, wherever they may be, are going to align and allow us to look view and protect our data. And so together this is the Dell Technologies advantage. This is who Dell Technologies is today. But as you've probably heard, there is a new Executive Order. And that new Executive Order is all around this idea of Zero Trust. But it's not a very clear idea at all. In fact, the idea is not new, it's been around for a very, very long time. But the idea is there's different ways to look at Zero Trust, it's, I can do something. Items like micro segmentation are using software defined networking software defined storage to protect the data that I have to limit the access, I can look at the people that are accessing the data and restrict them. But the real idea is that Zero Trust has to apply to both the logical entities, users and processes, as well as the infrastructure components themselves, the hardware, servers and storage and network hardware. And so, by implementing Zero Trust, it's a process to get from where you are today to where you need to be. And one of the easiest steps is by introducing into your core, the idea and existing equipment that can do Zero Trust. And that's where Dell Technologies can really assist. Because Dell Technologies can help you. We have everything designed from security up from the ground up. So, everything inside the organization cannot be trusted. And so that includes the servers includes the firmware in the BIOS. And so, Dell Technologies makes it easy by having all of those components validate and verify when you're trying to do an upgrade. So, a malicious actor can't just upgrade your BIOS and install some spyware. But it's all built around the Dell Technologies framework. And that framework is just as indicated in Zero Trust user centric, making sure the user has the correct access, making sure their devices have the correct access and are secured, making sure the services themselves and application does not have access to more data than it should. And so, Dell Technologies can help because we have to trusted clients that you guys can use every day. We have the infrastructure for information technologies, our servers, and our storage and our networking that can help you bring those Zero Trust Intrinsic Security into your data centers wherever they are. And we have the software with VMware to allow the communications between the data center trusted and our clients trusted and make the entire data path a trusted data path. So, Dell Technologies is here is here to help you understand this presidential mandate and move forward with the Executive Order to make sure your environments have apply Zero Trust correctly. But the data center is more than just Zero Trust. In fact, the data center starts with the idea that data centers have to do work. And so, when we first do a quick review of our data center technologies, it really aligns into just a few silos. We have people, we have processes, and we have technology. But if you look closer into technology, you can see that that also can be aligned into key silos. Traditionally, it's compute where the work gets done, storage where the data is, and then the communications that allow the storage and the compute to talk to each other. The data center is built around getting the work done. And so, PowerEdge is Dell Technologies Coupa cute engine within the data center. And it's built around three massive capabilities. And the first is adaptive. It's designed around the latest Intel engineering, AMD engineering to provide the best and latest technologies. And it gives you a predictable outcome, I'll still worry about a server one not matching server number two, not matching server number three capabilities, the technology is predictable. But you can't scale based on a single unit. And so, PowerEdge is built also for autonomous, I can autonomously go into an environment and grow that environment. And so, it has the intelligence built into work together with other PowerEdge servers. This allows for a rapid transformation, I can scale from a single node to multiple nodes to a data center scale, and still be able to manage my infrastructure. And last but not least, it is part in a key member of the resilient infrastructure that Dell Technologies offers. Again, from that secure BIOS to the firmware to the drivers that Dell offers, they are all checked in cross check and also signed so that you as a customer don't have to worry about am I getting a bad copy of the data. So not only is the code signed, but when it actually goes to in the install and upgrade, it will check that code and that signature to make sure it's valid. PowerEdge is the core of our Compute Engine. Most if not all of our services and servers, and storage arrays are built around PowerEdge. And so, when you look at PowerEdge, and you look at what we're here to discuss today, it all comes back to not the bits, not the bytes, not the pieces and parts. But what is your mission trying to accomplish? What is the workload that you're trying to drive? And so, what Dell Technologies have done after looking after all of our customers, we looked at through our database of installs, databases of projects and what our customers were doing. And we really align these to some core workloads. And this is not all of the workloads. But these are more common ones. And so, you have a workload aligned around business applications. And these are your core SQL databases, exchange environments, your Oracle databases, we have data analytics, AI, ml, high performance computing, and containers and VDI. Again, not all, but certainly the major core of the workloads that we have. And as you can see, they've aligned, we've aligned our core servers, our core PowerEdge technology into what these workloads can accomplish and what can do them in the most efficient way. Because data centers, technology can do almost anything, I can get 1000 servers to do a job. But maybe I can do that in less than a third, or less than 20% of the same server have the same style servers, just envision differently. And so, Dell Technologies has that capability to offer multiple options that will get the job done. One of my core things is when I first started as within engineering, I tended to focus, I tended to focus on the R 750, for instance. So, I tried to fit the way you worked. And I tried to make my product bend and flex to meet the way you worked. Or sometimes I'll be honest, I actually tried to make you bend and flex to work to the way my product had to work. But as I grew and as I worked with more customers as I worked with more of my federal customers, I became more comfortable as an engineer, and I had more discussions and I really learned it wasn't about product and things changed. The product in my mind became how you worked, how your team worked? And then more importantly, what really were you trying to achieve? What was your outcome? What was your workload. And then that workload began to define the solution, not the other way around. And that really allowed me as an engineer to come up with the best solution, the most efficient solution, so that you guys got the most bang for your buck, you had a solution that worked the way you wanted it to work, that could do the workload that you needed to do. And so today, we talk workloads. And today, it's also about storage. So, keeping these workloads in mind, let's look at the Dell Technologies storage portfolio, and how that storage portfolio can start answering the needs of the workloads that you have. And so, the Dell Technologies portfolio is a very large portfolio. We start with our block based unified base storage arrays with Power Max, the leader in tears, zero, that seven nines of reliability, how we're storing unity, the bulk war of the mid-range storage arrays, we have our power scale, our file scale out file systems, that will grow to massive petabytes of information. And then we have for today's cloud native applications, our Elastic Cloud Storage ECS, which allows us to have massive built out file systems that do self-indexing that have metadata attached to each and every file, so that searching, and those new cloud native applications can get to the data that they need to present faster. And then in the center, we have that hyper converged, where we're bringing both the storage and the compute together, eliminating the complexity of the networking, we have VX rack and VP and PowerFlex as the RAC scale entities. And we have the fundamental unit of VX rail, version seven, in this case, it's being shown that allow you to build this hyper converged infrastructure in a way that's going to give you the ease of management and the operational scale that you need. And so throughout all of the technologies, whether it's the PowerEdge, whether it's our top technologies and storage portfolio, we do have one thing that traverses everything, and that is Dell Technologies power protect, you know, what better as our Data Domain pro platform. This is a tremendous platform that allows us to do that last step of cyber resiliency, and that's protecting our data. If a situation happens, power protect allows us to restore a good set of our data, get back to the working as fast as possible. So, let's look at a couple of these key storage arrays. And again, very, very high level not going to divulge into too much. But what we do have is we do have our power Max storage array. And this is again, the definition of tier zero datacenter storage. So powerful architecture, designed with scalability, it's designed for end-to-end NVMe key, its performance, its reliability, is the highest in the industry, for datacenter storage today. But it's not complex. In fact, it's designed for simplicity, it's designed to be integrated into the other products that you have in your data center to present one face to your workloads. For us, it is the bar, it becomes a bar for enterprise storage, the next generation, it's going to provide all of the certifications that we need within the federal government. So FIPS, 141, and 142 are there. All of these key elements are in our delta, Dell EMC powermax storage array. And last but not least powermax 10. Also, it is also the primary storage array for most mainframes in long IBM System, AI connectivity. We provide the storage for all of those applications that are critical within your data centers. And so, becomes a very, very powerful message throughout the platform connectivity, tier 079's of reliability. Power Max is the largest if you want to consider that though I can actually create a power mix that's very cost efficient and very efficient for your workloads. But we do have other storage arrays. And the first one that I'd like to touch on is one that is the most common mid-range storage array within the federal government. And that's our Dell EMC Unity platform. And this platform is designed, like it's bigger brother all around the performance and efficiencies that need to be within that today's data center. As you can see, it is NVMe. Ready, not by default, but you can upgrade it to an NVMe NVMe unit to be that spectacular performance that today's applications need. And unity is also designed for the cloud. So, with Unity, I can go and move my workloads dynamically from within my data center, to the FedRAMP cloud data centers, so I can move it to Microsoft Azure, or I can move my data to Amazon and Google. So, I can get that data that's no longer actively being used, and move it up to a place where it's going to be more efficiently, more cost effectively stored. And so, this is an automated process. Again, no interactivity, no change of your workflow. In order to accomplish this, just set it up, monitor it and forget about it, because it will copy your data move data back and forth between the cloud and the storage array as needed. But Unity x t is a mid-range storage array doesn't really stop there either. In fact, the leading platform for moving workloads from a local data center up into the cloud is VMware Cloud Foundation in unity is fully integrated within Cloud Foundation. In fact, it's fully integrated within the software designed data center technology for multi cloud. And so, you can build all of your new applications on unity, you can build with the peace of mind that we have reference architectures for all of the workloads that we've discussed today. So, it's integrated, and it's resilient. And it's defined for the least amount of risk to your environment. But as all things unity is slowly but surely being offset, if you want to call it that, by the new kid on the block, unity is NVMe. Ready. But power store, which is our next generation of storage array, based off of unity, and others, isn't not only an NVMe capable, but it's also storage class memory Optane capable storage array. This is a storage array that's been designed for today's data era. And it's all about providing a data centric model, a workload based on what data you have around what mission you're trying to accomplish. And so any workload, whether it's physical, whether it's virtual databases, even containers can be scaled and designed into a power store. Again, it's performance optimized with scale up and scale out NVMe and storage class memory capabilities. And it's always on always on inline compression and DD, which gives you the most capacity bang for your dollar, because it's going to give all of that performance optimization, but it's going to reduce the data footprint within your data center as well. It's intelligent, just like PowerEdge. It's designed to be programmed, I can work in my designers, my application, and developers can work in their native tools to program my power store to accept in double capacity double performance as my application scales. So, from today's containers, as I more people log in, I can allocate more and more and more resources. But I can do that using the tools available as opposed to calling a storage, a storage architect and allocating more storage. And like all of the other it has a flexible architecture. It is a scale up or scale out architecture. So, I can add DRS to each individual node. Or I can add nodes depending on the needs of the workload itself. Then we do have a flexible deployment model, which allows us, and we'll hear about this in the next slide or two to go to places where storage array has actually never really been. And so, when you look at power store, it's available as a storage platform, the power store t this operating system this model is your classic idea of a storage array. It provides storage for external hosts, very straightforward. But Dell Technologies upgraded power store. We've made it more Versatile. And this is where the real change the game changer within the federal government, the game changer for our customers for you really is we virtualized, the actual storage OS, we've taken power store OS and made it a virtual tenant on the actual storage array on top of VMware ESXi. And what this gives us is the ability to run applications on the storage array. So I indicated earlier that it's going places that no storage array has done is that because it can go by itself, you need me in embassies, where I need to do facial recognition, power store can collect all of that video data, and the apps on portion, I can actually run my virtual machines that are running the analysis on those video files on the storage array, I no longer need to have a complex network, I no longer need to have external complex compute. To do that work, I just need it on a virtual machine on the storage array itself. So, becomes very, very popular, very powerful, as a unit as an actual storage platform that allows us to move forward and take the technology to places that it needs to go for our customers to have their missions complete. And so, we've seen a lot of our block base power Max, we've seen unity, and now we've seen power store. But the data center and complex thing encompasses a lot more than block. In fact, the data center most of your data today is probably in an unstructured file format. And that's where dalliances power scale comes in. Power scale is our unstructured data storage array. It creates what we call a data lake, where I can put tons and tons and megabytes of files, video files, security footage, text files, log files, as well as user shares. And I can make that data available with security in mind to the applications that need to continually scan that data, to look at that data to derive that business efficiencies, that mission efficiencies that we as it people are looking for. And so one Fs provide power scale, the ability to log and put all that data there, but it also allows simplicity at scale, you can start small, start adding security logs, start adding application logs, start adding user files and continually grow, block by block by block, making the unit more powerful, making your data lake more searchable and more powerful for the organization. And so, from a file-based perspective, we have power scale from a block based we have power Max, we have power store, we have unity x t, which leads us to the benefits of the center ground, I need to get simpler, I need to remove some of the network and connectivity complexity that exists within my organization. And that's where the hyper converged conversation is. And Dell Technologies makes no mistake about it, we lead in hyper converged VX rail is the number one hyper converged platform in it today. And it's number one because it's built again, around that idea of automation. Making operations simpler by removing that complexity. I simplifying the view of it, simplifying the ability so that one person can now do the jobs because there's so easy and so automated of many. And that allows us to optimize our infrastructure and not worry about the complex silos of compute, networking, and storage brings it all together. It allows us it allows you to innovate. By harnessing VX rail, you can harness a direct path to the hybrid cloud, it can run VCF, it can allow you to swing workloads natively from itself, all the way up into the cloud. And so, becomes an empowerment agent for all of our developers, whether they're developing VMs with standard SQL Server with standard applications, or whether they're developing today Kubernetes and containers that allows us to move forward and evolve. And of course, it's an acceleration mechanism. It allows us to drive productivity, I can get things done faster through automation that allows me to surge ahead, I can get more applications, I can get the mission done faster, utilizing VX rail. And it does this several different ways. The first way it does this in my favorite as an X IT engineer is it gets rid of all of the spaghetti. And by spaghetti, I mean, which firmware Am I loaded? Which BIOS do I have? Which drivers? What connectivity? What switch am I using, it gets rid of all of that because it integrates a full stack lifecycle management. VX rail allows you to go from VX rail version three to Vx rail version four to Vx rail version five, and it does the work for you. So, you don't have to worry about which thing gets upgraded. First, which thing in what order do I need to go if from going from version one to version three, the lifecycle management, to me is one of the most powerful features and functions of the next round. The integration with the private clouds, the public cloud and the edge is an added benefit. Because I can now lifecycle manage all of it, my private data center, I can even manage an update and lifecycle manage all of my edge installs. Very, very powerful, very powerful with the abilities that it has. And speaking a little bit to, again, that presidential order on the Zero Trust, VX rail is all about is all built on security. In fact, from its very first day, it was built with security in mind. It is FIPS, 141 and 142 validated. And so, this as a platform can satisfy and begin to migrate your environment, true to a true Zero Trust environment. Very, very, very powerful. And so, with that we've actually had in talked about a great deal of the storage platforms that are available here at Dell Technologies. But as the title of this webinar is, Steve, how do these tie back to the workloads? Again, we don't want to think, well, I'm going to put in a VX rail to do this job. In fact, I don't want to think like that at all anymore. I want to think I have a job to do. What solution should I start looking at. And so, what I've done after, again, working with a lot of my customers, and a lot of my peers inside of Dell Technologies, is I've really started mapping, and I'm going to take that original workload set that we saw with PowerEdge. And now I'm going to expand that from PowerEdge into Dell EMC storage, and in reality, into the solutions, because the solutions are where we want to be to solve the entirety of the workload, not just how is it going to be working, and where am I putting things but the entirety. And so, when we look at business applications, we saw that the main line Dell Technologies servers, the R 750, the AR 650 are the primary mechanisms for doing the work within that workload. But as we grow that out, we saw here that VX rail and VX rack and VMware Cloud Foundation, which by the way are completely built on PowerEdge, servers can fit the bill for that workload PowerFlex as well as power store can also. And so, when we look at our solutions, it's going to be a combination of some of these pieces, and I'm putting all of them down. But understand that if you're doing a VX rail, you may or may not any longer need your R 750. Because your VX rail P series, for instance, is built on a 750. And so, we build solutions. And we look at all the options that are built within those solutions for the workload. What are the pros to the solution is it's a high-performance solution? But it's also got high performance and high-capacity block storage, I can get the work that my core applications need done. And likewise, building out the rest. I have my data analytics power platform, where I can have my 650s and my 75, 25s and I can have power scale as my storage array. And I can get a solution is going to provide high parallelism, and I'm going to have my unstructured data, that idea of a data lake capable. So, I can scan all of my storage, I can scan all of my files and really come to insights on how to make my mission more efficient and How to Reduce the work that I need to do to get there. And I filled out the rest of these as well. So, I have my AI ml high-performance. And again, containers and VDI. So, from a storage perspective, what do these look like? We have designed for the way you work, again, building solutions to the workloads around how you and your organization's work. And so, when we look at cloud and cloud native, we have power store, VX rack, PowerFlex, VX rail as we move forward, and I'm gonna go through these a little fast, but I do want to leave a lot of time for Justin to go through his presentation as well. We have power scale, we have Elastic Cloud Storage mainframe, we have our power max for mission critical mainframe AI series workloads. We have our physical business applications that are sometimes also virtualized. And you'll notice a lot of our storage arrays to really do and work within the solutions for business applications. And that same thing is also true for the virtualized applications. And what does this look like. So, I've included one set here. So, when I say business applications virtualized, you see, well, that's a lot of choices. But when you look at the solutions, it starts really eliminating itself. So, for instance, if I'm looking at my applications, virtual applications, I can have a solution that's traditional server and storage. So now I have my power ad server platforms, as well as my enterprise storage power store. And this is going to build your classic three tier storage Communication Server architectures that we're all very, very familiar with, that we're all comfortable with. But maybe I need to move to the next step, I want to start introducing virtualized application, but I still need the tie in to the physical. And so PowerFlex becomes the answer to that I can have a virtualized environment built on either open-source VMware, even Microsoft's as your and I can still have my physical workloads, I can still have my physical Oracle databases, but tying in to the PowerFlex storage, compatibility. And this guy's a tremendous edge, it's bottleneck free, it's reliable. And I don't need any longer to do database data migrations, I can migrate from physical node to virtual node on the fly. tremendous, tremendous dynamic capability. And last, but not least, for those of us who are more of a VMware based organization, we do have our VX rail, and VMware Cloud Foundation built on VX rail, which gives us our exceptional productivity. It gives us exceptional results. And quite frankly, it has the competitive edge that most of our organizations are looking for giving us that automation, that single view in a highly efficient architecture. But the one thing you saw on every single slide, every single slide that had something on it from a picture or an image or a storage array, was our power protect. And so underneath all of our compute underneath all of our storage arrays in every single solution, the last piece, not the least, probably one of the more important ones is power, protect the data domain platform are integrated data protection devices. And the reason this is so simple and powerful is that it's a trusted and known entity 80% of our backups in it today, run on Dell Technologies, data protection. It's that simple. It's an awesome platform to protect your investment, whether it's application, whether it's user data, whether it's generated data, or even telemetry and security data. And so, with that, I'm going to turn this over to Justin, who's going to be talking to you about one of the use cases that he has and that he has had recently around workloads and moving into and talking about storage from a workload perception.
Justin Sanders: And first I want to thank you, Stephen, for doing such a great job on the overview of where and you know, does come and come so far over the last couple of years. And today I would like to take no more than 10 minutes. I like to keep these this story of what is workload and what the specific use case has been the share to you guys for a brief background name's Justin Sanders. I'm a pre-sales Solutions Architect for Sibley and services here my core Our customers is all tribal nations. So, if you are a tribal nation out there, I would love to even just talk with you or if you're not, you know, we represent Sibley and service as a whole. But my communities are reservations. And we have a wide range of workloads, from protecting tribal data to health applications, supporting the communities and all the way to casino gaming applications. So, the way I like to highlight today is the work that we've done with Navajo Nation and Seneca casino, mostly focusing on Navajo Nation and we'll do a small comment about Seneca. But to set the stage, Navajo Nation when we first started having this combo, we've worked with multiple I think IT departments you know, there's IT departments that support the tribe as a whole. There's IT department that supports to education within the reservations, there's an IT department that supports the police force, and an IT department that supports you know, the health records and the health department all the way down to even and I separate it department for the utility authority services. And when we came in, everybody was kind of separated doing their own thing. And we had a vision for them about, you know, how can we get the whole because when we visited, you know, Navajo Nation, you'll be surprised to have all these entities working separately, but really only like, you know, one mile to two miles or three miles down the road, and honestly could work together. And how do we do that? Well, that's where Dell came into the vision. And today we're going to talk about a product that Steve introduced a VX rail to HCI. And really, this has been a our flagship HCI. And I don't have to agree 100%. With Stephen, that is the number one HCI platform out there because of all the use cases. And what I like to say is, it's not even, I wouldn't even call it a Dell product. I call it a VMware Dell product, because VMware and Dell have had the same amount of activity in creating this. So just to continue to move on with the story and what we've done. First, why even consider HCI? You know, Stephen talked about a lot of these key components, but we talked about ACI one, I would say, measuring all that lifecycle capabilities of taking the simplicity and taking the work out of the time that you spend and making sure your drivers making sure you know, your firmware, your ESXi, your V San, all your virtualization software to hardware are all compatible will HCI specifically VX rail takes that complexity out of it. And that's where you see a lot of the simplicity over here, bringing automation, we have a nice tagline that says, you know, a lot of IT departments spent 70% of their time just kind of keep the lights on and only 30% of time thinking about where they want their, you know, either business or nation state to move forward. And my job a lot of times when I come in is to flip that switch and to bring simplistic gear, and have you spent 30% of the time just keeping your lights on and 70% of time actually think about where we want to go. So how do we do that? You know, for Navajo Nation? Well, we come in, we do analysis, we always, you know, break down where we want to start, as Stephen said, with what your workload looks like not what fits the bill, not what we want to sell you but what's going on, right where, with what you're doing. So, we come in, we, you know, do full analysis, figure out what they're doing. This is a couple pools from Senecas data, you know, we see what were the requirements standpoint, and then we even go into what they currently do. So, these are just kind of exports that we've kind of walked through about, you know, these are the current processes are using where can we go in the future we get, we get really detailed, you know, so we can personalize all of our solutions that we create for you. So, what does that do? Well, you know, once we go through that whole initial initialization process, and we do all that discovery, we come up with ideas. And the idea for Navajo Nation was, you know, what, we have a lot of people who one are separated with different IT departments, but also lacking sometimes a manpower. You know, a lot of times I see within reservations that you have an admin who is doing networking, but also doing storage at the same time, or you know, that being pulled in many different directions. And that's when we thought, you know, what, what's the best thing we can do for them. And what we thought was to bring in a simplistic solution, that clusters and virtualizes, all your compute, and all your storage into one platform, meaning that if you're comfortable with VMware, all you have to do to manage this solution is use your vSphere web client. So, if you've ever gone to the vSphere Web Client, and you know, just provision a VM and said, hey, I want this amount of VCPUs, I want this amount of you know, virtual RAM, it needs this much capacity. If you ever gone through that, you know, step by step wizard, you know how easy this would be like, this is the workload I want to put onto a VM. Here's the template, please give it to me. And that's exactly what this system does it you know, virtualizes, your compute allowing those resources to be available for you, but it also virtualizes your storage, it takes each of these servers and puts it into one single data store. So, I like to say we wanted to give Navajo nation wants to consolidate their experience from five different departments down to a single data center. That is, you know, giving them the resources and asking the question, do I have it available? If the answer is yes, please give me the view. As simple as that, you know, you're pulling from a single data store, when it comes to provisioning or storage, and you're pulling from a virtualized compute environment. So, what we ended up doing was kind of a three, three-part transition, we took the main tribal data center, we it was running on traditional architecture before it was running on blades, you know, here's the power age blade old in 1000. And it had a sand backing it up. And it used to look like on the same on site A and Site B, what we've done is we've already replaced site a completely with seven node VX rails with, you know, the spine leaf fabric up here, and the running, you know, simple applications at the start exchange things that keep the business application moving forward, the core things that you need to keep track of your data, the exchange, the Active Directory, the ticket system, SQL databases, Skype, SharePoint, timekeeper, all the core applications that you need to keep the business going, you were able to virtualize, put them on VMs, and put it in a centralized, centralized area. Now, as Stephen continues to say, protection, and knowing what to do with your data, and making sure that you don't lose at all costs is a key component that we always security, security central plane is a key component into how we do everything. And at the same time, we haven't deployed these VX rails yet. But Navajo Nation, as of today, I just spoke with him this morning is on their way to bring this in, I would say early June, and they're going to have a complete VX rail production site and to complete the actual DR site. And here, there are some other initiatives. we're migrating education data, we're communicating, we're branching out to all the police department that utility, we're actually going to take away having the utility and police and education, they've been very thankful for this managing their own separate infrastructures, we're putting them on an elastic hyper converged solution. So, if they ever needed to expand a node, or bring in more data at the whim, you can scale as needed. And that's, that's a key thing when it comes to the simplicity of VX rail, when you get onto the VX rail platform. And the reason why this was a big thing for the Navajo Nation is that they thought about working with cloud providers, but they've always, you know, when you work with Native American reservations, there's always a hesitation to put your data off prem or into someone else's hands. And we want to make sure that, you know, we are providing them the capability of doing it, how they want to do it. And at the end of the day, we decided we want to give you something that's very easy, but that you still own and that, you know, I feel very safe. And this is my data and it's not somewhere else's. So, the reason why I highlight this as simplicity is we produce we have a whole internal team that supports you the whole lifecycle of your VX rail, we don't just sell this gear and say you know what you're on your own when it comes to updates and everything. No, we put out critical releases and maintenance releases out every month, or whenever when we feel that you know, VMware comes out with a new edition. So, like they say ESXi 7.0 comes out. We will pretest and pre validate this upgrade with all of the software but also the hardware, the drivers, the firmware, all of that. And we will put out one complete package that will actually go and update your complete cluster by yourself down one at a time. Non disruptively. So, this is something that it gets updated onto one download that we pretest and pre doubt they pre validate for you. So just the end, I'll just take like my last two minutes to highlight something very small about that we're doing. It's not very small, but it's pretty large casino there Niagara Falls, but they're looking to completely modernize how they do things. Again, simplicity came to the key forefront of that conversation. But not just simplicity. But they also came up with another challenge. They said we need simplicity, but we also need active protection. So, meaning that if one of our production goes down, we immediately lose node on disruptively, by having our data or our secondary side pick up on the production of our workloads. And I just wanted to highlight what we're doing there. As Stephen mentioned, we're looking at two clusters. There’s site a site B, these are some of the other smaller clusters that they're throwing in, in Buffalo and now gonna get some of the other casinos. But right here, this is going to be an active configuration. And I want to highlight this about a VX rail. A win that you know, even though you're going for simplicity, you're not sacrificing anything, and security and you we have all of the different ways to be protected, whether that's continuous availability down to archiving your date. So, I just wanted to highlight those two, those two scenarios and talk about how, you know the simplicity of ACI is really changing the way the landscape of Native American communities and the way they're doing it.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening. If you'd like more information on how Carahsoft or Dell Technologies can assist your institution, please visit www.carahsoft.com/dell or email us at DellTechnologies@carahsoft.com. Thanks again for listening and have a great day.