Dell Technologies World 2024 | Travis Zhao | Dell Technologies & Ian Pilcher | Red Hat

Clips
News
More from Dell Technologies World 2024

Ian Pilcher

Sr. Principal Product Manager

Red Hat

Travis Zhao

Director Multicloud Product Management

Dell Technologies

How hybrid cloud environments are transforming IT operations

In the world of enterprise IT, the push towards hybrid cloud environments is revolutionizing the industry.Recent discussions between Dell Technologies Inc. and Red Hat Inc. have highlighted their innovative partnership aimed at integrating artificial intelligence into existing IT infrastructure. This collaboration is not just about technology but about creating seamless, automated solutions that enhance operational efficiency and user experience, setting the stage for the future of IT, Travis Zhao (pictured, left), director of product management at Dell Technologies, explained.Dell’s Travis Zhao and Red Hat’s Ian Pilcher, talk to theCUBE about hybrid cloud environments

play_circle_outline Dell and Red Hat Collaborate on Apex Cloud Platform, Featuring OpenShift Container Orchestration on Dell Infrastructure

play_circle_outline Unlocking the Power of Trust: Dell and Red Hat's Partnership Revolutionizes the Open Ecosystem for Technology Deployment

play_circle_outline Discussion on the hybrid cloud approach for AI and the flexibility it offers

play_circle_outline Unleashing the Power of OpenShift AI: Introducing Capabilities for Managing, GPU Support, and Object-Scale Storage

Info

Travis Zhao | Dell Technologies & Ian Pilcher | Red Hat

Ian Pilcher

Sr. Principal Product Manager Red Hat

Travis Zhao

Director Multicloud Product Management Dell Technologies

search

Savannah Peterson

>> Good evening, wonderful humans, and welcome back to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here for day one of three days of live coverage here on theCUBE. It's a fantastic experience in the Venetian. If you can't tell behind me, it's buzzing. There's people hanging out, there's networking. We're going to be talking about one of the coolest partnerships that Dell has on the show. But real quick, I just want to say hello to Bob LaLiberté, who we have never had the chance to co-host together before. This is huge.

Bob Laliberte

>> Hello. Nice to meet you.

Savannah Peterson

>> Nice to meet you. How many Dell Tech Worlds have we been to?

Bob Laliberte

>> A bunch. I don't remember.

Savannah Peterson

>> Great. That sounds super statistically significant. All right, with that data, we'll move forward to our fantastic guest, Ian Pilcher. You and I have been here before. Great to have you back on the show.

Ian Pilcher

>> Thank you so much.

Savannah Peterson

>> And Travis Zao, thank you for being on the show as well.

Travis Zhao

>> Nice to be here. Thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> Big week for you, I can imagine.

Travis Zhao

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> We've talked Dell and Red Hat partnerships before. What's exciting about this week in particular? I'm going to start with you Ian.

Ian Pilcher

>> A few months ago we were together in Chicago and we were talking about the Apex Cloud platform for Red Hat OpenShift, which is a collaboratively co-engineered OpenShift appliance solution that we've been working with Dell on. It's a few months on, we are here. We can talk about some of the enhancements that we're making going forward. I don't want to steal all of Travis's Thunder, but I think you might find that this week's episode will be brought to you by the letters A and I.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that. Senior Principal Product Manager at Red Hat, I'll let you go ahead and take the stage now at this point, Travis.

Travis Zhao

>> We've been doing business with Red Hat for 25 years. Two years ago, we decided to go deeper with the relationship. So actually we jointly created a product, which the product is really about taking OpenShift container orchestration platforms on Dell infrastructure and packages that it was an easier to consume and easy to run a package that allows customers to purchase it very easily, support it from one single point of support, and we provide all the automations for the full stack so that people can concentrate on operating instead of being managed in day-to-day life. And the package really is about the OpenShift as well as Dell's compute, Dell's software-defined storage, and we put our automation software together with that to give them the easy button.

Bob Laliberte

>> Perfect. Now, I know you mentioned Kubernetes and everyone wants to talk about modern application architectures and so forth, but when I was at Red Hat two weeks ago, there was maybe a theme, you might call it, a constant murmuring in the crowd talking about organizations that were looking for potential alternatives for their virtualization solution.

Travis Zhao

>> .

Bob Laliberte

>> No, no, no, to virtualization solutions. So I know that came up a few times, I won't mention any names, but just a few times it came up. So maybe, I know we're here to talk in general about the Apex Cloud platform for OpenShift, but maybe you can talk about how organizations can leverage that if they were looking for options, just saying, for virtualization.

Ian Pilcher

>> For virtualization, for whatever reason they might want be doing that.

Bob Laliberte

>> For whatever reason.

Savannah Peterson

>> Broadening their horizons.

Ian Pilcher

>> Absolutely.

Bob Laliberte

>> How might you help them?

Ian Pilcher

>> OpenShift virtualization is a feature of the OpenShift product. It's included in all of the various editions and such. As long as you're running OpenShift on bare-metal, you can take advantage of OpenShift virtualization. And what it does is it allows you to bring virtual machines into your OpenShift environment. They are good citizens of the environment, if you will. They are peers of more modern containerized applications. They can participate in all of the cloud-native features and technologies that OpenShift brings to the table. So declarative operations with GitOps, advanced networking with Service Mesh, really all of the features that people like about the Kubernetes in the cloud-native space. You can bring your existing virtualized workloads over without having to modify those applications. And for some people that may be a step along the road to modernizing those applications, but in some cases it may not be. They can just fade away.

Bob Laliberte

>> Got it. Yeah, definitely. There was a lot of talk about it. And I was surprised as well because I was thinking that this transformation would be part and parcel of a modernization, but heard in a lot of cases organizations, "Nope, I just need to migrate and I need to do it rather quickly."

Ian Pilcher

>> And I should say Dell APEX is a great platform for that. It is a bare-metal-based OpenShift appliance. So OpenShift virtualization is there out of the box.

Travis Zhao

>> To add on what Ian had been saying, basically we provide a lot of what I call complementaries to the OpenShift virtualization. First of all, when you deploy the APEX platform for OpenShift, it's virtualization ready. What I mean by that is that we leave a system that is actually doing virtualization right there. You can do that.

Savannah Peterson

>> Seamlessly for them.

Travis Zhao

>> Seamlessly for them.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, that's a huge user experience.

Travis Zhao

>> Exactly. And then the second thing actually we did is provide the right storage for it because you have different use cases, the storage, it's not one size fits all. You always have to either right type of storage, right scale of the storage, right performance of the storage. So you've got to have that storage portfolio come with OpenShift virtualization. So that's what I did to basically compliment virtualization. And also when I talked to customers recently, because of all the AI pushes, they feel like all the AIs are running containers.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah.

Travis Zhao

>> They're running on OpenShift and all of a sudden they also say, "Hey, you know what? OpenShift can also run virtualization." It's really a double whammy that both things come together. This single platform can take them in the foreseeable future to run their virtualization workload, AI workload, and start their cloud-native journey.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's got to give them a lot of comfort when they're on the journey of adopting. We talked about digital transformation in the past. I feel like we're in the middle of an AI transformation era. We haven't quite dubbed it that, but that's what it is. When you speak with customers, I'm just projecting, but given the longevity of the relationship between Red Hat and Dell, does that trust and comfort carry forward when you're starting to recommend solutions for them moving forward?

Travis Zhao

>> We're starting building that trust. So what happens is that, in the past, we're not a deep partner, but this basically makes the partnership really a big deal.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's a big deal. This is an embedded little.

Travis Zhao

>> Exactly. And then the other thing I think customer relevance to is this is a co-engineer. It's not a Dell engineer. It is Red Hat. It's really that co-engineer. What happens is that we're taking Red Hat's pre-release code through a CDICD pipeline to our release cycle, and then we test all of the Dell's hardware, making sure it runs before Red Hat even releases. So when Red Hat releases, we have that single package. It allows customer to have a peace of mind to run their infrastructure instead of worrying about is it going to work or not. So that really shows the customer the trust level between the partners.

Bob Laliberte

>> And that's just so important, to have that ecosystem and the tightly integrated ecosystem.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think it's that partner play we've talking about all day. It matters so much right now.

Bob Laliberte

>> It really does, but it's more than just partnering. Like I said, you're going beyond just partnering. This isn't Dave Vallente. This isn't the Barney partnership. I love you, you love me, that kind of thing. You're actually going in.

Ian Pilcher

>> Not that we don't.

Bob Laliberte

>> You don't, but you're actually doing that tight integration with the engineering teams to ensure, like you said, when there's something released, you're there. So it's not like there's a delay, there's not a lag. So organizations, again, because they need to accelerate what they're doing, they need to make sure that when they're doing those upgrades that they're able to do them in a timely fashion.

Travis Zhao

>> Absolutely, yes.

Ian Pilcher

>> Historically, Red Hat and Dell have worked together for about a quarter-century now, and you had that assurance that if something broke, we would work together and fix it. We're really taking that to the next level, which is we're giving an assurance that it's not going to break.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah. I think that's great. And the other cool part about your relationship is that both of you support that open ecosystem, which is so great. For the longest time, I've been covering Dell and covering Red Hat as well, it's always been about, how do we keep things open? How do we drive and focus on that ecosystem of solutions? Because we all know there's no one vendor that can do it all. So being able to drive those partnerships I think is going to be incredibly important for the future of deploying technology and leveraging it to help organizations drive their business.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely, without question. So I'm curious, you're providing this cohesive experience for users. What is the feedback loop between both of you, your customers, and then each other when you're talking about how to build tools that cross-pollinate like this?

Travis Zhao

>> For me, right?

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. You go first.

Travis Zhao

>> Basically, what we do is that we talk to the customers all the time. For example, I meet five or six different customers right here in the show. They tell me what they love about OpenShift and then what they're expecting us from doing, how do we simplify them? So we take customers direct feedback and we'll take it back. And we also talk to our salespeople. So salespeople, what ae the kind of features and things that we should put into the product? And, for example, the right side of the storage is really direct feedback from our customers as well as sales. And then, to be honest, what customers love the most is our simplicity. At the end of the day, they are looking for outcomes. They don't want to worry about it, they just want the outcome. So with our automation, we were able to reduce 90% of the deployment time. It's all about time to value. And then when we do the automated lifecycle management for the entire infrastructure, we save 90%. Right now, they're doing manual, so all of those are very resonant with the customer.

Savannah Peterson

>> So when you two collaborate behind closed doors before we have a meeting like this, and I'm just curious, you don't have to reveal any secrets, but do you find that your customers are craving the same things so it's easy to create joint solutions?

Ian Pilcher

>> Yes, absolutely. Like Travis, I talk to a lot of customers at shows like this directly and such.

Savannah Peterson

>> You can tell.

Ian Pilcher

>> And their desires for the platform, they love what Dell has done with this platform, with the integration between the Dell hardware management and the OpenShift console, the ease of installation. For Red Hat, OpenShift is the Cloud OS, if you will. That's where we think workloads run best. In the public cloud, I click a button, I've got an OpenShift cluster. With Dell APEX, I get the same thing in my data center.

Savannah Peterson

>> So I have to ask, because you're a master of multi-cloud, we were having a little bit of a debate in our keynote analysis analyst segment earlier today in terms of the distribution of AI across on-prem or cloud hybrid. Where are we going to be at? Travis, I'm going to ask you first. Obviously, there's a lot of moving pieces right now, but what do you think the inevitable solutions for some of the big enterprise companies are going to be? Is it going to be hybrid? Is it going to be mostly on-prem? Are we going to lean into the cloud like we have? What's going to happen next?

Travis Zhao

>> I think it is all about the hybrid at the end. You can't run everything in the public cloud because sometimes the data is restricted outside. So if you can't move your data to the public cloud, you need to move the application down-prem to your data. So this is all about our joint product, and you make it hybrid. So basically the same thing you deploy, we have the same thing you can deploy in the public cloud from an OpenShift perspective, but remember we also have a Dell storage. The Dell storage that we provided to OpenShift can run on-prem. They can also run in the public cloud. So you have hybrid compute and then also hybrid storage so that your data and your application can basically move between cloud up and down. So that gives you that flexibility and assurance.

Savannah Peterson

>> Ian, what do you think? I agree with him.

Ian Pilcher

>> I would agree. If you've followed Red Hat for the last decade or so, you may have heard us yammering on about this thing called Open Hybrid Cloud.

Savannah Peterson

>> Just once.

Ian Pilcher

>> Yeah, once or twice.

Savannah Peterson

>> Just once or twice.

Ian Pilcher

>> The cool bit is the industry, it's really happening.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, yeah.

Ian Pilcher

>> This is cool stuff.

Savannah Peterson

>> Which is awesome. It's cool.

Ian Pilcher

>> And just like other applications, but more so, the future of AI is going to be hybrid because data lives in different places, mostly the data and the capacity lives in different places, or the workload needs to live, say, at the edge for latency purposes.

Savannah Peterson

>> 100%.

Ian Pilcher

>> That's going to be massive. In totality, if you actually look at the flops that will be devoted to AI workloads, the edge is going to outnumber everything, just like the ants out-mass us all.

Savannah Peterson

>> 100%. When you've got edge devices in everyone's hands, and this is going to become an AI device.

Ian Pilcher

>> Augmented reality for first responders.

Savannah Peterson

>> . Yeah, it's a whole different ballgame.

Bob Laliberte

>> And as long as we're talking about AI, for some reason, that comes up a lot lately.

Savannah Peterson

>> I guess we're here. We might as well.

Bob Laliberte

>> Some of the announcements from a couple of weeks ago, OpenShift AI. I know from the cloud platform, APEX, you've done a few things to help deliver better AI experiences as well in the platform. Do you guys want to take a few minutes and talk about what you've ?

Ian Pilcher

>> OpenShift AI, from my perspective, it takes AI from being a science project and makes it into a real production-ready, deployable, manageable workload. Just like OpenShift does for more general apps, OpenShift AI does that for the AI apps. So we have tooling for the lifecycle, essentially, for model development, training, deployment, life-cycling, and ultimately retirement.

Travis Zhao

>> We actually was at the Red Hat Summit, so we made a couple of announcements. So to basically accelerate and optimize OpenShift AI running on a Pascal platform, we actually extended our GPU support with NVIDIA to add an L-40S, which can satisfy most demanding customers' AI workloads. And also we refreshed a DVD, which is what we call validated design, to allow customers to build a digital assistant using OpenShift AI on Dell's Pascal platform. And also we're going to bring another reference architecture to basically using NVIDIA's technology to do speech recognition and translation. This is the power of three, Dell, Red Hat, as well as NVIDIA to make that joint happen. Last, I have to mention, we have also introduced the support of object-scale storage. Object storage is a very important part of the AI workload because it really gives you that scalable and efficiency data management, and it's the best solution for hosting those large language model as well as large data sets. So it's really a combination of all these we make AI a reality.

Savannah Peterson

>> And that's what we're all here talking about. It's not just about the high curve. It's not just about the ecosystem. It's about making AI real and how it's going to affect real people's lives. That's going to be my closing question to both of you gentlemen. Ian, I might've asked you this before, but we'll take a slightly different spin on it since we're in the Dell ecosystem right now. Lots changed in the last year. Even when I was reviewing some of the videos from last year, we were still saying generative AI instead of gen AI. I mean even just the nuance of how slang and, to your point, a year and a week ago, certain things have changed. All this stuff has changed so quickly. So what do you hope? Ian, I'm going to start with you, so get ready. What do you hope we can say at next Dell Tech World that's happened that we can't say yet today?

Ian Pilcher

>> Wow. What I want to see is real stories of AI out in the world helping people having a real positive impact on lives. It's easy to think of the negative uses. We've all seen the movies. I think when we first did our interview, they were playing the Terminator.

Savannah Peterson

>> We talked a little bit about Skynet.

Ian Pilcher

>> Music in the background.

Savannah Peterson

>> We talked a little bit about Skynet last time. That was the thing.

Ian Pilcher

>> That's easy to see, and there will be bad actors I'm sure, but it can do so much good. If you were, I don't know if you were at Red Hat Summit, but you saw the video of the folks from the Boston Children's Hospital doing fetal image scanning, and the only way it could be done was with AI. That's just incredible stuff that has the potential to have massive improvements in quality of life for people all over the world.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, it does. Travis, what about you?

Travis Zhao

>> For me, really, next year we come here, I think Dell will have, I'm thinking, I'm dreaming, is what I call a composable AI factory. What it allows you to do is really compose and read and write AI configurations to take AI to various different use cases. Not every AI is a data center. They could be in the edge. They could be in a remote side. So it is all about at the end, using a composable way to build all of these outcomes for customer in a very fast and effective way. .

Savannah Peterson

>> All right. We're holding you to, fast and effective next year. That's going to be our theme.

Bob Laliberte

>> Nice.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's great. Ian, Travis, thank you both so much for being here. Bob, pleasure hosting with you for the first time. And thank all of you from tuning in wherever you might be on this beautiful rock we're blessed to live on. My name's Savannah Peterson. We're here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. It's night one of three days of theCUBE's live coverage here at Dell Tech World. You're watching the leader in enterprise tech coverage.

Travis Zhao | Dell Technologies & Ian Pilcher | Red Hat

search

Savannah Peterson

>> Good evening, wonderful humans, and welcome back to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here for day one of three days of live coverage here on theCUBE. It's a fantastic experience in the Venetian. If you can't tell behind me, it's buzzing. There's people hanging out, there's networking. We're going to be talking about one of the coolest partnerships that Dell has on the show. But real quick, I just want to say hello to Bob LaLiberté, who we have never had the chance to co-host together before. This is huge.

Bob Laliberte

>> Hello. Nice to meet you.

Savannah Peterson

>> Nice to meet you. How many Dell Tech Worlds have we been to?

Bob Laliberte

>> A bunch. I don't remember.

Savannah Peterson

>> Great. That sounds super statistically significant. All right, with that data, we'll move forward to our fantastic guest, Ian Pilcher. You and I have been here before. Great to have you back on the show.

Ian Pilcher

>> Thank you so much.

Savannah Peterson

>> And Travis Zao, thank you for being on the show as well.

Travis Zhao

>> Nice to be here. Thank you.

Savannah Peterson

>> Big week for you, I can imagine.

Travis Zhao

>> Yeah.

Savannah Peterson

>> We've talked Dell and Red Hat partnerships before. What's exciting about this week in particular? I'm going to start with you Ian.

Ian Pilcher

>> A few months ago we were together in Chicago and we were talking about the Apex Cloud platform for Red Hat OpenShift, which is a collaboratively co-engineered OpenShift appliance solution that we've been working with Dell on. It's a few months on, we are here. We can talk about some of the enhancements that we're making going forward. I don't want to steal all of Travis's Thunder, but I think you might find that this week's episode will be brought to you by the letters A and I.

Savannah Peterson

>> I love that. Senior Principal Product Manager at Red Hat, I'll let you go ahead and take the stage now at this point, Travis.

Travis Zhao

>> We've been doing business with Red Hat for 25 years. Two years ago, we decided to go deeper with the relationship. So actually we jointly created a product, which the product is really about taking OpenShift container orchestration platforms on Dell infrastructure and packages that it was an easier to consume and easy to run a package that allows customers to purchase it very easily, support it from one single point of support, and we provide all the automations for the full stack so that people can concentrate on operating instead of being managed in day-to-day life. And the package really is about the OpenShift as well as Dell's compute, Dell's software-defined storage, and we put our automation software together with that to give them the easy button.

Bob Laliberte

>> Perfect. Now, I know you mentioned Kubernetes and everyone wants to talk about modern application architectures and so forth, but when I was at Red Hat two weeks ago, there was maybe a theme, you might call it, a constant murmuring in the crowd talking about organizations that were looking for potential alternatives for their virtualization solution.

Travis Zhao

>> .

Bob Laliberte

>> No, no, no, to virtualization solutions. So I know that came up a few times, I won't mention any names, but just a few times it came up. So maybe, I know we're here to talk in general about the Apex Cloud platform for OpenShift, but maybe you can talk about how organizations can leverage that if they were looking for options, just saying, for virtualization.

Ian Pilcher

>> For virtualization, for whatever reason they might want be doing that.

Bob Laliberte

>> For whatever reason.

Savannah Peterson

>> Broadening their horizons.

Ian Pilcher

>> Absolutely.

Bob Laliberte

>> How might you help them?

Ian Pilcher

>> OpenShift virtualization is a feature of the OpenShift product. It's included in all of the various editions and such. As long as you're running OpenShift on bare-metal, you can take advantage of OpenShift virtualization. And what it does is it allows you to bring virtual machines into your OpenShift environment. They are good citizens of the environment, if you will. They are peers of more modern containerized applications. They can participate in all of the cloud-native features and technologies that OpenShift brings to the table. So declarative operations with GitOps, advanced networking with Service Mesh, really all of the features that people like about the Kubernetes in the cloud-native space. You can bring your existing virtualized workloads over without having to modify those applications. And for some people that may be a step along the road to modernizing those applications, but in some cases it may not be. They can just fade away.

Bob Laliberte

>> Got it. Yeah, definitely. There was a lot of talk about it. And I was surprised as well because I was thinking that this transformation would be part and parcel of a modernization, but heard in a lot of cases organizations, "Nope, I just need to migrate and I need to do it rather quickly."

Ian Pilcher

>> And I should say Dell APEX is a great platform for that. It is a bare-metal-based OpenShift appliance. So OpenShift virtualization is there out of the box.

Travis Zhao

>> To add on what Ian had been saying, basically we provide a lot of what I call complementaries to the OpenShift virtualization. First of all, when you deploy the APEX platform for OpenShift, it's virtualization ready. What I mean by that is that we leave a system that is actually doing virtualization right there. You can do that.

Savannah Peterson

>> Seamlessly for them.

Travis Zhao

>> Seamlessly for them.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yes, that's a huge user experience.

Travis Zhao

>> Exactly. And then the second thing actually we did is provide the right storage for it because you have different use cases, the storage, it's not one size fits all. You always have to either right type of storage, right scale of the storage, right performance of the storage. So you've got to have that storage portfolio come with OpenShift virtualization. So that's what I did to basically compliment virtualization. And also when I talked to customers recently, because of all the AI pushes, they feel like all the AIs are running containers.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah.

Travis Zhao

>> They're running on OpenShift and all of a sudden they also say, "Hey, you know what? OpenShift can also run virtualization." It's really a double whammy that both things come together. This single platform can take them in the foreseeable future to run their virtualization workload, AI workload, and start their cloud-native journey.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's got to give them a lot of comfort when they're on the journey of adopting. We talked about digital transformation in the past. I feel like we're in the middle of an AI transformation era. We haven't quite dubbed it that, but that's what it is. When you speak with customers, I'm just projecting, but given the longevity of the relationship between Red Hat and Dell, does that trust and comfort carry forward when you're starting to recommend solutions for them moving forward?

Travis Zhao

>> We're starting building that trust. So what happens is that, in the past, we're not a deep partner, but this basically makes the partnership really a big deal.

Savannah Peterson

>> It's a big deal. This is an embedded little.

Travis Zhao

>> Exactly. And then the other thing I think customer relevance to is this is a co-engineer. It's not a Dell engineer. It is Red Hat. It's really that co-engineer. What happens is that we're taking Red Hat's pre-release code through a CDICD pipeline to our release cycle, and then we test all of the Dell's hardware, making sure it runs before Red Hat even releases. So when Red Hat releases, we have that single package. It allows customer to have a peace of mind to run their infrastructure instead of worrying about is it going to work or not. So that really shows the customer the trust level between the partners.

Bob Laliberte

>> And that's just so important, to have that ecosystem and the tightly integrated ecosystem.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think it's that partner play we've talking about all day. It matters so much right now.

Bob Laliberte

>> It really does, but it's more than just partnering. Like I said, you're going beyond just partnering. This isn't Dave Vallente. This isn't the Barney partnership. I love you, you love me, that kind of thing. You're actually going in.

Ian Pilcher

>> Not that we don't.

Bob Laliberte

>> You don't, but you're actually doing that tight integration with the engineering teams to ensure, like you said, when there's something released, you're there. So it's not like there's a delay, there's not a lag. So organizations, again, because they need to accelerate what they're doing, they need to make sure that when they're doing those upgrades that they're able to do them in a timely fashion.

Travis Zhao

>> Absolutely, yes.

Ian Pilcher

>> Historically, Red Hat and Dell have worked together for about a quarter-century now, and you had that assurance that if something broke, we would work together and fix it. We're really taking that to the next level, which is we're giving an assurance that it's not going to break.

Bob Laliberte

>> Yeah. I think that's great. And the other cool part about your relationship is that both of you support that open ecosystem, which is so great. For the longest time, I've been covering Dell and covering Red Hat as well, it's always been about, how do we keep things open? How do we drive and focus on that ecosystem of solutions? Because we all know there's no one vendor that can do it all. So being able to drive those partnerships I think is going to be incredibly important for the future of deploying technology and leveraging it to help organizations drive their business.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely, without question. So I'm curious, you're providing this cohesive experience for users. What is the feedback loop between both of you, your customers, and then each other when you're talking about how to build tools that cross-pollinate like this?

Travis Zhao

>> For me, right?

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. You go first.

Travis Zhao

>> Basically, what we do is that we talk to the customers all the time. For example, I meet five or six different customers right here in the show. They tell me what they love about OpenShift and then what they're expecting us from doing, how do we simplify them? So we take customers direct feedback and we'll take it back. And we also talk to our salespeople. So salespeople, what ae the kind of features and things that we should put into the product? And, for example, the right side of the storage is really direct feedback from our customers as well as sales. And then, to be honest, what customers love the most is our simplicity. At the end of the day, they are looking for outcomes. They don't want to worry about it, they just want the outcome. So with our automation, we were able to reduce 90% of the deployment time. It's all about time to value. And then when we do the automated lifecycle management for the entire infrastructure, we save 90%. Right now, they're doing manual, so all of those are very resonant with the customer.

Savannah Peterson

>> So when you two collaborate behind closed doors before we have a meeting like this, and I'm just curious, you don't have to reveal any secrets, but do you find that your customers are craving the same things so it's easy to create joint solutions?

Ian Pilcher

>> Yes, absolutely. Like Travis, I talk to a lot of customers at shows like this directly and such.

Savannah Peterson

>> You can tell.

Ian Pilcher

>> And their desires for the platform, they love what Dell has done with this platform, with the integration between the Dell hardware management and the OpenShift console, the ease of installation. For Red Hat, OpenShift is the Cloud OS, if you will. That's where we think workloads run best. In the public cloud, I click a button, I've got an OpenShift cluster. With Dell APEX, I get the same thing in my data center.

Savannah Peterson

>> So I have to ask, because you're a master of multi-cloud, we were having a little bit of a debate in our keynote analysis analyst segment earlier today in terms of the distribution of AI across on-prem or cloud hybrid. Where are we going to be at? Travis, I'm going to ask you first. Obviously, there's a lot of moving pieces right now, but what do you think the inevitable solutions for some of the big enterprise companies are going to be? Is it going to be hybrid? Is it going to be mostly on-prem? Are we going to lean into the cloud like we have? What's going to happen next?

Travis Zhao

>> I think it is all about the hybrid at the end. You can't run everything in the public cloud because sometimes the data is restricted outside. So if you can't move your data to the public cloud, you need to move the application down-prem to your data. So this is all about our joint product, and you make it hybrid. So basically the same thing you deploy, we have the same thing you can deploy in the public cloud from an OpenShift perspective, but remember we also have a Dell storage. The Dell storage that we provided to OpenShift can run on-prem. They can also run in the public cloud. So you have hybrid compute and then also hybrid storage so that your data and your application can basically move between cloud up and down. So that gives you that flexibility and assurance.

Savannah Peterson

>> Ian, what do you think? I agree with him.

Ian Pilcher

>> I would agree. If you've followed Red Hat for the last decade or so, you may have heard us yammering on about this thing called Open Hybrid Cloud.

Savannah Peterson

>> Just once.

Ian Pilcher

>> Yeah, once or twice.

Savannah Peterson

>> Just once or twice.

Ian Pilcher

>> The cool bit is the industry, it's really happening.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, yeah.

Ian Pilcher

>> This is cool stuff.

Savannah Peterson

>> Which is awesome. It's cool.

Ian Pilcher

>> And just like other applications, but more so, the future of AI is going to be hybrid because data lives in different places, mostly the data and the capacity lives in different places, or the workload needs to live, say, at the edge for latency purposes.

Savannah Peterson

>> 100%.

Ian Pilcher

>> That's going to be massive. In totality, if you actually look at the flops that will be devoted to AI workloads, the edge is going to outnumber everything, just like the ants out-mass us all.

Savannah Peterson

>> 100%. When you've got edge devices in everyone's hands, and this is going to become an AI device.

Ian Pilcher

>> Augmented reality for first responders.

Savannah Peterson

>> . Yeah, it's a whole different ballgame.

Bob Laliberte

>> And as long as we're talking about AI, for some reason, that comes up a lot lately.

Savannah Peterson

>> I guess we're here. We might as well.

Bob Laliberte

>> Some of the announcements from a couple of weeks ago, OpenShift AI. I know from the cloud platform, APEX, you've done a few things to help deliver better AI experiences as well in the platform. Do you guys want to take a few minutes and talk about what you've ?

Ian Pilcher

>> OpenShift AI, from my perspective, it takes AI from being a science project and makes it into a real production-ready, deployable, manageable workload. Just like OpenShift does for more general apps, OpenShift AI does that for the AI apps. So we have tooling for the lifecycle, essentially, for model development, training, deployment, life-cycling, and ultimately retirement.

Travis Zhao

>> We actually was at the Red Hat Summit, so we made a couple of announcements. So to basically accelerate and optimize OpenShift AI running on a Pascal platform, we actually extended our GPU support with NVIDIA to add an L-40S, which can satisfy most demanding customers' AI workloads. And also we refreshed a DVD, which is what we call validated design, to allow customers to build a digital assistant using OpenShift AI on Dell's Pascal platform. And also we're going to bring another reference architecture to basically using NVIDIA's technology to do speech recognition and translation. This is the power of three, Dell, Red Hat, as well as NVIDIA to make that joint happen. Last, I have to mention, we have also introduced the support of object-scale storage. Object storage is a very important part of the AI workload because it really gives you that scalable and efficiency data management, and it's the best solution for hosting those large language model as well as large data sets. So it's really a combination of all these we make AI a reality.

Savannah Peterson

>> And that's what we're all here talking about. It's not just about the high curve. It's not just about the ecosystem. It's about making AI real and how it's going to affect real people's lives. That's going to be my closing question to both of you gentlemen. Ian, I might've asked you this before, but we'll take a slightly different spin on it since we're in the Dell ecosystem right now. Lots changed in the last year. Even when I was reviewing some of the videos from last year, we were still saying generative AI instead of gen AI. I mean even just the nuance of how slang and, to your point, a year and a week ago, certain things have changed. All this stuff has changed so quickly. So what do you hope? Ian, I'm going to start with you, so get ready. What do you hope we can say at next Dell Tech World that's happened that we can't say yet today?

Ian Pilcher

>> Wow. What I want to see is real stories of AI out in the world helping people having a real positive impact on lives. It's easy to think of the negative uses. We've all seen the movies. I think when we first did our interview, they were playing the Terminator.

Savannah Peterson

>> We talked a little bit about Skynet.

Ian Pilcher

>> Music in the background.

Savannah Peterson

>> We talked a little bit about Skynet last time. That was the thing.

Ian Pilcher

>> That's easy to see, and there will be bad actors I'm sure, but it can do so much good. If you were, I don't know if you were at Red Hat Summit, but you saw the video of the folks from the Boston Children's Hospital doing fetal image scanning, and the only way it could be done was with AI. That's just incredible stuff that has the potential to have massive improvements in quality of life for people all over the world.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, it does. Travis, what about you?

Travis Zhao

>> For me, really, next year we come here, I think Dell will have, I'm thinking, I'm dreaming, is what I call a composable AI factory. What it allows you to do is really compose and read and write AI configurations to take AI to various different use cases. Not every AI is a data center. They could be in the edge. They could be in a remote side. So it is all about at the end, using a composable way to build all of these outcomes for customer in a very fast and effective way. .

Savannah Peterson

>> All right. We're holding you to, fast and effective next year. That's going to be our theme.

Bob Laliberte

>> Nice.

Savannah Peterson

>> That's great. Ian, Travis, thank you both so much for being here. Bob, pleasure hosting with you for the first time. And thank all of you from tuning in wherever you might be on this beautiful rock we're blessed to live on. My name's Savannah Peterson. We're here in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. It's night one of three days of theCUBE's live coverage here at Dell Tech World. You're watching the leader in enterprise tech coverage.