In order to excel in the hyperconverged infrastructure business, you have to be in the server business and offer a range of flexible options in order to better serve customers’ growing demands. And Dell Technologies Inc. has been pushing for innovation and change to ensure that the company is set up for the future of HCI.

“You have to be in the server business to win in the HCI business,” said Ashley Gorakhpurwalla (pictured), president and general manager of server and infrastructure systems at Dell EMC. “I don’t envy anyone trying to do this from a position of weakness or trying to adopt other people’s technology. … The underlying ability to invest in the server technology and beyond and differentiate, innovate on top of that is what it’s going to take to win — and maybe not tomorrow, but in the future as HCI takes off.”

Gorakhpurwalla spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed HCI and Dell EMC’s technological innovations. (* Disclosure below.)

Hyperconverged infustructure and open

When it comes to HCI, a standard kind of open infrastructure hardware platform will win over anything else, according to Gorakhpurwalla. “It may not be a server, but it’s going to look something like a server going forward,” he said. “So you better be a company that can do the scale of a standards-based platform. You better have the IP, the specialized stacks … data protection, storage, networking.”

Now with the pushing of a few buttons, companies can scale their infrastructure — which was unheard of 10 years ago. There is no longer the choice between legacy mode in information technology siloed or implementing cloud, and companies want that flexibility that HCI offers so that they can grow as needed. Companies are also already playing with a concept called edge compute to collect their data from remote places and locations.

“What if your data center has to live at a base of a cell tower at the end of a 30-mile dirt road where someone only visits 45 days apart, and they’re not an IT individual? How do you extend that infrastructure, that management domain, that security domain?” Gorakhpurwalla said. “We understand how to bring that environment the way we’ve been working on that remote management, lights out management style, our security.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2018 event. (* Disclosure: Dell EMC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell EMC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE