The evolution of workloads is resulting in new data center infrastructure and design needs. Developers and operation teams are shifting strategies toward a cloud-native and hybrid-cloud application, which demands improved storage requirements. As such, Dell Technologies Inc. and VMware Inc. are strengthening external storage solutions, according to Caitlin Gordon (pictured, left), vice president of product marketing at Dell EMC. 

“A lot of our customers want to use the cloud for very specific use cases,” she said. “They want to replace tape, and they want to archive to the cloud. So that’s really the cloud-enabled infrastructure piece. It is really about getting to: How do I leverage the cloud for disaster recovery, for archiving, for analytics?”

Gordon and Muneyb Minhazuddin (pictured, right), vice president of product marketing, cloud, security and workspace solutions at VMware, spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed Dell EMC and VMware collaboration, as well as advancements in external cloud storage (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Knight: Give us some examples of how you are jointly coming up with solutions?

Gordon: When we’re looking to use the cloud, external storage is an important part of the [Dell cloud] strategy. So what we’ve already done is we’ve collaborated together to validate [VMware Cloud Founcation] with both Unity and PowerMax. And that’s really the beginning of our journey together. To enable that external storage to be part of the workload domain, to have SDDC Manager not just manage the other parts of the infrastructure, but to manage external storage.

Miniman: Give us a little bit about that difference about … 2019 storage with Dell EMC and VMware versus the past.

Minhazuddin: I think … the integrations in the past were … API, interface-driven. Now — like you point out — it’s co-engineered starting with the solutions like VxRail and Cloud Foundation. The co-engineering makes a big difference because we’re sharing roadmaps.

Whether it’s Cloud Foundation, a full stack with lifecycle, SDDC Manager, that kind of integration only happens with co-engineering.

Knight: How would you describe the different cultures and how you can reflect each other and collaborate with each other in different ways?

Minhazuddin: It was tough initially to kind of figure out how do you … bring a cohesive roadmap where you’re making 12 months infrastructure investment in a roadmap to three months of software cycle. But I think it’s actually come together really well.

Gordon: That kind of legacy on Dell EMC’s side has come from the infrastructure, from the bottom up, and then the VMware has come from the top down. And bringing those two together, although our development cycles have a different kind of timespan against them, we’re trying to solve the same problems for our customers.

Miniman: There were things that needed to do the infrastructure layer, and there’s stuff that happens on the application side. I’d love to hear how this comes together, what’s in the product today, and how are you developing these together?

Gordon: Another interesting example that almost crosses those two is CloudIQ. It’s an agile-developed software application that … runs on a Dell EMC cloud. We now have that not just across our core storage portfolio, but we have that now with VM Health Insights. I think that just shows you how we do have those pieces of the culture coming together and trying to bring these solutions together.

Minhazuddin: There’s a more important part of the workload migration, which is the data migration. So how do you take data migration and look at different data sources, look at your databases. That’s where storage is so critical. It’s easy to take a snapshot of a workload and move it across. But then if you have to pin it on a very seamless data migration pad, you have to have really clear storage strategies, which will support your hyperconverged, your hybrid cloud, the external storage strategies that you’ve got to map to that migration pad.

Knight: What are some other trends that you’re seeing, and where do you think we’re going to be talking about it in the years to come on this?

Minhazuddin: I think the traditional workloads is breaking out into two things. One is do I migrate into the cloud? And the second is I’m rewriting the application to be more cloud-native.

Where I’m coming at is even though [modern workloads] look very modern, a lot of customers are maintaining this computer history museum, which all these apps are scaling through. And that’s not going away in our lifetime, because there’s a lot of complexity in there. And it’s really how we help our customers in the journey to pay off their technical debt and move over to newer technologies, be it cloud, cloud-native, and get a clean start.

Miniman: What does [the new Dell Technologies Cloud announcement] mean to the storage people? What storage is underneath that? Is that something that if they see it, will they recognize it?

Gordon: The Dell Technologies Cloud … essentially has two different flavors, and then one that we kind of said where we’re going in the future. One is the Dell Technologies Cloud platform, which is essentially the VxRail infrastructure. And then there’s the Data Center as Service “DCaS,” the VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. The third one, which was only mentioned quickly today, is that validated design. So that’s leveraging our best-of-breed, three-tier architecture, including storage validated and VCF-ready.

Minhazuddin: The trend shifted only in the last couple of years for hybrid … shut down my data center and go to the cloud. Now it’s really kind of gone two-way. The streets changed from not just going from the data center to the cloud, but also coming from cloud to the data center. So the interesting challenges become about not just taking the requirements of your client-server architecture and migrating it to … elastic cloud architecture, which also taking that elastic EC2, Azure environment and landing them into your data center environments managed as a service.

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 2019 event. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE