Curbing Cloud Sprawl – Chad Dunn, Dell Technologies

This is texturing TV. Hi everyone. Welcome back to text on TV.

I've got an interesting gentleman. I want you to meet for our next guest. His name is Chad Dunn.

He's with Dell. Hey, Chad, welcome to text strong TV. Hey Ellen.

Thanks for having me really great to be here. That's a pleasure. So Chad.

I I mentioned you were Dell. But before we jump into the Dell thing, let's hear a little bit about John. Absolutely, you know, I've been a Dell by way of EMC that'll be 16 years next month as a matter of fact here quite a while before that's where it knocked around a bunch of different startups here in the Boston area in the networking communication space, but it's been a lot of time in storage and previous to the role that I have now, which is leading product management for Dell Apex.

I ran the product management organization for a hyperconverged infrastructure business. Very cool. Excellent.

So you mentioned La Apex. I guess, you know, we should jump on that what exactly for those who aren't familiar is the delay Apex product line share. Well, Del Apex is really an umbrella brand that covers all things that are multi-cloud that have cloud-like consumption model both Financial as well as the user experience.

So things like storage as a service or compute as a service Cloud endpoints as a service, I'll contained under the Apex brand umbrella. Love it great stuff. All right, you know and I think so Chad you're talking to someone who 23 or 24 years ago.

com. What we call Dan ASP application service provider. We were Del host right?

We had done a deal with Dell and we they oemed our hosting and we had dated centers full of Dell nemc machines actually. Thank you very much. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I'm good. I contribute to your children's college fund or whatever but I don't think people wreck realize you know, we tend to think of the cloud as this amorphous no name.

kind of you know off the Box off the shelf Hardware kind of place people don't realize I think how big a player Dell is in that old Cloud ecosystem. That's true, especially in the in the private Cloud space where particularly with the hyper conversion infrastructure portfolio that we have Adele's been number one in that space for a number years now and it continues to grow really robustly and and more more where we're stepping in to support our customers as they go on this multi-cloud journey. Or what we're finding is the majority of our customers have multiple public Cloud instances.

In fact, 75% of them have at least one. I regard instance and 90% of those actually have three or more. So a lot of these companies have sort of become multi-cloud by default.

Absolutely interesting. And I've been watching this space reporting on this space living in this space for a long time. I think we all understood the hybrid Cloud right?

Everybody wasn't just gonna pick up and move everything that they had in their data centers into some public cloud. So there was always going to be this public private. You know at least in my work life and probably in yours right in our career paths our career times.

It's gonna be hybrid. Multi-cloud almost snuck up on a lot of people like people didn't really understand like why would you have something? in Amazon and Google or Azure, why would you have multiple things like multiple distinct instances even within the same class, but it's one of those things that as I said by default in the way that that evolved is you've got your developers and every organization and they're the real Innovation engine that this the driving company and you know, they're imperative is to innovate no matter where or how they get to do it and they're gonna see the best tools and the best places to do so And in some cases they're going to find the best tools at public cloud provider a and in other cases public cloud provider B.

And this is going to happen inside the lines of businesses. It's going to happen with different development teams until you wake up one day and realize you've got 25 different instances on AWS and 30 instances on Azure and Lord knows how many on gcp because if gravitated to those best debris tools and and development chains and our maximizing their capability to innovate as all of a sudden you wake up and you've got clouds for all you've got work that's all over the place. You don't necessarily know where they are.

But you know that your bills are getting big at the end of the month. Yep. And it's called sprawl.

That's exactly what it is. I'm part of it is also the whole Shadow it thing where you got, you know, the beauty one of the it's a double-edged sword, but one of the beauty of the cloud is hey, I mean I whip out my credit card and I spent up a few instances. No big deal.

Yeah, and and then the next guy doesn't the next gal does it and the next person does it and before you know it we all have a whole bunch of it and what the heck's going on, right? It's it's a problem. Right?

And then so to me that that's a you know, that shadow it Cloud sprawl is hard because I just really don't have a handle on it then. I think that's I'm sorry God you were gonna I think it's a problem. I think it's all so an opportunity.

So the benefit that you get out of it is you do have your developers. You have tools in their hands that are unprecedented in the capabilities that they have at their fingertips across, you know, both public and private Cloud providers. So, you know, if you think back to, you know, ten years ago, we were going to approach a machine learning.

It's sort of a project. Well, there's a scarce amount of tools out there that would allow us to do that. We're going to be rolling our own to develop those kinds of things.

Now. If I log into any of the public Cloud providers, I'm gonna find lots and lots of tools to tell me innovate so just unprecedented unprecedented number of assets at the disposal of our developers marketplaces much like the Apple Store really, you know, we had phones before the iPhone Believe It or Not Right But it was really sort of the Apple the apps. It's all about the apps, right?

It's the same thing in Cloud. It's those Market places that allow you to do just about anything you possibly want. There's there's a, you know an app for that in the marketplace.

But maybe not so great. If you're the it operations or not where you guys start worrying about things like data compliance data gravity of she's in general. Absolutely big attack service.

It's a big privacy risk different different countries are going to have different regulations around this. So on one hand great the developers out there innovating but when it comes time to say, okay who can really audit all this and know where all the data is who has access to it. It's a big challenge.

Well, you can't audit what you don't know it's part of the issue. But so that so that's absolutely so I called that's how I you know, that piece of the puzzle to me is you can't order what you can't know or you can't secure what you don't know is is a huge I mean, that's a problem Beyond that's a code red right? No pun intended.

But then let's get another aspect. I think the clouds bro, which is okay. Let's assume my it people know it exists and we got some policies and processes in place.

But the poor SOB in the in the in the finance office when he gets that bill every month. Yeah, it's his oh my God, how'd I spend 80 grand in Amazon last month or Google or any of them or combined? Our Cloud build last month was 170 thousand dollars.

Yeah, where is where how to get there? You've got to give you've got to be able to not slow down your developers, right? So that's hard right to get control of where that resides.

Now the way that we look at it. I'm specifically is we see both what we call ground to cloud and a cloud to ground strategy around this. So part of the ground to Cloud strategy is being able to take the data that I have and selectively movement in and out of the cloud whichever Cloud it is but keep it within the same data services say, for example, if you like the storage Services you get an adult powerflex while being able to also have that running in the cloud as well.

As on Prem have seen this Mobility between the two. All right. I've got, you know fair amount of control over that date.

I can audit that day. I can control how it moves then. But from a cloud to ground perspective some of those services at the hyperscale US are offering this can also actually be run on Prem.

So if you actually bring some of those services and then run them within your four walls or within a co-location that you control you've got a bit more security control on itability and governance of that data in those workloads. So, you know, we're trying to strike that balance between, you know, giving the it organizations that compliance and controls they need without inhibiting the developers. That's a tough.

It's really tough. I think part of what makes it tough to chat is we tend to think of the On-prem to Cloud it's not even on-prem because a lot of people use third-party data center, right? They're not but let's call it the data center to the public highway is a one-way street right that once we move stuff up to the cloud.

That's where it resides. That's where it is. We don't we don't think enough of hey, you know what we put it in the cloud for.

for a given period of time for some reason but when that you know reason for doing it is over the nice thing about the cloud was that elasticity. It didn't just blow up big it also can go theoretically. Back small so I you know, I've got some big thing going on.

I need that extra umph in the cloud. So now that big thing's over shut it down move step back to the data center. That's right.

I mean think about that use case. We're talking about powerflex running in the cloud. You know, I may have the bulk of my data, you know running in in powerflex in a co-location, but I could have Sovereign adjacency to any one of the clouds.

So some subset of my data can move into the cloud for some operations for some period of time and then move back out and it's got to be two-way street. I don't have to fully commit to any any particular power democratization of the data amongst the call providers. Absolutely.

So I think that's a big thing people. Progress there people need to recognize that and live it. Yeah, right.

All right, what any other advice for people around this Cloud sprawl? Issue, I look I think that anytime you're looking at moving workloads into the cloud or getting control of workloads that are already in the cloud. So it's a good time to start to rationalize those workloads and understand where they would run best.

I mean so a big Trend as soon as cloud computing became, you know, very very popular was you know from the CIO down everything goes to the cloud cloud first and so a lot of things just got rushed in the cloud as is without any refactoring So as you look at those workloads think about whether they need to be refactored to be more efficient think about whether you actually need them or not. And we we as an industry are not really good at retiring old applications. We tend to keep them around for a pretty long time, you know us included.

Yeah, and then you need to be able to do the math and have the observability to understand if it belongs to public Cloud great. Is it in the right public Cloud you have access to the right tools at the right cost profile and how how you secured it and then you know, finally, how do you want to consume? How do you want to pay for it?

Because another another key asked aspect of what we do with Apex is give customers the option of consuming infrastructure vs description. So you pay for what you're using pay on a subscription term. So that gives them a lot more flexibility oftentimes to recognize this it has operating expense rather than having Capital Equipment sit on their books and gives them a lot of flexibility and in terms of being able to increase that capacity sort of on demand.

So yeah, we want to make the use of infrastructure even if it's it's our infrast. Are as cloud-like and as flexible as they're used to when they use public cloud. fair enough good stuff for people who want to go over to Del Apex, maybe get more information on how that can help them with clouds for all as well as everything that Apex is about Chad.

Where can we send them? com and plug Apex into search bar. You'll find everything you need to search apex apex.

com sir. That's great, man. Hey Chad, I want to thank you for being on today's show.

Hey, this was great. I I think you know, the whole finops movement is shined the light. On on cloud sprawl and Cloud cost and you know, but sometimes that just looks at it's really strictly from the financial exposure.

Not the you know just the pure the security as you mentioned the security aspects and compliance aspects, you know the risk and and just Data management and so forth right? It's the finops. Persona is becoming as important as the operator Persona and No, I I agree with you.

We see it here. We see it here, you know from where we said we get a good view talking to a lot of different people and not no doubt about it. Anyway.

Hey man, thanks for being on come back and see us again. Keep us posted. Okay.

Be happy to Allen. Thanks very much. Hey, I appreciate it.

Chad Dunn from the the Dell dark. Well, it's still there. com right up if Cloud Spruce a problem for you as it probably is you may not even realize it.

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