Exploring Modern IT: Insights from Jennifer Aspesi | KubeCon SLC 2024

This is Textron tv. Hey, everyone. We're back here live at Q Con, salt Lake City, where it's cold.

Um, but it's, you know what, when you live in South Florida, it's nice to get cold for a few, just a few days to remember what it used to be like. Absolutely. And then go home.

Um, my next guest is someone we've been involved with at Dell for years. Mm-Hmm. But always behind the camera, right?

If, if you've watched our coupon coverage in years past, my friend Brad Melts was, uh, I forgot the, it, was it the DevOps team or the dev rel Dev Rel team, yeah. Product management. Yep.

And, and Brad's moved into another role at Dell, but really the power behind the throne was this woman right here. And now she's out front and center. Uh, Jen Apei.

Yep. Good enough. Close.

You say that's Close. A spacey. A spacey.

I always from New York, but, okay. A spacey. Jed, first of all, welcome for your first time in front of the Charact character with us.

Um, you know, I didn't want to embarrass you, but you have been kind of pulling strings, sort of like the Godfather or the Godfather behind there. But what, tell people a little about your role at Dell. Absolutely.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's been really a pleasure over the past few years, and I was joking with the team earlier today that I'm like the generative AI of Brad for this event only with more hair, the digital Twitch.

Exactly. I like that. Okay.

I like that. But yeah, so I've been in the industry for over 20 plus years in the infrastructure space. So my background really was storage, um, you know, with EMC corporation.

Sure. And I was head of technical, um, marketing engineering for virtualization for a spell. You know, I did the technical marketing engineering piece, uh, for a very long time.

And in the past five years, I've gone into global marketing where I really wanted to bring the customer use cases and stories into the marketing space, which in a hardware space predominantly can be challenging, right. Because we like to sell hardware, right. That's really been our bread and butter.

But then the shift between traditional IT to modern data and applications and it, I really had to dig in and focus on DevOps and automation. So that's what I've been working on to build in our organization for the past five years. Excellent.

Excellent. You know, I, I just want to talk about your organization. We mentioned Brad moved on Mm-Hmm.

It's not really called Dere anymore, correct? It's, it's kind of dev tech, correct. Right.

So, yeah, just a little. Yeah. So what we did, what was really amazing having a Dev Rel team was they really provided us with the education resources that we've needed for our presales teams.

And, you know, we've always had a cloud team, or what you would say, a cloud native type of specialized group of presales engineers, but we really needed to strengthen that. So between educating them through derel, we've expanded that organization to 600 plus. So we do the usual brown bags, and we do all of the things that we need to meet with customers all around the globe now to really have the conversations with our customers that, you know, they're still, remember our customers, they're IT admins predominantly, and many of them are still trying to figure out how to do DevOps, and now emerging platform engineering, that's a whole other space that we need to evolve to.

So that's what we're doing. We're expanding globally to have those conversations. Excellent.

Jen, I wanted to discuss three topics with you Sure. Today, if we can. The first one is, you know, look, VMware obviously got purchased by Broadcom.

Yep. That whole hypervisor way of doing cloud, I mean, it's not obsolete, it's still predominant probably, but it's, it's long in the tooth. You know, today, the, the new stack, right?

The new compute stack is, is Kubernetes and microservices and, and these things, some people say, oh, that's very different than virtualization. But the fact of the matter is a lot of these new compute stacks actually built on a hypervisor. Well, it could be bare metal too, but you know, they're on hypervisor.

Let's talk about, you know, the whole virtualization subject to Dell and how you guys approach this. Absolutely. So, I mean, let's, let's be real, right?

We had VMware as part of the company for so long, right? Yes. You did.

Uh, Ton of our customers, and when we say ton, probably all Of them more points, but go ahead. Yeah. They all have virtualization in some area of their space.

And when Broadcom bought VMware and the things that have transpired, it's, it's, to be blunt, it's pretty obvious that customers are struggling with what to do with their VMs. Right. And, you know, when containers came about, it really was the story.

Our container's gonna take over VMs and our position is it's everything goes right. We want to make sure that, you know, the workloads that our customers already have in VMs, they stay and evolve and or evolve, right? Right.

So we have a few things going on it. You know, we have Apex Cloud platforms for Red Hat OpenShift as well as Azure. And we support the virtualization piece with the Red Hat OpenShift to be able to move workloads into containers and be able to be managed through Kubernetes.

Right? That's the first piece. Mm-Hmm.

And then also recently our container storage modules, uh, for our, you know, storage arrays across all of the power arrays, we'll call them. You can do, uh, vert now, which is supported, which I love vert because it allows us to really present virtualization to containers in a way that anyone can use. Um, and so we've supporting that as of last week with csm.

Okay. One 12. Okay.

But also I wanna talk a little bit more about another, well-known partner, which is Susie. Right. We, you know, Susie, we did a demo yesterday here on the floor, um, of Harvester with Ver and our storage as well.

So, you know, we're really broadening these niche, open sourced, um, you know, opportunities with things like Cooper to be able to enable the ease of migration for customers in this space. So there's a lot going on. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, it would be a shame to have, you know, us drop the ball on virtualization. No. Well, it it's not going anywhere.

Yeah. Right. Yeah.

I think, you know what they say, old technologies never die like old generals. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. They just kind of fade away. But co uh, the whole virtualization is, is going strong.

And, and you know, the other thing, like you look at Seus and, and you look at a lot of the open, look, this whole community here is built on open source. Yeah. Yeah.

But you look at this open source and what starts out as a niche today becomes tomorrow's mainstream. Exactly. Exactly.

And when you are Dell, look, I, I worked with Dell for, uh, 28 years, 30 years, my first time working with Dell. Dell never likes to go in and be the first person in, in a market. They like to see it in a market that emerges and has a, a sizable market.

Yeah. And then they go in and try to get a, a sizable percentage of that market. Yeah.

Yeah. Right. So the fact that you're here seeing these mm-Hmm.

Niche markets right now, means that Dell feels that these are gonna be sizable markets. Yeah. And you're gonna stick your claim, you know, your share of those.

Um, speaking of sizable markets, can't, you know, you can't throw a stick without talking about ai Yeah. Generator of ai. And some people are saying, oh, it's never gonna live up to the hype.

Some people are saying, you ain't, you ain't seen nothing yet. Mm-Hmm. Um, talk to us a little bit about, you know, kind of you, the Dell outlook here.

Yeah. So, you know, I, uh, red Hat OpenShift seems to be our go-to right now. Um, apex Cloud platforms really opened up opportunity for us with customers that are using OpenShift to also be able to manage their workloads with ai.

Okay. And that's one piece, and that's great. That's a, a solution that's an offer.

The way that I look at ai, I really look at it in two, two avenues as it relates to Dell Technologies. You know, our infrastructure is built to support the workloads that build your AI ops, right? Or your, you know, generative AI tools that you're going to choose to use.

So that's one piece. And I could talk ad nauseum about build your automation processes so that you could be faster at developing your AI learning, right. Inferencing, whatever.

But then you have coding, coding is starting to rise as a conversation, right? So if you think about automation processes, right? Our, our end user is really ready to use generative AI to generate code.

And the conversation goes something like this, you know? Yes, they are. And as they mature, you can start teaching people that don't understand how to script or code how to script and code faster.

But then you always need the second and third tier checks, right? You go to your seasoned developers, you ask them to look at the code that they've been using to see, is it, is it the up to snuff to go into production, right? But I do see that there's an opportunity for a lot of the practitioners here on the floor to start really digging into how to use AI as a tool for learning how to script and code.

Like things like Ansible, things like Terraform, right? I mean, I love, I could talk about infrastructure as, as code code Sure. For, for days, right?

Um, but then there's also, you know, AI assisted code, right? We have a whole team that's investigating how, how is that gonna evolve? So, you know, it's mean, It's evolving.

Yeah. I, I talk to a lot of people about this, you know, pretty often, and I mean, week to week we're seeing huge improvements. You know, I, I was interviewing someone yesterday and I, I think it was GitLab mm-hmm.

You know, they're now having what they call assistance. Yeah. It's not agents, it's more like a copilot.

But basically when you code, the assistant will go off and do like sort of the technical writing descriptions for you and Mm-Hmm. So much of the test, it just, just goes, I mean, then let alone the agents where you just tell an agent, go write this, or go Yep. You know, set that up and you know, you foresee a day where, and it, you know, there's a couple of trends going on.

People moving out of these hyperscaler cloud centers back to data centers. Yeah. So you just, you know, you could see Adele having a, a Dell setup agent that you say, Hey, go set these up.

You know, maybe it's on a hypervisor. Yeah. Yep.

Set up my red shot red hat, you know, and it's done for you. I mean, the same way we're asking, we're saying AI could write code AI agents could actually set up your infrastructure. And that that's to me is mind boggling as someone who started in the data center world.

Yeah. Where you had to always have your tool belt with the screw driver, the rack stack. Oh yeah.

Absolutely. Um, Yeah. It's a crazy, crazy thought to think of.

It really is. And, and for somebody like me who was afraid of scripting for so long I know. And it's pretty, it's pretty wild.

Well the good news is it's not even scripting. Yeah. You'll be able to talk natural language.

True. Say agent go do this, that, and this for me. And yeah.

com. Mm. Our newest site for, for Techstrong.

We're excited. Um, I know Dell has some, you know, thoughts and Yeah. Goings on around platform engineering.

Would you share a little? Sure. I'll give it a shot.

So, you know, I really looking at, so I love looking at the practitioners, right? Um, you know, when we go into the briefing centers and we're talking to our customers, and I alluded to this earlier, you know, going way back, it's always been about the different, different types of admins, right? And traditional admins.

The platform engineer to me is a very interesting piece because we all want that one in all tool to provide, you know, abilities to make it seamless and easier for those end users to do. Mm-hmm. Right?

I mean, this is the age old story. We could go on and on about how many windows we've created, uh, you know, gooeys that people can click and launch an application and to be able to use it. Right.

And sometimes, you know, it, it just doesn't happen that it gives them everything they need. And I'm really feeling like we are on the edge of something, no pun intended, that we will be able to have a platform for infrastructure that these types of engineers that really want to be able to give a catalog to their application developers to be able to go launch whatever they need. They need more storage, they need a server upgrade, anything that they need without creating the silos that we've been complaining about for the past five years.

Sure. Right. And those engineers, and it's gonna be interesting to see, I do believe platform engineering is going to stick, you know, I've already mentioned Apex Cloud platforms as an example, but we also have in our booth this year, we have AIOps for the first time.

So looking at incidents, right? Being able to provide that window to Observa observability, um, in addition to Native Edge and other solutions. So what we really see is this culmination of what Dell is creating.

It may be multiple different solutions, but they're all looking more and more like a platform, like a catalog. Right. We don't have anything to hand over that's a one and all.

Um, but we can definitely have conversations with our services teams and, and things of that nature. Well, So unlike Dell, I always like to jump in a little early. Yeah.

And I did it with DevOps. We did it with Cloud native when it was contained. Yeah.

Was Container Journal, which was the name before Cloud Native now was really gonna have the word docker in it. I'm glad I didn't do go that way, but I could have Docker owned Docker. Yeah.

I'll never forget, I was down in Austin and I came back and I said, well, we shouldn't really use the word DACA but containers. But I told 'em, I said there was this other thing that they were talking about called Kubernetes, but it seems so hard. I don't see how anyone would ever use it.

Mm. Yeah. You know, another, another Right.

Decision by by me. Um, anyway, so, but we do think platform engineering has its future in front of it. Right.

And they, these things right now Yeah. Are kind of very point solution, if you will, but they're coming together into just sort of this way of doing things. Right.

Another the same way. DevOps, and we have ITSM and we have agile. Exactly.

You know, all of these kind. SRE This is yet another discipline here that I think goes, it's part of the factory, right? Yeah.

The way we run it today. Exactly. It's like a factory.

So, very excited with that. Anything else with Dell you want tell us? com still.

And, uh, you know, I'm excited about 2025. Absolutely. So am I.

Thanks. We're live. We're at CubeCon.

You just heard from Dell here. We have a lot more folks coming up today. Stay tuned.

This is Alan Shemel. We're out.