The challenge many data center managers face today is how to modernize without breaking the budget. Recognizing that its customers have responded favorably to turnkey solutions at the systems level, using converged infrastructure, or CI, products — such as VxBlock — Dell EMC has continued to refine its Vscale architecture, which is designed to scale-out data centers and share resources across the information technology landscape.

“It allows customers to take what they have today in legacy infrastructure and marry that to modern infrastructure using orchestration policies and software-defined networking,” said Jon Siegal (pictured), vice president of product management at Dell EMC. “This is a modern data center type of approach for the future.”

Siegal stopped by theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts Peter Burris (@plburris) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante) at VMworld 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed the development of the CI space, the business opportunity for Vscale and how one data analytics firm used it to modernize IT operations. (* Disclosure below.)

Dell EMC developed products in the CI space nearly seven years ago through a joint effort with VMware Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. “Our premise was how to simplify IT,” Siegal said, and the result was the introduction of Vblock and VxBlock for Dell EMC’s CI portfolio.

As advances in networking technology have resulted in fewer resources needed to perform routine tasks, IT managers are now looking more closely at how to develop new applications and services across the data center, including moving workloads, implementing data protection and enabling patches. This is the business opportunity that Vscale is seeking to exploit, Siegal explained.

IT moves up the stack

“The level and sophistication of the IT personnel getting hired is different now,” Siegal explained. “We’re seeing more and more focus and investment when it comes to IT moving up the stack.”

An example of Vscale’s business impact can be found in the experience of one Dell EMC customer, a healthcare data analytics provider who needed to manage big data to improve patient outcomes. The problem was how to do it within the data center structure.

“They had to find a way to triple their infrastructure without adding any new resources,” Siegal said.

Vscale enabled this data analytics firm to redesign its data center operation to improve the placement of and access to critical data for healthcare. “What’s important there is that we have a network that’s software-defined, that can orchestrate resources to put them in the right place at the right time,” Siegal concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of VMworld 2017. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for VMworld 2017. Neither VMware Inc. nor Dell EMC have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE