>>Mhm Yes. >>Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of Del Tech World Virtual. I'm john for a host of the cube. We've got a great two guests here talking about a new apex brand and products Allison Langdon, Senior Manager, product marketing at Dell and David Reed senior Director of Product Management. Dell all around the apex to CUBA alumni's great to see you remotely. Soon to be in person. It's right around the corner but great to see you. >>Hey, thanks for having me and us. >>So I wish >>we were in person. >>We missed the Deltek Worlds amazing event. Um we're virtual this year but all great goodness is here but great big announcement still go on. The Apex Brandon portfolio is coming together the cloud and as a service, everything is happening. You got the new apex data storage service take us through what what is the new service? Why? >>Sure. So I can start um you know, we've been seeing this this shift towards an as a service model, you know I. T. Has always struggled with complexities associated with under and over provisioning capital budget constraints, lengthy and complex to refresh cycles. So you know the events over this past year and our new normal is really accelerated these you know challenges and it made them even more manageable. You know organizations need to become really agile and um they don't want to invest make big upfront investments in infrastructure when they're having such a hard time forecasting there needs you know the new levels of unpredictability that's been accelerating this you know adoption of as of service. So this is why we're introducing apex data storage services essentially were radically simplifying how customers can acquire and manage their storage resources. So data storage services is going to be the first as a service offering in our apex portfolio. So it's going to provide an on crown portfolio of scalable and elastic storage resources that are designed for affects treatment. It's all going to be anchored in our apex console. So it's gonna be a seamless self service experience where you just have a few key inputs, your data service, your performance tier, you're looking for your commitment term, your base capacity, for example and then all the infrastructure is owned and maintained by us built on our Industry leading Technology. So really delivering a super simple self service as a service experience, >>You know, when Jeff Clark was first talking about this as a service as it should be, you know, introducing the project, Apex Devon, I was kind of okay, this is kind of what we heard when we were last in person in 2019. The end to end l cloud, hybrid, cloud operating model, this is kind of what we're talking about here. What's something that covers? What's what's what is this data services? How does that vector into that? Because you know data control planes are being talked about a lot. The use of data in A I. And A II. Operations impacts I. T. And cloud scale. So hybrids now the operating model for the enterprise. >>Yeah. Yeah definitely. And it's this is really only where we're starting and we're going to be starting on a set of apex data storage services. Um so if I step back a little bit and talk a little bit about what apex data storage services are, I'd like to draw a little bit of a contrast to how customers procure their equipment today. So a customer typically today says I need some storage I need some mid range storage. I need for example a power store 5000 and then they work with the sales representative and says I need 24 1.92 terabyte drives. They need certain connectivity and then we present a quote to them with a whole bunch of line items with a lot of different prices and then the customer needs purchased that year, purchased that upfront and then uh, the only asset and then they managed the asset. So they're taking the risk. They need to plan for that capacity. And what we're doing is we're radically flipping that model. Uh, and what we're, what we're doing here is we're just driving to an outcome. So customers, they don't want to take that risk. They just want to drive to their business outcomes and they want to manage their applications. So what they have to do in this model is just pick, hey, I want storage services, I want some block services, I want a certain performance level and I learned a certain capacity and I want a commitment level. And what we do is we basically create a rate for them And we've optimized a lot of our processes on the back end to be able to, once that order has booked, we target a very rapid time of 14 days from the time the order is dropped until the customer can actually start operating on that here. From the, the time is dropped to the time that they can produce in their first volume Is 14 days. And really all they have to do is operate the year and we manage everything everything for them that you know, from capacity management to change management to software, life cycles, patching and you and things like that. And now jOHN I want to address your question about the hybrid world. It's absolutely designed for a hybrid world. So in our first release will be offering this on customer premises. And we're also introducing announcing a relationship we have with the data center provider of Equinox, which is the largest co location provider in the world. And what will be able to do is provide the subscription service of this as a service, not only customer on customer premises but in near cloud environments, in a co location facility. And we also have software assets that will extend into this environment, all driven by a central pain of unified experience. >>That's awesome. The hybrid cloud, It's gotta have that table stakes now. So, good, good plug there. Thanks Call out Allison, I gotta ask you on the customer side, what's the drivers for the apex data storage service? What was the key things that there you're hearing, why this is important to them? Uh, and what is the value proposition? >>Right, Great question. So I touched on a little bit of that upfront, but it's, you know, essentially what we what we do with this offering is take it out of the infrastructure business so that they can focus on more value added activities, focusing on customer satisfaction. Um You know, because we're maintaining we're managing and maintaining all the infrastructure for them. You know, some of the key pain points are just, you know, the overhead associated with maintaining and managing that infrastructure. But there's also the financial aspect as well. These services are designed for affects treatment, so you're not having to make that big initial Capex expense, um you're really able to align your expenses with actual usage versus anticipated usage. So it eliminates that, you know, cycle of over and under provisioning, which either results in, you know, over provisions waste or under provisions risk. We essentially, you know, streamlined all of those processes. So the customer just has to worry about operating the, operating their storage and it takes a lot of that worry off of them and they're able to just pay for what they use, elastically scale of resources up and down. So it's essentially really simplified and more predictable. >>Page has always been one of those things where hey, I'll pay when I need it. I gotta ask you on the differentiation side. This is comes up all the time. How do you guys different from alternatives? How do you differentiate going forward? How do you guys be successful? What's the, what's the strategy? What's the, what's the focus? >>Yeah. So I'll take the, I'll take a couple of points and then I'll pass it over to you Alison if you don't >>mind. Um, >>so first and foremost, I'm asked this a lot. So what does Dell bring to the table in this whole little apex? And as a service? First and foremost, Del is the leading infrastructure provider for all of I. T. On premise. We have the enterprise infrastructure re leading across just about every major category of infrastructure. So first and foremost we have that. We also have the scale of the reach, not only in our enterprise relationships through our partner community. So that is one that is one huge advantage that we have. One thing that we're and we talked about this model. Um the level of management that we provide for our customers is second to none with this solution. So we provide um we provide all of the the difficult management tasks from end end that a customer that we repeatedly hear from our customers that they don't want to be dealing with anymore. And we're going to be able to do that at scale for our customers. And I know there's a couple more points, so I'd like to I'll pass it on to Alison and she can she can address a couple more points there. >>Yeah, sure. I mean obviously Devin makes a great point as being an industry leader and just the breadth of our portfolio in general, beyond just storage that we can essentially deliver as a service, but no, with our initial flagship storage as a service offering. Um, so with apex data storage services, you know, I talked a little bit about, you know, the pay as you go, pay as you know, pay for what you use. You know, essentially the way this works is, you know, there's an initial based commitment of capacity that the customer commits to and then they're able to elastically scale up and down above that base and only pay for what they use. One of the differentiators were bringing to the table is that, you know, in addition to that base and that, you know, the on demand space if you will, that that goes above that we're charging a single rate. So it's really a simplified and transparent billing process. So you're not getting any over ridge penalties or fees for going into that on demand. It's essentially a single rate based on your commitment and you know, as much as you scale up and down, you're gonna you're gonna stay within one single rate. So no surprise average penalties. So that's definitely something that that differentiates us. And the customers also have the ability to raise that based commitment at any point. Co terminus lee in their contract. So if they're seeing like a strong growth trajectory or anticipating a more, you know, a big burst in usage for some data intensive type workloads. You know, we can add that can raise that floor commitment resulting in a lower rate but still a single rate for both based on demand. >>Well certainly data storage and moving data around, having it in the edge to the core to whatever is critical. And I think I think that's a great service. The question I want to ask you guys next to addresses. Give us an update on the apex brand and portfolio overall. How does this fit in? How is it shaping out? Can just take a minute to explain kind of where it is right now and what's available, how it was the strategy and what's coming? >>Sure. So I can talk a little bit about what's available when we're talking about today and then maybe devon if you can touch a little bit on the on the strategy and going forward. Um But what we've announced today is you at Del Tech World is the apex brand, the apex portfolio, which as I mentioned, it's our strategy for as a service and cloud. So in addition to our data storage services offering that we've been focused on today, um which is part of our infrastructure services, we're also introducing our cloud services as well as some more customizable services. So from a cloud services perspective, we're also going to be talking about our apex private cloud and apex hybrid cloud offerings. And then of course the apex console is really what brings all of these pieces together. It's that single self service experience to manage all of your as a service resources from a single place, David, I don't know if you want to take it. >>So what I would, what I would like to add is a little bit more color on the customized services. So if you look at apex at a high level um it's really how we're transforming the way we do business with our partners and customers and the way we deliver products and offers to our our partners and customers. And within the apex umbrella there's really two segments of customers that we see. One, there is still a segment of customers that want some technology control. They want to build their they want to build their clouds, they want to build their infrastructure and that's where really the apex custom comes into it. And we have a very large business in our custom business today with Dell technologies on demand with flex on demand and data center utility and those will be represented to be apex flex on demand, apex data center utility, um you know, that's what we're announcing here. And then the second portion is really this apex turnkey offer where customers don't care to manage it, they want to just consume, they want to operate their gear. And that's where a lot of the innovation, a lot of the a lot of the strategy that we're talking about here with the hybrid cloud service, the product cloud service, apex data storage services. So we're building out a set of world class infrastructure services that will then be able to wrap our leading infrastructure utilities around data protection, security, migration, compliance etcetera. And then build a set of horizontal and vertical solutions on top of this infrastructure to provide uh paramount uh value to our >>awesome Alice. I gotta ask you because this is always the case right. There's always one or two features that jump out the product, everything as a service clearly aligns with the market macro conditions in the marketplace and the evolution of the architecture in all businesses. That's clear, there's no debate on that. You guys got that nailed. What's the, what's the key thing if you had to kind of boil out the one thing that people are gravitating towards on the data storage service because um, everyone kinda is going here, right? So what if you get people that are watching it are learning what's popping out as the key product feature here or a few things that jump out. >>Sure. So, I mean really at the core, it's all about simplicity. Um, it's in terms of the console itself, which we've talked about it, you know, you have your infrastructure resources, your storage, your cloud services and it's all, it's just so simple. It's just, it's a matter of a few simple clicks and inputs that are pretty intuitive to meet your needs. It's the fact that its outcome based, you know, we're not focused on delivering a product, it's really truly delivering an outcome and a service to meet the customer's needs. So it's a whole new way of you know approaching the market and talking to our customers and making it intuitive and simple and seamless and really, you know, taking so much of the complexity off of the table for them. Um So it's the simplicity of the console, it's the being able to transition to more op ex model um from a financial aspect is huge and then you know aligning your expenses, you know with your actual versus and you know anticipated usage, so being able to manage that unpredictability, so that's necessary talking about a specific feature but really how we're driving towards really focusing on the customer needs. >>Now the business values right there, it's all about the outcome and you know, we're about getting charged on this variable, you know, over age on some service David. How about under the hood? If I look at the engine of this, how it fits into the kind of product architecture, you look at the product management, you're building the product and the engineers are cranking away what's the, what's the gear, what gears look like? What's the machinery look like under the hood? What's the cool tech, if any, um, you would share, if you can share. >>Yeah, it's interesting that you asked that, john and it's, it's really interesting that we got probably what, 12 minutes into this interview and we didn't even talk about a product, not one single product and that is really by design here. We're really, we're really selling the service. We're selling an offer. The product is the service, the service is the product and it's really about selling those outcomes. But then at the end of the day since we're talking talking shop here um we are introducing block services and that's powered by our new award winning power store mid range product and our file services are going to be powered by our um our award winning power scale and Ice alone systems as well. So we'll be interested you know introducing block and file services and we'll be extending that to object object services and data storage services. Uh >>huh, awesome. You know Alison and Devon I was talking to a friend we're running weren't on camera with the camera was turned on but we're just riffing about all the coolness around devops to have sex cops, how I. T. S go into large scale cloud apps and we're talking about all that and we were both kind of coming to the same conclusion that the next generation on top of all this automation is the excess of service, everything is a service. Because if you go that next level, that's where it is. Because the outcomes, the outcome is the services and that's underpinned by automation ai ops all the other stuff that's kind of hardened underneath still enables it. And you guys are already there. So congratulations. That's really cool reaction to that. That concept of automation powers X as a service. >>Yeah, I'll take that one, john. So, um while I talked only about playing storage technologies that power this there is a phenomenal amount of investment in um uh work and thought going into building out the underlying infrastructure and operations behind this because we need to provide um the operations and management of this infrastructure services, not only for storage but for compute and solutions and develops environment at scale. And it's crucial that we, we build out that infrastructure, that automation, that machine learning AI offers to really support this. So yeah, you're absolutely right. That is fundamental to getting this model. Uh nailed >>Alison. You're feeling pretty good about the product and the service. Now everything is a service that's your wheelhouse. It's happening. >>Yeah, here we are. We've got, we've got apex portfolio has arrived. So yeah, feeling good. Um, definitely excited. >>He was bright. Congratulations Allison David, thanks for coming on the Cuban, sharing the updates on the apex new data storage services, the new portfolio, the directionally correct action of everything as a service and all the automation that goes on the, that's really kind of a game changer. Thanks so much for sharing on the CUBA. Really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks a lot, john, >>thank you. Okay. >>Del Tech world cube coverage continues. I'm john Kerry, the host. Thanks for watching. Yeah. Mhm.

live from Las Vegas it's the queue covering del technology's world 2019 brought to you by Dell technologies and it's ecosystem partners welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of Dell technologies world here live in Las Vegas I'm your host Rebecca night along with my co-host Stu minimun we have Jay Crone he is the senior consultant portfolio marketing at Dell EMC and Allison Langham consultant product marketing Dell EMC thank you so much for coming on the cube thanks for returning on so ricktum are we gonna talk today about cloud storage and data protection but I want to start with cloud and I'm gonna start with you Jay talk a little bit about what your customers what they want to do with the cloud well and so what one of the things we found is as cloud has been out there for a while and people have learned about what they can do with it it's not not the panacea that people thought there are about it about four or five use cases the big one is disaster recovery so a lot of people who can't won't don't care two don't have the money to set up a second data center will rent the cloud you know rent rent both capacity and computer in the cloud so disaster recovery is the big one we'll talk about that more in terms of some specific announcements the other ones make make sense it's really sort of the rent instead of buy test and development you know you want you want to spit up a test environment and run it for three hours find out what it what it tells you and then tear it down and not have to pay for it back up an archive is kind of a related to the disaster recovery but it's a little bit different use case because often people want to put the clout you two put the data some place to store it regular regulatory requirements that's an example which is different than disaster recovery analytics a big again it's this like what we used to call high performance computing where you need a lot of compute and a lot of storage for a short period of time and you don't want to you have a data center full of stuff that you're paying for or not using and then the last one there's lots of words for this the polite marketing term is workload migration also known as lift and shift which is these are the people that actually do want to take a workload from on-premises and pick it up and move it to the cloud wholesale so those are those are the ones disaster recovery is still far and away the most popular so Allison you know our observation coming in this week is there's a lot of discussion about that hybrid and multi cloud a lot of that focus gets put on you know the public clouds I mean you bring Satya Nadella to the show we're gonna talk a lot about Microsoft Azure and even when we get into the data center you know we we've seen the ascendancy of VX rail and that's an underlying component for many of the solutions that were all doubt but I know you're gonna help bring to us is help fill out some of the rest of the portfolio is you know from the EMC side and as Dell EMC comes in there's a large storage portfolio does that get left behind when we talk about cloud or pulled into the entire discussion yeah and a great question so you know when we think about our you know cloud strategy as a whole for Dell Dell technologies you know there's really there's two there's two pieces to that and so a lot of what you heard about yesterday and the big announcements around the Dell technologies cloud that's really helping customers really just completely transform to a cloud operating model and a lot of like the people processes technology implications of doing so the other piece of that is around our cloud enabled infrastructure which is really complementary to a lot of what we talked about yesterday and our cloud enabled infrastructure you know that's more of what we heard about today and what we're doing across both our storage and data protection portfolios to help customers modernize their existing infrastructure to be able to extend their data centers to the cloud so and it's you know these are there's our complementary pieces it's not really um it's not an aura conversation it's really an an conversation both pieces are really important when thinking about your cloud strategy just depending on you know workload and transformational readiness and where you're at to be able to do that so that's where a lot of our storage cloud capabilities come come into play all right okay maybe we could bring us down a little a little bit of level as to you know how I explain how cloud cloud enabled isn't cloud watching you know something like power Mac's you know well and that is that's interesting in fact I had that we just walked out of the booth was talking one of the product managers who had presiding to a customer that had one of some gear from a distinguished competitor shall we say was interested in PowerMax partly because of the cloud story so and PowerMax is is is just joining the cloud family and one of the things that we are have announced here that was talked about in the keynote is cloud storage services which is an offering that we have through a cloud service provider that allows you for example is an existing PowerMax customer to use s rdf to use native replication to replicate into the cloud and then in a VMware environment here's that disaster recovery use case coming in a VMware environment use Site Recovery Manager to perform a failover and then this service provider well you will read will spin up those VMs and VM works out on AWS so what you basically get is an automatic failover for VMware environments with power max so it's an extreme and unity by the way so both are a nice launch so we get we get that disaster recovery use case enabling you know our bread-and-butter our industry-leading storage platform so that's that's that's a big piece of the news and that wasn't that was announced here the other thing I do want to point out with that announcement is there's a multi cloud capability the the one I just discussed is that the automatic VMware use case but there's also the ability through our service provider to connect to regular AWS in addition to vm worked on an AWS Google and Azure which we might have heard a little about yesterday and we're excited about that as well Alison this is a very competitive market and customers really expect a lot they want new capabilities they want the latest and greatest what is the strategy and the messaging behind why Dell is the is the choice right so no I talked a little bit about they are speaking specifically around our cloud enable the infrastructure you know we had a lot of great announcements today but really we've been having we've been incorporating these cloud capabilities and functionality with on our storage and data protection portfolio for a long time and it's been around and we just we haven't really been talking about it but we have a lot of you know comprehensive cloud features and you know we sort of look at that in you know there's three specific areas where we really look for it to innovate with the cloud in our in our storage and data protection portfolio so that's areas like our cloud connected system so that's like data mobility our ability to tear data from on-prem to the cloud then we also have as Jay was just talking about Platte Lake we have our Cloud Data Services which includes our new cloud storage services offerings but it's also things like being able to deploy in the cloud and as opposed to extending to the cloud so things like cloud edition or data domain virtualization where you're deploying a software-defined version in the cloud and then spanning across the top of that from on-prem in the core to the cloud we have our cloud data insights so that's things like cloud IQ or clarity now that really enable you to proactively monitor and manage not just your infrastructure but also your data and really use that the artificial intelligence built into those to you know get you know good insights to manage manage and monitor your data from on-prem to the cloud so really that but those three areas we really bring together you know a comprehensive set of features to cloud enable your your infrastructure ok wondering if you can bring us inside some of the conversations you're having with customers you're wearing the shirt I see around a lot of the booths yeah you know you know what what are some of the you know top kind of business challenges and you know how are things different now than they might have been back when we called this EMC world well so the there's the disaster recovery use case which is which as I said is new the other thing that's happening is there's that five years of learning that people have had around the public cloud I was talking with a reseller yesterday and one of the value propositions that we have for this particular offering especially the cloud storage services is because the storage is at a service provider that is not the cloud provider shall we say they can offer a different economic model so what we're finding is people are finding new ways to go to the cloud for less money so and that's and that works out really really well because it makes the cloud more affordable for everybody it makes it gives them it gives us some additional business opportunity and most importantly it gives customers the ability to use the cloud consumption model the effects model and the outsourcing of the resources that they couldn't do before so that's the big thing is we were basically enabling the public cloud in ways that we couldn't have done to your point five years ago in addition to the cost benefits of that just building on the multi cloud piece with our cloud storage service is offering it's also about you know some concerns that like big concerns around public clouds like security and having control of your data their cloud storage services offering your data is actually sitting on external storage so it's directly connected to the cloud you have like a high-speed connection into the public cloud to be able to run your applications but and you can connect to multiple clouds move data between clouds you know as as it suits the business needs there's different workloads but at the same time you're still maintaining control of that data on you know durable persistent Dell EMC storage right it's on the gear you know and love and as I said all of our native replication this is this is wonderful because if you're a customer with gear on site you don't perceive any change your your s RDF pipe if you will it leaves the building like it used to it just goes to a cloud provider instead of a data center across the Hudson River so to speak well data protection and data security are it's a big theme this year for good and for good reason where do you think cuz the customer mindset is right now our customers appropriately concerned about the the threats that they face and the requirements that are that are bearing down or are they are they head in the sand I mean how would you describe where customers are right now in terms of thinking through these things everybody is concerned about security so the answer is it's right up there you know and we look at you know the the security is some of it is off site but it's it's things like Allison said we offer a model where your data is it it's in the lockbox that you know of as a unity or a nice loan or a Max and it's not in some amorphous place you know up there in the in the cloud as it were and that that gives people a lot of a lot of a warm warm fuzzy feeling and things like data at rest encryption at work on the storage arrays still work on the storage arrays when it's in the cloud so those features are still available to customers that they already know and love all right Alison one of the other things we've been talking a lot about this week is the VMware and Dell EMC pieces have come together more than ever before you know I think back you know when we used to rank how does EMC storage do with VMware well how many integrations does it have now many of the solutions you know VX rail it's got VCF sitting on it can you talk about how they did the VMware and the LMC storage pieces have been coming together even more yeah absolutely so specifically what one of the solutions that Jay was talking about earlier that automated disaster recovery feature from for our cloud storage services that's all about that's all about VMs it's all about VMware integration and it it really offers that if you get this disaster recovery as a service model for VMware environments who are running VMware cloud on AWS and they get you get that complete operational consistency so it's that's a huge benefit to our customers so there's that where it's you're leveraging for the automated disaster recovery it's either power max or unity including the new unity XT which was recently announced being able to completely have operational consistency within your VMware environment from on-prem to the cloud addition to that in addition to that we talked a lot about yesterday about the Dell tech cloud which VX rail is a key component of that we also have our storage our key storage platforms are also validated with VMware Cloud foundation for you know some more like high-performance workloads so we really have so things like power max and unity are also validated with VMware Cloud foundation to be able to get that Best of Breed storage as part of that stack as well it's something that you asked what's changed something that's kind of interesting so we're in the storage division we're in the storage business unit and we have weekly meetings bi-weekly meetings with the VMware cloud folks so that just tells you what's important there's VMware and cloud you know in that word and here we are as you know some of your prime your primary and unstructured storage people working on a regular basis with it with the VMware folks and that is an example of how the companies are coming together and doing doing things differently than we did before how are you finding this show this is the 10th year that the cube has been at at Dell Dell technologies world but back then Dell EMC world what are you how are you finding the vibe this year what's what is the tone of things very cloud focused on which has been a huge huge tip this year that's everything that we're hearing about is very cloud centered which is well it's nice to see you I wouldn't that wouldn't say it's so much of a victory lap bike but there's a lot of excitement certainly in our area on the floor there's a lot of work that has been done over the last couple of years to to get things aligned and put some new processes in place and get some new products out so you let you listen to the you know the Jeff Clark portions of the keynote in particularly yesterday and today he just goes this this this this and this and that's where customers want to see you know we have folks coming up they want to see the new power max they what they want to see the new unity XT of course you know that was it was fun last night it was just kind of sitting there on a pedestal and nobody pointed it out today people want to pull a cult that covers off and say show me the nvme slots so so there's that kind of vibe and excitement the partner vibe is there as well we've we have VMware and some other partners that we're working with so is there it's it's very exciting this year yeah that's great well Allison and Jay thank you both so much for coming on the cube it was great how are you I'm Rebecca night force 2 minimun and we will have so much more of the cubes live coverage of Dell technologies world live from Las Vegas coming up in just a little bit [Music]