>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCube! Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of Day One of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante in Las Vegas. Excited to welcome back to theCube one of our alumni Chhandomay Mandal, the Director of Marketing at Dell EMC. Chhandomay, nice to see you again. >> Happy to be here. >> We had a exciting keynote this morning, Michael Dell was talking about number one in market share for servers and storage, expecting when the 2018 calendar numbers, came out the first quarter to gain shares. What's going on with storage with All-Flash? >> We are excited about our storage All-Flash portfolio. We are going to have a couple of surprising announcements tomorrow, I cannot give away all of this. But all of our portfolio is going to continue to innovate based on all the things Michael touched upon, ranging from artificial intelligence, machine learning, all of those things. We have a complete portfolio of All-Flash products covering different market segments, customers. Ranging from the Max All-Flash, XtremIO, Unity accessories. So we are really excited about the face of innovations we are doing, the way we are capturing a market. So it's a great time to be in All-Flash storage. >> Chhandomay, I wonder if we can talk about how we got here. So the first modern instantiation of Flash, and there were a lot of SSD's and battery backed up memories in the past, but it was, I think it was EMC, dropped a flash drive into a Symmetrix way back when, and that began to change things. But people soon realized, the controller architecture's not going to support that, so we need All-Flash architectures. And then people quickly realized, oh wow, it's taken us decades to build this rich stack of services. Now fast forward basically a decade plus, where are we today in terms of All-Flash capabilities and adoption? >> In the enterprises today, you see All-Flash getting adopted at a very high rate. In fact, of the storage that we ship, almost 80% of it is All-Flash storage, and again, We have different products for different segments. And as you mentioned, we started from dropping SSD's into the enterprise arrays, a whole thing through the process. Now if you look at us, we have modern purpose-built All-Flash arrays like XtremIO and then All-Flash arrays like VMAX All-Flash and some announcements where you are going to see the maturity level over the last decade, all the data services that got brought in, and the very high-performance, low latency with mission critical availability that we are able to deliver, across the platform for all of our enterprise products. >> So Flash everywhere. And then we've made the observation a lot that, and it sounds trite, but I'll put it out there anyways, historically, when you think about storage it was all about persisting data. And you'd try to make it go as fast as you could, but it was mechanical. Now with Flash, it's all about doing stuff faster, real-time, low latency, massive IOPS, we're shifting the bottlenecks around. What's your take on that dynamic? >> Flash is a fast media, so having great performance is really, it will stay. That is not really the differentiator so to speak, but it needs to be coupled with advanced data services. You need to have very high resiliency. The customers can rely on you with five lines, six lines of availability day in and day out. As well as, you need to do the business solutions, transforming IT, helping businesses transform in their digital transformation process. Let me give you some quick examples. Lets take XtremIO for example. It started out as a purposeful, modern, leading All-Flash array. And it is built upon a unique architecture taking the advantage of Flash Media. It is content error, metadata-centric, active-active controller architecture that helps us deliver very high performance hundreds of thousands to millions of IOPS with very low, consistent latency. No matter how much you have written to that, what loads you are running, what are the system load, etc. But again, that's the first layer. The second layer of it is the advanced data services always on inline reducing the data space. So for example, the inline, the duplication, compression, and making sure we are not writing the duplicate data to the SSD's. Thereby increasing the longevity of the SSD media, as well as reducing the capacity footprint. And driving down costs. Speaking of that. You wrap it around into a very simple, modern UI that's very easy to manage. No tuning needed. That's where today's IT could go from the tactical day to day operations to strategic innovations. How they can do the IT transformation. Get into the digital transformation. Get ahead of their competition. Not only today but for tomorrow. >> And the content awareness and the metadata-centricity are what you just explained? Is that right? Can you connect those? >> Uh sure. Suppose when the data is being written, right? It might have duplicate data. Say for example you are running a video environment. Right? For your tens of thousands of users everybody has their Windows VM. Probably the same data across all the laptops. When you look at it in the XtremIO metadata-centric, always in memory architecture, the request comes in, you try to look it up. Now when you need to do that your metadata is always in memory and you are doing data reduction based on a unique fingerprinting algorithm, checking whether you have seen the data before. If you haven't seen the data before then only you only write it doing other data services on top of it. But if you have seen the data before then you you update the metadata in memory and acknowledge the right. You get a very fast, alright performance that is actually at memory speed, not even at the SSD speed. So this metadata-centric architecture that has all the metadata all the time in memory helps you accelerate the process especially in the case where a lot of duplicate data is present. >> It's a memory speed? Because you somehow eliminated an IO? Or is that NVMe? Or, or..? >> When you access data, right? An application says I want to access block XYZ. Any controller will need to have the metadata for it. And then based on the metadata it needs to do the access. It's like, when you go to a library, you want to find a book from a bookshelf. First you need to know the control number. And then based one the control number, which shelf, which rack, you go and fetch it. Storage controllers of every type works in the same way. If you cannot have your metadata in memory, then the first step the controller has to do is go down to the array, fetch the metadata, and then based on the metadata you fetch the data and solve the IO request. If you have the metadata always in memory, then that step is always eliminated. You can guarantee that your metadata is there and all you need to do is look up and solve the IO request. That's the key of delivering consistent performance. Okay? In other arrays if the metadata is not in memory you'll not get that consistency. But here we can deliver day in, and day out, 90% full or 10% full, whether it's OLTP or VDI, That high performance with very minimal latency. That's the key here. >> High performance, low latency. You've given us some really good overview into the potential that the technology can make to help IT-innovate. And as Michael Dell even said this morning that IT innovation is key. IT can be a profit center of an organization, really as a catalyst for digital transformation. Talk to us about some of the business benefits. That if a business is really wrapping their head around IT as a profit center, and as a driver of business strategy. What are some of the business benefits that All-Flash array can deliver to an organization? Any examples come to mind? >> Yes, I'll answer your question with one of the customer examples. Let's see how they have been doing it. It's my favorite example of Boston Red Socks. I'm from the Boston area. >> You're a fan, right? >> Absolutely. All the Boston sports teams. When Boston Red Socks was in the digital transformation journey, they had to transform a lot of things. First of all, the experiences of the spectators like us, who are in the field living to the moment, whether it's the jumbotrons, or getting the experience digitally on the smartphones. That's one aspect. The other aspect is there are a lot of analytics on all the players across MLB. To get the competitive advantage in terms of, which pitch or which batter? Who has what capabilities or deficiencies that they can go after the right player or when they are against them, how to take advantage of them. And then there are a lot of the business applications in a virtualized environment. As you look, ranging from better spectator experience, ranging to the coaches getting competitive advantage from the opposing players or the scouting department. And running the general back office applications, like Exchange and (mumbling), whatever need might be. Now they were able to consolidate all of these things into the XtremIO All-Flash array platform. And the ability to deliver this performance as well as getting a data reduction of almost seven is to one, was a key for Red Socks' digital transformation journey. >> So the business impact to Lisa's point is lower cost obviously, simpler management. But also faster time to result? How did they turn that into a competitive advantage? >> If they could run... Those analytics previously used to take ten hours. Now they can do it in two hours. That's an 80% faster turnaround time. Right? Previously if they could support 10,000 spectators on one particular wireless network. Now they have 80,000. It's the experience that's transformative for folks who are enjoying the game. It's the number of applications they are running. It's how they are running. They're viewing IT as a strategic investment. As opposed to something that's needed to run the operations. >> Well baseball games are like five hours now, cause you can even do an in game at that speed. How 'about the data services? When Flash first came out, All-Flash architectures they were not very rich in terms of data services. That's evolved. I mean the industry in general, and Dell EMC specifically, has put a lot of effort into that. Maybe you could describe some of the data. What do we mean by data services? Let's talk about copy services, migration services, snapshotting, etc. What are the important ones that we should know about? >> The important data services are thin provisioning, the data reduction technologies, the duplication, compression. Then you have your data protection in forms of various types of array technologies. The most important one I'll put out as how matter your snapshot surfaces, as well as what you can do for your data protection, business continuity, disaster recovery. Those are very critical for any businesses that needs to rely upon having their systems up and running 365 days 24 seven. Having those type of data surfaces is a key. And not only having, but also having a maturity. For example, taking VMAX All-Flash in this particular case, right? It's upon two (mumbling) of reliability, where SRDF is the gold standard in industry, in terms of resiliency, right? Six-ninths of ability. Those... Somebody coming up with brand new array on Day One cannot have it. We have seen that evolution with folks who originally had very fast storage. But then there was no data services. Right? It's the evolution of having the performance as well as the right data surfaces. That helps the customer transform their journey, both in terms of modernizing the IT infrastructure, as well as having the digital transformation to be competitive today and tomorrow. >> And the positioning of XtremIO, just to clarify for our audience, cause you got All-Flash VMAX, you got XtremIO. It's really... It's the high end of the midrange. Is that how we should think about that? >> We have a lot of... As you said the IMAX All-Flash, XtremIO, they're all important, and effectively we have the portfolio because with one product you cannot solve each and every customer needs. So picking on your very specific example, XtremIO is great for mixed workload consolidation, virtualized applications, VDI, as well as situations where you have lots of copies. So for example, you have a database, you need to create (mumbling) copies. You have copies for your backup, sandboxing. In these type of scenarios XtremIO is extremely good. And kind of like is the sweet spot. We are going to... We are having new XtremIO X-Bricks that are even lower priced point than the previous generation. Literally 55% better price entry point. Now this enterprise plus capabilities of XtremIO will be also available in the mid-market, at the mid-range price. >> Well Chhandomay, thanks so much for stopping by, and not only expanding on the customer awards that we saw this morning, by sharing with us the impact that the Boston Red Socks were making. But also sharing with us what's new with XtremIO and All-Flash. >> Thank you. >> And speaking between two Bostonians... >> Big night tonight. You got Bruins. We got Celtics. Red Socks take a back seat for awhile. But they'll be back. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live at Day One of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break.