>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube covering Dell EMC World 2017 brought to you by Dell EMC. >> And welcome back here to Las Vegas, we're in the Venetian, the Cube is at Dell EMC World 2017. Good afternoon or good evening if you're watching out on the East Cost or perhaps overseas. Good to have you with us as we continue our coverage here on the Cube. I am John Walls along with Keith Townsend who's the principal at CTO advisors. And we're joined by Boaz Palgi who is the vice president and GM and one of the founders of ScaleIO. Boaz, thanks for being with us here on the Cube. Good to see you. >> Yeah my pleasure. >> John: First time I think, is that correct? >> No no no it's my fourth time. >> John: Oh fourth time, first time with me, my apologies. >> It's my first time with you, yes. >> My apologies, tell me about the history a little bit. I think it really says something about the growth, the explosion and what you've seen. 14 employees back in 2013, Dell makes the purchase. Today you have 220 plus working. So obviously you've had a lot of great growth, a lot of expansion, but a lot of success. >> Yes, yes we've experienced a lot of growth not just in the number of people, but also in customers. Not just in number of customers but also in the capacity in production with customers. So today we see we have well over 300 large enterprise customers like financial institutions, telecoms, all kinds of other enterprises. Also on top of that some mid-size and even smaller customers. And what we see is that the capacity sizes of our customers have been growing over those four years as well. So if four years ago we had maybe a part of the storage estate in some of our customers, today we have quite a few large enterprises that have completely standardized their entire block storage estate on their ScaleIO. Maybe one example of that was today in the keynote opening of this event, Dan Maslowski of CitiGroup presented how they have been using ScaleIO. They're running ScaleIO on tens of petabytes today and still growing very, very fast and with a lot more capacity to be added over the next few months and years. >> So what's going on there? Why are customers with CitiGroup want, who've already made the move, but are making the move over to SDS. What's generating that kind of activity and what kind of gains do you think they're realizing from that? >> I think there are two ways to look at this. One way to look at it is that actually storage arrays were invented 25 or 30 years ago in order to work around the problem of lack of resources for CPU, for processing, for memory in the application servers. So 25, 30 years ago an application server had barely enough resources to run a single application. So if people wanted to add another application to manage the storage, etc., they had to take another server, fill it with disks and that became the storage server which is the storage array of today. But nowadays application servers obviously have ample resources in terms of CPU memory, network, bandwidth. You can put any media whether it's flash or magnetic in your servers. So you still have enough resources. That's exactly where ScaleIO comes into play. We take those little part of those resources to actually provide enterprise class, storage capabilities in a software form factor alongside the applications or the hypervisors or the databases on those same servers. So this is maybe the technology enabling the shift in the paradigm that has been happening. On the other hand when you look at what is possible today products like ScaleIO make operations of the data centers significantly easier. So if in the past you needed to have dedicated storage products that were actually islands by themselves you couldn't really inter operate between various storage products or various vendors. You needed dedicated storage teams that were specialized on that storage every few years. Storage estate would come up for refresh or their competitors would start bidding. You would start getting very expensive and intrusive data migration projects from the old storage to the new storage. All of that is something of the past when you work with soft storage like ScaleIO. >> So Boaz, let's talk about that for a little bit. WikiBond did research and determined that they called this market originally service, some people may call it hyperconversion infrastructure. But overtake traditional storage arrays in sales in the next couple of years. You talked about ease of use, let's talk about the deployment. How is ScaleIO consumed? >> We see several form factors of ScaleIO today. The most obvious one is software. Some of our customers buy ScaleIO software. They have the servers of their choice which might be Dell servers or HP, or IBM or any other server vendor out there. They build their own estate just like they used to buy servers to run their databases for Oracle or to run their operating system, the hypervisors, etc. Now they also run the storage as another application really on their servers. That's one form factor. Actually people some of our customers today downloaded software from ScaleIO from the internet, started to use it, started to grow it and then came to Dell EMC to buy the license and to grow it and to put it into production for real. >> That's a kind of strange statement you said. This is a platform that holds petabytes of storage. You're telling me customers just download it and installed it? I missed the whole sales process before the download part. That's very unusual for an EMC. >> It's unusual for EMC and especially for all of NS really in the storage space. But this is, this is a new world. So ScaleIO software is freely downloadable for testing purposes. Customers find it, download it, and we have not a small number of customers that actually came to us that way. Hey, we already use ScaleIO, we tested it. We took some servers that were lying around, we built a cluster, it works. It gives tremendous performance, it's easy to operate. We want to roll it our in production. And we're saying we need to buy the license for that. This is one form factor. The second form factor that we see are appliances. ScaleIO obviously supports the 14G servers of Dell. We are agnostic really to the underlying hardware. But this is with one of the Dell server approaches that we are supporting is to provide appliances based on 14G servers running ScaleIO together with hybervisors or like ESX or hyper VOKVM and a management software around it that we call AMS that allows customers to manage their entire stack of the server and the ScaleIO software and the hypervisor software and the firmware, etc. with single-clicks configuration, single-click upgrades, and pretty soon also a single-click deployment of machines and storage together. This is the second form factor appliances with whole management package for the entire stack really wrapped around it. The third form factor that we see are the VX Ragflex approaches. Where VCE or CSPD these days are selling entire racks including networking, compute, and ScaleIO storage. Customers can buy these racks, plug them in, and start running their applications and their environment out of the box. >> It's all about simplicity, right? I mean talking about one-click, you're talking about the accommodation of force, the new structure. So it's all about making it a lot easier at the end of the day. >> Keith: It's solving a great problem. >> Huge problem. I would say it's simplicity of management but also simplicity of operations. In the past traditional storage estates forced people to deal with storage items. Forklift upgrades from old systems to newer systems. When you have an array that's full you now need to somehow migrate data to another array. There are a lot of operational challenges with the traditional approaches that completely disappear just like that when you deploy a software like ScaleIO which completely scales across all these clusters, across all these environments, across bare metal operating systems as well as across multiple types of hypervisors. You really get one big pool if you may, of storage that well big and big pool also provides among the best performance in the industry as well. And this is because our architecture that is completely paralyzed and it makes it possible to not only aggregate capacity, but also aggregate performance across a large number of devices and nodes. >> So curious geek question. When EMC originally bought ScaleIO, Chas Thacket did what I think he called a face melting demo of using ScaleIO in AWS. Crazy stuff I don't even know, it was like a million iops or something coming out of AWS. Shows the portability of the application. Future of ScaleIO, you see a use case for ScaleIO in the cloud? >> Well, ScaleIO in many cases enables the cloud. So we see one of our main use cases is infrastructure of the servers. This is really private clouds in the enterprise or managed hosting or public clouds in telcoms or managed service provider environments. This actually represents a very significant part of our deployments. Another part of our deployments are the traditional enterprise applications like Oracle and SQL and hypervisors of the world. Then we also see deployments of the newer type of applications like (foreign words), Cassandra, all kinds of open stick implementations, etc. Also on ScaleIO. >> I hate to jump ahead but it's always interesting to talk with people such as yourself who are always kind of thinking ahead. What's the next big headache, or what's the next big problem that you'd like to tackle or you'd like to challenge that you think with a more polished or more defined storage capability would solve whatever that dilemma might be that emerging for the enterprise? >> I think the first hurdle we need to pass is just the challenge for most industry veterans in particular to make this shift from they're built like a tank traditional storage arrays that you can touch and see to software that has a connotation, or a perception of it's just software I can't touch it, I can't see it, how can it be robust? How can it be performance? How can I operate it in an easy manner? As a matter of fact, all of those topics are better with a ScaleIO software than with traditional enterprise arrays. We've built some of them in the past. But in ScaleIO you get the most advanced benefits in terms of operational ease, elasticity, scalability, performance, flexibility of deployment, readiness for the future. Agnosticity to the underlying hardware, underlying media. So this really makes the data center a lot easier to be operated, and also a lot lower cost because you eliminate a lot of the complexity. You eliminate a lot of the smaller vendors that only deliver a small part of your hardware state because now you as a customer can really leverage everything on your X-86 hardware. This is commodity par excellence. You can go out there, you can get server vendors to bid for the hardware state that you want to run. And on that estate you can run your applications, your databases, your ScaleIO software, whatever you need. >> So you're telling them you can touch it, or you don't have to touch it, you don't have to feel it. Trust me, it's real right? >> Don't trust me, try it. >> Boaz, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time here on the Cube and great seeing you. Again four time around you're about to join the five-time alumni club so congratulations on that. >> Can I by the way tell you a little bit about the version, the new version? Maybe very quickly end of this year we're releasing a version, a new version of ScaleIO, ScaleIO Next. The main items there are we are delivering space efficiency, but we provide it in a dynamic manner. So one of the big downsides of putting space efficiency in storage systems is that it usually hits performance quite significantly especially if the data is not too compressible. In ScaleIO we will dynamically compress data based on the compressibility of the data. So if data is not compressible we won't waste resources trying to compress it. If data is very compressible we will use more resources but we will also compress it and we will be able to do that with a very little, very small degradation of performance compared to the non-compressed environment. That's one, two we introduce volume migration in a non-disruptive manner enabling customers to move volumes from flesh-only to magnetic-only to hybrid environments on the fly without any disruption to the ongoing applications. We introduced a spot for vevos in order to be able to run all the ScaleIO capabilities, ScaleIO volume capabilities on a virtual machine granularity level in ESX. And we are also introducing the next level of the AMS management software which is the wrapper around the server with ScaleIO software appliance bundles that enables you to manage the entire stack. >> And timing again? >> End of this year, end of '17. >> Good deal, you've got a full plate, don't you? >> We do, we do. >> Very good well done, thank you again and sorry about that. I knew you had news you wanted to get in, I'm glad you did. >> Thank you for the opportunity. >> You bet, all right back with more on the Cube here from Dell EMC World 2017 right after this.