>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to You by Dell Technologies. >>Welcome to the Cubes Coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020. The Digital Experience. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to welcome back a Cube alumni and a new Cube member to the program today. China. My Mondal is back with US Director of Solutions Marketing for Dell Technologies China. But it's great to see you at Dell Technologies world, even though we're very specially death. >>Happy to be back. Thank you, Lisa. >>And Thomas Henson is joining us for the first time. Global business development manager for a I and analytics. Thomas, Welcome to the Cube. >>I am excited to be here. It's my first virtual cube. >>Yeah, well, you better make it a good one. All right. I said we're talking about a I so so much has changed John to me. The last time I saw you were probably were sitting a lot closer together. So much has changed in the last 67 months, but a lot has changed with the adoption of Ai Thomas. Kick us off. What are some of the big things feeling ai adoption right now? >>Yeah, I >>would have to >>say the two biggest things right now or as we look at accelerated compute and by accelerated compute we're not just talking about the continuation of Moore's law, but how In Data Analytics, we're actually doing more processing now with GP use, which give us faster insights. And so now we have the ability to get quicker insights in jobs that may have taken, you know, taking weeks to months a song as we were measuring. And then the second portion is when we start to talk about the innovation going on in the software and framework world, right? So no longer do you have toe know C plus plus or a lower level language. You can actually do it in Python and even pull it off of Get Hub. And it's all part of that open source community. So we're seeing Mawr more folks in the field of data science and deep learning that can actually implement some code. And then we've got faster compute to be able to process that. >>Tell me, what are your thoughts? >>Think I want to add? Is the explosive growth off data on that's actually are fulfilling the AI adoption. Think off. Like all the devices we have, the i o t. On age devices are doing data are pumping data into the pipeline. Our high resolution satellite imagery, all social media generating data. No. All of this data are actually helping the adoption off a I because now we have very granular data tow our friend the AI model Make the AI models are much better. Besides, so the combination off both in, uh, data the power off Like GPU, power surfers are coupled with the inefficient in the eye after and tools helping off. Well, the AI growth that we're seeing today >>trying to make one of the things that we've known for a while now is that it's for a I to be valuable. It's about extracting value from that. Did it? You talked about the massive explosion and data, but yet we know for a long time we've been talking about AI for decades. Initiatives can fail. What can Dell Technologies do now to help companies have successfully I project? >>Yeah, eso As you were saying, Lisa, what we're seeing is the companies are trying to add up AI Technologies toe Dr Value and extract value from their data set. Now the way it needs to be framed is there is a business challenge that customers air trying to solve. The business challenge gets transformed into a data science problem. That data scientist is going toe work with the high technology, trained them on it. That data science problem gets to the data science solution on. Then it needs to be mapped to production deployment as a business solution. What happens? Ah, lot off. The time is the companies do not plan for output transition from all scale proof of concept that it a scientists are playing with, like a smaller set of data two, when it goes toe the large production deployment dealing with terabytes toe terabyte self data. Now that's where we come in. At their technologies, we have into end solutions for the, uh for the ai for pollution in the customers journeys starting from proof of concept to production. And it is all a seamless consular and very scalable. >>So if some of the challenges there are just starting with iterations. Thomas question for you as business development manager, those folks that John um I talked about the data scientists, the business. How are you helping them come together from the beginning so that when the POC is initiated, it actually can go on the right trajectory to be successful? >>No, that's a great point. And just to kind of build off of what Shonda my was talking about, You know, we call it that last mile, right? Like, Hey, I've got a great POC. How do I get into production? Well, if you have executive sponsorship and it's like, Hey, everybody was on board, but it's gonna take six months to a year. It's like, Whoa, you're gonna lose some momentum. So where we help our customers is, you know, by partnering with them to show them how to build, you know, from an i t. And infrastructure perspective what that ai architectural looks like, right? So we have multiple solutions around that, and at the end of the day, it's about just like Sean. Um, I was saying, You know, we may start off with a project that maybe it's only half a terabyte. Maybe it's 10 terabytes, but once you go into production, if it turns out to be three petabytes four petabytes. Nobody really, you know, has the infrastructure built unless they built on those solid practices. And that's where our solutions come in. So we can go from small scale laboratory all the way large scale production without having to move any of that data. Right? So, you know, at the heart of that is power scale and giving you that ability to scale your data and no more data migration so that you can handle one PC or multiple PCs as those models continue to improve as you start to move into production >>and I'm sticking with you 1st. 2nd 0, sorry. Trying to go ahead. >>So I was going to add that, uh, just like posthumous said right. So if you were a data scientist, you are working with this data science workstations, but getting the data from, uh, L M c our scales thes scale out platform and, uh, as it is growing from, you see two large kills production data can stay in place with the power scale platform. You can add notes, and it can grow to petabytes. And you can add in not just the workstations, but also our They'll power it, solve our switches building out our enter A I ready solutions are already solution for your production. Giving are very seamless experience from the data scientist with the i t. >>So China may will stick with you then. I'm curious to know in the last 6 to 7 months since 2020 has gone in a very different direction thing we all would have predicted our last Dell Technologies world together. What are you seeing? China. My in terms of acceleration or maybe different industries. What our customers needs, how they changed. I guess I should say in the in 2020. >>So in 2020 we're seeing the adoption off a I even more rapidly. Uh, if you think about customers ranging from like say, uh, media and entertainment industry toe, uh, the customer services off any organization to, uh the healthcare and life sciences with lots off genome analysts is going on in all of these places where we're dealing with large are datasets. We're seeing ah, lot off adoption foster processing off A. I R. Technologies, uh, giving with, say, the all the research that the's Biosciences organizations are happening. Uh, Thomas, I know like you are working with, like, a customer. So, uh, can you give us a little bit more example in there? >>Yes, one of the areas. You know, we're talking about 2021 of the things that we're seeing Mawr and Mawr is just the expansion of Just look at the need for customer support, right arm or folks working remotely their arm or folks that are learning remote. I know my child is going through virtual schools, So think about your I t organization and how Maney calls you're having now to expand. And so this is a great area where we're starting to see innovation within a I and model building to be ableto have you know, let's call it, you know, the next generation of chatbots rights. You can actually build these models off the data toe, augment those soup sports systems >>because you >>have two choices, right? You can either. You know, you you can either expand out your call center right for for we're not sure how long or you can use AI and analytics to help augment to help maybe answer some of those first baseline questions. The great thing about customers who are choosing power scale and Dell Technologies. Their partner is they already have. The resource is to be able to hold on to that data That's gonna help them train those models to help. >>So, Thomas, whenever we're talking about data, the explosions it brings to mind compliance. Protection, security. We've seen ransom where really skyrocket in 2020. Just you know, the other week there was the VA was hit. Um, I think there was also a social media Facebook instagram ticktock, 235 million users because there was an unsecured cloud database. So that vector is expanding. How can you help customers? Customers accelerate their AI projects? Well, ensuring compliance and protection and security of that data. >>Really? That's the sweet spot for power scale. We're talking with customers, right? You know, built on one FS with all the security features in mind. And I, too, came from the analytics world. So I remember in the early days of Hadoop, where, you know, as a software developer, we didn't need security, right? We you know, we were doing researching stuff, but then when we took it to the customer and and we're pushing to production, But what about all the security features. We needed >>the same thing >>for artificial intelligence, right? We want toe. We want to make sure that we're putting those security features and compliance is in. And that's where you know, from from an AI architecture perspective, by starting with one FS is at the heart of that solution. You can know that you're protecting for you know, all the enterprise features that you need, whether it be from compliance, thio, data strategy, toe backup and recovery as well. >>So when we're talking about big data volumes Chanda, mind we have to talk about the hyper scale er's talk to us about, you know, they each offer azure A W s Google cloud hundreds of AI services. So how does DEL help customers use the public cloud the data that's created outside of it and use all of those use that the right AI services to extract that value? >>Yeah. Now, as you mentioned, all of these hyper scholars are they differentiate with our office is like a i m l r Deep Learning Technologies, right? And as our customer, you want toe leverage based off all the, uh, all the cloud has to offer and not stuck with one particular cloud provider. However, we're talking about terabytes off data, right? So if you are happy with what doing service A from cloud provider say Google what you want to move to take advantage off another surface off from Asia? It comes with a very high English p a migration risk on time it will take to move the data itself. Now that's not good, right? As the customer, we should be able to live for it. Best off breed our cloud services for AI and for that matter, for anything across the board. Now, how we help customers is you can have all of your data say, in a managed, uh, managed cloud service provider running on power scale. But then you can connect from this managed cloud service provider directly toe any off the hyper scholars. You can connect toe aws, azure, Google Cloud and even, like even, uh, the in place analytics that power scale offers you can run. Uh, those, uh I mean, run those clouds AI services directly on that data simultaneously from these three, and I'll add like one more thing, right? Thes keep learning. Technologies need GPU power solvers, right? and cloud even within like one cloud is not homogeneous environment. Like sometimes you'll find a US East has or gp part solvers. But like you are in the West and the same for other providers. No, with our still our technologies cloud power scale for multi cloud our scale is sitting outside off those hyper scholars connected directly to our any off this on. Then you can burst into different clouds, take advantage off our spot. Instances on are like leverage. All the GP is not from one particular service provider part. All of those be our hyper scholars. So those are some examples off the work we're doing in the multi cloud world for a I >>So that's day. You're talking about data there. So powers failed for multi cloud for data that's created outside the public club. But Thomas, what about for data that's created inside the cloud? How does Del help with that? >>Yes. So, this year, we actually released a solution, uh, in conjunction with G C. P. So within Google Cloud, you can have power scale for one fs, right? And so that's that native native feature. So, you know, goes through all the compliance and all the features within being a part of that G c p natively eso counts towards your credits and your GP Google building as well. But it's still all the features that you have. And so we've been running some, actually, some benchmarks. So we've got a couple of white papers out there, that kind of detail. You know what we can do from an artificial intelligence perspective back to Sean Demise Example. We were just talking about, you know, being able to use more and more GPU. So we we've done that to run some of our AI benchmarks against that and then also, you know, jumped into the Hadoop space. But because you know, that's 11 area from a power scale, prospective customers were really interested. Um, and they have been for years. And then, really, the the awesome portion about this is for customers that are looking for a hybrid solution. Or maybe it's their first kickoff to it. So back Lisa to those compliance features that we were talking about those air still inherent within that native Google G C P one fs version, but then also for customers that have it on prim. You can use those same features to burst your data into, um, your isil on cluster using all the same native tools that you've been using for years within your enterprise. >>God, it's so starting out for power. Skill for Google Cloud Trying to get back to you Kind of wrapping things up here. What are some of the things that we're going to see next from Dell from an AI Solutions perspective? >>Yes. So we are working on many different interesting projects ranging from, uh, the latest, uh, in video Salford's that they have announced d d x a 100. And in fact, two weeks ago at GTC, uh, Syria announced take too far parts with, uh, it takes a 100 solvers. We're part off that ecosystem. And we are working with, uh, the leading, uh uh, solutions toe benchmark, our ai, uh, environments, uh, for all the storage, uh, ensuring, like we are providing, like, all the throughput and scalability that we have to offer >>Thomas finishing with you from the customer perspective. As we talked about so many changes this year alone as we approach calendar year 2021 what are some of the things that Dell is doing with its customers with its partners, the hyper scale er's and video, for example, Do you think customers are really going to be able to truly accelerate successful AI projects? >>Yeah. So the first thing I'd like to talk about is what we're doing with the D. G. S A 100. So this month that GTC you saw our solution for a reference architecture for the G s, a 100 plus power scale. So you talk about speed and how we can move customers insights. I mean, some of the numbers that we're seeing off of that are really a really amazing right. And so this is gives the customers the ability to still, you know, take all the features and use use I salon and one f s, um, like they have in the past, but now combined with the speed of the A 100 still be ableto speed up. How fast they're using those building out those deep learning models and then secondly, with that that gives them the ability to scale to. So there's some features inherent within this reference architecture that allow for you to make more use, right? So bring mawr data scientists and more modelers GP use because that's one thing you don't see Data scientist turning away right there always like, Hey, you know, I mean, this this project here needs needs a GPU. And so, you know, from a power scale one fs perspective, we want to be able to make sure that we're supporting that. So that as that data continues to grow, which, you know we're seeing is one of the large factors. Whenever we're talking about artificial intelligence is the scale for the data. We wanna them to be able to continue to build out that data consolidation area for all these multiple different workloads. That air coming in. >>Excellent, Thomas. Thanks for sharing that. Hopefully next time we get to see you guys in person and we can talk about a customer who has done something very successful with you guys. Kind of me. Always great to talk to you. Thank you for joining us. >>Thank you. Thank you >>for China. May Mandel and Thomas Henson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes Coverage of Dell Technologies, World 2020

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. Digging into some of the hottest topics in tech, of course, multicloud has been one of the big things we've been talking about for a number of years, the maturation from just cloud in general, hybrid cloud and multicloud. Happy to welcome back to the program, one of our CUBE alumni, Chhandomay Mandal. He's a director of marketing from Dell Technologies. Chhandomay, pleasure to see you. >> Happy to be here. >> All right, so last year we were together for Dell Technologies World, VM World and of course, I've seen how these solutions have been expanding out partnerships especially a lot of it from Dell's side on leveraging VMware technologies to extend and connect to what your customers are doing with their cloud strategies. So, give us the update as to you know, what you're hearing from customers and how Dell is moving to meet them. >> Sure. Cloud adoption is really growing and even from the three hyperscalers, AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. There are over 500 different services today. And with this fast pace of innovation, I see costumers adopting many different services from these public cloud vendors. And again, they want to add up the services because they are differentiated. They have workloads that can leverage their services and sometimes even from leveraging the same data set. One challenge that we're seeing is, how do customers move data around from one cloud to another so that they can take advantage of the great innovation that is happening with cloud storage or cloud providers? Because moving the data comes with not only the migration risk, but also huge egress fees, the time it takes. So, solving this customer's challenge is our number one priority in the cloud offering. >> Great, Chhandomay, you brought up a bunch of really good points there. Of course, nobody's solved the speed of light issue, so we know data has gravity, it's not easy to move it. And yeah, absolutely, you know, I've been saying for the last couple of years, that data is one of those flywheels, when it comes to the cloud. Well, once you've got it in there, it's not, you know kind, of the traditional lock-in, but I have access to the data, I have access to the services and it's not easy to move it out, even if customers would want to take advantage of multiple services from multiple clouds. So, I'd love to hear, you know, what's DELL's role in this discussion? How are you helping us make our data more of a multicloud-enabled environment? >> Absolutely, it's true. So with us, Dell Technologies, cloud storage for multicloud, we are delivering scalable, resilient cloud data storage with flexible, multi-cloud access options. Ideal for securely, deploying or moving, demanding applications to the cloud for many different use cases. The way we are doing it, effectively, that customers can leverage log or file storage consumed as a service, directly from any different clouds, like, AWS, Google cloud, Azure, and we are providing very high speed, low latency connections from Dell EMC storage, from our managed services provider location, using a direct cloud connect option and, let me give you like an example. We have Dell EMC Isilon industries number one scale-out NAS It has a very high performance drives, large throughput, all scales to multi-petabyte, use cases have multiple different protocol access simultaneously from many different applications. Now the same Isilon, today can be leveraged as Dell technology's cloud storage with direct access to Azure, Google cloud, AWS on zoomed in the cloud operating model. So now, you can run your applications in any cloud while having data sitting outside of your cloud with a high performance, high speed access that you need. That's where we are bringing the innovation and the value. >> Okay, and if I heard your right Chhandomay, this is a managed service solution because if I want that, you know, high speed, you know, direct connection, with Azure and with AWS, normally I need to be, you know, in some service provider, Dell of course has lots of partners that offer those services. I'm not just talking about, you know, connecting my ray that I have in my data center, connected over the internet. because that wouldn't necessarily give me the bandwidth and performance that I need. Did I get that correct? >> Yeah, absolutely because again, you need this connection and all locations with the hyperscalers to get the high speed connection. Say in the case of Microsoft Azure, the express route, it need to be co-located in a facility like right next to them, so that you have the high bandwidth, high performance that you need for this application. >> Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It's kind of, you know, you're hyperscaler adjacent you just, through that connection it's relatively close. Might help if maybe if you've got, you know, a customer or an industry example of, you know, what the real life expectation and use cases, for a solution like this. >> Sure, so let me give you the example of genomics analysis. Now, is genome sequencer in a single cycle or a human being that creates 100 gigabytes of data and that's just like raw data. You need to run analysis, different types of analysis to check effects that are drug or something having on the DNA. Now, for example, NVIDIA Parabricks is a popular sequencing software that needs to be run on this data set. And again, it drives very high throughput. Sometimes it needs 100 gigabytes per second throughput to drive the performance. Now, we have worked with Microsoft Azure very closely and using Microsoft ExpressRoute, you can actually get that bandwidth, that throughput for running Parabricks, or nextgen sequencing or VMs in Azure leveraging Isilon. And in fact, we have worked with Azure to provide a completely egress fee data movement. So when this application is writing back data, to this application at it, as part of Dell technologies about storage, there is zero fee associated with it. And it's not just Microsoft Azure, right? You can have the same data set and run this Parabrick or nextgen sequencing VMs in Google cloud, AWS, Azure simultaneously. Thereby scaling up this process much faster. So, if you are a pharmaceutical company, trying to cure for disease spreading across the globe, you need to run, this on hundreds of thousands of patients creating hundreds of terabytes to petabytes of data, then, you can actually scale up the process across three or more different clouds very quickly. This truly shows you how you can leverage the power of Isilon, the scalable high performance storage in a multi cloud world. >> Yeah, very very interesting, you know, you talked about no cost for an egress fee and that, you know, can be one of those architectural killers. You think you have a good solution for a cloud, you put things out and then all of a sudden, you start getting things on your bill that you weren't expecting. So today, is there something special that the customer needs to do that it's for this service, that you're saying is that a partnership with Dell and Microsoft or you know, how does this differ from kind of the traditional egress fees that I'm used to getting or whether I'm using AWS, Azure or Google? >> So, this is like a, DELL and Microsoft Azure partnership. So that's where like you do not get, charged with the egress fee when the applications running in Azure, are connecting back to EMC storage as part of that cloud storage services. >> Okay, excellent, 'cause yeah, I mean, Chhandomay, I'm sure you're well familiar. A lot of times people look at cloud and they're saying, okay, when I look at the economic, if it's computer intensive, it makes a little bit more sense, if it's data intensive, there's lots of reasons that it might not make sense, that this is unlocking some of that data capabilities, I guess that leads to, you know, some of the opportunity around AI is of course, I need to think about my architecture. A lot of times data is not going to leave the edge environments, you know, autonomous vehicles is, you know, an obvious use case that we talk about. Usually there's training in a central location, but then I need to be able to actually do the work at the edge. So what does this, you know, cloud storage for multi cloud, how does AI fit into this whole gap? >> So, yes, for AI, you need to train very large data sets, for a long time, and you get to the results like you opt and you want. You gave the example of autonomous driving, right? The self driving car needs to understand many different scenarios, whether it's, icy road, a kid on the road, it's a slippery condition or you're running into a big wall, so on and so forth. Now, when it comes to dealing with this petabytes worth of data set and you need to train these models, okay? You need a very specific servers, GPU powered servers, okay. Now, to scale, you think that you'd go to the cloud and then you will be able to get the computer needs. However it turns out cloud is not an amorphous homogeneous place. Between the vendors, there is huge difference in terms of what GPU powered server you can get. And even like within one particular cloud vendor depending on the region, this vary widely. So it becomes critical, that you can have like data set that can be connected from many different clouds, from many different regions as you need it. And one more thing I want to highlight, AI is actually one area where these cloud providers are providing very differentiated services. So in the autonomous vehicle example, there are several stages of a model training depending on like what you are trying to achieve at one point in time. Now you can one day, or one part of the process, you can leverage AWS SageMaker for your model training. On the other part, you probably would like TensorFlow from Google cloud, good to it. Now when you have your data set outside of the cloud and you have the fast connection from many different clouds. You can take advantage not only, the different, GPU powered servers but also differentiated faster services that are available from this cloud providers. >> All right, so Chhandomay, how does the VMware Cloud Solution fit into this discussion? I know it's been a important piece of the DELL technologies cloud piece. So how does the multi cloud storage, VMware cloud and the multi cloud piece fit together? >> Sure, so the VMware cloud, on AWS is one of the key offering that we have, and it also fits into the multi cloud story very well. Actually, let me explain that with a customer example, okay. We have one of world's largest energy company down in Texas. They have four petabyte of Data Lake on Isilon, okay. And this is all seismic data, they are running analytics to workloads to figure out exactly which place in the ocean they should drill and, precision on here can be like millions or billions of dollars of difference. Now, they wanted to set up a secondary data center in the case of a disaster. What we were able to do is to spin up DR service for this customer leveraging Dell Technologies cloud storage. So they replicate the data to the cloud and then we spin up their DR environment with VMware Cloud on AWS, okay. And now the data is already in the cloud. So they got their, service with VMware Cloud on AWS but with the same data set. Now they are running those seismic analytics workloads from AWS, Google cloud and Azure, thereby speeding up the process of finding the next location to drill. So, you see the example where we leverage the EMC on AWS for DR as a service and since the data set is already there, now they are running their analytics to workloads for their regular operation. >> Great, well definitely a quite a bit of maturation in the Dell cloud solution, how that fits into multi cloud. Help put a point on it, Chhandomay, if you would, the conversations you're having with customers and Dell's role in the multi cloud discussion. >> Sure, so there are two important things. First, the ability to scale to many different clouds to leverage the different services, the compute infrastructure, so on and so forth. And the second part of it is depending on the applications, right, you might need to leverage for the same workload, working on the same data set, different services from different providers. Dell Technologies cloud storage for multi cloud is enabling that for our entire customer set. And I will, close out with one more important aspect. If you are a customer who is just starting your cloud journey or a one single cloud provider, go and see your cloud expert today. But still, you want to architect your solution so that, when the need comes, you can actually leverage multi cloud for compute or other services. So, if you decouple your services from like, where are your data is while doing the cloud access that actually makes your cloud architecture (mumbles). So, with Dell Technologies, cloud storage per multi cloud, we're helping customers not only today, but also for future. >> All right, well, Chhandomay Mandal, thanks so much for the updates, Congratulations to the theme on the process and look forward to talking to you again in the future. >> Thank you. >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman, thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (gentle music)

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum, World 2019 brought to you by VM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. We're here! Mosconi North for VM World 2019 10th Year of the Cube covering VM World. I'm stupid and my co host is John Troyer. And welcome to the program to guest from Del Technologies. Sitting to my right is Tender, my Mondal, who's the director of storage solutions and sitting to his right is David when the senior director of server, product planning and management also with Dell. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. All right, so we've got server and storage and talk about something that we've been talking about for a while on the server side been delivered for a bit and on the storage side is now rolling out. So everybody's favorite topic. Nonviolent till memory express or envy me as it rolls off the tongue storage class memory, or SCM and lots of other things, you know, down there, really helping a big, transformational wave that, you know, we really changes how our applications interact with the infrastructure channel, you know, bring us up to date on the latest. >> Sure on, let's start where you ended. We're seeing explosion off applications, right? And in fact, in mornings, keynote. Bad girl singer had a stocky speaks. There are 352 million enterprise applications today. On it will be 792 million in three years. Now, as the applications are growing exponentially, we cannot keep growing the infrastructure at that rate, So N v m e is the way we can consolidate it. Ah, lot off the infrastructure. If we can think about in tow and envy, Emmy starting from the server in fear me off our fabric through the stories area down, toe the back end with envy Emmy necessities. This actually can put together a great platform where you can consulate it. Ah, lot off the applications and delivering the high performance low latency that will need while meeting video surfaced level objectives so we can go over a little bit off the details, but I think it all starts from envy me over fabric coming from the server to the story, Ari. So probably like that's the fourth step we need to consider >> David. Do You know, I love this discussion when we get to talk at the application later because, you know, Flash changed the market a lot. You know, it's like, you know, much better energy, and it's much faster, Anything. But you know, this inflection point that we're talking about for application modernization, you know, envy me is one of those enablers there and something they know your team's been working on >> for a while. Yeah, actually, on the power each side we've been, You know, we've been embracing the benefits of enemy for quite some so many years now, right? We start out by introducing enemy in our 12 generations servers, you know, frontloaded hot, serviceable drives. And then, of course, we branch out from there on in today, you know, Ah, a lot of the servers from a Polish family all support enemy devices. So the benefit there is really giving customer choices in terms of what kind of storage kind of cheering they wanted, you know, for the applications needs. Right now, one of things that's great about, you know, enemy over fabric is it's more than just a flash storage itself. It's about enabling the standards, you know, across the host across the data fire Break down to the storage really to deliver on the overall performance that you know the applications of needs and buy, you know, improving I ops and lower late, Easy overall, from a server perspective, this just means that we're releasing more CPU cycles back into the application so that they can run different types of workloads. And for us, this is this is a great story from power. Just was from Power Macs and coming together to enable this Emmy, Emmy or fabric. >> You know, I'm I'm I'm kind of slow about some of these things, but if you kind of squint at the history and, you know, we went from the PC revolution and then we had, you know, we had Sands and raise right and we had we had centralized toward shared storage last couple of years, a lot of interest and stale right hyper converged. And you had a You had a lot of pizza boxes with the storage right there. It's I mean, I now think right and I'm following the threat, I think which is now that where we now can have ah, Iraq with again a fabric and and again, now we can We can focus on our envy me storage over our envy me over fabric driven, solid state storage somewhere below my servers that are that are doing handling compute somewhere else. Is that that the future we're headed towards now >> Yes. I mean, everything has its place. But to give you the perspective, right? It's not just, I mean coming down to the storage area, but how This is enough bling, the future storage as well. And the storage class memory is the perfect example. And as Defeat said, let's take power, Max, as an example, right. Eso in power Max, you can It is like entrant, envy me ready like you get envy emi over Fabrica de front end But then we have n v m E s s trees in the back end. The thing is now it is also the N v m e is enabling technologies like stories class memory which is bringing in very high performance, very less latency Latency is going down in the order off like tents off microseconds. Now this is as close as you can get. Tow the like Dedham with persistent story. However, you need a balance. This is like order of magnitude are costlier. Now you got bar Max. What we're doing in terms of first, it's envy me. Done right? What do you mean by that? You have, like, Marty controller architectures that can actually do this level of parallel processing and our concurrency. And then we have bought, like, ECM for storage, class, memory and envy, Emmy essences. And we're doing intelligent tearing best on the built in mission learning engine that we have. And it is looking at 40 million data sets. Really time to decide. Like which sort of walk lords should go on this same drives which should go on and the M. E s estates. And on top of it, you add quality of service. So this platform gives you are service level objectives. You can choose from diamond, platinum, gold, silver or bronze, and you can consulate it. Ah, lot off those 352 million different types of applications on this area guaranteeing you are going to meet all off your SL s, no matter what type of applications they were consolidated into. >> Okay, I'm wonder if you could boast. You know bring us into what this means for VM wear customers and break it into two pieces. One is kind of a traditional virtualized shop. And secondly, you know, spend a lot of time in the keynote this morning talking about the cloud native containerized, you know, type of environment. Will there be any difference from from both of your world? >> Yeah, absolutely. I'm glad you brought that up because, you know, from from our perspective, right, what we've seen with the enablement of enemy platforms. You know, John, you brought up a very interesting point, right? It seems like you know, past couple years, we went from moving storage onto the host and now would envy me with fabric. We're actually taking the storage away from the host again. Right? And that's exactly true, because, you know, the first, the first statement you brought up stew. It's about how flash enabled different applications to run better on the host. What? We see that still right? And so what enemy? You know, we see the lower response time enabling our customers Thio run more jobs and more v ems per server. That's one aspect of it. You know, we've seen his benefit a lot of our platform today or using various different applications and solutions, and you talk about the ex rail that's a visa and story for Del. You Talk about Visa and ready notes for customers who want to build it themselves. Right platforms enabled would envy me back playing enemies. Storage allows them to use enemy or SAS sata whatever they want. But the point is, here is that when they're using every me flash, for instance, and I'll talk a little bit about the power climaxed with this all flash, uh, me back plane in a case in the study that we did with V San application running, oh ltp type of workload, we saw the response time with every me over traditional SAS, you know, from our competitors improved by 56% right, which means that from that same particular solution build out, we were able to add 44% more of'em on the platform. Now, at the same time, we increase the overall orders per minute by roughly over 600,000. Oh, pm's for that type of, uh, benchmark over our nearest competitors so that right there is the benefit that we see from my virtual eyes from, Ah, being where perspective >> on. I'll add from the storage perspective in two ways. In fact, in last vehement in a MIA, we demonstrated in tow and envy, EMI over five break up with special build off this fear supporting Envy me over fabric and stories. Class memory with envy Me drives what it gives you a regular like this fear best environment is that you have the ability to move your PM's around like the applications where the highest performance and Latin's is critical. It will be on those special service levels and special like de testers. In fact, that demonstration was like ECM did a store, and in P m E Sense media does so in the same fabric with in Bar Mexican moved things around, whether it's like regular Fibre Channel or CNN and then the other part. I want to add in the morning like we saw the announcement that now communities is built in or will be built in with the years Excite platform, right and you're sexy is bread and butter off all the storage customers that we have now with like when you consider those, uh, those things built in under this fear black from Think about, like how many applications? How many actualized workloads you can run, where that it's on premise or humor. Cloud on AWS. All of those consolidation, as well as like the performance needs while reducing your footprint does the benefit of the V M R R shops. But the PM admits are going to see from the storage site >> again. I'm not following the parts, but what kind of we're not talking about a couple of megabytes here anymore, Right? What size of parts are shipping these days? So >> So, from our perspective, up to 77 gigabyte actually start. Seven terabytes drives are available on the markets today for Envy Me Now, whether customer by those drives, you know, it depends on economic factor. But yeah, it's something that's in this available from Dell >> so on. I'll act to what David said so far in CM drives 750 gig to 1.5. Articulate a C M drives on Dwell ported often drives that will be available in the power Max Acela's 15 terabyte envy EMI assistants. So this is the capacity we're talking about. And again the Latin's is at the application level, like from the storage like you're going to see, like, less than 300 microsecond. That's the power we are bringing in with this technology to the market. >> Give >> us a >> little look forward we talked about, you know, envy me has been shipping for a bit on the servers now, really rolling out on the storage side, I saw there's a lot of started from the space. You know, one recent acquisition got guts and people talking. What? What should we be looking for from both of you over kind of the next 6 to 12 months. >> So over next to a next 6 to 12 months, he will see a lot of innovation in this case from the storage site where wth e order of magnitude. I mean, the one single Ari, I mean, today it supports, say, like, 10 million I offs less than 500 microsecond latency. Ah, I cannot give you the exact details, but within like, a short time, these numbers are going to go up by more than, like, 50%. Latency is goingto get reduced. The troop would will be driving will actually like more than double s o. You see, like a lot of these innovations and kind of like evolution in terms off the drive capacities both from the CME, drives perspective. Envy me, assess these. Those will continue to expand, leading to foster performance. Better consolidation, Uh, for all the workloads. >> Yeah, from our perspective, I mean, you know, data growth is gonna continue. We all know that, And for us, it's like designing systems based on what the customers need, what the applications needs, right. And that's why we have different types of storage available today. So for us, you know, while we're doing a lot of things from a direct attached storage perspective, customers continue to have a need for share storage. EMI over fabric just provides a better know intense story for us, really from a Power edge and Power Macs perspective. But in the future, you asked what we're going to do. Well, we see the need to probably decouple stories, class memory from the host again. And really, what's preventing us from doing today? It's really having the right fabric in place to be able to deliver to that performance level that applications needs. MM evil fabrics, fibre Channel Ethernet ice, scuzzy or I'm sorry, Infinite Band, whatever. These are some of the things that you know we're looking forward to in the future to make that that lead. All >> right, well, it's really been great to see technology that I know the people that build your products have been excited about for many years. But rolling out into the real world deployment for customers that will transform what they're doing. So for John Troyer, I'm still Minuteman back with lots more coverage here from Be enrolled 2019. Thanks for watching the Cube.

(upbeat music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Chhandomay Mandal, he is the Director of Solutions Marketing for Dell EMC. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Happy to be here. >> Direct from Boston. This is a Boston panel, I love it. >> Yes, and we were on the same flight yesterday. >> (laughing) There you go! >> Ah, so half of Hopkinton. >> Yeah. So, we're here at Dell Technologies World, but you're here to talk to us about SAP. Explain to our viewers a little bit about the connection between your companies. >> Sure, so SAP connects a lot of our customers. They are running their ERP, CRM, digital procurement, HR systems, and many other workloads on SAP, and we, Dell Technologies, as a company, have a portfolio of solutions to support SAP workloads. So, that's the big connection. SAP and Dell EMC, we are big partners, and we work hand in hand as well. >> Talk a little bit about what SAP customers are doing. You know, everybody knows the stories of SAP multi-year implementation, very complicated, although driving business value, but today people want to be more agile, cloud, Hana, who's been around now for quite a number of years. SAP obviously pushing hard for a number of reasons. What are you seeing in the customer base? >> Yeah, SAP customers are in a journey. As you mentioned, the SAP landscapes implementations. In fact, in 2016, greater than fifty percent of SAP landscapes were running on Oracle. SAP has come up with the in-memory database, SAP Hana, and there is a mandate that by 2025, the customers need to be running on SAP Hana to run any SAP workload. So, customers need to go through that transition, and as the data explodes from IoT, Big Data, BlockChain, our next gen intelligent applications, they are driving a lot of analytics, and SAP has come up with a platform called SAP Leonardo for mission learning. So, customers are trying to consolidate their old SAP landscapes on an agile, modern infrastructure. They are planning to migrate all the older databases to SAP Hana. At the same time, they are looking into deploying SAP Leonardo to take advantage of IoT, AI, BlockChain, all those things. >> So SAP is dangling the carrot. With Hana, it's in memory, performance, efficiency. With Leonardo, it's the promise of machine intelligence, but there are challenges in migrating off of Oracle. How are customers dealing with that? Are you guys in a position to help with the partnership with SAP? Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yes, SAP implementations, as you know, is fairly complex, takes many months, years, and customers have been running SAP for a long time, so their challenge are, "How do we keep our businesses running while we need to transition from what we have to these SAP Hana based deployments." They are looking into modern infrastructures that will be able to consolidate all of this around their applications with the same SLS, and at the same time when they migrate one application to the next on SAP Hana, that platform should be able to add up and deliver all the SLS. So, refactoring what they have into this SAP Hana is really big for all of our customers, and how to have a better performing platform, how to deliver the agility's simplification, as well as lower the TCO. These are the projects that CIO's are running for our customers. >> So, as we know, simpler is always better. Can you talk about some of the ROI? What are companies actually seeing in terms of these benefits? >> So, let's take specific examples. Dell EMC PowerMax is the backbone of running SAP applications for a long time. Our previous generations in terms of VMAX, VMAX All Flash, now with our PowerMax, it has the highest skill ability of SLP Hana. It can actually run 162 SAP Hana nodes on a single array, but that's not the end game. The thing is, it can consolidate SAP, traditional SAP workloads, SAP Hana, as well as other mixed workloads while delivering the same performance masking the SLS, with it's built-in mission learning capabilities. Now, what does that translate to? We have several customers seeing benefits out of this. For example, a big sports equipment manufacturer, when they move to this platform, there are software quality assurance process. It used to take like ten days in all the infrastructure. Now they could run on this new platform in two days. That's literally eighty percent improvement, because of the higher performance, the more consolidation that they were able to access. So that's one example just from the performance perspective, but if you take a consolidation simpler to run, there are other examples I can actually walk you through. >> So, I want to double click on that, because every storage company wants to partner with SAP, target that stuff, because Oracle's not that friendly these days. They have their own hardware, right? They're trying to elbow you out with Exadata. So, talk a little bit more about the differentiation that Dell EMC brings relative to some of your other storage competitors, specifically within SAP environments. >> Sure, so first Dell comes in with a portfolio of solutions. As you are mentioning, these are fairly complex deployments, and customers are looking for cross state partner, with professional services, experience, and a portfolio of solutions, not just one solution fits all. Just to continue on that aspect, I talked about Dell EMC PowerMax. It's great for consolidation, for running Hana and the existing workloads, but then when you look at the next generation of applications, the IoT, AI, BlockChain, the unstructured world, Dell EMC Isilon is a great platform which has already been in the market and in the forefront of AI workloads. Dell, as a company, offer a portfolio of solutions, and it's not piecemeal. We see the broader picture, and plug in all the right pieces with the right consulting surfaces as well, so that the customers can run their applications day in and day out, and transition as well as bring in new deployments like SAP Leonardo. I'll give you one example here. Another big service provider, their analytics, their SAP APOs, used to take like 32 hours of run time, and they could only do in weekends. Now, with this Dell EMC storage solutions, they are actually down to, give or take, seven hours. So that's like 78% improvement in terms of how fast they can run this analytics, and this is turning into better decision making for the procurement manager, for the business analyst, and they are able to drive value from time to market, time to value, from all the data that's captured in these SAP landscapes. >> And these are realtime or near realtime analyses that are going on, right? But then ultimately you have to persist the data, that's where things like PowerMax come in, and then sometimes you got to bring it back in, and so are you guys architecting high speed interconnects and InfiniBands and all kinds of crazy stuff? >> All kinds of things-- >> NVMe's... >> And actually, you brought up a very good point. SAP Hana is an in-memory database, so everything is running in the memory speed. Why do you need high performing array like Dell EMC PowerMax? Guess what? Everything is in memory, but this is all critical databases. Everything needs to be persisted back to the storage array, and then when something reboots, you cannot stay still til all the data is back from the storage array into the memory. So, persisting the data quickly and fast reboots are also necessary. Driving the needs of throughputs like what PowerMax provides, 150 gigabits per second throughput, so that's where the connection comes in. >> So the throughputs you're describing really were unthinkable five years ago. Can you reflect on that a little bit in terms of what you've seen the technology do that you really couldn't have even imagined it doing, even in very recent times. >> In fact, that's a very good point. One of the customers that participated in this TOI study, they mentioned they wanted to go to the cloud, public cloud. When they wanted to go to the cloud at the time the maximum size of our database you could do was 2.5 terabyte, and they already had a 4 terabyte SAP database, so there was no way they could go to a public cloud. What they were looking into, the cloud operating model, so that you can actually be flexible with your infrastructure, consume as you go, and we were able to help in that transition with all of the solutions. >> Great. So where you think we're going to be going? I mean in terms of next year's Dell Technologies World 2020, which will be big just because it's a cool number. What do you think we'll be talking about next year's conference? >> That's a very good point, and as you mentioned 2020, we are already seven billion people, and by 2020 it's predicted to be like 30 billion devices generating 44 zettabytes of data, so managing all of this data, putting the data at the right tier, the data that needs to be accessed quickly to make realtime analysis process. The data that's seven days old, putting them in the right tier, accessing them, and driving the value from your data, from this past amount of data, so that you can make decisions, you can gather intelligence, and take this value to drive competitive differentiation will be where we are. And the form factor? Yes, everybody will be able to do all of this pretty much like realtime in phones or even smaller devices. >> It's the march to 2025, when everybody's going to be off Oracle. >> Well exactly! You're right. >> Oh, that's your mandate. >> Anyway, @dvellante if you want to talk about that. We've got a lot pf research on it, so... >> Exactly. >> Not trivial. >> Well Chhandomay, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. >> Same here. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have much more of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat electronic music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE! Our continuing coverage at VMworld 2018, I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host John Troyer. We're very excited to welcome back to theCUBE one of our alumni, Chhandomay Mandal, the director of product marketing at Dell EMC. Chhandomay, it's great to talk to you again! >> Thank you, nice to be here. >> We just seem to do this circuit in Las Vegas. >> Yeah. (laughing) >> So, loads of people here, we last got to speak four months ago at Dell Technologies World, thematically that event about making IT transformation real, about making digital transformation real, security transformation real. Let's talk about IT transformation. Yesterday, Pat Gelsinger talked about you know, the essentialness that customers have to transform IT, it's an enabler of digital transformation, let's talk about what Dell EMC is continuing to help customers do, to transform their IT so they can really get, get on that successful journey to digital transformation. >> Yes, the Dell transformation is key into this digital economy in order to thrive in this new world, right? And, digital transformation is fueled by IT transformation. For us, IT transformation means modernizing the underlying infrastructure, so that they can deliver on scale, performance, availability, cost-effectiveness. They can also automate a lot of the manual processes, and streamline the operations, net result being freeing up the resources, and kind of like, deliver the transformation for not only application processes, but also businesses in general. So, with our portfolio, we are helping customers into this journey and since we talked at Dell Technologies World, it is going great, we are seeing a lot of adoption in this portfolio. >> Chhandomay, I love, you know, you work on high-end storage, right? Which is. >> Yes. >> Which means that these are business-critical applications that you are supporting. >> Absolutely. >> And, that means that they're the most, in some of the ways, some of the most interesting, right? And the deepest and most important, when you're talking digital transformation. But it comes down to, you know, as you say, efficiency and how the IT department is running. In the olden days, you'd get a VMAX, and you'd have an admin, and there's a lot of knobs and adjustments and tuning, and you have to keep that machine running smoothly because they're supporting the enterprise. Now, new next generation PowerMax, some of the, you know, tell us a little about that. What I'm really impressed with is all the automation, and all the efficiency that goes into that platform. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. So, PowerMax is our latest flagship high-end product. It's an end-to-end NVMe design platform, designed to deliver like highest level of performance. Not just performance, but highest level of efficiency, as well as all the trusted data services that are synonymous with VMAX. And, not to talk about the six-nines of availability, all those goodness of the previous generations carried over. But, the key thing is, with PowerMax, what we have done is, if I need to boil it down into three things, this is a very powerful platform. It's simple, and it's trusted. So now, when I talk about very powerful, obviously performance is part and parcel. It is actually the fastest storage array. 10 million IOPS, 150 gigabytes per second, >> It's a maniac, it's a, it's a screamer, it's amazing. >> Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. >> Yeah yeah, yeah. >> But like that's kind of like a table steak and bread and butter for us. Now, what I want to highlight is, how simple the platform has become. We have a built-in machine learning engine within the platform. And now, instead of like, I need this much of capacity and this much of performance, you can actually provision storage based on the surface levels that you need to give your customers. And we, underneath, will take care of like whatever it means for any workloads you are running. And how are you doing it? So for example, today, right? Most of the applications are still like business applications, like Oracle, SAP, you name it. But, within the digital transformation, a lot of the modern, analytics heavy applications are also coming in, right? So, if I were to break it up it would be say like, 80, 20, to 80% business, 20% modern applications. Now, we are seeing the modern applications getting adopted like higher and higher and-- >> It's going to flip, right? At some point. >> Yes. Like in three to five years, the ratio will be opposite. Now, if you are buying an array like PowerMax today, how can we deliver the performance you need for business applications of today, while taking care of the analytics heavy applications of tomorrow, at the same time, meeting your applications? I mean, meeting your SLS all the way through. And that's where the machine learning engine comes in. It like, takes 40 million data sets in real-time. It makes six billion decisions per day, and, essentially, it figures out from the patterns in the data, how to optimize where to place the load, without the administrators having to like, tune anything, so it's like, extremely simple. Completely automated, thanks to the AI and ML engine. >> Taking advantage of those superpowers, AI, ML, that Pat. >> Yes. >> Talked about yesterday, so you talked about it's efficient, it's fast, trusted. Speaking of trust, Rackspace, long-time partner of Dell EMC and VMware, we actually spoke with them yesterday, Dell EMC and PowerMax particularly, have been really kind of foundational to enabling Rackspace to really accelerate their business, in terms of IT transformation. Talk to us about that in terms of them as a customer. >> So, nice that you bring up, Rackspace, they got a shout-out from Pat yesterday as the leading multi-cloud provider in the managed space, right. Now, if you look at Rackspace, they have like 100,000 plus customers all with various types of needs. Now, with a platform like PowerMax, they are able to simplify their IT environment, reduce a lot of consolidation happening on that dense platform. So they can reduce the footprint a lot of, less power culling. At the end of the day, they're minimizing their operational expenses, simplifying the management, how they manage their infrastructure, monitor their infrastructure. It becomes kind of like, invisible, or self-driving storage. Like, you really like, don't worry about it. You worry about the business, value it, and innovations that IT can bring, for your digital transformation. While the array kind of like, does it own work. A lot of work, no mistake about it. But everything is kind of like, hidden from the admin perspective. Whether you are running Oracle or Splunk, it figures out like what to do. Not only like maintaining the service levels, but as the technology evolves you bring in not just NVMe necessities, but next-generation storage class memory, they are going to automate and do the plasmid by itself. >> Yeah, that's huge, right? Because, and that's where you free up those time and resources, and brain power, frankly, for your IT and group then to be able to work on more strategic projects than tuning this particular data store and LUN or whatever for Splunk and et cetera, right? You've got so much, again, self-driving kind of self-driving storage, there. I also, Chhandomay, I also wanted to talk about the other kind of high-end array in Dell EMC's portfolio, the XtremeIO. And that, you know, all-flash, you can talk a little about that, but you know, what are the use cases there, and when should people be looking at that? And what kind of, what's new in that world? >> Sure. So, PowerMax is the flagship high-end productive spin, like evolved over 30 years, 1,000 plus patents, right? Whereas if you contrast it, XtremeIO is a purpose-built, all-flash array designed to take advantage of the flash media and designed from the ground up. Now, it delivers very high performance with consistently low latency. But, the key innovation there is the way it does in line, all the time, our data services. Especially the data reduction, the content, 800% in memory content, our metadata, helps deliver a new class of copy services so, and then, I mean, it scales modular loots, scale up and scale out. So, the use cases where XtremIO is very efficient is where you need a lot of, I mean you have a lot of common datas, for example VDI, we can offer like, very high data reduction ratios reducing your footprint for VDI type environment. The other use case is active, open data management. So, for example, like for every database, there are probably like eight to 10 copies at a minimum. Now with XtremIO, like you can actually use those copies, same as the production platform, and, cut around workloads on them. Like whether it's like your VIO upload, or like reporting test day of sandboxing. All of those things can be run at the same platform, and like the array will be able to deliver like, without any sweat. >> And as I said, you're doing copy data management sort of thing? >> Yes. >> Yeah, okay that's great. >> Yes, yes, yes. >> Yeah, that's. >> So, customer examples, you know how much I love that. You talked about this really strong example with PowerMax and Rackspace. Give us a great example of a customer using XtremIO X2 that's really enabled with these superpowers to grow their businesses. >> Sure, so at VMware what best can it be saying the customer, in this case will be, guess what? >> VMware. (laughing) >> So, VMware's IT cloud infrastructure team is using XtremIO X2 for their factualized SMP HANA environment. And there are several other workloads in the pipeline. But what I want to highlight is like, what and how they are doing it. So they have their production environment, they are leveraging replication technologies for our tier, and then from that tier, they are making copies, on those copies they are applying the patches, sandboxing, all those things. An exact replica of the production environment. And then, like when they are done, they are rolling it back out to the production. And the entire workflow is kind of like automated, tested, and a great example of, like how they are doing it. But it's not just the copy that are management, there are other aspects to it. So for example, the performance. Now, they started with like a two terabyte VM and they tried to clone both in the traditional storage, and XtremIO. With the traditional storage, it took like 2 1/2 hours. With XtremIO, it was done in like 90 seconds. >> So from two hours to 90 seconds. >> Seconds. >> Is dramatic. >> And, like they ran the data reduction, they can as if. So, for VMware's entire ESX production environment, this is like 1.2 petabyte storage. Now, with XtremIO data reduction technology, they can see that it will be reduced to like, 240 terabyte worth of storage. So, essentially, from three rows of storage, it would be reduced to three racks of XtremIO. So, you can see, these settings in, all over the place. Like, I mean footprint, power cooling management, all of those things. So, that would be my best example of, like, how XtremIO X2 is being used for, I mean, in a transformative way in the IT environment. >> Well it kind of goes along with one of the things that Pat Gelsinger talked about yesterday from VMware's perspective is, I think that the stat was, they've been able to reduce CO2 emissions by 540 million tons. Sounds like XtremIO might be, want to be, invisible. >> Yeah, of course. >> Facilitators. >> Yeah, yeah. Like we are contributing a lot in that. And I mean, at the end of the day, this is, like, what digital transformation is about right? So like, absolutely, yes. >> That's great, Chhandomay, I mean, the, I would love to have a problem. I would love to have a problem that required running, you know, hot on XtremIO because I think those are super interesting problems. And the fact that you can, you know, actually turn those huge data sets into something that's actually manageable and, I can envision three racks, I can't really envision, half a data center's worth of spinning discs, so, that's amazing. I love the fact that the engineering that goes into these high-end systems that you, on your, on the team, there. >> Yeah, so the one other thing I wanted to mention was the future-proof loyalty program. >> Yeah we've heard a little bit about that, tell us. >> Yes, so, this is essentially for our customers three things, like one is peace of mind. You know like what you are getting, there are no surprises. The second thing is investment protection. And then the third would be like (mumbles). So, there are like several components to it. And, like, it is not only like for XtremIO or PowerMax, it's pretty much like for the portfolio there is a list. Like, of what is part of it, and it's continually growing. Now for XtremIO and PowerMax purpose is the important things of asking for like if it's a three year warranty, and then like tier pricing, they know, like, exactly like what they are going to pay for support today as well as when maintenance renewal comes up. Then, (mumbles) migrations. So, back from exchange, right? Like with XtremIO to the next-generation PowerMax to PowerMax dot next, but like, they are covered with non-disruptive migration plans, storage efficiencies. And the last two things that we added they truly like we have announced that VMware is cloud-enabled. And cloud conception models, so like, I mean, as Michael says, cloud is not a place it's an operating model. So even with XtremIO and PowerMax, customers can pay for what they're using, and then, like, it's called flex on-demand. And they use, I mean when they use the buffer space, they can pay for that. And then with CloudIQ, we can monitor the storage areas from the cloud. It's the storage analytics, so it's cloud-enabled as well. So it covered pretty much like, all of the things Pat talked about yesterday. >> Fantastic, well I'm going to go out on a limb. Yesterday, I've asked a number of folks, what would you describe, I asked Scott Delandy, the superpower of certain technologies. And what I'm getting from this is trust. Like, the Trustinator, so, maybe that? Can you make a sticker by the time we get to Dell Technologies World next year? >> Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah. >> Chhandomay, awesome. Great to have you back on theCUBE, >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much for sharing all the excitement what's going on. We'll talk to you next time. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, for John Troyer, my co-host, I'm Lisa Martin. We are live at VMware with day two from the Mandalay Bay Las Vegas. Stick around, John and I will be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Sands, we are live here on theCUBE, the flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV, along with John Troyer with whom I've yet to be teamed up this week. Good to see you John. >> Nice to be here John. >> I'm John Walls and we're joined by Chhandomay Mandal who is a Director of Marketing at Dell EMC. Chhandomay, good to see you sir. >> Happy to be here. >> Nice to have you back on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> I know it's been a busy week for you, a great week from what I've heard from many. So first off, before we jump in, we're talking a lot about storage here. But first, your overview, what you've heard the vibe of the show and and kind of what your takeaway is going to be when you head home. >> So, this has been a great show. We have announced a lot of new products and I have been doing a lot of breakout sessions and customer meetings. And the customers are excited in terms of the depth of portfolio we have to offer, how we are helping them in their digital transformation journey along with the IT transformation that is fueling this digital transformation. For me personally, the takeaway is the product announcements we made in terms of the high-end storage, I cover high end storage marketing. Both Dell EMC PowerMax, are brand new, entry level design product line that we announced yesterday as well as the new enhancements we have done for XtremIO X2. This has been, like an exciting week. Happy to meet like an great number of customers both in meetings as well as in breakout sessions. So overall, I feel great, we accomplished a lot of things and I look forward seeing these customers taking their next steps in their digital transformation journey and happy to be part of their transformation. >> So, we had Caitlin Gordon on yesterday and she couldn't stop smiling about the announcement. When she started going through all the performance metrics 10 million IOPS, she's like, 2X, we're just blowing people away right now, and she's going on and on. So, Chhand run through some of that for us and tell us about about the product a little bit and what you think is revolutionary about it. >> Dell EMC PowerMax is our flagship property in the high end storage. If I were to characterize it in three words, it is fast, it is smart and it is efficient. As far as fast goes, it can deliver, as Caitlin said, up to ten million IOPS, 150 gigabytes per second throughput with very minimal latency, less than 300 microseconds. This is all backed by the end-to-end NVMe design that we have done, so this NVMe enabled architecture take away the limitations that we used to see from SAS, not only that, it is not just NVMe but also the storage class memory drive that is the next generation. It is this area, users both SEM and NVMe, so that's the first part. The next part is it's smart. It has an built in machine learning engine that actually analyzes 40 million data, in real time and makes 60 billion decisions per day to optimize data placements and making sure we are delivering the service levels for all different applications. And the last part is efficiency. We have introduced inline deduplication with hardware assisted feature. So now it has both compression and deduplication, giving a lot of capacity settings to our customers while not impacting the performance at all. >> You know Chhandomay, I was actually just speaking with Sean Wedige from Rackspace talking about that. The thing that impressed him the most, we actually skipped over the NVMe and we skipped over a lot of the parts inside of it, because that's the some of the performance that they needed for their service provider workload. But they're, one of the highest things that they valued out of it was the operational efficiency. In fact, I was sitting with some of the team yesterday talking to them and with a couple of storage admins and they they were swapping war stories about like, step 143 of 300 and trying to, as you had all the knobs and the scripts and the CLI and that's gone. A lot of that is gone. And whether you call it AI or or the machine, or deep learning, but the operational efficiencies that have now, in this next generation, of now called PowerMax, right, that seemed to be impressive, one of them one of the bigger things that impressed him. I don't want to say he wasn't impressed about the performance numbers. So, as you talk to customers this week has that really hit home? >> Absolutely, the operational efficiency, the effects reductions are like key to the customers enabling their IT transformation. Leading to this digital transformation. Now, how does this play into all the machine learning and AI techniques that this platform is built upon? So if you take a look at the workloads that the customers are running today, it's still enterprise workloads. 80% of it is like how traditional workloads, like SAP, Oracle, all of these. But then, there is the modern applications that are built on real-time data analysis. It feeds into the data, it analyzes it to make better decisions for the customers. Taking proactive actions. Delivering and using those data analysis as their computing advantage. But that is today only like say 20% of the work. Now, it is predicted that over the next three years to five years, that ratio is going to flip. So, it will be 20% of the traditional workloads and 80% is this modern applications like data generated from IoT, AI, all those things. Now how does PowerMax help in this scenario, so here comes that built in machine learning engine. It actually learns from the patterns in the data. So today it can analyze the data and do this optimize placement between storage class memory and NVMe SSDs based on those 80/20 rule. But then, as the workloads are getting adopted this is also learning from these patterns in data and adapting itself running these algorithms to make sure, even in future, when the workload percentage changes it is changing its algorithms and providing the same level of service. And not just data placement, this is service level agreements so our PowerMax customer can say for this application I need this much of latency. So, all these AI and machine learning techniques are being applied there. So as they are changing this service level directions it is adapting and making sure, whatever application requires whatever response times we are able to deliver it. And that's a huge operational benefit because the administrators do not need to tune and fiddle, figure out, how to get there. It is automatic, it is built-in, thanks to the built-in AI engine here. >> Chhandomay, there's now a generation of storage admins that now, needs to up level their jobs, right. Because that they used to have a real, it was tedious, talking to them. I'm actually kind of curious also, the rest of how this the portfolio fits together. In the sense of if you look at the industry, maybe a few years back, you almost would have kind of over fitted on on hyper-converged and you would have thought well, maybe one size does fit all and well that's the future. But it turns out, in the meantime, Dell EMC had this portfolio and there was a high, the high end that's been there all along and in fitting for appropriate workloads right. So, I'm just kind of curious Chhandomay, take this over to someone maybe XtremIO or what as you talk to the customers, when they talk to you, what apps and workloads do you then talk to them about? >> You bring up a very good and pertinent question which our customers ask us all the time. In this example let's take both our high-end products, we have Dell EMC PowerMax, we have Dell EMC XtremIO X2. Both are all flash arrays as great characteristics. Which is applicable where, right? So the first thing I want to say for all the customers that are running ultimate mission critical workloads where they need RPOs and RTOs, pretty much like instant, it cannot go down at any point in time and I'm not talking about just the like storage but also all the applications that is running. So SRDF, our remote replication technology within the PowerMax product that is the gold standard in the industry, delivering like six-nines availability for many many years. So, couple that with massive workload consolidation. For example, you are a big hospital. You are running your epic medical data records systems, it's not just like epic databases, but also your VDI desktops, your other virtual workloads. All you can consolidate in a very small footprint with our PowerMax platform. The third thing is, it's now end-to-end NVMe design. Right now, we are using dual ported NVMe SSDs. So customers who need that level of very high performance in like less than 300 microsecond latency with all this like real-time apps and business applications together. So that's the customer segment who finds our PowerMax as the appropriate platform. Now, XtremIO also a purpose-built, all flash array design from ground up for the flash media. So, what's the benefit there? Now here, again, what we are doing with XtremIO, we are offering this enterprise capabilities at the mid-range price. We actually introduced a new XtremIO X-Brick model to bring down the cost. It is 55% lower entry point than it used to be in the previous generation. We are going to sell that mid-market customers with enterprise capabilities with this new XtremIO X-Brick model. The way XtremIOs are always in memory, metadata centric architecture works out, it can deliver very high performance, consistently low latency, but also, it has integrated copy data management built in. What does it play? Think of a database where like for every database there are, say, five to 10 copies for disk and dev, backup, reporting, all of those things. Now, wherever you have massive amount of copies, XtremIO is a very good platform because you can actually bring those copies and run workloads on the copies themselves. You get enormous consolidation and capacity footprint in that type of situations. The last thing is workloads that has very high data reduction ratios. Think of it, virtual desktops or VDI. So here you have like thousands of users, running their desktops in a data center and but inherently like all the bases are the same. So here is like a lot of data reduction capabilities that come into picture and XtremIO's always in-memory, metadata centric architecture and this in line, all the time de-dup and compression helps in great amount of capacity savings with the data reduction technologies. For the workloads, where it is critical to have data reduction and it's the data itself lends to data capacity servings that's why it's the best in class. So, that's kind of like, give you a perspective of how these products complement each other. >> I know it's been a great week for you, a busy week for you. >> Absolutely. >> Breakout sessions, two CUBE interviews, client meetings, what have you, take a break. >> It's been a great show, it was a pleasure here talking to you. >> Thanks for joining us again and sharing the PowerMax story, it's a good one and I'm sure it's going to give you a lot of success down the road at Dell EMC. Back with more, you are watching Dell Technologies World 2018 coverage, live on theCUBE from Las Vegas. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's the CUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back to The Sands everyone. John Walls here along with Keith Townsend, and we are at Dell Technologies World, day one of three days of coverage here on theCUBE. Keith, good to see you sir, it's been a while. >> It has been about six months. >> Where have we been, and you've got that going on. You look so distinguished and professorial. >> You know what, I'm trying to make up for the lack of hair. (laughing) I appreciate that you noticed. >> Well it looks good, it looks good. Two guests with us, talking today about Extreme IO. We have Chhandomay Mandal, who is a Vice President of, or rather Director of Marketing, I gave you a promotion. >> Yeah, actually I like that. >> Can I get one, too? >> Director to VP, just like that, at Dell, and Kandy O'Mara who's a solutions architect at VMware, I'm sorry no promotion, Kandy, that's the way it goes. So Chhandomay, if you would, before we get started, let's talk about Extreme IO a little bit, and tell the viewers at home a little bit about the product and then we'll get into VMware's use of it and how that's taking shape. >> Yeah, so Extreme IO is the purpose build market leading all flash add-in. It's built on unique content, however meta data centric, party controller architecture coupled with intelligent software that helps us deliver very high performance, ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of IOPs with consistently low sub millisecond latency, irrespective of what the system load is, how much data has written through the alley, or whatever the workload characteristics are. Now, this metadata centric architecture lends itself to a lot of other benefits, for example, we do in-line all the time data reduction on the data path, and that leads to not only very high storage efficiencies, but also, since we do not write anything that's not unique, down to the SSDs, it gives much more longevity to the SSDs themselves, driving down costs. Our thing is it's pretty simple to use. >> And probably from a customer perspective, right, that's the huge value. >> Yes, it's pretty simple to deploy. We have an intelligent HTML 5 best EY, that's consumer grade easy to use at the same time, providing all the enterprise functionalities that you'll expect. The fourth thing I'll mention is integrated copy data management, so because this is a extremely high performance all flash alley, it is expected to do great in well TP environments, marginalizer environments, but on top of it, the way it is architected, because of this always in memory metadata architecture, the copies are literally as good as production volumes, so it's not just for production, you can actually use the copies to run workloads on them, and you get the same performance, same in-line all the time data surfaces on the production, on the copies, and you can not really figure out any difference between production volume and a copy volume, so that lives in to a lot of business benefits in terms of consolidating various copies and changing the application workflows. >> So Chhandomay, we'll dig into that in a second, with the inline dedupe, inline dedupe with copy data management, but first let's bring it up higher in the stack. Kandy, amazing performance numbers out of Extreme IO, but the all flash market is an extremely crowded market. For the average use end-user, as you engage customers, and you come to them, you know VMware runs VMware or Dell Technologies runs best on Dell Technologies, how do you help customers, even when you look at the Dell Technologies portfolio, when you have all flash V sand, you have Isolon, you have Isolon with flash, you have all these solutions, how do you help them navigate the broad portfolio and them come to the, give us some typical use cases for an Extreme IO. >> Right. For our instance, the first implementation of Extreme IO we have done was with SAP Hanna. Now that's an in-flash memory database, so, everything's in flash, you need a really fast backend storage array. So extreme IO, all flash with sub millisecond latency is a perfect fit. If your database is all-in memory, you can't have a slow storage behind it. You'll lose the performance, right, your database will become degraded. So that was our reason for going that direction, was because of the all flash memory of SAP Hanna. Now, the rest of those infrastructures actually have good use cases for other things, but in this case, for us, it was extreme IO. >> So let's focus in on that SAP Hanna usage. So SAP, in memory database, a lot of SI's will tell you you know what, the storage layer just needs to be fast, it doesn't have to be extreme IO fast, what do you guys find, what was the specific advantages in the SAP Hanna that brought you down to extreme IO. I mean the rights are done in memory, so. >> Well, actually the rights actually go to the disc. It is in memory, but it still has to write to disc and get the response back, especially the rights, right? >> Especially on SAP Hanna, it has very specific requirements in terms of when you're loading up the database, it needs to load up in a very specific. >> Kandy: It's like a tenth of a second, they use. >> For SAP Hanna, even though it is a new memory database. >> Right, that's where the misconception is, people think oh we put out slower storage, no you actually need the storage to be able to respond back to the database as quick as it does. The minimum requirement, I mean the maximum latency is like a tenth of a second, I mean it's really low. But it's sub millisecond, so we have no latency, we are actually getting a through-put in the performance. And there's other benefits with it as well, always on the reduction, that's huge, that's a big factor. When you don't have to have multiple copies sitting on your array, that saves you a lot of capacity. >> So people are saying, crowded market, lot of options, lot of choices, what was it for you that specifically said, okay, this is our product, this is what we want to dance with, so to speak, because you've got a lot of options. >> It was basically, it was the response that was needed for performance, and it was all flash, we were making a decision on where we wanted to run SAP Hanna, we did not have it implemented anywhere else, and we were like, we have existing infrastructure, and we were moving to a new data center, and we had to make a decision where we wanted to go, and extreme IO fit the bill, it met many of our different requirements. One of them was performance, the second one was the total lower cost of ownership, and then the snap technology, that was huge. >> So, let's talk a little bit more about that snap technology. I've spent a lot of time as an SAP infrastructure architect, and one of the most painful parts of SAP operations is being able to refresh DEV, QA, M plus One, the lower environments from production. What advantages have your, have you and your customers seen using snap management with extreme IO? >> So, let me kind of give you the broader view, and then you can talk about the very specific instances that you have seen. Extreme IO's snapshot technology, we call it Extreme IO actual copies, they are best in, best on the in-memory metadata. And extreme IO doesn't write anything on the SSDs unless it's unique across the entire cluster. Snapshots, by definition, is a copy. Like you mount it and make it writeable, so, for us, when you take a snapshot, it's an extremely fast operation, because all that we are doing is updating the metadata in memory, and then, if you are keeping it as a prediction copy, say for example, like as a read-only, just to recover from a disaster, then that's one purpose, but then the other purpose is use them as writeable snapshot, where, you can run your DES DEV, copy for backup, all of those things. Now, why can it do these things? The reason is, all these copies, they are not consuming any extra space. Until you are writing something unique to it as a DES DEV copy, right? So now, you have that capability of consolidating lots of copies, in our tradition, I mean, our customers base, for every database, there is literally like five to eight copies, 60% of the storage that gets consumed is essentially copies now if you consolidated all those copies into the single alley without consuming any extra capacity at the same time delivering that very high performance, not only for your production environment, but also for your DES DEVs, Qas, sandboxing, that gives the customer a lot of values, not only in terms of infrastructure dollars, but also transforming the application workflows, improving the productivity of the developers, and the storage admin, VM admin in general. So that's where we kind of see across the board from our VS customers. Now, alright, what's your experience? >> I'm like, "wow." No, actually what we do is, we're a little different. We actually use the writeable performance snapshots, we use them at our DR site, and what we'll do there is we'll mount those into a test bubble, and it is having our production environment, instead of needing a separate DEV environment, we can mount basically, in a little isolated bubble, those writeable snapshots, or copies, and test anything we want in our true little production environment. And then toss it away when we're done. So we can test out a new release, or we can do something different with the database or an application, and then when we're done, toss it away, that way we don't need so many different environments built out so it's a savings there. We don't make the local copies, what you guys were talking about for staging DEV, those are already built out, but we do put those on the same array now. Used to be, you'd have production on one array and stage on a different, right? But now, because they're similar, and you want the dedupe and the compression benefits, you want them on the same array, because that's where you gain that. The snapshots we do at the target, we play with those, the writeable, it's performance ready. It's the same performance as if you were on the source, which is a big game changer there for us. >> And I think it's really, from a technical perspective, really important to know why extreme IO is so much better at snapshot management. One of the things that Sanders will warn us, is that snapshots degrade performance over a period of time, so therefore the fact that you guys have a dedicated metadata subsystem helps improve overall performance. But I'd like to talk about your use case for extending to your DR side. So, from DR DI, what do you guys use to replicate data from one extreme IO to your DR? >> Right now, we, for us right now with SAP Hanna, we're using recover point with extreme io snapshots, which is fabulous because once the two sync up, the first initial sync, at that point, recover point literally just goes out and gets a snap diff and that's all the data is transferring over, so it lowers the requirements of your LAN, you know the bandwidth requirements are lower, so that's what we're using today. It's a great tool for us. And that way, we can mount it at the target site. >> And then just briefly, we're about out of time. Chhandomay, if you would, going forward, let's talk about where you are in terms of development, what you see as being maybe the next critical phase for extreme IO. >> So, in fact, here in Dell Technologies world, we are announcing the ability of our native repetition technology. Kandy mentioned she is using extreme IO with Recover Point that's a great solution. Now, we are going to have the native repetition technology and what's different from other solutions that are out there is this replication is also metadata aware, and as a result, it's not only sending only the unique data over the web, but also it's globally deduped and complex. And, suppose on your target site, you already have a data block. That might be unique for your primary site, and hence the primary says hey I need to send over this data and our protocol is going to say, yep, I have this metadata, I already have it, so send me the metadata pointer to it, and we are all done, we don't even need to send that unique block that was in the primary site, if it happens to stay, or it happens to exist, on the secondary site. As a result, we see great reduction in the wan bandwidth that's going to be used, and the total capacity that you will need between primary and secondary. So that will also be reduced. In fact, our numbers that we are going to say, you can get 38% less storage capacity wise, and wan bandwidth could be reduced as high as 75 to 80% based on the traditional mechanisms. >> So we actually did a test on this to see the performance between replicating a database using Recover Point on extreme IO with snapshots, and then we also did it with extreme IO data replication, and it was eight times faster. It was eight times faster replicating the same amount of data. >> So less data loss in case of emergency, just a higher level of service to the business. >> Nothing like a happy customer, right? >> Yeah. >> I actually love this product, I would not be talking about it, I really like extreme IO and I've been doing this for a while. >> Well, Kandy and Chhandomay, thanks for being with us, we appreciate the time, sorry about the promotion. (laughing) I think you've earned it though. Thanks for joining us, we appreciate it. >> Together: Thank you. >> Back with more from Dell Technologies World here in Las Vegas, you're watching theCUBE, back in just a bit.

>> 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.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering the VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to The Cube. We are live at VMworld for our continuing coverage of the event, day two, exciting morning. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Stu Miniman, and Stu and I are very excited to be joined by a Cube alumni Chhandomay Mandal, the Director of Storage Solutions Marketing at Dell EMC. Welcome back. >> Glad to be here. >> Yeah, we had you on The Cube a couple of times at Dell EMCworld. >> Yes. >> Just a couple of months ago. So, virtualization. Still a mainstay of the data center, right? Some big announcements yesterday and today. Can you talk to us about some of the trends that you're seeing in the virtualization market today? >> Sure. So, as many organizations are going through the IT transformation, data centers are becoming even larger, running thousands of applications, many thousands of VMs, right. So what we see is as many applications run, the underlying storage load becomes hugely random, the platform needs to be able to deliver very high performance all the time, 24/7, 365. Also, getting into the private cloud type environment, we see a lot of VM cloning, VM deployment, coming and happening in a rapid space. We also see the need of efficient copy management, to prevent the VMs' flaws in a very nice, contained, efficient manner. And finally, as we are hearing at VMworld, giving access to applications and data from any device, any application, any time, anywhere, that's becoming another aspect we are increasingly seeing across all of our customers. >> You bring up a lot of really interesting points. You know, I think back, the early days of virtualizations, like oh, we're going to give this abstraction layer and it's going to make everything really easy. Come one, invisible infrastructure, I shouldn't have to even worry about storage, right? But the reality is, there's a lot of work that goes into making sure that storage works well, and when we're talking virtualized environment, when we're talking cloud environment, what's that conversation you're having with customers? I think virtualization in cloud, who is it that brings up, hey, we got to make sure that storage meets our needs? What are some of the biggest things that you're hearing from customers and how are you helping to solve them? >> So as you look at the customers, right, maybe like five years ago it used to be pretty storage admin, or IT admin-centric conversations. We are seeing a transition into CXO-level business, solving our business challenges conversation. It's not that, how much storage I need, how many copies do I need to create, but it's more along the lines of, I need to bring my cloud-native application faster to market. It's taking six months of development cycle. How can it bring it back to like, three months, how I can hit the corner cases before the customers actually run into those in my keyware cycles? How I can run better analytics real-time, as opposed to having to wait for like 24 hours? So these are the business challenges customers are asking us to help solve, and we are evaluating where they are in their IT transformation journey, and how we can map those requirements into the underlying infrastructure that will help them get to that new era of virtualization, cloud-native applications, all those things. >> One of the things that Michael Dell talked about this morning on stage with Pat Gelsinger, was that the data conversation is, like you were saying, it's a CXO-level conversation, it's on the CEO agenda. Can you talk to us about some of things that Dell EMC is doing at that level of customer conversation where costs are concerned. We have this exploding growth of data volume, that's not changing, centers of data, not data centers anymore. How is Dell EMC helping to position where you can work with customers on the storage element that will really help drive cost efficiencies across an entire business? >> So, I'll start with a solid example, right. I mean, I was working with a customer who is running huge number of databases, and to run his business, he needs to have copies for his DevOps operations, he needs to have copies for his backup environment, copies to run his analytics environment, and there are storage silos everywhere, because he really was afraid of touching his production environment to meet his SLAs. Now, I'll give you an example of one of our portfolio products, Dell EMC XtremIO, in fact we literally announced the general availability of X2 here at at the IMC World. Now this is a purpose-built all-flash array that is designed to handle application-level problems. So for example, it can not only provide very high performance with consistently low latency for DB workloads, but because of its intelligent in-memory content over metadata architecture that's built for flash media, it can create copies without consuming any extra space instantly, and the admins, whether that's a DB or storage admin, they can actually consolidate production workloads with non-production workloads like DevOps environments analytics, thereby hugely reducing the storage capacity of it, but then there is an added benefit to it. Say for example, the application admin needs to deploy a VM for his latest application he's developing, right? So instead of having to go to a DBA to ask storage admin, he actually can self-service with the application-level plug-in, saying like, hey, I want to clone 10 VMs. And you know what? The DBAs are happy, the storage admins are happy, because they are out of that chain. They can monitor and make sure everything is running fine, but at the end of the day, the self-service is actually helping the developers bring the product to the market in a more timely and cost-efficient manner. >> So reduce TCO storage cost... >> I actually want you to kind of put a point on that because we'd actually looked into, you know when flash came into the marketplace, it was like, oh great, we're going to improve performance, but the business outcomes, what happened to the business, and one piece you talked about, the dev and test environments, used to be, you know, let's give them sold old gear, they kind of work on whatever could have. They can now increase their agility. Number one thing we hear, the keynote this morning talked about, how do I move faster, and giving them the tools in there, all of those copies, I'm putting them to use, I'm leveraging my data, I'm leveraging, you know, increasing the speed of my application development, and that's the number one thing that we hear from all customers is right, how can I not have storage be a boat anchor, but help me move my business forward. So you know, be a driver, not a cost. >> They don't need to be in the business of optimizing storage. It is helping them transform the business application workflows as opposed to, how do I plan for this, how do I keep monitoring, what do I need to do for the next upgrade, et cetera. >> So from a customer's perspective, can you talk to us about, to Stu's point, maybe one of your favorite examples of a customer who dramatically improved business outcomes, reducing cost of ownership, getting to market with products faster, launching new products. What are some of the big business outcomes that you've seen through a great customer example? >> So I actually have a couple. I'll start with one in the health care space. Scripps Health is a big, integrated non-profit health system down in San Diego area, and they are running their electronic health record systems, which are pretty vital for all the clinicians to access their patient data very quickly. Now, they had multiple problems. One was how to keep up with the explosion of all the images that were getting created, like copies for their EHR systems, et cetera. And at the same time, they had to back up their data, and they had to create many copies of their SQL Server environments. In fact, they could not keep up with that and the time it was taking was getting enormous. Once they moved to this XtremIO platform, they actually started to see, pretty much like that time to create the copies reduced by more than 80%. And then they also saw the advantage of data reduction. They are getting anywhere like four S21 to seven S21 data reduction on their storage capacity, and with the help of this integrated technology, now their doctors are able to see more patient in a day, pretty much like saving lots of doctor hours. >> Can imagine they can pull back large images faster, it's on all-flash, being able to get information to patients faster, make diagnoses maybe, improve their ability to do that as well? >> Chhandomay: Yes. >> Yeah. >> And changing the spectrum completely. I mean I'm from the Boston area, Red Sox is my favorite sports team down there along with Bats. Now, again, even with baseball, right, they need to run lots of analytics. They want to have their spectators in the historic Fenway Park the latest and greatest digital experience of the games that are going on, right? And they have to run all of their business applications as well as customer-facing systems on a platform that can keep up with the growth, and give their latest experience. Now again, they moved to XtremIO, they are seeing great performance, they are seeing seven S21 data efficiency, and literally, they say us, their business processes and the customer experience have changed. They don't really need to worry about how the backend is working, they can actually focus on the strategic outcomes of baseball operations and giving the viewers at Fenway the best possible IT experience through the mobile network, social networking, like all those things. So that's kind of like two of my favorite examples from completely different spectrums. >> Okay, so we're here at VMworld. Any specific use cases that you're especially seeing popular in this community as compared to the general storage market? >> So I would say one of the aspects we heard, I mean in the keynotes, any device, any application, like one cloud. For us, what we are seeing >> Stu: It's actually any cloud now, right? >> Yeah, any cloud. So it's pretty much the same, right? I mean it's any device, any application, anywhere, anytime access. So I want to say the end user computing is becoming very important. It was always important, but there were storage bottlenecks, but now with all these abstractions that are possible, the mobile device management that is coming in, we see a great uptick in terms of the desktop virtualization market, and again, bringing back to what we just announced, right? This XtremIO X2 platform is exceptional for VDI use cases. I mean, in our previous generation we had 700 plus customers running 2.5 million plus virtual desktops. Now with this new platform, I mean a single X-Brick, which is like a small, two-controller array necessity, it can host up to 4,000 desktops. And I mean we are seeing tremendous performance improvement, snappy desktop experience, with huge data reductions. So that's one area which we see keeping up with our customer base as they're going through that IT transformation through digital transformation. >> So one of the things, I love that you brought up the Red Sox, I'm a San Francisco Giants fan, but if they don't make it at the wild card, which is probably not going to happen, I might root for the Red Sox. But what I love that you talked about is, a baseball team is a technology company. A hospital, a university is a technology company. Presumably with a lot of legacy infrastructure that needs to be updated to modernize IT, how is now Dell EMC, with XtremIO, helping these companies on this path to digitalization, but on this legacy upgrade process? What's unique about how Dell EMC can do that leveraging XtremIO? >> So for us, at Dell EMC, modernizing IT infrastructure is essentially we think based on four pillars. Flash, one is flash, scale-out architecture, cloud-ready, and software-defined storage all backed by the world-class data protection. Now I want to take it one step back. It's not just about XtremIO or XtremIO X2, it's about the power of the portfolio that we have. So customers might have legacy infrastructure, both from us or from other vendors, but we provide the kind of like, walk into their environments, what we call get-modern assessments. We actually run various types of applications to see where their bottlenecks are, what performance do they need, and then take a portfolio approach to provide the complete solution in terms of how we can non-disruptively transform all of their workloads into a newer platform, be it based on XtremIO, or VMAX or ScaleIO, any of those platforms. But the key is, having the ability to non-disruptively move the legacy workloads into this modern infrastructure as well as enabling them to do those cloud-native applications digital transformation journey. >> You've mentioned cloud-native applications a few times. That modernization of the applications, one of the toughest journeys that we're going on. We've talked about virtualizing, we talked about cloud, but the application's something that it's pretty tough to make a change there. How is the infrastructure enabling that and what are some of the, just kind of in general, what are you hearing from customers, how are they doing along that journey? >> So in that space, right, we are seeing a great adoption of the platforms that can provide 24/7 365, not only just uptime, but great performance, at a lower TCO. And we are seeing adoption in terms of conversion, hyper-conversion, software-defined. So those are the elements that are helping the customers transform into that space, meaning, think of it in a automated self-service world where pretty much, like, I'm developing my applications and I click couple of buttons and all the infrastructure get provisioned as I need and when I'm done I kind of like decommission it. So that's the ultimate nirvana of self-service, automation, orchestration, that the end developers can use, and IT become a strategic operations, as opposed to kind of like keeping the lights on and making sure we are in the business. >> Excellent, well Chhandomay, we thank you so much for coming back to The Cube and sharing what's new at Dell EMC with the different technologies, and some great use cases across different companies that are tech companies at heart. We hope you enjoy the rest of the show. >> It was a pleasure of being on The Cube, thank you. >> Thank you. And we want to thank you for watching, I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Stu Miniman again, we are live, covering day two of VMworld 2017. From Las Vegas, stick around, we'll be right back.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back, here at Las Vegas at The Venetian. As theCUBE continues our coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. Along with our co-host, Paul Gillin, I'm John Walls, good to have you with us. As we, I guess were coming down the home stretch. >> Paul: We are. >> Day one. >> Paul: End of the day. >> Here at Dell EMC World 2017. With us now is Chhandomay Mandal, who is product marketing director at Dell EMC. Double dipping on us, we just had you on a few moments ago. This is nice, we get two shots. >> Thanks for having me. >> Good to have you back with us, yeah, it's good. >> Chhandomay: Thanks for having me. >> So before we were talking about XtremeIO, what you were doing in the healthcare space. Moving over now to copy data management, different part of your portfolio, and kind of what's up in that world with you. So just give us a little rundown, an overview of what you're up to right now. >> Sure, so let's start with what exactly is copy data problem. Why it's a problem, and why we need to be solving it? If you think of any business application, it comes with its production data. But for every bit of production data, you have many different copies. For example, when you're developing applications, you need copies for your development and testing. You need copies for your backup. You need copies for running your analytics environment. It's for every single production database, typically, we see five to 12 copies of that data. And in fact, I did see estimates. The copy data sprawl is like 40 billion dollar market, and 60% of all the data that exists are on copies. Now, our mission, especially with Dell EMC XtremIO, is to solve that copy data problem, giving the customers back a lot in terms of the storage efficiencies, and not only is the storage TCO, but transforming the business workflows. We did copy data management so that they can realize storage and infrastructure settings, but also the business impact from transforming the application workflows and bringing new production market in a much quicker way. >> So you said a 40 billion dollar market, I mean, what are the costs here? Is it just storage cost? Is it bandwidth, is it errors? Lack of data being out of sync? >> So the cost here has multiple components, right? First of all, there is the cost of the lost storage where you need to put the data on. But then, there comes the cost of managing the storage. How do you figure out where you backup copies are, if you need to restore, where are you going to get the data from? It's a cost of inefficiency meaning, like if your developer who is the highly paid, highly productive guy, supposed to be, right? He is waiting for the DBA or the storage admin to give the copy that he needs, then, that's just enough money, right? It's not just the infrastructure cost, but also the soft cost of, like your ability to bring the product to the market in a quicker way, addressing your customer needs in a quicker way. That acts up and those are the components in, like, how I value this intermarket. >> I guess what I'm hearing here, if you got five to 12 copy sets of data, I mean, massive amounts of waste in some cases, right? And maybe some of your clients, they like to know where everything is, but do they lose track of it, and so it's taking up space, taking up money, taking up time. Is that, are these the problems they're facing? >> Chhandomay: Yes, yes. >> Alright, so then, what's the answer then in terms of this better identification? There's X2, get to the heart of that, and help them in terms of better efficiencies? >> How do we achieve that efficiencies? Now, one thing is, the way, first of all, like, if you can consolidate your copies into one single platform. And copies are duplicate bits, right? So, first of all, the first thing in the process is you eliminate all the duplication that exists in your storage. You have your production data base, and you have your copies, which are, if not unique, then basically should not take up any extra space. Now, you take those copies, and make it like a repair plus one. So for example, your Dell part can run tests on it. So when the rights are coming in, only the changes that are happening, that should go into the storage. So that's Part A. Part B is, when you are running production environment, as well as what works on your copies, you need huge performance with consistently low latency. Because you cannot impact your production SLS. You have to meet that. >> You can't tell it, "Hang on, I've got something "else going on over here, right?" >> So you need a platform that can handle consistently high performance with low latency no matter what workload you are running. And then the copies themselves need to be very efficient. They should not take any extra space, unless there is something unique. And they should be able to perform just as well as in a production value. The hard part of this is, you need to orchestrate the inner process, right? I mean, you as in oracle admin. You really do not need to worry about how and where the storage is going to be saved for your copies. You click on a button, and it should do all the steps necessary right from your application console down to the storage. So this is the application orchestration that we in-built with AppSync and XtremIO. And then we have APIs that our customers can use to provide their own service catalog. So using these pillars, we consolidated all the copies, on the same platform, running different applications, with the same SLS, okay? And that kind of helps the customers to bring product faster, and address the copy needs. >> Now, this is a very hot market right now. And I'm thinking there's some startups, I'm thinking of Actifio and Catalogic in particular, that say that you shouldn't have many copies. You should have one copy, and then you should have pointers to that. What's your opinion of that? What are the pros and cons of that approach versus yours? >> So our approach, essentially, I mean, since you mentioned, right, there are copy data management vendors. What they're doing is, you have your production, then you make a gold copy off your production, and from that gold copy you run off different applications on those copies, right? So here you are introducing another element, another software, and another appliance, so to speak, to manage the copies. What we are doing, is kind of like you don't need that extra copy that your analytic part provider can provide. And then there are performance implications with the integrated copy data management that we are referring. The reason we can do it is, all of our metadata is in memory. It does not consume any extra space for storage. And no matter what the workload is, we can offer consistently high latency because everything is, the metadata is operating from the memory itself. So the way the third parties are doing, we do it the same way, even better, and at the production level. >> Another thing, and forgive my technical ignorance here, but David Fleur at Worky-Ban, has talked a lot about the benefits of flash storage. In that you don't have to create copies, you can create a single copy in flash, and then multiple users or applications can work from that. Do I have that straight? He says that's a game changer. >> Yes, that will be that game changer, and that's really like what we do. The caveat to that is, when you are creating the copies, and you want to run applications on the copies, your production should not be impacted, and the copies should also be able to deliver the same performance. And that part has been the challenge with other solutions in terms of providing the same performance, the same data services on the copies themselves. That's the idiot we solve will our intelligent content error in memory metadata architecture with XtemIO. >> You're talking about the integrated data management just a little bit ago. I mean, from a real life perspective, can you give us an idea about maybe a success story, somebody that you can point to and say, "This is how they incorporated that "into their process, I see it work for them, "and we can make it work for you too?" >> So, I'll give you an interesting statistic. We have 3,000 plus customers running XtremIO in production, and we get all the phone home data at our end, and we can see what they're doing. Now, for XtremIO customers, 56% of the copies that they're making, they are running workloads on them. They are not just for local data production. And, all the IOs, XtremIos that is out there in the field we'll see, 40% of the IOs are because of the copies. So we see across the board on the customers. I have many examples. For the sake of time, I'll just speak one. We all know Moen, they are the leading, not American manufacturers of the faucets, right? It's a big shop, and they have like, a lot of SLP landscapes in there. Before XtremIO, they could not keep up with the backups and the copies that they needed. After moving to XtremIO, now they can actually take the copies of their production SLP landscapes twice a day. They are quietly running reports. They are actually running like 90% shorter, and in fact, we were talking with Harvey H., literally, like before this segment, right? He was also talking about how efficient their copies are. I was talking with Scripps Health, who are also going to be presenting in here. They run like 3,000 copies in their environment, with XtremIO and AppSync, and like it's all working great. No impact on the performance, and they are meeting their SLS. >> Well, your performance on theCUBE has been outstanding. Back-to-back saves, we appreciate the time. Chhandomay, thanks for hanging with us. Best of luck down the road, and continued success here at the show as well. >> Thank you, it was a pleasure. >> We will continue with more from theCUBE here in Las Vegas. We are live at Dell EMC World 2017.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Dell EMC World here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Walls. Today we are talking to Chhandomay Mandal. He is the Senior Consultant Product Marketing here at Dell EMC, as well as Pat Harkins who is the CTO Informatics and Technology Services at Royal Victoria Health Center. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Glad to be here. >> So, Pat, I want to start with you. Tell us a little bit about Royal Health. >> Sure. Well, Royal Victoria Regional Health Center in Barrie, Ontario. We're about an hour north of Toronto, Ontario. It's a regional health center, variety of services. We provide oncology, cardiac, child and youth mental health, and what we're doing up there is providing a regional role, regional services for Meditech. We're host Meditech for a number of other hospitals in our area, and we're currently looking to expand that, and increase our volume, but also change platforms as well. >> So tell us about some of the biggest challenges that you see. >> Some of the biggest challenges that we're seeing right now is within Ontario, is the actual funding model, of course. Everything's a little bit tighter. But from a technology perspective, is actually staying with technology, with limited budgets and so forth, and staying with the latest, greatest, providing the best service to our customers, our physicians, our clinicians, which in turn is the best patient care. >> Chhandomay, you look at a client like Pat, who has very specific needs in health care. You've got time issues, you've got privacy issues. How do you deal, or what do you see as far as health care IT fitting in to what you're doing and the services you're providing to somebody like Pat, specifically knowing that these are very unique challenges and critically important challenges? >> Sure. We at Dell EMC look at what the problem is holistically. As Pat was mentioning, in the health care IT, one of the challenges we see is providing consistent high performance with low latency so that the clinicians, physicians can access the patient data in a timely way, quickly, they do not spend more time entering the data or accessing the data, rather spending more time with the patients. Then there is another problem that Pat alluded to. For any EHR, electronic health record systems, it is actually a consolidation of many workloads. You have the EHR workload itself, then you have analytics that needs to be run on it. There are other virtualized applications, and then there is distal partualization, because all the physicians now says they need to access the patient data. So effectively, we need to have platforms, and in this particular case, essentially All-Flash platforms that can offer very high performance, consistently low latency, high storage efficiency in terms of reduced footprint so that Pat and other health providers can consume less rack space, less space in the data center, reduced power and cooling, all those things, and at the end of the day, ensuring the copy data that they have between all the databases, those are efficiently managed and kind of like transforming the health care IT business workflow. That's what we at Dell EMC come with our All-Flash portfolio for health providers like Royal Victoria Health. >> So Pat, on your side of the fence then, from your perspective, limited resources, right? You've got to be very, very protective of what you have, and obviously you have your own challenges. How do you balance all that out in today's environment, where speed matters? Efficiency matters now more than ever. >> And that's, efficiency matters big time with our physicians, and what's happening is we look for partners like Dell EMC to help us with that. One thing that was happening in our experience with efficiency and with timely presentation of data, we weren't getting that with our previous vendor. And when we went to Dell EMC we work with them as a partner and said, "How can we improve on that? "What can we look for?" And we looked at Flash as being that solution, not only providing the performance that we were looking for but also providing built-in security that we were looking for, but also providing even more efficiency, so when the physician, the clinicians were getting that data, they get it in a timely manner, and that means that they're actually spending more time with the patient, they're not searching for the data, they're not searching for reports and so forth. >> Are you hearing any feedback from the patients themselves about how things have changed at the health center? >> Well, for me I'm still stuck in the dungeon. I'm in IT, so we're in the basement, right? so I don't necessarily-- >> John: Glad you could get out for the week. (laughing) >> Exactly. You know, we grow mushrooms in that area. So what's happening with, I don't necessarily talk with the patient, but we're getting the positive feedback from our clinicians and physicians who are then, if they're happy, that means they're providing usually, providing better patient care, and so that means the patients are happy. (audio cuts out) >> Is understanding the true, the point of patient health care from the point they're born to the point that their life ends, and what we're understanding is how getting that data and being able to provide that information to clinicians, see trends, be able to treat, be more proactive instead of a reactive in health care. That's the goal, and with technology and the storage and collecting the data and analytics we'll actually be able to provide that in the future. >> Chhandomay, from your perspective here, what is it about XtremIO you think that makes this a good match? And now you've had X2, right, and sorry Pat. >> Pat: No, it's fine. >> You just deployed, what, six months ago, you said? But now you've got an X2 version to consider, perhaps for your next deployment. What's the fit? Why does it work? >> So you mention Dell EMC XtremIO. So the core premise of XtremIO is we will be able to provide high performance, consistently in low latency no matter what workload you are running, no matter how many workloads you are consolidating on the same array. It is the same high-performance, low-latency, and we have in line all the time, data reduction technologies that are all working on in-memory metadata, which essentially boils down to we are doing all those storage operations at the control plane level without touching the data plane where the data actually lives or exists. So that in turn helps us to consolidate a lot of the copies. You mentioned analytics, right? You have your production database for your patient data, then you need to load those data in an ETL system for running the analytics, then you possibly have your instant development copies, copies for back-up. Now with XtremIO, all the copies, we do not store anything that's not unique, through that entire cluster, and all the metadata is stored in memory, so for us we can create copies that do not take any extra space, and you can run your workloads on the copies themselves with the same performance as in production volume and with all those data reduction and all those technologies that all those data services run. So what that in turn makes Pat's life easier is he can reduce the footprint, he can reduce or consolidate all the workloads on the ATA itself, and his application developers can bring the medical applications online much more faster, he can run his analytics and reports faster, being proactive about the care, and in a nutshell, pretty much taking the storage maintenance, storage planning, storage operations out of the picture so that they can innovate and they can spend time innovating in IT, helping patient care, as opposed to doing routine maintenance and planning. >> So it lets him focus on what he wants to do. You're not spending a majority of your time on mundane tasks, you're actually improving your operations. Give me a real-life example if you can. We talk about more efficiency and better speed, these are all good things and great terms to talk about, but in terms of actually improving patient care, or providing enhanced patient care, what does it mean? How does it translate? >> Well, how it translates is in a lot of cases with the physicians and what we've seen already with them, just with them, they're able to, because we actually improve performance, we're actually able to get more data in analytics, as we say, but then we're able to produce those reports and turn it around in a lot of cases, a lot quicker than what we've been able to do before. An example was, once we moved to XtremIO and our decision support team. Used to take 14 hours to run some of the reports that they were getting. They would start 'em at four o'clock in the evening, they would run to six a.m. in the morning, roughly. When we put the XtremIO in and they ran the same reports they started at 4 o'clock. By six p.m. that night they were completed. They actually called me because they thought they had something wrong. (laughing) It's never been that quick. >> John: Boss, this is too good. >> Exactly. >> John: I messed up. >> And so they actually ran the report three times, and they cued the QA against the report to understand that yeah, it is that efficient now. Now that we've turned that around we actually provide that to the clinicians. We're getting better patient care and they're able to get their information and react quicker to it as well. >> Talking about the massive amounts of data that's being generated that now needs to be analyzed in order to optimize performance, how much do your developers know about data, and are you doing more training for them so that they know what they're doing? >> Well, we always provide training. We're always working on that, but the thing is, we are providing more training and we're providing it to the point that they actually have to be able to mine that data. There's so much data, it's how to manage the data, mine the data. Our analysts at RVH is that we look to Meditech, our EHR vendor as well, to help us on that, but at the same time we're looking to, we're increasing our data warehouses, we're increasing our repositories and registries so that when we do have that data, we can get at it. >> I'm wondering too if using this kind of cutting-edge technology has had an impact on your recruitment. Michael Dell in his keynote mentioned how increasingly, employees are saying the kinds of technologies that's being used is having an impact. >> No, absolutely. I know our vendors, our staff are very excited about the technology. Where we were going before, they weren't, not that they weren't happy, but we were always dealing with mundane tasks. We had some issues that were always repetitive issues that we couldn't seem to get through. Now that we've actually upgraded to the Flash storage and moving through that, they're excited. They love the management, the ease of use, they have a lot of great ideas now it's actually, they're becoming innovative in their thoughts because they know they have the performance and the technology in the back end to do the job for them. >> I hate to ask you what's next because you're six months into your deployment, but this is a constantly evolving landscape, constantly improving. Obviously the pressure is at Dell EMC is responding really well, competitive pressures. What is your road map? If you look two, three years down the road in terms of the kinds of improvements you want to get, the kinds of efficiencies that you can get gains in, and then realistically from a budgetary standpoint, how do you balance all that together? >> Budgetary, there's always the constant discussion with our CFO, and so he's been very supportive, but where we see it going is we want to be able to actually, maybe not even necessarily go to the Cloud but become a private Cloud for our partners and be able to provide a lot of these regional services that we couldn't before with the technology that we had, and be able to expand the services. In Ontario we're seeing some budget constraints, as I mentioned. A lot of these smaller sites, the patients, the customers, as we would say are expecting the service, but with technology and the dollars, they might not be able to do it on their budget, but as we bring stuff back into our data center and be able to provide the technology, we've been able to spread that out, not only from storage, compute side, as well as virtualization, VDI desktops and so forth. That's where I see we're going over the next little while. >> How much learning goes on between your colleagues at CTOs at other health centers, and even health centers and hospitals in the states? Do you talk a lot about-- >> You know what? We do talk a lot. We share stories. Some good, some bad, but we try, we all have the same problems, and why re-create the wheel when you could actually learn from other people? So a lot of the CTOs, we do get together, informally and formally, and understand where we're going and then we also reach out through our vendors and through some of our user groups and so forth to the US and to some of our cohort CTOs down there to understand what they're doing, because they look at it from a different lens at times. >> So speaking of a different lens, from the other side of the fence, Chhandomay if you would, where are you see this headed in terms of your assistance in health care IT, what X2 might be able to do? What kinds of realizations do you think are on the horizon here, and what's possible for a health care provider like RVH? >> So all the organizations, if you look across the industry, they are in the digital transformation journey. Health care providers are no exception, and what we are enabling is the IT transformation part, and Dell XtremIO, and with the XtremIO X2 that we just announced, we are enabling that IT transformation for all of our customers, including health care providers like Royal Victoria Health. Now, with X2, specifically, we continue to improve upon the high performance, the unmatched storage efficiencies that we offer, effectively, again, bringing down the cost of hosting different types of workloads, managing it on a single platform with a much lower total cost of ownership for the health care providers like Pat, so that at the end of the day, they will be able to provide better patient and better care for the patients, be it like a doctor or clinician, trying to access the data from their endpoints or the finance or billing department trying to turn over the bills in a much shorter span as opposed to the typically 45 days turnover that we see. So that's where we see not only just XtremIO X2, but Dell EMC, the All-Flash storage portfolio, helping the customers in their digital transformation journey in health care, and with the IT department, going into the IT transformation journey to help with it. >> Chhandomay, Pat, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> It was great, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Walls. We will have more from The Cube's coverage of Dell EMC World after this. (electronic music)