okay we're back digging into trusted infrastructure with paris are good at he's a senior consultant for product marketing and storage at dell technologies pastor welcome to the cube good to see you great to be with you dave yeah coming from hyderabad awesome so i really appreciate you uh coming on the program let's start with talking about your point of view on what cyber security resilience means to to dell generally but storage specifically yeah so for something like storage you know we are talking about the data layer name and if you look at cyber security it's all about securing your data applications and infrastructure it has been a very mature field at the network and application layers and there are a lot of great technologies right from you know enabling zero trust uh advanced authentications uh identity management systems and so on and and in fact you know with the advent of you know the the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning really these detection tools for cyber securities have really evolved in the network and application spaces so for storage what it means is how can you bring them to the data layer right how can you bring you know the principles of zero trust to the data layer uh how can you leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to look at you know access patterns and make intelligent decisions about maybe an indicator of a compromise and identify them ahead of time just like you know how it's happening and other of of applications and when it comes to cyber resilience it's it's basically a strategy which assumes that a threat is imminent and it's a good assumption with the severity and the frequency of the attacks that are happening and the question is how do we fortify the infrastructure in this rich infrastructure to withstand those attacks and have a plan a response plan where we can recover the data and make sure the business continuity is not affected so that's uh really cyber security and cyber resiliency at storage layer and of course there are technologies like you know network isolation um immutability and all these principles need to be applied at the storage level as well let me have a follow up on that if i may the intelligence that you talked about that ai and machine learning is that do you do you build that into the infrastructure or is that sort of a separate software module that that points at various you know infrastructure components how does that work both dave right at the data storage level we have come up with various data characteristics depending on the nature of data we developed a lot of signals to see what could be a good indicator of a compromise um and there are also additional applications like cloud iq is the best example which is like an infrastructure wide health monitoring system for dell infrastructure and now we have elevated that to include cyber security as well so these signals are being gathered at cloud iq level and other applications as well so that we can make those decisions about compromise and we can either cascade that intelligence and alert stream upstream for uh security teams um so that they can take actions in platforms like sign systems xtr systems and so on but when it comes to which layer the intelligence is it has to be at every layer where it makes sense where we have the information to make a decision and being closest to the data we have we are basically monitoring you know the various parallels data access who is accessing um are they crossing across any geo fencing is there any mass deletion that is happening or a mass encryption that is happening and we are able to uh detect uh those uh patterns and flag them as indicators of compromise and in allowing automated response manual control and so on for i.t teams yeah thank you for that explanation so at dell technologies world we were there in may it was one of the first you know live shows that that we did in the spring certainly one of the largest and i interviewed shannon champion and my huge takeaway from the storage side was the degree to which you guys uh emphasized security uh within the operating systems i mean really i mean power max more than half i think of the features were security related but also the rest of the portfolio so can you talk about the the security aspects of the dell storage portfolio specifically yeah yeah so when it comes to data security and broadly data availability right in the context of cyber resiliency um dell storage uh this you know these elements have been at the core of our um a core strength for the portfolio and a source of differentiation for the storage portfolio you know with almost decades of collective experience of building highly resilient architectures for mission critical data something like power max system which is the most secure storage platform for high-end enterprises um and now with the increased focus on cyber security we are extending those core technologies of high availability and adding modern detection systems modern data isolation techniques to offer a comprehensive solution to the customer so that they don't have to piece together multiple things to ensure data security or data resiliency but a well-designed and well-architected solution by design is uh delivered to them to ensure cyber protection at the data layer got it um you know we were talking earlier to steve kenniston and pete gear about this notion of dell trusted infrastructure how does storage fit into that as a component of that sort of overall you know theme yeah and you know and let me say this if you could adjust because a lot of people might be skeptical that i can actually have security and at the same time not constrict my organizational agility that's old you know not an or it's an and how do you actually do that if you could address both of those that would be great definitely so for dell trusted infrastructure cyber resiliency is a key component of that and just as i mentioned you know uh air gap isolation it really started with you know power protect cyber recovery you know that was the solution more than three years ago we launched and that was first in the industry which paved way to you know kind of data isolation being a core element of data management and you know for data infrastructure and since then we have implemented these technologies within different storage platforms as well so the customers have the flexibility depending on their data landscape they can approach they can do the right data isolation architecture right either natively from the storage platform or consolidate things into the backup platform and isolate from there and and the other key thing we focus in trusted infrastructure delta dell trusted infrastructure is you know the goal of simplifying security for the customers so one good example here is uh you know risk being able to respond to these cyber threats or indicators of compromise is one thing but an i.t security team may not be looking at the dashboard of the storage systems constantly right storage administration admins may be looking at it so how can we build this intelligence and provide this upstream platforms so that they have a single pane of glass to understand security landscape across applications across networks firewalls as well as storage infrastructure and and compute infrastructure so that's one of the key ways where how we are helping simplify the um kind of the ability to uh respond ability to detect and respond these threads uh in real time for security teams and you mentioned you know about zero trust and how it's a balance of you know not uh kind of restricting users or put heavy burden on you know multi-factor authentication and so on and this really starts with you know what we are doing is provide all the tools you know when it comes to advanced authentication uh supporting external identity management systems multi-factor authentication encryption all these things are intrinsically built into these platforms now the question is the customers are actually one of the key steps is to identify uh what are the most critical parts of their business or what are the applications uh that the most critical business operations depend on and similarly identify uh mission critical data where part of your response plan where it cannot be compromised where you need to have a way to recover once you do this identification then the level of security can be really determined uh by uh by the security teams by the infrastructure teams and you know another you know intelligence that gives a lot of flexibility for for even developers to do this is today we have apis um that so you can not only track these alerts at the data infrastructure level but you can use our apis to take concrete actions like blocking a certain user or increasing the level of authentication based on the threat level that has been perceived at the application layer or at the network layer so there is a lot of flexibility that is built into this by design so that depending on the criticality of the data criticality of the application number of users affected these decisions have to be made from time to time and it's as you mentioned it's it's a balance right and sometimes you know if if an organization had a recent attack you know the level of awareness is very high uh against cyber attacks so for a time you know these these settings may be a bit difficult to deal with but then it's a decision that has to be made by security teams as well got it so you're surfacing what may be hidden kpis that are being buried inside for instance the storage system through apis upstream into a dashboard so that somebody you know dig into the storage tunnel extract that data and then somehow you know populate that dashboard you're saying you're automating that that that workflow that's a great example and you may have others but is that the correct understanding absolutely and it's a two-way integration let's say a detector an attack has been detected at a completely different layer right in the application layer or at a firewall we can respond to those as well so it's a two-way integration we can cascade things up as well as uh respond to threats that have been detected elsewhere uh through the api that's great all right api for power skill is the best example for that uh excellent so thank you appreciate that give us the last word put a bow on this and and bring this segment home please absolutely so a dell uh storage portfolio um using advanced data isolation um with air gap having machine learning based algorithms to detect uh indicators of compromise and having ripple mechanisms um with granular snapshots being able to recover data and restore applications to maintain business continuity is what we deliver to customers uh and these are areas where a lot of innovation is happening a lot of product focus as well as you know if you look at the professional services all the way from engineering to professional services the way we build these systems the very we configure and architect these systems cyber security and protection is a key focus uh for all these activities and dell.com securities is where you can learn a lot about these initiatives that's great thank you you know at the recent uh reinforce uh event in in boston we heard a lot uh from aws about you know detent and response and devops and machine learning and some really cool stuff we heard a little bit about ransomware but i'm glad you brought up air gaps because we heard virtually nothing in the keynotes about air gaps that's an example of where you know this the cso has to pick up from where the cloud leaves off but as i was in front and so number one and number two we didn't hear a ton about how the cloud is making the life of the cso simpler and that's really my takeaway is is in part anyway your job and companies like dell so paris i really appreciate the insights thank you for coming on thecube thank you very much dave it's always great to be in these uh conversations all right keep it right there we'll be right back with rob emsley to talk about data protection strategies and what's in the dell portfolio you're watching the cube [Music] you

the cyber security landscape has changed dramatically over the past 24 to 36 months rapid cloud migration has created a new layer of security defense sure but that doesn't mean csos can relax in many respects it further complicates or at least changes the ciso's scope of responsibilities in particular the threat surface has expanded and that creates more seams and cisos have to make sure their teams pick up where the hyperscaler clouds leave off application developers have become a critical execution point for cyber assurance shift left is the kind of new buzz phrase for devs but organizations still have to shield right meaning the operational teams must continue to partner with secops to make sure infrastructure is resilient so it's no wonder that in etr's latest survey of nearly 1500 cios and it buyers that business technology executives cite security as their number one priority well ahead of other critical technology initiatives including collaboration software cloud computing and analytics rounding out the top four but budgets are under pressure and csos have to prioritize it's not like they have an open checkbook they have to contend with other key initiatives like those just mentioned to secure the funding and what about zero trust can you go out and buy xero trust or is it a framework a mindset in a series of best practices applied to create a security consciousness throughout the organization can you implement zero trust in other words if a machine or human is not explicitly allowed access then access is denied can you implement that policy without constricting organizational agility the question is what's the most practical way to apply that premise and what role does infrastructure play as the enforcer how does automation play in the equation the fact is that today's approach to cyber resilient type resilience can't be an either or it has to be an and conversation meaning you have to ensure data protection while at the same time advancing the mission of the organization with as little friction as possible and don't even talk to me about the edge that's really going to keep you up at night hello and welcome to the special cube presentation a blueprint for trusted infrastructure made possible by dell technologies in this program we explore the critical role that trusted infrastructure plays in cyber security strategies how organizations should think about the infrastructure side of the cyber security equation and how dell specifically approaches securing infrastructure for your business we'll dig into what it means to transform and evolve toward a modern security infrastructure that's both trusted and agile first up are pete gear and steve kenniston they're both senior cyber security consultants at dell technologies and they're going to talk about the company's philosophy and approach to trusted infrastructure and then we're going to speak to paris arcadi who's a senior consultant for storage at dell technologies to understand where and how storage plays in this trusted infrastructure world and then finally rob emsley who heads product marketing for data protection and cyber security he's going to take a deeper dive with rob into data protection and explain how it has become a critical component of a comprehensive cyber security strategy okay let's get started pete gear steve kenniston welcome to the cube thanks for coming into the marlboro studios today great to be here dave thanks dave good to see you great to see you guys pete start by talking about the security landscape you heard my little rap up front what are you seeing i thought you wrapped it up really well and you touched on all the key points right technology is ubiquitous today it's everywhere it's no longer confined to a monolithic data center it lives at the edge it lives in front of us it lives in our pockets and smartphones along with that is data and as you said organizations are managing sometimes 10 to 20 times the amount of data that they were just five years ago and along with that cyber crime has become a very profitable enterprise in fact it's been more than 10 years since uh the nsa chief actually called cyber crime the biggest transfer of wealth in history that was 10 years ago and we've seen nothing but accelerating cyber crime and really sophistication of how those attacks are perpetrated and so the new security landscape is really more of an evolution we're finally seeing security catch up with all of the technology adoption all the build out the work from home and work from anywhere that we've seen over the last couple of years we're finally seeing organizations and really it goes beyond the i t directors it's a board level discussion today security's become a board level discussion yeah i think that's true as well it's like it used to be the security was okay the secops team you're responsible for security now you've got the developers are involved the business lines are involved it's part of onboarding for most companies you know steve this concept of zero trust it was kind of a buzzword before the pandemic and i feel like i've often said it's now become a mandate but it's it's it's still fuzzy to a lot of people how do you guys think about zero trust what does it mean to you how does it fit yeah i thought again i thought your opening was fantastic in in this whole lead into to what is zero trust it had been a buzzword for a long time and now ever since the federal government came out with their implementation or or desire to drive zero trust a lot more people are taking a lot more seriously because i don't think they've seen the government do this but ultimately let's see ultimately it's just like you said right if if you don't have trust to those particular devices uh applications or data you can't get at it the question is and and you phrase it perfectly can you implement that as well as allow the business to be as agile as it needs to be in order to be competitive because we're seeing with your whole notion around devops and the ability to kind of build make deploy build make deploy right they still need that functionality but it also needs to be trusted it needs to be secure and things can't get away from you yeah so it's interesting we attended every uh reinforce since 2019 and the narrative there is hey everything in this in the cloud is great you know and this narrative around oh security is a big problem is you know doesn't help the industry the fact is that the big hyperscalers they're not strapped for talent but csos are they don't have the the capabilities to really apply all these best practices they're they're playing whack-a-mole so they look to companies like yours to take their r your r d and bake it into security products and solutions so what are the critical aspects of the so-called dell trusted infrastructure that we should be thinking about yeah well dell trusted infrastructure for us is a way for us to describe uh the the work that we do through design development and even delivery of our it system so dell trusted infrastructure includes our storage it includes our servers our networking our data protection our hyper converged everything that infrastructure always has been it's just that today customers consume that infrastructure at the edge as a service in a multi-cloud environment i mean i view the cloud as really a way for organizations to become more agile and to become more flexible and also to control costs i don't think organizations move to the cloud or move to a multi-cloud environment to enhance security so i don't see cloud computing as a panacea for security i see it as another attack surface and another uh aspect in front that organizations and and security organizations and departments have to manage it's part of their infrastructure today whether it's in their data center in a cloud or at the edge i mean i think it's a huge point because a lot of people think oh data's in the cloud i'm good it's like steve we've talked about oh why do i have to back up my data it's in the cloud well you might have to recover it someday so i don't know if you have anything to add to that or any additional thoughts on it no i mean i think i think like what pete was saying when it comes to when it comes to all these new vectors for attack surfaces you know people did choose the cloud in order to be more agile more flexible and all that did was open up to the csos who need to pay attention to now okay where can i possibly be attacked i need to be thinking about is that secure and part of the part of that is dell now also understands and thinks about as we're building solutions is it is it a trusted development life cycle so we have our own trusted development life cycle how many times in the past did you used to hear about vendors saying you got to patch your software because of this we think about what changes to our software and what implementations and what enhancements we deliver can actually cause from a security perspective and make sure we don't give up or or have security become a whole just in order to implement a feature we got to think about those things yeah and as pete alluded to our secure supply chain so all the way through knowing what you're going to get when you actually receive it is going to be secure and not be tampered with becomes vitally important and pete and i were talking earlier when you have tens of thousands of devices that need to be delivered whether it be storage or laptops or pcs or or whatever it is you want to be you want to know that that that those devices are can be trusted okay guys maybe pete you could talk about the how dell thinks about it's its framework and its philosophy of cyber security and then specifically what dell's advantages are relative to the competition yeah definitely dave thank you so we've talked a lot about dell as a technology provider but one thing dell also is is a partner in this larger ecosystem we realize that security whether it's a zero trust paradigm or any other kind of security environment is an ecosystem uh with a lot of different vendors so we look at three areas one is protecting data in systems we know that it starts with and ends with data that helps organizations combat threats across their entire infrastructure and what it means is dell's embedding security features consistently across our portfolios of storage servers networking the second is enhancing cyber resiliency over the last decade a lot of the funding and spending has been in protecting or trying to prevent cyber threats not necessarily in responding to and recovering from threats right we call that resiliency organizations need to build resiliency across their organization so not only can they withstand a threat but they can respond recover and continue with their operations and the third is overcoming security complexity security is hard it's more difficult because of the things we've talked about about distributed data distributed technology and and attack surfaces everywhere and so we're enabling organizations to scale confidently to continue their business but know that all all the i.t decisions that they're making um have these intrinsic security features and are built and delivered in a consistent security so those are kind of the three pillars maybe we could end on what you guys see as the key differentiators that people should know about that that dell brings to the table maybe each of you could take take a shot at that yeah i think first of all from from a holistic portfolio perspective right the uh secure supply chain and the secure development life cycle permeate through everything dell does when building things so we build things with security in mind all the way from as pete mentioned from from creation to delivery we want to make sure you have that that secure device or or asset that permeates everything from servers networking storage data protection through hyper converge through everything that to me is really a key asset because that means you can you understand when you receive something it's a trusted piece of your infrastructure i think the other core component to think about and pete mentioned as dell being a partner for making sure you can deliver these things is that even though those are that's part of our framework these pillars are our framework of how we want to deliver security it's also important to understand that we are partners and that you don't need to rip and replace but as you start to put in new components you can be you can be assured that the components that you're replacing as you're evolving as you're growing as you're moving to the cloud as you're moving to a more on-prem type services or whatever that your environment is secure i think those are two key things got it okay pete bring us home yeah i think one of one of the big advantages of dell is our scope and our scale right we're a large technology vendor that's been around for decades and we develop and sell almost every piece of technology we also know that organizations are might make different decisions and so we have a large services organization with a lot of experienced services people that can help customers along their security journey depending on whatever type of infrastructure or solutions that they're looking at the other thing we do is make it very easy to consume our technology whether that's traditional on-premise in a multi-cloud environment uh or as a service and so the best of breed technology can be consumed in any variety of fashion and know that you're getting that consistent secure infrastructure that dell provides well and dell's forgot the probably top supply chain not only in the tech business but probably any business and so you can actually take take your dog food and then and allow other billionaire champagne sorry allow other people to you know share share best practices with your with your customers all right guys thanks so much for coming thank you appreciate it okay keep it right there after this short break we'll be back to drill into the storage domain you're watching a blueprint for trusted infrastructure on the cube the leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage be right back concern over cyber attacks is now the norm for organizations of all sizes the impact of these attacks can be operationally crippling expensive and have long-term ramifications organizations have accepted the reality of not if but when from boardrooms to i.t departments and are now moving to increase their cyber security preparedness they know that security transformation is foundational to digital transformation and while no one can do it alone dell technologies can help you fortify with modern security modern security is built on three pillars protect your data and systems by modernizing your security approach with intrinsic features and hardware and processes from a provider with a holistic presence across the entire it ecosystem enhance your cyber resiliency by understanding your current level of resiliency for defending your data and preparing for business continuity and availability in the face of attacks overcome security complexity by simplifying and automating your security operations to enable scale insights and extend resources through service partnerships from advanced capabilities that intelligently scale a holistic presence throughout it and decades as a leading global technology provider we'll stop at nothing to help keep you secure okay we're back digging into trusted infrastructure with paris sarcadi he's a senior consultant for product marketing and storage at dell technologies parasaur welcome to the cube good to see you great to be with you dave yeah coming from hyderabad awesome so i really appreciate you uh coming on the program let's start with talking about your point of view on what cyber security resilience means to to dell generally but storage specifically yeah so for something like storage you know we are talking about the data layer name and if you look at cyber security it's all about securing your data applications and infrastructure it has been a very mature field at the network and application layers and there are a lot of great technologies right from you know enabling zero trust advanced authentications uh identity management systems and so on and and in fact you know with the advent of you know the the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning really these detection tools for cyber securities have really evolved in the network and the application spaces so for storage what it means is how can you bring them to the data layer right how can you bring you know the principles of zero trust to the data layer uh how can you leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to look at you know access patterns and make intelligent decisions about maybe an indicator of a compromise and identify them ahead of time just like you know how it's happening and other ways of applications and when it comes to cyber resilience it's it's basically a strategy which assumes that a threat is imminent and it's a good assumption with the severity of the frequency of the attacks that are happening and the question is how do we fortify the infrastructure in the switch infrastructure to withstand those attacks and have a plan a response plan where we can recover the data and make sure the business continuity is not affected so that's uh really cyber security and cyber resiliency and storage layer and of course there are technologies like you know network isolation immutability and all these principles need to be applied at the storage level as well let me have a follow up on that if i may the intelligence that you talked about that ai and machine learning is that do you do you build that into the infrastructure or is that sort of a separate software module that that points at various you know infrastructure components how does that work both dave right at the data storage level um we have come with various data characteristics depending on the nature of data we developed a lot of signals to see what could be a good indicator of a compromise um and there are also additional applications like cloud iq is the best example which is like an infrastructure wide health monitoring system for dell infrastructure and now we have elevated that to include cyber security as well so these signals are being gathered at cloud iq level and other applications as well so that we can make those decisions about compromise and we can either cascade that intelligence and alert stream upstream for uh security teams um so that they can take actions in platforms like sign systems xtr systems and so on but when it comes to which layer the intelligence is it has to be at every layer where it makes sense where we have the information to make a decision and being closest to the data we have we are basically monitoring you know the various parallels data access who is accessing um are they crossing across any geo fencing uh is there any mass deletion that is happening or a mass encryption that is happening and we are able to uh detect uh those uh patterns and flag them as indicators of compromise and in allowing automated response manual control and so on for it teams yeah thank you for that explanation so at dell technologies world we were there in may it was one of the first you know live shows that that we did in the spring certainly one of the largest and i interviewed shannon champion and a huge takeaway from the storage side was the degree to which you guys emphasized security uh within the operating systems i mean really i mean powermax more than half i think of the features were security related but also the rest of the portfolio so can you talk about the the security aspects of the dell storage portfolio specifically yeah yeah so when it comes to data security and broadly data availability right in the context of cyber resiliency dell storage this you know these elements have been at the core of our um a core strength for the portfolio and the source of differentiation for the storage portfolio you know with almost decades of collective experience of building highly resilient architectures for mission critical data something like power max system which is the most secure storage platform for high-end enterprises and now with the increased focus on cyber security we are extending those core technologies of high availability and adding modern detection systems modern data isolation techniques to offer a comprehensive solution to the customer so that they don't have to piece together multiple things to ensure data security or data resiliency but a well-designed and well-architected solution by design is delivered to them to ensure cyber protection at the data layer got it um you know we were talking earlier to steve kenniston and pete gear about this notion of dell trusted infrastructure how does storage fit into that as a component of that sort of overall you know theme yeah and you know and let me say this if you could adjust because a lot of people might be skeptical that i can actually have security and at the same time not constrict my organizational agility that's old you know not an ore it's an end how do you actually do that if you could address both of those that would be great definitely so for dell trusted infrastructure cyber resiliency is a key component of that and just as i mentioned you know uh air gap isolation it really started with you know power protect cyber recovery you know that was the solution more than three years ago we launched and that was first in the industry which paved way to you know kind of data isolation being a core element of data management and uh for data infrastructure and since then we have implemented these technologies within different storage platforms as well so that customers have the flexibility depending on their data landscape they can approach they can do the right data isolation architecture right either natively from the storage platform or consolidate things into the backup platform and isolate from there and and the other key thing we focus in trusted infrastructure dell infra dell trusted infrastructure is you know the goal of simplifying security for the customers so one good example here is uh you know being able to respond to these cyber threats or indicators of compromise is one thing but an i.t security team may not be looking at the dashboard of the storage systems constantly right storage administration admins may be looking at it so how can we build this intelligence and provide this upstream platforms so that they have a single pane of glass to understand security landscape across applications across networks firewalls as well as storage infrastructure and in compute infrastructure so that's one of the key ways where how we are helping simplify the um kind of the ability to uh respond ability to detect and respond these threads uh in real time for security teams and you mentioned you know about zero trust and how it's a balance of you know not uh kind of restricting users or put heavy burden on you know multi-factor authentication and so on and this really starts with you know what we're doing is provide all the tools you know when it comes to advanced authentication uh supporting external identity management systems multi-factor authentication encryption all these things are intrinsically built into these platforms now the question is the customers are actually one of the key steps is to identify uh what are the most critical parts of their business or what are the applications uh that the most critical business operations depend on and similarly identify uh mission critical data where part of your response plan where it cannot be compromised where you need to have a way to recover once you do this identification then the level of security can be really determined uh by uh by the security teams by the infrastructure teams and you know another you know intelligence that gives a lot of flexibility uh for for even developers to do this is today we have apis um that so you can not only track these alerts at the data infrastructure level but you can use our apis to take concrete actions like blocking a certain user or increasing the level of authentication based on the threat level that has been perceived at the application layer or at the network layer so there is a lot of flexibility that is built into this by design so that depending on the criticality of the data criticality of the application number of users affected these decisions have to be made from time to time and it's as you mentioned it's it's a balance right and sometimes you know if if an organization had a recent attack you know the level of awareness is very high against cyber attacks so for a time you know these these settings may be a bit difficult to deal with but then it's a decision that has to be made by security teams as well got it so you're surfacing what may be hidden kpis that are being buried inside for instance the storage system through apis upstream into a dashboard so that somebody could you know dig into the storage tunnel extract that data and then somehow you know populate that dashboard you're saying you're automating that that that workflow that's a great example and you may have others but is that the correct understanding absolutely and it's a two-way integration let's say a detector an attack has been detected at a completely different layer right in the application layer or at a firewall we can respond to those as well so it's a two-way integration we can cascade things up as well as respond to threats that have been detected elsewhere um uh through the api that's great all right hey api for power skill is the best example for that uh excellent so thank you appreciate that give us the last word put a bow on this and and bring this segment home please absolutely so a dell storage portfolio um using advanced data isolation um with air gap having machine learning based algorithms to detect uh indicators of compromise and having rigor mechanisms with granular snapshots being able to recover data and restore applications to maintain business continuity is what we deliver to customers uh and these are areas where a lot of innovation is happening a lot of product focus as well as you know if you look at the professional services all the way from engineering to professional services the way we build these systems the way we we configure and architect these systems um cyber security and protection is a key focus uh for all these activities and dell.com securities is where you can learn a lot about these initiatives that's great thank you you know at the recent uh reinforce uh event in in boston we heard a lot uh from aws about you know detent and response and devops and machine learning and some really cool stuff we heard a little bit about ransomware but i'm glad you brought up air gaps because we heard virtually nothing in the keynotes about air gaps that's an example of where you know this the cso has to pick up from where the cloud leaves off but that was in front and so number one and number two we didn't hear a ton about how the cloud is making the life of the cso simpler and that's really my takeaway is is in part anyway your job and companies like dell so paris i really appreciate the insights thank you for coming on thecube thank you very much dave it's always great to be in these uh conversations all right keep it right there we'll be right back with rob emsley to talk about data protection strategies and what's in the dell portfolio you're watching thecube data is the currency of the global economy it has value to your organization and cyber criminals in the age of ransomware attacks companies need secure and resilient it infrastructure to safeguard their data from aggressive cyber attacks [Music] as part of the dell technologies infrastructure portfolio powerstor and powermax combine storage innovation with advanced security that adheres to stringent government regulations and corporate compliance requirements security starts with multi-factor authentication enabling only authorized admins to access your system using assigned roles tamper-proof audit logs track system usage and changes so it admins can identify suspicious activity and act with snapshot policies you can quickly automate the protection and recovery process for your data powermax secure snapshots cannot be deleted by any user prior to the retention time expiration dell technologies also make sure your data at rest stays safe with power store and powermax data encryption protects your flash drive media from unauthorized access if it's removed from the data center while adhering to stringent fips 140-2 security requirements cloud iq brings together predictive analytics anomaly detection and machine learning with proactive policy-based security assessments monitoring and alerting the result intelligent insights that help you maintain the security health status of your storage environment and if a security breach does occur power protect cyber recovery isolates critical data identifies suspicious activity and accelerates data recovery using the automated data copy feature unchangeable data is duplicated in a secure digital vault then an operational air gap isolates the vault from the production and backup environments [Music] architected with security in mind dell emc power store and powermax provides storage innovation so your data is always available and always secure wherever and whenever you need it [Music] welcome back to a blueprint for trusted infrastructure we're here with rob emsley who's the director of product marketing for data protection and cyber security rob good to see a new role yeah good to be back dave good to see you yeah it's been a while since we chatted last and you know one of the changes in in my world is that i've expanded my responsibilities beyond data protection marketing to also focus on uh cyber security marketing specifically for our infrastructure solutions group so certainly that's you know something that really has driven us to you know to come and have this conversation with you today so data protection obviously has become an increasingly important component of the cyber security space i i don't think necessarily of you know traditional backup and recovery as security it's to me it's an adjacency i know some companies have said oh yeah now we're a security company they're kind of chasing the valuation for sure bubble um dell's interesting because you you have you know data protection in the form of backup and recovery and data management but you also have security you know direct security capability so you're sort of bringing those two worlds together and it sounds like your responsibility is to to connect those those dots is that right absolutely yeah i mean i think that uh the reality is is that security is a a multi-layer discipline um i think the the days of thinking that it's one uh or another um technology that you can use or process that you can use to make your organization secure uh are long gone i mean certainly um you actually correct if you think about the backup and recovery space i mean people have been doing that for years you know certainly backup and recovery is all about the recovery it's all about getting yourself back up and running when bad things happen and one of the realities unfortunately today is that one of the worst things that can happen is cyber attacks you know ransomware malware are all things that are top of mind for all organizations today and that's why you see a lot of technology and a lot of innovation going into the backup and recovery space because if you have a copy a good copy of your data then that is really the the first place you go to recover from a cyber attack and that's why it's so important the reality is is that unfortunately the cyber criminals keep on getting smarter i don't know how it happens but one of the things that is happening is that the days of them just going after your production data are no longer the only challenge that you have they go after your your backup data as well so over the last half a decade dell technologies with its backup and recovery portfolio has introduced the concept of isolated cyber recovery vaults and that is really the you know we've had many conversations about that over the years um and that's really a big tenant of what we do in the data protection portfolio so this idea of of cyber security resilience that definition is evolving what does it mean to you yeah i think the the analyst team over at gartner they wrote a very insightful paper called you will be hacked embrace the breach and the whole basis of this analysis is so much money has been spent on prevention is that what's out of balance is the amount of budget that companies have spent on cyber resilience and cyber resilience is based upon the premise that you will be hacked you have to embrace that fact and be ready and prepared to bring yourself back into business you know and that's really where cyber resiliency is very very different than cyber security and prevention you know and i think that balance of get your security disciplines well-funded get your defenses as good as you can get them but make sure that if the inevitable happens and you find yourself compromised that you have a great recovery plan and certainly a great recovery plan is really the basis of any good solid data protection backup and recovery uh philosophy so if i had to do a swot analysis we don't have to do the wot but let's focus on the s um what would you say are dell's strengths in this you know cyber security space as it relates to data protection um one is we've been doing it a long time you know we talk a lot about dell's data protection being proven and modern you know certainly the experience that we've had over literally three decades of providing enterprise scale data protection solutions to our customers has really allowed us to have a lot of insight into what works and what doesn't as i mentioned to you one of the unique differentiators of our solution is the cyber recovery vaulting solution that we introduced a little over five years ago five six years parapatek cyber recovery is something which has become a unique capability for customers to adopt uh on top of their investment in dell technologies data protection you know the the unique elements of our solution already threefold and it's we call them the three eyes it's isolation it's immutability and it's intelligence and the the isolation part is really so important because you need to reduce the attack surface of your good known copies of data you know you need to put it in a location that the bad actors can't get to it and that really is the the the the essence of a cyber recovery vault interestingly enough you're starting to see the market throw out that word um you know from many other places but really it comes down to having a real discipline that you don't allow the security of your cyber recovery vault to be compromised insofar as allowing it to be controlled from outside of the vault you know allowing it to be controlled by your backup application our cyber recovery vaulting technology is independent of the backup infrastructure it uses it but it controls its own security and that is so so important it's like having a vault that the only way to open it is from the inside you know and think about that if you think about you know volts in banks or volts in your home normally you have a keypad on the outside think of our cyber recovery vault as having its security controlled from inside of the vault so nobody can get in nothing can get in unless it's already in and if it's already in then it's trusted exactly yeah exactly yeah so isolation is the key and then you mentioned immutability is the second piece yeah so immutability is is also something which has been around for a long time people talk about uh backup immunoability or immutable backup copies so immutability is just the the the additional um technology that allows the data that's inside of the vault to be unchangeable you know but again that immutability you know your mileage varies you know when you look across the uh the different offers that are out there in the market especially in the backup industry you make a very valid point earlier that the backup vendors in the market seems to be security washing their marketing messages i mean everybody is leaning into the ever-present danger of cyber security not a bad thing but the reality is is that you have to have the technology to back it up you know quite literally yeah no pun intended and then actually pun intended now what about the intelligence piece of it uh that's that's ai ml where does that fit for sure so the intelligence piece is delivered by um a solution called cybersense and cybersense for us is what really gives you the confidence that what you have in your cyber recovery vault is a good clean copy of data so it's looking at the backup copies that get driven into the cyber vault and it's looking for anomalies so it's not looking for signatures of malware you know that's what your antivirus software does that's what your endpoint protection software does that's on the prevention side of the equation but what we're looking for is we're looking to ensure that the data that you need when all hell breaks loose is good and that when you get a request to restore and recover your business you go right let's go and do it and you don't have any concern that what you have in the vault has been compromised so cyber sense is really a unique analytic solution in the market based upon the fact that it isn't looking at cursory indicators of of um of of of malware infection or or ransomware introduction it's doing full content analytics you know looking at you know has the data um in any way changed has it suddenly become encrypted has it suddenly become different to how it was in the previous scan so that anomaly detection is very very different it's looking for um you know like different characteristics that really are an indicator that something is going on and of course if it sees it you immediately get flagged but the good news is is that you always have in the vault the previous copy of good known data which now becomes your restore point so we're talking to rob emsley about how data protection fits into what dell calls dti dell trusted infrastructure and and i want to come back rob to this notion of and not or because i think a lot of people are skeptical like how can i have great security and not introduce friction into my organization is that an automation play how does dell tackle that problem i mean i think a lot of it is across our infrastructure is is security has to be built in i mean intrinsic security within our servers within our storage devices uh within our elements of our backup infrastructure i mean security multi-factor authentication you know elements that make the overall infrastructure secure you know we have capabilities that you know allow us to identify whether or not configurations have changed you know we'll probably be talking about that a little bit more to you later in the segment but the the essence is is um security is not a bolt-on it has to be part of the overall infrastructure and that's so true um certainly in the data protection space give us the the bottom line on on how you see dell's key differentiators maybe you could talk about dell of course always talks about its portfolio but but why should customers you know lead in to dell in in this whole cyber resilience space um you know staying on the data protection space as i mentioned the the the work we've been doing um to introduce this cyber resiliency solution for data protection is in our opinion as good as it gets you know the you know you've spoken to a number of our of our best customers whether it be bob bender from founders federal or more recently at delton allergies world you spoke to tony bryson from the town of gilbert and these are customers that we've had for many years that have implemented cyber recovery vaults and at the end of the day they can now sleep at night you know that's really the the peace of mind that they have is that the insurance that a data protection from dell cyber recovery vault a parapatex cyber recovery solution gives them you know really allows them to you know just have the assurance that they don't have to pay a ransom if they have a an insider threat issue and you know all the way down to data deletion is they know that what's in the cyber recovery vault is good and ready for them to recover from great well rob congratulations on the new scope of responsibility i like how you know your organization is expanding as the threat surface is expanding as we said data protection becoming an adjacency to security not security in and of itself a key component of a comprehensive security strategy rob emsley thank you for coming back in the cube good to see you again you too dave thanks all right in a moment i'll be back to wrap up a blueprint for trusted infrastructure you're watching the cube every day it seems there's a new headline about the devastating financial impacts or trust that's lost due to ransomware or other sophisticated cyber attacks but with our help dell technologies customers are taking action by becoming more cyber resilient and deterring attacks so they can greet students daily with a smile they're ensuring that a range of essential government services remain available 24 7 to citizens wherever they're needed from swiftly dispatching public safety personnel or sending an inspector to sign off on a homeowner's dream to protecting restoring and sustaining our precious natural resources for future generations with ever-changing cyber attacks targeting organizations in every industry our cyber resiliency solutions are right on the money providing the security and controls you need we help customers protect and isolate critical data from ransomware and other cyber threats delivering the highest data integrity to keep your doors open and ensuring that hospitals and healthcare providers have access to the data they need so patients get life-saving treatment without fail if a cyber incident does occur our intelligence analytics and responsive team are in a class by themselves helping you reliably recover your data and applications so you can quickly get your organization back up and running with dell technologies behind you you can stay ahead of cybercrime safeguarding your business and your customers vital information learn more about how dell technology's cyber resiliency solutions can provide true peace of mind for you the adversary is highly capable motivated and well equipped and is not standing still your job is to partner with technology vendors and increase the cost of the bad guys getting to your data so that their roi is reduced and they go elsewhere the growing issues around cyber security will continue to drive forward thinking in cyber resilience we heard today that it is actually possible to achieve infrastructure security while at the same time minimizing friction to enable organizations to move quickly in their digital transformations a xero trust framework must include vendor r d and innovation that builds security designs it into infrastructure products and services from the start not as a bolt-on but as a fundamental ingredient of the cloud hybrid cloud private cloud to edge operational model the bottom line is if you can't trust your infrastructure your security posture is weakened remember this program is available on demand in its entirety at thecube.net and the individual interviews are also available and you can go to dell security solutions landing page for for more information go to dell.com security solutions that's dell.com security solutions this is dave vellante thecube thanks for watching a blueprint for trusted infrastructure made possible by dell we'll see you next time

[Music] okay we're back digging into trusted infrastructure with paris our godaddy he's a senior consultant for product marketing and storage at dell technologies parasite welcome to the cube good to see you great to be with you dave yeah coming from hyderabad awesome so i really appreciate you uh coming on the program let's start with talking about your point of view on what cyber security resilience means to to dell generally but storage specifically yeah so for something like storage you know we are talking about the data layer name and if you look at cyber security it's all about securing your data applications and infrastructure it has been a very mature field at the network and application layers and there are a lot of great technologies right from you know enabling zero trust uh advanced authentications uh identity management systems and so on and and in fact you know with the advent of you know the the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning really these detection tools for cyber securities have really evolved in the network and the application spaces so for storage what it means is how can you bring them to the data layer right how can you bring you know the principles of zero trust to the data layer how can you leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to look at you know access patterns and make intelligent decisions about maybe an indicator of a compromise and identify them ahead of time just like you know how it's happening in other words of of applications and when it comes to cyber resilience it's it's basically a strategy which assumes that a threat is imminent and it's a good assumption with the severity and the frequency of the attacks that are happening and the question is how do we fortify the infrastructure in the switch infrastructure to withstand those attacks and have a plan a response plan where we can recover the data and make sure the business continuity is not affected so that's uh really cyber security and cyber resiliency and storage layer and of course there are technologies like you know um in network isolation um immutability and all these principles need to be applied at the storage level as well let me have a follow up on that if i may the intelligence that you talked about that ai and machine learning is that do you do you build that into the infrastructure or is that sort of a separate software module that that points at various you know infrastructure components how does that work both dave um right at the data storage level um we have come with various data characteristics depending on the nature of data we developed a lot of signals to see what could be a good indicator of a compromise um and there are also additional applications like cloud iq is the best example which is like an infrastructure-wide health monitoring system for dell infrastructure and now we have elevated that to include cyber security as well so these signals are being gathered at cloud iq level and other applications as well so that we can make those decisions about compromise and we can either cascade that intelligence and alert stream upstream for uh security teams um so that they can take actions in platforms like sign systems xtr systems and so on but when it comes to which layer the intelligence is it has to be at every layer where it makes sense where we have the information to make a decision and being closest to the data we have we are basically monitoring you know the various parallels data access who is accessing um are they crossing across any geo fencing is there any mass deletion that is happening or mass encryption that is happening and we are able to uh detect uh those uh patterns and flag them as indicators of compromise and in allowing automated response manual control and so on for iot teams yeah thank you for that explanation so at dell technologies world we were there in may it was one of the first you know live shows that that we did in the spring certainly one of the largest and i interviewed shannon champion and my huge takeaway from the storage side was the degree to which you guys uh emphasized security uh within the operating systems i mean really i mean powermax more than half i think of the features were security related but also the rest of the portfolio so can you talk about the the security aspects of the dell storage portfolio specifically yeah yeah so when it comes to data security and broadly data availability right in the context of cyber resiliency um dell storage uh this you know these elements have been at the core of our um a core strength for the portfolio and a source of differentiation for the storage portfolio you know with almost decades of collective experience of building highly resilient architectures for mission critical data something like power max system which is the most secure storage platform for high-end enterprises um and now with the increased focus on cyber security we are extending those core technologies of high availability and adding modern detection systems modern data isolation techniques to offer a comprehensive solution to the customer so that they don't have to piece together multiple things to ensure data security or data resiliency but a well-designed and well-architected solution by design is delivered to them to ensure cyber protection at the data layer got it um you know we were talking earlier to steve kenniston and pete gear about this notion of dell trusted infrastructure how does storage fit into that as a component of that sort of overall you know theme yeah and you know and let me say this if you could address because a lot of people might be skeptical that i can actually have security and at the same time not constrict my organizational agility that's old you know not an ore it's an end how do you actually do that if you could address both of those that would be great definitely so for dell trusted infrastructure cyber resiliency is a key component of that and just as i mentioned you know uh air gap isolation it really started with you know power protect cyber recovery you know that was the solution more than three years ago we launched and that was first in the industry which paved way to you know kind of data isolation being a core element of data management and uh for data infrastructure and since then we have implemented these technologies within different storage platforms as well so that customers have the flexibility depending on their data landscape they can approach they can do the right data isolation architecture right either natively from the storage platform or consolidate things into the backup platform and isolate from there and and the other key thing we focus in trusted infrastructure dell infra dell trusted infrastructure is you know the goal of simplifying security for the customers so one good example here is uh you know being able to respond to these cyber threats or indicators of compromise is one thing but an i.t security team may not be looking at the dashboard of the storage systems constantly right storage administration admins may be looking at it so how can we build this intelligence and provide this upstream platforms so that they have a single pane of glass to understand security landscape across applications across networks firewalls as well as storage infrastructure and and compute infrastructure so that's one of the key ways where how we are helping simplify the um kind of the ability to uh respond ability to detect and respond these threads uh in real time for security teams and you mentioned you know about zero trust and how it's a balance of you know not uh kind of restricting users or put heavy burden on you know multi-factor authentication and so on and this really starts with you know what we are doing is provide all the tools you know when it comes to advanced authentication uh supporting external identity management systems multi-factor authentication encryption all these things are intrinsically built into these platforms now the question is the customers are actually one of the key steps is to identify uh what are the most critical parts of their business or what are the applications uh that the most critical uh business operations depend on and similarly identify uh mission critical data where part of your response plan where it cannot be compromised where you need to have a way to recover once you do this identification then the level of security can be really determined uh by uh by the security teams by the infrastructure teams and you know another you know intelligence that gives a lot of flexibility uh for for even developers to do this is today we have apis um that so you can not only track these alerts at the data infrastructure level but you can use our apis to take concrete actions like blocking a certain user or increasing the level of authentication based on the threat level that has been perceived at the application layer or at the network layer so there is a lot of flexibility that is built into this by design so that depending on the criticality of the data criticality of the application number of users affected these decisions have to be made from time to time and it's as you mentioned it's it's a balance right and sometimes you know if if an organization had a recent attack you know the level of awareness is very high uh against cyber attacks so for a time you know these these settings may be a bit difficult to deal with but then it's a decision that has to be made by security teams as well got it so you're surfacing what may be hidden kpis that are buried inside for instance the storage system through apis upstream into a dashboard so that somebody could you know dig into the storage tunnel extract that data and then somehow you know populate that dashboard you're saying you're automating that that that workflow that's a great example and you may have others but is that the correct understanding absolutely and it's a two-way integration let's say a detector an attack has been detected at a completely different layer right in the application layer or at a firewall we can respond to those as well so it's a two-way integration we can cascade things up as well as uh respond to uh threats that have been detected elsewhere um through the api that's great all right api for power scale is the best example for that uh excellent so thank you appreciate that give us the last word put a bow on this and and bring this segment home please absolutely so a dell storage portfolio um using advanced data isolation with air gap having machine learning based algorithms to detect uh indicators of compromise and having rigor mechanisms with granular snapshots being able to recover data and restore applications to maintain business continuity is what we deliver to customers uh and these are areas where a lot of innovation is happening a lot of product focus as well as you know if you look at the professional services all the way from engineering to professional services the way we build these systems the way we we configure and architect these systems uh cyber security and protection uh is a key focus uh for all these activities and dell.com securities is where you can learn a lot about these initiatives that's great thank you you know at the recent uh reinforce uh event in in boston we heard a lot uh from aws about you know detent and response and devops and machine learning and some really cool stuff we heard a little bit about ransomware but i'm glad you brought up air gaps because we heard virtually nothing in the keynotes about air gaps that's an example of where you know this the cso has to pick up from where the cloud leaves off that was in front and so number one and number two we didn't hear a ton about how the cloud is making the life of the cso simpler and that's really my takeaway is is in part anyway your job and companies like dell so paris i really appreciate the insights thank you for coming on thecube thank you very much dave it's always great to be in these uh conversations all right keep it right there we'll be right back with rob emsley to talk about data protection strategies and what's in the dell portfolio you're watching the cube [Music] you

>> Welcome everybody to this cube conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and we're joined today by Richard Goodwin, who's the group director of IT at Ultraleap and Avishek Kumar, who manages Dell's Power Store, product line, he directs that product line along with several other lines for the company. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. >> (Avishek) Hi Dave. >> (Richard) Hi >> (Dave) So Richard, Ultraleap, very cool company tracks hand movements, and so forth. Tell us about the company and the technology I'm really interested in how it's used. >> Yeah, we've had many product lines, obviously. We're very innovative, and the organization was spun up from a PhD, a number of PhD students who were the co-founders for Ultraleap, and initially with mid-air haptics, as you, as many people may have seen, but also hand tracking, mid-air touch, sense and feel. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's quite impressive what we have produced and the number of sectors and markets that we were in. And obviously to, to push us to where we are, we have relied upon lots of the Dao technology, both software and hardware. >> (Dave) And what's your role at the company? >> I'm the group IT director, I'm responsible for the IT and business platforms, all infrastructure, network, hardware, software, and also the transition of those platforms to ensure that we're scalable. And we are able to develop our software and hardware as rapidly as possible. >> (Dave) Awesome. Yeah, a lot of data behind that too I bet. Okay Avishek, you direct a number of products at Dell across the portfolio, Unity, Extreme IO, the SC series, and of course power vault. It's quite the portfolio that you look after. So let's get into the case study, if we can, a bit, Richard, maybe you could paint a picture of, of your environment, some of the key applications that you're supporting and maybe what your infrastructure looks like. Give us a high level view. >> Sure. So, pre Power Store, we had quite a disparate architecture, so a fairly significant split and siding on the side of the cloud, not as hybrid as we would like, and not, not as much as on-prem, as we would have liked, and hey, but that's changed quite significantly. So we now have a number of servers and storage and storage arrays that we have on, on-premise, and then we host ourselves. So we are moving quite rapidly, you know as a startup and then moving to a scale-up, we needed that, that scalability and that versatility, and also the whole OPEX versus CAPEX, and also not being driven by lots of SaaS products and architecture and infrastructure, where we needed to be in control because of our development cycles and our products, product development. >> (Dave) So wait, Okay, So, so, too much cloud. I'm hearing you wanted a little bit a dose of on-prem, explain that a little bit more, the cloud wasn't doing it for you in terms of your development cycle, your control. Can you double click on that? >> Yeah. Some of the, some of the control and you know, there's always a balance because there's certain elements of our development cycles and our engineering, software engineering, where we need a very high parallelism for some of the work that we're doing, which then, you know, the CAPEX investment makes things very, very challenging, not commercially the right thing to do. However, there are some of our information, some of IP, some of the secure things that we do, we also do not want upgrades as an example, or any advantages or certain types of server and spec that we need to be quite and unique and that needs to be within our control. >> (Dave) Got it, Okay. Thank you for that. Avishek, we're going to talk about Power Store today. So set it up, please, tell us about Power Store, what it is, you know, why it's important to this conversation. >> Sure. So Power Store is a product that we launched may of 2020, roughly a little bit more than a year now. And it's a brand new architecture that Dell technologies released. And at the end of the day, I'll talk about a few unique aspects of the product, but at the end of the day, where we start with, it's a storage platform, right? So where we see similar to what Richard is saying here, in terms of being able to consolidate the customer's environment, whether it is blog, file, WeVaults, physical, virtual environments, and, and it's, as I said, it's a brand new architecture where we leveraged pieces of existing products, where it made sense, we are using all the latest and greatest technologies delivering the best performance based data reduction. And where we see a lot of traction is the options that it brings to the table for our customers in terms of flexibility, whether they want to add capacity, compute, whether in fact, we have apps on the deployment model where customers can consolidate their compute as well on the static storage platform with needed. So a lot of innovation from a platform perspective itself, and it's not just about the platform itself, but what comes along with it, right? So we refer to it as an ecosystem, part of it, where we work with Ansible playbooks, CSI plugin, you name it, right. And it's the storage platform by itself, doesn't stand by itself in a customer's environment, there are other aspects of the infrastructure that it needs to integrate with as well. Right? So if they are using Ansible playbooks, we want to make sure the integration is there. >> (Dave) Got it. >> And last, but perhaps not the least is the intelligence built into the platform, right? So as we are building these capabilities into the product, there is intelligence built into the product, as well as outside the product where things like Cloud IQ, things like technologies built into power suit itself makes it that much easier for the customers to manage the infrastructure and go from there. >> (Dave) Thank you for that, So, Richard, what was the workload? So it actually, you started with the sort of a Greenfield on-prem. If I understand it correctly, what was the workload that you were sort of building around or workloads? >> So, we had a, a number of different applications. Some of which we cannot really talk about too much, but we had, we had a VxRail, we had a a smaller doubt array and we have lots of what we class as runners, Kubernetes cluster that we run and quite a few different VMs that run on our, on-prem server infrastructure and storage arrays and the issues that we began to hit because of the high IO, from some of our workloads, that we were hitting very high latency, which rapidly stopped, began to cause us issues, especially with some of our software engineering teams. And that is when we embarked upon a competitive RFP for Dell Power Store, Dell were already engaged from an end-user compute where they'd been selected as the end-user compute provider from a previous competitive RFP. And then we engaged them regarding the storage issue that we had and we engaged the, our account lead and count exec, and a number of solution architects were working with us to ensure that we have the optimal solution. Dell were selected over the competitors because of many reasons, you know, the new technology, the de-duplication, the compression, the data, overall data reduction, and the guarantee that also came, came with that, the four-to-one data reduction guarantee, which was significant to us because of their amounts of data that we hold. And we have, you know, as I've mentioned, we're pulling further, further data of ours back into our hosted environments, which will end up on the Power Store, especially with the de-duplication that we're now getting. We've actually hit nine-to-one, which is significant. We were expecting four-to-one, maybe five-to-one with some of the data types. And what was excellent that we were that confident that they did not even review our data types prior, and they were willing to stand by that guarantee of four-to-one. And we've excelled that, we've got significant different data types on, on that array, and we've hit nine-to-one and that's gradually grown over the last nine months, you know, we were kind of at the six then we moved to seven and now we're hitting nine-to-one ratio. >> (Dave) That's great. So you get a little free storage. That's interesting what you're saying, Richard, cause I just assumed that a company that guaranteed four-to-one is going to say okay, let us, let us inspect your workload first and then we'll do the deal. So Avishek, what's the tech behind that data reduction that you're able to, with such confidence, not have to pre inspect the workload in this case anyway. >> Yeah. So, it goes back to the technologies that goes behind the product, right? So, so we, we stand behind the technology and we want to make it simpler for our customers as well where, again we don't want to spend weeks looking at all the data, scanning all the data before giving the guarantee. So we stand behind the technology where we understand that as the data is coming in, we are always going to be de-duplicate it. We are always going to compress it. There is technology within the product where we are offloading some of that to the outside the CPU, so it is not impacting the performance that the applications are going to see. So a data reduction by itself is not good enough, performance by itself is not good enough. Both of them have to be together, right? So, and that's what Power Store brings to the table. >> (Dave) Thank you. So Richard, I'm interested. I mean, I remember the Power Store announcement of, sort of, saw it leading up to it. And one of the big thrusts from Dell was the way I phrase it is essentially trying to create a cloud like experience on-prem. So really focused on simplicity. So my question to you is, let's start with just the deployment. You know, how complicated was it to install? What was that process like? How many clicks, I mean, not that you have to tell me how many clicks, but you know, what I'm asking is, is how difficult was it to get from zero to, you know, up and running? >> Well, we actually stepped our very difficult challenge. We were in quite a difficult situation where we'd pretty much gone off the cliff in terms of our IOPS performance. So the RFP was quite rapid, and then we needed to get whoever which vendor was successful, we needed to get that deployed rather rapidly and on the floor in our data center and server rooms, which we did. And it was very very simplistic, within three weeks of placing the order, we had that array in our server rack and we'd begun the migration, it was very simple to set up. And the management of that array has been, we've seen say 40% reduction in terms of effort to be able to manage our storage because it is very self-contained, you know, even from a reporting perspective, the deployment, the migration was all very, very, very simplistic, and you know, we we've done some work recently where we had to also do some work on the array and some other migrations that we were doing and the resilience came, came to, came to the forefront of where the Juul architecture and no single point of failure enabled us to do some things that we needed to do quite rapidly because of the, the Juul norms and the resilience within, within the unit and within the Power Store itself was considerable where we, we kept performance up, it also prioritize any discreet rebuilds, keeps the incoming ingest rates high, and prioritizes the, you know, the workloads, which is really impressive, especially when we are moving so quickly with our technology. We don't really have much time to, you know, micromanage the estate. >> (Dave) Can you, can you just repeat what you said on the percent reduction? I think I heard you cut out there a little bit, a percent reduction on, on, on management, on, on, on the labor side. >> So our lead storage engineer is estimated around 40% less management. >> (Dave) Wow. Okay. So that's, that's good. So actually, I love this conversation because, you know, in the early days of automation, people like, ah, that's my job, provisioning LUNs. I'm really good at it, but I think people are realizing that it's actually not something that you want to be really good at. It's something that you want to eliminate. So, it now maybe it's that storage engineer got his or her nights and weekends back, but, but what do they do now when they get that extra time, what do you, what do you put them on? You know, no more strategic initiatives or, you know, other, other tech things on the to-do list. What's that like?. >> The last thing that, you know, any of my team, whether it's the storage leads or some of the infrastructure team that were also involved in engaged, cause you know, the organization, we have to be quite versatile as a team in our skillsets. We don't want to be doing those BAU mundane tasks. Even the storage engineer does not want to be allocating LUNs and allocating storage to physical servers, Vms, etc. We want all of that to be automated. And, you know, those engineers, they're working on some of the cutting edge things that we're trying to do with machine learning as an example, which is much more interesting. It's what they want to be doing. You know, that aides, the obvious things like retention, interest and personal development, we don't want to be, you know, that base IT infrastructure management, is not where any of the engineers wants to be. >> (Dave) In terms of the decision to go with Dell Power Store. I'm definitely hearing there was a relationship. There was an existing relationship with Dell. I'm sure that played into it. >> There were many things. So the relationship wasn't really part of this, even though I've mentioned the end-user compute in any sets or anything that we're procuring, we want best of breed, you know, best of sets. And that was done on, the cost is definitely a driver. The technology, you know, is a big trust to us, We're a tech company, new technology to us is also fascinating, not only our own, but also the storage guarantee, the simplicity, the resilience within, within the unit. Also the ability, which was key to us because of what we're trying to do with our hybrid model and bring, bring back repatriate some of the data as it were from the client. We needed that ability to, with ease, to be able to scale up and scale high, and the Power Store gave us that. >> (Dave) When you say cost, I want to dig into that price or you know, the price tag or the, the cost, I mean, when you do the business case. And I wonder if we could add a little color to that. >> (Richard) There's two elements to this, so they're not only the cost of the price tag, but then also cost of ownership and the comparisons that we were running against the other vendors, but also the comparisons that we were running from a CAPEX investment against OPEX and what we have in the cloud, and also the performance, performance that we get from the cloud and our cloud storage and the resilience within that. And then also the initial price tag, and then comparing the CapEx investments to the OPEX where all elements that were key to us making our decision. And I know that there has to be some credit taken by the Dell account team and that their relationship towards the final phrase of that RFP, you know, were key initially, not all, we were just looking for the best possible storage solution for Ultraleap. >> (Dave) And to determine that on your end, was that like a feature, because it's sometimes fuzzy what the business impact is going to be like that 40% you mentioned, or the data reduction at nine to one, when there's a promise of four to one, did you, what did you do? Did you kind of do a feature function analysis and sort of line that up and, and say, okay, I'm going to map that to our business processes our IT processes and try to predict what the impact would be. Is that how you did it? or did you take a different approach? >> (Richard) We did. So we did that, obviously between vendors usually expected an RFP, but then also mapping to how that would impact the business. And that is not an easy process to go through. And we've seen more gains even comparing one vendor to another, some of that because of the technology, the terminology is very very different and sometimes you have to bring that upper level and also gain a much more detailed understanding, which at times can be challenging, but we did a very like-for-like comparison and, and also lots of research, but you're quite right. The business analysis to what we needed. We had quite a good forecast and from summarized stock information data, and also our engineering and business and strategic roadmap, we were able to map those two together, not the easiest of experiences, not one that I want to repeat, but we, we got it. (Dave laughing) >> (Dave)Yeah, a little bit of art and science involved. Avishek, maybe you could talk about Power Store, what, you know, give us the commercial. What makes it different from other products in the market of things like cloud IQ? Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Sure. So, so again, from a, it's music to my ears, when Richard talks about the ease of deployment and the management, because there is a lot of focus on that. But even as I said earlier, from a man technology perspective, a lot of goodness built-in, in terms of being able to consolidate a customer's environment, onto the platform. So that's more from a storage point of view that give the best performance, give the best data reduction, storage efficiencies. The second part, of course, the flexibility, the options that Power Store gives to the customers in terms of sort of desegregating the storage and the compute aspects of it. So if, as a customer, I want to start with different points in terms of what our customer requirements are today, but going forward as the requirements change from a compute capacity perspective, you can use a scale up and scale out capabilities, and then the intelligence built in, right? So, as you scale out your cluster, being able to move storage around right, as needed being able to do that non-disruptively. So instead of saying that Mr. Customer, your, your storage is going to you're at 90% capacity, being able to say that based on your historical trending, we expect you run out of capacity in six months, some small things like that, right? And of course, if the, the dial home, the support assist capabilities that enabled, cloud IQ brings a lot of intelligence to the table as well. In addition to that, as they mentioned earlier, there is apps on capability that gives another level of flexibility to the customers to integrate your storage infrastructure into a virtual environment, if the customer chooses to do that. And last but not the least, it's not just about the product, right? So it's about the programs that we have put around it, anytime upgrade is a big differentiator for us, where it's an investment protection program for customers, where if they want to have the peace of mind, in terms of three months, nine months, three years down the line, if we come out with new technologies, being able to be upgrade to that non-disruptively is a big part of it as well. It's a peace of mind for the customers that, yes I'm getting into the Power Store architecture today, but going forward, I'm protected from that point of view. So anytime upgrade, it's a new business program that we put around leveraging the architectural benefits of Power Store, whether your compute requirement, your storage requirements change, you're covered from that point of view. So again, a very quick overview of, of what Power Store is, why it is different. And again, that's where that comes from. >> (Dave) Thank you for that. Richard, are you actively using cloud IQ? Do you get the, what kind of value do you get from it? >> Not currently. However, we have, we have had plans to do that. The uptake and BCR, our internal Workload is not allowed us, to do that. But one of the other key reasons for selecting Power Store was the non-disruptive element, you know, with other SaaS products, other providers, and other issues that we have experienced. That was one, that was a key decision for us from a Power Store perspective. One of the other, you know, to go back to the conversation slightly, in terms of performance, we are getting, getting there. You know, there's a 400% speed of improvement of publishing. We've got an 80% faster code coverage. Our firmware builds a 1300% quicker than they were previously. and the time savings of the storage engineer and, you know, as a director of IT, I often asked for certain reports from, from the storage array, we're working at, for storage forecast, performance forecast, you know, when we're coming close to product releases, code drops that we're trying to manage, the reporting or the Power Store is impressive. Whereas previously my storage engineer would not be the, the most happiest of people when I would be trying to pull, you know, monthly and quarterly reports, et cetera. Whereas now it's, it's ease and we have live dashboards running and we can easily extract that information. >> (Dave) I love that because, you know, so often we talk about the 40% reduction in IT labor, which okay, that's cool. But then your CFO's going to say, yeah, but it's not like we're getting rid of people. We, you know, we're still spending that money and you're like, okay. You're now into soft dollars, but when you talk about 400%, 80%, 1300% of what you're talking about business impact and that's telephone numbers to a CFO. So I love those metrics. Thank you for sharing. >> Yeah. But what would, they obviously, it's sort of like dashboards when they visualize that they are very hard hitting, you know, the impact. You're quite right the CFO does chase down you know, the availability and the resource profile, however, we're on a huge upward trajectory. So having the right resilience and infrastructure in places is exactly what we need. And as I mentioned before, those engineers are all reallocated to much more interesting work and, you know, the areas that will actually drive our business forward. >> (Dave) Speaking of resilience, are you doing any replication? >> Not currently. However, we've actually got a meeting regarding this today with some of the enterprise and some of their storage specialists, in a couple of hours time, actually, because that is a very high on the agenda for us to be able to replicate and have a high availability cluster and another potentially Power Store need. >> (Dave) Okay. So I was going to ask you where you want to take this thing. I'm hearing, you're looking at cloud IQ, really try to exploit that. So you got some headroom here in terms of the value that you can get out of this platform to do replication, faster recovery, et cetera, maybe protect against, you know, events. Guys, Thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate your insights. >> (Richard) No problem. >> (Avishek) Thank you. >> And thank you for watching this cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time.

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation [Music] hi I'm Stu manna man and welcome to a special cube conversation normally the first week of May we would be at Dell technologies world but that event has been moved to the fall but one of the major announcements from the event are going forward joining me to talk about powering up the mid-range of storage is Caitlin Gordon she is the vice president of marketing at Dell technologies Caitlin you thanks so much for joining thank you so much for having me Stu it's great to be here all right so Caitlin the last couple of years at a dtw different segments of the market as I said it's been powered up as the marketing messaging usually you've got some good t-shirts you've got a lot the labs and demos so tell us about the important announcement that you're sharing with today yeah I mean unfortunately the show is not going on but the product is still launching it actually is already started chipping and we are excited that we're still at be able to announce it this week our store is really probably the most exciting product they've ever gotten to help bring to market and all those demos and labs that you've talked about we're gonna have them all they're all going to be digital this year as well and it's really important for us as a business because it really changes what we're able to do for our customers you know we love speeds and feeds and storage but power store is so much more than that We certainly have designed it to meet the needs of all the workloads lock and file providing performance and efficiency but even more importantly what we built with this platform is something that will help our customers change the way that they're running their data centers and maybe most importantly can adapt with them as their businesses evolve yeah it's so important Caitlin I'm glad you talked about that you know you know the storage industry you know IP in general we can really get wonky and dig down to the speeds and feeds and yeah we want to understand you know how does nvm me and sports class memory and all that thing fit into but I want you to talk about you know what is that customer requirement that you're solving for in the age of AI and cloud you know what are the customers looking for what are those things that your cell for that maybe you know previous generations you go back to like the Unity ie this weren't on the table for discussion yeah I think one of the most interesting thing that's happened for us in the past few years in our conversations with customers is we do have the speeds and feeds the end-to-end nvme and octane and all that wonderful goodness but what they're really helped they're really asking for help on is how do they move towards this vision of having a truly autonomous data center how do they move to a fully self-service model so that all of their infrastructure can be treated like code and that you can automate all of those storage workflows picking out all of the additional costs and time and probably most importantly risk of manual tasks how do we have infrastructure that can be a more intelligent and helped them make more proactive and intelligent decisions that's one part of the equation the other piece is what we've heard loud and clear and this is now true more than ever before that infrastructure investments not only need to make sense for what the needs are today but also need to have the flexibility to adapt with businesses as they're going through this rapid and unpredictable transformation so that they can ensure that there are infrastructure investments today don't become technical debt tomorrow so that ability to have infrastructure that can adapt and evolve that the business is so important to our customers yes so Caitlin how is that done you know traditionally store do you think about it you know I buy a box like why did no way I write it off over 30 number years so what's different about you know the the service is and I'm guessing there's some financial pieces that make you know power store and the rest of the power family different than what I would have bought traditionally from buying a storage array yeah really the whole dynamic changes and it starts really foundationally with the flexible architecture so the product itself is built with the flexible architecture the ability the fact that it's a container based architecture were able to innovate on a container basis which makes our data services across the portfolio more consist enables us to innovate faster it also means that all of our innovation will be delivered to customers in a non disruptive way whether that's a hardware upgrade or a software upgrade all of that will happen without impacting the business that's really the flexible and adaptable architecture but when you look at the deployment that's an even bigger conversation how can we help and deliver infrastructure that gives you a solution that can support a small footprint at the edge collapse that infrastructure at the edge help with data center modernization connect into cloud and the last piece you're just touching on is that consumption more and more and then that's accelerated over the past month or so the ability to consume this as a service it's such an important part of what we're doing here in power stores available all of our Dell technologies on-demand offerings flex on-demand to give you that ability to really consume an infrastructure and an object model really interesting you talked about you know underneath the covers you know containerized architecture you know I think back the previous generations when you know EMC moved on to an intel-based architecture you know there's things where you say there's a major change in the code bases a major change in the architecture and from a customer standpoint they shouldn't have to think about it but I know there's so much work that goes through to make sure that things are rock-solid that it's still gonna provide you know X nines of capability and make sure that you can run your business on it helped us understand a little bit about you know how you know you said a lot of things have changed but we're still talking about things that you know you're running you know our business is on or you know mid-race customers for small enterprises midsize enterprise you know but what's what's still the same I guess is what I'm asking for today's storage compared to what we were looking at that yeah and if you look at it I mean the architecture itself is built as an architecture can pick conserve the broadest set of needs or the biggest set of our customer base so foundationally it supports all physical databases and applications we've got we've all support it's got performance that's really incredible compared to our previous lead mid range all flash solutions seven times faster three times better response times the efficiency of course is critical the ability to support that in a really small footprint with always-on inline data reduction four to one guaranteed the architecture not only scales up of course as a storage appliance but also can independently scale compute so they have the ability to scale up in an appliance and scale out into a cluster and of course you can't resist the buzzwords that's important and an nvme of course the ability to support nvme based flash drives or SEM and it's specifically actually the dual ported octane drive for persistent storage so when you look at it it truly is a best-in-class all flash mid-range storage array but it also does a lot more and that's part of the fun dynamic of what we've built okay so you know we talked about scaling up and scaling out you know of course you know we look at Bay's world two things that are critically important to customers it's my data and my applications obviously you know strong legacy at Dell EMC looking at the data you touched a little bit about the applications but you know tell me more how does this fit for you know my latest cloud native type environments you know how do applications fit into this environment yeah and it's really builds on what we're starting to talk about with that container based architecture so the fact that his container based is interesting and good for us because we can innovate faster it's even more important for customers and we can deliver that to them faster and more consistently what's more interesting is what we can then do for their workloads and their applications because we have this brand-new modular software operating system of course we can deploy that as a standard bare metal on purpose-built hardware or storage appliance what's even more interesting and what's really different about what we can do with our store is we can also abstract that storage OS from the underlying hardware onboard VMware ESXi and run both the storage operating system and applications natively on the appliance so able to collapse the compute and storage layers into a single piece of infrastructure and run a handful of specialized applications on that one appliance which really is game-changing in the data center at the edge to change the way that you can run and consolidate your operations okay yeah if you say specialize to applications so let let's build onion a little bit on that you know I think back obviously you know Dell has a very strong position in hyper-converged infrastructure which is scaling you know compute and storage and doing that an entire environment I remember there were a lot of efforts to say well with a virtualized environment maybe I hate storage and I can put applications on it that was there was use case with Isilon and to say you know I've got a lot of general-purpose compute if I have some excess capacity maybe I can do that it wasn't something that I heard used a lot so what sort of applications and how do kind of compare and contrast this with other things like like HDI yeah and this is power stores apps on capability and really what it's built for is these kind of two classes of applications the first is infrastructure apps so think of these as any type of application that the infrastructure team themselves is is leveraging and wants to simplify their operations antivirus data protection things like that the other category would be what we call data intensive so a data intensive application really is more storage intensive right either has a high demand for capacity and a small demand for compute or is one of these more latency sensitive applications real-time analytics is a good example things like blink and spark the response time is really King and when we look at that in comparison to what HCI is we have been and we are in a great position right with the xrail has been leading the hyper-converged market and we know that our customers are deploying that alongside three-tier architecture and what you look at what we've done with our store what we already have with rail they're highly complementary what we've done in HCI is we've taken storage and brought it into compute what we've done with power store we've taken storage and we brought compute into it and it really solves four different is optimized for different challenges and we really think complementing those in the data center next to each other is going to be an increasingly common deployment model to have the right architecture or the right workloads and then you have VMware consistent operations across the top so you have that consistent operations within your data center whoo edge and also to the cloud all right so end-to-end portfolio is what you're saying there's options for the different applications what one of the big challenges for storage people always is you know I always used to joke it's the four-letter word its migration so customers you know there there are very few Greenfield deployments out there so the existing Dell customers people out there that have been doing things in previous ways how do they get to power store and you know once they're on power Spore what does that mean for you know future you know growth expansion you know migration discussions yeah and I've heard this before right forklifts are not a friendly thing and the good news is with power store it is truly the end of data migration we've built with power store is an architecture that enables you to non-disruptive Li upgrade the controllers when new generations come out you can destructively operate those keep all the capacity in place and don't have any an impact to your business we also know the customers need to get data to powers for now getting to the 2 power store is going to be really really seamless we have invested significantly and a number of different migration options for our portfolio and for third-party to get data to our score and what seamless means could be different to different customers that can be non disruptive it could be agent lists it also could be host based we'll have all of those solutions from day one to enable that transition that happened as seamlessly as possible and on a customer's own time we've actually optimized this to the point where we now enable you to move data from an existing platform to our store in less than 10 players okay that that's great Kaitlyn so you know III remember back when Mendell first finished the acquisition of EMC one of the things we heard loud and clear with Jeff Clarke is a simplification of the portfolio it's something we've heard throughout the ranks remember talking to Jeff Boudreau about hinting at what was happening at the in the mid-range so what does this mean for existing mid-range lines and tell us about what we expect to see as this transition rolls out yeah absolutely so power store is absolutely our lead mid-range all-flash offering we continue to have unity XD is our lead hybrid mid-range solution and we have at end of life any of our other existing mid-range platforms what we know above anything else is that transformation and transitions in the data center and on storage race takes time and the important thing for us is that we enable our customers to do that on their own time and as seamlessly as possible so we have not announced a new end of life when we do we're going to have a long service life and we've built all of these different migration tools to help support that transition so it's going to be very easy for our customers to do that move on their own time and it still enables us to deliver on what we've promised you which is a simplified portfolio great Kaitlyn last thing I want to ask you is what's challenging for people is number one they've got kind of the skill set and the rules that they have today so there needs to be you know an easy migration to go from what they have to the new on the other hand also sometimes it you you want to take a clean sheet of paper and say boy if you could just start over and do it this way it's going to make your life so much easier so tell us how you're balancing that and how you can help both that you know you're your install base as well as you know new people coming in that might not have been traditional storage industry yeah I think the reality is that they're the specialized skill as a storage administrator isn't is something that will not be a growing skill set and we need to help our customers certainly support an operating model that does work like a storage array but does so in a way that is extraordinarily simple and has a lot of intelligence built in so first and foremost this is a storage platform and has really been designed who have the most seamless and simple operating experience from an element manager with our store manager for a storage admin but at the same time we know that for a variety of reasons a lot of customers have a single team that managed their infrastructure and is really moving into more of a cloud operating model and for that we've built in all of the integrations and tools with vmware whether it's Fiero vmware cloud foundation to really help vmware administrator also be able to operate the system as well excellent so it's just on that also how do things like analytics fit into the entire monitoring discussion help us understand how that fits in with some of the rest of the Dell portfolio yeah that's exactly where I was going to go over the last piece of this is why would I Q is something that's really important is Prateek for us cloud IQ of course comes with power so it comes with all of our storage offerings today we're officially announcing it coming across our infrastructure portfolio as well and that's really game-changing for customers in a number of different ways first is it really helps produce risk in the environment because it shows you a health scare or for your data center and if it has an issue it will quickly help you pinpoint that and troubleshoot it before it ever actually becomes a problem that impacts your business you're gonna help you predict your future user needs things like predictive analytics built into cloud IQ help you do capacity forecasting and planning so that you can see exactly when you're going to get to those thresholds of 80 90 100 percent capacity and remedy that board impacts the business and with it now coming across the entire infrastructure portfolio the value it can bring is outside of just storage alone but to the entire data center and one of the biggest things our customers and partners have loved about Cloud IQ is the trusted advisor feature that allows these are our reps or partner to have the ability to be part of that cloud IQ experience he read into from a mobile application or from a web browser have that remote monitoring of the environment and add that human intelligence to the machine intelligence really manage that data center and help our customers stay on top of problems and stay ahead of them before they impact the business well Kaitlyn congratulations the whole power store team we understand a lot of hard work goes into building this and really look forward to by the time we get to Delta technology's world in the fall talking to customers that are using thanks so much for joining us and look forward to talking with you again thanks - great to see you all right be sure to check out the cube dotnet for all the upcoming events that we're doing right now of course a hundred percent remote I'm sue minimun and thank you for watching the Q [Music]

(light music). >> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCube covering Dell technologies world 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everybody and welcome back to theCube's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Travis Vigil. He is the Senior Vice President Product Management at Dell EMC. Thank you so much for coming on theCube, for returning to theCube I should say. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Here from Austin Texas. >> Yes. Yes I am. >> Mothership. So there is a lot of great storage news so much storage news this week. Break it down for us. What are some of the sort of the headlines that you'd like our viewers to know about? >> Yeah there was a ton this morning in the keynote but for me it was three of the announcements in particular are something that I'm really excited about. The first is that we announced the unity XT which is the next generation platform of our unity product line. We've been shipping unity for a little less than three years. And in that time, we've actually shipped in nearly 80000 units. So it's been very successful for us. It's been known for flexibility, unified block and file, simplicity, value and with this release we're really taking it to the next level. We are increasing the performance entirely new hardware platform. It increases the performance up to 2x versus the previous generation. We're increasing data reduction rates up to five to one data reduction rate. It's NVMe ready and it's also architected for a hybrid cloud world. We call it cloud ready. So that's one thing. The second thing I'm excited about is actually that cloud ready part that I just talked about on unity XT. So we announced Dell EMC Cloud storage services today. And basically what that allows you to do is consume unity, Isilone or power Max as a service with direct connections into multiple public clouds which is really cool. And so if you're a customer like a unity XT customer for example, an awesome use case would be hybrid disaster recovery as a service. You don't have to have a secondary data center and you can actually use a ready native replication from on premises to the cloud. We showed a demonstration on stage where we are actually able to fail over to VMC on AWS automatically across on premises and what is consumed as a service unity XT in the cloud. I'm also excited about this capability because if you look at our Isilon product line, the fact that you can direct connect into multiple different public clouds is really cool because what a lot of people use Isilon for is big data analytics, streaming. A lot of the applications that are driving the unstructured data growth need burst compute. And so if you can sit in a data center right next to these multiple public clouds and be able to pick which compute that you want to use with your Isilon and have a customer be able to consume that as a service that's pretty exciting. So cloud services on the portfolio, a big part of the announcement today that I'm excited about. And the third thing I'm excited about is all the other things we announced around Isilon in general. We announced an entirely new software upgrade, a new OS 1fsa.2. That release increases the scalability of our Isilon clusters from 144 to 252. So big increase. Isilon is already known for having a very big single namespace. And so you might be asking well who really needs 252 nodes in a single cluster? Well believe me when I tell you autonomous driving or connected car, media and entertainment are very interested in this capability from us. So those are the big three for me what we're doing on unity XT, what we're doing in terms of cloud Connectivity and what we're doing with respect to Isilon. >> Travis I wonder if we could zoom out for a second here. I think we're at an interesting transition point when you talk about the storage industry. I think historically, storage is highly fragmented. I had my tier one storage, I had my mid-range storage, we had object storage, we had special HPC storage and there are so many different subcategories that you put in the environment. I wrote an article when Dell bought EMC. I said this is the end of the storage industry as we knew it. And I come to a show like this, cloud, hyper converging infrastructure. All of these pieces, storage is important but you just walk through many of the speeds and feeds and some of the new product lines that come out. But storage at the center and the storage admin, that's what EMC World was that's not what I hear at Dell technologies World. Give us kind of where we are in that transformation and of course I'm not saying that two years from now, we're in a storage-less world and nobody thinks about it 'cause data is more important than ever. >> Absolutely. >> Price capacity points are enabling customers to do more with it. So would love just kind of you to reflect back on where we are and where we're going for the market here. >> Yeah that's an excellent question Stu. I think you're exactly right. The discussions that we're having with customers more and more are centered around what you're trying to do, what business problem are you trying to solve? And you look within the portfolio, there have been places that we've done that before like with Isilon, it was very vertical industry focused. Speaking in the language of the customers around healthcare genomics or media and entertainment or whatever industry vertical we were targeting. More and more for the core I.T. buyer it's I want the infrastructure to work with my ecosystem. I'm investing in VMware so I want VRO plugins or I'm utilizing Ansible as my management and orchestration layer. So I want an Ansible playbook. And so if you look at what we've announced on power Max as part of this show, VRO, CSI and Ansible plugins or adapters for power Macs are a big part of what we're announcing because more and more, the customers that we're talking to want the storage to be good performance, cost effective, autonomous in terms of making a lot of decisions and optimizing itself but they want it to work in the broader ecosystem. So I was just having a conversation with a very large customer over in the EBC area earlier and we were talking about power Max and we were talking about all the cool things and all the new speeds and feeds, start talking about the Ansible playbook and that's when the customer leaned in and was like "Tell me more. "How does that work? "Because we're doing Ansible". So I think you're exactly right. I think whether you talk about management and orchestration or you whether you talk about the Dell Tech cloud platform where you can have storage as a piece of that. The conversation is shifting to a higher level, to the application or business problem level. >> Yeah I love it. Take us a little bit at that application space where to spend a bunch of the conversations talking everything from dev ops to containerization and micro services. When you talk about hybrid cloud. Well if I want similar to what the cloud environment is, that's usually what I'm doing. And sure, the VMware piece plays into that too but usually modernization ties into it and I know I've been hearing that story quite a lot bit more when I talked to storage people today. >> Yeah absolutely. I think the dev ops conversation with storage admins is probably one of the most popular conversation we're having. What are you doing for CSI plugins? We just announced one for our extreme IO product line, a lot of interest, a lot of conversations around that. And I think the conversation is also shifting to help me manage it, help me get me more intelligence about my storage estate versus speeds and feeds so one of the key conversations we have with customers is around a capability we have which is called Cloud IQ which I like to call it a health tracker for your storage estate. It gives you statistics, it gives you capacity trending. It gives you performance trending, it uses A.I. to predict capacity spikes or performance anomalies. And it's really an awesome tool for our customers because customers that use that are able to resolve issues in their environment three times faster than customers that don't. So I think you're absolutely right Stu, the conversation is more about how do I use the storage array in my environment? What ecosystems am I supporting? So it works with all the other stuff that I have to deal with. >> So digital transformation has been the buzzword of the last five years and the theme of this year's real transformation. I want to talk a little bit about implementation of these big technology initiatives. How do you work with customers to define exactly what they need, gather, garner support and make sure everyone is pulling in the same direction and wants the same thing? And then really bring it together. I mean is that, first of all, a challenge? And then second of all, walk us through the steps of what you do. >> Yeah I think to the earlier conversation there is a spectrum of conversations that we're having with customers and as Dell Technologies, we talk to customers big and small and we talk to customers who want to procure a solution or they want to procure an array. And I think the common thread in the conversations we're having is, give me the information that I need so that I can easily integrate it into my environment. And we're not out of the world where people care about IOPS and latency and all the speeds and feeds in the storage array. But increasingly there's customers are like "Yeah, yeah I need that "but I need you to tell me how it works "in my oracle environment "or my SAP environment". And so you can look at a lot of the solutions that Dell Technologies is bringing together via our solutions group. We've brought out an A.I. solution and with computing, networking and storage. We're focusing on SAP as a high value workload where customers again, compute networking and storage how do you bring it all together and kind of t shirt size the different solutions. So you know I think that if I look at it from a product lens that's how we're approaching it. There's also a services lens to look at it which is there's many customers that still want to do it themselves. And there's many customers that say "Hey can I get a managed service? "Can you just do it for me?" So we have a broad spectrum of customers and many customers that are on different places on that journey but it's definitely the conversations no matter where you're starting are all trending to, I want you to do more so I can focus on my business and my applications. >> So Travis really we've merged through the largest acquisition in tech history. You came from the Dell side. >> I did. >> The Dell storage side so would just love to get real quick your perspective on being in the Dell storage team to now being in the Dell Technologies, Dell EMC storage team and what that impact's been when you're meeting with customers that huge booster into the enterprise space too. >> Yeah it's been an amazing journey over these last two plus years. I guess going on three years now and I took a little break from being outside of the product group and I came back about a year ago. And so you're right I ran product management for Dell storage for quite some time and then I had the great opportunity to come back and run product management for all of Dell EMC storage. And you know I think there's a lot of stuff that's the same. We're still driving the roadmap, we're still prioritizing customer needs. We're still striving to provide the best possible solution for customers in what we do as a storage array or what we do in a broader solution. But you know the coming together of Dell and EMC from my perspective, it's been a great success. We had a lot of strength on the compute side, we had a small storage business. EMC had a large storage business. And so the combination of the two it's just been like chocolate and peanut butter. I mean it's been really good and I'm amazed at all the conversations and all the customers that have invested in Dell EMC for their storage infrastructure. When we have some of these customer events and you have name brand universities or large government entities and they're there giving you feedback about how they're using Isilon or ECS or whatever in their environment it's just a really impressive portfolio that we have and it's been an absolute joy. >> Well that's great. Next year I want the Dell EMC candy bar. So there's your next product idea (laughs). >> With chocolate and peanut butter. Yeah I would want it too. >> Travis thank you so much it was a pleasure having you on the cube. >> Alright. Awesome. Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, there is so much more of theCube's live coverage from Dell Technologies world coming up just after this. (light music)

>> Narrator: 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 here on theCUBE. We continue our live coverage here from Dell Technologies World 2018. We are live, we are in Las Vegas. I'd say it was kind of warm when we first got here, but it's chilled off a little bit so I hope the weather is a little bit better wherever you are. But it's red hot inside here as far as what's happening on the show floor. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls. It is now our pleasure to welcome to our set, Susan Sharpe who's a senior consultant product manager at Dell. Susan, good to see you. >> Thank you very much. >> John: And Brian Henderson, director of Storage Portfolio Product Marketing at Dell EMC. Brian, good to have you both. >> Thank you >> Cube, rookies right? This is your-- >> I'm a rookie. >> First-timer >> Your debut, right? >> Yes >> First-timer >> Glad to break you in that way. It's good to have you here. Let's talk about the show. Just first off. Because we are starting to wind down, just a little bit. But you know strong attendance. I've been out on the solutions expo floor, that's really cool. A lot of great stuff going on out there. So the two of you what's your take on what you've seen here over the last three days? >> Yeah, I think there's a lot of transformation, right? It's all about transformation I think we're seeing that across the industry overall. Everything is changing everything is connected. It's all about apps these days. It's all about digitizing your business. Anywhere you can add technology to really add that element of your technology and digital modernization to your business. It's really starting to take shape, I think. A couple of years back, we were talking it but it wasn't really happening. And now we're seeing this huge trend towards everybody is actually starting to do it. >> John: Making it real, right? >> We're making it real. >> Alright Susan what do you think? >> So, I think he summarized it really well, I would just add to that automation and intelligence. Looking for systems to provide the insights and intelligence about the environment and simplify people's work. >> Brian and Susan, since it is your first time on the program tell us a little bit about what you've worked on. I've got some history with you, you're both what we call legacy EMC now, I guess. Like myself, I never worked for Dell EMC but I did work for a company that used to be called EMC. >> Absolutely, yeah we go way back Stu and I. Right now we're seeing a lot of sensible decisions being made. I'd say if you go way back, There was just a lot of things happening, there was a lot of a lot of smart moves being made these days. Michael Dell obviously made a huge investment in picking up EMC and for a lot of us, it's super exciting to see kind of it come together and there's been a lot of changes a lot of investments in the technologies of the future. Things like Cloud IQ which we're going to talk about. But it's been really fun. >> Great and Susan, what projects are you working on these days? >> So, Cloud IQ is my primary focus. As we talk more about the product I'll give some examples. But, we started with Cloud IQ very focused on one particular storage platform and now what we're looking at doing is expanding that across multiple platforms. So I get to be singularly focused on the Cloud IQ, but looking at it spanning across multiple platforms. >> I attended an event that Dell held towards the end of last year, they called it IQT and it was IOT with intelligence put together and some of us the analysts it was like okay, I see what you're doing but IOT everybody knows. Cloud IQ I think there's intelligence built into it. One of the themes, I've actually been looking this week, we've talked about intelligent storage, and intelligent management for a couple of decades in our industry but maybe explain a little bit more about the product and why is this actually intelligent now. No offense to the things we've tried in the past (Susan laughs) >> Susan: Sure >> But definitely, to your point Brian, it feels a little more real some of these things we're talking about. >> Yeah, absolutely so if you see what's going on with the industry today, everybody's connecting things and you know we've been collecting a lot of data in a very secure way from our customers for years. Just until recently we started to kind of talk about that and market that capability. It's really exciting what we can do with it. We make sure and we honor each customer their privacy rights, of course. But you're able to do a lot of in-depth analysis, collection We're able to look for anomalies in the system. So, the analogy I like to use is like a Fitbit for storage. It's not just storage, so we're kind of starting at storage which is the exciting part we're starting with unity we're now directed availability on the SC series which was formerly Compellent and then we're going to expand that to VMAX we're going to expand that to Xtremio so we're going to go cross portfolio with that and, can we talk about virtualization? >> Sure >> So we're going to expand into the vmware layer as well. So we're going to really start with a discrete use case we've got what, over 3,500 arrays already connected today. We're adding about 100 per week So, it's really exciting to see the data that we're able to get. We give it back to our customers and partners actually, so a lot of our key partners they want to be able to act as that intermediary for their customer and give them guidance on what to do. So, we've opened that up. >> Let me get into the Fitbit analogy. So what is the health that we're looking at there because we could all relate to that, right? We're looking at my pulse and blood pressure, all those things so what's the pulse and the blood pressure inside stories that you're looking at? >> A perfect lead in, so you talk about the typical metrics from a Fitbit in terms of the human body. The metrics that we're looking at in terms of the health and the categories that we're looking at are the typical things that you would care about in terms of your storage environment. So the things like data protection, are you maintaining your data protection windows and recovery point objectives and ensuring that your data is being protected the way that you expect. Things like capacity and ensuring that you are not at an imminent risk of running out of capacity. Nobody likes that phone call at two in the morning so being able to be proactive about indicating when storage administrators need to start taking action to be able to prevent that call at two in the morning. So some of those areas are where we're looking at our health score. >> Susan, I think back years ago EMC was one of the leaders in doing some of this. It was the phone home capability and we understood what was there. Customers always say, "Oh! The tech showed up with some part "that was ready to fail before we even knew." How is this different? What's this update? How did this change really how businesses are working when it comes to everything? >> I'm glad you lead with that because I think it's really important as a side note to emphasize that that is the foundation and has been the foundation for proactive health for many years. Now what we're doing is we're adding on additional areas of focus like the example that I gave for the data protection. That wouldn't result in the phone home necessarily and it doesn't need to result in the storage engineer showing up or the drive showing up at the door. Instead we can proactively alert our storage administrators to the fact, again, that their data is not being protected with the service level that they expect, and then provide that clear remediation about what they need to do to bring those into that compliance. So instead of break/fix type things, it's more about how they can better optimize their environment to be able to meet the goals that they have. >> When you're talking about support these days I mean that games changing right? >> Absolutely >> And so, as you develop new capabilities and new evaluation tools I mean your service in general, the support your giving, you've got to come out with almost like a new paradigm is it not? How is that changing in your world now? >> So, we see that I mean Susan talked about what we've done in the past how we're changing it and now it's, I go back to analogies right? So you used to go to the doctor when you got sick now it's all about wellness so you're encouraged to go a little more often to get a checkup, so we're doing the same types of things. We give health scores on a range of zero to 100 and we're able to drill in to those specific parameters that Susan talked about to be able to show people how to kind of set up a best practices environment. So we're really starting to get a lot more proactive about how people can understand the health of their system. We now have an app so people can actually check it out remotely. You could be on a beach somewhere on your vacation and you don't have to worry about your system because you can quickly scan it, and check in on the status of your system. So that's what I think people want, they want more access to things so they're able to proactively understand it instead of react and it's all crazy. >> Let me ask you about the number let's just pretend 85, I got 85 whatever, is that telling me that I'm doing something wrong? Or that something has gone wrong within the system? I mean, what is that telling me exactly about what irregularity has occurred? Is it because of something by commission, or is it omission and I've got a systemic problem? >> Well that's a great question. It could be any of those things, right? So, one of the main things that we're looking at, I gave the example, for instance, of a storage pool that is already oversubscribed because we have great efficiencies on our storage systems. But if that pool is oversubscribed and is starting to reach using our predictive analytics we can identify when that pool is starting to reach full capacity starting within a quarter. And so, by being able to look at that it may be that a storage administrator provisioned more storage in a given pool than was intended. But it may just be that the storage ended up being consumed faster than what was expected by everyone involved. So, it's not necessarily that someone did something wrong per se, but it's that it's now time to pay attention take action be proactive and alleviate the risk. >> I got you. >> Brian, walk us through just some of the basics of this product itself. >> Brian: Sure >> Is it something stand alone? Is it part of a maintenance package? >> Brian: Yeah yeah yeah >> Available today? How many customers are using this? >> Sure, so the product became available in kind of an early release capacity when we announced Unity two years back. Since then it's grown over 3,500 array. We're probably up around 4,000 arrays now. And we keep adding about 100 per week. The product is built with our own pivotal cloud foundry so it can be kind of ported across multiple different clouds it lives in the cloud and so you can access it anywhere, and what you're able to do is quickly get the health score. So it's plugged into your system, the back-end is also plugged into our big data lake so we're understanding what's happening across multiple systems, but we give specific guidance to each system. It's going to be really really valuable when we span it across the entire portfolio. Because then you'll get this dashboard kind of health score across the entire environment and you're basically looking at the dashboard of systems and you'll see kind of the red, yellow, green type markings of what to do next. Like Susan said, you're not going to find out everything just from that number, you'll drill in and what they've done is they've programmed in remediation tips for each one. So you're able to start really kind of high level and then drill into each component after that. >> Does that come with unities? Is it a SaaS offering? >> Comes free with that. It's SaaS offering that comes with that. >> Great, so maybe Susan walk us through this expansion that we've talked a little bit about. Once it's on the next platform everybody that has the platform gets it? >> Everybody has access to that, so Cloud IQ, one thing I want to add and I will get to that in just a moment is the benefit this is probably obvious already but the benefit of the fact that it is hosted in the cloud means that customers don't have anything to deploy and just like your smart phone, you get all of the latest upgrades with no effort at all. And we have a little "What's new in Cloud IQ" feature that you can always be up to date. So, the process is this it's very simple once the customer sets up the storage system and then the secure pipe, so secure remote services for heritage EMC products and support assist for the SC series bringing that data into the data lake then at that point the customer simply logs onto CloudIQ.DellEMC.com supply us their support credentials and they will see the systems that are being managed by Cloud IQ. And if I may just add another thing, we were talking about the proactive health score that is based on rules and best practices from the subject matter experts for each platform and those scans, those health checks start running within the first hour of the systems being in Cloud IQ so you're automatically, customer's are automatically getting the benefit of Cloud IQ. Excuse me. >> So, is it self-fix then? I mean, if I see red do I have the tools to get to yellow get to green? Or do I-- (stammers) What do I do? Do I call you? Or am I equipped enough that I can plug the leak myself? >> Absolutely, I'd say most of the issues are best practices recommendations. So you'll be able to get in there and see alright, uh something happened. Let's go back to the health analogy. If your resting heart rate is 75 and then one day it's all of a sudden 125, there's probably an issue, right? So that's uh that's a bad health score. >> Right, that's a red. (Susan laughs) >> That's a red flag what you need to do is probably get a little more exercise or maybe there's something stressing you out. That's kind of a similar analogy of what's happening. So, there's something in the system we have an anomaly prediction system that's part of this and so if you're normal IOPS pattern is a certain thing and then one day it's really really low or really high compared to the average we're also going to red flag that and we're going to tell you you ought to just look at what's happening in your environment. Most of the issues we're going to say, "Okay, you're running out of space. "There's a configuration issue. "Your network may not be hooked up just right "Go check it out and by the way, "based on your signature pattern "we're going to actually recommend what to do next." So we're collecting all these problem signatures and that's able to kind of get to a resolution very quickly. >> Yeah, Susan I know one of the things that people attending this show from the Dell EMC slide love the most get to talk to a lot of customers. So what kind of asks they're giving you, what kind of feedback they're giving you, what's on their wish list and you know, general feedback on Cloud IQ. >> The general feedback is more, faster. (laughs) We talked about the platforms that we're going to be adding in. There's a lot of enthusiasm about that. Those are based on asks from last year, so we are addressing those asks. And now that they see the momentum, they're wanting us to continue that momentum and continue to expand work Cloud IQ will be applied. I would say, hands down, that's the biggest request. And I love that request! I would love to see Cloud IQ expand as much as possible. >> Well here's to wishing 100s across the board for everybody's score card. Nothing but green, right? That's all we want. (Susan laughs) >> Brian: Absolutely >> Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you >> John: We appreciate the time and the insight. >> Thank you very much >> John: Fitbit for your IT operations All right back with more you are watching theCUBE here we are live at Dell Technologies World 2018 and we're in Las Vegas. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We are here live at Dell EMC World 2017, our eighth year coverage with the Cube. Formerly EMC World, now Dell EMC World. This is the Cube's coverage. I'm John Furrier, my cohost, Paul Gillin. Our next two guests are Craig Bernero, who is the senior vice president general manager of the midrange and entry storage solutions at Dell EMC. And Pierluca Chiodelli, VP appliance management at Dell. Guys, welcome to the Cube. Great to see you guys. >> Likewise. >> Thank you. >> Give us the update. We're hearing a ton of stories, 'cause the top stories, obviously the combination, merger, acquisition, whatever side you want to call acquired who. But all good, good stories. I mean, some speed bumps, little bumps along the way, but nothing horrific. Great stories. Synergies was the word we've been hearing. So you got to have some great growth with the Dell scale. Entry-level touchpoint growth, high end, get more entry level, give us the update. >> Yeah, absolutely. So again, first and foremost, I wanted to call out to all our customers and partners that are critical for the success that we've seen. No doubt, and actually, we've committed better together one fourth, which is why you saw two of our launches, both on the Unilining and the Assine line, which historically were part of EMC and Dell respectively prior. And main point is, a lot of the feedback we got from customers was they really respected and appreciate our customer choice first philosophy. But also understanding that there's clear demarkation where each of those technologies play in their sweet spot-- >> Well, how are you demarcating them right now? >> Absolutely, so traditionally, pre the EMC acquisition, what we actually ended up determining is, when you define the midrange market segment we were looking at, it was more in the upper range, upper level of it, where they're driving value from a technology aspect and with their Unity product set. We are focusing heavily into the all-Flash market segment, too, which is one of the major refreshes we did here. And then in the Dell storage, which is very server affinity, a direct attached construct at the entry through the lower end of the midrange band, it was actually some very clear swim lanes of where each of the respective products played to their strengths as well. And so as a result of that, we've really taken that to heart with our hybrid offering on the C side to get your economics. Again, effectively, our 10 cents per gig as they've rolled it outlined on Monday as far as the most affordable hybrid solution there on the market. And then you go to the upper, premium level of value capability, with all Flash to deal with your performance workloads and other characteristics, too. >> Here Luca, talk about the overlap, because we address that, we hit him head on with that. Turns out, not a lot of overlap. But as you guys come together with, we just had Toshiba on earlier. Flash is obviously big part of the success. Getting those price points down to the entry, midrange, enabling that kind of performance and cost is key, but as you look at the product portfolio, where are the areas you guys are doubling down on, and where is kind of some of the overlapping taking care of, if any? >> Yeah, so let me tell you, the first thing that is very important and we have in the show is the reaffirmation of the investment in the two product. So we have a panel entry yesterday also a panel with 120 customer. Divide 50% between the legacy, the heritage Dell and the EMC customer, and the amazing things there was the Flash adoption is very strong, but also they want to have it economical, so Four I is very strong. So this is really feet to our two product. Because if you remember, Compellan has been created as the best storage for data progression. And we double down on Unity now that we are now that we are now so completely full line of Unity product today. So in the other face, on the FC line, we reaffirmed the completion of the family with the new 5020. That provide more performance, more capacity, much more lenience. And we'll drive our 4020 customer to a very new product. So yes, some people before they think, "Oh these guys, they have a lot of overlap." But actually, we have two amazing product that they play together in this market. >> And talk about the customer dynamic, 'cause that's interesting about that. Almost the 50/50 split as you mentioned. They got to be, I mean, not, their indifference is probably, they're probably like, "Bring on the better product." I'm not hearing any revolts. Right, that no one's really revolting. Can you just share the perspective of some of the insight that they're telling you about, what they're expecting from you guys? >> So I think it's very fun to be in this position where we are right now, where we have such a good portfolio of product where a customer, company, people inside of our company start to learn how this product works. Because you sell what you know, right? Or you use what you know. People, right, try to do the same things every day. So we are forced now to look outside of our part and say, "You know, we have two product. "What is the benefit?" And now, we sparkle this discussion with the customer. And in any customer, we have before tremendous amount of common customer, right? The customer, they have a preference, but now they say, "Oh let me," an EMC customer say, "Maybe I have a huge case for "an all-Flash upgrade with Unity." And the SC customer say, "Oh, maybe now I can run "this application on Unity or SC "or Open App to a different things." What we say is, this is the line I use. We are the top one now because we can solve any use case. Right, if you look at our competitors, they try to cover everything with one product, right? >> John: You can mix and match. >> Yes, you can mix and match and we have a very differential part between the two. And we said, "SC economy, drive economy with the fact "that we can have a de-looped compression on speedy media." Unity optimized for Flash. >> Is there any incompatibility between the two? Do the two platforms work pretty seamlessly together? >> Pierluca: Yes. >> Yeah, so I'm going to expand a little further on that. So one of the things we did highlight as part of the all-Flash offering for Unity, 350 through the 650, the four new entry models, customers were surprised, you know. And there were some questions on the level of innovation we're driving. A year later, getting a full platform refresh was a very big surprise for customers. I typically, two years, 18 months of other vendors in the field, and they're like, "You just launched "the product last year, and you already have a refresh." And we did that 'cause we listened to customer requirements and the all-Flash, the performances as absolutely critical, so the controller upgrade. We went from a Haswell to Broadwell design. We actually added additional core capabilities in memory, and all with the architecture built to do an online date and place upgrade that will be driving later in the year, too. So, and the SC 5020 that we announced too as a separate product line to complementing, as Pierluca stated, but the third area that hasn't been necessarily amplified but customers have raved about seeing in the showroom area is our Cloud IQ technology, which is actually built off of Cloud Foundry. That's a value, the portfolio of the company and a strategic aligned business. And actually, it does preemptive and proactive not only monitoring, but we're taking that from Jeff Boudreau's keynote today. That whole definition of autonomous and self-aware storage well, in midrange 'cause of all the use cases and requirements, we're driving that into it. And there's actually, we have compatibility between Unity and SC in Cloud IQ. As that one pane of glass, it's not helmet manager, but more to take that value to a whole new level. And we're going to continue to drive that level innovation beyond, not just through software, but clearly leveraging better together talent to really solve some key business needs for customers. >> As David Guilden always says in the Cube, it's better to have overlap than holes in a product line. So that's cool that you guys got that addressed, and certainly mixing and match, that's the standard operating procedure these days in a lot of guys in IT. They know how to do that. The key is, does it thread together? So, congratulations. The hard question that I want to ask you guys and what everyone wants to know about, where the customer wins? Okay, because at the end of the day, you'd be number one at whatever old category scoreboard. >> Craig: Sure. >> Scoreboard of customers is what we're looking at. Are you getting more customers? Are they adopting, are they implementing a variety of versions? Give us the updates on the wins and what the combination is of Dell EMC coming together. What has that done for sales and wins? >> Yeah, so there's a public blog I posted for Dell EMC World, and it's about the one two punch with midrange storage. >> John: What was the title of that blog post? >> It was basically a one two punch, our midrange storage. And I'll provide you the link in followup. >> John: I'll look at it later. >> The reason we preemptively provided that was the biggest question I would get from customers was, which product are you going to choose? And our point was, both, right? Both products, the power of the portfolio. We don't need to choose one. Our install base on both those technologies is significant. But in that post, I also did quote some of the publicly available IEDC data, which showed us in our last quarter, in Q4, where you compare Q3 to Q4, we actually had double digit quarter growth for both Uni and SC, our primary leading lines in both the portfolio, which actually allowed us to get effectively back into a midrange market share segment. Now that's for purpose build. >> That reflects a very positive trend for Dell EMC midrange storage portfolio. I'm quoting directly from your blog post. One two punch drives midrange storage momentum. >> Craig: Correct. >> And it's not only the storage, right? I've been with a very big customer of ours. I was telling to an analyst this morning it's amazing to see the motion of the business that we can do now that we are Dell EMC. So being a private company in one sense allows us to do creative things that we didn't do before. So we can actually position not only one product or two product, but the entire portfolio. And as you see, with the server business, the affinity that some of the storage they have with the server, we can drive more and more adoptions for our work class. >> Just quickly, how is your channel reacting to all this? Are they fully on board, do they understand? Are they out there selling both solutions? >> 100%, we put a lot of investment into our channel enablements across the midrange storage products in portfolio as well, 'cause that's the primary motion that we drive as well. And that it allowed us to actually enable them for success, both in education enablement, and clearly, proper incentives in play. They're very well received. The feedback we've gotten has been overwhelmingly positive. And we've been complementing that more and more with constant refresher of not only our technology and sharing roadmap delivery so that it can plan ahead as that storage is used. >> I asked Mike Amerius Hoss and David Guilden the question, they both had the same answers. It's good to see them on the same page. But I said, you know, what's, where are the wins? And they both commented that where there's EMC Storage, they bring more Dell in. Where there's Dell, they bring more EMC Storage in. >> Yes, that's why they judged this with this customer. The new business motion that we can now propose like we have a very loyal customer from Arita GMC for example, but now we can offer also server, a software define on top of all that and the storage, right? And you can enter from the other one, from the server and position now a full portfolio of storage. >> Alright, I'm going to ask you a personal question. I'd like to get your reactions. Take your EMC hat off for a second. Put your industry participant, individual hat on. What's the biggest surprise from the combination, from your area of expertise and your jobs that you've personally observed with the combination? Customer adoption, technology that wasn't there, chaos, mayhem, what? >> Yeah, so I'll comment first. I think the, I mean, recognizing the real power of global scale, and what I mean by that is the combined set. So from an organization and R and D investment, being able to have global scale, where you have engineering working literally 24 by five, right, based on effectively, a follow the sun model, that's how you're seeing that innovation engine just cranking into high gear. And that was further extended with the power of the supply chain and innovation bringing together has been in my opinion, super powerful, right? 'Cause couple customers had shared with me, it's like, my concern if I go with a startup that may not be in business and relative to the supply chain leverage and the level of innovation, breadth, and depth of products that we have. >> Craig, that's a great point. Before we go to Pierluca, I just want to comment on that. We're seeing the same thing in the marketplace. A lot of the startups can't get into the pure storage play because scale requirements is now the new barrier entry, not necessarily the technology. >> Exactly. >> Not necessarily the technology, so that kind of reaffirms, that's why the startups kind of are doing that a lot of data protection, white space stuff. And their valuations, by the way, are skyrocketing. Go ahead, your comment, observation that surprised you or didn't surprise you, took you by storm, what? >> I need to say that I'm living a dream in this moment because I think it's a few times in life that you can experience a trust formation. And you can have the ability, actually, in my role that I have right now to accelerate this trust formation. And that it's not the common things to do in the company that is already established. So this shape, this come together give you more and more opportunity. So I'm so very exciting to do what I'm doing, and I love it. >> Injection of the scale, and more capabilities, it's like, go to the gym and you're like pumped up, you're in shape. >> Actually, I started to go to the gym after 20 years. (laughing) >> It's like getting a good meal. You're Italian, you appreciate a good buffet of resource, right? >> That's right. >> Dell's got the gourmet-- >> You know, every day, I find something new, some product that I didn't know, something that we did, innovation that we have in the company that we can actually use together. It's very very exciting. >> And the management teams are pretty solid. They didn't really just come in and decimate EMC. They essentially, it was truly a combination. Some say that EMC acquired Dell, some say Dell acquired EMC. But the fact that is even discussed shows a nice balance in terms of a lot of EMC at the helm. Its great sales force, great commercial business with Dell, very well play, I think. You guys feel the same way? >> I appreciate that, and couldn't agree more. And I think it shows as you look at business results and even from an employee satisfaction level. We continue to see that being record high, 'cause there's always that uncertainty, but the interesting piece is people have really been jazzed based on opportunity ahead. >> Alright, we're done complimenting. Let's get to the critical analysis. What's on the roadmap? >> Craig: A lot. >> Tell us what's coming down the pike. I know you privately do your earnings call, but you guys have been transparent, some of the things. What can you say about what's coming out for customers? What can they expect from you guys in the storage? >> I'll let Pierluca run the product management team. He drives that every day. >> So I do not say much, things that I'm getting. >> Share all, come on. You're telling, just spill it out. Come on. You and your dream, come on, sell it. >> We have only 20 minutes, so, really, as I said, we announced the 5020, right, we add the 7020 in August. We are planning to finish the lineup of the new family of SC for sure. We announced the ability to tiering to the Cloud, we're going to expand that. Also, we announced a full new set a family of Flash Unity. So we're going down that trajectory to offer more and more. And we are going to be very bold to offer also upgrades from old jan to the new jan and non-destructive upgrade and also a line upgrade. So it's a very very beefy roadmap that we show with our customer in the A and DH section. I need to say the feedback is tremendous, and to your point at the beginning, what is the ecosystem? How do you integrate the thing? You're going to see more and more, for example, the UI, the experience for the customer being the same. So the experience from the UI perspective-- >> Paul: Simplicity. >> Yes, simplicity. >> Paul: Simplicity is the new norm. >> Cloud IQ key, but also going between the products who have the same kind of philosophy. >> Hey, I always say, this great business model, make thins super fast, really easy to use, and really intuitive. Can't go wrong with that triple threat right there. So that's like what you guys are doing. >> Yes. >> Absolutely. >> Guys, thanks so much for coming on the Cube and sharing insight and update. Congratulations on the one two punch and the momentum and the success. That's the scoreboard we look at on the Cube. Are customers adopting it? Sharing all the data here inside the Cube live in Las Vegas with Dell EMC World 2017, stay with us for more coverage after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering Dell EMC World 2017 brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back here on The Cube, the Flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV. We rap up our coverage today, day two of Dell EMC World 2017. We're live in Las Vegas. I'm John Walls along with Rebecca Knight and joining us now all the way from Tobacco Road Patrick Williams, who is the IT Infrastructure Architect at North Carolina State University in beautiful Raleigh, North Carolina. Patrick, thank you for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Tell us first of all, you know, academically, you're the first, somebody from that community that we have a chance to speak with over the past two days. What are you seeing here that you are going to find of interest that you might want to take back with you to Raleigh, that maybe you're going to put into practice? >> Right, so we're really taking a look at the technologies that we have in play, and there's been a lot of new announcements at the conference this year, so we have Unity Storage, we have Data Domain and there's been announcements pretty much across that product spectrum, so we've been looking, going to breakout sessions talking to the experts and trying to take a look at the technology and see how we can take advantage of the new features that are offered in our environment. >> So before the cameras were rolling, you were setting the scene a little bit and describing the kinds of data needs, security needs that you have for a busy, thriving, and large college campus. Can you lay that out for our viewers? >> Right so for a college campus, one of the biggest concerns is around security, so there's a mandate or desire, probably as part of the academic culture to be as open as possible because the goal is to exchange ideas and to share resources between the university and across our set of institutions. So contrast that with the reality that we have to maintain a high level of security now, so there's obviously a lot of incidents. We are a Google Mail university and as you know, there was recently an attack on Gmail, right? So one of the things that we've had to do is to say, "We're going to implement Two Factor Authentication. "We're going to develop a classification system "around how we assess and manage data," so depending on the category, there's different levels of security that are in put in place in our (mumbles) environment, while also trying to remain as open as possible. >> So you have a lot of competing interests, it seems, in trying to balance those interests, is how much of your job? >> 100%. (laughing) Yeah, so what I would say is that in order to be able to get proposals forward, I have to be able to make the case on all sides of the equation, so I have to make the correct academic case. I have to make the correct business case. I have to make the correct cultural case and if I can make those cases coincide, then we can succeed and move things forward and get proposals. >> 'Cause you're saying that at NC State, it's not central IT. You're in IT, but there are some more schools that have options, they can make their own decisions, and so I would think coordination, integration, are not barriers, but certainly challenges. >> That's right, so we are, we call ourselves a central IT group; however, there is no mandate for each of the colleges to use central IT services, so our goal is to create kind of a foundational set of services that the consumers then in come and build on top of rather than building their own resources and we like to see that grow kind of organically rather than to mandate it, use of central services, and we've actually had great success. So we've had a lot of resources to come back from the edge into the central folds and be able to grow that centrally, put a higher level of resiliency on top of those services and satisfy our customers. >> In terms of one of the challenges, though, cost is a huge one, and then making sure that things do come within budget and not a penny over. Can you talk a little bit about some of those obstacles and how you've overcome them? >> Right, so cost is everything for us. Our budgets have been flat for the past three years, but the demand for growth in capacity and existing environments and the demand for new services is ongoing. What we've been able to do is to work really hard on assessing our resources. We've implemented Cloud IQ a year ago when it was first announced to get a kind of a long-term view of our environment and kind of track our growth, and that has enabled us to put the right data in the appropriate tier and be able to maximize our investment and that's really helped us be able to continue to grow our environments as we move forward. >> When you're talking about the different clients or constituencies you're trying to please: you've got the students, the faculty, the administration, and the staff, what do students want, what do faculty want, and how do you give them what they want? >> That's right. So students, is really interesting because the student perspective has really changed over the past couple of years and it caught us off-guard. We have a pervasive data network on our campus. We have all the dorms wired. We have about 21,000 students total. About 8000 stay on campus. All those dorms were hard-wired, but we did not have wifi enabled in all the dorms and we survey students every year. Last year we surveyed them and we got very bad marks because that, even a jack was not enough for them. If you look at what you typically show up with now, how many devices have a hard-wired jack, none, right? So they show up with four devices. They couldn't use any of them on our data network and their response on the survey was, the one that I remember the most was, "Our lives depend on wifi," that was the quote. >> Of course. >> We, of course, immediately went and looked at how we roll out 4000 access points right away. We did that over a summer. That was able to succeed. We also have a very unique set of challenges in that because I mentioned that, we only have 4000 students, slightly more than that, that stay on campus. The majority of them move back and forth between classes so 10 AM when 5000 people walk by one access point. >> When they've just woken up. >> That's right. >> 10 AM. >> Or log in to check their email, et cetera. So those are unique challenges so what we had to do is what are the tools to track the application resources? What's normal application performance? What's a normal peak and what's a breakout that's outside of the normal, and how do we profile that and we want to be well ahead of the demand so that we can put those resources in place ahead of the need. >> So what do you do about the challenge of future deployments? Your budget's going to be somewhat constrained. You know your needs are increasing. You know your constituents have new and growing demand. So, I mean, tough nut to crack, isn't it? You're trying to make your cloud strategy. What are you going to do with that? The 4GG server coming on board now, how do you find, or how do you balance that from the academic perspective? >> You mentioned that and also I didn't mention that one of our data centers is aging and so on top of all that, we're also starting to see, put a strain on our data center resources. What we really hope to be able to do is to leverage some type of a hybrid cloud strategy. The challenge for us has been, what is our application profile? If you look at applications that are a great fit in cloud and applications that are not a great fit in cloud, the traditional backend applications, the core infrastructure applications are not necessarily a great fit, and so what we're trying to figure out is what is the best hybrid solution that will help you move our environment forward and still leverage existing resources. >> So looking ahead, what does the college campus of the future, the technology-enabled college campus of the future look like? Give us a picture. >> I think one of the best examples i can give is our Hunt Library, so we opened a new library on what we call our Centennial Campus a few years ago. It was designed from the ground up as kind of a new model of what does the next generational library look like because it's not, if you think of a library now, you don't think of a traditional, okay, here's a building and stacks and stacks and stacks of books. So they put the books off in a corner and there is a large robotic library that's designed to handle the books and the bulk of it is about collaborative spaces, so there are high-end collaborative work stations, consolidated areas. There are students that are in the design school. If you want to go and practice your DJ skills, you can do that there as well, so that's where things are really headed. >> So Patrick, before we let you go, my final question is, when are you going to beat Carolina and Duke at basketball? >> We're waiting, so we have that US Championship banners from the '80s and I'm tired of looking at that, so we're really looking forward to-- >> Those days are long-gone. >> Right. >> Right, Patrick Williams, NC State, thank you for being with us here on The Cube. Safe travels back home and continued success at Raleigh. >> Thank you. >> Appreciate the time. >> Alright. >> Good. That raps it up here on The Cube, day two is in the books. We'll see you back here tomorrow morning at 11:30 central time, that's 2:30 on the East Coast, for more interviews live from Las Vegas, until then. For Rebecca Knight, I'm John Walls. Have a good night.