(uplifting music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is a CUBEConversation at SiliconANGLE's, Palo Alto studio, happy to welcome to the program, a first time guest and and new to Nutanix, the Chief Marketing Officer, Ben Gibson. Ben, thank you so much for joining us. >> Stu thanks for having me here. I love the studio and love the chance to chat with you. >> Alright, so our audience know Nutanix really well, so let's introduce them to you first of all. Give our audience a little bit about your background and, you know, we know Nutanix IPO'd not that long ago. Exciting. Growing real fast so, you know, I'm sure it makes sense but why for Ben? >> Yeah. For me, firs and foremost, it's such an exciting company. We're going through a lot of fairly strong growth right now. We've really created a category in the Space Realm Hyperconvergence and now we're really expanding from that position and to be in the middle of that, I think is really exciting. >> So your background is mostly in the networking space and it's one of those things, I'm a networking guy by background. >> Yeah. >> Networking is changing a lot, lately, but not nearly as fast as some of the other parts so, you know, tell us a little bit about your background, where you've been, what your skillset is going to bring to Nutanix, in that ecosystem. >> Yeah, you know, I did, like you, I hailed from the networking industry. I spent a good portion of my career at Sisco, I spent part of my career at Aruba Networks, which is in the Wi-Fi, wireless space, but I think you're right. I think the acceleration of innovation in Nutanix's industry a lot of stuff has changed so quickly in that space, so networking hasn't quite kept up with that level of change of things and for me it's kind of getting on a much faster train and moving forward with it. >> Alright, so we've had theCUBE at every single one of the DotNext conferences >> Ben: Thank you. >> They're fun. Your predecessor Howard Ting had a certain flair so let's talk a little bit about the show and, you know are there things that your going to be putting your stamp on at this show, coming up in New Orleans? >> Yeah, I mean first of all it great to succeed Howard, in the role. I used to be an advisor for the company and so Howard and I used to have periodic pancake breakfasts and I told him what I thought and he shared with me a lot about how exciting things were. What was happening at Nutanix and how they really move forward. And I knew about DotNext, I've seen DotNext I know what an exciting show it is. For a company like Nutanix to draw, this year, over 5000, attendees to this show, that's notable. And, what, to me, that signals is the level of intensity and the level of loyalty that we enjoy in our customer base, they're believers and they're coming to the show to learn from us, to connect with each other and really to accelerate some of their plans on how they continue to innovate. >> Yeah, you know, we travel to so many different shows and absolutely, it is at it's core, it's a user conference, it's users there wanting to learn how to use what they have even better. Learn about the cool net technologies. Dave Valente and I have talked about Nutanix is up there with companies like Service Now, that have, just, people that come and are just, you know, kind of fanatically supported. It reminds me of, you know, Vmware's a great company, doing well today. Many years ago everybody had the I love VMware bumper stickers. Vmware is a great show. We'll be there this year >> Ben: Yeah, so will we. >> And your company will too, so ah, what, what do people what brings them to that show from your standpoint and give us a little insight as to, kind of, some of the special things they'll be seeing this year in New Orleans. >> Yeah, you know, I think one of the biggest attractions of coming to this show is if you think about the role of an infrastructure professional, someone who's looking at hybrid Cloud environments and how do you manage those. Thinking about what applications run on what cloud platform. There's a lot of change and fluidity to that and I think the nature or the role of an IT or an Infrastructure professional is changing. Server Store J-Admin is quickly evolving because that's converging, just like the technology has and so, for me this show is about how do you get ahead of those trends. How do you position yourself to be as strategic as possible, within your own organization? And that's the way I like to think of Dotnext, it's a place that a professional can come to learn and to grow their career and their technology expertise. >> Yeah it's a great point, one of the things I've loved on theCUBE is there are speakers that aren't just from the tech industry, so everyone from Deepak Malhotra, who is from Harvard, um, thought leaders in the space to onstage at one of the shows it was David Blaine doing a magic trick while one of your engineers was configuring stuff. So there's some great speakers that'll be at the event this year to, not only learn the tech but as you said, you're thinking about the persons career and how do they embrace change and how do they help become more valuable to their company. >> Yeah, you know, there's two in particular that are going to be joining this year that I'm very excited about. One is Dr. Brene Brown. If you haven't seen her TED talk on YouTube I highly recommend you go and check it out. It's something different. It's about how do you be vulnerable, with yourself, with your career. How do you take chances? How do you take risk, and that's a lot of what's going on in our in our industry right now. The second one I think is going to be really fun and that's Anthony Bourdain. Known for his show, Parts Unknown and he's going to have colorful language, right, noted, some colorful language but also he's just a riot. He's the one I think is going to bring his special kind of flair to the show and get everyone really excited, laughing and maybe a little bit of gasping, in terms of what he's going to be sharing with us. >> Yeah, absolutely I mean, New Orleans is a great culinary destination and so I know everybody that's going there you'll want to check out the music, the culture and a lot going in there. So, excited about the show. We're going to have theCUBE there for two days. Last thing I want to talk to you about, Ben, just, Nutanix as a company, when I registered for the show there was one of the questions I thought was pretty interesting. They said, "What do you think Nutanix is?" You know, how do you, what's your relationship with Nutanix? And I'm trying to remember, I know one of the options was M: Is Nutanix a hypercovergence infrastructure player? Are they a cloud player? I think storage might even be in there, it's been one of those things as to, who is Nutanix? What are you today and what do you want to be in the next phase of growth? >> You know, it's a great question Stu, "Who is Nutanix?" We are focused on helping our customers build their enterprise cloud. Our taglines could be Your Enterprise Cloud. Enterprise Cloud is not only how you modernize your own data center but it's also, how do you embrace? How do you have a strategy? How do you govern? How do you bring together the right workload, for the right cloud platform at the right time? And that's the direction we're taking with our innovation. This is what more and more of our customers are looking to do. Not every application's going to a public cloud provider. Not every application is staying on premise. We're going to be living in the hybrid world, Enterprise Cloud is about how do you take the ingredients of hyperconvergent infrastructure? Take the ingredients for automation and management, over these different workloads, across these different environments and do so in a way that makes the complexity of infrastructure and multiple cloud management and make that all invisible. So for us that's our mission. It's building that Enterprise Cloud and making all that complexity go away. And that's the vision we're going to be talking about and that's what we think our attendees are really looking to get the guidance and, kind of the vision of how they move their careers forward and flourish in that space >> Ben, it's the barometer that I've been using for probably the last two years. If I spend a lot more time in kind of the Dev/Op Cloud native, you know, worlds these days. We were at an Amazon summit yesterday but, absolutely. It's heterogeneous world. IT has never, you know, let's throw out the old and start the new. Sure there's some new companies that might do that but it's a heterogeneous world, it's a multi-cloud world and big struggle for people is how do they get their arms around it? So if I look at a company that has started mostly on premises, it's like, oh how are you evolving? How are you working with the public Cloud? You know, Nutanix has been working very closely with Google over the last year or so. A new acquisition recently that I know plays into this whole story. Tell us a little bit about the acquisition and, you know, how does Nutanix look at itself, which is now, I mean, if you read the Wall Street reports, Nutanix is a software company. And you're getting great multiples on that and it's helping and you know I've been pretty vocal on this from it's early days, is Nutanix was never a hardware company. It, you know, building an appliance was a go to market choice to simplify and make it easy for customers but as the company matured, >> Yep. >> It made a lot more options and today it makes perfect sense that really software is where it goes, so you talked about a bunch of things there but specifically, kind of the multi-cloud and the acquisition first. >> You know Stu, we're really excited about this recent acquisition we made. It's a company called Minjar and the offering is essentially it's going to be integrated into our broader software platform, that allows customers to be able to assess on a realtime basis. What's the right Cloud platform for a particular workload from a costing perspective? From reliability standpoint. Derish talks about the law of the land. The laws of physics and the like, you need to apply these all to determine what you're going to run where. And what we got with this Minjar acquisition, is a really sophisticated way that our customers can embrace and is part of their enterprise cloud. Because part of this is taking back control over all this disaggregation of workloads running everywhere. You're losing control. Losing governance of your data and your applications if you don't really keep on top of it, this acquisition, I believe, is going to be a really key part of helping IT organizations regain that control. Yet still enjoy all the benefits of hybrid-cloud environments. Whether it be with an AWS an Azure a Google Cloud platform, like we're partnering very closely with, as well as what they're building with their Enterprise Cloud on premise. Whether it be, you know, with Nutanix. >> Yeah, it reminds me of, was it Progressive Insurance, I think has the, you know >> Yeah. >> We're going to give you quote on all of the things there. Cloud is complicated these days. Is there bias towards it, pushing towards, you know, Nutanix closer partners in the technology itself. >> Yeah, I mean it certainly has. There's a lot of complexity around that and to me the industry hasn't solved a lot of new complexity that has come out of the emerging trend of a different line of businesses starting to develop a new application now, on a certain Cloud platform and the like. And as you're seeing this demand for more application mobility between clouds, so all of a sudden the partners that are coming to us and the partners we're seeing and are demanded of that we work with in the market our players are looking at application automation. Players that are looking at dev/ops tools and the like and it both guides how we innovate on our Calm platform, which we introduced last year at DotNext as well it helps us expand our reach. So, we talked to our traditional buyers but there's a lot of new buyers now that are building those apps and managing those environments and we're going to start to see some of those come into the DotNext show. >> Alright. Ben I want to give you the final word. DotNext is one of the many events that I know you do lots of regional shows and the like, what should we expect to see from Nutanix through 2018? >> Yeah, you know the first thing is that the dialogue, the narrative for the company, that we're going out with we've moved to be a software only company and I think our customers tell us and I heard this from one of our largest retail industry customers just a few weeks ago, by moving to a software only model, it's given them freedom to take advantage of Nutanix, regardless of their hardware platforms. And like you said we've never been a hardware company, it's all been about software value and what you're going to see from us is a new narrative. An expansion of the branded Nutanix talking about the freedom we give for customers to build the data center they've always wanted to build. Freedom to run their application or the workload that they've wanted to run, where they choose to run it based on that insight I talked about. And in another realm, the freedom to play. Freedom to get their weekends back. A lot of our value proposition is because of all the complexity we've taken out of the equation, is that we give our customers their weekends back. This is a story that our DotNext attendees, I think, know better than other but we want to spread the word and so part of that is harnessing that freedom concept to build, to run, to play to invent and tell the world. And DotNext, whether is be in New Orleans, which I think is going to be a blast. When we take it to Europe, London and we do this all around the world, to me that's kind of ground zero for that story. For the community of what we've built together with our customers and partners and that what we take out to the world. >> Alright, well Ben Gibson, I'm glad we could introduce you to our community today because we're going to be seeing you at lots of other events, you and your team, of course, theCUBE will be at Nutanix, DotNext in New Orleans. Nutanix and you will be at Dell Technologies World in Las Vegas. Google Cloud Next happening this summer in San Fransisco. Lots of other shows so be sure to tune in to theCUBE.net, get the list of all the upcoming shows, Ben, Nutanix and of course lots of the Cloud and infrastructure ecosystem. Check it all out. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCUBE. (uplifting music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, D.C., it's theCube covering .NEXT conference brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to the District everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. And this is our special presentation of Nutanix NEXT Conf, hashtag NEXTConf. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Stu Miniman, my cohost for the two days of coverage at this event. Adam Japhet is here. He's the head of infrastructure at Scholastic Corp. Adam, thanks for coming on the Cube. >> Thanks for having me. >> So, is this your first .NEXT? >> This is my first .NEXT. >> Dave: What do ya think? >> There's a lot of energy here. It's a tremendous amount of energy. Just even in the size of the place. But the number of partners that you've got here and the number of customers, I'm really excited to be here. >> Well, the best is yet to come. Nutanix always does a really good job with the keynotes. >> Adam: Yeah, you haven't even opened the keynote yet, and it's already this much energy. >> Yeah, always very crisp messaging. They have great outside speakers. Robert Gates last year, Condi Rice and then, who was the illusionist? They had a-- >> Oh yeah, the guy in the box, David Blaine. Yeah, David Blaine held his breath for like nine minutes. >> He was holding his breath under water while the SE configured-- >> For the entire session? >> Yeah while the SE configured because the argument was it only takes eight minutes to configure a Nutanix solution. >> Wow. And then he came out, after eight minutes. You know he was able to configure the solution. Big hugs afterwards. Wet hugs. But anyway, it's a fun show here and it really hasn't even started yet. It started with Cube interviews. >> We've been interviewing. >> Now I'm even more excited. >> Dave: Yeah, so we've been interviewing practitioners all day. So tell us about Scholastic Corp. What do you guys do? >> Sure, so Scholastic, if you went to school in the US, you probably heard of Scholastic, but I'll reiterate it. It's the, actually, the world's largest, not just in the US, the world's largest children's book publisher and distributor. It's also a major education technology firm, so we do a lot of work within the education space with administrators, librarians, and other educators in your school system. But we're probably most recognized for our trade businesses. Which, Book Clubs, which is now called Reading Clubs, fairs and trade, and just the access to so many of the titles that so many kids in the US have grown up on. >> So, you're making sure the next generation will at least have the opportunity to read. (laughing) >> It's interesting, because I don't know if you're aware of this, but it was actually just two days ago, was the 20th anniversary of the release of the first Harry Potter book. What was called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone in England and now it was called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the US. And actually they did some analysis. Some of the articles I was reading about it about literacy and they actually think that the Harry Potter series has contributed to, I guess we're calling them Gen Z or the post millennials or whatever, they grew up with Harry Potter, really improving literacy in the US. That's how important some of these books that we publish over the years have been. >> So you actually said, used to call it Book Club, now you call it Reading Club. So, that's sort of an indication that your business model's evolving, going digital. So when we talk about some of the drivers there. >> Absolutely, I mean that was really one of the key drivers, I think. I've been at Scholastic a long time now. 17 plus years. So I've seen lots of different evolutions have been evolved and a lot of different technology projects have been evolved, different launches. And I think in particular in 2011, when the iPad came out, and we saw such a rapid transition with newspapers, and periodicals, and magazines. Myself included, I felt myself going through it. Switching to using electronic devices for consumption. The next immediate question is, is this going to make all physical books go away? And so, you know, we really pivoted hard into the digital arena at that time, because we wanted to be where our constituencies are. And interestingly, we found that actually digitization in the children's book space, maybe a little bit in the young adult space, but especially in the elementary school space, it actually has been fairly resistant of digitization. It's there. We've got a number of excellent products there. With Storia and a number of other products for delivering digital content to our consumers, but primarily children. But ultimately kids still read physical books. My kids are 11 and nine, and our house is full of physical books and we really kind of segregate the two together so that they have both the digital reading experience, which is somewhat different from the physical reading experience. Nevertheless, it is continuing to transform our industry. >> We were talking to to Virginia Gambale before. She's an advisor, a strategic advisor, to a number of companies, board member, investor. And she was talking about capital allocation and one of the questions I have is when you guys sort of look at this digital disruption, the change, at what point do you decide, okay hey, we've got to change or we'll be changed. Or we need to get ahead of this. How does that all take, how did it take place in your organization? Was it more reactive, proactive, and sort of where are you headed? >> I mean, I think the proactive elements around it is that we want to make sure that when our consumers are ready to go digital, we've got a viable product that responsive to as many devices as we think our consumers are going to use. And parallel information there, we've been watching really in the last three years how much Google has sweeped into the educational space and they have kind done that at the expense of Microsoft and Apple. And so, we see trends like that and we see how quickly digital can move into the educational spaces which is where the primary customers are and how we sell our products to children. And we knew that we needed to have a viable product there, so I think a lot of things for us are looking at different channels. Making sure that we've got a singular view of our customer and recognizing that our primary customers are really educators. That we're connecting with them and we're understanding how they're using our different models, our different lines of businesses. How they're communicating our products to the parents and children that consume them. And really getting that right balance of physical and digital products in front of every kid. I mean, our core mission is to get kids to learn to love to read. It's to generate literacy so that kids become young adults and full adults and they love to read, and that's really what the core mission is behind Scholastic. And however we can deliver the products to satisfy that mission, we're prepared to do that. >> Adam, reaching the ultimate user in that whole digital transformation, that tends to put a lot of stresses on infrastructure which is the hat you wear. So, maybe explain a little bit some of those challenges you were having and what you've done to transform on the infrastructure side to meet the requirements of the business. >> Absolutely. So in my role, in my various roles that I've had at Scholastic over the years, one of the things I've been able to experience is how different parts of the company move at different speeds. And some of it is just the nature of the function of the company. You know, your back office corporate spaces obviously are going to move somewhat slower than your digital engagement and your e-commerce space. In a role I had several years ago, where I was delivering e-commerce and digital services, I quickly realized that the traditional infrastructure models simply wasn't going to cut it at this point. We were delivering infrastructure trying to scale it out for very seasonal demand. Three, six month lead times trying to stack text stacks all stuff that end up being undifferentiated heavy lifting. So ultimately, for us, we took a couple of big leaps. One of the big leaps that we took was really moving into the public cloud several years ago and that worked out tremendously for us and we've really been able to find the right infrastructure model for delivering our customer engagement experiences has been the public cloud. But when we started to pivot towards the fact that we move physical products, you know a lot of companies don't necessarily deal with physical products anymore. I could be wrong but I don't know that Facebook has a physical, Well I guess they have their VR. They acquired, I forget the name of the VR company now but generally, companies don't deal with physical products. An all in public cloud model can work pretty well for them. But when you're dealing with physical products, latency matters. Geodata locality matters. And some of the applications that you're dealing with can be very centric to the delivery of your manufacturing and your warehouse operations. So, that's actually part of why we've been investing in Nutanix. Because we want to have that same kind of agility with our infrastructure and get out of mixing and matching various vendors text stacks deliver essentially what's a foundational platform for us to deliver business value out of. I'd rather go with one vendor, right? And have a finite set of vendors where we're delivering network and compute and storage and the service delivery of our applications on top of that, and Nutanix has worked out very well for us. >> Appreciate that Adam, and it's really interesting. We talk to customers, the two terms that get thrown out are hybrid or multi-cloud and you laid out where you're using public cloud. Do you consider your Nutanix solution, is that private cloud, hybrid cloud? (speaking over each other) Does that interact with multi-data center or any other services? >> I've kind of avoided the term hybrid cloud because what was originally marketed to us as hybrid cloud was the idea that your workload is seamlessly portable between all these different cloud providers. And we kind of realized that was never really our intent. I think multi-cloud is probably a better model for us, because we're finding that our various cloud provider services, and if you even scale beyond just the basic IS, you get to the pads and the especially SaaS layer, they're all cloud services but they're fairly fit for purpose. And a lot of what our role is as a technology organization has moved towards assembling all of these fit for purpose cloud solutions together into a service delivery that we from a technology group can deliver to our internal and external customers. And so I prefer the term multi-cloud. >> So if we could follow up on this, if I may, skepticism on hybrid cloud, but this idea of a control plane that spans multiple physical clouds, including on-prem. Is something that, am I understanding that you don't feel that that's needed in your organization or that's not feasible technically? >> I think it really depends on the applications that will be delivered to that. So for example, we're finally making our first real foray into containers. And so, we've looked at a couple of different technologies. There's a number out there like OpenShift and Kubernetes and that's really we feel the best opportunity for us to find a way to deploy a true hybrid cloud model where you can actually provision your workload. Maybe not to get so far as to the Priceline type Kayak type view of I want to deploy this workload right now and GCP is the most optimal at this point in time for that. That could be a potential future state, but again, even that feels like it's still a fair amount of undifferentiated heavy lifting for our service delivery. So we find the right mix of products so that we can deliver a kind of a cost optimal workload. And in many cases, I think that technology vendors still haven't quite figured out how to handle state. It works great with the stateless part of your applications but you need to persist your state somewhere. We're probably in the earlier stages, I would say, around utilized service delivery. >> What I heard I think is, you chose by application whether this is going to be something we do in-house because whether there is the locality, the analytics or data processing, something I need it for a reason, as opposed to other things. It's undifferentiated. Public cloud can take care of it and there's not a need to own it in town. >> Yes, you said it better than I said it. >> So the question, I think Dave's asking is how do you manage across? Do you manage them separately or do you want to manage it together? >> Probably at our maturity level, at this point we're probably really only at the governance stage. So we understand what we've got. We've got a good understanding of our cost structures in the public cloud. We don't nearly have as good as an understanding of our cost structures when we're doing hybrid deployments or on-prem deployments. And so that's probably as far as we've matured at this point, I would say. I think we do want to get to a future state where if we take other considerations in particular latency, the particular nature of that application or any other sovereignty or legal concerns outside, that we want to maintain maximum flexibility. Part of my role in the infrastructure group is to provide that kind of foundation. So, hoarding that workload is seamless across these different cloud providers and those application teams can really position the application where it is the best fit for purpose aligned with the price performance I have in mind. >> So bring it back to Nutanix for a little bit. Where do they fit? Talk about your journey a little bit. Maybe paint of picture of the infrastructure of the before, the after, what business impact it had. >> So there were really a couple of drivers for us through Nutanix. One of them is that as we moved a vast majority of our assets out of our data centers to these various cloud providers, we were left with a number of physical data centers and in many cases now, the only data centers that we're actually left with are our on-prem data centers that were no longer sized in accordance with the workload we want to maintain. Additionally for us, a lot of the investment of moving to the public cloud, we deferred a lot of the regular capital investments that we made in traditional infrastructure and we accepted the aging of that infrastructure but we recognize now that there is a fair amount of infrastructure there we need to maintain for these more local applications. And so, I wanted my team, I challenged my team last year to really take a modern approach, right? I don't want to necessarily assemble everything that we've done in the past, but in a much smaller scale to manage the local applications. I know that conversion, in particular hybrid converge, had matured pretty far by 2016. You know, what are the options out there? And so when we do our due diligence and we settled on Nutanix, we really felt that, it's both pioneering, at times even a little bit scary, because it was moving into a new foray with us. But I think it's worked out tremendously. We've started in our back office so that was actually really for that location if some mission critical workload in terms of how we actually do the fulfillment of our physical books, and we're in the process of bringing on a number of those applications off of traditional infrastructure with your segregation between your blade servers, and your chassis, and your racks, and your fiber storage, and your inline networking switches, and your storage array, and just having one condensed box that's going to run that system. >> So, for your in-house deployments, is that all Nutanix today or what's your mix? >> I'd say Nutanix is probably more, I'm getting up to the 20% range, and so 80% is still on traditional. But my goal is about a year from now that we'll, I don't know if they will be necessarily flipped but it will be more than 50 percent Nutanix. >> Is there anything that you're waiting for from Nutanix to be able to move those or is it just kind of budgets. >> It's our own people and process. >> Yeah, people and process. At this point, we're not, with any of these cloud providers, we're not as much hindered by the technology. The technology at this point is in many cases lapped our ability to actually consume it. We're drinking from several simultaneous fire hoses now, and it's which one we turn our mouths to, so. >> And you're taking advantage of Acropolis hypervisor or? >> Absolutely. That was also one of the key drivers. That was the hyper part of it really. I challenged the team. I said I want a solution where we can present a general purpose operating system and our application stack and to me bringing on a third party hypervisor at this point, it just felt like undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> And the container discussion, is Nutanix part of that too? >> Probably in our early stages. When we look at our workload right now, we don't have any on-prem workload that's been designated with containers. But I know having made the choice of Nutanix, if and when we come to that time, we'll be able to provision that on Nutanix and Acropolis. >> Not sure if you heard actually. This morning there was an announcement of partnership between Google and Nutanix so that should accelerate us on containers. >> I saw. That's very exciting. >> What's exciting about that to you? >> Well Google Cloud is one of the cloud providers we actively use today and I think they've really been a great thought leader in this space. We use a number of their services and I know they've really advanced the community around containers with Kubernetes and some of the technologies that they're working on. They have a very mature cloud offering today. And so I think the opportunity for us, that Google and Nutanix to work more closely together, I think a company like Scholastic is really only going to see the fruits, the benefits, of that relationship, and ease our growth into both platforms. >> Right. Adam, we have to leave it there. Thanks very much for coming on theCube and sharing your insights and your story. >> Adam: Appreciate it, appreciate it. Thanks having me on. >> You're very welcome. >> Adam: Okay. >> Alright keep it right there everybody. Stu and I'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. This is theCube. We're live from D.C. at Nutanix.Next. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back to Dell EMC World 2017. We're live here in the Venetian in Las Vegas. Day one of the three day show. Had Michael Dell out on the keynote stage earlier today. Also had David Blaine, world famous magician. Pretty interesting performance to say the least. >> Yeah I went down to get an ice pick. (man laughing) During our break. >> We'll get into that later but it was interesting. Keith Townsend, John Walls also joined by Itzik Reich who is the CTO of XtremeIO at Dell EMC. Itzik, thanks for being with us. It's good to see you sir. >> Thank you very much. >> All the way from Tel Aviv and great to have you. Alright, so your sweet spot of the company is giving birth to a new baby today. >> There you go. >> XtremeIO X2, tell us about that. What spawned that, and then what that responses be, what you developed. >> Right, I think in order to understand Xtreme, you need to start with the beginning, the X1. So, November 2015 I was having my class reunion, meeting my ex-girlfriend, and we've launched X1. And X1 became, within two quarters, the largest sole Dell flash array in the world. From nowhere to the largest sole flash array, at least in terms of units sold to the market. Right, both Garthner and I. And it was huge. A huge building and a success for us. A success because nobody would become the number one leader. And we built them because we didn't have the life cycle to normally mature a product. Right, so you mentioned being a father. I'm a father to two daughters, lovely daughters. One of them is six years old, one of them is five. And the young one is starting to show some signs of being a really clever person. And I'm afraid that somebody will tell me, oh she can skip the first class. Because skipping class serves some association with it. Social aspects of it. So we've been really busy trying to understand XtremeIO X1. Making super stable. Today we're already about 5/9 in the market. But it also would stand to refresh the product and come with something new. So our life cycle wasn't a traditional year or year and a half of refreshing the product. It took us longer for us to X2 and this is what we announced today. So what's new with X2. The first thing is the ability to come with really Dell's XO Drive and Dell's configuration. In X1 each DAE, you could put up to 25 drives inside of the DAE. And X2 can put out up to 72 drives per DAE right. And you can scale just like before. Up to 8X bricks. It's a huge capacity which you need for the vast majority of the use cases out there they don't know. Just VDR or just a single database is right. Today XtremeIO can fill pretty much every transaction while closing including virtualization wall close. You just need a lot of capacity for thousands of VM's. So that's one of the things. The other thing we improved performance of the X2 array. And the magic story around there was that because of the thousands and thousands of customers that we're involved with really got the good insight of the workload that they are running. And what we found out is something very interesting. The majority of those customers are running workload that they're very small block size. So you storage every item that arrives in the system as a different blocks characteristic and we found that the majority of them are using very, very small block size. And we want them to improve the performance of those block sizes. The IOPS and the latency. And we also wanted to make sure that it's actually more economical cheaper than the very expensive drives that the new NVMe drives that are out there. So different design goals. Making it faster and also making it cheaper in different dimensions. So we come with a new feature called Drive Boost. In a nut shell, in a nut shell Drive Boost will give you 80% better latency for pretty much every walkthrough that is out there. >> So... With that small block sizes versus big block sizes. Why is that important? We're at a conference and we're talking a lot about digital transformation. CEO, we teased John earlier. You know he's a sports guy, he doesn't do LAG goals. >> (laughing) Sorry. >> That's alright. >> Help us understand the value of that data type. >> Sure, so you know we like to think about digital transformation but at the end of the day. You're the customer, you have a database. You'll use it on query or queries against the database. If it's a very large database, there are thousands maybe even millions of queries everyday. Those queries take time for the end user to get a response for. So let's assume that you want a monthly report. And this report normally takes nine hours to generate. If I can shrink the report crunching time to two hours instead of nine, that means that I have provided better value for the business success. Right. One of the stories is that we have a financial customer in the Middle East. They need to generate the report every month between midnight because this is where they locate their reports. Up until eight o'clock in the morning. Why eight o'clock because this is when the employees start to come to work. And every hour that they exceed after the eight hour generation they get fined by the government. So if I'm saving this customer four hours then they are not getting fined by the government for generating the report. That's a true value for the customer return. Cause those things are important. People tend to think about just performance numbers in terms of IOPS but the real magic number is latency. How quick can you make the query? Whether it's a database application or a VDI VM or just a generic web server running on a Voltron machine. Those are the important things today. >> So transactional apps. Big deal. Are these transactional apps, we learned a lot about virtualization and cloud computing to date. Are these transactional apps running in a virtualized environment or are we still relying on big heavy metal workloads going to treat IO2. >> Yeah, it's a good question. At least from my experience some would argue that anywhere between 70 to 80% of the customer that allowed it went full virtualized. So their running their entire application running either under V6 or a Microsoft type of V. So they are fully virtualized. Some of the customers are still running their workload on a traditional physical servers right. Even in the S6 at the end of the day it runs on a physical server to all day the kill in itself. But yeah, the majority of them are already there in terms of virtualization. >> So what are customers really excited about when it comes to features sets for an XIO2 versus XtremeIO version wise. >> Right, amazing question. So performance, we've already discussed performance. 80% better latency, that's not something that you get because of the usage of better CPU's. Intel moves slow, it's basically dead right. They don't give you 200% performance between generation so we wanted to do something else and solve the same problem. The other thing is quality of service. We are not cheaping NGA but it's coming soon. The ability to give a specific VM, a specific IO copying and the latency copying. And also could give you the ability to burst to more IOP's techniques needed for a couple of minutes. So quality of service I the noisy neighbor right. Somebody generate too much noise you want him to be quiet. That's what quality of service is. The other things that we've announced native replication. We found out finally of our own replication that can replicate between one XtremeO2 and another. But it's not a traditional replication. The unique thing about XtremeIO was always the cusp. The content of dressable architecture. People typically think about it as a D Duplication feature but in fact we don't have a feature called D Duplication. We analyze the data as it goes through the system itself. And we give a unique shot signature to each one of those blocks. And if the shot signature already exists in the system we dupe the block. But it's not the feature per se. That why the D Duplication's so fast on XtremeIO. So up until now the customers architecture was only applicable to writing the data into the array itself. Now it's also applicable for replicating the data. So for example if you have a data reduction of five to one which is very common in virtualize use case. Many VM, many the same template and so on. You know need to replicate four times less the data at the source to the destination target. Right. So that's a very, very big thing because you need to replicate more and more data. But the 24 hour window isn't changed. God didn't upgrade it where the server respects the time. Right. >> (laughing) Right. >> It's still 24 hours per day. So this is super important for us and we're very excited about it. And the other thing is that, again larger denser configuration of the array itself so the customer can have up until two-thirds cheaper. The drive, the cost drive of the XtremeIO in itself so it's cheaper for them to put their walkthrough on ExtemeIO. Whether to really pick up the just the database that needs all the performance in the world. So we can really become a true enterprise array with those features. >> It seems like it's got to be for you a constant chase though right. You're looking for higher performance, you're looking for lower costs. You've said you just gained 80% increase in your performance capabilities. >> Yup. >> And now people are going to be looking at you over the next Xtreme and so what next? You know, where are the gains to be had in the next generation of technology and just in terms of philosophically approaching that so what do you do. >> Yeah, yeah again another good question. I actually gave a briefing about it just earlier. So, the first thing we need to do is an industry not just the daily insists to lower the costs of the drive itself to be even cheaper than and economical drive. That's not Dell today right, the hybrid mechanical drive. You can get a more economical drive if you apply data reduction on it right. So if you're five times cheaper because of the data that's gets integrated into the array and get a different compress and different provisioning. Then you can be on par with the mechanical drives. So first we want to be on par if not cheaper. We want everybody to move to S's. And we were the first twirl for charade the portfolio of Dell EMC. That's the first thing. The second thing is to really get a better insight into your wall application, wall close. Today people analyze things like IOP's and latency but what does your application really think? Where are the cues in the application stock itself right. How can you find them out in the storage sub-system itself right. So we are on a journey to over there with our importing mechanisms. So a year and a half ago, we started a new project to completely change the reporting mechanism of the WebUI. The interface of XtremeIO right. And today you can really get to drill down into pretty much every aspect. Up until now you had to purchase a third party software that will analyze your walkthrough for you. So things like Instagram, IO's, block size, read and write like I can see pair of blocks. So you can really understand your workload. We also give you something like abnormalities. We can tell you every week this application is being fine but on that Friday for some reason the response time wasn't that good. You should go in and check it out. Maybe it's in the application there is a bottleneck. Maybe it was a bottleneck in the storage load. So you can actually find it out. But I would argue that the long term goal. That's a vision right? That I'm not announcing anything yet. Is really the ability to marriage or combine between the softer defined wall right. The input converge mechanism, to the traditional arrays right. Although SSD's not that traditional. Maybe you can have a denser configuration with very small to DAE but the performance aspect of it will not be drive from the DEA where it actually store the data but from Voltron machines. That you can spin up and down in a cloud like fishing. That will bring you all the performance that you need. That's a thing to me the only gray. The really merging between the walls. Cause there isn't one perfect answer right. The softer refined guys will tell you everything should go to softer defined storage. We will tell you everything should go to flash arrays. But really the truth is like always right in between. And this is really one of the direction that we are approaching. >> I tell you what, for now I want you to enjoy X2 for now. How about that. >> That sound good. >> It's a good day for you. And don't let that five year old skip either. I think that's a good idea too. >> Very good. Very good. Thank you very much. >> And so thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Thanks. >> Back with more here on theCUBE. We're live in Las Vegas at Dell EMC World 2017. (exciting techno music)