>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018, brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome to our live coverage here. Day three at Dell Technologies World 2018. We are live in Las Vegas. Hope you've been with us for the first two days. We have a great lineup here for you on day three. I'm John Wallace, along with Stu Miniman. Glad to have you along, Stu, it's always great to work with you. >> Thanks, John. Same for you. >> Good week so far for you? >> It's been excellent, my voice is holding up, it's been a long week. >> You're a busy man. >> Excited to get all of this, and heck, I'll be seeing Dan again next week at the big show. >> Dan McConnell's becoming like, he's like not even an annual visitor, you're like a bimonthly visitor here on theCUBE, right? VP of Converged Platforms. >> Stu: Fifth time, you get a free sandwich. >> Yeah, that's right, I got to punch card, I got to sign and get it punched each time. >> Yeah, nice to have you, Dan. Nice to have you back, good to see you again. Alright, let's just talk about the show, first off. Here we are, day three, we talked a little bit yesterday about customer discussions, conversations, so now you've had a little bit of time to soak this in and what you've heard from folks, and what would be your takeaway here? >> Sure, may spin this one a little bit, may have an angle here. Tremendous interest in HCI, and I'm not saying that just because I'm in HCI. No, but it's a lot of good, solid feedback from customers. It's starting to shift more in the mainstream, right? So as we see customers deploy it, more workloads get deployed on top of it. There's a tremendous amount of interest in HCI. When we look at all the graphs of customer interviews we're doing and analyst discussions we're doing, HCI is right there at the top of the list, in terms of subjects that we're talking about. >> Can you quantify that? Are numbers at all out there floating around, in terms of growth, in terms of what... >> Oh, from the HCI side, yeah. Most analysts will agree, it's about 70 to 80 percent in growth year over year. I'd say, from a Dell perspective, we're doing 138 percent, so we're actually growing faster than market. A lot of that's due to, we've got a, one, we've been in the HCI business for a while, two, we take a portfolio approach. There's never any one size fits all, so we actually take a portfolio approach to HCI. We've got what are multiple different consumption models, one that is an appliance, this is the server, the hardware, the software, lifecycle managed in an appliance. And then the next layer is what we call rack scale. Obviously, HCI puts some pressure on the network, right? High network dependency. Rack scale, what rack scale does is include the networking components in that engineered system attribute. Pretested, pre-designed, inclusion of both the physical, as well as the virtual network, and across both of those consumption models, we have a stack that is very VMware-centric, right? VxRail, VxRack SDDC, and we have a stack that is what we call Open HCI. Supports multiple hypervisors, that is XC series on the appliance and VxRack Flex on the rack-scale solution, so portfolio approach, cover the whole market, and we're really seeing it blow up, it's great. >> Dan, it's interesting. I think back to when people were first trying to wrap their brains around this whole HCI thing, it was like, oh, okay, I took server and storage, kind of smashed it together, some software maybe in there, but it was, oh, this is small-end thing, it's maybe four nodes, maybe getting to eight nodes, but you talked about the VxRack Flex, which we've been watching ScaleIO since before the acquisition, and all that solutions. Much larger configuration, some people said, oh, it's not even HCI, because I've talked to some customers, well, I can do a storage-only configuration or I can do a full hyperconverged configuration. We've seen maturation and some segmentation in the marketplace, so you know, bring us inside that, from, you know, the Flex business, just what you're seeing, what differentiates it from some of the other options. >> Absolutely, I'd say it's flexible. (dog barking) Dog barking next door. >> John: On cue. >> On cue. >> There he is again. It's one of the philanthropic Dell outreach programs, it's comfort pets. >> Therapy dogs. >> Therapy dogs, thank you. So we're right next door, no reflection at all on the guests or the program or whatever. >> They're in day three, too. It's been a long conference for them. >> We're getting punchy, alright, back to Flex. >> Back to Flex. >> Just explaining, yeah. >> So, back to your point. Flex... is flexible. We've got customers from four nodes, all the way up to over, large enterprise customers over a thousand nodes. Matter of fact, about 45 percent of our business comes from Fortune 500, so when you think HCI, like you said, HCI started in what was VDI. We're going to pick a workload, VDI's kind of linearly scalable, HCI was a good fit. Nowadays, it's multiple workloads, right? That flexibility, agility, ease-of-scale, people are putting more and more workloads on top of it. VxRack Flex, we've got, when you talk about scalable, up to a thousand nodes, literally 30 million IOPS, right? So, performance, I think we've got it covered. So it's definitely maturing, some of those larger customers are running anywhere from database, all the way to mission-critical applications. >> Dan, I actually did a case-study of one of your larger global financial companies a few years ago. Want you to talk about what they saw this solution at. This was a foundation for their private cloud. They use, in certain regions, public cloud makes sense, but in a lot of areas, this is the foundational layer of private cloud. A lot of times, people, oh, HCI, it is what it is, it's some boxes and some software, but talk about the private cloud angle. >> This customer, it's actually a very interesting storyline. They started off doing what we would call do-it-yourself, build-your-own, and loved the technology, as is predominant with HCI, continued to scale. Bought a lot, added on, added on, and as they continued to add, continued having discussions with them, and they actually love the technology, would love to be able to automate more, would love to spend less time setting it up as it comes in. So they actually moved up that consumption pyramid into VxRack Flex, which comes, as opposed to do-it-yourself, comes shrink-wrapped, roll it in. So they actually designed their infrastructure, their data center around what they call pods. Fairly large pods, but they've changed the consumption units on how they consume IT. They'll actually wheel in Flex pods, that's their new unit of consumption. Now, a Flex pod is... >> Not to be confused with another product called FlexPod. >> Oh, gosh, yes, VxRack Flex pods. Yes, absolutely. >> We unfortunately have run out of words in our industry here, so yeah. >> I'm sure you'll find something in the vernacular that will apply here. >> I'll try and burn that one from my memory, but good catch. >> So that's one use case. Just in general now, so what is the value prop for a customer today, as opposed to what kind of flexibility you're giving them, we've heard about performance, but how are people actually putting it to use for them, and what are they doing better, do you think, because of that? >> I'll start off, one, which is an architectural discussion, and I'll crunch this down pretty small. In the beginning, there was DAS, direct-attached storage, and it was fast, and it was easy to manage, as long as you had to manage one. You get a hundred units, and it was siloed storage, and it was hard, so the world came up with SAN. It's consolidated storage, it's great. I can carve it up, I can manage it from one place, and then we came up with flash, SSD, blindingly fast, and that storage controller started to be a choking point, so we moved the storage back into the server, a la HCI. >> Actually, we called it Server SAN for that specific reason. >> Exactly right, exactly right. Initial ventures into some of HCI, you could only scale the storage or only scale the HCI clusters as big as one given cluster. So you started building somewhat of silos of HCI. One of the beauties of Flex and VxFlex OS storage software is it can scale across multiple clusters. Those clusters can be VMware, they can be BareMetal, they can be Linux, so you start to gain all the advantages of HCI, flexibility, agility, kind of incremental scaling, pay as you grow, with all of the advantages of storage consolidation. I no longer have pools of siloed storage, I can carve up ones as needed, when needed, I can manage it all as one combined storage pool. From a Flex perspective, it's got some pretty nice architectural attributes, which give you the best of HCI and agility and scale, as well as storage consolidation. So we're seeing a lot of success there. >> Dan, I hear things like open, flexible, some of those environments, and I think about the service providers and requirements that they have for how they need to simplify their environments, super conscious on cost, how's this been doing in the service provider market recently? >> Absolutely, funny you bring that up. We actually talk internally, we've got a service provider team inside Dell, they focus on servicing the large telcos and other service providers, and we've noticed that their underlying infrastructure is very very similar with Flex, so we're in discussions to see how we land what they do on top of what we do as a standardized offering. Even right now, a lot of our customers are in the service provider space. That large growth, flexibility, and some of the underlying storage stack has multi-tenancy capabilities, where you can carve up and isolate, that lend itself very very well to service providers. >> Oh, go ahead, Stu. >> For people that know ScaleIO, anything new that they should be understanding? I understand it's this packaging as like a hardware model. Organizationally, it lives under the server team now, I believe it is. >> Absolutely, so two things there. One, organizationally, all the HCI stuff came in up under Ashley Gorakhpurwalla so it came in up under the server side, and then, so, ScaleIO is up under Jeff Boudreau, under Dan Embar, it's storage stack, it's in under the storage division. We work very very closely together. Second thing that's happening, there's a, one, we've been in the HCI world for a while, in the CI world for a while. We've quickly determined we can drive much better customer experience, much better customer outcomes, as we lean more towards an appliance or an engineered system versus a do-it-yourself kind of model. With ScaleIO, what we're trying to do is push it more into an appliance model, push it more into rack scale model, VxRack Flex. There's a outbound shift away from, kind of, what was ScaleIO as a software only and into more of an engineered system appliance offering, so with that shift, you'll see a rebrand from ScaleIO to VxFlex OS. It's just a rebrand of the software. >> So I'm glad Stu talked about organization, because you had to kind of reorg not too long ago, and so we had Ashley on yesterday, we talked to Jeff yesterday, as well. So from your perspective, now that you've had a few months to settle in, find your groove, how much of a difference do you think, as far as customer-facing, is this making in terms of responding to those kinds of needs and those desires. >> Sticking HCI with the server team has an awful lot of synergy. Obvious, compute-centric, scale, from a business scale perspective. So there's an awful lot of goodness in living in that same organization. Ashley's done it pretty well to make sure there's a lot of alignment, but we're also keeping a lot of the engineered system special sauce focus on the HCI side. So we're able to, one, better leverage a lot of the, what I would call, supply chain scale, the processes and go-to-market capabilities of an engine that is built around hundreds and thousands of units, right? That stretches across services, that stretches across factory and supply chain. Obviously, we want to drive HCI, we want to drive HCI in the mainstream and scale. Sitting right there in the server organization, they do scale, right? So lot of good learnings, lot of good synergy and leverage across teams. >> It's coming together for you. Nicely done. Thanks for joining us again, good to see you. You going to see each other next week, you said? >> That's right. >> We down in New Orleans, is that... yeah. >> Yeah. >> Alright, enjoy, and stay out of trouble, both of you. >> Absolutely, you know, one week in Vegas... >> Vegas one week, New Orleans the next, that's a recipe for an interesting time. >> Yes, that it is. >> Dan McConnell, thanks for being with us here on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Back with more from Las Vegas right after this. You're watching theCUBE from Dell Technologies World 2018. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to the Cube, day two of our coverage of Dell Technologies World. We're in Las Vegas, and I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We're having a great day, a great day and a half, yesterday as well, learning a lot about what Dell Technologies is doing to help customers make things real. Digital transformation, IT transformation, security transformation, workforce transformation, you name it. We are excited to welcome back to the Cube, one of our alumni, Dan Inbar, the SVP and GM of XtremIO and ScaleIO. Welcome back, Dan. >> Thank you very much, good to be here. >> So, lots of news in the last day and a half. What is the state of the union with XtremIO? >> So, we're very excited, today we launch the new release of X2, that brings to the market the native replication capability, X2 native replication, which is done like XtremIO does everything in a very unique and special way, leveraging our architecture of cast-based architecture. And, as such, being a very effective and very efficient native replication. In addition, what we've launched now is the new release, which is an entry-level XtremIO, allowing customers to start with a lower cost platform, leveraging all the capabilities that XtremIO brings with an enterprise grade solution, but in a lower market. So those are the big things that we brought about. >> Yeah Dan, let's unpack that a little bit for our audience. Let's start with the replication side, you know, EMC with, you know, SRDF, decades ago, really brought replication to the storage market, it was one of the things, when XtremIO first came out, it was like, well, if you want replication that's not native there are lots of options. The Dell EMC family has lots of options out there, so explain, kind of what went into it, why another one, what differentiates it. >> Sure. So the unique thing with our architecture, is basically we're looking at everything and fingerprinting everything, so that we don't write anything that's already written. And when you add another replication capability now, we do the same thing. So it's part of the way, basically. So what happens is, when you have an array, you do the first replication, you start replication, basically, most all solutions, you have to copy all the data first time, and then you can do snap diffs, or whatever. What we do is, basically, we copy everything already deadlocked and compressed, so you bring down the bandwidth up to 75% lower bandwidth. So it's significantly lower on the WAN, much more effective, as a result, a lot more cost-effective solution. >> Yeah, so we'd actually looked at the SNAP technology a few years ago, as one of the things that differentiated XtremIO in the marketplace, and what that means to businesses and how they can change how they work on it. Talk to us about the users and what does this replication mean to them and their business? How is it going to lead to further along that path of digital transformation that we traverse? >> So there's a few things that this brings to the market. First of all, because of our architecture. So that, you can now have your production, we've always said you could have your production and QA and Dev on the same platform, because of all of the snapshots that basically doesn't cost you anything. Well, now, if you want to now separate it, you don't have to pay for the one, so it's still basically for free, but you can put it into a different environment and you can have your whole TEST and DEV environment separate. If those who want to do it that way. So you have that ability again, in addition. But once you do all the replication you can get into, for example, if you do one too many replication, you can have one station that does replication, you'll get D Doop across all the systems, so again, a lot more efficient solution. So, basically what it brings you, is in the data transformation world, is a lot more effective, cost-effective solution, and it's a very unique way of approaching it. >> So, I want to talk about how this is impacting IT organizations, as IT now, and I think Michael Dell even said yesterday, needs to become and can become a profit center. We're seeing a lot more business leaders recognize that IT should be a business strategy, there's so much potential for it to really become much more horizontally aligned within an organization. Talk to us about, from that perspective, as your talking with customers, and presumably CIOs and leaders there, what are some of the benefits they're looking for this technology to deliver, in terms of elevating IT in a transformative way? >> So, what customers are saying is that, by using this, that they're basically they've taken away this problem from the end user, he's basically got all the resources he needs, got the performance that he needs, he's got no issues, and the cost-wise, it's significantly lower. So what it allows them, for example, if you want every developer to have his own copy, his ability to work independently, without having everyone fight about the number of copies we can do and who's getting what copy, you can just do it. You can have endless amount of copies, it doesn't cost you anything. This is a very different way of doing things. It allows you to move a lot faster, and the pace, as we heard Michael talk about yesterday, the pace is picking up. These kinds of technologies allows you to work a lot faster, a lot more reacting to what's happening in the field. >> Alright so, Dan, when XtremIO came out, it was already a relatively small building block, built for kind of a really a scalable architecture, so explain to us what it means that you have a new entry level. What has changed from a technology standpoint, that's allowed you to kind of repackage? >> So what you're talking about is with the X1, it was a scale out architecture, as you mentioned. X2 brought to the market, scale up as well as scale out. So each brick can have up to 72 drives, so you can start with 18 drives and grow by small tax, so you have a lot more granularity. What the X2T does, it starts, it goes up to 36 drives. Okay, so it gives you the ability, it's more limited, from the point of view of the scale out. You can always upgrade it, but customers should make the decision upfront. If it's a small system that he wants, then it makes sense to go with the X2T, because it's limited and doesn't scale up. You can upgrade it, but you'll end up paying more then, to get to the same scale. >> Okay, so is there different hardware, or is this limiting on software, how is this product different from the main one? >> It's basically the ability to work the system with less memory in the system, because it's a smaller system, so you can work with less memory. >> Okay, so it's actually a different chassis, though, is that right? >> No, same box exactly. You can always upgrade, and you buy an expansion kit and you just add the memory and you're back to an R, which is the code name for the largest scale out system. The only problem is, because it's an upgrade, because you're doing it after the fact, because you're doing it in the field, you're going to end up paying more. So if a customer thinks that he needs only a very small system, prices over essence, this is the solution to go with. But if you want to add the scalability capability, you should probably start with an R. >> Alright, can you bring us inside? You know, was this a pull from customers to ask for this type of configuration? Are there specific use cases that you're hearing for this? >> Yeah, what we're seeing is a lot of demand from the field, and we're seeing it more and more. All the goodies that the high end solutions bring, but cost is an issue. So basically they're saying, we want a more competitive solution, with all the capabilities. We love the product, but give it to us cheaper. So, that's always true, and we're doing a lot of work to get that to them. But the X2T gives the opportunity for a customer to understand the values that XtremIO can bring to you, and then, afterwards, grow and understand the capabilities moving on. >> So some of the things that I've heard, Dan, you articulate, show how this technology can help customers transform IT. We've talked about getting things done faster, less costs, digital transformation as can be enabled by this technology, and also, sounds like workforce transformation, as you were saying. It sounds like these can be done more easily, maybe with less kind of competition internally. I'm wondering about the security froze. We talked about that as one of the four tenants of transformation. How does some of the native replication, for example, and the new capabilities of what you just announced, how does it help organizations facilitate security as they grow, have more and more data, which opens up, you know, attack surfaces? >> So, as you mentioned, I mean, replication adds, obviously, for the security, data security, not the pure security of someone penetrating, of course, but obviously the product itself has got all the securities and all the qualifications that are required in order to offer a completely secured offering. So, from that point of view, obviously you're covered. The replication brings to the market the capability of having it in a DR site, offsite, et cetera, and all those capabilities, that were proven time and time again, worth doing. >> Alright, Dan, last thing I wanted to cover is, in you organization you also have the ScaleIO products, so, big announcement with the X2 piece, what's the update on the ScaleIO piece, we've had the opportunity to interview on theCUBE, you know, customers over the years, and you know, where does that fit in the portfolio? >> So, ScaleIO is, as you know, we've repositioned it now to be as part of the V FLEX OS solution, and we're working very closely with the VxFLEX Team. As such, we're basically trying to push it to more, you have the VxFLEX OS, you have then the VxFLEX Ready Node solution, which is basically qualified Dell servers that you can combine together with our OS. We're working on making it into an appliance, which would come complete, and then a rack, which is a full HCI. So, really, the repositioning is to make it more, to be easier to consume in the broader market, obviously with the large customers, et cetera, to consume it as they did in the past. But really, it makes it much easier to consume. As you were saying before, the value of ScaleIO is very clear and it's a great product, it just makes it easier in this new positioning to consume by a broader market. >> Dan, thanks so much for stopping by, sharing what's new, how it's differentiated. And we look forward to having some customers on to talk about the business outcomes that they're achieving. So thanks for your time. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> We want to thank you for watching theCube, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We're live in Vegas, day two of Dell Technologies World, stick around, we'll be right back after a short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to SiliconANGLE media's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm Stu Miniman here with my cohost Keith Townsend, happy to welcome back to the program Tom Burns, who's the SVP of Networking and Solutions at Dell EMC. Tom, great to see ya. >> Great to see you guys as well. Good to see you again. >> All right, so I feel like one of those CNBC guys. It's like, Tom, I remember back when Force10 was acquired by Dell and all the various pieces that have gone on and converged in infrastructure, but of course with the merger, you've gotten some new pieces to your toy chest. >> Tom: That's correct. >> So maybe give us the update first as to what's under your purview. >> Right, right, so I continue to support and manage the entire global networking business on behalf of Dell EMC, and then recently I picked up what we called our converged infrastructure business or the VxBlock, Vscale business. And I continue also to manage what we call Enterprise Infrastructure, which is basically any time our customers want to extend the life of their infrastructure around memory, storage, optics, and so forth. We support them with Dell EMC certified parts, and then we add to that some third-party componentry around rack power and cooling, software, Cumulus, Big Switch, things like that. Riverbed, Silver Peak, others. And so with that particular portfolio we also cover what we call the Dell EMC Ready Solutions, both for the service provider, but then also for traditional enterprises as well. >> Yeah, well luckily there's no change in any of those environments. >> Tom: No, no. >> Networking's been static for decades. I mean they threw a product line that I mean last I checked was somewhere in the three to four billion dollar range. With the VxBlock under what you're talking there. >> Yeah it's a so, yeah-- >> Maybe you could talk, what does this mean? 'Cause if I give you your networking guy. >> Right. >> Keith and I are networking guys by background, obviously networking's a piece of this, but give us a little bit of how the sausage is made inside to-- >> Tom: Sure. >> Get to this stuff. >> Well I think when you talk about all these solutions, Cloud, Hybrid Cloud, Public Cloud, when you think about software-defined X, the network is still pretty darn important, right? I often say that if the network's not working, it's going to be a pretty cloudy day. It's not going to connect. And so the fabric continues to remain one of the most critical parts of the solution. So the thought around the VxBlock and moving that in towards the networking team is the importance of the fabric and the capability to scale out and scale up with our customers' workloads and applications. So that's probably the reason primarily the reason. And then we can also look at how we can work very closely with our storage division 'cause that's the key IP component coming from Dell EMC on the block side. And see how we can continue to help our customers solve their problems when it comes to this not your do-it-yourself but do-it-for-me environment. >> All right, I know Keith wants to jump in, but one just kind of high-level question for you. I look at networking, we've really been talking about disaggregation of what's going on. It's really about disaggregated systems. And then you've got convergence, and there's other parts of the group that have hyper convergence. How do you square the circle on those two trends and how do those go together? >> Well, I think it's pretty similar on whether you go hyper converge, converge, or do-it-yourself, you build your own block so to speak. There's a set of buyers that want everything to be done for them. They want to buy the entire stack, they want it pre-tested, they want it certified, they want it supported. And then there's a set of customers that want to do it themselves. And that's where we see this opportunity around disaggregation. So we see it primarily in hyperscale and Cloud, but we're seeing it more and more in large enterprise, medium enterprise, particular verticals where customers are in essence looking for some level of agility or capability to interchange their solutions by a particular vendor or solutions that are coming from the same vendor but might be a different IP as an example. And I'm really proud of the fact that Dell EMC really kicked off this disaggregation of the hardware and software and networking. Some 4 1/2 years ago. Now you see some of the, let's say, larger industry players starting to follow suit. And they're starting to disaggregate their software as well. >> Yeah, I would have said just the commonality between those two seemingly opposed trends it's scale. >> Right. >> It's how do customers really help scale these environments? >> Exactly, exactly. It depends a lot around the customer environment and what kind of skill sets do they have. Are they willing to help go through some of that do-it-yourself type of process. Obviously Dell EMC services is there to help them in those particular cases. But we kind of have this buying conundrum of build versus buy. I think my old friend, Chad Sakac, used to say, there's different types of customers that want a VxRail or build-it-themselves, or they want a VxBlock. We see the same thing happen in a networking. There's those customers that want disaggregated hardware and software, and in some cases even disaggregated software. Putting those protocols and features on the switch that they actually use in the data center. Rather than buying a full proprietary stack, well we continue to build the full stack for a select number of customers as well because that's important to that particular sector. >> So again, Tom, two very different ends of the spectrum. I was at ONS a couple of months ago, talked to the team. Dell is a huge sponsor of the Open Source community. And I don't think many people know that. Can you talk about the Open Source relationship or the relationship that Dell Networking has with the Open Source community? >> Absolutely, we first made our venture in Open Source actually with Microsoft in their SONiC work. So they're creating their own network operating software, and we made a joint contribution around the switch abstraction interface, or side. So that was put into the Open Compute Project probably around 3 1/2, maybe four years ago. And that's right after we announced this disaggregation. We then built basically an entire layer of what we call our OS10 base, or what's known in the Linux foundation as OPX. And we contributed that to the OPX or to the Linux foundation, where basically that gives the customer the capability through the software that takes care of all the hardware, creates this switch subtraction interface to gather the intelligence from the ASIC and the silicon, and bringing it to a control plane, which allows APIs to be connected for all your north-bound applications or your general analysis that you want to use, or a disaggregated analysis, what you want to do. So we've been very active in Linux. We've been very active in OCP as well. We're seeing more and more of embracing this opportunity. You've probably seen recently AT&T announced a rather large endeavor to replace tens of thousands of routers with basically white box switches and Open Source software. We really think that this trend is moving, and I'm pretty proud that Dell EMC was a part of getting that all started. >> So that was an awful lot of provider talk. You covered both the provider's base and the enterprise space. Talk to us about where the two kind of meet. You know the provider space, they're creating software, they're embracing OpenStack, they're creating plug-ins for disaggregated networking. And then there's the enterprise. There's opportunity there. Where do you see the enterprise leveraging disaggregation versus the service provider? >> Well, I think it's this move towards software-defined. If you heard in Michael's keynote today, and you'll hear more tomorrow from Jeff Clarke. The whole world is moving to software-defined. It's no longer if, it's when. And I think the opportunity for enterprises that are kind of in that transformation stage, and moving from traditional software-defined, or excuse me, traditional data centers to the software-defined, they could look at disaggregation as an opportunity to give them that agility and capability. In a manner of which they can kind of continue to manage the old world, but move forward into the new world of disaggregation software-defined with the same infrastructure. You know it's not well-known that Dell EMC, we've made our switching now capable of running five different operating softwares. That's dependent upon workloads and use cases, and the customer environment. So, traditional enterprise, they want to look at traditional protocols, traditional features. We give them that capability through our own OS. We can reduce that with OS partners, software coming from some of our OS partners, giving them just the protocols and features that they need for the data center or even out to the edge. And it gives them that flexibility and change. So I think it really comes at this point of when are they going to move towards moving from traditional networking to the next generation of networking. And I'm very happy, I think Dell Technologies is leading the way. >> So I'm wondering if you could expand a little bit about that. When I think about Dell and this show, I mean it is a huge ecosystem. We're sitting right near the Solutions Expo, which will be opening in a little bit, but on the networking side, you've got everything from all the SD-WAN pieces, to all the network operating systems that can sit on top. Maybe, give us kind of the update on the overview, the ecosystem, where Dell wins. >> Yeah, yeah I mean, if you think about 30-something years ago when Michael started the company and Dell started, what was it about. It was really about transforming personal computing, right? It was about taking something that was kind of a traditional proprietary architecture and commoditizing it, making sure it's scalable and supportable. You think of the changes that's occurred now between the mainframe and x86. This is what we think's happening in networking. And at Dell Technologies in the networking area whether it's Dell EMC or to VMware, we're really geared towards this SDX type of market. Virtualization, Layer two, day or three disaggregated switching in the data center. Now SD-WAN with the acquisition of Velocloud by VMware. We're really hoping customers transform at the way networking is being managed, operated, supported to give them much more flexibility and agility in a software-defined market. That being said, we continue to support a multitude of other partners. We have Cumulus, Big Switch, IP infusion, and Pluribus as network operating software alternatives. We have our own, and then we have them as partners. On the SD-WAN area while we lead with Velocloud, we have Silver Peak and we also have Versa Technology, which is getting a lot of upkick in the area. Both in the service provider and in the enterprise space. Huge area of opportunity for enterprises to really lower their cost of connectivity and their branch offices. So, again, we at Dell, we want to have an opinion. We have some leading technologies that we own, but we also partner with some very good, best-of-breed solutions. But being that we're open, and we're disaggregated, and we have an incredible scaling and service department or organization, we have this capability to bring it together for our customers and support them as they go through their IT transformation. >> So, Dell EMC is learning a lot of lessons as you guys start to embrace software-defined. Couple of Dell EMC World's ago, big announcement Chad talked about, ScaleIO, and abstracting, and giving away basically, ScaleIO as a basic solution for free. Then you guys pulled back. And you said, you know what, that's not quite what customers want. They want a packaged solution. So we're talking on one end, total disaggregation and another end, you know what, in a different area of IT, customers seem to want packaged solutions. >> Tom: Yeah. >> Can you talk to the importance of software-defined and packaged solutions? >> Right, it's kind of this theory of appliances, right? Or how is that software going to be packaged? And we give that flexibility in either way. If you think of VxRail or even our vSAN operating or vSAN ready node, it gives that customer the capability to know that we put that software and hardware together, and we tested it, we certified it, most importantly we can support it with kind of one throat to choke, one single call. And so I think the importance for customers are again, am I building it myself or do I want to buy a stack. If I'm somewhere in the middle maybe I'm doing a hybrid or perhaps a Rail type of solution, where it's just compute and storage for the most part. Maybe I'm looking for something different on my networking or connectivity standpoint. But Dell EMC, having the entire portfolio, can help them at any point of the venture or at any part of the solution. So I think that you're absolutely right. The customer buying is varied. You've got those that want everything from a single point, and you got others that are saying I want decision points. I think a lot of the opportunity around the cost savings, mostly from an Opex standpoint are those that are moving towards disaggregated. It doesn't lock 'em in to a single solution. It doesn't get 'em into that long life cycle of when you're going to do changes and upgrades and so forth. This gives them a lot more flexibility and capability. >> Tom, sometimes we have the tendency to get down in the weeds on these products. Especially in the networking space. One of my complaints was, the whole SDN wave, didn't seem to connect necessarily to some of the big businesses' challenges. Heard in the keynote this morning a lot of talk about digital transformation. Bring us up to speed as to how networking plays into that overall story. What you're hearing from customers and if you have any examples we'd love to hear. >> Yeah, no so, I think networking plays a critical part of the IT transformation. I think if you think of the first move in virtualization around compute, then you have the software-defined storage, the networking component was kind of the lagger. It was kind of holding back. And in fact today, I think some analysts say that even when certain software-defined storage implementations occur, interruptions or issues happen in the network. Because the network has then been built and architected for that type of environment. So the companies end up going back and re-looking at how that's done. And companies overall are I think are frustrated with this. They're frustrated with the fact that the network is holding them back from enabling new services, new capabilities, new workloads, moving towards a software-defined environment. And so I think this area again, of disaggregation, of software-defined, of offering choice around software, I think it's doing well, and it's really starting to see an uptick. And the customer experiences as follows. One is, open networking where it's based upon standard commodity-based hardware. It's simply less expensive than proprietary hardware. So they're going to have a little bit of savings from the CapEx standpoint. But because they moved towards this disaggregated model where perhaps they're using one of our third-party software partners that happens to be based in Linux, or even our own OS10 is now based in Linux. Look at that, the tools around configuration and automation are the same as compute. And the same as storage. And so therefore I'm saving on this configuration and automation and so forth. So we have examples such as Verizon that literally not only saves about 30% cost savings on their CapEx, they're saving anywhere between 40 and 50% on their Opex. Why? They can roll out applications much faster. They can make changes to their network much faster. I mean that's the benefit of virtualization and NSX as well, right? Instead of having this decisions of sending a network engineer to a closet to do CLI, down in the dirt as you would say, and reconfigure the switch, a lot of that now has been attracted to a software lever, and getting the company much more capability to make the changes across the fabric, or to segregate it using NSX micro segmentation to make the changes to those users or to that particular environment that needs those changes. So, just the incredible amount of flexibility. I think SDN let's say six, seven years ago, everyone thought it was going to be CapEx. You know, cheaper hardware, cheaper ASICs, et cetera. It's all about Opex. It's around flexibility, agility, common tool sets, better configuration, faster automation. >> So we all have this nirvana idea that we can take our traditional stacks, whether it's pre-packaged CI configurations that's pre-engineered, HCI, SDN, disaggregated networking. Add to that a software layer this magical automation. Can you unpack that for us a little bit? What are you seeing practically whether it's in the server provider perspective or on the enterprise. What are those crucial relationships that Dell EMC is forming with the software industry to bring forth that automation? >> Well obviously we have a very strong relationship with VMware. >> Keith: Right. >> And so you have vRealize and vROps and so forth, and in fact in the new VxBlock 1000, you're going to see a lot of us gearings, a lot of our development towards the vRealize suite, so that helps those customers that are in a VMware environment. We also have a very strong relationship with Red Hat and OpenStack, where we've seen very successful implementations in the service provider space. Those that want to go a little bit more, a little bit more disaggregated, a little bit more open, even it from the storage participation like SAP and so forth. But then obviously we're doing a lot of work with Ansible, Chef, and Puppet, for those that are looking for more of a common open source set of tools across server, compute, networking storage and so forth. So I think the real benefit is kind of looking at it at that 25,000-foot view on how we want to automate. Do you want to go towards containers, do you want to go traditional? What are the tool sets that you've been using in your compute environment, and can those be brought down to the entire stack? >> All right, well Tom Burns, really appreciate catching up with you. I know Keith will be spending a little time at Interop this week too. I know, I'm excited that we have a lot more networking here at this end of the strip also this week. >> Appreciate it. Listen to Pat's talk this afternoon. I think we're going to be hearing even more about Dell Technology's networking. >> All right. Tom Burns, SVP of Networking and Solutions at Dell EMC. I'm Stu Miniman and this is Keith Townsend. Thanks for watching The Cube. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the theCUBE. Now here's your host Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to a special theCUBE conversation here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome back to the program, Danny Cobb, who's with Dell EMC in the CTO office. >> Thanks Stu, great to see you here today. >> Great to see you too. So Danny, we're going to talk about a topic that like many things in the industry. It seems like it's something that happen overnight, but there's been a lot of hard work going on for quite a lot of years, even going back to heck when you and I worked together. >> Danny: That's right. >> A company use to be called EMC. NVMe, so first of all just bring everybody up to speed as to what you work on inside the Dell family. >> Danny: Sure, so my responsibility at now Dell EMC has been this whole notion of emergence systems. New technologies, new capabilities that are just coming into broad market adoption, broad readiness, technological feasibility, and those kinds of things. And then making sure that as a company we're prepared for their adoption and inclusion in our product portfolio. So it's a great set of capabilities a great set of work to be doing especially if you have a short attention span like I do. >> Danny, I spend a lot of time these days in the open source world. You talk about people are moving faster, people are trying lots of technologies. You've been doing some really hard work. The company and the industry in the standards world. What's the importance of standards these days, and bring us back to how this NVMe stuff started. >> So a great way to get everybody up to speed as you mentioned when you kicked off. NVMe, an overnight success, almost 11 years in the making now. The very first NVMe standard was about 2007. EMC joined the NVMe consortium in 2008 along with an Austin, Texas computer company called Dell. So Dell and EMC were both in the front row of defining the NVMe standard, and essentially putting in place a set of standards, a set of architectures, a set of protocols, product adoption capabilities, compatibility capabilities for the entire industry to follow, starting in 2008. Now you know from our work together that the storage industry likes to make sure that everything's mature, everything works reliably. Everything has broad interoperability standards and things like that. So since 2008, we've largely been about how do we continue to build momentum and generate support for a new storage technology that's based on broadly accepted industry standards, in order to allow the entire industry to move forward. Not just to achieve the most out of the flash revolution, but prepare the industry for coming enhancements to storage class memory. >> Yeah, so storage class memory you mentioned things like flash. One thing we've looked at for a long time is when flash rolled out. There's a lot of adoption on the consumer side first, and then that drove the enterprise piece, but flash today is still done through Ikusi interface with SaaS or Sata. And believe we're finally getting rid of when we go to NVMe. What some in the industry have called the horrible Ikusi stack. >> Danny: That's right. >> So explain to us a little bit about first, the consumer piece of where this fits first, and how it gets the enterprise. Where are we in the industry today with that? >> Yeah so as you pointed out a number of the new media technologies have actually gained a broad acceptance and a grounds full of support starting in the consumer space. The rapid adoption of mobile devices whether initially iPods and iPhones and things like that. Tablets where the more memory you have the more songs you carry, the more pictures you can take. A lot of very virtuous cycle type things occurred in the consumer space to allow flash to go from a fairly expensive perhaps niche technology to broad high volume manufacturing. And with high volume manufacturing comes much lower costs and so we always knew that flash was fast when we first started working on it at EMC in 2005. It became fast and robust when we shipped in 2008. It went from flash to robust to affordable with technologies like the move from SLC to MLC, and now TLC flash and the continuing advances of Moore's law. And so flash has been the beneficiary of high volume consumer economics along with our friend Moore's law over a number of years. >> Okay, so on the NVMe piece, your friends down in Round Rock in Dell. They've got not only the storage portfolio, but on the consumer side. There's pieces like my understanding NVMe already in the market for some part of this today, correct. >> That's right, I think one of the very first adoption scenarios for NVMe was in Lightweight laptop device. The storage deck could be more efficient. The fundamental number of gates in Silicon required to implement the stack was more efficient. Power was more efficient, so a whole bunch of things that were beneficial to a mobile high volume client device like an ultra light, ultra portable laptop made it a great place to launch the technology. >> Okay, and so bring us to what does that mean then for storage? Is that available in the enterprise storage today? >> Danny: Yeah. >> And where is that today and where is that today, and where are we going to see in the next years though? >> So here's the progression that the industry has more or less followed. If we went from that high volume, ultra light laptop device to very inexpensive M.2 devices that could be used in laptops and desktops more broadly, also gained a fair amount of traction with certain used cases and hyperscalers. And then as the spec matured and as the enterprise ecosystem around it, broader data integrity type solutions in the sili-case itself. A number of other things that are bread and butter for enterprise class devices. As those began to emerge, we've now seen NVMe move forward from laptop and client devices to high volume M.2 devices to full function, full capability dual ported enterprise NVMe devices really crossing over this year. >> Okay, so that means we're going to see not only in the customer pieces but should be seeing really enterprise roll out in I'm assuming things like storage arrays, maybe hyper converged. All the different flavors in the not too distant future. >> Absolutely right, the people who get paid to forecast these things when they look into their crystal balls. They've talked about when does NVMe get close enough to its predecessor SaaS to make the switch over be a no brainer. And often times, you get a performance factor where there's more value or you get a cost factor where suddenly that becomes the way the game is won. In the case of NVMe versus SaaS, both of those situations value and cost are more or less a wash right now across the industry. And so there are very few impediments to adoption. Much like a few years ago, there were very few impediment to adoption of enterprise SSDs versus high performance HDDs. The 15Ks and the 10K HDDs. Once we got to close enough in terms of cost parity. The entire industry went all flash over night. >> Yeah, it's a little bit different than say the original adoption of flash versus HDD. >> Danny: That's right. >> HDD versus SSD. Remember back, you had to have the algebra sheet. And you said okay, how many devices did I have.? What's the power savings that I could get out of that? Plus the performance that I had and then does this makes sense. It seems like this is a much more broadly applicable type of solution that we'll see. >> Danny: Right. >> For much faster adoption. >> Do you remember those days of a little goes a long way? >> Stu: Yeah. >> And then more is better? And then almost be really good, and so that's where we've come over what seems like a very few years. >> Okay, so we've only been talking about NVMe, the thing I know David Foyer's been look a lot from an architectural standpoint. Where we see benefit obviously from NVMe but NVMe over Fabrics is the thing that has him really excited if you talk about the architectures, maybe just explain a little bit about what I get with NVMe and what I'll get added on top with the over fabric piece of that. >> Danny: Sure. >> And what's that roll out look like? >> Can I tell you a little story about what I think of as the birth of NVMe over Fabrics? >> Stu: Please. >> Some of your viewers might remember a project at EMC called Thunder. And Thunder was PCI flash with an RDMA over ethernet front end on it. We took that system to Intel developers forum as a proof of concept. Around the corner from me was an engineer named Dave Min-turn, who's an Intel engineer. Who had almost exactly the same software stack up and running except it was an Intel RDMA capability nick and an Intel flash drive, and of course some changes to the Intel processor stack to support the used case that he had in mind. And we started talking and we realized that we were both counting the number of instructions from packet arriving across the network to bytes being read or written on the vis-tory fast PCI E device. And we realized that there has to be a better way, and so from that day, I think it was September 2013, maybe it was August. We actually started working together on how can we take the benefits of the NVMe standard that exists mapped onto PCI E. And then map those same parameters as cleanly as we possibly can onto, at that time ethernet but also InfiniBand, Fiber channel, and perhaps some other transports as a way to get the benefits of the NVMe software stack, and build on top of the new high performance capabilities of these RDMA capable interconnects. So it goes way back to 2013, we moved it into the NVMe standard as a proposal in 2014. And again three, four years later now, we're starting to see solutions roll out that begin to show the promise that we saw way back then. >> Yeah and the challenge with networking obviously is sounds like you've got a few different transport layers that I can use there. Probably a number of different providers. How baked is the standard? Where do things like hits the interoperability fit into the mix? When do customers get their hands on it, and what can they expect the roll out to be? >> We're clearly at the beginning of what's about to be a very, I think long and healthy future for NVMe over Fabrics. I don't know about you. I was at Flash Memory Summit back in August in Santa Clara and there were a number of vendors there starting to talk about NVMe over Fabrics basics. FPGA implementation, system on chip implementations, software implementations across a variety of stacks. The great thing was NVMe over Fabrics was a phrase of the entire show. The challenging thing was probably no two of those solutions interoperated with each other yet. We were still at the running water through the pipes phase, not really checking for leaks and getting to broad adoption. Broad adoption I think comes when we've got a number of vendors broad interoperability, multi-supplier, component availability and those things, that let a number of implementations exists and interoperate because our customers live in a diverse multi-vendor environment. So that's what it will take to go from interesting proof of concept technology which I think is what we're seeing in terms of early customers engagement today to broad base deployment in both existing fiber channel implementations, and also in some next generation data center implementations, probably beginning next year. >> Okay, so Danny, I talked to a lot of companies out there. Everyone that's involved in this (mumbles) has been talking about NVMe over Fabric for a couple of years now. From a user standpoint, how are they going to help sort this out? What will differentiate the check box. Yes, I have something that follows this to, oh wait this will actually help performance so much better. What works with my environment? Where are the pitfalls and where are the things that are going to help companies? What's going to differentiate the marketplace? >> As an engineer, we always get into the speeds and the feeds and the weeds on performance and things like that, and while those are all true. We can talk about fewer and fewer instructions in the networks stack. Fewer and fewer instructions in the storage stack. We can talk about more efficient Silicon implementations. More affinity for multi-processor, multi-core processing environments, more efficient operating system implementations and things like that. But that's just the performance side. The broader benefits come to beginning to move to more cost effective data center fabric implementation. Where I'm not managing an orange wire and a blue wire unless that's really what I want. There's still a number of people who want to manage their fiber channel and will run NVMe over that. They get the compatibility that they want. They get the policies that they want and the switch behavior that they want, and the provisioning model that they want and all of those things. They'll get that in an NVMe over Fabrics implementation. A new data center however will be able to go, you know what, I'm all in day one on 25, 5000 bit gigabit ethernet as my fundamental connection of choice. I'm going 400 gigabit ethernet ports as soon as Andy Beck-tels shine or somebody gives them to me and things like that. And so if that's the data center architecture model that I'm in, that's a fundamental implementation decision that I get to make knowing that I can run an enterprise grade, storage protocol over the top of that, and the industry is ready. My external storage is ready, my servers are ready and my workloads can get the benefit of that. >> Okay, so if I just step back for a second, NVMe sounds like a lot of it is what we would consider the backend in proving that NVMe over Fabrics helps with some of the front end. From a customer stand point, what about their application standpoint? Can they work with everything that they have today? Are there things that they're going to want to do to optimize for that? So the storage industry just take care of it for them. What do they think about today and future planning from an application standpoint? >> I think it's a matter of that readiness and what is it going to take. The good news and this has analogs to the industry change from HDD to SSDs in the first place. The good new is you can make that switch over today and your data management application, your database application, your warehouse, you're analytics or whatever. Not one line of software changes. NVMe device shows up in the block stack of your favorite operating system, and you get lower latency, more IOs in parallel. More CPU back for your application to run because you don't need it in the storage stack anymore. So you get the benefits of that just by changing over to this new protocol. For applications who then want to optimize for this new environment, you can start thinking about having more IOs in flight in parallel. You could start thinking about what happens when those IOs are satisfied more rapidly without as much overhead in and interrupt processing and a number of things like that. You could start thinking about what happens when your application goes from hundred micro-second latencies and IOs like the flash devices to 10 microsecond or one microsecond IOs. Would perhaps with some of these new storage class memory devices that are out there. Those are the benefits that people are going to see when they start thinking about an all NVMe stack. Not just being beneficial for existing flash implementations but being fundamentally required and mandatory to get the benefits of storage class memory implementations. So this whole notion of future ready was one of the things that was fundamental in how NVMe was initially designed over 10 years ago. And we're starting to see that long term view pay benefits in the marketplace. >> Any insight from the customer standpoint? Is it certain applications or verticals where this is really going to help? I think back to the move to SSDs. It was David Foyer who just wet around the entire news feed. He was like, database, database, database is where we can have the biggest impact. What's NVMe going to impact? >> I think what we always see with these things. First of all, NVMe is probably going to have a very rapid advancement and impact across the industry much more quickly than the transition from HDD to SSD, so we don't have to go through that phase of a little goes a long way. You can largely make the switch and as your ecosystem supports it as your vendor of choice supports it. You can make that switch and to a large extent have the application be agnostic from that. So that's a really good way to start. The other place is you and I have had this conversation before. If you take out a cocktail napkin and you draw an equation that says time equals money. That's an obvious place where NVMe and NVMe over Fabrics benefit someone initially. High speed analytics, real time, high frequency trading, a number of things where more efficiency. My ability to do more work per unit time than yours gives me a competitive advantage. Makes my algorithms better, exposes my IP in a more advantageous way. Those are wonderful places for these types of emerging technologies to get adopted because the value proposition is just slam dunk simple. >> Yeah, so running through my head are all the latest buzz words. Is everything at Wikibon when we did our predictions for this year, data is at the center of all of it. But machine learning, AI, heck blockchain, Edge computing all of these things can definitely be affected by that. Is NVMe going to help all of them? >> Oh machine learning. Incredible high bandwidth application. Wonderful thing stream data in, compute on it, get your answers and things like that. Wonderful benefits for a new squeaky clean storage stack to run into. Edge where often times, real time is required. The ability to react to a stimulus and provide a response because of human safety issue or a risk management issue or what have you. Any place that performance let's you get close, get you outer close to real time is a win. And the efficiency of NVMe has a significant advantage in those environments. So NVMe is largely able to help the industry be ready just at the time that new processing models are coming in such as machine learning, artificial intelligence. New data center deployment architectures like the Edge come in and the new types of telemetry and algorithms that they maybe running there. It's really a technology that's arriving just at the time that the industry needs it. >> Yeah, was reading up on some of the blogs on the Dell sites. Jeff Brew-dough said, "We should expect "to see things from 2018." Not expecting you to pre-announce anything but what should we be looking for from Dell and the Dell family in 2018 when it comes to this space? >> We're very bullish on NVMe. We've been pushing very, very hard in the standards community. Obviously, we have already shipped NVMe for a series of internal use cases in our storage platforms. So we have confidence in the technology, its readiness, the ability of our software stacks to do what they need to do. We have a robust, multi-supplier supply chain ready to go so that we can service our customers, and provide them the choice in capacities and capabilities and things like that that are required to bet your business, and long term supply assurance for and things like that. So we're seeing the next year or so be the full transition to NVMe and we're ready for it. We've been getting ready for a long time. Now, the ecosystem is there and we're predicting very big things in the future. >> Okay, so Danny, you've been working on this for 11 years. Give us just a little bit of insight. What you learned, what this group has learned from previous transitions? What's excited you the most? Give us a little bit of sausage making? >> What's been funny about this is we talk about the initial transition to flash, and just getting to the point where a little goes a long way. That was a three year journey. We started in 2005, we shipped in 2008. We moved from there. We flash in a raise as a tier, as a cache, as the places where a little latency, high performance media adds value and those things. Then we saw the industry begin to develop into some server centric storage solutions. You guys have been at the front of forecasting what that market looks like with software defined storage. We see that in technologies like ScaleIO and VSAN where their abilities to start using the media when it's resident in a server became important. And suddenly that began to grow as a peer to the external storage market. Another market San alternative came along with them. Now we're moving even further out where it seems like we use to ask why flash? And it will get asked that. Now it's why not flash? Why don't we move there? So what we've seen is a combination of things. As we get more and more efficient low latency storage protocols. The bottle neck stops being about the network and start being about something else. As we get more multi-core compute capabilities and Moore's law continues to tickle along. We suddenly have enough compute and enough bandwidth and the next thing to target is the media. As we get faster and faster more capable media such as the move to flash and now the move to storage class memory. Again the bottle neck moves away from the media, maybe back to something else in the stack. As I advance compute in media and interconnect, suddenly it becomes beneficial for me to rewrite my application or re-platform it, and create an entire new set of applications that exploit the current capabilities or the technologies. And so we are in that rinse, lather repeat cycle right now in the technology. And for guys like you and me who've been doing this for awhile, we've seen this movie before. We know how it hands. It actually doesn't end. There are just new technologies and new bottlenecks and new manifestations of Moore's law and Holmes law and Metcalfe's law that come into play here. >> Alright so Danny, any final predictions from you on what we should be seeing? What's the next thing you work on that you call victory soon right? >> Yes, so I'm starting to lift my eyes a little bit and we think we see some really good capabilities coming at us from the device physicists in the white coats with the pocket protectors back in the fabs. We're seeing a couple of storage class memories begin to come to market now. You're led by Intel and microns, 3D XPoint but a number of other candidates on the horizon that will take us from this 100 microsecond world to a 10 microsecond world maybe to a 100 nanosecond world. And you and I we back here talking about that fairly soon I predict. >> Excellent, well Danny Cobb always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks so much for walking us through all of the pieces. We'll have lots more coverage of this technology and lots more more. Check out theCUBE.net. You can see Dell Technology World and lots of the other shows will be back. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (uptempo techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Cube. Our continuing coverage of Vmworld 2017 continues. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're excited to be joined next by Jason Brown a Cube alumni consultant and product marketing for Dell EMC ScaleIO. Welcome back to the Cube Jason. >> Thank you for having me. >> Good to have you here, so day two of the event, lot's of announcements, lots of buzz. Talk to us about ScaleIO. What's the current state of the business. >> Well, it's actually really exciting right now. We're doing really well. We're seeing great customer adoption. We're seeing massive petabytes of ScaleIO deployed in data centers, and were here at the show really to talk to you about customers for ScaleIO for Vmware. 'Cause everyone here's above E10, obviously, they're doing awesome. We love it. They're doing great. But there's some differences and similarities between the two products that people get confused about, so we're here at the show really trying to help, you know, ease confusion, talk about how it's like peanut butter and jelly, right? Some people like peanut butter, some people like jelly but most people like 'em both, so we're just trying to help people out and understand when to choose which and sometimes it's both. >> Alright, Jason, I've got a history watching ScaleIO since before the acquisition, you know, service providers that usually kind of fit their model a little bit more than VSAN, so when I think scale, I tend to think ScaleIO. I interviewed ADP yesterday. Big customer, rolling out like 30,000 nodes of compute with VSAN. So, scales >> Yeah >> not only one piece of it. Maybe, help us kind of understand some of the, you know, of course there's going to be places that overlap, but what is the, you know, kind of ideal ScaleIO customer, what are they looking for, and how's that differ from the VSAN? >> Sure, so in particular if you're looking at ScaleIO for VMware, there's a few things you need to understand. First and foremost, with ScaleIO we're talking about consolidating resources across the data center. So we're talking data center grade software to find storage which can run in a hyperconverged model or not. And that's really key differentiating, 'cause if you look at these enterprises, especially, these large enterprises that built an IT organization of past 20 years, right? And so when you introduce HCI to them, you're transforming the architecture of the data center but also the IT operating environment. And that's scary for a lot of people who have spent millions of dollars having a server team, a network team, and the storage team. So one of the key things for ScaleIO in a VMware environment is, if you want to transform the architecture to software defined, but preserve that IT operating model, this two layer deployment, we call it, you can do that with ScaleIO. But on the flip side you can also do a more modern architecture with hyperconverged as well. So you can get the best of both worlds. So whether today you're ready to go all the way with the service providers, they'll go hyperconverged, you know out of the gate, but enterprises usually start more traditional and then move to that hyperconverged and ScaleIO provides that pathway to get there. >> Yeah, bring us inside those customers a little. 'Cause I've talked to a couple of very large customers of ScaleIO actually, did a case study at Citi and Citi told me, internally, we're just not ready to go fully hyperconverged. >> Jason: Exactly. >> So they kept that. They're massive scale. Talked to a large global hospitality company that, once again, looked more at kind of the storage usage of what they're doing so, I mean hyperconverged VSAN seems to be having, you know they've got 10,000 customers, they're all in that-- model. >> Exactly. >> So, what is it that gets a customer ready for that? What kind of pushes or pulls them towards being ready for, you know, embracing? >> Well, I think it's understanding your business goals and your desired outcomes. So with something like ScaleIO you're looking at simplicity in the data centers. So you're looking for scale, you know, not tens of nodes where traditional, I hear this said that traditional VSAN deployment is eight to 16 nodes, 'cause they're you know, VMware's everywhere, right? There's a lot of ROBO, SMB, VDI, use scales right there, and that's not really where ScaleIO plays. ScaleIO is about data center, so Tier 1 application, databases, data analytics. It's looking at things like containers and microservices, Splunk, NoSQL. Applications like that. So when you look at those types of applications and workloads, you have to understand that your scale will probably go from tens to hundreds of nodes. Your performance may go from a million IOPS to tens of millions of IOPS. You may need six nines availability 'cause again, you're running in the data center. Customers are replacing their SAN arrays with ScaleIO. So you need all that enterprise class, data center grade functionality with the scale performance and flexibility, the key thing is flexibility as well, if you want to run multiple workloads on a cluster, you need to be able to support VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, Linux, Windows, so and ScaleIO enables all of those things. And therefore, that's why when you look at your business goals, your business ops and what your data center looks like, you need to understand that functionality. Then you decide okay, is it going to be VSAN or ScaleIO or is it going to be both, 'cause I have both of those use cases there. >> So you talked about VSAN and ScaleIO, peanut butter and jelly. Michael Dell on main stage with Pat Gelsinger said VMware and Dell EMC are like peanut butter and chocolate. Both, all good flavors, in my opinion. I'd love to hear an example though, of where, like to your point, before I asked the question. We just had the CTO of Dell EMC storage, speaking with Stu and I a few minutes ago and one year post-combination, and he said customers are starting to understand now the value of Dell EMC-- >> Yes. >> Together. So with that, you know, a year later and customers now understanding the value proposition of this company that now also owns VMware, how much easier is the conversation, you know, away from VSAN verses ScaleIO? I'd love to understand where are you seeing where they both, those peanut butter and jelly sandwiches play together. What are some of the maybe industries or key use cases where a customer would need ScaleIO and VSAN? >> Sure. So if you think about financial services, Citi as Stu mentioned, one of the larger ones there, definitely plays there, in healthcare there's a few large big partner network companies that have come together to be successful there. Telco, Verizon, Comcast, right? Not only just private Cloud but public Clous as well, so when you look at your data center, you got to look at the whole thing. So, for your VDI, your ROBO, your SMB and maybe for a few of your enterprise applications that only need you know, 50,000 in an IOPS performance for your VMs then VSAN is going to be great there, but then you look to the other side of your data center and you've got something like SAP, you know HANA, I think any other, in fact, ORACLE, etc or you're looking to build a private cloud of hundreds of nodes, well that's where ScaleIO is going to sit. Over in that corner, you know? So, it really is understanding what your workloads are and where they play. You know, it's important to know too that for ScaleIO our primary use cases are array consolidation, so you've got silos of arrays in your data center and you want to stop managing silos of arrays, and you want to bring everything together into a single resource, a single cluster, boom, ScaleIO. You want to build the cloud environment whether you're a service provider building a public cloud like Swisscom for example, who built a public cloud based off of ScaleIO, or a private cloud like CitiGroup for example. It's pretty much a private cloud; mix of array consolidation as well. And then something like a gaming company that we've worked with where they are doing this next generation DevLogs containers, microservices, well ScaleIO's great for that too, 'cause it has the flexibility to start small and grow and support the various things that they need to be able to deploy their applications 32% faster. So you know, it really encompasses the whole data center. >> Yeah, a bunch of interesting points that I want to unpack a little bit there. Specifically, you're talking about all the new applications and the new technologies that people are doing. One of the challenges most people have, you know, the stack we've been using, I think, for my entire IT career is, you know, we spend what, somewhere between 70 and 90% of our time keeping the lights on. >> Jason: Yes. >> And the wave of kind of software-defined, you know, all of these type things, supposed to be, we need to simplify our environment, you know and, therefore I can take those resources and reallocate them, retrain them, put them on cool new things. What are you seeing from the customers, you know, just organizationally from what happens to the storage people as well as how do they take advantage of some of these tougher things like application modernization? >> Good question. Good question. So, you know it depends on the company right? There are, like you said, there are some customers that want to keep them separated and that's perfectly fine you know, there are tools that you can use with ScaleIO so that you can manage the storage independently of the compute. But then you've got things like our tight integration with vSphere, where the VMadmin can manage the storage as well. So, it depends on the preferences as well as the maturity of the organization and the skillset of the folks that are managing it as well. If you can have a storage admin become more agile and be able to manage the compute and the VMs as well then perfect. They become more generalists, right? We've talked about how these specialties becomes more generalists in these types of HCI and NextGen environments. So if they have that skillset then perfect and both ScaleIO and VSAN can enable that. And then if you're looking at app modernization, you know what do you need from an infrastructure storage perspective to achieve that, and how can you enable your application developers access that storage even faster? And that's really was ScaleIO does with the whole automation points behind everything. With, be able to add resources on the fly, remove resources on the fly, reallocate on the fly. So being able to be flexible for what they need when they all of a sudden are ramping up a new application is really critical. >> Yeah. I guess, I'm wondering if you have any specific examples. One of the critiques if you talk about, you know, storage, admins, fast is not something that usually, you think of. Flash is fast and everything like that but, how do we keep up with the pace change, how do I move things? How does ScaleIO help change that equation? Even just specifically for storage? >> Well I think that in order to be able to keep up with that change, right, it's about, as you said, simplifying their job and making it easier. So, if you've got the tools and the, just the functionality in the product itself, to be able to help them learn faster, be able to press a button as opposed to being able to allocate an array group and (murmurs) things that have an architecture, that makes that be able to achieve that as well, that's really how you do it. You know I haven't talked to any storage admins lately, unfortunately. So I can't give you a specific example, but that's really what we see at kind of the one on one level. >> And from a buyer's train of perspective, so much has changed and shifted towards this C-Suite. When we look at things like data protection, we, you know, some announcements about that yesterday, storage, and you said you haven't spoken with storage admins in a while. There's a lot of data that show that data protection storage isn't an IT problem, it's a business problem. So how has the conversation now with Dell EMC with respect to whether it's ScaleIO or whatnot, shifted upstream if you will, talking to more senior executives, rather than the storage guys and gals that are managing specific pieces? Tell us about that-- >> Sure. >> Conversation and maybe cultural shift. >> Well when you talk to any C level executive, what's the top of mind, right? Security, saving, cost savings, budget, right? So when we're talking to executives, where they talk about data center transformation, how software defines storage and enables that both at the architectural level and at the IT level, but also about how we can make their business easier to run and how it can save them money. so if you're able to get all this great flexibility and scalability and all this you know, performance, but then be able to preserve the features that you need, like compression and snapshots and being able to connect to your data protections suites as well? So if you can tell them all that and say hey and you know what, we have customers saving 50% five year TCO by doing that, without needing to do data migration or tech refreshers anymore. They're like alright, sign me up. Because you have to understand too, when you talk to them, they don't need to go buy an array the next day, and spend a couple million dollars they maybe be will be able to utilize in the future or not. They can start very small. Three nodes, four nodes, and have this pay as you go licensing so they love that as well because it grows on their terms. Not on our terms, on their terms. And that's really important for you know people that in those C level suites that are trying to maximize the efficiency of the business. >> Alright, Jason, one thing's when customers buy into a solution like this, it's more of a platform discussion these days and of course one of the things they're looking for is where are you taking me down the road? So it's great, here's what I can do today, one of the things I love this whole wave of it, is, you know, upgrades and migrations were like, you know, the four letter words for anybody in storage. >> Dirty words. >> And I said, you know, when we have a pool of resources and I can kind of add and remove nodes it was like, oh my God, that was, we conservatively estimated like five years ago that 30% of the overall TCO was based on that alone and. Wow. Scrap that. Last time you're ever going to need to, you know, migrate once you get on this platform. But, I want you to talk to us a little bit about, you know a little bit, kind of the vision and roadmap. What are >> Sure. >> You talking to customers about. >> Absolutely. So, you know with a product like this, it's constantly evolving and innovating so when we talk to customers about what's in the future, well you have to first be thinking about data services. Data services are always very important and with ScaleIO, you know, admittedly, we're a little short on some data services because we more focus on scalability and performance and making sure that we have a six nines architecture. So, the first and biggest thing that's coming very soon, if you were at Dell EMC with ScaleIO is compression. So being able to, you know for your block storage workloads, being able to maximize the efficiency of your storage even more with some in line compression? Very important. So we're doing that. We're also enhancing our snapshot's functionality so that, you know when you talk snapshots and SDS, you know, you compare it to an enterprise array, probably not up to snuff. Well what we're doing now with our snapshot keeping in relation to ScaleIO is we're actually going to have them be better or even much better than something you'd find in like an all flash array. You know, where you can have you know, thousands of snapshots in a v-tree and things like that. But it also goes to hardware as well. 'Cause there's always hardware, right? And with the innovation within Dell EMC with Dell PowerEdge servers with our friends in CPSD, we're able to innovate a lot faster with ScaleIO and SDS. So, 14G was announced. Well ScaleIO's going to be one of the first products within Dell EMC through our ScaleIO Ready Node to support mV dims and MVME. So as you know we support MVME today, one of the few software device storage platforms out there today that supports it, in a roll your own server model. With the Ready Node 14G coming out later this year, with the ScaleIO Ready Node, immediately out of the gate mVdim and MVME technology in a ScaleIO Dell EMC hardware product, 'cause it's already you know its Dell PowerEdge servers and ScaleIO software. And then helping our management keep our management keep (murmurs) as well so, introducing VVols for our VMware customers, being able to provide something called AMS which is our automated management services for the Ready Node so that you can deploy, configure, manage, upgrade, not only the storage software but the firmware as well as the EXS hypervisor all in a single button, in all a single interface, so we're doing that as well. So it's all about, you know, taking advantage of NextGeneration functionality from the hardware perspective, simplifying the management, then introducing critical features and functionality that our customers have been asking for. >> Just to make sure I'm 100% on this, things like the data services, that's software, so everybody that's got it today, will be able to upgrade it. Obviously the next generation of hardware always helps along the way, but you know, you manage those a little bit separate even though you want to handle both of those vectors. >> Yes, exactly. So when you upgrade to ScaleIO.next when it comes out you'll get that feature functionality. Now there's a few things you need to understand, right? You should have Mvdims and some type of flash media to support it. >> Stu: Sure. >> Because you're trying to maximize scalability and performance while providing these features, there's some dependencies there. But yeah, out of the gate, those features will be available. That's why it's called software-defined storage. It's all in the software, all this world of goodness is. >> Okay so take me upstream. Lot of new features, functionality coming out; what are the new business benefits if I'm the CEO of Swisscom, that I'm going to be able to achieve from that? >> Well I think definitely increased performance. Definitely increased efficiency of your storage with things like compression and snapshots. Now, if you're able to compress that data, get more out of your system-- >> But what kind of like, in terms of TCL. How am I going to be able to reduce. >> Oh, well. >> What are the factors of-- (grunts loudly) >> You know, we haven't run the numbers yet, but you know, the fact that we already can achieve 50% TCO, it can only get better from there when we're introducing these types of features, where you're maximizing efficiency, so, we expect it to bump up a bit. We're hoping we can work with you guys to get some good numbers that come out of it. >> Excellent. So continued strengthening of those-- business outcomes is, >> Yeah, that's it. You know, making sure, >> what you're talking about. >> Makings sure that the customers that want to move to software-defined storage in their data center, are able to achieve that in the most seamless way, and be able to reap the benefits. >> Fantastic. Well Jason, thanks so much for sharing your insights what's happening, um, peanut butter and jelly. Makes me hungry. I think it's time for lunch. >> It is lunch time, yeah. >> We thank you so much for coming back-- on the Cube. >> Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. >> And for my co-host Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin you are watching the Cube live, day two of our continuing coverage from VMworld 2017. Stick around. We'll be right back after a short break. (electronic music)

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

>> Announcer: Live from Washington, DC, it's the Cube covering .NEXT Conference, brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to NEXTConf everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm with Stu Miniman. This is the president's segment. Sudheesh Nair is back. Good to see you again, Sudheesh, the president of Nutanix. And Captain Canada himself, Chad Sakac. >> Dave. >> Cube alum, good friend. >> Dave, it's good to see you. >> Good to see you again. Stu. Hey everybody, most important thing, great, you know, .NEXTConf, but look, Canada Day, July 1st, is right around the corner. So remember, everybody, go have some poutine, drink some beers and celebrate. Then there's this July 4th thing that is apparently right around that. >> Yeah, well, it's important to us, 'cause we've ended an eight-week sprint of the Cube, so. >> Isn't Chad wearing red, white and blue? I think he's, uh ... >> I actually did that on purpose. You noticed! >> Here in DC, nice job. >> I figured when in DC, you know, celebrate Americana. >> Why not? Well, there's a lot of celebration going on here. You guys have been celebrating several years now. What is it? Two and a half years of ... >> With Dell, yes. With Chad it's relatively new, so ... (all laughing) >> It's actually been about three years, and it's been a ridiculously successful partnership. You know, I think ... >> I would say face-meltingly successful, but ... >> Yeah, you know what? I agree. >> Okay, so coming into this role, did you have misconceptions about Nutanix, or was that just marketing, when you were kind of ... >> No. Nutanix basically created the HCI category. They've been at it now for seven and change years. You know, great technology, very happy customers. I'd say out of the 6,200 or so Nutanix customers, roughly around 2,500, 2,700 are XC customers, so I've gotten to know them really well. They tell me pretty clearly what they like about Nutanix and what they like about XC. >> All right, so Chad, I'm looking at my notes here, and there was a guy Chad Sakac who said, "Niche corner case for VDI only," you know, that was Nutanix. >> Love it. >> You know, you're singing a little bit of a different story than we might've heard a couple of years ago. >> You know, I would say that it's important to acknowledge when you're wrong, Stu. You know, and I think that HCI in general has moved absolutely out of any corner case segment whatsoever. I met with a customer this morning that is basically a hospital that is running the bulk of all of their mission-critical customer healthcare records, packs, all on XC. And again, you know, I don't want to get us in trouble here at the .NEXT Conference, but we have an HCI portfolio, we see customers deploying HCI for every workload under the sun at this point. And frankly, I've said it publicly now, firmly and as clearly as I can, SDS and HCI models are ready for the majority of x86 workloads. That's not just my opinion, it's the company, it's Dell Technologies' point of view overall. >> You know, Joe Tucci was the master of sort of building an ecosystem with quasi-competitors, coop-etition, whatever you want to call it, and certainly the Dell/EMC relationship of many years ago was epic, one of the, probably the most successful storage relationship ever. So and, Sudheesh, you get a lot of concerns of Wall Street, when's this going to end? You guys used to get that all the time with Cisco and VC, and yet you continue to ... >> Still do. >> Yup. >> Chad: Still do. >> Valid questions, you know, it's the obvious place for analysts, snarky analysts to go. But in retrospect ... >> Chad: Is there such a thing as a non-snarky analyst? >> There're a couple, there're a couple out there. >> They're sitting here, right here. (Chad laughs) >> It is, getting paid ... >> After the comments that I've already gotten! >> It's getting paid to be snarky. >> That's what's fantastic, by the way. That's what's like watching Charlie Rose and Bill Clinton. Hard but smooth. >> So, if I go back into history, though ... I wish Michael were here, and I'll ask Michael, I know you watch, I'll you next time I see you. I wonder if he had to do it all over again, if he knew then what he knew now, if he would've just said, "You know what? "I'm going to do better just staying with the EMC partnership, "instead of going out and buying Equallogic or Compellent, "and we would've done better for customers, "might've made more money." I wonder if you've learned anything from that experience. I mean, you were biased, 'cause you were on the EMC side of that, obviously you didn't want to see Dell end that relationship, but are there similarities here? >> You know, I think that there's similarities, but there's a notable difference. When the Dell/EMC merger occurred, and the first time I came out to visit headquarters, I mean, lots of discussions with Sudheesh and with Dheeraj. There's a core thing here that's important to understand. The market is not in a zero-sum game. So if, if there's 6,200 Nutanix customers, 2,500 XC customers, roughly 3,000 VX Real customers, roughly 8,000 VSAN customers, you know how many VNX customers there are? 300,000. Do you know how many power-edge servers there are out there? 27 million. We're on the earliest days of the software-defined and HCI journey, and frankly, that's just the first step towards building hybrid clouds on-prem and off-prem that bridge one another, which has been a big part of the announcements from this week. >> Yeah, look, I think the first part of the question you asked, you got to be honest that, you know, when you flip sometimes TV channels, let's say you come across National Geographic, right? And then there's a cheetah chasing a deer. You stop, you want to watch. You know what's going to happen, the cheetah's going to eat the deer, one way or other, that's going to happen. You know it, but you want to watch it. The way we think of our industry, status quo is the cheetah. The deer is all of us, the moment you stop innovating. That is particularly true for companies like ours, young companies. The partnership that we have is not built on anything but the fact that we are adding more value for customers than what we would individually do. That's it. The sum of the parts of this should be higher than the individual parts, right? So what we have learned, for example, last quarter, you're absolutely right, financial analysts, they'll always ask us about the Dell EMC overhang. Last quarter, for example, we for the first time publicly talked about the fact that Dell EMC business was around eight to nine percent of our overall revenue. And it is not because that didn't grow. It is growing, but the overall business we are able to keep growing. Our destiny's in our hands, and it comes down to couple of things6: our ability to really accelerate innovation, because as a younger company, more agile, we are expected to do more, and you saw this morning. Number two, make sure that we are playing fair. There are rules of engagement that we are, because we know that they have tremendous amount of portfolio, and some of them will overlap, and that's okay. But you have to clearly define the rules of engagements, and be very fair in how we treat the partner. And if you do those two things right, we know that this is a relationship that'll last long time. >> And just a quick little add, I mean, the things that we bring is extending the platform's scale and reach. There's no question that you're a younger company, there's no question that we're a larger company. The number of customers that say, "We want the better together thing," and we give them that choice, it's very important for us to do that, but also add value. So whether it's integrating data protection, whether it's what we've done around running Cloud Foundry on top of XC. Home Depot talked about it. >> Classic example, yeah. >> It's a great example, where they want this, that, all together. Now I can't emphasize enough that what we've been trying to emphasize is be transparent, be consistent about those rules of engagement, and telling our customers, you know, driving that choice and giving them that benefit is something that we have to sustain. >> And it's also important to understand that you know, if you spent this morning watching the keynote, you clearly saw that we did not talk about hyperconverged. What we talked about were two things. One is pushing that cloud intelligence to the edge, and then building a hyper-cloud experience that is totally transparent. And the second thing was about building a multi-cloud environment through Calm. We did not talk about hyperconverged. Those things are not built on a platform that is not built for ... Those things are built on a platform that is ready for web-scale architecture. So the foundation that we have built in the last seven years is on which we are building, and as long as we continue to add value like that, and partner, for example, on PCF, you know, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, that's a classic example, a Home Depot example, right? They need that same experience that they're getting from Edibus. And Edibus is not just doing IAAS. They're doing PAAS, they're doing the entire thing. To do that, there is no shame in figuring out what we do well, what we don't do well, understand their strengths and weakness, come together, and deliver something that is better for customers. >> Sudheesh, I'm curious, actually, 'cause Home Depot is a, you know, lighthouse account for Pivotal, on Google Cloud platform. Talking to them about it for the last six months. How does that fit in? We know that the Dell family is a multi-function, so I'm curious to want to hear the Nutanix piece of how that fits in. >> Look, I think the Google thing is a relatively new thing for us. We are expecting two different areas that we are going to partner with them. >> No, no, but Home Depot specifically, is that related? >> No. >> Because they're a big GCP customer, so maybe Chad needs to fill it in. >> This specific project is all on Exceed with PCS. >> The thing that I think is fascinating, and to watchers, I would say, for the intellectually curious that are willing to double-click and go a little bit further, it's a little more of a complex, nuanced story, but everyone's looking for a soundbite, whether it's in politics, as we're here in DC, or whether it's in news, or whatever. Home Depot, like a ton of customers, is using GCP. They're using XC, they're using vSphere, they're using NSX, they're using PCF. It's not like there's some singular thing. Another fascinating example is, I talked to a customer who's a fantastic ScaleIO, VxRack FLEX customer, vSphere, enormous scale and scope, and when I asked them, they want a hybrid cloud to this point. HCI is just a foundation for hybrid cloud use. When I asked them, like, what are their hybrid cloud targets, they're like, "AWS, but we use GCP because we depend on TensorFlow." It is, we live in a world which you need to expand your mind and not naturally create this, like, binary A/B thing. >> Stu: It's a multi-cloud world, Chad. >> It's a multi-stacked, multi-cloud, multi-use case world. >> An inter-genius mess in IT that we've been dealing with. >> So another thing that analysts do a lot is give unsolicited advice. (Chad laughs) So I want to do that and maybe get your reaction. So, Amazon's operating profits are roughly almost double what EMC's were, Amazon Web Services, when EMC was a public company. Massive change and disruptive force in our industry. And frankly, if it weren't for AWS, we wouldn't be where we are today as fast as we were, so I see your joint challenge as fulfilling the vision of what we call true private cloud. Substantially mimicking the cloud experience on-prem. And you're behind, and you know you're behind at that, because Amazon's by definition in the lead. So your challenge as we see it is to create that experience and create that automation and allow people to shift their labor costs to the fun stuff. >> By the way, I agree, and I accept that advice. You can answer for you, but I'll tell you, we've been trying to ... So we started with the first enterprise hybrid cloud efforts almost three and a half years ago, and they're enormous, and at the time we said, "And deploy it on anything you want." And you know what? We had very limited success with that. And the reason we had limited success wasn't because we didn't get the customer going, "Yes, I want to have a hybrid cloud, "where I can bridge and connect to "multiple different public cloud targets." That idea, dead right. The idea of you can build it any way you want? Wrong. Then we said, "Okay, you know what? "CI is a simplification." What we realized is that life cycling CI stacks along with a CMP layer, whether it's inside an integrated thing, or whether it's directly adjacent, still too complex. The latest is basically all of our hybrid cloud, whether it's destined towards enterprise IAAS or PAAS on prem, runs on HCI. When? Always. Because HCI is fundamentally orders of magnitude easier to symph, to deploy, to scale, to version, etc., etc. What I've been seeing over the last 24 hours about basically the Calm acquisition becoming part of Acropolis, is the example where Nutanix is taking it, where they're trying to build it into the Calm and Acropolis stack. I think that's a common vision between the two companies. >> What you will hear from HP or Cisco or EMC or Nutanix, the picture isn't going to change much, because we all know what the blueprint looks like. I think the real question is, how do you get there? How you do that is where the difference is going to be, and the advantage we have is that because we built every stack with that clean architecture in mind, the North Star being, we have to deliver a fully-automatable stack, we have an added advantage of building every step connect naturally to the next step. So for example, our metadata structure, our storage fabric, our virtualization fabric, AHV, our automation fabric on Calm, and how we are introducing Xi, that's a hybrid cloud service, it is all controlled from Prism. And that Prism itself and Prism Central are fully distributed. So that ability to deploy this at scale across multiple continents and manage it, that is very similar to how Amazon ... The reason why Amazon can deliver millisecond billing on Lambda stack is not because they are taking ten different products. They have technology that is built to deliver that level of granularity. >> So again, I agree, but there's an element that I disagree. Calm was an acquisition. Calm was an acquisition of people and talent to basically extend up into the IAAS, chargeback, billing, self-service portal domain. No disrespect of the decision, technology, architecture. You've done, obviously, great progress that you've shown to the market the last two days about how you're integrating that into your stack. We've been at this now for four years, and we've looked at, how do we need to keep evolving our own Dell Technologies stacks? Again, it's not an either/or. So for example, we do multi-site PCF deployments directly on top of a HCI target that has total life cycle, completely distributed stack, and the Pivotal/Google work around Kubernetes coming as part of Pivotal, which echoes a lot of the Kubernetes becoming part of your stack as well. Kubo highlights what we're all trying to do towards that target. Again, I think that the natural tendency because people like to see car races to watch for crashes, cheetahs chasing lions ... >> Or something like that. >> I think we're all striving to do what you said. The customer demand for simple-to-operate, simple-to-deploy, simple-to-scale, turnkey IAAS, PAAS, and even SAAS stacks that're a hybrid deployment model, that is a fact. How customers need to evaluate all the choices in the marketplace is again, who does it best? >> And if you don't, you're the deer, is your point. >> Chad: You're the lion or the deer. >> I wish we had more time, guys. I'll give you both the last word. Chad, you're everywhere this week, and everywhere every week, but final thoughts. >> Final thoughts, I mean, customers can know that we're committed to customer choice, we're committed to this partnership. The number of customers in revenue continues to grow. Our point of view is that we've got a portfolio approach, but no one should be confused about what that means. That means that we're committed to the partnership. Customers, I've talked to a lot of them here, they're happy. Never punch your customer in the face, and never punch yourself in the face. Simple strategy from Chad Sakac. >> Sudheesh, put a capstone on it. >> My point's very simple. I think this is a partnership that is working. The company's run by really smart people. I don't think we are interested in doing anything that is going to make our customers' decision a wrong one for them. And we are committed, we are committed to innovate, and are committed a service to join customers together. Thank you. >> Guys, you know, you guys make this job fun. Thank you so much for coming on the Cube. Really appreciate it. >> It's our pleasure, guys. Remember, Happy Canada Day! >> All right, July 1st. Love it. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest right after this short break. (electronic music)

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

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas. It's The Cube. Covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> And the band played on. You might be able to hear the guitar player off in the distance. It's that time of day here at Dell EMC World 2017, along with John Furrier. I'm John Walls. Glad to have you here on The Cube. We are officially, John and I now, Node-O-Ramas. (laughing) We have joined the blue button club. We'll explain that in just a little bit. Tell you what it's all about. Here with me to do that is Armughan Ahmad, who is the SVP of Blueprint Solutions and Alliances of Dell EMC. Just had a launch. >> Yeah. Had to be one of the two. And Brian Payne who is the VP of Product Management in the server division at Dell EMC. Brian, thank you for being with us. >> Absolutely. Thanks for having me >> All right, so first off, let's talk 14G. Big server news, you guys make. I'm sure that's really had a lot of your attention this week. A lot of people want to know, Brian, what's up? Tell me about the excitement you generate with that announcement. >> Absolutely, it's generated a ton of excitement and it's not just been this week. It's been a lot of build up for driving a new generation of servers into the market. We start with what our customers are telling us that they're interested in, and with this generation we focused on the typical things you would expect, like how can we run workloads more effectively than the current generation of technology. However, as we look into the landscape as people drive digital transformation, the workloads are changing, right? There are a lot of new workloads. There's a lot of new technology that our customers need to sort out and figure out, where do I apply where in order to run things more effectively? And so we're focused on that in terms of delivering portfolio breadth so that our customers will have the capability when they need it to run their applications well. So that's one thing that is exciting and new. But aside from that, which is running our customers' applications, we're also focused on how can we make our customers more agile and effective through the automation tools that we've designed into this generation of servers? And then, lastly, security has been a big focus. And it's not bolted on security; it's integrated security built into the server throughout the supply chain and throughout the life cycle of the server. Those are the big things that have resonated with our customers as we've announced the next generation of servers. >> I was kind of kidding on the top there talking about the Node-O-Rama buttons. Both of you are wearing yours. So tell us what is that all about? What's Node-O-Rama going on there? >> So Janet Moore, who's actually in our product marketing group, came up with Node-O-Rama because as we were getting ready to launch 14G, awesome servers, Poweredge 14 Generation, we wanted to be ready for VSAN ready nodes 'cause customers really wanted to take storage and take that software-defined storage and ensuring when you take software-defined storage you want to really run it on a server platform to drive the next generation of IT transformation and digital transformation eventually. But we also wanted to the same thing with Microsoft Spaces Direct. We also wanted to do the same thing with our ScaleIO, software-defined scale out storage capability. But then not just stop there. We also have SAP HANA ready node, which is our SAP HANA for commercial and midsize customers. So that's where Node-O-Rama really came in. We've got a lot of nodes. So right now we're launching our Microsoft Spaces Direct ready node that got launched on Monday. So we're totally excited. We have the most ready nodes in the industry right now. >> So we were talking in our intro this morning on our other set, David Floyer, analyst at Wikibon, and Keith Townsend, another analyst. We were kind of looking at this announcement here. The big takeaways were really, really strong hyper-converged ACI message. Seeing that across the board. VMware is the glue layer between all this. And then finally, reality of hybrid cloud. So we were just talking about the ready systems. How does this all work? Because now, those are three nice areas developing. How does Node-O-Rama fit in that? How should they think about ready nodes, the context of that scene? >> Well, one thing that I mentioned a moment ago is just this idea of complexity that customers are dealing with. We still have, through our ready systems, we're able to offer simplicity for customers that want to buy a full system-level solution, but not everyone is, for a variety of reason, is ready to do that. However, they're left with saying, "Okay, I can buy servers from Dell, Poweredge Servers "and go run my workload, "but what do I pick? "I want to move to a software-defined storage. "I want to run something like SAP HANA. "Can somebody simplify that process for me?" And that's where ready nodes come in. It really streamlines the selection of technology where we've done the testing. We've done the validation to figure out what's going to run well and then we can point customers in that direction. And we can also streamline the services, the service offering around that. So it's really about making it simpler for out customers throughout the lifecycle of picking the technology and then deploying and managing. >> What about operational support? Efficiency, ease of use there? What's your position on that? >> Absolutely, operational support is streamlined and then if you have an issue with a ready node and you call up Dell services, they're going to immediately recognize what you have and be able to get you back up and running and working more effectively, more quickly. >> So where's the Nexus here, alliances and then what you're doing there? How's that coming together? >> Yes, so I lead our solutions business unit that is powered by our technology alliance partners, so VMware VSAN ready node, Microsoft Spaces Direct ready node. ScaleIO happens to be our own IP, so that's a ready node, and then SAP. So those are the alliance partnerships. And then what my group does is we work very close with Brian Payne and Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, whose at GM, for our server division, and Robbie Penaganti. That server division, it's all about the server right in the center of it so if you are going to drive a software-defined data center, you have to get a server right in the middle and make sure that server's not only scalable, it's intelligent, but it's also secure. So what we do is we actually take that server that's ready from their side and they certify it. We then take that in my group. We validate it, we make sure that the firmware that needs to be changed, the buyout that needs to be changed. The service capability, the sales enablement that we have to put out there. So it becomes a ready node, right? >> So tell me about the old days. I'm just kind of going, "Wow! "That sounds really easy" but it's not. They, in essence, have to build a server that's going to be ready for whatever composed solution you put together, whether it's VMware, Edge, or whatever. >> Armughan: Yeah. >> They have to then make the enablement happen. >> Armughan: Yeah. >> So in the old days, what was it like? Compare and contrast what it was in the old days. Go to the server guy and say, "I need these servers to support this, this and this" and then they go do it. >> Brian: Yeah. >> And months later. Take us through why is this different for the customer? >> It actually starts very early in the process as we look at the technology landscape, working with Armughan's team to figure out what technologies are going to change and transform the efficiency of how we run applications. It starts with defining the servers arm-in-arm with the team that's responsible for delivering those applications, figuring out what's going to work, develop it, and then bring it to market. And then it's really about streamlining that selection process for our customers. How can we make it easy for them to pick the right things and then quickly procure that and deploy that in their environment and start getting the business results that they're after? >> So time to market for the solution is optimized in that scenario? >> Brian: Oh yeah. >> You call in for the server, 14G. (finger snap) You have it all prepared, ready for you to go. >> So John, in the past, let's go back a few years, right? Our 13G servers at that time, or any other servers in the industry, were really developed for multi-workloads. They weren't developed for specific workloads. What we have now done at Dell EMC, and this is the synergy that Marius was talking about earlier that you were mentioning, which is we take our server group, we work hand-in-hand in our server group right up front, so that's 14G, as our 14th generation of Poweredge servers were being designed, Brian Payne and I, and our teams work very close together to say, "Okay, what are the top workload orientations "that we want to go after?" So software-defined storage, definitely top priority. Now, who should we be working with? VMware VSAN, of course. Microsoft Hyper-v Spaces Direct. Our ScaleIO business, because we know a lot of the customers want to do that. But then, in addition to that, we said, "Okay, ready nodes is good. "That's fantastic." But we know customers go from build to buy continue. So they'll be customers who would want SAP workload orientation, they would want Oracle workload orientation. They want Sequel workload orientation. But then those are your traditional apps. But now you're moving into the next generation apps of machine learning, AI, which is starting with high-due clusters and analytics clusters. So our partnership between server product group and our solutions product group. My product group does not exist without server product group. We have to ensure, and by the way, same thing goes for storage product group, our data protection product group, and our networking product group, as well as our CI and ACI product group. What we do is we, essentially, work right up front and make sure that that workload orientation is start through right in the beginning. >> John: What's the customer reaction? >> You want to take that. >> Yeah, sure, I was just going to add one piece and I'll address that. Conversely, the server isn't going to do anything without the application running on top of it. So that's where we go hand-in-glove here. Customers are very pleased with it. The adoption rates have been very strong of what's been in the market and then as we're bringing a breath of fresh air with the next generation technology, customers are very eager to begin adopting. >> John: What's the reaction to this announcement because the 14G had the fanfare yesterday when it was talked about, but what is the reaction to the 14G and the ready server nodes now? >> I'll give you an example, first of all, on our revenue growth. So we actually picked some major workload so VSAN ready node. We'd announced that about six months ago and our VSAN ready node business is through the roof right now on 13G. 14G launches as soon as the summer. Ashley Gorakhpurwalla mentioned on stage sometime this summer. As soon as that launches, we will be ready with 14G. But right now we have ready nodes already in the market on our 13th generation platforms. And as soon as we started launching these solutions we're finding that our customers, more importantly our channel partners as well, because they find that it's much easier, John, for them to deploy that. We're also seeing that same 13G to now 14G migration related to high-performance computing. A lot of customers are taking that on and the growth has been really fabulous. >> Yeah, I think if you rewind the clock before ready nodes and say, "What was the world like?" We had customers that were deploying and trying to deploy things like VSAN or other software-defined storage, and they were running into problems and us, VMware, we're trying to help customers navigate that, but what we found was there were dependencies in that stack in the underlying infrastructure, and so the ready nodes really came out of that how can we improve that customer experience and make sure that what we deliver is going to be trusted and reliable. >> And shipping around the summer, which is right around the corner. >> That is 14G is going to ship but right at the same time, our ready nodes for VSAN ready node and Microsoft Spaces Direct ready node and ScaleIO ready node will ship at the exact same time 14G Poweredge servers ship, right? But keep in mind, we're already selling all of the 13G-based platforms for ready nodes, ready bundles, and ready systems. >> John: I tell you, just knowing the channel partners, they're going to love this. >> Oh yeah. >> Because it's so peaked and not a lot of training involved and they can pick up the training and services (finger snap) right out of the gate, target workloads, good engagement of customers. Makes a lot of sense. Hangs together in my mind. Congratulations. >> Brian: Thank you. >> All right, so Node-O-Rama, this is the button here. >> Armughan: It's right here. >> Check out the ready nodes. It just sounds great. Ready, alert, fire jets go. (laughter) Take off in the aircraft carrier. >> There is nothing like being an honorary Node-O-Rama. So thank you very much for the pleasure. >> Getting ready to Rama. >> Always good seeing you guys. >> Thanks for being with us. >> Armughan: Thank you. >> Back with more coming up here. Dell EMC World 2017 Live from Las Vegas. You're watching The Cube. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's The Cube covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> We're back. This is Dell EMC World. We are The Cube. We're here in Las Vegas, Dell EMC World. Three days of back to back coverage. My name is Paul Gillin, and joining me right now Jason Brown, from product marketing at Dell EMC and Narasimha Krishnakumar, director of product management at VMware. And we're going to talk about software defined storage. What is software defined storage? Well everything is software defined these days, right? Our networks, our servers, our desktops, and now our storage arrays as well. We've been talking a lot about hardware storage at this conference today, but maybe we won't need the hardware so much the same way as we used to. I don't know. What is it? We'll start with that. Narasimha, what is software defined storage? >> So software defined storage is managing storage through software. Where you have a data plane that resides on any hardware that the customer chooses, and then the software is able to manage that storage, so that's software defined storage. There are different flavors of software defined storage which we are here to talk about. One is hyperconverged infrastructure which VMware is pioneering with its vSAN technology, and we also have the Dell EMC ScaleIO product that is offering customers the capability to run multiple workloads from multiple hypervisors. Jason? >> Yeah, definitely, so you think about the evolution of the data center with software defined. It started with Compute. VMware did it back in 2001 with virtualization where they were able to abstract, pool, and automate Compute. Then we've got software defined networking which has been hot. Now the last part of the SDDC is storage piece. So the key message with software defined storage is to essentially abstract the hardware, the storage inside the hardware, away from the typical array type architecture instead running on off the shelf X86 servers instead. So you're simplifying the Data Center, and you're standardizing as well on more common componentry to reduce cost, to increase efficiencies, and things like that. >> Isn't this what SANS was supposed to be in the first place? >> Well, right. So weren't SANS created to get rid of DAS? And what we've seen is that customers are coming to us saying I have a SAN model, but I'm finding it to be a little too rigid. Or I'm managing multiple silos of SAN, and it's becoming very cumbersome. And then, hey guess what, what happens after three to five years? Data migrations, tech refreshes, dirty words, right? And so customers are facing some of these challenges, and so they're looking at software defined storage to help solve some of those challenges they're facing with traditional infrastructure like arrays. >> What you're doing is essentially you're de-emphasizing the hardware as a vital component in the equation. Isn't that something that Dell EMC wouldn't want to do? I mean, why would you want to make hardware essentially something you don't think about? >> Well, it's essentially a portfolio approach. So think about mainframes. How long have they been around, right? And they won't be going away. Same with traditional infrastructure. For certain workloads, perfectly acceptable to continue running them on traditional array infrastructure. What we're seeing with software defined storage is that for some of these third platform, next generation applications, as well as some less critical workloads, customers are looking to optimize the storage that is being run on it. Software defined storage does that by giving you common hardware with all the goodness, the reliability, the Enterprise great feature function set, the scalability, the performance currently lives in the software itself, and therefore just gives you a lot simpler data center to not only manage but also build. >> So you say SDS right now is not something that you would use in a mission critical application. It's something that has a lower performance threshold perhaps? >> So I would say it's not lower performance. It's applicable to most workloads. So if you look at the evolution of the market, X86 workloads have bigger mainstream. Virtualization is mainstream. Customers have successfully virtualized their data centers. Most of the customers that we engage with at VMware, have successfully virtualized their data center. For those customers that are there in their virtualization journey and have completed the virtualization journey, they're looking at how do we extend that virtualization to storage and managed storage within the same framework of a server without having to use a specialized storage array. So we are increasingly seeing that, and most of the customers that are looking at digital transformation and transformation of their data center are looking at how do we take advantage of the software defined storage. A majority of the applications are running on X86. There are a specialized set of applications that would still benefit from storage arrays, and they're going to preserve those storage arrays for those set of applications. >> Now in storage you typically would have tier one storage or your high speed storage, tier two sort of your mid range, and then your archival storage. Would you have different SDS solutions for each of these, or would you abstract across the whole range of platforms? >> Dell EMC's approach is a portfolio approach. So we're going to have a jack of all trades with it. So there's various products within the set. So for block storage workloads you'd have ScaleIO. For file based workloads, something like Isilon. Something with archive and object storage, ECS. So it's more of a portfolio approach in that sense. >> But from a customer's perspective, am I abstracting, am I software defining all of those at once in one common pool, or to what level of control do I still have with where that data resides? >> So you do have a level of control as to where that data resides. What we have seen customers do is take a step by step approach to software defining their storage portfolio. For example, with the VMware vSAN technology, we see customers that are using virtualization solutions today with the vSphere product that we have. They have excellent storage systems, and they're looking at how do we take a set of workloads that are running on external storage systems, bring it in to the software defined storage approach. So, as Jason pointed out, I think the portfolio Dell EMC, Dell Technologies portfolio, has all the assets for our customers to do this piece by piece journey. It's an evolution. It's not going to happen overnight. We believe it's an evolution, and customers will slowly start embracing software defined storage. >> So let's talk about use cases. Right now, what are some of the most appropriate use cases that you're seeing for customers adopting this technology? >> So we embrace vSAN technology which is hyperconversion infrastructure. The first design goal that we started the product with was VDI. We see a lot of customers that are using vSAN for VDI. Now we are at the sixth generation of the product, and customers have started moving Enterprise class applications onto the vSAN platform. They now run Oracle. We are certified for SAP. We offer all the Enterprise class features such as deduplication of another work, all flash platform, as well as erasure coding. So customers now are embracing vSAN for Enterprise class applications, tier one applications, such as Oracle, SAP, and mission critical applications. >> We see some of the similarities as well with ScaleIO. We target more Enterprise service provider businesses looking to consolidate block storage workloads, looking to build a private cloud, and looking to do third platform devops types use cases as well. So containers, open staff, things like that, so that's where we kind of target our use cases for ScaleIO. >> These are not high performance applications. They may be mission critical, but they're not high performance necessarily. >> They are high performance in that the iops requirements expected from the storage system are enormous. So for example, vSAN all flash, a single ready node of vSAN can provide about a hundred thousand iops, and we can scale up to 64 nodes. We are talking about millions of iops that are available by the storage sub-system, and we are able to provide a policy based management framework where they can apply policies with respect to what type of performance requirements the application needs and serve it out of the platform. So these are applications that have high performance requirements as well as a blend of mixed workloads that can be supported by the platform. >> Do you work at cross purposes at all with your colleagues on the hardware side where they're trying to sell the virtues of their specific hardware platform, and you're saying, "We'll put it all on software "and we'll all manage it as a pool." >> So we do leverage the underlying capabilities of the hardware. For example, NVMe is one such example of a hardware technology that is readily available from our hardware partners. We work very closely with those hardware partners to make sure that the software leverages the performance characteristics that the underlying hardware provides. So at VMware, we take this ecosystem approach where we work closely with the partners, make sure that the drive is capable of providing those iops, and we are able to take advantage of those drive characteristics, and provide it for our customers. >> This is the magic of software defined storage, right? Depending on your workload, and what you're trying to achieve, software defined storage can support it. So if you do have a high iops requirement, you got a bunch of servers with NVMe flash in there, put some 10 gig ethernet on the back end, and bam, you've got a high performance system powered by software defined storage, but if you don't have that requirement, then you could build a hybrid type environment where you've got some SSD's as a cache, but you've got more spinning disc in the back end. So that the magic of software defined storage that you're able to actually tailor the environment based on the workload. >> Whole new world out there. Jason Brown, Narasimha Krishnakumar, thank you so much for joining us, telling us about this topic that I knew very little about, but which clearly is going to be on the radar going forward. We'll be back from Dell EMC World Las Vegas in just a moment. This is The Cube. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live From Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. We're here live in Las Vegas for Dell EMC World 2017. This is The Cube, I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Paul Gillin. And our next guest Manuvir Das, Senior Vice President of Product Management, Dell EMC, former Microsoft Asure, historic role at Microsoft, been at the EMC for a few years. Welcome to The Cube, good to see you. >> Thank you, it's nice to be here. >> So the last year we had a conversation. We were talking about some of the technology and the kind of direction it was going, so first question is from last year to this year, what's changed and what's the news? >> We've brought together two pretty well-known platforms that we did, Isilon for Scalar file and ECS for Scalar object. It one team that are now around called the Unstructured Data Storage Team. And we've done this really big because from the point of view of the customer, what we see is this confluence between file and object really in the space of unstructured storage, and we think we have some ideas of how to put that together in just the right solution for the customer. So that's why we brought these teams together and we've got a lot of great stuff to talk about this year. >> How are you positioning file versus object right now? It seems like object is the rage, but file is still going to be around for a long time. How do you position that? >> Yes, I think it will be. I think basically, if I may, it's not just two, but we see three pillars of unstructured storage. The first is file, which is really more towards compatibility with traditional workloads. A lot of the application ecosystem is comfortable programming against NFS or SMB, and that ecosystem is going to remain for a long time. For instance, in the space-like video surveillance. So that's where we see file. It's optimized more for performance rather than Scale, although you do get Scale. The next level was really object, which is more for your modern workloads, for your web and mobile sort of workloads. Optimized more for Scale rather than performance. And then, the third pillar that we see that we'd be working on now is really realtime data, or what you call streaming data, from things like IOT, where you're getting a firehose of information coming out and you got to store it very, very quickly. So we see these are three different pillars of unstructured storage. And really, what we've been working on in our Unstructured Data Storage Team is how to bring all of these three together in the right solution for the customer. >> So tell us about the group that you're in because this is kind of a new, not new industry, we're talking about unstructured data for many years, going on eight years, but it's becoming super important now as you have this horizontal data fabric development. We talked a little bit about it last year, but you can see a clear line of sight now with apps using data very dynamically. So you need under-the-hood storage, but now you need addressability of data. And so, there's a challenge of getting the right data from the right database to the right place on the app in less than a hundred milliseconds. I mean, that's like the nirvana. >> So I think there's a couple of things happening. Firstly, the advances in hardware have changed the game a fair bit, because you can take a software stack that was not optimized for latency to begin with, you can put it on all Flash hardware and you can reduce the roundtrip a lot, that's one thing. The other thing I see is that especially with the advancement of object >> For the stage of life in IT, you have research background, PhD in Computer Science, I mean, it's a pretty awesome time to be in computer science right now. There's a ton of opportunity that applies from that. Machine learning, all this goodness there. What's your vision of how the next 30 years are going to play out? Because Michael Dell said, "Hey, it's been 33 years," since he's started the company, the next 33 are going to be amazing, and I believe that to be true as well given the science opportunities. How do you look at this, from a personal level and also from a Dell EMC? >> I think what's really going to change is, up 'til now, a lot of things that have been done with computing have started with the thought of, "How much data can I really have?" And then, once I've decided how much data I can really have, what am I going to do with it? And I think sort of the innovation that's happened in storage that I'm a part of, what has really changed is it said, "You don't have to stop and think "about how much data you're going to have." You can just keep all of it. And so, what that means is I don't have to figure out upfront what I'm going to do with this data. I'm just going to bring it all in, it's going to be really cheap, the systems are really scalable that can hold it, and everything is sort of tagged in such a way that after the fact, five years from now, I can go do something with this data that I hadn't envisioned when I brought it in. And I think that just opens up a range of things that were hard to imagine. The other thing I think is, >> Programmatically meaning, from a software standpoint. Discoverability, >> That's right, I think as you said, machine learning is a big part of it. Because I think machine learning unlocks opportunities to mind the data that people hadn't really thought of before. And it comes back to the same thing that when I bring data in, whether it's from sensors or aircraft engines or what have you, I have no idea what I'm going to do with the data, so I have no idea which part of the data is important and which part of the data is less important. But when I can apply things like machine learning after the fact, I don't actually have to worry about that. I just bring it all in, and the algorithms themselves will figure out which part of the data is the useful part of the data. >> Your ScaleUp product line and ScaleOut product line, how are you positioning those two application-wise to your customers? >> So I think there is distinction between tier one storage and tier two storage. I think when you think about tier one storage, it's not just about the numbers, like latency and IOPS, but it's about the whole experience of tier one storage. Do I have, for my disaster recovery, do I have RPO-0, which means I can recover to the exact point in time I was at when I failed over data center. How does my replication work, what data services that I have? So I think our ScaleUp technologies are very well oriented towards the tier one kind of capabilities. And then our ScaleOut technologies are very well oriented towards sort of the ubiquitous tier two storage, which is much more deployable at Scale. It's pretty good performance in two, actually, but not with that complete set of capabilities you think about with tier one in terms of RPO-0s, synchronist replication, those kinds of things. So I think there's a very natural sort of mace between the two. And really, I think from a storage vision, what we see is the tier two storage is so scalable and so cheap, that all of your bools of tier one storage on the top tier down automatically into the tier two storage. And what that means is for our customers, if you think about how much tier one storage they have to provision today, they should be able to provision less of that, because they should be able to tier more of that down to the tier two storage, which is now capable enough to hold the rest of the data. >> And be available. >> And be available, >> Okay so, customers want to do this, a no brainer. So when we hear Amazon talk about this all the time, Jeff Bezos was just talking about just the other day a new chassis, they've got the recognition software so you see facial recognition, a lot of great stuff happening all over the Cloud world with this kind of modeling, with the power of computes that's available. What are the customers do now? Because now they get it, it's a no brainer obviously. Now they've got to change how they did IT 30 years to be agile for tomorrow. What's the playbook? >> So what we're seeing is, the step one that we're seeing more and more today, and have seen really for the last couple of years with Isilon and with DCS, is what I would call Consolidation of the Tier Two. So where we had 12 different clustered silos of storage for the different use cases, let's buy into this model that I can just build one large storage cluster, and it can handle the 12 different use cases at the same time. And that's what we've been proving out for the last few years. I think customers have really, enterprise customers are really getting there. And now, what we're beginning to see this year is the next phase, whether it's the industrial internet with the automotives, et cetera, the more IOT style use cases. In fact, on Wednesday, we'll be talking about a new thing we've got called Project Nautilus, which is the third leg of our stool with the streaming storage that is built on top of Isilon and ECS. And we're now at the point where are first customers are beginning to work with that, where they're saying, "From my sensors, "in the automobiles, on the cameras, "I'm going to bring in this firehouse of data, "I'm going to store it all with you, "but later on, I'm going to do analytics on it. "As it's coming in, I'm going to do "some real-time analytics on it, "and then after the fact, I'm going to do "the more batch style." >> I know Paul Scott wants to jump in, but I want you to just back up because I missed the three pillars. >> The three pillars were file, for which we have Isilon, object for your modern applications and web workloads, for which we have ECS, and then streaming storage for IOT. >> Which is Nautilus? >> Which is Project Nautilus, >> Okay, got it. >> The way I put it to people is traditional storage systems, ScaleUp or ScaleOut, file or object, they need resilience. So when you write the data, you have to write and think at the same time, because you have to record all kinds of information about it, you have to take locks, et cetera. For IOT, you need a storage system that writes now, and thinks later, so that you can just suck it all in. >> It sounds like an operating system. You've got a storage that's turning into like LUNs, provisioning, hardware. It's essentially intelligence software that has to compile, runtime, assembly, all this stuff's going on. >> And there's all these fancy names like LAN Architecture and all that kind of stuff. And what that's all saying is, "I bring the data in "and as it's coming in, "there's some things I already want to do with it, "I do that analytics in real-time. "There's other things when I go tag it, "who was in the photo, where was it, "and then the rest of it, I'm going to do later." And who knows what and when, and that's a beautiful thing. >> You're way along the thinking curve on this obviously, but where are your customers? I mean, you're talking about a pretty radically, different approach to processing and storing data even in realtime. Machine learning, meta tagging, there's a lot for them to absorb. >> And I think that part, it's a vertical driven, use-case driven thing. So there's some industries where we see a lot of uptake on that. Automotive is a great example. >> Financial services, >> Financial services, fraud detection, those kinds of things. And there's other verticals where it's not time for that yet. Like I said, healthcare is a great example. So in those verticals, we see more of just the storage consolidation, let me build one pool of tier two storage, if you will, and consolidate my 12 use cases sort of what we refer to as the Data Lake in our words, but I think it's specific verticals. And that's fine, if you look at even the traditional unstructured storage, I think it really started with certain verticals like media and entertainment, life sciences, and that's sort of where it kicked up from. And I think for the streaming storage, it's these verticals that are more oriented towards IOT, your automotive, your fraud detection, those kinds of things where it's really kicking off, and then it'll sort of broaden from there. >> How is this playing into the Dell server strategy? >> It's really a fantastic thing, I don't want to say so much for us as for our customer, because I've talked to a number of people in these verticals where the customer wants a complete solution for IOT. And what that means is number one: on the edge, do I have the right equipment with the right horsepower and the right software on the edge to bring in all the data from the edge and do the part of the processing that needs to be done right there on the edge of realtime, and then it has to be backed by stuff in the backing environment that can process massive amounts of data. And with Dell, we have the opportunity for the first time that we didn't have with the EMC alone to do the complete solution on both ends of it, both the equipment on the edge as well as the backing IT, so I think it's a great opportunity. >> You bring up so many awesome conversations because it's boring storage, now storage is not boring anymore because it's fundamental to the heartbeat of a company. >> Exactly. >> So here's a question for you, kind of like thinking out loud and riffing with you. So some debate, like, "Listen, I want to find "the needle in the haystacks, "but the haystacks are getting bigger," so there's a problem with that. I got to do more design and more gig digging, if you will. And the second point is customers are saying, to at least to us on The Cube and privately is, "I got a data lake that's turning "into a data swamp, "so help me not have swamps of data, "and I want more needles, "but the stack's getting bigger." What's your advice to those CXOs? Could be a CDO, chief data officer, a CS CISCO, these are the fundamental questions. >> I would say this, whatever technology you're evaluating, whether it's an on-premise technology or a hosted technology from a vendor like us, or it's a service out there in the Public Cloud, if you will, ask yourself two questions. One is, "If I size out what I need right now, "and I multiply it by 10 or 100, "what is it going to cost? "And is it really going to work the same way, "is it going to scale the same way?" Look at the algorithmics inside the product, not the Power Point and say, "The way "they've designed this thing, "when I put 100 times the data "on 100 times the number of servers "on this storage system, "are things actually going to work the same way or not?" >> So it's a scale question, kind of what are the magnitude thinking you need to kind of go out and size it up a bit. >> Because I see right now, the landscape is full of new technologies for storage, and a lot of them sound great and look great on the PowerPoint, and you go do a POC with four nodes or eight nodes, and you put Flash in there and it works really well. But the thing is, when you have 200 nodes of that, when you've got a 30 petabyte cluster and you've got to fail it over because your data center went down, how does that go? >> Well, it's also who's going to run it, too. You want less obstacles, not more, and you don't them to be huge, expensive developers. >> TierPoint, that's the other thing. We really don't talk to our customers in terms of storage acquisition costs anymore, we talk in terms TCO, total cost of ownership. You look at power, you look at cooling. >> That killed the Duke, basically, it was so hard to run and total cost of of ownership. Michael Dell was just on, I was interviewing Michael and I asked him like, "Where's the Cloud strategy?" I was just busting his chops a little bit, 'cause I know he's messaging, trying to get him off his messaging. But he made an interesting comment and metaphor. He goes, "Well John, I remember the days "during the internet days, where's you internet strategy?" Look where that happened, the bubble popped. But ultimately, everything played out as according to plan. There's pet food online, now we've got food delivery, DoorDash, all this stuff's happening. So he kind of was using it to compare to the Cloud today. There's a lot of hope and promise, where's your Cloud strategy? But yet, his point was it's going to be everywhere. >> Yeah, and I would say this, I think people sometimes confuse Cloud with Public Cloud. And I think what happened is, having that issue myself, I would say that Public Cloud exposed a certain model that had some benefits for the customer base that were new. That is, I can use as a service, I don't worry about operationalizing things, I can pay as I go, so I get that, it's elastic. But it also came with a lot of drawbacks. I don't have the kind of control that I would like to have. A normal thing that any person who takes a dependency on infrastructure has is, "Today's my Superbowl Sunday. "Don't touch my environment today." Now you go to a Public Cloud and you use a service that is used by thousands of other customers, so which day is Superbowl Sunday? Every day is Superbowl Sunday for somebody. >> It was a metaphor, Public cloud was a metaphor for virtualization that would effect the entire environment. >> And so, I think the journey we're all in, all the vendors, the Public Cloud suppliers, everybody is, "What are the right set of models "that are going to cover the space for all our customers?" There's not going to be one. There's several. I think the dedicated private Cloud models are certainly very appealing in a number of ways if you do the economics right. And I think that's the journey we're all on sort of together. >> I tweeted a little bit of the jewels out there this morning. True, Private cloud is going to be a $265 billion dollar market, but they were the first ones to actually size that, let's say true private public means essentially hybrid, but on-prem with a data center. That's huge numbers, it's not like rounding errors. >> We believe that, too. And that's why one of the neatest things we've announced this year with ECS object storage is something called ECS Dedicated Cloud, which is basically saying, "You can take the object storage "from us, but it's going to run in our data centers." We operate it, it's actually the developers who wrote the code from my team who are actually operating it, and you can do a variety of hybrid things. You can keep some of it on-prem, some of it off-prem, you can keep all of it off-prem. But regardless, it's your stuff. You can hug it, it's dedicated to you. You're not sharing the cluster with anybody else. You get to decided when you update your version, when you take a maintenance window or what have you. So, we're all searching for that sweet spot, if you will. >> I want to ask you about something, some of the different containers. The hottest thing right now in infrastructure, lack of persistent storage has been a real problem for containers. Is that a problem that's yours to solve or is it Docker's to solve? >> No, I think it is ours to solve with them. So, I'll say a couple of things. Firstly, our modern products, ECS and object storage as well as ScaleIO, our block ScaleOut storage, these are built with containers. So for instance, if you take ECS today, every ECS appliance that we ship, if you look inside very server, it's running Linux with Docker. And all the ECS code is running on Docker containers. That's just how it works. So A: we believe in containers, and two: I think we have been doing the work to provide that persistence ecosystem for containers using our storage. So we have a great team at Dell EMC called EMC Code. And these are people, they do a lot of this integration stuff, they work very closely with Docker and a number of the other frameworks to really plug our storage in. And I think it's a very open ecosystem. There are APIs there now, so you can plug anybody's storage in. And I think that's really if you compare VM-based infrastructures with container-based infrastructures. That's really the gap, because when you operationalize the stuff, you need things like that. You need persistent storage, you need snapshots, you need a VR-storage, you need those kinds of things, but I think that'll all come. >> Well, we're looking to continuing the conversation, I know time's tight. We'd like to follow up with you after the show, maybe bring you into our studio via Skype. You're in a hot area, you got the storage, you got the software, you got some Cloud action going on. Thank you very much for coming on The Cube, appreciate it. >> My pleasure for being here, thank you for having me. >> This is TheCube, live coverage here at Dell EMC World 2017. And I'm John Furrier with Paul Gillin, we'll be right back. Stay with us. (bright tech tones)