(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier here in the Palo Alto theCUBE studios. I'm the co-host of theCUBE. Also co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. We're here for some big news from Veritas. We're with Eric Seidman, who's the director of Solution's Marketing for Veritas. Veritas is introducing today and the press release is on the wire, Veritas Predictive Insights. Eric, thanks for coming in today and sharing thew news. >> Thanks John, absolutely, thanks for having me. >> So you guys have a unique new thing for Veritas. Not new to the industry, but new in capabilities, called Predictive Insights. I know Dave Vellante is actually linked on your press release and covered it in Chicago as an embargo. This is exciting news for Veritas because you guys have so much customer installed base, tons of data. Talk about what this new product is. What's the news? >> Well, thanks John, actually the news it's pretty exciting. Our customers are very excited and receptive about it. What it's actually doing is helping our customers reduce both planned and unplanned down time. And the way we're doing that is with an analytics engine that we've developed that's taking all the data from over 15,000 of our appliances around the world. We've been collecting that data for three years. We have hundreds of millions of data points from that. And we're utilizing our own AI ML engines that we've created to be able to predict things in customer's environments that may cause them down time or outages, and fix those before they happen. That's why our customers are really exciting about it. >> So how much does this cost? >> Well, it doesn't really cost anything. It's a value add. You know if our customers are utilizing our Veritas auto support services today, then as of yesterday, the service is turned on and we're already looking at their systems and creating this intelligence on them. >> So this is immediately valuable. >> And immediately evaluate those. >> So this is a new product from Veritas that takes existing operational data from your customer's environment. >> Correct. >> You guys are matching in your corpus of meta data. >> Exactly. >> A telemetry data, what, hundreds of millions of signals, call center, real log data, real outages and real things. >> Right, right. >> And creating machine learning and AI on top of it to extract value for you guys or for the customer? >> Well it's really for the customer. The benefit for the customer is that we have insights into you know our world wide universe of customers. But we can look at individual systems and say, why is this one operating differently than the others? And then the machine learning will actually determine that the ones that are operating really well have this patch and this patch installed. You know those types of things. And then we can apply that learning and that model to a particular customer's system. >> And they get a dashboard. >> And they get a dashboard that'll highlight what we call the system reliability score. So there's this, you know in big enterprises there's a lot of fatigue associated with events that are occurring all the time. You think of an enterprise, we have customers with many, many just net backup appliances alone. But you think of their entire infrastructure and all the alerts that they're getting. It creates a lot of fatigue. A lot of things go unfixed because they're minor events, like maybe a patch needs to be installed or a firmware update. While they're fixing the more hair on fire problems. But then ultimately those what looked like smaller events build up and build up and then they create outages. So what we're able to do is to identify which systems have potential anomalies. Highlight those very visually. Then they can drill down and we'll have prescriptive maintenance that can be taken to improve that. >> So site reliability score, we'll get to that in a second, I think that's a big deal. I want to read the press release headline. >> Okay. >> Veritas's Predictive Insights uses original intelligence AI, machine learning, ML, to predict and prevent unplanned service. Now the key word there is unplanned service. This is kind of the doomsday scenario for customers. They got a large data center or large infrastructure devices. Unplanned basically means an outage, if something happens, something bad happens. >> Yeah, something bad happens. >> And no one likes that, so what you guys are doing is giving them a valuated dashboard that taps into a product. So if, correct me if I'm wrong, but if a customer that has Veritas, if they have the products, they get the service. If they become a customer, they now have the capability built in out of the gate. >> Absolutely, right. >> And so they see all this, so you're taking all the data from years of experience. >> Yeah, exactly. >> Giving them a dashboard to help them look at unplanned down time type scenarios, and give them specific actions to take, particularly analytics and prescriptive analytics for them. >> Exactly, so what we're trying to really achieve for our customers is to use that intelligence and machine learning to identify things that may cause an outage in the future and prevent that outage from occurring, causing that down time, by taking remedial action in advance of that happening. And that's the beauty of Predictive Insights. That's really what it's providing for our customers. >> So you guys have this always on feature called auto support feature. >> Correct. >> That kicks in and it brings the system reliability score, SRS. I think this is important. I want you to explain this, I think this is a trend we're seeing certainly on the Cloud side of the market. Google has pioneered this concept called site reliability engineer over years of practice and they make their infrastructure work great. So we know that that kind of concept of having reliability, you guys are now giving a score to each appliance. >> Correct. >> It's almost like a health detector or like credit score. >> Definitely, credit score is a good analogy of that. >> So explain SRS, what's it mean for the customer and what's the impact to them? >> Yeah, so I don't know if you ever like, maybe you use one of those credit scoring apps os something like that, where it's monitoring your credit from three different agencies or whatever. That's kind of what we're doing, only the data sets are coming from a much broader set of appliances, right. But we're showing you your system reliability score, credit score if you will. And then we're showing you very prescriptively the processes you can take to improve your credit score, if you will, or your system's health and reliability. So that might be installing a firmware patch. Installing software update, things of that nature. Replacing some drives that may fail in the future. And all of those steps will then increase that liability score. >> And also you see in the hacking world, you know that one of the biggest parts of security breaches is not loading a patch. >> Yeah, exactly. >> The unplanned, unforeseen things are you know some sort of thing goes on, a hurricane, wild fire. You never know what's going to happen, so you got to be prepared for those kinds of infrastructure change or whatever. So I get that, so the operators can have a nice dashboard. I totally buy that. I want to get into the impact to the more on business side. How does this help the business owner that's your customer, does this help them with planning, refresh rates, total cost of ownership? Can you just talk about the impact of how this data relates to their job? Because I'd be like, what's in it for me? >> Yeah, no, exactly. And there's really three key areas that we're addressing for our customers. I mean the first one is around improving their operational efficiency, right. Again, reducing that alert fatigue and making it easier on the infrastructure management to do their job with less headaches, with less dashboards lighting up. So it's very, very prescriptive on highlighting what needs to be done and helping them through that process. The other area's around the prescriptive potential fault detection. And fixing those anomalies before they can actually cause a down time event, right, doing that in advance. So that's reducing the planned and unplanned down time, which can be significant in terms of cost to your business. One of the analysts states that this 20 million a year in cost associated with down time events like that, and that varies by industry. >> And that's a dart at the board, it's a big number. >> It's a big number, yeah. >> You pick your number, right, and see which one. >> And then the third area is really around helping our customers have better predictability into what their utilization requirements are. So the benefit there is really helping them improve their ROI on our appliances. Because now they don't have to over buy and over provisions at capacity because we can show them the trend data, the amount of efficiency they're getting from data. And they can right size their appliances in terms of performance capacity, and then we can warn them in advance. >> That's a real big thing is what's happening there. That's proactive. >> It's very proactive. >> It's not reactive. >> Exactly. >> Well you can solve on the reactive side because you just fix it. But then the proactive side is really where things break as you blow over capacity, you might want to add more. >> Yeah, believe it or not, those types of things have caused down time events in our customers, where they're assuming their backups are going to complete, as an example with net backup appliances, and yet they're out of capacity. And at the last moment that's a fire drill for them. So we can show them out 30, 60, 90 days, what they're utilization is, and then a threshold is at this point in time you're going to have potential outage, some kind of problem. And so we recommend that you add this capacity before that ever occurs. >> Alright, talk about the customer reaction to that. You guys, actually it was announced today, you talk to customers all the time. When you showed customers this in pre-launch, what was some of the feedback you guys heard? What were the key areas, what did they hone in on, what was the key things about the Predictive Insights that made them get jazzed up about this? >> Yeah, so it's really I would say it covers the two key areas that I already mentioned. One of 'em is helping prevent unplanned down time. That's a big concern for our customers in any industry. And this is going to be able to help them overcome that you know kind of rear view mirror look as to what's happening in the data center. And fixing a problem after it's occurred. Now they'll be able to be in advance of that and eliminate or at least significantly reduce those types of issues. And then the other one is helping, again, in that event fatigue at the operational model. That's where we've gotten the best feedback. >> So I'm going to ask you a hard question, which is, hey you know, predictive analytics has been around for awhile, pre-descriptive. why now, what's different about this opportunity? Obviously free is good because your customers get turned on pretty quickly. They get the benefits immediately, and new customers get it. I get that piece. >> Yeah. >> But what's different about you guys with this versus what might be out in the market? >> Yeah, I would say the key differentiation is that we have this very, very large universe of installed base systems that we've been gathering data on for over three years now. So the more data you have, the more data points you have. The better results you'll get from a machine learning type of environment. And we're still collecting data, both from the machines that are coming in from the telemetry data, as well as from our service personnel. So that right off the bat makes our solution unique than others that may have been like out sooner, in that we've developed a rich data set that is being applied to the machine learning. And hence, our results out the gate are very, very good. >> And you're using that, you're not actually charging for it. So that's another big one. >> Yeah, that's true too. >> So let's get into the specifics on the rollout. So this is a digital transformation table stake. You guys are checking a big box here. >> Sure. >> This is good. It gives your product some capability that levels that meta data, and that is what this data driven world is about. And certainly IoT is even going to make this even more of a table stake. >> Absolutely. >> On the rollout side, it's all appliances, Veritas. >> Uh huh. >> And then software only and then you're going to go beyond Veritas, is that right? >> Yeah. >> Explain that, what does that mean? So I get the appliances. What does software only mean and what does beyond Veritas mean? >> Yeah, so just to reiterate, today it's our appliances only. But many of our customers consume our solutions of software. And they're putting it on their bring our own server model. Probably about 40% of our customers, right. So we believe we can add this type of capability to be able to provide insights into our software that's installed on independent third party hardware as well. Maybe some of the capabilities won't be as rich, but we're going to start building those capabilities over time and try to bring in that data and help those customers that are software only customers. >> And that's on the road map? >> That's on the road map. >> Okay, so it's not available today? Okay, beyond Veritas? >> Yeah, so obviously many of our customers today are protecting data on prime, protecting data in the Cloud or some kind of hybrid model. And we support, we don't really care where the customers want to store their data. We're capable of protecting it and helping them achieve whatever those Cloud type of initiatives are in that environment. So an obvious next step would be to, hey how can we bring this to help you know where your data is located and how it's working in those environments? Is that back up going to be able to be restored, as an example? So we're looking at future capabilities to add on to this. There's going to be huge value to our customers. >> This is great news. Thanks for coming in and sharing. I really appreciate it. I want to get your thoughts on some observations that we've been making. Certainly theCUBE coverage of Veritas has been increased. Dave Vellante's been out on the road with the team, looked at some of the new back up recovery versions, looking at new UI, kind of new Veritas going on here. >> It kind of is. >> What's the vibe going on in Veritas? What's new about Veritas for the folks watching now and saying this is really cool. Veritas is cool and relevant right now. You guys are a product market fit. You guys got kind of a new Veritas vibe going on. What's it all about? Share your thoughts. >> Yeah, so I think there's, you know, some people call us legacy, right? But I don't think that's necessarily a bad term, right. I meant like when I'm gone, I hope I've left a legacy, right, that's worthwhile. And so we have that legacy, which is great. Because we've been adding, there's value for our customers for many, many years. But what's new and exciting I think for us is that we're able to provide solutions that are very, very simple to utilize, very easy to accommodate whatever their requirements are, whether it's on print or hybrid or in the Cloud, we don't really care. So we've kind of progressed I would say into a very, very modern architecture for what we're doing. And meeting the requirements today of what our customer's are doing as well as looking forward. And this Predictive Insights piece I think is just another manifestation on how we're progressing as a company, what we can bring to today on the current problems in the data center, and also looking out in terms of where the future requirements are as well. And we're ready for those. >> Well legacy is a great word. I love you brought that up because it's a double edge sword. If you're a legacy and you don't do anything and you rest on your legacy, then you kind of, you're just milking that until the legacy is dry. >> Fair. >> But if you look at what Microsoft's done, they're classified as a legacy vendor. Office was shrink wrapped software. >> Yeah. >> Satya Nadella comes over and now they're the darling of Cloud. They've shifted their products and execution to be what customers want, which is Cloud. Now they've got Office365, Azures, you know have been repurposed. There's some stuff they could still work on, but clearly cleared the runway. >> Yeah. >> And Oracle, not so much, Microsoft has. So this is a Veritas kind of vibe that's going on similarly to Microsoft. You guys are looking, hey we've got to install a base. We're going to use that and leverage the assets of that installed base, that legacy. Harness it and make it part of the digital transformation. Is that kind of the vibe? >> No, exactly, and I think Microsoft is a great example. I mean we're in tight partnership with Azure as a matter of fact. I just came from one of our vision solution's stages where a gentleman from Azure shared the stage with us and talking about our partnerships and all that. So I mean great example, but we're bringing those capabilities into the Cloud era, if you will. We have solutions that run natively in Cloud, help that environment, so. >> Making the transition to digital transformation. Veritas, the new Veritas, they got the solutions that are Cloud enabled. Using data for the benefit of the customers, not just trying to bolt it on and make more money. They're actually bringing value to the install base and changing the game up. Eric Seidman here inside theCUBE. Director of Solutions Marketing at Veritas. Part of theCUBE conversation, part of their news coverage of their Predictive Insights. I'm John Furrier, here in the Palo Alto studios, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(peppy music) >> Welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studios for a Cube Conversation. It's a great way to get a little closer to people when we're not at the hustle and bustle of a big show. Although this guest just came from a big show. He's Eric Seidman, director of solutions marketing for Veritas Technology, just back from Microsoft. Welcome, Eric. >> Thank you very much. >> So how was the desert? >> It was very hot. >> (laughs) It was very hot. >> It was very hot. >> So big Microsoft partner show, Inspire. What was kind of the vibe? Things are obviously going really well for Microsoft. We read about they're gaining market share on the cloud space against Amazon. So you know, Satya really seems to have done a great job moving that company. >> Indeed. So there was a lot of focus on Azure at the show. But I thought it was a great event for their partners that are attending there, not only to get more immersed in the capabilities of Microsoft, but also to meet with companies like us, like Veritas, to be able to learn more about our solutions, how they complement what Microsoft is doing, particularly in the public cloud space, and help those partners generate more revenue and help solve the customers' business problems as well. >> It's interesting. You guys are big in appliances. You've got a couple appliances, and we'll talk about specifically the Flex appliances. But more generically, some people might have a question. There's all this rise of public cloud. They're getting more and more percentage of the workloads. How does an appliance fit in a public cloud world? >> Yeah, so that's a great question. We got that a little bit at the Inspire show as well. So first off you kind of have to consider that everything that we do as a company comes out as software first, right? So we're software-defining everything, basically. But there's a lot of consideration that we look at what our customers' requirements are. And so there's many customers that prefer to consume in that agility model that software-defined allows them to do in terms of being able to very quickly scale, Add new features and capabilities on the hardware of their choice. You know, software-defined, particularly storage gives many customers that cloud agility that they're looking for. But there's other sets of companies that are also looking for that same software features and capabilities but prefer more of an appliance consumption model. Maybe they're not ready for that bifurcated type of approach to software and hardware, or they're looking for faster implementation of a fully supported solution. So we provide our customers kind of the best of both worlds. They can consume our solutions, our data protection and storage products as software or as appliances based on the requirements of the company. >> And what's kind of the special, for people that aren't as familiar with appliances, we always hear about industry standard hardware and you know, the hardware's going to zero. What's the advantages that you can accomplish with an appliance that you couldn't just use, you know, with regular kind of off-the-shelf hardware? >> Yeah, well, certainly we take care of that integration and task, and it's a fully supported configuration. So they get all of the benefits of that. But we also, I'd say our unique capability from an appliance standpoint is that it truly is software defined and remains software defined. So as an example of a customer chooses to deploy our Access appliance, which is a long-term retention appliance which complements our net backup, our data protection solutions. Even though they're getting it as an appliance, that software license isn't tied or locked to that appliance. It's still licensed separately. So as an example, if we come out with a new type of storage appliance, they're free to move that license to it. Or if they choose to even move to a third-party hardware, the newer, greener, cheaper pasture storage server, they can transfer that license to that. So while they're consuming it as an appliance for all the benefits around a fully supported solution for them, We still provide that software-defined flexibility or capability, so that's one of the unique aspects of that. >> And then really, you deliver kind of this mixed benefit to the client as well, so they've got the benefits of having it locally. You can put fast storage in there and have local storage as well as manage the pushing out of the other data that maybe is more appropriate in the public cloud or whatever. >> Yeah, so if we take kind of a look at what we were speaking to our Microsoft partners at Inspire, it was around our appliances. And like you were saying, well, why are you talking about appliances? You know, a big push to Azure and all. So we were able to show them with our Flex appliance, which is a very unique container-ized solution for multiple net backup solutions, being able to scale those out in containers versus physical storage devices or servers and also turn on or off cloud tiering capabilities as a service as well. So customers may have a requirement for multiple net backup domains, and in the future they want a tier to Azure or another public cloud, they can simply turn on that cloud tiering service in this Flex appliance. And then our Access appliance that I mentioned that complements our net backup solutions for on-premise long-term retention can also tier to Azure or public clouds as well. And those things both work together where we have very high performance retention in the Flex appliance for the best RPO RTO of the data protection services there. And that can tier to Access for additional on-prem storage at a lower cost per terabyte. And then either or through both, tier to the cloud, depending on the type of data. So a customer may have a requirement where they have to keep data on site, maybe it's for compliance or governance reasons. And then other domains may be okay to move that data longer-term into public cloud. So the appliances provide that type of flexibility that enables the customer to put the data where it meets the requirements, either for cost performance or for compliance requirements. >> So I'd like to kind of go up a notch. You know, you're out with customers all the time and listening to their needs and requirements. We hear all the time the explosion of data, unstructured data, regular data. How are you seeing that really manifest itself in customers that have specific problems today that are sitting at the table with you guys? I mean, what kind of stories are they telling you of kind of the rise of the data quantity that they're having to deal with? I don't know if you have some interesting anecdotes. >> Yeah, well, certainly it's not getting deleted. So more and more of it is being retained for various reasons. Some of it's for data protection reasons, ensuring that they're able to meet, like, litigation requirements and things like that. So there's a lot of long-term retention for those type of requirements. But more and more we're also seeing the growth of this type of data just for the use of mining it and getting more value out of it. They're not deleting it. They're finding that there's ways to monetize that data in different means. So we see that, and that's one of the reasons why our Access appliance has been very well accepted in the market, because it can retain vast amounts of data on-prem at a low price point and be utilized for either backup data protection aspects or the archival in these cases as well. >> So one of the concepts we talk a lot about on theCUBE is about data as a balance sheet asset. It never really was before, right? It was a liability, because you had to buy a bunch of gear to store it. And you couldn't keep it all, and it was too expensive, and you threw stuff away. Clearly the pendulum has swung, and now data's very valuable. Some argue it's the core asset of the business. So I'm just curious if you've seen a change in the investment profile, the ROI metrics, some of the ways that people are making purchase decisions in a world where they want to keep everything, where they recognize that data is an asset. And now it's really, it's not a cost to hold this stuff that's expensive to hold, but it's really now more of an investment to drive an asset that's hopefully going to drive cost savings to get into new businesses or opportunities for revenue. How is that manifesting itself in some of the decision processes that the buyers are going through? >> Yeah, I mean, often we hear a lot of those similar problems within our customers that we talk to. And I think the biggest challenge is, as you were talking about, the cost aspect. They're really trying to figure out, well, how do we move from a cost center or burden for storing all of this data to a value that delivers value to the company. >> Right, a business benefit. >> A business benefit from a cost nature. And we help the customers achieve that in many different ways. We have an object storage offering that has an integrated cognitive engine that can provide very, very deep search capabilities as well as integration into external ML and AI facilities to extract more value from the data. We have some cool products like info map that will allow a company to really see where all those important assets are stored and what type of data that they have and where it's located, you know, basically data center wide, company wide, and even what's in their cloud. And that's from info map. And so they can see it. Like, they may have important data that needs to be treated with GDPR compliance. How do you know where that's located, right? And how do I make sure I'm meeting those type of requirements? So those are some of the kind of tools that we're helping our customers move from that cost center to more of a value proposition where they're delivering business benefits and revenue to the company. >> Right, right. I'm just curious on the GDPR thing. We had a little thing here when it was GDPR day just a couple Fridays ago. >> I heard about that, yeah. >> How are those conversations? Was it a Y2K kind of a moment in the months leading up to it? Was it not that big of a deal? Did people get out in front of it? It seems like the regs passed a long time ago, but the due dates were delayed for quite a bit. And then oh, my goodness, it's GDPR day. >> Yeah, well, I was in the industry back in the Y2K days. I don't think it had that, it didn't have that same type of feeling of impending doom or something, like we don't know what to do. >> Right, until the first couple of clients drop it. >> Yeah, well, maybe, but I think it was more about, well, this is predictable. We've been working on GDPR, being able to provide the compliance to that for a couple years before that regulation came out, you know, working with our customers in Europe and stuff. So we've built a lot of infrastructure and software and capabilities that helped customers achieve that, you know, before the requirements hit. So I guess from our standpoint at Veritas, while it looked pretty menacing, you know, maybe from the outside, but we had been working with our customers all along so that they're already in that mode where they can comply with those new requirements. >> Right, but it just seems so counter to what computers do well. Computers write very well, and they copy very well. You know, so much effort in terms of your product and stuff is protecting that data, replicating the data, duplicating the data, making sure. And now with the GDPR requirement, I want you to take me out of your system. Like, where exactly is that record? And how many versions of that record are stored where? It's kind of that funny movie they made about the cloud. It's in the cloud; it's everywhere. It's nowhere at the same time. So was that kind of a unique challenge, Or you guys have been on top of that for a long time? >> Well, we've been on top of that, right? So that's where I think we brought this capability to our customers, so they were like, we're okay now. Take a deep breath. We're okay, because we have tools that can classify information, and we've had those for a very, very long time. So the customers can already know what their PII data is, where it's located, and then automatically tree it in different manners, like provide the right type of security associated with that PII data, store it in the right locations. All of those type of aspects, we've already automated that process through any of our various capabilities, some of them within our storage product, like I've mentioned, the cognization of our object storage and external software that we bring to the party, and of course, the visualization of it so that you can see it all through the info map. >> So I'm curious, we're halfway through 2018, which I still can't believe we're halfway through 2018. So as you look forward, what are some of the priorities for the balance of the year? What are some of the priorities going forward? >> Well, for us it's still meeting, helping those customers meet their GDPR requirements and ensuring that they're on top of those. Being able to visualize where their data is, is very, very important. And then like we were talking about just a couple of minutes ago, extracting the value from that data. So you'll see some new technologies coming from us later on this year that I'm really excited about. I'm looking forward to talking more about those with you in the future, and our customers that are going to continue that value proposition. We'll continue to help them store vast amounts of their growth of unstructured data, doing it economically, doing it in new ways, and again extracting more value from those data sets as well. >> Yeah, I love, you used "vast." You know, the rate and the amount and the quantity and the value is just going up, up, up. >> It is. >> So you guys are in a pretty good space. >> We think so, yeah, very good. >> All right, Eric, well, thanks for taking a few minutes. And welcome back from Vegas. I'm glad it's not 115 here for you. >> Yeah, so am I, thank you very much. >> All right, he's Eric Seidman and I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Palo Alto studios having a Cube Conversation. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, to EMC World. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with co-host, Paul Gillin. We are joined by Eric Seidman. He is the Senior Product Manager, Product Marketing, Dell EMC. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Eric: Thanks for having me. Pleasure. >> So I want to start out by talking about the Isilon launch. Tell us a little bit about the impetus for this new platform. >> Yeah, right, so thanks. You know, we see a lot happening from our customers' standpoint. I mean, there's a lot of trends in the industry. All flash, move to cloud. But in our particular markets and such is also a huge demand for more performance and really unconstrained scalability. And being able to do that but not compromise on enterprise features or protocols. Our customers still need all of the security and the protection that they expect as in their other storage platforms. And so we took a look at how we architected the Isilon hardware. Brought in all these different considerations and then went back to our engineering and said, "You need to make the number one mass "scale-out platform in the industry even better." And so here's your challenge engineering. And what they did was they developed a completely new architecture that goes from the traditional node in a chassis to being able to put that same type of node in a lot smaller space. And we've achieved that being able to take what would normally take 16 U of rack space and four nodes and compress that into a single 4 U chassis. But they just didn't make it smaller, they made it more reliable and also much, much faster. Six times faster in terms of IOPS, twice as the capacity that would be in a normal 16 U of space in a single 4 U. And so that has huge advantages for our customers who have these huge demands. So now they have more performance and less space, more capacity and less space, 75% reduction-- (audio and video defect) then tier that in the cloud as well. So we give them paths to be able to have the genomic research done faster, store more data, and can continuously store more data in less space. >> Manuvir Das was on earlier and talking about how you're positioning ECS is Tier 1 storage, and Isilon is Tier 2 storage. >> Eric: That's the other way around. >> My notes are wrong, (laughs) my mistake. >> Eric: Quite alright. >> Is there a merger at some point of those two, or are we going to continue to have two distinct tiers of storage? >> Well, we're bringing them closer together all the time. One of the unique capabilities that we have with Isilon is be able to tier, to ECS our cloud storage. And that has significant benefits for our customers, because when the data is in the ECS object store, now it can be automatically replicated across geographies around the world for higher redundancy capabilities, and also to be able to access that data remotely from other geos as well. So we're always looking at how to bring those two platforms closer together, and then you'll see tighter integration of Isilon and ECS as we progress. We kind of look at it though, the file and object as two distinct use cases and have different requirements. So our path has been to really be able to provide the best of breed for both of those. Best of breed for Scale-Out File with Isilon and its protocols for file, and then ECS for object protocols. But we're bringing those capabilities closer together with the tiering capabilities and the interactive capabilities with the data, whether it's in the file platform or in the object platform. >> You are a veteran of the data industry. Before the cameras were rolling you were telling us about how you really were at this at the beginning. So can you talk a little bit about how customers needs have changed over the years since you've been in this industry? >> Yeah, so I mean, significantly I've been around in the storage industry since RAID-- well, not RAID, but OpenRAID platforms for Linux systems came rolling out and things were transitioning from the mainframe to Linux and then that kind of area, and SANs were kind of the new concept back in the day. And that had a lot of capabilities about being able to consolidate different servers and different applications to share a storage for block protocols. And that was a big boon for the industry and changed how applications could be deployed and reduced the cost of storage and improved efficiencies. And with Isilon that scale-out capability for file protocols has kind of been that same type of breakthrough where we can now consolidate multiple types of workflows from many, many different data types and applications. We have customers consolidating tens, hundreds of different applications on a single Isilon cluster because it can scale in performance and capacity and can support so many different protocols so that you can, say, bring in data from weblogs from your Linux servers and then do in-place analytics on that to gain more insights into what's happening in your environment and that sort of thing. So it's kind of being that same kind of continuation of what we saw, or I saw, back in the day with RAID and SAN consolidating block storage. We've been able to bring that even further with scale-out NAS and then integration of object and cloud just kind of continues that. >> There's a massive transition going on right now form hard disk to flash-based storage. What are your customers, how are your customers driving this? I mean, what are they asking for from you in terms of flash capability? What are their buying plans for conventional rigid-- - Yeah, that's a great question. (audio and visual defect) Just, they want flash, 'cause sometimes it's like the new shiny thing. But they're not exactly sure-- (audio and visual defect) >> in a number of different industries. Can you talk about what you see as the most exciting and profound changes that you're seeing? >> Yeah, certainly. Well, I mean, the reason I keep mentioning genomic research, 'cause we were just in a meeting with one of our great customers, TGen, and they're doing life-saving research and movies are great and all, but it's kind of different on the scale of what we can do to help mankind. So obviously life sciences and health care is just a huge benefit that we're seeing brought out as well. But just a lot of the high-performance commercial environments like we talked about with media and entertainment being able to change how they're doing their workflows and enable them to actually see their daily shootings as they filmed them rather than having to compress them and watch their dailies in a lower compressed format and that sort of thing. So it's transforming that as I mentioned in the EDA space, being able to get their chips to market faster. And then particularly in that space, their data's doubling twice every year. So they have huge constraints around the amount of data that they can store, so we're helping them by being able to reduce their rack space by 75% with our new technology. So it's really impacting a lot of different use cases, not only in the performance side but as well as in the density and TCO as well. >> We hear about things like holographic storage and stuff that's coming out of the labs right now that sounds very exciting. As a storage guy, what excites you most? I mean, what's the next big thing? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Well certainly we're always looking at what's evolving in the storage. And that's one of the cool things about our architecture that we've announced here with our new generation of Isilon is that it's really future-proof. So it's designed for an eye on the future. It's extremely modular. It allows us to be able to independently change out the CPUs, change out the storage media, the networking capabilities and such. So as new technologies do come to market, we can quickly bring those into the product fold and then incorporate the features of that technology into the software and bring them to market very, very quickly. So, like, when a hundred gigabit ethernet is available in the market, we'll be able to accommodate that by just slipping in a new HBA in this modular architecture. It's designed on the media side to be very, uh, media agnostic. Today it supports SAS and SAS and SATA technologies all in the same node types, right. So and that allows us to configure these things in different ways for different types of use cases and such, so, yeah, I'd say, getting back to your original question here is that, we look forward to these new things coming out so that we can look at how we can integrate those into this new modular architecture. >> Paul: You're not going to pick winners though. >> (laughs) Not right now. >> One of the other things that Michael Dell talked about during his keynote was-- (audio and visual defect) >> You know, customers are very, very concerned about that. It's top of mind. You know, one of the key features again with Isilon is that you not only get this enormous performance benefit from this new flash nodes that are GAing this week, and all the new capabilities of the architecture, but we don't compromise on any of those areas, right. So we provide multi-protocol access through many, many different types of unstructured data, protocols, and Hadoop at HDFS, and Object APIs. But it just doesn't stop there, right, so we also have the security and the compliance with encryption and audit and a secure access zone so you can wall off a cluster, make sure it's secure, make sure storage admins can only do the admin and not get to the data. Things that are top of mind for our customers across a broad segment of markets. >> Eric, thanks so much for joining us. This has been great. >> You're welcome. Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Paul Gillin, we will have more from EMC World after this.