>> Voiceover: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience this year. I'm Lisa Martin, pleased to be joined by two CUBE alumni from Dell EMC. Please welcome Joe Caradonna, the VP of Cloud Storage CTO. Joe, good to see you again, even though quite socially distant. >> Yeah, thank you, it's great to be here. >> And Devon Reed is also joining us, the Senior Director of Product Management. Devon, how are you? >> I'm good, how are you doing? >> Good. >> Nice to be here, thank you. >> Nice to be chatting with you guys, although very, very socially distant, following rules. It wouldn't be a Dell Technologies World without having you guys on theCUBE, so we appreciate you joining us. So let's dig in. So much has happened in the world since we last spoke with you. But one of the things that happened last year, around a year ago, was the Dell On Demand program was launched. And now here we are nearly a year later when Michael Dell was just talking about, "Hey, Dell's plan is to go "and deliver everything as a service." We've heard some of your competitors kind of going the same route, some kind of spurned by COVID. Talk to us, Devon, we'll start with you, about what this direction is shift to as-a-service means and what it means specifically for storage. >> Yeah, certainly. So first and foremost, what we talked about last year with respect to On Demand, Dell Technologies On Demand, we've had great success with that program. But before I get into what we're doing with as-a-service, I really want to talk about why we're doing the as-a-service. And when we talk to customers and partners, and when we look at the trends in the market, what we're seeing is that customers are more and more wanting to consume technology infrastructure as a service in an OPEX manner. And analysts are revising those estimates up almost daily. And what we're seeing is one of the things that's driving that is actually why we're here in this remote session as opposed to being in Vegas, doing this. And it's really the global uncertainty around the pandemic. So it's driving the need to free up cash and consume these infrastructure more as a service. Now, as Michael said... Yeah, as Michael said, we have the broadest set of infrastructure offerings in the market and we are number one in most categories. And we're in the process of building out an offer structure that cuts across all the different infrastructure components. But to get real specific on what we're doing with a storage as a service, we are in the process of building out the first true storage or as a service offering for our infrastructure starting with storage. It'll be a private preview as of Q4, by the end of this fiscal year and generally available in the first half of next year. And what we're doing is taking the infrastructure, the Dell Technology's storage and where we're flipping the business model as opposed to buying it outright, the customers actually just consume it as a service. So they have a very simple consumption model where they just pick their outcome, they pick their restored service, they pick their performance, they pick their capacity, and we deliver that service to their on-premise site. >> Let me unpack outcomes of it, 'cause I saw that in some of the information online, outcome driven. What do you mean by that, and can you give us some examples of those outcomes that customers are looking to achieve? >> Yeah, so in today's world, the way people mostly consume infrastructure is, or at least storage, is that they say, "I need a storage product." And what the customers do is they work with our sales representatives and say, "I need a XYZ product. "Maybe it's a PowerStore and I need this much capacity. "I can pick all of the components, "I can pick the number of drives, "the type of drives there are." And that's really from a product perspective. And what we're doing with the, as-a-service, is we're trying to flip the model and really drive to what the business outcome is. So the business outcome here is really, I need block storage, I need this performance level, I need this much capacity. And then we basically ship the infrastructure, we think, that better suits those outcomes. And we're making changes across our entire infrastructure value chain to really deliver these service. So we try to deliver these much quicker for the customer. We actually manage the infrastructure. So it enables customers to spend less time managing their infrastructure and more time actually operating the service, paying attention to their business outcomes. >> Got it, and that's what every customer wants more of is more time to actually deliver this business outcomes and make those course corrections as they need to. Joe, let's talk to you for a bit. Let's talk, what's going on with cloud? The last time we saw you, a lot of change as we talked about, but give us a picture of Dell's cloud strategy. From what you guys are doing on-prem to what you are doing with cloud partners. What is this multi-pronged cloud strategy actually mean? >> Yeah, sure, I mean, our customers want hybrid cloud solutions and we believe that to be the model going forward. And so actually what we're doing is, if you think about it, we're taking the best of public cloud and bringing it on-prem, and we're also taking the best of on-prem and bringing it to the public cloud. So, you know, Devon just talked to you about how we're bringing that public cloud operation model to the data center. But what we've also done is bring our storage arrays to the cloud as a service. And we've done that with PowerStore, we've done that with PowerMax, and we've done that with PowerScale. And in the case of PowerScale for Google cloud, I mean, you get the same performance and capacity scale out in the cloud as you do on-prem. And the systems inter-operate between on-prem and cloud so it makes it easy for fluid data mobility across these environments. And for the first time it enables our customers to get their data to the cloud in a way that they can bring their high performance file workloads to the cloud. >> So talk to me a little bit about, you mentioned PowerScale for Google cloud service, is that a Dell hardware based solution? How does that work? >> Yeah, the adoptions have been great. I mean, we launched back in May and since then we brought on customers in oil and gas and eCommerce and in health as well. And we're growing out the regions, we're going to be announcing a new region in North America soon and we're going to be building out in APJ and EMEA as well. So, customer response has been fantastic, looking forward to growing up. >> Excellent, Devon back to you, let's talk about some of the things that are going on with PowerProtect DD, some new cloud services there too. Can you unpack that for us? >> So Joe, was talking about how we were taking our storage systems and putting them in the cloud. So I just back up in, and kind of introduce real quickly or reintroduce our Dell Technologies Cloud Storage Services. And that's really, we have our primary storage systems from Unity XT, the PowerStore, to PowerScale, to ECS, and that's housed in a co-locations facility right next to hyperscalers. And then that enables us to provide a fully managed service offering to our customers to a multi-cloud. So what we're doing is we're extending the Dell Technologies Cloud Storage Services to include PowerProtect DD. So we're bringing PowerProtect DD into this managed services offering so customers can use it for cloud, longterm retention, backup, archiving, and direct backup from a multicloud environment. So extending what we've already done with the Dell Technologies Cloud Storage Services. >> So is that almost kind of like a cloud based data protection solution for those workloads that are running in the cloud VMs, SaaS applications, physical servers, spiral data, things like that? >> Yeah, there's several use cases. So you could have a primary block storage system on your premises and you could actually be providing direct backup into the cloud. You could have backups that you have on-premise that you could be then replicating with PowerProtect data, data domain replication to cloud. And you could also have data in AWS, or Azure, or Google that you could be backing up directly to the PowerProtect domain into this service. So there's multiple use cases. >> Got it, all right. Joe, let's talk about some of the extensions of cloud you guys have both been talking about the last few minutes. One of the recent announcements was about PowerMax being cloud enabled and that's a big deal to cloudify something like that. Help us understand the nature of that, the impetus, and what that means now and what customers are able to actually use today. >> Yeah sure, I mean, we've launched the PowerMax as a cloud service about a year and a half ago with our partner, Faction. And that's for those customers that want that tier zero enterprise grade data capabilities in the cloud. And not just a cloud, it also offers multicloud capabilities for both file and block. Now, in addition, the Dell Tech World, we're launching additional cloud mobility capabilities for PowerMax, where let's say you have a PowerMax on-prem, you could actually do snapshot shipping to an object repository. And that could be in AWS, that can be in Azure, or it could be locally to our local ECS object store. In addition, in the case of Amazon we go a step further where if you do snapshot shipping into Amazon S3, you can then rehydrate those snapshots directly into EBS. And that way you can do processing on that data in the cloud as well. >> Give us an idea, Joe, the last few months or so what some of your customer conversations have been like? I know you're normally in front of customers all the time. Dell Tech World is a great example. I think last year there was about 14,000 folks there, was huge. And we're all so used to that three dimensional engagement, more challenging to do remotely, but talk to me about some of the customer conversations that you've had, and how they've helped influence some of the recent announcements. >> Yeah sure, customers... It might sound a little cliche, but cloud is a journey. It's a journey for our customers. It's a journey for us too, as we build out our capabilities to best serve them. But their questions are, "I want to take advantage "of that elastic compute in the cloud." But maybe the data storage doesn't keep up with it. In the case of when we go to PowerScale for Google, the reason why we brought that platform to the cloud is 'cause you can get hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput through that. And for our customers that are doing things like processing genomic sequencing data, they need that level of throughput, and they want to move those workloads into the cloud. The computer's there but the storage systems to keep up with it, were not. So by us bringing a solution like this to the cloud, now they can do that. So we see that with PowerScale, we see a lot of that with file in the cloud because the file services in the cloud aren't as mature as some of the other ones like with block and object. So we're helping filling some of those gaps and getting them to those higher performance tiers. And as I was mentioning, with things like PowerMax and PowerStore, it's extending their on-prem presence into the public cloud. So they can start to make decisions not based on a capability, but more based on the requirements for where they want to run their workloads. >> And let's switch gears to talking about partners now. Dell has a huge partner ecosystem. We always talk with those folks on theCUBE as well, every year. Devon, from a product management perspective, tell me about some of the things that are interesting to partners and what the advantages are for partners with this shift in what, how Dell is going to be delivering, from PCs, to storage, to HCI, for example. >> Yeah exactly, so, Joe mentioned that it's really a journey and Joe talked a lot about how customers aren't maybe not (indistinct) completely going to a hyperscale or to a complete public cloud. And what we're hearing is there's a lot of customers that are actually wanting the cloud-like experience, but wanting it on-prem. And we're hearing from our partners almost on a daily basis. I have a lot of partner customer conversations where they want to be involved in delivering this as a service. Through their customers, they want to maintain that relationship, derive that value, and in some cases even provide the services for them. And that's what we're looking do as the largest infrastructure provider with the broadest base of partnership we have an advantage there. >> Is there any specific partner certification programs that partners can get into to help start rolling this out? >> At this point, we are trying to build it, but at this point we had nothing to announce here but that's something that we're actively working on and stay tuned for that. >> I imagine there will be a lot of virtual conversations at the digital tech world this year, between the partner community when all of these things are announced. And you get those brains collectively together although obviously virtually, to start iterating on ideas and developing things that might be great to programmatize down the road. And, Joe, last question for you, second to last question actually, is this, this year as we talked about a number of times, everyone's remote, everyone's virtual. It's challenging to get that level of engagement. We're all so used to being in-person and all of the hallway conversations even that you have when you're walking around the massive show floor for example, what can participants and attendees expect from your perspective this year at Dell Technologies World? Will they be able to get the education and that engagement that Dell really wants to deliver? >> Yeah, well, clearly we had to scale things back quite, there's no way around that. But we have a lot of sessions that were designed to inform them with a new capabilities we've been building out. And not just for cloud, but across the portfolio. So I hope they get a lot out of that. We have some interactive sessions in there as well, for some interactive Q and A. And you're right, I mean, a challenge for us is connecting with the customer in this virtual reality. We're all at home, right? The customers are at home. So we've been on Zoom, like never before, reaching out to customers to better understand where they want to go, what their challenges are and how we can help them. So I would say we are connecting, it's a little different and requires a little more effort on everyone's part. We just can't all do it in the same day anymore. It is just a little more spread out. >> Well, then it kind of shows the opportunity to consume things on demand. And as consumers, we sort of have this expectation that we can get anything we want on demand. But you mentioned, Joe, in the second to last question, this is the last one. But you mentioned, everybody's at home. You have to tell us about that fantastic guitar behind you. What's the story? >> Every guitar has a story. I'll just say for today, look, this is my tribute to Eddie Van Halen. We're going to miss him for sure. >> And I'll have the audience know, I did ask Joe to play us out. He declined, but I'm going to hold them to that for next time, 'cause we're not sure when we're going to get to see you guys in person again. Joe and Devon, thank you so much for joining me on the program today. It's been great talking to you. Lots of things coming, lots of iterations, lots of influence from the customers, influence from COVID and we're excited to see what is to come. Thanks for your time. >> Both: Thank you so much. >> From my guests, Joe Caradonna and Devon Reed, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the Digital Experience. (soft music)

>> From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman And we're digging in with the VMware cloud on AWS update, of course, an important solution set we've been talking about for a couple of years. If you see we've done interviews with some of the VMware and AWS executives, we did a deep dive on some of the technology. And now we get to dig in with one of the users of the technology. Of course, the executive talk about the proof of how many customers have been using it. So happy to welcome to the program I have two guests from PLM insurance. First, sitting right next to me on the screen is BJ Gardner, who's the lead system architect. Next to him is Dave Zeigenfuss, who is a senior systems architect. BJ and Dave, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thank you for having us. All right. So BJ, just for our audience that does not know, Pennsylvania Lumberman's Mutual Insurance Company, give us a little bit about The company 125 years in history, obvious with the name, it's in the insurance business but help us understand, you know, what your business is and what you and Dave do for the organization. >> Sure, so Pennsylvania Lumbermens has been around for under 125 years, we just celebrated the 100 and 25th year. This February Actually, we are commercial insurance company, property Casualty. And we specialize in the wood niche. So we cover everything from lumber yards to auto fleets that have anything to do with moving wood selling wood. So we're pretty niche, we're pretty specific in our brand. And we're a mutual insurer. We're one of the few if not only one, left that does not offer insurance on mutual space >> Alright, and BJ give us a little bit of snapshot from an IT standpoint, obviously, you're using VMware, cause you're here, talk to us about what data centers and cloud usage looks like for PLM. >> So I've been without Pennsylvania Lumbermens for about 15 years, and we were operating in full on-prem with bare metal servers, and 2007-2008, We started with the VMware product set. And since then we've been moving little by little to the cloud. We have many of our core applications are sitting with vendors in the cloud as of right now, we have a small data center in Philadelphia that is an on prem. And then we have, which we'll talk about, why have cloud data center as a service model with the VMware Certified cloud partner called Faction. And then we also now have our disaster recovery as a cloud product. >> Excellent. Since we're talking about the the VMware cloud on AWS bring us inside a little bit,that DR In this case that you're using. That hybrid model, help tease that out. BJ will Start with you. And I'm sure, Dave will have some color to give after you share. >> Sure, I mean, you know, when you're talking about disaster recovery in general, the need to maintain business continuity, while keeping a lean IT staff and with no extended downtime and data loss is just... it's not an option. You can't afford to be down, you can't afford to lose data. So having a cloud service now for disaster recovery, or at least the concept of that helps us more IT shop, in the way of resources that we just don't have on hand on staff. So, that's, pretty much the biggest goal for us, is to maintain business continuity and you know, with our lean staff at the same time. >> Echoing BJ a bit, having an on prem solution and really, to BJ'S point about our lean staff, It made things quite cumbersome for us with maintaining backups replications and such. There was a lot involved. It was very time consuming. So the handoff to utilizing VMware cloud for our disaster purposes really, really helped that benefit our team as a whole. >> All right, you mentioned your partner on this solution is Faction. Help us understand how you made the decision to go down this path. >> So I can give you a quick... a quick rundown here how Faction came to be. so we're located our corporate is in fellow Philadelphia PA. We occupied two floors in an office building. Our data center was on the one floor we were consolidating. And we moved up to just one single floor. So we basically lost the footprint of the data center. So I went out hunting for co location type vendor, and hooked up with Faction. And yeah, so we've been with Faction for since 2015. We've had their, I call it kind of co lo, plus data centers as a service model, since then, since 2015. And we've been with them doing different initiatives here and there over the years and disaster recovery as a service is now one of them. >> Great, Dave, you've maybe supply a little more color on that piece. >> Yeah, sure. Yeah, the use of VMware cloud with Site Recovery Manager. Again, from a technical standpoint, it was second to none as far as the flexibility it gave us to grow our workloads, to maintain them. Recovery point objective was what really sold me. It allowed us to get extremely granular from a business continuity perspective. And, yeah, I'm a fan. I just, I really like VMware cloud with SRM. It's proven to be top notch. >> Yeah, maybe follow up on that, you've been a VMware customer for a number of years, you're familiar with the tooling, and everything else like that. So, how long did a solution like this take to roll out? >> So, I will guess so, absolutely, there was a good portion from when we started, so you have to kind of put it in perspective, because we had a data center in Atlanta, Georgia, that was our data recovery site with action. So we had a two fold project, we were going into a contract year, a renewal year. And Faction pitched, the AWS VMware on AWS service. So we were decommissioning a data center at the same time as we were rolling it out. So I'll just give you the quick timeline. So November of 2018, was basically the contract negotiations. We finalized everything kind of in February of 2019. As far as kicking off the call on how we are going to actually do the project. Work began around April of 2019. Faction went ahead and set up the AWS DDC environment in early May. Faction builds out the environment for the rest of May. June, we did some non disruptive load testing on the environment in AWS. We set up the replication recovery group build out throughout the summer of 2019. And then we had a full sign off in September 17th actually 2019 so I'll just kind of highlight though, in that process, that it took roughly about four months to do the full build out testing and the Atlanta data center decommissioning. >> Okay, and PJ after having done this, we've now got DR as a Service, what are the hero numbers? Have you reduced their cost savings loannes, How do you report up? The success or result of what you've done so far? >> Yeah, so speaking to that, so when we did the contract negotiation, in November of 2018, one of the things we realized when we were pitching the cloud disaster recovery as a service model, we saw roughly about a 20% annual savings in moving to this cloud service. So, a breakdown of what kind of the savings is it's pretty much in Atlanta we have some resource costs because we're running basically on a pillow type environment with with Baxter. and then we had a circuitry call, so we had a point to point line that would run out to, actually to New Jersey and then down to Atlanta. So we that cost as well. So we saved basically, we ripped out the point circuit And we got we offloaded some resource costs. So, like I said about a roughly about a 20% cost savings. >> Alright, so that that's some of the hard figures. Dave, bring us inside a little bit operationally, obviously, there's got to be a little bit of changes to how you manage things, automation is, has been hot for years, but even more so when you talk about cloud environments. So, how is this deployment, changed what the workers are doing and beyond that? >> Well, it's it's simplified things quite a bit, just by the partnership with Faction and in conjunction with VMware cloud for our disaster recovery solution, It's offered many benefits. For one, we had a primary engineer who left the company, we found some benefits to not having to fill that staff resource, so that that was also a positive from a money aspect. But as far as the day to day functioning where we go about doing things up, it really took things off my plate, off the rest of the teams plate And just really, really gave us a peace of mind as it pertains to our, our infrastructure and our data being secured. >> All right, well, I want to give you both the final word. What learnings do you have out of this? Any best practices you'd share? Or there's also some updates coming, taking VMware being able to take advantage of the latest bare metal offering from Amazon? I'll let you choose maybe BJ, we'll start with you and wrap with you Dave as to that those final words that you would share with your peers >> Yeah, I'll certainly start it off. I mean, coming from my perspective as kind of the manager of the team here, our goal as a company, our goal as an IT shop, our goal as an operations team, is to ensure the company's technology needs, will be met after, in the event of a disaster. And that is the key. You want to protect itself, you want to protect the data, you want to protect the customers. So, in the case of the cloud for us, is maintaining business continuity while reducing physical footprint and keeping the IT operations lean, like I had stated before. And one of the most important things and this is not just about disaster recovery, but establishing good partnerships with vendors, is absolutely imperative. Because I don't care how big your shop is, and again, we're on the small side, obviously, but you can't you can't do it alone. So you need really good strong partnerships and good relationships with them. >> And I would say, make sure you are Identify your critical business workloads. Know your environment, absolutely. It's imperative. Get it, you have to plan efficiently. And by all means, test, test test test, you can't test the solution enough. So that's really about all I have. >> All right, Well, David, BJ, thank you so much for joining us appreciate you sharing your your journey along and wish you the best of luck with the solution going forward. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> And thank you for joining us for this update VMware cloud on AWS, be sure to check out the cube.net for all the rest of the coverage we have both in the VMware and AWS ecosystems. I'm Stu Miniman And thank you as always for watching the cube. (upbeat music)