>> Announcer: theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, (gentle electronic music) brought to you by Dell. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Tech World 2022. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host, David Nicholson. Dave, I think first time we've co-hosted this week. >> Yeah. >> Excited to be with you. >> Very excited. >> Live wall to wall coverage. Two and a half days, two days and one evening. I'd say 7,000 plus people here, so really good showing. Caitlin Gordon is here, she's the vice president of product management for cloud solutions and tech alliances at Dell Technologies. Caitlin, welcome back to theCube, always a pleasure to see you, thanks for coming on. >> It is really good to be back in a physical cube, with three dimensional humans. >> Yeah, so unbelievable. >> And it was good to see you up on stage today, so fantastic job. I think the keynotes have been good. I think it's funny, coming out of COVID, it seems like the keynotes are really tight. >> Caitlin: Yeah. >> This year, you know. And, so I think that's good. You have a lot to say, so that's why we love theCube, so you can come back and. >> Caitlin: Nice to have a live audience, get the feedback, yeah. Yeah, they were, I tell you, the audience was engaged today, right? I mean, lots of hooping and hollering, so let's talk about multicloud. You know, it's, pre-COVID, post-COVID, feels like things have changed. Maybe, maybe due to COVID, maybe not, but what are you seeing, the patterns in customers around multicloud? >> Well it's been interesting. I've been in a multicloud world tour here over the last six to nine months, and you know, one thing is clear, for the first time as an industry, we agree on something, (Dave laughing) And that's multicloud. We don't agree on what it means, but we do agree that multicloud is our reality. And customers are having a lot of challenges with what that means. That means today reality is multicloud most of the time just means multi contract, alright. I know what hyperscaler's my primary, I have secondary, I probably brought someone that brought someone else in. I've got SaaS providers, I got my on-prem partners. But there's not a lot of continuity and consistency across that. It's really operational silos, data silos, being able to predict that spend is the challenge. And there's a lot of people challenges in there. Whether it's developer velocity, as Jen talked about earlier today. Or even just simply having enough people with the right skills, is a real big challenge because no matter what definition you have of multicloud, it means distributed, and it means a lot of different places, and that's a big challenge. >> I tagged you in my Tweet today, when you were up on stage, I don't know if you saw it. But basically you know, we use this term super cloud, and it was pretty clear to me anyway, an example of what I think of as what multicloud should be. An experience that spans location, that is the consistent experience with all my policies, and my security, my governance. Talk about what you guys are doing to map into the trends that you see. >> You used my favorite phrase, consistent experience. And really what we're doing is two things. We're building a portfolio of software and services, and that's really targeted at that consistent experience. You can have your data, and your workloads in the right place, but you can have a consistent experience with what you already have on-prem. We really need to have true hybrid cloud operations. We overused that term and we ruined it, and then we didn't use it anymore. But that's what we're talking about. On-prem to multiple public clouds have that consistency. But that's not enough because this is just such a complex landscape. The second part of what we're building is really an ecosystem of cloud partnerships. So whether it's the hyperscaler, certainly. But also colocation providers like Equinix. Or SaaS providers like Snowflake. The more we can partner with the key providers in the multicloud landscape, the more we can simplify that across. >> Yes, so you mentioned something that's key. Most people when they think about multicloud, they're not going into that because they really want to do the same thing nine different ways. So that consistency. >> Caitlin: It's not the design point. >> No, exactly. >> Caitlin: No. >> It's like, I want multi something. But not multi everything you offer. So the concept of using this well worn, well proven set of storage intelligence software titles, and putting them out into a variety of cloud providers, linking them with a unified experience is obviously powerful. And that seems to be what's behind Alpine? Is that the strategy? >> Yeah, it's absolutely right. Because you want that consistency because you have established multi lots of things. But you want to be able to get the consistency. But you want to be able to get that across all your data types. You can't just have consistency for file. You can't not only have consistency for object. You want to have that flexibility in who the providers are, and what type of data. And yet have, still have that operational consistency not so matter what. So that's that, that's the tough combination. Keeping flexibility, but also that simplicity and consistency. >> So Project Alpine, tell us more about it, what it is, why is is called a project, when will it be a product. >> (laughing) All of the things. >> Dave: Yeah. So Project Alpine, if you've been tuned in this week, you've heard this a few times. But it is our initiative to bring our block file and object storage software, to all of the major public clouds. So that is all about being able to really break the barriers between your data, and native public cloud services. The key thing, that you started off with it, operational consistency. If I have a power store on-prem, I can run our block software in the cloud, have that operational consistency, so it's the same UI, it's the same API's. Why that really matters, the undercurrent of that comes back to people. If you have the same tools, the same API's, you don't have to learn anything new. You don't have to re-skill or re-hire any people. And eventually you can drive that even more efficiently all through API's. So it's all about that consistent operations. I'm not going to ignore your project questions so I'll get to that as well. >> Thank you. >> It's a project because for a number of reasons, it's something we're working towards, and it's going to have deliverables and milestones over a number of months and years, to be honest. We actually first announced Project Alpine back in January as you know. And we have already extended that now in May to say what we're talking about and any news, started to show you what that's looking like. So original announcement as a project in January. Technology preview here in May. And then we're going to start to have early access for some of these to customers later this year. And then availability into next year. >> Excellent. So the primary value proposition I've been hearing is that operational consistency. Is there another dimension of value, in terms of function? In other words, I get why I'm not going to get that operational consistency across clouds and on-prem from a public cloud provider. Are there functional capabilities that you bring, I mean yes, help us understand that gap. >> Yeah. >> Between what you can offer as a long term, you know, the leader in storage, versus kind of the new entrance in the public cloud. >> Yeah, two things come to mind. The number one is data mobility. So having that very efficient and very simple data mobility. Because what's the most efficient way to send data from an on-prem storage appliance? Use the native mobility services that are already built into that platform. They're already there, you already know how to use them, and they're very efficient. So they're going to be very smart about what data you send to, and what data you send back from the cloud. Which is critical from a people standpoint, but also from a cost standpoint. Which is the other piece of this. We've been talking about the technology, but as you well know, the business requirements are pretty important. So being able to also, not only have your software in the cloud, but transact that through a public cloud marketplace, and in one case will actually be delivered as a native cloud service, is critical. So all the pre-committed spend that you have with any one of these hyperscalers, you can actually draw down against that credit to purchase these software and services, which is equally important to the technology value prop. >> Hence your expanding ecosystem kind of goes both ways. Okay, so when I'm on a console within one of the public clouds, I want to go into Alpine, and now I'm into a Dell experience. Is that correct? >> I talked about flexibility right, and choice. You have that consistency to say, if you want to standardize on one of the hyperscaler ecosystems, we'll inter-operate that through our API's. We're not going to force you into any single walled garden, but if you have chosen an ecosystem you want to be working through, you can abstract out our value through API's and still leverage that underneath the covers, really at the data layer. So we are really all about that consistency at the data layer, but inter-operating with whatever control planes, and whatever ecosystems you are working with. Which is, I've said it five times, but API's are a critical part of this. We love UI's, and they're pretty in a nice demo, but the reality is probably API's is where this is mostly going to be consumed. >> So, I have a question for you as a marketer. You mentioned technology versus business value. Clearly, outcomes, the actual business value associated with what we do in technology, is key. However, as an old time storage guy myself, (Caitlin laughing) I realize that what you're talking about here is decades of development, focusing on things like data protection, resiliency, performance, built originally in an environment that wasn't instrumented for high availability. >> Caitlin: Hmm. >> You needed things like clusters. There wasn't the concept of just JBOD in servers, one server fails, you throw it away, and it automatically goes to another. How do you balance, this is a very long question here, how do you balance the fact that your underlying technology is so good, with the desire to communicate the business value? Do you find yourself having to not talk about the technology as much anymore? Because there's so much impressive stuff there. >> Yeah, I'm a recovering marketing person myself. Um, it is really interesting having been at this show for many, many, many years. Not as many as Dave probably. (Dave laughing) >> Old man Dave. (Caitlin laughing) >> What can I say. >> I would say, a number of those years we spend most of our time talking about speeds and feeds. How many IOPS? What's the latency? What's our HERO number of the day? And we still care about that right, and data protection, what's your BD braid? How much can we save you? Still important. But it's a secondary conversation. What are we talking about now? Cloud native app mobility, and that modernization, and the underlying infrastructure isn't always going to be Dell's anymore, it's going to by in the hyperscalers in some cases. So it's a completely different conversation and different people we're talking to. It's very exciting, it's a little bit foreign to us, but we welcome it, and it's also still important that we understand the infrastructure side too. Because ultimately, even if this is being delivered as a service, someone is still delivering and managing that infrastructure and that is still critically important. >> So okay, Project Alpine, is it multicloud? Is it Apex? Is it subscription? Is it as a service? >> Caitlin: Yeah. >> We should be thinking about it. >> Yeah, all those things. Yes, check. (Dave laughing) All of the things. >> So they're coming together is the. >> It's coming together, right. You hit all of the right buzz words, bingo. But multicloud, the value prop is Project Alpine, multicloud data, and yes subscription is going to really be the model from an economic standpoint, that's really the key. But ultimately it all comes together. >> What are you seeing with data architectures? Kind of up leveling a bit these days, where you know, customers generally, they'll shove everything into a big data warehouse, or a single store, or cloud. You you guys talked about the edge a lot. We just had a great conversation with Lowes, and what they're doing with VxRail and their stores. How are you seeing the evolution of data architectures? >> I think the Snowflake announcement was a really really really good example. And it came through as an announcement but it's a partnership, right. And what's really interesting is it's very clear that what we've kind of inherently understood as an on-prem, primarily an on-prem vendor traditionally, is that data has a ton of gravity, and between data privacy, and just governance regulations, there's a lot of reason the data is not going to move. And what that means from a modern cloud based analytics standpoint like Snowflake, is they need to be able to support the data no matter where it lives. That doesn't mean pulling it into the cloud. Many customers including us will not do that. It means being able to access that data so that more distributed data architecture, but still being able to use those cloud based tools, is really where we're seeing, and why we've really announced this partnership this week. I think there's a ton more opportunity in that space. >> Well that's the epiphany of the Snowflake deal is you're able to access non-native Snowflake data, into the Snowflake data cloud, that's a first. >> Caitlin: Yup. >> Now there, I'm sure Snowflake is going to want to migrate it at some point. But to your point, you won't as a customer, a lot of customers to say, no. First of all, a lot of times, it's not a business case. If I don't have to move it, why should I move it? If it's cost effective, and it's protected. And then, there are constraints. >> Caitlin: Yeah. >> To moving data, like legal constraints and so forth. >> Absolutely. And data regulations are not getting less stringent, right? >> Right. Alright, we got to go. Caitlin Gordon, thanks so much for coming back in theCube. It was great to see you. Congratulations for all the announcements, and awesome to see you face to face. >> Yes, thanks for having me. >> Alright, you're very welcome. >> Good to have you. >> Thank you for watching, this is Dave Vellante, for David Nicholson, Lisa Martin, and John Furrier. You're watching theCube's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022 from Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (gentle electronic music)

>> Welcome to this "Cube" conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. Pleased to welcome back Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product Management at Dell technologies. Caitlin it's great to see you again, though virtually. >> Yes, it's good to see you as well, Lisa. >> Tony Frank is here as well. Global client executive at Equinix, Tony, welcome to the program. >> Thank you, Lisa. Good to be here. >> We're going to be talking about some news. Caitlin let's go back. You and I, before we started filming, we were trying to remember, when did we last see each other? Of course it was virtual. So APEX was announced product APEX, October 2021. Just about a year ago. Released it in may, but just refresh the audience's memories with respect to the catalyst for Dell to go into this as a service offering. >> Yeah, I think we're all losing track of the virtual months here, (all laugh) so go back in time a little bit. Yeah, exactly right. So in the fall of last year, we had announced Project APEX. The first actual APEX offers really came to market in the spring in May with our APEX Data Storage Services. And at that time we actually had pre-announced what we're going to talk more about here today with our partnership with Equinix. But if we take a step back, you know, why did Dell talk about this as a project and is now really investing for the future? It really connects to a lot of the conversations you guys have here in "theCube", right? What's happening in IT? What's happening with our customers? Is that they're looking for outcomes. Yes, they're predominantly still buying products today, but they're really starting to look for outcomes. They want to be buying those outcomes. They want to have something that is an operating expense for them. Something that we can take, we as the technology, the infrastructure experts can take on the management, can take on the ownership of that equipment and really enable them to focus on their business. So really consumption-based, usage based infrastructure, all being elastic resources that Dell owns and manages, but customers can still operate. And of course, one of the first offers was APEX Data Storage Services, which we're extending here this fall. >> Talk to me a little bit, Caitlin, about outcomes. I just want to understand what Dell actually is focusing on for its customers, where outcomes are concerned. >> Yeah. And it's interesting as a company, it's a pretty big transformation for us. We have always been a product led company, but it's not really about a product. So when I talk about APEX Data Storage Services, you're not going to hear me mention a product name or anything. Because what it's about, it's about offering our customers what they're actually looking for. Which in the case of storage, they're all looking for, I want either block or file storage. I want a certain tier, so it is at a higher performance. I want a certain capacity of it, and I want to commit for some period of time. That's it. Those are the questions we ask. There's no product names and sizing and it's really, really simple. And that's what we're talking about. It's really the beginning of really trying to deliver customers an outcome versus a product. >> Got it. APEX Data Storage Services. This is Dell's efforts to supply managed file and block Storage as Services. Talk to me about that. Talk to me about some of the things, how does it enable the fast time to value as little as 14 days for your customers? >> Yeah, so there's a lot of really important things we're doing here. We're not just taking the products we had and kind of packaging it up in a new financial model. There's a lot of parts to this. It all centers around the APEX console. So the APEX console is where you start, begin really ongoing manage and experience these outcomes from Dell Technologies. And it starts with selecting the service you want. So if you select that you want APEX Data Storage Services, you pick your type, you pick your tier, you pick your time period, and you pick your size, right? And then you're off to the races. And we will be able to, what we're committing to do is delivering that in as few, and as little as 14 days time to value. And for us, you know, one of the benefits of being able to do this as Dell, we have always really thrived in our supply chain and the ability to have that predictability and being able to deliver things as a service, including storage, is really something that's just an extension of what we've been able to do there. And our partnerships with Equinix actually is going to enable us to even look at that further and see what we can do to really bring value to our customers as quickly as possible. >> That speed, that time to value, is even more important as we've lived through the last tumultuous 18 months. Let's break into the news now. You guys pre-announced the partnership with Equinix, but talk to me about, with respect to APEX Data Storage Services, what's being announced? Caitlin, we'll start with you and then Tony we'll bring you into the conversation. >> Yeah, absolutely. So again, we first released APEX Data Storage Services in the spring, and we're already enhancing that today. Couple exciting things. So geographic expansion, so expanding out into additional regions across Europe and Asia, who are expanding our support. So we talked about the fact that it's block and it's file. Well, actually on our file capability here, on our file outcome, we now will have the ability to support an S3 protocol. So you can do that app development and run your operations all off the same platform. So that's an exciting new expansion there. We're also enabling partners sell through. Our partners are really, really important, whether the resell partners or technology partners like Equinix. So partner sell through is another important piece. And of course the most important for our conversation today, is the exciting new announcement of the fact that we are going to offer APEX Data Storage Services available in Equinix facilities, all integrated into the APEX console. The fifth question is, now, where do you want your APEX Data Storage Services? You can select a Dell provided facility and you get the choice to select the different cities of Equinix locations. And we're going to provide that single bill and experience through Dell, but on the backend, we've worked with Tony and team for months to get this to be a very streamlined experience for our customers. >> Tony, talk to us about this from Equinix's perspective. >> Yeah, we're very excited. Caitlin, thank you very much and Lisa, thank you. Very excited to be part of what Dell's doing with APEX and enable enterprise customers to get delivered to them at Equinix facilities Storage as a Service, in addition to additional Equinix capabilities, really enabling agile enterprises to distribute their infrastructure across the world, leveraging Dell product, Dell management, and to get access to partners, to their other footprints, to cloud service providers, et cetera, all within the footprints of Equinix. >> So Caitlin, APEX Data Storage Service in secure colo facilities in conjunction with Equinix. Talk to me about what the reception has been from Dell customers. >> Yeah, it's been really fun. I mean, first of all, when we thought about data center providers are a critical part of us being able to deliver that outcome to customers. And when we looked at the ecosystem of partners, it was very clear who we were going to be partnering with. Equinix was really the best partner for us. We already had been working together in many different ways and we're just taking this partnership to the next level. And what we've already seen actually, all the way since earlier this year, we've had many, many customers coming to us, at first it was separately, but now it's actually jointly to say, I'm having a challenge and here's my challenge. And most of these conversations start in one way. I'm getting out of the data center business. And the nice thing for us is that between our two companies, we can solve that. Right, we have the combination of the right infrastructure, and with our partnership with Equinix, you partner that with the data center services, you can actually give that full outcome to a customer. And we were solving those separately, and now we're solving those together. >> Those folks wanting to get out of the data center, if we think about in the last year and a half, how inaccessible the data centers were, Tony, I want to get your perspective on the colo market, and as we look at IT today, the acceleration of it and digital and cloud adoption and getting out of the data center that we've seen in the last 18 months. Help me understand why the colo market is really key today for the future of IT. >> Absolutely Lisa. So, you know, focusing on outcomes as Caitlin outlined earlier, is a really important part of, really how IT has managed this pandemic and thinking about how do we solve for this vast distributed set of employees that we used to have aggregated in a single building or multiple buildings, but really spearheaded in a couple locations. And all of a sudden everything became, you know, out in rural America, out in rural Europe, out everywhere, employees were spread out and they needed a way as an IT team, to bring together the network, the security and the ability to be very agile and focus on an outcome as opposed to, how am I going to get this next piece of equipment, this next storage device, this next compute system in my data center and add the cooling and the power and all the things that they have to think about. And really it was an outcome. How do I give my employees the best experience possible? My partners, that access they need to my systems and the various ways that we interact together. So the colo market as a whole has been really changed dramatically through the whole pandemic. And if you didn't know Zoom two years ago, it's your best friend now, or it's your, you know, least favorite way to do business, but the only way we have to do business in the world that we're living in today. >> A lifeline, and here we are Zooming with each other right now. (Caitlin and Tony laugh) Tony, I want to stick with you. Let's talk about this partnership between Dell and Equinix. Why is this such a compelling partnership? Talk to me about that from Equinix's perspective. >> Yeah. We're so excited to be able to be partnered with the number one leader and provider of infrastructure and infrastructure services. We have really been a niche provider for the last 15 years. We're a 21, 22 year old company, and we focused on developing ecosystems and those were at first the internet. We brought the telecom providers together to make the internet work. And then on top of that started enabling things like digital trading. Also enabling all sorts of ad exchanges so that you see the banner ads that apply to you when you go to a website. And so we were well known within those ecosystems that we worked within, but getting out to the enterprise has been a big challenge. And Dell brings us those relationships. They bring that expertise, that trusted advisor kind of role. And so being able to extend our sales team and really leverage what Dell has done across small, medium, large and very large enterprise is a real win for us. And it allows us to achieve a scale that we wouldn't have been able to achieve by ourselves without breaking the bank trying to hire people, and trying to get them familiar with those customers. And so Dell brings us into that. We're able to complete what I call the three legged stool. The compute, the storage, and now the networking aspects can be dealt with in a single conversation around an outcome. And APEX gives us a chance to really be agilely available as Dell's customers define that for themselves and to deploy the infrastructure where they need it and to achieve those outcomes that they're trying to get to. >> So it's an ostensible value that Equinix is getting by the Dell partnership. You said, pulling us into the enterprise, facilitating that scale. Caitlin, talk to me about this from Dell's lens. What makes this partnership so compelling for Dell and the future of it as a service? >> I'm laughing as Tony's talking through that because it tees it up perfectly. From Dell's perspective, when we looked at data center providers, one of the challenges for us is we're a global IT provider. So we had to partner with someone who understood what it meant to operate and manage data centers at a global scale and locations all over the world. There's a very short list to choose from once you look at it from that lens, but more importantly, and what Tony you already hit on, the networking. The interconnects that we have in our partnership with Equinix are incredibly valuable. Cause ultimately, although customers start going to a colo facility because they want out of data center business, they don't want to be managing racks and power and cooling and all of that. Oftentimes actually the value they find once they get there and why they stay and grow is those interconnects. The ability to connect to other tenants in these facilities and the ability to connect into the hyper-scalers. And the richness of those interconnects with Equinix was truly unmatched, and that's why it's been such an important partnership for us. >> Tony, what's been some feedback from the Equinix customer base? >> Well, it's really funny. I spent half of my time trying to figure out with my team, how we're going to solve for Storage as a Service. The next geography, the next product. But the other half of the time is spent, who on the team is the right person to go pair up with the Dell team and get the Dell team brought into a discussion. And it's going bi-directionally right now. The volume is picking up. The velocity is picking up and it really seems to be like that snowball just going down the hill. It's just picking up speed and with every interaction we're gaining trust with each other, we're gaining competence in what the message is and how to solve for it. And we're working out the various ways, you know, in a predictive way, what are most people asking for? But the wonderful thing is, there's custom availability to figure out a solution for just about any problem that the IT or infrastructure focused teams in the enterprise are looking to solve for. >> Tony, sticking with you for a final question or two, in terms of the last, you know, few months, have you seen any industries in particular that are really readily adopting this? We've seen so much change across industries in the last 18 months. I'm just curious if you're seeing any industries that are particularly taking advantage of this capability and this partnership. >> Yeah. I would point to highly regulated industries. Thinking about financial, thinking about governments, and it's not just a US situation. This is a global situation and data sovereignty where that matters to a particular customer, is really important that they keep that data in the geography that it needs to stay in. It's defined by the different governments around the world. You know, you see, the financial industry has been a first mover towards electronic trading and really disrupted, thankfully, prior to the pandemic, the way trading was done. Because in-person trading wasn't going to happen anymore. And so in the highly regulated world, that healthcares, the financials. Those folks are definitely looking for a solution that has certifications across the board to help them say to their auditors, we've got this covered. That's something we were able to bring to the table for Dell. And then it also helps that the first movers sort of towards a digital infrastructure were insurance companies and others that saw the value of leveraging partnerships and bringing together things as quickly and fast as they could, without deploying huge global networks to try and make it all happen. They can instead virtually meet in the same room, leveraging our software defined network called Equinix Fabric. It's been a real win for the regulated industries, certainly. >> Got it. Thanks for that, Tony. Caitlin, last question for you. This is Dell managed, so single bill from Dell. Where can the viewers go to learn more information about this new partnership? >> Delltechnologies.com/apex. You'll learn more about all things APEX. Really, the APEX consoles, the experience, so you can learn more about it there. And then of course, your friendly neighborhood, Dell EMC rep, and or channel partner, now that we've got that partner enablement as well. >> Delltechnologies.com/apex. Caitlin and Tony, thank you so much for joining us today, sharing the exciting news about what's new with Dell and Equinix and what's in it for your customers and your partners. We appreciate your time. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> For Caitlin Gordon and Tony Frank, I'm Lisa Martin, you've been watching a "Cube" conversation. (soft music playing)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2021-Virtual, brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2021-Virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host here on theCUBE. We've got Steve Gordon, Director of Product Management, Cloud Platforms at Red Hat. Steve, welcome to theCUBE, good to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Hey John, thanks for having me on, it's great to be back. >> So soon we'll be in real life, I think North America show, this is for the Europe Virtual, I think the North American one might be in person. It's not yet official. We'll hear, but we'll find out, but looking good so far. But thanks for all your collaboration. You guys have been a big part of the CNCF we've been covering on theCUBE, as you know, since the beginning. But, I wanted to get into the Edge conversation that's been going on. And first I want to just get this out there. You guys are sponsoring Edge Day here at KubeCon. I want you to bring that together for us, because this is a big part of what Red Hat's talking about and frankly customers. The Edge is the most explosive growth area. It's got the most complexity, it's crazy. It's got data, it's got everything at the Edge. Everything's happening. How important is Kubernetes to Edge Computing? >> Yeah, it's certainly interesting to be here talking about it now, and having kind of a dedicated Kubernetes Edge Day. I was thinking back earlier, I think it was one of the last in-person KubeCon events I think, if not the last, the San Diego event where there was already kind of a cresting of interest in Edge and kind of topics on the agenda around Edge. And it's just great to see that momentum has continued up to where we are today. And really more and more people not only talking about using Kubernetes for Edge, but actually getting in there and doing it. And I think, when we look at why people are doing that, they're really leaning into some of the things that they saw as strengths of Kubernetes in general, that they're now able to apply to edge computing use cases in terms of what they can actually do in terms of having a common interface to this very powerful platform that you can take to a growing multitude of footprints, be they your public cloud providers, where a lot of people may have started their Kubernetes journey or their own data center, to these edge locations where they're increasingly trying to do processing closer to where they're collecting data, basically. >> You know, when you think about Edge and all the evolution with Cloud Native, what's interesting is Kubernetes is enabling a lot of value. I'd like to get your thoughts. What are you hearing from customers around use cases? I mean, you are doing product management, you've got to document all the features, the wishlist. You have the keys to the kingdom on what's going on over at Red Hat. You know, we're seeing just the amazing connectivity between businesses with hybrid cloud. It's a game changer. Haven't seen this kind of change at this level since the late '80s, early '90s in terms of inflection point impact. This is huge. What are you hearing? >> I think it's really interesting that you use the word connectivity there because one of the first edge computing use cases that I've really been closely involved with and working a lot on, which then grows into the others, is around telecommunications and 5G networking. And the reason we're working with service providers on that adoption of Kubernetes as they build 5G basically as a cloud native platform from the ground up, is they're really leveraging what they've seen with Kubernetes elsewhere and taking that to deliver this connectivity, which is going to be crucial for other use cases. If you think about people whether they're trying to do automotive edge cases, where they're increasingly putting more sensors on the car to make smarter decisions, but also things around the infotainment system using more and more data there as well. If you think about factory edge, all of these use cases build on connectivity as one of the core fundamental things they need. So that's why we've been really zoomed in there with the service providers and our partners, trying to deliver a 5G networking capabilities as fast as we can and the throughput and latency benefits that come with that. >> If you don't mind me asking, I got to just go one step deeper if you don't mind. You mentioned some of these use cases, the connectivity. You know, IoT was the big buzz word, okay IoT. It's an Edge, it's Operational Technology, or it's a dumb endpoint or a node on the network has connectivity. It's got power. It's a purpose built device. It's operating, it's getting surveillance data, whatever the hell it's doing, right. It's got Edge. Now you're bringing in more intelligent, which is an IT kind of thing, state, databases, caching. Is the database too slow? Is it too fast? So again, it brings up more complexity. Can you just talk about how you view that? Because this is what I'm hearing, what do you think? >> Yeah, I agree. I think there's a real spectrum, when we talk about edge computing, both in terms of the footprints and the locations, and the various constraints that each of those imply. And sometimes those strengths can be, as you're talking about as a specially designed board which has a very specific chip on it, has very specific memory and storage constraints or it can be a literal physical constraint in terms of I only have this much space in this location to actually put something, or that space is subject to excess heat or other considerations environmentally. And I think when we look at what we're trying to provide, not just with Kubernetes but also with Linux, is a variety of solutions that can help people no matter where they are along that spectrum of the smallest devices where maybe Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or REL for Edge is suitable to those use cases where maybe there's a little more flexibility in terms of, what are the workloads I might want to run on that in the future? Or how do I want to grow that environment potentially in the future as well? If I want to add nodes, then all of a sudden, the capability that nannies brings can be a more flexible building base for them to start with. >> So with all of these use cases and the changing dynamics and the power dynamics between Operational Technology in IT, which we're kind of riffing on, what should developers take away from that when they're considering their development, whether they just want an app, be app developers, programming the infrastructure or they're tinkering with the underlying, some database work, or if they're under the hood kind of full dev ops? What should developers take into consideration for all these new use cases? >> Yeah, I think one of the key things is that we're trying to minimize the impact to the developer as much as we can. Now of course, with an edge computing use case where you may be designing your application specifically for that board or device, then that's a more challenging proposition. But there's also the case increasingly where that intelligence already exists in the application somewhere, whether it's in the data center or in the cloud, and they're just trying to move it closer to that endpoint, where the actual data is collected. And that's where I think there's a really powerful story in terms of being able to use Kubernetes and OpenShift as that interface that the application developer interacts with but can use that same interface, whether they're running in the cloud maybe for development purposes, but also when they take it to production and it's running somewhere else. >> I got to ask you the AI impact because every conversation I have or everyone I interview that's an expert as a practitioner is usually something along the lines of chief architect of cloud and AI. You're seeing a lot of cloud, SRE, cloud-scale architects meeting and also running the AI piece, especially in industries. So AI as a certain component seems to be resonating from a functional persona standpoint. People who are doing these transformations tend to have cloud and AI responsibility. Is that a fluke or is that just the pattern that's real? >> No, I think that's very real. And I think when you look at AI and machine learning and how it works, it's very data centric in terms of what is the data I'm collecting, sending back to the mothership, maybe in terms of actually training my model. But when I actually go to processing something, I want to make that as close as I can to the actual data collection, so that I can minimize what I'm trying to send back. Particularly, people may not be as cognizant of it, but even today, many times we're talking about sites where that connectivity is actually fairly limited in some of these edge use cases still today. So what you're actually putting over the pipe is something you're still trying to minimize, while trying to advance your business and improve your agility, by making these decisions closer to the edge. >> What's the advantage for Red Hat? Talk about the benefits. What are you guys bringing to the table? Obviously, hybrid cloud is the new shift. Everyone's agreed to that. I mean, pretty much the consensus is public clouds, great, been there, done that. It's out there pumping out as a resource, but now enterprise is goading us to keep stuff on premises, especially when you talk about factories or whatever, on premises, things that they might need, stuff on premise. So it's clear hybrid is happening. Everyone's in agreement. What does Red Hat bring to the table? What's in it for the customer? >> Yeah, I think I would say hybrid is really an evolving at the moment in terms of, I think, Hybrid has kind of gone through this transition where, first of all, it was maybe moving from my data center to public cloud and I'm managing most of those through that transition, and maybe I'm (indistinct) public clouds. And now we're seeing this transition where it's almost that some of that processing is moving back out again closer to the use case of the data. And that's where we really see as an extension of our existing hybrid cloud story, which is simply to say that we're trying to provide a consistent experience and interface for any footprint, any location, basically. And that's where OpenShift is a really powerful platform for doing this. But also, it's got Kubernetes at the heart of it. but it's also worth considering when we look at Kubernetes, is there's this entire Cloud Native ecosystem around it. And that's an increasingly crucial part of why people are making these decisions as well. It's not just Kubernetes itself, but all of those other projects both directly in the CNCF ecosystem itself, but also in that broader CNCF landscape of projects which people can leverage, and even if they don't leverage them today, know they have options out there for when they need to change in the future if they have a new need for their application. >> Yeah, Steve, I totally agree with you. And I want to just get your thoughts on this because I was kind of riffing with Brian Gracely who works at Red Hat on your team. And he was saying that, you know, we were talking about KubeCon + CloudNativeCon as the name of the conference. He's a little bit more CloudNativeCon this year than KubeCon, inferring, implying, and saying that, okay so what about Kubernetes, Kubernetes, Kubernetes? Now it's like, whoa, CloudNative is starting to come to the table, which shows the enablement of Kubernetes. That was our point. The point was, okay, if Kubernetes does its job as creating a lever, some leverage to create value and that's being rendered in CloudNative, and that enterprise is, not the hardcore hyperscalers and/or the early adopters, I call it classic enterprise, are coming in. They're contributing to open source as participants, and they're harvesting the value in creating CloudNative. What's your reaction to that? And can you share your perspective on there's more CloudNative going on than ever before? >> Yeah, I certainly think, you know, we've always thought from the beginning of OpenShift that it was about more than just Linux and Kubernetes and even the container technologies that came before them from the point of view of, to really build a fully operational and useful platform, you need more than just those pieces. That's something that's been core to what we've been trying to build from the beginning. But it's also what you see in the community is people making those decisions as well, as you know, what are these pieces I need, whether it's fairly fundamental infrastructure concerns like logging and monitoring, or whether it's things like trying to enable different applications on top using projects like KubeVert for virtualization, Istio for service mesh and so on. You know, those are all considerations that people have been making gradually. I think what you're seeing now is there's a growing concern in some of these areas within that broad CNCF landscape in terms of, okay, what is the right option for each of these things that I need to build the platform? And certainly, we see our role is to guide customers to those solutions, but it's also great to see that consensus emerging in the communities that we care about, like the CNCF. >> Great stuff. Steve, I got to ask you a final question here. As you guys innovate in the open, I know your roadmaps are all out there in the open. And I got to ask you, product managing is about making decisions about what you what you work on. I know there's a lot of debates. Red Hat has a culture of innovation and engineering, so there's heated arguments, but you guys align at the end of the day. That's kind of the culture. What's top of mind, if someone asks you, "Hey, Steve, bottom line, I'm a Red Hat customer. I'm going full throttle as a hybrid. We're investing. You guys have the cloud platforms, what's in it for me? What's the bottom line?" What do you say? >> Yeah, I think the big thing for us is, you know, I talked about that this is extending the hybrid cloud to the edge. And we're certainly very conscious that we've done a great job at addressing a number of footprints that are core to the way people have done computing today. And now as we move to the edge, that there's a real challenge to go and address more of those footprints. And that's, whether it's delivering OpenShift on a single node of itself, but also working with cloud providers on their edge solutions, as they move further out from the cloud as well. So I think that's really core to the mission is continuing to enable those footprints so that we can be true to that mission of delivering a platform that is consistent across any footprint at any location. And certainly that's core to me. I think the other big trend that we're tracking and really continuing to work on, you know, you talked about AI machine learning, the other other space we really see kind of continuing to develop and certainly relevant in the work with the telecommunications companies I do but also increasingly in the accelerator space where there's really a lot of new and very interesting things happening with hardware and silicon, whether it be kind of FPGAs, EA6, and even the data processing units, lots of things happening in that space that I think are very interesting and going to be key to the next three to five years. >> Yeah, and software needs to run on hardware. Love your tagline there. It sounds like a nice marketing slogan. Any workload, any footprint, any location. (laughs) Hey, DevSecOps, you got to scale it up. So good job. Thank you very much for coming on. Steve Gordon, Director of Product Management, Clout Platforms, Red Hat, Steve, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks, John, really appreciate it. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2021 Europe Virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host from theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (serene music)

>> Narrator: From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a cube conversation. >> Hi, Lisa Martin here with Caitlin Gordon, the VP of product marketing for Dell technologies, Caitlin, welcome back to the CUBE, we're excited to see you again. >> Caitlyn: I'm very excited to be here again. >> So data protection in the news what's going on? >> Yeah, it's been a busy year, we had obviously our Power Protect DD appliance launch last year. And then this year we've had announcements on the software side. We had announcements at VMworld, some more at Dell Technologies World. And now today we're announcing even more which is the new Power Protect the DP series appliances the new integrated appliances. And it's really exciting. So we now have our Power Protect DD, the next generation of data domain, and we have our power protect DP appliances integrated appliances. And that's all about combining both protection storage, protects and software in a single converge, all in one offering. That's really popular with our customers today, because of the simplicity the ability to really modernize your data protection in a very simple way, get up really up and running quickly. And in fact, it's really the fastest growing part of the backup appliance market. >> Yeah, I have read that the integrated appliances our market is growing twice as fast as the targeted market. So give us a picture of what customers can expect from the new DP series. >> Yeah, it's not that dissimilar to actually our DD series from last year, which is there's four models in the new DP series. And it's really all about getting better performance, better efficiency. We've got new hardware, assisted compression, denser drives, and all that gives us the ability to get faster backups faster recovery, In fact, you get 38% faster up backups, 45% faster recovery, more logical capacity, 30% more logical capacity, 65 to one deduplication which is just incredible and 60,000 IOPS for instant access. So really ups the game, both in performance and efficiency. >> Those are big numbers. You mentioned the DD launch last year, contrast it with what you're announcing now. What's the significance of the DP series? >> This is exciting for us because it does a couple of things. It expands our power protect appliance family, with the new DP series of integrated appliances. But at the same time, we're also announcing other important Power Protect enhancements on the software side. Power Protect data manager which we've been enhancing and continuing to talk about all year also has some new improvements the ability to deploy it in Azure and AWS gov cloud for in-cloud protection. The enhancements that we've done with VMware that we talked about, not that long ago at VM world about being able to integrate with based policy management really automating and simplifying VMware protection. And it's really all about kuberetes, right? And the ability to support kubernetes as well. So not only is this an exciting appliance launch for us but it's also the marketing of yet even more enhancements on the Power Protect data manager side and all that together, it means that with Power Protect, you really have a one-stop shop for all of your data protection needs no matter where the data lives, no matter what SLA, whether it's a physical virtual appliance, whether it's target or integrated, you've all got them in the Power Protect family now. >> Excellent. All right. Last question for you Caitlin, we know Dell technologies is focused on three big waves, it's cloud VMware and cyber recovery. Anything else you want to add here? >> Cyber resiliency, cyber recovery Ransomware has really risen to the top of the list. Unfortunately for many organizations and Power Protect cyber recovery is really an important enhancement that we also have with this announcement today. We've had this offering in market for a couple years with the exciting new enhancement here. So it is the first cyber recovery solution endorsed by sheltered Harbor. And if you're not familiar with Power Protect cyber recovery it provides an automated air gaped solution for data isolation, and then cyber sense provides the analytics and the forensics for discovering, diagnosing, and remediating those attacks. So it's really all about ransomware protecting from, recovering from those attacks, which unfortunately have become all too common for our customers today. >> Excellent news Caitlin. Thanks for sharing. What's new congratulations to you and the Dell team. >> Thank you so much, Lisa, >> For Caitlin Gordon, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube. (outro music)

(upbeat music) >> From theCube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hi, Lisa Martin here with Caitlin Gordon, the VP of product marketing for Dell Technologies. Caitlin, welcome back to theCube, we are excited to see you again. >> I'm very excited to be here again. So data protection in the news, what's going on? Yeah, it's been a busy year, we had our, obviously our PowerProtect DD appliance launched last year. And then this year, we have announcements on the software side, we had announcements at vMworld, some more at Dell Technologies world. And now today we're announcing even more, which is the new PowerProtect DP series appliances, the new integrated appliances, it's really exciting. So we now have our PowerProtect DP, the next generation of Data Domain. And we have our PowerProtect DP appliances, integrated appliances. And that's all about combining both protection storage, protection software in a single converged all in one offering. It's really popular with our customers today, because of the simplicity, the ability to really modernize your data protection in a very simple way, get up, really up and running quickly. And in fact, it's really the fastest growing part of the backup appliance market. >> I have read that the integrated appliances, our market is growing twice as fast as the target market. So give us a picture of what customers can expect from the new DP series. >> Yeah, it's not that just similar to actually our DD series from last year, which is there's four models in the new DP series. And it's really all about getting better performance, better efficiency, we've got new hardware assisted compression, denser drives, and all that gives us the ability to get faster backups, faster recovery. In fact, you get 38% faster backups, 45% faster recovery, more logical capacity, 30% more logical capacity 65 to one deduplication, which is just incredible. And 60,000 IOPS for instant access, so really ups the game both in performance and in efficiency. >> Those are big numbers. You mentioned a DD launched last year, contrast it with what you're announcing now, what's the significance of the DP series. >> And this is exciting for us because it does a couple things, it expands our PowerProtect appliance family, with the new DP series of integrated appliances. But at the same time, we're also announcing other important PowerProtect enhancements. on the software side, PowerProtect Data Manager, which we've been enhancing and continuing to talk about all year, also has some new improvements, the ability to deploy it in Azure, in AWS Govcloud for in-cloud protection, the enhancements that we've done with VMware that we talked about not that long ago at VMworld, about being able to integrate with storage based policy management, really automating and simplifying VMware protection. And it's really all about Kubernetes, right? And the ability to support Kubernetes as well. So not only is this an exciting appliance launch for us, but it's also the marking of yet even more enhancements on the PowerProtect Data Manager side. And all that together means that with PowerProtect, you really have a one stop shop for all of your data protection needs, no matter where the data lives. No matter what SLA, whether it's a physical virtual appliance, whether it's target or integrated. You've all got them in the PowerProtect family now. >> Excellent, all right, last question for you Caitlin. We know Dell Technologies is focused on three big waves, its cloud, VMware, and cyber recovery. Anything else you want to add here? >> cyber resiliency, cyber recovery, ransomware has really risen to the top of the list unfortunately for many organizations, and PowerProtect cyber recovery is really an important enhancement that we also have with this announcement today. We've had this offering and market for a couple years, but the exciting new enhancement here. So it is the first cyber recovery solution endorsed by Sheltered Harbor. And if you're not familiar with PowerProtect cyber recovery, it provides an automated air gapped solution for data isolation and then cyber sense provides the analytics and the forensics for discovering, diagnosing and remediating those attacks. So it's really all about ransomware protecting from or covering from those attacks, which unfortunately have become all too common for our customers today. >> Excellent news Caitlin, thanks for sharing what's new. Congratulations to you and the Dell team. >> Thank you so much Lisa. >> Okay Gordon. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. (soft music) >> Hi, Lisa Martin, with theCUBE here, talking with Caitlin Gordon, the VP of Product Marketing, at Dell technologies. Caitlin how are you? It's great to see you. >> I'm doing very well Lisa, thank you so much for having me. >> Nice to see you back on theCUBE. So lots of stuff going on in the news the last few months or so. A lot of stuff with respect to Cyber Recovery, Cyber Security, but talk to us about what's happening in the Purpose-Built Appliance Backup Appliance market. This market is growing. What's happening there, and talk to me about Dell's leadership role. >> Yeah, we've kind of come full circle. I've been in the data protection space for a while and I would say that, you know now we're looking at this as a $4 billion industry and security and protection has bubbled backup to the top of the list from an IT perspective. And one of the simplest, fastest ways to improve data protection is leveraging Backup Appliances. And there's really two segments within that. There's what I'll refer to as the target appliances and the integrated appliances. And we actually have had leadership in this space, since really the beginning. You know 50 cents of every dollar in this market is spent on Dell equipment. Where we see massive growth is really in that integrated appliance market. And those integrated appliances really simplify the deployment of not only the protection storage, but the protection software. So you can modernize your data protection, get much faster recovery, faster backups, as well as really get a smaller footprint, better efficiency, all in one single solution. And that's really where we've seen a lot of growth in the appliance market recently. >> Yeah. So as that, an integrated appliance market is growing twice as fast as targeted, give us a picture. You mentioned a few things, but kind of dig deeper into why customers are opting more and more for the integrated approach. >> Yeah that comes back to kind of a lot of the trends we see in IT overall. It's simplicity. It's ease of, how can you get to a better solution, a better outcome faster. And when it comes to integrated data protection appliances, it really it takes the guesswork out of it. You know, you have software and hardware, that's optimized to work together. You're really quick and easy to deploy, really simple to manage, 'cause it's all fully integrated and you get to a solution where you can get things like 65 one data reduction, get a very small footprint, get really fast improvements to not only backups, but probably even more importantly to recovery, get instant access to that data. And you really are able to with one purchase, transform all of your data protection. Now there's still a lot of great uses for target appliances as well of better flexibility. But, we've seen this overall you've seen this Lisa, every trend in probably IT and life, right? Simplicity. How can you get a faster, better answer? And integrated appliances really lean into that. It's as similar to what we see in the hyperconverged space, kind of in the primary storage and compute side of things. >> Yeah, I think we all want faster, simpler, better in every walk of life. One of the things this year that, in all of that lack of simplification, the complexity that we're living in that we've seen, is the rise of ransomware. It's not only on the rise, it's getting more personal. We've seen, you know, big companies, Garmin was attacked, one of the Cruise Lines was attacked, The New Zealand Stock Exchange, Facebook and Tik Tok were hacked. So we're starting to see so much more vulnerability and the ability of these hackers to expose more vulnerabilities. Have you seen that impacting your customers saying, "Hey, we need help here because now we have so many employees and devices, scattered." >> Yeah, unfortunately we have. You know, we've been talking about Ransomware Protection, Cyber Resiliency, Cyber Recovery with our customers for quite a number of years. And, now it's not a niche conversation just with financial institutions, it's a conversation with all of our customers. 'Cause either they've felt it or they've seen their competitors feel it and they need to protect themselves. So it has really become a conversation but it's not only our specialty sellers, but all of our sellers are having with our customers. And, it's really about not only being able to protect against them, which is an important part, but also recover from them. And that's really what our PowerProtect Cyber Recovery Solution is all about. And the exciting thing for us is that we actually have recently become the first Cyber Recovery Solution endorsed by Sheltered Harbor. Which really gives you an idea of the level of investment that we've made to provide that secure, automated air gap solution to give our customers that peace of mind. Because unfortunately this is becoming table stakes for any data protection out there today. >> Well, and as more and more, we see every company either becoming a data company or needing to become a data company to not just survive these times, but become successful as time goes on. To a point, it's one thing about protecting the data, but the actual need is to recover it should anything happen. Tell us a little bit more about Sheltered Harbor and what you guys were the first there to receive? Tell me a little bit more about that. >> Yeah, absolutely. Okay a little bit more on overall our solution and Sheltered Harbor is actually a consortium of organizations, primarily financial institutions that have really come together to define the standards, of what we need or Cyber Resiliency for Cyber Recovery. And for us with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery, we've worked closely with that organization, to meet those standards. And with that work and with that actual deploying in with one of our customers, we were able to become the first Cyber Recovery Solution endorsed by Sheltered Harbor to meet their standards there. And what's an important about our solution is that it's both that automated air-gapped solution for the data isolation, which is a part of it. But it's also, we have the CyberSense analytics and forensic tools that give you the ability to discover, to diagnose and to remediate against these attacks. So it gives you both sides of protecting that data air-gapping it, but also being able to intelligently discover and remediate against those attacks, if they do indeed happen. >> As VP of Product Marketing, I'm sure you're with customers often these days virtually. When you're having customer conversations, as you were singing out data protection and being able to recover and remediate, should anything like a ransomware attack happen, that's business critical. That's, you know, lifeline kind of stuff we're talking about. Have you seen the conversations within customer organizations shifts or is this now a board level or a C-level conversation in terms of data protection? >> Yeah, it's interesting. It's become a more frequent conversation. The people involved, are different. It's not just the backup administrators that are involved, it's really about the overall compliance strategy, the CSOs that are involved here. And it's becoming a corporate mandate as it really unfortunately needs to be at this point. So it's coming up more frequently, but also the types of people involved in that conversation have really changed the types of things we're having to talk about and build solutions for. So it's really changed that dynamic for us. And it's been great to really be on the front lines of that with our customers. You know, it started with those financial institutions and now it's really commonplace, to talk about this with everyone. >> So let's talk customers. Give us an example or two of some customers that are leveraging this new technology that are really achieving like the big deduplication ratio that you talked about, but also enabling their business to move forward. >> Yeah. One of my favorite ones for a couple of reasons I'll confess is, World Candy. Actually there are a World Corporation, but to me, they're a candy company. They actually make some chocolate out of Pennsylvania one of my favorites, chocolate covered pretzels. And they're a great example, right? 'Cause they're certainly not an IT specialty organization. They're trying to contract manufactured candy and they want to get things done as efficiently as possible. So they were looking a solution to overall modernize, their overall IT and that came with the combination of an Integrated Data Protection Appliance, as well as VXRail. And by implementing that, they were able to reduce their backup times from running overnight all night, to just two hours. They were able to get dedupe ratios of a 12O to one, 99.2% reduction, which is just incredible. And they were able to reduce their physical server footprint by 60%. So you can just imagine with an organization like this, that needs to run things as efficiently, as simply, as quickly as possible, how transformational that is. And, probably one of the other things that we find out of customers like this is, it's really about finding them a partner that can solve all of their problems in one place. And for data protection that's certainly one of the biggest things for PowerProtect is we now have a one-stop shop appliances software for all your data protection needs, large and small. And my favorite thing is actually our quote from this customer which is, he calls it a perfect partnership and that they have a single hand to high five. And we love to get those high fives from our customer and we really like to be that partner for them and to help them solve these challenges really no matter where their data is or what their challenges are. >> I like that a single can for a virtual high five. Speaking of partners, what's the channel play here? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for us, Dell Technology is overall channel partners are absolutely critical and in the data protection space, probably even more so. So channel partners are a huge part of our go-to-market. And one of the reason that channel partners really like to work with us, with Dell technologies on the data protection side, is because of the breadth of that portfolio. And now with our most recent enhancements on the appliance side, you now have a full PowerProtect portfolio. Target appliances, integrated appliances, physical, virtual, as well as modern data protection software with PowerProtect data manager. And for our partners, and for us, it's so important that they can have one vendor to offer all of these solutions because we know that our customer's challenges are complex, they're diverse, their data sets are diverse and they need to be able to partner with someone, leverage us as a vendor, leverage our partners, leveraging us as a vendor to really give our customers that answer. And that could be very different needs. They have traditional applications, they have new modern applications in Kubernetes and the growth of, and the importance of those types of applications. Our partners don't want and our customers don't want to have to deal with multiple vendors. Multiple vendors actually can increase risk, increase costs. They want to keep that simple, efficient. And that's why partnering with us, with Dell Technologies, why our channel partners really find us to be such a critical vendor to work with on the data protection side. >> So you've shared some impressive stats about what the technology is able to deliver. You gave us the great World Candy company example in terms of the things I heard a big workforce productivity there, they've got big deduplication there. They're able to sounds like reduce their on-prem footprint. From an economic value perspective, help us understand what the economic value of the DP series and even maybe feedback from the analyst community. >> Yeah, we've actually got a recent study which I'd encourage you guys to go read and I will just kind of give you the Cliffs Notes version of it. Which shows you the advantages of leveraging Dell Technologies portfolio for data protection. You can have your cost to protect as low as 1 cent per gigabyte per month, which is impressive. And that's that efficiency that you can get with PowerProtect. It's a reduction in the administration costs for data reduction of 22%, a reduction of 84% in your Cloud resources and services. We all know that people have moved to Public Cloud and probably one of the biggest concerns is the cost of that. By implementing the right data protection solutions, leveraging our in-cloud backup and protection, you can actually significantly reduce that because of the way that we've implemented it. And overall, you can't argue with anything that reduces costs by 98%. So you can reduce your storage resource costs by 98% by leveraging the PowerProtect portfolio. And again, it's a recent ESG study, which you can find on our website and read more about that study and the economic elements that lead into that. But you can just see the dramatic impact that can have, not only are you protecting your most valuable asset of data, but you're doing so in a way that saves the company money, and time and resources. And we all know that's never been more critical than ever. >> Those are very impressive, but compelling stats. Last question, talking about the three waves that we know Dell technologies is writing, we've got VMware, Cloud, Cyber Recovery, give us a flavor of the launch and the news and the new capabilities for this one-stop shop with perspective of what's happening in Cyber Recovery today. >> Yeah, so we've got enhancements on all fronts. So we, let me go in order there. So we've got on the Cloud front our PowerProtect data manager, which we've talked about a lot this year. We continued to really enhance that. Some recent enhancements, the ability to deploy that in Azure and AWS Cloud, to be able to do in-Cloud data protection. On the VMware side as we talked about just recently at VMworld, we've got new integrations with Storage Based Policy Management to really simplify and automate protection for the Vadmins as well as protection administrators. The ability to support, real mission critical applications and VMs, that are something we're working on to be able to more intelligently protect those VMs that have become more challenging to protect in traditional methods as well as integration with protect VCF. And then lastly, I think we've covered a bit today is certainly on that Cyber Recovery, Cyber Resiliency solution. First one to be endorsed by Sheltered Harbor in providing that air gap solution, as well as that ability to discover to remediate from those attacks. And you can kind of get a sense of, where we're really focused on. Those are our big three areas in both our appliance as well as our software portfolio really focused on simplifying that for our customers. >> Well Caitlin, we thank you for joining us as per what theCUBE has seen for many years with Dell Technologies. Lots of innovation, continued innovation. We thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE today. >> Thanks so much for having me. It was great to be here, Lisa. >> Excellent. With Caitlin Gordon, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is "theCUBE' conversation. >> Hi, Lisa Martin here with Caitlin Gordon, the VP of Product Marketing for Dell Technologies. Caitlin, welcome back to 'theCUBE' I'm excited to see you again. >> I'm very excited to be here again. >> So data protection in the news, what's going on? >> Yeah you know, it's been a busy year. We had obviously our power protect DD appliance launched last year and then this year, we've have announcements on the software side. We had announcements at the VMworld some more at Dell Technologies world. And now today we're announcing even more, which is the new PowerProtect PP series appliances, the new integrated appliances. And it's really exciting. So we now have our PowerProtect DD,xx the next generation of data domain, and we have our PowerProtect DP appliances, integrated appliances. And that's all about combining both protection storage, protecting software in a single converge, all in one offering. It's really popular with our customers today because of the simplicity, the ability to really modernize your data protection in a very simple way, get up really up and running quickly. And in fact, it's really the fastest growing part of the back of appliance market. >> I have read that the integrated appliances, our market is growing twice as fast as the targeted market. So give us a picture of what customers can expect from the new DP series. >> Yeah, and it's not that dissimilar to actually our DD series from last year which is there's in four models in the new DP series. There's a 4,400 which is actually now taking the PowerProtect brand and putting that on the existing DP 4,400 and then three new appliances: the 5,900, the 8,400 and then the 8,900. And it's really all about getting better performance, better efficiency. We've got new hardware, assisted compression, denser drives, and all that gives us the ability to get faster backups, faster recovery, in fact you get 38% faster backups, 45% faster recovery, more logical capacity, 30% more logical capacity, 65 to one theater application, which is just incredible and 60,000 IOPS for instant access. So really ups the game, both in performance and an efficiency. >> Those are big numbers, you mentioned the DD launch last year, contrast it with what you're announcing now. What's the significance of the DP series? >> And that this is exciting for us because it does a couple things. It expands our PowerProtect appliance family with the new DP series of integrated appliances. But at the same time, we're also announcing other important PowerProtect enhancements. On the software side, PowerProtect data manager, which we've enhancing and continuing to talk about all year also has some new improvements. The ability deploy it in Azure, in AWS GovCloud for in-cloud protection. The enhancements that we've done with VMware that we talked about, not that long ago at VMworld about being able to integrate with storage based policy management, really automating and simplifying VMware protection. And it's really all about Kubernetes right And the ability to support Kubernetes as well. So not only is this an exciting appliance launch for us, but it's also the marketing of yet even more enhancements on the PowerProtect data manager side. And all that together means that with PowerProtect, you really have a one-stop shop for all of your data protection needs no matter where the data lives, no matter what SLA, whether it's a physical, virtual appliance, whether it's target or integrated, you've all bought them in the PowerProtect family now. >> Excellent. All right. Last question for you, Caitlin we know Dell Technologies is focused on three big waves, it's cloud VMware and Cyber Recovery. Anything else you want to add here? Yeah, I'll pick up, especially on that last one, we talke%d a little bit about the enhancements we've done with cloud in cloud data protection, longterm recovery, disaster recovery, as well as what we've done on the VMware front, really important that we continue to have that automation at simplicity with VM-ware but cyber resiliency, cyber recovery ransomware has really risen to the top of the list. Unfortunately for many organizations and PowerProtect cyber recovery is really an important enhancement that we also have with this announcement today. We've had this offer in market for a couple of years, with the exciting new enhancement here. It is the first cyber recovery solution and endorsed by Sheltered Harbor. So it is the first Cyber Recovery solution endorsed by Sheltered Harbor. And if you're not familiar with PowerProtect data, PowerProtect, if you're not familiar with PowerProtect cyber recovery, it provides an automated air gapped solution for data isolation and then cyber sense provides the analytics and the forensics for discovering, diagnosing and remediating those attacks. So it's really all about ransomware protecting from protecting from or covering from those attacks, which unfortunately have become all too common for our customers today. >> Excellent news, Caitlin. Thanks for sharing what's new congratulations to you and the Dell team. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. >> For Cait%lin Gordon I'm Lisa Martin. You're watch%ing 'theCUBE'. (calm music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to You by Dell Technologies Everyone welcome back to the cubes Coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience I'm John for your host of the Cube Cube. Virtual. We're not in person this year were remote We're doing The interviews were not face to face. So thanks for watching two great guests to talk about the Dell Technology Storage and data protection for the VM Ware environments got Caitlin Gordon, vice President, product management, Dale Technologies and Leak as well. Vice president of Cloud Platform Business Unit, also known as CPB. You for VM where Lee and Cable in Great to see you both. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having me >>s So what? What a crazy year. We're not in person. Usually the the events Awesome. VM world recently went on and then you guys have the same situation role online now and it's >>really kind >>of highlighted the customer environments of cloud needed. But I've been saying this on all my reports and all the Cube interviews that the executives who are in charge and now saying, Look at our modern APS have to be cloud native because the obvious benefits are there and container ization has become mainstream. But yet I d c still forecast about 15% of enterprises are still fully containing rise, with a huge amount of growth coming around the corner. So you're seeing this mature market where containers are validated, they're being put into production. People are now moving hard core with containers. And you have the kubernetes. I gotta ask you, Li, I'm Caitlin. What does this mean for the customers? Are they getting harder pressure points to do things faster? What does it all mean for the customer? >>Yeah, I'll start. Only you can add to it. I mean, I think what we see is the trends that were already happening of now. Accelerated and modern APs were kind of the top of the priority list, but now it has is really expedited. But at the same time, traditional applications haven't gone anywhere. So there's this dichotomy that a lot of I t is dealing with of head Oh, accelerate those modern APs while also streamlining and simplifying my environment for my traditional laps. And not only do I need to the right infrastructure to have that for production workloads, modern, traditional, but also form a data protection standpoint. How to ensure that those are all secure and do all of that in a way that simplifies life for whether it's the data protection admin, the BM admin or even the developer right, all of the different folks involved and needing to make all of their lives simpler has just really exacerbated a challenge and really given us a lot of opportunity to try to solve that for customers together. >>Lee, What's your take on the landscape out there? >>Yeah, I'd emphasized that speed really matters today, right? That we're really looking at. How do you go and deploy new applications faster, right? New ways to get engaged with customers. I mean, it's not happening physically anymore. So how is it happening while it's happening largely through applications? And so as you now basically develop new applications more quickly, containers are a way to speed the pace of applications, and the theme that you know we continue to drive home is that that means infrastructure has to respond more quickly, and it means that for the teams that are managing infrastructure, it really helps if you have a consistent model where you can get mawr done with the same teams and leverage all the experience you have, as well as the security and infrastructure resiliency model that we're bringing together to our customers. >>This brings up the real question, and if this comes up, kind of you see more of the executive level like we need to have a modern application direction. They'll go. Everyone goes, Yeah, of course. Thumbs up. Then they go Try to make that a reality because even though Dev ops and Infrastructures Code is still the viable path, it's hard. It's like Caitlin, we're talking about EJ to core Data center hybrid the multi cloud. There's a lot going on under the hood there. So you guys are doing a lot of stuff together. VM Ware and Dell Technologies. What's the solution for customers? They gotta move faster. As lead pointed out, Caitlin, how are you guys working together to make that infrastructure more modern, faster, programmable and reliable, >>and make it simpler for the customers right? I think it really comes down to one of the most powerful things about the partnership is that from the dull technology standpoint, we have really a plethora of different solutions to support your VM or environment. Whether it's a three tier architecture with Power Edge power store or leveraging the X rail. Or very commonly, it's gonna be both of those. You have the right infrastructure to support the production workloads and have a consistent operating model between them leveraging devils and primary storage side and all the integrations we have with the ex rail. And then we have with power, protect data manager Great integrations in some recent enhancements that make that even better and are now able to protect Tan Xue, protect the VCF management domain and not only have the storage, but also the protection for that environment. But do it in a way that supports what the V A madman needs and also gives that consistent protection, consistent storage, consistent operating model for the rest of I T. And at the same time you're enabling the developers to move faster. >>Lee, You guys have been doing a lot of joint development, and we've been covering a lot of the news VM world. Ah, lot of joint engineering, a lot of joint integrations. You guys have been collaborating with Dell Technologies for a long time. Also, the relationship. Where is that Today? Can you expand on that a little bit and take a minute to explain the joint >>collaboration? I'll start with the fact that you know, good marketing is really easy when you have great engineering. And so the work that we're doing together, like between our companies. Now we have a lot to talk about, right? E mean the work scaling mentioned right around Devil's integration, for example, on power Max right on da npower store, right? I mean, you start looking at the integration work that we're doing together. It means that customers are getting the benefits of the joint integration work and testing right that comes and so you're guaranteed out of the box toe work. Also, you know, don't forget that contain owners and all of the things we're doing around containers. It's basically designed thio accommodate the fact that containers air spun up more quickly or destroyed more quickly, their shared across the hybrid cloud more frequently and without an inherent security model and built in data protection. It's really hard to go and see how you can deploy these with the enterprise resilience that's demanded at enterprise scale. And so that's what we're doing together, right? And, you know, we build great software, Uh, but without great hardware partnerships, it's one hand clapping, right. It's about getting our teams together, right? That really makes it sing at the customer level. >>You know, I think that's a really example of the business. Performance results have come in Vienna, where you guys were doing a great job. Go way back to the years ago when Pat and Raghu we're talking with from Amazon and all. Since then, it's been joint development, join integrations, and that's a great business model for you. And so, Caitlyn, I wanna get back to you. Because at VMRO we covered Project Monterey, the new initiative for the anywhere but a year before they had Project Pacific that came toe life with product results. Tan Xue specifically, you guys have the power protect data manager that we talked about in the summer, but now for Tan Xue supported and Tan Xue environments that super relevant, can you share any updates on your end on the power protect Data Manager and Tan Xue? >>Yeah, I li I couldn't agree more that great engineering mix our jobs a lot more fun and a whole lot easier. So we've been really lucky. And the partnership we've had has really never been stronger. So yeah, but the most recent release of power protect Data Manager introduces the support for that tan xue protection. It also introduces really important things like storage, storage based policy management. So in in biosphere, when you set up a storage policy, you have data protection as part of that and you have the integration with power protect data Manager. So you're able to automatically protect new VM that are created by that storage policy of being applied. >>But >>at the same time, it's also being tracked in power. Protect Data Manager. So you have that consistency across enabling your vitamins and enabling your data protection your i t. Team. To keep track of that, we also have ah tech preview that we did at VM World about how we're working as from Dell technology standpoint to innovate around. How do you protect some of these VMS that are so large and so mission critical that you need to be able to protect them in a new and innovative way that doesn't disrupt the business. And we did a tech preview of that, and it's something you'll hear more about from us, too. But it's PM traditionally would be in this category of unprotected ble because of the impact it could have on the environment and how we're really looking to do that in a more efficient and intelligent way. So we can actually protect those be EMS. And there's there's really a whole lot more. When you talk about objects, scale and everything else that we've done, it's really exciting. And you don't think Lee and I have ever talked as much as we do now. Ah, and it's been a lot of a lot of fun. >>It's been great following both of you guys on the keep interviews over the years. The success in the vision We had early conversations about what the plans where it's kind of all playing out. So I want to congratulate both of you of VM Ware Adele Technology. So good job going forward. The collaboration. I want to get to that in a second, you'll into it. But Caitlin Lee, I want to get your thoughts because one of the big themes this year besides covert and all the issues that that's highlighting. But in the cloud world, automation has been the number one conversation we've been hearing, and with that you got machine learning all the tech around that as you abstract away. The complexity of the infrastructure to make the modern APS automation has been great. The business cross connect is everything is a service we're seeing. This is the big wave coming. Could you guys share your vision on how all this stuff you mentioned V balls and all objects scale all these things? There's a >>lot of >>plumbing underneath and a lot of tooling, a lot of part piece parts. If that gets programmable, >>automation >>kicks in, which then enables everything is the service because you guys both share your vision of what that means in terms of what's going to change and what would it impact the customer? >>Yeah, and it's very relevant for this week, right? Dell Technologies world. That's a big part of what we've announced this week in our commitment to really bringing our portfolio as a service, and it's really interesting, especially for folks like Lee and I, who have been doing kind of mawr product marking and talking about speeds and feeds and thinking about how you make the product life simpler. And how do you automate that? Have the intelligence built in things like Biaro have been such an important part of that, especially with power store coming to market. But if you think about where that leads us, actually changes everything, which is when you have everything as a service and we're really delivering outcomes to our customers and no longer products. That automation is actually just a important and maybe even more important. But it's not the end user that cares about it directly is actually us, because as Dell Technologies, we become the ones managing that infrastructure, owning that infrastructure and the more automation we can bring in, the more intelligence we can build them for ourselves. The more insights we can give to our customers, the better that service can become. And it's really a flip from how we've always been thinking about and really rolling out automation. It's not actually about enabling our end users to do anything. It's actually about enabling them to not worry about any of it, but enable our own organization to support their outcomes better. So it really changes everything. >>Lee, what's your thoughts on this? Everything you've got, V Sphere V Center. You've got all the storage you got all the back up. All this stuff has to be automated. Makes sense. But as a service, how does that impact your world? >>You know, it really does. When you think about the VMRO Cloud Foundation, right, which is the integration of all of our V sphere with Visa. And with these, you know, our NSX products that will be realized. Management suite. Tom Zoo now, right, All of this pulled together. One of things that's interesting is when you go to the public cloud, we have some experience now where we always deliver that full stack together. And what that does is it frees up customers. Thio, go on, focus on the applications, I think and stop looking down the infrastructure. Start looking up at the APS. And so we're offering and bringing that same level of experience to the on premises data centers. And now bridging that across the hybrid cloud that all of a sudden gives you this sense that Hey, I'm future ready. No, matter where I am today. If I'm thinking about the hybrid cloud, I could go on move there, right. And with our partnership with Dell Technologies, there's such a great opportunity to bridge that uniquely, by the way across all of my on premises infrastructure, including common policy based management, back into storage through RV Valls efforts, right and then back in through objects scale right into objects based, uh, applications and through our DP efforts to data protection efforts, then back into, like, date full data protection. And so what you get now is we're helping customers realize that I got this. I could take new Cooper navies orchestrated applications and I could make them work and do it with the same operational model that I have today. Start spending more time on the applications, less time, basically configuring and managing underlying infrastructure. >>Caitlin you mentioned that earlier at the top of the segment, ease of use, making it easier, simpler, great stuff on the on on the future. Lee, I gotta ask you about Project Monterey. We did a lot of coverage on VM World on silicon angle in the Cube. I love how this comes out. It's always, You know, the brain trust that VM Ware lays out the future, they fill it in throughout the year, expect to see some meat on the bone there. But what is that gonna do from for new capabilities and how with Dell Technologies? Because, um, it's end to end, right this Michael Dell and I talked, I think, two years ago, a Dell Tech world. And then last year, he hit the point home hard and to end with Dell Technologies. It kind of feels like it's gonna be a good fit. Could you share how that Monterey project fits in with Dell Technologies? >>Yeah. We're so pleased to be showing this together with Dell Technologies at the VM World to showcase this new idea that you could basically go on, start offloading CPUs and using smart knicks as a way to basically now provide, um or let's call it a, You know, a architecture that allows you to, uh, be responsive to new application needs. So let me talk a little bit about that. So when we opened up Tansu, right, we got this complete inflow pouring of new container base kubernetes orchestrated APS. So what? We found was, Hey, they're driving a lot of CPU needs their driving a lot of scale out security needs for things like distributed firewalls. And so we started looking at this, and what's clear is we need to basically use the CPU very judiciously, So it's basically reserved for the APS. And so what we're doing now is we're basically saying there's an opportunity for us to go in, offload the CPU for things that look more like infrastructure, including S X, I and other things. And at the same time, then we could go and work together with Dell Technologies to be the deployment vehicle. And so, just like Project Pacific, which was going broad, if you will, this project moderate, which is going deep like the canyon, John not far from here, um is, you know, a source of all new discovery right where we'll be working together and over time, just like the Project Pacific name faded to black and became product Tan Xue vcf with Tom juvie sphere. With Hangzhou, we'll see that Project Monterey will evolve into new products coming together with Dell Technologies. >>Caitlin, can you elaborate on Take a min, explain the product how this renders into products because I can also imagine just the benefits just from a security standpoint. Efficiency. If the platform, um, there's a range of things, could you take a minute to >>explain the >>impact on products? >>Yeah, I think you'll hear a lot more about it, but we're obviously excited to be partners on this is Well, and I think it's It's just another example of the more intelligent the infrastructure can become than the rest of the entire I T organization can run more efficiently and that that can come in the form of the A. I built into power, Max, that can come in the form of the evils that we have both in Power Max and Power Store that can come in the form of even just the fact that we have now built a fully containerized S three compatible objects or platform called objects scale which we have no in early access. Um, that can run on the V sand data persistence platform, and it just gives you the ability to leverage this all of the right technology. And we can continue to really partner on that. I think Project Monterey really opens up even more opportunities to do that, and you'll certainly hear more from us on that in the future. >>I >>mean, you got compression, you got encryption. A lot of benefits across the board. Great to have you guys both on and your graduation. The great event. Final question for both of you, talk about this has been a crazy year. We're not face to face, so everything will be online. What should customers and partners and people watching know about the relationship between VM Ware and Dell Technologies this year? What's the big message to take away? What should people walk away with and and think about? >>I think it's It's never been stronger than ever, uh, than it's been than it is right now. We have never had >>more >>breath and more depth of integration. I think that the partnership on the engineering level, on the product management level on the marketing level, we have really never been in a better place. And you know what? What? My team is really enjoyed with VM world season and you're coming up on Deltek. World season is we've really enjoyed the fact that we've had so much richness >>of >>that integration to talk >>about, and >>we also know there's even more coming. So I, you know, from from my standpoint, if we really feel it and probably the best and most rewarding time we hear about that, is when we bring new things into market, we hear that back. And when Power Store came into the market and over the past few right kind of first months in market, one of the most resounding feedback that has come out as one of the most differentiated parts is that it? It's so incredibly integrated with VM ware. But we've even gotten questions from analysts asking, you know, did you purposely make it feel like you are really working similarly to a B M or environment? And you know what? That just shows how closely we have been working as organizations is that it comes a very seamless experience for our customers. >>Lee Final Word. >>What >>should people walk away with this year on the relationship between Be and we're in Dell Technologies? >>Well, I think the best partnerships right are ones that are customer driven. And what you're finding here is customers. They're actually encouraging us, right? We're doing a lot of three way meetings now, right where customers like, Hey, tell me how you're going to go involved this. How do I How do I basically modernized right and preserve my existing investment, perhaps Or, you know, update here, Or how do I grow like customers have really complex individual situations. And what you confined right is that we're helping jointly not, you know, just simply with the engineering side, which is awesome, but also with the idea that we're helping customers go on deploy responsibly in a time where it's very difficult to plan. And so if you come to us, we can help you jointly plan for the future in uncertain times and make sure that you're gonna be successful. And that's just a great feeling when you're a customer looking at, How do you deploy going forward in this? You know, with the amount of pace of change that we've got, >>I want to congratulate. Both of you have been following you guys. Success has been proven out on the business results and also the products and the enablement that you guys are providing customers been great. Thanks for coming on. Great to see both of you have a great event. Thanks for. Come on. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure. >>Okay, I'm John for your here with the Cube. Covering Del Technology Worlds Digital experience 2020 The Cube Virtual. >>Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies world, digital experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE coverage of Dell Technologies world digital experience. Happy to welcome to the program. First we have a first time guest Akanksha Mehrotra, she's the Vice President of Marketing with Dell Technologies. Joining us one of our CUBE alumni, Caitlin Gordon, she's the Vice President of Product Marketing, also with Dell Technologies. Caitlin, welcome back, Akanksha welcome to the program. >> Thank you Stu, happy to be here. >> Alright, so one of the big models we've been talking about for the last few years is a change in how customers acquire things, big thing we've talked about, for many years, this shift from CAPEX to OPEX. How cloud is impacting everything Jeff Clarke in the keynote was talking about, it's the Dell Technologies on demand, DTOD, I guess is the, four letter acronym we use Akansha help us understand a little bit from your standpoint, what is it? Why is it important to your customers? >> Yeah, so Stu, as soon as you as you heard, as part of the keynote, from from Jeff and others earlier today, we've been working really hard to bring the benefits of on demand IT to our customers, in private cloud, public cloud and edge. And certainly this year, especially, we've seen a lot of interest in this, COVID have catalyzed customer interest in flexible consumption in as a service. As we talk with our customers and partners, we hear this almost daily, it's required a level of agility that candidly traditional CAPEX based models simply haven't been able to provide, I mean, imagine taking your workforce remote over the weekend, and the stress that puts on your infrastructure. And so I think that's kind of forced IT to consider some of these alternatives. Another factor has also been, companies have been wanting to preserve capital, right, and avoid large cash outlays and having this type of flexibility and being able to pay for infrastructure, as you're using it, it gives them a way to do that. So I mean, those are some of the customer drivers that we've seen. Last year at Dell Tech Summit, around the this time last year, actually, in November timeframe, we introduced Dell Technologies on demand as our umbrella program for a flexible consumption and as a service solutions. And really what it what it seeks to do is make it easier for customers to get the simplicity and flexibility of cloud, along with the performance and security of on-premises infrastructure. So it's giving them a range of consumption models that include both payment option as well as services that they can apply on any one of the products in our portfolio from end user devices to core data center infrastructure to hybrid cloud solutions. And we've announced that last year, one of the things that you heard about today, and that we're announcing over this event is that we're continually looking to make it easier and simpler for our customers with various turnkey offerings and simpler offerings for them, given the interest that we've seen. >> Yeah, I want to key off of, you mentioned the impact of COVID-19. And for your customers, it's something we've definitely seen that the promise of cloud always has been to be highly flexible, we can scale up, we can scale down. We know that some services out there aren't always as flexible as we might hope. There's certain SaaS solutions, where you're signing up for a multi year offering and even for the cloud, I might lock in some savings by buying something in bulk. So help us understand, what are the benefits that your customer sees, the savings that they get and is this truly cloud flexible, which means I can burst up and scale as I need. And I can it reached the point, oh, hey, I need half the capacity for the next six months. Can I do that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Stu we actually commissioned IBC to talk to a few of our customers. So let me maybe share some of the benefits that they saw in broad terms, and then I can maybe share a specific example of what a particular customer saw. So we had IDC talk to several of the customers using Dell Technologies on demand models, various GIOS, and various sort of sizes. And what they found was that on average, they saw about a 23%, lower cost of storage operations per year, which is great, right? Lower cost of operations is always great. IT is always looking for those efficiencies, especially, in the current environment, but that's not all. I think that's just sort of part of the story. What they also shared with us is that, these types of models were able to help them become much more agile in how they work and change how they work. And what they found was that they saw 54% fewer incidents of downtime and they were 92% faster in their ability to deploy storage capacity, because they had that capacity in their data center available ready for that spike when their business saw it. ` So those are just some of the broad examples of what our customers have seen. Another specific example that I would would share with you is a large multinational institution, financial services company, we've been working with them for years to service their, enterprise scale, private cloud. And then more recently, they had us also, manage their storage as a service managed utility. And they've seen phenomenal results, they've been able to get 50% more compute power at 8%, lower cost, and 90% faster or reduce time and provisioning data. It's all about the yes, it's about the cost savings but really, it's about the agility that the business gets, right. And as you started out, right, with COVID, they really needed that agility and that flexibility and having these models available, ready to spike, ready to go down, right, have been able to provide that. >> Yeah, I think another thing we've seen is, people rush to cloud because it promised that agility, and we've had those conversations before is, there's a reality of what that means, which it might not be the resiliency you're looking for, it also might not actually be as simple as he thought it might be. And we're seeing some of that come back on-prem, whether you need resiliency or performance or security, or you don't want to be really locked into a specific public cloud but you still want to have that agility in the benefits of really running your data center in a service oriented model. And that trend has been picking up over the past couple years. And as we've already said a couple times today, we've seen that accelerate, but also, we starting to see more customers ask for it. It's not just the big and more strategic and the aggressive customers that are looking for this more and more customers are kind of seeing that this is the end game and that's kind of leads into where we're going, which is, how do we make this more accessible to others? >> Well, Caitlin, you're using one of one of my punch lines that I've used for a number of years now if remember, when we thought that cloud was inexpensive and easy to use, it's not. And if we look at what customers are doing, it's a hybrid model. They're deploying in multiple environments, we're seeing the public cloud look more like the enterprise, the enterprise look more like, the public cloud. So these offerings have, OPEX flexibility and the like, make a whole lot of sense. So you've said that, you've seen a lot of growth, especially this year, any metrics you can give us on, adoption, love the one customer example, in the financial space, anything else to kind of paint the picture as to, how prevalent this is becoming. >> Yeah, maybe I'll get started. So, we've seen nearly 50%, year over year growth in the customer base or our most recent quarter, and it's growing, we've seen over 500% increase, year on year in signed contracts, customer demand in these types of models has caused us to expand our offerings to into countries like Brazil, Chile, Colombia, India, and China. I mean, we already offered about 50 plus countries and along with our partner, network and even more, so, I mean, those are just some of the data points around business traction. In the models that we have another proof point that I could point you to is that, in April, we include, we announced a payment flexibility program, which gave our customers a number of promotions and options to extend this flexibility into, across our portfolio and into other parts of our businesses. And just recently, about a month ago, we extended that, and we've seen really good traction in that as well. So I think overall, like you said there's aspects about public cloud that customers really like, and they tell us, hey, I want to be able to pay as I go, I want to be able to extend and contract the infrastructure as I'm using it. I want a simple management experience. But then as Caitlin said, they realize that Oh, but I don't want to, pay for the refactoring and then the egress and the ingress charges and some of my workloads are better off on premises for performance, locality, security, compliance reasons, right. And therein lies the promise of as a service for on-prem infrastructure, 'cause really, I keep looking for the best of both worlds. And this gives you that right you can use the consumption models to grow and shrink as you needed, you can us the payment models to only pay for what you're using and along with our partner network, you can have in the location that you want so you can sort of have your cake and eat it too. >> Yeah, and I would just add on to that is that more and more of the conversation is both about how can I consume that more as a service and pay for just what I'm using? But also, how can I spend less time maybe zero time and energy actually managing that infrastructure? And how can I then allocate the time energy resources into running my business and investing in more strategic things? So becomes both an important financial conversation but even more so a conversation about how IT can empower the business, which really just changes what we're able to do for customers. So it's an exciting kind of transition to see this really evolve into really not talking about products anymore, and helping our customers have all their business. >> Well, Caitlin, that's a really interesting point, I want you to talk to us a little bit about the Dell Tech storage as a service, how does that fit, we were just talking about don't want to talk about products, we want to talk about really moving to that full OPEX model so help connect the dots for us. >> Yeah, so we're really excited about this, this will be coming in the first half of next year, as you probably heard earlier today. And what we're doing here is we've really taken what we already have had in market. And we've really upped that to the next level, we've accelerated the simplicity of what we offer here. And think of the experience is all starting in a single console, where you just pick up four things, what's the type of storage you want, what's the performance you want, how much and for how long, that's it. And then now we're counting the time from then to when it's in your data center in days, not months, not weeks, but in days and we're able to get you up and going. And it's your data center of your choice, whether that's on-prem in your own data center, or at a colo facility, we bring that equipment in, we get that deployed, we manage it for you, you operate it, and you simply pay for what you use. So you're really in a quick time to value you're in a very simple model and you're not really responsible for managing infrastructure that's really on us. And that moves you into being in a true OPEX model and it also enables you to accelerate what you're able to leverage that whether it's Blob Storage, file storage, you can get up and running quickly and let us worry about how to manage the infrastructure and we give you the ability to operate what you need to. >> Caitlin, maybe if you could give us a little bit of color as to what happens behind the scenes to make that work. As it sounds wonderful, you've had the program around for a year, these aren't trivial things that you're talking about all the logistics, the management the the gear, and making sure that the physical and the power and everything is all set. So help us understand the engineering, the development, and what this means from kind of a services and go to market that make a solution like this work. >> Yeah, and a lot of ways we're having to change our entire business to help our customers change there's, it goes from top to bottom, and you'll get to hear a lot more about it when we're actually available next year. But when you think about it, we have a lot of the DNA, we have a lot of the experience, we have the technology, but we almost have to completely flip the script on ourselves of how we deliver it, who our customer is, what our then end user customer needs from us, and what the role of things like our global services organization is what the role of our global sales organization is and how do we accelerate providing outcomes to our customers and get the rest out of their way. And the fact that I haven't mentioned a product name, but by the way, we actually have industry leading products and pretty much every category. So of course, on the back end, all of this is going to be powered by our industry leading storage solutions, like power store will be in your data center but at the same time, we will actually have worked to really masked that you don't even need to know that nor do you need to really operate much beyond what you need to really run your business. And that's really it's been an interesting work for us to just flip how we think about everything and you'll hear a whole lot more about it next year as we really bring this out into market but it's been really fun and a big learning for everyone. >> Excellent well yeah, something something power is underneath there well Caitlin. All right why don't you both give us the final takeaway for the Dell Tech on demand account. Start with you in just give us the final takeaway. >> Yeah, so I think look, I back to kind of what we were talking about, we've actually been offering these types of solutions to our customers for a really long time. Through Dell financial services, we've been offering payment flexibility for over 23 years, over 15 years and manage utility. So the customer example that I gave you is a customer who's running storage as a service and has been for many years, I think, building on that experience, listening to our customers feedback over that time period and over, of course, this past year, we're looking to apply all of that, to make it even more simpler for them to consume our infrastructure in the near future. And so, storage as a service is going to be a really exciting proof point of that, the momentum stats and some of the other things that I shared with you today and that you're going to hear about over the next couple of days or another proof point of it. But we're excited about this, and looking forward to continuing the dialogue with our customers with our partners and (mumbles) >> Then I would I'll kind of play off of one of your words there which is is all about simplicity for us is how do we take what we've been able to do for a lot of our customers accelerate that and simplify it to a point where we can offer that for all of our customers. And we're really looking to accelerate this first with storage and then get all of our offerings really into this model, because it's really about getting our customers out of managing infrastructure and give them the time, energy, resources to manage their business and simplicity is paramount to making sure that happens. >> Caitlin and Akanksha, thank you so much for giving us the updates. Congratulations to all the progress and definitely looking forward to hearing more beginning of next year. Thanks for joining. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thank you Stu >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman this is Dell Technology world digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you as always for watching theCUBE (upbeat music)

>> Voice over: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with coverage of KubeCon and CloudNativeCon Europe 2020 virtual, brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and Ecosystem Partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Mittleman, and welcome back to theCUBE's Coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe for 2020. Get to talk to the participants in this great community and ecosystem where they are around the globe. And when you think back to the early days of containers, it was, containers, they're lightweight, they're small, going to obliterate virtualization is often the headline that we had. Of course, we know everything in IT tends to be additive. And here we are in 2020 and containers and virtual machines, living side by side and often we'll see the back and forth that happens when we talk about virtualization in containers. To talk about that topic specifically, happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Steve Gordon. He's the director of product management at Red Hat. Steve, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks so much Stu, it's great to be here. >> All right, as I teed up of course, virtualization was a wave that swept through the data center. It is a major piece, not only of what's in the data center, but even if you look at the public Clouds, often it was virtualization underneath there. Certain companies like Google, of course, really drove a container adoption. And often you hear when people talk about, I built something CloudNative, that underlying piece of being containerized and then using an orchestration layer like Kubernetes is what they talk about. So maybe stop for a sec, Red Hat of course, heavily involved in virtualization and containers, how you see that landscape and what's the general conversation you have with customers as to how they make the choice and how the lines blur between those worlds? >> Yeah, so at Red Hat, I think we've been working on certainly the current iteration of the next specialization with KVM for around 12 years and myself large portion of that. I think, one thing that's always been constant is while from the outside-in, specialization looks like it's been a fairly stable marketplace. It's always changing, it's always evolving. And what we're seeing right now is as people are adopting containers and even constructs built on top of containers into their workflows, there is more interest and more desire around how can I combine these things, recognizing that still an enormous percentage of my workloads are out there running in virtual machines today, but I'm building new things around them that need to be able to interact with them and springboard off of that. So I think for the last couple of years, I'm sure you yourself have seen a number of different projects pop up and the opensource community around this intersection of containers and visualization and how can these technologies compliment each other. And certainly KubeVirt is one of the projects that we've started in this space, in reaction to both that general interests, but also the real customer problems that people have, as they try and meld these two worlds. >> So Steve, at Red Hat Summit earlier this year, there was a lot of talk around container native virtualization. If you could just explain what that means, how that might be different from just virtualization in general, and we'll go from there. >> Sure, so back in, I think early 2017, late 2016, we started playing around this idea. We'd already seen the momentum around Kubernetes and the result the way we architected OpenShift, three at a time around, Kubernetes has this strength as an orchestration platform, but also a shared provider of storage, networking, et cetera, resources. And really thinking about, when we look at virtualization and containers, some of these problems are very common regardless of what footprint the workload happens to fit into. So leveraging that strength of Kubernetes as an orchestration platform, we started looking at, what would it look like to orchestrate virtual machines on that same platform right next to our application containers? And the extension of that the KubeVirt project and what has ultimately become OpenShift virtualization is based around that core idea of how can I make a traditional virtual machine to a full operating system, interact with and look exactly like a Kubernetes native construct, that I can use from the same platform? I can manage it using the same constructs, I can interact with it using the same console, all of these kinds of ideas. And then on top of that, not just bring in workloads as they lie, but enable really powerful workforce with people who are building a new application in containers that still need some backend components, say a database that's sitting in a VM, or also trying to integrate those virtual machines into new constructs, whether it's something like a pipeline or a service mesh. We're hearing a lot of questions around those things these days where people don't want to just apply those things to brand new workloads, but figure out how do they apply those constructs to the broader majority of their fleet of workflows that exist today. >> All right, so I believe back at Red Hat Summit, OpenShift virtualization was in beta. Where's the product that solution sets till today? >> Right, so at this year's KubeCon, we're happy to announce that OpenShift virtualization is moving to general availability. So it will be a fully supported part of OpenShift. And what that means is, you, as a subscriber to OpenShift, the platform, get virtualization as just an additional capability of that platform that you can enable as an operator from the operator hub, which is really a powerful thing for admins to be able to do that. But also is just really powerful in terms of the user experience. Like once that operator is enabled on your cluster, the little tab shows up, that shows that you can now go and create a virtual machine. But you also still get all of the metrics and the shared networking and so on that goes with that cluster, that underlies it all. And you can again do some really powerful things in terms of combining those constructs for both virtual machines and containers. >> When you talk about that line between virtualization and containers, a big question is, what does this mean for developers? How is it different from what they were using before? How do they engage and interact with their infrastructure today? >> Sure, so I think the way a lot of this current wave of technology got started for people was whether it was with Kubernetes or Docker before that, people would go and grab, easiest way they could grab compute for capacity was go to their virtual machine firm, whether that was their local virtualization estate at their company, or whether that was taking a credit card to public Cloud, getting a virtual machine and spinning up a container platform on top of that. What we're now seeing is, as that's transitioning into people building their workloads, almost entirely around these container constructs, in some cases when they're starting from scratch, there is more interest in, how do I leverage that platform directly? How do I, as my application group have more control over that platform? And in some cases, depending on the use case, like if they have demand for GPUs, for example, or other high-performance devices, that question of whether the virtualization layer between my physical host and my container is adding that much value? But then still wanting to bring in the traditional workloads they have as well. So I think we've seen this gradual transition where there is a growing interest in reevaluating, how do we start with container based architectures? To, okay, how has we transitioned towards more production scenarios and the growth in production scenarios? What tweaks do we make to that architecture? Does it still make sense to run all of that on top of virtual machines? Or does it make more sense to almost flip that equation as my workload mix gradually starts changing? >> Yeah, two thoughts come to mind on that. Number one is, are there specific applications out there, or I think about traditional VMs, often that Windows environments that we have there, is that some of the use case to bring them over to containers? And then also, once I've gotten it into the container environment, what are the steps to move forward? Because I have to expect that there's going to be some refactoring, some modernization to take advantage of the innovation and pace of change, not just to take it, containerize it and leave it. >> Yeah, so certainly, there is an enormous amount of potential out there in terms of Windows workloads, and people are definitely trying to work out how do they leverage those workloads in the context of OpenShift and Kubernetes based environment. And Windows containers obviously, is one way to address that. And certainly, that is very powerful in and of itself, for bringing those workloads to OpenShift and Kubernetes, but does have some constraints in terms of needing to be on a relatively recent version of Windows server and so on for those workloads to run in that construct. So where OpenShift virtualization helps with that is we can actually take an existing virtual machine workload, bring that across, even if it's say Windows server 2012, run it on top of the OpenShift virtualization platform as a VM, And then if or when you start modernizing more of that application, you can start teasing that out into actual containers. And that's actually something, it is one of our very early demos at Red Hat Summit 2018, I think was how you would go about doing that, and primarily we did that because it is a very powerful thing for customers to see how they can bring those, all the applications into this mix. And the other aspect of that I'll mention is one of our financial services customers who we've been working with, basically since that demo, they saw it from a hallway at Red Hat Summit and came and said, "Hey, we want to talk to you guys about that." One of the primary workload, is a Windows 10 style environment, that they happened to be bringing in as well. And that's more in that construct of treating OpenShift almost as a pool of compute, which you can use for many different workload types with the Windows 10 being just one aspect of that. And the other thing I'll say in terms of the second part of the question, what do I need to do in terms of refactoring? So we are very conscious of the fact that, if this is to provide value, you have to be able to bring in existing virtual machines with as minimal change as possible. So we do have a migration solution set, that we've had for a number of years, for bringing our virtual machines to Linux specialization stacks. We're expanding that to include OpenShift virtualization as a target, to help you bring in those existing virtual machine images. Where things do change a little bit is in terms of the operational approaches. Obviously, admin console now is OpenShift for those virtual machines, that does right now present a change. But we think it is a very powerful opportunity in terms of, as people get more and more production workloads into containers, for example, it's going to become a lot more appealing to have a backup solution, for example, that can cater to both the virtual machine workloads as well as any stateful container workloads you may have, which do exist in increasing numbers. >> Well, I'm glad you brought up a stateful discussion because as an industry, we've spent a long time making sure that virtual machines, have storage and have networking that is reliable in performance and the like. What should customers be thinking about and operators when they move to containers? Are there things that are different you manage bringing into, this brings them into the OpenShift management plane. So what else should I be thinking about? What do I need to do differently when I've embraced this? >> Yeah, so I think in terms of the things that virtual machine expects, the two big ones that come to mind to me are networking and storage. The compute piece is still there obviously, but I think is a little less complicated to solve just because the OpenShift and broader Kubernetes community have done such a great job of addressing that piece, and that's really what attracted us to it in the first place. But on the networking side, certainly the expectations of a traditional virtual machine are a little bit different to the networking model of Kubernetes by default. But again, we've seen a lot of growth in container based applications, particularly in the context of CloudNative network functions that have been pushing the boundaries of Kubernetes networking as well. That's resulted in projects like Motus, which allow us to give a virtual machine related to networking interface that it expects, but also give it the option of using the pod networking natively, for some of those more powerful constructs that are native to Kubernetes. So that's one of those areas where you've got a mix of options, depending on how far you want to go from a modernization perspective versus do I just want to bring this workload in and run it as it is. And my modernization is more built around it, in terms of the other container based things. Then similarly in storage, it's an area where obviously at Red Hat, we've been working close with the OpenShift container storage team, but we also work with a number of ecosystem partners on, not just how do we certify their storage plugins and make sure they work well both for containers and virtual machines, but also how do we push forward upstream efforts, around things like the container storage interface specification, to allow for these more powerful capabilities like snapshots cloning and so on which we need for virtual machines, but are also very valuable for container based workloads as well. >> Steve, you've mentioned some of the reasons why customers were moving towards this environment. Now that you're GA, what learnings did you have during beta? Are there any other customer stories you could share that you've learned along this journey? >> Yeah, so I think one of the things I'll say is that, there's no feedback like direct product in the hands of customer feedback. And it's really been interesting to see the different ways that people have applied it, not necessarily having set out to apply it, but having gotten partway through their journey and realized, hey, I need this capability. You have something that looks pretty handy and then having success with it. So in particular, in the telecommunications vertical, we've been working closely with a number of providers around the 5G rollouts and the 5G core in particular, where they've been focused on CloudNative network functions. And really what I mean by that is the wave of technology and the push they're making around 5G is to take what they started with network function virtualization a step further, and build that next generation network around CloudNative technologies, including Kubernetes and OpenShift. And as I've been doing that, I have been finding that some of the vendors are more or less prepared for that transition. And that's where, while they've been able to leverage the power of containers for those applications that are ready, they're also able to leverage OpenShift virtualization as a transitionary step, as they modernize the pieces that are taking a little bit longer. And that's where we've been able to run some applications in terms of the load balancer, in terms of a carrier grade database on top of OpenShift virtualization, which we probably wouldn't have set out to do this early in terms of our plan, but we're really able to react quickly to that customer demand and help them get that across the line. And I think that's a really powerful example where the end state may not necessarily be to run everything as a virtual machine forever, but that was still able to leverage this technology as a powerful tool in the context of our broadened up optimization effort. >> All right, well, Steve, thank you so much for giving us the updates. Congratulations on going GA for this solution. Definitely look forward to hearing more from the customers as they come. >> All right, thanks so much Stu. I appreciate it. >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon EU 2020, the virtual edition. I'm Stu Stu Mittleman. And thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE in our Palo Alto studios. We're here with our quarantine crew, doing all the remote interviews, getting all the stories that matter. The great guest, Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Caitlin, CUBE alumni, welcome back remotely. We didn't make it to the Dell Technologies World got moved to the fall. We'll see you certainly virtually, but thank you for coming on remotely, appreciate it. >> Thank you so much for having me again, it's great to be here. >> So storage is on the upswing. We're seeing a lot of activity. We're going to talk about data protection specifically. But first, we want to find out what's going on with you guys. There's been some changes in your organization within Dell, can you take a minute to explain what they are? >> Yeah, absolutely. What we found is certainly a lot of our conversations in the storage space end up talking about data protection and data protection, talking about storage. And what we've decided to do is actually really bring those parts to the business together. So specifically now I've been in the storage business for a few years, I spent a long time in data protection before that. So now we've brought the gang back together, and we've got storage and data protection really brought together as an organization all the way through engineering, and product marketing. Product Management really help us collaborate and really attack problems for customers cohesively. So we're really early days here, but it's exciting. We've been really busy on the storage side, and we've got some exciting things coming here on the data protection side as well. >> I want to get your thoughts 'cause almost every interview I do in the past four months is just doesn't stop. It's COVID impact. It's one of those things that we've talked about data protection. I've had so many great conversations, continuous operations, non-disruptive operations, it couldn't ask for more disruption than people being asked to work at home. So it's caused some IT divides, this is something that we didn't see coming. Business still needs to go on. So I want to get your thoughts, we're seeing cloud obviously become highlighted in this pandemic, that's obviously impacting the data protection. What's going on in the data protection front on your side, because obviously, cloud is showing everyone, "Hey, I can use modern technologies in the cloud, but I still got to do my business, I still got to protect my data." What's going on? >> Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think we've seen a lot accelerate with this whole situation we're all in with a global pandemic, with the challenges that all businesses and people are having. But the digital transformation has been compressed, right? It would have taken people years, but now they've been forced to do that in months. Things like containers are really exploding and the requirement to protect Kubernetes is really something that we now more and more are having conversations about. Cyber ransomware has really unfortunately, only accelerated in this increasingly digital world that we're now all exclusively living in. So cyber resiliency has become a lot more important conversation. And then being able to protect data, certainly on-prem, but also across multiple public clouds and having that consistent experience is probably more important than it's ever been before as well. So it's really just put the accelerant on a lot of conversations that we were having before, and now they've become even more important. >> Talk about the innovations around the protect product, you've got the PowerProtect, it's agile, there's been some developments, what's the new additions? What's being highlighted? What are the key features? >> Yeah, so it's actually pretty exciting month for us here. PowerProtect Data Manager has been in the market for a full year. So believe it or not full year and again, as you mentioned, agile development. So it was introduced a year ago, we've had a number of enhancements over that year in the space of adding workloads, our cloud integration, we've added cloud Dr to both Azure and AWS. You have three click failover, two click failback. Really simple cloud disaster recovery, the availability and AWS marketplace for in-cloud data protection. As well, we have integration with our cyber recovery solutions, so again that ransomware protection and recovery is an important part. As well as a number of enhancements for supporting additional workloads, SAP Hana, CR Microsoft Exchange, we have broad workload support, we've really really enhanced that a lot. And then most recently, just this month, we now have a brand new data protection of PowerProtect Data Manager offer which includes all of our cloud capabilities, all inclusive, available in a subscription. So again, as we talked about the way not only people are using their data protection solutions, but how they're consuming and purchasing that, we've really transformed also now the way that people will be purchasing that. >> That's awesome, congratulations. Subscription is the format people want. And Amazon marketplace that shows they can consume if you're amazon customer, you just go in the marketplace, you get it, that's awesome. Congratulations, that's the way the world wants to consume. So that's awesome news. The thing I want to get your thoughts on and you guys have been busy. The cyber recovery and resilience piece you mentioned, can you talk about that because, we're hearing a lot more that work at home is not going to be more permanent. More permanent in the sense of, as we come out of the pandemic, people will say, "Hey, I can be productive at home." So you get to see the at home, not just a, "Here's some extra expense for your bandwidth." Is going to be more thought through. There's going to be more cyber attacks, just the attacks just on the COVID scams alone has been a problem at a personal level. But from a business standpoint, I got to have a VPN, I got to have my connections, I got to be secure. How do you guys look at that because organizations are putting a focus on it? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, cyber resiliency is something we've focused on actually for a number of years and it started in the obvious places, right. The banks of the world, the financial institutions and the healthcare organizations. Where they always had to have data really protected, and they were kind of some of the more early targets. But now we've seen ransomware. And these digital attacks really get worse and worse. I think all businesses, including our own, are really ramping up to make sure that we are protecting in every way we can. And from our data protection portfolio, we have a fully air-gapped solution. So you have that protection. And it does two things, it first helps mitigate against the attack in the first place by actually being able to do full content scanning to detect if an attack has happened. And just as importantly, if an attack happens, being able to quickly in an automated way, recover from that attack. I think it's something that we are really finding that our entire sales team, is having conversations about. It's no longer focused on the financial institutions of the world. It's every organization, and a lot of people really appreciate that we've come with that expertise and that knowledge to be able to help them prevent, and then, unfortunately, in many cases recover from these attacks. >> That's to me, it's table stakes, I'd have to agree with you. The question I have for you on that, you've doubled speed piece because one of the speed to recovery has always been a big feature. Now with the at home situation, how does that play into, how you guys have been on that speed to recovery aspect of that? Can you share some thoughts on that? >> Yeah, and it's specifically with cyber because we have a fully air-gapped solution, and it's in a secure enclave. That recovery is automated, and it's all within that secure enclave. So you have that security, you have the confidence, and you have the speed of that recovery. So it's really important the way we've implemented that, it's not attack on to an existing, it's truly a fully secure enclave, a full air-gapped solution so that you can recover quickly, but just as importantly, you can recover securely as well. >> One of the quotes that's been kicked around in the industry is, in the past two months, we've seen more digital transformation than the past two years. And I think that's rightfully articulate 'cause of COVID. And we're seeing all the warts and scabs out there, and the infrastructure whether it was investments lacking, the ones that made the right investments were doing well. And it becomes around cloud native, some of the things you guys saw with your success with agility. What is going on with a container based architecture, because that to me is becoming one of those things where it's accelerating development teams, at the same time providing some of those business values that people have to keep the lights on for. So, what do you guys look at that? How do you look at this container architecture? What specifically in the portfolio you guys have to address that? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think containers we found accelerating in the past couple years and then in the past few months, is a huge, huge requirement. And although we didn't think so pretty recently, containers are part of production applications. They need to be stored persistent storage on the storage side, but they probably even more critically and urgently they need to be protected. We've done a number of integrations and work specifically, with VMware to be able to support Kubernetes, and being able to support those workloads and protect Kubernetes workload. A lot of advanced integration, being able to protect and recover those clusters natively, and having that deep integration with VMware, as well as other other distributions as well. 'Cause we have really found that containers are exploding, the ecosystem is obviously very much evolving, but we are really keeping up with the bleeding edge of that to ensure that as these cloud native applications are developed, that the containers are truly being protected, just as physical applications of past had been. We need to make sure that certainly VMs but even more importantly, those containers alongside, are being protected. >> I've always been a big fan of containers and certainly Kubernetes that keeps the legacy alive and until you can transition, the new end and the old, and sometimes they can work together. With that, I want to get your thoughts specifically around this idea of technical debt. A lot of customers we talked to said, "Hey, I want more end-to-end, I want some cloud native, I got to have the versatility, I got to have the agility and the speed, I got to be multi cloud. So multi cloud's on the horizon, it's certainly hybrids today. I don't want my infrastructure to be the technical debt for tomorrow." That's the question that comes up. How do you answer that, and how do you talk to that specifically? >> Yeah, it's interesting, you bring that up, especially in the storage side, too. We've been talking about that a lot. That was a pretty centralized message about how we architected power store, and it's pretty central to everything that we're designing. Is that, investment with our Dell EMC Infrastructure with Dell Technologies, is investing for what you need today, but more importantly, is going to bring you into the future. And what we have with PowerProtect Data Manager is something that is rooted in the innovation and the proven architecture to provide support for all these broad workloads and all of these broad clouds, but also also be able to protect these new modern cloud native applications, and help you bridge that gap in your own environment, so you have that. And even just as important as supporting modern applications is that support for multiple clouds, AWS and Azure. We all know that, that technical debt can also come in the form of being locked into a single public cloud, you need that flexibility to be able to leverage that public cloud of choice, whether it's for disaster recovery, backup to cloud, long term retention to cloud, having that flexibility is also just as an important part of that equation as it is for your on-prem investments as well. >> Well, congratulations on that data protection on the product front. Having the bright mix. Having that certainly is going to be key as the buying cycle start to ramp up again. I want to get back to the business 'cause I'll check on the technology. Congratulations, I love cloud native, you know that. But check on the technology business model. You mentioned subscriptions. So can you talk about the trend on your customer side, the move from CapEx and OpEx. Because if you go cloud, the consumption will be subscription, there'll be more operating expenses. How does that impact the IT budgets? How do you guys align there? What's your answer to that, can you explain? >> Yeah, absolutely. We announced, late last year, so in the fall of last year, Dell technology is on demand family, and that's really our effort to focus more on our cloud like experience and consumption and product offerings. And part of that is our subscription, pay as you go model. And what we've found, and I'd love your perspective on this as well, is that, the moving from CapEx and OpEx has been a conversation and certainly when it comes to infrastructure, there's been some set of customers over the past 12 months that have been moving in that direction. We're seeing that accelerate, certainly in the infrastructure space, but as we all know, software is where that's already pretty well established. As I think you've said, that's table stakes. So we've seen that that's really the methodology, both from our standpoint and our customers' and our partners' is, when we're selling software, that's got to be really honest subscription basis. So that's why obviously, with PowerProtect Data Manager, it makes all the sense in the world to really focus there. And that's really part of our bigger initiative overall, to move towards more of these consumption based as a service OpEx models for our customers. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up I'd love to share my opinion, because I do have opinion on this. And one of the things that's coming out of some of the COVID interviews with the practitioners and the customers and the insiders is, it's a developer lead market. So cloud native, we've been talking about for years and it certainly happened. But as the pandemic has shown, people are going to be coming out of this. They have to have a growth strategy, they got to have the foundational product sets and technologies in place. But the customers, your customers, have to have a growth strategy. They got to refactor. They got to look at what they want to double down in, and kind on what they want to cut back. Some things are pretty obvious now, what not to do. So it's clear there's lines of sight around certain things, but it's developer led. The applications are going to drive value of the business, and so I'm seeing the alignment between that trend of developer led with a flex of consumption based resource. So yeah, you get the foundational services. And then hey, if the app successful, you're just still in business. I mean, people are really worried about, even, making sure they come out of this not on a downward trajectory. They want to be on an upward trajectory. That's a really key thing for 'em, your reaction. >> Yeah, I mean, that really resonates. I think it's and when we look at just to go back to the technology a little, 'cause, I never can resist, is if you look even just PowerProtect Data Manager, one of the things that's so important is that, we've have built that to be both controllable by the application and users so they can do their own protection, but then have that centralized view. And that being able to have that consolidated and centralized management of data from a single console for IT. And I think that gets to the now the next level with developers is, we need to enable developers as seamlessly as possible in their own language to be able to protect, to be able to store data, so IT can feel good about it. But we have to be able to enable them in the way that they are needing to develop these applications as quickly as possible, and from an IT perspective, that means being able to do that on-prem, or even do that in the cloud, so that we can keep all of those policies in place and keep that centralized governance, but really support the acceleration and the digital transformation that those folks are driving. So I think it makes a lot of sense and it really resonates with our product strategy. >> I think there's going to be a slew of new applications that are going to need to have all kinds of strategies built in countermeasures, recovery, all new things are going to emerge. So you guys certainly will be certainly more busy than ever. I want to get your product kind of view on something why I got you here, because I think this is kind of key. As you look at your portfolio, you mentioned the tech and the tech, all the features that you have, what are the few that resonate the most, it means classic product marketing, I mean, everyone wants to know, we've got all these features, which is great. Which ones do you say, Caitlin, are jumping out right now that are resonating the most? 'Cause sometimes it's a feature that might not be that heavy tech, or it's something that's really differentiated, but the customers will glob onto key features, what are some of the things that you're seeing that are rising to the top in terms of the feature set? >> Yeah, and it's not the speeds and feeds of yesterday. And I think this, more broadly across storage and data protection is what we're finding. The speeds and feeds are good, and some people do want to have that conversation. But we've gotten to a point from a technology from an industry standpoint, that we're able to meet latency, the bandwidth, the throughput that people need. But what's more interesting and is more compelling and important to the business is, how can you help me change the way I'm running my data center, and inter-operate with the cloud, and therefore change the way I'm running my business. And some of the pieces that come in there, is automation. I think automation within systems to systems across the enterprise, across edge and cloud, that is so incredibly critical. The AI that we're building into platforms, the integration with whether it's VMware based with VRO, whether it's Ansible modules, intelligence, and this idea of having an autonomous data center that then has that connectivity to cloud and inter-operate then also with the edge, is so incredibly compelling. And again, not just for the large enterprises, but more and more for smaller ones. Because in this world, we need to help our customers have their data center run itself as much as possible, and whatever does require administration is as simple as possible, right? We've all gotten used to technology being as simple as our smartphones, this consumerization of IT has really changed the requirement of what people think simple means. So the things that you don't necessarily think about, and we don't necessarily market even that actively about, how important the number of clicks and the user interface and the seamless transition to products, as well as automation, is so critical. And I think the other ones we've already hit on, integration with multiple public clouds, that flexibility, support for containers, and Kubernetes and deep VMware integration are increasingly critical. And I think, for someone who's been in product marketing for 15 years, I couldn't be happier that our conversations have kind of moved off of speeds and feeds and into these much more compelling and business centric conversation, because, I think we can add a lot more value to the business that way. >> It also shows the strategic nature, you mentioned edge, these new environments. It's a multi environment that you have to have build products for. So it's not so much, how fast packets are moving back and forth, or this or that. It's really about the business value. >> Yeah, it's about the business value, the locality, the value of the data, it's really all about the data and how we can help our customers better manage that across all locations. But do that in a very, very simple way. But the requirement for what simple really means, has really, really raised the bar on that, and we're going to continue to push ourselves and challenge ourselves on that as well. >> Caitlin, I'll give you the final word, talk about choice. Choice has always been a big part of what you guys have offered customers, Dell Technologies has great storage. In this day and age, what does that mean for a customer? What have the choice mean? >> Yeah, and I think it's a delicate balance. And we've gone through quite a transformation over the past couple years here. And this summer was an exciting one for many reasons, but, we just recently completed that full simplification of our portfolio and we have our full portfolio of power solutions, all the way from PowerMax to PowerVolt, PowerStore, PowerScale, PowerFlex, and of course, the one we talked about today, PowerProtect. We now have that all in market. And I bring that up because, that is our simple portfolio to give customers best in class products across all of these different categories. And the fact that we have that choice, but, we've simplified that choice down to as few choices as possible, coming back to what we were just talking about. It's critical that we have solutions that meet the requirements of all of our different customers, but also that we don't give them more than that. That we need to give them choices that will meet their needs, but also not give them so many choices, that it's overwhelming. You don't want to be the cheesecake factory and not be able to choose what you want, you need to just be able to choose from what the options that really makes sense. And that's why I think it's really exciting now as we move into the second half of this year and look into next, we have that portfolio now, and we can focus on, which is the right combination of solutions for you. >> During the pandemic, people are reading a book, doing a hobby, you guys are updating your product portfolio. Congratulations on all the hard work, Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product. Great to see you. Thank you for spending the time, giving us an update on the data protection stuff. And again, congratulations for being so productive during a tough time and stay safe, thank you. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me, good to see you. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage with Dell Technologies. Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product Marketing giving us the breakdown. Very productive for them during this time, and again, companies want a growth strategy when they come out of the pandemic. More than ever, infrastructure has to enable the software for the new solutions. Just to keep coverage, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE in our Palo Alto studios. We're here with our quarantine crew, doing all the remote interviews, getting all the stories that matter. The great guest, Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Caitlin, CUBE alumni, welcome back remotely. We didn't make it to the Dell Technologies World got moved to the fall. We'll see you certainly virtually, but thank you for coming on remotely, appreciate it. >> Thank you so much for having me again, it's great to be here. >> So storage is on the upswing. We're seeing a lot of activity. We're going to talk about data protection specifically. But first, we want to find out what's going on with you guys. There's been some changes in your organization within Dell, can you take a minute to explain what they are? >> Yeah, absolutely. What we found is certainly a lot of our conversations in the storage space end up talking about data protection and data protection, talking about storage. And what we've decided to do is actually really bring those parts to the business together. So specifically now I've been in the storage business for a few years, I spent a long time in data protection before that. So now we've brought the gang back together, and we've got storage and data protection really brought together as an organization all the way through engineering, and product marketing. Product Management really help us collaborate and really attack problems for customers cohesively. So we're really early days here, but it's exciting. We've been really busy on the storage side, and we've got some exciting things coming here on the data protection side as well. >> I want to get your thoughts 'cause almost every interview I do in the past four months is just doesn't stop. It's COVID impact. It's one of those things that we've talked about data protection. I've had so many great conversations, continuous operations, non-disruptive operations, it couldn't ask for more disruption than people being asked to work at home. So it's caused some IT divides, this is something that we didn't see coming. Business still needs to go on. So I want to get your thoughts, we're seeing cloud obviously become highlighted in this pandemic, that's obviously impacting the data protection. What's going on in the data protection front on your side, because obviously, cloud is showing everyone, "Hey, I can use modern technologies in the cloud, but I still got to do my business, I still got to protect my data." What's going on? >> Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think we've seen a lot accelerate with this whole situation we're all in with a global pandemic, with the challenges that all businesses and people are having. But the digital transformation has been compressed, right? It would have taken people years, but now they've been forced to do that in months. Things like containers are really exploding and the requirement to protect Kubernetes is really something that we now more and more are having conversations about. Cyber ransomware has really unfortunately, only accelerated in this increasingly digital world that we're now all exclusively living in. So cyber resiliency has become a lot more important conversation. And then being able to protect data, certainly on-prem, but also across multiple public clouds and having that consistent experience is probably more important than it's ever been before as well. So it's really just put the accelerant on a lot of conversations that we were having before, and now they've become even more important. >> Talk about the innovations around the protect product, you've got the PowerProtect, it's agile, there's been some developments, what's the new additions? What's being highlighted? What are the key features? >> Yeah, so it's actually pretty exciting month for us here. PowerProtect Data Manager has been in the market for a full year. So believe it or not full year and again, as you mentioned, agile development. So it was introduced a year ago, we've had a number of enhancements over that year in the space of adding workloads, our cloud integration, we've added cloud Dr to both Azure and AWS. You have three click failover, two click failback. Really simple cloud disaster recovery, the availability and AWS marketplace for in-cloud data protection. As well, we have integration with our cyber recovery solutions, so again that ransomware protection and recovery is an important part. As well as a number of enhancements for supporting additional workloads, SAP Hana, CR Microsoft Exchange, we have broad workload support, we've really really enhanced that a lot. And then most recently, just this month, we now have a brand new data protection of PowerProtect Data Manager offer which includes all of our cloud capabilities, all inclusive, available in a subscription. So again, as we talked about the way not only people are using their data protection solutions, but how they're consuming and purchasing that, we've really transformed also now the way that people will be purchasing that. >> That's awesome, congratulations. Subscription is the format people want. And Amazon marketplace that shows they can consume if you're amazon customer, you just go in the marketplace, you get it, that's awesome. Congratulations, that's the way the world wants to consume. So that's awesome news. The thing I want to get your thoughts on and you guys have been busy. The cyber recovery and resilience piece you mentioned, can you talk about that because, we're hearing a lot more that work at home is not going to be more permanent. More permanent in the sense of, as we come out of the pandemic, people will say, "Hey, I can be productive at home." So you get to see the at home, not just a, "Here's some extra expense for your bandwidth." Is going to be more thought through. There's going to be more cyber attacks, just the attacks just on the COVID scams alone has been a problem at a personal level. But from a business standpoint, I got to have a VPN, I got to have my connections, I got to be secure. How do you guys look at that because organizations are putting a focus on it? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, cyber resiliency is something we've focused on actually for a number of years and it started in the obvious places, right. The banks of the world, the financial institutions and the healthcare organizations. Where they always had to have data really protected, and they were kind of some of the more early targets. But now we've seen ransomware. And these digital attacks really get worse and worse. I think all businesses, including our own, are really ramping up to make sure that we are protecting in every way we can. And from our data protection portfolio, we have a fully air-gapped solution. So you have that protection. And it does two things, it first helps mitigate against the attack in the first place by actually being able to do full content scanning to detect if an attack has happened. And just as importantly, if an attack happens, being able to quickly in an automated way, recover from that attack. I think it's something that we are really finding that our entire sales team, is having conversations about. It's no longer focused on the financial institutions of the world. It's every organization, and a lot of people really appreciate that we've come with that expertise and that knowledge to be able to help them prevent, and then, unfortunately, in many cases recover from these attacks. >> That's to me, it's table stakes, I'd have to agree with you. The question I have for you on that, you've doubled speed piece because one of the speed to recovery has always been a big feature. Now with the at home situation, how does that play into, how you guys have been on that speed to recovery aspect of that? Can you share some thoughts on that? >> Yeah, and it's specifically with cyber because we have a fully air-gapped solution, and it's in a secure enclave. That recovery is automated, and it's all within that secure enclave. So you have that security, you have the confidence, and you have the speed of that recovery. So it's really important the way we've implemented that, it's not attack on to an existing, it's truly a fully secure enclave, a full air-gapped solution so that you can recover quickly, but just as importantly, you can recover securely as well. >> One of the quotes that's been kicked around in the industry is, in the past two months, we've seen more digital transformation than the past two years. And I think that's rightfully articulate 'cause of COVID. And we're seeing all the warts and scabs out there, and the infrastructure whether it was investments lacking, the ones that made the right investments were doing well. And it becomes around cloud native, some of the things you guys saw with your success with agility. What is going on with a container based architecture, because that to me is becoming one of those things where it's accelerating development teams, at the same time providing some of those business values that people have to keep the lights on for. So, what do you guys look at that? How do you look at this container architecture? What specifically in the portfolio you guys have to address that? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think containers we found accelerating in the past couple years and then in the past few months, is a huge, huge requirement. And although we didn't think so pretty recently, containers are part of production applications. They need to be stored persistent storage on the storage side, but they probably even more critically and urgently they need to be protected. We've done a number of integrations and work specifically, with VMware to be able to support Kubernetes, and being able to support those workloads and protect Kubernetes workload. A lot of advanced integration, being able to protect and recover those clusters natively, and having that deep integration with VMware, as well as other other distributions as well. 'Cause we have really found that containers are exploding, the ecosystem is obviously very much evolving, but we are really keeping up with the bleeding edge of that to ensure that as these cloud native applications are developed, that the containers are truly being protected, just as physical applications of past had been. We need to make sure that certainly VMs but even more importantly, those containers alongside, are being protected. >> I've always been a big fan of containers and certainly Kubernetes that keeps the legacy alive and until you can transition, the new end and the old, and sometimes they can work together. With that, I want to get your thoughts specifically around this idea of technical debt. A lot of customers we talked to said, "Hey, I want more end-to-end, I want some cloud native, I got to have the versatility, I got to have the agility and the speed, I got to be multi cloud. So multi cloud's on the horizon, it's certainly hybrids today. I don't want my infrastructure to be the technical debt for tomorrow." That's the question that comes up. How do you answer that, and how do you talk to that specifically? >> Yeah, it's interesting, you bring that up, especially in the storage side, too. We've been talking about that a lot. That was a pretty centralized message about how we architected power store, and it's pretty central to everything that we're designing. Is that, investment with our Dell EMC Infrastructure with Dell Technologies, is investing for what you need today, but more importantly, is going to bring you into the future. And what we have with PowerProtect Data Manager is something that is rooted in the innovation and the proven architecture to provide support for all these broad workloads and all of these broad clouds, but also also be able to protect these new modern cloud native applications, and help you bridge that gap in your own environment, so you have that. And even just as important as supporting modern applications is that support for multiple clouds, AWS and Azure. We all know that, that technical debt can also come in the form of being locked into a single public cloud, you need that flexibility to be able to leverage that public cloud of choice, whether it's for disaster recovery, backup to cloud, long term retention to cloud, having that flexibility is also just as an important part of that equation as it is for your on-prem investments as well. >> Well, congratulations on that data protection on the product front. Having the bright mix. Having that certainly is going to be key as the buying cycle start to ramp up again. I want to get back to the business 'cause I'll check on the technology. Congratulations, I love cloud native, you know that. But check on the technology business model. You mentioned subscriptions. So can you talk about the trend on your customer side, the move from CapEx and OpEx. Because if you go cloud, the consumption will be subscription, there'll be more operating expenses. How does that impact the IT budgets? How do you guys align there? What's your answer to that, can you explain? >> Yeah, absolutely. We announced, late last year, so in the fall of last year, Dell technology is on demand family, and that's really our effort to focus more on our cloud like experience and consumption and product offerings. And part of that is our subscription, pay as you go model. And what we've found, and I'd love your perspective on this as well, is that, the moving from CapEx and OpEx has been a conversation and certainly when it comes to infrastructure, there's been some set of customers over the past 12 months that have been moving in that direction. We're seeing that accelerate, certainly in the infrastructure space, but as we all know, software is where that's already pretty well established. As I think you've said, that's table stakes. So we've seen that that's really the methodology, both from our standpoint and our customers' and our partners' is, when we're selling software, that's got to be really honest subscription basis. So that's why obviously, with PowerProtect Data Manager, it makes all the sense in the world to really focus there. And that's really part of our bigger initiative overall, to move towards more of these consumption based as a service OpEx models for our customers. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up I'd love to share my opinion, because I do have opinion on this. And one of the things that's coming out of some of the COVID interviews with the practitioners and the customers and the insiders is, it's a developer lead market. So cloud native, we've been talking about for years and it certainly happened. But as the pandemic has shown, people are going to be coming out of this. They have to have a growth strategy, they got to have the foundational product sets and technologies in place. But the customers, your customers, have to have a growth strategy. They got to refactor. They got to look at what they want to double down in, and kind on what they want to cut back. Some things are pretty obvious now, what not to do. So it's clear there's lines of sight around certain things, but it's developer led. The applications are going to drive value of the business, and so I'm seeing the alignment between that trend of developer led with a flex of consumption based resource. So yeah, you get the foundational services. And then hey, if the app successful, you're just still in business. I mean, people are really worried about, even, making sure they come out of this not on a downward trajectory. They want to be on an upward trajectory. That's a really key thing for 'em, your reaction. >> Yeah, I mean, that really resonates. I think it's and when we look at just to go back to the technology a little, 'cause, I never can resist, is if you look even just PowerProtect Data Manager, one of the things that's so important is that, we've have built that to be both controllable by the application and users so they can do their own protection, but then have that centralized view. And that being able to have that consolidated and centralized management of data from a single console for IT. And I think that gets to the now the next level with developers is, we need to enable developers as seamlessly as possible in their own language to be able to protect, to be able to store data, so IT can feel good about it. But we have to be able to enable them in the way that they are needing to develop these applications as quickly as possible, and from an IT perspective, that means being able to do that on-prem, or even do that in the cloud, so that we can keep all of those policies in place and keep that centralized governance, but really support the acceleration and the digital transformation that those folks are driving. So I think it makes a lot of sense and it really resonates with our product strategy. >> I think there's going to be a slew of new applications that are going to need to have all kinds of strategies built in countermeasures, recovery, all new things are going to emerge. So you guys certainly will be certainly more busy than ever. I want to get your product kind of view on something why I got you here, because I think this is kind of key. As you look at your portfolio, you mentioned the tech and the tech, all the features that you have, what are the few that resonate the most, it means classic product marketing, I mean, everyone wants to know, we've got all these features, which is great. Which ones do you say, Caitlin, are jumping out right now that are resonating the most? 'Cause sometimes it's a feature that might not be that heavy tech, or it's something that's really differentiated, but the customers will glob onto key features, what are some of the things that you're seeing that are rising to the top in terms of the feature set? >> Yeah, and it's not the speeds and feeds of yesterday. And I think this, more broadly across storage and data protection is what we're finding. The speeds and feeds are good, and some people do want to have that conversation. But we've gotten to a point from a technology from an industry standpoint, that we're able to meet latency, the bandwidth, the throughput that people need. But what's more interesting and is more compelling and important to the business is, how can you help me change the way I'm running my data center, and inter-operate with the cloud, and therefore change the way I'm running my business. And some of the pieces that come in there, is automation. I think automation within systems to systems across the enterprise, across edge and cloud, that is so incredibly critical. The AI that we're building into platforms, the integration with whether it's VMware based with VRO, whether it's Ansible modules, intelligence, and this idea of having an autonomous data center that then has that connectivity to cloud and inter-operate then also with the edge, is so incredibly compelling. And again, not just for the large enterprises, but more and more for smaller ones. Because in this world, we need to help our customers have their data center run itself as much as possible, and whatever does require administration is as simple as possible, right? We've all gotten used to technology being as simple as our smartphones, this consumerization of IT has really changed the requirement of what people think simple means. So the things that you don't necessarily think about, and we don't necessarily market even that actively about, how important the number of clicks and the user interface and the seamless transition to products, as well as automation, is so critical. And I think the other ones we've already hit on, integration with multiple public clouds, that flexibility, support for containers, and Kubernetes and deep VMware integration are increasingly critical. And I think, for someone who's been in product marketing for 15 years, I couldn't be happier that our conversations have kind of moved off of speeds and feeds and into these much more compelling and business centric conversation, because, I think we can add a lot more value to the business that way. >> It also shows the strategic nature, you mentioned edge, these new environments. It's a multi environment that you have to have build products for. So it's not so much, how fast packets are moving back and forth, or this or that. It's really about the business value. >> Yeah, it's about the business value, the locality, the value of the data, it's really all about the data and how we can help our customers better manage that across all locations. But do that in a very, very simple way. But the requirement for what simple really means, has really, really raised the bar on that, and we're going to continue to push ourselves and challenge ourselves on that as well. >> Caitlin, I'll give you the final word, talk about choice. Choice has always been a big part of what you guys have offered customers, Dell Technologies has great storage. In this day and age, what does that mean for a customer? What have the choice mean? >> Yeah, and I think it's a delicate balance. And we've gone through quite a transformation over the past couple years here. And this summer was an exciting one for many reasons, but, we just recently completed that full simplification of our portfolio and we have our full portfolio of power solutions, all the way from PowerMax to PowerVolt, PowerStore, PowerScale, PowerFlex, and of course, the one we talked about today, PowerProtect. We now have that all in market. And I bring that up because, that is our simple portfolio to give customers best in class products across all of these different categories. And the fact that we have that choice, but, we've simplified that choice down to as few choices as possible, coming back to what we were just talking about. It's critical that we have solutions that meet the requirements of all of our different customers, but also that we don't give them more than that. That we need to give them choices that will meet their needs, but also not give them so many choices, that it's overwhelming. You don't want to be the cheesecake factory and not be able to choose what you want, you need to just be able to choose from what the options that really makes sense. And that's why I think it's really exciting now as we move into the second half of this year and look into next, we have that portfolio now, and we can focus on, which is the right combination of solutions for you. >> During the pandemic, people are reading a book, doing a hobby, you guys are updating your product portfolio. Congratulations on all the hard work, Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product. Great to see you. Thank you for spending the time, giving us an update on the data protection stuff. And again, congratulations for being so productive during a tough time and stay safe, thank you. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me, good to see you. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage with Dell Technologies. Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product Marketing giving us the breakdown. Very productive for them during this time, and again, companies want a growth strategy when they come out of the pandemic. More than ever, infrastructure has to enable the software for the new solutions. Just to keep coverage, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

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

(lively music) >> Narrator: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live US 2019. Brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to San Diego everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman, day one of of our wall-to-wall coverage, three days of Cisco Live. We're here at the DevNet Zone, a lot of action going around us, CCIE's learning how to become programmers too. Gordon Thompson is here. He's the vice president of world wide sales, for Enterprise Networking good to see you again Gordon. Michael Beesley, he's the CTO for Cisco service provider business. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having us. >> So Gordon, we were in Barcelona in February, we talked a lot about some of the big trends here. We're going to focus today on 5G and Wi-Fi six since Barcelona you've been probably talking to a lot of customers what are you hearing from them, what are the big trends in the marketplace? >> Well I think it's interesting right? 'cause the first thing we talk about is well this massive bandwidth improvement and everyone says oh so what? I mean that's not interesting you know? But bandwidth doesn't change the game totally but I take everyone back to 4G right? When we moved from 3G to 4G and when we moved from 3G to 4G there was a social transformation around bandwidth and that was the mobile device right? The mobile device came along where we could do everything on that mobile device and that was a real social transformation the interesting thing was that Wi-Fi wasn't really linked to that social transformation you know I would go and speak to customers back in the day who would say bring your own device? Naw over my dead body we're never bringing you know bring your own device into the environment and what happened over time was organizations gradually recognized the importance of bring your own device and 4G and therefore high speed Wi-Fi what we see this time around is 5G comes along with this massive bandwidth improvement but at the same time organizations are realizing the importance of Wi-Fi 6 similar speeds and actually what I think we're going to see this time round is the business transformation leading the social transformation. The last time it was the public driving the change into the enterprise this time I think we're going to see the enterprise drive the change much faster than we thought. >> That's interesting 'cause obviously the killer app there that coincided with the social change with Facebook and Twitter and really a reemergence of LinkedIn you know as a key tool for business people but it was really the Twitter's and Facebook's that sort of drove that so what's the killer app this time around? (chuckles) >> Well do you know I think it's difficult to say here's the killer app just now 'cause when 4G came out we didn't know what the killer app was so I think it's hard for me to say here's the killer app but what I would say is you know you start to see things like virtual reality, augmented reality becoming a reality and business are all starting to now think about how can we use these technologies to get closer to our customers, to improve the productivity of our employees and how we can reduce cost and these sort of things ultimately businesses'll be very innovative around this and there'll be multiple different killer apps come along, for us to put our hands on our hearts today and say this is the killer app you know I think that's daft. >> You'd be starting a company if you knew. >> Yeah I would. (laughs) >> So Michael share with us what we need to know about 5G other than okay it's faster but from an architect standpoint what do we need to know? What's different and how's that going to affect the adoption? >> Yeah it's interesting obviously there's the speed gains but along with that there's the densification of the RAN that goes with 5G and for some customers for some service providers the opportunity to virtualize that RAN and to replace traditional integrated base band units with virtualized infrastructure on which you can run the infrastructural workloads that are needed in the Radio Access Network to be able to run that on compute rather than wall gardened integrated systems which opens up the opportunity to just distribute computing storage throughout that network infrastructure which obviously is used for infrastructure used for the RAN and used for the distribution of the mobile core in particular as we all embrace and certainly Cisco's embracing from an architecture point of view the separation of the control plane and the user plane for that mobile packet core. But once you have that infrastructure once you have that distributed compute that is much, much closer to the end user both consumer but more importantly the enterprise and user than it's ever been before, that opens up all kinds of opportunities for subsequent workloads to land on that infrastructure obviously caching is the most obvious one as we all consume more and more videos certainly we look at the analyst expectations for video and video growth by 2022 we expect about 81-82% of all traffic on the network to actually be video traffic so being able to put video caches at the edge is very important both from a quality of experience point of view and a pure cost point of view and then you've got the opportunity for the placement of all kinds of third party applications onto that edge compute infrastructure without 5G that edge compute infrastructure probably doesn't come about which marries up with the trends that we see in enterprise which is the continuing expansion into The Cloud continued growth of SAS services as well as their own private data centers and private Cloud which opens up that edge infrastructure to all of those application vendors that are serving enterprise to be able to position workloads at the edge of that network that can take advantage of the low latency and the enhanced bandwidth at those locations in the network. >> So Stu pivoting off of what Gordon said mobile plus 4G and then the social transformation it sounds like it's in this case it's edge 5G and a business transformation. >> Yeah well and Dave actually the word that I kept hearing jump out at me when Michael was going through that is enterprise because when I think about the 4G rollout was Cisco involved? Sure. Was Cisco like the first one you think of, of mobile, social and everything like that? Well you know there's a place that Cisco played but enterprise, enterprise, enterprise well Cisco's got a very strong position in that environment so is that how we should be thinking of it? And the other thing is what Gordon talked about that inside out that 5G plus Wi-Fi 6 that pieces together seems like a perfect place for Cisco to add its you know place in the market. >> Well certainly we're very excited about the opportunities with regards to the enterprise space in general and how we can enable, we can partner with our service provider customers to better serve and to better integrate with that enterprise environment, bringing together these two very powerful and innovative technologies, bringing together Wi-Fi 6 and 5G and certainly we're not the only ones that would observe that there was a study recently a few months ago, a study done of the CEO's of mobile network operators and according to that study 69% of those operators felt that their main monetization and their main way to drive revenue and profit off of 5G was actually orientated towards the enterprise. >> Yeah and look I'm very excited about number one so obviously we're known for being a Wi-Fi 6 player but we're also working very closely with the 5G players in the marketplace to make sure there's seamless handoff between 5G and Wi-Fi 6 you know? So the minute you check into the hotel when you come to San Diego what's the first thing you do? You put in your name and your room number. Those days are gone right? There's a seamless handover now from the 5G network to the Wi-Fi network to say this is exactly who you are, we know who you are and we'll onboard you seamlessly see? And we're working very closely with all of the handset providers to make sure that we integrate neatly there as well. So as we said at the start I think you know it will start this time round with the enterprise transformation it will lead the way the last time round the enterprises were dragged kicking and screaming into this world they're not getting dragged kicking and screaming into this world this time they're ready. >> Where does automation fit in this whole equation? What are your customers telling you? >> Well certainly it's a key area of focus and it's a key area of innovation for us I mean I would say that when we talk about a 5G network we do have a tendency to over abstract that that is a complicated set of technologies of which Cisco is the market leader in many obviously we don't do the macrocell radio's that is not part of our portfolio but we do all of the STN transport both in terms of equipment optical modules the optics themselves we do all of that, we're leading the industry with regards to the mobile packet core all of our routing assets and the full automation suite that you need to be able to deploy and manage a network that is an order of magnitude more dense than we've ever seen before, a network that has more equipment deployed further out than we've ever had before all in an environment where obviously our SP's, the service providers the global kind of comment they must find ways to make more money and to save money and the automation suite that we bring forward facilitates being able to manage and operate these very very large networks in a very cost effective way to the point that the operational costs and the total cost of ownership is significantly reduced but that automation also brings the agility to that network to the point that the service providers mobile network can more quickly address and more quickly activate services that those enterprise customers in particular, need. I mean an enterprise would not want to wait six months for a service activation more likely they want it activated in six minutes and you know the key to that is having a full suite of closed loop automation tools that enable that service creation. >> All right guys sorry we've got to leave it there we're in the speed zone at the DevNet Zone and the planes are backing up so thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE we appreciate it all right keep it right there everybody we'll be back with our next guest right after this short break you're watching theCUBE live from Cisco Live 2019 in San Diego be right back. (electronic jingle)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen, brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone to the cubes. Live coverage of Del Technologies World here at the Venetian fifteen thousand attendees. One of the biggest, most important tech conferences all year long. I'm Rebecca, not your host. Along with my co host, stew Minutemen. We're joined by Caitlin Gordon. She is the VP product marketing at Delhi Emcee. Thanks so much for coming back on the cute Kate. I >> know This is so nice. Maybe we'LL have to make it three days in a row. >> I would we would love that. All right, so the last year at this very comforted you lunch power, Max, what's Tet Walker viewers through Sort of. The new capability is the latest and greatest. What's going on with power Max this year? >> Yeah, My favorite thing to talk about his power, Max. So we couldn't miss that today. Yeah, So a couple of updates in the Power Mac's front couple on the software side and then on more on the hardware side as well. S o from ah software side. We've got a couple pieces, which is a lot of our customers, really starting with the largest of our customers, are looking to add more automation into their data centers, and storage is no exception. And how do I automate some of those storage work clothes? Teo, make things run more seamlessly, get into more of a cloud operating model. So we had a couple of announcements on that front. We have a new V R. Oh, plug in, um, to automate work clothes through the r o A. CZ. Well, as ants will play books coming this summer, a couple important automation hand spins and obviously a lot more to come there in the future. The other one in a similar vein, is that containers, right. We've seen the increase adoption of container. So, um, and that the container is being used in production applications means that external storage is actually become a reality in that world, and the support for a C. S. I plug in on power Max, is something that we're seeing more interest from. So we have announced that's coming this summer as well. >> So, Caitlyn, I remember a year ago when Power Mask got announced. I heard things like intelligence and automation. And I went to add non, you know who's been working on this kind of technology for decades? Is that non how we've been talking about this for decades? Tell me why it's different and he lit up like I hadn't seen him in awhile, told me, What's going on for I want you to connect now a year later is what's this mean for customers? What does that automation? You know, an intelligence mean, is there a certain KP eyes or hero metrics who have is two customers using this today that they couldn't have done? And with you, no last generation intelligence storage? >> Yeah. Hey, think about it. It's really about moving to this concept of the Autonomous Data center. And how does this become an autonomous storage system? So both the intelligence within the system that we talked about last year and the decisions that the system is making itself every single day all by itself, that's that has really changed. And it's a completely new evolution of its making billions of decisions a day for customers so they don't have to do that means you're gonna have fewer people managing storage and they can invest in other things. Then when you move that up the stack, some of that the bureau, the answer will play books really enables you to then automate more of the work flows within that so again gets you more into that operating model, and you can automate not just the storage infrastructure, but then get to this autonomous data center >> So way talk to Travis briefly about Dev ops and you're mentioning answerable playbooks. You know, for years we've been talking to customers and saying, Okay, we we need to get two more agile environments, you know, Dev ops there, but enterprise storage specifically, there's a little bit slowed up, so it sounds like we're starting to get to greater adoption. What? What, what what got us over that you know, Hurdle, and where our customers with it today? >> Yeah, and I think it's really the maturity of our largest global customers that have gotten to a place where, for the workloads that will continue to remain on these thes on from infrastructure on our purpose built storage on our high end arrays, they need to run that as efficiently as possible. Um, and a lot of the work we've done to build in a. I does part of that, but really, ultimately they're looking at in there. Three. Terek protector. How do they run things more smoothly? Um, and it's really our customers that have brought that us is a requirement, and we've been able to to support that. >> So how do you work with customers? Mean innovation is, of course, an underlying theme of this of this conference. Talk about how you collaborate with customers to to solve their problems and how you help them. Think ahead what their future needs are. >> Yeah, and certainly Travis, I myself, might our teams, as well as the engineering team, spend a lot of time with our customers in the briefing centre. A lot of in the field, um, really talking about their challenges and the privilege that we have, especially with something like a Power Max platform, is the customers we have. There are the ones that are constantly pushing the boundaries of what we can do for them today, so they always need the best performance. The best efficiency and what has changed is they also now we need that simplicity. They need that operational simplicity, even on their high resiliency. High performance systems. Um, and we spend a lot of time understanding those requirements on DH, the problems that they're trying to solve and how we can help them get there and that that could be automation that could be containers. But it could also be cloud right, And that's the other piece that we've we made a lot of investments across our portfolio is how do we support that cloud consumption cloud operating model, leveraging public cloud? Um, and and a lot of it really just comes from how do we help our oppressors continue to solve their problems? >> It's a competitive marketplace, and, as you said, customers, they want everything. They want efficiency. They want simplicity. They wanted to not cost them too much money. What what's your unique selling point? How do you message this is This is why our solution is >> that I mean, our overall strategy delancy from a storage perspective is that we're way. We'LL have a single product in each segment with which we've compete and each one will be architected for very specific requirements so that we can meet the combination of a price points and it features and capabilities across all these different perspectives and that each one of our platforms is designed to be industry leading in that category. Which is why we have power Max on the high end, the resiliency, that performance, the availability that you know, banks, hospitals, governments around the world expect. But the same time we have mid range pot for us. We have an entry platform that could be sold for under twenty five thousand dollars, right and has a different set of requirements. We have the unstructured business, which is supporting the data. Aaron. That data explosion in a file data, Um, so the The fact is the matter is this. That is all about having the right actor architecture's so customers can have the data in the right place at the right time with the right service level. Um, and that's why we have this portfolio and within each portfolio that were leading in each one of those categories, That's kind of the bigger perspective we have on it. We do not just have a hammer. Not everything is a nail for us. Um, and that's an important part of how we can partner with with our customers to help themselves. Not one challenge, but all the challenges they have >> killing one of the interesting shifts we saw the show is clouds being talked at more than ever at this show. One of the earlier segments we had on we talked about the cloud enabled infrastructure. So things like power, Max, you know, I asked J. Crone, you know, tell me why this is cloud watching, and he gave me a good answer. What I want to ask you your angle on is when you talk to customers, you know how to storage fit into the overall discussion of their cloud strategy. You know what, some of the key business drivers and you know how how's Del technology? >> And I'm glad you said that because Jay and I have had this cloud washing conversation as well as I think that's the unfortunate thing in the reality in the market in the past, probably ten years is a lot of cloud washing, and where we're really focused today is, and we talked a little about this yesterday as well as they say. There's one piece of the how do we fit into overall Del technologies cloud strategy with the Del Tech Cloud. I'm in the VCF integration. We kind of covered that the other pieces that when we look at cloud enabled infrastructure, we're focused on solving really specific use cases that we hear our customers trying to solve today of connecting that data center into a public cloud. So that could be what we call cloud connected systems. The tearing of data from your own promises, infrastructure into the public cloud. Really, that's more of an archiving. This case, a kind of a tape replacement use case that could be dead, remain cloud tear, cloud tearing cloud pools. All the different pieces we have there could be CLO Data Services, right. Offering storage Data services is in a public cloud. Unity Cloud Edition will be one or the New Delhi emcee. Cloud storage services could be another one or even that cloud data insights piece of it. So it's really about solving that solving real challenges about disaster recovery Analytics in the cloud. How do you do that? In a really impactful way? That's simple and easy for customers. >> Yeah, the other Claude related thing wanted to get your take on is many of solutions. I heard on there is, you know, it's VX rail underneath. It's VX rail underneath. It's VX rail under >> you. Notice that >> I did, and you know a way. We had a number of people. V X ray. Lt's doing great, but, you know, if you talk about cloud and the infrastructure that I have in my data center, you know, we've talked Teo, talk to Dell for years. You know, the new power Max last year is underneath some of those admire. Where does that fit in? Kind of CIA and cloud, you know, infrastructure piece. >> Yeah, in a lot of different places. And for Roddy, for reasons, right? Some of us just the high value workloads you need. The scalability, the resiliency, the performance you need the ability to scale your computing your capacity separately. You want to be able to consolidate not just your applications, but actually all your file and sew something like unity or even power. Max, you can have your block workloads and your file workloads there. So we have a lot of customers looking to use traditional three tier architecture, but leverage that in a true cloud operating model from an automation standpoint, cloud consumption model, but also leveraging public cloud computing, right, leveraging the public cloud and really impactful ways, for example, for disaster recovery, eh? So it's really that combining what people love about our industry leading best of reed storage. Um, with that agility of the public cloud is a combination that we certainly hear a lot from our customers of How can I make the best use of clouds? Everyone walks in and say that club first strategy, but it's really about well, how do you actually think about data first and then how do you have a cloud strategy that supports that? >> So So let's talk about the future. I mean, ahs, You said This is what the customer is thinking about right now, but it's your job to think ahead and make sure that you are giving them solutions that fit their future need. So what are you thinking about the solutions that are available today that were really unimaginable five years ago. I think about ahead to twenty twenty five when there is enough data to fill the Empire State Building thirteen times over. How are you helping companies manage the tsunami of data? >> Yeah, and I think part of that is really about again the operations we talked about. Part of that really just comes back to having the right architecture for that type of workload. So this is where I salon actually well before the data era actually was designed for this specifically. So Iceland, created in the early two thousand's, was designed of one file system from terabytes and two petabytes. A single administrator can manage now up to fifty eight petabytes in a single file system. That's game changing when you think about the scale that we're seeing today. So the reason we went to that capacity isn't certainly just cause we thought we could. It was cause our customers were asking for it. Is these workloads in that data that we're talking about autonomous driving center that are just driving the scale? Ability limits, And they're asking for more and more in the most efficient floor print possible. And if you think about that, especially even in the cloud context, there's a There's a combination of How do you leverage that in the in the data center right? And physics means you can't get it up into the cloud necessarily. Um, but then also, there are use cases. They're like analytics of How do you leverage public cloud computing? But then you have that industry leading scale out now, as on the from the storage side so you can combine that. So you talk about something that we talked about here last year, and now we're talking about it a little bit more as well as our integration with Google Cloud platforms. So a lot of our customers are looking to use G. C p for compute for analytics workloads on DH. It's really almost rent your compute for analytics, but you have to have the right storage platform with the right architecture on the back end of that. So what we've done is fully integrated. Iceland, uh, platform and file system through G C P portal. So you could actually combine that public hug, compute and that file system that can support that type of scale. So it's a really unique combination that can help support not only the scale of that data, but also that some of the unique use cases and work loads that are coming out of that >> So Caitlin lot of products here that that would be talking about. Last thing I want to ask is customer customer conversation you have, you know, is data the center of the challenge and opportunity. They have something else that kind of bubbling up. As you look across the conversations you're having that you could have your audience. >> I think at the center of what I hear from customers, Data's in there, but they don't come in saying its data, right? They'll come in thinking about, you know, just trying to figure out how to use cloud properly there. Think about how Doe I simplify things. How do I, um, operate in a way to meet the service levels with a budget that's definitely not getting bigger? Um, and really be as efficient as possible. And it's not, um, some people are looking to go public. Cloud thinking. It's an easy button are there, but it's it's really about How do we change things? Teo run more efficiently and customers inherently to understand, right that the data is at the center of it, and that's increasingly the most valuable asset in the organization. And then they need to optimize their infrastructure to support that, so it really does come down to what? What can we help them to simplify? Optimize. Secure that so that they can truly unlock that. David Capital. >> Well, thank you so much, Caitlin, for coming back on the Cube. That's thanks for having me. Rebecca Knight for stew Minutemen. There is so much more coming up of the cubes. Live coverage of Del Technologies World in just a little bit.

(upbeat tech music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas of Dell Technologies World. I am your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my esteemed co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Caitlin Gordon. She is the VP of product marketing at Dell EMC and Muneyb Minhazuddin, who is the VP solutions of product marketing at VMware. Thanks so much for returning to theCUBE. You guys are veterans. >> Thank you for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So we're going to talk about the VMware, Dell EMC storage portfolio. It is better together, which sounds like it's a theme for a political campaign. Walk our viewers through, give us some examples of how you are jointly coming up with solutions. >> Yeah, I'll start if that's all right. I think that a lot of what we've seen is that the Dell Technologies cloud strategy is such an important thing about what we're talking about today, but what we've also seen is that when we're looking to use the cloud, external storage is an important part of that strategy, so what we've already done is we've collaborated together to validate VCF with both unity and power max. And that's really the beginning of our journey together, to enable that external storage to be part of the workload domain, to have SDDC manager not just manage the other parts of the infrastructure, but to manage external storage and that you can have resiliency and performance for those workloads that need it, those kind of high value workloads that need it, and that's really the beginning. We think it's going to get much broader, much deeper integration as we continue to work together. >> Yeah and I think as a continued theme, and our solutions as, you know, Caitlin was pointing out, again, you know, what's most important and what's customers want out of this and their evolution of, you know, workloads, which are very data center centric and, you know, clients of our architecture with a very specific infrastructure, design, application, shifting towards more cloud native and public cloud hybrid applications. So, that has a different nature of storage requirements that got to evolve from block storage, file storage, object storage. That evolution needs to happen and not only happens better together with VMware and Dell EMC, so. >> So, Caitlin, I think back to this is the 10th year we're having theCUBE here, what used to be EMC World and it used to be you talked about VMware and storage and it was okay, let's go through the integration points that we had and EMC would say "we're as good or better "than everybody out there" and check all the boxes here. There's a shift today when we're talking about not just working with it, but, you know, integrations of products really it looks more like joint solutions. We know in VxRail, there's, you know, joint development that happens on, so give us a little bit about that difference about, you know, 2019 storage with Dell EMC and VMware versus the past. >> Yeah, and there is a shift, right? We're here together. (laughs) >> Absolutely. And our teams, our product management teams, our organizations are coming together, they're spending a lot of time together collaborating on what our strategy is together. How do we best approach that so we can bring solutions to our customers that provide that level that Dell Technologies can really provide that no one else can? And it's truly something unique and differentiated and what we're talking about today is really just the beginning. There's a lot more to come on that front. >> And you know, I think also the integrations in the past where I would call them API, interface driven, now like you point out, it's co-engineered starting with the solutions like VxRail, cloud foundation, and the co-engineering makes a big difference because we're sharing road maps. We're sharing hey, what are we thinking about performance? What are we thinking about, you know, application requirements? And that's very different to just, I'm going to partner with you, I'm going to pass from APIs, you going to call some APIs, and that has an impact on like ready solutions, it is cloud foundation, a full stack with life cycle, SDDC Manager. That kind of integration only happens with co-engineering. >> Talk a little bit about the partnership and this better together. We talked about the products and the solutions, but I want to hear about the cultural, the cultures of the two companies. We know, I mean they're both technology powerhouse, both technology optimists. How would you describe the different cultures and how you can reflect each other and collaborate with each other in different ways? >> You want to start with that one? >> Sure, I think it's very interesting coming from, you know, west coast software, agile, we're like hey, we'll have VMworld in a few months, but you know, we're still from a software agile world. We're coming out with new services for Vmworld, we're not defined yet. And then working with, you know, Dell EMC folks who are, you're already looking at performance, infrastructure, planning, so the road map alignment of, you know, every three months, I'm going to come out with software innovation, whereas you have to put a lot of thought process into how to do this. It's actually had been quite interesting. You know, it's I would call it interesting because it was tough. It was tough initially to kind of figure out how do you kind of, you know, bring a cohesive road map where you're making 12 months, you know, infrastructure, investment in road map to three months of software cycle, but I think it's actually come together really well. >> And at the end of the day, we're talking the same customers and we're solving the same problems and in a lot of ways, that kind of legacy Dell EMC's side has come from the infrastructure, from the bottom up, and then the VMware kind of has come from the top down, and bringing those two together, although our development cycles have a different kind of time span against them, we're trying to solve the same problems for our customers and that's really where a lot of those innovations are going to continue to come. >> One of those interesting points you talk about from the bottom down and the top, bottom down and bottom up and top down. Sorry, >> (laughter) it's been a long day so far. >> We forgive you. We forgive you. >> These new waves of technology, you know, remember back to, you know, when flash rolled out. There were things that needed to do the infrastructure layer and there's stuff that happens on the application side. We are seeing a real renaissance in what's happening in the storage industry. Talk about NVMe, storage class memory. It's not just okay I have some new gear and I have to redo it, but, you know, it dramatically changes, you know, we're getting ready to scuzzy stack when you talk about the applications side, so, you know, I'd love to hear how this comes together and, you know, what's in the product today and how are you developing these together? >> Another interesting example that almost crosses those two is CloudIQ. So CloudIQ is something that we've developed in-house. It's an agile developed software application that is a cloud native app developed with pivotal, runs on a Dell EMC cloud. That's run out of our side of the house and it came out actually with Unity three years ago today. We now have that not just across our core storage portfolio, but we have that now with VM health insights, as well, where we've actually taken that approach where we can give that impact as well, and I think that that just shows you kind of how we do have those pieces of the culture too coming together and trying to bring these solutions together. >> I know, and I think again, you know, thinking customers first, right. We talk about this, you know, multi cloud, hybrid cloud environments where people are taking their workloads, they compute storage, networking requirement, and they're trying to migrate their workloads back and forth, but, you know, there's a more important part of the workload migration is also the data migration, right, so how do you take, you know, data migration and look at different data sources, look at your data bases, look at your, you know, different kind of data migration, and that's where, you know, storage is so critical. It's easy to take a snapshot of a workload and move it across, but then, if you have to pin it on a very seamless data migration pad, you have to have really clear storage strategies, which will support your, you know, hyper converge, your hybrid cloud, your external storage strategies that you got to map to that migration pad. >> Yeah and a service that we're going to announce tomorrow I started to kind of address that too, of like, how do you combine some of the public cloud compute and the agility of that with using these native array-based replication to get the data there, right, and combining not just that simple data movement, but having that application awareness and that application consistency, which is so critical for things like disaster recovery, which is one of the main things we certainly hear from our customers, how do I used the public cloud as my DR site? They don't want to run their own disaster recovery data centers. Customers of all shapes and sizes are really going there and something that we're announcing tomorrow is another example of that so we'll talk more about that one tomorrow, but we've got some more news on that one as well. >> So, in talking about the trends in cloud, we know that it's a multi cloud world, it's a hybrid cloud world. You were just talking about the different ways in which customers want to do their work and the different places they want to do it, public, private. What are some other trends that you're seeing and where do you think we're going to be talking about it in the years to come on this? >> Sure, like, you know, I think the traditional workloads is breaking out into two things. One is do I migrate into the cloud? And the second is I'm rewriting the application to be more cloud native. And it's not the entire application, and it's a classic example, I'm sure all of you do mobile banking, right? And guess what? I've worked with, lot of financial companies are doing this. It's a really cool, cloud native mobile application where I'm doing all my mobile banking, but then, my query goes to a main frame in a banking ledger, which is still, you know, where your banking ledgers maintain. And then pull through a three tier application through a web and database tier, pushed out to the cloud, and accessed by a cloud native environment. Where I'm coming at is even though it looks very modern, a lot of customers are maintaining this computer history museum, which all these apps are scaling through and that's not going away in our lifetime, because, you know, there's a lot of complexity in there, and it's really how we help our customers in the journey to pay off their technical debt and move over to newer technologies, be it cloud, cloud native, and get a clean start. You know, if you're a startup, you don't have all these technical debt, but unfortunately a lot of the large companies have these technical debt and how we help customers, because they're really lost. They're like I don't know what to do, there's so much coming at me, and they need the help, and I think that that's where the power of Dell Technologies comes together in giving them that journey. >> Yeah and the bank is a really good example. We have a customer who's exactly that example where everything from the main frame that runs all their transaction processing that they've always run to their mobile applications all run off of a power max, and part of this journey for them is that they absolutely need that infrastructure, but they also need to simplify their operations as much as possible and I think one platform to consolidate all that on is true in banks, and governments, and hospitals around the world and I think that that's part of where we see a lot of this pull of how do I get that cloud experience, but how do I still use that infrastructure that I have? >> Caitlin, everybody's trying to squint through the new announcement of the Dell Technologies cloud there and what does this mean to the storage people, you know, what storage is underneath that? Is that something that they see it, will they recognize it? I was wondering if you can help eliminate that some. >> Yeah and some of this will be a little clearer too tomorrow as we talk through a little bit more of the details, but if you think through the Dell Technologies cloud strategy essentially as two parts, the Dell Technologies cloud announced today and then Dell Technologies cloud enabled infrastructure that we'll talk through tomorrow. So the Dell Technologies cloud, what we announced today, essentially has two different flavors announced today and then one that we kind of said where we're going in the future. One is the Dell Technologies cloud platform, which is essentially the VxRail infrastructure and that's that first offer, and then there's the data center as service, the VMware cloud on Dell EMC. The third one, which was only mentioned quickly today, is that validated design. So that's leveraging our best of breed three tier architecture, including storage with that. The term that Jeff used today was VCF ready. Right, it validated with VCF, that's with Unity and Power max today. Again, that's the beginning, but you can picture what we're doing with validated design, is really enabling us to offer our three tier architecture, best of breed, across all three tiers, and leveraging VCF for that life cycle management, etc. >> And again, it's giving customers those choices to say hey, do I want to keep and maintain my, modernize my infrastructure, or do I have, you know, and this is the trend shifting where hybrid, you know, people will be talking about that, it's just the trend shifted only in the last couple of years for hybrid in, shut down my data center and go to the cloud. Now it's really kind of gone two way. The streets changed from not just going from data center to the cloud, but also coming from cloud to the data center, so the interesting challenges become about not just taking the requirements of your, you know, client server architecture and migrating it to, you know, elastic cloud architecture, which also taking that elastic EC2, you know, Azure environment and landing them into your data center environments managed a service, so that comes with its own challenges, but that's where customers want it to be, because you know, they're going "I've built so much IP, natively in my cloud, "applications that I've built over the years "and now I have a need for it closer to my data center "or my users or my edge and I really need to bring it back" And that's, you know, having challenges from a storage perspective. Now, they were not designed for client server, they were designed for cloud native elasticity, so I go to build storage architecture that's supposed there. >> And I think the other pieces that, and we'll talk some about this tomorrow, but this Dell Technologies cloud enabled infrastructure is kind of a, the other side of the coin, where we think about Dell Technologies cloud, that's really transforming into a cloud operating model and you're purchasing infrastructure to really transform that, but a lot of our customers want to use the cloud for very specific use cases. They want to replace tape and they want to archive to the cloud, right, so we have the capabilities and we'll continue and the vast capabilities of simply moving data from your infrastructure into public cloud, converting into object and putting in there, so you've met the cost profile, and you can maybe finally get rid of tape. I think I've for 14 years been trying to get rid of tape in the industry. Haven't gotten there yet. But then there's things like offering your data services, storage, data protection, data services in a cloud, so offer to find assets in the cloud or even as a service consumption of our infrastructure. So again, more on that tomorrow. And then there's the how do you manage that infrastructure and the data itself? Having that visibility on that and that's really that kind of cloud data insights piece of that. So that's really the cloud enabled infrastructure piece is really about getting to how do I leverage the cloud for disaster recovery, for archiving, for analytics? That type of thing. So, a lot of the things we'll talk about tomorrow more focus on those types of cases as well. >> Well you've given us a lot of tantalizing tidbits about what we're going to hear tomorrow, so thank you-- >> So now you have to tune in. >> We will be here. You better be here too. >> I know where to find you. >> Caitlin, Muneyb, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. This was great. >> Thanks. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have a lot more of our, theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat tech music)