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