>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World, 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and it's Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back here on theCUBE. We continue our live coverage here from Dell Technologies World 2018. We are live, we are in Las Vegas. I'd say it was kind of warm when we first got here, but it's chilled off a little bit so I hope the weather is a little bit better wherever you are. But it's red hot inside here as far as what's happening on the show floor. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls. It is now our pleasure to welcome to our set, Susan Sharpe who's a senior consultant product manager at Dell. Susan, good to see you. >> Thank you very much. >> John: And Brian Henderson, director of Storage Portfolio Product Marketing at Dell EMC. Brian, good to have you both. >> Thank you >> Cube, rookies right? This is your-- >> I'm a rookie. >> First-timer >> Your debut, right? >> Yes >> First-timer >> Glad to break you in that way. It's good to have you here. Let's talk about the show. Just first off. Because we are starting to wind down, just a little bit. But you know strong attendance. I've been out on the solutions expo floor, that's really cool. A lot of great stuff going on out there. So the two of you what's your take on what you've seen here over the last three days? >> Yeah, I think there's a lot of transformation, right? It's all about transformation I think we're seeing that across the industry overall. Everything is changing everything is connected. It's all about apps these days. It's all about digitizing your business. Anywhere you can add technology to really add that element of your technology and digital modernization to your business. It's really starting to take shape, I think. A couple of years back, we were talking it but it wasn't really happening. And now we're seeing this huge trend towards everybody is actually starting to do it. >> John: Making it real, right? >> We're making it real. >> Alright Susan what do you think? >> So, I think he summarized it really well, I would just add to that automation and intelligence. Looking for systems to provide the insights and intelligence about the environment and simplify people's work. >> Brian and Susan, since it is your first time on the program tell us a little bit about what you've worked on. I've got some history with you, you're both what we call legacy EMC now, I guess. Like myself, I never worked for Dell EMC but I did work for a company that used to be called EMC. >> Absolutely, yeah we go way back Stu and I. Right now we're seeing a lot of sensible decisions being made. I'd say if you go way back, There was just a lot of things happening, there was a lot of a lot of smart moves being made these days. Michael Dell obviously made a huge investment in picking up EMC and for a lot of us, it's super exciting to see kind of it come together and there's been a lot of changes a lot of investments in the technologies of the future. Things like Cloud IQ which we're going to talk about. But it's been really fun. >> Great and Susan, what projects are you working on these days? >> So, Cloud IQ is my primary focus. As we talk more about the product I'll give some examples. But, we started with Cloud IQ very focused on one particular storage platform and now what we're looking at doing is expanding that across multiple platforms. So I get to be singularly focused on the Cloud IQ, but looking at it spanning across multiple platforms. >> I attended an event that Dell held towards the end of last year, they called it IQT and it was IOT with intelligence put together and some of us the analysts it was like okay, I see what you're doing but IOT everybody knows. Cloud IQ I think there's intelligence built into it. One of the themes, I've actually been looking this week, we've talked about intelligent storage, and intelligent management for a couple of decades in our industry but maybe explain a little bit more about the product and why is this actually intelligent now. No offense to the things we've tried in the past (Susan laughs) >> Susan: Sure >> But definitely, to your point Brian, it feels a little more real some of these things we're talking about. >> Yeah, absolutely so if you see what's going on with the industry today, everybody's connecting things and you know we've been collecting a lot of data in a very secure way from our customers for years. Just until recently we started to kind of talk about that and market that capability. It's really exciting what we can do with it. We make sure and we honor each customer their privacy rights, of course. But you're able to do a lot of in-depth analysis, collection We're able to look for anomalies in the system. So, the analogy I like to use is like a Fitbit for storage. It's not just storage, so we're kind of starting at storage which is the exciting part we're starting with unity we're now directed availability on the SC series which was formerly Compellent and then we're going to expand that to VMAX we're going to expand that to Xtremio so we're going to go cross portfolio with that and, can we talk about virtualization? >> Sure >> So we're going to expand into the vmware layer as well. So we're going to really start with a discrete use case we've got what, over 3,500 arrays already connected today. We're adding about 100 per week So, it's really exciting to see the data that we're able to get. We give it back to our customers and partners actually, so a lot of our key partners they want to be able to act as that intermediary for their customer and give them guidance on what to do. So, we've opened that up. >> Let me get into the Fitbit analogy. So what is the health that we're looking at there because we could all relate to that, right? We're looking at my pulse and blood pressure, all those things so what's the pulse and the blood pressure inside stories that you're looking at? >> A perfect lead in, so you talk about the typical metrics from a Fitbit in terms of the human body. The metrics that we're looking at in terms of the health and the categories that we're looking at are the typical things that you would care about in terms of your storage environment. So the things like data protection, are you maintaining your data protection windows and recovery point objectives and ensuring that your data is being protected the way that you expect. Things like capacity and ensuring that you are not at an imminent risk of running out of capacity. Nobody likes that phone call at two in the morning so being able to be proactive about indicating when storage administrators need to start taking action to be able to prevent that call at two in the morning. So some of those areas are where we're looking at our health score. >> Susan, I think back years ago EMC was one of the leaders in doing some of this. It was the phone home capability and we understood what was there. Customers always say, "Oh! The tech showed up with some part "that was ready to fail before we even knew." How is this different? What's this update? How did this change really how businesses are working when it comes to everything? >> I'm glad you lead with that because I think it's really important as a side note to emphasize that that is the foundation and has been the foundation for proactive health for many years. Now what we're doing is we're adding on additional areas of focus like the example that I gave for the data protection. That wouldn't result in the phone home necessarily and it doesn't need to result in the storage engineer showing up or the drive showing up at the door. Instead we can proactively alert our storage administrators to the fact, again, that their data is not being protected with the service level that they expect, and then provide that clear remediation about what they need to do to bring those into that compliance. So instead of break/fix type things, it's more about how they can better optimize their environment to be able to meet the goals that they have. >> When you're talking about support these days I mean that games changing right? >> Absolutely >> And so, as you develop new capabilities and new evaluation tools I mean your service in general, the support your giving, you've got to come out with almost like a new paradigm is it not? How is that changing in your world now? >> So, we see that I mean Susan talked about what we've done in the past how we're changing it and now it's, I go back to analogies right? So you used to go to the doctor when you got sick now it's all about wellness so you're encouraged to go a little more often to get a checkup, so we're doing the same types of things. We give health scores on a range of zero to 100 and we're able to drill in to those specific parameters that Susan talked about to be able to show people how to kind of set up a best practices environment. So we're really starting to get a lot more proactive about how people can understand the health of their system. We now have an app so people can actually check it out remotely. You could be on a beach somewhere on your vacation and you don't have to worry about your system because you can quickly scan it, and check in on the status of your system. So that's what I think people want, they want more access to things so they're able to proactively understand it instead of react and it's all crazy. >> Let me ask you about the number let's just pretend 85, I got 85 whatever, is that telling me that I'm doing something wrong? Or that something has gone wrong within the system? I mean, what is that telling me exactly about what irregularity has occurred? Is it because of something by commission, or is it omission and I've got a systemic problem? >> Well that's a great question. It could be any of those things, right? So, one of the main things that we're looking at, I gave the example, for instance, of a storage pool that is already oversubscribed because we have great efficiencies on our storage systems. But if that pool is oversubscribed and is starting to reach using our predictive analytics we can identify when that pool is starting to reach full capacity starting within a quarter. And so, by being able to look at that it may be that a storage administrator provisioned more storage in a given pool than was intended. But it may just be that the storage ended up being consumed faster than what was expected by everyone involved. So, it's not necessarily that someone did something wrong per se, but it's that it's now time to pay attention take action be proactive and alleviate the risk. >> I got you. >> Brian, walk us through just some of the basics of this product itself. >> Brian: Sure >> Is it something stand alone? Is it part of a maintenance package? >> Brian: Yeah yeah yeah >> Available today? How many customers are using this? >> Sure, so the product became available in kind of an early release capacity when we announced Unity two years back. Since then it's grown over 3,500 array. We're probably up around 4,000 arrays now. And we keep adding about 100 per week. The product is built with our own pivotal cloud foundry so it can be kind of ported across multiple different clouds it lives in the cloud and so you can access it anywhere, and what you're able to do is quickly get the health score. So it's plugged into your system, the back-end is also plugged into our big data lake so we're understanding what's happening across multiple systems, but we give specific guidance to each system. It's going to be really really valuable when we span it across the entire portfolio. Because then you'll get this dashboard kind of health score across the entire environment and you're basically looking at the dashboard of systems and you'll see kind of the red, yellow, green type markings of what to do next. Like Susan said, you're not going to find out everything just from that number, you'll drill in and what they've done is they've programmed in remediation tips for each one. So you're able to start really kind of high level and then drill into each component after that. >> Does that come with unities? Is it a SaaS offering? >> Comes free with that. It's SaaS offering that comes with that. >> Great, so maybe Susan walk us through this expansion that we've talked a little bit about. Once it's on the next platform everybody that has the platform gets it? >> Everybody has access to that, so Cloud IQ, one thing I want to add and I will get to that in just a moment is the benefit this is probably obvious already but the benefit of the fact that it is hosted in the cloud means that customers don't have anything to deploy and just like your smart phone, you get all of the latest upgrades with no effort at all. And we have a little "What's new in Cloud IQ" feature that you can always be up to date. So, the process is this it's very simple once the customer sets up the storage system and then the secure pipe, so secure remote services for heritage EMC products and support assist for the SC series bringing that data into the data lake then at that point the customer simply logs onto CloudIQ.DellEMC.com supply us their support credentials and they will see the systems that are being managed by Cloud IQ. And if I may just add another thing, we were talking about the proactive health score that is based on rules and best practices from the subject matter experts for each platform and those scans, those health checks start running within the first hour of the systems being in Cloud IQ so you're automatically, customer's are automatically getting the benefit of Cloud IQ. Excuse me. >> So, is it self-fix then? I mean, if I see red do I have the tools to get to yellow get to green? Or do I-- (stammers) What do I do? Do I call you? Or am I equipped enough that I can plug the leak myself? >> Absolutely, I'd say most of the issues are best practices recommendations. So you'll be able to get in there and see alright, uh something happened. Let's go back to the health analogy. If your resting heart rate is 75 and then one day it's all of a sudden 125, there's probably an issue, right? So that's uh that's a bad health score. >> Right, that's a red. (Susan laughs) >> That's a red flag what you need to do is probably get a little more exercise or maybe there's something stressing you out. That's kind of a similar analogy of what's happening. So, there's something in the system we have an anomaly prediction system that's part of this and so if you're normal IOPS pattern is a certain thing and then one day it's really really low or really high compared to the average we're also going to red flag that and we're going to tell you you ought to just look at what's happening in your environment. Most of the issues we're going to say, "Okay, you're running out of space. "There's a configuration issue. "Your network may not be hooked up just right "Go check it out and by the way, "based on your signature pattern "we're going to actually recommend what to do next." So we're collecting all these problem signatures and that's able to kind of get to a resolution very quickly. >> Yeah, Susan I know one of the things that people attending this show from the Dell EMC slide love the most get to talk to a lot of customers. So what kind of asks they're giving you, what kind of feedback they're giving you, what's on their wish list and you know, general feedback on Cloud IQ. >> The general feedback is more, faster. (laughs) We talked about the platforms that we're going to be adding in. There's a lot of enthusiasm about that. Those are based on asks from last year, so we are addressing those asks. And now that they see the momentum, they're wanting us to continue that momentum and continue to expand work Cloud IQ will be applied. I would say, hands down, that's the biggest request. And I love that request! I would love to see Cloud IQ expand as much as possible. >> Well here's to wishing 100s across the board for everybody's score card. Nothing but green, right? That's all we want. (Susan laughs) >> Brian: Absolutely >> Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you >> John: We appreciate the time and the insight. >> Thank you very much >> John: Fitbit for your IT operations All right back with more you are watching theCUBE here we are live at Dell Technologies World 2018 and we're in Las Vegas. (upbeat music)