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]