>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Sands! We continue here live on theCUBE, our coverage here of Dell Technologies World 2018. 14,000 attendees wrapping up day 3. We are live as I said with Stu Miniman. I'm John Walls, and it is now our pleasure to welcome to the set Steve Fingerhut, who is the SVP and GM of SSD and Cloud Software Business Units at Toshiba Memory Americas. Steve, good to see you, sir. >> Great to be here. >> And Ravi Pendekanti, who is the SVP of Server Solutions Product Management and Marketing at Dell. >> Thank you, John. >> Ravi, good to see you, sir. >> Same here, sir. >> Yeah, let's talk about, first off, show theme. Make it real, right? Digital transformation, but make it real. >> Ravi: Yup. >> So, what does it mean to the two of you? We've heard that theme over and over again, and what do you think that means to your customers as well? How do you make it real for them? >> First and foremost, I think the whole idea of new workloads come in play. People talk about machine learning and deep learning as you, I'm sure, are aware of. People talk about analytics. The fact is, each of us is collecting a lot more data than a year ago. Which is good for my friend Steve and others, and obviously, we like the fact that customers are looking at making more real-time, if not near real-time, analysis. And the whole notion of governmental agencies across the world trying to go into more of a digital world where if you look at a country like India, for example, I mean, they have a billion people who are looking at other cards where they didn't have a form of identification for each individuals. Now if they're gone through a new transformation phase where they want to ensure that every single one of them actually has a way of identification, and it's all done digitally with accounts and everything else that goes on, this is just some of the manifestations of the digital transformation we see, whether it is in your industries, pick your favorite one, whether it's financial sector, the manufacturing, health care, all the way to governmental agencies. I think each of them are looking at how do they look at providing rights out of services. Either for their customers or their communities at large, and, you know, we can't be more excited about what this provides an opportunity for us to go back and provide a way for them to communicate and do some cool takes. >> Steve? >> Yeah, Ravi, you mentioned the workloads that are driving the new campaign or that you're highlighting in the new campaign Make It Real, and, many of those workloads are, they're new architectures, and they were basically built from day one on SSDs, right? Counting on that performance, reliability, etc. And so obviously, that's what we're here to promote at the show. And you can see the new workloads, obviously anything Cloud very much counts on SSDs and Flash. And then as you get into machine learning, different types of artificial intelligence, those are certainly counting on the performance of SSDs. And keep nothing more real than actual products in hands so with Ravi's products and ours, we have a number of demo's, including the new AMD platforms that the Power Edge team is rolling out, running all of these new workloads on Toshiba SSDs. So it's a good way to make it real. >> Yeah, Steve, maybe bring us in a little bit kind of the state of storage, though. We have talked about SSDs, and we're now a decent way into it. Dell's announcement talking a lot about NVMe. Maybe give us the Toshiba viewpoint on memory and storage and some of those transitions we're going through. >> Right, well, I guess the secret's out that SSDs are a great addition. Right? You take pretty much any environment, and you add SSDs, and it will go faster. So it's pretty much the biggest bang for the buck in terms of incremental performance. So what that means is just tremendous growth. And the last couple years have been, really for the industry, keeping up with that really increased demand. So there's inherent efficiencies in the SSDs. We're trying to build as many as we can, and then obviously trying to help our customers use them in the most efficient ways possible. >> Yeah, I agree with Steve. I mean, it is an efficiency equation. The fact of the matter is, you really do need to provide customers with a better way of ensuring that timely information is made available. Again, it's information, and it has to be timely. Because if you really don't provide it at a time when our customers need it, there's really no advantage of being really, having right infrastructure, right? Or lack of it, for that matter. Case in point, if you look at what we just announced, Stu. Yesterday, we had talked about the R840, for example, which is a 4-socket server. And we actually announced it with 44 NVMe drives, believe it or not. That's about two times more than the nearest competitor that just gives you an idea into the amount of data that customers are consuming on the applications, obviously. And more importantly, when we were coming up with this notion, we felt that 12 was probably a good number. Maybe 24 was going to be a stretch. And the number of customers we have talked to even in the last two days, I mean it's been huge. We're hearing them saying, "Wow, we can't wait "to go get this product in our hands." Because that really shows you that there is already a pretty big demand for these kinds of technologies to be brought in. >> Yeah, I like what you were saying there, Ravi, because I'd like both of you to help connect the dots for us a little bit. 'Cause when I think back to, okay, what speed disc did I have? Or was the flash piece in? This was something that, it was traditionally the server admin. Maybe there was some application person that came in. But you're talking about C-level discussions here. The trends that Jeff Clark talked about in his keynote as to, you know, this is what the business is driving things, like AINML and some of those. Steve, how are the conversations changing to get this piece of the infrastructure up at more of the C-level discussion? >> Right, it certainly is part of the transformation where it's been talked about several times this week. IT has moved from being a cost center to the revenue center and then that puts it on the CEO's radar much more squarely. You definitely want to, if you're the CIO, CTO, infrastructure leader, your goal is to try to deliver that agility, right? Don't stand in the way of revenue, while managing security, managing cost. And it's those dynamics and, you know, it's not a new conversation, but it's the public versus private hybrid. What exactly should go where? And those are still top-of-mind for all the customers we're talking to. >> Actually, Steve hit on something else, if I may, which is about security. And I can't tell you, Stu, a good 70% of the customers on average today, do not finish a conversation in the 30-minute chunks we have had without talking about what is it you guys are going to do for security. And that's a huge number or an increase from where we were just even a year or two ago. And imagine having said that, if you really had a longer conversation, security obviously is one of those fundamental pillars that everybody comes down to. Because everybody's worried about data, and the fact that there's leakage of information, if I may, pertaining to this. And more importantly, you know, making it real, if I may, to your point earlier on, Jon, as well. Which is, customers don't want to look at just the buzz words. They're now asking for proof points. Proof points on, "Hey, what does this really mean "in terms of security?" For example, when we talk about zero arrays or, you know, secure arrays, sorry, which is, how do you go retire an old data server or a box without necessarily worrying about the bits and bytes being left on the disc drives? So we have come up with new technologies which enables all the drives to be wiped. Makes it a lot easier, of course, with some of the stuff we do with Toshiba, and some of their technologies as well. But my point, again, being that I think now, our C-level execs are coming in asking us for, not just the major teams, but they're actually more interested in finding out how and what is it we're doing to help some of those major teams. And I think the number of requests we have had for some of the white papers we have come out with, Steve, I think has only grown up now. >> Absolutely. >> Which, I don't think was happening in the past from the C-level execs. So it's absolutely a valid statement. >> Yeah, well, there were Senate hearings last year and some pretty famous data breaches, and you have senators grilling CEO's, and it was shocking. They actually used, there was a senator who used the term, full disc encryption, and taking a CEO to task for not using full disc encryption and so I think that might help, talking about getting on the C-level radar. That helps. >> That was good staff work there. >> Exactly, exactly. That was a good plant. >> Yeah, right. But to the point of security. Obviously with this exponential growth of data, unstructured, blowing up, and then all of a sudden, you become a lot riper, if you will, and you've got a lot more to manage. And so with that, how much more at risk are people, and is that what's raising the awareness now in the C-sweep? Is they realize that they're a much bigger target now than maybe when data wasn't as plentiful you know, back in the old days, if you will. Is that part of this? Or is that it? >> I believe that's a big part of it. And, one of the other things that's obviously going with this is, if you really look at the disclosures that any of us have to go through, even in terms of whether it's a simple credit card you're looking at. I don't know if you've ever seen those. As we were doing some of the analysis, we noticed. You want a simple credit card application, we'd had some security, and, you know, personal information clauses is actually garnered by about 120% in terms of the number of things they ask for. And making sure that the consumer is aware as well. Right? I don't think that happened before. And the fact of the matter is, I don't think there's a single day that we can go through any of the trade press without somebody coming out with a security breach maybe, or a security feature, whether it's hardware or software. And I think there's a whole security encryption device or drives, I think there's a huge demand for that as well, right? >> Absolutely. And you talk about the data growth. It's obviously been phenomenal. In his keynote Monday, Michael Dell talked about the data growth from machine to machine, and it's going to make this look like a little bit of data. So like you said, just that risk, the exposure is much larger, and you have to keep that data secure. So as Ravi mentioned, we work closely with Dell. There's a lot of, it's not an easy problem to solve, right? So there's a lot of engineering to make sure that you have that end-to-end security, and that's why we work with things like the instant system erase, right? So you can, one button, erase the system in minutes, versus in the past, it might take hours and days. And do you really trust that it's gone? Those types of things, so I think that those are enabling a much more robust security, and you basically have to make it easy, right? >> Letting people sleep at night. >> Exactly. >> That's what you're doing. >> It's interesting. In the past, the only way you could do that was you had to write a series of 0's and 1's on their driver. And that would take, you know, hours together. That's how you would erase your data, right? I love when you talk about autonomous vehicles. Imagine there's a whole big, a whole discussion as much as how do you make sure that you have the, that's kind of an edge computing as Jeff, I think, mentioned on stage yesterday. That you want to not have latency come in between making a deterministic turn, right? Or an object appears. You don't want to wait for the breaking system to play because some decision needs to be made in a remote center. Right? Which essentially means now you have got data being collected and analyzed and acted upon. And there are things like that, and you've probably heard of all the insurance companies are working on, you know, what kind of data can we collect it, because when crashes happen, right? How do you make sure that, you know, there are privacy laws in place and what-not, who has access to it, plenty of stuff. >> John: Sure. >> Steve, want to get your viewpoint. We're getting not far from the end of the show. Why don't you give, in general, the partner viewpoint of Dell technology's world in, specifically Toshiba. I know you've got, there's the booze, there's the party, there's demos, there's labs, so a lot of activity your team's doing, for those that haven't been here. And, you know, Toshiba's worked with both Legacy Dell, Legacy MC. Any commentary to close on that coming together? >> Right. I think last year, I used the Jordan/Pippen analogy, but it's only gotten better since then. So it's a great partnership. We're definitely growing strong together, and like you said, that doesn't happen overnight. That's years of hard work and trust that makes that a possibility. But I truly believe we're only getting started. And you know, one of our goals we're working together is how do we make these important capabilities like security more common, more accessible, lower cost, those types of things. So that's a major factor, major focus area for us going forward. But definitely see this is just the beginning. >> Any key highlight from the show or activities that your team's been doing here that you'd like to leave us with? >> Sure. Yeah, we have a significant presence here. We have eight server demos running. I mentioned the AMD servers, multiple workloads across these new emerging workloads. And then the hands-on demo zone. Where actually, the developers can use the systems and software they want to evaluate. They can use them in the Cloud. Those are all being driven by Toshiba, and of course, as part of the Dell Solution. Yeah, we're happy. Honored to be a big part of the show this year. >> Jordan/Pippen, I was thinking more like Curry/Durant. That's where I was going with that. >> Exactly. That might be a little more up-to-date, right? >> I'm good with Jordan. No, he wasn't bad. Pretty good pair like you two are. Thanks for joining us both. We appreciate it, Ravi, Steve. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Good seeing you here. Back with more of a continue, our live coverage here on theCUBE where Dell Technologies World 2018, and we are in Las Vegas.