>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, to EMC World. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with co-host, Paul Gillin. We are joined by Eric Seidman. He is the Senior Product Manager, Product Marketing, Dell EMC. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Eric: Thanks for having me. Pleasure. >> So I want to start out by talking about the Isilon launch. Tell us a little bit about the impetus for this new platform. >> Yeah, right, so thanks. You know, we see a lot happening from our customers' standpoint. I mean, there's a lot of trends in the industry. All flash, move to cloud. But in our particular markets and such is also a huge demand for more performance and really unconstrained scalability. And being able to do that but not compromise on enterprise features or protocols. Our customers still need all of the security and the protection that they expect as in their other storage platforms. And so we took a look at how we architected the Isilon hardware. Brought in all these different considerations and then went back to our engineering and said, "You need to make the number one mass "scale-out platform in the industry even better." And so here's your challenge engineering. And what they did was they developed a completely new architecture that goes from the traditional node in a chassis to being able to put that same type of node in a lot smaller space. And we've achieved that being able to take what would normally take 16 U of rack space and four nodes and compress that into a single 4 U chassis. But they just didn't make it smaller, they made it more reliable and also much, much faster. Six times faster in terms of IOPS, twice as the capacity that would be in a normal 16 U of space in a single 4 U. And so that has huge advantages for our customers who have these huge demands. So now they have more performance and less space, more capacity and less space, 75% reduction-- (audio and video defect) then tier that in the cloud as well. So we give them paths to be able to have the genomic research done faster, store more data, and can continuously store more data in less space. >> Manuvir Das was on earlier and talking about how you're positioning ECS is Tier 1 storage, and Isilon is Tier 2 storage. >> Eric: That's the other way around. >> My notes are wrong, (laughs) my mistake. >> Eric: Quite alright. >> Is there a merger at some point of those two, or are we going to continue to have two distinct tiers of storage? >> Well, we're bringing them closer together all the time. One of the unique capabilities that we have with Isilon is be able to tier, to ECS our cloud storage. And that has significant benefits for our customers, because when the data is in the ECS object store, now it can be automatically replicated across geographies around the world for higher redundancy capabilities, and also to be able to access that data remotely from other geos as well. So we're always looking at how to bring those two platforms closer together, and then you'll see tighter integration of Isilon and ECS as we progress. We kind of look at it though, the file and object as two distinct use cases and have different requirements. So our path has been to really be able to provide the best of breed for both of those. Best of breed for Scale-Out File with Isilon and its protocols for file, and then ECS for object protocols. But we're bringing those capabilities closer together with the tiering capabilities and the interactive capabilities with the data, whether it's in the file platform or in the object platform. >> You are a veteran of the data industry. Before the cameras were rolling you were telling us about how you really were at this at the beginning. So can you talk a little bit about how customers needs have changed over the years since you've been in this industry? >> Yeah, so I mean, significantly I've been around in the storage industry since RAID-- well, not RAID, but OpenRAID platforms for Linux systems came rolling out and things were transitioning from the mainframe to Linux and then that kind of area, and SANs were kind of the new concept back in the day. And that had a lot of capabilities about being able to consolidate different servers and different applications to share a storage for block protocols. And that was a big boon for the industry and changed how applications could be deployed and reduced the cost of storage and improved efficiencies. And with Isilon that scale-out capability for file protocols has kind of been that same type of breakthrough where we can now consolidate multiple types of workflows from many, many different data types and applications. We have customers consolidating tens, hundreds of different applications on a single Isilon cluster because it can scale in performance and capacity and can support so many different protocols so that you can, say, bring in data from weblogs from your Linux servers and then do in-place analytics on that to gain more insights into what's happening in your environment and that sort of thing. So it's kind of being that same kind of continuation of what we saw, or I saw, back in the day with RAID and SAN consolidating block storage. We've been able to bring that even further with scale-out NAS and then integration of object and cloud just kind of continues that. >> There's a massive transition going on right now form hard disk to flash-based storage. What are your customers, how are your customers driving this? I mean, what are they asking for from you in terms of flash capability? What are their buying plans for conventional rigid-- - Yeah, that's a great question. (audio and visual defect) Just, they want flash, 'cause sometimes it's like the new shiny thing. But they're not exactly sure-- (audio and visual defect) >> in a number of different industries. Can you talk about what you see as the most exciting and profound changes that you're seeing? >> Yeah, certainly. Well, I mean, the reason I keep mentioning genomic research, 'cause we were just in a meeting with one of our great customers, TGen, and they're doing life-saving research and movies are great and all, but it's kind of different on the scale of what we can do to help mankind. So obviously life sciences and health care is just a huge benefit that we're seeing brought out as well. But just a lot of the high-performance commercial environments like we talked about with media and entertainment being able to change how they're doing their workflows and enable them to actually see their daily shootings as they filmed them rather than having to compress them and watch their dailies in a lower compressed format and that sort of thing. So it's transforming that as I mentioned in the EDA space, being able to get their chips to market faster. And then particularly in that space, their data's doubling twice every year. So they have huge constraints around the amount of data that they can store, so we're helping them by being able to reduce their rack space by 75% with our new technology. So it's really impacting a lot of different use cases, not only in the performance side but as well as in the density and TCO as well. >> We hear about things like holographic storage and stuff that's coming out of the labs right now that sounds very exciting. As a storage guy, what excites you most? I mean, what's the next big thing? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Well certainly we're always looking at what's evolving in the storage. And that's one of the cool things about our architecture that we've announced here with our new generation of Isilon is that it's really future-proof. So it's designed for an eye on the future. It's extremely modular. It allows us to be able to independently change out the CPUs, change out the storage media, the networking capabilities and such. So as new technologies do come to market, we can quickly bring those into the product fold and then incorporate the features of that technology into the software and bring them to market very, very quickly. So, like, when a hundred gigabit ethernet is available in the market, we'll be able to accommodate that by just slipping in a new HBA in this modular architecture. It's designed on the media side to be very, uh, media agnostic. Today it supports SAS and SAS and SATA technologies all in the same node types, right. So and that allows us to configure these things in different ways for different types of use cases and such, so, yeah, I'd say, getting back to your original question here is that, we look forward to these new things coming out so that we can look at how we can integrate those into this new modular architecture. >> Paul: You're not going to pick winners though. >> (laughs) Not right now. >> One of the other things that Michael Dell talked about during his keynote was-- (audio and visual defect) >> You know, customers are very, very concerned about that. It's top of mind. You know, one of the key features again with Isilon is that you not only get this enormous performance benefit from this new flash nodes that are GAing this week, and all the new capabilities of the architecture, but we don't compromise on any of those areas, right. So we provide multi-protocol access through many, many different types of unstructured data, protocols, and Hadoop at HDFS, and Object APIs. But it just doesn't stop there, right, so we also have the security and the compliance with encryption and audit and a secure access zone so you can wall off a cluster, make sure it's secure, make sure storage admins can only do the admin and not get to the data. Things that are top of mind for our customers across a broad segment of markets. >> Eric, thanks so much for joining us. This has been great. >> You're welcome. Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Paul Gillin, we will have more from EMC World after this.