(cheerful music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AMD's 4th Generation EPYC launch. I'm Dave Nicholson, and I'm here in our Palo Alto studios talking to Greg Gibby, senior product manager, data center products from AMD, and Mohan Rokkam, technical marketing engineer at Dell. Welcome, gentlemen. >> Mohan: Hello, hello. >> Greg: Thank you. Glad to be here. >> Good to see each of you. Just really quickly, I want to start out. Let us know a little bit about yourselves. Mohan, let's start with you. What do you do at Dell exactly? >> So I'm a technical marketing engineer at Dell. I've been with Dell for around 15 years now and my goal is to really look at the Dell powered servers and see how do customers take advantage of some of the features we have, especially with the AMD EPYC processors that have just come out. >> Greg, and what do you do at AMD? >> Yeah, so I manage our software-defined infrastructure solutions team, and really it's a cradle to grave where we work with the ISVs in the market, so VMware, Nutanix, Microsoft, et cetera, to integrate the features that we're putting into our processors and make sure they're ready to go and enabled. And then we work with our valued partners like Dell on putting those into actual solutions that customers can buy and then we work with them to sell those solutions into the market. >> Before we get into the details on the 4th Generation EPYC launch and what that means and why people should care. Mohan, maybe you can tell us a little about the relationship between Dell and AMD, how that works, and then Greg, if you've got commentary on that afterwards, that'd be great. Yeah, Mohan. >> Absolutely. Dell and AMD have a long standing partnership, right? Especially now with EPYC series. We have had products since EPYC first generation. We have been doing solutions across the whole range of Dell ecosystem. We have integrated AMD quite thoroughly and effectively and we really love how performant these systems are. So, yeah. >> Dave: Greg, what are your thoughts? >> Yeah, I would say the other thing too is, is that we need to point out is that we both have really strong relationships across the entire ecosystem. So memory vendors, the software providers, et cetera, we have technical relationships. We're working with them to optimize solutions so that ultimately when the customer buys that, they get a great user experience right out of the box. >> So, Mohan, I know that you and your team do a lot of performance validation testing as time goes by. I suspect that you had early releases of the 4th Gen EPYC processor technology. What have you been seeing so far? What can you tell us? >> AMD has definitely knocked it out of the park. Time and again, in the past four generations, in the past five years alone, we have done some database work where in five years, we have seen five exit performance. And across the board, AMD is the leader in benchmarks. We have done virtualization where we would consolidate from five into one system. We have world records in AI, we have world records in databases, we have world records in virtualization. The AMD EPYC solutions has been absolutely performant. I'll leave you with one number here. When we went from top of Stack Milan to top of Stack Genoa, we saw a performance bump of 120%. And that number just blew my mind. >> So that prompts a question for Greg. Often we, in industry insiders, think in terms of performance gains over the last generation or the current generation. A lot of customers in the real world, however, are N - 2. They're a ways back, so I guess two points on that. First of all, the kinds of increases the average person is going to see when they move to this architecture, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's even more significant than a lot of the headline numbers because they're moving two generations, number one. Correct me if I'm wrong on that, but then the other thing is the question to you, Greg. I like very long complicated questions, as you can tell. The question is, is it okay for people to skip generations or make the case for upgrades, I guess is the problem? >> Well, yeah, so a couple thoughts on that first too. Mohan talked about that five X over the generation improvements that we've seen. The other key point with that too is that we've made significant process improvements along the way moving to seven nanocomputer to now five nanocomputer and that's really reducing the total amount of power or the performance per watt the customers can realize as well. And when we look at why would a customer want to upgrade, right? And I want to rephrase that as to why aren't you? And there is a real cost of not upgrading. And so when you look at infrastructure, the average age of a server in the data center is over five years old. And if you look at the most popular processors that were sold in that timeframe, it's 8, 10, 12 cores. So now you've got a bunch of servers that you need in order to deliver the applications and meet your SLAs to your end users, and all those servers pull power. They require maintenance. They have the opportunity to go down, et cetera. You got to pay licensing and service and support costs and all those. And when you look at all the costs that roll up, even though the hardware is paid for just to keep the lights on, and not even talking about the soft costs of unplanned downtime, and, "I'm not meeting your SLAs," et cetera, it's very expensive to keep those servers running. Now, if you refresh, and now you have processors that have 32, 64, 96 cores, now you can consolidate that infrastructure and reduce your total power bill. You can reduce your CapEx, you reduce your ongoing OpEx, you improve your performance, and you improve your security profile. So it really is more cost effective to refresh than not to refresh. >> So, Mohan, what has your experience been double clicking on this topic of consolidation? I know that we're going to talk about virtualization in some of the results that you've seen. What have you seen in that regard? Does this favor better consolidation and virtualized environments? And are you both assuring us that the ROI and TCO pencil out on these new big, bad machines? >> Greg definitely hit the nail on the head, right? We are seeing tremendous savings really, if you're consolidating from two generations old. We went from, as I said, five is to one. You're going from five full servers, probably paid off down to one single server. That itself is, if you look at licensing costs, which again, with things like VMware does get pretty expensive. If you move to a single system, yes, we are at 32, 64, 96 cores, but if you compare to the licensing costs of 10 cores, two sockets, that's still pretty significant, right? That's one huge thing. Another thing which actually really drives the thing is we are looking at security, and in today's environment, security becomes a major driving factor for upgrades. Dell has its own setups, cyber-resilient architecture, as we call it, and that really is integrated from processor all the way up into the OS. And those are some of the features which customers really can take advantage of and help protect their ecosystems. >> So what kinds of virtualized environments did you test? >> We have done virtualization across primary codes with VMware, but the Azure Stack, we have looked at Nutanix. PowerFlex is another one within Dell. We have vSAN Ready Nodes. All of these, OpenShift, we have a broad variety of solutions from Dell and AMD really fits into almost every one of them very well. >> So where does hyper-converged infrastructure fit into this puzzle? We can think of a server as something that contains not only AMD's latest architecture but also latest PCIe bus technology and all of the faster memory, faster storage cards, faster nicks, all of that comes together. But how does that play out in Dell's hyper-converged infrastructure or HCI strategy? >> Dell is a leader in hyper-converged infrastructure. We have the very popular VxRail line, we have the PowerFlex, which is now going into the AWS ecosystem as well, Nutanix, and of course, Azure Stack. With all these, when you look at AMD, we have up to 96 cores coming in. We have PCIe Gen 5 which means you can now connect dual port, 100 and 200 gig nicks and get line rate on those so you can connect to your ecosystem. And I don't know if you've seen the news, 200, 400 gig routers and switchers are selling out. That's not slowing down. The network infrastructure is booming. If you want to look at the AI/ML side of things, the VDI side of things, accelerator cards are becoming more and more powerful, more and more popular. And of course they need that higher end data path that PCIe Gen 5 brings to the table. GDDR5 is another huge improvement in terms of performance and latencies. So when we take all this together, you talk about hyper-converged, all of them add into making sure that A, with hyper-converged, you get ease of management, but B, just 'cause you have ease of management doesn't mean you need to compromise on anything. And the AMD servers effectively are a no compromise offering that we at Dell are able to offer to our customers. >> So Greg, I've got a question a little bit from left field for you. We covered Supercompute Conference 2022. We were in Dallas a couple of weeks ago, and there was a lot of discussion of the current processor manufacturer battles, and a lot of buzz around 4th Gen EPYC being launched and what's coming over the next year. Do you have any thoughts on what this architecture can deliver for us in terms of things like AI? We talk about virtualization, but if you look out over the next year, do you see this kind of architecture driving significant change in the world? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It has the real potential to do that from just the building blocks. So we have our chiplet architecture we call it. So you have an IO die and then you have your core complexes that go around that. And we integrate it all with our infinity fabric. That architecture allows you, if we wanted to, replace some of those CCDs with specific accelerators. And so when we look two, three, four years down the road, that architecture and that capability already built into what we're delivering and can easily be moved in. We just need to make sure that when you look at doing that, that the power that's required to do that and the software, et cetera, and those accelerators actually deliver better performance as a dedicated engine versus just using standard CPUs. The other things that I would say too is if you look at emerging workloads. So data center modernization is one of the buzzwords in cloud native, right? And these container environments, well, AMD'S architecture really just screams support for those type of environments, right? Where when you get into these larger core accounts and the consolidation that Mohan talked about. Now when I'm in a container environment, that blast radius so a lot of customers have concerns around, "Hey, having a single point of failure and having more than X number of cores concerns me." If I'm in containers, that becomes less of a concern. And so when you look at cloud native, containerized applications, data center modernization, AMD's extremely well positioned to take advantage of those use cases as well. >> Yeah, Mohan, and when we talk about virtualization, I think sometimes we have to remind everyone that yeah, we're talking about not only virtualization that has a full-blown operating system in the bucket, but also virtualization where the containers have microservices and things like that. I think you had something to add, Mohan. >> I did, and I think going back to the accelerator side of business, right? When we are looking at the current technology and looking at accelerators, AMD has done a fantastic job of adding in features like AVX-512, we have the bfloat16 and eight features. And some of what these do is they're effectively built-in accelerators for certain workloads especially in the AI and media spaces. And in some of these use cases we look at, for example, are inference. Traditionally we have used external accelerator cards, but for some of the entry level and mid-level use cases, CPU is going to work just fine especially with the newer CPUs that we are seeing this fantastic performance from. The accelerators just help get us to the point where if I'm at the edge, if I'm in certain use cases, I don't need to have an accelerator in there. I can run most of my inference workloads right on the CPU. >> Yeah, yeah. You know the game. It's an endless chase to find the bottleneck. And once we've solved the puzzle, we've created a bottleneck somewhere else. Back to the supercompute conversations we had, specifically about some of the AMD EPYC processor technology and the way that Dell is packaging it up and leveraging things like connectivity. That was one of the things that was also highlighted. This idea that increasingly connectivity is critically important, not just for supercomputing, but for high-performance computing that's finding its way out of the realms of Los Alamos and down to the enterprise level. Gentlemen, any more thoughts about the partnership or maybe a hint at what's coming in the future? I know that the original AMD announcement was announcing and previewing some things that are rolling out over the next several months. So let me just toss it to Greg. What are we going to see in 2023 in terms of rollouts that you can share with us? >> That I can share with you? Yeah, so I think look forward to see more advancements in the technology at the core level. I think we've already announced our product code name Bergamo, where we'll have up to 128 cores per socket. And then as we look in, how do we continually address this demand for data, this demand for, I need actionable insights immediately, look for us to continue to drive performance leadership in our products that are coming out and address specific workloads and accelerators where appropriate and where we see a growing market. >> Mohan, final thoughts. >> On the Dell side, of course, we have four very rich and configurable options with AMD EPYC servers. But beyond that, you'll see a lot more solutions. Some of what Greg has been talking about around the next generation of processors or the next updated processors, you'll start seeing some of those. and you'll definitely see more use cases from us and how customers can implement them and take advantage of the features that. It's just exciting stuff. >> Exciting stuff indeed. Gentlemen, we have a great year ahead of us. As we approach possibly the holiday seasons, I wish both of you well. Thank you for joining us. From here in the Palo Alto studios, again, Dave Nicholson here. Stay tuned for our continuing coverage of AMD's 4th Generation EPYC launch. Thanks for joining us. (cheerful music)

(techno intro music) >> Hey everyone, good afternoon from sin city. This is Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are in full swing of theCUBE's four days of coverage of AWS re:invent 2022. North of 50,000 people are here. We're nearing hundreds of thousands online. Dave, this has been, this is a great event. We've had great conversations. We're going to be having more conversations. One of the things we love talking about on theCUBE is AWS and its ecosystem of partners, and we are going to do just that right now. Brian Henderson joins us, Director of Marketing at Dell Technologies. Marc Trimuschat, Director of Worldwide Storage Specialists at AWS is also here. Guys, it's great to have you. >> Great to be here. >> Great to be here, yeah. Feeling the energy of the show. >> Isn't it great? >> Mark: I know, amazing. >> It's amazing. It started out high and it has not dropped since Monday night. Brian, talk a little bit about Dell, what you're doing with customers on their Cloud journeys. Every customer, every industry is on one at different points in their journey, but what's Dell helping out with there? >> What we're here to talk about is the progression that we've seen, right, Cloud has changed a lot over the years and Dell has really put out a strategy to help people with their Cloud journey, kind of wherever they are. So a lot of people have moved full shift. A lot of people see that as another location, and what we're showing at the booth is the idea of taking these enterprise capabilities that people know and trust from Dell, courting them to the Cloud. In some cases not courting, but just delivering that software in the Cloud, as well as taking some of the Kubernetes integrations, EKS Anywhere, bringing that on-prem. So we've got some storage, data protection, and our Kubernetes integration to talk about at the show. >> Awesome, Mark, talk about the role from Amazon's point of view that third party vendors like Dell Technologies plays in AWS's expanding vision of Cloud. >> Great, well, we're really excited to be partnering with Dell. What we see that historically is, you know, AWS is focused on builders, people, and really the developer community who are building those components themselves, putting together really resilient infrastructure and applications. What we're seeing today is a shift also to the type of customers that we're seeing, more traditional enterprise customers, who are demanding really performance, the scalability, also the resiliency of what they had on-premises, and they want that on the Cloud as well. So with Dell, and we've got some great solutions that we're partnering on, including Dell PowerFlex that provides that linear scalability and some of the high performance capabilities that customers are demanding. And also, another big trend that we're seeing is customers being affected by things like unfortunately malware events, right, and data protection. So Dell provides some great solutions in both those areas that allow enterprise customers to really experience that mission critical capability and resiliency that they have on-premises in the Cloud. >> You know, Brian, we've been at this a long time. >> Brian: Oh yeah, great to see you again. >> And I've been hearing my whole career that storage is going to get commoditized. And I guess if you're talking about spinning discs or flash drives, it's probably true, but as Mark was just saying if you want resilient storage and things that are recoverable, that don't go down all the time, they're not commodities. >> Brian: Yeah. >> It's real engineering. And you built the stack up, so talk about how that connection, what value you bring to the Cloud and your customers. >> Yeah, so what we see is people are always looking out for enterprise grade capabilities. So there's going to be a set of offerings, and AWS has a fantastic foundation for building on top of with the marketplace. So what we're able to do is really bring, in some cases, decades worth of investment in software engineering and put these advanced capabilities, whether it be PowerFlex with its linear scale. We'll have a file offering very soon. These products have been built from the ground up to do a very unique purpose. Giving that to people in the Cloud is just another location for us, AWS being the market leader. We're the market leader in storage. So us working together for the benefit of customers is really where it's at. >> Can you double click on that, Brian, what Dell and AWS? Give us all those juicy details. >> Sure, sure, sure, so what we've done right before this show is we put a product called PowerFlex, if you go back to 2018 scale IO, and you're taking this really linear scaling software defined architecture, and you're putting that in the Cloud. What that allows you to do is get that really advanced linear scale performance. You can even span clusters across AWS regions, as well as zones. So it's a really unique capability that allows us to be able to check in and do that. And in the data protection space, it's a whole separate category. We've been at this actually quite a while. We've got about 14 exo bytes of data that's already being protected on the AWS Cloud. So we've been at that for quite a while. And the two levels are really, do you want to back that up? Do you want to take a traditional back up application, maybe it's a lift and shift, and I want to back it up the way I used to, and you can do that in the Cloud now. Or we're seeing cyber resiliency come up a lot more, and we were just talking right before, it's a question of when, not if, and so we have to give our customers the option to not only detect that failure event early, but also to separate that copy with a logical air gap. >> The cyber resiliency is a topic we are talking more and more about. It's absolutely critical. We've seen the threat landscape change dramatically in the last couple of years. To your point, Brian, it's no longer, when we think of ransomware, it's no longer are we going to get hit? It's when, it's how often. What's the damage going to be? I think I saw a stat recently that there's one ransomware attack every 11 seconds. The average cost of reaches is in the millions, so what you're doing together on cyber resiliency for businesses in any industry is table stakes. >> Yeah, we just saw a survey that, it was done earlier this year survey, 66% unfortunately of corporations have experienced a malware attack. And that's an 80% increase from last year. >> Lisa: Wow. >> So again, I think that's an opportunity. It's a threat, but an opportunity, and so the partnership with Dell really helps bridge that and helps our customers, our mutual customers, recover from those incidents. >> A lot of people might say, this is interesting. A storage guy from Amazon, a storage guy from Dell, two leaders. And one might think, why didn't they just throw in a dash three, right, but you guys are both customer driven, customer obsessed. In the field, what are customers saying to you in terms of how they want you to work together? >> Well I think there's a place for everything. When you say throw in to S3, so S3 today, one of the big trends when you're looking here is just the amount of data, you know, we hear that rhetoric, you know, we've been in storage for many years, and the data has all increased up and to the right. But, you know, AWSI, S3 today, we have over 280 trillion objects in our, driving a hundred million transactions per second right now, so that's scale. So there's always a place for those really, we have hundreds of thousands of customers running their data links, so that's always going to be that really, you know, highly reliable, highly durable, high available solution for data links. But customers, there's a lot of different applications out there. So where customers are asking are those enterpise. So we have EBS, for example, which is our great, you know, scalable block search, elastic block store. We introduced some new volume types, like GP2, GP2, and IO2VX, which will have that performance. But there's still single availability zone. So what customers have done historically is they maybe the application layer, they put an application layer replication or resiliency across, but customers on-prem, they've relied on storage layers to do that work for them. So, with PowerFlex, that'll stand either using instant storage or EBS, building on that really strong foundation, but provide that additional layer to make it easy for customers to get that resiliency and that scalability that Brian talked about. >> Yep, yep. >> Anything you can add to that? >> Yeah, I mean to your question, how do we work together is really, it's all customer driven. So we see customers that are shifting workloads in the Cloud for the first time. And it might make sense to take an object, like PowerFlex or another storage technology, maybe you want to compress it a little bit before you send it to the Cloud. Maybe you don't want to lift and shift everything. So we have a team of people that works very closely with AWS to be able to determine how are you going to shift that workload out there? Does this make the right sense for you? So it's a very collaborative relationship. And it's all very customer driven because our customers are saying, I've got assets in the public Cloud, and I want them to be managed in a similar fashion to how I'm doing that on-prem. >> So customer obsession is clearly on both sides there. We know that. >> It's where it starts. >> Exactly, exactly. Going back to PowerFlex for a second, Brian, and I'd love to get an example of a joint customer that really is showing the value of what Dell and AWS are doing together. The question for you on PowerFlex, talk about the value that it offers to the public Cloud. And why should customers start there if they are early in this journey? >> All right, yeah, so the two angles are basically, are you coming from PowerFlex or you're coming from Cloud. If you're Cloud native, the advantage would be things like a really, really advanced block file system that has been built from the ground up to be software defined and pretty much Cloud native. What you're getting is that really linear scale up to about 1,000 nodes. You can span that across regions, across availability zones, so it's highly resilient. So if there's a node failure in one site, you're going to rebuild really fast, depending on the size of that cluster. So it's a very advanced architecture that's been built to run, you know, we didn't have to change a single line of code to run this product in the Cloud because it was Cloud native by default, so. >> Well that's the thing. We also see, and you've seen that with some of the other solutions, but customers really want that. Enterprise customers are, they want us to make sure those mission critical applications are working and stay up. So they also want to use the same environment. So we were talking before, we also see use cases where maybe they're using PowerFlex on-premises today and they want to be able to replicate that to PowerFlex that's in the Cloud. So we're seeing those, and the familiarity with that infrastructure really is that easy path, if you will, for those more conservative mission critical customers. >> We've learned a lot over the years from AWS's entry into the marketplace. Two recent teams working backwards. We talk about customer obsession. And also the Cloud experience. It brings me to APEX. >> Oh yeah. >> Dave: How does APEX fit in here? >> Yeah, so APEX is the categorization for all the things that we're doing around a modern Cloud experience for Dell customers. So we're taking them also on a journey, kind of as a service model. There's a do-it-yourself model. And anything that we do that touches Cloud is now being kind of put under that APEX moniker. So everything that we're doing around Project Alpine, enterprise software capabilities in the Cloud. Do you want someone else to manage it for you? Do you want it in a polo? That might be the right fit for you. It's all under that APEX umbrella and journey. So we're kind of still just getting started there, but we're seeing a lot of great traction. People want to pay as they go, you know, it's a very popular model that AWS has pretty much set the foundation for. So pay as you go, utility based pricing, this is all things our customers have been asking for. >> Yeah, so APEX, you basically set a baseline. You can dial it up, dial it down, very much pay by the drink. >> Absolutely. >> And, you know, like you said, it's early days. >> Brian: Yeah. >> But that's, again, AWS has influenced the business in a lot of different ways. >> Again, with the Dell, you know, the trust customers that Dell has built over the years and having those customers come in. We obviously are getting, again, it's an accelerated option for financial services to healthcare and all these customers that have relied on Dell for years, moving to the Cloud, having that trusted name and also that infrastructure that's similar and familiar to them. And then the resilience of the foundation that we have at AWS, I think it works really well together for those customers. >> I think it underscores to the majority of both AWS and in a lot of ways Dell, right. In the early days of Cloud, it was like uh oh, and now it's like oh, actually big market. Customers are demanding this. There's new value that we can create working together. Let's do it. >> Yeah, I mean, it didn't take us that long to get to it, but I'd say we had little fits and starts over the years, and now we've recognized like, this is where the future is. It's going to be Cloud, it's going to be on-prem, it's going to be Edge, it's going to be everything. It's going to be an and world. And so just doing the right thing for customers I think is exactly where we landed. It's a great partnership. >> Do you have a favorite customer story that you think really shines the light on the value of the Dell AWS partnership in terms of the business impact they're making? >> We have several large customers that I can't always like drop the names, but one of them is a very large video game production company. And we do a lot of work together where they're rendering maybe in house, they're sending to a shared location. They're copying data over to S3. They're able to let all their editors access that. They bring it back when it's compressed down a little bit and deliver that. We're also doing a lot of work with, I think I can say this, Amazon Thursday night football games. So what they've done there, it's a partner of ours working with AWS. All the details inside of that roaming truck that they drive around, there's a lot of Dell gear within there, and then everything connects back to AWS for that exact same kind of model. We need to get to the editors on a nightly basis. They're also streaming directly form that truck while they're enabling the editors to access a shared copy of it, so it's really powerful stuff. >> Thursday night prime is pretty cool. You know, some people are complaining cause I can't just switch channels during the commercials. It's like, first of all, you can. Second of all, the stats are unbelievable, right. You can just do your own replay when you want to. There's some cool innovations there. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. >> Very cool innovations. I've got one more question for each of you before we wrap. Marc, a question for you, we're making a fun Instagram reel. So think about a sizzle reel of if you were to summarize the show so far, what is AWS's message to its massive audience this year? >> Well, that's a big question. Because we have such a wide, as we mentioned, such a wide ranging audience. I really see a couple key trends that we're trying to address. One is, again don't forget, I'm a storage guy, so it's going to come from an angle from data, right. So, I think it's just this volume of data and that customers are bringing into the Cloud, either moving in from enterprises today or organically, just growing. You know, a couple years ago, megabytes were a lot, and now, you know, we're talking about petabytes every day. Soon it's going to be exo bytes are going to become the norm. So the big, I'd say, point one is the trend that I see is just the volume of data. And so what we're doing to address that is obviously we talked a little bit about S3 and being able to manage volumes of data, but also things like DataZone that we introduced because customers are looking to make sure that the right governance and controls to be able to access that data. So I think that's one big thing that I see the theme for the show today. The second thing is around, as I said, really these enterprise customers really wanted to move in these mission critical applications into the Cloud, and having that infrastructure to be able to support that easily from what they're doing today and move in quickly. The third area is around data protection, making sure the data protection and malware recovery, that's the theme that we see is really unfortunately that's today. But being able to recover quickly, both having native services and native offerings just built in resiliency into the core platforms, like S3 with object application, et cetera. And also partnering with Dell with cyber recovery and some of the solutions with Dell. >> Excellent, and Brian, last question for you. A bumper sticker that succinctly and powerfully describes why Dell and AWS are such awesome partners for customer issues. >> Best of both worlds, right? >> Lisa: Mic drop. >> Mic drop, done. >> That's awesome. You said that a lot more succinctly. (people laughing) >> Enterprise in Cloud, Cloud comin' to enterprise. >> Yeah, leader meets leader, right? >> Yeah, right. >> Love it, leader meets leader. Guys, it's been a pleasure having you on theCUBE. We appreciate hearing the latest from AWS and Dell from a storage perspective and from a Cloud perspective and how you're helping customers manage the explosion of data that's not going to slow down. We really appreciate you coming by the set. >> Thank you. >> Great, thanks so much, appreciate it. >> My pleasure. For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> With cloud computing, programmable infrastructure, open source momentum with things like Terraform and software defined everything, people have been asking, "Does hardware still matter?" The obvious answer is software has to run on something but why does hardware still matter specifically? What customer value is there in advanced hardware architectures and what are some of the less frequently discussed nuances of hardware that make software run better and businesses run more efficiently and securely at scale. Welcome to the Cube's ongoing series where we explore the importance of hardware its evolution over the decades and its future outlook with me is longtime cubilam, Shannon Champion. Who's the vice president of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Welcome Shannon. >> Thank you. Glad to be here. >> Yeah, it's always great to collaborate with you. Shannon, you've had a pretty impressive career. You've got this killer combination of you have an engineering degree, multiple engineering degrees actually combined with business education. You've worked as a semiconductor engineer, a quality engineer, product manager, product marketing exec, et cetera. And you now have responsibility for a variety of hardware and software led infrastructure at Dell. How have you seen hardware evolve over the years? >> Well, first of all, thank you. I appreciate that intro Dave. Yeah, it's been a fun journey. I think there's two things. I think there's a product led evolution and then there's customer evolution. And obviously those go hand in hand. If you think about the technology from a hardware perspective, it's become more advanced, more specialized and the diversification of chip architectures is really what's driving that. It's gone from general purpose CPUs to GPUs, to specialty processors like, DPUs and purpose-built accelerators. And with all that specialization, obviously more and more software is required to really knit it together. We believe Dell is uniquely positioned to do that. >> Awesome. So I want to just come right out and ask you, you know, with cloud and software defined and hyper-converged why specifically does hardware still matter? >> Well, if you know anything about Dell, you know we are driven by customer first mindset. So I'm going to go back to that customer evolution I talked about and from a customer perspective, purchase decisions used to be more about feature function, Like how much compute memory storage can you pack in and get the best performance characteristics. Of course, people still care about this and almost every customer, if you look at the widespread surveys that have been done in the industry projections are still going to be making data center infrastructure purchases for the foreseeable future, but more and more, these sort of like traditional hardware capabilities are table stakes. And what customers are making purchase decisions on are the software driven capabilities that provide the differentiating capabilities to allow them to do more with less. So with that sort of comes a refocusing of where IT adds value for their organizations. We know maintaining and managing the infrastructure is not what differentiates companies and makes them stand out from the crowd. So that's what this whole notion of IT Transformation is all about. Our customers are pulling us into a broader set of problems and their purchase criteria is moving away from hardware feature function to differentiated solution and software value decision making with more focus on how they can drive business value beyond the infrastructure. So it's really the combination of hardware with software that optimizes and delivers the best outcomes and the tighter the link we can create between them the more seamless the experience for customers. >> Gotcha and I mean, this is more important than ever with the push toward digital transformation. And everybody's trying to get digital right. Now thinking about Dell as a company and its broader strategy, the majority of revenue comes from what most people would think of as hardware but as Jeff Clark often points out, the vast majority of engineers are software engineers. Can you explain how that dynamic works and what role hardware plays in that equation? >> Yeah, totally. So if you think about IT transformation infrastructure is the enabler of that transformation, but infrastructure needs to be smarter, easier, more automated, more secure. And that's done with software and our software engineering focus is nothing new. I think Dave, we were together five years ago talking about the latest version of HCI on the 14th generation of power edge servers. And at that time we were talking about how our hardware platform engineers were working with the software engineers to design in software defined storage capabilities within the power edge platform. So, you know, we, that we are not new to this. We've been looking at ways we can use software to exploit the underlying hardware features and capabilities and do that in a differentiated way because it delivers value for customers. And honestly, they're willing to pay a premium for that. >> Yeah. I remember that well, 14G now 15G, soon we're going to be talking about 16G. Can you give me an example of where hardware differentiation has created value for your customers beyond, you know what a straight software only solution running on generic white boxes might bring? >> Yeah, I have a couple of examples. The first is easily VxRail, right? VxRail, our jointly engineered HCI system with VMware. It provides full stack integration of hardware and software for that consistent operations in VMware environments. And when you think about evolution of infrastructure VxRail is actually a cool story. When it was introduced six years ago its scalability and performance, you know had it be rapidly adopted mainly in the data center but customer demands have evolved and they wanted to extend that operational efficiency to a broader and broader set of workloads. Not only in the data center, but in the cloud at the edge. So VxRail grew and its portfolio today has maximum flexibility. You can choose the best platform to meet performance, storage, graphics, IO, cost requirements a range of processor types and NVMe drives and graphics cards. So it really is the most configurable HCI system to meet any workload demand. And we recently introduced some new node types. That's hardware based, right? VxRail dynamic nodes and satellite nodes and our customers and partners are really excited about these, the dynamic nodes, as you know add the capability to scale compute and storage independently and extend to primary storage like power store and the satellite nodes are single nodes for the edge. So that's all hardware stuff, but the secret to VxRail really is more about the software. So I'm going to go back there. The VxRail HCI system software is what makes VxRail more seamless and simple than any other HCI system. And when managing your environment is easier and more automated and your workloads can stay up and running, leveraging that intelligent life cycle management customers pay attention. So again, it's that combination of hardware and software and for VxRail customers it's how we're delivering that truly curated experience like we like to call it that they can't get anywhere else. >> Awesome. So last question. Anything else you want to bring into the discussion before we close? >> Yeah. Two things, actually I have another good example of hardware differentiation and how it creates value for customers. And this one is based upon PowerStore. So PowerStore inline data reduction uses Intel quick assist technology and it performs hardware accelerated compression. So it's basically handling data reduction in hardware. We offload the compute intensive workloads of compression and conserve the CPU cycles for storage IO tasks that save application and storage processing time, cycles and costs. So it's a more consistent way to do storage efficiency and leverage power storage advance inline compression and it's always on, and it doesn't compromise performance of other services. So, with PowerStore using this hardware differentiated approach to inline data reduction, customers get an average four to one data reduction across all their workloads, don't compromise performance or services. And honestly, a lot of times we see them achieving up to 20 to 1 or more depending on the data type. So yeah, I just wanted to throw out that other example. >> Great. >> The last thing I'll say is we just launched a trifecta storage innovation at Dell Technologies World. We have over 500 new high value software enhancements that bring out the best in our storage hardware platforms and that's across PowerStore, PowerMax and PowerFlex. So I encourage folks to go check that out and you know obviously let us know what you think. >> Yeah. We can put a link to those in the show notes. And I was there at Dell Tech World. It was actually quite amazing. Shannon, thanks so much for coming on and sharing your insights really appreciate it. >> My pleasure. >> All right. And thank you for watching this Cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome back to Las Vegas. We're here in the Venetian convention center. My name is Dave Alan. I'm here with my co-host John fur. You're watching the Cube's live coverage of Dell tech world 2022. Great crowd. I would say 7,000, maybe even 8,000 people. When you add in all the peripheral attendees, Jeff Clark is here. He's the vice chairman and co-chief operating officer of Dell technologies. Great to see you face to face, man. >>Hey guys. Good to see you again. Awesome. >>So really enjoyed your keynote this morning. You were pumped up, uh, I thought the, the presentations and the demos were crisp. So congratulations. Thank you. How you feeling? >>Doing a great job? How am I feeling? Uh, well, one relieved. If you know me well enough, I'm an engineer by heart. So trade the anxiety to do that is, uh, and build up is quite draining, but having it done, I feel pretty good now, but I feel good about what we discussed. Uh, it was a fun day to be able to talk to real customers and partners face to face like we're doing here and showcasing what we've been doing. I must admit that was a little bit of fun. Yeah. >>Well, we're chilling on the cube. Uh, we're laid back as you know. Um, what was your favorite moment? Cause you got a lot of highlights. The snowflake deal. We love been talking about it all, all show. Um, the, the, I IP of Dell with software define was pretty cool. Lot of great stuff. What's what >>Some cool laptop stuff too. That was interesting. You know, I don't have to. Where's the, where's the share button. >>We have a discord server now and all 18,000 people want to know. >>You're asking me to pick a monks, my should, which I like the most. >>How big is your monitor on your desk? >>Uh, I have a 49 on one side and a 42 on the other side. That's what both you guys need >><laugh> productivity, da >><laugh> well, in the world of zoom, it was incre incredibly productive to have that surface area in front of you. So, which of my announcements was my favorite, I think from a raw technology point of view, showcasing Dell, thinking about what we've done in a very differentiated way. It's hard not to say the power flex >>Engagement. Oh, look at that. Look, I wrote just, just wrote down power flex. Yep. Right. >><laugh> okay. Think about it. Softer defined. We, the leader and softer defined, uh, infrastructure that can be, think of it as independently, independent ability to scale compute from storage so we can linear scale and those no bounds, unlimited IO performance. The ability to put file block support, hyper hypervisors and bare metal all on a single platform. And then we made a, a bunch of other improvements around it. It's truly an area where we a leader we're differentiated in our core IP matters >>And that's Dell IP, Dell technology top >>The bottom. >>Okay, cool. >>So from a pure technical point of view, it's probably my favorite. What's not liked about PowerMax, the most mission critical, the most secure high end storage system in the world. And we made it better. We made it more secure. We put an isolated vault in it. We added some, uh, multifactor authentication. We improved the architecture for twice the performance, 50% better response time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yes, pretty cool. <laugh> and then you gotta put a notebook in front of everybody where you think about in this modern workplace. And what we've learned is hybrid users. What software that we've embedded into that latitude 93 30 was pretty interesting. I thought. And then if I pull day one into the conversation, sort of the direction of where we're going of, multi-cloud the role of multi-cloud and our ability to be sort at the center of our customers multi-cloud world. I loved how Chuck described moving from multi-cloud by default to multi cloud, by design, and then the subsequent architecture that we put behind it. And then probably cherry on the old cake was the snowflake announcement that got a lot of people excited about bringing a really differentiated view of cloud based analytics down on our object storage. I know that was more than one, but I can't help. >>I like the cherry on top >>You've um, said a number of times, I think the 85% of your engineers are software engineers. You talked about, is that the right number, roughly? Yes, sir. And, and so, uh, you talked also about 500 new features today and, and every time you're talking about those features, I inferred anyway, it was part of the OS. A lot of it anyway, a lot of software does hardware still matter? And if so, why? >>Of course hardware still >>Matter. Explain why. >>Well, last time I checked doesn't the software stuff work on the hardware. Exactly. Doesn't the software things make hardware calls to exploit the capability we built into the software. Of course it does says it absolutely does matter, but I think what we're trying to describe or to get across today is we're moving up the stack, we're adding more value. Basically our customers are dragging us into a broader set of problems and software is increasingly the answer to that running on the best hardware, the best infrastructure, being able to build the right software abstraction to hook into either data frameworks, like a snowflake, being able to present our storage assets of software in the pub book cloud, ultimately the ability to pull them and think of it as a pool of storage for developers to make developers lives easier. Yeah. That's where we're going >>And, and is accurate in your view, you're going up to stack more software content and there's value. That's also flowing into Silicon, whether it's accelerators or Nicks and things like that, is that a right way to think about what's happening in hardware and software. We, >>You and I have had a number of conversations, David, the evolution of the architecture, where we're going from a general purpose CPU based thing to now specialty processors, whether that be a smart Nick purpose, built accelerators. If we leaped all the way out to quantum, really purpose built accelerators for a specific algorithm, there's certainly specialization going on. And as that happens, more software and software defined is necessary to knit together. And we have to be the person that does that. Mm-hmm <affirmative> yeah. >>Talk about how the software defined piece makes the innovation happen on the hardware. Is it, is it the relationship that it's decoupled or you guys are just building design Silicon to make the software better? Cuz that interplay is a design, uh, is designed in, right? >>Uh, I, I think it's a little bit of both clearly being able to exploit the underlying hardware features and capabilities in your software in a differentiated way is important. Something we've excelled at for many, many years, but then the ability to abstract. If you think about some of the things that we talk about as a data fabric or a data plane and a data plane working across different architectures, that's an abstracted piece of software that ultimately leads to a very different and that's where we're driving towards >>What's different now. And what's similar now from the past, I was just on a, a panel. I talking about space, Cal poly and California space symposium and this hardware and space and it's, software's driving everything you can't do break, fix and space. It's talk about the edge. You can't talk about. You can't do break hard to do break, fix and space. So you gotta rely on software in the supply chain. Big part of the design as software becomes more prevalent with open source and et cetera, that innovation equation is designed in. What's your, what's your thoughts on that? >>Help me understand John, what more of this specific of what you're looking for, where do you want to dive into >>The, as Silicon becomes more of a more efficient, what does that do for the software in things like edge, for instance, as the boxes move out and the, the devices move to the home, they gotta be faster, more intelligent, more secure. Uh, Michael says it's a, it's a compute tower now 5g for instance. >>Yeah. Uh, maybe another way to look at it. We've been in the industry a little while for the longest time hardware capabilities were always ahead of software. We built great hardware. We let software catch up. What's changed certainly in this time. And as we look going forward is the software capabilities are now ahead of those very hardware capabilities in bringing it. And to me, that's a, it's a very fundamental change. Certainly in my 35 years of doing this, that's very different. And if you believe that continues, which I do, particularly as we face increasingly more difficult challenges to continue with Moore's law, how do we continue to build out the transistor density? We've all benefited from for four, five decades now, softer innovation is going to lead, which is what we tried to hint at today. And I think that's the future. That's where you're gonna see us continue to drive and think about how we talk about, uh, technology today. I know Dave and I had this conversation not too long ago, whether it's infrastructure is code, who would've thought of that idea a decade ago. <laugh> uh, if we think about, uh, data as code we were talking about before we got on air, what data on code data's little bits, one's in zero stored in Silicon, you store >>It, <laugh> you move it >>Around now. So it, it opens the door or the door to, I think innovation done differently and perhaps even done it more scale as if we abstract it correctly. >>Yeah. And might led a good point on when he was on about all the good benefits that come from that in the customer and in society. And I guess the next question with the customer side, it take your, if the, if the flip, if the script is flipping, which I believe that it is, I agree with you. How does the customers deal with the innovation strategy? Because now they wanna take advantage of the new innovation, but what problems and opportunities are they facing? That's different now than say a decade ago, if you're in it or you're trying to create a great group within your CISO organization. I mean, there are problems now that we didn't see before. What do you, how do you see that? >>Well, I, I, I think the, the biggest change would be again, if you look and reflect on our careers, it was sort of in the business, it played a role. It was often put off to the corner, just make the place sort of work. And today, and I think the pandemic has the pandemic and global health crisis accelerated this technology is now part of people's business and you can't compete without technology. And in fact, we saw it during the early days of the pandemic, those CU customers that were further along on their digital transformation, generally weathered the storm in their sector better than those who were behind. >>Yeah, >>Absolutely. What does that tell us technology was an enabler. Technology helped them, whether the storm prepared them, made them more competitive. So now I think I don't meet many CIO and CEOs who don't have the conversation about their business model and technology being symbiotic, that they're integrated, that they can't do one without the other. That's a very different mindset than when we grew up in this industry where this stuff was. So now you take that as a basis. We got data everywhere. Most of the data's gonna come out of the data, not in the data center's gonna be created outside of the data center. The attack surface has grown disproportionately >>People, people sharing data, too, their data with other data, very much so generating >>Data in places. Sometimes they don't know where it is and hope to get it back. So the role to be able to protect that estate, if you will, to be able to protect the information, which increasingly data is companies fuel, but makes 'em go, how do you protect it? How do you ultimately analyze it? How do you provide them the insights to ultimately run and drive their business? That's the opportunity. >>So we are in the same wavelength with Powerflex and, and I'm a little concerned about confirmation bias, but, but I, I wanna say this, I really like the way your Dell's language and yours specifically has evolved. You talk about abstraction layers, hiding that underlying complexity, building value on top of the hyperscalers on prem connecting sore, we call it super cloud. You guys call it multi-cloud. We saw two examples of that today, project Alpine and the snowflake is early examples. Uh, I'm trying to gauge how real this is. We think it's real. Uh, we talked to customers who clearly say, this is what they want. Um, I wonder if you could add a little detail to that, some color on your thoughts on, on how real this is, how it will evolve over time. >>Well, from our, from our seat and the way that I, that, that I see it in driving our underlying product development, roadmaps, people want to drag into conversation about public and private and this, and what have you. And, and that's not how customers work today. Uh, customers really have got to this point where they want to use the best capabilities regardless of where they lie. And if that's keeping mission critical data on premise taking advantage of analytic tools in the cloud, doing some test dev in the public cloud, moving out to edge, they want to be able to do that reasonably quickly and not. We were talking about this before we got on the air in an easy fashion. It can't be complex. Yeah. So how do you actually knit this together in a way that is not complex and enables customers? That's what I think customers want. So you think about our multi-cloud vision. It's about building an ecosystem across all of the public clouds, which we've made announcement and announcement to do that. Well, >>You said earlier default versus by design, which referencing to the multi-cloud. But I think the design is the key word here. The design is a system architecture you're talking about. You said also technology and business models are tied together and enable or that's. If you believe that, then you have to believe that it's a business operating system that they want, they wanna leverage whatever they can. And at the end of the day, they have to differentiate what they do >>Well, that that's exactly right. If I take that in what, what Dave was saying. And, and, and I summarize it the following way. If we can take these cloud assets in Cape capabilities, combine them in an orchestrated way to delivery, distributed platform, game over, >>Tell us we gotta wrap, which bummed me out because I, we had so much, we haven't covered. We haven't talked about 5g. We really haven't hit on apex. Uh, what else is exciting? You something, you know, let's let's in the last minute or so, let's do a wrap. >>We just, >>I know we just got started. We had >>A schedule, >>Two guys, the boss, this >>Is great. We wanna go the next, >>Not when it comes to the schedule, just laid >>Out the, just laid out the checkmate move right there. You know, um, >>Look, what I get excited about, uh, >>Edge to me is a domain that we're gonna see in this part of our careers have the same level of innovation and discovery that we just saw in the early part of our careers and probably times 10 or times a hundred. And I, and I think about the world we live in and matching up what's happening in this digitization of our world and everything, having a sensor in it, collecting data everywhere on everything, and then being able to synthesize it in a way that we can derive reasonable insight from to be able to make real time decisions from whether that be in healthcare, a smart city, a factory of the transportation area, our own website of how the traffic comes in and how we present our offers more effectively to what you want, which are different than what Dave wants. The possibilities are unlimited and, or on the half of the first ending, if you like baseball, analogies, absolutely. And a long way to go and a tremendous amount of innovation that'll happen here. I get excited about that place. Now. It's not gonna happen overnight every once say, oh, we're smoking edge. Wasn't at IOT, stop putting a timeframe on it. Yeah. Know, the foundation is built to be able to develop, evolve and innovate from here. Like I've never seen. >>And the playbook to get back to your game overcome is whoever can simplify the comp and reduce the complexity and make things simpler and easier. That's, I mean, that's kind of the formula for success basically. I mean, it sounds kind of easy, right? Like >>Spot on, >>Just do it, but what, but that's hard. >>Remember it's hard and being able to build data centers and, and millions of places. So for example, what we'll leave in a little 5g, you think about all of the public cloud data centers today. I think there's roughly 600 locations. You've got 7 million cell towers. Yeah. 7 million cell towers gonna >>Be like how reach right there. >>Data center at the edge of the network. Yeah. As we just aggregate the telecom infrastructure. Sure. From a monolithic big black box into a disaggregated standards based architecture with virtualization and containerization in it. >>I mean, outta compute, I love the whole Metro operating model there, like having that data center at that edge, all that wire wireless coming in. >>I >>Agree. Pretty impressive. Powering the Teslas and all the cars out there sending telematics to, uh, people's phones. And >>Let's wait to next wearables >>Here >>To, I was gonna say next Dell technology world choose to have some fun. <laugh> >>Jeff Clark. Thanks so much for coming to the cube. You're awesome guest and, uh, congratulations on all the success and really appreciate your time. Yeah. Thanks for >>Having me. Thanks for kind words. >>All right. Thank you for watching. This is Dave for John furrier, Dell tech world 2022 live. We'll be right back. You're watching the cube. >>That was great. Mean you great riff.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE, with digital coverage of Dell Technologies world. Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to the CUBE'S coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, The Digital Experience. I'm Lisa Martin joined by a couple of guys from Dell Technology. Please welcome Martin Glynn, the senior director for product management for PowerMax Martin good morning. >> Good morning. >> Nice to see you. And joining Martin is Matthew Paul, the senior director of product management for PowerFlex at Dell Technologies. Matthew, nice to see you. >> Nice to see you thanks for having us Lisa. >> So our virtual cube this year can't be with you guys in person or the 14,000 other folks that usually attend at Dell Technologies World but a lot of opportunities to engage customers and partners and present analysts digitally, which is great. So Matthew, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to us about what's new with PowerFlex, this was the kind of the end of the rebrand under the power portfolio that Dell Technologies undertook the last couple of years formerly the VXFlex excuse me, from Scale IO, what's new with PowerFlex? >> Yeah, that's a spot on. So really the idea of us aligning the full power portfolio is kind of a big deal, right? Part of the winning roadmap to at IO, kind of assigned to our customers and our field and everyone that software defined storage is a critical part of the Dell Technologies strategy. If you think about PowerFlex, just to kind of level set, it's really a software defined infrastructure kind of system that brings you the best of traditional three tier infrastructure and the best of HCI infrastructure while being able to make that experience really simple in the enterprise while still delivering exemplary really great performance and scale. In terms of new things, well, just real quick, in terms of kind of new things, we brought interesting topics like native Async replication, secure snapshots, some end to end lifecycle management pieces. So a lot of great innovation in the last year. >> And that was some of the recent announcements. Tell me Matthew, from a customer perspective since you've announced Asynchronous replication snapshots, what's the customer adoption, customer feedback been like? >> Yeah, it's been fantastic. We continue to grow this market really strong, you know, we're focusing on high end large enterprise customers working towards, bringing down also into kind of enterprise and commercial customers, so it'll make things easier to use. But very strong adoption and great investments here at Dell with this product. >> All right, so PowerFlex, Martin, let's go to you PowerMax, talk to us about PowerMax. And then also how it kind of fits into the whole power portfolio. >> Sure, yeah, so thanks Lisa. The PowerMax products, I think was the first product other than of course, the server products to be powered up in the storage portfolio, PowerMax is the sort of flagship sort of derived product that we've had now for, you know, a few decades really been a leader in mission critical data centers. But I think that pace of innovation over the last year just like Matt describing the PowerFlex side has been a really phenomenal. Just about a year ago he came out with a storage class memory, we did fiber channel Endymion over fiber channel, and more recently brought in a few really interesting new technologies, like support for replication, with VVols, cloud mobility, and now, efficient encryption. So the set of things we're enabling our customers to do with their you know, sort of traditional three tier SAN infrastructure is really just unmatched. >> So Matt talk to me about the last six seven months, where are these enterprise customers in terms of leveraging PowerMax for example, when everything just changed dramatically almost overnight. Enterprises in every industry had to suddenly remote workforce. How did PowerMax help your customers pivot and ensure that their digital transformation could support this business surviving? >> Yeah, well, like everybody we were a little worried at the outset, you know lot of uncertainty about how things would play out and the response from our customers has been amazing. You know, they've all sort of really doubled down on using our technology to support their businesses through this new model. So, you know, the business has been really amazing really incredible, and it's been great to partner with our customers that help them continue to deliver the services that they need you know, in this new model. So that part's been, been really wonderful, and as we work really closely with them, some of the things we just came out with, you know, they've helped us to design and deliver in a way that they can best take advantage of so, you know, for example the new cloud mobility functionality that's letting them take information directly off of their mission, critical sort of bedrock sand infrastructure and push it up to an object store. And that could be a local private object store, it could be a public object store like AWS. And so that's you know, it's enabling them to take advantage of some new models and a new approach to doing things. And I think ultimately that's going to help them work through this you know, new normal, we're all participating in. >> Yeah, we want to help those businesses not just survive this time, but be able to thrive, especially as we don't know how much of this remote scattered workforce is going to remain. We're hearing estimates from some of the big technology leaders at all. 50% percent of the workforce is going to remain at home so really helping organizations to maneuver and navigate these challenging landscapes is a big priority I know for Dell Technologies we talked about that with some other guests. Matthew, over to you talk to me about PowerFlex from a workloads perspective, so we can get a good idea for the workloads that it's really ideally best suited for. >> Yeah, I think wanted to just take a quick second on the COVID piece, because we have a couple of really big customers that we had to enable really quickly for curbside checkout and, you know, they were trying to run things, they were putting it on their existing infrastructure, their existing systems, and it just wasn't fast enough, it wasn't keeping up. And by working closely with the customer and designing a system with PowerFlex as the core, allowed us to enable them really quickly to turn from a customer who didn't have this idea of curbside checkout to enabling curbside checkout. So I think working and partnering closely with our customers is a critical part of how Dell Tech is successful and enabling them to kind of work through these tough times. With workloads, Yeah, oh, go ahead sorry. >> That's okay go ahead. >> I was going to say with workloads in general, the way that we have to think about them with enterprise quality or enterprise requirements is really in kind of a scheme of looking at performance, understanding scalability, ensuring we have enterprise class availability, and then last but definitely not least is like how we manage that and how we make it easier for customers to work through those. And when I think about Flex there's two or three key areas that we try to go after, if you, one of the key differentiation pieces around Flex is the fact that we can deploy it in multiple manners. So you can deploy it in an HCI mode, where you have the compute and networking together, or you can go deploy it in a dis-aggregated mode where you have compute and networking, I mean, compute and storage separate. And if those are separate that allows you to scale those independently work really, really well for key database workloads, key workloads like, let's say even like Honda, where you maybe have really high compute but little less storage requirements. So that really allows customers to dial up and down what makes the most sense for them right? The other angle that we're seeing pretty big adoption is around this idea of re-platform or realigning the data center with transformation with software defined scale all block storage. So think about deploying Powerflex in an environment and then being able to use that in a virtual environment in a physical environment, in a container environment being able to have your traditional applications like SQL or Oracle, right along really cool new applications like the ELK Stack or Mongo DB or other things, because of the way that we design our layout, it's really aligned towards being able to re-platform and align in a software defined infrastructure. So customers are using to kind of align those pieces meaning platforms, re-platforming and then also aligning specific applications that require high performance. >> I heard a lot in that and one word that pops up is no, that's good. >> No, I can tell you're passionate about it. >> I love it, yeah. >> And also the customer influence is absolutely critical. I think this is a time you mentioned the curbs I check in, and then I was reading a few months ago about some of the huge brands that were filing for chapter 11 and companies like big retailers that simply couldn't pivot, couldn't digitally transform to even offer curbside check in so that factor alone since us consumers are so demanding was table stakes a few months ago. It still is, but getting an organization able to pivot so quickly is key. Martin let's go over to you, PowerMax, workloads. Talk to me about some differentiators as well. >> Yeah Aatually, if I could I'll start with sort of some similar examples that Matt laid out there, you know, just like we have customers who chose PowerFlex you know, were in environments that made sense for them. We had customers who chose PowerMax to meet similar new demands with the whole, you know pandemic. So we had some really big customers just so okay, now we have sort of line of sight and, you know, across both products, I think the thing that our customers value most is you know, the quality of the experience, the performance of the experience, some of the things Matt mentioned already. But they really pull forward, you know, huge numbers of systems and business, and be able to support you know, where they saw things going. So that was really great to partner with them on that and be ready to help support them and provide a product that they felt really good about making such huge investments in, you know, it was great to see their trust in us and be able to deliver for them. So, that was, I think a big part of the first half of the year, that sort of new, you know, new workloads and new use cases for us on the PowerMax side really revolve around giving our customers new capabilities that can deliver new services for their end users. So one of those is our new support for VVols remote replication. And this really lets us tie together the way that the infrastructure is managed at the VMware level, much more closely to the way that the storage infrastructure is managed. And the result is that our, our customers can do more granular operations for their end users, they can simplify the whole process, and now they can do it on top of our remote replication solution, which, you know going on 20 plus years now, it's really been sort of the gold standard in which they've come to rely on so much. So that's really exciting to be able to offer that to them now, to have it be part of the whole VMware stack that they're deploying and let them use you know, new things like, you know the way VVols works with our cyber site recovery manager, to let them automate you know, the testing, I feel always in the actual fail over. There's an interesting example of how I think our customers are going to take advantage of some of these new technologies as we go forward. >> You mentioned giving customers the ability with the right infrastructure to offer new services. And that's another critical component as we've seen in 2020 is businesses needing to pivot continuously and come up with new creative ideas, products, and services and new ways of delivering those to their existing customers holding onto them and hopefully growing their customer base. And that ability to leverage technology, to deliver new services is also one of the key kind of foundations that will allow businesses to be the winners of tomorrow. Matthew, to you talk to me when you're in customer situations, customers have choice, we know this, ding into me, give me the top three differentiators when you're talking to customers, why PowerFlex is the ideal solution for them? >> That's a great question. I'm glad you asked. (laughs) So I think, you know, as part of being a product guy it's really cool when the intellectual property within your product is software that your company owns and hardware, your company owns. So we're able to do some really cool stuff together to deliver innovative solutions for our customers. But, you know, when I think about my product I think first and foremost, around performance and scale right? You know, several million, IO'S a sub-millisecond response time and anytime someone wants more performance they just add another server, right? So this idea that we scale literally is a key differentiator for the product. A second key differentiator is this idea that I talked a little bit about before that we, you can kind of multi-platform this. So when you roll this out, you can deploy to use it with virtual environments, whether it's VMware or Hyper-V or other virtual environments. You can have bare metal deployment. So if you want to run this with Linux and use software defined storage in the bare metal, we can support that. Or we can go directly to containers. So you can use containers, bare metal or virtual. And so this idea of choice is a huge differentiator. And then the last one is anchored around this idea that when you scale and you get the benefit of management, you don't have to scale everything at the same time. So in traditional software defined infrastructure on the HCI side you have to scale compute and storage together. So every time you add a node you add compute power and storage power. With power flex, we've been able to effectively split those two pieces off, so a customer could actually only scale what they need. And in fact, if they only want to buy storage side of the solution, you can just buy storage side solution and then you can have existing infrastructure connect to that and it behaves just like a traditional three tier model. So those are, I think are the key things that I think differentiate the product and kind of make it special here at Dell and for our customers. >> Matthew, sticking with you, are there any, I think of things like compliance and healthcare and financial services, especially right now, what are some of the key benefits that PowerFlex delivers, say for some of those essential industries right now? >> Yeah, I think, you know it's interesting 'cause those are two of our largest space and financial is probably our largest space. And really for them, it comes down to, you talked about compliance, you talk about scale and then you talk about management. So we said some really interesting requirements because of scale so large, for example, in our last release we're able to start to do rack level firmware and software updates. So when you look at other solutions they might be doing system at a time, doing updates taking them offline and then running those around. But in our scenario, since we kind of own the SDS layer and the compute side, we can actually do update these for an entire rack in one shot. Dramatically reducing the complexity, dramatically reducing the amount of time it takes to do updates. So that's a real big deal in financial space. And then in terms of healthcare, for example we're the only software defined solution product that can run all of Epic healthcare, all pieces of Epic within our product. All other products run out of bandwidth, run out of performance. So they end up not being able to run all sides of the requirement, whether it's the database back end, or the VDI front end, we're the only one on the market that can do all of that. >> It seems to really be a big differentiator in healthcare as a lot of organizations run on Epic or try to, to help with patient care and care delivery. Martin, last question for you. Give me a snapshot of the partner's perspective over the last couple of years with the rebrand under Dell Technologies, with the power portfolio, how have your partners embraced the simplification? >> So, you know, I think that the overall, this gave them clearer understanding of where and what to sell and what made sense for power max in particular, you know, I think it let them anchor on, you know the flagship product of the legendary performance and reliability of that platform and, you know, gave them an easy way to think about where to position that with, you know, our end customers and, you know, in what ways that the products would benefit their customers the most. So, you know, as Matt described on the PowerFlex side, it starts with our performance and reliability and then ultimately, you know enabling them to do whatever they need to do, so across all the different data services and we got to talk ready about some of the new ones you know, but we also have a lot that we've you know, refined over the years and, you know making it sort of official and sort of the PowerMax envelope what everyone really just sort of simplify how they would consume it all. So, you know, I think, you know maybe one of the thing, you know, worth mentioning in all these new use cases and environments and, you know, all the different applications that our customers are trying to operate and deliver on is, you know, security, you know, so we developed a new capability that we call end-to-end efficient encryption. And this really lets customers do encryption all the way from the host through to the storage. And, you know I think ultimately that's going to help them sleep better at night and also, you know help them avoid some of the things that you've seen crop up now. Now that the world is so digital and all the different threats that our customers face. So we're keeping our finger on the pulse of a lot of different needs you know, whether it's flexibility, performance reliability, but all these new new technologies as well to make sure that we set our customers up to be successful as possible. >> That's exactly what they want to be, successful. Martin, Matthew, thank you so much for joining me on the Cube, sharing the updates for PowerMax, PowerFlex, the differentiators. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Yeah, thank you Lisa this was fun. Alright from my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the cubes coverage, Dell Technologies World at 2020, the digital experience. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE in our Palo Alto studios. We're here with our quarantine crew, doing all the remote interviews, getting all the stories that matter. The great guest, Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Caitlin, CUBE alumni, welcome back remotely. We didn't make it to the Dell Technologies World got moved to the fall. We'll see you certainly virtually, but thank you for coming on remotely, appreciate it. >> Thank you so much for having me again, it's great to be here. >> So storage is on the upswing. We're seeing a lot of activity. We're going to talk about data protection specifically. But first, we want to find out what's going on with you guys. There's been some changes in your organization within Dell, can you take a minute to explain what they are? >> Yeah, absolutely. What we found is certainly a lot of our conversations in the storage space end up talking about data protection and data protection, talking about storage. And what we've decided to do is actually really bring those parts to the business together. So specifically now I've been in the storage business for a few years, I spent a long time in data protection before that. So now we've brought the gang back together, and we've got storage and data protection really brought together as an organization all the way through engineering, and product marketing. Product Management really help us collaborate and really attack problems for customers cohesively. So we're really early days here, but it's exciting. We've been really busy on the storage side, and we've got some exciting things coming here on the data protection side as well. >> I want to get your thoughts 'cause almost every interview I do in the past four months is just doesn't stop. It's COVID impact. It's one of those things that we've talked about data protection. I've had so many great conversations, continuous operations, non-disruptive operations, it couldn't ask for more disruption than people being asked to work at home. So it's caused some IT divides, this is something that we didn't see coming. Business still needs to go on. So I want to get your thoughts, we're seeing cloud obviously become highlighted in this pandemic, that's obviously impacting the data protection. What's going on in the data protection front on your side, because obviously, cloud is showing everyone, "Hey, I can use modern technologies in the cloud, but I still got to do my business, I still got to protect my data." What's going on? >> Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think we've seen a lot accelerate with this whole situation we're all in with a global pandemic, with the challenges that all businesses and people are having. But the digital transformation has been compressed, right? It would have taken people years, but now they've been forced to do that in months. Things like containers are really exploding and the requirement to protect Kubernetes is really something that we now more and more are having conversations about. Cyber ransomware has really unfortunately, only accelerated in this increasingly digital world that we're now all exclusively living in. So cyber resiliency has become a lot more important conversation. And then being able to protect data, certainly on-prem, but also across multiple public clouds and having that consistent experience is probably more important than it's ever been before as well. So it's really just put the accelerant on a lot of conversations that we were having before, and now they've become even more important. >> Talk about the innovations around the protect product, you've got the PowerProtect, it's agile, there's been some developments, what's the new additions? What's being highlighted? What are the key features? >> Yeah, so it's actually pretty exciting month for us here. PowerProtect Data Manager has been in the market for a full year. So believe it or not full year and again, as you mentioned, agile development. So it was introduced a year ago, we've had a number of enhancements over that year in the space of adding workloads, our cloud integration, we've added cloud Dr to both Azure and AWS. You have three click failover, two click failback. Really simple cloud disaster recovery, the availability and AWS marketplace for in-cloud data protection. As well, we have integration with our cyber recovery solutions, so again that ransomware protection and recovery is an important part. As well as a number of enhancements for supporting additional workloads, SAP Hana, CR Microsoft Exchange, we have broad workload support, we've really really enhanced that a lot. And then most recently, just this month, we now have a brand new data protection of PowerProtect Data Manager offer which includes all of our cloud capabilities, all inclusive, available in a subscription. So again, as we talked about the way not only people are using their data protection solutions, but how they're consuming and purchasing that, we've really transformed also now the way that people will be purchasing that. >> That's awesome, congratulations. Subscription is the format people want. And Amazon marketplace that shows they can consume if you're amazon customer, you just go in the marketplace, you get it, that's awesome. Congratulations, that's the way the world wants to consume. So that's awesome news. The thing I want to get your thoughts on and you guys have been busy. The cyber recovery and resilience piece you mentioned, can you talk about that because, we're hearing a lot more that work at home is not going to be more permanent. More permanent in the sense of, as we come out of the pandemic, people will say, "Hey, I can be productive at home." So you get to see the at home, not just a, "Here's some extra expense for your bandwidth." Is going to be more thought through. There's going to be more cyber attacks, just the attacks just on the COVID scams alone has been a problem at a personal level. But from a business standpoint, I got to have a VPN, I got to have my connections, I got to be secure. How do you guys look at that because organizations are putting a focus on it? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, cyber resiliency is something we've focused on actually for a number of years and it started in the obvious places, right. The banks of the world, the financial institutions and the healthcare organizations. Where they always had to have data really protected, and they were kind of some of the more early targets. But now we've seen ransomware. And these digital attacks really get worse and worse. I think all businesses, including our own, are really ramping up to make sure that we are protecting in every way we can. And from our data protection portfolio, we have a fully air-gapped solution. So you have that protection. And it does two things, it first helps mitigate against the attack in the first place by actually being able to do full content scanning to detect if an attack has happened. And just as importantly, if an attack happens, being able to quickly in an automated way, recover from that attack. I think it's something that we are really finding that our entire sales team, is having conversations about. It's no longer focused on the financial institutions of the world. It's every organization, and a lot of people really appreciate that we've come with that expertise and that knowledge to be able to help them prevent, and then, unfortunately, in many cases recover from these attacks. >> That's to me, it's table stakes, I'd have to agree with you. The question I have for you on that, you've doubled speed piece because one of the speed to recovery has always been a big feature. Now with the at home situation, how does that play into, how you guys have been on that speed to recovery aspect of that? Can you share some thoughts on that? >> Yeah, and it's specifically with cyber because we have a fully air-gapped solution, and it's in a secure enclave. That recovery is automated, and it's all within that secure enclave. So you have that security, you have the confidence, and you have the speed of that recovery. So it's really important the way we've implemented that, it's not attack on to an existing, it's truly a fully secure enclave, a full air-gapped solution so that you can recover quickly, but just as importantly, you can recover securely as well. >> One of the quotes that's been kicked around in the industry is, in the past two months, we've seen more digital transformation than the past two years. And I think that's rightfully articulate 'cause of COVID. And we're seeing all the warts and scabs out there, and the infrastructure whether it was investments lacking, the ones that made the right investments were doing well. And it becomes around cloud native, some of the things you guys saw with your success with agility. What is going on with a container based architecture, because that to me is becoming one of those things where it's accelerating development teams, at the same time providing some of those business values that people have to keep the lights on for. So, what do you guys look at that? How do you look at this container architecture? What specifically in the portfolio you guys have to address that? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think containers we found accelerating in the past couple years and then in the past few months, is a huge, huge requirement. And although we didn't think so pretty recently, containers are part of production applications. They need to be stored persistent storage on the storage side, but they probably even more critically and urgently they need to be protected. We've done a number of integrations and work specifically, with VMware to be able to support Kubernetes, and being able to support those workloads and protect Kubernetes workload. A lot of advanced integration, being able to protect and recover those clusters natively, and having that deep integration with VMware, as well as other other distributions as well. 'Cause we have really found that containers are exploding, the ecosystem is obviously very much evolving, but we are really keeping up with the bleeding edge of that to ensure that as these cloud native applications are developed, that the containers are truly being protected, just as physical applications of past had been. We need to make sure that certainly VMs but even more importantly, those containers alongside, are being protected. >> I've always been a big fan of containers and certainly Kubernetes that keeps the legacy alive and until you can transition, the new end and the old, and sometimes they can work together. With that, I want to get your thoughts specifically around this idea of technical debt. A lot of customers we talked to said, "Hey, I want more end-to-end, I want some cloud native, I got to have the versatility, I got to have the agility and the speed, I got to be multi cloud. So multi cloud's on the horizon, it's certainly hybrids today. I don't want my infrastructure to be the technical debt for tomorrow." That's the question that comes up. How do you answer that, and how do you talk to that specifically? >> Yeah, it's interesting, you bring that up, especially in the storage side, too. We've been talking about that a lot. That was a pretty centralized message about how we architected power store, and it's pretty central to everything that we're designing. Is that, investment with our Dell EMC Infrastructure with Dell Technologies, is investing for what you need today, but more importantly, is going to bring you into the future. And what we have with PowerProtect Data Manager is something that is rooted in the innovation and the proven architecture to provide support for all these broad workloads and all of these broad clouds, but also also be able to protect these new modern cloud native applications, and help you bridge that gap in your own environment, so you have that. And even just as important as supporting modern applications is that support for multiple clouds, AWS and Azure. We all know that, that technical debt can also come in the form of being locked into a single public cloud, you need that flexibility to be able to leverage that public cloud of choice, whether it's for disaster recovery, backup to cloud, long term retention to cloud, having that flexibility is also just as an important part of that equation as it is for your on-prem investments as well. >> Well, congratulations on that data protection on the product front. Having the bright mix. Having that certainly is going to be key as the buying cycle start to ramp up again. I want to get back to the business 'cause I'll check on the technology. Congratulations, I love cloud native, you know that. But check on the technology business model. You mentioned subscriptions. So can you talk about the trend on your customer side, the move from CapEx and OpEx. Because if you go cloud, the consumption will be subscription, there'll be more operating expenses. How does that impact the IT budgets? How do you guys align there? What's your answer to that, can you explain? >> Yeah, absolutely. We announced, late last year, so in the fall of last year, Dell technology is on demand family, and that's really our effort to focus more on our cloud like experience and consumption and product offerings. And part of that is our subscription, pay as you go model. And what we've found, and I'd love your perspective on this as well, is that, the moving from CapEx and OpEx has been a conversation and certainly when it comes to infrastructure, there's been some set of customers over the past 12 months that have been moving in that direction. We're seeing that accelerate, certainly in the infrastructure space, but as we all know, software is where that's already pretty well established. As I think you've said, that's table stakes. So we've seen that that's really the methodology, both from our standpoint and our customers' and our partners' is, when we're selling software, that's got to be really honest subscription basis. So that's why obviously, with PowerProtect Data Manager, it makes all the sense in the world to really focus there. And that's really part of our bigger initiative overall, to move towards more of these consumption based as a service OpEx models for our customers. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up I'd love to share my opinion, because I do have opinion on this. And one of the things that's coming out of some of the COVID interviews with the practitioners and the customers and the insiders is, it's a developer lead market. So cloud native, we've been talking about for years and it certainly happened. But as the pandemic has shown, people are going to be coming out of this. They have to have a growth strategy, they got to have the foundational product sets and technologies in place. But the customers, your customers, have to have a growth strategy. They got to refactor. They got to look at what they want to double down in, and kind on what they want to cut back. Some things are pretty obvious now, what not to do. So it's clear there's lines of sight around certain things, but it's developer led. The applications are going to drive value of the business, and so I'm seeing the alignment between that trend of developer led with a flex of consumption based resource. So yeah, you get the foundational services. And then hey, if the app successful, you're just still in business. I mean, people are really worried about, even, making sure they come out of this not on a downward trajectory. They want to be on an upward trajectory. That's a really key thing for 'em, your reaction. >> Yeah, I mean, that really resonates. I think it's and when we look at just to go back to the technology a little, 'cause, I never can resist, is if you look even just PowerProtect Data Manager, one of the things that's so important is that, we've have built that to be both controllable by the application and users so they can do their own protection, but then have that centralized view. And that being able to have that consolidated and centralized management of data from a single console for IT. And I think that gets to the now the next level with developers is, we need to enable developers as seamlessly as possible in their own language to be able to protect, to be able to store data, so IT can feel good about it. But we have to be able to enable them in the way that they are needing to develop these applications as quickly as possible, and from an IT perspective, that means being able to do that on-prem, or even do that in the cloud, so that we can keep all of those policies in place and keep that centralized governance, but really support the acceleration and the digital transformation that those folks are driving. So I think it makes a lot of sense and it really resonates with our product strategy. >> I think there's going to be a slew of new applications that are going to need to have all kinds of strategies built in countermeasures, recovery, all new things are going to emerge. So you guys certainly will be certainly more busy than ever. I want to get your product kind of view on something why I got you here, because I think this is kind of key. As you look at your portfolio, you mentioned the tech and the tech, all the features that you have, what are the few that resonate the most, it means classic product marketing, I mean, everyone wants to know, we've got all these features, which is great. Which ones do you say, Caitlin, are jumping out right now that are resonating the most? 'Cause sometimes it's a feature that might not be that heavy tech, or it's something that's really differentiated, but the customers will glob onto key features, what are some of the things that you're seeing that are rising to the top in terms of the feature set? >> Yeah, and it's not the speeds and feeds of yesterday. And I think this, more broadly across storage and data protection is what we're finding. The speeds and feeds are good, and some people do want to have that conversation. But we've gotten to a point from a technology from an industry standpoint, that we're able to meet latency, the bandwidth, the throughput that people need. But what's more interesting and is more compelling and important to the business is, how can you help me change the way I'm running my data center, and inter-operate with the cloud, and therefore change the way I'm running my business. And some of the pieces that come in there, is automation. I think automation within systems to systems across the enterprise, across edge and cloud, that is so incredibly critical. The AI that we're building into platforms, the integration with whether it's VMware based with VRO, whether it's Ansible modules, intelligence, and this idea of having an autonomous data center that then has that connectivity to cloud and inter-operate then also with the edge, is so incredibly compelling. And again, not just for the large enterprises, but more and more for smaller ones. Because in this world, we need to help our customers have their data center run itself as much as possible, and whatever does require administration is as simple as possible, right? We've all gotten used to technology being as simple as our smartphones, this consumerization of IT has really changed the requirement of what people think simple means. So the things that you don't necessarily think about, and we don't necessarily market even that actively about, how important the number of clicks and the user interface and the seamless transition to products, as well as automation, is so critical. And I think the other ones we've already hit on, integration with multiple public clouds, that flexibility, support for containers, and Kubernetes and deep VMware integration are increasingly critical. And I think, for someone who's been in product marketing for 15 years, I couldn't be happier that our conversations have kind of moved off of speeds and feeds and into these much more compelling and business centric conversation, because, I think we can add a lot more value to the business that way. >> It also shows the strategic nature, you mentioned edge, these new environments. It's a multi environment that you have to have build products for. So it's not so much, how fast packets are moving back and forth, or this or that. It's really about the business value. >> Yeah, it's about the business value, the locality, the value of the data, it's really all about the data and how we can help our customers better manage that across all locations. But do that in a very, very simple way. But the requirement for what simple really means, has really, really raised the bar on that, and we're going to continue to push ourselves and challenge ourselves on that as well. >> Caitlin, I'll give you the final word, talk about choice. Choice has always been a big part of what you guys have offered customers, Dell Technologies has great storage. In this day and age, what does that mean for a customer? What have the choice mean? >> Yeah, and I think it's a delicate balance. And we've gone through quite a transformation over the past couple years here. And this summer was an exciting one for many reasons, but, we just recently completed that full simplification of our portfolio and we have our full portfolio of power solutions, all the way from PowerMax to PowerVolt, PowerStore, PowerScale, PowerFlex, and of course, the one we talked about today, PowerProtect. We now have that all in market. And I bring that up because, that is our simple portfolio to give customers best in class products across all of these different categories. And the fact that we have that choice, but, we've simplified that choice down to as few choices as possible, coming back to what we were just talking about. It's critical that we have solutions that meet the requirements of all of our different customers, but also that we don't give them more than that. That we need to give them choices that will meet their needs, but also not give them so many choices, that it's overwhelming. You don't want to be the cheesecake factory and not be able to choose what you want, you need to just be able to choose from what the options that really makes sense. And that's why I think it's really exciting now as we move into the second half of this year and look into next, we have that portfolio now, and we can focus on, which is the right combination of solutions for you. >> During the pandemic, people are reading a book, doing a hobby, you guys are updating your product portfolio. Congratulations on all the hard work, Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product. Great to see you. Thank you for spending the time, giving us an update on the data protection stuff. And again, congratulations for being so productive during a tough time and stay safe, thank you. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me, good to see you. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage with Dell Technologies. Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product Marketing giving us the breakdown. Very productive for them during this time, and again, companies want a growth strategy when they come out of the pandemic. More than ever, infrastructure has to enable the software for the new solutions. Just to keep coverage, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE in our Palo Alto studios. We're here with our quarantine crew, doing all the remote interviews, getting all the stories that matter. The great guest, Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Caitlin, CUBE alumni, welcome back remotely. We didn't make it to the Dell Technologies World got moved to the fall. We'll see you certainly virtually, but thank you for coming on remotely, appreciate it. >> Thank you so much for having me again, it's great to be here. >> So storage is on the upswing. We're seeing a lot of activity. We're going to talk about data protection specifically. But first, we want to find out what's going on with you guys. There's been some changes in your organization within Dell, can you take a minute to explain what they are? >> Yeah, absolutely. What we found is certainly a lot of our conversations in the storage space end up talking about data protection and data protection, talking about storage. And what we've decided to do is actually really bring those parts to the business together. So specifically now I've been in the storage business for a few years, I spent a long time in data protection before that. So now we've brought the gang back together, and we've got storage and data protection really brought together as an organization all the way through engineering, and product marketing. Product Management really help us collaborate and really attack problems for customers cohesively. So we're really early days here, but it's exciting. We've been really busy on the storage side, and we've got some exciting things coming here on the data protection side as well. >> I want to get your thoughts 'cause almost every interview I do in the past four months is just doesn't stop. It's COVID impact. It's one of those things that we've talked about data protection. I've had so many great conversations, continuous operations, non-disruptive operations, it couldn't ask for more disruption than people being asked to work at home. So it's caused some IT divides, this is something that we didn't see coming. Business still needs to go on. So I want to get your thoughts, we're seeing cloud obviously become highlighted in this pandemic, that's obviously impacting the data protection. What's going on in the data protection front on your side, because obviously, cloud is showing everyone, "Hey, I can use modern technologies in the cloud, but I still got to do my business, I still got to protect my data." What's going on? >> Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think we've seen a lot accelerate with this whole situation we're all in with a global pandemic, with the challenges that all businesses and people are having. But the digital transformation has been compressed, right? It would have taken people years, but now they've been forced to do that in months. Things like containers are really exploding and the requirement to protect Kubernetes is really something that we now more and more are having conversations about. Cyber ransomware has really unfortunately, only accelerated in this increasingly digital world that we're now all exclusively living in. So cyber resiliency has become a lot more important conversation. And then being able to protect data, certainly on-prem, but also across multiple public clouds and having that consistent experience is probably more important than it's ever been before as well. So it's really just put the accelerant on a lot of conversations that we were having before, and now they've become even more important. >> Talk about the innovations around the protect product, you've got the PowerProtect, it's agile, there's been some developments, what's the new additions? What's being highlighted? What are the key features? >> Yeah, so it's actually pretty exciting month for us here. PowerProtect Data Manager has been in the market for a full year. So believe it or not full year and again, as you mentioned, agile development. So it was introduced a year ago, we've had a number of enhancements over that year in the space of adding workloads, our cloud integration, we've added cloud Dr to both Azure and AWS. You have three click failover, two click failback. Really simple cloud disaster recovery, the availability and AWS marketplace for in-cloud data protection. As well, we have integration with our cyber recovery solutions, so again that ransomware protection and recovery is an important part. As well as a number of enhancements for supporting additional workloads, SAP Hana, CR Microsoft Exchange, we have broad workload support, we've really really enhanced that a lot. And then most recently, just this month, we now have a brand new data protection of PowerProtect Data Manager offer which includes all of our cloud capabilities, all inclusive, available in a subscription. So again, as we talked about the way not only people are using their data protection solutions, but how they're consuming and purchasing that, we've really transformed also now the way that people will be purchasing that. >> That's awesome, congratulations. Subscription is the format people want. And Amazon marketplace that shows they can consume if you're amazon customer, you just go in the marketplace, you get it, that's awesome. Congratulations, that's the way the world wants to consume. So that's awesome news. The thing I want to get your thoughts on and you guys have been busy. The cyber recovery and resilience piece you mentioned, can you talk about that because, we're hearing a lot more that work at home is not going to be more permanent. More permanent in the sense of, as we come out of the pandemic, people will say, "Hey, I can be productive at home." So you get to see the at home, not just a, "Here's some extra expense for your bandwidth." Is going to be more thought through. There's going to be more cyber attacks, just the attacks just on the COVID scams alone has been a problem at a personal level. But from a business standpoint, I got to have a VPN, I got to have my connections, I got to be secure. How do you guys look at that because organizations are putting a focus on it? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, cyber resiliency is something we've focused on actually for a number of years and it started in the obvious places, right. The banks of the world, the financial institutions and the healthcare organizations. Where they always had to have data really protected, and they were kind of some of the more early targets. But now we've seen ransomware. And these digital attacks really get worse and worse. I think all businesses, including our own, are really ramping up to make sure that we are protecting in every way we can. And from our data protection portfolio, we have a fully air-gapped solution. So you have that protection. And it does two things, it first helps mitigate against the attack in the first place by actually being able to do full content scanning to detect if an attack has happened. And just as importantly, if an attack happens, being able to quickly in an automated way, recover from that attack. I think it's something that we are really finding that our entire sales team, is having conversations about. It's no longer focused on the financial institutions of the world. It's every organization, and a lot of people really appreciate that we've come with that expertise and that knowledge to be able to help them prevent, and then, unfortunately, in many cases recover from these attacks. >> That's to me, it's table stakes, I'd have to agree with you. The question I have for you on that, you've doubled speed piece because one of the speed to recovery has always been a big feature. Now with the at home situation, how does that play into, how you guys have been on that speed to recovery aspect of that? Can you share some thoughts on that? >> Yeah, and it's specifically with cyber because we have a fully air-gapped solution, and it's in a secure enclave. That recovery is automated, and it's all within that secure enclave. So you have that security, you have the confidence, and you have the speed of that recovery. So it's really important the way we've implemented that, it's not attack on to an existing, it's truly a fully secure enclave, a full air-gapped solution so that you can recover quickly, but just as importantly, you can recover securely as well. >> One of the quotes that's been kicked around in the industry is, in the past two months, we've seen more digital transformation than the past two years. And I think that's rightfully articulate 'cause of COVID. And we're seeing all the warts and scabs out there, and the infrastructure whether it was investments lacking, the ones that made the right investments were doing well. And it becomes around cloud native, some of the things you guys saw with your success with agility. What is going on with a container based architecture, because that to me is becoming one of those things where it's accelerating development teams, at the same time providing some of those business values that people have to keep the lights on for. So, what do you guys look at that? How do you look at this container architecture? What specifically in the portfolio you guys have to address that? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think containers we found accelerating in the past couple years and then in the past few months, is a huge, huge requirement. And although we didn't think so pretty recently, containers are part of production applications. They need to be stored persistent storage on the storage side, but they probably even more critically and urgently they need to be protected. We've done a number of integrations and work specifically, with VMware to be able to support Kubernetes, and being able to support those workloads and protect Kubernetes workload. A lot of advanced integration, being able to protect and recover those clusters natively, and having that deep integration with VMware, as well as other other distributions as well. 'Cause we have really found that containers are exploding, the ecosystem is obviously very much evolving, but we are really keeping up with the bleeding edge of that to ensure that as these cloud native applications are developed, that the containers are truly being protected, just as physical applications of past had been. We need to make sure that certainly VMs but even more importantly, those containers alongside, are being protected. >> I've always been a big fan of containers and certainly Kubernetes that keeps the legacy alive and until you can transition, the new end and the old, and sometimes they can work together. With that, I want to get your thoughts specifically around this idea of technical debt. A lot of customers we talked to said, "Hey, I want more end-to-end, I want some cloud native, I got to have the versatility, I got to have the agility and the speed, I got to be multi cloud. So multi cloud's on the horizon, it's certainly hybrids today. I don't want my infrastructure to be the technical debt for tomorrow." That's the question that comes up. How do you answer that, and how do you talk to that specifically? >> Yeah, it's interesting, you bring that up, especially in the storage side, too. We've been talking about that a lot. That was a pretty centralized message about how we architected power store, and it's pretty central to everything that we're designing. Is that, investment with our Dell EMC Infrastructure with Dell Technologies, is investing for what you need today, but more importantly, is going to bring you into the future. And what we have with PowerProtect Data Manager is something that is rooted in the innovation and the proven architecture to provide support for all these broad workloads and all of these broad clouds, but also also be able to protect these new modern cloud native applications, and help you bridge that gap in your own environment, so you have that. And even just as important as supporting modern applications is that support for multiple clouds, AWS and Azure. We all know that, that technical debt can also come in the form of being locked into a single public cloud, you need that flexibility to be able to leverage that public cloud of choice, whether it's for disaster recovery, backup to cloud, long term retention to cloud, having that flexibility is also just as an important part of that equation as it is for your on-prem investments as well. >> Well, congratulations on that data protection on the product front. Having the bright mix. Having that certainly is going to be key as the buying cycle start to ramp up again. I want to get back to the business 'cause I'll check on the technology. Congratulations, I love cloud native, you know that. But check on the technology business model. You mentioned subscriptions. So can you talk about the trend on your customer side, the move from CapEx and OpEx. Because if you go cloud, the consumption will be subscription, there'll be more operating expenses. How does that impact the IT budgets? How do you guys align there? What's your answer to that, can you explain? >> Yeah, absolutely. We announced, late last year, so in the fall of last year, Dell technology is on demand family, and that's really our effort to focus more on our cloud like experience and consumption and product offerings. And part of that is our subscription, pay as you go model. And what we've found, and I'd love your perspective on this as well, is that, the moving from CapEx and OpEx has been a conversation and certainly when it comes to infrastructure, there's been some set of customers over the past 12 months that have been moving in that direction. We're seeing that accelerate, certainly in the infrastructure space, but as we all know, software is where that's already pretty well established. As I think you've said, that's table stakes. So we've seen that that's really the methodology, both from our standpoint and our customers' and our partners' is, when we're selling software, that's got to be really honest subscription basis. So that's why obviously, with PowerProtect Data Manager, it makes all the sense in the world to really focus there. And that's really part of our bigger initiative overall, to move towards more of these consumption based as a service OpEx models for our customers. >> Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up I'd love to share my opinion, because I do have opinion on this. And one of the things that's coming out of some of the COVID interviews with the practitioners and the customers and the insiders is, it's a developer lead market. So cloud native, we've been talking about for years and it certainly happened. But as the pandemic has shown, people are going to be coming out of this. They have to have a growth strategy, they got to have the foundational product sets and technologies in place. But the customers, your customers, have to have a growth strategy. They got to refactor. They got to look at what they want to double down in, and kind on what they want to cut back. Some things are pretty obvious now, what not to do. So it's clear there's lines of sight around certain things, but it's developer led. The applications are going to drive value of the business, and so I'm seeing the alignment between that trend of developer led with a flex of consumption based resource. So yeah, you get the foundational services. And then hey, if the app successful, you're just still in business. I mean, people are really worried about, even, making sure they come out of this not on a downward trajectory. They want to be on an upward trajectory. That's a really key thing for 'em, your reaction. >> Yeah, I mean, that really resonates. I think it's and when we look at just to go back to the technology a little, 'cause, I never can resist, is if you look even just PowerProtect Data Manager, one of the things that's so important is that, we've have built that to be both controllable by the application and users so they can do their own protection, but then have that centralized view. And that being able to have that consolidated and centralized management of data from a single console for IT. And I think that gets to the now the next level with developers is, we need to enable developers as seamlessly as possible in their own language to be able to protect, to be able to store data, so IT can feel good about it. But we have to be able to enable them in the way that they are needing to develop these applications as quickly as possible, and from an IT perspective, that means being able to do that on-prem, or even do that in the cloud, so that we can keep all of those policies in place and keep that centralized governance, but really support the acceleration and the digital transformation that those folks are driving. So I think it makes a lot of sense and it really resonates with our product strategy. >> I think there's going to be a slew of new applications that are going to need to have all kinds of strategies built in countermeasures, recovery, all new things are going to emerge. So you guys certainly will be certainly more busy than ever. I want to get your product kind of view on something why I got you here, because I think this is kind of key. As you look at your portfolio, you mentioned the tech and the tech, all the features that you have, what are the few that resonate the most, it means classic product marketing, I mean, everyone wants to know, we've got all these features, which is great. Which ones do you say, Caitlin, are jumping out right now that are resonating the most? 'Cause sometimes it's a feature that might not be that heavy tech, or it's something that's really differentiated, but the customers will glob onto key features, what are some of the things that you're seeing that are rising to the top in terms of the feature set? >> Yeah, and it's not the speeds and feeds of yesterday. And I think this, more broadly across storage and data protection is what we're finding. The speeds and feeds are good, and some people do want to have that conversation. But we've gotten to a point from a technology from an industry standpoint, that we're able to meet latency, the bandwidth, the throughput that people need. But what's more interesting and is more compelling and important to the business is, how can you help me change the way I'm running my data center, and inter-operate with the cloud, and therefore change the way I'm running my business. And some of the pieces that come in there, is automation. I think automation within systems to systems across the enterprise, across edge and cloud, that is so incredibly critical. The AI that we're building into platforms, the integration with whether it's VMware based with VRO, whether it's Ansible modules, intelligence, and this idea of having an autonomous data center that then has that connectivity to cloud and inter-operate then also with the edge, is so incredibly compelling. And again, not just for the large enterprises, but more and more for smaller ones. Because in this world, we need to help our customers have their data center run itself as much as possible, and whatever does require administration is as simple as possible, right? We've all gotten used to technology being as simple as our smartphones, this consumerization of IT has really changed the requirement of what people think simple means. So the things that you don't necessarily think about, and we don't necessarily market even that actively about, how important the number of clicks and the user interface and the seamless transition to products, as well as automation, is so critical. And I think the other ones we've already hit on, integration with multiple public clouds, that flexibility, support for containers, and Kubernetes and deep VMware integration are increasingly critical. And I think, for someone who's been in product marketing for 15 years, I couldn't be happier that our conversations have kind of moved off of speeds and feeds and into these much more compelling and business centric conversation, because, I think we can add a lot more value to the business that way. >> It also shows the strategic nature, you mentioned edge, these new environments. It's a multi environment that you have to have build products for. So it's not so much, how fast packets are moving back and forth, or this or that. It's really about the business value. >> Yeah, it's about the business value, the locality, the value of the data, it's really all about the data and how we can help our customers better manage that across all locations. But do that in a very, very simple way. But the requirement for what simple really means, has really, really raised the bar on that, and we're going to continue to push ourselves and challenge ourselves on that as well. >> Caitlin, I'll give you the final word, talk about choice. Choice has always been a big part of what you guys have offered customers, Dell Technologies has great storage. In this day and age, what does that mean for a customer? What have the choice mean? >> Yeah, and I think it's a delicate balance. And we've gone through quite a transformation over the past couple years here. And this summer was an exciting one for many reasons, but, we just recently completed that full simplification of our portfolio and we have our full portfolio of power solutions, all the way from PowerMax to PowerVolt, PowerStore, PowerScale, PowerFlex, and of course, the one we talked about today, PowerProtect. We now have that all in market. And I bring that up because, that is our simple portfolio to give customers best in class products across all of these different categories. And the fact that we have that choice, but, we've simplified that choice down to as few choices as possible, coming back to what we were just talking about. It's critical that we have solutions that meet the requirements of all of our different customers, but also that we don't give them more than that. That we need to give them choices that will meet their needs, but also not give them so many choices, that it's overwhelming. You don't want to be the cheesecake factory and not be able to choose what you want, you need to just be able to choose from what the options that really makes sense. And that's why I think it's really exciting now as we move into the second half of this year and look into next, we have that portfolio now, and we can focus on, which is the right combination of solutions for you. >> During the pandemic, people are reading a book, doing a hobby, you guys are updating your product portfolio. Congratulations on all the hard work, Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product. Great to see you. Thank you for spending the time, giving us an update on the data protection stuff. And again, congratulations for being so productive during a tough time and stay safe, thank you. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me, good to see you. >> Okay, this is theCUBE coverage with Dell Technologies. Caitlin Gordon, Vice President of Product Marketing giving us the breakdown. Very productive for them during this time, and again, companies want a growth strategy when they come out of the pandemic. More than ever, infrastructure has to enable the software for the new solutions. Just to keep coverage, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I am Stu Miniman and welcome to this special cube conversations. We're here with Dell Technology to share the news of an update to one of their product lines. We've watched for a number of years, Dell has taken their portfolio like I said they powered them up. So, of course the servers are known for a long time PowerEdge and we've seen many of the storage products and like going through their power up and here we have is the PowerFlex. So people that are familiar with what's happening in the software defined storage and hyper-converged space will remember the VX flex, so it's powered up. Joining me to discuss this important announcement, we have Matthew Paul, who's the Senior Director of Product Management and Anthony Cinelli, who's the Senior Director of Business Development, both with Dell Technologies. Matt, let's jump right into it. PowerFlex, powering up this segment of the market, give us the importance and what the announcement is. >> Great, thank you Stu thanks for having us. Yeah, I'm really excited to announce that we're powering up our product and we're moving our VxFlex product through the new power brand and the power name, really responding to customers and our customers taking this product on and aligning it and using it to be able to... Inline with our bigger portfolio that we have at Dell EMC, delivering outcomes for our customers. So it's an exciting timeframe and it really reflects this idea of customers' adoption, in the technology and our investment as Dell Technologies in this software defined storage, to kind of signify to the market that we're here to stay and this is an exciting thing we're working through. The second part around this on top of kind of the rebrand is a new launch of PowerFlex three five So this new software and this software information is delivering some key additions to our portfolio, including a replication, including a new HDMI 5 GUI and including some really cool additions to our software management stack that customers are really been asking for. >> Excellent. So AC, in normal times you're out meeting with a lot of customers, I'm sure you're still talking to a lot of customers, even if you're in work from home mode during the pandemic, but help us understand one of the things we know that Dell has done is it is spring line the portfolio, but when you talk about storage software-defined storage, converged, hyper-converged, there's still a few different options inside the Dell family. So tell us where PowerFlex fits and how it differentiates in position, compared to some of the other pieces. >> Yeah, great question. So, I have a pretty nice role here for Dell, which is, I am responsible for our entire portfolio of converged, hyperconverged, and software defined offerings. And really what that affords me is one particular luxury when I engage with customers. And that luxury is that I can start every single customer engagement with a question. Which is, what problem are you trying to solve? And that's really important because having a portfolio at my disposal allows me to lead with that question and really focus the conversation and solution on what their business problem is and how best to solve it. Now, the things we typically listen for when it comes to Flex are things like flexibility, things like performance, things like I'm trying to solve a platform where I want to re-platform my architecture to a software-defined outcome. But I need to run a wide variety of workloads. I need to run virtual workload, I need to run physical workload, I need to run container workload, I want to consolidate all of that onto a single modern software-defined infrastructure. Or we hear workload specific things. Things like I have an incredibly high performance Oracle Database, or I have a workload. One great example of a customer was cause of COVID they had to go from 60,000 to 160,000 remote users over a weekend. They did that on Flex with zero incremental infrastructure required for the storage. All the performance, all of the horsepower was fully capable of handling that increased capacity. Another customer, curbside pickup was a great application for their business, saw a hundred X performance requirement increase essentially over the course of a weekend because of COVID. Running on flex, they were able to swallow that performance increase with no problem. So a lot of what we see when it comes to Flex and the problems we're hearing are I need a platform that has a lot of inherent flexibility, or I have a very acute workload problem, then I need something very scalable and very performant to solve. But again, my luxury is I can always ask the customer the question first and then leverage the power of our portfolio to provide the best solution to solve for their business problem. >> All right, so AC, appreciate you talked about scale and performance, two of the really big things, if you talk about what's happening in this space. Matt, maybe you can help us sequin through a little bit, as to how this differentiates compared to other solutions in the market place we saw software-defined storage, hyper-converged infrastructure run through its wave in the last few years, you've got some very large customers, big brand names globally, as well as service providers that have used Flex in the past. So explain how this is different from others out there. >> Yeah, I think when we talk about how we manage and we work through this, it's our concepts, so I'm trying to really democratize this software to the masses, right? And be able to make it easy to use and simple to use. If you think about old or traditional software-defined storage, all the knobs and all the tweaks, sometimes it make it difficult to implement. And so you get these really high end extreme customers that leave all these knobs to tweak. We do that very, very well, but what we've been focused on the last couple of years is ensuring we can get that to multiple places through robust kind of investment in our flex manager space. So be able to automate and make things a lot easier and simpler for customers to use that way we can go down and provide this technology to more people. And then the other thing is kind of meeting customers where they need to be. And so a couple of key mechanism, which people consume our products is through our appliances and our racks or integrated racks. So when a customer comes after a kind of a full end to end white glove solution, whether I want to roll a big rack into their environment, plug it in, get it up and going, we have a full integrated rack that we deliver to the customers that really drive that outcome. And then if you think about the difference between that and the appliance the appliance has given us a little more flexibility. So if you want to plug that into an existing network or an existing environment, well, both of these things give you that extreme scale and performance that AC was just talking about, while that rich management experience. so I think you kind of aligned the consumption models and the new management, which also brings a big differentiated value to the product. >> Excellent, so, Matt when I hear you talking about these solutions, wonder if you can help connect this with how your customers are talking about cloud in general, you talked about consumption model, you talked about how to manager, so where does this fit? whether it's the Dell Tech Cloud or just your customers overall discussion of cloud. >> Yeah, so a couple of things come to mind here. Typically what we see with PowerFlex is customer saying, I'm trying to achieve what we call this common platform, which is, I want to build an on premises cloud, that gives me the flexibility to run all the workloads in my data center. And when we say all the workloads, that's everything from obviously your virtualization stack through things like your physical bare metal workloads typically your high performance databases all the way through this emerging world of containers. And those containers could be virtual, could be physical. And giving customers the value of running all of that on a single underlying software-defined infrastructure, with all of the automation life cycle management to go along with it, there's really just nothing like that in the market. So really where we're seeing this adoption is customers who are saying, I want to build my own cloud within my data center, that gives me the ability to run my workloads and because I'm building them on a common infrastructure, I can build automation that allows my end users to consume that infrastructure in a very cloud-like manner. So that's one big thing that we are seeing customers really bite off on. Another approach is within that Dell Technologies cloud platform. Which is, how do we leverage the best of all of the assets under the Dell Technologies umbrella, namely assets from VMware, VMware cloud foundations and everything they offer in their multicloud story, and providing a wide variety of options within the Dell Technologies portfolio to solve that. Obviously we have our VxRail platform, which is the most integrated solution vertically within that VMware stack. We also have other offerings within our storage portfolio that have the ability to plug into that, PowerFlex being one of those as an option for customers to leverage within that Dell Tech Cloud platform strategy. >> Excellent. Matt, you mentioned the new updates with three dot five maybe give us a little bit more on that If whether it's an existing customer, what things they've been asking for that are in this release, or maybe first some new people that might not have looked at the Flex family for awhile that three dot five might be bringing to the table. >> Yeah, I think the great thing about this product, it's an end to end solution. So we bring all these things together that add that value. A couple of the key things is that we've been hearing and driving towards our customers is around replication or a synchronous replication. So the ability for us to be able to align that and give that to customers is probably the most important piece of this release. We also did some really cool stuff in the management stack. So if you think about other competition or other products, being able to align firmware updates for example, or software updates for example, because of the scale of our product, we've had to align real unique things in our managements like stack like the ability to do rack level updates. So really innovative, really differentiated. So customers can take racks at a time down to do updates 'cause they don't have time when there's thousands of servers in their environment, they don't have time to do one note at a time in a round robin fashion. >> And a point to add onto that, right? What's really unique and Matt touched on it, this concept of democratization. We've always done large really well with this technology, right? In a way that really no other technology platform in this space can. What the team has built on the management stack is now allowing us to also do small and medium incredibly well, where we can bring this incredibly disruptive technology to the masses, to your general enterprise, to your general mid market type customer, who's not solving for hundreds or thousands of notes, but maybe solving for 10, 20 or 50 notes and delivering this very disruptive outcome that helps them much more adapt or much more quickly adapt to changing demands they have, harnessing all this flexibility, but doing it with point click operations that are incredibly simple across the full stack. >> Excellent, well, we've heard from Jeff Clark when you get the power brand on there, that's a message to the customers that this is a platform that's going to be with us for quite a number of years. Give us a look forward as to both of you as to what would you expect to see from PowerFlex. >> Yeah, I mean, we're really excited about the future, right? To your point, aligning with the winning roadmap, the investment level in this technology is really high within the organization, how we work well within the broader Dell Technologies portfolio is really exciting. So we'll continue to innovate and drive this democratization story that Anthony was talking about. Innovate in new data services, innovate in new management paradigms and stacks. Like the thing I just talked about in terms of doing rack level updates. And I think just giving customers, listening to our customers and providing that on a reoccurring basis is the critical thing. So we're really embracing this idea of providing updates on a regular basis to be able to respond to customers' needs on a daily day basis. >> Yeah, I think one thing to add to that, that I'm excited to see the team continue executing on is delivering actual workload solution-based outcomes, right? Very often customers will come to us and say, here's my workload problem, right? It's an Oracle, it's a Slung, it's an elastic stack or name your workload. The team's really done a great job of leveraging this platform and building full stack validated solutions, oftentimes in tandem with the application vendor. So customers can consume this technology with complete confidence to run oftentimes their most important or critical workloads, knowing that they have the full backing of the vendor, they have the full backing of the infrastructure provider and the application provider working together to deliver this technology as an outcome. And because of its extreme flexibility, we can adapt it to so many different workload scenarios and customers have responded to that incredibly well. So for me, I'm excited to see the team continuing to build that solutions portfolio because customers are really seeing a ton of value in that. >> Great. I guess final question I have for you Matt, probably up your alley there, availability of the product, is it available now at the launch and if I was a VxFlex customer before what does the move to PowerFlex move, how do I get from where I was to the future If there are any hardware changes or is it all software? >> Yeah, good point. So it's available now, there on the 25th, so, really excited for the customers and we do support customers going from the existing version to the new version. And so the upgrades are pretty straight forward, pretty easy to bring in that updated management stack and then bring in the updated FlexOS. I'm sorry, PowerFlex version. (giggles) >> It's all right, I'm sure customers will be going back and forth on the terms. All right, Matt and AC thank you so much for the update. Congratulations on the progress. (mumbles) All right, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the cube. (soft music)