(light music playing) >> Welcome back to VEEAMON 2022 in Las Vegas. We're at the Aria. This is theCUBE and we're covering two days of VEEAMON. We've done a number of VEEAMONs before, we did Miami, we did New Orleans, we did Chicago and we're, we're happy to be back live after two years of virtual VEEAMONs. I'm Dave Vellante. My co-host is David Nicholson. Eric Herzog is here. You think he's, Eric's been on theCUBE, I think more than any other guest, including Pat Gelsinger, who at one point was the number one guest. Eric Herzog, CMO of INFINIDAT great to see you again. >> Great, Dave, thank you. Love to be on theCUBE. And of course notice my Hawaiian shirt, except I now am supporting an INFINIDAT badge on it. (Dave laughs) Look at that. >> Is that part of the shirt or is that a clip-on? >> Ah, you know, one of those clip-ons but you know, it looks good. Looks good. >> Hey man, what are you doing at VEEAMON? I mean, you guys started this journey into data protection several years ago. I remember we were actually at one of their competitors' events when you first released it, but tell us what's going on with Veeam. >> So we do a ton of stuff with Veeam. We do custom integration. We got some integration on the snapshotting side, but we do everything and we have a purpose built backup appliance known as InfiniGuard. It works with Veeam. We also actually have some customers who use our regular primary storage device as a backup target. The InfiniGuard product will do the data reduction, the dedupe compression, et cetera. The standard product does not, it's just a standard high performance array. We will compress the data, but we have customers that do it either way. We have a couple customers that started with the InfiniBox and then transitioned to the InfiniGuard, realizing that why would you put it on regular storage? Why not go to something that's customized for it? So we do that. We do stuff in the field with them. We've been at all the VEEAMONs since the, since like, I think the second one was the first one we came to. We're doing the virtual one as well as the live one. So we've got a little booth inside, but we're also doing the virtual one today as well. So really strong work with Veeam, particularly at the field level with the sales guys and in the channel. >> So when INFINIDAT does something, you guys go hardcore, high end, fast recovery, you just, you know, reliable, that's kind of your brand. Do you see this movement into data protection as kind of an adjacency to your existing markets? Is it a land and expand strategy? Can you kind of explain the strategy there. >> Ah, so it's actually for us a little bit of a hybrid. So we have several accounts that started with InfiniBox and now have gone with the InfiniGuard. So they start with primary storage and go with secondary storage/modern data protection. But we also have, in fact, we just got a large PO from a Fortune 50, who was buying the InfiniGuard first and now is buying our InfiniBox. >> Both ways. Okay. >> All flash array. And, but they started with backup first and then moved to, so we've got them moving both directions. And of course, now that we have a full portfolio, our original product, the InfiniBox, which was a hybrid array, outperformed probably 80 to 85% of the all flash arrays, 'cause the way we use DRAM. And what's so known as our mural cash technology. So we could do very well, but there is about, you know, 15, 20% of the workloads we could not outperform the competition. So then we had an all flash array and purpose built backup. So we can do, you know, what I'll say is standard enterprise storage, high performance enterprise storage. And then of course, modern data protection with our partnerships such as what we do with Veeam and we've incorporated across the entire portfolio, intense cyber resilience technology. >> Why does the world, Eric, need another purpose built backup appliance? What do you guys bring that is filling a gap in the marketplace? >> Well, the first thing we brought was much higher performance. So when you look at the other purpose built backup appliances, it's been about our ability to have incredibly high performance. The second area has been CapEx and OpEx reduction. So for example, we have a cloud service provider who happens to be in South Africa. They had 14 purpose built backup appliances from someone else, seven in one data center and seven in another. Now they have two InfiniGuards, one in each data center handling all of their backup. You know, they're selling backup as a service. They happen to be using Veeam as well as one other backup company. So if you're the cloud provider from their perspective, they just dramatically reduce their CapEx and OpEx. And of course they've made it easier for them. So that's been a good story for us, that ability to consolidation, whether it be on primary storage or secondary storage. We have a very strong play with cloud providers, particularly those meeting them in small that have to compete with the hyperscalers right. They don't have the engineering of Amazon or Google, right? They can't compete with what the Azure guys have got, but because the way both the InfiniGuard and the InfiniBox work, they could dramatically consolidate workloads. We probably got 30 or 40 midsize and actually several members of the top 10 telcos use us. And when they do their clouds, both their internal cloud, but actually the clouds that are actually running the transmissions and the traffic, it actually runs on InfiniBox. One of them has close to 200 petabytes of InfiniBox and InfiniBox, all flash technology running one of the largest telcos on the planet in a cloud configuration. So all that's been very powerful for us in driving revenue. >> So phrases of the week have been air gap, logical air gap, immutable. Where does InfiniGuard fit into that universe? And what's the profile of the customer that's going to choose InfiniGuard as the target where they're immutable, Write Once Read Many, data is going to live. >> So we did, we announced our InfiniSafe technology first on the InfiniGuard, which actually earlier this year. So we have what I call the four legs of the stool of cyber resilience. One is immutable snapshots, but that's only part of it. Second is logical air gapping, and we can do both local and remote and we can provide and combine local with remote. So for example, what that air gap does is separate the management plane from the actual data plane. Okay. So in this case, the Veeam data backup sets. So the management cannot touch that immutable, can't change it, can't delete it. can't edit it. So management is separated once you start and say, I want to do an immutable snap of two petabytes of Veeam backup dataset. Then we just do that. And the air gap does it, but then you could take the local air gap because as you know, from inception to the end of an attack can be close to 300 days, which means there could be a fire. There could be a tornado, there could be a hurricane, there could be an earthquake. And in the primary data center, So you might as well have that air gap just as you would do- do a remote for disaster recovery and business continuity. Then we have the ability to create a fenced forensic environment to evaluate those backup data sets. And we can do that actually on the same device. That is the purpose built backup appliance. So when you look at the architectural, these are public from our competitors, including the guys that are in sort of Hopkinton/Austin, Texas. You can see that they show a minimum of two physical devices. And in many cases, a third, we can do that with one. So not only do we get the fence forensic environment, just like they do, but we do it with reduction, both CapEx and OpEx. Purpose built backup is very high performance. And then the last thing is our ability to recover. So some people talk about rapid recovery, I would say, they dunno what they're talking about. So when we launched the InfiniGuard with InfiniSafe, we did a live demo, 1.5 petabytes, a Veeam backup dataset. We recovered it in 12 minutes. So once you've identified and that's on the InfiniGuard. On the InfiniBox, once you've identified a good copy of data to do the recovery where you're free of malware ransomware, we can do the recovery in three to five seconds. >> Okay. >> So really, really quick. Actually want to double click on something because people talk about immutable copies, immutable snapshots in particular, what have the actual advances been? I mean, is this simply a setting that maybe we didn't set for retention at some time in the past, or if you had to engineer something net new into a system so to provide that logical air gap. >> So what's net new is the air gapping part. Immutable snapshots have been around, you know, before we were on screen, you talked about WORM, Write Once Read Many. Well, since I'm almost 70 years old, I actually know what that means. When you're 30 or 40 or 50, you probably don't even know what a WORM is. Okay. And the real use of immutable snapshots, it was to replace WORM which was an optical technology. And what was the primary usage? Regulatory and compliance, healthcare, finance and publicly traded companies that were worried about. The SEC or the EU or the Japanese finance ministry coming down on them because they're out of compliance and regulatory. That was the original use of immutable snap. Then people were, well, wait a second. Malware ransomware could attack me. And if I got something that's not changeable, that makes it tougher. So the real magic of immutability was now creating the air gap part. Immutability has been around, I'd say 25 years. I mean, WORMs sort of died back when I was at Mac store the first time. So that was 1990-ish is when WORMs sort of fell away. And there have been immutable snapshots from most of the major storage vendors, as well as a lot of the small vendors ever since they came out, it's kind of like a checkbox item because again, regulatory and compliance, you're going to sell to healthcare, finance, public trade. If you don't have the immutable snapshot, then they don't have their compliance and regulatory for SEC or tax purposes, right? With they ever end up in an audit, you got to produce data. And no one's using a WORM drive anymore to my knowledge. >> I remember the first storage conference I ever went to was in Monterey. It had me in the early 1980s, 84 maybe. And it was a optical disc drive conference. The Jim Porter of optical. >> Yep. (laughs) >> I forget what the guy's name was. And I remember somebody coming up to me, I think it was like Bob Payton rest his soul, super smart strategy guy said, this is never going to happen because of the cost and that's what it was. And now you've got that capability on flash, you know, hard disk, et cetera. >> Right. >> So the four pillars, immutability, the air gap, both local and remote, the fence forensics and the recovery speed. Right? >> Right. Pick up is one thing. Recovery is everything. Those are the four pillars, right? >> Those are the four things. >> And your contention is that those four things together differentiate you from the competition. You mentioned, you know, the big competition, but how unique is this in the marketplace, those capabilities and how difficult is it to replicate? >> So first of all, if someone really puts their engineering hat to it, it's not that hard to replicate. It takes a while. Particularly if you're doing an enterprise, for example, our solutions all have a hundred percent availability guarantee. That's hard to do. Most guys have seven nines. >> That's hard. >> We really will guarantee a hundred percent availability. We offer an SLA that's included when you buy. We don't charge extra for it. It's like if you want it, like you just get it. Second thing is really making sure on the recovery side is the hardest part, particularly on a purpose built backup appliance. So when you look at other people and you delve into their public material, press releases, white paper, support documentation. No one's talking about. Yeah, we can take a 1.5 petabyte Veeam backup data set and make it available in 12 minutes and 12 seconds, which was the exact time that we did on our live demo when we launched the product in February of 2022. No one's talking that. On primary storage, you're hearing some of the vendors such as my old employer that also who, also starts with an "I", talk about a recovery time of two to three hours once you have a known good copy. On primary storage, once we have a known good copy, we're talking three to five seconds for that copy to be available. So that's just sort of the power of the snapshot technology, how we manage our metadata and what we've done, which previous to cyber resiliency, we were known for our replication capability and our snapshot capability from an enterprise class data store. That's what people said. INFINIDAT really knows how to do the replication snapshot. I remember our founder was one of the technical founders of EMC for a product known as the Symmetric, which then became the DMAX, the VMAX and is now is the PowerMax. That was invented by the guy who founded INFINIDAT. So that team has the real chops at enterprise high-end storage to the global fortune 2000. And what are the key feature checkbox items they need that's in both the InfiniBox and also in the InfiniGuard. >> So the business case for cyber resiliency is changing. As Dave said, we've had a big dose last several months, you know, couple years actually, of the importance of cyber resiliency, given all the ransomware tax, et cetera. But it sounds like the business case is shifting really focused on avoiding that risk, avoiding that downtime time versus the cost. The cost is always important. I mean, you got a consolidation play here, right? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Dedupe, does dedupe come into play? >> So on the InfiniGuard we do both dedupe and compression. On the InfiniBox we only do compression. So we do have data reduction. It depends on which product you're using from a Veeam perspective. Most of that now is with the InfiniGuard. So you get the block level dedupe and you get compression. And if you can do both, depending on the data set, we do both. >> How does that affect recovery time? >> Yeah, good question. >> So it doesn't affect recovery times. >> Explain why. >> So first of all, when you're doing a backup data set, the final final recovery, you recovered the backup data set, whether it's Veeam or one of their competitors, you actually make it available to the backup administrator to do a full restore of a backup data set. Okay. So in that case, we get it ready and expose it to the Veeam admin or some other backup admin. And then they launch the Veeam software or the other software and do a restore. Okay. So it's really a two step process on the secondary storage model and actually three. First identifying a known good backup copy. Second then we recover, which is again 12, 13 minutes. And then the backup admin's got to do a, you know, a restore of the backup 'cause it's backup data set in the format of backup, which is different from every backup vendor. So we support that. We get it ready to go. And then whether it's a Veeam backup administrator and quite honestly, from our perspective, most of our customers in the global fortune 2000, 25% of the fortune 50 use INIFINIDAT products. 25% and we're a tiny company. So we must have some magic fairy dust that appeals to the biggest companies on the planet. But most of our customers in that area and actually say probably in the fortune 500 actually use two to three different backup packages. So we can support all those on a single InfiniGuard or multiples depending on how big their backup data sets. Our biggest InfiniGuard is 50 petabytes counting the data reduction technology. So we get that ready. On the InfiniBox, the recovery really is, you know, a couple of seconds and in that case, it's primary data in block format. So we just make that available. So on the InfiniBox, the recovery is once, well two. Identifying a known good copy, first step, then just doing recovery and it's available 'cause it's blocked data. >> And that recovery doesn't include movement of a whole bunch of data. It's essentially realignment of pointers to where the good data is. >> Right. >> Now in the InfiniBox as well as in InfiniGuard. >> No, it would be, So in the case of that, in the case of the InfiniGuard, it's a full recovery of a backup data set. >> Okay. >> So the backup software just launches and it sees, >> Okay. >> your backup one of Veeam and just starts doing a restore with the Veeam restoration technology. Okay? >> Okay. >> In the case of the block, as long as the physical InfiniBox, if that was the primary storage and then filter box is not damaged when you make it available, it's available right away to the apps. Now, if you had an issue with the app side or the physical server side, and now you're pointing new apps and you had to reload stuff on that side, you have to point it at that InfiniBox which has the data. And then you got to wait for the servers and the SAP or Oracle or Mongo, Cassandra to recognize, oh, this is my primary storage. So it depends on the physical configuration on the server side and the application perspective, how bad were the apps damaged? So let's take malware. Malware is even worse because you either destroying data or messing, playing with the app so that the app is now corrupted as well as the data is corrupted. So then it's going to take longer the block data's ready, the SAP workload. And if the SAP somehow was compromised, which is a malware thing, not a ransomware thing, they got to reload a good copy of SAP before it can see the data 'cause the malware attacked the application as well as the data. Ransomware doesn't do that. It just holds it for ransom and it encrypts. >> So this is exactly what we're talking about. When we talk about operational recovery and automation, Eric is addressing the reality that it doesn't just end at the line above some arbitrary storage box, you know, reaching up real recovery, reaches up into the application space and it's complicated. >> That's when you're actually recovered. >> Right. >> When the application- >> Well, think of it like a disaster. >> Okay. >> Yes, right. >> I'll knock on woods since I was born and still live in California. Dave too. Let's assume there's a massive earthquake in the bay area in LA. >> Let's not. >> Okay. Let's yes, but hypothetically and the data center's cat five. It doesn't matter what they're, they're all toast. Okay. Couple weeks later it's modern. You know, people figure out what to do and certain buildings don't fall down 'cause of the way earthquake standards are in California now. So there's data available. They move into temporary space. Okay. Data's sitting there in the Colorado data center and they could do a restore. Well, they can't do a restore. How many service did they need? Had they reloaded all of the application software to do a restoration. What happened to the people? If no one got injured, like in the 1989 earthquake in California, very few people got injured yet cost billions of dollars. But everyone was watching this San Francisco giants played in Oakland, >> I remember >> so no one was on the road. >> Al Michael's. >> Epic moment. >> Imagine it's in the middle of commute time in LA and San Francisco, hundreds of thousands of people. What if it's your data center team? Right? So there's a whole bunch around disaster recovery and business country that have nothing to do with the storage, the people, what your process. So I would argue that malware ransomware is a disaster and it's exactly the same thing. You know, you got the known good copy. You've got okay. You're sure that the SAP and Oracle, especially on the malware side, weren't compromised. On the ransomware side, you don't have to worry about that. And those things, you got to take a look at just as if it, I would argue malware and ransomware is a disaster and you need to have a process just like you would. If there was an earthquake, a fire or a flood in the data center, you need a similar process. That's slightly different, but the same thing, servers, people, software, the data itself. And when you have that all mapped out, that's how you do successful malware ransomeware recovery. It's a different type of disaster. >> It's absolutely a disaster. It comes down to business continuity and be able to transact business with as little disruption as possible. We heard today from the keynotes and then Jason Buffington came on about the preponderance of ransomware. Okay. We know that. But then the interesting stat was the percentage of customers that paid the ransom about a third weren't able to recover. And so 'cause you kind of had this feeling of all right, well, you know, see it on, you know, CNBC, should you pay the ransom or not? You know, pay the ransom. Okay. You'll get back. But no, it's not the case. You won't necessarily get back. So, you know, Veeam stated, Hey, our goal is to sort of eliminate that problem. Are you- You feel like you guys in a partnership can actually achieve that. >> Yes. >> So, and you have customers that have actually avoided, you know, been hit and were able to- >> We have people who won't publicly say they've been hit, but the way they talk about what they did, like in a meeting, they were hit and they were very thankful. >> (laughs) Yeah. >> And so that's been very good. I- >> So we got proof. >> Yes, we absolutely have proof. And quite honestly, with the recent legislation in the United States, malware and ransomware actually now is also regulatory and compliance. >> Yeah. >> Because the new law states mid-March that whether it's Herzog's bar and grill to bank of America or any large foreign company doing business in the US, you have to report to the United States federal government, any attack, same with the county school district with any local government, any agency, the federal government, as well as every company from the tiniest to the largest in the world that does, they're supposed to report it 'cause the government is trying to figure out how to fight it. Just the way if you don't report burglary, how they catch the burglars. >> Does your solution simplify testing in any way or reduce the risk of testing? >> Well, because the recovery is so rapid, we recommend that people do this on a regular basis. So for example, because the recovery is so quick, you can recover in 12 minutes while we do not practice, let's say once a month or once every couple weeks. And guess what? It also allows you to build a repository of known good copies. Remember when you get ransomeware, no one's going to come say, Hey, I'm Mr. Rans. I'm going to steal your stuff. It's all done surreptitiously. They're all James Bond on the sly who doesn't say "By the way, I'm James Bond". They are truly underneath the radar. And they're very slowly encrypting that data set. So guess what? Your primary data and your backup data that you don't want to be attacked can be attacked. So it's really about finding a known good copy. So if you're doing this on a regular basis, you can get an index of known good copies. >> Right. >> And then, you know, oh, I can go back to last Tuesday and you know that that's good. Otherwise you're literally testing Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday to try to find a known good copy, which delays the recovery process 'cause you really do have to test. They make sure it's good. >> If you increase that frequency, You're going to protect yourself. That's why I got to go. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBEs. Great to see you. >> Great. Thank you very much. I'll be wearing a different Hawaiian shirt next to. >> All right. That sounds good. >> All right, Eric Herzog, Eric Herzog on theCUBE, Dave Vallante for David Nicholson. We'll be right back at VEEAMON 2022. Right after this short break. (light music playing)

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE. With digital coverage of Dell Technologies World-Digital Experience. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hello everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Dell Tech World 2020. This is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Sam Groccot. Who's the Senior Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Sam, great to see you. Welcome. >> Great to be here, Dave. >> All right, we're going to talk generally about cloud in the coming decade. And really how the cloud model is evolving. But I want to specifically ask Sam about the as a service news that Dell's making at DTW. What those solutions look like. How they're going to evolve. Maybe Sam, we can hit on some of the customer uptake and the feedback as well. Does that sound good? >> Yeah, sounds great. Let's dive right in. >> All right, let's do that. So look, you've come from the world of disrupter. When you joined Isilon, they got acquired by EMC and then Dell. So, you've been on both sides of the competitive table. And cloud is obviously a major force actually I'd say the major disruptive force in our industry. Let's talk about how Dell is responding to the cloud trend generally. Then we'll get into the announcements. >> Yeah, certainly. And you're right I've been on both sides of this. There is no doubt if you look at just over the last decade or so. How customers and partners are really looking at evaluating how they can take advantage of the value of moving workloads to the cloud. And we've seen it happen over the last decade or so. And it's happening at a more frequent pace. There's no doubt that is really what planted the seed of this new operating experience. Kind of a new lifestyle so to speak, around as a service. Because when you go to the cloud, that's the only way they roll. Is you get an as a service experience. So, that really has started to come into the data center. As organizations are moving specific workloads or applications to the cloud. Of hey, how do I get that in an on-premise experience? I think throwing gasoline on that is certainly the pandemic and COVID-19. Has really made organizations evaluate how to move much quicker and more agilely by moving some applications to the cloud. Because frankly on-prem just wasn't able to move as fast as they'd like to see. We're seeing that macrotrend accelerate. I think we're in good shape to take advantage of that as we go forward. >> Well, that brings us to the hard news of what you're calling Project Apex i.e your as a service initiative. What specifically are you announcing this week? >> Yeah. So, Project Apex is one of our big announcements and that's really where we're targeting. How we're bringing together and unifying our product development. Our sales go-to-market. Our marketing go-to-market. Everything coming together underneath Project Apex. Which is our as a service and cloud like experience. Look, we know in that world where customers we're constantly evaluating which applications stay on-prem. Which applications and workloads should go to the cloud. I think the market has certainly voted clearly that it's going to be both. It's going to be a hybrid multicloud world. But what they absolutely are clear that they want is a simple, easy to use as a service experience. Regardless of if they're on-prem or off-prem. And that's where really the traditional on-prem solutions fall down. Because it's just too darn complex still. They've got many different tools, managing many different applications that oversee their cloud operations, their various infrastructure, whether it's server or compute or networking. They all run different tools. So, it gets very, very complex. It also very rigid to scale. You can't move as fast as the cloud. It can't deploy as fast. It requires manual intervention to buy more. You typically got to get a sales rep in-house to come in and extend your environment and grow your environment. And then of course, the traditional method is very CapEx heavy. In a world where organizations are really trying to preserve cash. Cash is king. It doesn't really give them the flexibility traditionally or going forward that they'd like to see on that front. So, what they want to see is a consistent operating experience for their on and off-prem environments. They want to see a single tool that can manage, report and grow and do commerce across that environment. Regardless of if it's on or off-prem. They want something that can scale quickly. Now look, when you're moving equipment on-prem, it's not going to be a click of a button. But you should be able to buy and procure that with a click of a button. And then very quickly, within less than a handful of days. That equipment should be stood up deployed and running in their environment. And then finally, it's got to deliver this more flexible finance model. Whether it's leveraging a flexible subscription models or OPEX friendly models. Customers are really looking for that more OPEX friendly approach. Which we're going to be providing with Project Apex. So very, very excited about kind of the goals and the aspirations of Project Apex. We're going to see a lot of it come to market early next year. I think we're well situated, as I said, to take advantage of this opportunity. >> So, when I was looking through the announcement and sort of squinting through it. The three things jumped out and you've definitely hit on those. One is choice. But sometimes you don't want to give customers too much choice. So, it's got to be simple and it's got to be consistent. So, it feels like you're putting this abstraction layer over your entire portfolio and trying to hit on those three items. Which is somewhat of a balancing act. Is that right? >> Yeah. No, you're exactly right. The kind of the pillars of the Project Apex value proposition so to speak, is simplicity choice and consistency. So, we've got to deliver that simple kind of end to end journey view of their entire cloud and as a service experience. It needs to span our entire portfolio. So, whether it's servers, storage or networking or PCs or cloud. All of that needs to be integrated into essentially a large, single web interface that gives you visibility across all of that. And of course, the ease of scale up and frankly scaled down. Should be able to do that in real time through the system. Choice is a big, big factor for us. We've got the broadest portfolio in the industry. We want to provide customers the ability to consume infrastructure any way they want. Clearly they can consume it the traditional way. But this more as a service flexible consumption approach is fundamental to making sure customers only pay for what they use. So, highly metered environment. Pay as they go. You leverage subscriptions. Essentially give them that OPEX flexibility that they've been looking for. And then finally, I think the real key differentiator is that consistent operating experience. So, whether you move workloads on or off-prem. It's got to be in a single environment that doesn't require you to jump around between different application and management experiences. >> Alright, so I've got to ask you the tough question. I want to hear your answer to it. I mean, we've seen the cloud model. Everybody knows it very well. But why now? People are going to say, okay, you're just responding to HPE. What's different between what you're doing and what some of your competitors are doing? >> Yeah. So, I think it really comes down to the choice and breadth of what we're bringing to the table. So, we're not going to force our customers to go down one of these routes. We're going to provide that ultimate flexibility. And I think what will really define ourselves against them and shine ourselves against them is, that consistent operating experience. We've got that opportunity to provide both an on-prem, Edge and cloud experience. That doesn't require them to move out of that operating experience to jump between different tools. So, whether you're running a Storage as a service environment. Which we'll have in the first half of next year. Looking through our new cloud console that is coming out early next year as well. You're going to be able to have that single view of everything that's going on across your environment. And also be able to move workloads from on-prem and off-prem without breaking that consistent experience. I think that is probably the biggest differentiator we're going to have. When you ladder that onto just the general Dell Technologies value of being able to meet and deliver our solutions anywhere in the world at any point of the data center, at the Edge, or even cloud-native. We've got the broadest portfolio to meet our customer needs wherever we need to go. >> So, my understanding is the offerings, it's designed to encompass the entire Dell Technologies portfolio. >> That's right. >> From client solutions, ISG, et cetera. Not VMware specifically. It's really that whole Dell Technologies portfolio. Correct? >> Yeah and look, over time we totally expect to be able to transact to VMware through this. We do expect that to be part of the solution eventually. So yeah, it is across, PC as a service, Storage as a service, Infrastructure as a service. Our cloud offers all of our services, traditional services that are helping to deliver this as a service experience. And even our traditional financial flexible consumption models will be included in this. Because again, we want to offer ultimate choice and flexibility. We're not going to force our customers to go down any of these paths. But what we want to do is present these paths and go wherever they want to go. We've got the breadth of the portfolio and the offers to get them there. >> Oh, okay. So, it's really a journey. You mentioned Storage as a service coming out first and then as well. If I understand it, the idea is to, I'm going to have visibility and control over my entire state on-prem, cloud, Edge, kind of the whole enchilada. Maybe not right out of the shoot, but that's the vision. >> Absolutely. You've got to be able to see all of that and we'll continue to iterate over time and bring more environments, more applications, more cloud environments into this. But that is absolutely the vision of Project Apex is to deliver that fully integrated core, Edge, cloud partner experience. To all of the environments our customers could be running in. >> I want to put my customer hat on my CFO, CIO hat. Okay, what's the fine print. What are the minimum bars to get in? What's the minimum commitment I need to make? What are some of those nuances? >> Yeah. So, both the Storage as a service, which will be our first offer of many in our portfolio. And the cloud console, which will give you that single web interface to kind of manage, report and kind of thrive in this as a service experience. All that will be released in the first half of the next year. So, we're still frankly defining what that will look like. But we want to make sure that we deliver a solution that can span all segments. From small business to medium business, to the biggest enterprises out there. Globally goal expansion through our channel partners. We're going to have Geos and channel partners fully integrated as well. Service providers as well. As a fundamental important piece of our delivery model and delivering this experience to our customers. So, the fine print Dave will be out early next year. As we GA these releases and bring into market. But ultimate flexibility and choice, up and down the stack and geographically wide is the goal and the intent we plan to deliver that. >> Can you add any color to the sort of product journey, if you will? I even hesitate Sam, to use the word product. Because you're really sort of transferring your mindset into a platform mindset and a services mindset. As opposed to bolting services on top of a price. You sell a product and say okay, service guys you take it from here. You have to sort of rethink, how you deliver. And so you're saying, you start with storage. And then so what can we expect over the next midterm-longterm? >> Yeah. I'll give you an example. Look, we sell a ton of as a service and flexible consumption today. We've been at it for 10 years. In fact in Q2, we sold our annual recurring revenue rate is 1.3 billion growing at 30% very, very pleased. So, this is not new to us. But how you described it Dave is right. We adopt products, customers then pick their product. They pick their service that they want to bolt on. Then they pick their financial payment model they bolted on. So, it's a very good, customized way to build it. That's great. And customers are going to continue to want that and will continue to deliver that. But there is an emerging segment that wants more just kind of think of it as the big easy button. They want to focus on an outcome. Storage as a service is a great example where they're less concerned about what individual product element is part of that. They want it fully managed by Dell Technologies or one of our partners. They don't want to manage it themselves. And of course they want it to be pay-for-use on an OPEX plan that works for their business and gives them that flexibility. So, when customers going forward want to go down this as a service outcome driven path. They're simply going to say, hey, what data service do I want? I want file or block unified object. They pick their data service based on their workload. They pick their performance and capacity tier. There is a term limit, right now we're planning one to five years. Depending on the amount of terms you want to do. And then that's it. It's managed by Dell Technologies. It's on our books from Dell Technologies and it's of course leveraging our great technology portfolio to bring that service and that experience to our customers. So, the service is the product now. It really is making that shift. We are moving into a services driven, services outcome driven set of portfolio and solutions for our customers. >> So, you actually have a lot of data on this. I mean, you talk about a billion dollar business. Maybe talk a little bit about customer uptake. I don't know what you can share in terms of numbers and a number of subscription customers. But I'm really interested in the learnings and the feedback and how that's informed your strategy? >> Yeah. I mean, you're right. Again, we've been at this for many, many years. We have over 2000 customers today that have chosen to take advantage of our flexible consumption and as a service offers that we have today. Nevermind kind of as we move into these kind of turn-key, easy button as a service offers that are to come that early next year. So, we've leveraged all of that learnings and we've heard all of that feedback. It's why it's really important that choice and flexibility is fundamental to the Project Apex strategy. There are some of those customers that they want to build their own. They want to make sure they're running the latest PowerMax or the latest PowerStore. They want to choose their network. They want to choose how they protect it. They want to choose what type of service. They want to cover some of the services. They may want very little from us or vice versa. And then they want to maybe leverage additional, more traditional means to acquire that based on their business goals. That feedback has been loud and clear. But there is that segment that is like, no, no, no. I need to focus more on my business and not my infrastructure. And that's where you're going to see these more turn-key as a service solutions fit that need. Where they want to just define SLAs, outcomes. They want us to take on the burden of managing it for them. So, they can really focus on their applications and their business, not their infrastructure. So, things like metering. Tons of feedback on how we'll want to meter this. Tons of feedback on the types of configurations and scale they're looking for. The applications and workloads that they're targeting for this world. Is very different than the more traditional world. So, we're leveraging all of that information to make sure we deliver our Infrastructure as a service and then eventually Solutions as a service. You think about SAP as a service, VDI as a service. AI machine learning as a service. We'll be moving up the stack as well to meet more of a application integrated as a service experience as well. >> So, I want to ask you. You've given us a couple of data points there, billion dollar plus business. A couple thousand customers. You've got decent average contract values if I do my math right. So, it's not just the little guys. I'm sorry, it's not just the big guys, but there's some fat middle as well that are taking this up. Is that fair to say? >> Totally. I mean, I would say frankly in the enterprise space. It's the mid to larger sides historically and we expect they'll continue to want to kind of choose their best of breed apart. Best of breed of products, Best of breed services. Best of breed financial consumption. Great. And we're in great shape there. We're very confident or competitive and competing in that space today. I think going into the turn-key as a service space that will play up-market. But it will really play down-market, mid-market, smaller businesses. It gives us the opportunity to really drive a solution there. Where they don't have the resources to maybe manage a large storage infrastructure or a backup infrastructure or compute infrastructure. They're going to frankly look to us to provide that experience for them. I think our as a service offers will really play stronger in that mid and kind of lower end of the market. >> So, tell us again. The sort of availability of like the console, for example. When can I actually get-- >> Yeah. >> I can do as a service today. I can buy subscriptions from you. >> Absolutely. >> This is where it all comes together. What's the availability and rollout details? >> Sure. As we look to move to our integrated kind of turn-key as a service offers. The console we're announcing at Dell Technologies World as it's in public preview now. So, for organizations, customers that want to start using it. They can start using it now. The Storage as a service offer is going to be available in the first half of next year. So, we're rapidly kind of working on that now. Looking to early next year to bring that to market. So, you'll see the console and the first as a service offer with storage as a service available in the first half of next year. Readily available to any and everyone that wants to deploy it. We're not that far off right now. But we felt it was really, really important to make sure our customers. Our partners and the industry really understands how important this transformation to as a service and cloud is for Dell Technologies. That's why frankly, externally and internally Project Apex will be that north star to bring our end to end value together across the business. Across our customers, across our teams. And that's why we're really making sure that everybody understands Project Apex and as a services is the future for Dell. And we're very much focused on that. >> As the head of product marketing. This is really a mindset, a cultural change really. You're really becoming the head of service marketing in a way. How are you guys thinking about that mindset shift? >> Well really, it's how am I thinking about it? How is the broader marketing organization thinking about it? How is engineering clearly thinking about it? How is finance thinking about it? How is sale? Like this is transformative across every single function within Dell technologies has a role to play, to do things very differently. Now it's going to take time. It's not going to happen overnight. Various estimates have this as a fairly small percentage of business today in our segments. But we do expect that to start to, and it has started to accelerate ramp. We're preparing for a large percentage of our business to be consumed this way very, very soon. That requires changes in how we sell. Changes in how we market clearly. Changes in how we build products and so forth. And then ultimately, how we account for this has to change. So, we're approaching it I think the right way Dave. Where we're looking at this truly end to end. This isn't a tweak in how we do things or an evolution. This is a revolution. For us to kind of move faster to this model. Again, building on the learnings that we have today with our strong customer base and experience we've built up over the years. But this is a big shift. This isn't an incremental turn of the crank. We know that. I think you expect that. Our customers expect that. And that's the mission we're on with Project Apex. >> Well, I mean, with 30% growth. I mean, that's a clear indicator and people like growth. No doubt. That's a clear indicator that customers are glomming onto this. I think many folks want to buy this way, and I think increasingly that's how they buy SaaS. That's how they buy cloud. Why not buy infrastructure the same way? Give us your closing thoughts Sam. What are the big takeaways? >> Yeah. The big takeaways is from a Dell Technologies perspective. Project Apex is that strategic vision of bringing together our as a service and cloud capabilities into a easy to consume, simple, flexible offer. That provides ultimate choice to our customers. Look, the market has spoken. We're going to be living in a hybrid multicloud world. I think the market is also starting to speak. That they want that to be an as a service experience, regardless if it's on or off ground. It's our job. It's our responsibility to bring that ease. That simplicity and elegance to the on-prem world. It's not certainly not going anywhere. So, that's the mission that we're on with Project Apex. I like the hand we've been dealt. I like the infrastructure and the solutions that we have across our portfolio. And we're going to be after this, for the next couple of years. To refine this and build this out for our customers. This is just the beginning. >> Wow, it's awesome. Thank you so much for coming to theCUBE. We're seeing the cloud model. It's extending on-prem, cloud, multicloud it's going to the Edge. And the way in which customers want to transact business is moving at the same direction. So, Sam good luck with this and thanks so much. Appreciate your time. >> Yeah, thanks Dave. Thanks everyone. Take care. >> All right and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and our continuing coverage of Dell Tech World 2020. The virtual CUBE. We'll be right back right after this short break. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. Going to be going through digging a little bit into the history as well as talking about the modern storage environment. Happy to welcome back to the program. One of our CUBE alumni, someone even I actually known for many years, we worked together for a number of years. Scott Delandy is the Technical Director of Dell Storage in Data Protection Division, of course with Dell Technologies. Scott, great to see you. >> Hey, Stu, is so awesome to see you guys. Thank you for the opportunity to come and chat with you. Today we've got some really exciting stuff that we want to go through and I know you and I are probably going to have a little bit of an issue because I know when we get together, we always want to reminisce about, you know, the things that we've done and you know, the stuff that we've gotten to work on and as well as the cool stuff that's happening within technology today. So everybody buckle in, 'cause this is going to be cool. >> Unfortunately, you know, we're only a few miles away from each other in person, but of course, in these time we have to do it while remote, but we'll walk side by side for a little bit of memory lane. >> Yes absolutely. >> You know, as I hinted you and I both worked at a company that many people will remember, I always worry Scott, you know, the younger people, you know, will be like, EMC, you know, who are they? Back when I started at EMC in 2000, it was, you know, you talked about prime and deck and some of the other companies here in Massachusetts that had been great and then been acquired or things that happened. So you even had a little bit, you've had a longer tenure at what is now Dell, EMC, of course, you know, the mega merger a couple of years ago. So, talk about a little bit, you know, your journey and we're going to be talking about PowerMax, which of course is the continuation of the long legacy of this Symmetrics platform. >> Yeah, it's crazy. So, I hit 30 years, with EMC and now with, Dell back in July. So it's been, you know, an amazing three now going on three plus decades of being able to work with amazing technology, incredibly talented people within the organization, as well as some of the best and brightest when it comes to users and customers that actually deploy the technology. So it's been a tremendous ride and you know, I'm not planning on slowing down any time soon. Let's just keep going, man. >> Yeah. You talk about decades, Scott, it felt like 2020 has been a decade into itself. (Scott laughs) So, but we, we talk about that history, Symmetrics really created, you know, that, that standalone storage business, you know, created a lot of technologies that help drive a lot of businesses out there, bring us up to speed, PowerMax, you know, what, where does that business fit in their portfolio? Got any good stuff for us that's adoption here in 2020. >> Yeah. I mean, you, you kind of said it. So when Symmetrics was originally introduced, and that was kind of one of the older generations architectures of what we now know today as PowerMax, a lot has changed with respect to the platform in terms of the technology, the types of environments that we support, the data services that we provide. So it's been, you know, again, three plus decades of evolution in terms of the technology, but kind of the concept of external storage buying computer deploying compute, separate from the storage infrastructure, that was a, unheard of concept back in 1990 when we first introduced Symmetrics. So this, month September is actually the 30 year anniversary from when we actually first created, that platform and, you know, lots of things have changed, right? It started as, you know, a mainframe platform and then we evolved into mainframe and open systems. And then we started looking at the adoption of things like client server, and then environments became virtualized, and, you know, throughout that entire history Symmetrics and now PowerMax has really been, one of the core tenants in terms of leveraging the storage infrastructure to make a lot of those evolutions happen in terms of the types of applications, types of operating environments and just the entire ecosystem that goes around, supporting an organization's applications and helping them run their business. Now where you know, PowerMax comes into play today, it is that it's still considered, the gold standard when it comes to high end technology, providing the reliability, the automation, the data services, the rich functionality that has made that platform, the success that still continues to be. You know, one of the things that blows my mind is if you look at just the last earnings call from, you know, last month or a couple of months ago now, PowerMax business is still growing what grew for that quarter at a triple digit rate. And, you know, you think of, you know, you look at kind of what's happening from a technology standpoint and kind of, you know, external storage has been a pretty kind of stable segment in terms of the infrastructure business, but still being able to see that type of growth, and just talking to users and, you know, hearing how much they continue to love the platform, how they continue to, you know, rely on the types of things that we're able to provide for their applications, for their businesses, just the tremendous amount of trust that's been built up, with respect to that platform. It's cool to be a part of that, and to be able to hear those types of things from the people that actually use the products. >> Yeah. One of the big changes during my time, you know, in the portfolio there, Scott was of course the real emergence of server virtualization with VMware of course. I'd actually started working, you know, when I was at EMC with VMware ahead of the acquisition. And then once the acquisition happened, there was a long maturation of storage in VMware environment. We kind of look back and say, you know, we spent a decade trying to fix and make sure that, you know, storage and networking could work well in those virtual environments. So we've got VMworld going on, understand you've got some news on the update, you know, that constant cadence of always make sure that, the storage and the virtual environment, work very well together. So, why don't you bring us up to date on the new. >> Yeah, so it's pretty exciting. So we are announcing some new software capabilities for the platform, as well as some new hardware enhancements, but basically the three focuses are a tighter integration with VMware specifically, by introducing new support for vVols and then changing the way that we've been able to deploy, and support vVols within the platform. We're also introducing, new cloud capabilities. So being able to take your primary storage, your PowerMax system, and being able to extend that to leverage cloud deployments. So being able to consume the capacity a little bit differently, being able to support some real interesting use cases in terms of why somebody might want to take their primary tier one storage and connect that, and to be able to move some of those datasets into a cloud provider. And then the third part is some really innovative things happening around security, really around being able to provide additional support for data protection, especially for things like encrypted environment, while still being able to preserve the efficiencies that we've built into these storage platforms. So those are kind of the three big things there's lot of other what we would call giblets also associated with the launch. But those are really the big ticket items that I think people are talking about in terms of this release. >> Well, let's drill in a little bit there, Scott. So if we take the cloud piece, you know, their message, of course, we understand, you know, Dell and VMware have partnered very closely together. VMware very much is driving that, you know, hybrid and multicloud deployment out there. So when I talk to some of the product teams, is you know, that consistency of deployment, you know, say you take a BX rail with VMware VCF, that that similar environment, what I could do in a Google cloud or an Azure, how does the, those cloud solutions that you talk about fit into that overall discussion? >> Well, when you look at something like vVols, right? So, vVols is a little bit of a change or a newer way of being able to connect, into an external storage platform. And one of the things that we're trying to solve with vVols is being able to provide, better granularity in terms of the storage and the capacity being consumed at the individual VM level, but also being able to plug into the VMware ecosystem so that even though you have an external storage device connected into that environment, the way it gets managed, the way it gets provisioned, the way you set up replication, the way you recover things is completely transparent because all of that is handled, through the VMware software that sits above that. So it seems like a trivial exercise to just, you know, plug in a storage system and kind of away you go, but there's heavy lifting required in order to support that because you've got that in sometimes, in some cases make changes to the things that you're doing on the back end storage side, as well as work with the ecosystem provider in this case VMware. That have changes so that they can support some of the functionality and some of the rich data services that you're able to provide under the covers. Right. I'll give you a great example. So one of the things that we have the ability to do today is when we plug into a VMware environment with a PowerMax, we can support up to 64,000 devices, right? And you just try and get your head around that 64,000 devices. What does that even mean? It sounds like a lot, is that just marketing number and nobody would ever, you know, get to that level in terms of the number of devices that you would have to support. But one of the, kind of the technical challenges that we wanted to be able to solve is that when you deploy a virtual machine, each individual virtual machine consumes minimally three vVols in order to support that. And sometimes dozens and dozens of vVols especially if you're looking at doing things like copies or making snapshots of that. So the ability to scale to that large number of vVols and being able to support that, in a single storage system is very powerful for our users, especially folks out there that are looking to do, massive levels of consolidation where they really want to collapse the infrastructure down. They want to get as few physical things that they have to manage, which means you're spreading, you know, hundreds, thousands of these virtual machines into a single piece of infrastructure. So scale really does matter, especially for the types of users that would deploy a PowerMax in their environment, because of, again, the things that they're trying to do from an IT perspective, as well as the things that they need to do in order to be able to support their businesses. >> Yeah. Well, Scott, absolutely scale is such an important piece of the overall discussion today. It means different things to different people. It could mean you're massively scaling out like the hyperscalers, there's the edge discussion of, you know, small scale, but lots of copies. Talk to me about scale when it comes to those mission critical application. So, you know, I think about the solutions and data services that you're talking about, of course, you know, EMC, the Symmetrics really helped create that allegory with things like SRDF, Timefinder back in the day. So, what are you hearing today what's most important for critical application. >> So it really, excellent point. It really comes down to automation, right? Where, you know, you think of some of these, large environments, and we have users out there today that will have tens of thousands of virtual machines running in a single system. And you know, the ability to manage those, you can't find human beings that are, enough of them, as well as, you know ability to keep up with all the changes that happen in that environment. It's just something, that cannot physically be done in a manual way. So having that environment as automated as possible is really important, but it's not just automation, it's being able to automate at scale, right? So if I have 10,000 VMs and I want to go ahead and make a change in the environment, going through and making those VM by VM by VM is incredibly impractical. So being able to plug into the environment and being able to have hooks or APIs into the interfaces that sit on top of that, that's where a lot of the value comes in, right. It's really that automation, because again, tens of thousands of VMs, 64,000 devices. cool cool stuff, but you're not going to manage those individually. So how do you take that infrastructure and how do you literally make it, invisible to everybody around it so that when you have something that you want to do, just worry about the outcome, you don't worry about the individual steps required in order to get to that outcome. >> Yeah. What you said is so important, Scott, I love when PowerMax first came out, I got to talk with some of the engineers and, you know, the comment I made is, we've been talking about automation for decades. You know, Scott, you probably know better than most, when some of the previous generations, no automation would be discussed, but it's different. And what they really said is, it's so much about, you know, machine scale and being able to, we've gone beyond human scale. Humans could not keep up with the amount of changes and how we do things, and it's not just some scripts that you build. So there really is that, kind of machine learning built into what we're talking about. The other thing we've talked about for a long time and has always been critical in your space and you'd hit it up before, security. So, you know, give us the discussion of, you know, security in PowerMax, how that fits over in company's overall security stance. >> Well, I mean, at a very high level, I can confidently say that there is a heightened level of awareness around security, especially for the types of applications and the types of data, that we would typically support within these platforms. So it is very much a top of mind discussion. And, you know, one of the things that people are looking at in terms of how do I protect that data is it needs to be encrypted, right? And you know, we've been doing encryption for many many years. Right? We first introduced that through a feature called DARE which is Data At Rest Encryption, which would allow us at the individual drive level to encrypt it. So if that drive was ever physically removed either to be serviced, or, you know, someone just lost the drive, you wouldn't have to worry about that data being kind of out in the wild and being able to be accessed by somebody, because there was an encryption key. And unless you had that key, you could not access that data. And for many many years, that became a check in the box requirement. You cannot put your gear in my data center, unless I can assure that that data that's being stored on that system is encrypted, right. What's changing now, is just being able to encrypt the data on the array is no are good enough for some environments. The data needs to be encrypted from the host, from it being written by the application all the way through the server, the memory, the networks, everything, the controllers, right to the backend storage. So it's not just encrypting the data that's at rest, but encrypting the data end to end. Right. And one of the challenges that you have is that when you are writing an encrypted data, to a storage platform, especially in all flash storage platform, one of the data services that provides a lot of value is the ability to do data reduction, through a combination of things like data deduplication, and compression, and pattern recognition. There's all this kind of cool stuff that happens under the covers. So we will typically see a three to one, four to one data reduction for a particular application. But when that data is encrypted, you no longer get that efficiency it won't dedup, it won't compress. That kind of changes the sort of economic paradigm if you would, as you look at these external storage devices. So we've been talking to customers, we had one customer in particular come to us. They were a large insurance company. And one of their biggest customers came to them and said, our new policy is that all of our employee data, has to be encrypted, encrypted end to end. And so, as they looked at, well, how are we going to address that requirement? They quickly realized that in order to do that, they're going to need to increase the amount of storage that they have three to four X, because this data that they were getting really high deduplication and compression up against, they we're no longer going to get that. So what we did is we looked at well, what are ways that we can preserve the data efficiencies, the data reduction on the storage side, while still being able to meet the requirement to encrypt that data? So one of the new features that we're introducing within PowerMax is the ability to do end-to-end encryption while still being able to preserve the efficiencies. So I can turn encryption on all the way at the host level. I can write that data into the PowerMax, the PowerMax has access to the encryption keys that are on the host. It has the ability to decrypt that data in line. So there's no bump in the wire. There's no performance impact, apply the data reduction to it, and then re-encrypt the data as we're writing it out to the back. Yeah. So it's a hugely important feature for IT organizations, that are just now kind of getting their heads around this emerging requirement, that it's just not the stuff that's at rest that needs to be encrypted, it's the data end to end that's in that process. So big challenge there, and it really is one of the innovations that we're kind of pushing, in order to basically meet that requirement for this you know, set of users out there that see this as either something that they need today, or an evolving requirement where they want to put infrastructure in place. So if they're not doing it today, but they see maybe a couple of years down the line, that's something that they're going to need to do. They have the ability to enable that feature on the storage itself. >> Well, so Scott, 30 years of innovation, driving through this, you know, first of all, I hope if you haven't planned already, you need to get one of those Symmetrics refrigerators that I saw from back in the day, you know, wheel that out to the parking lot of where our tool's used to be, you know, a sign to the times that, you know, it used to be a bar for a few times now, you know, an organic sushi place, but you know, socially distanced gathering to celebrate, but give us a little look forward, you know, 30 years, I'm not resting on your laurels, always moving forward. So what would we expect to see, from PowerMax you know, going forward? >> So, two things, number one, the person that came up with that idea of the, what we internally refer to as the V fridge was an absolute genius. Just, you know, I would say that person was a genius. Second thing is in terms of, you know, what we see going forward is, I mean, one of the top of mind discussions for a lot of users is cloud, right? How do I have a cloud strategy? I know that I have applications that I am going to continue to need to run in my, what we'll call a quote unquote traditional data center, just because of the sensitivity of the application, just the predictability that I need around that. I need to basically control that and I have the economics in place where that becomes a really cost effective way of being able to support those types of workloads. But that said, there are other ways that I can consume storage infrastructure, that doesn't require me to go ahead and buy a storage system and kind of deploy it in a data center that I own. So users want to basically be able to explore that as an option, but they want to really understand what's the right use case for that. So one of the things that we're also introducing within PowerMax, and we expect there to be a lot of interests and we expect there to be definitely a solid uptake in terms of adoption, is the ability connect a PowerMax into a cloud, right? So this could be a Dell ECS platform. It could be Amazon S3, it could be Microsoft Azure. So there's a lot of flexibility in terms of the type of cloud connectivity that I could support. But as we looked at you know, what do we want to do? We don't want to to just, you know, connect into a cloud because that's doesn't mean anything, right? So we need to understand, you know, what's, the right use case, right? So when we talk to a lot of our users, they had their storage systems and what they were doing is they were using a lot of capacity for things like snapshots, right? Creating point in time copies of their applications, for a variety of reasons, doing those for database checkpoints, doing those to support testing and development environments, doing those because they wanted to make a copy, and do some sort of offline processing up against that. But very mature, very well established concept of making copies called snapshots. And when we talk to some users, they are, we have some out there that are very heavy consumers of snapshots. And in some cases, 25-30% of the storage that they're using, is being consumed for snapshots. And what the requirement was is, Hey, if I could free up that space by taking these snapshots that I create, then may be I'll use them within the first couple of days, couple of weeks, but then I want to keep those snaps, but I don't really need to keep them, on my primary tier one storage. Maybe if I could offload those to another type of storage, that's either more cost effective, allows me to consume it on demand, gives me the ability to free up those resources so that I could use this capacity that I already own for other things that are growing within the environment, that would be something that I would be interested in. So we, we heard that requirement and, you know, from a product management standpoint, when you look at developing new products, new capabilities, there's kind of three things that you always want to do. Number one, you want to identify what is the requirement? What is the use case? What is the problem that you're trying to solve? And you want to make sure you understand that really well. And you build a technology that's designed to do that in a very good and efficient way. So that's number one. Number two is you want to make it easy to deploy, right? We don't want to create an environment where you need, you know, it's very fragile and you need, you know, specialized skills to go in there and deploy it, it's literally firing up the application, putting in the IP addresses for the S3 storage that you want to connect to, and then away you go, your setup is done, really really simple setup. But the third thing, and really, you know, one of the more important things is, what's the user experience? right. Is this something bizarre? Is this managed as a vApp? Is this something that I have to, you know, click on another application, I have to fire up another screen? So you want to take the management of that data service, and you want to build it right into the platform itself. So with the cloud snapshot capability that we're introducing, that's exactly what we're doing. Where we've identified a solid use case that we knew a lot of customers out there are going to be very interested in understanding, what they can do with this. And what type of new flexibility it can provide. Number two, making it super simple to deploy. Matter of fact, it's included with the PowerMax. You buy the PowerMax, that software functionality, that capability is included with the platform. So there's not even an additional licensing charge required to do that. It's included with the storage. And number three, an ease of perspective. I create a snapshot. I have the option. Do I want that snapshot to live on the array that I created it? Or do I want to take that snapshot, and do I want to push it off onto that provider? Whether it's an ECS in my data center or whether it's something that's sitting over an Amazon AWS, but really easy to basically deploy. And what we plan to do is to take this capability that we've narrowed down to a very specific use case in order to make sure, that we have a clear idea of what the benefits are in terms of why users would want to deploy it, look at other things, because there are other opportunities that we have to expand that to as that capability matures, and as we start to see adoption really take off, >> Oh, Scott, great to catch up with you. Thanks so much for helping us, you know, look down memory lane, as well as a look at the new pieces today and where we're going for the future >> Stu, always a pleasure. Thanks a lot. Great to talk to you again, as always. And hopefully we can get to do this again sometime soon, and maybe a real kind of physical sort of setting, where you know, we're not separated by, you know, a couple of counties and having to go to the West coast and come back here, but maybe you know, actually in a similar physical location. >> Definitely. We all hope for that in the future that we can get everybody back together. In the meantime, we have all the virtual coverage, be sure to check out thecube.net Of course all theCUBE conversations as you can see linked on the front page. Well, it shows like VMworld that we alluded to. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching. Thank you. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018, brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (bright music) >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We are with Dell Technologies World and about 14,000 other people here. You're watching theCUBE. We are excited to welcome back to theCUBE Scott Delandy, the Technical Director of Dell EMC. Hey, Scott! >> Hey guys, how are you? >> And you have a featured guest, Mike Bollman, the Director of Server and Storage Architecture from Enterprise Products Company, welcome! >> Thanks for having me. >> So you guys are a leader in oil and gas. I hear some great things. Talk to us about what it is that you're doing and how you're working with Dell EMC to be innovative in the oil and gas industry. >> So we're actually a Dell EMC storage customer for about the last two years now, and working with them on how we can bring in a lot of the data that we have from the field. The buzzword today is Internet of Things, or IoT. We've been doing it for many, many years, though, so we pull that data in and we look and analyze it and figure out how we can glean more information out of it. How can we tune our systems? As an example, one of the things that we do is we model a product as it flows through a pipeline because we're looking for bubbles. And bubbles mean friction and friction means less flow and we're all about flow. The more product we can flow the more money we can make. So it's one of the interesting things that we do with the data that we have. >> And Scott, talk to us about specifically oil and gas in terms of an industry that is helping Dell EMC really define this next generation of technology to modernize data centers and enable companies to kind of follow along the back of one and start doing IoT as well. >> Yeah, so the things that Mike has been able to accomplish within Enterprise Products is amazing because they truly are an innovator in terms of how they leverage technology to not just kind of maintain sort of the core applications that they need to support just to keep the business up and running but how they're investing in new applications, in new concepts to help further drive the business and be able to add value back into the organization. So we love working with Enterprise and users like Mike just because they really push technology, they're, again, very innovative in terms of the things that they're trying to do, and they provide us incredible feedback in terms of the things that we're doing, the things that we're looking to build and helping us understand what are the challenges that users like Mike are facing and how do we take our technology and adapt it to make sure that we're meeting his requirements. >> So unlike any other energy, oil and gas, you guys break scale. I mean you guys define scale when it comes to the amount of data and the need to analyze that data. How has this partnership allowed you to, what specifically have you guys leveraged from Dell EMC to move faster? >> So we've done a number of things. Early on when we first met with Scott and team at Dell EMC we said we're not looking to establish a traditional sales-customer relationship. We want a two-way business partnership. We want to be able to take your product, leverage it in our data centers, learn from it, provide feedback, and ask for enhancements, things that we think would make it better not only for us but for other customers. So one of the examples if I can talk to it. >> Scott: Please. >> One of the examples was early on when PowerMax was kind of going through its development cycle, there was talk about introducing data deduplication. And one of the things that we knew from experiences is that there are some workloads that may not do well with data dedup, and so we wanted some control over that versus some of the competitor arrays that just say everything's data dedup, good, bad, or indifferent, right? And we have some of that anecdotal knowledge. So that was a feature that the team listened to and introduced into the product. >> Yeah, yeah, I mean it was great because we were able to take the feedback and because we worked so closely with the engineering teams and because we really value the things that Mike brings to the table in terms of how he wants to adopt the technology and the things that he wants to support from a functionality perspective, we were able to basically build that into the product. So the technology that we literally announced earlier this morning, there are pieces of code that were specifically written into that system based on some of the comments that Mike had provided a year plus ago when we were in the initial phases of development. >> So being an early adopter and knowing that you were going to have this opportunity to collaborate and really establish this symbiotic relationship that allows you to test things, allows Dell EMC to get that information to make the product better, what is it that your company saw in Dell EMC to go, "Yeah, we're not afraid to send them back," or, "Let's try this together and be that leading edge"? >> I think honestly it came down to the very first meeting that we had. We had a relationship with some of the executives inside of EMC from other business relationships years ago, and we reached out and said, "Look, we want to have a conversation," and we literally put together a kind of a bullet-pointed list of here's how we want to conduct business and here's what we want to talk about. And they brought down some of their best and brightest within the engineering organization to have a open discussion with us. And really we're very open and honest with what we were trying to accomplish and how they could fit in, and then, again, we had that two-way dialogue back of, "Okay, well what about this," or, "What about that?" And so from day one it has been truly a two-way partnership. >> So Lisa's all about relationships and governance. I'm all about speeds and feeds. (Mike laughing) I'm a geek, and I want to hear some numbers, man. (Mike laughing) So you guys got the PowerMax. We had Caitlin Gordon on earlier. She's Product Marketing for the PowerMax, very, very proud of the product, but you're a customer that had it in your data center. Tell us the truth. (Mike laughing) How is, is it... Is it what you need to move forward? >> It is unbelievably fast in all honesty. So early on we brought it into our lab environment and we got it online and we stood it up, and so we were basically generating simulated workloads, right? And so you've got all of these basically host machines that are just clobbering it as fast as you can. We ran into a point where we just didn't have any more hardware to throw at it. The box just kept going, and it's like okay, well we're measuring 700,000 IOPS, it's not breaking a sweat. It's submillisecond (laughs) leads. It's like well, what else do we have? (laughs) And so it just became one of those things. Well, all right, let's start throwing snapshots at it and let's do this and let's do that. It truly is a remarkable box. And keep in mind we had the smallest configurable system you could get. We had the what is now, I guess, the PowerMax 2000, >> The 2000, yeah. yeah, in a very, very small baseline configuration. And it was just phenomenal in what it could do. >> So I would love to hear a little bit more about that. When we look at things such as the VMAX, incredible platform which had been positioned as a data center consolidator, but a lot of customers I saw using that as purpose-built for a mission critical set of applications, subset of applications in the data center. Sounds like the PowerMax, an example of the beta relationship you guys have, is a true platform that you can run an entire data center on and realistically get mission critical support out of a single platform. >> Absolutely, yeah, so even today in our production data center we have VMAX 450, VMAX 950s in today running. And we have everything from Oracle databases, SQL databases, Exchange, various workloads, a tremendous number of virtual iServers running on there, I mean hundreds and hundreds or actually probably several thousand. And it doesn't matter how we mix and match those. I have Exchange running on one array along with an Oracle database and several dozen SQL databases and hundreds of VMs all on one array and it's no problems whatsoever. There's no competition for I/O or any latency issues that are happening. It just works really well. >> And I think one of the other powerful use cases, if I could just talk to this, in your environment specifically there's some of the things you're doing around replication where you're doing multi-site replication, and on a regular basis you're doing failover, recovery, failback as part of the testing process. >> Mike: Absolutely. >> So it's not just running the I/O and getting the performance of the system, it's making sure that from a service-level perspective from the way the data's being protected being able to have the right recovery time objectives, recovery point objectives for all of the applications that you're running in your environment, to be able to have the infrastructure in place that could support that. >> Lisa: So I want to, oh. >> Go head. >> Sorry, thanks Keith. So I want to, I'm going to go ahead and go back up a little bit. >> Mike: Sure. >> One of the announcements that came out today from Dell Technologies was about modernizing the data center. You've just given us a great overview of what you're doing at the technical level. Where are you in developing a modern data center? Are you where you want to be? What's next steps for that? >> So I don't think we're ever where we want to be. There's always something else so we're always chasing things. But where we are today is that there's a lot of talk for the last several years around cloud, cloud this, cloud that. Everybody has a hardware, software, or service offering that's cloud-something. We look at cloud more as an operational model. And so we're looking at how can we streamline our internal business taking advantages of, say, RESTful APIs that are in PowerMax and basically automating end to end from a provisioning or a request perspective all the way through the provisioning all the way to final deployment and basically pulling the people out of that, the touchpoints, trying to streamline our operations, make them more efficient. It's been long said that we can't get more people in IT. It's just do more for less and that's not stopping. >> And if I could just make another plug for Mike, so I visited Mike in his data center it was about a year ago or something like that. And I've been in a lot of data centers and I've seen all kinds of organizations of all different size and scale and still today I talk about the lab tour that we went on because just the efficiency in how everything was racked, how everything was labeled, there was no empty boxes scattered around. Just the operational efficiency that you've built into the organization is, and it's part of the culture there. That's what gives Mike the ability to do the types of things that he's able to do with what's really a pretty limited staff of resources that support all of those different applications. So it's incredibly impressive not just in terms of what Mike has been able to do in terms of the technology piece but just kind of the people and the operational side of things. It's really, really impressive. I would call it a gold standard (Mike laughing) from an IT organization. >> And you're not biased about it. (Lisa and Mike laughing) >> Mental note, complete opposite of any data center I've ever met. (Lisa, Mike, and Scott laughing) Okay, so Mike, talk to us about this automation piece. We hear a lot about the first step to modernization is automation, but when I look at the traditional data center and I look at all the things that could be automated how do you guys prioritize where to go first? >> So we look at it from where are we spending our time, so it's really kind of simple of looking at what are your trouble tickets and what are your change control processes or trouble control tickets that are coming in and where are you spending the bulk of your time. And it's all about bang for the buck. So you want to do the things that you're going to get the biggest payback on first and then the low-hanging fruit, and then you go back and you tweak further and further from there. So from our perspective we did an analysis internally and we found that we spent a lot of time doing basic provisioning. We get a tremendous number of requests from our end users, from our app devs and from our DBAs. They're saying, "Hey, I need 10 new servers by Monday," and it's Friday afternoon, that sort of request. And so we spend the time jumping through hoops. It was like, well, why? We can do better than that. We should do better than that. >> So PowerMax built in modern times for the modern data center. Have you guys seen advantages for this modern platform for automation? Have you looked at it and been like, "Oh, you know what? "We love that Dell EMC took this angle "towards building this product "because they had the modern data center in mind"? >> So again I think it goes back to largely around REST APIs. So with PowerMax OS 5978 there's been further enhancements there. So pretty much anything that you could do before with SIM CLI or through the GUI has now been exposed to the REST API and everybody in the industry's kind of moving that way whether you're talking about a storage platform or a server platform, even some of the networking vendors. I had a meeting earlier today and they're moving that way as well. It's like whoa, have you seen what we're doing with REST? So from an infrastructure standpoint, from a plumbing perspective, that's really what we're looking at in tracking-- >> And if I can add to that I think one of the other sort of core enablers for that is just simply to move to an all flash-based system because in the world of spinning drives, mechanical systems, hybrid systems, an awful lot of administrative time is spent in kind of performance tuning. How do I shave off milliseconds of response time? How do I minimize those response time peaks during different parts of the day? And when you move to the all flash there's obviously a boost in terms of performance. But it's not just the performance, it's the predictability of that performance and not having to go in and figure out okay, what happened Tuesday night between four and six that caused this application to go from here to here? What do we have to do to go and run the analysis to figure all of that out? You don't see that type of behavior anymore. >> Yeah, it's that indirect operational savings. So before when flash drives kind of first got introduced to the market we had these great things like FaaS where you could go in and you could tune stuff and these algorithms that would watch those workloads and make their best guesses at what data to move when and where. Without flash, that's out the window. There's no more coming in on Monday and all of a sudden then something got tuned over the weekend down to a lower tier storage and it's too slow for the performance requirements Monday morning. That problem's gone. >> And when you look under the covers of the PowerMax we talked a lot today about some of the machine learning and the predictive analytics that are built into that system that help people like Mike to be able to consolidate hundreds, thousands of applications onto this single system. But now to have to go in and worry about how do I tune, how do I optimize not just based on a runtime of applications but real-time changes that are happening into those workloads and the system being able to automatically adjust and to be able to do the right thing to be able to maintain the level of performance that they require from that environment. >> Last question, Scott, we just have a few seconds left. Looking at oil and gas and what Mike and team have done in early adoption context, helping Dell EMC evolve this technology, what are some of the other industries that you see that can really benefit from this early adopter in-- >> I, what I would say is there are lots of industries out there that we work with and they all have sort of unique challenges and requirements for the types of things that they're trying to do to support their businesses. What I would say, the real thing is to be able to build the relationships and to have the trust so that when they're asking for something on our side we're understanding what that requirement and if there are things that we can do to help that we can have that conversation. But if there are things that we can't control or if there are things that are very, very specific to a small set of customers but require huge investments in terms of R&D and resources to do the development, we can have that honest conversation and say, "Hey Mike, it's a really good idea "and we understand how it helps you here, "but we're still a business. "We still have to make money." So we can do some things but we have to be realistic in terms of being able to balance helping Mike but still being able to run a business. >> Sure, and I wish we had more time to keep going, but thanks, guys, for stopping by, talking about how Dell EMC and Enterprise Products Company are collaborating and all of the anticipated benefits that will no doubt proliferate among industries. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We're live, day two of Dell Technologies World in Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break. (bright music)