>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World, 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (techno music playing) >> Welcome back to theCUBE, day three in Vegas. Dell Technologies World, I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer. Welcoming some distinguished CUBE alumni back to our set here at Dell Technologies World, and back to theCUBE. We've got Sean Wedige, CTO of Enterprise Solutions at Rackspace, and Scott Delandy, Technical Director at Dell EMC. Hey, guys. >> Hey. >> Hey. >> Good afternoon. >> Thanks so much for coming back and talking with us about what you guys are up to lately. So, Rackspace. Sean, you guys have been a longtime Dell EMC partner. >> Sean: We have been. >> We are interested to learn about what you guys are doing from a service provider's perspective with the new PowerMax. What are some of the unique requirements that you are looking to bring into your environment versus just traditional enterprise? >> Sure, so we have been a longtime user of Dell and EMC technologies, going way back into the early 2000s, almost to the inception of our company. And we've always relied on them for availability for high performance to be able to support our customers, specifically, now, we're looking at the PowerMax release, and the capabilities it brings to us, and Dell EMC has really taken service provider needs into account, so they've created additional capabilities around monitoring, around visualization, around role-based access, that allows us to extend features out to our customers. Things like easier migration tools, things like incredible performance, that allows us to not have to micromanage workloads, and so it's a extremely powerful platform that we're looking to put to work for a hundred thousand plus customers. >> Yeah, and I think some of the things that Rackspace has as far as use-cases are very much things that influenced a lot of the functionality in the new features that went into the product, and I'll give you a couple of examples. So, one of the things that we introduced is the ability to do provisioning of storage based on service levels. So what that means is, I can figure out what I want my performance to be for a specific workload, with folks getting higher performance, using more resources, and having a premium associated with that, but also being able to provide good performance at economical cost points. So I now have a range of options that we can now provide through the service providers. But what's cool about the technology is, years ago in order to do that, you had to really be able to understand the underlying technology, so that you could go ahead and you could tune the knobs and the buttons and the levers to make sure that, if gold was supposed to be this, it would give you gold, and if you had platinum it was supposed to do this, but those things were very manual in terms of how they were set up. The new system, basically, is more about what is the result that you're trying to achieve from a performance perspective? And then we use all of the automation, the machine learning, the predictive analytics, to figure out, okay, where do I place and move that data based on the policy that's assigned for it to make sure I'm in compliance with that service level. So again, a lot of those things are specifically done to help service providers meet a wide range of requirements for the users and use-cases that they have for their customers. >> And our engineers are very excited not to have to spin so many knobs and stare at the blinking dots, and those are the types of things that keep 'em up at night, "how am I guaranteeing the service levels "and the performance that my customers need?" So the A.I. capability, the ability to do tiering on the fly, that we don't have to manage that, allows us to really focus on higher-value activities for our customers. >> Yeah, I was interested in your experience, and one of the marquee features on this new release is the labeled A.I., and that means a lot of things to a lot of people, and in drilling down yesterday there was a lot of really interesting stuff about its learning capabilities and the fact that it would look back farther and infer, it knows about certain things like Oracle files, it knows how to treat them and it'll learn more, there'll be more roles and it'll figure some stuff out itself, so I don't actually care whether it's called A.I. or not, at the end of the day, does it lower your operational costs and make you more efficient, right? And it sounds like that's been your experience. It makes us more efficient, but more so, it makes us more effective in delivering to customers. So if we're doing VNX, or wherever the platform might be in our PowerMax, and we're putting hundreds to thousands of workloads underway, we have to make sure there's not contention between customers, right? Every one of those customers are relying on us, and they may have different workload cycles. We have certain customers for whom their busiest seasons are the weekends, the holidays, and they will have different cycles than customers that are traditional income, or some digital marketing companies, so this allows us not to have to worry about tuning individually, that the system can adjunct and take care of that and ensure that we're meeting those service levels that we've provided for our customers. So, absolutely, a huge step forward. >> And one of the other things, again, around service providers is you've got the performance, you've got the management, you've got the system, but then the other key driver for some of the new features is around the security of the platform. Because now you're moving into a world of multi tenancy. You've got different organizations that are now sharing a resource. So number one, you want to make sure that everybody gets the performance and the predictability, and that's where the machine learning and analytics comes into play, but then you also want to be able to provide the individual users access to be able to do certain things, to view certain things, but make sure that they're only able to access the pieces of storage that they should only be accessing. So by adding additional controls around role-based security, and in building that into the system, and allowing you to control who has access to what specific functions within the system, who can see what, all these different roles makes it a lot easier for Sean to be able to take the rich reporting that they can now provide, and to be able to share that up with their users and make sure that they're doing it in a very secure way. >> On that security, Brian. Sorry Sean, I'm just curious, security transformation, IT transformation, digital transformation, all themes of this make-it-real event that we're at, We talk with customers that say "Data isn't valuable unless we can actually glean "and extract and act on insights from it "to be able to deliver better customer experiences, "and different chain of products to market." On the differentiation front, what is, for Rackspace's perspective, what is this partnership and use of PowerMax going to be able to deliver for you? Not revealing secret sauce, but how is this differentiating where you're able to offer your customers? >> I think we should talk about how Rackspace differentiates themselves from other players in the market. >> Yes. >> I think that's a key part of the solution. >> Was just going to go there. So Rackspace has a long history of being a managed service provider to customers, and traditionally it's been the managed hosting space, everything was dedicated. And increasingly through our acquisitions of the last couple of years, our portfolio has broadened. Everything from collocation to private clouds, to public cloud capabilities to hybrid solutions, and an increased focus on application security, ERP, digital applications, and so our customers are coming to us with this wide range of platforms and going, "I'm struggling with this transformation, "How do I do this, What's the right form-factor? "How do I look at my applications?" So increasingly, Rackspace has built out capabilities around a professional services arm, to help customers navigate that transformation. Is this a really legacy application that should go on one of our collocation facilities? Is this a high-secure, really highly governed, heavy compliance-requirement that should go under private cloud, or should we look at a public cloud systems? And increasingly, customers are saying, "I am needing to stay in the private cloud", the customer you're talking to, "because of security, "because I need to be able to guarantee performance, "because I need to have visibility "and configurability of my solution." So this gives us all of those. It gives us the ability to have a secure, single tenant or multi tenant environment. It gives us the ability to have that high-performance. It gives the ability to federate out that visibility to give customers a cloud-like control, a cloud-like visibility, or I'd say even beyond cloud-like visibility, despite going through a service provider and not being able to put their hands on the infrastructure themselves. >> Yeah, I would even extend that, because again, you've got the technology side, but then the other thing I think that people really appreciate in partnering with Rackspace is the amount of expertise that they bring to the table. Expertise, not just in the technology side, but understanding different industries, and different customer environments, and what are the best practices, and how do we set things up and make sure that we're not just meeting expectations, but we're exceeding what those users expect to see from an IT perspective. I know that that's a big part of why people go to Rackspace. >> And Dell EMC is making the infrastructure easier for us as we move up the stack. We, like our customers, don't want to spend a lot of time in the hardware tier and the infrastructure tier. I'm seeing some real iCharts out here around all the different technologies; containerization, various types of databases, big data. Just absolute iCharts that on some of these very large screens you still can't read right. So the technologies that are on top that are really driving value are becoming more complex. That's where we want to focus our time and energy, and let the infrastructure play a larger role in self-managing. >> That's actually a really interesting segue maybe into the bigger industry for a second. I think if the industry goes in hype cycles, in the public conversation anyway, and if you would have just picked up some magazines or whatever, do they still print magazines? Some websites a year or two ago, you'd think that hyper-converged architectures were going to eat the world, one size was going to fit all, and in the cloud and on prep. In the meantime, in the background for many people, but front of mind, they're chugging along. There's a huge portfolio at Dell. A new Dell EMC never stepped back from saying "We have a portfolio." And one of those tiers is this VMAX, and now the next generation, this PowerMax. I don't know, Scott, can you talk a little bit about to the needs of those customers and applications that have always been there, and how you're addressing them? >> I will tell you this, the thing that we're all clearly seeing is that IT is becoming consumerized. From a user perspective, they just expect things to work. They expect everything to be like a mobile device, and it's just that simple, and if I need an app, I download the app, and it gets on there, and if I need to replace it, everything just all magically happens. The analogy is when they look at IT from a user perspective, They see the duck on the pond, and the duck is just kind of moving along slowly. What they don't see are the things that folks like Sean and Rackspace are doing where underneath that, you've got these feet that are just mad pedaling away to keep the duck moving forward. Now, I think that that's the thing that's changed, is we want to make sure that we are delivering the technology in the way users want to be able to consume that, but there's still a lot of heavy lifting, there's still a lot of complexity, there's still a lot of core infrastructure that happens underneath that, but the consumer doesn't want to be exposed to that. Matter of fact, most consumers aren't even aware That that's happening under the covers. It's in the cloud, it just works! >> You talked about the iCharts, here, everywhere, because there is so much complexity as more and more technologies need to be integrated. How does Rackspace help demystify some of that, and make things more simple for your customers in any industry, especially as data privacy and security are household terms now, and everybody being really wrapped around that, how do you help make it less complex? >> Dell EMC, we have a massive portfolio. And so everything they have got, everything VMware has got, everything that Microsoft has got, we support all of that plus networking infrastructure, plus security, it is a very broad capability to be able to help customers meet their needs. And what we're seeing is, we're seeing customers coming to us and going, "I just don't have the capability "to rationalize all this, I need help." We're also seeing customers that are pivoting the other way, that have gone, "I went to public cloud buying into the economics "and that everything was going to be great. "What I'm finding out is that I can just shift back "to private cloud, it gets some better economics, "depending upon workload, "depending upon whether it's always on, "the performance requirements, security." So we're seeing a lot of changes. There's no one-size-fits-all, it's not everybody's going public cloud, like was the big mantra two, three years ago. So what Rackspace has done is a few things. I mentioned earlier, we've grown through acquisition. We've expanded our footprint into new services around collocation into Asia-Pacific region, into state and federal government capabilities that came through an acquisition of Datapipe. We've moved into more the application management space through the acquisition of TriCore. Customers struggling with "How do I run ERP? "I've got to consolidate my data centers "from 25 data centers, I want to get down to three. "I need to move everything to a managed service provider, "but you have to be able to help me with these "mission critical applications, "it's no longer enough just to be "at the infrastructure tier." And so wrapping around all this, we've created a very large professional services capability, because going to a customer and saying, "What do you want?" "What can we sell you?" Is not the right way. Going to the customer these days, You're having to say "What is your business paying? "What can we help you with, "and how can we supplement your teams "and provide the expertise to be "able to get you there?" In areas like data center consolidation, cloud transformation, Dev bombs enabled, and big data capabilities. >> Last question guys, in the last 30 seconds or so, early tester of PowerMax, longtime Dell EMC partner, as we've talked about, what are your expectations as this thing rolls out? >> We have very high expectations for it. We always have high expectations of next generation. Last year we were here talking about unity for some of our mid tier customers now looking to PowerMax looking for a real high-end enterprise-type customers. Our expectation is that's going to simplify our management. It's going to empower our internal users and our customers more. And then we haven't even talked about the efficiencies that's going to bring in the data center in terms of the smaller amounts of space and power and cooling that are needed for something of this scale. So for us, data center is a very large operating expense. So the more we can put in a smaller space, the better off it is for a second on with it. >> Awesome. Well guys, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE again, sharing what's going on with Rackspace, the continuation of the Dell EMC partnership. We appreciate your time. >> Glad to be here, thank you. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, again, we're live, day three of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin for John Troyer. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest. (techno music playing)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Sands, we are live here on theCUBE, the flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV, along with John Troyer with whom I've yet to be teamed up this week. Good to see you John. >> Nice to be here John. >> I'm John Walls and we're joined by Chhandomay Mandal who is a Director of Marketing at Dell EMC. Chhandomay, good to see you sir. >> Happy to be here. >> Nice to have you back on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> I know it's been a busy week for you, a great week from what I've heard from many. So first off, before we jump in, we're talking a lot about storage here. But first, your overview, what you've heard the vibe of the show and and kind of what your takeaway is going to be when you head home. >> So, this has been a great show. We have announced a lot of new products and I have been doing a lot of breakout sessions and customer meetings. And the customers are excited in terms of the depth of portfolio we have to offer, how we are helping them in their digital transformation journey along with the IT transformation that is fueling this digital transformation. For me personally, the takeaway is the product announcements we made in terms of the high-end storage, I cover high end storage marketing. Both Dell EMC PowerMax, are brand new, entry level design product line that we announced yesterday as well as the new enhancements we have done for XtremIO X2. This has been, like an exciting week. Happy to meet like an great number of customers both in meetings as well as in breakout sessions. So overall, I feel great, we accomplished a lot of things and I look forward seeing these customers taking their next steps in their digital transformation journey and happy to be part of their transformation. >> So, we had Caitlin Gordon on yesterday and she couldn't stop smiling about the announcement. When she started going through all the performance metrics 10 million IOPS, she's like, 2X, we're just blowing people away right now, and she's going on and on. So, Chhand run through some of that for us and tell us about about the product a little bit and what you think is revolutionary about it. >> Dell EMC PowerMax is our flagship property in the high end storage. If I were to characterize it in three words, it is fast, it is smart and it is efficient. As far as fast goes, it can deliver, as Caitlin said, up to ten million IOPS, 150 gigabytes per second throughput with very minimal latency, less than 300 microseconds. This is all backed by the end-to-end NVMe design that we have done, so this NVMe enabled architecture take away the limitations that we used to see from SAS, not only that, it is not just NVMe but also the storage class memory drive that is the next generation. It is this area, users both SEM and NVMe, so that's the first part. The next part is it's smart. It has an built in machine learning engine that actually analyzes 40 million data, in real time and makes 60 billion decisions per day to optimize data placements and making sure we are delivering the service levels for all different applications. And the last part is efficiency. We have introduced inline deduplication with hardware assisted feature. So now it has both compression and deduplication, giving a lot of capacity settings to our customers while not impacting the performance at all. >> You know Chhandomay, I was actually just speaking with Sean Wedige from Rackspace talking about that. The thing that impressed him the most, we actually skipped over the NVMe and we skipped over a lot of the parts inside of it, because that's the some of the performance that they needed for their service provider workload. But they're, one of the highest things that they valued out of it was the operational efficiency. In fact, I was sitting with some of the team yesterday talking to them and with a couple of storage admins and they they were swapping war stories about like, step 143 of 300 and trying to, as you had all the knobs and the scripts and the CLI and that's gone. A lot of that is gone. And whether you call it AI or or the machine, or deep learning, but the operational efficiencies that have now, in this next generation, of now called PowerMax, right, that seemed to be impressive, one of them one of the bigger things that impressed him. I don't want to say he wasn't impressed about the performance numbers. So, as you talk to customers this week has that really hit home? >> Absolutely, the operational efficiency, the effects reductions are like key to the customers enabling their IT transformation. Leading to this digital transformation. Now, how does this play into all the machine learning and AI techniques that this platform is built upon? So if you take a look at the workloads that the customers are running today, it's still enterprise workloads. 80% of it is like how traditional workloads, like SAP, Oracle, all of these. But then, there is the modern applications that are built on real-time data analysis. It feeds into the data, it analyzes it to make better decisions for the customers. Taking proactive actions. Delivering and using those data analysis as their computing advantage. But that is today only like say 20% of the work. Now, it is predicted that over the next three years to five years, that ratio is going to flip. So, it will be 20% of the traditional workloads and 80% is this modern applications like data generated from IoT, AI, all those things. Now how does PowerMax help in this scenario, so here comes that built in machine learning engine. It actually learns from the patterns in the data. So today it can analyze the data and do this optimize placement between storage class memory and NVMe SSDs based on those 80/20 rule. But then, as the workloads are getting adopted this is also learning from these patterns in data and adapting itself running these algorithms to make sure, even in future, when the workload percentage changes it is changing its algorithms and providing the same level of service. And not just data placement, this is service level agreements so our PowerMax customer can say for this application I need this much of latency. So, all these AI and machine learning techniques are being applied there. So as they are changing this service level directions it is adapting and making sure, whatever application requires whatever response times we are able to deliver it. And that's a huge operational benefit because the administrators do not need to tune and fiddle, figure out, how to get there. It is automatic, it is built-in, thanks to the built-in AI engine here. >> Chhandomay, there's now a generation of storage admins that now, needs to up level their jobs, right. Because that they used to have a real, it was tedious, talking to them. I'm actually kind of curious also, the rest of how this the portfolio fits together. In the sense of if you look at the industry, maybe a few years back, you almost would have kind of over fitted on on hyper-converged and you would have thought well, maybe one size does fit all and well that's the future. But it turns out, in the meantime, Dell EMC had this portfolio and there was a high, the high end that's been there all along and in fitting for appropriate workloads right. So, I'm just kind of curious Chhandomay, take this over to someone maybe XtremIO or what as you talk to the customers, when they talk to you, what apps and workloads do you then talk to them about? >> You bring up a very good and pertinent question which our customers ask us all the time. In this example let's take both our high-end products, we have Dell EMC PowerMax, we have Dell EMC XtremIO X2. Both are all flash arrays as great characteristics. Which is applicable where, right? So the first thing I want to say for all the customers that are running ultimate mission critical workloads where they need RPOs and RTOs, pretty much like instant, it cannot go down at any point in time and I'm not talking about just the like storage but also all the applications that is running. So SRDF, our remote replication technology within the PowerMax product that is the gold standard in the industry, delivering like six-nines availability for many many years. So, couple that with massive workload consolidation. For example, you are a big hospital. You are running your epic medical data records systems, it's not just like epic databases, but also your VDI desktops, your other virtual workloads. All you can consolidate in a very small footprint with our PowerMax platform. The third thing is, it's now end-to-end NVMe design. Right now, we are using dual ported NVMe SSDs. So customers who need that level of very high performance in like less than 300 microsecond latency with all this like real-time apps and business applications together. So that's the customer segment who finds our PowerMax as the appropriate platform. Now, XtremIO also a purpose-built, all flash array design from ground up for the flash media. So, what's the benefit there? Now here, again, what we are doing with XtremIO, we are offering this enterprise capabilities at the mid-range price. We actually introduced a new XtremIO X-Brick model to bring down the cost. It is 55% lower entry point than it used to be in the previous generation. We are going to sell that mid-market customers with enterprise capabilities with this new XtremIO X-Brick model. The way XtremIOs are always in memory, metadata centric architecture works out, it can deliver very high performance, consistently low latency, but also, it has integrated copy data management built in. What does it play? Think of a database where like for every database there are, say, five to 10 copies for disk and dev, backup, reporting, all of those things. Now, wherever you have massive amount of copies, XtremIO is a very good platform because you can actually bring those copies and run workloads on the copies themselves. You get enormous consolidation and capacity footprint in that type of situations. The last thing is workloads that has very high data reduction ratios. Think of it, virtual desktops or VDI. So here you have like thousands of users, running their desktops in a data center and but inherently like all the bases are the same. So here is like a lot of data reduction capabilities that come into picture and XtremIO's always in-memory, metadata centric architecture and this in line, all the time de-dup and compression helps in great amount of capacity savings with the data reduction technologies. For the workloads, where it is critical to have data reduction and it's the data itself lends to data capacity servings that's why it's the best in class. So, that's kind of like, give you a perspective of how these products complement each other. >> I know it's been a great week for you, a busy week for you. >> Absolutely. >> Breakout sessions, two CUBE interviews, client meetings, what have you, take a break. >> It's been a great show, it was a pleasure here talking to you. >> Thanks for joining us again and sharing the PowerMax story, it's a good one and I'm sure it's going to give you a lot of success down the road at Dell EMC. Back with more, you are watching Dell Technologies World 2018 coverage, live on theCUBE from Las Vegas. (upbeat music)