(happy techno music) >> Welcome everybody to this cube conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and we're joined today by Richard Goodwin. Who's the group director of IT at Ultra Leap and Avishek Kumar who manages Dell's power store product line and directs that product line along with several other lines for the company, gentlemen, welcome to the cube. >> Hi Dave >> Hi >> So Richard ultra leap, very cool company tracks, hand movements, and so forth. Tell us about the company and the technology, I'm really interested in how it's used. >> Yeah, we've had many product lines, obviously. We're at very innovative, um and the organization was spun up from PhD, a number of PhD students who were the co-founders for ultra leap. um And initially with mid-air haptics, um as you, as many people may have seen, but also hand tracking, mid-air had such a sense and feel. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's quite impressive what we have produced and the number of sectors and markets that we're in. Um And obviously to push us to, to where we are, we have relied upon lots of the Dell technology, both software and hardware. >> And what's your role at the company. >> Uh, I'm the group IT director, uh, I'm responsible for the it and business platforms or infrastructure network hardware software, and also the transparency of those platforms to ensure that we're scalable. And we are able to develop our software and hardware as rapidly as possible. >> Awesome. Yeah, a lot of data behind that too. I bet. Um okay Avishek, you direct a number of products at Dell across the portfolio, unity, extreme IO, the SC series, and of course, power vault. It's, it's quite the portfolio that you look after. So let's get into the case study. If we can, a bit, Richard, maybe you could paint a picture of, of your environment, some of the key applications that you're supporting and maybe what your infrastructure looks like. Give us a high level view. >> Sure. So pretty power store. We had quite a disparate architecture, so a fairly significant split and siding on the side of cloud, not as hybrid as we would like, and not, not as much as our on-prem as we would have liked and Hey, that, that has changed quite significantly. So we now have a number of servers and storage and storage arrays that we have on, on premise. And then we host ourselves. So we are moving quite rapidly, you know, as a, as a startup and then moving to a scale-up we needed that, that scalability and that versatility, and also the whole OPEX versus CapEx and, um, and also not being driven by lots of SaaS products and architecture and infrastructure where we needed to be in control because of our development cycles and our products, product development. >> So wait, oh okay. So, so too much cloud, you wanted to run a little bit of a dose of on-prem explain that a little bit more the cloud wasn't doing it for you in terms of your development cycle, your control, can you double click on that? >> Yeah. Some of the, some of the control and, you know, there's always a balance because there are certain elements of our development cycles and our engineering software engineering, where we need a very high parallelism for some of the work that we're doing, which then, you know, the CapEx investment makes things very, very challenging, not commercially that the right thing to do. However, there are some of our information, some of IP, some of the secure things that we do, we also do not want upgrades as an example, or any outages or certain types of server and spec that we need to be quite bespoke and unique, and that needs to be within our control. >> Got it, okay. Thank you for that. Avishek, we're going to talk about power store today. So set it up, please tell us about power store, what it is, you know, why it's important to this conversation. >> Sure, so power store store is a product that we launched may of 2020, roughly a little bit more than a year now. And it's a brand new architecture that Dell technologies released. And at the end of the day, I'll talk about a few unique aspects of the product, but at the end of the day, the, where we start with it's a storage platform, right? So where we see similar to what Richard is saying here, in terms of being able to consolidate the customer's environment, whether it is blog file, weevils, physical virtual environments, and, and it's, as I said, it's a brand new architecture where we leveraged pieces of existing products, where it makes sense and it's, we are using all the latest and greatest technologies delivering the best performance based data reduction and, and where we see a lot of traction is the options that it brings to the table for our customers in terms of flexibility, whether they want to add capacity compute, whether in fact, we have apps on the current model where customers can consolidate their compute as well on the static storage platform if needed. So a lot of innovation from a platform perspective itself, and it's not just about the platform itself, but what comes along with it, right? So we refer to it as an ecosystem, part of it, where we work with Ansible playbooks, CSI plugin, you name it, right. And it's, the storage platform by itself. Doesn't that, doesn't stand by itself in a customer's environment there are other aspects of the infrastructure that it needs to integrate with as well. Right? So if they're using Ansible playbooks, we want to make sure the integration is there. >> Got it. >> And last but not the least is the intelligence built into the platform, right? So as we are building these capabilities into the product, there is intelligence built into the product, as well as outside the product where things like cloud IQ, things like uh, um, technologies built into power suit itself makes it that much easier for the customers to manage the infrastructure and go from there. >> Thank you for that, so, Richard, what was the workload? So it actually, you started with sort of a Greenfield on prem. If I understand it correctly, what was the workload that you were sort of building around or workloads? >> Sorry, we had a, a number of different applications. Some of which we cannot really talk about too much, but we had, we had a VxRail, we had a, a smaller Dell array, and we have lots of what we classes, runners, cubeanetics cluster that we that we run and quite a few different VMs that run on our, on-prem server infrastructure and storage rates and the issues that we began to hit because of the high IO, from some of our, um, workloads that we were hitting very high latency, which rapidly stopped, began to cause us issues, especially with some of our software engineering teams. And that is when we embarked upon a competitive RFP for uh, Dell power store. Dell were already engaged from an end-user compute where they'd been selected as the end-user compute provider from a previous competitive RFP. And then we engaged them regarding the storage issue that we had, and we engaged the, our account leading count exec, and a number of solution architects were working with us to ensure that we have the optimal solution. Dell were selected over the competitors because of many reasons, you know, the, the, the new technology, the DG plication, the compression, that data overall data reduction, and the guarantee that also came, uh, came with that, with the four to one data reduction guarantee, which was significant to us because of the amount of data that we hold. Um, And we have, you know, as I mentioned, we're pulling further, further data of ours back into our hosted environments, which will end up on the power store, especially with the duplication that we're now getting. We've actually hit nine to one, which is significant. We were expecting four to one, maybe five to one with some of the data types. And what was excellent Dale were that confident that they did not even review our data types prior. And they were willing to stand by that guarantee of four to one and we've excelled that we've got different data types on, on that array, and we've hit nine to one and that's gradually grown over the last nine months. You know, we were kind of six them we moved to seven and now we're hitting nine to one ratios. >> That's great. So you get a little free storage. That's interesting what you're saying, Richard, cause I just assumed that a company that's guaranteed four to one is going to say, okay, let us, let us inspect your workload first and then we'll do the deal. So Avishek, what's the tech behind that data reduction that you're able to with such confidence, not have to pre inspect the workload in this case anyway. >> Yeah. So, so it goes back to the technologies that goes behind the product, right? So, so we, we stand behind the technology and we want to make it simpler for our customers as well. Where again, we don't want to spend weeks looking at all the data, scanning all the data before giving the guarantee. So we stand behind the technology where we understand that as the data is coming in, we are always going to be duplicated. We are always going to compress it. There is technology within the product where we are offloading some of that to the outside the CPU. So it is not impacting the performance that the applications are going to see. So a data reduction by itself is not going to get enough performance by itself is not good enough. Both of them have to be together. Right. So, and that's what powers to brings to the table. >> Yeah. Thank you. So Richard, I'm interested. I mean, I remember the power store announcement, sort of saw it leading up to it. And one of the big thrusts from Dell was the way I phrase it is essentially trying to create a cloud-like experience on-prem. So really focused on simplicity. So my question to you is, let's start with just the deployment. You know, how complicated was it to install? What was that process like? How many clicks, I mean, not that you have to tell me how many clicks, but you know, what I'm asking is, is how difficult was it to get from zero to, you know, up and running? >> Well, we actually sat down with a very difficult challenge. We were in quite a difficult situation where we'd pretty much got off of a cliff in terms of IOPS performance. So the RFP was quite rapid. And then we needed to get which, whoever, which vendor was successful, we need to get that deployed rather rapidly and on the floor in our data center and server rooms, which we did. And it was very, very simplistic within three weeks of placing the order. We had that array in our server rack and we'd begun the migration that it was very simple to set up. And the management of that array has been, we we've seen say 40% reduction in terms of effort it took to be able to manage our storage because it is very self-contained, you know, even from a reporting perspective, the deployment, the migration was all very, very, very simplistic. And, you know, we we've done some work recently where we had to also do some work on the array and some other migrations that we were doing and the resilience came, came to, came to the forefront of where the whole architecture and no single point of failure enabled us to do some things that we needed to do quite rapidly because of the, the jole notes and the resilience within, within the unit and within the power store itself was considerable where we, we kept performance up. People also prioritize any discreet rebuilds, keeps the incoming ingest rates high and prioritizes that, you know, the workloads, which is really impressive, especially when we are moving so quickly with our technology. We don't really have much time to, you know, micromanage the estate. >> Can you, can you just repeat what you said on the percent reduction? I think I heard you cut out there a little bit, a percent reduction on, on, on management, on, on, on the labor side. >> So our lead storage engineer is estimated around 40% less management. >> Wow. Okay. So that's, that's good. So actually, I, I love this conversation because, you know, in the early the days of automation, people are like, ah, that's my job provisioning, LUNs. I'm really good at it. But I think people are realizing that it's actually not something that you want to be really good at. It's something that you want to eliminate. So it now maybe it's a, that, storage engineer got his or her nights and weekends back, uh, but, but what do they do now when they get that extra time, what do you, what do you put them on? You know, no more strategic initiatives or, you know, other, other tech things in the to-do list, what's that like? >> You know, any of my team, whether it's the storage leads or some of the infrastructure team that are also involved in engaged, cause you know, the organization, we have to be quite versatile as a team in our skillsets. We don't want to be doing those BAU mundane tasks. Even the storage engineer does not want to be, you know, allocating Luns and allocating storage to physical servers, VMs, et cetera. We want all of that to be automated. And the, you know, those engineers, are they working on some of the cutting edge things that we're trying to do with machine learning as a, as an example, which is much more interesting, it's what they want to be doing. Um, you know, that aides, the obvious things like retention interest and personal development, we don't want to be, you know, that base IT infrastructure management is, is, is not, not where any of the engineers wants to be. >> In terms of the decision to go with Dell power store. I, I, I'm definitely hearing there was a relationship. There was an existing relationship with Dell. I'm sure that played into it. And you, you mentioned a couple of times that RFP, so, so you kind of lined up various various vendors. What can you tell us about that in, in addition to the relationship, what was it that led you to power store? >> Uh, there were many things saying, you know, the relationship wasn't really part of this, even though I've mentioned the end user compute in any sets or anything that we're procuring, we want best of breed and best of set, but, and there were four vendors that were engaged in the RFP and it was down selected to, two, and that was done on the cost is definitely a driver. The technology, you know, is a big trust to us. We're a tech company. New technology to us is also fascinating, not only our own but also the, the storage guarantee, the simplicity, the resilience within, within the unit. Also the, the ability which was key to us because of what we're trying to do with our hybrid model and bring, bring back and repatreize some of the data as it were um, from the client, we needed that ability to, with ease, to be able to scale up and scale out, and the power store gave us that. >> When you say cost of, I want to dig into that price or, you know, the, the, the, the price tag or the, the cost. I mean, when you do the business case, and I wonder if we could add a little color to that. >> Yeah, the, the, there there's two elements to this, so there's not even the cost of the price tag, but then also cost of ownership and the comparisons that we were running against the other vendors, but also the comparisons that we were running from a CapEx investment against OPEX and what we have in the cloud, and also the performance and performance that we get from the cloud and our cloud storage and a resilience within that, and then also the initial price tag, and then comparing the CapEx investments to the OPEX were all elements that were, were key to us making our decision. And you know that there has to be some credit taken by the Dell account team and their relationship towards the final phrase of that RFP, you know, were key, initially, not at all, we were just looking for the best possible storage solution for ultra-leap. >> And to, to determine that on your end, was that like a feature, because it's sometimes fuzzy what the business impact is going to be like that 40% you mentioned, or the data reduction at nine to one, when there's a promise of four to one, did you, what did you do? Did you kind of do a feature function analysis and sort of line that up and, and say, okay, I'm going to map that to our business, our processes, our IT processes, and try to predict what the impact would be. Is that how you did it, or did you take a different approach? >> We did. So we did that, obviously between vendors as you'd expected in RFP, but then also mapping to how that would impact the business. And that that is not an easy process to go through. We've seen more gains, even comparing one vendor to another, some of that because of the technology, the terminology is very, very different and sometimes you have to bring that up a level and also gain a much more detailed understanding, which at times can be challenging, but we did a very like-for-like comparison and, and also lots of research, but you're quite right. The, the, the business analysis to what we needed. We had quite a good forecast and from my supplier stock and information data, and also our engineering and business and strategic roadmap, we were able to map those two together, not the easiest of experiences, not one that I want to repeat, but we got through it. >> Yeah, a little bit of art and science involved. Avishek, maybe you could talk about power store, what, you know, give us the commercial. What makes it different from other products in the market? Things like cloud IQ, maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Sure, so, so again, from a, a it's music to my ears, when Richard talks about the ease of deployment and the management, because there is a lot of focus on that. But even as I said earlier, from a manned technology perspective, a lot of goodness built in, in terms of being able to consolidate a customer's environment into, onto the platform. So that's more from a storage point of view that will give the best performance, give the best data reduction, storage efficiencies. Um, the second part, of course, the flexibility, the options that power store it gives to the customers in terms of sort of desegregating the storage and the compute aspects of it. So if, as a customer, I want to start with different points in terms of what our customer requirements are today, but going forward as requirements changed from a compute capacity perspective, you can use a scale up and scale out capabilities, and then the intelligence built in, right? So as you scale out your cluster, being able to move storage around right, as needed being able to do that non-disruptively. So instead of saying that Mr. Customer you're, you're storage is going to, you're at 90% capacity, being able to say that based on your historical trending, we expect you run out of capacity in six months, some small things like that. Right. And of course, if the, the dial home, the support assist capabilities that are enabled, cloud IQ brings a lot of intelligence to the table as well. In addition to that, as they mentioned earlier, there is apps on capability that gives another level of flexibility to the customers to integrate your storage infrastructure into a virtual environment. If the customer chooses to do that. And last but not the least, it's not just about the product right? So it's about the programs that we have put around it. Any anytime I'll create is a big differentiator for us, where it's an investment protection program for customers, where if they want to have the peace of mind, in terms of three months, nine months, three years down the line, if we come out with new technologies, being able to be upgrade to that non-disruptively is a big part of it as well. It's a peace of mind for the customers that, yes, I'm getting into the power store architecture today, but going forward, I am I'm protected from that point. So anytime I upgrade, it's a new business program that we put around leveraging the architectural benefits of power stool, whether your compute requirements, your storage requirements change you're, you're, you're covered from that point of view. So again, very quick a overview of, of what power store is, why it is different, and again, that's where that comes from. >> Thank you for that. Richard, are you, are you actively using cloud IQ? Do you get, what kind of value do you get from it? >> Not currently. However, we have, we have had plans to do that. The uptake and BCR, our internal workload has not allowed us to do that, but one of the other key reasons for selecting power source was the, the non-disruptive element, you know, with other SaaS products, other providers, and other issues that we have experienced. That was one, that was a, a key decision for us from a, a power store perspective. One of the other, you know, I would like to go back to the conversation slightly, in terms of performance, we are getting, getting now, you know, there's a 400% speed of improvement of publishing. We've got an 80% faster code coverage. So our firmware builds a 1300% quicker than they were previously and, and the time savings of the storage engineer and, you know, as a, as director of IT, I often asked for certain reports from, from the storage array, when we're working out for, um, storage forecast, performance forecast. And, you know, when we're coming close to product releases, code drops that we're trying to manage, the reporting or the power stories is impressive. Whereas previously my storage engineer would not be the, the most happiest of people when I would be trying to pull, you know, monthly and quarterly reports, et cetera. Whereas now it's, it's easy and we have live dashboards running, and we can easily extract that information. >> I love that, because, you know, so often we talk about the 40% reduction in IT, labor, uh, which, which, okay, that's cool. But then your CFO's going to say, yeah, but it's not like we're getting rid of people. We, you know, we're still spending that money and you, okay. They're getting you're now into soft dollars, but when you talk about 400%, 18%, 1300% of what you're talking about, business impact and that's telephone numbers to a CFO. So I love those metrics. Thank you for sharing. >> Yeah. But what would, they, obviously, in some of our dashboards when they visualize that they are very hard hitting, you know, the impact that you're quite right that the CFO does chase down, you know, the availability and the resource profile, however, we're on a huge upward trajectory. So having the right resilience and infrastructure in places is exactly what we need. And as I mentioned before, those engineers are all reallocated to much more interesting work. And, you know, the, the areas that will actually drive our business forward. >> Speaking of resilience, are you doing any replication? >> Not currently. However, there, uh, we've actually got a meeting regarding this today with some of that was a surprise that some of their storage specialists in a couple of hours time, actually, because that is a very high on the agenda for us to be able to replicate and have a high availability cluster and another potentially power store name. >> So I was going to ask you kind of where you want to take this thing. I'm hearing you, you're looking at cloud IQ, really try to exploit that. So you've got some headroom here in terms of the value that you can get out of this platform to, to do replication, faster recovery, et cetera, maybe protect against, you know, events. Any other things that you would identify as things you would either want from Dell or things that you'd like to see this platform direction you'd like to see it take in the future? >> Uh, yeah. We, we actually had some discussions recently and we are actively involved in some of the power store roadmap, which is, which is really good for us because we get visibility. And we also get to feed back to Dell on some of the features that we would like to see. So one of the things that we're discussing is a virtual kind of power store is what we would like to see. So some of that resilience would be really useful for us to be able to fail over quite rapidly and have live access to you are sick of data rather than potentially having hole sites. And we're looking at some of the Dell service offerings, which are quite impressive and is currently ticking. You know, we're very early in the, in the stages of the discovery, but there's quite a few boxes being ticked. Currently. >> Guys, we got to leave it there. I love this example of where you've got infrastructure, really connecting directly to a fast growth company, helping it scale, guys, thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate your insights. >> Thank you >> And thank you And thank you for watching this cube conversation. This is Dave Volante, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE, our coverage of Dell Technologies World, the Digital Experience continues. I have a long-time guest coming back, joining me in the next segment here. Jon Siegal is back, the Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. Jon, it's good to see you, welcome back to the program. >> Thanks Lisa, always great to be on. >> We last spoke about six months ago and here we are still at home. >> I know. >> But there has been no slowdown whatsoever in the last year. We were talking to you a lot about Edge last time but we're going to talk about PowerStore today. It's just coming up on its one year anniversary. You launched it right when the pandemic happened. >> That's right. >> Talk to me about what's happened in the last year with respect to PowerStore. Adoption, momentum, what's going on? >> Yeah, great, listen, what a year it's been, right? But certainly for PowerStore especially, I mean, customers and partners around the world have really embraced PowerStore, specifically really it's modern architecture. What many people may not know is this is actually the fastest ramping new architecture we've had in all of Dell's history, which is quite a history of course. And we saw 4 X quarter over quarter growth in the most recent quarter. And you know, in terms of shipments, we've shipped well over 400 petabytes of PowerStore, you know, so special thanks to lots of our customers around the world and industries like education, gaming, transportation, retail. More than 60 countries, I think 62 countries now. They include customers like Columbia Southern University, Habib Bank, Real Page, the University of Pisa and Ultra Leap, just to name a few. And to give you a sense of how truly game changing it's been in the market is that approximately 20% of the customers with PowerStore are new to Dell, new to Dell Technologies. And we've tripled the number of wins against some of our key competitors in just the last quarter as well. So look, it's been quite a year, like you said and we're not stopping there. >> Yeah, you must have to wear a neck brace from that whiplash of moving so quickly. (both laughing) But that's actually a good problem to have. >> It is. >> And curious about, is it 20% of the PowerStore customers are net new to Dell? >> Yeah. >> Interesting that you've captured that much in a very turbulent year. Any industries in particular that you see as really being transformed by the technology? >> Yeah, it's a great question. I think just like we're bringing a disruptive technology to market, there's a lot of industries out there that are disrupting themselves as well, right, and how they transform, particularly with, you know, in this new era during the pandemic. I think, I can give you a great example. One of the new capabilities of PowerStore is AppsON just for those that aren't familiar. AppsON is the ability for PowerStore to run apps directly on the appliance, good name, right? And it's thanks to a built-in VMware ESXi hypervisor. And where we've seen really good traction with AppsON, is in storage intensive applications at the edge. And that brings me to my example. And this one's in retail. And you know, of course just like every industry I think it's been up-ended in the past year. There's a large supermarket chain in northern China that is new to Dell. During the pandemic they needed to fast-track the development of a smart autonomous retail system in all their stores, so that their customers could make their purchases via smartphone app. And again, just limiting the essentially the person to person interaction during the pandemic and this required a significant increase in transaction processing to get to the store locations that they didn't have equipment for before, as well as support for big data analytics applications to understand the customer behavior that's going on in real-time. So the net result is they chose PowerStore. They were new to Dell and they deployed it in their stores and delivered a seamless shopping experience via smartphone apps. The whole shopping experience was completely revolutionized. And I think this is really a great example of again, how the innovations that are in PowerStore are enabling our customers to really rethink how they're transacting business. >> Well, enabling the supermarkets to be the edge but also in China where everything started, so much, the market dynamics are still going on, but how quickly were they able to get PowerStore up and running and facilitate that seamless smartphone shopping experience? >> It was only weeks, only weeks, weeks from beginning to getting them up to speed. I mean, we've had great coverage, great support. And again, they embraced, I mean, they happened to leverage the AppsON capabilities, so they were able to run some of their applications directly on the appliance and they were able to get that up and running very quickly. And they were already a VMware customer as well. So they were already familiar with some of the tools and the integration of the VMware. And again, that's also been a sweetspot for this particular offer. >> Okay, got it. So a lot in it's first year. You said 4 X growth, over 60 countries, 400 petabytes plus shipped, a lot of new net new customers. What is new? What are you announcing that's new and that's going to take that up even a higher level? >> That's right. We're always going to up the ante, right? We're always going to, we can't rest on our laurels for too long. Look, we're very excited to share what's new for PowerStore. And that is one of the reasons we're here of course. I can break it down into two key highlights. First is a major software update that brings more enterprise innovation, more speed, more automation in particular to both new and existing customers. And we're also excited to announce a new lower cost entry model for the PowerStore family called the PowerStore 500. And this offers an incredible amount of enterprise class storage capabilities, much of which I have talked about and will talk more about today, for the price. And the price itself is what's going to surprise some folks. It starts as low as 28,000 US street price which is pretty significant, you know, in terms of a game changer, we think, in this industry. >> So let's talk about the software update first. You've got PowerStore 2.0, happy birthday to your customers who are going to take advantage of this. >> That's right. >> Kind of talk me through what some of the technological advancements are that your customers are going to be able to leverage? >> That's a great point. Yeah, so from a software perspective I like how you said that, happy birthday, yeah so all of our, just to be clear from a software update perspective, all of our existing customers are going to get this as a simple free non-disruptive update. And this is a commitment we've had to our customers for some time. And really it's the mantra if you will, of PowerStore, which is all about ensuring that our customers can encounter our very flexible platform that will keep giving them the latest and greatest. So really a couple of things I want to highlight from PowerStore that are brand new. One is we're giving a speed boost to the entire PowerStore lineup. Customers now, existing customers, you get up to 25% faster, mixed workload performance which is incredible, right off the bat. Secondly, we're enabling our customers to take full advantage of NVME now across the data center with the option of running NVME over fiber channel. And this again requires just a simple software update and no additional hardware if they already have 32 gig capable switches and HBAs on-prem. We've also made our unique AppsON feature, which I just talked about in the China example, we've made that more powerful and with scale out. This means more aggregate power, more aggregate capacity and it makes it even more ideal now for storage intensive apps to run at the edge with PowerStore. Another capability that's been very popular with our customers is our data reduction specifically our intelligent Dido which is always on and automated. And now what it does is it enables customers to boost performance while still guaranteeing the four to one data reduction that we have, at the same time. So just to give a quick example, when the system is under extreme IO, duress if you will, it automatically prioritize that IO versus the DDUP itself and provides a 20% turbo boost if you will, of performance boost for the applications running. All this is done automatically, zero management effort, zero impact to the data reduction guarantee of four to one that we already have in place. And then the last highlight I'd like to bring up is, last but not least, is one we're really proud of is the ability for our customers to now take more cost advantage, if you will, cost effective advantage of SCM or storage class memory. PowerStore now differentiates between SCM drives and NVME drives within the same chassis. So they can use SCM as a high-performance layer, if you will with as few as one drive, right? So they don't have to populate the whole chassis, they can use just one SCM drive for cost-effectiveness, for embedded data access. And this actually helps reduce the workload latency by up to 15%. So, another great example on top of NVME that I already mentioned, of how PowerStore is leading the practical adoption of next generation technologies. >> Are you seeing with the lower cost PowerStore 500, is that an opportunity for Dell to expand into the midsize market and an opportunity for those smaller customers to be able to take advantage of this technology? >> Absolutely, yeah. So the PowerStore finder, which we're really excited about introducing does exactly what you just said, Lisa. It is going to allow us to bring PowerStore and the experience of PowerStore to a broad range of businesses, a much broader range of edge use cases as well. And we're really excited about that. It's an incredible amount of enterprise storage class performance, as I mentioned, and functionality for the price that is again, 28,000 starting. And this includes all of the enterprise software capabilities I've been talking about. The ability to cluster, four to one data reduction guarantee, anytime upgrades. And to put this in context, a single 2U appliance, the PowerStore 500 supports up to 2.4 million SQL transactions per minute. I mean, this thing packs a punch, like no other, right? And it's a great fit for stand-alone or edge deployments in virtually every industry, we've mentioned retail already also healthcare, manufacturing, education and more. It's an offering that's really ideal for any solution that requires an optimization of price/performance, small footprint and effortless automation. And I can tell you, it's not just customers that are excited about this, as you can imagine our channel partners, they can't wait to get their hands on this either. >> Was just going to ask you about the channel. >> It is going to help them reach new sets of customers that they never had before. You mentioned midsize, but also in addition to that, it's just going to open it up to all new sets of use cases as well. So I'm really excited to see the creativity from our channel partners and customers and how they adopt and use the PowerStore 500 going forward. >> Tell me about some of those new use cases that it's going to open up. We've seen so many new things in the last year and such acceleration. What are some of the new use cases that this is going to help unlock value for? >> Yeah, again, I think it's going to come down a lot to the edge in particular, as well as mid-size, it can run, again, this can run storage, intensive applications. So it's really about coming down to a price point that I think the biggest example will be mid-sized businesses that now, it's now affordable to. That they weren't able to get this enterprise class capabilities in the past more than anything else. Cause it's all the same capabilities that I've mentioned but it allows them to run all types of things. It could be, they could run, new next-generation intensive data, intensive databases. They can run VDI, they can run SQL, it does, essentially more than anything else makes existing use cases more accessible to mid-sized businesses. >> Got it, okay. So, so much momentum going on in the first year. A lot of that you're souping it up with this your new software, we talked about the new mid-size enterprise version PowerStore 500. What else can we expect from PowerStore, the rest of calendar 2021? >> Yeah, I think lots of things. So first of all we're so pleased at the amount of commitment to innovation that we've had over the past year. We're going to continue to work very closely with VMware to drive more and more innovation and enhancements with capabilities like AppsON that I talked about, and VM-ware or (indistinct) which is a key enabler for that. We're also committed to continuing to lead the industry in the adoption of modern technologies. I gave some good examples today of NVME and AppsON and SCM, storage class memory, and customers can expect that continued commitment. Look, we've designed PowerStore from the ground up to be very flexible so that it can be enhanced and improved non-disruptively. And I think we did that with this release. We proved that and no one can predict the future, clearly, it's been a crazy year. And so businesses need storage that's going to be flexible with them and grow with them and evolve with them. And customers can expect that from PowerStore. And we plan on doing just that. >> So customers can, that are interested can go direct to Dell. They can also go through your huge channel, you said, in terms of those customers that are thinking about it maybe adding to the percentage of new customers. What's your advice on them in terms of next steps? >> Yeah, next steps is, you know, I got to say this, we've done, it's crazy, we've done over 20,000 demos of PowerStore in one year, no joke. And you know, it's a new world. And so the next step is to reach out to Dell. We'd love to showcase this through a demo, give them whether it's a remote experience that way or remote proof of concept but yeah, reach out to Dell, your local rep or local channel partner and we'd love to show you what's possible more than anything else and look, we're really proud of what we've accomplished here. Just as impressive as these updates, I must say, is that in many instances, the team that brought this to market, the engineering team, they did this just like we're doing today, right? Over Zoom, remotely, while balancing life and work. So I just also want to thank the team for their commitment to delivering innovation to our customers. It hasn't wavered at all and I want to thank our top notch team. >> Right, an amazing amount of work done. You've had a very busy year and glad that you're well and healthy and been as successful with PowerStore. We can't wait to see in the next year those numbers that you shared even go up even more. Jon, thank you for joining us >> Looking forward to it. and sharing what's new with PowerStore. We appreciate your time. >> Always a pleasure, Lisa. >> Likewise >> Look forward to talking to you soon. >> Yeah >> Take care. >> For Jon Siegal, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, a Digital Experience. (slow upbeat music)