(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)

>>The cube presents, Dell technologies world brought to you by Dell. >>Welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin and Dave Vale are live in Las Vegas. We are covering our third day of covering Dell technologies world 2022. The first live in-person event since 2019. It's been great to be here. We've had a lot of great conversations about all the announcements that Dell has made in the last couple of days. And we're gonna unpack a little bit more of that. Now. One of our alumni is back with us. Shannon champion joins us again, vice president product marketing at Dell technologies, and she's a company by Pete Robinson, the director of infrastructure engineering at Salesforce. Welcome. Thank >>You. >>So Shannon, you had a big announcement yesterday. I run a lot of new software innovations. Did >>You hear about that? I heard a little something >>About that. Unpack that for us. >>Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, it's so exciting to be here in person and have such a big moment across our storage portfolio, to see that on the big stage, the boom to announce major updates across power store, PowerMax and power flex all together, just a ton of innovation across the storage portfolio. And you probably also heard a ton of focus on our software driven innovation across those products, because our goal is really to deliver a continuously modern storage experience. That's what our customers are asking us for that cloud experience. Let's take the most Val get the most value from data no matter where it lives. That's on premises in the public clouds or at the edge. And that's what we, uh, unveil. That's what we're releasing. And that's what we're excited to talk about. >>Now, Pete, you, Salesforce is a long time Dell customer, but you're also its largest PowerMax customer. The biggest in the world. Tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing with PowerMax and your experience. >>Yeah, so, um, for Salesforce, trust is our number one value and that carries over into the infrastructure that we develop, we test and, and we roll out and Parex has been a key part of that. Um, we really like the, um, the technology in terms of availability, reliability, um, performance. And it, it has allowed us to, you know, continue to grow our customers, uh, continue needs for more and more data. >>So what was kind of eye popping to me was the emphasis on security. Not that you've not always emphasized security, but maybe Shannon, you could do a rundown of, yeah. Maybe not all the features, but give us the high level. And at Pete, I, I wonder how I, if you could comment on how, how you think about that as a practitioner, but please give us that. >>Sure. Yeah. So, you know, PowerMax has been leading for, uh, a long time in its space and we're continuing to lean into that and continue to lead in that space. And we're proud to say PowerMax is the world's most secure mission, critical storage platform. And the reason we can say that is because it really is designed for comprehensive cyber resiliency. It's designed with a zero trust security architecture. And in this particular release, there's 19 different security features really embedded in there. So I'm not gonna unpack all 19, but a couple, um, examples, right? So multifactor authentication also continuous ransomware anomaly detection, a leveraging cloud IQ, which is, uh, huge. Um, and last but not least, um, we have the industry's most granular cyber recovery at scale PowerMax can do up to 65 million imutable snapshots per array. So just, uh, and that's 30 times more than our next nearest competitor. So, you know, really when you're talking about recovery point objectives, power max can't be beat. >>So what does that mean to you, Pete? >>Uh, well, it's it's same thing that I was mentioning earlier about that's a trust factor. Uh, security is a big, a big part of that. You know, Salesforce invests heavily into the securing our customer data because it really is the, the core foundation of our success and our customers trust us with their data. And if we, if we were to fail at that, you know, we would lose that trust. And that's simply not, it's not an option. >>Let's talk about that trust for a minute. We know we've heard a lot about trust this week from Michael Dell. Talk to us about trust, your trust, Salesforce's trust and Dell technologies. You've been using them a long time, but cultural alignment yeah. Seems to be pretty spot on. >>I, I would agree. Um, you know, both companies have a customer first mentality, uh, you know, we, we succeed if the customer succeeds and we see that going back and forth in that partnership. So Dell is successful when Salesforce is successful and vice versa. So, um, when we've it's and it goes beyond just the initial, you know, the initial purchase of, of hardware or software, you know, how you operate it, how you manage it, um, how you continue to develop together. You know, our, you know, we work closely with the Dell engineering teams and we've, we've worked closely in development of the new, new PowerMax lines to where it's actually able to help us build our, our business. And, and again, you know, continue to help Dell in the process. So you've >>Got visibility on the new, a lot of these new features you're playing around with them. What I, I, I obviously started with security cuz that's on top of everybody's mind, but what are the things are important to you as a customer? And how do these features the new features kind of map into that? Maybe you could talk about your experience with the, I think you're in beta, maybe with these features. Maybe you could talk about that. >>Yeah. Um, probably the, the biggest thing that we're seeing right now, other than OB the obvious enhancements in hardware, which, which we love, uh, you know, better performance, better scalability, better, and a better density. Um, but also the, some of the software functionality that Dells starting to roll out, you know, we've, we've, we've uh, implemented cloud IQ for all of our PowerMax systems and it's the same thing. We continue to, um, find features that we would like. And we've actually, you know, worked closely with the cloud IQ team. And within a matter of weeks or months, those features are popping up in cloud IQ that we can then continue to, to develop and, and use. >>Yeah. I think trust goes both ways in our partnership, right? So, you know, Salesforce can trust Dell to deliver the, you know, the products they need to deliver their business outcomes, but we also have a relationship to where we can trust that Salesforce is gonna really help us develop the next generation product that's gonna, you know, really deliver the most value. Yeah. >>Can you share some business outcomes that you've achieved so far leveraging power max and how it's really enabled, maybe it's your organization's productivity perspective, but what are some of those outcomes that you've achieved so far? >>Um, there there's so many to, to, to choose from, but I would say the, probably the biggest thing that we've seen is a as we roll out new infrastructure, we have various generations that we deploy. Um, when we went to the new PowerMax, um, initially we were concerned about whether our storage infrastructure could keep up with the new compute, uh, systems that we were rolling out. And when we went through and began testing it, we came to realize that the, the performance improvements alone, that we were seeing were able to keep up with the compute demand, making that transition from the older VMAX platforms to the PMAX practically seamless and able to just deploy the new SKUs as, as they came out. >>Talk about the portfolio that you apply to PowerMax. I mean, it's the highest of the highest end mission critical the toughest workloads in the planet. Salesforce has made a lot of acquisitions. Yeah. Um, do you throw everything at PowerMax? Are you, are you selective? What's your strategy there? So >>It's, it's selective. In other words that there's no square peg that meets every need, um, you know, acquisitions take some time to, to ingest, um, you know, some run into cloud, some run in first, in, in first party. Um, but so we, we try to take a very, very intentional approach to where we deploy that technology. >>So 10 years ago, someone in your position, or maybe someone who works for you was probably do spent a lot of time managing lawns and tuning performance. And how has that changed? >>We don't do that. <laugh> we? >>We can, right. So what do you do with right. Talk, talk more double click on that. So how talk about how that transition occurred from really non-productive activities, managing storage boxes. Yeah. And, and where you are today, what are you doing with those resources? >>It, it, it all comes outta automation. Like, you know, the, you know, hardware is hardware to a point, um, but you reach a point where the, the manageability scale just goes exponential and, and we're way, well past that. And the only way we've been able to meet that, meet that need is to, to automate and really develop our operations, to be able to not just manage at a lung level or even at the system level, but manage at the data center level at the geographical, you know, location level and then being able to, to manage from there. >>Okay. Really stupid question. But I'm gonna ask it cause I wanna hear your answer. True. Why can't you just take a software defined storage platform and just run everything on that? Why do you need all these different platforms and why do you gotta spend all this money on PowerMax? Why, why can't you just do >>That? That's the million dollar question. Uh, I, I ask that all the time. <laugh>, um, I think software defined is it's on its way. Um, it's come a long way just in the last decade. Yeah. Um, but in terms of supporting what I consider mission critical, large scale, uh, applications, it's, it's not, it's just simply not on par just yet with what we do with PowerMax, for example. >>And that's exactly how we position it in our portfolio. Right? So PowerMax runs on 95% of the fortune 100 companies, top 20 healthcare companies, top 10 financial services companies in the world. So it's really mission critical high end has all of the enterprise level features and capabilities to really have that availability. That's so important to a lot of companies like Salesforce and, and Pete's right, you know, software define is on its way and it provides a lot of agility there. But at the end of the day for mission critical storage, it's all about PowerMax. >>I wonder if we're ever gonna get to, I mean, you, you, you, it was interesting answer cuz you kind of, I inferred from your that you're hopeful and even optimistic that someday will get to parody. But I wonder because you can't be just close enough. It's almost, you have to be. >>I think, I think the key answer to that is it's it's the software flying gets you halfway there. The other side of the coin is the application ecosystem has to change to be able to solve that other, other side of it. Cuz if you simply simply take an application that runs on a PowerMax and try to run it, just forklift it over to a software defined. You're not gonna have very much luck. >>Recovery has to be moved up to stack >>Operations recovery, the whole, whole whole works. >>Jenny, can you comment on how customers like Salesforce? Like what's your process for involving them in testing in roadmap and in that direction, strategic direction that you guys are going? Great >>Question. Sure. Yeah. So, you know, customer feedback is huge. You've heard it. I'm sure this is not new right product development and engineering. We love to hear from our customers. And there's multiple ways you heard about beta testing, which we're really fortunate that Salesforce can help us provide that feedback for our new releases. But we have user groups, we have forums. We, we hear directly from our sales teams, our, you know, our customers, aren't shy, they're willing to give us their feedback. And at the end of the day, we take that feedback and make sure that we're prioritizing the right things in our product management and engineering teams so that we're delivering the things that matter. Most first, >>We've heard a lot of that this week. So I would agree guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about Salesforce. What you doing with PowerMax? All the stuff that you announced yesterday, alone. Hopefully you get to go home and get a little bit of rest. >>Yes. >>I'm sure that there's, there's never a dull moment. Never. Can't wait guys. Great to have you. >>Thank you. You guys, >>For our guests on Dave Volante, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching the queue. We are live day three of our coverage of Dell technologies world 2022, Dave and I will be right back with our final guest of the show.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Dell Technologies World 2021, the virtual version. My name is Dave Vellante and this is theCUBE I'm pleased to welcome Bill Wavro, the president and GM, Dell Financial Services at Dell Technologies. Bill. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks Dave. It's really great to be here with you. >> So we heard in Alison Doos keynote, Dell Technologies all in on as a service APEX. She's the executive lead. So really passionate about that. Talk about DFS in that context, you've always had a way to help people shift CapEx to OPEX but what's your specific role regarding APEX? >> Yeah, well, thanks Dave. Look, we're really excited about APEX in DFS we think APEX solutions gives customers access to the broadest range of infrastructured solutions in the industry if you combine that with the Dell Technologies portfolio of ISG technology and solutions, that's a great combination for customers but you asked about DFS and in DFS we've been delivering consumption solutions for over 15 years. So taking a look at the APEX portfolio you can broadly divided into two categories, turnkey, APEX turnkey solutions, like data storage services and then APEX custom solutions like data center utility and Flex on Demand and those custom solutions are with DFS plays. And as I said we've been offering those for over 15 years. We have a lot of experience with customers, what customers are looking for? We have tens of thousands of assets out there today with hundreds of customers that are being metered on a regular basis that we're billing monthly. So we're getting a lot of feedback from customers. And I think the APEX solutions announcements that you heard here at Dell Technologies World are a further expansion of that. They're built on the backbone of what DFS has been delivering for a long time. So we've taken I think the best of those solutions and we've listened to customers, what are they looking for? What do they want? And we've got even new and improved offerings in the current announcement that we made. So, I think when you talk to customers they want a couple of things. They want simplicity. They want to be able to understand how they're going to acquire it and how those payment solutions work and they want choice. And I think the APEX solutions gives customers both of those things. And the good news is they're available on all sorts of ISD hardware be it servers storage, hyper-converged, converged infrastructures. Customers can choose what technology they're looking for and they can create their own demand environment. And the last thing I'll do is a little plug for DFS. We've been in the payment solution business for over 25 years. So we not only offer consumption solutions but we offer traditional leases and financing. And so when you add all that together and you go talk to a customer about technology and how they want to pay for it we think we've got the broadest range in the industry. And we're really proud of that. >> Okay, cool. So you have the two areas that you simplified it. That which is great. You've got that standard off the shelf and then you've got the custom solutions. The standard stuff is like console data storage and then cloud services that breaks down even further. And then the custom, I got my notes, APEX Flex on Demand and APEX data center utility, how do APEX custom solutions differ from those turnkey offerings. >> Yeah. Well, the beautiful thing about APEX is it gives customers choice. So as you mentioned, you have turnkey. So if you think data storage services that's one of our new turnkey type offerings and those turnkey offerings are outcome-based. So think about it as an outcome. What is a customer looking for? Do they want file versus block storage? What sort of capacity do they need? What performance level are they looking for? But it's thinking of those outcomes. And Dell Technology is going to take care of the rest, right? A customer can go to the APEX console and they can review those choices. They can make their selections and then they can turn it over to Dell and we'll deploy that technology, we'll manage it, we'll upgrade it and we'll service it over the life of the term. So the customer can focus on outcomes versus on acquiring and managing technology. So that's the turnkey solution and that's probably the biggest and newest part of our announcement of APEX solutions. And then we have the custom, the custom, as you mentioned data center utility Flex on-demand. That's what DFS has been delivering for many years now. And that's for our customer who wants to select the product. So think of it as a product-based solution where a customer wants to select the technology. They may want to manage it themselves. They may want to have a partner manage it. They may want to include different services. So they're able to put that together in a custom way and satisfy whatever problem they're trying to solve. So we found that many customers are going to want to select that custom solution because they're in a part of their data transformation journey where they still want to control some of that technology and others will want to go the turnkey route. So again, it kind of goes back to the customer choice in allowing them to acquire it the way that they want to acquire it. >> Okay. So like an example might be, I'm just making this up. I'm a financial institution, I'm a big VMAX customer. I got some kind of special process that I use, that I wrote that gives me competitive differentiation because I can get a millisecond faster than my competitor speed or whatever. And I want that I'm not going to take it. That's not part of your turnkey solution but that's part of my value add, I want that but I want your help in sort of customizing that and making it as a service. Is that like reasonable example? >> That's a great example. And so let me talk about that a little bit. So let me give you a couple of examples of use cases and what the products provide. So think about, let's talk about data center utility first because when you think of the data center utility think data center, right? These are the large deployments. They're big customers. They they're most likely a global customer and they want to get out of the data center business, right? They want to get out of the day-to-day management of that and be able to focus on, hey, how do we as I as a CIO deliver value to my business? I want to make a difference in that business strategy. CIO is more and more being asked to help the business and enable that business strategy. And so many of them want to get out of the data center management business and this is where a data center utility product can come in. It allows us to go in as Dell and help that customer manage that data center. So it has the most flexibility in terms of, custom building, custom reporting, very low if any minimum commitments. And one of the best features is we have a delivery manager who's assigned to every account who can help that customer procure assets, manage assets, deal with capacity management. So we really can take over the management of that data center and allow the customers IT group to focus on delivering value to the business. So we think that's a really important aspect of it. And it allows us to manage even existing assets that are sitting out at the customer as well as new purchases. And then back to the kind of example that you gave, where a customer really wants that high performance they have specific hardware in mind. They can also use a Flex On Demand type product so that the customer is able to pick the hardware whether it be servers, storage, converged infrastructure, hyper-converged and they can select the technology that they want to use. They can sign up for a very flexible period of time. So they can go from one year to five years. They may only need this hardware for a limited period of time. Maybe they're working on a project where they're going to need additional storage capacity for the next couple of years, so they can sign up for a two year contract if they want, they can sign up for the commitment level that they want to use. So, one of the great things that customers are looking for is they want that cloudlike operating model. They want to pay for that technology as they utilize it. And they don't want to be locked in to having to purchase a large amount of data if potentially they're not going to use it. So Flex On Demand gives them that flexibility. They could sign up for 50% of a storage arrays capacity and only pay for usage above and beyond that 50%. So it offers customers a lot of choice and a lot of ability to get the technology they want and be a very flexible utilization method as they go forward. >> So, I don't think a lot of people realize that you said very low or no minimum commitments. And so maybe you could explain that a little bit and who owns the asset? >> When we talk about Flex on Demand it is still owned by Dell. So Dell owns that asset and the customer can commit. And we think we have the broadest range of commitment levels in the industry. So if you think about a Flex on Demand type offering and let's say you want to purchase a storage array you can sign up for a 50% minimum commitment. So again, you've got flexibility on the term. So you can go one to five years you can sign up for 50% commitment. So you're going to get a bill for 50% of that storage usage every month but you're not going to get a bill for anything more unless you utilize it. Now, let's say one month you go to 60%, right? So you're going to pay that extra 10% only when you use it. If you go back down to 50% the following month, you don't pay. And let me point something out on this because I think this is where we differ from a lot of our competition. The rate you pay is the same. So it's the same for the minimum commitment level of 50% as it is for the incremental 10% or 20% that you use above that. Some of our competitors have surge pricing. So basically once you go above your commitment you're paying a premium. We don't do that. We've heard from customers. They don't like that. They want it simple. They want to pay one rate per gigabyte throughout the life of that contract. And so we do that. Another unique feature which we kind of just implemented recently is that the max that you can pay is 85% on that storage usage. So if you sign up for a 50% minimum commitment and let's say you use 90% of it so you've got a pretty significant increase off your minimum. We will only charge you up to 85%. And that's a new feature that we added to all our Flex on Demand products recently for future customers as well as previous customer. So you've actually gone back to all our current customers and said, this applies to you even though that wasn't part of the original offering we're going to cap you at that 85% level. And the reason we did that is because a lot of customers love, pay for things as they use them. They're a little uncomfortable on uncertainty of maybe paying too much, right? So we put this in to help protect customers that they wouldn't have to worry about paying more than they expected to. So we think that's a pretty cool feature of what we offer. >> Yeah. So to summarize the features, I got the portfolio, I got the whole portfolio I have access to, I get the flexibility that you just described in great detail and then pricing transparency or certainty. And then the other piece of that is the value the 85% cap. So that's pretty cool. >> Yeah. >> Okay. So you've been doing this for a while. You have data and experience with real customers, with different types of customs solutions. Maybe you could share some of the business impacts and benefits that customers have seen. >> Yeah. Well, let me give you example. So data center utility like we had a large multinational manufacturer who again as I mentioned earlier they wanted to get out of the data center environment. They don't want to manage that anymore. They had a complex data center. It was managed with about 50% of their own internal IT department and 50% with a third-party service provider. They had multiple hardware vendors, multiple third parties providing services. It was very very complex. So they came to Dell Technologies. We took that data center put it into a data center and utility contract. And we took over management of the data center. So it freed up that 50% of their own IT staff to work on other things. It provided value to the business. And then we were able to take that consolidate vendors make it a lot simpler and improve the efficiency of the data center. And that's an important thing. So it's not just about how you pay for it, that you pay for it in a variable manner. It's how efficient can you make that data center? And no one knows Dell Technologies assets and hardware better than us, right? So we were able to create tremendous value by utilizing those assets more efficiently. So they were getting more productivity out of the underlying IT assets. We simplified it for them. And we were able to take their team out of that day-to-day management which is what they were looking for. So there's a great example of a win-win on both sides. And what we've found with these customers is once they go to this kind of model, they stay with it. They like it. And we actually ended up expanding our relationship with these customers. So it's good for us in a lot of ways. And one of the things we didn't talk about earlier is another benefit that maybe isn't so obvious, particularly when you look at a Flex on Demand type product. So let's think about Flex on Demand. One of the things customers are struggling with is how to predict how much data storage they're going to need in the future. There's this huge data explosion going on in the world. We've talked about that many times. And CIO's often have trouble trying to predict how much capacity they're going to need in the future, right? They don't know exactly where it's going to go. And so one of the struggles that they have is when they have a need for that data it takes time to get it available. So if you think about a CIO that all of a sudden has additional capacity they need to add to their infrastructure, it could take 90 days to get that out on the floor. They've got to go through their internal requisition process. They've got to select a vendor, they've got to acquire the hardware to get it all set up. This all takes time. 90 days later is too late. One of the things that Flex on Demand offers is that you're able to get that capacity on the floor and at the push of the button you can have it up and running. So you're not paying for it until you use it but once you do need it you can have it available really quickly. And that's one of the benefits that maybe people don't expect when they use this Flex on Demand product but provides tremendous value for customers. So we've seen that kind of time and time again with Flex on Demand we had a large pharmaceutical customer who went to one of these, had a mandate that they wanted to go to a cloud operating model for all their IT purchases. So they wanted to free up cash flow that was kind of a directive from the top, free up cashflow, let's get out of the CapEx business and Flex on Demand was a perfect answer to that because it freed up the cashflow. They paid for the technology over time and they were able to have this capacity available whenever they needed it. So we've seen that as a tremendous benefit of the custom Flex on Demand model. >> I've done a lot of TCO studies Bill and I'll tell you that the upfront planning, the capacity planning, the asset management, the procurement, these are a big chunk of the labor cost associated with total costs. Okay. So we've got the turnkey with the three components. We've got the custom with the two components. There was a fifth bucket in my notes here which is the partners in the channel. And I'm really interested in how the channel is transforming, no longer can you just be a box seller in the channel. Those days are gone. Made a lot of money doing that, good deal. But, now you got to add value. The cloud has really changed everything there. And of course it's all about the margin and profitability. So talk about the channel. You've always had relationships and how APEX fits with channel partners. >> Yeah, well look Dave, we've had great experience working with our partners. I mean, partners are hearing the same thing from customers that were here, they want a cloud-based type operating model. They want to pay for their technology as they use it. So partners are looking to provide the same value to customers. And we found that working with partners expands our reach tremendously and they have a lot of expertise. So the APEX custom solutions are designed to work with partners. Partners can either sell those for themselves so they can sort of resell our solution to them or they can just refer the business to us. And they're going to get a 20% uplift on the committed contract value for those contracts. So this is really financially attractive to our channel partners. And it allows us to work with those partners to get to more customers, right? And as I mentioned earlier these custom solutions can include services from the partners so we can provide the hardware piece to them. They can add on their services on top of that and they can be the primary relationship with a customer or again they can refer it over to us. So we found that to be a really good value proposition for partners. And we think they're pretty happy about it. I mean, we have an example, RelateCare as a company that supports healthcare organizations around the world. So helping with patient communication appointment scheduling tele-health which is a really big area right now as you know with the pandemic still going across the world this is an area for medics growth. So RelateCare was working with one of our partners, Arc Fire and they needed more flexibility in the data center. And so these APEX Flex on Demand was a perfect solution for that. It allowed them to deliver a secure flexible data center and work with their partner to really improve the service level that was occurring in that relationship. And if you think about it, one of the things we didn't mention is particularly for a lot of healthcare companies and companies and customers who have a high sensitivity around data security and where that data resides. One of the advantages of on-prem solutions like APEX Flex on Demand or data center utility is know where your data is. The public cloud can move the data around often without you knowing about it. And so that security of that assurance that you know exactly where your data is, is really important to a lot of our customers. So its kind of another feature that has been official for customers. And again, we're seeing partners adopt this more and more. And I think over time that is going to continue to grow. >> Yeah. So 20 points on the uplift plus additional services that I can bring in because they have a tighter relationship, in this model, right? The renewal starts when you sign the contract. So it's a much, much deeper relationship. Can the partners, can they white label the service? Is it co-branded? Is it all Dell branded? >> Yeah. Well, they have the choice. I mean, the partner can financially take on the billing and relationship primarily if that's what they would like to do. And again, so that's one of the offerings or they can refer it to us. Many partners they don't have the back end or the infrastructure to do all that billing and collecting themselves. So they prefer just to refer it to us. Another part is at large they do have those capabilities and they want to take on the primary relationships. So we can work with them both ways and we have worked with them both ways. >> Nice. We're out of time, Bill, but give us the bottom line. You've touched on some of this but why APEX over the competition? >> Yeah. Well, look, I think it goes back. The first thing is Dell Technologies, right? Dell Technologies has the broadest selection of products and services means. So you combine that with APEX solutions you've got a win-win, it's unbeatable in my opinion. We also I think have the best range of flexibility in those payments solutions. So you can go from a minimum commitment of 40% all the way up to 85%, you can go one to five years, no surcharges, right? The rate is the rate. The rate goes from the minimum all the way to the maximum. We have the storage cap that I talked about, HCI cap at 85%. So you're going to be capped. So you don't have unexpected costs that you didn't forecast and you can flex up and down, right? So you flex up, you could flex down, some of our competition once flex up you can't flex back down. And that's a real negative in my opinion. And we've got 15 years of experience of doing this. So that's really important. We work with a lot of customers. We've learned a lot during those journeys and we think we're the best equipped to provide you with consumption solutions and as a service solutions that really work with customers. >> Financial flexibility, asset management, the really key part of IT that we don't spend enough time talking about. Bill, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and sharing your insights. >> Thanks, Dave. Really glad to be here. Thank you. >> All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE's continuous coverage of Dell Tech World 2021 the virtual edition. We'll be right back right after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Advertiser: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi, everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to our ongoing CXO series, Charlie Giancarlo season, chief executive officer of Pure Storage. Charlie, always a pleasure. Thanks so much for taking the time. >> Thanks, Dave. And like you said, always a pleasure, thank you. >> Well, I got to start asking you, the last time we talked, you were recovering from COVID. How are you doing? >> Yeah, I'm doing great actually. I seem to have fully recovered. I've been on 17 mile hikes at 10,000 feet. I've been doing a lot of biking, so it looks like other than my wife telling me that maybe I'm not all there, but she did that before COVID. So I'm used to it. >> Well, that's awesome to hear. Well, of course, just yesterday, you guys announced your quarter. I want to start there. You beat expectations, although revenue growth was a little less robust than we're used to from Pure, but you clearly had some activity regarding COVID in the US. International, very strong, but again, we'll talk about this US customers kind of reevaluating was your other key point. I got a lot of takeaways from the call that I want to ask you about. But the big thing was you had set a very confident tone on the Earnings Call. So I kind of want to start there. Well, give us your summary. >> Yeah, no, thank you for that. So first of all, we feel like we're operating really with all of our cylinders going. We have operational discipline. We've been adding to our R&D capabilities. We've hired people this year. and we showed a profit this quarter. So we're operating, I think very well. We've introduced a boatload of new products continuously over the last couple of quarters, including, FlashArray//C, the first and only all-flash product that competes at second Tier disc levels. We introduced our file services on FlashArray//C, which really allows us to go into the general purpose of file market. And we picked up a huge amount of share as you well know in Q1. We believe we're going to pick up significant share in Q2 as well, well above our competitors. So we feel like given everything we can control, we're doing very well. As you said, in Q2, what we saw was Europe, which came out of the crisis for the most part recover very, very nicely. The US, that's still in the crisis. Of course, we're seeing some slowness and especially among what we call the mid tier or the commercial market. They've been hurt very badly by the lockdown in the economy. And they have our sympathies, but we definitely saw some slow down there. >> Yeah, so I want to talk about the market share and maybe unpack some of that data. I mean, you guys gave a cautious outlook. It kind of gave no formal guidance, but you did informally guide flat, so you kind of gave some visibility there. So actually I appreciated it. I think some of the analysts were a little bit concerned there, but I think that's prudent. And they're really the expectations are a function of your expectations around the COVID recovery. I think you mentioned your account almost state by state and very clearly the international where you've seen comebacks have been very, very strong. >> Right, so I think our customers' data continues to grow if anything, growing faster under a lockdown environment and the move to more digital engagement with everyone, their customers, their employees, et cetera. So digital continues to grow, which generally creates more demand. However, of course, as you know, in storage customers generally always have a buffer. And what we saw on Q2 was customers starting to reconsider how they're going to spend their IT budget. And whenever you have a reconsideration, you have a slowdown. And that's what we experienced. And especially in the US where the effects of the pandemic, of the economy have been much more severe than in other parts of the world. >> Yeah, so I want to talk about some data. I often, as you know, like to share some data from our partner ETR every quarter we do the survey. So guys bring up that chart. And what it shows here, let's just set it up for the audience and Charlie for you as well. That this is essentially net score, which is a measure of spending velocity for the major primary guys. So we show Pure at the top in orange, that's just a coincidence guys. And then HPE, NetApp, Dell, and IBM. And you can see the net score, and then I've super imposed there in that table, in the upper left. And you can see Pure Storage is really the only one of these majors in the green. Everybody else is in the red, which is either the lower or high teens. And you can see a little bit of a COVID impact, last quarter, but holding strong at about a 40% net score where everybody else is, as I say, in the mid teens. And so that's a real positive. I point out, this is a forward looking survey. So we're asking people, what are you planning on spending in the second half relative to what you spent in the first half. And again, we see Pure with consistent momentum. I'll add, just if you looked at the past quarter, you guys announced plus 2% growth. IBM was plus 3% growth and we know why, they have the mainframe tailwind. HPE played a little hide, the growth ball. I don't know Charlie, how closely you looked at it, but they said 4% growth sequentially. Now, the last quarter they were down 16%. The same quarter last year, they were flat. So it looks to me like they were down this quarter. So we appreciate when you have clear guidance. >> Their storage, by the way, was down 10% year over year. >> Yeah, okay, great, thank you. I didn't pick up on that. And so, yeah, that seemed like that to me. And then NetApp happens tonight and we get Dell tomorrow. But so you were saying that you gained share, what gives you that confidence? >> Well, several, you mean for Q2? We know we gained Q1, right? We were 15 points above the industry average and maybe about 20 points ahead of our competitors. We saw a similar momentum from our partner. Remember, we're 100% partner fulfilled, right? And so in conversations with our partners, we have a general sense of how we're doing vis-a-vis competitive environments. We also know that our win rates have held very nicely and in quarters, almost every quarter, we're used to about a 20% per annum higher growth rate than our competitors. So when all of our metrics, that is our relative metrics. Things like win rates and so forth continue unabated, we generally expect to have the same outcome. >> Great, and then so let me go through some of the takeaways that I have from the quarter. I'll just run through them and we can go wherever you like. But the COVID snapback obviously is a key indicator. We saw that in international versus the US. >> Charlie: Right. >> New opportunities for growth. I want to talk about that, at some length the FlashArray//C object, the Cohesity pieces and other TAM expansion. The pipeline is very encouraging, but there's some uncertainty leading to your tepid guidance. Very strong, gross margins as usual. The subscription model is growing nicely. I want to hit on that. And the RPO, the remaining performance obligations grew to almost a billion dollars. That's a big number. New logo, solid at 20%. No real change in the competitive, but you called out, you'll see more PowerMax than PowerStore. That was really interesting. You're still hiring pretty aggressively, last quarter. And your technology investments continue. And I'll throw in the seven nines, which I think is another industry first, but where do you want to go there? >> Yeah, well, seven nines is a reliability figure for those of your audience that doesn't know. It relates to how much uptime or availability a product has or in our case, fleet of products. We have tens of thousands of arrays in the field. And last quarter we achieved what's called seven nines, which is the equivalent across the fleet of only three seconds of downtime per array per year. Which is, most other vendors had struggled to stay to five nines. And that's typically without even counting what they call scheduled downtime for upgrades. We don't even count that. We count all downtime of any type. So we're clearly, I think with no doubt, we're the most reliable product on the these days. >> So I want to come back to the TAM discussion because you, I inferred many opportunities for you guys to continue to grow. I mean, it's Flash, it's still about flash. flash is gaining share relative to spinning disk and relative to hybrid, you guys made that point a lot. FlashArray//C, you sound pretty happy with that, again, going after hybrid. And then this notion of bringing file services and object that unify play. kind of the man made great strides years ago with that capability. And then the data protection piece, the recovery with Cohesity, the faster recovery. That's another TAM expansion. So really, I identified four points of potential growth area for you over the next several years. I wonder if you could talk about that? >> Absolutely, we do feel very positive about all these areas. These areas open up a huge amount of the TAM that we didn't play in before. So FlashArray//C for example, as you say, flash was always a primary workload environment for flash 'cause it was very expensive compared to disc. Higher performance, better ecological footprint, denser, faster, cheaper, are more expensive though. So it only went after primary workload, but the vast majority of data storage is secondary workload. Things that don't require the high performance and therefore customers want it less expensive. And of course there were even more bits there. But FlashArray//C now competes very well with low cost disc, which is amazing. And of course it's 10 times lower footprint and 10 times more reliable. So this is the first and literally today only product that has all-flash in that secondary workload market. So just opens up a huge amount for us. And then, yes, I love talking about data protection for the following reason, customers actually don't want to do a backup, right? If you think about it, what they really want is recovery. Backup is what you have to do in order to get recovery. And these backup systems have been very good at backup, but usually can take 24 or 48 or even more hours to be able to recover from a failure. And now with ransomware, you don't want your website to be down for days before it comes back up. You don't want your traders not trading for days. It costs a lot of money. And with what we call rapid recovery and now flash recover, we can have companies come back within an hour or two at most, with a rapid recovery solution. And so the integrated solution that we've put together with Cohesity, allows customers to very quickly get up and running with an anti ransomware solution that allows them to get back up and operating in no time at all. >> Well, was interesting to see you choosing the partner route. I mean, you could have, if you remember EMC in the day. They bought in, data protection and it had actually worked out pretty well for them. You look at a company like NetApp, they've chosen not to vertically integrate with backup. You're choosing the same path. What's the thinking there? Stick to your knitting and partner up and add value where you can? >> Yeah, we have strong partnerships actually with all of the data backup players, Veritas Veeam, with Rubrik and others. In many cases, customers have already made their decision who their backup player is. Also, backup is actually a very relatively fragmented market. There's backup for different types of applications and different vendors have strengths and weaknesses in each one of those. And so our partnership across the backup board is very important to us. We did see however customers wanting an integrated solution, which we have, let's say initiated with Cohesity. But we believe it's the first of what will be multiple pure validated designs. Not all of which will be OEM, but all of which will be available as integrated systems in the market, through our channel partners. And so you can expect to see more of these as we go forward. >> So kind of the PVDs okay. I want to ask you about your subscription model. I mean, it's growing very nicely. Are there nuances there just in terms of understanding the income statement ie, product revenue was down, subscriptions growing. Are you going through that transition and having to sort of educate people on the impact on the income statement? You didn't make a big deal out of that on the Earnings Call and I thought, well, maybe I'm overstating that, but I wonder if you could talk about that dynamic? >> No, no, you're absolutely correct. And there is some of that going on on the earning statement. The bigger part, though, of let's say the lower growth this quarter was due, and the forecast was due to the pandemic. No doubt and especially in the US, especially hard hit in the US. But simultaneously we are going through the transition that many companies have had to go through in the past where a larger proportion over time of our sales are going to be what we call Pure as-a-Service and our unified subscription. So moving to subscription from CapEx. And whenever you do that, it takes a while, even though your sales, as in bookings, can stay in the growth path. The revenue takes a while to catch up as your subscription bookings grow. So there is some of that going on on our P and L as well. >> Yeah, well, it's the nirvana to the extent you can get that model. And of course your RPO is a good indication of you got a nice backlog that's yielding, that's certainty in revenue. >> That's correct. And the RPO is very nice and it reflects the fact that we have multi-year contracts going in with customers who are choosing Pure as-a-Service in Evergreen. And of course, the billing only reflects what we've actually built them for. >> I was struck by your comments regarding your main competitor, which is Dell, Dell EMC. Now, of course, in the early days of Pure, I've always said you guys drove a truck through the old VNX and symmetrics base. You said you're seeing PowerMax more than you're seeing PowerStore. That was interesting and somewhat surprising to me. >> Yeah, well, a standard play of Dell is to offer VMAX because it's less expensive versus our FlashArray. And then when the customer clearly says, well, it's just not performance enough or it just can't do the work that we need, then they'll offer PowerMax at a supposedly a deep discount to be able to compete with a FlashArray. So that's been a favorite tactic of theirs for quite some time. We maintain our win rates against that. PowerStore on the other hand, remember, it's a forklift upgrade with a new product on four different Dell existing products, right? And two things. One, is customers are just reluctant right now to try new things, right? They don't have the time to be able to test them properly. But I also think there's some reluctance even on Dell's part to put those properties up for grabs right now, when customers are more risk adverse. So, we continue, as I said, we are not seeing it as much as we had thought we might going into this. >> Yeah, we'll definitely find out more tomorrow. And I would expect that, to the extent that you're having more and more success in file, you're going to obviously run into NetApp more. >> Yeah, and that's what we're expecting. The file services on FlashArray//C really allow us to start to penetrate the general purpose file market. Clearly not on the very small, and we're not going after the very small market. We're going after the data center file share market on this and the Tier 2 workloads. >> Well, what's the early returns there? I mean, you saw the NetApp did the SolidFire acquisition to shore up NetApp kind of missed flash, and then bought SolidFire but that is obviously a good play. Do you feel like it's a tougher road than perhaps the old EMC install base or what are you seeing early on? >> Well, there's a lot of maturity obviously in files. And it will take us a while to be able to get up to full levels of maturity in files. But what customers love about us is our simplicity. And our file services on FlashArray is just as simple as our block services on FlashArray. And I think what customers are going to find is a very performant product that requires very little maintenance, very little tuning to meet their needs. And I think they're just going to appreciate the fact that it's a true fully capable block product with a fully capable set of file services. And that they'll be able to consolidate more and more of their use cases onto smaller and smaller footprint. So I think that's what they're going to appreciate about what we do. >> That's ironic, outsimplifying NetApp, which of course made its name, taken on guys like ASPEX for those of you remember that or even even the early day. So that's good. And I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you about cloud. Thinking on cloud, I know it's early days and I know most of your subscriptions of course are still with on-prem, but you made an interesting announcement last year to accelerate with Cloud Block Store running on AWS. How's the uptake been there? What can you tell us about that? >> Yeah, we're seeing a good uptake there. I'd say more of it is in the DevOps environment than in the actual NDR, disaster recovery, more than it is in transition of primary workloads into the cloud. And we're just seeing a bit less of that than one would expect given all the press around it. I don't think it's us. I think customers are just taking a while. They're focusing their new activities in the cloud and much less about transitioning existing environments. But we are seeing work done there. What we are seeing is a huge uptake in what we call our unified subscription, which is a Pure as-a-Service on-prem where we deliver to our customers, basically cloud, the equivalent from their point of view of cloud storage on-prem, where we manage the entire environment plus the unified subscription is that plus Cloud Block Store. So regardless of where our customers want to place their data, either on-prem or in the cloud, it's the same price and the same contract, same interface, same management to them. So we've seen a huge, I mean, literally an incredible spike in uptake in that. >> Great, thank you for that. And then I got to end with, I asked you last time about networking. You have a, a very wide observation space and a lot of expertise in a lot of different areas. So I want to ask you about, we've seen the spate of IPOs this week. Snowflake came , Palantir, UniFi, JFrog, number of others. Very interesting to see that in the Valley, you're in the Valley. Of course you shot in the Valley like everybody else these days, but what do you make of that? Is it kind of everybody trying to get in before the election? Or is it just a really good time? What's your take on that? >> I think a lot of it is getting in before the election, but a lot of stock market movements as you well know, has to do with cash flows more than it has to do with the prospects of individual companies and just given the amount of stimulus that's taking place, not just in US but worldwide. There's a lot of money floating around, which is boiling stock market prices. And so it's a great, an old colleague of mine had a saying, "When Monday's on sale, take it." And that seems to be the case right now, at least as far as the stock market is concerned. And I've stood there for a good time for IPOs. >> Well, the Palantir IPO took a swipe at Silicon Valley broadly, really targeting, I think Facebook and Google. It really doesn't have anything to do with your business, but I mean, I think as an executive in Silicon Valley, you see the innovation and the software development that's going into so many good things. I was struck by that though. I thought it was a little bit of a cheap shot at Silicon Valley. It really was aimed at Google and Facebook because there's so many companies from you guys, Cisco, Palo Alto Networks, it'll work on and on and on. They are just doing some great software work. And we're seeing that with COVID, where would we be without Big Tech? >> Well, thank you, Dave. I think the press tends to focus on the consumer companies. And we all have maybe our own individual opinions about the way they operate, but you're correct. I mean, I think the good foundational work that many companies in Silicon Valley are doing to make our lives easier every day, just continues to really impress. >> Well, Charles Giancarlo it's always a pleasure. Thanks so much. You're generous with your time. I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, Dave. Again, as you said, always a pleasure to speak with you and look forward to doing it next quarter. >> All right, us as well. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time, we're out. (bright upbeat music)

(jazzy music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello, and welcome to theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, California for another CUBE conversation, where we go in depth with thought leaders driving innovation across the tech industry. I'm your host, Peter Burris. It's going to be a multi-cloud world. It's going to be a multi-cloud world because enterprises are so diverse, have so many data requirements and application needs that it's going to be serviced by a panoply of players, from public cloud to private cloud and SaaS companies. That begs the question, if data is the centerpiece of a digital strategy, how do we assure that we remain in control of our data even as we exploit this marvelous array of services from a lot of different public and private cloud providers and technology companies? So the question, then, is data sovereignty. How do we stay in control of our data? To have that conversation, we're joined by Erik Kaulberg, who's a vice president at Infinidat. Erik, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thanks, nice to be here. >> So before we get into this, what's a quick update on Infinidat? >> Well, we just crossed the 5.4 exabyte milestone deployed around the world, and for perspective, a lot of people don't appreciate the scale at which Infinidat operates. That's about five and a half Dropboxes worth of content on our systems and on our cloud services deployed around the world today. So it's an exciting time. It's great being able to deliver these kinds of transformations at large enterprises all over the place. Business has been ramping wonderfully, and the other elements of our product portfolio that we announced earlier in the year are really coming to bear for us. >> Well, let's talk about some of those product, or some of those announcements in the product portfolio, because you have traditionally been more of an interestingly and importantly architected box company, but now you're looking at becoming more of a full player, a primary citizen in the cloud world. How has that been going? >> It's been great. So we announced our Elastic Data Fabric program, which is really our vision for how enterprises should deal with data in a multi-cloud world, in May, and that unified several different product silos within our company. You had InfiniBox on the primary storage appliance platform standpoint. You have Neutrix Cloud on the primary storage for public clouds. You have InfiniGuard for the secondary storage environments, and now we've been able to articulate this vision of enterprises should be able to access the data services that they want at scale and consume them in however way they prefer, whether that be on a private cloud environment with an appliance or whether that be in an environment where they're accessing the same data from multiple public clouds. >> So they should be able to get the cloud experience without compromising on the quality and the characteristics of the data service. >> Exactly. And fundamentally, since we deliver our value in the form of software, the customer shouldn't have to really care on what infrastructure it's running. So Elastic Data Fabric really broadens that message so that customers can understand, yes, they can get all the value of Infinidat wherever they'd prefer it. >> Okay, so let's dig into this. So the basic problem that companies face, to kind of lay this up front, the basic problems that companies face is they want to be able to tap into this incredible array of services that you can get out of the cloud, but they don't necessarily want to force their data into a particular cloud vendor or particular cloud silo. So they want the services, but they want to retain control over their data and their data destiny. How do you, in your conversations with customers, how do you see your customers articulating that tension? >> I think when I deal with the typical CIO, and I was in a couple of these conversations literally yesterday, it all comes back to the fundamental idea of do you want to pledge allegiance to a single public cloud provider forever? If the answer to that is no or if there's any hesitation in that answer, then you need to be considering services that go beyond the walled gardens of individual public clouds. And so that's where services like our Neutrix Cloud service can allow customers to keep control, keep sovereignty over their data in order to make the right decisions about where the compute should reside across whichever public cloud might offer the best combination of capabilities for a given workload. >> So it has been historically a quid pro quo where, give me your data, says the public cloud provider, and then I'll make available this range of services to you. And enterprises are saying, well, I want to get access to the services without giving you my data. How are companies generally going to solve this? Because it's not going to be by not working with public cloud or cloud companies, and it's not going to be by wanting to think too hard about which cloud companies to work with for which types of workloads. So what is the solution that folks have to start considering? Not just product level, but just generally speaking. >> Speaking broadly, I would say that there's no single answer for every company, but most large enterprises are going to want some sort of solution that allows their data to transcend the boundaries of public clouds. And there's a couple of different approaches to doing that. Some approaches just take software and then knit together multiple data silos across clouds, but you still have the data physically reside in different cloud environments, and then there are some approaches where they abstract away the data, where the data's physically stored, so that it can be accessed by multiple public clouds. And I think some mix of those approaches, depending on the scale of the company, is probably going to be one element of the solution. Now, data and how you treat the locations of data isn't the whole solution to the problem. There's many things to consider about your application state, about the security, about all that stuff, but-- >> Intellectual property, compliance, you name it. >> Absolutely. But if you don't get the data problem figured out, then everything else becomes a whole lot more complicated and a whole lot more expensive. >> So if we think about that notion of getting the data problem right, that should, we should start thinking in terms of what services does this data with these characteristics, by workload, location, intellectual property controls, whatever else they might be, what service does that data require? Today, the range of services that are available on more traditional approaches to thinking about storage are a little bit more mature. They're a little bit more, the options are a little bit greater, and the performance is often a lot better than you get out of the public cloud. Would you agree with that and can you give us some examples? >> Of course, yeah. And I think that in general, the public cloud providers have a different design point from traditional enterprise environments. You prioritize scale over resilience, for example. And specific features that we see come up a lot in our conversations with large enterprises are snapshots, replication with on-prem environments, and the ability to compress or reduce data as necessary depending on the workload requirements. There's a bunch of other things that get rolled into all of that. >> But those are three big ones. >> But those are big ones, absolutely. >> So how are enterprises thinking about being able to access all that's available in the cloud while also getting access to the data services they need for their data? >> Well, in the early days of public cloud deployments, we saw a lot of people either compromising on the data services and rearchitecting their applications accordingly or choosing to bring in more expensive layers to put on top of the standard hyperscale public cloud storage services and try and amalgamate them into a better solution. And of course we think that those are kind of suboptimal approaches, but if you have the engineering resources to invest or if you're really viewing that as something you can differentiate your business on, you want to make yourself a good storage provider, then by all means have at it. We think most enterprises don't want to go down that path. >> So what's your approach? How does Infinidat and your company provide that capability for customers? >> Well, step one is recognizing that we have a robust data services platform already out there. It's software, and we happen to package it in an appliance format for large enterprises today. That's that 5.4 exabytes, that's mostly the InfiniBox product, which is that software in an appliance. And so we've proven our core capabilities on the InfiniBox platform, and then about two and a half years ago now, we launched a service called Neutrix Cloud. And Neutrix Cloud takes that robust set of capabilities, that set of expectations that enterprises have around how they're going to handle multi-petabyte datasets, and delivers all those software-driven values as a public cloud service. So you can subscribe to the value of Infinidat without having any boxes involved or anything like that. And then you can use it for two things, basically. One is general purpose public cloud storage. So a better alternative or a more enterprise-grad alternative to things like AWS, EBS, or EFS. And another use case that is surprisingly popular for us is customers coming from on-prem environments and using the Neutrix Cloud service as just a replication target to get started. Kind of a bridge to the cloud approach. So we can support any combination of those types of scenarios, and then it gets most interesting when you combine them and add the multi-cloud piece, because then you're really seeing the benefits of eliminating the data silos in each individual public cloud when you can have, say, a file system that can be simultaneously mounted and used by applications in AWS, Azure, and GCP. >> Well, that's where, I would've thought that that would've been a third use case, right? >> Yeah. >> Is that multi-cloud and being able to mount the data wherever it's required is also obviously a very rich and important use case that's not generally available from most suppliers of data-oriented services. So where do you think this goes? Give us a kind of a visibility in where your customers are pointing as they think about incorporating and utilizing more fully this flexibility and new data services, the ability to extend and enhance the data services they get from traditional public cloud players. >> I think it's still early innings in general for the use of enterprise-grade public cloud services. I think NetApp actually just recently said that they're at $74 million annual run rate for their entire cloud data services business. So we have yet to see the full potential in general through the entire market of those capabilities in public clouds. But I think that in the long term, we get to this world where cloud compute providers can compete, truly have to compete for enterprise workloads, where you essentially have a marketplace where the customer gets to say, I have a workload. I need X cores. I need X capabilities. The data's right here in Neutrix or in something like Neutrix. And what will you offer me to run this workload for 35 minutes in Amazon? Same thing to Azure, same thing to GCP. I think that kind of competitive marketplace for public cloud compute is the natural endpoint for a disaggregated storage approach like ours, and that's what frankly gets some of our investors very excited about Infinidat, as well, because we're really the only ones who are making a strong investment in a multi-cloud piece first and foremost. >> So the ability to have greater control over your data means you can apply it in a market competitive way to whatever compute resource you want to utilize. >> Exactly. Spot instance pricing, for example, is only the beginning, because, I assume you're familiar with this, you can basically get Amazon to give you a discounted rate on a block of compute resources, similar to the other public clouds. But if your data happens to be in Amazon but Azure's giving you a lower spot instance rate, you're kind of SOL or you're going to pay egress fees and stuff like that. And I think that just disaggregating the data makes it a more competitive marketplace and better for customers. I think there's even more improvements to be had as the granularity of spot instance pricing becomes higher and higher so that customers can really pick with maximum economic efficiency where they want a workload to go for how long and ultimately drive that value back into the return that IT delivers to the business. >> So, Erik, you mentioned there's this enormous amount of data that's now running on Infinidat's platforms. Can you give us any insight into the patterns, particular industries, size of companies, workloads, that are being featured, or is it just general purpose? >> It's always a tough question for us because it is truly a horizontal platform. The one unifying characteristic of pretty much every Infinidat user is scale. If you're in the petabyte arena, then we're talking. If you're not in the petabyte arena, then you're probably talking to one of the upstart vendors in our space. It's business-critical workloads. It's enterprise-grade, whether you talk about enterprise-grade in the sense of replacing VMAX-type solutions or whether you talk about enterprise-grade in terms of modernizing cloud environments like what I've just described. It's all about scale, enterprise-grade capabilities. >> Erik Kaulberg, Infinidat, thanks again for being on theCUBE. >> Thanks. >> And once again, I want to thank you for joining us for another CUBE conversation. I'm Peter Burris. See you next time. (jazzy music)

>> Narrator: Live, from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, It's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem partners. >> And, welcome back here on theCUBE, we're at the Moscone Center here at downtown San Francisco. Gorgeous day outside, by the way. Picture perfect day. Chamber of Commerce weather, but a lot of big news happening inside here for VMworld 2019, along with John Troyer. I'm John Walls, we're joined by Pierluca Chiodelli, who's the Vice President of Product Management at Dell EMC. And, Pierluca, good to see you, Sir. >> Thank you, it's awesome to be here. >> Great, thanks for being here. And Muneyb Minhazuddin, whose the VP of solutions product marketing at VMware. And Muneyb, I know you're right just hot off the presentation stage. >> Yes I am. >> Catch your breath, it's all going to be fine. How was your audience? I'm sure standing remotely. >> Yeah, it was thirteen hundred plus >> Excellent, yeah. Been a big week, already. >> Of course it has, yeah. >> For you and your team. So, first off, let me just, let's step back, talk about the vibe of the show, the theme of the show we saw Pat on the stage. >> Muneyb: Perfect. >> About an hour and a half this morning, just your thoughts about day one and the big announcements that VMware's been making. >> It's been a great week, and it's actually been a great approaching week. As you know, on Thursday we announced intent and acquire both Pivotal and Carbon Black for close to about $5,000,000,000. So, that's, kind of a big announcement by itself, and then how do you kind of bring in and keep day one where you're not too focused on those two, but get the narrative of VMworld across. And really, you know, where we have, you know, CUBE has been with us on this journey for a long time. >> Right. >> We've seen that data center shift into kind of two tangents. One is, you know, workloads into data center break out into public clouds. Second, rerouting into cloud native applications. And, if you've seen our strategy wall when that was kind of the key messages. Hey, we're embracing both the modern app development, the focus on Kubernetes and Tanzoo announcement, was all about to say, "VMware platforms ready "for the breakout of both tangents." First, Cloud Native, we've got Kubernetes, we're bringing it right into vSphere, so that everybody in the audience can support it. Second, the breadth of our cloud everywhere, right, so, we've gone from Amazon to IBM to Google to Ajour. So, it'll give you the infrastructure for your workloads to be your choice. Modernize or migrate. (chuckles) That was a key message for us to kind of land today. For a lot of our audience who are kind of stuck in that same piece of, "What am I doing with my workloads? "What is that platform I got to build on?" And, you know, the key foundational platform being VMware Cloud Foundation. Right, that was our strategy, and I think last year we called out VMware Cloud Foundation in Pat's keynote, because I wrote it 44 times. (laughs) (group laughter) We didn't do it that many times, this time. We only said that's the platform that lands in Amazon, GCP, Ajour, IBM, and 4,200, you know, cloud provider partners. That gives you really that public cloud extension. The second part being modern apps, Kubernetes is a new, kind of, modern app development platform, vSphere is embedded into that project pacific and the whole Tanzoo announcement, right? So, really, a powerful message, what do you think? Was that successfully landed? >> I think so. John, do you feel good about what you heard today? >> Yeah, absolutely, I think VCF is super interesting. I'm also kind of, so there was an announcement today also about the Dell Technologies Cloud Validated Designs for using VCF. So, VCF the layer, which is kind of the VMware stack with some extra magic in it, that can be in, can make a private hybrid cloud, you know, everywhere. So, talk to us a little bit about Dell Technologies Cloud. As I call it, "DTC." The, it's a lot, there's a lot of stuff in that as well, so, but we have two very complicated solutions stacks that are, we're talking about now, so. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Can you talk a little bit about the validated design and what came out of that? >> Absolutely, so before we go into the validated design, I think it's very important as Muneyb said. When we think about the Dell Technology Cloud, really, it's a component of the best (murmurs) technology from our storage, networking, and also compute, but we did the VMware VCS on top. So, we work very closely with VMware, and today we are announcing today the Cloud Validated Design. As we announce at the Dell Technology World in May, we said Dell Technology Cloud is this, now we want to tell to the people, how you can easily deploy this. What is make this tangible? So, what we are doing today is rapid time to value. We did design and pretested configuration, that we put in Dell Technologies Cloud Validated Design, as we said. The other important things as Muneyb said, right? It's... And, I heard this also from theCUBE. There was a debate with Stu and other people about, what is the Cloud? How I deploy the Cloud? When we think about Dell Technologies we speak with different peoples, and two set of peoples. One is the app, right? The Cloud app, all the app people that, they want to build have all the automation, DevOps operation and all these things. But, behind those people, there's still an infrastructure. So, we are speaking on both things. So, it's very important this paradigm is there, where you can have people that they can consume the technology, and understand how to build the infrastructure to be automated, and build that automation for the Cloud. So, that's what is the Dell Technologies Font Validation Design. Right. So, one of the biggest things here that we announced, is not only the Cloud Validation Design. It's the first one but also the ability to have compute, storage and network together, and also use it primary storage as a primary citizen of the VCF. So, we should talk about that later but that's-- >> Absolutely, and I think to catch onto that, you know, talking about the applications et cetera, you know, again, in the evolution of Cloud, and we've been on the journey for 10 years is, we've had, the first few years of the Cloud journey was, felt a little like a one way street, which was, kind of meant where people were shutting down data centers and going to all these public cloud providers, was always a one-way street. Now, VMware, and if you followed us closely, we had a service call VMware, you know VCHS, which is VMware Hybrid Cloud Service before the vCloud Air and then we came out with this solution, right? The idea was, we thought there's going to be movement back-and-forth but it wasn't the case. People were seriously shutting down and going one way. As we made all these partnerships of you know, Amazon, IBM, we started seeing, and you heard stories of IHS, Freddie Mac on stage where they take six weeks to move 100 applications one way into the Cloud, customers started asking us some questions, say, 'If it's so easy to go that way, is it also that easy to bring it back?' >> Come back! >> Right? And, that kind of lead to the whole kind of Dell partnership, Dell announcement within the Dell Cloud Foundation, you know, VMware Cloud Foundation, Dell Technologies Cloud Platform to say that, "Hey, it's actually..." There's a notion of not going from hardware-specific, you know, just high-tuned for workloads to commodity hardware in the Public Cloud. There's now a need for having common hardware platform on both on-PRAM, off-PRAM because there is a need for customers to take EC2 workloads or, you know, Ajour workloads and bring it on PRAM again. That was just a notion of how fast it is. I add that point because it is so critical to know that your hardware is performing in tuned, to perform for a high business critical applications. People forgot about them the first few phases of going to the Cloud, and now as they think about a hybrid, true hybrid Cloud nature, they want optimal performance in the software layer, in the hardware layer. You know, hence our announcement of Dell Technologies Cloud, Cloud Foundation, Validated Design. It's really supporting that customer notion. >> So, it's like this optimal, or maximized flexibility is what you're trying to give people. I mean, is that-- >> Pierluca: With the Cloud simplicity, that's really the key. >> But what drives that? I know that you have, you've, you know, whether you're on-PRAM or you're off-PRAM, you're going to decide what workload's going to go on what space on, so forth, but is some of that kind of hedging bets for future workloads because you can't predict where they're going to be done or where you want them done? Or is it just providing flexibility today, and let's not worry about tomorrow? You know, it just seems like there's a lot of runway here, if you will. >> Yeah, and I think there's no right or wrong answer. One of the big workshops I do with our customers is really kind of say have you figured out what's your three to five-year application strategy? Because again, in that first phase of that fast migration to the Public Cloud, people were just like CIOs I know, it's like, I have a cloud for strategy, what does that mean? I'm shutting down all data centers, I'm going to the Cloud. Right or wrong, and that's my Cloud First strategy. Now, what they've come to realize is not all workloads work effectively in the Cloud, right? So, they kind of like, hey, put an application strategy to say what are the most optimal applications that will get the benefit of Cloud? These are like, e-commerce retail. They have to have, you know, Black Friday, expanding elasticity. If you got no slow, mundane, you know backend processes doing batch processes of massive storage of in a bank ledger in the back end, they're not going to get that elasticity. I know what it is, I know how many, you know, batch processes I got to run. So, people are getting smarter about which ones get the benefit of, you know, modern app development, or Cloud elasticity, which ones don't really need to have that. So, we've seen best practice customers actually have a very good app strategy, three to five years, and then decide how much of my app strategy is gone to the right, you know, or gone to the left, right? It's pretty much to say, "I don't have to change." 60, 70% of my Eastern European customers, their banking ledgers are still on mainframes. They're not in a hurry to go to the Cloud, whereas, you know Fintech on the East Coast is going, "I'm going to the, I'm going to the Cloud", right? So, it's really that strategy that's, they should take the app strategy and decide what the infrastructure strategy is on the top shelf. >> I think from the storage business, we see that really clear, right? The app is definitely what is moving the things, right? It's not, people they're not thinking anymore because the transformation is in the way that you consume the infrastructure. They not thinking anymore about what I put there, but is about what app I need to run, how I build my app. So, it's the environment. And, I don't think personally I meet a lot of customer. There is not one right way or wrong way, it's an end, right? As you can see also in VCF we have Vsend, VxRail and primary storage. If you look at two years ago, we will be sitting here and say, you know, "It's only this, not the other things." When we, I been in governor conference, three years ago was like, it's all Cloud. It's reality is the world, the information technology world is always the same, where is a natural genius things. Because people, they need to have the trust, right? You cannot run your entire things on something that you don't know or you didn't prove. So, what we give here today with our technology is the flexibility. You can have a Cloud approach, but use the trusted PowerMax, for example, in conjunction with Vsend, in conjunction with the Unity. So, not all these is the proof that you can preserve your investment. But, is the proof that you can start to build those up. And, if you've seen what paths say today, then those app can live everywhere. So, you can go, you can move, it's much easier to move, and you can just trust what you're doing. >> And, you hit an important point on the move part, right? And, people are so easy, like, "Hey I moved a thousand applications in six weeks "to VMC and AWS." The fundamental notion where that was not possible before, was compute, network, storage. Like, we've been doing vSphere for a long time, you know that. And, it wasn't that easy because what used to happen is people thought, "Hey, a virtualized computer, I can move it." But, what did not happen as you moved that, was your databases, you know, your storage, rules didn't follow you into the Cloud. Your networking QOS and, you know, policies, and you know, priorities didn't follow you into the Cloud. So, that was kind of like, you know, you know, I'm an Australian, so it was a half-assed solution, right? (group laughing) So bear with my language, right. It was a half-assed solution, but really what needs to happen is your compute, your network, your storage has to all work together. And, that's where Cloud Foundation was powerful. And, what we're lighting with this Validated Designs is also that capability that your computer, or storage is one unit from a app. Once you package it and make it available in all the platforms, then that migration becomes six weeks, two weeks to move that. Because once you break it apart, it's a nightmare. There's not a lot of folks who have survived database migrations. (laughs) >> I mean maybe Pierluca, you can kind of sum us up here. This conversation's been a lot around evolution, right? And, there's also been an evolution of data center design and what to expect with that, you know, just buying things off the shelf and getting a Var and, you know, the VMAX, and we've been through this whole, and now, we've talked about VxRail, which can be part of this solution. But, can you talk, just, maybe, take us in, take us out with the, or into the future with the Dell Technologies Cloud as the idea of the Validated Design, the idea of this stack from Dell Technologies in storage et cetera, what can we expect in the near future? And, how much guidance will folks get? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, without breaking any NDA things, but this is only the first step. So, the Cloud Validated Design is just the first step where we said, 'Okay, we are tasked in this, "we putting this together." We are working very closely to also solve the entire things that VCF allow you to do first day deployment, allow you to expand the infrastructure, and allow you also to do life cycle management. For example, with the VxRail we already have the life cycle management part. We are working in way to do that also for our storage and other things. So, if you think about that then it becomes as you said, all the policy we put, like with Vworld, will be strategically in that sense, the policies can be carried over. So, then you can go to VMC, you can go to another place where the software and infrastructure can move back. So, because people can do this on PRAM, a replicate exactly but not only replicate the application, but replicate the (murmurs). What do you do on the QOS, all these key things that makes people running enterprise application, right? So that's, I think, it's very exciting moment. I think it's just the starting of this dream. >> Absolutely. >> Gentlemen, thanks for the time. >> Thank you. >> And you're all, you paint a pretty exciting future, don't ya? >> I hope so. >> So, I can't wait to look forward to even VMworld 2020? >> Wait 'til Barcelona, come on? (laughs) >> All right, well I'm not making that road trip, so unfortunately-- >> We going to more out there. >> But, Barcelona's going to be good. >> Yes, thank you for having us. >> No, I'm not the best guy, so, all right good. Hey, gentlemen, thank you for the time. >> Thank you >> Thank you. >> I appreciate it very much, great discussion. >> Thank you very much. >> Thanks for having us. >> Back with more from San Francisco right after this. (techno music)

(orchestral music) >> Hi everybody my name is Dave Vallate and welcome to the special CUBE community event. You know, customers are on a digital journey. They're trying to transform themselves into a digital business, what's the difference between a business and a digital business? Well we think it's the way in which they use data. So we're here with a company Infinidat who's all about using data at multi petabyte scale. We have news, we have announcements, we're gonna drill down with subject matter experts, and we're gonna start with Brian Carmody, who's the chief technology officer of Infinidat. Brian, it's good to see you again. >> Good to see you too, Dave. And I can't believe it's been a year. >> It has been a year since we last sat down. If you had to summarize, Brian, the last twelve months in one word, what would it be? >> How about two words, "insane growth". >> Insane growth, okay. >> Yes, yes. >> Talk about that. >> Yeah so, as of this morning at least, Infinidat has a hair over 4.6 exabytes of customer data under management, which is just insanely cool and I'm not sure if I counted all of the zeroes properly, but it looks like it's around 180 trillion IOs served to happy customers so far as of this morning. >> Some mind boggling numbers, so let me ask you a question. Is this growth coming from, sort of traditional workloads? Is it new workloads, is it a mix? >> Oh, that's a great question. So you know, early in the Infinidat ramp, our early traction was with core banking, transaction processing applications. It was all about consolidation and replacing rows of venoxes with a single floor tile, Infinibox. But in the past year, virtually all of our growth has been an expansion outside of that core, and it's a movement into greenfield applications. So basically, obviously our customers are going into hardcore digital transformation, and this kind of changes the types of workloads that we're looking at, that we're supporting, but it also changes the value proposition, consolidation and stuff like that is all about the bottom line, it's about making storage more efficient, but once we get into the digital transformation, these greenfield applications which is what most of our new growth is, it's actually all about using your digital infrastructure as a revenue generating machine for opening up new markets, new opportunities, new applications et cetera. >> So when people talk about cloud native, that would be an example, using cloud native tool chains, that's what's happening on your systems. Is that correct? >> Yeah absolutely. And I can give you some examples. So I recently spent a day with a group of engineers that are working with autonomous vehicle sensor data. So this is telemetry coming off of self driving cars. And they're working with these ridiculously large, like multi petabyte data sets, and the purpose of this system is to make the vehicles more smarter, and more resistance to collisions, and ultimately more safe. A little bit before that, me and a bunch of other people from the team spent a day with another partner, they're also working with sensor data, but they're doing biometrics off of wearables. So they've perfected an algorithm that can, in real time, detect a heart attack from your pulse. And will immediately dispatch an ambulance to your geolocation of where, hopefully your arm is still connected to your body. And immediately send your electronic medical health records to that nearest hospital, and only then you get a video call on your phone from a doctor who says hey, are you sitting down? Your gonna be fine, you're having a heart attack, and an ambulance is gonna be there in two minutes. And the whole purpose of this is just to shave precious minutes off of that critical period of getting a person who's having a heart attack, to get them the medical care they need. >> Yeah, I'd say that's a non traditional workload. And the impact is saving lives, that's awesome. Now let's talk a little bit about your journey. You know, our friends at Gartner, they do these magic quadrants, a lot of people don't like 'em, I happen to think they're quite useful, as a guidepost, you guys have always been strong on the vision, and you've been executing. Where are you today in that quadrant? >> Yeah, it's an extreme honor. Gartner elevated us into the Leader's Quadrant last year, so customers take that very, very seriously. And the ability to execute access, is, what Gartner says it's, are you influencing the market? Are you causing the incumbents to change their strategies? And with our disruptive pricing, with our liability guarantees, our SLAs and stuff like that, Gartner felt like we met the criteria. And it's a huge honor, and we absolutely have our customers to thank for that because the magic quadrant isn't about what you tell Gartner, it's about what your customers tell Gartner. >> Congratulations on that, and I know the peer insight, you guys have done very well on that also. I want you to talk about the team, you're growing. To grow, you've gotta bring on good people. You've added some folks, talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah, yeah, well speaking of Gartner, we got Stan Zafos who recently joined. He's gonna be running product marketing for us. We're working with Doc, so he's a legend in the industry, so we're delighted to have him on board. Also, Steiny came over from Pure to join us as our field CTO, another legend who needs no introduction. So really, really happy about that. But also, it's not just, those are guys that customers see. But we're also experiencing this on the engineering side. So we, for example, we recently were very amused to realize that there are now more EMC fellows working at Infinidat, if you count Moshe, more EMC fellows working at Infinidat then working at Dell EMC, which is just, you know a humorous, kind of funny thing. So as the business has grown and has gotten momentum, you know, just like we're continuously amazed by the creativity and the things our customers are doing with data, every day, I am continuously amazed and humbled by the caliber of people that I get to work with every day. >> That's awesome. >> We're really, really happy about that. >> All right, well thank you for the recap of the past year, let's get into sort of some of the announcements today, and I wanna talk about the vision, so you have this Infinidat elastic data fabric, I'm interested in what that is, but I'm also, frankly even more interested in why. What's the "why" behind that? >> Sure. So elastic data fabric is Infinidat's roadmap, and our shared vision with customers for the future of enterprise storage. And the "why" is because customers demanded it. If we look at what's happening in the industry and the way that real customers are dealing with data right now, they have some of their data, and some of their workloads are running across public clouds. Some of them are in managed service providers. Some of them are SASs, and then they have on premises storage arrays, and elastic data fabric is Infinidat's solution that glues all of that together. It turns it into a single platform that spans on premises, colo, Infinidat powered managed service providers, Google, Amazon and Azure, and it glues it into a single platform for running workloads, so over the course of this of these presentations, we're gonna drill down into some of the enabling technologies that make this possible, but the net net, is that it is a brand new, next generation data plane for let's say for example, within a customer data center it allows customers to cluster multiple Infiniboxes together into what we call availability zones, and then manage that as a single entity. And that scales from a petabyte up to an exabyte of capacity per data center, and typically a customer would have one availability zone per data center and then one availability zone that can span multiple clouds, so that's the data plane. The control plane is the ability to manage all of this, no matter where the data lives, no matter where the workload is or needs to be and to manage it with a single pane of glass. And those are the kind of pieces of enabling technology that we're gonna unpack in the technical sessions. >> Two questions on that if I may. So you've got the data plane and the control plane, if I want to plug in to some other control plane, you know VMware control plane for instance, your API based architecture allows me to do that? Is that correct? >> Oh yeah, it's application aware, so for instance if you're running a VMware environment or a Kubernetes environment, it seamlessly integrates into that, and you manage it from a single API endpoint, and it's elastic, it scales up and down, and it's infinite and immortal. And probably the biggest problem that this solves for customers is it makes data migrations obsolete. It gives us the ability to decouple the data lifecycle from the hardware refresh lifecycle, which is a game changer for customers. >> I think you just answered my second question, which is what makes this unique? And that's at least one aspect of course. >> Yeah, I mean that's the, data migrations are the bane of customer's existence. And the larger the customer is, the more filer and erase sprawl they have, the more of a data migration headache they have. So when we kicked this project off five years ago, our call to action, the kernel of an idea that became elastic data fabric, was find a way to make it so that the next generation of infrastructure engineers that are graduated from college right now, will never know what a data migration is, and make it a story that old men in our industry talk about. >> Well that's huge because it is the bane of customers' existences. Very expensive, minimum $50,000 per migration, and many, many months, thanks Brian, for kicking this off, we've got a lot of ground to cover, and so we're gonna get into it now. We're gonna get into the news, we're gonna double click on some of the technologies and architectures, we're gonna hear from customers. And then it's your turn, we're gonna jump into the crowd chat and hear from you, so keep it right there. We'll be right back, right after this short break. (calming music) We're back with Doc D'Errico, the CMO of Infinidat. We're gonna talk about agility and manageability. Good to see you Doc. >> Good to see you again, Dave. >> All right, let's start in reverse order, let's start with manageability. What's your story there? >> Sure, happy to do that, you know Dave, we get great feedback from our customers on how simple and easy our systems are to manage. We have products like Infinimetrics which give them a lot of insights into the system. We have APIs, very simple and easy to use. But our customers keep asking for more insights into their environment, leveraging the analytics that we already do, now you've also heard just now about our elastic data fabric, which is our vision, Infinidat's vision for the data center, not just for today, but into the future. And our first instantiation of that vision in answering those customer responses, is a new cloud based platform, initially to provide some better monitoring and analytics, but then you're going to go into data migrations, auto provisioning, storage availability zones, and really your whole customer experience with Infinidat. >> So for my understanding, this is a SAS solution, is that correct? >> It is, it's a secure, multi site solution, so in other words, all of your Infinidat systems, wherever they are around the world, all visible through a single pane of glass. But the cloud based system gives us a lot of great power too, it gives us the agility to provide faster development and rapid enhancement based on feedback and feature requests. It also then provides you customizable dashboards in your system, dashboards that we can create very rapidly, giving you advisors and insights into a variety of different things. And we have lots of customers who are already engaged in using this. >> So I'm interested in this advisors and insights, my understanding is you guys got a data lake in the backend. You're mining that data, performing analytics on it. What kinds of benefits do customers get out of that? >> Well they can search into things, like abandoned volumes within their system. Tracking the growth of their storage environment. Configuration errors, like asymmetric ports and paths, or even just performance behaviors, like abnormal latencies or bandwidth patterns. >> So when you're saying abandoned volumes, your talking about like, reclaiming wasted space? >> Absolutely. >> To be able to reuse it. I mean people in the old days have done that because of a log structured file and they had to do it for performance, but you're doing it to give back money to the customers, is that right? >> That's exactly right, you know customers very often get requests from business units to spin off additional volume sets for whether it be a test environment or some specific application that they're running for some period of time. And then when they spin down the environment they sometimes leave the data set there thinking that they might need it again in the not so distant future, and then it sort of dies on the vine, it sits there taking up space and it's never used again, so we give them insights into when the last time things were accessed, how often it's accessed, what the IO patterns are, how many copies there might be, with snapshots and things like that. >> You mentioned strong customer feedback. Everybody says they get great customer feedback. But you've been with a lot of companies. How is this different, and what specifically is that feedback? >> Yeah, the analytics and insights are very unique, this is exactly what customers have been asking for from other vendors. Nobody does it, you know we're hearing such great stories about the impact on their costs. Like the capacity utilization, reclaiming all that abandoned capacity, being able to put new workloads and grow their environment without having to pay any additional costs is exciting to them. Identifying and correcting configuration issues, getting ahead of performance problems before they occur. Our customers are already saving time and money by leveraging this in our environment. >> All right let's pivot to agility. You've got Flex, what's your story there? What is Flex? >> Well Dave, imagine a world if you will, if you didn't have to worry about hardware anymore, right, it sounds like a science fiction story but it's not. >> Sounds like cloud. >> It sounds like cloud, and people have been migrating to the cloud and in the public cloud environment, we have a solution that we talked about a year ago called Neutrix Cloud, providing a sovereign based storage solution so that you can get the resilience and the performance of Infinibox or Infiniguard in your system today, but people want that experience on premises, so for the on premise experience, we're announcing Infinibox Flex, and Inifiniguard Flex, an environment where, you don't have to worry about the hardware, you manage your data, we'll manage the hardware, and you get to pay for what you use as you need it. You can scale up an down, we'll guarantee the availability. 100% availability, and with this environment, you'll get free hardware for life. >> Okay a lot of questions, so this sounds like your on prem cloud, right, you're bringing that cloud experience to the data, wherever it lives, you say you can scale up and scale down, how does that work, you're over provisioning, or, and you're not charging me for what I don't use, can you give us some details there? >> Well just like with an Infinibox, we're going to try to provide the customer with the Infinibox that they need not just for today, but for tomorrow. We're gonna work with the customer to look into the future and try to determine what are their performance requirements and capacity requirements over time. The customer will have the ability to manage the data configuration and the allocation of the storage and add or remove storage as they need it. As they need it, as they scale up, and we'll build them based on the daily average, just like the cloud experience, and if, as they reduce, same thing, it will adjust the daily average and build accordingly. >> Am I right, the customer will make some minimum commitment, and then if they go over that, you'll charge 'em for it, if they don't, then you won't charge 'em for it, is that correct? >> If they go over it, we'll charge them for the period they go over, if they continue to use it forever, we'll charge them that. If they reduce it back, then we'll charge them the reduced amount. >> So that gives them the flexibility there and the agility. Okay 100% availability, what's behind that? >> You know, we have a seven nines reliability metric that we manage to on a day to day basis. We have customers who have been running systems for years without any noticeable downtime, and when you have seven ninths, that's 3.16 seconds of availability per year. Right, the life cycle of an IO timeout is much longer than that, so effectively from the customer's application perspective, it's 100% available. We're willing to put our money where our mouth is. So if you experience downtime that's caused by our system at any time during that monthly period, you get the next month for free for the entire capacity. >> Okay, so that's a guarantee that you're making. >> That's a guarantee. >> Okay, read the fine print. But it sounds like the fine print is just what you said it is. >> It's pretty straight forward. >> Free hardware for life. Free, like a puppy? (laughs) >> No, free like in free, free meaning you're paying for the service, we're providing the capacity for you to put your data, and every three years, we will refresh that entire system with new hardware. And the minimum is three years, if you prefer because of your business practices to change that cycle, we'll work with you to find the time that makes the most sense. >> So I could do four years or five years if I wanted. >> You could do four years or five years. You could do three years and three months. And you'll get the latest and greatest hardware. We'll also, by the way provide the data migration services which is part of this cloud vision. So your not going to have to do any of the work. You're not going to have to pay for additional capital expense so that you have two sets of hardware on the floor for six months to a year while you do migration and work it into your schedules. We'll do that entire thing transparently for you in your environment, completely non disruptive to you. >> So you guys are all about petabyte scale. Hard enterprise problems, this isn't a mom and pop sort of small business solution, where do you see this play? Obviously service providers are gonna eat this stuff up. Give us some -- >> Yeah you know, service providers is a great opportunity for this. It's also a wonderful opportunity for Infiniverse. But any large scale environment this should be a shoo-in. And you know what, even if you're in a small scale environment that has a need that you wanna maintain that environment on premises, you're small scale, you wanna take advantage of your data more. You know you're going to grow your environment, but you're not quite sure how you're gonna do it. Or you have these sporadic workloads. Perhaps in the finance industry, you know we're in tax season right now, taxes just ended half a month ago right, there are plenty of businesses who need additional capacity for maybe four months of the year, so they can scale up for those four months and then scale back down. >> Okay, give us the bottom line on the customer impact. >> So the customer impact is really all about greater agility, the ability to provide that capacity and flexible model without big impact to their overall budget over the course of the year. >> All right Doc, thank you very much. Appreciate your time and the insight. >> It's my pleasure, Dave. >> All right, let's year from the customer, and we'll be right back. Right after this short break. >> Michael Gray is here, he's the chief technology officer of Boston based Thrive, Michael, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey, glad to be here. >> So tell us about Thrive, what are you guys all about? >> You know, Thrive started almost 20 years ago as a traditional managed service provider. But really in the past four to five years transformed into a next generation managed service provider, primarily now, we're focusing on cyber security, cloud hosting and public cloud hosting, as well as disaster recovery. To me, and this is something that's primary to Thrive's focus, is application enablement. We're an application enablement company. So if your application is best run in Azure, then we wanna put it there, a lot of times we'll find that just due to business problems or legacy technologies, we have to build private clouds. Or even for security reasons, we want to build private cloud, or purely just because we're running into a lot of public cloud refugees. You know they didn't realize a lot of the, maybe incidental fees along the way actually climbed up to be a fairly big budget number. So you know, we wanna really look at people's applications and enable them to be high performance but also highly secure. >> So I'm curious as to when you brought in Infinidat, what the business impact was economically. There's all the sort of non TCO factors that I wanna explore, so was it the labor costs that got reduced, did you redeploy those resources? Was it actually the hardware, or? >> First and foremost, and you know this is going back many years, and I think I would say this is true for any data center cloud provider. The minute the phone rings and someone says my storage is slow, we're losing money. Okay, because we've had to pick up the phone and someone needs to address that. We have eliminated all storage performance help desk issues, it's now one thing I don't need to think about anymore. We know that we can rely on our performance. And we know we don't need to worry about that on a day to day basis, and that is not in question. Now the other thing is really, as we started to expand our Infinidat footprint geographically, we suddenly started to realize, not only do we have this great foundation built but we can leverage an investment we made to do things that we couldn't do before. Maybe we could do them but they required another piece of technology, maybe we could do them but they required some more licensing. Something like that, but really when we started the standardization, we did it for operational efficiency reasons, and then suddenly realized that we had other opportunities here. And I have to hand it to Infinidat. They're actually the ones that helped us craft this story. Not only is this just a solid foundation but it's something you can build on top of. >> Has that been your experience, that it's sort of reduced or eliminated traditional storage bottlenecks? >> Oh absolutely, and you know I mentioned before that storage forms have now become an afterthought to me. You know, and a little bit the way we look at our storage platform is from a performance standpoint, not a capacity standpoint, we can throw whatever we want at the Infinidat, and sort of the running joke internally is that we'll just smile and say is that all you got? >> You mean like mix workloads so you don't have to sort of tune each array for a particular workload? >> Yeah, and you know I can image that as someone who might be listening to what I'm saying, well hey come on, it can't really be that good. And I'm telling you from seeing it day to day, again you can just throw the workloads at it, and it will do what it says it does. You don't see that everyday, now as far as capacity goes, there's this capacity on demand model, which we're a huge fan of, they also have some other models, the flex model, which is very useful for budgeting purposes, what I will tell you is you have to sacrifice at least one floor tile for Infinidat, it's very off putting first on day one, and I remember my reaction. But again, as I was saying earlier, when you start peeling back the pieces of the technology and why theses things are, and the different flexibility on the financial side, you realize this actually isn't a downside, it's an upside. >> We're gonna talk performance with Craig Hebbert who's vice president with Infinidat, he focuses on strategic accounts, Craig, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, so let's talk performance, everybody talks about performance they have their bench marketing, everybody's throwing Flash at the problem, you guys, you use Flash, but you didn't hop on that all Flash bandwagon, why and how are you different? >> Great question, we get it a lot with our customers. So we innovated, we spent over five years looking at the big picture, what the box would need today. What it would need in the future, and how would we arrive there by doing it economically? And so as you said, we use a small amount of Flash, that's a small percentage, two, three, four percent of the total box, but we do it by having a foundation that nobody else has, instead of throwing hardware at the solution, we have some specific mechanisms that nobody else has, we have a tri, which is a multi value structure that allows us to dynamically trace and track all of the IOs that come into the box, we ship intelligence. Everybody else ships dumb blocks of data. And so their only course of action to adopt new strategies is to bolt on the latest and greatest media. I've had a lot of experience at other companies where they've tried to shoehorn in new techniques whether it be a NAS Blade into an existing storage box or whether it be thin provisioning after the fact. And things that are done sort of like after the design is done never pan out very well. And the beauty with Infinibox is that all our protocols work the same way. I-ska-zin, NAS Block, it is all structured the same way. And that makes performance equal over all those protocols. And it makes it also easy to manage via the same API structure. >> So you're claiming that you can give equivalent or better performance with a combination of Flash and Spinning Disk than your competitors who are all Flash. Can you kind of add some color to that? >> Absolutely, so we use DRAM, all of our writes are ingested into the box through DRAM. We have 130 microsecond latency. Which is actually the lowest speed that fiber channel can attain, and so we're able to do things very, very quickly, it's 800 times faster NAND which is what our competitors are using. We have no raid structure on the SSD at all. So as things flow out of DRAM and go onto the SSD, our SSD is faster than everybody else's. Even though we use the same, so there's a mechanism there that we optimize. We write in large sequential blocks to the SSD. So the wear rate isn't the same as what our competitors are using, so everything we do is with an optimization, both for the present data and also the recall, and one of the things that culminates in a massive success for us, how we have those three tiers of data, but how we're able to out performance all Flash arrays, is that we do something, we hold data in cache for a massive amount of time, the average write latency in something like a VMAX is something like 13 seconds, the maximum is 28, we hold things for an astounding five minutes, and what that allows us to do is put profiles around things and remove randomness, randomness is something that's plagued data storage vendors for years. Whether it's random writes or random reads. If you can remove that randomness, then you can write out what are the slowest spinning disks out there, the Nearline SAS drives, but they're the fastest disks for sequential read, so if everything you write out is sequential, you can use the lowest cost disk, the Nearline SAS disk, and maximize their performance. And it's that technology, it's those patterns, 138 patterns that allow us to do all of these 38 steps in the process which augment our ability to serve customers data at a vastly reduced price. >> So your secret sauce is architecture intelligence as you call it, and then your able to provide lower cost media, and of course if Flash were lower cost, you'd be able to use that. There's no reason that you couldn't. Is that correct? >> We could but we wouldn't gain anything from it. A lot of customers say to us, why aren't you using more Flash, why don't you build an all Flash array? Why don't you use NVME? And we are actually the next version of the soft-wool-ship and the ME Capable as well as storage class memory. Why we don't do it is because we don't need it. Our customers have often said to us why don't you use 16 gig fiber channel or 32. And we haven't made that move because we don't move bottlenecks, we give customers a solution which is an end to end appliance, and so when we refresh the software stack, and we change the config with that, we make sure that the fiber channel is upgraded, we make sure that the three port, the Infiniban, everything comes with an uplift so there's not just one single area of a bottleneck. We could use more SSD but it would just be more money and we wouldn't be able to give you any more performance than we are today. >> So you have some hard news today. Tell us about that. >> Yeah I will. So we are a software company, and going back to the gen one I was here on day one when we started selling in the United States, when the first box was released it was 300,000 IOs, Moshe said he wanted a million IOs without changing the platform. We got up to about 900,000, that's a massive increase by just software tweaks, and so what we do is once the product has gone through its second year we go back and we optimize and we reevaluate. Which is what we did in the fall of 2018. And we were able to give a 30% uplift to our existing customers just with software tweaks in that area, so now we move to another config where we will introduce the 16, the 32 gig fiber channel cards and the MEO for fabric and storage class memory and all those things that are up and coming, but we don't need to utilize those until the price point drops. Right now if we did that, we'd just be like everybody else, and we would be driving up the price point, we're making the box ready to adapt those when the price point becomes accessible to our customers. >> Okay, last question, you spent a lot of time with strategic accounts, financial services, healthcare, insurance, what are some of the most pressing problems that you're hearing from them that you guys are helping them solve? >> It's a great question, so we see people with sprawl, managing many, many arrays, one of our competitors for instance for Splunk, they'll give you one array with one interface for the hot indexes, another mid tier array with another interface for the warm indexes. >> Brute force. >> Yeah, and then they'll give you a bunch of cold now storage on the back end with another disparate interface, all three of them are managed separately and you can't even control them from the same API. So what customers like about us, and just Splunk is one example. So we come in with just one 19 inch array and one rack, the hot indexes are handled by the DRAM, the warm indexes are handled by the SSD, and cold data's right there on the Nearline Sass drives. So they see from us this powerful, all encompassing solution that's better, faster, and cheaper. We sell on real, not effective, and so when encryption and things like this get turned on, the price point doesn't go up with Infinidat customers. They already know what they're buying. Everything else is just cream. And it's massive for economical reasons, as well as technological reasons. >> Excellent, Craig, thank you. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Okay keep it right there everybody. We'll be right back after this short break. (calming music) We're back with Ken Steinhart who's a field CTO with Infinidat, Ken, good to see you again. >> Great to see you Dave, it's been a long while. >> It sure has, thanks for coming back on the CUBE here. So you have the customer perspective. You've worked with a lot of customers. You've been a customer, availability, high availability, obviously important, especially in the context of storage. What's Infinidat's story there? >> Well high availability's been a cornerstone for Infinidat obviously from the beginning. And it's really driven some pretty amazing things. Not the least of which has been seven nines of availability proven by the product. What's new and different now, is we're extending that with the ability to do active active clustering and it's the real deal, we're talking about the ability to have the exact same volume now at synchronous distances, presenting itself to both sites as if it were just a single volume. Now this is technology that's based upon the existing synchronous replication and Infinisnap technology that Infinidat has already had, and this is gonna provide always on, continuous operation, even able to be resilient against site failures, component failures, storage failures, server failures, whatever, we will provide true zero RPO and true zero RTO at distance, and it's able to provide the ability to provide consistency also by using a very lightweight witness which presents itself as a third, completely separate fault domain to be able to see both sites to ensure the integrity of information, while being able to read and write simultaneously at two sites to what logically looks like one single volume. This is gonna be supported with all the major cluster software and server environments. And it's incredibly easy to deploy. So that's really the first point associated with this. >> So let me follow up on that, so a lot of people talk about active active, a lot of companies. How is this specifically different? >> It's different in that it is going to be able to now change the economics, first and foremost. Up until now, typically, people have had to trade off between RPO, RTO and cost, and usually you can get two of the three to be positive but not all three. It's sort of like if you buy a car. RPO equates to the quality of the solution, RTO equates to the speed or time, cost is cost. If you buy a car, if it's good and it's fast it won't be cheap, if it's good and it's cheap, it won't be fast, and if it's fast and it's cheap it won't be good, so we're able to break that paradigm for the first time here, and we're gonna be able to now take the economics of multi site, disaster tolerant, cluster type solutions and do it at costs to what are comparable to what most people would do for just a single site implementation. >> And your secret sauce there is the architecture, it's the software behind it. >> Well it's actually a key point, the software is standard and included. And it's all about the software, this is an extension of the existing synchronous replication technology that Infinidat has had, standard and included, no additional costs, no separate quirky gateways or anything, being able to now have one single volume logically presented to two different sites in real time continuously for high availability. >> So what's the customer impact? >> The customer impact is continuous operation at economics that are comparable to what single site solutions have typically looked like. And that's just gonna be huge, we see this as possibly bringing multi site disaster tolerance and active active clustering to people that have never been able to afford it or didn't think they could afford it previously. That really brings us to the third part of this. The last piece is that, when you take an architecture such as Infinidat with Infinibox, that has been able to demonstrate seven nines of availability, and now you can couple that across at distance in synchronous distances to two data centers or two completely different sites, we are now able to offer a 100% uptime guarantee. Something that statistically hasn't really been particularly practical in the past, for a vendor to talk about, but we're now able to do it because of the technology that this architecture affords our customers. >> So guarantee as in, when I read the fine print, what does it say? >> Obviously we'll give the opportunity for our customers to read the fine print. But basically it's saying we're gonna stand behind this product relative to its ability to deliver for them, and obviously this is something customers we think are gonna be very, very excited about. >> Ken, thinks so much for coming on the CUBE, appreciate it. >> Pleasure's mine, Dave. As always. >> Great to see you. Okay, thank you for watching, keep it right there. We'll be right back, right after this short break. (calming music) Okay we're back for the wrap up with Brian Carmody. Brian, let's geek out a little bit. You guys are technologists, let's start with the software tech that we heard about today. What are the takeaways? >> Sure, so there's a huge amount of content in here, and software is most of it, so we have, first is R5. This is the latest software release for Infinibox. It improves performance, it improves availability with active active, it introduces non disruptive data mobility which is a game changer for customers for manageability and agility. Also as part of that, we have the availability of Infiniverse, which is our cloud based analytics and monitoring platform for Infinidat products, but it's also the next generation control plane that we're building. And when we talk about our roadmap, it's gonna grow into a lot more than it is today, so it's a very strategic product for us. But yeah, that's the net net on software. >> Okay, so but the software has to run on some underlying hardware, so what are the innovations there? >> Yeah, so I'm not sure if I'd call 'em innovations, I mean in our model, hardware is boring and commoditized and really all the important stuff happens in software. But we have listened, customers have asked us for it, we are delivering, 16 gigabit fiber channel is a standard option, and we're also giving a option for a 32 gig fiber channel, and a 25 gig ethernet, 25 gig ethernet, which is again, things that customers asking for 'em, and we've delivered, and also while we're on the topic of protocols and stuff like that, we're also demonstrating our NVMe over fabrics implementation, which is deployed with select customers right now, it is the world's fastest NVMe over fabrics implementation, it is a round trip latency of 52 microseconds which is half the time, roundtrip for us, is half the time that it takes a NAND Flash cell to recall its data, forgetting about the software stack on the round trip, that's gonna be available in the future for all of our customers, general availability via a software only update. >> That's incredible, all right, so to get out what that means for the road map. >> Oh sure, so basically with our road map, is we're laying out a very ambitious vision for the next 18 months of how to give customers ultimately what they are screaming for which is help us evolve our on premises storage from old school storage arrays and turn them into elastic data center scale clouds in my own data centers, and then come up and give us an easy, seamless way to integrate that into our public cloud and our off premises technologies, and that's where we're gonna be. Starting today, and taking us out the next 18 months. >> Well we covered a lot of ground today. Pretty remarkable, congratulations on the announcements. We covered all the abilities, even performance ability. We'll throw that one in there. So thank you for that, final word? >> The final word is probably just a message to our customers to say thank you, and for trusting us with your data. We take that covenant very seriously. And we hope that you with all of this work that we've done, that you feel we're delivering on our promise of value, to help them enable competitive advantage and do it at multi petabyte scale. >> Great, all right thank you Brian. And thank you, now it's your turn. Hop into the crowd chat, we've got some questions for you, you can ask questions of the experts that are on the call. Thanks everybody for watching. This is Dave Vallante signing out from the CUBE.

(upbeat music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host, Dave Vellante. We are joined by Chhandomay Mandal, he is the Director of Solutions Marketing for Dell EMC. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Happy to be here. >> Direct from Boston. This is a Boston panel, I love it. >> Yes, and we were on the same flight yesterday. >> (laughing) There you go! >> Ah, so half of Hopkinton. >> Yeah. So, we're here at Dell Technologies World, but you're here to talk to us about SAP. Explain to our viewers a little bit about the connection between your companies. >> Sure, so SAP connects a lot of our customers. They are running their ERP, CRM, digital procurement, HR systems, and many other workloads on SAP, and we, Dell Technologies, as a company, have a portfolio of solutions to support SAP workloads. So, that's the big connection. SAP and Dell EMC, we are big partners, and we work hand in hand as well. >> Talk a little bit about what SAP customers are doing. You know, everybody knows the stories of SAP multi-year implementation, very complicated, although driving business value, but today people want to be more agile, cloud, Hana, who's been around now for quite a number of years. SAP obviously pushing hard for a number of reasons. What are you seeing in the customer base? >> Yeah, SAP customers are in a journey. As you mentioned, the SAP landscapes implementations. In fact, in 2016, greater than fifty percent of SAP landscapes were running on Oracle. SAP has come up with the in-memory database, SAP Hana, and there is a mandate that by 2025, the customers need to be running on SAP Hana to run any SAP workload. So, customers need to go through that transition, and as the data explodes from IoT, Big Data, BlockChain, our next gen intelligent applications, they are driving a lot of analytics, and SAP has come up with a platform called SAP Leonardo for mission learning. So, customers are trying to consolidate their old SAP landscapes on an agile, modern infrastructure. They are planning to migrate all the older databases to SAP Hana. At the same time, they are looking into deploying SAP Leonardo to take advantage of IoT, AI, BlockChain, all those things. >> So SAP is dangling the carrot. With Hana, it's in memory, performance, efficiency. With Leonardo, it's the promise of machine intelligence, but there are challenges in migrating off of Oracle. How are customers dealing with that? Are you guys in a position to help with the partnership with SAP? Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yes, SAP implementations, as you know, is fairly complex, takes many months, years, and customers have been running SAP for a long time, so their challenge are, "How do we keep our businesses running while we need to transition from what we have to these SAP Hana based deployments." They are looking into modern infrastructures that will be able to consolidate all of this around their applications with the same SLS, and at the same time when they migrate one application to the next on SAP Hana, that platform should be able to add up and deliver all the SLS. So, refactoring what they have into this SAP Hana is really big for all of our customers, and how to have a better performing platform, how to deliver the agility's simplification, as well as lower the TCO. These are the projects that CIO's are running for our customers. >> So, as we know, simpler is always better. Can you talk about some of the ROI? What are companies actually seeing in terms of these benefits? >> So, let's take specific examples. Dell EMC PowerMax is the backbone of running SAP applications for a long time. Our previous generations in terms of VMAX, VMAX All Flash, now with our PowerMax, it has the highest skill ability of SLP Hana. It can actually run 162 SAP Hana nodes on a single array, but that's not the end game. The thing is, it can consolidate SAP, traditional SAP workloads, SAP Hana, as well as other mixed workloads while delivering the same performance masking the SLS, with it's built-in mission learning capabilities. Now, what does that translate to? We have several customers seeing benefits out of this. For example, a big sports equipment manufacturer, when they move to this platform, there are software quality assurance process. It used to take like ten days in all the infrastructure. Now they could run on this new platform in two days. That's literally eighty percent improvement, because of the higher performance, the more consolidation that they were able to access. So that's one example just from the performance perspective, but if you take a consolidation simpler to run, there are other examples I can actually walk you through. >> So, I want to double click on that, because every storage company wants to partner with SAP, target that stuff, because Oracle's not that friendly these days. They have their own hardware, right? They're trying to elbow you out with Exadata. So, talk a little bit more about the differentiation that Dell EMC brings relative to some of your other storage competitors, specifically within SAP environments. >> Sure, so first Dell comes in with a portfolio of solutions. As you are mentioning, these are fairly complex deployments, and customers are looking for cross state partner, with professional services, experience, and a portfolio of solutions, not just one solution fits all. Just to continue on that aspect, I talked about Dell EMC PowerMax. It's great for consolidation, for running Hana and the existing workloads, but then when you look at the next generation of applications, the IoT, AI, BlockChain, the unstructured world, Dell EMC Isilon is a great platform which has already been in the market and in the forefront of AI workloads. Dell, as a company, offer a portfolio of solutions, and it's not piecemeal. We see the broader picture, and plug in all the right pieces with the right consulting surfaces as well, so that the customers can run their applications day in and day out, and transition as well as bring in new deployments like SAP Leonardo. I'll give you one example here. Another big service provider, their analytics, their SAP APOs, used to take like 32 hours of run time, and they could only do in weekends. Now, with this Dell EMC storage solutions, they are actually down to, give or take, seven hours. So that's like 78% improvement in terms of how fast they can run this analytics, and this is turning into better decision making for the procurement manager, for the business analyst, and they are able to drive value from time to market, time to value, from all the data that's captured in these SAP landscapes. >> And these are realtime or near realtime analyses that are going on, right? But then ultimately you have to persist the data, that's where things like PowerMax come in, and then sometimes you got to bring it back in, and so are you guys architecting high speed interconnects and InfiniBands and all kinds of crazy stuff? >> All kinds of things-- >> NVMe's... >> And actually, you brought up a very good point. SAP Hana is an in-memory database, so everything is running in the memory speed. Why do you need high performing array like Dell EMC PowerMax? Guess what? Everything is in memory, but this is all critical databases. Everything needs to be persisted back to the storage array, and then when something reboots, you cannot stay still til all the data is back from the storage array into the memory. So, persisting the data quickly and fast reboots are also necessary. Driving the needs of throughputs like what PowerMax provides, 150 gigabits per second throughput, so that's where the connection comes in. >> So the throughputs you're describing really were unthinkable five years ago. Can you reflect on that a little bit in terms of what you've seen the technology do that you really couldn't have even imagined it doing, even in very recent times. >> In fact, that's a very good point. One of the customers that participated in this TOI study, they mentioned they wanted to go to the cloud, public cloud. When they wanted to go to the cloud at the time the maximum size of our database you could do was 2.5 terabyte, and they already had a 4 terabyte SAP database, so there was no way they could go to a public cloud. What they were looking into, the cloud operating model, so that you can actually be flexible with your infrastructure, consume as you go, and we were able to help in that transition with all of the solutions. >> Great. So where you think we're going to be going? I mean in terms of next year's Dell Technologies World 2020, which will be big just because it's a cool number. What do you think we'll be talking about next year's conference? >> That's a very good point, and as you mentioned 2020, we are already seven billion people, and by 2020 it's predicted to be like 30 billion devices generating 44 zettabytes of data, so managing all of this data, putting the data at the right tier, the data that needs to be accessed quickly to make realtime analysis process. The data that's seven days old, putting them in the right tier, accessing them, and driving the value from your data, from this past amount of data, so that you can make decisions, you can gather intelligence, and take this value to drive competitive differentiation will be where we are. And the form factor? Yes, everybody will be able to do all of this pretty much like realtime in phones or even smaller devices. >> It's the march to 2025, when everybody's going to be off Oracle. >> Well exactly! You're right. >> Oh, that's your mandate. >> Anyway, @dvellante if you want to talk about that. We've got a lot pf research on it, so... >> Exactly. >> Not trivial. >> Well Chhandomay, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. >> Same here. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have much more of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit. (upbeat electronic music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hi everybody this is Dave lotta a and this is the cube the leader in live tech coverage this cube conversation I'm really excited Craig Hibbert is here he's a vice president of infinite at and he focuses on strategic accounts he's been in the storage business for a long time he's got great perspectives correct good to see you again thanks for coming on good to say that good to be back so there's a there's a saying don't fight fashion well you guys fight fashion all the time you got these patents you got this thing called neuro cache you're your founder and chairman mo che has always been - cutting against the grain and doing things his own way but I'd love for you to talk about some of those things the patents that you have some architecture the neuro cache fill us in on all that sure so when we go in we talk to customers and we say we have a hundred and thirty-eight patents a lot of them say well that's great but you know how does that relate to me a lot of these are and or gates and certain things that they don't know how it fits into the day to day life so I think this is a good opportunity to talk about several of those that do and so obviously the neural cache is something that is is dynamic instead of having a key in a hash which all the other vendors have just our position in that table allows us to determine all the values and things we need from it but it also monitors this is an astounding statement but from the moment that array is powered on every i/o that flows through it we track data for the life of the reins for some of these customers it's five and six years so you know those blocks of data are they random are they sequential are they hot are they cold when was the last time was accessed and this is key information because we bring intelligence to the lower level block layer where everybody else has just done they just ship things things come into acutely moving they have no idea what they are we do and the value around that is that we can then predict when workloads are aging out today you have manual people writing things in in things like easy tier or faster or competing products or two stories right and all these things that that manage all these problems are the human intervention we do it dynamically and that feeds information back into the Ray and helps to determine which virtual ray group it should reside on and where on the discipline Dalls based upon the age of the the application how it's trending the these are very powerful things in a day where we need eminent information send in to a consumer in a store I'd it's all all this dynamic processing and the ability to bring that in so that's that's one of the things we do another one is that the catalyst for our fast rebuilds we can rebuild two failed full 12 terabyte drives in under 80 minutes if those drives are half full then it's nine minutes and this is by understanding where all the data is and sharing the rebuild process from the drives that's another one of our patterns perhaps one of the most challenging that we have is that storage vendors tend to do error correction at the fibre channel layer once that data enters into the storage array there is no mechanism to check the integrity of that data and a couple of vendors have an option to do this but they can only do it for the first right and they also recommend you to turn that feature off because it slows down the box so we're infinite out is unique and I think this is for me one of the the most important paths that we have is that every time we ride a 64k slice in the system we assign some metadata to that and obviously it has a CRC check sum but more importantly it has the locality of reference so if we subsequently go back and do a reread and the CRC matches but the location has changed we know that corruption has happened sometimes a bit flipped on right all of these things that constitute sound data corruption that's not just the impressive part what we do at that point is we dynamically deduce that the data has been corrupt and using the parity in the quorum where it were a raid 6 like a dual parity configuration we rebuild that data on the fly without the application or the end-user knowing that there was a problem and that way served back the data that was actually written we guarantee that were the only array that does that today there's massive for our customers I mean the time to rebuild you said 12 terabyte drive I mean I yeah I would have thought I mean they always joke how long do you think it takes to rebuild a 30 terabyte drive because eventually you know sure you know it's like a month with us it's the same so if you look at our three terabyte drives it was 18 minutes the four terabyte drives 18 minutes the 618 minutes 812 will be good all the way up to 20 terabyte drives figuration we have no what I came back to a conversation we've had many many times we've shown you guys we were early on in the flash storage trend and we saw the prices coming down we done like high-speed spinning disks were there days were numbered and sure correct in that prediction but then you know disk drives have kept that distance yeah you guys have a skewed going all flash because the economics but help us understand this because you've got this mechanical device and you yet you guys are able to claim performance that's equal to or oftentimes much much better than a lot of your all flash competitors and I want to understand that a little bit it suggests to me that there's so much other overhead going on and other ball necks in the system that you guys are dealing with both architectural II and through your intelligence software can you talk about that absolutely absolutely the software is the key right we are a software company and we have some phenomenal guys that do the software piece so as far as the performance goes the the backend spinning discs are really obfuscated by two layers of virtualization and we ensure that because we have massive amounts of DRAM that all of that data flows into DRAM it will sit in DRAM for an astonishing five minutes I say astonishing because most of our vendors try to evict cache straight away so they've got room for the next one and that does not facilitate a mechanism by which you can inspect those dumb pieces of data and if you get enough dumb data you can start to make him intelligent right you can go get discarded data from cell phone towers and find out we know where people go to work and what time they worker because of that what demographic at the end and you know now you're predicting the election based upon discarding itself on talladega so so if you can take dumb data and put patterns around it and make it sequential which we do we write out a log structured right so we're really really fast at the front-end and some customers say well how do you manage that on the backend here's something that our designers and architects did very very well the the speed of the of ddr3 is about 15k per second which is what Cindy REM right now we have 480 spindles on the backend if you say each one of them can do a hundred 100 mics per second which they can do more than that 200 that gives us a forty eight gigabit gigabyte sorry per second backplane D stage ability which is three times faster than the DRAM so when you look at it the box has been designed all the way so there is no bottleneck through flowing through the DRAM anything that still been access that comes out of that five minute window once it's D stays to all the spindles incidentally analog structured right so right now it over 480 spindles all the time and then you've got the random still on the SSD which will help to keep that response time around about 2 milliseconds and just one last point on there I have a customer that has 1.2 petabytes written on a 1.3 a petabyte box and is still achieving a 2 millisecond response time and that's unheard of because most block arrays as you fill them up to 60 70 % that the performance starts going in the tank so I go down memory lane here so the most successful you know storage array in the history of the industry my opinion probably fact it was symmetric sand mosha a designed that he eschewed raid5 everybody was on the crazy about raid 5 is dead no no just mirror it yeah and that's gonna give us the performance that we need and he would write they would write 2d ran and then then of course you'd think that the D stage bandwidth was the bottleneck because they had such a back high a large number of back-end spindles the bandwidth coming out of that DRAM was enormous you just described something actually quite similar so that I was going to ask you is it the D stage bandwidth the bottleneck and you're saying no because your D stage being what there's actually three tighter than the D rate up it is so with the symmetric some typical platforms you would have a certain amount of disk in a disk group and you would assign a phase and Fiber Channel ports to that and there'd be certain segments in cash that would dedicated those discs we have done away with that we have so many well with two layers of the virtualization at the front as we talked about but because nothing is a bottleneck and because we've optimized each component the DRAM and I talked about the SSDs we don't write heavily over those we write in a sequential pattern to the SSD so that the wear rate is elongated and so because of that and we have all the virtualized raid groups configured in cache so what happens is as we get to that five-minute window we're about 2 D state all of the raid groups the al telling the cash how to lay out the virtual raid structure based on how busy or the raid groups are at the time so if you were to pause it and ask us where it's going we can tell you it's the Machine line it's the artificial intelligence of saying this raid group just took a D stage you know or there's a lot of data in the cache that's heading for these but based upon the the prediction of the heart the cold that I talked about a few months ago and so it will make a determination to use a different virtual rater and that's all done in memory as opposed to to rely on the disk so we're not we don't have the concept of spare disk we have the concept of spare capacity it's all shared and because it's all shared it's this very powerful pool that just doesn't get bogged down and continues to operate all the way up to the full capacity so I'm struggling with this there is no bottleneck because there's always a problem that can assure them so where is the bottleneck the ball net for us is when the erase fault so if you overwrite the maximum bandwidth and that historically you know in in 2016-2017 was a roughly 12 cube per second we got that in the fall 2018 to roundabout 15 and we're about to make the announcement that we've made tectonic increases in that where will now have right bandwidth approach in 16 gig per second and also read bandwidth about 25 K per second that 16 is going to move up to 20 remember what I said we release a number and we gradually grow into it and and and maximize and tweak that software when you think that most or flash arrays can do maybe one and a half gig per second sustained writes that gives us a massive leg up over our competition instead of buying an all flash array for this and another mid-tier array for this and coal social this you can just buy one platform that services at all all the protocols and they're all access the same way so you write an API one way mark should almost as big fan of this about writing code obviously was spinnaker and some of those other things that he's been involved in and we do the same thing so our API is the same for the block as it is for the NAS as it is for the ice cozy so it's it's very consistent you write it once and you can adapt multiple products well I think you bring about customers for short bit everybody talks about digital transformation and it's this big buzzword but when you talk to customers they're all going through some kind of digital transformation oh they want to get digital right let's put it that way yeah I don't want to get disrupted they see Amazon buying grocers and while getting into the financial services and content and it's all about the data so there's a real disruption scenario going on for every business and and the innovation engine seems to be data okay but data just sitting there and a data swamp is no good so you got to apply machine intelligence for that to that data and you got to have scale mm-hmm do you guys make a big deal about about petabyte scale yeah what are your customers telling you about the importance of that and how does it fit into that innovation sandwich that I just laid out sure no it's great question so we have some very because we're so have 70 petabytes of production over those 70 yep we have a couple of those both financial institutions very very good at what they do we worked with them previously with a with another product that really kind of introduced another one of most Shea's products that was XIV that introduced the concepts of self-healing and no tuning and things like we don't even talked about that there's no tuning knobs on the infinite I probably should mention that but our customers said have said to us we couldn't scale you know we had a couple hundred terabyte boxes before there were okay you know you've brought you've raised the game by bringing in a much higher level of availability and much higher capacity we can take one of our but I'm in this process right now the customer we can take one of our boxes and collapse three vmax 20 of VMAX 40s on it we have numerous occassions gone into establishments that have 11 12 23 inch cabinets two and a half thousand spindles of the old DMC VMO station we've replaced it with one 19-inch rack of arts right that's a phenomenal state when you think about it and that was paid for you think some of these v-max 47 it's 192 ports on them Fiber Channel ports we have 24 so the fibre channel port reduction the power heating and cooling over an entire row down to one eight kilowatt consumption by the way our power is the same whether it's three four terabytes six eight twelve they all use the same power plan so as we increase the geometry capacity of the drives we decrease the cost per usable well we're actually far more efficient than all fly sharing with the most environmentally friendly hybrids been in this planet on the array so asking about cloud so miss gray on the planet that would be yeah so when cloud first sort of came out of the division Financial Services guys are like no clouds that's a bad word they're definitely you know leaning into that adopting it more but still there's a lot of workloads that they're gonna leave on Prem they want to that cloud experience to the data what are you hearing from the financial services customers in particular and I and I've single them out because they're they're very advanced they're very demanding they are they a lot of dough and so what do you see in terms of them building cloud hybrid cloud and and what it means for for them and specifically the storage industry yeah so I'm actually surprised that they've adopted it as much as they have to be honest with you and I think the the economics are driving that but having said that whenever they want to get the data back or they want to bring it back home prime for various reasons that's when they're running into problems right it's it's like how do I get my own data back well you've got to open up the checkbook and write big checks so I think infini debt has a nice strategy there where we have the same capabilities that you have on prime you having the cloud don't forget nobody else has that one of the encumbrances to people move into the cloud has been that it lacks the enterprise functionality that people are used to in the data center but because our cost point is so affordable we become not only very attractive or four on Prem but for cloud solutions as well of course we have our own new tricks cloud offering which allows people to use as dr or replications and so however you want to do it where you can use the same api's and code that your own dis and extrapolate that out to the cloud I was there which is which is very helpful and so we have the ability if you take a snapshot on Amazon it may take four hours and it's been copied over to an s3 device that's the only way they can make it affordable to do it and then if you need that data back it's it's not it's not imminent you've got to rehydrate from s3 and then copy it back over your snapshot with infinite data its instantaneous we do not stop i/o when we do snapshots and another one the patterns we use the time synchronous mechanism every every AO the rise has a timestamp and we when we take a snapshot we just do a point in time and in a timestamp that's greater than that instantiation point is for the volume and previous is for the snapshot we can do that in the cloud we can instantly recover hundreds of terabytes worth of databases and make them instantly available so our story again with the innovation our innovation wasn't just for for on pram it was to be facilitated anyway you are and that same price point carries forward from here into the cloud when Amazon and Microsoft wake up and realized that we have this phenomenal story here I think they'll be buying from us in leaps and bounds it's it's the only way to make the cloud affordable for storage vendors so these are the things you talk about you know bringing bringing data back and bringing workloads back and and there are tool chains that are now on Prem the kubernetes is a great example that our cloud like and so when you bring data back you want to have that cloud experience so automated operations plays into that you know automation used to be something that people are afraid of and they want to do do manual tearing member they wanted their own knobs to turn those days are gone because people want to drive digital transformations they don't want to spend time doing all this heavy lifting I'm talk about that a little bit and where you guys fit yeah I mean you know I say to my customers to not to knock our competition but you can't have a service processor as the inter communication point between what the customer wants and it deciding where it's going to talk to the Iranian configure it's going to be instantaneous and so we all we have we don't have any Java we don't have any flash we don't have any hosts we don't have massive servers around the data center collecting information we just have an html5 interface and so our time to deployment is very very quick when we land on the customer's dark the box goes in we hook up the power we put the drives in we're Haiti's the word V talk because it brings back memories for a lot of course I am now we're going back in time right knowing that main here and so we're very dynamic both in how we forward face the customers but also on the backend for ourselves we eat our own dog food in the sense that we are we have an automation team we've automated our migration from non infinite out platforms towards that uses some level of artificial intelligence we've also built a lot of parameters around things like going with ServiceNow and custom sites because well you can do with our API what other people take you know page and page of code I'll give you an example one of our customers said I need OC i the the let-up management product we called met up and they said hey listen you know it usually takes six months to get an appointment and that it takes at least six months to do the comb we said no no we're not like any other storage render we don't have all these silly raid groups and spare disk capacity you know this weave three commands we can show in the API and we showed them the light Wow can you send us an array we said no we can do something better we were designed SDS right when when infinite out was coded there was no hardware and the reason we did that is because software developers will always code to the level of resilience of the hardware so if you take away that Hardware the software developers have to code to make something to withstand any type of hardware that comes in and at the end of the coding process that's when we started bringing in the hardware pieces so we were written STS we can send vendors and customers a an OVA a virtual appliance of our box they were able to the in a week they told the custom we have to go through full QA no reason why it wouldn't work and they did it for us and got it was a massive customer of theirs and ours that's a powerful story the time to deployment for your homegrown apps as well as things like ServiceNow an MCI incredible infinite out three API calls we were done so you guys had a little share our partnership with met up in the field we did yeah I mean was great they had a massive license with this particular customer they wanted our storage on the platform and we worked very very quickly with them they were very accommodating and we'd love to get our storage qualified behind their behind their heads right now for another customer as well so yeah there's definitely some sooner people realize what we have a Splunk massive for us what we're able to do was plunk in one box where people the competitors can't do in a row so it so it's very compelling what we actually bring in how we do it and that API level is incredibly powerful and we're utilizing that ourselves I would like to see some integration with canonical Marshall what these guys have done a great job with SDS plays we'd like to bring that here do spinnaker do collect if I could do some of those things as well that we're working on the automation we just added another employee another FTE to the automation team and infinite out so we do these and we engage with customers and we help you get out of that trench that is antiquity and move forward into the you know into the vision of how you do one thing well and it permeates the cloud on primary and hybrid all those guys well that API philosophy that you have in the infrastructure is code model that you just described allows you to build out your ecosystem in a really fast way so Greg thanks so much for coming on thank you and doing that double click with this really I'd love to have you back great thanks a lot Dave all right thank you welcome thank you for watching you're watching the cube and this is Dave Volante we'll see you next time

(upbeat music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE! Our continuing coverage at VMworld 2018, I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host John Troyer. We're very excited to welcome back to theCUBE one of our alumni, Chhandomay Mandal, the director of product marketing at Dell EMC. Chhandomay, it's great to talk to you again! >> Thank you, nice to be here. >> We just seem to do this circuit in Las Vegas. >> Yeah. (laughing) >> So, loads of people here, we last got to speak four months ago at Dell Technologies World, thematically that event about making IT transformation real, about making digital transformation real, security transformation real. Let's talk about IT transformation. Yesterday, Pat Gelsinger talked about you know, the essentialness that customers have to transform IT, it's an enabler of digital transformation, let's talk about what Dell EMC is continuing to help customers do, to transform their IT so they can really get, get on that successful journey to digital transformation. >> Yes, the Dell transformation is key into this digital economy in order to thrive in this new world, right? And, digital transformation is fueled by IT transformation. For us, IT transformation means modernizing the underlying infrastructure, so that they can deliver on scale, performance, availability, cost-effectiveness. They can also automate a lot of the manual processes, and streamline the operations, net result being freeing up the resources, and kind of like, deliver the transformation for not only application processes, but also businesses in general. So, with our portfolio, we are helping customers into this journey and since we talked at Dell Technologies World, it is going great, we are seeing a lot of adoption in this portfolio. >> Chhandomay, I love, you know, you work on high-end storage, right? Which is. >> Yes. >> Which means that these are business-critical applications that you are supporting. >> Absolutely. >> And, that means that they're the most, in some of the ways, some of the most interesting, right? And the deepest and most important, when you're talking digital transformation. But it comes down to, you know, as you say, efficiency and how the IT department is running. In the olden days, you'd get a VMAX, and you'd have an admin, and there's a lot of knobs and adjustments and tuning, and you have to keep that machine running smoothly because they're supporting the enterprise. Now, new next generation PowerMax, some of the, you know, tell us a little about that. What I'm really impressed with is all the automation, and all the efficiency that goes into that platform. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. So, PowerMax is our latest flagship high-end product. It's an end-to-end NVMe design platform, designed to deliver like highest level of performance. Not just performance, but highest level of efficiency, as well as all the trusted data services that are synonymous with VMAX. And, not to talk about the six-nines of availability, all those goodness of the previous generations carried over. But, the key thing is, with PowerMax, what we have done is, if I need to boil it down into three things, this is a very powerful platform. It's simple, and it's trusted. So now, when I talk about very powerful, obviously performance is part and parcel. It is actually the fastest storage array. 10 million IOPS, 150 gigabytes per second, >> It's a maniac, it's a, it's a screamer, it's amazing. >> Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. >> Yeah yeah, yeah. >> But like that's kind of like a table steak and bread and butter for us. Now, what I want to highlight is, how simple the platform has become. We have a built-in machine learning engine within the platform. And now, instead of like, I need this much of capacity and this much of performance, you can actually provision storage based on the surface levels that you need to give your customers. And we, underneath, will take care of like whatever it means for any workloads you are running. And how are you doing it? So for example, today, right? Most of the applications are still like business applications, like Oracle, SAP, you name it. But, within the digital transformation, a lot of the modern, analytics heavy applications are also coming in, right? So, if I were to break it up it would be say like, 80, 20, to 80% business, 20% modern applications. Now, we are seeing the modern applications getting adopted like higher and higher and-- >> It's going to flip, right? At some point. >> Yes. Like in three to five years, the ratio will be opposite. Now, if you are buying an array like PowerMax today, how can we deliver the performance you need for business applications of today, while taking care of the analytics heavy applications of tomorrow, at the same time, meeting your applications? I mean, meeting your SLS all the way through. And that's where the machine learning engine comes in. It like, takes 40 million data sets in real-time. It makes six billion decisions per day, and, essentially, it figures out from the patterns in the data, how to optimize where to place the load, without the administrators having to like, tune anything, so it's like, extremely simple. Completely automated, thanks to the AI and ML engine. >> Taking advantage of those superpowers, AI, ML, that Pat. >> Yes. >> Talked about yesterday, so you talked about it's efficient, it's fast, trusted. Speaking of trust, Rackspace, long-time partner of Dell EMC and VMware, we actually spoke with them yesterday, Dell EMC and PowerMax particularly, have been really kind of foundational to enabling Rackspace to really accelerate their business, in terms of IT transformation. Talk to us about that in terms of them as a customer. >> So, nice that you bring up, Rackspace, they got a shout-out from Pat yesterday as the leading multi-cloud provider in the managed space, right. Now, if you look at Rackspace, they have like 100,000 plus customers all with various types of needs. Now, with a platform like PowerMax, they are able to simplify their IT environment, reduce a lot of consolidation happening on that dense platform. So they can reduce the footprint a lot of, less power culling. At the end of the day, they're minimizing their operational expenses, simplifying the management, how they manage their infrastructure, monitor their infrastructure. It becomes kind of like, invisible, or self-driving storage. Like, you really like, don't worry about it. You worry about the business, value it, and innovations that IT can bring, for your digital transformation. While the array kind of like, does it own work. A lot of work, no mistake about it. But everything is kind of like, hidden from the admin perspective. Whether you are running Oracle or Splunk, it figures out like what to do. Not only like maintaining the service levels, but as the technology evolves you bring in not just NVMe necessities, but next-generation storage class memory, they are going to automate and do the plasmid by itself. >> Yeah, that's huge, right? Because, and that's where you free up those time and resources, and brain power, frankly, for your IT and group then to be able to work on more strategic projects than tuning this particular data store and LUN or whatever for Splunk and et cetera, right? You've got so much, again, self-driving kind of self-driving storage, there. I also, Chhandomay, I also wanted to talk about the other kind of high-end array in Dell EMC's portfolio, the XtremeIO. And that, you know, all-flash, you can talk a little about that, but you know, what are the use cases there, and when should people be looking at that? And what kind of, what's new in that world? >> Sure. So, PowerMax is the flagship high-end productive spin, like evolved over 30 years, 1,000 plus patents, right? Whereas if you contrast it, XtremeIO is a purpose-built, all-flash array designed to take advantage of the flash media and designed from the ground up. Now, it delivers very high performance with consistently low latency. But, the key innovation there is the way it does in line, all the time, our data services. Especially the data reduction, the content, 800% in memory content, our metadata, helps deliver a new class of copy services so, and then, I mean, it scales modular loots, scale up and scale out. So, the use cases where XtremIO is very efficient is where you need a lot of, I mean you have a lot of common datas, for example VDI, we can offer like, very high data reduction ratios reducing your footprint for VDI type environment. The other use case is active, open data management. So, for example, like for every database, there are probably like eight to 10 copies at a minimum. Now with XtremIO, like you can actually use those copies, same as the production platform, and, cut around workloads on them. Like whether it's like your VIO upload, or like reporting test day of sandboxing. All of those things can be run at the same platform, and like the array will be able to deliver like, without any sweat. >> And as I said, you're doing copy data management sort of thing? >> Yes. >> Yeah, okay that's great. >> Yes, yes, yes. >> Yeah, that's. >> So, customer examples, you know how much I love that. You talked about this really strong example with PowerMax and Rackspace. Give us a great example of a customer using XtremIO X2 that's really enabled with these superpowers to grow their businesses. >> Sure, so at VMware what best can it be saying the customer, in this case will be, guess what? >> VMware. (laughing) >> So, VMware's IT cloud infrastructure team is using XtremIO X2 for their factualized SMP HANA environment. And there are several other workloads in the pipeline. But what I want to highlight is like, what and how they are doing it. So they have their production environment, they are leveraging replication technologies for our tier, and then from that tier, they are making copies, on those copies they are applying the patches, sandboxing, all those things. An exact replica of the production environment. And then, like when they are done, they are rolling it back out to the production. And the entire workflow is kind of like automated, tested, and a great example of, like how they are doing it. But it's not just the copy that are management, there are other aspects to it. So for example, the performance. Now, they started with like a two terabyte VM and they tried to clone both in the traditional storage, and XtremIO. With the traditional storage, it took like 2 1/2 hours. With XtremIO, it was done in like 90 seconds. >> So from two hours to 90 seconds. >> Seconds. >> Is dramatic. >> And, like they ran the data reduction, they can as if. So, for VMware's entire ESX production environment, this is like 1.2 petabyte storage. Now, with XtremIO data reduction technology, they can see that it will be reduced to like, 240 terabyte worth of storage. So, essentially, from three rows of storage, it would be reduced to three racks of XtremIO. So, you can see, these settings in, all over the place. Like, I mean footprint, power cooling management, all of those things. So, that would be my best example of, like, how XtremIO X2 is being used for, I mean, in a transformative way in the IT environment. >> Well it kind of goes along with one of the things that Pat Gelsinger talked about yesterday from VMware's perspective is, I think that the stat was, they've been able to reduce CO2 emissions by 540 million tons. Sounds like XtremIO might be, want to be, invisible. >> Yeah, of course. >> Facilitators. >> Yeah, yeah. Like we are contributing a lot in that. And I mean, at the end of the day, this is, like, what digital transformation is about right? So like, absolutely, yes. >> That's great, Chhandomay, I mean, the, I would love to have a problem. I would love to have a problem that required running, you know, hot on XtremIO because I think those are super interesting problems. And the fact that you can, you know, actually turn those huge data sets into something that's actually manageable and, I can envision three racks, I can't really envision, half a data center's worth of spinning discs, so, that's amazing. I love the fact that the engineering that goes into these high-end systems that you, on your, on the team, there. >> Yeah, so the one other thing I wanted to mention was the future-proof loyalty program. >> Yeah we've heard a little bit about that, tell us. >> Yes, so, this is essentially for our customers three things, like one is peace of mind. You know like what you are getting, there are no surprises. The second thing is investment protection. And then the third would be like (mumbles). So, there are like several components to it. And, like, it is not only like for XtremIO or PowerMax, it's pretty much like for the portfolio there is a list. Like, of what is part of it, and it's continually growing. Now for XtremIO and PowerMax purpose is the important things of asking for like if it's a three year warranty, and then like tier pricing, they know, like, exactly like what they are going to pay for support today as well as when maintenance renewal comes up. Then, (mumbles) migrations. So, back from exchange, right? Like with XtremIO to the next-generation PowerMax to PowerMax dot next, but like, they are covered with non-disruptive migration plans, storage efficiencies. And the last two things that we added they truly like we have announced that VMware is cloud-enabled. And cloud conception models, so like, I mean, as Michael says, cloud is not a place it's an operating model. So even with XtremIO and PowerMax, customers can pay for what they're using, and then, like, it's called flex on-demand. And they use, I mean when they use the buffer space, they can pay for that. And then with CloudIQ, we can monitor the storage areas from the cloud. It's the storage analytics, so it's cloud-enabled as well. So it covered pretty much like, all of the things Pat talked about yesterday. >> Fantastic, well I'm going to go out on a limb. Yesterday, I've asked a number of folks, what would you describe, I asked Scott Delandy, the superpower of certain technologies. And what I'm getting from this is trust. Like, the Trustinator, so, maybe that? Can you make a sticker by the time we get to Dell Technologies World next year? >> Oh yeah, absolutely, yeah. >> Chhandomay, awesome. Great to have you back on theCUBE, >> Thank you. >> Thank you so much for sharing all the excitement what's going on. We'll talk to you next time. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, for John Troyer, my co-host, I'm Lisa Martin. We are live at VMware with day two from the Mandalay Bay Las Vegas. Stick around, John and I will be right back with our next guest. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate, 2018, brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin. Been here all day with Dave Vellante. We're joined by David Floyer now. Guys, really interesting, very informative day. We got to talk to a lot of puritans, but also a breadth of customers, from Mercedes Formula One, to Simpson Strong-Tie to UCLA's School of Medicine. Lot of impact that data is making in a diverse set of industries. Dave, you've been sitting here, with me, all day. What are some of the key takeaways that you have from today? >> Well, Pure's winning in the marketplace. I mean, Pure said, "We're not going to bump along. "We're going to go for it. "We're going to drive growth. "We don't care if we lose money, early on." They bet that the street would reward that model, it has. Kind of a little mini Amazon, version of Amazon model. Grow, grow, grow, worry about profits down the road. They're eking out a slight, little positive free cashflow, on a non-gap basis, so that's good. And they were first with All-Flash, really kind of early on. They kind of won that game. You heard David, today. The NVMe, the first with NVMe. No uplifts on pricing for NVMe. So everybody's going to follow that. They can do the Evergreen model. The can do these things and claim these things as we were first. Of course, we know, David Floyer, you were first to make the call, back in 2008, (laughs) on Flash and the All-Flash data center, but Pure was right there with you. So they're winning in that respect. Their ecosystem is growing. But, you know, storage companies never really have this massive ecosystem that follow them. They really have to do integration. So that's, that's a good thing. So, you know, we're watching growth, we're watching continued execution. It seems like they are betting that their product portfolio, their platform, can serve a lot of different workloads. And it's going to be interesting to see if they can get to two billion, the kind of, the next milestone. They hit a billion. Can they get to two billion with the existing sort of product portfolio and roadmap, or do they have to do M&A? >> David: You're right. >> That's one thing to watch. The other is, can Pure remain independent? David, you know well, we used to have this conversation, all the time, with the likes of David Scott, at 3PAR, and the guys at Compellent, Phil Soran and company. They weren't able, Frank Slootman at Data Domain, they weren't able to stay independent. They got taken out. They weren't pricey enough for the market not to buy them. They got bought out. You know, Pure, five billion dollar market cap, that's kind of rich for somebody to absorb. So it was kind of like NetApp. NetApp got too expensive to get acquired. So, can they achieve that next milestone, two billion. Can they get to five billion. The big difference-- >> Or is there any hiccup, on the way, which will-- >> Yeah, right, exactly. Well the other thing, too, is that, you know, NetApp's market was growing, pretty substantially, at the time, even though they got hit in the dot-com boom. The overall market for Pure isn't really growing. So they have to gain share in order to get to that two billion, three billion, five billion dollar mark. >> If you break the market into the flash and non flash, then they're in the much better half of the market. That one is still growing, from that perspective. >> Well, I kind of like to look at the service end piece of it. I mean, they use this term, by Gartner, today, the something, accelerated, it's a new Gartner term, in 2018-- >> Shared Accelerated Storage >> Shared Accelerated Storage. Gartner finally came up with a category that we called service end. I've been joking all day. Gartner has a better V.P. of naming than we do. (chuckles) We're looking' at service end. I mean, I started, first talking about it, in 2009, thanks to your guidance. But that chart that you have that shows the sort of service end, which is essentially Pure, right? It's the, it's not-- >> Yes. It's a little more software than Pure is. But Pure is an awful lot of software, yes. And showing it growing, at the expense of the other segments, you know. >> David: Particularly sad. >> Particularly sad. Very particularly sad. >> So they're really well positioned, from that standpoint. And, you know, the other thing, Lisa, that was really interesting, we heard from customers today, that they switched for simplicity. Okay, not a surprise. But they were relatively unhappy with some of their existing suppliers. >> Right. >> They got kind of crummy service from some of their existing suppliers. >> Right. >> Now these are, maybe, smaller companies. One customer called out SimpliVity, specifically. He said, "I loved 'em when they were an independent company, "now they're part of HPE, meh, "I don't get service like the way I used to." So, that's a sort of a warning sign and a concern. Maybe their, you know, HPE's prioritizing the bigger customers, maybe the more profitable customers, but that can come back to bite you. >> Lisa: Right. >> So Pure, the point is, Pure has the luxury of being able to lose money, service, like crazy, those customers that might not be as profitable, and grow from it's position of a smaller company, on up. >> Yeah, besides the Evergreen model and the simplicity being, resoundingly, drivers and benefits, that customers across, you know, from Formula One to medical schools, are having, you're right. The independence that Pure has currently is a selling factor for them. And it's also probably a big factor in retention. I mean, they've got a Net Promoter Score of over 83, which is extremely high. >> It's fantastic, isn't it? I think there would be VMI, that I know of, has even higher one, but it's a very, very high score. >> It's very high. They added 300 new customers, last quarter alone, bringing their global customer count to over 4800. And that was a resounding benefit that we were hearing. They, no matter how small, if it's Mercedes Formula One or the Department of Revenue in Mississippi, they all feel important. They feel like they're supported. And that's really key for driving something like a Net Promoter Score. >> Pure had definitely benefited from, it's taken share from EMC. It did early on with VMAX and Symmetrix and VNX. We've seen Dell EMC storage business, you know, decline. It probably has hit bottom, maybe it starts to grow again. When it starts to grow again, I think, even last quarter, it's growth, in dollars, was probably the size of Pure. (chuckles) You know, so, but Pure has definitely benefited from stealing share. The flip side of all this, is when you talk to you know, the CxOs, the big customers, they're doing these big digital transformations. They're not buying products, you know, they're buying transformations. They're buying sets of services. They're buying relationships, and big companies like Dell and IBM and HPE, who have large services arms, can vie for certain business that Pure, necessarily, can't. So, they've got the advantage of being smaller, nimbler, best of breed product, but they don't have this huge portfolio of capabilities that gives them a seat at the CxO table. And you saw that, today. Charlie Giancarlo, his talk, he's a techie. The guys here, Kicks, Hat, they're techies. They're hardcore storage guys. They love storage. It reminds me of the early days of EMC, you know, it's-- >> David: Or NetApp. Yeah. Yeah, or NetApp, right. They're really focused on that. So there's plenty of market for them, right now. But I wonder, David, if you could talk about, sort of architecturally, people used to criticize the two controller, you know, approach. It obviously seems to be doing very well. People take shots at their, the Evergreen model, saying "Oh, we can do that too." But, again, Pure was first. Architecturally, what's your assessment of Pure? >> So, the Evergreen, I think, is excellent. They've gone about that, well. I think, from a straighforward architecture, they kept it very simple. They made a couple of slightly, odd decisions. They went with their own NAND chips, putting them into their own stuff, which made them much smaller, much more compact, completely in charge of the storage stack. And that was a very important choice they made, and it's come out well for them. I have a feeling. My own view is that M.2 is actually going to be the form factor of the future, not the SSD. The Ssd just fitted into a hard disk slot. That was it's only benefit. So, when that comes along, and the NAND vendors want to increase the value that they get from these stacks, etc., I'm a little bit nervous about that. But, having said that, they can convert back. >> Yeah, I mean, that seems like something they could respond to, right? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> I was at the Micron financial analysts' meeting, this week. And a lot of people were expecting that, you know, the memory business has always been very cyclical, it's like the disk drive business. But, it looks like, because of the huge capital expenses required, it looks like supply, looks like they've got a good handle on supply. Micron made a good strong case to the street that, you know, the pricing is probably going to stay pretty favorable for them. So, I don't know what your thoughts are on that, but that could be a little bit of a head wind for some of the systems suppliers. >> I take that with a pinch of salt. They always want to have the market saying it's not going to go down. >> Of course, yeah. And then it crashes. (chuckles) >> The normal market place is, for any of that, is go through this series of S-curves, as you reach a certain point of volume, and 3D NAND has reached that point, that it will go down, inevitably, and then cue comes in,and then that there will go down, again, through that curve. So, I don't see the marketplace changes. I also think that there's plenty of room in the marketplace for enterprise, because the biggest majority of NAND production is for consumer, 80% goes to consumer. So there's plenty of space, in the marketplace, for enterprise to grow. >> But clearly, the prices have not come down as fast as expected because of supply constraints And the way in which companies like Pure have competed with spinning disks, go through excellent data reduction algorithms, right? >> Yes. >> So, at one point, you had predicted there would be a crossover between the cost per bit of flash and spinning disk. Has that crossover occurred, or-- >> Well, I added in the concept of sharing. >> Raw. >> Yeah, raw. But, added in the cost of sharing, the cost-benefit of sharing, and one of the things that really impresses me is their focus on sharing, which is to be able to share that data, for multiple workloads, in one place. And that's excellent technology, they have. And they're extending that from snapshots to cloud snaps, as well. >> Right. >> And I understand that benefit, but from a pure cost per bit standpoint, the crossover hasn't occurred? >> Oh no. No, they're never going to. I don't think they'll ever get to that. The second that happens, disks will just disappear, completely. >> Gosh, guys, I wish we had more time to wrap things up, but thanks, so much, Dave, for joining me all day-- >> Pleasure, Lisa. >> And sporting The Who to my Prince symbol. >> Awesome. >> David, thanks for joining us in the wrap. We appreciate you watching theCUBE, from Pure Storage Accelerate, 2018. I'm Lisa Martin, for Dave and David, thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from the Bill Graham Auditorium in San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2018, brought to you by Pure Storage. (bright music) >> Welcome to theCUBE. We are live at Pure Storage Accelerate 2018. I'm Lisa Martin also known as Prince for today with Dave Vellante. We're at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, really cool, unique venue. Dave, you've been following Pure for a long time. Today's May 23rd, they just announced FY19 Q1 earnings a couple days ago. Revenue up 40% year over year, added 300 new customers this last quarter including the Department of Energy, Paige.ai, bringing their customer tally now up to about 4800. We just came from the keynote. What are some of the things that you've observed over the last few years of following Pure that excite you about today? >> Well Lisa, Pure's always been a company that is trying to differentiate itself from the pack, the pack largely being EMC at the time. And what Pure talked about today, Matt Kixmoeller talked about, that in 2009, if you go back there, Fusion-io was all the rage, and they were going after the tip of the pyramid, and everybody saw flash, as he said, his words, as the tip of the pyramid. Now of course back then David Floyer in 2008 called that flash was going to change the world, that is was going to dominate. He'd forecast that flash was going to be cheaper than disk over the long term, and that is playing out in many market segments. So he was one of the few that didn't fall into that trap. But the point is that Pure has always said, "We're going to make flash cheaper than "or as cheap as spinning disk, "and we're going to drive performance, "and we're going to differentiate from the market, "and we're going to be first." And you heard that today with this company. This company is accelerated to a billion dollars, the first company to hit a billion dollars since NetApp. Eight years ago I questioned if any company would do that. If you look at the companies that exited the storage market, that entered and exited the storage market that supposedly hit escape velocity, 10 years ago it was 3PAR hit $250 million. Isilon, Data Domain, Compellent, these companies sold for between $1 and $2.5 billion. None of them hit a billion dollars. Pure is the first to do that. Nutanix, which is really not a storage company, they're hyper-converged infrastructure, they got networking and compute, sort of, hit a billion, but Pure is the the first pure play, no pun intended, storage company to do that. They've got a $5 billion evaluation. They're growing, as you said, at 40% a year. They just announced their earnings they beat. But the street reacted poorly because it interpreted their guidance as lower. Now Pure will say that we know we raised (laughs) our guidance, but they're lowering the guidance in terms of growth rates. So that freaks the street out. I personally think it's pure conservativism and I think that they'll continue to beat those expectations so the stock's going to take a hit. They say, "Okay, if you want to guide lower growth, "you're going to take the hit," and I think that's smart play by Pure because if and when they beat they'll get that updraft. But so that's what you saw today. They're finally free cash flow positive. They've got about a billion dollars in cash on the balance sheet. Now half a billion of that was from a convertible note that they just did, so it's really not coming from a ton of free cash flow, but they've hit that milestone. Now the last point I want to make, Lisa, and we talked about this, is Pure Storage at growing at 40% a year, it's like Amazon can grow even though they make small profit. The stock price keeps going up. Pure has experienced that. You're certainly seeing that with companies like Workday, certainly Salesforce and its ascendancy, ServiceNow and its ascendancy. These companies are all about growth. The street is rewarding growth. Very hard for a company like IBM or HPE or EMC when it was public, when they're not growing to actually have the stock price continue to rise even though they're throwing off way more cash than a company like Pure. >> Also today we saw for the first time the new CEO's been Charlie Giancarlo, been the CEO since August of 2017, sort of did a little introduction to himself, and they talked about going all in on shared accelerated storage, this category that Gartner's created. Big, big focus there. >> Yeah, so it's interesting. When I look at so-called shared accelerated storage it's 2018, Gartner finally came up with a new category. Again, I got to give credit to the Wikibon guys. I think David Floyer in 2009 created the category. He called it Server SAN. You don't know if that's David, but I think maybe shared accelerated storage's a better name. Maybe Gartner has a better V.P. of Naming than they do at Wikibon, but he forecast this notion of Server SAN which really it's not DAS, it's not SAN, it's this new class of accelerated storage that's flash-based, that's NVMe-based, eliminates the horrible storage stack. It's exactly what Pure was talking about. Again, Floyer forecast that in 2009, and if you look at the charts that he produced back then it looks like you see the market like this going shoom, the existing market and the new market just exploding. So Pure, I think, is right on. They're targeting that wide market. Now what they announced today is this notion of their flash array for all workloads, bringing NVMe to virtually their entire portfolio. So they're aiming their platform at the big market. Remember, Pure's ascendancy to a billion really came at the expense of EMC's VMAX and VNX business. They aimed at that and they hit it hard. They positioned flash relative to EMC's either spinning disk or flash-based systems as better, easier, cheaper, et cetera, et cetera, and they won that battle even though they were small. Pure's a billion, EMC at the time was $23, $24 billion, but they gained share very rapidly when you see the numbers. So what they're doing is basically staking a claim, Lisa, saying, "We can point our platform "at the entire $30, $40, $50 billion storage TAM," and their intention, we're going to ask Charlie Giancarlo and company, their aspiration is to really continue to gain share in that marketplace and grow significantly faster than the overall market. >> So they also talked about the data-centric architecture today and gave some great examples of customers. I loved the Domino's Pizza example that they talked about, I think he was here last year, and how they're actually using AI at Domino's to analyze the phone calls using this AI engine to identify accurate order information and get you your pizza as quickly as you want. So not only do we have pizza but we were showered with confetti. Lot of momentum there. What is your opinion of Pure, what they're doing to enable companies to utilize and maximize AI-based applications with this data-centric architecture? >> So Pure started in the what's called block storage, really going after the high-volume, the transaction OLTP business. In the early days of Pure you'd see them at Oracle OpenWorld. That's where the high-volume transactions are taking place. They were the first really, by my recollection, to do file-based flash storage. Back in the day it was you would buy EMC for a block, you'd buy NetApp for file. What Pure did is said, "Okay, let's go after "the biggest market player, EMC, "which we'll gain share there in block, "and then now let's go after NetApp space and file." They were again the first to do that. And now they're extending that to AI. Now AI is a small but growing market, so they want to be the infrastructure for artificial intelligence and machine intelligence. They've struck a partnership with Nvidia, they're using the example of Domino's. It's clearly not a majority of their business today, but they're doing some clever things in marketing, getting ahead of the game. This is Pure's game. Be first, get out in the lead, market it hard, and then let everybody else look like they're following which essentially they are and then claim leadership position. So they are able to punch above their weight class by doing that, and that's what you're seeing with the Domino's example. >> You think they're setting the bar? >> Do I think they're setting the bar? Yeah, in many respects they are because they are forcing these larger incumbents to respond and react because they're in virtually all accounts now. The IT practitioners, they look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant, who's in the upper right, I got to call them in for the RFP. They get a seat at that table. I would say it was interesting hearing Charlie speak today and the rest of the executives. These guys are hardcore storage geeks, and I mean that with all due respect. They love storage. It kind of reminds me of the early days of EMC. They are into this stuff. Their messaging is really toward that storage practitioner, that administrator. They're below the line but those are the guys that are actually making the decisions and affecting transactions. They're touching above the line with AI messages and data growth and things like that, but it's really not a hardcore CIO, CFO, CEO message yet. I think that will come later. They see a big enough market selling to those IT practitioners. So I think they are setting the bar in that IT space, I do. >> One of the things I thought that they did well is kind of position the power of data where, you know people talk about data as fuel. Data's really a business catalyst that needs to be analyzed across multiple areas of a business simultaneously to really be able to extract value. They talked about the gold rush, oh gee, of 1849 and now kind of in this new gold rush enabling IT with the tools. And interestingly they also talked about a survey that they did with the SEE Suite who really believe that analyzing data is going to be key to driving businesses forward, identifying new business models, new products, new services. Conversely, IT concern do we have the right tools to actually be able to evaluate all of these data to extract the value from it? Because if you can't extract the value from the data, is it, it's not useful. >> Yeah, and I think again, I mean to, we give Pure great marketing, and a lot of what they're doing, (laughs) it's technology, it's off-the-shelf technology, it's open source components. So what's their differentiation? Their differentiation is clearly their software. Pure has done a great job of simplifying the experience for the customer, no question, much in the same way that 3PAR did 10 or 15 years ago. They've clearly set the bar on simplicity, so check. The other piece that they've done really well is marketing, and marketing is how companies differentiate (laughs) today. There's no question about it that they've done a great job of that. Now having said that I don't think, Lisa, that storage, I think storage is going to be table stakes for AI. Storage infrastructure for AI is going to have to be there, and they talked about the gold rush of 1849. The guys who made all the money were the guys with the picks and the axes and the shovels supplying them, and that's really what Pure Storage is. They're a infrastructure company. They're providing the pickaxes and the shovels and the basic tools to build on top of that AI infrastructure. But the real challenges of AI are where do I apply and how do I infuse it into applications, how do I get ROI, and then how do I actually have a data model where I can apply machine intelligence and how do I get the skillsets applied to that data? So is Pure playing a fundamental catalyst to that? Yes, in the sense that I need good, fast, reliable, simple-to-use storage so that I don't have to waste a bunch of time provisioning LUNs and doing all kinds of heavy lifting that's nondifferentiated. But I do see that as table stakes in the AI game, but that's the game that Pure has to play. They are an infrastructure company. They're not shy about it, and it's a great business for them because it's a huge market where they're gaining share. >> Partners are also key for them. There's a global partner summit going on. We're going to be speaking, you mentioned Nvidia. We're going to be talking with them. They also announced the AIRI Mini today. I got to get a look at that box. It looks pretty blinged out. (laughing) So we're going to be having conversations with partners from Nvidia, from Cisco as well, and they have a really diverse customer base. We've got Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport Formula One, we've got UCLA on the CIO of UCLA Medicine. So that diversity is really interesting to see how data is being, value, rather, from data is being extracted and applied to solve so many different challenges whether it's hitting a race car around a track at 200 kilometers an hour to being able to extract value out of data to advance health care. They talked about Paige.ai, a new customer that they added in Q1 of FY19 who was able to take analog cancer pathology looking at slides and digitize that to advance cancer research. So a really cool kind of variety of use cases we're going to see on this show today. >> Yeah, I think, so a couple thoughts there. One is this, again I keep coming back to Pure's marketing. When you talk to customers, they cite, as I said before, the simplicity. Pure's also done a really clever thing and not a trivial thing with regard to their Evergreen model. So what that means is you can add capacity and upgrade your software and move to the next generation nondisruptively. Why is this a big deal? For decades you would have to actually shut down the storage array, have planned downtime to do an upgrade. It was a disaster for the business. Oftentimes it turned into a disaster because you couldn't really test or if you didn't test properly and then you tried to go live you would actually lose application availability or worse, you'd lose data. So Pure solved that problem with its Evergreen model and its software capability. So its simplicity, the Evergreen model. Now the reality is typically you don't have to bring in new controllers but you probably should to upgrade the power, so there are some nuances there. If you're mixing and matching different types of devices in terms of protocols there's not really tiering, so there's some nuances there. But again it's both great marketing and it simplifies the customer experience to know that I can go back to serial number 00001 and actually have an Evergreen upgrade is very compelling for customers. And again Pure was one of the first if not the first to put that stake in the ground. Here's how I know it's working, because their competitors all complain about it. When the competitors are complaining, "Wow, Pure Storage, they're just doing X, Y, and Z, "and we can do that too," and it's like, "Hey, look at me, look at me! "I do that too!" And Pure tends to get out in front so that they can point and say, "That's everybody following us, we're the leader." And that resonates with customers. >> It does, in fact. And before we wrap things up here a lot of the customer use cases that I read in prepping for this show all talked about this simplicity, how it simplified the portability, the Evergreen model, to make things much easier to eliminate downtime so that the business can keep running as expected. So we have a variety of use cases, a variety of Puritans on the program today as well as partners who are going to be probably articulating that value. >> You know what, I really didn't address the partner issue. Again, having a platform that's API-friendly, that's simple makes it easier to bring in partners, to integrate into new environments. We heard today about integration with Red Hat. I think they took AIRI. I think Cisco's a part of that partnership. Obviously the Nvidia stuff which was kind of rushed together at the last minute and had got it in before the big Nvidia customer show, but they, again, they were the first. Really made competitors mad. "Oh, we can do that too, it's no big deal." Well, it is a big deal from the standpoint of Pure was first, right? There's value in being first and from a standpoint of brand and mindshare. And if it's easier for you to integrate with partners like Cisco and other go-to-market partners like the backup guys you see, Cohesity and Veeam and guys like Catalogic are here. If it's easier to integrate you're going to have more integration partners and the go-to-market is going to be more facile, and that's where a lot of the friction is today, especially in the channel. >> The last thing I'll end with is we got a rain of confetti on us during the main general session today. The culture of Pure is one that is pervasive. You feel it when you walk into a Pure event. The Puritans are very proud of what they've done, of how they're enabling so many, 4800+ customers globally, to really transform their businesses. And that's one of the things that I think is cool about this event, is not just the plethora of orange everywhere but the value and the pride in the value of what they're delivering to their customers. >> Yeah, I think you're right. It is orange everywhere, they're fun. It's a fun company, and as I say they're alpha geeks when it comes to storage. And they love to be first. They're in your face. The confetti came down and the big firecracker boom when they announced that NVMe was going to be available across the board for zero incremental cost. Normally you would expect it to be a 15 to 20% premium. Again, a first that Pure Storage is laying down the gauntlet. They're setting the bar and saying hey guys, we're going to "give" this value away. You're going to have to respond. Everybody will respond. Again, this is great marketing by Pure because they're >> Shock and awe. going to do it and everybody's going to follow suit and they're going to say, "See, we were first. "Everybody's following, we're the leader. "Buy from us," very smart. >> There's that buy. Another first, this is the first time I have actually been given an outfit to wear by a vendor. I'm the symbol of Prince today. I won't reveal who you are underneath that Superman... >> Okay. >> Exterior. Stick around, you won't want to miss the reveal of the concert tee that Dave is wearing. >> Dave: Very apropos of course for Bill Graham auditorium. >> Exactly, we both said it was very hard to choose which we got a list of to pick from and it was very hard to choose, but I'm happy to represent Prince today. So stick around, Dave and I are going to be here all day talking with Puritans from Charlie Giancarlo, David Hatfield. We've also got partners from Cisco, from Nvidia, and a whole bunch of great customer stories. We're going to be right back with our first guest from the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Motorsport F1 team. I'm Lisa "Prince" Martin, Dave Vellante. We'll be here all day, Pure Storage Accelerate. (bright music)

>> 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)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World, 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and it's Ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back here on theCUBE. We continue our live coverage here from Dell Technologies World 2018. We are live, we are in Las Vegas. I'd say it was kind of warm when we first got here, but it's chilled off a little bit so I hope the weather is a little bit better wherever you are. But it's red hot inside here as far as what's happening on the show floor. Along with Stu Miniman, I'm John Walls. It is now our pleasure to welcome to our set, Susan Sharpe who's a senior consultant product manager at Dell. Susan, good to see you. >> Thank you very much. >> John: And Brian Henderson, director of Storage Portfolio Product Marketing at Dell EMC. Brian, good to have you both. >> Thank you >> Cube, rookies right? This is your-- >> I'm a rookie. >> First-timer >> Your debut, right? >> Yes >> First-timer >> Glad to break you in that way. It's good to have you here. Let's talk about the show. Just first off. Because we are starting to wind down, just a little bit. But you know strong attendance. I've been out on the solutions expo floor, that's really cool. A lot of great stuff going on out there. So the two of you what's your take on what you've seen here over the last three days? >> Yeah, I think there's a lot of transformation, right? It's all about transformation I think we're seeing that across the industry overall. Everything is changing everything is connected. It's all about apps these days. It's all about digitizing your business. Anywhere you can add technology to really add that element of your technology and digital modernization to your business. It's really starting to take shape, I think. A couple of years back, we were talking it but it wasn't really happening. And now we're seeing this huge trend towards everybody is actually starting to do it. >> John: Making it real, right? >> We're making it real. >> Alright Susan what do you think? >> So, I think he summarized it really well, I would just add to that automation and intelligence. Looking for systems to provide the insights and intelligence about the environment and simplify people's work. >> Brian and Susan, since it is your first time on the program tell us a little bit about what you've worked on. I've got some history with you, you're both what we call legacy EMC now, I guess. Like myself, I never worked for Dell EMC but I did work for a company that used to be called EMC. >> Absolutely, yeah we go way back Stu and I. Right now we're seeing a lot of sensible decisions being made. I'd say if you go way back, There was just a lot of things happening, there was a lot of a lot of smart moves being made these days. Michael Dell obviously made a huge investment in picking up EMC and for a lot of us, it's super exciting to see kind of it come together and there's been a lot of changes a lot of investments in the technologies of the future. Things like Cloud IQ which we're going to talk about. But it's been really fun. >> Great and Susan, what projects are you working on these days? >> So, Cloud IQ is my primary focus. As we talk more about the product I'll give some examples. But, we started with Cloud IQ very focused on one particular storage platform and now what we're looking at doing is expanding that across multiple platforms. So I get to be singularly focused on the Cloud IQ, but looking at it spanning across multiple platforms. >> I attended an event that Dell held towards the end of last year, they called it IQT and it was IOT with intelligence put together and some of us the analysts it was like okay, I see what you're doing but IOT everybody knows. Cloud IQ I think there's intelligence built into it. One of the themes, I've actually been looking this week, we've talked about intelligent storage, and intelligent management for a couple of decades in our industry but maybe explain a little bit more about the product and why is this actually intelligent now. No offense to the things we've tried in the past (Susan laughs) >> Susan: Sure >> But definitely, to your point Brian, it feels a little more real some of these things we're talking about. >> Yeah, absolutely so if you see what's going on with the industry today, everybody's connecting things and you know we've been collecting a lot of data in a very secure way from our customers for years. Just until recently we started to kind of talk about that and market that capability. It's really exciting what we can do with it. We make sure and we honor each customer their privacy rights, of course. But you're able to do a lot of in-depth analysis, collection We're able to look for anomalies in the system. So, the analogy I like to use is like a Fitbit for storage. It's not just storage, so we're kind of starting at storage which is the exciting part we're starting with unity we're now directed availability on the SC series which was formerly Compellent and then we're going to expand that to VMAX we're going to expand that to Xtremio so we're going to go cross portfolio with that and, can we talk about virtualization? >> Sure >> So we're going to expand into the vmware layer as well. So we're going to really start with a discrete use case we've got what, over 3,500 arrays already connected today. We're adding about 100 per week So, it's really exciting to see the data that we're able to get. We give it back to our customers and partners actually, so a lot of our key partners they want to be able to act as that intermediary for their customer and give them guidance on what to do. So, we've opened that up. >> Let me get into the Fitbit analogy. So what is the health that we're looking at there because we could all relate to that, right? We're looking at my pulse and blood pressure, all those things so what's the pulse and the blood pressure inside stories that you're looking at? >> A perfect lead in, so you talk about the typical metrics from a Fitbit in terms of the human body. The metrics that we're looking at in terms of the health and the categories that we're looking at are the typical things that you would care about in terms of your storage environment. So the things like data protection, are you maintaining your data protection windows and recovery point objectives and ensuring that your data is being protected the way that you expect. Things like capacity and ensuring that you are not at an imminent risk of running out of capacity. Nobody likes that phone call at two in the morning so being able to be proactive about indicating when storage administrators need to start taking action to be able to prevent that call at two in the morning. So some of those areas are where we're looking at our health score. >> Susan, I think back years ago EMC was one of the leaders in doing some of this. It was the phone home capability and we understood what was there. Customers always say, "Oh! The tech showed up with some part "that was ready to fail before we even knew." How is this different? What's this update? How did this change really how businesses are working when it comes to everything? >> I'm glad you lead with that because I think it's really important as a side note to emphasize that that is the foundation and has been the foundation for proactive health for many years. Now what we're doing is we're adding on additional areas of focus like the example that I gave for the data protection. That wouldn't result in the phone home necessarily and it doesn't need to result in the storage engineer showing up or the drive showing up at the door. Instead we can proactively alert our storage administrators to the fact, again, that their data is not being protected with the service level that they expect, and then provide that clear remediation about what they need to do to bring those into that compliance. So instead of break/fix type things, it's more about how they can better optimize their environment to be able to meet the goals that they have. >> When you're talking about support these days I mean that games changing right? >> Absolutely >> And so, as you develop new capabilities and new evaluation tools I mean your service in general, the support your giving, you've got to come out with almost like a new paradigm is it not? How is that changing in your world now? >> So, we see that I mean Susan talked about what we've done in the past how we're changing it and now it's, I go back to analogies right? So you used to go to the doctor when you got sick now it's all about wellness so you're encouraged to go a little more often to get a checkup, so we're doing the same types of things. We give health scores on a range of zero to 100 and we're able to drill in to those specific parameters that Susan talked about to be able to show people how to kind of set up a best practices environment. So we're really starting to get a lot more proactive about how people can understand the health of their system. We now have an app so people can actually check it out remotely. You could be on a beach somewhere on your vacation and you don't have to worry about your system because you can quickly scan it, and check in on the status of your system. So that's what I think people want, they want more access to things so they're able to proactively understand it instead of react and it's all crazy. >> Let me ask you about the number let's just pretend 85, I got 85 whatever, is that telling me that I'm doing something wrong? Or that something has gone wrong within the system? I mean, what is that telling me exactly about what irregularity has occurred? Is it because of something by commission, or is it omission and I've got a systemic problem? >> Well that's a great question. It could be any of those things, right? So, one of the main things that we're looking at, I gave the example, for instance, of a storage pool that is already oversubscribed because we have great efficiencies on our storage systems. But if that pool is oversubscribed and is starting to reach using our predictive analytics we can identify when that pool is starting to reach full capacity starting within a quarter. And so, by being able to look at that it may be that a storage administrator provisioned more storage in a given pool than was intended. But it may just be that the storage ended up being consumed faster than what was expected by everyone involved. So, it's not necessarily that someone did something wrong per se, but it's that it's now time to pay attention take action be proactive and alleviate the risk. >> I got you. >> Brian, walk us through just some of the basics of this product itself. >> Brian: Sure >> Is it something stand alone? Is it part of a maintenance package? >> Brian: Yeah yeah yeah >> Available today? How many customers are using this? >> Sure, so the product became available in kind of an early release capacity when we announced Unity two years back. Since then it's grown over 3,500 array. We're probably up around 4,000 arrays now. And we keep adding about 100 per week. The product is built with our own pivotal cloud foundry so it can be kind of ported across multiple different clouds it lives in the cloud and so you can access it anywhere, and what you're able to do is quickly get the health score. So it's plugged into your system, the back-end is also plugged into our big data lake so we're understanding what's happening across multiple systems, but we give specific guidance to each system. It's going to be really really valuable when we span it across the entire portfolio. Because then you'll get this dashboard kind of health score across the entire environment and you're basically looking at the dashboard of systems and you'll see kind of the red, yellow, green type markings of what to do next. Like Susan said, you're not going to find out everything just from that number, you'll drill in and what they've done is they've programmed in remediation tips for each one. So you're able to start really kind of high level and then drill into each component after that. >> Does that come with unities? Is it a SaaS offering? >> Comes free with that. It's SaaS offering that comes with that. >> Great, so maybe Susan walk us through this expansion that we've talked a little bit about. Once it's on the next platform everybody that has the platform gets it? >> Everybody has access to that, so Cloud IQ, one thing I want to add and I will get to that in just a moment is the benefit this is probably obvious already but the benefit of the fact that it is hosted in the cloud means that customers don't have anything to deploy and just like your smart phone, you get all of the latest upgrades with no effort at all. And we have a little "What's new in Cloud IQ" feature that you can always be up to date. So, the process is this it's very simple once the customer sets up the storage system and then the secure pipe, so secure remote services for heritage EMC products and support assist for the SC series bringing that data into the data lake then at that point the customer simply logs onto CloudIQ.DellEMC.com supply us their support credentials and they will see the systems that are being managed by Cloud IQ. And if I may just add another thing, we were talking about the proactive health score that is based on rules and best practices from the subject matter experts for each platform and those scans, those health checks start running within the first hour of the systems being in Cloud IQ so you're automatically, customer's are automatically getting the benefit of Cloud IQ. Excuse me. >> So, is it self-fix then? I mean, if I see red do I have the tools to get to yellow get to green? Or do I-- (stammers) What do I do? Do I call you? Or am I equipped enough that I can plug the leak myself? >> Absolutely, I'd say most of the issues are best practices recommendations. So you'll be able to get in there and see alright, uh something happened. Let's go back to the health analogy. If your resting heart rate is 75 and then one day it's all of a sudden 125, there's probably an issue, right? So that's uh that's a bad health score. >> Right, that's a red. (Susan laughs) >> That's a red flag what you need to do is probably get a little more exercise or maybe there's something stressing you out. That's kind of a similar analogy of what's happening. So, there's something in the system we have an anomaly prediction system that's part of this and so if you're normal IOPS pattern is a certain thing and then one day it's really really low or really high compared to the average we're also going to red flag that and we're going to tell you you ought to just look at what's happening in your environment. Most of the issues we're going to say, "Okay, you're running out of space. "There's a configuration issue. "Your network may not be hooked up just right "Go check it out and by the way, "based on your signature pattern "we're going to actually recommend what to do next." So we're collecting all these problem signatures and that's able to kind of get to a resolution very quickly. >> Yeah, Susan I know one of the things that people attending this show from the Dell EMC slide love the most get to talk to a lot of customers. So what kind of asks they're giving you, what kind of feedback they're giving you, what's on their wish list and you know, general feedback on Cloud IQ. >> The general feedback is more, faster. (laughs) We talked about the platforms that we're going to be adding in. There's a lot of enthusiasm about that. Those are based on asks from last year, so we are addressing those asks. And now that they see the momentum, they're wanting us to continue that momentum and continue to expand work Cloud IQ will be applied. I would say, hands down, that's the biggest request. And I love that request! I would love to see Cloud IQ expand as much as possible. >> Well here's to wishing 100s across the board for everybody's score card. Nothing but green, right? That's all we want. (Susan laughs) >> Brian: Absolutely >> Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you >> John: We appreciate the time and the insight. >> Thank you very much >> John: Fitbit for your IT operations All right back with more you are watching theCUBE here we are live at Dell Technologies World 2018 and we're in Las Vegas. (upbeat music)