>> Live from Los Vegas. It's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Los Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is our wall-to-wall coverage. We're wrapping up day one. I'm Dave Alonte, my cohost here at this segment is Stu Miniman. Jon Siegal is here as the vice president of product marketing, cubulum from Dehli MC. Good to see you again Jon. >> Great to be back as always guys! >> And I love that you brought a customer, Suzan Pickett is here. >> That's what I do, by the way. You realize that, that's my new thing. >> Suzan is the VP and director of Converged Infrastructure at US Bank. >> Thank you for having me. >> Welcome, one of my banks. I got a lease with US Bank. You guys are great. >> Thank you. >> Great to have you guys. >> Let's start with a customer, if that's okay? >> Absolutely. >> Tell us about your role, you got CI in your title that's interesting. >> I do. >> That's a relatively new trend, explain that. >> Yeah absolutely, so I've been at the bank a couple years now and my teams focus on Converged and Hyperconverged Infrastructure, delivering solutions and infrastructure as a service for our business. >> You guys have been working together for a while if I understand it Jon, right? Talk a little bit about what's happening here at the show maybe give us a quick overview of what's happening in CI and HCI in your world. >> Absolutely, so a lot going on as you saw today in Dell Tech cloud announcement. HCI was a key pillar there. Really VxRail, in particular, was featured as the simple and fast foundation for the Dell Tech cloud both as the on-prem manage version as well as, as you heard, the Data Center as a service. So really exciting to see how HCI continues to evolve and it's use cases around cloud and infrastructure as a service, as well as platform as a service as well. So a lot of exciting announcements there. In addition to that, just this past week, by the way, we also, since you mentioned CI, Converged Infrastructure, we just announced that we re-upped our agreement with Cisco, a new multiyear agreement extension to continue to innovate with Cisco on the VxBlock, which, as you know, was the pioneer in this, Converged Infrastructure space and with all the recent integrations we've done now with VMware, VxBlock as well as HCI, is really built to be a on-prem foundation for the cloud. >> Yeah so, this goes back to 2009, when Cisco and VMware and EMC got together and created this concept of Converged Infrastructure. There were other competitors in the market, but you guys kind of lead that trend, and so when you go back to that years ago, that's our storage and networking and compute, they were different parts of the organization. I presume you guys went through a similar journey. You had to put all that together. Herd some calves. And what did that do for your business? What was your journey like to CI? >> I think we're still on that journey, but I think it's also evolving as we go more Agile and more DevOps, more software-defined, we're seeing a lot more blending of the teams as well so we're creating a lot of virtual teams that encompass not just infrastructure but security, developers, networking as well and really being able to deliver that infrastructure's service, platform as a service, end-to-end provisioning for our business lines. >> Suzan, I love that story because I remember talking to, when this started, you talk to the storage group and they'd say, "Oh my gosh, you're going to take away my job." I'm like, "You know that security thing that they've been yelling at you to fix for a while? You talk about the new business apps that we need to do. These are the types of jobs that we want you to do." I heard you talk about Agile and DevOps and all these things. Talk a little bit about, what are the pressures you're facing from the business and the relationship between your group that help you to meet those now. >> Sure, well the first thing we did was we created an infrastructure automation services team and people looked at us like we're a little crazy to do that and we pull those highly, highly motivated potentials from within the organization that we already had to focus on automation and get the foundation for infrastructure as a service and get that part right. Something as basic as provisioning a virtual machine would take 12 weeks or longer and through our journey with Kubernetes today, containers, vRealize Automation Suite, on both Converge and Hyperconverge, VxFlex. We're now reducing that down to about three days and we anticipate, with a lot of our sprints and iterations, that we're going to be getting that down to less than a day within the next quarter. >> So John Furry says that automation is the killer app for infrastructure, so are you guys, are you building essentially out on infrastructure as a service platform, where people used to call it private cloud. I don't know if you use that term still. I think it's still valid. >> We do, yeah. >> How's that going? What's been the business impact of that so-called private cloud? >> We had a Business Critical Application that would often take year release cycles, more than 12 weeks to get a server, primarily focusing on physical servers, and now what we're doing is we're partnering with them with not only the business, the application folks, the developers, the middleware teams, networks, security, but also all of the infrastructure teams to deliver that faster speed to market, and so now they're down to days now to provision. They actually gave us a stat the other day that said, "By using our automation with Kubernetes on Hyperconverge VxFlex, that they were able to have cost avoidance of hiring a bunch of people to build physical servers. So that in and of itself was a huge win, but the fact that we can repurpose and releverage that automation, those workflows, the orchestration models, means that we can continue this conversation with the next business line and the next business line and keep telling that story and it's a good one. >> Jon I'd live to hear from what Suzan was saying and there's so many of the modern things that they're doing. When you look at your customer base, how are they doing on that journey? We used to always ask, in the earlier days, it was like, alright how much was I just eliminating sub-silos but pretty much doing the same apps and same processes before or have I really gone through some transformation? >> I tell you what, we've seen quite a bit of transformation in our customer base because they had to. You look at now, as you see with US Banks, they're now transforming their organization to support DevOps, right? That's an entirely new realm for them to focus on. That means they need to make infrastructure easier and simpler so we're finding that is really, I think, that's the catalyst and that they're realizing that the way to do this is let's make infrastructure as simple as possible. Infrastructure service. Make that platform as a service available so our customers can spend less, wait, our IT department can spend less time on the speeds and fees, if you will, of maintaining infrastructure, more time innovating up the stack versus down the stack, right? >> Alright Suzan, I got to ask a question Jon probably doesn't want me to ask you. You're trying to simplify, 'cause you're doing all this stuff that's not really adding value to your business, you want to do stuff that's going to make you more competitive. Well why don't you just throw all this stuff in the cloud? >> Good question and I think that eventually we will have a multicloud strategy, but it is a bank and we don't want to be in the news for a data breach and that's the real answer but also because we want to, again, lay that foundation for an on-premise, solid infrastructure as a service with service catalogs at the business. We can then drive that product taxonomy and they know that they get a good, solid product from IT and then we extend that into the cloud so as much as we can do that, and maybe there will be some cloud native apps down the road that go 100% in the public cloud. I don't have a crystal ball. I suspect there will be, but again we want to do it right and we think this is the right foundation to lay for that. >> You want to have total control over, certainly, your mission critical apps, I'm presuming, right? Maybe put some stuff up. I'm sure you have plenty of stuff in the cloud. Well why Dell EMC? >> I think it goes back to our strategic partnership. It's always been that strong partnership, that enablement, and that continuous feedback loop. We need something, we go talk to our product teams. We get that back, we get it back from our product teams, so it's not always perfect, and there are competitors out there, but at the end of the day, when we look at the Dell Technologies family and that ecosystem and our ability to integrate, iterate, automate within that family, it just helps us stream like that and standardize. >> We've heard this morning from a lot of folks. Michael Dell talked about it. Jeff Clark talked about it. Companies want to consolidate the number of suppliers, certainly infrastructure suppliers, throwing sass forget it, so many apps now. Are you seeing that? Is there pressure to consolidate the number of suppliers, or do you still have, in certain cases, where you really want to go best of breed, so-called best of breed, for some niche app, or do you want to consolidate suppliers? >> So I always want to standardize because that's going to help our automation story, but I still want best of breed, and so that's one of the primary reasons that we're standardized on Dell Technologies today. VxFlex being one of them and Converged Infrastructure being another. There are use cases for multi-vendor strategy, but again, you would look at the right solution for the right job at the right time. >> Okay Jon, that was a totally loaded question, so can you be both a portfolio company like yours and still be best of breed and if so, how so? >> Well I think what we are, we certainly are a portfolio company in the way that, but I think we have leading infrastructure, leading solutions in each case. You take things like Hyperconverge and Converge, great example of that, and I think what we see at the US Bank is that that porfolio of solutions is what's actually enabling US Bank to essentially address all other challenges, right? Whether it's the IS, whether it's the crown jewel applications that Suzan's trying to support, whether it's the DevOps that they're trying to actually build out right now. We've got best of breed solutions for each of those as well within our portfolio. And also, I would say that we're really focused on, ultimately, a portfolio with a purpose meaning that we're taking our networking, for example, portfolio, you just talk to Drew Shulkin. Together with out HCI portfolio, and we're ensuring that they work really seamlessly together so that in the case of, for example, working with, say VxRail or VxRack, we're able to automate all the networking for a HCI environment or at least 98% of it. That's really, again, taking but that's because we're best of breed and porfolio at the same time. >> Yeah so, I'm throwing all kinds of loaded questions out here, and I want to understand this because as independent observers you get Company A says this, Company B says that, but the customer's ultimately the arbiter. How do you, maybe not define, but how do you look at best of breed, what is best of breed to you? >> I look at the technology that's going to make me look good and that's going to make my teams look good and that's not just day one, that's day two and I think that's where the differentiator is as well. We've always found that Dell Technologies is there to support us. Stuff breaks, right? Your car needs oil, your tires need rotating, and it's the same with equipment in the Data Center. How those companies react and they support and they have your back when that happens, I think is the key differentiator and we always found Dell Technologies to be there for us. >> So I'm hearing the breadth, the porfolio. We haven't talked about services but I know that's a key part of it. >> Well, Suzan I hear you talking about day two. CI helped simplify that day one and then, as it matured, it worked more on the day two, and HCI even more. When you talk about the cloud solutions from Dell EMC, that cloud operating model. When you think about public cloud, I don't think about what version I'm on, it takes care of that. When I hear some of the solutions from Dell, it's getting to that model. How are they doing along that that spectrum, I guess, from the, "Okay I need to do the RCM and manage when I do the updates" to "I don't even think about it anymore." >> Sure, I think it is still something that we all care about as much as we're told we shouldn't care about it, I care. I want to make sure that we're doing the right things at the right time. I think it's a journey. I think we've come a long way in the last few years and I think that every year it gets better and as we start extending to that multicloud, obviously that's going to drive some of that solutioning as well. I think we'll continue to see improvement in that area. >> What is something that you'd like to see Jon do to make your life better? (laughs) Besides cut prices, you can't say cut prices. >> Alright, cut prices. >> Every year you cut prices. >> Let's talk about that deal. I think just continuing to be there, continuing to represent, bringing forth the products, the products team, helping us be strategic and also be very tactical. While I have this one last opportunity 'cause I don't know where we are timewise. I just want to shout out to my team. Right, so it's not just the Dell Technologies team that's bringing all this to the table, it's my team and the organization and my peer teams as well. We just keep sharing, we keep collaborating, and we keep iterating. >> Yeah Jon, one of the things, talk about collaboration, my understanding is Suzan's part of one of the user groups here. You know, big community. >> Yes. >> We always talk about at these shows. Maybe you can share that. >> Yeah so Suzan is actually a new board member for our Converge user group which has been around for several years now and she just joined a few months ago. >> I did. >> And I think that we talk about collaboration and feedback. Suzan is representing not just her own team, she's representing teams around IT around the world. And I think she's a great example of providing feedback, not just at Dell EMC directly, but to other users as well, and best practices and tips and tricks. We have a user group tomorrow at three o'clock. I think couple big executives might be there as well, so it's going to be a lot of fun. So tomorrow at three o'clock. I think it's, at least, our sixth annual that we've had here. But the user group itself, I think exemplifies as much as you've been talking about 'cause that's evolved from being what used to just be about a user group just about blocks, VxBlocks, now it's about CI, it's about HCI, it's about VxBlock, it's about Dell Tech cloud. We have VMware on the panel as well as Dell EMC so I think you see the user group has evolved with our customers and with our portfolio. >> It's a community, it's a mechanism for people to say, "How did you do that" or "How should I do this" or "How do I get my team motivated" or "How do I collaborate with security?" These are tough questions and so I think just having that network of people that can come together and ask those questions and be transparent and be authentic, that's what it's about. >> Appearance, problem-solving, sharing ideas. >> Yeah. >> You've been a Converged Infrastructure client, customer for a number of years. >> I have. >> So you've seen pre-acquisition, how has the Dell EMC merger affected your perception of the company and your relationship with them? >> I think in the last year, or the previous year, we were all waiting to see where things fell and what was going to happen, and I think now it's found it's feet, right? We're starting to see some announcements in both the Converged and the VxFlex space, and it's really starting to come together and I think that story, the Dell Technologies family story is really starting to come together where maybe in the last 12, 18 months, there was a little bit of unknown there and so, we just kind of sitting back and waiting and curious but keep doing what we're doing using that best of breed, the best practices that we have on the floor. >> Alright awesome. Suzan, Jon, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a great segment. >> Thank you. >> I appreciate it. Alright, that's a wrap for day one. Dave Alonte, Stu Miniman, John Furry's over there. Lisa Martin, Rebecca Knight is here. This is day one, we got wall-to-wall coverage. Tomorrow, day two and day three. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Michael Dell's coming on tomorrow. We got Pat Kelsey going to be on tomorrow. Tom Sweet's coming on later on in the week. Awesome coverage, check out thecube.net. This is Dave Alonte, Stu Miniman. We'll see you tomorrow, thanks for watching.

(intense orchestral music) >> Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante, welcome to this special CUBE presentation, where we're covering the Dell EMC Integrated Data Appliance announcement. You can see we also are running a crowd chat, it's an ask me anything crowd chat you can login with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, and ask any question. We've got Dell EMC executives, we're gonna hear from VMware executives, we've got the analyst perspective, we're gonna hear from customers and then of course we're gonna jump into the crowd chat. With me is Beth Phalen, who is the President of Dell's EMC, Dell EMCs Data Protection Division, Beth, great to see you again. >> Good to be here, Dave. >> Okay so, we know that 80% of the workloads are virtualized, we also know that when virtualization came on the scene it caused customers to really rethink their data protection strategies. Cloud is another force that's causing them to change the way in which they approach data protection, but let's start with virtualization. What are you guys doing for those virtualized customers? >> Data protection is crucial for our customers today, and more and more the vAdmins are being expected to protect their own environments. So we've been working very closely with VMware to make sure we're delivering the simplest data protection for VMware, taking into account all of the cloud capabilities that VMware is bringing to market and making sure we're protecting those as well. We have to do that without compromise, and so we have some really exciting innovations to talk about today. The first of those is the DP4400, we announced this a few weeks ago, it is a purpose-built appliance for mid-sized customers that brings forward all of our learnings from enterprise data protection, and makes it simple and easy to use, and at the right price point for our mid-sized customers. We're the extension into VMware environments and extensions into the cloud. >> Okay, so I mentioned up front that cloud is this disruptive force. You know people expect the outcome of cloud to be simplicity, ease of management, but the cloud adds IT complexity. How are you making data protection simpler for the cloud? >> And the cloud has many different ways the customers can leverage it. The two that we're gonna highlight today are for those customers that are using VMware Cloud on AWS, we're now enabling a seamless disaster recovery option, so customers can fail over to VMware Cloud on AWS for their DR configurations. And on top of that, we're very excited to talk about data protection as a service. We all know how wildly popular that is and how rapidly it's growing, and we've now integrated with VMware vCloud Director to allow customers to not have to have a separate backup as a service portal, but provide management for both their VMware environments and their data protection, all integrated within VCD. >> Okay great, so, we know that VMware of course is the leader in virtualization, we're gonna cut away for a moment and hear from VMware executives, we're gonna back here we're gonna do a deep dive, as I say we got great agenda, we're gonna explore some of these things; and then of course there's the crowd chat, the ask me anything crowd chat. So let's cut over to Palo Alto, California, in our studios over there, and let's hear from the VMware perspective and Peter Burris, take it away, Peter. (intense orchestral music) >> Thanks, Dave! And this is Peter Burris, and I can report that in fact we have another beautiful day here in California. And also, we've got a great VMware executive to talk a bit about this important announcement. Yanbing Li is the Senior Vice President and GM for the Storage and Availability Business Unit at Vmware, welcome back to theCUBE Yanbing. >> It's great to be here, thank you for having me Peter. >> Oh absolutely we've got a lot of great stuff to talk about but let's start with the obvious question. Why is it so important to VMware and Dell EMC to work on this question, data availability, data protection? >> You know I have a very simple answer for you. You know Dell EMC has been the marketing leader for the past decade, and they are also a leading solution for all of our VMware environment, it's very natural that we do a lot of collaboration with them. And what's most important, is our collaboration is not only go-to-market collaboration, in labeling our joint customers, but also deep engineering level collaboration, and that is very very exciting. Lots of our solutions are really co-engineered together. >> So, that is in service to something. And now putting all this knowledge, all this product together to create a solution, is in service of data protection but especially as it relates to spanning the cloud. So talk to us a little bit about how this is gonna make it easier for customers to be where they need to be in their infrastructure. >> Certainly VMware has been also on a journey to help with our customers, their transition from data center to the cloud, and data protection is a very crucial aspect of that; and we're looking for simpler, scalable, more robust data protection solutions. You know VMware launched our VMware Cloud on AWS service last year, and Dell EMC has been with us since day one; they're the first solution to be certified as a data protection service for VMware Cloud on AWS. We also work with 4500 VCCP partners, this is the VMware Cloud partner program partners that, you know they are building cloud services based on VMware software defined data center stack. And we are also working with Dell EMC on integrating their data protection source with vCloud, their vCloud Director software, so that you know our customer has integrated data protection for our VCCP partners. So you know across all the cloud initiatives, we are working very closely with Dell EMC. >> So bringing the best of the technology, the best of this massive ecosystem together, to help customers protect their data and give them options about where they operate their infrastructure. >> Definitely. I'm personally very excited about their recent announcement that has been to the Data Domain Virtual Edition, where they're offering a subscription-based data protection bundle that can allow a VMware Cloud on AWS instance to back up their data, you know, using a subscription model, and you can backup 96 terabytes for any single SDC cluster in VMware Cloud on AWS. So they're definitely driving a lot of innovation not only in technology, but also in consumption, how to make it easier for customers to consume. And we're excited to be a partner with Dell EMC together on this. >> Fantastic! Yanbing Li, VMware, back to you, Dave! >> Thanks, Peter. We're back for the deep dive, Beth Phalen and joining us again, and Ruya Barrett, who's the Vice President of Marketing for Dell EMC's Data Protection Division, thanks guys for coming on. Ruya, let me start with you. Why are customers, and what are they telling you, in terms of why they're acquiring your data protection solutions? >> Well, Beth talked a little bit about the engineering effort, and collaboration we've been putting in place, and so did Yanbing with VMware, so whether that's integration into vCenter, or vSphere, or vRealize Operations Manager, vRealize Automation or vCloud Director, all of this work, all of this engineering effort, and engineering hours is really to do two things: deliver simply powerful data protection for VMware customers >> But what do you mean by simple? >> Simple. Well, simple comes in two types of approaches, right? Simple is through automation. One of the things that we've done is really automate across the data protection stack for VMware. Where as 99% of the market solutions really leave it off at policy management, so they automate the policy layer. We automate not only the policy layer, but the vProxy deployment, as well as the data movement. We have five types of data movement capabilities that have been automated. Whether you're going directly from storage to protection storage, whether you're doing client to protection storage, whether you're doing application to protection storage, or whether you're doing Hypervisor Direct to application storage. So it really is to automate, and to maximize the performance of to meet the customer's service levels, so automation is critical when you're doing that. The other part of automation could be in how easy cloud is for the admins and users, it really has to do with being able to orchestrate all of the activities, you know very simply and easily. Simplicity is also management. We are hearing more and more that the admins are taking on the role of doing their backups and restores, so, our efforts with VMware have been to really simplify the management so that they can use their native tools. We've integrated with VMware for the vAdmins to be able to take backup and restore just a part of their daily operational tasks. >> So, when you talk about power, is that performance, you reference performance, but is it just performance, or is it more than that? >> That's also a great question, Dave, thank you. Power really, in terms of data protection, is three fold, it's power in making sure that you have a single, powerful solution, that really covers a comprehensive set of applications and requirements, not only for today, but also tomorrow's needs. So that comprehensive coverage, whether you're on-premise, or in the cloud is really critical. Power means performance, of course it means performance. Being able to deliver the highest performing protection, and more importantly restores, is really critical to our customers. Power also means not sacrificing efficiency to get that performance. So efficiency, we have the best source ID duplication technology in the market, that coupled with the performance is really critical to our customers. So all of these, the simplicity, the comprehensive coverage, the performance, the efficiency, also drives the lowest cost to protect for our customers. >> Alright, I wanna bring Beth Phalen into the conversation, Beth, let's talk about cloud a little bit. A lot of people feel as though I can take data, I can dump it into an object store in the cloud, and I'm protected. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, we hear that same misconception, and in fact the exact opposite is true; it's even more important that people have world class data protection when they're bringing cloud into that IT environment, they have to know where their data is, and how is protected and how to restore it. So we have a few innovations that are going on here for a long time, we've had our hyper cloud extensions, you can do cloud tiering directly from Data Domain. And now we've also extended what you can do if you're a VMware Cloud on AWS customer, so that you can use that for you cloud DR configuartion, fail over to AWS with VMware Cloud, and then fail back with vMotion if you choose to; and that's great for customers who don't wanna have a second site, but they do wanna have confidence that they can recover if there's a disaster. On top of that we've also been doing some really great with VMware, with vCloud Director integration. Data protection as a service is growing like crazy, it's highly popular around the globe as a way to consume data protection. And so now you can integrate both your VMware tasks, and your data protection tasks, from one UI in the Cloud Director. These are just a few of the things that we're doing, comprehensively bringing data protection to the cloud, is essential. >> Great, okay. Dell EMC just recently made an announcement, the IDPA DP4400, Ruya what's it all about? Explain. >> Absolutely, so, what we announced is really an integrated data protection appliance, turnkey, purpose-built, to meet the specific requirements of mid-sized customers, it's really, to bring that enterprise sensibility and protection to our mid-sized customers. It's all inclusive in terms of capabilities, so if you're talking about backup, restore, replication, disaster recovery, cloud disaster recovery, and cloud long-term retention, all at your fingertips, all included; as well as all of the capabilities we talked about in terms of enabling VM admins to be able to do all of their daily tasks and operations through their own native tools and UI's. So it's really all about bringing simply powerful protection to mid-sized customers at the lowest cost to protect. And we now also have a guarantee under our future proof loyalty program, we are introducing a 55 to one deduplication guarantee for those exact customers. >> Okay. Beth, could you talk about the motivation for this product? Why did you build it, and why is relevant to mid-sized customers? >> So we're known as number one in enterprise data protection we're known for our world-class dedupe, best in class, best in the world dedupe capabilities. And what we've done is we've taken the learnings and the IP that we have that's served enterprise customers for all of these years, and then we're making that accessible to mid-sized customers And there were so many companies out there that can take advantage of our technology that maybe couldn't before these announcements. So by building this, we've created a product that a mid-sized company, may have a small IT staff, like I said at the beginning, may have VM admins who are also responsible for data protection, that they can have what we bring to the market with best-in-class data protection. >> I wanna follow up with you on simple and powerful. What is your perspective on simple, what does it mean for customers? >> Yeah, I mean if you break it down, simple means simple to deploy, two times faster than traditional data protection, simple means easier to manage with modern HTML5 interfaces that include the data protection day-to-day tasks, also include reporting. Simple means easy to grow, growing in place from 24 terabytes up to 96 terabytes with just a simple software license to add in 12 terabyte increments. So all of those things come together to reduce the amount of time that an IT admin has to spend on data protection. >> So, when I hear powerful and here mid-sized customers, I'm thinking okay I wanna bring enterprise-class data protection down to the mid-sized organization. Is that what you means? Can you actually succeed in doing that? >> Yeah. If I'm an IT admin I wanna make sure that I can protect all of my data as quickly and efficiently as possible. And so, we have the broadest support matrix in the industry, I don't have to bring in multiple products to support protection on my different applications, that's key, that's one thing. The other thing is I wanna be able to scale, and I don't wanna have to be forced to bring in new products with this you have a logical five terabytes on-prem, you can grow to protecting additional 10 terabytes in the cloud, so that's another key piece of it, scalability. >> Petabytes, sorry. >> And then-- >> Sorry. Petabytes-- >> Petabytes. >> You said terabytes. (laughs) >> You live in a petabyte world! >> Of course, yes, what am I thinking. (all laugh) and then last but not least, it's just performance, right? This runs on a 14GB PowerEdge server; you're gonna get the efficiency, you can protect five times as many VMs as you could without this kind of product. So, all of those things come together with power, scalability, support matrix, and performance. >> Great, thank you. Okay, Ruya, let's talk about the business impact. Start with this IT operations person, what does it mean for that individual? >> Yeah, absolutely. So first, you're gonna get your weekends back, right? So, the product is just faster, we talked about it's simpler, you're not gonna have to get a PhD on how to do data protection, to be able to do your business. You're gonna enable your vAdmins to be able to take on some of the tasks. So it's really about freeing up your weekends, having that you know sound mind that data protection's just happening, it works! We've already tried and tested this with some of the most crucial businesses, with the most stringent service-level requirements; it's just gonna work. And, by the way, you're gonna look like a hero, because with this 2U appliance, you're gonna be able to support 15 petabytes across the most comprehensive coverage in the data center, so your boss is gonna think your just a superhero. >> Petabytes. >> Yeah exactly, petabytes, exactly. (all laugh) So it's tremendous for the IT user, and also the business user. >> By the way, what about the boss? What about the line of business, what does it mean to that individual? >> So if I'm the CEO or the CIO, I really wanna think about where am I putting my most skilled personnel? And my most skilled personnel, especially as IT is becoming so core to the business, is probably not best served doing data protection. So just being able to free up those resources to really drive applications or initiatives that are driving revenue for the business is critical. Number two, if I'm the boss, I don't wanna overpay for data protection. Data protection is insurance for the business, you need it, but you don't wanna overpay for it. So I think that lowest cost is a really critical requirement The third one is really minimizing risk and compliance issues for the business. If I have the sound mind, and the trust that this is just gonna work, then I'm gonna be able to recover my business no matter what the scenario; and that it's been tried and true in the biggest accounts across the world. I'm gonna rest assured that I have less exposure to my business. >> Great. Ruya, Beth, thank you very much, don't forget, we have an ask me anything crowd chat at the end of this session, so you can go in, login with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, and ask any question. Alright, let's take a look at the product, and then we're gonna come back and get the analysts perspective, keep it right there. (intense music) >> Organizations today, especially mid-sized organizations, are faced with increased complexity; driving the need for data protection solutions that enable them to do more with less. The Dell EMC IDPA DP4400 packages the proven enterprise class technologies that have made us the number one provider in data protection into a converged appliance specifically designed for mid-sized organizations. While other solutions sacrifice power in the name of simplicity, the IDPA DP4400 delivers simply powerful data protection. The IDPA DP4400 combines protection software and storage, search and analytics, and cloud readiness, in one appliance. To save you time and money, we made it simple for you to deploy and upgrade, and, easily grow in place without disruption, adding capacity with simple license upgrades without buying more hardware. Data protection management is also a snap with the IDPA System Manager. IDPA is optimized for VMware data protection. It is also integrated with vSphere, SQL, and Oracle, to enable a wider IT audience to manage data protection. The IDPA DP4400 provides protection across the largest application ecosystem, deliver breakneck backup speeds, more efficient network usage, and unmatched 55 to one average deduplication. The IDPA DP400 is natively extensible to the cloud for long-term retention. And, also enables simple, and cost effective cloud disaster recovery. Deduplicated data is stored in AWS with minimal footprint, with failover to AWS and failback to on-premises quickly, easily, and cost effectively. The IDPA DP4400 delivers all this at the lowest cost-to-protect. It includes a three year satisfaction guarantee, as well as an up to 55 to one data protection deduplication guarantee. The Dell EMC IDPA DP4400 provides backup, replication, deduplication, search, analytics, instant access for application testing and development, as well as DR and long-term retention to the cloud. Everything you need to deliver enterprise-class data protection, in a small integrated system, optimized for mid-sized environments. It's simply powerful. (upbeat music and rhythmic claps) >> Cool video! Alright, we're back, with Vinny Choinski, who is the Senior Analyst for the Validation Practice at ESG, Enterprise Strategy Group. ESG is a company that does a lot of research, and one of the areas is they have these lab reports, and they basically validate vendor claims, it's an awesome service, they've had it for a number of years and Vinny is an expert in this area. Vinny Choinski, welcome to theCUBE great to see you. >> How you doin' Dave? Great to see you. >> So, when you talk to customers they tell you they hate complexity, first of all, and specifically in the context of data protection, they want high performance, they don't wanna have to mess with this stuff, and they want low cost. What are you seeing in the marketplace? >> So our research is lining up with those challenges; and that's why I've recently done three reports. We talked to how EMC is addressing those challenges and how they are making it easier, faster, and less expensive to do data protection. >> So people don't wanna do a lot of heavy lifting. They worry about the time it takes to do deployment. So, what did you find, hands on, what'd you find with regards to deployment? >> Yeah, so for the deployment, we really yeah, we focused on the DP4400 and you know how that's making it easier for the IT generalist to do data protection deployment, and management. And what we did, I actually walked through the whole process from the delivery truck to first backup. We had it off the truck and racked up and powered up in about 30 minutes, so, it's a service sized appliance, pretty easy, easy to install. Spent 10 minutes in the server room kinda configuring it to the network, and then we went up to an office, and finished the configuration. After that I basically hit go on the configuration button, completely automated. And I simply monitored the process until the appliance was fully configured. Took me about 20 minutes, you know, to add that configuration to the appliance, hit go, and at the end, I had an appliance that was ready for on-site, and backups extended to the cloud. >> So, that met your expectations? It meshed with the vendors claims? >> It was real easy. We actually had to move it around a couple times, and you know, this stuff used to be huge you know, big box, metal gear. >> Refrigerators. (laughs) >> Refrigerators. It was a small appliance, once we installed it, got a note from the IT guy, had to move it. No tools, easy rack, the configuration was automated. We had to set network parameters, that's about it. >> How about your performance testing, what did that show? >> So we did some pretty extensive performance testing. We actually compared the IDPA Dell appliances to the industry recognized server grid scaled architecture. And basically we started by matching the hardware parameters of the box, CPU, memory, disk, network, flash, so once we had the boxes configured apples to apples shall we say, we ran a rigorous set of tests. We scaled the environment from a hundred to a thousand VMs, adding a hundred VMs in between each backup run. And what we found as we were doing the test was that the IDPA reduced the backup window significantly over the competitive solution. A 54 to 68% reduction in the backup window. >> Okay. So again, you're kind of expectations tied into the vendor claims? >> Yep. You know the reduction in backup time was pretty significant that's a pretty good environment, pretty good test environment, right, you got the hundred to a thousand VMs. We also looked at the efficiency of data transfer, and we found that IDPA outperformed the competitor there as well, significantly. And we found that this is do to the the mature data domain deduplication technology. It not only leverages, like most companies will, the VMware Changed Block Tracking API, but it has it's own client-side software that really reduces, significantly reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred over the network for each backup. And we found that reduced the amount of data that needs to be transferred against the competitor by 74%. >> What about the economics, it's the one of the key paying points obviously for IT professionals. What did you see there? >> Yep, so, there's a lot that goes into the economics of a data protection environment. We summed it up into what we call the cost to protect. We actually collected call home data from 15,000 Dell EMC data protection appliances deployed worldwide. >> Oh cool, real data. >> Real data. So, we had the real data, we got it from 15,000 different environments, we took that data and we we used some of the stuff that we analyzed, the price that they paid for it, how long has it been in service, what the deduplication rates they're getting, and then the amount of data. So we had all the components that told us what was happening with that box. So that allowed us to to distill that into this InstaGraphic that we see up here, which takes 12, shows 12 of the customers that we analyzed. Different industries, different architectures, on the far left of this InstaGraphic you're gonna see that we had a data domain box connected to a third-party backup application, still performing economically, quite well. On the far right we have the fully integrated IDPA solution, you'll see that as you put things better together, the economics get even better, right? So, what we found was that both data domain and the IDPA can easily serve data protection environments storage for a fraction of a penny per month. >> Okay. Important to point out this is metadata, no customer data involved here, right, it's just. >> It's metadata that's correct. >> Right, okay. Summarize your impressions based on your research, and your hands on lab work. >> Yeah, so I've been doing this for almost 25 plus years, I've been in the data protection space, I was an end user, I actually ran backup environments, I worked in the reseller space, sold the gear, and now I'm an analyst with ESG, taking a look at all the different solutions that are out there, and, you know data protection has never been easy, and there's always a lot of moving parts, and it gets harder when you really need a solution that backs up everything, right? From your physical, virtual, to the cloud, the legacy stuff, right? Dell EMC has packaged this up, in my opinion, quite well. They've looked at the economics, they've looked at the ease of use, they've looked at the performance, and they've put the right components in there they have the data protection software, they have the target storage, they have the analytics, you can do it with an agent, you can do it without an agent. So I think they've put all the pieces in here, so it's not an easy thing in my opinion, and I think they've nailed this one. >> Excellent. Well Vinny, thanks so much for for comin' on and sharing the results of your research, really appreciate it. Alright, let's hear from the customer, and then we're gonna come back with Beth Phalen and wrap, keep it right there. (upbeat techno music) >> I was a fortune 500 company, a global provider of product solutions and services, and enterprise computing solutions. The DP4400 is attractive because customers have different consumption models. There are those that like to build their own, and there are those that want an integrated solution, they want to focus on their core business as opposed to engineering a solution. So for those customers that are looking for that type of experience, the DP4400 will address a full data protection solution that has a single pane of glass, simplified management, simplified deployment, and also, ease-of-management over time. >> Vollrath is a food service industry manufacturer, it's been in business for 144 years, in some way we probably touch your life everyday. From a semantic perspective, things that weren't meeting our needs really come around to the management of all of your backup sets. We had backup windows for four to eight hours, and we were to the point where when those backups failed, which was fairly regular, we didn't have enough time to run them again. With Dell EMC data protection, we're getting phenomenal returns, shorter times. What took us eight hours is taking under an hour, maybe it's upwards of two at times for even larger sets. It's single interface, really does help. So when you take into account how much time you spend trying to manage with old solutions that's another unparalleled piece. >> I'm the IT Director for Melanson Heath, we are a full service accounting firm. The top three benefits of the DP4400 simplicity of not having to do a lot of research, the ease of deployment, not having to go back or have external resources, it's really designed so that I can rack it, stack it, and get going. Having a data protection solution that works with all of my software and systems is vital. We are completely reliant on our technology infrastructure, and we need to know that if something happens, we have a plan B, that can be deployed quickly and easily. (upbeat techno music) >> We're back, it's always great to hear the customer perspective. We're back with Beth Phalen. Beth let's summarize, bring it home for us, this announcement. >> We are making sure that no matter what the size of your organization, you can protect your data in your VMware environment simply and powerfully without compromise, and have confidence, whether you're on-prem or in the cloud, you can restore your data whenever you need to. >> Awesome, well thanks so much Beth for sharing the innovations, and we're not done yet, so jump into the crowd chat, as I said, you can log in with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, ask any questions, we're gonna be teeing up some questions and doing some surveys. So thanks for watching everybody, and we'll see you in the crowd chat.

>> Narrator: Live from Chicago, Illinois, it's theCUBE, covering VeeamOn 2018. Brought to you my Veeam. >> Welcome back to Chicago everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage, and we are covering VeeamOn 2018, #VeaamOn. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my cohost Stuart Miniman, Duncan Epping is here, Chief Technologist, Storage and Availability at VMWare and the world's number one blogger in virtualization, Yellow Bricks, yellow-bricks.com. Duncan, thanks very much coming to theCUBE. Good to see you. >> No problem, my pleasure, it's been a while. I actually hoped to be on the show probably six, seven, eight years ago, I don't know how long it is, but I've watched many episodes. So it's great to be part of it. >> Well great, Duncan one of the biggest problems is you're so busy, every year at VM World you were totally booked up, so no thanks so much we're so glad we could do this. >> So Stu and I remember the peer insight we did many many years ago back when we had Boonyon on recently, and he was talking about when VMWare sort of created virtualization, it pushed the bottle neck around. It created a lot of stress on the storage systems. And WMWare for years dealt with that through API integration and the like and very well sort of covered. But I wonder if you could take us through your perspectives of the journey of storage at VMWare and generally, or specifically, and virtualization generally. >> Yeah, it's a good question. I think everyone that has been part of the community has faced all of the different challenges from a storage perspective. I mean, Stu, you now what kind of problem EMC had when VMWare first started doing virtualization. And I think the key reasons for these were fairly straightforward. When we started virtualization and we started leveraging shared storage systems, those shared storage systems were never designed with virtualization in the back of their minds. They were designed for physical workloads, maybe one or two machines connected to it, you know in larger volume it may be 10 or 15, but not 10 or 15 physical hosts with hundred of virtual machines. So we started noticing is that from a performance perspective systems were lagging, we were doing all sorts of things to the storage systems that they weren't expecting, virtual machine snapshots. They were seeing IO patterns that they had never seen before. Instead of sequential IO we had a lot of random IOs so we had to start doing different things from a storage perspective so as you said, we started with APIs, we had the vSPhere APIs for IO filtering, we have the Divi APIs, the array integration, so that we can offload some of the functionality, but of course on top of that what we started doing within VMWare is we started exploring what we could do smarter from a storage point from our stance. So not just looking at how we can help the ecosystem, but also what we can do from our perspective, so there were two main efforts over the past couple of years. The first one is virtual volumes. It has taken a while before the adoption ramped up. I think part of that is mainly because a lot of our customer base was still on vSphere 5.5. Now that we're starting to see broader adoption of vSphere 6.0 and actually 6.5 and 6.7, we're starting to see the adoption of stuff like virtual volumes go up as well. That is also due to the fact that our partners like Pure Storage, Nimble, HP with 3PAR has been pushing or have been pushing VVols tremendously. So they've done a great job, and we're starting to see a lot of customers adopting VVols, and that way we're getting around some of the limitations that we have from a traditional storage perspective. >> Explain that, what are customers telling you about the benefits that they're getting out of VVols and VVol and VVol adoption? >> Well, there's two main things. It kind of depends on what kind of problems you're facing, but a lot of customers come to us with management issues and scalability issues. From a scalability perspective we have larger customers that literally have thousands of volumes. If you look at an E6 cluster today you're limited in terms of the numbers of volumes you can connect to a cluster. So that's one thing. As soon as they start moving to VVols now they're not managing those individual volumes anymore but they're managing the storage system as a whole, and they start creating policies, and that's where the management aspect comes into play. So it becomes a lot easier to manage, because instead of having thousands of volumes to select from, they don't normally have to look at a spreadsheet, for instance, to figure out where to place a virtual machine, now they simply make a policy and the policy engine will figure out where to place that virtual machine. >> Dave: It sounds like cloud. >> It actually is, you know, the cloud version of, cloudified version of storage I would say. But it brings a lot of benefits. And the funny thing is that we've been talking about policies and policy engines for a long time, even in the cloud, but try to come up with one cloud that actually has a decent policy engine. Hardly anyone has that today. From a storage perspective I think storage policy based management framework that VMWare has is quite unique. Well now we're starting to see that popping up in other areas, and that's the strange thing about it. >> Always back to the software mainframe Stu. >> Yeah, and Duncan one of the things we've really seen, a transition for, it took us about a decade to try and fix storage in a virtualized environment, and today most things are built either understanding virtualization, or at least that's part of the puzzle, and then of course VVols led us into was the ability for vSANs. Help us kind of transition that threshold as to how that's just kind of a given underneath for vSAN and other solutions like it. >> Yeah, if you look at vSAN it has been around for a while. The beta was in 2013, as you guys know. We have a large adoption, at least we saw a large increase over the last couple of years, I would say the last two years. You guys have spoken with Yangbing before, so you know about the business side of vSAN, I'm not going to cover that, but if you look at it from a technology perspective we stared developing this 2008, 2009, that's when we started thinking about what we could do different from a storage perspective. There were already some companies doing something in the hyperverge space and we figured we could do something significantly different than they were doing. They had a storage solution that sat on top of the hypervisor, we own the hypervisor so we can create something that sits within the hypervisor, and that's when we started looking at including these different technologies, so we started looking in how can we introduce things like deduplication and compression? What can we do with for ROBO solutions? Can we do something like stretch clustering in an easy way? There are a lot of stretch cluster solutions out there, but if you look at a stretch clustering solution today it typically takes weeks to implement that. If you look at something like vSAN, it was our aim to actually to be able to deploy something like that from a storage perspective within hours instead of weeks, right? And we've been able to achieve that, and it has been a huge undertaking, but I think it's fair to say that it has been rather successful. >> All right, Duncan, help connect the dots to where we are here at VeeamOn. It's funny, I think Veeam started out heavily in virtualization, still heavily involved in virtualization, they've got a v in the beginning of their name. When I hear the keynote this morning, a lot of hyper, reminded me of before we had, before hyperconverge fully took over, VMWare tried to call it a hypervisor converge system around VMWare, so talk to us a little bit about data protection, the Veeam relationship and how that fits into things like vSAN and vSphere? >> Yeah I think, I talk to a lot of customers as a Chief Technologist, it's part of my role to talk to customers and have discussions about what's on top of their mind. Data protection is always one of those things that comes up. I would say it's always in the top three. Whenever you talk to a CIO, a CTO, protection of the data, availability of data, resiliency, reliability, it's fairly important. Veeam of course, for us, is a great partner. Primarily because of the simplicity of the features and the products that they offer. Whenever I talk to a customer and they explain how difficult it is to manage their backup and recovery solutions I always point them to a partner like Veeam simply because it's going to make their life a lot easier if you ask me. And I can see that Veeam is slowly transitioning. As you mentioned, the v is in front of the name. The v is in front of our name as well, but we know that it's not, the whole world isn't just VMWare and the whole world isn't just virtual. There's a lot of other different solutions out there, and actually Veeam's looking at other revenue streams as well. I would argue, though, if you're looking at something like the edge space which I think that more or less exploring at looking at things like IoT, there's going to be some form of virtualization within that, whether that's VMWare based or another solution of course is going to be the question. That is something that we'll need to figure out in the upcoming years, but I think there's a big opportunity out there. If you ask me, the keynote was really interesting. I kind of missed the end of details. I'm hoping that the closing keynote is going to give some more details on what they will be doing in the IoT space, how they see their solution evolving from that point of view because it's a market that's still being developed, but that's definitely going to be interesting. >> So Duncan it's interesting to hear you say that when you talk to customers data protection is in the top three, even amongst CIOs. It used to not be that way. Data protection was always a bolt on, it was an afterthought, it was kind of one size fits all. What's changed? >> Well I think the importance of the data has changed. If you look over the last 10 years whenever you talk to any company out there that has lost any significant amount of data they understand what the value was of the data that they were hosting. I think the big difference over the past 10 years is in the past we had applications like email, maybe some file services and that's it. But now everything revolves around applications, and that's also the shift that I'm seeing in the industry. Also from an IT perspective, right? In the past, over the past decade I think everyone has been focused on the infrastructure layer. If you look at something like VBlock, very much infrastructure focused. If you look at something like hyperconverged solutions, very much infrastructure focused. But now whenever we talk to customers, customers are more and more interested in what we can do for the application layer. What kind of benefits do we have for Exchange, for Oracle, for SAP, you name it? I think that's also a big change that's happening in the industry right now. One of the things from a technical perspective, and there may be others, but when VMWare really became prominent it was wonderful but we were reducing the number of physical resources, and the one workload that took a lot of physical resources was backup, and then sort of Veeam swept in and took advantage of that sea change. What's the technical constraint now when you think about things like multi cloud and SaaS and IoT, data's much more distributed, it's out of the control necessarily of a single platform. So from a technicals perspective, what's the big challenge and sort of the gate to architectures today? >> Well as you said, the distribution of data is the big challenge as it stands right now from a technical perspective. I think the biggest challenge that most of the players in this space, and not just Veeam, some other players as well, will have is trying to figure out how to control and manage their data. Other platforms are facing similar challenges. And no one really has solved this problem yet. We're starting to see some players in this space that have solutions that sit out in Azure, that sit out in Google Cloud, but it's a very challenging solution, and I think if you ask me, and this is something that I've said internally as well, the company that is capable of managing and owning the data is the company that's probably going to be most successful in the cloud war that's now happening. I think that's the most critical aspect. Workloads can move around, but data is very difficult to move around and own as well. >> Duncan one of the discontinuities we see in the marketplace that you mentioned earlier, wondering if you can talk to, in the enterprise in the data center, how do we get them to get to that next version? Comfortable with it, it's stable, it works. I look at the cloud, I'm running Microsoft Azure or AWS I'm running the version that they want. How do we help close that gap? Because from a security standpoint, from a features standpoint, we need to move there, but you know it seems to be just one of the greatest disconnects we see between kind of my data center and somebody else's cloud. >> That is a great question. I think we had a lot of challenges in the past. I think it's fair to say with vSphere 5.0 it was a great release, 5.5 among great releases. But the challenges that we have from an upgrade perspective was typically V centered and all of the components connected to it. It's not just the vSphere platform but if you look at the vSphere platform, the challenges that we had were all of the components integrating with it, whether that's something like vROps, VRA's, or VREalize Automation, but it could also be something like Evermar or maybe Veeam. So there were so many different components we had to take into account. So what we started doing within VMWare was simplifying the architecture from a vSPhere perspective. If you look at vSAN for instance, it used to be a solution where we had multiple functions spread out across different virtual machines. I'm now trying to bring that back into a single virtual machine again. Actually dumbing it down, making it easier to upgrade. So that is something that is actively happening within VMWare, and it is something that we started with 6.0, and that's also the reason why we see the adoption from 6.0 to 6.5 and 6.5 to 6.7, is at a must faster pace than 5, in the 5 code stream, so 5 to 5.1, for instance, took a lot longer for a lot of customers or 5.1 to 6.0, took extremely long for a lot of customers. It's the key reason is complexity from our infrastructure stand. While we're changing that, we're evolving that in the upcoming years. >> Duncan it's the last question here, but as the technologist, things that you're looking at that are exciting to you, that you know, get your juices flowing? >> Yeah, that's an interesting one because it's something that I've been thinking about recently. I've been doing vSphere for the last, well wasn't even called vSphere back then, but I've been doing this for the last 12 years, virtualization. Thirteen years maybe something like that. At least as a consultant and then as a technologist and technical marketing, but recently I'm starting to look more and more at the edge space. For computing, IoT, I think that's a really interesting space, especially because there isn't really significant market. Well, there is a significant market out there, but there isn't really one player out there that really stands out. No one has really figured out what customers would like to do with it and how our customers are going to use it. So the edge computing space and IoT's a really interesting thing and especially because of the distributed aspect is one of the things that I've been always been passionate about, vSphere clusters, which is a distributed mechanism. So distributed computing is definitely something that has my interest. >> All right if you care about virtualization, VMWare, follow the yellow brick road, yellow-bricks.com. Duncan, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me guys. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from Chicago, VeeamOn 2018. We'll be right back. (techno music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, its theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, SilconANGLE's premier live streaming show where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise we are live day two of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend, welcoming back a CUBE alumni, Gil Shneorson Senior Vice President of VxRail and GM at Dell EMC. Hey Gil. >> Thank you for having me back. >> Well we're excited to talk to you. So looking at some of the announcements that came out today where Dell EMC says they're the number one market leader in global hyper-converged infrastructure, and you've said that's happened really quickly. Tell us a little bit about that leadership. >> I think we found a way to take a systems approach to what is otherwise a software-defined world. So we found a way to get all of the economical benefits of hyper-converged driven by software, at the same time own the responsibility for those systems to be up and running and life cycle managed, taking away more of the responsibility then customers would have to do it on their own and I think that recipe has led us to a leadership position very, very quickly. >> So, you know we talked earlier today, can you expand upon some of that responsibility alleviating from customers, specifically around SLAs, around IO when you software-define or software-deliver storage, kind of the operating model changes. Can you expand upon that? >> Yeah, that's a very good point. So look at software-defined storage technology, for example. We happen to work with VSAN, which is the leading software-defined technology, but when customers choose to deploy software-defined solutions on their own, they're doing something that they haven't been doing in many, many years, which is take on the responsibility for up timing. It used to be that storage vendors, you know held responsibility for storage up time, for IOPs, for performance. So I think what we're doing is we found the balance. We've been getting a lot of benefits of hyper-converged and software defined, but at the same time own the responsibility from an operations standpoint to make it more like a traditional architecture and what they know. And that combination is very, very important. So for example, the ability to look at the entire system from software to driver to firmware, and always deliver a known good package because something that customers would have to do on their own, and they're all capable of doing it, but if they could choose not to do it why not offload it to somebody like us that does it for them. And so while there are two deployment models, we have a very massive growth in the systems approach, model (music drowns out voice) and I think people hand off things that they could do but they choose not to because they can focus on other things in the IT shop. For example, digital transformation and really the path to the multicloud by adding more and more layers on top of infrastructure that they can trust. >> Speaking of multicloud, I was in Jeff Clarke's opening session this morning. He was talking about, he gave a stat, I think it was 50 plus to 56% of users surveyed are using more than one cloud. So one of the things I also saw in the press release about the advancements of VxRail and VxRack, giving customers a clear path to adopt VMWare-based multiclouds. What is that clear path? How was that differentiated? So let's remember that both of those products, VxRail and VxRack SDDC are products that are built on the VMWare stack. They're optimized for VMWare users. They're not agnostic to anything. They're really VMWare on VMWare with automation and hardware and packaging that we do as a system. By delivering that robust infrastructure in one of the announcements that we made was that we created the VMWare validated design to add the rest of the VMWare stack and create an infrastructure as a service environment. That inherently comes with the ability to offload workloads to VMWare's service provider, cloud service provider, including Amazon and Google and the likes, but really a very vast network. So you take an infrastructure that's based on VMWare and harden is designing the system, you add on top of it to a prescriptive VVD exactly how to add the layered toppings like VRealize Automation, and through that inherently you get the entire VMWare value proposition going from a local solution to multicloud. And so the announcement was that validated design, which is very important, and then the announcement also included all sorts of hardware innovations or small evolutions like NVMe drives and 25 gigabyte ethernet, and higher memory CPUs. All of those are just to make sure that the infrastructure itself is ready to support that software stack that ultimately leads them to a full IO solution and offloading to the multicloud that are available to them. >> So big announcement or big set of education last year at VM World was the VCF. VMWare Cloud Foundation. It is the foundation of VMWare's infrastructure cloud play. Can you help talk through the importance in how VCF differentiates VMWare, VxRail, VxRack from competitors. >> So VCF is a software bundle. It's also an orchestrator that allows customers to manage multiple VMWare clusters within context. It's called a workload domain, and they can manage those clusters, and they can deploy them, they can life cycle management, they can microsegment them with NSX, and they can move workloads between them and to the cloud. VxRack SDDC is a system that basically lays down the VCF bits on a system premanufactured, and that's how we benefit from VCF as a differentiator. What we've done in addition we've announced 14G servers to be supported in that architecture. And we've also extended it to a, for example, a dial home on a system level. A lot of serviceability features, a physical view of the service as part of the graphic user interface. So not only does VCF differentiate VMWare by having the ability to finally leverage the entire stack, our value add is in taking that in the physical to virtual integration, if you will, life cycle management, and serviceability around servicing all of the system, which makes it a very robust infrastructure. So today customers have two choices. They can buy VxRack with VCF on top of it, or they can get to the same outcome with VxRail following a VVD prescriptive. And so what we do is we let them choose. If they're not ready for an NSX deployment they'd start with one, if they are they'll start with the other. Either way the outcome is going to be a full (music drowns out voice) from VMWare that can offload to multicloud. We just give them choices of how to get there. >> So want to kind of play off the value add for a second. We're at this event, the event theme Make It Real, making digital transformation real is a mandatory for businesses, right? They have the opportunity to take and apply data to multiple cases, use cases, within their organization to deliver differentiation. So you talked about a lot of the value out of the choices that you're giving customers from an IT perspective, what are some of the business, when you're sitting there with customers, what are some of the business outcomes they're looking for this technology to help them deliver? >> So that's a good question. So two levels of an answer. One is that by getting an automated infrastructure, IT itself can free up cycle to actually implement the (mumbles). It also frees up time for those organizations who are embarking on native cloud application development. For example, to deploy pivotal Cloud Foundry on top of (mumbles) Which is another prescriptive reference cycle actually that we have out there. And allow them to innovate. What I'm most interested in when I visit customers is what workloads are running on HCI. And I ask them and they say, is it testive, is it mission critical? And I'm happy to see that by now HCI, and specifically our products, have become mission critical, data centered, so all the way from the core to the edge running, banking applications a scale, running trading applications scale, running manufacturing application scale, running ports all over the world. I mean there's one customer that runs ports with automated trucks where the AI that runs those trucks is running on a VxRail. I mean, it's very, very exciting to see how our technology has been adopted into mainstream, into mainstream application compute. I think that's very exciting. And IT can enable more of those applications run and develop more because they have to do less in managing the physical infrastructure across multi companies. >> So Lee Caswell, Senior Vice President of Products over at VMWare brought in his customer from Celtic yesterday, and he validated that. They went all in from a legacy three tier architecture on Dell SE, they were Dell customer before, went with the Xrack, sorry VxRail, mission critical applications out the gate. So I'm seeing a shift. Last year around this time we were doing education and saying, you know, what is HCI versus a traditional architecture? Are you seeing that same thing at the show, as a shift that customers are no longer asking oh what is VxRail or VxRack, but that very thing is how can we accelerate digital transformation using VxRail or VxRack? >> Yeah, we have a very large percentage of the meetings, in fact almost 200 meetings that were requested to review the technology with us initial. That's a lot, that shows a lot of interest. There are a few customers that still don't know, and we've met some of those at the show. There are a few customers who are still contemplating whether HCI is right for them. And by the way, to those customers we say, don't rush into it, you have choices. If that's what you used to, what the economics were for you, there is no reason to rush into HCI. It's just depending on if you're going to get a better outcome than what you have today. But a very common question from customers is okay, then why do I need traditional storage? And for somebody from my vantage point, let's say there's a lot of bare-metal computing out there that requires traditional. But we think that traditional storage becomes more specialized, you know specific DR use cases, very large ratios between compute and storage and requires shared storage, but the HCI type of technology is definitely, and we see it with market growth, right? The market is growing at 60 to 70%. We're growing over 150% and taking share in this growing market, but we're still very, very small if you compare it to the whole IT tam. So there's a lot of way to go. Partly is that we still need to work on the last mile, being sure that our products are more mature, that we figure out how to operate them in a real life environment. So there's work to do, but the economical benefits are so strong that customers are making the choice more and more and more, and they trust us to know how to close the gaps that we still have. And it's a very collaborative effort between our and our customers. We listen, we respond very quickly, and so we can keep the machine going. >> It sounds like a momentum that we talked about with you I think at VM World back in eight or so months ago continues. And we want to thank you for stopping by theCUBE, sharing what's new with VxRack, VxRail, and how customers can be successful there. >> Absolutely. >> Thanks, Gil. >> Thank you for having me again. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live in a concert at Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We'll be right back with our next guest after a short break.