>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's the CUBE, with digital coverage of Dell Technologies world. Digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to the CUBE'S coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, The Digital Experience. I'm Lisa Martin joined by a couple of guys from Dell Technology. Please welcome Martin Glynn, the senior director for product management for PowerMax Martin good morning. >> Good morning. >> Nice to see you. And joining Martin is Matthew Paul, the senior director of product management for PowerFlex at Dell Technologies. Matthew, nice to see you. >> Nice to see you thanks for having us Lisa. >> So our virtual cube this year can't be with you guys in person or the 14,000 other folks that usually attend at Dell Technologies World but a lot of opportunities to engage customers and partners and present analysts digitally, which is great. So Matthew, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to us about what's new with PowerFlex, this was the kind of the end of the rebrand under the power portfolio that Dell Technologies undertook the last couple of years formerly the VXFlex excuse me, from Scale IO, what's new with PowerFlex? >> Yeah, that's a spot on. So really the idea of us aligning the full power portfolio is kind of a big deal, right? Part of the winning roadmap to at IO, kind of assigned to our customers and our field and everyone that software defined storage is a critical part of the Dell Technologies strategy. If you think about PowerFlex, just to kind of level set, it's really a software defined infrastructure kind of system that brings you the best of traditional three tier infrastructure and the best of HCI infrastructure while being able to make that experience really simple in the enterprise while still delivering exemplary really great performance and scale. In terms of new things, well, just real quick, in terms of kind of new things, we brought interesting topics like native Async replication, secure snapshots, some end to end lifecycle management pieces. So a lot of great innovation in the last year. >> And that was some of the recent announcements. Tell me Matthew, from a customer perspective since you've announced Asynchronous replication snapshots, what's the customer adoption, customer feedback been like? >> Yeah, it's been fantastic. We continue to grow this market really strong, you know, we're focusing on high end large enterprise customers working towards, bringing down also into kind of enterprise and commercial customers, so it'll make things easier to use. But very strong adoption and great investments here at Dell with this product. >> All right, so PowerFlex, Martin, let's go to you PowerMax, talk to us about PowerMax. And then also how it kind of fits into the whole power portfolio. >> Sure, yeah, so thanks Lisa. The PowerMax products, I think was the first product other than of course, the server products to be powered up in the storage portfolio, PowerMax is the sort of flagship sort of derived product that we've had now for, you know, a few decades really been a leader in mission critical data centers. But I think that pace of innovation over the last year just like Matt describing the PowerFlex side has been a really phenomenal. Just about a year ago he came out with a storage class memory, we did fiber channel Endymion over fiber channel, and more recently brought in a few really interesting new technologies, like support for replication, with VVols, cloud mobility, and now, efficient encryption. So the set of things we're enabling our customers to do with their you know, sort of traditional three tier SAN infrastructure is really just unmatched. >> So Matt talk to me about the last six seven months, where are these enterprise customers in terms of leveraging PowerMax for example, when everything just changed dramatically almost overnight. Enterprises in every industry had to suddenly remote workforce. How did PowerMax help your customers pivot and ensure that their digital transformation could support this business surviving? >> Yeah, well, like everybody we were a little worried at the outset, you know lot of uncertainty about how things would play out and the response from our customers has been amazing. You know, they've all sort of really doubled down on using our technology to support their businesses through this new model. So, you know, the business has been really amazing really incredible, and it's been great to partner with our customers that help them continue to deliver the services that they need you know, in this new model. So that part's been, been really wonderful, and as we work really closely with them, some of the things we just came out with, you know, they've helped us to design and deliver in a way that they can best take advantage of so, you know, for example the new cloud mobility functionality that's letting them take information directly off of their mission, critical sort of bedrock sand infrastructure and push it up to an object store. And that could be a local private object store, it could be a public object store like AWS. And so that's you know, it's enabling them to take advantage of some new models and a new approach to doing things. And I think ultimately that's going to help them work through this you know, new normal, we're all participating in. >> Yeah, we want to help those businesses not just survive this time, but be able to thrive, especially as we don't know how much of this remote scattered workforce is going to remain. We're hearing estimates from some of the big technology leaders at all. 50% percent of the workforce is going to remain at home so really helping organizations to maneuver and navigate these challenging landscapes is a big priority I know for Dell Technologies we talked about that with some other guests. Matthew, over to you talk to me about PowerFlex from a workloads perspective, so we can get a good idea for the workloads that it's really ideally best suited for. >> Yeah, I think wanted to just take a quick second on the COVID piece, because we have a couple of really big customers that we had to enable really quickly for curbside checkout and, you know, they were trying to run things, they were putting it on their existing infrastructure, their existing systems, and it just wasn't fast enough, it wasn't keeping up. And by working closely with the customer and designing a system with PowerFlex as the core, allowed us to enable them really quickly to turn from a customer who didn't have this idea of curbside checkout to enabling curbside checkout. So I think working and partnering closely with our customers is a critical part of how Dell Tech is successful and enabling them to kind of work through these tough times. With workloads, Yeah, oh, go ahead sorry. >> That's okay go ahead. >> I was going to say with workloads in general, the way that we have to think about them with enterprise quality or enterprise requirements is really in kind of a scheme of looking at performance, understanding scalability, ensuring we have enterprise class availability, and then last but definitely not least is like how we manage that and how we make it easier for customers to work through those. And when I think about Flex there's two or three key areas that we try to go after, if you, one of the key differentiation pieces around Flex is the fact that we can deploy it in multiple manners. So you can deploy it in an HCI mode, where you have the compute and networking together, or you can go deploy it in a dis-aggregated mode where you have compute and networking, I mean, compute and storage separate. And if those are separate that allows you to scale those independently work really, really well for key database workloads, key workloads like, let's say even like Honda, where you maybe have really high compute but little less storage requirements. So that really allows customers to dial up and down what makes the most sense for them right? The other angle that we're seeing pretty big adoption is around this idea of re-platform or realigning the data center with transformation with software defined scale all block storage. So think about deploying Powerflex in an environment and then being able to use that in a virtual environment in a physical environment, in a container environment being able to have your traditional applications like SQL or Oracle, right along really cool new applications like the ELK Stack or Mongo DB or other things, because of the way that we design our layout, it's really aligned towards being able to re-platform and align in a software defined infrastructure. So customers are using to kind of align those pieces meaning platforms, re-platforming and then also aligning specific applications that require high performance. >> I heard a lot in that and one word that pops up is no, that's good. >> No, I can tell you're passionate about it. >> I love it, yeah. >> And also the customer influence is absolutely critical. I think this is a time you mentioned the curbs I check in, and then I was reading a few months ago about some of the huge brands that were filing for chapter 11 and companies like big retailers that simply couldn't pivot, couldn't digitally transform to even offer curbside check in so that factor alone since us consumers are so demanding was table stakes a few months ago. It still is, but getting an organization able to pivot so quickly is key. Martin let's go over to you, PowerMax, workloads. Talk to me about some differentiators as well. >> Yeah Aatually, if I could I'll start with sort of some similar examples that Matt laid out there, you know, just like we have customers who chose PowerFlex you know, were in environments that made sense for them. We had customers who chose PowerMax to meet similar new demands with the whole, you know pandemic. So we had some really big customers just so okay, now we have sort of line of sight and, you know, across both products, I think the thing that our customers value most is you know, the quality of the experience, the performance of the experience, some of the things Matt mentioned already. But they really pull forward, you know, huge numbers of systems and business, and be able to support you know, where they saw things going. So that was really great to partner with them on that and be ready to help support them and provide a product that they felt really good about making such huge investments in, you know, it was great to see their trust in us and be able to deliver for them. So, that was, I think a big part of the first half of the year, that sort of new, you know, new workloads and new use cases for us on the PowerMax side really revolve around giving our customers new capabilities that can deliver new services for their end users. So one of those is our new support for VVols remote replication. And this really lets us tie together the way that the infrastructure is managed at the VMware level, much more closely to the way that the storage infrastructure is managed. And the result is that our, our customers can do more granular operations for their end users, they can simplify the whole process, and now they can do it on top of our remote replication solution, which, you know going on 20 plus years now, it's really been sort of the gold standard in which they've come to rely on so much. So that's really exciting to be able to offer that to them now, to have it be part of the whole VMware stack that they're deploying and let them use you know, new things like, you know the way VVols works with our cyber site recovery manager, to let them automate you know, the testing, I feel always in the actual fail over. There's an interesting example of how I think our customers are going to take advantage of some of these new technologies as we go forward. >> You mentioned giving customers the ability with the right infrastructure to offer new services. And that's another critical component as we've seen in 2020 is businesses needing to pivot continuously and come up with new creative ideas, products, and services and new ways of delivering those to their existing customers holding onto them and hopefully growing their customer base. And that ability to leverage technology, to deliver new services is also one of the key kind of foundations that will allow businesses to be the winners of tomorrow. Matthew, to you talk to me when you're in customer situations, customers have choice, we know this, ding into me, give me the top three differentiators when you're talking to customers, why PowerFlex is the ideal solution for them? >> That's a great question. I'm glad you asked. (laughs) So I think, you know, as part of being a product guy it's really cool when the intellectual property within your product is software that your company owns and hardware, your company owns. So we're able to do some really cool stuff together to deliver innovative solutions for our customers. But, you know, when I think about my product I think first and foremost, around performance and scale right? You know, several million, IO'S a sub-millisecond response time and anytime someone wants more performance they just add another server, right? So this idea that we scale literally is a key differentiator for the product. A second key differentiator is this idea that I talked a little bit about before that we, you can kind of multi-platform this. So when you roll this out, you can deploy to use it with virtual environments, whether it's VMware or Hyper-V or other virtual environments. You can have bare metal deployment. So if you want to run this with Linux and use software defined storage in the bare metal, we can support that. Or we can go directly to containers. So you can use containers, bare metal or virtual. And so this idea of choice is a huge differentiator. And then the last one is anchored around this idea that when you scale and you get the benefit of management, you don't have to scale everything at the same time. So in traditional software defined infrastructure on the HCI side you have to scale compute and storage together. So every time you add a node you add compute power and storage power. With power flex, we've been able to effectively split those two pieces off, so a customer could actually only scale what they need. And in fact, if they only want to buy storage side of the solution, you can just buy storage side solution and then you can have existing infrastructure connect to that and it behaves just like a traditional three tier model. So those are, I think are the key things that I think differentiate the product and kind of make it special here at Dell and for our customers. >> Matthew, sticking with you, are there any, I think of things like compliance and healthcare and financial services, especially right now, what are some of the key benefits that PowerFlex delivers, say for some of those essential industries right now? >> Yeah, I think, you know it's interesting 'cause those are two of our largest space and financial is probably our largest space. And really for them, it comes down to, you talked about compliance, you talk about scale and then you talk about management. So we said some really interesting requirements because of scale so large, for example, in our last release we're able to start to do rack level firmware and software updates. So when you look at other solutions they might be doing system at a time, doing updates taking them offline and then running those around. But in our scenario, since we kind of own the SDS layer and the compute side, we can actually do update these for an entire rack in one shot. Dramatically reducing the complexity, dramatically reducing the amount of time it takes to do updates. So that's a real big deal in financial space. And then in terms of healthcare, for example we're the only software defined solution product that can run all of Epic healthcare, all pieces of Epic within our product. All other products run out of bandwidth, run out of performance. So they end up not being able to run all sides of the requirement, whether it's the database back end, or the VDI front end, we're the only one on the market that can do all of that. >> It seems to really be a big differentiator in healthcare as a lot of organizations run on Epic or try to, to help with patient care and care delivery. Martin, last question for you. Give me a snapshot of the partner's perspective over the last couple of years with the rebrand under Dell Technologies, with the power portfolio, how have your partners embraced the simplification? >> So, you know, I think that the overall, this gave them clearer understanding of where and what to sell and what made sense for power max in particular, you know, I think it let them anchor on, you know the flagship product of the legendary performance and reliability of that platform and, you know, gave them an easy way to think about where to position that with, you know, our end customers and, you know, in what ways that the products would benefit their customers the most. So, you know, as Matt described on the PowerFlex side, it starts with our performance and reliability and then ultimately, you know enabling them to do whatever they need to do, so across all the different data services and we got to talk ready about some of the new ones you know, but we also have a lot that we've you know, refined over the years and, you know making it sort of official and sort of the PowerMax envelope what everyone really just sort of simplify how they would consume it all. So, you know, I think, you know maybe one of the thing, you know, worth mentioning in all these new use cases and environments and, you know, all the different applications that our customers are trying to operate and deliver on is, you know, security, you know, so we developed a new capability that we call end-to-end efficient encryption. And this really lets customers do encryption all the way from the host through to the storage. And, you know I think ultimately that's going to help them sleep better at night and also, you know help them avoid some of the things that you've seen crop up now. Now that the world is so digital and all the different threats that our customers face. So we're keeping our finger on the pulse of a lot of different needs you know, whether it's flexibility, performance reliability, but all these new new technologies as well to make sure that we set our customers up to be successful as possible. >> That's exactly what they want to be, successful. Martin, Matthew, thank you so much for joining me on the Cube, sharing the updates for PowerMax, PowerFlex, the differentiators. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Yeah, thank you Lisa this was fun. Alright from my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching the cubes coverage, Dell Technologies World at 2020, the digital experience. (gentle music)

>> Narrator: From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >> Hi, I am Stu Miniman and welcome to this special cube conversations. We're here with Dell Technology to share the news of an update to one of their product lines. We've watched for a number of years, Dell has taken their portfolio like I said they powered them up. So, of course the servers are known for a long time PowerEdge and we've seen many of the storage products and like going through their power up and here we have is the PowerFlex. So people that are familiar with what's happening in the software defined storage and hyper-converged space will remember the VX flex, so it's powered up. Joining me to discuss this important announcement, we have Matthew Paul, who's the Senior Director of Product Management and Anthony Cinelli, who's the Senior Director of Business Development, both with Dell Technologies. Matt, let's jump right into it. PowerFlex, powering up this segment of the market, give us the importance and what the announcement is. >> Great, thank you Stu thanks for having us. Yeah, I'm really excited to announce that we're powering up our product and we're moving our VxFlex product through the new power brand and the power name, really responding to customers and our customers taking this product on and aligning it and using it to be able to... Inline with our bigger portfolio that we have at Dell EMC, delivering outcomes for our customers. So it's an exciting timeframe and it really reflects this idea of customers' adoption, in the technology and our investment as Dell Technologies in this software defined storage, to kind of signify to the market that we're here to stay and this is an exciting thing we're working through. The second part around this on top of kind of the rebrand is a new launch of PowerFlex three five So this new software and this software information is delivering some key additions to our portfolio, including a replication, including a new HDMI 5 GUI and including some really cool additions to our software management stack that customers are really been asking for. >> Excellent. So AC, in normal times you're out meeting with a lot of customers, I'm sure you're still talking to a lot of customers, even if you're in work from home mode during the pandemic, but help us understand one of the things we know that Dell has done is it is spring line the portfolio, but when you talk about storage software-defined storage, converged, hyper-converged, there's still a few different options inside the Dell family. So tell us where PowerFlex fits and how it differentiates in position, compared to some of the other pieces. >> Yeah, great question. So, I have a pretty nice role here for Dell, which is, I am responsible for our entire portfolio of converged, hyperconverged, and software defined offerings. And really what that affords me is one particular luxury when I engage with customers. And that luxury is that I can start every single customer engagement with a question. Which is, what problem are you trying to solve? And that's really important because having a portfolio at my disposal allows me to lead with that question and really focus the conversation and solution on what their business problem is and how best to solve it. Now, the things we typically listen for when it comes to Flex are things like flexibility, things like performance, things like I'm trying to solve a platform where I want to re-platform my architecture to a software-defined outcome. But I need to run a wide variety of workloads. I need to run virtual workload, I need to run physical workload, I need to run container workload, I want to consolidate all of that onto a single modern software-defined infrastructure. Or we hear workload specific things. Things like I have an incredibly high performance Oracle Database, or I have a workload. One great example of a customer was cause of COVID they had to go from 60,000 to 160,000 remote users over a weekend. They did that on Flex with zero incremental infrastructure required for the storage. All the performance, all of the horsepower was fully capable of handling that increased capacity. Another customer, curbside pickup was a great application for their business, saw a hundred X performance requirement increase essentially over the course of a weekend because of COVID. Running on flex, they were able to swallow that performance increase with no problem. So a lot of what we see when it comes to Flex and the problems we're hearing are I need a platform that has a lot of inherent flexibility, or I have a very acute workload problem, then I need something very scalable and very performant to solve. But again, my luxury is I can always ask the customer the question first and then leverage the power of our portfolio to provide the best solution to solve for their business problem. >> All right, so AC, appreciate you talked about scale and performance, two of the really big things, if you talk about what's happening in this space. Matt, maybe you can help us sequin through a little bit, as to how this differentiates compared to other solutions in the market place we saw software-defined storage, hyper-converged infrastructure run through its wave in the last few years, you've got some very large customers, big brand names globally, as well as service providers that have used Flex in the past. So explain how this is different from others out there. >> Yeah, I think when we talk about how we manage and we work through this, it's our concepts, so I'm trying to really democratize this software to the masses, right? And be able to make it easy to use and simple to use. If you think about old or traditional software-defined storage, all the knobs and all the tweaks, sometimes it make it difficult to implement. And so you get these really high end extreme customers that leave all these knobs to tweak. We do that very, very well, but what we've been focused on the last couple of years is ensuring we can get that to multiple places through robust kind of investment in our flex manager space. So be able to automate and make things a lot easier and simpler for customers to use that way we can go down and provide this technology to more people. And then the other thing is kind of meeting customers where they need to be. And so a couple of key mechanism, which people consume our products is through our appliances and our racks or integrated racks. So when a customer comes after a kind of a full end to end white glove solution, whether I want to roll a big rack into their environment, plug it in, get it up and going, we have a full integrated rack that we deliver to the customers that really drive that outcome. And then if you think about the difference between that and the appliance the appliance has given us a little more flexibility. So if you want to plug that into an existing network or an existing environment, well, both of these things give you that extreme scale and performance that AC was just talking about, while that rich management experience. so I think you kind of aligned the consumption models and the new management, which also brings a big differentiated value to the product. >> Excellent, so, Matt when I hear you talking about these solutions, wonder if you can help connect this with how your customers are talking about cloud in general, you talked about consumption model, you talked about how to manager, so where does this fit? whether it's the Dell Tech Cloud or just your customers overall discussion of cloud. >> Yeah, so a couple of things come to mind here. Typically what we see with PowerFlex is customer saying, I'm trying to achieve what we call this common platform, which is, I want to build an on premises cloud, that gives me the flexibility to run all the workloads in my data center. And when we say all the workloads, that's everything from obviously your virtualization stack through things like your physical bare metal workloads typically your high performance databases all the way through this emerging world of containers. And those containers could be virtual, could be physical. And giving customers the value of running all of that on a single underlying software-defined infrastructure, with all of the automation life cycle management to go along with it, there's really just nothing like that in the market. So really where we're seeing this adoption is customers who are saying, I want to build my own cloud within my data center, that gives me the ability to run my workloads and because I'm building them on a common infrastructure, I can build automation that allows my end users to consume that infrastructure in a very cloud-like manner. So that's one big thing that we are seeing customers really bite off on. Another approach is within that Dell Technologies cloud platform. Which is, how do we leverage the best of all of the assets under the Dell Technologies umbrella, namely assets from VMware, VMware cloud foundations and everything they offer in their multicloud story, and providing a wide variety of options within the Dell Technologies portfolio to solve that. Obviously we have our VxRail platform, which is the most integrated solution vertically within that VMware stack. We also have other offerings within our storage portfolio that have the ability to plug into that, PowerFlex being one of those as an option for customers to leverage within that Dell Tech Cloud platform strategy. >> Excellent. Matt, you mentioned the new updates with three dot five maybe give us a little bit more on that If whether it's an existing customer, what things they've been asking for that are in this release, or maybe first some new people that might not have looked at the Flex family for awhile that three dot five might be bringing to the table. >> Yeah, I think the great thing about this product, it's an end to end solution. So we bring all these things together that add that value. A couple of the key things is that we've been hearing and driving towards our customers is around replication or a synchronous replication. So the ability for us to be able to align that and give that to customers is probably the most important piece of this release. We also did some really cool stuff in the management stack. So if you think about other competition or other products, being able to align firmware updates for example, or software updates for example, because of the scale of our product, we've had to align real unique things in our managements like stack like the ability to do rack level updates. So really innovative, really differentiated. So customers can take racks at a time down to do updates 'cause they don't have time when there's thousands of servers in their environment, they don't have time to do one note at a time in a round robin fashion. >> And a point to add onto that, right? What's really unique and Matt touched on it, this concept of democratization. We've always done large really well with this technology, right? In a way that really no other technology platform in this space can. What the team has built on the management stack is now allowing us to also do small and medium incredibly well, where we can bring this incredibly disruptive technology to the masses, to your general enterprise, to your general mid market type customer, who's not solving for hundreds or thousands of notes, but maybe solving for 10, 20 or 50 notes and delivering this very disruptive outcome that helps them much more adapt or much more quickly adapt to changing demands they have, harnessing all this flexibility, but doing it with point click operations that are incredibly simple across the full stack. >> Excellent, well, we've heard from Jeff Clark when you get the power brand on there, that's a message to the customers that this is a platform that's going to be with us for quite a number of years. Give us a look forward as to both of you as to what would you expect to see from PowerFlex. >> Yeah, I mean, we're really excited about the future, right? To your point, aligning with the winning roadmap, the investment level in this technology is really high within the organization, how we work well within the broader Dell Technologies portfolio is really exciting. So we'll continue to innovate and drive this democratization story that Anthony was talking about. Innovate in new data services, innovate in new management paradigms and stacks. Like the thing I just talked about in terms of doing rack level updates. And I think just giving customers, listening to our customers and providing that on a reoccurring basis is the critical thing. So we're really embracing this idea of providing updates on a regular basis to be able to respond to customers' needs on a daily day basis. >> Yeah, I think one thing to add to that, that I'm excited to see the team continue executing on is delivering actual workload solution-based outcomes, right? Very often customers will come to us and say, here's my workload problem, right? It's an Oracle, it's a Slung, it's an elastic stack or name your workload. The team's really done a great job of leveraging this platform and building full stack validated solutions, oftentimes in tandem with the application vendor. So customers can consume this technology with complete confidence to run oftentimes their most important or critical workloads, knowing that they have the full backing of the vendor, they have the full backing of the infrastructure provider and the application provider working together to deliver this technology as an outcome. And because of its extreme flexibility, we can adapt it to so many different workload scenarios and customers have responded to that incredibly well. So for me, I'm excited to see the team continuing to build that solutions portfolio because customers are really seeing a ton of value in that. >> Great. I guess final question I have for you Matt, probably up your alley there, availability of the product, is it available now at the launch and if I was a VxFlex customer before what does the move to PowerFlex move, how do I get from where I was to the future If there are any hardware changes or is it all software? >> Yeah, good point. So it's available now, there on the 25th, so, really excited for the customers and we do support customers going from the existing version to the new version. And so the upgrades are pretty straight forward, pretty easy to bring in that updated management stack and then bring in the updated FlexOS. I'm sorry, PowerFlex version. (giggles) >> It's all right, I'm sure customers will be going back and forth on the terms. All right, Matt and AC thank you so much for the update. Congratulations on the progress. (mumbles) All right, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching the cube. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to the Cube 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. Every Enterprise is saddled with the challenge of how to get more value out of their data. While at the same time trying to find new ways of associating value with product or value with service and to work with the different technology suppliers to create an optimal relationship for how they can move their business forward within a data-driven world. It's a tall order but 2020 is going to feature an enormous amount of progress and how enterprises think about how to handle the people, process and technology of improving their overall stance towards getting value out of their data. So to have that conversation today, we're joined by a Guy Churchward, who's the CEO of Datera. Guy welcome back to the cube. >> Thank You Peter, I appreciate it. >> So before we go any further give us a quick update what's going on with Datera? >> We're doing pretty well. I mean this year's we're just going to close it off. So we're in Q4 right at the end of it. You mentioned data-driven, you know I mean that was obviously one of my key excitements, years ago we kind of moved from a hardware resiliency or Hardware-driven to software resiliency, Software defined and I do think that we've hit that data-defined, data-driven infrastructure right now. I've been in the CEO role now just about a year. I've been on the board since August of a year and change ago and part of it is we had a little bit of an impedance mismatch of message, technology and basically I go to market. So the team quite brilliantly produced this data services platform to do data driven architectures. >> Mmmh. >> But customers don't wake up every morning and go, I need to go buy a data-driven, how do I buy one? And so when I came in I realized that you know what they had was an exceptional solution but the market isn't ready yet for that thought process, and what they were really buying still was SDS, software defined storage. >> So it almost in a connect way. so I'm going to buy an SDS and connect it to something and get a little bit of flexibility over here but still worry about the lock in every where else. >> Yeah, exactly and in fact even on the SDS side. What they weren't looking for is bring your own server storage. What they were looking for was automation and they were looking to basically break out and have more data mobility and data freedom. And so that was good and then the second one was our technology really sells directly to enterprises, directly to large scale organizations and it's very difficult as a start-up, small company to basically be able to punch straight into a global account, you know. Because they'll sit back and say, well you know would you trust your family jewels to a company that's got 40 employees in Silicon Valley. >> Right. >> And so what you really have is this and get the message right and then make sure you have to flow through to the customer credibility right and we were fortunate to land a very strategic relationship with HP. And so that was our focus point. Right. So we basically got on board with HP, got into their complete program, started selling very closely to them of which their sales team has been marvelous and then we're just finishing that that year. The good news is and you know I'll give you a spoiler I care about Billings, you know I mean we actually move from an appliance business to a software business exclusively, and so we basically sell term agreement. So if you think about it from a bookings perspective, that's important but basically how much you bill out is more important. From a Billings perspective I think we're going to run roughly 350% up year-over-year. >> Ooh. >> Yeah which is kind of good. Right I mean in other words it was a bit of a pat on the back that seems very happy with that and then even from new account acquisitions if I count the amount of accounts that we bought in this year and to date, entirely since 2013 we've only had one customer churn, so all the customers are coming with us but if I count this year, if I look at 16 17 and 18 we've actually bought more customers on board in 19 than all three pulled together. So we're actually finishing a very very strong year. >> Congratulations. Now if we think about going into 2020 you're closing this quarter, but every startup has to have a notion of what's going to happen next and what role you're going to play. And what happens next. So if I look back I I see the enterprise starting to assert themselves in the cloud businesses. That's having an effect on on everybody. But it really becomes concrete you know, the rubber really meets the road at the level of data. So as you start to grow you're talking more customers, as you talk to more customers and they expressed what they need out of this new cloud oriented world, what kinds of problems are they bringing to the table as far as you're concerned? >> Yeah, I mean they initially come to us so what I would say is every account that we've run we've replaced traditional arrays storage arrays and every account we've run, we've actually competed against SDS vendors and whether that's something like Dells, VxFlex or even vSAN, VMware's vSAN and which are probably the two most well-known ones. A lot of cases I mean we actually have 100% win rate against that in these competitive situations, but interestingly most customers now are putting dual source in place. So in fact the reason that we've ridden pretty quickly and we've run lots of deals, isn't because we're going in and saying VxFlex is failing or vSAN is failing, but they want something extra, they want automation, they want desegregation, they want scale >> They want second source. In many respects of sales is, it's succeeding but you have to push a little bit harder and that is ease most easily done by bringing in another platform with crucial functionality... >> Yeah >> ...and a second source. >> And I think you're on the money there Peter because if I look at second source in the traditional array business, no CIO worth their soul is a single source vendor so they they will have Dell and they'll have HP or they'll have HP and they'll have Pure, doesn't matter and and even on HCI you'll see the HCI vendors, Nutanix is doing very well, so is Dell. So therefore they'll have that from second source if its critical. So if an environment is critical they always have a second source and so even now when you look into software-defined, this market in 2019 was very much like the, let's get the second source in place. And that shows you where we are on the maturity curve because people is basically moving on this en mass. Now that's 2019 you're asking about 20, 21, 22 moving forward. The reason that the traditional arrays weren't working for them is whether it's flexibility or it's basically management costs or maintenance, but it's data freedom. It's what they're really looking for. You know, what is a data center? Is it on-premise, is it cloud? It's definitely cloud but the question is is it on-premise cloud? Is it hybrid cloud, is it public cloud? And then you mention edge. You know we actually find customers who are looking and are saying look, the most important thing for us is being data-driven and what data-driven basically articulates is we get data in, we analyze it, we make decisions on it and we win and lose against our competition as fast as we can be accurate on that data set. And a lot of the decisions are getting made at the edge. So a lot of people are looking at saying my data center is actually at the edge, it's not in the center in the cloud, right. >> Well in many respects, it's for the first time a data center actually is what it says it is, right. Because the data center used to be where the hardware was and now increasingly enterprises are realizing that the services and the capabilities have to be where the data is. >> Yeah. >> Where the data is being produced, where the data is being utilized and certainly where the data, where decisions are being made about what to keep what not to keep, how much of it etc, and that that does start to drive forward an increased recognition that at some point in time we are going to talk more about the services that these platforms, or these devices or these software-defined environments provide. Have I got that right? >> Yeah, yeah you have and even if you look at that, you know ... what the AI/ML, you know I mean if I if I kind of step back and I look at what a customer's trying to do which is to utilize as much data as possible, in a way that they have data freedom that allows them to make decisions and that's really where AI and machine learning comes in. Right you know everybody employs that. I recently bought a camera, shockingly inside the camera it's got ML functionality into it, it's got AI built into it, my new photo editing software on my iPad is actually an ML-based system. They don't do it because it's a buzz word, they do it because basically they can get a much higher level of accuracy and then use data for enrichment, right. And then in the ML track, the classic route was I'm going to create a data lake, right. So I got my data lake and I've got everything in it then I'm going to analyze off the back of it. But everybody was analyzing once it's in the data lake. And what they've realized is to compete, they actually have to analyze much quicker. >> Right. >> And that's at the edge, and that's in real-time and that string based. And so that's really where people are sort of saying I can't ... I'm not going to have any long pole in my technology tent. I'm not going to have anything slow me down, I have to beat my competition and as part of that they need complete fluidity on their data. So I don't care whether it's at the edge or it's in the center or in the cloud, I need instant access to it for enrichment purposes and to make fast and accurate decisions. So they don't want data silos. You know, so any product out there that basically says me me me me give me my data and therefore I'm going to encrypt in such a ways you can't read it and it's not available to anybody else. They are just trying to eradicate that. And and we've sort of moved. It's a weird way of putting it but we've moved from hardware-defined to software-defined and I think we've moved into this data-defined era. But at the same time, it's the most stupid thing for me to say, because we've never not been in a data-defined era. But it's the way in which people think with their architecture as they sign up a data center now or a cloud and they're not saying, hey so about the hardware, it's based on that or it's the software. It's always going to be about the data. The access to the data, however before you get excited. (laughs) The thing that I kind of look at I say so what has fundamentally changed? And it's the fact that we always used to have to make a decision. You know, I ran a security analytics business and when you do things like log management, it's about collecting as much as data so in other words accuracy beats speed. And then security event management is speed beats accuracy. Because you can't ask questions of the same data. But technology is caught up now. So we've actually moved from the do you want accuracy? Or do you want speed? It's like "or arena". So people were building architectures in this "or" world, you know. Do you want software-defined? If you want software-defined you can't have Enterprisilities. Why not? Well, if you want an enterprise application, I mean remember the age-old adage. You should never buy a version 1.0 of an app. >> Right. But what happens is they want they want this ... people are turning around saying I need an enterprise application, I want full data access to the back of it, I actually need it to be fluid, I need it Software-defined, I don't know where it's going to be based and I don't want to do forklift upgrades. I want and and and and and. Not or, so what we've actually moved to is a software-defined era you know, and a data-defined architecture in an "and arena". And where customers are truly winning and where they're going to beat their competition, is where they don't settle and say oh I remember back two years ago, this happened and therefore we should learn from that, and we shouldn't do that. They're actually just breaking through and saying I'm going to fire the application up I want it up and running within 30 days, I want it to be an enterprise application, I need it to be flexible, I needed to have a hype of scale and then I'm going to break it down and by the way I'm not going to pay contractually to an organization to build all that infrastructure. And that's really why soup to nuts, as we move forward not only they sort of building an infrastructure is data-defined infrastructure, they don't want lock-in. They want optionality and that means they want term licenses which is sure, they don't want these proprietary silos and they need data flexibility on the back of it. And those are the progressive customers, and by the way I've not had to convince a single customer to move to software-defined or data-defined. Every client knows they're going there, the question on the journey is, how fast they want to get. >> Right, when? >> Yeah. >> So if so look every single every single enterprise, every single business person takes a look at what are regarded as the most valuable assets and then they hire people to take care of those assets, to get value out of those assets, to maintain those assets, and when we move from a hardware world where the most valuable asset is hardware that leads to one organization, one set of processes, one set of activities. Move into a software world to get the same thing. But we agree with you, we think that we are moving to a world that is data first, where data is increasingly going to be the primary citizen and as a consequence we're seeing firms reinstitutionalize how work is done, redefine the type of people they have, alter their sourcing arrangements, I mean there's an enormous amount of change happening because data is now becoming the primary citizen. So how is Datera going to help accelerate that in 2020? >> Yeah I mean and again that's part of data access. And then also part of data scale. Back probably six seven eight years ago. EMC we were even I remember Steve Manley is a good buddy of mine, we went on stage and we talked about bringing sexy back to back up. We were trying to move away from backup admins just being backup admins to backup admins actually morphing their job into being AI/ML. You know, I remember a big client of mine, and it wasn't in the EMC days, it was before that were basically saying they have to educate their IT staff, they want to bring them up as they move forward. In other words, you can't ... what you don't want is you don't want your team, because it all comes down to people. You don't want them stuck in an area to say we can't innovate forward because we can't get you away from this product, right. So one of our customers at Datera is a SaaS vendor. And their challenge is they had traditional array business even though it was in a SaaS model, it was basically hardware in the background and they would buy instances and they found that their HR cost, their headcount cost was scaling, >> With the hardware. >> Exactly, and and they were looking at and going, what does that do to my business? It does one or two things, either one is it means that cost I mean do I bear that I don't make profitability and I can't drive my business or do I lay that on my customers and then the cost goes up and therefore I'm actually not a cloud scale. And I can't hire all the people I need to hire into it. So they really needed to move to a point of saying how do I get to hyper scale? How do I drive the automation that allows me to basically take staff and do what they need to do. And so our thing isn't removing staff, it's actually taking the work that you have and the people and put them in a way they really matter. So in other words if you think about the old days of I'm going to mess this up but, I talked to somebody recently about what IT stands for. And they said IT should stand for information technology, right. I mean that's really what it is. But, but you know for the last 20 years it stood for infrastructure technology? >> Yeah. >> And that's frustrating, because in essence we got way too many people managing a lot of crap. And what they really should be doing is focusing on what makes the business happen. >> Yeah. >> And for instance I like to run a business by money in and money out, everybody else does and then you look at it and you say well, how do I get more money coming in? By being smarter and quicker than somebody else. How do I do that? By data analytics. Where do I want to put my work? Well I want to put it into the ML/AI and I want more analysts to work on it. I want my IT staff to do that. Let's move them into that. I don't want them you know rooms and reams of people trying to make it you know manage arrays that don't function the way they should or... >> One more percent out of that array of productivity. >> Yeah, abnormally trying to scale HCI solutions to a hyper scale that actually is impossible for them to do it. >> Right. >> You know and and that was the thing that really what Mark, who was the founder of Datera and the team really did is they looked at it from a cloud perspective and said it's got to be easier than this. There must be a way of doing low lights-out automation on storage. And that's why I was saying when I took over, I kind of did the company an injustice by calling it an SDS Tier 1 vendor. But in reality that was what customers could assume. And we're basically a data services platform that allows them to scale and then if you hop forward you go how do you open up the platform? How do you become data movement? How do you handle multi-cloud? How do you make sure that they don't have this issue? And the policies that they put in place and the way in which they've innovated, it allows that open and flexible choice. So for me, one is you get the scale, two you don't have forklift upgrade three is you don't have human capital cost on every decision you make, and it actually fits in in a very fluid way. And so even though customers move to us and buy us as a second source for SDS, once they've got the power of this thing they realize actually now they've got a data service platform and they start then layering in other policies and other systems and what we've seen is then a good uptick of us being seen as a strategic part of their data movement infrastructure. >> You expand. >> Exactly. >> Guy Churchward, CEO of Datera, thanks again for being on the Cube. >> My pleasure. Thank you Peter. >> And thank you for joining us for another CUBEConversation. I'm Peter Burris, see you next time. (upbeat music)

(energetic music) >> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, the ESPN of tech. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are here live in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World, the 10th anniversary of theCUBE being here at this conference. We have two guests for this segment. We have Jeff Woolsey, the Principal Program Manager Windows Server/Hybrid Cloud, Microsoft. Welcome, Jeff. >> Thank you very much. >> And Bob Ward, the principal architect at Microsoft. Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks, glad to be here. >> It's a pleasure. Honor to be here on the 10th anniversary, by the way. >> Oh is that right? >> Well, it's a big milestone. >> Congratulations. >> Thank you very much. >> I've never been to theCUBE. I didn't even know what it was. >> (laughs) >> Like what is this thing? >> So it is now been a couple of days since Tatiana Dellis stood up on that stage and talked about the partnership. Now that we're sort of a few days past that announcement, what are you hearing? What's the feedback you're getting from customers? Give us some flavor there. >> Well, I've been spending some time in the Microsoft booth and, in fact, I was just chatting with a bunch of the guys that have been talking with a lot of customers as well and we all came to the consensus that everyone's telling us the same thing. They're very excited to be able to use Azure, to be able to use VMware, to be able to use these in the Azure Cloud together. They feel like it's the best of both worlds. I already have my VMware, I'm using my Office 365, I'm interested in doing more and now they're both collocated and I can do everything I need together. >> Yeah it was pretty interesting for me 'cause VMware and Microsoft have had an interesting relationship. I mean, the number one application that always lived on a VM was Microsoft stuff. The operating system standpoint an everything, but especially in the end using computer space Microsoft and VM weren't necessarily on the same page to see both CEOs, also both CUBE alums, up there talking about that really had most of us sit up and take notice. Congratulations on the progress. >> For me, being in a SQL server space, it's a huge popular workload on VMware, as you know and virtualization so everybody's coming up to me saying when can I start running SQL server in this environment? So we're excited to kind of see the possibilities there. >> Customers, they live in a heterogeneous environment. Multicloud has only amplified that. It's like, I want to be able to choose my infrastructure, my Cloud, and my application of choice and know that my vendors are going to rally around me and make this easy to use. >> This is about meeting our customers where they are, giving them the ability to do everything they need to do, and make our customers just super productive. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So, Jeff, there's some of the new specific give us the update as to the pieces of the puzzle and the various options that Microsoft has in this ecosystem. >> Well, a lot of these things are still coming to light and I would tell people definitely take a look at the blog. The blog really goes in in depth. But key part of this is, for customers that want to use their VMware, you get to provision your resources using, for example, the well known, well easy to use Azure Infrastructure and Azure Portal, but when it's time to actually do your VMs or configure your network, you get to use all of the same tools that you're using. So your vCenter, your vSphere, all of the things that a VMware administrator knows how to do, you continue to use those. So, it feels familiar. You don't feel like there's a massive change going on. And then when you want to hook this up to your Azure resources, we're making that super easy, as well, through integration in the portal. And you're going to see a lot more. I think really this is just the beginning of a long road map together. >> I want to ask you about SQL 19. I know that's your value, so-- >> That's what I do, I'm the SQL guy. >> Yeah, so tell us what's new. >> Well, you know, we launched SQL 19 last year at Ignite with our preview of SQL 19. And it'll be, by the way, it'll be generally available in the second half of this calendar year. We did something really radical with SQL 19. We did something called data virtualization polybase. Imagine as a SQL customer you connecting with SQL and then getting access to Oracle, MongoDB, Hadoop data sources, all sorts of different data in your environment, but you don't move the data. You just connect to SQL Server and get access to everything in your corporate environment now. We realize you're not just going to have SQL Server now in your environment. You're going to have everything. But we think SQL can become like your new data hub to put that together. And then we built something called big data clusters where we just deploy all that for you automatically. We even actually built a Hadoop cluster for you with SQL. It's kind of radical stuff for the normal database people, right? >> Bob, it's fascinating times. We know it used to be like you know I have one database and now when I talk to customers no, I have a dozen databases and my sources of data are everywhere and it's an opportunity of leveraging the data, but boy are there some challenges. How are customers getting their arms around this. >> I mean, it's really difficult. We have a lot of people that are SQL Server customers that realize they have those other data sources in their environment, but they have skills called TSQL, it's a programming language. And they don't want to lose it, they want to learn, like, 10 other languages, but they have to access that data source. Let me give you an example. You got Oracle in a Linux environment as your accounting system and you can't move it to SQL Server. No problem. Just use SQL with your TSQL language to query that data, get the results, and join it with your structured data in SQL Server itself. So that's a radical new thing for us to do and it's all coming in SQL 19. >> And what it helps-- what really helps break down is when you have all of these disparate sources and disparate databases, everything gets siloed. And one of the things I have to remind people is when I talk to people about their data center modernization and very often they'll talk about you know, I've had servers and data that's 20, 30, even, you know, decades old and they talk about it almost like it's like baggage it's luggage. I'm like, no, that's your company, that's your history. That data is all those customer interactions. Wouldn't it be great if you could actually take better advantage of it. With this new version of SQL, you can bring all of these together and then start to leverage things like ML and AI to actually better harvest and data mine that and rather than keeping those in disparate silos that you can't access. >> How ready would you say are your customers to take advantage of AI and ML and all the other-- >> It's interesting you say that because we actually launched the ability to run R and Python with SQL Server even two years ago. And so we've got a whole new class of customers, like data scientists now, that are working together with DBAs to start to put those workloads together with SQL Server so it's actually starting to come a really big deal for a lot of our community. >> Alright, so, Jeff, we had theCUBE at Microsoft Ignite last year, first time we'd done a Microsoft show. As you mentioned, our 10th year here, at what used to be EMC World. It was Interesting for me to dig in. There's so many different stack options, like we heard this week with Dell Technologies. Azure, I understood things a lot from the infrastructure side. I talked to a lot of your partners, talked to me about how many nodes and how many cores and all that stuff. But very clearly at the show, Azure Stack is an extension of Azure and therefore the applications that live on it, how I manage that, I should think Azure first, not infrastructure first. There's other solutions that extend the infrastructure side, things like WSSD I heard a lot about. But give us the update on Azure Stack, always interest in the Cloud, watching where that fits and some of the other adjacent pieces of the portfolio. >> So the Azure Stack is really becoming a rich portfolio now. So we launched with Azure Stack, which is, again, to give you that Cloud consistency. So you can literally write applications that you can run on premises, you can move to the Cloud. And you can do this without any code change. At the same time, a bunch of customers came to us and they said this is really awesome, but we have other environments where we just simply need to run traditional workloads. We want to run traditional VMs and containers and stuff like that. But we really want to make it easy to connect to the Cloud. And so what we have actually launched is Azure Stack HCI. It's been out about a month, month and a half. And, in fact, here at Dell EMC Dell Technology World here, we actually have Azure Stack HCI Solutions that are shipping, that are on the marketplace right now here are the show as well and I was just demoing one to someone who was blown away at just how easy it is with our admin center integration to actually manage the hyper converged cluster and very quickly and easily configure it to Azure so that I can replicate a virtual machine to Azure with one click. So I can back up to Azure in just a couple clicks. I can set up easy network connectivity in all of these things. And best yet, Dell just announced their integration for their servers into admin center here at Dell Technologies World. So there's a lot that we're doing together on premises as well. >> Okay, so if I understand right, is Dell is that one of their, what they call Ready Nodes, or something in the VxFlex family. >> Yes. >> That standpoint. The HCI market is something that when we wrote about it when it was first coming out, it made sense that, really, the operating system and hypervisor companies take a lead in that space. We saw VMware do it aggressively and Microsoft had a number of different offerings, but maybe explain why this offering today versus where we were five years ago with HCI. >> Well, one of the things that we've been seeing, so as people move to the Cloud and they start to modernize their applications and their portfolio, we see two things happen. Generally, there are some apps that people say hey, I'm obviously going to move that stuff to Azure. For example, Exchange. Office 365, Microsoft, you manage my mail for me. But then there are a bunch of apps that people say that are going to stay on Prem. So, for example, in the case of SQL, SQL is actually an example of one I see happening going in both places. Some people want to run SQL up in the Cloud, 'cause they want to take advantage of some of the services there. And then there are people who say I have SQL that is never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to the Cloud because of latency or for governance and compliance. So I want to run that on modern hardware that's super fast. So this new Dell Solutions that have Intel, Optane DC Persistent Memory have lots of cores. >> I'm excited about that stuff, man. >> Oh my gosh, yes. Optane Persistent Memory and lots of cores, lots of fast networking. So it's modern, but it's also secure. Because a lot of servers are still very old, five, seven, ten years old, those don't have things like TPM, Secure Boot, UEFI. And so you're running on a very insecure platform. So we want people to modernize on new hardware with a new OS and platform that's secure and take advantage of the latest and greatest and then make it easy to connect up to Azure for hybrid cloud. >> Persistent Memory's pretty exciting stuff. >> Yes. >> Actually, Dell EMC and Intel just published a paper using SQL Server to take advantage of that technology. SQL can be I/O bound application. You got to have data and storage, right? So now Dell EMC partnered together with SQL 19 to access Persistent Memory, bypass the I/O part of the kernel itself. And I think they achieved something like 170% faster performance versus even a fast NVNMe. It's a great example of just using a new technology, but putting the code in SQL to have that intelligence to figure out how fast can Persistent Memory be for your application. >> I want to ask about the cultural implications of the Dell Microsoft relationship partnership because, you know, these two companies are tech giants and really of the same generation. They're sort of the Gen Xers, in their 30s and 40s, they're not the startups, been around the block. So can you talk a little bit about what it's like to work so closely with Dell and sort of the similarities and maybe the differences. >> Sure. >> Well, first of all, we've been doing it for, like you said, we've been doing this for awhile. So it's not like we're strangers to this. And we've always had very close collaboration in a lot of different ways. Whether it was in the client, whether it's tablets, whether it's devices, whether it's servers, whether it's networking. Now, what we're doing is upping our cloud game. Essentially what we're doing is, we're saying there is an are here in Cloud where we can both work a lot closer together and take advantage of the work that we've done traditionally at the hardware level. Let's take that engineering investment and let's do that in the Cloud together to benefit our mutual customers. >> Well, SQL Server is just a primary application that people like to run on Dell servers. And I've been here for 26 years at Microsoft and I've seen a lot of folks run SQL Server on Dell, but lately I've been talking to Dell, it's not just about running SQL on hardware, it's about solutions. I was even having discussions yesterday about Dell about taking our ML and AI services with SQL and how could Dell even package ready solutions with their offerings using our software stack, but even addition, how would you bring machine learning and SQL and AI together with a whole Dell comp-- So it's not just about talking about the servers anymore as much, even though it's great, it's all about solutions and I'm starting to see that conversation happen a lot lately. >> And it's generally not a server conversation. That's one of the reasons why Azure Stack HCI is important. Because its customers-- customers don't come to me and say Jeff, I want to buy a server. No, I want to buy a solution. I want something that's pre configured, pre validated, pre certified. That's why when I talk about Azure Stack HCI, invariably, I'm going to get the question: Can I build my own? Yes, you can build your own. Do I recommend it? No, I would actually recommend you take a look at our Azure Stack HCI catalog. Like I said, we've got Dell EMC solutions here because not only is the hardware certified for Windows server, but then we go above and beyond, we actually run whole bunch of BurnInTests, a bunch of stress tests. We actually configure, tune, and tune these things for the best possible performance and security so it's ready to go. Dell EMC can ship it to you and you're up and running versus hey, I'm trying to configure make all this thing work and then test it for the next few months. No, you're able to consume Cloud very quickly, connect right up, and, boom, you got hybrid in the house. >> Exactly. >> Jeff and Bob, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> Our pleasure. Thanks for having us. Enjoyed it, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have more of theCUBEs live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. And it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here at the Sands Expo in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman, we are joined by Lewie Newcomb he is the Vice President, Server Storage and HCI Engineering Dell EMC. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE >> Thank you. >> For the first time ever. >> For the first time, I'm excited. Very excited about it. >> Yes well we're happy to have you. So we're talking VxFlex and we have not talked a lot about VxFlex on the show, I now you had a segment earlier. Tell us about your news today. >> Okay, well the big news for the show this week is we've launched an appliance. So traditionally we do a rack level product with VxFlex. So we've launched an appliance, so basically, think half-rack without networking. And then we did some updates to our software that we can talk about. And we also still, and we've added some more platforms. So we added the 840 PowerEdge server. So all of our products are on PowerEdge servers. And the 840 with 4-socket, we now have a great platform for SAP HANA. >> So Lewie let's take it back a sec, because VxFlex, there are some new products, but a main piece of this, this was a rebranding of some of the other pieces in the CI and HCI family. So maybe those people that have a little history, if you can help put this into context as to which brands are gone and under this umbrella. >> Yeah, so I'll just start with the new brands. VxFlex is the brand, VxFlex Ready Nodes, VxFlex Appliance is the new product, VxFlex Integrated Rack. VxFlex OS and VxFlex Manager. So a lot of parts there. >> Simplicity. >> Okay. (laughs) >> The naming is very simple and it's easier to talk about. I think a big improvement over our previous brands. And then, I'll go into some of the details. So, I talked about the Appliance, think about new consumption model, little bit smaller chunk there. But we also updated the software, the OS, so the VxFlex OS we added compression in this release, it's VxFlex 3.0 is the revision, it's shipping today. We added compression and we changed the data layout so we actually have higher performance and small granularity and snapshots. So some storage features were added. We also have many new certifications. So I mentioned the SAP HANA, we also have Epic, both VDI and the database. We also have SAS Analytics has a great white paper talking about our product and the benefits of our product. And we're really a performant product. If you think about, it's a pure software SAN And we can also do HCI, we can also combine the software SAN with the HCI we call that two-layers, the way we refer to the software SAN. >> Alright, so this week there's a lot of discussion about VxRail, so maybe use that a touch point for people to understand. VxRail, joint integration between VMware and Dell. VMware Hypervisor, give us a little compare and contrast as to some of those pieces. >> Great question, the VxRail as you said, it's our, integrated in an entire VMware stack. And some great announcements, I love ACE, if you seen the ACE announcement. So the Flex though is a product that's out there because not all customers are in a VMware environment. We also support bare metal. >> Or even if they use VMware they're not 100% VMware. >> Not 100%, and many of our customers actually have both. For high performance databases they might pick Flex. For more general purpose VDI and things they might pick the Rail and so customers as we talk to 'em, they different needs and we have different products for those, so we give them that choice. >> Well, let's actually walk us through a little bit about the VxFlex customer and sort of, so this customer what are their needs and why is VxFlex the choice? >> And you've been doing software defined for a long time so I always see it this way, you start out with a customer that's transforming their business, they want to get into software defined, they want to prepare themselves for the future. Well that's where we start, we're software defined. And the next thing we look at is, do they need performance? Do need they need some one millisecond latency across you know, 50 nodes, 1000 nodes, we can do that. We're very high performance, so that's why I mentioned the databases. And the other things is, we just talked about is that choice they may not want to use just vSphere, they might want to use other hypervisors, so we support those hypervisors. And then the real interesting thing is that two-layer, because as you know with HCI we combine the application and the stored services all on one node. So in our product we can actually separate those, so you can scale storage and compute separately. And it's still all in one storage pool. So it's a very flexible product that fits that kind of customer's needs. >> Okay, simplicity is really one of the key words that we've heard in this whole trend there. It's interesting having had discussion from CI all the way through HCI, some of the software that allows me to manage it, really makes invisible some of those choices. You just said, well HCI was, I can have some choices between the computing storage, but usually they did go in blocks together versus scaling them separately. Can you talk a little bit about the management suite and what that means from a customer administrator and the infrastructure team as to how they look at this spectrum of offerings. >> Sure, so we have the VxFlex Manager, I mentioned that in the beginning, so that manager is starting to automate that management orchestration. So from deployment to serviceability to provisioning, we launched several new features in that, in this current release 3.2 release. So it, more granularity round the service of the drives and things like that. We'll continue to evolve that. You mentioned that you're hearing that, every customer I talked to this week, number one thing we talk about is more automation, more ease of use, so as they're going into software defined, they're all asking for the same thing and we're going to support that with the VxFlex Manager. >> Alright, great so talk a little bit about the application, you talk about high performance environment, one of the things we've been looking in this space especially is, what are some of the new areas, things like containerization, Kubernetes, is this platform that the customer builds ready for that environment and how do we span from kind of what I have and where I'm going. >> Yeah, so we just launched our Kubernetes plugin, the CSI plugin, so we have some customers already testing that beta and because we have bare metal, we can also support that in that native environment, So most customers they are still using that in a virtualization environment. But they're preparing for the future, they're looking at different options, so it gives them that flexibility if they want to go bare metal. >> So you're 15 years at Dell and you've really spent your career in storage and we're talking about the big customer... Customer list of what they want, they want ease of use, they want simplicity, they want speed. >> They want performance. >> They want performance, so what are the kinds of things that you're thinking about for the next year's? >> Yeah well next year, we're still building out some of the storage services. So later in the year we'll add some new storage services, like we just added compression, so our launch this week was compression and we'll add more and more storage services more data protection, more replication. We'll continue in that path, and more and more management. The management is going to be a key area focus for us. >> Right, can you take us inside some of those customer conversations, good excitement, 15,000 people here. I'm sure you've talked to a lot of customers, what are some of the key concerns that are raising to them and what's the feedback you're getting? >> A lot of the customers the reason they want automation is they want to manage their full environment, 'cause remember at the rack level we've integrated the switching. So they want a predictable outcome and when they have drift, when they want to do security updates, that's most of our conversations, they want us to do more and more automation around that. Compliance against the product itself and then when a security patch comes in. And by the way I'll mention the two-layer, another great advantage of two-layer, a lot of times, these security patches come in only on the compute side. So we can do a security patch on the compute side without disrupting the storage pool, so it's a big advantage so that's 90% of the conversations we're having. >> Yeah, maybe touch on one of the big concerns, you talk about, I want that cloud operating model. When I'm running in any of the public clouds, I don't have to think about what version I'm running. The old days of, oh I had to manage it to in the VCE days, it was the compatibility matrix and then the RCM documentation, how are we doing towards getting to that simple push button, you know I take care of it, securities patches come I don't have to worry about scrambling I've got that taken care of. >> That's nirvana, that's our north star. We're working on that and we're using the Flex Manager as that platform and more and more we're taking those requirements in the Flex Manager and we'll be rolling it out. Our goal is to have that one click upgrade right? That one button, our goal is to be able to do compliance and quick updates, and it's a journey. And it's the most complex part as you know, you mentioned, some older products, it's the most complex part of the solution, is keeping that compliance and that performance where you need it. >> So how do you manage that? I mean as you said it's a huge challenge that your company's facing and yet also all your clients are facing too. >> Well luckily we have a lot smart people. (laughs) and we have great customers. The nice thing you know, Dell's direct, the interaction we've had with customers this week, I mean they're designing with us, they're telling us what they need. And we're not a large large scale business in relative to a server business and using computing. So we have relationships with almost all of our customers. And we go and show them our roadmaps, we go get feedback from them, they help us define what they need and we follow our customers. >> Well it's really interesting, because we know that Dell's turning 35 very soon and middle age is the time where you start to get a little more set in your ways, a little older, a little creakier, but what you're describing is this real collaborative relationship with your customers and not sort of this my way or the highway kind of thing. >> I feel I work in a startup, we're agile, we're listening to our customers, we're doing the right things. We're not focused all just on our business, we're focused on our customer outcomes. We made a big ship this year on my product line of talking about the databases and the certifications and we're really trying to help our customers through those decisions without them having to make all those decisions themselves. >> Yeah, what about the consumption model, some of the other product lines we're talking to are going to manage their services as well as moving towards that OPEX model. How's that fit into the VxFlex? >> Yeah, we're not there yet, of course we're going to lead with our Dell Technologies portfolio, We have some great products in that portfolio. But we'll get there over time. Today, you saw the announcements on day one with VMware, Dell EMC and the cloud platforms. We'll continue to build infrastructure, we'll continue to stay in our lane, where we do really really well and the customers love us. But We'll eventually get to different consumption models. >> So tell us a little bit about this show for you. This is not your first rodeo here at Dell Technologies World. >> And I hope and you're seeing this, this feel like we're one big company now right? We've been three years in the making. And coming to Dell Tech this year, I feel like we're one. And Michael's key note was, the first customer I talked to, you know, everything Michael said, resonated so well with me and so it really feels that way. And just the vibe back there and in the solution expo, it's just, you know at level 10. >> Well right, so we're passed the Dell EMC integration point, but the big thing we've been talking about this week is, you know those seven logos up on the banner behind you there are acting like one. So VxRail designed together, sold together. Can you talk a little bit about where do some of the other pieces of the portfolio fit into place. >> Pivotal Cloud Foundry right? Almost all of us are parting with Pivotal Cloud Foundry and building that stack and offering that service to our customer, you know Secureworks RSA, we all need security right? We're all working there too. And even now, so I work in the PowerEdge team, you know, storage product, so we're working, we're taking PowerEdge and putting it everywhere. So all of our data protection products, RSA, our storage products, we're working PowerEdge everywhere and leveraging that. And the beauty about that is you saw the VxRail ACE announcement right? That's a platform, that's a analytics platform that now we can build on and designing PowerEdge. We can put requirements into PowerEdge to make that a much richer telemetry box and really start getting some analytics in that solve some problems, predictive analysis and things like that. So yeah, it's been fun, I've been on the tip of the spear of this, you know, coming from the storage side, and I'm starting to see it really really come together this year, here at this show. >> Alright, so want to give you the final word, VxFlex I know people, if they went through the expo hall they could see it, touch it and the like. For those that didn't make it to the show, what do you want the key takeaway for VxFlex? >> So we're pure software defined, we're very high performance, we're ideal for your databases, we're ideal for scale, we can scale up to 1000 nodes or higher. And we have many many customers doing that. We have running in the show this week, a database running at six nodes over a million IOPS, sub one millisecond latency. So... >> A good note to end on, (laughs) powerful. >> Bang yeah. (laughs) >> Lewie thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, appreciate it, it's been fun. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Stu Miniman, we will have so much more of day three of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit. (techno music)

>> 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.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018, brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome to our live coverage here. Day three at Dell Technologies World 2018. We are live in Las Vegas. Hope you've been with us for the first two days. We have a great lineup here for you on day three. I'm John Wallace, along with Stu Miniman. Glad to have you along, Stu, it's always great to work with you. >> Thanks, John. Same for you. >> Good week so far for you? >> It's been excellent, my voice is holding up, it's been a long week. >> You're a busy man. >> Excited to get all of this, and heck, I'll be seeing Dan again next week at the big show. >> Dan McConnell's becoming like, he's like not even an annual visitor, you're like a bimonthly visitor here on theCUBE, right? VP of Converged Platforms. >> Stu: Fifth time, you get a free sandwich. >> Yeah, that's right, I got to punch card, I got to sign and get it punched each time. >> Yeah, nice to have you, Dan. Nice to have you back, good to see you again. Alright, let's just talk about the show, first off. Here we are, day three, we talked a little bit yesterday about customer discussions, conversations, so now you've had a little bit of time to soak this in and what you've heard from folks, and what would be your takeaway here? >> Sure, may spin this one a little bit, may have an angle here. Tremendous interest in HCI, and I'm not saying that just because I'm in HCI. No, but it's a lot of good, solid feedback from customers. It's starting to shift more in the mainstream, right? So as we see customers deploy it, more workloads get deployed on top of it. There's a tremendous amount of interest in HCI. When we look at all the graphs of customer interviews we're doing and analyst discussions we're doing, HCI is right there at the top of the list, in terms of subjects that we're talking about. >> Can you quantify that? Are numbers at all out there floating around, in terms of growth, in terms of what... >> Oh, from the HCI side, yeah. Most analysts will agree, it's about 70 to 80 percent in growth year over year. I'd say, from a Dell perspective, we're doing 138 percent, so we're actually growing faster than market. A lot of that's due to, we've got a, one, we've been in the HCI business for a while, two, we take a portfolio approach. There's never any one size fits all, so we actually take a portfolio approach to HCI. We've got what are multiple different consumption models, one that is an appliance, this is the server, the hardware, the software, lifecycle managed in an appliance. And then the next layer is what we call rack scale. Obviously, HCI puts some pressure on the network, right? High network dependency. Rack scale, what rack scale does is include the networking components in that engineered system attribute. Pretested, pre-designed, inclusion of both the physical, as well as the virtual network, and across both of those consumption models, we have a stack that is very VMware-centric, right? VxRail, VxRack SDDC, and we have a stack that is what we call Open HCI. Supports multiple hypervisors, that is XC series on the appliance and VxRack Flex on the rack-scale solution, so portfolio approach, cover the whole market, and we're really seeing it blow up, it's great. >> Dan, it's interesting. I think back to when people were first trying to wrap their brains around this whole HCI thing, it was like, oh, okay, I took server and storage, kind of smashed it together, some software maybe in there, but it was, oh, this is small-end thing, it's maybe four nodes, maybe getting to eight nodes, but you talked about the VxRack Flex, which we've been watching ScaleIO since before the acquisition, and all that solutions. Much larger configuration, some people said, oh, it's not even HCI, because I've talked to some customers, well, I can do a storage-only configuration or I can do a full hyperconverged configuration. We've seen maturation and some segmentation in the marketplace, so you know, bring us inside that, from, you know, the Flex business, just what you're seeing, what differentiates it from some of the other options. >> Absolutely, I'd say it's flexible. (dog barking) Dog barking next door. >> John: On cue. >> On cue. >> There he is again. It's one of the philanthropic Dell outreach programs, it's comfort pets. >> Therapy dogs. >> Therapy dogs, thank you. So we're right next door, no reflection at all on the guests or the program or whatever. >> They're in day three, too. It's been a long conference for them. >> We're getting punchy, alright, back to Flex. >> Back to Flex. >> Just explaining, yeah. >> So, back to your point. Flex... is flexible. We've got customers from four nodes, all the way up to over, large enterprise customers over a thousand nodes. Matter of fact, about 45 percent of our business comes from Fortune 500, so when you think HCI, like you said, HCI started in what was VDI. We're going to pick a workload, VDI's kind of linearly scalable, HCI was a good fit. Nowadays, it's multiple workloads, right? That flexibility, agility, ease-of-scale, people are putting more and more workloads on top of it. VxRack Flex, we've got, when you talk about scalable, up to a thousand nodes, literally 30 million IOPS, right? So, performance, I think we've got it covered. So it's definitely maturing, some of those larger customers are running anywhere from database, all the way to mission-critical applications. >> Dan, I actually did a case-study of one of your larger global financial companies a few years ago. Want you to talk about what they saw this solution at. This was a foundation for their private cloud. They use, in certain regions, public cloud makes sense, but in a lot of areas, this is the foundational layer of private cloud. A lot of times, people, oh, HCI, it is what it is, it's some boxes and some software, but talk about the private cloud angle. >> This customer, it's actually a very interesting storyline. They started off doing what we would call do-it-yourself, build-your-own, and loved the technology, as is predominant with HCI, continued to scale. Bought a lot, added on, added on, and as they continued to add, continued having discussions with them, and they actually love the technology, would love to be able to automate more, would love to spend less time setting it up as it comes in. So they actually moved up that consumption pyramid into VxRack Flex, which comes, as opposed to do-it-yourself, comes shrink-wrapped, roll it in. So they actually designed their infrastructure, their data center around what they call pods. Fairly large pods, but they've changed the consumption units on how they consume IT. They'll actually wheel in Flex pods, that's their new unit of consumption. Now, a Flex pod is... >> Not to be confused with another product called FlexPod. >> Oh, gosh, yes, VxRack Flex pods. Yes, absolutely. >> We unfortunately have run out of words in our industry here, so yeah. >> I'm sure you'll find something in the vernacular that will apply here. >> I'll try and burn that one from my memory, but good catch. >> So that's one use case. Just in general now, so what is the value prop for a customer today, as opposed to what kind of flexibility you're giving them, we've heard about performance, but how are people actually putting it to use for them, and what are they doing better, do you think, because of that? >> I'll start off, one, which is an architectural discussion, and I'll crunch this down pretty small. In the beginning, there was DAS, direct-attached storage, and it was fast, and it was easy to manage, as long as you had to manage one. You get a hundred units, and it was siloed storage, and it was hard, so the world came up with SAN. It's consolidated storage, it's great. I can carve it up, I can manage it from one place, and then we came up with flash, SSD, blindingly fast, and that storage controller started to be a choking point, so we moved the storage back into the server, a la HCI. >> Actually, we called it Server SAN for that specific reason. >> Exactly right, exactly right. Initial ventures into some of HCI, you could only scale the storage or only scale the HCI clusters as big as one given cluster. So you started building somewhat of silos of HCI. One of the beauties of Flex and VxFlex OS storage software is it can scale across multiple clusters. Those clusters can be VMware, they can be BareMetal, they can be Linux, so you start to gain all the advantages of HCI, flexibility, agility, kind of incremental scaling, pay as you grow, with all of the advantages of storage consolidation. I no longer have pools of siloed storage, I can carve up ones as needed, when needed, I can manage it all as one combined storage pool. From a Flex perspective, it's got some pretty nice architectural attributes, which give you the best of HCI and agility and scale, as well as storage consolidation. So we're seeing a lot of success there. >> Dan, I hear things like open, flexible, some of those environments, and I think about the service providers and requirements that they have for how they need to simplify their environments, super conscious on cost, how's this been doing in the service provider market recently? >> Absolutely, funny you bring that up. We actually talk internally, we've got a service provider team inside Dell, they focus on servicing the large telcos and other service providers, and we've noticed that their underlying infrastructure is very very similar with Flex, so we're in discussions to see how we land what they do on top of what we do as a standardized offering. Even right now, a lot of our customers are in the service provider space. That large growth, flexibility, and some of the underlying storage stack has multi-tenancy capabilities, where you can carve up and isolate, that lend itself very very well to service providers. >> Oh, go ahead, Stu. >> For people that know ScaleIO, anything new that they should be understanding? I understand it's this packaging as like a hardware model. Organizationally, it lives under the server team now, I believe it is. >> Absolutely, so two things there. One, organizationally, all the HCI stuff came in up under Ashley Gorakhpurwalla so it came in up under the server side, and then, so, ScaleIO is up under Jeff Boudreau, under Dan Embar, it's storage stack, it's in under the storage division. We work very very closely together. Second thing that's happening, there's a, one, we've been in the HCI world for a while, in the CI world for a while. We've quickly determined we can drive much better customer experience, much better customer outcomes, as we lean more towards an appliance or an engineered system versus a do-it-yourself kind of model. With ScaleIO, what we're trying to do is push it more into an appliance model, push it more into rack scale model, VxRack Flex. There's a outbound shift away from, kind of, what was ScaleIO as a software only and into more of an engineered system appliance offering, so with that shift, you'll see a rebrand from ScaleIO to VxFlex OS. It's just a rebrand of the software. >> So I'm glad Stu talked about organization, because you had to kind of reorg not too long ago, and so we had Ashley on yesterday, we talked to Jeff yesterday, as well. So from your perspective, now that you've had a few months to settle in, find your groove, how much of a difference do you think, as far as customer-facing, is this making in terms of responding to those kinds of needs and those desires. >> Sticking HCI with the server team has an awful lot of synergy. Obvious, compute-centric, scale, from a business scale perspective. So there's an awful lot of goodness in living in that same organization. Ashley's done it pretty well to make sure there's a lot of alignment, but we're also keeping a lot of the engineered system special sauce focus on the HCI side. So we're able to, one, better leverage a lot of the, what I would call, supply chain scale, the processes and go-to-market capabilities of an engine that is built around hundreds and thousands of units, right? That stretches across services, that stretches across factory and supply chain. Obviously, we want to drive HCI, we want to drive HCI in the mainstream and scale. Sitting right there in the server organization, they do scale, right? So lot of good learnings, lot of good synergy and leverage across teams. >> It's coming together for you. Nicely done. Thanks for joining us again, good to see you. You going to see each other next week, you said? >> That's right. >> We down in New Orleans, is that... yeah. >> Yeah. >> Alright, enjoy, and stay out of trouble, both of you. >> Absolutely, you know, one week in Vegas... >> Vegas one week, New Orleans the next, that's a recipe for an interesting time. >> Yes, that it is. >> Dan McConnell, thanks for being with us here on theCUBE. >> Thank you, thanks for having me. >> Back with more from Las Vegas right after this. You're watching theCUBE from Dell Technologies World 2018. (upbeat techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back to the Cube, day two of our coverage of Dell Technologies World. We're in Las Vegas, and I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We're having a great day, a great day and a half, yesterday as well, learning a lot about what Dell Technologies is doing to help customers make things real. Digital transformation, IT transformation, security transformation, workforce transformation, you name it. We are excited to welcome back to the Cube, one of our alumni, Dan Inbar, the SVP and GM of XtremIO and ScaleIO. Welcome back, Dan. >> Thank you very much, good to be here. >> So, lots of news in the last day and a half. What is the state of the union with XtremIO? >> So, we're very excited, today we launch the new release of X2, that brings to the market the native replication capability, X2 native replication, which is done like XtremIO does everything in a very unique and special way, leveraging our architecture of cast-based architecture. And, as such, being a very effective and very efficient native replication. In addition, what we've launched now is the new release, which is an entry-level XtremIO, allowing customers to start with a lower cost platform, leveraging all the capabilities that XtremIO brings with an enterprise grade solution, but in a lower market. So those are the big things that we brought about. >> Yeah Dan, let's unpack that a little bit for our audience. Let's start with the replication side, you know, EMC with, you know, SRDF, decades ago, really brought replication to the storage market, it was one of the things, when XtremIO first came out, it was like, well, if you want replication that's not native there are lots of options. The Dell EMC family has lots of options out there, so explain, kind of what went into it, why another one, what differentiates it. >> Sure. So the unique thing with our architecture, is basically we're looking at everything and fingerprinting everything, so that we don't write anything that's already written. And when you add another replication capability now, we do the same thing. So it's part of the way, basically. So what happens is, when you have an array, you do the first replication, you start replication, basically, most all solutions, you have to copy all the data first time, and then you can do snap diffs, or whatever. What we do is, basically, we copy everything already deadlocked and compressed, so you bring down the bandwidth up to 75% lower bandwidth. So it's significantly lower on the WAN, much more effective, as a result, a lot more cost-effective solution. >> Yeah, so we'd actually looked at the SNAP technology a few years ago, as one of the things that differentiated XtremIO in the marketplace, and what that means to businesses and how they can change how they work on it. Talk to us about the users and what does this replication mean to them and their business? How is it going to lead to further along that path of digital transformation that we traverse? >> So there's a few things that this brings to the market. First of all, because of our architecture. So that, you can now have your production, we've always said you could have your production and QA and Dev on the same platform, because of all of the snapshots that basically doesn't cost you anything. Well, now, if you want to now separate it, you don't have to pay for the one, so it's still basically for free, but you can put it into a different environment and you can have your whole TEST and DEV environment separate. If those who want to do it that way. So you have that ability again, in addition. But once you do all the replication you can get into, for example, if you do one too many replication, you can have one station that does replication, you'll get D Doop across all the systems, so again, a lot more efficient solution. So, basically what it brings you, is in the data transformation world, is a lot more effective, cost-effective solution, and it's a very unique way of approaching it. >> So, I want to talk about how this is impacting IT organizations, as IT now, and I think Michael Dell even said yesterday, needs to become and can become a profit center. We're seeing a lot more business leaders recognize that IT should be a business strategy, there's so much potential for it to really become much more horizontally aligned within an organization. Talk to us about, from that perspective, as your talking with customers, and presumably CIOs and leaders there, what are some of the benefits they're looking for this technology to deliver, in terms of elevating IT in a transformative way? >> So, what customers are saying is that, by using this, that they're basically they've taken away this problem from the end user, he's basically got all the resources he needs, got the performance that he needs, he's got no issues, and the cost-wise, it's significantly lower. So what it allows them, for example, if you want every developer to have his own copy, his ability to work independently, without having everyone fight about the number of copies we can do and who's getting what copy, you can just do it. You can have endless amount of copies, it doesn't cost you anything. This is a very different way of doing things. It allows you to move a lot faster, and the pace, as we heard Michael talk about yesterday, the pace is picking up. These kinds of technologies allows you to work a lot faster, a lot more reacting to what's happening in the field. >> Alright so, Dan, when XtremIO came out, it was already a relatively small building block, built for kind of a really a scalable architecture, so explain to us what it means that you have a new entry level. What has changed from a technology standpoint, that's allowed you to kind of repackage? >> So what you're talking about is with the X1, it was a scale out architecture, as you mentioned. X2 brought to the market, scale up as well as scale out. So each brick can have up to 72 drives, so you can start with 18 drives and grow by small tax, so you have a lot more granularity. What the X2T does, it starts, it goes up to 36 drives. Okay, so it gives you the ability, it's more limited, from the point of view of the scale out. You can always upgrade it, but customers should make the decision upfront. If it's a small system that he wants, then it makes sense to go with the X2T, because it's limited and doesn't scale up. You can upgrade it, but you'll end up paying more then, to get to the same scale. >> Okay, so is there different hardware, or is this limiting on software, how is this product different from the main one? >> It's basically the ability to work the system with less memory in the system, because it's a smaller system, so you can work with less memory. >> Okay, so it's actually a different chassis, though, is that right? >> No, same box exactly. You can always upgrade, and you buy an expansion kit and you just add the memory and you're back to an R, which is the code name for the largest scale out system. The only problem is, because it's an upgrade, because you're doing it after the fact, because you're doing it in the field, you're going to end up paying more. So if a customer thinks that he needs only a very small system, prices over essence, this is the solution to go with. But if you want to add the scalability capability, you should probably start with an R. >> Alright, can you bring us inside? You know, was this a pull from customers to ask for this type of configuration? Are there specific use cases that you're hearing for this? >> Yeah, what we're seeing is a lot of demand from the field, and we're seeing it more and more. All the goodies that the high end solutions bring, but cost is an issue. So basically they're saying, we want a more competitive solution, with all the capabilities. We love the product, but give it to us cheaper. So, that's always true, and we're doing a lot of work to get that to them. But the X2T gives the opportunity for a customer to understand the values that XtremIO can bring to you, and then, afterwards, grow and understand the capabilities moving on. >> So some of the things that I've heard, Dan, you articulate, show how this technology can help customers transform IT. We've talked about getting things done faster, less costs, digital transformation as can be enabled by this technology, and also, sounds like workforce transformation, as you were saying. It sounds like these can be done more easily, maybe with less kind of competition internally. I'm wondering about the security froze. We talked about that as one of the four tenants of transformation. How does some of the native replication, for example, and the new capabilities of what you just announced, how does it help organizations facilitate security as they grow, have more and more data, which opens up, you know, attack surfaces? >> So, as you mentioned, I mean, replication adds, obviously, for the security, data security, not the pure security of someone penetrating, of course, but obviously the product itself has got all the securities and all the qualifications that are required in order to offer a completely secured offering. So, from that point of view, obviously you're covered. The replication brings to the market the capability of having it in a DR site, offsite, et cetera, and all those capabilities, that were proven time and time again, worth doing. >> Alright, Dan, last thing I wanted to cover is, in you organization you also have the ScaleIO products, so, big announcement with the X2 piece, what's the update on the ScaleIO piece, we've had the opportunity to interview on theCUBE, you know, customers over the years, and you know, where does that fit in the portfolio? >> So, ScaleIO is, as you know, we've repositioned it now to be as part of the V FLEX OS solution, and we're working very closely with the VxFLEX Team. As such, we're basically trying to push it to more, you have the VxFLEX OS, you have then the VxFLEX Ready Node solution, which is basically qualified Dell servers that you can combine together with our OS. We're working on making it into an appliance, which would come complete, and then a rack, which is a full HCI. So, really, the repositioning is to make it more, to be easier to consume in the broader market, obviously with the large customers, et cetera, to consume it as they did in the past. But really, it makes it much easier to consume. As you were saying before, the value of ScaleIO is very clear and it's a great product, it just makes it easier in this new positioning to consume by a broader market. >> Dan, thanks so much for stopping by, sharing what's new, how it's differentiated. And we look forward to having some customers on to talk about the business outcomes that they're achieving. So thanks for your time. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> We want to thank you for watching theCube, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We're live in Vegas, day two of Dell Technologies World, stick around, we'll be right back after a short break. (upbeat electronic music)