>> 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)

>> 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)