>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back here to Las Vegas, live at the Venetian, theCUBE continuing our coverage of Dell EMC World 2017, where we're extracting a signal from the noise here on theCUBE. Of course, the flagship broadcast outlet for SiliconANGLE TV. I'm John Walls. Good to have you with us here along with Keith Townsend who's the principal of CTO Advisors, and joining us now is Arindam Paul who's the senior consultant of product marketing at Dell EMC. Arindam, thanks for being with us today. >> Thank you, John. >> It's kind of like the XtremIO X2 hour right now on theCUBE. (Everyone chuckling) We just said it's great talking about the launch today. You're heavily involved with X2. Just had the first break-out session and you said you packed the house. >> Yes. >> Standing room only. So I assume it was a big hit. What were the customers, if you will, most interested in and what was your sense of where they were coming from? >> That's right, thank you. Yes, we just had our first break-out session and there was a lot of customer interest. It was primarily the customers wanted to know, obviously, what was great about X2, how would it differentiated versus X1, in terms of speed... Not only what speeds and feats, but also all the features, the software enhancements, everything that we're going to be announcing this week. >> John: So a hungry market? >> Definitely, definitely. We were, actually, to be quite honest, it was on top of the lunch hour, so we were not expecting a very full audience because obviously, we are keeping people from their lunches, but the interest belied our expectation. We were very happy and surprised. >> John: So literally a hungry market then? >> Definitely. >> Over lunch time. >> You're right (laughing). >> So, I'm going to ask a lazy question. What was the biggest question coming out of the session as people stood around and asked? >> Yeah, people loved all the hardware enhancements that we're bringing to markets. There was a lot of impromptu unsolicited clapping and cheering when we announced that our latest GUI, graphical user interface, is going to be without Java. Apparently, that was anticipated for a very long time. >> Keith: I almost clapped just now. (John laughing) >> That right, HTML5 was and we have a lot of enhancements that use graphical interface in terms of, like intuitive, very context-sensitive hints as you'd expect on your iPhone, as you're configuring and walking though the menus. We also have a lot of nice reporting, very beautiful search capabilities that's going to be there for the first time and people, apparently, just loved it. Especially from an administrative perspective. >> Any new, exciting data services that weren't available in XIO1 that's available in XIO2? >> In terms of data services, yes, obviously. Like, now we're going to be scaled up as well scaled out, so we're going to be multidimensionality scaling and then we obviously have done a lot of work in terms of tuning performance, tuning data compression, so you're going to get a lot more compression out of our platform, data reduction out of our platform. Overall, it's a lot of interest. >> When's the last time you got spontaneous applause at a presentation? (Arindam laughing) >> I'll tell you, for as skeptical and as discerning customer base as ours, it's hard to get. >> I imagine. >> You have to earn it. >> You had to feel like, "Hey, we've hit the jackpot here." >> We did, exactly. >> So to speak in Vegas. >> So, customer base, I've been hearing a lot about cheaper, deeper storage in XIO2. What is the target customer for XIO2? Is this only for larger enterprises or is there a play for the SMB mid-size company as well? >> We wanted to make X2 the platform of choice for our customers who are primarily interested in, say for example, copy data management. We've been an amazing copy data management machine, like if you look at our installer base today, we have about 1.5 million snapshots of XtremIO virtual copies that have been used. The vast majority of them, well 50% of them, are actually writable snapshots, so they're being used very differently than primarily dumb backup copies, or secondary copies. They are active citizens, first-class citizens, they're at par with volumes. So copy data management is obviously a big use case for us. Virtual desktops, VDIs, right? >> Before we get off into VDI, copy data management, that's a term I've heard, but some people might not have heard that term. What's copy data management and what's the impact of copy data management to an IT budget, for example? >> Oh, there's tremendous benefits, right? Copy data management, when done right, like we do on our platform, really lets your IT break the chains and it frees IT, and provides for them a lot of business agility so that they're able to make instant copies of the production database virtually at will, without any cost, even in terms of time because they're instant copies, or in terms of occupying spaces. So you could literally create clones of your data, and these clones are perfectly functional clones so you can write to them, you can read to them as if your production data, and that's an amazing capability of itself. By the way, when you're creating these copies, there's zero to no impact to your production performance. Your production performance keeps on being as it is. Now, when you layer on top of that, because of our metadata architecture, metadata delivery architecture, you can make the copies resemble production or make the production resemble the copies. So you can basically restore-refresh at will. Again, without any impact to production, without any downtime, without literally any cost whatsoever. So when you're able to do this kind of stuff right now, think about the use case in your typical tester and their production environment. Where you have one copy of production and then multiple copies for your test engineers. You'd allot your engineers all the analytics copies and all those copies can be, literally, run very close to production because it doesn't cost you hours to basically create those copies or it doesn't take terabytes of space. So it really, truly lets you add agility to your IT and basically run your business much much efficiently and fast. >> Flash storage in general always helped with VDI, seems like there's a connection between copy data, flash storage, and VDI. Am I making an assumption here? >> Well, VDI, when you think about it, is copies of desktops. It would be perfect copies if you're not trying to basically customize them. So we use a slightly different technology, in namely our inline deduplication and compression and how we integrate our inline dedupe and our in-memory metadata with VDI-specific commands such as VAAI xcopy, how you basically clone virtual desktops. So we don't use snapshots to clone the virtual desktops, instead we use something called VAAI xcopy optimized with inline metadata, but the effect is the same. You can literally create roll-out virtual desktops, thousands and thousands of copies of virtual desktops in a really short order and you can manage them and everything compresses and dedupes very efficiently in a very small optimal footprint. >> You've heard from your customers today, at least in a brief amount of time. What do you think is going to be the biggest benefit an X1 user is going to find with X2? At the end of the day, what do you think is going to be the "Aha!" moment for them that's really going to open their eyes as to how you've impacted their businesses. >> Certainly, certainly. So we have a lot of eager customers and I think of the features that were long-sought after by our customer base, I think they're very happy about the economics of the platform. So we have significantly reduced the dollar-per-gigabyte cost to the customer on an effective basis and it's going to be like 1/3rd of what it was in X1. I think people were literally jumping on the seats when they heard that because not only don't you have better performance, better data reduction, new data services, but hey, we just slashed the price >> Save me money. >> 66% >> Right. >> So, outside of cost savings, new data services, one of the things that I heard is data replication natively. >> Right. >> That's a big deal. Walk us through the data replication capability. >> Yes, yes. Again, if you step back, one of the things that our architecture let's us do because of, again, our metadata, our foundation architecture that's based on metadata, is that we're very, very efficient in doing copies. Whether it's VDI copies or database copies, we are a copy machine. When you think of it and step back, replication is a copy problem because you're creating yet another copy, the only difference is that now the copy is happening outside of your box, from one XtremIO to another XtremIO. So what we did was that we leveraged the same foundational architecture, our same architecture, to basically not only replicate changes but actually dedupe changes. Now if you think about a global enterprise that has maybe a multisite replication going on, like four, five, six, seven, eight, up to 16, 32 sites that are replicating to one place, now you can see the power of our architecture. So there are many advantages. One is that you're only replicating deduplicated changes. What I mean by that is if there is a block of data that's already at the target site, you won't need to replicate that again, all you need to do is copy metadata and point it across, and that gives you like 99% savings. That's one. You also change the data transfer problem into a data reduction problem because now the only data you have to put on the wire to replicate is everything after dedupe and compression, and we get about four to one. So you slash your data transfer by 75%. In a global dedupe system, when you're multiple sites replicating to one target site because of the fact that all sites are deduplicating among themselves, we expect savings to be up to 38% on average. So savings at the target site, savings on the WAN bandwidth, and much faster replication. That's our solution. >> That's why they were standing on their seats clapping for you today (Everyone laughing) >> That's true. >> Arindam, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time. >> Thank you very much. >> Congratulations on a very successful launch and one I'm sure will be many more spontaneous rounds of applause. >> We're just getting started, thank you. >> You bet. >> Thank you, John. We continue here on theCUBE live from Dell EMC World 2017. We're in Las Vegas. Back with more in just a bit. (gentle music)