>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back to Dell EMC World 2017. We're live here in the Venetian in Las Vegas. Day one of the three day show. Had Michael Dell out on the keynote stage earlier today. Also had David Blaine, world famous magician. Pretty interesting performance to say the least. >> Yeah I went down to get an ice pick. (man laughing) During our break. >> We'll get into that later but it was interesting. Keith Townsend, John Walls also joined by Itzik Reich who is the CTO of XtremeIO at Dell EMC. Itzik, thanks for being with us. It's good to see you sir. >> Thank you very much. >> All the way from Tel Aviv and great to have you. Alright, so your sweet spot of the company is giving birth to a new baby today. >> There you go. >> XtremeIO X2, tell us about that. What spawned that, and then what that responses be, what you developed. >> Right, I think in order to understand Xtreme, you need to start with the beginning, the X1. So, November 2015 I was having my class reunion, meeting my ex-girlfriend, and we've launched X1. And X1 became, within two quarters, the largest sole Dell flash array in the world. From nowhere to the largest sole flash array, at least in terms of units sold to the market. Right, both Garthner and I. And it was huge. A huge building and a success for us. A success because nobody would become the number one leader. And we built them because we didn't have the life cycle to normally mature a product. Right, so you mentioned being a father. I'm a father to two daughters, lovely daughters. One of them is six years old, one of them is five. And the young one is starting to show some signs of being a really clever person. And I'm afraid that somebody will tell me, oh she can skip the first class. Because skipping class serves some association with it. Social aspects of it. So we've been really busy trying to understand XtremeIO X1. Making super stable. Today we're already about 5/9 in the market. But it also would stand to refresh the product and come with something new. So our life cycle wasn't a traditional year or year and a half of refreshing the product. It took us longer for us to X2 and this is what we announced today. So what's new with X2. The first thing is the ability to come with really Dell's XO Drive and Dell's configuration. In X1 each DAE, you could put up to 25 drives inside of the DAE. And X2 can put out up to 72 drives per DAE right. And you can scale just like before. Up to 8X bricks. It's a huge capacity which you need for the vast majority of the use cases out there they don't know. Just VDR or just a single database is right. Today XtremeIO can fill pretty much every transaction while closing including virtualization wall close. You just need a lot of capacity for thousands of VM's. So that's one of the things. The other thing we improved performance of the X2 array. And the magic story around there was that because of the thousands and thousands of customers that we're involved with really got the good insight of the workload that they are running. And what we found out is something very interesting. The majority of those customers are running workload that they're very small block size. So you storage every item that arrives in the system as a different blocks characteristic and we found that the majority of them are using very, very small block size. And we want them to improve the performance of those block sizes. The IOPS and the latency. And we also wanted to make sure that it's actually more economical cheaper than the very expensive drives that the new NVMe drives that are out there. So different design goals. Making it faster and also making it cheaper in different dimensions. So we come with a new feature called Drive Boost. In a nut shell, in a nut shell Drive Boost will give you 80% better latency for pretty much every walkthrough that is out there. >> So... With that small block sizes versus big block sizes. Why is that important? We're at a conference and we're talking a lot about digital transformation. CEO, we teased John earlier. You know he's a sports guy, he doesn't do LAG goals. >> (laughing) Sorry. >> That's alright. >> Help us understand the value of that data type. >> Sure, so you know we like to think about digital transformation but at the end of the day. You're the customer, you have a database. You'll use it on query or queries against the database. If it's a very large database, there are thousands maybe even millions of queries everyday. Those queries take time for the end user to get a response for. So let's assume that you want a monthly report. And this report normally takes nine hours to generate. If I can shrink the report crunching time to two hours instead of nine, that means that I have provided better value for the business success. Right. One of the stories is that we have a financial customer in the Middle East. They need to generate the report every month between midnight because this is where they locate their reports. Up until eight o'clock in the morning. Why eight o'clock because this is when the employees start to come to work. And every hour that they exceed after the eight hour generation they get fined by the government. So if I'm saving this customer four hours then they are not getting fined by the government for generating the report. That's a true value for the customer return. Cause those things are important. People tend to think about just performance numbers in terms of IOPS but the real magic number is latency. How quick can you make the query? Whether it's a database application or a VDI VM or just a generic web server running on a Voltron machine. Those are the important things today. >> So transactional apps. Big deal. Are these transactional apps, we learned a lot about virtualization and cloud computing to date. Are these transactional apps running in a virtualized environment or are we still relying on big heavy metal workloads going to treat IO2. >> Yeah, it's a good question. At least from my experience some would argue that anywhere between 70 to 80% of the customer that allowed it went full virtualized. So their running their entire application running either under V6 or a Microsoft type of V. So they are fully virtualized. Some of the customers are still running their workload on a traditional physical servers right. Even in the S6 at the end of the day it runs on a physical server to all day the kill in itself. But yeah, the majority of them are already there in terms of virtualization. >> So what are customers really excited about when it comes to features sets for an XIO2 versus XtremeIO version wise. >> Right, amazing question. So performance, we've already discussed performance. 80% better latency, that's not something that you get because of the usage of better CPU's. Intel moves slow, it's basically dead right. They don't give you 200% performance between generation so we wanted to do something else and solve the same problem. The other thing is quality of service. We are not cheaping NGA but it's coming soon. The ability to give a specific VM, a specific IO copying and the latency copying. And also could give you the ability to burst to more IOP's techniques needed for a couple of minutes. So quality of service I the noisy neighbor right. Somebody generate too much noise you want him to be quiet. That's what quality of service is. The other things that we've announced native replication. We found out finally of our own replication that can replicate between one XtremeO2 and another. But it's not a traditional replication. The unique thing about XtremeIO was always the cusp. The content of dressable architecture. People typically think about it as a D Duplication feature but in fact we don't have a feature called D Duplication. We analyze the data as it goes through the system itself. And we give a unique shot signature to each one of those blocks. And if the shot signature already exists in the system we dupe the block. But it's not the feature per se. That why the D Duplication's so fast on XtremeIO. So up until now the customers architecture was only applicable to writing the data into the array itself. Now it's also applicable for replicating the data. So for example if you have a data reduction of five to one which is very common in virtualize use case. Many VM, many the same template and so on. You know need to replicate four times less the data at the source to the destination target. Right. So that's a very, very big thing because you need to replicate more and more data. But the 24 hour window isn't changed. God didn't upgrade it where the server respects the time. Right. >> (laughing) Right. >> It's still 24 hours per day. So this is super important for us and we're very excited about it. And the other thing is that, again larger denser configuration of the array itself so the customer can have up until two-thirds cheaper. The drive, the cost drive of the XtremeIO in itself so it's cheaper for them to put their walkthrough on ExtemeIO. Whether to really pick up the just the database that needs all the performance in the world. So we can really become a true enterprise array with those features. >> It seems like it's got to be for you a constant chase though right. You're looking for higher performance, you're looking for lower costs. You've said you just gained 80% increase in your performance capabilities. >> Yup. >> And now people are going to be looking at you over the next Xtreme and so what next? You know, where are the gains to be had in the next generation of technology and just in terms of philosophically approaching that so what do you do. >> Yeah, yeah again another good question. I actually gave a briefing about it just earlier. So, the first thing we need to do is an industry not just the daily insists to lower the costs of the drive itself to be even cheaper than and economical drive. That's not Dell today right, the hybrid mechanical drive. You can get a more economical drive if you apply data reduction on it right. So if you're five times cheaper because of the data that's gets integrated into the array and get a different compress and different provisioning. Then you can be on par with the mechanical drives. So first we want to be on par if not cheaper. We want everybody to move to S's. And we were the first twirl for charade the portfolio of Dell EMC. That's the first thing. The second thing is to really get a better insight into your wall application, wall close. Today people analyze things like IOP's and latency but what does your application really think? Where are the cues in the application stock itself right. How can you find them out in the storage sub-system itself right. So we are on a journey to over there with our importing mechanisms. So a year and a half ago, we started a new project to completely change the reporting mechanism of the WebUI. The interface of XtremeIO right. And today you can really get to drill down into pretty much every aspect. Up until now you had to purchase a third party software that will analyze your walkthrough for you. So things like Instagram, IO's, block size, read and write like I can see pair of blocks. So you can really understand your workload. We also give you something like abnormalities. We can tell you every week this application is being fine but on that Friday for some reason the response time wasn't that good. You should go in and check it out. Maybe it's in the application there is a bottleneck. Maybe it was a bottleneck in the storage load. So you can actually find it out. But I would argue that the long term goal. That's a vision right? That I'm not announcing anything yet. Is really the ability to marriage or combine between the softer defined wall right. The input converge mechanism, to the traditional arrays right. Although SSD's not that traditional. Maybe you can have a denser configuration with very small to DAE but the performance aspect of it will not be drive from the DEA where it actually store the data but from Voltron machines. That you can spin up and down in a cloud like fishing. That will bring you all the performance that you need. That's a thing to me the only gray. The really merging between the walls. Cause there isn't one perfect answer right. The softer refined guys will tell you everything should go to softer defined storage. We will tell you everything should go to flash arrays. But really the truth is like always right in between. And this is really one of the direction that we are approaching. >> I tell you what, for now I want you to enjoy X2 for now. How about that. >> That sound good. >> It's a good day for you. And don't let that five year old skip either. I think that's a good idea too. >> Very good. Very good. Thank you very much. >> And so thanks for joining us. >> Thank you. Thanks. >> Back with more here on theCUBE. We're live in Las Vegas at Dell EMC World 2017. (exciting techno music)

(upbeat music) >> In 2010 Wikibon predicted that the all flash data center was coming. The forecast at the time was that flash memory consumer volumes, would drive prices of enterprise flash down faster than those of high spin speed, hard disks. And by mid decade, buyers would opt for flash over 15K HDD for virtually all active data. That call was pretty much dead on and the percentage of flash in the data center continues to accelerate faster than that, of spinning disk. Now, the analyst that made this forecast was David FLoyer and he's with me today, along with Renen Hallak who is the founder and CEO of Vast Data. And they're going to discuss these trends and what it means for the future of data and the data center. Gentlemen, welcome to the program. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be here. >> Thank you for having me. >> You're very welcome. Now David, let's start with you. You've been looking at this for over a decade and you know, frankly, your predictions have caused some friction, in the marketplace but where do you see things today? >> Well, what I was forecasting was based on the fact that the key driver in any technology is volume, volume reduces the cost over time and the volume comes from the consumers. So flash has been driven over the years by initially by the iPod in 2006 the Nano where Steve Jobs did a great job with Samsung and introducing large volumes of flash. And then the iPhone in 2008. And since then, all of mobile has been flash and mobile has been taking in a greater and greater percentage share. To begin with the PC dropped. But now the PCs are over 90% are using flash when there delivered. So flash has taken over the consumer market, very aggressively and that has driven down the cost of flash much much faster than the declining market of HDD. >> Okay and now, so Renen I wonder if we could come to you, we've got I want you to talk about the innovations that you're doing, but before we get there, talk about why you started Vast. >> Sure, so it was five years ago and it was basically the kill of the hard drive. I think what David is saying resonates very, very well. In fact, if you look at our original presentation for Vast Data. It showed flash and tape. There was no hard drive in the middle. And we said 10 years from now, and this was five years ago. So even the dates match up pretty well. We're not going to have hard drives anymore. Any piece of information that needs to be accessible at all will be on flash and anything that is dormant and never gets read will be on tape. >> So, okay. So we're entering this kind of new phase now, with which is being driven by QLC. David maybe you could give us a quick what is QLC? Just give us a bumper sticker there. >> There's 3D NAND, which is the thing that's growing, very very fast and it's growing on several dimensions. One dimension is the number of layers. Another dimension is the size of each of those pieces. And the third dimension is the number of bits which a QLC is five bits per cell. So those three dimensions have all been improving. And the result of that is that on a wafer of, that you create, more and more data can be stored on the whole wafer on the chip that comes from that wafer. And so QLC is the latest, set of 3D NAND flash NAND flash. That's coming off the lines at the moment. >> Okay, so my understanding is that there's new architectures that are entering the data center space, that could take advantage of QLC enter Vast. Someone said they've rented this, a nice set up for you and maybe before we get into the architecture, can you talk a little bit more about the company? I mean, maybe not everybody's familiar with with Vast, you share why you started it but what can you tell us about the business performance and any metrics you can share would be great? >> Sure, so the company as I said is five years old, about 170, 180 people today. We started selling product just around two years ago and have just hit $150 million in run rate. That's with eight sales people. And so, as you can imagine, there's a lot of demand for flash all the way down the stack in the way that David predicted. >> Wow, okay. So you got pretty comfortable. I think you've got product market fit, right? And now you're going to scale. I would imagine you're going to go after escape velocity and you're going to build your moat. Now part of that, I mean a lot of that is product, right? Product is sales. Those are the cool two golden pillars, but, and David when you think back to your early forecast last decade it was really about block storage. That was really what was under attack. You know, kind of fusion IO got it started with Facebook. They were trying to solve their SQL database performance problems. And then we saw pure storage. They hit escape velocity. They drove a truck through EMC sym metrics HDD based install base which precipitated the acquisition of XtremeIO by EMC. Something Renan knows a little bit about having led development, of the product but flash was late to the NAS party guys, Renan let me start with you. Why is that? And what is the relevance of QLC in that regard? >> The way storage has been always, it looks like a pyramid and you have your block devices up at the top and then your NAS underneath. And today you have object down at the bottom of that pyramid. And the pyramid basically represents capacity and the Y axis is price performance. And so if you could only serve a small subset of the capacity, you would go for block. And that is the subset that needed high performance. But as you go to QLC and PLC will soon follow the price of all flash systems goes down to a point where it can compete on the lower ends of that pyramid. And the capacity grows to a point where there's enough flash to support those workloads. And so now with QLC and a lot of innovation that goes with it it makes sense to build an all flash, NAS and object store. >> Yeah, okay. And David, you and I have talked about the volumes and Renan sort of just alluded to that, the higher volumes of NAS, not to mention the fact that NAS is hard, you know files difficult, but that's another piece of the equation here, isn't it? >> Absolutely, NAS is difficult. It's a large, very large scale. We're talking about petabytes of data. You're talking about very important data. And you're talking about data, which is at the moment very difficult to manage. It takes a lot of people to manage it, takes a lot of resources and it takes up a lot, a lot of space as well. So all of those issues with NAS and complexity is probably the biggest single problem. >> So maybe we could geek out a little bit here. You guys go at it, but Renan talk about the Vast architecture. I presume it was built from the ground up for flash since you were trying to kill HTD. What else do we need to know? >> It was built for flash. It was also built for Crosspoint which is a new technology that came out from Intel and micron about three years ago. Cross point is basically another level of persistent media above flash and below Ram. But what we really set out to do is, as I said to kill the hard drive, and for that what you need is to get the price parity. And of course, flash and hard drives are not at price parity today. As David said, they probably will be in a few years from now. And so we wanted to, jumpstart that, to accelerate that. And so we spent a lot of time in building a new type of architecture with a lot of new metadata structures and algorithms on top to bring that effective price down to a point where it's competitive today. And in fact, two years ago the way we did it was by going out to talk to these vendors Intel with 3D Crosspoint and QLC flash Mellanox with NVMe over fabrics, and very fast ethernet networks. And we took those building blocks and we thought how can we use this to build a completely different type of architecture, that doesn't just take flash one level down the stack but actually allows us to break that pyramid, to collapse it down and to build a single system that is as fast as your fastest all flash block device or faster but as affordable as your hard drive based archives. And once that happens you don't need to think about storage anymore. You have a single system that's big enough and cheap enough to throw everything at it. And it's fast enough such that everything is accessible as sub-millisecond latencies. The way the architecture is built is pretty much the opposite of the way scale-out storage has been done. It's not based on shared nothing. The way XtremIO was the way Isilon is the way Hadoop and the Google file system are. We're basing it on a concept called Dis-aggregated Shared Everything. And what that means is that we have the media on one set of devices, the logic running in containers, just software and you can scale each of those independently. So you can scale capacity independently from performance and you have this shared metadata space, that all of the containers can see. So the containers don't actually have to talk to each other in the synchronous path. That means that it's much more scalable. You can go up to hundreds of thousands of nodes rather than just a few dozen. It's much more resilient. You can have all of them fail and you still didn't lose any data. And it's much more easy to use to David's point about complexity. >> Thank you for that. And then you, you mentioned up front that you not only built for flash, but built for Crosspoint. So you're using Crosspoint today. It's interesting. There was always been this sort of debate about Crosspoint It's less expensive than Ram, or maybe I got that wrong but it's persistent, >> It is. >> Okay, but it's more expensive than flash. And it was sort of thought it was a fence sitter cause it didn't have the volume but you're using it today successfully. That's interesting. >> We're using it both to offset the deficiencies of the low cost flash. And the nice thing about QLC and PLC is that you get the same levels of read performance as you would from high-end flash. The only difference between high cost and low cost flash today is in right cycles and in right performance. And so Crosspoint helps us offset both of those. We use it as a large right buffer and we use it as a large metadata store. And that allows us not just to arrange the information in a very large persistent right buffer before we need to place it on the low cost flash. But it also allows us to develop new types of metadata structures and algorithms that allow us to make better use of the low cost flash and reduce the effective price down even lower than the rock capacity. >> Very cool. David, what are your thoughts on the architecture? give us kind of the independent perspective >> I think it's brilliant architecture. I'd like to just go one step down on the network side of things. The whole use of NBME over fabric allows the users all of the servers to get any data across this whole network directly to it. So you've got great performance right away across the stack. And then the other thing is that by using RDMA for NASS, you're able, if you need to, to get down in microseconds to the data. So overall that's a thousand times faster than any HDD system could manage. So this architecture really allows an any to any simple, single level of storage which is so much easier to think about, architect use or manage is just so much simpler. >> If you had I mean, I said I don't know if there's an answer to this question but if you had to pick one thing Renan that you really were dogmatic about and you bet on from an architectural standpoint, what would that be? >> I think what we bet on in the early days is the fact that the pyramid doesn't work anymore and that tiering doesn't work anymore. In fact, we stole Johnson and Johnson's tagline No More Tears. Only, It's not spelled the same way. The reason for that is not because of storage. It's because of the applications as we move to applications more and more that are machine-based and machines are now not just generating the data. They're also reading the data and analyzing it and providing insights for humans to consume. Then the workloads changed dramatically. And the one thing that we saw is that you can't choose which pieces of information need to be accessible anymore. These new algorithms, especially around AI and machine learning and deep learning they need fast access to the entirety of the dataset and they want to read it over and over and over again in order to generate those insights. And so that was the driving force behind us building this new type of architecture. And we're seeing every single day when we talk to customers how the old architecture is simply break down in the face of these new applications. >> Very cool speaking of customers. I wonder if you could talk about use cases, customers you know, and this NASS arena maybe you could add some color there. >> Sure, our customers are large in data. We started half a petabyte and we grow into the exabyte range. The system likes to be big as, as it grows it grows super linearly. If you have a 100 nodes or a 1000 nodes you get more than 10X in performance, in capacity efficiency and resilience, et cetera. And so that's where we thrive. And those workloads are today. Mainly analytics workloads, although not entirely. If you look at it geographically we have a lot of life science in Boston research institutes medical imaging, genomics universities pharmaceutical companies here in New York. We have a lot of financials, hedge funds, Analyzing everything from satellite imagery to trade data to Twitter feeds out in California. A lot of AI, autonomous driving vehicles as well as media and entertainment both generation of films like animation, as well as content distribution are being done on top of best. >> Great thank you and David, when you look at the forecast that you've made over the years and when I imagine that they match nicely with your assumptions. And so, okay, I get that, but that doesn't, not everybody agrees, David. I mean, certainly the HDD guys don't agree but they, they're obviously fighting to hang on to their awesome run for 50 years, but as well there's others to do in hybrids and the like, and they kind of challenge your assumptions and you don't have a dog in this fight. We just want the truth and try to do our best to report it. But let me start with this. One of the things I've seen is that you're comparing deduped and compressed flash with raw HDD. Is that true or false? >> It's in terms of the fundamentals of the forecast, et cetera, it's false. What I'm taking is the new egg price. And I did it this morning and I looked up a two terabyte disc drive, NAS disc drive. I think it was $54. And if you look at the cost of a a NAND for two terabytes, it's about $200. So it's a four to one ratio. >> So, >> So and that's coming down from what people saw last year, which was five or six and every year has been, that ratio has been coming down. >> The ratio between the cost Delta, between HDD is still cheaper. So Renan I wonder one of the other things that Floyer has said is that because of the advantages of flash, not only performance but also data sharing, et cetera, which really drives other factors like TCO. That it doesn't have to be at parody in order for customers to consume that. I certainly saw that on my laptop, I could have got more storage and it could have been cheaper for per bit for my laptop. I took the flash. I mean, no problem. That that was an intelligence test but what are you seeing from customers? And by the way Floyer I think is forecasting by what, 2026 there will be actually a raw to raw crossover. So then it's game over. But what are you seeing in terms of what customers are telling you or any evidence you have that it doesn't have to be, even that customers actually get more value even if it's more expensive from flash, what are you seeing? >> Yeah in the enterprise space customers aren't buying raw flash they're buying storage systems. And so even if the raw numbers flash versus hard drive are still not there there is a lot of things that can be done at the system level to equalize those two. In fact, a lot of our IP is based on that we are taking flash today is, as David said more expensive than hard drives, but at the system level it doesn't remain more expensive. And the reason for that is storage systems waste space. They waste it on metadata, they waste it on redundancy. We built our new metadata structures, such that they everything lives in Crosspoint and is so much smaller because of the way Crosspoint is accessible at byte level granularity, we built our erasure codes in a way where you can sustain 10, 20, 30 drive failures but you only pay two or 1% in overhead. We built our data reduction mechanisms such that they can reduce down data even if the application has already compressed it and already de-duplicated it. And so there's a lot of innovation that can happen at the software level as part of this new direct dis-aggregated shared everything architecture that allows us to bridge that cost gap today without having customers do fancy TCO calculations. And of course, as prices of flash over the next few years continue declining, all of those advantages remain and it will just widen the gap between hard drives and flash. And there really is no advantage to hard drives once the price thing is solved. >> So thank you. So David, the other thing I've seen around these forecasts is that the comments that you can't really data reduce effectively hard disk. And I understand why the overhead and of course you can in flash you can use all kinds of data reduction techniques and not affect performance, or it's not even noticeable like put the cloud guys, do it upstream. Others do it upstream. What's your comment on that? >> Yes, if you take sequential data and you do a lot of work upfront you can write out in very lot big blocks and that's a perfect sequentially, good way of doing it. The challenge for the HDD people is if they go for that for that sort of sequential type of application that the cheapest way of doing that is to use tape which comes back to the discussion that the two things that are going to remain are tape and flash. So that part of the HDD market in my assertion will go towards tape and tape libraries. And those are serving very well at the moment. >> Yeah I mean, It's just the economics of tape are really attractive. I just feel like I've said this many times that the marketing of tape is lacking. Like I'd like to see, better thinking around how it could play. Cause I think customers have this perception tape, but there's actually a lot of value there. I want to carry on, >> Small point there. Yeah, I mean, there's an opportunity in the same way that Vast have created an architecture for flash. There's an opportunity out there for the tech people with flash to make an architecture that allows you to take that workload and really lower the price, enormously. >> You've called it Flape >> Flape yes. >> There's some interesting metadata opportunities there but we won't go into that. And then David, I want to ask you about NAND shortages. We saw this in 2016 and 2017. A lot of people saying there's an NAND shortage again. So that's a flaw in your forecast prices of you're assuming prices of flash continue to come down faster than those of HDD but the shortages of NAND could be problematic. What do you say to that? >> Well, I've looked at that in some detail and one of the big, important things is what's happening in the flash market and the Chinese, YMTC Chinese company has introduced a lot more volume into the market. They're making 100,000 wafers a month for this year. That's around six to 8% of market of NAND at this year, as a result, Samsung, micron, Intel, Hynix they're all increasing their volumes of NAND so that they're all investing. So I don't see that NAND itself is going to be a problem. There is certainly a shortage of processor chips which drive the intelligence in the NAND itself. But that's a problem for everybody. That's a problem for cars. It's a problem for disk drives. >> You could argue that's going to create an oversupply, potentially. Let's not go there, but you know what at the end of the day it comes back to the customer and all this stuff. It's interesting. I love talking about the architecture but it's really all about customer value. And so, so Renan, I want you to sort of close there. What should customers be paying attention to? And what should observers of Vast Data really watch as indicators for progress for you guys milestones and things in the market that we should be paying attention to but start with the customers. What's your advice to them? >> Sure, for any customer that I talked to I always ask the same thing. Imagine where you'll be five years from now because you're making an investment now that is at least five years long. In our case, we guaranteed the lifespan of the devices for a decade, such that you know that it's going to be there for you and imagine what is going to happen over those next five years. What we're seeing in most customers is that they have a lot of doormen data and with the advances in analytics and AI they want to make use of that data. They want to turn it from a cost center to a profit center and to gain insight from that data and to improve their business based on that information that they have the same way the hyperscalers are doing in order to do that, you need one thing you need fast access to all of that information. Once you have that, you have the foundation to step into this next generation type world where you can actually make money off of your information. And the best way to get very, very fast access to all of your information is to put it on Vast media like flash and Crosspoint. If I can give one example, Hedge Funds. Hedge funds do a lot of back-testing on Vast. And what makes sense for them is to test as much information back as they possibly can but because of storage limitations, they can't do that. And the other thing that's important to them is to have a real-time experience to be able to run those simulations in a few minutes and not as a batch process overnight, but because of storage limitations, they can't do that either. The third thing is if you have many different applications and many different users on the same system they usually step on each other's toes. And so the Vast architecture is solves those three problems. It allows you a lot of information very fast access and fast processing an amazing quality of service where different users of the system don't even notice that somebody else is accessing the same piece of information. And so Hedge Funds is one example. Any one of these verticals that make use of a lot of information will benefit from this architecture in this system. And if it doesn't cost any more, there's really no real reason delay this transition into all flash. >> Excellent very clear thinking. Thanks for laying that out. And what about, you know, things that we should how should we judge you? What are the things that we should watch? >> I think the most important way to judge us is to look at customer adoption and what we're seeing and what we're showing investors is a very high net dollar retention number. What that means is basically a customer buys a piece of kit today, how much more will they buy over the next year, over the next two years? And we're seeing them buy more than three times more, within a year of the initial purchase. And we see more than 90% of them buying more within that first year. And that to me indicates that we're solving a real problem and that they're making strategic decisions to stop buying any other type of storage system. And to just put everything on Vast over the next few years we're going to expand beyond just storage services and provide a full stack for these AI applications. We'll expand into other areas of infrastructure and develop the best possible vertically integrated system to allow those new applications to thrive. >> Nice, yeah. Think investors love that lifetime value story. If you can get above 3X of the customer acquisition cost is to IPO in the way. Guys hey, thanks so much for coming to the Cube. We had a great conversation and really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, Thanks for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the Cube. We'll see you next time. (gentle music)

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

(upbeat techno music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by the VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, here in VMworld 2018. Joining me is my guest host John Troyer, and I am Stu Miniman. And coming to the program, it's hard to believe, for our first time, Jay Krone, who's a senior consultant, Storage Portfolio with Dell EMC. And I say that just to give our audience some context. Jay works for Dell EMC, but we both worked for a company called EMC back in the day. And Jay's has had a number of roles where he's brought lots of people on the program, has known theCUBE since its inception. >> Inception, yeah. >> Yeah,ninth year doing it, and now you've made it. >> Right, I'm finally here. >> All right, so Jay, give our audience a little bit of your background, what you're working on these days. >> So, I'm a longterm storage veteran, as Stu said. I worked for the old EMC back when the only product we had was a scuzzy connected symmetrix and have been though the fiber channel wars. I've been through the SAS wars, the SATA wars, the SSD wars. I'm now working on a couple of cross-portfolio programs. The one we're here to talk about today is the Future-Proof Loyalty Program. >> Yeah, and for the audience that doesn't know what a scuzzy connector is. (Jay laughing) It was this really fat plug that plugged in, It had actual pins-- >> And lots of wires. >> That were designed for-- >> Lots of wires. >> On and off, so those kind of protocols have kind of changed and everything. But when I interviewed at EMC in 2000, it was like, oh, that connection, that I would take two computers and connect them. That was a scuzzy cable. >> Right. >> And it was relatively short-length, so wow. We can go down our memory lane later. But Jay, you're talking about something specific. We talk about the future, and it's tough to predict it. But Dell's going to make sure that everything's future proof, right? >> Of course. >> All right, what's that mean? >> What that means, what's interesting, back in the day we were competing and innovating primarily just in a technology dimension. And a lot of us technologists. We've had fun time doing that. But as people have gotten more sophisticated about the way they buy technology, they're looking for other assurances that vendors are going to be there for them when something goes wrong. So, there are nine different, what we call offers or pillars in the Future-Proof Program that are really intended to give customers peace of mind, probably most importantly, protect their investment, the money that they spend on IT, and to your point, give them a path forward. So, what we've done is looked across the inventory of things that Dell EMC already offered. Many of these were business practices that we already had in place. And what we've done is turned up the volume and made them more, basically, more visible to customers and to our selling forces, and the response has been really good. And the financial ones, of course, are the ones that people, shall we say, gravitate to at the beginning because when they're making a purchase, whether its effectively an extended warranty or a trade-in credit on their old stuff. Think of it, when you go buy a car, you get a trade-in, so you're protecting the investment you made in the car. These are all things that customers are interested in getting and we get from Dell EMC. >> OK, and just in case, people didn't catch that. I think the umbrella for the program is the Dell EMC Future-Proof Loyalty Program? >> Correct! Is that it? OK. >> OK, and one of the things that's important for folks that have been watching, it was started originally as the Future-Proof Storage Loyalty Program because it was generated out of our storage business. And what happened is the customers and sales people were so excited about it, they said, "Can you add more?" And we said, "Yes, we can." And so in July, for example, we added data protection, the IDPA DP4400 product, along with a guarantee specifically tailored for that product. We're here, one of the reasons that I'm here, and we are here at VMware is we added VXRail on Monday. That one's extremely exciting because even before it was officially in the program, we helped a customer with a six-figure purchase through one of the Future-Proof benefits. And then, we have another, we have an eight-figure deal in the wind right now, on VXRail based on some of the pillars of the Future-Proof Program. >> And so, Jay, when you talk about some of the, you're talking about some of the pillars, some of the motivators for the customer then. I mean, some of it's just the transparent financial, some of it's kind of dedupe and storage guarantees. >> Correct. >> All those, you're including all these. >> Correct, correct. And then, yeah, 'cause part of it is to make... Bring Dell and EMC together was complex. >> Gotcha. >> Or created some complexity and some confusion, shall we say. Part of the reason we created this program was to make it simpler to consume and to make some of the things easier to find. >> Yeah, right, right, I mean, much, I mean, like buying a car, right? Enterprise hardware has always been a little bit mysterious. Like, what does cost? Well, how much money do you have? And then I tell you how much it cost. >> Exactly. >> And shady. I mean, not shady, but discounts, and it's not very, it's very opaque. But a lot of these things are real clear, out in the open. Actually, I just went through the website. >> Exactly. >> We guarantee you're going to get this, you can do this. >> Right, right. >> And in three years or five years, we guarantee this, and it's pretty upfront. >> Exactly, and I mean, what you mentioned is the Clear Price Maintenance Program. I mean, again, as we all know, there were some pricing practices with customers that were neither clear nor predictable on maintenance renewals. And so that's been something that's been extremely exciting. That is, in fact, one of the things VXRail folks are excited about, where what ends up happening from a customer perspective is when they get the quote, the quoting system automatically generates your prepaid maintenance price and your renewal price, either three year or five years from now, depending upon the contract you pick, and it's right there on the paper. And I can't get clearer and I can't get more predictable. Here's what you going to pay now, and here is what you going to pay later. >> As a cultural shift, was there any kind of discussion internally about, well, wait a minute, sometimes I hold these, I hold a couple points for a partner. I hold a couple points to make sure I get a deal. Was there a discussion about the changing culture of being so open? >> Well, yes, is the short answer. I'll say it was a culture change. But what's happened is the industry is shift. We don't use scuzzy cables any more, and that maintenance pricing practice has pretty much been voted down by the customer. So, its innovate or die. And so, and part of what I want to say is the innovation is not only in the products. We're doing some innovation on the business side as well. >> Yeah, Jay, I'm curious. We've said on theCUBE many times, the bar the customers will measure everything against is how they do things in the cloud. So, how I consume it, how I think about it. >> Right. >> But one of the challenges with the cloud is sometimes there's uncertainty as to what that bill's going to be next month. >> Right. >> So, maybe you can give us a compare-contrast as of what you've learned. And is there a comparison between this program and what you're talking about? >> Well, so this program is targeted at the infrastructure products. So, it's not so much to compare against the cloud pricing itself; however, what we've done here, also announced this week as part of the larger Dell EMC Cloud Marketplace is what we call the Cloud Consumption Models. And this is a couple of the cloud financing programs. Again, they were already in place from Dell Financial Services. They give customers the ability, if they really want to buy infrastructure that they put in their data centers in an Opex model, you can do that. And it's called Flex on Demand. There's a couple of really exciting high-velocity, they call it Flex on Demand Velocity for Unity and X2 where again, there's a rate card. So you are not coming in and having the sales person sharpen the pencil and say, here's what the price is. So they'll come in with the rate card on how to consume that. And when we take a look at that, that pricing model versus both some of our system vendor competitors, as well as some of your, shall we say, more prominent cloud competitors, as Michael said, the cloud is an operating model, not a place. If you want to have that operating model for the way you pay for the infrastructure, buying an XtremIO capacity from us with the cloud model is cheaper than buying SSD capacity from one of the cloud providers. >> All right, Jay, want to give you the final word. Believe there's a website if people want to find out more. What is the final takeaway you'd want people to have about this program? >> Well, basically, investment protection is number one. Peace of mind is really important. There are a number of guarantees about product performance. And as we've said, the future is bright. We're giving you a way to go there. >> All right, Jay Krone. Pleasure to catch up with you on camera. >> Likewise, thank you. >> As it is always off camera. For John Troyer I am Stu Miniman. Back with more coverage here, theCUBE, VMworld 2018, thanks for watching. (electronic musical flourish)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Sands, we are live here on theCUBE, the flagship broadcast of SiliconANGLE TV, along with John Troyer with whom I've yet to be teamed up this week. Good to see you John. >> Nice to be here John. >> I'm John Walls and we're joined by Chhandomay Mandal who is a Director of Marketing at Dell EMC. Chhandomay, good to see you sir. >> Happy to be here. >> Nice to have you back on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> I know it's been a busy week for you, a great week from what I've heard from many. So first off, before we jump in, we're talking a lot about storage here. But first, your overview, what you've heard the vibe of the show and and kind of what your takeaway is going to be when you head home. >> So, this has been a great show. We have announced a lot of new products and I have been doing a lot of breakout sessions and customer meetings. And the customers are excited in terms of the depth of portfolio we have to offer, how we are helping them in their digital transformation journey along with the IT transformation that is fueling this digital transformation. For me personally, the takeaway is the product announcements we made in terms of the high-end storage, I cover high end storage marketing. Both Dell EMC PowerMax, are brand new, entry level design product line that we announced yesterday as well as the new enhancements we have done for XtremIO X2. This has been, like an exciting week. Happy to meet like an great number of customers both in meetings as well as in breakout sessions. So overall, I feel great, we accomplished a lot of things and I look forward seeing these customers taking their next steps in their digital transformation journey and happy to be part of their transformation. >> So, we had Caitlin Gordon on yesterday and she couldn't stop smiling about the announcement. When she started going through all the performance metrics 10 million IOPS, she's like, 2X, we're just blowing people away right now, and she's going on and on. So, Chhand run through some of that for us and tell us about about the product a little bit and what you think is revolutionary about it. >> Dell EMC PowerMax is our flagship property in the high end storage. If I were to characterize it in three words, it is fast, it is smart and it is efficient. As far as fast goes, it can deliver, as Caitlin said, up to ten million IOPS, 150 gigabytes per second throughput with very minimal latency, less than 300 microseconds. This is all backed by the end-to-end NVMe design that we have done, so this NVMe enabled architecture take away the limitations that we used to see from SAS, not only that, it is not just NVMe but also the storage class memory drive that is the next generation. It is this area, users both SEM and NVMe, so that's the first part. The next part is it's smart. It has an built in machine learning engine that actually analyzes 40 million data, in real time and makes 60 billion decisions per day to optimize data placements and making sure we are delivering the service levels for all different applications. And the last part is efficiency. We have introduced inline deduplication with hardware assisted feature. So now it has both compression and deduplication, giving a lot of capacity settings to our customers while not impacting the performance at all. >> You know Chhandomay, I was actually just speaking with Sean Wedige from Rackspace talking about that. The thing that impressed him the most, we actually skipped over the NVMe and we skipped over a lot of the parts inside of it, because that's the some of the performance that they needed for their service provider workload. But they're, one of the highest things that they valued out of it was the operational efficiency. In fact, I was sitting with some of the team yesterday talking to them and with a couple of storage admins and they they were swapping war stories about like, step 143 of 300 and trying to, as you had all the knobs and the scripts and the CLI and that's gone. A lot of that is gone. And whether you call it AI or or the machine, or deep learning, but the operational efficiencies that have now, in this next generation, of now called PowerMax, right, that seemed to be impressive, one of them one of the bigger things that impressed him. I don't want to say he wasn't impressed about the performance numbers. So, as you talk to customers this week has that really hit home? >> Absolutely, the operational efficiency, the effects reductions are like key to the customers enabling their IT transformation. Leading to this digital transformation. Now, how does this play into all the machine learning and AI techniques that this platform is built upon? So if you take a look at the workloads that the customers are running today, it's still enterprise workloads. 80% of it is like how traditional workloads, like SAP, Oracle, all of these. But then, there is the modern applications that are built on real-time data analysis. It feeds into the data, it analyzes it to make better decisions for the customers. Taking proactive actions. Delivering and using those data analysis as their computing advantage. But that is today only like say 20% of the work. Now, it is predicted that over the next three years to five years, that ratio is going to flip. So, it will be 20% of the traditional workloads and 80% is this modern applications like data generated from IoT, AI, all those things. Now how does PowerMax help in this scenario, so here comes that built in machine learning engine. It actually learns from the patterns in the data. So today it can analyze the data and do this optimize placement between storage class memory and NVMe SSDs based on those 80/20 rule. But then, as the workloads are getting adopted this is also learning from these patterns in data and adapting itself running these algorithms to make sure, even in future, when the workload percentage changes it is changing its algorithms and providing the same level of service. And not just data placement, this is service level agreements so our PowerMax customer can say for this application I need this much of latency. So, all these AI and machine learning techniques are being applied there. So as they are changing this service level directions it is adapting and making sure, whatever application requires whatever response times we are able to deliver it. And that's a huge operational benefit because the administrators do not need to tune and fiddle, figure out, how to get there. It is automatic, it is built-in, thanks to the built-in AI engine here. >> Chhandomay, there's now a generation of storage admins that now, needs to up level their jobs, right. Because that they used to have a real, it was tedious, talking to them. I'm actually kind of curious also, the rest of how this the portfolio fits together. In the sense of if you look at the industry, maybe a few years back, you almost would have kind of over fitted on on hyper-converged and you would have thought well, maybe one size does fit all and well that's the future. But it turns out, in the meantime, Dell EMC had this portfolio and there was a high, the high end that's been there all along and in fitting for appropriate workloads right. So, I'm just kind of curious Chhandomay, take this over to someone maybe XtremIO or what as you talk to the customers, when they talk to you, what apps and workloads do you then talk to them about? >> You bring up a very good and pertinent question which our customers ask us all the time. In this example let's take both our high-end products, we have Dell EMC PowerMax, we have Dell EMC XtremIO X2. Both are all flash arrays as great characteristics. Which is applicable where, right? So the first thing I want to say for all the customers that are running ultimate mission critical workloads where they need RPOs and RTOs, pretty much like instant, it cannot go down at any point in time and I'm not talking about just the like storage but also all the applications that is running. So SRDF, our remote replication technology within the PowerMax product that is the gold standard in the industry, delivering like six-nines availability for many many years. So, couple that with massive workload consolidation. For example, you are a big hospital. You are running your epic medical data records systems, it's not just like epic databases, but also your VDI desktops, your other virtual workloads. All you can consolidate in a very small footprint with our PowerMax platform. The third thing is, it's now end-to-end NVMe design. Right now, we are using dual ported NVMe SSDs. So customers who need that level of very high performance in like less than 300 microsecond latency with all this like real-time apps and business applications together. So that's the customer segment who finds our PowerMax as the appropriate platform. Now, XtremIO also a purpose-built, all flash array design from ground up for the flash media. So, what's the benefit there? Now here, again, what we are doing with XtremIO, we are offering this enterprise capabilities at the mid-range price. We actually introduced a new XtremIO X-Brick model to bring down the cost. It is 55% lower entry point than it used to be in the previous generation. We are going to sell that mid-market customers with enterprise capabilities with this new XtremIO X-Brick model. The way XtremIOs are always in memory, metadata centric architecture works out, it can deliver very high performance, consistently low latency, but also, it has integrated copy data management built in. What does it play? Think of a database where like for every database there are, say, five to 10 copies for disk and dev, backup, reporting, all of those things. Now, wherever you have massive amount of copies, XtremIO is a very good platform because you can actually bring those copies and run workloads on the copies themselves. You get enormous consolidation and capacity footprint in that type of situations. The last thing is workloads that has very high data reduction ratios. Think of it, virtual desktops or VDI. So here you have like thousands of users, running their desktops in a data center and but inherently like all the bases are the same. So here is like a lot of data reduction capabilities that come into picture and XtremIO's always in-memory, metadata centric architecture and this in line, all the time de-dup and compression helps in great amount of capacity savings with the data reduction technologies. For the workloads, where it is critical to have data reduction and it's the data itself lends to data capacity servings that's why it's the best in class. So, that's kind of like, give you a perspective of how these products complement each other. >> I know it's been a great week for you, a busy week for you. >> Absolutely. >> Breakout sessions, two CUBE interviews, client meetings, what have you, take a break. >> It's been a great show, it was a pleasure here talking to you. >> Thanks for joining us again and sharing the PowerMax story, it's a good one and I'm sure it's going to give you a lot of success down the road at Dell EMC. Back with more, you are watching Dell Technologies World 2018 coverage, live on theCUBE from Las Vegas. (upbeat music)

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

>> 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)

Live from Las Vegas, It's the Cube. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its Ecosystem Partners (techno music) >> Welcome back to the Cube. We are live on Day 2 in Las Vegas at the Sands Expo Center. Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman and we are welcoming to the Cube, for the first time, distinguished engineer and VMAX Product Group CTO, Adnan Sahin. Adnan, it's great to have you on the Cube. >> Thank you, great to be here. >> So, big announcements going on at the event this week. Talk to us about the modern data center. Saw that press release this morning. What does the modern data center, how does Dell Technologies define it? And how are you seeing and helping customers implement it? >> Again, it goes into, like when you have, are running an application you need compute, storage and network so that really had to have a modern infrastructure to cover all those bases. So, that's really during the Keynote we heard today from Jeff Clark on our compute capabilities new servers as well as new storage offering from Dell EMC, the PowerMax >> All right, Adnan, PowerMAx, let's start there. (Adnan) Yes. So one of the flagship announcements here at this show, building on the VMAX which of course builds on the Symmetrix history. Why don't you give us a little overview and then we'll dig into some questions I have? >> So, yeah, we've been really following the industry trends. So, we introduced VMAX All Flash a couple years back. And then we are also looking at the industry trends and what we realized is that the industry is transitioning in terms of media interface, from SAS connected drives into NVMe and PCIE connected drives. And the main driver for that one is two-fold. One, is reducing the latency. And with NVMe you can get much leaner, softer layers that really gives you lower latency. And the other one is the media transition that changes from a NAM based non-withheld memories technology into newer and emerging low latency, ultra low latency technology. So with NVMe we can get both at the same time. >> All right, so Adnan, you know, we remember back when it was EMC at the time. It came with the Flash Technologies. Everybody's doing Flash. Now anybody in the storage industry, NVMe, NVMe over fabric. Everyone's talking about it. PowerMax Bob, up on stage, Bob DeCrescenzo (Adnan) Correct, yes, yes. Spent many, many years working on this said, there's a big difference between just having it and really being able to utilize it. So, without going too deep, explain to us some architectural things that have to happen, from a hardware and software standpoint to take advantage of this transition. >> Sure, so VMAX and PowerMax is really a scale-out, multi-controller architecture therefore, we need to have persistent storage, accessible through multiple controllers, at least two. So, in order to really be highly resilient and highly available to system, we need multi ported, dual ported drives available to us. One of the things that we spend quite a lot of time is to really make sure that dual ported NVMe drives are ready for our highly demanding, enterprise resilient storage system. So we spend a lot of time improving drive quality as well as our software to handle all the NVMe related concerns. >> So, at the event, the theme, Make It Real, yesterday Michael Dell kicked things off and talked about these four transformative elements where customers need to transform to be successful. Digital, IT, security, workforce. With what you just talked about and the new enhancements some of the technologies, how is that helping customers make their digital transformations effective, so that they can deliver different shades of products. I know you just came from a customer meeting. Maybe an give us an example of what you're seeing applied out there. >> The important thing is the applications. The customers have been databases, many different variants. There's been some traditional databases and new and emerging databases. Main driver is, of course, available to resilience but at the same time operational simplicity because we have simplified our user interface and overall use experience significantly over years. So that with fewer people, they can manage many, many larger capacities of the systems. And then with latency is an important aspect of application experience. If you lower the latency, either through caching or lower latency media, you give better experience to end user and therefore they can do more with what they have as infrastructure. >> Adnan, are there any specific use cases or verticals where you're finding that, especially the NVMe offering is going to be most helpful at day one. >> I think, any traditional application that has like journals that will benefit. But on top of that, if you are running large queries of random IO access storage they will get lower latency out of NVMe based systems. They could be real-time analytics, for example. You can get ultra-low latency from the back hand. And also if you are using some of the database, data warehouse type of application you can get massive band width out of VMAX and PowerMax systems that helps you process more in shorter time. >> So analytics as a use case attach the storages, of course, really interesting one, heavily growing. One of the other interesting things about PowerMax, is I think it was discussed, predictive analytics inside. So, I think back to, I mean, disclosure, I worked at EMC for 10 years. We think of intelligent storage was something we've been talking about for a long time. Explain what's different about this generation of analytics and predictive compared to previous storage innovations. >> Sure, sure. So we have the infrastructure to keep track of work loads as they find address granularity. So, we keep track of access types and access sizes in as small as five megabytes a piece. So in a larger system that could be 40 million data sets for a 200 terabyte system. And once we have data we can analyze and we have some linear regression, time series analysis that we can predict whether an active address space will remain active or whether if a cold address space will remain cold. And based on that we can make decisions. Previously, we were able to make, use those decisions for queuing in hard drives and flash drives. More recently, we are using it for data reduction technologies. For compression, for example, duplication. If data set is highly active, we don't necessarily compress them because they will be updated frequently therefore the CPUs used will not be effective. So then taking to the next level the storage class memory becomes available. We will be able to use the media based on the strengths. So if for storage class memory, low latency, we can place read heavy and write heavy work loads into storage class memory. >> So giving customers, presumably, the ability to take data, use it as a catalyst in many different lines of the business to combine it, recombine it and be able to use the analytics that are built in, it sounds like, to not just get insights they can take action on but actually act on them. (Adnan) Correct. >> Give us an example of a customer that's maybe doing that to be able to deliver a differentiated product or service to their customer. >> So part of the important features that they are introducing is available both in PowerMax and VMAX systems is service levels. So that's very relevant to all or most of our customers because, for example, if you are a service provider, customer service provider, even though all the data resides on very fast NAM flash media they can still provide differentiated performance to their own tenants. For example, if the tenant is paying a certain amount they may get silver or bronze service level. They may no see the full benefit of Flash with that service level but when they upsold into a higher performance level or service level. With a simple change in Unisphere, for example, they can get Flash response time right away. So it's basic changes and simplify their business models makes it more predictable for them. Another one is also the prioritization. They can also set priorities for applications as long as high priority service level gets it is response time, expected target response time everybody will get enjoy low response time. But if the high priority group or application does not meet its targets then we start to increase response time of lower priority applications to give more resources for high priority applications. So that's really a way that customers can capitalize with this feature. >> All right, Adnan, I wonder if you can give us a little bit, dig into NVMe, NMVe over fabric and you talked about storage class memory. Specifically looking at availability, maturity and what kind of pricing considerations for these that we can expect kind of today and the next 12 months. >> So, NVMe as the interface drives themselves, this day they may be at a premium compared to SAS but the expectation when we talk to industry leaders and vendors there will be crossover expected very soon. So that really is the positioning that we just want to be in this market. Get the product out. And then really be ready when that crossover happens. In terms of storage class memory, again, it comes at a premium. But then we, using our intelligence, if we can direct most of the eyeOS to this premium source media then we can let customers enjoy benefits of that extra premium that would endure. They would help to pay but over time, just remember, early days of Flash, when the first Flash came out. It was very expensive at the time but over time it became more and more prevalent. So what our expectation is storage type class of memory, over time will follow similar path. And it will become very possible in the near future that we will see all storage class memory systems coming out of vendors. >> All right, how about the NVMe over Fabric? >> NVMe over Fabrics, we are looking, definitely we have plans for NVMe over Fabrics. Of course, standards are still evolving and also for enterprise customers there's concerns around multi pathing, support and not sure of that. We are working with standards bodies and other vendors on improving that aspect. >> Okay, so there's one thing about this transition that's a little different than most. It has an impact on the application. So where is Dell getting involved or how are you working with your customers? You talked about getting ready for that storage class memory. This is not just, we've been skuzzy for a long time. So, how do we get ready as an industry? What's Dell's positioning in that discussion of applications? >> I mean, Dell seems very so close to participating in standards bodies and with the industry thought leaders on really getting to come up with standard based solutions. I think that is one direction that we are going after with this. >> Anything on the application side, though? Or is that more on the pivotal VM? >> Application side of course, we have VM we have very deep discussions with VM and NVM over fabrics and how we can work with them more efficiently. >> So, Adnan, when we kicked off this segment we talked about it being the first Dell Technologies World. Indicator of the absorption of the EMC federation. Over your shoulder is the Dell EMC Partner Program. What are some of the feedback that you're hearing from partners, technology partners who are collaborating. You mentioned VMWare. What's some of the feedback that you're hearing at the event in terms of what you have announced and how do your partners influence design of these leading technologies? >> There's great excitement. We've been working with them, listening to them, learning from them and I think overall, everybody is excited with the new product. And we are also, as a group very excited with and been working for awhile. And we are happy to be able to release the product today. >> Adnan, one of the other product lines that, there were a bunch announced around the xtrem IO and the X2. Can you just help us make sure we understand positioning today of things like VMAX and PowerMax and the xtremIO Family. >> Each product platform has strengths. If customers are happy with what they are using, they should continue with the same product line. It think that really makes it easier for everyone. Xtreme, I believe, announced a remote application, as well. So, it's great. >> From a foundational perspective, what are these technologies going to be able to do to enable enterprises to start taking advantage and realizing the possibilities of emerging technologies machine learning, artificial intelligence, IOT? >> I think, important part is. If you look at all those things, what is really needed is ultra low latency high band width, capabilities from storage. Because you have massive compute capability sometimes customers use in memory applications as well. And we need to be close to compute as close as possible to memory. It's not always possible but we want to get to be there. We have significant value add to be clear. For example, we have local and remote reapplication capable. If you're running any of those applications in a mission critical in mind. You want to make sure that you have local application capability as well as remote application disaster recovery. Business continues models built around. And what we have with our infrastructure to really give customers that type of mission critical. You can not take in chances in this day and age with these applications. >> Adnan, I got to talk to Jeff Clark, earlier today on the Cube and he talked about the engineering culture. From the EMC side, I'm curious if working with your Dell team, you've got that whole server team. Has that changed some of the processes there? How does that impact the development and the viewpoint of the engineering team? >> There's very clear, much better communication. We're been talking to the server team very easily and very frequently actually. Just to make sure that, for example, we understand their challenges and then type of solace that they come up with on the service side and we can apply on our storage. And the same from our side. We give feedback on our experiences on the storage to them. And not only with the server side but also across different portfolio components in our storage in our business units as well. >> So last question: Customers that are here in the early stages of transformation and are looking for best practices, where do we start? Do we start with transforming IT to make it into a profit center. What are your recommendations? >> Can you repeat? I could not hear the last one. IT? >> Yeah, what are your recommendations for customers that might be at the very beginning of their transformation journey. What do you recommend? Where do they start, in terms of going, 'hey we've got our business leaders, recognize IET should become a part of our business strategy. It shouldn't be a cost center. It should be a profit center." How do you recommend they start these conversations with Dell EMC/ Dell Technologies to get... >> They just need to talk to their representative about business need and application needs. We have a large portfolio of products available to our customers. Again, on the high end there's the resilient storage with more capabilities that might be VMAX. On the mid range it could be either unity or storage center. And on the sever side, again, similar types of options available. They just need to talk about their application needs, virtualization needs, storage needs, hyper converge says traditional lock storage versus file storage connectivity. Those make all the difference and I think our field people have experience in really helping customers out. >> Well, Adnan, thanks so much for stopping by and sharing with us what's new with the technologies. We appreciate your time. >> Thank you. Thanks. >> We want to thank you for watching the Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We are here live Day 2 of Dell Technologies World from Vegas. Stick around. We'll be right back after a short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Well welcome back. Glad to have you live here on the Cube as we continue our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. We are live in Las Vegas. We're in the Sands Exposition Center. I'm with Keith Townsend who had a heck of a night last night. Just a good chicken-and-waffle Las Vegas night. >> You know what? One o'clock in the morning is chicken and waffles here in the Grand Lux, and the view of Venetian, I have to eat at Palazzo because the one in the Venetian closes at 11. >> Oh my, well you know how to live. You know how to live. And I've always said that about you. (laughs) It's a pleasure to welcome as our first guest of the day, Caitlin Gordon, who is the Director of Storage Marketing at Dell EMC. And good afternoon, Caitlin. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> John: A Cube vet, right? You're a Cube veteran. >> I mean as three, is that like, is you're over the hump as a veteran? >> John: Oh absolutely. >> All right, then yes, I'm in. >> You deserve a varsity letter now. >> Aw, do I get a letter jacket too? >> Well, we'll work on that later. We'll give you a Cube sticker for now how 'about that? >> Okay, I'll take a sticker. >> All right, so you've given, you've launched I would say given birth, but you've launched a brand new product today, PowerMax. Tell us all about that. First off, paint us the big picture, and we'll drill down a little bit and find out what's so new about this. >> Yeah, absolutely. So hot off the presses. Announced just two hours ago in the keynote this morning. So PowerMax is, really, the future of storage. The way we're talking about it, it is fast. It is smart and it's efficient. So we could kind of go through each one of those, but the headline here, this is modern tier zero storage. It's designed for traditional applications of today, but also next gen applications like real-time analytics. We have some metrics that show us that up to 70% of companies are going to have these mission-critical, real-time analytic workloads. And they're going to need a platform to support those and why shouldn't it be the same platform that they already have for those traditional workloads. >> So let's just go back. What makes it smarter? And what makes it more efficient? You know, what makes it faster? >> Caitlin: Can we start with fast? >> Yeah sure. >> Okay, that's my favorite one. So fast. I've got some good hero numbers for ya. So we'll start there. 10 million IOPS. That makes it the world's fastest storage array. Full stop. No caveats to that. 150 gigabytes a second throughput. We've got under 300 microseconds latency. That's up to 50% faster than what we already have with VMAX All Flash. So that's great. That's wicked fast, as Bob said, right? But how do we actually do that is a little bit more interesting. So the architecture behind that, it is a multi-controller, scale out architecture. Okay, that's good. That's check. You had a good start with that. But the next thing we did is we built that with end-to-end NVME. So end-to-end NVME means it's NVME-based drives, flash drives now, SCM drives, next generation media coming soon. It's also NVME over Fabric ready. So we're going to have a non-disruptive upgrade in the very near future to add support for NVME over Fabric. So that means you can get all the way from server across the network, to your storage array with NVME. It's really NVME done right. >> So let's talk about today. We've NVME, Fabric ready, which I love NVME over Fabric. Connectivity getting 10 million IOPS to the server in order to take care of that. What are the practical use cases for that much performance? What type of workloads are we seeing? >> Where we see this going in is to data centers where they want to consolidate all of their workloads, all of their practices, all of their processes, on a single platform. 10 million IOPS means you will never have to think about if that array can support that workload. You will be able to support everything. And again, traditional apps, but also these emerging apps, but also mainframe. IBM i, file, all on the same system. >> So can we talk about that as opposed to, let's say you even compare it to another Dell family technology. We just had the team Sean Amay and his VMware customer talking about SAP HANA on XtremIO. XtremIO is really great for one-to-one application mapping, so that's as SAP HANA. So are you telling me that PowerMax is positioned that I can run SAP HANA and in addition to my other data center workloads and get similar performance? >> Absolutely, it is the massive consolidator. It's kind of an app hoarder. You can put anything on it that you've got. And it's block, it's file, and then it's also got support for mainframe and IBM i, which there's still a significant amount of that out there. >> So that's an interesting thing. You're having all of these traditional data services. Usually when we see tier zero type of arrays, Dell EMC had one just last year, there's no services because you just, it's either go really fast or moderately fast and data services. How do you guys do that? >> Yeah well the benefit of where we're coming from is that we built this on the platform of the flagship storage array that's been leading the industry for decades. So what we did is we took the foundation of what we had with VMAX, and we built from that this end-to-end NVME PowerMax. So you get all of that best-in-class hardware, that optimized software, but it comes with all the data services. So you get six nines availability, best-in-class data protection, resiliency, everything that you'd need, so you never have to worry. So this is truly built for your mission-critical applications. >> Yeah, so really interesting speeds and feeds. Let's talk about managing this box. VMAX has come a long way from the Symmetrix days, so much easier to manage. However, we're worried today about data tiering, moving workloads from one area to another. These analytics workloads move fast. How does PowerMax help with day two operations? >> So you've heard the mention of autonomous infrastructure, right? Really PowerMax is autonomous storage. So what is has is it has a built-in, real-time, machine learning engine. And that's designed to use pattern recognition. It actually looks at the IOs and it can determine in a sub-millisecond time, what data is hot, what data should be living where, which data should be compressed. It can optimize the data placement. It can optimize the data reduction. And we see this as a critical enabler to actually leveraging next-generation media in the most effective way. We see some folks out there talking about SCM and using it more as a cache. We're going to have SCM in the array, side-by-side with Flash. Now we know that the price point on that when it comes out the door is going to be more than Flash. So how do you cost-effectively use that? You have a machine learning engine that can analyze that data set and automatically place the data on that when it gets hot or before it even gets hot, and then move it off it when it needs to. So you can put in just as much as you need and no more than that. >> So let's talk about scale. You know I'm a typical storage ad man. I have my spreadsheet. I know what lines I map to what data and to what application. And I've statically managed this for the past 15 years. And it's served me well. How much better is PowerMax than my storage ad man? I can move two or three data sets a day from cache to Flash. >> Really what this enables from a storage administrator perspective, you can focus on much more strategic initiatives. You don't have to do the day-to-day management. You don't have to worry about what data's sending where. You don't have to worry about how much of the different media types you've put into that array. You just deploy it and it manages itself. You can focus on more tasks. The other part I wanted to mention is the fact that you heard Jeff mention this morning that we have Cloud.IQ in the portfolio. Cloud.IQ we're going to be bringing across the entire storage portfolio, including to PowerMax. So that will also really enable this Cloud-based monitoring predictive analytics to really take that to the next level as well. Simplify that even more. >> You know, I'd like to step back to the journey. More or less. When you start out on a project like this and you're reinventing, right, in a way. Do you set, how do you set the specs? You just ran off a really impressive array of capability. >> Caitlin: Yeah. >> Was that the initial goal line or how was that process, how do you manage that? How do you set those kinds of goals? And how do you get your teams to realize that kind of potential, and some people might look at you a little cross-eyed and say, are you kidding? >> Caitlin: Right, right. >> How are we going to get there? I don't know. (laughs) >> We always shoot for the moon. >> John: Right. >> So we always, this type of product takes well over a year to get into market. So you saw PowerMax Bob on stage there talking about it. So his team is the one that really brings this to market. They developed those requirements two years ago. And they were really looking to make sure that at this time, as soon as the technology curve is ready on NVME, we were there, right? So this just shipping with enterprise class, dual port, NVME drives. Those were not ready until right now. Right, those boxes start shipping next week. They are ready next week, right? So we're at the cutting edge of that. And that takes an extraordinary world-class engineering team. A product management team that understands our customers' requirements that we have today, 'cause we have thousands of customers, but more importantly is looking to what's also coming in the future. And then at some point in the process things do fall off, right? So we have even more coming in future releases as well. >> So let's talk connectivity into the box. How do I connect to this? Is this iSCSI, is this fiber channel? What connectivity-- >> So this is definitely fiber channel. And so our NVME over Fabric will be supported over fiber channel with this array. But we find with the install base with our VMAX install base especially they're very heavily invested in fiber channel today. So right now that's where we're still focused. 'Cause that's going to enable the most people to leverage it as quickly as possible. We're obviously looking at when it makes sense to have an IP-based protocol supported as well. >> So this storage is expensive on the back end. Talk to me about if data efficiency, dedup, are we coming out with. 'Cause a lot of these tier zero solutions don't have dedup out the box. >> Or they have it, but if you use it you can't actually get the performance that you paid for, right? >> There's no point in turning it on. >> Yeah, it's like yeah, we checked the box, but there's really no point. Yeah, so VMAX had compression. VMAX also had compression, and what we've done with PowerMax is we now have inline deduplication and compression. The secret to that is that it's a hardware-assisted. So it's designed to, that card actually will take in, it'll compress the data, and it also passes out the hashes you need for dedup. So that it's inline, it will not have a performance impact on the system. It can also be turned on and off by application and it can give you up to five-to-one data reduction. And you can leverage it with all your data services. Some competitive arrays, if you want to use encryption, sorry you can't actually use dedup. The way we've implemented it, you can actually do both the data reduction and the data services you need, especially encryption. >> So before we say goodbye, I'm just, I'm curious, when you see something like this get launched, right. Huge project. Year-long as you've been saying. And even further back in the making. Just from a personal standpoint, you get pumped? Are you, I would imagine-- >> Caitlin: I got to tell ya-- >> This is the end of a really long road for you. >> We have been worked, for the marketing team, we've been working on this for months. It is the best product I've ever launched. It's the best team I've ever worked with. In the past two days since I landed here to getting that keynote out the door has been so much adrenaline, built up, that we're just so excited to get this out there and share it with customers. >> And what's this done to the bar in your mind? Because you were here, now you're here. But tell me about this. What have you jumped over in your mind? >> We have set a very high bar. I'm not really sure what we're going to do at this point, right? From a product standpoint it is in a class by itself. There is just nothing else like it And from an overall what the team has delivered, from engineering all the way from my team, what we've brought together, what we've gotten from the executive, we've never done anything like it before. So we've set a high bar for ourselves, but we've jumped over some high bars before. So we've got some other plans in the future. >> I'm sorry go ahead. >> Let's not end the conversation too quickly. >> All right, all right, sure, all right. >> There is some-- >> He's got some burning questions. >> Yeah, I have burning, this is a big product. So I still have a lot of questions from a customer perspective. Let's talk data protection. You can't have mission-critical all this consolidation without data protection. >> Caitlin: Absolutely. >> What are the data protection features of the PowerMax? >> I'm so glad you asked. I spent a decade in data protection. It is a passionate topic of mine, right? So you look at data protection and kind of think of it as layered, within the array, so we have very efficient snapshot technology. You can take as many snaps as you need. Very, very efficient to take those. They don't take any extra space on them when you make those copies. >> Then can I use those as tertiary copies to actually perform, to point to workloads such as refreshing, QA, DAB, et cetera? >> Yeah, absolutely. You can mount those snapshots and leverage those for any type of use case. So it's not just for data protection. It's absolutely for active use as well. So it's kind of the on the array, and then the next level out is okay, how do I make a copy of that off the array? So the first one would be well do that to another PowerMax. So as you probably know, the VMAX really pioneered the entire primary storage replication concept. So we have certainly asynch if you have a longer distance, but a synchronous replication, but also Metro, if you have that truly active active-use case so, truly the gold standard in replication technologies. And our customers, it's one of the number one reasons why they say there is no other platform on the planet that they would ever use. And then, you go to the next level of we're really talking about backup. We have built in to PowerMax the capabilities to do a direct backup from PowerMax to a data domain. And that gets you that second protection copy also on a protection storage. So you have those multiple layers of protection. All the copies across all of the different places to ensure that have that operational recovery, disaster recovery in that array, and that the data's accessible at all times no matter what the scenario. >> So let's talk about what else we see. When we look at it, we go into our data center and you see a VMAX array, there's a big box with cabinets of shelves, and you're thinking, wow, this thing is rock solid. Look at the PowerMax. That thing is what about a six-- >> Caitlin: I think it's pretty cute, right? >> Yeah it's pretty cute. I love, that's a pretty array. (laughs) >> Yeah. >> You have one over there. So when you see a VMAX, it just gives you this feeling of comfort. PowerMax, let's talk about resiliency. Do we still have that same VMAX, rock solid, you go into a data center and you see two VMAX, and you're thinking this company's never going to go down. >> Caitlin: Right. >> What about PowerMax? >> Guess what? It is the same system. It's just a lot more compact. We have people consolidating from either VMAXs or competitive arrays, but they're in four racks and they come down into maybe half a rack. But you have all the same operating system, all the same data services, so you have non-disruptive upgrades. If you have to do a code upgrade across the whole array at the same time. You don't have to do rolling reboots of all the controllers. You can just upgrade that all at the same time. We have component-level fault isolation. So if a component fails, the whole controller doesn't go down. All you lose is that one little component on there until you're able to swap that out. So you have all of the resiliency that over six nines availability built into this array. Just like you did with the ones that used to be taking up a bit more floor tile space. The PowerMax is about 40% lower power consumption than you have with VMAX All Flash 'cause it can be supported in such a small footprint. >> So are we going to see PowerMax and converge system configurations? >> Yeah, absolutely. So if you're familiar with the VxBlock 1000, which we launched back in February, it will be available in a VxBlock 1000. And of course the big news on that is you have the flexibility to really choose any array. So it could be an X2 and a PowerMax in a VxBlock 1000. >> So that's curious. What is the, now that we have PowerMax, where's the position of the VMAX 250? >> So the, I'm glad you asked, 'cause it's an important thing to remember. VMAX All Flash is absolutely still around and we expect people to buy it for a good amount of time. The main reason being that the applications, the workloads, the customers, the data centers, that are buying these arrays, they have a very strict qualification policy. They take six, nine months, sometimes a year, to really qualify, even a new operating system. >> Keith: Right. >> Let alone a new platform. So we absolutely will be selling a lot of VMAX All Flash for the foreseeable future. >> Well, Caitlin, it's been a long time in the making, right? >> Absolutely. >> Huge day for you. >> Yes. >> So congratulations on that. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Great to have you here on the Cube. And best of luck, I'm sure, well you don't need it. Like I said, superior product, great start. And I wish you all the best down the road. >> Thank you. Hope to see you guys again soon. >> Caitlin Gordon. Now that'd be four. >> Yes, it'd be four. >> We'd love to have you back. Caitlin Gordon joining us from Dell EMC. PowerMax, the big launch coming just a couple hours ago here at Dell Technologies World 2018. Back with more live coverage here on the Cube after this short time out. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCube! Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCube's coverage of Day One of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante in Las Vegas. Excited to welcome back to theCube one of our alumni Chhandomay Mandal, the Director of Marketing at Dell EMC. Chhandomay, nice to see you again. >> Happy to be here. >> We had a exciting keynote this morning, Michael Dell was talking about number one in market share for servers and storage, expecting when the 2018 calendar numbers, came out the first quarter to gain shares. What's going on with storage with All-Flash? >> We are excited about our storage All-Flash portfolio. We are going to have a couple of surprising announcements tomorrow, I cannot give away all of this. But all of our portfolio is going to continue to innovate based on all the things Michael touched upon, ranging from artificial intelligence, machine learning, all of those things. We have a complete portfolio of All-Flash products covering different market segments, customers. Ranging from the Max All-Flash, XtremIO, Unity accessories. So we are really excited about the face of innovations we are doing, the way we are capturing a market. So it's a great time to be in All-Flash storage. >> Chhandomay, I wonder if we can talk about how we got here. So the first modern instantiation of Flash, and there were a lot of SSD's and battery backed up memories in the past, but it was, I think it was EMC, dropped a flash drive into a Symmetrix way back when, and that began to change things. But people soon realized, the controller architecture's not going to support that, so we need All-Flash architectures. And then people quickly realized, oh wow, it's taken us decades to build this rich stack of services. Now fast forward basically a decade plus, where are we today in terms of All-Flash capabilities and adoption? >> In the enterprises today, you see All-Flash getting adopted at a very high rate. In fact, of the storage that we ship, almost 80% of it is All-Flash storage, and again, We have different products for different segments. And as you mentioned, we started from dropping SSD's into the enterprise arrays, a whole thing through the process. Now if you look at us, we have modern purpose-built All-Flash arrays like XtremIO and then All-Flash arrays like VMAX All-Flash and some announcements where you are going to see the maturity level over the last decade, all the data services that got brought in, and the very high-performance, low latency with mission critical availability that we are able to deliver, across the platform for all of our enterprise products. >> So Flash everywhere. And then we've made the observation a lot that, and it sounds trite, but I'll put it out there anyways, historically, when you think about storage it was all about persisting data. And you'd try to make it go as fast as you could, but it was mechanical. Now with Flash, it's all about doing stuff faster, real-time, low latency, massive IOPS, we're shifting the bottlenecks around. What's your take on that dynamic? >> Flash is a fast media, so having great performance is really, it will stay. That is not really the differentiator so to speak, but it needs to be coupled with advanced data services. You need to have very high resiliency. The customers can rely on you with five lines, six lines of availability day in and day out. As well as, you need to do the business solutions, transforming IT, helping businesses transform in their digital transformation process. Let me give you some quick examples. Lets take XtremIO for example. It started out as a purposeful, modern, leading All-Flash array. And it is built upon a unique architecture taking the advantage of Flash Media. It is content error, metadata-centric, active-active controller architecture that helps us deliver very high performance hundreds of thousands to millions of IOPS with very low, consistent latency. No matter how much you have written to that, what loads you are running, what are the system load, etc. But again, that's the first layer. The second layer of it is the advanced data services always on inline reducing the data space. So for example, the inline, the duplication, compression, and making sure we are not writing the duplicate data to the SSD's. Thereby increasing the longevity of the SSD media, as well as reducing the capacity footprint. And driving down costs. Speaking of that. You wrap it around into a very simple, modern UI that's very easy to manage. No tuning needed. That's where today's IT could go from the tactical day to day operations to strategic innovations. How they can do the IT transformation. Get into the digital transformation. Get ahead of their competition. Not only today but for tomorrow. >> And the content awareness and the metadata-centricity are what you just explained? Is that right? Can you connect those? >> Uh sure. Suppose when the data is being written, right? It might have duplicate data. Say for example you are running a video environment. Right? For your tens of thousands of users everybody has their Windows VM. Probably the same data across all the laptops. When you look at it in the XtremIO metadata-centric, always in memory architecture, the request comes in, you try to look it up. Now when you need to do that your metadata is always in memory and you are doing data reduction based on a unique fingerprinting algorithm, checking whether you have seen the data before. If you haven't seen the data before then only you only write it doing other data services on top of it. But if you have seen the data before then you you update the metadata in memory and acknowledge the right. You get a very fast, alright performance that is actually at memory speed, not even at the SSD speed. So this metadata-centric architecture that has all the metadata all the time in memory helps you accelerate the process especially in the case where a lot of duplicate data is present. >> It's a memory speed? Because you somehow eliminated an IO? Or is that NVMe? Or, or..? >> When you access data, right? An application says I want to access block XYZ. Any controller will need to have the metadata for it. And then based on the metadata it needs to do the access. It's like, when you go to a library, you want to find a book from a bookshelf. First you need to know the control number. And then based one the control number, which shelf, which rack, you go and fetch it. Storage controllers of every type works in the same way. If you cannot have your metadata in memory, then the first step the controller has to do is go down to the array, fetch the metadata, and then based on the metadata you fetch the data and solve the IO request. If you have the metadata always in memory, then that step is always eliminated. You can guarantee that your metadata is there and all you need to do is look up and solve the IO request. That's the key of delivering consistent performance. Okay? In other arrays if the metadata is not in memory you'll not get that consistency. But here we can deliver day in, and day out, 90% full or 10% full, whether it's OLTP or VDI, That high performance with very minimal latency. That's the key here. >> High performance, low latency. You've given us some really good overview into the potential that the technology can make to help IT-innovate. And as Michael Dell even said this morning that IT innovation is key. IT can be a profit center of an organization, really as a catalyst for digital transformation. Talk to us about some of the business benefits. That if a business is really wrapping their head around IT as a profit center, and as a driver of business strategy. What are some of the business benefits that All-Flash array can deliver to an organization? Any examples come to mind? >> Yes, I'll answer your question with one of the customer examples. Let's see how they have been doing it. It's my favorite example of Boston Red Socks. I'm from the Boston area. >> You're a fan, right? >> Absolutely. All the Boston sports teams. When Boston Red Socks was in the digital transformation journey, they had to transform a lot of things. First of all, the experiences of the spectators like us, who are in the field living to the moment, whether it's the jumbotrons, or getting the experience digitally on the smartphones. That's one aspect. The other aspect is there are a lot of analytics on all the players across MLB. To get the competitive advantage in terms of, which pitch or which batter? Who has what capabilities or deficiencies that they can go after the right player or when they are against them, how to take advantage of them. And then there are a lot of the business applications in a virtualized environment. As you look, ranging from better spectator experience, ranging to the coaches getting competitive advantage from the opposing players or the scouting department. And running the general back office applications, like Exchange and (mumbling), whatever need might be. Now they were able to consolidate all of these things into the XtremIO All-Flash array platform. And the ability to deliver this performance as well as getting a data reduction of almost seven is to one, was a key for Red Socks' digital transformation journey. >> So the business impact to Lisa's point is lower cost obviously, simpler management. But also faster time to result? How did they turn that into a competitive advantage? >> If they could run... Those analytics previously used to take ten hours. Now they can do it in two hours. That's an 80% faster turnaround time. Right? Previously if they could support 10,000 spectators on one particular wireless network. Now they have 80,000. It's the experience that's transformative for folks who are enjoying the game. It's the number of applications they are running. It's how they are running. They're viewing IT as a strategic investment. As opposed to something that's needed to run the operations. >> Well baseball games are like five hours now, cause you can even do an in game at that speed. How 'about the data services? When Flash first came out, All-Flash architectures they were not very rich in terms of data services. That's evolved. I mean the industry in general, and Dell EMC specifically, has put a lot of effort into that. Maybe you could describe some of the data. What do we mean by data services? Let's talk about copy services, migration services, snapshotting, etc. What are the important ones that we should know about? >> The important data services are thin provisioning, the data reduction technologies, the duplication, compression. Then you have your data protection in forms of various types of array technologies. The most important one I'll put out as how matter your snapshot surfaces, as well as what you can do for your data protection, business continuity, disaster recovery. Those are very critical for any businesses that needs to rely upon having their systems up and running 365 days 24 seven. Having those type of data surfaces is a key. And not only having, but also having a maturity. For example, taking VMAX All-Flash in this particular case, right? It's upon two (mumbling) of reliability, where SRDF is the gold standard in industry, in terms of resiliency, right? Six-ninths of ability. Those... Somebody coming up with brand new array on Day One cannot have it. We have seen that evolution with folks who originally had very fast storage. But then there was no data services. Right? It's the evolution of having the performance as well as the right data surfaces. That helps the customer transform their journey, both in terms of modernizing the IT infrastructure, as well as having the digital transformation to be competitive today and tomorrow. >> And the positioning of XtremIO, just to clarify for our audience, cause you got All-Flash VMAX, you got XtremIO. It's really... It's the high end of the midrange. Is that how we should think about that? >> We have a lot of... As you said the IMAX All-Flash, XtremIO, they're all important, and effectively we have the portfolio because with one product you cannot solve each and every customer needs. So picking on your very specific example, XtremIO is great for mixed workload consolidation, virtualized applications, VDI, as well as situations where you have lots of copies. So for example, you have a database, you need to create (mumbling) copies. You have copies for your backup, sandboxing. In these type of scenarios XtremIO is extremely good. And kind of like is the sweet spot. We are going to... We are having new XtremIO X-Bricks that are even lower priced point than the previous generation. Literally 55% better price entry point. Now this enterprise plus capabilities of XtremIO will be also available in the mid-market, at the mid-range price. >> Well Chhandomay, thanks so much for stopping by, and not only expanding on the customer awards that we saw this morning, by sharing with us the impact that the Boston Red Socks were making. But also sharing with us what's new with XtremIO and All-Flash. >> Thank you. >> And speaking between two Bostonians... >> Big night tonight. You got Bruins. We got Celtics. Red Socks take a back seat for awhile. But they'll be back. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live at Day One of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break.

>> Welcome to another edition of Wikibon's Weekly Research Meeting on theCUBE. (techno music) I'm Peter Burris, and once again I'm joined by, in studio, George Gilbert, David Floyer. On the phone we have Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, Ralph Finos, and Neil Raden. And this week we're going to be visiting Dell EMC's Analyst Summit. And we thought we'd take some time today to go deeper into the transition that Dell and EMC have been on in the past few years, touching upon some of the value that they've been creating for customers and addressing some of the things that we think they're going to have to do to continue on the path that they're on and continue to deliver value to the marketplace. Now, to look back over the course of the past year, it was about a year ago that the transaction actually closed. And in the ensuing year, there's been a fair amount of change. We've seen some interesting moves by Dell to bring the companies together, a fair amount of conversation about how bigger is better. And at the most recent VMworld, we saw a lot of great news of VMworld, VMware in particular working more closely with Amazon and others, or AWS and others. So we've seen some very positive things happen in the course of the past year. But there are still some crucial questions that are addressed. And to kick us off, Dave Vellante, where are we one year in and what are we expecting to hear this week? >> Dave: And foremost, Michael Dell was trying to transform his company. It wasn't happening fast enough. He had to go private. He wanted to be an enterprise player, and amazingly, he and Silver Lake came up with four billion dollars in cash. And they may very well pull off one of the greatest wealth creation trades in the history of the computer industry because for four billion dollars, they're getting an asset that's worth somewhere north of 50 billion, and they're paying down the debt that they used to lever that acquisition through cash flow. So like I say, for a pittance (laughs) of four billion dollars, they're going to turn that into a lot of dough, tens and tens of billions. If you look at EMC pre the M and A, I'm sorry, if you look at Dell pre M and A, pre-merger, their transformation was largely failing. The company was making a lot of acquisitions but it wasn't able to reshape itself fast enough. If you look at EMC pre-merger, it was a powerhouse, but it was suffering from this decade-long collapse of infrastructure hardware and software pricing, which was very much a drag on growth and cash flow. So the company was forced to find a white knight, which came in the form of Michael Dell. So you had this low gross margin company, Dell's public gross margin before it went private were in the teens. EMC was in the roughly 60%. Merge those together and you get a roughly 30% plus gross margin entity. I don't think they're there yet. I think they got a lot of work to do. So a lot of talk about integration. And there's some familiarity with these two companies because they had a fairly large OEM deal for the better part of a decade in the 90s. But culturally, it's quite different. Dell's a very metrics-driven culture with a lot of financial discipline. EMC's kind of a take the hill, do whatever it takes culture. And they're in the process of bringing those together, and a lot of cuts are taking place. So we want to understand what impacts those will have to customers. The other point I want to make is that without VMware, in my view anyway, the combination of these companies would not be nearly as interesting. In fact, it would be quite boring. So the core of these companies, you know, have faced a lot of challenges. But they do have VMware to leverage. And I think the challenge that customers really need to think about is how does this company continue to innovate now that they can't really do M and A? If you look at EMC, for years, they would spend money on R and D and make incremental improvements to its product lines and then fill the gaps with M and A. And there're many, many examples of that, Isilon, Data Domain, XtremIO, and dozens of others. That kept EMC competitive. So how does Dell continue that strength? It spends about four and a half billion a year on R and D, and according to Wikibon's figures, that's about 6% of revenue. If you compare that with other companies, Oracle, Amazon, they're into the 12%. Google's mid-teens. Microsoft, obviously to 12, 13%. Cisco's up there. EMC itself was spending 12% on R and D. So IBM's only about 6%, but remember IBM, about two thirds of the company is services. It's not R and D heavy. So Dell has got to cut costs. It's a must. And what implications does that have on the service levels that customers have grown to expect, and what's the implications on Dell's roadmap? I think we would posit that a lot of the cash cows are going to get funded in a way that allows them to have a managed decline in that business. And it's likely that customers are going to see reduced roadmap functions going forward. So a key challenge that I see for Dell EMC is growth. The strength is really VMware, and the leverage of the VMware and their own install base I think gives Dell EMC the ability to keep pace with its competitors because it's got kind of the inside baseball there. It's got a little bit of supply chain leverage, and of course its sales force and its channels are a definite advantage for this company. But it's got a lot of weaknesses and challenges. Complexity of the portfolio, it's got a big debt load that hamstrings its ability to do M and A. I think services is actually a big opportunity for this company. Servicing its large install base. And I think the key threat is cloud and China. I think China, with its low-cost structure, made a deal like this inevitable. So I come back to the point of Michael Dell's got to cut in order to stay competitive. >> Peter: Alright, so one of the, sorry- >> Dave: Next week, hear a lot about sort of innovation strategies, which are going to relate to the edge. Dell EMC has not announced an edge strategy. It needs to. It's behind HPE in that regard, one its major competitors. And it's got to get into the game. And it's going to be really interesting to see how they are leveraging data to participate in that IOT business. >> Great summary, Dave. So you mentioned that one of the key challenges that virtually every company faces is how do they reposition themselves in a world in which the infrastructure platform, foundation, is going to be more cloud-oriented. Stu Miniman, why don't you take us through, very quickly, where Dell EMC is relative to the cloud? >> Stu: Yeah, great question, Peter. And just to set that up, it's important to talk about one of the key initiatives from Dell and EMC coming together, one of the synergies that Michael Dell has highlighted is really around the move from converged infrastructure to hyper converged infrastructure. And this is also the foundational layer that Dell EMC uses today for a lot of their cloud solutions. So EMC has done a great job with the first wave of converged infrastructure through partnering with Cisco. They created the Vblock, which is now VxBlock, which is now a multi-billion dollar revenue stream. And Dell did a really good job of jumping on early with the hyper converged infrastructure trend. So I'd written research years ago that not only was it through partnerships but through OEM deals, if you look at most of the solutions that were being sold on the market, the underlying server for them was Dell. And that was even before the EMC acquisition. Once they acquired EMC, they really get kind of control, if you will, of the VMware VSAN business, which is a very significant player. They have an OEM relationship with Nutanix, who's doing quite well in the space, and they put together their own full-stack solution, which takes Dell's hardware, the VMware VSAN, and the go-to-market processes of what used to be VCE, and they put together VxRail, which is doing quite well from a revenue and a growth standpoint. And the reason I set this all up to talk about cloud is that if you look at Dell's positioning, a lot of their cloud starts at that foundational infrastructure level. They have all of these enterprise hybrid clouds and different solutions that they've been offering for a few years. And underneath those, really it is a simplified infrastructure hardware offering. So whether that is the traditional VCE converged infrastructure solutions or the newer hyper converged infrastructure solutions, that's the base level. And then there's software that wraps on top of it. So they've done a decent amount of revenue. The concern I have is, you know, Peter, you laid out, it's very much a software world. We've been talking a lot at Wikibon about the multi-cloud nature of what's going on. And while Dell and the Dell family have a very strong position in the on-premises market, that's really they're center strength, is around hardware and customer and the enterprises data center. And the threat is public cloud and multi-cloud. And if it centers around hardware and especially when you dig down and say, "okay, I want to sell more servers," which is one of the primary drivers that Michael wants to have with his whole family of solutions, how much can you really live across these in various environments? Of course, they have partnerships with Microsoft. There's the VMware partnerships with Amazon, which is interesting, how they even partner with the likes of Google and others, it can be looked at. But from that kind of center strength is on premises and therefore they're not really living heavily in the public and multi-cloud world, unless you look at Pivotal. So Pivotal's a software, and that's where they're going to say that the big push is, but it's these massive shifts of large install base of EMC, Dell, and VMware, compared to the public cloud that are doing the land grabs. So this is where it's really interesting to look at. And the announcement that we're interested to look at is how IOT and edge fits into all of this. So David Foyer and you, Peter, research about how- >> Peter: Yeah, well, we'll get to that. >> Stu: There's a lot of nuance there. >> We'll get to that in a second, Stu. But one of the things I wanted to mention to David Floyer is that certainly in the case of Dell, they have been a major player in the Intel ecosystem. And as we think about what's going to happen over the course of the next couple of years, what's going to happen with Intel? It's going to continue to dominate. And what's that going to mean for Dell? >> Sure, Dell's success, I mean, what Stu has been talking about is the importance of volume for Dell, being a volume player. And obviously when they're looking at Intel, the PC is a declining market, and ARM is doing incredibly well in the mobile and other marketplaces. And Dell's success is essentially tied to Intel. So the question to ask is if Intel starts to lose market share to ARM and maybe even IBM, what is the impact on that on Dell? And in particular, what is the impact on the edge? And so if you look at the edge, there are two primary parts. We put forward there are two parts of the edge. There's the primary data, which is coming from the sensors themselves, from the cameras and other things like that. So there's the primary edge, and there's the secondary edge, which is after that data has been processed. And if you think about the primary edge, AI and DL go to the primary edge because that's where the data is coming in, and you want the highest fidelity of data. So you want to do the processing as close as possible to that. So you're looking at these examples in autonomous cars. You're seeing it in security cameras, that all of that processing is going to much cheaper chips, very, very close to the data itself. What that means is that most of that IOT, or could mean, is that most of that IOT could go to other vendors, other than Intel, to go to the ARM vendors. And if you look at that market, it's going to be very specialized in the particular industry and the particular problem it's trying to solve. So it's likely that non-IT vendors are going to be in that business. And you're likely to be selling to OT and not the IT. So all of those are challenges to Dell in attacking the edge. They can win the secondary edge, which is the compressed data, initially compressing it 1,000 to one, probably going to a million to one compression of the data coming from the sensors to a much higher value data but much, much smaller amounts, both on the compute side and on the storage side. So if that bifurcation happens at the edge, the size of marketplace is going to be very considerably reduced for Intel. And Dell has in my view a strategic decision to make of whether they get into being part of that ARM ecosystem for the edge. There's a strong argument that's saying that they would need to do that. >> And they will be announcing something on Monday, I believe, or next week. We're going to hear a lot about that. But when we think, ultimately, about the software that Dell and EMC are going to have to think about, they're very strong in VMware, which is important, and there's no question that virtual machines will remain important, if not only from an install base standpoint but from, in the future, how the cloud is organized and arranged and managed. Pivotal also is an interesting play, especially as it does a better job of incorporating more of the open source elements that are becoming very attractive to developers. But George, let me ask you a question, ultimately, about where is Dell in some of these more advanced software worlds? When we think about machine learning, when we think about AI, these are not strong markets right now, are not huge markets right now, but they're leading indicators. They're going to provide cues about where the industry's going to go and who's going to get a chance to provide the tooling for them. So what's our take right now, where Dell is, Dell EMC is relative to some of these technologies? >> Okay, so that was a good lead in for my take on all the great research David Floyer's done, which is when we go through big advances in hardware, typically relative price performance changes between CPU, memory, storage, networking. When we see big relative changes between those, then there's an opportunity for the software to be re-architected significantly. So in this case, what we call unigrid, what David's called unigrid previously is the ability to build scale-out, extremely high-performance clusters to the point where we don't have to bottleneck on shared storage like a SAN anymore. In other words, we can treat the private memory for each node as if it were storage, direct-attached storage, but it is now so fast in getting between nodes and to the memory in a node that for all intents and purposes, it can perform as if you had a shared storage small cluster before. Only now this can scale out to hundreds, perhaps thousands, of nodes. The significance of that is we are in an era of big data and big analytics. And so the issue here is can Dell sort of work with the most advanced software vendors who are trying to push the envelope to build much larger-scale data management software than they've been able to. Now, Dell has an upward, sort of an uphill climb to master the cloud vendors. They build their own infrastructure hardware. But they've done pools of GPUs, for instance, to accelerate machine learning training. Dell could work with these data management vendors to get pools of this scale-out hardware in the clouds to take advantage of the NoSQL databases, the NewSQL databases. There's an opportunity to leapfrog. What we found out at Oracle, at their user conference this week was even though they're building similar hardware, their database is not yet ready to take advantage of it. So there is an opportunity for Dell to start making inroads in the cloud where their generic infrastructure wouldn't. Now, one more comment on the edge, I know David was saying on the sort of edge device, that's looking more and more like it doesn't have to be Intel-compatible. But if you go to the edge gateway, the thing that bridges OT and IT, that's probably going to be their best opportunity on the edge. The challenge, though, is it's not clear how easy it will be in a low-touch sort of go-to-market model that Dell is accustomed to because like they discovered in the late 90s, it cost $6,000 per year per PC to support. And no one believed that number until Intel did a study on itself and verified it. The protocols from all the sensors on the OT side are so horribly complex and legacy-oriented that even the big auto manufacturers keep track of the different ones on a spreadsheet. So mapping the IT gateway server to all the OT edge devices may turn out to be horribly complex for a few years. >> Oh, it's not a question of may. It is going to be horribly complex for the next few years. (laughing) I don't think there's any question about that. But look, here's what I want to do. I want to ask one more question. And I'm going to go do a round table and ask everybody to give me what the opportunity is and what the threat is. But before I do that, the one thing we haven't discussed, and Dave Vellante, I'm going to throw it over to you, is we've looked at the past of Dell talks a lot about the advantages of its size and the economies of scale that it gets. And Dell's not in the semiconductor business or at least not in a big way. And that's one place where you absolutely do get economies of scale. They got VMware in the system software business, which is an important point. So there may be some economies there. But in manufacturing and assembly, as you said earlier, Dave, that is all under consideration when we think about where the real cost efficiencies are going to be. One of the key places may be in the overall engagement model. The ability to bring a broad portfolio, package it up, and make it available to a customer with the appropriate set of services, and I think this is why you said services is still an opportunity. But what does it mean to get to the Dell EMC overall engagement model as Dell finds or looks to find ways to cut costs, to continue to pay down its debt and show a better income statement? >> Dave: So let me take the customer view. I mean, I think you're right. This whole end to end narrative that you hear from Dell, for years you heard it from HP, I don't think it really makes that much of a difference. There is some supply chain leverage, no question. So you can get somewhat cheaper components, you could probably get supplies, which are very tight right now. So there are definitely some tactical advantages for customers, but I think your point is right on. The real leverage is the engagement model. And the interesting thing from I think our standpoint is that you've got a very high-touch EMC direct sales force, and that's got to expand into the channel. Now, EMC's done a pretty good job with the channel over the last, you know, half a decade. Dell doesn't have as good a reputation there. Its channel partners are many more but perhaps not as sophisticated. So I think one of the things to watch is the channel transformation and then how Dell EMC brings its services and its packages to the market. I think that's very, very important for customers in terms of reducing a lot of the complexity in the Dell EMC portfolio, which just doubled in complexity. So I think that is something that is going to be a critical indicator. It's an opportunity, and at the same time, if they blow it, it's a big threat to this organization. I think it's one of the most important things, especially, as you pointed out, in the context of cost cutting. If they lose sight of the importance of the customer, they could hit some bumps in the road and open it up for competition to come in and swoop some of their business. I don't think they will. I think Michael Dell is very focused on the customer, and EMC's culture has always been that way. So I would bet on them succeeding there, but it's not a trivial task. >> Yeah, I would agree with you. In fact, one of the statements that we heard from Michael Dell and other executives at Dell EMC at VMworld, over and over and over again, on theCUBE and elsewhere, was this notion of open with an opinion. And in many respects, the opinion is not just something that they say. It's something that they do through their packaging and how they put their technologies into the marketplace. Okay, guys, rapid fire, really, really, really short answers. Let's start with the threats. And then we'll close with the positive note on the strengths. David Floyer, really quick, biggest threat that we're looking at next week? >> The biggest threat is the evolution of ARM processes, and if they keep to an Intel-only strategy, that to me is their biggest threat. Those could offer a competition in both mobile, increasing percentages of mobile, and also also in the IOT and other processor areas. >> Alright, George Gilbert, biggest threat? >> Okay, two, summarizing the comments I made before, one, they may not be able to get the cloud vendors to adopt pools of their scale-out infrastructure because the software companies may not be ready to take advantage of it yet. So that's cloud side. >> No, you just get one. Dave Vellante. >> Dave: Interest rates. (laughing) >> Peter: Excellent. Stu Miniman. >> Stu: Software. >> Peter: Okay, come on Stu. Give me an area. >> Stu: Dell's a hardware company! Everything George said, there's no way the cloud guys are going to adopt Dell EMC's infrastructure gear. This is a software play. Dell's been cutting their software assets, and I'm really worried that I'm going to see an edge box, you know, that doesn't have the intelligence that they need to put the intelligence that they say that they're going to put in. >> So, specifically, it's software that's capable of running the edge centers, so to speak. Ralph Finos. >> Ralph: Yeah, I think the hardware race to the bottom. That's a big part of their business, and I think that's a challenge when you're looking at going head on head, with HPE especially. >> Peter: Neil Raden, Neil Raden. >> Neil: Private managed cloud. >> Or what we call true private cloud, which goes back to what Stu said, related to the software and whether or not it ends up being manageable. Okay, threats. David Floyer. >> You mean? >> Or I mean opportunities, strengths. >> Opportunities, yes. The opportunity is being by far the biggest IT place out there, and the opportunity to suck up other customers inside that. So that's a big opportunity to me. They can continue to grow by acquisition. Even companies the size of IBM might be future opportunities. >> George Gilbert. >> On the opposite side of what I said earlier, they really could work with the data management vendors because we really do need scale-out infrastructure. And the cloud vendors so far have not spec'd any or built any. And at the same time, they could- >> Just one, George. (laughing) Stu Miniman. >> Dave: Muted. >> Peter: Dave Vellante. >> Dave: I would say one of the biggest opportunities is 500,000 VMware customers. They've got the server piece, the networking piece kind of, and storage. And combine that with their services prowess, I think it's a huge opportunity for them. >> Peter: Stu, you there? Ralph Finos. >> Stu: Sorry. >> Peter: Okay, there you go. >> Stu: Dave stole mine, but it's not the VMware install base, it's really the Dell EMC install base, and those customers that they can continue moving along that journey. >> Peter: Ralph Finos. >> Ralph: Yeah, highly successful software platform that's going to be great. >> Peter: Neil Raden. >> Neil: Too big to fail. >> Alright, I'm going to give you my bottom lines here, then. So this week we discussed Dell EMC and our expectations for the Analyst Summit and our observations on what Dell has to say. But very quickly, we observed that Dell EMC is a financial play that's likely to make a number of people a lot of money, which by the way has cultural implications because that has to be spread around Dell EMC to the employee base. Otherwise some of the challenges associated with cost cutting on the horizon may be something of an issue. So the whole cultural challenges faced by this merger are not insignificant, even as the financial engineering that's going on seems to be going quite well. Our observation is that the cloud world ultimately is being driven by software and the ability to do software, with the other observation that the traditional hardware plays tied back to Intel will by themselves not be enough to guarantee success in the multitude of different cloud options that will become available, or opportunities that will become available to a wide array of companies. We do believe the true private cloud will remain crucially important, and we expect that Dell EMC will be a major player there. But we are concerned about how Dell is going to evolve as a, or Dell EMC is going to evolve as a player at the edge and the degree to which they will be able to enhance their strategy by extending relationships to other sources of hardware and components and technology, including, crucially, the technologies associated with analytics. We went through a range of different threats. If we identify two that are especially interesting, one, interest rates. If the interest rates go up, making Dell's debt more expensive, that's going to lead to some strategic changes. The second one, software. This is a software play. Dell has to demonstrate that it can, through its 6% of R and D, generate a platform that's capable of fully automating or increasing the degree to which Dell EMC technologies can be automated. In many conversations we've had with CIOs, they've been very clear. One of the key criteria for the future choices of suppliers will be the degree to which that supplier fits into their automation strategy. Dell's got a lot of work to do there. On the big opportunities side, the number one from most of us has been VMware and the VMware install base. Huge opportunity that presents a pathway for a lot of customers to get to the cloud that cannot be discounted. The second opportunity that we think is very important that I'll put out there is that Dell EMC still has a lot of customers with a lot of questions about how digital transformation's going to work. And if Dell EMC can establish itself as a thought leader in the relationship between business, digital business, and technology and bring the right technology set, including software but also packaging of other technologies, to those customers in a true private cloud format, then Dell has the potential to bias the marketplace to their platform even as the marketplace chooses in an increasingly rich set of mainly SaaS but public cloud options. Thanks very much, and we look forward to speaking with you next week on the Wikibon Weekly Research Meeting here on theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering the VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to The Cube. We are live at VMworld for our continuing coverage of the event, day two, exciting morning. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Stu Miniman, and Stu and I are very excited to be joined by a Cube alumni Chhandomay Mandal, the Director of Storage Solutions Marketing at Dell EMC. Welcome back. >> Glad to be here. >> Yeah, we had you on The Cube a couple of times at Dell EMCworld. >> Yes. >> Just a couple of months ago. So, virtualization. Still a mainstay of the data center, right? Some big announcements yesterday and today. Can you talk to us about some of the trends that you're seeing in the virtualization market today? >> Sure. So, as many organizations are going through the IT transformation, data centers are becoming even larger, running thousands of applications, many thousands of VMs, right. So what we see is as many applications run, the underlying storage load becomes hugely random, the platform needs to be able to deliver very high performance all the time, 24/7, 365. Also, getting into the private cloud type environment, we see a lot of VM cloning, VM deployment, coming and happening in a rapid space. We also see the need of efficient copy management, to prevent the VMs' flaws in a very nice, contained, efficient manner. And finally, as we are hearing at VMworld, giving access to applications and data from any device, any application, any time, anywhere, that's becoming another aspect we are increasingly seeing across all of our customers. >> You bring up a lot of really interesting points. You know, I think back, the early days of virtualizations, like oh, we're going to give this abstraction layer and it's going to make everything really easy. Come one, invisible infrastructure, I shouldn't have to even worry about storage, right? But the reality is, there's a lot of work that goes into making sure that storage works well, and when we're talking virtualized environment, when we're talking cloud environment, what's that conversation you're having with customers? I think virtualization in cloud, who is it that brings up, hey, we got to make sure that storage meets our needs? What are some of the biggest things that you're hearing from customers and how are you helping to solve them? >> So as you look at the customers, right, maybe like five years ago it used to be pretty storage admin, or IT admin-centric conversations. We are seeing a transition into CXO-level business, solving our business challenges conversation. It's not that, how much storage I need, how many copies do I need to create, but it's more along the lines of, I need to bring my cloud-native application faster to market. It's taking six months of development cycle. How can it bring it back to like, three months, how I can hit the corner cases before the customers actually run into those in my keyware cycles? How I can run better analytics real-time, as opposed to having to wait for like 24 hours? So these are the business challenges customers are asking us to help solve, and we are evaluating where they are in their IT transformation journey, and how we can map those requirements into the underlying infrastructure that will help them get to that new era of virtualization, cloud-native applications, all those things. >> One of the things that Michael Dell talked about this morning on stage with Pat Gelsinger, was that the data conversation is, like you were saying, it's a CXO-level conversation, it's on the CEO agenda. Can you talk to us about some of things that Dell EMC is doing at that level of customer conversation where costs are concerned. We have this exploding growth of data volume, that's not changing, centers of data, not data centers anymore. How is Dell EMC helping to position where you can work with customers on the storage element that will really help drive cost efficiencies across an entire business? >> So, I'll start with a solid example, right. I mean, I was working with a customer who is running huge number of databases, and to run his business, he needs to have copies for his DevOps operations, he needs to have copies for his backup environment, copies to run his analytics environment, and there are storage silos everywhere, because he really was afraid of touching his production environment to meet his SLAs. Now, I'll give you an example of one of our portfolio products, Dell EMC XtremIO, in fact we literally announced the general availability of X2 here at at the IMC World. Now this is a purpose-built all-flash array that is designed to handle application-level problems. So for example, it can not only provide very high performance with consistently low latency for DB workloads, but because of its intelligent in-memory content over metadata architecture that's built for flash media, it can create copies without consuming any extra space instantly, and the admins, whether that's a DB or storage admin, they can actually consolidate production workloads with non-production workloads like DevOps environments analytics, thereby hugely reducing the storage capacity of it, but then there is an added benefit to it. Say for example, the application admin needs to deploy a VM for his latest application he's developing, right? So instead of having to go to a DBA to ask storage admin, he actually can self-service with the application-level plug-in, saying like, hey, I want to clone 10 VMs. And you know what? The DBAs are happy, the storage admins are happy, because they are out of that chain. They can monitor and make sure everything is running fine, but at the end of the day, the self-service is actually helping the developers bring the product to the market in a more timely and cost-efficient manner. >> So reduce TCO storage cost... >> I actually want you to kind of put a point on that because we'd actually looked into, you know when flash came into the marketplace, it was like, oh great, we're going to improve performance, but the business outcomes, what happened to the business, and one piece you talked about, the dev and test environments, used to be, you know, let's give them sold old gear, they kind of work on whatever could have. They can now increase their agility. Number one thing we hear, the keynote this morning talked about, how do I move faster, and giving them the tools in there, all of those copies, I'm putting them to use, I'm leveraging my data, I'm leveraging, you know, increasing the speed of my application development, and that's the number one thing that we hear from all customers is right, how can I not have storage be a boat anchor, but help me move my business forward. So you know, be a driver, not a cost. >> They don't need to be in the business of optimizing storage. It is helping them transform the business application workflows as opposed to, how do I plan for this, how do I keep monitoring, what do I need to do for the next upgrade, et cetera. >> So from a customer's perspective, can you talk to us about, to Stu's point, maybe one of your favorite examples of a customer who dramatically improved business outcomes, reducing cost of ownership, getting to market with products faster, launching new products. What are some of the big business outcomes that you've seen through a great customer example? >> So I actually have a couple. I'll start with one in the health care space. Scripps Health is a big, integrated non-profit health system down in San Diego area, and they are running their electronic health record systems, which are pretty vital for all the clinicians to access their patient data very quickly. Now, they had multiple problems. One was how to keep up with the explosion of all the images that were getting created, like copies for their EHR systems, et cetera. And at the same time, they had to back up their data, and they had to create many copies of their SQL Server environments. In fact, they could not keep up with that and the time it was taking was getting enormous. Once they moved to this XtremIO platform, they actually started to see, pretty much like that time to create the copies reduced by more than 80%. And then they also saw the advantage of data reduction. They are getting anywhere like four S21 to seven S21 data reduction on their storage capacity, and with the help of this integrated technology, now their doctors are able to see more patient in a day, pretty much like saving lots of doctor hours. >> Can imagine they can pull back large images faster, it's on all-flash, being able to get information to patients faster, make diagnoses maybe, improve their ability to do that as well? >> Chhandomay: Yes. >> Yeah. >> And changing the spectrum completely. I mean I'm from the Boston area, Red Sox is my favorite sports team down there along with Bats. Now, again, even with baseball, right, they need to run lots of analytics. They want to have their spectators in the historic Fenway Park the latest and greatest digital experience of the games that are going on, right? And they have to run all of their business applications as well as customer-facing systems on a platform that can keep up with the growth, and give their latest experience. Now again, they moved to XtremIO, they are seeing great performance, they are seeing seven S21 data efficiency, and literally, they say us, their business processes and the customer experience have changed. They don't really need to worry about how the backend is working, they can actually focus on the strategic outcomes of baseball operations and giving the viewers at Fenway the best possible IT experience through the mobile network, social networking, like all those things. So that's kind of like two of my favorite examples from completely different spectrums. >> Okay, so we're here at VMworld. Any specific use cases that you're especially seeing popular in this community as compared to the general storage market? >> So I would say one of the aspects we heard, I mean in the keynotes, any device, any application, like one cloud. For us, what we are seeing >> Stu: It's actually any cloud now, right? >> Yeah, any cloud. So it's pretty much the same, right? I mean it's any device, any application, anywhere, anytime access. So I want to say the end user computing is becoming very important. It was always important, but there were storage bottlenecks, but now with all these abstractions that are possible, the mobile device management that is coming in, we see a great uptick in terms of the desktop virtualization market, and again, bringing back to what we just announced, right? This XtremIO X2 platform is exceptional for VDI use cases. I mean, in our previous generation we had 700 plus customers running 2.5 million plus virtual desktops. Now with this new platform, I mean a single X-Brick, which is like a small, two-controller array necessity, it can host up to 4,000 desktops. And I mean we are seeing tremendous performance improvement, snappy desktop experience, with huge data reductions. So that's one area which we see keeping up with our customer base as they're going through that IT transformation through digital transformation. >> So one of the things, I love that you brought up the Red Sox, I'm a San Francisco Giants fan, but if they don't make it at the wild card, which is probably not going to happen, I might root for the Red Sox. But what I love that you talked about is, a baseball team is a technology company. A hospital, a university is a technology company. Presumably with a lot of legacy infrastructure that needs to be updated to modernize IT, how is now Dell EMC, with XtremIO, helping these companies on this path to digitalization, but on this legacy upgrade process? What's unique about how Dell EMC can do that leveraging XtremIO? >> So for us, at Dell EMC, modernizing IT infrastructure is essentially we think based on four pillars. Flash, one is flash, scale-out architecture, cloud-ready, and software-defined storage all backed by the world-class data protection. Now I want to take it one step back. It's not just about XtremIO or XtremIO X2, it's about the power of the portfolio that we have. So customers might have legacy infrastructure, both from us or from other vendors, but we provide the kind of like, walk into their environments, what we call get-modern assessments. We actually run various types of applications to see where their bottlenecks are, what performance do they need, and then take a portfolio approach to provide the complete solution in terms of how we can non-disruptively transform all of their workloads into a newer platform, be it based on XtremIO, or VMAX or ScaleIO, any of those platforms. But the key is, having the ability to non-disruptively move the legacy workloads into this modern infrastructure as well as enabling them to do those cloud-native applications digital transformation journey. >> You've mentioned cloud-native applications a few times. That modernization of the applications, one of the toughest journeys that we're going on. We've talked about virtualizing, we talked about cloud, but the application's something that it's pretty tough to make a change there. How is the infrastructure enabling that and what are some of the, just kind of in general, what are you hearing from customers, how are they doing along that journey? >> So in that space, right, we are seeing a great adoption of the platforms that can provide 24/7 365, not only just uptime, but great performance, at a lower TCO. And we are seeing adoption in terms of conversion, hyper-conversion, software-defined. So those are the elements that are helping the customers transform into that space, meaning, think of it in a automated self-service world where pretty much, like, I'm developing my applications and I click couple of buttons and all the infrastructure get provisioned as I need and when I'm done I kind of like decommission it. So that's the ultimate nirvana of self-service, automation, orchestration, that the end developers can use, and IT become a strategic operations, as opposed to kind of like keeping the lights on and making sure we are in the business. >> Excellent, well Chhandomay, we thank you so much for coming back to The Cube and sharing what's new at Dell EMC with the different technologies, and some great use cases across different companies that are tech companies at heart. We hope you enjoy the rest of the show. >> It was a pleasure of being on The Cube, thank you. >> Thank you. And we want to thank you for watching, I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost Stu Miniman again, we are live, covering day two of VMworld 2017. From Las Vegas, stick around, we'll be right back.

>> 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)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. >> Welcome back, here at Las Vegas at The Venetian. As theCUBE continues our coverage of Dell EMC World 2017. Along with our co-host, Paul Gillin, I'm John Walls, good to have you with us. As we, I guess were coming down the home stretch. >> Paul: We are. >> Day one. >> Paul: End of the day. >> Here at Dell EMC World 2017. With us now is Chhandomay Mandal, who is product marketing director at Dell EMC. Double dipping on us, we just had you on a few moments ago. This is nice, we get two shots. >> Thanks for having me. >> Good to have you back with us, yeah, it's good. >> Chhandomay: Thanks for having me. >> So before we were talking about XtremeIO, what you were doing in the healthcare space. Moving over now to copy data management, different part of your portfolio, and kind of what's up in that world with you. So just give us a little rundown, an overview of what you're up to right now. >> Sure, so let's start with what exactly is copy data problem. Why it's a problem, and why we need to be solving it? If you think of any business application, it comes with its production data. But for every bit of production data, you have many different copies. For example, when you're developing applications, you need copies for your development and testing. You need copies for your backup. You need copies for running your analytics environment. It's for every single production database, typically, we see five to 12 copies of that data. And in fact, I did see estimates. The copy data sprawl is like 40 billion dollar market, and 60% of all the data that exists are on copies. Now, our mission, especially with Dell EMC XtremIO, is to solve that copy data problem, giving the customers back a lot in terms of the storage efficiencies, and not only is the storage TCO, but transforming the business workflows. We did copy data management so that they can realize storage and infrastructure settings, but also the business impact from transforming the application workflows and bringing new production market in a much quicker way. >> So you said a 40 billion dollar market, I mean, what are the costs here? Is it just storage cost? Is it bandwidth, is it errors? Lack of data being out of sync? >> So the cost here has multiple components, right? First of all, there is the cost of the lost storage where you need to put the data on. But then, there comes the cost of managing the storage. How do you figure out where you backup copies are, if you need to restore, where are you going to get the data from? It's a cost of inefficiency meaning, like if your developer who is the highly paid, highly productive guy, supposed to be, right? He is waiting for the DBA or the storage admin to give the copy that he needs, then, that's just enough money, right? It's not just the infrastructure cost, but also the soft cost of, like your ability to bring the product to the market in a quicker way, addressing your customer needs in a quicker way. That acts up and those are the components in, like, how I value this intermarket. >> I guess what I'm hearing here, if you got five to 12 copy sets of data, I mean, massive amounts of waste in some cases, right? And maybe some of your clients, they like to know where everything is, but do they lose track of it, and so it's taking up space, taking up money, taking up time. Is that, are these the problems they're facing? >> Chhandomay: Yes, yes. >> Alright, so then, what's the answer then in terms of this better identification? There's X2, get to the heart of that, and help them in terms of better efficiencies? >> How do we achieve that efficiencies? Now, one thing is, the way, first of all, like, if you can consolidate your copies into one single platform. And copies are duplicate bits, right? So, first of all, the first thing in the process is you eliminate all the duplication that exists in your storage. You have your production data base, and you have your copies, which are, if not unique, then basically should not take up any extra space. Now, you take those copies, and make it like a repair plus one. So for example, your Dell part can run tests on it. So when the rights are coming in, only the changes that are happening, that should go into the storage. So that's Part A. Part B is, when you are running production environment, as well as what works on your copies, you need huge performance with consistently low latency. Because you cannot impact your production SLS. You have to meet that. >> You can't tell it, "Hang on, I've got something "else going on over here, right?" >> So you need a platform that can handle consistently high performance with low latency no matter what workload you are running. And then the copies themselves need to be very efficient. They should not take any extra space, unless there is something unique. And they should be able to perform just as well as in a production value. The hard part of this is, you need to orchestrate the inner process, right? I mean, you as in oracle admin. You really do not need to worry about how and where the storage is going to be saved for your copies. You click on a button, and it should do all the steps necessary right from your application console down to the storage. So this is the application orchestration that we in-built with AppSync and XtremIO. And then we have APIs that our customers can use to provide their own service catalog. So using these pillars, we consolidated all the copies, on the same platform, running different applications, with the same SLS, okay? And that kind of helps the customers to bring product faster, and address the copy needs. >> Now, this is a very hot market right now. And I'm thinking there's some startups, I'm thinking of Actifio and Catalogic in particular, that say that you shouldn't have many copies. You should have one copy, and then you should have pointers to that. What's your opinion of that? What are the pros and cons of that approach versus yours? >> So our approach, essentially, I mean, since you mentioned, right, there are copy data management vendors. What they're doing is, you have your production, then you make a gold copy off your production, and from that gold copy you run off different applications on those copies, right? So here you are introducing another element, another software, and another appliance, so to speak, to manage the copies. What we are doing, is kind of like you don't need that extra copy that your analytic part provider can provide. And then there are performance implications with the integrated copy data management that we are referring. The reason we can do it is, all of our metadata is in memory. It does not consume any extra space for storage. And no matter what the workload is, we can offer consistently high latency because everything is, the metadata is operating from the memory itself. So the way the third parties are doing, we do it the same way, even better, and at the production level. >> Another thing, and forgive my technical ignorance here, but David Fleur at Worky-Ban, has talked a lot about the benefits of flash storage. In that you don't have to create copies, you can create a single copy in flash, and then multiple users or applications can work from that. Do I have that straight? He says that's a game changer. >> Yes, that will be that game changer, and that's really like what we do. The caveat to that is, when you are creating the copies, and you want to run applications on the copies, your production should not be impacted, and the copies should also be able to deliver the same performance. And that part has been the challenge with other solutions in terms of providing the same performance, the same data services on the copies themselves. That's the idiot we solve will our intelligent content error in memory metadata architecture with XtemIO. >> You're talking about the integrated data management just a little bit ago. I mean, from a real life perspective, can you give us an idea about maybe a success story, somebody that you can point to and say, "This is how they incorporated that "into their process, I see it work for them, "and we can make it work for you too?" >> So, I'll give you an interesting statistic. We have 3,000 plus customers running XtremIO in production, and we get all the phone home data at our end, and we can see what they're doing. Now, for XtremIO customers, 56% of the copies that they're making, they are running workloads on them. They are not just for local data production. And, all the IOs, XtremIos that is out there in the field we'll see, 40% of the IOs are because of the copies. So we see across the board on the customers. I have many examples. For the sake of time, I'll just speak one. We all know Moen, they are the leading, not American manufacturers of the faucets, right? It's a big shop, and they have like, a lot of SLP landscapes in there. Before XtremIO, they could not keep up with the backups and the copies that they needed. After moving to XtremIO, now they can actually take the copies of their production SLP landscapes twice a day. They are quietly running reports. They are actually running like 90% shorter, and in fact, we were talking with Harvey H., literally, like before this segment, right? He was also talking about how efficient their copies are. I was talking with Scripps Health, who are also going to be presenting in here. They run like 3,000 copies in their environment, with XtremIO and AppSync, and like it's all working great. No impact on the performance, and they are meeting their SLS. >> Well, your performance on theCUBE has been outstanding. Back-to-back saves, we appreciate the time. Chhandomay, thanks for hanging with us. Best of luck down the road, and continued success here at the show as well. >> Thank you, it was a pleasure. >> We will continue with more from theCUBE here in Las Vegas. We are live at Dell EMC World 2017.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Dell EMC World here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Walls. Today we are talking to Chhandomay Mandal. He is the Senior Consultant Product Marketing here at Dell EMC, as well as Pat Harkins who is the CTO Informatics and Technology Services at Royal Victoria Health Center. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Glad to be here. >> So, Pat, I want to start with you. Tell us a little bit about Royal Health. >> Sure. Well, Royal Victoria Regional Health Center in Barrie, Ontario. We're about an hour north of Toronto, Ontario. It's a regional health center, variety of services. We provide oncology, cardiac, child and youth mental health, and what we're doing up there is providing a regional role, regional services for Meditech. We're host Meditech for a number of other hospitals in our area, and we're currently looking to expand that, and increase our volume, but also change platforms as well. >> So tell us about some of the biggest challenges that you see. >> Some of the biggest challenges that we're seeing right now is within Ontario, is the actual funding model, of course. Everything's a little bit tighter. But from a technology perspective, is actually staying with technology, with limited budgets and so forth, and staying with the latest, greatest, providing the best service to our customers, our physicians, our clinicians, which in turn is the best patient care. >> Chhandomay, you look at a client like Pat, who has very specific needs in health care. You've got time issues, you've got privacy issues. How do you deal, or what do you see as far as health care IT fitting in to what you're doing and the services you're providing to somebody like Pat, specifically knowing that these are very unique challenges and critically important challenges? >> Sure. We at Dell EMC look at what the problem is holistically. As Pat was mentioning, in the health care IT, one of the challenges we see is providing consistent high performance with low latency so that the clinicians, physicians can access the patient data in a timely way, quickly, they do not spend more time entering the data or accessing the data, rather spending more time with the patients. Then there is another problem that Pat alluded to. For any EHR, electronic health record systems, it is actually a consolidation of many workloads. You have the EHR workload itself, then you have analytics that needs to be run on it. There are other virtualized applications, and then there is distal partualization, because all the physicians now says they need to access the patient data. So effectively, we need to have platforms, and in this particular case, essentially All-Flash platforms that can offer very high performance, consistently low latency, high storage efficiency in terms of reduced footprint so that Pat and other health providers can consume less rack space, less space in the data center, reduced power and cooling, all those things, and at the end of the day, ensuring the copy data that they have between all the databases, those are efficiently managed and kind of like transforming the health care IT business workflow. That's what we at Dell EMC come with our All-Flash portfolio for health providers like Royal Victoria Health. >> So Pat, on your side of the fence then, from your perspective, limited resources, right? You've got to be very, very protective of what you have, and obviously you have your own challenges. How do you balance all that out in today's environment, where speed matters? Efficiency matters now more than ever. >> And that's, efficiency matters big time with our physicians, and what's happening is we look for partners like Dell EMC to help us with that. One thing that was happening in our experience with efficiency and with timely presentation of data, we weren't getting that with our previous vendor. And when we went to Dell EMC we work with them as a partner and said, "How can we improve on that? "What can we look for?" And we looked at Flash as being that solution, not only providing the performance that we were looking for but also providing built-in security that we were looking for, but also providing even more efficiency, so when the physician, the clinicians were getting that data, they get it in a timely manner, and that means that they're actually spending more time with the patient, they're not searching for the data, they're not searching for reports and so forth. >> Are you hearing any feedback from the patients themselves about how things have changed at the health center? >> Well, for me I'm still stuck in the dungeon. I'm in IT, so we're in the basement, right? so I don't necessarily-- >> John: Glad you could get out for the week. (laughing) >> Exactly. You know, we grow mushrooms in that area. So what's happening with, I don't necessarily talk with the patient, but we're getting the positive feedback from our clinicians and physicians who are then, if they're happy, that means they're providing usually, providing better patient care, and so that means the patients are happy. (audio cuts out) >> Is understanding the true, the point of patient health care from the point they're born to the point that their life ends, and what we're understanding is how getting that data and being able to provide that information to clinicians, see trends, be able to treat, be more proactive instead of a reactive in health care. That's the goal, and with technology and the storage and collecting the data and analytics we'll actually be able to provide that in the future. >> Chhandomay, from your perspective here, what is it about XtremIO you think that makes this a good match? And now you've had X2, right, and sorry Pat. >> Pat: No, it's fine. >> You just deployed, what, six months ago, you said? But now you've got an X2 version to consider, perhaps for your next deployment. What's the fit? Why does it work? >> So you mention Dell EMC XtremIO. So the core premise of XtremIO is we will be able to provide high performance, consistently in low latency no matter what workload you are running, no matter how many workloads you are consolidating on the same array. It is the same high-performance, low-latency, and we have in line all the time, data reduction technologies that are all working on in-memory metadata, which essentially boils down to we are doing all those storage operations at the control plane level without touching the data plane where the data actually lives or exists. So that in turn helps us to consolidate a lot of the copies. You mentioned analytics, right? You have your production database for your patient data, then you need to load those data in an ETL system for running the analytics, then you possibly have your instant development copies, copies for back-up. Now with XtremIO, all the copies, we do not store anything that's not unique, through that entire cluster, and all the metadata is stored in memory, so for us we can create copies that do not take any extra space, and you can run your workloads on the copies themselves with the same performance as in production volume and with all those data reduction and all those technologies that all those data services run. So what that in turn makes Pat's life easier is he can reduce the footprint, he can reduce or consolidate all the workloads on the ATA itself, and his application developers can bring the medical applications online much more faster, he can run his analytics and reports faster, being proactive about the care, and in a nutshell, pretty much taking the storage maintenance, storage planning, storage operations out of the picture so that they can innovate and they can spend time innovating in IT, helping patient care, as opposed to doing routine maintenance and planning. >> So it lets him focus on what he wants to do. You're not spending a majority of your time on mundane tasks, you're actually improving your operations. Give me a real-life example if you can. We talk about more efficiency and better speed, these are all good things and great terms to talk about, but in terms of actually improving patient care, or providing enhanced patient care, what does it mean? How does it translate? >> Well, how it translates is in a lot of cases with the physicians and what we've seen already with them, just with them, they're able to, because we actually improve performance, we're actually able to get more data in analytics, as we say, but then we're able to produce those reports and turn it around in a lot of cases, a lot quicker than what we've been able to do before. An example was, once we moved to XtremIO and our decision support team. Used to take 14 hours to run some of the reports that they were getting. They would start 'em at four o'clock in the evening, they would run to six a.m. in the morning, roughly. When we put the XtremIO in and they ran the same reports they started at 4 o'clock. By six p.m. that night they were completed. They actually called me because they thought they had something wrong. (laughing) It's never been that quick. >> John: Boss, this is too good. >> Exactly. >> John: I messed up. >> And so they actually ran the report three times, and they cued the QA against the report to understand that yeah, it is that efficient now. Now that we've turned that around we actually provide that to the clinicians. We're getting better patient care and they're able to get their information and react quicker to it as well. >> Talking about the massive amounts of data that's being generated that now needs to be analyzed in order to optimize performance, how much do your developers know about data, and are you doing more training for them so that they know what they're doing? >> Well, we always provide training. We're always working on that, but the thing is, we are providing more training and we're providing it to the point that they actually have to be able to mine that data. There's so much data, it's how to manage the data, mine the data. Our analysts at RVH is that we look to Meditech, our EHR vendor as well, to help us on that, but at the same time we're looking to, we're increasing our data warehouses, we're increasing our repositories and registries so that when we do have that data, we can get at it. >> I'm wondering too if using this kind of cutting-edge technology has had an impact on your recruitment. Michael Dell in his keynote mentioned how increasingly, employees are saying the kinds of technologies that's being used is having an impact. >> No, absolutely. I know our vendors, our staff are very excited about the technology. Where we were going before, they weren't, not that they weren't happy, but we were always dealing with mundane tasks. We had some issues that were always repetitive issues that we couldn't seem to get through. Now that we've actually upgraded to the Flash storage and moving through that, they're excited. They love the management, the ease of use, they have a lot of great ideas now it's actually, they're becoming innovative in their thoughts because they know they have the performance and the technology in the back end to do the job for them. >> I hate to ask you what's next because you're six months into your deployment, but this is a constantly evolving landscape, constantly improving. Obviously the pressure is at Dell EMC is responding really well, competitive pressures. What is your road map? If you look two, three years down the road in terms of the kinds of improvements you want to get, the kinds of efficiencies that you can get gains in, and then realistically from a budgetary standpoint, how do you balance all that together? >> Budgetary, there's always the constant discussion with our CFO, and so he's been very supportive, but where we see it going is we want to be able to actually, maybe not even necessarily go to the Cloud but become a private Cloud for our partners and be able to provide a lot of these regional services that we couldn't before with the technology that we had, and be able to expand the services. In Ontario we're seeing some budget constraints, as I mentioned. A lot of these smaller sites, the patients, the customers, as we would say are expecting the service, but with technology and the dollars, they might not be able to do it on their budget, but as we bring stuff back into our data center and be able to provide the technology, we've been able to spread that out, not only from storage, compute side, as well as virtualization, VDI desktops and so forth. That's where I see we're going over the next little while. >> How much learning goes on between your colleagues at CTOs at other health centers, and even health centers and hospitals in the states? Do you talk a lot about-- >> You know what? We do talk a lot. We share stories. Some good, some bad, but we try, we all have the same problems, and why re-create the wheel when you could actually learn from other people? So a lot of the CTOs, we do get together, informally and formally, and understand where we're going and then we also reach out through our vendors and through some of our user groups and so forth to the US and to some of our cohort CTOs down there to understand what they're doing, because they look at it from a different lens at times. >> So speaking of a different lens, from the other side of the fence, Chhandomay if you would, where are you see this headed in terms of your assistance in health care IT, what X2 might be able to do? What kinds of realizations do you think are on the horizon here, and what's possible for a health care provider like RVH? >> So all the organizations, if you look across the industry, they are in the digital transformation journey. Health care providers are no exception, and what we are enabling is the IT transformation part, and Dell XtremIO, and with the XtremIO X2 that we just announced, we are enabling that IT transformation for all of our customers, including health care providers like Royal Victoria Health. Now, with X2, specifically, we continue to improve upon the high performance, the unmatched storage efficiencies that we offer, effectively, again, bringing down the cost of hosting different types of workloads, managing it on a single platform with a much lower total cost of ownership for the health care providers like Pat, so that at the end of the day, they will be able to provide better patient and better care for the patients, be it like a doctor or clinician, trying to access the data from their endpoints or the finance or billing department trying to turn over the bills in a much shorter span as opposed to the typically 45 days turnover that we see. So that's where we see not only just XtremIO X2, but Dell EMC, the All-Flash storage portfolio, helping the customers in their digital transformation journey in health care, and with the IT department, going into the IT transformation journey to help with it. >> Chhandomay, Pat, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> It was great, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Walls. We will have more from The Cube's coverage of Dell EMC World after this. (electronic music)