(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)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, Digital Experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital version. I'm Lisa Martin, welcoming back to theCUBE one of our distinguished alumni, Travis Vigil, the SVP of Product Management for Dell Technologies. Travis, nice to see you today. >> Hey, how's it going Lisa? >> Not bad, nice to connect with you virtually, of course this year, everything is so different. You've already done virtual CUBEs. So welcome back to our very-- >> Yeah, this is my third one. >> Socially distance program. Third one? Third time lucky. >> Yeah. >> All right, so back in May, you were on theCUBE talking about the launch of PowerStore. Really what Dell Technologies was doing to kind of converge formerly overlapping technologies by Acquisitions, Compellent, XtremeIO, give us an update last few months of what's going on with PowerStore, customer adoption, momentum, stuff like that. >> Yeah, it's been almost six months that we've launched the product, and it's been an unbelievable experience. Let me kind of break it up into a couple of different aspects. First of all, we had to launch PowerStore into a very different world than we had anticipated. The global pandemic is obviously affecting everybody and everything around the world. Our first priority at Dell is the health and safety of our customers, of our team members, of our partners. And it was a very interesting experience in that, this technology is extremely important to many of our customers that are in essential businesses or businesses that are impacted by what's going on in the world. So even though there's this broad backdrop against which we had to launch the product, we're still seeing fantastic adoption and fantastic momentum. Since launch, we've shipped world wide over 40, we've shipped into over 40 different countries already. And we have the biggest pipeline that we've ever generated for our product in the history of Dell and EMC at this point in its life. But, I think to really talk about momentum and what's going on, it's better to talk about specific customers and what they're doing and what they're finding advantageous about the product. Start maybe with a healthcare example, a healthcare provider in North America chose to adopt PowerStore as a multimillion dollar deal. And what they were trying to do was modernize their data centers. They had many heritage storage devices in their data centers. There was a lot of technical debt and they wanted to modernize things, make things more autonomous. And at the same time consolidate multiple different data centers into most... Still they had data centers across the country and across the world, but they were consolidating into fewer sites. And with PowerStore because of the efficiency, because of the deduplication capability, because of the performance of the array, they were actually able to reduce the annual Opex they have related to storage expenditures by $3 million per year by going to PowerMax, I'm sorry, by going to PowerStore. So that was a big one. Another good example was an AMEA high-tech customer. They adopted PowerStore because of PowerStore's ability to scale performance and capacity independently. And in the business that they're in, they have two things that they're trying to balance. One is kind of a spiky performance requirement across their different applications, and the other is kind of a variable and uncertain growth of data. So the ability to scale performance when they need it and capacity when they need it allowed us to win this nearly million dollar deal with them. And then other one that's one of my favorites, an entertainment company in the APJ region, obviously with all of us staying home, I can speak for my kids that are remote learning right over my shoulder. There's a lot more video games going on. And so this particular provider was able to do three things by installing PowerStore. First, they were able to decrease their backup window from multiple weeks to a half a day because of the performance of the array. And the other thing they were able to do was to increase video game development efficiency by 25% and decreased costs of storage by 25%. So faster backups, more efficient game development, and decreased costs. So those are just a couple of the examples that we have for PowerStore. We're seeing great adoption, great traction, and really, customers and partners are really excited about what we've brought to market. >> You talked about some of the things that are essential, that even back in May when PowerStore was launched, no one would have thought here in October, 2020, we'd still be in such a state of massive remote workforce, businesses that we wouldn't have thought like a gaming company, and APJ being essential, as really being essential. Talk to me about the speed of adoption, for example, the healthcare organization that you talked about in North America. How quickly were you able to enable that organization to upgrade or migrate to PowerStore so that they could achieve not only those business objectives or outcomes that you talked about, but do so in a way where only essential folks needed to be on site, if it was on-prem, 'cause of course it was all the challenges there, right? >> Yeah, it's a really good question. This was a brand new product for us. And in order to enable proof of concept, in order to enable our partners to be able to demonstrate the product, it's taken an enormous amount of coordination and enormous amount of doing things remotely. And so, it's actually taken a little bit more time than had we been able to fly people around the world to do it, but we've gotten very proficient at organizing with the customer, being able to host the demonstrations or the proof of concepts remotely, be able to do our customer briefings remotely. So it is a new world and a new way of doing it, but we're doing it very effectively. >> So PowerStore was big from the beginning. There was like 1000 engineers working on this. This was the largest beta launch in Dell's history. >> The largest beta that we'd ever done, yes. >> Launching it during a pandemic that was unpredictable and you're seeing tremendous momentum. So walk me through, when you're talking to customers, what are some of the key differentiators that really make PowerStore unique? >> Yeah, I like to start at the architecture of the product when I'm talking to a customer about PowerStore, because with storage products, the architecture is the thing that all features and capabilities are built on. And so when you look at the core architecture of PowerStore, was a ground up design, a clean sheet design optimized for the way the world is today and the way the world is going to be. And so it was optimized for the latest and greatest in terms of media, whether that be NVMe or SCM, it was microservices based so that it's much more modular in the way that we can develop. And it was built from the ground up with things like performance and efficiency in mind. When we first launched this array, and this fact is true today, we were bringing a product to market because of the fact that we had built it and optimized it at its core for the way the world is today, that was seven times more performant and three times more responsive than any previous mid range array that we had brought to market. So, that core performance is kind of point number one. Point number two, data reduction. Data reduction is the new normal. And with PowerStore, we have a guaranteed 4:1 data reduction. We've actually had a partner that did a test across a broad array of mid range storage devices. And in their particular environment, they saw 4.6:1 data reduction. And the closest competitive array that they had in their environment was getting less than 4:1. So being very competitive industry leading in data reduction is another key capability. And then if you go back to the core architecture, and I talked about it in the high tech company that I mentioned, the European high tech company. The ability to scale performance and capacity independently in our scale out design is another differentiator. For folks that have been around storage arrays, a long time, traditional storage array, you would add capacity sometimes when you needed performance or you'd add performance sometimes when you needed capacity. By being able to separate those two things, customers can really get optimized in their environment for what their needs are. They need more performance, they can add more performance. They need more capacity, they can add more capacity. So I put those three things in the core architectural differentiation that's resonating with customers and partners. And then above and beyond that, we brought some industry only capability to market in that we are the only purpose built storage appliance with a built in VMware, ESXi hypervisor. So what this allows customers to do is, run VMware based applications on the same hardware as they're hosting for storage that's being fed to clients in the more traditional model. And this enables a whole new host of use cases where customers can change the way that they're optimized in the core. And also there's a lot of good edge deployments that this new capability can help enable. So it's being architectually advanced in performance, efficiency, and scale up and scale out, and bringing industry only capabilities in our integration, especially with VMware to market that have really resonated with our customers. >> Tell me about some of those new use cases that the VMware integration is enabling, especially in today's climate with massively scattered workforce that some big execs predict 50% of the workforce is going to stay remote. We've got the edge expanding, device proliferation. What are some of the new use cases that what PowerStore can deliver uniquely as you said, is going to be able to drive and help many businesses thrive? >> Yeah, I think that there's a change in the way that you can do things in the core, but I think the new, either remote site or kind of the distributed edge benefits from the ability to do more with less. And so if you can have hardware that is able to provide some compute capability and a lot of storage capability, those applications and use cases that are migrating to the edge or to a remote site can be enabled with a single device, which leads to easier manageability, lower total cost of ownership than having to deploy multiple devices. >> So you, great with the stats, you articulated the value that Dell Technologies set out to establish with PowerStore, all the testing what you're seeing actually in customer environments, which is fantastic. When you're talking with analysts, looking at what Dell Technologies has done and to develop PowerStore. And like I said, merging technologies from Compellent and XtremeIO, et cetera. Are analysts looking at this as maybe a benchmark in terms of what storage array companies should be doing? >> Yeah, there was some press that was written when we announced that the release of PowerStore established a new benchmark of what was expected from a mid range storage array which was something that was really fulfilling, especially after all of the work and all of that engineering that we talked about, that ended the innovation that we had put into it over the course of a multi-year journey. And so, what we're seeing, whether it be from partners, whether it be from analysts, whether it be from customers, is people really understanding that we have taken a huge step forward in simplifying our portfolio. That we're able to direct our R&D investments into a single platform to bring more and more capability to that platform over time. And that message is resonating very strongly. >> So wrapping things up here, PowerStore is in its first five or six months. And during that time, crazy things have happened in the world. We're in a state of still disarray, if you will, no pun intended. What is next for the second half of PowerStore's first year? How is Dell Technologies going to enable businesses to really continue to get past that survival mode right now, into thriving so that they can be the winners of tomorrow? >> Yeah, I think the first half of this year was all about getting the product out into market, getting people educated on it, getting partners trained up on it, getting those key early wins, establishing that thought leadership on what we're doing with the overall storage portfolio. The second half of this year is really about adoption and getting it into the hands of more customers, getting it into that... Enabling our partners to amplify our message into the market. And so I think you're going to see a continual drumbeat from us in terms of more adoption, more momentum and more success on PowerStore. And for me, that is the foundation going back to the architecture, comment I made earlier of good things to come in the future. The architecture is so flexible and is built for the future. And so when new things come, when new media comes, when new interfaces or interconnect technologies come, when we invest in even tighter integration with VMware, like at VMworld just a couple of weeks ago, we announced that we're partnering with VMware on a new interconnect technology and NVMe-over-TCP. That core architecture is so flexible that it can adopt with software upgrades to the way the world is going to be in the future. And so for me, it was getting it out into the market, getting it adopted, and then continuing to provide new features and new capabilities as the market evolves. >> And as our evolution is sort of unclear, the flexibility that you talked about, the simplification are needed everywhere. I'll take those as well. Travis, thank you so much for sharing with us the moments for the first half of PowerStore's first year and what we can look to see in its, not just second half, but going forward, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you so much, Lisa. >> My pleasure, for Travis Vigil, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE'S coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020 Digital Experience. (upbeat 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)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Dell Technologies World. This is Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, break it all down. Stu, this is our ninth year at Dell, EMC, Dell EMC, Dell Technologies World. >> Yeah, I mean Dave, and Old EMC World was one of the first places I met you. I think it was like 2008 or something like that. There was like a little blogger lounge. >> Yeah, this is 15 for you, I think it's 11 or 12 for me. >> Stu: Yeah. >> So it's been quite a run. I mean you remember the early days of this event. It was really a technical show. And I think that's probably why it's had such staying power. Because the roots are embedded in technology, but wow what a long way we've come. >> Yeah, I mean, first of all, Dave, theCUBE, oh my god, I can't believe, double set here. We were looking at photos of us shoved in the corner with horrible lighting and no good cameras, and we've got a massive crew here. You're always looking sharp as usual, Dave. >> Thank you Stu. (laughing) >> Yeah, I mean gosh, that first year, I was wearing a vendor polo. (laughing) No hoodies back then. I wear a hoodie some now. But it's interesting for me, especially, since I spent 10 years working at EMC. I've been at Dell World for four or five years, kind of the mash up of those two is the biggest tech merger we've been covering since it was announced. This show has a lot of Dell overtones. So you and I have been that, Dell World was originally that CIO event. You had people like Bill Clinton and Elon Musk up onstage here. At this show we've got people like Walter Isaacson up onstage, I love reading his books, listen to the podcast. >> Dave: Andy McAfee. >> Andy McAfee, who you and I have interviewed a few times, talking about the second machine age, so some of those kind of high-level business issues as opposed to the deep in the portfolio, Dave Donatelli upstage walking through 37 different product announcements. >> So back then did you have hair or was this... >> Yeah, come on Dave, I was, when I started at EMC I was 7 foot tall and had hair. You know, the years of tech beat me down. >> So let's look at this merger, Stu. We go back, we've said, you and I have talked about this a lot. It was inevitable. You had Amazon coming in hard, driving margins of the enterprise down. Something had to happen to HPE, something had to happen to EMC, these infrastructure companies, and we said at the time that what we were going to see is 19% gross margin company married to the 16% gross margins company, come somewhere together in the low 30s gross margin. That's exactly what we've seen. The thing that's a little bit surprising to me is we've seen growth out of Dell. I've seen a lot of growth out of many enterprise infrastructure companies that are large and incumbents. Obviously people like Pure Storage grow very quickly. But at the time the merger we pinned them at slow 70s and they're now $80 billion, and we want to break that down a little bit. But did the growth surprise you? Particularly the client side grew. And the storage side declined multiplicitously. >> Dave, as you've been breaking down and I've been watching you, half of their business is the client side, and when they call out 21 consecutive quarters of growth, well if half the business has grown, that's good. And VMWare, doing well. We just interviewed Pac Elsinger. You know, VMWare's clicking well, integrating with the cloud. There's a lot of change there. Just one quick thing, talk about EMC. For me, one of the saving graces for EMC is they never bought a large services organization. You know, back in the day it was like, oh they were going to buy Accenture. There were some of these things. You look at the companies that have 100,000 services people, they're having to trim down, they're having to spin things out. You know the Dell spin merge, is Dell did spin off per row. So, while there have been some consolidation and some reductions since Dell and EMC have come together, you know, overall they're growing, there's good, there's new areas that they're putting R and D together. >> Just to give our audiences a little sort of overview in case you're not that familiar with what Dell has become, Dell Technologies, I mean, essentially you're looking at an $80 billion business. The core client side and infrastructure of the enterprise side comprised about 69 billion. VMWare's almost 8 billion, and then other, you know RSA, and well, whatever was back then pivotal before the IPO, etc., you know, Dell Financial, etc., was about 3 billion. That gets you to 80 billion. As you said, the client side is about half of the business. It's growing very nicely at about 7% a year, and it's about five and a half, 5.6% operating income. The ISG business, which is the core of, the classic EMC, all the server stuff, all the networking stuff. It's about, let's see 30.7 billion, almost 31 billion. The servers and networking side are growing at 20% a year. The storage is declining quite significantly. Double digits, they're sort of moderating that decline. And it's a higher percentage operating income, as percentage of revenue about 7%. You'd like to see that significantly higher. Now you go to VMWare, right? VMWare is 10% of the company's revenue but it accounts for half of the company's operating cash flow because it's margins, operating margins, are way up, high 20s, low 30s-- >> Yeah, I mean Dave, it was, I remember VM World, I think it was two years ago, I went to Michael, I'm like, "Michael, people think you're going to sell that off." And he was just foaming at the mouth. He's like, "They're stupid, they don't understand math." >> Dave: Well why would he? >> You know VMWare absolutely-- >> I mean, there's a 35% operating margin business, I mean it's a fantastic business. >> Dave, to be honest, everybody watching, is VMWare went through a little bit of a downturn. You know, the show two years ago wasn't great. >> Dave: Okay, right. >> But you know, NSX is now cooking, vSAN's doing great. There's lots of good areas that they have there. And the cloud picture. I mean turn back three years ago, Dave, VMWare was making statements like, when the old bookseller wins we're losing. EMC on their side was kind of trying to play a little bit with public cloud, but it was well understood in the field, public cloud is your enemy. And the market has matured. It understood that companies are figuring out their cloud strategy and their application and data strategy. And it's not a winner take all, zero sum game, everything goes to one of the top three or four public cloud players. >> So I got to ask you, so you feel as though that's sustainable, right? 'Cause I got to say, if I were AWS I would be looking at this saying this awesome. I need to get into the enterprise. I got to deal with the number one enterprise infrastructure player in VMWare in terms of its brand and its presence. I mean half a million customers, I think, is the number. I'm very excited. The flip side of that is the reality is, that deal for VMWare has been a huge tailwind for them. So help us square that circle. >> Yeah, and Dave, it's nuanced and complicated. Because when I talk to service providers, when I talk to the channel partners here with VMWare and with Dell, they're all starting to work more and more with VMWare. So you know, short-term, next two to three years, I think there's a great tailwind for VMWare to get involved here, but my concern is long term that people get on Amazon and they say, this is great and look at all these services and all of these things, maybe I don't need to pay for my server virtualization anymore. Maybe I don't need some of those pieces. What do I need in my data to center, sure I'll continue, but it's slowly declining like you mentioned. Storage is on a bit of a decline overall. So it's death by 1000 cuts. It is that replacement. For me it's always watching that data and that applications. It is tough, like super tough. David Floyer always say migrations, don't do 'em. You're going to go through so much pain, especially things like database migrations. But it is something that's happening. It's going to take the next five to 10 years as we look at these shifts. People are building new apps all the time. That tends to favor the public clouds, and there's so much happening in that space, but you know, the whole Dell family including Pivotal and VMWare, Virtustream, RSA, there are places where they win and still do well because, remember of course, none of these companies, it's not like they have 75% market share. So you know, if you ask Michael Dell, number one thing is he wants to take market share from HPE, and if he continues to take some of their market share it can help offset some of the things that he's losing to the public cloud. >> And well you have to take market share in a market that's not growing that fast. But you know, as we say on theCUBE many times, these disruptions are not binary, right? We still have mainframes for example. In fact, they're helping their tailwind for IBM right now. So you can put forth a scenario where yeah, a lot of these cloud native apps are going to be built in AWS and a lot of VMWare customers are going to do that, but as we often say, organizations can't just take their data and stuff it into the cloud, the public cloud, right? They've got to bring the cloud operating model to their data, to their business. We ask Pat, is it just use case specific, the Amazon Cloud and IBM I guess as well, or is it really bringing that cloud experience. And you know, he definitively said it's both, and I presume you buy that? >> Yeah, and I mean, Dave I listened to Michael DEll's keynote, and he said their goal is to integrate from the edge to the multi-cloud world. There's things that I want to understand this week. You know, I talked to some of my, you know, the real pellor heads here, that do really advanced type of technology. There are sessions here on containers. There's probably people talking about serverless here at the show. So they're looking at those next generation things, especially the VMWare side of the house is there. At the edge, you and I got to hear really the IoT strategy that Dell laid out towards the end of last year. Edge, absolutely huge opportunity, and there is no clear leader today because it's very early here, so how real are some of these opportunities to really expand beyond the traditional market because look, Dell's doing great in servers, that's the core of their business. It's the main driver for a lot of it, and you know, as Michael's happy to say, he said, "You know, hey, the PCs "and laptops are still doing well "two decades after IBM called it the post PC world." >> Thank goodness for client side. I mean that has been the savior here. What do you think, I mean you were at EMC for a number of years. What do you think happened to the storage side? That was a surprise to me because EMC is very rarely, if ever, a lost share in storage. They've either held share or bumped it up, doing acquisitions and so forth. But you had kind of Tucci with his hand at the wheel, doing tuck-in acquisitions, really focused on maintaining that share. Do you think it was just the disruption of the merger? Was it just inevitable that you had just the storage business getting too long in the tooth? What happened? >> Yeah, I mean, Dave, and there are so many things. Everything from the quarter shifted. So you know, it was going to take the end of quarter, which EMC always had a huge hockey stick on, shifted by a month. So some of it it was just financial where it landed up in the quarter, some of the big shifts that are happening in the market. EMC was very early on flash and did well in it, and they've got the VMAX and they've got the XtremeIO, and they're doing well there, but there's lots of competition there. Hyperconverge, once again, Dell and EMC doing great there. But there are some of these macroshifts and clouds eating away at it. So I don't have a single answer. There's so many different pieces. You know, storage has always been a knife fight. One of the things I want to understand this week, Dave, is the old EMC, well, we're going to have nine or 17 different products, and they'll all overlap. You wonder if Dell is, I really expect that Michael Dell, Jeff Clarke are going to streamline that portfolio. Profitability, make sure that they're getting the market share that they need because the old model might have worked in a growing market, but in a flat to slightly negative market it's not going to make much sense. >> And you already said that, I mean you made the point, Michael's keynote, the keynotes generally this morning, no question had Michael's fingerprint on them. That's much more like a Dell World than a traditional EMC World. We had Jeremy and Jonathan coming out on motorcycles and all kinds of crazy stuff. You know, much more staid. I think conservative, sending a message of steady. We're here for you to support your digital transformation. We are your infrastructure partner, so I mean, I think it's clear who's running the company. Alright, Stu, well, looking forward to this week. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage, double CUBE sets, check out thecube.net for all the live coverage. Check out siliconangle.com, wikibon.com as well for all the research. We'll be back right after this short break. We're live at Dell Technologies World 2018.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMWorld 2017, brought to you by VMWare and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to VMWorld 2017 everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my co-host, Peter Burris. Bob Wambach is here. He's the Vice President of Marketing for Converged Platforms and Solutions at Dell EMC. Bob, good to see you again. >> Good to see you, guys. Always a pleasure. >> It's been a good week, you guys have had a lot going on. We were at the Influencer reception last night. Great shindig, thank you for that. >> Peter: Very much. >> Lot of momentum in this ecosystem: VMWAre, financials are looking good. We just had Pat Gelsinger on, he has a spring in his step. What's going on from your perspective? >> You know I see the spring in Pat's step, and I look at it and, you know I know the stock's up, everything's going great for them, but what I really see is the plan they've put in place, right? And this is a long time coming. If you remember last year you remember Pat was talking about, it's a multi-cloud world, right? And everything VMWare has been doing for the last couple of years has been leading up to some of these announcements that you're seeing now. So I see a guy who's really happy because, made some big bets, had a plan, and the bets are paying off. And most of the benefit is actually going to be in the future. And as you see, Michael's looking pretty happy too this week, right? (laughter) So I think if you heard Pat in the opening keynote, one of the things that struck me is he said we're going from data centers to center of data. And it's really recognizing that there's this explosion of data going on and this data has to be handled in different fashion, and that's a cloud operating model. It's not a cloud. the cloud's an operating model not a place, and it's a multi-cloud world out there. So, you look at most large companies, maybe they have Concur, they have ADP, they have Salesforce.com. There's multiple SaaS providers that they have and then they use on premise equipment, they want to cloud-ify that, right? Is how do I get to, I've got my own journey to cloud. Our job is to really help them both on their journey for on premise equipment, but then working with VMWare, working with Pivotal, is making easy to utilize and navigate the multi-cloud world as well. >> So, we've been talking all week, Peter is really sort of driving our research at Wikibon, helping us think through the customer implications and one of the things we've been talking all week is the reality of that data and not being able to move that data into the cloud, bringing that cloud operating model, as you were just pointing out to the data. But, the implication there, as you've talked about many times Peter, is you've got to have the simplicity and other attributes of the cloud in order to make that brand promise come true, what we call true private cloud. So, what are you guys doing in that regard to achieve that vision? >> First, it's listening. Michael Dell likes to say, and it's very frequently that he says, we have big ears to us. Our job is to really listen to customers, understand their business. You need to understand their business and then once you understand your business, you better know how to help them. And, there's also preferences. They've got capex versus opex preferences. They're going to make decisions of on premises versus off premises based upon data gravity, based upon governance, based upon SLA's, latency. All these things that have to do with the characteristics of the data; data movement. And, then you have a, there's actually a preference for, I want to build it myself. Or, I'm actually very focused on my business and I'd like to be nearly out of the IT business. So, we look at this, everybody's a builder, you're a builder at some level. If you are a builder down at the component level, where you want to pick your servers, you're going to pick vSAN. Then we have our Ready portfolio. vSAN Ready Nodes covers that, right? So, it's the easiest way to buy vSAN in a PowerEdge server. And, if you start going up the stack and you want that packaged with software, we have Ready bundles. And then we start moving into where people are realizing I don't add a lot of value to the business by putting together pieces of hardware and software. So, I want to rely on Dell EMC to do some of that for us. That's where our VxRail, VxRack, VxBlock comes in. Where we own the engineering, manufacturing, management, support, sustaining of that. All the life cycle assurance, single contact support. That's from us. Then there's customers further up that say, well I want a stack, a software stack. We increasingly see that the world's evolving into, sometimes people refer to it as stack wars. And VmWare is doing exceptionally well in the stack wars. They're very prevalent in on premise and now they also have the integrations with the Googles, with AWS, with IBM Cloud. Our announcement this week about the Ready system is taking Dell EMC's expertise in hyper-converged infrastructure, which we co-engineered, co-developed with VMWare, and VMWare taking the lead on how do you package up vSphere, NSX and vSAN together with it and vRealize. They control the roadmap for that, they know how to do the lifecycle automation updates, so what we do is we provide the hyper-converged infrastructure and it's actually a simple overall environment for customers when they combine these. When Michael talks about peanut butter and chocolate a couple of times, and that's really what I think about the Ready systems. There's VMWare, we have for Pivotal, we'll also have Pivotal Ready system that can give you either a Pivotal Cloud Foundry, the easiest way to get a Pivotal Cloud Foundry environment on our hyper-converged infrastructure, or the Pivotal Container Services, PKS on hyper-converged infrastructure. >> So Bob, you mentioned early on of having different overview of the portfolio, you mentioned early on that VMWare had a plan, and they've been executing about that plan. But, you also got a plan within the hyper-converged team, within the whole enterprise cloud team. So, software and hardware are once again co-mingled in ways that they haven't been for a long time. The kind of normal separation, just get the hardware and then you get the software. But, now we're seeing that because of the complexities of trying to bring all this together, talk a little bit about how you're influencing the VMWare plan and the VMWare plan is influencing the hardware side of things. >> You know it's a great question. I think there's been a great learning experience. As you know for several years, we've had Enterprise Hybrid Cloud. Enterprise Hybrid Cloud started with a request from customers to make it easier to create a full cloud. People were realizing, I've been trying to build my cloud. It's super hard. I actually don't want to spend my best people and my time and money on this. So, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud initially started working with some very large enterprises. And, it was a way to take any type of converged or hyper-converged infrastructure and bring the whole VMWare portfolio to market with full turn key system. Full stop, it's we own it, we will make this stuff work. So, the goodness there is that the customers would get something that was incredibly rich, and remember this, a lot of this started out on converged infrastructure, so you basing it on a SAN fabric, VMAX, All-Flash, XtremeIO data domain. So you have all the flexibility and option of the data services, rich data services and data protection. Now it turns out Enterprise Hybrid Cloud is really really hard, right? We don't have magic software to do this. There's hundreds of people that are making all this stuff work so that when it goes into these large enterprises it adapts to their environment and it's very reliable, robust, scalable, flexible. The other side of the coin is, it takes so long to test and QA the new VMWare, perfectly fine, very solid VMWare features, that they don't show up to market for a long time. The largest enterprises understand this, but for many customers, you end up having this misalignment, where VMWare's saying, "I want you to take these features now", and we're saying, "That's six months away in Enterprise Hybrid Cloud." So, what you've seen develop in the Ready systems are perfect example of this is if we constrain down for most people, most people are not the largest banks in the world, there's not the largest pharmas or governments. Hyper-converged infrastructure is ready for the vast majority of work loads today and they need a pretty well defined set of features and functionality. So, VMWare more takes the lead, on this is how we're going to package these up. This is our software suite. We know how to do life cycle. Together, you work on the hyper-converged infrastructure, which is also co-developed with them. And, it ends up being a very good path to get these into the hands of many more customers. We're talking 10x customers, if you think about hundreds of people that are likely EHC, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud candidates, versus many thousands that are VMWare Ready system candidates. So, I think it's a great example of how we work together to figure out what is the sweet spot for volume and velocity of being able to provide value very quickly to the largest number of customers. >> So, we Chad on theCube yesterday and we asked, Dave and I asked him a series of questions, and one of them was, so tell us about how the cloud experience is going to manifest itself through Dell EMC products. One of the things he said was, in anticipation of these cloud wars, or in these platform wars, I think was his term, that increasingly it is going to be about how well you bind between different clouds. Interesting, I was walking through the show earlier and I saw one of our big user clients and I stopped and said hi to him. And, the two things that he mentioned when I asked him what he's looking for is, one, he used the same word, bind, how well does this bind to that, tell me about how your platform is going to bind to other platforms. And, automation was the second one. He said, I want to see, increasingly we're going to bring new technology in based on its demonstrable automated characteristics. What do you think about that, as you think about building platforms and how the portfolio is going to evolve against those two dimensions. The ability to bind things better and the ability to automate things more. >> Right, so, I think it's spot on, first of all. And, if we look at two different use cases. The one use case of most customers today, VMWare customers, they're using the VMWare suite, environment on premises. VMWare actually now binds those to AWS, to IBM Cloud, to Google Cloud. And, for me the killer app is NSX, right? If you think about, you want to traverse, navigate these different clouds. You want to do it securely, protected, segmentation and all of the richness of security and control over that. NSX is really the way to do that. When we talk about automation, VMWare is the best company to take the lead in how to automate that binding it together. So, whereas in the past, with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, we, and that continues to go on, we did all the automation, there's a much more efficient path for most customers with VMWare doing that. And, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud still remains the realm of, I'm going to say, hundreds of customers where these are huge deals. These are $50 Million and up deals. Where you're providing incredible value all in, for all their different applications, right? And, most, you know the vast majority of customers today clearly not on hyper-converged infrastructure, but they could be and if the value prop is so compelling, it's so compelling that it's definitely, that's where things are going. So, we look at where things are going and try to optimize for that. Pivotal Cloud Foundry is also something that, in my view, binds the developer environment together. You develop it once and then you can publish this wherever you want. So there is a strategy within Dell Technologies companies to work together to do this and the more we work together, another great thing happens, is that your field teams end up being aligned and telling the same story. So, whereas with Enterprise Hybrid Cloud we would have inherit conflict. Because we'd be speaking about the virtues of Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, but VMWare is telling them you need these new features, right? And this is where, when that little friction goes away and you have full alignment, so we're all on the same page, we're all the saying the same things, it's far more credible. >> Well, it also accelerates the customer. >> Bob: It sure does. >> And, I think that's probably one of the most important things. At the end of the day, it's to get the customers going. >> Yeah, we got to wrap, but somebody said the other day that VMWare is moving at the speed of the CIO. Robin Matlock today said today, yeah, but the CIO has to move faster, but it's hard. So, you're right, you're trying to accelerate that. And, to I guess my last point is when you were talking about, we've been talking about, forming the cloud model to your business, when you were describing sort of what you do for Enterprise Hybrid Cloud, that's not a trivial exercise. It requires a lot of expertise and a lot of process, and a lot of good thinking. >> Right, and it is very, it's by definition, customizable. You end up doing something different for every customer. Whereas, Ready, the Ready solutions portfolio I think are going to be huge. Just huge in the coming year. And the whole idea is to make it easy. It's ready for wherever you are on this journey. If you are ready for more of a, I want to jump into cloud and I see this path, I'm ready to move, then it's Ready Systems, right? If you are more of a, I want to put the software elements together myself and build that, then we have Ready bundles. And, high performance computing has been huge for us. Data analytics, increasingly I think those are connected together. So, there's synergy between the two of them. Then, the Ready nodes, for people who are, I really want to build this stuff myself, this is the path that I'm going down. And it takes all of the, we have an opinion, right? Our opinion is we want you moving quickly because we see the customers benefiting from it. Ultimately, all our customers are trying to be very competitive and successful at whatever their mission is, and we know the further up the stack you go, we can help you be more competitive. But, it takes the conflict out of the relationship when they know that I can help you wherever you are, we have something that is right for you. >> Alright, we got to wrap. Thanks Bob for coming on. Taking you on a journey of Vmworld 2017. Bob Wambach, thanks for coming back in theCube. >> Thanks. >> You're welcome. Keep right there buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCube. We're live from VMworld 2017. Be right back. (exciting music)

>> 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)

>> 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.