>>Mm. >>Welcome back to the Cube. Special presentation. Simplifying Hybrid Cloud Brought to You by Cisco We're here with Vegas Rattana, who's the director of product management for you? CSS Cisco and James Leach, who was director of business development at Cisco. Gents, welcome back to the Cube. Good to see you again. >>Hey, thanks for having us. >>Okay, Jim, let's start. We know that when it comes to navigating a transition to hybrid cloud, it's a complicated situation for a lot of customers and as organisations that they hit the pavement for their hybrid cloud journeys, one of the most common challenges that they face. What are they telling you? How is Cisco specifically UCS helping them deal with these problems? >>Well, you know, first, I think that's a That's a great question. And, you know, the customer centric view is is the way that we've taken. Um, it's kind of the approach we've taken from Day one, right? So I think that if you look at the challenges that we're solving for their customers are facing, you could break them into just a few kind of broader buckets. The first would definitely be applications, right? That's the That's where the rubber meets your proverbial road. Um, with the customer. And I would say that you know, what we're seeing is the challenges customers are facing within applications come from the way that applications have evolved. So what we're seeing now is more data centric applications. For example, um, those require that we are able to move, um, and process large datasets really in real time. Um, and the other aspect of application, I think, to give our customers kind of some pose some challenges would be around the fact that they're changing so quickly. So the application that exists today or the day that they make a purchase of infrastructure to be able to support that application. That application is most likely changing so much more rapidly than the infrastructure can't keep up with today. So, um, that creates some some challenges around. How do I build the infrastructure? How do I write? Size it without over provisioning, for example. But also there's a need for some flexibility around life cycle and planting those purchase cycles based on the life cycle of the different hardware elements and within the infrastructure, which I think is the second bucket of challenges. We see customers who are being forced to move away from the like a modular or blade approach, which offers a lot of operational and consolidation benefits. And they have to move to something like, um, Iraq server model for some applications because of these needs that these data centric applications have. And that creates a lot of opportunity for silo going. The infrastructure and those silos, in turn, create multiple operating models within the A data centre environment that, you know, again drive a lot of complexity. So that complexity is definitely the the enemy here. Um, and then finally, I think life cycles. We're seeing this democratisation of of processing, if you will, right, so it's no longer just CPU focus. We have GPU. We have F p g A. We have things that are being done in storage and the fabrics that stitch them together that are all changing rapidly and have very different life cycles. So when those life cycles don't align for a lot of our customers, they see a challenge in how they can can manage this these different life cycles and still make a purchase without having to make too big of a compromise in one area or another because of the misalignment of life cycles. So that is a kind of the other bucket. And then finally, I think management is huge, right? So management at its core is really right size for for our customers and give them the most value when it when it meets the mark around scale and scope. Um, back in 2000 and nine, we weren't meeting that mark in the industry and UCS came about and took management outside the chassis, right? We put at the top of the rack, and that works great for the scale and scope we needed at that time. However, as things have changed, we're seeing a very new scale and scope needed, Right? So we're talking about hybrid cloud world that has to manage across data centres across clouds. And, um, you know, having to stitch things together for some of our customers poses a huge challenge. So there are tools for all of those those operational pieces that that touched the application that touched the infrastructure. But they're not the same tool. They tend to be, um, disparate tools that have to be put together. So our customers, you know, don't really enjoy being in the business of building their own tools. So, um, so that creates a huge challenge. And one where I think that they really crave that full hybrid cloud stack that has that application visibility but also can reach down into the infrastructure. >>Right? You know, Jim, I said in my my Open that you guys, Cisco sort of changed the server game with the original UCS. But the X Series is the next generation, the generation of the next decade, which is really important cause you touched on a lot of things. These data intensive workloads, alternative processors to sort of meet those needs. The whole cloud operating model and hybrid cloud has really changed. So how's it going with the X Series? You made a big splash last year. What's the reception been in the field? >>Actually, it's been great. Um, you know, we're finding that customers can absolutely relate to our UCS X series story. Um, I think that the main reason they relate to it as they helped create it, right, it was their feedback and their partnership that they gave us Really, those problem areas, those, uh, those areas that we could solve for the customer that actually add significant value. So, you know, since we brought you see s to market back in 2000 and nine, we had this unique architectural, um uh, paradigm that we created. And I think that created a product which was the fastest in Cisco history. Um, in terms of growth, Um, what we're seeing now is X series is actually on a faster trajectory. So we're seeing a tremendous amount of uptake. We're seeing, uh, both in terms of the number of customers. But also, more importantly, the number of workloads that our customers are using and the types of workloads are growing. Right? So we're growing this modular segment that exists not just, um, you know, bringing customers onto a new product, But we're actually bringing them into the product in the way that we had envisioned, which is one infrastructure that can run any application and do it seamlessly. So we're really excited to be growing this modular segment. Um, I think the other piece, you know that, you know, we judge ourselves is, you know, sort of not just within Cisco, but also within the industry and I think right now is a You know, a great example. Our competitors have taken kind of swings and misses over the past five years at this, um, at a kind of a new next architecture, and we're seeing a tremendous amount of growth even faster than any any of our competitors have seen. When they announced something, um, that was new to this space. So I think that the ground up work that we did is really paying off. Um, and I think that what we're also seeing is it's not really a leapfrog game, Um, as it may have been in the past, Um, X series is out in front today, and we're extending that lead with some of the new features and capabilities we have. So we're delivering on the story that's already been resonating with customers, and we're pretty excited that we're seeing the results as well. So as our competitors hit walls, I think we're you know, we're executing on the plan that we laid out back in June when we launched that series to the world. And, uh, you know, as we as we continue to do that, um, we're seeing, you know, again tremendous uptake from our customers. >>So thank you for that, Jim. So viscous. I was just on Twitter just today, actually talking about the gravitational pull. You've got the public clouds pulling C x o is one way. And you know I'm Prem folks pulling the other way and hybrid cloud So organisations are struggling with a lot of different systems and architectures and and ways to do things. And I said that what they're trying to do is abstract all that complexity away, and they need infrastructure to support that. And I think your stated aim is really to try to help with that with that confusion with the X series. Right? So how so? Can you explain that? >>Sure. And and and that's the right, Uh, the context that you built up right there, Dave, if you walk into Enterprise Data Centre, you see platform of computer systems spread all across because every application has its unique needs. And hence you find Dr Note Driving system memory system, computing system, coordinate system and a variety of farm factors. When you do, you, for you and every one of them typically come with a variety of adapters and cables and so forth Just create silence of resources. Fabric is broad. The actress brought the power and cooling implications the rack, you know, the space challenges and above all, the multiple management plane that they come of it, which makes it very difficult for I t to have one common centre policy and enforce it all across across the firmware and software and so forth and then think about the great challenges of the baroness makes it even more complex as these go through the great references of their own. As a result, we observe quite a few of our customers. Uh, you know, really, uh, seeing Anna slowness in that agility and high burden, uh, in the cost of overall ownership, this is where the X rays powered by inter side. We have one simple goal. We want to make sure our customers get out of that complexities. They become more Asyl and drive lower tco and we are delivering it by doing three things. Three aspects of simplification first simplify their whole infrastructure by enabling them to run their entire workload on single infrastructure and infrastructure, which removes the narrowness of fun factor and infrastructure which reduces direct from footprint that is required infrastructure were power and cooling better served in the Lord. Second, we want to simplify it with by delivering a cloud operating model where they can create the policy ones across compute network stories and deployed all across. And third, we want to take away the pain they have by simplifying the process of upgrade and any platform evolution that they are going to go through the next 23 years. So that's where the focus is on just driving down the simplicity lowering down there. >>That's key. Less friction is is always a good thing now, of course, because we heard from the hyper flex guys earlier, they had news. Not to be outdone, you have hard news as well. What innovations are you announcing around X series today? >>Absolutely. So we are following up on the excited, exciting extras announcement that we made in June last year. Day and we are now introducing three innovation on experience with the bowl of three things First, expand the supported World War and extra days. Second, take the performance to new levels. Third dramatically reduced the complex cities in the data centre by driving down the number of adapters and cables. To that end, three new innovations are coming in. First, we are introducing the support for the GPU note using a cable list and very unique X fabric architecture. This is the most elegant design to add the GPS to the compute note in the model of form factor thereby, our customers can now power in AML workload on any workload that needs many more number of GPS. Second, we are bringing in GPS right onto the computer note and thereby the our customers can now fire up the accelerated video upload, for example, and turf, which is what you know we are extremely proud about, is we are innovating again by introducing the fifth generation of our very popular unified fabric technology with the increased bandwidth that it brings in, coupled with the local drive capacity and density is that we have on the computer note our customers can now fire up the big data workloads the F C I work. Lord, uh, the FDA has worked with all these workloads that have historically not lived in the model of form. Factor can be run over there and benefit from the architectural benefits that we have. Second, with the announcement of fifth generation fabric, we become the only vendor to now finally enable 100 gig and two and single board banned word and the multiple of those that are coming in there. And we are working very closely with our partners to deliver the benefit of these performance through our Cisco validated design to oversee a franchise. And third, the innovations in, uh, in the in the fifth and public again allow our customers to have fewer physical adapters, made the Internet adapter made with our general doctors or maybe the other stories adapters. They reduced it down and coupled with the reduction in the cable so very, very excited about these three big announcements that we're making in this part of the great >>A lot There. You guys have been busy. So thank you for that. Because so, Jim, you talked a little bit about the momentum that you have. Customers are adopting. What problems are they telling you that X series addresses and and how do they align with where where they want to go in the future? >>Um, that's a great question. I think if you go back to um and think about some of the things that we mentioned before. Um, in terms of the problems that we originally set out to solve, we're seeing a lot of traction. So what the cost mentioned, I think, is really important, right? Those pieces that we just announced really enhanced that story and really move again to kind of to the next level of, of taking advantage of some of these problem solving for our customers. You know, if you look, you know, I think the cost mentioned accelerated VD. That's a great example. Um, these are where customers you know, they need to have this dense compute. They need video acceleration, they need type policy management, right. And they need to be able to deploy these, um, these systems anywhere in the world. Well, that's exactly what we're hitting on here with X series right now, we're hitting the mark in every every single way, right? We have the highest compute config density that we can offer across the, you know, the very top end configurations of CPUs. Um, and a lot of room to grow. Um, we have the the premier cloud based management. You know, hybrid cloud suite. Um uh, in the industry. Right. So check there. We have the flexible GPU accelerators that that the cost just talked about that we're announcing both on the system and also adding additional ones to the through the use of the X fabric, which is really, really critical to this launch as well. And, uh, you know, I think finally, the fifth generation of fabric interconnect and virtual interface card, um, and an intelligent fabric module go hand in hand in creating this 100 gig and end bandwidth story that we can move a lot of data again. You know, having all this performance is only as good as what we can get in and out of it, right? So giving customers the ability to manage it anywhere be able to get the bandwidth that they need to be able to get the accelerators that are flexible to that fit exactly their needs. This is huge, right? This solves a lot of the problems we can take off right away with the infrastructure. As I mentioned, X fabric is really critical here because it opens a lot of doors here. We're talking about GPS today, but in the future, there are other elements that we can disaggregate like the GPS that solve these lifecycle mismanagement issues. They solve issues around the form factor limitations. It solves all these issues for like it does for GPU. We can do that with storage or memory in the future, So that's going to be huge, right? This is disaggregate Asian that actually delivers right. It's not just a gimmicky bar trick here that we're doing. This is something that that customers can really get value out of Day one. And then finally, I think the future readiness here. You know, we avoid saying future proof because we're kind of embracing the future here. We know that not only are the GPS going to evolve, the CPUs are going to evolve the drives, the storage modules are going to evolve. All of these things are changing very rapidly. The fabric that stitches them together. It's critical, and we know that we're just on the edge of some of the developments that are coming with C XL with with some of the the PC express changes that are coming in the in the very near future. So we're ready to go X and the X fabric is exactly the vehicle that's going to be able to deliver those technologies to our customers. Our customers are out there saying that you know, they want to buy into something like X Series that has all the operational benefits, but at the same time, they have to have the comfort in knowing that they're protected against being locked out of some technology that's coming in the future. We want our customers to take these disruptive technologies and not be disrupted, but use them to disrupt, um, their competition as well. So, um, you know, we're really excited about the pieces today, and I think it goes a long way towards continuing to tell the customer benefit story that X Series brings And, um, again, stay tuned because it's going to keep getting better as we go. >>A lot of headroom, uh, for scale and the management piece is key. There just have time for one more question because talk to give us some nuggets on the road map. What's next for? For X X series that we can look forward to? >>Absolutely Dave, as as we talked about. And James also hinted this is the future radio architecture, a lot of focus and innovation that we are going through is about enabling our customers to seamlessly and painlessly adopt very disruptive hardware technologies that are coming up no infantry place. And there we are, looking into enabling the customer journey as the transition from PCH in less than 4 to 5 to six without rip and replace as they embraced the Excel without rip and replace as they embrace the newer paradigm of computing through the desegregated memory desegregated P. C, A, r N B and dance drives and so forth. We're also looking forward to extract Brick Next Generation, which will and now that dynamic assignment of GPS anywhere within the chassis and much more. Um, so this this is again all about focusing on the innovation that will make the Enterprise Data Centre operations a lot more simpler and drive down the PCO by keeping them not only covered for today, but also for future. So that's where some of the focus is on there. >>Okay, Thank you guys. We'll leave it there in a moment. I'll have some closing thoughts. >>Mhm

>> Presenter: From around the globe, it's the cube, with digital coverage of pager duty summit 2020. Brought to you by pager duty. >> Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, today talking with Tammy Bryant is a cube alumna, the principal Site reliability engineer at Gremlin and the co-founder and CTO of the Girl Geek Academy. Tammy, it's great to have you on the program again. >> Hi Lisa, thanks so much for having me again. It's great to be here. >> So one of the things I saw in your background 10 plus years of technical expertise, and SRE, and chaos engineering, and I thought chaos engineering, I feel like I'm living in chaos right now. What is chaos engineering and why do you break things on purpose? >> Yep. So the idea of chaos engineering is that we're, breaking systems but in a thoughtful controlled way, to identify weaknesses in systems. So that's really what it's all about. The idea there is, you know, When you're doing really complicated work with technical systems, so like, for example, distributed systems and say, for example, you're working at a bank, it's tough to be able to pinpoint the exact failure mode that could cause a really large outage for your customers. And that's what chaos engineering is all about. you inject the failure proactively, to identify the issues and then you fix them before they actually cause really big problems for customers and you do it during the middle of the day, you know, when you're feeling great, instead of being paged in the middle of the night for an incident, that's actually like causing your customers pain, and making you lose a lot of money. So that's what chaos engineering really is. >> Are you seeing in the last six months since the world is so different, are you seeing an increase in customers? Now with, the for example, Brick and Mortars shut down and everything having to convert to digital if it wasn't already? Is there an increase in demand for chaos engineering services? >> Yeah, definitely. So a lot of people are asking what is chaos engineering, how can I use ,it will it help me reduce my incidents? and definitely because there are a lot of new services that have been rolled out recently, say, for example, curbside pickup. That's a whole new thing that had to be created really recently to be able to handle a large amount of load. And you know, people show up, they want to get their product really fast, 'cause they want to be able to just get back home quickly. And that's something that we've been working on with our customers is to make sure that curbside pickup experience is really great. The other interesting thing that we've been working on because of the pandemic is making sure that banks are really reliable, and that customers are able to get access to their money when they need it. And able to see that information too. And you can imagine that not as when you're in lockdown, and you only can leave your house for maybe an hour a day, you need to be able to quickly get access to your money to buy food, and we've seen some big incidents recently, where that hasn't been the case. Yeah. >> And I can imagine I mean, just thinking of what happened with, everything six months ago and how people were, we are just, demanding, right, consumers were demanding, we expect to get whatever we want, whether it's something we buy on Amazon, something that we stream on Netflix, or whatnot, we have this expectation that we can almost get it in real time. But there was a there was, you know what, there was a delay a few months ago, and there still is to some degree. But companies like Amazon and Netflix, I can imagine, really must have a big focus on chaos engineering, to test these things regularly. And now have proved, I would imagine to some degree that with chaos engineering that they have built, they're built to withstand that. >> Yes, exactly. So our founders at Gremlin came from Netflix and Amazon, our CEO had worked at both where he done chaos engineering, and that's actually why he decided to create Gremlin. It's the first company in the world to offer chaos engineering as a service. And you know, obviously, when you're working somewhere like Netflix, you know the whole product, you have to be able to get access to that movie, that TV show, right in that moment, and also customers expect to be able to see that on for example. There PlayStation in their living room and it should work and there paying for a subscription, So, to be able to keep them on that subscription, you need to offer a great service. Same thing with Amazon, you know, Amazon.com, they've done a lot of chaos engineering work over many years now to be able to make sure that everything is available. And it's not just that, the entire amazon.com is up and running. It's also for example, that when you go and look at a page that the recommendation service works toO and they're able to show you, hey, here's some other things that you might like to get to buy at this time. And I like as as a consumer, I love that 'cause it helps me save time and effort and even money as well 'cause it's giving you some good advice. So that's the type of statement we do. >> Exactly, So. when you're working with customers, I'd love to understand just a little bit from the, like the conversational standpoint is this now, is chaos engineering now, at kind of the sea level or is it still sort of in within the engineering folks 'cause looking at this as a make or break, knowing that for example, Netflix, there's Hulu, there's Disney Plus, there's Apple TV. Plus, if we don't get something that we're looking for right away, there's prime, we're going to go to another streaming service. So are you starting to see like an increase in demand from companies that no, we have competition right behind us, we've got to be able to set up the infrastructure and ensure that it is reliable. Now more than ever. >> Yeah, exactly. That's really, really important. I'm seeing a lot of executives. I mean, I've seen that since the beginning, really, since I first started working at Gremlin. I would often be invited by executives to come and give talks actually, within their company, to help the teams learn about chaos engineering, and I love doing that, It's really great. So I'd be invited by C levels, or VPs, from different departments. And I often get people adding me on LinkedIn from all over the world who are in leadership roles, because really, like, you know, they're responsible for making sure that their companies can hit those critical metrics and make sure that they're able to achieve their really, you know, demanding business goals, and then they're trying to help their teams be able to achieve that, too. So I've actually been so pleased to see that as well. Like it is really cool to have an executive reach out and say, hey, I'm thinking of helping my team, I'd like to get them introduced to you can you come and just teach them about this topic? And I love being able to do that it's really positive. And it's the right way to improve. >> It is, and I think nowadays, with reliability being more important than ever, you know, we talked to leaders from industry, from every industry. And there are certain things right now that are going to be shaping the winners and the losers of tomorrow. And it sounds to me like chaos engineering is one of those things that's going to be fundamental to any type of business to not just survive these times, but to thrive going forward. >> Yes, I definitely think so. I mean, obviously, people can easily just go to a different URL and try and use a different service. And you know, we're seeing now failure across so many different industries. We didn't see that before. But for example, you know, I'm sure you've seen in the news or heard from friends and family about schools, now being completely online. And then kids can't actually access, their calls their resources, what they need to learn every day. So that really just shows you how much it's impacting us as a society, we really know that the internet is critical. It's amazing that we have the internet, like how lucky we are to have this, but it needs to work for us to actually be able to get value out of it. And that's what chaos engineering is all about. You know, were able to make sure that everything is reliable, so it's up and running. And we do that by looking at things like redundancy. So we'll do failover work where we completely shut down an application or service and make sure it gracefully fails over. We also do a lot of dependency failure work, where you're actually looking to say, this is the critical path of this service. And a lot of people don't think about this, but the critical path really starts at sign in. So you need to make sure that login and sign in works really well. It's not just about like the experience once you've signed in, that has to work well all the way through. So actually if you have a good understanding of user experience, it helps you create a much better pathway and understand those critical pieces that the customer needs to be able to do to have a great experience. And I care a lot about that. Like whenever I go and work somewhere, I always read customer tickets, I always try and understand what are the customer pain points. And I love listening to customers and then just solving their problems. The last thing I want them to do is, you know, be complaining or be really annoyed on Twitter because something just isn't working when they need it to be working. And it is really critical these days. It's a the internet is a really serious part of our day to day life. >> Oh, it's a lifeline. I mean, that's, some folks. It's the only way that they're connecting with the outside world, is through the internet. So when things aren't, I had a friend whose son first day of college couple weeks ago, freshman year, first class couldn't get into zoom. And that's a stressful situation. But I imagine too, though, that and I know you're going to be speaking at the pager duty summit that more folks need to understand what this is. And I can tell the you have a real authentic passion for it. Talk to us about what you're going to be talking about at the pager duty summit. >> Sure thing, I'm really excited to be speaking at Pager Duty Summit very soon. My talk is called building, and scaling SRE teams, so site reliability engineering teams. And this is something that I've done previously. I've built out the SRE teams at Dropbox for both databases as well as storage. So block storage, and then I also lead the code workflows team. And that's for, you know, over 500 million users, people accessing the critical data that they store on Dropbox all the time. You know the way that folks use Dropbox is in so many different ways. Maybe it's like really famous music musicians who are trying to create an amazing new album that happens or maybe it's a lawyer preparing for a court case, and they need to be able to access their documents. So those are a lot of customer stories that would come up over time. And prior to that, I worked at the National Australia Bank as well leading teams too and obviously like people care about their money if they can't access their money. If there incorrect transactions, if there are missing transactions, you know, duplicate transactions, maybe people don't mind so much about it you get like a double deposit, but it's still not good from the bank's perspective. So there's all types of different chaos that can happen. And I found it to be really interesting to be able to dive into that and make sure that you can make improvements. And I love that it makes customers happier. And also, it helps you improve your company as a whole. So it's a really good thing to be able to do, And with my talk, I'm going to talk to folks about, you know, not only why it's important to build out a reliability practice at your organization, you know, back in the day, people used to go, why would you need a security team? You know, why would we need that? now everybody has a security team, everyone has a chief security officer as well. But why don't we focus on reliability, like we know that we see incidents out in the news all the time, but for some reason, we don't have the chief reliability officer. I think that's definitely going to be something that will appear in the future just like the chief security officer roll up. But that's what I'm going to talk about there. How you can find site reliability engineers, I'll share a few of my secrets. I won't give any spoilers out. But there's actually quite a few places that you can find amazing people. There's even a school that you can hire them from, which I've done in the past. And then I'll talk to you about how you can interview them to make sure that you get the best people on your team. There are a number of things that I think are very important to interview for. And then once you've got those folks on your team, I'll talk to you about how you can make sure that they're successful. How to set them up for success and make sure that they're aligned to not only your business goals, but also your core values as a company, which is really important too. >> Yeah, that's fantastic. It's very well rounded, I'm curious, what are some of the the characteristics that you think are really critical for someone to become a successful SRE? >> Yeah, so there's a few key things that I look for. One thing is that, somebody who is really good at troubleshooting, so they need to be able to be comfortable with complexity, ambiguity and open ended challenges and problems and also thrive in those types of environments. Because often you're seeing something that you've never seen happen before. And also you're working with really complicated systems. So you just need to be able to feel good in that moment. And you can test for that during an interview question on troubleshooting and debugging. So that's something that I'll go into in more detail. But that's definitely the first characteristic. The other thing, of course, is you want to have someone who is good at being able to build solutions. So they can code, they understand automation, they can figure out how can I take this pain point, this problem? And how can I automate it and then scale this out and make it available for everyone across my organization? So someone who has that mindset of building tools for others, and often they are internal tools, because maybe you're building a tool that helps everybody know, who's on call every single critical service at the company and also non critical service and they can identify that in a minute or less like maybe even just in a few seconds, and then they can quickly get that person involved, if anything need to escalate to them. Via for example, a tool like pager duty, that's really what you want. You want them to be able to think, how can I just make this efficient? How can I make sure that we can get really great results? And yeah, I think they also just need to be really personable too and work well in a really complicated organizational structure. Because usually they have to work with the engineering team, the finance team to understand the revenue impact. They need to be able to work with the PR team and the social media team, if they're incidents, and then they need to provide information about when this incident is going to be resolved, and how they can update VIP customers. They need to talk to the sales team, because what happens if you're giving a demonstration, and then somehow there's an issue, or failure that happens, an incident and then in the middle of your very important sales demo, you're not able to actually deliver it that can happen a lot too. So there are a lot of very important key skills. >> Sounds like it's a really cross functional role, pivotal to an organization, that needs to understand how these different functions not only operate, but also operate together, is that somebody that you think has certain types of previous work experience? Is this something that you talked to the Girl Geek Academy girls about? How did they get into? I'm curious, like what the career path is? >> Yeah, it's interesting, like I find a lot of SRE's often come from either a few different backgrounds. One is they came through the world of Linux and understanding systems, and just being really interested in that. Like deep diving into the kernel, understanding how to improve performance of systems. The other side is maybe they came from coding background where they were actually building applications and features. I started off actually on that side, but I also had a passion for Linux. And then I sort of spread over into the other side and was able to learn both. And then often you know, someone who's comfortable with being on call and handling incidents, but it is a lot of skills, like that's actually something that I often talk to folks about, and they asked me how can I become a great SRE? There's so many things I need to learn. And I just say, you know, take it slow, try and gradually increase your number of skills. People often say that there is like there's some curve for SRE's, where you have the operations side, on one side, and then the coding side on the other. And often like the best person sits right in the middle where they have both ops and engineering skills. But it's really hard to find those people. It's okay if you have someone that's like, really deep, has amazing knowledge of Linux and scaling systems and internet management, and then you can pair them up with a really amazing programmer who's great at software engineering and software architecture, that's okay, too. >> We've been hearing for a long time about this sort of negative unemployment with respect to cyber security professionals. Is that, are you guys falling into that same category as well with SRE? Or is it somehow different or you just know this is exactly what we're looking for? We want to go out there, and even in the Girl, Greek Academy, maybe help girls learn how to be able to find what I imagine are a lot of opportunities. >> Yeah, there are so many opportunities for this. So it's definitely an opportunity because what I see is there's not enough SRE's. So tons of companies all over the world will actually ping me and say, hey, Tommy, how do I hire SRE's, that's why I decided to give this talk because I wanted to package that up and just share that information as to how you can do it. And also, maybe you can't find the SRE's because they don't exist. But you can help retrain your team. So you can have an engineer learn the skills that are required to be an SRE, that's totally possible too, maybe move them over to become an SRE. With girl geek Academy, one of the things that I've done is run hackathons and workshops and just online training sessions to help girls learn these new skills. So that's exactly what our mission is, is to teach 1 million girls technical skills by 2025. And I love to do mentoring at scale, which is why it's been really cool to be able to do it online and through these like workshops and remote hackathons. And I definitely love to do something where else work with some of our customers actually, and run an event. I did one a while back, it was really cool, we were able to have all of the girls come in and be at the customer's office and actually learn skills with the customer, which was really fun. And it helps them actually think, hey, I could work one day that would be really amazing. And I'm going to do that again in November. And it's kind of fun too. We can do things like have like, you know, dad and mom and then daughter day, where you actually bring your daughter to work and help her learn technical skills. That's really fun because they get to see what you do and they understand it more and see how cool chaos engineering really is. Then they think oh, wow, you're so awesome, this is great. >> I love it, that's fantastic. Well it sounds like, like I said before your passion for it is really there. What, I think is really interesting is how you're talking about chaos engineering and just the word in and of itself chaos. But you painted in such a positive lights critical business critical, but also the all the opportunities there that businesses have to learn and fine tune so such an interesting conversation. Yeah, Tammy. We have you back on the program. But I thank you so much for joining me today. And for those folks that lucky enough that are attending the pager duty summit, they're going to get to learn a lot from you. Thank you. >> Thanks so much for having me, Lisa. >> For Tammy Bryant, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering Adobe Summit twenty nineteen brought to you by X Ensure Interactive. >> Hey, welcome back, everyone. Day two of live coverage of the Cube here in Las Vegas for Adobe Summit twenty nineteen. I'm John Career with Jeff Brick, Our next guest needing Stallman, managing director of a Censure Interactive. Welcome to the Cube. Thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> You can't miss your booth when you walk in. Got a nice set up there. You guys got a big prominent location to show. Tell us about Ascension Interactive. And what you guys doing the show? >> Oh, yeah. So thanks again for having us is a great a great summit. A great conference. It's one of our big kind of showcases for the year. We've got a couple of different experiences Were demo ing this year. We've got some really cool X are experiences that people are coming by the booth and putting device is on and it really interacting with and having fun with. We've got some interesting topics around Trends in content creation, headless content, train three D, etcetera. So some great topix around kind of Howard disrupting marketing and content with our clients today. >> Contest becomes so important now, Not only is it you have content development creatives. You have all kinds of applications now. Integrating was once kind of a cottage industry of creative doing cool stuff. Now that's kind of table stakes. It's a whole another level of cloud computing meets creative, so it's kind of an interesting growth curve right now, you're seeing a lot of adoption, a lot of the kind of tools from Tech in with the creative talk about that dynamic, because that's kind of the whole show here. It's all about not just marketing Cloud, and it's about creative experiences and now the new cool stuff out there and people try to figure out how to do it. I want that dynamic of creative tech coming together. >> Yeah, it's enemy from Accenture Interactive. That's really kind of where we've built our business around having that as a technology company that's really drawing a lot of specific talent to build out that creative tak kind of talent mindset. It's a different way of kind of operating and working and building those experiences, so we're kind of first and foremost and experience agency S O. We're all about building experiences for our clients, and it's a kind of ah maybe unique patch that we've we've carved out for ourselves. To say you have to consider technology is part of it and data and effectiveness and analytics. But then, actually, how do you build experiences that are really engage our customers and be really innovative? So certainly has its center at interactive. That's our That's our remit. And we're working out some really exciting work with clients in that area >> about the difference between center interactive and century proper. Because we've done a lot of enemies with center you guys, we're different talked about. The difference is that you guys have and what what's your mission? >> So it's enter. Active are first and foremost. We are an experience agencies. So again, those experiences could be everything from your typical kind of website experience. And how do you best in engage consumers at your site to commerce? Teo X are so we've got a Z mentioned it, several different applications of experiences and x r that we're demo ing here, and we're working on with our clients, um, a R V r as well as sale stools. So in the centre interactive, we take it, we take a creator first, like what is the experience. We really need to build, do the right type of research and then bring in the design, talent and the unique kind of optimization, talent and technology talent to be able to ensure that whatever we're building for a client is actually scaleable for more than just kind of that one exciting news case they've got. But how do you ensure that that's really going to be the right platform in experience? They can scale for other parts of the enterprise of the parts of the business, etcetera. We're proud of who we are >> seriously, because you guys are involved in a lot of things. You keep saying x r for extended reality, and I think it's interesting because some people think it's got to be one hundred percent immersive or not. But if you guys air pioneering, this is a lot of places to kind of extend reality. Blend the rial and the C g. I. And it kind of had this mixed combo experience. So where people using that what are some of the interesting opportunities beyond no trying on a dress from the computer with your with your avatar that you guys are working on >> right, So so definitely have our share of kind of cool consumer experiences and, you know, wanting interesting. That's things that's happening in the market is consumers. They're expecting as they start to engage with RVR, even like immersive commerce. And, um, you're online configurations for shopping and it kind of configuring your own products. They're expecting the same level of, like, hi and visualization that they're getting in the programs and media that they're consuming at home. So getting that right is that's That's a challenge for a lot of brands, and it's a challenge. And technologies, they're changing pretty rapidly to support that. So we've got an experience here were demo ing this week, which is is really on kind of that high end past, which is allowing your design your own your own bathroom experience with countertops, and it's so realistic that you can literally you feel like you could touch that. You could appreciate the textures. You can touch the experience. So it's it's really helping to kind of give customers give consumers back control, but they don't have to rely on a contractor and other types of design services. They really have many options. They can see what that looks like in their own space. I can do that from the convenience of my home, etcetera, and that's kind of one end around. And it's still consumer facing and how to brands create more amorous of shopping experience and make that pass to purchase easier, effective, faster like and, you know, close well. The other types of experiences that I think you're really, really powerful and really interesting is it's starting to use x r for training purposes. So we just want to go home. Oh, actually at Mobile World Congress for PR experience that we built to train foster care professionals on go on making incredibly complicated is around what to do with families and children and really trained them. So how do you take a very subjective experience and train people for the different scenarios to make the right judgment calls? And so that's an interesting kind of application of X r. We're also doing X are in the field of service service technician, so working on automotives and ensuring your using hand, our virtual technology to be able Tio I understand, is that the right party should be working on and what are the best practices around around, whether it's a home technician that's going out and trying to install our complex device or working at an automotive so >> so practical use cases. And then there's also the glamorous ones, like Game of Thrones. Talk about you guys. The relationship with game of thrones is a dynamic. Their share want the shows so that the Cube we Go game of thrones fan. So you guys were somewhat involved in that Such share. >> Yeah, so on. And it's very timely. Obviously, with the final season coming out of the fourteenth, and for like, super fans like myself, it's It's been an exciting year for us. So, um, Extension Interactive has done a very deliberate Siri's of acquisitions over the past ten years, and last year we acquired MCA Vision. So Maga Vision was renowned internationally for their CD I and special effects work on DH. No. One of the most exciting words they've received is an Emmy for outstanding visual effects for game of thrones. So So you got a lot of buzz at the time saying, What is extension interactive? What's what's the kind of thought process, their game of thrones, visual effects, and it really was all about this idea of, you know, again, consumers are expecting this level of visual and this level of experience in how they're interacting with you. So, Mac, a vision was a very we needed a way to be more innovative and how we're bringing the right talent and capabilities to building X. Our experiences, product configurations, etcetera and maka vision had unique capability around three visualisation CG I visual effects and really that again, that whole package of kind of art and technology to create these very high end visualization experiences. So So it's been a really exciting here for us. Um, and starting to now take that model and start to bring that Teo marketing teams that were working within the brands e commerce teams and starting to say, How do we create these type of >> bond? That >> it's It's a nice looking the MCA vision sight and and some of the you know, they have some of the cool movie stuff. But I was fascinated by the car stuff, right? They have these beautiful car shots for car commercials, and I'm curious after hearing about, you know, a be testing and you know all the things that you could do with your experience in the dental experience. Interactive are seeing that now with I got forty seven versions of that car commercial because now if I'm doing it with Mac Division, I don't have to shoot forty seven versions. I can manipulate the CG I car in a very different way because I know that you said super high gloss, super high glam. But it's programmable, so you can do stuff with it without having to call the team together and hope for a beautiful day in Carmel to go over the bridge. >> Exactly all those variables. So I mean brands right now, as they're trying to kind of create trying tio react and set up models to support hyper personalization programmatic content in it that is so challenging. It's so challenging because traditional >> means of >> going out and doing the shoot that you're talking about and doing. Even product shots and tons of photography like you have to create so many versions so expensive to be able to support all of your products. All the variations when you put global into the mix and you've got different labels and different languages etcetera. So, again, it's a It's a scale problem today. I think a lot of people think it's a technology problem, but it's actually it's actually that that's a solution. But it's definitely it's a human problem. And so in our practice, we focus on content creation models. And so this is why Macrovision acquisition so essential is we were disrupting the way continents created, whether it's for brands and their their commercial spots or it's their commerce content. Or or there social media content. By using this idea of taking a digital twin of, let's say, the Mercedes or the Mercedes car and being able to take engineering data and visualize a product digitally before it even exists before I mean literally, the prototype is not available. You know this amazing flexibility. Teo certainly configure that in many different ways, digitally. For these shoots, all you need is some some background in Madrid, etcetera, to be able to roll the car through, um, and Tamar and Magic. But you're able, Tio, you're now able Teo, represent that product, get your media created and put it into market to start generating buzz presales, et cetera. I mean, that's that's so powerful. You're getting ahead of product launch. >> How did how are the cost dynamics changing? Because before you said, it's expensive to do is shoot Yes, but now you can do multiple flavors within the computer is just radically different economics, because I'm sure when they come in and say, I want you guys to game of thrones I want that kind of production value like, yeah, that's really the expectancy. Yeah, To do it in software is a completely different kind of approach. >> I mean, I don't know how brands are not going to give it to this model because they cannot possibly they cannot. They're goingto exponential cross to be able Teo, keep pace with again, even just the variation of product, much less starting to now. Personalize that or be ableto dynamically. Render that so. The cost model today is is is exorbitant, and it's just growing. And so this because you're now able to configure things digitally and again used the right tools to be able tio represent different versions of product changed. The backgrounds, change, change, any of the factors that you need to be able to say this is a new piece of content that. I think it's better targeted at this segment. You want to test that out a little bit. I don't want to kind of double down on that and ending for all of that cost to go do this. You gives you a ton of flexibility, especially, and how you're bringing you no talent in wants to shoot it once and then and that enviable to swap. For example, I may change the bracelet on the talent to do five different ads out instead of >> risk management to a swells testing. Knowing what you're looking at, getsem visibility into what success looks like then, kind of figuring it out. One thing I want to ask you is that in the tech business, we've always been fascinated by Moore's law doubling the speed of the processors. That's Intel thing. But if you look at what you guys do with the game of thrones on the high end with CG, I see the C g I and all the cool stuff. The experiences that people have today become the expectations or the expectations become the new experiences. So you've seen an accelerated user experience. Visually, you got gaming, culture, gaming environments. I mean fortnight wasn't around two years ago. Right? Half the world pretty much plays the game or you got game of thrones. So he's now will soon become table stakes, these kinds of experience. So I got to see where you guys are going with that. How does that change how you guys operate because you gotta look at the expectations of the users consumer. That might be the new experience. How to figure out that dynamic is challenging. How do you guys do that? What's the What's the guiding philosophy around that? That trend? >> Yes. So we have, um we're maniacal about ensuring that the experience for designing is really well thought through with the right research in the right input from us. We're on the right contact. So while it may sound like a great idea and it may sound like something you need, like, how do we make sure we're doing the right thing? Right? Diligence, Tio to build the red experience and represent the product in the right way. And then we also a maniacal on the back end of testing and after optimizing that so being very realistic about is it effective is a driving is driving. Whatever the K p I is, even if it's just innovation, is it driving the KP eyes, uh, that you need and then adjusting? Because nothing could be stagnant? He's >> super exciting area. I mean, there's so much opportunity and change going on. Awesome final questions about the relationship with the job You guys are here. Adobes got a whole growth strategy in front, and that looks really strongly gotta cloud technology platform. Now they're integrating data across multiple their modules in their suites. How does that impact you guys? What's your relationship with Adobe? Yes, >> so we are. We are very big partner of Adobe. We've had a accolades throughout the years of being partner of the year. So we have a large practice dedicated Teo helping clients really look at how to implement the stack howto build content and campaign delivery models on top of that. So it's, um, both the technology and an implement implementation focus, but quite frankly, and I think what's unique is a is a process and kind of how do you operational as that focus? Like I said, you know, everyone's talking about atomic comic, the atomic content these days and certainly, I mean the adobe stack. Absolutely. Khun support that And really power personalized dynamic content for you is a brand but operational operational izing. That is a totally different story. So we're really working with the Adobe team closely on with our customers. Tio kind of build the model on top of the stack and say, How do you need to change your organization to really, really get the value out of out of these tools and really deliver the experiences that are going to be differentiated? >> We've heard that all along all week here and other events we go to is that it's not the tech problem. It's these new capabilities being operationalized older cultures as a people process problem. >> Yeah, it seems >> to be the big, big story. >> It's a it's it's. And I would say it's an ongoing challenge for the brands we work within, and they're constantly getting additional. Um, uh, market demands to be able to kind of continue changing their model. Like I said, programmatic particularly and hyper personalization is is really putting that into practice is is >> great practice Navy. Thanks for coming on. Sharing your insights here on the I do appreciate it. Thank you very much >> for having me >> live coverage here in Dopey Summit twenty nineteen in Las Vegas. To keep coverage day to continue. Stay with us for more after this short break.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE, covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity and theCUBE's eco-system partners. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We are joined by Mike Flasko. He is the Principal Group Product Manager here at Microsoft. Thanks so much for returning to theCUBE, you are a CUBE alumni. >> I am, yeah thanks for having me back. I appreciate it. >> So you oversee a portfolio of products. Can you let our viewers know what are you workin' on right now? >> Sure, yeah. I work in the area of data integration and governance at Microsoft, so everything around data integration, data acquisition, transformation and then pushing into the governance angles of, you know, once you acquire data and analyze it are you handling it properly as per industry guidelines or enterprise initiatives as you might have? >> You mentioned the magic word, transformation. I would love to have you define. It's become a real buzz word in this industry. How do you define digital transformation? >> Sure, I think it's a great discussion because we're talking about this all the time, but what does that really mean? And for us, the way I see it is starting to make more and more data driven decisions all the time. And so it's not like a light switch, where you weren't and then you were. Typically what happens is as we start working with customers they find new and interesting ways to use more data to help them make a more informed decision. And it starts from a big project or a small project and then just kind of takes off throughout the company. And so really, I think it boils down to using more data and having that guide a lot of the decisions you're making and typically that starts with tapping into a bunch of data that you may already have that just hasn't been part of your kind of traditional data warehousing or BI loop and thinking about how you can do that. >> Mike bring us inside the portfolio a little bit, you know, everybody knows Microsoft. We think about our daily usage of all the Microsoft product that my business data runs through, but when you talk about your products they're specific around the data. Help us walk through that a little bit. >> Sure, yeah. So we have a few kind of flagship products in the space, if you will. The first is something called Azure Data Factory and the purpose of that product is fairly simple. It's really for data professionals. They might be integrators or warehousing professionals et cetera and its to facilitate making it really easy to acquire data from wherever it is. Your business data on-prem from other clouds, SAS applications and allow a really easy experience to kind of bring data into your cloud, into our cloud for analytics and then build data processing pipelines that take that raw data and transform it into something useful, whatever your business domain requires. Whether that's training a machine learning model or populating your warehouse based on more data than you've had before. So first one, data factory all about data integration kind of a modern take on it. Built for the cloud, but fundamentally supports hybrid scenarios. And then other products we've got are things like Azure Data Catalog, which are more in the realm of aiding the discovery and governance of data. So once you start acquiring all this data and using it more productively, you start to have a lot and how do you connect those who want to consume data with the data professionals or data scientists that are producing these rich data sets. So how do you connect your information workers with your data scientists or your data engineers that are producing data sets? Data catalog's kind of the glue between the two. >> Mike wondering if you can help connect the dots to some of the waves we've been seeing. There was a traditonal kind of BI and data warehousing then we went through a kind of big data, the volumes of data and how can I, even if I'm not some multi-national or global company, take advantage of the data? Now there's machine intelligence. Machine learning, AI and all these pieces. What's the same and what's different about the trend and the products today? >> Sure, I think the first thing I've learnt through this process and being in our data space for a while and then working our big data projects is that, for a while we used to talk about them as different things. Like you do data warehousing and now that kind of has an old kind of connotation feeling to it. It's got an old feel to it, right? And then we talk about big data and you have a big data project and I think the realization that we've got is it's really those two things starting to come together and if you think about it, like everybody has been doing some form of analytics and warehousing for a while. And if we start to think about what the Brick Data Technologies has brought is a couple of things, in my opinion that kind of bring these two things together is with big data we started to be able to acquire data of significantly larger size and varying shape, right? But at the end of the day, the task is often acquire that data, shape that data into something useful and then connect it up to our business decision makers that need to leverage that data from a day to day basis. We've been doing that process in warehousing forever. It's really about how easily can we marry big data processing with the traditional data warehousing processes so that our warehouses, our decision making can kind of scale to large data and different shapes of data. And so probably what you'll see actually, at Ignite conference in a lot of our sessions, you'll hear our speakers talking about something called a modern data warehousing and like, it really doesn't matter what the label is associated with it. But it's really about how do you use big data technologies like Spark and Data Bricks naturally alongside warehousing technologies and integration technologies so they really form the modern data warehouse that does naturally handle big data, that does naturally bring in data of all shapes and sizes and provides kind of an experimentation ground as well, for data science. I think that's the last one that kind of comes in is once you've got big data and warehousing kind of working together to expand your analytics beyond kind of traditional approaches the next is opening up some of that data earlier in its life cycle for experimentation by data science. It's kind of the new angle and we think about this notion of kind of modern data warehousing as almost one thing supporting them all going forward. I think the challenge we've had is when we try to separate these into kind of net new deliverables, net new projects where we're starting to kind of bifurcate, if you will, the data platform to some degree. And things were getting a little too complex and so I think what we're seeing is that people are learning what these tools are good at and what they're not good at and now how to bring them together to really get back some of the productivity that we've had in the past. >> I want to ask you about those business decision makers that you referenced. I mean there's an assumption that every organization wants to become more data driven. And I think that most companies would probably say yes, but then there's another set of managers who really want to go by their gut. I mean have you found that being a conflict in terms of how you are positioning the products and services? >> Yeah absolutley. In a number of customer engagements we've had where you start to bring in more data, you start to evolve kind of the analytics practice. There is a lot of resistance at times that, you know, we've done it this way for 20 years, business is pretty good. What are we really fixing here? And so what we've found is the best path through this and in a lot of cases the required path has been show people the art of the possible, run experiments, show them side by side examples and typically with that comes a comfort level in what's possible sometimes it exposes new capabilities and options, sometimes it also shows that there's some other ways to arrive at decisions, but we've certainly seen that and almost like anything, you kind of have to start small, create a proving ground and be able to do it in a kind of side by side manner to show comparison as we go, but it's a conversation that I think is going to carry forward for the next little while especially as some of the work in AI and machine learning is starting to make it's way into business critical settings, right? Pricing your products. Product placement. All of this stuff that directly affects bottom lines you're starting to see these models do a really good job. And I think what we've found is it's all about experimentation. >> Mike when we listen to (mumbles) and to Dell and we talk about, you know, how things are developed inside of Microsoft, usually hear things like open and extensible, you got to have APIs in any of these modern pieces. It was highlighted in the Keynote on Monday, talking about the open data initiative got companies like Adobe and SAP out there, they have a lot of data, so the question is, of course, Microsoft has a lot of data that customers flow through, but there's also this very large eco-system we see at this show. What's the philosophy? Is it just, you know, oh, I've got some APIs and people plug into it? How does all the data get so that the customers can use it? >> Yeah it's a great question. That one I work a lot on and I think there's a couple of angles to it. One is, I think as big data's taken off, a lot of the integration technology that we've used in the past really wasn't made for this era. Where you've got data coming from everywhere. It's different shapes and it's different sizes and so at least within some of our products, we've been investing a lot into how do we make it really easy to acquire all the data you need because, you know, like you hear in all these cases, you can have the best model in the world if you don't have the best data sets it doesn't matter. Digital transformation starts with getting access to more data than you had before and so I think we've been really focused on this, we call it the ingestion of data. Being able to really easily connect and acquire all of the data and that's the starting point. The next thing that we've seen from companies have kind of gone down that journey with us is once you've acquired it all, you quickly have to understand it and you have to be able to kind of search over it and understand it through the lens of potentially business terms if you're a business user trying to understand what is all these data sets? What do they mean? And so I think this is where you're starting to see the rise of data cataloging initiatives not necessarily master data, et cetera, of the past, but this idea of, wow, I'm acquiring all of this data, how do I make sense of it? How do I catalog it? How does all of my workers or my employees easily find what they need and search for the data through the lens that makes sense to them. Data scientists are going to search through a very technical lens. Your business users through business glossary, business domain terms in that way and, so for me it all starts with the acquisition. I think it still far too hard and then becomes kind of a cataloging initiative and then the last step is how do we start to get some form of standards or agreement around the semantics of the data itself? Like this is a customer, this is a place. This is what, you know, a rating and I think with that you're going to start to see a whole eco-system of apps start to develop and one of the things that we're pretty excited about with the open data partnerships is how can we bring in data and to some degree auto-classify it into a set of terms that allow you to just get on with the business logic as opposed to spend all the time in the acquisition phase that most companies do today. >> You mentioned that AI is becoming increasingly important and mission critical or at least, bottom line critical in business models. What are some of the most exciting new uses of AI that you're seeing and that you hope expands into the larger industry? >> Sure. It really does cross a number of domains. We work with a retailer, ASOS. Every time we get to chat with them it's a very interesting use on how they have completely customized the shopping experience from how they layout the page based on your interest and preference through to how the search terms come back based on seasonality of what you're looking at based on what they've learnt about your purchase patterns over time, your sex, et cetera. And so I think this notion of like, intensely customized customer experiences is playing out everywhere. We've seen it on the other side in engine design and preventative maintenance. Where we've got certain customers now that are selling engine hours as opposed to engines themselves. And so if there's an engine hour that they can't provide that's a big deal and so they want to get ahead of any maintenance issue they can and they're using models to predict when a particular maintenance event is going to be required and getting ahead of that through to athletes and injury prevention. We're now seeing all the way down to connected clothing and athletic gear where all the way down, not just at the professional level, but it's starting to come down to the club level on athletes as they're playing, starting to realize that, oh, something's not quite right, I want to get ahead of this before I have a more serious injury. And so we've seen it in a number of domains almost every new customer I'm talking with. I'm excited by what they're doing in this area. >> Well, you bring up an interesting challenges. I've heard Microsoft is really I guess verticalizing around certain industries to put solutions together. One of the challenges we saw, you know, we saw surveys of big data. The number use case came back was always custom and it was like, oh, okay, well how do I templatize and allow hundreds of customers to do this not every single project is a massive engagement. What are you seeing that we're learning from the past and it feels like we're getting over that hump a little bit faster now than we were a few years ago. >> Yeah, so if I heard you correctly, it's a little bit loud so you're saying everything started at custom? And how do we get past that? And I think it actually goes back to what we're talking about earlier with this notion of a common understanding of data because what was happening is everybody felt they had bespoke data or we had data that was speaking about the same domains and terms, but we didn't agree on anything, so we spent a ton of time in the bespoke or custom arena of integrating, cleaning, transforming, before we could even get to model building or before we could get to any kind of innovation on the data itself and so I think one of the things is realizing that a lot of these domains we're trying to solve similar problems, we all have similar data. The more we can get to a common understanding of the data that we have, the more you can see higher level re-usable components being built, saying, "Ah, I know how to work on customer data" "I know how to work on sales data" "I know how to work on, you know, oil and gas data" whatever it might be, you'll probably start to see things come up in industry verticals as well. And I think it's that motion, like we had the same problem years ago when we talked about log files. Before there was logging standards, everything was a custom solution, right? Now we have very rich solutions for understanding IT infrastructure et cetera that usually became because we had a better base line for the understanding of the data we had. >> Great. Mike Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a pleasure having you. >> Thank you for having me. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite coming up just after this. (techno music)

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

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

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