(intro music) >> "theCUBE's" live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> We're not going to- >> Hey everybody, welcome back to the Fira in Barcelona. My name is Dave Vellante, I'm here with Dave Nicholson, day four of MWC23. I mean, it's Dave, it's, it's still really busy. And you walking the floors, you got to stop and start. >> It's surprising. >> People are cheering. They must be winding down, giving out the awards. Really excited. Pier, look at you and Elias here. He's the vice president of Engineering Technology for Edge Computing Offers Strategy and Execution at Dell Technologies, and he's joined by Dan Cummins, who's a fellow and vice president of, in the Edge Business Unit at Dell Technologies. Guys, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> I love when I see the term fellow. You know, you don't, they don't just give those away. What do you got to do to be a fellow at Dell? >> Well, you know, fellows are senior technical leaders within Dell. And they're usually tasked to help Dell solve you know, a very large business challenge to get to a fellow. There's only, I think, 17 of them inside of Dell. So it is a small crowd. You know, previously, really what got me to fellow, is my continued contribution to transform Dell's mid-range business, you know, VNX two, and then Unity, and then Power Store, you know, and then before, and then after that, you know, they asked me to come and, and help, you know, drive the technology vision for how Dell wins at the Edge. >> Nice. Congratulations. Now, Pierluca, I'm looking at this kind of cool chart here which is Edge, Edge platform by Dell Technologies, kind of this cube, like cubes course, you know. >> AK project from here. >> Yeah. So, so tell us about the Edge platform. What, what's your point of view on all that at Dell? >> Yeah, absolutely. So basically in a, when we create the Edge, and before even then was bringing aboard, to create this vision of the platform, and now building the platform when we announced project from here, was to create solution for the Edge. Dell has been at the edge for 30 years. We sold a lot of compute. But the reality was people want outcome. And so, and the Edge is a new market, very exciting, but very siloed. And so people at the Edge have different personas. So quickly realize that we need to bring in Dell, people with expertise, quickly realize as well that doing all these solution was not enough. There was a lot of problem to solve because the Edge is outside of the data center. So you are outside of the wall of the data center. And what is going to happen is obviously you are in the land of no one. And so you have million of device, thousand of million of device. All of us at home, we have all connected thing. And so we understand that the, the capability of Dell was to bring in technology to secure, manage, deploy, with zero touch, zero trust, the Edge. And all the edge the we're speaking about right now, we are focused on everything that is outside of a normal data center. So, how we married the computer that we have for many years, the new gateways that we create, so having the best portfolio, number one, having the best solution, but now, transforming the way that people deploy the Edge, and secure the Edge through a software platform that we create. >> You mentioned Project Frontier. I like that Dell started to do these sort of project, Project Alpine was sort of the multi-cloud storage. I call it "The Super Cloud." The Project Frontier. It's almost like you develop, it's like mission based. Like, "Okay, that's our North Star." People hear Project Frontier, they know, you know, internally what you're talking about. Maybe use it for external communications too, but what have you learned since launching Project Frontier? What's different about the Edge? I mean you're talking about harsh environments, you're talking about new models of connectivity. So, what have you learned from Project Frontier? What, I'd love to hear the fellow perspective as well, and what you guys are are learning so far. >> Yeah, I mean start and then I left to them, but we learn a lot. The first thing we learn that we are on the right path. So that's good, because every conversation we have, there is nobody say to us, you know, "You are crazy. "This is not needed." Any conversation we have this week, start with the telco thing. But after five minutes it goes to, okay, how I can solve the Edge, how I can bring the compute near where the data are created, and how I can do that secure at scale, and with the right price. And then can speak about how we're doing that. >> Yeah, yeah. But before that, we have to really back up and understand what Dell is doing with Project Frontier, which is an Edge operations platform, to simplify your Edge use cases. Now, Pierluca and his team have a number of verticalized applications. You want to be able to securely deploy those, you know, at the Edge. But you need a software platform that's going to simplify both the life cycle management, and the security at the Edge, with the ability to be able to construct and deploy distributed applications. Customers are looking to derive value near the point of generation of data. We see a massive explosion of data. But in particular, what's different about the Edge, is the different computing locations, and the constraints that are on those locations. You know, for example, you know, in a far Edge environment, the people that service that equipment are not trained in the IT, or train, trained in it. And they're also trained in the safety and security protocols of that environment. So you necessarily can't apply the same IT techniques when you're managing infrastructure and deploying applications, or servicing in those locations. So Frontier was designed to solve for those constraints. You know, often we see competitors that are doing similar things, that are starting from an IT mindset, and trying to shift down to cover Edge use cases. What we've done with Frontier, is actually first understood the constraints that they have at the Edge. Both the operational constraints and technology constraints, the service constraints, and then came up with a, an architecture and technology platform that allows them to start from the Edge, and bleed into the- >> So I'm laughing because you guys made the same mistake. And you, I think you learned from that mistake, right? You used to take X86 boxes and throw 'em over the fence. Now, you're building purpose-built systems, right? Project Frontier I think is an example of the learnings. You know, you guys an IT company, right? Come on. But you're learning fast, and that's what I'm impressed about. >> Well Glenn, of course we're here at MWC, so it's all telecom, telecom, telecom, but really, that's a subset of Edge. >> Yes. >> Fair to say? >> Yes. >> Can you give us an example of something that is, that is, orthogonal to, to telecom, you know, maybe off to the side, that maybe overlaps a little bit, but give us an, give us an example of Edge, that isn't specifically telecom focused. >> Well, you got the, the Edge verticals. and Pierluca could probably speak very well to this. You know, you got manufacturing, you got retail, you got automotive, you got oil and gas. Every single one of them are going to make different choices in the software that they're going to use, the hyperscaler investments that they're going to use, and then write some sort of automation, you know, to deploy that, right? And the Edge is highly fragmented across all of these. So we certainly could deploy a private wireless 5G solution, orchestrate that deployment through Frontier. We can also orchestrate other use cases like connected worker, or overall equipment effectiveness in manufacturing. But Pierluca you have a, you have a number. >> Well, but from your, so, but just to be clear, from your perspective, the whole idea of, for example, private 5g, it's a feature- >> Yes. >> That might be included. It happened, it's a network topology, a network function that might be a feature of an Edge environment. >> Yes. But it's not the center of the discussion. >> So, it enables the outcome. >> Yeah. >> Okay. >> So this, this week is a clear example where we confirm and establish this. The use case, as I said, right? They, you say correctly, we learned very fast, right? We brought people in that they came from industry that was not IT industry. We brought people in with the things, and we, we are Dell. So we have the luxury to be able to interview hundreds of customers, that just now they try to connect the OT with the IT together. And so what we learn, is really, at the Edge is different personas. They person that decide what to do at the Edge, is not the normal IT administrator, is not the normal telco. >> Who is it? Is it an engineer, or is it... >> It's, for example, the store manager. >> Yeah. >> It's, for example, the, the person that is responsible for the manufacturing process. Those people are not technology people by any means. But they have a business goal in mind. Their goal is, "I want to raise my productivity by 30%," hence, I need to have a preventive maintenance solution. How we prescribe this preventive maintenance solution? He doesn't prescribe the preventive maintenance solution. He goes out, he has to, a consult or himself, to deploy that solution, and he choose different fee. Now, the example that I was doing from the houses, all of us, we have connected device. The fact that in my house, I have a solar system that produce energy, the only things I care that I can read, how much energy I produce on my phone, and how much energy I send to get paid back. That's the only thing. The fact that inside there is a compute that is called Dell or other things is not important to me. Same persona. Now, if I can solve the security challenge that the SI, or the user need to implement this technology because it goes everywhere. And I can manage this in extensively, and I can put the supply chain of Dell on top of that. And I can go every part in the world, no matter if I have in Papua New Guinea, or I have an oil ring in Texas, that's the winning strategy. That's why people, they are very interested to the, including Telco, the B2B business in telco is looking very, very hard to how they recoup the investment in 5g. One of the way, is to reach out with solution. And if I can control and deploy things, more than just SD one or other things, or private mobility, that's the key. >> So, so you have, so you said manufacturing, retail, automotive, oil and gas, you have solutions for each of those, or you're building those, or... >> Right now we have solution for manufacturing, with for example, PTC. That is the biggest company. It's actually based in Boston. >> Yeah. Yeah, it is. There's a company that the market's just coming right to them. >> We have a, very interesting. Another solution with Litmus, that is a startup that, that also does manufacturing aggregation. We have retail with Deep North. So we can do detecting in the store, how many people they pass, how many people they doing, all of that. And all theses solution that will be, when we will have Frontier in the market, will be also in Frontier. We are also expanding to energy, and we going vertical by vertical. But what is they really learn, right? You said, you know you are an IT company. What, to me, the Edge is a pre virtualization area. It's like when we had, you know, I'm, I've been in the company for 24 years coming from EMC. The reality was before there was virtualization, everybody was starting his silo. Nobody thought about, "Okay, I can run this thing together "with security and everything, "but I need to do it." Because otherwise in a manufacturing, or in a shop, I can end up with thousand of devices, just because someone tell to me, I'm a, I'm a store manager, I don't know better. I take this video surveillance application, I take these things, I take a, you know, smart building solution, suddenly I have five, six, seven different infrastructure to run this thing because someone say so. So we are here to democratize the Edge, to secure the Edge, and to expand. That's the idea. >> So, the Frontier platform is really the horizontal platform. And you'll build specific solutions for verticals. On top of that, you'll, then I, then the beauty is ISV's come in. >> Yes. >> 'Cause it's open, and the developers. >> We have a self certification program already for our solution, as well, for the current solution, but also for Frontier. >> What does that involve? Self-certification. You go through you, you go through some- >> It's basically a, a ISV can come. We have a access to a lab, they can test the thing. If they pass the first screen, then they can become part of our ecosystem very easily. >> Ah. >> So they don't need to spend days or months with us to try to architect the thing. >> So they get the premature of being certified. >> They get the Dell brand associated with it. Maybe there's some go-to-market benefits- >> Yes. >> As well. Cool. What else do we need to know? >> So, one thing I, well one thing I just want to stress, you know, when we say horizontal platform, really, the Edge is really a, a distributed edge computing problem, right? And you need to almost create a mesh of different computing locations. So for example, even though Dell has Edge optimized infrastructure, that we're going to deploy and lifecycle manage, customers may also have compute solutions, existing compute solutions in their data center, or at a co-location facility that are compute destinations. Project Frontier will connect to those private cloud stacks. They'll also collect to, connect to multiple public cloud stacks. And then, what they can do, is the solutions that we talked about, they construct that using an open based, you know, protocol, template, that describes that distributed application that produces that outcome. And then through orchestration, we can then orchestrate across all of these locations to produce that outcome. That's what the platform's doing. >> So it's a compute mesh, is what you just described? >> Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a software orchestration mesh. >> Okay. >> Right. And allows customers to take advantage of their existing investments. Also allows them to, to construct solutions based on the ISV of their choice. We're offering solutions like Pierluca had talked about, you know, in manufacturing with Litmus and PTC, but they could put another use case that's together based on another ISV. >> Is there a data mesh analog here? >> The data mesh analog would run on top of that. We don't offer that as part of Frontier today, but we do have teams working inside of Dell that are working on this technology. But again, if there's other data mesh technology or packages, that they want to deploy as a solution, if you will, on top of Frontier, Frontier's extensible in that way as well. >> The open nature of Frontier is there's a, doesn't, doesn't care. It's just a note on the mesh. >> Yeah. >> Right. Now, of course you'd rather, you'd ideally want it to be Dell technology, and you'll make the business case as to why it should be. >> They get additional benefits if it's Dell. Pierluca talked a lot about, you know, deploying infrastructure outside the walls of an IT data center. You know, this stuff can be tampered with. Somebody can move it to another room, somebody can open up. In the supply chain with, you know, resellers that are adding additional people, can open these devices up. We're actually deploying using an Edge technology called Secure Device Onboarding. And it solves a number of things for us. We, as a manufacturer can initialize the roots of trust in the Dell hardware, such that we can validate, you know, tamper detection throughout the supply chain, and securely transfer ownership. And that's different. That is not an IT technique. That's an edge technique. And that's just one example. >> That's interesting. I've talked to other people in IT about how they're using that technique. So it's, it's trickling over to that side of the business. >> I'm almost curious about the friction that you, that you encounter because the, you know, you paint a picture of a, of a brave new world, a brave new future. Ideally, in a healthy organization, they have, there's a CTO, or at least maybe a CIO, with a CTO mindset. They're seeking to leverage technology in the service of whatever the mission of the organization is. But they've got responsibilities to keep the lights on, as well as innovate. In that mix, what are you seeing as the inhibitors? What's, what's the push back against Frontier that you're seeing in most cases? Is it, what, what is it? >> Inside of Dell? >> No, not, I'm saying out, I'm saying with- >> Market friction. >> Market, market, market friction. What is the push back? >> I think, you know, as I explained, do yourself is one of the things that probably is the most inhibitor, because some people, they think that they are better already. They invest a lot in this, and they have the content. But those are again, silo solutions. So, if you go into some of the huge things that they already established, thousand of store and stuff like that, there is an opportunity there, because also they want to have a refresh cycle. So when we speak about softer, softer, softer, when you are at the Edge, the software needs to run on something that is there. So the combination that we offer about controlling the security of the hardware, plus the operating system, and provide an end-to-end platform, allow them to solve a lot of problems that today they doing by themselves. Now, I met a lot of customers, some of them, one actually here in Spain, I will not make the name, but it's a large automotive. They have the same challenge. They try to build, but the problem is this is just for them. And they want to use something that is a backup and provide with the Dell service, Dell capability of supply chain in all the world, and the diversity of the portfolio we have. These guys right now, they need to go out and find different types of compute, or try to adjust thing, or they need to have 20 people there to just prepare the device. We will take out all of this. So I think the, the majority of the pushback is about people that they already established infrastructure, and they want to use that. But really, there is an opportunity here. Because the, as I said, the IT/OT came together now, it's a reality. Three years ago when we had our initiative, they've pointed out, sarcastically. We, we- >> Just trying to be honest. (laughing) >> I can't let you get away with that. >> And we, we failed because it was too early. And we were too focused on, on the fact to going. Push ourself to the boundary of the IOT. This platform is open. You want to run EdgeX, you run EdgeX, you want OpenVINO, you want Microsoft IOT, you run Microsoft IOT. We not prescribe the top. We are locking down the bottom. >> What you described is the inertia of, of sunk dollars, or sunk euro into an infrastructure, and now they're hanging onto that. >> Yeah. >> But, I mean, you know, I, when we say horizontal, we think scale, we think low cost, at volume. That will, that will win every time. >> There is a simplicity at scale, right? There is a, all the thing. >> And the, and the economics just overwhelm that siloed solution. >> And >> That's inevitable. >> You know, if you want to apply security across the entire thing, if you don't have a best practice, and a click that you can do that, or bring down an application that you need, you need to touch each one of these silos. So, they don't know yet, but we going to be there helping them. So there is no pushback. Actually, this particular example I did, this guy said you know, there are a lot of people that come here. Nobody really described the things we went through. So we are on the right track. >> Guys, great conversation. We really appreciate you coming on "theCUBE." >> Thank you. >> Pleasure to have you both. >> Okay. >> Thank you. >> All right. And thank you for watching Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson. We're live at the Fira. We're winding up day four. Keep it right there. Go to siliconangle.com. John Furrier's got all the news on "theCUBE.net." We'll be right back right after this break. "theCUBE," at MWC 23. (outro music)

>> Welcome everybody to this cube conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and we're joined today by Richard Goodwin, who's the group director of IT at Ultraleap and Avishek Kumar, who manages Dell's Power Store, product line, he directs that product line along with several other lines for the company. Gentlemen, welcome to the cube. >> (Avishek) Hi Dave. >> (Richard) Hi >> (Dave) So Richard, Ultraleap, very cool company tracks hand movements, and so forth. Tell us about the company and the technology I'm really interested in how it's used. >> Yeah, we've had many product lines, obviously. We're very innovative, and the organization was spun up from a PhD, a number of PhD students who were the co-founders for Ultraleap, and initially with mid-air haptics, as you, as many people may have seen, but also hand tracking, mid-air touch, sense and feel. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's quite impressive what we have produced and the number of sectors and markets that we were in. And obviously to, to push us to where we are, we have relied upon lots of the Dao technology, both software and hardware. >> (Dave) And what's your role at the company? >> I'm the group IT director, I'm responsible for the IT and business platforms, all infrastructure, network, hardware, software, and also the transition of those platforms to ensure that we're scalable. And we are able to develop our software and hardware as rapidly as possible. >> (Dave) Awesome. Yeah, a lot of data behind that too I bet. Okay Avishek, you direct a number of products at Dell across the portfolio, Unity, Extreme IO, the SC series, and of course power vault. It's quite the portfolio that you look after. So let's get into the case study, if we can, a bit, Richard, maybe you could paint a picture of, of your environment, some of the key applications that you're supporting and maybe what your infrastructure looks like. Give us a high level view. >> Sure. So, pre Power Store, we had quite a disparate architecture, so a fairly significant split and siding on the side of the cloud, not as hybrid as we would like, and not, not as much as on-prem, as we would have liked, and hey, but that's changed quite significantly. So we now have a number of servers and storage and storage arrays that we have on, on-premise, and then we host ourselves. So we are moving quite rapidly, you know as a startup and then moving to a scale-up, we needed that, that scalability and that versatility, and also the whole OPEX versus CAPEX, and also not being driven by lots of SaaS products and architecture and infrastructure, where we needed to be in control because of our development cycles and our products, product development. >> (Dave) So wait, Okay, So, so, too much cloud. I'm hearing you wanted a little bit a dose of on-prem, explain that a little bit more, the cloud wasn't doing it for you in terms of your development cycle, your control. Can you double click on that? >> Yeah. Some of the, some of the control and you know, there's always a balance because there's certain elements of our development cycles and our engineering, software engineering, where we need a very high parallelism for some of the work that we're doing, which then, you know, the CAPEX investment makes things very, very challenging, not commercially the right thing to do. However, there are some of our information, some of IP, some of the secure things that we do, we also do not want upgrades as an example, or any advantages or certain types of server and spec that we need to be quite and unique and that needs to be within our control. >> (Dave) Got it, Okay. Thank you for that. Avishek, we're going to talk about Power Store today. So set it up, please, tell us about Power Store, what it is, you know, why it's important to this conversation. >> Sure. So Power Store is a product that we launched may of 2020, roughly a little bit more than a year now. And it's a brand new architecture that Dell technologies released. And at the end of the day, I'll talk about a few unique aspects of the product, but at the end of the day, where we start with, it's a storage platform, right? So where we see similar to what Richard is saying here, in terms of being able to consolidate the customer's environment, whether it is blog, file, WeVaults, physical, virtual environments, and, and it's, as I said, it's a brand new architecture where we leveraged pieces of existing products, where it made sense, we are using all the latest and greatest technologies delivering the best performance based data reduction. And where we see a lot of traction is the options that it brings to the table for our customers in terms of flexibility, whether they want to add capacity, compute, whether in fact, we have apps on the deployment model where customers can consolidate their compute as well on the static storage platform with needed. So a lot of innovation from a platform perspective itself, and it's not just about the platform itself, but what comes along with it, right? So we refer to it as an ecosystem, part of it, where we work with Ansible playbooks, CSI plugin, you name it, right. And it's the storage platform by itself, doesn't stand by itself in a customer's environment, there are other aspects of the infrastructure that it needs to integrate with as well. Right? So if they are using Ansible playbooks, we want to make sure the integration is there. >> (Dave) Got it. >> And last, but perhaps not the least is the intelligence built into the platform, right? So as we are building these capabilities into the product, there is intelligence built into the product, as well as outside the product where things like Cloud IQ, things like technologies built into power suit itself makes it that much easier for the customers to manage the infrastructure and go from there. >> (Dave) Thank you for that, So, Richard, what was the workload? So it actually, you started with the sort of a Greenfield on-prem. If I understand it correctly, what was the workload that you were sort of building around or workloads? >> So, we had a, a number of different applications. Some of which we cannot really talk about too much, but we had, we had a VxRail, we had a a smaller doubt array and we have lots of what we class as runners, Kubernetes cluster that we run and quite a few different VMs that run on our, on-prem server infrastructure and storage arrays and the issues that we began to hit because of the high IO, from some of our workloads, that we were hitting very high latency, which rapidly stopped, began to cause us issues, especially with some of our software engineering teams. And that is when we embarked upon a competitive RFP for Dell Power Store, Dell were already engaged from an end-user compute where they'd been selected as the end-user compute provider from a previous competitive RFP. And then we engaged them regarding the storage issue that we had and we engaged the, our account lead and count exec, and a number of solution architects were working with us to ensure that we have the optimal solution. Dell were selected over the competitors because of many reasons, you know, the new technology, the de-duplication, the compression, the data, overall data reduction, and the guarantee that also came, came with that, the four-to-one data reduction guarantee, which was significant to us because of their amounts of data that we hold. And we have, you know, as I've mentioned, we're pulling further, further data of ours back into our hosted environments, which will end up on the Power Store, especially with the de-duplication that we're now getting. We've actually hit nine-to-one, which is significant. We were expecting four-to-one, maybe five-to-one with some of the data types. And what was excellent that we were that confident that they did not even review our data types prior, and they were willing to stand by that guarantee of four-to-one. And we've excelled that, we've got significant different data types on, on that array, and we've hit nine-to-one and that's gradually grown over the last nine months, you know, we were kind of at the six then we moved to seven and now we're hitting nine-to-one ratio. >> (Dave) That's great. So you get a little free storage. That's interesting what you're saying, Richard, cause I just assumed that a company that guaranteed four-to-one is going to say okay, let us, let us inspect your workload first and then we'll do the deal. So Avishek, what's the tech behind that data reduction that you're able to, with such confidence, not have to pre inspect the workload in this case anyway. >> Yeah. So, it goes back to the technologies that goes behind the product, right? So, so we, we stand behind the technology and we want to make it simpler for our customers as well where, again we don't want to spend weeks looking at all the data, scanning all the data before giving the guarantee. So we stand behind the technology where we understand that as the data is coming in, we are always going to be de-duplicate it. We are always going to compress it. There is technology within the product where we are offloading some of that to the outside the CPU, so it is not impacting the performance that the applications are going to see. So a data reduction by itself is not good enough, performance by itself is not good enough. Both of them have to be together, right? So, and that's what Power Store brings to the table. >> (Dave) Thank you. So Richard, I'm interested. I mean, I remember the Power Store announcement of, sort of, saw it leading up to it. And one of the big thrusts from Dell was the way I phrase it is essentially trying to create a cloud like experience on-prem. So really focused on simplicity. So my question to you is, let's start with just the deployment. You know, how complicated was it to install? What was that process like? How many clicks, I mean, not that you have to tell me how many clicks, but you know, what I'm asking is, is how difficult was it to get from zero to, you know, up and running? >> Well, we actually stepped our very difficult challenge. We were in quite a difficult situation where we'd pretty much gone off the cliff in terms of our IOPS performance. So the RFP was quite rapid, and then we needed to get whoever which vendor was successful, we needed to get that deployed rather rapidly and on the floor in our data center and server rooms, which we did. And it was very very simplistic, within three weeks of placing the order, we had that array in our server rack and we'd begun the migration, it was very simple to set up. And the management of that array has been, we've seen say 40% reduction in terms of effort to be able to manage our storage because it is very self-contained, you know, even from a reporting perspective, the deployment, the migration was all very, very, very simplistic, and you know, we we've done some work recently where we had to also do some work on the array and some other migrations that we were doing and the resilience came, came to, came to the forefront of where the Juul architecture and no single point of failure enabled us to do some things that we needed to do quite rapidly because of the, the Juul norms and the resilience within, within the unit and within the Power Store itself was considerable where we, we kept performance up, it also prioritize any discreet rebuilds, keeps the incoming ingest rates high, and prioritizes the, you know, the workloads, which is really impressive, especially when we are moving so quickly with our technology. We don't really have much time to, you know, micromanage the estate. >> (Dave) Can you, can you just repeat what you said on the percent reduction? I think I heard you cut out there a little bit, a percent reduction on, on, on management, on, on, on the labor side. >> So our lead storage engineer is estimated around 40% less management. >> (Dave) Wow. Okay. So that's, that's good. So actually, I love this conversation because, you know, in the early days of automation, people like, ah, that's my job, provisioning LUNs. I'm really good at it, but I think people are realizing that it's actually not something that you want to be really good at. It's something that you want to eliminate. So, it now maybe it's that storage engineer got his or her nights and weekends back, but, but what do they do now when they get that extra time, what do you, what do you put them on? You know, no more strategic initiatives or, you know, other, other tech things on the to-do list. What's that like?. >> The last thing that, you know, any of my team, whether it's the storage leads or some of the infrastructure team that were also involved in engaged, cause you know, the organization, we have to be quite versatile as a team in our skillsets. We don't want to be doing those BAU mundane tasks. Even the storage engineer does not want to be allocating LUNs and allocating storage to physical servers, Vms, etc. We want all of that to be automated. And, you know, those engineers, they're working on some of the cutting edge things that we're trying to do with machine learning as an example, which is much more interesting. It's what they want to be doing. You know, that aides, the obvious things like retention, interest and personal development, we don't want to be, you know, that base IT infrastructure management, is not where any of the engineers wants to be. >> (Dave) In terms of the decision to go with Dell Power Store. I'm definitely hearing there was a relationship. There was an existing relationship with Dell. I'm sure that played into it. >> There were many things. So the relationship wasn't really part of this, even though I've mentioned the end-user compute in any sets or anything that we're procuring, we want best of breed, you know, best of sets. And that was done on, the cost is definitely a driver. The technology, you know, is a big trust to us, We're a tech company, new technology to us is also fascinating, not only our own, but also the storage guarantee, the simplicity, the resilience within, within the unit. Also the ability, which was key to us because of what we're trying to do with our hybrid model and bring, bring back repatriate some of the data as it were from the client. We needed that ability to, with ease, to be able to scale up and scale high, and the Power Store gave us that. >> (Dave) When you say cost, I want to dig into that price or you know, the price tag or the, the cost, I mean, when you do the business case. And I wonder if we could add a little color to that. >> (Richard) There's two elements to this, so they're not only the cost of the price tag, but then also cost of ownership and the comparisons that we were running against the other vendors, but also the comparisons that we were running from a CAPEX investment against OPEX and what we have in the cloud, and also the performance, performance that we get from the cloud and our cloud storage and the resilience within that. And then also the initial price tag, and then comparing the CapEx investments to the OPEX where all elements that were key to us making our decision. And I know that there has to be some credit taken by the Dell account team and that their relationship towards the final phrase of that RFP, you know, were key initially, not all, we were just looking for the best possible storage solution for Ultraleap. >> (Dave) And to determine that on your end, was that like a feature, because it's sometimes fuzzy what the business impact is going to be like that 40% you mentioned, or the data reduction at nine to one, when there's a promise of four to one, did you, what did you do? Did you kind of do a feature function analysis and sort of line that up and, and say, okay, I'm going to map that to our business processes our IT processes and try to predict what the impact would be. Is that how you did it? or did you take a different approach? >> (Richard) We did. So we did that, obviously between vendors usually expected an RFP, but then also mapping to how that would impact the business. And that is not an easy process to go through. And we've seen more gains even comparing one vendor to another, some of that because of the technology, the terminology is very very different and sometimes you have to bring that upper level and also gain a much more detailed understanding, which at times can be challenging, but we did a very like-for-like comparison and, and also lots of research, but you're quite right. The business analysis to what we needed. We had quite a good forecast and from summarized stock information data, and also our engineering and business and strategic roadmap, we were able to map those two together, not the easiest of experiences, not one that I want to repeat, but we, we got it. (Dave laughing) >> (Dave)Yeah, a little bit of art and science involved. Avishek, maybe you could talk about Power Store, what, you know, give us the commercial. What makes it different from other products in the market of things like cloud IQ? Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Sure. So, so again, from a, it's music to my ears, when Richard talks about the ease of deployment and the management, because there is a lot of focus on that. But even as I said earlier, from a man technology perspective, a lot of goodness built-in, in terms of being able to consolidate a customer's environment, onto the platform. So that's more from a storage point of view that give the best performance, give the best data reduction, storage efficiencies. The second part, of course, the flexibility, the options that Power Store gives to the customers in terms of sort of desegregating the storage and the compute aspects of it. So if, as a customer, I want to start with different points in terms of what our customer requirements are today, but going forward as the requirements change from a compute capacity perspective, you can use a scale up and scale out capabilities, and then the intelligence built in, right? So, as you scale out your cluster, being able to move storage around right, as needed being able to do that non-disruptively. So instead of saying that Mr. Customer, your, your storage is going to you're at 90% capacity, being able to say that based on your historical trending, we expect you run out of capacity in six months, some small things like that, right? And of course, if the, the dial home, the support assist capabilities that enabled, cloud IQ brings a lot of intelligence to the table as well. In addition to that, as they mentioned earlier, there is apps on capability that gives another level of flexibility to the customers to integrate your storage infrastructure into a virtual environment, if the customer chooses to do that. And last but not the least, it's not just about the product, right? So it's about the programs that we have put around it, anytime upgrade is a big differentiator for us, where it's an investment protection program for customers, where if they want to have the peace of mind, in terms of three months, nine months, three years down the line, if we come out with new technologies, being able to be upgrade to that non-disruptively is a big part of it as well. It's a peace of mind for the customers that, yes I'm getting into the Power Store architecture today, but going forward, I'm protected from that point of view. So anytime upgrade, it's a new business program that we put around leveraging the architectural benefits of Power Store, whether your compute requirement, your storage requirements change, you're covered from that point of view. So again, a very quick overview of, of what Power Store is, why it is different. And again, that's where that comes from. >> (Dave) Thank you for that. Richard, are you actively using cloud IQ? Do you get the, what kind of value do you get from it? >> Not currently. However, we have, we have had plans to do that. The uptake and BCR, our internal Workload is not allowed us, to do that. But one of the other key reasons for selecting Power Store was the non-disruptive element, you know, with other SaaS products, other providers, and other issues that we have experienced. That was one, that was a key decision for us from a Power Store perspective. One of the other, you know, to go back to the conversation slightly, in terms of performance, we are getting, getting there. You know, there's a 400% speed of improvement of publishing. We've got an 80% faster code coverage. Our firmware builds a 1300% quicker than they were previously. and the time savings of the storage engineer and, you know, as a director of IT, I often asked for certain reports from, from the storage array, we're working at, for storage forecast, performance forecast, you know, when we're coming close to product releases, code drops that we're trying to manage, the reporting or the Power Store is impressive. Whereas previously my storage engineer would not be the, the most happiest of people when I would be trying to pull, you know, monthly and quarterly reports, et cetera. Whereas now it's, it's ease and we have live dashboards running and we can easily extract that information. >> (Dave) I love that because, you know, so often we talk about the 40% reduction in IT labor, which okay, that's cool. But then your CFO's going to say, yeah, but it's not like we're getting rid of people. We, you know, we're still spending that money and you're like, okay. You're now into soft dollars, but when you talk about 400%, 80%, 1300% of what you're talking about business impact and that's telephone numbers to a CFO. So I love those metrics. Thank you for sharing. >> Yeah. But what would, they obviously, it's sort of like dashboards when they visualize that they are very hard hitting, you know, the impact. You're quite right the CFO does chase down you know, the availability and the resource profile, however, we're on a huge upward trajectory. So having the right resilience and infrastructure in places is exactly what we need. And as I mentioned before, those engineers are all reallocated to much more interesting work and, you know, the areas that will actually drive our business forward. >> (Dave) Speaking of resilience, are you doing any replication? >> Not currently. However, we've actually got a meeting regarding this today with some of the enterprise and some of their storage specialists, in a couple of hours time, actually, because that is a very high on the agenda for us to be able to replicate and have a high availability cluster and another potentially Power Store need. >> (Dave) Okay. So I was going to ask you where you want to take this thing. I'm hearing, you're looking at cloud IQ, really try to exploit that. So you got some headroom here in terms of the value that you can get out of this platform to do replication, faster recovery, et cetera, maybe protect against, you know, events. Guys, Thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate your insights. >> (Richard) No problem. >> (Avishek) Thank you. >> And thank you for watching this cube conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time.

(happy techno music) >> Welcome everybody to this cube conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and we're joined today by Richard Goodwin. Who's the group director of IT at Ultra Leap and Avishek Kumar who manages Dell's power store product line and directs that product line along with several other lines for the company, gentlemen, welcome to the cube. >> Hi Dave >> Hi >> So Richard ultra leap, very cool company tracks, hand movements, and so forth. Tell us about the company and the technology, I'm really interested in how it's used. >> Yeah, we've had many product lines, obviously. We're at very innovative, um and the organization was spun up from PhD, a number of PhD students who were the co-founders for ultra leap. um And initially with mid-air haptics, um as you, as many people may have seen, but also hand tracking, mid-air had such a sense and feel. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's quite impressive what we have produced and the number of sectors and markets that we're in. Um And obviously to push us to, to where we are, we have relied upon lots of the Dell technology, both software and hardware. >> And what's your role at the company. >> Uh, I'm the group IT director, uh, I'm responsible for the it and business platforms or infrastructure network hardware software, and also the transparency of those platforms to ensure that we're scalable. And we are able to develop our software and hardware as rapidly as possible. >> Awesome. Yeah, a lot of data behind that too. I bet. Um okay Avishek, you direct a number of products at Dell across the portfolio, unity, extreme IO, the SC series, and of course, power vault. It's, it's quite the portfolio that you look after. So let's get into the case study. If we can, a bit, Richard, maybe you could paint a picture of, of your environment, some of the key applications that you're supporting and maybe what your infrastructure looks like. Give us a high level view. >> Sure. So pretty power store. We had quite a disparate architecture, so a fairly significant split and siding on the side of cloud, not as hybrid as we would like, and not, not as much as our on-prem as we would have liked and Hey, that, that has changed quite significantly. So we now have a number of servers and storage and storage arrays that we have on, on premise. And then we host ourselves. So we are moving quite rapidly, you know, as a, as a startup and then moving to a scale-up we needed that, that scalability and that versatility, and also the whole OPEX versus CapEx and, um, and also not being driven by lots of SaaS products and architecture and infrastructure where we needed to be in control because of our development cycles and our products, product development. >> So wait, oh okay. So, so too much cloud, you wanted to run a little bit of a dose of on-prem explain that a little bit more the cloud wasn't doing it for you in terms of your development cycle, your control, can you double click on that? >> Yeah. Some of the, some of the control and, you know, there's always a balance because there are certain elements of our development cycles and our engineering software engineering, where we need a very high parallelism for some of the work that we're doing, which then, you know, the CapEx investment makes things very, very challenging, not commercially that the right thing to do. However, there are some of our information, some of IP, some of the secure things that we do, we also do not want upgrades as an example, or any outages or certain types of server and spec that we need to be quite bespoke and unique, and that needs to be within our control. >> Got it, okay. Thank you for that. Avishek, we're going to talk about power store today. So set it up, please tell us about power store, what it is, you know, why it's important to this conversation. >> Sure, so power store store is a product that we launched may of 2020, roughly a little bit more than a year now. And it's a brand new architecture that Dell technologies released. And at the end of the day, I'll talk about a few unique aspects of the product, but at the end of the day, the, where we start with it's a storage platform, right? So where we see similar to what Richard is saying here, in terms of being able to consolidate the customer's environment, whether it is blog file, weevils, physical virtual environments, and, and it's, as I said, it's a brand new architecture where we leveraged pieces of existing products, where it makes sense and it's, we are using all the latest and greatest technologies delivering the best performance based data reduction and, and where we see a lot of traction is the options that it brings to the table for our customers in terms of flexibility, whether they want to add capacity compute, whether in fact, we have apps on the current model where customers can consolidate their compute as well on the static storage platform if needed. So a lot of innovation from a platform perspective itself, and it's not just about the platform itself, but what comes along with it, right? So we refer to it as an ecosystem, part of it, where we work with Ansible playbooks, CSI plugin, you name it, right. And it's, the storage platform by itself. Doesn't that, doesn't stand by itself in a customer's environment there are other aspects of the infrastructure that it needs to integrate with as well. Right? So if they're using Ansible playbooks, we want to make sure the integration is there. >> Got it. >> And last but not the least is the intelligence built into the platform, right? So as we are building these capabilities into the product, there is intelligence built into the product, as well as outside the product where things like cloud IQ, things like uh, um, technologies built into power suit itself makes it that much easier for the customers to manage the infrastructure and go from there. >> Thank you for that, so, Richard, what was the workload? So it actually, you started with sort of a Greenfield on prem. If I understand it correctly, what was the workload that you were sort of building around or workloads? >> Sorry, we had a, a number of different applications. Some of which we cannot really talk about too much, but we had, we had a VxRail, we had a, a smaller Dell array, and we have lots of what we classes, runners, cubeanetics cluster that we that we run and quite a few different VMs that run on our, on-prem server infrastructure and storage rates and the issues that we began to hit because of the high IO, from some of our, um, workloads that we were hitting very high latency, which rapidly stopped, began to cause us issues, especially with some of our software engineering teams. And that is when we embarked upon a competitive RFP for uh, Dell power store. Dell were already engaged from an end-user compute where they'd been selected as the end-user compute provider from a previous competitive RFP. And then we engaged them regarding the storage issue that we had, and we engaged the, our account leading count exec, and a number of solution architects were working with us to ensure that we have the optimal solution. Dell were selected over the competitors because of many reasons, you know, the, the, the new technology, the DG plication, the compression, that data overall data reduction, and the guarantee that also came, uh, came with that, with the four to one data reduction guarantee, which was significant to us because of the amount of data that we hold. Um, And we have, you know, as I mentioned, we're pulling further, further data of ours back into our hosted environments, which will end up on the power store, especially with the duplication that we're now getting. We've actually hit nine to one, which is significant. We were expecting four to one, maybe five to one with some of the data types. And what was excellent Dale were that confident that they did not even review our data types prior. And they were willing to stand by that guarantee of four to one and we've excelled that we've got different data types on, on that array, and we've hit nine to one and that's gradually grown over the last nine months. You know, we were kind of six them we moved to seven and now we're hitting nine to one ratios. >> That's great. So you get a little free storage. That's interesting what you're saying, Richard, cause I just assumed that a company that's guaranteed four to one is going to say, okay, let us, let us inspect your workload first and then we'll do the deal. So Avishek, what's the tech behind that data reduction that you're able to with such confidence, not have to pre inspect the workload in this case anyway. >> Yeah. So, so it goes back to the technologies that goes behind the product, right? So, so we, we stand behind the technology and we want to make it simpler for our customers as well. Where again, we don't want to spend weeks looking at all the data, scanning all the data before giving the guarantee. So we stand behind the technology where we understand that as the data is coming in, we are always going to be duplicated. We are always going to compress it. There is technology within the product where we are offloading some of that to the outside the CPU. So it is not impacting the performance that the applications are going to see. So a data reduction by itself is not going to get enough performance by itself is not good enough. Both of them have to be together. Right. So, and that's what powers to brings to the table. >> Yeah. Thank you. So Richard, I'm interested. I mean, I remember the power store announcement, sort of saw it leading up to it. And one of the big thrusts from Dell was the way I phrase it is essentially trying to create a cloud-like experience on-prem. So really focused on simplicity. So my question to you is, let's start with just the deployment. You know, how complicated was it to install? What was that process like? How many clicks, I mean, not that you have to tell me how many clicks, but you know, what I'm asking is, is how difficult was it to get from zero to, you know, up and running? >> Well, we actually sat down with a very difficult challenge. We were in quite a difficult situation where we'd pretty much got off of a cliff in terms of IOPS performance. So the RFP was quite rapid. And then we needed to get which, whoever, which vendor was successful, we need to get that deployed rather rapidly and on the floor in our data center and server rooms, which we did. And it was very, very simplistic within three weeks of placing the order. We had that array in our server rack and we'd begun the migration that it was very simple to set up. And the management of that array has been, we we've seen say 40% reduction in terms of effort it took to be able to manage our storage because it is very self-contained, you know, even from a reporting perspective, the deployment, the migration was all very, very, very simplistic. And, you know, we we've done some work recently where we had to also do some work on the array and some other migrations that we were doing and the resilience came, came to, came to the forefront of where the whole architecture and no single point of failure enabled us to do some things that we needed to do quite rapidly because of the, the jole notes and the resilience within, within the unit and within the power store itself was considerable where we, we kept performance up. People also prioritize any discreet rebuilds, keeps the incoming ingest rates high and prioritizes that, you know, the workloads, which is really impressive, especially when we are moving so quickly with our technology. We don't really have much time to, you know, micromanage the estate. >> Can you, can you just repeat what you said on the percent reduction? I think I heard you cut out there a little bit, a percent reduction on, on, on management, on, on, on the labor side. >> So our lead storage engineer is estimated around 40% less management. >> Wow. Okay. So that's, that's good. So actually, I, I love this conversation because, you know, in the early the days of automation, people are like, ah, that's my job provisioning, LUNs. I'm really good at it. But I think people are realizing that it's actually not something that you want to be really good at. It's something that you want to eliminate. So it now maybe it's a, that, storage engineer got his or her nights and weekends back, uh, but, but what do they do now when they get that extra time, what do you, what do you put them on? You know, no more strategic initiatives or, you know, other, other tech things in the to-do list, what's that like? >> You know, any of my team, whether it's the storage leads or some of the infrastructure team that are also involved in engaged, cause you know, the organization, we have to be quite versatile as a team in our skillsets. We don't want to be doing those BAU mundane tasks. Even the storage engineer does not want to be, you know, allocating Luns and allocating storage to physical servers, VMs, et cetera. We want all of that to be automated. And the, you know, those engineers, are they working on some of the cutting edge things that we're trying to do with machine learning as a, as an example, which is much more interesting, it's what they want to be doing. Um, you know, that aides, the obvious things like retention interest and personal development, we don't want to be, you know, that base IT infrastructure management is, is, is not, not where any of the engineers wants to be. >> In terms of the decision to go with Dell power store. I, I, I'm definitely hearing there was a relationship. There was an existing relationship with Dell. I'm sure that played into it. And you, you mentioned a couple of times that RFP, so, so you kind of lined up various various vendors. What can you tell us about that in, in addition to the relationship, what was it that led you to power store? >> Uh, there were many things saying, you know, the relationship wasn't really part of this, even though I've mentioned the end user compute in any sets or anything that we're procuring, we want best of breed and best of set, but, and there were four vendors that were engaged in the RFP and it was down selected to, two, and that was done on the cost is definitely a driver. The technology, you know, is a big trust to us. We're a tech company. New technology to us is also fascinating, not only our own but also the, the storage guarantee, the simplicity, the resilience within, within the unit. Also the, the ability which was key to us because of what we're trying to do with our hybrid model and bring, bring back and repatreize some of the data as it were um, from the client, we needed that ability to, with ease, to be able to scale up and scale out, and the power store gave us that. >> When you say cost of, I want to dig into that price or, you know, the, the, the, the price tag or the, the cost. I mean, when you do the business case, and I wonder if we could add a little color to that. >> Yeah, the, the, there there's two elements to this, so there's not even the cost of the price tag, but then also cost of ownership and the comparisons that we were running against the other vendors, but also the comparisons that we were running from a CapEx investment against OPEX and what we have in the cloud, and also the performance and performance that we get from the cloud and our cloud storage and a resilience within that, and then also the initial price tag, and then comparing the CapEx investments to the OPEX were all elements that were, were key to us making our decision. And you know that there has to be some credit taken by the Dell account team and their relationship towards the final phrase of that RFP, you know, were key, initially, not at all, we were just looking for the best possible storage solution for ultra-leap. >> And to, to determine that on your end, was that like a feature, because it's sometimes fuzzy what the business impact is going to be like that 40% you mentioned, or the data reduction at nine to one, when there's a promise of four to one, did you, what did you do? Did you kind of do a feature function analysis and sort of line that up and, and say, okay, I'm going to map that to our business, our processes, our IT processes, and try to predict what the impact would be. Is that how you did it, or did you take a different approach? >> We did. So we did that, obviously between vendors as you'd expected in RFP, but then also mapping to how that would impact the business. And that that is not an easy process to go through. We've seen more gains, even comparing one vendor to another, some of that because of the technology, the terminology is very, very different and sometimes you have to bring that up a level and also gain a much more detailed understanding, which at times can be challenging, but we did a very like-for-like comparison and, and also lots of research, but you're quite right. The, the, the business analysis to what we needed. We had quite a good forecast and from my supplier stock and information data, and also our engineering and business and strategic roadmap, we were able to map those two together, not the easiest of experiences, not one that I want to repeat, but we got through it. >> Yeah, a little bit of art and science involved. Avishek, maybe you could talk about power store, what, you know, give us the commercial. What makes it different from other products in the market? Things like cloud IQ, maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Sure, so, so again, from a, a it's music to my ears, when Richard talks about the ease of deployment and the management, because there is a lot of focus on that. But even as I said earlier, from a manned technology perspective, a lot of goodness built in, in terms of being able to consolidate a customer's environment into, onto the platform. So that's more from a storage point of view that will give the best performance, give the best data reduction, storage efficiencies. Um, the second part, of course, the flexibility, the options that power store it gives to the customers in terms of sort of desegregating the storage and the compute aspects of it. So if, as a customer, I want to start with different points in terms of what our customer requirements are today, but going forward as requirements changed from a compute capacity perspective, you can use a scale up and scale out capabilities, and then the intelligence built in, right? So as you scale out your cluster, being able to move storage around right, as needed being able to do that non-disruptively. So instead of saying that Mr. Customer you're, you're storage is going to, you're at 90% capacity, being able to say that based on your historical trending, we expect you run out of capacity in six months, some small things like that. Right. And of course, if the, the dial home, the support assist capabilities that are enabled, cloud IQ brings a lot of intelligence to the table as well. In addition to that, as they mentioned earlier, there is apps on capability that gives another level of flexibility to the customers to integrate your storage infrastructure into a virtual environment. If the customer chooses to do that. And last but not the least, it's not just about the product right? So it's about the programs that we have put around it. Any anytime I'll create is a big differentiator for us, where it's an investment protection program for customers, where if they want to have the peace of mind, in terms of three months, nine months, three years down the line, if we come out with new technologies, being able to be upgrade to that non-disruptively is a big part of it as well. It's a peace of mind for the customers that, yes, I'm getting into the power store architecture today, but going forward, I am I'm protected from that point. So anytime I upgrade, it's a new business program that we put around leveraging the architectural benefits of power stool, whether your compute requirements, your storage requirements change you're, you're, you're covered from that point of view. So again, very quick a overview of, of what power store is, why it is different, and again, that's where that comes from. >> Thank you for that. Richard, are you, are you actively using cloud IQ? Do you get, what kind of value do you get from it? >> Not currently. However, we have, we have had plans to do that. The uptake and BCR, our internal workload has not allowed us to do that, but one of the other key reasons for selecting power source was the, the non-disruptive element, you know, with other SaaS products, other providers, and other issues that we have experienced. That was one, that was a, a key decision for us from a, a power store perspective. One of the other, you know, I would like to go back to the conversation slightly, in terms of performance, we are getting, getting now, you know, there's a 400% speed of improvement of publishing. We've got an 80% faster code coverage. So our firmware builds a 1300% quicker than they were previously and, and the time savings of the storage engineer and, you know, as a, as director of IT, I often asked for certain reports from, from the storage array, when we're working out for, um, storage forecast, performance forecast. And, you know, when we're coming close to product releases, code drops that we're trying to manage, the reporting or the power stories is impressive. Whereas previously my storage engineer would not be the, the most happiest of people when I would be trying to pull, you know, monthly and quarterly reports, et cetera. Whereas now it's, it's easy and we have live dashboards running, and we can easily extract that information. >> I love that, because, you know, so often we talk about the 40% reduction in IT, labor, uh, which, which, okay, that's cool. But then your CFO's going to say, yeah, but it's not like we're getting rid of people. We, you know, we're still spending that money and you, okay. They're getting you're now into soft dollars, but when you talk about 400%, 18%, 1300% of what you're talking about, business impact and that's telephone numbers to a CFO. So I love those metrics. Thank you for sharing. >> Yeah. But what would, they, obviously, in some of our dashboards when they visualize that they are very hard hitting, you know, the impact that you're quite right that the CFO does chase down, you know, the availability and the resource profile, however, we're on a huge upward trajectory. So having the right resilience and infrastructure in places is exactly what we need. And as I mentioned before, those engineers are all reallocated to much more interesting work. And, you know, the, the areas that will actually drive our business forward. >> Speaking of resilience, are you doing any replication? >> Not currently. However, there, uh, we've actually got a meeting regarding this today with some of that was a surprise that some of their storage specialists in a couple of hours time, actually, because that is a very high on the agenda for us to be able to replicate and have a high availability cluster and another potentially power store name. >> So I was going to ask you kind of where you want to take this thing. I'm hearing you, you're looking at cloud IQ, really try to exploit that. So you've got some headroom here in terms of the value that you can get out of this platform to, to do replication, faster recovery, et cetera, maybe protect against, you know, events. Any other things that you would identify as things you would either want from Dell or things that you'd like to see this platform direction you'd like to see it take in the future? >> Uh, yeah. We, we actually had some discussions recently and we are actively involved in some of the power store roadmap, which is, which is really good for us because we get visibility. And we also get to feed back to Dell on some of the features that we would like to see. So one of the things that we're discussing is a virtual kind of power store is what we would like to see. So some of that resilience would be really useful for us to be able to fail over quite rapidly and have live access to you are sick of data rather than potentially having hole sites. And we're looking at some of the Dell service offerings, which are quite impressive and is currently ticking. You know, we're very early in the, in the stages of the discovery, but there's quite a few boxes being ticked. Currently. >> Guys, we got to leave it there. I love this example of where you've got infrastructure, really connecting directly to a fast growth company, helping it scale, guys, thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate your insights. >> Thank you >> And thank you And thank you for watching this cube conversation. This is Dave Volante, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hello, everyone. And welcome back to the cubes Coverage of Del Tech World 2020. With me is Jeff Boudreau, the president general manager of Infrastructure Solutions group Deltek. Jeff, always good to see you, my friend. How you doing? >>Good. Good to see you. >>I wish we were hanging out a Sox game or a pat's game, but, uh, I guess this will dio But, you know, it was about a year ago when you took over leadership of I s G. I actually had way had that sort of brief conversation. You were in the room with Jeff Clark. I thought it was a great, great choice. How you doing? How you feeling Any sort of key moments the past 12 months that you you feel like sharing? >>Sure. So I first I want to say, I do remember that about a year ago. So thank you for reminding me. Yeah, it's, uh it's been a very interesting year, right? It's been it's been one year. It was in September was one year since I took over I s G. But I'm feeling great. So thank you for asking. I hope you're doing the same. And I'm really optimistic about where we are and where we're heading. Aziz, you know, it's been an extremely challenging year in a very unpredictable year, as we've all experienced. And I'd say for the, you know, the first part of the year, especially starting in March on I've been really focused on the health and safety of our, you know, the families, our customers and our team members of the team on a lot of it's been shifting, you know, in regards to helping our customers around, you know, work from home or education and learn from home. And, you know, during all this time, though, I'll tell you, as a team, we've accomplished a lot. There's a handful of things that I'm very proud of, you know, first and foremost, that states around the customer experience we have delivered on our best quality in our product. NPS scores in our entire history. So something I'm extremely proud of during this time around our innovation and innovation engine, we part of the entire portfolio which you're well aware of. We had nine launches in nine weeks back in that May in June. Timeframe. So something I'm really proud of the team on, uh, on. Then last, I'd say it's around the team and right, we shifted about 90% of our workforce from the office tow home, you know, from an engineering team. That could be, you know, 85% of my team is engineers and writing code. And so, you know, people were concerned about that. But we didn't skip a beat, so, you know, pretty impressed by the team and what they've done there. So, you know, the strategy remains unchanged. Uh, you know, we're focused on our customers integrating across the entire portfolio and the businesses like VM ware and really focused on getting share. So despite all the uncertainty in the market, I'm pretty pleased with the team and everything that's been going on. So uh, yeah, it's it's been it's been an interesting year, but it's really great. I'm really optimistic about what we have in front of us. >>Yeah, I mean, there's not much you could do a control about the macro condition on it, you know it. Z dealt to us and we have to deal with it. I mean, in your space. It's the sort of countervailing things here one is. Look, you're not selling laptops and endpoint security. That's not your business right in the data center. Eso. But the flip side of that is you mentioned your portfolio refresh. You know, things like Power Store. You got product cycles now kicking in. So that could be, you know, a buffer. What are you seeing with Power Store and what's the uptake look like? They're >>sure. Well, specifically, let me take a step back and the regards the portfolio. So first, you know, the portfolio itself is a direct reflection in the feedback from all our partners and our customers over the last couple of years on Day two, ramp up that innovation. I spent a lot of time in the last few years simplifying under the power brands, which you're well aware of, right? So we had a lot of for a legacy EMC and Legacy dollars. Really? How do we simplify under a set of brands really over delivering innovation on a fewer set of products that really accelerating in exceeding customer needs? And we did that across the board. So from power edge servers, you know, power Max, the high end storage, the Powerball, all that we didn't hear one. And just most recently. And, you know, it's part of the big launches. We had power scale. We have power flex for software to find. And, of course, the new flagship offer for the mid range, which is power store. Um, Specifically, the policy of the momentum has been building since our launch back in May. And the feedback from our partners and our customers has been fantastic. And we've had a lot of big wins against, you know, a lot of a lot of our core competitors. A couple examples one is Arrow Electronics SAA, Fortune 500 Global Elektronik supplier. They leverage power Store to provide, you know, basically both, you know, enterprise computing and storage needs for their for their broader bases around the world on there, really taking advantage of the 41 data reduction, really helping them simplify their capacity planning and really improve operational efficiencies specifically without impacting performance. So it's it's one. We're given the data reductions, but there's no impact on performance, which is a huge value proffer for arrow another big customers tickets and write a global law firm on their reporting to us that over 90 they've had a 90% reduction in their rack space, and they've had over five times two performance over a core competitors storage systems azi. They've deployed power store around the world, really, and it's really been helping them. Thio easily migrate workloads across, so the feedback from the customers and partners has been extremely positive. Um, there really citing benefits around the architecture, the flexibility architecture around the micro services, the containers they're loving, the D M or integration. They're loving the height of the predictable data reduction capabilities in line with in line performance or no performance penalties with data efficiencies, the workload support, I'd say the other big things around the anytime upgrades is another big thing that customers we're really talking about so very excited and optimistic in regards as we continue to re empower store the second half of the year into next year really is the full full year for power store. >>So can I ask you about that? That in line data reduction with no performance hit is that new ipe? I mean, you're not doing some kind of batch data reduction, right? >>No, it's It's new, I p. It's all patented. We've actually done a lot of work in regards to our technologies. There's some of the things we talk about GPS and deep use and smart Knicks and things like that. We've used some offload engines to help with that. So between the software and the hardware, we've had leverage new I. P. So we can actually provide that predictable data reduction. But right with the performance customers need, So we're not gonna have a trade off in regards. You get more efficiencies and less performance or more performance and less efficiency. >>That's interesting. Yeah, when I talked to the chip guys, they talk about this sort of the storage offloads and other offloads we're seeing. These alternative processors really start to hit the market videos. The obvious one. But you're seeing others. Aziz. Well, you're really it sounds like you're taking advantage of that. >>Yeah, it's a huge benefit. I mean, we should, you know, with our partners, if it's Intel's and in videos and folks like that broad comes, it's really leveraging the great innovation that they do, plus our innovation. So if you know the sum of the parts, can you know equal Mauritz a benefit to our customers in the other day? That's what it's all about. >>So it sounds like Cove. It hasn't changed your strategy. I was talking toe Dennis Hoffman and he was saying, Look, you know, fundamentally, we're executing on the same strategy. You know, tactically, there's things that we do differently. But what's your summarize your strategy coming in tow 2021. You know, we're still early in this decade. What are you seeing is the trends that you're trying to take advantage of? What do you excited about? Maybe some things that keep you up at night? >>Yeah, so I'd say, you know, I'll stay with what Dennis said. You know, it's our strategy is not changing its a company. You probably got that from Michael and from job, obviously, Dennis just recently. But for me, it's a two pronged approach. One's all about winning the consolidation in the core infrastructure markets that we could just paid in today. So I think Service Storage Network, we're already clear leader across all those segments that we serve in our you know, we'll continue to innovate within our existing product categories. And you saw that with the nine launches in the nine weeks in my point on that one is we're gonna always make sure that we have best debris offers. If it's a three tier, two tier or converge or hyper converged offer, we wanna make sure that we serve that and have the best innovation possible. In addition to that, though, the secondary piece of the strategy really is around. How do we differentiate value across or innovating across I S G? You know, Dell Technologies and even the broader ecosystems and some of the examples I'll give you right now that we're doing is if you think about innovating across icy, that's all about providing improved customer experience, a set of solutions and offers that really helped simplify customer operations, right? And really give them better T CEOs or better. S L. A. An example of something like that's cloud like it's a SAS based off of that we have. That really helps provide great insights and telemetry to our customers. That helps them simplify their I T operations, and it's a major step forward towards, you know, autonomous infrastructure which is really what they're asking for. Customers of a very happy with the work we've done around Day one, you know, faster, time to value. But now it's like Day two and beyond. How do you really helped me Kinda accelerate the operations and really take that away from a three other big pieces innovating across all technologies. And you know, we do this with VM Ware now live today, and that's just writing. So things like VX rail is an example where we work together and where the clear leader in H C I. Things like Delta Cloud Uh, when we built in V M V C F A, B, M or cloud foundation in Tan Xue delivering an industry leading hybrid cloud platform just recently a VM world. I'm sure you heard about it, but Project Monterey was just announced, and that's an effort we're doing with VM Ware and some other partners. They're really about the next generation of infrastructure. Um, you know, I guess taking it up a notch out of the infrastructure and I've g phase, you know, some of the areas that we're gonna be looking at the end to end solutions to help our customers around six key areas. I'm sure John Rose talking about the past, but things like cloud Edge five g A i m l data management security. So those will be the big things. You'll see us lean into a Z strategies consistent. Some big themes that you'll see us lean into going into next year. >>Yeah, I mean, it is consistent, right? You guys have always tried to ride the waves, vector your portfolio into those waves and add value. I'm particularly impressed with your focus on customer experience, and I think that's a huge deal. You know, in the past, a lot of companies yours included your predecessor. You see, Hey, throwing so many products at me, I can't I don't understand the portfolio. So I mean, focusing on that I think is huge right now because people want that experience, you know, to be mawr cloudlike. And that's that's what you got to deliver. What about any news from from Dell Tech world? Any any announcements that you you wanna highlight that we could talk about? >>Sure. And actually, just touching back on the point you had no about the simplification that is a major 10 of my in regards the organization. So there's three key components that I drive once around customer focus, and that's keeping customers first and foremost. And everything we do to is around axillary that innovation. Engine three is really bringing everything together as one team. So we provide a better outcome to our customers. You know, in that simplification after that you talk about is court toe what we're driving. So I want to do less things, I guess better in the notion of how we do that. What that means to me is, as I make decisions that want to move away from other technologies and really leverage our best of breed type shared type, that's technology. I p people I p I can, you know, e can exceed customer needs in those markets that were serving. So it's actually allows me to x Sorry, my innovation engine, because I shift more and more resource is onto the newer stock now for Del Tech world. Yes, We got some cool stuff coming. You probably heard about a few of them. Uh, we're gonna be announcing a project project Apex. Hopefully you've been briefed on that already. This isn't new news or I'll be in trouble. But that's really around. Our strategy about delivering, simple, consistent as a service experiences for our customers bringing together are dealt technology as a service offering and our cloud strategy together. Onda also our technology offerings in our go to market all under a single unified effort, which Ellison do would be leading. Um, you know, on behalf of our executive leadership team s, that's one big area. And there is also another big one that I'll talk about a sui expand our as a service offers. And we think there's a big power to that in regards to our Dell Technologies. Cloud console solving will be launching a new cloud console that will provide uniformed experience across all the resources and give users and ability toe instantly managed every aspect of their cloud journey with just a few clicks. So going back to your broader point, it's all about simplicity. >>Yeah, we definitely all over Apex. That's something I wanted to ask you about this notion of as a service, really requiring it could have a new mindset, certainly from a pricing and how you talk about the customer experience that it's a whole new customer experience. Your you're basically giving them access. Thio What I would consider more of a platform on giving them some greater flexibility. Yeah, there's some constraints in there, but of course, you know the physical only put so much capacity and before him. But the idea of being ableto dial up, dial down within certain commitments is, I think, a powerful one. How does it change the way in which you you think about how you go about developing products just in terms of you know, this AP economy Infrastructure is code. How how you converse about those products internally and externally. How would you see that shaking >>out Dave? That's an awesome question. And it's actually for its front center. For everything we do, obviously, customers one choice and flexibility what they do. And to your point as we evolved warm or as a service, no specific product and product brands and logos on probably the way of the future. It's the services. It's the experience that you provide in regards to how we do that. So if you think about me, you know, in in infrastructure making infrastructure as a service, you really want to define what that customer experiences. That s L. A. That they're trying toe realize. And then how do we make sure that we build the right solutions? Products feature functions to enable that a law that goes back to the core engineering stuff that we need to dio right now, a lot of that stuff is about making sure that we have the right things around. If it's around developer community. If it's around AP rich, it's around. SdK is it's all about how do we leverage if it's internal source or external open source, if you will. It's regards to How do we do that? No. A thing that I think we all you know what you're well aware but we ought to keep in mind is that the cloud native applications are really relevant. Toe both the on premises, wealthy off premise. So think about things around portability reusability. You know, those are some great examples of just kind of how we think about this as we go forward. But those modern applications were required modern infrastructure, and regardless of how that infrastructure is abstracted now, just think about things like this. Aggregation or compose ability or Internet based computing. It's just it's a huge trend that we have to make sure we're thinking of. So is we. We just aggregate between the physical layers to the software layers and how we provide that to a service that could be think of a modern container based asset that could be repurposed. Either could be on a purpose built thing. It could be deployed in a converge or hyper converged. Or it could be two points a software feature in a cloud. Now, that's really how we're thinking about that, regards that we go forward. So we're talking about building modern assets or components That could be you right once we used many type model, and we can deploy that wherever you want because of some of the abstraction of desegregation that we're gonna do. >>E could see customers in the in the near term saying, I don't care so much about the product. I want the fast one all right with the cheaper one e. >>It's kind of what you talking about, that I talked about the ways. If you think about that regards, you know, maybe it's on a specific brand or portfolio. You look into and you say, Hey, what's the service level that I'd wanted to your point like Hey, for compute or for storage, it's really gonna end up being the specific S l A. And that's around performance or Leighton see, or cost or resiliency they want. They want that experience in that that you know, And that's why they're gonna be looking for the end of the end state. That's what we have to deliver is an engineering. >>So there's an opportunity here for you guys that I wonder if you could comment on. And that's the storage admin E. M. C essentially created. You know, you get this army of people that you know pretty good of provisioning lungs, although that's not really that's a great career path for folks. But program ability is, and this notion of infrastructure is code as you as you make your systems more programmable. Is there a skill set opportunity to take that army of constituents that you guys helped train and grow and over their careers and bring them along into sort of the next decade? This new era? >>I think the the easy answer is yes, I obviously that's a hard thing to do and you go forward. But I think embracing the change in the evolution of change, I think is a great opportunity. And I think there is e mean if you look step back and you think about data management, right? And you think about all the you know all data is not created equal and you know, and it has a life cycle, if you will. And so if it's on edge to Korda, Cloward, depending think about data vaults and data mobility and all that stuff. There's gonna be a bunch of different personas and people touching data along the way. I think the I T advance and the storage admin. They're just one of those personas that we have to help serve and way talk about How do we make them heroes, if you will, in regards to their broader environment. So if they're providing, if they evolve and really helped provide a modern infrastructure that really enables, you know infrastructure is a code or infrastructure as a service, they become a nightie hero, if you will for the rest of team. So I think there's a huge opportunity for them to evolve as the technology evolves. >>Yeah, you talked about you know, your families, your employees, your team s o. You obviously focused on them. You got your products going hitting all the marks. How are you spending your time these days? >>Thes days right now? Well, we're in. We're in our cycle for fiscal 22 planning. Right? And right now, a lot of that's above the specific markets were serving. It's gonna be about the strategy and making sure that we have people focused on those things. So it really comes back to some of the strategy tents were driving for next year. Now, as I said, our focus big time. Well, I guess for the for this year is one is consolidation of the core markets. Major focus for May 2 is going to be around winning in storage, and I want to be very specific. It's winning midrange storage. And that was one of the big reasons why Power Store came. That's gonna be a big focus on Bennett's really making sure that we're delivering on the as a service stuff that we just talked about in regards to all the technology innovation that's required to really provide the customer experience. And then, lastly, it's making sure that we take advantage of some of these growth factors. So you're going to see a dentist. Probably talked a lot about Telco, but telco on edge and as a service and cloud those things, they're just gonna be key to everything I do. So if you think about from poor infrastructure to some of these emerging opportunities Z, I'm spending all my time. >>Well, it's a It's a big business and a really important one for Fidel. Jeff Boudreau. Thanks so much for coming back in the Cube. Really a pleasure seeing you. I hope we can see each other face to face soon. >>You too. Thank you for having me. >>You're very welcome. And thank you for watching everybody keep it right there. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. Our continuing coverage of Del Tech World 2020. We'll be right back right after this short break

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to You by Dell Technologies Everyone welcome back to the cubes Coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience I'm John for your host of the Cube Cube. Virtual. We're not in person this year were remote We're doing The interviews were not face to face. So thanks for watching two great guests to talk about the Dell Technology Storage and data protection for the VM Ware environments got Caitlin Gordon, vice President, product management, Dale Technologies and Leak as well. Vice president of Cloud Platform Business Unit, also known as CPB. You for VM where Lee and Cable in Great to see you both. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks for having me >>s So what? What a crazy year. We're not in person. Usually the the events Awesome. VM world recently went on and then you guys have the same situation role online now and it's >>really kind >>of highlighted the customer environments of cloud needed. But I've been saying this on all my reports and all the Cube interviews that the executives who are in charge and now saying, Look at our modern APS have to be cloud native because the obvious benefits are there and container ization has become mainstream. But yet I d c still forecast about 15% of enterprises are still fully containing rise, with a huge amount of growth coming around the corner. So you're seeing this mature market where containers are validated, they're being put into production. People are now moving hard core with containers. And you have the kubernetes. I gotta ask you, Li, I'm Caitlin. What does this mean for the customers? Are they getting harder pressure points to do things faster? What does it all mean for the customer? >>Yeah, I'll start. Only you can add to it. I mean, I think what we see is the trends that were already happening of now. Accelerated and modern APs were kind of the top of the priority list, but now it has is really expedited. But at the same time, traditional applications haven't gone anywhere. So there's this dichotomy that a lot of I t is dealing with of head Oh, accelerate those modern APs while also streamlining and simplifying my environment for my traditional laps. And not only do I need to the right infrastructure to have that for production workloads, modern, traditional, but also form a data protection standpoint. How to ensure that those are all secure and do all of that in a way that simplifies life for whether it's the data protection admin, the BM admin or even the developer right, all of the different folks involved and needing to make all of their lives simpler has just really exacerbated a challenge and really given us a lot of opportunity to try to solve that for customers together. >>Lee, What's your take on the landscape out there? >>Yeah, I'd emphasized that speed really matters today, right? That we're really looking at. How do you go and deploy new applications faster, right? New ways to get engaged with customers. I mean, it's not happening physically anymore. So how is it happening while it's happening largely through applications? And so as you now basically develop new applications more quickly, containers are a way to speed the pace of applications, and the theme that you know we continue to drive home is that that means infrastructure has to respond more quickly, and it means that for the teams that are managing infrastructure, it really helps if you have a consistent model where you can get mawr done with the same teams and leverage all the experience you have, as well as the security and infrastructure resiliency model that we're bringing together to our customers. >>This brings up the real question, and if this comes up, kind of you see more of the executive level like we need to have a modern application direction. They'll go. Everyone goes, Yeah, of course. Thumbs up. Then they go Try to make that a reality because even though Dev ops and Infrastructures Code is still the viable path, it's hard. It's like Caitlin, we're talking about EJ to core Data center hybrid the multi cloud. There's a lot going on under the hood there. So you guys are doing a lot of stuff together. VM Ware and Dell Technologies. What's the solution for customers? They gotta move faster. As lead pointed out, Caitlin, how are you guys working together to make that infrastructure more modern, faster, programmable and reliable, >>and make it simpler for the customers right? I think it really comes down to one of the most powerful things about the partnership is that from the dull technology standpoint, we have really a plethora of different solutions to support your VM or environment. Whether it's a three tier architecture with Power Edge power store or leveraging the X rail. Or very commonly, it's gonna be both of those. You have the right infrastructure to support the production workloads and have a consistent operating model between them leveraging devils and primary storage side and all the integrations we have with the ex rail. And then we have with power, protect data manager Great integrations in some recent enhancements that make that even better and are now able to protect Tan Xue, protect the VCF management domain and not only have the storage, but also the protection for that environment. But do it in a way that supports what the V A madman needs and also gives that consistent protection, consistent storage, consistent operating model for the rest of I T. And at the same time you're enabling the developers to move faster. >>Lee, You guys have been doing a lot of joint development, and we've been covering a lot of the news VM world. Ah, lot of joint engineering, a lot of joint integrations. You guys have been collaborating with Dell Technologies for a long time. Also, the relationship. Where is that Today? Can you expand on that a little bit and take a minute to explain the joint >>collaboration? I'll start with the fact that you know, good marketing is really easy when you have great engineering. And so the work that we're doing together, like between our companies. Now we have a lot to talk about, right? E mean the work scaling mentioned right around Devil's integration, for example, on power Max right on da npower store, right? I mean, you start looking at the integration work that we're doing together. It means that customers are getting the benefits of the joint integration work and testing right that comes and so you're guaranteed out of the box toe work. Also, you know, don't forget that contain owners and all of the things we're doing around containers. It's basically designed thio accommodate the fact that containers air spun up more quickly or destroyed more quickly, their shared across the hybrid cloud more frequently and without an inherent security model and built in data protection. It's really hard to go and see how you can deploy these with the enterprise resilience that's demanded at enterprise scale. And so that's what we're doing together, right? And, you know, we build great software, Uh, but without great hardware partnerships, it's one hand clapping, right. It's about getting our teams together, right? That really makes it sing at the customer level. >>You know, I think that's a really example of the business. Performance results have come in Vienna, where you guys were doing a great job. Go way back to the years ago when Pat and Raghu we're talking with from Amazon and all. Since then, it's been joint development, join integrations, and that's a great business model for you. And so, Caitlyn, I wanna get back to you. Because at VMRO we covered Project Monterey, the new initiative for the anywhere but a year before they had Project Pacific that came toe life with product results. Tan Xue specifically, you guys have the power protect data manager that we talked about in the summer, but now for Tan Xue supported and Tan Xue environments that super relevant, can you share any updates on your end on the power protect Data Manager and Tan Xue? >>Yeah, I li I couldn't agree more that great engineering mix our jobs a lot more fun and a whole lot easier. So we've been really lucky. And the partnership we've had has really never been stronger. So yeah, but the most recent release of power protect Data Manager introduces the support for that tan xue protection. It also introduces really important things like storage, storage based policy management. So in in biosphere, when you set up a storage policy, you have data protection as part of that and you have the integration with power protect data Manager. So you're able to automatically protect new VM that are created by that storage policy of being applied. >>But >>at the same time, it's also being tracked in power. Protect Data Manager. So you have that consistency across enabling your vitamins and enabling your data protection your i t. Team. To keep track of that, we also have ah tech preview that we did at VM World about how we're working as from Dell technology standpoint to innovate around. How do you protect some of these VMS that are so large and so mission critical that you need to be able to protect them in a new and innovative way that doesn't disrupt the business. And we did a tech preview of that, and it's something you'll hear more about from us, too. But it's PM traditionally would be in this category of unprotected ble because of the impact it could have on the environment and how we're really looking to do that in a more efficient and intelligent way. So we can actually protect those be EMS. And there's there's really a whole lot more. When you talk about objects, scale and everything else that we've done, it's really exciting. And you don't think Lee and I have ever talked as much as we do now. Ah, and it's been a lot of a lot of fun. >>It's been great following both of you guys on the keep interviews over the years. The success in the vision We had early conversations about what the plans where it's kind of all playing out. So I want to congratulate both of you of VM Ware Adele Technology. So good job going forward. The collaboration. I want to get to that in a second, you'll into it. But Caitlin Lee, I want to get your thoughts because one of the big themes this year besides covert and all the issues that that's highlighting. But in the cloud world, automation has been the number one conversation we've been hearing, and with that you got machine learning all the tech around that as you abstract away. The complexity of the infrastructure to make the modern APS automation has been great. The business cross connect is everything is a service we're seeing. This is the big wave coming. Could you guys share your vision on how all this stuff you mentioned V balls and all objects scale all these things? There's a >>lot of >>plumbing underneath and a lot of tooling, a lot of part piece parts. If that gets programmable, >>automation >>kicks in, which then enables everything is the service because you guys both share your vision of what that means in terms of what's going to change and what would it impact the customer? >>Yeah, and it's very relevant for this week, right? Dell Technologies world. That's a big part of what we've announced this week in our commitment to really bringing our portfolio as a service, and it's really interesting, especially for folks like Lee and I, who have been doing kind of mawr product marking and talking about speeds and feeds and thinking about how you make the product life simpler. And how do you automate that? Have the intelligence built in things like Biaro have been such an important part of that, especially with power store coming to market. But if you think about where that leads us, actually changes everything, which is when you have everything as a service and we're really delivering outcomes to our customers and no longer products. That automation is actually just a important and maybe even more important. But it's not the end user that cares about it directly is actually us, because as Dell Technologies, we become the ones managing that infrastructure, owning that infrastructure and the more automation we can bring in, the more intelligence we can build them for ourselves. The more insights we can give to our customers, the better that service can become. And it's really a flip from how we've always been thinking about and really rolling out automation. It's not actually about enabling our end users to do anything. It's actually about enabling them to not worry about any of it, but enable our own organization to support their outcomes better. So it really changes everything. >>Lee, what's your thoughts on this? Everything you've got, V Sphere V Center. You've got all the storage you got all the back up. All this stuff has to be automated. Makes sense. But as a service, how does that impact your world? >>You know, it really does. When you think about the VMRO Cloud Foundation, right, which is the integration of all of our V sphere with Visa. And with these, you know, our NSX products that will be realized. Management suite. Tom Zoo now, right, All of this pulled together. One of things that's interesting is when you go to the public cloud, we have some experience now where we always deliver that full stack together. And what that does is it frees up customers. Thio, go on, focus on the applications, I think and stop looking down the infrastructure. Start looking up at the APS. And so we're offering and bringing that same level of experience to the on premises data centers. And now bridging that across the hybrid cloud that all of a sudden gives you this sense that Hey, I'm future ready. No, matter where I am today. If I'm thinking about the hybrid cloud, I could go on move there, right. And with our partnership with Dell Technologies, there's such a great opportunity to bridge that uniquely, by the way across all of my on premises infrastructure, including common policy based management, back into storage through RV Valls efforts, right and then back in through objects scale right into objects based, uh, applications and through our DP efforts to data protection efforts, then back into, like, date full data protection. And so what you get now is we're helping customers realize that I got this. I could take new Cooper navies orchestrated applications and I could make them work and do it with the same operational model that I have today. Start spending more time on the applications, less time, basically configuring and managing underlying infrastructure. >>Caitlin you mentioned that earlier at the top of the segment, ease of use, making it easier, simpler, great stuff on the on on the future. Lee, I gotta ask you about Project Monterey. We did a lot of coverage on VM World on silicon angle in the Cube. I love how this comes out. It's always, You know, the brain trust that VM Ware lays out the future, they fill it in throughout the year, expect to see some meat on the bone there. But what is that gonna do from for new capabilities and how with Dell Technologies? Because, um, it's end to end, right this Michael Dell and I talked, I think, two years ago, a Dell Tech world. And then last year, he hit the point home hard and to end with Dell Technologies. It kind of feels like it's gonna be a good fit. Could you share how that Monterey project fits in with Dell Technologies? >>Yeah. We're so pleased to be showing this together with Dell Technologies at the VM World to showcase this new idea that you could basically go on, start offloading CPUs and using smart knicks as a way to basically now provide, um or let's call it a, You know, a architecture that allows you to, uh, be responsive to new application needs. So let me talk a little bit about that. So when we opened up Tansu, right, we got this complete inflow pouring of new container base kubernetes orchestrated APS. So what? We found was, Hey, they're driving a lot of CPU needs their driving a lot of scale out security needs for things like distributed firewalls. And so we started looking at this, and what's clear is we need to basically use the CPU very judiciously, So it's basically reserved for the APS. And so what we're doing now is we're basically saying there's an opportunity for us to go in, offload the CPU for things that look more like infrastructure, including S X, I and other things. And at the same time, then we could go and work together with Dell Technologies to be the deployment vehicle. And so, just like Project Pacific, which was going broad, if you will, this project moderate, which is going deep like the canyon, John not far from here, um is, you know, a source of all new discovery right where we'll be working together and over time, just like the Project Pacific name faded to black and became product Tan Xue vcf with Tom juvie sphere. With Hangzhou, we'll see that Project Monterey will evolve into new products coming together with Dell Technologies. >>Caitlin, can you elaborate on Take a min, explain the product how this renders into products because I can also imagine just the benefits just from a security standpoint. Efficiency. If the platform, um, there's a range of things, could you take a minute to >>explain the >>impact on products? >>Yeah, I think you'll hear a lot more about it, but we're obviously excited to be partners on this is Well, and I think it's It's just another example of the more intelligent the infrastructure can become than the rest of the entire I T organization can run more efficiently and that that can come in the form of the A. I built into power, Max, that can come in the form of the evils that we have both in Power Max and Power Store that can come in the form of even just the fact that we have now built a fully containerized S three compatible objects or platform called objects scale which we have no in early access. Um, that can run on the V sand data persistence platform, and it just gives you the ability to leverage this all of the right technology. And we can continue to really partner on that. I think Project Monterey really opens up even more opportunities to do that, and you'll certainly hear more from us on that in the future. >>I >>mean, you got compression, you got encryption. A lot of benefits across the board. Great to have you guys both on and your graduation. The great event. Final question for both of you, talk about this has been a crazy year. We're not face to face, so everything will be online. What should customers and partners and people watching know about the relationship between VM Ware and Dell Technologies this year? What's the big message to take away? What should people walk away with and and think about? >>I think it's It's never been stronger than ever, uh, than it's been than it is right now. We have never had >>more >>breath and more depth of integration. I think that the partnership on the engineering level, on the product management level on the marketing level, we have really never been in a better place. And you know what? What? My team is really enjoyed with VM world season and you're coming up on Deltek. World season is we've really enjoyed the fact that we've had so much richness >>of >>that integration to talk >>about, and >>we also know there's even more coming. So I, you know, from from my standpoint, if we really feel it and probably the best and most rewarding time we hear about that, is when we bring new things into market, we hear that back. And when Power Store came into the market and over the past few right kind of first months in market, one of the most resounding feedback that has come out as one of the most differentiated parts is that it? It's so incredibly integrated with VM ware. But we've even gotten questions from analysts asking, you know, did you purposely make it feel like you are really working similarly to a B M or environment? And you know what? That just shows how closely we have been working as organizations is that it comes a very seamless experience for our customers. >>Lee Final Word. >>What >>should people walk away with this year on the relationship between Be and we're in Dell Technologies? >>Well, I think the best partnerships right are ones that are customer driven. And what you're finding here is customers. They're actually encouraging us, right? We're doing a lot of three way meetings now, right where customers like, Hey, tell me how you're going to go involved this. How do I How do I basically modernized right and preserve my existing investment, perhaps Or, you know, update here, Or how do I grow like customers have really complex individual situations. And what you confined right is that we're helping jointly not, you know, just simply with the engineering side, which is awesome, but also with the idea that we're helping customers go on deploy responsibly in a time where it's very difficult to plan. And so if you come to us, we can help you jointly plan for the future in uncertain times and make sure that you're gonna be successful. And that's just a great feeling when you're a customer looking at, How do you deploy going forward in this? You know, with the amount of pace of change that we've got, >>I want to congratulate. Both of you have been following you guys. Success has been proven out on the business results and also the products and the enablement that you guys are providing customers been great. Thanks for coming on. Great to see both of you have a great event. Thanks for. Come on. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure. >>Okay, I'm John for your here with the Cube. Covering Del Technology Worlds Digital experience 2020 The Cube Virtual. >>Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies world, digital experience, brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE coverage of Dell Technologies world digital experience. Happy to welcome to the program. First we have a first time guest Akanksha Mehrotra, she's the Vice President of Marketing with Dell Technologies. Joining us one of our CUBE alumni, Caitlin Gordon, she's the Vice President of Product Marketing, also with Dell Technologies. Caitlin, welcome back, Akanksha welcome to the program. >> Thank you Stu, happy to be here. >> Alright, so one of the big models we've been talking about for the last few years is a change in how customers acquire things, big thing we've talked about, for many years, this shift from CAPEX to OPEX. How cloud is impacting everything Jeff Clarke in the keynote was talking about, it's the Dell Technologies on demand, DTOD, I guess is the, four letter acronym we use Akansha help us understand a little bit from your standpoint, what is it? Why is it important to your customers? >> Yeah, so Stu, as soon as you as you heard, as part of the keynote, from from Jeff and others earlier today, we've been working really hard to bring the benefits of on demand IT to our customers, in private cloud, public cloud and edge. And certainly this year, especially, we've seen a lot of interest in this, COVID have catalyzed customer interest in flexible consumption in as a service. As we talk with our customers and partners, we hear this almost daily, it's required a level of agility that candidly traditional CAPEX based models simply haven't been able to provide, I mean, imagine taking your workforce remote over the weekend, and the stress that puts on your infrastructure. And so I think that's kind of forced IT to consider some of these alternatives. Another factor has also been, companies have been wanting to preserve capital, right, and avoid large cash outlays and having this type of flexibility and being able to pay for infrastructure, as you're using it, it gives them a way to do that. So I mean, those are some of the customer drivers that we've seen. Last year at Dell Tech Summit, around the this time last year, actually, in November timeframe, we introduced Dell Technologies on demand as our umbrella program for a flexible consumption and as a service solutions. And really what it what it seeks to do is make it easier for customers to get the simplicity and flexibility of cloud, along with the performance and security of on-premises infrastructure. So it's giving them a range of consumption models that include both payment option as well as services that they can apply on any one of the products in our portfolio from end user devices to core data center infrastructure to hybrid cloud solutions. And we've announced that last year, one of the things that you heard about today, and that we're announcing over this event is that we're continually looking to make it easier and simpler for our customers with various turnkey offerings and simpler offerings for them, given the interest that we've seen. >> Yeah, I want to key off of, you mentioned the impact of COVID-19. And for your customers, it's something we've definitely seen that the promise of cloud always has been to be highly flexible, we can scale up, we can scale down. We know that some services out there aren't always as flexible as we might hope. There's certain SaaS solutions, where you're signing up for a multi year offering and even for the cloud, I might lock in some savings by buying something in bulk. So help us understand, what are the benefits that your customer sees, the savings that they get and is this truly cloud flexible, which means I can burst up and scale as I need. And I can it reached the point, oh, hey, I need half the capacity for the next six months. Can I do that? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Stu we actually commissioned IBC to talk to a few of our customers. So let me maybe share some of the benefits that they saw in broad terms, and then I can maybe share a specific example of what a particular customer saw. So we had IDC talk to several of the customers using Dell Technologies on demand models, various GIOS, and various sort of sizes. And what they found was that on average, they saw about a 23%, lower cost of storage operations per year, which is great, right? Lower cost of operations is always great. IT is always looking for those efficiencies, especially, in the current environment, but that's not all. I think that's just sort of part of the story. What they also shared with us is that, these types of models were able to help them become much more agile in how they work and change how they work. And what they found was that they saw 54% fewer incidents of downtime and they were 92% faster in their ability to deploy storage capacity, because they had that capacity in their data center available ready for that spike when their business saw it. ` So those are just some of the broad examples of what our customers have seen. Another specific example that I would would share with you is a large multinational institution, financial services company, we've been working with them for years to service their, enterprise scale, private cloud. And then more recently, they had us also, manage their storage as a service managed utility. And they've seen phenomenal results, they've been able to get 50% more compute power at 8%, lower cost, and 90% faster or reduce time and provisioning data. It's all about the yes, it's about the cost savings but really, it's about the agility that the business gets, right. And as you started out, right, with COVID, they really needed that agility and that flexibility and having these models available, ready to spike, ready to go down, right, have been able to provide that. >> Yeah, I think another thing we've seen is, people rush to cloud because it promised that agility, and we've had those conversations before is, there's a reality of what that means, which it might not be the resiliency you're looking for, it also might not actually be as simple as he thought it might be. And we're seeing some of that come back on-prem, whether you need resiliency or performance or security, or you don't want to be really locked into a specific public cloud but you still want to have that agility in the benefits of really running your data center in a service oriented model. And that trend has been picking up over the past couple years. And as we've already said a couple times today, we've seen that accelerate, but also, we starting to see more customers ask for it. It's not just the big and more strategic and the aggressive customers that are looking for this more and more customers are kind of seeing that this is the end game and that's kind of leads into where we're going, which is, how do we make this more accessible to others? >> Well, Caitlin, you're using one of one of my punch lines that I've used for a number of years now if remember, when we thought that cloud was inexpensive and easy to use, it's not. And if we look at what customers are doing, it's a hybrid model. They're deploying in multiple environments, we're seeing the public cloud look more like the enterprise, the enterprise look more like, the public cloud. So these offerings have, OPEX flexibility and the like, make a whole lot of sense. So you've said that, you've seen a lot of growth, especially this year, any metrics you can give us on, adoption, love the one customer example, in the financial space, anything else to kind of paint the picture as to, how prevalent this is becoming. >> Yeah, maybe I'll get started. So, we've seen nearly 50%, year over year growth in the customer base or our most recent quarter, and it's growing, we've seen over 500% increase, year on year in signed contracts, customer demand in these types of models has caused us to expand our offerings to into countries like Brazil, Chile, Colombia, India, and China. I mean, we already offered about 50 plus countries and along with our partner, network and even more, so, I mean, those are just some of the data points around business traction. In the models that we have another proof point that I could point you to is that, in April, we include, we announced a payment flexibility program, which gave our customers a number of promotions and options to extend this flexibility into, across our portfolio and into other parts of our businesses. And just recently, about a month ago, we extended that, and we've seen really good traction in that as well. So I think overall, like you said there's aspects about public cloud that customers really like, and they tell us, hey, I want to be able to pay as I go, I want to be able to extend and contract the infrastructure as I'm using it. I want a simple management experience. But then as Caitlin said, they realize that Oh, but I don't want to, pay for the refactoring and then the egress and the ingress charges and some of my workloads are better off on premises for performance, locality, security, compliance reasons, right. And therein lies the promise of as a service for on-prem infrastructure, 'cause really, I keep looking for the best of both worlds. And this gives you that right you can use the consumption models to grow and shrink as you needed, you can us the payment models to only pay for what you're using and along with our partner network, you can have in the location that you want so you can sort of have your cake and eat it too. >> Yeah, and I would just add on to that is that more and more of the conversation is both about how can I consume that more as a service and pay for just what I'm using? But also, how can I spend less time maybe zero time and energy actually managing that infrastructure? And how can I then allocate the time energy resources into running my business and investing in more strategic things? So becomes both an important financial conversation but even more so a conversation about how IT can empower the business, which really just changes what we're able to do for customers. So it's an exciting kind of transition to see this really evolve into really not talking about products anymore, and helping our customers have all their business. >> Well, Caitlin, that's a really interesting point, I want you to talk to us a little bit about the Dell Tech storage as a service, how does that fit, we were just talking about don't want to talk about products, we want to talk about really moving to that full OPEX model so help connect the dots for us. >> Yeah, so we're really excited about this, this will be coming in the first half of next year, as you probably heard earlier today. And what we're doing here is we've really taken what we already have had in market. And we've really upped that to the next level, we've accelerated the simplicity of what we offer here. And think of the experience is all starting in a single console, where you just pick up four things, what's the type of storage you want, what's the performance you want, how much and for how long, that's it. And then now we're counting the time from then to when it's in your data center in days, not months, not weeks, but in days and we're able to get you up and going. And it's your data center of your choice, whether that's on-prem in your own data center, or at a colo facility, we bring that equipment in, we get that deployed, we manage it for you, you operate it, and you simply pay for what you use. So you're really in a quick time to value you're in a very simple model and you're not really responsible for managing infrastructure that's really on us. And that moves you into being in a true OPEX model and it also enables you to accelerate what you're able to leverage that whether it's Blob Storage, file storage, you can get up and running quickly and let us worry about how to manage the infrastructure and we give you the ability to operate what you need to. >> Caitlin, maybe if you could give us a little bit of color as to what happens behind the scenes to make that work. As it sounds wonderful, you've had the program around for a year, these aren't trivial things that you're talking about all the logistics, the management the the gear, and making sure that the physical and the power and everything is all set. So help us understand the engineering, the development, and what this means from kind of a services and go to market that make a solution like this work. >> Yeah, and a lot of ways we're having to change our entire business to help our customers change there's, it goes from top to bottom, and you'll get to hear a lot more about it when we're actually available next year. But when you think about it, we have a lot of the DNA, we have a lot of the experience, we have the technology, but we almost have to completely flip the script on ourselves of how we deliver it, who our customer is, what our then end user customer needs from us, and what the role of things like our global services organization is what the role of our global sales organization is and how do we accelerate providing outcomes to our customers and get the rest out of their way. And the fact that I haven't mentioned a product name, but by the way, we actually have industry leading products and pretty much every category. So of course, on the back end, all of this is going to be powered by our industry leading storage solutions, like power store will be in your data center but at the same time, we will actually have worked to really masked that you don't even need to know that nor do you need to really operate much beyond what you need to really run your business. And that's really it's been an interesting work for us to just flip how we think about everything and you'll hear a whole lot more about it next year as we really bring this out into market but it's been really fun and a big learning for everyone. >> Excellent well yeah, something something power is underneath there well Caitlin. All right why don't you both give us the final takeaway for the Dell Tech on demand account. Start with you in just give us the final takeaway. >> Yeah, so I think look, I back to kind of what we were talking about, we've actually been offering these types of solutions to our customers for a really long time. Through Dell financial services, we've been offering payment flexibility for over 23 years, over 15 years and manage utility. So the customer example that I gave you is a customer who's running storage as a service and has been for many years, I think, building on that experience, listening to our customers feedback over that time period and over, of course, this past year, we're looking to apply all of that, to make it even more simpler for them to consume our infrastructure in the near future. And so, storage as a service is going to be a really exciting proof point of that, the momentum stats and some of the other things that I shared with you today and that you're going to hear about over the next couple of days or another proof point of it. But we're excited about this, and looking forward to continuing the dialogue with our customers with our partners and (mumbles) >> Then I would I'll kind of play off of one of your words there which is is all about simplicity for us is how do we take what we've been able to do for a lot of our customers accelerate that and simplify it to a point where we can offer that for all of our customers. And we're really looking to accelerate this first with storage and then get all of our offerings really into this model, because it's really about getting our customers out of managing infrastructure and give them the time, energy, resources to manage their business and simplicity is paramount to making sure that happens. >> Caitlin and Akanksha, thank you so much for giving us the updates. Congratulations to all the progress and definitely looking forward to hearing more beginning of next year. Thanks for joining. >> Thank you Stu. >> Thank you Stu >> All right, I'm Stu Miniman this is Dell Technology world digital experience. I'm Stu Miniman. And thank you as always for watching theCUBE (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios (upbeat music) in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE conversation. I'm Stu Miniman, coming to you from our Boston area studio, and really happy to welcome to the program to dig into some of the latest on what's going on in the multi-cloud ecosystem. First of all, coming back to the program, not too far from where I'm sitting, Joe CaraDonna. He is the Vice President of Engineering Technologies, with Dell Technologies, and joining him, someone he knows quite well, is Rich Sanzi, who's Vice President of Engineering at Google Cloud. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining. >> Great to be here, Stu. >> Thank you. >> All right, so Joe, we've been watching Dell Technologies, how the cloud portfolio and solution has been maturing, and working with the ecosystem. Maybe set the table for us, what's Dell doing with cloud? Why are we sitting here with the ? >> Well, we're here to talk about our OneFS for Google Cloud offering. We did something really special with Google here. We brought together the power and scale of our OneFS file system, along with the economics and the simplicity of public cloud, and together, I think, what we did is define a new standard for scalable file in public cloud, where we have a game-changing performance and capacity. We have a full range of enterprise-grade data management capabilities, and we enable real hybrid cloud, and open up new use cases for our customers. >> Excellent, thanks Joe for setting the table on that. Rich, let's pull you into the conversation. Before we go into the Google thing, give us a little bit about your background. You've been in storage, as I hinted at. You worked with Joe before, and tell us about your role inside of Google. >> Yeah, so I actually joined Google a few years ago, responsible for storage, and storage for all of Google, in addition to Google Cloud. And then, you know, big company things. We've been growing rapidly, and an opportunity opened up where I could be much more engaged on the Compute side, and so I'm responsible for Compute, the IaaS infrastructure for Google Cloud Engine. So it's my pleasure to be here and support Joe and Dell Technologies in the launch of OneFS on Google Cloud. >> Yeah, Rich, I'd like to come back to you on something, 'cause when you look at cloud, for many years it was cloud versus, you know, taking over the world, destroying everything before it. And especially, you look at Compute, or storage specifically, people have a little bit of a hard time wrapping their heads around, where my application lives. Does it just live one place? Are my applications going a little bit hybrid there? I look back, you know the disclosure, I worked at EMP for years. You know that storage is complicated and diverse, that's why we have file, block, and object. We have lots of different types of solutions out there. There's never been a silver bullet that says, "Okay, 90% of the people can use this one thing "for everything." So Rich, let's start with you. Cloud definitely has changed the discussion of storage, but I feel like I've seen the enterprise solutions looking more like the hyperscalers, and the hyperscale solution blurring the lines with what was traditionally happening in the data center. Do you agree with some of that? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. I think it's really nice when you control the horizontal and the vertical, and you can adapt your application stack, but that's just not the reality where we are today. The reality is that a cloud vendor, working with customers who bring their workloads in the cloud, have to be able to support all of the best-in-class types of storage that people are using. You're absolutely right, we're using cloud, or sorry, we're using objects, we're using block, we're using file. One of the great pieces of this, is that in the file space, you really need scalable file to go along with your scalable compute. >> Excellent, so-- >> Yeah, and I'll just add-- >> Please, go ahead Joe. >> Yeah, I mean, our customers, for a long time, have been asking, our Isilon customers in particular, asking for a long time to bring this type of capability to the cloud. They want the scalability of the elastic compute in the GPUs. They also want the OpEx model, right? And they want to be able to bring the high performance compute workloads to the cloud, but they need a scalable file system that can keep up with the demand, and that's what we set out to solve for. >> Excellent, so Joe you mentioned that the Isilon piece. You know, we've watched what has happened with that. You know, Isilon has always been software at the core and highly scalable, so we'd like you both, Joe you teed it up there, but Rich, why is this important for Google Cloud customers, and how's it different from, maybe, how they were doing things in the past? >> Well, I think one of the things that I think I'm really excited about, is that this enables customers to leverage the cloud, and not make a ton of changes on their server side. So it really allows them to preserve their investment, and their applications, and the way that they think about storage, and the way they think about how that scales and performs. So that, for me, is a, let's make it easy for customers to consume cloud, rather than make it a hurdle, and that's my view. >> Yeah, and Joe, help frame this for us a bit. You know, we watched Dell Technologies recently had the Power Store announcement. A lot of discussion about cloud native architectures, moving to micro-services. Google's one of the earliest and most prominent examples of innerized architectures out there. So, where does the file solution fit in this whole discussion that customers have about modernization of their applications, and the journey that they're going on? >> Yeah, well, not all applications lend themselves well to object. They need file semantics, as well as the performance characteristics that come along with that, in terms of throughput and latencies. But even beyond that, what our customer's looking for is the data management capability, right? Whether it's snapshots, or the multi-protocol data access for NFS, or SMB, or even HDFS. And they're looking for replication, native replication, so they can have their Isilon systems in the data center, replicate their data directly into the file service of the cloud so they can actually operate on that data, and then there's things that we take for granted now, at least in the data center, of that high availability and that high durability, that storage arrays deliver. So, it's a combination of things that make it attractive for customers, that open up these new workloads, especially in terms of a high performance compute. >> Excellent, you talked a bit about some of the reasons why customers wouldn't want file. Of course, scale is one of those things we've been talking about for many years. Scale means different things to many people. There's few companies that know scale better than Google, so Rich, talk a little bit about scalability, performance, what these types of evolutions mean, and what you're hearing from customers. >> Certainly from a scale perspective, things like objects and object store is super scalable. It's also, you know, requires application changes, to really make use of. Customers are really looking for scalable solutions that enable them to bring their existing applications to cloud, and not have to make a ton of changes to it. That's one of the things I think is great about the Dell offering, is that it is a full-fidelity solution that has the performance and scale of what customers are expecting from their on-premise, and then when we wire that up with the Google network into our Google Cloud compute regions, we get very high performance, and very high fidelity, low latency as a result. We think that that removes potential headaches that customers may have when they bring big applications in the HBC space, and related high performance computing space in the cloud. >> Great, and Joe, is all this available now? Tell us a little bit about availability. What do you expect the demand to be for this solution? >> Well, I expect the demand to be great, right? The kind of workloads we're talking about here cut across a wide range of verticals. So everything from whether it's like sciences for genomics research, oil and gas for seismic data processing, media and entertainment for video editing and rendering, or even finishing, automotive telemetry data that requires processing and scale, and EDA. So, I think it hits upon a wide variety of use cases and verticals, and we've even structured our pricing and our tiers to make it more accessible for use cases from high performance, all the way down to even archival. >> So, maybe just to clarify, this is GA today? >> Yeah, yes, it is GA. (laughs) >> Okay, excellent. >> Beta is behind 'em. >> Appreciate that, and how does, you mentioned flexibility on pricing. How much of this is what's available from Google, what's available from Dell? How does that relationship and go-to-market work together? >> Yeah, well it's a native service in Google. You can provision directly from the Google Portal. You can manage your file systems directly from the Google Portal, and the billing is integrated. So you get one bill from Google, whether it's for our OneFS file service, or any of Google's native services. >> Excellent, Rich, we'd love to hear, talk about from the Google side, the ecosystem. I know last year, I was at the Google Next event, really saw strong demand from the partner community. They're looking to work with Google, many have worked with Google for many years. What kind of feedback have you been getting and how this fits into the overall solution? >> So, from a partner perspective, one of the things that we really want to enable our partners, is to bring their services onto our platform, and to integrate them tightly as if they were a Google offering, and that's so things like the integrated billing, the provisioning from the Google Portal, things like that are core tenets for us for helping our customers and our partners' customers easily consume services in the cloud. So, sort of one of the P-zero requirements, from my perspective, for our product offering here, was that in fact it was just integrated into the Google Cloud platform, and that it would be discoverable and easily usable by customers. So I think that enables partners to deliver a first-class service on our platform. >> Yeah, I mean, Rich, absolutely. Some of the feedback I've gotten from the ecosystem, is, how do they put it? They say, "Google kind of puts you through the ringer. "By the time you get through that, "it is going to work." And of course, we know, Google's doing that to make sure that there are good, reliable, strong services by the time the end customer gets them. All right, Joe-- >> Yes, and-- >> (laughs) Go ahead, yeah. >> I was going to say, you know, delivering these services, and delivering them reliably, it's a multi-company partnership, but we understand that at the end of the day, the customer wants to be assured that there is, they have one contact for problems with the service, and so that's where Google very much wants to be that primary contact, 'cause who knows where the issues could be. Are they in the data center, or are they in the network, or are they on the customer side? We feel responsibility to front (audio distorts). >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Joe, I guess, final thing for you. Talk about the Dell Technologies Google Cloud relationship, why that's important, what differentiates it from some of the many other partnerships that Dell has. >> Yeah, sure, before I touch on that, I want to talk about, you mentioned scale, and scale means different things to different people. And when we're talking about scale here, capacity's one element of that, and we certainly scale that way, but performance is the other way. And ESG did a performance study on the OneFS file service that we're offering, and they fired up the biozone benchmark, which fired up over 1000 cores in Google, running NFS load to the file system. They sized the file system at 2 petabytes, which seems large, and it is, but you can scale much larger than that with our service, and their results on throughput was 200 gigabytes per second on the read, and 100 gigabytes per second on the write. Now, these are game changing numbers, right? It's numbers like that that enable compute-intensive, high performance workloads in Google Cloud, and we're opening that up. And it's also important to note that this is a scalable file system, so if you want to double those throughput numbers, you just double the capacity of your file system. So that's the power of scale that we're delivering here. And our file system can scale up to 50 petabytes, so a lot of runway there. As far as the partnership with Google goes, I mean, Google's been great. Their infrastructure is amazing. In order to hit those kind of performance numbers, your head goes to compute and the file system, but there's also a network in there, and to hit those kind of numbers, Google had to supply a two terabyte per second network, and they were able to supply the compute and the network with ease, and without hiccup. So it's together that we're solving for the compute, network, and storage equation, and that we can deliver a holistic solution. And lastly, I would just point out, the engineering teams work great bringing that cloud native experience into that Google Portal, really simplifying user experience. So, they can provision and manage the systems directly from the Portal, as well as unifying the billing. So I think the partnership's been great, and it's going to be interesting to see how our customers use the service to accelerate their cloud journey. >> Well, Joe and Rich, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on GA of this, and definitely look forward to hearing the customer journeys as they go on. >> Thank you, Stu. >> All right, thank you. And Rich, thank you for your partnership. >> Yeah, your welcome, Joe. Thank you, as well. >> All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all the coverage, the virtual events that we're participating, as well as the back catalog of interviews that we've done. I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation [Music] hi I'm Stu manna man and welcome to a special cube conversation normally the first week of May we would be at Dell technologies world but that event has been moved to the fall but one of the major announcements from the event are going forward joining me to talk about powering up the mid-range of storage is Caitlin Gordon she is the vice president of marketing at Dell technologies Caitlin you thanks so much for joining thank you so much for having me Stu it's great to be here all right so Caitlin the last couple of years at a dtw different segments of the market as I said it's been powered up as the marketing messaging usually you've got some good t-shirts you've got a lot the labs and demos so tell us about the important announcement that you're sharing with today yeah I mean unfortunately the show is not going on but the product is still launching it actually is already started chipping and we are excited that we're still at be able to announce it this week our store is really probably the most exciting product they've ever gotten to help bring to market and all those demos and labs that you've talked about we're gonna have them all they're all going to be digital this year as well and it's really important for us as a business because it really changes what we're able to do for our customers you know we love speeds and feeds and storage but power store is so much more than that We certainly have designed it to meet the needs of all the workloads lock and file providing performance and efficiency but even more importantly what we built with this platform is something that will help our customers change the way that they're running their data centers and maybe most importantly can adapt with them as their businesses evolve yeah it's so important Caitlin I'm glad you talked about that you know you know the storage industry you know IP in general we can really get wonky and dig down to the speeds and feeds and yeah we want to understand you know how does nvm me and sports class memory and all that thing fit into but I want you to talk about you know what is that customer requirement that you're solving for in the age of AI and cloud you know what are the customers looking for what are those things that your cell for that maybe you know previous generations you go back to like the Unity ie this weren't on the table for discussion yeah I think one of the most interesting thing that's happened for us in the past few years in our conversations with customers is we do have the speeds and feeds the end-to-end nvme and octane and all that wonderful goodness but what they're really helped they're really asking for help on is how do they move towards this vision of having a truly autonomous data center how do they move to a fully self-service model so that all of their infrastructure can be treated like code and that you can automate all of those storage workflows picking out all of the additional costs and time and probably most importantly risk of manual tasks how do we have infrastructure that can be a more intelligent and helped them make more proactive and intelligent decisions that's one part of the equation the other piece is what we've heard loud and clear and this is now true more than ever before that infrastructure investments not only need to make sense for what the needs are today but also need to have the flexibility to adapt with businesses as they're going through this rapid and unpredictable transformation so that they can ensure that there are infrastructure investments today don't become technical debt tomorrow so that ability to have infrastructure that can adapt and evolve that the business is so important to our customers yes so Caitlin how is that done you know traditionally store do you think about it you know I buy a box like why did no way I write it off over 30 number years so what's different about you know the the service is and I'm guessing there's some financial pieces that make you know power store and the rest of the power family different than what I would have bought traditionally from buying a storage array yeah really the whole dynamic changes and it starts really foundationally with the flexible architecture so the product itself is built with the flexible architecture the ability the fact that it's a container based architecture were able to innovate on a container basis which makes our data services across the portfolio more consist enables us to innovate faster it also means that all of our innovation will be delivered to customers in a non disruptive way whether that's a hardware upgrade or a software upgrade all of that will happen without impacting the business that's really the flexible and adaptable architecture but when you look at the deployment that's an even bigger conversation how can we help and deliver infrastructure that gives you a solution that can support a small footprint at the edge collapse that infrastructure at the edge help with data center modernization connect into cloud and the last piece you're just touching on is that consumption more and more and then that's accelerated over the past month or so the ability to consume this as a service it's such an important part of what we're doing here in power stores available all of our Dell technologies on-demand offerings flex on-demand to give you that ability to really consume an infrastructure and an object model really interesting you talked about you know underneath the covers you know containerized architecture you know I think back the previous generations when you know EMC moved on to an intel-based architecture you know there's things where you say there's a major change in the code bases a major change in the architecture and from a customer standpoint they shouldn't have to think about it but I know there's so much work that goes through to make sure that things are rock-solid that it's still gonna provide you know X nines of capability and make sure that you can run your business on it helped us understand a little bit about you know how you know you said a lot of things have changed but we're still talking about things that you know you're running you know our business is on or you know mid-race customers for small enterprises midsize enterprise you know but what's what's still the same I guess is what I'm asking for today's storage compared to what we were looking at that yeah and if you look at it I mean the architecture itself is built as an architecture can pick conserve the broadest set of needs or the biggest set of our customer base so foundationally it supports all physical databases and applications we've got we've all support it's got performance that's really incredible compared to our previous lead mid range all flash solutions seven times faster three times better response times the efficiency of course is critical the ability to support that in a really small footprint with always-on inline data reduction four to one guaranteed the architecture not only scales up of course as a storage appliance but also can independently scale compute so they have the ability to scale up in an appliance and scale out into a cluster and of course you can't resist the buzzwords that's important and an nvme of course the ability to support nvme based flash drives or SEM and it's specifically actually the dual ported octane drive for persistent storage so when you look at it it truly is a best-in-class all flash mid-range storage array but it also does a lot more and that's part of the fun dynamic of what we've built okay so you know we talked about scaling up and scaling out you know of course you know we look at Bay's world two things that are critically important to customers it's my data and my applications obviously you know strong legacy at Dell EMC looking at the data you touched a little bit about the applications but you know tell me more how does this fit for you know my latest cloud native type environments you know how do applications fit into this environment yeah and it's really builds on what we're starting to talk about with that container based architecture so the fact that his container based is interesting and good for us because we can innovate faster it's even more important for customers and we can deliver that to them faster and more consistently what's more interesting is what we can then do for their workloads and their applications because we have this brand-new modular software operating system of course we can deploy that as a standard bare metal on purpose-built hardware or storage appliance what's even more interesting and what's really different about what we can do with our store is we can also abstract that storage OS from the underlying hardware onboard VMware ESXi and run both the storage operating system and applications natively on the appliance so able to collapse the compute and storage layers into a single piece of infrastructure and run a handful of specialized applications on that one appliance which really is game-changing in the data center at the edge to change the way that you can run and consolidate your operations okay yeah if you say specialize to applications so let let's build onion a little bit on that you know I think back obviously you know Dell has a very strong position in hyper-converged infrastructure which is scaling you know compute and storage and doing that an entire environment I remember there were a lot of efforts to say well with a virtualized environment maybe I hate storage and I can put applications on it that was there was use case with Isilon and to say you know I've got a lot of general-purpose compute if I have some excess capacity maybe I can do that it wasn't something that I heard used a lot so what sort of applications and how do kind of compare and contrast this with other things like like HDI yeah and this is power stores apps on capability and really what it's built for is these kind of two classes of applications the first is infrastructure apps so think of these as any type of application that the infrastructure team themselves is is leveraging and wants to simplify their operations antivirus data protection things like that the other category would be what we call data intensive so a data intensive application really is more storage intensive right either has a high demand for capacity and a small demand for compute or is one of these more latency sensitive applications real-time analytics is a good example things like blink and spark the response time is really King and when we look at that in comparison to what HCI is we have been and we are in a great position right with the xrail has been leading the hyper-converged market and we know that our customers are deploying that alongside three-tier architecture and what you look at what we've done with our store what we already have with rail they're highly complementary what we've done in HCI is we've taken storage and brought it into compute what we've done with power store we've taken storage and we brought compute into it and it really solves four different is optimized for different challenges and we really think complementing those in the data center next to each other is going to be an increasingly common deployment model to have the right architecture or the right workloads and then you have VMware consistent operations across the top so you have that consistent operations within your data center whoo edge and also to the cloud all right so end-to-end portfolio is what you're saying there's options for the different applications what one of the big challenges for storage people always is you know I always used to joke it's the four-letter word its migration so customers you know there there are very few Greenfield deployments out there so the existing Dell customers people out there that have been doing things in previous ways how do they get to power store and you know once they're on power Spore what does that mean for you know future you know growth expansion you know migration discussions yeah and I've heard this before right forklifts are not a friendly thing and the good news is with power store it is truly the end of data migration we've built with power store is an architecture that enables you to non-disruptive Li upgrade the controllers when new generations come out you can destructively operate those keep all the capacity in place and don't have any an impact to your business we also know the customers need to get data to powers for now getting to the 2 power store is going to be really really seamless we have invested significantly and a number of different migration options for our portfolio and for third-party to get data to our score and what seamless means could be different to different customers that can be non disruptive it could be agent lists it also could be host based we'll have all of those solutions from day one to enable that transition that happened as seamlessly as possible and on a customer's own time we've actually optimized this to the point where we now enable you to move data from an existing platform to our store in less than 10 players okay that that's great Kaitlyn so you know III remember back when Mendell first finished the acquisition of EMC one of the things we heard loud and clear with Jeff Clarke is a simplification of the portfolio it's something we've heard throughout the ranks remember talking to Jeff Boudreau about hinting at what was happening at the in the mid-range so what does this mean for existing mid-range lines and tell us about what we expect to see as this transition rolls out yeah absolutely so power store is absolutely our lead mid-range all-flash offering we continue to have unity XD is our lead hybrid mid-range solution and we have at end of life any of our other existing mid-range platforms what we know above anything else is that transformation and transitions in the data center and on storage race takes time and the important thing for us is that we enable our customers to do that on their own time and as seamlessly as possible so we have not announced a new end of life when we do we're going to have a long service life and we've built all of these different migration tools to help support that transition so it's going to be very easy for our customers to do that move on their own time and it still enables us to deliver on what we've promised you which is a simplified portfolio great Kaitlyn last thing I want to ask you is what's challenging for people is number one they've got kind of the skill set and the rules that they have today so there needs to be you know an easy migration to go from what they have to the new on the other hand also sometimes it you you want to take a clean sheet of paper and say boy if you could just start over and do it this way it's going to make your life so much easier so tell us how you're balancing that and how you can help both that you know you're your install base as well as you know new people coming in that might not have been traditional storage industry yeah I think the reality is that they're the specialized skill as a storage administrator isn't is something that will not be a growing skill set and we need to help our customers certainly support an operating model that does work like a storage array but does so in a way that is extraordinarily simple and has a lot of intelligence built in so first and foremost this is a storage platform and has really been designed who have the most seamless and simple operating experience from an element manager with our store manager for a storage admin but at the same time we know that for a variety of reasons a lot of customers have a single team that managed their infrastructure and is really moving into more of a cloud operating model and for that we've built in all of the integrations and tools with vmware whether it's Fiero vmware cloud foundation to really help vmware administrator also be able to operate the system as well excellent so it's just on that also how do things like analytics fit into the entire monitoring discussion help us understand how that fits in with some of the rest of the Dell portfolio yeah that's exactly where I was going to go over the last piece of this is why would I Q is something that's really important is Prateek for us cloud IQ of course comes with power so it comes with all of our storage offerings today we're officially announcing it coming across our infrastructure portfolio as well and that's really game-changing for customers in a number of different ways first is it really helps produce risk in the environment because it shows you a health scare or for your data center and if it has an issue it will quickly help you pinpoint that and troubleshoot it before it ever actually becomes a problem that impacts your business you're gonna help you predict your future user needs things like predictive analytics built into cloud IQ help you do capacity forecasting and planning so that you can see exactly when you're going to get to those thresholds of 80 90 100 percent capacity and remedy that board impacts the business and with it now coming across the entire infrastructure portfolio the value it can bring is outside of just storage alone but to the entire data center and one of the biggest things our customers and partners have loved about Cloud IQ is the trusted advisor feature that allows these are our reps or partner to have the ability to be part of that cloud IQ experience he read into from a mobile application or from a web browser have that remote monitoring of the environment and add that human intelligence to the machine intelligence really manage that data center and help our customers stay on top of problems and stay ahead of them before they impact the business well Kaitlyn congratulations the whole power store team we understand a lot of hard work goes into building this and really look forward to by the time we get to Delta technology's world in the fall talking to customers that are using thanks so much for joining us and look forward to talking with you again thanks - great to see you all right be sure to check out the cube dotnet for all the upcoming events that we're doing right now of course a hundred percent remote I'm sue minimun and thank you for watching the Q [Music]