 How are you doing? Great. Good. You having a good show? Having an excellent show. It's a great show. This has been an awesome venue. It seems like the customer responses have all been totally positive. It's just been really good. Yeah, I've been on a whirlwind tour, Kelly, as you know, of all these events. I try to judge the success of an event by the degree to which the high-level marketing glitz matches with the customer excitement. I would say it matches pretty well here. Yeah, I would definitely say that. It's been absolutely incredible, actually. I mean, you know, I go to a lot of events as well, and the, you know, the customers here, the partners, they're just extremely happy, they're thrilled. I mean, I'm not talking about people up here because, you know, sometimes we wonder if they're just saying it for the cameras, but just in the hallways. The Cube has that intoxicating effect. Yeah, that's right. But in the hallways, you know, everybody's super excited, and one of the main things that we've heard is the labs. The hands-on labs. The hands-on labs are like the hot topic. They've actually been a real success. You know, the hands-on labs sort of evolved from the Ecology user conferences that have happened over the last year and a half, and the first one that we had was instructor-led training only, and it was received really well, you know. But we started to get more of a customer base going to these forums, and the hand, and for the second Ecologic Storage Forum, the instructor-led training filled up in like two days. So there was a lot of customers and a lot of feedback basically saying, you know, I'm really bummed that the instructor-led training is full. I really was hoping to get better training, like hands-on type training and that sort of thing. So we conscribed like sort of a makeshift sort of 20 station hands-on lab at the last user forum, and there was a line down the hallway out the door for people just to come in and do just a basic, you know, administration lab. So this time we're like, well, how can we improve on that? You know, how can we really make this useful where customers will have the leisure throughout the entire conference to come in, take a bunch of labs, go to a session, see something they like, and then play around with it. Yeah. You know, and so what we did is we built 24 different labs across 30 stations for the Ecologic products. And then we started talking with the folks from Compellent in PowerVault. And they're like, yeah, this is a great idea. Let's jump on board. And then they built Compellent hands-on labs in PowerVault hands-on labs at IDM, and it's been awesome. So you basically have rooms full of these? Yeah, there's a large room and there's different quadrants when you go in and you want to take a Compellent lab. You can go in the Compellent Quadrant IDM lab. You go in the IDM Quadrant and so on. So it's not demos of future products as much as it is real hands-on, existing stuff. People get to break things. So it's not about selling new stuff and marketing. It's about teaching, education. It's about knowledge transfer. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Because you figure there's so many sessions going on. And they're all on different topics and different tracks, especially with host integration with the storage systems. Different technologies like replication and snapshotting and data protection. And they can go to these tracks, but then they're skeptical about really implementing it in their environment because, A, they haven't set it up. Understandably. And how can they get their hands on it, play with it, become familiar with it prior to integrating it into their environment? Are there any other opportunities throughout the year for customer to do that? Well, it's funny you bring that up actually because we've been talking with a few folks and the engineering executive team about, how can we offer this ongoing throughout the year? Can we do something where maybe customers can sign up and do these labs online, perhaps, and so on? Is it as useful online as it is in person? It would be very similar to where they're at now. The only difference is they're not going to have that lab proctor sort of hands-on assistance, which we'd have to make sure that documentation is really clear so that they understand exactly what they're doing and the steps that are needed to complete the labs. Maybe include some pictures. Oh, there's lots of pictures. There's lots of pictures. I was going to ask you about documentation. So a lot of this is setting it up properly and knowing how to do that step by step. Do you document that as a deliverable? We do. Well, one of the things that we've done is we took a look at what it took to build these labs. It's all built on Dell storage blade servers. There's 16 ESX servers that are running 1,600 virtual machines across 40 terabytes of ecological rays and one and a half terabytes of RAM across the board. How big is the room you would have needed to do that 20 years ago? Oh, gosh. No, right, now it fits in two half racks. That's like the Pentagon, you know? It's a massive environment, but we're using VMware and we're using ESX servers and it scales really, really well. So we've had a great success with it so far. We're really happy with the results and we're kind of like, well, we knew there was a demand, but we didn't know what the demand was gonna be and now we're seeing that the demand is high and the responses that we've gotten on feedback surveys and so on have been just outstanding. Even now that you've opened it up and it's during the whole conference, you're still seeing a steady flow. Oh, yeah, it's the steady flow in and out. Some folks are in there and they're taking multiple labs on different tracks when they have time leaving, going to a session, coming back, taking another lab and so on and they have some free time. I think, Kelly, that's one of the things about the Dell Storage Forum that I like is that this thing's gonna grow. Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's gonna explode. But the roots of the Dell Storage Forum are the hands-on people and so it's the practitioners, it's the people who are solving the day-to-day problems and it's gonna grow from those roots so I think that it will look back 10 years from now and say, hey, remember when we were in that the little hotel? That's exactly right. The little hotel. So I think that that is, it's smart because it has that grassroots feeling to it. Even though there's some good marketing and Michael Dell came in and everything else, I think that, and this show will grow but it'll become more business-oriented but the heart of it will be the technical side. Well, that's the whole backbone of it, right? We wanted to create a forum and an avenue where customers can just learn. It's not a conference that you go to in Vegas where you get a bunch of different vendors and it's all marketing fluff and a bunch of old hoopla. We do this, we do that type of thing. It's like, nope, this is what you have to work with. Learn, learn how to work with it, be comfortable with it so that you can go further with it and better the usability and increase your working efficiency in your data centers. So I know the conference isn't over yet and you haven't had time to relax and think about things but just right now, what do you think you'll do next year different? One of the things we're gonna do next year for sure is probably scale the labs bigger. Okay, even bigger. Everything, it's like data, right? Just keeps growing, you know? But yeah, we'll end up scaling the labs bigger, probably offer more tracks and just try to continue with the momentum and the excitement about users coming in and being able to get their hands on stuff. How much demand is there for more application-specific integration and demonstration and hands-on? Like for instance, exchange, you know, 2010 or SharePoint? Tremendous, tremendous. Right, you see that as a... Well, one of the things that we find is that, customers will buy storage products and they'll integrate the storage system into their environment but they won't take advantage of the tools that they have available to them, right? Across the board. I mean, it doesn't matter what storage product it really is but there's so many different tools like monitoring software, you know? Performance monitoring software to better monitor your SAN, host integration, like data protection with Microsoft volume shadow copy services, things of this nature that can improve the environment and really automate tools and utilities for the administrator that they either A are aware of but not quite comfortable with using and decide, well, I don't really want to take that chance. You know, this way, it gives them a chance to use it and, you know, better familiarize with how these operations work and how these different technologies integrate with the applications and so on. Good, well, it's just fantastic. Congratulations. Thank you, yeah, it's been a great... I mean, the whole forum's been a real great success merging, you know, the Ecologic User Farm with C Drive and making it one, you know, a unified Dell forum has just been phenomenal and the responses that I've gotten from customers on the Ecologic side, on the Power Vault side, on the Compound side, they're all super static about this, you know, and it seems like there's a lot of good vibes. Yeah, good energy, definitely a good vibe here. Yeah, for sure. And it's intimate. Like you said, it's intimate. I'm going to miss the days when it's intimate because this thing is going to grow, it's going to explode, everybody's going to want to be here. Oh yeah, it definitely is going to grow. You're going to have a big giant conference center. I can see it. So you're missing out, is what he's saying. Well, because you can feel the buzz, it is going to grow. You can sense that with shows. You know when you're at a show and you're like, oh, next year this is going, yeah, you're thinking to yourself, wow, we're going to do this next year, it's going to bevel or triple. I tell you the same thing with Citrix. Citrix Energy was just this energy and you just see that thing is going to explode. I get the same feeling here, you know. Again, more intimate, but a lot of excitement. Yeah, it's been great, like I said, you know, I mean, all the responses and the customers learned a ton. I've talked personally with probably, you know, a hundred or so customers about integrating with SQL Server or VMware or Exchange and these different operating systems and applications and how, what are the best practices to do this? This is my environment, but I'm a little skeptical or I have a question about this type of setup. You know, most of the folks here are, you know, either engineering or technical folks and they can address these types of concerns and issues, which is great, you know. I mean, it's not just, I'm going to a conference and I'm going to hear a bunch of tracks about what's coming. This is what we have and now that I know about this, what do I do to change my environment to make it better? Yeah. And a lot of the customers here, you know, small, mid-sized businesses, that's what you guys hit. You sell to a lot of the Web 2.0 guys. I didn't happen to meet a bunch of them, but I don't know if you did, Kelly, you know, the big scale out mega data center guys. This is not the show for them necessarily, but the reason I'm asking the question, did you get any questions around this whole emerging area of Hadoop? Is that even on the radar screen of your customer basis, you know, the big data thing, analytics? It definitely is, you know, there was a session today that I presented on on SQL Server best practices and we had a customer in Germany who had a 40 terabyte SQL Server environment and they were scaling it, excuse me, and he wanted to just know, you know, this is how I laid things out. Is it correct? Yeah. You know, is this appropriate? Is this the right way to do things? Did I architect my network correctly? Did I, you know, design my database layout correctly and that sort of thing? And then his next follow-up question is like, what can I do to make it better? What about technologies like deduplication and some of these other things? And, you know, these are the things that we can address for them. Well, we appreciate it. Hey, thanks for having me on QTV. Yeah, Derek. Well done. All right, next time. We'll be watching. Thank you. You're welcome. Thanks. Thanks guys. So, wow.