 Welcome back everyone, it's theCUBE live in Las Vegas at Mandalay Bay, Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante here. Day two of theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World. We've had amazing conversations, as we always do, but you know, because you've been tuned in since last night. Lots of announcements yesterday, as you know. Lots of announcements, big announcements this morning. We're going to be unpacking some of those in case you missed the keynote. Caitlin Gordon joins us, one of our alumni. We've got two alumni actually here. Caitlin's back, VP of Product Management, cross-platform software installations at Dell Technologies, and Maggie Kupor is back as well. Director of Multi-Cloud Product Management at Dell. Great to have you ladies back on theCUBE. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having us, it's so good to be back again. Isn't it great? It's like yesterday. I know, it feels like yesterday, maybe it was. Not Vegas yesterday though, it's like a week ago. Oh, Vegas yesterday, yeah. That's a whole separate conversation. So yesterday we were on main stage talking about cloud to ground, ground to cloud, air traffic control, talking about some of the nuggets that were announced today. Yeah, today we really got to unpack that. Jeff's keynote is always a lot of fun because we really get to show what we talked about on the first day, so we really got to bring that ground to cloud strategy to life and really show some of the new SaaS software that we've been building, and it's really the evolution of what we've been talking about since last year, when we talked about Project Alpine, and now we officially have gone from project to product. And ultimately that ground to cloud strategy, how do we help our customers really unlock that workload flexibility? Be able to choose where to deploy your workloads, be able to choose the right location, whether that's on-prem or a public cloud. And the biggest thing that we've heard, and really the genesis of that Project Alpine, and now this new Apex storage for public cloud, is how do we help unlock some workloads? Which is the native storage services in the public cloud are great for a lot of things, but mission critical workloads, scalable fire workloads, it's just not something that we've been able to solve for. So now with the Apex block and Apex file for AWS and block for Azure, we can now help our customers bring those workloads and really unleash those workloads in the public cloud and have that consistent operating model from on-prem into the cloud. And we didn't stop there. I'll let Maggie pay off a whole lot more of the details because it is her baby, but we also announced the Apex Navigator for multi-cloud storage and the Apex Navigator for Kubernetes. New software, part of the Apex console, that really is that air traffic control. How do we bring a really consistent and simple experience to our customers as we bring that software to the cloud? Awesome, Maggie, walk us through the demo that you gave on main stage this morning. Talk to us about infrastructure perspective, but also the value in it and how, to Caitlin's point, how are you helping customers unlock the value in their workloads regardless of where they are? Yeah, no, it was very exciting and so fun to be on stage, to be demoing, you know, what we've been working on. It's been a truly exciting opportunity to be able to do that. So really, you know, what we demoed was, it was a four-part demo where we started with, as Caitlin said, we have really moved from our project Alpine to actually productizing it. So taking our products, you know, how we are software defining them and making them available in the public clouds so that our customers have full control over their data wherever they need, right? So we talked and we showed how customers can deploy our storage software in the public clouds off their choice with, you know, whatever performance capability they would perform, like to see with that and really, you know, getting it deployed in the cloud. We then also talked about, once we have deployed it, what all we can do with this data, right? Being able to move data from one location to another so that customers really have the ability to have portability of data, right? I mean, you don't have to have the decision of where the data ultimately needs to live. It can live at one place, things change, you need to move it to a different location. We can let you do that. And so we walked through, you know, because we were walking through a block storage example, we walked through volume-level mobility, but if you had to do a file deployment, you could do file-level mobility as well, you know, and it's bi-directional, so you can go from on-prem to the cloud, cloud-back, or even between clouds, right? Which is pretty incredible. We then also showed how you could do that in a containerized world, right? Because we know more and more mission-critical applications are being containerized. And that requires persistent storage. So how do you take that and have the ability to move the entire container along with all its underlining data? So we talked about the navigator for Kubernetes, which is very exciting. I know I was here last year talking to you about that, so I was very excited to see that, you know, in action. You know I love this conversation because in late 2021, we sort of coined this term super cloud and then we got a lot of grief for it. And we said, well, we got to define this, we did. And then we saw it last year in the form of Project Alpine. We said, okay, this is very super cloud-like. And some of the criticism that we get is people say, oh, this is just SaaS, it's not just SaaS, it's a set of services that actually has a purpose-built PAS layer to do things like make it consistent across the platform, across the clouds, do recovery, all these types of things. My question is, what's the deployment model for these services? Is it, are you instantiating instances, the full stack in each cloud? Is there sort of a single global instance? What are you doing and or what are you envisioning? Yeah, it's a great question and I'll start with it and then you can add all the color that I missed on top of that. So the easiest way to think about, at least where we're starting, is how do we help our customers manage their software to find storage on the public cloud infrastructure that they already have. So it's in their own instances, right? So they're going to be paying AWS and Azure for that IaaS, essentially. And then they're going to use our navigator to deploy our Apex public cloud storage in their public cloud instances. That's their control plane, which can live anywhere I wanted to or does it live on-prem? Yeah, so the actual control plane, so this new SaaS offer, the Apex navigator from us is actually built on our own cloud. So that is our SaaS infrastructure and truly is, really you're just paying for that, that's a subscription where you get that ability to have that deployment and that mobility and it's really to ease that and for being that true cloud experience to that Apex storage for public cloud. So that's in Dell data centers. That's right. The people ask you, the customers ask, where's it going to live? Do they care? Interestingly enough, I think it's going to start coming up more. I think that data sovereignty, the security issues is really starting to open up a better understanding of actually wanting it maybe not on a public cloud infrastructure that we built this SaaS in our own data centers. We are accountable for that infrastructure and it's certainly a conversation about where those live today, where they need to expand to into the future and how do we really evolve? I mean, it's really the beginning of a journey of us becoming yet a new chapter as a real software company because these are standalone software offers that we're bringing out there. So it's a single control plane that lives on Dell's data centers and then the individual stack of the cloud service provider is unique, but you make it consistent across, right? Exactly. So one of the things, and I do want to call out that, yes, it's the Apex Navigator, but it's actually part of the same Apex console that we showed last year on stage. So it's really extending the Apex console to have these capabilities that we're building with Navigator. And think of that as an orchestrator that's going to orchestrate this complexity of cloud that customers might have, right? You might have a few instances that you're running on-prem, you might have a few instances running on AWS, potentially in Azure. This is a place, a centralized control plane where you can see all your assets across everything, whether you're doing it on-prem, in Kolo, Edge, or even the public clouds, right? Can you guys elaborate on the customer involvement in the productization of Alpine? I know that Dell is very, very customer focused, very customer-first. Your customers are a big part and everything that you do is for them. Talk about, share with us your thoughts on the customers really in the driver's seat, if you will. Yes, definitely in the driver's seat. Sometimes like passenger seat, driver's seat. Taxi driver's seat. Yeah, and you know what, it's interesting because it's been informed, I think, almost from three dimensions. On the one hand, bringing our software to the public cloud's not new to us. We've had our data protection software, which I know you love, in the public cloud for a long time, right? We protect over 17 exabytes of data in the public cloud today. So we're not new to that. When we've learned a lot from our customers, that's where they pulled us first. They needed that long-term retention, that backup use case. And then over the past few years, what we've heard a lot more is, kind of two fans, either, I have mission-critical databases and applications that I run on my data center today. They've got scale performance and resiliency. When I try to move those into the public cloud, it breaks. It can't meet the needs of what I have, right? We've had some of the early adopters, things like Oracle databases, or looking at Epic workloads, just can't make that bridge. And so on the block side, it's largely been trying to enable a lift and shift type mentality. And we've had very passionate customers really helping us and driving that innovation and informed not just getting our software to find storage there, but what the experience needs to be to support that. And on the file side, we see it very industry-specific, right? Meeting and entertainment, healthcare. The places where file data is their business, but they need to take advantage of the analytics in the cloud. If we know one thing, the file services, storage services in the public cloud are probably the weakest point. They're just getting that enterprise-class scale and performance and resiliency in the cloud is something that's really tough. And our customers have officially pulled us into needing to bring that 1FS technology, which is what powers that Apex file storage in AWS, bring that in there. They can still use those analytic workloads, but they can add that up to a petabyte scale in a single namespace and the seamless mobility back to on-prem. We listen to our customers strongly and they make sure we do. And they're helping bring us along in that journey. And I'm really grateful that they're in that driver seat and passenger seat and we get to see it somewhere in the back to try to go with them. Do you expect the typical use case is that hybrid, sort of a data on-prem, and I want to connect to AWS, let's say, or I want to connect to GCP or Azure, sort of as a one-to-one. Or do you expect more of a true multi-cloud use case? I'd say most of our customers that we've been talking to are very much interested in having the ability to connect the on-prem to the clouds. And they might be using multiple clouds, but not for the same applications. So they might want to just go from on-prem to AWS for a certain application, but for Azure, for another one. So most of the customers, we're seeing that as a use case. I think what resonates the most for our customers, though, is this ability to move data. The ability to move data at a volume level, at file levels, at container level, whatever their application is, how do we help them really simply move data from one place to another? So they have full control over their data instead of it being locked down at one place. And so every time we've been talking about our offerings, whether it is the Apex public cloud storage or the navigator, they're very excited about us being able to deliver that functionality to them. Did you develop a new high-speed data mover for this, or was it an existing tool? It's what I like to call the cloud-optimized mobility. I'd made that up, though, that's unofficial, so that's how it works. We're very proud of you. We're very proud of you, though. They don't let us do that officially, but a lot of that. But really, we know we have a lot of different ways to make good use of that network, and the important thing is to really make good use of that network connection that you have. So we have, in both cases, on the block and the file side, we're leveraging very efficient mobility technologies so that we can minimize that bandwidth required. And how about the security model? You've got the shared responsibility model, you've got three clouds, you've got three different shared responsibility models. Are you taking care of that, or is that the customer's responsibility, or the cloud's responsibility? No, Maggie's passionate on this one. Yes, so we are taking very good care from a security perspective, keeping zero trust framework in mind as we're building these products. So it starts with the IM model, or the access model. We're relying on our customers to provide their IM that integrates with our IM so that they can actually say which operators need to be part of that model. So we're actually federated with customer's identity using our... So all of this also shows up as a premier. So if you are a Dell premier account customer, you log into the premier to get access to the console and the navigator functionality. So it's all being integrated at one place with our Dell customers using their federated identity. So everything that we're working on we're integrating with IM, having our back, as well as SSO. So one of the things that I'm super proud and excited about is that we have painlessly worked to make sure that we truly give customers a single experience when they come into the Apex console. So everything from going from the console, navigating themselves into the element managers of the products, or even from monitoring and observability capabilities into Cloud IQ, all of these experiences are linked together using SSO. So it has been an incredible journey the last few months to ensure that we actually do this right so that the customers have that single sign-on experience and keeping security in mind. So you've abstracted the Cloud single sign-ons and then you create a Dell single sign-on, or is it... I think there's two different pieces, right? What you're talking about is the logging in from our experience and then you want to talk about how we handle the credentials on the Cloud side as well. Correct. So the customers come in and use their credentials. We're not storing customers credentials into our environment because we want to make sure that customers feel safe coming in because we also understand it's a SaaS platform that's hosted by Dell. So we're taking full, you know, we're really being very careful on how we're handling that. And availability, can I buy this today? I mean, we might take the order. Availability is in the second half of the year. Second half, okay, and you still, you haven't released pricing, have you? We have not released pricing yet, yeah. I do want to clarify, the public, the block storage and public Cloud is available today. That's a very good clarification, yeah. And the navigator aspect is coming in the second half. And is it, what's the pricing model? Can you share that? I mean, at the highest level, it's all software, so not a surprise, these are all subscriptions. It's really simple to think about on the storage side. We're really looking at dollars per terabyte subscription model. And essentially with the new navigator model, it's going to be a tiered subscription over time with that base subscription. It's actually essentially hard bundled in with that software-defined storage. So that Apex public Cloud storage is a subscription. And part of that is actually the base navigator model as well, so really trying to simplify not just the experience of the product, but even the procurement experience as well. That's important. No matter what pricing model you pick, it's not going to be perfect as you well know, but you got to get as close as possible to how the customers want to consume. That's right. Yeah, very cool. So many announcements, so much going on. Talk about, in the last minute or so that we have, share your thoughts on really how this is enabling customers to get that full visibility and go from multi-Cloud by default and kind of chaos to that strategic by design that everyone's talking about. Do you want to start? Sure, yeah, I think what is very exciting about what we're bringing is really what I was talking about bringing a consistent experience no matter where your data lives, right? So that is really the key to what we're bringing. How are we going to expand that in the future is like really bringing all our block, file, object, data protection capabilities and have them available to our customers in all clouds, right? That's really our goal. This is what we want to give and give them a really connected experience, again, no matter where the data resides. It'll be fun talking to a customer next year about this at 24 Tech World. We're very excited about that. I think ultimately it comes down to choice, but also consistency and it's investment protection of the infrastructure you're buying and of your people, probably most importantly. Ultimately, that's what we think multi-Cloud by design is going to mean is that means that people that you have can be the people that manage your on-prem and in the cloud and that you've simplified that and you haven't had to make a choice based on the resources you have. You make the choice based on what your workload needs and your people can support that. Nice. Ladies, thank you so much for joining Dave and me and packing some of the announcements, sharing with us why you're excited and like we said, it's great to see going from project to product. Congratulations on that. We look forward to hearing the next year of news that it brings. Thank you again. Thank you for having us. All right. Our pleasure for our guests and for Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. Up next, Travis V. Hill joins us. Douglas Phillips as well talking about Dell and Microsoft and their shared vision for hybrid cloud. See you in a minute.