 John from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering EMC World 2016. Brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas with EMC World 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Our guest guest is Yothi Swaroop, who's the director of product marketing at EMC. Scale I.O., you're the man behind Scale I.O. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks, thanks guys. It's glad to finally be here. You know, it's taken me, what, seven years? What I'm here. It's our seven year. Love to have you because one of the things, one, you got a great technical background. You worked at Oracle back in the day. You used no middleware. You know this industry. But you are in the middle of a high growth S-curve as Dave was saying on our previous segments with Scale I.O. This is a killer product. So I want you to give us a quick background on what it is and why is it popping right now? What's, and why wasn't it popping last year? Great question. Now, you summarized it really well. Killer product. We're really disrupting. We're killing traditional architectures with Scale I.O. We're going after, you know, markets that were traditionally successful for what, 10, 20 years with traditional sand. 50 billion dollar market that drew over a decade. We want the new hyper-convert software-defined market to be that new 50 billion dollar revenue run rate with Scale I.O. Now, why is Scale I.O. so differentiated from all the other so-called hyper-convert software-defined products out there? It's because, one, we offer a choice to our customers. You could not only run Scale I.O. hyper-converged, you could also run a two-layer storage only, or you could mix the two in a single cluster. Nobody else can do this. This is a big differentiator. Then, as the name suggests, Scale I.O., Scale and I.O., right? It's all about scalability and performance. Those were the core tenets of the product. When the founders, Boaz, Ares, and others were designing this over in Israel, those were the core tenets that they focused on. Let's focus on scalability and performance, and let's leave the bells and whistles for later. A lot of companies, hyper-converged products and vendors out there, focus on data services. They talk about a lot of these, you know, superficial services outside, but they lose track of the fact that there's scale and performance that most large Fortune 500 companies need today. And that was the core tenet of Scale I.O., and today, I mean, if you watch CJ's keynote, storage reviews, codes came up, and storage reviews an independent test lab, and they said, we're the fastest hyper-converged product, and it scales infinitely, thousands of nodes. So, okay, the next stage was to say, okay, EMC, where's the meat and the bone? Nutanix has been doing this for a while. How do you compare with Nutanix? They're the gold standard today. How do you guys compete against them? Is it better? What's the take? Well, I'm not qualified to, you know, depict what the gold standard is, but because I'm married to Scale I.O., I can say we are the gold standard because we're going after the whales. I don't want to comment on particular vendors out there, but we are really going after the Fortune 100, the Fortune 10 customers. Citibank did two sessions here at EMC World talking about how they're standardizing their entire block-based infrastructure, a petabyte scale, multi-petabyte scale on Scale I.O., moving away from traditional architectures. This is Citibank, a financial services firm that usually doesn't even want to talk about what they're doing in the back end. Right, they're out here. Verizon, one of the largest telcos out there, standardizing on Scale I.O. for their block storage environments, right? So, I don't know what the gold standard is. Well, let's define the gold standard. In your mind, forget Scale I.O. for a second. What would be the ideal gold standard, the highest bar of excellence in this product category? More nodes, more scale, but what would be the couple tick marks? It's a combination. We'll probably need a standard's body to define what the gold standard is, right? It can't be us here, but I think the gold standard is, if you can name three of the top five banks, three of the top telcos, three of the top retail vendors, saying they're using these products at Scale and are extremely happy with the performance they're getting out of it, that's probably the simplest gold standard you can come up with, right? Everything else in the end doesn't really matter. Yes, they give us the best swag at the conference. No, it's about whether you're scaling this product and is it screaming, are all your applications, whether it's P2, P3 emerging, are all of them running at the pace at which you want them to run at? What makes a bank like Citigroup or Citigroup Bank standardize on Scale I.O. Is it the number of nodes connected? What are some of the main reasons why they jump on this product? It's probably a brave person in the infrastructure division of Citigroup, right? No, but all jokes aside, hyperconvergence software defined is as much an HR conversation as it is an IT conversation, right? You're going away from three different teams, managing network, compute, storage, two, saying, hey, this is all going to be managed in one layer, Mr. CIO of a big bank or a big telco, what do you think about that? And he's probably stretching as they're going, do I have to lay people out? Do I have to restructure this? Seems like a hairy mess. Do I even get started here? So the catch with Scale I.O. is we predict a evolutionary approach to how you adopt software defined, right? Start with 10 nodes, start with five nodes, start with one single application, see if you're getting the performance you desire, and then scale it out to other applications and other workloads. Don't let this not be a revolution straight off the bat. Let it be an evolution. So can we talk about why this is happening now? If you roll back to the days where all the storage was inside the server and you had, you know, IBM S&A and DeckNet, all these sort of different standards for networking, and then we know what happened. Storage was offloaded from the server and the SAN was created, the big box controller, and for good reason. You could share it, offload of the CPU. Cisco, we all know what Cisco did with IP networking. Good, great. So why now is the pendulum swinging back? It's a great question. So I think the number one reason is costs, right? You know, I'm a marketer, you talk to any marketing guy, they'll give you, you know, resiliency, agility, et cetera, et cetera, all of these big buzzwords. But there are three things every CIO wants to do, right? Reduce costs, make money, reduce risk. Those are the only three things that CIO is concerned about. So with Hyperconverge, with software-defined storage, you can do all three. You can talk to all of those three points with your infrastructure. One, like I said, the HR conversation. You don't really need that many people to manage your infrastructure anymore. Power, cooling, OPEX stuff. You reduce so much over five years. So there's a conversation to be had in all those areas. And with risk, you're reducing risk so much because you have this one single layer to manage now, one single plane of glass. You don't really have those three different teams where three things can go wrong, especially if you're doing a do-it-yourself. So the simplification message makes a lot of sense. You're going to bring all these components together and it's the whole software-defined meme. But what about the functionality of the stack itself? It takes, as you know, a long time to harden that stack. I mean, sometimes a decade. How is EMC and your customers, how are you dealing with that? Take the city example, they're obviously willing to sacrifice a stack that maybe have a decade or two decades or three decades of hardened functionality. How are you getting around that challenge? Again, that's another great question, right? You have to be a risk-taker. I'm also not a believer in the fact that just because it's software, it's not hardened, right? There's high availability resiliency built into these software modules that people have created. Folks like Ares, who's the CTO of the company, also designed Extremeio, which is a multi-billion dollar business today, right? So I don't buy that argument completely that it's not hardened just because it's software. So let me redefine that. So not hardened. I accept that because it's EMC. You're not going to ship the product if it's not hardened and knocking wood there. But so, what about the functionality though? It takes time to, whether it's copy services or whatever, data reduction services, the level of maturity of that stack, would you agree is not as great? I totally agree, right? So again, it depends on the use cases you're really going after. So we're going after infrastructure as a service for traditional applications as well as modern applications with no SQL databases or open stack, et cetera. And most of those customers that we've dealt with almost come back to me and say, Jyothi, today my pressing requirement is not really Ddupe and compression. You know, I'm not really using Scale.io for VDI or Robo type of use cases. With, you know, Ddupe is a must for those type of use cases by the way and Extreme.io does a great job of that. VxRail, which is based on VSAN does a great job of that. So there are products for those use cases. What we're going after is the core of the data center. The petabyte scale where people are just putting software on commodity hardware, Dell x86 servers and running their entire block infrastructure on it. So the Dell acquisition is like music to your ears now, right? I mean, that's a real tailwind for your business, right? I mean, talk about that a little bit. Oh, well, I can only talk about it as much as I can talk about it, but you know, it's overall 100% positive for us. We, you know, Scale.io runs on commodity servers and Dell is a leader in that business, right? And they're doing it with other competitive vendors as well. So you're agnostic to the service, right? But, but there's clearly going to be go-to-market opportunities that you guys can create. Well, absolutely. I mean, look at Dell's channels, right? The partner ecosystem that they have. EMC has always been a direct sales company and we've done tremendously well with that. Built a humongous company, a very profitable company, but Dell goes to mid-market customers differently through channels and partners. That ecosystem suddenly opens up for Scale.io, VxRack and VxRail. So, you know. Can you help us? Can you quantify the business, the scale of the business, the growth of the business? Anything you can share with us? Absolutely. I can share what CJ presented this morning, right? The momentum is tremendous. 345% year-over-year growth is what we've been through this past year. It's been a crazy time. We're growing in all different theaters of the world. We're growing, the top three verticals for us are financial services, telco service providers in no particular order. And all of them are deploying Scale.io in large scale, petabyte scale. So we're not even talking to customers in a way who are at the five, 10 terabyte range, right? We're not chipping a single node or two nodes. But we're really going after the big customers and they're coming to us. And once someone, five people here about Citibank, here at EMC World, we already have 50 people asking us, oh, can we just replicate that in our environment? Can you have us talk to that person? So it works ready. So what's the typical configuration look like? Node-wise, capacity-wise? It's so mixed, Dave. I mean, to be honest with you, it's hard to put a finger on it, right? You're a service provider, you're a different way. You have a do-it-yourself mentality. You buy the software, you kind of engineer it on the back end, you have a, you start big. Whereas if you're a financial services customer, you kind of, even though you want to go big, you start with five nodes and then, you know, you put one less mission critical application on it and then you kind of expand it to the other application. So it's hard to put a finger on it just yet, just because we're an emerging technology and an emerging product within EMC, but maybe next year, I'll definitely be in on it. But the bell curve goes from a handful of nodes, let's say, you know, single digits to many, many dozens, or? Yeah, that would be the MBA way of thinking, right? But it's not been that way, ever since we introduced free and frictionless. So we put Scalaia out there for free. You don't even have to put your name down, you get the product for free. So people have been downloading it and trying it out in test-dev environments, right? In non-production environments without support. And they've grown it out to such, you know, huge clusters and I love it. And they come back to us and say, you know, we've already tested it this out at scale. Jofi, you know, why don't we talk numbers here, right? So that was a home run for us, making this product free and frictionless. A lot of people were skeptical when we made the product available for free non-production use, unlimited scale. But it's just worked out brilliantly. Verizon, CD, everybody else. What are some of the customer anecdotes you hear from customers? They've fallen out of their chair. What are they honing on in terms of the value proposition? So there are two types of customers. One type of customer that's just adopted Scalaia and just running with it. And there are reasons why they just did that, right? They want to move away. Capacity planning is a huge one. I don't want to think three years. I don't want to be tied into one vendor and, you know, in a sand for three to five years. Can you help me, you know, move away from that? Data migration. Oh my God, that's been such a challenge. Can I not do data migration ever again? Right? So those are the type of challenges you hear and those are the kind of anecdotes you get from customers who've just bought. But customers who've had it for a year or two years are talking CAPEX, OPEX benefits. You know, the CIOs are willing to come up here and talk about it and say, oh my God, 505% ROI just by, you know, moving away from my traditional monolithic architecture to software-defined, we're just loving it. So it becomes a CAPEX, OPEX conversation. Once we've moved beyond the data migration and the capacity planning conversation. Yeah, and I'll give you the final word of the segment. For the folks that didn't see the keynote or are watching now or are watching on demand after, what's the big highlight that you'd like to share with them and what's the most important things being announced here and the activities here at EMC World? Well, the most important thing with ScaleIO is Mr. Customer, if you have an application that can run on block storage and if you want to save money running your application on block storage and scale to hundreds of nodes and petabytes without losing sight of performance, ScaleIO is the answer for you. And guess what, you're not the first ones to do it. Tens of Fortune 500 customers are already using it and it's only going to increase in the coming months. Yeah, I think Swaroop here inside the queue talking about ScaleIO, Joe Tucci and Mike UNA, Dave predicted that hyperconverge will be number one in the business. So we'll see, under a lot of pressure. We'll talk to CGA about that. You're watching theCUBE, converging all the data here, sharing it with you. You're watching theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We'll be right back. Looking back at the history of Dell...