 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman 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 Caitlyn Gordon. She is the vice president of marketing at Dell Technologies. Caitlyn, great to see you, thanks so much for joining. Thank you so much for having me, Stu. It's great to be here. All right, so Caitlyn, the last couple of years at DTW, different segments of the market have, 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 of the labs and demos, so tell us about the important announcement that you're sharing with us today. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately the show is not going on, but the product is still launching. It actually has already started shipping, and we are excited that we're still able to announce it this week. PowerStore is really probably the most exciting product I've ever gotten to help bring to market. And all those demos and labs that you've talked about, we're going to 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. We love speeds and feeds in storage, but PowerStore is so much more than that. We certainly have designed it to meet the needs of all the workloads, block and file, providing performance and efficiency. But even more importantly, what we've 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 business has evolved. Yeah, it's so important, Kaitlin, I'm glad you talked about that. The storage industry, IT in general, we can really get wonky and dig down into the speeds and feeds and yeah, we want to understand, you know, how does NVMe and storage 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 you're solving for that maybe, you know, previous generations you go back to like the Unity XA, just weren't on the table for discussion? Yeah, I think one of the, 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 and the end-to-end NVMe and Optane and all that wonderful goodness, but what 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, taking out all of the additional cost and time and probably most importantly, risk of manual tasks. How do we have infrastructure that can be more intelligent and help 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 their infrastructure investments today don't become technical debt tomorrow. So that ability to have infrastructure that can adapt and evolve with the business is so important to our customers. Yeah, so Caitlin, how has that done? Traditionally storage, you think about it, I buy a box, I write it away, I write it off over a certain number of years. So what's different about the services and I'm guessing there's some financial pieces that make power store and the rest of the power family different than what I would have thought 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, we're able to innovate on a container basis which makes our data services across the portfolio more consistent 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 and PowerStore is available with all of our Dell technologies on demand offerings, flex on demand to give you that ability to really consume infrastructure in an OPEX model. Really interesting, you talked about underneath the covers, containerized architecture. I think back to previous generations when EMC moved on to an Intel based architecture. There's things where you say there's a major change and the code base is 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 going to provide X9s of capability and make sure that you can run your business on it. Help us understand a little bit about how you said a lot of things have changed but we're still talking about things that you're running our business on for mid-race customers for small enterprises, mid-size enterprise. What's still the same I guess is what I'm asking for today's storage compared to what we were looking at that path. Yeah and if you look at it I mean the architecture itself is built as an architecture that can serve the broadest set of needs for the biggest set of our customer base. So foundationally it supports all physical databases and applications. We've got VVol 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 it's important and to end 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 we talk about scaling up and scaling out of course, we look at phase world two things that are critically important to customers it's my data and my applications obviously strong legacy at Dell EMC looking at the data you touched a little bit about the applications but tell me more how does this fit for my latest cloud native type environments 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 it's 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 storage appliance. What's even more interesting and what's really different about what we can do with PowerStore 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 you're 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, you said specialized application so let's feel the onion a little bit on that. I think back obviously, Dell has a very strong position in hyper-converged infrastructure which is scaling 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 can take storage and I can put applications on it. There was use case with Isilon to say, I've got a lot of general purpose compute if I have some extra capacity maybe I can do that. It wasn't something that I heard used a lot. So what sort of applications how do you kind of compare and contrast this with other things like HCI? Yeah, and this is PowerStore's 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 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 Flink and Spark where response time is really king. And when we look at that in comparison to what HCI is we have and we are in a great position, right? With VxRail has been leading the hyperconverged market and we know that our customers are deploying that alongside three-tier architecture. And what you look at what we've done with PowerStore and 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 PowerStore, we've taken storage and we brought compute into it. And it really solves for different and is optimized for different challenges. And we really think complimenting those in the data center next to each other is going to be an increasingly common deployment model to have the right architecture for the right workloads. And then you have VMware consistent operations across the top to have that consistent operations within your data center to 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. One of the big challenges for storage people always is, I always used to joke it's the four letter word, it's migration. So customers, there are very few green field deployments out there. So the existing Dell customers, people out there that have been doing things in previous ways, how do they get to PowerStore? And once they're on PowerStore, what does that mean for future growth, expansion, migration discussions? And I've heard this before, right? Forklifts are not a friendly thing. And the good news is with PowerStore, it is truly the end of data migration. What we've built with PowerStore is an architecture that enables you to non-disruptively upgrade the controllers when new generations come out. You can non-disruptively upgrade those, keep all the capacity in place and not having impact to your business. We also know the customers need to get data to PowerStore. Now, getting data to PowerStore is going to be really, really seamless. We have invested significantly in a number of different migration options for our portfolio and for third party to get data to PowerStore. And what seamless means could be different to different customers, that can be non-disruptive, it could be agentless, it also could be host-based. We'll have all of those solutions from day one to enable that transition to happen 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 PowerStore in less than 10 clicks. Okay, that's great, Caitlin. So, you know, I remember back when Dell first finished the acquisition of EMC, one of the things we heard loud and clear with Jeff Clark is a simplification of the portfolio. Something we've heard throughout the ranks, I remember talking to Jeff Boudreau about hinting at what was happening 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 PowerStore is absolutely our lead mid-range all-fash offering. We continue to have Unity XP as our lead hybrid mid-range solution. And we have out-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 arrays 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 any 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 to which is a simplified portfolio. Great, Caitlin, 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 tools that they have today. So there needs to be an easy migration to go from what they have to the new. On the other hand also, sometimes 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 your install base as well as new people coming in that might not have been traditional storage administrators. Yeah, and I think the reality is that the specialized skill as a storage administrator 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 to have the most seamless and simple operating experience from an element manager with power 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 manage 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 VRO, VMware Cloud Foundation to really help VMware administrator also be able to operate the system as well. Excellent. So 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 Cloud IQ is something that's really important and strategic for us. Cloud IQ of course comes with power store, 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 reduce risk in the environment because it shows you a healthcare score 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 and impacts your business. It can help you predict your future 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% capacity and remedy that for it 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 either our reps or a partner to have the ability to be part of that Cloud IQ experience to be 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 to 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, Caitlin, congratulations to 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 Dell Technologies World in the fall talking to customers that are using. So thanks so much for joining us and look forward to talking with you again. Thanks Stu, great to see you. All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all the upcoming events that we're doing right now, of course, 100% remote. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching The Cube.