 Travis and Pete, you guys have fun. Okay, hi, John McArthur. I'm Travis. Travis, nice to meet you, Pete. Good to see you again. It's been a long time. Yeah, that's been. Welcome to the queue. Well, it's from way back. From way back, yeah, it's my friend Mr. Valente coming in. Mr. Valente will be here tomorrow morning. He's on our red eye. Right now, he's at another event in Las Vegas. And he's going to fly in on the red eye and be here tomorrow morning. So I'm sure he'll want to hook up with you. Yeah, he sent me a tweet or a... He's posting you? OK. And so tell me what you're up to these days, because you and I haven't talked in a little while. Sure. Well, I just took over. I'm the general manager for our ecologic organization. So I'm in the process of moving up to New Hampshire. All right, live for or die. A little bit back to my roots, as you know. I spent a lot of time up in Shrewsbury Mass with the old digital team prior to the compact merger. Heading back up there. Travis just recently moved up there as well. You're already up in New Hampshire? Yeah, live for or die. OK. Good value for your real estate up there. Yeah, it's a beautiful part of the country. It's a beautiful part. Yeah, and it's nice in January. This was actually a particularly difficult winter. We actually had to bring the dozer in to move the snow back. Yeah. I was up there during the winter a lot, and there was seven foot snow banks. Yes. It felt like an urban canyon driving through the streets of Boston. I have a picture from outside my house with a basketball hoop. In one car, we have parked outside. Two cars are parked inside. One parked outside, and the snow on top of the car was at the height of the basketball hoop. Goodness. Yes, that was. But it's all melted now. So it's good. It's beautiful now. So you guys are hiring up in Nashua? Yes, we are. We heard that from Darren that you guys are looking to hire. Where are you hiring these days? Actually, within storage, we're hiring everywhere. But Nashua being one of the key sites we're hiring in. Sure. And basically all skill sets, if you will. Yeah. OK. I think Darren said we're about 90% software engineers. So obviously, we're looking for people to work on the software products and a lot of the integration that we do with applications and such make it even more important to get those skill sets. I mean, if you look at the hiring we've done in the Nashua Design Center since we've been there, we've more than doubled the size of the staff there. We actually were hiring so quickly that we had to go and look at other geography so we could hire. You've got development in Israel. You've got California now. Our Silicon Valley Design Center. The compelling team is up in Minneapolis. And Austin, Texas, the Austin Design Center. And something in India, too, I think? No? Or is that somebody else? We have a little bit in India. It's connected with our Ocarina Acquisition and Hyderabad. We have a small team there. That's because I think Darren was talking about that or Phil was talking about that this morning. OK. So we're looking in all those areas. Good. Well, we need jobs. So that's good. It's nice to be hiring in this environment. Right, right, right. So tell me a little bit about the integration of some of the technologies and how you help the customers differentiate between how are you driving innovation on the ecologic side and how you sort of contrast that with what's going on the compelent side. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. Good. So one of the big announcements we've had at this event is the release of our ecologic SF-S7500, which is adding file capability to the ecologic product. So you actually announced that this morning? We did this morning, yes. And that came out of the Exonet acquisition? That's correct. That's exactly right. So we did the Exonet acquisition about 18 months ago, roughly. February of last year. February of last year. And we've been working on the integration very diligently for the last year plus. And we're bringing the product to market. And I'm really excited about it because a lot of the customers, ecologic customers and customers in general, have enormous unstructured data growth. And file capability helps them manage that unstructured growth. And it's not just any file capability. It's based on the Exonet IP, high performance, high end file system. Yeah. Exonet was pretty much a high performance kind of file system, right? So how far down are you taking that into your? I mean, is this for? It's targeted at the ecologic customer set today. So describe that ecologic customer set to me. But maybe before we go there, we've also released a product called the NX-3500, which also uses the Exonet file system on our Power Vault line. So the idea is to do it, obviously, on Power Vault, do it on the ecologic. And you can imagine what we might be doing on it. And eventually, it's going to be uncompellent, right? Yeah, exactly. OK. And is that sort of how you tier them? And I don't want to oversimplify too much, but you get Power Vault for the S, right? And then you got ecologic for the load emit of the mid-range and compelent for the mid-range and upper. Is that sort of a differentiation? Is that too simple? Well, I mean, it's roughly correct. I mean, I think each product set is targeted at a unique, distinct customer need in the IT environments. Power Vaults are customers that a lot of them are S, but even some larger customers who just need a little bit of extra storage, they need good performance. They need basic capabilities. But first and foremost, they need for it to be affordable. So really targeted at that customer set. Ecologic is targeted at what we like to call the lean IT staff, highly virtualized, fast-growing customer set. And there's a lot of those customers out there with virtualization coming on. I remember a very large retailer in Massachusetts that's got a huge installation of Ecologic in there, I think. And they're very virtualized infrastructure. Yeah, if you look at typical Ecologic customer, 50%, 60%, 70% of their applications are virtualized. We were just talking with a customer right before we came here. 80% of their applications are virtualized. So it's pretty common to be highly virtualized in an Ecologic environment. So they need dynamic storage, adaptive storage, flexible storage. But first and foremost, they need for it to be very easy to manage. Because by and large, Ecologic customers have very lean IT staff. They were talking about having three people on the IT staffs managing 60 arrays, for example. In the old days, if you remember, we used to use so many terabytes that an administrator could manage. Yeah, I actually remember doing a white paper on that a long time ago about what we first did was we centralized storage into a big iron. And that gave some centralized management capabilities. Now you guys have figured out how to do centralized management, even though you've got 70, 80 storage systems. That's right. So that's a big change in the industry. Yeah, it's come a long way. So yes, we have. Still doing dispatch to fix disk drives and things like that. Well, we were talking earlier about one of the customers we just had the conversation with, asked me what was the first project to work on. It was a one gigabyte, five and a quarter inch drive in 1986. And we were selling them for $10,000 per drive. So that kind of takes you back. Puts it in perspective a little bit. Yeah, I spent $5 million for five terabytes or something like that, I forget. We used to call it dollars per megabyte. Now you can't even do that anymore. It's pennies. So it's good growth. What are we going to see the rest of the show today? You've got, of the rest of the week, you've got, what's the focus? What are the big things to watch for in the show? So the great thing about this show is that we get people from the actual product development group to come and educate customers. We have a ton of hands-on labs for our ecologic customers, our compelling customers, our Power Vault customers. We have a hands-on lab for the new FS-7500 that we announced today that people can go and touch. And these hands-on labs, you talk to a lot of people that come to these events. They almost in and of themselves make the event worthwhile. The ability to touch and look at the tools and see how they could use them in their environment is very valuable to them. But in addition to that, we have a lot of educational sessions, best practices sessions, sharing information between customers. And you've got a lot of your partners here, right? Absolutely. Yeah, so a lot of education there. Yeah, I think in general, Dell are looking for open, capable, affordable systems. And part of that is we're not going to go and try to do all the applications ourselves. We're gonna team with those people. You see the VMware, Symantec, and our other key partners here that we work with on an ongoing basis to make sure that we're bringing best of breed along with our storage solutions. And in addition to our ISV partners, we also have channel partners here. So the show started out with a channel partner specific day. A lot of the same education that the end users like, the channel partners like. But that's an innovation for this show versus what we've done historically when it was the Equalogic user conference. Bringing Compellent into the full. They had it, so you had channel partners and end users at the show. And so we decided to adopt that model as well because the channel is a key part of us serving customers. Compellent was 100% through the channel. As was Equalogic. As was Equalogic. Yes. Okay. And is that still true today? Or is that, how's that evolving? We have a dual model. So very, very friendly with the channel, but we also do have a large storage system. Okay. Going in. And obviously we're trying to strike the right balance there because if we're going to grow, obviously we need our channel partners to be a big part of our growth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so I think one of the things that I like to focus on is where do you see Equalogic products evolving over the next 12, 24 months? You've did the scale of the file system. I think, were you in the session this morning? No, no, we were broadcasting. Okay, broadcasting. Okay. I think if you look at our overall strategy, I think Equalogic is going to be a big part of that overall strategy. So we're doing the integration of the technologies to start with. Started with the file system. You know, we purchased Ocarina. Right. So you can imagine that we're taking that compression and dedupe data reduction technology and moving it into, down in the file system, talking about primary storage, things like that. So you're going to see that continue to evolve, right? And we're also looking at across products. You know, we had a question this morning, for example, have you started thinking about compelling and using Equalogic and being able to move from an Equalogic box to a compelling box? So if you had sort of a data center, you know, if compelling is your data center and Equalogic is your departmental, are you going to be able to move that? So those are the kinds of things we're going to continue to look at. But we're also going to look at growing the Equalogic, you know, you mentioned specifically Equalogic. We're going to continue to grow the capability of Equalogic. We're going to make it easier to use than it already is. Virtualization, that's been the center point. Easy to use, virtualization for Equalogic. We'll continue to do more of that. And one of the things, as Travis was talking about, what are we doing here at the conference? One of the things is that we're getting very good feedback from our customers. And we really, that's one of the things we take out of this conference more than anything is get that feedback and incorporate it into the products. As he said, we just met with a customer and he was happy because he's actually on four beta programs with us as we speak right now. Which means that he's getting to see the products early. He's giving us input. And we're making the changes that he's looking for. Yeah, and I really, I mean, I think it shows, you know, the compelling philosophy, the Dell philosophy, the Equalogic philosophy, all have merged into, you know, what is now the Dell philosophy, which is customers first, right? Customers in. And the customer we were talking to was saying, hey, you know, we were running this beta program. I gave you feedback on something I wanted to change. He's communicating directly with the development team. The next beta release, we had made that change for him. And he was remarking on it. You know, he was saying that's remarkable. Yeah, yeah. The green was pretty hot there for a while. You know, a lot of focus on green initiatives. You know, reducing the cost of operating, the operating cost of power, cooling, things like that. Where does that sit today in Equalogic and Compellant? Well, I think a good example is Compellant. When you start talking about the tiering architecture, you're automatically moving the data from more expensive, higher powers, outstate this, SAS drives, off to cheaper. SATA. SATA drives. So that's one thing, for example. The other thing is, is we start looking at the Ddupe technology. Think about it. If you can Ddupe the data, move it off to something else, and you just need less storage, all of a sudden, you're just green by default. Yeah, yeah. And are you seeing customers asking more and more for that kind of technology? Or is this a push or a pull? They like the optimization, right? You know, and the great... It's not an operational efficiency. Right, well, you get the maximum performance out of your environment with the minimal amount of spindles, which saves you money, but it also saves you power and cool. So we're seeing a lot of customers, you know, go that way because of the economic benefits. Okay, okay. I, you know, you ask if it's a push or a pull. I think it's a little bit of a neutral. You know, we're moving there because the technology's taking us there, and it's a benefit to the customers. So in the past, where they may have asked for it, because, oh, my data center's running out of space, my power bills are too high, we're starting to meet those needs with some pretty neat technologies, and therefore, they don't have to ask for it, because we're already doing some of those. It's just happening. Yeah, actually, back in the day when I bought five terabytes for five million bucks, one big driver was, we were out of space. You're out of space. And I needed to squeeze smaller disk drives in the same place. Yeah, the other thing is that you don't always need to raise floor environments for these products. Yeah, that's really gone away. Equalogy doesn't require a raised floor, right? And we're actually doing some internal studies, thermal studies, and, you know, how far can we take that envelope? Because we know people are going to deploy these in areas that aren't raised floor environments. I guess I'm dating myself because I don't even know what a raised floor is. I'm just kidding. Wow, wow, okay, he has a lot to learn. Yeah, so Dara and I were talking about, do we remember our draft numbers, so. That was before me, okay. The draft numbers were before you, so, okay. So, yeah, all right. So yeah, because he was a fighter pilot. Yeah, he was, he was. So, and what about, we've been through a number of disasters recently. We had the situation in Japan. We've had, you know, flooding. We've had hurricanes. We've had earthquakes, things like that. Where does data protection fit into the strategy and where are we going to see some innovations at the storage system level from Equalogy for data protection? It's core to the strategy. I mean, when you're putting all of your data centralized, the protecting that data in the event of human error or natural disaster is imperative. And so, with Equalogic and all inclusive software capability that comes with it, customers get replication technology with Equalogic included in the price. And so that's actually one of the most popular pieces of technology that customers use with Equalogic's replication technology for DR type scenarios. Is it doing campus replication? Are they doing a wide area of replication? It's both. It's both. So the D-dup will be a critical part of the wide. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, we're actually talking to the customers where they're asking for a specific type where maybe they want to replicate onsite and then move the data offsite. And that data that's offsite is not necessarily for operational every day. So you can maybe treat a little bit different, right? You can D-dup it, move it off, keep it on cheaper storage. So all of a sudden, you get a double benefit. You have a DR site, if you will, that you can bring back up and you also are saving money. Right, right. I think that's certainly an area where we're seeing more and more requirements. I think things like 9-11 happen and in those businesses, I forgot what the number percentage was, but I think it's 80, 90% of the businesses that get impacted by that never come back. Now, if you can find the source for that data, I've been looking for the source for that data. I've heard that data, but I haven't found the source for that data. I, we're all quoting the same data, obviously. So somebody must have it. Somebody's got it, yeah, yeah. Anyway, but it clearly is a big issue when you've lost data. Well, let's face it, our businesses, our data in a lot of cases, right? You start talking about billing and that sort of thing. What are you going to do about it? Right, right. So any other, well, let's talk a little bit about, we were talking about cloud earlier and how Dell is in 22 of the 25 largest cloud providers. Is there a cloud strategy for Equalogy? I think it depends on how you define cloud. So you define cloud, and you can answer the question. Right, so if you're talking about- Or tell me it's the wrong question, that's the right way to answer that. If you're talking about a highly virtualized environment as sort of a private cloud, we're absolutely there. Most of our customers are doing that today. And there's also some smaller service providers that are offering more of a public cloud for Equalogy, using Equalogic as well. And some internal Dell groups are doing the same. I was talking to some guys from one of the internal Dell groups about how they've got a big Dell on Dell sort of philosophy here and how they drink their own Kool-Aid. So tell me what's going on there. Specific on cloud, I can't say much. No, but in terms of Dell using Equalogic technology internally- If you look at, for example, we acquired Perot. Yeah. And Perot- That was actually your largest acquisition, right? It was our largest acquisition, exactly. So when you look at what they're trying to do from the services side in the cloud, you can imagine that we're working closely together with them to make sure that the Equalogic technology plays into the cloud solutions. So we're spending a lot of time with them making sure that as they go out, they're taking the Equalogic product along with us. Dell Data Center Services, are you working with that group? Well, our internal, well, a good example is IT. Our internal IT groups run all of our exchange on Equalogic today. So you still haven't put your email in the cloud, you're still using Exchange, huh? We're still, yeah. Yeah, we're waiting kind of about- We could put your email in the cloud if you want. We're not ready to put ours there yet, I guess. Yeah, well, yeah, mine went down the other day, but I'm in the cloud. But I didn't lose anything, I don't think. I think Travis kind of alluded to this when he said, we'll define the cloud, right? There's the public cloud, there's private clouds, there's infrastructure providers to the cloud. I think you're going to see a lot of the technology that's already there being utilized for clouds, and it's going to be interesting to see if your member storage is a service about what, 10 years ago? I do remember storage as a service. It's sort of back a little bit. Yeah, well, it kind of went out because- It did go back. The economics didn't work out. Right, but it is, but now we've got lots of active, we've obviously got Amazon S3. That's right. Right, we've got companies like Nervonix, right, who are building out of storage infrastructure as a service, so what's your take on that? I think it's going to keep growing. It makes you know our data centers solutions team. You quoted the number earlier. Our team is a big provider to them, mainly on the server side, right? And we're going to be jumping in with the on the storage side as well. Well, that's great. Travis, nice to meet you. Pete, good to reconnect. It's good to see you again.