 Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this special CUBE presentation where we're covering the Dell EMC Integrated Data Protection Appliance Announcement. You can see we also are running a crowd chat. It's an ask me anything crowd chat. You can log in with Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook and ask any question. We've got Dell EMC executives. We're going to hear from VMware executives. We've got the analyst perspective. We're going to hear from customers. And of course we're going to jump into the crowd chat. With me is Beth Phalen who is the president of Dell EMC, Dell EMC's data protection division. Beth, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Okay, so we know that 80% of the workloads are virtualized. We also know that when virtualization came on the scene it caused customers to really rethink their data protection strategies. Cloud is another force that's causing them to change the way in which they approach data protection, but let's start with virtualization. What are you guys doing for those virtualized customers? Data protection is crucial for our customers today and more and more the V admins are being expected to protect their own environments. So we've been working very closely with VMware to make sure we're delivering the simplest data protection for VMware, taking into account all of the cloud capabilities that VMware is bringing to market and making sure we're protecting those as well. We have to do that without compromise and so we have some really exciting innovations to talk about today. The first of those is the DP4400. We announced this a few weeks ago. It is a purpose-built appliance for mid-sized customers that brings forward all of our learnings from enterprise data protection and makes it simple and easy to use and at the right price point for our mid-sized customers with the extension into VMware environments and extensions into the cloud. Okay, so I mentioned up front that cloud is this disruptive force. People expect the outcome of cloud to be simplicity, ease of management, but the cloud adds IT complexity. How are you making data protection simpler for the cloud? And the cloud has many different ways that customers can leverage it. The two that we're going to highlight today are for those customers that are using VMware cloud on AWS. We're now enabling a seamless disaster recovery option so customers can fail over to VMware cloud on AWS for their DR configurations. And on top of that, we're very excited to talk about data protection as a service. We all know how widely popular that is and how rapidly it's growing. And we've now integrated with VMware cloud director to allow customers to not have to have a separate backup as a service portal but provide management for both their VMware environments and their data protection all integrated within VCD. Okay, great. So we know that VMware, of course, is the leader in virtualization. We're going to cut away for a moment and hear from VMware executives. We're going to come back here. We're going to do a deep dive. As I say, we've got a great agenda. We're going to explore some of these things. And then of course, there's the crowd chat. They ask me anything, crowd chat. So let's cut over to Palo Alto, California and our studio's over there. And let's hear from the VMware perspective and Peter Burris, take it away, Peter. Thanks, Dave. And this is Peter Burris and I can report that in fact we have another beautiful day here in California. And also we've got a great VMware executive to talk a bit about this important announcement. Yang Bing Lee is the senior vice president in GM for the storage and availability business unit at VMware. Welcome back to the CUME, Yang Bing. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me, Peter. Well, absolutely. We've got a lot of great stuff to talk about, but let's start with the obvious question. Why is it so important that VMware and Dell EMC work on this question of data availability, data protection? You know, I have a very simple answer for you. You know, Dell EMC has been the market leader for the past decade. And they are also a leading solution for all of our VMware environment. This is very natural that we do a lot of collaboration with them. And what's most important is now our collaboration is not only on go-to-market collaboration, enabling our joint customers, but also on deep engineering level collaboration. And that is very, very exciting. We have a lot of our solutions are really co-engineered together. So there is in service to something. And now putting all this knowledge, all this product together to create a solution is in service to data protection, but especially as it relates to spanning the cloud. So talk to us a little bit about how this is going to make it easier for customers to be where they need to be in their infrastructure. You know, certainly VMware has been also on our journey to help with our customers. Their transition from data center to the cloud and data protection is a very crucial aspect of that. And we're looking for a simpler, scalable, more robust data protection solution. You know, VMware launched our VMware cloud on AWS service last year. And Dell EMC has been with us since day one. Their first solution to be certified at the data protection service for VMware cloud on AWS. We also work with 4,500 VCPP partners. This is the VMware cloud partner program partners that, you know, they are building cloud services based on VMware software defined data center stack. And we are also working with Dell EMC on integrating their data protection service with the vCloud their vCloud director software so that, you know, our customer has integrated data protection for our VCPP partners. So, you know, across all the cloud initiative we're working very closely with Dell EMC. So bringing the best of the technology, the best of this massive ecosystem together to help customers protect their data and give them options about where they operate their infrastructure. Definitely, I'm personally very excited about their recent announcement, the enhancement to the data domain virtual edition where they're offering a subscription based data protection bundle that can allow a VMware cloud on AWS instance to backup their data, you know, using a subscription model. And you can backup 96 terabytes for any single SDC cluster in VMware cloud on AWS. So they're definitely driving a lot of innovation, not only in technology, but also in consumption, how to make it easier for our customers to consume. And we're excited to be a partner with Dell EMC together on this. Fantastic, gang being lead VMware. Back to you Dave. Thanks Peter, we're back for the deep dive. Beth Phalen is joining us again and Rhea Barrett, who's the vice president of marketing for Dell EMC's data protection division. Thanks guys for coming on. Rhea, let me start with you. Why are customers, what are they telling you in terms of why they're acquiring your data protection solutions? Well, Beth talked a little bit about the engineering effort and collaboration we've been putting in place. And so did Yang Ming with VMware. So whether that's integration into vCenter or vSphere or vRealize operations manager, vRealize automation or vCloud director, all of this work, all of this engineering effort and engineering hours is really to do two things. Deliver simply powerful data protection for VMware customers. What do you mean by simple? Simple. Well, simple comes in two types of approaches, right? Simple is through automation. One of the things that we've done is really automate across the data protection stack for VMware. Whereas 99% of the market solutions really leave it off at policy management. So they automate the policy layer. We automate not only the policy layer but the vProxy deployment as well as the data movement. We have five types of data movement capabilities that have been automated. Whether you're going directly from storage to protection storage. Whether you're doing client to protection storage. Whether you're doing application to protection storage or whether you're doing hypervisor direct to application storage. So it really is to automate and to maximize the performance of to meet the customer's service levels. So automation is critical when you're doing that. The other part of automation could be in how easy cloud is for the admins and users. It really has to do with being able to orchestrate all of the activities very simply and easily. Simplicity is also management. We are hearing more and more that the admins are taking on the role of doing their backups and restores. So our efforts with VMware have been to really simplify the management so that they can use their native tools. We've integrated with VMware for the vAdmins to be able to take backup and restore just a part of their daily operational tasks. So when you talk about power, is that performance? You referenced performance, but is it just performance or is it more than that? That's also a great question, Dave. Thank you. Power really in terms of data protection is threefold. It's power in making sure that you have a single powerful solution that really covers a comprehensive set of applications and requirements, not only for today but also tomorrow's needs. So that comprehensive coverage whether you're on-premise or in the cloud is really critical. Power means performance, of course it means performance. Being able to deliver the highest performing protection and more importantly restores is critical to our customers. Power also means not sacrificing efficiency to get that performance. So efficiency, we have the best source ID duplication technology in the market. That coupled with the performance is really critical to our customers. So all of these, the simplicity, the comprehensive coverage, the performance, the efficiency also drives the lowest cost to protect for our customers. I want to bring Beth failing into the conversation. Beth, let's talk about cloud a little bit. A lot of people feel as though I can take data, I can dump it into an object store in the cloud and I'm protected, your thoughts. Yeah, we hear that same misconception and in fact the exact opposite is true. It's even more important that people have world-class data protection when they're bringing cloud into their IT environment. They have to know where their data is and how is it protected and how to restore it. So we have a few innovations that are going on here. For a long time we've had our hyper cloud extensions. You can do cloud tiering directly from data domain. And now we've also extended what you can do if you're a VMware cloud on AWS customer. So you can use that for your cloud DR configuration, fail over to AWS with VMware cloud and then fail back with the emotion if you choose to. And that's great for customers who don't want to have a second site but do want to have confidence that they can recover if there's a disaster. On top of that, we've also been doing some really great work with VMware with vCloud director integration. Data protection as a service is growing like crazy. It's highly popular around the globe as a way to consume data protection. And so now you can integrate both your VMware tasks and your data protection tasks from one UI in vCloud director. These are just a few of the things that we're doing. Comprehensively bringing data protection to the cloud is essential. Great. Okay, Dell EMC just recently made an announcement. The IDPA DP4400. Rhea, what's it all about? Explain it. Absolutely. So what we announced is really an integrated data protection appliance. Turnkey purpose built to meet the specific requirements of mid-sized customers. It's really to bring that enterprise sensibility and protection to our mid-sized customers. It's all inclusive in terms of capabilities. So if you're talking about backup, restore, replication, disaster recovery, cloud disaster recovery, and cloud long-term retention, all at your fingertips, all included, as well as all of the capabilities we talked about in terms of enabling VM admins to be able to do all of their daily tasks and operations through their own native tools and UIs. So it's really all about bringing simply powerful data protection to mid-sized customers at the lowest cost to protect. And we now also have a guarantee under our future proof loyalty program. We are introducing a 55 to 1 deduplication guarantee for those exact customers. Okay, Beth, I wonder if you could talk about the motivation for this product. Why did you build it and why is it relevant for mid-sized customers? So we're known as number one in enterprise data protection. We're known for our world-class dedupe best in the class, best in the world, the dedupe capabilities. And what we've done is we've taken the learnings and the IP that we have that served enterprise customers for all of these years and then we're making that accessible to mid-sized customers. And there are so many companies out there that can take advantage of our technology that maybe couldn't before these announcements. So by building this, we've created a product that a mid-sized company may have a small IT staff, like I said at the beginning, may have VM admins who are also responsible for data protection. Now they can have what we bring to the market with best in class data protection. I want to follow up with you on simple and powerful. What is your perspective on simple? What does it mean for customers? Yeah, I mean, if you break it down, simple means simple to deploy, two times faster than traditional data protection. Simple means easier to manage with modern HTML5 interfaces that include the data protection, data day tasks, also include reporting. Simple means easier to grow, growing in place from 24 terabytes up to 96 terabytes with just a simple software license to add that 12 terabyte increments. So all of those things come together to reduce the amount of time that an IT admin has to spend on data protection. So when I hear powerful and I hear mid-sized customers, I'm thinking, okay, I want to bring enterprise class data protection down to the mid-sized organization. Is that what it means? Can you actually succeed in doing that? Yeah, if I'm an IT admin, I want to make sure that I can protect all of my data as quickly as efficiently as possible. And so we have the broadest support matrix in the industry. I don't have to bring in multiple products to support protection on my different applications. That's key. That's one thing. The other thing is I want to be able to scale. I don't want to have to be forced to bring in new products. With this, you have a logical five terabytes on-prem. You can grow to protecting an additional 10 terabytes in the cloud. So that's another key piece of it, scalability. Petabytes, sorry. Petabytes. Petabytes. You said terabytes. We live in a petabyte world. Of course. Yes, what am I thinking? And then last but not least is just performance, right? These ones on a 14G PowerEd server, you're going to get the efficiency. You can protect five times as many VMs as you could without this kind of product. So all of those things come together for power, scalability, support matrix, and performance. Great. Thank you. OK, Rio, let's talk about the business impact. Start with the IT operations person. What does it mean for that individual? Yeah, absolutely. So first, you're going to get your weekends back, right? So the product is just faster. We talked about it's simpler. You're not going to have to get a PhD on how to do data protection to be able to do your business. You're going to enable your V admins to be able to take on some of the tasks. So it's really about freeing up your weekends, having that sound mind that data protection is just happening. It works. We've already tried and tested this with some of the most crucial businesses, with the most stringent service level requirements. It's just going to work. And by the way, you're going to look like a hero, because with this 2U appliance, you're going to be able to support 15 petabytes across the most comprehensive coverage in the data center. So your boss is going to think you're just a superhero. Petabytes. Exactly, petabytes. Exactly. So it's tremendous for the IT user and also the business user. Well, what about the boss? What about the line of business? What does it mean to that individual? So if I'm the CEO or the CIO, I really want to think about where am I putting my most skilled personnel. And my most skilled personnel, especially as IT is becoming so core to the business, is probably not best served doing data protection. So just being able to free up those resources to really drive applications or initiatives that are driving revenue for the business is critical. Number two, if I'm the boss, I don't want to overpay for data protection. Data protection is insurance for the business. You need it, but you don't want to overpay for it. So I think that lowest cost is a really critical requirement. The third one is really minimizing risk and compliance issues for the business. If I have the sound mind and the trust that this is just going to work, that I'm going to be able to recover my business no matter what the scenario and that it's been tried and true in the biggest accounts across the world, I'm going to rest assured that I have less exposure to my business. Great. Rhea, Beth, thank you very much. Don't forget, we have an Ask Me Anything crowd chat at the end of this session, so you can go in, log in with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, and ask any question. All right, let's take a look at the product, and then we're going to come back and get the analyst perspective. Keep it right there. Organizations today, especially mid-sized organizations, are faced with increased complexity, driving the need for data protection solutions that enable them to do more with less. The Dell EMC IDPA DP4400 packages the proven enterprise class technologies that have made us the number one provider in data protection into a converged appliance specifically designed for mid-size organizations. While other solutions sacrifice power in the name of simplicity, the IDPA DP4400 delivers simply powerful data protection. The IDPA DP4400 combines protection software and storage, search and analytics, and cloud readiness in one appliance. To save you time and money, we made it simple for you to deploy and upgrade, and easily grow in place without disruption, adding capacity with simple license upgrades without buying more hardware. Data protection management is also a snap with the IDPA system manager. IDPA is optimized for VMware data protection. It is also integrated with vSphere, SQL, and Oracle to enable a wider IT audience to manage data protection. The IDPA DP4400 provides protection across the largest application ecosystem, deliver break-net backup speeds, or efficient network usage, and unmatched 55 to 1 average deduplication. The IDPA DP4400 is natively extensible to the cloud for long-term retention, and also enables simple and cost-effective cloud disaster recovery. Deduplicated data is stored in AWS with minimal footprint with failover to AWS and failback to on-premises quickly, easily, and cost-effectively. The IDPA DP4400 delivers all this at the lowest cost to protect. It includes a three-year satisfaction guarantee, as well as an up to 55 to 1 data protection deduplication guarantee. The Dell EMC IDPA DP4400 provides backup, replication, deduplication, search, analytics, instant access for application testing and development, as well as DR and long-term retention to the cloud. Everything you need to deliver enterprise-class data protection in a small integrated system, optimized for mid-size environments. It's simply powerful. Cool video. All right, we're back with Vinnie Chowinsky, who is a senior analyst for the validation practice at ESG Enterprise Strategy Group. ESG is a company that does a lot of research and one of the areas is they have these lab reports and they basically validate vendor claims. It's an awesome service. They've had it for a number of years and Vinnie is an expert in this area. Vinnie Chowinsky, welcome to theCUBE. Great to see you. How are you doing, Dave? Great to see you. So, when you talk to customers, they tell you they hate complexity, first of all. They, it's specifically in the context of data protection. They want high performance. They don't want to have to mess with this stuff and they want low cost. That's right. What are you seeing in the marketplace? So our research is lining up with those challenges and that's why I've recently done three reports that talk to how EMC is addressing those challenges and how they're making it easier, faster and less expensive to do data protection. So people don't want to do a lot of heavy lifting. They worry about the time it takes to do deployment. So what did you find, hands on, what did you find with regard to deployment? Yeah, so for the deployment, we really, we focused on the DP4400 and you know, how that's making it easy for the IT general is to do data protection deployment and management. And what we did, I actually walked through the whole process from the delivery truck to first backup. We had it off the truck and racked up and powered up in about 30 minutes. So it's a, it's a server size appliance. Made it pretty easy, easy to install. Spent like 10 minutes in the server room, kind of configuring it to the network and then we went up to an office and finished the configuration. After that, I basically hit go on the configuration button, very completely automated. And I simply monitor the process till the appliance was fully configured. Took me about 20 minutes of, you know, to add that configuration to the appliance hit go. And at the end, I had an appliance that was ready for onsite and backups extended to the cloud. So that met your expectations. It meshed with the vendor's claim? It was really easy. We actually had to move it around a couple of times. And, you know, this stuff used to be huge, you know? Big box, metal gear. Refrigerators. Refrigerators. It was a small appliance. Had to, once we installed it, got a note from the IT guy, had to move it. No tools, easy rack. The configuration was automated. We had to set network parameters. That's about it. How about your performance testing? What did that show? So we did some pretty extensive performance testing. We actually compared the IDPA, the double appliances to a industry recognized server grid, scale out architecture. And basically we started by matching the hardware parameters of the box. CPU, memory, disk, network, flash. So once we had the boxes configured apples to apples, shall we say, we ran a rigorous set of tests. We scaled the environment from a hundred to a thousand VMs, adding a hundred VMs in between each backup run. And what we found as we were doing the test was that the IDPA reduced the backup window significantly over the competitive solution. A 54 to 68% reduction in the backup window. Okay, so again, met your kind of expectations and tied into the vendor claims? Yep, the reduction in backup time was pretty significant. That's a pretty good environment, pretty good test environment, a hundred to a thousand VMs. We also looked at the efficiency of data transfer and we found that IDPA performed the competitor there as well significantly. And we find that this is due to the mature data domain deduplication technology. It not only leverages, like most companies, will the VMware Change Block Tracking API, but it has its own client-side software that significantly reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred over the network for each backup. And we found that reduced the amount of data that needs to be transferred against the competitor by 74%. Okay, what about the economics? It's one of the key pain points obviously for IT professionals, what did you see there? Yep, so there's a lot that goes into the economics of a data protection environment. We summed it up into what we called the cost to protect. And we actually collected call home data from 15,000 EMC, Dell EMC data protection appliances deployed worldwide. Oh cool, real data. Real data, so we had the real data, we had it from 15,000 different environments. We took that data and we used some of the stuff that we analyzed with the price that they paid for it. How long has it been in service? What the deduplication rates they're getting and then the amount of data. So we had all the components that told us what was happening with that box. So that allowed us to distill that up into this Instagraphic that we see here, which shows 12 of the customers that we analyzed. Different industries, different architectures. On the far left of this Instagraphic, you're gonna see that we had a data domain box connected to a third party backup application, still performing economically quite well. The far right, we have the fully integrated IDPA solution. You'll see that as you put things better together, the economics get even better, right? So what we found was that both the data domain and the IDPA can easily serve data protection environments storage for a fraction of a penny per gig per month. Okay, important to point out this is metadata, no customer data involved here. It's metadata, okay, correct. Summarize your impressions based on your research and your hands-on lab work. Yeah, so I've been doing this for almost 25 plus years. I've been in the data protection space. I was an end user, I actually ran backup environments. I worked in the reseller space, sold the gear, and now I'm an analyst with ESG taking a look at all the different solutions that are out there. And data protection's never been easy and there's always a lot of moving parts and it gets harder when you really need a solution that backs up everything, right? From your physical, virtual, to the cloud, the legacy stuff, right? Dell EMC has packaged this up, in my opinion, quite well. They've looked at the economics, they've looked at the ease of use, they've looked at the performance and they put the right components in there. They have the data protection software, they have the target storage, they have the analytics, you can do it with an agent, you can do it without an agent. So I think they've put all the pieces in here. So it's not an easy thing in my opinion and I think they've nailed this one. Excellent, well Vinny, thanks so much for coming on and sharing the results of your research, really appreciate it. All right, let's hear from the customer and then we're going to come back with Beth Phalen and Raap. Keep it right there. Arrow is a Fortune 500 company, a global provider of product solutions and services and enterprise computing solutions. The DP4400 is attractive because customers have different consumption models. There are those that like to build their own and there are those that want an integrated solution. They want to focus on their core business as opposed to engineering a solution. So for those customers that are looking for that type of experience, the DP4400 will address a full data protection solution that has a single pane of glass, simplified management, simplified deployment and also ease of management over time. Ball Raap is a food service industry manufacturer that's been in business for 144 years. In some way, we probably touch your life every day. From a semantic perspective, the things that weren't meeting our needs really come around to the management of all of your backup sets. We had backup windows for four to eight hours and we were to the point where when those backups failed, which was fairly regular, we didn't have enough time to run them again. With Dell EMC data protection, we're getting phenomenal returns shorter times. What took us eight hours is taking under an hour. Maybe it's upwards of two at times for even larger sets. It's a single interface, really does help. So when you take an account, how much time you spend trying to manage with old solutions, that's another unparalleled piece. I'm the IT director for Melanson Heath. We are a full service accounting firm. The top three benefits of the DP4400, the simplicity of not having to do a lot of research, the ease of deployment, not having to go back or have external resources, it's really designed so that I can racket stack it and get going. Having a data protection solution that works with all of my software and systems is vital. We are completely reliant on our technology infrastructure and we need to know that if something happens, we have a plan B that can be deployed quickly and easily. We're back. It's always great to hear the customer perspective. We're back with Beth Phalen. Beth, let's summarize, bring it home for us this announcement. We are making sure that no matter what the size of your organization, you can protect your data in your VMware environment simply and powerfully without compromise and have confidence, whether you're on-prem or in the cloud, you can restore your data whenever you need to. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Beth, for sharing the innovations and we're not done yet. So jump into the crowd chat. As I said, you can log in with Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, ask any questions. We're going to be teeing up some questions and doing some surveys. So thanks for watching everybody and we'll see you in the crowd chat.