 Hey guys, welcome back to Los Angeles. Lisa Martin will come into you live from KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2021. Very excited to be here. This is our third day of back to back coverage on theCUBE. And we've got a couple of guests, Kube alumni, joining me remotely. Please welcome Parasar Kodadi, Senior Consultant of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies and David Noi VP of Product Management at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, welcome back to the program. Thank you very much. So Parasar, let's go ahead and start with you. Let's talk about what Dell EMC is offering to developers today in terms of unstructured data. Absolutely Lisa, great to be here. So let me start with the container storage interface. This is KubeCon and a couple of years ago, the container storage interface was still in beta and the storage vendors were very enthusiastically kind of building the plugins into their different storage portfolio to offer enterprise-grade features to developers building applications on the Kubernetes platform. And today, if you look at the Dell EMC storage portfolio, B block volumes, NAS shares, S3 object APIs, VMware virtual volumes, however you're consuming storage, you have the plugins that are required to run your applications to these enterprise-grade features, speech-writeable snapshots, data replication, all available in the Kubernetes layer. And just this week at KubeCon, we announced the container storage modules, which is kind of the next step of productivity for developers, be it in terms of observability of the storage metrics using tools like Prometheus, visualizing it, Trafana, authorization capabilities so that Kube admins can have better resource management of the storage that is being consumed. So there are these multiple modules we have released. And if you look at unstructured data, this term may be a bit new for, or kind of not very familiar for developers, but basically the storage world, there is a distinction that is being made between primary storage and unstructured storage or unstructured data solutions. And by unstructured, we mean file and object storage. If you look at the KubeCon technical sessions, I was very glad to see that there is an entire stream for machine learning and data. So that speaks to how popular Kubernetes deployment models are getting when it comes to machine learning and artificial intelligence, even applications like genomics and media and entertainment. And with the container storage interface and the container storage modules, with the object storage portfolio that Dell has, we offer the comprehensive unstructured data solutions for developers, be it object or file. And the advantage the developers are getting is these, if you look at platforms like PowerScale and ECS, these are like the industry workhorses with the highest performance. And if you think of scale, think of 250 NAS nodes with a single main space with NVIDIA GPU direct capabilities. All of these capabilities developers can use for applications like machine learning or any computationally intensive or data intensive application that requires these NAS, scale of NAS platforms. So that's what is new in terms of what we are offering in terms of the storage features they say. Got it, Parasar, thank you. David, let's bring you into the conversation now. You launched ObjectScale at VMworld. Talk to us about that, what some of the key features and capabilities are and some of those big business benefits that customers are going to be able to achieve. Sure thing, so I really want to focus on three of the biggest benefits. These would be the fact that the product is actually based on Kubernetes, the scale of the product. And then it's ability to do global replication. So let me just touch on those in order. You said the product is based on Kubernetes and here we are at KubeCon, so it's the perfect time to be talking about that. This product really caters to those who are looking for a flexible way to deploy object storage in containerized fashion. It appeals to the DevOps folks and folks who like to automate things and call the Kubernetes APIs to make the actual deployment of the product very simple and turnkey. And that's really what people turn to Kubernetes for is the ability to spin things up when they need them and spin them down as they don't and make that all on commodity hardware and commodity pricing. And the idea there is that by making it as simple and easy as possible, you're not going to get as much shadow IT. You won't have people going off and putting things off into a public cloud. And so where security of an organization or control of the data that flows within an organization is important. Having something that's easy for developers to use in the same paradigm that they're used to is critical. Now I talked about scale and, you know, if you'd have come to me two years ago, I would have told you, you know, Kubernetes, yeah containers, people are kicking it around and they're doing some interesting science experiments. I would say in the last year, I started to see a lot of requests from customers in the dozens, even to a hundred petabyte range as it relates to capacity for Kubernetes and specifically looking for CSI and COSI so this is the object storage implementation of the container storage interfaces. So scale is definitely there. And the idea of this product is to provide easy scalability from the terabytes range into the multi-petabyte range. And again, it's that ease of use, that ease of deployment because it is Kubernetes-based and because it's API driven that makes that possible. So we're talking about going from a three node minimum to thousands of nodes. And this allows people to deploy the product either at the edge or in the data center in the edge because you can get very small deployments in the data center to massive scale. So we wanna provide something that covers that gamut. The last thing I talked about was replication. So let me just touch upon what I mean by that. When people go and build these deployments, if you're building a deployment at the edge of an object scale product, you're probably taking in sensor data or some kind of information that you wanna then send back to a data center for processing. So you make it simple to do bucket-based replication, sorry, object storage-based replication to move things to another location. And that can be used either for bringing data back for analytics from the edge. It can be used for availability. So making sure that you have data available across multiple data centers in the case that you have an outage. It could be even used for sharing data between developers in one site and another site. So we provide that level of flexibility. Overall, this is a next generation object store, leveraging, you know, Delta Nology's number one position in object storage. So I'm pretty excited about it. And how, David, is object scale integrated with VMware software stock? Give us that slice of dice. Yeah, and that's a good question. So, you know, we're talking about this being a Kubernetes-based product. You can deploy it on OpenShift or we integrate directly with VMware Cloud Foundation and with Tanzu, which is VMware's container orchestration and management platform. I've seen the demo of the product myself from my team and they've showed it to be in there. Did all of the management of the product was actually done within the vSphere UI, which is great. So easy to go and just enter the vSphere UI, install the product very simply, have it up and running and then go and do all of your management through that user interface or to automate it using the same APIs that you're used to through VMware and the Tanzu platform. Thank you. Parasar, back to you. Security is a big theme here in Kubernetes. It's also been a big theme here. We've been talking about it the last three days here at KubeCon. How does Dell EMC's unstructured portfolio offer that necessary cyber protection that developers need to have and bake that into what they're doing? Sure, Lisa. Let me talk about cybersecurity. You know, there are different layers of security right from, you know, smarter firewalls to, you know, how to manage privilege, account access and so on. And what we are trying to do is to provide a layer of cyber defense right at the asset that you're trying to protect, which is the data. And this is where the ransomware defender solution is basically detecting any patterns of a compromise that might have happened and alerting the IT administration about these possible intrusions into the data by looking at the data access patterns in real time. So that's a pretty big deal when we are actually putting all these, you know, observance on the primary data. And that's what the PowerScale platform cybersecurity protection features offers. Now we have also extended this kind of detection mechanism for the object data framework on ECS platforms as well. So this is like then additional layer of security at the layer of, you know, where the data is actually being read and written to. That's the area, you know, in case of object where we are looking at the S3 traffic and trying to find these parents. In case of a file data access, we are looking at the file access patterns and so on. So, and in addition to this, we are also providing a data isolation mechanism that is very critical in many cyber recovery processes with the smart aid dev solution as well. So this is something that the developers are getting for, like without having to worry about it because that is something implemented at the infrastructure layer itself. So they don't have to worry about, you know, trying to, you know, code it or, you know, develop their application to integrate these kinds of things because it's embedded in the infrastructure at the one of this API level, at the ECS API level. So that's pretty differentiating in the industry. I think there can be storage solutions out there for that. You mentioned, go ahead David. Yeah, so I mean, look, if you look at what a lot of the objects storage players are doing as it relates to cyber security, they're playing off the fact that they've implemented object lock and basically using that to lock down data. And that's good. I mean, I'm glad that they're doing that. And if the case that you were able to lock something down and someone wasn't able to bypass that in some way, that's fantastic. Or if they didn't already encrypt it before it got locked down. What Parasar is referring to is a little bit more than that. It's actually the ability to look at user behavior and determine that something bad is happening. So this is about actually being able to do, you know, predictive analytics, being able to go and figure out that you're under attack, there's anomalous behavior and we're able to go and actually infer from that that something bad is happening and where we think it's happening and lock it down even more securely than for example, just saying, hey, we provide object lock capabilities, which is one of the responses that I've seen out there from object storage vendors. Can you share with us, Parasar, our customer example? Like walk us through how this is actually being used to deploy and what some of those business outcomes are. Yes, Lisa. So in terms of containerization itself, we have a media and entertainment kind of customer story here. Swiss TXT, they have a platform as a service where they serve their customer base with a range of media production and broadcasting solutions and they have containerized this platform and part of this containerization is, part of their services is they offer infrastructure as a service to media producers who need a high performance storage, high performance compute and PowerScale and ISLON have been their vocal solutions to offer this and now that they have containerized their core platform with the CSI interface for PowerScale, they are able to continue to deliver this infrastructure, high performance infrastructure and storage services to their customers through the API and it's great to see how fast they could refactor their application, but yet continue to offer the high performance enterprise grade features of the PowerScale platform. So Swiss TXT would love to share more details of the story in a hyperlink format. And where can folks go to learn more about ObjectScale and what you guys are announcing? A particular URL website that you want to direct folks to? I would say Delltechnologies.com and that's the best place to start. Yeah, we'll go to the Delta product pages around ObjectScale, which should be publicly available. Excellent. Thank you for joining me on the program today, walking through how Dell EMC is helping developers with respect to unstructured data, talking to us about ObjectScale that you launched at VMworld, some of those big customer benefits and of course showing us the validation, the proof in the pudding with that customer story. We appreciate your insights. Thank you, Lisa. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Los Angeles. We're coming to you from our coverage of KubeCon and CloudNate upon North America 21. Coming back, stick around rather, I should say. We'll be back after a short break with our next guest.