 Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering EMC World 2016. Brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Gracely. Welcome back to EMC World 2016 here in Las Vegas. You're watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman joined by Brian Gracely and EMC World started out really as the engineering teams coming and sharing with customers, how things go on the inside, how they're building products, the feedback from the customers. Happy to have on the program for the first time, Fidel Maruso, who's the SVP and general manager of Enterprise and Mainframe Solutions in the Core Technologies Division of EMC. Fidel, welcome to the program. Hey, thanks Stu, it's great to be here. All right, so a lot of your team is here, giving sessions, been working on lots of product announcements, talk about what brings you to EMC World and what your team's working on. So, the team in the middle of that long title, the core team runs Symetrix, and so VMAX, and so most of the team are here giving sessions around VMAX, VMAX All Flash, and VMAX Mainframe on V3, which came out last quarter. So, I think they're scheduled from nine in the morning until eight or nine at night. And so, some of them are engineers who have actually been here since the first conference that was ever done on EMC World, so. Yeah, so Fidel, a lot of people have short memories. Yep. So, you hear the word Symetrix and you think back to the 1990s. But, and even VMAX has been around for a while, so bring us up to speed as to architecturally and positioning Symetrix and VMAX are today. Yeah, so, we tend to take the word VMAX and Symetrix and think old and antique and going not really relevant in today's world. I can tell you that the customers I talk to, we run their mission critical applications, and about three or four years ago, we embarked on a journey to re-architect VMAX pretty much from the ground up. So, a whole slew of new hardware and new, you know, kind of off-the-shelf hardware, latest Intel processors, Infiniband, but really the core structural changes were around the software architecture. And we took our ingenuity operating system, which has all of the reliability, availability, and serviceability things that were known for throughout the industry. We re-architected for what we call cloud scale, but really what that was around was our metadata and making sure we had enough metadata to scale to cloud levels, you know, thousands and thousands of devices, millions of devices, adding in SNAP technology that had zero impact, you know, on SNAPs, and allowing us to have an embedded container that could, you know, allow you to provide native file from the box, you know, native embedded management. And so, that architecture we came out in 2014 with the V3 launch. Since then, we've been incredibly busy leveraging the foundational aspects of that architecture and adding in a number of things last year and probably a very well-kept secret at EMC. And it's hard to keep a secret in a big company, adding in flash technologies into that architecture. And that founded the foundation for the VMAX All Flash, which we launched on February 29th in London, so. Yeah, so, I mean, Flash isn't new to the VMAX. I mean, I remember back in 2008, our head, Dave Vellante, said, you know, EMC throws a haymaker and it was something that was heard around the storage industry. So, I mean, you talked about three years of work and all the change. Now, how much of the code change, you know, how much really went into, you know, that this is, you know, maybe only a name of VMAX? Yeah, so we, you know, it is true. We're pioneers in flash and tiering and, you know, over the last couple of years, what we noticed was, you know, flash capacities becoming bigger, flash costs coming down in the marketplace and, you know, a number of things that we can do around our right caching with right folding and right coalescing to help optimize rights to the back end on flash arrays, okay? So it's a, on flash, you know, it's a different problem to solving for spinning disk. They're mechanical devices. They've got, you know, we've got 20-something years of history in knowing how oil leaks and all of those different things. And, you know, I'm not the best mechanical engineer around, but on flash, that comes with its own set of problems, you know, where you have to really worry about how long it'll last in managing the right. So we spend a lot of time on, you know, innovating around our cache algorithms to make sure that we coalesce and fold rights going to the back end. In addition to that, we added a lot of telemetry around looking at where, you know, the where out is going and looking at how we can get to lower rights per day drives and do that in such a way that our customers could still experience, you know, in fact, higher availability than they usually get from a VMAX. So out of the code that changed, I would say it was the hypermax code that we brought out in V3. The basis of that was about 14 million lines of code rewritten and of that about five to six million around optimizing flash. So a lot of code and, you know, it's, we have a great team and probably some of the best engineers I would say in the industry and, you know, that combined with the price points of flash with the efficiency technologies around compression that we're bringing onto the platform, you know, kind of now makes it a question of not will I deploy flash in my enterprise data center, but when will I deploy flash in my enterprise data center? And then we took all of our data services, layered those on top, and that has created a compelling value proposition for our customers. Yeah, beyond just performance, you know, you've got experience from a tiering and a hybrid perspective now in all flash perspective. Beyond just, you know, application performance, what other things have surprised you about customer use cases that are driving flash, you know, driving flash efficiency, all those things? So a lot of things, you know, I've spoke to a lot of customers here this week and performance is kind of a given, you know, and it's funny, you ask someone, how much performance do you need for an application? And they look at you and they say, I'll take as much as I can get because I don't really know. I don't really know when I'm going to get a burst. You only know when it's not enough. You only know when it's not enough. So that's the first piece. The second piece is the TCO around flash is really compelling. Just came from looking at a case study where a customer had taken 11 VMAX 40Ks, okay, and reduced them into one VMAX all flash array. So the amount of real estate and the data center they're going to save, the amount of power, the amount of cooling, the, you know, you're going to have less replacements of drives with spitting disk is less reliable than flash. All of that adds up to tremendous TCO savings for them. So they're looking at all of those aspects and then it becomes, it's an easier thing to manage. You know, you don't have to worry about, am I promoting or demoting data the, you know, the right way we worry about, am I spreading the load correctly to manage the wear? But the, you know, the customers don't have to worry about that and potential unpredictabilities. We're the leader in tiering, but, you know, it is a more complicated approach than just having one single tier of flash. Yeah, one of the announcements this morning was around the Virtustream storage cloud. How excited are you to be able to say, go to your customers and now say, we not only have the best enterprise storage, we have the best enterprise storage cloud, you know, bringing those things together. It's phenomenal, you know, we did a little acquisition in the enterprise, this big long name of my group, whatever it is, but, you know, we basically acquired a small company, Twinstrata, in Massachusetts, two years ago, nearly this summer. And at the time, you know, it was a very strategic acquisition for us because what it does is it allows you to have a gateway from any block storage device out to a public cloud. We now today have support for Virtustream on the back of that. And actually the only tier that we support in the VMAX All Flash is you have the flash tier and you have a cloud tier. So if you have cold data or data you want to move off, now you have the ability to move that to either Virtustream, a public cloud, an object storage through our cloud array. So, you know, we're truly, I think, bringing the value of hybrid arrays and this kind of flexible agile, you know, movement of data back and forth, you know, to different clouds, especially Virtustream doing that. Now, Virtustream is particularly exciting because it's really focused on enterprise applications and that's where our strength is. You know, that's what we do well, that's what we understand well. And, you know, having that asset along with our enterprise storage is, it's, I think, a lot of value add for our customers. Yeah, Virtustream's always been a little bit of a diamond in the rough. I think now that EMC's going to bring it to light, I think, especially with the backup piece of it, it's going to get more and more visibility. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, we've been working tightly with those guys for the last, not, pretty much the last six to nine months. Yeah, you know, I think they came in and, you know, it's... Put them to work. Yeah, well, that's EMC, you know, it's... So, on the one end, we've got cloud and at the other end of kind of the technology spectrum, how about mainframes? Is part of your group? How does that fit into the overall picture? How is that still relevant for IT today? So, you know, it's funny, it's... This is a technology that I think is going to be in people's data centers for as long as many of us are actually going to be on this earth, okay? So, people trust it, they're relying on it with the new Z13 Business Class series. There are other applications, I think that people thought they were going to re-host that they're not necessarily re-hosting now that IBM is bringing down the cost of getting into the mainframe space. So, at the end of February, we announced mainframe support on VMAX 3. And it isn't just compatible mainframe support, we also announced new technologies like ZDP. So, it's basically a time machine, you know, persistent copies on mainframe to help, you know, kind of make sure that they can, you know, tolerate logical corruption. So, that's an innovation around there that we're doing. We're also... I'm also responsible for the disk library for mainframe. And in that, actually, we are going to attach that, we're going to have a supporting cloud array so that actually you can now take your backups to a disk library for mainframe and then move that data out to an object store, you know, with our technology. So, I think our mainframe business is vibrant. You know, we have a lot of customers who are joint mainframe and open. And they like to have the consistency of experience with one vendor, one platform, you know, kind of same manageability and the same kind of service and support behind it. So, we're alive and well. And we think this is, now that we have mainframe on V3, this is truly going to be a great year for us. Okay, so, understand mainframe really is, I mean, the main platform for EMC with VMAX, VMAX is the one that supports mainframe. When it comes to flash, EMC has a lot of options. Yep. If I don't have mainframe, how do you guys position that these days? So, you know, it's, so flash, we've got, you know, we're a tremendous rocket ship success with Xtreme I.O. Very fortunate to have that in the marketplace and be clearly the number one leader in all flash arrays. Now with the, you know, kind of adding to the portfolio with VMAX all flash and with Unity, you know, we're really moving into a situation where if you, for instance, in the enterprise, you want to, you have VMAX customer, you like VMAX data services and you want flash because that is the media of choice for people now moving forward, then that's one option for you. If you want the best efficiency technologies with deduplication and compression and Xtreme I.O., and clearly, you know, they're number one in the market, you know, for a very, very good reason, very simple to deploy, you know, then we have Xtreme I.O. And then with Unity, you know, you've got the file, you've got the, I don't know if you guys saw the new little brick that Jeff has. Incredibly easy to use, incredibly easy to deploy. I think, you know, we'll see a lot of uptick there that, you know, assuming we have the right pricing across the portfolio and then we support it all with our new warranty model, expect more across the board. So. So, 2016, you're a flash, you know, how fast do you guys see the adoption? Our CTO, David Floyers, you know, done the forecast out there. Economically, we feel we're about at the cut-over, but, you know, these things usually take a long time. So what's the view point? So, you know, I worked for a very famous man in the storage industry a number of years ago and he's comment and I'll always remember it because I come from the server side of the world and he said, you know, in storage, things always move slower than you think until they don't, okay? And so, I think, you know, my personal opinion, I'm very bullish about the transition to flash, especially at the higher end of the line. And my range is, you know, I would say that I would expect to see at least 30 to 40% moving to all flash by the end of this year. And more back-end loaded as we come out with compression technologies, but I really think the commercials are there. You know, it's moved from kind of the incubator status into, you know, kind of grown-up citizen and I think it'll be very quick. Excellent. Fadama Russo, really appreciate you sharing everything that's going on with kind of symmetric VMAX product lines. 2016, EMC said, is the year of all flash, so we'll be back with lots more coverage here from EMC World 2016. You're watching theCUBE. It's always fun.