 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, and welcome to a CUBE Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman coming to you from our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome back to the program, one of our longtime CUBE alums. Travis V. Hill, he is the senior vice president of product management for storage and data protection at Dell Technologies. Travis, nice to see you. It's great to see you, Stu, as always. All right, so Travis, while we aren't at Dell Tech World, you know, this May 2020, that's gonna be handled in the fall. There are a lot of things happening in the storage world. Your team's announced Power Store just a couple of weeks ago and many other things happening in the storage world and we're gonna get to dig into it. So I guess, let's start there with the new mid-range solution. I had a great conversation with Caitlin Gordon. What's the initial feedback you've been getting from the field, you know, and from customers, of course? You know, Stu, it's been a whirlwind of a couple of weeks with the public unveiling of Power Store. This was a major release for us, you know, simply put, I've referred to it as probably the most important and strategic launch that we've had at Dell since the combination of Dell and EMC. I personally have been involved with the program for a little over two years and we have had significant investment in bringing this product to fruition, over a thousand engineers across Dell Technologies, including engineers at VMware put in tireless time, hours, innovation into bringing this product to market and we're extremely excited about it. The press has been very positive on the launch, on the capabilities, but more importantly, customers and partners have been extremely positive on the launch and the capabilities. Stu, we've been talking for multiple years now about the fact that we are going to be simplifying our product line, especially in the mid-range and the release of Power Store is a major milestone in that simplification and I can go into speeds and feeds and what differentiates it, but to me, the biggest part of this announcement is that we have a product in the market that is resonating with the field, resonating with customers, resonating with partners and feedback from the largest beta program that we've done as a part of a mid-range storage launch ever gave us early indications that things would be, the feedback would come back this way and we're very happy with the initial traction that we're receiving. Well, Travis, definitely a lot of work. He said over a thousand engineers working on that. It's interesting, you think back to the storage world, for a long time, it was growth of product line through acquisitions. Of course, Dell made a couple of acquisitions you're quite familiar with over the years, EMC over the years made many acquisitions Tell me, what does it mean for a thousand engineers to work on something? Often you'll hear, oh, well, a startup of 50 people, they built some new thing and that rocketed them to the next thing and by the time they get to a thousand people, oftentimes, they're talking about have they been acquired or are they going public? So why is that investment needed and what's the outcome of that kind of, starting from the ground up solution? Yeah, it's a good, it's a good question, Stu. I, when I think about it, what we set out to do with PowerStore is something very ambitious, which is to simplify the product lines, to bring the best capabilities of the current shipping mid-range products into a next generation architecture. And when we looked at doing that, we quickly determined that in order to be flexible and to be able to innovate quickly, in able to be able to provide the features and capabilities needed to bring all of those customers forward, we had to make significant investment. And I don't know of another example to your point of a company having done this internally, especially with a heritage of acquisition. And so getting to build something from the ground up that is optimized and modern for the workloads of today, but also able to bring customers from previous or current generation products forward is something that's been really special. And something that I think that Dell will be able to continue to innovate and lead the market in mid-range, from the investment that we made for well into the future. All right, so Travis, one of the other discussions we've been having with the Dell team quite a bit over the last couple of years is how storage fits into the whole discussion of cloud. So there's some recent announcements, you've got recent products. How is Dell thinking about that world of storage and how that integrates into the customers overall? The cloud discussion. Yeah, if I think about cloud, I think about a couple of things. One, there's sort of the cloud operating aiding model, which is things need to be really simple. Things need to be autonomous. There's this concept of being able to provide private cloud functionality on-prem. And so when I look at the cloud, when I look at some of the capabilities that we've built into PowerStore, for example, it's delivering that cloud-like, simple to use, simple to scale experience, but on-prem. Then I think the other aspect of cloud, which is just as important is how do on-prem products integrate with leverage and really allow the capabilities that they provide to be used both on-prem in a hybrid cloud environment or directly as part of a service in a public cloud. And we have seen that customers that are looking at us, customers that are in specific industries or looking at specific workloads are really looking for that flexibility, that burst capability, if you will, to be able to leverage certain capabilities across on-prem and in the cloud. And specifically, we've seen that demand with customers that utilize our Icelon products, our 1FS products. Those customers, some of them are corporate, using them for kind of traditional file workloads, enterprise file workloads, but there's a big chunk of customers that are in specific verticals like life sciences, genomics, like genomic sequencing, media and entertainment, things like collaborative video editing or wanting the ability to burst to the cloud or video rendering, use cases like autonomous driving, where the massive scalability that we have in 1FS for those customers that are using it in an on-prem solution, they want to be able to also utilize it in a public cloud as a public cloud capability. And so part of what we're announcing is the ability to utilize 1FS as a native capability in Google Cloud. And lots of interest from customers of the type that I just spoke about to be able to leverage that capability. And it's really like the capabilities we're bringing are like nothing else on the market. I'm not exaggerating to say that the scalability, the performance, the capacity are orders of magnitude better than what competitors can provide with their cloud capabilities. Yeah, well Travis, absolutely. If I think about the word scale, Google's one of the first companies that comes to mind. Right, right. Google has the global reach and the networking capability. It's been interesting watching, Dell has partnerships and the Dell family has partnerships with a lot of, pretty much all the cloud providers at this point. So what's special about the Google solution you said, unparalleled there, bring us underneath the covers a little bit and help us understand what really differentiates the 1FS solution that you're doing with Google Cloud. Yeah, so I'll take it back to the workloads. The Life Sciences, Media Entertainment, Autonomous Driving, they need massively scalable file solutions from a performance perspective and a capacity perspective. And the solution that we've engineered, co-engineered with Google Cloud provides massive scalability and massive capacity. In particular, versus one of our closest competitors, it's 46 times higher in terms of read throughput, 96 times higher in terms of write throughput and 500 times higher in terms of maximum file system capacity. And these workloads require it. I mean, these are massive file-based repositories and it's not just the capacity, but it's the performance of that capacity that is extremely important. So much like the value we bring on-prem with 1FS, we're bringing that value to the cloud, to Google and because you're utilizing common 1FS, whether you're on-prem or in the cloud, you have native replication capabilities available for customers that want to do that bursting. Yeah, it's been fascinating, Travis. My background's a little bit more on the block side of the house than the file side of the house. But from mid-range storage where we kind of put block and file together to get unified, then you saw the huge explosion of the scale-out NAS-type solutions. And then one of the things the whole industry looked at is what's that gap between object, which is what is typically underlying the cloud storage and files. So many of these solutions are really blurring those lines, pulling these things together. So ultimately, customers don't need to think about some of those underlying storage networking architectures. They can just solve their problems. Yeah, no, I think you're exactly right. And I actually come from a mid-range background as well. And I've been associated with 1FS and Isilon for a couple of years now. And the amazing thing to me is the growth of data. You know this stat better than I do, Stu, which is 80% of all the data generated in the next decade will be unstructured. And so that's not to say that traditional storage arrays aren't gonna continue to grow. Those workloads are growing as well. But the massive growth and the reason that there is such a desire to do things in or close to the clouds for file-based workloads comes from that underlying growth. Yeah, so Travis, I guess one of the other things that's interesting to look at as with the global pandemic going on, automation is front and snuff for customers. I can't go touch my gear. So therefore, I need to limit how often I would need to do that. So how does that just overall usability, autonomous nature of these type of solutions fit into everything we've been talking about? Yeah, it's core to solutions going forward. Whether you're talking about the 1FS Google solution or whether you're talking about Power Store, more and more customers need to be focused on the business outcomes or the IT outcomes and not the care and feeding or tweaking of the equipment. And so I think the best example of that is what we've done with Power Store in terms of that ground up architecture that's really built with machine learning directly into the platform and the ability to take multiple Power Stores and look at them as a single logical unit and make recommendations about where things should be located and best configured. And so we know because of the fact that we're taking in all of this IO, whether it be on our file solutions or our block slash unified solutions, what the underlying workloads are and the fact that we're building in this knowledge, this intelligence into the system is part of why we designed the architecture from the ground up when you're talking about Power Store. And if you go back and look at the original design of 1FS and that highly scaled out architecture, you know, it's been a calling card for 1FS since almost day one, which is this concept of simplicity at scale, right? And, you know, the fact that you have petabytes and petabytes of data shouldn't mean that you need tens or hundreds of people to manage and feed it. You should be able to administer it with a small number of IT professionals. All right, Travis, wanna give you the final word, you know, bring us inside, you know, customer conversations you're having and what else a customer should know about really Dell Technologies today? You know, it's a very interesting time to be part of a technology company with everything that's going on. And I think, you know, the last several months have shown us that digital transformation is key to company's success. I look at Dell Technologies and the fact that, you know, basically over the course of a week, you know, we went from very few people or a minority of people working remotely to almost the entire company working remotely. And the thing that made that happen was our underlying IT systems and the fact that they are built on capabilities that are resilient, that are autonomous, that are modern. And so, you know, I'm extremely bullish about the capabilities that we're bringing to market. I'm extremely bullish about the cloud capabilities that we're building in to our solutions, especially on the unstructured side of the house. And I think that the, the next wave of, I would say the thing that this pandemic has highlighted is the need to be a digital business going forward. And, you know, I think that speaks very well for the prospects of Dell Technologies going forward and for infrastructure solutions going forward as well. All right, well, Travis, pleasure catching up. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Stu, it's always a pleasure. All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all the upcoming shows as well as you can search through the archives. I've got interviews as Travis and I mentioned on Power Store and many of the other Dell announcements. So be sure to check those out. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.