 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back to Las Vegas to EMC World. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Paul Gillan. We are joined by Eric Seidman. He is the senior product manager, product marketing Dell EMC. Thanks so much for joining us here. Thanks for having me. So I want to start out by talking about the Icelon launch. Tell us a little bit about the impetus for this new platform. Yeah, right, so thanks. You know, we see a lot happening from our customer standpoint. I mean, there's a lot of trends in the industry, all flash, move to cloud. But in our particular markets and such, there's also huge demands for more performance and really unconstrained scalability. And being able to do that, but not compromise on enterprise features or protocols. Our customers still need all of the security and the protection that they expect as in their other storage platforms. And so we took a look at how we architected the Icelon hardware, brought in all these different considerations, and then went back to our engineering and said, you need to make the number one mass scale out platform in the industry even better. And so here's your challenge, engineering. And what they did was they developed a completely new architecture that goes from the traditional node in a chassis to being able to put that same type of node in a lot smaller space. And we've achieved that by being able to take what would normally take 16 U of rack space in four nodes and compress that into a single four U chassis. But it just didn't make it smaller. They made it more reliable. And also much, much faster, six times faster in terms of the IOPS, twice as the capacity that would be in a normal 16 U of space in a single four U. And so that has huge advantages for our customers who have these huge demands. So now they have more performance in less space, more capacity in less space. 75% reduction in rack space. I mean, if you look at some of our customers like at Genomics Research, where they're doing population scale studies and they don't ever get rid of any of their studies, that allows them to put significantly more data into their data centers. And plus we've got the capability to then tear that into cloud as well. So we give them paths to be able to, you know, have the Genomic Research done faster, store more data, and continuously store more data in less space. Now Manavir Das was on earlier and talking about how you were positioning ECS as tier one storage and Isilon as tier two storage. No, the way around. My notes are wrong. That's right there. My mistake. Is there a merger at some point of those two? Are we going to continue to have two distinct tiers of storage? Well, we're bringing them closer together all the time. One of the unique capabilities that we have with Isilon is be able to tier to ECS our cloud storage. And that has significant benefits for our customers because when the data is in the ECS object store, now it can be automatically replicated across geographies around the world for higher redundancy capabilities and also to be able to access that data remotely from other GOs as well. So always looking at how to bring those two platforms closer together, and then you'll see tighter integration of Isilon and ECS as we progress. We kind of look at it though, the file and object is two distinct use cases and have different requirements. So our path has been to really be able to provide the best of breed for both of those. Best of breed for scale out file with Isilon and its protocols for file and then ECS for object protocols. But we're bringing those capabilities closer together with the tiering capabilities and the interactive capabilities of the data, whether it's in the file platform or in the object platform. You are a veteran of the data industry. Before the cameras were rolling, you were telling us about how you really were we're at this at the beginning. So can you talk a little bit about how customer needs have changed over the years since you've been in this industry? Yeah, so I mean significantly, I've been around in the storage industry since raid, well not raid, but open raid platforms for Linux systems came rolling out and things were transitioning from the mainframe to Linux and in that kind of area. And Sands were kind of the new concept back in the day. And that had a lot of capabilities about being able to consolidate different servers and different applications to share a storage for block protocols. And that was a big boon for the industry and changed how applications could be deployed and reduced the cost of storage and improved efficiencies. And with Isilon, that scale out capability for file protocols has kind of been that same type of breakthrough where we can now consolidate multiple different types of workflows from many, many different data types and applications. We have customers consolidating tens, hundreds of different applications on a single Isilon cluster because it can scale and performance and capacity and can support so many different protocols so that you can say bring in data from web logs from your Linux servers and then do in place analytics on that to gain more insights into what's happening in your environment and that sort of thing. So it's kind of been that same kind of continuation of what we saw or I saw back in the day with RAID and SAN consolidating block storage. We've been able to bring that even further with scale out hands and then integration of object and cloud just kind of continues that. There's a massive transition going on right now from hard disk to flash-based storage. What are your customers... How are your customers driving this? I mean, what are they asking for from you in terms of flash capability? What are their buying plans for conventional rigid... Yeah, that's a great question. So a lot of customers just, you know, they want flash because sometimes it's like the new shiny thing but they're not exactly sure why. Others have specific performance demands that they're trying to achieve. I know you had Tim here from Lightstorm earlier, right? They need to be able to stream a high definition 4K video going to 8K, right? And so flash is enabling new workloads that we couldn't deliver before with Isilon. So our customers have been pushing us, pushing that envelope, you know, genomic research. We need it faster and EDA, you know, the densities of the chips are getting smaller and we need to get them to market faster. So we're getting that kind of pressure from our customers and that's what the new all flash Isilon allows us to bring to those customers along with a great reduction in floor space because of the considerable density. We have 924 terabytes in a 4U of all flash. But it's not just the all flash part because that can be, you know, kind of expensive. And so because we've got this inherent tiering capabilities within 1FS, we can help customers achieve the performance or requirements they need but do it cost effectively by being able to put their high performance data sets on that relatively expensive flash tier and then automatically move that data down to lower tiers or more cost effective tiers in terms of performance and cost as that data is no longer required in that flash tier. And that's one of the really unique capabilities of Isilon, right, so, you know, we can kind of give them the just the right amount of flash for the performance requirements and then optimize the cost of storing that data over time by tiering it down to high density, lower cost nodes and even to the ECS, object storage in the cloud. When we're talking about how this is transforming so many industries and you keep mentioning genomic research but it's transforming a number of different industries, can you talk about what you see as the most exciting and profound changes that you're seeing? Yeah, certainly. Well, I mean, the reason I keep mentioning genomic research because we were just in a meeting with one of our great customers, T-Gen and, you know, they're doing lifesaving research and, you know, movies are great and all but it's kind of different on the scale of what we can do to help mankind, right? So, obviously, life sciences and healthcare is just a huge benefit that we're seeing brought out as well but, you know, just a lot of the high performance commercial environments like we talked about with the media and entertainment, being able to change how they're doing their workflows and enable them to actually see their daily shootings as they film them rather than having to compress them and watch their dailies in a lower compressed format, that sort of thing. So, it's transforming that, as I mentioned, in the EDA space, being able to get their chips to market faster and then particularly in that space, right, their data is doubling twice every year and so they have huge constraints around the amount of data that they can store, right? So, we're helping them by being able to reduce the rack space by 75% with our new technology. So, it's really impacting a lot of different use cases, not only in the performance side but as well as in the density and TCO as well. We hear about things like holographic storage and stuff that's coming out of the labs right now that sounds very exciting. As a storage guy, what excites you most and what's the next big thing? Yeah, that's a great question. Well, certainly, we're always looking at what's evolving in the storage and that's one of the cool things about our architecture that we've announced here with our new generation of Icelon is that it's really future-proof. So, it's designed for an eye in the future. It's extremely modular. It allows us to be able to independently change out the CPUs, change out the storage media, the networking capabilities and such. So, as new technology do come to market, we can quickly bring those into the product fold and incorporate the features of that technology into the software and bring them to market very, very quickly. So, like when a 100 gigabit ethernet is available in the market, we'll be able to accommodate that by just slipping in a new HBA in this modular architecture. It's designed on the media side to be very media agnostic. Today, it supports SAS and SAS and say that technology is all on the same node types, right? So, and that allows us to configure these things in different ways for different kinds of use cases and such as well. Yeah, I'd say, you know, getting back to the original question there is that we look forward to these new things coming out so that we can look at how we can integrate those into this new modular architecture. We're not going to winters, though. Not right now. One of the other things that Michael Dell talked about during his keynote was just how complicated this is and how companies have to have digital transformation is about having a security strategy and an Internet of Things strategy and an AI strategy. Are companies, are they being thoughtful enough in your opinion about storage and about data management? Or is there anything that keeps you up at night about the way companies are thinking about these things? Yeah, well, to your first point, yeah, definitely. I think customers at first and foremost in their mindset, they not only need to be able to be incorporating all these new improvements in their current workflows, but they're also looking at what's coming next. You know, what's happening in augmented reality and artificial intelligence and how is that going to impact their business and how do they adopt to those changes that's driving their business into new areas and doing it successfully? And what I mean by that is with the security and governance and compliance for many, many different industries, right? I would say, yeah, the customers are very, very concerned about that. It's top of mind. You know, one of the key features, again, with Isilon is that you not only get this enormous performance benefit from the new flash nodes that are GA-ing this week and all the new capabilities of the architecture, but we don't compromise on any of those areas, right? So we provide multi-protocol access through many, many different types of unstructured data protocols and then Hadoop, HDFS, and Object APIs. But this isn't stopped there, right? So we also have the security and the compliance with encryption and audit and secure access zones that you can wall off a cluster, make sure it's secure, make sure storage admins can only do the admin and not get to the data. Things that are top of mind for our customers across a broad segment of markets. Eric, thanks so much for joining us. This has been great. You're welcome. Thank you very much. I'm Rebecca Knight for Paul Gillan. We'll have more from EMC World after this.