 From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this special CUBE Conversations. We're here with Dell Technology to share the news of an update to one of their product lines. We've watched for a number of years. Dell has taken their portfolio and what they said they've powered them up. So of course the server is known for a long time power edge and we've seen many of the storage products and the like going through their power up. And here we have is the power flex. So people that are familiar with what's happening in the software defined storage and hyperconverged space will remember the VX flex. So it's powered up. Joining me to discuss this important announcement, we have Matthew Paul, who's the senior director of product management and Anthony Cinelli, who is the senior director of business development, both with Dell Technologies. Matt, let's jump right into it. You know, power flex, powering up this segment of the market, give us the importance and what the announcement is. Great, thank you Stu, thanks for having us. Yeah, I'm really excited to announce that we're powering up our product and we're moving our VX flex product to the new power brand in the power name. Really responding to customers and our customers taking this product on and aligning it and using it. To be able to in line with our bigger portfolio that we have at Dell EMC delivering outcomes for our customers. So it's an exciting time frame and it really reflects this idea of customers adoption, the technology and our investment as Dell technologies in this software defined storage to kind of signify to the market that we're here to stay. And this is an exciting thing we're working through. The second part around this on top of kind of the rebrand is a new launch of power flex three five. So this new software and new software information is delivering some key additions to our portfolio, including a replication, including a new HDMI five GUI and including some really cool additions to our software management stack that customers have really been asking. Excellent. So AC, you know, in normal times, you're out meeting with a lot of customers. I'm sure you're still talking a lot of customers, even if you're in work from home mode during the pandemic. But help us understand, you know, one of the things we know that Dell has done is it is streamlined the portfolio. But when you talk about, you know, storage software defined storage converge hyper converge, there's still a few different options inside the Dell family. So tell us where, you know, power flex fits and how it differentiates, you know, in position compared to some of the other pieces. Yeah, great question. So, you know, I have a pretty nice role here for Dell, which is I am responsible for our entire portfolio of converged hyper converged and software defined offerings. And really what what that affords me is one particular luxury when I engage with customers and that luxury is that I can start every single customer engagement with a question, which is what problem are you trying to solve? And that's really important because having a portfolio at my disposal allows me to lead with that question and really focus the conversation and solution on what their business problem is and how best to solve it. Now, the things we typically listen for when it comes to flex are things like flexibility, things like performance, things like I'm trying to solve a platform where I want to replatform my architecture to a software defined outcome. But I need to run a wide variety of workloads. I need to run virtual workloads. I need to run physical workloads. I need to run container workloads. I want to consolidate all of that onto a single modern software defined infrastructure. Or we hear workload specific things, things like I have an incredibly high performance Oracle database or I have a workload, you know, one great example of a customer was because of COVID, they had to go from 60,000 to 160,000 remote users over a weekend. They did that on flex with zero incremental infrastructure required for the storage. All the performance, all of the horsepower was fully capable of handling that increased capacity. Another customer, curbside pickup was a great application for their business. Saw a hundred X performance requirement increase essentially over the course of a weekend because of COVID. Running on flex, they were able to swallow that performance increase with no problem. So a lot of what we see when it comes to flex and the problems we're hearing are I need a platform that has a lot of inherent flexibility or I have a very acute workload problem that I need something very scalable and very performant to solve. But again, my luxury is I can always ask the customer the question first and then leverage the power of our portfolio to provide the best solution to solve for their business problem. All right. So AC appreciate you talked about, you know, scale and performance, two of the really big things. If you talk about what's happened in this space, Matt, maybe you can help us squint through a little bit as to how this differentiates compared to other solutions in the marketplace. You know, we saw software to find storage, hyperconverged infrastructure run through its wave in the last few years. You've got some very large customers, you know, big, you know, brand names globally, as well as service fighters that have used flex in the past. So explain how this, you know, is different from from others out there. Yeah, I think, you know, when we when we when we talk about how we manage and we work through this, it's our concepts of trying to really democratize this software to the masses, right? And be able to make it easy to use and simple to use. If you think about old or traditional software to find storage, all the knobs and all the tweaks sometimes make it difficult to implement. And so you get these, you know, really high and extreme customers that need all these knobs to tweak. We do that very, very well. But what we've been focused on the last couple of years is ensuring we can get that to multiple places through robust kind of investment in our flex manager space. So be able to automate and make things a lot easier and simpler for customers to use. That way we can go down and provide this technology to more people. And then the other thing is kind of meeting customers where they need to be. And so a couple key mechanism which people consume our products is through our appliances and our racks or integrated racks. So when a customer, you know, comes after a kind of a full end to end wide club solution, where they want to roll a big rack into their environment, plug it in, get it up and going. We have a full integrated rack that we deliver to customers to really drive that outcome. And then if you think about the difference between that and the appliance, the appliance has given us a little more flexibility. So if you want to plug that into an existing network or an existing environment, but both of these things give you that extreme scale and performance that AC was just talking about while that rich management experience. And so I think you kind of align the consumption models and the new management, which also brings a big differentiated value to the product. Excellent. So, you know, Matt, when I hear you talking about these solutions, what wonder if you can help connect this with how your customers are talking about cloud in general? You talked about consumption model, I talked about how to manage. So, you know, where does this fit in, you know, whether it's the Delta cloud or just your customers overall discussion of cloud? Yeah. So a couple of things come to mind here, typically what we see with PowerFlex is customers saying, I'm trying to achieve what we call this common platform, which is I want to build an on-premises cloud that gives me the flexibility to run all the workloads in my data center. And we say all the workloads, that's everything from obviously your virtualization stack through things like your physical bare metal workloads, typically your high performance databases, all the way through this emerging world of containers and those containers could be virtual, could be physical. And giving customers the value of running all of that on a single underlying software-defined infrastructure with all of the automation and lifecycle management to go along with it, there's really just nothing like that in the market. So really where we're seeing this adoption is customers who are saying, I want to build my own cloud within my data center that gives me the ability to run my workloads. And because I'm building them on a common infrastructure, I can build automation that allows my end users to consume that infrastructure in a very cloud-like matter. So that's one big thing that we are seeing customers really bite off on. Another approach is within that Dell Technologies Cloud Platform, which is how do we leverage the best of all of the assets under the Dell Technologies umbrella, namely assets from VMware, VMware Cloud Foundations and everything they offer in their multi-cloud story and providing a wide variety of options within the Dell Technologies portfolio to solve that. Obviously, we have our VxRail platform, which is the most integrated solution vertically within that VMware stack. We also have other offerings within our storage portfolio that have the ability to plug into that, PowerFlex being one of those as an option for customers to leverage within that Dell Tech Cloud Platform strategy. Excellent. Matt, you mentioned the new updates with 3.5. Maybe give us a little bit more on that, whether it's an existing customer, what things they've been asking for that are in this release, or maybe for some new people that might not have looked at the Flex family for a while that 3.5 might bring them to the table. Yeah, I think the great thing about this product, it's an end-to-end solution. So we bring all these things together to add that value. A couple of the key things that we've been hearing and driving towards our customers is around replication or asynchronous replication. So the ability for us to be able to align that and give that to customers is probably the most important piece of this release. We also did some really cool stuff in the management stack. So if you think about other competition or other products being able to align firmware updates, for example, or software updates, for example, because of the scale of our product, we've had to align really unique things in our management stack, like the ability to do rack-level updates. So really innovative, really differentiated, so customers can take racks out of time down to do updates because they don't have time when there's thousands of servers in their environment, they don't have time to do one note at a time in a round robin fashion. And a point to add on to that, right? What's really unique and Matt touched on it, this concept of democratization, we've always done large really well with this technology, right? In a way that really no other technology platform in this space can. What the team has built on the management stack is now allowing us to also do small and medium incredibly well, where we can bring this incredibly disruptive technology to the masses, to your general enterprise, to your general mid-market type customer who's not solving for hundreds or thousands of nodes, but may be solving for 10, 20 or 50 nodes and delivering this very disruptive outcome that helps them much more adapt or much more quickly adapt to changing demands they have, harnessing all this flexibility, but doing it with point-click operations that are incredibly simple across the full stack. Excellent. Well, we've heard from Jeff Clark when you get the power brand on there, that's a message to the customers that this is a platform that's going to be with us for quite a number of years. Give us a look forward as to both of you as to what we should expect to see from PowerFlex. Yeah, I mean, we're really excited about the future, right? To your point, aligning with the winning roadmap, the investment level in this technology is really high within the organization. How we work well within the broader Dell Technologies portfolio is really exciting. So we'll continue to innovate and drive this democratization story that Anthony was talking about, innovate in new data services, innovate in new management paradigms and stacks. Like the thing I just talked about in terms of doing rack-level updates. And I think just giving customers, listening to our customers and providing that on a reoccurring basis is a critical thing. So we're really embracing this idea of providing updates on a regular basis to be able to respond to customers' needs on a daily basis. And I think one thing to add to that, that I'm excited to see the team continue executing on, is delivering actual workload solution based outcomes, right? Very often customers will come to us and say, here's my workload problem, right? It's a Oracle, it's a Splunk, it's an Elastic Stack, or name your workload. The team's really done a great job of leveraging this platform and building full stack validated solutions, oftentimes in tandem with the application vendor. So customers can consume this technology with complete confidence. To run, oftentimes, their most important or critical workloads, knowing that they have the full backing of the vendor, they have the full backing of the infrastructure provider and the application provider working together to deliver this technology as an outcome. And because of its extreme flexibility, we can adapt it to so many different workload scenarios and customers have responded to that incredibly well. So for me, I'm excited to see the team continuing to build out that solutions portfolio because customers are really seeing a ton of value in that. Great, I guess final question I have for you, Matt, probably up your alley there. Availability of the product, is it available now at the launch? And if I was a VxFlex customer before, what does the move to PowerFlex move? How do I get from where I was to the future? If there are any hardware changes or is it all software? Yeah, good point. So it's available now, you know, on there on the 25th, so really excited for the customers. And we do support customers going from the existing version to the new version. And so the upgrades are pretty straightforward, pretty easy to bring in that updated management stack and then bring in the updated FlexOS. I'm sorry, PowerFlex version. All right, I'm sure customers will be, you know, going back and forth on the terms. All right, Matt and AC, thank you so much for the updates. Congratulations on the progress. Thanks, Stu. Have a good one. Take care. All right, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.