 From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Hi, and welcome to a special CUBE conversation here in our Boston area studio. I am Stu Miniman, and we're digging in with Dell EMC on data protection in the multi-cloud era. Happy to join, welcome to the program. First time guest. Nelson. Nelson Chu, who is the director of Solutions Marketing with Dell EMC. Nelson, great to see you. Great to be here, thank you Stu. All right, so you and I were both at CUBECon plus CloudNativeCon with about 12,000 of our friends in the open-source community down in San Diego, California. Why don't you bring us in first? It's probably not the first place that people think of when they think of Dell EMC, so explain a little bit what the team was doing, the announcements there, and what you were seeing at the show. Sure, no, I appreciate that. It was our first time for Dell Technologies. It was kind of our coming out party, we all went into the CloudNative realm. We've got a tremendous amount of momentum, especially obviously around Kubernetes, between what we've done in the data protection space with our PowerProtect software for Kubernetes, what we've done in our storage realm in the work that we've done around container storage interfaces. So a lot of that was coming out and introducing that to the CUBECon and CloudNativeCon attendees. I think it was a really good timing though. Yeah, so Nelson, we've been watching, the role of the developers, the discussion of DevOps of course is central what's happening, not only at CUBECon, but many of the Cloud shows there. I know at VMworld, you see what's happening on with the VMware code team. So explain how kind of the Dell Technologies Cloud partnership with VM, or how that all pulls together for activities that your organization's doing within the DevOps. Well, you know that we're right there, right? It's all about DevOps. It's about the developers. It's about the new world of bringing CloudNative applications and driving them into the production environment. I think that, you know, we heard that at VMworld with Pat Gelsinger and where his pillars of, you know, build, run, protect, connect are key aspects. So, you know, if you look at that management component, protect falls right into that area, right? Because with the growth of data as we're seeing it today, the need to manage that in a CloudNative realm becomes even more prevalent and important. You know, we've seen DevOps mature over the last couple of years, right? You see, you know, we had 8,000 people in Seattle, right? Now we had 12,500 of your best friends and it's just going to grow, right? I'm sure you saw that, right? Yeah, absolutely, huge growth there. And I'm glad you brought up the protect thing because when I think about developers, we want to reduce the friction for developers to be able to build their apps. You think about DevOps is, you know, keeping agility going. But, you know, where is the data and how do I make sure that, you know, we know when we go to a Cloud world, we still need to think about security. We still need to think about data management and data protection there. So, explain to our audience how that protect piece fits into the DevOps world. Well, you know, for first, we should clarify a little bit, right? Because like over the last two years, everything's been about security within containers, right? And that's great because you're protecting the applications and people are worried about penetration there. And it's been fantastic. And I think that today, specifically around the aspect of securing the application and now securing the infrastructure is key. You know, storage has become a very, very relevant topic, whether it's like persistent volumes taking center stage, right? When it comes to client-native apps moving into production, because it's about protecting those mission-critical workloads. And as you just stated, you have your applications, but at the end of the day, your data is really the capital, right? And that's what you really need to focus on. It becomes a greater importance when you have that holistic discussion about DevOps, right? And so now we have the aspect of the Kubernetes administrator meets the IT administrator, right? And having to be able to protect through this application transformation that's being driven by cloud-native complexity and that traditionally was disaggregated from the infrastructure. But now as you mature and you look at those production and mission-critical environments, you really have to pay attention to how am I going to protect my data from the edge to core to cloud and in that cloud-native world. Yeah, definitely is one of those areas we found at the conference, for many it's a steep learning curve to try to understand, you know, Kubernetes, all of these cloud-native architectures. If you come in there with a traditional infrastructure role, it was actually something we were discussing more a couple of years ago was some of the basic blocking and tackling of networking and storage inside of a container environment. But now a lot of discussion is around that application development and therefore we need to make sure that we're having not only the app dev, but the infrastructure team all understanding how everything goes together and protection, of course, a critical piece there. Oh, absolutely. And if we look at all the different projects that are underway under CNCF, I mean, it's fantastic, right? I mean, there's so much momentum. Everyone's now also looking at that infrastructure, right? I mean, last year was all about the service mesh, right? So I think that we're at that inflection point that now it's going to be a lot about the storage and protecting that storage. If you look at Project Valero, right? So Project Valero is an open source project under CNCF, right? Being driven by the work that was done by the active formerly known as Heptio, right? So we've got Joe Bieta, right? You've got Craig McClocky and the work that they've done and it started out as ARC. Well, now Dell EMC and specifically obviously the Data Protection team is working and contributing hand in hand with the VMware team on Valero. And I think you'll see that resonate through the future of Tanzu and Pacific as we go forward. Great, let's connect the dots now between what we're doing at the CNCF, KubeCon show and now we've got AWS re-invent coming up. So Amazon might not let us use the word multi-cloud in that context there, but absolutely that was the conversation at many of the other shows this year is hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, how customers get their arms around all these environments. So help us understand how this story that we were just talking about a cloud native environment fits into the broader kind of public cloud discussion. Oh, absolutely. So I think one of the key aspects to that is around consistency, right? So being able from a data protection perspective be able to protect all that valuable data that you have whether it's in premises, where it's in cloud, where it's multi-cloud or hybrid. And you want to be able to protect that holistically using the same capability that you have from your premises base into or out of or within cloud. So I want to be able to within AWS be able to protect my data from region to region, right? So we've got a great offering for VMware cloud on AWS. It allows you to protect into and within the cloud itself. So you can protect in and extend out to the cloud. Yeah, definitely probably one of the most interesting partnerships I think the industry's been watching the last two years is VMware and AWS, the dominant virtualization in your data center environment and the leader in public cloud. So looking forward to hearing some proof points at the conference, any give us a little bit of hint as to what we'll be seeing and hearing about at the show? Well, I think you'll hear a lot about that consistency with regards to observability, orchestration, automation, automation becomes so key that you take your workflows for data protection from premises to the cloud and having that consistency. I think you'll also see some pretty, pretty significant numbers coming forth with regards to how much data is being protected in AWS. Okay, definitely looking forward to that. Always looking forward to the customers. All right, Nelson, want to give it the last word. What else should we be looking for your team kind of end of 2019 and going into 2020? Well, you know, I think it all starts with cloud and multi-cloud, right? That's our core focus. That's where we're driven to. I think you'll see innovation, especially in the cloud and data space that we have. I think you'll see further innovation in the cybersecurity and the cyber recovery space around data protection. So I think those are really key elements that you'll see more from. Yeah, absolutely. Super important discussions around data, around security and everything there. Nelson, thank you so much for joining us here in theCUBE. Stu, thank you. All right, be sure to check out siliconangle.com for exclusive content leading up to an after AWS reinvent of course and check out theCUBE.net. If you're not at the show, if you are at the show, come to the center of the show floor at the Venetian inside the Sands Convention Center. You can find myself, Dave Vellante, John Furrier and our whole team there for three days, wall-to-wall coverage for our last big show of the year. And I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching theCUBE.