 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We are with Dell Technologies World and about 14,000 other people here. You're watching theCUBE. We are excited to welcome back to theCUBE Scott D'Alandi, the technical director of Dell EMC. Hey Scott. Hey guys, how are you? Can you have a featured guest, Mike Balman, the director of server and storage architecture from Enterprise Products Company. Welcome. Thanks for having me. So you guys are a leader in oil and gas. I hear some great things. Talk to us about what it is that you're doing and how you're working with Dell EMC to be innovative in the oil and gas industry. So we're actually a Dell EMC storage customer for about the last two years now, working with them on how we can bring in a lot of the data that we have from the field. The buzz word today is internet of things or IoT. We've been doing it for many, many years though. So we pull that data in and we look and analyze it and figure out how we can glean more information out of it. How can we tune our systems? As an example, one of the things that we do is we model a product as it flows through a pipeline because we're looking for bubbles and bubbles mean friction and friction means less flow and we're all about flow. The more product we can flow, the more money we can make. So it's one of the interesting things that we do with the data that we have. And Scott, talk to us about specifically oil and gas in terms of an industry that is helping Dell EMC really define this next generation of technology to modernize citizens and enable companies to kind of follow on the back of one and start doing IoT as well. Yeah, so the things that Mike has been able to accomplish within enterprise products is amazing because they truly are an innovator in terms of how they leverage technology to not just kind of maintain sort of the core applications that they need to support just to keep the business up and running but how they're investing in new applications and new concepts to help further drive the business and be able to add value back into the organization. So we love working with enterprise and users like Mike just because they really push technology. They're again very innovative in terms of the things that they're trying to do and they provide us incredible feedback in terms of the things that we're doing the things that we're looking to build and helping us understand what are the challenges that users like Mike are facing and how do we take our technology and adapt it to make sure that we're meeting his requirements. So unlike any other energy, oil and gas, you guys break scale. I mean, you guys define scale when it comes to the amount of data and the need to analyze that data. How has this partnership allowed you to, what specifically have you guys leveraged from Dell EMC to move faster? So we've done a number of things. Early on when we first met with Scott and team at Dell EMC we said we want to, we're not looking to establish a traditional sales customer relationship. We want a two-way business partnership. We want to be able to take your product, leverage it in our data centers, learn from it, provide feedback and ask for enhancements. Things that we think would make it better, not only for us, but for other customers. So one of the examples, if I can talk to it, one of the examples was early on with PowerMax is kind of going through its development cycle, there was talk about introducing data deduplication. And one of the things that we knew from experiences is that there are some workloads that may not do well with data dedupe. And so we wanted some control over that versus some of the competitor arrays to just say everything's data dedupe, good, bad or indifferent, right? And we have some of that anecdotal knowledge. So that was a feature that the team listened to and introduced into the product. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it was great because, you know, we were able to take the feedback and because we work so closely with the engineering teams and because we've really valued the things that Mike brings to the table in terms of, you know, how he wants to adopt the technology and the things that he wants to support from a functionality perspective, we were able to basically build that into the product. So the technology that we literally announced earlier this morning, there are pieces of code that were specifically written into that system based on some of the comments that Mike had provided a year plus ago when we were in the initial phases of development. So being an early adopter and knowing that you were going to have this opportunity to collaborate and really establish this symbiotic relationship that allows you to test things, allows Dell EMC to get that information to make the product better. What is it that your company saw in Dell EMC to go, yeah, we're not afraid to send them, but let's try this together and be that leading edge? I think, honestly, it came down to the very first meeting that we had. We had a relationship with some of the executives inside of EMC from other business relationships years ago and we reached out and said, look, we want to have a conversation and we literally put together kind of a bullet-pointed list of here's how we want to conduct business and here's what we want to talk about and they brought down some of the best and brightest within the engineering organization to have a open discussion with us and really we're very open and honest with what we were trying to accomplish and how they could fit in and then, again, we had that two-way dialogue back of, okay, well, what about this or what about that? So from day one, it has been truly a two-way partnership. So Lisa's all about relationships and governance. I'm all about speeds and fees. I'm a geek and I want to hear some numbers, man. So you guys got your, the PowerMax, we had Caitlin Gordon on earlier. She's product marketing for the PowerMax or very, very proud of the product, but you're a customer that had it in your data center. Tell us the truth. How is it, is it what you need to move forward? It is unbelievably fast in all honesty. So early on, we brought it into our lab environment and we got it online and stood it up. And so we were basically generating simulated workloads, right? And so you've got all these, basically, host machines that are just clobbering it as fast as you can. We ran to a point where we just didn't have any more hardware to throw at it. The box just kept going, right? It's like, okay, well, we're measuring 700,000 IOPS. It's not breaking a sweat, you know? It's sub-millisecond latency. It's like, well, what else do we have? And so it just became one of those things. It's like, all right, well, let's start throwing snapshots at it and let's do this and let's do that. It truly is a remarkable box. And keep in mind, we had the smallest configurable system you could get. We had what is now, I guess, the PowerMax 2000. Yeah. And a very, very small baseline configuration. And it's just phenomenal. And look at it. So I would love to hear a little bit more about that. You know, when we look at things such as the VMAX, incredible platform, which had been positioned as a data center consolidator. But a lot of customers, I saw using that as purpose-built for mission-critical set of applications, subset of applications in the data center. Sounds like the PowerMax, an example of the beta relationship you guys have, is a true platform that you can run an entire data center on and realistically get mission-critical support out of a single platform. Absolutely, yeah. So even today in our production data center, we have VMAX 450, VMAX 950s in today running. And we have everything from Oracle databases, SQL databases, exchange, various workloads, a tremendous number of virtualized servers running on there. I mean, hundreds and hundreds, actually probably several thousand. And it doesn't matter how we mix and match those. I have exchange running on one array along with an Oracle database and several dozen SQL databases and hundreds of VMs, all in one array. And there's no problems whatsoever. There's no competition for IO or any latency issues that are happening. It just works really well. I think one of the other powerful use cases, if I could just talk to this in your environment specifically, are some of the things you're doing around replication, where you're doing multi-site replication. And on a regular basis, you're doing failover, recovery, failback as part of the testing process. Absolutely. So it's not just running the IO and getting the performance of the system. It's making sure that from a service level perspective, from the way the data is being protected, being able to have the right recovery time objectives, recovery point objectives for all of the applications that you're running in your environment to be able to have the infrastructure in place that can support that. So I want to... You're going? Sorry, thanks, Keith. So I'm going to kind of go back up a little bit. One of the announcements that came out today from Dell Technologies was about modernizing the data center. You've just given us a great overview of what you're doing at the technical level. Where are you in developing a modern data center? Are you where you want to be? What's next steps for that? So I don't think we're everywhere we want to be. There's always something else, right? So we're always chasing things. But where we are today is there's a lot of talk for the last several years around cloud. Cloud is cloud that. Everybody has a hardware, software, or service offering that's cloud something. We look at cloud more as an operational model, right? And so we're looking at how can we streamline our internal business? Taking advantages of, say, RESTful APIs that are in PowerMax and basically automating end-to-end from a provisioning or request perspective all the way through the provisioning, all the way through final deployment. And basically pulling the people out of that, the touchpoints, trying to streamline our operations, make it more efficient. It's been long said that we can't get more people in IIT, it's just do more for less, right? And that's not stopping. And if I could just make another plug for Mike. So I visited Mike in his data center just about a year ago or something like that. And I've been in a lot of data centers, right? And I've seen all kinds of organizations of all different size and scale. And still today I talk about the lab tour that we went on because just the efficiency in how everything was racked, how everything was labeled, there was no empty boxes scattered around. The operational efficiency that you've built into the organization, right, is in part of the culture there, that's what gives Mike the ability to do the types of things that he's able to do with, which is really a pretty limited staff of resources that support all of those different applications. So it's incredibly impressive, not just in terms of what Mike has been able to do in terms of the technology piece, but just kind of the people in the operational side of things. It's really, really impressive. I would call it a gold standard from an IIT. You're not biased about it. Mental no complete opposite of any data center I've ever met. Okay, so Mike, talk to us about this automation piece. A lot of, you know, we hear a lot about the first step to modernization is automation. But when I look at the traditional data center and I look at all the things that could be automated, how do you guys prioritize where to go first? So we look at it from where are we spending our time, right? So it's really kind of simple of looking at what are your trouble tickets and what are your change control processes or control tickets that are coming in, right? And where are you spending the bulk of your time? And you know, it's all about bang for the buck, you know? So you want to do the things that you're going to get the biggest payback on first and then the low hanging fruit. And then you go back and you tweak further and further from there. So from our perspective, we did an analysis internally and we found that we spent a lot of time doing basic provisioning. We get a tremendous number of requests from our end users, from our app devs, and from our DBAs of saying, hey, I need 10 new servers by Monday and it's Friday afternoon. That sort of request. So we spend the time jumping through hoops. It was like, well, why? We can do better than that. We should do better than that. So PowerMax built in modern times for the modern data center. Have you guys seen advantages for this modern platform for automation? Have you looked at it and be like, oh, you know what? We love that Dell EMC took this angle towards building this product because they had the modern data center in mind. So again, I think it goes back to largely around REST APIs. So with PowerMaxOS 5978, there's been further enhancements there. So pretty much anything that you could do before with SimCLI or through the GUI has now been exposed to the REST API. And everybody in the industry is kind of moving that way. Whether you're talking about a storage platform or a server platform, that's even some of the networking vendors I had a meeting earlier today, and they're moving that way as well. It's like, whoa, have you seen what we're doing with REST? So from an infrastructure standpoint, from a plumbing perspective, that's really what we're looking at. And trying to make it. And if I can add to that, I think one of the other sort of core enablers for that is just simply the move to an all flash-based system, right, because in the world of spinning drives, mechanical systems, hybrid systems, an awful lot of administrative time is spent in kind of performance tuning, right? How do I shave off milliseconds of response time? How do I minimize those response time peaks during different parts of the day? And when you move to the all flash, there's obviously a boost in terms of performance, but it's not just the performance, it's the predictability of that performance and not having to go in and figure out, okay, what happened Tuesday night between four and six that caused this application to go from here to here? What do we have to do to go and run the analysis to figure all of that out? You don't see that type of behavior anymore. Yeah, it's that indirect operational savings, right? So before when flash drives kind of first got introduced to the market, we had these great things like FAST where you could go in and you could tune stuff and these algorithms that would watch those workloads and make their best guesses that went with data to move when and where. With all flash, that's out the window. There's no more of coming in on Monday and all of a sudden something got tuned over the weekend down to a lower tier storage and it's too slow for the performance requirements on Monday morning, that problem's gone. And when you look under the covers of the PowerMax, we talked a lot today about some of the machine learning and the predictive analytics that are built into that system that help people like Mike to be able to consolidate hundreds, thousands of applications onto this single system but now I have to go in and worry about how do I tune, how do I optimize? Not just based on a runtime of applications but real-time changes that are happening into those workloads and the system being able to automatically adjust and to be able to do the right thing to be able to maintain the level of performance that they require from that environment. Last question, Scott. We just have a few seconds left. Looking at oil and gas and what Mike and team have done in early adoption contexts, helping Dell EMC evolve this technology. What are some of the other industries that you see that can really benefit from this early adoption? What I would say is there are lots of industries out there that we work with and they all have unique challenges and requirements for the types of things that they're trying to do to support their businesses. But I would say the real thing is to be able to build the relationships and to have the trust so that when they're asking for something on our side, we're understanding what that requirement and if there are things that we can do to help that, we can have that conversation but if there are things that we can't control or if there are things that are very, very specific to a small set of customers but require huge investments in terms of R&D and resources to do the development, we can have that honest conversation and say, hey, Mike, it's a really good idea and we understand how it helps you here but we're still a business, we still have to make money. So we can do some things but we have to be realistic in terms of being able to balance helping Mike but still being able to run a business. Sure, and I wish we had more time to keep going but thanks, guys, for stopping by talking about how Dell EMC and Enterprise Products Company are collaborating and all of the anticipated benefits that will no doubt proliferate among industries. We want to thank you for watching The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with Keith Townsend. We're live, day two of Dell Technologies World in Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break.