 Scott Sinclair, he is the Dell Storage Product Manager. Come on in. Hey, Scott. Good to meet you. The Dell Storage Product Manager? I think there's more than one of us. I was just going to say. One of? Yes. So which product? The best. The best. Yeah, so I'm the product manager for the FS7500. Ah, yes. Which we just announced yesterday at the Dell Storage Forum and we're all really excited about it. So talk a little bit about it. Okay, yeah, sure. The FS7500 is really one of the first products. It's a NAS product, but it's more than that. It's based on a scale out file system architecture. Which traditionally, those have been reserved for the very high end. That's a high performance computing application, right? Exactly. High performance computing. All the data analytics that Michael was talking about this morning. All those sorts of things. What we did was, we wanted to go into the mid-range SMB, kind of this mid-market space. And we said, you know what? We need to help our customers and really help the IT administrators out there handle unstructured data. And handle it in a way that is different than everyone else. So we looked across the industry and we found these scale out file system architecture technologies that traditionally were reserved for these HVCC computing space. And what we did was, we put our engineers on it and with the help of the Ecologic team, which is known for essentially being one of the easiest to use storage products in the industry. And we took this technology and we made it very simple to use. And made it in a form factor and a deployment model that works for an SMB customer. So it's like an appliance today? Exactly, exactly. On the network? It's an appliance that plugs into an Ecologic group. Okay. He didn't bite on that. Yeah, I mean... An appliance on the network. Appliance on the network. Yeah, yeah. So many devices with that. Sort of like a network of appliances. You know, it's been a long day, so I got it ready. It's only 2045. Wow. Yeah, exactly. Oh yeah, I never sleep. No, somebody referred to this as, this was your strategy to go after NetApp. Now, you're interested in doing direct company competition and comparisons, but are you going into those kinds of workloads then? Well, you know, like you were saying. We hesitate to really call out or go after any one specific competitor. But you know, at the end of the day, there are folks in this space, right? They have file storage needs that are looking at different ways to do it. And some of the traditional companies out there, while they do have good products, are based off of architectures that are old and actually need to be updated. And for example, one of the examples of that is they may have essentially architectural limitations in how big they can scale. A lot of customers that we speak with that have traditional NAS or unified products today run into a lot of challenges around how big a file should be. So essentially with data growing out of control, folks are actually going in and saying, you know, I have IT guys that literally all they do is every week or every couple days, they got to go in, provision more storage and create another file share. And that's just creating more and more work. So a lot of simplification there around managing file share? Exactly. Simplification. Because what we've done is we've done something completely different. Is how these traditional file systems or these traditional NAS arrays work is they basically force you to carve up little pieces of data and then basically manually manage your data and make sure that you're actively distributing across all the different stores. We make that all that automatic. So instead of having, you know, essentially lots of little shares, you can create one giant share. Like for example, the FS7500 that we just announced allows you to create a single file share up to half a petabyte if you want to. Aren't there some downsides to that in terms of managing it? You know, the interesting thing is we've seen a lot of folks actually prefer to have the flexibility. Now if you want to carve it up, you can carve that up however you want. If you want to have thousands of small shares, we have no problem with that. So what kind of customer really prefers the bigger share versus the smaller individual? You know, it's more than just the ability to scale. I talk with a lot of folks and they say, well, you know what, that's great that you guys can scale bigger to file shares bigger than everyone else. But I don't have that much data. I'm a hundred percent customer. Exactly. So what these guys do is, you know, it's not just about the ability to scale. It's about the virtualization aspect that that ability to scale provides. So what happens is when you take an FS7500 and you use it within an ecological group, ecological logic has the ability to essentially create a virtualized pool of storage. So what it will do is it will move data across storage arrays in order to load balance it to make sure your performance is utilized as efficiently as possible. The FS7500 does the same thing. If you need more performance, you can scale by adding in another one, which gives you four active active redundant controllers that essentially allow you to load balance across all of these. So what does this do? It essentially means that as you expand your storage needs, you can make sure that all the processing and memory are working to its fullest capacity and all the drives on the back end are working to its fullest capacity. A lot of these traditional architectures, where we talk about, you know, they have limits in what they can scale, those limits translate directly down to hard drives. So what that means is this share is tied to these three hard drives. If folks are not accessing that share, then these three or four hard drives are not spinning. Yeah. With us, you know, since the shares are virtualized across all the drives, essentially you're getting the maximum amount of performance out of the storage that you paid for. Is anybody else using a sort of a similar architecture? There is some folks using a similar architecture that are out there, but they're pretty much reserved to the HPCC space. Dell is the only company that I'm aware of right now that is actually taking this type of technology and saying, we're going to make it easy to use and affordable for the SMB and mid-market space. Equalogic is sort of a, if you use a classic Clayton Christensen model, it was a low-end disruptor, right? It came up and started moving into larger and larger environments. With high-performance computing, you're taking some of this very high-end and you're pushing it down. A lot of people have failed at that kind of thing, taking a high-end solution and trying to scale it down to make it usable by a smaller customer. Why are you successful? Well, you know, I think a lot of it is based off of the focus that Equalogic has had and the history that Equalogic has had at easy use. This is something that, you know, what we've decided to do is we've taken a very complicated and very complex and very feature-rich capability. And what we've basically said is, let's focus on the customers, let's look at what their core needs are, and let's drive ease of use as the top priority. So we've actually made, in the first release, we've made decisions where we put ease of use above capability on this. I mean, essentially, when you're trying to take something down to an SMB space from, you know, that used to be up in the high-end, the biggest challenge that you have is high-end systems have, you know, 17,000 buttons and knobs and things. A lot of knobs that you can use to essentially get this thing to work right. And scientists like that. They do. And large customers like it, you know, large enterprises love it because they can tweak it to their environment. However, the challenge is for the SMB, they don't want that. They want one knob, they want one button. We were talking yesterday about how, you know, CEOs, they don't want to pay people to know that in and out for that to be their expertise. Exactly. They want to move away from that and they want it to be more easier and more consumer-friendly almost. Not consumer-friendly, but... Almost like consumer-friendly, though. But almost like it, right? So you're finding that as well, it sounds like? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Has that been going on for a while or is that a shift? As far as a strategy or as far as... No, as far as that mentality, you know, moving away from someone, one person or two people being solely focused on, you know, managing all of that. Well, you know, it depends on the environment. It depends on, you know, their design within their IT infrastructure. What we've really noticed is, you know, if you look at some of these SMB shops, they have more IT generalists rather than specialists. And so that's what we try to design for it, is we try to go after and put essentially a laser focus on ease of use, try to drive something that an IT generalist can come up, understand, and as we add new features and capability, what that does is we keep it within that same framework. And so it's a framework that they're familiar with and they're comfortable with and an understanding of how things work. So when we look at actually adding new features, we actually put them in context around the expectations of existing customers. Got that was great. I appreciate you coming on. We look forward to hearing more about it as you start to deploy across the rest of the platforms. Absolutely. Welcome to theCUBE. You've been cubed. Thank you. Thank you so much. We appreciate it.