 Hey everyone, good afternoon from Sin City. This is Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. We are in full swing of theCUBE's four days of coverage of AWS re-invent 2022. North of 50,000 people are here. We're hearing hundreds of thousands online. Dave, this has been, this is a great event. We've had great conversations. We're going to be having more conversations. One of the things we love talking about on theCUBE is AWS and it's ecosystem of partners and we are going to do just that right now. Brian Henderson joins us, Director of Marketing at Dell Technologies. Mark Chimichat, Director of Worldwide Storage Specialists at AWS is also here. Guys, it's great to have you. Great to be here. Great to be here, yeah. I'm feeling the energy of the show. Isn't it great? I know, it's amazing. It's started out high and it has not dropped since Monday night. Brian, talk a little bit about Dell, what you're doing with customers, on their cloud journeys, every customer, every industry is on one, different points in their journey, but what's Dell helping out with there? What we're here to talk about is the progression that we've seen, right? Cloud has changed a lot over the years and Dell has really put out a strategy to help people with their cloud journey, kind of wherever they are. So a lot of people have moved full shift. A lot of people see that as another location and what we're showing at the booth is the idea of taking these enterprise capabilities that people know and trust from Dell, porting them to the cloud. Some cases not porting, but just delivering that software in the cloud, as well as taking some of the Kubernetes integrations, EKS anywhere, bringing that on-prem. So we've got some storage and data protection and our Kubernetes integration to talk about at the show. Awesome, Mark, talk about the role from Amazon's point of view that third party vendors like Dell Technologies plays in AWS's expanding vision of cloud. Great, well, we're really excited to be partnering with Dell. What we see is historically as AWS folks on builders, people put in and really the developer community who are building those components themselves, putting together really resilient infrastructure and applications today. What we're seeing today is a shift also to the type of customers that we're seeing, more traditional enterprise customers who are demanding really the performance, the scalability and also the resiliency of what they had on-premises, but they want that in the cloud as well. So with Dell, we've got some great solutions that we're partnering on, including Dell PowerFlex that provides that linear scalability and some of the high performance capabilities that our customers are demanding. And also, another big trend that we're seeing is customers being affected by things like unfortunately malware events and data protection. So Dell provides some great solutions in both those areas that allow enterprise customers to really experience that mission critical capability and resiliency that they have on-premises in the cloud. You know, Brian, we've been at this a long time. Oh yeah. Yeah, I've been here. Great to see you again. It's a career that storage is going to get commoditized. And I guess if you're talking about spinning disks or flash drives, that's probably true. But as Mark was just saying, if you want resilient storage and things that are recoverable that don't go down all the time. Yeah. They're not commodities. It's real engineering. And you built the stack up. So talk about how that connection, what value you bring to the cloud to your customers. Yeah. So what we see is people are always looking out for enterprise-grade capabilities. So there's going to be a set of offerings and AWS has a fantastic foundation for building on top of with the marketplace. So what we're able to do is really bring, in some cases, decades worth of investment in software engineering and put these advanced capabilities, whether it be PowerFlex with its linear scale, will have a file offering very soon. These products have been built from the ground up to do a very unique purpose, giving that to people in the cloud is just another location for us. AWS being the market leader, we're the market leader in storage. So us working together for the benefit of customers is really where it's at. Can you double-click on that, Brian? What Dell and AWS should give us all those juicy details? Sure, sure, sure. So what we've done right before this show is we've put a product called PowerFlex. If you go back to 2018, ScaleIO, and you're taking this really linear scaling software-defined architecture, and you're putting that in the cloud. What that allows you to do is get that really advanced linear scale performance. You can even span clusters across AWS regions as well as zones. So it's a really unique capability that allows us to be able to check in and do that. And then data protection space, it's a whole separate category. We've been at this actually quite a while. We've got about 14 exabytes of data that's already being protected on the AWS cloud. So we've been at that for quite a while, and the two levels are really, do you want to back that up? Do you want to take a traditional backup application? Maybe it's a lift and shift, and I want to back it up the way I used to, and you can do that in the cloud now. Or we're seeing cyber resiliency come up a lot more, and we were just talking right before. It's a question of when, not if. And so we have to give our customers the option to not only detect that failure event early, but also to separate that copy with the logical air gap. The cyber resiliency is a topic that we are talking more and more about. It's absolutely critical. We've seen the threat landscape change dramatically in the last couple of years. To your point, Brian, it's no longer, we think about ransomware, it's no longer, are we going to get hit? It's when, it's how often. What's the damage going to be? I think I've saw a stat recently that there's one ransomware attack every 11 seconds. The average cost of breaches is in the millions. What you're doing together on cyber resiliency for businesses in any industry is table stakes. We just saw a survey that was earlier this year, survey 66% unfortunately of corporations have experienced now a malware attack, and that's an 80% increase here and here from last year. So again, I think that's an opportunity, it's a threat but an opportunity and so the partnership with Dell really helps to bridge that and helps our customers or mutual customers recover from those incidents. So I think a lot of people might say, okay, this is interesting, storage guy from Amazon, storage guy from Dell, two leaders, and one might think, why don't they just throw it into S3, right? But you guys, both customer driven, customer obsessed. In the field, what are customers saying to you in terms of how they want you to work together? I think there's a place for everything. When you say throw it into S3, so S3 today, one of the big trends when you're looking here is just the amount of data. We hear that rhetoric, we've been in storage for many years and the data always increases up and to the right. But AWS S3 today, we have over 280 trillion objects and they're driving 100 million transactions per second right now, so at that scale. So there's always a place for those really, we have hundreds of thousands of customers running their data lakes. So that's always going to be that really, highly reliable, highly durable, highly available solution for data lakes. But customers, there's a lot of different applications out there. So where customers are asking are those enterprise, so we have EBS for example, which is our great scalable block storage, elastic block store, we've introduced some new volume types like GP2, GP3 and IO2BX, which have that performance. They're still in a single availability zone. So what customers have done historically is say maybe at the application layer, they've put an application layer replication or resiliency across, but customers on prem, they've relied on the storage layer to do that work for them. So with PowerFlex, that'll span either using instant storage or EBS building on that really strong foundation to provide that additional layer to make it easy for customers to get that resiliency and that scalability that Brian talked about. Anything you'd add to that? Yeah, I mean, to your question, how do we work together is really, it's all customer driven. So we see customers that are shifting workloads in the cloud for the first time. And it might make sense to take an object like PowerFlex or another storage technology, maybe you want to compress it a little bit before you send it to the cloud. Maybe you don't want to lift and shift everything. So we have a team of people that works very closely with AWS to be able to determine how are you going to shift that workload out there? Does this make the right sense for you? So it's a very collaborative relationship and it's all very customer driven because our customers are saying, I've got assets in the public cloud and I want them to be managed in a similar fashion to how I'm doing that on prem. So customer obsession is clearly on both sides there. We know that. We know that. Where it starts. Exactly, exactly. I want to get back to PowerFlex for a second, Brian. And I'd love to get an example of a joint customer that really is showing the value of what Dell and AWS are doing together. But question for you on PowerFlex, talk about the value that it offers in the public cloud and why should customers start there if they are early in this journey? All right. Yeah, so the two angles are basically, are you coming from PowerFlex or you're coming from cloud? If you're cloud native, the advantage would be things like a really, really advanced block file system that has been built from the ground up to be software defined and pretty much cloud native. What you're getting is that really linear scale up to about a thousand nodes. You can span that across regions, across availability zones. So it's highly resilient. So if there's a node failure in one site, you're going to rebuild really fast depending on the size of that cluster. So it's a very advanced architecture that's been built to run. We didn't have to change a single line of code to run this product in the cloud because it was cloud native by default. Well, that's the thing we also see and you've seen that with some of the other solutions, but customers really want that enterprise customers are, they want us to make sure those mission critical applications are working and stay up. And so they also want to use the same environment. So we were talking before, we also see use cases where maybe they're using PowerFlex on premises today and they want to be able to replicate that to a PowerFlex instance in the cloud. So we're seeing those and then the familiarity with that infrastructure really is that easy path, if you will, for those more conservative, you know, mission critical customers. So we've learned a lot over the years from AWS's entry into the marketplace, two pizza teams working backwards. We talk about customer obsession. And also the cloud experience brings me to Apex. Oh yeah. How does Apex get in here? Yeah, so Apex is the categorization for all the things that we're doing around a modern cloud experience for Dell customers. So we're taking them also on a journey, kind of there's an as a service model, there's a do it yourself model and anything that we do that touches cloud is now being kind of put under that Apex moniker. So everything that we're doing around project Alpine, enterprise, software capabilities in the cloud. Do you want someone else to manage it for you? Do you want it in a polo? That might be the right fit for you. It's all under that Apex umbrella and journey. So we're kind of still just getting started there, but we've seen a lot of great traction. People want to pay as they go. You know, it's a very popular model that AWS has pretty much set the foundation for. So pay as you go, utility based pricing. This is all things our customers have been asking for. Yeah, so Apex, you can basically set a baseline, you can dial it up for a period of time, dial it down very much, pay by the drink. Absolutely. And you know, it's just like you said, it's early days. Yeah. But that's again, AWS has influenced the business in a lot of different ways. We see, you know, again, with the Dell, you know, the trust of customers that Dell has built over the years and having those customers come in, we obviously are getting again, it's accelerating adoption for, you know, from financial services to healthcare and all these customers who've relied on Dell for years, moving to the cloud, having that trusted name and also that infrastructure that's similar and familiar to them. And then the resiliency and just the foundation that we have is AWS. I think it works really well together for those customers. Well, I think it underscores too the maturity of both AWS and in a lot of ways Dell, right? And the early days of cloud was like, uh-oh. And now it's like, oh, actually big market. Customers are demanding this. There's new value that we can create working together. Yeah. Let's do it. Yeah, I mean, it didn't take us that long to get to it, but I'd say we had little fits and starts over the years. And now we've recognized like, this is where the future is. It's going to be cloud. It's going to be on-prem. It's going to be edge. It's going to be everything. It's going to be an and world. And so just doing the right thing for customers, I think is exactly where we've landed. So it's a great partnership. Do you have a favorite customer story that you think really shines a light on the value of the Dell AWS partnership in terms of the business impact they're making? We have several large customers that I can't always drop the name, but one of them is a very large video game production company. And we do a lot of work together where they're rendering maybe in-house. They're sending to a shared location. They're copying data over to S3. They're able to let all their editors access that. They bring it back when it's compressed down a little bit and deliver that. We're also doing a lot of work with, I think I can say this, Amazon Thursday night football games. So what they've done there, it's a partner of ours working with AWS. All the details inside of that roving truck that they drive around, there's a lot of Dell gear within there. And then everything connects back to AWS for that exact same kind of model. We need to get it to the editors on a nightly basis. They're also streaming directly from that truck while they're enabling the editors to access a shared copy of it. So it's really powerful stuff. Thursday night prime is pretty cool. Some people complain because they're like, oh, I can't just switch channels during the commercials. I'm like, first of all, you can. Second of all, the stats are unbelievable, right? You could just do your own replay when you want to. There's really some cool innovations there of it. Very cool innovations. I got one more question for each of you before we wrap. Mark, question for you. We're making a fun Instagram reel. So think about a sizzle reel of, if you were to summarize the show so far, what is AWS's message to its massive audience this year? Well, that's a big question because we have such a wide, as we mentioned, such a wide-ranging audience. I really see a couple of key trends that we're trying to address. One is, don't forget, I'm the storage guy, so it's going to come from an angle from data, right? So I think it's just this volume of data and that customers are bringing into the cloud, either moving in from enterprises today or organically just growing into, a couple years ago, megabytes were a lot and now we're talking about petabytes every day and soon it's going to be exabytes are going to become the norm. So the big, I'd say, point one is the trend that I see is just the volume of data. And so what we're doing to address that is obviously, we talked a little bit about S3 and being able to manage the volumes of data, but also things like data zone that we introduced because customers are looking to make sure that the right governance and controls to be able to access that data. So I think that's one big thing that I see the theme from the show today. The second thing is around, as I said, about really these enterprise customers really wanting to move in these mission-critical applications into the cloud and having that infrastructure to be able to support that easily from what they're doing today and move in quickly. And the third area is around data protection and making sure their data protection and malware recovery. That's a theme that we see, you see, is it really, unfortunately, that's today, but being able to recover quickly, both having native services and native offerings just built in resiliency into the core platforms like S3 with object law for application, et cetera, and also partnering with Dell on the cyber recovery and some of the solutions from Dell. Excellent, and Brian, last question for you. A bumper sticker that succinctly and powerfully describes why Dell and AWS are such awesome partners for customers to use. Best of both worlds. All right? Mic drop. Mic drop, done. That's awesome. You said that a lot more succinctly. Enterprises and cloud, cloud coming enterprise. Yeah, leader meets leader, right? Yeah, right. Love it, leader meets leader. Guys, it's been a pleasure having you on theCUBE. We appreciate hearing the latest from AWS and Dell from a storage perspective and from a cloud perspective and how you're helping customers manage the explosion of data that's not going to slow down. We really appreciate you coming by the set. Thank you. Great, thanks guys. Thanks so much, appreciate it. Our pleasure. For our guests and Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage.