 Live from the Mendelebe Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and John Waltz. And welcome back here in Las Vegas as theCUBE continues our coverage of VMworld, starting to wind down here on day three. Glad to with us here on the live stream as we continue gathering insights for you. And I'm happy to share that with you. Along with John Furrier, I am John Waltz and we're joined now by Rami Katz, who's the Vice President of Product Management for EMC's Extreme I.O. And Rami, nice to have you with us. Thanks for taking the time. Nice to meet you. The show for you, pretty exciting time, I think because of, for a number of reasons, but the one that really, I think, jumps out is the hands-on lab that you've got going on here. Because you've got this real test area here where it's all hands-on deck, all things coming at you, a thousand people may be more doing all kinds of different things, you're learning a lot and they're seeing a lot. Tell us more about that. Yeah, so that's a good point. It's all started up three years ago when it was. And it's a very nice story. Before that, they used to have eight racks supporting the hands-on lab because it's such a huge infrastructure need for imagine hundreds of people coming simultaneously trying to provision and spawn a new lab. And there's a lot of IOP and performance requirements and so they needed a lot of infrastructure to support it. It all, when we launched our technology, VMware saw that and adopted this for the hands-on lab, they shrink it to about half a rack and it was pretty successful. So they are doing it here for the third consecutive year. So imagine that all of those people coming wants to provision a lab and they get it under the scene immediately. Well, we've been, this is our seventh VM world and I've been to the ones before the queue was started and the hands-on labs is by far the most popular. People love to go in there and there's literally thousands of people and a variety of different use cases of labs. So it used to be these, the provision racks and I used to sit and say to myself, they shipped that and it's like the full racks, big power supplies, over provisioning basically infrastructure to handle an unknown capacity or flash mob, if you will. And so they had to basically over, that has been the data center design and obviously the areas like network over provision, you don't know that costs a lot for a customer. So it's an interesting example. So you guys have lowered the footprint. How has performance been? I'm sure this female all flash has been faster but you're providing that dynamic environment where you're spinning up resources very, very fast. Is that the similar value proposition that you see for the customer? Absolutely. And that's also part of the new announcements that we've made last week. We announced the integration through the V center, through VRO, the Realize Orchestrator when you can do end-to-end workflow to provision storage, including copies. So imagine that the customer has the same catalog of product that you use here, obviously it's not maybe a lab, but it can be like a production database that you want to provision to one of his developer for analytics, for reporting, for testing, for QA and the end user just with a button click can create a copy of the database or whatever the customer would like him to do and it gives him the ability to be independent and for the storage guy to continue work on the infrastructure and move it forward. So we definitely see a customer doing the same. So talk about the integration, the announcement. Also there was a Microsoft component I think in the announcement too, VMware and Microsoft. Can you just unpack that a little bit further? Would it just explain for a minute what that is specifically about? Yeah, sure. So, we have been pretty vocal about the ICDM, the older copy sprawl that with extremely your purpose built technology, you can create many copies as you like. Now, the underlying technology is great but you really unleash the power of this technology when you give it to the users. So, and how do you give it to the users? Through the user integration tools. So we have the VRO to integrate it to the VMware admin so he can create the copies through his tools, the vCenter and we have it available for the Microsoft user through SCVMM, the Microsoft System Center as well as PowerShell if he wants to script in Microsoft environment, this is available as well. So all of that was announced just last week. So what's the problem that does that solve? I mean, because that's, I mean you guys are well known for really been blazing performance and I know we'll talk about it later but I heard the Dell guys are super excited to get their hands on this on September 7th or official day to the close but in this announcement, these enhancements, what problems are you solving? So the problem that we are solving is in today's world, if a user, an end user, an application owner would like to get a copy of the database, he needs to talk to the storage admin to provision storage, that's a manual. Now he needs to pick up the phone, storage admin is probably doing something right now so he needs to stop doing it. There goes the voicemail. That can happen as well. Five million checks, come on, pick up your phone. That can happen as well. Or maybe say, yeah, I'll get to it in two weeks. Now, if you give the power to the user to do it by himself, then you know, he doesn't need to talk to anybody. He wants it now. What do they use the data for? And what do they use in the data for? Whatever they want, application, support, is it analytics? It can be test dev, it's a common use case. It can be analytics, reporting, QA. We have just a real customer-like example, financial institution. Used to have just two copies because they were always too hard to maintain and to refresh and labor-intensive. Now they have 20 copies of the same database available to the users and that really accelerated their production cycle. What's the big architectural advantage that Xtreme I own? What's the big innovation that you guys had? What makes you different? So Xtreme I own is purpose-built for Flash. So from ground up, we designed the system to best suit the new technology. Part of that is the scale-out architecture that you really need. You scale out in order to get what Flash can give you, the enormous performance that Flash can give you. But that's only part of that. We designed all our copies technologies so you can get multiple copies and get the same performance as you get for production and that's really sort of the problem of the copy sprawl that most of the data are created by copies and on top of that being able to do in-line data services, compression, deduplication, really creates huge efficiencies for the customers. You know, John, I was saying to Dave Vellante when we first met Xtreme I own, these guys did an amazing job. First of all, the big acquisition strategic for EMC but the performance was the key and when Flash was getting hyped, it was all about low latency and I think that is an area we're seeing in other conversations from big data analytics as the DevOps and the cloud native world become more proliferated. IT needs to have this fabric of just really fast data management around the databases. So you need blazing performance. Is that still the mission for you guys? I mean, as you guys go forward in the product management, what's on the roadmap? What are you guys working on? How are you going to go faster? Everyone wants more speed. So I think the faster on the IOPS and the speed and feeds, maybe this is where we started but that's been pretty common and we have now and we have about dozens that are doing and in some use cases they give pretty decent performance but there are some differences. The difference is whether you are able to create more efficiencies in deduplication and compression is one but you really unleash it when you have many copies, when you can support many copies and to do all of that together, that's something that we don't see anybody that's saying. And that's valuable to the customer. Absolutely, absolutely. And then in addition to high performance, the other side of the equation is okay, you know, what's it going to cost me? Because for a long time, you know, for relatively long time, it costs relatively a lot and that price is coming down, you're able to provide high performance. So how much consideration is that for you as you're looking at trying to squeeze a little more speed out of this? You're also trying to be cost efficient or cost mindful. So cost is coming down because the media, a cost is coming down, so that's one. But the other one is really what the value that you are getting out of your system, right? If you are able to do, to have like 30 to one efficiency by using copies, then really the cost of the hardware is less of an issue, so and then- It's paying for itself in that respect then. Yeah, absolutely. And customer are seeing that. Customer are doing the cost analysis and are seeing that they can, their efficiencies really save them money. I got to ask you about the Dell Technologies integration. Now seeing on September 7th that that's the official date. Michael Dell was talking to me last night at the Visan event that Yang Bing was putting on. That it's closed and he's all happy and we're kind of letting us know. He's got a big smile. So the Dell guys I talked to, and certainly in the hallway, some of the execs on the engineering side, they're excited to get their hands on Extreme I.O. So I know we've been waiting on China, that's now done, but the transitions have been going on. I know there's been a lot of work with an EMC. David Goulden's team has been really working hard and it's been a lot of great feedback. So I got to ask you, what are they excited about? What do you guys see for synergies with Dell? Because Dell's got a lot of stuff in their arsenal too, but now you bring in Extreme I.O. It's like a powertrain for them. It's a really interesting combination. Share some internal color if you can. Oh, so first we are super excited as well. We think the Dell deal is a tremendous opportunity for us. First and foremost, we get tens of thousands of salespeople that will go and sell Extreme I.O., right? Obviously, Dell is very strong in the supply change, which you mentioned cost, right? So that provides additional opportunity to cost reduction and bring some more cost benefits to customers. And Dell has technology and great technology. Doesn't have a product that is equivalent to Extreme I.O. And that's part of the excitement. They would like, tens of thousands of people would like to go sell Extreme I.O. as well. You're popular, much more other people. Now EMC had you, now it's a bigger pie. That's the plan, yeah. Okay, any features that you can share on the roadmap with the Dell, come on, give us a little bit of, come on, share something. A morsel of data. I can certainly ask you to stay tuned and hopefully we'll meet very soon. Come on, we're all friends. Come on, slide on the internet. Hopefully in a few months we'll meet again. How about the, I mean, we talk about the lab and what people take away from it, you know, thousands of users, what do you take away from it? What do you learn out of that grand experiment that's going on here next door that you can put into business practice? Yeah, so what we did take is that we've seen this use case and we've seen how important it is to tie it to the end user. And that's part of the announcement that we made, how we are pushing more and more, not only the underlying platform technology, but also all the integration point. We have integration with Oracle, with SQL Server, with VMware, obviously. So we are pushing all the integration to the end user to give the end user the power to provision, the power to have more copies, the power to be more productive because it gives value to customers. Do you find an aha moment in there though? Is there a time where somebody does something that it does surprise you or you find out there's a new capability or maybe a different capability that you weren't aware of before? I... No surprises? We are always surprised to see how customers are using our products. They certainly do things that, you know, you couldn't think about all of the things the customers will do with the product, but we are seeing, we are learning from our customers what they can do and what the technology can do for them. It's the first time for them, it's a groundbreaking product. It's, you know, so you got to see it evolve, right? I mean, let it bake out like in the oven. All those copy management and how customers are using and the number of copies they are using is something that we've seen. We are seeing customers using it more and more and we are learning from our customers and trying to, you know, my take is that in order to make our product better, you see how your customer are using, you see what they need, try to address their need. It's the best way to make the product better. Before we let you go, final chance to answer John's question from before. Anything you want to share with us? You didn't answer? Well, you did, but it was not a short and sweet. Rami, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time and a lot of fun there next door. Thank you. Thank you. theCUBE coverage continues here from VMworld from Mandalay Bay, right after this.