 Hi everybody, we're back. It's day three here at Dell Storage Forum. We're in Boston and we're live. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.tv's production of Dell Storage Forum 12. And I'm here with my co-host, Stu Miniman. I'm Dave Vellante at Wikibon.org. This is day three for us. This is the second year we've done the Dell Storage Forum and we've been witnessing the transformation of Dell from essentially a box maker into a company that owns its own intellectual property. It has put a major emphasis on storage and data center and including servers and storage and networking. We've heard from all three of those groups today or this week and we'll hear more from customers and other experts today. Some news, Stu, on Dell. Dell announced this morning in a conference call that Michael Dell had with analysts, Wall Street analysts, that the company's going to pay a dividend. And stock's actually up pre-market on that news. We've got the open now, so I don't know what the current price is, but it was up earlier this morning. And so Michael Dell told the analysts that they're going to increasingly, first thing he said is we're going to cut $2 billion of costs over the next three years and we're going to focus increasingly, he said, on the data center. With a particular emphasis on gear, hardware, storage, networking, and servers and a secondary focus on software and services. And as I say, they also announced a dividend of 32 cents a share and the closing price yesterday was just under 12 bucks. Yeah, Dave, it's interesting. At breakfast this morning I was talking to a Dell customer and a Dell partner and they were disappointed with Wall Street. They said Dell's really kind of turned themselves around. They're more profitable. They're growing and we were talking about the dividend and said, when are they going to get a little bump on that? So, you know, if they've got good growth potential, as you've pointed out, all these products that they're adding in the data center have better margins than they had in the PC and server era. Yeah, so the stock's up almost 4% today on that news. You know, Dell's obviously an interesting company. You know, a lot of Wall Street, I think Wall Street analysts don't understand the company. Frankly, they see Dell as a box seller with an aim on the box. And while that is true for much of the company's business, I'd say a couple of things. One is Dell always differentiated with the supply chain and its distribution channel. It's an ability to have a customer experience that differentiated it from the competition. Now, of course, I understand why the street is paying less attention to that in the post PC era, but Dell is transforming into a company that owns a lot of its own IP. Stu, the company's a $60 billion company and its valuation is around, just hovers over $20 billion. And it's got $14 billion of cash in the bank. So in theory, Dell could buy back the remaining shares outstanding and essentially own the entire company. So it's got, you know, I think a lot of upside from that standpoint, the stock, you know, if they do aggressive buybacks, the stock could go up, I mean, I'd say $14 billion in cash, you know, net out the cash, they're talking about $6 billion in value for a $60 billion company. You know, personally, I think that's undervalued to the extent that Dell can continue its transformation. So Dave, the other thing, we had Carter George's keynote this morning and we've kicked off our broadcast on day one with Carter. And what he talked to us about is Dell really creating that storage personality. So really an interesting way as to how Dell does acquisitions. They don't just acquire them and try to grow them, but they're putting together those building blocks, understanding those software components that weave together the entire solution. And really, you know, Dell's got a compelling message. They're hitting all the notes that we expect. They've got, you know, a flash message that they went into a little bit of depth on. You know, obviously on the server side, Dell's been doing flash for a number of years, but from the storage side, starting to see that bridge to the server and the storage together, what they're calling project termies. And the new term they came up to was their NVM, their nonvolatile memory, where they can create a shared global coherent cash between the servers. And this is based off of the RNA networks acquisition that they made just a year ago. And if you look at it, Carter said, you can even take a single server and you could just full that up with flash and that could be really an appliance then that could serve up flash, you know, at the server to a number of other servers. So what's happening here is we're seeing a total evolution of the IO hierarchy and IO design. 20 years ago, all the action was at the server. And really the server vendors were largely in control. The server was the single point of control. Function over the last 20 years has migrated away from the host to the other side of the channel out to the disk array. Why? For practical reasons of being able to share data, being able to protect data, things like snapshots, things like replication and other capabilities that we've seen go out to the array and then the array became the single point of control for all those functions. And there's of course a lot of processing power in the array as you well know, Stu. And so now we're seeing with the advent of flash and the difference is that flash is a persistent media, right? I mean, you've got to have a persistent media and that media has been spinning disk for, you know, 50 years. Now we have this advent of flash driven by the consumer electronics trend, really driven by Apple's choice to use flash in its iPods and then of course all its other consumer devices has really driven the cost of flash down. So the enterprise has done some very sort of unnatural acts to make flash enterprise ready and what that's done is it's allowed the price gap between memory, you know, non-volatile memory if you will, and spinning disk to compress. And now we're seeing a migration of function back to the other side of the channel and we're seeing that hierarchy of flash really get granular. It started with enterprise flash drives stuffed into arrays but of course the array controller became the bottleneck and so they've seen people put PCIe cards, you know, directly on the server, you're seeing Fusion IO do things like atomic rights directly to its product and then EMC comes out with VF cash. Now Dell has an opportunity according to Nick Allen yesterday to leapfrog that whole vision of what EMC put forth as VF cash. So Stu the interesting thing to me is you're seeing the whales not wait. They're all jumping in, I say all, well particular now we've seen EMC make moves. We certainly heard IBM last week talk about its Bluehawk which is a thunder like product and now Dell using its RNA virtualized memory technology combined with flash to really put forth the vision of a shared global cash coherent capability that it wants to integrate across all of its products. Yeah, Dave, absolutely. And another area we've seen a strong focus on and talked about the keynote, Appassure CTO came on and talked about how they're really able to use the snapshotting technology to have both a crash and application consistency and that's going to extend to the flash cash. So whether you have the storage in the server or whether you have it down in the storage array they're going to have that application awareness and be able to recover. As they kind of joked and they said that the joke's always been backup's easy, recovery's hard. Now Dell's looking to make recovery simple. Well, as my friend Fred Moore would say backup is one thing, recovery is everything. All right, so we're seeing Dell really try to push the integration. Integration is non-trivial, Stu, as you know. Used to work at EMC and I always felt that in watching EMC integration sometimes got put on the back burner in favor of execution of the individual portfolio products you're seeing a totally different message from Dell where integration is front and center. At the same time, again, it's not trivial to do that integration, it takes a long time. We heard yesterday that it's going to take another year for Dell to get block-based compression from Ocarina into the ecologic and compelling arrays. I took IBM two years to do that with store-wise so it clearly is not a trivial exercise, but so we're going to be talking about all this stuff today. We got another full day. Keep it right there, we have Randy Kearns coming up next. Randy is a senior strategist at the Evaluator Group. The Evaluator Group, for those of you who don't know, is a Colorado-based consultancy. They do a lot of both technical research and business research, one of the sharpest consultancies around Randy is a real expert in storage, been around the business for a long time. We're going to get his perspective, so keep it right there. We'll be right back, live. This is theCUBE from Dell Storage Forum in Boston. Keep it right there.