 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital experience. I'm Lisa Martin joined by a couple of guides from Dell Technology. Please welcome Martin Glenn, the Senior Director for Product Management for PowerMax. Martin, good morning. Good morning. Nice to see you. And joining Martin is Matthew Paul, the Senior Director of Product Management for PowerFlex at Dell Technologies. Matthew, nice to see you. Nice to see you. Thanks for having us, Lisa. So our virtual CUBE this year can't be with you guys in person or the 14,000 other folks that usually attend at Dell Technologies World, but a lot of opportunities to engage customers and partners and press and analysts digitally, which is great. So, Mark, Matthew, let's go ahead and start with you. Talk to us about what's new with PowerFlex. This was the end of the rebrand under the power portfolio that Dell Technologies undertook the last couple of years, formerly VX Flex, excuse me, from ScaleIO. What's new with PowerFlex? Yeah, that's a spot on. So really the idea of us aligning the full power portfolio is kind of a big deal, right? Part of the winning roadmap to.o kind of assigned to our customers and our field and everyone, that software-defined storage is a critical part of the Dell Technologies strategy. If you think about PowerFlex just to kind of level set, it's really a software-defined infrastructure kind of system that brings you the best of traditional three-tier infrastructure and the best of HCI infrastructure while being able to make that experience really simple in the enterprise, why still delivering essentially our really great performance in scale. In terms of new things, well, just real quick, in terms of kind of new things, we brought interesting topics like native Async replication, secure snapshots, some end-to-end lifecycle management pieces. So a lot of great innovation in the last year. And that was some of the recent announcements. Tell me, Matthew, from a customer perspective, since you announced Async or Disapplication snapshots, what's the customer adoption customer feedback been like? Yeah, it's been fantastic. We continue to grow this market really strong. We're focusing on high-end, large enterprise customers working towards bringing down also into kind of enterprise and commercial customers to make things easier to use. But very strong adoption and great investments here at Dell with this product. All right, so PowerFlex, Martin, let's go to you. PowerMax, talk to us about PowerMax and then also how it kind of fits into the whole Power portfolio. Sure, yeah. So thanks, Lisa. The PowerMax products, I think was the first product other than of course the server products to be powered up in the storage portfolio. PowerMax is the sort of flagship storage array product that we've had now for a few decades, really been a leader in mission critical data centers. But I think the pace of innovation over the last year, just like Matt described in the PowerFlex side has been really phenomenal. We just about a year ago, we came out with storage class memory. We did fiber channel, MDME over fiber channel. And more recently, we brought in a few really interesting new technologies like support for replication with V-Vault, cloud mobility and now end-to-end efficient encryption. So the set of things we're enabling our customers to do with their sort of traditional three tier sand infrastructure is really just unmatched. So Martin, talk to me about the last six, seven months. Where are these enterprise customers in terms of leveraging PowerMax, for example, when everything just changed dramatically almost overnight, enterprises in any, every industry had to had suddenly remote workforce. How did PowerMax help your customers pivot and ensure that their digital transformation could support this business surviving? Yeah, well, like everybody, we were a little worried at the outset, you know, a lot of uncertainty about how things would play out. And the response from our customers has been amazing. They've all sort of really doubled down on using our technology to support their businesses through this new model. So, you know, the business has been really amazing, really incredible. And it's been great to partner with our customers to help them continue to deliver the services they need, you know, in this new model. So that part's been really wonderful. And as we work really closely with them, some of the things we just came out with, you know, they've helped us to design and deliver in a way that they can best take advantage of. So, you know, for example, the new cloud mobility functionality, you know, that's letting them take information directly off of, you know, their mission critical sort of bedrock, sand infrastructure and push it up to an object store in a, like, be a local private object store or it could be a public object store like AWS. And so that's, you know, that's enabling them to take advantage of some new models and a new approach to doing things. And I think ultimately that's gonna help them work through this new normal we're all participating in. Yeah, we wanna help those businesses not just survive this time, but be able to thrive, especially as we don't know how much of this remote scattered workforce is gonna remain. We're hearing estimates from some of the big technology leaders at all, 50% of the workforce is going to remain at home. So really helping organizations to maneuver and navigate these challenging landscapes is a big priority. I know for Dell Technologies, we talked about that with some other guests. Matthew, over you talk to me about PowerFlex from a workloads perspective. So we can get a good idea for the workloads that it's really ideally best suited for. Yeah, I think wanted to just take a quick second on the COVID piece, because we have a couple of really big customers that we had to enable really quickly for curbside checkout. And, you know, they were trying to run things. They were putting it on their existing infrastructure, their existing systems, and it just wasn't fast enough. It wasn't keeping up. And by working closely with the customer and designing a system with PowerFlex as the core allowed us to enable them really quickly to turn from a customer who didn't have this idea of curbside checkout to enabling curbside checkout. So I think working and partnering closely with our customers is a critical part of how Dell Tech is successful and enabling them to kind of work through these tough times. With workloads, yeah, oh, go ahead, sorry. That's okay, go ahead. I was gonna say with workloads in general, the way that we have to think about them with enterprise quality or enterprise requirements is really in kind of a scheme of looking at performance, understanding scalability, ensuring we have enterprise class availability. And then last but definitely not least is like how we manage that and how we make it easier for customers to work through those. And when I think about Flex, there's two or three key areas that we try to go after. If one of the key differentiation pieces around Flex is the fact that we can deploy it in multiple manners. So you can deploy it in an HCI mode where you have the compute and networking together or you can deploy it in a disaggregated mode where you have compute and networking, I mean, compute and storage separate. And if those are separate, that allows you to scale those independently work really, really well for key database workloads, key workloads like, let's say even like HANA where you maybe have really high compute but little less storage requirements. So it really allows customers to dial up and down what makes the most sense for them, right? The other angle that we're seeing pretty big adoption is around this idea of re-platform or realigning a data center with transformation with software-defined scale-outblock storage. So think about deploying PowerFlex in an environment and then being able to use that in a virtual environment in a physical environment, in a container environment, being able to have your traditional applications like SQL or Oracle, ride along really cool new applications like Elastic Stack or MongoDB or other things because of the way that we design our layout, it's really aligned towards being able to re-platform and align in a software-defined infrastructure. So customers are using to kind of align those pieces meaning platforms, re-platforming and then also aligning specific applications that require high performance. I heard a lot in that and one word that pops up is, no, that's good. It's not silly. No, I can tell you're passionate about it and also the customer influence is absolutely critical. I think this is a time you mentioned the curbside check-in and then I was reading a few months ago about some of the huge brands that were filing for Chapter 11 and companies like big retailers that simply couldn't pivot, couldn't digitally transform to even offer curbside check-in. So that factor alone since as consumers are so demanding was table stakes a few months ago. It still is, but getting an organization able to pivot so quickly is key. Martin, let's go over to you, PowerMax workloads. Talk to me about some differentiators as well. Yeah, actually, if I could, I'll start, I know it's sort of some similar examples that Matt laid out there. Just like we have customers who chose PowerFlex, where environments that made sense for them, we had customers who chose PowerMax to meet similar new demands with the whole pandemic. So we had some really big customers just said, okay, now we have a sort of line of sites and across both products, I think the thing that our customers value most is the quality of the experience, the performance of the experience, some of the things Matt mentioned already, but they really pulled forward, huge numbers of systems and business to be able to support where they saw things going. So that was really great to partner with them on that and be ready to help support them and provide a product that they felt really good about making such huge investments. And it was great to see their trust in us and be able to deliver for them. So that was, I think, a big part of the first half of the year, the sort of new workloads and new use cases for us on the PowerMax side really revolve around giving our customers new capabilities that can deliver new services for their end users. So one of those is our new support for B-Balls remote application. And this really lets us tie together the way that the infrastructure is managed at the VMware level much more closely to the way that the storage infrastructure is managed. And the result is that our customers can do more granular operations for their end users. They can simplify the whole process and now they can do it on top of our remote application solution, which going on 20 plus years now has really been sort of the gold standard in which they've come to rely on so much. So that's really exciting to be able to offer that to them now to have it be part of the whole VMware stack that they're deploying and let them use new things like B-Balls works with our VMware site recovery manager to let them automate the testing of failovers and the actual failovers. So there's an interesting example of how I think our customers are gonna take advantage of some of these new technologies as we go forward. You mentioned giving customers the ability with the right infrastructure to offer new services and that's another critical component as we've seen in 2020 is businesses needing to pivot continuously and come up with new creative ideas, products and services and new ways of delivering those to their existing customers, holding onto them and hopefully growing their customer base and that ability to leverage technology to deliver new services is also one of the key kind of foundations that will allow businesses to be the winners of tomorrow. Matthew, to you talk to me when you're in customer situations, customers have choice, we know this, dig into me, give me the top three differentiators when you're talking to customers why Power Flux is the ideal solution for them. That's a great question, I'm glad you asked. So I think as part of being a product guy, it's really cool when the intellectual property within your product is software that your company owns and hardware your company owns. So we're able to do some really cool stuff together to deliver innovative solutions for our customers. But when I think about my product, I think first and foremost around performance and scale. Several million IOPS at sub millisecond response time and anytime someone wants more performance, they just add another server, right? So this idea that we scale linearly is a key differentiator for the product. A second key differentiator is this idea that I talked a little bit about before that you can kind of multi-platform this. So when you roll this out, you can deploy it and use it with virtual environments, whether it's VMware or Hyper-V or other virtual environments, you can have bare metal deployment. So if you wanna run this with Linux and use software-defined storage in the bare metal, we can support that. Or we can go directly to containers. So you can use containers, bare metal or virtual. And so this idea of choice is a huge differentiator. And then the last one is anchored around this idea that when you scale and you get the benefit of management, you don't have to scale everything at the same time. So in traditional software-defined infrastructure on the HCI side, you have to scale compute and storage together. So every time you add a node, you add compute power and storage power. With PowerFlex, we've been able to effectively split those two pieces off so a customer can actually only scale what they need. And in fact, if they only wanna buy storage side of the solution, you can just buy storage side of the solution and then you can have existing infrastructure connect to that and it behaves just like a traditional three-tier model. So those are, I think, are the key things that I think differentiate the product and kind of make it special here at Dell and for our customers. Matthew's taking with you. Are there any, I think of things like compliance and healthcare and financial services, especially right now, what are some of the key benefits that PowerFlex delivers, say for some of those essential industries right now? Yeah, I think it's interesting because those are two of our largest space and financial is probably our largest space. And really for them, it comes down to you talked about compliance, you talk about scale, and then you talk about management. So we've had some really interesting requirements because of scale so large. For example, in our last release, we're able to start to do rack level firmware and software updates. So when you look at other solutions, they might be doing system out of time, doing updates, taking them offline and then running those around. But in our scenario, since we kind of own the SDS layer and the compute side, we can actually do updates for an entire rack in one shot, dramatically reducing the complexity, dramatically reducing the amount of time that it takes to do updates. So that's a real big deal in financial space. And then in terms of healthcare, for example, we're the only software defined solution product that can run all of Epic Healthcare, all pieces of Epic within our product. All other products run out of bandwidth, run out of performance. So they end up not being able to run all sides of the requirement, whether it's the database backend or the VDI front end, we're the only one on the market that can do all of that. Seems to really be a big differentiator in healthcare as a lot of organizations run on Epic or try to help with patient care and care delivery. Martin, last question for you. Give me a snapshot of the partners perspective. Over the last couple of years with the rebrand under Dell Technologies with the Power Portfolio, how have your partners embraced this simplification? So I think that overall this gave them clearer understanding of where and what to sell and what made sense for PowerMax in particular. I think let them anchor on the flagship product, the legendary performance and reliability of that platform and gave them an easy way to think about where to position that with our end customers and in what ways that the product would benefit their customers the most. So as Matt described on the PowerFlex slide, it starts with our performance and reliability and then ultimately enabling them to do whatever they need to do. So across all the different data services and we got to talk right about some of the new ones, but we also have a lot that we've refined over the years and making it sort of official and sort of the PowerMax envelope but everyone really just sort of simplify how they would consume it all. So I think maybe one other thing worth mentioning in all these new use cases and environments and all the different applications that our customers are trying to operate and deliver on is security. So we developed a new capability that we call end-to-end efficient encryption. And this really lets customers do encryption all the way from the host through to the storage. And I think ultimately that's gonna help them sleep better at night and also help them avoid some of the things that we've seen crop up now, now that the world is so digital and all the different threats that our customers face. So we're keeping our finger on the pulse of a lot of different needs, whether it's flexibility, performance, reliability and all these new technologies as well to make sure that we set our customers up to be as successful as possible. It's exactly what they want to be successful. Martin, Matthew, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE, sharing the updates for PowerMax, PowerFlex, the differentiators, we appreciate your time. Thank you, Lisa. Yeah, thank you, Lisa, this was fun. All right, from my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE's coverage on Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital experience.