 Okay, we're back, this is The Cube, SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage of Dell Storage Forum 12. We're in Boston. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We're here with Travis Vigil, who is the Executive Director of Dell Equalogic. Travis, welcome. Thank you. How are you doing? Good, thank you. So, the Dell Storage Forum's second year looks bigger and better, even. Yeah. And of course, it's in Boston. That's a good thing. So, it's our second combined Dell Storage Forum. And so, when I say combined, that's a combination of compelence to ecologic user conference in Dallas for customers, and it's just amazing to see what's going on here. Well, it's fantastic that, again, you chose Boston. We love the venue, and it looks like a good crowd. We were there this morning listening to the presentations to the channel partners. And that's always been your guys' home court, right? Right. So, what's your update on what's going on in Equalogic? Well, things are good in Equalogic. You know, Equalogic has been part of the Dell family for about four and a half years now. And in that timeframe, we've grown the number of Equalogic customers that we have from 4,000 to over 40,000 customers. We've continued to invest in Equalogic as a key part of Dell Storage. And, you know, Carter was just up here talking about the fluid data architecture. It's a key part of the fluid data architecture as well. We have really continued to keep Equalogic industry leading in terms of application integration. We have integration with VMware that's second to none in the industry. We have integration with a lot of the key Microsoft applications, SQL, Exchange. We added integration to Linux. And, you know, it's really continued a story with our customers. You know, give me a product with enterprise class features, but make it so that a mere IT generalist can manage it. You know, I want all the features, but I have a lean IT staff, I don't have a lot of time to manage it, and so I just want it to work. And that's why we've focused on providing integration and ease of use with those applications that the majority of our customers are using with their Equalogic environments. So Travis, you talked about the VMware integration. I'm wondering if we can dig in a little deep on that. So I started working with VMware over 10 years ago, and Dell from the server side was one of VMware's biggest partners. From the storage side, as we've seen the acquisitions of Equalogic and Compellent come in, we've seen deeper integration and, you know, you're claiming second to none integration. Can you talk a little bit about that partnership and how closely you're working with VMware? Absolutely. The focus on integration for the Equalogic product line, it started even pre-acquisition. And since the acquisition, we've really doubled down on those efforts. And it started with vCenter integration in terms of management capabilities. We've done application consistency with VMware. We have support for site recovery, the site recovery manager solution. We have done some ease of use tools for VDI deployment. So we have a tool we call the Virtual Depth Top Deployment Utility. That helps speed deployment for VDI deployments using VMware. And we have been there with all of their major storage initiatives, VAI. We were one of the first partners to have support for VAI. VASA, we have support for VASA. And, you know, there's some exciting new things that are coming in the future that we're just starting to talk about. One of the new initiatives is VVALS, that's sort of the next generation of VAI, and we're working closely with them on developing that as well. Yeah, so the whole VMware storage ecosystem has really evolved. Yeah, absolutely. You know, three or four years ago, it was kind of a mess. I mean, it was really a difficult thing for customers to really deal with storage. I mean, it just was sort of like pushing the problem out. How has that changed? And, you know, what's the future hold? You mentioned VVALT. You know, what can we expect now going forward? Well, I... Wow. Sorry about that. No problem. We're expecting a big answer. Well, you know, I think that a big part of our success with Equalogic has been that focus on virtualized environments in VMware in particular. We have probably about 75, 80% of our customers that are running Equalogic in some sort of virtualized environment. And, you know, they're really looking for storage that is easy to manage and just works with their virtualized environment. And you're right. You know, when you started seeing this huge inflection point of people on the server side moving to a virtualized environment, they wanted to go to shared storage so they could get some of the benefits that shared storage provides in a virtualized environment, like the ability to do V motion and some of the more advanced capabilities in a virtualized environment. They were looking for storage that was easy to use. And it was interesting because, you know, this was the first time a lot of these applications, the applications that were initially being virtualized were put on a SAM. And so it was really kind of a jump ball. It wasn't clear that you had to go on, you know, your traditional data set or SAM to deploy shared storage for a virtualized environment. So what we saw was a lot of projects being deployed, utilizing Equalogic as the back end for a virtualized environment. And really it's a big part of the success that we've had because of that intense focus on making sure that we're integrated and optimized in a very easy to use solution in a virtualized environment, VMware and Hyper-V. You mentioned Travis VDI before. Yes. So what's going on with VDI? I mean, you know, for a couple of years ago and even in recent history, it was kind of a nichey offering, right? It was very specialized on whether it was call centers or maybe certain financial applications, maybe, you know, government. We had to have highly secure. Is that changing from customers? Yeah, VDI is a very interesting application. You know, I personally think we're sort of on the, you know, at the precipice of the big adoption of VDI in the industry. And, you know, sort of like virtualization in the beginning, one of the issues that people have had with virtualized desktop deployments has been the storage. So we hear from our customers and our channel partners that, hey, I want to do VDI and the way I do it is I get a server, it has some DAZ in it. I do a proof of concept for 50 desktops, 100 desktops. It works fabulously. But then I try to scale it out and, you know, and I run into performance issues. I run into scaling issues, so on and so forth. And that issue to me is a perfect issue that can be solved by or an issue that can be addressed by scale-out architectures. Now, Carter was up here talking about scale-out architectures being one of the key tenets of the fluid data architecture. What a scale-out architecture like Ecologic allows you to do is scale performance and capacity linearly. And so you can do that proof of concept with a small Ecologic device and as you scale it out, you're able to scale performance and capacity linearly and you don't run into that, you know, I call it the VDI hangover issue where, you know, it worked great when it was small, but when I scaled it, I have all these manageability and performance issues. And it's been a big focus for us on the Ecologic side for some time. I talked about the virtual desktop deployment utility that we have as part of our host integration tools for VMware. Also, we've launched and refreshed what we refer to as a hybrid array. And the hybrid array is an Ecologic array that has both SSD and spinning media in the same array. But most importantly, it has the intelligence in the array to make sure that the hot bits of data end up on the SSD. The cooler bits of data end up on the spinning media. So you can think of it as, you know, kind of tiering with an array. You know, obviously, compelling second to none in tiering in the industry. This is a very targeted offering for like a VDI deployment. And what we've seen is customers are able to get very big performance boosts because of using SSD in combination with spinning media. They're able to address a lot of the issues they've had around boot storms, a lot of the issues that they've had around scaling VDI deployments, you know, starting small and growing. And so, you know, with the hybrid array, with the ease of use, with the scale out architecture that we have on Ecologic, you know, we believe that we have an excellent solution that addresses many of the storage problems people have had with VDI traditionally. Yeah, Travis, you know, I've actually been quite impressed with Ecologic's VDI story. Back in 2010, you guys brought us Brown Shoe as a customer that had, you know, thousands of desktops that were transformed at VMworld. And they were using the hybrid array. Using the hybrid array. So, you know, when I've looked at VDI, there are kind of three things that kind of hold people back. One is they don't do a proper assessment going in and they run into that overruns and costs and they're not prepared. Sizing their users, you know, don't have the performance that they expect. Secondly, going from that pilot, as you said, to the production is usually different. A lot of people say, this is my test environment. When I go to production, it's different. And then I run into that gap. But your scale at architecture fits. And the third one I'm wondering if you can address quickly for us is, you know, who manages this? So, like we talked about from kind of traditional storage to virtualized storage, there's some of the blurring of the lines. The desktop deployments are usually, you know, owned by, you know, there's a desktop group or there's a storage group and who owns it? How do you guys see that fitting into the environment? Yeah, so, you know, I think with virtualization, what you saw was that the virtualization team ended up owning both the servers and the storage for virtualization deployments. I think, you know, it's still a bit of a known on VDI, but, you know, my guess is, and what we're seeing more and more of is, again, the virtualization team is owning the entire enterprise portion of the deployment. You know, we talked about VDI, we didn't talk much about the endpoint. Talked a lot about the, you know, the backend infrastructure because that's where people have been having the issues in terms of sizing, assessment, and scaling. And so, you know, specifically to your question, you know, I believe it's going to be the virtualization team that ends up owning that. You know, I think, you know, that's a good thing for Dell Storage given our tight integration with virtualization. The server virtualization team. That's right. Yeah, that's right. Despite the changes at the endpoint with mobility. Yes, yes, specifically to the backend. Yeah. Because the, you know, I think the ownership between the backend and the front end is yet to be determined, but certainly on the backend, the planning, the assessment, the delivery of that has got to be owned by the server virtualization team. And what in your, what's your sense of how the endpoint is changing the requirements? Because when you think of desktop virtualization, you think of a very, you know, update intensive environment, much different than a server virtualization environment. How is mobile changing that? You know, I think it all goes back to the sizing and the performance assessment up front. You know, what we're seeing, you know, VDI sizing and benchmarking is still pretty nascent, but we're seeing is that there's a couple of two or three different performance sizing profiles that are coming out, you know, kind of the task worker, the call center type worker, and moving forward, I think you're going to have to have a third one for the mobile worker as well. And so, you know, it's going to be, you know, one of those both and things, where you're going to have to look at your entire endpoint users and how, you know, amalgamate, you know, what type of users they have in there for an aggregate workload back into the, to the server and storage back end. Great, so Travis, I'm wondering if we can switch back to kind of the general Dell storage discussion. You know, so we know through the acquisitions of equal logic and compelling, Dell's put a lot of effort in still building out those engineering and developing. We heard in the keynote today, they said, you know, we don't want you to think so much of products and we want you to think it's Dell storage. So can you give us a little bit of the inside baseball as to what you've seen the last couple of years? Yeah, absolutely. You know, Carter came up, was here, and he was talking about, you know, how going forward with Dell storage is going to have an identity. And it's going to be less of an identity of equal logic or compelling or any of any of the companies that we've acquired. And you know, it's very important that there are some key capabilities that we have in these products like tiering on compelling or scale out on equal logic or ease of use on equal logic that will become part of the Dell storage portfolio identity. And so you're starting to see that blurring, you know, even with what we're doing with our file system offerings. We have a fluid file system support for equal logic. We have fluid file system support for Power Vault. And maybe if you stick around here, you might hear some more updates about fluid file system support on some other stuff. And so you're going to see that as a link across the portfolio, common and consistent file system, common and consistent deduplication, which Carter also talked about, as the foundation that starts to tie at least all of the primary storage offerings together and provides the foundation on which you can build, you know, cross-platform tiering. So that same tiering concept that you have on a compelling device, you can extend that across the portfolio even going all the way to our archival products like the DX product, for example. So you're starting to see that develop and that is absolutely where we're making the investments in R&D going forward to provide a Dell storage portfolio. I mean, I personally like the emphasis on integration. A lot of people give lip service to integration. My sense is Dell is really serious about it. I want my last question, I wish I had more time because I got some tweets here too, but to talk about the flash, so I can envision, you know, at least five layers of flash. You get the server flash, you all flash array, the hybrid, you get now just a pure bit bucket spinning and then you get an archive. You know, maybe there's some of those blend, but it seems to me that's a software challenge now. And you mentioned compelling and sort of the gold standard, if you will. You know, data movement, they invented the whole concept. I guess IBM mainframe has invented it, but Dell, I mean, a compelling product to the masses. In the context of that integration, that feels like a whole new challenge for you guys. Right, talk about that a little bit. Well, you're right. You're going to see flash at all places in the ecosystem, in the server, in the storage, you know, and it's going to serve different purposes of acceleration depending on where you put it, right? You know, we see a real big opportunity given that Dell is an end to end provider of server storage and networking to have flash in the server as sort of a tier zero capability. And, you know, we've done a lot of work on making the flash in the server more usable on the server side, but sort of the holy grail is, you know, how do you make it such that the flash in the server is a logical extension of, say, a compelling sand, right? And it has the same manageability and the same benefits of traditional external storage. And so, you know, I would expect that you will be hearing more about that, potentially here at this conference, and it's a very big focus for us going forward. You know, I said the last question, but I... Yeah, Travis, actually, if I can get a question in here too, we've been having some discussions on Twitter about the SMB market and was wondering if you can help us kind of tease apart how equal logic and like Power Vault, how Dell looks at the SMB market and where you kind of see that fitting. And if I may, so there's a tweet that I got that I wanted to respond to. It was from D. McVitty. He said, I'm an equal logic fanboy, but last time I checked, it's a little expensive for most SMBs. I wonder if you could respond to that as well. Yeah, so, you know, the interesting thing is we use sort of SMB as a generic customer segment. And what you see is within SMBs, you have people that are extremely small and are just looking for an easy way to add some external storage. And you see customers that have storage needs that a lot of large enterprises have. And M is really different than S a lot of times. Absolutely, absolutely. M is different than S. And so, you know, equal logic has never been the acquisition price leader. What we've been is the TCO leader, right? So we have all inclusive software capabilities. So all of the integration, all of the advanced features, you know, all of that comes if you're an equal logic customer on a valid support contract. And then the scaling capability, the ease of use in scaling, and the long-term investment protection you get from the scale out architecture are really our values. So, you know, the target customer for equal logic is, you know, I potentially have small external storage needs today, but I'm fast growing. And that manageability is the thing I need first and foremost, right? I probably don't have a storage department. I probably have an IT guy and it just needs to be easy to use, right? And so I'm willing to pay for those features and benefits because of the fact that I will save money in the long run in terms of manageability. Now, Power Vault on the other hand is, there's a lot of customers that just need cost-effective external storage. And, you know, those customers live in SMB. They live in our public segment, they live in LE. And so we actually sell the Power Vault product across, you know, all of those business units. So there's really very different uses for each of those products. Yeah, so if you're a super small company and storage is not strategic, you may be not growing, equal logic might not be for you. That's right. But if you've got some constraints on your business as a result of storage growth, then equal logic is probably a better fit. That's right, that's exactly right. Good. All right, Travis, well listen, thanks very much for taking time out of your busy schedule here at Dell Storage Forum for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. And welcome back anytime. All right, thank you very much. All right, keep it right there. This is theCUBE, SiliconANGLE.tv's continuous coverage of Dell Storage Forum. We'll be right back.