 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Dell EMC World. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Paul Gillan. We are joined by David Noy. He is the Vice President of Product Management at Dell EMC. Thanks so much for joining us, David. Thank you, it's lovely to be here. So I want to talk about the new generation of platform, the Isilon, new platform. Tell us about the launch, tell us about the new family. Next generation, Isilon, sure. So we're very excited about it. Last year at EMC World, we gave a sneak peek of a product we called Nitro, which is an all flash version of the Isilon node. We didn't tell people as actually the architecture that went into that Nitro node was actually the architecture we were gonna re-architect the entire products that went all the way from our deepest and kind of least expensive archive nodes to all of the nodes in between. They were completely gonna be revamped with this new architecture. We're very excited about it and we've been talking to customers and they love it. So what was the impetus behind it? What was the problem you were trying to solve? Yeah, I think there was, look at me down to five things. Like number one, we were a very vertically oriented, industry oriented product company. We worked with customers in real entertainment, in life sciences, in healthcare, who were just driving enormous performance requirements out of the product. And so we had to go build a flash product to meet those new performance requirements. And we had to also look at the other side of it, which is these customers are gathering so much data through these high performance workloads, they need a place to keep it. And they don't want to use 10, 12, 13, 14 racks to store all this data we have to keep sometimes for seven years for regulatory purposes or even for 30 years of lifetime of a patient. So getting the data as compact as possible and storing it as economically as possible with this minimal footprint in the data center was absolutely critical. So it's all around performance and then density and cost. But then we went a little bit further. We said, well, in order to do that, our current platforms just may not stretch that far. So we re-architected them to make them smaller, units of storage. When you make them smaller, there are some things that you get out of that. We could drive more nodes. So scalability became a requirement for us because we wanted to get bigger and bigger and bigger. So we had to drive more and more scale capabilities into the product. And then we said, well, geez, if we're in the process of actually re-architecting it, why don't we look at things that potentially have high fail rates? So things that would create potential service requirements, serviceability requirements in the field, let's take those out of the product. And so we made the product more reliable by taking out components that we knew would have a high fail rate. And then the last thing is, well, if you're going to do that, you still have to occasionally service the product. So we wanted to make it as easy as possible to go and pull and push components or potentially upgrade them. And so all of this resulted in a product that's faster on one side, less expensive and more dense on the other side, provided a scale which is multiples of what we ever provided in the past. And then by the way, much more available, much more highly available, much more resilient and easy to service. So it's a win-win across the board for our customers. Yeah, it sounds so easy. It took all of it, but yes. No, I'm being facetious. You do claim that the new Iceland delivers 18 times the throughput, nine times the IOPS performance. Well, I mean, what's the magic there? Can you geek out a little bit? How are you achieving these leaps in performance? I mean, there's a couple of things that we did. First of all, is if you look at our traditional nodes, they usually have two CPUs and a 4U enclosure. By going to these smaller units, we're actually able to put more CPUs because each of these units have their own CPU and motherboard complex behind it, a set of drives. So now you have four CPUs and a 4U driving less number of drives. So your CPU to spindle ratio or your CPU to drive ratio is dramatically increased. On top of that, we've adopted flash technology. So that's the 18 times performance that you see. So in using flash technology, you can get the benefits of all flash performance, which were very relevant in the block world, but now are relevant in the file world as well. As I said, many of our customers are pushing the limits of media production or genomic sequencing, these things or chip design. These things all have a time to result requirement that's getting even more and more stringent. And so by moving to flash media, we can take advantage of the performance of that media type. What is the mix of flash versus traditional media now? In terms of the orders that are coming in from customers, are they still buying a lot of hard disk? Well, customers will continue to buy hard disk for some time. You know, between some of the more high performance spinning disk and flash, the price points are where they kind of look at it and you're like, well, I could buy half of one versus twice as much of the other and it costs me about the same and I get best performance, so I might as well go flash and get a better, more compact footprint. But when you start to look at what people do with their data, it's not always about just the high performance side. After I've taken all that data in and done something with it, I usually have to keep it. It's pretty hard to delete, so you got to keep this stuff around for a really long time, as it turns out, when you get to the archive phase of data's lifecycle, the spinning disk prices are just unbeatable from an economics perspective, regardless of whether you're considering the density, how much space they take or power consumption, they're just really, really inexpensive. So the density of hard disk continues to improve. The performance actually maxed out a long time ago, right? That's right. But the density continues to improve at Moore's Law type of pace? Not quite in Moore's Law, but fast enough that it's actually still worthwhile and the prices have come down pretty quickly as well. So, yes. Do you see flash crossing over? I mean, the flash has come down so quickly over the last two years. Does flash pricing eventually cross over hard disk pricing or will they continue to sort of march down? On the high end, it'll probably cross over and get pretty close and close enough to where it's almost negligible. On the low end now we're looking at something like a 30 to 40 times multiplier between a capacity and a really dense drive with some of the more unique technologies like shingle magnetic resonance media that can provide really, really dense storage. But the performance isn't really there, but it's great for an archive play where you write it, set it, forget it, don't come back for a really long time. You don't want to put it on tape because once it's on tape, retrieving it and actually using that data for something could take a long time. People want instantaneous access to their data when they need it, but they may not need it that often. I want to talk about how a company like Dell EMC stays innovative. How closely are you working with customers to understand the challenges that they're facing and understand their workflow processes and what they need to get done? The great thing about Isilon is it was kind of born in the world of media entertainment by a specific problem which was how do I stream video just as fast as possible? And we expanded into other verticals and as we expanded into verticals, we hire subject matter experts who really know that the problem sets and the software vendors and the workloads in those verticals, whether it's genomic sequencing or chip design manufacturing, financial services or even healthcare, MRI, PAX images, things like nature. And so we work very closely with those customers and they're constantly asking us for, hey, I need a solution which is going to stream 4K video. Oh, by the way, we're filming an 8K video. Oh no, now we're filming in 12K video because someday in the future, the fears will support that and then we downresit to 4K. In life sciences, for example, we now have with our flash solution what used to take on the order of six hours to sequence a genome, get it down to like 20 minutes, which in a hospital environment, life and death situation, that's significant. David Noy, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight for Paul Gillan. We will have more from Dell EMC World after this.