 Welcome everybody to this CUBE Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante, and we're joined today by Richard Goodwin, who's the group director of IT at UltraLeap and Abhishek Kumar, who manages Dell's PowerStore product line, who directs that product line along with several other lines for the company. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Hi Dave. Hi, that's me. So Richard, UltraLeap, very cool company. It tracks hand movements and so forth. Tell us about the company and the technology you're really interested in how it's used. Yeah, we have many product lines. Obviously we're very innovative and the organization was spun up from PhD, a number of PhD students, who are the co-founders for UltraLeap and initially with mid-air haptics, as many people may have seen, but also hand tracking, mid-air touch, sense and feel. So yeah, it's quite impressive what we have produced and the number of sectors and markets that we are in. And obviously to push us to where we are, we have relied upon lots of the Dell technology, both software and hardware. And what's your role at the company? I'm the group IT director and responsible for the IT and business platforms, all infrastructure, network, hardware, software, and also the transition of those platforms to ensure that we're scalable and we are able to develop our software and hardware as rapidly as possible. Awesome. Yeah, a lot of data behind that too, I bet. Okay, Abhishek, you direct a number of products at Dell across the portfolio, Unity, ExtremeIO, the SC series, and of course Power Vault. It's quite the portfolio that you look after. So let's get into the case study if we can a bit. Richard, maybe you could paint a picture of your environment, some of the key applications that you're supporting and maybe what your infrastructure looks like. Give us a high level view. Sure. So pre Power Store, we had quite a disparate architecture. So a fairly significant split and siding on the side of cloud, not as hybrid as we would like and not as much as on-premise we would have liked. And hey, that's changed quite significantly. So we now have a number of servers and storage and storage arrays that we have on-premise and then we host ourselves. So we are moving quite rapidly, as a startup and then moving to a scale-up, we needed that scalability and that versatility and also the whole OPEX versus CAPEX. And also not being driven by lots of SaaS products and our architecture and infrastructure where we needed to be in control because of our development cycles and our product development. So wait, okay, so too much cloud. You want a little bit of a dose of on-prem and explain that a little bit more. The cloud wasn't doing it for you in terms of your development cycle, your control. Can you double click on that? Yeah, some of the control and there's always a balance because there's certain elements of our development cycles and our software engineering where we need a very high parallelism for some of the work that we're doing, which then the CAPEX investment makes things very, very challenging and not commercially the right thing to do. However, there are some of our information, some of our IP, some of the secure things that we do. We also do not want upgrades as an example or any outages or certain types of server and spec that we need to be quite bespoke and unique and that needs to be within our control. Got it, okay, thank you for that. Abhishek, we're going to talk about PowerStore today. So set it up, please. Tell us about PowerStore, what it is, why it's important to this conversation. Sure, so PowerStore is a product that we launched May of 2020, roughly a little bit more than a year now. And it's a brand new architecture that Dell Technologies released. And at the end of the day, I'll talk about a few unique aspects of the product, but at the end of the day where we start with, it's a storage platform, right? So where we see similar to what Richard is saying here in terms of being able to consolidate the customer's environment, whether it is blog, file, V-walls, physical, virtual environments. And it's, as I said, it's a brand new architecture where we leverage pieces of existing products where it made sense. And we are using all the latest and greatest technologies, delivering the best performance, based data reduction. And where we see a lot of traction is the options that it brings to the table for our customers in terms of flexibility, whether they want to add capacity, compute, whether, in fact, we have apps on deployment model where customers can consolidate their compute as well on the storage platform if needed. So a lot of innovation from a platform perspective itself. And it's not just about the platform itself, but what comes along with it, right? So we referred it as an ecosystem part of it, where we work with Ansible Playbook, CSI plug-in, you name it, right? And it's the storage platform by itself doesn't stand by itself. In a customer's environment, there are other aspects of the infrastructure that it needs to integrate with as well, right? So if they're using Ansible Playbooks, we want to make sure the integration is there. Got it. And last, perhaps not the least is the intelligence built into the platform, right? So as we are building these capabilities into the product, there is intelligence built into the product as well as outside the product where things like Cloud IQ, things like technologies built into PowerStore itself makes it that much easier for the customers to manage the infrastructure and go from there. Thank you for that. So Richard, what was the workload? So actually you started with the sort of a green field on-prem, if I understand it correctly, what was the workload that you were sort of building around or workloads? Sorry, we had a number of different applications, some of which we cannot really talk about too much. And then we engaged them regarding the storage issue that we had and we engaged our account leading, AccountingZec, and a number of solution architects were working with us to ensure that we had the optimal solution. Dell were selected over the competitors because of many reasons. The new technology, the de-duplication, the compression, the overall data reduction, and the guarantee that also came with that, the four-to-one data reduction guarantee, which was significant to us because of the amount of data that we hold. And we have, as I mentioned, we're pulling further data of ours back into our hosted environments, which will end up on the power store, especially with the de-duplication that we're now getting. We've now actually hit nine-to-one, which is significant. We were expecting four-to-one, maybe five-to-one with some of the data types. And what was excellent, Dell, were that confident that they did not even review our data types prior, and they were willing to stand by that guarantee of four-to-one. And we've excelled at that. We've got significant different data types on that array, and we've hit nine-to-one. And that's gradually grown over the last nine months. We were kind of at six, and we moved to seven, and now we're hitting nine-to-one ratios. That's great, so a little free storage. That's interesting what you're saying, Richard, I just assumed that a company that guarantees four-to-one is going to say, okay, let us inspect your workload first, and then we'll do the deal. So Abhishek, what's the tech behind that data reduction that you're able to, with such confidence, not have to pre-inspect the workload in this case anyway? Yes, so it goes back to the technologies that goes behind the product, right? So we stand behind the technology, and we want to make it simpler for our customers as well, where again, we don't want to spend weeks looking at all the data, scanning all the data before giving the guarantee. So we stand behind the technology, where we understand that as the data is coming in, we are always going to deduplicate it, we are always going to compress it. There is technology within the product where we are off-loading some of that to the outside the CPU, so it is not impacting the performance that the applications are going to see. So a data reduction by itself is not good enough, performance by itself is not good enough. Both of them have to be together, right? So, and that's what PowerStore brings to the table. Thank you. So, Richard, I'm interested. I mean, I remember the PowerStore announcement, I sort of saw it leading up to it, and one of the big thrusts from Dell, the way I phrase it is essentially trying to create a cloud-like experience on-prem. So really focus on simplicity. So my question to you is, let's start with just the deployment. You know, how complicated was it to install? What was that process like? How many clicks? Not that you have to tell me how many clicks, but you know what I'm asking is, is how difficult was it to get from zero to, you know, up and running? Well, we actually stepped down a very difficult challenge. We were in quite a difficult situation where we'd pretty much gone off of a cliff in terms of our iOS performance. So the RFP was quite rapid, and then we needed to get, whoever, which vendor was successful, we need to get that deployed rather rapidly and on the floor in our data center and server rooms, which we did. And it was very, very simplistic. Within three weeks of placing the order, we had that array in our server rack, and we had begun the migration. It was very simple to set up. And the management of that array has been, we've seen a 14% reduction in terms of effort to be able to manage our storage because it is very self-contained. You know, even from a reporting perspective, the deployment, the migration was all very, very, very simplistic. And, you know, we've done some works recently where we had to also do some work on the array and some other migrations that we were doing. And the resilience came to the forefront of where the dual architecture and no single point of failure enabled us to do some things that we needed to do quite rapidly because of the dual nodes and the resilience within the unit and within the power store itself was considerable. Where we kept performance up, it also prioritized any disk rebuilds, keeps the incoming ingest rates high and prioritizes the workloads, which is really impressive, especially when we are moving so quickly with our technology, we don't really have much time to micromanage the estate. Can you just repeat what you said on the percent reduction? I think I heard you cut out there a little bit, a percent reduction on management, on the labor side? Yeah, so our lead storage engineer is estimated at around 40% less management. Wow, okay, so that's good. So, actually, I love this conversation because, you know, in the early days of automation, people were like, ah, that's my job, provisioning lungs, I'm really good at it. But I think people are realizing that it's actually, you know, not something that you want to be really good at, it's something that you want to eliminate. So, now maybe it's a, that storage engineer got his or her nights and weekends back, but what do they do now? When they get that extra time, what do you put them on? You know, more strategic initiatives or, you know, other things in the to-do list? What's that like? The last thing, you know, any of my team, whether it's the storage leads or some of the infrastructure team that are also involved and engaged, because, you know, the organization, we have to be quite versatile as a team in our skill sets. We don't want to be doing those BAU Monday tasks. Even the storage engineer does not want to be, you know, allocating lungs and allocating storage to physical servers, VMs, et cetera. We want all of that to be automated. And, you know, those engineers are now working on, you know, some of the cutting edge things that we're trying to do with machine learning as an example, which is much more interesting is what they want to be doing. You know, that aids the obvious things like retention, interest and personal development. We don't want to be, you know, that base IT infrastructure management is not where, you know, any of the engineers want to be. In terms of the decision to go with Dell Power Store, I'm definitely hearing there was a relationship, there was an existing relationship with Dell. I'm sure that played into it. There were many things. So, you know, the relationship wasn't really part of this, even though I mentioned the end user compute, you know, in any sector or anything that we're procuring, we want best of breed, you know, a best of sex. And that was done on, you know, cost is definitely a driver. The technology, you know, is of interest to us. We're a tech company. New technology to us is also fascinating, not only our own, but also the storage guarantee, the simplicity, the resilience within the unit. Also, the ability which was key to us because of what we're trying to do with our hybrid model and bring back and repatriate some of the data as it were from the cloud. We needed that ability to, with ease to be able to scale up and scale out and the Power Store gave us that. When you say cost, I want to dig into that. Price or, you know, the price tag or the cost? I mean, when you do the business case and I wonder if we could add a little color to that. Yeah, there's two elements to this. So they're not only the cost of the price tag, but then also cost of ownership and the comparisons that we were running against the other vendors, but also the comparisons that we were running from a CAPEX investment against OPEX and what we have in the cloud and also the performance, you know, the performance that we get from the cloud and our cloud storage and the resilience within that. And then also the initial price tag and then comparing the CAPEX investment to the OPEX. We're all elements that were key to us making our decision. And, you know, there has to be some credit taken by the Dell account team and their relationship towards the final throws of that RFP, you know, were key. Initially, not at all. We were just looking for the best possible storage solution for ultrally. And to determine that on your end, was that like a feature, because it's sometimes fuzzy what the business impact is going to be like that 40% you mentioned or the data reduction at nine to one when there's a promise of four to one. What did you do? Did you kind of do a feature function analysis and sort of line that up and say, okay, I'm going to map that to our business, our processes, our IT processes and try to predict what the impact would be. Is that how you did it or did you take a different approach? We did. So we did that, obviously between vendors as you'd expect in an RFP, but then also mapping to how that would impact the business. And that is not an easy process to go through. And we've seen more gains even comparing one vendor to another. Some of that because of the technology, the terminology is very, very different and sometimes you have to bring that up a level and also gain a much more detailed understanding which at times can be challenging. But we did a very like for like comparison and also lots of research, but you're quite right. The business analysis to what we needed, we had quite a good forecast and from some of our historical information and data and also our engineering and business and strategic roadmap, we were able to map those two together. Not the easiest of experiences, not one that I want to repeat, but we talked about that. Yeah, a little bit of art and science involved. Abhishek, maybe you could talk about Power Store, give us the commercial, what makes it different from other products in the market? Things like Cloud IQ, maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Sure. So again, from a music to may years when Richard talks about the ease of deployment and the management, because there is a lot of focus on that, but even as I said earlier from a man technology perspective, a lot of goodness built in in terms of being able to consolidate customer's environment onto the platform. So that's more from a storage point of view to give the best performance, give the best data reduction storage efficiencies. The second part, of course, the flexibility, the options that Power Store gives to the customers in terms of sort of disaggregating the storage and the compute aspects of it. So if as a customer, I want to start with different points in terms of what our customer requirements are today, but going forward as your requirements change from a compute capacity perspective, you can use a scale up and scale out capabilities. And then the intelligence built in, right? So as you scale out your cluster, being able to move storage around, right? As needed, being able to do that non-disruptively. So instead of saying that Mr. Customer, your storage is going to run at 90% capacity, being able to say that based on your historical trending, we expect you run out of capacity in six months. Some small things like that, right? And of course, if the dial home, the support assist capabilities are enabled, Cloud IQ brings a lot of intelligence to the table as well. In addition to that, as I mentioned earlier, there is apps on capability that gives another level of flexibility to the customers to integrate your storage infrastructure into a virtual environment if the customer chooses to do that. And last but not the least, it's not just about the product, right? So it's about the programs that we have put around it. And anytime upgrade is a big differentiator for us, where it's an investment protection program for customers where if they want to have the peace of mind in terms of three months, nine months, three years down the line, if we come out with new technologies, being able to be upgrade to that non-disruptively is a big part of it as well. So it's a peace of mind for the customers that yes, I'm getting into the power store architecture today, but going forward, I'm protected from that point of view. So anytime upgrade, it's a new business program that we put around leveraging the architectural benefits of power store, whether your compute requirement, your storage requirements change, you're covered from that point of view. So again, a very quick overview of what power store is, why it is different, and again, that's where that comes from. Thank you for that, Richard. Are you actively using Cloud IQ? Do you get, what kind of value do you get from it? Not currently, however, we have had plans to do that. The uptake and how basically our internal work mode is not allowed us to do that. But one of the other key reasons for selecting power store was the non-disruptive element, with other SaaS products, other providers and other issues that we've experienced. That was a key decision for us from a power store perspective. What are the other, I'd to go back to the conversation slightly in terms of performance, we are getting now, there's a 400% speed of improvement of publishing. We've got an 80% faster code coverage. Our firmware builds 1,300% quicker than they were previously and the time savings of the storage engineer and as a director of IT, I often ask for certain reports from the storage array while we're working out storage, performance forecasts and when we're coming close to product releases, code drops that we're trying to manage. The reporting on the power store is impressive, whereas previously my storage engineer would not be the most happiest of people when I would be trying to pull month-end quarterly reports, et cetera. Whereas now it's ease and we have live dashboards running, we can easily extract that information. I love that because so often we talk about the 40% reduction in IT labor, which okay, that's cool, but then your CFO is going to say, yeah, but it's not like we're getting rid of people, we're still spending that money and okay, they're getting, you're now into soft dollars, but when you talk about 400%, 18%, 1300%, you're talking about business impact and that's telephone numbers to a CFO. So I love those metrics. Thank you for sharing. Yeah, well, when they obviously, some of our dashboards, when they're visualized, they are very hard hitting the impact. You're quite right to see it, but it does chase down the availability and the resource profile. However, we're on a huge upward trajectory, so having the right resilience and infrastructure in place is exactly what we need. And as I mentioned before, those engineers are all reallocated to much more interesting work and the areas that will actually drive our business forward. Speaking of resilience, are you doing any replication? Not currently, however, we've actually got a meeting regarding this today with some of Dell's enterprise and some of their storage specialists in a couple of hours time, actually, because that is very high on the agenda for us to be able to replicate and have a high availability cluster and another potentially power store made. So I was going to ask you kind of where you want to take this thing. I'm hearing you're looking at cloud IQ, really trying to exploit that. So you got some headroom here in terms of the value that you can get out of this platform to do replication, faster recovery, et cetera, maybe protect against, you know, events. Guys, thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate your insights. Thank you. And thank you for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante and we'll see you next time.