 Live from Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell EMC World 2016, brought to you by Dell EMC. Now, here are your hosts, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. Welcome back to Austin, Texas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Chris Radcliffe is here. He's the Senior Vice President of the Core Technology Division for Dell EMC. Chris, great to see you again. Great to see you guys. Last time I saw you, we were just EMC. Not with Dell EMC. Yeah, I've been impressed. Dave's been really good. He hasn't just said EMC once on the program yet. You know, it's been a little tougher for me to make that transition. You're not talking about those. I got something to help you. So, I felt ashamed the last time I was on. No thanks. Remember when I gave you guys the flash drives? And they hadn't checked, I just took them out of the box from my guys. They hadn't checked them with the vendor, had got them with a virus on, so I had to take them back. But I've got these nice new Dell EMC ones for you. Okay, great. So, there you go. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. We're the storage company. I'll give one to Furrier. I know Furrier was kind of mad last time that we had to take the other one back. All right, you didn't want to give it up. So, is this your first Austin Dell world slash EMC? Funny story there. I used to work at Dell before I came to EMC. I was actually involved in the first two Dell worlds. And organizing them, and actually, Michael came to me and sent me an email and said, you might want to talk to these guys. They'd be good to have on the show floor. But just through a weird set of circumstances, I never actually came to Dell world. Even though, I mean, so one of the things I did was, the first year we had President Clinton. Yeah, right, he was great. So, we aren't going to turn this into a political debate or anything tonight. No, but he was phenomenal that year. You didn't get to see his talk. I didn't get to see his talk. It was fantastic. It was really good. So, that was one of the things that I organized as part of that. But this is my, so my first time here, but as an employee again, just came in a different way. I mean, that was a good show. And at the time though, let's see, Dell was, of course, still a public company. Yeah. You know, making the transition into the enterprise. Yeah. And wow, what a difference four years makes. So, how's the integration going? Great. I mean, day one, flawless. Absolutely flawless. It was, I did a conference call with some analysts on day one. And the first thing they said was that they were blown away, that the conference system said- It's true. It was no longer EMC, it was Dell EMC. Welcome to Dell EMC. Signage, emails. The buildings. I came in that morning, all the signage was up. It was our email, I'm from Dell.com, right? It was all that stuff just, it went the way it's supposed to go, but it never seems to go. So, it's been fantastic. A lot of synergy between the two companies. Interestingly enough, we're going to be doing a sneak peek for press and analysts tomorrow of some work that was going on even before the merger was announced. Between us and one of the Dell technologies, between one of our technologies and one of the previous Dell technologies, which is absolutely fantastic stuff. Bit of a game changer, we think. So, you'll hear more about that as the week progresses. I mean, there are a lot of differences, but we've often, not just us, but many have likened the merger, acquisition, whatever you call it, to a simpler example, which was a digital compact. There wasn't a lot of overlap there. They made quick decisions, boom, it was clean. This is obviously a lot bigger. The portfolio's much more compact, but it seems like you're taking a similar approach. This goes there, this goes there. Okay, we're going to make some quick decisions. Pretty pragmatic. So, Michael, very involved. Does this thing called facts and alternatives? Every decision, you create a document about what are the facts around the decision, what are the alternatives, and you make a call. And it allows us to move really quickly. And I think that transition team did an incredible job. Absolutely incredible job. Day one was seamless. It was really fantastic to be a part of it. So, specifically, how can you give us some specifics on the legacy Dell and legacy EMC storage portfolios? What are the decisions that you've made there that you can share? If you look at our portfolio, that's just the legacy Dell portfolio, for core technologies, which is what I'm responsible for. Extreme I.O., 3,000 customers, $3 billion revenue in three years, the absolute leader in the all-flash market. We have 40% market share, twice the next guy. We have more market share than the next three guys combined. And more share than you have in your traditional storage business. And more share than we have ever had in the traditional storage business. Not to preempt what you're going to say, but that's... The only thing where we have bigger market share is in purpose-built backup appliances with data domain. Because we're sitting, I think, around 62% there. But so, I mean, we're bigger than the next three guys combined, and they aren't small names. It's like IBM and HPE, they're the two of those in that list, but so bigger than the next three combined, which is fantastic. So we've got Extreme I.O., we've got VMAX, we have Unity, we have Data Domain Platform, and then we have all our associated software, including the backup and recovery software and things like Viper Controller and Viper SRN. So Core Technologies is really the core of EMC's storage business. As part of the merger, we have also taken responsibility for all of Dell's storage products. And the big question that we kept getting asked by people like you is, so, come day one, you're going to have something like 12 block storage platforms. Who's going to lose? The thing about that question is that if anybody loses, customers lose. And I think one of the things that Michael really has pushed us on is no customer gets left behind. So, as of day one, all those platforms continue to be supported. They will live out their natural lives, just like they'll follow the natural circle of life of any product. So all our, if you're a compelling customer, keep buying compelling today, right? It's, as we move forward, some of those products we'll not invest in, but we'll continue to invest in compelling. We'll continue to invest in Unity in the mid-range. We'll continue to invest in Extreme I.O. and VMAX at the high end. And of course, we'll continue to invest in Data Domain and the associated products. But at the core, you've got the compelling products, you've got Unity, VMAX, Extreme I.O. And you made some announcements ahead of Dell EMC World. Yeah, we kind of had to. Yeah, I mean, normally we get like mega-lots at the show, boom, smoke, fire. You guys decided to announce beforehand. Why and what did you announce? Well, so, remember back in February we did, we announced the year of all flash. So you may have heard the term YOF. So this is one of the things that we've pushed on a lot. We believe that 2016 is the year that enterprise flash becomes the majority of what people want and what people buy. It gets cheaper than spinning media. So throughout the year, we have absolutely focused on not just flash enabling our portfolio, but rebuilding our portfolio around flash technologies. So we came straight out of the gate at the start of the year with VMAX, all flash. At EMC World, we introduced Unity, all new, ground up, built for flash, designed for flash, modern architecture, modern hardware platform, built for the future, very heavy on data services, very easy to add data services to. And we kind of thought that was going to be our two announcements for the year. The team is firing on all cylinders. When we looked at Dell EMC World, we realized we could turn this into another storage event because we had more announcements last week than most of our competitors make in a year. And this is our kind of end of year wrap up announcements. So VMAX 250F, did you guys see that? Rave reviews from customers, service providers love it. We're taking the gold standard of enterprise data services in the storage market, which is VMAX, and we're making it available in a smaller V-brick than we've ever been able to do before. So it starts at 11 terabytes. You get all that capability of VMAX, it's exactly the same VMAX platform. You just get it in a smaller package. So it makes it much more easier to acquire. But Chris, how do I turn that into a VMAX fridge then? Because... No, we do VMAX Kegorators now. So you should stop by my office. Not that there's ever any alcohol in it, but I have a Kegorator that was given to me by one of the engineering teams. We do Kegorators now. All right, so if you look at your messaging on the year of All Flash, how are customers kind of in the adoption there? Because we agree on the pricing. David Floyer said with kind of the data reduction, our CTO, with the data reduction, where prices are, you know, flash. And, you know, Wikibon's been really early on kind of the All Flash data center. So we believe, you know, the product and the pricing is there. Yet, you know, enterprise, even if you said something's cheaper, they're like, well, this is what I'm used to buy and this is what, you know, the finance guys have approved. You know, how are we doing it, getting people to, especially in the storage space, to move along to some of the new stuff? We call it sudden impact. Right, so normally in the storage market, it's a world of incremental improvement. When you start looking at All Flash, it's orders of magnitude improvement. So you're talking about, we always talk about, we talk about sub millisecond response times. We don't mean 0.98 milliseconds. It's 0.5, it's less than 0.5, right? So we have platforms now that we're talking about. We're talking about, well, one of the customers said to me best this year, he said, the microsecond's the new millisecond. Yeah. Right, and that's what they care about. VMAX 250F, All Flash platform available. You've never been able to get it at this greater price from EMC. We've made it even better. We've introduced inline compression. So you can store four times the amount of data in that box that you're used to. It's a free upgrade, non-disruptive. It's like, what's not to like about that? We've done the same thing for Unity. So Unity came out of the box in May. At the end of this quarter, we're going to add inline compression to that platform as well. So again, you immediately overnight, you get double the capacity. And I feel like I'm going to start selling the Ginzo knives here, and that's not all. So as well as that, we're starting to incorporate the high capacity drives. So you can now get these things with seven and a half terabyte of flash drives, or 15 terabyte flash drives. So what that means is in a box like Unity, you can get about 400, I think it's about 400 terabytes in two use. So you think about that footprint. The biggest Unity box was up to 600 drives. So you do the math. 600 drives, 15 terabytes, and it's all flash. And then you're compressing that. I know we can compress that. And it depends on your workload. You'll see different levels of compression, but we do intelligent compression. So the box looks at your workloads, and it'll only compress the things that either you want compressed, or that it thinks can be compressed. So it takes, it's this idea of simplicity at the same time, because one of the things that flash gives you is simplicity of use. And so we've done as much as we can to make the box as simple to manage and as automated as we possibly can. Is that a library of algorithms, or are you just intelligently applying your algorithm? You intelligently apply it to that. You can just, the box can just look at a workload, try and compress it, see what it looks like at the other end. And if it doesn't make fiscal sense, it won't do it. But you're betting flash, you've come aboard, are thinking, what, that's easy. Well, there was a period of time when the market analysts were saying, well, 2017, it's still going to be a small fraction of the market. That's, your thinking has changed on that, right? Our thinking completely changed on that. Doubling down on flash, betting flash. So there are those smart, some smart people saying, you know what, spinning disk going to continue for a long time, it's going to be the cheapest solution. You guys are not saying that. No, what we're saying, for most enterprise workloads, flash. And what it was, was at the end of last year, when we start to do our next fiscal year planning, we started talking to our suppliers. We looked at what they were, the prices and the volumes that they were talking about and the capacities. And it's a basic math problem. And it became very clear that this was the year we had to go big. We'd already been doing the work to build an all flash VMAX, because it's all done in software. I mean, VMAX is no custom ASICS anymore. It's all built on industry standard hardware, right? So all the magic's in the software. So we had those millions of lines of code in there and ready to go. So we just started building the boxes. That's why we announced February 29th, Leap Day, and we were delivering that day. Yeah. Chris, let's talk about the data protection portfolio there, because take aside the data domain piece, there was actually kind of one of the areas that we thought to kind of looking from the outside that there was a bit of overlap and might need to be some justification between kind of the legacy Dell and the EMC portfolios. You had some announcements that you made last week, maybe kind of bring us up to speed on that. Yeah, so, well, year of all flash, we flash-enabled data domain. So it doesn't make sense today, fiscally, even with all the DDoop that we get. And like a data domain box, I'll give you 30X DDoop, right? And compression. But the thing is it doesn't make sense to go all flash with that. However, it does make sense to use flash to performance enhance that, to give it more throughput, and to make recovery almost instantaneous. So we have a whole range of data domain platforms that are now flash-enabled. They've a flashed tier in them. And that allows us to back up faster, do more throughput, and then to give our customers almost instantaneous recovery. At the same time, we've also releasing a virtual edition of data domain that is certified for and could just run on any platform, including Dell. So any server platform. People criticize you. They say, oh, EMC never talks about recovery. Now Dell EMC. True or not? You just did. We talk about it all the time. They talk about it some more. I mean, we talk about it all the time. It's a massive business for us. We're number one in that market. I mean, specifically recovery, recovery performance, restore. You talk about the speed of backup. You don't talk about restore speed. What do you say to that? We talk about it all the time. It's a core critical measure for everything that we do. So we can back you up faster and we can give you near instantaneous recovery. We also, if you recall, one of the things that we didn't think would be announced in this year, but we ended up announcing was the isolated recovery solution. I don't know if we actually ever talked about this. So we had a customer come to us last year and the wake of a number of those big, visible hacks that happened. Oh, yes. We did talk about this. So the CIO comes to us and he says, I just talked to this other CIO and he said they didn't come to steal my data. They came to destroy my business. Ransomware. Right, with all this ransomware. Build me a solution. So we built an isolated recovery solution, fully automated based on VMAX initially, now available on data domain, soon to be made available on Unity. And it gives customers a fully automated air gap solution and dependent on how much risk they're willing to take. In terms of RPO. In terms of RPO, we can actually have this thing replicate to the secure version that goes through a bunch of different analyses and tasks to make sure that what you're replicating is clean and good and hasn't been compromised. We can sell you one of those and set it up and it just works. Automated uses some features that are specific to VMAX, features that are specific to data domain. And you can fill in those RPO gaps in other ways. Yeah, you can do them with snapshots for the air gap piece. You're going to accept some level of RPO, which could be, you know, I don't know, whatever. It could be an hour or two hours. Well, for some customers, it's a weekly backup. For some customers, it's an hourly backup. For some customers, it's every 20 minutes, right? They'll be all right. It could be days, weeks, but because you're talking about how much risk you want to bear. Somebody trying to put you out of business. What's the ROI based on the cost that's going to be? And you could do that equation. So we have a bank in New York who will remain nameless, who's built a concrete bunker into which they will place one of these things. No one will go in or out of that thing. It's fully automated. They don't want anybody touching it. They don't want anybody getting physical access to it. It's, this is a board level discussion that's happening today in the US and we're the only vendor with a solution. And the interesting thing about our solution is that if you're a VMAX customer, it slots right in. If you're a customer of other products from EMC beyond VMAX, we got a data domain solution that slots right in and it'll even work with those other vendors. That's so classic EMC, it goes now to Dell EMC, but EMC would find problems like that and say, hey, we could solve that. And then all of a sudden it becomes a big business and then the whole industry's copying it. Yep. I mean, that's how SRDF started. That's exactly how SRDF started. Ernst & Young actually have a practice built around the isolated recovery solution. I'll bet. So this isn't just some little idea that we have off in the corner. There are companies like Ernst & Young that are seeing significant value from the innovation that we've built in direct response to a customer request. And that's the magic here, right? It's not just us sitting in a, because we got plenty of people who do that. Sitting rooms all day, drinking cappuccino, thinking up great big ideas for storage. But I think the mark of a true customer-centric company is a customer comes in and said, I'm scared about this and I want you to help me. And a month later, we have a solution on his desk and the next day, we get an email which says, tell me how much of when you can install it. But that's a business I want to work for. And that's the reason why we do what we do. Yeah, and it wasn't like, it's correct me if I'm wrong, but it wasn't huge invention required. It was more process and thinking through how to create a solution. Yeah. It was automating, it was defining the process, making sure it was a bulletproof process, looking at where there could be a gap, where there could be an issue, and then just locking it down and automating it. Awesome. All right, we got to go. Chris, thanks very much for coming. I'll give you the last word. Thanks for having me. But things we should be paying attention to. I mean, you're rolling out new announcements. We got a lot of new stuff coming along. I think the thing to really watch out for is there's been a lot of work going on in the background that nobody knows about, between various parts of the Dell, the legacy Dell organization and our organization. We got some big stuff. We're talking about some big stuff this week. We got some bigger stuff coming out at the start of next year. I think it's going to blow some minds. I think there's some people with preconceived ideas about who we are and what we're capable of doing, and we're going to fundamentally change that. So I'm really looking forward to it. Look at the number of announcements we have. The team is fired up. They're innovating like crazy. We're firing on all cylinders. We're delivering more products than the marketing team can actually cope with. And I've been on the other side of that particular thing where you've got no products coming. How am I going to tell you? This is the pain, I know. So the embarrassment of riches. All right, excellent Chris. A lot of people thinking that this is a big time for them to take advantage, that you're going to let your guard down. I don't see it. No. Congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me guys. You're welcome. All right, keep right there. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE. We're live from Dell World, Dell EMC World 2016, right back.