 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE, day two of our coverage of Dell Technologies World. We're in Las Vegas and I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We're having a great day, great day and a half yesterday as well, learning a lot about what Dell Technologies is doing to help customers make things real. Digital transformation, IT transformation, security transformation, workforce transformation, you name it. We are excited to welcome back to theCUBE one of our alumni, Dan Inmar, the SVP and GM of Xtreme.io and Scale.io. Welcome back, Dan. Thank you very much, good to be here. So, lots of news in the last day and a half. What is the state of the union with Xtreme.io? So, we're very excited today, we launched the new release of X2 that brings to the market the native application capability, async native application, which is done like Xtreme.io does everything in a very unique and special way, leveraging our architecture of CAS based architecture and as such being a very effective and a very efficient native application. In addition, what we've launched now is the new release which is an entry level Xtreme.io, allowing customers to start with a lower cost platform, leveraging all the capabilities that Xtreme.io brings with an enterprise-grade solution, but in a lower market. So, those are the big things that we have to build. Dan, let's unpack that a little bit for our audience. Let's start with the replication side. Sure. EMC with SRDF, decades ago, really brought replication to the storage market. It was one of the things when Xtreme.io first came out that it was like, well, if you want replication, it's not native. There are lots of options. Correct. The Dell EMC family has lots of options out there. So, explain what went into it, why another one, what differentiates it. Sure. So the unique thing with our architecture is that everything is basically, we're looking at everything and fingerprinting everything so that we don't write anything that's already written. And when you add another replication capability now, we do the same thing. So it's part of the array basically. So what happens is, when you have an array, you do the first replication, you start replication, basically most all solutions, you have to copy all the data first time and then you can do snap diffs or whatever. What we do is basically, we copy everything already deduced and compressed. So you bring down the bandwidth up to 75% lower bandwidth. So it's significantly lower on the WAN, much more effective, as a result a lot more cost effective solution. So, we'd actually looked at the snap technology a few years ago as one of the things that differentiated Stream.io and the marketplace and what that means to businesses and how they can change how they work on it. Talk to us about the users and what does this replication mean to them and their business, how is it going to lead to further along that path of digital transformation that we first. So there's a few things that this brings to the market. First of all, because of our architecture, so that you can now have your production, we always said you can have your production and QA and a dev on the same platform because of all the snapshots that basically doesn't cost you anything. We're now, if you want to now separate it, it doesn't, you don't have to pay for the WAN, so it's still basically for free, but you can put it in a different environment and you can have your whole test and dev environment separate if those who want to do it that way. So you have that ability again. In addition, but once you do all the replication, you can get into, for example, if you do one too many replication, you can have one station that does replication, you'll get dedupe across all the systems. So again, a lot more efficient solution. So basically what it brings you in the data transformation world is a lot more effective, cost-effective solution, and it's a very unique way of approaching it. So want to talk about how this is impacting IT organizations as IT now, and I think Michael Dell even said yesterday, needs to become and can become a profit center. We're seeing a lot more business leaders recognize that IT should be a business strategy. There's so much potential for it to really become much more horizontally aligned within an organization. Talk to us about, from that perspective, as you were talking with customers and presumably CIOs and leaders there, what are some of the benefits they're looking for this technology to deliver in terms of elevating IT in a transformative way? So what customers are seeing is that by using this is that they're basically, they've taken away this problem from the end user. He's basically got all the resources he needs, he's got the performance that he needs, he's got no issues, and the cost-wise, it's significantly lower. So what it allows them, for example, if you want every developer to have his own copy, his ability to work independently without having everyone fight about the number of copies we can do, who's getting what copy, you can just do it. You can have endless amount of copies. It doesn't cost you anything. This is a very different way of doing things. It allows you to move a lot faster and the pace, as we heard Michael talk about yesterday, the pace is picking up. These kind of technologies allows you to work a lot faster, a lot more reacting to what's happening in the field. All right, so Dan, when ExtremeIO came out, it was already a relatively small building block built for kind of really a scalable architecture. So explain to us what it means that you have a new entry level. What has changed from a technology standpoint that's allowed you to kind of repack it? So what you're talking about is with the X1 was a scale out architecture, as you mentioned. X2 brought to the market scale up as well as scale out. So each brick can have up to 72 drives. So you can start with 18 drives and grow by small packs. So you have a lot more granularity. What the X2T does, it starts, it goes up to 36 drives. Okay, so it gives you the ability, it's more limited from the point of view of the scale out. You can always upgrade it, but for customers should make the decision upfront. If it's a small system that he wants, then it makes sense to go with X2T because it's limited and doesn't scale up. You can upgrade it, but you'll end up paying more than to get to the same scale. So is there different hardware or is this a limiting on software? How is this product different from the main one? It's basically the ability to work the system with less memory in the system because it's a smaller system. So you can work with less memory. So it's actually a different chassis though, is that right? No, it's the same box exactly. You can always upgrade and you buy an expansion kit and you just add the memory and then you're back to an R, which is the code name for the larger scale out system. The only problem is because it's an upgrade, because you're doing it after the fact, because you're doing it in the field, you're going to end up paying more. So if a customer thinks that he needs only a very small system, prices of the essence, this is the solution to go with. But if you're going to add the scalability capability, you should probably start with an R. All right, can you bring us inside? Was this a pull from customers to ask for this type of configuration? Are there specific use cases that you're hearing for this? Yeah, what we're seeing is a lot of demand from the field to have all, and we're seeing it more and more. All the goodies that the high end solutions bring, but costs is an issue. So basically they're saying, we want a more competitive solution with all the capabilities. We love the product, but give it to us cheaper. So that's always true, and we're doing a lot of work to get that there, but the X2T gives an opportunity for a customer to understand the values that Xtremio can bring to you, and then afterwards grow and understand the capabilities moving on. So some of the things that I've heard Dan, you articulate, show how this technology can help customers transform IT. We've talked about getting things done faster, less cost, digital transformation can be enabled by this technology. It also sounds like workforce transformation. As you were saying, it sounds like things can be done more easily, maybe with less kind of competition internally. I'm wondering about the security froze. We talked about that as one of the four tenants of transformation. How does some of the native application, for example, and the new capabilities of what you just announced, how does it help organizations facilitate security as they grow, have more and more data which opens up attack surfaces? So as you mentioned, I mean replication adds obviously for the security, the data security, not the pure security of someone penetrating, of course, but obviously the product itself has got all the securities and all the qualifications that are required in order to offer a completely secured offering. So from that point of view, obviously you're covered. The replication brings to the market the capability of having it in a DR site, offsite, et cetera, and all those capabilities that are proven time and time again worth doing. All right, Dan, last thing I wanted to cover is in your organization, you also have the Scale.io product, so big announcements with the X2 piece. What's the update on the Scale.io piece? We've had the opportunity to interview on theCUBE, customers over the years, and where does that fit in the portfolio? So Scale.io is, as you know, we've repositioned it now to be part of the Vflex OS solution, and we're working very closely with the Vflex team. As such, we're basically trying to push it to more, you have the Vflex OS, you have then the Vflex ready node solution, which is basically qualified Dell servers that you can combine together with our OS. We're working on making it into an appliance which will come complete, and then our rack which is a full HCI. So really, the repositioning is to make it more to be easier to consume in the broader market. Obviously, with the large customers, et cetera, continue to consume it as they did in the past, but really it makes it much easier to consume. As we were saying before, the value of Scale.io is very clear, and it's a great product. It just makes it easier in this new positioning to consume by a broader market. Dan, thanks so much for stopping by, sharing what's new, how it's differentiated, and we look forward to having some customers on to talk about the business outcomes that they're achieving, so thanks for your time. Thanks so much for having me. We want to thank you for watching The Cube. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. We're live in Vegas, day two of Dell Technologies World Stick Around. We'll be right back after a short break.