 from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for EMC World 2012, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We're coming down to the end of day two. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. Our next guest, I say, is the SVP of Marketing for EMC's Emerging Technologies Division, ETD. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. I'm thrilled to be back. It's one of my favorite things of any big events. We love getting the data from the folks in theCUBE. And your group is hot. Last year, we talked to CJ. And really, this year, it's flowering nicely, the strategy working, right? Obviously, core technologies takes care of the current engine of innovation and sales. Emerging's being positioned. Obviously, to go through the new stuff called Cloud Native, which clearly is DevOps. Break that down for us, because this is really the hot area. This is where the transformation's going to. This is where the puck is headed. So skating's where the puck is, is what the customers want. What's the big announcements and what's the big feedback you're getting here? Yeah, yeah, so the Emerging Technology Division consists of a pretty wide portfolio of pretty much one-dotto or two-dotto products, for the most part, with the exception of the ISON Business Unit, which is on its eighth generation. The other products in the portfolio are the new DSSD product, Scalio, ECS, Viper, and the new, recently announced, BXRecton Trino just today. So we've got a very, very broad portfolio. To your point, very much focused on the next generation of newer applications as we move forward. So from an ETD perspective, our mission and why we exist within EMC, we carry that opportunity for two things. Innovation and growth, that's what we're judged on, that's what we're measured against. We have to be the innovation engine and the growth engine for EMC, and that's what CJ and myself are laser focused on. So one of the things that we've talked about many, many times as you guys laid out the software-defined mission a couple years ago, and then last year, that clarity around the emerging side was Viper. Some have been saying not much has been happening since 2013, but there's been a lot happening, but there's been two areas that's been fitting into the controller and the storage. You guys stopped calling it object and block store with Viper. Explain that, because this is a nuance, because you got ECS and ScaleIO, right? Talk about that dynamic and what it really means and state of Viper. Sure, sure, so software-defined storage is one of our key strategic pillars within emerging technology. We have a family line of four products today, the Viper controller, which I'll come back to. Certainly the ECS, software-defined object storage system, ScaleIO, software-defined block storage system, and then we just announced late last year the newest member of the family, the file option, which is Iceland SD Edge. So we now have file, block, and object all underneath the Viper controller for data management and automation. So we've got, by far, the broadest portfolio of SDS offerings in the industry, we believe. The Viper product, yes, a few years ago, frankly, we confused the market. We heard the feedback from our customer, we heard the feedback from you guys. We tried to glom too much into this Viper brand and Viper value proposition, so what we decided to do is make it simpler. Focus Viper on the controller aspect. We actually open-sourced the core IP in the Copperhead open-source initiative that we announced last year. And now we actually just announced yesterday the new Viper 3.0, which includes all of the recent updates to the Copperhead open-source initiative. But more importantly, we can now add up to 50 different arrays of storage underneath the Viper controller for storage automation and management, as well as we released the SDK for the first time. Again, all that feedback from our Copperhead community, the object storage is now a separate thing altogether. That's the ECS, so think of it as two separate things. I always felt Viper in its original instantiation was a way to bridge. Sometimes Goulden talks about 2.5. I always felt like Viper was a bridge, an abstraction layer that allowed me to take my existing EMC devices into the future. Okay, great. And you kind of, in my view, anyway, put the rest of the 50 on the back bar. Sounds like you've kind of flipped that. Yeah, yeah, I think in the first versions of Viper controller, it was all of the EMC products, and then one or two of third-party vendor products. Now that we've updated it, we open-source it, vendors have contributed to opening up and now we're writing to the API and SDK themselves, we now truly have a wide variety of third-party vendors, and in addition to, of course, all of the EMC products. So I think we're now, with 3.0, we've got the vision of supporting a truly heterogeneous, bridged environment, whether it's EMC or third-party. Now all that can be managed provision and automated on a new Viper controller. So the value proposition is simplification? Yeah, absolutely. Simplification, automation, ease of use, that is absolutely what Viper's focused on. And like I said, we completely kind of parted the Cs on the object storage data services that was Viper as well. That is now exclusively ECS, and that has replaced all of our object products in the portfolio now. So I want to demystify software-defined storage or SDS, and we had a crowd chat, I'm going to quote something, I want to get your comments on the state of it. What are the drivers pushing customers towards SDS? You said on our crowd chat, why SDS threefold, lower cost via commodity hardware, two, scalability into the hundreds of thousands of terabytes with high performance, flexibility of different consumption while software-only appliances converge infrastructure. What is the state of that, those three things? Because that was, and those are three different things. Those are the three Ys SDS. Yeah, exactly. So the SDS strategy that we have, it is a multi-pronged consumption choice. You can consume it just as exclusively software, bring your own hardware. We do the turnkey appliances as well, whether it's ISLON, scale IO now with the X-Rect Flex, and then the ECS can be consumed as an appliance as well. And then third leg of the stool is converged infrastructure. But we offer our customers all three choices. I will tell you where the market in the industry is right now. Most of our customers today love the vision and the value proposition of the SDS, but ultimately want us to deliver turnkey appliance or conversion infrastructure offering. I would say 70 to 80% of the market today is still moving to give me the full box for the integrated experience, the supportability, that turnkey nature. We are seeing the software, truly build your own software only, happening at the largest of the large, the service providers, the people that are going to really invest into the R&D horsepower that's required to stand that up yourself. So a question we had earlier on CrowdChat, I want to ask you this question, came on through our CrowdChat. DSSD is the latest flash darling. How's it doing? And is rack scale flash a recognized category at this time? Well, with an EMC, we certainly think so. But has the market accepted it? No, not yet. Which one, the darling part? Or the category? I would say, yeah. We'll come back to success thus far, but from a category creation look, I've built the scale out NAS category back at Iceland. It took years to build a new category. It is not easy going. We're absolutely committed. We've gotten a lot of support out of the gate, but ultimately success of that product will drive a creation of that category, as well as competitors coming into the space. So, you know, we're- Highlights on some of those category successes? Yeah, so we announced the product on February 29th, the Quantum Leap launch. We G8 it 30 days later. So we're just 60 days into the G8 of the product. We've had great success in the first quarter of selling it. We achieved all of our goals that we set out. New customers across really three use cases, high performance analytics, high performance computing, and then traditional large scale oracle environments that need basically a rack scale deployment for storage underneath oracle rack type environment. And you think based on the data you've seen on other category build outs, this is going much faster? I don't think so. I think it's going to be a couple years in the making. Are we on a faster trajectory to achieving that category? I don't know yet. It's too soon to tell. It's radical. I mean, the performance levels, the fact that you're not having to rewrite application. I mean, you go back to the early days of Fusion I.O. This is what we thought Fusion I.O could have been. So we thought the vision was right on and we'd fall in love with vision sometimes. And then seeing DSSD is like, okay, wow, this is the potential to actually fulfill that vision. Yeah, and I think what we're finding is, especially with the early adopters, is less than 100 microseconds of latency, like mind blowing unheard of 10 million IOPS per second. We announced the ability to double that yesterday now just in 60 days since the GA. The reality is the thing is so fast, people don't even understand how to use it yet. We're that far ahead of the market in the industry. So we're going to go into a lot of our strategic POCs, get that product installed, solve some oracle scale challenges, maybe do some Hadoop and Analyst with Clodera. But the world is our oyster in terms of what it could ultimately solve. But I expect we will find more opportunities and more use cases than even what we're thinking about right now because it is so far ahead of the game. Develop a sandbox. Absolutely. New apps that people haven't even conceived of yet. Yep, absolutely. So VxRack is touted as the cloud native kind of thing. What types of organizations are best suited for that kind of turnkey solution? Yeah, so the VxRack Neutrino, which we announced yesterday, we're actually going to be demoing it in the keynote tomorrow, is really built for that OpenStack consumer who is probably pulling their hair out and is frustrated in how long it takes to stand up in OpenStack environment, how unstable that is when you have to upgrade that environment. And frankly, is someone who doesn't want to invest the DevOps and the R&D required to manage and maintain a production mission critical OpenStack environment. You don't hear that much. You guys probably run into customers, you're searching for that list of enterprise grade, OpenStack, mission critical deployments. They're few and far between. What VxRack Neutrino has set out to solve is to make that enterprise grade, take the science out of the science project with an OpenStack, provide a stable turnkey environment for the EMC customer base. Typically the enterprise buyer that wants to get into OpenStack but doesn't want all the headaches and challenges. They don't want to build it out. They don't want to build it. They want to buy it. So do you see that accelerating the OpenStack adoption? We think so, yes. And we certainly, we were at OpenStack Summit last week. I had a tremendous NDA room briefing because it was a week ahead of our big announcement this week but we were oversubscribed because we were meeting. What was the feedback from some of those meetings? Thank you. This is like Tylenol or this is AdVol to my problems. This is now going to make it a reality of actually getting OpenStack stood up in a mission critical use case. So really delivering on OpenStack? We have to deliver that. We have to deliver that. So for them the benefit for the aspirin was was it's on the design side, it was more delivery of the cloud or standing. I would say in a scale out hyperconversion environment delivering an enterprise grade OpenStack. Today what they do is they go in and download a bit here, a bit there, get their own hardware stood up. It's a long, painful process. We're taking that out of the process and deployment. So Icelon is kind of the crown jewel of this portfolio. It was something from a revenue standpoint. I know you guys don't break out. I love all of my products. But I know. It's done well. In fact, years ago we said that Icelon was the big data aspect of it. Yeah. The acquisition was a bold acquisition. It was like, boom, we're going to go get it. Two billion dollars, I think was the number. And you know, EMC, you know, pretty good job at acquisitions. But when you first came to Wikibon, I remember the small little office, you know, we had the cube in our conference room kind of thing. And Icelon was pretty narrow in healthcare and media. Okay. And then now you get this huge distribution channel and thing explodes into a new realm. So give us the update on Icelon. You got some announcements tomorrow. Maybe you can show us a little leg on. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So Icelon continues to be to your point, the crown jewel in terms of the revenue contributor to emerging technology. You know, Icelon was acquired at the end of 2010. We were doing roughly a quarter billion dollars at the time, had 400 people. Now we're well over a thousand people. We're doing well over a billion dollars in revenues now. We've gone through that hockey stick growth that really the EMC channel has brought us. The other thing that we've been able to deliver, since, you know, that's not been five years. I can't believe it's been five years, is a tremendous amount of innovation off of the original 5.x version Icelon was operating then. We're now released 8.0. And that innovation we've built over the last five years really expanded our marketplace that we can compete in. We've taken on new applications like Hadoop and Splunk in the next generation space. And frankly, we've really been able to take more and more share of the NAS market than I think most would have ever imagined we were able to be able to do. I got to ask you a historical question. Sure. You know, I've always been impressed with Icelon. In fact, you know, I remember when Pat Gelson was still EMC. Yeah. The founder was still around and I said, you guys are more like Big Data. Scott Cook's sitting there like, whoa, we're a green one. But that time, that was all about Hadoop. But you guys at that time were powering huge web scale companies. Facebook, you name all the big, big whales that were pioneering, which now are as proof shows with Facebook's earnings. All that data is now value for their apps. Yes, that's right. So I want to ask you a question. What have you learned since then? Because you guys certainly have continued to power through on the success side of large scale, yet this scale out open source model has been going on. So I'm not saying you're open source, but I mean the variety, you're powering a big engine of that. Sure. What have you learned and what have you tweaked along the way and what have you learned and what's the current situation? Yeah, I would say so this was all about the last major Icelon launch. Sure it was our eighth generation technology, but we expanded our technology outside of a singular data center. Up until just a couple of months ago, we were confined to a singular data center which meant the initial bulk problems that we're trying to solve in the scale out NAS segment, but we couldn't get to remote offices, we couldn't get to collaborative workflows, departmental. It's kind of the one knock. We didn't have that. And the second one is we couldn't talk to the cloud either, which in this world, that's a non-starter. I think certainly EMC is committed to everything, it's hybrid and everything is cloud enabled. We weren't until just a couple of months ago. So with this new release based on the customer feedback is we can now extend to the edge and do full featured Icelon smaller, kind of call it less than 50 terabyte environments, that you can run every capability of Icelon on a build your own commodity hardware based architecture. We only sell the software there, we have no box to sell there. And then on the core to cloud integration, we natively now can tier to cloud. So for customers that want to move a lot of their cold or frozen archive data off of their, frankly, higher performance and more expensive Icelon core system, you can simply tier that to Amazon, Azure, Virtustream, you name it, ECS. But the beauty of the architecture is despite that data living thousands of miles away and over large network links, your file system, your users, you and I still think it's a local file. It may take a little longer to get but there's no application knowledge change, no API changes, it is seamlessly tiered, the file system is completely intact, infinitely scalable and we take away the yet again another silo or you got to throw your data into Iron Mountain historically and I'll throw your data into an S3 object store, you lose that connectivity. We maintain that connectivity all the way through a slide cycle, whether it's in the cloud, at the edge or on the core. Well, that edge capability all the way through, you know, that end to end, edge to core, it reeks of IoT as well. So what kind of momentum, if any, I mean, I'm sure seeing some, but what are you seeing? Yeah, so IoT has been a great use because we're actually seeing more and more IoT move to the object storage space with the ECS platform. We're seeing many of the major car manufacturers who are the perfect example, quintessential example of capturing sensor information off, anything and everything you can touch and affect a car's performance or the customer experience. Every major automotive organization is attaching hundreds if not thousands of sensors to the car. They need to capture all that information to improve serviceability, improve drivability, customer experience. Object store is typically what we're seeing most IoT environments at billions of scale, petabytes, billions of objects, petabyte scale. That's the perfect application for an object storage architecture. Get pushed, boom. Yeah, you don't need a POSIC file system. You don't need the full features of snapshots and replicating everything that you need in the traditional NAS space. You don't, you need scale and efficiency and ECS 2.2 just introduced metadata search, which is its newest feature that allows you to now, so you got billions of, billions of objects. Now you can know where they are and you can find them much more efficiently as well. And that helps. So we're actually seeing that go object. And that helps on the application side too, because no matter where the data is in its form, active to totally frozen, you can get all of it. You get all of it, yep. Yeah, and that's going to be big. Well, we really appreciate the time, sharing the update. Yeah. A big fan of Icelon, it's been great stuff. Final words, share with the audience. What's the big theme this year? What's the big takeaway for the folks that couldn't make it down here at EMC World, well obviously the merger is top discussion, but what else is the trending? Yeah, so tomorrow and all of our listeners and hopefully you too will be joining us for the keynote. It can be watched around the world, 10 a.m. Pacific tomorrow. We're going to show off some really cool technology. We're going to show off all the products I just talked about. We're going to show off some new products that we're not even releasing in the immediate future, but it is something that is, I would say, in the right around the corner, that it really is going to yet again, radically change the game. We talked a little bit about this on Monday's keynote, Project Nitro from Icelon is coming to tomorrow's discussion. Lots of pent-up excitement around that, but at the end of the day, back to the priorities of emerging tech, we got to show growth, we got to show innovation, and I think that's what we'll be showing across the board tomorrow. So it's going to be an exciting, fun-filled, there'll be a DB9 on stage, a Aston Martin, James Bond, Q, lots of fun tomorrow. Well you got two guys, Churchwood. Come on. Mission accomplished. Well, good internal competition. It's great stuff, innovation is alive. Love the emerging group, great stuff. You guys are really doing some solid innovation there. Congratulations. Thanks for being on theCUBE. Appreciate your insight. Thank you. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE here at EMC World 2016. We'll be right back. Looking back at the history of Dell, personal computers,