 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 2016. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, our seventh year here at EMC World of theCUBE, seventh season, our next guest is Chris Radcliffe, who's the CEO Vice President of Marketing of Core Technologies Group, which got a big prop on stage today from David Gouldin, the CEO of Dell EMC, the new division. Chris, good call. Good call a couple of years ago, seeing two groups forming Core Technologies, emerging products. Decouple, we talked about this last time, decouple them, make the highly cohesive entities. Highly optimized, congratulations. Give us the update. Where's the beef? Where's the beef? Come on, where is that? Because Gouldin's saying it's amazing, all this stuff's happening. So it is. I mean, frankly, we call it an embarrassment of riches. Right, so, and actually I got a present for you guys, that I haven't told anybody. So this is completely on the fly. You don't know what's coming out of my pocket. So look at this. A new erase, an all-flatter rate. This is all EMC's virtual software on a single USB stick. Really? So that's your data sander in your pocket. Beautiful. Can you imagine seven years ago? A bunch of code on there. A bunch of code on there. So can you imagine seven years ago, EMC turning up here, and handing you a little stick and saying you can get virtual unity on here. You can get virtual data domain. You can get virtual Icelon. You can get all the tools to look at your existing infrastructure and have those tools recommend the best path forward for you from connectivity through computing through storage. And it's literally in something that fits in your wallet. This is like the IoT dream, right? So you bring data sander out to the edge. That's edge core cloud was the message. Does this factor into that? Well, it's all our virtual software. So like I said, DD, virtual Icelon, virtual unity, virtual. And it's just all on a stick that you don't even notice it when it's in your pocket. I have about 50 of these things in my pocket. And nobody knows. Well, it's funny because in the early days when you started talking about this, you're like, okay, when is that actually going to happen? People say that's never going to happen. It's happened. But now we're rolling with it. So big news, so when we pulled the organization together a couple of years ago, when we started to look at the individual roadmaps, 2016 was actually kind of dry for us. When we were going to rock 2015, a lot of the really cool stuff looked like it was going to be 2017. So one of the things that Guy Churchward did was he pulled us together as his leadership team and said, we have to look at the infrastructure, look at the products we're building, get rid of any product overlap, make it really easy for our customers to understand which products they should be buying and when, make it really easy and compelling for them to buy them and use them. And so 2016 has turned into one of our biggest years. So if you think we're rolling out everything in pretty much three ways. So you get it as a purpose-built product, you get it as a virtual edition, and you get it as part of Converged Infrastructure. So for a great example, that's Data Domain. So Data Domain Virtual Edition's on here. We're updating the Data Domain platform itself to do cloud tiering. So we now cloud tier your de-duplicated data into the cloud, can be any cloud you want. Clearly we prefer a virtual stream, we see that as an enterprise-class public cloud. But we're open, we like to give our customers choice so we'll take any. So we'll roll out to any public cloud. Unity is, I don't know if you guys have seen the Unity box. It's cool. So you think of the previous generation, which was the VNX, we took a look at that, ground up redesign, this thing's got Docker in there, it's got Linux in there. We've gone from 7U to 2U, 27 cables to six cables, massively simplified user interface. And it's 20 grand. Yeah, industry-leading, that's all flash. Great. Starts at under 20 grand, neighborhood starts at under 10. So you've got this tiny box that gives you massive capability and just scales. So the big message that I heard on the keynote was, I want you to explain this, because I think it's important for folks to know, you have kind of the pillars, all flash kind of storage products. And then you have this protection and trust layer underneath. That's the data domain, copy data. Describe that. Was it a bolt-on? Is it a bolt-on data domain to all flash? What changed from two years ago with the pillars? You have ExtremeIO and you have the VMAX flash. That seems to be the big thing with VMAX. Those are the pillars on top and then the platform underneath, protection and trust. Well, so if you look at what we think it takes to modernize a data center, there's a few things, right? So you've got to leverage the cloud, you've got to leverage software-defined storage, you've got to leverage flash, but the unconverged infrastructure. But the reality is, no matter what you do, you have to protect your data, right? It's one of those things where every modern data center needs a modern data protection strategy. And that's why it's not a bolt-on, but it is something that wraps the whole thing. You didn't incorporate that into the design of all flash. Well, we did in a way, because on the all flash platforms, we have copy data management. So we actually have very lightweight snapshots on VMAX all flash, on Unity and on ExtremeIO. But on their own, they aren't really a data protection strategy. There's something that will help you, but you need a management layer for that. And that's where our data protection starts. So Unity got a lot of buzz, because everyone liked the Unity messaging, because it does unify a lot of the VNX. And everyone loves an array. And everyone loves an array. But I want to get your thoughts on something. I'll read the quote that I wrote down from the keynote. It says, announcing Unity, new all flash array family from mid-tier applications, a unified system, and then there was a reference that he Goulden mentioned to startups that are slow and irrelevant. And independent testing confirmed that we've also confirmed some good automation, but also comparing some existing startups that do something similar, and that they were slow and irrelevant. And Goulden said, we can't say which ones. Can you say which ones? So what I can tell you, is when we were building Unity, one of the tasks that we set the team was, if you're looking at mid-level IT departments, if you're looking at remote office branch office, those guys, they don't have dedicated IT departments. So this box has to be simpler than simple to manage, operate, deploy, buy, right? So we looked at what we thought were the leading ease, or what were supposed to be the leading ease of use products. Product that were converged. Like who? And specifically. Like Etonics? Well, products, that sounds like a good one to go up against, doesn't it? So Converts products that were specifically aimed at that lower-mid market. And then we got a company called MadPow. Now what MadPow do is they do user interface testing and design for people like Google, Microsoft, and Apple. And so we got them in independently, and we didn't sit behind them saying, this is why we did this. We gave them the box. They took some compete, what we felt were the target that we wanted to look at in terms of simplicity, and they tested it. And they said it was a modern, smooth, fast interface. And they love that they ranked us way higher than anybody else. And automation was a big part of that too, I heard from references. I mean, when you're talking about this at that mid-level, it just has to be simple. It's just got to work. And that's why 27 cables to six, a very small form factor, making these things almost infinitely scalable, making them really easy to use. That's what matters to those guys. And so it fits in, we heard today, it fits in sort of the low end, but it can go pretty high. Well, this thing can go high. You can get up to three petabytes and a rack with these things. So, I mean, you said earlier, Guy was saying, let's eliminate all the overlap, but there's overlap there, isn't there? I mean, I could see this attracting a lot of people at the high end. Well, if you look at Extreme IO and VMAX, at the high end, they offer a very high degree of incredibly rich data services, right? VMAX with SRDF, VMAX with mainframe support, VMAX with iSeries support. Yeah, you're not going to do that with you. A lot of, you're not going to, well, you're not even going to want that at the mid-level, right? What, the thing with Extreme IO, it's got all the inline compression, inline DGP, again, very much an enterprise-class platform. The features that we built into Unity were really for smaller deployments and ease of use. So, things like VMAX and Extreme IO are optimized for density per tile. Something like Unity is optimized for simplicity. What about this copy data management capability that you guys are talking about? So, copy data management is starting to be the next big problem in IT. So, all our modern architectures, all our modern systems have this ability to do snapshots. The snapshots are fantastic because they allow you to, for example, give your developers their own copy of the database, but you don't need 50 copies of the database. They only have the delta rate. It's like spinning up VMs. Easy, go! But this is what happened, right? So, when VMs first came along, they were awesome because they allowed us to separate the underlying hardware from our software, right? From our applications. But then what happens when you're trying to manage thousands of these things? And the things about copies, copies are great because everybody can make them. But, you know how engineers work, right? I'm going to take a copy and I'm going to work on this thing until I get it fixed. And then I'm going to work on the next thing that I want to fix. I'll just take another copy for that. So, you have all these old copies sitting around and there's service level issues with that, they're taking up a ton of space. In many cases, there can actually be legal issues with that. Because they're working process. Exactly. You don't want that stuff hanging around. So, the enterprise copy data management technology that we're going to show tomorrow. I see demo on it tomorrow. It really does two things. The first one is it gives you the ability, a single place to go for all your copies across your infrastructure. So, it allows you to discover, monitor and manage your copies. Which, you know, if you're thinking about 50 to 120 to 150 copies of the same data lying around, this thing gives you that single view, it allows you to manage it and it allows you to delete the, well, it allows you to put in a process whereby you can get rid of the old ones. And Dell was talking about Costco to zero, all this Moore's law stuff. So, that kind of makes sense, has as many copies as possible. Why not, right? Yeah. But I got to ask you the question, because resiliency is a big theme in your group. Be resilient, be more efficient, use slash would be highly optimized around that transactional, traditional workload. Then groove, swing, if you will, in IT. But then there's also this, they have this optimized mode, kind of gap between the emerging cloud native apps that happens on the other side. And cloud native in this gap, what's the bridge? How do your customers move from your group, which essentially pass the, essentially the baton, if you will, those cloud native workloads that look differently? So how do your two groups work together and how does a customer rationalize that? Well, really it depends on the applications, right? So one of the things that we find with our customers is that as they look at applications, they tend to bucketize them by the length of life that our application's going to have, right? So if they're looking at an application with a seven plus year lifespan, that goes over at least two hardware refreshes. So they look at that as very much what we consider tech debt, right? You've heard us talk about, you heard Guy talk about tech debt before. So we see that as a tech debt thing, right? So applications that are going to be around for over seven years require considerable investment, considerable overhead to manage, monitor and have them work. If you have applications that are only going to be around for a year or so, or applications that are only going to be three to five years, that's not necessarily the most optimal place to push them, right? So an app that's only going to be around for a year, you would probably just push into the cloud. It's one to three years, just put it in the cloud. If it's three to five, put it on hyper-converged, because if it goes away, you can still repurpose that to do something else. From, but to get back to your question, right? Because I've kind of ignored your question up until now, is from our customer's perspective, it's about giving them choice. So if you are an existing VMAX customer today, and you want a tier to the cloud or an existing DD customer, you don't have to go and buy an enterprise hybrid cloud. You can just go and leverage the cloud tier and that we've built in the VMAX, the cloud tier and that we've built into Unity, the cloud tier and that we've built in the DD. If you want to build a full end-to-end cloud-native application, and you want to do that yourself, then you can do that using our platforms with Pivotal. How you deploy it will actually change depending on the nature of the application. If it's object-based or it's more transactional, sort of the applications that we typically have. So we work very, clearly work very closely with CJ's group and those other guys, but our thing is give customers choice if they want to push to the cloud, let them push to the cloud, and it should be any cloud, not just that. The workload drives it basically. Right, and it's like choice of array. But you're building that cloud option into virtually every one of your solutions. So every product that we have should be able to leverage the cloud, right? And that's part of the deal with Virtustream as well, so that we can own the end-to-end solution. So from my perspective, the cloud is just another type of media, right? It shouldn't be different. It shouldn't be different than just stickin' drives in a machine, it's just more storage space. So our goal is to make it as simple as possible for people to leverage the cloud in their existing infrastructure, and then we also make it very simple for them to build cloud apps, deploy cloud apps, or if they're already using cloud apps like Google or Office 365, we've got things like spanning. So spanning will give you that cloud-to-cloud backup. Right, so our thing is, you want to run a virtual edition on white box hardware, great. You want to buy purpose built from us? Great, we'll do that. You want to buy Converse Infrastructure? We'll do that. I mean, our view is give our customers choice and build the best to break the solution to solve whatever problem they have. And they'll buy from you. It makes the sales cycle a little bit more complex. Because it's always harder to choose between five things than it is to just, if you only have one thing to sell, you only sell one thing, right? But that's why we have such a great sales force. You know, so I've been at EMC, this is my fourth EMC world, third year at EMC. One of the main reasons I joined EMC was because the sales force is the best enterprise sales force that exists. There's no one better in this industry. These guys continue to sell incredibly well in a market that is, in many ways, is starting to shrink. And that extends to the channel as well, right? I mean, EMC turned around its channel, whatever, six, seven years ago. And by the way, Unity? One from worst to first. Unity's built for the channel. You think about that box under 10K for a hybrid solution with that level of capability? Our channel partners are over the moon about Unity. I bet. So this is what we're going to hear from Guy tomorrow. Let's give us, show a little leg. Well, show a little leg. How can I pre-empt Guy? It's, there's, I can tell you, there's a pub involved. Ha, all right. There's virtual reality. We just did a double a couple of weeks ago. There's virtual reality involved. There's a coffee shop involved. We're actually talking about doing a demo using bagels. Not sure how that's going to work out. I've got to go into rehearsals and take a look at that one. Oh, yeah, I'm ready to go. I know, it's just, Are you going to have a board on the stage like show 2C? No, no. Have you seen, Church Ward is not coordinated. Yes. So he's bad enough on four wheels, put him on, his history on two wheels isn't very good, you should ask him. He'll break a hip or something if we put him on one of those boards. So, one of the things we're going to do is we're going to bring up the leaders from across CT that have new products. So Fidelma, Jeff, Pedro and Beth Phelan are going to be up there. Guy and Jeremy are going slide lights. So we've actually, I actually think they're better without slides. Because they play, I mean this is a very tightly knit team. We're a very tightly knit team. So letting them just play off each other. And they have things that they want to talk about and we're just going to play a fair bit of it by ear. Now there's still going to be slides, there's still going to be videos, there's still going to be demos. But we are letting them play a little fast and loose. Which is, I think that's kind of where the magic happens. Yeah, it's like riffing on the guitar. Musicians kind of just jamming. Right, and you've got the pressure of the new boss sitting right there in the front row. And Michael will be sat there in the front row with a big grin on his face. Final question, given that fact that it looked like there was a good call making the two groups, your group is doing very well. Share to the customers that are watching, what's coming out of this EMC world for them? Because you have the merger on the doorstep, you have essentially the world changing, it's in transition to this whole new way. You still got to optimize for traditional workloads. What could you glean out of this EMC world? Share with them. What's the key messages? I think one of the big concerns and one of the things that you've seen our competitors kind of push on is this is going to cause complete, this merger is going to cause complete disarray. And everything's going to stop because everybody's going to be focused on the merger and what their new jobs are going to be and all that. Hasn't happened. We are absolutely 100% focused on innovating and delivering new products, not just delivering them, delivering new products, high quality and on time. So Unity has been orderable for over a month. Right, so you could order it first of April. Those guys delivered a fantastic product ahead of schedule in manufacture and ready to go today. Virtual edition, purpose built and converged. All on the same day. You're going to see more of that from us. More converged stuff. We're actually also announcing a converged backup appliance. So you get data domain with our backup software and a VCE built, deployed, integrated box. You're shipping products. You guys are shipping a lot of products. This is the embarrassment of riches. I could sit here all day and tell you guys about our products. We've got another hour. Chris Radcliffe on theCUBE here. This is theCUBE here. Extracting the same noise. You're watching theCUBE right back with more live coverage from EMC World. After this short break, you're watching theCUBE. It's always fun to come back to theCUBE because, you know, the discussion is always.