 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE, day three in Vegas, Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with John Troyer, welcoming some distinguished CUBE alumni back to our site here at Dell Technologies World and back to theCUBE. We've got Sean Weenage, CTO of Enterprise Solutions at Rackspace and Scott Delaney, Technical Director at Dell EMC. Hey guys. Thanks so much for coming back and talking with us about what you guys are up to lately. So Rackspace, Sean, you guys have been a long time Dell EMC partner. We are interested to learn about what you guys are doing from a service provider's perspective with the new PowerMax. What are some of the unique requirements that you were looking to bring into your environment versus traditional enterprise? Sure, so we have been a long time user of Dell and EMC technologies. You're going way back into the early 2000s, almost the inception of our company, and we've always relied on them for availability, for high performance to be able to support our customers. Specifically now, we're moving, we're looking at the PowerMax release and the capabilities it brings to us. And if Dell EMC has really taken service provider needs into account, right? So they've created additional capabilities around monitoring, around visualization, around role-based access that allows us to extend features out to our customers. Things like easier migration tools, things like incredible performance that allows us to not have to micromanage workloads. And so it's an extremely powerful platform that we're looking to put to work for our 100,000 plus customers. Yeah, and I think some of the things that Rackspace has as far as use cases are very much things that influenced a lot of the functionality and the new features that went into the product. And I'll give you a couple of examples. So one of the things that we introduced is the ability to do provisioning of storage based on service levels, right? So what that means is I can figure out what I want my performance to be for a specific workload with folks getting higher performance, using more resources and having a premium associated with that, but also being able to provide good performance at economical cost points. So I now have a range of options that we can now provide through the service providers. But what's cool about the technology is in years ago, in order to do that, you had to really be able to understand the underlying technology so that you could go ahead and you can tune the knobs and the buttons and the levers to make sure that if gold was supposed to be this, it would give you gold. And if you had platinum and it was supposed to be this, but those things were very manual in terms of how they were set up. The new system basically is more about what is the result that you're trying to achieve from a performance perspective, and then we use all of the automation, the machine learning, the predictive analytics to figure out, okay, where do I place and move that data based on the policy that's assigned for it to make sure that I'm in compliance with that service level. So again, a lot of those things are specifically done to help service providers meet a wide range of requirements for the users in use cases that they have for their customers. And our engineers are very excited not to have to spend so many knobs and stare at the blinky dots. And there's the types of things that keep them up at night. How am I guaranteeing the service levels and the performance that my customers need? So the AI capability, the ability to do tiering on the fly that we don't have to manage that allows us to really focus on higher value activities for our customers. I was interested in your experience, right? One of the marquee features on this new release is labeled AI, right? And that means a lot of things to a lot of people. And I don't really, in drilling down yesterday, right? There was a lot of really interesting stuff about its learning capabilities and the fact that it would look back farther and infer it knows about certain things like Oracle files, it knows how to treat them and it'll learn more and there'll be more roles and it'll figure some stuff out itself. So I don't actually care whether it's called AI or not. At the end of the day, does it lower your operational costs and make you more efficient, right? And it sounds like that's been your experience. Hey, it makes us more efficient, but more so it makes us more effective in delivering to customers, right? So if we're doing, you know, VNX or wherever the platform might be and now PowerMax and we're putting hundreds to thousands of workloads on an array, we have to make sure that there's not contention between customers, right? Every one of those customers are relying on us and they may have different workload cycles, right? Some might be, you know, we have certain customers for whom their busiest season are the weekends, right? The holidays and they will have different cycles than customers that are traditional e-commerce or digital marketing companies. And so this allows us not to have to worry about tuning individually, that the system can adjust and take care of that and ensure that we're meeting those service levels that we provided to our customers. So absolutely a huge step forward. And one of the other things again around service providers is, you know, you've got the performance, you've got the management of the system, but then the other key driver for some of the new features is around the security of the platform, right? Because now you're moving into a world of multi-tenancy, right? So you've got different organizations that are now sharing a resource. So number one, you want to make sure that everybody gets the performance and the predictability and that's where the machine learning and analytics comes into play. But then you also want to be able to provide the individual users access to be able to do certain things, to view certain things, but make sure that they're only able to access the pieces of storage that they should only be accessing. So by, you know, adding additional controls around role-based security and building that into the system and allowing you to control who has access to what specific functions within the system, who can see what, you know, all these different roles makes it a lot easier for Sean to be able to take the rich reporting that they can now provide and to be able to share that up with their users and make sure that they're doing it in a very secure way. On that security front, sorry, Sean, I'm just curious, you know, security transformation, IT transformation, digital transformation, all themes of this make it real event that we're at. I'm curious from a, you know, we talk with customers that say, well, the data isn't valuable unless we can actually glean and extract and act on insights from it to be able to deliver better customer experiences and differentiated products to market. On the differentiation front, what is from Rackspace's perspective? What is this partnership and use of PowerMax going to be able to deliver for you, not revealing secret sauce, but from a, how is this differentiating where you're able to offer your customers? Well, I think we should talk about how Rackspace differentiates themselves from other players in the market. Because I think that's a key part of the story. I was just going to go there. So Rackspace has a long history of being a managed service provider to customers and traditionally it's been the managed hosting space. Everything was dedicated and increasingly through our acquisitions over the last couple of years, our portfolio has broadened, you know, everything from colocation to private clouds to public cloud capabilities to hybrid solutions and an increased focus on applications security, ERP, digital applications. And so our customers are coming to us with this wide range of platforms and going, I'm struggling with this transformation. How do I do this? What's the right form factor? How do I look at my applications? So increasingly Rackspace has built out capabilities around a professional services arm to help customers navigate that transformation. You know, is this a really legacy application that should go in one of our colocation facilities? Is this a high secure, really highly governed and heavy compliance requirement that should go into private cloud or should be looking at public cloud systems? And increasingly customers are saying, okay, I am neat to stay in the private cloud that customers are talking to. Because of security, because I need to be able to guarantee performance, because I need to have visibility and configurability of my solution. So this gives us all of those, right? It gives us the ability to have a secure, single tenant or multi-tenant environment. It gives us the ability to have that high performance and gives the ability to federate out that visibility, to give customers a cloud-like control and cloud-like visibility, or I'd say even beyond cloud-like visibility, despite going through a service provider and not being able to put their hands on the infrastructure themselves. Yeah, I would even extend that because again, you've got the technology side, but then the other thing that I think that people really appreciate in partnering with Rackspace is just the amount of expertise that they bring to the table. Expertise, not just in the technology side, but understanding different industries and different customer environments and what are the best practices and how do we set things up and make sure that we're not just meeting expectations, but we're exceeding what those users expect to see from an IT perspective. I know that that's a big part of why people go to Rackspace. And Dell EMC is making the infrastructure easier for us as we move up the stack. Like our customers, don't want to spend a lot of time in the hardware tier and the infrastructure tier. I'm seeing some real eye charts out here around all the different technologies, containerization, various types of databases, big data. I mean, just absolute eye charts that on some of these very large screens you still can't read, right? So the technologies that are on top that are really driving value are becoming more complex. That's where we want to focus our time and energy and let the infrastructure play a larger role in self-managing. That's actually a really interesting segue maybe into the bigger industry for a second. I think, you know, the industry goes in hype cycles, right? And the public conversation anyway. And if you would have just picked up some stuff, magazines or whatever, they still print magazines, some websites a year or two ago, right? You'd think that maybe hyper-converged architectures were going to eat the world. One size was going to fit all in the cloud and on-prem. In the meantime, in the background for many people, but, you know, front of mind, right? They're chugging along. There's a huge portfolio. Dell EMC never stepped back from saying, we have a portfolio, right? And one of those tiers is this V-Max and now the next generation, this PowerMax, right? I don't know, Scott, can you talk a little bit about to the needs of those customers and applications that have always been there and how you're addressing them? I will tell you this. The thing that we are all clearly seeing is that IT is becoming consumerized, right? Where, from a user perspective, they just expect things to work, right? They expect everything to just be like a mobile device and it's just that simple and if I need an app, I download the app and it gets on there and if I need to replace it, everything just, and it just all magically happens. So, you know, the analogy is, when they look at IT from a user perspective, they see the duck on the pond and the duck is just kind of moving along slowly. What they don't see is the things that folks like Sean and Rackspace are doing where, underneath that, you've got these feet that are just mad pedaling away to keep the duck moving forward, right? And I think that that's the thing that's changed is we want to make sure that we are delivering the technology in the way users want to be able to consume that. But there's still a lot of heavy lifting, there's still a lot of complexity, there's still a lot of core infrastructure that happens underneath that, but the consumer doesn't want to be exposed to that. Matter of fact, most consumers aren't even aware that that's happening under the covers. It's just, it's in the cloud, right? It just works. You talked about the iCharts here, everywhere, because there is so much complexity as more and more technologies need to be integrated. How does Rackspace help demystify some of that and make things more simple for your customers in any industry, especially as data privacy and security are household terms now with everybody being really wrapped around that. How do you help make it more less complex? Like Dell EMC, we have a massive portfolio, right? So everything they have got, everything VMware has got, everything that Microsoft has got, we support all of that, plus networking infrastructure, plus security, it is a very broad capability to be able to help customers meet their needs, right? And what we're seeing is, we're seeing customers coming to us and going, I just don't have the ability to rationalize all this, I need help. We're also seeing customers that are pivoting the other way that have gone, I went to public cloud buying into the economics and that everything was going to be great. What I'm finding out is, I could shift back to private cloud and get some better economics, depending upon workload, depending upon whether it's always on, the performance requirements, security. So we're seeing a lot of changes, right? There's no one size fits all. It's not everybody's going public cloud, like was the big mantra two, three years ago. So what Rackspace has done is a few things. I mentioned earlier, we've grown through acquisition. We've expanded our footprint and do new services around co-location into Asia Pacific region, into state and federal government capabilities that came through an acquisition of data pipe. We've moved into more the application management space through the acquisition of Tri-Corp. Customers struggling with, how do I run ERP? I've got to consolidate my data centers from 25 data centers, I want to get down to three. I need to move everything to a managed service provider, but you have to be able to help me with these mission critical applications. It's no longer enough just to be at the infrastructure tier. And so wrapping around all this, we've created a very large professional services capability because going to a customer and saying, hey, what do you want? What can we sell you is not the right way. Going to the customer these days, you're having to say, what is your business pain? What can we help you with? And how can we supplement your teams and provide the expertise to be able to get you there in areas like data center consolidation, cloud transformation, DevOps enablement and big data capabilities? Last question guys, in the last 30 seconds or so, you're an early tester of PowerMax, longtime daily EMC partner as we've talked about. What are your expectations as this thing rolls out? We have very high expectations, right? We always have high expectations of next generation. Last year, we were here talking about Unity for some of our mid-tier customers now looking to PowerMax for our real high-end enterprise type customers. Our expectation is this going to simplify our management. It's going to empower our internal users and our customers more. And then we haven't even talked about the efficiencies it's going to bring in the data center in terms of the smaller amounts of space and power and cooling that are needed for something of this scale. So for us, data center is a very large operating expense. So the more we can put in a smaller space, the better off it is for us economically. Awesome. Well guys, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE, again, sharing what's going on with RecSpace, the continuation of the Dell EMC partnership. We appreciate your time. Glad to be here. Thank you. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. Again, we're live at day three of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin for John Troyer. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest.