 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. Welcome back to VMworld. You are watching theCUBE. We are live on day two continuing coverage from the show this year. I'm Lisa Martin, my co-host is Stu Miniman and we're very excited to welcome our next guest. First time on theCUBE, Scott D'Landy. First time. First time technology director at Dell EMC. Welcome to theCUBE. Thrilled to be here. We're thrilled to have you and you have a couple of really interesting things that I want to kick off with. First of all, I played Vodgeball. If you're not familiar, Vodgeball is a really cool. Starts on the Sunday right before VMworld. Benefits, Wounded Wars, which is fantastic. But it's a serious game I've played before. I was terrified for my life. What was your experience like this year? It's a great event and they've been doing it for the last several years, I mean. So it was my first time I was able to participate but it basically is a lot of the partners and exhibitors here. They put a team together and it's to support the Wounded Warrior Foundation. So it's a great charity and a great cause. But yeah, it was very intense because when they asked me to play, I was like, dodgeball, Vodgeball, how hard could it be, right? You just pick up the ball and you just throw it at somebody, right? I had no idea that this is like a legit thing. There's referees, there's rules, there's strategy. I mean, it was like intense. So, and you know, we had fun. I think everybody had fun, but I will say there were, there were some teams that were very serious and very determined to do well. Yes. Nobody injured, I hope. Not that I recall. No, no, there was one injury. There was one injury. Somebody was going backwards and fell into somebody who was taking a picture and there was blood. Ooh. Yeah, there was a little bit of blood. But hey, again, for a good cause, right? So. People at VMworld, they're serious about whatever they're doing. Very serious, that's for sure. That's for sure. I think also that interests me about your background is you have a really interesting connection with an industry that people wouldn't think, oh, there's a similarity between wrestling, WWE and Dell EMC. On the customer experience side, you've talked with John Cena, who I admire what work he does on TV. Tell us about the similarities that you and he discussed about the customer experience. So yeah, so it was last year. So there's an event. It's actually a legit thing called Customer Experience Day. And so at Dell EMC, we had different events planned at the different locations and there were speakers that came in. Matter of fact, if you were in the Santa Clara area, they had Matthew McConaughey was the individual that they had come there. But we had John Cena, which I think we probably got a better deal out of that. Because you can put to your point, it's like what's the similarities? And I even asked them as we were getting ready to do the interview. I was chatting with them a bit and I was like, you know, you probably have no idea what we do and why you're here. And this is like completely different to, and he was like, absolutely not. I am so looking forward to this because I'm going to talk to new people that I've never talked to before. What we do and what you do is very similar because it really is about that customer experience and making sure that people enjoy it. They, you connect with those customers. You connect with those users out there. It's all about how the technology on our side is getting consumed and what our users are able to do. But it's also the products that they're putting out there and just from an entertainment perspective. And he got up there and he spoke for 20 minutes and it was amazing. I mean, he just did such a great job. Yeah, so Scott, I actually worked with you at EMC. You did, yes. And you've been at EMC for just a few years. I still have to say it's now Dell EMC. Dell EMC. I say, for some reason, LinkedIn says I worked for Dell EMC for 10 years. I worked for EMC Corporation. So those of us in Massachusetts, EMC had a profound impact on kind of technology. But how long has it been now? You've been there and tell us how you got to your current roles. With EMC and now Dell EMC, I just hit my 27th year. So going on 28 years now. Badge number 399 for anybody that's still keeping score. You started as a child, right? I was 11 when I started. It was before they changed the child. It's been five years as a, you know, yeah, yeah, childhood. But no, it's great. I mean, you think about how the company has changed and evolved in that period of time. And I think the thing that I've always loved and continue to love about the company and the organization is just how we continue to evolve, we continue to change, we continue to adapt to what's happening in the technology space. Because, you know, as you know, there's things are constantly moving. And I think the difference over the last several years is that the rate of change has completely accelerated with new ways to be able to deliver IT, new ways to basically consume the things that we've been developing for years. I come on the storage side of things and just from a company perspective, the portfolio has expanded to include pretty much anything from a technology perspective. So it's really, really cool to be able to be a part of that. All right, so Scott, so, you know, there are many in the storage industry that have perspective, but I mean, you've been there since like, I guess day one of Symmetrics, you know, really. And Symmetrics through DMX, through VMAX. It's still product line, it's still going strong. You know, why is VMAX, you know, important in enterprise tech today? Well, you know, you think about it and it really is cool. It's something that I've worked closely with throughout my career. But you know, you think about examples of technology that have been available in the market for 30 or so years. I mean, I can only come up with two. If you can come up with one, let me know. But I think of mainframes and I think of Symmetrics, VMAX, right? And there's still a key part of technology because there's a tremendous amount of trust. The world's most mission critical workloads run on those environments. It's a proven platform that still continues to be really, really a core part of an IT infrastructure for many, many organizations. Yeah, it always resonated with me. I think you talk to anyone in that storage organization and they've all read only the paranoid survive. So, you know, we know, you know, Intel microprocessors, you know, going strong, you know, lots of discussion about where more is going. But right, you know, I think back to the early days of things like SRDF really changed a lot of what's going on. And, but now, I mean, you know, flash is the discussion. We've just been talking with some of your peers about, you know, software to find storage. Yes. What are some of those key customer conversations you're seeing these days out there in the market? So I think, you know, from a modernization perspective, clearly flash is becoming the predominant way people want to store their information, right? And that's, you know, you think about flash when it was initially introduced years and years ago, it provided a solution for high performance requirements, right? It was really, really fast, much faster than mechanical media at the time. But it was also really, really expensive. And I think what's changed is kind of two things. Number one, the media costs have come down pretty dramatically, right? But still more expensive than spinning drives. But the arrays themselves have also become much more efficient in terms of how they're able to take advantage of flash, right? You think of things like data reduction technologies, compression, dedupe, thin provisioning, snapshots, all of these types of things, where we typically see about a four to one space efficiency, right? So if I've got a hundred terabytes, I'm paying for that hundred terabytes of capacity, but through all of these technologies, I can make that look like 400 terabytes to the outside world. So that dramatically changes the cost curve and makes it way more efficient, way more affordable than what people have previously done with things like hybrid arrays or even spinning drives. So it's cool. And you think of what's going, what's happening in the future, there are different memory based technologies, storage class memory technologies that are going to start to become available in the marketplace. And it'll be interesting to see architecturally how that's going to impact some of the things that are available in the marketplace today. So it's going to be very interesting, I think in the next couple of years, as the technology continues to evolve, and you're able to do things from a performance, density, capacity perspective that, today you're just kind of getting to the tip of the iceberg in terms of some of the niche technologies that are out there. These are things that are going to become much, much more mainstream going forward. So again, people often think that storage, storage, storage, the boring stuff, right? The only time people care about storage is if something breaks, right? They just assume that it's going to work. But again, there's a lot of really cool things happening from an innovation and from a technology perspective. And again, being on the technology side and getting to work very closely with the engineering guys and the product managers, and then being able to talk to customers and users and understand kind of what challenges they're facing today and where they see things going in the future. Again, it's a great opportunity because you get to see all of this stuff coming together. So it continues to be fun. I don't know if I can do another 27 years, but I'm hoping to get at least a couple more good ones. You got like another 30 before retirement age, something like that, right? Right, right. Yeah, I think you're right. I'll do the math on that, maybe not quite 30, but I appreciate it anyways, Stu. So speaking of innovation, Michael Dow was talking about that this morning. And I thought it was cool that he and Pat shared some laughs on, you know, now that the combination is done with Dell EMC and they own VMware. There's competitors that are now partners, et cetera. Can you talk to us, you talked about kind of talking with product groups. How are you facilitating innovation and integration, say with the VMAX on the, with VMware? Well, how is that kind of going? So, you know, VMware is definitely a big, obvious partner for us. But they also, their customers and the use cases that they have fit in very well with our technology and our system, specifically around VMAX. You know, you look at some of the really large environments that are out there. I know customers that have 50,000 plus VMs running on a single storage system, right? And, you know, you think of just how massive that is and you put 50,000 anything on one, right? So, you know, you need to make sure that you've got the performance, you've got the scale, you've got the reliability, you've got the data services. Those are the things that people need to be able to do consolidation at that scale. And that's where, you know, certainly VMAX is kind of the technology that continues to be core for those types of workloads. But again, there's always new things that are coming up and there's also, you know, a set of new challenges that users are always looking at. And again, Flash is a good example where, you know, you're starting to hit the limits in terms of what you could do with traditional mechanical media, but the Flash was still too expensive at the time. But again, taking advantage of that data reduction technology and building it into the system and being able to do it in a way that doesn't compromise any of the data services, it doesn't impact performance, it doesn't change the reliability or the availability of the applications and the workloads. I mean, that's what kind of users sort of expect from us, right, and that's what we deliver. I think you still got 30 more years in you, just with this passion next time and that you're talking about now. We'll see, we'll see. Well, maybe you guys will have me back next year and we can see where we are then. Well, we are so thankful to you for stopping by theCUBE for your first time. We're now part of theCUBE alumni. Awesome, I can't, I am so thrilled. Yeah, I don't think we have John Cena on. We do have, you know, a few professional athletes. I've interviewed a couple of former Patriots and the like. As I told John when I interviewed him, he may be bigger than me, but I have better hair. Bye, Fart. Bye, Fart. Well, Scott Nielany, thank you so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing some of the innovations that you're doing and we'll look forward to seeing you on theCUBE next time. Awesome, thank you. All right, and for Scott, my co-host to Minimum, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching day two, live from VMworld 2017 from Las Vegas. Stick around, we will be right back.