 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here at the Venetian. 15,000 attendees, one of the biggest, most important tech conferences all year long. I'm Rebecca Knight, your host, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We're joined by Caitlin Gordon. She is the VP Product Marketing at Dell EMC. Thanks so much for coming back on theCUBE, Caitlin. I know, this is so nice. Maybe we'll have to make it three days in a row. Oh, we would love that. All right. So last year, at this very conference, you launched PowerMax. What's, walk our viewers through sort of the new capability. It's the latest and greatest of what's going on with PowerMax this year. Yeah, my favorite thing to talk about is PowerMax, so we couldn't miss that today. Yeah, so a couple updates on the PowerMax front. Couple on the software side and then more on the hardware side as well. So from a software side, we've got a couple pieces, which is a lot of our customers, really starting with the largest of our customers, are looking to add more automation into their data centers and storage is no exception. And how do I automate some of those storage workflows to make things run more seamlessly, get into more of a cloud operating model? So we had a couple of announcements on that front. We have a new VRO plugin to automate workflows through VRO, as well as Ansible Playbooks coming this summer. So a couple of important automation enhancements and obviously a lot more to come there in the future. The other one in a similar vein is that containers, right? We've seen the increased adoption of containers. So, and that the containers being used in production applications means that external storage has actually become a reality in that world. And support for a CSI plugin on PowerMax is something that we're seeing more interest from. So we've announced that that's coming this summer as well. So Caitlin, I remember a year ago when PowerMax got announced, I heard things like intelligence and automation. And I went to Adnan, you know, who's been working on this kind of technology for decades. I said, Adnan, how haven't we been talking about this for decades? Tell me why it's different. And he lit up like I hadn't seen him in a while. He told me what's going on. For I want you to connect now a year later is what's this mean for customers? What does that automation and intelligence mean? Is there certain KPIs or hero metrics you have as to customers using this today that they couldn't have done and with last generation intelligence storage? Yeah, and I think about it. It's really about moving to this concept of the autonomous data center and how does this become an autonomous storage system? So both the intelligence within the system that we talked about last year and the decisions that the system is making itself every single day, all by itself. That has really changed and it's a completely new evolution of it. It's making billions of decisions a day for customers. So they don't have to do that. It means you can have fewer people managing storage and they can invest in other things. Then when you move that up the stack, some of the VRO, the Ansible Playbooks really enables you to then automate more of the workflows within that. So again, it gets you more into that operating model and you can automate not just the storage infrastructure but then get to this autonomous data center. So we talked to Travis briefly about DevOps and you're mentioning Ansible Playbooks. For years we've been talking to customers and saying, oh okay, we need to get to more agile environments, DevOps there, but enterprise storage specifically is a little bit slow to adopt. So it sounds like we're starting to get to greater adoption. What got us over that hurdle and where are customers with it today? Yeah, and I think it's really the maturity of our largest global customers that have gotten to a place where for the workloads that will continue to remain on these on-prem infrastructure, on our purpose-built storage, on our high-end arrays, they need to run that as efficiently as possible. And a lot of the work we've done to build an AI does part of that, but really ultimately they're looking at in their 3-tier architecture, how do they run things more smoothly? And it's really our customers that have brought that to us as a requirement and we've been able to support that. So how do you work with customers? I mean innovation is of course an underlying theme of this conference. Talk about how you collaborate with customers to solve their problems and how you helped them think ahead of what their future needs are. Yeah, and certainly Travis, myself, our teams as well as the engineering team, spend a lot of time with our customers in the briefing center and the field, really talking about their challenges and the privilege that we have, especially with something like a PowerMax platform, is the customers we have there are the ones that are constantly pushing the boundaries of what we can do for them today. So they always need the best performance, the best efficiency, and what has changed is they also now need that simplicity. They need that operational simplicity even on their high resiliency, high performance systems. And we spend a lot of time understanding those requirements and the problems that they're trying to solve and how we can help them get there. And that could be automation, that could be containers, but it could also be cloud, right? And that's the other piece that we've made a lot of investments across our portfolio is how do we support that cloud consumption, cloud operating model, leveraging public cloud. And a lot of it really just comes from how do we help our customers continue to solve their problems. It's a competitive marketplace and as you said, customers, they want everything. They want efficiency, they want simplicity, they want it to not cost them too much money. What's your unique selling point? How do you message, this is why our solution is the best one? Our overall strategy at Dolomsey from a storage perspective is that we'll have a single product in each segment which we compete and each one will be architected for very specific requirements so that we can meet the combination of a price point and features and capabilities across all these different perspectives and that each one of our platforms is designed to be industry leading in that category which is why we have PowerMax on the high end, the resiliency, the performance, the availability that banks, hospitals, governments around the world expect but at the same time we have mid-range platforms. We have an entry platform that can be sold for under $25,000, right? And has a different set of requirements. We have the unstructured business which is supporting the data error and that data explosion of file data. So the fact of the matter is that it's all about having the right architecture so customers can have the data in the right place at the right time with the right service level and that's why we have this portfolio and within each portfolio that we're leading in each one of those categories and that's kind of the bigger perspective we have on it. We do not just have a hammer, not everything is a nail for us and that's an important part of how we can partner with our customers to help them solve not one challenge but all the challenges they have. Caitlin, one of the interesting shifts we saw at the show is clouds being talked at more than ever at this show. One of the earlier segments we had on, we talked about the cloud-enabled infrastructure. So things like PowerMax, you know, I asked Jay Crone, you know, tell me why this isn't cloudwashing and he gave me a good answer. What I want to ask your angle on is when you talk to customers, you know, how does storage fit into the overall discussion of their cloud strategy? You know, what are some of the key business drivers and you know, how is Dell technology? Yeah, and I'm glad you said that because Jay and I have had this cloudwashing conversation as well as I think that's the unfortunate thing in the reality of the market in the past probably 10 years is a lot of cloudwashing and where we're really focused today is, and we talked a little about this yesterday as well, is there's one piece of the, how do we fit into overall Dell technologies cloud strategy with the Dell tech cloud and the VCF integration? We kind of covered that. The other piece is that when we look at cloud-enabled infrastructure, we are focused on solving really specific use cases that we hear our customers trying to solve today of connecting that data center into a public cloud. So that could be what we call cloud connected systems, the tiering of data from your on-premises infrastructure into the public cloud. Really that's more of an archiving use case, the kind of a tape replacement use case. That could be data domain cloud tier, cloud tiering, cloud pools, all the different pieces we have there. Could be cloud data services, right? Offering storage data services in a public cloud. Unity cloud additionally would be one or the new Dell EMC cloud storage services could be another one. Or even that cloud data insights piece of it. So it's really about solving that, solving real challenges about disaster recovery, analytics in the cloud, how do you do that in a really impactful way that's simple and easy for customers. Yeah, the other cloud related thing I wanted to get your take on is many of the solutions I heard on there is, you know, it's VxRail underneath, it's VxRail underneath, it's VxRail underneath. You notice that? I did, and heck, we had a number of people, VxRail's doing great. But, you know, if you talk about cloud and the infrastructure that I have in my data center, you know, we've talked to Dell for years, you know, the new PowerMax last year is underneath some of those environments. Where does that fit in kind of CI and cloud, you know, infrastructure pieces? Yeah, in a lot of different places, and for a lot of different reasons, right? Some of it's just the high value workloads. You need the scalability, the resiliency, the performance, you need the ability to scale your compute and your capacity separately. You want to be able to consolidate not just your applications, but actually all your file. And so something like Unity or even PowerMax, you can have your block workloads and your file workloads there. So we have a lot of customers looking to use a traditional three tier architecture, but leverage that in a true cloud operating model from an automation standpoint, cloud consumption model, but also leveraging public cloud compute, right? Leveraging the public cloud in really impactful ways, for example, for disaster recovery. So it's really that combining what people love about our industry-leading best of breed storage with that agility of the public cloud is a combination that we certainly hear a lot from our customers of how can I make the best use of cloud. Everyone walks in and says they have a cloud first strategy, but it's really about well, how do you actually think about data first and then how do you have a cloud strategy that supports that? So let's talk about the future. I mean, as you said, this is what the customer is thinking about right now, but it's your job to think ahead and make sure that you are giving them solutions that fit their future needs. So what are you thinking about the solutions that are available today that were really unimaginable five years ago? Think about ahead to 2025 when there is enough data to fill the Empire State Building 13 times over. How are you helping companies manage this tsunami of data? Yeah, and I think part of that is really about, again, the operations we talked about. Part of that really just comes back to having the right architecture for that type of workload. So this is where Icelon actually, well before the data era, actually was designed for this specifically. So Icelon, created in the early 2000s, was designed to have one file system from terabytes to petabytes. A single administrator can manage now up to 58 petabytes in a single file system. That's game changing when you think about the scale that we're seeing today. So the reason we went to that capacity isn't certainly just because we thought we could. It was because our customers were asking for it. And it's these workloads in that data era that we're talking about, autonomous driving, et cetera, that are just driving the scalability limits and they're asking for more and more in the most efficient floor print possible. And if you think about that, especially even in the cloud context, there's a combination of how do you leverage that in the data center, right? And physics means you can't get it up into the cloud necessarily. But then also there are use cases there like analytics of how do you leverage a public cloud compute, but then you have that industry leading scale out NAS on the, from the storage side, so you can combine that. So when you talk about something that we talked about here last year and now we're talking about it a little bit more as well as our integration with Google Cloud Platform. So a lot of our customers are looking to use GCP for compute for analytics workloads. And it's really almost rent your compute for analytics. But you have to have the right storage platform with the right architecture on the back end of that. So what we've done is fully integrated ISLON platform and file system through GCP portal so you can actually combine that public cloud compute and that file system that can support that type of scale. So it's a really unique combination that can help support not only the scale of that data, but also that some of the unique use cases and workloads that are coming out of that. All right, so Caitlin, a lot of products here that would be talking about. Last thing I want to ask is in the customer conversation you have, is data the center of the challenge and opportunity they have? Is there something else that's kind of bubbling up as you look across the conversations you're having that you can share with our audience? I think at the center of what I hear from customers, data's in there, but they don't come in saying it's data. They'll come in thinking about just trying to figure out how to use cloud properly. They think about how do I simplify things? How do I operate in a way to meet the service levels with a budget that's definitely not getting bigger? And really be as efficient as possible. And it's not, some people are looking to go public cloud thinking it's an easy button, but it's really about how do I change things to run more efficiently? And customers inherently do understand, right, that the data is at the center of it and it's increasingly the most valuable asset in the organization, and then they need to optimize their infrastructure to support that. So it really does come down to what can we help them do? Simplify, optimize, secure that so that they can truly unlock that data capital. Great, well thank you so much, Caitlin, for coming back on theCUBE. Yes, thanks for having me. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. There is so much more coming up of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World in just a little bit.