 Live 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 day two of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here in Las Vegas at the Sands Expo. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We have two guests for this segment. We have Kunal Ruvala. He is the SVP Software Engineering Dell EMC and Ed Yardiminian, SVP Product Development Dell EMC. Thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you, thank you for having us, thank you. So, as we know, customers are dealing with a tsunami of data. And this is what, from Michael Dell, from his words, it is exceedingly complex. There is so much to manage. Can you just lay the foundation and just tell our viewers what you're hearing from customers and the specific challenges they're facing? Well, I think customers have been pretty specific with us and they've been very consistent about it. Their business is being disrupted by digital transformation. Data is exploding and it's hard to manage. And then on top of it, they're working as hard as they can to cope with that growth, best they can, but that's often causing them unintended consequences and making things either less efficient or harder to manage in their data centers and in their operation. So our job is, and that, those factors are making it difficult for them to realize the true benefit of all the data that they have. So our job is to help them unlock all of that potential that's stored in their data. All right, so, Kanal, data protection, it got some good call-outs in the keynote, new brandings, Power Protect, can you walk us through what's new, what's a rebrand and what we should be taking away? Absolutely, Stu. So it's been an exciting morning already. As you heard, we've announced Dell EMC Power Protect software and Dell EMC Power Protect X400. It is our new next generation data management software platform and the new next generation multi-dimensional data management appliance. And with Power Protect, we believe that it will help mid-size and large enterprise organizations transform from what is traditionally been a traditional form of data protection to more of a data management space and data management solutions. So that's what happens with Power Protect. Power Protect comes as you have heard in different form factors, you can deploy it as a software or it can come as an appliance. But it gives you the ability to set up policies and manage the data where you can create the backups, you can create the restores and restore the data that you need. At the same time, have other use cases to help with data management problems that customers are running into today. So as we know, the landscape is really changing. There are new threats, there are new requirements that companies need to abide by. What are the sort of, can you walk us through some of the specs of this and exactly what it does? Yeah, absolutely. It is based on a modern architecture. It is software-defined and we see that a lot of the transformation that we're seeing in the industry is driving towards software-defined. We do see that there is a need for data protection to recite closest to where the data is or where the application owners are. So if you think of customers that have thought about data protection in the past as sometimes as an afterthought, they've run into challenges when they've had incidents or they've lost data. If you think about how do you best protect some of this data, if you give the powers to the customers that are closest to the data or the data owners, there's a good chance of success with data protection strategies. So having self-service-driven architectures as well as capabilities to help with centralized IT management are key parts of what we do with Power Protect. And then as you think about just the explosion of data that we've seen in the usage and the widespread usage of cloud, it is cloud-enabled, multiple ways of using Power Protect in the cloud, storing to the cloud, cloud-turing to the cloud, so there are a lot of things that we can do with multi-cloud environments that customers have as well as having simplicity of management. So these are some of the key pillars that come together as you think about Power Protect, software as well as the appliances. Yeah, and so Ed, I'm wondering if you can just bring us in a little bit because if I look at the challenges out there, we know one of the biggest things in IT is nothing ever dies, you know? I've got old environments out there that I need to be able to manage. That data protection layer is something that, it can sometimes be, you have to be able to do it over time because it needs to work with so many different environments. So I've got everything from, oh boy, my mainframe and my legacy applications to the latest cloud-native, wonderful, multi-cloud things like we saw Microsoft up on stage talking about. Can you give us what you're hearing from customers? What are they finally moving forward and how do you manage that breadth of data that you need to be able to deal with? The diversity, both of their workloads that are being protected and the environments and the distributed data centers that they have and the operational challenges they have is tremendous. That's why we have a portfolio of products. So we have a portfolio both in the software side as well as the appliance side that deal with the different challenges that they have. But whether it's on the edge with our virtual edition in larger data centers with things like Data Domain and some of our data protection suite products as well as in this modern data protection space and the new products that we're introducing today. So we need, customers need diversity in how we protect their data and then they need different options for how and where that they do that. Yeah, anything specifically that is different now than it would have been five years ago when it talks about diversity of environments or media that they're working on? We talked about tape earlier and one of the challenging things is we keep building new products that don't have some of these features because we think that's not where the market's going. But even on our entry data domain appliance we just added tape capability to it because that's what customers feedback is. They said even in the smallest case we still have a need for that in our environment. So 2019 is not the year that tape finally dies. I think you're seeing, obviously there's not new tape probably being deployed but customers still have tape in their environment and they need a way to protect but also be able to access and leverage the data that's in their tapes. We had a customer we're talking about big data and then they said, you know the biggest data is on our tapes but it's locked up. So we need a way to have accessibility for that data and bring it into our business and our transformation. So if I may just add to that. Unlocking the data no matter where it resides whether it's on the tape, whether it's on disk, whether it's in the cloud, no matter how far it is from where the applications are and being able to provide a solution that helps unlock the data, bring it to where it is required and being able to use it again is I think a key part of what we're trying to solve. I know that so many people are eager to memorialize tape but what I'm trying to think about is how are you talking with customers about these things because there is sort of an unease with we've got data over here and we're not ready to migrate it over this way and how are you sort of holding your customer's hand and walking them through these decisions? I mean, there's no cookie cutter answer because it is different for every organization. So how do you help a customer think through these very big challenges? I think one of the key parts of this is having conversations with the customers to think about what their objectives are, what their standard objectives are for their environments. Now in certain cases we've seen customers that have governance or compliance requirements because of the industries that they play in. One customer, for example, is talking about backups being required for 50 years. So there are customers that have long-term retention needs or situations where they want to have backups or data stored for different purposes. As you think about what these SLOs are and as you talk to customers about what problems they want to solve, defining what the solution is and how that solution helps them meet their SLAs or meet their business objectives is a good way that customers understand what we can present and how we can help them. And I think one thing I'd add is we can also approach it from a portfolio perspective. So when we talk about solving their problems we don't need to talk about it just as data protection but as a portfolio so we can bring in VxRail discussion and PowerEdge and different storage options and we can build them a solution that is encompassing all the different things that will really solve their problem. Yeah, let's get underneath the covers here for a second. You brought up some of the platform pieces. What's the update on the appliance piece as that fits into the PowerProtect family? Yeah, so we have an appliance instantiation that both is a hybrid, so a combination of spinning media and flash as well as an all-flash appliance. We needed, and that was kind of one key tenant is having the performance options available at different cost points. Another requirement was scale out. So we needed, we have customers that need starting at a half a petabyte or even a petabyte but we also have customers that want to start 64, 100 TBs and that's what our appliance is allows not only to scale in place so they can buy one and then they can grow it in place or they can actually add nodes and scale out as another way to deal with the data explosion. So I think the appliance is offering both this Konalmach and earlier software to find. It is scale out and it has cloud coverage in that it's object aware, it's cloud aware. And I think with the software platform that we've built that integrates seamlessly with the appliance, we have the ability to drive automation that helps with customers' deployments as the environments continue to change. One thing that's consistent with every customer that we speak to is that environments aren't stagnant, they keep evolving, they keep changing and it's not just an expansion of the environments but there are different types of workloads that come and there are different types of deployment models that they have and with the automation that we've built in it's easy for customers to use the automated policies to help with the data protection that we provide. Yeah, so let's talk about the data for a second. You know, one of the objectives, I loved you talking about how much data they had on tape, they want to unlock that. How much are you having conversation with customer about the value of data and how important that is to their business and where your solutions that really helps to enable the business unlock that value. Sure, so I think it is very clear to us in all of our conversations that I think data is becoming the new currency. I think data is the center of all of the decisions that are getting made within organizations. Identifying what the critical data is, what the critical applications are, where the data is important for continuous operations of a business in a lot of cases, data is continuously required for all businesses now. But what is some of the data that helps with the decision making that is required for business to succeed is important. So once there has been an identification of what this data is, what the classification is for the data, having different strategies to protect that data, to help restore from that data, backups is a critical part of what we have worked with customers on. Yeah, not all data is created equal and then different workloads, different data needs different strategy to make sure that it's whether well-protected, it's resilient and accessible. Yeah, anything in the modern workloads that are impacting you, I think kind of the AI, ML, IOT type environments where there's a lot of data. And when you talk about not data, it's very created equal. It's like, okay, sometimes there's a lot of data, but I don't necessarily want to spend as much on some of these classes' data. I want to be able to use them. How does that fit into the discussion? So as we think about how we built the architecture, we built an architecture where there are services that help with collecting more data and more information that can help with decision-making within the product. As you think about different forms of modern data that is available, whether it be containers, whether it be applications that are residing on-prem or seamlessly transitioning to the cloud, bringing the right amount of data back, having analysis on that data and helping protect it is critical. So I think those are key components of how we solve the data protection problem. That and having patented, industry-leading efficiency and data reduction technology, it's going to cost money wherever you save the data, but if we can optimize and reduce that, provide a great total cost of ownership, that's key for these customers. Because a lot of it seems easy upfront, but then long-term, those costs can escalate, whether it's on-prem or in cloud, and we have to make sure that they maintain a good TCO. And I think to add to that also, the application owners understand their data better than anyone else does. Giving the power to the application owners on when they need to protect the data, what they need to do with the data, and when they need to restore from that data is a critical part of driving success for the customers. While we do that, it is important that the central IT teams are able to enforce the compliance and governance across the entire environment as well, whether it be existing workloads, new workloads, new applications, but we want to provide the central IT team the ability to have that SLO-driven compliance framework, and that's what the platform presents as well. I want to ask you to sort of look into the future a little bit, and we're talking a lot about, as you said, companies, organizations, their data needs are not stagnant. They are always changing. That is really the one true constant of this technological world that we live in. What do you think we're going to be talking about in 2020, in 2025, when we heard from the keynote, there's going to be enough data to fill the Empire State Building 13 times over, which is just staggering in and of itself. I mean, what are some of the things that organizations need to be thinking about to make sure that they are preparing for the future? I think we talked a little bit about AI and ML. I think integrating more and more of those technologies into the product so that they're making decisions and they're being smart without the user intervention, and they're even understanding the quality of service, quality of data, and making those decisions. We integrated ML into the new appliance product to help one of the biggest challenges our customers face is managing the capacity and maintaining good D-dup performance, and we integrated ML in order to decide where to put that data, both for capacity and performance. I think we're going to further see the integration of that technology on our end, as well as the customers end. All right, so bring us on home. Power Protect, new branding, new products. I hear the power name. I'm sure Jeff Clark's happy when we talk about getting alignment across the portfolio. I've talked to a lot of the other power groups this week. What should customers take away as to why this is different? Yet, the comfort of the history and experience that EMC and Dell have brought in this space for many years. So for all of us, it's a very exciting announcement. It is our new modern data management platform that we've launched. With Power Protect, you get the ease of, the simplicity of deployment. You get the full integrated stack. If you have the appliance deployment form factor, if you have the flexibility with the software deployment that you need, you have the ability to protect and do all of your data management use cases, or drive the data management use cases for critical workloads. And I think that's the key problem that customers are trying to solve. It's also the platform that's built with our trusted architectures. And it's built on what we've done very well with the trusted architectures that we've built. So I think with that, Power Protect gives you a platform that customers will be able to use and will be able to expand their businesses in the future as well. Well said. I think what we saw in the demos today of many of the storage products and data protection products, you see a very consistent UX across those products. And we want, as Kinal was saying, bring the trusted technologies that we've had, but bring them in a modern, usable way. And if you know a little bit about using a PowerEdge or a VxRail or an ECS product, as soon as you get this new Power Protect product, actually we've been bringing that technology to some of our other products, it'll feel familiar and it'll be easy to use. So, yep. That's a great note to end on. Ed Kinal, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you, Rebecca. Thanks for talking to you. We will have so much more coming up on day two of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World in just a little bit. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman.