 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you by Dell EMC. Here live in Las Vegas for Dell EMC World 2017. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Keith Townsend. Eighth year of covering EMC World. Now the first year of Dell EMC World 2017 as the combination comes together. Decided to have Caitlin Gordon, Director of Product Marketing for the high end of Dell EMC storage. Also, Babson MBA, like myself, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. We've got the Babbo MBAs on, which is two of us now. We're going to sandwich Keith here with a little MBA action. Watch out. Congratulations, Babson's doing great. Great to see you. And your husband goes there too, you said. Yeah, double beaver house. So, big update on the high end. High end we heard from Marius and Dell, Michael himself, that the draw on the Dell side, where storage was big, they're pulling in a lot of Dell. Where Dell was big, the storage is coming in. The magic is starting to happen. Synergies are coming together. The high end is driving a lot of that. What's the update? Give us the quick updates for the hard news here at the show. Yeah, so refresh is both Extreme IO and VMAX. I think you guys have gotten a little bit of information on the Extreme IO side. So we'll start with the VMAX. On VMAX we've got brand new flagship VMAX, the VMAX 950F. So that is the brand new kind of high end on the VMAX side of things. Replaces both the 450 and the 850. So it's all about speed. 67, 68% faster, 6.7 million IOPS, 30% better response times than the previous generation. Most interesting though, up to four times faster than the nearest competitor. So that's the fun stuff. Awesome, Extreme IO, what's the update on Extreme IO? So on the Extreme IO side, X2, brand new next generation Extreme IO, new hardware, new software, so performance, efficiency, scalability, multi-dimensional scalability, scale up, scale out. So a lot of improvements on the Extreme IO side as well. So what does that mean for customers? I mean, okay, speeds and feeds, I get that, got performance, what's the impact of customer? The great thing about the high end portfolios, it's really clean, kind of where it all fits. So VMAX, great for enterprise workloads, consolidation, mission critical apps, and then Extreme IO is great for those efficiency use cases. So think VDI, where you can get really great V2 rates, overall 10 to one reduction in kind of VDI environments, or what we would call large-scale snapshots. So when you're not just making snapshots for protection, but you're making a lot of snapshots, and you're doing something with them. And we have both offerings now, both refreshed, which gives you really the best bang for your back. Efficiency, performance, availability, no compromise. Kayla, give an example of a customer that's leveraging all that. You know, we have so many, a lot of healthcare customers, financial customers. You heard some of our customers on stage this time around. And I think one of our favorite charts that we have in some of our presentations here is from one of our healthcare customers. They put in a VMAX All Flash, and their latency drops off so low you can barely even see it on the chart anymore. Some of them other ones have calculated the doctor hours saved from putting in a VMAX All Flash. 17 doctor hours saved per week, or something very remarkable, which is, and that's what matters in the end of the day, is kind of the customers and the impact they're having on those environments. So help us flesh out the difference between a high-end storage array, which honestly has been getting a little pounding of, you know what, it's all about scale-out, x86 storage, server-sand, HCI. Where's the value still in the high-end array? Yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to the things that maybe aren't all that sexy but are really, really important. Availability, the performance, not just raw performance, but the ability to have the performance to support all your workloads on one array. The availability support that. We're talking over six nines availability, and all the data services that you need, so protection, security, that's not going away, it's getting more and more important every day. We have a couple enhancements on that front. We're introducing secure snapshots. You can create a snapshot and you can lock that down to set a retention period for it, external key managers, also kind of the mobility, non-disruptive migration, all of this combined, and none of it compromising each other. So you have the performance, you have the security, you have the efficiency all in at the same time. A lot of the newer technologies are great in their own rights, but they don't have all of that maturity of data services that we have in some of the high-end arrays. So the EMC-ELECT lab is right around the corner. You know, those guys love to tweet and talk about the latest IOPS and the knobs that you can turn on these high-end arrays, but customers want to move away from the complexity of high-end arrays. Talk to us about the importance of CI, converged infrastructure, when it comes to getting time to value from these products. Yeah, and you said the exact right phrase right there, which is, hey, I think it's really important that we always come out with their arrays, and if you want to buy the array, you can do that. And then generally about a quarter later, we'll stagger and offer it in the converged infrastructure, so both on the extreme IO side and the VMAX side, they'll come in a VX block in the next quarter or two. And that's increasingly important because people do want that faster time to deployment and faster time to value, but at the same time, you have the choice. So you have the option to go one way or the other. So I got to ask, we've been watching the VMAX for years, and Dave Vellante, who's not here, we speculate, man, the VMAX is vulnerable. VMAX is vulnerable. Pure storage, took a lot of little nibbling at the breadcrumbs, at the heels of VMAX. A lot of their revenue has come from some of the VMAX as it moved to All Flash. You mentioned the All Flash had a tipping point. Talk about the speed difference, because that's really the game changer. VMAX gets to All Flash VMAX. You're talking about killer performance. How does that happen? Yeah, and I think it's more than performance. I mean, All Flash is certainly important, but it's important because it's more reliable. It's better rebuild times, and yes, you get the performance. The other thing that's important to think about in the All Flash space is that there is a true segmentation between high-end arrays and mid-range arrays. The mid-range arrays do not have multi-controller, all active controller architectures, and the high-end arrays truly do. If you differentiate the marketplace, you can really start to delineate between the high-end and the mid-range arrays, which is why we have a portfolio that we do, and why some of the competitors try to play against us and maybe they're probably comparing against the wrong ones. Well, how should customers look at that? Because there's a lot of fun, as you know, in the storage industry. No, I have not seen that. The fun is everywhere. That's part of the fun. Yeah, it's part of the fun, but clarify. What should they know? I mean, give them the update. Yeah, I think the important thing to think about is that there's really two pieces of the All Flash market. High-end arrays have very clear delineations of availability, multi-controller, the data services, the security, and the performance. And I'm talking the big here-and-number performance so you can put all your workloads on there and you don't even worry about it. And then there's a different segment of the market that has great availability, has great performance, but it's probably a dual-controller architecture, maybe even active-passive, which is important for certain parts of the market, but it's different. It's different than a high-end array. And I think it's really important that you consider that when you're looking at an All Flash array is, well, is it a multi-controller architecture? Is that really going to, am I getting all of the controllers I'm paying for or am I paying for one that just sits there? That's, it's an important thing to understand what the architecture is. And they each have their places in the market, but they are different. And it's part of our portfolio strategy. So help us understand the difference between the two. Both are All Flash arrays. VMAX, I know what I get in the history of a VMAX. X2 is on its second generation. What's the difference between the two? When does one fit versus the other? Probably one of the most important questions. So you said one of the most important things on the VMAX side is the history. So I always talk about proven over decades. It went from spinning disk to hybrid to All Flash. And by the way, the go forward strategy for VMAX, All Flash all the time. Now already over 80% of net new sales for VMAX are All Flash. So we're all in on All Flash there. And really VMAX is the enterprise workload consolidator, mission critical apps. Really the kind of the overall enterprise workloads is going to be majority of time VMAX. Extreme IO is really good. And that metadata and centric architecture gives you great efficiency. The deduplication gets you great efficiency. So kind of really easy way to look at it. Things like VDI where you get great deduplication or ICDM or large scale snapshots is where Extreme IO fits. You know, we know from our current Extreme IO install base that of all of the snapshots out there, more than half of them are writable. They're actually actively taking more than 40% of the IO's from a read and a write perspective. So the snapshots for Extreme IO are not protection copies, less than half of them are protection copies. They are actively being used. So that's a great use case. And then any kind of highly compressible, deduble workloads are greatly VDI. What's the big reaction here at Dell EMC world this year? What's the hallway conversations that you've had, briefings with analysts and whatnot? I think that the thing that's been most fun for me, and this is both with colleagues and with press and with analysts, is that this is obviously our first year as Dell EMC world. And it feels only like everything's accelerated. We are still what made EMC so great and innovating. I mean, the amount of news we had is just the sheer volume of news is certainly a proof point, but I think the energy is just really great. We have all of the greatness that was always EMC. And you just add the Dell factor to it and it's just been overall positive. And I think we've heard that from customers, press analysts and coworkers even. And the results too, performance wise, Michael was commenting in Marius as well on just the wins, the customer wins both sides, the synergies. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It's been great and our customers really appreciate it. And they, you know, it's really nice whenever you have a conversation with a customer or a press or analyst and the answer you give is like, that's what I wanted to hear. Kind of everyone feels, I think, settled. Caitlin, thanks for the insight on VMAX and Extreme.io and great to have you on. Babson graduate, director of product marketing at Dell EMC here inside theCUBE. So you're breaking it down Dell EMC where I'm John Furrier, Keith Townsend. More live coverage, stay with us, we'll be right back.