 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Hello everybody and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Travis V. Hill. He is the Senior Vice President Product Management at Dell EMC. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, for returning to theCUBE, I should say. Thank you so much for having me. You're from Austin, Texas. Yes, yes I am. Your mother ship. So there's a lot of great storage news, so much storage news this week. Give us, break it down for us. What are some of the sort of the headlines that you'd like our viewers to know about? Yeah, you know there was a ton this morning in the keynote, but for me it was three of the announcements in particular are something that I'm really excited about. The first is that we announced the Unity XT, which is the next generation platform of our Unity product line. We've been shipping Unity for a little less than three years, and in that time we've actually shipped to nearly 80,000 units. So it's been very successful for us. It's been known for flexibility, unified block and file, simplicity, value. And with this release, we're really taking it to the next level. We are increasing the performance, an entirely new hardware platform. It increases the performance up to two X versus the previous generation. We're increasing data reduction rates up to five to one data reduction rate. It's NVME ready and it's also architected for a hybrid cloud world. We call it cloud ready. So that's one thing. The second thing I'm excited about is actually that cloud ready part that I just talked about on Unity XT. So we announced Dell EMC cloud storage services today. And basically what that allows you to do is consume Unity, Isilon or PowerMax as a service with direct connections into multiple public clouds, which is really cool. And so if you're a customer, like a Unity XT customer, for example, an awesome use case would be hybrid disaster recovery as a service. You don't have to have a secondary data center and you can actually use a rain native replication from on-premises to the cloud. We showed a demonstration on stage where we are actually able to fail over to VMC on AWS automatically across on-premises and what is consumed as a service, Unity XT in the cloud. I'm also excited about this capability because if you look at our Isilon product line, the fact that you can direct connect into multiple different public clouds is really cool because what a lot of people use Isilon for is big data analytics, streaming, a lot of the applications that are driving the unstructured data growth need burst compute. And so if you can sit in a data center right next to these multiple public clouds and be able to pick which compute that you want to use with your Isilon and have a customer and be able to consume that as a service, that's pretty exciting. So cloud services on the portfolio, big part of the announcement today that I'm excited about. Now the third thing I'm excited about is all the things we announced around Isilon in general. We announced an entirely new software upgrade or a new OS, 1FS 8.2. That release increases the scalability of our Isilon clusters from 144 to 252. So big increase. Isilon is already known for having a very big single namespace and so you might be asking, well, who really needs 252 nodes in a single cluster? Well, believe me when I tell you autonomous driving or connected car, media and entertainment are very interested in this capability from us. So those are the big three for me. What we're doing on Unity, XT, what we're doing in terms of cloud connectivity and what we're doing with respect to Isilon. Yeah, so Travis, I wonder if we could zoom out for a second here. I think we're at an interesting transition point when you talk about the storage industry. Yeah. You know, I think historically, you know, storage is highly fragmented. You know, I had, you know, my tier one storage, I had my mid-range storage, we had object storage, we had, you know, special HPC storage and there's so many different subcategories that you put in the environment. You know, I wrote an article in DellBot EMC. I said, this is the end of the storage industry as we knew it. When I come to a show like this, you know, cloud, you know, hyper-converged infrastructure, all of these pieces, storage is important, but you know, you just walk through many of the speeds and feeds and some of the new product lines that come out, but you know, storage at the center and the storage admin, you know, that's what EMC world was. That's not what I hear at Dell Technologies World. Give us kind of where we are in that transformation and of course, I'm not saying that, you know, two years from now, you know, we're in a storageless world and nobody thinks about it because data is more important than ever. You know, price capacity points are enabling customers to do more with it. So, you know, we'd love just kind of you to reflect back on kind of where we are and where we're going for the market here. Yeah, that's an excellent question, Stu. I think you're exactly right. The discussions that we're having with customers more and more are centered around what you're trying to do. What business problem are you trying to solve? And you know, you look within the portfolio, there've been places that we've done that before, like with Isilon, it was very vertical industry focus. Speaking in the language of the customers around healthcare genomics or media and entertainment or whatever industry vertical, we were targeting more and more for kind of the core IT buyer, it's, you know, I want the infrastructure to work with my ecosystem, right? I'm investing in VMware, so I want VRO plugins or I'm utilizing Ansible as my management and orchestration layer, so I want an Ansible playbook. And so, I mean, if you look at what we've announced on PowerMax as part of this show, VRO, CSI and Ansible plugins or adapters for PowerMax are a big part of what we're announcing because more and more the customers that we're talking to want the storage to be, you know, good performance, cost effective, autonomous in terms of, you know, making a lot of decisions and optimizing itself, but they want it to work in their broader ecosystem. So I was just having a conversation with a very large customer over in the EBC area earlier and we were talking about PowerMax and we were talking about all the cool things and all the new speeds and feeds, start talking about the Ansible playbook. And that's when the customer leaned in and was like, tell me more, how does that work? When can we get it out? You know, because we're doing Ansible. So I think you're exactly right. I think whether you talk about management and orchestration or whether you talk about the Dell Tech Cloud Platform where can you have storage as a piece of that, the conversation is shifting to a higher level to the application or business problem level. Yeah, I love you. Take us a little bit at that application space where to spend a bunch of the conversations, you know, talking everything from DevOps to containerization and microservices. You know, when you talk about, you know, hybrid cloud, well, if I want similar what the cloud environment is, that's usually what I'm doing. I mean, sure, you know, the VMware piece plays into that too, but usually modernization ties into it. And I know I've been hearing that story quite a lot bit more when I talked to storage people today. Yeah, absolutely. I think the DevOps conversation with storage admins is probably one of the most popular conversation we're having. What are you doing for CSI plugins? We just announced one for our extremely open product line. You know, it got a lot of interest, a lot of conversations around that. And you know, I think the conversation is also shifting to, you know, help me manage it, you help me give me more intelligence about my storage estate versus, you know, speeds and feeds. So one of the key conversations we have with customers is around a capability we have, which is called Cloud IQ, which I like to call it a health tracker for your storage estate, right? It gives you statistics, it gives you capacity trending, it gives you performance and trending. It uses AI to predict capacity spikes or performance anomalies. And it's really an awesome tool for our customers because customers that use that are able to resolve issues in their environment three times faster than customers that don't. So I think you're absolutely right, Stu. The conversation is more about how do I use the storage array in my environment? What ecosystems am I supporting? So it works in my, you know, works with all the other stuff that I have to deal with. So digital transformation has been the buzzword of the last five years and that the theme of this year is real transformation. I want to talk a little bit about implementation of these big technology initiatives. How do you work with customers to define exactly what they need, gather, garner support and sort of make sure everyone is pulling in the same direction and wants the same thing. And then really bring it together. I mean, how do you, is that first of all a challenge and then second of all, walk us through the steps of what you do? Yeah, I think, you know, to the earlier conversation, there's a spectrum of conversations that we're having with customers. And as Dell Technologies, we talk to customers big and small. And we talk to customers who want to procure a solution or they want to procure an array. And, you know, I think the common thread in the conversations we're having is, you know, give me the information that I need so that I can easily integrate it into my environment. And, you know, we're not out of the world where people care about IOPS and latency and, you know, all the speeds and feeds in the storage array. But increasingly it's, you know, there's, customers are like, yeah, yeah, I need that. But I need you to tell me how it works in my Oracle environment or my SAP environment. And so you can look at a lot of the solutions that Dell Technologies is bringing together via our solutions group. We've brought out an AI solution end to end with compute networking and storage. We were focusing on SAP as a high value workload where customers, again, compute networking and storage. How do you bring it all together and kind of t-shirt size the different solutions? So, you know, I think that if I look at it from a product lens, that's how we're approaching it. There's also a services lens to look at it, right? Which is, there's many customers that still want to do it themselves. And there's many customers that say, hey, can I get a managed service? Can you just do it for me? So, you know, we have a broad spectrum of customers and a broad, you know, many customers that are in different places on that journey. But it's definitely the conversations, no matter where you're starting, they're all trending to I want you to do more so I can focus on my business and my applications. So, Travis, you know, we really, we merged through the largest acquisition in tech history. You came from the Dell side and the Dell storage side. So, we just love to get real quick, you know, your perspective on being in the Dell storage team to now being in, you know, the Dell technologies, Dell EMC storage team and, you know, what that impact's been when you're meeting with customers that, you know, huge booster into the enterprise space too. Yeah, it's been an amazing journey over these last, you know, two plus years, I guess going on three years now. And I took a little break from being outside of the product group and I joined about, I came back about a year ago. And so, you're right, I ran product management for Dell storage for quite some time and then I had the great opportunity to come back and run product management for all of Dell EMC storage. And, you know, I think there's a lot of stuff that's the same, right? It's, you know, we're still driving the roadmap, we're still prioritizing customer needs, we're still, you know, we're still striving to provide the best possible solution for customers in what we do as a storage array or what we do in a broader solution. But, you know, the coming together of Dell and EMC from my perspective, it's been a great success. You know, we had a lot of strength on the compute side, we had a small storage business, EMC had a large storage business and so the combination of the two has just been, you know, like chocolate and peanut butter. I mean, it's just, it's been really good and I'm just, I'm amazed at all the conversations and all the customers that have invested in Dell EMC for their storage infrastructure. It's, you know, when we have some of these customer events and you have, you know, name brand universities or large government entities and they're there giving you feedback about, you know, how they're using Icelon or ECS or whatever in their environment. It's just a really impressive portfolio that we have and it's, you know, it's been absolute joy. Well, that's great. Next year I want the Dell EMC candy bar. So that's, there's your next product idea. With chocolate and peanut butter, yeah, I would want it too. Travis, thank you so much. It was a pleasure having you on theCUBE. All right, awesome. Thank you very much. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. There is so much more of theCUBE's live coverage from Dell Technologies World coming up just after this.