 theCUBE presents Dell Technologies World, brought to you by Dell. Welcome back to theCUBE. Lisa Martin and Dave Vellante are live in Las Vegas. We are covering our third day of covering Dell Technologies World 2022, the first live in-person event since 2019. It's been great to be here. We've had a lot of great conversations about all the announcements that Dell has made in the last couple of days. And we're going to unpack a little bit more of that now. One of our alumni is back with us. Shannon Champion joins us again. Vice President of Product Marketing at Dell Technologies. And she's accompanied by Pete Robinson, the Director of Infrastructure Engineering at Salesforce. Welcome. Thank you. So Shannon, you had a big announcement yesterday. I ran a lot of new software innovations. Did you hear about that? I heard a little something about that. Unpack that for us. Yeah, awesome. Yeah, it's so exciting to be here in-person and have such a big moment across our storage portfolio to see that on the big stage, the boom to announce major updates across PowerStore, PowerMax, and PowerFlex all together. Just a ton of innovation across the storage portfolio. And you probably also heard a ton of focus on our software-driven innovation across those products because our goal is really to deliver a continuously modern storage experience. That's what our customers are asking us for, that cloud experience. Let's get the most value from data no matter where it lives that's on-premises in the public clouds or at the edge. And that's what we unveiled. That's what we're releasing and that's what we're excited to talk about. Now, Pete, Salesforce is a long-time Dell customer but you're also its largest PowerMax customer, the biggest in the world. Tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing with PowerMax and your experience. Yeah, so for Salesforce, trust is our number one value and that carries over into the infrastructure that we develop, we test, and we roll out. And PowerMax has been a key part of that. We really like the technology in terms of availability, reliability, performance, and it has allowed us to continue to grow our customers, continue needs for more and more data. So what was kind of eye-popping to me was the emphasis on security. Not that you've not always emphasized security, but maybe, Shannon, you could do a rundown of maybe not all the features, but give us the high level. And Pete, I wonder how, if you could comment on how you think about that as a practitioner, but please give us that. Sure, yeah, so PowerMax has been leading for a long time in its space and we're continuing to lean into that and continue to lead in that space. And we're proud to say PowerMax is the world's most secure mission critical storage platform. And the reason we can say that is because it really is designed for comprehensive cyber resiliency. It's designed with a zero trust security architecture. And in this particular release, there's 19 different security features really embedded in there. So I'm not going to unpack all 19, but a couple examples, right? So multi-factor authentication, also continuous ransomware anomaly detection, leveraging Cloud IQ, which is huge. And last, but not least, we have the industry's most granular cyber recovery at scale. PowerMax can do up to 65 million immutable snapshots per array. So just, and that's 30 times more than our next nearest competitor. So really when you're talking about recovery point objectives, PowerMax can't be beat. So what does that mean to you, Pete? Well, it's the same thing that I was mentioning earlier about that, the trust factor. Security is a big part of that. Salesforce invests heavily into securing our customer data because it really is the core foundation of our success. And our customers trust us with their data. And if we were to fail at that, we would lose that trust and that's simply not, it's not an option. Let's talk about that trust for a minute. We know we've heard a lot about trust this week from Michael Dell. Talk to us about trust, your trust, Salesforce's trust in Dell technologies. You've been using them a long time, but cultural alignment seems to be pretty spot on. I would agree. Both companies have a customer-first mentality. We succeed if the customer succeeds. And we see that going back and forth in that partnership. So Dell is successful when Salesforce is successful and vice versa. So when we've, and it goes beyond just the initial, the initial purchase of hardware or software, how you operate it, how you manage it, how you continue to develop together. We work closely with the Dell engineering teams and we've worked closely in development of the new PowerMax lines to where it's actually able to help us build our business. And again, continue to help Dell in the process. So you've got visibility on a lot of these new features, you're playing around with them. I obviously started with security because that's on top of everybody's mind, but what are the things that are important to you as a customer and how do these features, the new features kind of map into that. Maybe you could talk about your experience with the, I think you're in beta maybe with these features. Maybe you could talk about that. Yeah, probably the biggest thing that we're seeing right now other than the obvious enhancements in hardware, which we love, better performance, better scalability, better, you know, better density. But also the, some of the software functionality that Dell is starting to roll out, we've implemented Cloud IQ for all of our PowerMax systems. And it's the same thing. We continue to find features that we would like and we've actually worked closely with the Cloud IQ team and within a matter of weeks or months, those features are popping up in Cloud IQ that we can then continue to develop and use. Yeah, I think trust goes both ways in our partnership, right? So Salesforce can trust Dell to deliver the products they need to deliver their business outcomes, but we also have a relationship to where we can trust that Salesforce is going to really help us develop the next generation product that's going to, you know, really deliver the most value. Yeah. Can you share some business outcomes that you've achieved so far, leveraging PowerMax and how it's really enabled? Maybe it's your organization's productivity perspective, but what are some of those outcomes that you've achieved so far? There's so many to choose from, but I would say probably the biggest thing that we've seen is, as we roll out new infrastructure, we have various generations that we deploy. When we went to the new PowerMax, initially we were concerned about whether our storage infrastructure could keep up with the new compute systems that we were rolling out. And when we went through and began testing it, we came to realize that the performance improvements alone that we were seeing were able to keep up with the compute demand, making that transition from the older VMAX platform to the PMAX, practically seamless and able to just deploy the new SKUs as they came out. Talk about the portfolio that you apply to PowerMax. I mean, it's the highest of the highest end, mission critical, the toughest workloads on the planet. Salesforce has made a lot of acquisitions. Do you throw everything at PowerMax? Are you selective, what's your strategy there? So it's selective. In other words, there's no square peg that meets every need. Acquisitions take some time to ingest. You know, some run in a cloud, some run in first party. But so we try to take a very intentional approach to where we deploy that technology. So 10 years ago, someone in your position or maybe someone who works for you was probably spending a lot of time managing lawns and tuning performance, and how has that changed? We don't do that. We can't. Right, so what do you do? Right, talk more, double click on that. Talk about how that transition occurred from really non-productive activities, managing storage, boxes, and where you are today. What are you doing with those resources? It all comes down to automation. Hardware is hardware to a point, but you reach a point where the manageability scale just goes exponential, and we're well past that. And the only way we've been able to meet that need is to automate and really develop our operations to be able to not just manage at a lawn level or even at the system level, but manage at the data center level, at the geographical, you know, location level, and then being able to manage from there. Okay, really stupid question, but I'm going to ask it because I want to hear your answer. True. Why can't you just take a software defined storage platform and just run everything on that? Why do you need all these different platforms and why do you get to spend all this money on PowerMax? Why can't you just do that? That's the million dollar question. I ask that all the time. I think software defined is, it's on its way. It's come a long way just in the last decade. But in terms of supporting what I consider mission critical, large scale applications, it's simply not on par just yet with what we do with PowerMax, for example. And that's exactly how we position it in our portfolio, right? So PowerMax runs on 95% of the Fortune 100 companies, the top 20 healthcare companies, top 10 financial services companies in the world. So it's really mission critical high end has all of the enterprise level features and capabilities to really have that availability that's so important to a lot of companies like Salesforce and, and Pete's right, you know, software defined is on its way and it provides a lot of agility there, but at the end of the day for mission critical storage it's all about PowerMax. I wonder if we're ever going to get to, I mean, you, you, it was interesting answer because you kind of, I inferred from your answer that you're hopeful and even optimistic that someday we'll get to parity. But I wonder, because you can't be just close enough. It's almost, you have to be. I think, I think the key answer to that is it's, it's the software defined gets you halfway there. The other side of the coin is the application ecosystem has to change to be able to solve that other side of it. Because if you simply take an application that runs on a PowerMax and try to run it, just forklift it over to a software defined, you're not going to have very much luck. Recovery has to be moved up the stack. Operations, recovery, the whole, whole works. Shannon, can you comment on how customers like Salesforce, like what's your process for involving them in testing, in the road map, and in that direction, strategic direction that you guys are going through? Sure, yeah. So, you know, customer feedback is huge. You've heard it. This is not new, right? Product development and engineering. We love to hear from our customers, and there's multiple ways. You heard about beta testing, which we're really fortunate that Salesforce can help us provide that feedback for our new releases. But we have user groups. We have forums. We hear directly from our sales teams. Our, you know, our customers aren't shy. They're willing to give us their feedback. And at the end of the day, we take that feedback and make sure that we're prioritizing the right things in our product management and engineering teams. So that we're delivering the things that matter most first. We've heard a lot of that this week, so I would agree. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about Salesforce, what you're doing with PowerMax, all the stuff that you announced yesterday alone. Hopefully you get to go home and get a little bit of rest. Yes, sure that there's never a dull moment. Never. Can't wait. Thanks for having me. Thank you guys. For our guests on Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBE. We are live day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2022. Dave and I will be right back with our final guest of the show.