 from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 from Las Vegas, I'm Lisa Martin. This is day one of the event. Justin Warren, pleased to be joined with you. And we're welcoming back to theCUBE one of our distinguished alumni. The one and only, Scott D'Landy. Scott. When did I get upgraded to distinguished? I think I just said that just now. Okay, excellent. I do give often people promotions on there, so. I love it, I love it. You are the technology director, so if you want to become CTO, you just let me know. I'll stick with where I am right now. Okay, so Scott, lots of huge event, 20,000 years old plus, started yesterday. They've got five days of VMworld this year. We're here for three. You started yesterday. Yep. Some of the momentum that you're hearing from customers of Dell Tech World, where we spoke with you, was just four months ago. Right. The whole theme of make it real. Yep. How is Dell EMC helping customers live that vision four months later? Yeah, there's been a lot of excitement and a lot of interest, actually. So we've been busy, so we've got the solutions expo down the hall over there. We've got tons of people that are coming over. And if I had to kind of classify what we're seeing, there's people that are kind of falling into two camps, right? There are the people that know us. They're users of our technology. They're coming in and they've got questions. They want to understand what we're doing. What are some of the things that we have on the roadmap? What are some of the newer things that we're introducing? So they're looking for just kind of general updates in terms of the things that they're already using. And then we have another set of people that are coming by that aren't that familiar with us. They know obviously Dell, they know who EMC is, but they're not that familiar with the actual products and the technology. So they're coming over and they're just trying to understand what are the things that you have available? What are some of the solutions that we can think about? How can you help us solve some of these problems? So it's interesting. You have kind of the core sort of users that we talk to pretty regularly. And then we have new users that are coming over and they just want to understand, hey, where does this all play and how can this help me? So when those customers, it surprises me in a way that there are people who haven't heard of you or who haven't heard of some of these products. I've been using them and known them for so many years that I kind of forget that they've been able to do. It's mainly the application side of the house. So the infrastructure guys we know really, really well, but it's the application guys where they'll come in and they'll say, well, I know we use this or we have external storage or we use a SAN, but what is the difference between a SAN connected external array and a hyperconverged platform? What are the use cases? Where does one fit over the other? The infrastructure guys kind of understand that because they live in that world, they know what the use cases are, they understand what their requirements are and how that fits in. But from an application perspective, the infrastructure is infrastructure. It's just this magic stuff that sits there and it just is supposed to work, right? So again, they're coming in and they're trying to understand a little bit more around where things fit in and kind of what are some of the available options that they have in terms of the types of infrastructure that they can be deploying their applications on. So what kind of applications are we talking here? Who are these people who are coming and asking to understand the infrastructure a little bit more? So it's a lot of the VM administrators are coming in. Again, their world is around kind of managing the vCenter side of things and kind of the server side and even the hyperconverged side. We're seeing more and more people moving to that. But now they're trying to understand, well, hey, if I have an external array or if I have a network storage device in the environment, how does this change my role? Does it complicate things? Are there new skills that I need to learn? Are there new workflows and operational things that I have to think about? And so they're trying to kind of figure that out. And it's interesting in a lot of cases because of some of the deep integration points that we have with VMware, a lot of the things that they're doing today don't really change just by moving into kind of an external, traditional type of a storage deployment because all of that still gets abstracted at the VM level, right? So we'll offload a lot of the things that they're doing at the server side to the storage, but in terms of how they're managing the infrastructure and the things that they're doing and the things that they're touching, it doesn't change, but there are some additional efficiencies that they could take advantage of in terms of performance, space efficiency, replication, all of these types of things that they now use the array to do, whereas in the past, these were things that just kind of ran at the server level, run. One of the things this morning that Pat Gelsinger talked about is superpowers and being able to enable enterprise organizations to take advantage and maximize their superpower of AI, IoT, machine learning. How is PowerMax and what Dell EMC is doing and how they're evolving going to enable customers, go, okay, data is power, yeah, it's currency, it's fuel, it's the lifeblood, but unless you can actually really harness the power and make it work for you, you're going to miss a lot of insights. How do you guys supercharge that? It's interesting because I did hear that part of the discussion and I thought a little bit about that and I said, boy, if we were going to be a superhero, we would be the invisible man, right? And the sense that we're there, we're making sure that things are running, we're keeping service levels where they're supposed to be, we're keeping the applications available, everything is running well from a performance standpoint, but you don't see it, you don't think about it, it just is there. So that would be the superpower that we would want because under the covers, there's a ton of things that are happening, right? The machine learning happening within the system, the predictive analytics, the use of artificial intelligence to understand how workloads are behaving, how things are changing, anticipating things that are going to be going on based on patterns that we've seen previously and being able to react to those in near real time. Again, transparent to the outside world, you don't see them, you don't think about them, but under the covers, this is what we're doing. So how do you get people excited about that? Because if it's invisible, you can't see it, it's like plumbing. You don't care about it most of the time until it's broken. So how do you convey that to people? Again, another good question. So one of the things I've had users come and say to me is that as they've upgraded their environment, as they've moved to newer infrastructure, things like PowerMaxes, they find the infrastructure to become boring, right? That's exactly it. And when they say it's boring, they say that's not a bad thing. I wish more things that I'm managing within my environment were as boring as the things that we're experiencing with PowerMax because I spend very little time dealing with it. It works. It's a trusted part of the environment and it's something that I know that is going to do what I needed to do when I needed to do. So it's kind of boring because I don't have to spend a lot of time worrying about that, but there's a lot of other things that they need to focus on. So this is a nice thing that they don't have to deal with anymore. Yeah, that idea of trust, I think is something which doesn't get enough airplay really, is that you can rely on it. You know it's going to do what it says that it does. It does what it says on the 10, day in, day out, all the time. Yes. When we talk to users about some of the things that we're thinking about doing on the roadmap, some of the new features and some of the longer-term initiatives that we're starting to work out in terms of the engineering roadmaps, the one thing that they always say to us is, whatever you do, don't do anything that changes the availability, the reliability, the serviceability because that's the main reason why I bring this technology in is because I don't have to worry about those things because I know it works. So PowerMax has some pretty sexy metrics, 3x in terms of speed, 3x better performance density, up to 50% faster response times, which you want from anything, right? Anything in the world. I'd love to understand an example of one of those users you're talking about where this invisible technology has not only delivered the performance and the response times that they need, but has gone all the way up to the business level and really helped to transform that business. Give us an example of one of those. So it's a great, it's actually a great example. So what we're starting to see are new different types of workloads starting to be deployed on this infrastructure, right? So for example, you look at traditional database environments, things like Oracle and SQL and those types of things, those are core applications that we've been supporting for years and years, right? They rely on a lot of the array-based, infrastructure-based resiliency and protection and data integrity and they work really, really well. Now we're starting to see newer workloads starting to come into play, things like Splunk, right? Where they start outside of the traditional data center environment because it's a new application, they're doing some sort of analytics up against that, some sort of data warehousing. So it kind of starts off outside of core IT, but it starts to come back to core IT because as core IT has to now manage that application, they don't want to do it differently than what they're already doing, right? So they want the way it's protected to be the same, the way it's secured to be the same, the way the replication, the management, the data efficiencies around things like DDoop and compression, encryption, all of those things, they want to take the things that work really, really well in the core applications and they also want to layer those in and apply those to the newer applications that are starting to come in. Performance is a great example, right? Because when you have an all-flash array, you're looking at something that's not just fast from a submillisecond response time perspective, you're looking at something that's very, very predictable. So it's fast when the system is busy, it's fast when the system's not busy, I don't have to worry about traditional workload spikes that I may have seen with some of the other types of deployments around mechanical physical distrives. So again, the performance is a very strong capability but it's not just running fast, it's running fast all the time regardless of what the workload looks like. So how are you introducing this to these new teams that might be looking at, so new applications, there's a tendency that everything has to be new. We're not going to use anything that we've already got that's proven trusted, we can trust it. No, no, we're going to go completely new, we will put it on, no SQL on blockchain. Yeah, what's driving the transition where people say, actually I want to put this on the stuff that I know and trust? It's at kind of almost the CIO level where they're looking to drive efficiencies through standardization within their environment. Again, the idea of having different pieces of infrastructure and different technologies and different vendors supporting all these becomes very, very complicated when you start to scale that out across hundreds, thousands of applications. So the ability to basically standardize that into a common set of infrastructure that can meet a wide range of requirements is very, very desirable because it's just the operational efficiency that you can drive with that type of a model. So operational efficiency, speed, what about the intelligence? How is the smarts of PowerMax enabling Dell EMC to push past those competitors? You're setting me up. As we like to say in Hopkinson, it's wicked smart. Wicked smart storage, and I'm putting on a very thick, thick Boston accent. I like it. Getting close to an Australian accent. I like it. So when you think about the things that we've been doing within the array from an architecture perspective, the analytics that we're collecting and the way we're able to dig deep into that and get very, very granular in terms of what's happening under the covers within the system. These are things that we've been developing over dozens of years, literally dozens of years. You look at the system itself, we were just thinking about this the other day. We went and we looked up how many patents we have related to the platform over the almost 30 years that the system has been out there from an architecture perspective. And it's over a thousand patents that we have just on that one platform alone, right? So there's a lot of smart people thinking about a lot of things that we need to build into that system. So users and administrators and application owners, again, don't think about that and the system basically becomes invisible. So we talked with Scott over the weekend about wanting to do a David Letterman at top 10 list. He's firing up my list right now. Didn't quite have enough time to give you guys the full top 10. So we thought we'd kind of break it down to the top three. The top three, yep. The top three things that you probably don't know about PowerMax. I have like about 20 here, so I'll give you the quick three. The first one is you may be surprised to realize this, but you used the PowerMax or VMAX today. Did you know that? No, I don't. Did you buy anything today? Yes, I did. Did you use a credit card? Yes, I did. I did. That is a high likely degree that that was processed on a VMAX or a PowerMax system. Did you make a phone call? Yes, I did. You just cell phone? Yes. That record got translated somewhere, so that's a good chance that that was also processed on a VMAX. So I think the thing is that the systems that we have available are so ingrained into the daily lives and basically make the things around us work that we kind of forget or take for granted that this is happening. But as we like to say, if people don't understand or don't know that it's VMAX or PowerMax behind the scenes that's doing it, that's a good thing, right? Because again, we want to be invisible. We want to just make sure that everything runs. So that's number one we'll start with. Number two, when you think of VMAX, it's kind of like a duck. Like a duck. It's like a duck. Like a wicked, smart duck. A wicked, smart duck because you're looking out at the pond and you're seeing this duck and he's just kind of scooting along very gracefully, very calmly. Everything is nice. It's a nice fall day. But when you look under the covers, you've got those feet that are furiously paddling away. But again, to the outside world, you don't see all of that work that's going on underneath, right? And that's very much what a VMAX is doing. It's wonderful. It's graceful. Things are moving very smoothly. But under the covers, there are things happening that you don't have to worry about and it's just going to kind of get you to where you need to be. Awesome. Bring it home. What's that last one? Bring it number three. So I would say for this, there will be no zombie apocalypse. Wow, that's fantastic. I've been worried. Are you? I have been very concerned at the number of zombies. There are, so have to be, so the zombie apocalypse, and actually I have to give Chad Sackage credit for this because he wrote a famous blog a couple of years ago. It is a Chad thing where, if it wasn't for things like PowerMax and VMAX existing in the environment today and making the world run, we very likely could be facing a zombie apocalypse because what if you couldn't make a phone call? What if you couldn't make a credit card transaction, book a room, book a flight? Do all the things that you just expect to run? That would be a zombie apocalypse. So because of VMAX and PowerMax, there will never be, well, there will hopefully never be a zombie apocalypse. And if it happens, it's probably because of some genetic mutation hopefully not related to anything within technology. Exactly. Oh Scott, thanks so much for stopping by and chatting with Justin and me. Wish we had more time. Distinguished alumni, Scott Delaney. And I'm kind of envisioning like a new sticker for your super power invisible man, but it's got to have the outline of your hair. Okay. Yeah, we'll do that. I'll work on that. I'll get the marketing people over here. Okay, I'm looking forward to getting my sticker. Okay. Thanks again, Scott. Thank you so much. For Justin Moore and I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas. Stick around, we'll be right back with our next guest.