 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. Welcome back here to Las Vegas, live at the Venetian, theCUBE continuing our coverage of Dell EMC World 2017, where we're extracting a signal for the noise here on theCUBE, where's the flagship broadcast outlet for SiliconANGLE TV. I'm John Walls, good to have you with us here, along with Keith Townsend, the principal of CTO advisors, and joining us now is Aurendra Paul, who's a senior consultant of product marketing at Dell EMC. And Aurendra, thanks for being with us today. Thank you, John. It's kind of like the Xtreme iO X2 hour right now on theCUBE, we just said it's a great on talking about the launch today. You're heavily involved with X2, just had the first breakout session and you said you packed the house. Yes. Standing room only, so I assume it was a big hit. What were the customers, if you will, most interested in and what was your sense of where they were coming from? That's right, thank you. Yes, we just had our first breakout session and there was a lot of customer interest and it was standing room only. Primarily, the customers wanted to know, obviously what was great about X2? How was it differentiated versus X1? What are the, in terms of speeds and feeds? Not only about speeds and feeds, but also all the features, the software enhancements, everything that we're going to be announcing this week. So, a hungry market. Definitely, definitely, we were actually, to be quite honest, it was on top of the lunch hour, so we were not expecting a very full audience because obviously we were keeping people from the lunches, but the interest relied on our expectations. I mean, we were very happy and surprised. So, literally a hungry market then. Definitely. Over lunchtime. You're right. So, I'm going to ask a lazy question. What was the biggest question coming out of the sessions? Is people stood around X? Yeah, people loved all the hardware enhancements that were bringing to market. There was a lot of impromptu, like unsolicited clapping and cheering when we announced that our latest GUI, Graphical User Interface, is going to be without Java. Apparently that was anticipated for a very long time. So. I almost clapped just now. So, let's get started. That's right. HTML5 was, and we have a lot of enhancements that we've done in the Graphical User Interface in terms of like intuitive, very context-sensitive hints, right? As you'd expect on your iPhone, as you're configuring and walking through the menus, we also have a lot of nice reporting, very beautiful search capabilities that's going to be there for the first time and people apparently just loved it. It's an administration perspective. Any new exciting data services that weren't available in XIO 1, that's available in XIO 2? In terms of data services, yes. Obviously, like now we're going to be scale up as well as scale out. So we're going to be multi-dimensionally scaling. So that's going to, and then we obviously have done a lot of work in terms of like tuning performance, right? Tuning data compression. So you're going to get a lot more compression out of our platform, data reduction out of our platform. So yeah, so overall it's a lot of interest. When's the last time you got spontaneous applause to the presentation? Right? I'll tell you, for a skeptical and discerning customer basis hours, it's hard to get. You have to earn it. You had to feel like, hey, we've hit the jackpot here. We did, exactly. So to speak in Vegas, but yeah. So look, customer base, I've been hearing a lot about cheaper, deeper storage in XIO 2. What is the target customer for XIO 2? Is this only for large enterprises or is there a play for the SMB mid-sized company as well? You see, like we wanted to make X2, the platform of choice for our customers who are primarily interested in say, for example, copy data management. We have been an amazing copy data management machine. Like if you look at our install base today, we have about 1.5 million snapshots or extremely virtual copies that are being used. The vast majority of them, well, not the 50% of them are actually writeable snapshots. So they are being used very differently than primary like dumb backup copies, right? Or secondary copies. They are active citizens, right? First class citizens, they're at par with volumes. So copy data management is obviously a big use case for us, virtual desktops, VDIs, right? Before we get onto VDI, copy data management, that's the term that I've heard, but some people might not have heard that term. What's copy data management and what's the impact of copy data management to an IT budget, for example? Oh, there's tremendous benefits, right? Copy data management, when done right, like we do on our platform, really lets your IT break the chains out of and freeze IT, right? And provides for them a lot of business agility so that they're able to make instant copies of the production database virtually at will without any cost either in terms of time because they're instant copies or in terms of occupying spaces, right? So you can literally like create clones of your data, right? And these clones are perfectly functional clones so you can write to them, you can read to them, right? As if you production data, right? And that's an amazing capability of itself. And then when you think, oh, by the way, when you're creating these copies, there's zero to no impact to your production performance, okay? Your production performance keeps on being as it is. Now, when you layer on top of that because of our metadata architecture, metadata leverage architecture, you can make the copies resemble production or make the production resemble the copies so you can basically like restore, refresh at will. Again, without any impact to production, without any downtime, without literally any cost whatsoever. So when you're able to do this kind of stuff, right? Now think about the use case in your typical test and their production environment, right? Production where you have multiple, one copy of production and then multiple copies for your test engineers, you develop in engineers or the analytics copies, right? And all of those copies can be literally like run very close to production, right? Because it doesn't cost you hours to basically create these copies or it doesn't take like terabytes of space. So it really truly lets you add agility to your IT, right? And basically run your business much more efficiently and fast. So flash storage in general always helped with VDI. Right. It seems like there's a connection between copy data, flash storage and VDI. Right. Am I making an assumption here? It's, well, VDI when you think about it is copies of desktops, right? But we don't like, it would be perfect copies if you're not trying to basically customize them, right? So we use a slightly different technology, or in namely our inline deduplication and compression and how we integrate our inline dedupe and inline or in memory metadata with VDI specific commands such as VAI X copy, right? How you basically clone virtual desktops. So we don't use snapshots to clone the virtual desktops. Instead we use something called VAI X copy optimized with inline metadata. But the effect is the same. You can literally create like roll out virtual desktops, thousands and thousands of copies of virtual desktops in a really short order, right? And you can manage them and everything compresses and dedupes very efficiently in a very small optimal footprint. Yeah, what you've heard from your customers today. Yeah. At least in a brief amount of time. What do you think is going to be the biggest benefit an X1 user is going to find with X2 at the end of the day? Like what do you think is going to be the aha moment for them that's really going to open their eyes as to what, how you've impacted their business? Certainly, certainly. So we have a lot of interest, so a lot of eager customers. And I think the single of the features that were long sought after by our customer base, I think they're very happy about the economics of the platform. So we have significantly reduced the dollar per gigabyte cost to the customer on an effective basis. And it's going to be like one third of what it was on X1. I think people were like literally jumping on their seats when they heard that because not only don't you have better performance, better data reduction, right? New data services, but hey, we just slashed the price. Save the money. 66%. Right. So outside of cost savings, new data services, one of the things that I heard is data replication native. Right. That's a big deal. Walk us through the data replication capability. Yes, yes. So this has been, so again, if you step back, one of the things that our architecture lets us do, like because of, again, our metadata, our foundation architecture that's based on metadata is that we are very, very efficient in doing copies. Right. Whether it's VDI copies or database copies, we are a copy machine. Right. When you think of it and step back, replication is a copy problem, right? Because you're creating yet another copy. The only difference is that now the copy is happening outside of your box, right? From one extreme IRA to another extreme IRA. So what we did was that we leveraged the same foundational architecture, our same architecture, to basically not only replicate changes, but actually dedupe changes. Right. So now if you think about our global enterprise that has maybe like a multi-side replication going on, like four, five, six, seven, eight, up to 16, 32 sites that are replicating to one place, now you can see the power of our architecture, right? So there are many advantages. One is that you're only replicating deduplicated changes. So what I mean by that is if there is a block of data that's already at the target site, you won't need to change, you won't need to replicate that again, all you need to do is copy a metadata, a pointer across, and that gives you like 99% savings. Right. That's one. You also change the data transfer problem into a data reduction problem, right? Because now the only data that you have to put on the wire to replicate is everything after dedupe and compression. Right. Which, and we get about four to one. So you slash your data transfer by 75%. In a global dedupe system, when you have multiple sites replicating to one target site, because of the fact that all sites are deduplicating among themselves, we expect savings to be about 38 up to 38% on average. So savings at the target site, savings on the van bandwidth, right? And much faster replication. That's our solution. That's why they were standing on their seats clapping for you today. That's true. That's true. All right, so thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time. Thank you very much. Congratulations on a very successful launch. And what I'm sure will be many more spontaneous rounds of applause. We are just getting started. Thank you. You bet. Thank you, John. Yeah, we continue here on theCUBE, live from Dell EMC World 2017. We're in Las Vegas. Back with more in just a bit.