 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Oh, welcome back here on theCUBE. We continue our live coverage here from Dell Technologies World 2018. We are live, we are in Las Vegas. I'd say it was kind of warm when we first got here, but it's chilled off a little bit. So I hope the weather's a little bit better wherever you are, but it's red hot inside here as far as what's happening on the show floor. Well, I'm with Stu Miniman. I'm John Walls. It is now our pleasure. Welcome to our set, Susan Sharp, who's a Senior Consultant Product Manager at Dell. Susan, good to see you. Thank you very much. And Brian Henderson, Director of Storage Portfolio Product Marketing at Dell EMC. And Brian, good to have you back. Cube, this is, this is Rookie's, right? This is your- I'm a Rookie. First-timer. Making your debut. First-timer. Glad to break in that way. It is good to have you here. Let's talk about the show. Just first off, we're starting to wind down just a little bit. But, you know, strong attendance. I've been out on the Solutions Expo floor. That's really cool. A lot of great stuff going out there. So the two of you, what's your take on what you've seen here over the last three days? Yeah, I think there's a lot of transformation, right? It's all about transformation. I think we're seeing that across the industry overall. Everything is changing. Everything is connected. It's all about apps these days. It's all about digitizing your business. Anywhere you can add technology to really add that element of your technology and digital modernization to your business. It's really starting to take shape, I think, a couple of years back. We were talking it, but it wasn't really happening. And now we're seeing this huge trend towards everybody's actually starting to do it. Making it real. Right? Making it real. Exactly. All right, Susan, what do you think? So I think you summarized it really well. I would just add to that automation and intelligence, looking for systems to provide the insights and intelligence about the environment and simplify people's work. Right, absolutely. Brian and Susan, since you did your first time on the program, tell us a little bit about what you work on. I've got some history to you. You're both what we call legacy EMC now, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Myself, I never worked for Dell EMC, but I did work for a company that used to be called EMC. Absolutely. Yeah, we go way back, Stu and I, but right now we're seeing a lot of sensible decisions being made. I'd say if you go way back, there was just a lot of things happening. There's a lot of smart moves being made these days. Michael Dell obviously made a huge investment in picking up EMC. And for a lot of us, it's super exciting to see kind of it come together. And there's been a lot of changes, a lot of investments in the technologies of the future. Things like CloudIQ, which we're going to talk about, but it's been really fun. Great. And Susan, what projects are you working on these days? So CloudIQ is my primary focus. And as we talk more about the product, I'll give some examples, but we started with CloudIQ very focused on one particular storage platform. And now what we're looking at doing is expanding that across multiple platforms. So I get to be singularly focused on the CloudIQ, but looking at it spanning across multiple platforms. Yeah, I attended an event that Dell held towards the end of last year. They called it IQT and it was IoT with intelligence put together. And some of us, the analysts, it was like, okay, I see what you're doing, but IoT everybody knows, but CloudIQ, I think there's intelligence built into it. One of the themes I've actually been looking at this week, we've talked about intelligent storage and intelligent management for like a couple of decades in our industry, but maybe explain a little bit more about the product and why is this actually intelligent now? No offense to the things we've tried in the past, but it definitely, to your point, Brian, it feels a little more real some of these things we're talking about. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So if you see what's going on with the industry today, everybody's connecting things. And you know, we've been collecting a lot of data in a very secure way from our customers for years. Just until recently, we started to kind of talk about that and market that capability. It's really exciting what we can do with it. We make sure and we honor each customer like their privacy rights, of course, but you're able to do a lot of in-depth analysis, collection, we're able to look for anomalies in a system. So the analogy I like to use is like a Fitbit for storage. And it's not just storage. So we're kind of starting at storage, which is the exciting part. We're starting with Unity. We're now directed availability on the SC series, which was formerly compelling. And then we're going to expand that to VMAX. We're going to expand that to ExtremeIO. So we're going to go cross portfolio with that. And can we talk about virtualization? I mean, yeah, I mean, so we're going to expand into the VMware layer as well. So we're going to really start with a discrete use case. We've got what, over 3,500 arrays already connected today. We're adding about 100 per week. So it's really exciting to see the data that we're able to get. We give it back to our customers and partners, actually. So a lot of our key partners, they want to be able to act as that intermediary for their customer and give them guidance on what to do. So we've opened that up. I mean, get into the Fitbit analogy. So what is the health that we're looking at there? I mean, because we can all relate to that, right? We're looking at my pulse and blood pressure and all those things. So what's the pulse of the blood pressure inside storage that you're looking at? A perfect lead-in. So you talk about the typical metrics from a Fitbit in terms of the human body. The metrics that we're looking at in terms of the health and the categories that we're looking at are the typical things that you would care about in terms of your storage environment. So the things like data protection, are you maintaining your data protection windows and recovery point objectives and ensuring that your data is being protected the way that you expect. Things like capacity and ensuring that you are not at an imminent risk of running out of capacity. Nobody likes that phone call at 2 in the morning. So being able to be proactive about indicating when storage administrators need to start taking action to be able to prevent that call at 2 in the morning. So some of those key areas are where we're looking at our health score. Susan, I think back years ago, EMC was one of the leaders in doing some of this. It was the phone home capability and we understood what was there. My customers always say, oh, the tech showed up with some part that was ready to fail. Before we even knew, how's this different? What's this update? How does this change really how businesses are working when it comes to everything? I'm glad you led with that because I think it's really important as a side note to emphasize that that is the foundation and has been the foundation for proactive health for many years. Now what we're doing is we're adding on additional areas of focus like the example that I gave for the data protection. That wouldn't result in the phone home necessarily but and it doesn't need to result in the storage engineer showing up or the drive showing up at the door. Instead, we can proactively alert our storage administrators to the fact that again, that their data is not being protected with the service level that they expect and then provide that clear remediation about what they need to do to bring those into that compliance. So instead of break fix type things, it's more about how they can better optimize their environment to be able to meet the goals that they have. You know, when you're talking about support these days, I mean, that game's changing, right? Absolutely. And so as you've developed new capabilities and new evaluation tools, I mean, your service in general, the support you're giving, you know, you've got to come out of almost like a new paradigm, is it not? I mean, so how's that changing in your world now? So we see that. I mean, Susan talked about what we've done in the past, how we're changing it. And now it's, I go back to analogies, right? So you used to go to the doctor when you got sick. Now it's all about wellness, right? So you want, you're encouraged to go a little more often to get a checkup. So we're doing the same types of things. We give health scores on a range of zero to 100. And we're able to drill into those specific parameters that Susan talked about, to be able to show people how to kind of set up a best practices environment. So we're really starting to get a lot more proactive about how people can understand the health of their system. And we now have an app, so people can actually check it out remotely. You could be on a beach somewhere on your vacation and you don't have to worry about your system because you can quickly scan it and check in on the status of your system. So that's what I think people want. They want more access to things, so they're able to proactively understand it instead of react and it's all crazy. Let me ask you about the number. Let's just pretend 85, I got 85, whatever. Is that telling me that I'm doing something wrong? Or that something has gone wrong within the system? Or, I mean, what is that telling me exactly about what irregularity has occurred? Is it because of something by commission or is it by omission and I've got a systemic problem? Well, that's a great question. It could be any of those things, right? So one of the main things that we're looking at is I gave the example, for instance, of a storage pool that is already oversubscribed because we have great efficiencies on our storage systems, but if that pool is oversubscribed and is starting to reach using our predictive analytics, we can identify when that pool is starting to reach full capacity starting within a quarter. And so by being able to look at that, it may be that a storage administrator provisioned more storage in a given pool than was intended, but it may just be that the storage ended up being consumed faster than was expected by everyone involved. So it's not necessarily that someone did something wrong per se, but it's that it's now time to pay attention, take action, be proactive and alleviate the risk. All right, gotcha. Brian, walk us through just some of the basics of this product itself. Is it something standalone? Is it part of a maintenance package? Availability Day, how many customers are using this? Sure, sure, so the product became available in kind of an early release capacity when we announced Unity two years back. So since then, it's grown what, over 3,500 arrays. We're probably up around 4,000 arrays now, and we keep adding about 100 per week. The product is built with our own pivotal cloud foundry, so it can be kind of ported across multiple different clouds. It lives in the cloud, so you can access it anywhere, and what you're able to do is quickly get the health score. So it's plugged into your system. The back end is also plugged into our big data lake, so we're understanding what's happening across multiple systems, but we give specific guidance to each system. It's going to be really, really valuable when we span it across the entire portfolio, because then you'll get this dashboard kind of health score across the entire environment, and you're basically looking at the dashboard of systems, and you'll see kind of the red, yellow, green type markings and what to do next. And so like Susan said, you're not going to find out everything just from that number. You'll drill in, and what they've done is they programmed in remediation tips for each one. So you're able to kind of start really high level and then drill into each component after that. So, sorry, does that come with Unity's SaaS offering? It comes free with that. It's SaaS offering that comes with that. Great, so maybe Susan, walk us through this expansion that we've talked a little bit about that. Once it's on the next platform, everybody that has the platform gets it or? Everybody has access to that. So Cloud IQ, one thing that I want to add, and I will get to that in just a moment, is the benefit, this is probably obvious already, but the benefit of the fact that it is hosted in the cloud means that customers don't have anything to deploy. And just like your smartphone, you get all of the latest upgrades with no effort at all. And we have a little what's new in Cloud IQ feature that you can always be up to date. So the process is this, it's very simple. Once the customer sets up the storage system, and then the secure pipe, so secure remote services for heritage EMC products, and support assist for the SC series, bringing that data into the data lake, then at that point, the customer simply logs on to cloudicue.delemc.com, supplies their support credentials, and they will see the systems that are being managed by Cloud IQ. And if I may just add another thing, we were talking about the proactive health score. That is based on rules and best practices from the subject matter experts for each platform, and those scans, those health checks start running within the first hour of the systems being in Cloud IQ. So you're automatically, customers are automatically getting the benefit of Cloud IQ. Excuse me. Is it self-fixed then? I mean, if I see red, do I have the tools to get the yellow, get the green, or do I, you know, I mean, how do, what do I do? Right, I mean, what do I call it? Am I equipped enough that I can plug the leak myself? Absolutely. I'd say most of the issues are best practices recommendations. So you'll be able to go in there and see, all right, something happened, like let's go back to the health analogy. If your resting heart rate is 75, and then one day it's all of a sudden 125, there's probably an issue, right? So that's a bad health score. That's a red. That's a red flag. What you need to do is probably get a little more exercise, or maybe there's something stressing you out. That's kind of a similar analogy to what's happening. So there's something in the system, we have an anomaly prediction system as part of this. And so if your normal IOPS pattern is a certain thing, and then one day it's really, really low, or really high compared to the average, we're also going to red flag that. And we're going to tell you, you ought to just look at what's happening in your environment. Most of the issues, we're going to say, okay, you're running out of space. There's a configuration issue. Your network may not be hooked up just right. Go check it out. And by the way, based on your signature pattern, we're going to actually recommend what to do next. So we're collecting all these problem signatures, and that's able to kind of get to a resolution very quickly. Yeah, Susan, I know one of the things that people attending this show, from the Dell EMC side, love the most, get to talk to a lot of customers. So I'm curious, what kind of ass they're giving you? What kind of feedback they're giving you? What's on their wish list? And, you know, general feedback on Cloud IQ, too. The general feedback is more faster. The general feedback, we talked about the platforms that we're going to be adding in, and there's a lot of enthusiasm about that. Those are based on asks from last year. So we are addressing those asks, and now that they see the momentum, they're wanting us to continue that momentum and continue to expand where Cloud IQ will be applied. That would say, hands down, that's the biggest request. And I love that request. I would like to see Cloud IQ expand as much as possible. Well, here's the wishing of hundreds across the board for everybody's scorecard. Nothing but green, right? That's all we want. Absolutely. All right, good. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Thank you. Fitbit for your IT operations. All right, back with more. You're watching theCUBE here. We are live at Dell Technologies World 2018 and we're in Las Vegas.