 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to the stands. We continue here live on theCUBE, our coverage here of Dell Technologies World 2018. 14,000 attendees wrapping up day three. We are live, as I said, with Stu Miniman. I'm John Walls, and it is now our pleasure to welcome to the set Steve Fingerhut, who is the SVP and GM of SSD and Cloud Software Business Unit at Toshiba Memory Americas. Steve, good to see you, sir. Great to have you. And Ravi Pendikhani, who is the SVP of Service Solutions, Product Management, and Marketing at Dell. Thank you, John. Ravi, good to see you, sir. Same here, sir. Yeah, let's talk about, just first off, show theme. Make it real, right? Digital transformation, but make it real. So, what does that mean to the two of you? We've heard that theme over and over again, and what do you think that means to your customers as well? How do you make it real for them? First and foremost, I think the whole idea of new workloads coming play. People talk about machine learning and deep learning, as you, I'm sure, are aware of. People talk about analytics. The fact is, each of us is collecting a lot more data than a year ago, which is good for my friend Steve and others, and obviously, we like the fact that customers are looking at making more real time, if not near real time, analysis, and the whole notion of governmental agencies across the world, trying to go into more of a digital world where, and if you look at a country like India, for example, I mean, there are a billion people who are looking at other cards where they didn't have a form of identification for each of the individuals. Now, they've gone through a new transformation phase where they want to ensure that every single one of them actually has a way of identification and is all done digitally with accounts and everything else that goes on. These are just some of the manifestations of the digital transformation we see, whether it is in your industries, pick your favorite one, whether it's financial sector, the manufacturing, healthcare, all the way to governmental agencies. I think each of them are looking at how do they look at providing the right set of services, either for their customers or their community, communities at large, and we can't be more excited about what this provides as an opportunity for us to go back and provide a way for them to communicate and do some cool things. Steve? Yeah, Ravi, you mentioned the workloads that are driving the new campaign or that you're highlighting in the new campaign make it real, and many of those workloads are their new architectures and they were basically built from day one on SSDs, right? Counting on that performance, reliability, et cetera. And so obviously that's what we're here to promote at the show, and you can see the new workloads, obviously anything cloud, very much counts on SSDs and Flash, and then as you get into machine learning, different types of artificial intelligence, those are certainly counting on the performance of SSDs and keep nothing more real than actual products in hand. So with Ravi's products and ours, we have a number of demos, including the new AMD platforms that the PowerEdge team is rolling out, running all of these new workloads on Toshiba SSDs, so it's a good way to make it real, right? Yeah, Steve, maybe bring us in a little bit to kind of the state of storage though. We have talked about SSDs, we're now a decent way into it, Dell's announcement talking a lot about NVMe, maybe give us the Toshiba viewpoint on memory and storage and some of those transitions we're going through. Right, well I guess the secrets out that SSDs are a great addition, right? Say pretty much any environments and you add SSDs and it will go faster, so it's pretty much the biggest bang for the buck in terms of incremental performance, so what that means is just tremendous growth and the last couple years have been really for the industry, keeping up with that, really increased demand. So there's inherent efficiencies in SSDs, we're trying to build as many as we can and then obviously try to help our customers use them in the most efficiently as possible. Yeah, I agree with Steve, I mean, it is an efficiency equation. The fact of the matter is you really do need cost, I mean you do need to provide our customers with a better way of ensuring that timely information is made available. Again, it's information and it has to be timely because if you really don't provide it at a time when our customers need it, there's really no advantage of being really having the right infrastructure or lack of that matter. Case in point, if you look at what we just announced, Stu, yesterday we had talked about the R840 for example, which is a four socket server and we have actually announced it with 24 NVMe drives, believe it or not, that's about two times more than the realest competitor. That just gives you an idea into the amount of data that customers are consuming and the applications obviously are more importantly, you know, when we were coming up with this notion, we felt that 12 was probably a good number, maybe 24 was going to be a stretch and the number of customers we have talked to even in the last two days, I mean it's been huge, we're in there saying, wow, we can't wait to go get this product in our hands because that really shows you that there is already a pretty big demand for these kinds of technologies to be brought in. Yeah, I like what you were saying there, Ravi, because I'd like both of you to help connect the dots us for a little bit because when I think back to, okay, what speed, disk did I have or what's the flash piece in, this was something that it was traditionally the server admin, maybe there was some application person that came in, but you're talking about C-level discussions here, the trends that Jeff Clark talked about as keynotes as to this is what the business driving things like AI and ML and some of those, Steve, how are the conversations changing to get this piece of the infrastructure up at more of the C-level discussion? Right, it certainly is, it's part of the transformation where it's been talked about several times this week, IT has moved from being a cost center to the revenue center and then that puts it on the CEO's radar much more squarely. You definitely want to, if you're the CIO, CTO, infrastructure leader, your goal is to try to deliver that agility, right? Don't stand in the way of revenue while managing security, managing cost and it's those dynamics and it's not a new conversation but it's the public versus private, hybrid, what exactly should go where and those are still top of mind for all the customers we're talking to. I actually, Steve hit on something else, if I may, which is about security and I can't tell you, Steve, a good 70% of the customers at an average today do not finish a conversation in a 30 minute chunks we have had without talking about what is it you guys are going to do for security and that's a huge number or an increase from where we were just even a year or two ago, right? And imagine, and having said that, if you really had a longer conversation, security obviously is one of those fundamental pillars that everybody comes down to because everybody's worried about data and the fact that there's leakage of information of MA pertaining to this. And more importantly, making it real, if I may, to your point earlier on, John, as well, which is customers don't want to look at just the buzzwords they're now asking for proof points, proof points on, hey, what does this really mean in terms of security? For example, when we talk about zero arrays or secure arrays, sorry, which is, how do you go retire an old data server in a red box without necessarily worrying about the bits and bytes being left on the disk drives? So we have come up with new technologies which enables all the drives to be wiped, right? Makes it a lot easier, of course, with some of the stuff we do with Toshiba and some of their technologies as well. But my point again being that, I think now our C-level execs are coming in and asking us for not just the major teams, but they're actually more interested in finding out how and what is it we're doing to help some of those major teams. And I think the number of requests we have had for some of the white papers we have come out with, Steve, I think has only grown up now. Absolutely. Which I don't think was happening in the past from the C-level execs. So it's absolutely a valid statement. Right, well there were Senate hearings last year on some pretty famous data breaches and you have Senators grilling CEOs and it was a shocking, they actually used, there was a Senator who used the term full disk encryption and taking a CEO to task for not using full disk encryption. And so I think that might help. You talk about getting on the C-level radar, that helps. That was good staff work there. Exactly, exactly. That was a good plan. Yeah, right. Well, I mean, but to the point of security, obviously with this exponential growth of data unstructured, you know, blowing up and all of a sudden you become a lot riper, if you will, and you've got a lot more to manage. And so with that, I mean, how much more at risk are people? And is that what's raising the awareness down to C-suite? And so realize that, you know, they've got, they're a much bigger target now than maybe when data wasn't as plentiful, you know, back in the old days, if you will. Is that part of this? Or is that it? Is that? I believe it's a big part of it. Yeah. And one of the other things that's obviously going with this is if you really look at the disclosures that any of us have to go through, even in terms of whether it's a simple credit card you're looking at, I don't know if you've ever seen this. And as we were doing some of the analysis, we noticed even a simple credit card application, we'd had some security and, you know, personal information classes. It's actually gone up by about 120% in terms of the number of things they ask for. And making sure that the consumer is aware as well. Right? And the fact of the matter is, I don't think there's a single day that we can go through any of the trade press without somebody coming out with a security breach maybe or a security feature, whether it is hardware or software. And I think it's just, you know, this whole secure encryption device drives, I think there's a huge demand for that as well. Right? Absolutely. And you talked about the data growth. It's obviously been phenomenal. In his keynote Monday, Michael Dell talked about data growth from machine to machine and it's going to make this look like a little bit of data. So, like you said, that risk, the exposure is much larger and you have to keep that data secure. So, as Robbie mentioned, we work closely with Dell. There's a lot of, it's not an easy problem to solve, right? So there's a lot of engineering to make sure that you have that end-to-end security. And that's where we work with things like the Instant System Erase, right? So you can one-button erase the system in minutes versus in the past it might take hours or days and do you really trust that it's gone? Those types of things. And so I think those are enabling a much more robust security and you basically have to make it easy, right? Letting people sleep at night. Yeah, that's what you're doing. You know, in the past, the only way you could do that was you had to write a series of zeros and ones on the drive. And that could take hours together. That's how you would erase your data, right? And now when you talk about autonomous vehicles, imagine there's a whole big, whole discussion as much as how do you make sure that you have the, that's kind of an edge computing, as Jeff, I think, mentioned on the stage yesterday, that you want to not have latency come in between making a deterministic turn, right? Or an object appears. You don't want to wait for the breaking system to play because some decision needs to be made in a remote center, right? Which essentially means now you have got data being collected and analyzed and acted upon. And there are things like that and you probably have heard of all the insurance companies are working on what kind of data can be collected because when crashes happen, right? How do you make sure that their privacy loss in place and what not who has access to it? Plenty of stuff. Sure. Steve, I want to get your viewpoint. We're getting not far from the end of the show. What don't you give, in general, the partner viewpoint of Dell Technologies World in specifically? Toshiba, I know you've got, yeah, there's the booth, there's party, there's demos, there's labs, there's a lot of activity your team's doing for those that haven't been here. And Toshiba's worked with both Legacy Dell, Legacy MC, any commentary to close on that coming together? Right, I think last year I used the Jordan Pippin analogy, but it's only gotten better since then. So it's a great partnership. We're definitely growing strong together. And like you said, that doesn't happen overnight, that's years of hard work and trust that makes that a possibility. But I truly believe we're only getting started. And one of our goals we're working together is how do we make these important capabilities like security more common, more accessible, lower cost, those types of things. That's a major factor, major focus area for us going forward. But definitely see, this is just the beginning. Any key highlights from the show or activities that your team's been doing here that you'd like to leave us with? Sure, yeah, we have a significant presence here. We have eight server demos running, like I mentioned, the AMD servers, multiple workloads across these new emerging workloads. And then the hands-on demo zone where actually their developers can use the systems and software they want to evaluate. They can use them in the cloud. Those are all being driven by Toshiba and of course as part of the Dell solution. So yeah, we're happy, honored to be a big part of the show this year. But Jordan Pippin, I was thinking more like Curry Durant. That's where I was going with that. Exactly, I'm getting a little more up-to-date. I'm good with Jordan, he wanted that. Yeah, that was a pretty good pair like you two are. Thanks for joining us both. We appreciate it, Robbie, Steve, good seeing you here. Thank you very much. Back with more of a continue our life coverage here on theCUBE where Dell Technologies World 2018 and we are in Las Vegas.