 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Well, good afternoon or good evening if you're watching back in the Eastern Time Zone. Good to have you here live as theCUBE continues our coverage of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm John Walls along with Stu Miniman and we now welcome Jeff Boudreau who's the president and GM of storage at Dell EMC. Jeff, good to see you. Good to see you guys. Thank you for having me. All right, it's been like a solid, what, six hours since you launched your new product, the PowerMax. What's been, I'm curious, what's been the reaction and what do people want to know from you when they get a little FaceTime? Well, the big things I have is, one, the reaction's been fantastic since we launched this morning. Obviously, Jeff Clark on stage with my good friend, Bob DiCresenzo, PowerMax Bob, now known and understood. And Bob did a great job today announcing the product. The feedback has been phenomenal. People really want to understand when I kind of frame it as that, we talked about the future of enterprise storage. And I kind of put some bold statements out there saying it's the fastest storage array, it's the most intelligent storage array and it's the most resilient storage array in the market today. And I kind of go through that. And a lot of people want to understand a lot around what we've done around NVMe as an interface, NVMe in the protocol stack and also with the media itself and understand that and truly unleashing the power of doing what I would call NVMe right. And as you kind of think about where we are and where we want to go with storage class memory and making sure you unleash the whole value. So that's a big one customers talking about. The other big one is around a lot of the ML and the AI. So we've done a lot of great work, that the team's done an amazing job with the OS and the PowerMax operating system. And we do a lot of work with the application hinting, if you will. So we have some technology that we've built that actually that understands the applications almost like putting a fingerprint on it, if you will. And then we have algorithms and heuristics within the array that understands does pattern recognition across that and that really understands that. So last year I talked a lot about autonomous storage. This is the realest first step of actually trying to be truly autonomous storage. Yeah, Jeff, it's really interesting. The people that have watched the storage industry, there's certain things that kind of, this is where we are. SCSI has been with us for longer than my career. So you look at NVMe and storage class memory and we're starting to get beyond that. I talked with that done earlier and say, intelligent storage is something that, I've seen lots of product announcements over the other talk to intelligent storage, but when you talk about billions of decisions being made by arrays underneath, bring us inside the product team a little bit and how much effort goes into this and the effort. I mean, if the team number one is a phenomenal team, I think they're world class and everything they do and all the products they build, it's been phenomenal. And they've done a ton of work underneath around the algorithm heuristics. I mean, we've been doing, I mean, if you think of our install base and how much data that we store, protect and secure at the end of the day is we do more than anybody else. So the team's done a lot of work around, our data scientists and our engineers have done a lot of works to understand kind of the IO patterns, heuristics off the drives, the telemetry streams, and then actually building the algorithms to really make sense of that data and provide useful insights. So it's not easy to your point. It's a lot of great work by a great team. So add not, I'm glad you had them because he's one of the key guys to make sure that it all works and comes together. And then being able to understand the use case and that application tied back to the system is where the magic happens. We're really connecting that and really putting that forward. You know, we talk about faster and you probably can, maybe you can hear the music. It's not loud or not faster. I mean, how so? And what was your measurement for success there? How did you say, okay, this is the goal. This is what we're shooting for. Or did you take technology and say, what can we squeeze out of this? Well, it's kind of funny. When we built the architecture, we actually do a lot of prototyping and we do a lot of kind of paperwork up front, right? As we understand the customer requirements, the use cases we're trying to drive. We actually write a lot of that down on paper and say, okay, what do we need to do to hit that market need? And then we look at what we need to do from a hardware and a software standpoint as we architect the system. And that's what the team really did here. So what we were looking at is what the customers are looking at, not only for today, but into the future. So as you think about where we are today and you heard Michael talk about 2020, I actually have been talking a lot about 2030. If you think about IoT, you think about AI, machine learning, all the sense of data, structure and unstructure, data's exploding, right? And the end of the day is how is our customers going to, you know, it's one thing to store and protect and secure that data. We got to do a lot more than that, right? And this goes back to how do we make, you know, get in real time, make it accessible, but also extract the value of that data to provide useful insights back to our customers so they can provide them to their customers either for better business decisions or more value or what have you. And that's really where the power comes from. So I've been focused a lot on the data and to me it's really about the data, the data explosion that's coming. The customers really understand how big that's going to be in the period of time. And so what we worked on today, focused on what we're trying to do tomorrow, we want to make sure that we have a clear path to help our customers on that journey. So going back to some of the performance characteristics that we looked at is not only what we modeled for today, you know, making sure that we're the best in the industry, best in the market. We also want to look forward to saying, okay, as data explodes over the next few years, can this technology evolve and support that growth in that data? And a lot is going to go back to the machine learning and AI, because there's going to be a lot of compute required to actually do a lot of that and provide that intelligence going back. So some big claims I think probably the team talked to you about today. We're two X, anybody in the industry barn on in this space. So it's 10 million IOPS on an 8,000. You're talking 150 gigabytes per second for bandwidth. I mean, just the latency and the performance is just phenomenal in this box. And I, you know, it's got so much horsepower behind it. And we also did some creative things around efficiencies. I hopefully had none of them talk to you guys about it, but we did inline Ddupe, inline compression. We offload that engine, so that way we could have no impact on the data services and really offload on the card so we don't impact performance for our customers. Yeah, Jeff, love that discussion of data. I think there's been a great trend the last few years talking, it's not just about storing whether it's structured, unstructured, block, file, object. It's about how businesses can leverage that data, get into the business, big in the themes of the keynotes, IT and business. We really, really bring it together. Maybe look at your storage portfolio. How is that transforming businesses? How is the, not just storage, but data impacting what's going on? I mean, to me, data is the precious metal. It's the crucial asset, right? You can debate if it's the most important asset for our customers, you know, between their people and their data, you can debate. For me, if you kind of step back, data is the most crucial asset they have. So you got to treat it as such. And to me, it's about what can we do to kind of unleash the power of that data to enable them to be more successful? And so, I think you're dead on. It's not just about infrastructure. Infrastructure's interesting, it's cool. It's modern, we have to make sure that we enable it through that way. But it's really about having a data strategy and how they want to do it. So if you think about having the right data in the right place at the right SLA, there's things around how do you manage the mobility, the infrastructure supporting and all the things that you would do to drive that. And I think that's critical. So we want to make sure we as Dell Technologies and we as Dell EMC, and me as the storage guy, make sure that we unleash the value of that data to enable our customers to make better business decisions and add more value to their businesses. And that's what we're driving. And that's the whole strategy we're working on. All right, Jeff, talked about PowerMax. Talked to the team about the X2 announcement there. Step back for a second. Give us a snapshot of what's happening with the storage portfolio and, you know, you came from what we would call the legacy EMC. So now that we've had more than a year under our belts between the company together, give us that update on the portfolio. Yeah, so I mean, we still believe in the power of the portfolio and no ifs and buts, so I'm not going to shy away from that. In regards to that brings us a lot of strengths but it also provides some weaknesses in regards to complexity. And the big thing I think Michael talked about a year ago is we're going to leave no customer behind and we're completely living up to that, right? So you've seen launches recently on Unity, you've seen launches recently on SC, seen launches recently on X2 and what have you. And we're going to continue to do that because our customers, we have a large and loyal install base of legacy Dell or legacy EMC customers, which are obviously the most important people, direct and indirect sellers that have some biases or confidence in certain things and we want to make sure we take care of them. To be clear, simplification is part of our strategy and it will be. So going from a lot of brands to less than brands, we're absolutely going to do it and I'm happy to share that more detail when we have more detail, but we are working through that but my commitment to the customer is going back to Michael's point, it's going to really twofold. One is on the data migration of the data mobility. It will be native and it will be seamless to move data from point A to point B. So I want to be clear, everything will have an XGen. It might not be the same brand or tattoo that they were used to before. It will be a system that meets the market need, the customer requirements and the architecture and the feature functions to support that. We will provide the mobility natively. In addition to that, we're going to provide our loyalty programs. So not only on the technology side, we'll make sure that they're whole, but on the loyalty program. So our investment protection that our customers want, need and demand and deserve, we're going to provide that as well. So we're going to take care of them on the technology side, we're also going to take care of them on the business side. But like I said, I'll share more details when we're here, probably more some next year. Right, simple, predictable, profitable, right? That's right, it's really that simple. That's good formula. Jeff, thanks for being with us, we appreciate the time. Awesome, thank you for having me. Jeff Goudreau from Stories of Dell EMC. Back with more, we are live here in the Sands at Dell Technologies World 2018.