 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE, our continuing coverage at VMworld 2018. I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host, John Troyer. We're very excited to welcome back to theCUBE one of our alumni, Chandomoi Mondaw, the director of product marketing at Dell EMC. Chandomoi, it's great to talk to you again. Thank you, nice to be here. We just seem to do the circuit in Las Vegas. Yeah. So, loads of people here. We last got to speak four months ago at Dell Technologies World, thematically that event about making IT transformation real, about making digital transformation real, security transformation real. Let's talk about IT transformation. Yesterday, Pat Gelsinger and talked about, you know, the essentialness that customers have to transform IT. As an enabler of digital transformation, let's talk about what Dell EMC is continuing to help customers do to transform their IT. So, they can really get on that successful journey to digital transformation. Yes. Digital transformation is key in today's digital economy in order to thrive in this new world, right? And digital transformation is fuelled by IT transformation. For us, IT transformation means modernizing the underlying infrastructure so that they can deliver on scale, performance, availability, cost effectiveness. They can also automate a lot of the manual processes and streamline the operations, net result being freeing up the resources and kind of like deliver the transformation for not only application processes, but also businesses in general. So, with our portfolio, we are helping customers into this journey. And since we talked at Dell Technologies World, it is going great. We are seeing a lot of adoption in this portfolio. Shana, may I love, you know, you work on high-end storage, right? Which is, which means that these are business critical applications that you're supporting. Absolutely. And that means that they're the most, in some ways, some of the most interesting, right? And the deepest and most important when you're talking digital transformation. But it comes down to, you know, as you say, efficiency and how the IT department is running. In the olden days, you'd get a V-Max and you'd have an Admin and there's a lot of knobs and adjustments and tuning and you have to keep that machine running smoothly because they're supporting the enterprise. Now, next generation, PowerMax, tell us a little bit about that. What I'm really impressed with is all the automation and all the efficiency that goes into that platform. Absolutely, absolutely. So PowerMax is our latest flagship high-end product, right? It's an end-to-end NVMe design platform designed to deliver like highest level of performance, not just performance, but highest level of efficiency as well as all the trusted data surfaces that are synonymous with V-Max and not to talk about the six nines of availability. All those goodness of the previous generations carried over. But the key thing is with PowerMax, what we have done is, if I need to boil it down into three things, this is a very powerful platform. It's simple and it's trusted. Now, when I talk about powerful, obviously performance is part and parcel. It is actually the fastest storage array, 10 million IOPS, 150 gigabytes per second. It's a screamer. It's amazing. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's kind of like a table steak and bread and butter for us. Now, what I want to highlight is how simple the platform has become. We have a built-in machine learning engine within the platform. And now, instead of like I need this much of capacity and like this much of performance, you can actually provision storage based on the service levels that you need to give your customers. And we underneath will take care of like whatever it means for any workloads you are running. And how are you doing it? So for example, today, right? Most of the applications are still like business applications like Oracle, SAP, Unemi. But within the digital transformation, a lot of the modern analytics heavy applications are also coming in, right? So if I had to break it up, it will be like say 80, 20 today, 80% business, 20% modern applications. Now, we are seeing the modern applications getting adopted like higher and higher. It's going to flip right at some point. Like in three to five years, the ratio will be the opposite. Now, if you are buying an array like PowerMax today, how can we like deliver the performance you need for business applications of today while taking care of the analytics heavy applications of tomorrow, at the same time, meeting your applications. I mean, meeting your SLAs all the way through. And that's where the machine learning engine comes in. It like takes 40 million data sets in real time. It makes six billion decisions per day. And essentially it figures out from the patterns in the data how to optimize where to place the load without the administrators having to like tune anything. So it's like extremely simple, completely automated thanks to the AI and ML engine. Taking advantage of those superpowers AI, ML that Pat talked about yesterday. So you talked about it's efficient, it's fast trusted. Speaking of trust, Rackspace long time partner of Dell EMC of VMware. We actually spoke with them yesterday. Dell EMC and PowerMax particularly have been really kind of foundational to enabling Rackspace to really accelerate their business in terms of IT transformation. Talk to us about that in terms of them as a customer. So nice that you bring up Rackspace. They got a shout out from Pat yesterday as the leading multi-cloud provider in the managed space, right? Now, if you look at Rackspace, they have like 100,000 plus customers all with various types of needs. Now with a platform like PowerMax, they are able to simplify their IT environment, reduce a lot of consolidation happening on that dense platform so they can reduce the footprint, a lot of like less power cooling. At the end of the day, they are minimizing their operational expenses, simplifying the management, how they like manage the infrastructure, monitor the infrastructure. It becomes kind of like invisible or self-driving storage. Like you really like don't worry about it. You worry about the business value add and innovations that IT can bring for your digital transformation while the array kind of like does it own work? A lot of work, no mistake about it. But everything is kind of like hidden from the admin perspective. Whether you are running Oracle or Splunk, it figures out like what to do, not only like maintaining the service levels, but as the technology evolves to bring in not just NVMe SSDs, but next generation storage class memory, they are going to automate and do the placement by itself. Yeah, that's huge, right? Because then that's where that you free up those time and resources and brainpower frankly for your IT group then to be able to work on more strategic projects than tuning this particular data store and LUN or whatever for Splunk and et cetera, right? That you've got so much, again, self-driving kind of self-driving storage there. I also, Chandramay, I also wanted to talk about the other kind of high-end array in Dell EMC's portfolio with the Extreme I.O. And that, all flash, you can talk a little bit about that, but what are the use cases there and when should people be looking at that and what's new in that world? Sure, so PowerMax is the flagship high-end product. It's been like evolved over 30 years, 1,000 plus patents, right? Whereas if you contrast it, Extreme I.O. is a purpose-built all-flash array designed to take advantage of the flash media and design from the ground up. Now, it delivers very high performance with consistently low latency, but the key innovation there is the way it does in line all the time, data services, especially the data reduction, the content, 100% in-memory content, our metadata helps deliver a new class of copy services. So, and then, I mean, it scales modularly with scale up and scale out. So, the use cases where Extreme I.O. is very efficient is where you need a lot of, I mean, you have a lot of common data, say for example, VDI, we can offer very high data reduction ratios, reducing your footprint for VDI type environment. The other use case is active copy data management. So, for example, for every database, there are probably eight to 10 copies at a minimum. Now, with Extreme I.O. you can actually use those copies same as the production platform and run workloads on them, like whether it's like your BI workload or like reporting, test steps, sandboxing, all of those things can be run at the same platform and like the array will be able to deliver like without any sort. In essence, you're doing copy data management, sort of thing. Yeah, okay, that's great. Yeah. So, customer examples, you know how much I love that. You talked about this really strong example with PowerMax and Rackspace. Give us a great example of a customer using Extreme I.O. X2 that's really, but enabled with these superpowers to grow their businesses. Sure. So, at VMware, what best can it be saying the customer in this case will be, guess what? VMware. So, VMware's IT cloud infrastructure team is using Extreme I.O. X2 for their virtualized SAP HANA environment and there are several other workloads in the pipeline. But what I want to highlight is like what and how they are doing it. So, they have their production environment, they are leveraging replication technologies for our DR and then from that DR, they are making copies. On those copies, they are applying the like patches, sandboxing, all those things and exact replica of the production environment and then like when they are done, they are rolling it back to the production. Like the entire workflow is kind of like automated, tested and a great example of like how they're doing it. But it's not just the copy data management, there are other aspects to it. So, for example, the performance. Now, they started with like a two terabyte VM and they tried to clone both in the traditional storage and Extreme I.O. With the traditional storage, it took like two and a half hours. With Extreme I.O. it was done in like 90 seconds. So, from two hours to 90 seconds is dramatic. And like they ran the data reduction they can achieve. So, for VMR's entire ESX production environment, this is like 1.2 petabyte storage. Now, with Extreme I.O. data reduction technology, they can see that it will be reduced to like 240 terabyte worth of storage. So, essentially from three rows of storage, it would be reduced to three racks of Extreme I.O. So, you can see the settings in like all over the place. Like, I mean, footprint, power, cooling, management, all of those things. So, that would be like my best example of like how Extreme I.O. X2 is being used for, I mean, in a transformative way in the IT environment. Well, it kind of goes along with one of the things that Pat Gelsinger talked about yesterday from VMR's perspective is I think that the stat was, they've been able to reduce CO2 emissions by 540 million tons. Sounds like Extreme I.O. might be one of the invisible facilitators. Yeah, like we are contributing a lot in that. And, I mean, at the end of the day, this is like what digital transformation is about, right? So, like, absolutely, yes. That's great, Shader Bay. I mean, I would love to have a problem. I would love to have a problem that required running, you know, hot on Extreme I.O. Because I think, you know, those are super interesting problems. And the fact that you can, you know, actually turn those huge data sets into something that's actually manageable. And, you know, I can envision three racks. I can't really envision, you know, half a data center's worth of spinning disks. So, that's amazing. I love the fact that the engineering that goes into these high-end systems on the team there. Yeah, so, and the one other thing I wanted to mention was the Future Proof loyalty program. Yeah, we've heard a little bit about that. Tell us. Yes, so, this is essentially for our customers three things. Like, one is a peace of mind. You know, like, what you are getting. There are no surprises. The second thing is investment protection. And then the third would be like a path forward. So, there are like several components to it. And, like, it is not only like for Xtremio or PowerMax, it's pretty much like for the portfolio, there is a list, like, of what is part of it. And it's continually growing. Now, for Xtremio and PowerMax purposes, the important things are first of all, like it's a three-year warranty. And then, like, clear pricing. They know, like, exactly, like, what they're going to pay for support today, as well as when maintenance renewal comes up. Then, never only migrations. So, platforms change, right? Like, with Xtremio to the next generation, PowerMax to PowerMax.next. But, like, they are covered with non-destructive migration plans, storage efficiencies. And the last two things that we added, literally, like, we announced at VMworld is cloud enabled. And cloud consumption models. So, like, I mean, as Michael says, cloud is not a place, it's an operating model. So even with Xtremio and PowerMax, customers can pay for what they're using. And then, like, it's called, like, flex on demand. And then, like, use, I mean, when they use the buffer space, they can pay for that. And then, with cloud IQ, we can monitor the storage arrays from the cloud. It's the storage analytics, so it's cloud-enabled as well. So, it covered pretty much, like, all of the things Pat talked about yesterday. Fantastic. Well, I'm going to go out in a limb yesterday. I've asked a number of folks. What would you describe, you know, I asked Scott DeLandy, the superpower of certain technologies. And what I'm getting from this is trust. Like, the trustinator. So, maybe that. Can you make a sticker with the time we get to Dell Technologies World next year? Oh yeah, absolutely. I'm so excited about it, awesome. Great to have you back on theCUBE. Thanks so much for sharing all the excitement, what's going on. We'll talk to you next time. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We're John Troyer, my co-host. I'm Lisa Martin. We are live at VMworld Day 2 from the Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas. Stick around, John and I will be right back with our next guest.