 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here live in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Stu Miniman. We have Jay Crone, he is the senior consultant portfolio marketing at Dell EMC and Allison Langen consultant product marketing Dell EMC. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having us. You for returning on theCUBE. I'm returning, thanks for having me again. You are a newbie. Yes, first time. Your first time, it's going to be great. So we're going to talk today about cloud storage and data protection. But I want to start with cloud and I want to start with UJ. Talk a little bit about what your customers, what they want to do with the cloud. Well, and so one of the things we found is cloud has been out there for a while and people have learned about what they can do with it. It's not the panacea that people thought. There are about four or five use cases. The big one is disaster recovery. So a lot of people who can't, won't, don't care to, don't have the money to set up a second data center will rent the cloud. You know, rent both capacity and computer in the cloud. So disaster recovery is the big one. We'll talk about that more in terms of some specific announcements. The other ones make sense. It's really sort of the rent instead of buy. Test and development. You know, you want to spit up a test environment and run for three hours, find out what it tells you and then tear it down and not have to pay for it. Backup and archive is kind of a relate, related to the disaster recovery, but it's a little bit different use case because often people want to put the cloud, you know, put the data someplace to store it. Regulatory requirements as an example, which is different than disaster recovery. Analytics, a big, again, it's this, like what we used to call high performance computing where you need a lot of compute and a lot of storage for a short period of time and you don't want to, you have a data center full of stuff that you're paying for and not using. And then the last one, there's lots of words for this. The polite marketing term is workload migration, also known as lift and shift, which is these are the people that actually do want to take a workload from on premises and pick it up and move it to the cloud wholesale. So those are the ones, disaster recovery is still far and away the most popular. So Allison, you know, our observation coming in this week is there's a lot of discussion about that hybrid and multi-cloud. And a lot of that focus gets put on the public clouds. I mean, you bring Satya Nadella to the show, we're going to talk a lot about Microsoft Azure. And even when we get into the data center, you know, we've seen the ascendancy of VxRail and that's an underlying component for many of the solutions that were rolled out. What I know you're going to help bring to us is help fill out some of the rest of the portfolio. Is, you know, from the EMC side and as Dell EMC comes in, there's a large storage portfolio. Does that get left behind when we talk about cloud or how does that get pulled into the entire discussion? Not at all, yeah, and a great question. So, you know, when we think about our, you know, cloud strategy as a whole for Dell technologies, you know, there's really, there's two pieces to that. And so a lot of what you heard about yesterday and the big announcements around the Dell technologies cloud, that's really helping customers really just completely transform to a cloud operating model and a lot of the people processes, technology implications of doing so. The other piece of that is around our cloud-enabled infrastructure, which is really complimentary to a lot of what we talked about yesterday and our cloud-enabled infrastructure, you know, that's more of what we heard about today and what we're doing across both our storage and data protection portfolios to help customers modernize their existing infrastructure to be able to extend their data centers to the cloud. So, and it's, you know, these are, there's our complementary pieces and it's not really, it's not an or a conversation, it's really an and conversation. Both pieces are really important when thinking about your cloud strategy, just depending on, you know, workload and transformational readiness and where you're at to be able to do that. So, that's where a lot of our storage cloud capabilities come into play. All right, Jay, maybe we can bring us down a little bit of level as to, you know, how, explain how cloud-enabled isn't cloud-watching, you know, something like PowerMax, you know. Well, and that's interesting. In fact, I had, we just walked out of the booth was talking to one of the product managers who had, was talking to a customer that had one of some gear from a distinguished competitor, shall we say, was interested in PowerMax, partly because of the cloud story. So, and PowerMax is just joining the cloud family and one of the things that we are, have announced here that was talked about in the keynote is cloud storage services, which is an offering that we have through a cloud service provider that allows you, for example, as an existing PowerMax customer, to use SRDF, to use native replication to replicate into the cloud and then in a VMware environment, here's that disaster recovery use case coming. In a VMware environment, use Site Recovery Manager to perform a failover and then this service provider will spin up those VMs in VMware cloud on AWS. So what you basically get is an automatic failover for VMware environments with PowerMax. So it's an extreme, and a unity by the way. So both of our, and Isilon. So we get that disaster recovery use case enabling our bread and butter, our industry leading storage platform. So that's a big piece of the news and that was announced here. The other thing I do want to point out with that announcement is there's a multi-cloud capability. The one I just discussed is the automatic VMware use case, but there's also the ability through our service provider to connect to regular AWS in addition to VMware cloud on AWS, Google and Azure, which we might have heard a little about yesterday and we're excited about that as well. Allison, this is a very competitive market and customers really expect a lot. They want new capabilities, they want the latest and greatest. What is the strategy and the messaging behind why Dell is the choice? Right, so I talked a little bit about, like speaking specifically around our cloud-enabled infrastructure. We had a lot of great announcements today, but really we've been incorporating these cloud capabilities and functionality with our storage and data protection portfolio for a long time and it's been around and we haven't really been talking about it enough, but we have a lot of comprehensive cloud features and we sort of look at that in, there's three specific areas where we really look to innovate with the cloud in our storage and data protection portfolio, so that's areas like our cloud connected system, so that's like data mobility, our ability to tier data from on-prem to the cloud. Then we also have, as Jay was just talking about, we have our cloud data services, which includes our new cloud storage services offerings, but it's also things like being able to deploy in the cloud as opposed to extending to the cloud, so things like cloud addition or data domain virtualization where you're deploying a software defined version in the cloud, and then spanning across the top of that from on-prem in the core to the cloud, we have our cloud data insights, so that's things like cloud IQ or clarity now that really enable you to proactively monitor and manage not just your infrastructure, but also your data, and really use that artificial intelligence built into those to get good insights to manage and monitor your data from on-prem to the cloud, so really that, with those three areas, we really bring together a comprehensive set of features to cloud enable your infrastructure. Jay, wondering if you can bring us inside some of the conversations you're having with customers, you're wearing the shirt I see around a lot of the booths. What are some of the top kind of business challenges and how are things different now than they might have been back when we called this EMC world? Well, so there's the disaster recovery use case, which as I said is new. The other thing that's happening is there's that five years of learning that people have had around the public cloud. I was talking with a reseller yesterday, and one of the value propositions that we have for this particular offering, especially the cloud storage services, is because the storage is at a service provider that is not the cloud provider, shall we say, they can offer a different economic model. So what we're finding is people are finding new ways to go to the cloud for less money. So, and that works out really, really well because it makes the cloud more affordable for everybody. It gives us some additional business opportunity and most importantly, it gives customers the ability to use the cloud consumption model, the OPEX model, and the outsourcing of the resources that they couldn't do before. So that's the big thing is we're basically enabling the public cloud in ways that we couldn't have done to your point five years ago. Right. In addition to the cost benefits of that, just building on the multi-cloud piece, whether cloud storage service is offering, it's also about some concerns that, like big concerns around public cloud is like security and having control of your data. There are cloud storage services offering. Your data is actually sitting on external storage. So it's directly connected to the cloud. You have like a high-speed connection into the public cloud to be able to run your applications. But, and you can connect to multiple clouds, move data between clouds, you know, as it suits the business needs or as different workloads. But at the same time, you're still maintaining control of that data on durable, persistent Dell EMC storage. Right. It's on the gear you know and love. And as I said, all of our native replication, this is wonderful because if you're a customer with gear on site, you don't perceive any change. Your SRDF pipe, if you will, it leaves the building like it used to. It just goes to a cloud provider instead of a data center across the Hudson River, so to speak. Well, data protection and data security, it's a big theme this year for good reason. Where do you think the customer mindset is right now? Are customers appropriately concerned about the threats that they face and the requirements that are bearing down? Or are they head in the sand? I mean, how would you describe where customers are right now in terms of thinking through these things? Everybody is concerned about security. I mean, so the answer is it's right up there. You know, and we look at the security, some of it is off site, but it's things like Allison said, we offer a model where your data is, it's in the lock box that you know of as a Unity or an Isilon or a PowerMax, and it's not in some amorphous place, you know, up there in the cloud as it were. And that gives people a lot of a warm fuzzy feeling, and things like data at rest encryption that work on the storage arrays still work on the storage arrays when it's in the cloud. So those features are still available to customers that they already know and love. All right, Allison, one of the other things we've been talking a lot about this week is the VMware and Dell EMC pieces have come together more than ever before. You know, I think back, you know, when we used to rank, how does EMC storage do with VMware? Well, how many integrations does it have? Now, many of the solutions, you know, VxRail, it's got VCF sitting on it. Can you talk about how the VMware and the Dell EMC storage pieces have been coming together even more? Yeah, absolutely. So specifically what, one of the solutions that Jay was talking about earlier, that automated disaster recovery feature for our cloud storage services, that's all about VMs, it's all about VMware integration. And it really offers that, if you get this disaster recovery as a service model for VMware environments who are running VMware cloud on AWS, you get that complete operational consistency. So that's a huge benefit to our customers. So there's that where it's, you're leveraging for the automated disaster recovery, it's either PowerMax or Unity, including the new Unity XT, which was recently announced, being able to completely have operational consistency within your VMware environment from on-prem to the cloud. In addition to that, we talked a lot yesterday about the Dell Tech cloud, which VxRail is a key component of that. We also have our storage, our key storage platforms are also validated with VMware cloud foundation for some more high performance workloads. So things like PowerMax and Unity are also validated with VMware cloud foundation to be able to get that best of breed storage as part of that stack as well. And something that you asked what's changed, something that's kind of interesting, so we're in this storage division, we're in the storage business unit, and we have weekly meetings, bi-weekly meetings with the VMware cloud folks. So that just tells you where, what's important, there's VMware and cloud in that word. And here we are as some of your primary and unstructured storage people working on a regular basis with the VMware folks. And that is an example of how the companies are coming together and doing things differently than we did before. How are you finding this show? This is the 10th year that theCUBE has been at Dell Technologies World, the back-band Dell EMC world. What are you, how are you finding the vibe this year? What is the tone of things from where you are? Well, it's a very cloud-focused topic. Which has been a huge, huge shift this year. It's everything that we're hearing about is very cloud-centered, which is nice to see. I wouldn't say it's so much of a victory lap, but there's a lot of excitement, certainly in our area on the floor. There's a lot of work that has been done over the last couple of years to get things aligned and put some new processes in place and get some new products out. So you listen to the Jeff Clark portions of the keynote in particular yesterday and today. He just goes this, this, this, this and this. And that's what customers want to see. We have folks coming up, they want to see the new PowerMax, they want to see the new Unity XT. Of course, it was fun last night. It was just kind of sitting there on a pedestal and nobody pointed it out. Today, people want to pull the covers off and say, show me the NVMe slots. So there's that kind of vibe and excitement. The partner vibe is there as well. We have VMware and some other partners that we're working with. So it's very exciting this year. Yeah, it's great. Well, Allison and Jay, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great having you. Thank you, thanks for having us. Thank you so much. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have so much more of theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World, live from Las Vegas, coming up in just a little bit.