 from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Cover EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Welcome back, everyone. We are here live at EMC World 2016. It's silk at angles, media is theCUBE. Our flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Jeffrey Droze, SVP and general manager of Mid-Rain Solutions Core Technology Group at EMC. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you for having me. So this is the year of All Flash. What makes 2016 an All Flash year? What does that mean opportunities for your customers? Well, first, as everybody knows, flash is critical and we're going to see flash everywhere. If it's in the computer, if it's in the network, if it's in the storage. And for us, specifically in the storage, it's absolutely critical. We've been using flash for a long time and we've had great products in the portfolio. If that's Extreme I.O or VMAX, All Flash. We need to make sure that we had a real strong offering in the mid-range and that's what Unity is all about. Making sure that we have a strong offering in the mid-range. Price points, phenomenal. Just a price point again? Yeah, price point for All Flash in that space is starting under $18,000. Did the shift to All Flash, Jeff, happen faster than you guys thought? I remember two years ago at EMC World, David Goulden showed some slides, showed 2017, still going to be more spinning disks than flash and we were like, no, no, no. And then we sort of challenged that. But then you guys kind of said, all right, we're going all in. Talk about that dynamic, what happened? Yeah, so I'd say the transition, it happened a bit faster than most people thought it would be in regards to that stuff, especially for some of those, the higher performance or the more transactional applications. We want to make sure that. I want to be clear in the mid-range, we still have a ton of customers buying a ton of disk in storage in regards to kind of a hot and a cold tier. Because of more cost-effectiveness. Absolutely, and that becomes simplicity and economics. All right, so let's unpack Unity a little bit. So where'd this come from? We've heard this morning, it's got a little bit of VNXE in it. So that's good because it's simple. Take us back to the sort of idea and how it came about. Sure, actually, we kind of took, one, we were listening to our customers and we were looking specifically at the mid-range market. So if you think of the mid-market and kind of the key capabilities, they were looking for simplicity and they were looking for affordability. And a very powerful box and a very dense package is really what they were asking us for. So it was, how do you help us with, simplify the operational management, but also how do you help us drastically reduce the capital infrastructure? So those are really kind of the design center of that. So kind of what we did is we took a clean sheet approach with Unity and really there was only two, I'd say big innovations that came forward from prior technologies. So in VNXE still we had a major leap with multi-core optimizations with MCR and MCX. That type of technology was brought forward into Unity. And then in addition to that, we took the simplicity and the support ecosystem of VNXE and brought that forward. Other than that, it's pretty much all new. So it's Suzy Linux operating system. That's enough flare code. Flare's dead, Java's dead, Dart's dead. So basically what you would have here is that Suzy Linux, latest and greatest, that allows containers. We embedded our ESRS with a Docker container that's inside, natively. From there we use a state of the art file system, a brand new file system. Dirty little secret is that file system actually was shipping last year in the 3200 only, just so we could get some test and feed in regards to that stuff. We've got a lot of feedback from our customers on that. Brand new H&L5 UI, all fully restful APIs. So if you're using the H&L5, the API or the CLI, 100% consistent. Customers are loving that and loving that Java's dead and H&L is forward. And then from a technology standpoint, we have the cores, latest and greatest from Intel, latest DRAM and the latest SSD. So the 3D NAND TLCs. They're loving that Java's dead. Explain why they're loving that Java's dead. A lot of things around soft, it's just, there's a lot of complexity sometimes with Java is what I guess you come to know. I mean, there's some good things about it but there's a lot of complexity. So if it's around security, if it's around complexity, if it's around host agents, things like that, those all go away with the H&L5. So huge differences between what we know as VNX and that legacy versus UV. Yeah, Unity is truly going to be the flagship mid-range product for EMC as we go forward. And positioning, I mean, this thing scales. Absolutely. Right, so you can see it doing a couple of things. One is it's fitting in nicely to your portfolio. It's attacking certain competitors that have been nipping at your ankles, right? But it also scales up. Absolutely. So it actually starts, I'd say, it almost starts as, you know, as low as you can go. So we have a software to find instance. It's a virtual Unity that's actually free, downloadable today, right? And actually that can scale up with capacity support that goes up to about $5,000 in one year. I think we got it on this. It's right on that stick. There you go. And that's free, downloadable. Then we go into kind of our lower end offering. That covers from an IDC kind of price band perspective. Kind of like the sub 10K market, right? And it can scale all the way up. We're talking into the millions in regards to how we do this. So we have basically four flavors of the products in regards to the 300, a 400, a 500, and a 600. And it can scale absolutely both on performance, on latency, on capacity. Right, okay. So in the product portfolio, it will nip away at the high end or is there a clear separation? There's a good separation. Obviously we want to have a little bit of overlap between all of us just to make sure. Overlap is better than gaps. That's right. So as we kind of come up, exactly right. So as we come up, we basically think about, think of, if you looked at a traditional VNX, we would basically cover up to probably the mid of the, cover into the 7600, into the little bit of the 8000. When you get to the 8000 scale of what we used to have with VNX, it's the connectivity you lose. So it's faster, it's simpler, it's more affordable, it's condensed packaging, but the connectivity is what we lose. And that's when we transition to like extreme IO or a VMAX. Talk about the channel relationship because channel wants turnkey. They want to be able to integrate in low price point to get and build services around it. How is this unity product fit into that criteria? This was actually, as I said, we built it for the mid market, we built it for the channel. I mean, it's probably, it's not usually a strong point, sometimes a DMC of what we've done, but we're really focused on the partners here. And that wasn't just about the product itself, it was around the whole ecosystem. So how we price, how we package, the promotions and incentives that we're running with them. The actually the training programs actually, I think there was a tweet by Presidio today about telling how we did it all before GA, which is a new thing in regards to some of the stuff. So we really want to make sure that ecosystem in regards to how they can support their customers better as we're delivered by the product. So everything is simplest. And what feedback have you gotten from any kind of third party? We've heard some independent testing was done. What's the key value that's kind of popping out of the early returns of other products? It was actually interesting. We've done a couple outside studies. We weren't known always to be in the most simplest company to do business with other products. So actually we hired an industry consultant to actually do a three week analysis, deep dive in the technologies. The name is Mad Powell. We used a design firm, ESPN, Microsoft, Google. They came in and did a three week study and we crushed it across. Anybody in the competitors in that low end to mid market, if it was a hybrid at all flash or a hyperconverged, you need to crush them on the simplicity metrics across the board. So the channel obviously is going to love this product. How do you see that fitting in with the competitive dynamic in the channel? Because there's a land grab going on for the channel. The channel is shifting from sort of box seller to solutions. This is like a killer box, right? So is it sort of elongating that traditional trend or does it fit into a solution strategy? We talk about that a lot. So it does both. So one is that it will fit in spaces where maybe the full converged solution isn't going to be a play. So that there's a simple and affordable kind of economic play that gives them an offering. In addition to that, they love the flexibility of the portfolio. Like I mentioned, I don't know if I mentioned this before, but we basically as part of the portfolio having the virtual, having a purpose built either all flash or hybrid, but then in addition having to converge all g-ing at the exact same time. So they love the notion of being able to take a virtual instance for software to find or a purpose built specifically for an environment or an opportunity to meet a customer's SLA or we'll be launching a new V block, the 350, which will be unity embedded inside there for those converged software. So the all flash starts at 18K, the hybrid is what? Sub 10K. Sub 10K. And the software is free. And then it goes up to a two grand, 2,500 for a like 10 terabytes of capacity in EMC support. Or it can go up to about 5K and that's about 50 terabytes of capacity with EMC support. Where's the sweet spot in that market price band wise? I mean, where's the, where's the big one? It's more towards the bottom. What we're seeing is a lot of our customers, especially actually believe it or not, it's a lot of large customers like big banks and what have you, they're looking for is really around business agility is the use case. It's like edge devices or say they're in downtown New York and they want to get a development project up and running quickly. They have excess compute. They take this thing, they download it, they get it up and running, get the project going and then eventually when they need a purpose built because they need a higher SLA on performance or resiliency than they're bringing on them. My final question is, where does it fit in relative to customer engagement from your stand for a sale, go to market perspective. How do customers engage with you? Multiple way, actually it's multiple ways. So obviously EMC has their direct sales force that we've always had. This will be a huge reach with the channel in regards to how we go forward. So a lot of this will be done through the channel, a major percentage of it. And then also we have our online store capabilities. This product can be bought through the online store as well. And what's the free component? You mentioned some free software. Yeah, so that's what we call it V Unity. It's virtual unity and it comes as I said before and three flavors. So it was announced today with David. There's a link already up there. People can go and use it right now. You guys have it in your pocket and the memory stick and you can start using it. You mentioned the online store. As soon as the Dell transaction closes that's going to be an interesting product to put in the online store. Well, great naming, good branding, congratulations. Jeff Boudreau, SVP, the mid-market for the Core Technologies Group. We'll be right back with more coverage from EMC Real 2016. This is Silicon Angles, theCUBE, Extracting the Signal from Noise. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. You're watching theCUBE. It's always fun to come back to theCUBE because...