 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World here at the Sands Expo in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are joined by Louis Newcomb. He is the vice president server storage and HCI engineering Dell EMC. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE for the first time ever. I'm excited, I'm excited about it. Yes, well we're happy to have you. So we're talking VxFlex and we have not talked a lot about VxFlex on the show. I know you had a segment earlier. Tell us about your news today. Okay, well the big news for this show this week is we've launched an appliance. So traditionally we do a rack level product with VxFlex. So we've launched an appliance. So basically you can think half rack without networking. And then we did some updates to our software that we can talk about. And we also still, and we've added some more platforms. So we added the 840 powered server. So all of our products are on powered servers. And the 840 with four socket, we now have a great platform for SAP HANA, so. All right, so Louis, let's take back a sec because VxFlex, there are some new products, but a main piece of this, this is a rebranding of some of the other pieces in the CI and HCI family. So maybe those people that have a little history, if you can help put this into context as to which brands are gone and under this umbrella. Yeah, so the new, I'll just start with a new brand. VxFlex is the brand. VxFlex Ready Nodes, VxFlex Appliance is the new product. VxFlex Integrated Rack, VxFlex OS, and VxFlex Manager. So a lot of parts there. Simplicity. Okay. The naming is very simple and it's easier to talk about. I think big improvement over our previous brands. And then I'll go into some of the details. So I talked about the appliance, think about new consumption model, a little bit smaller chunk there. But we also updated the software, the OS. So the VxFlex OS, we added compression in this release. It's VxFlex 3.0 is the revision. It's shipping today. We added compression and we changed the data layout so we actually have higher performance and small granularity in snapshots. So some storage features were added. We also have many new certifications. So I mentioned the SAP HANA, we also have Epic, both VDI and the other database. We also have a SAS Analytics as a great white paper talking about our product and the benefits of our product. And we're really a performance product. You think about it's a pure software sand and we also can do a HCI. We can also combine the software sand with the HCI. We call that two layers, the way we refer to the software sand. All right, so this week there's a lot of discussion about VxRail. So maybe use that as a touch point for people to understand VxRail, join integration between VMware and Dell, VMware hypervisor, give us a little compare and contrast with some of those pieces. Great question, the VxRail as you said it's our integrated in the entire VMware stack and some great announcements. I love ACE, if you've seen the ACE announcement. So the Flex though is a product that's out there because not all customers are in a VMware environment. We also support bare metal. Or even if they use VMware, they're not 100% VMware. Not 100%. And many of our customers actually have both. For high performance databases, they might pick Flex. For more general purpose VDI and things they might pick to rail. And so in customers as we talk to them they have different needs and we have different products for those. So we give them that choice. Well, let's actually walk us through a little bit about the VxFlex customer and sort of, so this customer, what are their needs and why is VxFlex the choice? And you've been doing software defined for a long time. So I always say it this way. You start out with a customer that's transforming their business. They want to get in a software defined. They want to prepare themselves for the future. Well, that's where we start. We're software defined. And then the next thing we look at is do they need performance? Do they need some one millisecond latency across 50 nodes, 1,000 nodes, we can do that. We're very high performance. So that's why I mentioned the databases. And then the other thing is, we just talked about is that choice. They may not want to use just vSphere. They might want to use other hypervisors. So we support those hypervisors. And then the real interesting thing is that two layer because as you know with ACI, we combine the application and the storage services all in one node. So in our product, we can actually separate those. So you can scale storage and compute separately. And it's still all in one storage pool. So it's a very flexible product that fits that kind of customer's needs. Okay, simplicity is really one of the keywords that we've heard in this whole trend there. It's interesting. You have discussions from CI all the way through HCI. Some of the software that allows me to manage it really makes invisible some of those choices. You just said, well, HCI was, I can have some choices between the computing storage, but usually they did go and block together versus scaling them separately. Can you talk a little bit about kind of the management suite and what that means from a customer administrator and the infrastructure team as to how they look at the spectrum of offerings. So we have the VX Flex Manager, I mentioned that in the beginning. So that manager is starting to automate that management orchestration. So from deployment to serviceability to provisioning, we launched several new features in that in this current release, 3.2 release. So it's more granular around the service of the drives and things like that. We'll continue to evolve that. You mentioned that you're hearing that every customer I talk to this week. Number one thing we talk about is more automation, more ease of use. So as they're going into software to find they're all asking for the same thing and we're going to support that with the VX Flex Manager. All right, great. So talk a little bit about the application to talk about high performance environment. One of the things we've been looking in this space especially is what are some of the new areas, if things like containerization and Kubernetes, is this platform that the customer builds ready for that environment and how do we span from kind of what I have and where I'm going. Yeah, so we just launched our Kubernetes plug-ins and CSI plug-ins so that we have some customers already testing that in beta and because we have bare metal we can also support that in that native environment. So most customers they are still using that in a virtualization environment but they're preparing for the future. They're looking at different options so it gives them that flexibility if they want to go bare metal. So you're 15 years at Dell and you've really spent your career in storage and we're talking about the big customer, customer list of what they want. They want ease of use, they want simplicity, they want speed. They want performance. They want performance. So what are the kinds of things that you're thinking about for next years? Yeah, well next year we're still building out some of the storage services. So later in the year we'll add some new storage services like we just added compression. So our launch this week was compression and we'll add more and more storage services, more data protection, more replication. We'll continue in that path and more and more management. The management is going to be a key area focus for us. All right, can you take us inside some of those customer conversations? Good excitement, 15,000 people here. I'm sure you're talking a lot of customers. What are some of the key concerns that are raising to them and what's the feedback you're getting? A lot of the customers and the reason they want automation is they want to manage their full environment. Because remember at the rack level we've integrated the switching. So they want a predictable outcome and when they have drift, when they want to do security updates, that's most of our conversations. They want us to do more and more automation around that. Compliance against the product itself and then when a security patch comes in. And by the way, I'll mention the two layer, another great advantage of two layer. A lot of times these security patches come in only on the compute side. So we can do a security patch on the compute side without disrupting the storage pool. So it's a big advantage. So that's 90% of the conversations we're having. Yeah, maybe touch on one of the big concerns if you talk about I want that cloud operating model. When I'm running in by any of the public clouds, I don't have to think about what version I'm running. The old days of, oh, I had to manage it to, in the VCE days it was the compatibility matrix and the RCM documentation to, how are we doing towards getting to that simple push button, I take care of it, security patches come, I don't have to worry about scrambling, I've got that taken care of. Yeah, that's Nirvana, that's our North Star. So we're working on that and we're using the Flex Manager as that platform and more and more we're taking those requirements in the Flex Manager and we'll be rolling that out. Our goal is to have that one click upgrade, to have that one button. Our goal is to be able to do compliance and quick updates and it's a journey. And it's the most complex part, as you know, you mentioned some older products. It's the most complex part of the solution is keeping that compliance and that performance where you need it. So how do you manage that? I mean, as you said, it's a huge challenge that your company's facing and yet, and also all your clients are facing too. Well, luckily we have a lot of smart people. And we have great customers. I mean, the nice thing, Dell's direct. I mean, the interaction we've had with customers this week, I mean, they're designing it with us. They're telling us what they need. And we're not a large, large-scale business, you know, in relative to a server business or end-using computing. So we have relationships with almost all of our customers and we can get in, you know, we go and show them our roadmaps. We go get feedback from them. They help us define what they need and we followed our customers. Well, it's really interesting because we know that Dell's turning 35 very soon and middle age is the time where you start to kind of get a little more set in your ways, a little older, a little creakier, but what you're describing is this real collaborative relationship with your customers and not sort of this my way or the highway kind of thing. I feel like we're going to start up. We're agile. We're listing our customers. We're doing the right things. You know, we're not focused all just on our business. We're focused on our customer outcomes. I mean, we made a big shift this year on my product line of talking about the databases and the certifications. And we're really trying to help our customers through those decisions without them having to make all those decisions themselves. Yeah, what about the consumption model? Some of the other product lines we're talking to are going to manage services as well as moving towards that OPEX model. How does that fit into the VXX? We're not there yet. Of course, we're going to lead with our Dell Technologies portfolio. We have some great products in that portfolio, but we'll get there over time. It's just not, you know, today, you saw the announcements on day one with VMware, Dell, EMC and the cloud platforms. You know, we'll continue to build infrastructure. We'll continue to stay in our lane where we do really, really well and the customers love us, but we'll eventually get to different consumption models. So tell us a little bit about this show for you. This is not your first rodeo here at Dell Technologies World. Yeah, and I hope when you're seeing this, this feels like we're one big company now, right? We've been, it was three years in the making. And, you know, coming to Dell Tech this year, it just, we feel, I feel like we're one. And Michael's keynote was, you know, the first customers I talked to said, you know, everything Michael said resonated so well with me. And so it really feels that way. And the, you know, just the vibe back there in the solution expo is just, you know, at level 10. Well, right, so we're past the Dell EMC integration point, but the big thing we've been talking about this week is, you know, the seven logos up on the banner behind you there are acting like one. So, you know, VxRail designed together, sold together. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, where do some of the other pieces of the portfolio fit in there? Pivot Cloud Foundry, right? Almost all of us are partnering with Pivot Cloud Foundry and building that stack and offering that service to our customer. You know, Secure works RSA. We all need security, right? We're all working there too. And even down, if you look at that, so I work in the PowerEdge team, you know, you know, storage product. So we're working, we're taking PowerEdge and putting it everywhere. So all of our data protection products, RSA, our storage products, we're working PowerEdge everywhere and leveraging that. And the beauty about that is you saw the VxRail ACE announcement, right? That's a platform, right? That's an analytics platform that now we can build on and designing PowerEdge, we can put requirements into PowerEdge to make that a much richer telemetry box and really start getting some analytics that solve some problems, predictive analysis and things like that. So yeah, it's been fun. I've been on the tip of the spear of this, you know, coming from the storage side. And I'm starting to see it really, really come together this year, here at this show. All right, so I want to give you the final word. VxFlex, I know people, if they went through the expo hall, they could see it, touch it and the like. For those that didn't make it to the show, what do you want the key takeaway for VxFlex? Yeah, so we're peer software defined. We're very high performance. We're ideal for your databases. We're ideal for scale. We can scale it up to a thousand nodes or higher. And we have many, many customers doing that. We have running in the show this week, a database running at six nodes over a million IOPS, sub one mil second latency. A good note to end on, powerful. Bang, yeah. Louis, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Thank you, I appreciate it, it's fun. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman. We will have so much more of day three of the CUBE's live coverage of Dell Technologies World coming up in just a little bit.