 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage day one of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante in Las Vegas. Excited to welcome back to theCUBE one of our alumni, Chanda Mai Montal, the director of marketing at Dell EMC. Chanda Mai, nice to see you again. Happy to be here. So we had an exciting keynote this morning. Michael Dell was talking about number one in market share for servers and storage, expecting when the 2018 calendar numbers came out for first quarter to gain shares. What's going on with storage with All Flash? So we are excited about our storage All Flash portfolio. We are going to have couple of surprising announcements tomorrow. I cannot give away all of these, but all of our portfolio is going to continue to innovate based on all the things Michael touched upon ranging from artificial intelligence, machine learning, all of those things. We have a complete portfolio of All Flash products covering different market segments, customers, ranging from VMAX All Flash, Xtreme I.O., Unity, SC series. So we are really excited about the pace of innovations we are doing, the way we are capturing a market. So it's a great time to be in All Flash storage. John DeMay, I wonder if we can talk about how we got here. So the first modern instantiation of Flash, there were a lot of SSDs and battery backed up memories in the past, but it was, I think it was EMC dropped a flash drive into a symmetric way back when. And that began to change things. But people soon realized, well, the controller architecture is not going to support that. So we need All Flash architectures. And then people quickly realized, oh wow, it's taken us decades to build this rich stack of services. So now fast forward, basically a decade plus, where are we today in terms of All Flash capabilities and adoption? So in the enterprises today, you see All Flash getting adopted at a very high rate. In fact, of the storage that we ship, almost like 80% of it is All Flash storage. And again, like we have different products for different segments. And as you mentioned, we started from like dropping SSDs into the enterprise arrays evolving through the process. Now, if you look at us, we have modern purpose built All Flash arrays like Xtremio and then All Flash arrays like Vmax All Flash and some announcements where you are going to see the maturity level over the last decade, all the data services that got brought in and the very high performance low latency with mission critical availability that we are able to deliver across the platform for all of our enterprise products. So Flash everywhere. And then, we've made the observation a lot that, and it sounds trite, but I'll put it out there anyways, historically, when you think about storage, it was all about persisting data. And you try to make it go as fast as you could, it was mechanical. Now with Flash, it's all about doing stuff faster, real time, low latency, massive IOPS, we're shifting the bottlenecks around. What's your take on that dynamic? So Flash is a fast media, so having great performance is really table steak. That is not really the differentiator, so to speak, but it needs to be coupled with advanced data services. You need to have very high resiliency. The customers can rely on you with five, nine, six, nine of availability day in and day out, as well as you need to do the business solutions, transforming like IT, helping businesses transform in their digital transformation process. So let me kind of like give you some quick examples. Let's take Extreme IO for example. So it started out as a purpose-built, modern, leading, all-Flash array. And it is built upon an unique architecture, taking the advantage of Flash media. So it is content-aware, metadata-centric, active-active controller architecture that helps us deliver very high performance, hundreds of thousands to millions of IOPS with very low consistent latency, no matter how much you have written to the array, what workloads you are running, what are the system load, et cetera. But again, that's the first layer. The second layer of it is the advanced data services always on inline reducing the data space. So for example, the inline deduplication compression and making sure we are not writing the duplicate data to the SSDs, thereby increasing the longevity of the SSD media, as well as reducing the capacity footprint and driving down costs. Speaking of that, you kind of like wrap it around into a very simple, modern UI that's very easy to manage, no tuning needed. So that's where today's IT could go from the tactical day-to-day operations to strategic innovations, how they can do the IT transformation, get into the digital transformation so that they're ahead of their competition, not only today, but for tomorrow. And the content awareness and the metadata centricity are what you just explained, is that right? Can you connect those? Ah, sure. So suppose when the data is being written, right? It might have duplicate data. Now, typically, say for example, you're running a VDI environment, right? So for your tens of thousands of users, everybody has their Windows VM, probably like the same data across all the laptops, right? Now, when you look at it, in the extramile metadata centric, always in memory architecture, the request comes in, you try to look it up. Now, when you need to do that, your metadata is always in memory and you are doing data reduction based on a unique fingerprinting algorithm, checking in whether you have seen the data before. So if you haven't seen the data before, then only you write it doing other data services on top of it. But if you have seen the data before, then you just update the metadata in memory and acknowledge the right. You get a very fast right performance that is actually at memory speed, not even at the SSD speed. So this metadata centric architecture that has all the metadata all the time in memory helps you accelerate the process, especially in the case where a lot of duplicate data is present. It's a memory speeds, because you've somehow eliminated an IO, or is that NVMe or? So, when you access data, right? An application says I want to access blog XYZ. So any controller will need to have the metadata for it, and then based on the metadata, it needs to do the access. It's like when you go to a library, you want to find a book from a bookshelf. First, you need to know the control number, and then based on the control number, like which shelf, which rack, you go and fetch it. Storage controllers of every type works in the same way. Now, if you cannot have your metadata in memory, then the first step the controller has to do is go down to the array, fetch the metadata, and then based on the metadata, you fetch the data and serve the IO request. Now, if you have the metadata always in memory, then that step is always eliminated. You can guarantee that your metadata is there, and all you need to do is look up and serve the IO request. That's the key of delivering consistent performance. Okay, in other arrays, if the metadata is not in memory, you will not get that consistency. But here, we can deliver day in and day out, 90% full or 10% full, whether it's OLTP or VDI, that high performance with very minimal latency. That's the key here. So, high performance, low latency. You've given us some really good overview into the potential that the technology can make to help IT innovate. And as Michael Dell even said this morning, that IT innovation is key. IT can become a profit center of an organization, really as a catalyst for digital transformation. Talk to us about some of the business benefits that if a business is really wrapping their head around IT as a profit center and as a driver of business strategy, what are some of the business benefits that all FlashArray can deliver to an organization? Any examples come to mind? Yes, I will answer your question with one of the customer examples. So, let's see how they have been doing it. And it's my favorite example of Boston Red Sox. I am from the Boston area. You're a fan, right? Absolutely, all the Boston sports teams. Now, when Boston Red Sox was there in the digital transformation journey, now they had to transform a lot of things. First of all, the experiences of the spectators like us who are in the field living to the moment, like whether it's the Jumbotrons or like getting the experience digitally on the smartphones. So that's one aspect. The other aspect is there are a lot of analytics on all the players across MLB to get the competitive advantage in terms of which feature, which batter, who has what capabilities or deficiencies so that they can go after the right player or when they are against them, how to take advantage of that. And then they run a lot of the business applications in a virtualized environment. So, as you look, ranging from better spectator experience, ranging to the coaches getting competitive advantage from the opposing players or the scouting department and running the general back office applications like Exchange and like ORACO, whatever it might be. Now they were able to consolidate all of those things into the ExtremeIO or Flash array platform and the ability to deliver this performance as well as like getting a data reduction of almost like seven is to one was a key for Red Sox digital transformation journey. So the business impact to Lisa's point is lower cost, obviously, simpler management but also faster time to result or how did they turn that into a competitive advantage? So if they could run, say, those analytics previously used to take like 10 hours, now they can do it in two hours. So that's like an 80% faster turn around time, right? Previously, like if they could support like 10,000 spectators on one particular like wireless network, now they have like 80,000. So it's the experience that's transformative for the folks like who are enjoying the game. It's the like a number of applications they are running. It's how they are running. And they are viewing IT as a strategic investment as opposed to something that's needed to run the operations. Well, you know, baseball games are like five hours now because you could even do it in game at that speed. How about the data services? When Flash first came out, all Flash architectures, they were not very rich in terms of data services. That's evolved. I mean, the industry in general and Dell EMC specifically has put a lot of effort into that. So maybe you could describe some of the data, what do we mean by data services? Talking about copy services, migration services, snapshotting, et cetera. What are the important ones that we should know about? So the important data services are like thin provisioning, the data reduction technologies like deduplication, compression. Then you have your data protection in forms of like various types of red technologies. The most important one I'll put out as like what you, I mean, how match your snapshot services as well as what you can do for your data protection, business continuity, disaster recovery. Those are very critical for any businesses that needs to rely upon like having their systems up and running 365 days or 24-7. So having those type of data services is a key and not only having but also like having a maturity. For example, taking Vmax All Flash in this particular case, it's built upon of like two decades of reliability where SRDF is the gold standard in industry in terms of resiliency, right? Six ninths of availability. So those, somebody coming up with a brand new array like on day one cannot have it. We have seen that evolution with folks who originally had very fast storage but then like there was no data services, right? So it's the evolution of having the performance as well as the right data services that helps the customer transform their journey both in terms of modernizing the IT infrastructure as well as having the digital transformation to be competitive today and tomorrow. And the positioning of Extreme.io just to clarify for our audience because you got all Flash, Vmax, you got Extreme.io. It's really, it's the high end of the mid-range. Is that how we should think about that? So we have a lot of, I mean, like as you said, like Vmax, All Flash, Extreme.io, they're all important and effectively like we have the portfolio because with one product you cannot serve each and every customer needs. So picking on your very specific example, right? Extreme.io is great for mixed workload consolidation, virtualized applications, VDI, as well as situations where you have lots of copies. Okay, so for example, you have our database, you need to create test and dev copies. You have copies for your backup, sandboxing. So in these type of scenarios, Extreme.io is extremely good and kind of like is the sweet spot. And we are going to, we are having new Extreme.io X-Prix that are even lower priced point than the previous generation. It's literally 55% better price entry point. So now this enterprise class capabilities of Extreme.io will be also available in the mid-market at the mid-range price. Which one of my thanks so much for stopping by and not only expanding on the customer awards that we saw this morning by sharing with us the impact that the Boston Red Sox are making, but also sharing with us what's new with Extreme.io and All Flash. Thank you. And sitting between two Bostonians. Big night tonight. Got Bruins, we got Celtics. Red Sox take a back seat for a while, but they'll be back. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. We are live at day one of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break.