 Welcome to theCUBE, our coverage of Dell Technologies World. The digital experience continues. I have a long time guest coming back, joining me in the next segment here, John Stigl is back, the vice president of product marketing at Dell Technologies. John, it's good to see you. Welcome back to the program. Thanks, Lisa. Always great to be on. We last spoke about six months ago and here we are still at home, but there has been no slowdown whatsoever in the last year. We were talking to you a lot about Edge last time, but we're going to talk about PowerStore today. It's just coming up on its one year anniversary. You launched it right when the pandemic happened. Talk to me about what's happened in the last year with prospective PowerStore, adoption, momentum. What's going on? Yeah, great. Yeah, listen, what a year it's been, right? But certainly for PowerStore especially, I mean, customers and partners around the world have really embraced PowerStore. Specifically, it's really, it's modern architecture. What many people may not know is this is actually the fastest ramping new architecture we've had in all of Dell's history, which is quite a history, of course. And we saw four X quarter over quarter growth in the most recent quarter. And in terms of shipments, we've shipped well over 400 petabytes of PowerStore. So special thanks to lots of our customers around the world and industries like education, gaming, transportation, retail, more than 60 countries, I think 62 countries now. They include customers like Columbia Southern University, Habib Bank, RealPage, the University of Pisa, and UltraLeave, just to name a few. And to give you a sense of how truly game-changing it's been in the market is that approximately 20% of the customers with PowerStore are new to Dell, new to Dell Technologies. And we've tripled the number of wins against some of our key competitors in just the last quarter as well. So look, it's been quite a year, like you said, and we're not stopping there. Yeah, you must have to wear a neck brace from that whiplash of moving so quickly, but that's actually a good problem to have. But I'm curious about 20% of the PowerStore customers are net new to Dell. Interesting that you've captured that much in a very turbulent year. Any industries in particular that you see as really being transformed by the technology? Yeah, it's a great question. I think, look just like, we're bringing disruptive technology to market. There are a lot of industries out there that are disrupting themselves as well, right? And how they transform, particularly in this new era during the pandemic. I think, I can give you a great example. One of the new capabilities of PowerStore is apps on, just for those that aren't familiar, apps on is the ability for PowerStore to run apps directly on the appliance, good name, right? And it's thanks to a built-in VMware ESX hypervisor. And where we've seen really good traction with apps on is in storage intensive applications at the edge. And that brings me to my example. And this one's in retail. And of course, just like every industry, I think it's been upended in the past year. It's a large supermarket chain in Northern China that was new to Dell. During the pandemic, they needed to fast track the development of a smart autonomous retail system in all their stores so that their customers could make their purchases via a smartphone app. You know, and again, just, you know, limiting the essentially the person-to-person interaction during the pandemic. And this required a significant increase in transaction processing at each of the store locations that they didn't have equipment for before, as well as support for big data analytics applications to understand the customer behavior that's going on in real time. So the net result is they chose PowerStore. They were new to Dell and they deployed it in their stores and delivered a seamless shopping experience via smartphone apps. You know, the whole shopping experience was completely revolutionized. And I think this is really a great example of, again, how the innovations that are in PowerStore are enabling our customers to really rethink how they're transacting business. Well, enabling the supermarkets to be the edge, but also in China where everything started so much, the market dynamics just are still going on. But how quickly were they able to get PowerStore up and running and facilitate that seamless smartphone shopping experience? It was only weeks, only weeks, weeks from, you know, from beginning to getting them up to speed. I mean, we've had great coverage, great support. And again, they embraced, I mean, they happened to leverage the apps on capability so they were able to run some of their applications directly on their clients. And they were able to get that up and running very quickly. And they were already a VMware customer as well. So they're already familiar with some of the tools and integration of VMware. And again, that's also been a sweet spot for this particular offer. Okay, got it. So a lot in its first year, you said 4X growth over 60 countries, 400 petabytes plus shipped. A lot of new, new customers, what is new? What are you announcing that's new and it's going to take that up even a higher level? That's right. We're always going to up the ante, right? We always going to, we can't rest in our laurels for too long. Look, we're very excited to share what's new for PowerStore. And that is one of the reasons we're here, of course, is I can break it down into two key highlights. First is a major software update that brings more enterprise innovation, more speed, more automation in particular to both new and existing customers. And we're also excited to announce a new lower cost entry model for the PowerStore family called the PowerStore 500. And this offers an incredible amount of enterprise class storage capabilities, much of which I have talked about and we'll talk more about today for the price. And the price itself is what's going to surprise some folks. It starts as low as 28,000 US street price, which is pretty significant, in terms of the game changer we think in this industry. So let's talk about the software update first. You've got PowerStore 2.0. Happy birthday to your customers. We're going to take advantage of this. Kind of talk me through what some of the technological advancements are that your customers are going to be able to leverage. That's a great point. Yeah, so from a software step, like I said, happy birthday. Yeah, so all of our, just to be clear, from a software update perspective, all of our existing customers are going to get this as a simple, free, non-destructive update. And this is a commitment we've had to our customers for some time. And really is the mantra, if you will, PowerStore, which is, it's all about ensuring that our customers can count on a very flexible platform that will keep giving them the latest and greatest. So really a couple of things I want to highlight from PowerStore that are brand new. One is we're giving a speed boost to the entire PowerStore lineup. Customers now, existing customers, get up to 25% faster mixed workload performance, which is incredible right off the bat. Secondly, we're enabling our customers to take full advantage of NVMe now across the data center with the option of running NVMe over Fiber Channel. And this again requires just a simple software update and no additional hardware if they already have 32 gig capable switches and HBAs on-prem. We've also made our unique apps on feature, which I just talked about in the China example. We've made that more powerful and would scale out. This means more aggregate power, more aggregate capacity, and it makes it even more ideal now for storage intensive apps to run at the edge with PowerStore. Another capability that's been very popular with our customers is our data reduction, specifically our intelligent Ddupe, which is always on and automated. And now what it does is it enables customers to boost performance while still guaranteeing the four to one data reduction that we have at the same time. So just to give a quick example, when the system is under extreme IO, Duresse, if you will, it automatically prioritized that IO versus the Ddupe itself and provides a 20% turbo boost, if you will, a performance boost for the application running. All this has done automatically zero management effort, zero impact to the data reduction guarantee of four to one that we already have in place. And then the last highlight I'd like to bring up is last but not least is one we're really proud of is the ability for our customers to now take more cost advantage, if you will, cost effective advantage of SCM or storage class memory. PowerStore now differentiates between SCM drives and NVME drives within the same chassis. So they can use SCM as a high performance layer, if you will, with as few as one drive, right? So they don't have to populate the whole chassis. They can use just one SCM drive for cost effectiveness for metadata access. And this actually helps reduce the workload latency by up to 15%. So another great example on top of NVME that I already mentioned of how PowerStore is leading the practical adoption of next generation technologies. Are you seeing with the lower cost PowerStore 500, is that an opportunity for Dell to expand into the mid-size market and an opportunity for those smaller customers to be able to take advantage of this technology? Absolutely, yeah. So the PowerStore 500, which we're really excited about introducing, it does exactly what you just said Lisa, it is going to allow us to bring PowerStore and the experience of PowerStore to a broad range of businesses, a broad range, a much broader range of edge use cases as well. And we're really excited about that. It's an incredible amount of enterprise storage class performance as I mentioned in functionality for the price that is getting 28,000 starting. And this includes all of the enterprise software capabilities I'm talking about, the ability to cluster, four to one data reduction guarantee, any time upgrades. And to put this in context, a single 2U appliance, the PowerStore 500, supports up to 2.4 million sequel transactions per minute. I mean, this thing packs a punch like no other, right? And it's a great fit for standalone or edge deployments in virtually every industry. We've mentioned retail already, also healthcare, manufacturing, education and more. And it's an offering that's really ideal for any solution that requires an optimization of price performance, small footprint and effortless automation. And I can tell you, it's not just customers that are excited about this, as you can imagine our channel partners, they can't wait to get their hands on this either. It's gonna help. I'm just going to ask you about the channel. It is going to help them reach new sets of customers that they never had before. You mentioned mid-size, but also in addition to that, it's just going to open it up to all new sets of use cases as well. So I'm really excited to see the creativity from our channel partners and customers and how they adopted use the PowerStore 500 going forward. Tell me about some of those new use cases that it's going to open up. We've seen so many new things in the last year and such acceleration. What are some of the new use cases that this is going to help unlock value for? Yeah, again, I think it's going to come down a lot to the edge in particular, as well as mid-size, it can run, again, this can run storage intensive applications. So it's really about coming down to a price point that I think the biggest example will be mid-size businesses that now it's now affordable too, that they weren't able to get this enterprise class capabilities in the past, more than anything else, because it's all the same capabilities that I've mentioned, but it allows them to run all types of things. It could run new next generation intensive data, intensive databases. They can run VDI, they can run SQL. Essentially more than anything else makes existing use cases more accessible to mid-size businesses. Got it, okay. So so much momentum going on in the first year, a lot of that you're souping it up with this year, new software. We talked about the new mid-size enterprise version, PowerStore 500. What else can we expect from PowerStore the rest of calendar 2021? Yeah, I think, look, I think lots of things. So first of all, we're so pleased at the amount of, you know, commitment to innovation that I've had over the past year. We're gonna continue to work very closely with VMware to drive more and more innovation and enhancements with capabilities like apps on that I talked about and VM or V-Vols, which is a key enabler for that. We're also committed to continuing to lead the industry in the adoption of modern technologies. I gave some good examples today of NVME and apps on and SCM, storage class memory and customers can expect that continued commitment. Look, we've designed PowerStore from the ground up to be very flexible so that it can be enhanced and improved non-disruptively. And I think we did that with this release, we proved that. And no one can predict the future clearly. It's been a crazy year. And so businesses need stores that's gonna be flexible with them and grow with them and evolve with them. And customers can expect that from PowerStore and we plan on doing just that. So customers that are interested can go direct to Dell. They can also go through your huge channel you said in terms of those customers that are thinking about it, maybe adding to the percentage of new customers. What's your advice on them in terms of next steps? Yeah, I mean, next steps is, you know, I gotta say this, we've done, it's crazy. We've done over 20,000 demos of PowerStore in one year. No joke. And, you know, it's a new world. And so the next step is to reach out to Dell. We'd love to showcase this through a demo, give them, whether it's a remote experience that way or remote proof of concept. But yeah, reach out to Dell, your local rep or local channel partner. And we'd love to show you what's possible more than anything else. And look, we're really proud of what we've accomplished here just as impressive as these updates. I must say, you know, is that in many instances the team that brought this to market, the engineering team, they did this just like we're doing today, right? Over Zoom, remotely while balancing life and work. So I just also want to thank the team for their commitment to delivering innovation to our customers and it hasn't wavered at all. And I want to thank our top-notch team. Right, an amazing amount of work done. You've had a very busy year. And glad that you're well and healthy and been as successful with PowerStore as you can. We can't wait to see in the next year those numbers that you shared even go up even more. John, thank you for joining us and sharing what's new with PowerStore. We appreciate your time. Always a pleasure, Lisa. Likewise. Yeah, for John Siegel, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World, the digital experience.