 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of Dell Technologies World, digital experience brought to you by Dell Technologies. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020, the digital experience. I'm Lisa Martin and I'm pleased to welcome back one of our CUBE alumni, John Shirley is with us, the vice president of unstructured storage product management, John, welcome back to theCUBE. Thank you for having me, it's great to be back. So, so much has changed since we last saw you, we're very socially distanced, but talk to me from a storage and unstructured data perspective, a lot of changes in the year of 2020. Yeah, a lot of changes everywhere, but especially in our space as well, and we're seeing just a phenomenal amount of growth with storage still, that's continuing, but what we're really seeing is things changing pretty rapidly actually to new cloud-based applications, and it almost seems like everything that's happened during that pandemic has kind of been an accelerant to getting to that next level of technology, and so we're really excited to be working with our customers, really guide them in the journey to getting to new cloud-based applications, cloud native applications, and really just helping them take advantage of all of this unstructured data that's being generated. Yeah, we've heard about acceleration in so many facets this year, and that it's, we're accelerated by 24 to 36 months. Talk to me about, for example, I was talking to a Dell Technologies customer EarthCam the other day, and of course, the massive amount of video that they're generating, 24 by seven by 365, from all over the world, the edge, cloud, core, so much growth there, how are you seeing customers be able to pivot quickly and adapt to how different things are? Yeah, you know, the interesting part too isn't just the collection of data anymore, it's how customers want to treat that data, and what we're seeing over and over again is that we get the video streams coming in, but there's also all of these sensors in the world, and so marrying up the video streams with the sensor information and keeping that in a repository so that you can do things like real-time analytics, but also be able to take that same data set and also get the historical view is becoming critically important, and that's the thing that's really changed is how the data is being used. Yes, the data keeps coming in, but customers are really, really taking a different view in terms of how they want to go use that data, so we have a lot of tools that we've created over the last year or two that are helping our customers harness and really use that data, something that they just weren't able to do a couple of years ago. You know, we always talk about data as currency or data as gold or data equals trust, and the most important factor for any business is extracting value from that data. I think now real-time is even more important if you think of contact tracing, for example, or the accelerator work going on to develop a vaccine, so much access has to be now because data from yesterday isn't good enough. It's not going to help solve some of these big use cases. What are some of the key use cases that you're seeing accelerate in the last few months? You just hit it right on the head, so the way we look at it, there's kind of two points within the timeline of data that's the most valuable, and of course what you just said, data right away in the here now, that's one of the times that it's the most valuable to have that data, but then if we kind of take a look at that data as it ages, does it get less important? Well, some of it might, but actually, the data has a big scale data-like data repository and be able to extract value out of that kind of holistically as a big set of data is extremely important as well, and so we have tools, everything from our streaming data platform that talks about how we can extract value from that data right as it's coming off the sensor or the video streams. We've got our PowerScale product which provides very, very high performance storage so that customers can stream a bunch of data and get some of that AI and ML off of that data, and then we've got our ECS object storage-based product what customers want, exabytes of data, and they just want a really long-term, robust storage repository, so we've kind of got all the tools together that really helping our customers extract that value. Talk to me about data migration, that's always a big challenge, especially as many businesses live in a hybrid or multi-cloud world where they've got or using public cloud services on-prem edge maybe for example, but in terms of being able to get to the data and run algorithms on it to do AI, how can a customer, give me like a snapshot of an example infrastructure that you see as common with customers that allows them to harness data wherever it is and be able to run AI on wherever it is without having to move it around and pay all those charges and of course, lose precious time. Yeah, that's a great question. What we're seeing a lot to is customers wanting to take advantage of things like the power of the compute in the cloud and they don't necessarily want to move the data in and out of the cloud, but at the same time, we want to make sure that the customers have the flexibility to choose which cloud that they want to go to, so we have multiple cloud offerings that we're given to our customers, specifically the ability to take the data, we host the service for the customer, so it's all in all operated within the Dell IMC infrastructure team and then we can map that data up to the cloud. So whether they want to go to any of the big three cloud providers, we can map that up, there's no egress fees and they can go ahead and take advantage of the data very quickly and easily. So really from a flexibility perspective, being able to meet them where they are. That's absolutely right. So whether the customers are in the edge or in there in their core or in the cloud, we'll be there to help their needs. So this is the first Dell Technologies world that is digital, lot of opportunity for folks to learn and still be able to have as much engagement as possible. Talk to us about some of the things that you're excited about that customers are going to learn in terms of how you're helping them get more value out of the data faster in a time of such massive change. Yeah, so we're doing so much within the team. So earlier this year, we introduced a new product called PowerScale, which is taking our industry leading 1FS software for scale out file. And we have put that and really taken advantage of what we have within the Dell family and taking the best server hardware with PowerEdge. We've taken a 1FS software, mirroring it together, we're really extracting the best value of the data with those platforms. So again, the industry leading scale file solution, mirroring that up with the industry leading server solution. And now we've got even more robust solution. On top of that, we have announced our object scale solution. And so object scale is an object store solution that's specifically targeted for customers running Kubernetes. We partnered up with our friends over at VMware and we've developed an object store specifically for developers on top of Kubernetes environment so that when customers want to go and start generating new applications with object store and new cloud native apps, they can really quickly spin up new object store, new buckets and start writing data. It's very simple and easy to use. And then when they want to grow at scale, we've got our ECS object store to get them to that petabyte scale. So it's very exciting. Can you give us an example of a customer that's already doing that that you see is really achieving some significant benefits? Yeah, yeah, so probably the one that's the most fun to watch is we're working with a company that's doing amusement park rides and really taking a look at all the sensor information so that they can get predictive analytics in terms of the maintenance of the rides, making sure that if there is maintenance that needs to get done, they can get that fixed as quickly as possible so that customers going through those rides. A, of course they're gonna be safety. Safety is always number one, but being able to make sure those rides are maintained so that the lines move quickly and they can keep customers going through and you get as many people enjoying those rides as you can. And that's all coming from our streaming data platform, which is, again, taking that information, all of that sensor feed, and they need that real-time value that we talked about before. They get that real-time value, but they also get the historical view so they can see how the maintenance is kind of evolved over time. So that's one that's been a lot of fun to work with here over the last couple of months. And hopefully we get to go back to amusement parks and the calendar year 2021, wouldn't that be nice? You mentioned safety and that, yeah, and that kind of makes me think about security. We've seen so much about increases, like companies like Zoom, for example, with increased scrutiny on their data security, more compliance requirements, data protection being even more important as there was this massive pivot to work from home seven months ago. And a lot of folks are still there and are going to be there. Tell me a little bit about some of the things that you're doing to facilitate this data, this massive increase in unstructured data is managed securely, so that if there's any sort of breach or incident, your customers are in good shape. We have a lot of focus on security within the organization, and that's really across the board, and that's really across all of Dell Technologies products. So we do a lot of things around encrypted drives to make sure that if the drives are ever pulled out of the system, there's no way to go access that data. There's just no way to go do that without the original keys, and you can't get those original keys when they're not in the system. So we make sure that we do a lot of hardening at the system at that level. We work very closely with the broader partner and ecosystem community to make sure that we provide things like ransomware protection, isolate, so in case if something does happen, A, you identify it as quickly as you can, but B, you make sure that you have a good data set and a good golden copy of that data that you can always go back to. You mentioned ransomware, it's really been on the rise in 2020. I read a stat a couple of days ago that every 11 seconds a ransomware attack occurs, and when we think about how many new industries are exposed, I read recently that the New Zealand Stock Exchange was hit a couple of times, Carnival Cruise Line, the Department of Veterans Affairs, social media with Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and 235 million user profiles, great from an unsecured cloud database. So not only is that threat landscape expanding, but we've got more people accessing corporate networks with maybe personal devices, where those phishing emails are probably even getting more sophisticated. Yeah, we spend, like I said, we spend a lot of time, we have a whole security team within the storage group that does nothing but thinks about security and how we can harden the products to make sure they stay secure and robust, and we keep the bad people away. That's excellent. All right, so any predictions what we might see in the next six to nine months from Dell Technologies with respect to helping customers who are hopefully have pivoted from this survival mode to now being able to thrive, leverage data, extract values from it to identify new revenue streams or new products or new innovation. What do you see on the horizon? Yeah, I see just the continued acceleration of the technology I see. Dell Technologies spending a lot of our time focused on solutions so that when we can go into a customer environment, we talk about solutions and we talk about how we can get time to value. So how quickly can we get up the customer up and running with a known good configuration, supportable, it's enterprise grade, and we can have our customer spend time writing code and developing new applications and not worrying about how to go build that infrastructure. So you're gonna see a lot of things and a lot of partnerships across our entire infrastructure team, which internally we call ISG and we're really working together as one ISG team to make sure all of our networking, our storage and our compute and all of the software that goes around that we act as one overall family for our customers and provide that solution. Then we also partner very close with VMware to provide that software layer. So that again, when we go to our customers and they wanna start a new project, we have all of the tools within our portfolio. We've been around for a very long time. We have very strong focus on both the horizontal, the various workloads that customers are running and also very specific vertical through the industry and teams that just are dedicated on that. But I think you're gonna see a lot more is the solution-based approaches where we can go into customers, we can provide that solution and it's up and running in a very, very short amount of time. Last question you said, you mentioned you guys have been doing this a long time. I know you've been with Dell for 10 years. What are the three things that you would say if you're in a customer situation and they're looking at Dell and maybe they're looking at HPE for example or some other competitors, what are the three things that you think really differentiate what Dell technologies can deliver with respect to extracting value from massive amounts of unstructured data? Absolutely, I mean, this is where I get really excited and why I'm so proud to be at Dell because if I look at all of the advantages that we have that we can bring to our customers, we have just the knowledge. So I think first and foremost when it comes to unstructured data, we have been the most prevalent player in the market. And again, if you look at different verticals, think about like media and entertainment, we've won an Emmy just because we've been around and we had the technology that's really met the needs. But that's one, we have all of the deep knowledge and that's really gonna give a lot of benefit to our customers. Two, we've got the breadth of the portfolio. So not only do we have very specific knowledge in one area where I actually cover all of the unstructured portfolio for our customer's needs, whether that's file or object or streaming data, might even be the data management, data management when we have data ITU to help our customers understand that data portfolio is really broad. So deep knowledge, we have a broad portfolio and then we have the overall Dell Technologies family that we go forward with. So again, it's not just about the unstructured data, it's everything that goes around that. It's the servers, it's the computer, it's all the infrastructure, but it's the software. That's also our partners in that whole ecosystem that we built up across Dell Technologies. That's what really makes us strong and really the best person to go partner with. Excellent knowledge, breadth and a large ecosystem. John, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE today, talking to us about all the exciting things that you're working on and what's to come. We appreciate your time. Thank you very much. For John Shirley, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Dell Technologies World 2020.