 From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante, and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I've been following trends in backup and recovery and data protection for decades. And I'll tell you, right now is one of the most exciting eras that I've ever seen. And with me here to talk about some of the trends and some hard news is Beth Phalen, she's the president and general manager of Dell EMC's data protection division. Beth, it's great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, it's great to be here, Dave. It's always good to talk to you. Yeah, so there's been a subtle change in IT, even when you go back to sort of the downturn in 2008 where IT was largely a support function. It's really now becoming a fundamental enabler. Are you seeing that with your customers? Absolutely. The vision of IT being some back office that is segregated from the rest of the company is no longer true. What we find is customers want their application owners to be able to drive data protection and then have that compared with a central oversight so they can still have that global view. The other big change is for years, data has been this problem that we have to manage. I got so much data, I got to back it up, protect it, move it. It's now become a source of value. Everybody talks about digital transformation. It's all about how you get value from data. Yeah, and it's so interesting because it was there all the time, right? And suddenly people have realized, yes, this is an asset that has a huge impact on our business and our customers. And again, it makes it even more important that they can rely on getting access to that data because they're betting their business on it. So as the head of the data protection division, it's interesting, even the parlance has changed. It used to be when it was just tape, it was backup. And now it's data protection. So the mindset is shifting. It is, and it's continuing to shift, right? With new threats like cyber recovery and other challenges that are out there, protecting data becomes the core of what we're offering our customers. So let's talk a little bit more about the catalysts for that change. You've got tons of data, you're able to apply now machine intelligence like you never have before, and you got cloud, which brings scale. So this is changing the needs of customers and the way in which they protect data. I mean, as customers' data becomes more and more distributed across multiple cloud providers, multiple locations, it's even more important that they can answer the question, where is my data and is it protected? And that they can recover it as quickly as possible. And you're seeing things like DevOps, data protection strategies and data management strategies that are supporting DevOps and analytics applications. You also have new threats like ransomware. So it's a more fundamental component of cyber. Yeah, and you hear us talking a little bit about cyber recovery, the new product that we introduced last year. We can't just think about data protection as backup. We have to think about it as the comprehensive way that customers can get access to their data, even if they're attacked. So much has changed, everything has changed. Yeah, the level of innovation that we've been doing has been keeping up with that change. And that's one of the things that I'm most excited about as the president of this division. We've been investing in enhancing the customer experience and cyber recovery, as I mentioned, and expanding into new markets, into driving a new level of reliability and resiliency, building on the nutrition that we have, and of course, expanding into the cloud. So one of the things that hasn't changed is the fundamentals of I need to get my data back, I need to protect, I need to be trusted. So why is it, well, you guys make a big deal out of being number one, you're number one in all the Gartner Magic Quadrants and so forth. Why is leadership so important to customers? And what are those fundamentals that haven't changed? Yeah, so two questions there. First, leadership is so important because we have more experience protecting data around the globe than anybody else. And that means all environments, right, from the multi-petabyte major corporations to the shops that have maybe eight terabytes or 24 terabytes, we're involved in it all. So that experience is important. And then those fundamentals you talked about, lowest cost to protect, fastest performance, fastest backups, and resiliency, those fundamentals have to be part of any data protection product. So the way you guys are organized, you are in charge of R&D as well. You talked about innovation before. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how your R&D investments are translating into customer value in terms of price performance. So resiliency, speed, cost, what's going on there? Yeah, the biggest thing that I want to talk about and highlight here is how much our investment in cloud is enabling our customers to continue to have confidence that they can get the same level of digital trust that they've had with us on-prem, but now as they expand into the cloud for cloud disaster recovery, long-term retention, data protection in the cloud, that confidence comes with them. And we're doing it in a way that allows them to seamlessly expand into the cloud without having to introduce additional gateways, additional hardware. It becomes an extension of their data protection infrastructure. So the cloud operating model is very important here. What are you guys doing for, for instance, admins, application owners in terms of enabling self-service, for example? So we have the broadest application support of any company, and what we're doing is we're integrating directly with those applications, whether it be Oracle, SAP, you can go down the list, and then of course directly integrating with VMware for the VM admins. And that's not enough though, because if we just did that, you wouldn't be able to have one view of how your data protection policies are working. And so we pair that with centralized governance to make sure that the person in charge of their data protection for that company still can have confidence that all the right things are happening. So what does the data protection portfolio look like? How should we think about that? Yeah, three simple things. Data domain, our new integrated appliances, and data protection suite. Okay, follow-up question on that is, how do you for customers abstract the complexity? How are you simplifying their world, especially in this cloud operating model? Yeah, and simplifying comes in multiple stages. You have to simplify the first box to backup experience. We've got that down to an hour and a half, two hours and max. From there, you have to make sure the day-to-day tasks are simple. So things like two clicks to do a cloud failover, three clicks to fail back. Things like a single step to restore a file in a VMware environment, and then live movement of that VM to another primary storage array. That kind of targeted customer use case, simple process is core to what we've been doing to enhance the customer experience. Now you guys aren't really a public cloud provider, so you got to support multiple clouds. What are you doing there in terms of both cloud support and what are you seeing in multi-cloud? Yeah, and most customers have more than one cloud provider that they're working with. So what we do is we allow the customer's specific example right from within the data domain interface to select which cloud they want a tier two, and then they can also select other cloud providers of the same through the same interface. So it's not a separate experience. They can focus on the data domain, but then interact with multiple clouds. Awesome, Beth, thanks for taking some time here to set this up. We're going to hear about some hard news that you guys have today. We've got some perspectives from IDC analysts, but right now let's take a look at what the customer says. Keep it right there. Phoenix Children's is a healthcare organization for kids. Everything that we do is about the kids. So we want to make sure that all our critical data that a doctor or a nurse needs on the floors to be able to take care and see kids, we need to make sure it's available at any time. The data protection software that we're using from Dell EMC with data domain give us that protection. Our critical data are well kept and we can easily recover them. Before we moved to data domain, we were using Veritas NetBackup and some other technology. Our backup windows were taken upwards of 20 to 24 hours. Moving to data domain with the duplication, we can finish our full backups in less than seven hours. The user deployment for data protection software and data domain, it was very easy for us. Our engineers, they have never worked with data protection software or data domain before. They were able to do some research, work a little bit with some Dell engineers and we were able to implement the technology within a month, a month and a half. ECS for Phoenix Children's Hospital is a great technology. Simple to use, easy to manage, the benefits from a user perspective are tremendous. From an IT perspective, I can extract terabytes of data in less than an hour. When we get into a critical situation, we can rely 100% on ECS that we will get the information that the doctor or the nurse needs to take care of the kid. The data protection software and the data domain benefits for Phoenix Children's Hospital are great. There is a solution that works seamlessly together. I have no worries that my backups will not run. I have no worries that I will not be able to recover critical applications. We're back with Rhea Barrett, who's the Vice President of Marketing for Dell EMC's Data Protection Division. We got some hard news to get into, Rhea. Let's get right into it. What are you guys announcing today? We are announcing a basically tremendous push with our data protection appliances family, both in data domain and integrated data protection appliances, and the software that basically makes those two rock. Okay, so you've got a few capabilities that you're announcing, cloud, performance. Take us through at a high level. What are the three areas that you're focused on? Exactly, you nailed it, Dave. So three areas of announcement. So exciting cloud capabilities and cloud expansion. We've been investing in cloud over the last three years, and this announcement is just a furthering of those capabilities. Tremendous push around performance for additional use cases and services that customers want. And the last one, but not least, is basically expanded coverage and push into the mid-market space with our data domain 3300 and IDPA 4400. And this comes in the form of software that I can install on my existing appliances? It's all software value that really enables our appliances to do what they do best to drive efficiency performance, but it's really the software layer that makes it sing. And if I'm a customer, I get that software, no additional charge? If you have the capabilities today, you'll be able to get the expanded capabilities, no charge. Okay, so one of the important areas is cloud. Let's get into some of the cloud use cases. You're focused on a few of those. What are they? Cloud has become a really prevalent destination. So when we look at cloud and what customers want to do with regards to data protection in the cloud, it's really a lot of use cases. The three we're gonna touch on today is really cloud tiering. Our capabilities are on cloud tiering with long-term archival. So they're really trying to leverage cloud as a long-term archival. The second one is really around cloud disaster recovery. So to and from the cloud. So that's really important use case. That's becoming really important to our customers. And not, God forbid, for a disaster, but just being able to test their disaster recovery capabilities and resiliency. And the last one is really in cloud data protection. So those are the three use cases and we have enhancements across all three. Okay, let's go deeper into those. So cloud tiering, we think of tiering, oftentimes you remember the big days of tiering, inbox tiering, hot data, cold data. What are you doing in cloud tiering? Well, cloud tiering is our way of really supporting object storage, both on-premises and in the cloud. And we introduced it about two years ago. And what we're really doing now is expanding that coverage, making it more efficient, giving customers the tools to be able to understand what the costs are gonna be. So one of the announcements is actually a free space estimator tool for our customers that really enables them to understand the impact of taking an application and using long-term retention using cloud tier, both for their on-premise data protection capacity, as well as what they need in the cloud and the costs associated. So that's a big question before customers wanna move data. Second is really broadest coverage. I mean, right now, in addition to the usual suspects of AWS, Azure, Dell EMC, Elastic Cloud Storage, we now support SAP, we support Alibaba, we support Google Cloud. So really how do you build out that multi-cloud deployment that we see our customers wanting to do with regards to their long-term archival needs? So really expanding that reach. So we now have the broadest coverage with regards to archiving in the cloud and using cloud for long-term retention. Great, okay, let's talk about disaster recovery. I'm really interested in this topic because the customers that we talk to, they want to incorporate disaster recovery and back up as part of a holistic strategy. You also mentioned testing. Not enough customers are able to test their DRs. It's too risky, it's too hard, it's too complicated. What are you guys doing in the DR space? So one of the things that's, I think, huge and very differentiated with regards to how we approach, whether it's archival, whether it's DR or in cloud, it's the fact that from an appliance standpoint, you need no additional hardware or a gateway to be able to leverage the capabilities. So one of the things that we introduced, again, Cloud DR over a year ago, and we introduced it across our data domain appliances as well as our first entree to the mid-sized companies with IDPA, DP4400, and now what we're doing is making it available across all our models, all our appliances, bar none, and all of our appliances now have the ability to do fully orchestrated disaster recovery either for test use cases or actual disasters, god forbid, but what they are able to do is the three-click failovers and two-click failbacks from the cloud, so both for failback from the cloud or in the cloud. So it's really big and important use cases for our customers right now. And again, with that, we're expanding use case coverage to now we used to support AWS only, now we also support Azure. Great. Okay, the third use case you talked about was in-cloud data protection. What do you mean by that and what are you doing there? Yeah, so one of, again, the really interesting things about our portfolio is our ability to run it as an integrated hardware software platform or in the form of a software-only deployment. So our data domain virtual edition is exactly that. You can run our data domain software in virtual machines. And what that allows our customers to do is whether they're running a software-defined data center on-prem or whether they want in-cloud capabilities and all that goodness they have been getting from data domain in the cloud, they now can do that very easily. And what we've done in that space with this announcement is expanded our capacity coverage. So now data domain virtual edition can cover 96 terabytes of in-cloud capability and capacity. And we've also, again, with that use case expanded our coverage to include Google Cloud, AWS, Azure. So really expanded our coverage. Great. I'm interested in performance as well. Of course, everybody always wants more performance, but are we talking about backup performance, restore performance, what are you doing in that area? Perfect. And one of the things when we talk about performance, one of the big use cases we're seeing that's driving performance is that customers want to make their backup copies do more. They want to use it for application test and development. They want to use it for instant access to their VMs, instant access and restores for their VMs. So performance is being fueled by some additional services that customers want to see on their backup copies. So basically one of the things that we've done with this announcement is improved our performance across all of these use cases. So for application test and development, you can have access to instant VMs, up to 32 instant access and restore capabilities with VMs. We have improved our cache utilization. So now you can basically support a lot more IOPS, leveraging our cache enhanced cache, four times as many IOPS as we were doing before. So up to 40,000 IOPS with almost no latency. So tremendous, again, improvement in use cases. Restores, customers are always wanting to do restores faster and faster. So file restores is no exception to that. So with multi-streaming capability, we now have the opportunity and the capabilities to do file restores two times faster on-premise and four times faster from cloud. So again, cloud is a big, everything we do, there's a cloud component to it, and that performance is no exception to that. Okay, the last thing I want to touch on is mid-market. So you guys made an announcement this past summer, and so it sounds like you're doubling down on that space. Give us the update. Yeah, sure, so we introduced the data domain 3300 and our customers have been asking for new capacity points. So one of the things we're introducing with this release is an eight terabyte version of data domain 3300 that goes in scales up to 32 terabytes. In addition to that, we're supporting faster networking with 10 gig ease support as well as virtual tape libraries over fiber channel. So virtual tape libraries are also back and we're supporting with data domain 3300. So again, tremendous improvements and capabilities that we've introduced for mid-market in the form of data domain 3300 as well as the DP4400 which is our integrated appliance. So again, how do we bring all that enterprise goodness to a much broader segment of the market in the right form factor and right capacity points? I love it, you guys are on a nice cadence. You know, last summer we got this announcement, we got Dell Technologies World coming up in May, actually end of April now May. Very exciting. So looking forward to seeing you there. So much for taking us through these announcements. Yeah, thank you, thanks for having us. You're very welcome. Okay, now let's go to Phil Goodwin. Phil Goodwin is an analyst at IDC and IDC has done a ton of research on the economic impact of moving to sort of modern data protection environment. They've interviewed about a thousand customers and then had deep dive interviews with about a dozen. So let's hear from Phil Goodwin at IDC and we'll be right back. IDC research shows that 60% of organizations will be executing on a digital transformation strategy by 2020, barely a year away. The purpose of digital transformation is to make the organization more competitive with faster, more accurate information and timely information driving business decisions. If any digital transformation effort is to be successful, data availability must be a foundational part of the effort. Our research also shows that 48.5% or nearly half of all digital transformation projects involve improvements to the organization's data protection efforts. Purpose-built backup appliances or PBBAs have been the cornerstone for many data protection efforts. PBBAs provide faster, more reliable backup with fewer job failures than traditional tape infrastructure. More importantly, they support faster data restoration in the event of loss. Because they have very high data deduplication rates, sometimes 40 to one or more, organizations can retain data onsite longer at a lower overall cost, thereby improving data availability and TCO. PBBAs may be configured as a target device or disk-based appliance that can be used by any backup software as a backup target or as integrated appliances that include all hardware and software needed for fast, efficient backups. The main customer advantages are rapid deployment, simple management, and flexible growth options. The Dell EMC line of PBBAs is a broad portfolio that includes data domain appliances and the recently introduced integrated data protection appliances. Dell EMC data domain appliances have been in the PBBA market for more than 15 years. According to IDC market tracker data, as of December 20th, 2018, Dell EMC with data domain and IDPA currently holds a 57.5% market share of PBBA appliances for both target and integrated devices. Dell EMC PBBAs have support for cloud data protection, including cloud long-term retention, cloud disaster recovery, and protection for workloads running in the cloud. Recently, IDC conducted a business value study among Dell EMC data protection customers. Our business value studies seek to identify and quantify real-world customer experiences and financial impact of specific products. This study surveyed more than 1,000 medium-sized organizations worldwide, as well as provided in-depth interviews with a number of them. We found several highlights in the study, including a 225% five-year ROI. In numerical terms, this translated to $218,928 of ROI per 100 terabytes of data per year. We also found a 50% lower cost of operating a data protection environment, a 71% faster data recovery window, 33% more frequent backups, and 45% more efficient data protection staff. To learn more about IDC's business value study of Dell EMC data protection and measurable customer impact, we invite you to download the IDC white paper titled The Business Value of Data Protection in IT Transformation, sponsored by Dell EMC. We're back with Beth Phalen. Beth, thanks again for helping us with this session and taking us through the news. We've heard about, from a customer, their perspective, some of the problems and challenges that they faced. We heard about the hard news from Rhea. Phil Goodwin at IDC gave us a great overview of the customer research that they've done. So let's bring it home. What are the key takeaways of today? Yeah, first foremost, this market is hot. It is important and it is changing rapidly. So that's number one. Data protection is a very dynamic and exciting market. Number two is at Dell EMC, we've been modernizing our portfolio over the past three years. And now we're at this exciting point where customers can take advantage of all of our strength but in a multi-cloud environment, in a commercial environment, for cyber recovery. So we've expanded where people can take the value from our portfolio. And I would just want people to know that if they haven't taken a look at the Dell EMC data protection portfolio recently, it's time to take another look. We appreciate all of our customers and what they do for us. We have such a great relationship with our customer base. We want to make sure that they know what's coming, what's here today, and that how we're going to work with them in the future. Well, great, congratulations on the announcement. You guys have been hard at work. It is a hot space, a lot of action going on. Where can people find more information? Go back to dellemc.com, it's all there. Right, well thank you very much, Beth. Yeah, thank you, Dave. And thank you for watching. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante from theCUBE.