(light music).
>> Live from Las Vegas.
It's theCube covering Dell
technologies world 2019.
Brought to you by Dell Technologies
and its ecosystem partners.
>> Hello everybody
and welcome back to
theCube's live coverage
of Dell Technologies
World here in Las Vegas.
I'm your host Rebecca Knight
along with my co-host Stu Miniman.
We are joined by Travis Vigil.
He is the Senior Vice
President Product Management
at Dell EMC.
Thank you so much for coming on theCube,
for returning to theCube I should say.
>> Thank you so much for having me.
>> Here from Austin Texas.
>> Yes. Yes I am.
>> Mothership.
So there is a lot of great storage news
so much storage news this week.
Break it down for us.
What are some of the sort of the headlines
that you'd like our viewers to know about?
>> Yeah there was a ton
this morning in the keynote
but for me it was three
of the announcements
in particular are something
that I'm really excited about.
The first is that we
announced the unity XT
which is the next generation platform
of our unity product line.
We've been shipping unity
for a little less than three years.
And in that time,
we've actually shipped
in nearly 80000 units.
So it's been very successful for us.
It's been known for flexibility,
unified block and file, simplicity,
value and with this release
we're really taking it to the next level.
We are increasing the performance
entirely new hardware platform.
It increases the performance up to 2x
versus the previous generation.
We're increasing data reduction rates
up to five to one data reduction rate.
It's NVMe ready and it's also architected
for a hybrid cloud world.
We call it cloud ready.
So that's one thing.
The second thing I'm excited about
is actually that cloud ready part
that I just talked about on unity XT.
So we announced Dell EMC
Cloud storage services today.
And basically what that allows you to do
is consume unity, Isilone or power Max
as a service with direct connections
into multiple public clouds
which is really cool.
And so if you're a customer
like a unity XT customer for example,
an awesome use case would be
hybrid disaster recovery as a service.
You don't have to have
a secondary data center
and you can actually use
a ready native replication
from on premises to the cloud.
We showed a demonstration on stage
where we are actually able
to fail over
to VMC on AWS automatically
across on premises and what is consumed
as a service unity XT in the cloud.
I'm also excited about this capability
because if you look at
our Isilon product line,
the fact that you can direct connect
into multiple different
public clouds is really cool
because what a lot of
people use Isilon for
is big data analytics, streaming.
A lot of the applications
that are driving the
unstructured data growth
need burst compute.
And so if you can sit in a data center
right next to these multiple public clouds
and be able to pick which compute
that you want to use with your Isilon
and have a customer
be able to consume that as a service
that's pretty exciting.
So cloud services on the portfolio,
a big part of the announcement today
that I'm excited about.
And the third thing I'm excited about
is all the other things we announced
around Isilon in general.
We announced an entirely
new software upgrade,
a new OS 1fsa.2.
That release increases the scalability
of our Isilon clusters from 144 to 252.
So big increase.
Isilon is already known
for having a very big single namespace.
And so you might be asking well
who really needs 252
nodes in a single cluster?
Well believe me when I tell you
autonomous driving or connected car,
media and entertainment
are very interested in
this capability from us.
So those are the big three for me
what we're doing on unity XT,
what we're doing in terms
of cloud Connectivity
and what we're doing
with respect to Isilon.
>> Travis I wonder if we could zoom out
for a second here.
I think we're at an
interesting transition point
when you talk about the storage industry.
I think historically,
storage is highly fragmented.
I had my tier one storage,
I had my mid-range storage,
we had object storage,
we had special HPC storage
and there are so many
different subcategories
that you put in the environment.
I wrote an article when Dell bought EMC.
I said this is the end
of the storage industry
as we knew it.
And I come to a show like this,
cloud, hyper converging infrastructure.
All of these pieces, storage is important
but you just walk through
many of the speeds and feeds
and some of the new product lines
that come out.
But storage at the center
and the storage admin,
that's what EMC World was
that's not what I hear at
Dell technologies World.
Give us kind of where we
are in that transformation
and of course
I'm not saying that two years from now,
we're in a storage-less world
and nobody thinks about it
'cause data is more important than ever.
>> Absolutely.
>> Price capacity points
are enabling customers
to do more with it.
So would love just kind of you
to reflect back on where we are
and where we're going for the market here.
>> Yeah that's an excellent question Stu.
I think you're exactly right.
The discussions that we're having
with customers more and more
are centered around
what you're trying to do,
what business problem
are you trying to solve?
And you look within the portfolio,
there have been places
that we've done that
before like with Isilon,
it was very vertical industry focused.
Speaking in the language of the customers
around healthcare genomics
or media and entertainment
or whatever industry
vertical we were targeting.
More and more for the core I.T. buyer
it's I want the infrastructure
to work with my ecosystem.
I'm investing in VMware
so I want VRO plugins
or I'm utilizing Ansible
as my management and orchestration layer.
So I want an Ansible playbook.
And so if you look at what we've announced
on power Max as part of this show,
VRO, CSI and Ansible plugins or adapters
for power Macs are a big part of
what we're announcing
because more and more,
the customers that we're talking to
want the storage to be good performance,
cost effective, autonomous in terms of
making a lot of decisions
and optimizing itself
but they want it to work
in the broader ecosystem.
So I was just having a conversation
with a very large customer
over in the EBC area earlier
and we were talking about power Max
and we were talking
about all the cool things
and all the new speeds and feeds,
start talking about the Ansible playbook
and that's when the customer leaned in
and was like "Tell me more.
"How does that work?
"Because we're doing Ansible".
So I think you're exactly right.
I think whether you talk about management
and orchestration or you
whether you talk about
the Dell Tech cloud platform
where you can have storage
as a piece of that.
The conversation is
shifting to a higher level,
to the application or
business problem level.
>> Yeah I love it.
Take us a little bit at
that application space
where to spend a bunch
of the conversations talking everything
from dev ops to containerization
and micro services.
When you talk about hybrid cloud.
Well if I want similar
to what the cloud environment is,
that's usually what I'm doing.
And sure, the VMware
piece plays into that too
but usually modernization ties into it
and I know I've been hearing that story
quite a lot bit more
when I talked to storage people today.
>> Yeah absolutely.
I think the dev ops conversation
with storage admins
is probably one of the
most popular conversation
we're having.
What are you doing for CSI plugins?
We just announced one
for our extreme IO product line,
a lot of interest, a lot of
conversations around that.
And I think the conversation
is also shifting to
help me manage it,
help me get me more intelligence
about my storage estate
versus speeds and feeds
so one of the key conversations
we have with customers is
around a capability we have
which is called Cloud IQ
which I like to call it a health tracker
for your storage estate.
It gives you statistics,
it gives you capacity trending.
It gives you performance trending,
it uses A.I. to predict capacity spikes
or performance anomalies.
And it's really an awesome tool
for our customers
because customers that use that
are able to resolve issues
in their environment
three times faster than
customers that don't.
So I think you're absolutely right Stu,
the conversation is more about
how do I use the storage
array in my environment?
What ecosystems am I supporting?
So it works with all the other stuff
that I have to deal with.
>> So digital transformation
has been the buzzword
of the last five years
and the theme of this
year's real transformation.
I want to talk a little bit
about implementation of these
big technology initiatives.
How do you work with customers
to define exactly what they need,
gather, garner support
and make sure everyone is
pulling in the same direction
and wants the same thing?
And then really bring it together.
I mean is that, first of all, a challenge?
And then second of all,
walk us through the steps of what you do.
>> Yeah I think to the
earlier conversation
there is a spectrum of conversations
that we're having with customers
and as Dell Technologies,
we talk to customers big and small
and we talk to customers
who want to procure a solution
or they want to procure an array.
And I think the common thread
in the conversations we're having is,
give me the information that I need
so that I can easily integrate
it into my environment.
And we're not out of the world
where people care about IOPS and latency
and all the speeds and
feeds in the storage array.
But increasingly there's
customers are like
"Yeah, yeah I need that
"but I need you to tell me how it works
"in my oracle environment
"or my SAP environment".
And so you can look at
a lot of the solutions
that Dell Technologies
is bringing together
via our solutions group.
We've brought out an A.I. solution
and with computing,
networking and storage.
We're focusing on SAP
as a high value workload
where customers again,
compute networking and storage
how do you bring it all together
and kind of t shirt size
the different solutions.
So you know I think that if I look at it
from a product lens that's
how we're approaching it.
There's also a services lens to look at it
which is there's many customers
that still want to do it themselves.
And there's many customers that say
"Hey can I get a managed service?
"Can you just do it for me?"
So we have a broad spectrum of customers
and many customers
that are on different
places on that journey
but it's definitely the conversations
no matter where you're
starting are all trending to,
I want you to do more
so I can focus on my business
and my applications.
>> So Travis
really we've merged through
the largest acquisition in tech history.
You came from the Dell side.
>> I did.
>> The Dell storage side
so would just love to get real quick
your perspective on being
in the Dell storage team
to now being in the Dell Technologies,
Dell EMC storage team
and what that impact's been
when you're meeting with customers
that huge booster into
the enterprise space too.
>> Yeah it's been an amazing journey
over these last two plus years.
I guess going on three years now
and I took a little break
from being outside of the product group
and I came back about a year ago.
And so you're right I
ran product management
for Dell storage for quite some time
and then I had the great opportunity
to come back and run product management
for all of Dell EMC storage.
And you know I think
there's a lot of stuff
that's the same.
We're still driving the roadmap,
we're still prioritizing customer needs.
We're still striving
to provide the best possible
solution for customers
in what we do as a storage array
or what we do in a broader solution.
But you know the coming together
of Dell and EMC from my perspective,
it's been a great success.
We had a lot of strength
on the compute side,
we had a small storage business.
EMC had a large storage business.
And so the combination of the two
it's just been like
chocolate and peanut butter.
I mean it's been really good
and I'm amazed at all the conversations
and all the customers
that have invested in Dell EMC
for their storage infrastructure.
When we have some of these customer events
and you have
name brand universities or
large government entities
and they're there giving you feedback
about how they're using Isilon or ECS
or whatever in their environment
it's just a really impressive portfolio
that we have and it's
been an absolute joy.
>> Well that's great.
Next year I want the Dell EMC candy bar.
So there's your next
product idea (laughs).
>> With chocolate and peanut butter.
Yeah I would want it too.
>> Travis thank you so much
it was a pleasure having you on the cube.
>> Alright. Awesome.
Thank you very much.
>> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman,
there is so much more of
theCube's live coverage
from Dell Technologies world coming up
just after this.
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