foreign welcome back to the cube Lisa Martin and Dave vellante here day three of our coverage of Dell Technologies world live from Las Vegas Mandalay Bay we have had a ton of great conversations I believe this is our 24th segment that we filmed since Monday night we have a couple of alumni joining us once again which is great we've got Drew shulke Hughes here as well VP product management primary storage and connectivity at Dell Technologies hey Drew Shannon Champion is once again with us BP product marketing at Dell Technologies guys it's so great to have you back on thecube thank you for joining us thanks for having us you guys let's talk about some hot topics what's what's hot and driving storage today Shannon we'll start with you and Andrew we'll get your feedback I mean there's tons of innovation happening here at the show hot topics for storage really in three main categories multi-cloud cyber resiliency and efficiency so just a ton you saw multi-cloud announcements happening in Force at the show a couple weeks ago we talked about a storage announcement that really leans into cyber resiliency and efficiency and customers are talking in multi-cloud about complexity about their skills gaps and about managing unpredictable costs so um that's those are the Hot Topics big big topics yeah yeah absolutely yeah and I think tying it back it kind of all comes back to Innovation right and like to what extent can we um as Dell Technologies address these areas of complexity of multi-cloud resilience cyber resiliency and efficiency to allow our customers to innovate and and you know differentiate their products instead of having to focus on those things which to be honest we should be taken care of for them yeah it's interesting years ago I asked an executive what do you care about in storage he's like look all I wanted to do is Rock Solid lightning fast and dirt cheap now to do that you know it was like you get inside talking about what kind of discs are there what kind of Flash and you know you mentioned those three areas it's a whole different ball game now isn't it we're talking about cross-cloud cyber resiliency I mean up until you know I don't know whatever five ten years ago nobody really even talked about that and they certainly talked about it after the pandemic I guess efficiency always but the way you get efficiency is different now so what are those sort of barriers to achieving these areas of of innovation I mean like talking about speeds and feeds of our storage products and I was kidding with some of the folks in the booth earlier that we don't really even load the data sheets up in the booth anymore because it's not what the conversation is people are trying to get Innovation and drive those Innovation projects and yeah they want to do it through efficiency and optimizing operations but more and more they're talking about power savings that's critical to them we know that 80 percent of customers or more are making sustainability and Energy Efficiency a key buying decision so those are some of the conversations that we're having in the booth yeah I'd say you know you talk about the Rock Solid you know cheap you know and secure it or I forget what the acronyms used Dave but like that's that's the that's the price of admission stuff now right they're assuming that's all there um and you know you know the cyber cyber resiliency and cyber security topic boy it's rare that I go buy a customer conversation where that doesn't come up as a conversation Point unsolicited like we don't even have to put up a slide it's it's top of everybody's Minds for so many reasons um but we've done some pretty exciting things in terms of what we announced a couple weeks back on that front talk a little bit about that first of all Define Cyber resiliency and and how is Dell enabling organizations to achieve it as we see the threat landscape especially with Edge and cloud and everything being so amorphous the threat landscape is only getting bigger the threat actors are only getting more sophisticated so what are you doing from a storage perspective to help customers achieve cyber resiliency yeah it's it's really Broad and so you've got to go all the way back to actually like how it is we develop our products right so we have a nist compliant development process Hardware route of trust that we design into our Hardware products um you know you know software supply chain verification hardware supply chain verification data arrest encryption like it's it's so fundamental and all of that stuff was foundational by the way ahead of well of ahead of anything that we announced here in the past couple weeks specifically what we focused on just recently here is our power store product is now what we call Stig compliance so it meets the highest levels of security standards for the Department of Defense um which allows us to open into opportunities for the federal government but beyond that opportunity for the federal government you know what we're increasingly hearing is a number of our customers have been deemed quote unquote critical industries by the executive branch of the of the government today and what we mean by that are utility companies Transportation Company financial institutions they're beginning to be held to that same bar that was previously reserved for you know a Department of Defense agencies and so the kind of investment that we make in supporting you know DOD helps there but beyond that we've done a bunch of other efforts furthering the cause of zero trust with Native multi-factor authentic authentication integration um secure and immutable snapshots so if something bad does happen we're giving you a very fine-grained recovery uh window that you can go do that and not having to worry about that becoming corrupted so there's there's a broad set of things and it begins all the way back from design all the way to how if something bad does happen how we're going to help you recover we're talking about all these sort of up the storage stack anyway Innovations and then but at the end of the year ago after Dell tech world you and I sat down we we had our does Hardware matter of discussion you were super helpful in taking us inside and it's funny because as much as we talk about the upper level value there's still all kinds of interesting things going on in the hardware with the alternative processors the Knicks the CPUs the gpus the mpus and so that hasn't gone away in fact actually in many ways the Innovation is accelerating but then you have to do all this other stuff on top of it what's the symbiotic symbiotic nature between that hardware and these upper stack levels yeah so what you're hitting on is the importance of software really in integrating that that full stack and you may have heard in the plethora of Innovations at the keynote Jeff Clark throw out lots of numbers but one of them was that over the last year since the last time we sat down with you we've delivered over 2 1000 software-driven storage features across our entire portfolio from high-end mid-range entry HCI data protection and software is really the key to all of that a little known fact within our engineering staff in in our infrastructure solutions group 85 percent are software engineers and their job is really to take that hardware and make it easier to use integrated into the full stack and that's really the nature of the cloud announcements that we had it's the nature of how power store is originally architected so over the next couple months you'll see innovations that are all software based across our whole portfolio but we really are focusing in first in leading the charge with powerstor the Cyber resiliency updates that Drew talked about are part of that software release as well as you know efficiency updates why starting with powerstor just give us kind of a little back story there yeah I mean like across our entire portfolio we're all on different release Cadence for power store in particular uh we're making a lot of noise about that because it has the most in terms of cyber resiliency and efficiency right now um so Drew hit on the Cyber resiliency effort we as a foundation we've always had sort of operational efficiency but I talked about how important power is so a power store with this new release is our most power efficient storage system 60 percent uh more energy efficient more iops per watt with several energy certified models so we're listening to our customers we're building in the things that matter and you know releasing them as quickly as we can talking about the federal government certifications earlier it's interesting you know the overall when we came into 2023 cios and I.T decision makers expected to spend almost six percent more this year in their budget than they did last year and as you well know that's consistently come down I think they're projecting maybe two percent growth this quarter so it's still growing which is good news and they maybe hope to you know overall this year maybe it's three percent okay but one area there's actually two areas that are significantly above that six seven eight percent and that's small business and then U.S government and so how does this certification enable you to do more with the US government what are those conversations like and maybe you can give us a sense of that yeah well so that that certification allows us to be submit for what they call the the APL the approved product list right which roughly the the total storage Market associated with the US federal government is about a billion dollars okay so it's it's kind of worth doing at that point in time um so that's certainly a huge opportunity for us um but like I said it sends a clear signal to the rest of the industry to the rest of the world to government agencies outside the U.S as well right
look at it if we're holding the bar high enough that we can you know power you know the US federal government even even the most secure agencies within that I think it sends a very strong message on that front um I think as you pertain to the SMB thing it probably dovetails more into the efficiency conversation where we've done some pretty exciting stuff over there as well well so maybe you talk about that so so snowflake just reported lower guidance as expected actually because it's easy to dial down Cloud you saw that with Amazon's results uh we saw that with Alibaba you know not us but but so companies want to be more efficient they can't it's not as easy to dial just dial down what you've already purchased capex but with new purchases if they can be more efficient do more with less so how are customers taking advantage of that what are you specifically doing there yeah so from a operations perspective power store was always sort of built with that in mind intelligent automation self-optimizing architecture so making sure that the users can take advantage of the and optimize their resources and do more with less so it's been a core sort of principle from the start security is concerned even even for power store you know we talk about security being a board level discussion and it is across every industry how have your you were talking Shannon about some of the things that you don't need in the booth anymore because the conversation has changed has the level of conversation within a customer organization changed as well yeah I mean like I think that goes back to the Innovation concept that Drew was talking about um you know when customers are looking at the challenges that they have it's less about what the infrastructure can do it's about I need multi-cloud worlds but it's complex and how do I overcome that I I need to protect myself from cyber attacks that's top of mind for me and and at the same time I need to go faster because I need to optimize for my skills my skills gaps in in resource and everything so those are things holding people back from being able to innovate and that's the nature of the conversation like help me with these things so that I can spend time on the projects that are going to drive more Revenue help me attract new talents and really drive more customer value and I don't know if you've heard about it yet I'm sure you have but there's a new Dell Technologies Innovation index and it's set out to sort of do exactly that validate across I think 6 000 it decision makers and say what does innovation mean to you and those that are well intentional and investing and able to overcome some of these objections to spend time on Innovation and be a leader in their industry and innovating are seeing those outcomes and are leading the charge within their industry so that's the level of conversation we're having yeah I was looking at that the Dell Innovation index Benchmark survey and Innovation leaders as you described are twice as likely to experience big things High Revenue growth obviously Talent attraction as you mentioned but growing customer value which is critical for businesses across any industry yeah and I'd say the other thing that you know especially at an event like this where we've got the broad portfolio under discussion with all of our customers is don't just tell me how you can make things efficient within that one product like look at you've got the broadest portfolio in the industry what can you what can you do to bring those things together and make life easier and really we look at that as a huge opportunity to drive a ton of Automation and I'll maybe just highlight two areas that came out you know one in the announcement last week another one that we've kind of been discussing this week is you know in that same power store released we provided um Native integration of something we call Storage direct so we can actually integrate our power protect data domain products and set them up through the power store manager so the storage admin now has the ability to pull in that entire data protection process into a single unified storage process no need for need for a dedicated backup server we can use either a cloud or a physical endpoint set it up in 90 seconds a really truly compelling better about Better Together story but that one that drives a lot of value for our customers the other one that I think is a personal favorite of Shannon 9 is something we call Dynamic Epson and it and a lot of it came up out of actually the event that we had a year ago where a ton of our partners were pointing out this this idea that hey vxrail has like you know the hyper-converged leader and we really love the operational model that comes with it but look we also love power store and we have a need for power store level storage capabilities and features like that but it's a different operational model how can we how can we bring those things together and this whole idea of dynamic Epson is you know using a what we call a vxrail dynamic node so a storage list vxrail node as that host and front end for powerstor and what we've announced here at this particular show is we've actually pulled into the life cycle management of powerstor so we and customers absolutely love this and I just finished a conversation with one of them which is it allows them to you know ground their entire process on a single operational model but gives them incredible flexibility in terms of the kind of workloads and storage demands they want to go drive and I love that we're at a company where we can we're one of the few that can pull that off and it's a nice place to be example of organizing the light what your guys are articulating and you're delivering through powerstor I'm sure there's many to choose from yeah I know there are there are a tons to choose from um I don't know what comes to mind well I I was just talking to a German customer and um they had already been starting to use that Dynamic note as a front end on their power store and they had set up six as a host and they had no idea that this integrated lifecycle management thing was coming and I finished a briefing with them and um you know they were like practically doing cartwheels out of the out of the briefing room when we told them that this this was now available next with the next software release so that was personally rewarding I love being able to share the news on something that somebody had been you know hadn't hadn't vocally asked for it but we anticipated that late indeed that's those are the best I'm glad you brought up the notion that on Cyber resiliency just optimizing for one product if it doesn't cut it you have to have that you know Full House and you guys obviously have an advantage that my question is how do you and can you be both best of breed at the product level but also have that full integration and and if so you know what's the trick to getting there other than saying yes we're best to breed which everybody says yeah I think we can and we've shown that we can with some of the announcements here at the show because really the nature of the multi-cloud announcements is doing exactly that it's taking our best of breed software driven storage Innovation that customers know and love on-prem and taking it to the public cloud and also at the same time creating that operational experience on-prem and you can only do that if you have the product level specific differentiation in power flex and power scale and others for example and and creating that common storage layer that Jeff talked about is the integration horizontally that drive consistency and flexibility across all of those but then also taking that software driven Innovation to create that life cycle management experience that's a tightly integrated vertical stack so there's integration that we do horizontally and vertically to connect all these products but in each their own right they are best to breed so I think we are pulling this off successfully and it's exciting I didn't realize this that we learned from Jeff today on the cube that that common storage layer actually stretches to Native Edge that it's the same sort of underlying substrate which is obviously that's really really important but I I thought they were sort of separate stove pipes for now but they're clearly not that was my uh misunderstanding so yeah that's huge yeah another proof Point yeah yeah and how have you seen in the final thoughts here just thinking about multi-cloud and and last year when we sat down with chuck wood and we sat down with him again yesterday last year was multi-cloud is by default and so many organizations and it needs to be by Design how is power store powerflex and those tools do you see I'm sure you do as a facilitator of customers going from by default to by Design yeah so you know our multi-cloud strategy from last year that was set out what's most exciting to me about this show is that it comes to life in so many products and so much Innovation the strategy was really you know the foundation of the strategy it was as a service in modern consumption it has grown from cloud ground to Cloud which is what we delivered with project Alpine which is really all based upon our best to breed storage software and then also bringing that cloud to ground but down with our Apex Cloud platforms and as Dave alluded to you know having that common storage layer across just not just multi-cloud but to the edge that is creating a lot more Simplicity flexibility agility control for our customers so I think we're delivering on the promise we set I think we've heard that the last couple days Drew last question for you a little sneak peek into the road map we talked about power store we know there's more things coming any little nuggets so you can drop the folks within the audience would love to know oh man you're going to get me in trouble I don't mean to more is coming true more is definitely coming in and I'm going to go back to like right how many how many of our development resources are in software right so expect to see a software release from us each and every quarter um you know across our entire primary storage portfolio will be at PowerMax at Mission critical be it power store for the Enterprise via powerflex for software defined we've got a very compelling roadmap for the next 12 to 18 months um stay tuned I would just say that I don't want to get in too much trouble here but the same themes though I'll if you give you a sneak peek multi-cloud cyber resiliency efficiency expect to see a pretty consistent Landing Zone across those three and everything that we do we'll be watching Drew Shannon thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the cube today thank you thank you for having me looking forward to watching this space we want to thank you for watching for our guests and Dave vellante I'm Lisa Martin our next session kind of David Hardy and Brandon Peterson join us we're going to be talking about efficient at cool I.T systems we've been talking a lot about generative AI power Etc you're going to want to hear this conversation and how it's going to affect efficiency in your organization coming right up thank you foreign
2023-05-30