>> TheCUBE presents Dell Technologies World
brought to you by Dell.
>> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage
of Dell Tech World 2022.
My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with
my co-host David Nicholson.
David, I think the first time we've co-hosted this week.
>> Yeah. >> Excited to be with you.
>> Very excited.
>> Live wall to wall coverage,
2 1/2 days, two days and one evening.
I'd say 7,000 plus people here so really good show
and Caitlin Gordon is here.
She's the Vice President of Product Management
for Cloud Solutions and Tech Alliances at Dell Technologies.
Caitlin, welcome back to theCUBE.
Always a pleasure to see you.
Thanks for coming on.
>> It's really good to be back in a physical cube
with three dimensional humans.
(David chuckles) >> Yeah, so unbelievable.
And it was good to see you up on stage today, fantastic job.
I think the keynotes have been good.
I think it's funny coming out of COVID it seems
like the keynotes are really tight this year
and so I think that's good.
You have a lot to say so that's why we love theCUBE
so you can come back and--
>> It's nice to have a live audience, get the feedback.
>> Yeah, they were...
I tell you the audience was engaged today, right?
I mean lots of hooping and hollering.
So let's talk about multi-cloud.
You know pre COVID post COVID feels like things have changed
maybe due to COVID maybe not but what are you seeing
the patterns and customers around multi-cloud?
>> Well, it's been interesting.
I've been on a multi-cloud world tour here
over last six to nine months and one thing is clear
for the first time as an industry we agree on something
and that's multi-cloud.
We don't agree on what it means but we do agree
that multi-cloud is our reality and customers are having
a lot of challenges with what that means.
I mean today reality is multi-cloud most of the time
just means multi-contract.
I know what hyper scaler is my primary,
I have a secondary.
I probably bought someone that brought someone else in.
I've got SaaS providers,
I got my on-prem partners but there's not a lot
of continuity and consistency across that.
It's really operational silos, data silos,
being able to predict that spend is the challenge.
And there's a lot of people challenges in there
whether it's developer velocity as Jen talked about earlier
today or even just simply having enough people
with the right skills is a real big challenge
because no matter what definition you have of multi-cloud
it means distributed and it means a lot of different places
and that's a big challenge.
>> I tagged you in my tweet today when you're up on stage.
I don't know if you saw it but big basically as you know
we use this term super cloud and it was pretty clear to me
anyway an example of what I think of as what multi-cloud
should be an experience that spans location,
that is the consistent experience with all my policies
and my security, my governance.
Talk about what you guys are doing to map into the trends
that you see.
>> You use my favorite phrase, consistent experience.
And really what we're doing is two things.
We are building a portfolio of software and services
and that's really targeted at that consistent experience
so you can have your data and your workloads in the right
place but you can have a consistent experience
with what you already have on-prem.
We really need to have true hybrid cloud operations.
We overuse that term and we ruined it and then we didn't use
it anymore but that's what we're talking about.
On-prem to multiple public clouds have that consistency
but that's not enough because this is just such
a complex land landscape.
The second part of what we're building is really
an ecosystem of cloud partnerships.
So whether it's the hyperscale or certainly
but also co-location providers like Equinix
or SaaS providers like Snowflake.
The more we can partner with the key providers
in the multi-cloud landscape the more
we can simplify that across.
>> Yeah, So you mentioned something that's key.
Most people when they think about multi-cloud
they're not going into that because they really
want to do the same thing, nine different ways.
(Nicholson laughs) So that consistency--
>> It's not the design point.
No. >> No, exactly.
It's like I want multi something
but not multi everything you offer.
So the concept of using this well worn, well proven set
of storage intelligence software titles and putting them out
into a variety of cloud providers linking them
with a unified experience is obviously powerful.
And that seems to be what's behind Alpine.
Is that the strategy?
>> Yeah, it's absolutely right because you want that
consistency because you have established multi lots
of things but you want to be able to get the consistency
but you want to get that across all your data types.
You can't just have consistency for file
you can only have consistency for object.
You want to have that flexibility in who the providers
are and what type of data and yet still have
that operational consistency no matter what.
So that's the tough combination,
keeping flexibility but also that
simplicity and consistency.
>> So project Alpine, tell us more about it.
What it is, why is it called a project?
When will it be a product?
(Caitlin laughs)
>> All of the things. >> Yeah.
>> So project Alpine as if you've been tuned in this week
you've heard this a few times but it is our initiative
to bring our block file and object storage software
to all of the major public clouds.
So that is all about being able to really break the barriers
between your data and native public cloud services.
The key thing that you started off with it,
operational consistency.
If I have a power store on-prem I cannot run our block
software in the cloud, have that operational consistency
so it's the same UI, it's the same APIs.
Why that really matters the undercurrent of that
comes back back to people.
If you have the same tools, the same APIs
you don't have to learn anything new,
you don't have to reskill or rehire any people
and eventually you can drive that even more
efficiently all through APIs.
So it's all about that consistent operations.
I'm not going to ignore your project questions.
So I'll get to that as well.
>> Thank you. (Caitlin chuckles)
>> It's a project for a number of reasons.
It is something we're working towards
and it's going to have deliverables and milestones
over a number of months and years to be honest.
We actually first announced project Alpine back in January
as you know and we have already extended that now in May
to say what we're talking about and then we started
to show you what that's looking like.
So original announcement as a project in January,
technology preview here in May and then we're going to start
to have early access for some of these to customers
later this year and then availability into next year.
>> Excellent, so the primary value proposition
that I'm hearing is that operational consistency...
Is there another dimension of value in terms of function?
In other words I get why I'm not going to get that operational
consistency across clouds and on-prem from
a public cloud provider.
Are there functional capabilities that you bring?
I mean yes, help us understand that gap
between what you can offer as a long term,
you know the leader in storage versus kind of the new
entrance in the public cloud.
>> Yeah, two things come to mind.
The number one is data mobility.
So having that very efficient and very simple data mobility
'cause what's the most efficient way to send data
from an on-prem storage appliance?
Use the native mobility services that are already built
into that platform.
They're already there.
You already know how to use them and they're very efficient.
So they're going to be very smart about what data you send
to and what data you send back from the cloud
which is critical from a people standpoint
but also from a cost standpoint which is the other
piece of this.
We've been talking about the technology but as you well know
the business requirements are pretty important.
So being able to also not only have your software
in the cloud but transact that through a public cloud
marketplace and in one case will actually be delivered
as a native cloud service is critical.
So all the pre-committed spend that you have with any one
of these hyperscalers you can actually draw down
against that credit to purchase these software
and services which is equally important
to the technology value prop.
>> Hence you're expanding ecosystem kind of goes both ways.
Okay, so when I'm on a console within one of the public
clouds I want to go into Alpine and now I'm into
a Dell experience, is is that correct?
>> I talked about flexibility and choice.
You have that consistency to say
if you want to standardize on one of the hyperscale
or ecosystems we'll inter-operate that through our APIs.
We're not going to force you into any single-walled garden
but if you have chosen an ecosystem you want to be working
through you can abstract out our value through APIs
and still leverage that underneath the covers
really at the data layer.
So we are really all about that consistency at the data
layer but in our operating with whatever control planes
and whatever ecosystems you are working with which is...
I've said it five times but APIs are a critical
part of this.
We love UIs and they're pretty in a nice demo
but the reality is probably APIs is where this is mostly
going to be consumed.
>> So I have a question for you as a marketer.
You mentioned technology versus business value
clearly outcomes the actual business value associated
with what we do in technology is key.
However, as an old time storage guy myself I realize that
what you're talking about here is decades of development
focusing on things like data protection, resiliency,
performance built originally in an environment that
wasn't instrumented for high availability.
You needed things like clusters.
There wasn't the concept of just JBOD and servers.
One server fails you throw it away
and it automatically goes to another.
How do you balance...
This very long question here.
How do you balance the fact that your underlying technology
is so good with the desire to communicate
the business value?
Do you find yourself having to not talk about the technology
as much anymore because there's so much
impressive stuff there?
>> Yeah, I'm a recovering marketing person myself.
It is really interesting having been at this show
for many, many, many years.
Not as many as Dave probably
>> Old man Dave (Caitlin laughs)
And I say--
>> I would say a number of those years we spent most
of our time talking about speeds and feeds,
how many IOPS, what's the latency,
what's our hero number of the day
and we still care about that and data protection.
What's your DDUP grade?
How much can we save you?
Still important but it's a secondary conversation.
What are we talking about now?
Cloud native app mobility and app modernization
and the underlying infrastructure isn't always
going to be Dells anymore it's going to be in the hyperscalers
in some cases.
So it's a completely different conversation
and different people we're talking to.
It's very exciting.
It's a little bit foreign to us but we welcome it
and it's also still important that we understand
the infrastructure side too because ultimately even if this
is being delivered as a service someone is still delivering
and managing that infrastructure
and that is still critically important.
>> So Project Alpine is it multi-cloud, is it apex,
is it subscription, is it as a service?
>> Yeah. >> What should we think about?
>> Yeah, all those things.
Yes, check all of the things.
>> So they're coming together--
>> It's coming together, right?
You hit all of the right buzzword bingo
but the value prop is Project Alpine Multi-Cloud Data
and yes subscription is going to really be the model
from an economic standpoint.
That's really the key but ultimately it all comes together.
>> What are you seeing with data architectures,
kind of up level in a bit these days where...
You know customers generally they'll shove everything
into a big data warehouse or a single store or cloud
and you guys talk about the edge a lot.
We just had a great conversation with Lowe's
and what they're doing with VxRail and their stores.
How are you seeing the evolution of data architectures?
>> I think the Snowflake announcement was a really,
really good example and it came through as an announcement
but it's a partnership and what's really interesting
is it's very clear that what we've kind
of inherently understood primarily an on-prem vendor
traditionally is that data has a ton of gravity
and between data privacy and just governance regulations
there's a lot of reason that data is not going to move.
And what that means from a modern cloud based analytics
standpoint like Snowflake is they need to be able
to support the data no matter where it lives.
That doesn't mean pulling it into the cloud.
Many customers including us will not do that.
It means being able to access that data so that more
distributed data architecture but still being able
to use those cloud based tools is really where we're seeing
and why we've really announced this partnership this week
and there's a ton more opportunity in that space.
>> Well, that that's the epiphany of the Snowflake deal
is you're able to access non-native Snowflake data
into the Snowflake data cloud.
That's a first. >> Yeah.
>> That's a big deal.
Now there are...
I'm sure Snowflake's going to want to migrate it at some point
but to your point you won't as a customer,
a lot of customers are saying, "No"...
First of all a lot of times it's not a business case.
If I (indistinct)that move it why should I move
it if it's cost effective and it's protected?
And then there are constraints to moving data,
legal constraints and so forth and some--
>> And data regulations are not getting less stringent.
(Caitlin chuckles) >> All right, we got to go.
Caitlin Gordon, thanks so much for coming back
in "The Cube". It was great to see you.
Congratulations for all the announcements
and awesome to see you face to face.
>> Yes, thanks for having me.
>> You're very welcome. >> Good to have you.
And thank you for watching this David Vellante
for David Nicholson, Lisa Martin and John ferry
you're watching "theCUBE's" coverage of Dell Technologies
World 2022 from Las Vegas.
We'll be right back
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