>> Narrator: From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston,
connecting with thought leaders all around the world.
This is a cube conversation.
>> Hi, I am Stu Miniman
and welcome to this special cube conversations.
We're here with Dell Technology
to share the news of an update
to one of their product lines.
We've watched for a number of years,
Dell has taken their portfolio
(mumbles)
they powered them up.
So, of course the servers
are known for a long time PowerEdge
and we've seen many of the storage products
and like going through their power up
and here we have is the PowerFlex.
So people that are familiar
with what's happening in the software defined storage
and hyper-converged space
will remember the VX flex,
so it's powered up.
Joining me to discuss this important announcement,
we have Matthew Paul,
who's the Senior Director of Product Management
and Anthony Cinelli,
who's the Senior Director of Business Development,
both with Dell Technologies.
Matt, let's jump right into it.
PowerFlex,
powering up this segment of the market,
give us the importance
and what the announcement is.
>> Great, thank you Stu
thanks for having us.
Yeah, I'm really excited to announce
that we're powering up our product
and we're moving our VxFlex product
through the new power brand and the power name,
really responding to customers
and our customers taking this product on
and aligning it and using it
to be able to...
Inline with our bigger portfolio
that we have at Dell EMC,
delivering outcomes for our customers.
So it's an exciting timeframe
and it really reflects
this idea of customers' adoption,
in the technology
and our investment as Dell Technologies
in this software defined storage,
to kind of signify to the market
that we're here to stay
and this is an exciting thing we're working through.
The second part around this
on top of kind of the rebrand
is a new launch of PowerFlex three five
So this new software and this software information
is delivering some key additions to our portfolio,
including a replication,
including a new HDMI five gooey
and including some really cool additions
to our software management stack
that customers are really been asking for.
>> Excellent.
So AC, in normal times you're out
meeting with a lot of customers,
I'm sure you're still talking to a lot of customers,
even if you're in work from home mode during the pandemic,
but help us understand
one of the things we know that Dell has done
is it is spring line the portfolio,
but when you talk about storage
software-defined storage,
converged, hyper-converged,
there's still a few different options
inside the Dell family.
So tell us where PowerFlex fits
and how it differentiates in position,
compared to some of the other pieces.
>> Yeah, great question.
So, I have a pretty nice role here for Dell,
which is, I am responsible for our entire portfolio
of converged,
hyperconverged,
and software defined offerings.
And really what that affords me
is one particular luxury
when I engage with customers.
And that luxury
is that I can start every single customer engagement
with a question.
Which is, what problem are you trying to solve?
And that's really important
because having a portfolio at my disposal
allows me to lead with that question
and really focus the conversation and solution
on what their business problem is
and how best to solve it.
Now, the things we typically listen for
when it comes to Flex
are things like flexibility,
things like performance,
things like I'm trying to solve a platform
where I want to re-platform my architecture
to a software-defined outcome.
But I need to run a wide variety of workloads.
I need to run virtual workload,
I need to run physical workload,
I need to run container workload,
I want to consolidate all of that
onto a single modern software-defined infrastructure.
Or we hear workload specific things.
Things like I have an
incredibly high performance Oracle Database,
or I have a workload.
One great example of a customer was
cause of COVID
they had to go from 60,000
to 160,000 remote users over a weekend.
They did that on Flex
with zero incremental infrastructure required
for the storage.
All the performance,
all of the horsepower
was fully capable of handling that increased capacity.
Another customer,
curbside pickup was a great application for their business,
saw a hundred X performance requirement increase
essentially over the course of a weekend
because of COVID.
Running on flex,
they were able to swallow that performance increase
with no problem.
So a lot of what we see when it comes to Flex
and the problems we're hearing are
I need a platform that has a lot of inherent flexibility,
or I have a very acute workload problem,
then I need something very scalable
and very performant to solve.
But again, my luxury is
I can always ask the customer the question first
and then leverage the power of our portfolio
to provide the best solution
to solve for their business problem.
All right, so AC,
appreciate you talked about scale and performance,
two of the really big things,
if you talk about what's happening in this space.
Matt, maybe you can help us sequin through a little bit,
as to how this differentiates
compared to other solutions in the market place
we saw software-defined storage,
hyper-converged infrastructure
run through its wave in the last few years,
you've got some very large customers,
big brand names
globally,
as well as service providers
that have used Flex in the past.
So explain how this is different from others out there.
>> Yeah, I think when we talk about how we manage
and we work through this,
it's our concepts,
so I'm trying to really democratize
this software to the masses, right?
And be able to make it easy to use and simple to use.
If you think about old
or traditional software-defined storage,
all the knobs and all the tweaks,
sometimes it make it difficult to implement.
And so you get these really high end extreme customers
that leave all these knobs to tweak.
We do that very, very well,
but what we've been focused on the last couple of years is
ensuring we can get that to multiple places
through robust kind of investment
in our flex manager space.
So be able to automate and make things a lot easier
and simpler for customers to use
that way we can go down
and provide this technology to more people.
And then the other thing is kind of meeting customers
where they need to be.
And so a couple of key mechanism,
which people consume our products
is through our appliances
and our racks
or integrated racks.
So when a customer comes after
a kind of a full end to end
white glove solution,
whether I want to roll a big rack into their environment,
plug it in, get it up and going,
we have a full integrated rack
that we deliver to the customers
that really drive that outcome.
And then if you think about
the difference between that and the appliance
the appliance has given us a little more flexibility.
So if you want to plug that into
an existing network
or an existing environment,
well, both of these things
give you that extreme scale and performance
that AC was just talking about,
while that rich management experience.
so I think you kind of aligned
the consumption models
and the new management,
which also brings a big differentiated value to the product.
>> Excellent, so,
Matt when I hear you talking about these solutions,
wonder if you can help connect this
with how your customers are talking about cloud in general,
you talked about consumption model,
you talked about how to manager,
so where does this fit?
whether it's the Dell Tech Cloud
or just your customers overall discussion of cloud.
>> Yeah, so a couple of things come to mind here.
Typically what we see with PowerFlex
is customer saying,
I'm trying to achieve
what we call this common platform,
which is, I want to build an on premises cloud,
that gives me the flexibility
to run all the workloads in my data center.
And when we say all the workloads,
that's everything
from obviously your virtualization stack
through things like
your physical bare metal workloads
typically your high performance databases
all the way through this emerging world of containers.
And those containers could be virtual,
could be physical.
And giving customers the value of running all of that
on a single underlying software-defined infrastructure,
with all of the automation life cycle management
to go along with it,
there's really just nothing like that in the market.
So really where we're seeing this adoption
is customers who are saying,
I want to build my own cloud within my data center,
that gives me the ability to run my workloads
and because I'm building them on a common infrastructure,
I can build automation
that allows my end users to consume that infrastructure
in a very cloud-like manner.
So that's one big thing that we are seeing customers
really bite off on.
Another approach
is within that Dell technologies platform.
Which is, how do we leverage the best
of all of the assets
under the Dell Technologies umbrella,
namely assets from VMware,
VMware cloud foundations
and everything they offer
in their multiples cloud story,
and providing a wide variety of options
within the Dell Technologies portfolio to solve that.
Obviously we have our VxRail platform,
which is the most integrated solution
vertically within that VMware stack.
We also have other offerings within our storage portfolio
that have the ability to plug into that,
PowerFlex being one of those
as an option for customers to leverage
within that Dell Tech Cloud platform strategy.
>> Excellent.
Matt, you mentioned the new updates with three dot five
maybe give us a little bit more on that
If whether it's an existing customer,
what things they've been asking for
that are in this release,
or maybe first some new people
that might not have looked at the Flex family for awhile
(mumbles)
>> Yeah, I think the great thing about this product,
it's an end to end solution.
So we bring all these things together that add that value.
A couple of the key things is
that we've been hearing and driving towards our customers
is around replication or a synchronous replication.
So the ability for us to be able to align that
and give that to customers
is probably the most important piece of this release.
We also did some really cool stuff in the management stack.
So if you think about other competition or other products,
being able to align firmware updates for example,
or software updates for example,
because of the scale of our product,
we've had to align real unique things in our managements
like stack
like the ability to do rack level updates.
So really innovative, really differentiated.
So customers can take racks at a time down to do updates
'cause they don't have time
when there's thousands of servers in their environment,
they don't have time to do one note at a time
in a round robin fashion.
>> And a point to add onto that, right?
What's really unique
and Matt touched on it,
this concept of democratization.
We've always done large really well
with this technology, right?
In a way that really no other technology platform
in this space can.
What the team has built on the management stack
is now allowing us to also do small and medium
incredibly well,
where we can bring this incredibly disruptive technology
to the masses,
to your general enterprise,
to your general mid market type customer,
who's not solving for hundreds or thousands of notes,
but maybe solving for 10, 20 or 50 notes
and delivering this very disruptive outcome
that helps them much more adapt
or much more quickly adapt to changing demands they have,
harnessing all this flexibility,
but doing it with point click operations
that are incredibly simple across the full stack.
>> Excellent, well, we've heard from Jeff Clark
when you get the power brand on there,
that's a message to the customers
that this is a platform
that's going to be with us for quite a number of years.
Give us a look forward
as to both of you as to
what would you expect to see from PowerFlex.
Yeah, I mean, we're really excited about the future, right?
To your point, aligning with the winning roadmap,
the investment level in this technology
is really high within the organization,
how we work well within
the broader Dell Technologies portfolio
is really exciting.
So we'll continue to innovate
and drive this democratization story
that Anthony was talking about.
Innovate in new data services,
innovate in new management paradigms and stacks.
Like the thing I just talked about
in terms of doing rack level updates.
And I think just giving customers,
listening to our customers
and providing that on a reoccurring basis
is the critical thing.
So we're really embracing this idea
of providing updates on a regular basis
to be able to respond to customers' needs
on a daily day basis.
>> Yeah, I think one thing to add to that,
that I'm excited to see the team continue executing on
is delivering actual workload
solution-based outcomes, right?
Very often customers will come to us and say,
here's my workload problem, right?
It's an Oracle,
it's a Slung,
it's an elastic stack
or name your workload.
The team's really done a great job
of leveraging this platform
and building full stack validated solutions,
oftentimes in tandem
with the application vendor.
So customers can consume this technology
with complete confidence
to run oftentimes
their most important or critical workloads,
knowing that they have the full backing of the vendor,
they have the full backing of the infrastructure provider
and the application provider
working together to deliver this technology as an outcome.
And because of its extreme flexibility,
we can adapt it to so many different workload scenarios
and customers have responded to that incredibly well.
So for me, I'm excited to see the team continuing
to build that solutions portfolio
because customers are really seeing a ton of value in that.
>> Great. I guess final question I have for you Matt,
probably up your alley there,
availability of the product,
is it available now at the launch
and if I was a VxFlex customer before
what does the move to PowerFlex move,
how do I get from where I was to the future
If there are any hardware changes
or is it all software?
>> Yeah, good point.
So it's available now,
there on the 25th,
so, really excited for the customers
and we do support customers
going from the existing version to the new version.
And so the upgrades are pretty straight forward,
pretty easy
to bring in that updated management stack
and then bring in the updated FlexOS.
I'm sorry, PowerFlex version.
(giggles)
>> It's all right, I'm sure customers will be
going back and forth on the terms.
All right, Matt and AC
thank you so much for the update.
Congratulations on the progress.
(mumbles)
All right, I'm Stu Miniman and thank you
for watching the cube.
(soft music)