Steve McDowell 0:03 Welcome to another edition of DataCentric Podcast. I'm Steve McDowell, Senior technology analyst and quarantine bread Baker at Moor Insights & Strategy, and I'm here with my partner in crime live from his turkey room, Matt. Matt Kimball 0:18 Yeah, I'm not a bread Baker though. So.. Steve McDowell 0:20 you're not what do you have a quarantine hobby? What do you Matt 0:24 you know you and I should move in together we can be like the odd couple Felix and Oscar. You can bake the bread and I'll fix the faucets when they go leaky. Steve McDowell 0:33 So I'm Felix, Great. All right. Hey, Matt. So my calendar tells me we should be in Las Vegas this week. drinking too much coffee collecting t shirts stealing water bottles from from booths, but we're not we're virtual in Dells taking this conference virtual and moving it to later this year, I think. But that's that's not stopping the Dell machine from continuing to innovate and release products. It seems like For a long time now Dell has been talking about its mid range neck storage. And they've been stingy on the details. We talked about this after their analyst event in November where they talked a lot about storage, but they wouldn't tell us what the heck was in their mid range next. But today, we finally get to find out what it's all about. Because this morning, Dell announced its new PowerStore product. So if you're excited, I'm excited to have Caitlin Gordon here. Caitlin is Dell's Vice President of Product Marketing responsible for Dell EMC storage and data protection portfolio? Welcome, Caitlin. Caitlin Gordon 1:34 Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. This is an exciting day for us. Steve McDowell 1:38 I bet it is. You've spent you spent most of your career at EMC, and now Dell EMC, so this must be an exciting launch. And PowerStore. It feels like one of the biggest storage launches in recent memory from you or really some of your competitors that must feel really good. What do you tell us? What do you want to tell us about what your teams have delivered here with PowerStore? Caitlin Gordon 2:01 Yeah, absolutely. Steve, I dare I may go as far as to say this is the biggest and hardest but most fun launch I've ever been a part of. So it's it's exciting to finally get it out into the market. And sorry, we were stingy on it before. I think it was worth the weight. And when we finally brought it out, hopefully here today. Steve McDowell 2:20 Oh, yeah, absolutely. Right. And we did an analyst briefing about a week ago where we got, we got to see what's in PowerStore with a little more in depth. And now you know, today that's available to everyone. So what are you aiming for? And what do you deliver with PowerStore? How do you feel about the product? Caitlin Gordon 2:37 Yeah, we're really excited about it. You know, this has been years in the making for us. We've been designing this for a number of years. And when we looked at what do we want to build here, we really took a clean sheet design with what we built with PowerStore. And it's a pretty rare thing to get to do that as a fortune 500 company to actually build something from the ground up and get to design Every single piece the way you want, it's kind of like if you build your own house where you literally get to pick every knob, every pole, everything in the whole house, you get to design that down. And when we're designing PowerStore, we're really we're thinking, how do we serve the broadest set of our customers needs in primary storage? What would that look like? What would the architecture look like? What kind of protocols what hard drives? What does the software look like? And then how do we not only create infrastructure that will help them with what they need today? But probably most importantly, how can it help them change the way they operate their data center and evolve with their business and we know everyone's business is evolving unpredictably and rapidly and you need to ensure that infrastructure can evolve with you. Steve McDowell 3:47 So between the legacy EMC products and legacy Dell price, a crowded portfolio and PowerStore seems to simplify, simplify the mid range and kind of a good way. It covers a broad swath of the market. As he talked about so we're we're we're Where are you aiming this in terms of workloads, and how do you think it sits relative to the rest of your portfolio? Caitlin Gordon 4:08 Yeah, certainly been one of our known challenges as we came together as Dell Technologies, is how do we simplify this portfolio and PowerStore is a major step on that journey. So we've had PowerMax as our lead. In the high end, we've had PowerVault as a lead in the entry space. Now with PowerStore, we have our lead, mid range, all flash solution, and that's a big part of the market. Right mid range is the biggest part of the external storage market. It's a highly growing part of that market. And when we looked at workloads, we're really talking about certainly databases and applications for your block workloads, but both physical and virtual, right, because we know that even though a lot of the world is virtualized things that are physical today are probably going to remain that way. And at the same time, we want to be able to support container based workloads and Kubernetes support and general purpose files all on the same system. Because based standardizing and consolidate all those workloads on a single system, it really helps simplify overall operations. Steve McDowell 5:10 Makes a lot of sense. And so the things that performance beast, I'm not going to go into speeds and feeds but but you guys are claiming it's seven times faster, but three times lower latency than a comparable unity XP system. But beyond its raw capability, his whole idea of intelligent infrastructure, and the use of embedded AI, seemed to play a critical role, and how the system was designed and performs and operates, right, so tell us talk to us about how you're using AI and embedded intelligence to help make the experience better. Caitlin Gordon 5:43 Yeah, it's all towards this vision of helping our customers get to an autonomous data center. That mean having the automation to the box, right with the arrow Ansible modules, support for Kubernetes really helps it fit into these DevOps ops environments and overall self service, it was kind of your automation to the box. Automation in the boxes that AI you mentioned is built into the platform. It's really all designed to optimize system resources minimize the time that it spends hands on with the infrastructure, less time hands on means less money spent, and lower risk, right, the less manual steps. And the last part of that is the intelligence from Cloud IQ. So that's our cloud based analytics platform that provides really advanced monitoring of infrastructure helps our customers stay ahead of problems. And probably even more important today, it helps them do so remotely, whether it's from a web browser or a mobile application, they can keep an eye on their infrastructure, quickly troubleshoot issues, and even predict future needs. And cloud IQ. Part of our announcement today was cloud IQ, not only supports PowerStore and our storage portfolio, but we'll actually be coming across all of the Dell infrastructure portfolio as well. Matt Kimball 7:02 Hey, so quick question for Caitlin. I'm going Steve to eight. So quick question for you interesting on the kind of you talked about autonomy and kind of the autonomous data center. You know, Dell has made a lot of progress on the autonomy front PowerOne was launched back in November, great story around programmable infrastructure. Is this kind of lines up to that greater vision of Dell, you know, essentially plug it in, and they're just kind of resources ability. Okay. I see you nodding some..Yes, can hear the nodding. Caitlin Gordon 7:36 So absolutely. The autonomous infrastructure from power one is really the beginning of this. Every piece of infrastructure we introduce into the market will have that intelligence built in. So whether it's three tier architecture in a single solution or the individual components themselves, they need to have that intelligence built in because we fundamentally believe anything we bring to our customers today has to be Be very simple to operate within the Lv manager itself. But even more importantly, really just fit into all of the automation initiatives in the overall business as a whole. Matt Kimball 8:11 Sure, and you look for a common kind of integrated back end. You mentioned the Ansible. I know that's a big part of the PowerOne solution. You're looking at a common back end management kind of functionality integration among all those kind of parts of the infrastructure portfolio as well, I'm assuming, right? Caitlin Gordon 8:29 Yeah, we see malas that there's some customers are standardizing on VMware as that kind of control plane for the data center. So we have plugins like Yarrow and pra to enable that for our customers who are all in on VMware. But we also know others are really into more open automation. And that's where Ansible will come in. So you'll be able to support all of your data center with infrastructure, including PowerStore with the Ansible module. Thank you. Steve McDowell 8:58 So Caitlin, one of the one of the things that caught my attention when we went to the briefing on PowerOne is beyond its storage capabilities. You You're, you're embedding a hypervisor in this thing. And you talked a little bit about during the launch event. This idea of the business edge and how PowerStore can play there. So you have some when you're calling apps on, which I really like that term, but what is apps on and where do you see it being leveraged? This is not HCI. Right? Caitlin Gordon 9:28 Yeah, that's the that's one of the primary questions we get. So apps on, you know, for those who are not kind of read up on it yet epsilon is a really exciting capability of PowerStore. What we've done with PowerStore, essentially, we have two different deployment models. Your standard deployment model is the PowerStore OS running bare metal on purpose built hardware serves of external capacity for hosts, which is pretty traditional deployment for a storage array. What we also have is a hypervisor deployment model which enables Less to take that PowerStore less abstracting from the underlying hardware, onboard our favorite hypervisor, VMware ESXi. And run that PowerStore OS in a VM on PowerStore. Now with the remainder of that hypervisor, we can run a handful of specialized applications onboard the appliance. And that's what apps on is it's really that capability to run applications on board. Steve McDowell 10:25 And you're giving you're giving the end customer the IT guys the ability to put their own applications within those virtual machines. They manage it like any other VMware installation with, I guess, PowerStore is partitioned off somehow. You're opening this up for them to deploy their own applications. Caitlin Gordon 10:42 That's absolutely right. Anything that can run in a VM can run on there, what we really have heard from our early customers, and conversations with partners as well. I think that we'll probably see that infrastructure type application so antivirus data protection type things will be run on board helps simplify things to really collapse the compute into the storage infrastructure from that standpoint, the other would be more data intensive app. So think of things that are very latency sensitive real time analytics, Flink and spark, that type of thing would really run well, because you have that locality to the storage for the compute. That's really where we see this being used. And you mentioned that it's not HCI. Highly complimentary to HCI. We know VX rail is really been leading the HCI market. We also know it's deployed side by side with three tier architecture most of the time, and the reason is that each architecture is really built for different types of workloads. And what we've done with PowerStore, we brought a little bit of compute into storage, whereas what you've done with HCI is he kind of brought a little bit of storage into compute. And when you can leverage these two side by side and have consistent operations with VMware over the top is a pretty unique combination of having the right architecture All right workloads, but still simplifying operations. Steve McDowell 12:03 Yeah, sounds like it. And then. So I guess just to play this back a little bit, so if I'm a customer and I'm deploying an application to an a VM running on PowerStore, what I see from PowerStore just traditional block storage, whatever it is, I'm exploiting maybe vol support, but that I'm interfacing it like I would any other storage array. You're not definitely right. Yep. Yeah. Awesome. That it that is very cool. And beyond what you talked about, I can see that being used and you know, the edge and Robo or maybe I want a consolidation play without going full steam HCI. Caitlin Gordon 12:38 That's right. Yeah. Especially if your standard on a standardized on PowerStore at your core data center, right, the limited footprint at the edge really makes it make sense to have to be able to collapse that infrastructure down into a single stack. Okay. Steve McDowell 12:53 The other thing you talked about as part of the launches, you built PowerStore. It's a clean sheet designed to ground a beverage To using very modern architectural elements that evolve how we think about building storage arrays, right? I've been in the storage industry for a long time, right? And this goes beyond just things like NVMe. Everywhere you're building, you built the PowerStore internal architecture on a containerized foundation. You usually don't talk about, you know, how the system's architected internally? You are right. So what's the benefit? The containerized approach brings to PowerStore users. Caitlin Gordon 13:30 Yeah, so again, it's a fully container based architecture. So that OS is all built in innovated on the container level. That it really is two big benefits for us. It's able enabled us to innovate faster and even bring it to market in the first place. And as we innovate over time and enhance the software, we're going to be able to do that at a more granular level and at a faster pace. The other thing and the part that customers will really be able to benefit from more directly Is because we're focused on development at that container level, we're able to develop, develop things and then deploy them consistently across our portfolio. For example, the file stack that you have in PowerStore is something that we've built and containerized and will continue to deploy as the standard files back across our entire primary storage portfolio. So you get that consistency across the whole portfolio and you get the benefit of the faster innovation at that container layer. Steve McDowell 14:33 Excellent. Now that that makes sense in India, that that's really kind of future proofing allows you to deliver I guess feet are faster and safer feature updates, bug fixes, things like that. So that's a big help to the end customer. The other thing is a big help to the end customer and I think this is new for you. You're changing up your approach on how you're keeping your storage customer's current with what you're calling the Anytime Upgrade program. What is anytime, upgrade Caitlin Gordon 15:00 So anytime upgrades really exciting it's interesting how much of our conversation has moved away from speeds and feeds and efficiency and has been the bread and butter of what was storage even five years ago into how do I consume things? How do I make things more simply simply streamline in my overall business operations and purchasing, and anytime upgrades really marries the ability to non disruptively upgrade the controller technology with a new service offering and customers who buy into the Anytime Upgrade program have the ability to do that non disruptive controller upgrades that means keep all capacity in place, but new controller technology into the system without disrupting the business without taking downtime. To do that within generation, you can do that to the next generation. You can also use your Anytime Upgrade credit towards a second appliance and scale out how PowerStore can scale up and scale out and when you compare anytime Upgrade to other like programs in the market. We're really excited because we've designed this to be really flexible, it doesn't have the limitations of others of when you what timing, you can do that upgrade and requiring these long, three year lock ins on the contracts. And really having all those flexible solutions of how you can swap that out, is really unique compared to other programs in the market. So we're really excited because it really enables us to, again, help not only change the way that their infrastructure operates, but how their business operates and how they can consume it. Steve McDowell 16:36 You met you made the claim. And I'm one of your slides that I read that if you're a Dell EMC customer, this will be the last data migration you do. Right, you put some tools in to do, looking at the slide now, a 10 Click migration from existing platforms. And I guess you're going to streamline that moving forward. That's an important part of the story, right? Caitlin Gordon 16:56 It's hugely important once you're on PowerStore. It's the end of data migration. And the good news is getting data there will be that last migration will be really seamless. We've invested a considerable amount of time and energy, we actually had a dedicated engineering program around simply that migration technology. We've built on a number of options into the platform to enable that non disruptively enable that without an agent, or of course, there's host based solutions. And you've got the claim right there. We've done so much here that we can enable our customers to move for anything existing system into PowerStore in less than 10 clicks, which really just shows how much we put into ensuring that that is a seamless and simple experience to get the data there. And that last migration will be a good experience and it'll be even better because it's your last one. Steve McDowell 17:47 Yeah. So while we're talking about other Dell systems, this lands right in the mid range. There's a lot of legacy or a lot of adoption of your more traditional, I guess now our legacy products. How are you looking at it PowerStore and how are you positioning PowerStore relative to the products that it's I don't want to say replacing supplementing, how would you characterize it? Right? What's happening in mid range? your portfolio? Caitlin Gordon 18:11 Yeah, yeah. So PowerStore is now officially our lead, mid-range, all-flash solution. Unity XT is our lead, mid-range hybrid solution. We've also not end of life any of other existing products that have been serving that part of the market. There's one thing that we know about our data center customers and storage, certainly our storage customers. We are not going to be rushing a transition here. We need to make sure that that time we give customers time to be able to transition to these lead products on the time they want. And with the tools that they want to use. We've built everything ready to go from day one, but we know it's going to take years for people to feel comfortable with the new technology move there. And that's why we have not done have left any of our existing platforms. And we're going to ensure that that transition is really seamless and can happen on a customer's time. Steve McDowell 19:06 Oh, that's a great approach. I mean, storage upgrade cycles, you tend to take a very long time and people build tooling around existing infrastructure so that you're keeping that alive. I applaud that. I will switch gears just a little bit. Matt and I have been following, you know, infrastructure as a service for that storage as a service or different utility models. You know, providing storage processing, whatever it is, and there's been a range of consumption models that have ranged your that have emerged over the past few years. That supplement traditional on on prem deployments. You guys, right, you got pays you grow, flex on demand, data center, utility, all of these things. How are you seeing demand evolve over that spectrum of offering is there growth in one model versus the other? Caitlin Gordon 19:55 Yeah, it's been interesting to watch and especially even in the last couple years I'd say that this was a very rare conversation to have with customers not so long ago. And more and more, it's becoming really important part of what consume, what our customers are looking for is that ability to consume infrastructure as an operating expense. And we haven't seen really one or another really pop. And we've, we've really been enhancing our offerings. You know, it's probably a couple weeks ago, we released a one year term, for example, for flex on demand. So we're continuing to enhance our offerings. We're getting a lot of feedback from our customers about what they want to see. So we're really early days here, but it's clear that this is where we're all going. And the interest is certainly increasing here. And it's an A really, it's we're happy that PowerStore is part of that Dell Technologies on demand portfolio, because it's an important part of how we're bringing all of our technology to market. Steve McDowell 20:55 To kind of wrap up, you've been, you've been at EMC Dell Technologies most recently. This one's exciting. You've reinvented mid-range storage. Where are you going next? Caitlin Gordon 21:07 Vacation was the plan, but not anymore. So. So I guess I guess we'll have to cook up something else to do. Yeah, we're not stopping. We've got a lot of exciting announcements that come in. We've got a lot of work to do. And a lot of areas, I think, you know, we focus a lot on primary storage today. There's huge market opportunity in the unstructured space as well. So I you know, stay tuned, we've got a lot more that we're cooking up in the next coming months here. Okay, I know you don't want to announce anything here, right, but wearing my analyst hat, and I'm looking at your portfolio slide right now. There's a handful of things there that don't have the Power brand on them yet. So I'm guessing that that's where you're gonna be looking. Let's say, no, it's not a bad guess. Steve, we're very clear that we're going to have a leading solution and the branding is going to all line up so you might be onto something there. Steve McDowell 21:58 All right, well, that's a great note to end on. Thanks, Caitlin, take time joining us and congratulations on this launch. You're gonna have a busy week. Caitlin Gordon 22:06 Thank you so much for having me. It's great talking to you guys. Great. Steve McDowell 22:09 Hey, Matt. This wraps up another data center podcast. Matt Kimball 22:15 Most certainly does.