Dell Technologies World 2024 | Drew Schulke & Shannon Champion | Dell Technologies

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Drew Schulke

Vice President – Product Management, Primary Storage

Dell Technologies

Shannon Champion

Vice President of Product Marketing

Dell Technologies

Data storage efficiency and security: Dell’s dual focus for the future of data management

As the demand for stronger data management systems grows, companies are innovating to ensure that data storage efficiency not only keeps pace with business needs but also enhances operational efficiency.The conversation around artificial intelligence-driven storage, enhanced data reduction and flexible, scalable solutions highlights a transformative period for the industry, according to Drew Schulke (pictured, right), vice president of product management at Dell Technologies Inc.Dell’s Shannon Champion and Drew Schulke talk to theCUBE about data storage efficiency.“I think there’s always this quest for never-ending improvements in performance

play_circle_outline Presence of VPs from Dell on the show, discussing PowerStore Prime

play_circle_outline Features of PowerStore Prime (performance improvement, data reduction guarantee)

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Drew Schulke & Shannon Champion | Dell Technologies

Drew Schulke

Vice President – Product Management, Primary Storage Dell Technologies

Shannon Champion

Vice President of Product Marketing Dell Technologies

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>> Good evening, Dell fans, and welcome back to Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here on the evening of day two of three at Dell Tech World. Fantastic event here. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined by my co-host, Dave Vellante. Dave, we're rocking.

>> Dell fans, I like that. A lot of Dell fans these days.

>> I would assume the folks tuning into some of this broadcast are probably Dell fans.

>> Dell's Hot again.

>> And if you're not a Dell fan right now, you're kind of missing out on the train.

>> Yeah, you are missing out. Good call.

>> Yeah, we got two VPs from Dell joining us on the show, Drew Schulke from the infrastructure group. Thank you so much for being here, Drew.

Drew Schulke

>> Yep, thank you.

>> It's a pleasure. And Shannon Champion returning from which she was with us last night. She's back today. Shannon, how you doing today?

Shannon Champion

>> I am doing fabulous. Thank you.

>> You're rolling with us on the happy hour segments. It's great bringing the fun, bringing the power edge. What would you say has been the most exciting thing for you? Things were just getting started when we got to chat yesterday. What's been the most exciting thing for you in the last 48 hours. Such a moment for Dell.

Shannon Champion

>> There's so many exciting moments, but what I want to point out here is the giant PowerStore Prime logo on main stage, day one, Michael Dell announcing to the world the latest and greatest from our leading flagship all-flash storage offer. That was a really proud moment.

>> It is a proud moment. It seems like a lot of people were talking about. It almost felt like their kids were on stage this particular week because of the magnitude of the announcements that Dell is making though. I think it's a realization of a lot of things. Drew, has it been a similar experience for you?

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah, no, very much so. And to have PowerStore on day one, given the magnitude of the launch, I think it was appropriate, to be honest, a significant advancement in terms of what we've done in the product, but then around the product in terms of surrounding it, in terms of what we're doing with our AIOps platforms, what we're doing with our services, what we're doing with our subscription models. There's a lot to talk about here beyond just what's happening inside the box.

>> So I want to get into the big features of PowerStore Prime, but can we just zoom out for a minute and can you talk about what's happening in the storage market? The all-flash data center was obviously a big trend, and that changed everything, but you guys have been innovating largely in software since that epiphany. What are the big trends you're seeing in the market dynamics in storage these days that we should be aware of?

Drew Schulke

>> Well, I'll begin with this. I think there's always this quest for never-ending improvements in performance. You never want to have storage be the bottleneck for your application or your business at this point in time. So to what extent are you always delivering some sort of incremental headroom? You can on the performance side? There's an efficiency angle that's always front and center, and efficiency takes a couple of different forms. How efficient are you storing my data, because that's ultimately defining how much I'm having to invest in the infrastructure around it? That also dovetails nicely into a power efficiency story because the least expensive energy consumption and storing data is data you don't have to store, so store it really efficiently on that side. But then beyond that, what are you doing to make it efficient? And then I'd probably rounded out as well with kind of the third leg of that stool is security's always top of mind. And you just read the news, what's going on day in and day out, you hear of cyber attacks and so forth, and so security's always at the forefront.

>> So let's dig into that a little bit. So been following storage for a long time and I go way back, and it's always the same. Customers want storage to be rock solid, lightning fast, and dirt cheap. And how you get there has evolved over time. So you guys have got... You got QLC, you got five to one data reduction, you got performance there, you got cost, cloud mobility, secure snapshots. I'm sure there's space efficient snapshots are in there, all kinds of features available at no cost as long as you're on the maintenance agreement. So what's inside of PowerStore Prime?

Shannon Champion

>> Yeah, you mentioned software, right? PowerStore's celebrating its four year anniversary. In that four years we released seven major releases. It's really built to be continuously modern so that you can bring those capabilities to bear. So with PowerStore Prime, Drew mentioned performance. So customers can see a 30% performance improvement in PowerStore at no cost, non-disruptively just upgrade your software. It's that easy.

>> Every CFO just smiled.

Shannon Champion

>> Yeah, exactly. And in addition to that, there's software capabilities built in, intelligent compression that gives you a 20% improvement in data reduction. We upped our guarantee. You mentioned five to one data reduction guarantee. That's the best in the industry. So we're really excited about the benefits that that brings, like store more data in less infrastructure. So you don't need as much that has power and cooling and efficiency improvements that come along with that. So a lot of software driven innovation that we're focused on with PowerStore.

>> What do I have to do to get the guarantee?What's the fine print there? Is there certain conditions I have to meet? Do you go in and sort of game the workload, so like, "Okay, now we'll give you a five to one guarantee"? How does that work?

Drew Schulke

>> Any data that's reducible, we promise the five to one. No pre-assessment required. And if we fail to meet our word on it, the remediation is incredibly painless and seamless. We'll just ship you another drive to make you whole in terms of the capacity that you needed. Now we do go through a process where we size the workload and understand what is reducible or not and make sure we're giving you the system you want. But if it's reducible, five to one, no questions asked.

>> And you make that transparent to the customer up front. They know what they can expect. Wow, they're smiling. That's cool, because usually these guarantees are like, okay, wait a minute, if this, if this, if that, and then the remediation is we will give you your cable minute back.

>> Yeah, we'll give you some credits for the future to spend more money with us instead of actually... Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's a big part. Go ahead.

Shannon Champion

>> We're seeing some examples in the field of achieving far better than five-to-one data reduction.

Drew Schulke

>> Sure. Yeah.

Shannon Champion

>> So an example of that is DOWL. They're a civil engineering firm in North America, and they instituted PowerStore for all of their enterprise applications, databases, VMs. They loved that you could do physical, virtual, and containerized applications in one system, so they got the flexibility. But when they started using PowerStore, they got twelve-to-one data reduction. So we're seeing a lot of examples of customers.

>> That's huge.

Shannon Champion

>> Yeah.

>> How are you achieving that?

>> Yeah.

>> What is it? Is it like newfangled compression, data reduction ?

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah, compression is a big one. And this is, again, the power of software where we have a team that spends nothing but looking at our compression algorithms and how it is, we can fine-tune these things. We've also got a wonderful trove of insight from our install base. We look at all the PowerStores that are out there in the field. We see what they're attaining. We can characterize their workloads. That helps us inform us about where we can make tweaks to get further advances on this going forward. So we're on a treadmill here and we're not going to get off. We're not stopping at five-to-one. Anything that we can do to improve the efficiency is a win-win for both us and our customers.

>> Everybody wants to do things quicker, faster, more cost-effective with lower cooling costs. There's so many lines of that axis that what you're talking about really improves business operations, especially as we're talking about AI. Drew, you mentioned earlier you talked about security and that being top of mind, 83% of companies expecting attack or have experienced an attack in the last 12 months. That's everybody pretty much. How does PowerStore help customers be better prepared for when that moment happens?

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah, great question. So I'd say you got to think of multiple layers. One is, how do you prevent a nefarious actor from getting actually access to the systems? Right?

>> Right.

Drew Schulke

>> And so this is where we invested heavily in things like identity access management, so fully integrated multi-factor authentication. So I can't get into power. I can't actually touch the system unless I've authenticated twice, which by the way, if you look at cyber attacks in the U.S. over the past two years, 96% of them could have been prevented with multi-factor authentication, right? So it's kind of-

>> 96%?

Drew Schulke

>> 96%.

>> My gosh.

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah, which is why things like that are ending up in the White House executive order for cybersecurity for critical industries, right? So you got to have good practice and protection there. But then once you're... Okay, let's say you're the 4% that gets through, what are you doing in terms of being resilient and having lots of options and protecting that data? So you look at what we can do in PowerStore, asynchronous replication option, synchronous replication options, metro replication options to provide an active, if you want to, alternative if something happens on your main system. Beyond that, you start to look at the better together story we have within ISG with our data protection products fully integrated to our PowerProtect portfolio with what we call storage direct. So from within PowerStore, I as the storage admin can set my backup and my restore policies to a Dell PowerProtect system, which could also be on-prem, it could be on a third site, or it could be in the public cloud. Incredible flexibility in terms of your ability to be resilient if something bad goes wrong.

>> Okay, so got... I checked the box on rock solid with security, the MFA. The dirt cheap, I got with the five to one data reduction, worst case for workloads that are reducible.

>> Love that. Yeah.

>> And then let's talk about the lightning fast component. How are you achieving the performance increases that you're claiming?

Shannon Champion

>> I mentioned software. There's also hardware, right? Data in place, upgrades available. We'll get you 66% faster performance with the new PowerStore 4.0 as part of PowerStore Prime. And we are also introducing a new model for PowerStore, the PowerStore Q, you might know where I'm going with this one. We have QLC technology that we're offering in PowerStore, so customers don't have to compromise the performance or their budget and really get the best of both worlds. And it is the industry's most flexible QLC offering. So you can start small, you can scale in granular increments. There's a lot of differentiation in that offer.

>> Can we do a little NAND one-on-one here?

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah.

>> Explain QLC to the audience.

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah, happy to.

>> Why is it beneficial? There are some trade-offs. How are you managing the trade-offs?

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah, I'm happy to. So TLC is the common flash that's used in most arrays today. The T stands for try, three bits per cell on the NAND. QLC is four bits per cell. That's the Q for the quad. So in getting four bits per cell, there's economies of scale that happens when you're actually packaging up the NAND where I can actually put more storage on it. So why wouldn't everybody go do that? Well, with QLC, when you're putting more bits per cell, you do have to be conscious of things like endurance and how many daily writes I can go do and support, which if you're running an enterprise, all-flash array is not something to take lightly. But we've, through our engineering of this system, have put together an implementation in the 3200Q, which if you buy the minimum drive count, you're going to have no issue in terms of wear, and by the way as well, no issue in terms of performance degradation, which is something we've seen in the industry. So other companies that put up QLC systems, you'll see this throttling of performance because they need to basically slow down the writes to not have it wear out the system. So that's the big... That's the NAND one-on-one piece, which is economically advantaged, but you need to understand what you're getting into and engineer around that appropriately.

>> So the slow down the writes, is that a garbage collection thing or is that just aware?

Drew Schulke

>> Being more conscious about where you're putting the writes so you're not writing over things.

>> Okay. So it's figuring out mapping to where it's a good place to write. Okay, cool. Thank you for that.

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah, happy to.

>> Yeah. So a lot's happened in the last year, obviously, and four years in. Congratulations on the anniversary there. What can we expect to see in the next year? I know you're teasing a little bit here, but give us a little more of the window through the looking glass.

Shannon Champion

>> Well, I'm going to let Drew decide if he wants to talk about Roadmap, but what I will say that we haven't had a chance to talk about here is PowerStore Prime is about the product. We covered that. It's about the programmatic elements, but it's also about our partnerships. And we are going big with this launch with our partner community. So in the next year, you can expect to see them partner with us to bring all this innovation to our joint customers. We have specific programs for our partners. With this launch, better Together bundles are being delivered to them so they can streamline the sales motion of PowerStore together with PowerProtect. And we're also have a power to compete program, so there are storage acquisition incentives for our partner community when they win new business on PowerStore together with us.

>> Three Ps.

>> I love it.

>> You had to do it

Shannon Champion

>> Yeah.

>> Super Cloud. Can't resist, can you?

Shannon Champion

>> No.

Drew Schulke

>> My discussions with partners this week thus far have been unbounded enthusiasm for what we're doing to put them first on this particular offering, so we're excited.

>> Yeah. And you really get that feeling of a culture of trust, and a true, I don't use this term ever really in tech, but a true sense of family. You look at all your partners and everyone playing, and you're also proud of each other and what you're able to deliver. It's really exciting. Have there been... I'm curious, you could probably get to talk to a lot of customers as they roll this out. Have there been any interesting surprises for you, applications use cases? Maybe you haven't seen something that's kind of fun that maybe you hadn't expected?

Shannon Champion

>> Interesting.

Drew Schulke

>> Well, I'd say let's... I'll throw out one out there, and maybe I'll get in trouble for this. Shannon will let me know. But the storage requirements around AI are taking shape and evolving, and it's interesting when you hear pockets of things coming up right now. And one that came up today, or not today, but yesterday was this use case where they were putting an AI solution together and it was hundreds of microservices, so this massive Kubernetes-based deployment kind of thing. And they looked at PowerStore and they're like, "Oh, we need small persistent volumes associated with these containers. And PowerStore with the way it scales out is a perfect fit for this." And we're like, "Cool. AI use case, we found another one." These pop up very frequently right now, and so we're kind of collecting all these things and thinking about, we bring them together into a comprehensive AI storage strategy, which is so diverse and growing and evolving day by day. It's really exciting.

>> Security angle's interesting at the storage level when you think about all the things that applications have to take care of in terms of security. So do you see, going forward, the ability to bring some of that protection closer to the data to ease really the application developer pain? Does that make sense, that that trend could actually take shape with AI? What do you think?

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah, I think so. I think it's good practices that we've already had in the storage for a very long time around thinking about data and rest encryption and things like this that we're not going to turn off for AI. We'll just lean more heavily into it at this point in time. But with AI, you're going to have data coming and going and so forth, and so I think there's certainly some opportunities to think about to what extent do you want to start tackling things about data and flight encryption, and there's an opportunity there.

>> I guess the nature of my question is the recovery aspects-

Drew Schulke

>> Okay....

>> that you design, the developers design into the app. And it's sort of painful for them. It's a real pain in the neck that they have to worry about that. I just wonder with AI over time, if more of that can happen closer to the data-

Drew Schulke

>> Sure....

>> that would give developers more latitude to develop innovation.

>> Yeah. Like we're talking about, getting that time back to do the creative stuff and walk the dog.

>> Right. Yeah. Right. Walk the dog or the chicken.

>> Yeah. Actually, speaking of the chicken, Dave, would you like to explain this tattooed chicken?

>> So this is for Lizzie. Lizzie, this is coming home. I know we've been taking pictures all week, but this is actually a video for you and your chicken, this tattooed chicken that you have to name. And thank you for letting us use your chicken. And your mom will have this in her back. She'll bring this home for you. Okay. All right. And she loves you very much. We love you too, even though we haven't met you,

>> Leslie, we look forward to having you on the show some day sitting right up here like our fabulous guests. Speaking of, I think it's probably a beautiful moment to close down what was a fantastic conversation. Drew, Shannon, thank you both so much for talking to us.

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah, thank you guys. Congratulations.

>> Such an exciting PowerStore moment. Such a great Dell moment. Fantastic. Dave, always a pleasure. First time I've heard you or seen you hold a tattooed chicken, so I'm going to go ahead. We've had a lot of CUBE firsts.

>> No chickens of CUBE, but yeah.

>> Yeah. And thank all of you for tuning in to see whatever we hold up next. Here live from our three days of coverage of Dell Tech World in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, my name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.

Drew Schulke & Shannon Champion | Dell Technologies

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>> Good evening, Dell fans, and welcome back to Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here on the evening of day two of three at Dell Tech World. Fantastic event here. My name's Savannah Peterson, joined by my co-host, Dave Vellante. Dave, we're rocking.

>> Dell fans, I like that. A lot of Dell fans these days.

>> I would assume the folks tuning into some of this broadcast are probably Dell fans.

>> Dell's Hot again.

>> And if you're not a Dell fan right now, you're kind of missing out on the train.

>> Yeah, you are missing out. Good call.

>> Yeah, we got two VPs from Dell joining us on the show, Drew Schulke from the infrastructure group. Thank you so much for being here, Drew.

Drew Schulke

>> Yep, thank you.

>> It's a pleasure. And Shannon Champion returning from which she was with us last night. She's back today. Shannon, how you doing today?

Shannon Champion

>> I am doing fabulous. Thank you.

>> You're rolling with us on the happy hour segments. It's great bringing the fun, bringing the power edge. What would you say has been the most exciting thing for you? Things were just getting started when we got to chat yesterday. What's been the most exciting thing for you in the last 48 hours. Such a moment for Dell.

Shannon Champion

>> There's so many exciting moments, but what I want to point out here is the giant PowerStore Prime logo on main stage, day one, Michael Dell announcing to the world the latest and greatest from our leading flagship all-flash storage offer. That was a really proud moment.

>> It is a proud moment. It seems like a lot of people were talking about. It almost felt like their kids were on stage this particular week because of the magnitude of the announcements that Dell is making though. I think it's a realization of a lot of things. Drew, has it been a similar experience for you?

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah, no, very much so. And to have PowerStore on day one, given the magnitude of the launch, I think it was appropriate, to be honest, a significant advancement in terms of what we've done in the product, but then around the product in terms of surrounding it, in terms of what we're doing with our AIOps platforms, what we're doing with our services, what we're doing with our subscription models. There's a lot to talk about here beyond just what's happening inside the box.

>> So I want to get into the big features of PowerStore Prime, but can we just zoom out for a minute and can you talk about what's happening in the storage market? The all-flash data center was obviously a big trend, and that changed everything, but you guys have been innovating largely in software since that epiphany. What are the big trends you're seeing in the market dynamics in storage these days that we should be aware of?

Drew Schulke

>> Well, I'll begin with this. I think there's always this quest for never-ending improvements in performance. You never want to have storage be the bottleneck for your application or your business at this point in time. So to what extent are you always delivering some sort of incremental headroom? You can on the performance side? There's an efficiency angle that's always front and center, and efficiency takes a couple of different forms. How efficient are you storing my data, because that's ultimately defining how much I'm having to invest in the infrastructure around it? That also dovetails nicely into a power efficiency story because the least expensive energy consumption and storing data is data you don't have to store, so store it really efficiently on that side. But then beyond that, what are you doing to make it efficient? And then I'd probably rounded out as well with kind of the third leg of that stool is security's always top of mind. And you just read the news, what's going on day in and day out, you hear of cyber attacks and so forth, and so security's always at the forefront.

>> So let's dig into that a little bit. So been following storage for a long time and I go way back, and it's always the same. Customers want storage to be rock solid, lightning fast, and dirt cheap. And how you get there has evolved over time. So you guys have got... You got QLC, you got five to one data reduction, you got performance there, you got cost, cloud mobility, secure snapshots. I'm sure there's space efficient snapshots are in there, all kinds of features available at no cost as long as you're on the maintenance agreement. So what's inside of PowerStore Prime?

Shannon Champion

>> Yeah, you mentioned software, right? PowerStore's celebrating its four year anniversary. In that four years we released seven major releases. It's really built to be continuously modern so that you can bring those capabilities to bear. So with PowerStore Prime, Drew mentioned performance. So customers can see a 30% performance improvement in PowerStore at no cost, non-disruptively just upgrade your software. It's that easy.

>> Every CFO just smiled.

Shannon Champion

>> Yeah, exactly. And in addition to that, there's software capabilities built in, intelligent compression that gives you a 20% improvement in data reduction. We upped our guarantee. You mentioned five to one data reduction guarantee. That's the best in the industry. So we're really excited about the benefits that that brings, like store more data in less infrastructure. So you don't need as much that has power and cooling and efficiency improvements that come along with that. So a lot of software driven innovation that we're focused on with PowerStore.

>> What do I have to do to get the guarantee?What's the fine print there? Is there certain conditions I have to meet? Do you go in and sort of game the workload, so like, "Okay, now we'll give you a five to one guarantee"? How does that work?

Drew Schulke

>> Any data that's reducible, we promise the five to one. No pre-assessment required. And if we fail to meet our word on it, the remediation is incredibly painless and seamless. We'll just ship you another drive to make you whole in terms of the capacity that you needed. Now we do go through a process where we size the workload and understand what is reducible or not and make sure we're giving you the system you want. But if it's reducible, five to one, no questions asked.

>> And you make that transparent to the customer up front. They know what they can expect. Wow, they're smiling. That's cool, because usually these guarantees are like, okay, wait a minute, if this, if this, if that, and then the remediation is we will give you your cable minute back.

>> Yeah, we'll give you some credits for the future to spend more money with us instead of actually... Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's a big part. Go ahead.

Shannon Champion

>> We're seeing some examples in the field of achieving far better than five-to-one data reduction.

Drew Schulke

>> Sure. Yeah.

Shannon Champion

>> So an example of that is DOWL. They're a civil engineering firm in North America, and they instituted PowerStore for all of their enterprise applications, databases, VMs. They loved that you could do physical, virtual, and containerized applications in one system, so they got the flexibility. But when they started using PowerStore, they got twelve-to-one data reduction. So we're seeing a lot of examples of customers.

>> That's huge.

Shannon Champion

>> Yeah.

>> How are you achieving that?

>> Yeah.

>> What is it? Is it like newfangled compression, data reduction ?

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah, compression is a big one. And this is, again, the power of software where we have a team that spends nothing but looking at our compression algorithms and how it is, we can fine-tune these things. We've also got a wonderful trove of insight from our install base. We look at all the PowerStores that are out there in the field. We see what they're attaining. We can characterize their workloads. That helps us inform us about where we can make tweaks to get further advances on this going forward. So we're on a treadmill here and we're not going to get off. We're not stopping at five-to-one. Anything that we can do to improve the efficiency is a win-win for both us and our customers.

>> Everybody wants to do things quicker, faster, more cost-effective with lower cooling costs. There's so many lines of that axis that what you're talking about really improves business operations, especially as we're talking about AI. Drew, you mentioned earlier you talked about security and that being top of mind, 83% of companies expecting attack or have experienced an attack in the last 12 months. That's everybody pretty much. How does PowerStore help customers be better prepared for when that moment happens?

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah, great question. So I'd say you got to think of multiple layers. One is, how do you prevent a nefarious actor from getting actually access to the systems? Right?

>> Right.

Drew Schulke

>> And so this is where we invested heavily in things like identity access management, so fully integrated multi-factor authentication. So I can't get into power. I can't actually touch the system unless I've authenticated twice, which by the way, if you look at cyber attacks in the U.S. over the past two years, 96% of them could have been prevented with multi-factor authentication, right? So it's kind of-

>> 96%?

Drew Schulke

>> 96%.

>> My gosh.

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah, which is why things like that are ending up in the White House executive order for cybersecurity for critical industries, right? So you got to have good practice and protection there. But then once you're... Okay, let's say you're the 4% that gets through, what are you doing in terms of being resilient and having lots of options and protecting that data? So you look at what we can do in PowerStore, asynchronous replication option, synchronous replication options, metro replication options to provide an active, if you want to, alternative if something happens on your main system. Beyond that, you start to look at the better together story we have within ISG with our data protection products fully integrated to our PowerProtect portfolio with what we call storage direct. So from within PowerStore, I as the storage admin can set my backup and my restore policies to a Dell PowerProtect system, which could also be on-prem, it could be on a third site, or it could be in the public cloud. Incredible flexibility in terms of your ability to be resilient if something bad goes wrong.

>> Okay, so got... I checked the box on rock solid with security, the MFA. The dirt cheap, I got with the five to one data reduction, worst case for workloads that are reducible.

>> Love that. Yeah.

>> And then let's talk about the lightning fast component. How are you achieving the performance increases that you're claiming?

Shannon Champion

>> I mentioned software. There's also hardware, right? Data in place, upgrades available. We'll get you 66% faster performance with the new PowerStore 4.0 as part of PowerStore Prime. And we are also introducing a new model for PowerStore, the PowerStore Q, you might know where I'm going with this one. We have QLC technology that we're offering in PowerStore, so customers don't have to compromise the performance or their budget and really get the best of both worlds. And it is the industry's most flexible QLC offering. So you can start small, you can scale in granular increments. There's a lot of differentiation in that offer.

>> Can we do a little NAND one-on-one here?

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah.

>> Explain QLC to the audience.

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah, happy to.

>> Why is it beneficial? There are some trade-offs. How are you managing the trade-offs?

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah, I'm happy to. So TLC is the common flash that's used in most arrays today. The T stands for try, three bits per cell on the NAND. QLC is four bits per cell. That's the Q for the quad. So in getting four bits per cell, there's economies of scale that happens when you're actually packaging up the NAND where I can actually put more storage on it. So why wouldn't everybody go do that? Well, with QLC, when you're putting more bits per cell, you do have to be conscious of things like endurance and how many daily writes I can go do and support, which if you're running an enterprise, all-flash array is not something to take lightly. But we've, through our engineering of this system, have put together an implementation in the 3200Q, which if you buy the minimum drive count, you're going to have no issue in terms of wear, and by the way as well, no issue in terms of performance degradation, which is something we've seen in the industry. So other companies that put up QLC systems, you'll see this throttling of performance because they need to basically slow down the writes to not have it wear out the system. So that's the big... That's the NAND one-on-one piece, which is economically advantaged, but you need to understand what you're getting into and engineer around that appropriately.

>> So the slow down the writes, is that a garbage collection thing or is that just aware?

Drew Schulke

>> Being more conscious about where you're putting the writes so you're not writing over things.

>> Okay. So it's figuring out mapping to where it's a good place to write. Okay, cool. Thank you for that.

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah, happy to.

>> Yeah. So a lot's happened in the last year, obviously, and four years in. Congratulations on the anniversary there. What can we expect to see in the next year? I know you're teasing a little bit here, but give us a little more of the window through the looking glass.

Shannon Champion

>> Well, I'm going to let Drew decide if he wants to talk about Roadmap, but what I will say that we haven't had a chance to talk about here is PowerStore Prime is about the product. We covered that. It's about the programmatic elements, but it's also about our partnerships. And we are going big with this launch with our partner community. So in the next year, you can expect to see them partner with us to bring all this innovation to our joint customers. We have specific programs for our partners. With this launch, better Together bundles are being delivered to them so they can streamline the sales motion of PowerStore together with PowerProtect. And we're also have a power to compete program, so there are storage acquisition incentives for our partner community when they win new business on PowerStore together with us.

>> Three Ps.

>> I love it.

>> You had to do it

Shannon Champion

>> Yeah.

>> Super Cloud. Can't resist, can you?

Shannon Champion

>> No.

Drew Schulke

>> My discussions with partners this week thus far have been unbounded enthusiasm for what we're doing to put them first on this particular offering, so we're excited.

>> Yeah. And you really get that feeling of a culture of trust, and a true, I don't use this term ever really in tech, but a true sense of family. You look at all your partners and everyone playing, and you're also proud of each other and what you're able to deliver. It's really exciting. Have there been... I'm curious, you could probably get to talk to a lot of customers as they roll this out. Have there been any interesting surprises for you, applications use cases? Maybe you haven't seen something that's kind of fun that maybe you hadn't expected?

Shannon Champion

>> Interesting.

Drew Schulke

>> Well, I'd say let's... I'll throw out one out there, and maybe I'll get in trouble for this. Shannon will let me know. But the storage requirements around AI are taking shape and evolving, and it's interesting when you hear pockets of things coming up right now. And one that came up today, or not today, but yesterday was this use case where they were putting an AI solution together and it was hundreds of microservices, so this massive Kubernetes-based deployment kind of thing. And they looked at PowerStore and they're like, "Oh, we need small persistent volumes associated with these containers. And PowerStore with the way it scales out is a perfect fit for this." And we're like, "Cool. AI use case, we found another one." These pop up very frequently right now, and so we're kind of collecting all these things and thinking about, we bring them together into a comprehensive AI storage strategy, which is so diverse and growing and evolving day by day. It's really exciting.

>> Security angle's interesting at the storage level when you think about all the things that applications have to take care of in terms of security. So do you see, going forward, the ability to bring some of that protection closer to the data to ease really the application developer pain? Does that make sense, that that trend could actually take shape with AI? What do you think?

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah, I think so. I think it's good practices that we've already had in the storage for a very long time around thinking about data and rest encryption and things like this that we're not going to turn off for AI. We'll just lean more heavily into it at this point in time. But with AI, you're going to have data coming and going and so forth, and so I think there's certainly some opportunities to think about to what extent do you want to start tackling things about data and flight encryption, and there's an opportunity there.

>> I guess the nature of my question is the recovery aspects-

Drew Schulke

>> Okay....

>> that you design, the developers design into the app. And it's sort of painful for them. It's a real pain in the neck that they have to worry about that. I just wonder with AI over time, if more of that can happen closer to the data-

Drew Schulke

>> Sure....

>> that would give developers more latitude to develop innovation.

>> Yeah. Like we're talking about, getting that time back to do the creative stuff and walk the dog.

>> Right. Yeah. Right. Walk the dog or the chicken.

>> Yeah. Actually, speaking of the chicken, Dave, would you like to explain this tattooed chicken?

>> So this is for Lizzie. Lizzie, this is coming home. I know we've been taking pictures all week, but this is actually a video for you and your chicken, this tattooed chicken that you have to name. And thank you for letting us use your chicken. And your mom will have this in her back. She'll bring this home for you. Okay. All right. And she loves you very much. We love you too, even though we haven't met you,

>> Leslie, we look forward to having you on the show some day sitting right up here like our fabulous guests. Speaking of, I think it's probably a beautiful moment to close down what was a fantastic conversation. Drew, Shannon, thank you both so much for talking to us.

Drew Schulke

>> Yeah, thank you guys. Congratulations.

>> Such an exciting PowerStore moment. Such a great Dell moment. Fantastic. Dave, always a pleasure. First time I've heard you or seen you hold a tattooed chicken, so I'm going to go ahead. We've had a lot of CUBE firsts.

>> No chickens of CUBE, but yeah.

>> Yeah. And thank all of you for tuning in to see whatever we hold up next. Here live from our three days of coverage of Dell Tech World in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada, my name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.