Dell Technologies World 2024 | Lisa Miller | Equinix & Todd Lieb | Dell

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Todd Lieb

Vice President, Cloud Partnerships

Dell

Lisa Miller

SVP, Platform Alliances and Global Channel

Equinix

Dell PowerStore on Equinix Metal simplifies global storage with enhanced connectivity

Based on the growing demand for flexible storage options, Dell PowerStore on Equinix Metal provides a simplified infrastructure that accelerates time to value. Thanks to enhanced connectivity and close proximity to leading public clouds, Dell PowerStore on Equinix Metal enables enterprises to deploy, manage and view compute and storage across the globe, according to Lisa Miller (pictured, left), senior vice president of platform alliances at Equinix Inc.Equinix’s Lisa Miller and Dell’s Todd Lieb talk to theCUBE about the importance of Dell PowerStore on Equinix Metal.“We’ve had a really long partnership with Dell,” Miller said

play_circle_outline Dell and Equinix Collaborate to Unveil Powerful Partnership: Introducing Dell PowerStore on Equinix Metal

play_circle_outline Revolutionary Global Storage Infrastructure: Achieving One Millisecond Latency to All Clouds

play_circle_outline The Promising Future of AI and Data: Emphasizing Storage and Proximity for Optimal Results

play_circle_outline Operational efficiencies and cost optimization

play_circle_outline Expansion into international markets

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Lisa Miller | Equinix & Todd Lieb | Dell

Todd Lieb

Vice President, Cloud Partnerships Dell

Lisa Miller

SVP, Platform Alliances and Global Channel Equinix

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>> Good evening, nerd fam, and welcome back to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here for our last segment on day one of three jam-packed days at Dell Tech World. The show is already buzzing. We've had some thrilling guests and I am delighted to be joined by my co-host, Bob. Bob, how are you doing tonight?

>> Doing very well, thanks.

>> You're holding up well day one.

>> We're doing good.

>> You bringing that energy. You brought me a Hershey bar tonight. That was so thoughtful.

>> I did. I thought you might need a little something to keep you going.

>> You're so sweet. Little did you know what a pepper pot you were getting yourself into.

Lisa Miller

>> I didn't get a Hershey bar.

>> Very excited for our next segment, continuing our conversation around partnerships tonight. We have a return guest, Todd Lead, who's been hanging out with us all night. We might as well make you an analyst at this point for theCUBE.

>> Can't get rid of me.

>> And we have the fabulous and effable energy-filled, especially for this time of evening, Lisa Miller, the SVP of Alliances at Equinix. Thank you so much for being here, both of you.

>> Thank you.

Lisa Miller

>> Thanks for having us.

>> Yeah, you've got your Dell Blue, you got your seersucker. Everyone's looking great. Lisa, how's the day been for you?

Lisa Miller

>> It has been awesome. Went to the partner summit.

>> Oh, how was that actually?

Lisa Miller

>> It was great.

>> I didn't get to stick my head there.

Lisa Miller

>> Great. Michael Dell came and spoke, had all of the senior leadership from Dell, showed a huge commitment to the partner community. I thought it was awesome.

>> That is awesome. I love seeing so many executives involved in this show in a way, not just on stage, but actually kind of getting to meet everybody. Todd, how's your day been? What was more fun being on the show floor or hanging out with us here on the stage.

Lisa Miller

>> Definitely hanging out with you guys on the stage. Is that the right answer? Okay, check that, thank you.

>> We might let you on a third time this week if you keep up that kind of attitude.

Lisa Miller

>> Oh, fantastic. I got to check my schedule.

Lisa Miller

>> That's now my new highlight.

>> Check's in the mail, Todd. Check's in the mail.

Lisa Miller

>> Check's in the mail. There you go. No, I love coming out here. Not necessarily Las Vegas, Las Vegas is fun, but the show is awesome. So between spending time with partners, customers, meeting you wonderful people here on theCUBE-

>> You're really hitting all the notes.

>> That's correct.

>> Excellent work. We'll buy you a martini. Don't worry. You're good, you're good.

>> I figured I'd throw that in. No, it's really good. It's six months of activity compressed into three days, so it can get a little exhausting, but it's all for the right reasons. It's good stuff.

>> It is good stuff. Lisa, you all had a lot of announcements recently. What's going on with the partnership? Give us the high level.

Lisa Miller

>> Well, I just have to tell you, we've had a really long partnership with Dell. We've sold with Dell. We are a great landing space for Dell's equipment. But what's exciting right now is our partnership is we are launching Dell PowerStore on Equinix Metal at Equinix data centers.

>> What does that mean? What does that add for your communities?

Lisa Miller

>> What that means is a customer can now get PowerStore as a service, so cloud adjacent storage as a service for Dell equipment at Equinix. We manage it, customer controls it. It's beautiful.

>> Sounds pretty seamless to me. Sounds like a lot of your partnerships.

>> Yeah, this is special, right, Savannah? So the crayons and construction paper kind of story here.

>> Break it down to me. Close the laptops. Give me what happens with the crayons.

>> Let's go back to nursery school.

>> Yeah, let's go.

>> Back to nursery school. I was the guy in the corner eating paste. All right.

>> I was smelling glue, so we're the same.

>> We were probably sitting next to each other. Anyways, sorry. We went off the rails there.

>> We were sitting next to each other.

>> Customers need storage. See that transition?

>> Yes.

>> Now they just get it lit up, ready to go on the data center floor already connected to the clouds and to their cages in 30, 40, 50 countries out the gates. I don't know. That seems pretty cool.

>> That is pretty cool.

>> That is pretty cool. Giving everyone ... so that unified global approach to how they have their storage, whether it be close to the cloud or close to one of their edge locations. I know one of the things I've always been impressed with Equinix is the fact ... I think what's the stat? It's something like you have five milliseconds to 80% of the population of the countries that you're in. So really impressive for organization-

>> That's really impressive, honestly.

>> Well, yeah, and I think especially when you thinking about storage and with all the, I'll just go ahead and say it now, AI stuff that's going on and the importance of having your data close and having it in a timely ... having that reduced latency, shall we say, could be really important play for organizations that need to be able to store data that want to do inferencing, but might not have a physical location that they can keep it in. Now you've got this ability to have a consistent storage infrastructure that can be deployed globally and have very close proximity to their end users or their environments.

Lisa Miller

>> Absolutely, and you are looking at about one millisecond to all of the clouds.

>> Even better.

Lisa Miller

>> That's powerful.

>> If you look at what we're doing with Dell Tech World today or over the next couple of days, one of the biggest announcement categories, let's call it, is around PowerStore and our mid-range products.

>> Big hype, yep. In a great way.

>> Equinix has dug in right away for that to bring out to their customer base. So customers are getting out of the data center business, they're going to the cloud, they want a cloud operating model. This is that, right? But think of it as step one. If you think about the other capabilities that are stacked right behind this, AI, hint hint, right?

>> Cough, cough.

>> Cough, cough. So think about taking the AI or the Equinix managed services, they manage, customer operates, but do that for PowerStore. Then lay down an AI capability, lay down a data protection capability and just snap that out into and across the data centers.

>> It's clear you've been working together for a little while. How long have you been working together, Todd?

>> We were laughing about this earlier. I asked you but I forget. When did Equinix build their first data center?

Lisa Miller

>> About 25 years ago.

Lisa Miller

>> So we've been working together 25 years.

>> Nice.

Lisa Miller

>> Well, because Dell equipment has been being shipped to Equinix data centers since we started. It really has been a partnership for 25 years, and we've continued to increase our partnership with selling together on strategic accounts. Now, this is critical. Customers want to see their storage and their compute and their cloud capabilities right next to each other and we can deliver that as a service.

>> It's really impressive. I mean, Dell having their 40th anniversary this month, also 30 years of PowerEdge and you've been collaborating for 25. That's a college student's life of Dell and Equinix collaboration. That's really impressive.

>> Exactly. That's what you get here too, by the way. A little gray hair along the way, but that's all right.

>> Better it going gray and stay than go away. That's all I'm saying.

>> That's it.

>> Have you practiced that line before?

>> Maybe once or twice.

>> I wasn't going to say it, Bob. I'm glad you did.

Lisa Miller

>> Yeah, it was just the obvious. Stating the obvious side.

>> There's no shame outside of obviously getting to chat with a lot of your customers and community and talk more about your partnership, what are you most excited about this week? Lisa, I'll start with you.

Lisa Miller

>> Well, I think when you look at Dell being the leader in storage, we of course feel we're the global leader and data center and you'd be able to put that together, I think it's such a powerful message for us and where we can deliver it initially in over 30 countries. Our goal is to continue to add Metal locations and our great partnership with Dell, they tend to be everywhere we are and so it allows for an exciting future for us. Because you heard about Dell's partner first strategy, and as we get towards summer, you're going to hear some more exciting news where capabilities that we are talking about today may be delivered through their partners. So just more and more exciting things coming. This is the beginning and there's even more to come.

>> I love a good little cool shout-out.

Lisa Miller

>> Was I a spoiler there or not? That wasn't a spoiler.

>> That was just a ice little tease.

>> Just a little enough of a drip.

Lisa Miller

>> Just a drip. There we go.

>> So think of ecosystem. We're here, a little bullseye now. We're going to go ring, ring, ring out and bring in the rest of the ecosystem to come play.

Lisa Miller

>> Well, and as you think of Dell has been talking about how customers want to have their services on-prem, and you also talk about the cloud, well, we are that private network in the middle. So as customers want to grow and expand into new markets, they're not going to always go out and create a new office location. That's where we fit in so well where we can say, "Come to the private cloud, you've got the proximity to the clouds, but you have your compute, your storage, and this is how you can grow. It's as a service and it's almost instant on", and so it is really going to be impactful for customers.

>> It's also going to drive a lot of operational efficiencies because it's the model they're used to working with what they maybe had on-prem, et cetera, so now it's just extending that. So regardless of where you want to deploy it in the globe, you're going to have that consistent ... I like to refer to it as the principle of least astonishment. When you go to open it up, it doesn't look different. Very familiar to you. You're able to complete all the functions and activities that you need to in a timely manner.

Lisa Miller

>> Absolutely. For us, as Todd said, the ecosystem that we have is one of the best things at Equinix. We have getting close to a half a million interconnections to all of the type of ecosystems you need to reach regardless of the vertical. So combine that with the power of storage for Dell, I think we're about to a mic drop. That's what I'm thinking.

>> I mean, I think you almost might have.

Lisa Miller

>> I think you just did.

>> You're kind of teasing it. You're really giving us quite the build up. I'm loving it. I'm really loving it. All right. Since you're giving us this really good foreshadow, and because you do touch across verticals, you both get to see a lot of different applications, different customer use cases, a lot of things. I understand there may be some secrets that you cannot reveal, but from a personal perspective, not even just from your partnership perspective, from a personal perspective, what gets you most excited about what happens next. In our AI future, it could be our globalized . Could be anything. It could just be you. But as a technologist, as someone who sees everything, what's get you stoked.

Lisa Miller

>> You want to go first?

>> Sure.

>> I can see you're deciding who has to go first, so I'm letting you duel it out.

Lisa Miller

>> When I talk with customers, especially C-level or VP-level IT leaders, they break their IT problems into two chunks. They got to figure out where to run work and they have to figure out where to store data. All the action has been around where am I going to run work? I'm going to pick this up, I'm going to move it here, I'm going to write code here, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. Then the data was the problem. It's the anchor they're trying to drag along and it's like, "Well, I moved everything there, but the data's still in my ..." wherever, data center, colo, wherever it may be. What I'm actually kind of interested in and what I'm excited about is I think we're changing the rules there. I think we're kind of freeing up customer's ability to move data into new locations, to put it close to the cloud, but not in the cloud, to have it run in their cage in Equinix Metal inside a public cloud. So the whole data story is going to kind of play out and data as Michael I think would say on stage is the fuel for AI. So now we're playing in that game as well. If I had to say what I was excited about, that would be it.

Lisa Miller

>> I would say many of the same things because to me it's all about where your data lives and where your data lives is where your data needs to be stored and I feel that this partnership is at the center of that and that's really where I feel Equinix strength is because of the adjacency and we want to be where data lives.

>> And not forcing people to bring their data somewhere it's not already, to your point. I was like, we were talking about bringing the AI to your data and not the inverse. I think that's really going to make a big difference in cost efficiency, in optimization of workflows and generally just the human experience with a lot of these products that we have coming out there.

Lisa Miller

>> Yes. A lot of people that have brought their data to the cloud is now saying, "Wait a minute, with AI, I may not want my data there, but I want it close." So that cloud adjacency for data is so important for that data storage. So important, and so that adjacency to have this storage solution between Dell and Equinix as a service with that adjacency of one millisecond or close to that, I think that's pretty special.

>> How important is speed for your customers?

Lisa Miller

>> Is what?

>> Is speed, that one millisecond? We're talking about and I think it matters to a lot of us, and we're talking about inference and latency, but you're talking to everybody on the front lines. How much do those milliseconds make a difference?

Lisa Miller

>> Well, it matters a lot because when you-

Lisa Miller

>> We built your business on it, so ...

Lisa Miller

>> We built our business on it so a lot of applications require five milliseconds or less for point of sale, and so they have to be close to the edge of a network so that they can have that latency. Then when you think of all the cloud applications and how many times data sits one place, it has to go into the cloud, it has to come back, it has to go back and forth, that latency is critical. When we're moving mission-critical applications from the cloud to an Equinix data center, that matters. So when our competitors are not with that close proximity, it matters.

>> I love that analogy and I think that's so important because when you think about what the use cases are for so many of the enterprises, it's really about real-time insights.

Lisa Miller

>> That's right.

Lisa Miller

>> So in order to do that, you really need to minimize the amount of latency that you have so that you can ... and talking about retail, if you're trying to do some kind of location-based service and real-time offer management, it doesn't help that the person's walked 30 yards beyond where you're trying to get them to. They're not going to turn around and come back.

>> If it's not real-time, it's not real.

Lisa Miller

>> Amen.

>> Same thing when you think about hospitals potentially leveraging this type of stuff, same type of thing. "Hey, we need to find this cart." You don't need to find it two days from now. You need to find it right now because there's a real impact. So there's a lot of great use cases that really point to that fact of organizations need to do more real-time analysis. You said you've got the data, so when you were talking about Todd, you're expanding, you can easily see, well, once you've got the data and you want to maybe leverage that data to do some inferencing to get some real-time insights, there's a lot of great possibilities that could extend from what you're announcing today to where it could go in the future.

Lisa Miller

>> Bob, you said something that just triggered a thought. You said enterprise and Lisa and I were talking earlier, Equinix has a specialty or a concentration in large enterprise customers that need large cabinets and colos and cages and Dell works with the largest customers in the world and has a business that kind of goes all the way down to you and I buying something for my parents kind of thing. So what we're doing with some of these services is also opening up enterprise class capabilities to customers of all shapes and sizes. You don't have to be that huge enterprise that has to buy this square footage and make commitments. You can come in and acquire a service to get started, but have enterprise class capabilities with it, including the AI support. That's kind of fun. That's really interesting.

>> It's huge to be able to step up and into it too without having to ...

Lisa Miller

>> You can.

Lisa Miller

>> In fact, we are able to deliver a very low entry point for being able to provide this storage where you don't have to have a significant commitment, which also makes this an awesome offer.

Lisa Miller

>> You're ordering it through an Equinix portal. You don't need the skill set to run it because Equinix is doing that. You can just operate and use it. Then not only do you do that, but you could say, "Okay", we talked about this use case. "I operate in London and Amsterdam and Ashburn, but I want to try and experiment in 15 markets, Brazil, India, Malaysia, et cetera. See what happens." All of a sudden a couple of those markets really start to take off. So you acquire space, you build out what you need, and other ones you may shrink, you may expand, but you have the ability to kind of go and experiment and do things that you couldn't do before, which is kind of cool.

>> The other interesting part, some of those places you mentioned are somewhat power constrained. They may not even be able to deploy infrastructure there. They're going to have to use an outside infrastructure like an Equinix.

Lisa Miller

>> Well, and the beauty is if a customer finds that a location is growing like crazy, they might add a facility there and then they can still have their capability on-prem. So the blend of now this flexibility that it gives you just doesn't matter if you're providing the services for a customer for Dell on-prem or in the cloud. Now you have all of this flexibility of an as a service in all of these edge locations. While this is available in 30 markets, we have over 260 data centers. So that gives us a lot of growth.

>> That's some range.

Lisa Miller

>> Potential.

>> Yeah, you've got some reach.

>> That's some growth potential there.

>> I love that.

Lisa Miller

>> That's right. It gives us a lot of growth potential to get to all those 75 metro markets in over 33 countries.

>> Awesome.

>> All right, last question because you are our last interview of the evening and we mentioned martinis earlier.

Lisa Miller

>> Uh-oh.

>> Lightning round. What is your favorite Vegas meal and beverage? Todd, starting with you.

>> I would go sushi. I know it's a little generic. It's just my favorite meal in general.

>> That's okay. Do you have a favorite sushi spot in Vegas? Like a Nobu guy?

>> I'm a Nobu guy.

>> You're a Nobu guy. I could see it on your face and you almost didn't say it. Just say it. It's okay.

Lisa Miller

>> I can go Nobu. Then when there're some version of a tasty saki, just going with the sushi.

>> I love that.

Lisa Miller

>> I know what Lisa orders, which is a little disturbing potentially.

Lisa Miller

>> That means a really good partnership. That's what I think. Really good.

>> Really good partnership when I know exactly what she drinks and it's very specific. Go ahead.

Lisa Miller

>> Lemon drop martini.

Lisa Miller

>> With ...

Lisa Miller

>> Sugar rim.

>> Bingo.

Lisa Miller

>> Oh, see, you even know down to that detail. Yes, with the sugar rim.

>> That is a caring partner.

>> That's a partnership.

Lisa Miller

>> That's it.

>> Focus on the important stuff.

Lisa Miller

>> I would say I love the steak choices that you have. So many amazing steak houses in Las Vegas. I don't know if I have a favorite.

>> No, they are all pretty phenomenal.

Lisa Miller

>> They are all darn good.

>> Yes.

Lisa Miller

>> And I'm from the Midwest, so Nebraska, Iowa beef.

>> So you know a good steak.

Lisa Miller

>> Good steak.

>> You know a good steak.

Lisa Miller

>> So there are so many great steak houses here.

>> Now I want a steak. Bob, you have anything you're looking forward to eating?

>> No, my favorite meal is usually my next one.

>> Well, Todd, Lisa, it's really been a pleasure. Thank you for closing this out. The best possible way we could have. Bob, what a treat to share the desk with you tonight.

>> Thank you.

>> We were joking in the beginning about having some jazz hands, so I'm going to ask all of us to close with our jazz hands. Thank all of you for tuning in live to our three days of coverage here at Dell Tech World in beautiful Las Vegas Nevada. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.

Lisa Miller | Equinix & Todd Lieb | Dell

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>> Good evening, nerd fam, and welcome back to beautiful Las Vegas, Nevada. We're here for our last segment on day one of three jam-packed days at Dell Tech World. The show is already buzzing. We've had some thrilling guests and I am delighted to be joined by my co-host, Bob. Bob, how are you doing tonight?

>> Doing very well, thanks.

>> You're holding up well day one.

>> We're doing good.

>> You bringing that energy. You brought me a Hershey bar tonight. That was so thoughtful.

>> I did. I thought you might need a little something to keep you going.

>> You're so sweet. Little did you know what a pepper pot you were getting yourself into.

Lisa Miller

>> I didn't get a Hershey bar.

>> Very excited for our next segment, continuing our conversation around partnerships tonight. We have a return guest, Todd Lead, who's been hanging out with us all night. We might as well make you an analyst at this point for theCUBE.

>> Can't get rid of me.

>> And we have the fabulous and effable energy-filled, especially for this time of evening, Lisa Miller, the SVP of Alliances at Equinix. Thank you so much for being here, both of you.

>> Thank you.

Lisa Miller

>> Thanks for having us.

>> Yeah, you've got your Dell Blue, you got your seersucker. Everyone's looking great. Lisa, how's the day been for you?

Lisa Miller

>> It has been awesome. Went to the partner summit.

>> Oh, how was that actually?

Lisa Miller

>> It was great.

>> I didn't get to stick my head there.

Lisa Miller

>> Great. Michael Dell came and spoke, had all of the senior leadership from Dell, showed a huge commitment to the partner community. I thought it was awesome.

>> That is awesome. I love seeing so many executives involved in this show in a way, not just on stage, but actually kind of getting to meet everybody. Todd, how's your day been? What was more fun being on the show floor or hanging out with us here on the stage.

Lisa Miller

>> Definitely hanging out with you guys on the stage. Is that the right answer? Okay, check that, thank you.

>> We might let you on a third time this week if you keep up that kind of attitude.

Lisa Miller

>> Oh, fantastic. I got to check my schedule.

Lisa Miller

>> That's now my new highlight.

>> Check's in the mail, Todd. Check's in the mail.

Lisa Miller

>> Check's in the mail. There you go. No, I love coming out here. Not necessarily Las Vegas, Las Vegas is fun, but the show is awesome. So between spending time with partners, customers, meeting you wonderful people here on theCUBE-

>> You're really hitting all the notes.

>> That's correct.

>> Excellent work. We'll buy you a martini. Don't worry. You're good, you're good.

>> I figured I'd throw that in. No, it's really good. It's six months of activity compressed into three days, so it can get a little exhausting, but it's all for the right reasons. It's good stuff.

>> It is good stuff. Lisa, you all had a lot of announcements recently. What's going on with the partnership? Give us the high level.

Lisa Miller

>> Well, I just have to tell you, we've had a really long partnership with Dell. We've sold with Dell. We are a great landing space for Dell's equipment. But what's exciting right now is our partnership is we are launching Dell PowerStore on Equinix Metal at Equinix data centers.

>> What does that mean? What does that add for your communities?

Lisa Miller

>> What that means is a customer can now get PowerStore as a service, so cloud adjacent storage as a service for Dell equipment at Equinix. We manage it, customer controls it. It's beautiful.

>> Sounds pretty seamless to me. Sounds like a lot of your partnerships.

>> Yeah, this is special, right, Savannah? So the crayons and construction paper kind of story here.

>> Break it down to me. Close the laptops. Give me what happens with the crayons.

>> Let's go back to nursery school.

>> Yeah, let's go.

>> Back to nursery school. I was the guy in the corner eating paste. All right.

>> I was smelling glue, so we're the same.

>> We were probably sitting next to each other. Anyways, sorry. We went off the rails there.

>> We were sitting next to each other.

>> Customers need storage. See that transition?

>> Yes.

>> Now they just get it lit up, ready to go on the data center floor already connected to the clouds and to their cages in 30, 40, 50 countries out the gates. I don't know. That seems pretty cool.

>> That is pretty cool.

>> That is pretty cool. Giving everyone ... so that unified global approach to how they have their storage, whether it be close to the cloud or close to one of their edge locations. I know one of the things I've always been impressed with Equinix is the fact ... I think what's the stat? It's something like you have five milliseconds to 80% of the population of the countries that you're in. So really impressive for organization-

>> That's really impressive, honestly.

>> Well, yeah, and I think especially when you thinking about storage and with all the, I'll just go ahead and say it now, AI stuff that's going on and the importance of having your data close and having it in a timely ... having that reduced latency, shall we say, could be really important play for organizations that need to be able to store data that want to do inferencing, but might not have a physical location that they can keep it in. Now you've got this ability to have a consistent storage infrastructure that can be deployed globally and have very close proximity to their end users or their environments.

Lisa Miller

>> Absolutely, and you are looking at about one millisecond to all of the clouds.

>> Even better.

Lisa Miller

>> That's powerful.

>> If you look at what we're doing with Dell Tech World today or over the next couple of days, one of the biggest announcement categories, let's call it, is around PowerStore and our mid-range products.

>> Big hype, yep. In a great way.

>> Equinix has dug in right away for that to bring out to their customer base. So customers are getting out of the data center business, they're going to the cloud, they want a cloud operating model. This is that, right? But think of it as step one. If you think about the other capabilities that are stacked right behind this, AI, hint hint, right?

>> Cough, cough.

>> Cough, cough. So think about taking the AI or the Equinix managed services, they manage, customer operates, but do that for PowerStore. Then lay down an AI capability, lay down a data protection capability and just snap that out into and across the data centers.

>> It's clear you've been working together for a little while. How long have you been working together, Todd?

>> We were laughing about this earlier. I asked you but I forget. When did Equinix build their first data center?

Lisa Miller

>> About 25 years ago.

Lisa Miller

>> So we've been working together 25 years.

>> Nice.

Lisa Miller

>> Well, because Dell equipment has been being shipped to Equinix data centers since we started. It really has been a partnership for 25 years, and we've continued to increase our partnership with selling together on strategic accounts. Now, this is critical. Customers want to see their storage and their compute and their cloud capabilities right next to each other and we can deliver that as a service.

>> It's really impressive. I mean, Dell having their 40th anniversary this month, also 30 years of PowerEdge and you've been collaborating for 25. That's a college student's life of Dell and Equinix collaboration. That's really impressive.

>> Exactly. That's what you get here too, by the way. A little gray hair along the way, but that's all right.

>> Better it going gray and stay than go away. That's all I'm saying.

>> That's it.

>> Have you practiced that line before?

>> Maybe once or twice.

>> I wasn't going to say it, Bob. I'm glad you did.

Lisa Miller

>> Yeah, it was just the obvious. Stating the obvious side.

>> There's no shame outside of obviously getting to chat with a lot of your customers and community and talk more about your partnership, what are you most excited about this week? Lisa, I'll start with you.

Lisa Miller

>> Well, I think when you look at Dell being the leader in storage, we of course feel we're the global leader and data center and you'd be able to put that together, I think it's such a powerful message for us and where we can deliver it initially in over 30 countries. Our goal is to continue to add Metal locations and our great partnership with Dell, they tend to be everywhere we are and so it allows for an exciting future for us. Because you heard about Dell's partner first strategy, and as we get towards summer, you're going to hear some more exciting news where capabilities that we are talking about today may be delivered through their partners. So just more and more exciting things coming. This is the beginning and there's even more to come.

>> I love a good little cool shout-out.

Lisa Miller

>> Was I a spoiler there or not? That wasn't a spoiler.

>> That was just a ice little tease.

>> Just a little enough of a drip.

Lisa Miller

>> Just a drip. There we go.

>> So think of ecosystem. We're here, a little bullseye now. We're going to go ring, ring, ring out and bring in the rest of the ecosystem to come play.

Lisa Miller

>> Well, and as you think of Dell has been talking about how customers want to have their services on-prem, and you also talk about the cloud, well, we are that private network in the middle. So as customers want to grow and expand into new markets, they're not going to always go out and create a new office location. That's where we fit in so well where we can say, "Come to the private cloud, you've got the proximity to the clouds, but you have your compute, your storage, and this is how you can grow. It's as a service and it's almost instant on", and so it is really going to be impactful for customers.

>> It's also going to drive a lot of operational efficiencies because it's the model they're used to working with what they maybe had on-prem, et cetera, so now it's just extending that. So regardless of where you want to deploy it in the globe, you're going to have that consistent ... I like to refer to it as the principle of least astonishment. When you go to open it up, it doesn't look different. Very familiar to you. You're able to complete all the functions and activities that you need to in a timely manner.

Lisa Miller

>> Absolutely. For us, as Todd said, the ecosystem that we have is one of the best things at Equinix. We have getting close to a half a million interconnections to all of the type of ecosystems you need to reach regardless of the vertical. So combine that with the power of storage for Dell, I think we're about to a mic drop. That's what I'm thinking.

>> I mean, I think you almost might have.

Lisa Miller

>> I think you just did.

>> You're kind of teasing it. You're really giving us quite the build up. I'm loving it. I'm really loving it. All right. Since you're giving us this really good foreshadow, and because you do touch across verticals, you both get to see a lot of different applications, different customer use cases, a lot of things. I understand there may be some secrets that you cannot reveal, but from a personal perspective, not even just from your partnership perspective, from a personal perspective, what gets you most excited about what happens next. In our AI future, it could be our globalized . Could be anything. It could just be you. But as a technologist, as someone who sees everything, what's get you stoked.

Lisa Miller

>> You want to go first?

>> Sure.

>> I can see you're deciding who has to go first, so I'm letting you duel it out.

Lisa Miller

>> When I talk with customers, especially C-level or VP-level IT leaders, they break their IT problems into two chunks. They got to figure out where to run work and they have to figure out where to store data. All the action has been around where am I going to run work? I'm going to pick this up, I'm going to move it here, I'm going to write code here, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. Then the data was the problem. It's the anchor they're trying to drag along and it's like, "Well, I moved everything there, but the data's still in my ..." wherever, data center, colo, wherever it may be. What I'm actually kind of interested in and what I'm excited about is I think we're changing the rules there. I think we're kind of freeing up customer's ability to move data into new locations, to put it close to the cloud, but not in the cloud, to have it run in their cage in Equinix Metal inside a public cloud. So the whole data story is going to kind of play out and data as Michael I think would say on stage is the fuel for AI. So now we're playing in that game as well. If I had to say what I was excited about, that would be it.

Lisa Miller

>> I would say many of the same things because to me it's all about where your data lives and where your data lives is where your data needs to be stored and I feel that this partnership is at the center of that and that's really where I feel Equinix strength is because of the adjacency and we want to be where data lives.

>> And not forcing people to bring their data somewhere it's not already, to your point. I was like, we were talking about bringing the AI to your data and not the inverse. I think that's really going to make a big difference in cost efficiency, in optimization of workflows and generally just the human experience with a lot of these products that we have coming out there.

Lisa Miller

>> Yes. A lot of people that have brought their data to the cloud is now saying, "Wait a minute, with AI, I may not want my data there, but I want it close." So that cloud adjacency for data is so important for that data storage. So important, and so that adjacency to have this storage solution between Dell and Equinix as a service with that adjacency of one millisecond or close to that, I think that's pretty special.

>> How important is speed for your customers?

Lisa Miller

>> Is what?

>> Is speed, that one millisecond? We're talking about and I think it matters to a lot of us, and we're talking about inference and latency, but you're talking to everybody on the front lines. How much do those milliseconds make a difference?

Lisa Miller

>> Well, it matters a lot because when you-

Lisa Miller

>> We built your business on it, so ...

Lisa Miller

>> We built our business on it so a lot of applications require five milliseconds or less for point of sale, and so they have to be close to the edge of a network so that they can have that latency. Then when you think of all the cloud applications and how many times data sits one place, it has to go into the cloud, it has to come back, it has to go back and forth, that latency is critical. When we're moving mission-critical applications from the cloud to an Equinix data center, that matters. So when our competitors are not with that close proximity, it matters.

>> I love that analogy and I think that's so important because when you think about what the use cases are for so many of the enterprises, it's really about real-time insights.

Lisa Miller

>> That's right.

Lisa Miller

>> So in order to do that, you really need to minimize the amount of latency that you have so that you can ... and talking about retail, if you're trying to do some kind of location-based service and real-time offer management, it doesn't help that the person's walked 30 yards beyond where you're trying to get them to. They're not going to turn around and come back.

>> If it's not real-time, it's not real.

Lisa Miller

>> Amen.

>> Same thing when you think about hospitals potentially leveraging this type of stuff, same type of thing. "Hey, we need to find this cart." You don't need to find it two days from now. You need to find it right now because there's a real impact. So there's a lot of great use cases that really point to that fact of organizations need to do more real-time analysis. You said you've got the data, so when you were talking about Todd, you're expanding, you can easily see, well, once you've got the data and you want to maybe leverage that data to do some inferencing to get some real-time insights, there's a lot of great possibilities that could extend from what you're announcing today to where it could go in the future.

Lisa Miller

>> Bob, you said something that just triggered a thought. You said enterprise and Lisa and I were talking earlier, Equinix has a specialty or a concentration in large enterprise customers that need large cabinets and colos and cages and Dell works with the largest customers in the world and has a business that kind of goes all the way down to you and I buying something for my parents kind of thing. So what we're doing with some of these services is also opening up enterprise class capabilities to customers of all shapes and sizes. You don't have to be that huge enterprise that has to buy this square footage and make commitments. You can come in and acquire a service to get started, but have enterprise class capabilities with it, including the AI support. That's kind of fun. That's really interesting.

>> It's huge to be able to step up and into it too without having to ...

Lisa Miller

>> You can.

Lisa Miller

>> In fact, we are able to deliver a very low entry point for being able to provide this storage where you don't have to have a significant commitment, which also makes this an awesome offer.

Lisa Miller

>> You're ordering it through an Equinix portal. You don't need the skill set to run it because Equinix is doing that. You can just operate and use it. Then not only do you do that, but you could say, "Okay", we talked about this use case. "I operate in London and Amsterdam and Ashburn, but I want to try and experiment in 15 markets, Brazil, India, Malaysia, et cetera. See what happens." All of a sudden a couple of those markets really start to take off. So you acquire space, you build out what you need, and other ones you may shrink, you may expand, but you have the ability to kind of go and experiment and do things that you couldn't do before, which is kind of cool.

>> The other interesting part, some of those places you mentioned are somewhat power constrained. They may not even be able to deploy infrastructure there. They're going to have to use an outside infrastructure like an Equinix.

Lisa Miller

>> Well, and the beauty is if a customer finds that a location is growing like crazy, they might add a facility there and then they can still have their capability on-prem. So the blend of now this flexibility that it gives you just doesn't matter if you're providing the services for a customer for Dell on-prem or in the cloud. Now you have all of this flexibility of an as a service in all of these edge locations. While this is available in 30 markets, we have over 260 data centers. So that gives us a lot of growth.

>> That's some range.

Lisa Miller

>> Potential.

>> Yeah, you've got some reach.

>> That's some growth potential there.

>> I love that.

Lisa Miller

>> That's right. It gives us a lot of growth potential to get to all those 75 metro markets in over 33 countries.

>> Awesome.

>> All right, last question because you are our last interview of the evening and we mentioned martinis earlier.

Lisa Miller

>> Uh-oh.

>> Lightning round. What is your favorite Vegas meal and beverage? Todd, starting with you.

>> I would go sushi. I know it's a little generic. It's just my favorite meal in general.

>> That's okay. Do you have a favorite sushi spot in Vegas? Like a Nobu guy?

>> I'm a Nobu guy.

>> You're a Nobu guy. I could see it on your face and you almost didn't say it. Just say it. It's okay.

Lisa Miller

>> I can go Nobu. Then when there're some version of a tasty saki, just going with the sushi.

>> I love that.

Lisa Miller

>> I know what Lisa orders, which is a little disturbing potentially.

Lisa Miller

>> That means a really good partnership. That's what I think. Really good.

>> Really good partnership when I know exactly what she drinks and it's very specific. Go ahead.

Lisa Miller

>> Lemon drop martini.

Lisa Miller

>> With ...

Lisa Miller

>> Sugar rim.

>> Bingo.

Lisa Miller

>> Oh, see, you even know down to that detail. Yes, with the sugar rim.

>> That is a caring partner.

>> That's a partnership.

Lisa Miller

>> That's it.

>> Focus on the important stuff.

Lisa Miller

>> I would say I love the steak choices that you have. So many amazing steak houses in Las Vegas. I don't know if I have a favorite.

>> No, they are all pretty phenomenal.

Lisa Miller

>> They are all darn good.

>> Yes.

Lisa Miller

>> And I'm from the Midwest, so Nebraska, Iowa beef.

>> So you know a good steak.

Lisa Miller

>> Good steak.

>> You know a good steak.

Lisa Miller

>> So there are so many great steak houses here.

>> Now I want a steak. Bob, you have anything you're looking forward to eating?

>> No, my favorite meal is usually my next one.

>> Well, Todd, Lisa, it's really been a pleasure. Thank you for closing this out. The best possible way we could have. Bob, what a treat to share the desk with you tonight.

>> Thank you.

>> We were joking in the beginning about having some jazz hands, so I'm going to ask all of us to close with our jazz hands. Thank all of you for tuning in live to our three days of coverage here at Dell Tech World in beautiful Las Vegas Nevada. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.