Caitlin Gordon, VP, Product Marketing, Dell EMC | @caitsgordon sits with Rebecca Knight & Stu Miniman for Dell Technologies World 2019 in Las Vegas, NV. #DellTechWorld #theCUBE https://siliconangle.com/2019/06/06/qa-dells-autonomous-storage-evolves-meet-data-demands-delltechworld/ Q&A: Dell’s ‘autonomous storage’ evolves to meet data demands Automation and artificial intelligence are buzz words bandied around a lot these days. But how do customers know which products are really cutting edge and which are being rebranded in an effort to make old products or services seem new again? When Dell EMC introduced the PowerMax storage family last year, it was with fanfare for cutting-edge capabilities, such as predictive analytics. The storage solution has had a year to prove itself in the marketplace, and Dell is back one year later to discuss PowerMax’s new “powers” for 2019, use cases, sales strategies. and how Dell EMC collaborates with customers to innovate and improve products for the marketplace. Caitlin Gordon (pictured), vice president of storage portfolio product marketing at Dell EMC, spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.) [Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.] Miniman: Let’s talk about PowerMax. What does automation and intelligence mean for the customer? Are there certain key performance indicators or hero metrics that you have for customers using PowerMax that they couldn’t have done with last-generation intelligence storage? Gordon: It’s really about moving to this concept of the autonomous data center, and how does this become an autonomous storage system. So, both the intelligence within the system that we talked about last year and the decisions that the system is making itself every single day have really changed; it’s a completely new evolution. It’s making billions of decisions a day for customers so that they don’t have to. You’re going to have fewer people managing storage, and they can invest in other things. Then, when you move that up the stack, some of the vRO, the Ansible playbooks really enable you to automate the workflows within that. So, again, gets you more into that operating model, and you can automate not just the storage infrastructure, but then get to this autonomous data center. Knight: Innovation is an underlying theme of this conference. Talk about how you collaborate with customers to solve their problems and how you help them think ahead to their future needs? Gordon: [We] spend a lot of time with our customers in the briefing center and the field really talking to them about their challenges. And the privilege that we have, especially with something like a PowerMax platform, is the customers … are constantly pushing the boundaries of what we can do for them. So, they always need the best performance, the best efficiency. But what has changed is they also now need that operational simplicity, even on their high-resiliency, high-performance systems. We spend a lot of time understanding those requirements and the problems that they’re trying to solve and how we can help them get there. And that could be automation, that could be containers, but it could also be cloud, right? Knight: What’s your unique selling point? How do you message that Dell EMC storage solutions are the best? Gordon: Our overall strategy at Dell EMC, coming from a storage perspective, is that we’ll have a single product in each segment which we compete and each one will be architected for very specific requirements so that we can meet the combination of a price point — and features and capabilities across all these different perspectives. Each one of our platforms is designed to be industry leading in that category. Which is why we have PowerMax on the high end — the resiliency, the performance, the availability that banks, hospitals, governments around the world expect. But at the same time, we have mid-range platforms. We have an entry platform that can be sold for under $25,000 and has a different set of requirements. We have the unstructured business which is supporting the data era and that data explosion. So, the fact of the matter is that it’s all about having the right architecture so customers can have the data in the right place, at the right time, with the right service level. And that’s why we have this portfolio and within each portfolio that we’re leading in each one of those categories. ... Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2019 event. (* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)