Grey Beards on Systems - 66: GreyBeards talk Midrange storage part 2, with Sean Kinney, Sr. Dir. Midrange Storage Mkt, Dell EMC

Episode Date: July 24, 2018

Sponsored by: Dell EMC Midrange Storage In this episode we talk with Sean Kinney (@SeanRKinney14), senior director, midrange storage marketing at Dell EMC.  Howard and I have both known Sean for a number of years now. Sean has had multiple roles in the IT industry, doing various marketing and management duties at multiple vendors. He’s … Continue reading "66: GreyBeards talk Midrange storage part 2, with Sean Kinney, Sr. Dir. Midrange Storage Mkt, Dell EMC"

Hey everybody, Ray Lucchese here with Howard Marks here. Welcome to another sponsored episode of the Greybeards on Storage podcast, a show where we get Greybeards Storage Assistant bloggers to talk with storage assistant vendors to discuss upcoming products, technologies, and trends affecting the data center today. This Greybeards on Storage podcast is brought to you today by Dell EMC Mid-Range Storage and was recorded on December 13, 2017. We are very pleased to have with us here today Pierluca Chiodelli, an old friend from Tech Field Day and VP of Product Management for Mid-Range Storage and Customer Operations. So, Pierluca, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and what's new in Dell EMC Mid-Range Storage?

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here with you guys since we spent time together at the Tech Field Days. Great experience, great to be a fan of that show and what we put together for the storage. Who I am, I'm running product manager for the mid-range and also customer operation. This includes supporting customer and strategic account, but also including driving the roadmap. And our family got bigger and bigger as we become Dell EMC. So I had the honor and pressure to bring to market two impressive products, Unity and SC, and also having all the Heritage products that we have in our portfolio from Heritage EMC, VNX, that I'm sure a lot of people know,

and also Equalogic from the Heritage Dell portfolio. Oh, gosh, you got it all. Yeah. I've been in this role for a couple of years now. Obviously, as I said, the role expanded with the portfolio that we have. But I'm an older storage guy. I've been 20 years in the field. I'm starting as a customer engineer,

so I came from a customer support perspective. So this gives me the ability to put, obviously, the customer as a number one in our thinking every time that we build something new or we want to refine the product that we have. God, you almost qualify as a grayberry, Tera Pirlota. Yes. Except he shaves.

I have a little bit of beer to be honest. There you go. So 20 years as a customer engineer all the way to product VSP and product management. That's a pretty impressive story in and of itself. Yeah, and between two countries. So I started actually in Europe, in Italy, and I came to the U.S. And, you know, I don't want to spend the podcast to speaking about myself, but to speaking about the product we're doing.

But as I said, it's kind of a dream come true, right? Tell us a little bit about the two or three or four products that you're managing these days. Yeah. So if you look at our storage and in our mid-range specifically, we have a great portfolio. And specifically, we are leading today, and we are industry number one in term of market

share with two big products right we have the sc series and the unity series all these products that we bring to market as i said they have a tremendous amount of revenue just to give you example here between unique and sc we're a close to 2.3 billion dollar we have an amazing amount of uh system in the field more than 35 000 system installed only between these two products right so yeah that would that would be wonderful if we were Wall Street analysts. But we're storage analysts. And so we'd like to get a little geekier than dollars. Nothing wrong with dollars, Howard. I understand that.

We all need them eventually. 35,000 yeah 35,000 customer installations is also pretty damn impressive for any product especially enterprise class like this stuff is the good side of that is you install that many

and all the bugs show up yeah very soon if something's wrong, they'll find it so you can fix it. We hope to find it. We try to find as much as we can in-house. Yeah, but we all know that

users are more inventive at breaking things than the test department. I'm not so good in the lab anymore, so that doesn't count as a user. Yeah, yeah. than the test department. I'm not so good in the lab anymore, so that doesn't count as a user. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, so with the two products,

the two main product lines, and they seem to be like multiple products within each one of these families, right? I mean, is there some sort of overlap between these two? Yeah, so... How does that play out? Obviously, we address the mid-range storage business and market. Right. So in the mid range market, you have a ton of different use case. So what we want to do here is, yes, we have two product. And by the way, some of the other competitors, they have as well two product

in the mid range without mention names. But what we want to do is we want to leverage the best of these two products. As you know, when we came together as a company, Dell EMC, we had people say, oh, this product is going away. This other product goes away. That's actually not true because we find out because I'm more a techie guy than a business guy, just to bring back the things to the techie place. We have great product in the mid-range because we have SC, for example. SC invented the data progression.

There is no such product as SC in data progression with the granularity and the capability of the SC. In Unity, there is no such product as Unity with the density, 2U, 6 cable, easy to install, easy to manage, very sleek UI. So the two products, you can use the two products in the same customer for different use cases. For example, Unity is a completely unified product in 2U. So when you need FileBlock, VBall, you should use Unity. If you want the best cost and best performance, especially when you have people they want to use Flash, but they also want to use Big Tab and apply compression and dedupe to them, that's SC.

So the way we position the product is really we invest in both and we create an ecosystem around that because that's really the key. What is the experience from the customer point of view? And I think you think that's an important thing. So I think Howard and Ray, I think what the customer really experienced at the end using these two products. Well, that's all that matters. So we are really bringing an ecosystem together

around these two products, starting with the CloudIQ. If you didn't hear the CloudIQ, if you didn't hear about CloudIQ, it's our cloud-based analytics and monitoring. It's basically in the cloud. We have more than 2,000, 3,000 users over there that can look at their install

base. We bring in these to SC as well. So when you log in in in CloudIQ, you can manage and monitoring proactively, and we have an L-score capability, both SC and Unity. So the experience is completely seamless and is the same experience. The other things we're doing from a UI perspective inside of the product, every product, Unity and FC has its own element manager.

But we bring the same element manager together. We're going to launch on FC what we have on Unity, that is Unisphere. And Unisphere will extend to FC and the look and feel will be the same. So what we try to do is really tell to the customer, you know, you have different use case. Now, we can build a product that tries to do everything. That's normally the right thing to do because every architecture is designed

for doing something specifically. And what we want to do is really to tell the customer that's where this product excel and this other product excel. And this is why we build this product. Now, we have a tremendous success with both products and that's why we have a tremendous attachment also of customers that they love one product

versus the other, right? I'm Italian, I love Ferrari, but someone else that's from Germany will love a Porsche. I love Ferrari too. I just don't fit in. Me too. That's a challenge for me.

The advantage to being in the podcast is that you cannot see that we are overweight probably. Yeah, okay. We won't go there. So, Perlucco, so we've got sc and that's the technology that um came out of compelling correct and and unity which is an evolution of vmx e right yes so vnxc was the first instantiation of what we call, again, for the techie,

was our first Linux-based OS operating environment. But Unity has a completely new file system and containerized technology that was not present on VNXC. So we started with the VNXC to switch into Linux-based OS and leverage network stack from Linux that allow us to bring in stuff that, you know, right? The network today on Linux is more advanced than the proprietary network because obviously everybody uses this feature, like multi-training and the ability to do VLAN. It only makes sense to leverage

the software that's out there. Right, absolutely. But then the key thing is we bring components like the MCC, the multi-core cache, and the file system, as I said, that is a proprietary component that we wrote from scratch for that enterprise level. And same things on SC, right? SC is not Linux-based, but it's BSD-based OS, but it's a containerized as well.

So we use also KVM in some case. But the core, the pages, the real core of the architecture that is based on pages, that basically can be very granular, it's the key component and it's the proprietary component of the SC. And it's interesting how in a year or two, all of that technology is going to be valuable for tiering between multiple solid state memories. Right. So I think we had this discussion offline one day. Absolutely. I mean, we in the future, we see a future where the media transition will force us to leverage different media at different

price points. Not different of what I know that people, they're not calling hybrid, but in the concept of being a technology that I can land the data where they need, based on the performance profile that I need, it's the decay model, right? It's how the data will decay given the time. And that will become real again when we move into NVMe, persistent memory, and then we have like hammer drives

and other things, big tab on the other side that you don't want to read from them. Never. Right. So inline tiering and all this technology will become part absolutely, I think, three, four, five years from now of the technology, of the storage, of the future. Right. And the good thing is both Unity and SC, they already have these things. So it's just, we introduced these things many years ago on SC, as I said, was from the ground up. On Unity, we have FastVP, we have FastCache, another concept that we don't have on SC, but

really, the two, we have a lot of expertise in moving data on the right place, right? So that's I think is the key. You mentioned use cases that both SC and Unity really address fairly well. Could you kind of give us an example of a particular use case where one or the other might be a better solution? Absolutely. So if I'm thinking that, as I said, Unity is very dense.

It's 2U, 25 drive, all flash or hybrid, but mostly all flash. We have dedupe coming out, compression already there. And the main use case is Unify. So in Unity, you can provision file system, LAN, and VVOL in the same way. So if you are a generalist and you don't, I mean, I like the old days where we have all the bezel and whistle that we can tweak for the storage. But in today's world... Yeah, no, it's gone now.

Storage today is smarter than storage administrators. We should stop trying to play with that stuff. So that's really the design center of Unity. It's really easy for someone that that never been in storage to provision. And also the integration with the VM is very important, right? We can drive everything very seamless. So as I said, you can provision a LAN as you can provision a file system. It's completely wizard driven, step by step.

Also provision your protection directly from when you provision the LAN and or the file system or the VVOL, all from there, right? So it's very easy, very easy to deploy. I mean, there is for the people that they listen to us, there is a video on YouTube. You can take a look. You can install a Unity in 15 minutes, up and running, rack and stack and everything right so that's what's the design concept on the sc side if i think in a very big use case for sc it's like sc is set and forget so what what i'm saying here is it's being created with the logic that i can

have not only one tier but i can have multiple tiers on the same spinning media, but also I can tier two different things and apply different technology for data reduction, independent if they are spinning media or flash media. And this is where really FC Excel, in the fact that during the data progression, I can really automatically, the system adjusts the consumption,

expand and contract the rates on demand without any intervention. So basically you always get the best TCO. Now, one is Unify as I said that's the purpose it's easy Unify it's file and block SC is really the one that you set and you forget because it's doing all this data progression and you are always sure that you get the best dollar per IOs you mentioned that uh it

manages carrying multiple tearing levels on the same spinning media using like outer diameter and inner diameter kinds of things there not to talk disc mind you i know i'm antiquated but i am a gray beard sort of so so what what are we doing because Because everything is virtualized in SC. Everything is a page. So we can actually create really different RAID group using the page. So the page can come from the same disk and I can make a pool of that page

and say this is a RAID 1.0 when I can also have a RAID 5 or RAID 6, right, on the same spinning media. Also, we have a technology that was called FastTrack that we implemented many years ago. That's for spinning media. It makes sure that the pages, they land on the margin of the spindles, right? On the platter. So, yes, they do do in the track, out of track. Even in multiple rates on the same disk,

it's quite interesting from that perspective. And that would apply to SSD as well. So that's the other side. Now, both of these products have cloud sort of tiering as well. Is that true, Eureka? Correct. so another important things that we offer um today with unity and soon with the with the sc is the ability to um tier into the cloud for file in call this basically the ability to connect.

We have a cloud support where we offer a CTA, it's a cloud tiering appliance. It's a virtual machine that you spin up and basically it's able to move based on a schedule an entire snap if it's a block side or tearing a single file to the cloud with different policy. Single file? Yes.

What? And that's what this MLiken has a pointer and will pull it back when I need it, right? Yeah, I understand, but this, subdirectory level stuff here. I'm impressed. You know, this is the big difference between Unity and SC is one knows about files and the others just block. Correct.

And this is a technology that it's very popular today. I mean, it's a technology that we invented many years ago. It's actually based on a DHSM protocol that we created many years ago. But basically, it's based on stubs. So I can tier, I create a stub, and it's very sophisticated because CTA has a policy engine that is able to be very intelligent and very granular. And we extend the capability of the file tiering to the blocks.

So we can now ship the snap, block snap, from Unity and SC in the cloud. And obviously, we support all the cloud, but we want to offer, and other things that I want to speak about, the storage loyalty program. I want to speak about the fact that we offer a Virtustream promotion when you buy a Unity on an SC, where you can basically tier to the cloud for free for one year. Okay, is there a Unity VSA I can spin up in Virtustream so I can access that snapshot from machines in the public cloud? Well, we have a Unity

VSA. That is something that will come in the future. We offer VSA Unity today and you can download for free. So people that they are teching again, that they like to hear about these things, they should know that you can download the VSA for free

and you can play with them. If you like it, you can pay and you can pay basically for the support and it becomes a fully licensed Unity. And you can replicate also to a physical Unity. But so far, we're not offering this in the cloud. You can deploy it in your cloud if you have a VM environment, but we're not offering that yet in the cloud. Okay, all right. This has been great. Howard, are there any last questions? Can I mention one thing more that we just launched? I think people will, as I mentioned, part of the future proof program that we're going to offer to the customer, there is this VistaStream storage cloud.

But also we offer, we can swap that with another technology. Like if he buys Unity, doesn't like, or he doesn't fit the use case, we can give them SC or vice versa, or we can refund them. Also, the other thing is the hardware investment protection. So we want to guarantee to the people that their hardware investment is always protected. And if you move to a new technology, we're going to take into account the hardware that you have. So we have a promotion also on the hardware side for upgrades. The other thing is we have a predictable support pricing.

So we don't charge more for this future proof. It's the same price. We just want to extend this because we want our customer to feel very good. And by the way, this is extended to other products and not only in the mid-range. But we want the customer to really worry free about what they choose, right?

And the other things, you thing is efficiency guarantee is a big thing today. So we guarantee the customer without any assessment that he can get 4 to 1 all-flash storage efficiency. I think this program is very important because also one of the most painful things when we change technologies, the data migration. So with this program, we say to the customer, you not need to worry about data migration. We always we will always have a technology to bring you from A to B or C.

So and we invest in an engineer to make this happen. Today with Deft-C, we have cross-replication and migration from Ecologic. With Unity, we have seamless migration for file and block from VNX and all the Solera systems. And also Clarion. So my Clarion 500, CX500 is still... I know you're going to bring it in. Are you still afraid from that? Well, I will say that you need to have the right version of code to do that. You might have to fight for money.

It's only 15 years. Yeah, you probably not pay anything right now. So I think the future proof doesn't apply in that case. You need to pay something for having this. So, Herluca, these loyalty programs are brand new, right? I mean, this is the stuff you just announced the last couple of months, right? Yeah, we actually announced last month. It was in November, October, November.

I don't remember exactly, but it was at the end of October, beginning of November. There's an efficiency guarantee. There's a data reduction or storage. There's a worry-proof migration and future proof. There's like three or four different things here, right? It's actually seven things in total, right? Seven, okay.

Yeah, so it's a bunch of things. Buying storage just isn't what it used to be, is it? No, I guess not. And that's a good thing, isn't it? Yes. I mean, I think we want, at the end of the day, we want to make the choice very easy for the customer without regret. And be sure that you come with Dell EMC.

We are number one in storage. We play to remain number one in storage. And we guarantee you, and this is the power of a company like Dell EMC, right? Stay behind what we tell you. Independent of the product, and I know this is not a very technical thing, but this is why, if I was a customer, we would choose some things versus the other things. Because it's also about the company, the service, and what is around the ecosystem. We have a lot of startups

and they're doing a great job, but they try to address one use case and they try to be the shiny things. But here we say, you run your business, you run your future, your infrastructure on us. We stay behind you. So that's important. Well, it seems like a great place to end the podcast. Howard, is there any last questions?

Oh, no, I like that as an ending point. I'm a big fan of this whole change in the storage buying process and vendors in general deciding we're going to make you a loyal customer by making you happy as opposed to by making it really uncomfortable to leave. Well, this has been great. Thank you very much, Pierluca, for being on our show. No, thank you very much to you guys, and happy holidays to everybody.

And thanks to Dell EMC for sponsoring this podcast. Our next podcast, we will talk to another data center system or storage technology guest. Any questions you want us to ask, please let us know. And if you enjoy our podcast, tell your friends about it, and review us on iTunes as this will also help to get the word out. That's it for now. Bye, Howard. Bye, Ray. Until next time. And a Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.