Jonathan Siegal & Peter Smails | EMC World 2015

Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube covering EMC World 2015, brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. Welcome back to EMC World, everybody. I'm Dave Vellante with Wikibon.com, Wiki.org, SiliconANGLE, the Cube. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Jonathan Seagull is here along with Peter Smells. They're with the Product Marketing Group within the Core Technologies Group at EMC. We just heard from Stephen Manley. Jonathan, Peter, welcome to the Cube.

So Jonathan, I was saying we were just talking to Stephen about architectures and the like. So what's going on at the Core Technologies Group? A lot, obviously. I tweeted out today it's the biggest division, it's the most profitable division of EMC. It's where the bread is buttered. So give us the update.

Peter, that's a good high-level overview. Can you take us through sort of the products? Take it down to the product level. What should people be paying attention to here at EMC?

Sure. A couple things. I'll walk across the board and then I'll turn back over. You can double-click on some of the primary stuff, I can double-click on some of the data protection. But pick up on John's point: sort of three key themes: simplify and automate, path to the cloud, data protection everywhere. If you look at what we talked about on the primary side from a simplify and automate standpoint, it's all about VMAX. You can double-click on that, but it's all about not only best-of-breed storage with XtremIO for all-flash, with VMAX, with VNX, it's also the software inherent capabilities of being a data services platform to automate that path to the cloud. News with CloudArray as well as with CloudBoost. We can double-click on both of those. And then from a data protection everywhere standpoint, big news with the new DD9500, but really more on secret sauce or on software on data protection. So that's at 30,000 feet, and we can kind of take that in whatever direction you want.

Well, let's unpack that. Because Stephen said you can't do a four-hour keynote, we can't do a four-hour Cube interview, but we can go for 20, 25 minutes, whatever you want. We're available. Well, let's start at the top. Let's start with VMAX. All right, we got two cubes. Let's just keep going all day. Three days of coverage with the CV. I love it. So let's start at the top. VMAX, it sounds like you're making VMAX sort of this asset play where you can deliver storage services through VMAX, any storage services if that's what the customer wants to do. Jonathan, maybe you could take us through that strategy.

Right. Okay, what about the customer says, 'All right, sounds good, but I want to go in a different direction.' What options does that customer have?

Okay. And then on the data protection side, you've got a new product. We heard today, I think it was Jeremy or somebody said, 'Just think of it as double everything.' Maybe it was David. Double everything. Okay, so let's double-click into double everything.

Yeah, it's actually better than that. Double everything versus our own previous stuff. Relative to the competition, it's even better. So very brief context: this notion of data protection everywhere. What is data protection everywhere? You'll hear us talk about that a lot. What it means is customers deploy and consume data and applications in a variety of different ways: traditional on-premise, they run virtualized infrastructure, they run in hybrid cloud environments, they have applications and data in the cloud. We have to deliver solutions to provide data protection across that entire spectrum.

That sounds good. People want to know, is that feasible?

Absolutely. And I'll talk about the proof points right behind that. The second point is around SLAs. I have to be able to deliver SLAs across all of those, from availability through archiving. So what did we announce today? Hardware always gets sort of the top billing. So we announced the new DD9500, which is our next gen. It resets the bar from a performance and scalability standpoint. You heard David talk about sort of double everything. From a competitive standpoint, it's 1.6x the performance, it's 4x the scalability of our closest competitors. So we reset the bar from a purpose-built backup appliance. But the real news, the important message, is really the secret sauce is all around software. So the box always gets the headlines, but the secret sauce of everything we're doing with data protection is about software. So we've made a number of announcements on that front as well. DD 5.6, 16% performance boost across the entire portfolio. Expanded ecosystem of applications with big data for Hadoop and NoSQL deployments. That's within the DD traditional backup. Beyond that, we introduced ProtectPoint, the next rev of ProtectPoint, expanding our ecosystem of support around Oracle, SAP, and DB2 support. So direct integration from primary to protection storage, that's all powered by software as well. Project Falcon: Project Falcon is a preview of a software-only version of Data Domain. That is monumental, and that's why we're previewing it. Because think down the road: software-only deployments of DD, rapid deployment of remote office/branch office support, cloud service providers being able to deploy cloud bursting for data protection, all enabled through Data Domain software.

So Falcon is your software-defined version of data protection?

Correct. It's a preview of a software-only version. And the concept is run it on commodity hardware. That's exactly right. Run functionality out of the Data Domain that's been locked in the box, and then saying, 'Okay, that's the statement of direction.' That's exactly right, because we want to unlock more rapid deployments, new use cases, different price points. It gives customers a whole new different way of looking at this. And back to the whole data protection everywhere, that touches across. We've got on-prem covered pretty well. You go into virtual environments, you could see us offer only DD in that environment. Absolutely. You go to hybrid cloud, you go to born-in-the-cloud.

So I want to come back to sort of the customer challenges, Jonathan. When you talk to EMC customers, they say, 'Love EMC, great service, great products, we just got a lot of them.' And I've heard you guys talk about integration, and it's right at the heart of the Core Technologies Group. You got Joe Tucci who says it best: 'It's better to have overlap than it is to have gaps.' Well, you got some overlap. So it sounds like a big theme is integration. What problems are you trying to solve with that integration? And what's the sort of journey look like as a customer? What can I expect if I'm a customer of say VMAX, VNX, I got Data Domain, should I be thinking about VPLEX? Help me sort of squint through that complexity.

So we should think of this portfolio as coming together. And I'm sure it's not going to happen all at once, but help us take me through the journey of a customer. What should I expect in the next, let's say, 6, 12, 18 months in terms of that integration? Convince me that I should stay with these products and you're going to put me on that journey.

I was just going to expand on your point. If you kind of net that out to your question, you look at the integration. At the end of the day, there's no silver bullet, no magic bullet from an application workload standpoint, whether it's data protection or primary storage. You've got to have a best-of-breed portfolio strategy. We've got that. That's not going to change. XtremIO, VMAX, VNX, right on down the line. We've got a great best-of-breed strategy. The key is then around all the automation that John was talking about. And we've got proof points to speak to that today. So back to proof points to the customer, we've got those today. On the data protection side, same thing. It's all about tighter integration with protection infrastructure. So we introduced ProtectPoint today. You'll see that ecosystem expand. You heard about XtremIO. One of the key differentiators there is around replication that's powered by RecoverPoint. So another good example of a short-term integration. So I think what you'll see directly, the journey is you're going to continue to see us have best-of-breed portfolio, and you're going to continue to see us build more and more leverage, which ultimately is driving that simplification of the infrastructure and asset leverage for the customer.

We're talking customers, but you're right, we're out of time. We haven't even touched on, we barely touched on ViPR. We didn't talk about VPLEX, RecoverPoint, ProtectPoint. Then you got VMware, you got OpenStack, you got Hyper-V. We got cloud, all kinds of integrations that you've got to support. Massive portfolio, substantial R&D effort to make all this stuff work. You guys have done a great job building competitive products. We're getting the hook. Jonathan, Peter, thanks very much.

Thanks for having us. Appreciate it.

All right, there everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from EMC World. This is Dave Vellante. I'll be back with John Furrier right after this break.