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.

We do not just have a hammer; not everything is a nail for us. And that’s an important part of how we can partner with our customers to help them solve not one challenge, but all the challenges they have.

Miniman: When you talk to customers, how does storage fit into the overall discussion of their cloud strategy?

Gordon: When we look at cloud-enabled infrastructure, we are focused on solving really specific use cases that we hear our customers trying to solve today, such as connecting their data center into a public cloud. So that could be what we call cloud-connected systems; databank cloud tier, cloud tiering, cloud pools … all the different pieces we have there.

It could be cloud data services — offering storage data services in a public cloud. Unity Cloud Edition would be one, or the new Dell EMC Cloud Storage Services could be another one. Or even cloud data insights. It’s really about solving challenges about disaster recovery, analytics in the cloud — how do you do that in a really impactful way that’s simple and easy for customers?

Knight: Let’s talk about the future. Think ahead to 2025 when there’s enough data to fill the Empire State Building 13 times over. How are you helping companies manage this tsunami of data? 

Gordon: [Dell EMC] Isilon [scale out network attached storage] was specifically designed for this. Well, before the data era Isilon was designed to have one file system from terabytes into petabytes. A single administrator can manage now up to 58 petabytes in a single file system. That’s game changing when you think about the scale that we’re seeing today.

The reason we went to that capacity was because our customers were asking for it. It’s these workloads that we’re talking about — autonomous driving, etc. — that are just driving the scalability limits. And customers are asking for more and more in the most-efficient footprint possible. So, we talk about Isilon’s integration with Google Cloud Platform. A lot of our customers are looking to use GCP for compute for analytics workloads, and it’s almost a “rent your compute” for analytics. But you do have to have the right storage platform with the right architecture on the back end of that.

What we’ve done is fully integrate the Isilon platform and file system through GCP portal so you can combine that public cloud compute and that file system that can support that type of scale. It’s a unique combination that can help support not only the scale of that data, but also some of the unique use cases and workloads that are coming out.

Miniman: As you look across your customer conversations, is data the center of the challenges and opportunities your customers have? Or is there something else coming up? 

Gordon: What I hear from customers is that data is in there. But they don’t come in saying its data. They’ll come in just trying to figure out how to use cloud properly.

They’ll think about “How do I simplify things?” or “How do I operate in a way to meet the service levels with a budget that’s definitely not getting bigger, and really be as efficient as possible?” Some people are looking to go public cloud thinking it’s an easy button. But it’s really about: “How do I change things to run more efficiently?”

Customers inherently understand that the data is at the center of it, that data is increasingly becoming the most valuable asset in their organization, and that they need to optimize their infrastructure to support that. So, it really does come down to what can we help them do simplify, optimize, secure that so that they can truly unlock that data capital.

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.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE