1. If you could illustrate the demands of today's mission critical workloads that require high performance and massive capacity.

The demonetization of the 500 and 1000 rupee notes, the highest denominations, lead to chaos forcing us to change our habits. We all now believe and understand that it is safer to transact online using payment gateways. It is more secure to use debit cards and credit cards. All transactions, small or large are going to happen electronically or through a valid legal path. Companies offering digital payment platforms have seen a huge surge in the traffic with the number of people subscribing to their services and downloading their apps with 300 to 400 percent growth. The biggest challenge that faces the industry today is that when the business can grow unprecedentedly based on factors such as this, political move or a buying season such as Diwali or Christmas or any other factors make our transactions go up and down. Entrepreneurs today want flexible and agile solutions that can meet their ever-growing demands. Imagine today if the payment gateways, unable to take the load, had completely collapsed, then there would have been absolute mayhem.

2. Often IT professionals take backup and recovery into their own hands and protect their data outside of the normal IT processes. This creates silos of manageability and visibility that almost assuredly will lead to non compliance with corporate retention mandates and likely fail restores when they matter most. Now deduplication is the answer to this. Please comment.

One can back-up their data but will face a lot more challenges than imagined during recovery. That is why we talk to customers about multiple recovery points. For example, if you look at all the flagships that we have, we have something call Snapshot and Snapshot recovery capability. So most of our customers whenever they have an application issue or a user issue, they do not even go to the back-up. They just pick up the back-up from these points in time and they are back in business in a few seconds. Let’s say a bank has lost its whole database, even if they had a great back-up solution, it will take eight to ten hours for recovery.  We provide solutions to customers to enable instantaneous data recovery. Another complication that clients tend to overlook is that the loss of data can force an entire company to its knees. This is when hackers gain access to your data and resort to blackmail, offering the data in exchange for money. Our company has solutions where one can take back-ups and completely seal it from the external world. So if you have that kind of an attack, you can restore the data back. Back-up administrators or CIOs need to understand that implementing any homegrown technology will ultimately be outdated. They have to rely on professionals who will recommend products based on potential predicaments in the future.

3. Tell us about Dell EMC’s new range of Data Domain protection storage appliances.

Dell Domain has been a complete game changer in the back-up industry. Customers are unable to accomplish back-ups, which even if they achieve are not compliant. Even if the back-up is complete and is compliant, one cannot verify that. You can only verify when you have a disaster. Once disaster strikes and the recovery process begins, it takes a prolonged number of hours. Dell Domain comes to the fore and begins an accelerated back-up that requires only a few minutes, little space and can be verified anytime. It will completely transform the way one does back-up and recovery.

4. Which pain points of the storage space do you intend to mitigate with your integrated file tiering to the public cloud (including Virtustream), along with intelligent and predictive analytics through the CloudIQ cloud-based storage analytics platform?

When customers think of cloud, the objective is not to put the data in cloud. In retrospect, the objective is to get flexibility and agility that was not possible earlier. For example, earlier if one would deploy a system; one would have a maximum of 10000 customers. If another 20000 customers show up, systems will crash unable to handle the load, leading to upset customers and the business bearing the brunt. Imagine any of the payment gateways crash, the backlash will be so severe that they will never be able to recover from it. Cloud as a service offers flexibility and agility. You pay for what you use. Some customers want to put data in the public cloud, some customers want to have the same agility in the networking system and some prefer a hybrid cloud. That is why it is important for customers and is of top priority to us to give the customers the ability to have elasticity in the data center and in external cloud and also keeping the connectivity so that they migrate easily.