>>Welcome back to the cubes coverage of Veeam on 2022 at the RS. Nice to be at the aria. My co-host Dave Nicholson here. We spend a lot of time at the Venetian convention center, formerly the sand. So it's nice to have a more intimate venue. I really like it here. George Burg is joining us. He's the vice president of data protection at vast data, a company that some of you may not know about. George. >>Welcome a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. >>So VAs is smoking hot, raised a ton of dough. You've got great founders, hard charging, interesting tech. We've covered a little bit on the Wikibon research side, but give us the overview of the company. Yeah, >>If I could please. So we're here at the, you know, the Veeam show and, you know, the theme is modern data protection, and I don't think there's any company that epitomizes modern data protection more than vast data. The fact that we're able to do an all flash system at exabyte scale, but the economics of cloud object based deep, cheap, and deep archive type solutions and an extremely resilient platform is really game changing for the marketplace. So, and quite frankly, a marketplace from a data protection target space that I think is, is ripe for change and in need of change based on the things that are going on in the marketplace today. >>Yeah. So a lot of what you said is gonna be surprising to people, wait a minute, you're talking about data protection and all flash sure. I thought you'd use cheap and deep disc or, you know, even tape for that or, you know, spin it up in the cloud in a, in a deep archive or a glacier. Explain your approach in, in architecture. Yeah. At a >>High level. Yeah. So great question. We get that question every day and got it in the booth yesterday, probably about 40 or 50 times. How could it be all flash that at an economic point that is the fitting that of, you know, data protection. Yeah. >>What is this Ferrari minivan of which you speak? >>Yeah, yeah, yeah. The minivan that goes 180 miles an hour, right. That, you know, it's, it's really all about the architecture, right? The component tree is, is somewhat similar to what you'll see in other devices. However, it's how we're leveraging them in the architecture and design, you know, from our founders years ago and building a solution that just not, was not available in the marketplace. So yeah, sure. We're using, you know, all flash QLC drives, but the technology, you know, the advanced next generation algorithms or erasure coding or rage striping allows us to be extremely efficient. We also have some technologies around what we call similarity, some advanced data reduction. So you need less, less capacity if you will, with a vast system. So that obviously help obviously helps us out tremendously with their economics. But the other thing is I could sell a customer exactly what they need. If you think about the legacy data protection market purpose built back of appliances, for example, you know, ALA, Adele, Aita, and HP, you know, they're selling systems that are somewhat rigid. There's always a controller in a capacity. It's tied to a model number right. Soon as you need more performance, you buy another, as soon as you need more capacity, you buy another, it's really not modular in any way. It's great >>Model. If you want to just keep, keep billing the >>Customer. Yeah. If, if that, if yeah. And, and I, I think, I think at this point, the purpose, you know, Dave, the purpose built backup appliance market is, is hungry for a change. Right. You know, there's, there's not anyone that has one. It doesn't exist. I'm not just talking about having two because of replication. I'm it's because of organic growth. Ransomware needs to have a second unit, a second copy. And just, and just scalability. Well, you >>Guys saw that fatigue with that model of, oh, you need more buy more, >>Right? Oh, without a doubt, you said we're gonna attack that. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. No, no, no. That's great. Without a doubt. So, so we can configure a solution exactly. To the need. Cause let's face it. Every single data center, every single vertical market, it's a work of art. You know, everyone's retention policies are different. Everyone's compliance needs are different. There might be some things that are self mandated or government mandated and they're all gonna be somewhat different. Right? The fact of the matter is the way that our, our architecture works, disaggregated shared everything. Architecture is different because when we go back to those model numbers and there's more rigid purpose built back of appliances, or, or maybe a raise designed specifically for data protection, they don't offer that flexibility. And, you know, I, I, I think our, our, our, our entry point is sized to exactly what the need is. Our ease of scalability. You need more performance. We just add another compute, another compute box, what we call our C box. If you need more capacity, we just add another data box, a D box, you know, where the data resides. And, you know, I, you know, especially here at Veeam, I think customers are really clamoring for that next generation solution. They love the idea that there's a low point of entry, but they also love the idea that, that it's easy to scale on demand, you know, as, as needed and as needed basis. >>So just, I wanna be just, I want to go down another layer on that architecturally. Cause I think it's important for people to understand. Sure, exactly what you're saying. When you're talking about scaling, there's this concept of the, of the sort of devil's triangle, the tyranny of this combination of memory, CPU and storage. Sure. And if you're too rigid, like in an appliance, you end up paying for things you don't need. Correct. When all I need is a little more capacity. Correct. All I need is a little more horsepower. Well, you wanna horsepower? No, you gotta buy a bunch of capacity. Exactly. Oh, need capacity. No, no. You need to buy expensive CPUs and suck a bunch of power. All I need is capacity. So what, so go through that, just a little more detail in terms of sure. How you cobble these systems together. Sure. My, the way my brain works, it's always about Legos. So feel free to use Legos. >>Yeah. We, so, so with our disaggregated solution, right. We've separated basically hardware from software. Right. So, so, so that's a good thing, right? From an economic standpoint, but also a design and architecture standpoint, but also an underlining underpinning of that solution is we've also separated the capacity from the performance. And as you just mentioned, those are typically relatively speaking for every other solution on the planet. Those are tied together. Right? Right. So we've disaggregated that as well within our architecture. So we, we again have basically three tier, tier's not the right word, three components that build out a vast cluster. And again, we don't sell like a solution designed by a model number. And that's typically our C boxes connected via NVMe over fabric to a D box C is all the performance D is all the capacity because they're modular. You can end up like our, our baseline product would start out as a one by one, one C box one D box, right? >>Connected again, via different, different size and Vme fabrics. And that could scale to hundreds. When we do have customers with dozens of C boxes, meeting high performance requirements, keep in mind when, when vast data came to market, our founders brought it to the market for high performance computing machine learning, AI data protection was an afterthought, but those found, you know, foundational things that we're able to build in that modularity with performance at scale, it behooves itself, it's perfect fit for data protection. So we see in clients today, just yesterday, two clients standing next to each other in the same market in the same vertical. I have a 30 day retention. I have a 90 day retention. I have to keep one year worth of full backups. I have to keep seven years worth of full backups. We can accommodate both and size it to exactly what the need is. >>Now, the moment that they need one more terabyte, we license into 100 terabyte increments so they can actually buy it in a sense, almost in arrears, we don't turn it off. We don't, there's not a hard cat. They have access to that capacity within the solution that they provide and they can have access immediate access. And without going through, let's face it. A lot of the other companies that we're both thinking of that have those traditional again, purpose-built solutions or arrays. They want you to buy everything up front in advance, signing license agreements. We're the exact opposite. We want you to buy for the need as, and as needed basis. And also because the fact that we're, multi-protocol multi-use case, you see people doing many things within even a single vast cluster. >>I, I wanna come back to the architecture if I, I can and just understand it better. And I said, David, Flo's written a lot about this on our site, but I've had three key meetings in my life with Mosia and I, and I you've obviously know the first week you showed up in my offices at IDC in the late 1980s said, tell me everything, you know about the IBM mainframe IO subsystem. I'm like, oh, this is gonna be a short meeting. And then they came back a year later and showed us symmetric. I was like, wow, that's pretty impressive. The second one was, I gave a speech at 43 south of 42 south. He came up and gave me a big hug. I'm like, wow. He knows me. And the third one, he was in my offices at, in Mabo several years ago. And we were arguing about the flash versus spinning disc. And he's like, I can outperform an all flash array because we've tuned our algorithms for spinning disc. Everybody else is missing that. You're basically saying the opposite. Correct. We've turned tuned our algorithms to, for QC David Flos says Dave, there's a lot of ways to skin a cat in this technology industry. So I wanted to make sure I got that right. Basically you're skinning the cat with different >>Approach. Yeah. We've also changed really the approach of backup. I mean, the, the term backup is really legacy. I mean, that's 10, 12 years of our recovery. The, the story today is really about, about restore resiliency and recovery. So when you think about those legacy solutions, right, they were built to ingest fast, right? We wanna move the data off our primary systems, our, our primary applications and we needed to fit within a backup window. Restore was an afterthought. Restore was, I might occasionally need to restore something. Something got lost, something got re corrupted. I have to restore something today with the, you know, let's face it, the digital pandemic of, of, of cyber threats and, and ransomware it's about sometimes restoring everything. So if you look at a legacy system, they ingest, I'm sorry. They, they, they write very fast. They, they, they can bring the data in very quickly, but their restore time is typically about 20 to 25%. >>So their reading at only 20, 25% of their right speed, you know, is their rate speed. We flip the script on that. We actually read eight times faster than we write. So I could size again to the performance that you need. If you need 40 terabytes, an hour 50 terabytes an hour, we can do that. But those systems that write at 40 terabytes an hour are restoring at only eight. We're writing at a similarly size system, which actually comes out about 51 terabytes an hour 54 terabytes. We're restoring at 432 terabytes an hour. So we've broken the mold of data protection targets. We're no longer the bottleneck. We're no longer part of your recovery plan going to be the issue right now, you gotta start thinking about network connectivity. Do I have, you know, you know, with the, with our Veeam partners, do we have the right data movers, whether virtual or physical, where am I gonna put the data? >>We've really helped customer aided customers to rethinking their whole Dr. Plan, cuz let's face it. When, when ransomware occurs, you might not be able to get in the building, your phones don't work. Who do you call right? By the time you get that all figured out and you get to the point where you're start, you want to start recovering data. If I could recover 50 times faster than a purpose built backup appliance. Right? Think about it. Is it one day or is it 50 days? Am I gonna be back online? Is it one hour? Is it 50 hours? How many millions of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars were like, will that cost us? And that's why our architecture though our thought process and how the system was designed lends itself. So well for the requirements of today, data protection, not backup it's about data protection. >>Can you give us a sense as to how much of your business momentum is from data protection? >>Yeah, sure. So I joined VAs as we were talking chatting before I come on about six months ago. And it's funny, we had a lot of vast customers on their own because they wanted to leverage the platform and they saw the power of VAs. They started doing that. And then as our founders, you know, decided to lean in heavily into this marketplace with investments, not just in people, but also in technology and research and development, and also partnering with the likes of, of Veeam. We, we don't have a data mover, right. We, we require a data mover to bring us the data we've leaned in tremendously. Last quarter was really our, probably our first quarter where we had a lot of marketing and momentum around data protection. We sold five X last quarter than we did all of last year. So right now the momentum's great pipeline looks phenomenal and you know, we're gonna continue to lean in here. >>Describe the relationship with Veeam, like kind of, sort of started recently. It sounds like as customer demand. Yeah. But what's that like, what are you guys doing in terms of engineering integration go to market? >>Yeah. So, so we've gone through all the traditional, you know, verifications and certifications and, and, and I'm proud to say that we kind of blew the, the, the roof off the requirements of a Veeam environ. Remember Veeam was very innovative. 10, 12 years ago, they were putting flash in servers because they, they, they want a high performing environment, a feature such as instant recovery. We've now enabled. When I talked about all those things about re about restore. We had customers yesterday come to us that have tens of thousands of VMs. Imagine that I can spin them up instantaneously and run Veeam's instant recovery solution. While then in the background, restoring those items that is powerful and you need a very fast high performance system to enable that instant. Recovery's not new. It's been in the market for very long, but you can ask nine outta 10 customers walk in the floor. >>They're not able to leverage that today in the systems that they have, or it's over architected and very expensive and somewhat cost prohibitive. So our relationship with Veeam is really skyrocketing actually, as part of that, that success and our, our last quarter, we did seven figure deals here in the United States. We've done deals in Australia. We were chatting. I, I, I happened to be in Dubai and we did a deal there with the government there. So, you know, there's no, there's no specific vertical market. They're all different. You know, it's, it's really driven by, you know, they have a great, you know, cyber resilient message. I mean, you get seen by the last couple of days today and they just want that power that vast. Now there are other systems in the marketplace today that leverage all flash, but they don't have the economic solution that we have. >>No, your, your design anticipated the era that we're we're in right now from it, it anticipated the ability to scale in, to scale, you know, in >>A variety. Well, listen, anticipation of course, co coincidental architecture. It's a fantastic fit either way, either way. I mean, it's a fantastic fit for today. And that's the conversations that we're having with, with all the customers here, it's really all about resiliency. And they know, I mean, one of the sessions, I think it was mentioned 82 or 84% of, of all clients interviewed don't believe that they can do a restore after a cyber attack or it'll cost them millions of dollars. So that there's a tremendous amount of risk there. So time is, is, is ultimately equals dollars. So we see a, a big uptick there, but we're, we're actually continuing our validation work and testing with Veeam. They've been very receptive, very receptive globally. Veeam's channel has also been very receptive globally because you know, their customers are, you know, hungry for innovation as well. And I really strongly believe ASBO brings that >>George, we gotta go, but thank you. Congratulations. Pleasure on the momentum. Say hi to Jeff for us. >>We'll we'll do so, you know, and we'll, can I leave you with one last thought? Yeah, >>Please do give us your final thought. >>If I could, in closing, I think it's pretty important when, when customers are, are evaluating vast, if I could give them three data points, 100% of customers that Triva test vast POC, vast BVAs 100% Gartner peer insights recently did a survey. You know, they, they do it with our, you know, blind survey, dozens of vast customers and never happened before where 100% of the respondents said, yes, I would recommend VA and I will buy VAs again. It was more >>Than two respondents. >>It was more, it was dozens. They won't do it. If it's not dozens, it's dozens. It's not dozen this >>Check >>In and last but not. And, and last but not least our customers are, are speaking with their wallet. And the fact of the matter is for every customer that spends a dollar with vast within a year, they spend three more. So, I mean, if there's no better endorsement, if you have a customer base, a client base that are coming back and looking for more use cases, not just data protection, but again, high performance computing machine learning AI for a company like VA data. >>Awesome. And a lot of investment in engineering, more investment in engineering than marketing. How do I know? Because your capacity nodes, aren't the C nodes. They're the D nodes somehow. So the engineers obviously won that naming. >>They'll always win that one and we, and we, and we let them, we need them. Thank you. So that awesome product >>Sales, it's the golden rule. All right. Thank you, George. Keep it right there. 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